admin Books, Students, Writing

No reading, bad writing

Everyone I know who is a good writer is also a good reader. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, then, helps to explain why so many of the students I teach are (to put it bluntly) bad writers.

The article reports on a study released by the National Endowment for the Arts called “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence.”

Among the findings: in 2006, 15- to 24-year olds in America spent just seven minutes on voluntary reading (including online reading) per day during the week and 10 minutes a day on weekends. On the other hand, they spend 2-2.5 hours a day watching television.

There it is.

admin Books, Students, Writing

Spare Prose PLEASE!!!

Somewhere along the way, probably in high school, college students learn that “good” writing means long sentences and big words. But in my experience, most students don’t have the linguistic dexterity to pull this off. It just becomes an overwrought jumble of words and punctuation.

Not that I can do much better myself, but I do try to take the advice of William Zinsser in On Writing Well to cut everything I write IN HALF.

I was reminded of the strength of spare prose in a review of Run by Ann Patchett in the September 30th issue of the New York Times Book Review. Reviewer Leah Hager Cohen writes, “Among the many things to admire about Ann Patchett is the lack of frivolity in her prose. She prefers nouns and verbs to crowded flights of lyrical adjectives and adverbs, and she doesn’t dally excessively over a pretty phrase. Patchett is more hammer and nails than glue and lace; small wonder, then, that her books tend to be such solid, weight-bearing constructions.”

admin Higher Education, Students, Teaching

What We’re Selling, What They’re Buying

Had a conversation with a good colleague the other day who marveled at the fact that the knowledge we are trying to “sell” students in class is the only commodity that people willingly shortchange themselves on. That is, most students pay full price for their courses but want to do as little as possible in them. Have fewer assignments? Fine by them. Less reading? Even better. Cancel class? Fine by them. My colleague said it’s like paying full price for a Coke and getting only a half full cup — and being happy about it.

It’s easy for professors to get upset about how students devalue the educational commodity we think we are providing. I get upset about it myself. But the reality is this: the commodity that college students are buying for their tuition money is not an EDUCATION (knowledge, understanding, insight, or anything like that). The commodity the students are buying in each class is a grade and a certain number of credits, and over the course of their undergraduate careers, a degree.

Herein lies a good deal of the misunderstanding between professors and students: what we think we’re selling and what they think they’re buying are two different things.

admin Students, Teaching

What the teacher learned

I was reminded the other day at a teaching seminar of this truism: Students may not remember the substance of what you teach, but they will remember how you made them feel.

Now, I’m no proponent of “emotivism” as a moral philosophy, but I do know that the professors who took the time to make me feel like I was someone worth talking to made all the difference in my own occupational choice.

Are you feeling me?

admin Books, Clothes, Students, Tennis, Travel

I’m Back!

I guess I took the summer off. I didn’t mean to, but teaching summer school wiped out 8 weeks, then I had 4 weeks to do 12 weeks worth of other work. A couple of brief points by way of getting back into things:

1. I (heart) Montreal. Spent a week up there with my boy, Shattuck Slim, at a conference and LOVED it. I also developed a fondness for The Netherlands while there. What I learned: in French, a bow tie is called “noeud papillon” — knotted butterfly. Beautiful. Thanks to Nadia at Harry Rosen for that.

2. I (heart) Ana Ivanovic, who won the Coupe Rogers in Montreal the week after I was there.

3. Now that classes have started again this fall, I have to ask: why do so many students refer to any book as a “novel”?

admin Books, Higher Education, Students

To the Class of 2006

On the occasion of graduation, an excerpt from Alan Lightman’s novel, Reunion (in which the narrator attends his 30th college graduation reunion):

“Young people explode with their discovery of the world and the newness of life. They sleep and sleep in their tiny cocoons, and suddenly one day, perhaps in one moment, as in the moment Juliana first kissed me, suddenly a young person wakes up and finds the universe tilting and gasping in front of him. Infinity. So many things are happening for the first time. What young people don’t realize is that so much is happening for the last time as well. The world is both opening and closing at once.

The first kiss, the first ecstasy of love, the play of light in the trees on a particular fall day, the endless flood of strength in our biceps and thighs. We have the illusion that all of this will happen again and again. In a way this falseness of youth is even more painful than the branching channels ahead. For the young are very much aware of the moment of the first kiss, the first ecstasy of love, and so on. They are keenly aware. Their terrible miscalculation is thinking that these moments will repeat in the infinity of time, that their bodies and minds will hold.”

Enjoy the rest of your lives, Graduates of the Class of 2006!

admin Higher Education, Religion, Sociology, Students

Speaking of Duke

Speaking of Duke, here’s a quote from a recent New York Times article called “Rebels with a Cross”:

[Christian Smith, a University of North Carolina sociologist,] compared the romance of rebellion to the middle-class fascination with hip-hop culture. “Spoiled suburban white kids act like rappers, and there is a real connection to something, but really it’s not what their lives are fundamentally about,” he said. “Their lives are about wanting to go to Duke University.”

admin Books, Higher Education, Students

Student (Dis)Engagement?

From “A Very Long Disengagement” by Mark Bauerlein, Chronicle of Higher Education (6 January 2006):

“Last spring Nielsen Media Research reported that the average college student watches 3 hours 41 minutes of television each day. . . . Last year the National Survey of Student Engagement found that 44 percent of first-year students never discuss ideas from their readings or classes with their professors outside of class. . . . The trends are not unrelated. The more young people gather to watch TV shows, transmit e-mail and text messages, and blog and chat and surf and download, the less they attend to their regular studies. . . .

To repeat, the more time young adults devote to activities like sending e-mail messages, the less time they devote to books, the arts, politics, and their studies. Time has proved the formula. In the 1990s the gurus and cheerleaders of technology promised that the horizon of users would expand to take in a global village, and that a digital era would herald a more active, engaged, and knowledgeable citizenry, with young adults leading the way. It hasn’t happened. Instead, youth discourse has intensified, its grip on adolescence becoming even tighter, and the walls between young adults and larger realities have grown higher and thicker.”