I was trying to stimulate discussion, and also to push students into writing things that other people would read, so that they might pay more attention to rhetoric. To stimulate discussion, I had students read an article by Howard Zinn, (chapters from A Peoples’ History of the United States, actually, and post a reaction to it on a listserve. Then we would discuss the article in class the next day. Then they were to post a reaction to the class discussion of the article. Then they were supposed to choose a post written by another student and respond to that, too. Then we would start with the next article. This just didn’t work well. Students found it difficult to disagree with one another, or to interact with the text, or with me, or with anything else. They told me they really liked the class, but I think that was because I tried to take grading off-the-table–as long as they posted, I didn’t focus on quality or relevance. The one time I pointed out that one of the students was being irresponsible, in a remark about Hillary Clinton, she felt picked on. So I found myself in the Chair’s office for the first time that semester.

The second visit to the Chair’s office originated from my strategy to get them to think of their writing as relevant and visible by others outside the class. I asked them to read large sections of Paul Johnston’s A History of the American People, and at the end of the semester, after discussing it at length, asked them to post short reviews on Amazon.com. Then I checked the site to look at their reviews. The reviews were the worst sort of junk. No support for opinions that were superficial and, worse, looked as if they had crafted them in an attempt to please me. I was just trying to get them to think, and they thought I was trying to make them Marxist robots. Then, at the end of the semester, the Chair called me into his office again to show me a letter written by some psychology professor from the University of California. The guy was irritated because my students had lowered the ranking of the book at Amazon substantively with their reviews. So I had to write a letter to him explaining that my experiment in getting students to think went horribly wrong.

This was the same semester that I had to take my oral exams for the second time, being the only student in the history of the University who failed their orals.