One of the big difficulties in transitioning from graduate school into the professorial ranks is, obviously enough, managing scholarship and scholarly productivity. Publish or perish. Even at “teaching institutions” such as my own, the expectations for scholarly production are–as I believe they should be–high. Teaching and service are the day-to-day expectations, and somewhere along the way assistant professors in every discipline are expected to produce scholarship.
Most of the advice I have received about starting a tenure-track job has been along the lines of “don’t expect to get anything [scholarship] done your first year.” And, “just figure the place out, then start cranking over the summer.”
Well, my type-A personality simply can’t abide. I want to get cranking now, especially because a lot of article ideas that I had fermenting in the swamp that is my brain went unattended for too long while I was finishing my dissertation. Those ideas need to climb out of the swamp and into the world, even if they turn out to be hideous beast creatures. [Revision is the cure for the beast creatures that crawl out of my brain, lots of revision.] So, these first two weeks of the semester, I’ve been writing a lot. And I’m very happy about that.
But I know that such enthusiasm and dedication can lag. A new friend/colleague, Mary Byrnes, and I agreed upon an ambitious wager in an effort to force ourselves to be productive this year. Mary is in her second year of her appointment here at Western Carolina University. I drew up a contract outlining the parameters of the wager, which I have posted, partly to force us both to hold to the bet. Liver Mush is the motivating force within the wager.
You can rest assured that the results of the wager will be posted here on 3 x 3 in Cullowhee around Memorial Day 2011.
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently asked, as it periodically does,”Should Colleges Do More To Teach Students About Plagiarism?“ The Chronicle is a great resource, but they’re pretty good at hyping some fear too. (Note: The Chronicle’s blog, Profhacker, is awesome by the bucketful, and if you aren’t reading it daily, you should check it out. Plug it into your RSS feed.)
But I (and a lot of other rhetoric/composition folks I know) am not thrilled to witness more plagiarism hand-wringing. Like most universities, my institution requires instructors to paste a verbatim academic integrity statement into their policy statements and/or syllabi. That’s fine. Students should know about academic integrity, and practice it. And of course we should teach them the various conventions of citation–which are far broader than MLA and APA, which, honestly, are useless to many first-year rhet/comp students, even over the course of their collegiate careers. We should teach the broader conventions, and spirit, of citation.
Beyond that, I think plagiarism might be more the instructor’s responsibility than the student’s. I’m certainly not the first person to suggest this. Here’s what I mean though:
There are always students who will cheat and seek an alternate route, for whatever reason. But I think these students are extremely rare, more rare than we think. And even if they are more common than I think they are, those negative impulses that might compel some students to plagiarize are very easily short-circuited.
Write creative assignments. A well written assignment, that monkeys with the conventions of typical rhet/comp essay requirements, is virtually impossible to plagiarize, at least in part because good assignments would make plagiarism attempts so ridiculously obvious that even the boldest plagiarists would be unlikely to make an attempt at plagiarism in the first place. I have in mind the types of assignments, for example, that my graduate school colleague Jim Brown (now of Wayne State) assigned in his Anthologics rhetoric class.
Creative assignment design and re-design not only reduces the opportunity and likelihood of plagiarism, but it’s likely to keep students and instructors more engaged. In terms of self-interest, I feel that creative assignment design, which I attempt to practice, not only hijacks students’ opportunities to plagiarize, but makes grading a hell of a lot more fun for me. And creative assignments can and should be every bit as rigorous as more conventional assignments. Ideally, they can be even more rigorous, as it’s often harder to complete an assignment that doesn’t rest upon tired, well-known academic conventions.
When plagiarism cases come up, I wonder if it is at least partially my responsibility, perhaps an indication that my assignment may have invited plagiarism. Of course, there will always be students who try to take a short cut. But perhaps we should be asking, Should Colleges Do More to Teach Professors About Lousy Assignment Design? And I ask that question as an untenured assistant professor. Just something to let your brain-teeth gnaw on.
Inspiration for the title of the post from the Cracker song, Guarded by Monkeys (click for YouTube video – I didn’t want to embed it).
Any academic is beset by some demanding time constraints. First and foremost, we must teach. For me, that means three classes a semester, two sections of ENGL 101 – Composition I, which is our first-year rhetoric course, and one section of ENGL 514 – Fundamentals of Teaching Composition, which is our graduate introduction to how to teach writing.
In case it’s of any use to other academics beginning their tenure track careers, I thought I would outline my schedule, which is rough and will inevitably have to adapt, but this is my attempt to juggle all of the demands that being a first-year, tenure track academic place upon me.
I tried to balance the interests of three primary concerns in coming up with this schedule: 1) adequate teaching prep time; 2) dedicated writing time, to keep up the publishing; and, 3) dedicated time off, when I’m absolutely not doing academic work.
I also worked in a couple of quirks, which may not appeal to others. For example, one of my writing days is Sundays, for several reasons. I know there’s no chance of a department meeting or other meeting coming up on a Sunday, so that day really can be dedicated writing time, always. Also, it allows me to have a weekday off, which is something I like for running errands and the like, or fishing in popular places when most other anglers have to be at work.
So, here’s my rough schedule for Fall 2010:
Sunday — Writing Day, at home
Monday — Off from School-Related Work
Tuesday — Teaching Prep and Teaching (2 undergrad sections)
Wednesday — Office Hours, Teaching Prep, on campus (if I get done early, writing)
Thursday — Office Hours, Teaching Prep, and Teaching (2 undergrad sections, 1 grad section)
Friday — Writing Day, on campus, U-Club for Happy Hour with fellow faculty
Saturday — Off from School-Related Work
Obviously, during heavy grading times some of the idealism of this schedule will become temporarily compromised, but I intend to stick to this as much as possible, and there’s plenty of time built in for the meetings that will inevitably come up. I’ll provide an update in a couple weeks outlining how well this is working out. Out of town weekend trips will also force me to shift the particulars every now and then as well.
If others feel like sharing their schedules, or simply how they manage their schedule and the interests of teaching and writing, which often compete with one another, please feel free to post your thoughts in the comments section.
*Someone already pointed out that I didn’t block off service time. I should have been more specific. I’m hoping that I will be able to take care of my service obligations on the Teaching Prep days, primarily because I have a great Dept Chair who, recognizing the difficulties of being a first year faculty member, has given me relatively limited service obligations. Though, I did get elected to a somewhat important committee this week, despite myself.*
**Someone pointed out grading. I take it as a given that on weekends when I’m grading (I will have five of them this semester), ain’t nothing but grading going to be happening.**
I’m very pleased to post a Kairos review of the Pedagogy Panel that I was on this past March at the College Composition and Communication Conference in Louisville. Paul Butler (U Houston) and TR Johnson (Tulane) did a wonderful job putting the panel together, and I was very pleased to be included in what seemed like, as Olinger observes in her review, an important moment in the contemporary renaissance of interest in style within the discipline of rhetoric.
The review is a little more sparse than I would prefer, but provides an excellent account of the day, and a few links to the Prose Style Workshop I taught last fall at UT Austin.
And special thanks to Andrea Olinger of the University of Illinois UC for taking the time to write her thoughtful review.
I still have a lot of posts to catch up on–posts about RSA, as well as about the experience of starting a tenure track job. The whole new job thing is even more overwhelming than I imagined, but going well. For the time being though, I have a more instrumental post.
A UT Austin colleague and I have proposed a panel for Austin’s (in)famous South-by-Southwest Interactive conference, titled Folkways These Days: Crafty Knowledge in Digital Networks. Please vote for the panel! Only your votes will get us into the Interactive conference. So, PLEASE VOTE EARLY AND OFTEN!
You will need to register on the SXSW Panel Picker site in order to vote, but it only takes a quick second to register. And, as they used to say in the Bartles and Jaymes ads, “thanks for your support.” We’re pretty confident that our panel will be better than a wine cooler though.
I’ll begin posting more frequently and more thoroughly soon. Right now I have a new institution to orient myself to and some syllabi to write.
