Failure and Resilience

These are the code words these days.  You've probably read the recent article by Jessica Bennet in the New York Times, about an initiative at Smith to help students deal with failure.  It's an interesting article, with discussion of not only Smith's initiative, but several other schools' work in the same area.

The basic idea is that the students at these schools have never really experienced failure, and then when they get into college and don't do as well at something (they're talking B-land grades and such as failure), the students have difficulty dealing with it.  First recognized, according to the article, at Stanford and Harvard as "failure deprived," these students basically haven't fallen down and picked themselves up enough to shrug off the next fall.

The article talks about programs at Stanford, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, U of Pennsylvania, U of Texas-Austin, UCLA, and Davidson College, all of which encourage students to try things and be willing to fail at them.

I gather from Meansomething (in a facebook conversation, mostly) that there's so much pressure and competition to get into the right college that High School students are being taught to focus primarily on what they're good at, and not to try as much new stuff that they're not already good at.  That way, they get to show how wonderful they are on transcripts and stuff, and don't have to risk having that poor grade in [subject they aren't already good at] to hold them back.

I guess I have a couple issues with the idea.

First and foremost: The schools listed above pretty much are all way elite.

NWU isn't elite.  But I've had relatively few students in my time at NWU who have emotional difficulty when they fail.  Usually, they mess up on something, get a little upset, and either work harder, figure out how to do better, or get over it and mess up some more.  If the colleges told their admissions offices that they want students who've demonstrated an ability to fail and deal productively with that failure, they'd get a different population of students, probably including some like my own.  Those schools can change their perceived problem if they decide they're willing to risk admitting students who've demonstrated failure and resilience.

In fact, I'm guessing their really exciting students have already experienced lots of failure and recovery.

Which brings me to my second point: if you're doing anything difficult and working to your capacity at it, you're failing a fair bit.  That goes for athletes, musicians, scientists, humanists, everyone.

I bet every single day, Yo-Yo Ma fails at something in his cello practice/playing.  His failure's probably pretty much at the level of not playing quite as he wants a given piece, or missing a fingering slightly, or whatever.  But he's a darned good cellist, and yet working at his level, challenging himself, he probably fails a lot.  And then he practices more, and in performance, most of us wouldn't hear the slight imperfection that he knows is there at some point or other.

The same goes for athletes.  How many incompletions did Joe Montana throw.  A lot.  But he also threw some amazing, beautiful passes.

A high school musician who's really doing their thing is failing a lot, and then practicing some more, and dealing with it.  The same with an athlete.

But if all the science students are doing is cook book science, following recipes in the chem lab and getting an A for following directions well, then they aren't really doing science, and they aren't really working at a high enough level.  Of course, there's a point at which chem students have to learn basic stuff without being in danger of blowing up their schools.  But somehow, they aren't doing in their field what the musician or athlete is doing in theirs; they aren't figuring out what's been done before, a bazillion times, on just some level for themselves.

The musician playing a C major scale isn't doing something new.  And they should have guidance.  And yet, they're doing something cognitively different than following a chem class recipe book, no?

That Girl Scout who plans a camping trip, even with adult guidance, is doing the cognitive work, and may fail on some level, in fact, probably will.  And hopefully, she'll learn from that failure.

I'm guessing the really exciting students at Stanford or wherever, are the ones who've done something like music, athletics, scouting, started a business or community project, failed, and figured out how to go on again.

And I'm guessing the ones who are less resilient, less able to deal with failure, are the ones who've done really good work at cook book chemistry (or whatever).  They've followed directions really well, and worked hard to do things just right.  And they did things just right.

So how do high schools teach students to fail?  Or would it be enough for colleges to look for signs of successful failures when they're admitting students?

I'm not picking on chemistry, but it seems to me, from my own experience, that beyond learning basic lab safety and procedures, I didn't do much chemistry in my chemistry labs, not in two years in high school, not in several years in college.  And I don't know if there's a way that could be done differently, since there's so much pressure to teach large numbers of students in lab classes.  But somehow, in biology, we did little actual experiments, often trying to grow some plant with this or that different condition, and sometimes, they failed.

Can students productively fail assignments/exercises in my courses?  There's certainly lots of room for students to fail at their research projects on some level and still get an A on the project for failing well.  (When they really try to learn something and run into a brick wall, and learn something else, for example.)  But other work?

What about you?  Did you fail and learn from it early?  Or no?

Do you teach students how to fail?

***

Learning violin is taking me to whole new levels of failure these days.  But Strings says that she's never satisfied with her performance at a concert, even though other folks don't even realize she's made a mistake or something.  She just has expectations about the level of playing she wants, and doesn't (she says) ever quite get there fully.

The good news is that I'm improving on violin by failing and working through difficulties.

Two Good Things!

We had a big poetry reading last night, the main rule of which was that the poem/passage not be in Modern English.

So, I read a passage, and had a prop, and I got a big laugh reading about a beheading.  I also had audience participation (thwack, thud, splat, and ewww were the audience participation parts).

It seems wrong to get a big laugh about a beheading, but it was the prop.  (I balled up a green jacket, put a hat on it, taped on two blue circles for eyes, and used red ribbon for blood, and had a colleague roll it out at the appropriate moment.)

I've gotten several congratulatory comments today about the reading.  So, that's good.

***

I have a review coming up next year, a big one for me, but I'm on sabbatical, so I arranged with a colleague to do a class visit this semester, so that there's a fresh report available.  Today was the only day that really worked in the past couple of weeks.

My colleague came to my seminar class, where we did final revision work on their seminar papers.  It can't have been especially exciting, but it was good.  First, every single student was really engaged in working on their papers.  And they had useful, good questions that showed their engagement.  And, at the end, most every student said the session had been really useful to them.

We basically worked through the sorts of things one should work through to fine tune an essay: thesis, intro, topic sentences, organization, checked citations, definitions, and so forth.  The thing is, most students are busy and won't make themselves double check this stuff (because they think they've already checked it by writing the paper), but it's really useful to do.

My colleague had a great suggestion to make it even better, and was overall very complimentary about the session.  I was a little nervous in that way one is sometimes, so I'm glad and relieved it went well.

It's one of the things I really wanted to take care of this semester for fall.  Check.

***

Just over one week of classes left!  I have a bad case of spring fever and sabbaticalitus, but I'm done with grading until next week, at least.  I do have to work on my Kalamazoo paper a lot more, but that's do-able, I think.

Home Stretch

We have two more weeks of classes, then finals, and then, yes, it's spring.  For real.

I had a great time at Birding School, and learned a LOT, which was wonderful.  Such fun!

In the meanwhile, I have to finish grading a stack to hand back later today, prep for peer revision stuff in my senior seminar today, prep to teach Persepolis, and yes, work on my Kalamazoo paper.  (I'm guessing Kalamazoo is really convenient for folks who are finishing up right now; they have a week or two without classes to work on papers, then a weekend trip, and then summer begins for real for them.  Not quite so convenient for me, alas.  But I'm looking forward to it.)

I had my seminar students turn in drafts in the discussion area (in groups) on Sunday.  Two were late (they turned it in after midnight when it was due at 5 or 6pm), but everyone turned one in.

One of the late students wrote on their turn in note that they don't usually do drafts, just write and turn things in.  What they turned in was 6 pages (the assignment is 12-15).  So I'm hoping that they'll get some good, critical feedback and take revision more seriously than usual.

Teaching Peer Revision

This coming week, my senior seminar students will turn in their essay drafts (to our course management system, in the discussion area, where they're grouped into small groups), and then the next class session, they'll do peer revision.

So, taking Earnest English's suggestion, we spent a little time today reflecting on (in writing) and then talking about what made peer revision effective for them, and what made it ineffective.

My students suggested that really reading the draft carefully was vital.  yes.

Another suggested that they worry less about hurting feelings and more about giving real, honest criticism and feedback.  yes.

Another suggested that they give feedback in terms of questions, rather than directions.  (So more, a "I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here, can you explain it in different words?" than a "do this" sort of response.)  yes.

And one suggested that real, full drafts were much better to work with as revisers.  YES!


And we talked about problems, which mostly came down to people not reading carefully, or focusing on grammar rather than bigger picture stuffs.


I've asked them to give their peers one or two things to think about when they submit their drafts, so that they'll get the most helpful response possible. 


What do you do to help your students have a better peer revision experience?

Wild Dash to the Finish

How much do you work with undergrads on research/writing strategies?  How do you do it?


It's that time of the semester when we're all dashing to the finish.  We have five more weeks here.

In my Intro to Lit course, students turn in their critical essay next week.  I held open office hours last week, before leaving for SAA, and got some students, but this week I've had bunches.  So I'm in on a non-teaching day, holding office hours, hoping to help some more. 

In my senior seminar, I've been trying to be more proactive about the seminar paper stuff.  Just after break, I took a class session and we did a bunch of freewriting and other brainstorming activities about paper ideas.  Then students turned in a basic paper idea, and I responded to that.

In our meeting before I went to SAA, I spent time talking about strategies for writing a good paper, figuring out what to say, using research, and so on.  And while I was gone, I set them to get started, with the suggestion that rereading was a good start.

They seemed to appreciate talking about strategies.  I hope they weren't just BSing.

Yesterday, we spend time talking about what they'd accomplished, where they were stuck, and tried to help each person with some suggestions.  I also told them about my Kalamazoo paper, and that I'd be working on a paper along with them.

My plan going forward is to spend some time each week talking about progress and problems, and trying to help solve the problems.

And yes, I need to work on my Kalamazoo paper, too!

Here's wishing us all good work!

Sympathy for my Students

My violin teacher told me that she has her college students tell her something new about the composers of their pieces.  I'm guessing this is to get them to look up the composer and read, say, a Wikipedia entry, which would at least give them a basic intro to period, place, and the composer's history.  At any rate, I've been doing this.  For some it's easier than others.

According to Wikipedia, Bach may not be buried in Bach's grave.  Neat.

And JB Lully, the super famous French Baroque composer wasn't born French?  Nope, according to Wikipedia, he was born Giovanni Battista Lulli in Florence, and became a French subject in 1661.

This week, though, my new piece is by Beethoven.  What new can I possible learn about Beethoven to tell my teacher?  (Lots would be new to me, but not to her.)

So I decided instead of stopping at Wikipedia, I'd look up some scholarly articles.  Now, I start with a huge advantage over my students there, because I know how to limit the searches and such.  But still, I looked at articles that were way, way beyond anything I could understand (because I don't know the theory stuff, especially). 

And that's what happens to my students all the time, especially when they look at specialized articles in, say, English lit.

So, how do we get students to begin to read and understand those articles? 

***

I was reading a student's Shakespeare paper today, and it cites a bunch of sources that sounded suspect, so I started looking, and the suspect sounding ones were mostly papers by undergrads, put up on the web by their schools (it looked like), with one other looking like it was someone doing research for an SCA type group (not bad for what it was, but not what my student should have been depending on).

Research Meetings

My writing students are working on a research project.  Basically, the writing course is prescribed, and this is a sort of lit review type project.  So we faculty folks tend to do lots of conferencing for these.

We spent last week working on developing ideas about what to research, looking at a variety of sources, talking with a librarian, and so forth.  We read several sample projects from previous students.

And this morning I had my first conference meeting of the week.  The student came in and said she wanted to show me her outline.  So I asked her about what she'd read.  She hadn't actually read even the two things she found in class last week.  But somehow, she was going to make an outline. 

What are they teaching students in high school?  It's like many of them think research is a matter of having an opinion, writing an outline, writing the paper, and then looking for support for your opinion. 

I did try to argue against that as a strategy last week, but obviously, I didn't do a good enough job.

Waiting for the next student, and hoping that one has actually read their research a bit.

Reorganizing the Seminar?

I'm teaching a senior seminar on Race in/and early modern drama this spring, and spending some time looking at a variety of critical readings.  I've already ordered the plays, and have some documentary stuff ready to go.

Traditionally, I've organized senior seminars like this:

First few weeks: theory, criticism, then a play or lit text, historical texts

Second few weeks: more theory, criticism, plays!

Third few weeks: start students on research project, plays!

Final few weeks: lots of work on research project, a play or lit text


In some ways, this works really well.  reading theory/criticism early sets the agenda, and then we're well prepared to talk about plays.

BUT, because I start them on their research projects early (and they tend to write good projects as a result), they usually write their research projects on one of the texts we read in the second few weeks.

I'm wondering what would happen if we read some plays fast in the first few weeks, then in the second few weeks, read theory, criticism, other historical texts, and then in the third three weeks, go back to the plays in more depth, and such?

How do you organize courses when you want students to produce a strong research project at the end?

New Assignment?

Like most instructors, I'm constantly trying to think of better assignments for various courses.  This time around, I'm thinking about my junior level Canterbury Tales course.  I'm quite happy with the word paragraph assignment that Sisyphus (at Academic Cog) shared with me a while back.  That gets students writing regularly, focusing closely on the text, and makes up about 5-7 pages of writing for the semester. 

But I'm looking for a longer assignment, one that will challenge students, but not be out of reach.  The thing is, they're learning Middle English in the course, and our library resources are limited, and I'm not a real medievalist, so I don't feel like asking them to do a full on research paper is right.  When I did, some while ago, they tended to either find one tiny idea and then look for critical essays to support that idea, or they'd find a critical essay and like that idea, and try to rework it.  In any case, they weren't really researching anything new.  (That contrasts with my senior seminar students, who can usual do something new because I tend to teach several less canonical texts, and they can find new things to think and argue about those texts.)

I had a conversation not too long ago with our honors guy, about a student's potential project, and he had an idea of asking a student to find a critical essay and then read everything the paper cited, and then write a paper talking about the critical conversation represented in the original essay.  Now that seemed like a great idea, and I started thinking about it in case the student wants to do a project, and then I thought maybe that would work for the longer project for the course.  So yesterday, I started looking at crucial essays written in the past ten years about the various tales, and I realized that it's probably unrealistic to expect my students to do that sort of project.  For one thing, most of the critical essays cite 40 or so other texts, many of them medieval, some Latin, and many very theoretical (Derrida, for example).  They looked like really interesting essays, but my students just aren't strong enough readers of criticism to work with them very well.

I'm thinking of using one of them, though, to work with students on reading critical essays, and then building an assignment from there.  In the past, I've given students a list of topics and had them do basic lit reviews, and I think I might go with that.

I'd love to hear about what sorts of assignments people give for lit students to help them build towards real research skills.

Back to the Fifties

My students are working on a project where they pose a question having something to do with our class, and then try to find an essay published in a peer reviewed journal that helps them understand the question or an answer to some extent.  They read and write an analysis of the essay.  It's a stepping stone (see, I chose a different metaphor) along the way to other research.

We're talking through the questions now, and I'm struck again (as every time I've done this) by how often their questions feel very "fifties" to me, where "fifties" means that it feels critically old fashioned.

They tend to want to know if Hamlet is really crazy, for example, or if Lady Macbeth had kids.  These aren't bad questions, but they feel out of step with questions most critics these days are asking and pursuing.

My goal is for them to be able to find a useful essay, so I help them modify and look for stuff, so things usually turn out okay.

Some of them are carrying over from high school questions, it seems.

Others, of course, are asking much more fun (from my point of view) questions.

What sorts of questions do your students ask?  How do the questions change across course levels?  (These are first and second year students, mostly, so they really are early in their development as college students.)

Survey Says?

I've been working on a project this fall with a student, building off a project he did for a class last spring, which looks at how high school teachers do a specific sort of thing.

We're using a survey, and then following up with interviews if folks are willing.

You know what this means.  Yes, the IRB.  This is a computer survey, so we aren't even worried about possible paper cuts, but of course these things need to get done.  (And while I may sound flip, because I think the risk of harm from our survey is laughably small, I think it's vital that researchers treat human subjects well and with real respect.  The thing is, I think we're held to a higher standard than the people who make you sign a thing when you enter a clinic/hospital saying that they can do anything they like with whatever they find, and if you don't like it, they won't treat you at the clinic/hospital.  We HAVE to include a statement [and take it seriously] that our subjects can opt out without any coercion.)

The student has been doing most of the leg work, with me providing guidance, which is how it should be.  He's done background reading (much of which I found and read over the summer to figure out if such a project might be useful and interesting), done some searching in high school text books, did the IRB certification (I did a re-up on mine, too), and put together the survey.

And then we submitted it, and waited.  And the IRB folks sent it back with some suggested revisions.  So we made those, and resubmitted, and waited.  And then we got to do some more revisions (all of which were helpful), and clarifications.  Then we got the go-ahead.

But then the survey test email was a mess.  It turned out that the way it displayed letterhead made it seem like there was something really bad on the email, so it wouldn't download the letterhead, and therefore also the letter, without a special click.  And since no one is crazy enough to special click something they've received from crazy people at some university, we knew that wouldn't work.

Happily, the student worked with the IT folks here (who are wonderful in all sorts of ways, and great and helpful at solving problems), and voila, it worked, and now it's sent out.

So now we wait to find out!

Fill Out All the Forms

I've been working on a small internal grant, and just finished submitting it.

It's been frustrating.  Not because the project is frustrating, since it's not at that point.  And not because I've done some procrastination thing, since I haven't.

It's been frustrating because the forms are totally non-intuitive to me, and I don't use them well.  (Look, I already whined about the forms at the beginning.)

And it's been frustrating because the forms need to be "routed" electronically in certain ways, and the first way is through my chair (who is supportive and fine and all), and my chair is going out of town during the actual submission period, so I need to submit it early to get it through that step.

Anyway, I'd written the description and narrative stuff, and wanted to talk to my chair about it (since it's sort of her field, though not in a bad way).  But then zie was busy, and so couldn't see me until the next day.  The zie and I went through it, and zie liked it, but had a lot of good revision suggestions.  So I made those, and then went to talk to the writing center guy, and he did the same, and then I revised again.

And then I filled out all the budget stuffs, and finally, hit submit.

And nothing.

Now the form says that you should get an immediate email from the grant office and to let them know if you don't, but of course it was late afternoon, so the grant office was closed.

I sent them an email, and let my chair know.  And my chair sent an email to the grant headperson, but zie is on vacation.  (Which I knew, because someone had advised me to go ask hir to give me feedback on the grant, and I'd called to see if I could do that, but the admin assistant said zie wasn't available, and not to worry because it would be fine, blah blah blah.)

So this morning, I tried again to submit, and nothing but the computer busy thing.

So I called the admin assistant, and zie walked me through, and it turns out that if you click from the "work in progress" area, it doesn't work.  No, you have to click in from the "my work" area.

Doesn't that seem counterintuitive?  I want the work in progress, because I'm working on progressing.

And so finally, it worked.

Anyway, I'm excited about this project, and think it will be interesting.  I'll probably try to do it even without the grant, but the grant would pay for a student collaborator, and that would be good!  (It's a SOTL type thing, that grew out of a paper the student did.)

Cross your fingers for me!

Filling Forms

I started the process of filling out a grant form this morning.  I signed onto the newish system.  Then I tried to sign my collaborating student on.  It seemed to work, except it would kick me back and the collaborator slot would be empty.  So I tried again.  And again. 

And then I called the grant office, and the very nice person there tried, and tried again, tried something else, and then said she's call the person who's paid to handle computer forms.

Bleargh.

I find grant forms pretty darned stressful anyway, but the newish ones are just horrible.

We're using these newish ones because we're too cheap to pay the royalties to use the sort of forms we used to use.  I wonder how much the difference in cost is, especially with pretty much every office having to set up new forms in some way and then troubleshoot them, and so on.

Of course, the office that decided not to pay the royalties doesn't pay me, because I was working on my own time this morning.  So they just don't care.  Or maybe they're happy because they aren't paying and who cares about faculty summers.


Anyway, this grant is due in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to get started because I'm lousy at grant writing sorts of stuff. 

I think this could be a very cool project, potentially useful, even.

Wish me luck!


I did get an email back telling me that the form had been fixed.  Now to write a narrative of the project.  Oh, joy.

Thinking About Teaching Research Again

I'm up this year, after a break of a couple years, to teach our intro graduate research class. I've taught it before with fair success (or so students said during their graduation assessment interviews: things like the class being useful and such), but I want to do it way better.

So, I thought I'd think out loud a little about it. Dr. Virago, over at Quod She (is there anyone who doesn't get a silly grin on their face just at that title?) has hinted that she may do a post on how she teaches her research class. I'd also be interested in other people's experiences, both as students and as teachers.

Part of the difficulty of doing a research course in English is that we don't tend to share a single methodology in the way that a lot of fields do. For the most part, we're working with unique stuff (a novel, a play, a poem), and we take all sorts of approaches. In broad terms, we tend to approach things historically and theoretically, sometimes overlapping those lots, sometimes little. The difficulty is that knowing historical and cultural context about any given era takes a long time; knowing much about every possible context?

And it's not just knowing historical and cultural stuff, it's knowing how to get at that stuff in a given field. I know there are ways to get at LOADS of early 20th century periodicals, and that it's a really interesting project for students to choose a periodical and read a whole year of it, paying attention not only to the articles, but also to advertising and such. But I have no idea where I'd begin to look for those periodicals, especially at our university. (Okay, I know I'd go to our librarians and to my colleagues who do early 20th century lit, but on my own, nope.) Part of our long apprenticeship in English involves learning to access stuff, learning to read it (in Latin, secretary hand, whatever), and learning to interpret it. It matters, for example, that we call the "Geneva Bible" the Geneva Bible, and that we have some ideas about what that means to readers.

So, I gather, most folks teaching research make some choices: teach broadly, and hope to know enough to introduce students to lots of areas. Teach within one's own field, and hope that the students gain enough in that field to learn on their own in their own field. Then there's the added problem of actually having the necessary resources at my school (thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for EEBO!).

And theory is just as, or perhaps even more, difficult!

So, the question to the internet: If you've had experience with a research course, what's the most important thing a student should learn in a research course? What are the best ways to get a student there?

What projects give the most bang for the buck?