A Week In: How's It Going?

You may recall my whining a week ago about suddenly being surprised with a BYUI teaching contract this semester. How are things going? That is the tale I am about to tell.

It's . . . okay. I'd still rather have the semester off. However, as I mentioned previously the money is welcome. And I do have a refreshing mix of students, most of whom appear to be concurrent enrollment students who are also in high school. They tend to be pretty motivated individuals, which always helps.

Not that my other students aren't motivated. Maybe motivated and surrounded by privilege is the better way to put it. And not in a bad way. They just don't have the struggles that my typical mix of students have.

Trying not to put too much detail in there, I guess . . .

I have spent two long evenings this week with student conferences, something I really did not want to do. But I've put on the stiff upper lip and done it. I have more to do Friday and Saturday, but I can see the end of them now. I also gave myself a break Tuesday and Thursday, so I'm not doing them every day this week. That meant more piled into Monday and Wednesday, but it was worth it.

WHAT KIND OF FRIEND ARE YOU!

As some of you may know, in addition to my full-time job I teach online English at BYU-Idaho.

Last month, with enrollment looking to be lower than expected, I was offered a Level Three contract for this semester, meaning the chance of getting a contract wasn't likely.

I happened to check my email round about noon and saw I had a "contract update" from the powers that be, changing that Level Three to a Level One, meaning I most certainly have a class.

Semester starts today. Guess who isn't prepared, nor as of yet doesn't even has a class in Canvas to prepare?

And I already have students asking if I can add them to the class.

The inmates are running the asylum.

I have put in a call to Online Scheduling to find out what the poop is.

Further updates will arrive as events warrant.

UPDATE 1: I have been able to email my students to let them know I am aware I have a class but that I can't access it yet. They may not be able to access it yet either, so we're likely in the same boat. Any deadlines for this week will be shifted accordingly.

UPDATE 2: My wife, on learning the news, says with the extra cash I can buy the new desktop computer I've been thinking about. The one I have is Windowsn 10 and can't be updated to Windows 11, and Windows 10 support ends in a few months.

UPDATE 3: I'm in. Class count has continued to increase, from 16 to 22. The cap is 25, which I expect I may have reached since I checked last night.

UPDATE 4: Yup. Hit the cap.

Okay, Now Talk to Me

NOTE: I shared this with my students today, hoping to show them how dialogue, even if it has to be contrived a bit, helps bring readers into their writing.

I remember this happening:

My brother and I loved to ride our bikes through the industrial park and vacant lots next to our home. The road was lightly-traveled, so we could weave all we wanted on our bikes, or dart into the vacant lots to bounce along the dirt trails. One day we decided to take a longer route, and at one point I hollered we should race. I was in the lead, but my brother is pretty fast on his bicycle, so quickly took the lead.

Our route led us through the parking lot of an abandoned RV dealership, a construction office and then past a looming, two-story concrete building that jutted out of line of the others, concealing a business that engraved gravestones right on the corner where we turned for home.

The parking lot leading to the two story building was rough, so as I raced to catch my brother, I was more interested in watching the bumps so I wouldn't crash. I rounded the corner, shot past the gravestones then barreled the few hundred yards to the house and came to a halt in the garage.

My brother wasn't there.

Odd. He'd been ahead of me. Maybe he went inside? But his bike wasn't there either. I waited a few minutes then rode off in search of him, retracing our route. Maybe he found something interesting to do I was missing out on.

When I went around the corner of the two-story building, I saw him lying on the ground, partly underneath his bicycle, moaning a bit. When he heard me he looked up and said he'd been looking over his shoulder to see how far behind I was, then turned around just in time to see he was about to hit the building. He laid his bike out and only got a scraped hand. I don't know how I missed it all, unless I was too busy looking at the rough parking lot to hear the crash.

I like to think this is pretty vivid. There's a lot of detail here. But there's something missing. I'm going to try again.

My brother and I loved to ride our bikes through the industrial park and vacant lots next to our home. The road was lightly-traveled, so we could weave all we wanted on our bikes, or dart into the vacant lots to bounce along the dirt trails. One day we decided to take a longer route, and at one point I hollered "Hey, let's race!"

"No fair! You're already ahead!" he yelled. But I laughed and pedaled faster.

I had to. I was in the lead, but my brother is pretty fast on his bike.

"See you, loser!" he shouted as he passed.

Not fair.

Our route led us through the parking lot of an abandoned RV dealership, a construction office and then past a looming, two-story concrete building that jutted out of line of the others, concealing a business that engraved gravestones right on the corner where we turned for home.

The parking lot leading to the two story building was rough, so as I raced to catch my brother, I was more interested in watching the bumps so I wouldn't crash. I rounded the corner, shot past the gravestones then barreled the few hundred yards to the house and came to a halt in the garage.

My brother wasn't there.

Odd. He'd been ahead of me. Maybe he went inside? I hollered through the back door to the house: "Randy! You there?" I got silence. But his bike wasn't there either. I waited a few minutes then rode off in search of him, retracing our route. Maybe he found something interesting to do I was missing out on.

When I went around the corner of the two-story building, I saw him lying on the ground, partly underneath his bicycle, moaning a bit. When he heard me he looked up. "I was watching you, over my shoulder, to see how far behind you were. Then I turned my head and that building was there." He laid his bike out and only got a scraped hand, rather than crashing into the building. Lucky.

"I don't know how I missed it," I said. "Maybe I was looking at the parking lot. Didn't hear you crash."

Again, this is vivid, I think. But hearing my brother and I talk -- that adds another dimension. I hope it helps draw you into the story more deeply.

Try that with your stories.

Are these quotes 100% accurate? Probably not. I remember what happened and in a general sense the things we said to each other, but I can't guarantee what I've recreated here is 100% accurate to what was said.

But that doesn't matter. I'm recreating a story from my own life, and as long as I try to be faithful to the memories I'm recreating, 100% accuracy doesn't matter.

What does matter is using the conversation to help draw the reader into the story. Hearing the words, rather than merely being told something like that was said, strips away a barrier between the writer and the reader and helps both be present at the same time.

A favorite example of this from real life is from Wilson Rawls' "Where the Red Fern Grows." Rawls writes in the introduction to the book:

[This as yet unnamed person has spotted a dogfight, and is wading in to stop it.]

Taking off my coat, I wandered in. My yelling and scolding didn't have much effect, but the swinging coat did. The dogs scattered and left.

Down on my knees, I peered back under the hedge. The hound was still mad. He growled at me and showed his teeth. I knew it wasn't his nature to fight a man.

In a soft voice I started talking to him. "Come on, boy," I said. "It's all right. I'm your friend. Come out now."

The fighting fire slowly left his eyes. He bowed his head and his long red tail started thumping the ground. I kept coaxing. On his stomach, an inch at a time, he came to me and laid his head in my hand.

Rawls uses the quoted phrases in this instance to bring verisimilitude to this scene. He could have continued simply to narrate, but hearing the words, particularly in context with the violent dogfight he describes earlier, helps bring the story from a frenzy to a calmer state. Is this likely 100% accurate to what he said in this instance, or is it more likely that he says something similar when he stops any dogfight? Probably the latter. But hearing the words acts as a calming brake to this scene.

I challenge you, as you write your stories, to look for ways you can use quoted words to help connect your readers to what you're writing. Because I guarantee when I read that quote, I too am calmed. It sends the message he's done this before, he loves dogs, he wants to make a friend. It's a big message sent in a few compact phrases.

Try this out in your writing. It can be powerful.

Connecting with Connectivism

If Wikipedia is to be believed, connectivism “is a theory of learning based on the premise that knowledge exists in the world rather than in the head of an individual.”

Tyler’s made it our challenge to get to know connectivism on a personal basis and consider how we might revise (again, no wholeseale revisions, just tweaking) our teaching approach.

I don’t like to rely on Wikipedia for a definition, but at least Wikipedia offers a clear one. George Siemens, in “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age,” offers a choppy definition of connectivism, one that occurs “within nebulous environments of shifting core elements,” much as he describes the learning process: “Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories.”

So I have to break down his definition:

Chaos he defines as “The breakdown of predictability, evidenced in complicated arrangements that initially defy order.”

Network he defines as “connections between entities.”

Complexity he defines as, well, he doesn’t really define it.

And finally, he defines self-organization as “spontaneous formation of well organized structures, patterns, or behaviors, from random initial conditions.”

So if I understand his terms correctly, he believes connectivism is learning defined by the breakdown of predictability that is navigated through connections between entities – and those entities can include the self, peers, instructors, and the knowledge that exists in the world rather than in the head of the individual – who spontaneously (and in some cases collectively) form a well-organized structure from the random collection of knowledge and entities they encounter.

I admit to a few assumptions and assimilations going into that redefinition, as I am in fact applying connectivism in trying to synthesize a definition of the term that I can understand. I also throw in an implied definition of complexity, which Siemens leaves undefined.

As I read more about connectivism, two things immediately come to mind.

First, is Nicholas Carr’s infamous 2008 piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” as printed in the July/August edition of The Atlantic magazine. In his article, Carr laments (to much criticism and scorn, I admit, though much of that criticism is short-sighted) that the growing reliance on information outside our heads – absent a deep synthesis of said information – is not, for many of us, converting that information into knowledge. He writes:

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

Carr concedes that the Internet is likely to have as profoundly positive effects on knowledge and ideas as did the written word and the printing press, saying, “[Y]es, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.” What he laments is that the “efficiency and immediacy” of information we find on the net – and anywhere outside our own skulls – “may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, [developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf] says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”

Of course, we’re all “mere decoders” of information until we have read and acted upon that information enough that it becomes internal – I can’t call ‘stuff’ that exists outside my own head “knowledge” because, to me, knowledge implies that I understand the information I am taking in.

That brings up the second thing that came to mind as I read about connectivism.

I’m currently reading “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,” by Richard Rhodes. In this book, Rhodes follows the development of the hydrogen bomb in the United States and the Soviet Union in the years immediately following World War II. Interestingly, Rhodes chooses to begin the story with an in-depth analysis of how the Soviet Union used intellectual theft of American and British atomic bomb and nuclear reactor theory and development to supplement its own research efforts. The Russian atomic theorists eagerly read and absorbed what the nation’s spies were feeding them. But to ensure that the information they were being fed was correct (both theoretically and correct by way of not being misleading because the United States knew they were being spied on and thus were feeding the spies incorrect information), they had to test every theory, every equation, ever assumption that came their way. They did indeed exist in a connectivist world, navigating through connections between entities who spontaneously (and in some cases collectively) form a well-organized structure from the random collection of knowledge and entities they encounter.

So it is not, as Siemens says, “the pipe is more important than the content within the pipe.” Whether we get information from the Internet, from books, from the written word, or whether we acquire our information through legal channels or through intellectual theft (though here, ethics come into play, but that is not part of this discussion) it doesn’t matter. What matters is how we act upon the information we receive, and how we synthesize that information into knowledge. We can mindlessly continue to consume information and have our brains function on only a rudimentary level as we read, knowing full well that since that information exists out there, somewhere we can almost immediately find it again, that retaining that information or synthesizing it beyond the point that the assignment we needed it for is complete as Carr fears, or we can, as the Russians did, use connectivist ideals to acquire information but then rigorously test it and convert it from information to knowledge. Both of these approaches can exist within the networks, organizations, and institutions that Siemens believes are powerful repositories of knowledge – but until the individual realizes, as Siemens points out, that he or she is the starting point of connectivism, all those connections, that information outside the head, mean absolutely nothing.

It is not, either, as Siemens says, that “we can not longer personally experience and acquire learning that we need to act.” If the individual, residing within a network where connections to information exist aplenty, does nothing to activate those connections and to convert that information into knowledge, it is the fault of the individual, not of the network, the information, nor of the conduit by which those networks or information are provided.

That is what I need to change in my teaching approach: Activating that individual responsibility to go beyond what is the bare-bones necessity. I’ve seen some of my students exercise that ability – I did nothing to ignite it in them; they have done so previously, and are thus reaping the benefits of working within their small FDENG101 networks to complete their group assignments this week. Others, however, have not had that individual to connectivist spark ignited, and are floundering. They have floundered all along, not taking advantage of the connections they can have with their peers in class. Perhaps I have failed them in not helping them find that spark that moves them from the individual to the connectivist.

Snapping My Underwear

This just doesn't bode well.

When this week started, I had no classes to teach at BYU-Idaho. Midweek, I had two. Now, I'm just not sure, and I'm starting to get a small collection of emails form confused students who aren't so sure either.

Part of our "preflight checklist" in getting ready for our courses to begin includes sending an email to our students, introducing the course and letting them know what to expect. Thusfar, I've received four replies from some gently confused students who were convinced they'd signed up for a classroom version of this English course.

So confusion reigns.

I've contacted the powers that be to find out what's supposed to be going on, and, as a precaution, told these students that they should attend their physical classroom unless they hear otherwise.

This makes me nervous, because of the possibility that I'm going to wind up with a classroom full of disgruntled students who were counting on a physical classroom but have instead been shunted into an online course. Not that an online course is all that bad -- but it's not what they were expecting. Not what I'm expecting either -- I don't think it's fair to my students or me to suddenly plop them into an online course without letting them know. I hope that hasn't happened, and that we're just dealing with crossed wires in the registration system.

I've emailed the teacher they say they're supposed to have, so she can help deshambleize.

But I'm going to be doing some nail-biting over the weekend, nonetheless.

. . . Et Il se Casse le Guele

Once again, I am a teacher without students. I don’t mind saying it’s frustrating (given this) that with three semesters now passed I still have yet to teach at BYU-Idaho.

So as I play some German music in the background (because it is introspective and I want to introspect) I have to wonder: Am I doing something wrong? As far as that navel-contemplation goes, I think I am only guilty of the sin of inexperience. If there were something in my background that would put the mark on my face, I would have assumed I would have not been invited through instructor training or been shown the virtual door. But I’m still in the system, studentless, adrift, and bereft of any hope that I might be invited to teach any time soon.

I had high hopes a few months ago when I got the e-mail asking teachers to sign up for additional sections because they anticipated demand would be higher this semester. Then a bunch of the instructor sin line ahead of me also signed up for additional sections and I couldn’t even catch a trickle. I begin to get the feeling I can’t even catch a cold in this fashion.