Some you could just hug

To say that my enthusiasm for my job right now is high would be a serious misinterpretation of the concept. Between the rapid growth of our department in the past few years and the concurrent downturn in the economy—accompanied by a downturn in university funding—I have seen my classes range to incredibly large for writing programs as my grading assistance has dwindled to one.

Add to that my frustration with the low evaluations I got last semester and my lack of confidence that my spring course is accomplishing anything worthwhile, much less what either the department or I would like to see happening, and the picture becomes pretty gloomy.

Yesterday was the first day back to class after the winter break. I was out all last week on a consulting job, so I had to play catch-up yesterday, which was complicated by the fact that the computer jocks had changed out the operating system on my computer and confused my email system, my web browser, and my printer connections. The handful of students who dropped by with questions provided sort of comic relief.

One of them was very apologetic about needing me to reconsider his grade from a previous semester, which was good because it kept me from pinching his head off. Another had a similar case but probably a better excuse; since he arrived late in the afternoon, he lingered a while after hours and just chatted, which I mostly appreciated because he said some nice things about my fall course—words I probably needed to hear.

The third came to ask a favor of a different flavor. Part of my chagrin with this semester is that the department has seemed to be stacking ideas like Jenga blocks and then flinging Tonka trucks into them, which has led this semester to my classes mixing sophomores and juniors into a course designed for juniors but now redesigned for sophomores. I can see some potential benefit to the mix, sort of in the way one-room schoolhouses benefited from having sixth-graders in the same room with primary grades: advantages of the older helping the younger, but frustrations for the older who feel held back by the younger—the differences in vocabulary and comprehension of the industry are easily that great.


Southpark's concern in this was that the juniors have to participate in a paper contest in a couple of weeks where they have been advised to present the simple proposals they wrote in my class last spring. For those who actually took the class last spring, that's no problem; for the ones who are just now taking it, it is: they haven't yet written the proposals. Southpark is a TA in one of their labs this semester, and some of them had approached him for help in preparing for the presentation.

His visit to my office was to ask me to stay late this evening and try to help them negotiate a solution to the problem of presenting a paper when they only began the course today. This is a kid who had had some conflicts with my class in the fall, but I had been amused by some of his strategies to manage them. The one that stands out best in my memory is the evening he sat in on several presentations "to get some ideas," when in fact he simply hadn't been able to attach himself to a presentation group. Others complained to me that they couldn't get a group together; he found a way to attach himself to a group and meet his obligations.

He clearly was not one of the surly evaluators who have had me off my feed but in fact was creative enough to meet my challenges in a subtle but sufficient way. He had come into my office being gracious about my course and sympathetic toward our mutual students, so I certainly couldn't turn him away, although I really didn't have much idea of what I might say that would help this crowd.

When I got to the classroom for the help session, Southpark was there with his backpack to greet me. "Do you think it would help for me to show them my presentation?" he asked. I had really expected the students to want more information about what to present than how to design the presentation, but certainly a brief run through his couldn't hurt them, so I happily agreed.

From the very beginning of his talk, I must have been beaming: starting on the title slide, he pointed out details that I had covered time and again last semester, never knowing whether I was really getting through to students in the presentations sessions but pretty sure from their surly evaluations that they had resented my suggestions. I can't know how much of what Southpark said cam from my class and how much came from other experiences, but he even stopped from time to time to say things like, "This isn't as good as it could be, but here's what I plan to do to improve it." I was floored that he touched on so many concepts I had coverend—even more so when he showed me my comments on his slides from the fall and how he had worked through cleaning them up.

For my part, which wound up being only a few minutes in the hour-long session, I fielded questions from the juniors mostly about the content and organization of their presentations, as I had anticipated from the beginning. After they had left, I complimented Southpark on the fine job he had done of showing the students a good model, giving them some good ideas for ensuring that their presentations went well, and assuring them that the point of the contest was to help them become better professonals. He was concerned about his tendency to stammer through rough spots in presentations, and I pointed out to him that he hadn't stammered at all tonight—probably, I think, because he was so intimately sure of his subject matter after having worked with it so much in the fall.

He cocked his head for a minute, thought it over, and acknowledged that the hard work of developing his paper last semester really had led to an easier task of developing the presentation, and he knew the presentation so well that showing it to the younger students had been no challenge. He seemed to have learned more from the class than he thought he had.

And maybe I taught more than I realized in that class, too. This semester might turn out all right after all.