End-of-Semester Questions

... and things are much as normal; i.e. No Time To Post. But here are the eternal end-of-semester questions:

1. Why do faculty (myself included) assign all their major papers to be due in the final two weeks of the semester when we KNOW from experience that this will cause us pain and distress?

2. Why does the time crunch seem to leave some faculty time for writing long, crazy missives (and even longer responses to said crazy missives) to faculty online discussion lists? How are they doing this? Are elves doing their grading?

3. Where can I get some grading elves?

4. Do students not know where my office is until the last three weeks of the semester? Does it disappear like Brigadoon for the rest of the semester?

5. Why do I assign so much written work?

6. How is it that I have already booked my summer solid with work obligations?

7. Seriously: Where does one pick up those elves? And do they have relatives that do things like shop for groceries and do laundry?


Please feel free to add your own questions to the list...

First Day Observations

1. I haven't been in the classroom since last May. More importantly, I haven't been in my classroom clothes since last May. Spain included a lot of delicious cheese. You do the math.
2. My classes are packed. Seriously: all of them are full to capacity. This is unusual for medievalists. But damn, it's not easy leading a discussion in these big classes.
3. I have almost all my classes prepped and ready through March. Because February is going to be a haze of travel and writing and course prep. 
4. This begins my fifteenth year on the tenure track. Why do I still feel like a rank beginner?
5. If there were any class in which to have an interrupting mansplainer, did it have to be my gender class?
6. This is not a Middlemarch post. In case you hadn't figured that out by now. But that will come tomorrow.

"European Identity" My Lily-White Ass.

So.

This week, my campus was targeted by a national white supremacist organization as part of a larger national campaign. We found our hallways, library, kiosks adorned with variations on this theme:

The poster in our hall. I've blurred the org. name because F those jerks.

So today, I had to go into two of my classes and address this. There was no internal debate. No should I/should I not -- none whatsoever. Not even for a second. First of all, the issue was a misuse of the very past I was there to discuss, and so it was required that I talk about this, and take a strong stand about the abuses of history. Second, if someone wants to complain that I'm using class time to say mean things about nazis, I'm cool with that. Anyway, I mentioned that these morons were basing their idea of the future being "ours" and belonging to "us" on a bogus claim of the past belonging to "us."

I may or may not have deployed the phrase "ass-ignorant." Reports vary. I am certain that I was shaking at various points.

A representative of our administration made a point about being a public university and thus respecting free speech. Which is true. What is also true is that outright lies are not co-equal with reasonable arguments. Just like it's not "airing both sides" to arrange a debate between a German historian and a Holocaust denier.

It's not so often that medieval history is on the front lines of the fight against nationalism. We tend to get characterized as "esoteric" or even "irrelevant" to the way we live our lives today. But not knowing allows these falsehoods to take hold. And we don't do ourselves, our students, or our society any good by trying to be apolitical in the face of something both historically wrong and morally repugnant.

We have a role to play. Time to step up, be loud, be unafraid and unapologetic. Time for historians to make sure they get right with history.

Qualms About Being Qualified, or What the Hell Am *I* Doing Pretending to Teach Paleography?

Today, my friends, was convocation at my college. This can only mean one thing: the semester is actually going to begin. On Monday. Will a year have left me rested and rejuvenated? Or will it have rendered me utterly unable to cope? Only time will tell.

But... other than stupidly deciding that this was the year to Revise! All! The! Courses!, I've taken on an extra quasi-prep: for my two excellent grad students (truly, they are) I am organizing a paleography workshop. Just six weeks, I told them. You should not think this will prepare you for the archives, I told them. But it might, just might, prepare them to take a real paleography course from someone who's actually qualified.

Query now: I wonder if anyone is really qualified to teach a medieval paleography course. I mean, someone whose field is Manuscript Studies, perhaps. But a working medieval historian? Most of us work with one century, at most. We tend to specialize in two or three hands at first, maybe expanding that over the course of a career. But a paleography course runs the whole gamut. Who among us is specialist in Merovingian chancery script:

...and blackletter book hands:

...and whatever the hell this is:

 

(Oh. Wait. That's one of mine.)

Anyway, the point is that I need to realize that most people who have ever taught paleography have been in the same situation I'm in: confident in a handful of hands, vaguely competent in a few others, and ready to admit ignorance in some places. I guess I can live with that.

Final Grades: A Little Secret

Open letter to my students:

Congratulations! We have all survived yet another semester. Ring out, wild bells! Yet for some, this will be an anxious time, for you're awaiting your grades. You're wondering why I haven't sent back your papers yet, or why the final paper & exam categories haven't been filled in. You'd also wonder about the hour-long gap between me finishing grading and posting the final grades, if only you knew about it.

So here's a little secret, something that many of us proffies do for our undergrads that you may not know about: If you've shown consistent effort and/or improvement over the semester, we spend that extra hour or so scrounging around the gradebook, looking for somewhere to find you just one more point if it will push you into the next-highest grade levels. Because we recognize that numbers don't tell the whole story, and that a gradebook calculated down to the quarter-point out of 100 doesn't weight for improvement or one little silly mistake on a quiz because you were tired but you remembered walking out the door...

Because mostly, though it may not seem like it, we really like you, and we're totally on your team. And we want you to have a good summer.

Now: can we go out and play?

Shedding

I have shed a grad student.

A person with lots of enthusiasm and a great idea for a thesis, but who struggled with writing and organization. A person who could not meet deadlines and who dropped out of contact for months on end. A person who spent a year learning an obscure language in order to be able to work with the required sources. A person whose personal life seemed to be a neverending series of crises, probably all quite real and serious, but all of which coincided with work deadlines.

I tried structure. I tried letting go and waiting. I mixed and remixed compassion and strict guidance. I sent a long, kind e-mail telling this student that a graceful exit was okay, and had no reflection on them as a person; that it was okay to admit they'd gotten in over their head; that there was no judgment. Finish if you can, but get out if you need to; there's no need to punish yourself. All to no avail. Even the impending seven-year up-or-out deadline (set by the university) had, in the end, no effect. There were apologies, and professions of really wanting to finish, but...

And now this student has realized this, just as s/he has run out of time. Yesterday, with my concurrence, the grad director sent a kind but firm "no" to a request for another extension. And I know that's the right thing to do. But I still feel rotten.

Hindenburg Student

Sometimes students explode. Sometimes they burn bright and then fizzle. And sometimes, the crash is long and slow, but nevertheless ends in flames.

This student's crash I saw from a long way off. From week 2, it was obvious that s/he was one of those students that was a voracious but sporadic consumer of facts. They'd pop out randomly in class. Yet they seemed to have little to do with the actual reading. So we had a talk about that every few weeks. I mentioned that talking about outside materials (a) didn't let me see that s/he'd been doing the classwork, and (b) shut the rest of the class out of the conversation.

Then there were the odd behaviors: the close-talking, the need for immediate verbal feedback at the end of each class, the need to shake my hand at the end of every conversation. These struck me as possible spectrum disorder issues, so I talked to hir -- gently! -- about getting to see the folks at DSS. I even mentioned a specific person who I knew was particularly helpful.

Then there were the anxieties, the near-tearful breakdowns in my office. For these, again gently, I mentioned how helpful our free on-campus counseling program could be. That it was totally normal to feel overwhelmed in the first semester of transferring from a two-year school to a four-year one. That we had lots of resources to help hir; s/he only needed to use them.

By week five, it was obvious that this airship was going down in flames and I was suggesting withdrawing from some of hir classes. By week 8, it had gotten bad enough that I was floating the possibility of medical leave: "just to give you time to get in the position where you can really succeed the way you want to."

S/he insisted that s/he was "just going to stick it out and see it through."

And today, I got the e-mail: after three missed appointments to talk about the final paper and two extensions, s/he wrote to say s/he wouldn't be turning in the paper. S/he was getting Ds or Fs in all hir classes, but s/he was going to do better next semester.

For which s/he was enrolled in five classes for a total of 16 credit hours.

Sometimes, you see a crash coming from a long way off. And sometimes, despite your best efforts, the student crashes and burns, all the while insisting that everything's fine.

There ought to be a mathematical equation...

...to express the relationship between a given student's effort on a project or in a class and the amount of time a professor spends on that student alone.

Mathematicians? Care to take a crack at this? While you're at it, I'd appreciate a bar graph with student grades plotted along the X axis, and average professor-hours per student on the Y axis.

What I'm Learning from my Grad Students

How about: way more than I thought I would?

I have a system for my M.A. exams for my grad students. I developed this system to try to balance student interests with me not going completely insane trying to make sure I knew all the material that they'd covered for their exams. I haven't been in the biz long enough to have an eight-page bibliography from diverse medieval stuff topics from memory or in my notes already, and since I'm the only medievalist, I've got to be able to cover students interested in stuff all over the continent, for the entire thousand-year period.

Here's how it works: Students taking a M.A. exam with me have to read about 45-50 items, spread out over 5 different subtopics. I have a list of about a dozen topics that I've got reading lists ready to go for.

But, here's the deal: if there's something they really, really want to explore, and it's not on my list, they can design a field of their own. They come up with the topic and a preliminary reading list; I tinker with the list to make sure it works, and off we go.

What this means is that, for most students, I end up reading up on a field that's totally new to me. Sometimes I couldn't care less about the field. Anglo-Norman institutions? Do. Not. Care. But I read them, and I try to design a question.  But sometimes, it's pretty interesting.

Which is a long way to say that this month, I'll be reading a whole heck of a lot on Islamic, Norman, Angevin, and Aragonese Sicily. And I think this is actually going to be one of those reading lists that ends up being a lot of fun.

Professor Notorious: What the Critics are Saying

Part of putting together my promotion file is assembling my student evaluations. We've actually improved the evaluations in recent years, and changed the tenure/promotion file process so that student evals are only one small part of the picture. But still, we have to include them. We are only required to include the summary sheets (e.g., the raw numbers), but we can include the actual narrative comments as well.

I read these comments as they come in, but there's something about going through six years' worth at once that gives one a bit more big-picture perspective. Sure, there are the loads of "She's great!" or "There's too much reading!" or "She made me love this subject!" or "She should make her assignments not due on the same day as my other classes' assignments." Such evaluations, like the poor, will always be with us. There are also the ones that offer concrete suggestions about how an assignment might be more helpfully structured, or who give me feedback on a new experimental assignment. And I take those into account.

But then, there are the really fun ones (and I do mean that), which I now share with you:
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·      “Babbles in connection with lecture” [If only it were just in lecture.]

·      “This was a great class. Too bad it had so much religion in it.” [Well, it is a course on medieval Europe.]

·      “As always, I enjoyed your class. Teach more classes!” [Dear God, no.]

·      “It would be cool if you taught a bit more about the Knights Templar.”  [::backing out of the room slowly…::]

·      “Class was a pain and great at the same time” and “Very dedicated to getting us through the semester without losing our minds.” [Two comments from my methods class – what we refer to as “history boot camp”]

·      “Hi. You are cool.” [Thanks. Back atcha'.]

·     “The Abelard reading isn’t as interesting as Lateran IV.” [I just… What?!?]

·      “I didn’t dread coming to this class.” [I usually didn't, either. Usually.]

·      “SWED => This final is gonna blow.” [SWED = “smoke weed every day.” I had to look this up. Who says we don’t learn as much from our students as they learn from us?]

·      “Good job, tough class, great hair.” [A student who has taken my critiques of wordiness to heart.]

·      "What isn’t the Mediterranean?" [This, from a class where I apparently asked “What is the Mediterranean?” a few too many times…]

And finally, perhaps my all-time favorite evaluation comment: 

 ·      “Her passion for history is as contagious as smallpox and a lot more fun."

Please, ma'am: May I have some more?

Today is my last teaching day before spring break. And while most of my classes this week have been replaced by conferences for upcoming papers, I did have one to get through: Western Civilization. A 100-level class, and today we were discussing El Cid. And let me tell you, I was dreading it. This is a really fun story, and I'd been selling it to them for a couple of weeks: Battles! Honor! Valor! Betrayal! Christians and Muslims! But walking into class today, I knew I had several things working against me:

• These are not history majors. Most of them are taking this class as a General Education requirement, so they're only here because they have to be.
• A medieval epic may be exciting to a medieval historian, but it's not everybody's cup of tea.
• It's the last class before spring break.

So, you will appreciate how pleasantly surprised I was that the 60% or so of the class who actually participated did so with some real enthusiasm. But even more than that, there was this conversation after class:

"Yes, Susie? Did you have a question?"

"Well, it's kind of off-topic..."

"I love off-topic questions. Shoot."

"Well... I really liked this book! I read it all in one night. Like, I had to do laundry, and I was really mad because I had to put the book down! And so... I was wondering... Are there other books like this that you can recommend?"

That's right: My undergraduate, non-major, taking-this-required-course student just asked me for more medieval literature. Because it was so awesome.

You'll be stone dead in a moment!

From an e-mail from the leader of the History Students' Association, regarding an upcoming event that I agreed to give a quick 5-minute talk (on medieval food) for:

Dear Dr. Notorious,
 
Thank you for presenting tomorrow for the HSA event. Just as a reminder the event is from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm in the conference room.  The first 30 minutes will be presentations by the students or HSA members, followed by presentations by our extinguished faculty, such as yourself.

There are so many jokes here that I don't know where to start, so I'll just let my witty commentariat supply the punchlines. But first and foremost, there's this:

On being stood up

Undergraduates, take note:

If we have academic business to discuss -- a paper conference, say -- I will go out of my way and be up on campus for you on a day I'm normally not here. I don't have to be, and I don't expect that other faculty members ought to do the same -- this is my choice, after all. But because I have made that choice, I abjure any right to resent you for taking me up on the offer, or to loudly trumpet the sacrifices I'm making. If I voluntarily make an offer, I should follow through with a cheerful mein.

BUT...

If you fail to make that appointment, even once, with no notice, just leaving me cooling my heels in my office when I could be elsewhere, you may expect that I will never again go out of my way for you. I will continue to be as helpful to you as you need me to be, but that help will come only during my regular office hours. Period.

I was the best of students; I was the worst of students

As my most recent post explained, somehow one of the voices talked me into taking a class on a 1200-page Spanish novel. After 5 or 6 weeks (I lose track), I've figured out what sort of student I am: The one who seems really bright, but just isn't performing up to her potential.

We've all had these students in our classes. Chances are, you've got at least one right now. I've got two (in two different classes). They're great in discussion, but don't leave themselves enough time to get the As that your best professor instinct tells you they're capable of. If only they budgeted their time better! By all rights, they should be pulling straight As! How can you get through to them?

Being in the student position myself has been enlightening in this respect. Here's how my semester has gone in this class:

Weeks one and two: knocked it out of the park. Did all the reading. Took conscientious notes. Participated in class -- maybe even a little too much.

Week three: Holy shit. How did so many deadlines pile on at once? I need to finish that article, and there's that performance review that I totally spaced on and it's due tomorrow, and I'm trying to organize conferences and stay on top of the grading for once... And come the evening before the night class, I realize that I haven't done any of the reading, and I won't have time to do it the day of class, because I'm teaching all day, and so I make the decision... to skip class.

Week four: Similar to week three, except I've cleared off two of my three big must-dos, but another one that I had been putting off was due, and it was a hard deadline, so I got about half of the reading done (and no, I didn't do the reading from the week before -- no time for both). So I attended the first half of class, then skipped out at the break.

Week five: back on track. I back-burnered my grading (I'm paying for this now, I'll have you know) and managed to do all the reading again, understand what was going on, and turn in a creditable performance. Again, I probably talked too much -- something I'm acutely conscious of from my own discussion-leading experience. So I tried to shut up. But there are just so many interesting things to discuss!

And here we are at week six. And that grading needs to get done. But I just found out that a dear colleague's husband died suddenly so I'll be attending a memorial service on Saturday, and a housewarming for Voice of Reason on Sunday, and there's a college-level committee meeting tomorrow, and pick up the bike from the shop, and buy and mail off a small birthday gift for my sister. This weekend.

Which is to say: Where before I intellectually knew that my class is not the only thing going on in my students' lives, now I understand. It's been a long time since I've been in that position. Ouch.

Self-Interest Disguised as Professorial Generosity

Grad student e-mail (paraphrased): Here's my outline for our meeting/discussion today. It's not what I'd like for it to be, and I apologize: I've been very sick this past week. But I'll do my best in our meeting today. Thanks.

Me, thinking about my to-do list for today (in order):

• Read and comment grad student thesis chapter
• Read and rank 20 potential award files
• Reread materials for seminar tonight
• Read/grade a dozen short (@ 3 pp.) reading reviews for same seminar and return to students by 6 p.m.
• Read above student submission and meet with student
• Meet with thesis student
• Hold office hours 
• Lead evening seminar
• IF TIME PERMITS: grade 5-8 short student writing projects (@ 3-4 pp) from survey course; eat something; remember to put on pants.

My reply to student (again, paraphrased): Oh, you poor dear! I want you to get better, and I'd like not to get sick myself. Would it be better for you if we rescheduled later in the week?

There. With one e-mail I just crossed one item off my to-do list.

We interrupt the job search series...**

...for a bit of kvetching, and a not-quite-open thread:

Who out there feels like this year's incoming students are showing the worst consequences of NCLB (in terms of engagement, critical thinking, creativity, etc.)? I'm at a mid-tier regional uni; is it the same at other institution types? I don't want to generate a "Kids these days/it's the end of civilization" type of post; I'd rather think about how we're dealing with it as classroom teachers. If you're seeing this, what are you doing? Have you lowered your expectations? Changed your approach? Are you putting in more one-on-one hours?

And will Common Core save us all?


**Job search series to return Friday. I'm thinking I'll talk (and listen!) about the mid-career search. After that, the influence of technology. So stay tuned.

Talking (to a Search Committe) about Teaching

When I was a wee slip of a jumped-up grad student, [1] I was fortunate enough to have faculty who were invested in doing mock job market activities. We workshopped CVs and cover letters, had mock interviews (complete with appropriate attire) and job talks, the whole nine yards. It was a very popular series, and saved more than one of us from more than one disaster.

Around that time was just when the "statement of teaching philosophy" was just coming into vogue as a part of the job search package. Suddenly, every search committee wanted one. Problem was, since it was so new, no one could figure out what it was -- not even search committees who asked for it, I suspect. But one of the faculty mentors in our job search series made a comment on one draft statement that has stuck with me. Reading how this faux applicant talked about his emphasis on primary sources and class discussion, the faculty member said, "This is a good teaching methodology, but it's not a teaching philosophy."

So, what's the difference?

Now, before I jump into that let's get two things out of the way. The first is that everything I say from here on out is in the way of general advice. But if your job ad or search committee's instructions say that your teaching philosophy should feature a discussion of A & C, then fertheluvagod, ignore my advice and write about A and C. And thank your lucky stars that you are working with a search committee that is clearly communicating what it wants to see. This is the kind of department you want to work for. Don't screw it up by ignoring their instructions and sending them something generic just because some random blogger told you that this was what a teaching philosophy should look like. Got it?

Second, you'll hear a lot from certain quarters how the teaching philosophy is a BS exercise, that most committees  ask for it as a sort of fishing expedition with no clear understanding of what they want to see, and that everything that everyone says is all exactly the same... basically, comments that might encourage you not to take this seriously. Mama Notorious is here to tell you no. Okay, in some cases, some of this might be quite true. But in jobs where teaching is a significant part of the mission, your ability (or not) to talk about your approach to teaching shows the search committee that you have thought deeply about how to be effective in the classroom, and that you have a sort of a vision that goes beyond the syllabus and "I assign lots of primary sources." So if your search committee asks for one, take it seriously. Spend some time on it, just as you would spend on a cover letter.

Okay, with those two caveats in mind, as well as the usual YMMV, I'll talk about my approach to teaching philosophies, and I hope that people who have served on search committees that have asked for these will also jump in on the comments and add their perspectives.

Keep it brief: Just like you wouldn't go on and on in your cover letter, you want your teaching philosophy to be no more than 1-2 single-spaced pages (again, this is assuming that your committee hasn't given you specific page limits).

Remember that teaching methodology isn't the same as teaching philosophy: What you do in class is important, but why you do what you do is really what the "philosophy" part of it is.

Philosophical points can be abstract, so back them up with a concrete example: This is where you can -- and likely should -- weave in a bit of methodology. So you have a principle that guides your teaching or course design or whatever. Then you give an example from a course you have designed or taught to nail it down.

Beware the Scylla and Charybdis of edu-jargon and treacle: Too much Bloom's Taxonomy is going to cause lots of eye-rolls among faculty members who have sat through far too many meetings where far too many folks have tried to force-feed them the latest technological innovation or educational model that will save us all, at least until 18 months from now when the next one comes along. Likewise, sounding like you've watched Dead Poets' Society too many times may cause them to lose their lunch. A knowledge of new directions in the field is good (even essential if you get an on-campus interview and find yourself across from a provost who wants to know how you scaffold your courses or what your take on the flipped classroom is). So is idealism -- in fact, if you are an ABD or a freshly-minted Ph.D. and you're not a bit more idealistic than the people interviewing you, there'd probably be something wrong there. But don't overdo either one. Too much in either case and you risk coming across as someone who is saying things that someone told them Good Teachers believe. Be enthusiastic, be engaged, but above all, do not pull out your trowel and start laying on the bullshit. Be true.

Avoid pretentious references like "Scylla and Charybdis." 'Nuff said.

A teaching philosophy should not read like a course catalog, replete with a list of every course and every topic within each course. On the other hand, it should, along the way, give an idea of the range of courses you could teach. In this, you will want to slightly tailor each one to the school you are applying for. If the job is going to call for you to be a generalist, then you will want to emphasize the breadth of courses you can teach. If the job description says that, in addition to courses in your field you will be responsible for teaching the Early U.S. History survey, then your statement ought to address your approach to intro-level survey courses. Just like in your cover letters, you'll probably be working from a general template or two, but then make sure that each one is targeted towards the job you're applying for. And again, don't get all list-y. Remember that the approach/philosophy is the main point; weave in mentions of your courses as you deliver that main message.

Sound like a lot of work for a document that hardly anyone asked for 15 years ago? It is. So here's my last bit of advice: Just like the cover letter, the teaching philosophy is a work of writing and a presentation of who you are as a teacher and what you would bring to their department; give it as much attention as you would that cover letter. Revise it, show it to people, revise it again, have a beginning, middle and end to it, polish the prose. And make it honest.

Thus endeth my take on this. Now, for those of you out there who have sat on search committees and read more than your share of these documents, what would you advise?



[1] And I was always a jumped-up grad student whose reach was always, if not exceeding my grasp, then certainly preceding my grasp by about 18 months. I'm sure the faculty of my graduate institution could only roll their eyes and shake their heads at times.

Loving and hating the independent study

One of the things that has been making my life nuts and my blogging light this semester is the fact that, in addition to my regular course load (10 units) and my undergraduate advising, I'm teaching two independent studies this semester. And honestly, I can't settle on how I feel about that.

Let me give you the context: For those of you just tuning in, I teach at a regional M.A. comprehensive university, which means that we have a large undergraduate population, a small cohort of M.A. students, and no Ph.D. program. We teach anywhere from three to four regular courses a semester, the majority of these in the undergraduate program, and our per-semester student load per tenure-track faculty member [1] can range from 60-120, depending on the particular courses, and the fields.  With a load like this, independent studies are rare, except for M.A. students preparing for their exams or working on their theses.

And, like everywhere else (I think): these classes are taught as an overload, don't count towards our contractual obligations, and are strictly unpaid.

Yet this semester, I find myself teaching two of them.

Here's the situation: one is for a graduate student. Due to a combination of poor planning and circumstance, she finds herself near the end of her program, but needing one more content course in the field to graduate. And the fact is that I don't *have* more courses in the field. So we're doing an independent study. The other is one of our rare undergraduates who has been accepted into our departmental honors program. Part of the "honor" is that you get to take three extra content courses *and* write a 40-page senior thesis. And this last bit is done at the end of two semesters of one-on-one coursework with a faculty adviser.  And I have to admit, this one I asked for -- literally: I asked the student to apply, because he was (a) very talented, and (b) interested in my area of research.

So, here's the bad part: instead of working on my own reading for my own research, I'm adding an extra 100-200 pages (give or take) a week for these two classes. And we haven't even got to the bit where I have to grade stuff. It's a lot of work. In fact, even as I type this, there's a book on my coffee table that I need to finish today.

But -- and here's the cool thing -- the reading is fascinating. In one case, it's in an area very closely related to what I do, and something that I really should know more about, but in fact only have the most basic textbook knowledge. In the other, it has nothing at all to do with my work, but it's stuff that I've always wanted to know more about.

You know how sometimes you develop a seminar syllabus and add in two books you haven't read yet but want to, on the principle that assigning them will force you to read them? Yes, well: multiply that by two entire syllabi, and you've got my situation, for both good and for ill.

In the end, I'm still not sure if this was a good idea. It's a huge challenge, especially with two in a single semester. But dang, I am learning a lot.

Now, If you'll excuse me, I have a book to read.


[1] Lecturer student-loads are eye-poppingly huge, of course.

Well, crap -- this is enough to make me post something

Sound the bells!

Okay, so as I noted, this semester I have three regular courses, two independent studies, and am acting undergraduate advisor. Plus I committed to write an article. I'm dumb. And also not blogging.

Not that there haven't been blogworthy things. Oh my, yes. This semester I have:

• ...gotten verging-on-shouty with a colleague. In the hall. In front of students.
• ...refused to sign off on a thesis before some revisions were made, and gotten into it with the thesis chair about that.
• ...been on the receiving end of a couple of really weird personal interactions that have formerly comfortable situations suddenly awkward.
• ...sprained my ankle.
• ...gotten my credit card hacked

May I note that all of the above happened within a ten-day period?  Yeah, it was the most emotionally exhausting week and a half I've had in ages. And other than the ankle (healing well, thank you), I really can't blog about any of it. And though I could blog about the last two, I just haven't had the time (see above), nor does what I have to say (both things suck righteously) do much to embiggen the human spirit. So I forbear.

But... the Steubenville verdict. And, more importantly, the media reaction to it.

There is no shortage of commentary flying about the internets about this one, so perhaps you won't want to read my thoughts on this.  I'll keep it short:

1. Ew. Gross. Beyond gross.
2. I've seen this movie before. Like, 600 years ago.

Here's how it worked in the Middle Ages (and please note that this is coming from a Certified Historian of Medieval Women and Gender Who Wrote a Whole Damn Book about This):

1. Patriarchy exists. Boo. 
2. Patriarchal gender system sorts you into two categories, and if you're in the "female" category, then your sexuality is closely monitored and heavily regulated -- sometimes by your parents, sometimes by your spouse. If you're an adult single woman, then technically you're supposed to do it yourself, but in reality, you're in for some heavier-than-usual scrutiny by your entire community.
3. If you're going to be sexually active outside of marriage, you need to keep it under control -- limited partners, and preferably one that you're going to marry, and soon. This means you are a Good Girl, and entitled to protection when someone commits a crime against your property or person. You are also entitled to Special Protections for your Vulnerable Femaleness.
4. Step outside those boundaries, though (Where were those boundaries, precisely? Yeah, we don't really have a firm consensus on that, but we'll let you know), and you've in essentially done an opt-out on being a woman. This means that if you are beaten, raped, or otherwise harmed, you really don't have a case, because, by opting out of the gendered limitations on your behavior, you've also opted out of the gendered protections. You did this to yourself, missy.
5. And no, you can't opt for "human" protections; that would mean that there is an "outside" of patriarchy, and that's just plain silly. 

Okay, I have to go to work, so I need to be done. Have at it.

Why I'm Never Lecturing on the Norman Conquest Again (an accidental defense of the lecture format)

Yesterday, I lectured on the Norman conquests of England and southern Italy, and I will never be doing that again.

Let's set aside all the glaring factual errors I had in that lecture (I actually had to post an entire page of corrections on the class' blackboard page). Let's also set aside the fact that the English part of it is the one thing that my handful of fanboys know about in obsessive detail, and delight in asking questions that begin with "But isn't it true that...?"

What really went wrong was that the lecture was a dumb idea from the git-go. Don't get me wrong: I don't think the Normans are unimportant. They're actually pretty damn interesting. But lecturing about their eleventh-century conquests? Dumb, dumb, dumb.*

This brings me to a rumination about the lecture format itself. "They" are constantly telling us that the lecture is dead, boring, droning, and on and on. Only crusty old farts give lectures. Students don't learn. It's too passive.

I agree with that last one, which is why my "lectures" are mish-mashes of me talking and us diving into the primary sources to have the students dig out how they illustrate a point we were just talking about (or, in some cases, are about to talk about). And as far as my end of it, I'm a damn good talker. I know, everyone thinks they're a good lecturer. but organizing a talk and holding an audience is actually something I'm really good at. If you haven't met me, you'll just have to believe me.

Lecturing also plays to another one of my skills (and the skills of academics in general), and that's drawing connections between seemingly disparate ideas, in a way that a first-year student can see it. Granted, a nice monograph will do the same thing, but when I'm talking about lecturing, I'm talking about an intro-level course.  By the time we get to the level where we're reading monographs, I've ditched the lecture format. But for those survey students, the important point about a good lecture is that it provides students with something that they couldn't get from reading a textbook or looking it up on Wikipedia.

And that was where this lecture went wrong. It was basically "some stuff about the Normans." When I finished it and was analyzing the problems, I realized that students could have gotten almost the same thing on Wikipedia. Actually, they could have gotten better from Wikipedia, because my lecture was riddled with inaccuracies, conflations, and was just a freaking mess.

And I gave that lecture because... well, because somewhere along the way, we decided that the Norman Conquest was Very Important, and therefore deserved one of the limited-number lecture slots in a survey course. I've got no problems with the first half of that statement, but the second part is problematic. There are more Very Important Things in my field than fit into a semester or two, especially now that I've given over 20% of my course to one-on-one tutorials. But I'm still making some of my selections based on some idea that you can't have a lecture course on the Middle Ages without talking about the Normans, but the lectures on sex, or poison, or children, or foodways are "only if there's time." Yet those latter things are precisely the things that most textbooks don't spend a lot of time on.

In any case, I'm starting a rethinking process, one where my decision-making process starts with "Can I add something to the textbook account here?" If not, I'm just being redundant. And I've become that dead, boring, droning crusty old lecturer, the straw-professor that all the MOOC-heads are talking about.


*At least for me. Your lecture on the Normans may be riveting.