On taking students' suggestions and questions seriously

In this post, I said that "When in doubt, assume that a student's question or suggestion is sincere." Here's an example where I did not follow that advice and regretted it:

Once, when I was a TA for an intro to US history (part 2, from the Civil War to the present), we were discussing the 1970s in discussion section. I mentioned "stagflation" and defined it as "a recession in which there is inflation instead of deflation." I drew a contrast (if I recall correctly) between the 1970s and the Great Depression and the Depression of the 1890s.

This was in Spring, 2008, at the beginning of the present recession, and one of my students asked, does that mean we have stagflation today? I quickly dismissed the question with a comment, the gist of which was "no, this recession is different."

I was wrong to be so dismissive. She was one of my brightest students, but even if she hadn't been, her question was sensible: newspaper accounts (and for all I know, economists) were reporting that we were in a recession and that we had inflation. Ergo, by my definition of "stagflation," that's what we were experiencing. (This was before the credit crisis had hit its nadir, so the possibility of deflation wasn't in the news.)

What I should have done is acknowledge that my definition of stagflation might be faulty, because I doubt that even the more alarmist economists in 2008 would call what we were going through a "stagflation."

A taxonomy of student plagiarism

One of the most frustrating things to deal with as a TA or adjunct instructor is student plagiarism. It's frustrating for many reasons and in many ways, and I'm still not sure what to do about it. One major source of frustration is that it's not as easy to identify as I would have thought, say, when I first started TA'ing back in the late 1990s. One reason is that there are different kinds of plagiarism:

1. Outright plagiarism. This is when a student downloads an entire paper or almost an entire paper, or quotes, for paragraphs at a time, from other sources without giving attribution. This is by far the easiest to identify and deal with. The student almost always knows that it's wrong and almost always accepts the punishment (usually an F for the course....but I hope to write later why I am uneasy with zero-tolerance policies, even for instances as egregious as this).

2. Outright plagiarism of material assigned for the course. This occurs most often when a student quotes from a textbook assigned for class without citing the textbook. It's plagiarism and it's pretty bad, but does it really deserve an F for the course?

3. Taking things from another source--usually wikipedia or encarta or sparknotes or Encyclopedia Briannica online--and paraphrasing slightly, without any citation. These situations are really murky. It's "obviously" plagiarism, but it does represent some effort to understand the material besides merely copying from another source. I'm not convinced all students, or at not all Freshman college students, even realize this is plagiairism.

What to do?

What I learned from teaching, part 3

1. When it doubt, assume that a student's question or suggestion is sincere.

I'm not here talking about accepting excuses for tardiness or late papers (although this might apply in those situations). I'm talking specifically about suggestions that students make about the course or questions they have about the content of the course. Once I had a student suggest that the students grade each other's papers, instead of me grading them. I dismissed that suggestion out of hand and in a way that probably hurt her feelings. As it turns out, it would have been unworkable and probably not the best way to go about papers in that particular class. Still, I could've been nicer about appreciating her suggestion, because it was made in good faith.

Similar thing with questions. Students almost never ask questions unless they sincerely want an answer. (There are exceptions, to be sure, but in general, even something that seems obvious may not be obvious to the student.)


2. There is not such thing as 100% fair lateness/tardy/absent policy. No matter how hard you try, nothing you will do when it comes to exceptions to the course requirements is going to be completely fair to everyone in the class.

What I learned from teaching, part 2

My girlfriend, who's an excellent teacher in her own right, has offered another suggestion about teaching that I heartily endorse:

Sarcasm has no place in the classroom.

The few times I have used sarcasm in the classroom, I have always regretted it. It tends to alienate students, even those who aren't the object of the sarcasm. (I'm reminded of the Pink Floyd lyrics: "No dark sarcasm / In the classroom.")

As a corollary to this point, I'll say that sarcasm has no place in lectures about history. What I mean is, the historian, or teacher of history, should usually strive to present the topic without being sarcastic about the intentions of the historical actors involved.

For example, if I'm teaching about the so-called "Lochner-era" of the Supreme Court, the mantras of "the Court gave people the right to work extra long hours without overtime" (Lochner v. New York) or "the Court affirmed the right of people to be cheated in a lottery scheme" (I forget the case, but it came from the 1890s and had to do with a Louisiana based lottery) do not necessarily capture what the justices meant when they cast decisions based on "liberty of contract" doctrines. (For what it's worth, I realize that the notion of a "Lochner Era" court is a bit under dispute and a bit of a caricature; still, the use of sarcasm does nothing, in my mind, to expand critical thinking about the issue. Also, David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy is working on a book about the Lochner court, which I look forward to reading when it's out.)

The AAA all over again?

Jason Kuzinicki at Positiveliberty links to a post that suggests Congress's "cash for clunkers" program is reminiscent of some of the wasteful destruction of foodstuffs under FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Administration. I hadn't seen the connection before, but I think I see it now.

For those who aren't familiar with the program, here are the details: the federal government has promised to reimburse car buyers (indirectly through car dealers) who trade in their own gas-inefficient cars for newer, more gas-efficient cars. Apparently, the program has been a "huge success" (although there is some dispute about it: see this post from the Volokh Conspiracy) and the original $1 billion or so allocated for the purpose has all been spent and Congress is busy trying to pass another law to allocate yet another $1 or $2 billion to the program.

The comparison with the AAA is that as the AAA destroyed food in order to drive up the price of food to help farmers, so this program is destroying cars in order to help out car dealerships and car companies.

Where the comparison breaks down, in my view, is that this program, even if the several billions sought are devoted to it, is not as far reaching as the AAA. (I'm not enough of an expert--in fact, I'm not an expert at all--on the AAA, but I wouldn't be surprised if the AAA was much more expansive....at the very least, Congress had created its own administration to oversee the program.)

Another point where comparison breaks down is that one of the stated justifications for the program and, presumably, one of the reasons why it was passed, was to provide for more environmental friendly cars and thereby help the environment. I don't think the AAA had such a goal (maybe I'm wrong....it wouldn't surprise me if the AAA tried to address such environmental concerns as the dustbowl....again, my ignorance is conspicuous.)

Most of my friends seem to cheerlead this cash for cars program, and mostly they harp on the supposed environmental benefits. There very well may be such benefits, and maybe the economy is helped also (the links above dispute that claim, but then again, the authors aren't necessarily sympathetic to government intervention in markets...at the same time, they're not knee-jerk reactionaries either).

But one thing is clear: the government is giving away tax money to subsidize the auto industry.

Food for Thought

I've stumbled across this very interesting article about what, according to the author, are the unthinking criticisms that "agri-intellectuals" level against modern farming. I'm still contemplating it, but it has made me think differently about certain things I had taken for granted when it comes to organic farming, "industrial agriculture," and factory farming of animals. His concluding paragraph:

But farmers have reasons for their actions, and society should listen to them as we embark upon this reappraisal of our agricultural system. I use chemicals and diesel fuel to accomplish the tasks my grandfather used to do with sweat, and I use a computer instead of a lined notebook and a pencil, but I'm still farming the same land he did 80 years ago, and the fund of knowledge that our family has accumulated about our small part of Missouri is valuable. And everything I know and I have learned tells me this: we have to farm "industrially" to feed the world, and by using those "industrial" tools sensibly, we can accomplish that task and leave my grandchildren a prosperous and productive farm, while protecting the land, water, and air around us.

Although I'm still processing the article, I can say I have learned a lesson that I've had to learn and relearn several times in my life: I should try to get the facts before opining on whatever it is I have opinions about.

A. E. Houseman, Immortality, and the Hapless Student Straw Man

In my English class when I was a senior in high school, we read Perrine's Sound and Sense, an introduction to poetry.

One of the poems in that book we had to read was A. E. Houseman's "Is My Team Plowing." The premise of that poem is this: a man has died and is wondering if everyone is so distraught at his death that, functionally, all the people he knew could not get on with their lives. We see in the poem, however, that everything pretty much is going on well without him. In other words, the lesson I take from the poem is that the world will go on without us when we leave it. (While there may be other, closer interpretations of that poem, I believe that mine is plausible and readily apparent from the poem.)

In the Perrine volume, at the end of the poem is a set of questions for classroom discussions. The gist of one of the questions was: "One student wrote a paper saying that "Is My Team Plowing?" proved that A. E. Houseman believed in immortality (in fact he did not). Why was that student wrong?" I don't have the book in front of me, but this quotation represents the gist of the question, along with the knowing assurance that A. E. Houseman did not believe in immortality.

I find this pedagogical technique quite objectionable because it appears to do one of two objectionable things. First, it takes what might superficially be a "plausible misinterpretation" of the poem and makes it into a straw man by positing that some student came up with it. The misinterpretation is "plausible" in the sense that one who has little experience in reading poetry and who gave the poem only a cursory reading might indeed come up with a notion that it endorses the idea of immortality. For example, one of the speakers in the poem is the dead person, speaking from beyond the grave. A superficial reading might lead to the conclusion that the poem evinces some belief in immortality.

The second objectionable thing that this pedagogical technique might be doing is that it takes a real-life effort by a student. This student probably sincerely believed that his or her "plausible misinterpretation" of the poem really proved what he or she thought it did. That student was probably wrong, but the effort was likely sincere.

I think these approaches are objectionable because they set up a "straw man" that compel the discussants to determine what the poem is not, rather than what the poem is. It also sets up the specter of a hapless student who just bumbles along misinterpreting the assignments. One plausible effect of setting up this straw man is to discourage other people who are students from even volunteering their own observations on the poem. (I say "plausible effect" because I don't believe it's an inevitable result, but it is something counterproductive that may come from such a way of framing the question.)

Besides these two approaches that I find objectionable, there is another point about the discussion question that rubs me the wrong way. That's the assurance that Houseman did not believe in immortality. I know very little about the guy and have, indeed, read probably only three of his poems--"Is My Team Plowing?," "Terence, this is stupid stuff," and "To an Athlete Dying Young"--and none of these seem to prove to me that Houseman believed in immortality. I'm also willing to accept that he may have written extensively on the subject, declaring on every page his disbelief in immortality and may have so confided in everyone he met. So far so good.

But we really can't know. Maybe he was lying to everyone, or maybe he had some sort of deathbed conversion.

Or maybe his poetry and other writings evinced a train of thought, a logic, that, if taken to its rightful conclusion, might demonstrate that he did indeed believe in immortality, in spite of himself. Maybe the very act of writing--putting one's words to paper--reflects a belief in the permanence of life or of one's self.

It's this latter possibility that I wonder about. I don't really care whether Houseman believed in immortality. (I am also personally wary of arguments that try to tease a meaning out of one's writings that is contrary to the writer's expressed beliefs.) But perhaps the (possibly fictitious) student wrote what he or she did on the belief that "Is My Team Plowing?" betrayed some understanding and belief in immortality. Maybe that student realized full-well that Houseman was mocking a disposition common to many of us, namely, that the world will be so sad at our passing that it will think long and hard before resuming its rotation along its axis. Maybe the student, being a student and not a fully developed intellectual, may not have had the tools to write clearly or may not have yet learned to make his or her argument precise enough to be argued with, but it's possible the student was sincere and deserved better than this flip criticism.