Onechan-sensei

So the other day on the ride back from school/day care, with both girls in car seats in the back, out of the blue onechan tries to teach imoto about the best way to cover your mouth when you sneeze, a fitting topic as both have been dealing with the sniffles for about two weeks now. She carefully explained how it's better to sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands, as you can pass along germs to other people much more easily the latter way. I reminded her about it this morning accidentally when I was telling the tsuma this story, and she proceeded to repeat the lesson, complete with the big idea, the rationale, a demonstration, and an attempt to move imoto's arm in the prescribed manner (this last part didn't go over so well). It's good to see she's learning something useful (about teaching as well as avoiding pandemics) at her hoikuen. As the elder child, I've followed in my dad's footsteps profession-wise. Now I'm wondering if onechan is predisposed to be a professor, too. I don't know whether to be proud or worried.

On Blogging and Teaching

Teaching Tuesdays have been few and far between, not to mention short and anything but sweet. It's not for lack of topics but for lack of time. Well, not just that. It's more like one of my friends was saying about the announcers in the final minutes of the Bills' heartbreaking loss to Dallas: "Just shut up! Stop saying it's over! Don't jinx us!" It's not like I've been pitching no-hitters in all my classes, but somehow it feels like to blog about any aspect of them or to begin to reflect on the effects of the Fulbright experience on my teaching in the States or on similarities and differences between my Fukuoka and my Fredonia students would be to jeopardize a streak of some sort. But I think it would be all right to suggest that my blogging here at CitizenSE while I was in Japan was a way for me to process all the reading and research I was doing to prepare for my all-new preps there, whereas this semester I've basically been teaching modified versions of familiar courses that incorporate a lot of the ideas I processed in Japan. So I don't need to blog as much here on teaching-related matters because I did so much of that during the past winter, spring, and summer.

But I do have an onechan-related teaching story for y'all. With the tsuma taking courses twice a week and working at UB three times a week this semester, I'm now dropping the girls off at and picking them up from day care, as well as getting dinner started. When the girls get tired of entertaining each other and begin to bug me while I'm trying to get organized to begin doing something resembling "cooking," I give them a snack or a drink. But only certain kinds of things--nothing sweet, for instance. The tsuma and I have been trying to drill into onechan's head that you can only have dessert after you've eaten enough real food--stuff with protein so you grow big and strong, or things with vitamins so your hair grows long long long. (Yes, those things motivate her, even if she can't pronounce vitamins exactly right yet.) But onechan has a real sweet tooth (thanks to me, I guess), so despite our efforts she's always asking if she can have some forbidden item before dinner, and we're always saying no. For some reason, this evening when I was in the middle of getting ready to cook, she asked if she could have a Peco-chan candy right then, and I told her, "sure, but if you have it now you can't have one for dessert." I guess I was curious to see what kind of choice she'd make. Well, she got the funniest look on her face--kind of shocked and horrified and suspicious and tempted all at once--paused for awhile, and finally replied in a kind of scandalized tone of voice, "Daddy, I'm going to wait. You should eat real food first." Then she went off on this long soliloquy about how ashita (tomorrow) she was going to have Peco-chan candy for dessert, too. I think she couldn't believe I had forgotten the house rule and wanted to make sure I would give her credit for correcting me. Anyway, it was one of those moments when you feel completely ratified as a teacher--"she gets it! she actually gets it!" Nice.

I should note that in fact she motored through three servings of dinner--macaroni and cheese, yellow rice, and steamed fresh green beans (hey, I never said I was agood cook!)--just so she could get to dessert, but when the time finally came she decided to have a lollipop instead of the Peco-chan candy. Then she topped it off with some apple sauce, because "it's good for you, daddy." Probably she's right, as this was home-made stuff she and imoto made at imoto's day care out of the fresh apples they were too sick to pick on Columbus Day.

Kid-Free Family Friday (Almost)

My dad has landed a pretty cool gig. The tsuma knows Michel Foucault's social security number. Moral of the story: interesting things come your way when you follow what you love. For him, it's sports and philosophy (not always in that order); for her, it's libraries and archives.

P.S.--OK, one kid thing: imoto is now following onechan's exercise program...on one of her bedposts, about 3 feet in the air. Now we can't leave the two girls alone in onechan's bedroom. I wonder when imoto will get a sense of danger.

P.P.S.--Well, one more: onechan is starting to tell some pretty surreal stories. Like the time in the car this past week when, fed up with missing all the animal carcasses on and to the sides of the local roads we've been driving on lately, she started telling us a story about a kaba (hippo), no, wait, a mama and a baby, who jumped over the car on their way to a really big puddle--but you missed them, daddy. Well, yeah.

Who Wants to Be a Tenure-Track Professor? Part I: The Letter

Not everyone does, first of all. But as that's a personal preference--and likely a temporary one, at that, as long as life off the tenure track in the U.S. is less like a Fulbright Lecturing Grant in Japan and more like what non-Japanese adjuncts go through there--I'll focus today (and in this CitizenSE series) on the search for a tenure-track job in my field, English. Since every discipline is different, this'll only be of interest to people outside English for comparative purposes, and even for people in English it'll be most useful for those contemplating applying for a job at an institution like mine, a public regional university. Bardiac has a series going already on this exact topic, while Tenured Radical provides an instructive contrast from the liberal arts college side. (I'm looking forward to The Little Professor, Dr. Crazy [now that her book manuscript is done], and Dr. Virago [now that she's decided not to go on the market herself] also picking up on it). But for what it's worth, here's advice on the application letter from a recently-tenured professor who's been closely involved a good number of searches in his first decade on the job.

Should you write it in the first place? You don't have to apply for every job in your field. In fact, fresh out of grad school you shouldn't even apply for a job with a heavy teaching load--4/3 or higher is pretty much the norm in the public "satellites"--unless you love teaching, can speak and write cogently about your experience and approaches, and can realistically finish the dissertation before you start the job. Or unless there's something about the school and/or the location that make that job too attractive not to take a shot at it before it's snapped up. Keep in mind you'll be going up against people struggling to escape the adjunct track or another tenure-track job/place. Unless you can seriously imagine yourself living and working there, save yourself the time, money, and anxiety and focus on the jobs you care the most about.

Do your research. It took me three searches before I landed a tenure-track job. For all of them, even the last one, I was mostly focused on Research I universities and liberal arts colleges, at which I was getting to the MLA interview stage at a decent rate but no further. My three on-campus visits (the first during the second search) were all at public satellites, so by the last one, I kind of figured out how to handle myself in them, and lo and behold, that's the one that resulted in an offer. The irony is that even though the school that hired me was in my home state, I had never heard of it before I saw their job ad. So I actually had done a fairly serious amount of research on the place to help me decide whether to apply in the first place. Which brings me around to the point of this paragraph. Since the "academic job market" has gotten even more competitive while information about universities and departments has become so much easier to get over the past decade, it's imperative to figure out something about your audience before you customize your standard letter. And if you aren't motivated to customize your letter, maybe you shouldn't be applying to a school you've never heard of in the first place.... I can't tell you how many letters by people from top-notch grad programs ended up in the reject bin over the past ten years b/c they were obviously composed with a much different kind of institution than ours in mind--but it's a big number. And an hour or two of research could have made the difference for a lot of these people.

OK, so given how unknowable your actual audience is, how do you customize your letter? It's true, at most a few people from the personnel committee will be reading your letter the first time around, although if it's good everyone will eventually have read it, as will those interviewing you at MLA (several of whom are likely not to be on the personnel committee). The literature searches I've been closely involved in all involved hundreds of applicants, too many for any one person to read. So we would try to ensure that each letter had two sets of eyes on it, and three if there was a serious disagreement between the original pair. In practice, however, unless the letter and c.v. screamed "top candidate," it was unlikely to survive the first cut--narrowing the several hundred down to the 25-50 top candidates for the 8-12 MLA interview slots. In some searches, we asked for a full dossier--evidence of teaching effectiveness, a writing sample, letters of recommendation, and sometimes more--from this pool. Other times, we asked for less. More on that stage later--the key issue now is how to increase the likelihood that your letter makes the first cut. Well, this is where your research on the school/department comes in.

• Clearly you're applying to a teaching institution, so make the case from the start that you're ready to step right in and step up as a teacher. If you must discuss your research early, do so in a way that sets up your teaching paragraph well. A bit on your overall approach (to course design as well as pedagogy) is fine, but well-chosen specifics (like teaching awards, experience with designing your own courses, patterns in your teaching evaluations, the kinds of courses you're looking forward to designing at the school) can help show the personnel committee that you've thought seriously about what you can contribute to the department.
  
• From looking at the list of faculty and their teaching and research interests, you can make a quick approximation as to what kind of search this is: augmenting a department strength, filling a "coverage" gap or otherwise balancing or diversifying the department, moving the department in a new direction entirely.... You can also get a rough sense of how much hiring they've been able to do in the previous decade. The key thing to look for is how many colleagues in your fields and sub-fields you can expect to have, not least as a quick estimate of the likelihood that the personnel committee will have anyone in them on it. Reminding yourself that you're writing for non-specialists will do you a world of good--not just in describing your research and suggesting how it matters, but also in framing your teaching and the kinds of courses you could (and most want to) offer. This will also come in handy as you decide what other material to send the school and prepare for the MLA interview (if all goes well).
  
• You can also learn a lot by looking at the requirements of the major and whatever course descriptions you can find (online syllabi, catalog, etc.). Does everyone teach comp regularly or occasionally? What kinds of introductory-level courses would you be expected to teach and how are they organized--as introductions to the discipline, surveys of British and American lit, genre-based world literature courses, criticism- or theory-or "teaching the conflicts"-based courses, or what? On a 4/3, you'll get plenty of opportunities to teach in your specialties, but you'll also be pitching in on the required courses. If the catalog tells you how often the department's courses are supposed to be offered, it'll also give you a pretty good sense of where faculty and student interests lie at that school.
  

OK, so I know something about the place, the school, faculty, and department...is there anything else I can do to show my interest in a place besides customizing my teaching and research paragraphs? Yeah, since capital-starved institutions--and you can bet that public regional universities fit this bill--rely so much on adjunct labor, the service responsibilities on tenured and tenure-track faculty are very high. So any experience you have in helping create or sustain or improve an academic institution is worth describing. Also, your last paragraph is a good place to drop any hints you feel need to be dropped. Often faculty at public satellites (especially older ones not familiar with any job market since the 1970s) are wondering (with various levels of anxiety, self-deprecation, paranoia, and cynicism) why you are applying for the position in the first place. If you can close with any honest and specific answers to this question, do it.

When we're reading letters and c.v.s, we're not just judging the quality of the candidates in the abstract, we're also trying to figure out how seriously they're interested in us and what kind of colleagues they'd be. We don't want to waste an MLA interview on someone for whom we're just a "safety school" or a "practice run." We want to be in a position where we'd be excited to work with any of the MLA interviewees. Given how much time and energy goes into the search on our side, we don't want a failed search. And given that we're competing with other teaching institutions and often research institutions for our top candidates, we have to be prepared to move down our list quickly if our first offer gets turned down. While a great letter alone won't get you in our top 10ish, it can either open or close the door. Taking the extra three hours to research us and revise your standard letter accordingly is time well-spent. And if you think otherwise, it's better not to send the letter at all.

[Update (10/21/07): undine has joined in.]

Sister Acts

I only have one younger brother and no other siblings, so I'm familiar with a certain kind of brotherly dynamic. The tsuma only has one older sister and no other siblings, so I'm pretty dependent on her experience to figure out what to expect from onechan and imoto as they grow up. What I'm looking for from Blogoramaville are a broader set of perspectives. Feel free to respond any time.

Imoto is almost a year and a half and onechan will be four at the end of the year, so we've already been living in interesting times, so to speak. Not so long ago, Imoto got jealous of our watching a home video from the first month of onechan's life for the first time since she was born. At times, it seems as if onechan is the "m" and imoto the "s" in a sadomasochistic relationship. We've drilled "don't hurt the baby!" so successfully into onechan's head that lately I've been sounding like a self-defense instructor: "Don't just lie there crying! She'll only keep pulling your hair!" Overall, of course, they love each other to death, and there's nothing cuter than listening to onechan chatter away in cutesy Japanese when she's trying to teach imoto something or convince her to do something. We're even beginning to feel comfortable letting them play alone together in another room for a half an hour at a time (or until the screaming reaches a certain pitch, whichever comes first), relatively confident that the metaphor in the previous sentence will remain merely metaphorical.

It's just that as an imoto herself, the tsuma tends to see things from imoto's perspective more easily than from onechan's. As an onichan, I suppose I do the opposite, although of course it's easier to see when someone else is doing it. So if we can just get enough descriptions of sister acts from the netizens of Blogoramaville, we might be able to temper our natural sibling biases enough to...I don't know, be better parents? That seems a little ambitious, doesn't it? Just give us some good stories and we'll be satisfied.

Congratulations, 5000th Visitor

You get the chance to continue writing for the obscurest blog on teh internets!

Notes Toward a Prolegomenon To All Future Golf/Academia Analogies

Scott Eric "The Red" (of eye, in the public eye, or at least that portion of it directed his way by KC Johnson!) Kaufman kicked it off. All the many people who have written glowing encomiums to and analyses of C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary moved the ball down the field. So you only have them to blame for the following series of plays I'm calling here. (The football epic simile is all my own.)

So what do golf/academia analogies have to do with teaching? Thanks for asking!

Way back when in Andrew Ross's Cultural Studies course in grad school my best friend and I did a teaching presentation on Beyond a Boundary. I hope it was more memorable to the class than it has turned out to be to me or my computers or my bookshelves, as I can't find any trace of it anywhere. But once, I'm certain, I did attempt to teach cricket to someone. Ross must have found it hilarious.

Which is the scenic route to my point: if you want a cricket critic, I am not your man. Nor am I trying to do for golf blogging what C.L.R. James did for cricket criticism. (Insert appropriate Zaphod Beeblebrox quotation here.) But I will try to convince you we can learn something from analogizing the academy through golf. So long as you provide the "something," no one will get hurt.

Grad School:Q-School. This one writes itself. Q-School, for those who don't know it, is a 6-round ordeal which only the top x in the field advance through to qualify for the top professional tour in the U.S.--PGA for men, LPGA for women. Of course, to even get into Q-School, you need to qualify. So your entire amateur career is like your primary and secondary schooling, undergrad is like the sectional qualifiers for Q-School, the pre-dissertation phase consists of the first 4 rounds of Q-School itself, the dissertation is the 5th, and the job search is the 6th. So you can end up with exempt status on the big tour (tenure-track job) or become a non-exempt tour member (off the tenure track) or not (try again next year or play on the Nationwide/Futures/Hooters Tour--more TAing or maybe community college adjuncting). The analogy breaks down a bit with that last option, as you figuratively have to start over at the undergrad level if you have a bad 6th round at Q-School. And actually a flaw creeps in before then, because you can get a job before you finish your dissertation, which would be something like the LPGA saying, "Well, you can finish your 5th round later, because the other 5 out of 6 were so good you're practically guaranteed of getting exempt status. Just try to get it in during your rookie year sometime." But otherwise it's a damn fine analogy. If you think playing center field is tough, try the last two rounds of Q-School.

Money List on PGA/LPGA:Renewal Process for Pre-Tenure Faculty. This one almost writes itself. If you don't make the top 90 on the money list in a given year on the LPGA Tour, you lose your exempt status; it's top 125 for the PGA. The higher you get on the money list, the more exempt you get (longer exemptions, more invitations to limited-field tournaments). And if you win a tournament, you get an even longer exemption. So losing your card is like losing your job (but at least you get to skip to the last round of Q-School!), doing well enough to be put up for a two- or three-year renewal by your department rather than staying to an annual schedule and to begin getting invited to give talks at conferences and public fora is like getting into the top 40 or whatever on the money list, and publishing your book is like winning a tournament. Now, there's really no tenure on either tour, so the analogy kind of breaks down there, but most professional careers don't last 7 years, anyway, so let's ignore that problem and move on to the next analogy.

Your Individual Career:A 72-Hole Tournament. What I like about this analogy is that it brings out how academia is unlike most sports, in that you should get better with age, and the stakes get higher the further you go. Break your academic career down into 9-year segments and make each segment equivalent to one round in a tournament consisting of four such beasties. Grad school and any relevant experience before it is the first round; pre-tenure is the second (assuming most people these days start out with some sort of adjuncting or visiting experience before getting on the tenure track); then comes the cut (only the top 70 plus ties in a 120-to-144-player field usually move on for the final two rounds--quite a bit harsher than the overall tenure rate in the U.S. each year, I'll hazard a guess); then the last two rounds are where you're going for the win, coasting to retirement, or something in between (a WD is ok, but make sure you don't do something that'll get you DQed). By this count, I'm already in the weekend of my academic career. They call Saturday "moving day," because it's the time when the lead pack pulls away from the field. So if each academic year is the equivalent of 2 holes (yes, I chose the length of my segments carefully), I'd better start making some birdies.

Course:Institution. Some courses are tougher and/or more prestigious than others. The tournament organizers might want to set the course up even tougher than usual or they might want a birdie-fest. So how high the rough is, how narrow the fairways are cut, how fast the greens are running, how close to trouble the pins are placed, and a million other factors--including the weather--determine how difficult a particular course will be playing, above and beyond the course architecture/layout. So make the tenured faculty, administrators, and trustees of a college or university the tournament organizers, the taxpayers, alumni, and other donors the tournament sponsors and course owners, the students, parents, legislators, and others who affect the conditions of teaching and research the weather, and the tenure-track professors the humble players trying to figure out where the birdie holes are and how to survive the monster holes and howling winds. So while this analogy, when combined with the previous one, assumes you stay at one institution your entire career, it's otherwise pretty good.

Stats:Assessment. Moneyball magpies and fantasy football freaks may think they've got the market cornered on which stats matter the most in determining player quality/value, and they've certainly got a point that on its face it's tougher to do this for a team sport than an individual sport like golf, but, face it, people, golfers and golf fans are the nerdiest stats people of all--been tracking stats, arguing over which matter the most, and using them to develop and tweak player ranking systems for much much longer and better than anyone else. Players themselves try to "close the loop" by looking at outcomes to figure out where to improve their games. I don't quite know what greens in regulation percentage, scrambling percentage, birdies per round, scoring average, majors and other wins, top 3s, top 10s, and annual and career money lists are equivalent to in academia, but if I had more time, I'd flesh out that analogy at both individual and institutional levels.

Some other time. In the meantime, feel free to propose further analogical possibilities in comments.

Onechan Has a Few Questions for Blogoramaville

Last night the topic of technology came up somehow and in the process of offering onechan a working definition ("technology is something people make to get something done") and examples ("a pencil is writing technology," "a crayon is drawing technology"), she not only came up with good examples of her own ("a toilet," "a computer," "a sink"), but also threw me for a loop with some others that I've taken the liberty of turning into questions for Blogoramaville:

1. Is food a technology? At first I was going to answer that the means of growing, raising, and preparing food were technologies, but food itself wasn't. But then I thought of the way corn (right?) was at first inedible in its naturally occurring varieties, and early humans in the Americas (right?) actually bred those varieties together and made it edible (where's Jared Diamond when you need him? oh yeah, in one of those boxes from Japan I never unpacked....). Then I thought of genetically engineered foods. So, Blogoramaville, what say ye? Is corn a technology? What about the genetically-engineered food itself (as opposed to the technologies used to make it)?

2. Are people a technology? I asked onechan how people get made, and she paused for a long time, and finally said, "Byoin." Once I got over my disappointment that she didn't come up with "aliens" and satisfaction that whatever Baptist training she got at her yochien didn't stick enough for her to answer "Kamisama" (God), I started thinking about her actual answer. Now, I might be willing to concede that hospitals are a people-making technology, in the senses they help babies get born and with the caveat that I didn't really want to get into exactly how people are made with her. But the idea that byoin make people threw me for a loop until I started wondering about genetic engineering again--in that sense, could people make people for certain purposes, and would those people then be technology? Now I've been thinking about human institutions like the family and slavery and the corporation.... Blogoramaville, what say ye?

Inquiring toddlers want to know!

Toddlers Gone Wild

So it's somehow fitting that just as I'm reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, which is a funny take on familial embarrassings, imoto decided to show me what it's all about. At this semester's Women's Studies symposium the other day, she got it into her head to head for the podium, try to stare down the speaker (a new colleague who specializes in 19th C American women writers), and then toddle off, yanking off her tank top as she went. As there were only about, oh, 20 people out of the 50 there with an angle to see her doing this, it wasn't so bad, but by the third time she tried it (yeah, I kept bringing her back in the room after wrestling her shirt back on in the hallway--victory of hope over experience, fine line between bravery and stupidity and all that), pretty much everyone had checked out her belly button.

So was this as embarrassing as onechan's love of "exercise," which entails finding the nearest pole-like object (it started as the kitchen table leg in our apartment in Fukuoka, but quickly graduated onto many other tall, thin, cylindrical things) and kind of, well, embracing it, suspending herself above the ground for as long she can? Well, yeah, except for the time at the wedding of one of the tsuma's best friends a few weeks ago when onechan found a pole holding up a tent covering the outdoor dance floor and proceeded to get her exercise in front of, oh, about half the guests at this very big post-wedding dinner.

Clearly imoto was just hot and onechan wants a strong upper body so she can climb to the top of any playground structure whenever she feels like it, but to be on the safe side I'm brainstorming ways to talk them out of exotic dancing as a career path. Just in case.

On Leaving Academia

For those wondering what life after leaving the tenure-track can look like, I'll briefly note that one of my best friends who did this is working on an investigative documentary TV series that just won an Emmy for this episode. Watch them all!

Hump Day

We've switched our monthly department meetings to Wednesdays from noon to one, away from the usual Friday from three to whenever slot. Today's our second meeting and I can already report that I'm liking it. Somehow the week seems more than halfway over already.

Speaking of Storytelling...

What kind of mental state do you have to be in to believe that the consequences of doing this won't be worse than just taking the damn test?

Maybe I should be assigning "Fancy's Show Box" in my Postcolonial Hawthorne class to help my students deal with the trauma of getting an afternoon off on a nice sunny day. We've already read "Young Goodman Brown," which seems relevant in a different way.

Onechan's a Storyteller

Already. Just don't be taken in when she says with a straight face that her imoto is solely responsible for the mess in the playroom or just pulled her hair! (She's going to have to learn to stop lying to her mom eventually, right?) After telling her I played great for the first time in a long time in the faculty noon-time basketball games I've been joining fairly regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays since I returned from Fukuoka, onechan regaled me with a long story about how she played basketball, volleyball, and soccer with her sensei and tomodachi at the Fredonia hoikuen yesterday--and even "all by myself." I don't know what Plato or Zora Neale Hurston would say, but I'm certainly enjoying her stories.... And no, the fact that she painted me my birthday present yesterday has nothing to with it. Nothing, I say!

(Yes, I'm a little bit more relaxed about her adjustment into English and western NY now. If only I could say the same about imoto.)

On Devi and Rowling

Remember when I said it would take about, oh, a month to start some Deathly Hallows blogging? Me neither. Let's just say that never happened, shall we? Why? Well, I'm ready with Harry Potter 7 spoiler #1, of course! Are you sitting down?

Too bad I have no idea how to put things "below the fold," because this one's a doozy. I'll be as coy as possible in case anyone's even further behind the fantasy zeitgeist than I am. (You know, besides the three-quarters of my students in my Postcolonial Hawthorne class today, my dad....) The good news for you is that you don't even have to go back to my now-7-months-old-and-more Devi blogging to get this one. Quite the opposite--it's actually one where Rowling clarifies Devi.

Let's put it this way: remember how The Boy Who Lived lives up to his name towards the end of Deathly Hallows? How he's unexpectedly (if you're anything like me, that is) empowered by his acceptance of his own death and transformed by his courage in acting on it? Assuming you do, you'll appreciate how weirdly similar this is to the acceptance and transformation Devi details for the Nagesias in "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha." That is all. A cross-cultural structural parallel that may well top my Douglas Adams-Salman Rushdie one. You may go.

[Update: Uh, wait! Before you go, check out the slyly disguised Harry Potter 1 reference in paragraph 3 of this otherwise deathly serious article. My year will be complete if Martindale owns up to it here!]

On Classroom Observations

As associate chair of my department, I'm responsible for mentoring new hires during their first semester on campus, which includes writing an observation letter on their teaching. The way we usually handle this in my department is to give our new professors as much choice in the process as possible: among the classes I am free to attend, they are free to choose which course I will observe and when my two visits will take place (usually toward the beginning and toward the end of the semester). No pre-observation or post-observation meetings are required, but they can of course request them, and since we're meeting as needed to discuss any questions and problems they may have over the course of the semester, it's easy to discuss their classes and students along the way. All I ask for before my first visit is a syllabus. Since they go up for renewal for the second year sometime late in the fall semester, thanks to our nutty renewal and promotions schedule, I'll be writing up the letters over Thanksgiving Break so they can get them right after it and decide whether to include them in their files or not.

The point of these visits is to give useful feedback on their course design, pedagogy, classroom management, and so on. What I usually try to do while observing a class is figure out how the lesson is structured and why, how it relates to the overall course goals, and how the students are responding to it and to the professor. Obviously my being there changes the classroom dynamic to some extent, which is why only about a third of my overall focus is on their responses, especially during that first visit. But that doesn't mean I don't do a lot of student-watching. I like to come to a class early and watch/listen as the students come into the classroom, so I can see how they change as the professor enters the room. If there are any group or team discussions or activities, I like to place myself in a location where I can listen in on several teams (while appearing to be focused on taking notes). The great thing about students at my university is that from their words and body language it's very clear what they're thinking and how engaged they are with a lesson plan.

Still, especially for new faculty, that's not the be-all and end-all of an observation, particularly the first one. I've been here long enough (it's the start of my 10th year, if you count the year away) to have realized that it's how the students change over the four (or more) years they're here that matters most, so you have to think in semester-long arcs as well as shorter ones. If a particular class doesn't go as planned, you still have many more chances (and many many more than in Japan, where they meet only once a week for half the overall contact hours as in U.S. universities) to meet your goals for the semester. Of course, in my second visit, I'm looking to see whether/how the class atmosphere has changed, along with the quality of student engagement and discussion, particularly if the professor wasn't happy with how the first class went. But like I said, how the students respond to a new professor before any word-of-mouth has gotten around the student grapevines, which helps students self-select professors who match their own goals and learning styles, is not the biggest of deals to me.

What is is seeing how the professors are adjusting to the students in their class. Coming to a new institution, it's difficult to anticipate what student expectations and habits are with respect to reading load, in-class participation, individual and team assignments, taking responsibility for their own learning, and so on. In your first semester at a new place, you're basically gathering intel for the future--the next class, the next week, the next unit, the next semester--and looking for patterns in student thought and behavior. What can you expect from English majors? from English Adolescence Education majors? from Early Childhood Education English Concentrators? from students from the arts? humanities? social sciences? sciences? What about the mix of first- through fourth-years in your classes? What are their (often different and conflicting) expectations for this course? And so on. The goal is to figure out what the assumptions about them that you might be making that could be getting in the way of teaching them better, as well as what assumptions they seem to be making that they need to be disabused of or lead away from.

By adjusting to the students, then, I don't mean pandering to them, patronizing them, or catering to their every whim. I mean figuring out what are reasonable challenges to be presenting them with at what time in the semester, figuring out what you need to do to prepare them to do as well as possible on the assignments you've laid out for them, figuring out how to get and keep the group of students in front of you (or around you) motivated to push and challenge themselves. I mean thinking realistically and pragmatically about how to achieve your goals in the course. And maybe rethinking your goals and methods for the next time around.

Not all this shows up in my observation letter, of course. A good part of the letter is simply describing what I saw, in as much detail as I can muster from my notes and memories. Along the way or at the end, I usually include a mix of interpretations and assessments and suggestions. In doing this I tend to be more about options and roads not taken (but might be in the future) than about armchair quarterbacking or backseat driving; I consider alternate ways of achieving the apparent goals for the class meeting or adjusting them in light of the course goals. I try to convey to the professor and to anyone else who might happen to read the letter someday the complexities of and subtleties in teaching well.

Which means these things take a long time to write. But I usually learn a lot about teaching from visiting my colleagues' classes and writing up my observations, so I figure I should only return the favor with a letter they may be able to learn from.