The Hour Hand
Stop calling these students mentally ill
Anxiety and depression need to be reclassified
Photo by Sander van der Wel on Flickr
Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about efforts to improve the services available to students related to their psychological well-being on campuses. University presidents met for a workshop recently, and Queen’s University welcomed a new $1-million chair to study stigma.
Now, I am no mental health professional but I do know a few things about universities and have some experience with anxiety and depression.
If it were up to me, those trying to improve things on Canadian campuses would keep one crucial principle in mind: be careful how you talk about it.
First, let’s call depression and anxiety something other than “mental illness.”
The three secret qualities of top students
Prof. Pettigrew tells what his A+ students have in common
Aristotle, a great scholar. By Tilemahos_E on Flickr.
A blogger at Inside Higher Ed has posed a fascinating question: what is an ideal student?
Strictly speaking, there could not possibly be an ideal student any more than there could be perfect person. But the question is worth thinking about if you care about education.
I wouldn’t want to repeat the answers already on offer, so let me move the question out of the abstract just a bit and ask a similar question: what have my very best students had in common?
To answer this question, I turned to a list I keep affixed to my filing cabinet in my office under a magnet that says “ARS LONGA, VITA BREVIS.” It shows all the students who have earned grades of A+ in my courses. Readers of this blog may surmise from my curmudgeonly persona that the list is not huge. In fact, there are sixteen names.
From that list I selected the five who seemed most memorable for their abilities and achievements. What did they have in common? Many things, of course, some of which were also suggested in the IHE piece: curiosity, open-mindedness, willingness to be engaged. Intelligence, of course, and a capacity for hard work, obviously. But three other qualities stand out, too:
- 1. Ambition. By this, I don’t mean a desire to be famous or make a lot of money, but rather a willingness to try to do something great in whatever one does. For the best students, an assignment is not merely a requirement to be met, but an opportunity to test and strengthen themselves.
2. Humility. Seemingly the opposite of ambition, humility, in the best students, sits in elegant balance with it. The best students have the confidence to push themselves to be the best they can, but they are humble enough to know that there is always more to learn. Life is short, and learning the art takes a long time.
3. Creativity. Observers sometimes worry that formal education stifles creativity, and, to be sure, academia does come with certain rules and restrictions. Still, like a great musician or painter, a great student figures out that some rules are actually empowering, and that some can be stretched or broken when the occasion demands.
Of course, these students don’t come along every day. My little A+ list shows I’m lucky if they come along every year, and nobody would suggest you have to be a top student to be a good student. But all students should ask themselves whether they could demonstrate more of these qualities. I know I could have used more of number 2 when I was a student.
But then, we didn’t have blogs in those days, and I probably wouldn’t have listened, anyway.
Todd Pettigrew is Associate Professor English at Cape Breton University.
Pettigrew: the military shouldn’t train on campus
The argument against a Canadian Officers Training Corps
Photo by The United States Army
Last week, another prominent Canadian restated the proposal that Canada should bring back The Canadian Officers Training Corps, a campus-based program that was discontinued in 1968, but championed in a recent film by Robert Roy.
Lee Windsor, Deputy Director of the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick, supports a program whereby undergraduates register as cadets and get military training on campus while pursuing their studies, after which they may or may not choose to sign up in the reserves or the regular forces.
The new proposal has been widely reported, but not widely endorsed. We should keep it that way.
Continue reading Pettigrew: the military shouldn’t train on campus
The Cougars? The Redmen? Oh, how offensive!
The naming of sports teams is now fraught with peril
The Human Beings Mascot from Community on Citytv
One of the best running gags in the TV show Community is that Greendale College’s teams are called “The Human Beings”—an absurdly bland moniker designed to insulate the school from complaints and controversy—the sort of complaints levied periodically against the Cleveland Indians or the Washington Redskins.
The fictional school’s feckless Dean might have a point, though, because naming sports teams, at schools especially, is now fraught with peril.
This danger was underscored last week when Utah’s Corner Canyon High School had to do away with its team name “Cougars.” The term, which, in some circles has come to mean an older woman sexually interested in younger men, was the subject of complaints. Canyon teams will now be “The Chargers.”
Continue reading The Cougars? The Redmen? Oh, how offensive!
Why traditional lectures will thrive
A defense against those who say lectures should be “social”
Photo by poptech on Flickr
There are few long-standing traditions that have as rough a reputation these days as the lecture.
Many commentators on higher education tend to see them as boring, old-fashioned and unsuited to the modern world and the modern student.
Thus American psychology professor Pamela Rutledge in this recent blog entry takes the lecture as typical of the hidebound university because it is “unidirectional and linear,” not social and students don’t get to decide when it’s over.
But despite her arguments, I feel confident that traditional lectures serve a unique purpose. I believe they will serve us well into the future.
How profs talk about you behind your back
Prof. Pettigrew explains what’s in the reference letter
Sealed letter by zappowbang on Flickr
In Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels, Simon Darcourt takes up the task of writing letters of reference for his students when he happens to be in a bad mood. Worse, his students have irked him by making requests at the last minute and expecting him to pay for postage. So, in a fit of pique, he savages them: “treacherous, never turn your back on him” he says of one; he describes the mind of another as “flat as Holland—the salt marshes, not the tulip fields.”
When I was a student I was always respectful when asking for letters, lest my profs be offended and take out their anger on me in the same way. Now, as a professor who has written dozens upon dozens of reference letters for scholarships, grad programs—once to help a student get an apartment—I can see how nerve-wracking the process must be for those doing the asking.
Canada’s Top Five university comics
Prof. Pettigrew ranks our campus cartoonists
#2. Caveman Agent by Evan Eshelman
One fond memory of my undergraduate days is of reading the comics in the student newspaper. They lacked the artistry of professional comics in the big dailies but they had a certain joie de vivre that came with, presumably, not getting paid very much (if anything at all).
Since then I have followed university comics mainly when they get involved in controversies, as when the UPEI student newspaper was confiscated by university officials after it published the notorious Danish Mohammed cartoons, or when a community college ran a comic in which Barack Obama looked a bit like a monkey, or when the Saskatchewan student paper ran a comic, reportedly by mistake, showing Jesus in, shall we say, a sexually compromising position.
But browsing student news sites the other day, I became curious as to the state of university comics, so I went looking and found that the tradition was alive and well, and even better than I remember. In fact, I was so impressed that I am inspired to provide my entirely subjective, online-only list of the top five university comics in Canada. Here are my picks.
5. The Daily Snooze, by Jacob Samuel, Simon Fraser
Samuel provides us with quite charming one-off panel cartoons, of the sort one finds in The New Yorker—and provides fewer head scratchers than that redoubtable mag.
4. Ski Ninjas, by Kyle Lees, Lakehead
Ski Ninjas feels like it could have been called Little Orphan Anime. I admire the strong lines and the simple off-beat humour, as in this strip where the joke is essentially that “booze” is a funny word. Which it is.
3. Too Fancy Gents, by Mike Hayes and Amani Elrofaie*, Western
Too Fancy Gents gives us the dialogue of two Oscar Wilde-esque fellows called Monocle and Bowler (perversely, Monocle wears a bowler, and Bowler wears a monocle). Typically our gents (who really are too fancy) sound awfully posh but quickly veer off into accounts of their sexual escapades or drug-fuelled misadventures.
2. Caveman Agent, by Evan Eshelman, York
I must admit, I don’t think I always understand Eshelman’s Caveman Agent (which feels a bit like Ziggy if Gary Larson had drawn it, with a dash of Krazy Kat for flavour), but the drawing is fantastic and the artist manages to catch his main character (is Cavemen his name?) in oddly human moments, as in this panel where he tries to keep his dinosaur from being traumatized.
This one makes me slightly regret my one-winner-per-university rule, though, since York provides several other worthy candidates, including Adventuresome by Keith Maclean, and the very clever Sent from the Moon, by Alison Wight. Let’s call those very honourable mentions.
1. Glamour Pig, by Katherine Johnson, Dalhousie
Glamour Pig is a largely text-based comic with admittedly sketchy drawing, but has just the sort of skewed viewpoint that gives us a new perspective on life (as in one comic where Johnson lists some of the downsides of eye glasses: “Impossibility of repair should damage occur in post-apocalyptic future.”). This is the kind of comic that makes you feel like you have a cool new friend.
If I have missed any worthy candidates, please feel free to link to them below. Meantime, campus cartoon artists: don’t stop now!
*We initially failed to give credit to Amani Elrofaiem, the illustrator behind Too Fancy Gents. We regret the error. Additionally we initially listed Ski Ninjas as Sky Ninjas. This post was updated Jan. 14, 2011.
A notable New Year’s resolution
Prof. Pettigrew shares his secrets for superior note-taking
Photo by Tulane Publications on Flickr
Perhaps it’s been a gradual shift, but this year I have noticed that students really aren’t taking notes like they used to. It’s especially noticeable among my first-year students, a great many of whom don’t seem to take notes at all, or who, I notice, write down things there is no need to write down and put their pens down at crucial times.
The benefits of taking good notes in class are many and, for the most part, obvious. Taking notes forces you to pay closer attention and helps keep you focussed when you might otherwise drift off. Notes force you to actually process what you’re hearing rather than simply let the lecture wash over you. And finally, of course, notes allow you to review the whole term’s material and show a mastery of all that material come exam time.
The case against Wikipedia in the classroom
Students should learn to build arguments, not write entries
Image by nojhan on Flickr
All professors have to deal with what Noah Geisel has recently termed The Wikipedia Dilemma. With the online encyclopedia now the largest in the world, freely available, and ubiquitous on the web, the problem is evident. Should a prof forbid students from using Wikipedia or embrace it as a modern research tool without equal?
The case for Wikipedia is obvious: it’s easy to access, simple to use, and covers a far wider range of material than any other reference work. And though it may occassionally be subject to error, as all reference works are, its eminent editability keeps it relatively accurate and incredibly up to date. I once read an article about quicksand, and curious to know more about it, checked Wikipedia, only to find the article I had just read, an article that had been published that very day, cited among the sources.
Continue reading The case against Wikipedia in the classroom
In defense of the good old-fashioned exam
Take-home exams just aren’t the same
Photo by Patrik Axelsson on Flickr
I love almost everything about being a professor. Teaching, research—I even look forward to department meetings.
But I hate grading exams. And just as I become a flat-tax advocate every April when I’m trying to locate receipts and hoping I don’t owe the government money, every December I harbor fantasies of getting rid of exams altogether.
Many of my colleagues in the arts are way ahead of me on this, either giving no exams at all, or giving students an extra, essay-like assignment commonly called a “take-home” exam. But since you take it home and have an extended time to do it, it’s not really an exam in the traditional sense.
Bad Santa: A Musical Essay
Who’s your Christmas Daddy?
For an English professor, the holiday season’s many pleasures—from raucous parties to quiet nights beside the fire—are always overlaid with the less pleasurable task of grading exams. My exams usually feature “sight passages”: short poems (or other texts) for the students to analyze.
I don’t know if it’s the sight passages, or just the fact that we English profs have a hard time turning off our critical faculties at the best of times, but during this time of year I always find myself writing little essays in my head about the Christmas songs I hear.
Last year, as readers of this space may recall, I found myself deeply troubled by the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” This year, it’s that cutest of holiday classics: “I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”
You probably know the song by heart, but, if you don’t, here are the lyrics, and here’s a recording. And in the spirit of fair play, here is my sight essay on that little song.
The song is very short and the speaker is clearly a child young enough to still believe in Santa, so the lyrics don’t allow us to determine what precisely is being described. And that’s what’s so interesting, yet frustrating about the song. What exactly does our young speaker witness?
There are at least three possibilities, beginning with the innocuous but quickly spilling over into the deeply troubling.
1. It’s Daddy. Most casual listeners probably assume that what the child sees is actually her father, dressed as Santa and enjoying a cup of spiced snog with Mommy while the little one is supposed to be dreaming of sugar plums. Our little insomniac however, in her innocence, neither realizes that it’s Daddy nor realizes that if it weren’t, Daddy might not have found it very funny.
But even if we accept this reading, a question remains. Why is Daddy dressed as Santa Claus? Perhaps because he’s been playing Santa for the family or for some other event, but there’s nothing in the song to suggest that he has. So we must be open to the more interesting possibility that Daddy has dressed as Santa for Mommy’s sake. Mommy has been dancing and prancing in her negligee for Père Noël, and that the child has, rather awkwardly, walked in on a bit of Yuletide foreplay.
2. It’s some other guy. Since the child does not recognize “Santa” we can’t say for certain that the man Mommy is kissing is Daddy at all. It might be someone else dressed as Santa (Why? See above). In this case, we can be fairly sure that Daddy would definitely NOT be laughing were he to walk in on his wife and her lover. Perhaps he would be magnanimous considering that they were under the mistletoe, but I doubt it.
3. It really is Santa. This is the most disturbing possibility of all, that Mommy is having an affair with Kris Kringle, perhaps on an annual basis. It’s disturbing because, when you think about it, the whole idea of Santa Claus is pretty creepy. This old man sneaks into your house in the middle of the night while everyone is sleeping? If anyone really did that, you’d call the cops.
Plus, isn’t Santa a married man? No wonder that old elf is so jolly.
Now, why do I have to go and ruin a perfectly nice little song? Don’t blame me: I didn’t write it. If songwriter Tommie Connor wanted it to be clear, he should have written another verse. I wish he had. As it is, I have to listen to the damn thing every year and wonder…
Todd Pettigrew is Associate Professor English at Cape Breton University.
Why we cite
Are profs psychotic about citation styles?
Photo courtesy of Adriane Dizon on Flickr
A few years ago, I told a colleague how tough it was to teach students to cite sources correctly. He chuckled and replied that he didn’t really worry about such details. After all, he said, unless students are going to graduate school, what difference could it make if they knew the difference between MLA and Chicago citation styles?
A more extreme version of this view—that insisting on correct use of professional citation styles amounts to a psychosis—is taken up by Kurt Schick in The Chronicle of Higher Education. For Schick, citation styles are “alien and absurd” to today’s students and trying to teach those styles to those students is “a colossal waste.” Sure, he says, teach students to cite, but stop worrying about the technical details—leave students more time to focus on what really matters.
Schick’s analysis is razor sharp, but I’m unconvinced. For one thing, he assumes that if students have to spend less time on one thing (citing), they will spend more on others (careful reading and analysis). That’s never been my experience. Where I come from, if you make an assignment easier, students just spend less time on it.
There are several other good reasons to teach students to cite exactly and correctly. For one, many students do go to grad school, and you never can tell exactly who it will be. You can’t create one set of standards for those who really want to learn all aspects of the discipline and another set for those who don’t. Rather than hold everyone to the lower standard, why not hold them to the higher one?
Schick maintains that we can divorce the form of the citation style from the function. That we can teach why we cite without teaching exactly how. But by the time you teach someone how to cite even sort-of well, you might as well teach them how to cite perfectly correctly. After all, any reasonable attempt at citing an edition of Shakespeare, for example, would have to include the author’s name, the editors of the edition, who published it and when. Anything less than that and your entry wouldn’t be very useful, even if you weren’t worrying about the details. But do those things and you’ve done most of what MLA and Chicago want anyway.
Most importantly, the discipline that comes with citing correctly fosters an attention to intellectual detail that will serve students well whatever they do. They may not be required to know the details of MLA style in their jobs, but then, they probably won’t write formal essays in their jobs either, but we teach them to do it because it helps make them methodical, careful thinkers. And part of that means, when faced with a writing task (legal brief, screenplay, whatever), learning the right way to do it, and then doing it that way.
As I often tell my students, faced with the choice between right and almost right, why not do it right?
Todd Pettigrew is Associate Professor English at Cape Breton University.
A nativity scene on campus?
A simple solution for the Christmas controversy blues
Photo by kevin dooley on Flickr
Last year around this time I was startled to notice a small nativity scene set up in our university cafeteria. I considered making a formal complaint to the effect that at a public university such overtly religious symbols should be avoided. But it was only a little one, and even my great and growing peevishness has its limits.
Still, it’s easy to see why Christmas poses such a problem for educational institutions. On one hand, it is a venerable annual tradition for millions, with a seemingly endless store of symbols and songs to draw upon. On the other hand, for many, it is among the holiest days of the year, and one still hears a phrase like “the true meaning of Christmas” where “true meaning” is meant to suggest the religious meaning.
And so it is no surprise that controversy and indignation has become one of our new favourite holiday traditions.
Time for this year’s edition of X-Ring Idol
A fine university deserves better than this: Pettigrew
Photo by GViciano on Flickr.
There’s a lot I like about St. Francis Xavier University. Its pleasant campus, the small town charm of Antigonish, its rich history. But the ridiculous obsession that the university and its alumni have with their university ring…
Yes, it’s December again, and that means it’s time for the annual X-ring ceremony at the storied Nova Scotia campus. If you don’t live in the Maritimes, it’s hard to imagine how crazy people are for this ring. The University has multiple web pages devoted to it, complete with close-up glamour shots that look like they were taken for a Mercedes-Benz advertisement. Graduates await the ceremony like kids awaiting Christmas, and like so many Gollums out of Tolkein, they count the days til they can get their hands on the precious, the precious.
Continue reading Time for this year’s edition of X-Ring Idol
In defense of courses with crazy titles
Like Harry Potter 101, Superhero Science, Basket Weaving…
Is Harry Potter a bird course? Photo illustration by Casey David on Flickr
Last week, both crusty old curmudgeons and left-wing crusaders received an early holiday gift from Baylor University in Texas: an outrageously named course: Homosexuality as Gateway Drug.
Unsurprisingly, the local TV news played clips of offended students and the blogosphere went wild.
Piling on courses with offensive or trivial names has long been a pastime for those with plenty of time on their hands and not much sense of nuance. But the joke is old—and it needs to stop.
Case in point: Baylor later changed the official title of the offending course to something more generic. Meanwhile, it came out that the “course” in question was not a regular offering, but an independent study being pursued by a single student.
Professors get some bizarre gifts
Pettrigrew’s guide to thanking professors appropriately
Venison photo by Collin Anderson on Flickr
The other day, in the hallway outside my door, something unusual happened: a student offered his history professor a large amount of venison. The student had recently taken up bow-hunting and had, apparently, become pretty good at it, because he had plenty of deer meat to give away.
The prof graciously turned it down.
That particular gift may have been odd, but it’s not at all uncommon for students to offer gifts. I have a mug adorned with Shakespearean insults on my desk to attest to that fact, and a hand-carved Malaysian pencil in my drawer as further evidence. Student gifts range from the tasteful and understated—I once received a lovely metal bookmark with my initials engraved on it—to the downright bizarre.
A colleague (the same one who turned down the venison) reports being given, among other things, a gavel, a Satan bobble-head, and the right to consider himself some kind of Viking prince. One instructor told me ruefully that all her students had ever given her were “headaches and angst.”
A look inside gamers’ clubs on campus
Why study when you can kill goblins?
Pathfinder capture by Olivia Hotshot on Flickr
A few months ago, I was having dinner with a group of colleagues from a hiring committee, including the student representative. This student happened to be one I know fairly well. At one point during the meal she looked at me a little bashfully and said, “You know there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while.” It made me nervous. I could tell something personal was coming.
“What kind of character do you play in D&D?” she asked. It turned out she had just started playing and had learned that I played in a game with other faculty members, so she became curious (answer at the time: Gnomish Paladin; answer now: Half-Orc Monk; oh, and, strictly speaking, its Pathfinder, not D&D).
Gaming of various sorts—board, video, role-playing—seems to have always been popular on campus. I remember hearing about gaming groups at the University of Waterloo when I was still in high school. It’s not surprising, given the number of nerds (I use the term affectionately) who tend to end up in higher education—including advanced nerds like me who end up in the faculty. Indeed, a quick survey of university websites finds gaming groups across the country. At the University of Victoria it’s merged with “tech.” Clubs are active at the University of Guelph and Trent too. Not surprisingly, given the imaginations of game enthusiasts, some clubs play games with their names. The Club at the University Regina—the Gaming Fellowship—gives a nod to Tolkien. Others revel in playful acronyms like the Association of Ryerson Role-Players and Gamers (ARRG!).
Lessons from Lukács
How the traditional university is under attack from all sides
Professor Alone. Photo by Shaylor on Flickr
The epic battle waged between Gábor Lukács and the University of Manitoba, which ended last week, has shone an unflattering light onto the state of academic integrity at our universities.
Listening to most recent observers, one would think that our universities need to be completely “reinvented” because professors spend too much time either not teaching at all or at least not teaching practical job skills.
But the Lukács case shows what’s really wrong.
As universities become increasingly defined by their administrations—as opposed to their faculty—the traditional values of higher education come under assault from all sides: from management, from the public, and even from the associations that represent professors themselves.
Why profs don’t need more teacher training
We’re good enough already, says Prof. Pettigrew
Over in the UK, there’s more talk about university professors needing formal teacher training. One hears similar proposals more and more lately in this country, too. But in the end, it is, like so many ideas about higher education, a meretricious scheme masquerading as commonsense reform.
On the surface, the notion that university professors should have some kind of formal Education credential has a certain appeal. Professors, after all, spend a lot of their time teaching, why wouldn’t it make sense to require them to have the same level of training as other teachers? Just because you know about your discipline, the thinking goes, doesn’t mean you know how to teach it.
Outcomes don’t matter
Yet another pointless report on higher education: Pettigrew
We hear a lot of noise about “outcomes” at universities these days. Much of it is well meaning, but little is helpful. Government types like to make these kinds of noises because they want to be seen as good stewards of public money making sure education is providing good value for the dollar. But all this talk about outcomes and its demented twin “quality assurance” does nothing to make universities better. A good, or rather bad, example is this week’s report about “ensuring quality” from the Council of Ontario Universities.
According to the report, a focus on outcomes is necessary to “assure taxpayers, policymakers and government of the excellent return on investment of a university education.” I could say plenty about this kind of ugly, narrow-minded view of higher education that sees learning as merely another engine of utilitarian economic growth rather than a means to nurture a democratic civilization. And I have. So I won’t repeat those arguments here.
Instead, I will argue that any attempt to refashion university education along an outcomes-based model is, or at least should be, doomed to failure. Here’s why.
