Forget it Jake -- it's Star Wars

Having been born at the tail end of the baby boom, I'm now about a quarter century older than most of my students. This creates certain pedagogical challenges, one of which is that I often don't have a good sense of what cultural and historical allusions and illustrations are going to resonate with or even be comprehensible in a classroom setting.

For example, last semester, I wanted to reference the ending of Chinatown to highlight a couple of points about the legal system, so I asked a class of about 55 students how many of them had seen it. A total of one student raised her hand. She said "do you mean the one in San Francisco?"

Just this week in a seminar on criminal punishment we were discussing punishment as revenge fantasy, and I discovered that none of the dozen or so students had seen either any Dirty Harry films or any portion of Charles Bronson's Death Wish oeuvre.

Now this circumstance could easily degenerate into a Pete Hamill-style Grumpy Old Man lament on how in the innocent 1970s we had quality filmmaking and the only drug was joy, but I'm curious regarding the extent to which both modern media and contemporary demographics have changed expectations regarding inter-generational familiarity with popular culture. When I was an undergrad 30 years ago I would have thought it very strange if professors assumed any kind of familiarity on my part with the American pop culture of 1950. My expectations are bit different, perhaps unrealistically so, for two reasons: Netflicks and the cultural domination of the boomers. For instance, when I discuss the bundle of sticks metaphor for property rights I assume I can put up the cover of Led Zeppelin IV on a slide and it will be familiar to a non-trivial portion of the class (this assumption has proven to be accurate).

On the other hand, you have the Chinatown-Dirty Harry-Death Wish problem. I sort of feel like my students should have seen Chinatown, in the same way they should have read The Great Gatsby. Expecting them to be familiar with Harry Callahan's hand cannon and accompanying witticisms, let alone the repulsive Death Wish series, is another matter (although I do think the Eastwood films are both a reflection of and have influenced some important cultural beliefs about the relationship between law, violence, and justice).

Anyway, at this point I find that the only two film references that I can always count on the vast majority of the class to get are The Wizard of Oz and the first Star Wars trilogy. I'm wonder about the extent to which technology has and will gradually change this circumstance -- that it is or will make pop culture, both in its high art and low schlock manifestations, more reliably intergenerational as pedogogical references or just subjects of general conversation.

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How to bootstrap student diction.

(The rest of the post is quite long and requires you already be interested in how to teach students how to acquire a credible academic ethos ... but since a few of you emailed me saying you are interested in that, I'll post the first fourth of it here. The rest of it [including the footnotes] can be found at my place.)

When you teach composition, you quickly learn that although you only instruct students for 10 weeks, professors in other departments have the rest of those students' academic careers to complain to the academic senate about the terrible job you did.

"How is it possible," these hypothetical professors sputter, "that three years ago these students passed your research and methodology course?"*

Because lower-division writing consists of equal parts remedial buck-passing-correction and advanced training in how establish and maintain an academic ethos, what triggered these professors' outrage can be almost anything: students whose grammar seems like evidence that they find pleasure in its repeated violation; students with fifth-grade vocabularies, for whom "nest" is a noun they recently left, not a verb to be performed on clauses; students who are actually able to weave money-words into complex sentences, but who still fail to meet an imagined or remembered standard of what constitutes college writing; etc.

When I hear complaints like this, I say nothing. What can I say?

"Three years ago, I spent two months doing my damnedest to teach students who don't read how to sound like an academics who do nothing but."

That's an honest, but wholly inappropriate, response; after all, when complainants are attempting to pass the buck retroactively, the last thing they want to hear is that their reliance on the Great Scantron in large undergraduate lectures means they might have helped create the situation they declaim.

Because no one who never practices the skills they barely acquired will be any good at them three years later, I spend a lot of time in the classroom teaching them to study the way their sources write. They may not remember every last thing I taught them, but if they remember how to model their prose, they can fake like they do.

Quick background: the core text for this section of the research and methodology course is the terrible, terrible self-help book Happier. It has the imprimatur of academic writing—the cover proclaims it to be "the backbone of the most popular course at Harvard" and there's a conspicuous "Ph.D." after Tal Ben-Shahar's name—so on the first day of class, I analyze the rhetoric of the cover in order to disabuse the students of the notion that everything written by a person with a doctorate is authoritative.

"We will be concentrating on the claims he makes and the evidence he cites to back them up," I tell them. "Not the little letters that follow his name."**

Because he provides little in the way of evidence and cites what little evidence he provides with all the rigor and clarity of a seventh-grader, Ben-Shahar functions as a perfect foil.*** The students are annoyed by his sloppiness the way I am with theirs, and I cultivate their frustration every class, because they may not remember how to cite something properly three years later, but they will remember the annoyance they felt during, for example, peer review sessions. They begin to appreciate and crave the exactitude of a well-sourced article, which is good, but they still need to learn how to write like the writers they now want to emulate. How do I teach them to do that in 10 weeks?

I devote one class to pretending.

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When the Shore is Out of Sight

Via James Joyner, I'm wondering whether this really characterizes a common experience in higher ed:

All course materials, including weekly presentations, must be submitted months in advance. This, I’m told, is not only to ensure that books are ordered and copyrights cleared, but also for the various documents to pass along the line of administrative staff whose job includes vetting them in order to be sure no rules have been violated, then uploading them in the appropriate format. Moreover, a syllabus, we are constantly reminded, is a binding legal document; once submitted, it must be followed to the letter. Omissions or inclusions would be legitimate grounds for student complaint.

While the focus is on online courses, many of the generalizations seem to be intended for all college teaching. Speaking for myself, I can't say that I've ever experienced anything like this. The last time anyone in authority "vetted" anything about a syllabus of mine was probably the autumn of 2000, when I began teaching my independent courses. Is the passage of syllabi through layers of administrative staff something common? Moreover, while I've often heard the claim that a syllabus is a "binding legal document," I've always found that it means much less than it implies. I appreciate that there are faculty who attach pages of legalese to their syllabi, but a) this has always been voluntary at any institution I've been affiliated, and b) it's not that onerous a task once you have the legalese; you simply attach the same handout to every syllabus.

Gone, then, are the days when I could bring my class an article from that morning’s New York Times. Now, when I stumble on a story, book or film that would fit perfectly with the course I’m currently teaching, I feel depressed, not excited. I can mention it, sure, but I can’t “use” it in the class.

Really? You can't bring a New York Times article to class and have the students read it? I find this... implausible. For one, including the reading of the New York Times as a class requirement in the syllabus is a remarkably easy way to cover many sins. Second, while I've heard many student complaints in my time that I've believed to be illegitimate, I don't think I've ever heard something quite as stupid as "she made us read a New York Times article that wasn't on the syllabus." More importantly, I can't imagine any administrator actually taking such a complaint seriously.

Nor can I reorient the course in mid-stream once I get to know the students; I can’t change a core text, for example, if I find they’ve all read it before; I can’t change the materials to meet student interests or help with difficulties, as I once did without a second thought.

Indeed, I suppose that a restrictive syllabus does make it mildly more difficult to completely restructure a course halfway through the semester, or to change out major texts that the students have, in many cases, already spent money on. I guess I'm unconvinced that either of these are bad things; one of the points of a good syllabus is to allow students to plan their semester, structure their time, and choose the most helpful course of study.

And so, while I guess that some frustration at "educrats" is merited, I'm not terribly compelled by any of the above complaints. Indeed, I'm sometimes inclined to think that faculty may be a touch too attached to some of the overly feudal aspects of their positions; it's really not necessarily to the benefit of undergraduate students that faculty be given nearly complete freedom over how to structure their courses, especially when some of those courses are required. As we all are constantly reminded, teaching undergraduates is very rarely the reason that particular faculty are hired or retained, and I can't fault elements of administration for believing that there are aspects of undergraduate teaching that should be monitored. Another way to say this is that while I think that there should be considerable deference to the faculty vision of how specific undergraduate courses should be constituted, this deference ought not be total. Finally, I'm still deeply skeptical of the ability of teaching evaluations to act as guides to good and bad teaching.

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An end of the quarter treat: "Batman Is My Boss"

The final assignment of my visual rhetoric course is called Rhetoric in Practice (or RIP). It has two components. To paraphrase the rubric: the students create their own rhetorical performance, explore questions of how to target an audience, follow the conventions of a genre, choose the medium for their message, and all the while, use the critical tools they’ve been learning all quarter to develop their ideas. They then perform a rhetorical analysis of their own work via a detailed writer's memo.

The pedagogical theory behind this is sound: by forcing them to do something fun at the end of the quarter, I get better evaluations the tools I taught them over the course of it become more solidly ensconced in their brain-space. Only this time, instead of deducing the rhetorical intent behind someone else's decisions, they must decide how to communicate their message to their target audience most effectively. Over the years I've had many successful projects, including

• a Batman-centric version of The Game of Life that opens with pegs for two parents and one child already in the car and an Alfred peg in the wing awaiting the inevitable
• a pop-up book of Watchmen, in which the first page consisted of pulling a tab that sends the Comedian crashing out a window and into the reader's lap
• a scored and recorded soundtrack to Alan Moore's The Killing Joke
• a New York Review of Books style review of the novelization of Batman Begins, in which the book is slammed for its Ludlum-lite car chases and unconvincing fisticuffs
• an adaptation of this issue of Planetary by Cormac McCarthy
• a Master Legend-type recruitment video for a superhero academy

This quarter it looks like I'll be adding a few more to my personal hall of fame. One of them is so conceptually brilliant in its timeliness that the idea alone sent my head spinning: a comic in which a super-heroic University of California student punches a certain unpopular university president in the face repeatedly (this idea elicited cheers from classmates when the student first shared it). The second is a web-comic by this student entitled "Batman Is My Boss." Here's a sample page in which she uses moment-to-moment transitions to great effect:

She plans on updating it both for the class and, with encouragement, after it ends. Go encourage her already!

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The Monty Hall problem and counter-intuitive teaching

The Monty Hall problem is a well-known thought experiment in probability analysis. The problem is fairly simple, but for reasons that aren't well understood the right answer is sufficiently counter-intuitive that a very large majority of people get it wrong on their first attempt. More interestingly, I've found that students often resist the validity of the correct answer, even when the problem is analyzed in some detail. The problem:

Suppose you're on a game show and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. The car and the goats were placed randomly behind the doors before the show. The rules of the game show are as follows: After you have chosen a door, the door remains closed for the time being. The game show host, Monty Hall, who knows what is behind the doors, now has to open one of the two remaining doors, and the door he opens must have a goat behind it. If both remaining doors have goats behind them, he chooses one randomly. After Monty Hall opens a door with a goat, he will ask you to decide whether you want to stay with your first choice or to switch to the last remaining door. Imagine that you chose Door 1 and the host opens Door 3, which has a goat. He then asks you "Do you want to switch to Door Number 2?" Is it to your advantage to change your choice?

(Taken from the wiki page if you want to look up the answer).

Here are some strategies I've used for explaining the solution to students who resist accepting it.

(1) Redescribing what the offer to switch gives you, i.e., by switching you are in effect choosing two doors instead of one, and thus doubling your odds of success.

(2) Recharacterization via different quantities, i.e., what if there are one hundred doors and 99 goats and a car, and Monty Hall is required to show you 98 goats after you choose a door?

(3) Explicitly working out all the potential iterations, i.e., if you choose Door 1 and there's a car behind it then X, but if there's a goat behind it then Y etc.

(4) Empirical testing. Have the student run the experiment and observe the results.

These are listed in descending order of abstraction, and probably not coincidentally ascending order of pedagogical effectiveness. (Occasionally there will be a holdout even after (4). This person is invariably male and almost certainly a future litigator.

Anyway, teaching the problem is a fun way to get students to think about the limits of common sense intuition, which is a much-cited source of wisdom for legal interpretation in general, and statutory interpretation in particular. It's also a good way to get people to think about how people tend to cling to intuitively correct answers, even in the face of demonstrations that their intuitions are wrong.

Update: Thanks for the comments, and especially to J.W. Hamner's variation on explanation (1) and Vardibidian's card trick for explanation (2) -- I'm going to use those.

Lemuel Pitkin and Mike Schilling emphasize that it's crucial that the rules of the game require Hall to reveal a goat after the initial choice, and that without this caveat the situation is different. Just for the heck of it, gaming that out: The contestant doesn't know what if any post-choice decision rule constrains Hall, or even if Hall knows what's behind the doors. What should the contestant do?

Possibility (A) Hall doesn't know what's behind the doors.

Possibility (B) Hall knows and is indifferent to whether you win or lose.

Possibility (C) Hall knows and wants you to win.

Possibility (D) Hall knows and wants you to lose.

If (A), then the revealing of a goat moves the odds to 50/50 for the remaining doors, and therefore switching neither helps nor hurts.

However, this is where "pure" game theory needs some richer sociological context. In our culture it would be a very strange game show in which the host didn't know what was behind the doors, and therefore might accidentally reveal the car. So as a practical matter the contestant can probably rule out (A) as an actual possibility. In any case, the sum probabilities created by (B), (C), and (D) remain dispositive, since (A) would leave the contestant indifferent to switching or staying, i.e., whether you estimate the odds of (A) being the case as 1% or 99% makes no difference -- the only thing that matters are the odds governing the other possibilities.

Moving right along, if (B) is the case, then as long as you assume he's not going to choose to show you a car, which given the rules of game shows is a pretty safe assumption, we're right back to the classic description of the problem, and you double your odds of winning by switching.

If (C) is the case, then deciding whether to switch comes down to your estimate of Hall's assumptions regarding your mental state. Maybe you've chosen the goat, and because he wants you to win he's giving you additonal information that, if you both understand the probability structure and that he wants you to win, tells you to switch. But here's a disturbing possibility: maybe you've chosen the car and he wants you to win, but he's showing you a goat precisely because he believes that if he does so he'll encourage you not to switch, because like most people you'd get the probabilities wrong under the classic assumptions of the game's rules, and it's more likely you'll choose to stay than switch because of endowment effects or sheer stubborness. Remember you don't know the rules -- you don't know whether he even has to open one of the other doors. The analysis is the same for (D) but reversed.

Ultimately if you don't know the rules of game, you have to make two separate judgments: what are the probabilities that (B), (C) and (D) are the case, and what are the probabilities within each of those possibilities? Those two estimates then determine whether to switch or stay, since (A) leaves you indifferent.

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In that moment, I knew I'd be accused of sexual harassment again.

Two of the "acquire an alternative skill set with real world application" assignments that we teach in composition are 1) how to build and manage a wiki and 2) how to compose a PowerPoint presentation that doesn't cause your audience to slit your throat or their wrists. I combine them into a single assignment in which students choose the text they found most compelling, develop a wiki based upon its rhetorical situation (author/auteur, historical context, themes, signature features, symbols and motifs, etc.) and then share their results with the class. On Tuesday, I stressed that their presentation must not consist of reading their wiki aloud (by virtue of emphasizing the difference in media, e.g. "How do you speak a link?") and we discussed strategies they can employ to prevent us from mass-suiciding on Thursday.

Yesterday, midway through an already engaging presentation, one of my students paused during her discussion of the contextual allusions present in her text.

"Also," she said as she made to forward her presentation, "I think there's an allusion to tentacle porn."

The class gasped.

Her mouse clicked.

I sat mute. Horrified into silence.

Time dilated as we approached the horizon of this career-ending event. I held that diphthong in "Wait!" so long it slid into a schwa.

Her mouse clicked again.

The screen brightened and . . .

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