Primrose Road

Dear College Students,

If your email address begins with SexxxyThang69 or the like, please seriously consider creating an email address that uses your first initial and last name, first name and last initial, full name, etc., especially if you're (1) communicating with professors or (2) sending out resumes with your email address printed on them.

Rhetorically yours,
PR

For those of you not following my grading progress on Facebook: 20 papers graded, 82 remaining.

Granted, final papers for Intro to Fiction (two classes in which they enrolled *everyone* who needs a last-minute 200-level humanities class to graduate) are not officially due until 2PM tomorrow, so we'll see if I actually receive all 102 papers.

Also accomplished today:
- booked wedding photographer 545 days in advance (NYC wedding planning is wacky)
- met with eight freshman comp students
- made dinner that involved green vegetables
- planned Atlantic City trip w/Mom
- planned Washington DC museum-ing trip w/SigOther

Dissertation progress:
- nope

Holiday gift purchasing progress:
- nope

Instances of copy-and-paste plagiarism spotted today:
- zero! (It's a miracle: they finally understand that I HAVE GOOGLE TOO.)

Part I of White Noise: here's what my studentlekh came up with (ok, I threw in the "media skeptic" part, but they thunk the rest) --



Also, I learned that graduates of middle schools in the county where I teach still resent not being *told* what was happening on 9/11. They knew something was wrong because their teachers were mumbling fearfully to each other in the halls and then going back into the classrooms and telling the students that everything was ok. In the days and weeks afterwards, their teachers didn't mention anything about the event and its aftermath(s) because principals were afraid of upsetting students whose relatives had been involved in the disaster.

By popular request. ;)

1. There is no such thing as "social promotion" in college; you can't pass a class simply by showing up on a regular basis. On the first day of class, your professor will likely distribute a syllabus that outlines exactly how (s)he will compute your grade. If you don't turn in assignments, you'll fail (or, in some schools, receive a "withdrawal" failure, which means that you didn't do enough to even earn a grade of F).

2. If you regularly show up 45 minutes after class has started, *everyone* will notice. The professor probably won't take time out of his or her teaching/lecture to address the issue, but it will be reflected in your grade.

3. Copy-and-paste plagiarism is not just unethical; it's dumb. If you don't understand why, then you need to read more and tweak your critical thinking skills a bit. Your professors have access to exactly the same Internet that you do.

4. Absences every once in a while are ok. Even I have accidentally set my alarm to "PM" instead of "AM" on occasion. Unless you're absent more than 10% of the time (i.e. more than three times for a class that meets two days a week for a 15-week semester), your professors probably don't want to hear -- or strain to believe -- your excuses. In college, it's ridiculous to make up high-school-style excuses. Know your audience.

5. If you have to go to the restroom, just go. Please, please, please don't raise your hand and ask if you can use the restroom.

6. If you have to leave your cell phone on in class (or during a meeting), turn it to silent, not vibrate. Never answer a call in class. (I hope that sounds ridiculous to most readers.)

7. Always think three steps ahead. Imagine the consequences of your actions three steps in advance; if, for example, you answer your cell phone in class, what will happen next? What actions might the professor or other students take? If you copy-and-paste an essay from a website, what will the professor likely do? When you're caught, what will happen next? Always think about how your actions will affect others (your classmates included).

The Chicago Tribune offers up an article about why college might not always be "worth it". For example:

But they caution that some college choices are no longer a wise investment. Students destined for low-paying careers, they say, simply cannot manage certain debt levels. Loans can surpass $100,000 depending on the school and the borrower.

"If you're going to be a nursery school teacher your whole life, you should not be taking out a lot of loans," said Sandy Baum, senior policy analyst for the College Board and an economics professor at Skidmore College. "That's the problem. It's an investment people make without knowing how they will pay it off."

The counterargument, of course, is that the value of college is not necessarily a higher salary, but more finely-tuned critical thinking skills:

Experts point out that the college experience is not just about financial rewards. There is also that business about learning a few things. Students are able to explore their interests. They often become inspired by subjects they never knew existed and are able to view the world through a broader lens.

"There's value added when it comes to critical thinking and moral reasoning," said Ernest Pascarella, a University of Iowa professor who has studied the effects of college.

...

"Career-wise, college has been very important for me," [a 22-year-old finance major] said. "But it's also about knowledge. If I wasn't in school, I wouldn't be able to understand what's going on with the economy and with other things that affect my life."

I wonder if the question is not so much one of whether college is "worth it" but whether college has become the new high school. Young people in many places in the US find themselves competing for service and retail jobs with college graduates, even though these jobs do not necessarily require "college-level" skills. Meanwhile, graduate school seems to be fast becoming the new college, where college graduates find that they can't get higher-level jobs unless they hold M.A.s or M.B.A.s, and some, unable to find jobs after graduation, enter graduate school in order to delay their disappointment with the job market.

Perhaps the critical thinking skills that we work so hard to develop in our freshman comp students need to be taught in high school. I'm concerned that instead of teaching important skills in high school, parents, teachers, and the public education system in some states are merely extending adolescence until at least age twenty-two.

(Sometimes, I give my 200-level literature classes tongue-in-cheek "how to be a grownup" lessons. They're more appreciative than you might imagine.)

One of my Intro to Fiction students, in response to a question about how the short story "Paul's Case" (which ends with a young man throwing himself under a train) would be different if it had been narrated in first person:

"Obviously, it would have ended with the words 'ow, my face!'."

I tell my students at the beginning of the term that they get three *free* absences for classes that meet twice a week; after the fourth, a student's grade will be lowered by a full letter. The reason for the *free* absences? I don't want to hear dumb excuses.

Of course, some students always come up to me before or after class to tell me why they missed the last class meeting anyway. Eighty-five percent of the time (I don't think I'm overestimating this), the student will tell me that he or she was in a car accident.

Is "I was in a car accident" the new "my grandmother passed away"?
If not, then approximately thirty of my students have been in car accidents since 2005. Which would suggest, of course, that there is a clear correlation between being in my class and getting into car accidents. ;)

For final exams, the only excuse I'm accepting is "I was attacked by a bear."

200-level fiction survey class, circa 9:30AM, after students have spent 10 minutes asking questions about assignments/due dates/how the syllabus works --

Me: You know, according to some psychological studies, you guys ask me all of these questions because you want me to be your mom.

30 minutes later --

Student: Do we have to read the Allende story for Monday, Mommy?

He was joking, of course, much unlike Ralph Wiggum. ;)

I teach my freshman comp classes with three goals in mind for students:

1. Gain a working understanding of the rhetorical triangle, especially in terms of how they need to adjust their writing to the specific rhetorical situation (i.e. audience and purpose);

2. Learn how (and why) to write essays and term papers that engage specific examples as opposed to general clichés, and

3. Understand appropriate forms of evidence for different rhetorical situations as well as the how, when, and why of citation.

I've taught a handful of 200-level literature classes and have found that the major lingering issue that remains unresolved from freshman comp is #3. Students regularly hand in papers that cite essay mill essays (i.e. sample essays on the Web that serve to entice students to purchase pre-written essays that they can then turn in as their own) and often-random websites as support for their arguments.

While it would be naive of me not to attribute this to "English class doesn't really matter"-itis, I've decided that this semester, I'm doing what I'll call the "What The Heck Am I Looking At?" exercise with my two Fiction survey classes. Each group (50-student English classes being taught by lone adjunct = lots of group work) will receive printouts of the following Web pages, reached by Googling "baldwin sonny's blues" (one of the stories we'll be reading in class):

- Lecture notes from the UC Davis website;

- "Summary and Study Guide from enotes.com;

- Essay on biblical allusions in the story from findarticles.com;

- JSTOR article that they won't be able to access via their school's computers;

- 123helpme.com's essay (see two entries back for my 123helpme.com lamentation);

- Wikipedia entry on the story.

Then each group will discuss the sources in terms of (1) function (i.e. why does the site/page exist?), (2) credibility, and (3) ethical use.

Of course, "ethical" in this context probably means "not making yourself look like someone who is unaware that the teacher, too, has access to Google."

We'll see how this works out. The Freshman Comp / Business Writing Crap vs. Not Crap exercise is still going strong.

Why why why must essay mill site 123helpme.com tell students "How to Cite This Page" in MLA format?

I love it when I see essay mill essays -- nay, correctly cited essay mill essays -- on students' Works Cited (often spelled "Work Cited" -- thanks, Whole Language) Lists.