Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization, Teaching

Designing a Syllabus

It’s easy to underestimate how much time and thought a syllabus absorbs, but they demand a lot of attention, especially because they’re one of the most direct mechanisms to communicate with students. People sometimes dismiss that long syllabus, but I’m definitely on the other side of the divide: I try and make my syllabuses as comprehensive as I possibly can — in part to make sure that I have a place to point to when students have questions, but, more importantly, to head those questions off altogether. I also find that the more I teach a class, the more I refine and scaffold the syllabus, the closer it gets to inspiring new courses and scholarship.

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After I figure out what the class is topically concerned with, I tend to start by thinking about what kinds of assessments are being used, and that usually depends on the level of the course. If it’s a lower division course or an introductory course, I tend to use exams, and schedule one every 4-5 weeks in a term. If it’s an upper division course, I still use exams — but I space them out more and offer students other options for assessment. So, for my upper division students, I usually allow them — by petition — to write a research paper or write periodic precis of the course content. This allows more advanced, specialized students to focus their attention on a more meaningful project — but, like students taking the exams, they still have scheduled deadlines for various part of the project. You can see exams of an introductory syllabus here (Intro to Cultural Anthropology: ANTH 166 2016) and a more advanced syllabus here (Medical Anthropology: ANTH 134 2014). The one exception to this upper division structure is when it’s a required course, and in those cases I still stick with exams, which tend to be more essay oriented (like this upper division survey of anthropological theory, ANTH 152 2015). In any case, when I use exams, they tend to have short, take home essays (like 2-3 pages) as well as short answer portions — in my attempt to meet every students’ test-taking strengths and weaknesses.

I find that having the schedule of the assessments helps to provide an outline for the content of the course — so if an exam happens every 4 weeks, within the preceding 4 weeks, I’ll try and cover 2, 2-week units, or 4 1-week units. If we have a big conceptual unit, I work to consolidate it all on one side of an assessment. I work with the assumption that students can bomb an assessment (if they take a month off, say), but they should be able to get back on track with the next assessment if they get back in the saddle. So my assessments tend to be non-comprehensive — they only include the material since the last assessment, with the exception of the final exam. Generally speaking, these assessments make up about half of a student’s final grade, and I structure the grade so that even if the student scores only 50% on all of this material, he or she can still pass with a C — as long as they complete all of the other work in the class.

The rest of the grade in most of my classes is based on attendance (usually no more than 10%, and typically only for attending section, not lecture — unless it’s a seminar and I can take attendance), with the lion’s share being some form of reading comprehension assignment. In lower division classes, I tend to use a single reading question for each reading, which students answer through an online portal (like Blackboard or Sakai) — it tends to be a question to help the student focus on a key point in the reading, and to integrate it with things that we’ve discussed in class or that he or she has encountered in other readings. So, for example, it might ask a student to define a theory in the present reading and compare it to a concept from another reading; or the question might ask the student to define a concept from another reading and support it with evidence from the present reading. If it’s an upper division course, I tend to use reading guides, which ask the students to identify the author’s thesis, discuss the evidence used and how it relates to the thesis, attempt to identify the debates the author is engaging in and with whom, and, ultimately, to articulate whether they find the piece compelling. In both cases, I find that these kinds of assignments prepare students for coming to class ready to discuss the content at a level appropriate to the class, and they also serve to create an ongoing study guide for the class. By the end of the term, if the student has completed these reading assignments, she or he has a large body of notes they can draw from to prepare for any final exam or final project.

I’ve discussed elsewhere how I choose readings for a class, so I won’t go into that much here. Basically, at the lower division, I tend to choose an article or book chapter for each day (about 25-30 pages); less than that, and I find it hard to have much to lecture on or discuss with students. At the upper division, I tend to assign about 5 readings per week, with more of them being due early in the week. So, for example, if it’s a Tuesday and Thursday class, I’ll ask students to read 3 readings for Tuesday, with 2 for Thursday (assuming they have more time on the weekend to do schoolwork, which isn’t always true). If the reading is especially dense or theoretical, I tend to use about 20-25 pages worth, and have it be the sole reading for the day — or I might pair it with an illustrative example that’s easy to read and see the application of the theory in. One thing I try and avoid is reading a whole book with students over 2-3 weeks of the class.  I find that after a day or two talking about the book, they stop reading it, and only get back into it at the very end of the section. Instead, I use chapters from throughout a book over the course of the term — so selections from the books will be paired with other readings thereby — maybe — illuminating the relationships between the books and other existing scholarship. The exceptions to this are when we’re reading a whole book over 1 or 2 weeks in class, and the contents of the book are such that they give us a lot to discuss on a daily basis.

I usually fill 2 single-spaced pages with various policies for the class, from discussions of academic misconduct and learning services on campus, to proper citational practices, my work expectations for students, and rules about when and how students can contact me. The most important of these is the last: I have a window for answering emails, usually first thing in the morning, Monday through Friday. Emails received after the window are responded to the following day, and emails received on Friday are responded to on Monday. I also tell students that I don’t respond to student emails if the information they’re seeking is in the syllabus. Since implementing that policy, the amount of student email I’ve received has been reduced by 90%. Some students erroneously think I don’t want to communicate with them, but I try and make clear to them that I do — just only during certain times, since answering student email is a very small part of my overall professional responsibilities.

One policy I’ve tried in the past, and may very well revisit in the future, is a Good Faith grade. The idea is this: if a student turns in all of the assignments on time and minimally complete, she or he can receive no lower than a C in the course. The couple of times I’ve used this policy, no one who was failing the class had turned in all of the assignments on time, so they were ineligible for the Good Faith grade. But I did find that students seemed to like me more when there was a very straight forward policy on how to do a minimal amount of work and still pass the class.

Ultimately, I take a ‘no surprises’ approach to the syllabus: I try and get as much into it as possible so that students aren’t taken off guard by assignments, expectations, policies, or the schedule. Making the syllabus as clear as I can — which can sometimes mean 15 page syllabuses — helps save me time over the course of the term (and maybe does the same for students).

Other tips or questions? Post them in the comments below.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization

Let’s Fund Every Graduate Student for 7 Years

Several years ago, I had an incidental conversation with a senior colleague, Ken George, who was at the time the chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He had come up with an idea to fund graduate students for seven years, and not through some enormous endowment, but through state funded education. It’s been a decade, and to my knowledge, no university has tried out a scheme similar to what George devised. So I want to put this idea out into the world and see if any institution will take me up on it — it’s a worthy experiment, and one that might radically change the way we train graduate students, how students experience graduate study, and the integration of undergraduates and graduate students on the contemporary campus.

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My memory of the conversation with George was that he reasoned that the average time to Ph.D. for an Anthropology student was seven years. So, to be a competitive program, Madison would need to fund all of its incoming students for at least that long. The kernel of the idea he pitched to me was that students would receive teaching  or research assistantships for years 1-3, then receive a fourth year that was fully funded — so they could conduct research unfettered and without the need of securing external funding — and then return to the university for years five-seven, during which they would serve as primary instructors for their own classes. The funding they would receive in years five through seven would be reduced to pay the university back for the research year. There were probably more details to the plan, but these are the parts that have stuck with me — including George’s mention that he had discussed the plan with a university financial officer who told him it was feasible. And, after almost a decade of teaching at state universities, I think it might be the necessary future to address many of the concerns faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates face.

During their instructor years, I’m assuming that graduate students are teaching two to three classes per year (probably three), basically a reduced tenure-track teaching load and not-totally-abusive adjuncting teaching load. Like faculty, most of the graduate student’s commitment during the school year would be to teaching, but he or she would also have time to write up the research from year four — and work on other professionalization matters. More importantly, they would receive a living wage, which would support them for three years and also provide them with security of employment so they could spend their summers writing and not seeking a new job.

I don’t want to be evasive, but I also don’t know the math. I’ve tried to puzzle out how this all might work, but every institution is different and what they pay instructors who are ABD vs. Ph.D. varies, as well as the cost of health benefits. But the basic idea is this: income should be consistent over the 7 year period, adjusting for inflation. So whatever one is paid in year four — the research year — should be the same as what one is paid in year five. It’s probably not going to be great — it might be the equivalent of $20,000 each year — but it should be reliable.

But if you just want some numbers to think about, consider that it might cost a university $40,000 per year per graduate student (including stipend and benefits), and that three, 20-student classes generate about $60,000 per year (assuming students pay a relatively cheap $1000 per class). Now, most graduate students don’t cost that much, and most undergrads pay more than that per class, so even if the margins are tight, the university would still be operating with a profit, which can go towards facilities, administrators, and all the other gears that need to be greased to make a university run.

One thing I’m always asked when I bring this proposal up is: what does a department do about a student who takes the fourth year funds and then never returns? Again, I don’t know that there’s one universal bureaucratic right answer, but basically the funds would be converted into a tuition fee and the student would need to pay it back. Likewise, if a student decided not to stay for the full seven years — say she or he gets a tenure track job somewhere — she or he could pay the prorated remaining balance from year four off. So, if a student takes a job at the end of year six, she would need to pay one year’s worth of the forward funding back to the university for year four (about $7,000). Students could also decline the research year and just proceed to the instructorship or pay off the research year with an external grant. It shouldn’t be a form of entrapment, but rather the kind of security that provides at least partial liberation from base anxieties (like paying rent and buying groceries).

The big challenge I see is having classes for the returning graduate students to teach. Given a modest graduate program of six graduate students, this would mean that during any given year (not adjusting for attrition), the department would have 18 instructors teaching a total of 54 new classes. Some of these courses might be in the major, but most of them would need to be channeled elsewhere. And this is the crux of the proposition as I see it — where does all this labor go?

My best guess is to create a new requirement for every major on campus, namely a two part writing or communication class that’s major-specific and taken during year one or two of an undergraduate career. For example, in an anthropology department, majors would be required to take a two term sequence in Reading Anthropology and Writing Anthropology. The first would teach them how to identify theses, supporting arguments, the use of evidence, basic genres of social scientific writing, etc. The second course would focus more squarely on getting students to write as novice anthropologists, with all of the expected generic conventions in place. Both of the courses would help them in their major, and benefit them overall with more intensive critical reading and writing training that could be applied in other courses they take, in and out of their major.

There’s another basic math problem, which is that the number of graduate students in any particular program might be out of proportion to the number of undergraduates enrolled in the department’s major. One way to handle this would be to have graduate students from cognate programs teach at the undergraduate level in departments with excessive majors. So, for example, biological anthropology Ph.D. students might teach the Reading and Writing Biology courses in the Biology department, freeing up graduate students there to do the laboratory work they are needed for by faculty in Biology.

The tougher question is what to do about majors like Computer Science, where conventions of communication vary significantly from other disciplines. But courses could be offered to train graduate students in the necessary skills, and there might be significant monetary incentives to lure them into teaching in these programs. Each institution would need to figure out what the roadblocks are and address them with local resources — or, potentially, start new interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs to meet the needs produced by new requirements.

In any case, the course content should be determined by the instructor to reflect her or his areas of confidence and strength, but assignments across iterations of the same class should be similar so as to ensure that standards are being met. Teaching critical reading and writing skills to undergraduates also benefits instructors, whose own reading and writing skills tend to further develop through teaching. And such intensive teaching helps graduate students gain confidence and skills in one of the primary skills they’ll need in their future as educators.

There are some significant reputation dividends to be gained with a program like this for departments and universities: the university can brand itself as especially dedicated to undergraduate reading and writing skills, and in a landscape where graduate training seems precarious if not exploitative, the university can cast itself as ethical and intensely focused on the professional development and economic security of its graduate students.

If you convince your department or dean to experiment with a 7-year funding plan, let me know. And if you can think of any thing I missed, let me know that too…

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Uncategorized

What’s it like to be an Assistant Professor? (Research University version)

I often jokingly tell graduate students that I wish someone had told me about the sheer number of meetings I would have to attend as a faculty member — not to dissuade me, but to clue me into the bureaucratic reality of what it’s like to be a faculty member. This is my attempt to distill my experience as a tenure-track assistant professor at two large, state research universities and the lessons I learned about the reality of what being an assistant professor is like with an eye towards preparing future faculty for the everyday reality of professorship. As usual, it’s largely based only on my experience — other people surely have different experiences (even at the same institutions), and the experiences of friends at other kinds of institutions clearly differ from my own.

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Briefly, my own institutional biography: I accepted a job at Wayne State University while finishing my dissertation in early 2007. I spent a year there — I actually started teaching in the summer term — and then moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz. I was at UCSC from 2008 through 2015, and went up for tenure there in 2012. So, in total, I spent one year as an assistant at Wayne, and four as an assistant at UCSC. Generally, the experiences were not significantly different in their broad contours.

The big change from being a dissertating graduate student to being a tenure-track faculty member is that you move from being almost entirely self-directed to suddenly being beholden to the needs of others — in the classroom, but also in your department and the university and profession more generally. Usually, this is referred to as “service” and it can include everything from being a department chair, to serving on job search committees, to giving guest lectures in other people’s classes, to serving on M.A. or Ph.D. committees — and so many more permutations, especially outside of one’s departmental home. Service happens at the level of the department, the level of the division, the level of the university, and the level of the profession. So, on the one hand, I had ongoing commitments — like serving on Ph.D. committees, the number of which steadily increased over time — and new, one- and two-year commitments that changed with each academic year. In any given year, I tended to accept two to three new service roles, most of which changed the following year — and these included things like serving on the graduate admissions committee, the professionalization workshop I ran, prize committees for undergraduate and graduate students (both at UCSC and through the Society for Medical Anthropology), the academic review committee for students in danger of being expelled or suspended, the university’s committee on faculty welfare, and a variety of one-off activities (like guest lecturing, serving on external grant agency review panels, and a host of peer-reviewing for journals). On any given week, it probably amounted to 2-4 hours of work and meetings — sometimes, though, it was dramatically more, like when I had to write a report for a committee that I was serving on (which probably took something like 10-15 hours in one week). And any peer-reviewing I did tended to take 3-4 hours, usually once or twice each month.

There are many more meetings — and emails, and telephone calls (still — some people actually want to talk on the phone!) — which range from meeting with eager or delinquent undergraduates, to meeting with current and prospective graduate students, to meeting with teaching assistants, to faculty meetings, to university-level meetings. At Wayne we had biweekly or monthly Friday morning faculty meetings; at UCSC we had nearly weekly faculty meetings on Wednesday afternoons. Most of these meetings required no preparatory work on my part, and on average I would spend 3-5 hours each week in meetings. It could be dramatically more though, especially with university-level and meetings to support the discipline, and in a couple of cases I easily spent 10 or more hours in meetings in one week.

It’s easy to minimize the amount of time it takes to prepare and teach new courses, but it can be all-consuming. At Wayne, I was tasked with teaching a two-semester sequence of theory in medical anthropology at the graduate level — which was an entirely new course and not one that was particularly portable — and also an introduction to cultural anthropology for undergraduates. When I moved to UCSC, none of these classes were usable, in part because at UCSC the senior faculty protected the junior faculty from teaching the very large (~400 students) introduction to cultural anthropology course. But, also, I designed my intro class to resonate with the life experiences of students in Detroit, so a lot of the content would have needed to change as well. When I got to UCSC, I was asked to teach an introduction to medical anthropology course for undergraduates, and from there it was up to me to design my curriculum — so, I came up with graduate courses in science studies and experimentation, and undergraduate classes in the biology of everyday life, medicine & colonialism, and, eventually, I took on the service requirement of teaching the introduction to cultural anthropology, ethnographic methods, and cultural anthropological theory. (You can see my syllabuses on my Teaching page.)

Each of these preps took a few weeks of part-time work before the term began — and in most cases, took a lot of work at the stage when I had to propose the course at the departmental and university levels in order to get approval to offer the class and to garner general education breadth designations. During the term I first offered the class — and to a lesser extent with later iterations — there was significant work throughout the week, reading material, preparing lectures, writing assignments and exams. On top of service requirements, commuting, childcare, running errands, and everything else, this meant that I got very little new writing or research done during the term. (Over time, I was able to develop a rhythm wherein most of my writing and research would get done in terms with old classes or during the summer, and editing work or revisions on articles were saved for the intensive teaching terms.) Only late in my time as an assistant professor did I get to the point where I was teaching classes I had taught before, and then had more time for research and writing — but then started teaching more new classes, and also developed some fatigue related to teaching some of my steady classes. All told, it tended to be about 5 hours per week in the classroom, plus another 15-20 hours per week in preparation, emailing with students, office hours, and other sundry teaching support (which goes down to 5-10 hours per week with a retaught class).

Then there’s things like giving colloquium talks and attending conferences and workshops, all of which can be edifying, but also time consuming. Until The Slumbering Masses came out in 2012, most of my invitations were based on my social network — after the book came out, the invitations started to widen. I developed a rule pretty early on that I wouldn’t give more than one colloquium talk per term and wouldn’t travel to more than one conference per term. I also wouldn’t travel over the Mississippi River more than once per year, since I tended to lose too much time to travel. There were exceptions, but having the rule meant that I really paid attention to my schedule for the year, and that I would try and avoid excessive travel — and maximize the travel I did do. I also tend to only present new work at conferences and colloquia; if I recycled the same talk, I might approach things differently, but given that I was always working to produce new material for talks, I wanted to make sure I had the time to do the necessary writing. In any given week, these kinds of speaking engagements had little effect, but when I was traveling, it tended to take 3-4 days (plus the writing to support the talk).

Publishing also loomed large, and my tenure requirements at both institutions were about the same: a few articles and a book. I tend to write an article or two each year, as well as working on book chapters. I was fortunate to get an advanced book contract rather early, and had a handful of article manuscripts by the time I started at UCSC, so most of the real, anxiety-inducing pressure was off, but I did have to work on actually getting everything written and published. I tend to work in fits and starts rather than in a steady stream of productivity, so I would sometimes work on edits or small writing during the term, but most of the heavy writing was left for periods when I wasn’t teaching. The biggest challenge was writing the book, which took 3-4 months of intensive work — which I spent at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, while my partner was in India doing her own research — and then was followed by another intense period of revisions, which happened about six months later (at which point we had a newborn). That was followed by needing to work with a copy editor and then to correct the proofs of the book. The intensive writing and revision work often took all day, every day that I could fit it in (based on teaching and family schedules); the editing and proofing work also took all day, and because there was often a very small window (like 2 weeks) to turn things around, it often meant squeezing it in whenever I could. And when I’m just writing — articles, book chapters, talks — I tended to work a couple hours each day, but that could be anything from actual writing, to editing, to reading in support of the writing project or transcribing old research. When I could, though, I’d binge on writing and work all day, but that changed significantly after having our first child.

I’ve hinted at it throughout, but it’s worth remembering that there’s all the duties and joys of non-professional life too, and spending time dating or with a partner, parenting, having hobbies, grocery shopping, commuting, talking to your parents, reading for enjoyment, fixing the toilet, cooking, and everything else that life is really all about takes up a lot of time. Developing a schedule to make sure that you’re not just working is vital to staying happy.

I’m pretty low stress, and my departments at Wayne and UCSC were supportive of me and my work, but there was still stress enough during those four years at UCSC for me to develop shingles twice (which my family doctor was sure was stress-related). Know that if you go into the professorial line of work that there are significant demands on your time and all sorts of stressors — but approaching them deliberately can significantly mitigate their effects on you. And make sure you sign up for health insurance — just in case.