The wrong week to quit.

Grad students: As another semester and year of graduate school comes to a close, a sudden change in personal habits is not advisable:

Make it fit.

Thanks for Hating On Me

I wrote this song for everybody who is mad at somebody about their blessings.
Mostly for family, you know, cause that…that thing does happen.
So cousin so-and-so whoever you are out there: Heh heh.

–Jill Scott, on VH1 Soul

Yes, Jill, that thing does happen. And in my case, mostly with family (but not my cousins). Thank you for writing this song. In addition to helping me in my never-ending quest to find examples of the malefactive construction in English (i.e., things that happen on somebody), your song has been my mantra of the week (translation: see #6 of this post):

Hate On Me
From Jill Scott’s The Real Thing – Words and Sounds, Vol. 3

If I could give you the world
On a silver platter
Would it even matter?
You’d still be mad at me

If I could find in all this
A dozen roses
Which I would give to you
You’d still be miserable

In reality
I’m gonna be who I be
and I don’t feel no fault
For all the lies that you bought

You can try as you may
Break me down but I say
That it ain’t up to you
Gonna do what you do

Hate on me hater
Now or later
‘Cause I’m gonna do me
You’ll be mad baby
Go ‘head and hate on me hater
I’m not afrai-id
What I got I paid for
You can hate on me

Ooh if I gave you peaches
Out of my own garden
And I made you a peach pie
Would you slap me?

I wonder if I gave you diamonds
Out of my own womb
Would you feel the love in that?
Or ask, “why not the moon?”

If I gave you sanity
For the whole of humanity
Had all the solutions
To the pain and pollution?

No matter where I live
Despite the things I give
You’ll always be this way
So go ‘head and

Hate on me hater
Now or later
‘Cause I’m gonna do me
You’ll be mad baby
Go ‘head and hate on me hater
I’m not afrai-id
What I got I paid for
You can hate on me (x2)

You cannot hate on me ’cause my mind is free, feel my destiny

..So shall it be

You make me uncomfortable with your words

OK, the summer has passed, and school is about to start once again. I feel like now that some time has passed, I can give a retrospective of some of the things I learned last semester being a discussion section leader in a 101 level class.

I went to a big state school, and I have sat in my share of discussion sections. Some days, I didn’t want to go to them. And some days, I went ahead and skipped them. When it came time for me to teach one of these things, I expected people to run me a line or two to explain why they haven’t been showing up to class. You know, lines that didn’t involve “Sorry, I got really wasted last night and your discussion section is at 9am” or “dude, I got really wasted last night, and besides, you’re going to ask me questions about a lecture that I didn’t even go to.” My favorites, paraphrased thusly:

“I’m sorry that I missed the first two weeks of your discussion section, but see, this class is in Science Building 2, and on my class schedule printout, they put Science Building 1. I’ve been going to Building 1.”

So you mean to tell me that, out of all the other students in this class who managed to find the classroom–and probably had Science Bldg. 2 written on their class schedules–you are the only one who had a little mixup, because they put Bldg. 1 on your schedule. And you also mean to tell me that, after the first week, when you went to Bldg. 1 to find nobody there, you decided to go back there again the next week only to find the classroom empty, and only then did you think something was up and that you might need to contact someone about that.

Yeah.

“I’ve been trying to contact you to tell you I’ve been sick for the last two weeks, but I had the wrong email address for you. I’ve been emailing the wrong person.”

Um, my email address is on (1) the course syllabus, (2) the info. sheet I handed out on the first day of discussion section, (3) the department website, and (4) the homepage for the 101 class on the department website. (5), I’ve sent group emails to the class, meaning you could have just hit reply. And (6), my email address is very Google-able.

I hope any of my former students who might find and read this know that I love them, loved teaching them, and that I would do anything for them and the advancement of their education.

But people, I’m gonna have to call you out. I called my student out on this latter one, and we had a laugh.

And school starting again means that I will be heading back to tutoring at the Writing Center, a job that I thoroughly enjoy. But boy, I will tell you the greatest thing about being a discussion section leader and a writing tutor: I don’t have to grade. Which brings me to the main feature of this post.

English/composition/rhetoric professors and TAs have to deal with a lot of mess. A lot of semi-literary, semi-professional, semi-baked written down mess. Hell, any TA or professor who has to deal with written assignments deals with mess. I am reminded of Taylor Mali’s The The Impotence of Proofreading.

The worst part is, they have to evaluate and grade this mess. And when a student gets a grade that they don’t like, or a grade that they think won’t make mommy and daddy happy, the lines people run them can be downright outrageous. But this one takes the cake:

You Make Me Uncomfortable with your Words

The gist of this story from the Acephalous blog is that a student got a bad grade in a writing class, emails the teacher, and essentially blames the teacher for the bad grade. The entire post is worth a read, but here are some excerpts, emphasis mine:

You try to be objective and the very attempt becomes your flaw because you try so hard to grade fairly and comment wisely that you become biased to your own ideas. You criticize our writings because we are college students and young but do not realize that you offend most of us when you do this…

…You like to lead discussions and that is bad because it is the entire means by which we learn but we do not know what you want from us on our papers. I have honestly no idea what I learned from you in this class because so much time was spent discussing the tiny details in the passages in the book and so if I learned anything it is how to read things in too much detail. I could have read books in too much detail on my own but that is not what I came to college to do because I already know how to read and I would have told you this but you make me completely uncomfortable with your words so I never said a word.

Well, let’s not feel too bad for the guy, right? It’s just an international student, possibly Asian, who has deference for his superiors, a penchant for run on sentences, and really might not feel comfortable talking to his teacher, because that’s not how they do it where he’s from.

No. As revealed later:

the student is, in fact, a native speaker of the upper-class, Wonder Bread variety.

I feel justified to re-call this person out cause I have been guilty of running such lines. Never to this extent, but I have. In fact, I laugh because I have been guilty of this in my graduate student career. Yes, I was a great writer in high school. In college, the papers I wrote in my French poetry and literature classes were nonpareil. But my eventual undergraduate degree, business, did not require me to write a lot of papers. I took time off of school between undergrad and grad school. And I changed fields when I went from undergrad to grad school. My writing, for which the two years prior to grad school had been limited to journaling and letter writing, was completely inappropriate for the research tasks I was taking on. I was having composition translation problems–I couldn’t compose a research paper to save my life. And though my teacher was very explicit on what the content of the paper was supposed to be, she wouldn’t tell me how to do it in the format appropriate for the field, and I got pissed. I also once got mad because I thought a prof. was giving preferential treatment to ESL students–holding me up to a higher standard because it was OK for their presentations and papers to not be perfect (who knows if she was). I think teaching domain-specific academic writing styles and techniques is important, and not done enough (at least to my knowledge). And ESL students should get a break–but not too much of one. But these are all other posts for another day.

I laugh at this post because I, too, am of the upper middle class white bread variety. I laugh because oh my god, I have been one of those people. But some people think we shouldn’t laugh. And the author apparently got a bit of criticism for posting it from both colleagues and students. But here’s the thing. For whatever reasons, we laugh because the author is absolutely on to something. The root of the humor is particularly pithy:

Some students, and generally some people, have an incredible sense of entitlement. When they show their ass by laying that out on the line, it’s funny.

Entitlement is not a new concept in education. And that is nothing to laugh about. The story that comes to my mind is uproar over grade inflations at Harvard–particularly the uproar that I imagine must have come from the parents: “I pay how much to send my kid to this school, and you’re giving them a what in your class?” It trickles down to their kids. But right on, Mister author man (I believe his name is Scott). As he told his critics, they can ruffle their feathers all they want:

But only the outrageously entitled will think poorly of me for mocking outrageous entitlement … and I’m not interested in pandering to that particular demographic. (White patriarchal privilege being something I demystify in my class, not encourage.)

Issues of money, the cost of higher education, and the mentality of “getting what you paid for” won’t be separated from the learning process for a long time. It’s a shame, because it hurts our collective critically-thinking brain as a whole.

It’s hard to call out students who you think are not working up to their potential. Or ones who does not care to. Especially the entitled kind of students like the one here. As great as it would be, you can’t just say, “I can tell you spent all of about 5 minutes or pulled an all nighter to throw this together” or “it’s entirely clear that you have not read the book, nor have you gleaned anything from class, the times that you do choose to show up”. Not only do you risk a slap on the wrist, you risk lawsuits. You want to see students get all they can out of what you’re offering them. But they make their choices, and most of the time, these choices do not factor in the fact that education is a privilege, not another hoop their parents are making them jump through.

I will say that the student did have one good point, at least one that was implied: it is scary to approach a professor about writing a paper. You think you’re cheating. Or your ideas are your babies, and they need to be protected. I’ve felt all these things. As a teacher, it’s hard to establish trust with students in order to get them to come to you on the offensive instead of the defensive.

I think the big message I’m trying to make by these examples here is clear: educators in general need to find ways to start calling out this mess. And students need to know that it is a mess. Learning is a process. Learning how to think independently, and how be criticized for those independent thoughts is tough. Those words are uncomfortable. But sometimes, you gotta sit there, take them, and learn something from them. And examples like these are ways to start the conversation. I think the more that students and teachers can acknowledge that these kinds of situations exist, the better. The more we can accept that confrontation is not something to back away from–especially in education–and the more teachers and students can get up in each other’s faces about it, the better off we are.

And if we do that, not only can we make our words more comfortable, we can make them smarter.

Words of Wisdom

“The truth is that many people set rules to keep from making decisions.” -Mike Krzyzewski

Semester’s over. Now what?

“The problem with doing nothing is knowing when you’re finished.”  –Benjamin Franklin

I’m a grad student. I have TONS of issues.

No, you’re not going to hell

This is a fabulous piece on how to avoid freaking out because you missed a deadline from insidehighered.com

If only I had read it sooner…

More words of wisdom

“They might be [reading your abstract] on a plane. Between two bloody marys.” -Z.B.

Words of Wisdom

“Being precise is a bitch.” –J.G.

“The _____ Hypothesis sucks bad.” –W.S.