Is publishing perishing?

Introverts make excellent eavesdroppers.

I overheard one of my more senior colleagues complaining to another senior colleague awhile back that his post-tenure review committee didn't seem to appreciate all the time he spent doing scholarly writing. He viewed that work as the bulk of his service to the college and professional development. Instead, the evaluators wanted him to participate on more committees.

I admit that the colleague making the complaint is notoriously curmudgeonly. He knows he should make nice and show his face at a few more meetings and the occasional holiday party.

But, with that said, I was still bothered by his situation. In a sense, the evaluators were suggesting that the only real professional development, the only meaningful involvement on campus, was the kind done in groups. Going off by yourself and writing couldn't possibly be helping anyone.

So, while professors at the four-year schools, especially the research institutions, are cracking under the weight of expectations to publish, we at the community college level could now be chided for it. While they were living the old "publish or perish" ultimatum, was publishing going to perish among those of us in the "basement of the ivory tower"?

It reminds me of a little meeting all new hires had to participate in when I first joined the tenure-track faculty at my community college. A then-administrator explained that, now, my duties would be primarily teaching and so rather than being a scholar in my field (English), as I had been as a grad student, I would now be a scholar of education.

A little part of me died inside.

It was kind of insulting, both to my students and to me. It was as if she was saying that my students would all be at such a low level that they wouldn't benefit from my studying a literary specialty but would rather benefit more from me picking up endless gimmicks to convey elementary material to them.

It was as if she was saying that nobody needed me to be an expert in my field. (I thought of the other old-timer's response to my colleague the curmudgeon: "Committees? Any schmuck can join a committee. Not everyone can publish the kind of stuff you do.")

Telling faculty that no one needs them to be a specialist is a great way to get them to forget what they love about the field and get burned out. When I first started teaching high school and expressed my dismay at what my life had become to one of my former English professors, his advice was to be sure to read every day. Buried in homework, I thought he was crazy. But he had said to pick up some poetry every day, even if it was just for ten minutes: "Remember what you love." And now I see that he was right. If you can't keep up with your scholarly interests, if you can't be excited about your field, students won't find you very inspiring.

Numbers

Sometimes, I say to my students, much of English is math. My course is out of 1000 points. If you get 0/100 on something, your grade's going to take a big hit. Especially if you're already on the brink, getting a 75%. The grade is a simple calculation. Add all points earned, divide by total points possible. Move decimal point two places to get percentage. Simple.

But people don't believe. Or they just deny basic mathematical fact. "I've gotten mostly C's and D's, but can I still get a B in this class?" We always want something other than numbers to be at play.

Sometimes there is. Students always like to hold out the hope that extra efforts and a special dose of creativity will push them from 69% to 70%, from 79% to 80%. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't; after all, people whose grades are low are usually not the type of people to be putting forth the kind of effort that will push them over the borderline to the grade that they want.

While grades are pretty simple math, we often treat group work as if it's a matter of simple math while it isn't at all. This occurred to me as I read a couple of essays last week when my self-proclaimed introvert students explained that they liked the small group work we do in class because they felt more comfortable speaking in small groups rather than in front of the whole class. I was surprised, which seems weird. Introverts love one-on-one and small group communication, right?

Maybe I was stuck in the instructor's perspective: I don't know if I'll ever totally get over the uncomfortable feeling of not being able to be everywhere at once, directing the lesson in an orderly fashion. I don't like hopping from group to group, never knowing exactly what part of the reading we'll be talking about next.

But then I thought back on my time as a student. I didn't like small-group work then, either. Why did my students like it while I didn't?

Well, introversion isn't just a numbers game. Sticking an introvert with just any one or two people doesn't mean the introvert will have a good rapport with that person/those people. Often, in K-12, students have gone to school with the same people for years and there can be years of history between those people, good or bad. In college, you could be paired with a total stranger; you might bond, but you might not. At least in college, students are less clique-y and more open to actually having an intellectual discussion--that is, in college, you might not be deemed a nerd for actually wanting to participate in the group's assigned task rather than socialize.

Part of it may also have to do with the fact that I'm an oldest child. As the stereotype goes, I always got along better with older people than I did with my peers. In a whole-class discussion, at least the teacher wanted to hear what I had to say and would usually respond in an encouraging way. I knew how to relate to adults. The rules were explicit and easy. Throw me into a group, and I had to spend most of my time figuring out the rules of teenage socialization rather than dealing with the content.

In whole-class discussion, the teacher's presence could protect me. Even though I had to speak up in front of others, those others were usually quiet and if they said anything insulting, the teacher would hear and deal with it. But in groups, it's noisy. The teacher wasn't there to shame my classmates into polite toleration of me or whoever the speaker was.

When I read about collaborative learning, the research always assumes a benevolent collaborator. In the real world, that's not always the case.

As they say, it's a jungle out there. Yes, introverts love one-to-one or small-group communication, but an introvert gazelle isn't going to enjoy hanging out with a lion, even if there's just one of him/her.

Liquid Extroversion

I love Mondays and Wednesdays this semester because they are my online teaching days and I can be my introverted self all day long. Because I don't need to be in as mad a dash to get to campus as I do on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I stop at Starbucks and get a larger size coffee than usual so I can save half of it for the next day, because that's when I really need it, when I'm face-to-face.

The first week of school: how to exhaust yourself by teaching almost NO content at all!

Every semester, I fall for it. To make myself feel better about going back to work after a vacation, I think, "Oh, well, it's only the first week. I don't have to really study or prep. It's mostly going over the syllabus and the writing process and adding or dropping people."

When I think that, my brain selectively forgets that I'm an introvert. All my new students will be strangers. I will have to chit-chat with them during icebreakers.

Some of these total strangers will appear to be mad or sad when I tell them I cannot add them. I will not know if they are sincere in the urgency of their requests. As a highly sensitive person, I will be troubled by this.

I will be on the spot constantly at the beginning. I have to set the tone by going through the administrative procedures sternly on the first day. When things loosen up a little, I will still be on the spot because even if I'm not giving direct instruction, I'll have to speed around the room, making sure everyone is on task because behavioral standards are set during the first few weeks.

It may sound crazy, because as soon as writing starts coming in, the grading starts, but I actually look forward to curling up with a cup of coffee and reading their "Your Personal Literary History" essays and their "Introduce Yourself" poems. I guess we could call  those activities the introvert's favorite icebreakers-- the ones you do alone! And while the get-to-know-you activities in class do help me some, I find that I don't really learn their names until I have read their stories.

When the content is hard...

...introverts might need to lecture it first.

It strikes me that when I'm teaching something new or a piece of literature that's complex or very in-depth, I feel like I need to lecture about it (or do a teacher-led whole-class discussion) a few times before I'm comfortable with group work. I learn best in a focused manner, and a focused way of teaching helps me master the material. As they say, you don't really learn something until you have to teach it to someone else. Once I'm comfortable that I won't forget my main points or get confused, I'm more comfortable opening things up to group work in which things happen more helter-skelter and out of order and during which time I can't be with everyone at once. Now, this probably wouldn't be a problem for an extrovert teacher who learns by interacting with others. It may help him/her master new material by diving at it from different angles, moving from group to group. So, an extrovert teacher might be able to start with group work right out of the gate. But an introvert may take awhile to work into a more student-centered style of teaching.

Teacher-centered is almost always presented as bad. I would ask that those who evaluate beginning teachers to consider whether or not those teachers are introverts and rather than label a new teacher who lectures as a bad teacher, help support them in the transition. Teaching is notorious for expecting new teachers to have the same load and the same expertise as older teachers. Let's modify our expectations.

That line from Gatsby

At one of Gatsby's parties, Jordan explains to Nick, "I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy" (54).

Of course, I've found a convoluted way to relate this quotation to teaching. A few days ago, some friends and colleagues and I had a brief exchange on Facebook in which it came up that enjoying speaking to large groups doesn't necessarily mean that a person is extroverted. I find that, as an introvert, talking to large groups often means you're lecturing or leading a class discussion, both of which allow you to follow a topic in depth and in an organized manner, which introverts love. So, to throw a little S.A.T.-quality allusion at you, are large classes to the introvert teacher what large parties are to The Great Gatsby's Jordan Baker? I, however, when I lecture or lead class discussion, am not looking so much for privacy as focus.

Finally, some recognition!

I'm happy to have a positive post, as I feel that lately I've spent a lot of time on here fending off attacks on things that introverts like.

I've now been to a professional development session in which introversion was mentioned as a valid learning style ("style" is the wrong word, probably, but I hope you get what I mean) that teachers should address. So, just as we should appeal to the traditional learning styles of auditory, visual, kinesthetic, we should consider introversion. It was an On Course workshop given at my college by their representative Elaine Zamora, who is also a community college teacher.

I think the only other time I've heard about introverts in a professional development setting was in a temperament exercise in the school of education when I got my teaching credential about 15 years ago. Often, if we hear about introverts in educational situations at all, we're glossed over--oh, those people know how to do stuff on their own so let's ignore them; or, oh, those are the readers who always do well in school anyway, so they don't need any attention; or, worse yet, those kids need to get with it and learn how to be more extroverted to succeed in our society.

To have my temperament validated in the same way that we try to validate other kinds of diversity--cultural, gender, religious--was a breath of fresh air!

The introvert-friendly activity we did at the workshop was simple, but had a big payoff. On Course calls it the "Silent Socratic Dialogue," which means that a student and partner each write on a prompt. Then, they exchange notebooks, read their partner's writing, write a question, exchange books again, answer the question, exchange books, read answer and write another question, etc. While we only took about five minutes each go-around to write our questions or answers, you could easily do this for longer. Even if you only did the five minutes, however, it's a lot more time than the introvert typically gets in an oral conversation where the rapid-fire back-and-forth takes seconds.

It was great to see that collaborative work need not be noisy and rushed.

And, as Elaine mentioned, sometimes in conversation we're so worried about coming up with a clever response that we don't really listen (this is an especially big problem for introverts, I think, and probably part of why they dread small talk). This silent dialoguing allowed us introverts to focus on our partner's words and take our time to reflect on our responses.