Harvard U. Offers a New Plan for Allston Land Holdings

Sounds like Harvard wants its own version of Kendall Square, which has been a tremendous boom for MIT, East Cambridge, and the region.  Of course, the land that Harvard owns:

a) is not located near public transportation (save for bus lines),
b) there is only so much demand for research parks, and there are many established areas around the region (Kendall Square, the corridors on Routes 128, 3, & 495, and a growing area around UMASS Medical in Worcester),
c) perhaps most importantly, Harvard doesn’t really produce a lot of people that can produce… things.  They produce self-important, precocious folk with magic keys to Wall Street, State Street, and K Street, but only a small minority of its undergrads have the technical prowess to create the next great widget/battery/billion-dollar noun.  In my opinion, Harvard would be better served using the space to create an investment banker obstacle course or something – how to dodge clients while making for the bar - or perhaps set up a branch office of the Robb Report.  Just my two cents.

Yeah, you’re old fashioned. Like, sixty years old. Before adjunctification. 
Students are being cheated. That’s part of it.
There used to be a professor working across the hall from me who would bitch me out if I came to work sick. I guess he was afraid of airborne germs. He had been the dean previously, too, so he knew I would pay the price for canceling.
These anecdotes provide more evidence of how acceptable it is, some places, to believe that some people’s lives are not important.

This particular teacher response certainly sounds extreme, but Mr. Jenkins seems right to me: the student must sink or swim where h/she is, unfair as that sounds.

As for sending messages to students, I admit I do this myself (I am currently at a community college, working with a Comp 2 – “research” – course as a part-timer). But I believe I do it fairly.

This semester I’ve had about a 50% drop rate, a great proportion of which seemed due to the inability to accept “C’s” and “D’s” on paper assignments, despite rather liberal re-write policies. The students certainly saw themselves as stronger than their initial marks reflected, but they were not. The point was to let them know that they now WERE in college, and would have to write at a higher level, i.e. learn how. This was clearly too much for many of them to handle.

This syndrome has been remarked upon ad nauseam of course. But I am still amazed, as I have been for 15 years, at how over-confident and fragile American students are. It is mind-boggling to me. Somehow my generation [born 1956] has done a great dis-service to those following us. But trying to hold the line on standards in college courses seems an indispensable task, even if it is merely trying to put fingers into a bursting dam – which is frankly what it seems like to me all too often.

But still, my best hopes are with the success of my students, who will emerge stronger writers and at least more adequate learners – if they stick it out.

When “collegiality” gets in the way of truth, it’s definitely no longer a virtue.  I’m sure students can tell when they have a very bad teacher, and they must find it demoralizing when teachers they do respect defend the bad ones out of misplaced solidarity. Think about the message that sends about the values of the institution(s) and the place of the student’s well-being among them.

As I have said before, being a high school teacher (English and Social Studies) and a P/T college professor in the humanities, I think I have a unique perspective on this issue. I will agree that some of my brethren at the K-12 level will nitpick from time to time. At the same time, however, others are so accustomed to poor writing that they pass kids along who have no business leaving their particular grade level.

The result when I get said students at the college level who have either a 1) an obsession about mechanics (I care more about making your case well than I do about page length or formatting of the title page) or 2) a wanton disregard (or ignorance, I suppose) about paragraphs, punctuation (I recently had 8 sentences jammed into one “super sentence”) and spelling (homophones, anyone).

Coordination between high schools and our nearest state school has been done with limited short-term success, but, to my knowledge, there has not been conversation between the faculty of our high school and the local CCs (where many of our students go, by the way) on the topic of writing. Maybe it’s time there should be.  

Thanks, v8573254. I actually did recommend that she meet with her teacher to go over the essay. I also suggested she meet with the teacher before the next essay was due, maybe take in a rough draft, to see if she was on the right track.

Rob

I gave my students a writing assignment that involved using a database to locate a peer-reviewed article and the students did not know what a peer-reviewed article was.  I was taken aback by this and so I spent an entire lecture talking about different sources of information.

I just received this article via e-mail and was disturbed by the fact that the student was not treated honestly by either teacher she dealt with. I have occasionally had students come to me with issues having to do with other professors and I always tell them the truth and then strongly advise them to try to work it out with their professor before going any higher.
If students are going to learn to trust us as instructors then we need to be trustworthy. I do not find this in a teacher who who give an assignment that even another English teacher could not figure out and I do not find it in a teacher that tells the student to “figure out” what the other teacher wanted and “give it to her”. We, as professionals, should be providing our students with clear, understandable assignments. They should not have to “figure out” what we want. We should be telling them clearly. This is our job; to teach. Gene

Who ever said anything about not being “bothered with helping them because it’s not my job”? That’s an incredibly cynical and twisted take on anything I said.

Rob

And your analogy is where it falls down.  If someone hits the ball, no one can argue it was actually a strike.  If an umpire consistently called “strike!” at hits, he would be fired.  If this student truly met the guidelines set forth in the rubric to earn a passing grade, then you SHOULD talk to the teacher (or encourage the student to, or report it to the Dean/Principal).  If you aren’t willing to do these things, it makes me doubt that the student did not actually get a hit – that is, the student didn’t ACTUALLY meet the rubric set forth by the teacher.  Perhaps you just feel bad for the student, who knows….but if they didn’t actually meet the rubric, the answer is simple – tell the student to follow the rubric.  If the student did follow the rubric, again, the answer is simple – the teacher needs to be called out (just as an ump would be if he mislabeled a hit a strike)

I would like to note that I give my students almost NO instruction on how to format things besides “keep it neat”, and this drives them crazy….because apparently no one’s given them freedom to make their own choices.  None of their work looks identical – some put data in columns that others put in rows.  I couldn’t care less – if the data is there the data is there.  If I can read it, I can read it.  And the students learn how to – GASP – do something for themselves.  

Really?  When I was a student I never received a rubric.  Not once.  It never prevented me from handing in what the teacher wanted because – hey – guess what?  That’s what the entire semester is for.  First day of class, we were told all our papers should be formatted a certain way.  Second day of class, we were told what types of references were acceptable in a paper.  So on.  Why does a student need a rubric if they’re being given this information?  It’s a waste of trees and a waste of time…because, honestly, if you told them the paper needs to be three pages, why do you need to then, give them a piece of paper saying the exact same thing?

I mean, if you want to give out a rubric, that’s fine, I’m not going to accuse you of anything (the way you are accusing teachers who don’t give out rubrics) but it’s really annoying to have to print out the 7 page rubric my co-professor has designed for our students TWO page paper, especially when most of it should be common sense.  

Rubrics aren’t for one student at a time. They are meant for the class (or all of an instructor’s classes, that instructor’s department, possibly the college) as a whole.

I would question anyone who teaches Composition, Literature, or any writing designated course who does not use rubrics. In these same courses, anyone relying on a 7 page rubric doesn’t seem too clear on what s/he wants from student writing.

I would also question any instructor who expects the same tone and style for an editorial as a research paper. When students compose a personal narrative, audience expectations should shift, just as an editorial assignment vs. research. Too often, instructors want what works for them only, but they aren’t the audience despite what they think.

Keep it neat is nice, but it’s subjective nature won’t work when you’re grading 20+ individuals. Tell students MLA (or APA or whatever) style, teach it, teach that it changes but one style is expected, and you’ve established not what you want but what is broadly accepted in a specific discipline.

Oral instructions are, I’d say, an implicit rubric. An explicit rubric (in writing) is preferable because then there’s no, “But you said…But I said…”

What I call prestidigitation is when an implicit rubric is given and it turns out that the explicit rubric is different.

poor ex-pac10 teams

Something is fishy here suggesting that this is contrived news.  I’m no statistician, but my guess is that across any particular 4-year period the probability of 1 of 5 Division 1 schools having a drop in attendance of at least 20% is fairly high.  And, there are many mundane reasons for drops in attendance such as the extensive renovations of the field house at Georgia Tech.  The drops in attendance, as noted by other comments here, probably are due to such local factors.  If these drops represent a more pervasive trend, it would be better supported by reporting the overall attendance in Division 1 basketball each year across several years.  Indeed, overall attendance could be up considerably if most of the the schools among the 4 out of 5 not showing a 20% drop had substantial increases in attendance. This article appears to be another example of the Chronicle trying to create news in a way that is disrespectful of the critical abilities of its targeted readership.