Slate: "In the Ivory Tower, Men Only"

In Slate, Mary Ann Mason suggests that for female academics, having children is a "career killer." 

She's a Dean and has done the research and all that, so I'm not going to argue with her, especially since so much of what she says is what we all recognize as true (and now have stats to back it up).

A few bullet points of response:

• "In our study of University of California doctoral students, 70 percent of women and more than one-half of the men considered faculty careers at research universities not friendly to family life." I wonder if this isn't more true at (1) top 10 universities (2) in the sciences than at other types of universities.  It's not that it isn't true, but is it equally true for the humanities?
• "There is some good news for women. The second tier is not a complete career graveyard. We have found that a good proportion of those toiling as adjuncts and part-time lecturers do eventually get tenure track jobs."  That is good news, and I'm glad that Mason's research supports this. 
• "Among tenured faculty, 70 percent of men are married with children compared with 44 percent of women." 
• "Women who achieve tenure are more likely than men to fall into the midcareer slump. They take longer, sometimes much longer, to be promoted to full professor, the top of the academic ranks. For the first time in the career march from graduate school, children do not make a clear difference in their career slowdown."  You know what does make a difference? Being asked to do just one more service thing, and then one more, and then one more and not saying no. Learning to say no is the key, I think, especially to things that are "collegial" but will go nowhere in your  tenure and promotion folder. 
• "Men and women retire at about the same age, but women have less income to rely upon in retirement; their salaries at retirement are, on average, 29 percent lower." Not a happy statistic, but good to know. 
• "It is important for women to become more assertive at faculty meetings, to negotiate starting salary, to argue for justice in the promotion process, as Sheryl Sandberg argues in Lean In." There's quite a bit of chicken-and-egg reasoning here. "Become more assertive at faculty meetings" as an adjunct (says I, who was one for a long time), and you might find yourself unemployed, although to be fair, no place I've ever worked operated in this way. Become more assertive as t-t assistant or associate, and you'll get the "Great idea! Why don't you study this and write a report on it" time-sucking committee laid at your door.   Being assertive is not an unalloyed good. What battles do you want to fight, and are they worth it if you are an untenured assistant or not-yet-full associate? You need to decide. 

• "For instance, at Berkeley, after enacting several new policies to benefit parents, including paid teaching leaves for fathers, job satisfaction scored much higher among parents, and more babies are being born to assistant professors." Again, this is good news, because if this more family-friendly attitude is going to spread, it has to start from places like that so that other institutions can see that it works. 

This issue of women in academe is different from Lauren Sandler's "great writers have only one child"  essay on the Atlantic's site, which I took to be one of its ongoing attempts to stir up Teh Wimmenz (hello, Caitlin Flanagan!) and looked at primarily for Jane Smiley's response.  

Does having only one child make a difference? Who knows? What are the other common variables? Did the great ones all eat granola for breakfast? The two main things seem to be (1) good child care and (2) having a personality best described as "driven," which really means disciplined and focused on writing. It's a little disheartening, though, to see how fast the commenters went to "X is a bad mother!" "No, she isn't!" to prove their points.

To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, I sometimes think that these sites are saying to us, "let's you and her fight" rather than something substantive by posting these things. Mary Ann Mason's post wasn't one of those but an honest attempt to look at a problem. 

The dream writing group, SCDP/CGC version

If you don’t have an in-person writing group, your dreams will apparently supply one.

I was working for a firm that turned out to be an academic version of Sterling Cooper Draper Price/Cutler Gleason and Chaough.

Someone stopped by my office to tell me that the read-through was today. "Read-through?" Yes, employees who requested it, and apparently I had, could get the firm together to discuss what they were working on. The meetings were only an hour, but they'd all give feedback.

We all gathered in a room--fittingly, Bert Cooper's office--and sat in a circle, some on the floor and some in chairs, crowded together. An anonymous junior copywriter began to read it, with feeling and slowly.  Mercifully, Roger Sterling wasn't there, but Peggy and Ted Chaough were giving it their most earnest attention. Don was, as usual, AWOL.

As he read, people began to wonder aloud "why are you talking about this now? Where is this leading?" I lunged over to Cooper's overflowing desk, grabbed a steno pad and a ballpoint pen that was running out of ink, and started taking notes on their reactions.

"This reads pretty well, but I still don't know why you're telling us this."

Then another reader took over and said "This has some rough language." They all nodded, and she began to read and even to sing parts of it. She read the parts where it said "insert reference here" and "talk about that other instance of the same idea." Loudly. With feeling.

I tried to say things like "I didn't know you'd read this particular draft" and "It's not quite ready," but no one paid any attention.

The hour drew to a close, and I had not yet sunk through the floor. I had pages of scratchy handwritten notes and reactions written down in the steno pad.

Gene Siskel, who apparently worked at SCDP/CGC, stood up. "I have to go. I think this has  promise, but you should get to the point sooner. Right now I'd give it a thumbs-sideways."

Peggy smiled, and Ted Chaough said, "Don't worry. At my first meeting, I thought I would have to quit and become a professional babysitter. It's pretty good."

Bert Cooper said, "That's all right, dear."

Meeting adjourned. 

For the research junkies among you: index cards

At The Junto: A Research Blog on Early American History, there is a post that is pure delight for everyone who loves to read about the research process. (Come on, I can't be the only one!)

Once I got to an archive, I created a new Word document for each collection I looked at. As I read, I transcribed the quotes I thought would be useful for me, making sure to note in bold when a volume changed over to the next volume. As I transcribed, if I came across a quote that immediately gave me something to say, I’d make a note to myself using all caps so that I could spot it easily when skimming a document. I should say that sometimes these notes were useful, and sometimes they were completely useless; at various points during the write-up stage I found myself vehemently crossing out my capitalized notes.

The author, raherrmann, then used to put these word documents into 3 x 5" formats and print them onto index cards, though how this happens exactly--does Avery make sheets of index cards? do you stack them up like photo paper?--isn't specified.

The end result is a stack of index cards that you can shuffle around, with page numbers to help you put the whole thing back together. Doesn't this sound orderly?

I've tried with index cards a few times just to see if it will help my writing process, but I am too impatient to type everything out in this way, although like raherrmann, I take copious notes and transcribe a lot at archives. I always go back to the tried and true.

To wit:

• books bristling with translucent colored tags or post-its piled high around me
• a nest of printed Word documents in front of me
• a yellow pad with "Don't forget to write this!" and a lot of handwritten things on it
•  more Word documents open on the computer.  

Each book has a special place, too, depending on how soon it's being used: side bookcase, bookcase above the desk, space ahead of me on the desk between keyboard and monitor, space to the left of me on the desk. It looks as though I've built myself a book fort and have drawn up the ladder behind me.

Evernote would be smarter, probably, but I can't get the hang of it. If it's in a file, even if it's an Evernote file, it's invisible to me. It doesn't help that I've never gotten it to read handwriting, as it's supposed to do, and that sometimes the things I think I've captured on the web are blank.  I know I'm doing something wrong, but it takes too much time to figure out.

Scrivener has helped immensely with making the whole manuscript in chapters visible at once, but if I put research in the research folders, I still forget about it. The research journal has helped, too, since I can search for terms and see what I thought about something.  750words.com lets you download all your daily writing as a text file, so that's searchable, too.

But wouldn't it be great to have all those thoughts in index cards ready to be put together?

What's your research/writing process?

At The Chronicle: Don't like teaching? It's okay to fake it.

At The Chronicle, "I Don't Like Teaching. There, I Said It" is part of the "Do Your Job Better" series. (Huh?)

The advice that "Sidney Perth" gives is pretty straightforward: if you don't like teaching, fake it and don't worry about it.  Liking teaching isn't the same as being a good teacher, he says.  Good teaching behaviors make a good teacher. You don't have to like it; you just have to care about it.

Part of this rings true.  I can write a good administrative report, but that doesn't mean I like to do it.

I like to teach. I like the process of discovery, both mine and the students', and I like the energy of a good class discussion. There's an excitement to that process, which is probably why the MOOC idea is so threatening to me. Not every class is going to be great, not every student is going to appreciate what you do, but enough do to make the whole process worthwhile.

But why would you spend your life doing something that you really don't like? This is the part of the article that fascinates me. It can't be the low pay, or the long hours, or the Hunger Games-type competition for positions, or the sitting-over-a-dunk-tank feeling you get every time some fool on the internet or in the legislature decides that the humanities are the problem with the good old US of A.

In fact, I'd disagree with one part of his premise, which is that not liking teaching is like not liking puppies. If you profess too great a love for teaching, especially if you're female, that can be scanned in some people's minds as "isn't serious about research." Is this article really a humble-brag about loving research instead of teaching? I don't think it is, because he doesn't mention research.

Do you like to teach? Would you do it even if you didn't like it?

Wait, what? So Coursera wants to be Blackboard when it grows up?

This Inside Higher Ed article about MOOC partnerships has me confused. Instead of offering free education for the masses, and definitely not the classes, Coursera has another business model in mind, and it's coming soon to a state university near you.

But some universities will try Coursera to see how well they can use its software to offer traditional for-credit online classes to dozens of registered students at once. If universities like the platform, long-time industry players like Desire2Learn and Blackboard could find themselves with new competition.

 If a little competition will improve Blackboard, I'm all for it. I think, though, that what they're talking about is selling content modules of the sort that a lot of textbook providers already have available for Blackboard.

Koller said she now wants people to start thinking of Coursera content as

a textbook.

Figure 1. Daphne Koller tries a different approach
to explain MOOCs to wary faculty members.

Clever girl, Daphne Koller. Since faculty have been making a fuss, the message has changed from  "MOOCs are shiny and good for us all" to  "Don't fear the MOOC! It's just a talking textbook."

But the dream of a professor-less class, or an unprofessor class where knowledge of the person in the room doesn't count, hasn't died yet:

SUNY's associate provost, Carey Hatch, said the system also plans to offer incentives to campuses to develop and consume online courses that meet general education requirements. Some courses could be “guided MOOCs” where a SUNY instructor helps SUNY students work their way through a course that was created by another institution. 

See that "develop and consume"? How much will state universities be allowed to develop, and how much will they have to pay to "consume" content that they probably already have in their "online classes that meet" gen ed requirements?

“We hope to reach more students with the existing faculty that we have,” Hatch said. 

"Reach more students with the existing faculty that we have"--I'm confused again. Does mean that state schools' "existing faculty" will get to grade and tutor more students than ever before but still will not be allowed to run their own courses?

To partner with so many institutions, however, Coursera will sidestep a contractual obligation to primarily offer courses from members of the Association of American Universities or “top five” universities in countries outside of North America. It will do so by creating a new section of its website to house material from the less-than-elite state universities. This different section will offer MOOCs but will be branded in a different way.

Figure 2. Don Draper didn't get the account,
but the Coca-Cola of ketchups is
still iconic as a brand.

They really aren't kidding about perpetuating class structures with this model.  You can buy Heinz, or you can buy store brand ketchup, but it'll be absolutely clear on everyone's transcript.

You'll be shocked to learn, in a follow-up article at IHE, that SUNY faculty weren't told about this brave new plan for their futures until after the administrators had made it a done deal.

MOOC partnership in the classroom

First, a riddle:

Q. How is MOOC news like a bag of potato chips?

A. First, you can't stop eating them, and then you can't stop offering them around to all your friends, regardless of how bad they make you all feel the rest of the day.

Here, from the Chronicle, is what a MOOC-infused class looks like:

The San Jose State instructor ran his edX-infused course as in a fairly standard "flipped" format. He would instruct students to watch Mr. Agarwal's short lectures before each class session. Mr. Ghadiri spent the first 10 minutes of each class answering questions from his students about the MIT professor's lectures. Then he typically spent 10 minutes giving his own lecture: a summary of the most salient themes from Mr. Agarwal's lectures, plus some original material. 

After that, Mr. Ghadiri divided the 86-student class into groups of three and had them do worksheets on the lecture material. The instructor and his teaching assistants fanned out across the classroom, observing the teams and giving them tips when they were stuck. Finally, Mr. Ghadiri gave the students a quiz to take on their own. Mr. Ghadiri says he wrote all his own quizzes and worksheets.

So, as an instructor, you get to:
1.  Repeat another person's lecture, emphasizing what he or she thought was important. The students thus get the MOOC information twice. Wasn't the flipped classroom supposed to save time?
2. Answer questions about another person's lecture.
3. Create worksheets and quizzes.
4. Grade worksheets and quizzes.
5. Spend extra time prepping by watching another person's lecture.
6. Tutor students.

The fun part is all outsourced--getting the information together, presenting it to a live group of students with plenty of interruptions and extemporaneous ideas exchanged.

But don't despair.  You still get to grade.

Temple Grandin smacks down Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule: a MOOC post

Over at Wired, in "Your Genes Don't Fit: Why 10,000 Hours of Practice Won't Make You an Expert," Temple Grandin and Richard Panek take on Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule. Citing Gladwell's well-known example of Bill Gates's computer opportunities, she describes her own similar experience:

Now let me tell you the other side of that story. In the late 1960s, when I was a student at Franklin Pierce College, I had access to the same terminal as Gates — the exact same Teletype terminal. The school’s computer system tapped into the University of New Hampshire’s mainframe. So I had as much access as I wanted, and I had as much firepower as I wanted, and it was all free. And you’d better believe I wanted to spend as much time as possible on that computer. I love that sort of stuff; I love to see how new technology works. The computer was called Rax, so when I turned on the computer, a message would type out on paper: Rax says hello. Please sign in. And I would eagerly sign in.

And that was it. I could do that much — but that was all. I was hopeless. My brain simply doesn’t work in a way that allows me to write code. So saying that if I’d spent ten thousand hours talking to Rax, I would be a successful computer programmer, because anyone can be a successful computer programmer, is crazy.

I say: Talent + 10,000 hours of work = Success. Or to put it another way: Nature + nurture = Success.

Others say: 10,000 hours of work = Success. Or to put it another way: Nurture = Success.

This one-size-fits-all approach to learning seems to me the fallacy--okay, one of many fallacies--of the MOOC paradigm.  Even if you grant the following MOOC cheerleading points, which are repeated ad nauseam as fact by The New York Times--

• That all classes, everywhere in universities, are terrible 1000-person lectures where bad Podunk U teachers drone on to disengaged students;
• That bad Podunk U teachers, which includes everyone not in a MOOC affiliation, only know how to lecture from yellowing notes and have no idea how to engage students in discussion;
• That video lectures are much, much better than in-person lectures because they are shiny and from "the best of the best";
• That those who are against MOOCS also hate baseball, puppies, and humanity

--you are still left with this question: how do you tap into students' varying talents and abilities? 

A MOOC will let you put in the 10,000 hours. It's never going to know the difference. Will it lead to inevitable success, though?

I'm not talking about learning styles but the differences in individuals that you see in any class where there's discussion--that is, any humanities class. They all have talents, but how do you reach them? 

Do you think that Eager Keener in the front row, who has her hand up for 30 minutes out of a 50-minute class, would do well in a MOOC? She might, but how would she (1) receive the affirmation that she so obviously craves and at the same time (2) learn how to share attention and listen to other members of the class without a real live teacher who brings out those abilities?

Or what about Slouchy McBaseballcap, who sits in the back row and is terrified lest his cool be shattered by answering a question?  Sitting for 10,000 hours in front of a computer screen might be just his cup of Red Bull, and in fact, he probably does it already with WoW or Minecraft or something. But how is he going to recognize other talents for analysis, writing, and discussion if there's no live teacher? 

If 10,000 hours in front of a screen were all that mattered, Sunrise Semester would have educated everyone already. But there's more to it than that.