[lit-ideas] Re: Pausing Philosophically for Coffee off the B9086, with Tammie Norries

  • From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:43:30 -0700

On Aug 15, 2011, at 2:52 PM, Donal McEvoy wrote:

>  The reading out of essays in Oxford tutorials, a colossal waste of time 
> [compare having someone read something to you when you could read it 
> yourself], is one of a myriad of such 'traditions', along with tutors who 
> provide no evaluation of the essay but simply use it as a jumping off point 
> for what they want to say anyway. 
> 
I spent the first fifteen or twenty years of my academic career being 
"efficient" in the manner you suggest.  Over the past five or so I have come to 
the conclusion that having students read their writing aloud is also useful.  
In my classes a successful paper now not only has to be well written; it must 
also be sufficiently well read to engage, and possibly even convince, an 
audience.  When the student can't find his or her way through a sentence, or 
looks up to find people staring off into space, he or she knows there's further 
work to be done.  I'm not suggesting that reading aloud should be the only way 
thoughts are evaluated; I'm merely sticking up for a procedure which is quite 
rare on this side of the pond.

As for evaluation by students and by colleagues, all I know about this after 
all this time is that the processes and systems I've been exposed to stumble as 
follows: everyone agrees that there is such a thing as good teaching, there's 
little agreement about how to measure what this might be, if there are perks 
and rewards to be distributed, and assurances given that everyone is getting a 
moneysworth, a just system must have a sensible way of evaluating whether 
people's teaching is any good.  

The evaluation forms our students fill out are not unlike the ones Robert and 
Walter describe.  "On a scale of one to five, do you strongly agree, weakly 
agree, feel neutral about, disagree with, strongly disagree with the following 
proposition...This class has helped my writing..."  Something along those 
lines.  And then student fill in dots and all the dots are read by machines and 
tallied.  What one can learn from such data, I don't know.  Like Robert and 
Walter, I take note of the written comments and sometimes adjust my teaching in 
response to patterns I perceive.

I take Donal's point about tenure processes reinforcing orthodoxies.  The other 
side of the argument is that administrators come and go, as do educational and 
disciplinary and inter-disciplinary fads and fashions.  Tenure can provide an 
institution with an institutional memory, a sense of what it now is, what it 
said it aspired to be, how it arrived at this juncture.  Having made the long, 
hard climb, I am in favor of it.  My college currently is not.

David Ritchie,
Portland, 
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