I Want to Take This Class!

Kurt Vonnegut speaking at Case Western Reserve University (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although I didn’t win Powerball this week, I’m still hoping that I will find a ticket for time travel lying on the sidewalk.  If it turns up, I may head back to 1955 and enroll in Kurt Vonnegut’s class at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and get started on my term paper.  You can view the specifics of the assignment as described in today’s issue of Slate by clicking here.

In “Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules for Reading Fiction,” an excerpt from Dan Wakefield‘s Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, Suzanne McConnell shares the assignment that she saved.  It immediately offers some ideas ripe for poaching by any good teacher:

• Write an assignment in the form of a letter to make it more personal
• Be specific about the requirements of the task at hand; include both positive and negative directives
• Encourage your students to embrace their own experiences, not the ones they may think they “should” have
• Allow your students to make their own value judgments, but insist that they reflect on the origins of those values
• Invite your students to see themselves as people whose opinions matter
• Make it clear that you expect your students to experience pleasure in completing the task.
  

  Term Paper Galore (Photo credit: Bright Green Pants)

   

Kudos to Ms. McConnell for saving this letter.  Do you find inspiration as you read it?  Please share!

Related articles

• Kurt Vonnegut’s Tips for Teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1967) (openculture.com)

Boring is Beautiful

English: A bored person (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I perused Slate this morning (one of my growing list of guilty pleasures), I happened upon Mark O’Connell‘s post, “Surprisingly Interesting: A Dispatch from the 2012 Boring Conference.”  How did I miss out on this, and how soon can I book a ticket to next year’s event?  You see, I take it as an article of faith that virtually anything is interesting if you just learn enough about it, or have some level of personal investment, or are simply open to the wonders of the universe. (Wait…did I just create a new definition of “nerdiness”?)

As college instructors, we all encounter students who are enrolled in our class to complete a slot on their degree plan, openly declaring that “I have no interest in this subject whatsoever….it’s just boring.”  If they don’t say it to you, they have said it to the advisor who broke the news that they needed to take it. Trust me on this one.  These are typically folks who have not reached the life stage in which Nova episodes fill up one’s DVR.

English: Hand I’m bored Español: Mano I’m bored (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ah, but isn’t that what college is for?  Who among us has not stumbled upon, or been forcibly shoved into, a class that we never wished to take that nevertheless proved to be an epiphany?  At some point, most of us have been the intellectual equivalent of a 4-year-old insisting on chicken fingers when the menu featured filet mignon and creme brulee, a state of affairs that lasted until some long suffering teacher pried open our clenched minds and offered a bite of knowledge that tasted like Bananas Foster.

For me, it was entomology.  I dislike bugs….really loathe them.  But the best biology professor at U of L in the 1970’s, Dr. Charles Covell, was a noted lepidopterist and entomologist who taught entomolgy.  My friends were taking it.  My class at the same time was cancelled.  So I signed up.  Nearly 40 years on, I still have fond memories of that class, and I never see a butterfly without thinking warmly of spring afternoons spent racing across the fields near Louisville, net in hand, pursuing those beautiful creatures. Had I missed that “boring” course, I would be the poorer for it.

Eastern Swallowtail – Papilio glaucus – Taken in Louisville Kentucky (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Long ago I read an anecdote that I am unable to google today.  (Please tell me if you know the source…I think it was a noted woman writer.)  She related that she had met a man who blustered that War and Peace was a big, boring book when it was only he who was big and boring. Anatomy, calculus, history, sociology….all of these may seem big and boring to our students.  Maybe if we offer them the right “nets,” they, too. will find pleasure in catching those beautiful, boring butterflies.

Related articles

• Boring festival brings unexpected intrigue (guardian.co.uk)

The Saving Grace of Math

Mathematics (Photo credit: Terriko)

Why would a community college English instructor like me be a math advocate? Actually, I’ve always been a math advocate, and just in the past two weeks, I’ve put together more clearly the reason.  In sharing memories with old friends from school long ago, wonderful math memories came flooding back, as well as a new perspective on why math can be a great subject for anyone, not just prospective math buffs

One argument of many students is, “Math has nothing to do with my career plan. It shouldn’t be a requirement.” Their argument sounds convincing and utilitarian, especially in an age of student loans and the need to get efficiently from point A to point B, point A being an education, and point B being a good job.

US Navy 100727-N-4304M-001 A student at a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) summer camp at Ryken High School in Leonardtown, Md (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, some important benefits of math lie hidden in plain sight now that I think about it. Today’s students often feel weighted down with life situations, whether traditional students or non-traditional. Home life for the traditional student may be fraught with stresses, and certainly we know the plight of non-traditional students trying to balance relationships, finances, family, and jobs. What could possibly be the upside of taking math?

First, it’s good to point out that we can’t think about our personal problems all the time. Sometimes, we need to think about impersonal problems—like math problems. Let’s think of math as an example of a neutral zone in which the subject matter does not have emotions. The student might feel emotions while trying to do the math, but the math is not of itself a drama with conflict and complex personalities. This can be a beautiful thing for several reasons.

For one thing, math is logical. It relentlessly is what it is—the ordering of steps in a prescribed order to arrive at the correct outcome. This will be helpful in all zones of life, both professional and personal since life is built on logic just like buildings are built on architecture.

Dansk: Dedikeret til matematik (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Next, math is relational: numbers, lines, angles, and shapes all relate to each other because they take up space; and not only that, they are positioned relative to each other and may intersect or overlap. But fear not, you won’t hear them fighting or going to war. You will just see what they look like on paper.

Also assuring is the predictable nature of math. In college math for non-math majors, one gets a hang of how equations work, and they work the same way every day. Just think about how disconcerting it would be if the sun didn’t rise every day. It’s the same for most math courses that most students will take. There’s a good feeling in getting into the rhythms of predictability.

Last, there’s a verifiable solution to the problems. With many subjects, people argue about what is the correct answer, and this is because with literature, history, and social discourses, values enter in and therefore debate.

This all might make math seem irrelevant to the utilitarian side of life since most study of math leaves its applied side deferred except for those who continue and do enter professions dependent upon knowing how to do the math. However, because of math’s qualities hidden in plain sight, it is a perfect type of learning that carries over into how we study and apply other types of knowledge, and into how we solve other types of problems.

Stress (Photo credit: topgold)

But even apart from that, we all need a break from drama, and the emotionless content of math and its impersonal nature can make it a welcome break from stresses. Almost everybody plays games for a diversion, so why not play at math and turn it into a more sporting mindset? It might relieve some stress.
pleasureteam note: Have you or your students been surprised by unexpected benefits from mastering your discipline?  Do you love your subject for reasons beyond its obvious utility?  Please share.

Related articles

• Math Anxiety: Treating the Pain (pleasureinlearning.com)

The Two-Joke Minimum: Parting Thoughts

(pleasureteam note: Today’s post concludes Dr. Felton’s series on using humor in the classroom.  Thanks, Kevin, for giving us all some smiles and inspiring us to to pass them on to our students.)

Carson as Carnac the Magnificent, one of his most well known routines (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 I have given these principles names, but they could be called anything.

•  THE  JOHNNY CARSON RULE – Only “pull the legs” of people who can defend themselves.  Create a safe atmosphere.

•  EVERYONE’S A COMEDIAN – Be the straight guy/gal often.  Leave yourself open because if allows students the chance to play off your “material.”

•  COROLLARY (to everybody is a comedian): WHEN IN DOUBT, SELF-DEPRECATE —Rodney Dangerfield and Johnny Carson knew how to do this. It’s a very high level of humor because it requires a great deal of self-confidence to laugh at yourself and your mistakes.  Psychologists are trained to talk about their vulnerabilities and weaknesses to clients so their clients become aware they are not the only ones with self-doubts and troubles. People want to know they are not the only ones with weaknesses.  Instead of feeling ashamed or inferior they learn they are not alone. It’s just part of the human condition.  Modeling humility and acknowledging one’s own frailties also has this effect in the classroom.  Self-deprecation is a great way of achieving this.   Also,  people are much less likely to take pot shots at people who freely admit their frailties. Conversely, arrogance puts most people off, leaving many looking for ways to take the arrogant person “down a notch”.  Arrogant, self-important people are a pain and, unfortunately, don’t even know it.
  

  Rodney Dangerfield’s comedy album No Respect. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

•  BE IN THE MOMENT– Be ready to use what comes your way.

•  PLAN SPONTANEITY – If something works, use it over and over again.

•  DON’T FORGET THE PAST— The success I have achieved in teaching rests squarely upon super examples given to me by former students who applied what I was talking about to their lives.  When I hear a super example, I tell the student that their offering is becoming a permanent part of my class.

•  REAL LIFE EXAMPLES ARE BETTER THAN CONTRIVED ONES – Nuff’ said!

•  STORY HOUR IS BETTER THAN HAPPY HOUR – Students have told me that the humorous stories I tell help them understand and remember the material. Thankfully, many of the stories are true. I just wished I could remember which ones they are!

(pleasureteam note:  It’s interesting to note how often self-deprecation has been offered in various forms as a strategy for making the learning experience more pleasurable.  See previous posts by Pat Riley, Karen Dougherty, and others.)

Related articles

• The Two-Joke Minimum: Part 3 (pleasureinlearning.com)
• The Two Joke Minimum: Part I (pleasureinlearning.com)
• The Two-Joke Minimum: Part 2 (pleasureinlearning.com)

Super Site of the Week: A Gift from Down Under

While paddling along through the web this week, I wandered into Guidelines on Learning that Inform Teaching and immediately felt right at home.  Half a world away, Adrian Lee, Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, has been thinking about some of the same topics that float our pleasureinlearning boat.

The sixteen “Guidelines” featured on the site are drawn from literature and experience, and feature brief justification for each Guideline as well as a toolkit document to assist instructors in reflecting on how that Guideline might enahance their own teaching.  Guideline #3, for example, is “Fun,” and includes the following:

“Learning should be pleasurable. There is no rule against hard work being fun.” Ramsden, P. 1992, Learning to Teach in Higher Education, Routledge, London, p. 102.

The site also includes discipline-specific “exemplars.”  I took a look at a first computer science lecture ….the accent alone is worth the click.  (And the lecturer’s opening remarks reminded me of Kevin Felton’s Two-Joke Minimum.)

Another link led me to this short video highlighting an active learning classroom:

It’s great to know that college instructors all around the world are interested in enhancing students’ learning experience and are willing to share their ideas.  That’s what keeps us going here!

—Karen

The Two-Joke Minimum: Part 3

(pleasureteam note: Dr. Kevin Felton’s series on using humor in the classroom continues today. You can see the first two segments by clicking the links below.)

Dead Poets Society (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Humor can diffuse situations like wrong answers, insensitive comments, politically incorrect statements, etc.  Here are some of the techniques that I use.  I use them only after I know the students and am confident it will not offend the student in question.

Wrong answers – I use humor to “cushion the blow” of a student giving the wrong answer in response to a question I ask in class. Some of the ways I do this include:

•  I pretend to hit a buzzer and say, “Wrong! But thanks for playing”.  I took that from Robin Williams role as a teacher in Dead Poets Society.

• I say that an answer a student gave is wrong.  I follow that with “Will someone open up the window and let some of the wrong out”?  I took that from Ray Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond.

• I might even follow a wrong answer from a student with, “That is absolutely the last time I am ever calling on you.”

Blatant political incorrectness or insensitive remarks – If a student uses “foul” language or makes what has come to be understood as an insensitive remark about a group, I sometimes do one of the following:

•  I tell students, “Let’s put what you just said into the ol’ Politicalcorrectometer and see what happens”.

• As a “teachable moment”, I explain that they probably were unaware their remark was inappropriate and explain why.

• My colleague Greg Bridgeman makes his students put a quarter in a jar when this happens.

Why do I think that humor is such a valuable tool?

Humor can improve student learning – after all, we’re looking for ways to help improve student attention, retention, understanding of our disciplines, and hopefully make learning a pleasure.

Scrubs (TV series) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Humor can improve student attention.  Humor, together with a fast-paced, interesting, attention-grabbing approach can produce a mindset that says, “I’d better pay attention or I’ll miss something”.  Robin Williams’ stand-up comedy and the TV show, Scrubs, are examples of this. Freud said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious,and I say that humor is the royal road to getting students attention.

Humor can more effectively help students retain information and produce a greater understanding of the subject than might occur when we use a serious tone.  This fall, I am experimenting with extemporaneous role playing with students.  I ask students to come up to the front of the class and act out a scenario involving a sociological concept with me.  I have a plan ahead to make it humorous, and I think it is an effective tool. Students can see the concept unfolding before their eyes, and the element of humor helps them remember it.

—Kevin

(pleasureteam note: Check back next week for Dr. Felton’s closing thoughts on how he uses humor in his classroom.)

Related articles

• The Two Joke Minimum: Part I (pleasureinlearning.com)
• The Two-Joke Minimum: Part 2 (pleasureinlearning.com)

Clever Clip(s) of the Week

Metaphor, simile, parable, allegory….these are words that we recognize as the lexicon of the Humanities folk rather than the Science geeks.  When we science nerds do employ video to help our students learn, we often rely on the “science-y” ones alone, often almost pathetically titled by some soul struggling to make them sound irresistible:  “Translating the Code: Protein Synthesis.”  Sign me up for that!

Here’s a trick that I like to use when introducing the daunting topic of cell physiology.  My students have just finished their first exam in the previous hour and are typically tired from lack of sleep, stressed about their performance on the test, and frightened by the length and complexity of the cell physiology chapter in their text.   So I show them this clip:

Next, a slide of a puzzled baby, asking “Now why would she show us that?”

(Long pause for response….someone usually hazards a pretty good guess.)

Now, I show them this clip from Harvard Biovisions by StudioDaily (cue ooohs and aaahs):

After watching both videos, students are able to tell me how the two are alike, and they begin to understand, without much prodding from me, that the workings of our cells are fascinating, complex, and, like the workings of that fabulous Coke machine, completely hidden from our senses.

Finally, I promise that by the end of the week, they will be able to identify almost everything in the Harvard video. We often sneek a second peek at the Coke video as well, and the class has fun making analogies to cellular processes with their newly acquired knoweldge.

—Karen

Do you have favorite videos that you use to invite your students into the wonders of your discipline?  How do you use them?

Related articles

• Harvard University and XVIVO Take Students on Another 3D Journey (prweb.com)

Telling the Story: The Importance of Narrative

(Some thoughts on Dr. Pamela Eddy’s Keynote address, “Leadership in an Environment of Change,” presented at the KCTCS Leadership Conference on November 12, 2012)

For those of us on faculty or staff not wired to a career path toward becoming a college president, Dr. Pamela Eddy’s keynote speech at Hopkinsville Community College’s leadership seminar still had a lot to offer. For one thing, even though one might not want to be the president, everyone cares about an upbeat tone of competency and accompanying friendly atmosphere in which to work.

Dr. Eddy covered many topics, but what caught my attention as an English teacher was that she has a knack for “telling the story.” Being a research specialist has its challenges, and one of them is the presentation of data without making it stultifying in format and tedious. Additionally, administrative terminology can sound disconcertingly abstract, leading to a sense of remoteness from the vignettes all around.

Dr. Eddy counters this by talking about specific community colleges and the styles of their presidents and how people on campus respond. “Am I afraid to run into the president?” She told a colorful story about running into the president of her school one day in the store and how embarrassed she felt because she had her paint clothes on. “The president is the president twenty-four hours a day.” That image stuck in my mind and made a vivid point.

Dr. Eddy also talked about our relationship to data. Yes, she had a PowerPoint presentation with charts, data, observations, and even some comic strips; she also had a recurring theme of “telling a story” with our data. By creating an interesting narrative of where things are and where they can go, the story has a much better chance of sticking in the listener’s mind than just data alone with rhetorical logic to interpret it.

Dr. Pamela Eddy
(Source: http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/peddy)

Yet she made the point that a “feel good” atmosphere on a campus is not enough. One school president she knew of was a good old boy and thought that the “feel good” atmosphere alone is leadership. This is not the case where the numbers suggest that pedagogy is dipping and a college reeling in the wrong direction educationally.

But by taking data and creating a narrative that leads to feeling good based on a good story unfolding with good facts behind it, the office of president at a community college will start to look a lot more appealing to more people who typically in the past would dismiss the job as uninteresting to pursue.

I am happy sixty-three year old English teacher not looking to be a president, but I am glad to hear that more upcoming presidents will probably be doing something I enjoy getting students to do every day—telling stories and telling them with good information.

Phrase of the Week: TIL

lol brb 🙂 @ (Photo credit: nicolasnova)

As a late and rather inept adopter of smartphone technology, I am slowly learning the unique alphabet of text speak. (Sadly, this is proving to be a necessity when reading student emails and, even more sadly, their written assignments.  But I digress….)  I was delighted to find that Google knows the meanings of all those curious multi-cap snippets, including some that I wish I hadn’t checked.

I’ve progressed from LOL to ROFL to SMH.  My current favorite is TIL.  Did you Google it?  TIL is “Today I Learned.”  T-I-L seems like a T-O-O-L waiting to be used.  We all know that asking students to recap the day’s main learning objectives is a tried-and-true way to consolidate learning.  Students with smart phones might text me during the last moments of class, while those without that gadget could write their TIL the old-fashioned way.  The TIL would need to be submitted during the final moments, thus discouraging early departure from the session.

• The TIL could also be specifically focused: “TIL that protein synthesis is important because…..” (sneaky early departers would not know the prompt…unless a confederate sent it to them, I suppose.)
• “TIL  that my favorite celllular organelle is ….”
• The TIL could be used to encourage connections with other disciplines: “TIL that Greek sculptors knew a lot about muscular anatomy because they liked to represent specific muscles such as……..”
• “TIL things that I can do to avoid fractures, such as …”
• “TIL this surprising fact about the human brain……”

An image macro illustrating a pun from similar sounding “Rofl” and “waffle”. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

TIL could be used in virtually any discipline.  It might be fun to start the next class by sharing the most interesting or funniest TIL’s from the previous session or some data regarding the class’s responses.  After all, YOLO.

—Karen

Have you found a way to incorporate popular technology or its byproducts in your classes?  Please share.

The Two-Joke Minimum: Part 2

Humor can help build student-teacher bonds and achieve camaraderie!

People are hungry to bond with people—especially in the alienated, non-face-to-face world in which we live. In an ideal world, the relationship between a teacher and a class is so highly developed that both the teacher and the students feel they can safely express themselves (question material, make an observation, etc.).  If used correctly, humor can help make this happen.

Humor might take the form of “inside” jokes between the teacher and the class that are nurtured and developed over the course of the semester.  It can also evolve into what anthropologists have witnessed in many cultures–the joking relationship. A joking relationship can be between two people or done with an entire class. Let me give some examples:

• When I discuss folkways (the minor norms/rules of society), I explain to students that there are literally thousands of folkways in a classroom that are understood and never mentioned. One semester, I mentioned that one folkway is sitting in chairs, and I pointed out that I never said they had to sit in chairs.  The next class period, I walked into the classroom and found that the students had removed all of the chairs and were all sitting on the floor on mats. We definitely had a joking relationship that made learning a pleasure.
• During another class back in 2007, a coworker came to my classroom door and told me that I had an urgent phone call. I told my class “sternly” not to go anywhere while I was away.  When I came back, the room was empty and the lights were out. Noticing that the classroom door next to mine was closed, I opened it.  The entire class jumped out and surprised me.  Last week, a student from that class stopped me at Kroger and reminded me of that event.
• In yet another class, I was talking about how we all, to some degree, have to deal with feelings of powerlessness. Using myself as an example, I said that I can play guitar, but people don’t exactly line up to hear me play. I mentioned Elvis Presley as an example of a person who commanded a great deal of personal charisma—so powerful that women would hurl “unmentionables” at him while he was on stage.  The next class period, several female students suddenly started looking at their watches and smiling. All at once, I was “pelted” with, well, you know.  So, now who holds the power?
  

  Elvis Presley, 1973 Aloha From Hawaii television broadcast (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

• In a final example, I was explaining how management styles relate to power and influence. I mentioned in passing that I personally didn’t feel comfortable with close supervision. When I entered the class the next day, the president of HCC was sitting in class and said that he had just stopped by to observe my teaching practices. My class even got the President in on the joke.

I imagine that many of you are thinking back to classes you’ve taught where humor produced a strong sense of cohesiveness that ultimately lead to increased student engagement and learning—even loyalty to the subject matter and the learning experience.

—Kevin

pleasureteam notes: Tune in next Monday for the next installment of Dr. Felton’s “The Two-Joke Minimum.”  In the meantime, we would love to hear about any insider jokes that have developed in your classes.

Related articles

• The Two Joke Minimum: Part I (pleasureinlearning.com)
• 15 Ways To Become A More Effective Teacher (howtolearn.com)