Rigor

I've been surrounded by discussions of rigor lately. In academia, rigor seems always to go hand in hand with quality. Degree programs, departments, courses, and assignments which are deemed more "rigorous" are also seen as better. Aside from an often glaring lack of rigor in the definition of "rigor" itself, I suspect that using rigor as a proxy for quality is often misguided.

A post from Dean Dad raises many of these issues. He writes,

Which is more rigorous: a program with all required and prescribed classes, or a program with a host of electives? 

The correct answer is that the question doesn’t make sense.  It’s like asking whether red cars are faster than blue cars.  Academic rigor and freedom of choice are unrelated.  One can choose very easy classes, very difficult classes, or a mix.  A program can require very easy classes, very hard classes, or a mix.  And that’s before getting into non-objective definitions of rigor. 

That should be common sense.  But nearly every year I find myself arguing with people who believe that rigor is about control.  It’s frustrating, because the underlying assumptions -- and therefore definitions -- are different, so we wind up talking past each other.

The idea of a longer required sequence of courses, a longer list of required readings, a longer required essay, etc. strikes many academics as obviously more rigorous and, therefore, better. I have failed many times in discussions with colleagues to shift them from this way of thinking. Quality and quantity are rarely so easily linked.

The real effect of these sorts of mechanical methods of increasing rigor may simply be to make the work load less possible and/or less palatable for many students. Students who are struggling academically, students with less natural talent for reading and writing, students who have to spend more time working for a wage, or students with other compelling intellectual interests, all may fail when rigor is increased in this way. This looks like what has been achieved is making your program/class/assignment more selective since fewer successfully complete it. True enough. But finding the breaking point beyond which only the most academically gifted and well supported students can succeed is very different from fostering excellence in education. In fact, it may be a sign of just the opposite. If the only students who succeed are the most talented ones, that's not very compelling evidence for the quality of our instruction. If one gave voice lessons, but the only students who passed your course were already Grammy winners, it's not clear you're doing much good for your students. They would all sing wonderfully no matter what you were teaching. That we can teach things to wonderful students does not really say much about our teaching skills.

Instead, the goal of rigor starts to feel a bit like a form of academic hazing. We add more required readings, more and longer writing assignments, more and more difficult exams, and the result of this increased work load is called "rigor." We weed out the students unable or unwilling to suffer enough. Making something difficult and making something good are different goals. Strangely enough, making something difficult is easy, and we tend to do that well in academia. Making something good is much harder, and creating an environment where learning is facilitated is much more difficult than creating an environment where learning is hard. A fallacy of composition no doubt lurks somewhere behind many of our discussions of academic rigor.

Don't Shoot

A few years back, I wrote here about guns on campus. This terrible policy keeps coming back to haunt us. Here's a link to a more eloquent piece on the topic: 

In light of the bill permitting guns on our state’s college and university campuses, which is likely to be approved by the state House of Representatives in the coming days, I have a matter of practical concern that I hope you can help with: When may I shoot a student?

Why I Don't Teach Hegel

Structure of Hegel's Science of Logic

Preparing For Classes

At the beginning of the semester, I can often convince myself that wandering through YouTube videos in search of new things to show in class is a useful way to spend my time. Below are two videos I unearthed in this quest. The first is short compilation of Sigmund Freud's home movies including clips of Herr Doktor playing with a baby and a dog. The second is a film of André Breton's apartment and art collection. I find them both charming, so I believe I will inflict them on my students this semester.

Paulo Feire Death Metal

This now exists. It was created and performed by one of my students as a final project this semester and features lyrics culled from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (aka POO). Listen and Die.

 

Metal Freire

Although the silent film treatment of Socrates may not materialize, here is another student project proposal I like: a death metal version of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This also makes me happy. Oddly enough, I think Freire might even have approved.

        

Student Feedback

Below is a paragraph that was written after a pleasant discussion with students about one of my current works in progress. Having a venue to discuss faculty writing with students is new for me. I like it. I rarely want to subject my own classes to such a thing. The content is unlikely to fit well into the class. But this class revolves around discussions of academic research more generally and student engagement with issues involved in doing interdisciplinary work. It seems to be working. The students seem to like the glimpse of their professors at work, and I like the opportunity for student feedback on my writing.

Another corollary to the reliance on unpaid digital labor is a loss of waged jobs. As more and more amateur and user-generated content is produced, less and less waged work may become available. This trend may be offset somewhat by the overall expansion in the size of the audience and in the demand for digital content, but as a total share of the labor involved, waged labor will become an ever dwindling part or the total labor expended on digital production. Coupled with this contraction of waged digital labor, there is another type of pressure created by the capitalist integument of digital work. Like other jobs under capitalism, there is always a tendency to de-skill the labor force. This serves to make more labor-power available for exploitation, to increase competition among workers, and to lower wages. While the creation and dissemination of digital content used to require relatively high technical skills and some knowledge of computers and programming, now it is often reduced to a point and click skill. This de-skilling of the digital labor force is, of course, a prerequisite for the widespread use of unwaged digital labor. Tasks such as streaming digital video online, which used to require significant technical skills, now require about the same amount of skill as sending an email. This process is most often seen in the light of a broadening of access and a democratization of the process of producing digital content. And so it is. However, this was never really the goal for capital. Freeing digital labor from the shackles of specialized knowledge is less important to capital than the attendant benefits of expanding the available labor supply in such a way that waged digital jobs vanish into a vast ocean of unwaged, user-generated content. That digital work begins to look more like a kind of addictive behavior and less like an economically valuable activity of its own is of little consequence.

Silent Socrates

A student pitched me an idea for her final class project: a silent film version of Plato's Apology. This makes me happy.

Marxist Rage Comics

This is a new assignment I began experimenting with this semester. I point interested students to a rage maker site and then ask them to create a rage comic illustrating a passage from Marx for the class blog. So far, the results have made me happy. Here's one student comic on primitive accumulation and the bloody legislation against the expropriated:

I'm particularly fond of the deer in the deer park "lol"ing at the peasant. I'll be doing this again.

Wiki Wonderlands

Via:

The Georgia Institute of Technology has stripped, at least for now, more than 10 years of class work from its collaborative-learning Web sites, known as Swikis. 

Following a student’s complaint to the university that his name was listed on the Web site of a public course, Georgia Tech officials decided on Monday to remove all Swikis other than ones from the current semester, said Mark Guzdial, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing, who is a co-creator of the Swikis. 

He reported the development on his Computing Education blog this week. (The tech journalist Audrey Watters picked it up on her blog.) 

In his post, Mr. Guzdial recounts how he and two Ph.D. students created the Swiki, or CoWeb, in 2000, so that students would have a place to “construct public entities on the Web.” The Swikis served intentionally undefined purposes, such as providing a forum for cross-semester discussions and a home for public galleries of student work. “All of that ended yesterday,” he wrote, because of Georgia Tech’s concerns about Ferpa, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

This seems a case of an administration over reacting to the barest hint of a legal challenge. My best guess is that the only part of this that might be covered by FERPA is identifying student posts by full name on a university course site. Identifying posts by a user handle, initials, etc., would be fine.

If the blogs themselves were public and hosted on blogger or tumblr rather than on a password protected university server, there never would have been a temptation to identify posts with students' full, legal names. In addition, students would maintain full control over what information remained online after the end of the course, not the university. I don't think there is anything in FERPA that prevents students from identifying themselves, their work, or the courses they took online. FERPA simply prevents the institution from publishing this information.

Deleting all the student authored wikis at Georgia Tech seems a very rash act.

Mirror Stage

I must remember this photo the next time I teach Lacan's "Mirror Stage."

Attendance Forecast

How to forecast class attendance by looking out your office window:

When the weather is gray and cold, it will be too miserable outside for students to want to make the trek to class and so attendance will drop off.

When the weather is gorgeous and sunny, it will be too nice outside for students to want to spend time in class and so attendance will drop off.

It's a lose/lose situation. There is simply no such thing as good weather for classes.

Freud Lives

In a previous post, I recounted the sad tale of opposition to a course I had proposed on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. I predicted eventual success despite this opposition, but that it would require many hours of tedious and contentious committee meetings. This turned out to be the case.

After wending its way through the program faculty, the advisory board, the curriculum subcommittee, the college council, and finally the university policy committee, I am pleased to announce that there is now a course on Freud at my institution. By a single vote, my colleagues decided that perhaps there was still some reason to teach Freud – despite assertions that his theories have been discredited, that his ideas may harm vulnerable students, and that lawsuits against the university would be imminent. It was a sad, frustrating and time consuming series of debates, but at least it is over now.

The process has taken its toll on my enthusiasm, and left yet another bad taste in my mouth concerning campus politics. However, I will strive to enjoy the new course. There are a surprising number of students who seem to be very excited about the class already. I find this charming and I imagine their enthusiasm will soon rekindle my own.

Warhol's Freud

Best Excuse Yet

This semester I had a student offer me the following excuse for missing class:

He was very sorry, but he had been in a bar fight. He was hit over the head with a bottle and wound up in the hospital with a concussion.

I assume the story is true, since only someone who is concussed would think sharing this story with your professor was a good idea.

Strip Mining the Mind

This is a lovely video of a lovely talk. Here's another equally lovely quote from Robinson:

Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.

The Money Trick

Somehow, I had never read The Great Money Trick before. A friend uses this as an in-class readers' theater for teaching Marx. I tried it out in my class yesterday as a prelude to reviewing for the midterm, and it worked great! The students enjoyed it, plus I had an excuse to feed them all pumpkin bread. I also learned that my students can't fake a good Cockney accent to save their souls. It was both pitiful and hilarious at the same time.

'As the working classes were in need of the necessaries of life and as they could not eat, drink or wear the useless money, they were compelled to agree to the kind Capitalist’s terms. They each bought back and at once consumed one-third of the produce of their labour. The capitalist class also devoured two of the square blocks…'

FML

Here is the reaction from my colleagues in the psychology department to a proposed undergraduate general education course on Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams:

We would be concerned if students had an academic experience at [our University] that endorsed psychoanalysis as a viable approach to personality and the meaning of dreams in an era where psychological inquiry has for decades relied on scientific methods that have dismissed psychoanalysis along with phrenology, astrology and other invalid explanations of human behavior.

Salvidor Dali's 1939 sketch of Freud.

It's not that the psychology department itself has any interest in teaching courses on Freud. This we knew already. However, the fact that they wish to prevent any "academic experience" of Freud by students anywhere at our university is new.

I don't believe these objections will prevent the course from being offered, but it will consume the time and energy of many people around campus. This is the level of intellectual debate that occupies much of my time as an academic. Some days it strikes me as comic. Other days, it just makes me sad.

Perhaps the next course I propose will be "Psychoanalysis, Phrenology and Astrology." That should make for some entertaining committee meetings at the very least.

Porn and Activism

I plan to use Ethan Zuckerman's wonderful paper in class this semester.

"Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.

Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats."

"I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media – it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test – if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable."

The tension between the consumption and production of online content is shaping much of the current struggle over what the internet will become. I'm attracted to this simple litmus test of porn and activism as the twin signs of a progressive medium.

My guess is it will provoke some interesting class discussion.

Summer School

I'm finishing up my first ever semester of summer school teaching and I've been pleased with how things have gone. It has not been as grueling as I feared for either the students or myself.

One of the surprise hits of the semester has been using Zizek's The Pervert's Guide to Cinema in class. The movie is very long - almost 3 hours - but is split up into three parts each of which provides a nice framework for class discussion. Talking about movies seems to open up discussion much more quickly than simply reading Lacan's "Mirror Stage."

The only downside is that it means I have to inflict on myself almost every disturbing scene from every David Lynch film ever made. That's a lot of disturbing scenes.

Teaching, Learning and New Media

Via. A talk by Michael Wesch.



A companion lecture to this much shorter video: