10.29.09
The Craw of the Matter
In case you haven’t noticed, students who can’t take responsibility for themselves and their own education really get on my nerves.
You see, most of the my kids are at a community college. Our demographics have drastically changed since I started there. When I started, the majority of our students, something like 65%, were non-traditional-age, working adults. Now, we’ve switched to something like 35%. However, many of our traditional-age students are also trying to work, support families, care for children, take a full course load to get through the degree as quickly as possible, etc. So though our demographic of age had flip-flopped, I would say the general life angle of the students have not.
In other words, most of my students are working their butts off.
Hence, I get annoyed and offended at students who want to shirk their work and complain about their lives getting in the way. Maybe you should take some time to put your house in order, so you can concentrate on your studies better. I get annoyed at students who shirk their work because they don’t care, or because Mom and Dad are footing the bill. You are wasting a precious opportunity, one that most of your classmates are working their butts off to maximize (or get at all). I get annoyed at students who fail to show up to class, then whine about their grades. You aren’t paying for grades. You are paying me to help you in your intellectual development. I know most of these people are not going to be art historians, but there are still skills of critical thinking, reading comprehension, and communication they need- skills that I consider critical life skills.
I get annoyed, because students who whine, complain, and shirk through their educational experience are an offensive affront to all those students who are working three jobs while raising their kids and taking care of their sick mother (all of whom have the flu this time of year) and taking a full load of classes yet manage to come to class, do their work, turn it in, all ON TIME.
And we’re not talking about the students who come to me with issues and need one or two days wiggle room. They may be irksome when I’m grumpy, but being flexible so that folks can manage their time with all that juggling is just part of being in a community college. After all, Janie does sometimes get sick and have to stay home from school, or you might be in a fender-bender or have the starter die, even on exam day. There is a big difference between the occasional and rare emergency and a Slacker.
Slackers suck. Slackers are the rotten apples that ruin semesters, and they manage to disrupt everyone else while ruining it.
10.09.09
Some good news
My colleague underwent surgery, and it turned out to be a very different problem- and far more fixable- than originally thought! They still won’t be back this semester, but YAY!!!! Thank you everyone for the positive thoughts.
10.04.09
I second this.
I love Phil Harding.
Hey, I’m an art historian who specializes in ancient and medieval stuff. How can I not love Phil Harding?
10.01.09
Emergency Course Takeover
One of the positives of being an adjunct is that being a hired gun, you can still pull out your revolver in the middle of a semester. That means if there is an emergency, you can actually help. For example, my one semester started without coverage for one of the classes. Hook me up to a video camera and voila! Those students get to keep their course.
One of my colleagues is very ill. Its a sad thing, because said colleague is positively brilliant, both as a scholar and a teacher, and you can’t really say that about a lot of folks in academia. We are going to lose this colleague, and we were all hoping it was going to be later rather than sooner.
You don’t always get what you want.
The latest onset was dramatic and sudden, and here we are five weeks into a semester, and we have students in courses with no professor. I’m actually a little flattered that they thought to call me about the class. Being an adjunct, I may have 5 other classes, but they are at a different school (many school limit adjuncts to 4 classes, because they are “part-time”); I can take this one on. I picked up the notes and materials we could find- our colleague was apparently working on the class and had most of the materials at home- and it was very sad. This is my colleague’s favorite, in-field class. This is the baby. I have to do not just a good job with it, but a great job. I have to make my colleague pleased and proud that this course could be covered, and make sure the students get the education they want and paid for. With this colleague, that is a tall order. Big, big shoes to fill.
Going to be a very busy weekend.
07.13.09
Clues to the Clueless #20
Hint: Trying to write an essay or exam while drunk or high is a Bad Idea.
Seriously.
And if you weren’t drunk or high, and your professor reads your test or essay and starts to think “WTF? Is this student drunk or high?” at any point, that is also Bad.
For my exams, they have a choice of three questions, and they have to use at least three specific examples of objects, covering at least three different periods of art. This test covered Prehistory through Ancient Rome.
The question:
History and historical events often impact art in very direct ways. Discuss moments in history which directly impacted art, how that impact was communicated through art, and how art, in turn, may have impacted history and culture. Remember that art includes 2-dimensional art (ie painting), sculpture, and architecture, you do not need to focus on just one of these.
No, its not the best question I ever wrote. Just sue me now.
But seriously, this is not an answer:
what moments in history have directly impacted art?
To this day we take the ruins and artifacts we find underground beneath our modern day, busy street, capitalist society; and we find the cherished possessions and remnants of the most sophisticated form of human expression. Art.
Artifacts, left behind from when artisans and craftsmen roamed the Earth tell us a story of evolving significance and change through the passage of time. And the history of human art can be very interesting due to the fact how significantly big human brains that require massive stimulation.As soon as humans in prehistoric ages figured out how to draw and speak, its been a non stop journey of Art and its history in the making.
Verbal and visual forms of communication are what humans use to gain control and become society. The intelligence our brain computes in people gives them the capabily to understand the value of asking questions and exploring all the possible answers.
Different cultures will have various societies of people all which impact history differently and what has made our people who are living right now all the intelligent folks they are…living in a high tech virtual world. 2009
Studying the history of The Arts, allows to see a mental picture in our minds all the ideas people we wondering or discovering before the answer was ever discovered. One thing that Humans do and will continue to do…is ask the qustion:
What is the meaning of life?
Humans speculating the meaning of life is so deep on another level, its different for everyone, one may not even know that their sculpture of abstract thoughts molded out of clay from the earth, would one day tell the children of the future…the hobbies, ideas, doodles, writings and songs would be an Art!
Through Arts we become alive. They are a vital function that all humans particiapate in creating, whether they are aware of it or not.
Life can be looked at in great depth, by studying History.
People at different times and different places held different values.
During the 15rh century ancient Greeks enjoyed skillful artist. They admired illusionist, and using realism in their works. Admiring the artist’s who could
capture an objects exact look and paint onto a canvas exactly what they are looking at.The Greek story of Zeuxis and Parrhisuis and their bet on who was the best painter came to the conclusion that Zeuxis grapes he painted were nicely done…but the curtain that hung by the grapes…Was voted the winner due to the fact of how ‘real’ the curtain was appeared.
That story was then later Painted in the 17th century by Adriaen Van Der Spelt & Frans Van Mieris, painters who wanted to portray their interpretation of the Greeks Story on how realism was admired by the Greek Peoples.
The catacombs underneathe Europe holds many stories of ancient people who traveled underground, using anything that could be a sculpting or writing tool, to draw pictures of what they saw everyday, kept track of daily routines, formed the first signs of any language to explain how they felt…and what they thought life would onto them.
Any medium of art can be observed from anyone’s eye. It is the eye of the beholder who interprets the story. People have different ideas and expressions. In order to understand human nature as a whole…you have to look at all art and understand the whole meaning to what the artist is trying to tell you.
We will express our mental thoughts and ideas as long as we can pick up any utensil capable of making a mark….and use it to scribble random feelings across the canvas of our world.
Seriously, people. Leave off the intoxicating substances before writing. Don’t just pick up any utensil capable of making a mark, and scribble random mental thoughts to your professor.
06.09.09
Oh boy, new cheating scam!
I am so glad I have set in protections against this form of cheating already. When a student emails me a paper or assignment, I instantly open it. If it is corrupted, i email them and tell them I can’t open it. I require that the assignment be turned in on time, and in a form I can read- corrupted files do not count as a turned-in assignment! Until they get the confirmation from me, the assignment is not turned in!
06.05.09
Can I make these required reading?
05.27.09
What am I doing?
Believe it or not, when I design a class, I am actually thinking about the students, and what skills they need to move on to the next level. This changes depending on whether I am teaching an intro, mid-level, or upper-level class, and whether I am teaching at my community college or one of the four-year colleges. I also pay attention to what skill set kids actually arrive with, and make in-the-action adjustments.
Teaching at the community college is a wonderful opportunity, partly because of the wide variety of skill sets you get, partly because you have a real chance to help students move along in their intellectual development generally, preparing them for more advanced work and thought.
Who are my students? I teach a lot of intro courses. I think a lot of colleges make a huge mistake allowing these classes to be poorly taught, poorly organized, and poorly delivered, because these are the classes that form a real basis for your field and for the development of students. If you can lead the horse to the water now, you give them a great opportunity to know how to drink and what to do when they arrive at the next level classes. ONe of the reasons these classes can be so bad is that the people teaching them either lose sight of who these students are, never find out who these students are, just simply don’t care who these students are. They use these entry-level classes for weeding instead of teaching.
By definition, students in an intro class are at the start of their intellectual development in your field. Even seniors taking an intro class revert to a need for a framework, an authoritative starting point to begin their exploration. It is much easier to explore the world if you have roots somewhere, a point of reference to orient yourself. However, my students tend to be first- or second-year students, or a growing number of homeschoolers. With a community college, they are often a variety of ages and have a variety of goals, and thus have a diverse set of ultimate needs.
With intro classes, that need of a basic framework is the skeleton around which to develop a class. Intro classes tend to be information-laden, packed with all sorts of important basics. You need to pack in basic milestones of your field, while giving your students a sampler of what might be ahead for them and catch their interest to explore more. For art history, I need to pack in a basic outline of works of art that are reasonably firm in the timeline of art, provide vocabulary and methodology used for art, and teach students to actually look at objects in an objective manner.
At the same time, I need to pull students to the next level of intellectual development. At the start of their exploration, they need that authoritative framework; but the next step is to consider the wide variety of interpretations and opinions. After all, without controversy, I’m kind of out of a job. Students need to be able to start considering different ideas and think critically about them- how are they supported? Does the student agree with this support? What counter-arguments are out there? And the best students can even go to the next level- creating their own theories and interpretations of material (a step more usual to take in mid- and upper-level classes).
How to move students along in their intellectual development? That is the question before me as I design assignments, select reading, and evaluate work. If you push students too fast, you lose them. Students seem to feel they are doing “all the work and all the teaching” with actually learning anything. If you push them too slow, the class is boring and they don’t learn anything (nor do they move on in their development).
A lot of the “new-fangled” ideas for teaching do great in upper-level classes, but I’m worried about using blogs and too much independent study with students who have to facts to build on. It is more worrisome with the newer students I am seeing, who do not have the same skill set students had when I started ten years ago. These students have been raised in a world of heavy standardized testing and empty writing shells. They are trained to spit back whatever you have spoonfed them. You would think this would be a great skill set for basic intro classes, but it is a whole step back from ten years ago. These students have no skills for actually thinking about material, for generalizing material. If I teach that Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa in 1505, and Michelangelo carved the David in 1501, they cannot grasp the fact that Leonardo and Michelangelo are contemporaries on their own; I have to make a point of saying so. They have no passion for topics, which makes it difficult to make anything relevant for them. Pulling them to the next level takes extra time and practice, because they haven’t had any in any field.
I have to take this remedial role of my classes into consideration when designing them. I have to regauge how and when to push, so that I end up at the same endpoint of my classes ten years ago. What is more, i have to navigate this new challenge with students who feel entitled to high grades, despite their mediocre work. For these spoonfed, standardized world, “minimum requirement” means an A, not a C. My class becomes a very rude shock if I don’t design it to help them move along in their development, and move along quick.
The fact is, I used to get students read for college-level work, and now I get an increasing majority of student who are not. At the community college level, I have a real chance to give these students the opportunity to be ready. At the four-year level, where this cis also an increasing problem, I have a chance to pull those kids who need remediation to the level they need to be to move on to those mid-and upper-level classes.
After all, as an intro teacher, that is my job. Start with what you get, and get them prepared to really explore the world around them.
