The Salt-Box

This is a first for me: A blog post reconstructed from text messages, but here goes:

A friend of mine at another university–for strict anonymity’s sake we’ll call him “Brian”–wrote this afternoon to ask whether I had any practical advice on developing rubrics for evaluating student writing. You can see an example of a rubric I use here; here’s the assignment it’s for).

Anyway, here are the things I told “Brian”:

• Make the math, if there’s math (for example, if points are assigned, which convert to a grade), easy to do in a hurry!
• Make sure that the rubric is aligned to the learning outcomes for the assignment.  Your rubric doesn’t have to capture everything–just what you’re working on in this paper.
• Make sure the rubric produces results you can live with.  Try it out on some papers before you commit to using it with students.  (Maybe it produces scores that seem too low/high, or doesn’t differentiate well between average and strong papers.)
• Build credibility for the rubric by norming with students.  Give them a real (anonymized!) paper, a copy of the rubric, and grade it collectively in class.  Have them discuss their grading process, and explain your own.
• Whenever possible, give the students the rubric in advance.  It gives organized students the opportunity to prioritize their revisions in the most productive way.

That’s my list!  But I’m really not a rubric expert, just some guy who’s been using them increasingly for a year or so.  What are your suggestions for designing a good rubric?

Last week I was in Porto for WikiSym 2008. It was both fun and informative, in ways some followup posts will explore. Perhaps the most interesting and invigorating part was the opportunity to be at a conference that was both related to my daily work and yet distant from my research expertise. WikiSym’s a conference for wiki developers, researchers (several sociologist/communication types studying Wikipedia), and practitioners. Aside from George Landow, who gave a keynote, I think I was the only literature professor.

On the one hand, this was a bit awkward, especially at moments of idle chit-chat.

But on the other hand, there were some real advantages:

• It was fun to see different possibilities for conferences. Any conference with a twitter printer and a flickr feed is worth attending. OpenSpace was fascinating. And, of course, the conference about wikis had a wiki that people could edit with reports and notes and such throughout the conference. Those technologies and social practices made the conference productive in real-time, as it were, rather than simply providing inspiration or food for thought (though it offered those, too).
• An advantage of a conference like WikiSym, especially if you’re a relative outsider, is that there’s surprisingly little bullshit posturing. People were friendly and open, without much worrying about what kind of school you’re from, or whether you’re going to be able to help their career. (Some of that may be a characteristic of “people who are interested in wikis,” but it seems related to the idea that, in a mixed group, reputation matters less.)
• It was also fun to be able listen without having to sound smart. It’s always surprising to discover the extent to which anxiety over status or expertise clogs one’s thinking.

Of course, just going to a random conference outside your area would probably be meaningless or frustrating.  For the exercise to be useful, it needs to be something you’re genuinely interested in, and preferably have at least some experience with. Beyond that, however, I’d say that such a conference can be powerful.

Matt Sedensky has an interesting article out today on the problem of institutionalizing elderly Holocaust survivors. Here’s the lead:

Nearly every night, Martin Hornung’s nightmare unfolds to the same haunting strains. Of Auschwitz. Of screaming voices. Of scenes he would rather not relive in the light of day.

“I’m almost afraid to go to sleep,” the 86-year-old retired computer engineer said.

The horrors that revisit Hornung in the dark are common among Holocaust survivors and are a reason why he refuses to enter a nursing home despite his myriad health problems.

Jewish organizations worldwide are working to keep survivors out of such facilities, where the surroundings and routines — strangers in uniforms, desolate shower rooms, medical procedures — can worsen flashbacks.

Sedensky doesn’t cite it, but there’s an interesting documentary by Shosh Shlam, called Last Journey into Silence (see the trailer here), which is about a group of survivors who, after the war, were locked away in mental institutions as psychotic. About ten years ago, they were moved to a hospice called Shaar Menashe, and were re-diagnosed with Holocaust-related PTSD, sometimes with interesting effects. (Though, of course, these patients now also suffer from 30-odd years of institutionalization–the idea of a “cure” is pretty remote.) The film recovers their story, and also reflects on the complex relationships between survivors and their children.

A. and another grad school colleague interviewed Shlam about the movie some years ago–it’s available here as a .pdf.

It’s odd that these three came out within a week of each other, as they were conducted several months apart, but I do have three new interviews up over the past 10 days or so:

• In Clarkesworld Magazine, an interview with Richard K. Morgan (author of Altered Carbon, the recipient this year of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Black Man [Thirteen])
•  In Bookslut, an interview with Kate Summerscale (author of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, recipient this year of the BBC4 Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction)
• In PopMatters, an interview with Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (editors of Steampunk, and too many other things to mention)

Next month has some other exciting things coming, which I can’t mention yet, but it’s probably safe to say that this particular cluster may be the coolest I get for quite some time . . . !!

The school board seems to have met to discuss the issue of “Kaizen Thursdays,” after a storm of criticism erupted from many parents who felt that they hadn’t been consulted, or even informed. And I think that Rick Guiness, the reporter from the Herald who covered it, read my post, though he doesn’t name the blog specifically:

In a blog posted on the internet, one parent complained of poor communication between the district and parents over the shortened day.

According to the posting by the parent of one 5-year-old received, a letter from the superintendent explained that Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life and that “We know this places a burden on you and that it reduces instructional time for your children.”

Pretty sure that’s me. (The only 2 google results for the quoted sentence are my post and the Herald’s article.) Of course, Guiness only quotes me quoting the letter, but that’s ok.

Anyway, the latest news is that the school board has approved the idea of shortened Thursdays . . . because of budget cuts. Here’s Guiness:

Citing budget cuts, the Board of Education announced Monday that as of Sept. 18, the district will have shortened days on Thursdays.

If it’s true that budget cuts are the reason, then parents are being sold a bill of goods. At the public meeting, the superintendent made very clear that the reason to adopt shortened Thursdays was quality control: it would promote common planning among teachers, more individualized instruction, and a variety of other worthy goals. (All of which I support.) But if the reason to go to shortened Thursdays is money . . . that’s not good. Because assessment and common planning are *expensive* to do well. You can’t just wing it when you’ve carved out a spare hour or two. If money is so tight right now, then this is the wrong year to implement shortened Thursdays.

Also, I do think that there were interesting concerns raised in the meeting which need to be explored further. I heard several parents say that there were no options for once-a-week early afternoon daycare for the youngest children. Some public statement about where they might go would be useful.

Pragmatically, this decision doesn’t affect my family at all: The boy’s in half-day kindergarten*, and so the “half-day” concept doesn’t apply.

In other news, a school board member resigned in protest . . . though not over this.

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*Apparently this week the kindergarten students had the concept of “lockdown drill” explained to them–during their designated library time. What a depressing concept–and one born almost entirely out of media, parental, and bureaucratic/lawyerly hysteria. Plus, the boy has a job!

1. At meetings of each, there can frequently be more passionate discussion of the by-laws governing the election than the candidates for election or actual issues.

2. At both, it’s hard to find people willing to hold office.

Thus, 3.  The happiest parliamentary maneuver of all, which I am forever grateful to a past senate president for showing to us, and which came into play at a league meeting tonight: Once the # of candidates = the # of vacant seats, “I move that we adopt the ballot as a slate.”  Followed immediately by adjournment!

A few days ago I posted a low-tech way to notice more details in an English classroom; here’s a more web-friendly way.

Assuming you have an electronic version of your text–generally (though not always) a safe assumption for my Victorian lit classes; less frequently true when I teach cyberpunk–then word clouds are your friend.  I’m partial to TagCrowd, but you can’t swing a cat without hitting a new word cloud tool these days.

What’s nice about a tool like TagCrowd is that it lets you test your assumptions about what a work is about against the words being used.  To a certain extent, if your thesis doesn’t line up with the language of the text, then you either need a new thesis, or a clever rhetorical strategy for explaining away the absence of such evidence.

I frequently use TagCrowd in teaching as a way to complicate things when a class is hell-bent on a particular reading.  My favorite example of this is Mary Shelley’s story, “The Parvenue.”  After a trip to the dictionary to look up “parvenue,” students will often race to assume that it’s primarily a story about the class conflict between a husband and wife.  And certainly that’s an important part of the story.

When you have TagCrowd work its magic on the story, though, you quickly see one word jump out: mother.  From there one might remember Mary Shelley’s other works that have fraught accounts of maternity, or remember the tragedy of Shelley’s own biography.  One might even remember that, from time to time, spouses project onto their partners arguments that they really should be having with one’s parents.  Maybe none of those things is relevant in this story–but the site immediately provides a clue for going back and looking at the story again.

(Really unready for class tomorrow!)

. . . both for us and for the 5-yr-old. We’re unready for the start of classes on campus, but the boy’s pretty excited about the start of kindergarten tomorrow. In part, this is the unfortunate effect of a name change: His school now calls itself the Holmes Elementary School for Science and Technology, and so the poor kid thinks that they’re going to be starting off in the lab building robots and mixing chemicals.

We had out-of-town guests over the weekend, and upon their departure discovered a voice mail from the school that said, “Great news! A spot has opened up in All-Day Kindergarten, and [the boy] is at the top of the waiting list. I’d like to talk to you about it, but, you know what? I can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t prefer All-Day Kindergarten to Half-Day, so I’ll just switch him. His new teacher is . . . his new classroom is . . . .”

I can’t think of a single reason, other than a desire to have free daycare (which I recognize is nontrivial), why someone would prefer to send a 5-year-old to school all day. As I understand it, there’s no additional content to the all-day classes: after the half-day kids are gone, there’s basically lunch, nap, recess, plus dealing with all the discipline issues that arise from asking 5-yr-olds to concentrate all day. So we were pretty mad.

But, on a whim, I called the school today, on the premise that, since we’re always on campus right before the start of school, maybe someone would be there . . . And a school official picked up the phone! Because so many parents have been angrily demanding that their child get free daycare All-Day Kindergarten, our refusal opened up a spot for one of them. Problem solved!

I was feeling good about things again, and was getting ready to hang up the phone, when I made a little joke about the Dattco Bus Company’s magic, time-traveling buses.   We then had the following exchange:

School Official: What time’s he supposed to get home?

Me: 11.39.

S. O.: Oh, that’s ok–school gets out at 11.35.

Me: Um, the letter that went to parents says 11.45. I have it here in my hand.

S. O.: I need to double-check again — I’m actually not sure what time school gets out.  We’ve changed it a few times.

On the one hand, I appreciate candor, and I myself frequently get confused about classes that start or end at weird times.  (My evening classes often begin at 6.50, which I’ve never quite adapted to.) At the same time, it is . . . odd to try to feel sanguine about dropping off the boy at a place where, the day before, they’re still not sure what time things end.

Fingers crossed!

(If you’re want something to read besides this mini-drama around kindergarten and over-obsessive helicopter-parents-in-training, try this interview I did with Richard K. Morgan.  I’ll be posting “deleted scenes” from the interview later in the month.)

Yesterday we received a letter from the boy’s elementary school. (Dated 8/18, but received 8/30.) The school is supposed to be a good one, but the letter’s still got gaffes a-plenty.

We’ll pass over the fact that they misspell the boy’s name. There are, after all, FIVE whole letters to keep track of, and it’s easy to see how one could get confused. And it’s not like young children are proud of their name, or recognize it straightaway or anything. (Credit where credit’s due: The teacher’s letter to us, which arrived earlier in the week, correctly spelled his name *both* times. A gold star for her!)

What’s more indicative of a system in which the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing is the included bus schedule*.

In this letter, we’re told several things:

1. “If your child will be riding a bus this year, he/she will receive a post card from Dattco Bus Company letting you know where and when your child will be picked up and dropped off. . . . If you haven’t heard from Dattco by Wednesday afternoon, August 27, 2008, please call the Pupil Accounting Office.” Again, the letter was received on Saturday, Aug. 30. There are no longer any business days before school.
2. However!! Included with the letter is a bus schedule! With the boy’s name and our address! Including the estimated time of drop-off: “11:39 AM.” Remember that time.
3. Half-day Kindergarten ends at 11.45 AM. Apparently the Dattco Bus Company uses advanced, time-traveling buses, because he’ll arrive at our home six minutes before the end of school. Just think what we can do with the time saved every day!

*Sigh.* Apparently some friends have formed a pool to speculate about how long we’ll keep the kid in New Britain public schools.

Update: Not directly related, but certainly germane to the difficulties of the district:

The report found that nearly 26 percent of New Britain children under the age of 18 were living in families with income below the Federal Poverty Level. The disparity of median income of local families compared with the state median also was highlighted in the report.

Overall, the income of Connecticut residents rose in the last five years to a high of $65,967, while local residents saw their median income drop to $39,409 from $40,270 in 2006.

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*He won’t be on the bus for several reasons: we live super-close to the school, the buses include kids from the whole elementary school–so, kindergarten students are riding with 5th graders, plus there’s the fact that we’re obsessive. But every kid is theoretically scheduled for busing to this school, because there aren’t sidewalks in a lot of the surrounding neighborhood.

Wired calls Leland Chee “the Star Wars continuity cop,”  the man responsible for  “keep[ing] meticulous track of not just the six live-action movies but also cartoons, TV specials, scores of videogames and reference books, and hundreds of novels and comics.”

To occupy our 5-yr-old while we were getting ready for a visit from Wisconsin relatives, A bought him a DK Readers book about the new Star Wars: Clone Wars animated movie.  The book’s called Watch Out for Jabba the Hutt.

It turns out that there’s an error of fact in the book: It claims that Jabba the Hutt is the uncle of (the flamboyant, offensive) Ziro the Hutt.  (See the photographic proof here.)  As people who have seen the movie will know, however, this is backwards: Ziro’s the uncle.  (Wookiepedia has it here.)

All of this is just to say that, today, 29 August 2008, my 5-yr-old spotted his first nitpicky, continuity-type error in a Star Wars-universe related item.  All by himself.  To be honest, I’m not quite sure whether to wipe away a tear of pride or turn ourselves in to Child Services.