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The Teaching Front
We’re midway through the French-Indian War in my American History 120s, having blasted through Early Colonialism as rapidly as possible. There are important components which I will pick up later, namely triangular trade, mercantilism and the like when we approach the American Revolution. I didn’t waste any time on the Salem Witch Trials (I never do). On the other hand, I spent a significant amount of time laying down the foundation of slavery in America.
At our present pace, we should arrive at the first exam dates by the end of week five, start of week six. This is later than my peers, probably because I spend a lecture day or two talking about the nature of history in general. On the other hand, I’m further along on the timeline than many of them.
Not that it is a competition. Each teaches there own way. Fortunately for me, the majority of my peers recognize and respect this concept.
In American History 121 I’ve got a split between my two evening classes. One of them is about to fight the Spanish-American War after we spent time on the concept of Imperialism. Prior to that we used Andrew Carnegie as our focal point for the Second Industrial Revolution. And of course, we covered Reconstruction. In the other class we are just about to emerge from Reconstruction. Hopefully we’ll pick up speed over the next two weeks.
I’m building new exams for all classes this semester, generating new essay questions as we move along. I’ve been using the same essays for a couple of years now and it seems to be long past time to switch things up.
Once we clear the first exams I’ll proceed forward to the Pre-Revolutionary Era and Theodore Roosevelt respectively. I think I’ve got at least two to three good classes with the potential for a fourth if I can weed out the dead weight or get them to see the light. The first exam almost always serves as a wake up call for many of them. They’ll make a decision to double down or bail out based upon what happens in the next couple of weeks.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this period is that I provide ample warning for what is coming down the pike. It isn’t an ambush by any means, instead it is perhaps more akin to a carefully scripted training exercise. They are given metrics by which I will grade the exam in the form of commonly made mistakes. In many ways, it is another history lecture for the students, a history of their predecessors and how they tend to react to the first exams in my classes.
Sadly, they frequently ignore these warnings and advance to contact expecting to get through without too much trouble.
They are often sorely mistaken.
Lastly, I had a guest visit my classroom to see how I did business. She was there on the day we killed General Edward Braddock, a bastard in need of frequent killing if you ask me. Later when I talked with my guest, she said if she had more history instructors like me, she might have chosen a different discipline. She gave me high marks for getting my students to class on time, keeping their attention and moving forward at a brisk pace.
I’ve got to say, I always appreciate positive feedback concerning my teaching. Thanks!
The Writing Front
I was able to get fiction writing done on three separate instances this week. Next week, the plan is to increase that to four days a week, Monday through Friday, probably around the two pm time frame. That isn’t my strongest time creatively but it is open and the campus is relatively quiet.
I also transcribed some of the longhand material, tweaking and refining as I went. I’m pretty happy with the results so far.
The goal is to have a finished product ready by semester’s end. Perhaps I might sign up for the National Novel Writing Month competition. This is slated to become a novella sized project and I think the subject matter I’ll address warrants that much coverage.
It feels good to be back in the saddle again. This wouldn’t be possible without the support of the Woman I Love, Trinity, who got her vehicle back to operational status, freeing me from transport duties.
Thank you very much.
The Fitness Front
The transportation freedom mentioned above has given me the flexibility to focus on my efforts in the swimming pool. This week the goal was to complete 4000 yards by today. I fell short by a 1000 yards since I didn’t go today.
On the other hand, my weight is now down to 190.5 pounds, more than twenty pounds less than my January 2012 high of 212 pounds.
My energy levels are good on a relatively consistent basis. On the rare instance when I am late to class and I have to drop for push ups (I believe in paying for breaking my own syllabus rules, believe it or not) I can easily pump out more push ups than are actually required. In fact, I got applause in one class for pumping out twenty without too much effort.
Not bad, given that I had swam a thousand yards with a 25 push up warm up a mere thirty minutes earlier.
The only downside of the renewed fitness condition is that I often underestimate how much projection power I have.
I’ve become known as “The Loud One.”
Other Fronts
The new glasses came in to replace the pair I busted last week. Now all we need to do is just count the days down to the next two pay days on the 22nd and the 1st respectively. Those resources should, finally, after ten months of economic misery, lost sleep and bubbling anger, allow us to patch the last of the major holes in the budget. Barring anymore disasters, we can move forward with getting our fiscal house in order.
I continue to read Dario Cirello’s Aegean Dream, a memoir of the time Dario and his wife spent in Greece. It is strange to be reading this while I am taking Spanish. The commentary on language troubles matches my own efforts at trying to speak Spanish intelligently.
Finally, the new Kindle arrived to replaced the dead one. I’ll pick it up from the landlord’s office tomorrow before I head off to training with the Lifeguard Company I work for.
So it goes. Things are getting better by the day, barring an exception or two. May the upward climb continue.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
When I was a kid, I always thought the early decades of the 21st Century would feature the usual exotic gear of science fiction. Perhaps we’d have HAL 9000s without homicidal tendencies, teleport systems and the like.
Instead, when I walk into a classroom, here is what I have in the year 2011.
1. I have a computer console, perhaps as old as three years maybe more. The computer contained therein is at best, a slow, fickle device which runs about as reliably as my radio teletype rig did when I was in the Army.
2. I have a projection system which, unfortunately, is only as good as the computer it is hooked up to. It projects images either onto a “Smart Board,” or a screen.
3. In some classrooms, I have the aforementioned “Smart Board.” This device is designed to incorporate multimedia on a traditional wall type surface.
4. I have PowerPoint, which is one of the programs in the computer.
No holograms. No time machines. No smart boards which really are smart. No voice activated computer system which will instantaneously respond to my commands CORRECTLY the first time and every time after that.
5. Oh, I have the Internet.
As a published science fiction writer, you’d think I’d be the first to use all of this technology to maximum effect. I am the second youngest history adjunct we have, which means by virtue of my age, my presence on the net, and a dozen other factors, that I am most likely to embrace the tools in my classroom.
Do I?
No. In a word, I hate them.
Why?
1. The computer is slow, unresponsive and does not respond to intuitive moments when you have to improvise in a lecture in order to make a point. It also vectors you straight into an inflexible presentation mode.
2. The projector is only as good as the computer you have. If the computer is having a good day, then it works fine. If the computer is not having a good day or someone prior to you did something to it, you’ll have trouble. This chews up valuable class time which would be spent doing other things.
3. The smartboard isn’t that smart, is not responsive enough for my tastes and like the projector, is only as good as the computer it is attached to. After a semester of experimentation with the smartboard, I stopped using it.
4. PowerPoint.
My frustrations with PPT are nearly endless. When forced to sit through a PPT presentation, I find myself looking at the clock, wondering if the Presenter or Lecturer is simply going to read from the script. If they do so, I shut them out. Further, in my experience, students will compulsively and more to the point, mindlessly write down EVERY THING THEY SEE BECAUSE IF IT IS ON THE PPT IT MUST BE IMPORTANT!
This slows the class down even further while you wait for the slow writers to catch up.
5. The Internet?
We have campus wide wifi. Guess what the students do with it?
Surf facebook, look at porn and generally do nothing productive.
In other words, I have a room full of what are supposed to be shiny toys designed to help me teach my students. Instead, they are very much like the plagued M-16 which American soldiers and many others have suffered with for decades. Fickle, prone to failure and not terribly effective.
What I’d like is a classroom filled with intuitive technology which could respond instantaneously to my commands, something which is fluid and not limited to a mere linear sequential process. Here is my wish list.
1. A smart board that is essentially an oversided iPad. I could swipe the screen, write on it with a device, tap commands to activate videos, utilize a Skype style function to contact historians for impromptu conversations, link classrooms for learning across disciplines and the like.
Yes, our “smart board” is supposed to be capable of all of that. It is slow, fickle and too unresponsive for my taste.
2. A hologram of some type, something which could conjure three dimensional images of historical figures, give them a voice and allow them to move about the classroom. Even better yet would be a hologram which can interact with the students in scenario based education.
3. A gaming system which allows students to actually enter a historical world. Those who play video games such as Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire and a host of others know what I am talking about. A virtual world where students can be given assignments where they go in search of various, programmable research assignments. Part of the game would be to successfully interact with the inhabitants of a given time period, conduct interviews and gain further knowledge in that fashion.
This would give them exposure to material culture, technological culture and most important for many, social history in general. It would augment the standard traditional political historical narrative.
4. A computer system which is simple, robust and responsive.
What do I use since I don’t have any of the items on my wish list?
Oral tradition, also known as lecture. I use my dry erase board to draw concepts, stick figures and the like in order to illustrate concepts. I use my storytelling ability to try and conjure that hologram out of thin air, using the student’s own imagination to the best of our collective abilities.
In other words, I use what is essentially ancient, reliable technology to teach in a 21st Century classroom because the other gear is unreliable and interferes with my teaching style.
So it goes. Discuss.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
The Teaching Front: Pondering Points
I teach history, not math. We should get this off the deck immediately. My math skills are, to be honest, atrocious. So when I sat down to figure out how to build my first batch of tests four years ago, it seemed to me that the best solution was to build a 100 point test. There would be four such tests in a semester, which matched my own experiences as a student. Issuing the grade the student earned would be a simple matter. Deduct points based upon errors, mistakes and wrong answers, subtract from 100 and there you have it, a grade to issue. If they lost 3 points, they got a 97 percent which would be an A. If they lost 65 points, that would be a 45 percent, which would be an F.
The thing is this. Just what, exactly should something be worth?
I’m not the first person to wrestle with this and there are all sorts of philosophies on what assessment should be used for, how many points to issue, should it be high stakes or low stakes and so on and so forth. An instructor’s assessment methodology, or lack thereof, is probably one indicator of their overall teaching philosophy.
I started with first principles.
First, I always hated homework in high school. To me, it was not much more than paperwork which had to be mindlessly completely. When I did it, which was not always the case, I ground through it reluctantly and turned it in. As soon as it was turned in, I forgot about everything except what the item was worth. If I really hated the class, and I hated half of them in any given year, I probably forgot the point value as well.
One pleasant aspect of college is that in many classes, you do not have homework. This often comes as a culture shock to freshman students, who are used to grinding out the assignments. You still have to do the assigned work, such as reading and study guides, but in most traditional college classes in the social sciences, homework isn’t issued.
It is worth pointing out that once someone pulled the gun away from my head per homework, which were now called study guides and reading assignments, I popped through them pretty quickly. I also retained the information for much longer than I might have otherwise. Not issuing homework also cut down on a number of other issues, such as allocating time to grade the assignments and the fact that most students probably cheat on the homework assignments. My summer working as a lifeguard around a bunch of high school students served only to reinforce that latter notion.
That leaves me with tests, quizzes and essays.
My first year exams were modeled on those issued by Larry Cox for American History at Maple Woods Community College. They were multiple choice exams only, 100 points, each question is worth one point each. It was the type of test I took and I remembered happily blasting through them without any real effort, though I messed up the scantron on the very first test which gave me a fright. Fortunately, we fixed the error and I got a solid A on my first exam.
The problem? Students were having trouble finishing the test. This is something I still struggle with, most people read v-e-r-y . . . s-l-o-w-l-y. The more important the item, the slower they go. They more nervous they are, they go even slower still. If they are prone to test anxiety, more on that in a bit, they tend to freeze up completely.
Another problem is the fact that other students who put in a minimal amount of time memorizing bits of data simply regurgitated the data onto the test, earned an A, just like I did, and moved on without really learning much. Given that survey classes are supposed to be preparing the students for advancement to higher levels and remembering my own troubles in that transition, this didn’t sit easily with me.
A final problem is that I was advised to issue some portion of the test with a writing component. Over the semesters I experimented with short answers, which are maddening to grade and issue points to. Just how much should a short answer be worth? Five points or ten? Twenty or two? It also seemed to me that the short answer wasn’t much better than the multiple choice in terms of assessing their understanding of the material. It was just another version of the multiple choice only I had to suffer through their bad handwriting.
There is cheating on tests as well, I might add.
So I pulled a page from the Western Civ classes I took years ago. On those exams the Instructor used a fifty-five point essay question. There were three per exam, he would pick one at random. Then you’d write. It was a harder test, to be certain, but it did force you to memorize the facts, think critically about the question at hand, organize a response and economize your words plus your time in order to complete the exam before the end of class.
I generated my first essay based exams with a point value of fifty points and issued them to my classes with fear in my heart. There was a lot of nay saying about the average student’s ability to write an essay, some of it well founded I might add. I’d still have the problem of bad handwriting and poor organization to deal with.
But why fifty points? Here is my reasoning.
First, if the point value is too low, like say 25 points, then the student will wargame the exam and figure they can skimp on the effort. At best you’ll get what is basically a short answer paragraph of maybe three to eight sentences which fails to answer the question on any level.
Second, if the point value is too high, then the student worries too much about the essay question, focusing on it to the exclusion of the rest of the exam.
Third, if they blow the essay, that is over half of the exam. Fifty points out of a hundred is a nice, round number to work with. They can’t blow it off, but they can’t blow off the other part of the test either. If they at least put some effort into it, they can get a passing score.
How do I grade the essays? On that matter, it becomes rather subjective and it is often a point of contention.
For one thing, I actually READ each essay. Students frequently assume that what I will do is skim their essay, looking for key terms. I do skim the essays the first time just to see how long it is, how it is organized, what I am dealing with over all. Then I read them.
I look for the following things when reading.
1. Is the essay well organized? Does it have a beginning, a middle and an ending which makes sense? Did the student accurately lay down the historical sequence of events in order to build their answer properly?
Often a badly organized essay is very much akin to a three year old with a box of crayons. It is all over the place and when I talk about essays I actually take a marker and scribble a line that goes in loops all over the board. This graphic representation sinks in for many of them.
2. Did you indent your paragraphs?
Some students do not know how to indent for some reason. When I get their essay, it is a solid block of text which is virtually unreadable. I warn them in advance to indent their essays, tell them how to do it if they have a doubt (place your index finger on the page and start writing from there) and I tell them that if they have a new idea, it probably needs a new paragraph. After all, Thomas Jefferson probably doesn’t want to share his paragraph with Alexander Hamilton.
Failure to indent costs a student one point per each offense to a maximum of five points. Five points is enough to hammer the point through to them without actually failing them if they executed everything else properly.
3. Factual errors.
Telling me that George Washington was at the Battles of Saratoga (for the record, he wasn’t) constitutes a factual error. I can’t brush it off as an opinion or an argument. When a student makes a factual mistake it shows me that they have not mastered the basic details required by the question. Thus I deduct points, anywhere from one to five, depending on the severity of the error.
These errors can and do add up very quickly. I also think this separates the adults from the kids in that someone who is good at memorizing bits of data often lacks the practice and experience of putting the puzzle together. It also serves as a pretty good indicator of what is going on in their headspace.
The complaint, often leveled by students against this element of the grading is that they have no real way of knowing EXACTLY what to put on the test. This type of student is one who still thinks, in spite of everything I have taught them, that history is merely about memorization.
“If only I can memorize the RIGHT details, I can ace Mr. Murphy’s test,” they must say to themselves.
The funny thing is, I do tell them EXACTLY what they need to know. It is called lecture and part of what I am looking for is their ability to summarize their understanding effectively.
4. Lack of details.
This is perhaps the most maddening aside from poor organization. Here is an example.
These guys were mad about taxes so they started a revolution. They fought against those other guys, I can’t remember who they are. It was a long fight with a lot of dead people in it but when it was over, our country was born. I’m sure glad they fought for us because I wouldn’t have my freedom without them.
A student will often say, “This is right, isn’t it?”
Yes.
And no.
Yes, it is a description of something I cover in class. It is right, vaguely. It also lacks nearly every detail one would need in order to figure out exactly what the student was talking about. If the student were to give an informative speech on a lecture in my class using the above paragraph, they would probably fail the assignment. It lacks the standard who, what, where, when, how and why that one needs in order to flesh this out.
Lack of detail will cost a student one to five points per instance.
5. Insufficient length.
This usually goes hand in hand with the above. If I get a blank essay, I’ll issue zero points. If I get a paragraph like the one I mentioned in italics, I’ll be charitable and issue ten points for effort. If the student nails the multiple choice then they’ve got a 60 percent, which is just barely passing.
While disappointing in many respects, these are the easiest to grade. You put ten points on them and move on.
The essay questions themselves are challenging yet if you read them and answer every component of them, it is possible to build a framework from the question itself.
Here is a question from my Western Civ One class.
Describe the causes and motivations of the Peloponnesian War. Identify the major combatants of the war and provide details on the nature of this conflict. Furthermore, was the war inevitable? Did the major combatants want a war and could it have been avoided? Provide your opinion supported by sufficient historical evidence and reasoning.
Students often ask, “Why is this one single block of text?”
I tell them, “I want you to get into the habit of taking blocks of text like this and breaking them down into component parts. When you reach upper level courses, you’ll look back on this question and see it as pretty clear cut in what I’m looking for.”
During the same semester that I issued this question, I brought a 300 level essay question from Trinity’s classes in to read to my students. Even with a Master’s level education, it took me a lot of effort to pull apart exactly what that instructor was looking for. My question simply asks you to tell me what you know about the period in question, lay down the causes and motivations, and provide evidence for your opinion.
The evidence, in this case, was to be pulled from a survey of the historigraphic (a history of history) lecture which detailed what previous historians had said about the war. It was probably one of the most complex lectures I’d ever given a college level course and perhaps a bit too hard at the 100 level. On the other hand, my Western Civ students beat the living daylights out of the question in spite of the difficulty.
In an opinion based question like this one, opinion counts for ten points. If you give only an opinion not supported by knowledge of the facts, you’ll be lucky to get any points at all.
So, to rift off of something Terri Lowry once said, what are my objectives?
1. I want to impart to the student that the study of history is more than mere memorization. They must be able to think critically about the information in order to, at later stages of the game, have a defensible opinion based upon the evidence at hand.
2. I want the student to gain the ability to write a critical essay outside of the core composition courses in preparation for advancement to higher level college classes.
3. I want the student to develop the ability to summarize their argument effectively, balancing the need for time conservation in class against the need to provide as much detail as possible.
4. Finally, I want the student to actually REMEMBER something from my class for longer than sixteen weeks.
In this bit of pondering I’ve only covered the essay portion. I still issue a multiple choice component which is worth two points a piece for a subtotal of 50 points.
Why two points per question? Again, it gets down to time. I think, even though the essay is worth half of the exam, that it is the more important component of the exam. I have to balance that view against the fact that not all students are good essay writers and they have a limited amount of time to complete the exam. If I issued one point per question for a maximum of 50 questions, they would be back to lack of time, which would affect the quality of their essay.
I could simply make the exam a 75 point exam but then we’re back to the problem of a student worrying more about the essay than the multiple choice. I want to get them into the habit of taking both sections seriously.
I didn’t get to test anxiety on this run. Maybe I will later, but this particular essay is long enough already.
Oh, what would I give this entry if I were grading it?
To be honest, it does wander around a fair amount and it does lack detail in places. In other places, it is vague.
I’d give it an 80 percent. Barely a B.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
I’ve had a blog of one form or another since 2003. There was the first Pondering Tree at Journalspace, which blew up and sucked most of the material down a wormhole back in 2008. And of course there is this one.
In the Fall of 2007 I started teaching at roughly the same time I started publishing fiction. I never expected to teach given the screwball interpretation of the hiring policies at a sister campus. The change in jobs meant a change in what I could and could not post about. Obviously I could not talk in great detail about what happened in the classroom, my own scruples would prevent that if the law didn’t. Nor could I post on certain topics which might be seen as unprofessional.
The entries changed and so did the readership. In many respects it seems to have fallen off since 2007. Part of that is due to the ongoing stall in my writing career, which seems to be holding steady at two story publications. It would help if I would write fiction, send it to market and revise older projects. However, as I type this blog I have the earphones in because the television is going.
I simply can not write any fiction with any verbal audio input. I’ve tried over and over again with the results of staring at a blank screen in total frustration. That frustration bleeds into the relationship I have with the Woman I Love and causes endless havoc. As it stands, writing a blog entry or doing non-fiction with the earphones in, tuned to instrumental music, is borderline difficult.
In any case, the solution to that problem is a writing space where I am alone and it is quiet. I’ve blogged about that before so I won’t beat that horse again.
I find it unwise to blog about the relationship I’m in, or other relationships, which also causes grief from time to time. There is an ongoing feeling that the blog should be a couples blog, which it is not. It is a writer’s blog. Maybe it might be worth the time to create a stand alone couples blog but then it wouldn’t really be mine, it would be OURS.
There is also the feeling on my part that some things truly should be private. The world doesn’t need to know every detail about my relationship with Trinity. Even the Facebook feed doesn’t feature every aspect of our love affair for each other.
Further, writing anything that even feels remotely critical runs the risk of starting a problem. Such comments are often taken as a sign of unhappiness on my part and that the relationship is in trouble.
Which it isn’t. I can’t write fiction when ANY other human being is around. I had a bitch of a time doing it when I lived with my parents as a kid and again in my adult years. I can’t seem to get it done in a coffee house or any place else where humans are talking.
It is what it is.
As for blogging about my summer job, as with my teaching, there are things I can talk about and things I can not. I love the job but I have had my frustrations, the sort of frustrations that would bleed out there in years past. To be candid, I think my greatest frustration comes from enabling parents who put their children at risk with their own behavior. That said, I can’t really go into detail about that either.
Thus, I’m left with little to say most days. If I do have something to say, it is something that can usually be conveyed in less than 420 characters at Facebook.
At Facebook I’ve had some pretty lively discussions over one thing or another, the sort of thing which used to happen here at the Tree. I also use Facebook for many of the admin functions this blog used to serve, such as an online post it note, a record of things accomplished and yes, the things we ate for dinner. Sometimes I vent my spleen there, as I have done here.
Thus I find myself wondering about the future. Perhaps a day will come when the bare dirt around the Pondering Tree becomes overrun with the pixelated weeds and creeper vines of the internet. Should another server crash take place, perhaps it won’t even be that, nothing more than digital oblivion thrown to the four winds of words written and lost forever.
Who knows?
Year 2011 – Fall Semester Prep
We went to breakfast this morning at Corner Cafe in Liberty, the last hurrah for Summer 2011. Below is a shot of the place.
After a Wal-Mart run for some last minute items, I dropped Trinity off at the Pod in order to get some work done on the car. It took longer than I thought it would to clean the windows, wash the car and organize the trunk.
On the Guy Front per the car, the plan is to organize a maintenance kit for each vehicle. Once upon a time in the Army, I had such a kit for my privately owned piece of shit S-10 that my Father fucked me over with after I got back from the Gulf.
Desert tan, folks. Not only had it been through three engine blocks by time I got it, but it was desert tan.
I really, truly, deeply wonder sometimes what that man was thinking. I should spend my independent study session with Terri Lowry writing up some material pondering that particular question.
In any case, the plan is to have a basic kit in both cars by October. Contrary to popular belief among my extended family, thanks again to my Father, I am capable of rudimentary maintenance work on the vehicles. By rudimentary I mean that I can change a battery, change the oil (not that there is a place to do that here at the Pod), check fluids, change tires . . . you get the idea.
I also need to get a full sized spare rim for the ZX-2. It makes me nervous, driving around on the pathetic sort of donut that they give you these days.
Lastly, I’ve all but decided to get a new keyboard, one of the old school clickety-clack Model M keyboards. At the beginning I can hook it up to my laptop and possible make some headway on various tasks which need doing. Later on, perhaps when I convert a space at my Mom’s into a true writer’s space, I can get a writing only computer to go with it.
Then we can see about getting this writing career of mine back on track!
So it goes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
The Teaching Front
I sat down yesterday to figure out reading assignments from the new textbooks we were issued for this coming academic year. When reviewing the various subjects, an instructor of history is always faced with a dilemma.
You can teach your material in a straight forward, linear sequential process. Just move forward from the first chapter to the last, touching on each topic as you go, emphasizing some, summarizing others. This is pretty much how my survey history courses were taught to me and frankly, it didn’t bother me all that much. I was able to retain pieces of the puzzle, earlier bits of data, important clues, and draw them together into a more comprehensive narrative whole. I do this just as naturally as some math teachers do . . . well, whatever the hell it is that they do with their formulas.
The problem is that one faces the student who either doesn’t know how to put the narrative together in their head or is incapable of retaining the information. While some would simply say, “Write them off, you can’t save them all,” that has always bothered me. Some folks simply lose the puzzle pieces you give them over the course of a semester, or they are distracted by their other courses, or life in general for that matter.
I also have to admit, that as a writer of fiction, the standard strategy never seemed very satisfying to me. Overly simplistic, expecting too little of even our best students, while losing many to sheer boredom.
The other strategy, one I cobbled together for my second teaching eval four years ago, was to give a comprehensive lecture on the trouble between the United States of America and the Empire of Japan. It suffered from being a bit too comprehensive for a 100 level course, as many of my first year lectures did. However, it did accomplish a number of things.
For the first time, the light popped on for many of my students. They would look at the textbook and go, “The text doesn’t say anything about any of that, Mister Murphy. Why?”
I actually saw the light of true comprehension, even among students who didn’t care for or actively disliked history. I gave them all of the pieces of the puzzle at once, more or less sorted out if not completely assembled for them.
In other words, I prefer the comprehensive method where you go back into the past, perhaps even before the course actually started chronologically, to explain how the events came to be.
The only problem? It is time consuming and it does draw attention away from other topics. In other words, you simply can’t do this with every topic of importance in the course.
This leads to the next problem.
What do you emphasize and what do you summarize? As a former grad school instructor told me, “You cover what you can.” True, but you’ll be damned by some for political prejudice for not covering certain topics. That Instructor is very much a social historian, it is his strength. Social history, however, is not a strength of mine in spite of my indoctrination in that subfield of history.
I have to admit that I prefer the more traditional political history over the social historical narrative. It is very hard, even for me, to draw any understanding from social history when it is taught in near isolation from political events even though they may well have generated those events. At best, comprehensive social history should be saved for the three hundred level on up, after students have a solid core of political history built into their understanding.
Thus I tend to emphasize political events, particularly with regard to foreign policy, economics to a lesser degree, and finally technological advancement. Given that we have spent the last decade locked in constant warfare, I find the notion of minimizing America’s foreign policy history unpalatable. It seems to me that at the very least, students should have a rudimentary understanding of how this country became a superpower.
In any case, I’m left with a decision on what to focus on based upon my strengths as an historian, my understanding of the material, and my professional beliefs as to what should receive proper emphasis.
So it goes.
The Fitness Front
I weighed in today at the LRC at 196 pounds, down from a high of 212 pounds back last January. I’m close to my old weight back in the Fall of 2009. On the other hand, I’m slimmer, more developed in terms of back and triceps muscles and my endurance in the lap lanes is far superior to what it was even a year ago.
I celebrated by swimming five hundred meters in the LRC swimming pool, 100 meters at a time. Compared to last spring, swimming the 25 meter length was easy compared to the competition pool at my summer job.
It felt good. Hopefully over the next nine months, I’ll improve upon the weight situation and my swimming ability.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
The Manual Typewriter is Dead! Long Live the Manual Typewriter!
When I was a kid, my mom had one of those traveling style manual typewriters which was kept in a carrying case much like a suitcase. I used to open it up and play with the keys, imagining that I was actually using a computer with the lid of the case serving as my screen. The funny thing is that this make believe computer didn’t have a mouse. It is probably best to remember that the apex of technology at the time was the Atari 2600 and the Apple IIe’s that our schools had. We used them to make simple programs that would draw pictures and play Lemonade Stand.
The Manual always frustrated me, even after I learned how to type in high school. I could never build up any real speed because the keys would lock up with each other. Of course, the machine is specifically designed to slow you down for just that reason.
As for automatic typewriters, I learned to type on IBM Selectrics. For the record, I actually failed the second half of Typing One in High School. Once I learned the basics I found that I wasn’t terribly interested in the other aspects of the course, such as how to type a myriad of business letters. I suspect that I sensed that the need to know precisely how to craft such things would soon fade.
When I joined the Army, I allowed myself to be talked into MOS 31C, Single Channel Radio Operator. It was also known as radio teletypist. No recruiter ever used the second term because I suspect they knew that it wouldn’t appeal to 17 year old recruits. Instead, they showed laserdisc videos of soldiers assembling satellite dishes and fiddling with digital readouts. In my mind, that looked pretty cool. They also showed soldiers carrying radios on their backs with combat teams, a dangerous job but not the one I actually got.
Instead, when I got to Fort Gordon, Georgia in October of 1989, I found a piece of equipment that more closely resembled the props needed for a 1950s science fiction movie than a one set in the 21st Century. Depressed and missing my girlfriend of the time, I signed up for an accelerated typing class in an effort to cut two weeks off my training and get out of there early.
I passed the training with no real trouble. The downside is that the Army kept me for the additional two weeks where I got to pick up trash, move pile A over the pile B and the like.
Fast forward to my year in Korea. I used my paycheck to buy the first and last typewriter I would ever own. I used that Panasonic to keep a detailed journal of my experiences in Korea. In actuality, I used it to vent my spleen about my growing frustrations with the unit I was assigned to. However, even though I have since destroyed the inch and a half thick journal, I did gain from the experience by practicing my typing and my composition skills.
I do not miss typewriters. I don’t miss the need to properly align the page in the machine. I don’t miss losing a page of work because of a series of typos. I definitely do not miss correction tape.
When I got home, I purchased my first desktop computer, a Dell 386 33 mHz computer with WordPerfect 5.1 installed onboard. I hooked an HP 500 inkjet printer (the best thing HP ever made) and saw miraculously clear, clean print materialize with the click of that mouse button I had forgot to imagine as a kid.
I was hooked.
There is a fair amount of modern technology which I find irritating, cellphones, texting, and PowerPoints are three good examples. There is also a fair amount of old, reliable technology which I admire, such as bicycles, horse and buggies, and the landline telephone. That said, I won’t miss the typewriter.
Not one bit.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Twenty years ago this week I was coming to the realization that I had survived my first and last war. In retrospect, that war was a forgone conclusion. Military historians have ascertained that the reasons for the defeat of the Iraqi Armed Forces at the hands of the Coalition Forces of Operation Desert Storm can be traced to poor leadership, poor planning, lack of motivation among the opposing forces, and perhaps an overinflated assessment of the capabilities of Soviet technology.
It was a war that lasted, in terms of ground combat, four days.
It changed everything.
How did I come to stand on the razor’s edge of history? Granted, I didn’t have any effect on it through my personal actions. I was a mere cog, a little tiny bit of the war machine, one that could have been deleted without a second thought. In fact, if I were writing a novel on the Persian Gulf War, which would probably need at least one fire fight to satisfy the readers, I would pick someone other than myself as an example. I saw a lot of things, but in terms of actual battlefield changing actions, I did very little.
I bore witness, and that is about it. As wars go, I got off pretty easy in the initial assessment. So easy that many of my peers, including one particular prick in South Korea, frequently stated that it wasn’t a real war at all.
Tell that to the Iraqis we killed.
I am not a repentant veteran. I never have been. I offer no apologies for my service nor make any excuses. I do not experience any great discomfort at what happened. Perhaps I experience a very real regret that people I bore no personal grudge against were killed and I often wonder about the living that survived the dead.
I wasn’t particularly eager to go to war either. I was not the kind of soldier who sat around masturbating to the latest issue of Guns and Ammo while whispering sweet nothings to my weapon, named after some woman whose pants I failed to get into. I did not volunteer for Airborne training, in fact I actively turned down an opportunity to go. I did not have any particular affinity for elite infantry units such as the Rangers, who seem still to this day to be not much different than Marines. Technology interested me more than living in the mud and if the Air Force had offered as much for enlistment as the Army had, I probably would have been an airman.
Instead, I joined the Army. Money was part of the motivation, family lineage in the Army was another, and finally the lack of any real prospects was a third. Perhaps patriotism figured in at some point though I can be just as cynical as the next American about my home nation. Lastly, if nothing else, I knew I was a fighter. I had spent my teen years fighting. I would spend my Army years fighting and I’d fight some more after that.
It is perhaps a strange thing then that I was influenced by what is essentially an antiwar documentary which was aired in 1983 on PBS. Each night I would sit down in front of my small black and white television set in my bedroom, which was a big thing in my book, having a television, to watch Gwynne Dyer hold for on the futility of war.
The documentary, entitled War, was designed to educate the public on the futile nature of warfare as a means of resolving differences. Like many products of the Reagan Era, it was designed to scare the living shit out of anyone with an ounce of sanity about the probability of a nuclear war.
Here is the installment entitled The Deadly Game of Nations.
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The music with the intro, along with the images, embedded themselves into my teenage brain. Unlike my peers, I never saw anything you might call glory in warfare. I knew it was a bloody, horrifying, dirty business. I knew it came with horrendous costs, all I had to do was look at my Vietnam Era father to see that. From reading the history books along with science fiction novels, I knew that the next World War, the one we still haven't fought and hopefully never will, was going to be the last.
Dyer's job was to talk me out of enlisting. He wasn't a dick about it. He was a veteran of military service himself steeped in a solid background of military education. He was antiwar without disrespecting, demeaning or insulting the soldiers.
In my case, he failed.
To be fair, my father failed too. So did my mother, at least the first two times I signed an enlistment contract. Each time I managed to come up with sufficient justification for enlistment. Threats to crack my kneecaps not withstanding, I signed the dotted line. I should point out that I nearly did so again in 2004 in order to go to Iraq, not because I felt a need to prove myself, but because I felt a need to back up my support for Operation Iraqi Freedom by virtue of direct participation.
Perhaps some perspective is in order.
In March 1989, when I signed the Delayed Entry Program contract, these facts were known.
1. The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Russia actively targeted civilian population centers with enough ordnance to destroy the planet many times over.
2. The danger of dying in such a war was no less or great at Fulda Gap in Germany than it would be if I stayed in Kansas City, Missouri. What difference does it make if a T-72 gets me, nerve gas or a ten megaton nuke chucked at Downtown KCMO? Dead is dead, no matter where the dying transpires.
3. The two Super Powers had managed to keep the genie in the bottle. I had a belief, perhaps a naive one, that no one would go so far as to chuck nukes around like so many hand grenades.
4. On a personal level, the economy sucked. My job prospects were awful. Four years of active service bearing witness to the failures of my civilian counterparts only serve to reinforce the notion that I had made the right choice.
5. I had to pay for college somehow.
So I signed up, knowing that I was signing a contract. I promised to go fight, and if need be, die. In exchange, the United States of America would feed, clothe and house me. They'd provide a rudimentary if not great medical care program and if I made it to the end of my first four years, they'd give me money for college.
If I could pick up an honorable discharge.
All I had to do was agree to go kill anyone the United States of America declared the Enemy of the Week.
It turned out to be the Iraqis.
If a war was to be fought, I expected it to be at Fulda Gap in Germany. Or maybe, in my wilder moments, perhaps Columbia fighting some Vietnam do over in an attempt to control the drug trade. I didn't expect Iraq and I don't think the Iraqis did either.
Dyer's series is useful for a lot of reasons. Aside from laying out the mindset of a soldier, he captures the attitudes of the early 1980s regarding the military.
1. Soldiers are obsolete.
2. They are preserving an obsolete way of doing things.
3. The equipment they use is expensive, fickle and will probably fail them at the worst possible moment.
4. The Soviets have more of everything, which will lead us to use nukes.
It turns out Dyer was wrong, perhaps sadly enough. He was wrong on every front. We still use wars to solve our problems. We haven't blown the planet up yet (and I probably just jinxed us by typing that). Our weapons are expensive and fickle yet they are also far more effective than anyone could have possibly imagined.
In one respect, I'm glad he was wrong. If he had been right, I wouldn't be typing this right now. I'd be in a grave somewhere, long moldered away to nothing, the victim of a futile effort to dislodge an invader from another country.
In many ways, Dyer convinced me that it didn't matter where I was. Stay at home and catch a nuke or go for a soldier and take your chances. This series did the convincing.
So it goes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
It has been a busy week for yours truly. So busy that my fitness program, which had been running pretty consistent since the start of the new year, got a bit derailed as I dealt with one issue or another.
Let’s get to it.
The Teaching Front
We’re advancing to our first exam, which is far later than normal due to the snow days we’ve had. I’m behind in all of my classes as well, which is yet another struggle. Further, due to the disruptions, it has been difficult to build up momentum and bond with the students. As a result, things are not working quite as smoothly as I’d like. Fortunately, I have no real disciplinary issues on the table.
On the other hand, I see a lot of my students using their textbook and their study guide during the lecture to hunt down terms. On the surface this might seem like a good thing, right? At least they are paying attention to something.
Well, actually, it is a bad thing. It is a sign of a time crunched student, or worse, a bored student, who is attempting to work through the study guide while I lecture. More often than not students believe that the lecture material is not important for the test. I often get students who ask how much of what I lecture on is in the textbook.
Less than you’d think. The lectures are often specifically designed to go deeper into the topics at hand or they are designed to operate hand in glove with the textbook.
So an example would be the lecture on the Pre-Revolutionary Era of American History. The traditional way of teaching this is to start with the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act, the This Act and the That Act and rest assured that is exactly how it sounds to the student. They are merely memorizing bits of info for regurgitation and that is the last thing you want them to do. Memorization is just an early step towards true understanding.
Rather than lecture on those acts, I make the student responsible for reading the textbook’s coverage of those acts. What I do instead is lay out the case for why the Colonials believed that their only recourse was to declare independence from Great Britain. I lay down the grievances and I fill in the background for the Colonial’s historical understanding and perception of events.
How does that work out? Well, I’m two semesters into using that method and if you are a student who does what I told you to do, take notes on the lecture, tie it to your reading and form a synthesis of the two, then they do fine.
Test results aren’t much different between one strategy of coverage or the other, I might add.
In any event, they are doing their homework while I lecture. I think I’m going to put that on the Why Did I Fail The Test? section of my syllabus for next semester.
The Student Front
I’ve not had a chance to update either the Pondering Tree or Playing with Genesis.
We’ve moved into the actual writing of the novel. The group I am in wrote a combined first chapter this last week.
We’re in a computer lab and to be honest, I am growing to believe that this was not the best choice for the class. It is hard to get into an effective group in order to get any work done. The computers serve as a frequent distraction. Given that I was using my laptop on Tuesday, even I am guilty of this, though I had a reason (which is not the same as an excuse) for having that computer out. If nothing else, the clickety-click-click-click of the keys on my laptop are relatively quiet.
In fact, in terms of technology in the classroom, I think it ought to be banned. No videos, no slides, no powerpoints, none of it. Just a board to write on and comfortable chairs for the students to sit in with a large desk to spread out their things. On C-Span this morning (and what a wonderful discovery that is, a place where people discuss without drama or shouting or Jerry Springer like behavior) an education pundit was talking about a high tech public school on the East Coast which cost a pretty penny to equip with the latest and greatest in technology.
The performance at that school? In the toilet. Students surf the net, IM each other or spend their time trying to get the tech to work in the first place.
Banish to the Computer Science Department and leave it there.
I’ll provide a proper update to Playing with Genesis that covers the actual course material and progress later this weekend.
Research Project Number – 05
The Client was on deadline this week, which was something of a surprise to me. I wasn’t aware of the deadline. No matter. I sat down with the backlog I could most effectively contribute to and worked over the material. By deadline time, I had most of the storyline components covered. There are a few lingering errors in the manuscript but I will catch them later.
It is going to be a pretty big novel, folks. I’m looking forward to seeing how the trilogy ends.
The Writing Front
In the Early Morning Rain by Berry Henderson and myself is currently out to market. We haven’t heard anything back yet so we’re hopeful. It is a new market open to e-subs so I’ll be looking over my inventory to see what can be polished up and put into the wind. Many of the valuable things I have learned in World Building will be helpful in that respect.
On the novel front I was able to drag out the manuscript for the first time in a couple of weeks to give it a going over. What I have right now are a bunch of cobbled together, pasted together scenes which are loosely linked together. In looking over the manuscript I think some major work is needed to better define the roles of the various characters.
There is also one glaring problem, the same one I noticed with my previous novel effort, Convergence Point.
When I have the space to spread out and more specifically, work on a military topic, I tend to let the action and strategy dominate the narrative. It is a natural strength of mine as a storyteller and an historian. Unfortunately, without significant character depth and development, no one is going to care about that action. It will be nothing more than a series of cardboard targets getting cut down on the battlefield.
So that part of it needs significant work. It is the sort of thing I can probably hammer out in a week of concentrated effort.
As for the World Building in the novel, I think some refinement of various structures and institutions are necessary. I definitely want to redefine the family structure of this society based upon what I have learned in Melissa Eaton’s Cultural Anthropology side of the course.
If things go according to plan, I’ll use my time during Spring Break in tandem with Trinity’s Spring Break (which is at the end of the month) to get the project ready for submission to market.
Other Fronts
Over the next few days the Great Summer Job Hunt will commence. Now that I am lifeguard qualified I should be able to, hopefully, get a decent job at around 25 to 30 hours a week maximum. Even more ideally, it will be a posting to an outdoor pool.
Trinity is making plans to travel to California to see her eldest son and wife for a week during her Spring Break. I should be able to polish up the novel while she is out there. I’ve got to say that I am glad to see that fences have been mended with that particular component of her family.
Lastly, March 10th is my father’s birthday. He’ll be sixty-nine years old if my math is correct. No one thought he’d get this far given that he has prostate cancer, multiple myeloma, stage three lung cancer and a heart muscle that more closely resembles a chunk of hamburger than a heart.
I chalk it up to sheer cussed stubborness myself.
Trinity and I are going to see about getting some barbecue for tomorrow night so we can celebrate a bit early. Both of us will be tied up during the week with our respective college obligations.
So it goes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
The following is a document which I have attached to my syllabi for nearly three years now. It started off as a short list of six points. It has now, as you can see below, grown to nine points.
Enjoy.
American History
Updated: Tuesday, 01-18-2011
Why did I fail the Test?
In order to expedite the learning process and facilitate troubleshooting the potential reasons why students perform poorly on their exams, I have provided this list of primary factors which result in poor performance. This is not all inclusive, but it does cover the majority of poor test score issues.
1. Talking in class: Talking in class is perhaps the Number One pet peeve of the Instructor. Talking during the lecture not only takes your attention off of the material, it distracts everyone around the offending student. It is also THE PRIMARY COMPLAINT of your fellow students. Frequent offenders will be removed from the classroom without debate or discussion.
2. Someone next to you was talking: If you are distracted by a fellow student during the lecture then there is a pretty good chance that you missed something important. It is incumbent upon you to take action to correct this. It is within your right as a student to ask that your peer remain silent during the lecture. If they are unwilling to remain silent, report the behavior to the Instructor for further corrective action.
3. Sleeping in class: If the student is sleeping, the student is neither listening nor taking notes. A frequent excuse is that the course is boring. Part of education is learning to adapt and overcome which includes staying awake, whether you want to or not.
4. Texting in class: If the student is texting the latest non course related social gossip, they are not taking notes. Moreover, they probably aren’t paying attention either. Texting students are obvious to everyone around them to include the Instructor (who sees you hiding the phone under the desk, in your pocket, on your lap, etc). Aside from the fact that the syllabus states texting is forbidden in the first place, it is usually a self eliminating problem. Texting students perform poorly.
5. Poor attendance: If the student is not in class, they are not there to listen, take notes and learn. Reading the textbook alone and cribbing off of the notes of your peers will not suffice.
6. Late to Class: It goes without saying that if you are late to class, you probably missed something important. Tardy students invariably disrupt the class by asking their fellow student what they missed, impeding the learning process even further. Show up on time. It is that simple.
7. Failure to take notes: Learning does not occur by osmosis. The student must be an active participant and in a lecture based class that means taking good notes. Simply listening to the lecture will not work for the majority of the students in this class.
8. Failure to read the textbook: The textbook and the reading assignments are provided as a means of giving the student additional context and the opportunity to THINK about what they have learned. Learning is not just the mere memorization of facts. Learning is about understanding, in the case of history, why things may have happened the way they did and how they pertain to present day events.
9. Listening to your iPod during the lecture: The iPod or similar device is forbidden in any case. If you are listening to it, you aren’t listening to the lecture and you will fail your test.
There are other reasons but if you find that you have one or more of the following symptoms during the course of the semester, this might explain poor test performance. It is up to the student to be proactive and correct the problem.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Right now I’m in the middle of reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
Why? Well, it is a favorite of mine and it has been a few years since I read it last. I like the flavor of the novel and the delivery of Lee’s message about Southern small towns, race and gender issues. I like the fact the novel does not preach at me or crack me upside the head with an ideological ball bat. Lee just slowly builds sympathy for the Finch clan and the whole host of characters which make up Maycomb County in the 1930s.
You know, the narrative goes on for quite some time before you get to the heart of the novel. We meet the protag, a bib overall wearing tomboy named Scout and her older brother Jem. We wonder about the Radleys down the road and who hasn’t had creepy neighbors which seemed to spawn a mythology all their own. There is Atticus Finch, town lawyer, widower, raising an unconventional family in trying times. For nine chapters or so the reader is hit with one challenge to the conventions of 1960 (the novel’s first publication date) after another.
Then Tom Robinson comes up. We don’t meet him immediately. Instead, we encounter him as the subject of a matter of honor between Scout and Cecil Jacobs.
It features the N-word.
There it is. I do not dare even type it but most of us know which word I am referring to. In the Year 2010 I can use any number of different words up to and including the once horrifying but somewhat weakened FUCK in most venues.
But as a writer and a historian, I do not dare use the N-word. In class, when it comes up, I refer to it as the N-word. I often couch saying “the N-word” by saying, “I am not committing academic suicide today by saying the N-word.”
So I can’t use it academically even though the word is deeply ingrained into the American Lexicon. It is a word that has shaped American History and yet I, a trained historian, can not use it.
As a writer I find that I can not use that word either.
At the end of the day, I suppose I can and have lived with that compromise. The N-word is, today, an insulting, demeaning slur designed specifically to remind African-Americans of their former position in this society.
Yet there it is in Harper Lee’s novel. Why not just cut that word out and replace it with something else?
Negro? Well, even that is a bit dangerous, isn’t it?
African-American? While hyphenation is all the rage today it would be factually inaccurate to put that phrase into Scout or anyone else’s mouth in the Depression Era South of the 1930s.
So what is the solution?
The Historian and the Writer in me have the same answer.
Leave the novel alone and accept it on its own terms. To remove the N-word from To Kill a Mockingbird diminishes the power of the novel and worse, waters down the message intended by the writer.
Our past in the United States of America is often a painful one. Lately I have wondered if maybe some folks dislike history due to that pain, the unpleasant facts of our past sins, and in trying to reconcile them with who we are today decide that it is not worth the time.
I find myself wondering how long we will have to wait until a well meaning but misguided editor pulls the N-word from To Kill a Mockingbird?
Hopefully they will not do it anytime soon. In the next year or so I plan on using Lee’s novel in my American History 121 classes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Those that done said stuff