February 7, 2022
TPS Report Time
| “ | The mission of the School of Arts & Letters (SOAL) is to provide broad access to arts and humanities education that promotes creativity, elevates culture, encourages the pursuit of happiness, and prepares intellectually agile citizens to serve our communities and the creative economy of Georgia. | ” |
| — MGA School of Arts and Letters Mission Statement | ||
The apparatus for this year’s self-evaluation seems overly complicated. Perhaps I feel like the new student looking at my syllabus: a bit overwhelmed with it all. Instead of just the form I’ve been using for the past twenty years, this one has a new rubric that must be filled out, too. The premise, it seems to me, is that we need quantifiable, measurable evidence to analyze my performance. This is pretty simple for scholarship and service, but less so for teaching. Still, I have to put this behind me to get back to Lipton’s Journal.
Teaching
Here are my stats for teaching this year.
| Semester | Course | Delivery | # Enrolled | # Dropped | #Failed[1] | # Passed[2] |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fall 2021 | ENGL 1102.16[3] | F2F[4] | 10 | 1 | 2 | 5 |
| ENGL 2111.03 | F2F | 12 | 1 | 1 | 8 | |
| ENGL 2111.05 | OL[5] | 27 | 8 | 1 | 17 | |
| ENGL 2122.01 | OL SS[6] | 22 | 3 | 1 | 13 | |
| Summer 2021 | NMAC 3108.01[3] | OL | 20 | 2 | 4 | 11 |
| Spring 2021 | ENGL 2111.21 | OL | 29 | 2 | 1 | 23 |
| ENGL 2111.06 | OL SS | 27 | 6 | 2 | 17 | |
| ENGL 3700.02 | F2F | 9 | - | - | 9 | |
| NMAC 3108.01[3] | OL | 30 | 4 | 5 | 19 | |
| TOTALS | 186 | 27 | 17 | 122 | ||
Obviously, students still want online courses, judging by the high enrollment in those courses (I have 135 total) versus the low enrollments in face-to-face (31 total). Who could blame them? I did, too, and fortunately received more online sections than face-to-face. However, with the high enrollment caps, I taught an extra 21 students this year—enough to populate another survey.
I figure a reasonable cap for surveys is 20, and 15 for writing-intensive courses.
Total pass rate: 86%. I took the total number of students, subtracting the withdrawals and those who stopped working, and divided it into the total of those who passed. I realize that this final tally is somewhat arbitrary, since it discounts withdrawals and give-ups. Yes, I could be the cause of either of these, but this seems reasonable. These last few semesters have been trying for all of us.
This fall, I resurrected my old MediaWiki server LitWiki thinking I could introduce digital writing literacy to first- and second-year students without the added stress of writing or Wikipedia.
Designed and taught a new course for me, ENGL 2122 British Literature II Online. I also hadn’t taught ENGL 1102 in at least a decade, so this was practically a new course as well.
Publications
- “‘It Might Not Be Unpleasant to Live’: The Transitional Short Fiction of Norman Mailer.” The Mailer Review 15 (2021): Forthcoming.
- “Political Resonance.” Norman Mailer in Context. Ed. Maggie McKinley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP: 373–383.
Service
- Writing Center volunteer, fall 2021. Two hours a week.
- MGA Foundation drive representative, fall 2021.
- Editor, Project Mailer, the Digital Humanities initiative of the NMS.
- Associate Editor, The Mailer Review, since 2007.
- Vice President, Norman Mailer Society
- Member, Executive Board, NMS, since 2006.
- Member, Editorial Board, The Mailer Review, since 2021.
. . .
notes
