are students weird? -- an inquiry

Yes.

I believe most faculty teach more than one section of a course in any given semester. This semester, I have had two sections of Bioethics and two sections of Professional Ethics. The two sections of each course are markedly different. Contrasting, you might say. Almost entirely unalike would not be overly hyperbolic.

One section of one of these courses has been among the very most open, receptive, and engaged I've ever had. The students took the material and issues all over the place, practically every class session. They were happy, I'd say, to be in the philosophically delicious state of mind of perplexity. Almost every class session someone raised a question that stumped us all. It is clear from class discussions that these students are seriously engaged with the themes and texts, and are genuinely facing the central struggle of ethics (for purposes of this discussion, I shall stipulate that the "central struggle of ethics" is "Shit! Now what?!").

Not the best writers, however. Somehow this serious play hasn't been translated into text.

Another section of the same course is, in a word, reticent. I have sometimes felt as if I've walked into a poker game, their faces are so inscrutable. A small group of sometimes unreliably-attending students carries the conversation. When one is missing, the class has slowed. When two are missing, the class has sometimes stopped in its tracks. I have let long moments of uncomfortable silence pass, hoping the awkwardness would provoke some hesitant comment. I have cajoled. I have joked.

And yet, their papers are pretty good. Somehow their grasp of the ideas and texts in the course hasn't prompted them to raise questions, or respond to questions.

Is one class thinking philosophically, and the other not? How shall I correlate the verbal engagement of one class with the clear writing of the other? Should I give more weight to the strength of each class? Why?

Shit! Now what?!

In the other course, the differences are somewhat less acute, and the less verbal class has become much more active in just the last third of the semester. It's just as puzzling, though. What's so different about the classes, the student population, or perhaps my own approach, in each class? Does a more reserved kind of student tend to select one particular time slot for a class? Given the impaction of our schedule and the difficulty students have getting into classes (or enough classes, i.e., to qualify for financial aid), is it even plausible that students pick a class time?

Excuse me, but I'm inclined to believe that I do not have sufficient power over my students or the classroom environment to be the main determinant of these differences. I am but one man, after all. Unless a faculty member treats every class the same way, by standing up and lecturing to them every session, the students have a great deal of responsibility for what we might call the class ethos. It develops very much as a habit, and I guess that the first half-dozen class sessions more or less ingrain this habit. In those sessions, tacit consensus is built regarding who speaks and when, about the tone of discourse. Roles become defined and assigned through this process.

The habits become a template of expectations for each session. If a contrarian or devil's advocate arises, it becomes part of the script of the class that the person in that role reliably and predictably does his/her (usually his) thing at some point in each session. Often a co-teacher sort arises, who either has or imagines he/she (usually she) has superior understanding of course material and provides it when the moment comes.

From time to time, a monkey-wrencher arises, whose role is to cause breakdowns in a discussion that make some issue problematic at another level than the class had expected. Rarely, someone like a sage arises, who is able, at certain moments, to crystalize an entire concept, and place it in front of us.

I place an arbitrary value of 10% of overall grade on class participation. Almost every semester I have a class whose participation demands far more weight, because they have taken over the class, made it their own, and gone in directions I could scarcely have anticipated. Are those classes "better"?

In short, this is one of the things I most hate about grading. It's repulsive to take a set of experiences like these and turn them into a score.

this stupid program

It's the last day of classes for Spring semester, and for the academic year. That means it's time to start fighting with Excel to make it calculate grades for my classes.

I'm not computer illiterate, and I'm not math illiterate. But something about the Excel interface is so counter-intuitive to me that I feel like I am. This morning, considering the prospect of my semi-annual battle, part of my brain decided to call Excel "This Stupid Program."

"This Stupid Program" was the name of a program my friend Bob and I recorded, over and over again, using a series of cassette tape recorders from ages 9 or 10 until 19 or 20. As a kid, I was either instinctually or preternaturally drawn to parody, I don't know which. As a result, Bob and I made up and recorded multiple hours of utter silliness that made fun of TV and radio programs and, especially, ads. We called our efforts "WDUM," as though it were a radio station.

I used to draw up program schedules before we would record ourselves. As I recall the events, I had just put "This Stupid Program" on a schedule without any idea what it would be. I don't remember how it was that Bob became the host of the program, but I do know the entirety of the transcript of the show:

Time again for "This Stupid Program." "This Stupid Program" is designed to last approximately thirty-seven and one-half seconds, so it is almost time to go. There, it is time to go. See you next time on "This Stupid Program."

Now, that's fairly stupid. Having a program like that on a radio or TV broadcast would be rather stupid. Who would advertise on "This Stupid Program"? Who would listen to it? That was the conceit that drove WDUM - that these idiots were actually on the air. (And of course they had one chief sponsor, called Krazy Kooks Inkorporated, which was a conglomerate selling absolutely everything.)

Bob uttered the text in a weird muppety voice, which made it sillier. We used to repeat the show multiple times running, and by the third or so, it was immensely silly.

So, while I'm struggling to make Excel behave, I'll be hearing Bob in my head, and then the ad following, for KKI's Tree Tree, or some other similarly useless invention. Sadly, I've lost all of the tapes we made. I don't remember the circumstances of that, but it may have been in the flood in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1998 - the same one that took a dozen or more notebooks and plays, and hundreds of poems that I wrote from ages 13 on.

where the hell have I been?

Our buddies Christina (alt. X-ina) and Guerin got hitched this weekend at Ironstone Vineyards up in Murphys, CA. After 100 degree days the week before, it was overcast and drizzly this weekend, so the weather was perfect for an outdoor wedding.

It had the usual snafus weddings have. It started about a half-hour late, which meant that the song we wrote for X-ina, "Christina Sorting Records," played 3 times. It was scheduled as the music for the pre-processional seating of VIPs. The DJ played it promptly at 4, but nobody was ready, so he played it again, and then again once everyone had finally taken their places.

Ironstone has a pretty joint, and they make a couple exemplary wines, from grapes that don't grow on the premises. Ah, the California wine industry. Nothing could serve as a better example of our state, which is actually a series of misconstrued legends, lies, deceptions, and cruel acts of hucksterism.

It was a gorgeous wedding. There was wine a-plenty. Underage drinking. Drunken passes at newly-met acquaintances. Dancing a-go-go. No cake for the bride and groom. Photographers and videographers scattered like bits of confetti all over the place. "Just married" paraphernalia attached to their car. The bridal suite decked out in naughtiness. Lost items. Items left behind and picked up by random relatives and friends. And when we got home, my loveliest decorated their front door with toilet-paper streamers and, I kid you not, toilet-paper bells with clappers and a toilet-paper flower.

Now I'm grading. I've read a handful of Contemporary Moral Issues finals today, their due date, and this is strange, because it's only a handful, and it is now nearly 6 pm and I'm missing around 2/3 of their finals. They also had a question-and-answer journal on the assigned articles, which was due last Wednesday, and I'm missing 2/3 of those as well. Students, notoriously, don't follow instructions. I've thought of simply no longer giving instructions, and taking the Zen approach of accepting as their work whatever they decide to turn in, and applying evaluation criteria to it accordingly.

received: a letter, and numerous papers

I got a letter from my friend Bob the other day. Bob gave up on blogs a little while ago, and I'll be removing the link to his in a moment. He doesn't want to spend time that way, because, in his view, it's not a very rewarding way to communicate. He wrote me a letter instead.

We've written a lot of letters to one another. For a while, I was a quite avid letter writer, sending missives out to him, to Bobo the Wandering Pallbearer, to my high school friend Anne, to my friend Nancy. I generally typed them on my old manual machines, for a long time on an early 60s Hermes 2000, pages and pages of stuff about my life as a grad student, but mainly trying to capture a mood and lived experience.

Compared to email, a letter is a very different thing, especially written out longhand in fountain pen (as Bob's was, in virtually the same nearly illegible hadnwriting he's had since we were kids). It's tangible. It has a feint smell to it. The very good paper it's written on has a definite feel, with an affective dimension. I'm writing him back, in my nearly illegible handwriting.

Partly this is contextual: Bob has been my friend for more than 30 years. We grew up together in Ohio, and when I moved away at 13, writing letters was the way to communicate. Regrettably, perhaps, I don't have any of those any more. A flood in Pittsburgh lost me several boxes of my writing, including about 1000 poems, a couple plays, a dozen or more journals, and almost all my letters. I stopped saving correspondence, and finally have become so much more comfortable with electronic versions of things that I don't particularly like printing out any of my own papers any more.

For one reason or another, for many people, email doesn't have the same feel to it. The medium, or the genre, or the format, or the phenomenon, feels quasi-personal, somewhat institutional. Everything in email looks like a memo.

Bobo and I turned that into a source of amusement, by way of using the memo format inappropriately. You wouldn't write email within an institutional context beginning with something like "Dear Unmitigated Bastard." At least, you wouldn't if you're a fan of employment. In any case, this carried forward a tradition of ironic mutual abuse that began in college and continued through grad school correspondence (and beyond).

I'm a fan of all of it. Each medium has its best uses, I suppose, and each medium has its own way of habituating language and expression. It's a great source of fun to be able to pick them up in turns, to undergo the different ways media shape language and thought, affect, address, tone, all of it.

I'm gonna keep blogging, too, I figure, though as blog this has little "bloggy" about it, and I definitely regard it as a publicly kept journal more than anything else.

As such, let me make one final personal note on the day, most of which I've spent grading final papers. That note is:
WAAAAAAAAH!

Why oh why oh why does grading hurt? I mean, these aren't terrible papers. There've only been a couple duds, which is a very low duddism rate. They've been fine, some even quite good, and a couple wonderful ones. Still, ow.