Finished Grading
Posted on December 18, 2006
Filed Under Teaching |
I entered my grades around 1:00 Saturday afternoon. Sunday I didn’t do anything. It’s Monday & now I have to start planning next semester’s courses, not to mention the development of a wholly online version of my Vietnam course for summer. But all that can wait until tomorrow. Time for a bit of retrospective musing.
This was the semester my department, Humanities & Social Sciences, began teaching a brand new first-semester course for freshmen. We had been teaching the old Great Ideas course — a two semester sequence — since before I arrived at Clarkson twenty years ago. The new course is a single semester, to be followed by a souped-up writing across the curriculum requirement. The new course fits into a new general education curriculum that I had some part in developing, so I have something of a vested interest in the course working. We haven’t had our departmental postmortem yet, so I haven’t had the benefit of my colleagues’ reactions, but I am guardedly optimistic about the new course, though concerned about how the new curriculum fills our students’ need for writing instruction & practice. Basically, do they get enough writing practice after their first semester? Tentative answer: Students who arrive with some ability & background as writers & who take the new course — we call it the Clarkson Seminar — probably do get enough practice under the new curriculum. It’s the weak writers, probably the bottom quarter in terms of ability, who are going to suffer from the lack of a second-semester follow-on course.
The old two-semester Great Ideas course was as much a reading course as a writing course, designed on the great books model that reached its zenith in the 1980s. When I first came to the university, there was a very strict reading list: Pick at least five books from this list, with up to three more from this (somewhat broader) list. The first semester was limited to the ancient & medieval world, the second to the rest of the tradition, up to Camus, if I remember correctly. During my first decade at Clarkson, these structures were progressively loosened as younger faculty replaced older & as theoretical incursions of various sorts subjected the Western Canon to the assaults that have themselves become part of the standard discourse. By the turn of the millennium the old course was feeling its age & discussions began toward doing something new. These discussions were both bottom-up — from faculty within our department dissatisfied with the old structure — & top-down — from an administration looking for a general education curriculum that would be more “outcomes-based,” which is the jargon term for the way our accrediting organization now evaluates such things.
Because Clarkson is historically an “engineering school,” the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences was until ten years ago strictly a service department. (We were, in fact, until a few years ago, first a “Faculty” outside the other schools, then, for a few years, we were the School of Liberal Arts. About five years ago, we became a regular old department within a combined School of Arts & Sciences. The sciences, too, while they had their own majors, also mostly served the School of Engineering by teaching Calculus, Chemistry & Physics. We taught the Great Ideas & our electives were meant to serve the general education requirements engineers were thought to need in order to be “well-rounded.” The kids who couldn’t cut the engineering courses usually fell back into the Business School. But about a decade ago it became pretty clear that engineering enrollments were leveling off & that continued growth was going to depend on new programs in science & even in the liberal arts. And we haven’t done badly in programs like History & Political Science. We have around a hundred majors in our various programs & have become a place for students who arrive at the university believing — or their parents believing — they will become engineers, but who discover an intense dislike for, say, Calculus or Physics. We have also begun to recruit students who actually come to the university to study History or Political Science or, more rarely, the Humanities. We also run a double major program with the Business School.
I’m not sure why I have felt compelled to sketch out this superficial history of my department’s role in the university, except that I cannot manage to think about the new course outside of this political matrix. As part of the deal the department made with the university during the curriculum reform process, we agreed to reemphasize writing instruction in the Clarkson Seminar & in return we’d get a reduction in class size from twenty-five to twenty. The other part of the deal was that, in instead of teaching a second semester of the freshman course, our department would be able to offer more electives. In theory, this would benefit our nascent major programs as well as the general education curriculum, since in the spring semester there would be a lot more teaching power to offer electives that would serve both purposes. It would also give faculty a way to teach more courses in their specific disciplinary areas. That’s the macro level. At the micro level, one of the tensions within the department is between the Humanists, who are more or less comfortable with teaching writing, & the Social Scientists, who mostly claim ignorance or disdain writing instruction. I think the fault line as we begin to discuss the class will be between those who took the macro deal & are trying to make good on writing & those who took the reduced class size without a serious commitment to teaching writing. Because of the demographic profile of Clarkson students, the Humanities have fewer majors & consequently less clout than the Social Sciences both inside & outside the department. That’s reality. But the Social Scientists are, for the most part, the ones who are not much interested in teaching writing. They also, for the most part, would claim that they don’t know how to teach writing, a situation that ought to be addressed through a faculty development effort. Such an effort was bruited, but I haven’t seen much will from inside or outside the department to follow up on the talk. All of which has the potential to leave people like me, who make a serious effort to teach writing, feeling exploited.
How did the new course go? My two sections it went pretty well, though the smaller class size exaggerated, on the one hand, my very informal approach to discussion & class organization, and on the other hand, highlighted the weakness of the least able students. Taking advantage of the smaller class size, I abandoned a quarter century of practice & got out of the front of the classroom, moving everyone into a circle. Previously, I had preferred to conduct the orchestra from the front, only occasionally breaking into smaller groups for discussion. I called on people. In the new format, I tried very hard to let students take the lead. (I found, alas, that I can lecture from a student desk positioned in a circle almost as well as from behind a table at the front of the classroom!) The best students took off & ran with the discussion, but the weaker students sat quietly; as it turned out, the best talkers were the best writers. In the future, I need to work much harder to bring the weaker students into the conversation. Their inability to put ideas into language does not mean that they are incapable of ideas, though without adequate language they cannot be said to actually have ideas. Bringing such students into the conversation would be a form of socialization that might allow them to begin to have ideas. As for writing instruction, the top two-thirds of the class only needs correction & encouragement, but the bottom third needs aggressive intervention. That’s just my experience, of course — there were thirty-five or so other sections of the course, two per instructor — & I’m going to be very interested in hearing from my colleagues during the meetings we’ve scheduled for early next term.
So let’s say that twenty to thirty percent of first-year students need more writing instruction after completing the Clarkson Seminar, over & above the writing across the curriculum stuff everyone has to do to graduate. What form should that intervention take? There is no silver bullet, nor should we waste our time looking for one. The answer has to be variable & pragmatic. We have a good writing center with peer tutors for the motivated & more able of the bottom third. What we don’t have is a way of identifying the weakest language-users from the git-go. And what we don’t have, if we could identify these students, is a way to help them right from the beginning. We have talked about & the dean has said he would like to have an add-on course to the Clarkson Seminar that would be nothing but writing practice, staffed by people who really know how to do remedial writing instruction. Resources — the academic euphemism for money — are the main problem with such a course. We also need to create a group of “freshman electives” for the second semester of the first year that would have small class sizes & focus on writing. These could be taught by anybody, theoretically, inside or outside Humanities & Social Sciences, though most of them would certainly wind up being taught by Humanities & Social Sciences faculty. And that would require more faculty. Again, resources. Our faculty has remained the same size over the last decade, but our mission has been expanded & in fact ought to be expanded even more.
At the moment, I’d say the new course & the new curriculum have a lot of potential. The faculty in my department have some enthusiasm for the new course & the new curriculum, which allows them a good deal more freedom, but that enthusiasm is variable & precarious.
Comments
2 Responses to “Finished Grading”
Stumble it!
At Clarkson, the most writing I ever did was in my chemistry lab classes. I believe the “Instrumental Lab” class was the most intensive with a publication scale write-up due each week.
I believe I wrote alot in Lou Hinchman’s class on The American West.
With the exception of Stig Friberg, not one of the Chemistry teachers attempted to adjust any individual students spelling, sentence structure, etc.
Clarkson’s Engineering and Science faculty know how to write. They publish an awful lot of scientific papers. They spend time reading and critiquing other papers. Being able to convey one’s ideas in writing and in presentation is critical to the engineer who wants to “defy convention”.
Good luck getting the engineering faculty to worry about writing quality!
Sam, there are those who care about writing & they work all across the university; what we don’t have is a critical mass of such folks. The result is that some chem labs require lots of writing, some don’t. Some history classes require lots of writing, some don’t. There needs to be commitment on a teacher by teacher basis, but that will never be enough without an institutional commitment to writing & that rewards those faculty & students who make the effort. Clarkson has been saying the right things over the last few years & has made some modest moves in the right direction when it comes to writing across the curriculum, but we need, simply put, more faculty with the right training & attitude.