The Little Professor

Disjunction

PZ Myers' post on teaching genetics reminds me how difficult it can be to make the jump from my basic abilities to my students' basic abilities--and I'm not talking about intelligence or lit-crit skills. Last week, for example, I gave my students an in-class reading assignment--a short story by A. C. Doyle, about twenty pages long--and offered them a half-hour to finish it. Um. Yeah. Oops. Twenty pages of Doyle takes me about ten minutes; I wound up giving them forty, and most of them still weren't done. More to the point, I shouldn't have expected any of them to be done--but I'm no good at estimating how fast people who aren't me will be able to read anything.  (Even as I type, I can hear students in my Victorian novel classes muttering, "Yeah, we figured that out already, Dr. B.")

Under contract

At Cliopatria, Ralph Luker discusses the "syllabus = contract" issue, complete with a legal opinion from Eugene Volokh. This website, for example, suggests that one of the key functions of a syllabus is that it "serves as a communication device and contract to shift the responsibility for learning to the student," and similar positions can be found here, here (note the phrase "binding agreement"), here, and here. My student and non-academic readers may be puzzled about why such an apparently esoteric point should be of such concern to faculty.  Part of it goes to our understanding of the mutual obligations between instructor and student--something I brought up in the post on attendance.  I'm not Brian Leiter, and will therefore refrain from legal philosophizing, but it's worth remembering that contract implies consent, explicit or otherwise; a student who consents to the syllabus/contract takes on, as the quotation above claims, "responsibility for learning."  Once you've consented, in other words, there's no excuse--you've agreed to bide by the instructor's guidelines, and can't plausibly claim at some later date that you "didn't know" about, say, that take-home final exam (or the instructor's attendance policy).  At the same time, the instructor also pledges herself to teach the material on the syllabus, make herself available at the stated office hours, and so forth.  In principle, this gives both parties a say on the practice of the other.  The professor can penalize deviations from the contractual agreement by that trusty weapon known as the red pen, while the student can write nasty course evaluations (although it's often the case that these don't have to do with "the contract" per se...) or, more seriously, take his case to the department chair or grievance committee. 

In recent years, however, the spectre of the Litigious Undergraduate (or, more properly, the Litigious Parents of the Undergraduate) has raised her head.  One of the reasons we are being urged to make our syllabi more and more explicit is that, if the syllabus is a contract, then what is or isn't on it--and/or the assignments proper--may lay the college open to lawsuits.  Violate the "binding agreement," and the student may be able to take you or your college to court--over grades, academic dishonesty, assignments, whatever.  The problem, as Volokh points out, is that it's not clear that syllabi truly constitute "binding agreements" in any sense that could stand up in court.  In other words, we're being encouraged to "legalize" our relationships with our students, but it's not clear that what we're doing has any actual legal meaning.  And I suspect that some faculty feel that the rhetoric of contract, while it might render our mutual obligations explicit, inadvertently makes the professor-student relationship more adversarial than absolutely necessary--especially if that rhetoric is driven by fear of legal action!   

Bemused realization

I sat down to watch Get Shorty the other day, under the impression that I had never seen it.  A few minutes in, though, it started looking naggingly familiar.  Finally, an epiphany: I had seen it on television, with all the profanity edited out. 

Let's just say that, sans what one of my colleagues likes to call "Old English," the film is...shorter.  Much shorter.  In fact, really short.  Shorter than co-star Danny DeVito.  Or me, for that matter. 

(There are some serious posts in the pipeline.  Honestly.  It's just that week one was a little hectic, given that I had some rapid catch-up to do after getting trapped in California.) 

Conversations

1.  Overheard: a student talking to one of my colleagues, who was being his customarily wry self.

STUDENT: So, Professor X, do you like Shakespeare?

PROFESSOR X: Oh, he has his moments, I suppose.

2.  A guy doing some work in my house:

GUY: Are you a teacher?

ME: Yes.

GUY: Yeah, you have the kind of "teacher" look.

ME: [smiles, wonders if teachers have scarlet letters branded on their foreheads]

GUY: What do you teach? High school?

ME: No, I teach at the college.

GUY: Wow! You look kinda young to be teaching college.

ME: [smiles, wonders if all college professors are born sixty years old]

This Week's Acquisitions

(Actually, this last two weeks' acquisitions.)

• Emma Leslie, The Martyr's Victory: A Tale of Danish England (RTS, n.d.).  Monks in the ninth century.
• The Boy Martyr; Or, Manfresti's Page.  A Story of 1567 (Shaw, n.d.).  Short novel about the Inquisition.
• Catherine Sinclair, Modern Society; Or the March of Intellect.  The Conclusion of Modern Accomplishments, 2nd ed. (William Whyte and Co., 1837).  Social satire. More on Sinclair (1800-64) here and here (with photographs of her monument); there's also a digitized version of her classic children's novel, Holiday House.

• Catherine Maria Sedgwick, The Linwoods; Or, "Sixty Years Since" in America, ed. Maria Karafilis (New England, 2002). Reprint of Sedgwick's historical novel about the American Revolution, which is an obvious nod to Sir Walter Scott. The Sedgwick Society includes biographical and bibliographical information, as well as a few e-texts.

• Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner (Knopf, 2002).  Piano tuner voyages in Victorian Burma.
• Clyde Binfield, So Down to Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity, 1780-1920 (Dent, 1977).  Classic collection of essays on major Dissenting figures and themes.
• Linda Woodhead, An Introduction to Christianity (Cambridge, 2004).  General survey.
• J. C. Ryle, The Upper Room: Being a Few Truths for the Times (Banner of Truth, 1970).  Reprint of Ryle's sermon collection from 1888. More information on Ryle, with some e-texts.
• Christopher Wordsworth, Wordsworth's Occasional Sermons, 3rd Series (Rivington, 1852).  Mainly devoted to topics in education. Wordsworth's hymns and a short biography can be found at the Cyberhymnal.
• Stanley M. Burstein, The Reign of Cleopatra (Greenwood, 2004).  The most recent production from Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt.
• Clare A. Simmons, ed., Medievalism and the Quest for the "Real" Middle Ages (Frank Cass, 2001).  Essays on literary and scholarly attempts to deal with the Middle Ages, covering the eighteenth century to the present.
• Piya Pal-Lipinski, The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration (New Hampshire, 2005).  History of the odalisque.
• Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago, 2004).  Focuses on the Anglo-American tradition. (Alison very kindly wrote a nice blurb for my own book.)
• George P. Landow, ed., Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Ohio, 1979).  Form, themes, major figures (Ruskin, Newman, etc.).
• David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas (Oxford, 2005).  Examines the function and evolution of symbols associated with, as the title says, "liberty and freedom," moving from the colonial period to the present day. 
• Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods: How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods (Oxford, 2004).  The Renaissance appropriation of classical myth.

• Umberto Eco, ed., History of Beauty (Rizzoli, 2004).  History of aesthetics, focusing on standards of physical beauty.

Attend

A fellow Cliopatriarch, Jonathan T. Reynolds, directs us to his letter to the editor on attendance policies. Strictly speaking, I don't "grade" for attendance, in the conventional sense; students are penalized for excessive absences, but not rewarded for putting in an appearance. (The college's policy allows us to fail students who miss 30% of a given semester's meetings.) I'm aware that that's much stick, little carrot, but attendance policies are there to remind students of our mutual, understood obligations as teacher and student. There's no prize for meeting baseline expectations; nobody pats me on the shoulder, after all, for grading papers every semester. There are always anecdotes, of course, about doughty students who earn an "A" in a course after skipping every lecture, but in my own experience, I'm afraid, there's a pretty strong correlation between low attendance and low grades.

I suppose that you could pose a different objection to attendance policies: students are "adults" and should be allowed to make their own choices. But the adult world is full of attendance policies--see under "timesheets," "contracts," etc. More to the point, attendance policies don't prevent students from asking themselves, "To go to class or not to go to class--that is the question"; such policies simply remind them that choices have consequences.

A warp in the space-time continuum, perhaps

From an eBay spoof e-mail, received earlier this evening:

If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choice but to temporally suspend your account.

I must admit that temporal suspension sounds alluring, especially when it comes to deadlines, bills, the mortgage, etc.

St. Simeon Stylites

If you're a Victorianist who has always wondered what St. Simeon Stylites' column looked like--or, at any rate, what's left of the column--Philobiblion has a photograph.

Ups and Downs

• UP: I finally made it back to New York, in time for the second day of classes.
• DOWN: JetBlue put me on the red-eye, which means that I'm currently operating on, oh, two hours of sleep.  All those who have ever tried prepping for classes on two hours of sleep, raise your hands.  (All those who have ever successfully prepped for classes on two hours of sleep, raise your hands.)
• UP: Oooh! Look at all those books that arrived while I was gone!
• DOWN: Unfortunately, I also have a letter inquiring as to the whereabouts of my December timesheet (a most aggravating query, given that I turned it in on time).   
• UP: For once, I have absolutely no complaints about last semester's teaching evals.  The bibliography grad students, while not especially enamored of the course's content, were nevertheless quite content with how I taught it, and the Victorian survey kids were wildly enthusiastic. 
• DOWN: Of course, my feelings may change if I ever see the evals for my freshman course.  At present, they appear to be AWOL.
• UP: My roof isn't leaking.  (Since this is a new roof, it had better not be leaking.) 
• DOWN: Must call the snow plow guy again...

Beyond Renault

Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt has pointed me to Beyond Renault, a site devoted to post-1920 historical novels about Alexander the Great. The author, Jeanne Reames-Zimmerman, is both a historical novelist and a specialist in Macedonian history, and the site includes an interesting essay on the historical novelist's practice. Given Dan Green's query in the comments of the "Historical fiction" post, below, I found Reames-Zimmerman's distinction between "historical fiction" and "historical allegory" useful (although I'm not sure I agree entirely with her discussion of her former--but that's a different post).