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Teaching English for an Online University part I

Right now, things are not good for an English professor who only possesses an MA. Like many other fields of endeavor, there are so many qualified applicants for every job that universities, who prefer PhD.’s anyway, have no interest in anything less. More surprising than that, however, is the fact that community colleges are beginning to follow suit, in spite of the fact that a doctorate is no indication of a professor’s ability to effectively teach five sections of Freshman Composition without losing his or her mind. The last time I checked the Chronicle of Higher Ed. jobs listing, there was literally nothing on the board for a lowly MA.

It was only a matter of time, then, before I started teaching for one of the well-known online, for-profit universities. I won’t say their name here, but you have probably seen some commercials for them on television and the web. To begin with, the idea makes a lot of sense. People have been taking distance learning classes since shortly after radio began (perhaps even earlier), and the internet offers the added benefits of one-on-one communication with your professor as well as the ability to use the same visual aids as a brick and mortar classroom. If a professor is using a webcam (i personally don’t), an online student can even experience the body language of a lecture as well. In short, unless a student can afford to live on campus, their experience is going to be largely the same whether the school exists on the material plane or cyberspace.

I found the experience of teaching “part time” for my online university to be roughly analogous to being an adjunct teacher at a community college. That is to say that the wages are insulting, your bosses don’t much care about you, and the students range from brilliant to semi-retarded. However, there are some differences. For example, I find there to be a great deal less political game playing online, perhaps because nobody has to share an office with anybody else. An online adjunct doesn’t have to worry about the price of gasoline, which raises your effective net pay and cuts down on road rage. The methods used to rate a teacher’s performance are woefully inadequate at my online university. They are, however, at least as effective as the eval. process at a community college (which usually amounts to whether or not the dean likes you), if not better.

The main complaint I have about teaching online so far is that my particular online university has clearly hired more English composition teachers than they need and are actively prompting them to compete with one another for classes (more on that later). But, overall, I find working for an online university to be every bit as rewarding as teaching for a brick and mortar community college.

My Philosophy of Teaching 2011

Whenever I begin teaching a new composition class, I tell my students the following “As far as I am aware, there is no physiological difference between any of you and, say, Aristotle, or Socrates.”  It is an important part of my philosophy to acknowledge that college students aren’t stupid.  If they have difficulty with thinking critically or expressing those thoughts in writing, it is because they lack the tools and experience to do so, not because they’re dumb. I believe it is every teacher’s responsibility to remember this fact. What that translates to in the real world is mostly “elbow grease,” and comes in the form of pre-class preparation,  after-class help sessions, and an emphasis on the “process” aspects of writing.

 

Probably the aspect that I have most had to work on for my own improvement is the preparation. It can be difficult to prepare an effective class when one is an adjunct at two or three different colleges (with different syllabi and textbooks). But, over the past four years, I have developed better strategies for preparing my classes, and I have seen the improvement that good preparation brings.

 

I feel that most students can become good writers once they internalize the idea that writing is a process.  This is a difficult lesson for many students because, while they are exposed to writing every day, it comes to them as a completed product. For example, many of my students think of Twilight or similar books as good writing. I see it as my job, then, to help them see that Twilight wasn’t written in a day. Like any piece of good writing, it went through several revisions and probably doesn’t look much like the first draft any more.

 

Good teaching, like good writing, is not magic. Rather it is a long, but rewarding, process of developing the tools and the experience needed to communicate ideas effectively.

Theories of Grading Writing

Grading my students’ writing is one of my favorite things to do. I love to sit at a table in Charles B. Phillips library (the closest thing I have to an office) and spend a few hours interacting with my students’ thoughts and ideas, fountain pen in hand. It is a sort of meditation and, provided I don’t do too many at once, it leaves me feeling refreshed and energized. However, grading also fills me with a certain amount of existential dread.

The reason for this is the fact that I have yet to solidify a theory of grading with which I am completly happy. The main problem I have in coming up with a theory is the fact that the literature on grading seems to raise more questions than answers.

One of the central issues seems to be the contradiction inherent in taking a piece of student writing and, in the words of Peter Elbow, “summing up one’s judgment of a performance or person into a single, holistic number or score.”

After reading Michael Bernard-Donals’ essay “Peter Elbow and the Cynical Subject,” it seems like the best thing would be to bite the bullet and simply rank my students’ essays and be done with it. They would probably benefit from it in the sense that they would sort of “know where they stand” at all times. Bernard-Donals seems to be saying (maybe between the lines) that we’re all so fu*ked up by the fact of a grade that we make things worse when we try to mitigate the grade while remaining in the university system.

So ok. I should probably just treat papers as much as a scan tron as I can, for the good of all.

But there is a little voice in my head that tells me I could do so much more. If there was a way to reach students on a level that took them beyond being a “cynical subject”, well then I would be doing something really worthwhile. This requires more thought, and possibly more martinis.

opening .wps files

No matter how many times I tell my students not to email their papers in .wps format, I always get a few. As you probably already know, .wps files don’t play well with regular word processers like Word or Pages. The solution is this: go to www.zamzar.com which is a free service that will convert your file from .wps to .doc. It usually only takes a few minutes. I wish I had known about this as a TA.

Troubled Students

Right now I am checking my email every minute or so. Even though I know that it will tell me when I get a new email, I am furiously clicking the refresh button because right now I have a troubled student. Actually I have a couple, but tonight I am concerned about the one.

This student is having what the student describes as personal problems and I can tell from the student’s emails that he/she is suffering from depression. It’s painful enough to think of someone the age of a college freshman having depression problems, but when that student is in my class, I take it personally. I don’t see that there is any other way to look at it. So I email them and hopefully encourage them not to give up.

The problem is that depression, even in a mild form, can be so insidious that there isn’t much anyone can do. When I have a depressed student, I fear sometimes that it’s like a greek tragedy: what makes it tragic is not really the fact that bad things happen but that none of the characters can do anything to stop it. As if it’s my role to be “the concerned teacher” and it’s my student’s role to be “the troubled student” and things will not turn out well.

But I’m not really that pessimistic, so I just keep checking my email.

Creeping Plagiarism

Today I wanted to find some very simple literary criticism to have my composition 102 students read, after they had shared their own views on James Joyce’s short story, “Araby.”

The literary criticism databases only provided stuff that was a little to complicated for them. So, I googled “araby” and what did I get? Not information about the story or the author, but hundreds of pages offering  pre-written essays for sale!!!

God dammit! Mother F!@#$R

Aparantly the availability of pre-written essays has really gone through the roof since the last time I checked. I mean, I literally couldn’t find what I wanted because of all the “cheat.com” sites that were spamming my search.

I have to believe that this is due, in part, to No Child Left Behind. A generation of students has gone through a primary and secondary school system that has taught them how to “pass the test.” The problem is they don’t have any idea how to form a coherent argument (not unlike the head of the administration who came up with “no child”)

When I read what some of my students have written, my heart just f**king breaks. They clearly have intelligent thoughts and passionate feelings about their subjects, but they don’t know how to express them. It’s like watching a stroke victim (or Brian Wilson) try and tell you what they’re thinking.

I suppose the counterpoint to my complaint would be this: “Well, Fouts, that’s your job. Teach them how to express themselves using standard written English.  Teach them the available means of persuasion for any given situation. Teach them how to use the library, how to think critically, how to organize an argument, cite sources, create a bibliography, and also to put their names on every page. You have two months—-GO!”

The

During my community college class today, I was talking with one of my students after class. This student is concerned about issues of grammar arising from his/her learning English as a second language.

I seriously pity anybody who has to learn English as an adult. English doesn’t really make sense.

Last class, my student was concerned about when to use “a” and “an”. So, today, I had a little after-class session for anybody who wanted to stay. I went over the difference. Turns out that what she doesn’t understand is when to use “a” or “an” and “the”.

I tried to explain the definite article and another student came up with a perfect example: you might go shopping for “a” sweater, but eventually, while you are at the store, you find “the” sweater that you want. But my student still had problems with it. I think she is going to make it because her diagnostic essay was at the same writing level as everybody else’s but I wish I could explain it better.

After class, I stopped by my favorite microbrewery, Lunar Brewing, to drown my sorrows. While I was there I read the “Great Lakes Brewing News,” and, since it was on my mind, I marked all the usages of the word “the” in one of the articles.

This article is short. It consists of nine short paragraphs, but it contains 27 usages of the word “the”. Thing is, out of those 27, only fifteen of them were absolutely necessary. The remaining twelve could have been switched with “a” or “an,” or left out altoghether.

I have decided that the definate article is a subversive little bastard the gets everywhere, like roaches, and that I don’t like it very much at all. Grrrrrr.

So it goes.

Grammar Lesson?

In my rhetoric/literature class that I teach at a community college, I have a number of students for whom Engilsh is not their first language. Yesterday, as class was breaking up, one of them asked me the difference between “a” and “an”.

Despite the fact that I feel somewhat overwhelmed already (i’m not really, but it just feels that way), I find myself tempted to offer a short, after-class study session for my students. Nobody uses our room after us, so any students who wanted to, could stay after for a session.

If I did do that, I suppose I would have to offer to meet with any students who want to say, but are unable to do so as students need to all be given the same treatment (morally and legally) On the other hand, it is an extra thing and I suppose it would be covered under “office hours” since I haven’t got an office.

Another thing I could do would be to spend the last ten or fifteen minutes of each class going over more fundamental material. This way, everybody who comes to class could benefit. We have a one hour and fifteen minute session so I can probably make time for it.

hmmmmmm.

Will Work for Hoodies

So far, the most disappointing thing about being an adjunct teacher is the fact that I don’t have any money.

At my last “job” as a T.A. I actually got paid fairly well for the small amount of work that I did. Plus I had a sweet student loan shoring up my finances.

Now days, not so much. Times are getting hard already and it’s only the first week. I can’t even afford to buy a new round of hoodie sweatshirts for the fall. Normally I do this every year.

The ability to comfortably wear hoodies from September to May is one of the greatest advantages to living in the Midwest. So comfortable and relaxing…and a new hoodie is the most comfortable of all. *sigh*

First Class at Community College

Yesterday was my first class at Triton. I showed up several hours early to just kind of get the feel of the place. I had been there a few times over the summer, but you don’t really get the feel of a college until you spend some time there when students are present.

First impressions:

The campus wasn’t as crowded as I thought it would be. The main campus is pretty small and I thought that would translate to steady streams of students walking from one place to another. But I was really surprised at the small size of the crowds of students and the leisurely atmosphere of the outside area. In the student center, I was able to find an open table even during peak lunchtime hours. It could be that the place is a little more crowded in the evening.

My students were extremely quiet at first, more so than I am used to. My best guess on this is that they were probably a little nervous. Triton has open enrollment which means that alot of the students probably haven’t taken AP classes in high-school. To me that has no reflection on their ability, but they were probably more “out of their element” than my university students.

As I was told, there is a lot of variety in the racial and economic backgrounds of the students. There were a lot more students of Eastern European background than I had thought there would be.

So it goes.