The Midterm Experiment

My students have told me that they don't want to be guinea pigs. Unfortunately, every experienced teacher was new at some time, and if a teacher doesn't try new things he or she will simply stagnate in all the pedagogical techniques that don't work. I'm determined not to stagnate.

I'm giving my first midterm exam.

Normally, as an English adjunct, I simply assign papers that incorporate concepts we've learned in class as we go. This semester, however, I want to see if a multiple-choice-type exam will help my students become more grounded in the nit-picky grammar issues that they so often leave to software. Punctuation, grammar, and spelling are essential skills that once proven, can imbue students with a confidence in their own writing. They don't have to feel dependent on their word processing programs, which don't fix commas anyway.

A midterm exam will mean more work for me (and my students as well), but I feel the results should be worth the effort. I'm also hoping to include some questions about diagramming. Looking at the sentence from different angles (including the construction of a diagram on their own) will help new writers understand the mechanical side of grammar, and testing them on this mechanical side should hypothetically help them retain the most essential visual representations of clauses and phrases.

New Children and Wishes

Frances Hardinge's characters in Well Witched think in very mature patterns, but such a style could hardly be criticized. For Ryan to instantly understand an adult's innermost meanings is hardly more fantastical than for he and his friends to be herded by sentient-seeming shopping carts.

Contemporary children must surely believe, from their observations of grown-up media, that acting like a petulant teen is appropriate for all ages. These same children might have some difficulty relating to Ryan and Chelle, but I found the change of attitude in Well Witched both haunting and refreshing.

Childrens' books seem very much en vogue at the moment. It would be a shame if those mini-van mama groupies missed this brilliant opportunity for a book as dark and compelling as Garth Nix's The Ragwitch or Suzanne's Collins's Gregor the Overlander.

Student Evaluations

Although I've been teaching for more than a year, yesterday (yes, that's right, Christmas Day) marked the first student evaluations I've ever had the dubious opportunity to read. My students managed to impugn everything from my textbook to my hair and clothes. It was a truly disturbing experience, and not particularly efficacious in my opinion.

I did learn some interesting things about students' impressions of me, but learned much more about my former students, and not all of which was flattering to them. I wonder if I should be mortified by my own comments to teachers past, but I recall very few negative things I might have had to say of them. It has been my experience that students who do well complain less, and as per human nature, students who do badly lay more blame than is warranted on instructors.

One comment I cannot dismiss, though. I feel the urgent need to address an accusation students have been making for several semesters, even knowing they'll never read this. My students are somehow under the impression that I play favorites - that I am very strict with most students, but that I allow those few students who have the same opinions, or who know my family, to come late or hand in shoddy work without reprisal. It's totally untrue, and a look at my gradebook can prove it. My students have no way of knowing that everyone is marked late, whether I personally like them or not. They don't know that I cover their names when I grade their papers. They simply assume that because I am convivial in class the grades I hand back reflect that congeniality.

No teacher is purely mathematical in their policies. Every person has bias, prejudices, and uses stereotypes. I admit that I have mine, but they are not what my students believe. I am prejudiced towards effort. I tend to give much more credit to someone who is obviously trying than to someone who feels that they can effortlessly succeed, and whose attendance etc. reflects that attitude.

I must adjust my teaching strategies somehow to help students understand that I don't just hand out grades like candy. You'd think the algebraic formula I use should be of some assistance.

GRE: Literature in English

I recently re-took the Graduate Records Examination: Literature in English Subject Test. Now everyone keeps asking me how I think I did. I suppose if I looked at the questions and thought "I don't know this at all!" I could be pretty sure I'd bomb, or if I breezed through it like it was tissue-paper I could be fairly certain I'd get a high score. Unfortunately, I enjoyed it. I know there were questions I simply didn't know. There were several questions where I had narrowed the answers to two options, but couldn't decide between them. My best chances in that case would be about fifty percent.

This is the great tragedy of an English degree; I have been trained to be confident - to say things with certainty even if I'm only fifty percent sure I'm right. That makes standardized tests lots of fun, but it means I don't have the faintest clue how I did. I could have been completely mistaken, and yet totally confident. I won't find out until Christmas, when all my dreams of a PhD are dashed by a single percentile score.

Perhaps $130 is too much for three hours of pointless bubble-filling, however much fun it is.

A New Word

Today while reading Carlyle's "The French Revolution: A History" (NOT a typical ouvre), I came across a brilliant word with which I was not yet familiar. I blame my stubborn apolitical tendencies.

The word is "Poltroonery." Basically, it means cowardice, but it sounds so much more like "chicken" - *grins from ear to ear.*

Poltroonery, so newly re-named for me, has long been one of the weaknesses I despise most in humanity, and in myself. By fear we allow ignorance (a form of slavery), oppression, misfortune, misconception, and we allow our own souls to fester inside of us. Only by a profound courage - to accept truth, to shoulder responsibility, and to face the world unashamed - do we, as a species, move forward.

A Real Vote

Each semester someone in the English Department hosts a penny-poll, and this semester it's Donne vs. Shakespeare - the E.M.E. smack-down.

I sincerely believe that Donne will win for one simple reason. So many people don't like Shakspar because they know just enough about him to have been intimidated.

Donne was profound and funny. He thought in words and ideas so entwined together that they resembled the threads in some nautical rope, and from each twist sprouted some new metaphor which may or may not totally redefine the subject. His poetry embodied linguistic and theological complexity, and his ideas warrant nearly as much concentration as Ulysses.

Shekespear was crass and commercial. He wrote fast-talking but believable characters, and mocked his own cast, his critics, colleagues, and occasionally himself. He killed mercilessly and resurrected without a blink. He hosted fairies, demons, witches, bastards, cuckolds, royalty, and soldiers, and even the funny ones weren't safe. For an E.M.E., he was awfully modern.

How would you vote?

Thornton

My heart is still pounding away from the last two scenes of the BBC North & South. Pounding away, I tell you!

I recall a scene from earlier in the movie where Mr. Thornton has fallen asleep at his desk and his mother covers his shoulders with her shawl, and I remember thinking that he works too hard, and he wouldn't have time to keep a wife and childer happy. He might say that he works for their benefit, as his employees do, but if his employees don't work, they starve. If he doesn't work, his wife and sister wear their own cotton instead of imported silk.

And then I realized that Mr. Thornton personifies a conceptual medium between Mr. Darcy of the Romantic era and Ebenezer Scrooge of the Victorians. It turns my head in fascinating circles to imagine Scrooge as a romantic lead. I think I might indulge in that turn.