The Hour Hand

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.

Continue reading A notable New Year’s resolution

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.

Continue reading In defense of the good old-fashioned exam

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 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

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.”

Continue reading Professors get some bizarre gifts

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.

Continue reading Lessons from Lukács

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.

Continue reading Outcomes don’t matter

Prof. Pettigrew explains his support for more open urination

Photo by daveynin on Flickr

If you want evidence that universities are places where basic assumptions are questioned, check out this story about students in Regina and Winnipeg pushing for gender-neutral washrooms.

The point of such gender-neutral facilities is to provide a place for those who do not fit neatly into the normal divisions of male and female. If this seems confusing, consider the case of an old undergraduate buddy of mine who I will call “Andy.” Andy was, genetically speaking, female, but had her hair cropped short and liked to sport a Greek fisherman hat with a men’s shirt and jeans. She was tall and fit and if you were just passing by her on the street you would be hard-pressed to fit her into the usual categories of men and women. That, of course, was sort of the point. Once, a mean-spirited store-owner mistook her for an effeminate man: “You look like a girl,” he sneered.

Continue reading Gender-neutral washrooms are the way to go

Philosophical conversations make a comeback on campus

Photo by passer-by on Flickr

University students just aren’t what they used to be, it seems. James Lang, reviewing a book by Cathy Small in The Chronicle of Higher Education, sadly concedes that today’s students no longer engage in the big undergraduate discussions of the meaning of life, the sort of late-night, possibly pot-scented talks that he had when was he was young.  Indeed, he concludes, this new bunch of students no longer has “a curious and thriving intellectual life outside of their courses.”

Similarly, according to this U of T Dean, today’s young people no longer see a course as a chance to explore concepts and knowledge for their own sake, but merely as pragmatic means to Spartan ends. Then she hints that they may more boring too. “I sometimes wonder if people feel less curiosity now that they can just turn to Google,” Kelly Castle rhetorically asked in The Grid.

Continue reading Are today’s students really more boring?

Student passed despite “fundamental errors” says prof.

Photo by Rhett Sutphin on Flickr

One month ago, professor Gábor Lukács failed to gain standing in his lawsuit that accused the University of Manitoba of violating its own standards by awarding a PhD to a student who hadn’t passed a required exam because of disability related to exam anxiety.

Now, another professor at the University of Manitoba says a student who didn’t adequately meet a requirement was awarded a graduate degree.

Education professor Rodney Clifton tells Maclean’s On Campus that he was pulled from a thesis committee by an Associate Dean two days before a student’s oral defence of what he calls a substandard Master’s thesis that required serious revisions.

Clifton had served since 2006 as a member of a four-person Master’s of Education examining committee. When a draft of the thesis in question came to him in the summer of 2010, Clifton found what he considered “fundamental errors in the analysis of the data” on which the thesis was based. He pointed these problems out to the committee, including the supervisor Robert Renaud.

Clifton says Renaud assured him that the errors could be corrected after the oral defence, itself a fairly common practice when the errors are minor. But Clifton insisted that the data problems were too big for a conditional approval, that an entirely different method of analysis was called for, and that if the thesis did proceed to the oral defence, there was a good chance that he would vote against passing it. Because the university’s policies require unanimous decisions, his objections meant the student would likely have failed.

Clifton was rebuffed when he asked via e-mail to meet with the entire committee to discuss delaying the defence in order to give the student a chance to fix the mistakes. Telephone calls and e-mails Maclean’s On Campus left for Robert Renaud were not returned. But one of the e-mails Clifton received from Renaud indicates that the men disagreed over whether the whole committee should meet to discuss the errors. As the thesis defence date approached, Renaud wrote that he was not about to “waste the time of the committee” just to hear Clifton “rant” about problems Clifton had already pointed out.

A few days before the defence was scheduled, Renaud restated his case for letting the defence go ahead, insisting that he did not want the committee members to lower their academic standards, but that if the concerns about the thesis would eventually be fixed, and given that the student was approaching the deadline, why would Clifton want to “make things unnecessarily difficult?”

When Clifton still objected, Renaud wrote to express his disappointment with his refusal to compromise and cooperate. A day later, he wrote again, indicating that Clifton’s “reactions will negatively affect [the student’s] progress,” and telling him that since he was “unwilling to change [his] perspective,” Renaud was removing Clifton from the committee. Clifton fired back that Renaud had no business removing him from the committee, but that he was willing to have the student proceed to the defence to see if he could be convinced that his objections were not insurmountable. “It still remains to be seen,” Clifton warned, “if the student passes the oral examination or not.”

Less than an hour later—and only two days before the student defended the thesis—Clifton received the e-mail from Associate Dean Zana Lutfiyya saying that since “the majority of committee members are prepared to allow the student to move to the oral defence… I am comfortable with the defense proceeding, and in the change of committee membership.” The thesis was approved.

When Clifton asked Lutfiyya if he could see the final version of the thesis, the copy she forwarded showed, according to Clifton, that the changes to the statistical analysis were never made.

Taking him off the committee, Clifton says, violated principles of academic accountability. Faculty members must be allowed to debate the merits of a thesis. If administrators can simply replace a faculty member who objects, then that accountability disappears, he argues. The whole point of the committee, he says, is that the decision is not left up to individual administrators or even individual faculty members. ”We don’t have external agencies coming in to adjudicate us,” Clifton points out. Professors are bound to ensure the integrity of the degrees their university grants, he says.

In his more than 30 years as an academic, Clifton has never seen a case like this, he says.

Maclean’s On Campus tried to contact Dr. Lutfiyya for comment, but received notifications that she would be away until mid-October. U of M Dean of Education Robert Macmillan, the academic head of the faculty, did respond by e-mail on the school’s behalf to say that while he could not comment on the specifics of this case since he was not Dean at the time the events occurred, he had “seen instances elsewhere when committee members, and even supervisors, have been changed as a result of conflicting views over a student’s work.” In cases that he was familiar with, he said, “the decisions have not been made lightly.”

Todd Pettigrew (PhD) is an Associate Professor of English at Cape Breton University.