As a career college dean, I'm being perfectly honest when I tell people that I love my job. I know, there are a lot of people in a lot of fields who will say that between clamped teeth, fake grin plastered across tight jaws. Not me. I love watching students with a desire to make something of themselves, some of whom missed the path when it presented itself right after high school, and some of whom never had the path in the first place, yank their courage out of their pockets, meet the challenges, and become professionals in the field of study. I love seeing people who haven't had a job worth their time in years--decades, sometimes--go off to join new career-mates with smiles on their faces.
But there are some that make me want to eat my desk in frustration, yes there are. And it's not because of lack of ability--all of our students, by definition from the outcomes of the admissions testing and criteria we apply, have the ability to complete their chosen programs. And you know, sometimes life happens along the way, causing people to have to move away or stop studying for a period of time--just like happened to me before--and I understand that. That's not what frustrates me so much.
What makes my face turn a frustrated shade of crimson is people who self-sabotage. I mean, career colleges more than anybody else in the education field have honed our craft, using the data we have on both previous student outcomes and current employer desires, to create a process that is as near to a guaranteed path to success as is possible with the human mind being involved.
And they don't do it. Most do, granted, and as a result I have a lot of very successful people on my Facebook page as well as my other social media feeds--folks who followed what can be a rather difficult path, who pushed through, who succeeded. Folks who earned their success one quiz, one study session, one classroom exercise at a time.
At some point, it was because they decided/realized that it was more important to learn than it was to worry about not sucking.
I do know this. I've got tons of data about why dropouts tell us they leave. It's family issues, it's stubbed toes, it's hurt feelings when instructors call them out in front of class, and it's all the other, legitimate, life-happens stuff, too. But there's a pattern I've seen over the past many years. Way too many people are still caught in the "don't suck" fear-based mentality, and that causes them to stop trying when the chance to suck becomes very real.
You remember primary school, don't you? You remember when everybody's hands would burst up and all the kids would try to answer the teacher's question, joyfully, because they knew the answer?
You remember when somebody--you, perhaps--got one wrong, don't you? Way wrong, in fact. Wrong enough that people laughed.
Wrong enough that you sucked.
How'd it make you feel next time you wanted to answer a question?
Thing is, though, school is, or at least should be, all about sucking. (no, I can't believe I just wrote that, either) Learning is nothing more than the process of assimilating new information in with the old. In order to do that, though, especially once you're of an age where your brain is already full of old information, you have to come to grips with what you don't know. Come to grips, too, with what you knew that is actually wrong. Come to grips with sucking, to put it basely.
"There are no stupid questions," right? How many times have you heard that little lie? Yes, it's a lie. Yes, there are stupid questions out there. But in the classroom, the stupid questions need to be asked. If you're not asking the stupid questions, then you're not really learning.
The more complicated the learning you're trying to obtain--like, say, a nursing degree--the more you need to be willing to suck sometimes. Because, you know, it's hard. Nothing about nursing school should sound like it's easy to do, or to learn. And when you try--really, truly try--you're going to make mistakes. Yes, you're going to suck.
Hopefully, you'll learn from that, and you'll some day laugh at it as you recount how you became a professional nurse, be it practical or registered.
That's just how we learn.
Would-be novelists, y'all are the worst at this, though I haven't yet been dean over one of those programs. Some writers are so afraid to suck that they don't write anything of substance. Others will, and then they'll realize it sucks, and then they'll put it somewhere it'll never see the light of day again.
But writers, it's okay to suck. I mean, granted, don't send sucky prose to an agent and hope to get picked up, at least not unless it contains sparkly vampires or repetitive bondage scenes. (sorry, couldn't resist) But so many people I run into tell me how much they've always wanted to write a book, except that [fill in the excuse here]. Over, and over, I hear this. It's the same pattern I've noticed as a career college dean. People have grown up afraid to suck, and so out of fear of sucking they never learn what they need to learn.
So go out and--um, no, I can't finish that exhortation with a straight face. Just--just do it.
- TOSK
Showing posts with label college life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label college life. Show all posts
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Sunday, August 4, 2013
With Ceremony
"Even the most understated ceremony involves a certain respect for ritual and pageantry." - Vera Wang
Sometimes, it's the ceremony that counts.
As an Academic Dean by profession, I'm certainly tied to that reality. The academic world is full of rituals and ceremonies, each having its own meaning, place, and importance.
One specific and extremely vital ceremony comes to mind: commencement. I've worked in institutions with all sorts of traditions regarding the act of conferring credentials upon those who complete the requirements, and to many students nothing seems to matter more than the ritual of walking across the stage. One institution, in fact, only held the ceremony once per year, and though graduates had their credentials conferred, along with all rights and privileges (and pretty pieces of paper), immediately upon completion, some still called me every week as we got closer to the commencement ceremony time.
"Are we there yet?"
"Are we?"
I came to understand that ceremony's importance before I became a Dean, thanks to my service as student support coordinator. It was a common thing the students would comment upon during my meetings. Okay, okay, I get it....
One of the realities common with career colleges--and the practice is spreading among traditional institutions as well--is that the chief executive of the campus (typically called the President) doesn't always come from an academic background. Often they're good strong business leaders who can effectively balance a budget and work within a world of restricted resources, but they haven't always taken the time to examine the rituals associated with academic life as closely as they should.
One institution I worked for, in fact, was like that. Their ceremony, when I arrived, was kind of strange from an academic point of view. So I changed it, adding the traditional ritualistic feel in which people say stuff that the graduates won't remember past the flipping of the tassels, and then the new grads all parade across stage to receive the honors they've earned. Then comes the important legalistic part, where the head of academics (usually a Dean or higher) speaks on behalf of the faculty to the legal head of the institution (usually the President) and says "hey, dude, these students survived our crap, so grant them their degrees."
Okay, so it's not typically delivered in those precise words, but that's the general process. Then the Prez says "yeah, sure, man," and everybody flips tassels from the right to the left and then head out en masse for drinky-winkies.
So at this institution, I rewrote the script, adding that part of the ceremony in. Though it's not strictly necessary for a graduation ceremony, it makes the students feel like they accomplished something, and it makes the faculty feel important, and on top of all that it makes the chief executive feel like he/she has an important role, too. It's the ceremony that counts.
I did 'er up right. I wrote the President's portion of the script so that it went something something something "and all rights, responsibilities, and privileges appertaining thereunto." Go ahead, try saying that out loud. I dare you. That last couple of words are a tongue-twister.
At rehearsal, she asked me if it was right. Absolutely, ma'am. You need to say that, ma'am. It's the ceremony, ma'am.
At the actual ceremony, she nailed it. The whole phrase, including the last tongue-twisting couple of words, she enunciated perfectly. Yay! In fact, she smiled as we were done, and she shared with me how happy she was that she'd gotten the important words right.
Some day I'll have to go back and come clean to her. Nah, ma'am, I made that crap up to see if you could and would say it.
There was a similar ceremony at West Point, back when I was there, when dinosaurs roamed the plain, when there was a seriously challenging fourth class system. *ahem* It happened at the end of the year, when the fourth class cadets, who had been known for the entire academic year as simply "Plebe" or worse, became upperclassmen. Peers, ish.
We would line them up by cadet company, and then the upperclassmen in that company would go through the line one at a time shaking hands and introducing ourselves by first name. Recognition Day, it was called. It was a big deal.
Wasn't such a big deal to some of us when we went through it, honestly. By that point we already knew what the upper classmen's names were, and we also had our own little pet names for them (most of which we'd never repeat in their presence even after Recognition Day). It seemed--redundant. Irrelevantly so, in fact.
Thus it was that my class, in my company, at the end of our sophomore ("yearling") year, all went through introducing ourselves as "Bob." Guys, girls, everybody--just "Bob." Hell, they won't remember the names they don't already know, and they already know almost all of our names. Why not?
The Importance of Ceremony is why not. I found out a couple of years later that that class group never, ever forgave us for that little prank. To them, it was a horrible slight.
Oops. And I'd been one of the chief architects of that little pranky-wanky. Sorry, guys.
It's important to do things the right way sometimes:
With ceremony.
- TOSK
Sometimes, it's the ceremony that counts.
As an Academic Dean by profession, I'm certainly tied to that reality. The academic world is full of rituals and ceremonies, each having its own meaning, place, and importance.
One specific and extremely vital ceremony comes to mind: commencement. I've worked in institutions with all sorts of traditions regarding the act of conferring credentials upon those who complete the requirements, and to many students nothing seems to matter more than the ritual of walking across the stage. One institution, in fact, only held the ceremony once per year, and though graduates had their credentials conferred, along with all rights and privileges (and pretty pieces of paper), immediately upon completion, some still called me every week as we got closer to the commencement ceremony time.
"Are we there yet?"
"Are we?"
I came to understand that ceremony's importance before I became a Dean, thanks to my service as student support coordinator. It was a common thing the students would comment upon during my meetings. Okay, okay, I get it....
One of the realities common with career colleges--and the practice is spreading among traditional institutions as well--is that the chief executive of the campus (typically called the President) doesn't always come from an academic background. Often they're good strong business leaders who can effectively balance a budget and work within a world of restricted resources, but they haven't always taken the time to examine the rituals associated with academic life as closely as they should.
One institution I worked for, in fact, was like that. Their ceremony, when I arrived, was kind of strange from an academic point of view. So I changed it, adding the traditional ritualistic feel in which people say stuff that the graduates won't remember past the flipping of the tassels, and then the new grads all parade across stage to receive the honors they've earned. Then comes the important legalistic part, where the head of academics (usually a Dean or higher) speaks on behalf of the faculty to the legal head of the institution (usually the President) and says "hey, dude, these students survived our crap, so grant them their degrees."
Okay, so it's not typically delivered in those precise words, but that's the general process. Then the Prez says "yeah, sure, man," and everybody flips tassels from the right to the left and then head out en masse for drinky-winkies.
So at this institution, I rewrote the script, adding that part of the ceremony in. Though it's not strictly necessary for a graduation ceremony, it makes the students feel like they accomplished something, and it makes the faculty feel important, and on top of all that it makes the chief executive feel like he/she has an important role, too. It's the ceremony that counts.
I did 'er up right. I wrote the President's portion of the script so that it went something something something "and all rights, responsibilities, and privileges appertaining thereunto." Go ahead, try saying that out loud. I dare you. That last couple of words are a tongue-twister.
At rehearsal, she asked me if it was right. Absolutely, ma'am. You need to say that, ma'am. It's the ceremony, ma'am.
At the actual ceremony, she nailed it. The whole phrase, including the last tongue-twisting couple of words, she enunciated perfectly. Yay! In fact, she smiled as we were done, and she shared with me how happy she was that she'd gotten the important words right.
Some day I'll have to go back and come clean to her. Nah, ma'am, I made that crap up to see if you could and would say it.
There was a similar ceremony at West Point, back when I was there, when dinosaurs roamed the plain, when there was a seriously challenging fourth class system. *ahem* It happened at the end of the year, when the fourth class cadets, who had been known for the entire academic year as simply "Plebe" or worse, became upperclassmen. Peers, ish.
We would line them up by cadet company, and then the upperclassmen in that company would go through the line one at a time shaking hands and introducing ourselves by first name. Recognition Day, it was called. It was a big deal.
Wasn't such a big deal to some of us when we went through it, honestly. By that point we already knew what the upper classmen's names were, and we also had our own little pet names for them (most of which we'd never repeat in their presence even after Recognition Day). It seemed--redundant. Irrelevantly so, in fact.
Thus it was that my class, in my company, at the end of our sophomore ("yearling") year, all went through introducing ourselves as "Bob." Guys, girls, everybody--just "Bob." Hell, they won't remember the names they don't already know, and they already know almost all of our names. Why not?
The Importance of Ceremony is why not. I found out a couple of years later that that class group never, ever forgave us for that little prank. To them, it was a horrible slight.
Oops. And I'd been one of the chief architects of that little pranky-wanky. Sorry, guys.
It's important to do things the right way sometimes:
With ceremony.
- TOSK
Monday, January 21, 2013
To Lab, Or Not To Lab?
What kind of question is that?
Back in college (heck, most high schools) homework wasn't really something that was negotiated. You got it, and you did it. I got it, and I did it. Might have taken you a little less or more time than it took me, but it was still something that we knew was coming at us. You and/or I may not have done all that was assigned, and if we didn't then we paid the advertised (on the syllabus) price. Some teachers assigned more than others, and some of it was easier than the rest, but regardless, homework in college courses was, and still is, like water in the ocean. It's there, and you know it's there, and nobody has to get wet for you to believe in it.
It wasn't till I got to the other side of the desk that I realized there was more to the equation. There's an expectation, for example, that a student in college will spend two hours on homework for each hour he spends in class. Let me clarify, though. Homework includes anything expected to be done outside of class, including those pesky reading assignments, studying for quizzes, and even the AC (Annoying as Crap) worksheets. Oh, and the ever-present writing of papers of joy, and all that other way-too-fun stuff are included, too. It even used to include the time we spent in the library bent over card catalogs, while now it doesn't take much time to just pull up Wikipedia (kidding).
Meanwhile, "each hour he spends in class" can require qualification as well. That is because everybody expects reading and other out-of-class activities for preparing to be successful in lecture-type activities (a category of activities, actually, that involves initial or review exposure to course topics in various ways, and includes lecture, discussion, student presentations, game play, role play, and numerous other options) yet nobody really ever expects homework assignments for lab.
What is lab? Well, it's when you practice what you've learned, of course. My computer and cabling classes used to have lots of lab. So do the medical classes. Even non-technical courses like foreign languages often march the students over to a lab environment (or these days some do them in class on their iPads). In the courses I used to teach, it involved sitting down at a server and following the directions to install or configure something. What homework would I have given?
Anyway--you're probably about to ask me what is the issue. First, though, I need to go back a little in time, back to when people were trying to figure out how to measure college efforts. At work, you may get paid by the hour or by the job. In freelance writing, you might get paid by either of those, but often it's by the word instead. How, though, do you configure the system for students to pay for their education--what do they pay by? How do we quantify how much work a college student has completed? How, if the student transfers from one college to another, do we decide how much effort the student is exempt from at the new college in the name of avoiding repetition?
First, let me say it's not done the way I'd see it done in a perfect world. In that world, college effort would be measured in terms of acquisition of knowledge. That's hard to do; it's pretty much impossible, in fact, in a not-perfect world. It requires a measurement of change, also called a delta. You'd have to give some sort of assessment--a test--going in, and another test or series of them at the end. The difference in score, then, would indicate the amount of academic achievement the student will be granted credit for.
That method carries three crippling negatives, though. The first one is that not all disciplines are easily assessed in an objective manner. Math is. So is physics; if your experimental calculations find that the ball fell up instead of down, it's wrong (yes, that actually happened in a class I took). Art, though? Not as clear-cut to say what is good and what is great, is it? I've found in my own authorpreneurial pursuits that writing quality is extremely subjective. That's not entirely insurmountable, due to the opportunity presented by the multiple methods of portfolio evaluation, but portfolio methods aren't foolproof. Besides, there are still other problems. Specifically, if a student's measure of achievement is the delta between two scores, it incentivizes doing poorly on the first test. I can see a squad of parents lined up at the hall where the entrance exam is given, chanting "Fail that test! Fail that test!" At the same time, a third problem is that the end result in many cases should be pegged to a certain level; for example, at the end of my B.S.E.E. work I took (and passed) the Engineer In Training exam, the standards for which set a parameter for what someone with that credential should know. All the programs at my current college have similar exit exam requirements.
The other--a fourth, I suppose--negative, though again this one isn't insurmountable, is that the person who scores highest on a test may not have the most thorough grasp of course topics. Instead, he may just be the student with the most advanced test-taking skills. In using the delta system based on test scores, then, you're by definition measuring gain of test-taking ability in addition to any topical gains. Thus, if you know that you're using this measurement to assign credit, you take students who initially aren't experts at taking tests, and you spend a certain number of years with them trying to get their scores up as high as possible. What are you going to focus on teaching them, then--critical thinking as it applies to their discipline, or test-taking expertise?
So yeah--the delta method of awarding effort is problematic. What else is there?
You're probably sitting there thinking "it's the credit hour, dummy." You're right. The time-honored system of academic credits works by assigning the courses a certain helping of credit hours each, which the students earn through successfully passing them and accumulate over time.
But what specifically does the term "credit hour" mean?
I remember wondering that as a cadet. The calculus class, for example, bore four and a half credit hours. It also, as I quickly learned, required way more than four and a half hours of work. Other classes bore a mere three hours of credit, and to be honest some of those required more work than the calculus class. Take chemistry, for example. No, please, literally take it. Anywhere but here is where it belongs. That was three credit hours of brutality. I still sweat when I hear the word "stoichiometry," a term that, believe it or not, you actually do occasionally hear on an allied health college campus. And organics? I'd rather take the IOCT every day than mess with that topic again, and you West Pointers know how huge a statement that is.
Anyway, I once heard what I think is the best way to describe what a credit hour represents, while listening to a keynote address during an accreditation conference. The speaker explained that credit hours, rather than measuring any particular academic achievement, measure hours that the student spends with his butt in a chair. Hence, my somewhat sardonic description of class hours as "BIC (Butt In Chair) hours."
Put more delicately, the credit hour system, working off a thing called Carnegie Units, measures a student's quantity of what appears to be effort rather than his quality of effort.
Sounds rough, doesn't it? It's not the best system, that's for certain. But it's not bad. This post is getting past the "long" point and is into the "oh my God you're writing a dissertation" length so I won't go into the history of CU's. Suffice it to say that a bit over a hundred years ago, the Carnegie Foundation decided to try to end all the dissimilar methods colleges and universities were using to measure effort, and, in doing so, bend everyone into the pleasant happiness of consistency. They succeeded by offering a pension plan and only letting people from colleges that used their preferred system into it. Gotta love those purse strings--always powerful.
So the Carnegie system says--well, it says a lot of things, but the way it works out for colleges is that 15 BIC hours earn a student one semester credit, while 10 hours earns one quarter credit. Oh, but that's lecture, by the way; the system designers (neither Carnegie nor his Foundation, but I'll leave that story for later) recognized that lecture is "harder" than lab due to the out-of-class work that successful lecture efforts require. Thus, while a student earns one semester credit for 15 hours of participating in lecture type activities, it's double that requirement to earn a semester credit in lab. Same with quarter credits--double time.
It's been that way for well over a hundred years. Multiple times over, for some institutions, but again, that's a story for later.
And so we teachers, at least back when I taught full-time, gave homework. Many of us recognized that homework was figured into the credit the student was earning. All of us recognized that it was expected. And we also knew that it was needed. Oh, students love it when you go easy on the homework, but once they graduate it's a bad thing. Any institutions that doesn't, as a general rule, give good educationally-sound homework in copious quantities is sure to end up with a bad case of GTS (Graduates That Suck).
It was thus up to a few years ago, anyway. Enter the Department of Education and a certain few Congressmen, fresh off of their rousing efforts to wrest the primary and secondary school systems in the U.S. into a nice, consistent, measurable level of success based on the delta method I described earlier (yes, I know it's not possible, and you know it's not possible, but it wasn't my windmill they were tilting at). After a while, their attention turned to post-secondary. That means college. Which means me. My windmill. Suddenly there was a raft of new stuff being drafted, including the painful gainful employment requirements and other stuff I'll not bore you with. While they were at it, though, they decided that it would be nice if someone verified that colleges were--and yes, I'm saying this with a straight face, hard as it may be--actually giving their students homework.
Because, you know, we colleges are such slackers. Not only do we despise putting our poor students to work actually reading the material, we also hate assessing their efforts in order to see where they are in their learning.
*cough*
The good news for DoEd is that they don't actually have to do the work to verify anything. They're the agency that formed the agency that allows the accreditors to operate through a process called recognition. It's pretty much a given, then, that whatever they say goes, at least until a federal judge says no. When they say, for example, something along the lines of "you accrediting agencies need to verify that students are being assigned enough homework," then poof! Guess what happens?
Now, the interpretation of the homework thing varies from accreditation agency to accreditation agency, but the gist is that generally it's up to the college to document that it gives a sufficient amount of homework in each course. What does "document" mean? Remember my binder post from yesterday? Yeah, it means, especially if you're going to a career college, that some of the homework you do ends up in one of our pretty binders professionally organized using a tab system, and hopefully with your name blackened out, as proof that an actual human being (and, assumedly, an actual student) completed this particular bit of work.
If you're thinking, "wow, that must require a lot of binders," then you're right. But it is Required, so I do it, and luckily the local office supply store stocks a lot of binders knowing I'm in town.
But here's the rub: what does "sufficient amount" of homework mean? Well, you see, (enter sardonic chuckle here) it depends. If you're in what is defined as a clock hour program (a program can be defined as such for several reasons--our massage program is clock hour for the sole reason that the state has a minimum hours-of-training requirement in its licensing regs) then, um, well, there isn't any homework Required. Yep, that's right, no homework is required in clock hour programs. So go tell my stepson, who is in a clock hour program right now, that he doesn't have to do homework. I dare ya. He's overwhelmed at times in homework. He complains to me; I giggle inside, mentally thank his teacher, and then try to explain life, the universe, and everything to him. Keep in mind that technically, for those programs, it's not that homework isn't required; it's just that it's not Required by accreditation agency (due to the DoEd's strange rules), and thus his homework doesn't stand a chance of ending up in binders. Or maybe it actually does. It's just not Required to end up in binders.
For other programs it gets more complicated. Some rule sets Require two hours of homework for each lecture hour. Others say two hours of homework for each class hour. Still others use an old rule of thumb: two hours per week for each credit hour in the course.
Brass tacks, then: let's say there exists (and there does exist) a course that meets for 60 hours over six weeks of time. That's ten hours per week of BIC time. Thirty of the hours are designated as encumbered with lecture type activities, while the other thirty are lab. It's a four quarter-credit hour course (you have to round down, by the way, which technically under-awards every student for his effort in nearly every course, but only by a little). Anyway, the question for me, the Dean, isn't how much homework should be given, but rather how much homework should be Required? By the first method, the course needs 30 times two, or 60, hours of homework. Spread that out over six weeks and you get roughly ten hours per week, some weeks more and some less. The second method gives 60 times two, or 120, hours of homework, which is 20 hours per week. The result of the third method is four times two, or eight, hours per week.
Keep in mind that this is one of two courses a student usually takes in a six-week term. Assuming the other is identical for the sake of mathematical bliss, that's ten hours of BIC plus ten hours of homework, times two classes, or 40 hours of academic work per week--roughly the equivalent of a full-time job. The second method? Ten hours of BIC plus 20 hours of homework times two, which is 60 hours a week. That, by the way, is a long week. Third method: ten hours plus eight hours times two, which is 36 hours. Thus, you see that methods One and Three bear minimum results that are close: 40 versus 36 (the difference amounts to that rounding-down thing I talked about earlier), both solid workloads for a week, while method Two results in "Oh my God why did I think I could survive in college?"
Of course, if it happens to be defined as a course in a clock hour-based program, it's just ten BIC hours plus zero homework times two, which is 20.
But here's the rub: it's the same course, regardless. Same learning objectives. Same students, same classroom, same teacher. Same books. Same reading assignments. Same tests.
Only differences? The numbers advertised on the syllabus, and the amount of stuff we binderize.
Now do you see the issue?
To (require homework for) lab, or not to (require homework for) lab--that's the question that really needs to be answered.
- TOSK
Back in college (heck, most high schools) homework wasn't really something that was negotiated. You got it, and you did it. I got it, and I did it. Might have taken you a little less or more time than it took me, but it was still something that we knew was coming at us. You and/or I may not have done all that was assigned, and if we didn't then we paid the advertised (on the syllabus) price. Some teachers assigned more than others, and some of it was easier than the rest, but regardless, homework in college courses was, and still is, like water in the ocean. It's there, and you know it's there, and nobody has to get wet for you to believe in it.
It wasn't till I got to the other side of the desk that I realized there was more to the equation. There's an expectation, for example, that a student in college will spend two hours on homework for each hour he spends in class. Let me clarify, though. Homework includes anything expected to be done outside of class, including those pesky reading assignments, studying for quizzes, and even the AC (Annoying as Crap) worksheets. Oh, and the ever-present writing of papers of joy, and all that other way-too-fun stuff are included, too. It even used to include the time we spent in the library bent over card catalogs, while now it doesn't take much time to just pull up Wikipedia (kidding).
Meanwhile, "each hour he spends in class" can require qualification as well. That is because everybody expects reading and other out-of-class activities for preparing to be successful in lecture-type activities (a category of activities, actually, that involves initial or review exposure to course topics in various ways, and includes lecture, discussion, student presentations, game play, role play, and numerous other options) yet nobody really ever expects homework assignments for lab.
What is lab? Well, it's when you practice what you've learned, of course. My computer and cabling classes used to have lots of lab. So do the medical classes. Even non-technical courses like foreign languages often march the students over to a lab environment (or these days some do them in class on their iPads). In the courses I used to teach, it involved sitting down at a server and following the directions to install or configure something. What homework would I have given?
Anyway--you're probably about to ask me what is the issue. First, though, I need to go back a little in time, back to when people were trying to figure out how to measure college efforts. At work, you may get paid by the hour or by the job. In freelance writing, you might get paid by either of those, but often it's by the word instead. How, though, do you configure the system for students to pay for their education--what do they pay by? How do we quantify how much work a college student has completed? How, if the student transfers from one college to another, do we decide how much effort the student is exempt from at the new college in the name of avoiding repetition?
First, let me say it's not done the way I'd see it done in a perfect world. In that world, college effort would be measured in terms of acquisition of knowledge. That's hard to do; it's pretty much impossible, in fact, in a not-perfect world. It requires a measurement of change, also called a delta. You'd have to give some sort of assessment--a test--going in, and another test or series of them at the end. The difference in score, then, would indicate the amount of academic achievement the student will be granted credit for.
That method carries three crippling negatives, though. The first one is that not all disciplines are easily assessed in an objective manner. Math is. So is physics; if your experimental calculations find that the ball fell up instead of down, it's wrong (yes, that actually happened in a class I took). Art, though? Not as clear-cut to say what is good and what is great, is it? I've found in my own authorpreneurial pursuits that writing quality is extremely subjective. That's not entirely insurmountable, due to the opportunity presented by the multiple methods of portfolio evaluation, but portfolio methods aren't foolproof. Besides, there are still other problems. Specifically, if a student's measure of achievement is the delta between two scores, it incentivizes doing poorly on the first test. I can see a squad of parents lined up at the hall where the entrance exam is given, chanting "Fail that test! Fail that test!" At the same time, a third problem is that the end result in many cases should be pegged to a certain level; for example, at the end of my B.S.E.E. work I took (and passed) the Engineer In Training exam, the standards for which set a parameter for what someone with that credential should know. All the programs at my current college have similar exit exam requirements.
The other--a fourth, I suppose--negative, though again this one isn't insurmountable, is that the person who scores highest on a test may not have the most thorough grasp of course topics. Instead, he may just be the student with the most advanced test-taking skills. In using the delta system based on test scores, then, you're by definition measuring gain of test-taking ability in addition to any topical gains. Thus, if you know that you're using this measurement to assign credit, you take students who initially aren't experts at taking tests, and you spend a certain number of years with them trying to get their scores up as high as possible. What are you going to focus on teaching them, then--critical thinking as it applies to their discipline, or test-taking expertise?
So yeah--the delta method of awarding effort is problematic. What else is there?
You're probably sitting there thinking "it's the credit hour, dummy." You're right. The time-honored system of academic credits works by assigning the courses a certain helping of credit hours each, which the students earn through successfully passing them and accumulate over time.
But what specifically does the term "credit hour" mean?
I remember wondering that as a cadet. The calculus class, for example, bore four and a half credit hours. It also, as I quickly learned, required way more than four and a half hours of work. Other classes bore a mere three hours of credit, and to be honest some of those required more work than the calculus class. Take chemistry, for example. No, please, literally take it. Anywhere but here is where it belongs. That was three credit hours of brutality. I still sweat when I hear the word "stoichiometry," a term that, believe it or not, you actually do occasionally hear on an allied health college campus. And organics? I'd rather take the IOCT every day than mess with that topic again, and you West Pointers know how huge a statement that is.
Anyway, I once heard what I think is the best way to describe what a credit hour represents, while listening to a keynote address during an accreditation conference. The speaker explained that credit hours, rather than measuring any particular academic achievement, measure hours that the student spends with his butt in a chair. Hence, my somewhat sardonic description of class hours as "BIC (Butt In Chair) hours."
Put more delicately, the credit hour system, working off a thing called Carnegie Units, measures a student's quantity of what appears to be effort rather than his quality of effort.
Sounds rough, doesn't it? It's not the best system, that's for certain. But it's not bad. This post is getting past the "long" point and is into the "oh my God you're writing a dissertation" length so I won't go into the history of CU's. Suffice it to say that a bit over a hundred years ago, the Carnegie Foundation decided to try to end all the dissimilar methods colleges and universities were using to measure effort, and, in doing so, bend everyone into the pleasant happiness of consistency. They succeeded by offering a pension plan and only letting people from colleges that used their preferred system into it. Gotta love those purse strings--always powerful.
So the Carnegie system says--well, it says a lot of things, but the way it works out for colleges is that 15 BIC hours earn a student one semester credit, while 10 hours earns one quarter credit. Oh, but that's lecture, by the way; the system designers (neither Carnegie nor his Foundation, but I'll leave that story for later) recognized that lecture is "harder" than lab due to the out-of-class work that successful lecture efforts require. Thus, while a student earns one semester credit for 15 hours of participating in lecture type activities, it's double that requirement to earn a semester credit in lab. Same with quarter credits--double time.
It's been that way for well over a hundred years. Multiple times over, for some institutions, but again, that's a story for later.
And so we teachers, at least back when I taught full-time, gave homework. Many of us recognized that homework was figured into the credit the student was earning. All of us recognized that it was expected. And we also knew that it was needed. Oh, students love it when you go easy on the homework, but once they graduate it's a bad thing. Any institutions that doesn't, as a general rule, give good educationally-sound homework in copious quantities is sure to end up with a bad case of GTS (Graduates That Suck).
It was thus up to a few years ago, anyway. Enter the Department of Education and a certain few Congressmen, fresh off of their rousing efforts to wrest the primary and secondary school systems in the U.S. into a nice, consistent, measurable level of success based on the delta method I described earlier (yes, I know it's not possible, and you know it's not possible, but it wasn't my windmill they were tilting at). After a while, their attention turned to post-secondary. That means college. Which means me. My windmill. Suddenly there was a raft of new stuff being drafted, including the painful gainful employment requirements and other stuff I'll not bore you with. While they were at it, though, they decided that it would be nice if someone verified that colleges were--and yes, I'm saying this with a straight face, hard as it may be--actually giving their students homework.
Because, you know, we colleges are such slackers. Not only do we despise putting our poor students to work actually reading the material, we also hate assessing their efforts in order to see where they are in their learning.
*cough*
The good news for DoEd is that they don't actually have to do the work to verify anything. They're the agency that formed the agency that allows the accreditors to operate through a process called recognition. It's pretty much a given, then, that whatever they say goes, at least until a federal judge says no. When they say, for example, something along the lines of "you accrediting agencies need to verify that students are being assigned enough homework," then poof! Guess what happens?
Now, the interpretation of the homework thing varies from accreditation agency to accreditation agency, but the gist is that generally it's up to the college to document that it gives a sufficient amount of homework in each course. What does "document" mean? Remember my binder post from yesterday? Yeah, it means, especially if you're going to a career college, that some of the homework you do ends up in one of our pretty binders professionally organized using a tab system, and hopefully with your name blackened out, as proof that an actual human being (and, assumedly, an actual student) completed this particular bit of work.
If you're thinking, "wow, that must require a lot of binders," then you're right. But it is Required, so I do it, and luckily the local office supply store stocks a lot of binders knowing I'm in town.
But here's the rub: what does "sufficient amount" of homework mean? Well, you see, (enter sardonic chuckle here) it depends. If you're in what is defined as a clock hour program (a program can be defined as such for several reasons--our massage program is clock hour for the sole reason that the state has a minimum hours-of-training requirement in its licensing regs) then, um, well, there isn't any homework Required. Yep, that's right, no homework is required in clock hour programs. So go tell my stepson, who is in a clock hour program right now, that he doesn't have to do homework. I dare ya. He's overwhelmed at times in homework. He complains to me; I giggle inside, mentally thank his teacher, and then try to explain life, the universe, and everything to him. Keep in mind that technically, for those programs, it's not that homework isn't required; it's just that it's not Required by accreditation agency (due to the DoEd's strange rules), and thus his homework doesn't stand a chance of ending up in binders. Or maybe it actually does. It's just not Required to end up in binders.
For other programs it gets more complicated. Some rule sets Require two hours of homework for each lecture hour. Others say two hours of homework for each class hour. Still others use an old rule of thumb: two hours per week for each credit hour in the course.
Brass tacks, then: let's say there exists (and there does exist) a course that meets for 60 hours over six weeks of time. That's ten hours per week of BIC time. Thirty of the hours are designated as encumbered with lecture type activities, while the other thirty are lab. It's a four quarter-credit hour course (you have to round down, by the way, which technically under-awards every student for his effort in nearly every course, but only by a little). Anyway, the question for me, the Dean, isn't how much homework should be given, but rather how much homework should be Required? By the first method, the course needs 30 times two, or 60, hours of homework. Spread that out over six weeks and you get roughly ten hours per week, some weeks more and some less. The second method gives 60 times two, or 120, hours of homework, which is 20 hours per week. The result of the third method is four times two, or eight, hours per week.
Keep in mind that this is one of two courses a student usually takes in a six-week term. Assuming the other is identical for the sake of mathematical bliss, that's ten hours of BIC plus ten hours of homework, times two classes, or 40 hours of academic work per week--roughly the equivalent of a full-time job. The second method? Ten hours of BIC plus 20 hours of homework times two, which is 60 hours a week. That, by the way, is a long week. Third method: ten hours plus eight hours times two, which is 36 hours. Thus, you see that methods One and Three bear minimum results that are close: 40 versus 36 (the difference amounts to that rounding-down thing I talked about earlier), both solid workloads for a week, while method Two results in "Oh my God why did I think I could survive in college?"
Of course, if it happens to be defined as a course in a clock hour-based program, it's just ten BIC hours plus zero homework times two, which is 20.
But here's the rub: it's the same course, regardless. Same learning objectives. Same students, same classroom, same teacher. Same books. Same reading assignments. Same tests.
Only differences? The numbers advertised on the syllabus, and the amount of stuff we binderize.
Now do you see the issue?
To (require homework for) lab, or not to (require homework for) lab--that's the question that really needs to be answered.
- TOSK
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Binders Full Of Crap
You know, I've learned some of my life's most interesting lessons
before and during accreditation "visits" (an awfully nice way of
referring to excruciating inspections). To wit:
You see, with an accreditation visit they're typically looking through everything that the organization can document that it accomplishes. The "can document" part is important. For example, at one institution where I was Dean, I, in my inexperience at the time, had ditched an archaic form that instructors were supposed to use to request the administration's approval to have a guest speaker in class. I wanted the faculty members to have more guest speakers to bring in valuable real world insight from the community, and I knew from first-hand experience that the paperwork just got in the way. So I ditched it. I told the faculty they didn't have to have my approval to have a guest speaker. And everybody was happy.
Next visit, though, I learned that the forms weren't really there for the faculty or for the administration's benefit. Turned out they served as the requisite documentation for something the accreditors look for: "community involvement." Community involvement is interpreted by those whose interpretation is important as guest speakers and field trips. Since community involvement must be documented, that means guest speakers and field trips must in turn be documented.
In a binder.
Thus it was that the first in a long line of Stephen's Binders was born.
Heck, my career as a Dean has been one long string of binder creation, graduation ceremony planning, academic awards presentations, and listening to student complaints. All of which, of course, are fully documented in binders. I have binders full of field trips. I have binders full of graduations. I have binders full of sign-in sheets. Heck, in one case I even have a binder full of binders.
They made a big deal in the last election about Romney's "binders full of women" comment. Me, I don't have binders full of women. I have binders full of crap.
- TOSK
- Coffee always stays hotter in a carafe if you fill the carafe up with hot water first, then pour it out and replace it with hot coffee.
- Visitors to Alaska prefer an Alaskan brand of bottled water.
- Doilies matter.
- Thickness of a folder doesn't necessarily deter an inspector from going through each page.
- There's always something else you'll need a binder for.
- Corollary: you can never have too many spare binders. Or binder tabs.
You see, with an accreditation visit they're typically looking through everything that the organization can document that it accomplishes. The "can document" part is important. For example, at one institution where I was Dean, I, in my inexperience at the time, had ditched an archaic form that instructors were supposed to use to request the administration's approval to have a guest speaker in class. I wanted the faculty members to have more guest speakers to bring in valuable real world insight from the community, and I knew from first-hand experience that the paperwork just got in the way. So I ditched it. I told the faculty they didn't have to have my approval to have a guest speaker. And everybody was happy.
Next visit, though, I learned that the forms weren't really there for the faculty or for the administration's benefit. Turned out they served as the requisite documentation for something the accreditors look for: "community involvement." Community involvement is interpreted by those whose interpretation is important as guest speakers and field trips. Since community involvement must be documented, that means guest speakers and field trips must in turn be documented.
In a binder.
Thus it was that the first in a long line of Stephen's Binders was born.
Heck, my career as a Dean has been one long string of binder creation, graduation ceremony planning, academic awards presentations, and listening to student complaints. All of which, of course, are fully documented in binders. I have binders full of field trips. I have binders full of graduations. I have binders full of sign-in sheets. Heck, in one case I even have a binder full of binders.
They made a big deal in the last election about Romney's "binders full of women" comment. Me, I don't have binders full of women. I have binders full of crap.
- TOSK
Friday, January 18, 2013
An Interesting Thing Happened On The Way Home
"Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler." - Doug Coupland
"I swear, you have the most interesting life!" - Amy Sue Nogar
"It is better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period." - Chinese proverb
Well.
Now that was interesting.
Those who know me, including you who follow my blog, know I've been going through quite a chaotic period. We had our accreditation visit this week, and though I promise I have more interesting (there's that nasty word again) stuff to say about it, I'll just once again say this: perfect! Zero findings. Yay. Bazinga, even.
As if that weren't enough, we had a graduation ceremony too. Now, I'm a Dean, but you knew that, right? You may not have known that one of a Dean's most important events each year/semester/whatever is commencement. I know, there's a lot of hoopla and ceremonialisticism that happens there, but if you listen closely you'll notice that the crux of the action is when the Dean, as the chief representative of the faculty of the college, recommends the graduates to the President/Provost/whoever, the chief person who technically is the person empowered by the board of the institution to actually grant degrees and diplomas.
Basically, the most important moment to the Dean is when he gets to say words to the effect of "We're done with them. For better or for worse, they passed every test we could throw, and so it's our pleasure to now recommend them for release upon the greater society out there. I hope you approve. Now let's go have a drinky-winky."
And it happened as planned tonight, at least at first. Basically, it was as good a ceremony as it gets, with right at half of the graduates actually showing up on time in the right place with all their clothes on. No, I'm really not kidding. We actually ended up with all graduates (save one who never showed up) lined up properly with ten minutes to go before showtime.
That. Never. Happens.
No, I'm serious. Really, really serious. Never, ever, do you get a group of celebrating graduates, none of whom really owe you the time of day anymore, to be in the right place at the right time in the right mood in the right attire. It scared me, to tell the truth.
The rest of the ceremony went--well, okay. As okay as can be expected, anyway. I mean, yeah, the team does this particular ceremony once per year (and twice per year going forward), but twelve months is a long time to remember everything, which is why I wrote scripts long, long ago. Even with scripts, though, little points of chaos can happen. They do happen. They did happen. One of the faculty ushers did exactly what I told her to do, which in this case happened to be wrong. She figured it out quickly and righted the ship. The Valedictorian, a student I really didn't hold out much hope for on the presentation scale, gave a downright commendable speech, while the student who just had to read a couple of pages forgot her glasses and flubbed a few lines. And when it came time to recess (a fancy term for getting the heck outta there), the President, who leads both directions, apparently forgot, bringing about a confused couple of seconds that only ended after I, in stage voice, said, "This is us."
All in all, it was a mildly chaotic (as usual) but very successful event, right up till we got out of the room. Then, all hell broke loose.
The fire alarm went off.
Now, I'm normally the cause of the fire alarm going off. It's part of what I do, as a Security Specialist (aka Dean). Every so often, according to a frequency set by the local fire code, I'm the one who makes sure the appropriate agencies are notified (so that fire trucks don't come rushing to our aid) and then pulls the lever to force students and instructors out into the cold.
Actually, it's kinda fun, but don't tell my students or instructors.
At a previous campus, we had to do these things more often, and so I used to get requests from others to pull the alarm handle. It was such a common request, in fact, that I thought about auctioning off the right to pull the fire alarm when the time came.
Anyway, there are a lot of very technical things that happen at a school when a fire alarm is sounded. People grab certain things and evacuate, but that's just the start. Administrators are also tasked with certain routes to make sure people are evacuating, and a reporting sequence is planned and initiated as the event unfolds. At a school, a fire alarm is a big, choreographed, deal.
At a Convention Center, with 600 people and an MP3 of Pomp and Circumstance blaring at 120dB, it's not nearly as choreographed.
It took me a couple of minutes, in fact, to even interpret the *mumble mumble murph murph* of the PA system combined with the little flashes of light I saw as a fire alarm. Remember, we had the music going. People were cheering. People were talking. It was chaotic, as the end of commencement ceremonies always are. It was so chaotic, in fact, that at first all I noticed was the announcements that sounded like the Peanut's gang's parents speaking.
Have you ever been to a commencement ceremony? Remember the end? Nobody ever wants to leave; all the students and their families are trying to find and get pictures with all their faculty members. It's a chaotic whirlwind soup of people. Add to that a fire alarm, and--yeah. Interesting, indeed.
The good news is that eventually we did realize what was going on, and the security team did manage to break up the whirlwind soup and send them out. Our event technical manager was on site fairly quickly, helping to direct everyone out. Once again, I was impressed with the GRCC.
But boy, was it interesting.
- TOSK
"I swear, you have the most interesting life!" - Amy Sue Nogar
"It is better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period." - Chinese proverb
Well.
Now that was interesting.
Those who know me, including you who follow my blog, know I've been going through quite a chaotic period. We had our accreditation visit this week, and though I promise I have more interesting (there's that nasty word again) stuff to say about it, I'll just once again say this: perfect! Zero findings. Yay. Bazinga, even.
As if that weren't enough, we had a graduation ceremony too. Now, I'm a Dean, but you knew that, right? You may not have known that one of a Dean's most important events each year/semester/whatever is commencement. I know, there's a lot of hoopla and ceremonialisticism that happens there, but if you listen closely you'll notice that the crux of the action is when the Dean, as the chief representative of the faculty of the college, recommends the graduates to the President/Provost/whoever, the chief person who technically is the person empowered by the board of the institution to actually grant degrees and diplomas.
Basically, the most important moment to the Dean is when he gets to say words to the effect of "We're done with them. For better or for worse, they passed every test we could throw, and so it's our pleasure to now recommend them for release upon the greater society out there. I hope you approve. Now let's go have a drinky-winky."
And it happened as planned tonight, at least at first. Basically, it was as good a ceremony as it gets, with right at half of the graduates actually showing up on time in the right place with all their clothes on. No, I'm really not kidding. We actually ended up with all graduates (save one who never showed up) lined up properly with ten minutes to go before showtime.
That. Never. Happens.
No, I'm serious. Really, really serious. Never, ever, do you get a group of celebrating graduates, none of whom really owe you the time of day anymore, to be in the right place at the right time in the right mood in the right attire. It scared me, to tell the truth.
The rest of the ceremony went--well, okay. As okay as can be expected, anyway. I mean, yeah, the team does this particular ceremony once per year (and twice per year going forward), but twelve months is a long time to remember everything, which is why I wrote scripts long, long ago. Even with scripts, though, little points of chaos can happen. They do happen. They did happen. One of the faculty ushers did exactly what I told her to do, which in this case happened to be wrong. She figured it out quickly and righted the ship. The Valedictorian, a student I really didn't hold out much hope for on the presentation scale, gave a downright commendable speech, while the student who just had to read a couple of pages forgot her glasses and flubbed a few lines. And when it came time to recess (a fancy term for getting the heck outta there), the President, who leads both directions, apparently forgot, bringing about a confused couple of seconds that only ended after I, in stage voice, said, "This is us."
All in all, it was a mildly chaotic (as usual) but very successful event, right up till we got out of the room. Then, all hell broke loose.
The fire alarm went off.
Now, I'm normally the cause of the fire alarm going off. It's part of what I do, as a Security Specialist (aka Dean). Every so often, according to a frequency set by the local fire code, I'm the one who makes sure the appropriate agencies are notified (so that fire trucks don't come rushing to our aid) and then pulls the lever to force students and instructors out into the cold.
Actually, it's kinda fun, but don't tell my students or instructors.
At a previous campus, we had to do these things more often, and so I used to get requests from others to pull the alarm handle. It was such a common request, in fact, that I thought about auctioning off the right to pull the fire alarm when the time came.
Anyway, there are a lot of very technical things that happen at a school when a fire alarm is sounded. People grab certain things and evacuate, but that's just the start. Administrators are also tasked with certain routes to make sure people are evacuating, and a reporting sequence is planned and initiated as the event unfolds. At a school, a fire alarm is a big, choreographed, deal.
At a Convention Center, with 600 people and an MP3 of Pomp and Circumstance blaring at 120dB, it's not nearly as choreographed.
It took me a couple of minutes, in fact, to even interpret the *mumble mumble murph murph* of the PA system combined with the little flashes of light I saw as a fire alarm. Remember, we had the music going. People were cheering. People were talking. It was chaotic, as the end of commencement ceremonies always are. It was so chaotic, in fact, that at first all I noticed was the announcements that sounded like the Peanut's gang's parents speaking.
Have you ever been to a commencement ceremony? Remember the end? Nobody ever wants to leave; all the students and their families are trying to find and get pictures with all their faculty members. It's a chaotic whirlwind soup of people. Add to that a fire alarm, and--yeah. Interesting, indeed.
The good news is that eventually we did realize what was going on, and the security team did manage to break up the whirlwind soup and send them out. Our event technical manager was on site fairly quickly, helping to direct everyone out. Once again, I was impressed with the GRCC.
But boy, was it interesting.
- TOSK
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