29 "Threats"

I've been cleaning out my files at school and ran across a folder labeled "Threats."  In it are two pieces of "evidence" of students who really hated me because of their perception that I attacked them verbally. 

One is a photocopy of a set of interpersonal communication journal entries from a student I had back in the early 90s in which he calls me (the only person who was going to read these writings) an incompetent, angry, feministic man-hater.  He was also a Wiccan who also thought I probably hated people of the "Wise Craft".  I kept a photocopy of the journal because it mentions how sick he is of people attacking him for being a white male and that he should file a lawsuit.  He was mostly angry at a woman who was part of his classroom small group but he considered me his attacker for a comment I'd made about the skit his team performed.  What perturbed me most about the journal was the intensity of the feeling, the repetition of concerns, and the choice of using a classroom assignment to rage at the person reading it.  When I responded to his journal (giving the original copy of it back to him at the final) I finished by saying, "I appreciate your honesty in this journal.  I just wish your group had come to me when you started having problems with D.  I could have given her an assignment to take her out of the group if I had known about all your troubles. . . . You show an understanding of the materials.  Chapters 7 - 10 A."

Over the years, a few other students have used the journal or other classroom assignments as a forum for passive-aggressive criticism of me or my grading decisions.  The other piece of "evidence" in this file is a letter from a woman who tossed so many threats back and forth with one of her teammates in small group communication that Bart Q. had to be called in to help me mediate.  In her final report on her team experience she actually wrote about me (not in second but in third person) as a badly dressed, self-absorbed incompetent.  I'll give her two of those three, certainly.  But it was her style of delivery that was irritating.

Now, was the heavyset ex-felon who came in to complain about a grade and managed to share, during the discussion, that he was an ex-heroin salesman and user and that he'd been in the clink for killing someone, trying to scare me or just sharing who he was?  I don't know his motivation for self-disclosure.  I do know that I was the last one in the building and I really wanted him out of my office.  

But such experiences have been rare.  Far rarer for me than for some of my other colleagues, especially those who teach psychology. Over the years I seem to have discouraged most of the passive aggressive communicators by telling students about my own problem of being an "insensitive listener."   I tell them I just don't take hints.  And the more open I've been about my insensitivity, the less likely I've been to receive passive-aggressive comments.  I encourage students (and others) to ask directly for what they want. 

Now, I understand that this particular request reveals my own communication bias towards masculine/Western style of communication.  I know that speaking in a linear, straightforward manner is easier for some than for others.  And, really, when it comes to students, I do try to guess at what they want and ask about what they want in most situations when they are having trouble speaking directly.  But not when the indirection contains a hidden attack on me.  In those cases, I just won't hear it.  Even though I do.

Now, to drop this old "Threats" file into the recycling.

LY #134 If I Were Going To Teach This Again . . .

I would certainly do it differently.

That's what I've been thinking about my new Visual Rhetoric class as well as this quarter's face-to-face interpersonal. 

I'm not sure why I'm unhappy with the results of the Visual Rhetoric class when I was very happy last spring with the Rhetoric of Film.  In this winter's class they needed to make a still image while last spring they were required to make a short movie.  It was obvious to me that most students did more work last spring, and not just because movies are more work than photographs.  I was over-the-moon about last spring's student movies.  This winter, however, several of their final project visual texts looked thrown together at the last minute.  Then there were the analyses they did on them.  Right there in the directions I wrote that As would be applied only to essays with researched sources in them.  I provided several examples of those possible sources in class.  But how many of my students had sources, even googly ones?  ONE. That's right.  Just one!

Ack.  And after I showed them in class and in their homework how to super-fast-find supporting evidence on the web? 

Well, at least I got to teach the class.  And teaching it gave me the chance to return to the work of John Berger and readings I enjoyed even though my students didn't.  And, yes, because of my own obsessions the class was too theory heavy and if I taught it again I would place much more emphasis on the performative aspects of visual rhetoric and communication so that it was more closely related to our advertising and marketing classes rather than a replication of my own ancient graduate student interests.  (In my beginning is my end . . .)

And then there's the face-to-face interpersonal.  I wasn't happy with it for a variety of reasons.  First, I didn't do my work of memorizing their names very well.  It was a once a week class and what with the day lost to fake snow danger and my own trip out of town my mind just wasn't sticky enough to keep the names present to me.  Second, a good chunk of them didn't have the textbook  in a timely manner (i.e., by midterms, for f---'s sake) and so they didn't keep up with the  material.  I've faced that issue for 2 1/2 decades, however, so it "shouldn't" have ticked me off but for some reason it did.  Maybe because this was the last time I was teaching the class live and I was hoping for more.  Finally, I'd changed one of the assignments in class from writing/thinking to thinking/test-taking.   I made this change to get the live class more parallel to the online sections.  Big mistake.  It saved me the time usually spent in reading and grading but it didn't push them to think through the material as much as written homework would have done.  The quizzes also did not do their job of encouraging reading before class meetings.

Oh, well.  It's all done except for the complaints.  I've given my online interpersonal communication students until 5:00 pm this afternoon to write to me with any complaints they may have about my assessment of their course projects.  They need to read my assessments first, however on Grademark.  I sent out two course emails with links to how to find the Grademark materials and even then I received an email from a student who continued to read Grademark as "GradeBOOK" and kept looking for comments where they weren't.  So I'm not the only one with "technirritation."

LY #101 The Lost Last Time for Telephone

I didn't plan to write about Community on Tuesday.  I'd planned to write about the last time I was able to experience one of my favorite in-class activities -- Public Telephone.  But, sadly, classes were cancelled out of concern for student safety.  I will never lead this activity again.  And the countdown continues.

Richard Estes, Telephone Booths (1977) at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Now, I was somewhat annoyed by this because the danger to students was weather related and was over long before my class started in early evening.  The decision was made around 6 a.m. to cancel classes for the entire day, with the emergency call going out at 6:15.  There was black ice covering the ground throughout the region.  Most of it was gone by noon.  When it was still gone through the entire afternoon, evening, and night, I felt annoyed that I'd lost a whole week of class and especially because I'd lost my last chance to enjoy this activity.

Because of my annoyance I tried to track down the reason the school was closed the entire day rather than just during the morning.  After a few dead ends I received help from Cady-Mae, a lovely and intelligent young woman who works in the public safety office.  With her help I found out that a committee of ten makes the school closure decision after looking at a handful of extremely legitimate sources, including local weather sources, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Weather Channel, and a few other sites.  And, as we all know, the best meteorologists in the world can be wrong about the weather.  I certainly felt better about losing the day once Cady-Mae and a colleague of hers were willing to tell me what upper-level administrators were not -- just where their weather information came from.

So, back to this favorite activity.  It's really pretty simple but it has a powerful impact.  It's all about listening. 

1. I ask for six volunteers.  I take these folks outside of class and tell them to chat with each other and figure out who is the best listener.
2. I go back into the classroom and explain the activity to the other students.  They are to observe and take notes.  I hand out "the story" to the students in the classroom.  (The story I've used most recently is listed below.)
3. After setting up two chairs or desks face to face either in the front of the classroom or in the center (I prefer in the center of a circle of desks), I invite in the volunteer identified "best listener."  The other volunteers wait outside.
4. I read the story aloud to the first volunteer, emphasizing that he or she will need to tell the story to the next person.
5. Then, once I am done, that volunteer calls in the next one, who calls in the next, who calls in the next.

You see why I call it "Public Telephone."  Like the game "Telephone," the story changes from person to person.  Usually it shrinks.  And it's public because there's an audience for the shrinkage.  The changes in the story usually result in laughter from the audience which, of course, increases the volunteers problems with remembering and repeating the story.

Sometimes students have used "good" listening skills during the game.  I have not prohibited them from taking notes or asking questions, though very rarely do they ask if they can use those effective listening skills.  And just as rarely, even though they've allegedly read the chapter on listening, have they used paraphrasing. 

While effective listening is made visible by its usual absence, ineffective listening habits and environmental factors that make listening difficult are also easy to observe.  The audience is a huge distraction to the volunteers, as are their own inner monologues about performance and expectations of perfection.  The message I've crafted is purposefully scattered and hysterical, making it difficult to remember.  I always make sure to encourage the performers to talk about their experience and let them know that the ineffective listening was not just "their fault" but built into the situation.

When I first adapted this activity from a teacher's handbook back in the early 90s, I used the story in the handbook about a taxi driver.  But it just never fit my students.  After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I started using a "crisis" story; one that reflected the disastrous communication errors made by some of the helping organizations during that terrible event.  This story also allowed me to talk not only about listening skills but also about how important it is to create clear messages in an emergency situation. 

If you know anyone teaching interpersonal communication you are welcome to share this with them.  I take no ownership.

THE PUBLIC TELEPHONE CRISIS STORY

Imagine you are working in a crisis situation.  Use all the listening skills you can think of because you’re going to have to pass along this story to the next person.

Here’s what you need to tell the next person.  We need to get to work.  There’s a big fire rolling over Awbrey Butte.  Some jerk tossed a cigarette or something.  Who knows.  Anyway,  Bob Henderson is supposed to lead four vans to the dorm at the top of the hill.  The other three drivers are Kowalski, Smith and Wesson.  The wind has kicked the fire over a couple of roads so we want the students evacuated to the north if there’s still time.  We’re having problems with communications now.  Cell phones aren’t working and we don’t know which roads are open.  What you’re supposed to do is hurry people into the vans and keep them from carrying too much of their junk out of the dorm.  Some of them will want to take a lot of stuff.  The rule is, one backpack or one laptop bag.  That’s all they can carry.  Just one bag.  And no weapons.  So help the four drivers get students into the vans and then run through the dorms and look into every room, make sure no one’s passed out or sleeping, ok?  You got it?  If so, you can pass on this story to the next person.

LY #92 The Saddest Week

For the past few years that I've been teaching interpersonal communication online, the second week of class is the saddest week.  Chapter 2 of Looking Out, Looking In focuses on the role played by communication in the construction of our Selves.  To understand why the week is sad, you should know about the weekly participation assignment.

This is what my students are supposed to do each week:

1. A primary post with a sentence long quote from the text (with page number) accompanied by a description of a communication event or behavior that illustrates the quotation along with a clear explanation of how the quote and the description are connected.  The chosen quote should always come from that particular week's assigned readings in the textbook.  The communication event should include an observation of a particular action or thing that occurred or existed at a particular time and place and could be seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled.  Do not simply give a type of behavior like, "she was nice."  Be very specific and give a quote of a verbal message (Example: "She said, 'I really like the way you sing,'") or nonverbal message ("She picked up the groceries I'd dropped and helped me into the house.")
   
2. A thoughtful response to another student's primary post in which you mention something the other student has said.
3. At least one 5 turn conversation with a colleague.  This may result from your colleague's response to your primary post or your response to a colleague's primary post.
   
4. Be sure that you have at least 4 posts each week. 

For the second week, students need to offer a primary post in response to one of these prompts:

1. How has a specific communication behavior performed by one person (verbal or nonverbal) influenced the self-concept of another person? 
2. Can you identify and describe a communication choice that a person might make to manage the impressions others have of him or her in the workplace setting?

The reason that this is the saddest week is that all too often the primary post is about the terrible emotional and sometimes physical abuse my now adult students experienced at the hands of their parents. Sometimes that childhood abuse was followed by relationships with abuse relational partners.  In my current classes I have at least six women who shared that they'd escaped abusive husbands and two men who have talked about fathers who told them over and over that they were "nothing."  All this with quotations from the textbook and following all the other directions for the week.

I used to get information like this in the form of journals and back in the 90s I had lots of handwriting to read each week.  In those days students just shared the information with me, not with a "roomful" of other students.  And even then, I didn't see quite as much confession.  I'm not sure what accounts for the readiness now of students to share their histories so openly -- perhaps it's our confessional times.  It's challenging to give grades to such discourse but that's part of what I'm required to do.  

Grading:  One of the main reasons I'm really happy to retire.

LY #54 Tech whines, Spelling whines

So I took off and didn't visit my online classes for over 24 hours!

This is because I don't like the tablet interface.  I took my Google Nexus with me to Portland but the Blackboard interface is cumbersome and tiring.  I bought a year's worth for $1.99 but don't think I'll use it again for schoolwork.  I was not able to post an announcement to my classes because I couldn't figure out how to do it.  When I hit the "announcements" button it showed me the announcements from the BB administrator herself rather than showing me the announcements for a particular class.

Anyway, the class did not fall apart in my "absence."  When I got home this afternoon I responded to the most recent "primary" posts.  Each week, students are required to post one thoughtful text-responsive observation of communication behaviors.  They also need to respond to one other student's primary post as well as having a five turn conversation with that student or anyone else.  It makes for a lot of reading for me but I find that the conversational requirement actually gets the students interacting with each other more.

I wish, however, that they would spell-check.  Blackboard doesn't seem to do that automatically anymore -- one needs to hit the spell button to get the appropriate red underlining.  Sadly, this leads students to allow many uncorrected spelling errors.   I don't grade on either spelling or grammar but that doesn't mean I don't see it.  When people mix up there, their, and they're or two, to, and too, their action annoys me.  Then there are the folks who just type crazy!  Ack!

Now, the poor spelling and grammar doesn't indicate poor thinking.  Sometimes the posts with the terrible spelling are thoughtful and contain detailed observations of the world.  And sometimes good writers can make the dumbest statements.  Here is one of the ideas that bugged me last week. They read the chapter on nonverbal communications.  In their postings, some of my students wrote about certain situations having "a lot of nonverbal communication."  As though there are situations in which people are gathered together that do not have "a lot of nonverbal communication."  Nonverbal communication is everywhere all the time if people can see, taste, touch, smell, or hear each other.  What do these folks not get about the idea that all behavior communicates?  It's not just select behaviors that have messages.  ALL BEHAVIORS!!!  ALL!!!

Whew.  I'm glad I got that off my chest.

(See the nonverbal within the verbal there?) 

LY #48 Last Day Last Bend Bootcamp

Another working Sunday.  I've just finished writing a new quiz for my online sections of interpersonal communication.  Did you know that even though my quizzes are open book and objective, people students will still flunk them?

Today was also the last day of my last Bend Public Speaking Bootcamp.  The class listened to 15 persuasive speeches.  Well, 16 if you count Dr. Bouknight's 10 a.m. promotion of Spring Quarter in London.  We got out early because the class decided to take a short lunch break and push through.  That's one of the benefits of the Bootcamp.  Our focus in on learning and performing the skills.

This morning one student said, "We love you Huck, but we really hate the class."  I turned her words on her at the end of class when I said, "Well, I love you guys but we're finished I'm ready to go home so get outa here!"

I remember that long ago I had a student complain about me to the dean of instruction (or was he Vice President of instruction at that time?)  She said that I had been biased against her in an interpersonal communication class because she had made a similar remark in a previous quarter's public speaking class as the one I heard today.  In other words, she'd said that even though she passed the class she still hated public speaking.  I'd taken that a bit personally.  I hadn't thought that I'd shown her any rudeness in the class the following quarter but perhaps I did.  The course was around the time that I defended my dissertation and I know that I got the lowest teacher evaluations of my career that quarter.  I imagine that in my stress my immediacy behaviors and unconscious nonverbal displays of anxiety were bristling.  I wound up in a long telephone conversation in which at first I defended my presenting self and then, finally, apologized and cried.  Yes, tears, snuffling, sad voice and all.  I was really sorry.  I hadn't meant to hurt anyone's feelings but I had.

Nowadays, I apologize much more quickly.  It saves time.  And it was one of the most important skills I had as a department chair.  I made so many mistakes in that job that I probably expressed a good apology every couple of weeks.

LY #23 I like my students - "they're" writing not so much

Even before I taught interpersonal communication online, I taught it as a course with lots of student writing.  "Back in the day," I had them write personal journals, with four entries per week or chapter of the textbook.  Now, of course, my primary relationship with them is textual, except for the two skill focused phone calls.  And even though they are often deep thinkers who write with insight and intelligence about the ways of human interaction, they rarely write well.  Their hearts and minds are capable; their sentence construction not so much.  But for my class there is no economic liability to bad writing, only to bad thinking. 

Yet the bad writing is still one of the reasons I am retiring early.   Struggling through reversed words, dropped antecedents, and sentence structures borrowed from bad romance tires me out more than it once did.

(If you want to know more about bad sentences, watching this freaking cool video from Iolani Prep School English teachers and students.)


I remember my first year of teaching, when COCC had a ski team, I had a skiing Scandinavian in one of my interpersonal classes.  Her writing challenged my understanding because both the sentence structure and the spelling were more Swedish than English.  Nevertheless, by the end of the quarter I had no difficulty reading her writing while my own started to have verbs in odd places.  And so it is with my native English speakers.  My own style is influenced by whatever is coming in through my eyes or ears. 

"I guess I'm experiencing the anxiety of influence," she said bloomingly.