Quip

The Freshman's Alphabet Waltz

You, in a world of expanding diameter
Here's some advice in dactylic tetrameter
A is abandon, so leave your old fears behind
B is beginnings refresh and renew your mind
C is call home so your parents can sleep at night
D is discern and steer clear of what isn't right
E is expect the adjustment to challenge you
F is forgive minor cruelties that others do
G is go places and see things you never saw
H is your honor, a trustworthy inner law
I is "I think," so please think before saying it
J is use judgment, so pause and reflect a bit
K is seek knowledge that drives away mystery
L is let go of mistakes that are history
M is make sure that you sleep enough not to die
N is to never deceive yourself with a lie
O is occasional treats to anticipate
P is have patience for others to imitate
Q is for quiet time just between God and thee
R is your roommate; remember the line for P
S is stay here on the weekend and grow some roots
T is to tame your tongue; don't be a smartyboots
U is umbrellas are useless in Oregon
Soon as you put yours away it'll pour again
V is brief victories, followed by war again
W is weekends; don't play till your work is done
X is exhibit good manners to everyone
Y is your conscience; don't do what it won't allow
Z is for zero regrets twenty years from now

Quadrature

More and more I get the disturbing feeling that what I teach in the classroom has a lot in common with multivitamins, and not in a good way. I gave up on multivitamins about a year ago: I'd read accounts for and against them to get a sense of how the evidence stacked up, and it finally swayed me to the view that they do little besides give Americans the most expensive pee on earth. In fact, a lot of things we do when our health is squarely in the center of our attention have little effect; health, whether good or bad, is accumulated via very long waves of habit and behavior, some of which stretch back before our birth. Much of what we're up against, health-wise, is written in our genes.

That's actually not what got me to thinking this morning, but the analogy is striking. What stirred me up was yet another mention of prior knowledge as a pivotal factor in reading effectiveness. Put plainly, guiding a student to becoming a good reader has less to do with technique, SQ3R, instruction, drills, or anything along those lines than it has to do with simply knowing a good deal about a lot of things. People will find passages more difficult to read if they don't have a foundation of knowledge about the subject, and this degree of difficulty dwarfs verbal skill and instruction as a predictor of reading comprehension.

Me being in the communication racket and all, I immediately see parallels in my field. One interpersonal communication theory, Uncertainty Reduction, says that we communicate for the purpose of reducing uncertainty and beefing up the baseline from which we interpret, explain and predict others' behavior. For the most part it tracks the effect prior knowledge has on reading effectiveness, but with reference to conversation and other forms of relational communication.

That idea has a couple of huge implications for teaching. I work my hiney off trying to beef up people's communication competence, trying to put them through their paces at communication behaviors and skills that will help them reach out to others more effectively and appropriately, but the truth is that all this concern with technique is a tiny splinter in the huge beam that is situational or contextual knowledge. I'm not giving back my paycheck or anything, but it is a bit humbling.

The other implication was taken up by E. D. Hirsch in a book I was reading this morning. He makes the argument that in the early years of primary school, we need to teach students a much more uniform foundation of core knowledge to help them achieve cultural literacy. And he begins by acknowledging that this runs into trouble with people who are committed to making public education diverse and multicultural. According to him, diversity in the delivery of cultural artifacts is like teaching thirty different students in your English class thirty different versions of the alphabet: laudable in the abstract, but an invitation to chaos when it comes to the simplest learning skills that they'll need later on.

His argument has some appeal, but I'm not convinced. It reminds me of a couple of things I take up in my classes, one of which is the controversy over African-American vernacular English, more commonly known as Ebonics. The way I explain it to my students is that if you've got in your classroom a bunch of kids whose co-cultural heritage gives them a shared way of speaking, then you have no hope of teaching them a different way to speak if your approach is to say "Your way is lazy and wrong, and must be replaced by intelligent, right speaking." Instead, what teachers should do is invite students to become bilingual. AAVE is an internally consistent dialect, but there's another dialect, Standard Spoken English, that ranges between useful and indispensible in workplace situations, so it's worthwhile to learn it as a marketable skill, same as bookkeeping, to have available for use, rather than to change the worth of anyone's identity. And I think that distinction is important to maintain when we get to thinking about context and background knowledge. Hirsch's argument about the democratizing effect of a cultural core does homogenize and artificially normalize too many ideas held by the dominant group in a way that is false to fact, but if we keep our focus squarely on the usefulness of shared knowledge, as set apart from the correctness of that knowledge, the dangers that come with that homogenization might recede a bit.

The other thing it makes me think of is the never-ending tension between objective and interpretive perspectives on communication. I've written about this elsewhere, and my students have heard me talk the idea to death: some elements of communication can be measured empirically, while others can only be reported as experience, which some hearers say they share to varying degrees of fidelity, but which can't be captured and bottled. No one understands communication if they devote all their attention to one or the other of those two perspectives. Reasoning from that, I think it's probably true that we've neglected the importance of context and background knowledge, but to go so far as to say they're all that matters runs along the same lines as saying the measurable elements of communication tell us everything we need to know about how it works, which is downright silly. So these are wobbly ideas that are trying to find a balance: in some ways, this tracks the theory-practice dialectic that's coming up over and over again in my work with intraprofessional controversies, because background knowledge is what we accrue inductively through practice, while technique is quite similar to theory: a recipe for behaving, as compared to a recipe for knowing.

And as with most things communication-related, it's a bit of a mess. But as with most such things, it's also fascinating and fun to work through, and the more years I do it, the more I enjoy it.

Quintessence

One thing surgeons and serial killers have in common is that people who are squeamish about the sight of blood are that much less likely to become either one. Similarly, one thing police officers have in common with humanity's biggest bungholes is that both tend to be comfortable asserting authority. If you're not the kind of person who can do that, you might have other faults, but there's a glass ceiling separating you from the pinnacle of obnoxiousness. It also limits your career potential in law enforcement.

At this point, it would be easy for you to get the wrong impression. This is not an anti-police officer piece. Quite the opposite actually; as I write this, I'm caught up in a burst of impatience at how deeply and powerfully the anti-police officer feelings run in this town.

Eugene is a town of aging hippies. By and large, hippies don't warm up to people in uniforms who tell them what they may and may not do. Plus, some hippies, although not quite all, gravitate toward recreational activities that are very illegal. Eugene is also a town with a critical mass of citizens that identify themselves politically as left-wing. For that reason, they're very skeptical of appeals to law and order, and believe police activity usually is orchestrated, and almost entirely behind the scenes, to benefit those who have spent many generations in the wealthy and powerful class, and intend to stay there and to keep out anyone who looks, thinks, or lives differently. And Eugene is a college town. The traditional college-age population is finely situated to be anti-police for the same reason that so many of them go through a rough patch with their parents: they feel ready for complete autonomy, but chafe under the last bits of parental authority, and the friction between those two states builds and builds until something gives.

The output of the above factors, and probably a few others I haven't considered, is a seemingly endless flood of anti-police invective. Lots and lots of people here in this town hate the police. All police. And that goes hurtling past silly, far into the realm of the outright asinine.

Not all police officers are bullies. Not all police officers have a dysfunctional need to give orders, intimidate, demonstrate their power; far from all of them do. But too many of my neighbors and associates put on a convincing imitation of two year olds who fear and hate being vaccinated: they've got a keen memory of a few incidents that involved pain, and they therefore refuse to grapple with the reality that one moment of unpleasantness is probably a small price to pay for protection against a slow death, quite likely dragged through racking, lingering, hellish torment. Two year olds are shortsighted because they're two years old. But at some point, the two year old worldview has to give way, one hopes, to adulthood.

Even given occasions when a police officer behaves badly, it's just absurd to conclude that that police officer, let alone all police officers, carries that as a deeply engraved personality trait. Police work is grueling, and the bad days are unimaginable. A police officer who's gruff during a traffic stop may still be shaking from their own brush with mortality, while grieving the recent loss to violent death of a good friend, or even several good friends. I know how much of my civility I misplace after a day when students have talked back to me, or even just been sluggish in class, so I don't feel as though I'm in any position to hold them to a standard that's ridiculously higher when their working conditions are ridiculously more stressful.

And yes, obviously there are bad police officers. There are also bad plumbers, bus drivers, house painters, pastors, and weasel shavers. But not nearly as many people are willing to condemn those entire professions based on nothing but a few experiences, backed up with images on TV and the trash talk of immature friends. (Well, maybe pastors, but not the rest.)

The funny thing I'm left wondering is whether this marks the beginning of a swing back to where I started my adult life. I came out of high school far more conservative, politically, than ninety-nine out of a hundred people you'll ever meet. But the lifeblood of my education, from secondary to higher to postgraduate, was in debate, and I was slingshotted to the extreme opposite just by the painful experience of listening to arguments made badly. I went to Baylor, which was a pretty inbred nest of conservative thought, and it was like what I imagine musicians must suffer, having to listen to their favorite music being played sloppily and off-key for year after agonizing year. It soured me on what I'd originally believed. I've since maintained that I'm not really pro-Republican or pro-Democrat, not really pro-liberal or pro-conservative, but rather that I'm anti-bad argument. Throughout most of the Rush Limbaugh era, the boldest and most shameless blast of really embarrassingly bad arguments has come from the right, and that has kept me pinned against the opposite wing of politics. But it looks as though living in Eugene is starting to change that.

To an extent, I'll admit, I think this points to how much growing up I still have to do. The truth is that most of the musicians I know actually seem very patient with bad singers and performers. They apparently have the wisdom and kindness to rejoice at others' enjoyment, and to tame their own prissiness and pedantry enough to look past failures of execution to the overflowing heart that motivated the music. If I were a better person, I would be equally pleased to see the passionate engagement and boldness that drives people to enter into substantive conversation and at least attempt to stake out a defensible position. But that might be one of the marks that years in academia has left on me: hearing badly-made arguments still repels me. It doesn't say good things about my allegiance to the truth, but it's a consistent pattern.

Have to wait and see where it sends me next, now that I'm here.

Qualifying

Today, I got my first look at my course evaluations for the Spring 2010 term. My Interpersonal evals looked good, the Public Speaking ones were extremely positive, and the evals from Listening Behavior tore the roof off the house. It seems that in the opinion of the students, each of those classes went very, very well. The one outlier was Communication Theory.

I've been thinking a lot about that class. It's only the second time I've taught it, and the first time it's been its own class, as opposed to a special problems. Back in January, I announced that there would be two tests in the class, both at the very, very end: one would be an objective test over all the theories we'd covered, and the other would be an essay test, for which I'd give them the essay questions beforehand. In fact, I posted the essay questions before the first class meeting, so they had fifteen weeks to craft their answers. I also posted a study guide for the objective test around the third or fourth week, and stopped talking about it.

Late in April, about a week before the objective test, I mentioned it. More than half the class looked very surprised. "We have a test next week?" Not only had I told them at the start and provided a study guide, but the test itself was on the syllabus calendar. In bold. Bright red. But it was a complete surprise to them. More than half the class failed the test, and on the course evaluations I just read, they pointed to the arrangement of the class, and that test in particular, as the reason they didn't think the class was well taught.

What this makes me think is that I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't.

I'm also the lead instructor for First Year Seminar, so we did focus groups and other such activities to find out how we could make that class a more useful, positive experience for incoming freshman. What was the one message everyone agreed upon? What did they hammer into our heads? "Don't talk down to us or treat us like children. We're adults, and you should show us the same respect you show each other." But what happens when I don't nag them every week to study for their comprehensive final, like mom nagging them to clean their room? Well, that means I don't understand their needs as learners.

Their other repeated complaint, on the SSI and in feedback to our marketing firm, is that classes at NCU lack rigor. In this sense as well, my Theory students wound up unhappy receiving exactly what they'd asked for.

What they seem to think will happen in the workplace after they graduate is that their bosses will assign them only short tasks that fit within the attention span they choose to bring to bear, and whenever they do any longer-term work, their managers will manage their time for them. I don't think it works that way, but I suppose one of us is right, and if they are, things will work out. And if I was right, they won't be able to say no one tried to teach them differently.

Understand that I don't, by any stretch, think the class went perfectly. I learned a lot of lessons about how to tackle that class, and I think it'll look quite different the next time I run it. And I do continue to turn over in my mind what they say, because it is dangerous to rush to judgment and assume my own perspective on the class is all that matters. What they wrote, and what I learned, have a year and a half to percolate through my mind before I have to gear up to do this again.

But dangit, this is a class for majors! When I teach the general interest classes that draw people from every major on campus, I'm at peace with the reality that only some of what I talk about will strike a chord with them, and they'll pursue it and connect it with their own experiences and values, and retain that much. All the rest will go pouring out their other ear and be forgotten. But when it comes to Communication majors taking their survey of Communication Theories class, this is their toolbox. These are the ideas that make up the backbone of the field of study. It is not acceptable to me that they "play school," that they go through the motions, that they cram for a test and forget what was on it as soon as they get to their second post-test beer. Not acceptable. If we talked about Coordinated Management of Meaning in January, then it's downright important that they still grasp CMM in May, and in August, and May of the following year, and on and on. If they disagree, too danged bad: time for me to be a granite wall in their path, and they can either change their ways, or else wipe out on my stubbornness.

And I can also say that this experience provides some measure of reassurance on a worry I nursed through most of last year: it's a bad sign when you're too popular with your students. I don't want them to like me too much right now; instead, I want the twenty-years-from-now version of them to look back and like how much they grew under my instruction. Their work ethic and responsibility is not a fraction of what it will be, and if I fit their expectations right now, then I'm lowballing terribly. With this class, I got a glimmer of hope that they encountered the level of expectation that will stretch them into their best selves.

Quasi

In most activities people pursue with any appreciable intensity, there is a kernel of value embedded in an outer layer of utter absurdity.

I'll start backing up my assertion with the example of sports. I think any sport that picks up a serious measure of longevity has at its core an essence that is enjoyable and worthwhile. I think athletes who play those sports make great memories for themselves, form powerful bonds with teammates and rival competitors, and learn valuable lessons about discipline, teamwork, patience, humility, and the list goes on. But beyond that core lurk the toxins of popularity and money, and as soon as the sport picks up a sizable audience, whether regional, nationwide, or even global, the latent profit creates a bubble of false, distorted value that utterly skews the priorities of those who play it and those who follow it.

Oddly enough, virtually the same thing is true, straight down the line, for academic research. Any academic field that attracts a critical mass of researchers, plus consumers of the research, is definitely on to something. No matter how many hasty, lazy thinkers want to say we're nearing the end of science, and we know everything that needs to be known, we still discover every day new cracks and crevices of reality and human experience (not the same thing at all) that bear examining. But the way academic research works at universities, those crevices become veins of valuable ore to be mined for profit, until almost overnight the scholars are producing obscure, silly, contrived research projects that have vanishingly small power to change anyone's life for the better. I trained in the doctoral program of a Research I university, and my professors all assumed I'd go to a huge state school, crank out five or six journal articles each year, teach at most a single class, and effectively work in a think tank, surrounded by grad students who were my research disciples.

Didn't quite turn out that way.

You see, one of the few pursuits that I don't think is a core of value surrounded by a cocoon of absurdity is teaching. Teaching, from inside to out, is pure value. It's definitely the case that learning can range from worthwhile to absurd, and the unbalanced relationship ultra-orthodox Judaism has with Talmud study merely for study's sake has lately underscored that for me. But teaching, as far as I'm concerned, as far as my reasoning can take me, is worthwhile all the way through.

And notice what do I do for a living? I dabble in research on the side, and I even serve the athletic program at my college. But the kernel of what I do is teaching. Teaching makes everything else run; teaching is what defines me. It's my top priority. It's easily the most worthwhile, least counterfeit, enterprise I pursue, and I believe it's the most world-changing outlet for my energies that God provides.

I take great comfort in that. I think it's probably my best protection against burnout.

Quondam

Yesterday I had a moment of sledgehammer empathy.

To begin with, I was a very mediocre debater. I had to work incredibly hard to rack up what little competitive success I did finally wind up with. And since I was on one of the very best college debate squads in the nation, that meant I was reminded on a daily basis how far below most of my teammates I was in talent and skill. In part, this was healthy, because all my life I'd been one of the smarter kids, and things had come to me easily, so this showed me how small a pond I'd swum in, and gave me more realistic measures of how I stacked up against the rest of the world. It also lit a fire under me to work harder, which revolutionized my daily routine: since I'd been very young, I'd gotten by despite underperforming. Now there was something I craved, and all the effort I could possibly devote to it resulted only in inching progress. In many ways, that matured me, and made what I do today possible.

Those were the nice parts, but there were dark and painful parts as well. I remember how it felt not to measure up. I remember being a junior, and then a senior, and still not making the elimination rounds at the major tournaments, or winning big debates against good teams. I remember what a ripping, tearing sensation it was to grapple with the reality that my best simply wasn't good enough, that this was something that just wasn't in me. I could put everything else in my life aside and do nothing but debate, but I would never be anything but mediocre. I remember fantasies and daydreams that on particular occasions shriveled up and died, as I figured out that they were out of my reach no matter how hard I tried.

So where does the empathy come in?

Yesterday I had a student visit my office who'd done badly in one of my classes. The student is on academic probation, and is now facing academic dismissal from the school. In the past, I've been pretty clinical about this: college is not for everyone, and if someone's combined maturity level and intellectual chops don't, after repeated chances, produce the calibre of work required, then it's appropriate and even healthy to remove them, to steer them onto another path. But too often I pull back, brace myself for the tears and obvious grief, go robotically into my soft, gentle voice and relaxed eyes, and simply try to wait them out. Too often I judge them, condemn them, sit still and attentively while they speak their piece, and wonder in my head how much longer it will take.

Even if what I do is necessary and proper, and I do believe it is, the detachment from real pain and real grief is not acceptable. I have been guilty of it, and I repent of it. It's not enough just to put on a display of sympathy. It's not enough to show "appropriate empathic concern." If I'm not willing to endure the hurt, to call to my mind exactly what scars that hurt left on me, then I don't have enough motivation, enough passion, to tackle the teaching enterprise and give my all to helping them find a way to grow into and through the challenge of college. I do have to keep firmly before me the reality that the pain grew me, that the pain was necessary, but if I fall into the trap of becoming too blithe, too flippant, too much of a spectator and not enough of a participant, then I can't be the teacher I want to be.

And yes, effectively what I'm writing here is "Bring on the burnout." This is a recipe for shortening my teaching career. But no one ever said I should return what God gave me unmarked and undamaged. If I don't guard myself enough, then I can't be available to students in years to come, but if I make the converse error of guarding myself too much, then I become complicit in cruelty, and as far as I'm concerned, the proper direction to err is obvious.

Quantum

There's something downright Heisenbergian about the question of whether any of us were wanted, or planned, by our parents.

I use that term advisedly because in my case, I both was and wasn't. I know absolutely for sure that I was conceived accidentally, as a result of a failure of birth control. I also know absolutely for sure that my parents wanted me very badly, that they put a lot of planning and thought and patient waiting into the enterprise of bringing me into their household.

I know these things because I'm adopted. My mother has related enough details about the biologicals and their situation that I know my conception was an unwanted surprise. But I also know my parents were fully invested in the project of raising me from moment one.

For most people, the question is cloaked in mystery. It's not an easy topic to take up with one's parents. Amusingly enough, I do know about my pastor, because his father, the pastor emeritus, shared with us the answer to the question in the middle of a sermon. No, they hadn't planned on him. But for the rest, I'm not sure how it could be dropped smoothly into conversation, without kicking up a fair amount of discomfort. And I'm not sure how completely it would be possible to believe a positive answer. It's not possible to accidentally adopt a child, but the only evidence that a borne child was planned and wanted is self-reporting, which is necessarily shaky.

I find nicely ticklish the fact that most people do not know the answer to this question, and at the same time that I do know the answer, and that it's really two answers, and that they're opposites.

I like that. It's just sort of the way the world is.