Faculty Web For John Goldfine

Dec. 25.  Some more from 'Faking It,' by William Ian Miller: "I have found over the years that students tend to confuse pomposity with knowledge and nastiness with smarts. Students thus force...teachers to into being mean windbags to get the respect they crave."

And this: "...if someone plays at being an ironist long enough, a mocker, a person who fancies he is deep and needs to protect his depths--with humor when he is charming, but with sneers and superciliousness when he is not--he eventually becomes a defensive system and nothing more. A walled town, with everyone inside dead of the plague."  Hmm, has a certain resonance.

Dec. 20.  'Faking It,' a book by William Ian Miller, opens with Miller teaching class in law school.  The material doesn't interest him, his knowledge in the area he's lecturing about is thin--and to his horror he finds himself sounding exactly like his father at his most pompous.  He wants to get back to his own voice, but the pompous one seems to have stimulated his students, judging by their increased note-taking, so he plows on, one part of him lecturing, even though he's dry (twenty minutes left to go), while another begins berating himself for getting distracted by an attractive student and then questioning whether the student really is attractive.  Perhaps he simply has reached the age where youth is mistaken for beauty.  And still he lectures on....

Miller says: "...the techniques teachers use involve them in testing appearances, putting on shows, shocking their students, forcing them out of complacencies, playing devil's advocate, teasing, conning, insinuating, pleading, feeding, entertaining, faking, and, surely, testing."

Dec. 19.  Prompts.  Early in the week, I wrote three exam prompts ultimately derived from material in emcc.edu/faculty/jgoldfine--'Weirdness,'  'Names,' and 'Public Speaking.'  We went with the first one--just to prove the old adage that truth is still pulling on his shoes while a lousy essay prompt has run 'round the world.

A bad topic is a topic which elicits bad writing. It's not necessarily one that students see and immediately don't like.  On the contrary, lots of students would probably love it if we came up with abortion, lowering the drinking age, flagburning, capital punishment, the curse of the bambino, and so on as topics, even though most people can do very very little with any of them.  Those would be bad topics.  As was this one....

'Weirdness' pressed all the wrong buttons: some students took it as a chance to say that some stuff is just soooo weird, like unwashed bodies, koolaid-dyed hair, and baggy clothes.  My stupid topic had catapulted them back to the corridors of high school where, apparently, the major activity is figuring out the day's pecking order.

Others were also catapulted back to high school--to some earnest civics class where they were earnestly taught not to judge others (or, at least, if they did, to shut up about it), and we got a bunch of essays on the virtues of tolerance, entitled "Which of us in this big weird world can truly be said to be weird?"  (And, by the way, there was a lot of this 'weird stuff is definitely very weird' writing.  That's a sign of writer's  desperation and also a touching sign of faith that the word absolutely needs no definition, since everyone knows and agrees that dirty bodies, koolaid-dyed hair, etc are the essence of weird.)

Anyway, both approaches led to windy essays, full of sound and fury, signifying not much.  Both approaches caused a temporary amnesia, wherein the students forgot to write about their own experiences and forgot too that five paragraphs of their thoughts about a word does not make an essay--we'd prefer that drab old five-graf format, please. 

Dec. 18.  Exams.  The true pro weblogger would have sat down at a spare computer in 227 yesterday during the ENG 101 exam and logged away while all about him chaos reigned.  Boy, did I learn to hate 227 very fast.  Instead of computers around the perimeter of the room as in 223, they're lined up facing front on long desks, so the teacher feels like each word he speaks is attacking well-defended palisades.  Every seat in the room is in the last row, so to speak, because every student in this set-up is hiding behind massive furniture and computer hardware.  I like to figuratively grab my students by their lapels to talk to them.  I like to roll around on my task chair from writer to writer with nothing to hinder my progress except the Darkness of Fear-of-Writing, a darkness I can dispel with Eveready, the Magic Flashlight of Knowledge.

Instead of blogging, I was dealing with the fact that the printer in the room was NOT the default for the computers in the room.  Go figure! Took a few nasty seconds before it was clear what was happening.  Then: "Pull down the file menu, hit print, change the default printer to blah blah blah." 

Then someone managed more or less simultaneously to: ask the wrong printer to print, fail to save the exam anywhere, and too hastily disconnect a pen drive--locking the computer and losing the exam forever, leading to further difficulties.  Then there were paper jams in the printer (after I found paper).  Then there were unscheduled students in the room taking other exams for other instructors because of the snow day Monday (shouldn't those exams have been scheduled on exam days instead of the last class day?)  Then there were students looking for me to hand in stuff they hadn't handed in because of the snow day Monday. Then there were students looking for me to request that I look at essays whose last, final, absolute and irrevocable due date and deadline was the previous Friday ("I didn't know!").  Then there was the general contagious hysteria of Xmas, vacation, semester success or failure, writing an exam with a time limit on a set topic, crowding in at computers, and so on.  Meanwhile, I was reading all the papers I would have read Tuesday at leisure except for that snowday and also reading the exams as they began trickling in.

We try to avoid coarseness here at www.emcc.edu/faculty/jgoldfine, but we can say without fear of contradiction that Wednesday was truly a Day from Heck.

Somewhere in the archives (Dec. 5, in fact) the interested reader can find a relevant post on teacher self-pity.  Check it out!

Dec. 15.  ESL.  Interesting post on Winston's Diary on problems of ESL students in comp courses.  I sent the pseudonymous Winston, a grad student planning to be an English prof one of these days,  the following language from my syllabus, relating to an ESL student:

"GETTING HELP: Please let me do my job and help you if you’re having big troubles—or little ones.  Sometimes you have to work a little to get my attention in class, but please don’t give up.  There’s also help available in the Academic Support Center.   

Once I had a student who was bopping along doing okay (I thought.)  Come to find out, that student’s spouse was going over the student’s papers in a lot of detail before I ever saw them.  Far be it from me to drive a wedge between spouses, but I sure wish I’d known what the student was really capable of because that student badly blew the final.  I felt like a jerk, and that’s one reason why nowadays so much of the work must be done right in class under my eagle eye. 

If you find yourself, late some night, up against a deadline, tired, out of ideas, desperate, panicky, and tempted to submit work that isn't yours--the thing to do is forget the deadline and get some sleep. In the morning, get in touch with me. I can cut you slack on deadlines, help you with ideas, and generally buck you up. This is my job. Let me do it!"

Dec. 14.  Fifty eight years ago today, a blessed event occurred in the Richardson House on Longwood Avenue in the universe for which Boston serves as the Hub, to steal a line from HubBlog.

End of semester.  Several times Friday, talking to students about essays they were rewriting before the deadline, I would say, and not for the first time ever, "Okay, this paragraph is generic.  Anyone could put his name on it.  You haven't given us the goods: right now, we don't know what you ate for supper, what movie you saw, what your date was wearing, what was in the bottle, how fast you were going, what the cop said, what your father said...."

And the student would reply this last day of classes, as if struck by something for the first time, "Oh, you mean you want details?  Like specifics, examples?"

Yep, that surely is exactly what I mean.  I assume my effectiveness peaks at some point in the semester and then begins to decline--after all, there isn't all that much to say about writing, my best jokes have already gotten their laughs, my insights are yesterday's news, some students decide I'm an evil pain in the neck they won't listen to no matter what I say, and, truth to tell, I can't approach other students with as much hope as I did back in September and that lack of enthusiasm, however much I try to disguise it, must rub off.

One of the nice things about teaching is that twice a year I get to start all over, with new insights, new resolutions, new jokes, new tricks up my sleeve.  There are jobs on campus where people who work with people do not get to start over.  Those relationships remind me of arthritis: after a while the wear and tear erodes the joint cartilage so that bone scrapes on bone and thus begins the continuous, low-level, nagging pain the doctors have no cure for.  For people locked in similar professional relationships, things just seem to go along with nothing changing or improving and every contact causing mutual pain. I know this paragraph lacks exactly the sort of detail I insist my students include, but providing it would require a higher annoyance level than I can summon on my birthday.

Thoreau said those we can love, we can hate, and to the rest we are indifferent, and, true to that, it does seem that what initially attracts one to a person often winds up being exactly the quality which one eventually finds repulsive.  Someone as disorganized as me might find a systematizer inspirational, only in the end to feel straitjacketed by just that quality.  That's a little more specific than the previous graf....

Dec. 13.  Triumph!  My regular readers will know I have a long-standing hate/hate relationship with FrontPage.  They might like to check the archives for Nov. 26-Dec. 12, because, ahem, that is a hyperlink created by me without the help of Alexander R.!  Check it out.

Yesterday I had students writing course evaluations and evaluations of their own writing over the semester.  Here's part of an email to one student responding to the evaluation:

"...you're sadly mistaken when you say you think you've figured out what
sort of student writing I like and found it very easy to dish out the right
formula.  I like helping people understand their thoughts better and all
decent writing does that, but student writing generally is hard going.  I
don't really LIKE student writing at all!  You have to pay me to read it,
and you do!

But I do like seeing people get somewhere in their stuff and occasionally
astonish themselves.  I like being around for that.  Do I like lists,
amusing topics, and structured essays?--yes and no.  Yes, those things,
lists especially, are often tricks and pathways to success for students, so
naturally I tout them.  No, I don't like them because they can easily become
formulaic and undercut writing's real purpose which is to discard or, at least transcend, formulas.  I was open at any time to having my sox knocked off by anything you wanted to toss my way, five-graf formula or not....

And, oh yeah, don't be in the least chagrinned that you write for attention
(I know you're probably not chagrinned, but just in case....)  Everyone who
likes to write writes to be larger, to exist through words in a halo of light in
other people's minds and lives.  Without apology I write for attention and have at times found nothing sweeter in my life than saying something right and having that acknowledged in the world outside me."

Neurosis watch: yes, the teacher who tells his students that length does not count in the context of writing is hooked on Word's word-count feature.  Someday I picture myself arguing with administrators that this site DOES TOO! represent professional development.  And I need to be able to whip out the numbers since measurable goals and objectives are the evaluative tools of choice down in the carpeted offices.  There are about 7 thousand words in the first archive, representing 26 days of writing, and about 8 thousand in the second archive representing another 16 days of posts.  If this rate of increase is extrapolated through to the end of the spring semester, I will be using so many words a day, there will be none left for any other purpose in the universe, and we'll finally have a little peace and quiet around here.

"Numbers!"  the missus says, sipping her tea.  "Wow.  You must be doing something important!"