Caucus Frenzy

We're in the final push for the 2008 Iowa presidential party caucuses, and I've been spending much of the Christmas break campaigning for Barack Obama. Here's a photo from a recent Obama campaign event I attended in Des Moines.

With less than two days to go before the caucuses, it appears that Obama could capture more convention delegates than any other candidate in the race. That's based on today's Des Moines Register story showing Obama with 32 percent support in the state, opening a clear lead over Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

I'd love to say it's been because of my dogged work on behalf of the candidate, but it's really due to a great group of campaign workers who've flooded the state in the past several months. It was amazing to me during my volunteer shift on Sunday afternoon that I was one of the few people there who actually live in Ankeny. Many of the volunteers had come to the area without pay from California, New York, Colorado, Ohio and Florida.

End of the Term

After the weather troubles of the past day or so, Simpson got back on track with final exam week today. And it was a little bittersweet, as it was the last meeting of my first-year Liberal Arts Seminar. A great group to work with, and I took advantage of our last class to snap this photo. 

In the front are Abby Grover, Liz McKee, Robin Whitford, Brandon Herbert and Morgan Olson. In the middle are Sarah Keller, Nathan Frederick, Megan Cook and Macy Koch. And semi-circled around the back are Tim Ellwanger, Mallory Tandy, Ashley Katch, Brittney Jepson, Bruce Dahlhauser, Curt Tennison, Lexie Hagerty, Colleen Johnson, Erin Floro and Catie Ellingson. A couple of our group were gone the last day: Danielle Caswell, who was taking a Spanish final, and Manuel Gomez, who was winging his way spend the holidays with his mother in El Paso, Texas. Thanks for a great term, and we'll see you in the spring!

A (Very Rare) Snow Day!

If you're not in the Midwest, thank your lucky stars today. We're having a heck of an ice storm, and it's resulted in Simpson College calling off final examinations for the day. The driving is very difficult, the walking even tougher, and the trees are bending due to a heavy coating of ice.

This is pretty rare at Simpson: We're a residential college, and 90 percent of our students live within walking distance of their classes. We've called off classes only 3-4 times in the 18 years I've been at Simpson, and I understand that the college has called off classes so rarely in its 150 years that you could count the number of snow days on two hands. Joe Walt, the college's historian, probably could give me the exact number.

We'll be back at final exams tomorrow, pushing the schedule back a day for everyone. But the forecast is looking better, and it looks like we'll be able to get through to the end by the end of this week.

It's Final Exam Week

The semester comes to a halt this coming week with final exams at Simpson. Everyone talks about how stressful the week is for students, and it is. It can be stressful for faculty as well.

How so, you ask? After all, the students are taking the exam. You're writing them, deciding what they need to know. (Feel the power!) It's all a little more complicated than that.

The first stress is finding the time to write the exam. Many textbook publishers will give faculty exams that they can either give as is or adapt to their needs. These are called test banks. I've never been a fan of them. For one thing, my lecturing and discussion style inevitably leads us far afield of the text (not off topic, mind you — let's just say that I try to add value to the textbook presentation). The other thing is that I'm pretty sure that textbook publishers don't know the first thing about writing exams.

For me, much of this weekend's been taking up with writing and editing exams. My final exams are multiple-choice affairs, with much of the previous assessment of the course based on students' writing and critical-thinking activities in the course. And I cranked out 3 exams of 50 questions each yesterday. It took about 8 hours of my day, which was OK, given the crappy weather here in Iowa.

The second stress is editing the exam. To make for as fair an exam as possible, I start with an exam from an earlier semester and go over every question carefully (inevitably finding editing errors from the previous semester — ugh!). I never teach a course in an identical manner two semesters in a row, so that means a lot of questions from the old exam get thrown out and thus must be replaced with new questions. Those usually aren't too hard to write; I never seem to lack for material.

But then there's the detailed line-by-line editing. I teach copy editing at Simpson, so I'm a bit of a stickler for this. You're looking for the obvious typos, bad punctuation, etc., but you're also reading for clarity and the existence of (in my mind, at least) one clear answer to each item. There's nothing that bugs a faculty member more than a student claim that a question was a "trick" question — not because we want students to sit down, shut up and take the exam, but more because we feel that we've failed them in giving them a fair assessment of their knowledge. So I go over each question carefully, changing the order of questions if needed, making sure references to other questions in the exam are accurate, taking extra care to make sure there aren't two or more correct answers to an item.

How long does this all take? For each exam, it's 3-4 hours of work that goes through three or more drafts of an exam before a final copy is printed out.

In other words, anyone who says that faculty give multiple-choice exams because they're lazy and just want the semester over typically have never written one themselves.

Oh yeah, there's also 10 internship portfolios to grade this week, along with 20 papers from my Liberal Arts Seminar class. So it's going to be a busy and stressful week.

But I'll make it.

On The Road Again — This Time With Students

More than a month since I last posted — OK, I've been a bad blogger, but the excuse is that I've been deep in advising and registration and helping students at Simpson reach their goals.

I have been out of town again a couple of times: First, in late October to the annual POD faculty development conference in Pittsburgh, my first trip to the City of Steel. I'm in no hurry to go back. Never been a Steelers or Pirates fan, and the weather was cold, rainy and blustery pretty much the whole time.

More intriguing was an 18-hour (each way) road trip Nov. 16-18 to Fort Benning, Ga., with four Simpson students on one alumna to join a 25,000-strong rally against the U.S.-run Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation — better known as the School of the Americas. The Simpson crew is in the photo here: From left to right: Liz, Tom and Caitlyn Finn of Des Moines (Caitlyn graduated from Simpson this past May); Tracy Robson, the pride of Scranton, Iowa; and Courtney Lezanic of Omaha.

Lots of important folks were at the rally: Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich; Cynthia McKinney, a congresswoman from Georgia and Green Party presidential candidate; Father Roy Bourgeois, who is founder of the School of the Americas Watch and who visited Simpson a couple of years back. And there was a musical performance from the Indigo Girls, the video of which is here.

Heating Up the Energy Debate

Continuing on the Minnesota swing, I spent most of today at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter at the college's annual Nobel Conference. This year's topic is "Heating Up the Energy Debate," and this little college has brought in some of the top names of the field to talk about global warming and alternatives to carbon-based fuels.

I know virtually nothing about either topic, so it was an educational experience. But the bigger lesson is how even small colleges can do big events that draw huge crowds (6,500 this year — this at a college with about 2,000 students) and make a great statement about the school's commitment to liberal education.

I've posted some video here of the opening procession of faculty in full academic regalia. The conference continues tomorrow, after which I'll be happy to get a home-cooked meal.

Violence, Churches and the First Amendment

My field trip to Minnesota continues. I dashed up I-35 on Monday in time to see the Silha Lecturer at the University of Minnesota, this feature Robert Corn-Revere, First Amendment lawyer and author of a major treatise on mass communication law.

I don't usually learn a lot at public lectures, but Corn-Revere's was different. He spoke on "The Kids are Alright: Violent Media, Free Expression, and the Drive to Regulate," and opened with an instructive tale on Seung-Hui Cho, the student who killed 33 of his fellow Virginia Tech students last spring. As is usually the case in these shocking cases, the incident has led to calls for more regulation of violent media content.

But Cho went by the moniker of "Ax Ishmael," and some have suggested that religion might have had as much to do with the killings as violent media content. So, Corn-Revere suggested a thought experiment: What if, on the basis of religiously motivated violence, we decided to ban or simply regulate churches on the ground that we can't be sure how some unhinged individuals might twist their message?

Surely, nearly all Americans would revolt at the thought. But the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion both are protected by the First Amendment. Why are willing to sacrifice one but not the other?