Category Archives: Teaching

February 2, 2013, 11:53 am

When The Modern European History Survey Goes Modern: Social Media in the Lecture Hall

Our guest blogger Mary Louise Roberts is a Professor in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her most recent book, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War Two France, will be published with the University of Chicago Press in May. This essay was originally written for ”The Public Practice of History In and For a Digital Age,” a plenary session at the 2013 American Historical Association Annual Meeting. Roberts appeared with historians Edward Ayers andWilliam Cronon; editor Niko Pfund; journalist Michael Pollan and your very own Tenured Radical.

I begin with a confession. I resist change. Unlike the other people on this panel, I am a change resister. Unlike them, I have not pioneered digital or digitized approaches to historical inquiry. In fact I have consciously refused them. And when I have embraced new technologies,…

December 10, 2012, 3:05 pm

Why Teach the History of Modern American Conservatism? Because It’s Fun

By Claire Potter

One of Professor Radical’s Dirty Books

I first discovered the pleasure in teaching conservative political history almost a decade ago. A student I had never met before asked me to advise his senior thesis on Ronald Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign. At this time, political historians were just recovering from the shock and awe of the 1980 Reagan Revolution, and Lisa McGirr had just come out with Suburban Warriors: the Origins of the New American Right (2001).

However there was, as yet, very little to read about the resurgence of conservatism even though the research was well underway and the literature would soon begin to explode.

Therefore, part of the reason we had so much fun in the thesis tutorial was that the research was all about the primary sources. The thesis writer toodled out to the Reagan…

September 23, 2012, 11:53 am

An Eskimo in Egypt-land

By Claire Potter

O’Donoghue, who refused to write an SNL sketch for the Muppets: “I won’t write for felt.”

Today’s guest blogger is Jennifer Finney Boylan, Professor of English at Colby College. She is the author of twelve books, including the Falcon Quinn series for young adults and the memoir trilogy She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (2003), I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted (2008) and Stuck in the Middle With You: Parenthood in Three Genders (forthcoming in 2013).

Comedian Michael O’Donoghue once wrote a poem that began, “A blizzard blew an Eskimo way down to Egypt-land. He found they had no word for snow, and he no word for sand.” The poem goes on to describe the Egyptian and the Eskimo’s search for a common language, “the thing that each man shares.”

O’Donoghue was, of course, better known…

February 20, 2012, 3:37 pm

So You Think You Can Write During the Semester?

By Claire Potter

You actually can. But it’s going to take a lot more than just wanting to. I say this because I have navigated the rock (scholarship) and the hard place (The Job) that so many of us wrestle with in different ways over time. I have been:

The person who decided that my full time teaching job at a SLAC was too interesting, too full of new surprises, too packed with interesting students who would hold me accountable, too — well, too! — to write at all during the semester. In these years, I vowed to make the most of holidays, breaks, and summers. Bad plan! At least, a bad plan to make semester after semester, because the time off was never enough time, particularly when I failed to factor in the days spent at the beginning of these breaks watching teevee because I was so tired I couldn’t think and the days at the end getting ready to return to the classroom.
The person who decided…

January 12, 2012, 11:15 am

Teaching, Creativity and Interpretation; Or, What I Learned from D.W. Winnicott and Nell Irvin Painter

By Claire Potter

Donald Winnicott, 1896-1971

One of the many reasons I was happy not to go to the American Historical Association annual meeting is that I am starting a new job at a very different institution than the one at which I have worked for two decades. More than I usually do, I needed the time between terms to put together courses for students I have never met and who may also be very different from those I have known. I have had help in making my transition: new colleagues have sent me their syllabi, and they have been generous in critiquing drafts of mine, as well as answering the specific questions that help locate us as teachers. How much will the students read? Is the syllabus understood as a contract? Where is the writing workshop? What kinds of writing assignments work best? What type of guidance a…

September 17, 2011, 1:46 pm

The Problem That Has No Name: Or, If Computers Are A Labor Saving Device, Why Am I Working A Double Shift?

By Claire Potter

"Danger, Will Robinson!"

This is the first in a series of posts that addresses labor conditions in the academy, and the potential problems attendant to replacing people with machines.

In case you have wondered where Tenured Radical has been in the past week, we have been getting our classes up and running. One of the things we have been thinking about, as we worked 14 hour days (probably a modest 6-8 on the weekends) during the first two weeks of school, is that we do not even work close to a 40-hour week during the term.

Do the math: at minimum, I would say that we are currently clocking a 90 hour week, which leaves us no time for blogging, reading, going over the copy edits for the new collection, going to the gym, or cooking those gourmet dinners that some of our friends like to post…

May 31, 2011, 3:57 pm

Are Students A Captive Audience? Constructive Disagreement And Classroom Politics

By Claire Potter

The perfect teacher.

Recently I was reading a discussion of the relationship between campus speech codes, sexual harassment, and free speech doctrine. Because I am not a legal scholar I won’t dwell on the details, but the dilemma for educational institutions is this: how might one seek to regulate classroom expression that creates a hostile environment for students in a protected class without infringing on freedom of speech? Such utterances by a teacher or another student might include: “Students of color are only here because of affirmative action;” “Tammy sure is easy on the eyes;” or “Learning disabled people get extra time for the test, but I don’t believe that anyone deserves accommodation.” (I made all these up, but I once knew a male prof who was famous for saying to any female student who had a hyphenated last name: “Your mother must be one of those feminists.”)

The answer…

January 30, 2011, 7:47 pm

If A Student Essay Falls In The Woods And No One Is There To Read It, Does Anyone Care?

By Claire Potter

They’re B-A-A-A-a-a-ck!

A while back, I assigned two papers in one of my classes. In the first, I gave a straightforward “assignment” that asked students to think more deeply about the reading they had done up to that point and use what they had learned to analyze a primary document. In the scale of things, this is a standard history assignment. I gave the class three documents to choose from, and awaited the papers. When I began to read them, one thought came to mind:

“GAAAAH!”

Now, let me emphasize: they weren’t bad papers. Many of them were A-worthy; only a few received grades thought ought to have been worrisome to the recipients. And yet, as I paged thorugh them, I dreaded grading them. Why? They were dull.

Subsequently, I did a little informal research among the students, and most of them admitted that they, had been uninspired and uncertain about the point of the paper. …

January 11, 2011, 5:06 pm

If I Could Stick My Pen In My Heart/And Spill It All Over the Stage: Teaching Evaluations

By Claire Potter

If I could win ya, if I could sing ya

A love song so divine

Would it be enough for your cheating heart

If I broke down and cried? If I cried?

“It’s Only Rock n’ Roll (But I Like It),” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, 1974

In the past week or so, as many of us have been putting together classes for the new semester, teaching evaluations have arrived. I suspect they arrive electronically at most places now, as that is substantially cheaper for the institution. At Zenith we switched over from a paper system, where students filled them out together in one of the final classes, to an online one in which they fill them out alone and receive access to their grade for the course only after having done so. Like everyone else, students are bowling alone.

But I like it, like it, yes I do. Photo credit.

I have thought for years that fall teaching evaluations, received as the promise of the new spring…

September 5, 2010, 2:16 pm

Cultural Studies; Or, The Perils Of Mislabeling Campus Problems

By Claire Potter

One of the things I have noticed, probably because I live with an anthropologist, is that academics tend to use the word “culture” to describe a variety of things that, actually, are not cultural at all. It is true that “culture” has a great many meanings, depending on the context in which it is being used, the historical period or thing that is being described, and the intellectual tradition (if any) that is being referenced: here are a few. For social scientists, most centrally anthropologists, “culture” is far more likely to invoke a set of usefully contentious questions and methodological choices than an answer to any given problem.

In a college or university setting, however, when someone starts talking about “culture” it is too frequently the end of the discussion, an explanation for why things must be as they are and/or a way of distancing from something nettlesome. You will…