The Best Assignment

The best assignment should always be: show me what you can do.  The student should approach every assignment as though that were the implicit assignment. Do something good for me.

So the details of the assignment cannot detract from that.  A good student will interpret the assignment better and give you something better.  A bad student will opt for the less imaginative version of the same thing.  A really good assignment would not be capable of an unimaginative interpretation.  Some day I will think one up.

I don't remember college professors giving us prompts.  You were to write a paper on something related to the course material.

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I had another assignment in which the students had to invent an imaginary poet, then compare that poet's poem with the title "Arte poética" to poems of the same title by Borges, Huidobro, Neruda.  As you can expect, the best part of these papers was the invention of the apocryphal figure, since the other parts were rehashes of class discussions we had had about those three poems.  Students who actually wrote the entire poem, not just enough of it to quote from, also did better. I really tricked them into doing something a bit better than they would have thought to do, something a bit transgressive.  We make up all of our analyses anyway, so why does the poem have to be authentic?  And all poems are made up anyway, right?

(In the same level class sometimes I'll have them write an extra monologue to a play, or internal monologue to a novel.  So you can show that you understand the perspective of a character by doing this, without using the author's own words.)

I realized reading the papers that the students didn't quite get the Arte poética genre, because their invented poems were not metapoetic enough.  Students seemed to think that Still, I think it was successful.

And it is plagiarism-proof.

I think my assignments are the best aspect of my teaching.

Pronunciation

ON the one hand, I have to be fairly tolerant of imperfect pronunciation. The idea is not for every student to be perfect, at a native speaker level. I have even had colleagues who were quite bad, though not in my present job. As usual, I think "worse than me = unacceptable." So if I'm not perfect, that's ok, but I wouldn't want to have colleagues a whole lot worse than me.

Still, a significant portion of students in advanced level Spanish courses (junior / senior level, for us 400 and 500] really need improvement. Let's say there will be 5-7 students like this in a class of 20.

What I would like to see is:

--correct accentuation. Everyone is capable of emphasizing one syllable of a word over the rest of them, and learning what syllables that is.

--approximate phonemes. That is, the o of posible doesn't have to be perfect, but it cannot be the o of the English "possible." You should never pronounce u like the u of English umbrella. They don't have that sound in Spanish. Everyone is capable of this too. That is, pronouncing Spanish at least with the closest equivalent phonemes in English.

[Once the phonemes are more or less approximate, then the student can work on improvement.]

--basic ability to read aloud a correctly written Spanish text in a way comprehensible to a native speaker unaccostumed to English. Everyone can do that.

--elimination of English tags: um, like, you know... [when speaking Spanish]

What is needed is:

--Enough input. The students have to have sufficient exposure to good, authentic models.

--Knowledge of spelling conventions of Spanish. Students should know things like: h is silent.

--Knowledge of what phonemes exist and don't.

--Practice reading aloud; auto-critiques of recordings.

A phonetics course is great, but a course can lead to sophisticated knowledge of allophones, regional differences, and many other interesting things, without necessarily improving the student's pronunciation. I don't really care what exact accent the students are striving to emulate, as long as they hit basics common to all dialects of Spanish.

A student should have to produce a tape, to be judged anonymously by a knowledgeable person, at an acceptable level.

Coffee

A course I took over mid-semester from a colleague has been a little dead lately. I only had six students today, so I just took them all downstairs, bought them coffee, and we sat around a table in the cafeteria. The caffeine helped me a lot, for sure, and the students seemed to come to life. It was well worth it. Suddenly I didn't have to struggle to get them to participate.

I Just Want to Do My Work (Dammit)

I don't want to read an email from the Chancellor about parking for the football game. I don't want to fill out a form telling the university my ethnicity and other demographic details. I just want to do teaching and research, research and teaching, and then some more research after that. I'll do essential, meaningful service as well, helping to put together tenure documents, mentoring junior faculty, doing peer reviews of articles. I'll suffer through meetings. Most of what is "work" aside from that, however, is just a drain on energy.

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Since teaching is highly structured in time and research is highly unstructured, service cuts into research much more than teaching. Service is also like research in that it takes place in less structured time frames, and can be infinitely expandable. There are people with the same teaching load who do four times more service, just as there are scholars who publish four times more than their colleagues.

What if research was structured: you had to sit in a room and do it for so many hours a day for so many weeks (like Thomas's 16 week plan) and you had to be accountable for that time? What if, at the same time, teaching was totally unstructured: you would meet with random groups of students who wanted to see you on random occasions? In other words, what if we inverted the relation between research and teaching? Obviously a lot more research would get done, but more significantly the relation between the two activities would change. It seems rather odd that our too main activities should be so asymmetric in the way they are organized and rewarded.

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It's also interesting that scholarship is communication upwards, where the intended audience consists of specialists who know as much or more than you, and that teaching is communication downwards, where the intended audience knows vastly less than the instructor. It shouldn't be too surprising that the best at communicating upwards wouldn't always be the best at communicating in the other direction, or that those that are best at planning 15 weeks of classes aren't the best at working in a less structured way.

Graduate teaching is a special case, because the instructor has to decide when to go down and when to go up.

The Audiovisual Professor

Almost all of what I want to teach lately has to do with the sound of literature (and the sound of music itself in the case of my jazz course.) When I'm bringing in a poem sung, chanted, or recited on my ipod, it's not to entertain the students or supplement THE TEXT, the *real* poem on the page, but to study that performance in its own right. It's the concept behind Charles Bernstein's Close Listening, a book I used when I co-taught my seminar on poetry and performance. I have tons of Spanish poetry read aloud or sung--hours of it.

In my jazz course we've heard Langston Hughes reading with Mingus, Creeley with Steve Swallow et al, Kerouac making his own verbal music.

What I've found though is that we don't yet have a very good vocabulary for talking about the performance of language. This is another example of where teaching is out ahead of research. Instead of viewing teaching as the presentation or communication of the results of research or already existing knowledge, I view it as something more tentative that is paving the path for future projects.

Usually the argument is that students need teachers that are up-to-date with their fields, so their teachers should either be active researchers or recent PhDs. That's a valid argument. I would argue, though, that students need teachers who are going to do research in the future. I won't really know exactly where my ideas about poetry and performance are going to lead for a few more years.

Learning By Teaching

I've never taught a course without learning something. The process of teaching forces you to articulate ideas in ways you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. From undergraduate grammar courses I've learned more Spanish grammar and syntax; I developed ideas for my Lorca book out of my translation course. A very basic introductory course on literary analysis led to some ideas about redundancy in poetic language. Teaching literary theory forces me to go back to texts I wouldn't have looked at in many years.

I think I learn more from teaching undergraduate courses, because I often teach things I don't know as well, with the confidence that I can still stay far ahead of my students. You really should learn more from grad students than undergraduates, but that is not always the case.

I imagine it would be different in hard sciences, where basic courses would not teach the professor anything.

Teaching fewer courses would theoretically allow more time for research, but I wouldn't want to teach all that much less than I do. Teaching helps to structure time, allows the research process to be less solitary. As long as I can get a year or a semester off once in a while, I'm fine.

So very soon I have to figure out a course for next fall. It's modern peninsular lit at the undergraduate level, and I can teach any topic I want. What I want to do is teach something I can be completely enthusiastic about, something that I can learn from teaching.

The Pedagogy of 2nd Best Ideas

I'm teaching an advanced undergraduate course. It is supposed to be a capstone to their experience as Spanish majors. The problem: many of them are not prepared to do research and writing at a high enough level. In principle, they should be able to do everything an English major can--but in Spanish, a language foreign to them. In practice, they fall short of this. It's difficult, because it's like Ginger Rogers said: she danced everything that Fred Astaire did, but walking backwards and wearing heels.

Today I am going to try something different. I came up with ideas for 14 research projects relevant to the course. I will hand out these today, one for each student. they will take a few minutes to look at the idea that they each received, then will compare their ideas with those of other students. They can make as many trades as they want, or, if they really like their original suggestion, they can stay with it.

On Thursday, they will come to class again, with two new ideas of their own plus the professor's idea they came home with on Tuesday. Now they will trade their 2nd best idea with that of another student. At this point they will have 3 ideas apiece: one from the professor (me), one of their own, and one from another student. They will rank those in order of preference, and discard the 3rd best idea, whether it's from the professor, themselves, or another student. They will go home and write a paper using one of the two best ideas.

Now this might not work. The worst case scenario is that they will all be working with my ideas or with one another's worst ideas, but I'm hoping the exercise of developing and trading ideas will be useful in its own right. If they fail to develop two good ideas, then nobody will want to trade their second best idea for one of their own.

I'm asking them to imagine that we are writing a book together: Pervivencia de la tradición. I am the editor and they are the contributors. This book will never exist except in my imagination, but it is something that I might use to share the results of my course with a colleague at another university, for example.

I am going to judge my teaching in this course not by my teaching evaluations--a measure of consumer satisfaction--but by the quality of the contributions to this imaginary book. In other words, by the concrete results I achieve at actually teaching the students to learn what they are supposed to be learning. I'm a full professor, and there are very small raises in the university anyway, so I can afford a set of poor evaluations if my idea bombs.