On a Game Recently Ended

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I have mentioned that I have been a fan of things at many points in my life, but far less so now than in the past. One of the things of which I have been a fan, and perhaps the closest I come to still being one, is the tabletop role-playing game, particularly Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) in its earlier incarnations. The game is one about which I have written before (notably here), and it is one with which I have been involved since the beginning of my undergraduate years–so for quite some time, now. I have a lot of good memories bound up in playing that game; I had a lot of good times at its tables, and I have made no few excellent friends from them (even if I am not nearly so good at keeping up with them as I ought to be–but that is wholly on me).

When a couple of those friends flagged to my attention a play-by-post L5R game using the older rules-set with which I am familiar, I jumped at the opportunity. It had been quite some time since I was able to take part in such a game, and longer since I was able to do so as a player, responsible only for my one character and her part of interacting with the world rather than for the whole rest of the world (because I have run many games, singly and as part of a team). And I think I did well enough at it; my character found her way into a slow-moving romance that worked out well, as well as distinguishing herself in interesting ways throughout the game, and I, as player, am told that I made the gaming experience better for the people with whom I played. I have to consider it a successful endeavor.

There is a problem, of course–the game ended.

Oh, it needed to do so. It was time. The story that the game was set to tell was told, and the side-stories that the players brought into the game and developed through it concluded–most of them well. There are seeds of more stories to come, of course, and the game itself is but one part of a sprawling narrative into which all of us who took part are, at least in theory, invited. (That I know the person who runs the overall project–and had him playing at my own table for quite a while–helps my chances, I think.) But, as with a good book or a good movie, the fact that the game has ended is something of a sadness. I grew to love the characters even as my character grew to love her peers–some more than others, and one in particular–and I will miss them and the people whose words gave them life on my computer screen and in my mind.

Having read many, many books, though, and seen no few movies, I think I am in position to say that the sense of loss is greater with the game than with those media. For, much as I love any one novel or poem, or as immersed as I get into any movie, or as thoroughly as I have explored the expanded intellectual properties that have emerged from no few of them, or as far into scholarship and study of any of them as I have gone, with none of them have I been as immersed in the narrative as I nearly always am in the RPG–L5R, in particular. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Daniel Mackay writes eloquently and at length about the phenomenon, as does Gary Alan Fine; I think they both have good points to make about the peculiarly interactive story-making of gaming communities and the bonds that form thereby.

Those bonds, more than anything else, I will miss. I can only hope that I can maintain some of them and forge yet more in the times to come.

Class Report: ENGL 216, 7 February 2018

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After addressing some few procedural notes and questions from the previous class meeting, discussion turned to concerns of front matter, order of composition, and review. An example of earlier student work was treated at some length. Assignments were discussed, such as

  • Course Project: Front Matter, to be submitted online as a Word document before 0059 on 12 February 2018
  • Discussion posts, to be completed online before 0059 on 12 February 2018

Class met as scheduled, at 1800 in Rm. 107 of the San Antonio campus. The course roster listed seven students enrolled, unchanged since the last meeting; three attended, assessed informally. Student participation was reasonably good. No students attended office hours Monday from approx. 1800 to approx. 1900 online. (Office hours are scheduled to approx. 2000, but after an hour without student attendance, they were closed.)

In Response to Barbara J. King

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On 1 February 2018, Barbara J. King’s “Would College Students Retain More if Professors Dialed back the Pace” appeared on NPR.org. In the piece, King asks whether or not “slow teaching”–described in the text as spending a full course on a single text, concept, or small set of concepts–would allow students to engage more deeply with materials and thereby learn them better. She arrives at the question–and something of an answer to it–through reflecting on her own experience of reading and not retaining what is read, of reading an Atlantic piece by Julie Beck and stumbling onto a Chronicle of Higher Education article by Paula Marantz Cohen shortly thereafter, and reading a book by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber that discusses a phenomenon similar to that King herself addressed in 2016. Her regard for the practice is clear throughout, although she cites Cohen and presents herself as having questions about how broadly applicable the technique is.

The idea of slow teaching is a good one, and one that has informed seminars in which I have participated. In some ways, it is at the root of dissertation writing, at least in my field, where spending months and years with a single text is not at all uncommon. Yet I know that my experience as a student has not been the norm, and that in the teaching I have done, I have not had the luxury of orienting my classrooms around such a framework. As part of the precariate faculty, usually lacking full-time status and always absent tenure protections, I have in almost all my classes been obliged to follow specific assignment sequences. That is, I have had to have my students write æ number of papers or cover ð years of literature, or þ works in ƿ genres, and not seldom with the demand that the assignments come in at specified points in the term. And I know I am not alone in facing those demands; I was one of many who labored under them at a Big 12 school, and I am one who faces such things again at the for-profit for which I currently teach.

The practice, then, comes off as do many that get discussed by those secure in tenure or in retirement. The idea is a good one, but it is one that demands certain luxuries of position to be able to enact. I and my peers at the margins of academe do not have those luxuries; we are not the masters of our classrooms, the determiners of our curricula. And I and my colleagues–presently, at the for-profit, and previously, at a land-grant school that explicitly claims workplace readiness as part of its mandate, cannot avoid the “corporate-style focus on rush-rush productivity” King is not wrong to decry. Nor can we reasonably expect that our students, most of whom claim job placement as their reason for going to college, will welcome something that does not seem to help them get jobs–and the productivity model seems more likely to help with that getting than the slow teaching model King prizes. (Insofar as any teaching is helpful to that end, about which there is no shortage of disagreement, albeit not all well informed.) Perhaps with the kind of students who can afford, or believe they can afford (rightly or wrongly), to slow down from the rush of trying to survive the present to get to a better future, taught by faculty who have the support of their institutions to do such things, slow teaching would be a good thing–but my students are not in that position, and neither am I.

Since I Have It to Do Again–For at least One It…

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Not too long ago, I made a post to this webspace in which I noted the perils of “If I had it to do again” and laid out what I might do if ever I did. Also not too long ago, I made a post noting that I received another teaching assignment from the small bit of academe in which I remain. As I thought about the latter, the former came to mind, and, since I have it to do again in at least one small area, I figured I ought to give some thought to how I would do it.

Now, for some context: the class that I was assigned is a second-semester composition class. Students enrolled in it are supposed to have completed the first-semester class, so they should have some introduction both to the college environment and to how college-level writing (a term which is nebulous at best) or academic writing works. The second-semester class is supposed to build upon that introduction, traditionally culminating in a conference-length paper (i.e., eight to ten pages of double-spaced, 12-point text, or some 2,600 to 3,250 words, plus references). At the school where I am assigned the class, the paper emerges from a series of assignments that center around a set of general topics from which the students are asked to select one–and therein lies the problem.

The issue is not necessarily in the assignment sequence itself. While it could be improved upon (as everything can), it is reasonable and seems to work decently. What the issue is is the selection of topics. For one, they are too broad, requiring students to do more work to narrow their focus than most who sit for the class are equipped to do–even with explicit, targeted coaching and prompting. For another, they are supposed “high interest” topics such as dieting and gun control, topics which have been exhaustively detailed and on which no real progress in discussion has been made in the United States that I have seen. Worse, they are topics with which most of my students–adults who already have formed and largely set opinions–do not engage with, having little stake in them. They end up parroting media talking points rather than actually generating new thoughts and trying to create new knowledge, largely because they do not feel they are in a position to do so.

Because the topics are promulgated by the school as standards, I shall continue to accept them, of course. I can hardly not. But what I will do, since I do have it to do again, is suggest to my students, strongly, that they take up an alternative topic, one in which they have some investment and engagement–and one with which I have had success with students in the past (such as here). In effect, I will ask my students to look at their curricula, identify one major change that needs to be made, and argue why that change is the change that needs to be made. As such, the students will have a topic with which they have direct involvement, which is a motivating factor; they will have a narrow topic, which allows for detailed work and more sustained argument; and they will have a directly discernible audience, which will allow both for analysis of that audience and more effective address thereof.

I’ll be working up materials in more detail, of course, but I know that the students will have easy recourse to primary source material (their own course catalogs and other schools’), secondary source materials (the contents of ERIC come to mind, as does the Occupational Outlook Handbook, particularly since most or all of my students seek their degrees specifically for job prospects and career advancement), and tertiary/critical sources (namely accreditation requirements and theories of education both academic and popular). And I know that at least one student will argue that the composition course requirements should be lightened or eliminated–there always is at least one–and I have a wealth of information about that particular line of inquiry for reasons that I think are obvious.

Not many people get the chance to do things again, I know. I have been lucky in that I have been given the opportunity, and more than once. (I am less lucky in that I have also blown it more than once, but that’s another matter, entirely.) I mean to seize upon this opportunity; I hope that it will lead to a good end.

More Early Comments for the March 2018 Session at DeVry University in San Antonio

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Not long ago, I made a few comments about the March 2018 session at DeVry University in San Antonio, noting with appreciation that I had been offered a section of ENGL 135: Advanced Composition. I have been at work developing materials for that class, and I am happy with how things are proceeding in that line.

I am also happy to note that I have been offered another class, one I have not yet taught at the institution, although it is similar to one that I have taught elsewhere–namely SPCH 217: Public Speaking. From what I have seen of the course so far, it is similar to the HUM 110 class I taught at the now-defunct Technical Career Institutes, so that while it has been some time since I taught such a class, I am not coming into it all unaware of what I need to do and what I need the students to do. Materials are on their way to me now, so that much is to the good, and I look forward to seeing how I can make things better.

Class Report: ENGL 216, 31 January 2018

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After addressing some few procedural notes and questions from the previous class meeting, discussion turned to concerns of graphics and their integration into documents. Some review of paratext was needed, and ethics of graphics received some comment. Class time was spent interrogating an example previously emailed to students. Attention was also paid to upcoming assignments.

Students are reminded that the following assignments are coming due:

  • Course Project: First Draft, to be submitted online as a Word document before 0059 on 5 February 2018
  • Discussion posts, to be completed online before 0059 on 5 February 2018

Class met as scheduled, at 1800 in Rm. 107 of the San Antonio campus. The course roster listed seven students enrolled, unchanged since the last meeting; two attended, assessed informally. Student participation was good. No students attended office hours Monday from approx. 1800 to approx. 1900 online. (Office hours are scheduled to approx. 2000, but after an hour without student attendance, they were closed.)

If I Had It to Do Again…

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The phrase “If I had it to do again” is always a dangerous thing, applying later knowledge to a past event and so introducing a paradox, and possibly reshaping memory to suit a thing that did not happen and fragmenting the world a bit further every time. But it is an alluring danger, one that seems inescapable, and I have found myself mired in it far too many times. And even when I know that I will not have it to do again, I find myself giving thought to what I would do if I did.

For example, I’ve taught first-year college composition many, many times since I started teaching at the college level in 2006. Often enough, I have had a prescribed sequence of assignments in doing so–more often than not, in the event, whether at a technical college in New York City that is now vanished or at a Big 12 school after I had earned my doctorate. But I have, from time to time, been given broad control over teaching such classes. In one, I feel that I did a fairly decent job of things, shaping assignments such that I was able to teach them well and get good work from my students in return. (Indeed, I remain singularly impressed with the efforts some of those students made; it is why I continue to write letters for them when they ask me to do so.)

It was only in one, however, that I did so. In the other, a first-semester composition class, I ended up teaching essays in the somewhat dated modal tradition, asking students to write description and narrative and the like. They did decently enough, to be sure, but I feel as if I missed an opportunity with them–the more so, now that I look back upon the experience with reasonable certainty that it was the last chance I had to teach the way I would prefer to teach the class. For I am certain that the kind of academic job that would allow me to do so is forever outside my reach (and I am working on getting okay with that circumstance, although I am not at that point yet).

If I had it to do again, I think I would teach first-semester composition as a focus on rhetorical analysis–only. I would guide my students through reading pieces–it doesn’t matter what pieces, really–and distilling from them summaries of content, of expected primary and anticipated secondary audiences, of choices of authorities to employ, of likely effects of those choices, of gaps in reasoning, of deficiencies for other audiences than expected, of the effects of layout choices (such as my listing these ofs in-line rather than in bullets or my lack of pictures amid my text), and of other things whose names escape me at the moment, and into interpreting what those things mean and how they do so. Parsing the information out seems the set of skills they need–that all of us need–and the practice in doing so students would get who sincerely and diligently (issues too often in my classes, to be sure) conducted the analyses such a class would request would help them to do that.

I know it is not exactly a revolutionary idea that I would do such a thing if I had it to do again. I know that many of the trained rhetoricians and compositionists I know and have known do such things when they teach first-year composition. (I also know that it is comparatively rare that they do so; most teaching of first-year composition is done by people off of the tenure track, and, it seems, more by those who specialize in areas other than rhet/comp than by those who do.) And, again, I know that I am not likely ever to have the chance to teach again a class that I have ordered as I would like it to be. But if it is ever the case that I have it to do again, I know what it is I mean to do, and why.

Initial Comments for the March 2018 Session at DeVry University in San Antonio

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I know that I’ve had a lot to say about DeVry University this week, what with my usual class report and a recent addendum to an older post. But more news keeps coming in on that score, to wit:

Although I’ve not yet signed the contract for it, I have been offered a section of ENGL 135: Advanced Composition for the March 2018 session at DeVry University in San Antonio. The session runs 26 February through 21 April 2018; the class is slated to meet on Saturdays from 0900 to 1250 in Room 106 of the San Antonio campus. I still have a bit of time to begin to prepare and refine materials, and I look forward to doing again the work of teaching.

Among those materials will be an alternative assignment, one that follows the sequence prescribed by the University but that treats a different topic altogether. I have the hope that it will prove more amenable to students’ engagement than those previously assigned–and that they and I will gain more from it as a result.

Addendum to “Reflective Comments for the November 2017 Session at DeVry University in San Antonio”

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A while ago, I posted a set of comments in which I looked back at the work I did during the November 2017 session at DeVry University in San Antonio, Texas. At the time, I thought they would be the last word I had to say on the subject–but that has not proven to be the case (obviously). Information I received this week has given me cause to add to those comments–and happily.

The results of my end-of-course evaluations got back to me this week. One of the two classes I taught, ENGL 135: Advanced Composition, rated me at 3.53/4.00 overall, with all students who responded reporting that I met or exceeded their expectations. The other, ENGL 216: Technical Writing, rated me at 3.90/4.00 overall, with all but one report noting that I exceeded expectations (and that one said I met them).

To be honest, the reviews are far better than I am accustomed to receiving from students. I am glad to have gotten them–and gladder to be doing something right in the classroom. I suppose my earlier assertions about needing to continue particular practices have some backing; I am glad that I am doing more in that line, even if I still do go off on strange tangents from time to time.

A Rumination on Having Been a Fan

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I remember having been a fan of things–of a number of things, in fact. None of them were what I “should” have been fans of, though. Rather than what the football or basketball teams were doing, or what was happening in the races or in the ring, I kept up on what was happening in the pages of comic books. Rather than reading the newest New York Times bestsellers, I read epic poetry and classic science fiction. Rather than following the Top 40, I listened to the music that had been popular–or less so, as I found later–in decades past, progressive pop and jazz-rock fusion and more esoteric blends yet. And for each, I did everything I could not only to learn the words and melodies of each by heart, but also to learn the greater fictional continua in which they existed and the details of the artists’ lives.

Had that been all I did, things might have been otherwise–and better. But that was not all I did, to be sure. I held myself aloof from that many others did, and in so doing, I isolated myself from them–which ended up leaving me in quite the awkward position when I returned to the town where I grew up. Worse, I made a point of berating others for their interests, and so invited being belittled for mine–and some went further than the invitation. Still worse, I staked my identity on knowing most about the things I knew, so I felt–and acted upon–the desire to show that knowledge and, when that knowledge was not enough, I recoiled in shame, chastising myself bitterly over things that few if any others cared about.

Often, that last has been my experience of fandom. There are many who are able to do as I did, to spend their time and money collecting the things from which knowledge (not wisdom, to be sure) can be made and copying over that knowledge from the things into themselves. (I know now that it was an exercise in privilege that I could do so.) In my experience, they have tended to view their knowledge of their interests as their primary value, and they have worked to secure that value by displaying themselves as having mastered it most. It becomes a display like that of the peacock or the bird of paradise, the shouting of the howler monkey, a jockeying for status within a group that seems devoted to no good end. And I did more than my fair share of preening and posturing, making much of knowing things (but not of doing anything with them) and delving into obscurities simply to avoid being wrong–and more often making myself look more the fool in doing so.

But even with all the problems of fandom–and there are many, more than I care to elaborate on here or have the capacity to expound upon elsewhere–there were decided rewards for me. I was able to learn a great many things, and I have tended to enjoy learning. (It should be clear that I do, else I’d not have gone back for more degrees.) And I enjoy even now the exercise of such faculties as I have. (How many is debatable, as witness my degrees.) And there is a pleasure in getting lost amid the details of things, of being able to take the time and spend the resources to focus narrowly and deeply on something purely for the pleasure of it, to be able to be immersed in a thing that has no real purpose and no real relevance, something that is idle and unimportant. (Again, witness my degree work.)

There are times I miss it.

Believe me, I am glad that I have the life I have now. My wife and daughter are excellent, and helping them be so brings me no small amount of joy. I have a good job, one that does some good in the world and makes use of quite a bit of the skill-set I developed in earning my degrees and making an attempt to work the work of the mind as my main job. I have a good second job, one that has helped my family to build up a bit of a financial cushion, enough that we can begin to think about diversifying how we handle our money. And I am still able to do some small bits of academe, both in teaching with the second job and doing some light scholarship–nothing ground-breaking, but (I hope) solid and reliable.

The thing is, doing all of those things prevents me from giving myself fully to any one of them–as I used to be able to do with my fandom. Parts of me miss being able to focus narrowly and deeply on a single thing, to take the time to master all of its minutiae, to expend the resources to acquire all of the newest and best materials in the effort to have a complete account of things, a complete record of how a thing I have enjoyed–whether it be the traditionally nerdy Tolkien or Star Trek or Star Wars or one of any number of role-playing games or some other thing that becomes nerdy through the obsession (because I maintain that the essence of nerdiness is obsessive passion). And I confess to having felt delight in the metaphorical dick-measuring contests of competing geekitudes; while I know better now than to get into them, I do miss the feeling of victory they often (but not often enough, oh, no) allowed me.

The thing is, I am enough in things that I am around people who can do the things I used to do and enjoy, and they do them–while I can only watch and, when I participate, do so as one who has been but no longer is. I am left behind, I feel, brought along only on sufferance. Part of me wants to have something to contribute to those communities–but I realize that I no longer really do, except the occasional friendly ear and reminder of good times for the friends I have made. But many have such ears and friendships without having expended the energies I have, so I have to wonder how much of my time and effort have ultimately been wasted.