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.

How to have a completely stress-free semester

Ha ha!! Just kidding! I have no idea how to do this. Do you?

Did you know that iCal (a mac thing) actually has a function in which it color-codes your calendar in year-view based on how much you've scheduled yourself to do? Yellow is "You've got some stuff to do," orange-y is, "Hey, this is a pretty busy day," and red is apparently, "Honey... are you gonna be okay?"

Here's what last spring semester looked like:

But, anyway... even if I don't know how to have a stress-free semester, I know what can make it better, and what makes it worse. In that spirit, I'm back to my once-a-month resolutions. January is, as always, "clear the decks." In that spirit, this week has been devoted to syllabus preparation, returning long-overdue library books, and getting the home and work offices cleaned and organized (the latter takes place twice a year), and the e-mail inbox cleared out.

Is it working? Am I more organized and prepared? Well, I think one good indication is the fact that I'm only posting my January resolution when the month is half-done.  Yeah. But every day is a new opportunity and all that.

But enough about me: How is your new semester going? Any intentions you've set up to help keep yourself from being in the weeds, come March and April?

An Excellent Start

Now that's the way to start the year!  Here are excerpts from an e-mail in my inbox this morning, regarding a grant I was awarded in 2011:

I am happy to be able to report to you that the grant you were awarded in 2011 will be sent out today. [...] We are sorry that this took so long, and appreciate your patience.  I am sure you are all aware of the economic situation in [funding country]; I imagine that many of you may had given up hope that you would ever see your grants, so I hope this news brings a bit of good cheer to your new year.

Ha! Because you know, just yesterday I had resolved to give up on this grant. The money was spent, so... whatever. And now? It's like money fallen from the sky!

Also: I recently found out that my book (its story to be found here) got a prize. So, that's also nice.

No... it's better than nice. Blogger doesn't support GIFs, so I invite you to click here to see a truly excellent happy dance.

Here are a couple of pictures from what I was doing in between panels at the AHA. As you can see, I need to go back with more time, and more lenses.

French Quarter, 7:15 a.m.

Portrait of frequent commenter "Susan"

New Orleans has the world's coolest cemeteries.

Happy 2013!

Resolving to be a more consistent blogger

...but right now, I've got to catch a plane for the AHA. Until I return, here's a picture:

 

Happy New Year, everyone!

Student paper mad libs!

Okay, well, not really.

Hi!

I'm not dead, but I've just not been inspired to write much lately. Which, you know, happens.

But here I am, proctoring the last exam of the semester. And while I do so, I'm grading the very last undergraduate paper of the semester.  And right there, at the top, are these immortal and undying words:

"Since the beginning of time..."

It's nice to see someone go for the classics, yes?  This one happens to be about religion and science, so it's medium-silly. But since we're all in silly season, I invite those six of you who haven't given up on my blog entirely to complete the sentence above, using something that might be appropriate to your field.  Extra points for scientists!

It's that time of year again! (AMIW, day 5)

Time for the invitations to the Hawaii University International Conferences* to go out! I got mine this week; did you? If not, I'll share mine with you, so you can apply.

There are categories for Math, Engineering, and "Education," this last "including, but not limited to":

• Academic Advising and Counseling
• Art Education
• Adult Education
• Business Education
• Counselor Education
• Curriculum, Research and Development
• Distance Education
• Early Childhood Education/Elementary Education
• Human Resource Development
• Indigenous Education
• Kinesiology & Leisure Science
• Language Education
• Music Education
• Reading Education
• Rural Education
• Science Education
• Secondary Education
• Social Studies Education
• Special Education
• Student Affairs
• Educational Administration
• Educational Foundations
• Educational Measurement and Evaluation
• Educational Psychology
• Education Technology
• Education Policy and Leadership
• ESL/TESL
• Health Education
• Higher Education
• Teacher Education
• Second Language Studies
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Speech/Communication and Translation
• Theatre
• Urban and Regional Planning
• Visual Arts
• Women's Studies
• Inter-disciplinary and other areas of Arts and Humanities

Rarely have I seen a conference so refreshingly broad in its interests (And we should note that this ecumenical approach isn't just for humanities/social science types; math and engineering conferences are each almost as broad themselves).

Conference papers are peer-reviewed, and  "reviewers are selected among the academic members of the institute and are not related to institute academics and researchers." I'm a little fuzzy on what that means, but the word "academic" appears twice, so I assume that it's a good thing.

Also, there is a publication opportunity, open to papers accepted. You can download the papers included in last year's publication here, or buy your own CD-ROM. Last year's publication includes such diverse offerings as: an abstract/outline for a Ph.D. dissertation, a conference paper (its 11 pages uncluttered by footnotes), an article-length manuscript, complete with notes and bibliography, and a three-page paper proposal (or perhaps an introduction). There is, in other words, something for everyone.

Best of all: the registration fee is only $350!**

Admittedly, today was yet another day where I managed to get my 90 minutes in, but at the expense of everything else. Yet, if I keep working, maybe I'll have enough for a proposal. Deadline is December 1st!


*Warning: link to conference website comes complete with soundtrack of ocean waves and Hawaiian music; site contains no option to turn the sound off.

**Registration fee does not include airfare, conference hotel, food, or recreation.

How a Day Goes (A month in writing, day 4)

6:30-7:00: Wake up/snooze alarm/meditate

7:00-7:15: Make coffee while eating... weaken and turn on the news beforehand. Am saved from getting sucked in by the fact that it is pledge week on NPR. Normally I would be annoyed. Today I am grateful.

7:15-9:00: Work on article-related notes. They go slowly, but I do get the work on.  Best of all, I resist the siren song of the internet. A sense of accomplishment swells within me. The morning light slants in beautifully and lights up the oranges to the point that I am compelled to stop and take a picture. This looks like it's going to be the perfect day, the antithesis of yesterday's mnyeh.

Then, it all goes to hell...

9:00: Begin to work on lecture, powerpoint and quiz for 11 o'clock class.

10:00: omigod I have to be in class in an hour and I'm still home, in my pajamas, and not showered!

11:00: Arrive in class (miraculously, on time) and give a bang-up lecture. If only more than half the class had bothered to show up. C'MON, FOLKS!  I've got war, famine, and plague! What more do you want from me?

12:30: procure lunch (since I ran out of time to make it)

12:30: Wolf down two-thirds of lunch while answering e-mails.

1:00: College-level committee meeting. I feel vaguely competent.

2:30: Grade quizzes from class #1. Check e-mail. Prep for class #2. Eat last third of lunch.

3:30: Class #2. Also went well. Strangely, they were not prepared for the quiz, even though a simple glance at the syllabus combined with being able to count to two (seruiously: that's all the math that was required) would have told them that this "surprise" quiz was, in fact, an inevitability today.

5:00: Grade quizzes from class two while counseling two different grad students who "just have a quick question" that turned into half an hour apiece.

6:15: Ride bike to off-campus non-work-related thingy.

6:30: Thingy, plus grocery shopping

8:00: Ride home.

8:15: Dinner. Some TV. Check e-mail again.

9:15: Realize that, though I got my 90 minutes of work on my article done, nowhere in the 12 hours since then did I find two freaking thirty-minute blocks of time in which to complete the other tasks.

9:30-10:00: Blog about that. Because everyone likes to read about self-pity. Resolve to do better, and try to realize that today, I did the best I could with the time at my disposal. But that's not very much time at all.