Monthly Archives: May 2021

Week 15 (5/11 and 5/13)- Last Week!

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Click here for the End of Semester Overview

We made it to the last week of class! I don’t want to burden you with any more stuff at this stage, since I know finals are looming, so this week will also be pretty minimal in terms of assignments and activities.

What To Do Before Class (Tuesday, 5/11)

Readings Due: None!

Assignments Due (Structure & Accountability Only): First draft of web genre analysis due

Recommended for Everyone:

  1. Download this Semester Checklist, compare it with your grades in Blackboard, and figure out for yourself what you’re missing, what you plan on making up, and when you plan on doing it.
  2. Write down any questions you have about, well, anything.
  3. Is there anything that came up in our class this semester that you’d like us to talk about more? Or stuff you thought we would talk about this semester that we didn’t talk about?

What We’ll Do In Class

  • Guided reflection activity on the writing program’s course objectives
  • Group discussion on the content and design of this class (“Keepers, Dumpers, Fixers”)
  • Talk about any questions you have, and say goodbye

I know attendance has dropped in the last month or two, and I totally get it, but please make an effort to come to our last session– the more people we have, the more productive/useful our discussions will be.

What To Do Async Thursday (5/13)

Readings Due: None

Assignments Due: Yourself as Reader, Writer, and Researcher (click through for instructions)

Finals Week/Other Instructions

Keep working on your portfolio and mini-project! These are due Thursday, May 20. 

How To Do Stuff on WordPress/CUNY Commons:

Creating Your Portfolio
Intro to the WordPress Dashboard
Posts and Pages, Block and Classic Editor
Themes, Customizing, and Home Page Settings
Menus
Uploading/Embedding Files
Privacy Settings/Sharing
How WordPress Is Different On Your Phone

Extra Credit

You can still attend a writing center workshop for extra credit, or sign up for a 1:1 writing center session. There are several workshops between now and the end of the semester. I will receive a log of all attendance at the end of the semester, and I will input these points then.

Late Work

Please be aware that we are getting close to the late work deadline. All late work is due by the end of the day on Thursday, May 20. 

If you need an additional extension beyond that day, you must send me an email including the following:

  1. Which assignments you plan to submit after the deadline
  2. Which day(s) you will send them. You will choose your own extension deadline. I recommend taking the day you think you can get it done by and then adding an extra day just in case.

If I don’t receive the assignment before the deadline you choose, I can’t guarantee I will be able to look at it before submitting final grades. This policy exists so that I’m not sitting by my email at 11:50pm the day grades are due wondering if I will receive any last minute things.

If you want to take an incomplete in the class, please let me know as soon as possible so we can work out a timeline/plan.

 

Last Assignment: Yourself as Reader, Writer, and Researcher

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1-2 double-spaced pages on “Yourself as Reader, Writer, and Researcher” (Submit via the link on Blackboard OR post to our class blog if you want to share your response with your classmates too.) Due for everyone on Thursday, May 13th by end of the day

Please write in paragraph form, rather than a bulleted list of questions/answers.

Prompt:

We all have histories as readers, writers, and researchers, even if you hate these activities. For this assignment, help me get to know you and reflect on your time in John Jay’s writing program by telling me about your history with these activities. Below are several questions for you to consider as you compose your answer. You do not need to address all of them, and feel free to talk about other things related to reading, writing, research, and English classes.

  • What kinds of things do you read? (Not just books!)
  • What kinds of things do you love to read or hate to read? Why?
  • What’s a really good memory you have about reading, or a really bad one?
  • What about writing?
  • How much writing did you do in the years/semesters prior to now (including high school/writing for a job/anything else), and what kinds of things did you write?
  • What kinds of research have you done in the past?
  • What do you find difficult or confusing about the research process?
  • What were your past English classes like?
  • How did you feel about starting this class, and what do you feel like you gained from it? (Or, if you feel like you didn’t gain much, it’s totally okay to tell me about that too. In that case, what did you want to learn but didn’t?)
  • Did the pandemic change your reading/writing/research habits at all? If so, how?

Optional: More on Misleading Statistics

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Graduate students at NYU and at Columbia are on strike right now. Their demands include better pay, healthcare coverage, and the right to have discrimination and harassment cases evaluated by a third party mediator (instead of an employee of the university). Because of this, I was researching the history of grad student union organizing; in short, I found some data that looked wrong, investigated, and now am going to tell you about it.

We’re taught in school that sites ending with .gov are trustworthy, right? In this case, the data came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. So it’s literally their whole job to collect accurate information about labor-related topics.

The article I was reading that cited the BLS said that graduate assistants in the United States (like me) made an average of about $35,000 per year in 2015-2016. This immediately rang my alarm bells– the only grad assistants I know who make anywhere near that much money are at private universities in expensive areas (like Columbia). When I was getting my master’s degree in 2016-2018, I was paid $12,000 per year. So that couldn’t possibly be the real nationwide average.

I went to the BLS website, and found their 2020 data, which says the average graduate assistant in the U.S. makes $39,460, and that graduate assistants in the NYC area make an average of $52,170. This is not true!! Through my fellowship as a CUNY PhD student, living in one of the most expensive places in the United States, I am paid $27,548. This is low compared to students at places like Columbia and NYU, but not even the graduate students at those schools make $52,170 per year. I and every other graduate student I know work additional jobs in order to pay our bills.

So WTF is going on with this data? How is the “average” higher than anyone’s actual pay?

The answer was in the footnotes, at the very bottom of the page. This is why they tell you to always read the fine print. The BLS calculated these salaries by taking hourly wages and multiplying by 2,080 — the number of hours worked if you work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks per year. But this is not how graduate students are actually paid. We are part time employees, paid part-time salaries, who are expected to spend the rest of our time studying/doing our PhD program responsibilities. Yet the income data they are reporting is how much we would make if we were paid full time salaries. So, the data they are reporting doesn’t represent anybody’s actual experience. (Lots of people who are graduate students do work full time jobs on top of their studies, but not as part of their fellowships. Fellowships are always part time.)

Why does this matter?

Anyone who doesn’t have direct knowledge of grad student pay probably wouldn’t bother looking at the fine print and probably would just trust that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics was reporting accurate– and not misleading — information.

This means that newspapers, policy institutes, and other people/organizations looking for this info are reporting misleading information, likely without knowing it. The ALICE Project estimates that a basic necessities + emergency money budget for a single adult living alone in Manhattan is $53,844 per year. By the BLS’s numbers, graduate students in New York are pretty close to that! But in real life, we are not — unless we work extra jobs. This is especially important when it comes to grad student strikes, since the NYU and Columbia workers are demanding a living wage. When discussing salary and whether or not people are paid enough, it’s important to have accurate information about how much money people are actually getting paid!

In Conclusion

  1. Always read the fine print– information can be technically “true” but still misleading depending on what’s in the fine print
  2. Just because information is from the government doesn’t mean you can take it at face value
  3. If you need a math credit and aren’t sure what to take, take statistics. You’ll learn about many of the funky ways you can make real numbers say fake things.