posted 2008/02/11 at 20:38
In a lot of the business classes I took as an undergraduate, I would constantly run into these questions on tests where the wording of the questions and answers just completely threw me off. Some of the questions were missing vital information, some of the answers weren't very specific, and a lot of them used hedge words that made it nearly impossible for me to be confident with whatever answer I chose. Given that these were in classes where I was one of over a hundred students, and given how my teachers in these classes were adjuncts who were always short and abrupt in their dealings with students, it seemed foolish to go up during a test to ask for clarification. I tried asking for clarification a couple of times when I got these questions wrong, and the answers I got back were just slightly more polite rephrasings of "that's just not the correct answer" without any guidance as to what the correct answer was.
I always suspected that these instructors were just using test questions that had been prepared for them by the textbook company, but it was only about a month ago that I actually came upon one of these "test banks" when I got one along with the textbook for the business writing class I'm teaching this semester. Maybe it's because I'm a word junkie with a knack for finding all kinds of different ways to interpret words, or maybe it's because I'm so overly cautious about everything, but I can't figure out why these questions are written with such nebulous prompts and answers. Worse yet, I'm reading these test questions right after reading the corresponding chapters in the book, and I'm making notes on what I consider to be the important, overriding themes of the chapters, and then the test bank turns around and asks questions about some obscure statistic buried in the middle of a relatively unimportant paragraph. I don't know the process through which these questions are vetted and selected, but it seems really screwed up to me.
I'm not saying that test banks don't have a place in teaching, but looking back on my own days as a student I can now see just how they contribute to the laziness of some teachers. I can now look back on the tests I took in the Introduction to Business class I was in my first full-time semester, and the test bank questions literally look exactly like my instructor's tests were formatted. The instructor (a first-time adjunct who only lasted one more semester and who was almost universally despised by his students) must have just cut out the answer row from the test bank questions, copied that for the test, then filled out the answers on a Scantron sheet without even thinking about the appropriateness or quality of the questions. (He also taught from Powerpoint presentations that were obviously created by the same textbook company.) Being on the other side of the equation now, I understand that coming up with relevant, informative classes and methods of assessing what the students have learned is a difficult process, and yes, I think test banks are useful for instructors to have. Looking back on my own education, though, it seems like a lot of the instructors I had just took the Powerpoints and the test banks provided by the textbook manufacturers, talked for an hour and a half straight twice a week, and put little, if any, thought into just what they wanted students to learn and how best to help them learn those things. How can instructors expect their students to take the time to read and learn all of these things when they won't take more time to assess their progress than just running a bunch of Scantron sheets through a machine?
posted 2008/02/03 at 18:27
Someone has yet to explain to me the allure I've found in the past two years' Puppy Bowl broadcasts on Animal Planet. I'm not a dog person in the slightest, and I never watch Animal Planet any other time of the year. (We get enough animals coming around here to eat the food we leave out that I don't need to go to television to get my fill of animals.) There's something about the Puppy Bowl that just keeps me watching, though, and not just because there's nothing else on television right now besides you-know-what. Getting people to tune into the Puppy Bowl instead of the Super Bowl would be an interesting countercultural project, although I have a feeling it would attract more people who disliked teams in the game than people who wanted to make any kind of grand statement against football or the Super Bowl teams. Hey, I'll be the first to admit that if the Bengals were in the Super Bowl, I'd be watching that instead of the puppies.
All things being equal, though, I am going to flip over to the game every once in a while just to see how things are going there. My feelings about the Patriots and the Giants aside, the fact that the Patriots might go undefeated kind of adds an historical element to tonight's game that makes me feel obligated to catch at least parts of it. It's just one of those things that I feel a strange compulsion to watch, like Barry Bonds breaking the home run record or something along those lines. I imagine it's the same way for anyone with even rudimentary knowledge and interest in sports; when you know something historic may be about to happen, you feel obliged to keep track of it even if you have no personal investment in any of the players or teams. I guess it helps that in my favourite (North American) sport, the Red Wings have been the team breaking all of the records in recent years.
There's another reason I feel obliged to catch parts of the game, which is that I'm sure that my students will be watching as well. Even with as late at night as I teach, I'm sure some of them will still want to talk about the game, especially with Tom Brady being a University of Michigan player back in the day. I try to keep up with the music and television and such my students consume just in case I can find some teachable stuff in there (you'd be surprised how much of my class I devoted to stuff from Chappelle's Show back when I taught at UT), and although I doubt I'll find much to teach from in the Super Bowl (especially since my students will be doing peer reviews Monday and Tuesday), maybe knowing a little about what happens in the game tonight will make me seem a little less dorky than what I normally come off as.
Labels: sports, teaching, work
posted 2007/12/31 at 04:04
I'm writing you now ... well, because I always do a "Famous Blue Raincoat" post every year, whether on here or someplace else. This is probably the worst year for me to be staying up to do this post, too, because not only is my schedule such that staying up this late is harder than it has ever been before (yeah, I'm getting old, thanks for asking), but in about four hours here we're going to have movers coming in to get all of the heavy stuff out of my sister and brother-in-law's room to move to their new apartment. Given that their room is right next to mine, I'm guessing that I've doomed myself to less than a full night's sleep here, and of course I don't want to sleep through the change to a new year tomorrow night even if the passage of calendar years has never really been my thing.
I haven't made any actual resolutions for the new year in some time -- I prefer to make resolutions on my birthday -- but I guess I still kind of have wishes for the upcoming year. More than the requisite health and good luck for myself and my friends and family, I'm hoping I can finally achieve some clarity regarding my job/school situation that I wrote about a month ago. I do feel good that I was entrusted with an extra class for this coming term, and I'd like to think that my prospects for finding a full-time teaching job are looking up, but I'm still dealing with nagging questions about whether I may regret not going for an additional degree (or possibly even two). I don't think that my mind and heart are still split so evenly as they were a month ago between work and more schooling, but between the time and money I'm looking at investing here, as well as my own confused wishes, I'm still hesitating to commit one way or the other. Given how the deadlines for some of the schools I've looked at are rapidly approaching, I can't afford to hesitate much longer.
I was hoping that this vacation would give me time to clear my head about that mess, but of course then I had to worry about clearing my head of a hundred pounds of mucus in addition to everything else. I'm only just now getting back to a resemblance of a normal life, and two weeks from today I'll be back in the classroom again. (I'll actually start teaching my online course before that, but I'm still not in the same frame of mind for that class as I am for the ones I teach in the flesh.) As I teach more and more classes here -- if I don't get a full-time position soon then I'd like to at least pick up additional classes at other nearby colleges -- figuring out my schedule becomes more and more complicated. I'm not quite at the point where I'll need to start keeping a daily calendar, but I'm getting closer, and I'm having to deal with more uncomfortable questions about just how I spend my time. Perhaps I won't be able to make these "Famous Blue Raincoat" posts for much longer.
Labels: personal, teaching, work
posted 2007/12/27 at 21:31
Given how little most of my online friends have been updating lately, I guess I don't feel quite so bad about not posting these past few days. Of course, they're probably away on family vacations celebrating the holidays, whereas I'm still trying to shake the last of this bug off. I'm finally starting to feel like myself again, and I think I should be resuming normal activities here. I still have about two weeks of vacation, so I should have a good chunk of time here to handle the things I was hoping to handle over break, just not as much time as I would have liked. I really hope I feel well enough to start exercising again soon here, though, because I have put on a bit of weight these past couple of weeks (thanks to the combination of holiday food and going off my diet), and I want to get it off as quickly as possible.
I'm still kind of getting caught up on a lot of things, but I wanted to mention a couple of big changes in my life lately. I'm not sure if I said something about this earlier or not, but I was originally scheduled to teach two sections of composition next semester, which was going to be my first time ever teaching multiple classes in a term. Well, near the end of the semester I got an e-mail from my boss, and he asked if I could take an online section of introductory business writing. (The wait list for the online sections already offered was so big that they needed to create an extra section for the overflow.) I've never taught online before, and generally prefer to teach in the flesh where the students can interact with one another and I can help guide their conversations, and I'm definitely more at home teaching composition than business writing, but I took the assignment anyway because it's going to be a challenge for me, and, well, I like challenges. It also means more money, and it'll mean more stuff to put on my CV.
This does, however, mean that my reading load over vacation suddenly went sky-high since I have to familiarize myself with the text for the business writing class, and it's a pretty darn big one. My book pile was getting high enough to start with, and of course it only got bigger after Christmas. (I asked for clothes and books for Christmas and wound up with more clothes than books, which under the circumstances may actually be a good thing. Oh, and none of you bought me anything off of my Amazon wishlist, so expect more whining when my birthday comes up in March.) In spite of that I still went out tonight and picked up Keith Olbermann's new book, and there are still a lot of books I want to get as soon as I can. I have no idea where I'm going to find the time for all this reading, but maybe I can try to get caught up on it here before the next term starts.
The other bit of big news is that my sister and brother-in-law finally got their own apartment. They started moving things over today, and I'm guessing it will take them a few more days to get fully moved, but the house is about to get quieter, and given the antagonistic relationship I've had with them lately that's kind of a good thing. The bad part, though, is that they're taking Spyder to their apartment, and while we'll be moving Skooter into the house after that, I don't like that it'll be that much harder to see Spyder now. I'm hoping that the fact that I've already been trusted with an extra class in just my second term at MCCC means that I'll get a tenure-track position there soon, so I can start making enough money to live on my own as well.
Labels: family, personal, teaching, work
posted 2007/11/05 at 20:08
Antioch College to Remain Open (antioch-college.edu)
As an alum of Antioch (even though I never graduated from there, Antioch considers anyone who completed any course credit there an alum due to the academic and financial difficulties involved in getting all the way to the final degree), this news brought a huge sigh of relief from me. Not only do I still feel incredibly strong ties to Antioch from my time there and how it influenced me, but Antioch's historical influence on this country from the sixties onward cannot be overstated. I didn't like how little coverage the decision to close Antioch got this past summer, but this story seems to have hit a couple of more newswires, at least. Just like Kucinich doesn't seem to get that much press even though he's one of the few Democrats out there who espouses traditional Democratic values, I have to wonder if the American "left" is trying to sweep Antioch and its historical importance under the rug because of their misguided grab of the political centre.
On that level, I'm happy. On a professional level, I have to admit that I'm kind of sad. I've been thinking about my future a lot lately -- I'm still happy with how things are going at MCCC, but I'm agonizing over some possibilities that lay ahead of me -- and teaching at Antioch would be a dream for me. If Antioch had closed for those four years, all the professors there would have had to have found other jobs, and starting with a "clean slate" in 2012 would have put me in a much better position to go in and snag a job there. Now, not only is the college staying open, but it's cutting services and jobs, which means it will be all the more unlikely that a teaching job there will open up any time soon. I realize this is kind of a selfish way of looking at this announcement, but Antioch is a tremendously special place for me and it feels like my chances of ever landing a job there have just took a huge downturn.
That being said, I would love to give money to the college now so that they can stay open for these next few years, but I am just in no condition to do that right now. I'm hoping that I can pick up a second class to teach this coming semester to increase my steady income, but until then my finances will be kind of tight. You know, there is this one son of a former music professor at Antioch (the professor before the one I studied under, Dr. John Rinehart) who still lives in Yellow Springs and is kind of flush with cash ... and it sounds like he's feeling a wee bit guilty for leading a generation of young people to think it's okay to drop n-bombs all over the place ... just a thought.
Labels: antioch, teaching, work
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