Gradedown! Post 2

Just took care of the peer reviews and one of the hebdomadals, leaving me with

• 1 alterna-essay
• 51 hebdomadals
• 66 exam essays

Here are some interesting things I noticed about the IDs on the final exam:

1. If you were an economist -- and maybe some of you are, actually -- If I were an economist, I would have expected students to approach IDs beginning with the passages about which they felt most confident and proceeding on to passages and texts about which they felt less confident. If a student was only sure about, say, four texts, s/he would take an educated stab at a fifth text. If this hypothesis were right, ID grades would begin high and get lower as the student proceeded. What I noticed, though, was that for most students grades went in the opposite direction -- except in cases where you had to guess at a passage, you more or less improved as you got more practice writing out IDs. What this tells me is that practice really pays -- maybe next semester I will more strenuously urge students to work through several full IDs in the days before the exam.

2. Something I hadn't thought of before: Tristen (306) used the IDs not merely to talk through the thematic problems of the texts but to connect those texts to thematic problems in other texts. It was really smart work, I think, saying that texts could be identified not merely in isolation but also as parts of a larger discourse. That was pretty cool, and I urge all of you to steal Tristen's idea if you take ID-based exams in the future.

3. Whether or not you guys liked a text had little bearing on how well you identified it. This is strange to me -- it's an axiom in literary instruction that getting students to like literature is the entire battle: once they like a text, they will have little trouble working with it. Yet though Disgrace was the massive favorite -- at least according to Friday's quiz-poll -- the average ID score for passage #3 was 4.8/6; IDs of Endgame (passage #4), the second-least-favorite text according to Friday's poll, averaged exactly the same score. While Heart of Darkness had no votes as favorite text and 2 as least favorite, the average grade for HoD IDs (passage #8) was a massive 5.3/6. Here's the breakdown, organized by passage number:

1. Arcadia (3 votes as favorite; 1 vote as least favorite): 7 answers; mean score 4.3
2. The Waste Land (2 votes as favorite; 3 votes as least favorite): 20 answers; mean score 4.8
3. Disgrace (8 votes as favorite): 30 answers, mean grade 4.8
4. Endgame (5 votes as least favorite): 12 answers; mean grade 4.8
5. "Araby" (2 votes as favorite; 1 vote as least favorite): 31 answers; mean grade 4.7
6. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1 vote as least favorite): 25 answers; mean grade 4.8
7. Middlemarch (6 votes as favorite; 7 votes as least favorite): 8 answers, mean grade 4.1
8. Heart of Darkness (2 votes as least favorite): 22 answers; mean grade 5.3
9. To the Lighthouse (2 votes as favorite; 5 votes as least favorite): 10 answers; mean grade 4.6

I promise to get back to grading later tonight... well, whether I promise or not clearly it has to get done. I will probably regale you with a later post articulating some thoughts about peer review (the numbers here are interesting). A little bit later -- maybe after I finish grading; maybe as a reward for getting through some of the exam essays -- I'll write a little bit about next steps for you guys: continuing education, and all that.

Gradedown! Post 1

After the exam today, MOR gave us a grades-in deadline of the 22nd. I'll be posting here for the next few days to motivate myself to keep going -- it's not that I imagine you care; it's that I need something to do with my life other than grading and packing.

I managed to get all the IDs done this afternoon, so here's what I have left to grade:

• One alterna-essay
• 52 hebdomadals
• 9 peer reviews
• 66 exam essays

I don't want to work out the averages here, but I'm thinking that 10 hebdomadals a day should be manageable, although that will be on top of... what? 18 exam essays a day? Don't get me wrong: I am completely in love with this job; there's something about grading, though, that's somewhat overwhelming.

Office hours location update

Hi, all! In order to avoid disturbing my officemates, I'm going to be in HCW 7117 for my office hours this afternoon. On the off chance that someone kicks us out of the classroom, I'll update the note on my office door.

Some remarks about final exam strategy: essay questions (Part II)

So when I plotted out the words-per-five-minutes data we collected two weeks back, here's the frequency chart I got:

The mean words-per-five-minutes count is 132; the median is 124.5. If you wrote these essays blindly, putting pen to paper at minute 0 and going nonstop until minute 45, they would come on average to nearly 1,200 words -- the length of a 4-page paper. This strikes me as the sort of strategy that will drown me in inarticulate verbage.

Here's what I suggest: force yourself to spend 5 minutes thinking about the essay (not necessarily at the beginning -- time taken in the middle and at the end of the essay can really revitalize your argumentative strategy) and write a cautious and legible 24 words per minute. By doing this, you will come out with about 1,000 words -- probably the right length for a thoughtful 45-minute essay.

This is a strategy it is probably worth practicing. Set up a study date with a colleague, set an alarm for 45 minutes, and craft out a full response to a challenging essay question. This will not only give you a chance to figure out when it will be best for you to take your 5 minutes to think through your argument, and to see how well you put together an analytical thesis under pressure, but it will also give you a chance to think through some texts and interpretations: good practice all around.

I have not seen the final exam, and it can be difficult to guess exactly which essay topics Prof. Ortiz-Robles will pick, so you might strategize the essay questions on which you concentrate in such a way as to shore up your weaknesses. From personal experience, I have found that time you spend on any essay prompt translates into better performance on all essay prompts; better, then, to spend time focused on those prompts you hope won't show up on the final but which you fear will show up.

While you are mathematically safe crossing two prompts off the list -- you will only have to write on two out of four prompts on the final -- if you do so and those two prompts show up, you'll be stuck writing on the other two: potentially an ugly situation. Safer, again, to strategize answers to all the prompts, or at least to nine of them.

Develop answers to the essays that make use of more than the minimum two texts. If you have answers set to go that usefully compare three or four texts, then you will not only have an easier time figuring out what to say for those 1,000 words but you also won't have to worry about text overlap.

At a basic level, this class is not about information but about analysis: these essays should show not merely that you have been listening during lecture and discussion for the last 15 weeks, but that you have picked up on the basic strategies of intermediate-level literary analysis. Concentrate on creating new arguments from existing texts, and show me that you can synthesize new readings and contextualize the significance of these readings within the theoretical frames of the class -- the thematic shifts from Romanticism to Modernism; the changing relationship of individual to society; the definition and redefinition of man; shifting theories of what art does and/or how it acts in the world.

One last note about these essays: have fun with them! Be brazen; be creative in your interpretations and analysis. Argue your case with flair, and revel in strong connections between strange texts. If you're not having fun, find a new way to approach the question.

Some practice IDs

My wonderful fellow TA Katie sent me a set of practice IDs that she put together for her class:

• Word doc (42 kb)
• RTF (54 kb)
• PDF (111 kb)

Thank you, Katie!

Tuesday prefinal office hours

(The final prefinal hours, as it were.)

• Tue 5/15, 3:30 to 5:30 pm, 7134 Helen C. White Hall

7134 HCW is my actual office. If my fellow TAs are around I would rather not disturb them -- we can look for a classroom down the hall. If we move, I'll leave a note on the door.

Pre-final office hours!

Where I'll be:

• Monday 5/14 - 11 am to 3 pm - Fair Trade Coffee House
• Tuesday 5/15 - 3:30 to 5:30 pm - TBA

Come with questions, or with texts you'd like to go over. If I'm sitting with someone, join us! The more perspectives we have on a question or on a text the better we'll all do. (You might think about this as a sort of pedagogical multiperspectivalism.)

Possible prefinal office hours

I'm thinking about holding office hours on Monday of finals week from 11 am to 3 pm. Will those of you who are fairly certain you would like to meet with me before the final exam be able to meet with me during those hours? Would you prefer Sunday afternoon hours? Responses via email or via comments below are welcome.

Hebdomadal topics (week 15) (Updated 5/8)

Topic 1.

How effectively can literature respond to political problems? Consider how authors answer this question by means of texts themselves (e.g. Disgrace) and by means of illustrating the effect of literature through texts within texts (e.g. Byron in Disgrace or Byron in Arcadia). You can write about Disgrace alone or about Disgrace and any of the texts we have read this semester.

Here is one way you might think about this problem. Coetzee, Beckett, and T. S. Eliot won Nobel Prizes for literature. Unlike more literary prizes -- the Man Booker Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics' Circle Award, etc. -- the Nobel generally honors writers whose work has a social relevance and not merely an aesthetic relevance. How might the Nobel committee have seen in their work a social commentary absent from the writings of some of their contemporaries -- Stoppard, Auden, Yeats?

This prompt comes close to Final Exam Study Question #5. Feel free to use this hebdomadal as a run-through of that question.

Topic 2.

Develop a thorough answer to any of the essay questions that might appear on the final exam. You must write on Disgrace.

Note that you will have 45 minutes to write each essay during the exam, and that I will expect in the vicinity of 1,000 words for each essay. You might want to time yourself as you practice writing out your answer to one of the prompts.

Hebdomadal (week 14)

Topic 1: Seeing coherence in the incoherent

At the end of discussion on Friday, we were looking for points of coherence in The Waste Land. In particular, I was pushing you to identify (a) images, (b) problems, and (c) rhythmic and rhymic structures that connected shorter chunks of the poem to the poem as a whole. Here are the chunks in question:

1. First stanza (1-18, epigraphs)
2. Unreal city / sprouting corpse (60-76)
3. Game of chess (111-138)
4. Pub scene (139-172)
5. Typist (215-256)
6. Water / rock (331-359)
7. Last stanzas (424-434)

For this hebdomadal, continue this work, answering this question: In what way(s) does The Waste Land form a coherent whole? Bring in analytical work that your small group did last week but that you didn't get a chance to share.

Topic 2: Postmodern pop

For the last few lectures, Prof. Ortiz-Robles has been arguing that in the twentieth century cultural production has moved away from literature to mass media. Put this premise to the test. Transcribe the lyrics of your favorite song and perform a close reading of it.

Two rules:

1. The song you pick has to have been written in a period we can define as "postmodern" -- this either means during or after the 1960s, or else in a socio-cultural context that saw itself as having moved beyond the aesthetic limitations of the early twentieth century.
2. The song has to be sufficiently lyric-dependent that we can expect the songwriter to have spent some time figuring out what to say.

In what way does this song respond to the problems and theories of postmodernism we have discussed since the midterm? In what way does it resemble the literature we have read this semester? How do its lyrics respond to the poetic tradition? Should it / could it be taught alongside poetry?