I taught my first class of the semester on Monday. It felt good — it always does — to be back in the classroom again. New semester, new duties, new responsibilities: the bureaucracy here is the temporal equivalent of a gas, expanding to fill the available time. Which means I don’t have much time for leisure reading, but I’m riding my bike to and from work when the weather permits, and getting up early (5:15) to do PT before going in around 7. I’m trying to do the job stuff when I’m at work — I got some good work done in the office this summer, helping out with a Kairos issue (I won’t mind at all if you tell me how cool that logo is, and — while certainly partial — I really like what Steve did with his article), submitting one article for publication, and working on another, plus two more to go — and leave it behind as much as possible when I come home in the evening, but I know with the first batch of papers to grade, that’ll change. Still, I’m feeling well-adapted: I was one of the lead people working on our FYC curriculum over the past year, so I’m somewhat satisfied with the way we’ve worked the syllabus, and have much more comfort with the mesh between my expectations and my institution’s expectations than I did last year — to be blunt, it’s been a bit of a battle, and I felt like I took some flak last year. This year, I know the ropes, I know the responsibilities, and I know how the cadets are. Again, I love the plebes — the freshmen — because of their openness, their willingness, and their enthusiasm, but it’s also interesting to me that the cows — the juniors — that I taught last semester are now back as firsties with full firstie privileges, so I’ll run into them in their civilian clothes when I’m in town running errands. I’ll be mentoring some cows for the Marshall and Rhodes scholarship applications, and I’m mentoring a senior as a part of a pilot academic advising program, and that feels good as well. So: a new start, and I’m hoping it’s a good one.

Some final thoughts from Kerr tonight — it’s been a long night, and I should’ve been in bed long ago, but I’ve been struggling with various technology issues for my two sections tomorrow. Which is somehow appropriate, since the stuff from Kerr is about technology.

Kerr argues that “The best of the liberal arts colleges are likely to be the least affected by the new electronic technology since they are mostly engaged in the all-around development of the children of the already affluent (the top one-fifth of the economic scale), providing sports, lifetime friends, social skills, programs for cultural interests, and all-around intellectual advancement, not just job skills. These institutions get their main support from gifts by affluent alumni who have the ability and willingness to pay high tuitions for their children, not from public funds” (224). But those of us who have visited computer labs in wealthy private institutions and compared them to the computer labs at the less wealthy public institutions where we teach know quite well that “the best of the liberal arts colleges” also have more, better computers per student, and because their students tend to come from more affluent backgrounds, those students often possess a higher level of familarity and proficiency with computers, and also often know how to do different sorts of work with computers. The divisions Jean Anyon points to in “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” apply very much to the use of computers in elementary and secondary education: students in poorer schools are often given drills-and-skills instruction while students in wealthier schools get to do the fancy stuff.
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Mike the writing teacher might respond to Mike the blogger’s post yesterday in the following fashion:

“Dear Mike:

Your first paragraph really got my attention, with the way your small alliterations called attention to the connection between the cause (your classes having gone well) and the effect (your good mood), and the ‘oh’ of clear delight. The problem is, the rest of the entry doesn’t deliver on the promise of that paragraph. You immediately switch gears by going into a detailing of bad days, including a throwaway military reference, and then for no apparent reason throw some abuse at campus IT workers before returning briefly to your ostensible topic: your good teaching day. However, you bring it up again only to confuse us by just as quickly dropping the subject in favor of the focus of the post’s second half: questions of ethical student representation. In raising these questions, you in no way acknowledge the obvious and strong connections to your earlier post, ‘What’s in a Flame?’, which was prompted by remarkably similar questions about how and where instructors talk about students.

Maintaining a solid focus — either the ‘good day’ narrative or the ethics of representation questions — should help you revise this into something that readers may be able to productively engage with. It’ll take some work, though.”

And Mike the writing teacher would be right. It was just such a good day that I couldn’t not tell you about it. My questions are still there, though. From that CCC statement I linked and from what I’ve said here, what’s your sense of how much I can responsibly write about my classroom? Obviously, I wouldn’t ever use student names, not even just first names — but does even talking about a student without using names (e.g., “I have one student who’s ten months out of Moscow and has immense difficulties with English, but man! she’s well-read and has some fantastic ideas; one of her first drafts referenced Chagall and Bulgakov in this extended metaphor that worked with some seriously apocalyptic imagery to make a political statement about being a Jew in Russia”) violate my ethical obligations as a teacher and researcher? I think so. So how much can I say, if anything? And is this really just the question Liz was asking but in a different skin?

There’s an insightful discussion of the academic labor market over at the consistently excellent Invisible Adjunct. Reading the posts there led me to ask whether I should rethink the way I’ve circumscribed my examination of class to focus on students: after all, if I’m going to argue that class structures are enacted, negotiated, altered, or reproduced in the college writing classroom, teachers are certainly components of those class structures. As instructors, teachers may be reasonably expected to foster a student’s class mobility, while at the same time standing as a member of a class to which the student does not belong.
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