Salads Don't Deserve This

The word "salad" in the phrase "word salad" has always conveyed to me freshness and innocence.

Word salads are usually the handiwork of students struggling with time or flailing through difficult material. There is a certain mercy to the stark reality of a word salad. It can't be graded at all, much less assigned a value. The word salad tries to stave of failure but in doing creates failure so spectacular it requires acknowledgment and redress.

The word salad gets offered up in the desperate hope that the consumer of it will give it meaning--not even aspiring to truth.

The creator of a true word salad doesn't have enough command of words to lie.

Let's not call today's press conference a "word salad." It was a meretricious and long-simmering stew that could only be created by someone whose power is anchored in the ability to sublimate the structural integrity of ingredients to a few strong flavors, repellent to many but savored by aficionados. It was a stew to be slurped and savored by those hungry for its peculiar pleasures. But none were on hand, so it got flung.

Today's Koan: "More than Half a Day or Less"

A half-hour after the two-day NTFC Local 6546 strike ended at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on April 20, all members of the bargaining unit received an email from university HR demanding that they report whether or not they participated in the strike by Friday, April 22.  I blogged about that email here, but at that point I had not even clicked on the link to see the form I had to fill out. Here it is, in case you're interested. 

I myself found the form confusing, and my situation is simple. My job these days has a regular nine-to-five structure, so missing two days has effects that I myself am having to cope with as I make up for a solid 16 hours of lost office time of my own choosing. So what exactly am I supposed to put on this form?

I'm guessing that they're asking me to write in either or both dates, but the request "document the number of days of the strike" makes it sound like they don't know the nature of the labor action and want some evidence that the strike lasted as long as I say it did.  On the other hand, they only give two slots to write in a date, so who knows?

Okay, I'm being a little snarky here, but the person who generated this email is paid a high six figures (or the equivalent of 3 - 6 writing instructors, depending their rank) to communicate information about contracts and employment procedures to all the employees of the university. Clarity would seem to be in order.

I'm not the only person who was left with questions.  Fortunately, HR has provided an email "strikequestions@illinois.edu" where we can submit them.  

NTFC Local 6546 President Shawn Gilmore read the form carefully on behalf of his union members, and had more, which he kindly shared with many of us

1. The instruction email indicates that the Provost's office believes it is "is required to pay employees who work and to withhold pay from employees who chose not to work during the strike." What, specifically, requires this to be your office's approach?
2. The instruction email also indicates that "[i]f you elected to participate in the strike, it is required that you complete the Time and Attendance Form." To be clear, you have decided that this is your policy, thus the correct phrasing should be "The Provost's office requires..." correct?
3. The instruction email indicates that I should "submit the completed document to your unit administrator who handles HR matters." However, it is not clear if this means the administrator that supervises the three courses I'm teaching this semester (Bruce Erickson, the director of the Programs in Professional Writing), the Associate Head of the Department, who is in charge of the department's curriculum more broadly (Tim Newcomb), the Department Head, who signs my appointment letter each year (Michael Rothberg), our business manager (Jennifer Daly), or some other party.
4. The instruction email indicates that "The University is not interested in learning whether you do or do not support a labor organization or whether you have or have not engaged in protected concerted activities." But this is directly contradicted by the online form itself, which collects said information and provides no way to abstain from this question.
5. The instruction email indicates that "The purpose of this form is purely to determine whether you did or did not work on April 19th and/or April 20th, in order to accurately account for your time and to make any necessary pay adjustments for one or both days." However, the form provided cannot accurate account my time, as the form is not arranged in a way that corresponds with my labor. I do not have a fixed schedule that recurs each day, and as a professional, am expected to manage my time at my professional discretion. In point of fact, I shifted much of my work for these affected days to the weekend beforehand, over which I worked at least 10 hours that I was not compensated for. How will this be accounted for?
6. The form itself is an insecure .pdf format, which could potentially be filled out for me on my behalf without my knowledge. This raises large concerns about the privacy of my reporting and the accuracy of any information you receive.
7. Further, the instructions and form do not clarify the mechanics of submission--should I print and fill this out; can I email this document?
8. The required form reads that "[a]ny disputes related the hours worked during a strike will be reviewed before a final determination is made." Who will conduct this review? What is their expertise in assessing the work of teaching faculty and the management of their time? How can I be assured that this review will be impartial?
9. The form indicates that "[l]aws and policies regarding the appropriate use of state resources require that you accurately report work hours." This may be the case, but there is a implication here that your office must then respond in a certain way via those laws and policies, which I would like documentation on.
10. Finally, have you discussed the method of this reporting and assessment with the union, NTFC Local #6546? As your office obviously had prepared this documentation in advance, did you ask about cases that might apply to other members of the union? What of research faculty who ran their labs and walked the picket line? What of faculty that chose to teach and picket? Or that shifted their labor in order to complete most of their week's work on Monday, Thursday, and Friday this week?

Once I have some clarity on these issues, I will be happy to report my actions and time accurately. But I am not comfortable signing a document representation my actions and their consequences given the documentation I currently have.

Some members have written to point out that the April 22 deadline poses a hardship for those who celebrate the Jewish festival of Passover, which begins at sundown that day (or at noon for those who are strict in their ritual observance) and, like Christmas or Easter, for many requires travel to celebrate with family.

Others have pointed out that the nature of faculty work duties is such that one can  be physically absent from campus for two days and not grading papers or responding to email while still meeting all the needs of the courses one teaches.  In addition, many of are accustomed to doing a lot of work while off-campus or on weekends. Most of us don't get equipment like computers or phones from the university to do our jobs, and some shared offices don't have adequate wifi for the many teaching tasks that must be completed online, even for a face-to-face class. Moreover, an office shared by teaching faculty meeting students in office hours is not conducive to the teaching preparation and grading that requires focus and concentration.  So it's a good thing that as professionals, we are generally empowered to allocate our own time as we see fit.

Many of us have gotten variations on the following boilerplate response to our questions:

Thank you for recent email. In response to the various questions that you posed, the form is intended simply to ensure that employees are paid accurately and in accordance with the relevant law. The campus must not pay employees for services that they did not perform and may properly deduct pay from those employees in a manner consistent with the Fair Labor Standards Act. Under that Act, an exempt employee may be docked pay in half day increments if the employee does not perform services on a given workday, even if the employee performed more hours than usual on other days within the workweek. In accordance with these principles, the campus intends to use the following guide in assessing whether any deduction in pay is warranted:

• If an employee worked a full day, no time will be deducted;
• If an employee worked more than half day or less, no time will be deducted;
• If an employee worked a half day or less, four hours will be deducted; and
• If an employee did not work anytime on that day, eight hours will be deducted.

In determining the amount of time worked in a given workday, the time spent in activities such as grading papers, planning, conducting research and so forth should be counted. Department representatives will be seeking confirmation from those employees who submit forms that they did not engage in any of these other work activities on the dates of the strike. We are not requesting additional documentation be submitted with the form. In addition, if an employee needs additional time to submit the form, they should seek an extension from their supervisor or department administrator who handles HR matters. There will be no penalty assessed for submitting this next week.

In your case, you should submit the form to your department’s business manager, [name] either electronically or in the form of a hard copy. I would advise you to ask her who is the most appropriate person to sign the document.

The response of course raises additional questions:

• What is "more than half a day or less"? 
• What provisions are there for employees who "perform more hours than usual" outside the workweek?
• How exactly will "department representatives...be seeking confirmation" that those of us submitting the form "did not engage in any of these other work activities"? 

But enough. One grows weary of this troll/countertroll game. Whatever capacity HR has for enacting coherent and well-articuled employment policies ought to be directed in the next four days to communicating with the Interim Provost and Interim Chancellor so that the administration bargaining table can come to the schedule mediation session on April 27 ready to bargain with reasonable proposals on the thirteen key issues still outstanding.

Writing, or that which Dare Not Speak Its Name

The emissary from the world of business consulting was fielding questions from students in my course on career planning in the humanities.  "Business consulting needs writers, right?" asked one student.  The business consulting expert visibly blanched.  "Well, not writers, exactly, but we do need..." and he went on to describe any number of key tasks--drafting surveys, communicating results to clients, producing "deliverables"--that most people would call writing.

It's no longer okay to call it that.  Spend some time looking at job ads, position descriptions, career counseling sites and it's clear that no one writes anymore: they create content.  Or they strategize content.  Or sometimes they generate those "deliverables."  Rarely do they "write."  It's a useful thing to know if you're an old-school humanities major staring down the job market.  Type "writing" or "editing" into a job search engine and you quickly reach a dead end.  Type in "content"--or prepare to BS your skill set a bit and type in "user experience"--and many more opportunities emerge.

Anyone trained to closely assess language and tease out implications--which I suspect is most of the readers of this blog--can probably spend the next 15 minutes contemplating the differences between "content" and "writing" and arrive at a conclusion about the corporatization of everything.  "Content" aims to get monetized.  "Writing" may or may not.  

"Effective content" may or may not involve "good writing," depending on the strategy in play. Obfuscation, and a warm marinade of corporate terminology, has value in realms of existence that are well above my pay grade, but then, so can wallet-opening clarity and originality.   But one dare not call it "writing" and conjure up the inevitable waste of time that goes into conveying an important idea with precision.  

"Teaching with Technology"? Oh, Wait: You Meant "Delivering Content." Never Mind.

I've been sucked in again--a one hour brown-bag hosted by the university's "Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning."

Best Practices for "Back Pocket Video Production
Video pros and experienced faculty share their tips and tricks for producing video content for course enhancement and student assignments with only their phones and other "back-pocket" devices.

Sounds pretty innovative, and why not?  Most students carry around with them the capacity to shoot video; so do I.  They live in a world replete with screens and moving images; so do I.  They document their lives relentlessly with their hand-held devices, and I was born too early to understand how this unlimited capacity for self-expression across a variety of media platforms shapes how they understand the world.  I ask them to delve deeper into the printed word by writing about what they read--how might I harness their use of another media form?

I have some ideas, myself, but there are a lot of things I don't know about how to make them work:

• Like many non-tenure-track faculty with no research budget, I have to rely on a shared office computer or technology I've purchased for my personal use.  Where and how should I store video files that I create (or ask students to create) for a class?
• What are some rookie mistakes to avoid when using a handheld device to shoot video that's going to be viewed by strangers, rather than an audience of sympathetic family or facebook friends?
• What are the best platforms for making student-made videos available to their classmates?
• What FERPA and copyright issues should I be worrying about when using a site like YouTube for educational purposes?
• What kinds of video-centered assignments work well in a class where video production and visual media are NOT the main focus of learning?
• How have instructors successfully prompted students to exploit the communication possibilities of hand-held video?  What do students do better with video than with more conventional kinds of assignments?

So I went to the brown bag lunch.  Here's what I learned.

• Shooting video with a smart phones can capture ephemeral moments and otherwise undocumented voices.
• You can deliver course content effectively via three to six-minute videos that explain and reinforce key concepts.  
• Students like short home-made videos a lot, learn from them, and stop asking their instructors to repeat basic information in office hours.
• Production values matter: here are some cool toys we have to help make your videos more professional (turns out that "back-pocket" in the course description referred specifically to little backpacks full of gadgets that instructors can check out of the library).
• Editing your videos makes them better: here's how iMovie works on your handheld device.

There's nothing particularly wrong with any of that, only I don't teach big lecture classes, and I try to minimize the amount of time I spent talking at my students.  The bulk of learning takes place in my class when students discuss and interact with texts with my guidance.  Learning about a different way of talking at them doesn't help me guide that process more effectively.  Yet every time I trot hopefully off to an event that promises to help me innovate, I find myself talked to as if delivering information is the only thing I might want to do in the classroom.  "Innovation in Teaching and Learning"?  It looks suspiciously like draping Freire's banking model with enough cords,  dongles, and screens that we can make it unrecognizable and scalable.

On the (ahem) SERIAL Comma

The fucks one gives about the Oxford comma should start with the fact that everyone calls it that. The Chicago Manual of Style humbly calls it the "serial comma," even though naming rights could well go to the university press whose style guide has codified its use for copy editors everywhere.  Oxford hasn't held the line; the University of Chicago has.  Unlike the "Chicago serial comma"--that brisk tool of clarity, the "Oxford comma" reeks of elitism, which is perhaps why its detractors prefer to call it that.  "Elitist, Superfluous, or Popular?" asks the headline of the much-linked FiveThirtyEight story describing a poll taken on the issue.  Those are, apparently, the only options.  Of course, "Oxford comma" connotes both elitism and superfluity--it lounges by the tennis court or cricket field in its crisp button-down-collar shirt, sleeves rolled up, shirt-tail hanging out, sipping gin, all the trappings of privilege with no sign of the exploited labor that sustains it. It's a heedless, unnecessary comma. The "serial comma" on the other hand, is hard at work disambiguating long sequences of words. The truth, however, is that my affection for the serial comma is aesthetic. I like the way it gives a sentence a visual anchor--those final two terms in a series always look like they could drift off into the ether, unheeded and irrelevant. The comma affirms their shared relevance to everything that has come before. Yes, it distinguishes appositives from terms in a series, and its absence can produce hilarity:

Never mind that in the real world the context often makes the meaning clear (would anyone be led by a misplaced comma to believe that Stalin is a stripper?).  Rearranging the terms in these series would also eliminate the confusion: "Stalin, the strippers and JFK," "Wonder Woman, Superman and my parents," "Washington, the rhinocerii and Lincoln."  Genuine confusion generally only emerges from a series of terms when it is so complex that it has to be punctuated with semicolons, rather than commas.  Eliminating that final semi-colon before the final "and" can distort the relationship of the terms in the series--but at that point the prose is generally so turgid and unreadable that the errant semi-colon is the least of its problems.

The serial comma may not be the bulwark of reason and order that its supporters claim, but that's no reason to eliminate it.  In a world of dwindling resources, why not be generous with those that are renewable and sustainable, pleasing to the eye and the sense?  The serial comma stands ready to serve, even when it is not, strictly speaking, needed.

STEM Teaching Tricks: Ways to Avoid the Shit Sandwich?

image from http://www.hilaryhodge.com/category/uprising/

Over at Teaching Nonmajors Biology, there's a excellent post on post-exam assessments, with lots of examples, links, and explanation of the various bells and whistles such assessments can entail.  The basic idea is to walk students through an analysis of what they got wrong on any given exam and why. A worksheet in the form of an "exam wrapper" gets students to face the gaps in their study strategies and identify ways to fill them.  (H/t Small Pond Science for clueing me in to this blog!)

I've been doing something similar with the writing students do for my classes.  Before they hand in an assignment, I give them a worksheet that asks them to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their response to the assignment, as well as any additional information I should know about their writing process.  These worksheets often end up being the prompts for my own final comments on their papers. It turns out (to my surprise) that students can be very self-aware writers--they often recognize the problems in their papers before they hand them in, but don't know how to solve them.  When their assessments of their work deviate from my own, they often reveal students' confusion about the relationship between college paper criteria and effective writing (no, big words and complicated sentence structures don't necessarily make a good paper).

Four Years Prostrate to the Higher Mind

At our house, it's known as "The Ballad of the B- Student," on the strength of that one verse (you known the one). Lots of doctors of philosophy around here, and strangely, they often share an interest in B-grade movies.

It's only life, after all.

Teaching at a reasonably selective institution means teaching students who are really good at going to school. For some, that skill set includes intellectual curiosity--they know there's a lot of interesting stuff they don't know yet but that they want to learn about. For many, intellectual curiosity has nothing to do with education. For the latter group, being good at going to school means being really good at receiving information in preselected clumps (the course content) and repackaging it in prescribed ways (the course requirements). They know how to hit the high scores on a learning rubric, but they don't actually know how to learn anything and many of them seem to have lost the capacity to recognize that anything else might be the purpose of their education.