Random Thoughts

I am one of those teachers who bends over backwards for her students.  Now that my kids are all gone, it fits into my life to do that.  My husband doesn’t object and he is big enough to take care of himself if he needs something.  But this semester I have a group of students who are extremely demanding.  They question every assignment grade.  They wanted to submit many drafts, with only the most minor of edits made.  And since I have more students than normal this semester, this has been a real problem.  I ended up spending all weekend every weekend working on stuff for school.  So I decided to make some changes.

Last week I explained to the group currently writing papers that I would look at three drafts and I would look at them on certain days.  If they wanted me to look at the draft, it had to be submitted before then.  So yesterday I looked at 20 drafts.  But that was it.  Of course, some students submitted a second draft before they read my comments, but I am ignoring those until I check drafts again on Wednesday.

I hope that this will help make the students more responsible and thoughtful about the work they turn in as well as help me find some balance between work and life.  We both need it!

Here we are, halfway through the semester.  I don’t remember any semester that has left me needing a break as much as this one has.  For the first time, I am thinking of imposing an attendance policy similar to what the math department has – the equivalent of 2 weeks’ worth of absences means you fail the course.  Attendance has never been a problem for me in university level ESL until now.  On top of that, simplifying my expectations for the courses does not seem to have helped.  Maybe I do need to go back and teach simple sentences.

Anyway… I am really trying to take a break from it here.  But I can’t stop thinking and trying to come up with answers.  I am hoping that I can gain a little perspective.  I need it!

I am late getting on this topic.  I read the post on change.org when it was made,but I didn’t have time to really pay a lot of attention.  I pretty much dismissed it almost immediately.  While I don’t love phones in general, anyone who says

Cell phones baffle me.

is so far from my world that I didn’t pay a lot of attention.  But Ira’s post over at SpeEdChange made me look at the original post again.  He says:

This teacher is talking about nothing here but her own comfort and belief system. She thinks best when it is quiet. She thinks best when focused on one thing. She believes there is a specific way to study a text. And it is her job to bring these students to her beliefs.

The fact that some of us might function best in other ways, that some of us might need other structures, does not occur to her. If we would only “come to the light” – we would understand.

He encourages people to go to the original post and read the whole discussion, so I did.  It was fascinating.

The original post discusses everything from cell phone rudeness in class to the author’s belief that

By forcing them to put their phones and laptops away, I am giving them the opportunity to stop the random, jittery stimulation and instant information that surrounds them at all times, and instead turn their attention to a deep and slow understanding of one specific text, idea or question.

What strikes me most about the original post is the author’s conviction that she is right.  Maybe I am crazy, but I am seldom convinced that what I do in the classroom is “right”.  I am constantly experimenting, looking for a better way to do things.  While you may not agree with me, I do not think this makes me a “bad” teacher.  In fact, I think it is one of my strengths as a teacher.   But, of course, I may not be right.  Maybe it is a weakness.  What I am sure of is that if I continue to question my own teaching, I will discover if I am on the wrong track pretty quickly.

The discussion after the original post is even more interesting than the original post.  Both sides of the issue (and maybe a couple other angles, too!) are represented.  Ira himself posts his rules for cell phones in his classroom:

(1) Keep it out, on your desk. That way, if you’ve forgotten to silence the ring, we’re not waiting for you to find it in your backpack.

(2) If you need to talk, go outside. No big deal.

(3) Have it on all the time – we’ll be using it – polleverywhere, todaysmeet, SMS questions to people out of the classroom, sharing links, putting important notes in our calendars.

Of course the discussion that follows points out that not everyone has internet access on their phones, but basically Ira’s rules make sense to me:

1. Keep the cell phones out. It gretly increases the chance that you will remember to set the phone to silent.  I have on occasion forgotten to do that.  If I had taken it out of my bag, I would have remembered to do  it.
2. Keep the phones on.  I have no problem with that.  Like Ira, I don’t mind if a student has to leave the room to make or receive a call.  If it happened all the time, it would make me wonder if the student has a problem I need to know about or if I am somehow just not engaging him/her in class.  If my students are not engaged, I need to know it.
3. If I didn’t teach in a computer lab and if my students — even some of them — had access to the internet on their phones, I would definitely use them this way.  As it is, that is how we use the computers in front of us each and every class.

Another comment talked about it being more important to have students respect us than to like us.  I agree.  I do not have to be my students’ friend.  But I also don’t think that they will respect me because I tell them to put their cell phones away.  I earn their respect by creating a learning environment where they feel free to express their ideas, where they feel respected in every way.  Students don’t respect us because we exercise our authority but rather because we demonstrate qualities that they see as worthy of respect.  Respect doesn’t come automatically with your teaching credentials or your degree.

If students are consistently using cell phones in non-academic or non-emergency ways in class, it is time to think about what you are doing as a teacher.  If they use them to cheat on exams, maybe you need to change your exams.  If they use them to escape from the monotony of a boring class, maybe you need to try to make it not so boring.

As teachers, we are responsible for what goes on in our classes.  It is our responsibility as the professional educator to look for the causes of the problems we encounter, not merely to deal with the symptoms.

When I logged on to the blog I am using with my students this summer, I was surprised to see that it had been visited by 50 people the day after I wrote about it here.  I hadn’t shown it to my students yet, so they aren’t part of that 50.

Although I believe in sharing our work, it is still a little scary to think that people are actually looking at what I am doing.  Not scary out feeling they will steal it or they will come after me but scary as in being naked.

It’s funny how even good things can be scary.

I got another  wonderful comment on my “Rethinking my Connectedness” post.  This one was from Larry Sanger himself.  In the comment he said:

My disillusionment with the social Internet really doesn’t have to do with a dislike of specific tools. Like you, I honestly like what the tools I use do for me — if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be using them. What has me disillusioned is the opportunity cost the tools involve, and what I call the “pale shadow” of real human interaction that is Internet socialization. And now that so many people have moved so much of their free (social) time online, the actual quantity of social opportunities offline seems to be dwindling!

I think I understood all this from his original post, but perhaps I didn’t say it clearly, so I wantd to be sure to allow Larry to restate his position in his own words.

I am fascinated by this topic.  In my case and the case of my husband, I would say that most of our socialization takes place online.  Most of our non-work time is spent there.  And sometimes it feels like a “pale shadow” of what we could be experiencing.  But on the other hand, we don’t have a group of people here that we are ignoring in order to spend time online, so maybe it isn’t so bad.  We are slowly developing such a group of friends and acquaintances, but we haven’t really gotten there yet.  Is the Internet keeping us from doing that?  No, probably not.  It is our own laziness and, in my case, basic shyness.  And yet it probably contributes more than I realize.

What am I missing by being online?  That is a personal question that I will have to think about.  But there is another question that is maybe more important.   What could the Internet do differently to give us more real social interaction?

The answer, at least for me right now, seems to be community.  Just as in the small town where I currently live, in an online community I am known.  I am valued.  I am cared about.  I have belonged to such an online community for several years now.  I have been on the sidelines for most of that time, but over the years I have seen people reach out and connect to each other in really intense and very personal ways.  People in this community meet face to face.  They talk on the phone.  They interact both inside and outside of the community.

How is that community different from Facebook or some of the nings I have joined?  The main difference that I see is real diversity of focus.  It isn’t just about teaching English or about people who went to school with me.  It is about all aspects of life.  I can belong to the community and interact with people on many different levels and on many different topics.  It is a much richer experience.  Another difference is that the community has developed over time.  There aren’t thousands of new people joining each year.  There are new topics on a regular basis, but the old topics remain and can be revisited and reopened if the interest is there.  The pace is slower and more thoughtful.

I don’t know if such a community would seem different enough in Larry’s eyes to qualify as not being faceless.  But for me the experience there is hugely different from what I experience elsewhere.

Unlike Larry, I haven’t really written or even thought that much about this before.  I am thinking as I am writing.  I am learning as I go along.  And I still have a lot to learn!

Thanks, Larry, for both your original post that started me thinking and for your comment that made me clarify my thoughts.

These last couple days have been interesting ones for me.  Not sure why; not sure what prompted it, I mean.  But I have been looking at my online presences and thinking about where I spend my time.

It started yesterday, actually, with a message from Facebook that a friend had written about her upcoming wedding.  I didn’t know she was getting married, so I went on Facebook to check it out  I left her a comment, and then today she left me one.  And I finally say what Facebook could do for me that a lot of other sites can’t.  And I liked what I saw.  So today after I commented to that friend,  we ended up chatting for about 15 minutes.  And it was really nice.  I know there is no real revelation here, nothing all the rest of the world hadn’t figured out before, but it just now finally dawned on me.

This morning, too, I saw Stephen’s link to a post by Larry Sanger, Are you disillusioned with Web 2.0? It was an interesting post.  Sanger starts out saying:

Perhaps it will make me even more of a Web 2.0 apostate to say so, but FaceBook, Twitter, Digg, many blogs, and many online forums are becoming increasingly obnoxious to me.

Interesting, I thought, since I am just barely starting to really use Facebook.  Why would he find it obnoxious?

He discusses three reasons: Facelessness, GroupThink, and the fact that it is a waste of time.

It was the Facelessness argument that I thought most about.  Sanger says:

Now they seem woefully impoverished. The stunning diversity of humanity online does not make up for the annoying effects of anonymity and disembodiment — or in one word, facelessness.

It so happens that I “know” fairly well on the order of dozens of people, people each of whom I have, at one time or another, spent many hours conversing and/or working. I’ve met some of these people in real life (IRL), but I would not recognize most of them if I were to pass them on the street. And, when you get down to it, I don’t really know much about these people. We only know about our shared interests — Citizendium, Wikipedia, fiddle music, or what have you.

To be honest, this makes me sad.

It began to make sense to me — both Sanger’s reasons for not liking these tools anymore and my sudden liking for them.  In the past, my attempts to use Facebook, Twitter, the 43 sites, and a lot of other Web 2.0 staples was artificial.  It was done because someone told me I should use these great tools.  But I didn’t feel a need to connect with people I didn’t know.  I didn’t even want to connect with people I “knew” in cyberspace.  It is only now when I am starting to connect on Facebook with people I know in real life that I find meaning in using the tools.  And I will admit, I am not so interested in keeping up with the Facebook “friends”  I only know online.  It is the real flesh-and-blood people I want to know about.   And they are really the only people who truly want to know what I am doing and thinking, too, I would imagine.

I wonder if I am not reaching the limits of my ability to stay connected.  I have my own blogs, and I handle two other bogs for organizations I belong to.  Is that why I like Facebook: because it puts the people I care about all together in one place?  I know that makes it appealing.  Less work.  Like an RSS feed for my life.

But Facebook doesn’t eliminate my desire to blog.  It doesn’t mean I don’t want to reach out to others to discuss ideas.  So I think I will be doing this for a long time, too.  At least I hope so.

My feelings about all the tools that are out there, though, come closer to what Sanger is talking about here:

The first time we see a shiny new Internet toy, we are all oohs and aahs. But, OK…isn’t it time to stop it with the “Which Star Trek character are you?” quizzes on Facebook?

While I am not opposed to an occasional quiz, I am getting tired of trying to keep up with all the new tools.  There are some things I am just not going to get involved with.  (That isn’t a new idea, as anyone reading here will know.)  I honestly don’t see myself ever getting into Twitter, for example.  More than that, though, I am not interested in being friends with everyone in the world, with having a respectable Technorati rating, or any of the other measures of authority or connectedness we use online.

More than ever before, I just want to use the tools that make sense to met do the things that are important to me.

John commented on my post More on Literacy, and he raises some excellent points.  Regarding the lack of links in the news report, he said:

There were no links to original sources because a radio news article has different conventions, goals, and audience than an academic article. News articles whether in print or broadcast, rely on oral interviews for their information; citing a source means giving the name of the person they talked to. And they did that.

and

As you know, and probably teach, different genres have different rules.  Blogs and online writing are still new enough that the conventions aren’t formed yet, and even within the blogging world, there are different types of blogs with different types of rules forming, usually beginning with the style of offline writing they most resemble, or their writers are most familiar and comfortable with.

And he is absolutely right!  For instance, I checked Anderson Cooper’s blog, and there are few links in the way I think of them.  There are links to additional sources of information about the topics, however.  So I am at least given a place to start looking from.  But, as John says, there are different conventions in news blogs than there are in education blogs, for instance.  And there are fewer links.

So if I accept that this is how news writing is – even in the context of a blog,  I have to consider whether or not I am OK with that.

Obviously, I am not able to change the way news is written.  I don’t even really want to do that.  Well, maybe I do.  But I know it isn’t going to happen.  But I wonder if this is the way news should be written.

I lived for two years in El Salvador during the civil war (1980-1982).  Many of us there at the time commented on how the misrepresentations we saw in the US and even the British news media made us extremely skeptical of all news reports.  For instance, one morning I went to work, and everyone in the office was shocked to see I was there.  Why?  They had heard on the news that the town we were living in had been overtaken by the guerrillas during the night.  The cuartel, the army barracks less than a block from our house, had been captured and was under guerrilla control.  Or so the news reported.  But it didn’t happen.  As I said, this was less than a block from our house.  We slept with windows open all the time.  The soldiers in front of the cuartel waved to us as we passed by on our way to work, as they did every morning.

So for me personally, I cannot believe something just because I read it in the paper or online or see or hear a report.  I want to know where the information comes from.

So is it OK to say that news  reports don’t have to give us links to their sources or additional information because … they don’t give us links?  I cannot accept that for myself, for my own sources of news and information. I do not trust the media enough.  But that is my problem, not yours.

Also, I think there is a real difference between “news” and some of the other topics that are reported in the media.  If you are writing about a trial, a war, or something like that, it is probably not possible to cite your sources in the way I am advocating.  Linking to a guy standing on the street corner in Iraq who gives you information is not going to happen.  I know that.  But some reports can be linked to sources.  These are articles that pass as news but are really opinions.  And I think that the article that originally started this discussion is one of those kinds of reports.  There is no reason there couldn’t be links to one of the studies or even to more information about the educator quoted in the report.  A sidebar would make that easy.  It would add to the strength of the article for those who, like myself, want to know where these ideas came from.   As it was written, the article presents the opinions of one person as if they were fact, as if they were news.  That is when I want more information, when I want sources.

Obviously this isn’t a problem for a lot of people who read and listen to the news every day.  It isn’t even always a problem for me.  I have been known to accept what I am told on the news as well as the next person.  But I am not convinced that is a good thing.

I would argue that in these days when we have so much access to information, the conventions of writing – even in genre like news writing  – should change.  I think that we have a responsibility to invite our readers, whenever possible, to form their own opinions about what we  write.  We talk about the need for critical thinking, and yet we don’t seem to do much as a society to foster it.

John makes it clear that he is not trying to be argumentative, and I accept that.   This is a discussion that, in the old days, we would have had sitting around a table somewhere.  It would have been a friendly conversation then, as it is now.  But it is also an important discussion. And I am glad that John keeps coming back with his ideas.  When he, or anyone who comments here, shares his or her ideas, I am forced to re-examine my own.   So thanks, John!

In a recent comment, Craig wrote about how his blog had changed as he had changed over the years.  If you are not familiar with Teacher Dude’s  Grill and BBQ, you should really check it out.  It is a combination photo album/EFL lessons/political activism/movie site.  And it is really more than that.  But that gives you an idea…

My blog is nothing like Craig’s.  In some ways I don’t have as much focus as he does.  My blog, like my mind, rambles.   But like Craig’s, I think this blog has changed as I have changed.

Four years  ago, when I was a new blogger, I was a much more hesitant person, much less sure of myself, much more reluctant to express an opinion or take a chance.  Gradually, I have learned to express opinions.  Usually no one comments — either because no one is reading or because my opinions are too silly to comment on.  But I don’t care.  I am learning to speak my mind.  I have also learned that I can take a picture and post it to my blog.  It isn’t  a   great picture usually, not like Craig’s are, but it is a photograph that means something to me.  So I am happy.

Looking at my blog, it seems to me that what I am doing here is documenting who I am and who I am becoming.  It isn’t exciting or all that interesting, but to me it is valuable.   And I guess that is why I keep coming back.

I could really relate to David Domke’s Inside Higher Ed article today about time management.  He talks about importance and urgency and how the urgent things seem to crowd out the less urgent things, even if they are both equally important.  He talks about scheduling time for these less-urgent things so we don’t lose sight of them completely.  And then he makes the observation that has worked for me:

Do different things on different days of the week.

Simple, huh?  Well, it works!

Last semester I taught all five days of the week. (The schedule was set when I arrived on campus!) In and around that I had to find time for my ESL Director responsibilities.  It seemed like they never got done because I was so busy teaching and doing all the associated work. I got done what I needed to, but I it always seemed to be rushed and under pressure.

This semester I am teaching Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes.  I dedicate Tuesdays and Thursdays to the director part of my job.  And it has made all the difference in the world.  I feel so much better about what I am doing.  I think I am more productive, too.  Of course, I will sometimes look at student papers on those days, but I do it knowing I am stealing the time from what I should be doing.

If, like me, you have some parts of your professional life that seem to never get the time and attention they deserve, you might try this.  You may not be able to control your teaching schedule, but there has to be some time in your day that you can set aside for those other activities.  It isn’t perfect, of course, but it has really made a big difference for me this semester.

Inside Higher Ed has an article about a professor at Amherst College who is teaching a course called Consumption and Pursuit of Happiness.  The article quotes the professor as saying the course

is not about teaching students how or what they should consume but rather about teaching them to become aware of their personal consumption in relation to their happiness.

That sounds like a course most of us should be taking!