I like all of my student evaluations this semester except one. It says, “The course could be improved by having less readings and more in-class hands-on stuff.”
I’m really curious what we could be putting our hands on in an advanced literature seminar.
I also wonder where people get this bizarre and meaningless verbiage of hands-on, etc.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’ve learned not to take advice from random heffalumps. In general, avoid the narrative of self-improvement if you want to have a chance to improve in any area of your life. Otherwise, you will be looking up the term, ‘hands on’, trying to work out what the student really intended by that, and wasting time adjusting to the suggestions of someone who just came up with a brainwave that made them feel elite.
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The really annoying part is that when I write my application for tenure I will have to do exactly this: gather these inane suggestions from students and explain how I put them into practice. This will make for some inventive writing. Well, on the positive side, I will be able to get many funny blog posts out of it.
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As long as you don’t take it seriously, I think it won’t detract from your teaching. To tell you the truth, when I did a teaching course, the part about becoming self-aware was the most obstructive to me becoming a teacher. Had I been much less scrutinising of everything and more just myself, I would have done better. This whole trend where you have to analyze yourself to death isn’t helpful.
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“This whole trend where you have to analyze yourself to death isn’t helpful.”
– I know! If only our administrators stopped being so terrified of students and realized that, every once in a while, there will be a student who won’t be happy, and that’s not the end of the world. Human interactions involve some degree of unpleaantness and opposition, and that is normal. What is not normal is to try to please everybody all the time.
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I couldn’t agree more. It is control freak mentality which capitulates into absolute deference.
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Let’s apply Miller’s law (roughly: to understand something that makes no sense, first assume the person is being truthful and then figure out what they’re being truthful about).
First, I’m assuming that “hands on” is the students way of indicating that they’re a kinesthetic learner (if you believe in that typology).
Assuming that by ‘readings’ the student means reading stuff outside of class then maybe instead of 200 pg books read outside of class they would like shorter readings that could be subjected to intense scrutiny (a page or two in class that were then taken apart and put back together word by word).
Perhaps they imagine exercises that involve things rearranging lines in a poem or sections of a story to see what happens (I almost always preferred listening to cds in random order mode which sometimes seemed to make more sense than the original album order).
Perhaps they’re thinking of exercises where you change as much as you can in a short passage without changing the basic meaning.
Perhaps they’re thinking of story construction exercises?
It is possible that the student is just writing something because they think they have to or engaged in duck-evaluation (like ducktalk in 1984). But there’s always time to make that call later,but when feasible I prefer to be reasonably sure there’s not another explanation first.
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I dig your optimism and faith in humanity but I have this overpowering suspicion that the student wanted fill-in-the-blanks grammar exercises. I even had a dream tonight where students clamored for such exercises.
Well, at least they have given up on asking me for multiple choice.
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MULTIPLE CHOICE! HAHAHAHAHAH!
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So he wants a seminar to become more of a lecture? No issue here. Next!
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I don’t even know how to teach literature in the form of lectures. 🙂
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“Hands on” is a euphemism for not doing academic work. In these our-university-abroad summer programs, for instance, “hands on” would mean a guided tour of someplace like the Louvre, as opposed to discussion of a short story. Bizarrely, when I proposed sending the students to the Louvre as homework rather than making it part of class, and having the “hands on” city exploration in class be something more inventive and that couldn’t be done in English, i.e. attend a neighborhood meeting, a yoga class, whatever, it was not considered “hands on” enough … not touristy enough to be “hands on” and too challenging.
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I actually did that request to my literature 101 teacher, well not exactly with those words… As a result I got what I wanted: I got involved in theater for about month instead of having to attend class.
Your student’s usage of “hands on” suggests “business” to me. as if he wants to find applications of your course on his everyday work but I wonder what kind of job he has if he’s majoring in literature?
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As I always tell myself when eval time comes around… there are always outliers. I only pay attention to the patterns of negative/constructive criticism. But you know that! 🙂
In terms of hands-on… who knows. Do they want a literature lab? That could actually be a lot of fun… but not necessarily what we’re going for in lit classes!
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