The Salt-Box

Everyone in graduate school gets drilled into their head that they should be good to the department secretaries.  Department secretaries can accomplish all sorts of excellent things–they can expedite your travel paperwork, teach you the funky new copier, make sure your stipend money doesn’t stop when your funding department changes . . . they’ve got their hands on lots of levers.  They’re great.  And, in case you ever get a teaching job, it’s good practice, since department secretaries can help you with all manner of things–like getting you a good room to teach in, expediting your travel paperwork, &c.  Quite often, especially in your first couple of years, aside from filling in personnel forms in your first week, the department secretary may well be the only university staff member you deal with on a regular basis.

One of the things I have tried to be mindful of over the past couple of years is university staff outside of departments.  They used to terrify me, and they still scare me a bit.  They promulgate rules designed to cover contingencies I can’t imagine, and they deal with faculty, students, and state auditors–three audiences with very different interests.  Plus, they often like to use the phone to accomplish work-related tasks, and I hate the phone.  (My current voice mail quite literally begs people to hang up the phone and send me an e-mail.)

But as I’ve worked on a couple of committees that are populated by faculty and staff, and as I’ve worked on events that have occasionally required massive contributions and favors from administrators and staff, I have generally come to think that it’s important to know these people and to understand their jobs.  And not just because you may one day need a favor.

What’s interesting–aside from the normal interest one might take in people and their jobs–about the administrative side of the house is that it is, in many ways, an embodied history of the university and its decisions.  Policy X is housed in this department rather than that one because of historical contingency Z.  Policy exception Y, touted as exceptional customer service by one department, ends up interfering with another’s mission-critical task.  Rule 42, which seems intuitively stupid to any right-thinking faculty member, is *also* hated by the staff, but they have to do it anyway.  Rule 43 emerged because faculty members a, b, c, d, e, and f over many years refused to address circumstance foo.  And so forth.

I was at a meeting of such a committee a couple of weeks ago, and one of the participants said that the most amusing thing about the meeting was watching my face as I processed all the sausage-making that goes into making certain kinds of decisions, given the resource constraints that we operate under.  That experience is incredibly useful.

Don’t take me the wrong way: I don’t know much about how things work, and I have precisely no power on my campus.  I know that there is *always* going to be conflict between faculty who tend to improvise and a state-regulated bureaucracy that needs to have paper trails.  And I lean *way* too much on a handful of people who–out of kindness and out of a shared desire to make awesome things for students–are able to fix things when I just start beating my head against the desk.  And I don’t want you to get the idea that if you just walk across campus in someone else’s sensible shoes that all of your campus’s problems will vanish.  That can’t happen, especially in times of budgetary crisis and recission.

But I think that in addition to working on committees with faculty (which I’ve written about before), it’s worthwhile to find ways to connect with staff.  Maybe that’s through clubs.  Maybe it’s through the union, if you’re on a unionized campus.  (Or, if you’re on a campus with multiple unions, through inter-union collaboration.) Maybe it’s through big, honking committees. Learning about how your university works, not from gossip (which privileges scandal and vitriol), and not through the one time you need a particular office to process something, is a remarkable experience.  Because the staff serve the faculty and students as a whole, rather than just a department, they are the living memory of the institution.

I’m slow with the grading.  Some of it is garden-variety procrastination; some of it is bad planning (assignments for different classes coming in at the same time); some of it is overcommitments elsewhere; some of it is figuring out the assignment design before figuring out how the grading will work.  But a big part of it is overcommenting.  On most papers, I give three different kinds of feedback: a rubric score, interlineal comments (now delivered, in most cases, via track changes), and a terminal comment.

On the one hand, intellectually I know perfectly well that this isn’t necessarily helpful.  On the other hand, when I was a student I felt very strongly that comments = professorial love and engagement, so it’s hard for me to let that go.  Beyond that, the biggest problem with a lot of student writing is that it seems to have been produced with no thought of a reader.  It’s as if churning out material of a certain length is good enough, and so the plethora of comments is supposed to say, “Oi! Live reader here!)”

The track changes feature in Word actually makes matters worse in one way: If you change a formatting aspect of the paper (say, the margins), then it produces a comment about that for every single paragraph in a paper, so it looks like you’ve commented a lot.  But then it looks like all you’ve done is look at formatting, so I always make extra comments to convey that I read the paper carefully.

I also don’t think of comments as negative; often, I’ll use comments simply to suggest alternate lines of thought or stylistic possibilities.  (How else are the students going to get them?)

This really isn’t sustainable, however.

The other day, I re-discovered this word: satisfice, or to be happy with a good-enough solution, rather than one that is maximally optimal.  It reminded me that my current grading practice is a mostly failing attempt at maximizing the amount of possible feedback on any given assignment, which leads to two different counterproductive effects: it takes too long for me to grade, and students may well feel overwhelmed.  (Although very good students usually point to this overcommenting as the thing they like best about my teaching.)

What I need to do, then, is to develop a satisficing strategy: knowing where I’ve said enough to suggest opportunities for revision (and, to be candid, to justify the grade), but in such a way that it’s acceptably fast, light, and flexible.  Students who want more comments can always come in and talk to me anyway, right?

How do you know when enough’s enough?

(There’s always Ross’s solution . . . .)