What do teacherly [ETA: and studenty!] folks think of a student using the expression “sexing-up” in an essay?
I think it expresses pretty well what’s going on in the source materials he’s discussing, but is it too colloquial? Should I tell him to be more boring in future?
Crime Notes is the course blog I’ve set up for my skills and sources students this semester, to supplement the module page I made last year. Could be interesting to see what happens. I don’t know yet whether I’ll attempt to use it for discussions and exciting things like that, or simply stick to basic announcements and the like for the first time out.
Am I just being grumpy in finding this a slightly over-casual way for a student to address his teacher in an email?
I mean, I don’t mind ‘Hi’, so what’s wrong with this one? Perhaps my problem is just that it sounds uncomfortably close to ‘hey you’?
I learnt today that the course I’m currently teaching is already fully subscribed for next year. (And it went even faster, apparently, than the module in the same set of options on the Blitz…)
I sort of wonder what they’re actually expecting.
This will be a pretty momentous event for me, when it comes around: it’ll be the first time I’ve ever taught any course (or part of a course) more than once. So: 1. I don’t have to prepare everything from scratch; 2. I’ll have the chance to improve on things I wasn’t happy with this time around.
Fortunately, I don’t really have to deal with the “homework” excuses, in the sense that assessed work is all handed in through the departmental office, and requests for extensions have to go through “official” channels.
But I do get the emails about why they couldn’t make it to classes, and it’s just like reading some of those court cases. Do I believe this story or don’t I? How lame is that excuse? Or simply, you what? Are you taking the piss? (I’m not going into details just in case any of them find this blog.)
Mind you, at least they usually do get in touch with some sort of explanation, probably because early absences tended to get brusque emails with dark hints about the consequences of non-attendance.
What, then, are the a) lamest, b) most inventive (but somehow suspicious) and c) most unbelievable excuses you’ve heard from students for their failure to make it to class? Names etc may of course be changed to protect the “innocent”. (And if you have any entertaining homework excuses you haven’t recently blogged somewhere else, feel free to add those too.)
PZ Myers has some wise words on the problems of teaching science. (Update: this is well worth reading too.)
The real problem isn’t math, it’s epistemology. What we want from our students is that they understand how they know what they know. In the sciences, that often distills down into some properly applied mathematics and that common injunction on exams to “show your work.” It’s what we do in those peer-reviewed papers, which are all step-by-step explanations of how we got a particular answer. I suspect that one common thread among academics in all disciplines is that what we really like in a good paper is the logic and the story and the clever details that lead up to the conclusion, that what counts is the process.
The real problem is that so many people want the shortcut to the “right” answer… It’s Bronowski’s conflict between knowledge and certainty: most people prefer certainty, especially when knowledge might give them an answer they don’t like. And they especially favor certainty when it requires nothing more than learning a single datum, rather than the work it takes to do a calculation or derivation or document a chain of evidence. …
Our students aren’t buying a finished product, they’re getting a toolbox (with math at the heart of it) and instructions in how to use it. When they don’t realize that central fact, that’s when mutual disappointment occurs.
I think the parallels with teaching history (or other humanities disciplines) are clear. Yes, perhaps there are more ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers in (some branches of) science than in humanities disciplines, with significant implications for how practitioners view their craft, how confident they tend to be about their conclusions. (But how many people in the world have the comparative knowledge to judge that?) Science students are (perhaps) that much more likely to come to a question knowing that a correct answer to it does exist, that a score of 100% is possible. But it isn’t just about putting down that correct answer, even then. The process is vitally important too: show us your workings, how you got to the answer, show that you understood why and how. PZ himself points out parallels with history teaching: “historians have students who want history to be just the memorization of events that actually happened, rather than a difficult exercise in thinking and learning and evaluating.”
There’s one other difference, to my mind. The toolbox metaphor is fantastic – but I’m not sure that a historian’s toolbox would ever have a single core (ie, maths). Maybe the key skills of source criticism do represent that core, but I can’t help thinking that the historian’s toolbox is going to be a lot more ramshackle and thrown-together and idiosyncratic than that of a scientist. Thoughts, anyone?
PS: a question for linguists. Why do Americans do ‘math’ and the British do ‘maths’?
I’ve put up a couple more documents (photos and transcripts), a pair of petitions, which I’m thinking of using at some point during the introductory class of the course I’m teaching. (There’ll be more to come over the next few days.)
They probably seem quite enigmatic as they stand, without any proper context (I do have some more documents related to the first one that should be worth transcribing). They are only, I should stress, intended as a starting point for discussion; I’m hoping that there’s just enough there to get students curious about what might be going on. Anybody here want to make guesses?
Anyway, they’re only one set of archival documents that we’ll look at in the first session. We might not even get to them, since the main thing I’ll want to do is something that worked quite well with some other students a few years ago, using a series of documents to illustrate the progress of a prosecution from its beginnings (taking examinations before a JP, or a coroner, binding people by recognizance to appear in court; oh yes, I should also look for some arrest and gaol committal warrants); then the formal indictments; and finally documents that give information about verdicts, sentences and pardons. Then, if we have time, I’d like to use petitions (and perhaps similar documents addressed to judges) and jury presentments as examples of less formal methods of prosecution than the indictment (plus, petitions also being used to appeal against legal decisions); and to point to some of the potential diversity of court business. It wasn’t all just about trying and hanging felons (not in Cheshire and Wales anyway).
With pretty pictures as far as possible, like these. I won’t be expecting these students to read early modern handwriting, so we’ll mostly be working with documents that are already transcribed or with print materials, but I’m very grateful to the PRO to allowing us to use cameras so that (quite apart from my research stuff…) I’ll be able to start by showing them – and, of course, you lot too – some examples of what the original documents actually look like. Not that I expect anyone else to find it nearly as exciting as I do.
……..
PS: Anyone else out there who does read documents from this period fancy taking a look at the word, in the middle of the first of the two petitions, that I’ve transcribed in brackets with a question mark? I think it either says ‘minitryate’ or ‘minioryate’ (‘to miniature’ is given as a verb in the OED, one of its meanings being ‘to reduce’; ‘to minorate’ is also an obsolete word meaning to diminish, reduce). The general meaning is quite clear, but I can’t quite decide what those middle letters are. Any opinions?
I’ve now had requests to attend two different events in upcoming months (hurrah! Wow, it’s cool to be in demand… and both contacts made through the website and/or the blog, I think. See, my cunning plan is working). One has already been arranged for Friday 18th March; the other not quite finalised but a Friday in March is on the table.
Not to mention a notice of an Open University seminar on criminal justice history in Ireland and Scotland on Friday 25 February; and then there’s the York cultures of violence conference on 21-23 April (Thursday to Saturday).
Today I finally got the semester timetable with my one little two-hour class. (I did ask about this last month, but presumably it wasn’t ready.)
Guess what day of the week it’s on?
Fortunately it looks as though the not-quite-finalised event* will in fact be during our Reading week, and the 18th is the last day of term before the Easter hols so I’m guessing the students won’t mind that class being rearranged…
Sadly, though, I think the February seminar is out (sorry, Chris). But I don’t know what to do about the York conference. It’s an important conference and I really want to go along, but due to my own incompetence in missing the deadline I don’t have the excuse that I have to go to give a paper. And it could be bad enough rearranging the class once, let alone twice.
Dammit.
………….
* Which, by the way, is a study day on the history of crime in Wales, at Swansea. Anyone interested?
I have the outline and reading list for the first class of the semester. (Just need to pick some nice juicy documents to look at…). Which means, only 9 more to go.
If you’re interested, here’s a formal blurb and a list of the planned seminar topics. (Sorry if I’ve posted it before. I can’t remember.)
(though it will probably be mainly England and Wales in reality…)
Brief description
This module will develop students’ critical awareness of historical sources and methods of research through examination of a range of sources relating to crime and the use of the law in early modern Britain and the varied ways in which historians have used them. It will introduce sources including legal records and official correspondence, pamphlets and polemics, criminal ‘biographies’ and trial reports. It will examine key historiographical debates on social relations and tensions, particularly gender, religion and ‘class’ conflict, as well as the importance of techniques and theories derived from other disciplines in the development of the historiography since the 1970s.
Content
1. Introduction
2. Prosecutions and punishments
3. To catch a thief
4. Crimes of blood
5. Riot and popular politics
6. Disputes and litigation
7. Morals and manners
8. Respectable fears and myths
9. Whose justice? Class, control and ideology
10. Witchcraft: a special case?
Does that sound fun?
And if nothing else, I’ve learned to write the right kind of form-filling babble. (You should see the buzz-words in the Learning Outcomes section. Oh yay.)
And my teaching pages are sort of coming together:
Online primary sources (updated version of a list I posted here a couple of months ago)
Glossary (has some formatting now)
Student (group) blogging as an integral part of an American history survey course.
But you’ll need to be quick, as the blogs themselves will probably disappear at the end of this term, certainly by the end of the month (which seems a shame to me since some of the students have clearly put a lot of work in; some might, I suppose, decide to continue the subscription. But even if you’d got the bug, wouldn’t you rather start up your own?). I can imagine using blogs as a teaching resource, like a notice board or a place to post assignments, readings and so on; getting students themselves to do it feels a much bigger step. At least one is pretty impressive (http://lionheart.typepad.com/history/), but I haven’t had time to explore the overall quality of the blogs. (And probably won’t get much time either…)
I’ve just put online a revised draft of the Crime glossary. I’m not entirely happy with some of my definitions of officials (especially the London ones with which I’m not familiar), so those with more expertise than me are welcome to suggest better wordings. But apart from some formatting and the insertion of a few more dates, I think this is now close to completion. (Thankfully.) Well, I might want some more by way of modern criminology terms.
I’m still working on the lists of online texts and printed primary sources and they will hopefully go up before too long. I probably need to create a new index page for the teaching-related materials as well. (I suppose a ‘teaching’ category over here wouldn’t be a bad idea either…) And I want to put up more transcripts of Wales and Cheshire documents.