I was finally able to open a section of American Sign Language. When students were allowed to enroll, the section filled up completely with a wait-list within two days. This never happened to me before with any of the courses in the other 8 languages that I offer.
What would happen in a profit-oriented organization in the midst of a severe budget crisis?
A second section would immediately be opened, and people on the wait-list would be moved there, right?
But no. In our supposedly corporatized university, it will take me a million years to ask and ask and ask for a second section.
I’m giving an interview to our student newspaper today about our ASL course. I’m holding a promotional event on the 14th. This will undoubtedly bring many more students eager to enroll. It would be great to have an unfilled section ready for them. Instead, I’ll have to go through an entire crowd of scared bureaucrats who wouldn’t be able to make a decision.
I dream of a corporatized university. I have almost erotic fantasies of working in an environment where it’s all about bringing in the profit, innovating, achieving, and making things happen.
Clarissa's Blog 
“finally able to open a section of American Sign Language”
It’s great that you started that and especially great that you have it as a regular part of a foreign language department. Very often it gets shoved into some weird cubbyhole… where I went to university it was offered through a small department devoted to acoustics… (only one semester because the departments that depending on student enrollment in first year courses campaigned against it counting as a foreign language….)
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It used to be part of Speech Pathology, and it never got any enrollments because people don’t think of ASL as a pathology. During meetings with prospective students, they always came up to me to ask about ASL because I’m seen as “the languages person” on campus. This is the correct instinct, and I’m glad we are finally responding to it. Our position is that ASL is a language like any other, and we are planning to go all the way to higher level courses that address the cultural component. Maybe even do a minor in deaf studies.
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What is the cap, the maximum of students allowed in the class, out of curiosity? If this happened at my institution, administration would have gladly raised the cap at 100, 125, or 150 students per section, provided there is a classroom for them, before opening another section. I have to fight to keep elementary languages courses at a maximum of 80 students per section. Intermediate is 50-55. In sum, paperwork is always an issue, but in my case, there is something much worse going on.
There is a demand for ASL. I am curious to know why.
Ol.
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ASL has the maximum of 18 because the instructor requested that. The rest of the language courses are capped at 25.
I’m shocked and horrified that anybody anywhere has to teach elementary language courses to a classroom of 100+ students. It’s beyond wrong.
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Also, I will leave my position as Chair with the department offering 10 languages instead of the 7 we offered before, having added ASL, Ukrainian and Swahili. This is a great achievement given that there’s a collapse of support for languages everywhere in the country. And I’m actually growing the department. We went from one French major to 6, so more established languages are gaining, too.
Many things are possible if people put their minds to it.
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I am genuinely jealous of you. Congrats on your excellent work! At my institution, 1, 6,10 or 20 students majoring in Spanish will never be enough to save the program.
This is a boring conversation for your readers, so I will not write to much. Instead, and to sum it up, if you ever depressed because of your Uni administration and paperwork, give me a call. The comparison will cheer you up.
A cap at 25 sounds like an Ivy League school situation to me…
Lastly. with ASL, be careful. Some will demand the instructors to be someone with hearing loss. We can talk more about this…
Ol.
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I met colleagues yesterday who teach 5-5 and 6-6. Now I’m going to stop saying that I work at a teaching-heavy institution.
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In all fairness, is there a topic that can be taught well to a classroom of 100+ students? I am in STEM and have taught 100-level courses to a classroom of 250 people. It is the fast food service of academia. You get served, but you would be much better off eating elsewhere.
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“is there a topic that can be taught well to a classroom of 100+ students?”
I mostly don’t think so… I remember having to take statistics (after dropping once) and dreading it. I went to the main ‘lecture’ exactly once (auditorium with a couple hundred people watching a video with bad sound) and never went back.
Fortunately they offered smaller sections with grad assistants and I went to all of those and I ended up loving it (working thru the book at a campus bowling alley are some of my favorite undergrad memories).
I had a solid A but screwed up the final exam which was heavily based on the last material which I didn’t go to GA sessions for (I went to a conference to give a paper instead) so I ended up with a B+. Still a favorite class.
But another class I had to take was in political science in a smaller auditorium, still a lot of people, with a live lecturer who did a very good job. I went to classes did minimum studying and ended up with an A from the tests and a few years later I had to go to the office of the instructor (for something completely unrelated) and he remembered me (even though we had never interacted before).
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“There is a demand for ASL. I am curious to know why”
First answer is…. it looks cool and is fun. Some initial enthusiasm is lost when it turns out that it’s no faster to learn than French or German (especially receptive skills are hard to gain).
Also it has the word ‘American’ in the name – marketing genius so that many who might be leery of ‘foreign’ languages are more open to it.
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I also, to my shame, thought that you can get fluent in a single semester.
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Well, also, many (most?) people in the US are far more likely to know or be related to someone who is deaf, than someone who speaks another language and also doesn’t speak English. And if you are a hearing person proficient at ASL there’s a clear path to actual jobs as an interpreter. Churches, schools, and governments hire them, and that’s a very visible position that people know about– like, every emergency TV broadcast in my state has one, and I seriously doubt they’d risk underpaying for it.
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All good explanations. Thank you!
Ol.
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