Archive for the 'Pasadena City College' Category

Work, family, culture, and success: some thoughts on Asian and Latino achievement

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 16, 2008
in Academia, Ethnicity, Pasadena City College and Working
. 10 Comments

In summer school, the gap between what I want to do and what I have time to do yawns particularly wide. I’m lecturing five hours a day four days a week, and that doesn’t count prep time. I’m not complaining, mind, just sayin’ that it makes it hard to get the blogging in that I would like. I’m trying to work up a longer post on feminist Christian sexual ethics, but that’s going to be delayed for a while.

Just a quick link to an interesting Times story this morning: Trying to Bridge the Grade Divide in L.A. Schools. Hector Becerra’s Column One offering explores the wide (and, some say, rapidly widening) success differential between Latino and Asian students in California high schools. Becerra visits Lincoln High School in East Los Angeles, a famous institution with a large percentage of both Asian and Hispanic students, and interviews both teachers and kids about the “achievement gap.” At Lincoln, Asians are 15% of the student body — and 50% of the enrollees in Advanced Placement classes. Virtually all of the students, regardless of race, come from working-class, first-generation immigrant families; socio-economics alone do little to account for the disparity.

Lots of familiar explanations crop up, with differing cultural expectations usually topping the list. Continue reading ‘Work, family, culture, and success: some thoughts on Asian and Latino achievement’

Phone confusion

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 14, 2008
in Pasadena City College
. 2 Comments

I’ve been in the same office, with the same desk and the same bookshelves, since I joined Pasadena City College full-time in 1994. Fourteen years ago next month, when I moved into room C313, I inherited the cheap plastic Ericsson phone that my predecessor had used; it dated from the mid-1980s. It had two lines easily reached by pressing a button. Another button to retrieve voicemail. And one to put a caller on hold, but that broke around the same time we started bombing Afghanistan.

Much has happened in my life since I came to PCC full-time, in the same summer that OJ went for his famous drive in a white Bronco. My first ex-wife and I talked on that phone. I planned three weddings (to wives two, three, and four) at least in part on that phone. And over the years, I’ve had four or five different office computers and a few different printers. I’ve had three different office chairs. I’ve shared my two-person office with five different colleagues since 1994. And though I’ve done some extraordinary things in that office, had some extraordinary conversations, finished a dissertation and written nearly a third of all my blog posts in room C313, I’ve always had the same phone.

This morning, I came to work and saw a brand new Nortel device (Nortel has been redoing the campus network this summer) on my desk. Lots of features that I don’t understand. It took me five minutes to find a dial tone. I have no idea how to access my voice mail. No handbook was left, so I’m planning on keeping the damn thing around for decoration until I work up the energy to ask someone to show me how to use it.

In the meantime, don’t call me on my office line. And I miss my filthy and battered Ericsson phone, through which I uttered so much that was interesting and inane for so long.

“Our presence is evidence we’ve all screwed up”: defending the community colleges against Professor X

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 28, 2008
in Academia, Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 24 Comments

Via Lauren, this stunningly depressing article by Professor X about life in the basement of the ivory tower. X adjuncts a night class at a community college — which is what I did for one year (1993-94) before I had the great good fortune to get a tenure-track job at the tender age of 26. X teaches English, and he or she is grim about it:

Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest.

Okay, right off the bat, that describes only half of my students at Pasadena City College. Professor X doesn’t get in his night classes the students I’ve been getting in mine for fifteen years — which include not only the academically indifferent but those of exceptional potential whose family circumstances prevent them from attending a four-year college right away. I transfer students to Berkeley, UCLA, Occidental, and USC every year, students who have figured out that taking two years at $20 a unit makes good sense.

The thing about the community college is that I get such an astonishingly wide range of students. In a typical night class of nearly fifty, I will have a few very bright high school kids of perhaps 16 or 17 years of age. I will also have retirees in their 60s and 70s, 30-ish single moms returning to school, and quite a few students between the standard ages of 18-24. Some are very bright, with the skills but not the financial wherewithal to do well at competitive universities; others struggle with learning disabilities or barely average intellectual ability. That breadth of ability is a challenge, but it is also a joy — and anyone who doesn’t find it such should be elsewhere. Continue reading ‘“Our presence is evidence we’ve all screwed up”: defending the community colleges against Professor X’

Not just a professor, but a mentor: on hiring a new African-Americanist

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 24, 2008
in Academia, Mentoring, Pasadena City College, Race and Teaching
. 3 Comments

As most readers will know, the feminist blogosphere continues to go through an unusually painful period of discussion and debate about race, sex, and intersectionality. And while it really isn’t all about me, I find it, if not ironic, oddly serendipitous that this semester finds me on a hiring committee to select a new African-American specialist for a tenure-track position. The first round of interviews unfold this afternoon and tomorrow.

Confidentiality protocol bars me from disclosing too much about the hiring process, but I can share what has already been made public. After more than two decades, my colleague Pete Mhunzi, who taught both African and African-American history, is retiring. In this depressed budget climate, we had to fight tooth and nail to get a replacement position approved; some in the administration wanted to fill the Africanist position with a series of adjuncts.

At the beginning of the year, we sent out the standard notice for a new tenure-track hire. Because we are a community college, we need someone capable of handling several different intro courses: African-American history; the History of Ancient, Early Modern, and Modern Africa; modern U.S. Survey. We received a number of excellent applications, and starting at noon today, we’ll meet the most promising candidates, the one who survived the “paper screen” process.

When we were first writing the hiring proposal last year, there was some debate amongst the members of the committee about non-academic qualifications. We have only one professor who teaches African and African-American studies; the retiring holder of that position served not only as a classroom professor but also as a mentor to black students on campus, advising the BSA and so forth. Though just three decades ago, the campus was nearly 25% black, today the percentage of African-American students has plummeted to the mid-single digits. Some of that is due to the changing demographic of the San Gabriel Valley and of Southern California in general, some of that is due, frankly, to a decline in the number of African-American high school graduates who are attending any kind of college.

As far as I — and the other members of our committee — were concerned, it’s vital that the new faculty member we choose be committed not only to mentoring all students, but have a particular interest in working with young African-American men and women. Of course, this doesn’t mean we asked for or are demanding that the person we hire be themselves black. (Even with tenure, if I, as a member of a sitting hiring committee, announced on a public blog that race was a qualifying factor, I’d be in a massive heap of trouble. Heck, I might not be allowed to serve on a committtee again. Wait a minute… naw, bad idea.) Continue reading ‘Not just a professor, but a mentor: on hiring a new African-Americanist’

Facebook and teaching

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 10, 2008
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 3 Comments

My former student Hilary is now at UCLA, and she alerts me to this article in today’s Daily Bruin: Instructors use tech to reach students. It’s about professors who give out their cell phone numbers or use Facebook to stay in touch with students.

My students generally don’t have my cell phone number, though most of the kids from my old youth group program still do. I have something like 470 contacts on Facebook, of which perhaps 125-150 are current or former students. I don’t list Facebook on my syllabus as one of the primary ways to contact me; I urge students to use email and office hours. At the same time, I’m happy to let those students who do prefer Facebook to contact me that way. I don’t like to answer lengthy questions using that format, but am happy to respond to shorter ones on the site. Continue reading ‘Facebook and teaching’

Why I’m glad I have tenure: some reader wants me gone

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 28, 2008
in Blogging and Pasadena City College
. 28 Comments

I’m sitting on a couple of hiring committes at the college. (We’re hiring some English profs, and a new Africanist for our history program). Today, we met with the dean of Human Resources to get the usual talk about confidentiality, and the now-customary reminder about how our committee must comply with the mandates of California Proposition 209 (which banned most forms of affirmative action) while still ensuring a “diverse” applicant pool. Our HR head, Jorge, is a very agreeable sort, and he and I have had many good chats in recent years.

During a break, he came up to me. “Hugo, I meant to tell you. Last fall I got a couple of complaints about your blog. Someone wrote me a long letter demanding you be fired. I checked out your blog, but I can’t remember what it was that got them so upset. I told them about academic freedom and so forth, but I thought you should know.”

Jorge and I rolled our eyes together at the silliness of the world. I wasn’t troubled by fear for my job, because I do know that tenure is darn-near inviolate, and unless I lapse into manifest incompetence or rob a bank, I’m untouchable. But jeez, if I didn’t have the seniority I do, I would have felt very uncomfortable today. And honestly, I’m a little bit sad. I know I have annoyed a variety of people, but until today, had no idea that anyone would go to the lengths of writing a letter (backed up with more than one phone call to the vice-president) in order to get me terminated.

I blog under my own name for a reason. Look me up on the campus website, and you’ll find my office number and my office hours. Maybe it’s a mixture of naivete and arrogance, but I don’t think I have a damn thing to fear from anyone. It’s not as if I’m running for Senate. But gosh almighty, it peeves me that someone would go this far.

And you know, when the Lord blesses us with children, I may be a bit more careful about how open I am. If I can make someone angry enough to try and get me fired, I wonder if I could make an already unstable someone angry enough to go to the point of physical violence. And while the childless man can say “bring it on!”, the prospective father has to be more careful.

Reprint: First Week Blues: Saying “No”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 25, 2008
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 4 Comments

Originally published August 30, 2005. It’s appropriate again this week.

If there’s one thing I don’t like about the first week of classes, it’s the task of saying "no" over and over again. 

Like many community colleges, we have far more students than we have slots available in most of our classes. It’s a very rare course where I am able to accept everyone who shows up the first day trying to "crash" a class.  More often, as with the three classes I met today, I have wait lists of one or two dozen students.  I generally do lotteries for available seats, and ask all those not selected to leave.

I’d like to enroll everyone, of course, and be the "nice guy."  But if I did that, I’d be left with a classroom too tightly packed for anyone to move, and in serious violation of city and state fire and safety codes.  I’d also be overwhelmed with papers and tests and journals, and my grading load — with seven courses and no teaching assistants — is already immense.  So for reasons of both safety and sanity, I have had to get very good over the years at saying no.

Continue reading ‘Reprint: First Week Blues: Saying “No”’

Women’s Studies: not dead yet, thanks

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 15, 2008
in Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy and Pasadena City College
. 1 Comment

A reader named Fred kindly sends me a link to this Times Online story that ran a couple of weeks ago: Last women standing. According to Esther Oxford (love the name), Women’s Studies as a discipline is on the decline in the United Kingdom:

…the UK’s last stand-alone undergraduate degree in women’s studies, London Metropolitan used to have places for 35 undergraduates on the course. But in 2005, it stopped accepting new students.

It is all a far cry from the heyday for women’s studies in the late Eighties and early Nineties. In the past two decades, departments across Britain have been forced to integrate into other departments or to close outright. Only MAs and PhDs appear to be surviving the cull.

One problem has been the sustained attack on women’s studies as a “soft” subject appealing to fringe elements and perpetuating old-fashioned, irrelevant debates. Women and society have moved on, say critics, but women’s studies remains framed by the politics of a particular time, namely the feminist movement of the Seventies.

To be accurate, as the article makes clear, many Women’s Studies programs in Britain (as here in the United States) aren’t disappearing entirely. Instead, they are being folded into the larger discipline of Gender Studies. For example, here in Los Angeles, we see that the number of doctoral programs in Women’s Studies has been halved in the past few years. UCLA still has a Women’s Studies program, while arch-rival USC has a Gender Studies program — which grew out of an older Women’s Studies major. (Both are first rate.) It would be dishonest, however, to suggest that because there are fewer programs using the term “women’s studies” that the subject is on the decline. At some institutions, name changes reflect that the study of sex and society has been broadened and deepened rather than reduced,

(Parenthetically, I note that while I was an undergraduate, the “meteorology” major disappeared and was replaced by “Atmospheric Sciences”. It would have been silly to conclude that folks lost interest in studying weather simply because the nomenclature was altered!) Continue reading ‘Women’s Studies: not dead yet, thanks’

Grade inflation works both ways: on professor evaluations

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 11, 2008
in Pasadena City College, Ratemyprofessors and Teaching
. 13 Comments

Much to my surprise, when I came onto campus this morning I found my student evaluations from last fall waiting in my mailbox. As I wrote back in November when the evaluations were distributed, in the past professors don’t get the evals until May. Things have been sped up — perhaps because unlike in the past, no one bothered to type up the written comments. I was simply given all of the evaluations in a manila envelope.
Continue reading ‘Grade inflation works both ways: on professor evaluations’

“A B can mean many things”: lamenting the absence of the plus/minus grading option

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 13, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 20 Comments

It’s finals week, and I’ve got half a dozen stacks of blue books spread about my office. If every one of my students takes a final, I will have 339 exams to read through by next Tuesday. I will have 339 final grades to assign.

At PCC, as at most California community colleges, we aren’t permitted to use “+” and “-” modifiers on final grades. Leaving aside the tiny percentage of incompletes, and the equally tiny number of students who take a course “Credit/No-Credit”, all of my students will receive an A,B,C, D, or F. That leaves me only three real passing grades (D is technically passing, but I give few Ds) from which to choose.

What’s maddening is, of course, that students don’t fall neatly into three discrete categories. This is especially true, I note, of the B students. (I give slightly more Cs than Bs, and far fewer As.) The student who just barely missed an A gets the identical grade as a student who just barely avoided a C. Because I can’t give a “B+” and a “B-”, two students who did very different work each end up receiving the exact same mark; each receives a 3.0 on the standard American 4.0 grade scale. And the problem is true with other grades as well; the student who just barely gets an A receives the same 4.0 as the rare gem of a student who did flawless work of the “A+” variety.

Starting in the mid-1990s, the state began to permit the community colleges to assign “+” and “-” grades. The college had to decide as a whole to offer the option to all of its instructors. The University of California system has offered the modifiers for decades, and I was thrilled when we heard we would have a shot at the option. To my amazement, my colleagues in the Academic Senate here at Pasadena City College voted overwhelmingly to reject the plus/minus option. They complained — as Jessica Valenti would say, “I shit you not” –that taking on the plus/minus option would increase faculty work-loads!

The Senate was also lobbied by our student government, who worried that the modifiers would be more likely to reduce student GPAs than to raise them. Our student body president at the time said, with extraordinary chutzpah, “A lot of my As were barely As. If I had A- grades instead of straight A grades, I’d have a lower GPA.” (On the 4.0 system, an A- would be a 3.7, a B+ a 3.3, a B a 3.0, a B- a 2.7, a C+ a 2.3, etcetera.) I protested that I might consider giving an A- to a student to whom I would otherwise give a B, largely because I didn’t think they’d done A level work, but might be deserving of a modified A. And the number of B+ grades given would also help balance out student GPAs. In practice, student GPAs wouldn’t change at all — they would simply be more reliable indicators of achievement, as faculty would have greater precision.

Alas, faculty laziness and resistance to change — combined with intense lobbying from a small group of students worried about the spectre of the A-minus grade — served to block the implementation of the modifier option at PCC. It’s made my job much harder, and my final grades much less fair. Because I have so few final grade options, and because my students turn in such a wide range of work, A “B” from me, frankly, means a wide range of things and describes a range of abilities. And that’s not right.

Transgender Homecoming King: in celebration of Andrew: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 4, 2007
in GLBTQ and Pasadena City College
. 1 Comment

Not much time to post here this morning, but I have a short piece up at Inside Higher Education today: The Meaning of a Transgender Homecoming King. Last month, PCC elected my former student, Andrew Gomez (who is transitioning from female to male) as its Homecoming King. Homecoming is a bigger deal here than on most community college campuses, and I have some reflections at IHE.

UPDATE: I realize that the IHE piece was edited, and some of what I wrote was left out; the full piece as I originally wrote it is below the fold. Continue reading ‘Transgender Homecoming King: in celebration of Andrew: UPDATED’

Vulgar ostentation or justifiable pride: a reflection on hanging academic diplomas

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 8, 2007
in Class, Ethnicity, Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 31 Comments

On Friday, I wrote in my post about the perceived preference for Ph.Ds at the community college:

I’m glad I have my Ph.D. (My diplomas are all in a box somewhere, mind you. Our Kind of People never put degrees on the wall, after all; it seems showy and aggressive.)

I’ve been thinking about this issue of not putting the diploma on the wall. One of my senior colleagues here is a woman from, as she describes it, “an Irish working-class family where no one went to college.” One of six children, she was the first in her family to receive a B.A., and after years of hard work, a Ph.D. Her undergraduate and graduate diplomas are framed and hang on the wall in her office. She does insist that her students address her as “Dr. Sullivan” (not her real name).

Dr. S and I are good friends, and after I got my Ph.D. in 1999, she said to me “Now you can hang a new diploma on your wall.” I told her I didn’t think that was going to happen. “Why not?”, she asked.

I told Dr. S (who, among other things, has expertise in sociology) that “in my culture”, “my people” tend to see the display of diplomas as “showing off.” Both my parents had Ph.Ds. from Berkeley; I have no idea where either one of their diplomas is hiding. For them, putting a diploma up in the office would have been like hanging a marriage license on the wall after getting home from the honeymoon! It’s one thing, I told Dr. S, to be privately proud of an accomplishment; it’s another thing to wave the proof of that accomplishment around.

I don’t know which football coach it was who said it, but some grizzled old veteran who counseled against exuberant celebration after a score always said “Act like you’ve done it before and intend to do it again very soon.” In other words, drawing attention to one’s academic accomplishments (and hanging diplomas on the office walll is certainly drawing attention) suggests that one views the acquisition of the doctorate as vaguely miraculous. It also, I told Dr. S, seemed to be inviting admiration. OKOP, I told her, are trained to downplay “that sort of thing.”

Dr. S and I were and are good enough friends to have this sort of “cross-cultural dialogue.” Dr. S wasn’t in the least offended by my reluctance to hang my various diplomas, or by my willingness to confess to her my reasons for keeping the damn things tucked in a drawer. But she also offered her own perspective:

“Hugo”, she said, “I don’t display the diploma to show off for myself. My mother and father worked terribly hard to put me through school. My husband sacrificed enormously so that I could work on my doctorate while our kids were small. No one in my family or my husband’s had ever gotten a Ph.D. before. And after all that collective effort, if I act as you do — as if a Ph.D. is ultimately not important — it makes it seem as if I don’t appreciate all that they did to help me achieve this goal. When my eighty-year old mother comes to my office, she gets to see that diploma and it makes her feel incredibly proud. Your mother, Hugo, already has a Ph.D, and though I’m sure she’s proud of you, she doesn’t need to see it the way mine does.”

Dr. S reminded me that the “OKOP dislike of ostentation” is in part a manifestation of privilege. When everyone in the family goes to college, and lots of people get Ph.Ds, and parents don’t have to work double shifts at the factory to pay for graduate school for the kids — then the newly dissertated and hooded ones can afford to be nonchalant and self-deprecating. Dr. S argued that in her case, as a woman from a working-class Irish Catholic background, she was both entitled to a greater degree of display and indeed required to “show off”. To do any less would be to disrespect the extraordinary sacrifice of her loved ones.

I’m also aware of something that Dr. S didn’t mention. We teach on a campus that has a high percentage of non-white students, as well as a majority of folks who are first-generation college students. These students need reminders that a Ph.D. is possible for them too. Those professors who hold the doctorate — and are themselves members of ethnic minorities or were, like Dr. S, first-generation college students — thus have, perhaps, an obligation to display the diploma in order to inspire the young.

I have another colleague in another department; like me, he holds a Ph.D from UCLA. He is also African-American, and he began his academic career right here at PCC. On the wall in his office, he has diplomas from each stage of his career in higher education, starting with the associate’s degree from Pasadena all the way up to the doctorate itself. Those diplomas, which hang behind his desk and stare his visitors in the face are not just there to swell his head — they are there, I suspect, to send a message to those students who look like him (but not like me) that academic success is possible for everyone if they work hard enough. Though I’ve never discussed it with this man, I suspect that this is his reason for displaying the evidence of his academic prowess so boldly. What OKOP sees as aggressive and vulgar showiness, others may see as much-needed inspiration for the next generation.

I know my diplomas are somewhere in a box in the garage. I last saw them in 2002, when I was packing up after my divorce. I have no intention of throwing them out, of course. But in all honesty, I’m not really sure what to do with them. I don’t want them on the wall in my home, or on the wall in my campus office. Perhaps I’ll just keep them tucked away forever, in the same sort of place where I keep old tax returns and insurance papers. But let me be clear that I no longer cast aspersions on those who choose to hang the evidence of their achievements for all to see. For some, perhaps, it isn’t ostentation or insecurity that drives such display: it’s the desire to honor all those who made the achievement possible. And it’s the desire to inspire a new generation to achieve similar goals. In the end, there’s nothing vulgar or showy about that.

Ph.Ds at CCs: a reflection

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 5, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 13 Comments

I generally try and keep up with the very interesting Confessions of a Community College Dean blog, hosted at Inside Higher Education.

This week, an interesting piece by the unnamed dean on his preference for hiring Ph.Ds for full-time teaching positions at the community college. Dean writes:

Certainly, the single clearest criterion we look at is teaching ability, especially in the areas we need taught. I’ve seen Ph.D.’s fall flat here, and the degree won’t save them. I’ll grant that good-faith observers can differ on the relative performance of one teacher as against another – that’s one of the reasons that we have search committees. But a demonstration that fails to show, say, mastery of the subject matter, or the ability to speak clearly enough to be understood, is the kiss of death.

All of that granted, though, the preference for doctorates isn’t just arbitrary.

Although our degrees top out at the two-year level, our students don’t. A gratifying number of them go on to four-year degrees and beyond, up to and including medical school, law school, and grad school. I believe that part of the job of a cc is to prepare those students to succeed at the next level(s). To the extent that we can give the students exposure to the same faculty they’d get at the next level, I think we do them a service. (Honestly, in many cases, I think we do better than some of our four-year competitors at teaching intro courses. The four-year schools sometimes treat intro courses as afterthoughts or grudging obligations; they’re our bread-and-butter. Our intro classes are small, and taught mostly by full-time faculty. That certainly isn’t the case at, say, Flagship State.)

The sentence I placed in bold is an argument I’ve never considered.

As I’ve written before, I didn’t start graduate school at UCLA intending to teach permanently at a community college. I hadn’t ruled out the possibility either. My late father was a professor at UCSB, my mother a (now-retired) instructor at Monterey Peninsula College. Throughout my childhood, I had both parents as role models — and each taught at a different level in the state system of public education. When I started the pursuit of the Ph.D., I certainly expected to follow more in my father’s footsteps than my mother’s.

It was only when I started working as a teaching assistant (back in early 1991) that I realized that being in front of a classroom was electrifying and thrilling; doing research and writing was dull by comparison. I’d always known I was more of a performer than a deep thinker, and doing research and TA work at the same time made it clear that my future preference would be for a job at an institution where good teaching was the sole criterion for success.

When I was hired full-time at Pasadena City College in 1994, my dissertation adviser told me I would be “a fool” if I took the job. He had invested a lot of time in me as his protege, and wanted me to continue to do the research I had started to do on late-medieval English church history. I assured him that I would finish the dissertation I had started, but that teaching was my first love. He, a two-time winner of UCLA’s distinguished teaching award, pointed out that research excellence and outstanding teaching were not mutually exclusive. And I admitted he was right — but the shot at “instant financial security” that the PCC job offered was too tempting to decline, especially as I was about to get married for the second time.

Slightly fewer than half of my full-time colleagues at PCC have their Ph.Ds. I certainly didn’t have mine when I started. Though I was ABD (”all but done”, or “all but dissertation”) by 1994 when I started on the tenure-track, it took me another five years to finish the doctorate. It wasn’t until August 26, 1999, that I walked out of Powell Library with a little slip in my hand indicating that all the requirements had been met, the dissertation signed and filed, and the Ph.D at last in hand. Teaching full-time, going through a divorce and two severe mental breakdowns in the mid-1990s had slowed the pace of my writing.

When I finally got the Ph.D., my colleagues threw me a small party. My friend Marc Dollinger (now a professor of Jewish ethics at SF State, and himself a Cal undergrad, UCLA Ph.D.), put up signs all over the department — including the men’s restroom — saying “Hugo is Phinally PhinisheD.” It was very sweet. The congratulations I got from my mother and father and brother — all Ph.Ds themselves — were of course the sweetest. I felt as if I had finally gained membership in the one club to which I had most aspired to belong.

But my teaching didn’t change as a result of my getting the Ph.D. My students called me “Hugo” when I was a fresh-faced 27 year-old; most still call me “Hugo” now as I head into middle-age. The plaque on my door was changed by the college from “Mr. Hugo Schwyzer” to “Dr. Hugo Schwyzer” but that was not at my behest, and it seems to have had no impact on the respect I receive from my students. While “phinally phinishing” the Ph.D. felt good emotionally, it had very little connection to my work in the classroom.

I don’t think most PCC students know which of their professors have doctorates and which don’t. I certainly see no evidence that they have more automatic respect for those of us with Ph.Ds than for our colleagues with terminal M.A. degrees. Because my dissertation topic (the role of the bishops of Durham and the archbishops of York in providing for the defense of northern England during the reign of Edwards I, II, and III) has nothing to do with anything I teach at the college, I very rarely reference my own work while I am teaching.

The dean’s point in the blog that community colleges ought to offer future transfer students exposure to the same sort of profs they will encounter at the next level is a valid one. It makes sense, too, to counter the argument that the two-year colleges lack the academic quality of four-year institutions. Whether or not the Ph.D. means much in terms of improving teaching, it certainly means something to the public. My college, as far as I can tell, likes to tout the relatively high percentage of Ph.Ds on the faculty. To the extent that that assuages the anxieties of parents and students about the quality of the two-year professoriate, I’m willing to believe that possession of a Ph.D. ought to be a tie-breaker in hiring — but only when all else is truly equal. Beyond the “PR value”, I’m not sure the doctorate means much at our level.

I’m glad I have my Ph.D. (My diplomas are all in a box somewhere, mind you. OKOP never put degrees on the wall, after all; it seems showy and aggressive.) If a student comes to visit me and tells me that he or she is considering a Ph.D. in history, I’m very encouraging. I make it clear that the road to a doctorate is long and challenging. I tell them that though I personally loathed doing the research I had to do to produce my dissertation, I was elated when I finished. I did feel validated as a scholar and an intellectual, and even if I intended to walk away from the ivory tower, I knew I carried with me everlasting evidence of at least a basic level of skill and tenacity. I tell my students that a dissertation of hundreds (even thousands) of pages is written a sentence at a time (in my case, over nearly five years). And I do tell them that if they intend to teach at the four-year level, the Ph.D. will be indispensable. Going through the hoops to get that highest of degrees does, I tell them, prove something to those who make hiring decisions. It establishes credibility as a scholar in a way that few other things do.

The subjects I most enjoy teaching these days (ancient near eastern religion, contemporary gender studies) are more than a little far afield from my dissertation work. If those three little letters after my name increase my credibility in the eyes of my students, I’m at best ambivalent. If that increased credibility for me is linked to doubts in the skills of a colleague with a terminal M.A., that’s troubling.

Many of my students, I think, don’t know I have a Ph.D. unless they scrutinize my nameplate outside my office or look in the college catalogue. And though I am moderately proud of what I was able to do, that pride is almost entirely private.

Sowing seeds but never harvesting: a polemic about teaching and an attack on the educrats

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 27, 2007
in Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 12 Comments

The older I get and the more traveling we do, the longer it takes me to get over jet-lag. Some aspects of traveling have gotten easier with age (I have far fewer problems with my ears on landings, for example, than I did when I was young), but the jet-lag issue seems to get worse and worse. I’ve tried all the tricks and the remedies, and so far, no luck. We got back on Monday, and the last three nights I’ve had trouble getting through the night. I’m pretty beat this morning. Of course, I didn’t help my own cause by jumping back into a regular work-out regimen.

One advantage of being jet-lagged was that I woke up early enough to watch most of the women’s World Cup semi-final between Brazil and the USA. I’d been rooting for England in this tournament, of course, but once they were ousted I came back loyally to the Americans. Today’s game was a bit of a stunner; though the sending-off of Shannon Boxx was uncalled for, the USA was outplayed in virtually every aspect of the game by the creative Brazilians, whose women’s team is on the verge of being as dominant as the men’s. The decision to bench the wonderful American keeper, Hope Solo, for a frankly over-the-hill Briana Scurry was mystifying. Still, it was entertaining enough to watch.

On Tuesday, the college held its twice-yearly faculty “in-service education” day. The theme: “improving student learning outcomes” as part of the transition from a “teaching institution” to a “learning community.”

For the last decade, the administration has been eager to impress upon the faculty that we are not merely teachers but “learning facilitators.” Learning, we are told, is a collaborative process, more rich and democratic than the top-down method of traditional teaching. Few of us unblessed by graduate degrees from Schools of Education have any real idea what that means, and so the powers-that-be decree that we have these regular indoctrination sessions. The untenured faculty among us are advised to attend and feign earnestness, while the tenured folk hang around to see what sort of a free lunch will be put on. It’s rarely any good.

On Tuesday, I was handed a little yellow binder stuffed with handouts of articles from various education journals. I got a free pencil (alas, already sharpened) which had “PCC Flex Day 2007: The Passion for Learning” emblazoned upon it. In my folder was a little self-survey, so that I could discover my own unique learning style, and then share it with my colleagues during the stimulating “break-out sessions” that were sure to follow. After all, the educrats opine, we can’t really be effective “learning facilitators” until we become aware of our own learning styles — and how our own “ways of learning” may be obstacles to understanding the needs of students (sorry, “fellow learners”) who have different styles.

On the agenda for the day, the following:

Lunch (12:00-1:00)

Turn in your program assessment form at your food station to get your meal!

The Ed.Ds were on to us! They knew we came for free food, and so a crackdown had been implemented: no ticky, no lunchie. No self-assessment, no stir-fry over rice. Luckily enough, I had packed some trail mix, a nectarine, and a vegan protein bar, so the blackmail didn’t work on me.

Seriously, of course, the real reason for all of this wallowing in self-congratulatory edu-speak is that the community colleges, like most public institutions, are worried about accountability. Accountability is the buzzword of the decade; the taxpayers (and their duly elected representatives) want to know that they’re getting something in return for their billions. That’s not unreasonable; I’m no longer inherently opposed to being held accountable. (This is a new development in my life, as my parents, siblings, and ex-wives will tell you.) So the educrats have decided that the best way to prove accountability is to create measurable, testable, “student learning outcomes” (SLOs).

The longer I teach, the more convinced I become that worrying too much about assessing learning is one of the chief enemies of inspiring our students to want to learn. Look, I want all my students to pass their final exams, get good grades, and remember what it is that they’ve learned. But I’m teaching history, not providing a certificate in refrigerator maintenance. While my final exams assess what, on one given day, a student has managed to memorize, they don’t assess learning because real learning happens long after the student has left the class.

Especially in my gender studies courses, I know full well that it will take many of my students years and years to connect what they’ve learned in class to their own lives. Often, the epiphanies and break-throughs that matter will happen long after students have left this campus, long after they’ve moved out of reach of the educrats and their assessment tools. I always compare the job of a good teacher (I’m not a learning facilitator) to a gardener or a farmer. I know it sounds patriarchal, deeply Western, and unfashionably hierarchical, but there it is: I sow seeds in the soil of students’ hearts and minds. (Some of the time, my seed falls on rock, other times it ends up in the thistles, but some of it ends up in nice, loamy earth.) And here’s the thing: I don’t often get to see what blossoms and what doesn’t, because whatever flowers do bloom will generally do so months or years after the student has left my class.

So if the politicians and the educrats want to assess my skills as a teacher, they need to do more than look at my students’ test results. We all know that students can cram in information for a December final — and most of the facts they memorized will have vanished from their heads by Super Bowl Sunday. But a new way of seeing the world, of seeing, say, gender roles and relationships in a new light — that may well endure even though there are no reliable ways of assessing that sort of internal transformation. The most important things my students learn in my classes can’t possibly be measured by any government-provided instrument. I’ve been teaching long enough to have students come back years and years after taking a class; some just mouth platitudes such as “I really liked your class” but a few say wonderful, heartening, reassuring things; they tell me in detail how something I taught them helped change the direction of their lives. Most of the time, they’ll say something like “I didn’t realize it at the time, but when you said X, it started a whole new way of thinking about the world.”

There’s no SLO that can measure that.

Look, I know who pays my salary. If the state legislature and their Ed.D flacks want me to tweak my syllabi to emphasize the vocabulary of accountability, I’m happy to do it. But I’m still going to teach — primarily through lecture in an ancient, top-down, one-sided way. I’m going to pour out my enthusiasm and my passion, laboring in a field filled with rocky soil and pockets of rich earth. And for the most part, I won’t be around to see the harvest. That’s what it means to teach.

Urinal chat: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 28, 2007
in Men and Masculinity, Pasadena City College and Stuff
. 23 Comments

This morning in between classes, I slipped into the third floor faculty men’s room for a quick pit stop. We have just two old-fashioned urinals there, and one of my least favorite senior colleagues (I’ll call him “Manuel”) was stationed at one of them.

I’m not fond of this man; he and I have waged several ideological and pedagogical battles over the years. Nonetheless, I’m a cheery ENFP, and as I joined him to do my business, I said “Hey, my friend! What’s up?”

My colleague zipped himself, flushed the urinal, turned to me, and replied in a cool tone: “Why are you calling me your ‘friend’, Hugo?”

A bit stunned (and still busy with the task at — or in - hand) I slipped into the standard WASPy mode of cheerful, teasing, aggression: “Why, Manuel, are you saying we aren’t friends?” I threw in a wink.

Manuel made his way over to the sink to wash his hands, saying sharply as he did so, “I haven’t got time for your insincerity.”

As he headed out the door, I couldn’t resist an even-more exuberant, “You have a great day, buddy!”

Sigh. It’s true, I do address virtually every casual acquaintance as “buddy” or “my friend”. (My close male friends I call “my brother” or “brother man.”) I picked this habit twenty years ago, while spending two college summers working with the Public Works department in my hometown, hanging out with plumbers and carpenters and janitors. I suppose it does come across as frightfully insincere to some folks, and perhaps even aggressive to others.

And perhaps Manuel is right. I can come across to some folks as glibly insincere. And my standard response to hostility is to become even more polite and jovial (it’s violence, OKOP-style). I need to work on this.

UPDATE: Some folks have suggested that my use of the phrase “my brother” or “brother man” borrows from black culture. I picked up the former from all-white coworkers more than twenty years ago, and “brother man” has been in my vocabulary since I first read “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” in high school — where it is used by whites to refer to an affluent white man.

Similarly, when we were kids my brother and I affectionately called each other “boo”. (My mother called me her “little boo” starting around 1967.) My brother and I started doing this in the 1970s, and were both stunned to find out, years later, that it was a standard African-American term for a lover! My brother is and always will be “my boo boy”; I will always be his. And we’re as white as can be and trust me, the use of “boo” in our family has damn all to do with cultural appropriation!