Primrose Road

There's an article in this quarter's Skeptic magazine about some of the causes and effects of the "positive thinking" movement in American culture that for the most part rehashes previous arguments about self-esteem and The Secret but presents some interesting facts about the self-esteem movement in the classroom. Author Steve Salerno notes that psychologists found that while students in three Asian countries had stronger academic skills, students to whom they were compared in the United States "expressed much higher self-appraisals." The self-esteem movement may have simply made students feel more confident about poor academic skills and destroyed their ability to self-appraise, a skill that educational psychologists have shown is actually important to academic performance.

I remember several years ago taking a course within the composition program at my university's English department and students presenting unreflectingly positive reviews of a book that suggested that grading was akin to violence. At the same time, I was taking educational psychology courses and learning about research that shows that teaching is most effective when clear objectives are set and evaluated as quantitatively as possible. Though grading, when not used correctly, can indeed serve as a method of punishing students who do not enter the classroom with a certain skill set, I wonder if the grading-as-metaphor-for-violence idea instead comes from a concern that grading simply doesn't feel good.

Self-esteem feels good. Of course, as any competent psychologist will tell you, what feels good isn't always good for you; in fact, psychological treatment itself can often be unpleasant. While I think that we do need to eliminate the correlation between standardized testing and funding and socialize our public schools a bit more so that every child actually does have the opportunity to start from the same place, I at the same time do not believe that holding this view means that I must also buy into the idea that if it feels good, it is good. Policy in this case needs to be left up to educational psychologists, not self-esteem pushers and people with ideas about metaphors.

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

My department prefers that we use "readers" for introductory lit classes, so I use the Bedford Compact Introduction to Literature, which is probably the least of several evils because its pages aren't as thin as Norton's. ;)

This semester, on a dare, I'm teaching as part of the drama unit Othello, the one Shakespeare play that the Bedford reader anthologizes.

The reader offers students "A Note on Reading Shakespeare," which advises:

"If you find the reading difficult, try listening to a recording of the play. (Most college libraries have recordings of Shakespeare's plays.) Allowing professional actors to do the reading aloud for you can enrich your imaginative reconstruction of the action and chaacters. Hearing a play can help you with subsequent readings of it."

While audio recordings may be used while you're reading, films may only be used after you've read the play:

"It is important to view the performance after your reading, though, so that your own mental re-creation of the play is not short-circuited by a director's production."

Because, after all, Will wrote plays specifically so that they might be anthologized and read by college students; he never intended them to be performed or anything. ;)

Dear Publisher,

Was it really necessary for you to change the eighth edition of your intro to literature text *just enough* so that (1) I have to redo the syllabi for the first third of the semester and (2) none of my students could buy the book used?

Also, I would question your decision to replace an allegory about British colonialism in Asia with a 9/11 story published last year. Newness does not make a story more relevant.

Thank you for providing countless hours of entertainment.

- PrimroseRoad

Bing of Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes tells a story that may indeed sum up everything you need to know.

I have graded 82 out of 94 papers thus far.
After paper #82, it dawned on me that I was grading all the papers on a 20-point scale, though the syllabus and my gradebook both show that the final paper was supposed to be graded on a 30-point scale.

I've ::headkeyboard::ed so much that the "R" key is now permanently lodged in my forehead.

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).

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."