Still, once in a while I hear from one who is grateful to me. A few years after I lost my last position teaching high school journalism (which had turned out in some ways to be a blessing), I got a call from one of the few students I had had there who told me I needed to know that "we" had won a pretty significant award. He had gone on from my class (which he had taken as a sort of a fill-in-the-blank elective) to major in journalism at the local university, but his call was to tell me that he had learned the things he really needed to know in my high school journalism class. Needless to say, I was thrilled.
A couple of years ago, another student cornered me at a departmental function to tell me she had pretty much hated me when I graded her lab reports while she was an engineering sophomore, and her feelings had softened only gradually as she had moved through our program.
When she was in our master's degree program, she had sometimes come to my office to discuss her thesis project, and she began to see that the lessons from the undergraduate courses had taught her more than she had recognized. Now, as a PhD student in our online program and a drilling engineer for a major oil company, she was using the same lessons she had learned as a sophomore to write routine reports that sailed through management—and she attributed her success with them to those dreaded lab reports.
Just last week, a student emailed me with a question and noted that another former student had advised him to pay close attention in my writing class because those lab reports had turned out to be invaluable to that former student, too.
Nothing major, no student-driven awards, but still nice for a teacher to hear.
Monday night's class was one of those that reminded me why I like to do this. The class meets at 6 p.m. in the largest room in our building, which is filled to its gills with nearly 140 students. I'm pretty sure the students were on their good behavior more because they were hoping to get out a little early for another event than because my lecture was fascinating, but they were more attentive than they often are.
The lesson was fairly complex. I was trying to help juniors understand my philosophy about writing introductions to engineering reports, and as an example I was using a paper written by my coteacher, who has also often served as my mentor as I have learned to function in an engineering environment. I've used this paper (and the story that follows) in my course many times before, but this was the first time I had used them with him sitting in the classroom.
The students mostly recognize my collaborator's prestige; they know he has published textbooks, and they know that he is well-respected within the industry. So when I scanned to the end of his paper and showed them a references list of 37 papers, they were impressed with the importance of reading and citing literature—a lesson I really, really want them to learn.
We spent a couple of minutes on the conclusions to the paper and talked about their meaning and their merit before I zoomed back to the introduction. There, my point was that my collaborator—who holds the highest awards his professional organization can confer on him—includes the concepts from the conclusions right there, near the front of the paper, in the introduction.
The story I have told for years (and repeated Monday) is about another paper, though. The first time the two of us taught this course together—probably 14 or 15 years ago—he had told a class not to do that: putting the conclusions in the introductions spoils the surprise, he said. And I rudely interrupted his thought with a stage-whispered "or not." After class, he came to my office to debate the point, which I was comfortable enough conceding since I had only a couple of degrees in education, no professional publications, and nearly no comprehension of engineering at all.
A couple of days later, he showed up in the office with copies of three reports from a consulting company where he worked part-time as something like vice-president for technology. He dropped the reports on my desk, informing me that the client, the Gas Research Institute, had assured the consulting firm that their reports were consistently the best GRI received, although G RIfunded projects for a large number of organizations. The challenge: read these papers and see whether they contained conclusions in the introductions.
Recognizing the words from the conclusions in the introduction might have been simple enough, but recognizing their meaning would mean reading the papers more thoroughly. Besides, I needed to learn more about petroleum engineering, and what better place to start than some of the best papers in the industry?
The first paper was painful, some sort of gibberish about hydraulic fracturing in the Devonian shales, whatever any of that meant. As I told the students, reading it was a lot like reading Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky":
"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogroves
And the mome wraths outgrabe."
I knew better than to be surprised by the students' quizzical looks; Carroll was way ahead of Dr. Seuss in making up words, and most of the words in "Jabberwocky" apparently were outgrowths of a drug-induced stupor. But the analogy is still pretty good.
The second paper was easier to read, but logic suggested that I had somehow developed some rudimentary vocabulary while reading the first one, and surely my growing expertise with the language made it clearer to me. I had high hopes for the third one.
Imagine my disappointment, then, when the third paper was about as perplexing as the first; the lessons of the first two apparently had made no discernible difference at all.
But the challenge had been to find the conclusions echoing in the introduction, and I set out with all three papers to search. The first and third ones—the more difficult ones to read—sort of danced around the concluding ideas, but they never quite got to them. The third one was markedly different: I pulled out my brand new little yellow sticky notes and carefully marked the places where each conclusion was spelled out almost exactly in the introduction.
When my collaborator rolled back through my office in a couple of days, he said somewhat smugly that he bet I hadn't found the conclusions in the introductions.
"Well, not in this one," I said, picking up the first one. "Or in this one. But let's talk about this one." And I started thumbing to the pages with the sticky notes.
"You didn't," he answered, but I showed him unequivocally that, indeed, I did.
With him in the classroom Monday, I had to stop a moment to warn him to get ready for the students to laugh.
"Oh," he had said quietly that day in my office. "That's the one that I wrote."
They're young students, and they weren't particularly comfortable, but a ripple of chuckles crossed the room.
"But I don't know why I did that," he had continued. But I did, and it's the object lesson that makes the story so good: even though he has worked very hard to learn to write well, talking with writing teachers and taking additional courses well into his career, he ignored the advice of professionals who were not engineers and listened instead to his own brilliant intuition instead. His training told him to save the conclusions for the ending to keep from "giving away the surprise"; his heart told him his readers probably already knew the ending but instead needed closure, gentle reminders all through the paper that what the writers claimed would really turn out to be true.
"You weren't writing for those technical writing teachers," I said Monday. "You were writing for these young students who want to learn from your paper and need you to guide them through. You were writing for people who don't know the subject as well as you do. You were writing for me."
Sometimes a class of 140 students can be almost eerily quiet, and Monday night, it was.
But it reminded me why I love standing in front of it, and why sometimes teaching just fits.
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