Not quite enough

All of this effort, and they still couldn’t prevent Kevin McCallister from murdering two burglars:

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No basis for judgment

I see letters of recommendation as a necessary evil, meaning that I recognize them as an important part of my job but often feel unsure when I am writing them about whether I am actually helping my students or not. Upon obtaining my job I was not given the code, so I wouldn’t mind abolishing them. As long as they are around (and students can help me out a bit), though, I guess I will need to keep semi-arbitrarily ranking students in terms of their writing skills, leadership ability, maturity, and any number of other things.

Recently, though, I came across a recommendation form that strained the limits of my ability for judgment. A student of mine was applying for a position at a nonprofit organization with a Christian orientation. Apparently, when applying for a job at a Christian organization no topic is off limits. Among other things, the evaluation form asked me about the student’s reputation on campus, personal appearance, sense of humor, drinking habits, spiritual focus, servitude to Christ, and whether he or she is a “serving-type person” and exemplifies a Christian life. What the hell is a “serving-type person”?

Some of these questions allowed me to respond with “I don’t know,” but others did not. In my written comments I tried to elucidate the candidate’s academic strengths and weaknesses but I’m not sure how my non-answers will be seen by the hiring committee. Maybe they only want students who talk about their servitude to Christ in every class. Since this student was thankfully not that type of person, I guess that I had no choice but to leave the judgment to God.

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Obama’s educational argument

Following Obama’s comments about education during the State of the Union, David Shribman refutes the argument that the value of a college degree can be quantified on a scorecard (look up your own school here). He states:

Where the president has gone wrong — along with those college trustees contributing to the 39 percent decline in the number of liberal arts institutions — is in assuming that Americans need to be trained for a living rather than educated for life. This is more than a semantic distinction. It is the difference between reading Shakespeare in college and mastering accounting.

This is the sort of argument that many faculty members have been making, but it seems that the view of student-as-consumer, however flawed, is inescapable.

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How will a MOOC serve my students?

In any given class, I have some combination of first-generation college students, students whose parents have professional degrees, lower class, middle class, and upper class students, students who are engaged, students who are not, students who can learn on their own, and students who cannot. One of the most difficult parts of my job is teaching in a way that works for as many of these students as possible. I recently wrote about my belief that massive open online courses (MOOCs) are not a good match for my institution. Yesterday’s editorial in the New York Times makes the point that MOOCs are also unlikely to be a good match for many of my students.

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A guide to travel in the Jim Crow era

Slate’s history blog, The Vault*, which recently brought our attention to a children’s book about slavery and vinegar valentines, now focuses on the Negro Motorist Green Book, which was published from 1936-1964. The book, which is available in PDF form here, opens with the following statement:

With the introduction of this travel guide in 1936, it has been our idea to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trips more enjoyable.

This would work well to provide additional context for class discussion of something like Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, which focuses on African Americans during the great migration from the South to the North in the early-to-mid 20th century.

*My use of all of these posts might make up for the time that Slate was stealing my ideas.

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A valentine that tells him what you really think

Slate’s history blog, The Vault, features a selection of “vinegar valentines,” explaining that:

Vinegar valentines were a socially sanctioned chance to criticize, reject, and insult. They were often sent without a signature, enabling the sender to speak without fear. These cards were sent not just to significant others, friends, and family, but to a larger social circle. People might post a vinegar card to a store clerk, a teacher, or a neighbor.

The tradition was quite popular. Art historian Annebella Pollen points out that these cards were often produced by the same companies that made the frilly, beautiful valentine cards adorned with hearts and flowers, but cost much less. Some historians argue that comic valentines—of which vinegar valentines were one type—made up half of all U.S. valentine sales in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Many vinegar valentines were used to enforce gender roles. Senders would use the anonymity of the card to comment on the inappropriate behavior of a couple, or the distasteful political views of a feminist friend. Women seemed to be the targets of many of the surviving examples, but balding men, pretentious artists and poets, and smelly fat guys made appearances as well.

This one from the 1870s even reinforces the idea that reading novels is a waste of time:

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Nobody’s perfect

In honor of Darwin Day, here is a reminder that even famous brilliant people have bad days. On October 1, 1861, Darwin concluded a letter to Charles Lyell by writing:

But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.— I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids^f8 & today I hate them worse than everything so farewell & in a sweet frame of mind, I am | Ever yours | C. Darwin

Despite the teen angst in Darwin’s letter, he was 51 at the time.

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An online class about online classes

A recent campus e-mail asked for interested faculty to contact the administration about developing a MOOC, or massive open online course. Rather than traditional online courses at, say, the University of Phoenix, MOOCs are provided to (potentially thousands of) interested students free of charge and bear no college credit. Brad Koch’s* recent argument was similar to that of some of my colleagues. Koch states:

The difference between MOOC’s and liberal arts colleges is like the difference between televangelism and an old-timey tent revival; the message is essentially the same, but the experiences are worlds apart.

When institutions like Georgia College uncritically float along with the shifting tides of higher ed, they misallocate resources and dilute their brand. We cannot–and should not–compete with MOOC’s. We should instead own the value of our unique identity and fill our niche.

Serendipitously, an article by Will Oremus at Slate this week describes the failure of a MOOC on how to successfully plan and carry out online courses. Oremus quotes pupil Jill Barshay’s account of the course, who stated:

Within hours, things were going awry. Neither the “Getting Started” tab nor the “syllabus” tab offered much direction on how to begin the class. I wasted an hour taking surveys on my personal learning style. (One said I was a visual learner. The other said I wasn’t).

The biggest problem was breaking our class of more than 41,000 students into discussion groups. Dr. Wirth asked us to sign up using a Google spreadsheet. The only problem was Google’s own support pages clearly state that only 50 people can edit and view a document simultaneously. I was one of the thousands who kept clicking, but was locked out. When I finally got in, it was a mess. Classmates had erased names, substituted their own and added oodles of blank spaces. …

In the meantime, the video lectures were mind-numbing laundry lists of PowerPoint bullet points. A survey of educational philosophies left me no more enlightened than before I watched it. The readings were a bit better. One of my favorites, Teaching with Technology: Tools and Strategies to Improve Student Learning, linked to a hilarious PowerPoint comedy sketch about the stupidity of reading PowerPoint bullet points. …

Maybe this MOOC should have focused on irony! (Real irony, not the commonly misused meaning of “a strange coincidence.“) For more on MOOCs, Koch provides helpful links to some posts at Orgtheory available here, here, and here, and an article about why the campus experience still matters here.

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Super Bowl ads? Twitter isn’t buying it

Some people watch the Super Bowl for the football game, some people watch it for the halftime show, and some people watch it for the commercials. This year, hashtags were featured in half of all super bowl ads, encouraging the public to talk about their products on social networks like Twitter. The most interesting hashtag, however, was #notbuyingit, intended to call out sexism in advertising. Missrepresentation.org, which started it all, provides a recap here. According to the site, the worst offenders were GoDaddy.com (no surprise there), Audi (are you brave enough for sexism?), Kia (female spokes-robots!), Budweiser (would you like some beer with your women?), and Calvin Klein (notable for sexualizing a man). Maybe Twitter is useful after all.

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This is your brain on football

Just in time for the Super Bowl, a recent Rolling Stone article examines the effects of concussions on young people’s brains. Although the article is behind a pay wall, a video discussing the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, can be seen here. When faced with the evidence from a doctor who specializes in CTE, one father responded “You haven’t convinced me. I’ll need more evidence than that.” It is amazing that when it comes to things like CTE or global warming that threaten the lives of our children or the future of our planet mountains of scientific evidence will not convince us of their danger. I suspect that many of these same people, however, would be outraged by a single picture of a shorter-than-average sandwich from Subway.

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