flynn056

Is a smartphone a necessity for college students today? On Twitter over the weekend, arguing against Sara Goldrick-Rab, somebody posted that “Maybe today’s college students should NOT be buying $1200 phones.  That would be a start.” The predictable kerfuffle ensued. It’s a variation on “I walked to school uphill.  Both ways.” It’s a “kids today…” argument deployed to slough off any sense of responsibility for the challenges that today’s students face. The students at my college, an open-admissions commuter school, have certain things that I didn’t have.  Cars, for one. Smartphones, for another. I didn’t need a car, since I lived on campus, attended full-time, and had a work-study job that was an easy walk from the dorm.  And smartphones hadn’t been invented yet. I wrote papers in the campus computer center. That was usually okay, except at the end of the semester when everyone else did, too.   Here, now, many students have cars, and from what I see, nearly...

I spent Wednesday and Thursday of this week at the Middle States conference in DC.  In the course of two days, I had several “you are THIS old” moments. Needing to use the flashlight on my phone to read a menu Being greeted by the daughter of someone I used to work with Sharing memories of Gary Hart’s presidential campaigns It sneaks up on you.   -- The conference itself was more useful than I remember previous years’ being.  It’s the only major higher ed conference I attend regularly that isn’t devoted specifically to community colleges, so there aren’t as many familiar faces at this one.  And some issues sound different across sectors. (“That’s worth spending some endowment money.” “&*(%$&#^”) Still, as with the dog that didn’t bark, I was struck by some of the things I didn’t hear.  For all of the talk of student success, for instance, I didn’t hear a single mention from the stage of achievement gaps.  Admittedly, I only attended one panel at...

On the train to DC for the Middle States conference, I caught up on a few podcasts.  (My inner ear can’t tell the difference between a car and a train, so reading was out of the question.)  One of them, Planet Money, discussed a few “laws” of corporate behavior that started out as joking asides, but which came to be recognized over time as accidental truths.  Parkinson’s law, for instance, states that work expands to fill available time. That was apparently a wry aside in a paper, meant as a throwaway line, but it turned out to be largely true.  The Peter Principle -- everybody rises to their level of incompetence -- was much the same. Both were born in sarcasm.  Sarcasm allowed the floating of forbidden truths that could be tested and accepted only after they were put forward in a non-threatening way.   Most of us have had the experience a few times of hearing a sarcastic or wry throwaway line and being stopped cold by the abrupt recognition of truth. ...

This one is specifically for my counterparts at semester-based colleges everywhere.  It’s based on hard-won experiential knowledge, and I share it in the spirit of prevention. Be gentle with faculty between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  It’s a brutal time of year. They’re in “grading jail,” a dispiritingly accurate term for the deluge of grading and grade-related emergencies that comes at the end of the semester.  Worse, in the fall, grading jail coincides with the runup to the holidays. Stress plus stress equals, well, more stress. This is the time of year when even the most patient folks can get a little harried.  Students are stressed and pushing for ninth-inning rallies; faculty have more grading than at any other time of year; and the holidays are, well, the holidays.   A little kindness can go a long way, especially now.  

Yes, a syllabus is a contract.  John Warner posted a thoughtful piece yesterday in which he tried to escape the language of contract, preferring to think of his syllabus as “some mix of plan, promise, and manifesto.”  He pointed out that students don’t really get to negotiate syllabi, and that some classes are required, so the language of voluntary agreement seems strained. Worse, legalisms can get in the way of recognizing the particularity of students. To which the admin in me says, that’s all well and good, but it’s also a contract. If you’ve ever had to give a deposition, you’ll know what I mean.   If a professor’s grading practices or classroom practices are challenged by outside agencies -- whether private attorneys or state divisions of civil rights enforcement -- what matters is whether the professor stuck to the policies denoted in the syllabus.  Significant deviations from the syllabus, especially bespoke ones for particular students, raise signal flares ...

My Dad taught at SUNY Brockport, a small public liberal arts college in Western New York. As a kid, I saw some of the faculty from time to time, whether sneaking downstairs at parties my parents hosted or accompanying Dad to work (or to Wegmans).  I was much too young to have any idea of what they were like as scholars or teachers, but I got a pretty decent view of how some of them were as people. My favorites were always the ones with sly smiles and wry humor.  They were the ones who made you feel smarter just by being around them.  They didn’t try to impress, because they didn’t have to; they knew what they knew, and they mostly enjoyed watching people and cracking gentle, left-handed jokes.  You could learn a lot about someone by the way they treated a child. Rich Sorrell, a longtime history professor at Brookdale, was in that mold.  I liked him from the first time I met him, because he had that same blend of ironic and courtly that I recognized from childho...

All of a sudden, she’s singing. Last month, The Girl joined a birthday party trip into New York City to see Dear Evan Hansen.  The party consisted of about a dozen ninth graders, so the parents rented a second minivan to drive them all in.   The Dad told me a week or so later that at one point en route, TG had her headphones on and was singing along to something on her phone, and that he was struck by her voice.  He described it as beautiful, and asked how long she had been singing. I had no idea what to say; other than a few half-hearted group renditions of “Happy Birthday,” I don’t think I’ve ever heard her sing.  I expressed some surprise, and thanked him, and the conversation moved on. I didn’t really think about it for a couple of weeks. A few days ago, I mentioned it in passing to The Wife, who insisted that I tell TG, so I did.  Now, all of a sudden, she’s singing while she practices piano, and she’s joining the choir at school.  She’s even practi...