February 2022 Research Update

Amici!  It is March!

You know, I had an entire Patreon update drafted last Monday (February 21st).  No need for it to go to waste, so I'll include it below this newer update.  In the meantime, of course, events have conspired to remind us all why military historians are a thing our society needs.

To give you all a brief sense of where we are going: I wrote an 'explainer' on Ukraine last week which all of you (and about 60,000 other people according to Google Analytics) read.  I wish I could rejoice in that February, despite being a short month, has been the highest traffic month on ACOUP ever, but most of that traffic is rooted in the tragedy of what is currently happening to Ukraine.

For this week and next, because it seems necessary, I am hustling to write a 101-level explainers for nuclear deterrence and the theory of protracted people's war.  Both seem very relevant right now, since we have a major war involving aggression by a nuclear power and people are struggling to grapple with how the logic of deterrence works and also because that war is likely to become some form of protracted war and it is worth discussing what, in theory, that might look like.  So those posts will be probably this week and next (I may post them early if they are done early), in whatever order I get them written.

After that, I hope to return to more 'normal' topics for ACOUP for a bit.  The blog is not going to become All-Ukraine-All-The-Time (though my Twitter might).  In the ACOUP pipeline: a discussion of the Roman dictatorship (completely written, it got bumped out of the lineup by Events) and some material on Total War: Warhammer III and Expeditions: Rome.

At the same time, right as the Ukraine explainer was taking off on Friday, I was informed by my department that they were unlikely to have the funds to renew my contract for next year.  It's not their fault; the university restructured instructional budgets and (surprise!) once again the humanities got the short end of the stick.  That probably means I won't be teaching in the Fall (or possibly at all next school year); my wife has a stable job here so it doesn't make sense to relocate halfway across the country for some poorly paid 1-year adjunct appointment with a crushing teaching load.

It is, of course, a bitter irony that this happens right as the military history (and broader security studies) profession is showing its great worth in understanding a complex and important conflict, but not exactly an unexpected one.

In any event, the tremendous support from you all here is going to enable me to continue working on my research and writing for the public.  I am pretty hopeful I can get an unpaid 'courtesy' appointment even if I am not teaching which will let me keep access to library resources here, at least for the near future.  So I'll keep my shoulder to the wheel doing what I do, double-down on my writing and let the chips (and jobs) fall where they may.

Thank you all for making it possible for me to continue doing history.

Previous Update Follows:

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February is of course a short month, but some things have gotten done.  Of course classes march onward, midterms are taken, papers are turned in and so on.  On the writing front, Article II is in review; we can expect a result one way or the other in perhaps two or three months.  Assuming it is accepted, publication is likely to be late next year, because the journal in question publishes annually and I doubt I will make the cut-off to be in this year's volume.  That's not a real problem; an accepted article can be listed as 'forthcoming' on the CV, after all.

I also completed the editor's requested revisions to my chapter on the organization of the Roman military food supply for a volume we hope to publish with Brill.  Once all of the other author's chapters are in and revised, the whole thing will go into peer review, so it is probably at least two years out from appearing in print, but my part of the project is now mostly done.

You may recall that I was scheduled to appear as part of a zoom-panel-workshop for the Medievalist Toolkit back in December ("History in a Time of Polarization") which was delayed as a result of the Columbia graduate student strike.  We've got a new date now, March 20th (12pm-3pm EST), so that's back on and going to happen.  I've also written a review of the game Expeditions:Rome for Foreign Policy (they asked me) which should appear at some point; the editing there has understandably been delayed by the End of the End of History currently happening in Eastern Europe.  I should note that I do intend to also talk about Expeditions: Rome on the blog, but that I promised FP that I'd wait to do that until after the review they are paying me to write comes out, so that is 'on hold' as it were.

Of course February has also been a banner month for my hobby of choice, gaming so you will all understand the deep sacrifice I make to take time out of playing Crusader Kings III: Royal Court, Total War: Warhammer III and of course Elden Ring to write this (I'm kidding, I drafted this before Elden Ring came out.  Priorities!).

Because we're now moving into midterm season, I thought I might muse a bit on how I grade and think about grading.

In terms of the structure of assessments and my general grading philosophy, I am in many ways rather conservative; I tend to think the traditional structure of grades and assignments has something to recommend it, so long as it is employed intelligently and carefully.  I don't utilize the newer 'progressive grading' strategies that have come into (and often gone back out of) vogue, e.g. 'ungrading,' nor do I assign 'unassignments.'

Part of this is that I think that the purpose of school - at any level - is preparation for the broader world as it exists and my students are unlikely to find themselves dealing with an un-performance-review in their next job.  Likewise, the traditional essay mimics - with training wheels - persuasive writing that we actually use in broader society: the think-piece, the op-ed or the speech (and in very compressed form, the persuasive memo; I often assign very short papers (sub-800 words) for this reason).

So what are grades for in my view?  They have two purposes: communication and assessment, though these goals are often in tension with each other.  As communication, a grade is meant to tell a student how they are doing and if their current methods are being successful.  An 'A' thus means "keep doing what you are doing" while a 'C' means "change course" and yet lower grades mean "panic and come talk to me."  At the same time, of course, grades have an assessment value - they are supposed to reflect, at the end of the course, the degree to which students have mastered the material and skills the course pertains to.  

There can be a tension between these two uses of grading.  For a student that needs to make substantial adjustments to what they are doing, a sharply negative grade has a strong communicative value, but potentially throws off the course's final as an average of the rest.  On the flipside, an honest assessment of a struggling student can also be so demoralizing that it discourages effective shifts in learning strategies (that is, the student 'gives up' rather than changing their methods).

That tension is then compounded by the fact that different students will read different grades differently.  While 'F' and 'A' are understood the same, often very driven, strong students will take a B or B- as a failure and be upset or discouraged while other students will look at a C- and think 'good enough to pass' and not make any changes.  The former is especially true for students aiming at graduate school, for whom grades are about forward-looking admissions rather than looking back on coursework.  Of course to a significant degree as the instructor you just have to ignore this and try to grade fairly; certainly you do not want to alter your standards merely to send messages (that's what comments are for!).

But the temptation here is to resort to a grading system that is a compressed muddle where essentially everyone gets some form of B, with a few students getting As and even fewer getting Cs.  That makes everyone happy but has always struck be as pedagogically suspect.  The full (letter) grading scale is there for a reason - not every student is turning in B work.

The way I have tried to adjust for this is to structure the course's final grade to be more forgiving - not easier, but literally more forgiving - so that I can grade most assignments without needing to cushion student's final average.  Quizzes are typically set in a 'best (N-1) of N' format so that the lowest drops.  For classes with multiple short papers, I generally split the percentages up so that the later papers are worth substantially more than the earlier ones, giving students who initially have trouble time to get advice and improve for later papers.

Likewise, I tend to structure exams where students have a choice in what they answer, e.g. each section has two essay prompts, the student must pick one, or 5 terms, identify three.  Since they are presumably picking their strongest answers, I can grade more strictly and honestly.  After all, if you had a choice of your best question and still blew it, chances are there really are some major problems here we need to address (or the student just didn't put in the work).

And so far that strategy has worked for me - my student evaluations are very positive, even though I am not a particularly easy grader by the standards of my department (a trend, actually - pre-modern and especially ancient historians tend to be harder graders.  I think this is due to exposure to Classics and the way that upper-level Greek and Latin instruction tends to be savagely unforgiving, but I am also partial to the explanation one professor (a modern historian) in my department offered unprompted when I noticed this, that it was, "because you're real historians in a way that the rest of us aren't."  He of course rushed to qualify that statement, which will not stop me from having it engraved on my office door whenever I do manage to get a permanent office.)

And that was the month of February.  And here is Ollie, looking at the camera while Percy, behind, ponders how nice it would be to be an only-cat: