I guess your right. I took Organic Chemistry and knew I was wasn’t going to do well. I stuck it out, got a C- and took it again. Having copies of all the tests helped me study the next time I took the class.
What is your opinion of students bringing laptops to lecture? There’s been a bit of a brouhaha with some professors getting upset at students being potentially allowed to play games and suchlike.
But isn’t a “C-” passing? I ask because I’m wondering why you’d torture yourself again. Unless, of course, you needed the course for your major, in which case I totally understand. (Of course, it occurs to me that you might’ve taken it again just for the personal-this-time-I’m-getting-at-least-a-“B”-dammit! satisfaction of it. In which case–and if you could afford it–I get it.)
This is me, soooooo glad that I don’t need organic chemistry for (what will be) my major! I did have to take statistics, though (sociology major), and while I got an “A-” (I have **no ** idea how–and I’ve since forgotten everything!), I didn’t escape totally unscathed. 
While this is certainly part of what concerns people, I think that, on a more basic level, some people (especially me!) find the tippity-tappity noise of the keyboards (even the so-called quiet keyboards) to be mind-bendingly annoying. I had an English professor (poetry–Yeats, Auden, and Eliot) a couple of semesters ago who, while quite tech savvy himself, banned laptops in his classroom. (Likewise for hats that were not worn for religious purposes, bless his heart.) I tell ya, I could’ve licked his boots for that. (And what the hell is up with these folks who use their laptops in the library study rooms?! I mean, it’s difficult enough for me to process what I’m reading *without * the tippity-tappity in the background. Aaaargh!!)
I’m more greenhorn than PRR, but the laptops in class thing is driving me buggy. Several students DO take notes on theirs, and that tippety tappity doesn’t bother me since I know it’s constructive, but at least that many I know are fucking around-- they start laughing in the back row and I know it wasn’t anything I said. I’ve had one student pretty brazenly watching a video, which sucked in the row behind him. Our campus is wireless, so everyone’s on chat and such, too. I’ve had students e-mail me questions about term papers or exams, time-stamped during lecture.
So. . . mixed feelings. Don’t know how to solve this. Clad the lecture hall in lead or something. I wonder if I made a policy statement about “taking notes is fine-- anything else is not” if anyone would follow it?
I had to get at least a C and why I stuck it out. Getting a C- was pretty much the same thing as getting an F and he knew it and it sort of pissed me off. Trust me, I would rather have jumped off a building than taken it again. I had a great prof for the repeat and had him for Organic II and got B’s. I was ready to have a party because chemistry was not my subject.
Community colleges, also.
. I got a remote for my laptop and now lecture from the back of the room. I tell the studene beforehand that it’s their call how they spend their class time, but that I’ll remove them from the room if they disrupt others’ learning, or look at pornography while I’m teaching. I also note who’s doing something unrelated to the class; those folks do not get extensions, extra time from me of the teaching assistant, or opportunities to make up bad grades.
pseudotriton, what made you decide to become a professor?
Wow, I thought that scenario was going in a totally different direction.
What’s it like having tenure? Do you feel like you’ve got a free ride and can do whatever you like – blow off further publishing, etc., – or are there further milestones at which you’ll be judged on performance?
Have you served on a search committee? If so, what does the hiring process look like from that side? What makes a candidate stand out (or not) at an MLA interview?
Well, here’s a course I would take, even as a just as a no-credit con’t ed or if I were doing my engineering degree over again as a humanities elective.
Will you tie-in some classic American noir writers? Hammet, Chandler? Should I even mention Spillane and R.B. Parker? How about the whole Sin-City comic/film phenomenon? Does that make it into your curriculum? (Don’t forget Calvin & Hobbes & the Tracer Bullit series!)
Although I’m biased, being someone who does much better with didactic teaching, I must confess that I got irritated by “discusion” classes in my business degree. I didn’t care what other ignorant students like me thought of the situation, I wanted the professor’s more informed take on it.
On to other questions:
Are the office politics as vicious as they are reputed to be in academe?
From the books you mention, you don’t sound like someone who despises anything that was ever written by a “dead white man”. How much does the need to politically correct stifle what you would want to say in your lectures?
How do you feel about "those"students, you know, the ones who sit in front, pay attention, and often intervene too often in discussions: annoying nerdy keeners, or students who make it all worthwhile? (not that I was ever anything like that, you understand, no sirree, not me, why do you ask? )
Do you live in an Ivory tower?
Slight hijack, but I couldn’t resist responding to this:
While there are some exceptions, and the extent to which this is true for a given course obviously depends on the subject matter, most instructors at the college level aren’t trying to teach a body of factual content so much as they are trying to teach a way of thinking. And there’s only so much you can learn about thinking by listening to someone else do the thinking for you. The point, in other words, is for the students to learn how to analyze a situation on their own, and to be able to transfer those skills so they can do it again with a different situation when they don’t have an instructor to guide them or peers to collaborate with, not for them to memorize what the instructor thinks of a specific situation.
Even if the course does involve straight-up-and-down factual content, it’s still often beneficial to make the students responsible for conveying some of that content to their peers. If I give a student a definition of, say, a Spenserian sonnet in lecture, he or she may or may not be listening, and in any case listening is still a passive activity, and it’s often hard to retain information if you haven’t done anything active with it. If I tell the student to find the definition and report back to the class, that ensures that the student gets to practice an important skill (knowing where to look up the information) as well as learning the factual definition, and in addition, the act of explaining the definition to other people reinforces the content and makes it more likely that the student will remember it later.
When a student shows me some computational error I’ve made, or some grade I’ve failed to enter, or something, instantly. If it’s some argument like “The final paper was no way a C+, that was definitely an An essay I wrote…”, I’m a tough sell but it’s happened. The ony thing makes me close my mind is any argument that begins with the words “But I NEED a A in this course…” which just makes me think “Yeah, well then you should have been doing A work, no?” Not my problem.
If a student simply is disputing my judgment, and insisting he/she is getting a bad deal fom me, I’ll offer to ask one of my colleagues to grade the paper, with one caveat: I’ll accept my colleague’s recommendations whether it’s to raise the grade or lower it, and the student must agree in advance to accept that grade, whatever it is. A student who’s sincerely aggreived will do it, a student who’s just looking for an undeserved bump in the QPA will not.
That’s something I wonder about myself, btw: if there’s some sort of advice these students get, to make a pont of arguing they deserve a higher grade in every course they’ve ever taken, on the logical ground that five hours (an hour in each prof’s office every semester) will result in some improvement in their overall QPA and possibly a considerable bump, with no downside other than the investment of five hours.
I try to resist raising grades just to spare myself an argument, because I think a disappointing grade can serve as a reminder to students in future courses: “Hey, I have to put in some effort here, I can’t do a slapdash job if I want a good grade.” But I have done it when students have made substantial arguments.
Three times at MLA, and regularly when we’re hiring adjuncts and staff/administration position, which don’t require a full search committee.
Much of the MLA interviews on our part are factory production lines, often with up to ten candidates per day being interviewed, and much of the interview is rote: the chairman of the committee welcomes you, offers you something to drink, engages you in chit-chat, then committee members riff off your CV and cover letter, so the only place for you to stand out, usually, is in the kinds of questions you ask us at the tail of your interview. You don’t want to ask premature questions at this point: salary, released time, housing. Since at my school, junior faculty will teach a lot of core courses, it’s good to ask about those, since it shows us you’ve done your homework about your future duties, and you’re realistic about what kinds of teaching you’ll be doing. I’ve learned that it’s dangerous to ask about specific upper -level courses you’ve seen in our catelogue, since the curriculum may be changing and those courses might be the private property of someone in the room.
Since we’re not experts in your specific field, it’s good to pitch your dissertation topic just right: succinct, but not requiring deep reading in your area. Dwelling too extensively on the dissertation is dangerous in that it is often an earmark of prima donnas who think that the topic of their primary interest is also the topic of ours. Our only real interest (as opposed to polite interest) in your dissertation is how close you are to finishing it and having your degree in hand, since our dean wants every new hire to have the degree before getting here. If you’ve had your dissertation accepted, it’s okay to tell us about that, and if you’ve got a publisher interested, certainly tell us that. But dont go on and on about it, absent direct questioning. (Sometimes someone has an odd interest in your topic, but you could probably talk about that topic in your sleep.)
The other thing I’ve learned is not to take rejection too hard. I’ve seen candidates rejected for the stupidest of reasons, sometimes because one of my colleagues misunderstood something the candidate said, and the rest of the committee is in too much of a rush to defend the candidate.
I’m very big on advising students to drop the course if they’re doing badly. There’s often no way, barring a miracle, for them to pass, and putting in the effort to try will cause them to fail other courses as well. A student registered for six hard courses is gambling to start with: to stay in all six when things start going very badly is counter-productive and they often need prodding to see what’s best for them. I’ll often put it like this “If you do A work on every single future assignment and exam, you’ll get a D in the course–are you okay with that sort of pressure? If you are, are you okay with doing B+ work for here in, which won’t be easy, and still failing the course?”
I had a tendency to obsess about grades and it was the in-between grades that used to bug me. Like needing one point for an A or why not an A- instead of a B+.
I sometimes tried and was never successful and wondered if I wasn’t very good at presenting my argument or if it was just an exercise in futility.
The most attractive thing about it was that it was the kind of work that would not only allow me to write and publish, but would virtually demand it. I worked as an editor and journalist for a while , but I found that the last thing I wanted after a long day or week of looking at someone else’s manuscript was to look at mine, but I figured that a job that would hire and promote me if I published was a good line of work for me, and it was possible (not always easy) to structure my courses so that I’d have a few weeks, sometimes a few months, to work on my own stuff.
Also, after grad school, I realized that knew some interesting stuff backwards and forwards, so I could discuss these subjects without a great deal of anxiety. That’s the function I think of a rigorous grad school training–to make you so converant with the fine and delicate points of the field that it’s fairly effortless to talk about the background stuff, which is what the undergraduate classes are mainly about.
We’re wrestling with this one now, trying to institute some type of peer review system, to deal with the effect that grade inflation has on the student evals, which seems to me to be quite direct. Student evals are used for several purposes, : telling the profs what’s working, and what’s not, complaining about difficult or inappropriate course material, offering suggestions for revising the course, responding to experiments in this semester’s syllabus, etc. It’s not always clear what the students are evaluating FOR, nor what should be done with the evaluations. I’d hate for them to be used in granting tenure, but others would argue otherwise, and have brought up evals during tenure hearings, both positively and negatively.