City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research Kingsborough Community College 2021 The Teaching Zone: Square Pegs in Round Holes Cheryl Hogue Smith CUNY Kingsborough Community College How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/kb_pubs/235 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: AcademicWorks@cuny.edu T h e Te a c h i n g Z o n e : S q u a r e P e g s i n R o u n d H o l e s 413> Cheryl Hogue SmithThe Teaching Zone: Square Pegs in Round HolesThis article explores six years of student data to discover why students who appear not to have read a lengthy book are able to execute a successful paper designed around that text. T here is a fifth dimension which is known to man. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between known and unknown, and it lies between the pit of our confusion and the summit of our knowledge. This is the dimension of learning. And it can happen for students when educators enter an area which we call the Teaching Zone.Scene: Fall. A small classroom in Brooklyn. Cheryl Hogue Smith, occupation: teacher. A nondescript, commonplace person whose life is a treadmill built out of hallways. In just a moment, Smith will have to concern herself with her identity as a teacher. Because as of ten o’clock this chilly November morning, her nightmare is realized. You are invited to witness her downfall1 . . . > > > > >About midway through a particular fall day, during the tenth week of a twelve-week semester, my students were working on rough drafts of their final paper. As I was talking with one student about her draft, a nearby student inter-rupted and asked, “Um . . . what are we doing?”I stopped mid-sentence, turned to him, and stared, probably a little too long. “We’re working on the rough drafts of the final paper. You know, the one that’s due by 11:59 tonight?”“Yeah,” he asked, “but what are we writing about, exactly?” Are you kidding me? We’ve spent the last three weeks on this paper! “I mean, I know it’s about Hitler and art and everything,” Whew! “but, like, what are we supposed to do?”I explained, “If you are asking what I think you are asking, you need to provide reasons or motives as to why Hitler and Goering coveted art in general and Vermeer paintings in particular, and you need to use your sources to explain how you know that. The prompt lays it all out for you.” How many times must I cover this in class?“What do you mean by ‘reasons’ or ‘motives’?” he asked. Seriously? I hesitated for a moment, and then I thought about this particular d413-435-May21-TETYC.indd 413 8/4/21 8:01 PM414 T E T Y C Vo l . 4 8 , N o . 4 , M a y 2 0 2 1student. He was so bright, but he had missed several days of class, including, perhaps, all the days I talked about how students needed to explore the specific reasons and motives that may have led Hitler and Goering to “collect” art, specifically Vermeer paintings. “You know, what were their motives for acquiring art or their reasons for wanting it? Like Hitler and Goering seeing themselves as art connoisseurs? Or like Hitler’s proposed national museum in Linz or Goering’s country estate, where they each wanted to house the art they acquired? Or like the fact that Vermeer represented to Hitler and Goering an Aryan ideal in art? Or like the scarcity of Vermeer paintings . . .” As I was speaking these words, I was simultaneously think-ing, Oh. My. Goodness. What is coming out of my mouth? I am telling students exactly what they might include in their papers to do well on the assignment. They don’t need to think about this paper anymore because all they need to do is write what I am telling them to write. I have become that teacher. I had met the enemy, and she was I.> > > > >As soon as I recognized I had become the very teacher I often warned oth-ers against, I knew I would be changing my course, something I probably should have done at least two years earlier, when I started to suspect Edward Dolnick’s The Forger’s Spell, a 293-page book about art theft and forgery in early 20th-century Europe, was too long or too hard or too boring or too whatever-else-would-prevent-students-from-reading-it. Yet I was reluctant to change because the richness of Dolnick’s book allowed me to create a final assignment I felt appropriate for any first-year composition class. Principally, the assignment asked students to read closely and synthesize multiple texts into a paper organized point by point, wherein each paragraph used multiple sources to develop one main idea. For years, this as-signment provoked students to think critically about the texts they were reading. But on that fateful day when I felt I had entered the Twilight Zone, I realized I was doing more of the thinking than they. Years ago, I recognized a sea change in my students’ abilities (willingness?) to read long, complex texts, which, in turn, affected their ability to write about them (Smith and Jiménez). Yet I have always had faith that every student has the capac-ity to do college-level work—whatever that work might be or look like (Smith “Botched”). I attributed more recent students’ inability or unwillingness to read Dolnick’s book to one of two reasons: First, some students enter college with ste-reotypical notions that community college would “be like 13th grade” (Bickerstaff et al. 504); this expectation, in turn, leads them to approach reading and writing tasks passively, rather than actively, thinking they have little more to do than just show up to acquire the answers they need in order to pass the class. Second, some students enter college unprepared for college-level tasks. And, of course, some enter with both. The second is easier to address because, as Rebecca Cox argues, “being unprepared to meet certain expectations . . . is not the same as being unable to meet them” (11); indeed, I have always believed underprepared students can perform d413-435-May21-TETYC.indd 414 8/4/21 8:01 PMT h e Te a c h i n g Z o n e : S q u a r e P e g s i n R o u n d H o l e s 415college-level tasks once they know what is required of them to do so. The first is often more difficult to address because students need to be willing to change their understanding of what is expected of them during the reading and writing processes. Either way, I kept teaching the book because I thought that with more instruction from me, they could do it and would want to do it. I mean, who doesn’t want to read a book about sticking it to the Nazis?I now had to concede that The Forger’s Spell no longer worked for my stu-dents. I didn’t understand how students six, five, four—even three?—years prior seemed to have no difficulty with the book, while the population of student who sat in front of me now had such trouble. I wanted to discover whether I could ac-count for this change in students’ ability and/or willingness to read complex texts, so I contacted Christian Calienes in my school’s Institutional Research Office for help with analyzing years of course data. This article describes the results of that study, which led to two conclusions that, surprisingly, are not about students at all: (1) Conscientious instructors who try to change students’ reading habits can un-knowingly develop counterproductive teaching habits, and, related, (2) half-baked notions of what it means to “lower” one’s standards can lead teachers to create environments certain to perpetuate students’ beliefs that teachers possess answers they should simply give to students. Reading and iGeneration/Generation Z To best explain what happened in my class and to situate my study in its proper context, let me first describe the student population this study largely addressed. US students who entered college straight from high school in 2014 would have done so having spent their entire educational lives under the ineffectual educational policies of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Common Core (Klein), resulting, perhaps, in a facile ability to take standardized tests, but probably with little understanding of their responsibility to negotiate meaning when reading texts—including texts of their own making. Also, seniors graduating in 2014 would have been born just after the Millennial generation had fully elided from Millennials into iGeneration/Generation Z, the generation of students whose entire lives have been saturated with technology and “for whom Internet access has been constantly available, right in their hands” (Twenge 2). Combine the ways they read on their multiple electronic devices with their experiences in a test-taking culture that Patrick Sullivan explains “actively works against the development” of deep readers (146), and what emerges is a population of student2 who is unprepared for the kinds of deep reading we want our first-year composition students to engage in. As Nicholas Carr says, because these students grew up reading in “an en-vironment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning,” they developed a “juggler’s brain” (115–16), and not in a good way. Edward Dolnick, who has visited my students on two occasions, said that some of his “favorite discussions of the book were with [my] classes,” particularly with the student who “complained that all the jumping around in the book made his d413-435-May21-TETYC.indd 415 8/4/21 8:01 PM416 T E T Y C Vo l . 4 8 , N o . 4 , M a y 2 0 2 1head hurt.” Dolnick’s book is comprised of four threads that are informed by and dependent upon each other, and he explained that he organized the book from one part to another—and back again, in no particular order—because he simply felt that was the best way to tell the tale. One might think, with all the “jumping around,” the book would feed into students’ “juggler’s brains.” The problem, however, is that most iGen/Gen Z students don’t have what Maryanne Wolf calls the “cognitive patience” (Reader 92) to make the connections between and among Dolnick’s four threads, much less show an aptitude for the “sequential thinking” (80) required of students to keep track of each thread as it unfolds. Corey Seemiller and Meghan Grace explain that because iGen/Gen Z students have a “tendency to jump from screen to screen and conversation to conversation, many have short attention spans” (58), and it’s this short attention span that may have prevented my students from reading or understanding Dolnick’s book. It’s complicated. It’s not linear. It’s not something they can read in one sitting or in short bursts and, therefore, is “tl;dr (too long; didn’t read)” (Wolf Reader 2). These are problems first-year composition teachers have been dealing with in their classes. In fact, Wolf explains that numerous professors state their “students have become increasingly less patient with the time it takes to understand the syntactically demanding sentence structures in denser texts and increasingly averse to the effort needed to go deeper into their analysis” (92). Part of students’ impa-tience might be attributable to the fact that they prefer to watch TV or streaming services rather than read a book, “maybe,” as Jean Twenge argues, “because books just aren’t fast enough” (61). My experiences certainly fit this account, especially with The Forger’s Spell. But the issue is not only that Dolnick’s text was simply too long and dense; it also required of students a “capacity for sustained, focused attention,” an attribute Sheridan Blau “found to be [a mark] of competent readers” (Literature 210–11). But how and when, in this digital age that Carr, Wolf, Twenge, and Seemiller and Grace address, could students have developed this capacity, when they are endlessly distracted by the very existence of their electronic devices? To test how often I could be distracted by my phone, I recorded the time on the clock for every occa-sion I was even tempted to look at my phone as I was reading Wolf ’s book about digital distractions and deep reading. Those recorded times were 6:27, 6:28, 6:31, 6:34, 6:36, 6:39 (Smith “Fractured”). If I, a Gen Xer, could be so easily distracted during this twelve-minute informal study, just imagine the distractions iGen/Gen Z students experience. Twenge explained, in discussing Leo Yeykelis et al.’s research, that college students “switched between tasks every nineteen seconds on average. More than seventy-five percent of these students’ computer windows were open less than one minute. This is a very different experience from sitting and reading a book” (64). So, when Blau says, “When students come to class claiming not to have understood an assigned text, few of them have actually given the time and attention to the work of understanding that text that any of us who are expert readers would expect to invest in a similarly unfamiliar work” (Literature 211), it’s easy to imagine today’s students switching between screens or checking their phones, feeding their d413-435-May21-TETYC.indd 416 8/4/21 8:01 PMT h e Te a c h i n g Z o n e : S q u a r e P e g s i n R o u n d H o l e s 417short attention spans that prohibit a sustained, focused reading, especially when it comes to a long, complex book that jumps around so much it makes their heads hurt. The biggest problem, of course, is the disconnect between what instructors and students believe it means to learn. According to Cox, entering college students say they “sincerely hope to learn something important and meaningful” (67), but, in reality, what they really care about is “getting the grade and getting it over,” which leads to “a disheartening pattern of student disengagement and lack of real inter-est in learning” (79). Twenge adds that today’s students “are practical, serious, and anxious, focusing more on the exam grade and less on the joy of learning” (309). Both Cox and Twenge describe students who have the mindset that good grades are the measure of learning, not the struggle to successfully read a complex text (Dweck). Unfortunately, for these iGen/Gen Z students, trying to read a complex book such as The Forger’s Spell is certain to raise their anxiety about what is required to get a good grade. To be clear, I am in no way blaming elementary or secondary teachers whose hands are tied by ineffectual educational policies and who do an extraordinary job considering the confines within which they must work. iGen/Gen Z students just seem to expect that all instructors should honor their tendencies to “[shy] away from longer, more difficult texts” (Wolf Reader 93) and, instead, teach entertaining texts they can read in short bursts or watch on YouTube. A student once asked, “Why can’t you just tell us what we are supposed to know?”—a question that demonstrates students’ tendency “to behave like consumers of . . . interpretations rather than the producers of them” (Blau Literature 20), consumers who believe the way to “earn” their good grade is either not to read and wait for instructors to tell them what they need to know or to mine texts in search of “right” answers they think instructors have and are waiting for students to find (Smith “Interrogating”). Ultimately, it’s one thing to suspect or wonder whether students seem to be less interested in the work we assign, as Wolf and others describe above; it’s quite another to systematically study whether or not students’ actual performance was declining. Trend Analysis, Spring 2011 through Fall 2016Chris, my colleague from Institutional Research, suggested we conduct a trend analysis to see if we could detect any patterns in student behavior over the course of six years, specifically the years I taught The Forger’s Spell. To contextualize this analysis, I should explain that I teach at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York in the Learning Communities (LC) program, which connects my first-year composition course with an art history survey course, thus my choice of The Forger’s Spell. Students typically mirror the diverse urban population of Brooklyn and are full-time students, yet they often work full-time or at least several hours part-time and travel one to two hours each way by public transportation. LC students are entering freshmen, taking first-year composition in their first semester at Kingsborough. This study addresses only my course, not the art history course, which is taught by a different instructor. d413-435-May21-TETYC.indd 417 8/4/21 8:01 PM418 T E T Y C Vo l . 4 8 , N o . 4 , M a y 2 0 2 1We started our trend analysis by looking at the obvious: attendance, home-work grades, and final course grades.3 We also looked at final paper grades since The Forger’s Spell seemed to cause students more and more problems as the years passed; it was the final assignment in all semesters of the six-year span of the study. We set the final course grades as the dependent variable and proceeded with the following hypothesis: Because students seemed less and less capable of performing the reading tasks for my first-year composition class and, thus, seemed less capable of successfully executing the writing assignments for the course, final course grades should progressively go down from spring 2011 to fall 2016. With this hypothesis in mind, I thought we would discover the following factors to account for declining course grades: 1. Students would have more absences. Even though I don’t deduct for absences, they indirectly factor into students’ grades since absent students miss instruction. 2. Students would have lower homework grades. Homework assignments were consis-tent across semesters and consisted largely of in-class, small-group exercises designed to help students process the readings they would then write about. Homework accounted for 10 percent of students’ final course grade and could be made up if students were absent.3. Students would have lower final paper grades. The final paper consistently accounted for 30 percent of students’ final course grade, and The Forger’s Spell was the major source.Figure 1 shows the average final course grades, homework grades, and final paper grades; Figure 2 shows the average number of absences per student; and Figure 3 compares the trend lines from Figures 1 and 2.In looking at the data, we found that the hypothesis was partially supported. F I G U R E 1 . Average Grades for Course, Homework, and Final Paper100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Spring Fall Spring Fall Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall 2011 2011 2012 2012 2013 2014 2014 2015 2015 2016 2016 n=21 n=47 n=26 n=23 n=25 n=16 n=32 n=27 n=44 n=26 n=17 Final course grades Homework grades Dolnick final grades Figure 1. Average Final Paper, Final Course, and Homework Grades d413-435-May21-TETYC.indd 418 8/4/21 8:01 PMT h e Te a c h i n g Z o n e : S q u a r e P e g s i n R o u n d H o l e s 419First, when the number of absences was greater, students typically earned lower final course grades, which is not surprising given that students who are not prepared often ditch class. Second, when homework grades were lower, students typically earned lower final course grades. This is also not surprising, given that homework accounted for 10 percent of the final grade.However, the hypothesis fell apart in two ways: First, the final course grades did not progressively drop from spring 2011 through fall 2016. Second, and, for my purposes here, more importantly, final paper grades remained relatively flat across all F I G U R E 2 . Average Number of Absences per StudentF I G U R E 3 . Comparison of Trend Lines from Figures 1 and 216 14 12 10 8 6 4 3 2 1 0 Spring Fall Spring Fall Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall 2011 2011 2012 2012 2013 2014 2014 2015 2015 2016 2016 n=21 n=47 n=26 n=23 n=25 n=16 n=32 n=27 n=44 n=26 n=17 Figure 2. Average Number of Absences Spring Fall Spring Fall Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall Spring Fall 2011 2011 2012 2012 2013 2014 2014 2015 2015 2016 2016 n=21 n=47 n=26 n=23 n=25 n=16 n=32 n=27 n=44 n=26 n=17 Grades first-year composition Homework Dolnick final grade Absences Figure 3. Comparison of Trend Lines from Figures 1 and 2 d413-435-May21-TETYC.indd 419 8/4/21 8:01 PM420 T E T Y C Vo l . 4 8 , N o . 4 , M a y 2 0 2 1semesters, indicating that students consistently performed well on the assignment, even in a semester such as spring 2012, when course grades dropped by more than thirty points. I could not reconcile these data. Grades for the final paper, written largely about a 293-page book that students no longer read, should have gone down, yet students in my classes consistently received high grades. Subsequently, we ran two correlation tests in connection with the final pa-per—homework and final paper grades and absences and final paper grades—and one test for homework and absences. The results were as we suspected: Overall, homework correlated with final draft grades (0.779), absences correlated with final drafts (−0.737), and homework correlated with absences (−0.689). Still, although these data demonstrated high correlations, they could not help us understand why final paper grades from semester to semester were consistently high. One obvious reason might be that students’ writing skill was consistent. And it was. After looking at comparable paragraphs in random student papers across semesters (“comparable” in that they were written about the same main idea), I saw little difference in skill or ability. But I was not surprised by this finding because the writing itself was not the issue. The issue was the fact that, by and large, students were not reading (or understanding) Dolnick, yet were successfully executing their final papers. How could final paper grades remain relatively constant and high when it was so obvious in class that more and more students were having difficulty with The Forger’s Spell? The answer, I determined, must lie not with the students, but with their teacher. An Interpretivist Approach Since the researcher just became the subject of the study, I decided to use an in-terpretivist framework of inquiry to uncover an explanation for the discrepancy between what I expected to find and what I actually found. This method of inquiry recognizes “the existence of not just one reality, but of multiple realities that are constructed and altered by the knower,” realities that “are not more or less true; rather they are simply more or less informed” (Laverty 26). In other words, I needed to reflect back over the years and, with new eyes, determine whether any curricular or pedagogical changes might account for students’ ability to successfully execute a paper about a book they had not read. This reflection would not alter the validity of my previous understanding of the events as they initially unfolded, but looking at those events in light of the data from the trend analysis might provide a new perspective that could help me construct a different reality from the one I remem-bered after teaching each semester, one that might explain the inconsistencies in the data. That is to say, creating a framework in which to interpret any curricular and pedagogical changes retroactively and collectively might help me explain why students were consistently performing well on a paper when, in later years, most didn’t read the book that informed that paper. To begin this reflection, I conducted a document analysis of my syllabi, teaching notes, course management system, and gradebook for spring 2011 through fall 2016 in an effort to discover any changes in my curriculum and pedagogy that d413-435-May21-TETYC.indd 420 8/4/21 8:01 PMT h e Te a c h i n g Z o n e : S q u a r e P e g s i n R o u n d H o l e s 421might have affected students’ reading and writing performance related to the final paper. I analyzed these documents in chronological order to help me detect and track any changes. Figure 4 shows the notable changes I progressively made, changes undoubt-edly designed to help facilitate students’ development through the stages identified in Lev Vygotsky’s theory of learning, whereby learning takes place in the zone of proximal development (ZPD)—the zone that describes the distance between the problem-solving capabilities that students are able to exercise on their own and those they are able to bring to bear with the help of a teacher or peer (86–87). These changes probably felt like conscientious teaching when considered in isolation from semester to semester, but they might tell a different story when analyzed as a group. However, before I further analyzed these curricular and pedagogical changes, I wanted to assess the ways I responded to student writing for the final paper. Hence, I next performed a textual analysis on the feedback I made on students’ rough drafts to determine whether I was providing more pointed feedback in later semesters that might account for why students could successfully write about a book they had not read. Textual Analysis of Rough Draft Comments Since fall 2012, I provided online feedback4, giving me a record of every comment I made on rough drafts of the final paper. In order to “increase the likelihood of students knowing the most important problems to address in their writing,” I always provided “focused feedback . . . tied to the learning goals for the paper assignment” based upon a rubric I used across all semesters in this study (Stern and Solomon F I G U R E 4 . Changes in Curriculum and PedagogyFigure 4. Changes in Curriculum and Pedagogy Semester Change(s)F 2013 • Dropped from three major essays to two.S 2014 • Provided students with a synthesis grid to help them synthesize their sources. F 2014 • Provided an alterna > > > >d413-435-May21-TETYC.indd 428 8/4/21 8:01 PMT h e Te a c h i n g Z o n e : S q u a r e P e g s i n R o u n d H o l e s 429Smith, a fixture in Kingsborough hallways. Occupation: more enlightened teacher. Awakened from a nightmare, a teacher now more in tune with iGen/Gen Z students. You couldn’t experience this downfall, you say? Hopefully not in most places, where teachers know to look for it. But it did happen in this educator’s life, a life now back in the Teaching Zone.AcknowledgementsI am profoundly grateful to Christian Calienes for the hours of conversations we engaged in about this article and for the multiple drafts he read; I could never have pulled everything together without his wisdom and guidance. I would also like to thank Lauren Levesque, also from Kingsborough’s Institutional Research Office, for processing the trend analysis data for this study. And, as always and most importantly, thank you to my students, who always teach me how to better teach them.

Postcards from the Beach

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Postcards from the Beach

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