Teaching without Books

In “History without Reading,” Jim Cullen talks about a dirty little truth: a lot of students in our courses do not read, but we teach the courses as if they had done the reading, thereby only making things worse, because the students are getting nothing out of their classroom time. He suggests that it should be possible to teach history and historical thinking in such a way that we do not assume that the reading has been done. One reason students do not read, he says, is that we teach history assuming that it is obvious why one would want to study history, instead of trying to sell the relevance of history to students in the first place. Indeed, “so much of history education, from middle school through college, is a matter of going through the motions.” Cullen suggests that we not accept that and instead asks, “What would it actually mean to teach a course that presumed ignorance or indifference rather than one of preparation and engagement?”

Much of my teaching makes just this assumption, because the Western Civilization survey that I regularly teach is a general education requirement at George Mason University. People have to take it, whether they want to or not. I usually ask myself how I can teach a given class in a way that lets everyone get something out of it, no matter how well prepared they are. Of course, a well-done presentation can convey information to everyone, if they are engaged in it, but working with source material, visual or short texts, is often more helpful. Still, if the assumption that students read too little, if at all, frequently guides my preparation for individual classes, I refuse to accept it as a premise for a whole course. In the end, I want students to read, because it is impossible to do everything in class, and much of history is about reading and critical thinking. I want students to read and connect this reading to what goes on in class, and I want to hold students accountable for that reading.

Hence, last semester I began doing regular “surprise” reading quizzes. I usually posed the questions in a way that allowed students to answer in five minutes in a paragraph or with bullet points. Some questions would work if students had just done an internet search on the subject, but rising above a very low grade required actual reading. In the end, the carrot and sick that is the reading quiz seemed to work; however, it also increased the grading workload considerably, which is why I plan to vary formats in the coming semester. (See Plagiarism Again.)

Of course, doing things this way feeds into a system of rewards and punishments that still does not get across to students the value of studying history. I still need to convey why we are doing the work and even encourage them to want to do it. But relying on these factors alone does not seem to be enough, not even for the most engaged students in an elective history course.

Last week I listened to Daniel Pink talk about rethinking traditional carrots and sticks in the workplace. Pink argued that our minds and hearts do not always follow such logic, and employers could get more out of us with more nuanced approaches. His ideas found their limit, however, when a philosophy professor called in. Pink thought the professor was right to use the carrot-and-stick approach there, because it would work. On the other hand, the fact that the caller felt the need to ask indicated a certain level of dissatisfaction with her own approach, as I feel with mine. Pink himself added the caveat that students who learned only to react to incentives and sanctions would be ill-prepared for many workplaces that required more autonomy and initiative.

This last concern worries me, but maybe it is okay to ignore it in my large survey courses. After all, undergraduate education includes more independent work too, once students advance and specialize. Moreover, just getting to class and fulfilling the requirements of the General Education courses can help to train students in other ways, both intellectually and in terms of life habits such as self-discipline and task management.

[hat tip for reference to Cullen's article: @KevinLevin]

Teaching, Scholarship, and Pecuniary Concerns

The AHA meeting is on, and, as usual, I am not there. The reason is money. Even when this meeting has been local, I have been unable to afford the fees. I mention this on a history blog, because tight pecuniary circumstances affect a lot of historians who are adjunct professors or are in other poorly paid temporary positions. Brian Croxall teaches English, and his paper delivered in absentia at the recent MLA conference speaks to many of us. He not only highlights the money problems, but he also describes the adverse impact that this has on the scholarship and teaching of adjunct faculty, who can find themselves out of the loop.

Yes, there are social media and the internet, but occasional face-to-face contact is also necessary. The low status of blogging and social media in the academy place severe limits on the internet’s ability to compensate for insufficient face-to-face contact. Not enough work or ideas ever make it onto the open web. Of course, new media and email offer more opportunities to communicate, but even historians are human and thrive on the serendipitous and productive moments that arise through informal gatherings at academic conferences between panels and papers.

I usually avoid talking about my pecuniary circumstances, but the current economic climate combined with trends towards increasing reliance on temporary faculty makes the public relevance of my private situation clear. Indeed, sometimes I wonder at just how much in the mainstream of American economic thinking I was, when I set out to become a historian. Sure, doing a Ph.D. set me apart from those who focussed their efforts on maximizing income. But my decision was informed by the same boundless optimism that fed the housing bubble. The biggest difference? The law does not allow one to walk away from student loans when the thing one obtained through them has less value than the original purchase amount.

Related Articles:

• The Chronicle picked up Brian Croxall’s piece in an article entitled “Missing in Action at the MLA: Today’s Teachers of Today’s Students.”
• Katrina Gulliver wonders about the expensive locations the AHA chooses in “San Diego to Boston and All Points Between – thoughts on the AHA.”

History 100 Again

I have been pretty happy lately with my approach to George Mason University’s required History 100 (Western Civilization); however, chronological confusion in many exams last semester made me long to try a textbook again. I might live to regret the attempt, since the course is only one semester long, but I have decided to try the abridged version of Mark Kishlansky et. al., Civilization in the West (Penguin Academics). Trying to squeeze everything into the syllabus was much harder this way, even after skipping the first 200 pages of the text, but I am hoping the textbook will assist me in conveying a better sense of the chronological terrain. I have never been against textbooks in principal. I just have not found them to be practical for a one-semester course of this kind. Will this book fit the bill? Ideally, of course, someone would write a shorter book specifically for this kind of class. Abridged histories are usually still too long. Nonetheless, I am hoping that this halfway affordable text will prove to be an exception.

There are two other reasons I am changing things. First, doing so might help to minimize chances of plagiarism, since there will not be a similar set of assignments already in circulation on campus. Second, change keeps my teaching fresh.

Related Posts:

• A Different Approach to History 100?
• Lessons from the Classroom

Plagiarism Again

I had no plagiarism cases this fall. Maybe it is because I had an unusually ethical group of students, but it probably also had something to do with analysis they did based on short documents instead of books commonly discussed on the internet. With few exceptions, there were no answers to be found on the internet, though I took some chances with the inclusion of A Doll’s House in some questions. Even then, I did not let students focus on Ibsen’s play, but instead forced them to relate it to short documents that I made available on Blackboard. I have made similar attempts in the past, but usually by asking big synthetic questions based on two or three books instead of narrower interpretive questions based mainly on two or three specific documents.

Another variable was length. These source analysis exercises were only two pages, if that, which might have been short enough to prevent the kind of panic that leads to some plagiarism cases. Of course, two pages is less than ideal, but I had more than 150 students this past fall. Even with a grader to help me 10 hours per week, there was an enormous amount of assessment to do, especially since there were three of these exercises.

On a related note, in the coming semester I am going over to the dark side with some quizzes and parts of my exams. By that I mean I will be integrating some multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank elements. As much as I prefer to have students actively produce knowledge in exams, there is a limit to how much grading I can and should do, a limit I far exceeded last semester. Moreover, I will still be having them do analysis. Unfortunately, multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions can raise the specter of copying in overcrowded classrooms. It is with this issue in mind that I plan to use multiple versions of quizzes and exams. I am just not sure if I will have to create these by hand or if there is an easy and free technological solution.

Related Post:

• A New Personal Record in Plagiarism Cases

The Decade that Was

In these hard times it is tempting to look back on the entire decade in negative terms, especially in light of a difficult job market and the financial challenges that being an adjunct professor entails. That might indeed be the way I remember these times, but today I would rather frame the decade with politics and end on an optimistic note.

The decade began well with a nice celebration in Freiburg i.Br., where I was doing my dissertation research. But then I returned to a country that soon made George W. Bush its president. Just how fateful that election was, we did not know until after the attack on September 11, 2001. Here is an email I wrote the next day. Unfortunately, it turned out that I was right to be worried about “the impact that this violence [would] have on our own humanity.” The Bush administration invaded a country that had nothing to do with the September 11th attack. And it chose to use torture. The basic outlines of the story are well known, although historians will soon need to teach it. After all, our current crop of freshmen was only about ten years old at the time of the attack, and time shows no signs of slowing down.

Given these sentiments, my experience of President Obama’s inauguration at the beginning of this year should come as no surprise. I am republishing it here, nonetheless, because I have closed my personal blog, where I first posted it. I knew things in this country would not change overnight, so I am not disillusioned by the rancor in American politics this past year. But I am also struck by how long ago the feelings in this piece were. As we move forward into a new decade and better times, I would like to recapture the note of sober hope that I felt on January 20th.

Happy New Year!

Two of Two Million

January 20, 2009

On Sunday, January 18th, we attempted to see the concert at Lincoln Memorial. We took a bus down Wisconsin Avenue and got off at Foggy Bottom. Walking towards the memorial, we soon joined a mass of humanity heading in the same direction.

There was good will and a sense of expectation in the air. Unfortunately, there was also only one hour till the concert’s begin, and we had badly underestimated the time it would take to get through security. Exacerbating the situation were people cutting the lines, sometimes willfully, sometimes because the architecture of the lines was confusing.

We decided to give up at 2:00, when the concert was supposed to begin. We could chock it up to experience and be better prepared on Tuesday. Besides, just seeing the expectant crowds was a good thing. We also decided to walk to Memorial Bridge via Washington Monument, thinking we could at least see the crowds—and maybe hear some sounds—across the water. It turned out, however, that there were JumboTrons and loudspeakers at Washington Monument, no security checkpoints to go through, and the concert had not yet begun. We got within one or two hundred yards of a JumboTron and saw the whole thing from within a growing sea of humanity that reached as far back as the eye could see. The monument is on a hill, which means the crowd from my vantage point looked endless, since my view at the scene behind us reached only the monument, dropping off like the ocean does on the horizon at sea.

I choked up while singing the national anthem at the beginning. Catharsis. Healing after eight years of a leader who encouraged us to follow our worst instincts. The sense of joy and anticipation around me was palpable. We sang and we danced. Catharsis. Having the eighty-nine-year-old Pete Seeger there at the end made it that much sweeter—so did the whole choreography of the show, which brought not only different ethnicities on stage together, but also generations and genres. Garth Brooks’ singing “Shout!” was fine example of this tendency.

Afterwards we walked half of the way or more back home, though we found room in a bus for part of the trip. We talked with other passengers as if we all knew each other, which happens in DC, but seldom this easily.

That evening, my wife convinced me to volunteer for service the next day as Obama had been encouraging citizens to do, but my earlier hesitation meant all organized activities were already booked. So instead we signed up for a pledge drive next month for our local public radio station, which I had been planning to do anyway. And I reminded my wife of her other volunteering. She’s always been much better than me at stepping up when help is needed.

So Monday was a day at home. Sure, there were special events for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, but the next day would take a lot of energy and planning.

Told we had to choose between inauguration and the parade, and told the parade had security checkpoints, but a spot on the Mall for inauguration didn’t, the choice was easy. Moreover, being there was more important than having a chance to see Obama in the parade. What better way to bear witness than with two million people?

The decision to brave the crowds was easier, because we live in Glover Park, which is close enough to make it possible to avoid packed Metro stations.
This morning we took a bus to Dupont Circle and walked to Washington Monument. We left the apartment at 8:00 and had a spot with a view of a JumboTron by 9:00. They rebroadcast the concert to distract us, and they showed us the arriving guests. The wait passed by pretty quickly this way.

Our long-johns and other layers kept us reasonably comfortable. So did a folded yoga mat (for both sitting and standing on) and snacks and tea. The more crowded it got, the less the wind bit into us, though the breeze never completely went away on that small hill.

The mood reminded me of the Sunday concert, except we got past the anticipation to the main event. At times it felt like at a church, as some neighbors from Newport News responded to parts of the president’s speech with a rhythmic refrain of “Okay,” as if in a conversation with him. An “Amen” even slipped from my lips a couple times, including at the part where Obama denounced the false choice between security and our values. I was doubly impressed then when that Obama line drew a lot of extra cheers and applause where we were standing.

There will be more to ponder in the coming days and weeks. Right now I am exhausted from the cold and windy, but beautiful walk back from Washington Monument across to Lincoln Memorial, along the Potomac to Georgetown, and up Wisconsin Avenue to Glover Park. (Were we ever stiff after a short bathroom break at Barnes & Noble in Georgetown and then coffee at a small cafe on Wisconsin Avenue!)

Tired, beat, exhausted—the good kind.