in defense of widgets

A few weeks ago, I ran across a comment in the Chronicle of Higher Education forums that compared the standard five-paragraph essay foisted upon students everywhere as the academic equivalent of a widget. That is, this kind of essay serves no other purpose than as a thought exercise that bears little relationship to the kinds of thinking and writing students will need to do in the real world. 

While I would agree that the five-paragraph essay rarely leads to inspired writing--let alone reading--I think the comment misses a larger point about the nature of how students learn. So much of what we do in the classroom involves a measure of artificiality simply because, well, we’re in a classroom and we’re dealing with people who are not yet experts in the subject they’re studying. I’m a strong proponent of experiential learning and I try to help students make connections between the topics we talk about in class and life beyond the classroom. But I also use all kinds of classroom activities not because they mimic how students will use Spanish out in the world, but because they are helpful to students in gaining the skills and knowledge they will need out in the world. Just like medical students who start out with CPR dummies and cadavers, it’s OK to let beginning language students talk about a fictional trip to Spain before we ask them to undertake a complicated interpreting task. I’m fine with giving them activities that help them practice a specific vocabulary set or work on their verb conjugations, as long as they’re also learning how to convey relevant information despite limited language skills or to organize their thoughts in a meaningful way.

Which brings me back to the dreaded five-paragraph essay. Depending upon the kind of class I’m teaching, I’ve had students do all kinds of writing, from movie reviews to autobiographical essays. But I’ve also found the five-paragraph essay to be helpful in teaching students how to organize their thoughts around a central topic and then to marshall evidence that supports their interpretation of that topic. The ability to advance an idea and give valid reasons for supporting it is a really valuable skill, and it’s one that in very practical terms can help students convince employers to hire them or persuade future coworkers to join them in a project. And it’s a skill that carries over from writing into other realms, including the ability to evaluate the arguments of others, rather than accepting a proposition at face value.


I don’t doubt that there are other, and perhaps better, ways of teaching these skills, but I’m willing to cop to a certain amount of artificiality in the classroom because our job as teachers is to provide scaffolding that lets students try and fail and do better the next time. We give them tasks they can learn from until they’ve acquired enough skills and knowledge to do it on their own.

Now I just need to remember all this when the next round of essays is due and I'm cursing the idiot who assigned so much freaking writing.

las muditas

This description of one professor’s efforts to help shy students find a voice in her classroom resonated with me because I was also one of those quiet students. I remember all too well that queasy feeling in my stomach, the flush that came over my face when I knew I was going to have to talk in class. Although I learned to manage it with time, it stuck with me even through grad school, so much so that a more outgoing classmate dubbed my friend and me “las muditas”* for our reticence in class. The nickname infuriated me, in large part because it reminded me of how frustrated I was with my own shyness. Eventually, I set myself a quota for speaking in class and just forced myself to do it.

In this article, the author describes setting students up for success in class discussions by letting them test out their comments via email before class, then calling on them at an appropriate moment during the discussion. This is such a brilliant strategy because it goes right to the heart of the fear and lets students manage that anxiety in small steps and on their own terms, with the teacher’s support. In my own classes, my goal is to create a classroom dynamic in which anyone who wants to can voice an opinion in some capacity during the class session. To that end, other strategies I’ve tried include giving students brief, in-class writing exercises--that I usually count on a completion basis toward a participation grade--so that no matter who I call on, most of them will have at least something to say and they will have gotten to process it in writing before having to say it aloud. I also do a lot of small-group activities before leading into a large-group discussion, so that students have a chance to bounce ideas off of one another and try them out without the pressure of speaking in front of the entire class. It’s a tricky balance, though, especially when weighed against the very real need to move through the course material. 

Creating a classroom that invites participation is important pedagogically, because hearing from a variety of perspectives enriches learning for all students even as articulating one’s own ideas verbally reinforces individual student learning. But it’s also important politically, especially when students don’t speak up because they feel their age, their gender, or their socioeconomic background are at odds with perceived--or actual--norms in the university community. I want students to tackle tough questions and respect different experiences and opinions and find ways to resolve conflicts because these are life skills that I want them to take with them. And I emphasize mutual respect in the classroom because, ultimately, that’s the kind of society I want to live in.

*the little mute ones

sunset in the Blue Mountains

That moment at dusk when haze blankets the horizon and obscures the boundary between earth and sky. And then, as the lights from distant houses come on, the contours of the land are again briefly revealed, before the stars make their slow appearance. 

Photo credit. 

tinkering

I really like this video of Adam Savage talking about the importance of maker culture to the broader educational landscape. In particular, he argues for trying things and failing--and that making things helps kids do well in math, science, and other subjects. Taking things apart and putting them together again in different ways also encourages thinking in terms of systems and how they interact, rather than becoming too entrenched in a particular way of seeing things. 


Savage's take on tinkering also reminded me of this article on the virtues of being a generalist rather than a specialist, given that a diversity of skills and experiences will help employees adapt better over time. Now, let's get those liberal arts majors to a wood shop or laboratory.  

personal branding

Equal parts satire and survival skills, this post from a few years ago captures the essence of academia-as-performance art by laying out strategies for those all-important introductions that grad students fumble their way through on the first day of every new course.

My favorite bit of advice: "Never sacrifice originality and erudition for clarity."

for love or money

Reading, during graduate school, was about mastering a canon, attaining fluency in literary history and tradition, becoming conversant in the language of theory and criticism. It was often about proving oneself as a scholar and also, sometimes, about marking territory. Rarely did I read something without an eye as to what sort of use it could be put, whether as the foundation of an article, supplementary evidence for another project, or another milestone in the ongoing process of acquiring cultural capital.

Much of this is well and good and a perfectly normal part of the process by which academia replicates itself: of the many things I regret about grad school, the ability to have an intelligent conversation about most major periods of Spanish and Spanish American literature is not one of them.

Now that I’ve opted out of that world, though, my reading habits operate in an entirely different economy. If reading for graduate school was a primarily utilitarian activity, reading--particularly reading fiction--is for me now a more private, less commercial undertaking. Oh, sure, I still read to stay current in my field and to fill in gaps in my personal catalogue of Books That Must Be Read. And it’s hard to turn off the close reading habits acquired through such an intense engagement with literary study; I’m forever tracking narrative voices in my head and paying attention to plot structure and literary conventions and language as I move through a novel.

But I’ve regained that inimitable pleasure of sinking into another’s world through fiction, and I can once again do it merely because I love it. This is why, in part, I think the role of literary scholar never quite fit: I wanted literature to feed my soul, when the structure of academia insisted that I use it to make a living.

And although we do well to give commerce its due, it is good, also, to carve out a bit of space for the things we do first for love.

un recordatorio, tal vez un recuerdo

A former student, now a friend, asked me recently whether speaking Spanish feels too much like work when I’m out of the classroom and off the clock. Yes, it often does, a fact that saddens me. 

Despite that, Enrique Morente’s version of Federico García Lorca’s “La Aurora de Nueva York” breaks my heart and then heals it in all the right ways, reminding me of why I loved Spanish so much in the first place.