What Professors Do: Too Many Things

Social media right now is full of faculty plaints about the difficulties of making it through the final weeks of the semester. In past years, I’ve commented myself about the frenetically intense workload of this time of year.

A lot of it is about reading, grading, and providing feedback on ALL THE THINGS. One year, I calculated during the last week of the semester that I had approximately 1100 pages of student writing left to grade for students in three courses. I swore I would never make that mistake again. Counting the pages, that is.

The end of the academic year is also filled with symposia, thesis presentations, awards, and other rites of passage. I love to attend these, congratulate students, and meet their families, yet they add to an already intensely busy time.

Being on disability with Long Covid means I have time to think about how we got here. Shifts in how we think about teaching, the increasing roles of technology, the politicization and defunding of higher education, and the attendant move from tenured to contingent faculty all play major roles.

In my own undergraduate courses in literature and philosophy forty years ago, I took a midterm and a final exam, and wrote a paper near the end of the term. I could retrieve the final exam and the paper by going to the prof’s office and shuffling through a box left outside the door. Each item would have a grade at the top of the first page, maybe some marked typos, and possibly an enigmatic check or two in the margin. Teaching students writing as a process of drafting, revising, and rethinking — that you could “write to learn,” as Donald Murray put it — had not yet reached my faculty.

I became a literature professor after years of teaching composition. I took for granted that students should write a lot, with opportunities for informal, creative, and open-ended writing as well as more directed assignments. My students analyze, compare, and synthezise ideas, and they engage in meta-cognition about their reading, writing, and learning.

I assign a sequence of related writing assignments in all of my courses. I give a lot of oral and written feedback to help students see what they are good and and what they can get better at. I encourage and require drafting, revisions, expanding work, writing about the same topic for different audiences. So the way I teach takes a lot of time and energy in engaging with students and their work.

Add pandemic learning losses and the fragmenting mental health of young adults in a polarized nation facing down climate change. Professors are mandated to report if we notice students struggling. We refer students to appropriate resources on and off campus. We make phone calls to student life staff to ask them to reach out. We extend flexibility and grace to try to help students make it through courses, semesters, degrees.

These changes have happened in the context of broader social shifts. New technologies affect teaching more than you might think. Decades ago, I typed a two-page syllabus, made copies, and handed it out on the first day of class. We spent a few minutes reviewing major due dates, I’d explain the rationale for how the course was organized, and we would jump right into discussions of ideas.

Today, the syllabus is a contract between students and faculty, and contains pages and pages of information about policies and expectations, rubrics and grading criteria, uploaded to course management systems before classes start. Students buy books online rather than in a campus bookstore; usually, they have them by the third week of classes. Medieval texts exist in numerous editions and translations, and I’m lucky if students all end up with the versions I’ve planned on, and can be on the same page and even reading the same words.

The politicization of higher education has direct consequences on college faculty and their relationships with students. I’m not going to romanticize the past — there have always been plenty of students majoring in beer and bonhomie, doing the minimum they can to get through.

But current disdain among many segments of the US population for education and educators, alongside consistent defunding of higher education by state and federal governments and widespread hiring of hostile administrators with little respect for faculty, have wrought sea changes.

College and university faculty design courses and programs, they evaluate and re-evaluate the role of distribution requirements and the shape and extent of the major, and they create and revise policies on various aspects of student life. The emergence of AI-mediated writing is a current challenge for individual faculty and university policy: students need to understand appropriate uses and limitations of tools such as ChatGPT in fostering and not substituting for their own critical and original thinking. 

Across the nation, administrators, boards of trustees, and state legislatures are axing tenured professors, or simply not replacing them whey they retire. Classes are covered by hiring faculty to terms of just a few years, supplemented by numerous part-time instructors who teach at three or four different institutions to try to get by. 

Ever-fewer tenured professors shoulder the work of faculty governance and service to the profession, while coping with more stressors than ever before. So many are retiring or leaving the profession. Harvard and Stanford are never going to have trouble keeping faculty, but I wonder how much longer community colleges and regional universities can hire the faculty to keep offering courses and programs.

Action at Different Scales

Yesterday, I sat in a faculty meeting concerning the fate of our first year seminar (it lost) while fighting the urge to jump up and point out that it was 94 degrees outside, demolishing the previous record for October 2 in our coastal town, which will surely be threatened in coming decades by rising seas.

I went home and sat outside my house in the remnants of the day’s heat. I read the day’s news out of Washington, pondering what looks like the collapse of the American experiment in democracy, and scrolled social media posts about the explosion in medieval studies, with senior scholars (white and privileged) ignoring or outright denying the need for changes in how we teach and talk about our discipline given its roots in British imperial expansionism and its current appeal to white supremacists.

I heard squealing. Two squirrels were fighting, and when I got up to investigate, the larger squirrel fled, leaving the smaller one nearly unconscious.

My partner wrapped the little guy in a piece of old towel and deposited her / him in the crotch of a tree to recover. When we investigated an hour or so later, she looked brighter of eye, but frightened by flashlight-wielding humans. By morning she was gone. The scrap of towel was undisturbed, and we hoped she had scurried away under her own power, rather than being taken by a hunter seeking weakened prey, or a scavenger.

In the face of what looks like impending global catastrophe on both climatological and political grounds, it seems ridiculous to worry about squirrels or professors fighting for territory. It seems pointless to plant a few flowers to support the local monarch butterfly population when global systems appear to be on the verge of collapse.

But I think it’s precisely because catastrophe seems so imminent that it’s important to keep attending to the small things. Being able to hold in mind and heart the fate of the smallest beings keeps me from getting lost in the whirlwind of terrifying global events. Helps keep me from losing faith in the possibilities for positive change. Maybe, too, it keeps me human.

I didn’t get a photo of the little squirrel. But here’s a chipmunk that visited my back yard a few weeks ago. Stay grounded, y’all.

Living in Interesting Times: Now What?

I was born in Germany, nineteen years after the end of World War II. Growing up in the US, I often wondered what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930s, to watch Hitler gain power, to see Jewish neighbors taken away by force.

The world I live in today feels eerily like what I imagined then, except it's 2018 in the United States. And I feel completely helpless.

The government grants "thoughts and prayers" to domestic terrorists white men who routinely shoot people at malls, movie theatres, dance clubs, schools but refuses to take any action that would limit their impact. The government incarcerates people of color, deports people born in other places. The president was elected with a minority of the vote under a system that, whether it was designed to do so or not, it must now be acknowledged that it deliberately disenfranchises people of color, immigrants, urban residents, and the poor. Washington's current crop of "elected" officials seems to be at war against women, poor people, trans and gay people, people of color, and the earth itself -- anyone, in short, other than heteronormative white men with economic security.

But as the president fires increasing numbers of public servants, the real goal seems to be to destroy democracy.

This is "my" government. If I don't actively resist, I believe that I am complicit.

Yet I have little power. I am not a scholar of political science and I don't feel sure I understand what Trump and his allies (or his puppetmasters?) are up to. In my classes, while I don't pontificate on the news, I do raise issues of power and justice as they relate to language, environmental issues, and medieval literature, and point out how those cultural formations influence the present.

And so I feel paralyzed to act on any scale that feels meaningful.

Also, I am busy, with work and family responsibilities, and I am tired.

My sense of disquiet about current events keeps growing, threatening to become real panic, yet meaningful resistance seems out of reach. Acts like chaining myself to the fence at the White House grounds or hunger striking don't seem like they'd have much more impact than blogging, bloviating on Facebook, or joining another march.

Now what?

Teaching After Trump: Digital Preservation

I wrote a post last week about how I walked into class with a lecture outline and the plans to talk about sustainability and preservation in digital humanities and found myself speechless as I realized the landscape was shifting under my feet.

The following class meeting was committed to a visit to our library's rare books room; we have a small collection, useful for teaching, of manuscript leaves and early printed books that really helpful to have in conjunction with digital reproductions on Early English Books on Line and the British Library.

But for the next week, I wrote a lecture. After 25 years in the classroom, I usually write an outline, not a lecture. But this one, I needed to get right. Here's a portion of my comments to the class.

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I have long had a policy of not talking directly about politics in class. But right now, we're in a situation where what is going on is too important not to talk about. Also, I have tenure, so I can talk about politics. Therefore, it seems to me, in the current situation, I must.


The new administration has removed information on a wide variety of topics from the White House website. The presidential website of the previous administration (archived here, but no longer live) includes sections on civil rights, climate change, education, health care, immigration, disabilities, ethics, equal pay, veterans, and women's issues.

The current site has eliminated all of these sections, leaving references only to energy, foreign policy, jobs and trade, law enforcement, and a strong military (but not veterans).

Meanwhile, the new regime has instructed officials at the National Parks, the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, and several other federal organizations to freeze communications: no press releases, no peer-reviewed publications, no tweets, no blog posts, until new policies governing the release of information can be put in place.

That has not happened yet.

Meanwhile, National Parks employees who tweeted climate data were forced to delete those tweets, leading to the creation of rogue accounts like @BadHombreNPS and @AltUSNatParkService. These might be run by parks employees; no one is sure.

The day after the inauguration, Trump’s press secretary went on the news and insisted that the crowds attending the inauguration were “the largest ever” despite aerial photos, Metro statistics about numbers of riders, and police estimates suggesting it wasn’t true. Trump has long been tweeting pretty much whatever he feels like, with little regard for the truth.

Most recently, Trump issued an executive order banning Muslim (but not Christian) people from certain countries from entering the US, even if they held green cards. The US Attorney General, Sally Q. Yates, called this unconstitutional and issued a stay of the order, and Trump fired her.

Trump’s attack on truth is comparable to what has been done under previous totalitarian regimes. A totalitarian government is centralized, controls the flow of information, allows no dissent or criticism of the people in power. Trump’s attempts to discredit legitimate journalism and science are comparable to efforts in other totalitarian regimes of the past to silence anyone with dissenting views.

Trump has appointed Steve Bannon to the National Security Council, a move without precedent but one that gives significant power to the head of Breitbart News, a corporation dedicated to expressing rage against women, people of color, and non-Christians.

Trump’s demands that National Parks employees delete tweets and stop communicating with the public recall book burnings that occurred across German cities in 1933.

Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January and appointed Joseph Goebbels to institute a massive propaganda campaign. In May, across the country, people went into bookstores and libraries and took out books deemed "un-German" -- written by foreigners, Jews, liberals, pacifists -- and burned them.

As I wrote in my last post, teaching just got a lot harder. And teaching students to be critical consumers of on-line information just got a lot more crucial.

Teaching After Trump: What Is A Book?

When I teach courses on medieval literature and the environment, I know that there are issues that are going to intersect with contemporary politics that I have to navigate with caution. But yesterday, when it dawned on me in the middle of a class meeting that "What Is A Book?" is political, I was pretty well blind-sided.

The course looks at the transitions from manuscript to print and from print to digital, and tries to throw codicology, history of the book, and digital humanities in the air together to see what kinds of configurations stuff drops into. I've taught the course only once before, four years ago, so I'm still in a very fluid period of making stuff up as I go along.

Yesterday we were looking at the Appendix to Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century. My students all know that technology is terrible because it makes us distracted, but Davidson engages with the prophets of doom and makes a good case that there are also things to value, and rather than rejecting it, we should engage with technology and figure out what it can do.

The Appendix turns out to be a good introduction to the book, and the course, because it lists "Twenty-First Century Literacies" like attention, collaboration, global consciousness, and ethics. It raises good topics for discussion and gets the students and me pretty quickly beyond the problems of how social media and mobile devices are distracting us into other issues involving the ethics and affordances of technology.

The night before class, I'd spent half an hour or so on Twitter following the new president's gag order on US scientific agencies and national parks, the scrubbing of anything that could be interpreted as related to climate science from government websites, the silencing of agencies like the USDA and the CDC. (Salmonella, anyone? Zika?)

Davidson lists sustainability and preservation near the end of the appendix. She uses "sustainability" to refer to environmental issues like the amounts of electricity needed to power computers and servers, but digital humanists use the same word to refer to the creation of digital texts and databases in forms that will outlast current hardware and software configurations and still be readable, decades or hopefully even centuries into the future.

The related issue of "preservation" has to do with keeping copies of things -- archiving materials created digitally, as well as figuring out how to keep copies of things that began their life as material objects. If something originally in book form is preserved in pdf, is that the same as the original? What if there are different copies owned by two different people who made notes in the margins? How important are those notes?

Cotton Vitellius A. xv. is the manuscript that contains the unique copy of Beowulf. It was put together, probably in the seventeenth century, out of two different collections written several hundred years before, but a couple hundred years apart from each other. It contains the Nowell Codex, a late tenth- or early eleventh-century copy manuscript of two poems, including Beowulf, and three prose texts. Is that a book? Or is a medieval collection of materials different than what we think of today as "a book"? Are photographs of the Beowulf manuscript the same as the actual manuscript? What if we could print a 3-dimensional copy, retaining the texture of every page?

People who deal with other media ask related questions. Is a CD version of a song the same as its 45 rpm vinyl original? Is a DVD copy of "Singin' in the Rain" the same as a print of the film on several reels of 35mm film?

Preservation also deals with avoiding loss of data, which was a big problem in the early days of computing but is less acute now, when storage is cheap and it's easy to store redundantly. The issue of data that lasts forever, like social media posts that haunt people hunting for a job, looms larger.

So there I was in class, talking about the relatively long life of manuscripts in comparison to things like punch cards and 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and suddenly I apprehended the enormity of the new administration's deliberate suppression and even destruction of information.

I don't know if this material is being mirrored or archived in some other country that's now freeer than the United States or if, horrifyingly, decades of data that the new regime considers to be "alternative facts" or even "a hoax" will simply be destroyed. I don't know what the consequences might be of stopping research in the sciences and humanities dead, and how quickly it might recover if (when?) we get ourselves back on a course of sanity, four years or more from now.

But there I was talking about issues that, six months ago, seemed to have nothing to do with politics in the United States. Yet even though they have nothing to do with hot-button issues like climate science or women's health care, issues of data preservation and sustainability are completely politicized.

It caught me completely by surprise. I hadn't prepared to teach a class that was politically charged, and I found myself floundering. I said that whatever anyone's politics, our classroom had to remain a space for civil discourse. I said that I grade on how persuasively students organize and present their research, not on what their opinions are, and I hoped that students would feel free to disagree, even with me.

I need to do better, though. I need to make it clear that scrubbing websites is comparable to burning books and neither has a place in democracy.

I'm thankful for tenure. I'm thankful that I teach in a university, and a state, that isn't moving to silence its faculty. And I'm deeply sobered and dismayed by the implications. Teaching with integrity used to mean not smoking or sleeping with the students. It's become far more difficult to navigate the environment of alternative realities, suppression of scientific fact, and abrogation of human rights.

I now feel a grave responsibility to step up and state clearly that these things are not right. But I have to do so in a way that maintains respect for students with different views and allows for an open classroom atmosphere, that keeps the classroom a place of inquiry and the development of critical thinking, not a lecture on the ills of the people currently in power.

Teaching just got a whole lot harder.

What Professors Do: Writing, Embodied

I've been working like crazy to finish edits to my book since my semester ended, sitting at my computer for 12, 14 hours a day, eating meals at my desk, drinking coffee by the quart. I worked steadily from early May, when I finished my semester, through the end of June, when The Offspring finished school; we then took a two-week family vacation, after which I returned to the routine. I've been taking time out to walk, bike, do Capoeira, and go for the occasional run.

My book, on environmental aspects of Anglo-Saxon literature, connects with my commitments to environmental activism and cultural change. It feels to me like the most important thing I've ever written. Usually I find editing a slog, but on this project I'm enjoying crafting the prose, trying to make the project as strong as possible.

I haven't taken enough breaks: the other day I ended up with a spasm in my lower back.

I've put my computer on an old Ikea drawer unit and piled up an empty box and two yoga blocks for my mouse.

I'm on muscle relaxants, which have their side effects. I've been walking more and I've added a lot of yoga into the mix. Even standing at my desk aggravates the tension; I have to stop every few minutes to move around and stretch. My back is too frozen to do Capoeira, which usually loosens it up; even yoga is difficult.

I've been remembering what Jeffrey Cohen wrote, last summer, about his own writing lockdown to write Stone, which he documented on social media:

Reading through these posts now I can see that there will come day when my relentless drive will cause me harm.  

Well, honestly, it did cause me harm: I was something of a wreck by the end of the process, emotionally and physically. I injured my shoulder badly enough that it took several months of physical therapy to restore full function. People think the life of the mind is not dangerous, but it will kill you, if you let it. 

I've had his words at the back of my mind all summer, but I've been ignoring them, hoping I could get away with the schedule I've been keeping. I've been pushing myself hard because we have plans for another family vacation in August, and we don't leave until the book is finished. (Right, plus a few other projects I've been putting off.)

On my desk: a random business card, with "Race to the Face" written on the back for inspiration. Officially known as the Top Notch Triathlon, this is my favorite triathlon ever, and consists of a bike ride from Franconia Village to Echo Lake, a swim across the lake, and a hike/run up to the top of Cannon Mountain, former home to the Old Man of the Mountain. If I got enough work done, I was going to drive to New Hampshire, spend a few days with my parents, and do that triathlon.

I didn't.

Jeffrey writes, too, about anxiety and insomnia; I've been plagued by both this summer as well. During the day, I focus on the book; at night, my mind wanders among the numerous projects I'm ignoring to get this done. Overdue book reviews, overview book chapters, overdue responses to other people's work, overdue book orders for fall classes.

I want to follow Jeffrey's advice to his own earlier self: "chill the hell out." I want to spend more time with spouse, son, parents, dog. I want to hike more, run more, read for pleasure. I want time to cook good meals and enjoy them.

But I've finished the last edit of the book, done on a printout, and I just need to enter those changes into the computer file and send them off. So here I stand, at my desk, beavering away.

The reality: I never finish all the projects I plan over the summer. I'm always already behind at the end of the academic year, not only on research and writing but also on tasks related to teaching and faculty governance, often reviled as "committee work," but potentially very important in terms of shaping one's institution.

Last spring semester, I tried to cut back on take-out food, partly because it's not very healthy, but more importantly because it all comes in single-use plastic containers. I failed miserably, and eventually realized it was because I was too busy to cook meals and pack food for the workday.

I keep telling myself that if I work faster, work harder, get more done, I can take a break. But there's always another project. I have to figure out how to let some of this go. I know that I can say "no" to future projects, but for the moment, I'm stuck on the hamster wheel with no way off.

Jeffrey puts it better than I can, so I'll end with this:

...underneath the processes I describe run currents of apprehensiveness, fear, self-punishing discipline, and relentless drive that I do not think is healthy and is certainly not offered for emulation.

What Professors Do: Disability

Last week, this incredibly powerful essay crossed my radar: Katie Murphy writes about being a disabled student and having to ask all of her professors for accommodations during the first week of the semester.

It resonated with me in two important ways. One, I hate having to ask for accommodations, as a professional or as a human being.

Excuse me, your cigarette [that you're smoking under that no smoking sign] is triggering my asthma, would you mind putting it out? Usually, those requests get met with hostility from the smoker and silence from everyone else in the vicinity.

As a professor, I don't really get sick days. I'm expected to teach my classes. All of them. And if for some reason I can't make it to class, I'm expected to arrange for coverage.

This is one thing if I know I will be at a conference during a class meeting: I can plan an exercise that the students can do in class under the supervision of another faculty member. But if I get sick, I can't expect a colleague to be able to show up and teach what I was going to teach that day. Mostly because small departments depend upon having faculty in different fields to teach a wide range of courses, and much of the time, there's no one in my department who could just do what I do.

So I've made arrangements, after discussions with my department chair and the head of human resources, to teach on line at times when I can't breathe well enough to stand in front of students while talking for 75 minutes. Or three hours.  Or sit in front of them while managing a class.

These days, I get that sick once or twice a semester. The acute phase is usually over in three or four days, but it then takes three or four weeks to get back to full energy levels.

This means that my syllabus includes information to the effect that because of documented chronic illness, class may have to be moved on line at some point during the semester. And I'm told I have to point this out to my students on the first day of class in case someone should be uncomfortable with it and decide as a result to switch into a different section.

I hate having to do this.

I loathe having to paste this boilerplate into my syllabus every semester; I loathe having to ask my doctor each year for an updated letter confirming medical recommendation for the accommodation; I loathe having to hand it over to my department chair; and I really hate having to talk about it with my students.

In her blog post, Murphy does a truly great job of articulating the emotions that go along with this:

I have to engage in a little mental boxing match with self-doubt: “Do I really even need those accommodations? I could get by without them, right? I did before.” And guilt: “I’m wasting my professor’s time. They’re going to hate me. I’m such an inconvenience.” And shame: “A good student and a stronger person wouldn’t need all this stuff.

... Disabled people grow up learning to hate themselves, to hate their disability, because the world we live in hates disability for no logical reason. And sometimes the best way to fight that kind of illogic is with more illogic.

Self-doubt, guilt, shame, self-loathing. Check, check, check.

Except I fear that my supervisors AND my students are going to hate me, feel inconvenienced, suspect I might be malingering and really don't need these accommodations.

Murphy goes on to make a really excellent case for getting beyond those feelings. If you didn't already click through, go do it now, and read. You might even weep.

The second way that Murphy's essay resonated with me? I felt shame of a completely different kind. Shame that it never occurred to me that even though I know this burden, I have never seen it from a student's point of view. And so in my syllabus I have the standard boiler-plate about accommodations not being possible without documentation, see me in the first week of the semester, blah blah blah.

When I return from sabbatical and teach again, I will be removing that boilerplate, replacing it with something human, encouraging my colleagues to read Murphy's essay, and requesting that as a department we come up with better boilerplate.

And I will go on trying to conquer the self-loathing. That's harder, though.

I Got Tagged

... by my lovely cousin Amy, to take part in the ALS Ice-Bucket Challenge.

The Challenge has its detractors, some of whom think it's a stunt and others of whom worry that other organizations will see a drop in donations, but by and large I think it's a positive thing.

Nevertheless, I've decided to respond in my own way.  

Later today, I'm going to the pool, and I guess I'll go ahead and dump a bucket of ice water over my head, or let someone else do it.

I've also made a donation to the ALS Assocation.  And to the American Cancer Society, and to the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America.

ALS has, I supposed, touched my life; I once had a fitful, fearful, fretful night, after being told I needed to be tested for it, and then an hour or so on a gurney given electrical shocks to make sure all my nerves were working right. They were. Eventually, I was diagnosed with walking pneumonia, and thankfully, a week of antibiotics took care of it.

Cancer and Crohn's Disease have also touched my life. I have several family members who have lived with, or died from, either disease, and typing that sentence opens a hole in my heart. But those are not my stories to tell, so I'll leave it at that.

Finally, I've reached out to the local synagogue to ask about volunteer activities. I'm on sabbatical and this is a good opportunity to spend some time giving back. 

There are other organizations I could volunteer through, but volunteering as a Jew feels important and right at a time when antisemitism is on the rise again in Europe. Here in England, a store recently removed kosher goods (produced in Poland and the UK) from its shelves in response to "anti-Israel" protests: Judaism in general conflated with protests against Israeli actions in Gaza. And at a protest on the market square in Cambridge the other weekend, a man carried a sign reading "Israel = Nazis."

Made me sick.

And so I feel it's important to identify with Jews and Judaism in a public way.

Thank you, Amy, for tagging me, and thank you for getting me to think about these things, and getting me to make a commitment to volunteer work in the year to come.

Where Did April Go? (What Professors Do: Miscellaneous)

I haven't posted in a month.  Part of what happened to April was Passover, and the attendant cooking and eating and catching up with family.

Right after that, all hell broke loose.  John Ziker and his colleagues at Boise State recently did some research about how professors spend their time, and even they were surprised at how many hours their colleagues were working every week (average: 61) and how much of it was spent in meetings (17 percent) and answering emails (13 percent).

Some of the things I've been up to:

giving feedback on annotated bibliographies to guide drafting of term papers
writing recommendations for students and for colleagues
attending the various presentations, lunches and meetings involved in a tenure-track job search
reading MA theses, and providing feedback to guide revision
grading and commenting on papers to provide feedback to guide extended versions
writing, and delivering to colleagues, a lecture on digital humanities
meeting with students regarding academic work, internships, plans for graduate study
working with a former student on an article
scheduling MA thesis defenses, reading theses, attending defenses
providing comments on student presentations to guide drafting of final paper
organizing panels for a local conference, which I didn't end up being able to attend
committee meetings
attending end-of year honor society induction and awards ceremony
department meetings
did I mention grading/writing feedback on papers?
organizing an annual symposium

A few years ago, I asked my Facebook friends, many of whom are teachers, how much time they spent reading student papers; the answers ranged from three to five minutes per page.  I'd been wondering if I was doing something wrong, so that helpfully validated my own practice.

It's not over yet: I have final exams to write and to grade, a conference paper to write and deliver, term papers to read, final portfolios to review, final grades to calculate and submit, and various other administrative and teaching tasks before the semester is over. And then, sixteen months before I teach again: bittersweet.

What Professors Do: Spring Break

I'm working on a lecture I'll give at my own institution next month on "Digitizing the Humanities" in an effort to persuade the people at my own institution of the importance of investing in, practicing, and theorizing our digital future(s).

Increasingly, my own scholarly processes occur on-line.  I wrote a conference paper last year comparing the transitions from manuscript to print and from print to digital using scholarship -- articles and books -- obtained entirely on line and read entirely in digital formats. Arthritis has made writing by hand difficult for me for more than a decade, so there's no point in printing stuff out to mark it up, and these days I often read books or articles on iPad while tapping away on a computer.

Just to complete the digital loop, and for the sake of seeing if I could do it, I read the paper from my iPad rather than printing a copy to read from at the conference. For my non-academic readers who may be unfamiliar with this process, one of the things faculty do is go to conferences and read their papers to each other and then discuss them with each other and the audience. Our education system, in which faculty share ideas and habits of thinking with students in lecture or, ideally, small seminars, is another vestige of oral culture.

The dissemination of our ideas through oral delivery is a technology older even than the manuscript codex, one of a few lingering artifacts of the oral traditions of preservation and recitation of cultural memories that have shaped us as humans for millennia, even as we have shaped our cultural narratives through collective and repetitive telling.

As we move from printed materials toward digitally enabled methods of transmission and storage of uncertain sustainability and future, we also continue the shift from oral transmission of epic, lyrics, drama, political oratory, and education to something else, whether it's enabled by the (print and digital) technologies of writing or of audio and video recording.

What do we gain as we move to digital transmission of ideas? What do we lose?

We gain a lot of digital tools that enable faster answers to questions like, "What has been published about sexuality and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?" We also get to ask different questions, like "Do men and women use pronouns differently in this digital corpus of letters from the early modern period?"

We lose books as physical artifacts. We lose (at least as digital technologies exist today) stable arrangements of text and image on a printed page. We lose certain familiar physical, spatial relationships to books that have enabled our habits of reading, though as screens and the devices they're embedded in improve, the relationships between print and digital will keep shifting.

The transition from oral to written took many, many centuries, and as I've already suggested, oral transmission of ideas is not completely gone. The transition from manuscript to print took several generations, and handwriting is also not gone: school kids still write stuff out, some people still send each other letters through the mail, the check as a financial instrument isn't quite dead, and we still put our physical, handwritten signatures on tax returns and credit slips and passports.

Even though technological change seems to be accelerating, the transition from print to digital is likely to go on for a few generations. We need to keep asking these questions: what do we gain? what do we lose?

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I've also graded a couple of sets of papers during my spring break, contacted a student's advisor, gotten a little more exercise than usual, caught up on sleep, and kept up with the usual routines of kid supervision, dog walking, and housework.

Unfinished items on the list: a couple of reports, letters of recommendation, preparation for next week's classes, and some reading for an article I'm working on together with a student. I'm about to power down for Shabbat, but I'll get to some of those on Sunday.

What Professors Do: Winter Break

Some of the stuff I've been doing since submission of Fall grades, and have to work on before the start of spring semester:

Read textbooks
Spider Solitaire
Work on syllabi
New toilet seats
Vacuum clean apartment
Sleep in
Facebook
Try to remember research plan
Read a book, for fun
Catch up on email
Cook
New shower curtain
Write assessment document 
Write an email explaining why I can't write the assessment document
Schedule appointments with doctors
Build on-line course environments
Kenken
Go to bed early
Review page proofs for an article
Watch a movie
Write a paper proposal
Think about curriculum
Edit articles for special issue of journal
Play with the kid
Review MA program applications
Hire graduate assistants
Finish research report

I also have to find my marriage certificate (from 1991) to prove that The Mate is eligible for health coverage on my plan.  I also need to submit The Offspring's birth certificate to prove that I'm his mother.  Bureaucracy is charming.

What Professors Do: Anguish

We're in the business, most of us, to educate.  We want to engage students with the things we're passionate about.  For me, that includes literature and ways of reading as well as the desire and the tools to write well.

When students fail or do poorly, we beat ourselves up, assuming we've failed to inspire, to engage, even to explain adequately.  At the moment, I'm anguished at a remove, watching a young woman who was once one of my best students suffer from her students' disengagement.

At The Offspring's school, one of the best public schools in New York City, there are parents who complain, year after year, about their kids' teachers.  My response: I'm an educator, but I don't know how to teach fifth grade math -- or, for that matter, fifth grade anything else.  I can still get a scale out of my old clarinet, but I can't explain to The Offspring how to make the right sounds; it takes a music teacher to do that.

But we live in a culture that second-guesses teachers all the time, a society in which it's assumed that politicians and business leaders with no educational experience should make pedagogical decisions that affect the nation's kids.  That ideology starts with preschool and goes all the way up through college and beyond.  And if some of the students who grow up in that system think a degree is a credential to be received after doing time, and see their teachers and professors as an annoyance along the way, no one should be very surprised.

Twenty-five years ago, I watched students struggle because of a completely different kind of bureaucratic failure.  I was teaching four courses a semester in English composition and conversation at a university in Shanghai. Three classes were full of Shanghainese students who had been chosen to attend because they had recieved the best scores in English.

The fourth class consisted of students from a remote Chinese province who had been brought to the city to be educated.  Rather than taking classes with the other students, though, these students were kept in one group, separate from the others, and the entire class assigned the same major.  There were students in that class who were excellent at English; others probably would have done very well in engineering or business or the sciences.  Yet it had been decided that in their year, they would study English, regardless of their aptitudes or interests.

I loved the job, and it convinced me that I wanted to spend the rest of my life teaching.  But I felt terrible about those students sent to the city to learn English, working so hard, yet struggling to succeed in a field where they couldn't do their best work.

Today, I face students who are perfectly capable of doing good work, but don't want to bother.  Or they're working their way through school, trying to take as many credits as possible each semester to keep tuition costs down while working 30 or 40 hours a week -- and there just aren't enough hours in the day and night.

One kind of student exemplifies our national bad attitude toward the teaching profession; the other our political failure to support higher education.  The mechanisms are a little different, but we're failing our students, much as the Chinese were, quarter of a century ago.

What Professors Do: Spring Break

My plans for "vacation":

• Grade papers
• Take the car in to the garage (overdue oil change, overdue 100,000 mile service)
• Get new tires for the same car (they're not bald yet, but they're getting old)
• Prepare assignments and get ahead on course reading for the rest of the semester (because for academics, April is the cruelest month)
• Do research and write (two conference papers and an overdue journal article)
• Doctor's appointments (to schedule a procedure for after the semester is over)
• Go to a conference (meet grad students, preside over a session I've organized, give a paper)
• Cut back on coffee and catch up on sleep (see: April)

Academic friends and colleagues: When was the last time you took a vacation during your vacation?

What Professors Do: Write Assignments

Writing assignments for papers and projects we want our students to complete is another one of the things that professors do each semester. This isn't simply a mechanical task, but rather an intellectual challenge that ties the goals for the course and for the program with what students can be expected to produce at a given point in their academic careers.

I have to come up with an idea of what it is I want to the students to do, whether it's a short exercise in reading texts carefully with a dictionary to find the nuances of word meanings, or a longer research project in which students will come up with original ideas based on previously published scholarship.

I have to make sure that the materials covered in the course up to that point support the project I want the students to complete, in terms of information about the field, knowledge of research tools, and analytical skills. I also think about how writing the paper or doing the research assignment will help the students learn what I want them to get from the course.  (I'm generally interested in getting students thinking carefully and critically and asking good questions, rather than transmitting a bunch of facts.)

As I write the syllabus for the course, I'm already thinking about what kinds of research and writing assignments I'll be giving.  Sometimes I write out the assignment details when I write the syllabus, while I'm thinking through the issues of what I want students to learn and how I will help them learn it.

Conveying the instructions for a project in a one- or two-page description of the assignment is a challenge.  I want to be reasonably concise, so as to avoid overloading students with information, yet detailed enough to give a clear idea of what process they need to go through to get to the end result.

Each time I teach a course, I change the assignments, sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot.  I need to make sure students can't recycle their classmates' papers from previous semesters, and I also tinker with descriptions and instructions each semester to try to make sure everything is as clear as possible.

What Professors Do: Committee Work

I was talking to The Offspring this morning about some aspect of what it is we do as professors and it got me thinking about the fact that a lot of it is pretty opaque to people outside the profession.  So here is one salvo in what may or may not become a series.

I'll start with committees.  People in a variety of professions groan about having to go to committee meetings, and professors are no exception.  But faculty governance is crucial to a well-run institution of higher education:  It should be the faculty who make decisions about changes to the curriculum, but also to a wide variety of other issues.

One of the major issues in higher education in the past two decades has to do with what role new technologies should have in teaching, and I've served on a handful of different committees investigating various aspects of this question.

If it's to function well, a committee needs a clear mandate, which may come from a department chair or a school dean or from a different faculty committee, and an effective chair who can delegate research and analysis tasks to the committee members and then write a clear report with specific implement-able recommendations, all within a relatively short time frame.

A couple of years ago I chaired a committee that dealt in part with a question about class size for hybrid and on-line courses.  Hybrid courses combine on-line assignments with traditional, face-to-face teaching, usually via course management software that allows students to interact from computers or tablets at various times during the week or the semester.

Some of the questions we thought about: What's the optimal size for a graduate seminar in the humanities?  How does that change if the seminar is taught on-line?  What if it's a hybrid?  We looked at the practices of institutions similar to our own and we searched out research evaluating faculty work-load and student engagement at various class sizes.

It turns out there's been a decent amount of research on on-line classes. (The magic number: 16.1.  Good luck finding that one-tenth of a student.)  We had trouble finding work on hybrid classes, so the next step was to seek out colleagues in various disciplines who were teaching on line and ask them about their experiences.

Some might think it's easier to teach a hybrid class than a traditional one, because you don't have to get dressed up and show up in the classroom.  Instructors know that writing up a lecture can take a lot more time than delivering it in person, and managing an on-line community is time-consuming.  But we needed to document this in order to make a convincing case to set policy.

Other committees might look at what courses students should take, or review syllabi to make sure courses in a given category are comparable (e.g. in the amounts of reading and writing assigned, or in the amount of student collaboration required), or ask what should be done about grade inflation....

It's pretty much endless.  But I think that's the way it should be.