Foley's blog

Helping Students with Invisible Disabilities

Foley — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Marjorie Foley

Image Credit:

Leo Reynolds via The National Benefit Authority

I teach The Rhetoric of Harry Potter, which has an exceedingly long waitlist—for the past two semesters, the waitlist consisted of 50 UT seniors, and for awhile I couldn’t figure out why the 23 students in my class weren’t all seniors, especially since it looked like underclassmen didn’t even have a chance to get on the waitlist. After the first week or so in the semester, I found out why I had a mix of seniors, juniors, sophomores, and freshmen: a large number of my students have disabilities recognized by Students for Services with Disabilities, which allowed them to register during priority registration ahead of seniors.

About 50% of my class turned in letters from SSD, and there may still be more who have said nothing. Though these letters don’t relate the nature of their disabilities, and it would be impossible to tell from looking at them that they were disabled, many of my students have told me in confidence that their accommodations are related to anxiety disorders and other mental health disorders. As a result of their anxieties, my students often panic about the quality of their work and due dates.

They’ve also expressed anxieties about coming to see me in office hours when they’re worrying about upcoming due dates or when they’ve fallen behind on assignments. When you have one or two students with disabilities, it might be easy to become annoyed with the one student who can’t make due dates and who won’t come see you, even when you know that the student can and will perform at the A level on writing assignments. When you have ten (and counting) students with disabilities, it’s no longer an option. You can’t get annoyed; you have to find solutions.

As grad student instructors, I think many of us are aware of the dreaded Impostor Syndrome, the anxiety that comes with writing three 20-page papers in one week, and the dread we feel when we submit our writing to our peers, our advisors, and academic journals. And, we may have had the misfortune of being told to get our acts together by people who weren’t so nice about it, and the fortune to have supportive friends and advisors who tell us to do the same thing sympathetically.

In the classroom, I’ve never really been a hand-holder. I’m easily annoyed when students expect me to behave maternally. I’m even more annoyed when students don’t turn papers in on time because it throws off my schedule for grading them. But with so many intelligent students falling behind, I had to do something. I had to be sympathetic. I had to remember all the times that I was freaked out about a due date, overextended with extracurriculars, and terrified that my instructor would say, as one undergraduate advisor said to me, “Why are you here? Can you make this quick?”

I think our lack of sympathy as instructors and advisors comes from too much emphasis on student independence, without realizing that the first step toward independence for students with disabilities will be realizing there’s a problem and asking for help. I’ll just go ahead and say that’s the first step for all students, which is why my syllabus this year includes this: “Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.” As instructors, we should be aware that students who seem needy may just be on their way to becoming more, rather than less, independent.

On Grammar Pedagogy; or, Stop: Grammar Time

Foley — Sun, 14 Jul 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Marjorie Foley

Image Credit:

via Jamison Koehler

Never before have I spent an entire class period talking about grammar, but I decided that this semester I would try it to see what my students thought about being taught grammar and being graded on grammar (the first of which I never do unless asked by a student for one-on-one help, the second which I only do if grammar severely impacts my ability to understand their papers). I had my students read three articles: Joseph Williams' "The Phenomenology of Error," (a selection from) David Foster Wallace's "Tense Present" a.k.a. "Authority and American Usage," and Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like #99: Grammar. If you've never read these articles, here's a brief description: Williams argues that there are levels of error--some we notice, some we don't, and that it all depends on who's doing the writing. He ends by saying that he deliberately made 100 mistakes in "The Phenomenology of Error," none of which I noticed, and only one of which was noticed by a student. The selection from DFW was his advice to students who speak Standard Black English (his phrasing, not AAVE) instead of Standard Written (White) English, telling them that they have to learn SWE to be successful even though it's racist and classist and the whole shebang. SWPL echoes DFW's views that grammar is racist, particularly with this claim: "It is in their blood not only to use perfect grammar but also to spend significant portions of time pointing out the errors of others," sarcastically asserting that the whiteness of the speaker determines grammar's perfection. We had a lot of fun with this combination. I had tacked DFW and SWPL on as an afterthought, but I'm glad I did. About a quarter of the students completely misread Williams as a grammar Nazi, but they really liked the other two selections. While many of my students thought that grammar was the most important thing to know about writing, most of them took pretty quickly to the ideas expressed in all three of these works--grammar is dependent on the speaker and the listener OR the writer and the reader. What works in one place will not work in another. My African-American students were quiet for the first portion of the class, but one finally spoke up about David Foster Wallace: She said that just because she spoke SBE didn't mean that she was so dumb that she would write a paper in SBE and hand it in. Thinking on this, I wonder (as always) if DFW was right to say what he did to his SBE students, but for different reasons than before--he may have very much oversimplified the problem. Lastly, the combination of all three articles showed them different styles of writing about the same topic, which was great.

grammar
race

Using Embarrassment to Build Trust with Students

Foley — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:41:08 +0000

Author:

Marjorie Foley

Image Credit:

Freakin' Facts

I recently had a conversation with a couple of other instructors at UT about what to do when you've realized you've made a mistake about a student's grade, especially what to do if you've assigned a grade that is lower than what the student actually deserves.

Oftentimes, as younger or less experienced instructors, we have a tendency to believe that we cannot change a student's grade for the better because then they'll always question our grading practices, and then we'll have to deal with lessened authority in the classroom and constant requests for grade changes.

In the conversation with my fellow instructors, we discussed a couple of different solutions that would be, hopefully, fair to the student. One of these solutions was to bump up other grades over the course of the semester so that the student's final grade would be what it ought to be.

The other solution, which is the one I advocated, is simply to tell the student that you made a mistake and change his or her grade. I have done this before (yes, I make mistakes!), with no lessened authority and certainly no constant challenges to grades.

Of course, I have a teaching style in which I try not to be too authoritative in the classroom--I prefer students to feel comfortable challenging what I say because I believe that voicing those concerns allows 1) students to engage with the course and learn more and 2) me to become a better teacher, a better lecturer, and a better defender of rhetoric.

I'm also a "traditional" grader--I assign letter grades to each assignment rather than using a portfolio-based review system, and then I meet with the student. It's in this process of paper conferences that the student and I have the opportunity to discuss grades, wherein I go through the paper with the student and discuss all the comments I have made, which they have already read.

Once or twice in this process, a student and I have gone through a paper together and I've wound up at the end of the conference saying something like "Wow, why did I give you a C? I'm embarrassed that I made that mistake. Here, you deserve a B+. Sorry about that." I think that's totally ok.

In fact, if you're up to date on recent research out of UC Berkeley, you'll know that being embarrassed about mistakes actually makes you seem more trustworthy to others. So, feel free to suck up your pride (or anxiety about mistakes!), act a little embarrassed, and give 'em an A. They'll certainly appreciate a better grade, and they might like you more for admitting your mistake.