Category Archives: Writing Instructor

Laptop

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

(RECAP:  I have managed to get everything hooked up but realize that the data projector may not have any sound.  I have decided to pretend, when no sound comes out, that the people over in AV are all screwed up.  I am able to see my “desktop” projected onto the screen behind me by the data projector, but it has disappeared from my laptop.  It is, thus, very difficult to get the little arrow to go where I want it to go so that I might open the media player to play the CDrom and produce no sound.)

 As I attempt to manipulate the little arrow by looking at the screen behind me because I can’t see it on the blank screen of my laptop, the students titter at my discomfiture.  I complain that this is a new laptop and I am not yet used to it.  Also I am old.

Both are true.  I am feeling quite old at that moment and the laptop is new.  Indeed, I bought it with my own money for the express purpose of having it for classroom use.  I had grown sick and tired of the one I had been checking out from the writing program.  It was at least five years old, and I don’t know what it is but something goes haywire with a computer that’s five years old.

It’s like it has lint in its system or something.  Stuff would start popping up on the screen from out of nowhere.  Little signals saying it wanted to download something or I was supposed to do something, or in the middle of things it would start checking its disk.  Also I was not trusted by the program’s computer person, so I had been blocked from any ability to add something to the computer if I wanted to or to try to repair something if I wanted to do that.

 The students used the laptop for oral reports and they would want to show something but couldn’t because the laptop didn’t have something on it, and the screen would say download this but they couldn’t and I couldn’t either.  Also I had grown sick and tired of going to the computer person and asking her to help me.   That was her job, I thought, but everything I walked in, she would give me this look and say, “Oh, Nick, what have you done now.”

After about 8 years of this treatment, the computer person began to get under my skin, and I was rude to her on a couple of occasions.  Well, rude for me, anyway.  Which isn’t all that rude.  But I apologized anyway.  And we made up, I guess you would call it, and did the hugging thing.  I guess people just don’t see how terribly sensitive I really am.  And then, just when we had gotten comfortable enough with each other to be rude and then make up (sort of like family), she up and went and got a better job.

Anyhow I didn’t want to do that anymore or not be able to download stuff to the computer if I wanted to, so I went out and bought a laptop so I could be in charge of it.

I went to a PC Club not far away and said all I was interested in was the ratio of money to power or, in other words, what was their most powerful laptop for the least money.  I was not interested in features, add-ons, extras, or any of that crap.  I wanted raw power.  So that’s what I got from a computer manufacturer that I had never heard of and a type that they were going no longer going to carry.  In short, the last one of its kind on their shelf.

I got lots of power for about a thousand of my own dollars to be used in the education of my ungrateful and unappreciative students.  Unfortunately—I had not paid much attention to it at the time—but the thing weighs a ton.  It’s portable, but in a limited sense of that word.  I have bad rotator cuffs on both shoulders and walking with it to class in my over the shoulder bag just killed me.

But at that moment, I am not so much concerned with tonnage as I am with the fact that I cannot open the “media player” to play the Cdrom for which I have no sound.

Sardines

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I know that I am in the general area of my classrooms.  They are right there in front of me.  I say “they” because I have one for my 1-250 class and another for my 3-450 class.  As you can see homer'sbrainthese classes are back to back with a ten minute break between them.  One might think that it would make sense to assign me the same room for the whole period and not give me two different rooms.  But the university does not know how to make sense of anything.

Instead of one room, I have 2 rooms and they are RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO EACH OTHER.  For God’s sake.  And neither of these rooms has a data projector.  So in the ten minutes between the classes, I must urinate, smoke a cigarette, unplug all the stuff I have had to plug in for my data projector to work.  Put all the stuff on the damn cart, and PUSH IT RIGHT NEXT DOOR (for god’s sake) where I have then to plug all that crap back in again to various sockets and outlets.

Just standing there looking at the two rooms—and I am pretty sure I am looking at the two rooms; I just don’t know which one I has my first class—I get pissed off all over again.  A person, clearly a student, comes and stands next to me.  I assume he is in my class since he seems to be standing there aimlessly.  I say, “I don’t know which room it is.”  “Oh,” he says.  Then he spies a woman going in one of the doors and says he thinks she is in the class.  So we go in that door.

Sure enough it appears to be my class.  A room full of annoying sophomores.  Moreover, not a seat is empty.  They are all mashed in there like sardines.  About 10 years ago I walked into one of the classrooms in this building on the very first day it was opened for use.  I almost exploded.  This is supposed to be a university and part of the purpose although apparently a very insignificant part is to educate.

I walk into a place where such education is supposed to occur and find myself in a tiny box.  I have 25 students but there are 35 seats in the room.  The teacher’s table at the front of the room actually touches the desks in the front row.  Between the desk and the blackboard, I find about 2 feet of space into which I squeeze myself.  If I speak too vigorously, I am likely to spit on students who sit in the front row.  

I have to restrain my fury.  Brand spanking new classrooms with no data projectors built into them and so crammed with seats that I can scarcely move.  The students can’t move either.  And this is very troubling since I frequently break them into groups to discuss readings with each other.  Such groups will be impossible in this room because THERE IS NO ROOM TO MOVE.

I am about to have a hernia.  Millions of dollars have been spent building this building mostly for offices for professors and nobody bothered to speak to a teacher about how the classrooms should be set up.  I am freaking dumbfounded.  Not just by the stupidity of it, but by the clear and present indifference of the powers that be—whoever they might be—to the so-called educational mission of the university.

Then I think.  What the FUCK if we have an EARTHQUAKE?

Environmentally Responsible Trash Container

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

RECAP:  I am in my office preparing to go to class.  So far I have read my student-evaluations and was bummed by them.  I felt resentful feelings towards those who get high student evalauations and called them ass kissers. I have concluded that I am not cute. I have decided I have time to urinate before I head out to class.

 

I have 15 minutes till class starts and I still haven’t managed to get myself out of the office.  Thankfully, the male restroom is just a couple of steps away; if it weren’t I would have to take all my stuff with me because I wouldn’t have time to get back to my office to get my stuff and then get to class.  Additionally, if I had to carry all my stuff, I know from experience that I might have a hard time getting to my penis to urinate.  

 And at my age you don’t want to be fumbling around with stuff whilst taking a leak.  First you have trashbasketto find the damn thing.  Then you have to be careful not to pee on yourself.  It’s not too bad yet, but I am beginning to have a bit of a cut off issue.  I think I am done peeing but my penis, or more exactly, I believe, my bladder doesn’t seem to know it.  I have a slight aftermath leakage problem.  I need both hands to make sure I shake sufficiently and don’t leave unseemly spotting.

This particular restroom is pretty much reserved for the male members of the writing program.  We rarely have student urinators or defecators because our restroom is off the beaten path.  We are grateful for that.  The restroom has a sink and a mirror and a stall and next to that a brand new environmentally responsible urinal.

For some unknown reason, somebody decided to make our building an environmentally responsible building.  We even got some sort of plague for that; and little signs with some sort of green symbol were posted around when the building was converted to being environmentally responsible.  I have not idea what this means—being in an environmentally responsible building.  But it seems to mean that a special trash container was put in my office.  This container is like a regular trashcan but made of blue plastic with a smaller version of a trash container attached to its lip. 

Apparently, we are supposed to put paper into the big blue plastic bucket.  And garbage, like banana peals or apple cores or other possible rotting material, into the little bucket hanging onto the big bucket.  Unfortunately if you put something heavy, like some old batteries or a dead pencil sharpener, into the little bucket that hangs on the lip of the big bucket, and you have nothing in the big bucket, the big bucket falls over.  I find this annoying, so if the bucket happens to fall over I just leave the bucket lying on its side until I have something to put in the big bucket.

The big bucket doesn’t have a completely open top like a regular trash basket.  Instead it has a blue plastic lid with a long narrow hole in the middle about the length of a width of a piece of 8 by 11 paper.  Apparently, one is supposed to slip the paper into the long narrow hole, and I suppose the hole is long and narrow so that one does not try to put a whole book or magazine into the bucket.  I don’t know why you should not do that.  But clearly the long narrow hole is intended for some particular purpose.  So when I have something that won’t go through the long narrow hole, I just take the whole top off and drop the magazine in it.  That’s what I did with the phone book.

I guess I am not environmentally responsible because usually my environmentally responsible trash can scattered in three parts on the floor.  The lid is wherever I decided to fling the annoying think.  And the little bucket is sitting on the floor next to the big bucket until I can find something heavy enough to hold the big bucket down when I put something heavy in the little bucket.

Hot! I’m not!

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

That’s not fair really.  Getting good student evaluations on your teaching is not all a matter of kissing butt.  Students also like good looking teachers.  The guys especially like good looking cutewomen teachers, and the girls like good looking male teachers. I have always considered myself good looking enough.  I mean I don’t have two noses or big warts growing out of my forehead or something.  On the website, rateyourprofessor.com, I am not considered “hot.”  They put a little picture of a chili pepper by your name (indicating if you are hot).  But I don’t have a chili pepper so I am not.

Even if I ever had the potential to be hot, I am not sure I ever was even when younger.  I didn’t start teaching till I was in my 30s, so that might have put me out of the hotness range.  Also I used to sport this big old beard;  so unless a person was attracted to shaggy somewhat ill-kempt types, I doubt if I fell into the hot category except maybe with a few alienated, intellectual types with strong nurturing instincts.  

Somewhat recently, as I remember, I asked my students what “hot” exactly meant.  What actors I wondered were hot.  Mostly the women spoke up and they mentioned names of guys I didn’t know.   A lot of students watched that show called OC, about Orange County, and I think they thought some of the guys on that show were hot.  I don’t know.  I asked if De Caprio was hot; yea maybe they said, but he was sort of old hat.

So I asked when you say somebody is hot do you mean they are, if they are a man, handsome.  They looked a little befuddled.  Then somebody said, hot meant cute, and yeah, yeah, others said in chorus, that was it.  OK. Cute.  One of my least favorite things.  I am not a fan of cute.  I get tired of it really quickly. For me cute is sort of the high fructose corn syrup of appearance.  It’s a really quick, very, very sweet high and then it goes away fast and isn’t all that good for you.

So what was a handsome man, I asked, or a beautiful woman, or were there such things any more.  Or only cute, high fructose corn syrup people?  Well, maybe, they said, handsome was still there.  But it applied, if at all, mostly to old people.  So old people could be handsome but not cute?  More or less, they indicated.  So who would be a handsome actor, I asked, but they didn’t know any, so I let it drop.

But I wondered what this love of cuteness might say about my students.  Were I to attempt a phenomenology of cuteness, it might run something like this.  Part of the appeal of cuteness is its very lack of substance, its transience, one might say.  De Caprio, formerly cute, is now old hat.  Cute is new, and being hot too it cools rather quickly.  Part of the appeal of cuteness is its very faddishness, its come and then gone quality.  Biologically it’s true too.  Cuteness is brief; the face and the body can sustain it for only a very limited amount of time.  Over 25 I would argue cuteness is biologically impossible.  So at the heart, cute is cute because one doesn’t have to work hard to get it and one doesn’t expect to get much out of it either.  It’s a buzz.

Student Evaluations

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I went to my mailbox and found those loathsome teacher evaluations from summer school classes.  I didn’t want to look at them; I had already read the students’ written comments so I numerologyknew my evaluations wouldn’t be so hot.  These were the raw numbers from a computerized form that asked students to respond to two questions.  Rank the teacher for the course; rank the course—on a scale of excellent, very good, good, fair, poor.  So you get a number that can be used to compare your teaching to the teaching of others in the same course.

I hate these scores.  The damage they have done to my teaching and to my development as a teacher is immense and unfathomable.  Unfathomable because fear produces unconscious affects.  You censor yourself.  Things you might have done, insights you might have had, things you might have said get crushed by the fear that doing them, saying them, seeing them might have a negative affect on your scores.  Most tenured faculty members don’t pay any attention to these student evaluations at all.  They don’t have to because they have tenure.

But I have been for 26 years a lecturer.  First I was on one year contracts and then on three year contracts and the central, most significant bit of information used to determine whether I would be rehired or not is those damn student evaluation scores.  These are the most significant thing because ultimately the decision about whether you are rehired or not is made, not by your fellow teachers, but by the administration.  And what speaks most clearly to them is numbers.  A few years back at one branch of the university, the teaching scores of the lecturers were lined up and those who fell below a certain line were fired.  Hired and fired on the basis of numbers generated by the students you taught.

The numbers for the student evaluations for writing teachers are significantly and routinely higher than the numbers for any other classes on the whole campus.  One reason for that is that we teach small classes; the students get to know the teacher a bit and the teacher gets to know the students a bit.  The students appreciate that because in most of their large lectures they are anonymous and the professor might as well be the man on the moon.  The other reason is that sometimes quite consciously and sometimes very unconsciously, we writing teachers want to please the students so they won’t say nasty things about us in their evaluations or give us low scores.

This is a very bad, indeed pernicious situation.  I was surprised to learn over the years that even those instructors who routinely got the highest evaluations of all, sometimes 100% excellent, hated to look at their “scores.”  Maybe they were worried they had not received their usual 100% excellent; or maybe they were worried that they had because they 100% excellent indicated that once again, unconsciously of course, they had managed successfully to kiss the butt of each and every student.

Sophomores As Pre-Mature Cynics

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

When a person teaches writing, as I have, for 26 years to students who don’t want to take a writing class and resent being in the same room with people who teach it, I feel you have a right to be crabby.  Or at least to pretend to be.  Actually, I don’t mind the word ubiquitous.  I like the sound of it though I have small occasion to use it.  I just throw that in as an example of a big word.  I really don’t like the word “plethora.”    A person who uses “plethora” is a social climber, the kind of person who might be drawn to word power books as a way of cultivating an enormously inflated vocabulary as a means to intimidate others.

I don’t believe in using big words to intimidate others.  People who do that are vulgar and lacking class. If you want to use language to intimidate others, small words will do.

Of course, though, most students who try to use big works are not using them to intimidate but to imitate the big word users known as professors or teaching assistants.  They are humbly trying to conform but screw up a great deal while trying to do so.

But the deeper problem with my sophomores is not that they are probably average to poor writers rather that average to good.  No.  The problem is the sophomore attitude.  In less than a quarter, many conclude that college is a “game.”  Frequently this is a defensive strategy.  They came into the university thinking they would get A’s with little effort.  I do believe that about a quarter of the students I teach have a straight A average upon entering the university.  But then they don’t get A’s; they get B’s.  And sometimes if they are in the sciences they get Cs.

These students, rather than decide they are perhaps stupid or that their education was perhaps inadequate or that they did not study enough but partyed way too much, decide that school is a game, and if they screwed up, that’s because they have not learned the game.  Learning the game is not the same thing as learning at all.  Instead learning the game is best called working the system.  You simply have failed to make the right connections so you can find out who the easy teachers are or you have failed fully to grasp the technique of saying exactly what the professor wants you to say and no more or no less.  And because you have not figured that out, you study the wrong thing or too much and end up feeling like a social outcast among all those people who don’t seem to study at all but still get As.

Because the idea that college is a game serves as a defense for these people, as a cover up for some vulnerability, they can be quite obnoxiously assertive in their claim that college is nothing but a game with nothing of justice to it.  Such students will sometimes say, “I did not get my money’s worth from your class.”  Or: “Your class was a waste of my valuable time.”

I call these sophomores “pre-mature cynics.”

Annoying Sophomores

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

But over the weekend, the sophomore problem started bugging me again in multiple ways.  I had all those sophomores partly because the Writing Program didn’t have enough money to teach all the Freshpersons who were supposed to take the course.  Or to put it another way, even if every class had been completely filled with nothing but Freshpersons we did not offer enough classes to take all of the Freshpersons who were supposed to take the course in the year—the Freshperson year—that they were supposed to take it.  Some of the sophomores in my class might have actually tried to get in the course but couldn’t find an empty spot.  So here they were slopped over into my class. plethora

Also quite logically and correctly, no doubt, I assume that most of these sophomores had not tried very hard.  The people who wanted really to get into Writing 2 were people who requested the course on what is called the first pass through the computer system.  But most of these people had probably requested the course on their third pass and of course—what do you know?—but no spots were available. They didn’t want a spot most likely because they had failed the writing placement exam.

That meant as entering Freshpersons, the year before they got into my class, they had not been eligible to take Writing 2 but had to take Writing 1 that is the course a person has to take if they fail the writing placement exam.  Most students do not like failing a writing test and then have to take and also to pay for (and at one time get no graduation credit for) a course to make up for failing the test.  The test is a really stupid test, but the people who flunk it, at least half of them, do not write as well as the people who pass it.  They probably did not pass it because they lacked confidence as writers or were hung over.  So they fail the test and their confidence is further reduced, and then they take Writing 1 which makes them feel stupid or like they have the small pox and their confidence is further reduced.

Consequently by the time they get to my class the very idea of a writing class—and the potentials for humiliation and embarrassment implicit in it (not to mention the horror of a bad grade)—has put them in a pretty rancid mood.  Also the sophomores know as well as I do that the course is for Freshpersons.  Right there in the catalogue it says, “Writing 2 Introduction to Academic Writing.”  And during that Freshperson year when they should have been taking Writing 2 they were “introduced” or perhaps “smacked over the head” with Academic Writing in one of those General Education Courses they didn’t want to take either, but had to because they are required.  Some feel resentment at having to receive a brush up course on an introduction they have already experienced in the concrete form of a low grade.

Already, I suspect they are seeking compensatory structures, as I call them, to hide or muffle their inadequacies as writers. So off I go, “And don’t ever use that thing…What’s it call the thsaraous (I pretend I can’t pronounce Thesaurus).  Yea…that thing.  I know, even though I am old, that they have that thing on computers now.  But never use it. Never, ever use a big word when a simple one will do.  Why use ubiquitous when you can use every where.  Tell me, why the hell would you do that except to impress somebody with your knowledge of big words? What are you trying to do?  Make somebody else feel stupid?  Are you an elitist or something? Well, I am not stupid, I am not an elitist, and I am not impressed.  Also, I want you to know I just hate the word, ‘plethora.’”

Sophomores

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Almost all incoming students are required to take Writing 2.  I don’t mind teaching it because it’s part of the Freshman sequence, and the fall quarter is particularly nice because the class is usually full of students who may have never seen a college teacher up close and personal before.  Perhaps they are not overcome with joy at the prospect of learning, but they are at least excited to be in college.  Also they don’t quite know how college works yet, so I have the opportunity to act in my person as an introduction to the university, most especially to its intellectual standards and challenges.

But when I walked into my first Writing 2 course of the new school year (I am teaching two this quarter), I felt something was off.  The room was dead silent.  In the first quarter at college some students don’t know appropriate student teacher decorum and one of them might do something odd like ask you how you are doing or are you the professor. And usually too they are at least whispering to each other trying to make sure they are in the right class and the right room and at the right time.

But not with this class.  As soon as I sat down to take roll, I saw why.  The class had only a sprinkling of Freshpersons.  The rest were sophomores.  In the Vietnam War, people wrote about soldiers with the thousand mile stare.  These people had been through hell and back and seen it all.  Sophomores have the two inch stare.  They have seen just enough not to want to see anymore.  They slouch, they fidget, they yawn, they stretch, they put their heads on their desks for a few winks, and they don’t want to meet your eye. Sometimes, they lapse unconsciously into grooming behavior and sit there breaking off their split ends.

 Sometimes, I think I could drop dead on the floor, and they would just ignore me.  And then somebody would ask, “How long do we have to wait for the Professor till we can leave.”  Then they would wait the requisite 15 minutes and step over my dead body as they went out.

You might think it takes a year for a Freshperson to become a sophomore.  Actually it takes just two quarter or about one semester.  Teaching Assistants who start teaching Writing 2 in the fall come up to me in the spring quarter and say that they don’t know what they are doing wrong.  Things went well the first two quarters, but now…  I say, hell, you are doing fine.  It’s those sophomores.

So felt a bit disappointed sitting there in front of all those sophomores.  “Damn, I said, you are nearly all sophomores.  I am sorry Freshpersons but you are at a disadvantage.  What happened?  This class is supposed to be for Freshpersons.  Did you put it off?  Couldn’t you get in?”

I might as well have been talking into thin air.  But I got into taking roll and trying to pronounce these amazing names that I can’t pronounce at all and pretty quickly forgot, for the moment, the sophomore problem.