Teaching Possibilities

I'm hoping to steal shamelessly from some wise and worldly readers at other places.  

Too many colleges treat faculty as a cost, rather than an asset.  Professional development is often reduced to travel or webinars, and then cut when things get tight, which they nearly always do.

Conferences can be great; I've certainly learned a lot at them.  But they're expensive, and we have nowhere near the money to send everyone to them.  Multiply $1,500 by several hundred faculty and staff, and it adds up.  And the "send everyone to conferences" model suggests that every good idea comes from outside, which simply isn't true.

We have people with some terrific ideas right here.  

That's especially true when it comes to teaching, as opposed to current developments within particular disciplines.  

So we're trying something new, and I'm hoping that some folks who have done something similar will have useful tips.

We've assembled a group of respected faculty across disciplines -- they've chosen the name "Teaching Possibilities" -- to be on call to provide confidential, non-evaluative peer observations and feedback to any faculty, full-time or adjunct, who request them.  

The observations have a few ground rules: they have to be done by people outside the home discipline of the observed, to ensure fresh eyes.  They will not be reported back to the administration in any form other than a raw count (i.e. "this semester we did fourteen").  They will not discuss the observations with anyone outside the group.  And the goal of the observations is improvement.

My theory is that standard evaluations -- of the sort that go into personnel files -- are useful as a sort of quality control, but not generally ideal for improvement.  These are an attempt to fill that gap.

So my question to wise and worldly readers: any tips in our first semester?  Any fears?  If you teach and you had this option, would you take it?

Sympathy Pains

I had sympathy pains reading Paul Fain’s piece last week about Western Governors University and the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Education.  The piece does a nice job of outlining what amounts to a clash between a broad direction and legacy regulations.

Anyone in higher ed administration for more than ten minutes has seen some variation on this.  

Financial aid is a chronic source of forehead-slappers.  A few years ago I had the privilege to attend a panel discussion at the AACC that included financial aid people, policy people, and a few from the academic side.  The facilitator asked me to summarize the usual impression that folks on the academic side have of financial aid.  I dutifully played along, using adjectives like “frustrating,” “nitpicky,” and “stodgy.”  One of the financial aid folk laughed with recognition, saying that they always get that.  He didn’t even argue the point; he just took it as a cost of doing business.

It’s not any one person’s fault.  I’m glad that financial aid exists, and I pay attention to its requirements.  But the simple fact is that a system built on compliance and the fear of fraud will distrust anything messy.  And innovation, by definition, is messy.  To an auditor, experiments often look like irregularities.  Experiments are good, but irregularities are very, very bad.

To take a really easy example, the Department of Education is enforcing the credit hour more strictly than it ever has, at the exact same time that the direction of innovation is away from the credit hour entirely.  (A few years ago, the DOE tried to paper over the conflict by allowing more “experimental site authority.”  But for those of us who didn’t get the nod, the conflict endures.) The prompt, I think, was abuses in the for-profit sector, but the rest of us have to live with the increasingly confused regulations.

On a more macro level, the national push to accelerate degree completion came right after summer Pell money went away.  If we were even vaguely serious about acceleration, the first thing we would do is stop mandating that students on financial aid come to a screeching halt every May.  That should be obvious, but somehow the two policies fall into separate silos.

To be fair, it isn’t just financial aid. For reasons unknown, there isn’t an ERP system on the planet that actually makes sense for higher education.  It’s possible to customize, to some extent, but I’ve seen academic decisions made based on what could be coded in the system.  It’s an almost Dilbert level of absurdity, but it happens regularly.  

In my early days of administration, I used to believe that there was always a sweet spot in the Venn diagram.  I thought that if you tried hard enough, you could find the common daylight among the various layers of regulation and governance.  And sometimes that’s true.  But I’ve learned that sometimes you have to decide what matters more, and accept some static as a cost of doing business.  That’s not usually the result of conspiracy, although it can feel that way; it’s usually the result of mutual indifference among rulemakers.  But their mutual indifference can be paralyzing if you let it.

So my sympathy to the folks at WGU.  We’ve all been there.

Friday Fragments

Increased diversity among college students leads to decreased political and economic support for higher education, says new study.

This is not news to those of us at community colleges. Among non-profits, this has long been the most diverse sector of higher education.  It has also been the least funded.  

The same dynamic seems to hold in the K-12 world, as well; in areas where the voting population doesn’t resemble the schoolgoing population, school spending comes under sustained attack.  

The study suggests that the effect is strongest among the oldest generations, and much weaker among the younger ones.  I hope that’s truly a generational effect, rather than a life-cycle one.  

Many years ago, at CCM, we used to host special days for senior citizens in the area.  I usually did a presentation on American politics.  Morris is a very conservative area, and the seniors largely reflected that.  In one talk, someone raised an objection to what he saw as excessive immigration -- it was a variation on the “way of life” argument.  I responded that Social Security is pay-as-you-go, and significant immigration of young people was the only thing keeping the system afloat.  He actually paused, looked confused for a moment, and admitted that he had never heard that before.  I don’t know that he changed his mind, but the whole tone of the discussion abruptly became much more thoughtful.

We have some serious educating to do, and not only of our students.

--

40 percent of student loan debt is incurred in graduate school.  If we want to talk intelligently about student loans, that has to be part of the picture.

From a community college perspective, talk of "skin in the game" for student loans is deeply frustrating.  We have open-door admissions, and student loans are entitlements.  Yet we're supposed to be on the hook for repayments, even for students who dropped out after a month.  If you can't choose your borrowers, you can't refuse them, and you can't cap how much they borrow, how does it make sense to hold you responsible?

I know that it's politically impossible to ignore the issue, but the current solutions don't make sense.  I'd much rather see free community college, but if we can't get that anytime soon, here's an alternative to the current measure:

Just look at actual graduates.

If large numbers of graduates can't pay back loans, then there may very well be an issue with either the quality of the program, or the relevance of the program.  But judging programs based on people who dropped out in the first semester doesn't make sense.  At that point, you're really measuring the poverty of the students when they started.

--

This piece in the Atlantic is fascinating.  If high school graduation rates are up, why are college enrollments down?

The article notes that enrollments at community colleges tend to be countercyclical to the economy, which is true; it's harder to compete with a job than to compete with unemployment.  But I'd add a couple more factors.

One is the rapid decline of the for-profits.  For-profits targeted the populations most likely to be buffeted by the economy.  

Another, more basically, is that it's misleading to compare a rate to a raw number.  The high school graduation rate is a rate; enrollment numbers are numbers.  If you have a higher rate of a smaller group, you could wind up with a lower number at the end.  That's more or less what many of us in the Northeast and Midwest are facing; the high schools are doing better with the students they have, but they have fewer students.  Even with (welcome!) improvements in graduation rates, we're just not getting the volume we used to get.  

In previous years, I would have pointed to the incarceration rate, as well.  But I think we've passed Peak Incarceration.  

I hope that the "is college worth it?" drumbeat isn't having much of an effect.  We'll know when the next recession hits.

--

A tip o’the cap to Alan Rickman.  He had a way of making anything he was in, better.  By the hammer of Grabthar, he shall be remembered.

The Forgotten Fields

I was heartened to see that the MLA spent some time discussing the realities of teaching English at community colleges.  The discussion sounds like it was a good and honest first-level attempt to deal with some basic realities.  I know that math, as a discipline, does much the same thing; AMATYC exists precisely to give community college math faculty a venue in which their concerns get center stage.

But what about the faculty in smaller departments?

This one’s close to my heart, as a lapsed political scientist.  The poli sci department at Brookdale is two people.  At Holyoke, it was one, and he also taught history.  English and Math are both well into double digits; even if they don’t go to conferences, people at least have colleagues facing the same issues they’re facing.  But in poli sci, or history, or sociology, or many other fields, there just isn’t the critical mass of faculty on campus to form really good discussion groups.  Travel funding being what it is, relatively few community college faculty routinely attend, say, APSA or the AHA.  And if they do, I’d be surprised to discover that there was much there for them.  

(To be fair, APSA did have an “Undergraduate Education” section for a while.  It still may.  But I don’t recall any poli sci equivalent of CCCC or AMATYC.)  

When I arrived at CCM in 2003, the poli sci department was one person, and he was hired during the Nixon administration.  Any professional development was entirely up to him.  He was smart and capable, but entirely without colleagues.  (I counted it a personal victory when I was able to double the size of the department by hiring someone.)

That’s not unusual.

English, Math, and ESL do good jobs, as disciplines, in giving community college faculty attention and venues in which to discuss issues of common concern.  But they’re the exceptions, largely because they deal with uniquely vulnerable populations -- either students with developmental needs or students whose first language isn’t English -- and because they have critical mass.  Faculty in many other disciplines are relatively ignored.

Until fairly recently, there may not have been a practical way around that, given the realities of travel costs, teaching schedules, and low numbers.  But in the age of the interwebs, it seems like there should be options.  I’m not generally a fan of webinars, but I could see, say, a set of simultaneous regional conferences simulcasting to each other.  What are the best ways to teach Intro to Psych to community college students who don’t intend to be Psych majors?  What are the most effective ways to teach Intro to American Government to students who will never be poli sci majors, and whose academic preparation -- reading comprehension and historical background -- are uneven?  

Those conversations around Intro to Composition or Basic Algebra are happening nationally, and they should.  But students take more than English and math, and many of the same issues around reading, writing, and quantitative literacy show up in those other areas.  

Wise and worldly readers, are there green shoots in the forgotten fields?  Are there places that folks who populate departments-of-one can go that will acknowledge the institutional realities they face?  

Reminders

I called this one nine years ago.

This week the University of Phoenix announced that it’s considering “going private,” which means taking itself off the stock market.  It would still exist, and still be for-profit, but would no longer be publicly traded.

The idea would be to shield it from shareholders expecting a quick return to profitability.

Or, as I put it in 2007,

If I were appointed czar of the University of Phoenix, my first move would be to upgrade the faculty (hire a significant cohort of full-timers) to handle students with limited skills/motivation/time. Until they improve their graduation rate, they're going to be in serious trouble. Yes, that would entail a short-term cost. But it's the right way to go. Obviously, that strategy would crash headlong into the stock market imperative of quarterly returns, but I'm increasingly convinced that private equity is the way for for-profit higher ed to go. Yes, all that public capital sloshing around can be great fun for a time, but it creates pressures that I don't think any institution has yet figured out how to handle. They need patient capital, which means private capital.

(mic drop)

It’s hard to patiently restore quality when the markets impatiently demand profits.  

Patient capital is almost always private capital, but private capital isn’t always patient capital.  For UofP to restore its reputation, it will need autonomy not only from stockholders, but from the holding company that buys it.  It was slapped on the wrist by HLC in 2013 for insufficient autonomy from its ownership; depending on who buys it, that danger could reassert itself.

In higher ed, the traditional model for buffering a college from the whims of funders, whether public or private, is the Board of Trustees.  The Board is charged with taking the long view, and giving the administration the operational autonomy it needs to make the college succeed in its educational mission.  In other words, the Board is supposed to enable and enact the separation of ownership from control that was characteristic of the mid-twentieth century corporate model.

That model came in for plenty of criticism at the time, although in retrospect, it didn’t get its due.  In a twist of history, the alternative didn’t turn out to be democratic control by workers; it turned out to be subjection to a market red in tooth and claw.  The managers -- administrators, if you prefer -- who had relative autonomy at midcentury gave rise to a distribution of wealth and income more egalitarian than any that had come before, or has come since.  The subsequent moves to “unlock shareholder value” have led to multiple decades of increased income polarization.  That’s not a coincidence.

The for-profit sector dispensed with buffers from the outset.  It doesn’t derive income from philanthropy.  It charges more than its cost of production.  When times are good, that means it can expand very quickly, as it did in the 1990’s.  In the public sector, growth can be experienced as a cost, so you get slow growth and waiting lists; in the for-profit sector, growth more than pays for itself, so it can happen quickly.  But the same applies on the way down.  The lack of restraints on growth plays as a lack of buffers on the way down.  Stockholders don’t like to catch falling knives, so if the current management of Phoenix hopes to hold on, it will have to get rid of the stockholders.

What Hegel called the “cunning of history” is real.  Phoenix grew quickly by dispensing with many of the restraints of traditional higher ed.  Now, in freefall, it may remind us all of why we needed those restraints in the first place.  For that, I thank Phoenix.  The rest of us could use that reminder before we make the same mistakes.

The Long Game

People who know me know that one of my favorite phrases is “playing the long game.”  It means favoring sustainable, gradual, long-term changes over Big Splash interventions that often leave destruction in their wake.  That’s probably why this story made so much sense to me.

It’s a contrast between two major urban school districts in New Jersey: Newark and Union.  Newark got a huge burst of publicity, a major infusion of funds, the attention of some very high-profile people, and a master plan so complex that its author referred to it as “sixteen-dimensional chess.”  Union used existing staff to focus on reading.

Years later, Newark has very little to show for its changes, while Union is showing real and compounding gains.

The “Big Splash” model holds visceral appeal to some people.  It looks “decisive,” and it gets attention.  The “long game” model isn’t nearly as easy to encapsulate in a headline; in the very short term, it can look like not doing very much at all.  If you equate “leadership” with getting headlines and making big splashes, the long game can look sort of distant or passive.

But that’s a fundamental misreading.  The long game works.  It gets results.  It’s sustainable, even in the absence of “angel” funders.  And it allows for fallibility, public input, and institutional learning along the way.

(SNHU, characteristically, does both, and does them separately.  I’m a fan of that approach, but I don’t have the resources to try it here.  Very few places do.)

The long game works by looking at the resources and strengths that already exist, rather than assuming that the whole thing needs to be blown up.  It settles on one or a very few goals, sets timeframes measured in years, and gradually aligns resources around those goals.  It sticks to those goals and accepts mixed or incremental gains in the early going.  

It makes certain demands that make it harder than it sounds.  It requires both humility and perseverance in its administrative leadership.  It requires faculty and staff who are willing to admit that things aren’t perfect.  And it requires Board and public/political patience.  That last one can be the most difficult of all.

If the senior leadership turns over every couple of years, and each new team has to bring in a new Big Splash to justify its existence, you can expect a certain earned cynicism to set in among the staff.  You start to hear terms like “this too shall pass” or “flavor of the month.”  Certain desperate leaders will even cook the books to try to make it look like the Big Splash is actually working; that’s the sort of thing that works until it doesn’t.  And once it doesn’t, the cynicism gets even worse.

Making the long game work requires leadership that sticks around, keeps its eye on the big picture, admits when something didn’t work and makes a change, and doesn’t require the spotlight.  That combination is rarer than it should be, for all sorts of obvious political reasons.  

In the context of community colleges, I’d be skeptical -- if not openly cynical about -- any claims of improving completion rates by double digits in a year or two.  That’s not how this works.  In the absence of something fluky and extraordinary -- regression to the mean after a natural disaster, say -- improvement is likely to be uneven at first, and then gradual.  But it feeds on itself.  

Kudos to the Union schools for doing it the right way.  I hope that funders take note, and start thinking about investing in the long game.  The only thing better than a smart long-term strategy is a smart long-term strategy with money.  Bring it on.

Hearing Yourself

Musicians sometimes say that the hardest part of playing is listening.  To be really good, particularly in a group context, you have to be able both to play well and to listen well.  You have to hear how you sound, how the others sound, and how things fit together.  Some terrific players never make it to the top level because they’re so busy with their own sound that they don’t listen.

I’ve seen the same thing as a debate judge.  In team debates, in which each team has two or three members and the sides take turns responding to each other, everyone after the first speaker has a double burden: make the points she wanted to make, and also respond to what the other team did.  The latter seems to be much harder than the former.  Adults struggle with the same thing: I was struck at what happened in the last Democratic presidential debate after Bernie Sanders apologized to Hillary Clinton for a staffer snooping at an email list.  Clinton was clearly caught off-guard by someone taking the usually untrodden high road, but she managed to improvise her way to a reasonably graceful acceptance of the apology.  Martin O’Malley then erupted with a high-energy, clearly prepared attack on the “bickering” we had allegedly just seen.

But we didn’t.  One apologized, the other accepted.  That’s not bickering.  He was so eager to score his point that he didn’t bother listening to what they actually said.  Clinton may have been off-balance, but at least she recognized what had happened.  

Really good listening is at the heart of critical thinking.  And it’s rarer than it should be.  

Pop music lyrics often reflect an inability to hear while singing.  My personal favorite is still Van Halen’s “only time will tell if we stand the test of time,” which goes beyond garden-variety stupidity to earn extra credit for packing two cliches into a single phrase.  Honorable mention to Paul McCartney for the rare double-preposition: “in this world in which we live in…”  (John Moe’s “Pop Song Correspondences” are master classes in the art of listening closely to lyrics.)

Recently I’ve seen a couple of quotes that really made me wonder whether the speakers could even hear themselves as they spoke.  The first, which is from an English professor at a community college, fairly jumped off the screen when I read it.  It’s by Joe LeBlanc, an English professor at Northern Essex Community College, in Massachusetts.  He was quoted in his capacity as president of the statewide faculty union, which is currently on “work-to-rule” over a contract dispute.  I take no position on the dispute, since I’m in another state now, but Prof. LeBlanc’s statement made my jaw drop.  According to the Worcester Telegram, he responded to the state’s proposal as follows:

“[w]e’re not about to jump through hoops to improve our course completion rates.”

Wow.  Just, wow.  

Public sympathy for faculty comes mostly from a sense that they’re helping students.  For the president of a statewide faculty union to dismiss student success out of hand is astonishing.  I honestly wondered if he could hear himself when he spoke.  If I had read that in a caricature, I would have thought it overdone.

In case that seems too cartoonish a reading, LeBlanc added:

“We plan to increasingly tighten the screws with work-to-rule.”

So student success can be dismissed blithely, but “tightening the screws” on colleges merits sustained focus.  That’s an alarming pair of statements to make in public.

The second, blessedly removed from higher ed, came from governor Paul LePage, of Maine.  In discussing the very real heroin crisis, LePage said:

“These are guys with the names D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty...these types of guys...they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home...Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave…”

It’s the sort of thing you might expect to hear from Uncle Larry at Thanksgiving, but not from a governor in his second term.  As a cultural studies text, it’s impressive; you can spend hours peeling the layers.  But as a statement from a chief executive of a state, well, it doesn’t inspire confidence.  

So, as a former teacher of writing, I plead my case.  Listen to yourself when you speak.  It matters.

Note to New Jersey

What happens to places that export most of their talented young people?

Serious stagnation, if not worse.

This is where community colleges can serve a purpose better than anyone else.  Their graduates tend to stay in the local area.

Recent IPEDS data -- I know, I know, but still -- shows that New Jersey has one of the highest rates of high school graduates going to college out of state.  That has been true for a long time.  

I suspect it’s largely a function of the economic geography of the state.  It combines one of the highest per-capita incomes in the country with the highest population density in the country; that tends to put a squeeze on affordable housing.  Compared to most states, it has an unusual number of people who work outside the state, drawn mostly to the New York or Philadelphia metros.  It’s a hard place to start a family, given the cost of housing and the relative disconnect between local income levels and local salaries.  (High NYC salaries drive up prices in areas where local salaries don’t scale.)  

Every state exports some young people, and that’s fine.  If a kid from Maryland gets into Harvard or Stanford and wants to go, I don’t see a political crisis in allowing it.  But when a state or a region exports too many, and particularly of its highest achievers, it sets itself up for trouble.  

The whole “creative class” line of argument made famous by Richard Florida caught on because it explained something we’ve all seen: places that import lots of ambitious young people prosper.  That can become self-reinforcing over time.  My back-of-the-envelope test for whether an area is on the right track is whether it attracts significant numbers of young people who move there before they’ve found work.  Moving to accept an offer is one thing; moving without an offer shows real interest in being in a given area.  

The IPEDS data suggest that more young people want out of New Jersey than want in.  

From a policy perspective, I could imagine a few possible responses.

One would be indifference.  It’s easy and cheap in the short run, but over time, it doesn’t lead anywhere good.

Another would be some sort of coercion.  But that tends to backfire; the most ambitious students are the ones likeliest to escape.  And that’s leaving aside a whole set of moral issues.

I’d favor making the place more appealing as a destination.  Given that talented young people have choices, the best way to attract or keep them is to make the place a more attractive choice.  Make it likelier that the next wave of entrepreneurs will set up shop here.

The fastest, easiest, lowest-cost way to do that would be to make the community and state colleges stronger.  Give the high-achieving high school grad a reason to stick around, and give the high-achieving high school grad from a neighboring state a reason to come over.  

The advantage to this strategy is that the infrastructure is already in place.  It wouldn’t require solving much more intractable issues.  And it wouldn’t even rely initially on getting the word out in other states.  Just doing a better job of keeping the young people who are already here would make a difference.  We already know that community college grads are likely to stay in the local area, so you’d get a labor-force payoff quickly.  Strengthen the four-year sector as well, and the payoff could be even greater.  The scale of investment wouldn’t have to be all that high, though it would have to be sustained over time.  That includes during recessions.

When I worked in New Jersey in the previous decade, it exported scads of young people.  Upon returning, I notice it’s still doing the same.  How’s that working out?

It’s time to try something different.  The data tell the tale.  

Administrative Writing

Why is so much administrative writing so bad?

For the same reason that many syllabi are so horribly written.

In a word, contexts.  When writing, you can never be sure of the context in which what you wrote will be read.

You'll be read by many with goodwill, which is lovely.  You'll also be read by some with axes to grind.  You'll be read by amateur lawyers, trying to twist every ambiguous phrase or quirk of syntax into a new entitlement.  (A professor once responded to an email by accusing me of using "menacing ellipsis."  I decided that "menacing ellipsis" would be a great name for a band.) You may be read by actual lawyers in the context of some sort of legal action; if so, you can't anticipate the agenda, other than to say it won't be positive.  

In the context of personal writing -- writing to a friend, say -- it's easy to assume a shared context.  Even there, it's possible to get into trouble -- we're all warned about conveying tone in emails -- but it's usually broadly possible.  If all else fails, you can just pick up the phone and say "what was that?"  In the context of disciplinary writing, it's often safe to assume that the only readers will be people in that discipline, so you can rely on certain interpretive conventions.  

But when you're under scrutiny from people who are looking to score political points against you, you can't assume that your words will be read in good faith.  If anything, it's usually prudent to assume the opposite.

That's probably why, after all these years, I still have this writerly space largely to myself.  My colleagues don't blog, or if they do, they don't blog about higher ed policy.  Hell, I used a pseudonym for years until I felt like I had found a voice with which I was comfortable.  Putting ideas out there can draw fire.  I think of that as a form of leadership, though I've also heard it called risky.  Probably both.

In this sense, administration is closer to politics than to teaching.  Politicians' relationship to language is notoriously sketchy, going at least back to the Sophists.  The Sophists actually make an instructive case.  The term "sophist" forms the root of "sophistry," which we use to mean lying.  But it also forms the root of "sophisticated."  An acute awareness of the consequences of the misuse of language will lead, in the early stages, to forced or overly-safe constructions.  It takes a while to get comfortable enough with the externally-invisible conventions to be reliably able to hit the narrow overlap in the Venn diagram between "professional" and "human."  It's especially difficult when exhausted.  Some insist on being human, and eventually get nailed for something impolitic; most take refuge in cliche.  Moving from sophistry to sophistication takes time and practice, and the safe spaces in which to develop the skill to do that barely exist.

To be fair, there are more mundane reasons for painful administrative prose, as well.  Sometimes it comes from acronym overload.  Sometimes it comes from the overuse of internal shorthand, a temptation to which many academic researchers are also prone.  Sometimes it comes from extremely scrupulous adherence to various legal terms of art.  Sometimes it comes from time pressures.  And yes, some people are just lousy writers.  

But in thinking about what would improve the caliber of administrative writing overall, we might want to be careful what we wish for.  (See "take refuge in cliche," above.)  

It would be easy to adopt a more freewheeling and natural communication style if we just got all the skeptics to back off.  

But what, exactly, would that entail?

Richard Sennett noted forty years ago that the great irony of "transparency" is that it forces a much more powerful self-censorship.  That's not necessarily a bad thing; our first impulses aren't always in our best interest.  The old "hydraulic" model of catharsis -- blowing off steam, say -- assumes that once you've "gotten something out of your system," it's gone.  But that's not how the world works.  If I respond to the umpteenth silly request with "oh, bite me," I haven't resolved anything; in fact, I've created a whole new level of problem.  "Oh, bite me" might more accurately reflect my "authentic" state of mind in the moment, but it won't lead anywhere good.  And I certainly prefer a world in which most people don’t respond that way to me.  Catharsis is likelier to generate tension than to resolve it.

Put differently, some forms of self-censorship are what make organized life possible.  Self-censorship sometimes comes from considering the needs of others.  The act of thinking before speaking -- or writing -- may be tiring and frustrating, and in the hands of the less-skilled, may result in stilted prose.  But it pushes us in directions we need to be pushed.  If other people matter, then their opinions matter.  If they’re free to express those opinions, then folks in the public eye may be expected to craft their words carefully to avoid unhelpful conflict.  To flip Hannah Arendt on her head, banality isn’t necessarily evil; it may be a symptom of freedom.

Acronyms, on the other hand… (See “menacing ellipsis,” above.)

Best Intersession Class You Ever Took

What’s the best intersession class you ever took?

I’ll narrow it down.  By “intersession” I mean a very short-term class, typically offered for two or three weeks in January.  

January terms are relatively common in higher ed, since they fill a gap in the calendar, but they get sort of ignored in most discussions of both curriculum and student success.  We talk about semesters and the “summer melt,” and sometimes summer boot camps, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard someone mention January terms or intersessions in the context of higher ed policy discussions, other than around financial aid.  

At their best, intersession classes offer a kind of focus that most classes just can’t.  Because they stuff so much class time into such a brief window, they fairly demand almost exclusive attention from students.  I’ve had faculty tell me that intersession classes are their favorite ones to teach, because for two or three weeks, the students don’t do anything else.  They have to jump in with both feet.  

Perhaps as a function of self-selection, and perhaps because the short calendar doesn’t give much time for life to get in the way, pass rates for intersession classes have usually been much higher than for semester-based classes.  (At HCC, they were 15 to 20 points higher, year after year.)  It worked incredibly well for many 100-level gen ed classes.  It also worked well as a catch-up period for students who took developmental math in the fall, and just needed another week or two to pass it.  It worked incredibly well in classes like Nutrition, or Baking, where having really long days in the teaching kitchen allowed for more complicated and ambitious projects than could usually be done.

At least theoretically, I bet it would work well for language immersion.  Spend all day, every day, for several weeks speaking a language, and you’d have to pick up something.  

That said, I’d be wary of trying to stuff, say, English Composition into that format.  Even with long class times and plenty of in-class writing, the feedback (and grading) would just be too time-consuming.  I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, but I’ve never seen it done, and I have a hard time imagining it.  If someone has done it well, I’d love to know how.

In my student days, the January term was given over to interdisciplinary stuff.  (Given the need for credits to transfer, we’re more limited in the ability to do that here.)  My favorite was the one I took my sophomore year.  It was 1988, and the topic was Gay and Lesbian Politics in America.  For 1988, that was pretty daring.  The course was team-taught, nobody knew what to expect, and I remember being floored both by the content and by Wendy Brown’s ability to turn phrase after phrase.  Her smart-stuff-per-minute ratio was the highest I’ve seen, before or since, and she managed to be clear and understandable while she did it.  It was the verbal equivalent of landing consecutive triple axles while juggling.  There were times it was all I could do not to applaud.

All of which is by way of asking you, my wise and worldly readers: what’s the best intersession class you ever took?  For bonus points, what made it great?

Looking Up

I had to smile at the New York Times’ story yesterday breaking the news that senior citizens who attend college classes do it because they want to.  At this point, learning for the sake of it has become newsworthy.  The idea that people free from economic necessity can pursue higher learning isn’t exactly new -- Aristotle was no stranger to it, and Machiavelli waxed eloquent on the subject -- but it’s worth revisiting in a time of economic panic.  At this point, it’s almost radical to suggest that higher education is more than job placement.  

It is.

And yet, I understand.  The economy remains unforgiving for people trying to get started, and paths to the middle and upper middle classes are less legible than they once were.  Even once you’re there, holding on takes sustained and serious effort.  That’s especially true if you’re also trying to keep your kids on the right path.

That’s why the occasional break is so important.  It offers a chance to look up from the quotidian whitewater of events and get some perspective.

Christmas break is many things, but one of them is a chance to read stuff just because I want to.  It’s good for the soul. For a little over a week, I got to sit down from time to time with books or articles that held my interest just because.  And I remembered why I care as much about education as I do.

Without quite intending to, I read Kathryn Edin’s “$2 a Day” and Hanna Rosin’s “The Silicon Valley Suicides” back to back.  Edin’s book is a bracing account of the realities of living on the bottom of the American economic ladder in the wake of welfare reform; by her reckoning, several million Americans live on $2 a day or less, which is the measure some NGO’s use to calculate poverty internationally.  Rosin’s article profiles high-achieving teenagers in one of the most affluent areas in the country, in one of the most desired high schools in the country.  You’d think that reading them next to each other would constitute what, in my radio days, we used to call a collision mix.  But it didn’t.

They’re both about constrained possibilities, or the inability to see other ways of being.  

Edin’s subjects are so strapped that their world shrinks to what’s right in front of them.  Given the extreme and increasing economic segregation of housing in America, very poor people tend to be clustered with each other.  Growing up in a setting like that, desperation can come to seem both endemic and inevitable.  If everyone you know is struggling just as badly, or almost as badly, as you are, it becomes that much harder to see a way out.  Edin’s subjects are full of stories of couch-surfing -- often staying with people who were sexually or otherwise abusive, just to have a place to stay -- and of no-win ethical dilemmas.  Some sell food stamps (now in the form of EBT cards) because they need cash to pay utility bills or rent.  TANF is almost entirely absent; strikingly, nobody in her book received it, or knew anyone who did.  It has become so difficult to obtain that for all intents and purposes, it’s gone.  She writes of a teenage girl who consciously chooses a sexual relationship with a teacher because he promises her food.  By the girl’s reckoning, if the teacher feeds her, then there will be enough food left in the house for her siblings.  It’s the only way she can see to get everyone fed.

Rosin’s piece is about another world, but the habits of mind are the same.  Palo Alto High School has been plagued by multiple rounds of student suicides, largely among high-achieving students.  Rosin paints a vivid picture of students who are so deeply inculcated with upper-middle-class notions of meritocracy that they can’t even conceptualize rebellion.  They’re so focused on not losing the ground their parents gained that any failure, no matter how small or normal, seems catastrophic.  Most find their way through, but a disproportionate number see no better option than stepping in front of a Caltrans train.  

The economics matter, of course.  But so does a sense of larger possibility.  Neither Edin’s nor Rosin’s subjects can see an alternative to the world in which they feel stuck.  

That kind of vision can come from all sorts of places.  Kristin Hersh’s memoir of her late friend Vic Chesnutt,  “Don’t Suck, Don’t Die” is a jagged collection of broken visions.  It’s messy and spiky and unforgiving, crushingly sad, sometimes funny, and humane.  At about 180 short pages, it took me a half-dozen sittings to get through.  There’s nothing light about the book, but it’s worth the considerable effort.  

Hersh and Chesnutt were close friends for many years, and much of the book consists of tales of touring with their respective spouses.  But that’s like saying that Moby Dick is about trying to catch a whale.  It’s not wrong, exactly, but it misses the point.  

In Hersh’s telling, Chesnutt comes off as kind of a jerk.  She knows that -- he did, too -- but, as she put it, “love just is.”  The book gives the contours of a travelling foursome gradually shrinking, and of a friendship struggling.  One marriage dissolves and then sort of doesn’t; the other does, more slowly.  Money is sort of present, and then very much not.  

Hersh is far smarter than she lets on, with the eye of a naturalist.  She plays dumb at several points, but her writing betrays her.  Although she occasionally inveighs against musicians’ effort to “control” music by consciously writing it, she has gone to great pains to be kind to everyone in her writing.  Her husband, who leaves her at the end of the book, is portrayed sympathetically, as are Vic and his long-suffering wife, Tina.  Kristin and Billy’s children are entirely absent from the book, which struck me as a kindness to them.  The prose isn’t always linear, but it’s always tightly controlled, with her characteristic ear for phrasing.  She seems determined to find kindness and grace where she can, and to share it.

Which is why, as difficult as it is, the book won me over.  Hersh is awash in visions; some unbidden, some chosen, some even a little forced.  She sees her friends for who they are, and for who they want to be, and she loves them for trying.  She notices the grace notes in fleeting moments, and shares them as she can.  She’s artist enough to convey many of them -- for my money, “a man made of butterfat/careening around on a Sno Cat” is one of the best word-pictures in music -- but humble enough to try to lean towards the humane.  

I couldn’t speak for a while after finishing Hersh’s book.  But then I couldn’t shake some of the images.  The wings she imagines spreading from the back of Chesnutt’s wheelchair, the flavored non-dairy creamer packets they’d eat in hotel lobbies; they were all about seeing more than what was directly in front of her.  They were about looking up.

I’m glad to have had the chance to look up, too.  Now it’s back to work, trying to create opportunities for students to look up.  Share those grace notes, and remind them that there is more to life than job placement or predators.  There’s humanity, if you’re able to take a deep breath and look.