3 x 3 in Cullowhee

A lot of the students at my institution are painfully aware of the high price of tuition, which is one of many reasons that I am amazed when students miss excessive class sessions.  I recognize that in service courses, like Writing and Critical Inquiry, student interest in the class itself is generally less than in the classes they take for their majors.  But given the sacrifices many students here make to pay their tuition, I’m always amazed when they skip class repeatedly.

While students were working on an in-class writing exercise today, I decided to crunch some numbers for them.  Western Carolina University‘s current in-state full-time tuition is $3183.50 per semester.  So, I divided that by 4, because 12 credit hours is the minimum number of hours to be full-time as an undergrad, and thinking that most classes are 3 credit hours.  So, after dividing by 4 I come up with the number $795.86, which is essentially the price they’re paying for each class.  Then I divided that number by the number of times a class meets each semester, 45 for a three times weekly class, and 30 for a twice weekly class.  This gave me a pretty exact number of what students are paying in tuition per class meeting.  Excluding fees and housing costs, if a student is taking 12 credit hours at Western Carolina University, they are paying either $26.53 or $17.67 per class, respectively, depending upon whether the class meets two or three times a week.

If a student is taking more than 12 hours–which they should, because that’s where the most value is to be found in tuition–these numbers obviously go down. For comparison, a student taking 18 hours per semester only pays $11.80 or $17.67 per class session, which shows the tremendous value of maximizing hours once you hit the full-time end of the tuition scale. Of course, if over-extending oneself causes a student to fail a class, that value is obviously lost.  It’s a balancing act between academics and finances.

I gave the students this information, showing my math.  They were a little shocked.

It would be unacceptable to most students to simply skip a $75 cello lesson or $20 yoga session or rock climbing session that they had paid in advance, and if they are aware of the numbers, they might find it just a bit more unacceptable to miss class too.

I’ve had great attendance for the most part this semester, in part because of a newly strict attendance policy, as opposed to my laissez-faire attitude of old.  But it might be worth pointing out to classes these sorts of numbers, particularly in apathetically attended service courses.  What do your students pay per class session?  Do you know? I think we as instructors should be aware of these sorts of breakdowns.  How much do you owe students every time you walk into a classroom if each of them is paying close to $20 a day, excluding additional fees, to be there?

Please vote for the panel that Will Burdette (U Texas at Austin) and I have proposed for the 2012 SXSW Interactive festival .  Our description follows (click to go to the SXSW voting site):

It’s common to call the printing press revolutionary. But the printing press did not eliminate handwriting. To this day, we have Moleskine notebooks, Post-It Notes, hipster PDAs. Similarly, the digital revolution will not kill print. We still buy books online and mark them up with pencils and highlighters. Pens are still more ubiquitous than digital mobile apps. People pay for photographic prints to hang on their fridges and walls. Bookstores do not merely exist; they legitimate neighborhoods. Every coffee shop has a bulletin board full of printed posters. Instead of predicting “The Future of Print in the Digital Age,” this panel celebrates the present of print, and focuses on emerging print-digital hybrids. The panel consists of a printer, a couple of scholars, a poster distributor, and a print photographer who started a photo booth. Together we will explore projects that capitalize on the permeability of the boundaries separating manual, print, and digital realms.

Questions that the panel will address include:

1. What does the history of print suggest about the present of print?
2. What economic factors are shaping print presently?
3. What challenges and affordances are offered by the production and distribution of printed products?
4. What does the printed photo offer to an instagram world?
5. What print/digital hybrids are emerging to question the print/digital divide?

My own presentation will focus upon the ongoing symbiosis between analog and born-digital maps and mapping technologies.

SXSW does require you to register in order to vote, but it’s quick and painless. So, please vote for our panel, and vote early and often (seriously).

I can remember many occasions as a graduate student when both I and other students would complain to each other that we wished our professors would lecture more frequently.  In my three years of graduate course-work I can recall only one or two occasions when a faculty member lectured, and each time it was at the insistence of the graduate students in the class.

I think that in the humanities there is culture within which it is almost politically incorrect to lecture, especially in small seminars and especially to graduate students.  Humanities teachers tend to be heavily invested in the open-ended or guided class discussion, and in my experience (both as a student and observer of fellow graduate faculty at many different institutions), graduate faculty virtually never lecture.  But I think another resistance to lecturing, especially at the graduate level, comes from a Freire-inspired fear that to lecture is to participate in the now widely discredited “banking model” of education.  Personally, I’m a pluralist in most all things academic, and I think that dismissing a particular teaching method wholesale is a mistake.  Moreover, I think that always lecturing, and then testing on the material covered in the lecture, is exactly what Freire was criticizing.  Lecturing sparingly and with purpose, on the other hand, seems entirely different to me, and even necessary, rather than oppressive.

Frequently graduate faculty, especially at top tier institutions, are world class experts on the subjects that they teach within their graduate programs.  I think that it is a positive sign of humility when these world class experts do not simply assume, as experts both world-class and mediocre would have in the past, that students want to hear them drone from a lectern for three hours each week.  And yet, I think graduate faculty in the humanities should lecture more frequently.  Students want to hear the expert’s perspective sometimes, don’t always want to hear themselves or each other, and sometimes need a break from the demands of propelling a rigorous discussion each and every day.

I don’t think that a graduate level course should ever consist only of lecture.  But I do think that the lecture format is under-utilized in graduate education in the humanities, and to the detriment of graduate students’ educational experiences.

All of this was brought home to me this past week as I was preparing for the History of Rhetoric class I’m teaching this fall.  History of Rhetoric is probably the only course offered in my department where I and the students are responsible for covering 2500 years’ worth of theory and texts.  By necessity, “history of” courses must move in fits and starts, and detour around even important material.  Any one of the -isms that we will cover this semester could constitute its own graduate seminar.  But the purpose of such a course is not to cultivate expert knowledge in each –ism, but instead to show the relationships between people and periods and –isms so that students can get a sense of the “big picture” of the discipline and its past.  With all of this in mind, I’ve decided that I will be lecturing for 30-60 minutes each week (which represents 1/6 to 1/3 of our once-a-week 3 hour meetings).  First, it’s pretty tough on graduate students to expect them to sustain intense conversation for a full three hours.  Second, with so much material to cover, lecture can be a very efficient delivery method, and can be utilized without invoking the liabilities of the “banking model” of teaching.  Third, since I’ve started writing my lectures I have no doubt that I have better organized my thoughts about the course and refreshed my command of the material.

The ability to write and deliver lectures is an important skill for graduate students to develop as well.  At many institutions the graduate students who are hired into faculty positions will be expected to be able to lecture within the context of certain courses that their departments offer, especially for large undergraduate survey courses.  (Given the budget situations in most states, and concomitant increasing class sizes, the ability to lecture will be even more in demand in the short term.)  Isn’t it ironic then that humanities programs, which I think generally do a much better job training graduate students in sound pedagogical practices than other fields, do not teach graduate students how to lecture, nor even provide imitable examples in the course of graduate education?  It certainly is contrary to the ethos of my own discipline of rhetoric and composition to expect a student to excel at a skill, like lecturing, without first giving the student explicit instruction in the skill.

So, I’m going to do a little lecturing this semester.

I’ve finally gotten around to posting the syllabi and assignments for my fall courses, ENGL 202: Writing and Critical Inquiry (sophomore level, required, two sections) and ENGL 610: History of Rhetoric (graduate).  As always, I will probably tweak things over the course of the semester, giving students appropriate notice.

Fellow teachers, also as always, please feel free to crib from me if you see something you like, but I of course appreciate attribution.

My blogging frequency has dropped off lately because: 1) it’s summer, and I have been traveling and I need a break and have less to say anyway; and, 2) because I recently began writing a column dealing with professionalization issues for Inside Higher Ed.  The column is called “Tyro Tracts” and is intended to deal with the professionalization issues that face advanced graduate students and junior faculty (in all disciplines).  Because of the column, most of the stuff I have to write about professionalization issues, a past focus for this blog, will now be posted over at the Inside Higher Ed site (I won’t be cross-posting the columns, though I may index them somewhere here on 3 x 3).  I’ll continue to write about issues specific to rhetoric and composition here at 3 x 3 in Cullowhee, and my blogging frequency will pick back up in the fall.  With the IHE columns, I’m trying to address issues that don’t typically get addressed, or that people may find awkward to ask about, or not even know to ask/think about.  If you have a topic for a column, I’d love suggestions.  For example, I had no idea that the column on how to properly address professors would get such a strong response.  Anything is fair game.  Just drop a line or leave a comment if you have a column question or idea. The column runs every two weeks.

My first four IHE columns are here:

Cultivating Serendipity

Respect Departmental Staff

Doctor, Professor, or ‘Hey, you’?

Rules of the Game