The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Emily Sarah Holt, One Snowy Night; Or, Long Ago at Oxford (Shaw, n.d.). German evangelists come to England in the twelfth century, don't fare so well. (For that matter, this copy didn't fare so well in its transatlantic voyage. It seems to have gone from "reading copy" to "read at your own peril copy.")

• The Rescue: A Story of the Huguenots (RTS, [1880]). Children's story about Jeanne of Navarre and the persecution of the Huguenots.

• [Deborah Alcock], Under the Southern Cross: A Tale of the New World (Nelson, 1900). Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century.

• John Griesemer, Signal & Noise (Picador, 2004). Historical novel. All sorts of interesting things happen to a group of men setting up the transatlantic telegraph cable.

• Thomas Milner, The History of England (RTS, [1853]). English history through 1852.

• Steven Parissien, George IV: Inspiration of the Regency (St. Martin's, 2001). Biography emphasizing George IV's importance as a cultural patron.

• John Worthen, The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & the Wordsworths in 1802 (Yale, 2001). Group biography focusing on a transitional period in the Wordsworth circle's artistic and emotional lives.

Literary Life

Check out this terrific archive of comics, courtesy of the Guardian. Oh, dear--the man in this one sounds dangerously like me. Other personal favorites: here (don't click if you're working for the state of Virginia), here (hmm, works for undergraduates too), here, here, and--having just done CRC--here. (Via Making Light.)

Reinflation

Apparently, those of us who object to grade inflation have it all wrong. Or so Bill Coplin says. According to Coplin,

But no one has explored the idea that grade inflation may have significant benefits to undergraduates. I find today's students to be better writers, more accomplished at processing information and more knowledgeable about more things than students of 30 years or even 10 years ago.

Think about this for a moment. If students are truly better writers--and since I've just finished commenting on sixty rough drafts, I fear my response to that assertion is unprintable--then higher grades would represent not "inflation," but an objective measure of achievement. One would expect the same for signs of "accomplish[ment]" (measured how?) or "knowledg[e]" (again, measured how, and about what?). It's not clear, then, how "grade inflation" could possibly correlate with "improvement," since, under the circumstances, grades should not be "inflated" at all.

Matters don't improve as we go along. Here's Coplin's first example of "good" grade inflation:

First, the policy of most universities to allow drops fairly late in the semester has resulted in higher GPAs. My freshman class is called "boot camp" by my successful graduates. Students have to submit five papers during the semester at about two-week intervals. As they get their low grades back or fail to turn the papers in on time, they drop. Most universities permit late drops, which give students more flexibility in finding their interests and exploring their capabilities. This source of grade inflation is clearly a good thing.

Once again, this isn't "grade inflation"; in theory, at least, the "successful" students are earning their high grades. There's a perfectly reasonable point lurking in here--namely, that students discover a certain lack of aptitude for Major X and proceed to do the logical thing. Or do they? Many students persist in a major despite consistently low grades; some will wait around for an instructor who doesn't run class like a "boot camp." And God forbid I point this out, but if you've got a mass exodus from your courses every semester, enough to skew the final grades, then there might be a problem somewhere. In any event, since Coplin cites no statistics--how many colleges have late drops? how many students drop introductory courses to preserve their GPAs? how do such drops affect final grade distributions?--there's not much in the way of convincing evidence here.

Coplin goes on to suggest that grade inflation actually helps the learning process: "More important, I have found that students learn, on average, less than half of what they need to learn as undergraduates in formal course work. Therefore, higher grades give them some breathing room to undertake activities from which they can learn what is truly important." In other words, by making the "A" meaningless as a measure of student achievement, we allow students to relax enough to go off and Learn By Doing Cool Extracurricular Activities. This presumes, of course, that students with unearned "A"s feel the need to go off and Learn By Doing Cool Extracurricular Activities, seeing as how the instructor has, in effect, told them that they've mastered the material.

Ah, but students aren't the only ones liberated by grade inflation! "Finally, grade inflation allows the faculty a chance to provide apprentice opportunities to the best students, such as conducting research in a laboratory, doing a literature review for a historian or starting a mentoring program for a local community youth agency." Now, I'm looking for a charitable way to interpret this claim. Actually, I'm looking for any way to interpret this claim, because the cause-and-effect relationship seems awfully murky. If we've inflated the grades, then, pace Jordan Ellenberg, we've made it more difficult to tell students apart, not less.* Or does Coplin mean that there are the students who get "A"s, and then there are the students who get "A"s that actually mean something? Come to think of it, why does grade inflation "allo[w]" faculty to single out the best students for additional attention? Please tell me it isn't because the teacher has reduced the amount of time s/he spends grading. Please?

*--With all due respect to Ellenberg's statistics, it's not clear to me that faculty who inflate grades do so in some discriminating fashion. His model presumes that the professor will preserve grade distributions, just at some higher level. But many inflators are also conflators: the "A" range may comprise everything from "A" work to "C" work.

Ups and Downs

• Up (a): Good heavens! Warm weather! For the first time since, oh, November, I didn't turn the heat on. And I even wore a skirt.

• Up (b): Does this mean that the roofer will now get around to replacing my roof? I've had a dumpster and a pile of roofing materials in my driveway for over a month now. Instead of asking me about my car ("Has anything fallen off lately?"), my parents and colleagues have taken to asking about my dumpster ("Have you considered decorating it in pastels?").

• Down: Gusting winds + rigid gas permeable contacts = OUCH.

• Up: Hey, look! It's that book I ordered from the UK in January.

• Down (a): While there's something vaguely comforting about having 5,000 books neatly arranged in categories and alphabetized, it certainly makes shelving new books an exhausting experience.

• Down (b): ...And I'm out of shelf space again. Rats. (Looks longingly at PZ Myers' living room.)

• Up: Just one more week of classes, then another week of finals, and we're done.

• Down: Er...um...there's a downside to summer vacation?

British Children's Fiction

While it appears to have been dormant for a while, British Children's Fiction 1890s-1960s offers a useful bibliographical overview of major authors, with an emphasis on the "school story" genre.

Unfinished

I can't be the only one who feels a sense of grim obligation to finish whatever novel I've started. This isn't the case with secondary sources--as J. Paul Hunter once said in an MA seminar, that's what the index is for--but novels seem different, somehow. It's as though I'm betraying an unwritten compact with the author. More likely, though, it's just shame: I'm an English professor, therefore I should be able to slog my way through anything. And given what I read in my academic persona--Victorian historical novels (bad), sermons (boring), didactic literature (yikes), religious propaganda (gulp)--you'd think that my mental constitution would be strong enough to withstand anything the most stylistically challenged contemporary author might care to throw at me. Usually, it is. In the past decade, I've had to raise the white flag only twice, and in response to two very different novels:

1. Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon. If my department chair is reading this, I'm in trouble, because she's a fan. I've never had much stomach for Pynchon in the first place, but I hoped that this novel would remedy the situation. No such luck--I gave up after one hundred pages of faux eighteenth-century prose. If you protest indignantly that Pynchon is a great novelist, I'll nod and agree with you, but...well...surely the execution is just a wee bit heavy-handed? I'll probably try this one again, though.

And now, from a completely different literary universe:

2. Ciji Ware, The Island of the Swans. I'm a specialist in historical fiction, but I've always had a *cringe* response to historical romances--despite fellow academics who swear by them for good escapist fun. Besides, I thought I should read at least one romance, in the interest of genre coverage, and I'd heard decent things about this one. Oh. Dear. Lord. I couldn't get past the "handsome" William Pitt the Younger (huh?), flirting right and left (whah?) and ogling our heroine (you've got to be kidding me). I mean, Pitt had numerous virtues, but when did hunkiness become one of them? (I've been looking for a quotation from one contemporary society painter, possibly Hoppner, who said something to the effect that Pitt was the least artistically inspiring subject he'd ever had.)

UPDATE: Typo fixed (in response to correction).

Rough draft angst (an ongoing saga)

I finished hacking my way through the rough draft underbrush. Some good stuff, some mediocre stuff, some "please go see a tutor NOW" stuff. (Too much of the latter.) And a plagiarist, who got a very stern warning. At the end, I was left with yet another crop of pet peeves:

• "In stanza X, it says/On page X, it says/In line 12, it says..." Aside from the unnecessary "it"--there's something else speaking on page X?--this is just a dreadful way to introduce a quotation. The tag doesn't provide a graceful (or logical) transition from the previous sentence; moreover, there's no context for the quotation itself.

  
  

• "Due to the fact that..." Is there something wrong with "because"?

  
  

• Random quotations. Student makes claim X, then cites passage Y, which has nothing whatsoever to do with claim X.

  
  

• "In the novel, X, by Y..." God created possessives for a reason. And surely the audience--namely, the instructor--knows that X is a novel (or poem, or what-have-you)?

  
  

Alternate reading list

As a University of Chicago graduate, I hereby defer to Crescat Sententia's alternate list--which is, I suppose, a good enough illustration of how arbitrary these lists get.

Ask Not For Whom the Cell Phone Tolls

Theatrical performers and audiences aren't the only ones grousing about cell phones. Pity the poor instructor, attempting to hang on to the last shred of her students' rapidly fraying collective attention as she tries to explain the difference between independent and dependent clauses, who just as she hits the high note of her lecture hears that ominous noise--a cell phone's ring-tone. Does the student turn off the cell phone? If our instructor is lucky, yes; if not so lucky, the student cheerfully walks out of the room to do something far more important than absorb basic grammar.

Seriously. It's time to start putting cell phone policies in my syllabi. Now, if only I had a good comeback line. Laurence Fishburne's approach (scroll to bottom) has its appeal, but, um, I'm not tenured yet.

Reading list

Self-exposure, anyone? Put everything you've read on the list into boldface. (Via Pharyngula.) Predictably, my own gaps come mainly in twentieth-century fiction. Treasure Island must have escaped my attention--although I've read all of Stevenson's short stories and a few of the novels--and I'm going to lug Proust along on my next cross-country trip. (After all, Anthony Powell took up most of my last trip to CA and back.) No doubt everyone will have their own list of "hey, but I've read other stuff by that guy!" objections--in my case, besides Stevenson, Sinclair Lewis (Elmer Gantry), Victor Hugo (Les Miserables) and John Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men).

UPDATE: Oh, yeah, and Thomas Mann (Dr. Faustus, Death in Venice).

UPDATE II: Unavoidably, Chun satirizes the whole shebang.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans [I've read some excerpts]
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide [actually, I can't remember if I've read this or not]
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son