Tag Archives: presentations

Teaching

First-day activities: The Syllabus Scavenger Hunt

Leave a comment

I always hated the first days of college courses because they were so boring: professors just read through their syllabi. Blah blah blah you will need to buy this stuff blah blah blah here is how your grade breaks down. I was like, “I can read this myself” (obviously I wouldn’t), and “this is boring” (still true).

As a professor, I have done the thing where I pass out the syllabus and say, in my affected “I’m like you; I’m cool” voice: “I know you guys can read and will do so on your own time.” But then I also spend The Whole Semester, like everyone else in my profession, answering questions that are answered by the syllabus. I will have that annoyed-professor tone that we all get when we do that. There are tons of memes online about this very topic. There are even t-shirts you can get, which I’m actually going to get.

Meme of It's in the Syllabus
Meme of It’s in the Syllabus

So then I did the thing where I read through the syllabus like my own professors did. It was boring and it also did little to relieve me of having to answer questions about things that are already in the syllabus. It felt like I was participating in the cycle-of-abuse thing that academics do when they get a little shred of power. I had promised myself I’d never do that, yet here I am. Though I also inflict vocabulary and pop quizzes and assign reading logs and talk a lot about MLA format too, I try to limit the ways in which I relieve my own suffering by imposing it upon other people. So I’m not going to stage a performance of Milsom Reads Her Own Syllabus with Pauses and a Wagging Finger for Occasional Effect this year (which describes a lot of what I have experienced to be Pedagogical Approaches of Illustrious Academics).

I have been teaching for a decade now (đŸ’„đŸŒˆđŸ„‚), and on that basis I’m going to say that it’s a lost cause: I don’t think there is any way to avoid the fact that you are going to say things and then repeat them to students who will then ask you them again. “It’s in the syllabus” somehow doesn’t mean that anyone is going to know it by heart or even want to reference it. It’s relatable anyway. It’s like when I open the fridge and ask my mom where the mustard is even though I know if I spent more than .3 seconds looking for it, I’d find it on my own, and I also know she’s going to just yell at me to look for it yourself.  Maybe there is something Freudian going on in this after all? Maybe we just want to . . . interact?

Syllabus Scavenger Hunt

When I’m not feeling super overwhelmed at the beginning of a semester (which is hard when you’re in new jobs all the time and don’t really know what is expected and precarity and stress and so forth), I really like to create a “Syllabus Scavenger Hunt.” I did one this year because it’s the first time in a long time where I’m teaching in the same place for a second year in a row! (In case you missed it, this is a real, actual, literal privilege considering the dire state of the profession/the world/English departments.)

My Syllabus Scavenger Hunt is just a list of however many questions I can come up with about information that can be found by looking through the syllabus. It’s a real trick: give a fun name that evokes childhood to something that is really boring and tedious. But still pretend it is fun and reward students for doing it, which basically describes my pedagogy. This year’s Scavenger Hunt has a whopping 34 questions on it. These questions include such highlights as:

If you get a “D” in a course, will that course be transferable to a 4-year college?

and

Can you request an extension the day before something is due?

and

Why does Milsom require you to have a “Calendar” for her course?

Instead of forcing students to answer all 34 questions (yes, what a slog!), I’ll divide them up into groups of 3 or 4 and assign each group to 4-5 questions. After about 20 minutes or so, I’ll have each group present. This sort of low-stakes activity is so great because it forces the students to talk to each other (I always remind them to introduce themselves because if I don’t, they mightn’t), and then it enables me to observe the class dynamics right away: who opts to do the presentation? Who gets left out when the groups self-select? (I always immediately say “Oh you join these people” to make sure that awkward moment ends quickly.) Are there students who already know each other? Are there groups that have suddenly switched into speaking in Spanish? (I encourage that, though I have colleagues who police it–which seems weird to me. It’s cool to hear students explain things to each other in a different language and it also lets me see who needs what sort of assistance. Also I’m learning Spanish so it’s fulfilling on some sort of narcissistic level to hear my own writing translated for free.)

The fact that I will collect this handout and give a grade for doing it ensures that during these presentations, students appear to be scrambling to fill in the answers. This also means that they will interject and ask their classmates to repeat things. I love this set up because the class will usually start to own the progress through the handout. Even though the stakes are so low (this will account for literally .000000000008% of their grades), students will take it seriously. Also the questions are pretty provocative: why do my students need a New York Public Library card this semester? Why is it sometimes better to get an “F” than a “D” on your transcript at our school? đŸ€”

Also, I find that this Scavenger Hunt has been the best way for me to ensure that the students have been held accountable for reading the syllabus, and I find that it does not require me to read it aloud for them.

More Tips:

  • Make them write down what page each answer can be found on.
  • Make the whole group stand and come to the front of the room to present. This tells the students that they will have to get used to moving around in your class. Even the students who don’t plan to speak during the presentation will still feel like part of the group.
  • If the whole thing can’t be finished in one class period, it can be a homework assignment.
  • Include funny questions in the Scavenger Hunt.
  • Give everyone an “A” or 100% on the assignment as long as it is complete. Starting things off with a big win makes even the most vulnerable students feel positive about the class.
Conferences

“Miss Jemima” on the Blogosphere

Leave a comment

You may already know that a chapter of my dissertation is about Jemima Morrell’s Swiss Journal, an account of Thomas Cook’s first guided group tour to the Alps. Morrell was one of 63 Britons who bought his 680 Fr. package. She and her six friends set out with Cook in 1863, armed with Murray and Baedeker handbooks, and climbed the Alps in their petticoats.

My paper for Session 670 at the MLA 2015 conference—found here—discusses the ways in which phrases that Morrell had lifted from the pages of her guidebooks found their way into the blogs, news articles, and promotional materials the celebrated the journey’s 150th anniversary in 2013.

A young poet who won a competition to recreate Morrell’s journey blogged (minimally) about her experience. She took down the website shortly thereafter, but I have managed to secure the URL for myself. (You are welcome.) The Wayback Machine has provided us with access to one of its pages. Please click here to check it out.

Instructional Technology

Omeka presentation for a UCLA Cluster seminar

Leave a comment

Just put together this presentation for this Freshman Cluster’s seminar here at UCLA. Their instructor is assigning them this assignment in which they have to curate a collection related to the “history of Los Angeles” using Omeka – a free online curatorial platform. I’m eager to see what they come up with.

I’ve presented on building Omeka sites before (here’s my sample site that I plan to one day turn into something relevant to my dissertation), and the major issues that come up have to do with the relationship between “Collections,” “Exhibits,” “Sections,” “Pages,” and “Items.” Miriam Posner’s great handout is helpful (click here).

Put simply, the best way to use Omeka is to think of it as a museum. Items are your museum’s objects. You upload images (or an image) of them and classify them according to Dublin Core metadata fields. You store them in collections – which I think of shelves or storage rooms in the back of the museum. But just as you wouldn’t be able to store a sculpture in two different rooms at the same time, you also can’t store an Omeka item in two different collections.

Once you have amassed a good number of items (and arranged them into collections – or not), you can then put together an Exhibit. An exhibit in Omeka has sections, just like an exhibit in a museum has different rooms. Pages can be thought of as walls in that room of that exhibition.

Here’s my visualization of this metaphor:

Here's a visual rendering of the relationship between Exhibits, Sections, Pages, and Items in Omeka.
Here’s a visual rendering of the relationship between Exhibits, Sections, Pages, and Items in Omeka.

So for example: let’s say in your exhibit on “British Tourism” (to borrow from my own research), you organize one room for maps and one room for souvenirs. Then you would put all of Byron’s souvenirs on one wall and all of Dickens’ on another one. The room for maps is one section and the wall of Byronic souvenirs would be a page on Omeka.

Does that make sense? I hope so. Omeka is good for making exhibits – but people run into problems when they try to square-peg-round-hole it (like by using it as a blog).

There are some other features worth noting about Omeka – its multi-curator capabilities, its various themes, tagging, making public v. private items, adding simple pages for content, featuring items/collections/exhibits etc – but it’s best, when presenting on it, to start by clarifying the relationship between collections, exhibits, sections, pages, and items (the Omekan macrocosm to the Omekan microcosm!) before delving into too much detail about the other features.