My criticism of Ivy Tech’s handling of an adjunct who distributed alternate course materials to supplement his statistics class textbook needs a little clarification. I’m being critical here not so much of Ivy Tech itself as I am the model that sets Ivy Tech’s priorities.
I can accept that Ivy Tech, as an institution keenly interested in maintaining absolute consistency of course content across all sections, was simply acting within the dictates of its business model. Despite what its name might indicate, Ivy Tech Community College is not a single campus but a sprawling network of community colleges with 25 brick-and-mortar campuses throughout Indiana as well as a growing online education division. When you look at Prof. Norasteh’s statistics course, it is one of dozens, possibly hundreds, of sections of this course that are all running at the same time. Four-year colleges and universities have to be able to see this course listed on a student’s transcript and have some reasonable assurance of trust that that course with that grade indicates a uniform extent of mastery of the subject — regardless of where or from whom the student took it.
The same thing can be said for any franchise-based business, or any business that operates virtually as a collection of franchises. When you go to a McDonald’s, you expect to get the same experience and the same product, no matter whether it’s the McDonald’s up the street or one in another country. Uniformity of product is what makes McDonald’s and other franchise businesses work. Are you craving a Big Mac? Go to a McDonald’s — any McDonald’s. Are you wanting to take a statistics class that will transfer into a four-year university? Take it at Ivy Tech and don’t worry about which Ivy Tech or which instructor you are selecting. The same thing can be said for the for-profits like University of Phoenix, which have similarly highly-distributed populations and whose business model stands or falls on curricular uniformity.
So when I criticize Ivy Tech, it’s not so much Ivy Tech as it is the model that Ivy Tech uses which sets uniformity of experience as a higher priority than the quality of classroom learning. When you’ve got a system that actually ends up punishing professors who, on their own initiative and on their own dime, create course materials which help students learn the material better — because this creates a differential between that professor’s course and another professor’s — then I think you’ve got a broken system. What that system really does is reward the professors who do only what is required of them, no more — who stick with the incomprehensible textbook when they know good and well that their students aren’t learning from it. The incentive to do something to help students learn is rewarded by losing one’s job if not everybody else is doing something similar. Talk about your lowest common denominator.
Better to have a smaller, more concentrated educational environment where the uniformity-across-course-sections issue is minimized or nonexistent, and focus on making the classroom experiences as enriching as possible, where both professors and students are doing everything they can to learn, and everybody gets rewarded for doing so.
When you’re teaching a class and students are having trouble understanding the textbook, usually the responsible thing to do is provide them with some form of clarification in the form of a handout or some web links to additional resources. But apparently that’s a firing offense if you’re an adjunct faculty at Indiana’s Ivy Tech Community College:
Pejman Norasteh — like many adjuncts — didn’t have much control over the material he was supposed to cover [in his statistics class]. But students started to send him e-mail saying that the textbook was unclear. One student said he was getting “depressed” and giving up when he didn’t understand the required assignments. Another student wrote: “As usual, our textbook does a poor job of explaining concepts. I am adding this chapter to my list of examples of how poor our book is….”
In response to the e-mail messages and personal requests, Norasteh started handing out supplementary materials to cover the same subject matter as the textbook, but with his own explanations. While the students who complained were happy, some others were not. They sent e-mail messages to the division chair saying that they were being asked to do extra work on top of the syllabus because the supplementary materials were not mentioned on the syllabus as required reading. That of course was true, since Norasteh didn’t start the course thinking he would add to the reading beyond the textbook.
At that point, Norasteh received an e-mail from Mark Magnuson, division chair for liberal arts and sciences, and general education at the campus. Magnuson wrote that it was clear to him that “you are not using or following the syllabus or textbook,” adding that “all instructors, adjuncts and full-time, are required to use the syllabus and textbook in each course to meet the statewide agreed upon course objectives. Individual instructors do not have the option of straying from the syllabus and/or textbook.”
Ultimately, Noratesh was not kept on at the college. Never mind the fact that Noratesh was not “straying” from the textbook but merely doing his job as an educator to clarify the textbook and maximize the students’ learning experience.
There are actually two appalling things about this story. Perhaps foremost is the fact that Noratesh lost his job because he was doing his job, which is to teach students and give them the best learning experience possible. Apparently, according to Ivy Tech — which here in Indiana serves mainly as a transfer institution where students take courses and then transfer the credits to four-year colleges — the need for consistency in coursework trumps the need for clear exposition of the course content, which might (and frequently does) involve the instructor using his or her best judgment and creating materials of his or her own to supplement the standard materials. What’s more important here, Ivy Tech?
The other appalling thing is the reaction of those students who got upset because they were “having to to extra work”. God forbid that you should have to work harder than the absolute minimum to understand the course content — even if the absolute minimum, which involves using an impenetrable textbook, gets you nowhere. Will these same students be raising the same objections on their jobs after college if their bosses give them “extra work” to do or if they have to do “extra work” to make their clients happier? Shame on that attitude.
Final note for full disclosure: Jeff Fanter, Ivy Tech’s communications director who is mentioned in the original article, happens to be my next-door neighbor. He’s a good guy.
Just a public service announcement/question: This blog can be accessed, for the moment, on the web through one of two domain names: http://castingoutnines.wordpress.com or http://www.castingoutnines.net. The latter is a holdover from when I used to self-host this blog, and I have it mapped to the WordPress.com domain. The thing is, I pay $8 a year to map the castingoutnines.net domain to this blog, and my one-year period is up in a few weeks. Does anybody use the castingoutnines.net domain to come here? Would it be a lot of trouble to switch to using the RSS feed or using castingoutnines.wordpress.com instead?
If you do, and it would be, then I’d like to hear you say so in the comments. Otherwise I’ll probably let the domain name mapping lapse to save the $8.
Some time ago, I posted a very skeletal outline of a new Statement of Teaching Philosophy and got some good feedback. After struggling to write something that doesn’t sound like it came straight out of a Miss America pageant, I ended up throwing out the whole thing and starting over. After locking myself in my basement (my preferred location for really serious thinking and writing) for two hours, I had a totally new version of the document which I actually was sort of happy with. Only problem: It was four pages long in 10-point font. A few minutes ago, I finished a two-day editing process which got it down, barely, to two pages.
I’m hoping that you people out there can be kind again and read, review, and comment on this statement. The plain text version of the statement is “below the fold”. You can download a PDF of it here. Thanks in advance.
1. Holy Spirit (Third Day, Third Day)
2. Talk About Suffering (Phil Keaggy, Phil Keaggy and Sunday’s Child)
3. Curses (Steve Taylor, Squint)
4. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age (Holst, The Planets, perf. by NY Philharmonic)
5. The Finer Things (Steve Winwood, Back in the High Life)
6. Telephone Song (The Vaughan Brothers, Family Style)
7. Fire (The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced?)
8. Give Thanks to the Lord (Christ Community Church, re:awakening)
9. Searchran Charin Tsiall (Clannad, Magical Ring)
10. Perpetual Change (Yes, The Yes Album)
“Perpetual Change” (#10 on the list) is a personal favorite of mine, even though I’m no longer the die-hard Yes geek I was when I was in high school. Here’s a very cool performance of this, with Yes vocalist Jon Anderson together with the Paul Green School of Rock All-Stars. Pretty amazing considering that the instrumentalists here are just teenagers!
edwired has some thoughts on the future of the academy in an economy where giving away your product doesn’t necessarily make your business unprofitable. Academhack follows up with related thoughts on using video podcasting to replace the usual lecture format. Interesting idea in giving away the podcast and then charging for in-class activity.
Why pay dues to join a fraternity or sorority when you can pay one low price and have all the drunken party games on your Wii? I find it ironic that the Association of Fraternity Advisors would be so shocked. Where do you think the idea for the game came from, people?
I’ve had a couple of posts lately about what I’d do if I were the university president. Now there’s a series of articles out on the same subject except with contributions by people who are probably a lot more qualified for that position than I am.
Here are some updates on Xian-Jin Li’s purported proof of the Riemann hypothesis which I first blogged about here. Summary: There are some flaws, but it might be fixable.
50+ productivity blogs you’ve never heard of before. So please, spend lots of time reading those productivity blogs instead of getting stuff done. (Or better yet, write blog posts about spending time reading those blogs instead of getting stuff done…)
“The following are valid excuses for skipping class: I have a fever of 105 degrees; I need to fly to L.A. to accept an Academy Award; today in class we are reviewing a book I wrote; my leg is caught in a bear trap. The moral of this exercise: Always go to class!“
– from How to Win at College
Here are some memorable excuses I’ve had before:
A student missed class because, he said later, he had to go to the doctor. Fine, I said, just bring me the doctor’s note and I’ll excuse the absence. Instead of a doctor’s note, he brought me a bottle of pills that he said the doctor gave him. The bottle didn’t have a label on it.
A student approached me the day before a final exam to request that he be excused and take the final exam later in the week. The reason? He claimed his dad was a famous NASCAR driver and had called him up that morning telling him to come work with the pit crew at a big race. I told him to tell his dad that as soon as the final is over, he could join up with the team. (This was while I was at Vanderbilt, so it’s actually possible that his dad really was a famous NASCAR driver.)
A student missed three days of class. Later, he explained: He was in jail for a week. Turned out it was true. So I’d add incarceration to the list in the quote.
What good skipped-class excuses have you heard (or can you make up)?
Blogging is light right now because I’m on sick kid duty at home. But I wanted to check in to mention that this post is the 1000th post I have made here at Casting Out Nines. I’ve been thinking I need to say something stupendously wise for such a milestone, but I think that’s putting too much pressure on me, as I am accustomed to neither stupendousness nor wisdom. So instead, I just wanted to note some cool stats about the blog:
As I said, this is the 1000th post since the blog’s inception on December 3, 2005. That was 949 days ago, so I’ve averaged right at one post per day for 2.5 years. That’s been pretty much my goal for posting and will remain so.
This blog has had a total of 9,568 approved comments. That’s an average of about 10 comments per post, which is stat I am particularly pleased with, as it indicates that CO9s is not an echo chamber, as so many blogs are. The median amount of comments per post is probably more like 0 or 1, but at least occasionally there are substantive conversations that arise from the posts here, and I’m very humbled and thankful for that.
The Akismet filter has blocked 42,159 spam comments, not counting the 38 that are in the queue right now. I think a spam-to-legitimate comment ratio of 4.5:1 isn’t too bad for a blog these days.
So instead of something stupendous, I’ll just say “thanks” to all readers and commenters, past and present, who have made blogging here such a satisfying and educational experience.
Due to circumstances surrounding this article from last week, which you can read about in an update there, I need to be clear about something very important here:
Casting Out Nines is a private blog operated by me as a private citizen. This blog is not, in any way, affiliated with my employer. Opinions, statements, and comments here are not to be construed as me speaking for my employer. Those statements are my own, and nothing that occurs here should be implicitly or explicitly connected with my employer.
The reality of modern academe is that, no matter what your institutional affiliation, the time you can devote to research is being squeezed by multiple competing demands. No simple solution to that problem exists for any of us. But I have found that rethinking the nature of our professional commitments, such that teaching activities bleed into research ones (and vice versa), can be an effective way to reduce the time crunch. Academics describe their workload of scholarship, teaching, and service as if those were entirely separate entities. In reality, the line between teaching and research is usually much fuzzier.
Read the whole thing, in which Prof. Gendle writes at length about the potentially prosperous symbiosis between teaching and research. He points out three key scholarly skills which teaching reinforces: developing your presentation skills, responding appropriately to odd questions, and making connections across fields. He emphasizes his success in maintaining an active research agenda while keeping a “moderately heavy” teaching load, which for him is 5-6 courses per year. My teaching load is 8 courses (6 preps) per year, and to that situation Prof. Gendle says:
I am fortunate that my teaching load still allows some dedicated time for research. That may not be the case at institutions with teaching loads of seven or more courses in a single academic year. Teaching loads of that magnitude often pass a tipping point for most faculty members (myself included). With that many courses, there simply are not enough hours in the day to conduct classes, grade papers, etc., and still have time left for research.
Gendle is in the psychology department at Elon University, which is well-known for being an undergraduate institution with a reputation for engaging students in meaningful scholarly work.
Do any of you teach at institutions with a 7+ course-per-year teaching load, and still manage an active research program of some sort?
