Tales from the Classroom: Such Sweet Sorrow

Posted on December 8, 2004

I’m always at a loss when it comes to bringing my last class of the semester to a close. On the one hand, it seems a little anticlimactic to simply finish my lecture, tell the class that I’ll see them at the final, and then send them packing. That being said, I’m not a fan of the maudlin “Oh, it’s been such a great semester!” approach either.

Today, for instance, I briefly considered ending the semester by shouting “Smell ya later, suckers!” to the class and soft-shoeing my way out the door. Sadly, the door is located approximately a hundred feet from my lectern, allowing my students ample time to react to the slight and possibly retaliate as I danced my way to freedom.

Tales from the Classroom: One Step Ahead

Posted on November 19, 2004

Inexplicably, I’m speaking to a group of fellow graduate students this afternoon about my philosophy of teaching. Somehow, “stay at least one day ahead of your students on the assigned readings” doesn’t sound nearly as insightful when you gussy it up as a full-blown philosophy.

Tales from the Classroom: Pass the Geritol

Posted on October 27, 2004

There’s nothing like casually chatting with an undergraduate about music and hearing her say that she “totally rocked out” to Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill “back in sixth grade” to make you feel like the oldest person on the face of the Earth.

Tales from the Classroom: The Art of Shoemaking

Posted on October 25, 2004

A note to my fellow educators: if you’re ever explaining how tariffs may help protect domestic industries in the developing world with a hypothetical story about a skilled shoemaker in Afghanistan competing with Nike and you want to be taken seriously, don’t start off the story with, “Imagine there’s a cobbler in Kabul…”

Trust me on this one.

Bonus! Awful “cobbler in Kabul” limerick follows after the jump…

Tales from the Classroom: My Prerogative

Posted on October 19, 2004

I know some of my colleagues aren’t particularly fond of what they call “grade grubbers” — students who bring in their exams and lobby for additional points on questions they missed. It doesn’t bother me so much, but I have had a few far-out pleas for partial credit through the years.

One of my favorites occurred after my final exam a couple of semesters ago. Not ten minutes after I finished administering the exam, there was an e-mail from a student waiting in my inbox.

Jess,

I just finished taking your exam, and I know I missed number 18. I was on the border between a B and C going into the exam, and even though I know I got it wrong, could you give me partial credit since you spelled “perogative” (sic) wrong in the question?

Thanks,

Some Student

Okay, it takes cojones to ask for partial credit based solely on a misspelled word in the question that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for any other word in the English language. I’m not sure what it takes, however, to ask for partial credit when the word was actually spelled correctly in the first place (that’s “prerogative” — can’t forget the first “r”!) and you didn’t bother to look it up and double check before firing off an e-mail to your instructor.

Needless to say, he didn’t receive any partial credit. Meanwhile, it was all I could do to resist replying to his e-mail with nothing more than a Dictionary.com link.

Tales from the Classroom: Czech Yo’self Before You Wreck Yo’self

Posted on October 12, 2004

Yes, I said that I wouldn’t count off for spelling, but I’m afraid I still can’t give you credit for “Czech Republic” when the correct answer was “Chechnya.”

Tales from the Classroom: More “Did I just say that?”

Posted on October 11, 2004

Continuing my ongoing disservice to the students of this fine university:

“The International Court of Justice is a lot like the People’s Court in that countries allow a third party to resolve their legal disputes. Only when Judge Wapner awards a plaintiff $500 in overdue rent or whatever, the defendant must abide by the ruling and pay up. The ICJ, on the other hand, lacks an effective enforcement mechanism; in turn, countries are often unwilling to comply with its rulings. So, I guess you could say that the International Court of Justice is actually less powerful than the People’s Court.”

Sadly, I suspect my students aren’t familiar with the rich Wapnerian legal tradition.

Tales from the Classroom: Hipster Doofus

Posted on September 27, 2004

What my notes said: “For the cost of a single fully-loaded Abrams M1 Tank, we could supply over 530,000 vials of insulin for diabetics in the developing world.”

What I said in class: “For the cost of single tricked-out Abrams M1 tank with 20-inch rims and a spoiler, we could supply over 530,000 vials of insulin for diabetics in the developing world.”

Roughly half the class politely chuckled at my blatant, pandering attempt to seem “hip” and “with it.” The other half was wise enough not to risk encouraging future attempts at “being down” on my part.

So, for those of you keeping score at home, my rating on the patented Apropos of Something Cool-O-Meter™ remains unchanged at a below-average two out of five.

Tales from the Classroom: Note to Self II

Posted on September 15, 2004

Dear Jess,

I recently reviewed your syllabus and noticed that it seems to be based in part on the false premise that there are only twenty-six days in September. As you may or may not know, there are actually thirty days in the month of September — assuming, of course, that your syllabus isn’t built around some ancient Aztec or Incan calendar that employs a different counting method. In fact, under the Gregorian calendar adopted by most of the West several centuries ago, no month ever has twenty-six days.

At the risk of sounding like an “armchair professor,” perhaps scheduling readings and lectures for the week of the 27th would have been a wise choice. I, for one, look forward to seeing you tap dance your way through extending what’s barely one week’s worth of material into two.

Meanwhile, keep up the good work!

Sincerely,

Jess

Tales from the Classroom: More “Did I just say that?”

Posted on September 8, 2004

As part of my ongoing disservice to students at this fine university, I let this slip a few days ago during lecture:

“Why did the Cold War end? A lot of people will tell you that it was Reagan’s arms build-up or Gorbachev’s domestic reforms, but the truth of the matter is that the Cold War ended after the Italian Stallion, Rocky Balboa, defeated Soviet superman Ivan Drago in a harrowing fifteen-round boxing match to avenge the in-ring death of Apollo Creed.”

Follow that up with my God-awful impression of Sylvester Stallone delivering his “if the two of us can learn to get along, then we can all learn to get along” closing monologue, and you really begin to wonder how I landed this job in the first place.

Tales from the Classroom: Ask and Ye Shall Receive

Posted on August 20, 2004

I just received an update on my overcrowded classroom yesterday. It seems the Powers That Be agree that cramming forty students into a classroom that seats twenty isn’t such a great idea. So, they’ve moved me to a larger classroom. A much larger classroom — one that seats 300, to be exact. In fact, the auditorium is a free-standing building unto itself. I have my own building now.

So, instead of my forty students packed into a tiny classroom like sardines, they’ll be comfortably scattered throughout a cavernous auditorium whilst I strut and fret my hour upon the stage. I suppose it’s better than the previous arrangement, but it’s not exactly ideal either — and I still bet that I’m double-booked with another professor.

Tales from about the Classroom

Posted on August 10, 2004

Earlier today…

Me: I’m teaching a class this semester with forty students enrolled. I stopped by to check out the classroom today and noticed that it only seats eighteen.

Registrar: And?

Me: Um, well, shouldn’t we move the class to somewhere it will actually fit?

Registrar: Let’s wait until after the first day of class to see how it works out before we make any changes.

Call it a hunch, but unless I can somehow convince the students to sit on one anothers’ laps, I get the feeling that this isn’t going to just “work out.” Five bucks says that the classroom is double-booked during my hour, too.

Tales from the Classroom: The Second-Stringer

Posted on July 27, 2004

Student athletes often get a bad rap around universities. Sure, I’ll admit that there are some athletes who have about as much business in a college classroom as I have in the starting lineup for a women’s field hockey team. But, for every one or two of those stereotypical college athletes, there are a dozen or so more that genuinely work hard to do well in their classes — especially considering many of them have commitments to their respective sports programs that consume eight hours or more of their time each day.

A few years ago, while I was completing my MA and working as a teaching assistant, I had a member of the football team in one of my classes — a third-year backup safety, to be exact. He wasn’t doing particularly well in the class, but after meeting with him on a few occasions, he convinced me that he genuinely wanted to do better, but he simply didn’t have the time to devote to the class in the middle of the busy football season. So, we started meeting on a regular basis during my weekly office hours to go over his assignments and exams (much like I would do with any student who was struggling and wanted help), but his grades continued to hover somewhere in the D+/C- range. Eventually, I decided to schedule an appointment for the two of us to discuss the situation with the professor teaching the course to see if he could offer any insight.

Tales from the Classroom: My First Day

Posted on July 18, 2004

With school out for the summer and new teaching anecdotes few and far between, I haven’t added to my compendium of Tales from the Classroom for the past few months. Looking back at the archive, however, I realized that I somehow forgot to write about my first day as a teacher along the way. So, without further ado…

It was August 1999, and I had just moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, to start working on my MA in political science at Virginia Tech. The department had scheduled a brief orientation for the incoming graduate assistants a few days before classes began. At the orientation, our graduate coordinator started out by discussing our duties as graduate assistants at the university, explaining that most of us would spend our time grading exams, photocopying, picking up books from the library, and so forth. The only assistants who would have any teaching duties would be those working for Dr. So-and-So in the introductory world politics class. At that point, the coordinator began to pass around the TA assignments. Naturally, I was assigned to Dr. So-and-So. A few hours later, I was handed a textbook and told to be ready to teach from it on the following Monday — a mere four days later.

Tales from the Classroom: Course Development

Posted on May 25, 2004

My department recently informed me that I’ll have the opportunity to teach an introductory “global issues” course in the fall. It’s a freshman-level class, and it hasn’t been taught too many times in previous semesters — which means that I have quite a bit of freedom in terms of developing the course’s overall direction and content.

Just out of curiosity, if you were a freshman entering college this fall and had signed up for a global issues course, what would you want/expect to see covered? For instance, how much coverage of the current “war on terror” is too much? Would a broad theoretical treatment or a regional case-study approach (i.e. sections on Latin America, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and so forth) seem more beneficial? Is spending a lot of time on the legacy of the Cold War still relevant to kids who were born in 1986, or should more time be devoted to so-called “new” global issues like environmental scarcity and human rights?

Obviously, I have my own ideas of what’s appropriate, but I wonder if I might be a little too close to the discipline to accurately gauge what someone who isn’t a student of international affairs might expect from an entry-level course. That being said, I’d appreciate any ideas you’re willing to share!

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