However, the department wanted me to teach English 303 “Advanced Expository Writing.” It is a core course. Every English major has to take it. Somebody has to teach it. I am a writing specialist. There was no way to say no. I had to design a course that I could teach, that would avoid the problems noted above. I wanted a course in real, not pretend, writing. I thought about this Guitarsophist blog, and my own blogging experience.

I get about five hits a day on this blog, mostly from search engines looking for information on the “Roland Ready Stratocaster” guitar or, more recently, the “Tama Silverstar Metro Jam” drum kit. Those are review/opinion pieces on musical gear that is not well-covered in traditional sources, and readers seem to find those articles useful. Five hits a day is nothing. My daughter has a simple crochet pattern up on her blog that sometimes gets thousands of hits a day. However, even five hits a day means that I have readers, and having actual readers means that I have to think of my audience, a real audience, when I write. Even the potential for readers who may not actually show up influences my writing. Students in a traditional writing course, no matter how much we talk about audience analysis and do read-arounds, peer editing, and all of those audience-building tricks, know that they only have one important reader, the instructor, and that the instructor reads it to grade it, not to use it for any actual purpose. If student writing were posted to a blog, there would be a potential outside audience for it, and that potential might make the writing task more real.

Student blogs, therefore, might be a good pedagogical tool. However, that means that part of the course has to be about creating, designing, and managing a blog. I had been blogging for a while. If I did this, I would have to figure out how to teach students these skills.  As it turned out, this was a problem for some students, especially since I did not have a smart classroom equipped with a computer and a projector.

If a public audience is going to access the writing, the writing has to serve some purpose for that audience. It has to inform, or entertain, or comfort, or inspire, or do something for that audience that makes them want to read it. That meant that the assignments had to be something other than college essays. I would also have to design assignments that would live comfortably on the web, that would make sense as blog posts. That required some thought.

I also considered the fact that most writing these days is published on the web rather than in print, and that email has become the primary mode of business correspondence. Electronic texts are real writing!

I created six assignments:

• Reflective piece: How I became the Writer I Am Today
• Business Letter, Plus How to Write a Business Letter
• Informative piece: A Review of Something
• A Rhetorical Analysis
• A Research Report for a Decision Maker
• An Op-Ed piece
• Revisiting the Reflective Piece: How I Have Changed as a Writer

They also had to do weekly posts to a “commonplace page” which were quotations from things that they were reading for this class or other purposes to which they would respond.  Posting a business letter to a blog didn’t make sense, so I had them do some web searches on “How to write a business letter,” choose the two best sources and the one worst that they found, write some explanatory material, and then post their own efforts as examples.  This was a bit awkward, but they reported that they learned lot from doing it.  The assignment that was most awkward in the context of the blog was probably the rhetorical analysis.  Here is how one student began:

Welcome, welcome masses of the Internet! Today I decided to try and mix something old with something a little new and by old I mean rhetorical analysis (and for those thinking “hey I learned that in school, I know all about that” quiet, daddy’s talking) and by new I mean I’m going to apply it (or more specifically the Aristotelian appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos) to something found in today’s world. –K. Deushane

Talk about creating an ethos!

I decided that for this course most of the texts we read would also be online, but I found two books that I thought would be useful:

• Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2006.
• Holcomb, Chris and M. Jimmie Killingsworth. Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.

The premise of the Harris book is that all academic writing is essentially rewriting other texts for new purposes.  I’ll let one of the students describe the approach:

The terms were: forwarding, countering, taking an approach, and revising. I felt that I learned the most from the forwarding and countering parts of the book as Harris presents a way for writers to use other writer’s writings in their own words. That is, Harris outlines how to use other writers to back up my own writing without merely regurgitating their words. The part on countering was also helpful as it describes how to rebuke other author’s writings without simply disagreeing or showing research or evidence that contradicts them. Some terms that Harris uses in describing countering are: arguing the other sides, uncovering values, and dissenting. I found these terms and explanations to be especially useful because they taught me how to effectively counter claims by other authors. I did this by highlighting the strengths of other writers and then showing how they do not go far enough in their claims and assertions. Additionally, I highlighted ideas that other writers had argued and countered by showing problems from those ideas; I wrote about concepts that writers had not effectively defined, and I wrote about the limits of ideas of other writers. All of the concepts from Rewriting were addressed and discussed in class and this was instrumental in helping me develop as a writer. –D.J. Hernandez

That is a lot to learn from one book.  The Holcomb and Killingsworth book also elicited positive comments:

Performing Prose was the one of the two that really stuck to me.  The content of this book is golden. I always wondered what a college level writing textbook would be like, and this basically met all of my expectations. It’s easy to read, makes loads of sense, leans toward the technical side which I like, and doesn’t sound overly preachy and boring. –A. Heng

However, the books did not get rave reviews from every student, and I think that I could have integrated them better with the course.

I created a WordPress blog called “Writing in the Web World. ”  I made it private, so students had to request permission to read it.  I posted all of the assignments there, and I put links to all of the student blogs in the blogroll, so my blog was a portal to all of the other course blogs. It took a while to sort all of this out.  Most of the students made their blogs public to the whole world.  A few made theirs private, so we had to request access.

Several students reported that submitting papers as blog posts made them somewhat casual about deadlines.  Here are comments from a couple of students:

One issue I had with the blog however was that it doesn’t provide much of a sense of urgency. This phenomena might be limited to just me, but something about having to post up my work online as opposed to turning in a solid copy of work fill me with less of desire to work than turning in a hard copy. –A. Heng

Some issues I had with the writing assignments being posted on a blog, was keeping track of what I had to do and when assignments were due. Since I was not turning in hard copies of my work, I was often confused of what I have turned in and what I have not. I fell behind on my assignments quickly, and it was much more difficult to catch up. I also admit that I did not comment much on other people’s posts and I fell behind on my commonplace. –A. Morales

I must admit this was true for me as well.  It was harder to determine what I had read and what I hadn’t, and if I didn’t read right at the deadline, it was harder to determine when something had been completed.  It was also harder to respond.  I was using the WordPress comment feature, so if I wanted to refer to a particular sentence I had to copy and paste it into the comment window.  I usually made general comments first and then created a section of the response called “picky stuff” in which I suggested sentence-level changes.

Even with these problems, I will do something similar when I teach 303 again in the spring.  This student pretty much summarizes what I was trying to accomplish:

What I’ve learned from creating this blog is that there is an entire new audience out there for me to write for. No longer is writing in class just for the professor or the occasional student, but for someone completely new to my writing. There is feedback from not just one person, but feedback from the entire world, or just anyone who is able to access my blog. Before I would write what I had to just to get an A on my paper, which meant writing something I know the professor would like. In previous writing classes, I would sit in class to learn what kind of person the professor was, and through that, I was able to write something in an essay they wanted; I would write something that would catch their attention, something they would like that would get me on their good side, which meant getting a higher grade. Honestly, I was manipulating them, I did not put all my effort into the writing assignments because I knew the right thing to say that would make them happy or make them laugh just so I could get a good grade. Now, writing on a blog, I’m not just writing for one person, I’m writing for the world and because of that, I am able to give my honest opinion on something. I am now able to write whatever I feel like I want to write because I don’t know the world personally. Here, I can be my real self, not having to worry about getting graded by people who read my blog. –I. Chu

A couple of student posts attracted comments from outsiders:

From my own blog, my review of the Zeiss 50mm lens garnered attention from a blogger from Florida. It was a definite eye opener for me. There were people out there reading that I had never seen or heard of, that review put one of them at my electronic doorstep. –J. Colwell

When the other students heard about this, they were both inspired and a bit fearful.  Their writing really was out there for people to read.

Teaching the course this way was a lot more work than the traditional way, and there were numerous glitches and problems.  All things considered, however, I think university writing courses need to go in this direction.  Students at this level need to learn to do real writing for real people, not just academic exercises.  Even though it was more work, it felt like it was more productive work.  I will do it again.

The Composition Theory students are graduate students working to become writing teachers.   Some are currently teaching high school.  They are learning about the history, the goals, and practices of composition as a discipline, and learning to apply rhetorical theory to teaching reading and writing.   The course was designed to problematize traditional methods, and we worked through postmodern, Marxist, psychoanalytic, rhetorical, and philosophical approaches until nearly every possible approach had been questioned, and then they had to put some kind of pedagogy back together out of all of it.  In a course like this, the coming together doesn’t always happen during the course, so I have to look for growth, potential, and half-baked insight in their final products rather than complete understanding.  It sometimes takes time and patience to see through the false starts and misconceptions to the growing understanding.

The science fiction course is General Education, so it is a menagerie of engineers, scientists, psychologists, pre-med students, philosophers, math majors, business majors, historians, and even a few English majors.  They all add something to the discussion and we have a great time.  The tests are pretty straightforward.  If they have read the material, they will do fine, but they do take a while to read because the questions are short answer, and a lot are a little open-ended to leave room for individual interpretation.  For the final paper they can do a critical essay, a book review, or a short story, and most of them choose to write a story.  Some have written science fiction before, but for many, it is their first attempt to write any kind of story.  Although some are clumsy with exposition, and some are a bit too derivative of other popular culture, many of these are surprisingly good.  Sometimes I even begin to care about the characters and get engaged with what is happening.  Again, the best and the weakest are easy to evaluate.  The uneven ones are tough.

The professional writing course was new to me.  I ended up re-designing it on the fly.  They wrote a resume, an application letter, and numerous memos and emails, many of them for a company I invented called “Rent-A-Genius.”   They also did a research report that facilitated some kind of a decision, what car to buy, what test preparation company to use, what internship to seek, etc.  they also presented this material in a Powerpoint.  They designed a flyer, and created graphs and charts to present information.  They actually learned a lot, but since I was re-designing the course as I went along, things were not always quite coordinated.  At the end I had them revise everything and put it into a portfolio with a cover letter explaining all they had done and learned.  At the beginning I had had them fill out a questionnaire about their experiences with workplace writing.   Most had never done a resume.  Only two had been taught to write a simple business letter.  Only one had been taught any kind of time management system.  The portfolios showed that they had done a lot of new things.  I have no doubt that they are all much more employable after this course.  But then I had to figure out how to evaluate the portfolios.

I don’t think that there is any way to use multiple choice questions or scantrons to evaluate this learning.  I think this is the way it has to be.  It sure takes a lot of time though.

After the first midterm, we read the chapter on Structuralism in Peter Barry’s Beginning Literary Theory and a selection from Fernand de Saussure’s Course in Linguistics from the Richter anthology. The tacit theory that most undergraduate English majors bring to reading literature is that the author is a deep thinker who has intentionally designed the literary work to convey hidden meanings that only careful reading can uncover. Up to this point in the course, it was possible for them to fit most of the criticism we had read into this model. However, the structuralist focus on system rather than utterance, the elimination of the author as a limit on interpretation, and the problematic connection between signifiers and signifieds, all conspired to turn the tacit view on its head. Barry says that it is as if people who were very accustomed to studying eggs were now being asked to study chickens. One student wrote in his blog that his head had officially exploded.

From this point on, the students encounter many counter-intuitive questions. To what extent is the author spoken by the discourse? Do signifiers ultimately refer only to other signifiers? Can a work be free from class and ideology? Is language gendered? Up to the first midterm, the students feel that they are adding to what they know. Once they read Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault they are beginning to wonder if they know anything at all, or what it would mean to know something.

New learning and intellectual growth necessarily come out of confusion. To prepare the ground, the teacher has to make the students confused. If that is true, I succeeded admirably in this stage of learning. Of course, the confusion has to be productive.

When I designed the course, I thought that I would write online comprehension-check quizzes using the Blackboard 9 quiz module. The first one I tried to write was on Saussure. Blackboard doesn’t do short answer quizzes very well, so they had to be multiple choice. A multiple choice quiz has to have a clear right answer, but the wrong answers have to be plausible enough that a student might choose them. In general, I think that putting lots of plausible wrong answers in front of students is pedagogically questionable. For structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, it is hilariously impossible. I abandoned the enterprise. I wrote a second midterm instead.

One the last day of class I divided them into groups and had them do an activity based on the Academy Awards. Each group had to select a theory for each of the following categories:

Most mind-expanding theory
Most counter-intuitive theory
Most useful overall theory
Theory most deserving of being cast into the dustbin of history
Theory most useful for impressing your friends

This led to lively discussion and interesting choices. For example, one group decided to put feminist theory, not into the dustbin, but into the “recycle bin” because there were too many conflicts among the theorists, and because they thought that something called “Gender Theory” might be more encompassing and more useful.

Instead of a final, I had each student talk for a few minutes about the paper he or she was about to turn in. Papers were due electronically by midnight at the end of the day, so they had a chance to make some last minute changes if presenting to the class made them want to revise something. This activity was very popular. Several students said that it made the papers more meaningful and several made revisions.

I am teaching this course again next quarter, and I am planning to rework some of the design. All things considered, I’d say the course was a success. I learned a lot. For the students, I think this is a course that plants seeds that sprout a bit now but blossom later. That’s OK.

I read the poem to them, and I gave them a few cultural details and some textual issues, in case they wanted to go there. Still, a couple of students seemed to be unclear about what an “urn” was, or that the urn had pictures on it that Keats was describing. One never knows what sort of missing background knowledge is going to send a reading in the wrong direction.

A number of students pointed out that Plato argued that art was three times removed from reality because the object in our world is a representation of the ideal form of that object, and the artistic representation is thus a representation of a representation. This poem about the art on an urn is thus four times removed from the truth. That is a good point. However, many of them also argued that Plato would despise the poem, when in fact he would undoubtedly agree with the maxim in the last two lines: Truth is Beauty, Beauty, Truth. Well, excellence is rarely unmixed.

Many of our students are of the Romantic persuasion. They want literature to be about individual creativity, expression, emotion, and deep insight. Thus Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” speaks to them. Fortunately, this approach works well with Keats. However, what they take from Coleridge is the distinction between the primary and secondary imagination, and the fancy. They try to identify elements in the poem that correspond to these different aspects of the mind. This doesn’t really work. Nice try, though.

Students tend to like Victor Shklovsky and the concepts of habitualization and defamiliarization. This ode does give us a new way of thinking about ancient urns, at least if you have seen a Greek urn before, so this works. However, Shklovsky is arguing against the idea that art is imagery. Sometimes students read 180 degrees wrong. They read the opposition as the position, or read the hedge and don’t read the conclusion, so they think that Shklovsky is arguing that imagery is all. Some of my colleagues have noted this tendency as well. Perhaps students are not used to academic writing that takes the opposition seriously enough to lay the position out in a nuanced and fair way. The same thing happened with Wimsatt and Beardsley’s article about “The Intentional Fallacy.” They argue that while it is clear that authors have intentions, it is neither possible nor desirable to know them. My students were discussing authorial intentions and citing Wimsatt and Beardsley as the authorities for doing so.

When I first started reading these midterms, I was disheartened. There was so much misunderstanding! However, I have reconsidered. They have actually learned a great deal, as have I, and we still have half the quarter to go.

Most of my professors in those days were backsliding New Critics. They had heard of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, but they thought it was faddish nonsense and were waiting for it to go away. It wasn’t until I got to graduate school that high literary theory became an important topic of conversation. Now the standard texts, such as the one I am using, The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David Richter, contain everything from Plato and Aristotle to gender studies and queer theory, all to be covered in one course.

My syllabus starts out with the following questions:

What is literature? What is non-literature?
How is literature created?
What does literature do? How does it work?
What do literary texts mean? How do they mean? Is there a correct reading? How do we know?
Is authorial intention important? Or is literature created by the reader?
What role does literature play in society?
Is literature political? Ideological?
Is literature esoteric and exclusive, or part of popular culture?
Is literature nationalistic, ethnic, or gendered?

I write reading questions for each reading selection so that students read with the purpose of finding answers to the questions. I think this gives them a way into difficult texts. I then use the questions to structure the discussion. If a question provokes insight, discussion, and more questions, I allow that to happen until the vein peters out. Then on to the next question. I think that this is more engaging than lecturing. However, what has happened a number of times is that we end up applying literary theory to popular culture and taking up a lot of time with that. We spent an hour last week talking about what Aristotle would think of slasher movies. Some of the more serious students become frustrated when we do that, but the majority of them are quite engaged.

Some of the students are quite passionate about finding out how literature works. One of them came up after our discussion of Aristotle’s Poetics to say that he was disappointed in Aristotle because he seemed to be saying that the purpose of art was to create emotion. He hoped that subsequent readings would provide more satisfactory theories.

Most of the students merely tolerated classical and neo-classical theories of mimesis and rhetorical effects. They became much more animated when we read Wordsworth and Coleridge, especially after we applied their different poetics to actual poems, Tintern Abbey and Kubla Khan. However, in that activity I found myself teaching literature, something I never contemplated doing after I made my rhetorical turn, back in about 1983. I quickly sampled some critical articles on J-Stor to see what has been said. J-Stor is like a Hubble telescope that allows one to see what critics have been saying about a literary work over a long period of time, sometimes back into the 19th century. Different times, different critical approaches, different critics, different interpretations. Each search is the Literary Theory course in microcosm. So it is rhetorical after all!

I am also going to use a book by Peter Barry called Beginning Literary Theory. Another brief introduction to Literary Theory by Jonathan Culler is like a helicopter overflight of the landscape. The Barry book is like a bus tour where you actually get out and walk around a bit and look at things. Barry starts with structuralist theories, and for every theoretical perspective he gives you a historical overview with major figures, a bulleted list of what critics of that persuasion look for, a summary of a sample article, and questions to ponder. I think this will serve students well for the more recent, and more philosophical, approaches.

So far, this is all a lot of work, and I am having difficulty keeping my head above water. It is great fun, however, and it will get easier. I think the students are learning something. I know I am.

In fall 2002, I had been at my current institution for a little more than a year.  I was running a new writing center and teaching a section of basic writing.  Two weeks into the quarter I got a message from the English Department that  Dr. Steve Whaley, a long time member of the department, had passed away suddenly of a heart attack.  He had been teaching a general education science fiction course that now had 31 students and no instructor.  Did I want to take it over?

It turned out that I was the only member of the department who had read any of the assigned books.   They gave me his folder of materials for the course and some of the texts.    I decided to do it.

The folder was full of old quizzes, a lot of them on mimograph.  Dr. Whaley had been teaching this course for a long time.  I got a sense of how he ran the course day to day, but there was no hint of what he was trying to accomplish with it.  He had ordered a number of books, including the following:

• Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clark
• The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
• The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology, 1988

However, there was no schedule of readings, and I did not know why he had chosen these particular books.

The first meeting with the class was tough, as one might imagine.  I had to tell them that their professor had passed away.  Dr. Whaley had spent the first week lecturing and showing videos about science fiction, so they had not actually started reading yet.  I told them to start reading Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

To tell the truth, I had not thought of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a science fiction book until I saw it on Dr. Whaley’s syllabus, but it clearly is.  Ursula Le Guin calls science fiction a “thought experiment,” and others have noted that science fiction asks a “What if?” question.  In this case, the book asks, “What if one could suppress the good side of human nature and indulge the bad side simply by taking the appropriate drugs?”  Dr. Jekyll wants to indulge in the base pleasures of the lower class parts of London, but he wants to remain a respectable member of society at the same time.

There was a student from Africa (who claimed to be a prince) in the class who had never heard of the book.  Thus, when he discovered that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were THE SAME PERSON, he was immensely surprised!

It turned out that A Wizard of Earthsea is also about an individual split into good and evil parts.  Earthsea is fantasy, but the rules of magic are more rigorously observed in this book than are the laws of physics in most science fiction novels, so it is a good vehicle for talking about genre differences.  These books worked well together.  Clearly Dr. Whaley had had a plan.

Childhood’s End is also a very teachable novel.  It is typical Clark, but more self-contained than the sprawling 2001 series.  Some complain that science fiction is unsophisticated because it hits you over the head with big ideas.  Childhood’s End certainly does that.  It asks, What if technologically sophisticated aliens showed up and solved all of humanity’s problems?  What if they did this just as humans were about to enter space, but would not allow human space travel?  In the resulting utopia, what would happen to human creativity and drive?  And what purpose do the alien overlords actually have in doing all of this?

It turns out that undergraduate students enjoy being hit over the head with big ideas.  This book is always popular, though not with all members of the class.

It’s a general education course, so most of the students are not English majors.  I run the class sessions like dorm room bull sessions.  Every major has something to contribute.  Psych majors are doing character analysis, physics majors are  calculating orbits and relativity effects (very relevant to Haldeman’s Forever War), engineers are talking about the strength of materials, and business majors are costing things out.  I create reading questions to help them stay focused, and I fall back on them if the discussion lags, but it rarely does.

The short story anthology Dr. Whaley was using was full of classic stories.  I had read many of them in the original magazines when I was young.  I don’t use it anymore because it is expensive, and some of the stories are somewhat dated, but I enjoyed choosing from it the first time I taught the course.  I switched to a newer anthology, Visions of Wonder, but next time I am going to use The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois.  This covers 2008.  In winter, I will be teaching an honors section again, so I will give them the option of writing a short story.  This anthology will give them a very good idea of what the current market is like.

Over the years, I have found that classic science fiction novels from the 1950′s and 60′s are more teachable than current novels.  Writers like Clark, Phillip K. Dick and Alfred Bester tended to paint in big ideas with a broad brush, with just enough detail to allow the reader to fill in the rest with his or her imagination.   Current science fiction novelists try to create whole worlds with all the complexity of a fully imagined society.  There are lots of minor characters, lots of subplots, lots of intricate technology, cultural practices, etc., and many novels are trilogies or more.  The earlier novels are shorter and more efficient at big idea delivery.

However, next time, I am going to try two new ones.  Actually, I have been teaching one newer novel for quite a while: Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash.  To quote from my syllabus

Snow Crash is a fast-moving, wild and crazy book, set in a future where everything is privatized and there are no laws.  The CIA has become the CIC, the Central Intelligence Corporation.  The cops are private too. There are the Meta-cops, and The Enforcers.  If you are arrested, they might take you to a Hoosegow (pretty nice, you have to pay extra) or a franchise of The Clink (pretty terrible).  Fast food is provided by Uncle Enzo’s Pizza, which is owned by Nova Sicilia, i.e. the Mafia, which is no longer a criminal organization, because there are no laws.  People live in “burbclaves” which are gated communities with lots of rules.  You might live in a franchise of “Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong,” (pretty high tech) or if you are a racist you might live in “New South Africa,” or if you like the old south, “White Columns.”  Justice is provided by “Uncle Bob’s Judicial System.”  Into all of this chaos and order someone has introduced a computer virus so lethal that if a programmer sees it, his or her mind is scrambled like an operating system shutdown, or “Snow Crash.”  Along the way it turns out that this virus was originally written in Sumerian cuneiform and was responsible for the story of the tower of Babel.  It also turns out that Judaism, and to a certain extent Christianity and Islam, are essentially anti-virus protection written against this virus.  The main characters are a hacker named Hiro Protagonist and a 15-year-old female skateboard “Kourier” named Y.T. (for “Yours Truly”).  Her mother works for “Fedland” which is what is left of the U.S. government. A good part of the action takes place in the “Metaverse” which is cyberspace.  In many ways, this book is what the Matrix was trying to be.

That is always a popular book.  However, this time I am going to teach his newest book Anathem, which takes place in an alternate universe where all academics are sequestered in co-ed monasteries studying philosophy, mathematics, and some physics, some aspects of physics being too dangerous to study.  When the rulers of the secular world outside the walls encounter a problem that requires academic expertise, they can call a monk out, but the monk can never return.  Suddenly, one monk after another is being called out.  Something strange is afoot.

My daughter describes this book as starting out like a combination of Harry Potter and Gene Wolf’s Shadow of the Torturer, and ending up like a new version of Snow Crash.  It should be great fun.

I am also planning to teach Excession, by Iain M. Banks.  This takes place in the “Culture” universe.  The Culture is a society of immense ship minds, vastly powerful machine intelligences who give themselves names like “Not Invented Here,” or “Sleeper Service.”  Humans live aboard these ships, but do not control them.  The Culture is like liberal humanism writ large.  They are oh so ethical.  One of the races within their space is the Affront, who are squid-like creatures who like fighting, war, oppression, torture, male-chauvinism, bear-baiting, dog-fighting, drinking, carousing, etc.  The race that was trying to mentor them got disgusted and called them an “affront to civilization,” and they kind of liked the sound of that, so they became the Affront.  The Culture would like to annihilate them, but that wouldn’t be ethical, so certain political conflicts are set in motion.  Also, there appears to be an object in the universe that is older than the universe, and this is causing strange occurrences and odd ship behavior.

This one should be great fun as well.

Most science fiction is about ethical and moral concerns created by new technolgies.  Many of our students are actively involved in developing and implementing new technologies.  I think it is good for them to think upon the implications, and that makes this an important course.  I also want them to enjoy the reading and the discussion, so much so that they continue to read and discuss science fiction long after the course.  Since many students write me to tell me what they have been reading, it seems to work.

Faculty who are teaching Friday classes are supposed to designate other furlough days in which they normally would get paid, but are not teaching. It is possible to designate teaching days as furlough days, but doing this too much would go against the “compelling operational needs” of the campus. There is a certain Alice in Wonderland quality to all of the policy surrounding the furlough plan.

The CFA Frequently Asked Questions document reflects the nature of the fantasy world in which we now live and work. The following two exchanges get to the crux of the problem:

Can I work on a furlough day?

No. Prior to starting your assignment for any term between July 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010, you will have to certify in writing that you will not work on furlough days and that you will not work beyond the duties assigned for weeks with one or more furlough days.

Can I refuse to certify that I will not be working on furlough days? I will have to work on furlough days and do not want to lie.

No. Refusal to do so constitutes insubordination and may subject you to discipline. Instead, you should reduce (rather than just reshuffle) your workload so that you do not have to work on furlough days.

We must sign a document designating furlough days and promising not to work on those days. But what is “work” under these conditions and how can we avoid doing it?

Teaching current courses requires time-sensitive preparation. It is no fun to walk into a classroom unprepared, and winging it is rarely an effective teaching strategy. You have to review the reading assignments, score quizzes, respond to papers, plan activities, read background material and write lectures. It is a little easier if you have taught the course many times before, but it is still necessary to review the materials and take care of student work. In winter, for example, I am scheduled to teach three courses back to back on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, from 9:15 to 2:05. If I designate every other Thursday as a furlough day, it is almost guaranteed that I will need to do at least some preparation work on that day. Of course, I could shift some of the preparation work to Saturday or Sunday, but the fact of the matter is, faculty already do that. Why should it be forbidden to work on a furlough day when it is not forbidden to work on the weekend?

These days, there is also a steady stream of emails, discussion board postings, blog posts, and other electronic communications from students, faculty, administrators and others. Most faculty I know respond to these as they come because to do otherwise is to lose track. Once the email moves off the screen it is likely that it will not be answered. Committee work is another pressing, time-sensitive need. The committee can’t function if the members haven’t read the documents.

So far in the time-sensitive category we have teaching, course prep, electronic communications, and committee work. Are all of these banned on furlough days? But not on weekends?

Now for the long term activities. Reading books and journal articles is essential for keeping up with the field. Doing research, writing articles, scholarly books and textbooks are essential for being active in the field, and for retention, tenure and promotion. This is clearly work, but is it part of what the faculty member is paid to do? A professor who does not do these things will quickly become out of date and ineffective. Often there is a direct connection between the long term projects the professor is engaged in and the design and content of his or her teaching. Is this work banned on furlough days?

What if I read a science fiction novel that I am thinking of teaching in my science fiction course? Is that work, or am I just reading a novel?

Some administrators seem to think that the knowledge is in the textbooks, and that the professor is just a facilitator who assigns readings, administers and scores tests, responds to papers and assigns grades. In fact, unless the professor has written the textbook, the assigned text is often something the professor corrects, expands, contextualizes, explicates, or disparages. The professor should be at least as powerful a force in the classroom as the texts, and it is the intellectual life of the professor outside of the classroom that bestows this authority. In the modern university, the professor is responsible for the creation of new knowledge, not simply the passive transmittal of the old.

It is nearly impossible to separate the intellectual life of the professor from his or her role in the classroom. Is the furlough day to be a day of suspended cognitive animation, a mental blackout curtain, an intellectual dead zone? Just because we are not getting paid?

Do we have to promise not to think?

Perhaps we are to spend the day playing croquet with hedgehogs and flamingos? In the world of the furlough, only nonsense makes sense.

I love writing centers. When people ask what I do, I say that I hire students who write well to help students who don’t write well. That is it in a small nutshell. I love hiring and training tutors, watching them grow in skill and confidence, and watching them move on to careers in teaching, publishing, law, medicine, whatever. They often return to say that the writing center work improved their writing, helped them learn to deal with people, increased their confidence, and helped them get jobs. They form a community, learn from each other, and often remain in touch with fellow tutors for years after they leave.

I also love working with the students who come to us for help, especially when they come back with big smiles telling us that they passed the course or the test, and that they are more confident about their writing skills. Late in the quarter, when all appointments are booked and the desperate walk-ins are lined up in hope of a no show, I always left my office and started tutoring to help reduce the backlog. It was always a joy to work with them, interesting students doing interesting things, working hard to succeed.

However, I never intended to make a career directing writing centers. I was just about to defend my dissertation back in 1991 when the Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the institution I had been working at as a lecturer contacted me. He had been told by the president to create a writing center. He didn’t even know what a writing center was, exactly. Did I know? Would I be interested in creating one? That led to the first nine years, which was great, except that I didn’t have retreat rights to the English Department, so I was faculty without a department. I applied for retreat rights, a process which turned into a big fiasco that took years. Another campus offered me more money, a promotion to Associate Professor, and tenure, an offer I could not really refuse. That led to the second nine years.

Administration is a skill I learned on the job. You need to budget, plan, project, and act. You need to hire, train, and occasionally fire. You need to lead, and manage your employees and your student staff. You need to set policies, and know when to follow them and when to bend them. You need to market your services and defend your program from harm. You need to maintain a network of connections of all kinds, at all levels, from janitors to presidents, and treat everyone with respect and good will. In good times it’s fun. In bad times, it’s challenging, though it can be interesting. Right now, we are in very bad times. The university is shrinking, and parts are going to be lopped off.

So why resign now? I have wanted to do this for some while. It’s not that I have been out of the classroom all this time. I have been teaching two courses a year for the English Department and serving on their Teaching and Learning committee, which was charged with developing an outcomes assessment plan. The courses I have been teaching are mostly graduate seminars in rhetoric and composition with an occasional section of a general education science fiction course. I enjoy designing and teaching courses. I found that in the quarters I was not teaching, I missed it. I wanted to do more.

The English Department also has a lot of re-design work to do. Most campuses in our system are eliminating remedial English courses and introducing “stretch” models in which some students are allowed to take more time to do the same college-level work. They need someone to coordinate this work. In addition, members of the department are talking about creating a writing major, a program in which one could get an undergraduate degree in English focusing more on professional writing than on literary study. I want to work on designing this new program.

I will direct the writing center for one more quarter. In winter, I am currently scheduled to teach an honors section of science fiction, a course in professional writing, and and undergraduate literary theory course. The literary theory course will be the toughest preparation for me, as it has been many years since I thought about much of that material. Back in 1991 I would have been ready to go at it. However, I am already looking at syllabi, talking to other professors, and reviewing the textbooks that are generally used. I am confident that I will be ready. And most importantly, I am having a great time.

My colleagues in English and elsewhere seem to be delighted about my decision. No one has questioned the wisdom of it, even though it involves a pay cut and is occurring in a very uncertain time. I have begun to realize that most faculty think of the writing center director as a very low-level, if useful, position, a sort of chief grammar corrector. When I told one colleague, a philosopher, that I was going to teach Literary Theory, he asked, “Can you do that?” I laughed. I came out of a rhetoric and composition doctoral program that was nationally recognized (and criticized) as being more theory-oriented than most. My colleagues, except in English, just didn’t know.

People come up to me and say, “Congratulations!” I am not sure what they are congratulating me for. But I do know that this decision feels right, and I am looking forward to winter quarter in great anticipation.

Back in 2002, CSU had developed something called the “Early Assessment Program,” which involved giving a subset of our placement tests in English and math to students in the eleventh grade.  CSU trustees were strongly interested in “reducing the need for remediation,” and David Spence, the Vice-Chancellor at the time, argued that “If they do it in high school it is not remedial.”   The idea was that if student in the eleventh grade knew that they would probably not pass our placement tests and thus end up in remedial courses, they would do something to improve themselves.  But what would they do?

I was on the Executive Committee of CSU English Council at the time.  We went to the Chancellor’s Office twice to argue, “Early assessment without intervention is useless.”  Finally David Spence said, “What do you mean by intervention?”

We told them that they needed a year-long course.  They told us to develop the course.  We told them that we couldn’t because it would be a high school course, and we didn’t have any credibility with high school teachers and administrators.  They said fine, create a task force, work with high school teachers.

After that meeting, as I was driving one of my colleagues to the airport, we were thinking that we couldn’t turn this opportunity down because it had the potential to change the way English was taught in the whole state.  It turned out to do exactly that, and more.

I wrote a proposal, they funded it, and we had our first meeting in August, 2003.  At that meeting, I described my plan.  I said that we would take the best writing assignments from all of the developmental English courses in the CSU system and package them for high school teachers to teach.  I thought we would be done in nine months.    The high school teachers immediately said, “No, that won’t work.  First, the problem is more about reading than writing.  And second, we can’t touch anything unless it is aligned with the California English Language Arts Standards.”

When we started, the CSU folks and the high school folks were miles apart.  We quickly got a real education in what high school teachers were facing.  One of the most important factors in the success of this project has been extensive dialogue and collaboration between CSU and high school faculty.  We are now much closer together, and have a great deal of respect for one another.

In the first year the task force created an assignment template and nine teaching modules.  The template includes pre-reading, reading, and post-reading activities, a discussion of integrating material from sources into student writing and documenting it in MLA style, and writing activities that could culminate in a college essay, a letter to the editor, a book review, or a research paper.  This template can be used to create lesson plans for teaching almost any appropriate text.

In subsequent years, more modules were written for a total of 14.  The course received approval from the University of California system to count as senior English.  Thousands of teachers were trained to teach it, in hundreds of schools throughout the state.  The program is still growing.

The assignment template and a list of the modules can be seen on the Chancellor’s Office ERWC website.

Why is the ERWC so popular?  In part, I think it has to do with the following principles that we derived from it after we had created it:

1. The integration of interactive reading and writing processes;
2. A rhetorical approach to texts that fosters critical thinking;
3. Materials and themes that engage student interest and provide a foundation for principled debate and argument;
4. Classroom activities designed to model and foster successful practices of fluent readers and writers;
5. Research-based methodologies with a consistent relationship between theory and practice;
6. Built-in flexibility to allow teachers to respond to varied students’ needs and instructional contexts; and
7. Alignment with English-Language Arts Content Standards.

Another factor is unprecedented collaboration between CSU, the California Department of Education (CDE), County Offices of Education, local school districts, and many others.  Still another is the way the original task force worked together, and the talent and energy of subsequent members.  However, the biggest factor of all is that teachers and students like the materials.  Teachers like the flexibility, and the balance between structure and choice; students like the topics, the discussions, the opportunity to disagree with assigned texts, and the rhetorical and analytical strategies they learn.  There is a lot of grassroots buy-in.

Now we are six years down this road.  The leadership conference had sessions on adopting the course at a school site, using the materials in pre-service education courses, online materials and activities to be integrated with the course, and orientation sessions for new workshop leaders.  However, the most interesting to me was a session put on by teachers who had gotten a California Academic Partnership Program (CAPP) grant to develop materials and assessments at their particular schools.  They were not only teaching the course, but they were developing pre and post tests, mid-course assessments, new assignments and ancillary materials.  The most amazing thing, however, was that they were gathering statistical data from many sources and using their assessments to analyze the needs of their students and designing activities to meet those needs.  They were teacher-researcher-curriculum designers, working in environments where the official effort often demands absolute fidelity to some mass produced teacher-proof curriculum that doesn’t excite or engage anybody.  And they could prove that the ERWC with their adjustments was more effective than the expensive curricular tome from the huge publishing conglomerate.

This made my heart sing.  Of course, no one knows if any of this will survive the current budget mess.  However, in many districts the expensive tomes are due for replacement and the ERWC is way cheaper.  Perhaps there is hope.

I have read a couple of op-ed pieces which said that even if the state fired every single state employee, including all of the professors, it wouldn’t even begin to solve the budget problem.  It is not possible to close the budget gap with cuts only, yet some in the legislature are still trying to do that.  It would seem that most of the so-called leaders in state government are more interested in ideological posturing than problem solving or good government.  However, this post is not about that.

Professors are evaluated through a process that on my campus is called “Retention, Tenure, and Promotion” or “RTP.”  The three main categories of evaluation are teaching, scholarship, and service.  Different types of institutions have different priorities for faculty.  At a community college, the emphasis is on good teaching, and lots of it.  A community college professor could easily see 150 students a week in five courses.  At a “Research 1″ university such as a University of  California campus like Berkeley, the emphasis is on scholarship.  At a comprehensive university such as a typical CSU, teaching and scholarship are weighted more equally.

University service is a wild card.  Service means serving on university and college committees, running programs, presenting at campus events, coordinating activities, advising clubs, etc.  Service is strongly encouraged, but often not rewarded.

Traditionally, scholarship means creating new knowledge through experimentation, analysis, and study using whatever methods and practices are appropriate to the discipline, and publishing the results in a peer-reviewed journal.  In recent times, the definition of scholarship and publishing has expanded a bit to include such things as curriculum and program development and publishing online, although some of these things are still controversial.  In the sciences and increasingly in other fields, scholarship cannot even begin without grant funding, so writing grant proposals is a major component of faculty workload.

Faculty have a required teaching load.  My campus is on quarters, so the load is 3-3-3, or three classes in each of three quarters.  A typical semester load is 4-4.  Faculty do generally have summer off, but their contracts are for nine months, and nine months pay is stretched out over 12 months.  Summer is typically when much of the grant writing and article writing is done.   Without research and writing, new faculty will not be retained by the campus, and tenured faculty will not be promoted.  Every year, probationary faculty must submit an RTP packet with a description of everything they are working on, all publications, student evaluations, and a plan for improvement.  This packet, which sometimes fills two three-ring binders,  must be approved by the department, the college, and the university.

So, do faculty work only 12 hours per week, nine months a year?  Let’s look a little more closely at those 12 hours.  If one has a three course load, one will indeed be in class about 12 hours.  However, if you were going to stand in front of a class of 30-40 or even 100 students expecting you to be a font of wisdom and insight for 100 minutes, wouldn’t you want to be prepared?  In my experience, even if one has taught the same course many times, one still needs to re-read the materials, go over one’s notes, and update information.  If the course is a new preparation, the professor will spend hours reading the books and figuring out how to teach them.

Designing a new course, or a new way to teach a course,  involves knowing what to teach and how to teach it.  One needs to read new textbooks, consider the goals and desired outcomes of a course and  the students who will take it, design and sequence assignments, write quizzes and other assessments, and generally imagine the conceptual and intellectual progress of the students.  Last spring I taught a seminar called “Pedagogies of Reading” that I had not taught before.  I spent much of the summer reading books that might possibly be assigned in the course.  After choosing the books, I read them again, writing reading and discussion questions, creating assignments, and making notes for lectures.

In addition to preparation time, faculty must interact with students outside of class.  Office hours are required, but email has actually increased the amount of contact that faculty have with students dramatically.  Many of the emails say something like, “Hey Professor, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to class, did I miss anything important?”  However, we also get legitimate questions about the assignments and the course content, advisement questions about the program, career guidance questions, and requests for letters of recommendation.

I have found that the better I teach, the more students contact me.  Thus, the harder I work, the more work I have to do.  However, interacting with students is the most rewarding part of the job.

The part of the job that becomes a real grind after a while is grading papers, exams, quizzes, and other assignments.   It is hard to evaluate real knowledge and understanding with a multiple choice scantron test, although scantrons can be useful.  Evaluating written work takes so much time, and involves so many potential problems, including the possibility of plagiarism.  Many students have trouble expressing themselves in English.  If a student gets something wrong, is it because of their expression of a concept in English, or because they don’t understand the concept?  And there are so many ways to get something wrong.  Written work is hard to evaluate and grade, and requires feedback from the instructor.  However, multiple choice tests often simply hide a lack of understanding. In most disciplines, the harder way is the better way.

Any time that is left over after all of the above activities will be spent keeping up with the field by reading journals and books, participating in discussion lists, and attending conferences.

Are there tenured faculty who slack off?  Of course there are.  There are professors who just stand in front of the class and read the textbook to them.  There are some who are still reading from 20 year old lecture notes.  However, in my experience these are the rare exception, not the rule.   Most faculty became professors because they had a passion for their field of study and most remain passionate and interested in helping students throughout their careers.