Monthly Archives: December 2008

The Evolution of a Teaching Persona

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Every year as I’m finishing up another year and recovering from the pressure of teaching I read around in a handful of books on the subject that have been influential for my thinking, looking for inspiration or reassurance or something. This year I’ve been rereading portions of Banner and Cannon’s The Elements of Teaching, which I always find calming and thoughtful. I was just browsing the chapter on Character, which gives several tips: a teaching character must be authentic and consistent, distinct and individual; it means showing humanity by acknowledging lapses and errors and requires sociability; and it should mature with age.

Banner and Cannon note that "a trap young teachers often fall into is that of assuming ‘teaching personalities’ that are not their own. Such teachers are like unconscious actors; they are playing roles based, often unknowingly, on the favorite school teachers or college mentors of their own youth" (108). My only disagreement with this is to always consider it a trap. They remark that when 23-year-olds face 18-year-olds, they can’t play the graybeard. I started teaching freshman when I was 23, and this is certainly true. I could no more have been myself in front of those 18-year-olds than I could have plausibly played the graybeard. Still, based upon readings at the time on teaching persona, I did deliberately fashion one for the class, and it was indeed based upon a specific professor I’d had in college, which is not to say that it wasn’t also me.

My last year in college I took a two-semester sequence on critical theory from an English professor. We read in the history of critical theory from Plato to Derrida, and the lectures and discussions were engaging. The professor was very intense and treated whatever we were reading as well worth the intellectual effort it took to get through it. Everything was important. You knew this from the intensity of his lectures and comments. I’m thumbing now through one of the textbooks that year, David Richter’s The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Assuming what I marked up was what we read (this was seventeen years ago, after all), we read Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Dante, Philip Sidney, Hume, Kant, Hegel, T.S. Eliot, Kenneth Burke, Marx, Georg Lukacs, Benjamin, Freud, Frye, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, de Man, Edward Said, Gilbert and Gubar, and Cixous among others. I’ve read few of these for years, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be reading the post-structuralists ever again, but this was the intellectual meat of my youth and much of it I first ate at this professor’s table.

Though I had a number of good professors over the years, he still remains my touchstone, and I still recall my months working with him. He still remains the most intellectually serious and engaging professor in the classroom I’ve ever encountered. From him I learned not just to read or think intensely, but to try to communicate that intensity, that passion for ideas, to my own students. He showed me in his own teaching what it was like to live with ideas. I went to grad school in English thinking I would encounter this same intellectual rigor and passion. C’est la vie.

I entered the classroom with the same intense demeanor, and I always try to convey the intellectual worth of whatever I teach, but I’m sure I looked ridiculous as a baby-faced twenty-something talking about whatever fluff was in our rhetoric readers as if it were Kant or Hegel. Other young teachers played the hipster or the clown, but I couldn’t do it. Playing the graybeard, I wanted gravitas, and the only way to achieve it was, I thought, with the serious demeanor.  I was serious about my ideas and the intellectual life, but there are other ways to achieve that. Seriousness doesn’t make up for inexperience, ignorance, and bad teaching, all of which were my lot when I began.

"Character should mature with age." I read that line and laughed at my earlier self in a way that my earlier self probably wouldn’t have appreciated. When I started teaching, speaking in public terrified me. It literally made me sick; my stomach would ache before every class began. Combine shyness with inexperience and only a passing familiarity with the material, and you have a good recipe for my first year. I pity those poor students I had that year, and I used to hope later that if I encountered them again they wouldn’t remember me. I grew my hair long and grew a beard so they wouldn’t recognize me.

As I’ve gotten better at teaching, my teaching persona has edged ever closer to whatever might pass for my "real" persona. After enough years, I’ve started to grow more comfortble with myself in the classroom, more comfortable tolerating a certain amount of levity and personal disclosure I couldn’t have mustered seventeen years ago. Because I know how to maintain control, I don’t fear mutiny. Because I’m confident in my abilities, I’m more willing to admit my weaknesses or my lapses. Because I’m not trying to persuade my students that I’m not a fraud, I also tend to be more open and even to like the students more. An actor sees an audience, but I see individuals and personalities, and, I think, come across as more of a real person to them in consequence. And, ironically, now that I have a beard and it is in fact going gray, I never feel the need to play the graybeard.

Humor in the Classroom, or Wherever

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The other day I was chatting with a friend and fellow librarian about using humor in presentations and in the classroom. Whenever we’re working on presentations, we’ll run ideas by each other, and she has to endure comments from me like, “I have the basic outline, but I can’t figure out where to put in any jokes.” This may sound unnecessary, but I’m a firm believer in using humor in presentations as well as in the classroom. Humor engages listeners and reduces their anxiety.

Though I said “jokes,” I don’t really mean jokes in the general sense. I’m not very good at telling jokes, mostly because I can never remember any. Humor (or if it’s extemporaneous, wit) is more what I’m talking about. I know a few jokes of the “guy walks into a bar” variety, but I can’t imagine they would be very useful in a presentation to librarians or to a group of students in a class. Possibly I could develop some “guy walks into a library” jokes, but they probably wouldn’t be funny and wouldn’t blend into the material being presented. (I’ve appended my attempt at a “guy walks into a library” joke below, based on another joke I know.)

Sometimes I can actually plan a joke. I gave a talk on Google this summer, and was briefly comparing the now defunct Lively to Second Life. I’ve always been skeptical about Second Life, which seems to be losing its buzz (pace the claims of the SL people). In my presentation I said: “I haven’t seen any reason to use Second Life yet. Every time I’m there, I just end up naked and bumping into walls.” So far, so good. There were several head nods and a couple of titters, because anyone who’s used or read about SL knows this stuff happens. Then I followed with, “Since that’s how I spend a lot of my time in real life, I don’t see much point in going online.” I thought the joke went well. It highlighted my sketicism about SL as a useful tool while keeping the audience’s attention.

Usually whatever jokes I make are spontaneous. Recently, I was talking to a group of librarians about my theories and experiences weeding the collection for offsite storage. If anything cries out for levity, it’s this subject, which can manage to be boring and contentious at the same time. I was speaking off the cuff, but in discussing what kinds of little used materials I might send offsite, I remembered that I’d once discovered in a tight area of the stacks a whole shelf of books about Albert Schweitzer that hadn’t circulated since the 1960s. They were easy to send offsite. “So Albert Schweitzer, years after his death, was still performing good works by creating space in my stacks.” This joke might not work with college students, because it assumes at least a minimal familiarity with Schweitzer.

Audience is important. At another recent talk I was recalling a discussion I’d once had with one of my superiors about the way philosophy students work. I was being pressured to perform some library-related activities for which there was no need. For some reason, the Marshall McLuhan scene from Annie Hall popped into my head, and I did an impersonation of him in that scene. “You know nothing of my work.” I was just playing around, but a lot of the audience had obviously seen Annie Hall, which wouldn’t have been the case with most college students, especially freshmen.

In general, librarians are an easy crowd, though. Freshmen writing classes are another story. For those, I have almost no canned humor, but look for spaces to insert a witty comment. I’m not looking for belly-laughs, but simply want to hold their attention so they’ll listen to what I’m trying to communicate. Sometimes this is a joke about a book or article title we find. Or sometimes I tell them that while they might wait until the night before to write their research papers, they sure don’t want to wait until the night before to research them. I think it shocks them a bit that I say this, and it allows for a game instructor to jump in and reinforce lessons about time planning.

I’ve never set out to try to be funny in presentations, and I’ve tended to use humor more as I feel more comfortable being myself in front of groups of people, which has been a long time coming. I like joking around with friends, but for much of my life found it difficult to allow myself levity in public performances. Some people think funny can’t be taught, and to some extent I suppose this is true. Plenty of people have senses of humor without being funny themeselves. Some funniness possibly can be taught, though.

There are a lot of instructional materials to learn to be funnier, but it turns out that there’s a bit of library literature on the topic of using humor for library instruction as well. I found the recent Walker article in Library Lit, and that led me to the Trefts/Blakeslee article, which in turn led me to the Booth-Butterfield article in the communications literature (citations below, all available through ProQuest). Walker discusses the benefits to using humor in the classroom, like keeping students’ attention, increasing their retention of material, and reducing their information anxiety. She also summarizes someone’s suggestions of how to cultivate humor in the classroom (p. 120):

  • Smile/ be light-hearted.
  • Be spontaneous/natural.
  • Foster an informal climate/be conversations and loose.
  • Begin class with an ice-breaker, a short anecdote, or a humorous climate.
  • Encourage a give-and-take between yourself and students. Play off their comments.

These all seemed good recommendations to me, and in line with my experience.

Trefts and Blakeslee enrolled in a comedy course to see if they could become funnier. Their instructor divided people into two kinds of people: those who divide people into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. No, I’m kidding. He divided them into Fog People and Comedy People.

He says that the Fog People are people who “just don’t get It” (humor), and Comedy People are the ones who “reveal It” to the Fog People. From Greg Dean’s comedy tapes we learned that there is a distinct difference between having a sense of humor and being funny, or, as he describes it, having a “sense of funny”. Many of us probably feel we have a pretty good sense of humor, but that we are not particularly funny. Being funny, or having a sense of funny, is having the ability to make other people laugh; knowing what is funny in certain situations; and being able to look at the world, to observe, and to find humor in everything – even libraries! Therefore, Comedy People, the ones that can make people laugh, have both a sense of funny and a sense of humor. The Fog People only have a sense of humor.

To use humor in the classroom, the goal is to move from being a Fog Person to being a Comedy Person, the person who sees what is funny in a given situation. They have several tips tips to pass on:

  1. Do not give up after one try.
  2. Practice, practice, practice.
  3. Be yourself.
  4. Think about your audience.
  5. Keep a comedy journal.

They discuss each of these in turn. For me, 3 and 4 have been the most useful. They also do a good job of enumerating and discussing various practical ways to introduce humor: jokes, icebreakers, audio, questionaires, videos, cartoons, the unexpected, spontaneous wit, planned wit, and active learning.

The Booth-Butterfield article is much more abstract and less specifically applicable to library instruction. It does have a Humor Orientation (HO) scale that Trefts and Blakeslee use, though. It uses a Lickert scale to see if you agree or disagree with seventeen statements such as “1. I regularly tell jokes or funny stories when I am with a group” or “10. Even funny jokes seem flat when I tell them” (207). They also have an impressive taxonmy of types of humor with many examples. The types include Low Humor, Nonverbal, Impersonation, Language, Other Orientation, and Expressiveness, and gives examples of when these types are in play (212). Like most discussions of humor, the article itself isn’t very funny, but it does tell us a lot about funny people, or high-HO people. Unsurprisingly, they see potential for humor in more situations than low-HO people, and communicate more specifically what that potential is.

A large cognitive difference exists between a description which states “I’d tell a joke,” versus “Did you hear the one about…” It is the difference between “I’d give a great speech” and “Fourscore and seven years ago…” People who report high humor use know more exactly what they can say and do to elicit the laughter response, while low humor use people must describe that behavior in general and abstract terms. (215)

It’s also the difference between “I’d tell a joke about Second Life,” and “I’d talk about being naked and bumping into walls.”

Based on my own experience and the studies I’ve cited, the use of humor in the classroom or in presentations has many benefits, though it can’t be taken too far. There are some caveats in the articles I’ve been discussing, such as that the use of ethnic humor, culturally specific humor, or sarcasm can be problematic. One must also avoid the shift from being funny to just being a clown. This is well captured in a vignette from The Elements of Teaching (which I highly recommend as a thoughtful analysis and discussion of said elements). The book has chapters discussing Learning, Authority, Ethics, etc. Each chapter ends with a case study of a fictional, but plausible teacher. The chapter on Character finishes with a professor who conveyed no content and engaged no learning, but who was very popular with students because his class demanded little and had the nature of a vaudeville routine (115-19) which always left the students laughing, but not learning. I don’t think there’s any danger of that happening with librarians in instruction sessions, but it still is something to look out for if you want to use humor in the classroom.

Addendum: A guy walks into a library wearing a duck on his head and wants to use a computer. The librarian says, “We don’t allow pigs near our computers.” The guy says, “That’s not a pig. That’s a duck.” The librarian says, “I was talking to the duck!”

Banner, Jr., James M., and Harold C. Cannon. The Elements of Teaching. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Booth-Butterfield, S., and M. Booth-Butterfield. “Individual Differences in the Communication of Humorous Messages.” Southern Communication Journal 56, no. 3 (1991): 205-18.

Trefts, Kristin, and Sarah Blakeslee. “Did You Hear the One About the Boolean Operators? Incorporating Comedy into Library Instruction.” Reference Services Review  28, no. 4 (2000): 369-377.

Walker., B.E. “Using humor in Library Instruction.” Reference Services Review  34, no. 1 (2006): 117-28.

 

Problems of Part Timers

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Another study (found via KUAL) has highlighted the many problems with a heavy reliance on adjunct instructors in higher education. This has been a controversial issue for a generation at least, and where I went to grad school it was discussed ad nauseum by the graduate students who were doing the bulk of the teaching in the lower level classes. They eventually unionized, though I’m not sure they’ve ever gotten much of a benefit from that.

What impresses me about the more recent entries in the debate over part time adjuncts is the emphasis on the problems caused to the students, not just the teachers. Rhetorically, I’ve always thought arguments that teachers were being manipulated had little effect on the public. If someone wants to earn a PhD in a field with few jobs and refuses to do any other kind of work, how sympathetic is anyone supposed to be that the person has to teach six classes at three different universities to make ends meet? Other adjuncts sympathize. The rest of us just think, why don’t you go do something else then? Or, stop being such a sucker.

The average parent paying for college probably doesn’t care about the status of the college instructors, but they should care if the reliance upon and poor treatment of adjuncts means their children are less likely to graduate. The part timers and faculty unions should have been pushing this agenda all along instead of complaining that part timers don’t have tenure or academic freedom. Most workers don’t have tenure or academic freedom, so why should that bother them.

I was looking back through books like Will Teach for Food and related tomes and couldn’t help but notice the sense of entitlement driving the eventual turn to bitterness regarding the unavailability of tenure track positions. I’ve run across this a lot over the years. It’s the idea that just because you finished a PhD in some field, the world owes you a job as a professor. As long as the arguments were based upon resentment that highly educated people didn’t get the jobs that the seem to think they were owed, it’s no wonder nobody was paying attention. The success of books like Tenured Radicals and others and the inability of the professoriate to make their case to the public has in practice meant that nobody really cares about the part timer problem in academia.

Some previous arguments I’ve read have tried to paint people like me as a problem, arguing that it’s terribly important for freshman writing teachers to have tenure track jobs and PhDs in any field whatsoever. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that that’s really the problem. The subject of a writing class is writing, and having a PhD in a field other than writing studies guarantees nothing.

It’s also that the shift in emphasis is no longer trying to make me out a villian for being a part-time writing instructor that I find attractive. The problem isn’t inherently that someone is part-time, or not tenured, or whatever. The problem for student development, according to some of these newer studies, is that the relationships with students that benefit their retention and graduation can’t be built when teachers are shuffling around between two or three universities to make ends meet. While I teach writing only part time, I’m fully a member of the university community, and in fact have more permanence than the full time writing instructors here, who are ineligible for tenure and have a maximum contract of five years. I’m not contributing to the exploitation of part-time instructors – even though I am one – because the university fully supports me and I have the time to devote to my students.

So for personal and rhetorical reasons, I’m glad for the recent shift away from complaining about the poor treatment of adjuncts – which in general is shameful, and the university administrators who treat them so badly should be publicly shamed – to showing how that poor treatment affects student learning. The problem isn’t part timers. The problem isn’t a lack of tenure. The problem isn’t that people resent not getting the kinds of jobs they think they’re owed. The problem is that the way higher education treats its part-time instructors destroys the community necessary for learning.

Some people these days seem obsessed with online univeristies and distance education. These education institutions seem more appropriate for dispensing facts and credentialing people cheaply. However, they can never replace the community that comes with student life on campus or engaging others in discussion in a seminar room. There is a level of education that requires more than the presentation of some facts and some online quizzes, and that more is lost when colleges and universities become like businesses and the instructors become like day laborers. Nobody outside of academia cares that some PhD can’t get a cushy job. They might care when the complete lack of cushy jobs means that their children aren’t graduating.

The End of the Research Process

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I’ve been reading and commenting upon drafts of research essays the past couple of days. It’s the time of the semester when I get to see what I usually don’t get to see as a librarian: the end of the research process. Recently I heard a talk about embedded librarians. All the writing seminars have a librarian assigned to them, but since I act as my own librarian I’m about as embedded as it gets. Unfortunately, I don’t have anyone to blame when something goes wrong.

Fortunately, nothing serious has gone wrong, and the results aren’t at all unpleasing. Obviously a lot of the students understood the research process, and it was very easy to see who took shortcuts that generally didn’t work.

All those rules of thumb we have about research seem to work. For example, I usually warn students in library instruction sessions that they’ll have to read (or at least skim) more sources than they actually use, not just enough but more than enough. They can’t just do a search, take the first five items that come up, and write a research paper. Before they can figure out what there might be to say, they’ve got to do a lot of exploration. In the end result, I can tell who ignored this advice. It’s easy to spot the problem just by glancing at a bibliography.

Then there’s the variety of resources that librarians sometimes mention and instructors often require. Books, journal articles, newspaper articles, websites, etc. It’s good to have a range. Why, we don’t always explain, which is why it’s more a rule of thumb. But the answer is clear when research essays depend too heavily on one particular format. Lots of books in the bibliography are typically a problem, for example, because it means that students haven’t explored the article literature, which is often richer for specific topics. Just glancing at a bibliography shows a heavy reliance upon books, but reading the essay shows why this can be a problem.

I’ve written a couple of times about the improbable source, but finding the improbable source is just as problematic. The improbable source would do the intellectual work for the students. But students—and this is completely understandable—also have trouble resisting sources that do the work for them. It seems especially difficult for students to interrogate sources critically when they’re reasonably well written and in peer-reviewed journals.

This makes perfect sense, because students are new to the conversation, and other than providing the criticism myself I’m not sure how this skill can be developed without more reading and practice. In my class, it’s often a secondary source interpreting John Rawls in some applied way. The description of one of them seemed so bizarre I assumed the student had it wrong so I followed up and read the article. Nope. The student had done an excellent analysis. It’s just that the article based an entire philosophical argument on a dubious metaphor. Anything for tenure, I suppose. Just telling students to challenge authority doesn’t help, because they don’t have the tools yet, though I do try to explain why “peer-reviewed” doesn’t mean “right.”

However, this is another case where more than enough of a variety of sources helps. They need to get the sources arguing with each other. As librarians, we can’t always know which sources are best and don’t always see the end result of the research, but the rules of thumb help out, I suppose. I can certainly glance at what students have found and say, not more than enough and not enough variety. The great thing as a writing teacher is that I get to explain why in detail. Or maybe that’s the tedious thing. I’ll be able to tell after my brain unfries.