Now, a question: If you were a student who had to write a final and one of the prompts asked you to considering whether a certain culture was "medieval" "modern" or both - wouldn't you first do an internal check to make sure you understood those terms? And if you didn't, maybe choose a different topic? Not my students! Don't understand modern (i.e. think it means the computer age), no problem! Don't understand basics of what medieval Europe looked like (i.e. "Culture X in the 1600s had many medieval hold-overs like a free market economy, but that didn't prevent them from also being modern." in case you don't know, there was no free market in 17th century Europe and a highly regulated economy would be one of the elements that most historians would point to as a "medieval hold-over". We spent weeks on this).
And, if there are any students who have found this blog, you're probably smart enough not to do the following (but in case you aren't...): Never, ever, start a paper with "Merriam Webster.com defines XXXX as XXXX"
oh god, not the dictionary definition again! I have had students define "modern" "Modernity" "nationalism" "nation" "revolution" "socialism" "capitalism" and every other burgeoning topic with dictionary definitions. The worst are the ones that cite dictionary.com or wikipedia. If it were that easy to define why tf do you think we asked you to produce a paper that explores that term and its implications in a specific time period or place? UGH!!!!
ReplyDeleteI like this problem.
ReplyDeleteHere's a question for you: Is it fair to ask an either/or question like that on an exam? Or put differently: Is it fair to bait your students with that kind of question?
After marking (Canadianism for grading) my fair share of cluster f&^% exam essays, I avoid playing intellectual chicken with my students. Why? Well, because most of them have nerves of steel.
I think it is - especially considering that 1/2 of the lectures revolved around this particular question. And the question was either/or/ or a combination of the two. I also think that when done right, and I did get 2 really good answers, it forces the students to make and defend their categories of analysis and how they then apply those categories to their thinking about history. The better answers spoke to the artificiality of those terms and the baggage that comes with them. But most students picked this prompt out of the 4 b/c it looked "easier".
ReplyDeleteThat seems fair, but then if they are "artificial" and "baggage" laden terms, why talk about them? I try not to.
ReplyDeleteAnd in your own historical writing, how much time do you spend unpacking categories? I avoid writing problematic categories in my own writing because I hate people asking me clarifying questions about them. I'm a chicken shit.
Is this the kind of historical writing that students should be doing the undergraduate level, and in a test? I am not sure. I am all about avoiding prompts that are going to elicit responses that are going to piss me off. Call me selfish.
Yay, comment debate !
ReplyDeleteBecause I think we sometimes forget how useful the unpacking of those terms - which still for the most part define the field - is. We may have talked some things to death, but they're still very new concepts to my students. Just as I think there's something to being able to take a part (critically) "badly done" history, I think there' something to being able to say, "if we're using these terms, this is what they mean, this is why I've decided to use them, and this is where they work and this is where they don't". I guess I believe in the exercise of deconstruction, but that first requires something to deconstruct. In relation to the early modern, there is something about the exercise of identifying those elements of say the Early Modern Dutch Republic that are hold-overs from the medieval period, some elements that were rather innovative and still clung tightly to today (such as the first stock market and accompanying boom-bust cycles), and others still that may be seemed "modern" or "progressive" for the time, but don't fit either category. Seeing the early modern as straddling, rather comfortably thank you very much, two stages in what most students take for granted as a progressive narrative, I think is very useful in disrupting the idea that "it was all like Medieval times, and then Luther/Hobbes/Locke/The American or French Revolution burst onto the scene and that's why we in America today fight for our freedoms".
Plus it was a pretty easy question based around the major themes and lectures of the class.
As for my own work, it depends on the category. Most of my thesis is going to be challenging the dominant category of "mixed literacy" or "early literate cultures" that so far only consider textual-oral transmission. I plan to argue that the current category is limited when texts were meant to be read, heard, looked at (in terms of images but also the shape of the items on the page), and also performed.
Whether this is something undergrads should be doing, and on a test? I don't know - I got questions like that in take home finals, but I also got more crunchy historical questions on in-class exams than I see here (ex. Write an essay that analyzes the election trends in the Weimar Republic between 1920-1933, and discuss these trends in relation to the radical right and left in Germany. I've never seen anything so "unexpressive" on tests at this university). In my training, I did a lot of crunchy very guided essays and then longer, on my own research papers - quite different from what I see here.
And is the current system working? Not really, but am I going to take more time to think up final exam questions for a TA assignment in a class where I'm reading everything fresh, and do that early enough to think about how I might be able to structure sections in order to give students the tools they need to really do well? Maybe I'm jaded, but no. In my own classes? Definitely. When I'm TAing for someone in a field I am not familiar with? No way Jose.
As far as the other categories we (I) take for granted - get back to me when I've written more :)
Ok. This is tiring me out -- in a good way. I will have to stop after this comment because I have a lecture to write on Meanings of the Meiji Restoration. That's right: I am the pot that calls the kettle black.
ReplyDeleteBad on me for that first question of mine. I did not mean to suggest that teachers shouldn't work to deconstruct problematic categories when they come up in class or in readings. We - me and you and anyone else that wants to join our party - totally should. I do think that there are ways of describing the processes of 'modernity' without using the word 'modernity' whenever our super powers of description fail us. (When I find that way I'll let you know.)
But I also make a conscious effort to avoid saying anything that the students are going to plant in a exam. For example, in the class that I teach on Politics and Society in COUNTRY J there are certain words that I avoid saying for fear that they are going to appear in my students' reaction papers and exams:'society,' 'culture,' 'modernity/modern,' 'advanced,' and 'citizen' - until I reach 1945 in the course.
Do I have trouble avoiding these words in lecture? You bet I do. However, I have found that recording my lectures keeps me honest -- and my ego in check.
Ok. This was fun K. Back to my own blogging.