Either Or

I'm reading the description of Chaunticleer and Pertelote from the NPT at our poetry reading thing in a short bit. I've decided to do a participatory, interactive reading, and ask half the audience to make a "cockadoodledoo" sound whenever I say Chaunticleer's name, and the other half to make a clucking sound when I say Pertelote's name.

This will either make everyone laugh a lot, or get me disinvited to future poetry readings.

Feel the Ice!

Shockingly, I went to a meeting today that was actually useful.

It was a meeting for our special first year program, where we had a short information session (not as useful) and then time to chat with my mentors about what to do next fall (very useful). I'm looking forward to working with these students in the coming semester.

Virgil and the guidance gang from downunder are feeling the chill, eh?

Listening

I've been listening to presentations a lot of late. I have an accent (don't we all?), so maybe what I'm hearing is mostly an accent difference (people here know I'm not from here, but can't necessarily tell where I am from). But it feels more than that.

For example, several of my students have talked about the baccalaureate degree, except they pronounce it the "bachelorette" degree. It's like I'm watching the old Dating Game show, and we've got bachelorette number one, two, and three all behind the curtain. Yes, you too can get a bachelorette degree and a date all with just four years of moderately hard work! (I'm getting creepy Jim Lange flashbacks!)

By one of those linguistic connections where people extend a rule to other uses, my students have mentioned that for some careers, you need a doctorette degree.

I think what makes my ears perk up is the feminization of the terms, though students aren't acting like they're aware of that. I think they just don't have much experience hearing the words.

Earning my Paycheck

I've been meeting with several students today about revising papers. One of them came in last week, and today brought in a revision.

It was one of those essays where I take a look, and right from the beginning, the essay, the thesis, everything says "I know how to do this!"

I'd like to take full credit, but I think the student was just really ready to get things and put them together with a little bit of help. I was only the little bit of help at the right time, and now this student has this great skill that s/he can use in all sorts of situations.

It almost makes the whole getting out of bed on a rainy, nasty morning worth it!

More Spring!

The crocus are done, and now it's daffodil time! What gets me is that I feel like I put in a ton of bulbs, but when spring comes around, there aren't that many coming up yet. I obviously need to put in more bulbs!

The forsythia flowers are still going strong (despite a storm I thought might knock all the blooms off), and lots of other plants are coming up. I can see the sedum coming back, the salvia, the Siberian iris. The dogwoods look like they're getting ready to bloom.

The magic of the tamarack continues; the needles are getting a little longer, and the little pink areas (which I think are the "flowers" which become cones) are getting bigger, too.

I'm way behind in being ready for my bike trip, and I'm whussy enough that I don't much ride in the rain, and it's been raining, so I haven't ridden for a couple days. My longest ride so far is about 25 miles, and I have about a month to get to 65 miles (the longest day on the trip) and a week of 30+ miles a day. Did I mention there's hills there? And it's a higher altitude than here (by about 6 thousand feet).

I read somewhere that Grizzly Bears can run about 35 mph. My top biking speed ever, so far as I know, is 39.9 mph, going down a steep hill. I was scared enough that I couldn't pedal even a little to put the bike computer up to 40. So, I'm guessing if I meet a Grizzly, I'd better hope I'm far away and it's busy.

If not, I'm planning my epitaph: Bardiac: Exit, pursued by a bear. (Okay, you saw that coming, right?)

Questions, Please

I have questions I'd like help with.

First, we have a small MA program here. I'm wondering if anyone knows a good book for folks entering a grad program to give them a real sense of what's expected in terms of revision, independent reading, and so forth.

Second, it's been an age since I read much Spenser's FQ, and I'm thinking of rereading (over the summer) to teach some. But, my old Roche edition is in pieces. Can anyone suggest a good edition these days? (I could just borrow the department's Hamilton, but it's been a long time, and surely there's a really good edition available now?)

Thanks, all!

Committed to Committees

We have 29 tenure-line faculty in our department. These are the folks for whom service is one of the requirements of the contract. (Our adjuncts sometimes generously do service, but it can't be part of their contract and thus they can't be evaluated on their service. We have some other folks who aren't tenure track but do have service in their contracts.)

With our current committee structures, we have 64 positions in different committees that are supposed to be filled by tenure-line faculty. The chair, and two other faculty members in the 29 count have re-appointments that mean they sit on some committees by appointment, and so don't sit on other committees.

So, that's 26 bodies to fill 64 committee slots. (We have a couple other folks who are partially re-assigned to the big marble hallways of administration, but I'll include them in this count.)

We've totally done this to ourselves. And yes, we approved a new committee in the past year, one with five slots. A few years ago, we approved a different new committee with five slots.

Note: the slots don't include search committees or college/university committees.

Complicated

You've all read or heard some variant of the story about George Bernard Shaw at a dinner where he asked a woman sitting nearby if she'd sleep with him for a million pounds. She says yes, and then he asks if she'd sleep with him for ten shillings, and she says no, and asks if he thinks she's a prostitute. And he answers that they've already established that, now they're just haggling over the price.

ROTC is entering NWU.

We have this big priority that says we're all about inclusivity and diversity; it's supposed to be the underpinning of everything we do.

But when I ask about why we're letting ROTC come to campus (we already have students participating through another nearby campus), we're told it's about money. The program will bring us money that the students otherwise pay to the other campus. And because of the Solomon Amendment, if we reject ROTC, we'd lose access to all sorts of federal funding. (Link to the Supreme Court decision upholding the right of the government to withhold funding from law schools that refuse to allow recruiting by the US military, despite that "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" violates their principles of free expression and freedom of association.)

So basically, we've already determined that we're willing to sell out our basic principles. Now we're just haggling over the price. And right now, the price is pretty damned low when the principle is about discriminating against glbt folks.

Yeah, it's complicated, as one of my colleagues says. No one wants to endanger funding for anything, especially these days. I completely understand that, and I, too, am afraid of losing funding.

I hate cowardice, my own included.

Jerk

That would be me. Gah. I insulted someone without realizing, and now that I realize it, I don't quite know how to bring it up to apologize. I think I need to straight up apologize.

***

And then I had a student come in to office hours who smells strongly of tobacco. I didn't say anything (because despite tenure, I retain vestigal social skills).

Then in class, the lit mentioned something about cigarettes in a rather negative way.

And I couldn't help wondering if the tobacco student felt pointed out in a negative way.

I didn't choose the lit with that in mind (the cigarette thing is one line among many, noticable), and I don't tend to think about how tobacco users smell when I'm writing up a syllabus. And maybe other people don't notice tobacco smell as much as I do. (And then, of course, more than one student in the class smokes. I just noticed the one because of sharing a small space.)

(I really wish students wouldn't smoke, not only for their health, but mostly, utterly selfishly, because talking up close to a smoker tends to make me nauseated.)

Reverse Deja Vu

You know how in movies, you'll see a character do something, and then things will fade, and the same character, 20 years later, greying, walk a little less bouncy, is doing the exact same thing?

As I walked across the parking lot to the office building this morning, I had that feeling that I could blink and 20 years would have gone by, and I'd still be walking across the parking lot heading to work. It wasn't a good or bad feeling, just a feeling that time is fleeting.

On one hand, I try to do good, meaningful work, so I hope it's worth the time. And the state pays me, which means I can eat, afford shelter and so forth.

On the other hand, I've never been in a life situation without some major change for more than about 5 years. My current situation is longer than any has ever been before for me. I'm in the same house, at the same job/school now for 5 and 9 years, respectively.

But things should change drastically. We're hoping to build a couple new buildings on campus (yes, funds have been set aside for two, our first in about 25 years), and that will change the landscape of my life, hopefully in good ways.

And in 20 years, I probably won't have the same car; heck, I may not have a car. If I do, it probably won't be much like what I drive now. I doubt the parking lots are going to look the same, though my office might. (It's a good thing it got painted in colors I like!)

It Might Be Spring

If the forsythia have any say in the matter!

I took a ride with a friend yesterday, out a country road I hadn't really been on much except with the Wednesday women's group I ride with once there's decent weather. It was just about perfection. The road's along a lake for a while, with the usual mix of old lake cottages and starter mansions, with a lining of trees. There weren't too many hills, though there's a road we're going to aim to get up by the end of the season that leads to one of the ski areas I went to this past winter. (To be honest, my friend climbs way better than I do, and could have made it up there now. But I need some miles and smaller climbs first.)

Eagle and Hummingbird

As promised, here's a picture of the piece of art I got in DC. It's signed on the back by G. Matilpi. There seems to be a George Matilpi who does carvings on the Pacific coast of Canada. (Mr. Matilpi, if you see this, thank you for creating a beautiful piece of art. It's beautiful, and I cherish it.)

It's labeled "Eagle" and "Hummingbird" in different places (on the back). I see the eagle in the main figure, facing left, and then in the "chest" area, a hummingbird facing right. The colors are really good, warm and rich.

I'm thinking of putting it in my bedroom. Or of rearranging some art in the house and putting it in the living room. I love being able to look at beautiful art.

Authoritative Citation

One of my students listed "God" as an author in her bibliography. At least she didn't put it as a personal interview, eh?

The weekend can't come quickly enough.

Breaking News: T.S. Eliot was Wrong

Evidence of Eliot's error:

Yesterday, for the first time since Sunday, I got home early enough to take a walk around and enjoy the yard. In the two days since Sunday, the yard has started the green up thing.

The crocuses have been bringing me hope since March, but now you can see the daffodils (I think) starting up, too. Weirdly, a couple crocus bulbs seem to have been upended, so I stuck them back in. I should water them to give them at least a bit of a chance.

I missed seeing these last spring, and had forgotten how many different colors I'd put in (mixed bulb bag). Now I want to put in a lot more, because a little patch here and there isn't enough! In my yard fantasy, I have something blooming all season long. But in reality, I have a tendency to plant a lot of early blooming stuff because I'm so desperate for spring.

Two summers ago, I planted a couple forsythia at the side of the house where there was nothing really interesting. It's not a side of the house that's easy to see from anywhere except the neighbor's yard, pretty much (or my own), but still, I wanted something there. But last spring, of course, I wasn't here, so I've never seen these bloom. They'd probably look more promising in front of a dark backdrop, and without cages, but a good many of my plants live in cages because otherwise the rabbits kill them with alacrity. (And even so, the deer trim the tops.)

But best of all are the Tamaracks! They have these lovely soft green needles all summer, but then the needles turn bright yellow in fall and drop. All winter, they look like Charlie Brown's Christmas special.

And then in April, they start to bud, and little bits of green start to show, the needles beginning to grow. And tiny bits of pink here, too. I think those are the parts that will become the little cones.

I put the Tamaracks in the first summer I moved here, along with a couple of pine trees (in different places). The pines have probably doubled in size, but the Tamaracks seem to be growing very slowly.

All this, and it's mid-April and spring has come bringing joy to the Northwoods!

QED.

(Photographing plants up close, I really need to think about getting a lens for doing such things, so that I can get more of the picture in focus.)

Ego

I'm catching up on email. Among the gems, one of my colleagues on a committee has just noted that having [a little life experience] in [a specific academic field], s/he could teach introductory classes in that field.

So, really, I, having eaten for many years, could teach introductory nutrition.

And my friend over in economics likes to read novels, so she could teach intro to lit classes.

What fun!

Except I think this committee colleague was serious.

Poetry, Please!

There's a poetry reading thing, not of our own poetry, but of bits of famous or other poetry, and I've been asked to read some Middle English poetry. We are asked to read up to maybe 40 lines. (Shorter is better!)

So, I need suggestions, please!

If you were asked to read UP TO 40 lines of Middle English verse, what would you read?

***

Okay, folks, I obviously wasn't clear. I'm wondering exactly which 40 lines.

So far, I'm thinking of the description of Chaunticleer and Pertolet from the NPT, or maybe a description of spring; there's a nice one in the Parliament of Fowles. I also thought about the entry in Gawain, or part of the ax swinging part.

I enjoy the sexy stuff plenty, but I don't want to read some leering, sexist stuff as most people's sole experience with Middle English literature. Nor, to be honest, do I have a lot of interest in reading something overtly Christian in a way that sounds pious. (I did consider a bit of the annunciation stuff from the N-Town plays, because it blows me away that the fate of the world waits on Mary.) Nor, do I have time to contextualize a fart joke about Christianity.

I know that limits things.

I know this reveals the depths of my fakery about medieval stuff, but I don't actually own an ME edition of Piers Plowman. And I also must admit that I never really got into it.

I'm also not sure I can pull off Gawain well, since what poor ME I do have tends to have been learned via Chaucer stuff. So I don't think I get the dialect at all, really. And I don't want to make more of a fool of myself than necessary in front of colleagues (the regular folks might not know the difference, but a few colleagues will).

SAA Report

I saw a couple really smart, interesting papers, from just the folks you'd expect. I saw a couple disappointing papers, too, alas.

I saw and visited with friends, and got good news and bad news from and about them. Still, it was great to see the folks I saw.

I visited shortly with my mentor, who is as wonderful, which is a lot.

I met a couple bloggers, which was fun.

I enjoyed my workshop session and got some really good ideas!

And mostly, I went to a few museums and ate really good food.

First off, the reception was at the National Building Museum, and it was beautiful, but I didn't go back because I didn't have time. The food at the reception was yummy, as is always the case with SAA. Let's face it, we eat well.

My first purely fun visit was to the National Gallery of Art. There's something really fun when you walk into a gallery and think, hey, I recognize that face. And then you wonder where you recognize the face from. So, you look, and sure enough it's Cardinal Bembo, whose portrait by Titian is part of lots of editions of Castiglione.

I walked a bit further and found this familiar face, but again, wasn't sure who it was without looking. It's Devereux!

Even I managed to recognize David's Napoleon as Napoleon.

I really like going to a museum for a short visit, choosing a couple paintings to sit with and look at, and then being done. I don't have the mental stamina to look at painting after painting for hours. But, I really enjoy the shorter visit I did, and I did go make a point to see Raphael's and Van Gogh's works. Van Gogh especially, I love the three-dimensionality when I see one of his works in person, but I just don't much get the effect in prints.

So, thanks to Fretful Porpentine (who doesn't seem especially fretful in person, nor does she have nasty quills so far as I could tell), Susan, and Horace for the suggestion!

My next purely fun visit was to the National Museum of American History, which I must admit was a disappointment. First, it was crowded, and I was too impatient (and time-limited) to stand in line for a couple of the exhibits, primarily the Lincoln exhibit. But I liked the "this old house" exhibit, though these seem pretty common these days. And, like almost everything, the focus seemed to be on east coast history, and most especially, east coast history of white northern European folks, with a couple of token Jews in the mix. American Indians have been disappeared, as have almost all African Americans. The history of the west coast doesn't much seem to exist; there are no Russian fur traders or Spanish conquistadors, no French loggers.

I get that it's lots of fun to see Hollywood artifacts, but I really didn't feel like my desire to understand things better was met much at all. One little bit was interesting, an exhibit on the Scurlock photography studio, a studio which focused on photographing African Americans in and around DC. I got to think about the specialty of photographing folks with darker skin, which was something the exhibit talked about in explaining the success of the studio relative to others, and to think about the long history of African Americans in the DC area, especially earlier in the 20th century. So that was well worth seeing.

Horace had also recommended the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and so after my frustrations with the supposed American History museum, that's where I headed. I gather that it's a contested museum, but I'm not well-enough up on things to understand the contestation. I did enjoy it, especially that it took "American" broadly enough to include peoples of the Americas rather than peoples who happen to live where the United States now controls territory. I really liked seeing the story of contact told more broadly. And I like that they had curators from different indigenous groups telling the story of their own group, and that the museum recognized these curators and showed who they were. That seems important, and would be interesting for all museums, wouldn't it? I mean, wouldn't it be interesting to learn something about the curator of the National Gallery French collection?

That said, I also found some of the exhibits overwhelming; like just a bunch of pieces of gold work on the wall without contextualization that I needed to really undestand it. For example, I saw a piece that looked a lot like an Aztec alligator a friend of mine has done work on, and knowing how much she's worked on the context for that piece, I really wanted to get that from the museum. But instead, it was just a "hey, lots o' gold" sort of display. The same thing goes for the display of human figures.

I also found a small piece of art there, which I could both afford and liked. I'll try to add a picture soon!

So there you are. I went, I stimulated the economy, I saw a few left-over cherry blossoms. I enjoyed walking in the city. I usually really enjoy walking in cities, way more than I tend to enjoy walking in fields or trails. I'm partly ashamed to admit that, but there I am. I like the energy of city walking, I guess.

I'm a Goof

So, I'm packing for the conference; I have two urges in packing.

Urge the first: I'm going away! I need all the supplies I can bring (bcp, contact lens solution, clothes, tampons, etc)!

Urge the second: a towel and a toothbrush, and I'm good to go.

Neither of these is quite appropriate for a conference. I don't need a towel, for example, because the hotel will have those. But I need more than a toothbrush.

***

Thanks for all the travel suggestions! I appreciate the help.

I've Gotten Soft

When I was in the Peace Corps, to travel anywhere, I walked into the center of town and caught a bus. There were no bathrooms on the busses (of course), or any other amenities.

I lived in a small city on a big river, a river whose source was way up in the mountains near a resort town. To get up to the resort town or the medium sized city in a mountain valley not far from the resort town, they'd built a road along the river ravine. It was a dirt and gravel road, mostly just wide enough for one small bus. Being that the road was on the side of a ravine, and there were occasional accidents where busses fell off, I never relished being on the steep part of the road after dark.

And they were always working on it, so that our city had a special schedule. While the rest of the country worked Monday through Friday, and then had a weekend on Saturday and Sunday, we worked Tuesday through Saturday. That meant that the road was closed Tuesday through Saturday, and more or less open (depending on how construction was going amid the rains) from Saturday afternoon through Monday afternoon. Mail came to town Saturday, pretty much as soon as the road had opened, and went up the same afternoon, on the back of a motorcycle. (Packages didn't come. You had to go pick them up in the medium sized city in the mountain valley on a Monday, when the mail office there was open.)

If you wanted to go up when the road was closed, you had two choices. You could go to the next small city to the north, about two hours by dirt road, and then catch a bus up; that strategy added at least an hour to the trip (and more if the bus schedules didn't line up well). Or you could go transbordo. Transbordo meant you took a bus to the construction site, and then walked from that bus across whatever construction was happening to the other side of the construction, and then waited in hopes that the bus company had decided it was worthwhile to send another bus down from the medium city in the mountain valley. Sometimes transbordo meant you walked a hundred feet or so, over relatively dry stuff. Sometimes it meant you walked half a mile through serious mud and rain.

If everything went really well, it took six hours by bus from my small city to the big bus station at the southern end of the capital. If it didn't go well, it could take longer.

The Peace Corps office, of course, went on a regular schedule, so they were only open Monday through Friday. That meant, if you needed your gamma globulin shot, 5ccs of ice cold nastiness in your upper butt, you got on a bus on Saturday or Sunday for a six hour ride, half of it on the dirt road, spent the night in the capital (where you probably knew other volunteers, so it was good to visit), then went into the office early on Monday to get your shot, and then immediately scurried off to the bus station to get on the bus to ride back down the dirt road with your rear full of gamma globulin so that you could be back at work on Tuesday.

The thing is, I scheduled my shuttle service for tomorrow's trip to DC. I have to be on the shuttle at 2:45 am, to get to the airport in time for my flight at 7:10 am, to get to DC in time to make it to the hotel by the time for my session in the mid-afternoon.

And I was feeling particularly whiny about having to take the shuttle into the big city airport and sit around and change planes. I started writing a blog post about how much I hate living in the middle of nowhere.

And then I stopped...

because where I lived in the Peace Corps wasn't nearly as difficult to travel to and from as where a lot of other volunteers live. And we had a whole lot more resources and easier travel than a lot of people in those areas.

I've gotten really soft and I am disappointed.

SAA Meet-Up / DC Suggestions

So, let's plan a blogger meet up at 2pm at the Starbucks near the main lobby?

Question for everyone: I've been to DC a couple times, so I've seen the big monuments, visited congress, the White House (in the days when one could take a tour), a couple of the Smithsonians, Arlington, etc.

So, if you didn't need to see the usual stuff, but you have a day more or less to do something in DC other than SAA (I know, but my department isn't paying, so I get a day for myself!), what would you do?

What's the best thing to see/do in DC?

I'm game for a Smithsonian or other museum. And I'm very willing to bet they've changed enough that I'll enjoy any of them, even ones I've seen before. I'm also very happy to go see art, a park or whatever.

Is the WWII monument something I should put on the list?

NB. Shopping of any sort other than used books is OUT. It's hard to think of any incentive in the world that would make me want to go shopping.

Too Cruel?

Another potential entry in the great moments in literary history series. Except, it's beyond cruel and obscure. Perhaps it just goes to show that I really am a horrible person?



At any rate, who can tell us about this important moment in literary history?

*Edited to add: Okay, what he should be saying, sprawled on the ground, is

This beast has hurt my dignity and spine!
Alas! Alack! What should I do but whine?

SAA Blogger Meet-Up?

When I mentioned the idea before, a couple people were interested. I seem to remember thinking that a Saturday meeting would be best.

How about Saturday, say 10am?

I'm guessing the lobby. But I don't know the main hotel at all, is the lobby too big? Is there a better place?

Does anyone know if the hotel is within reasonably easy travel of the mall?

Grading: the I Hate Plagiarism Edition

How much do I hate plagiarism? Very, very much. I hate plagiarism a whole lot.

I hate inadvertent plagiarism, even.

I have a paper. The student cites a crappy web thing at the end (but nowhere in the body of the paper). So I look at the crappy web thing, and lo, the student has picked up phrases of crappiness. And, of course, the crappy web thing doesn't cite its sources. And the paper's basic argument pulls a lot from the crappy web thing.

The student cited the crappy web thing in the works cited, so I'm guessing s/he intended to use it appropriately.

I know I've talked about plagiarism in class. And in the assignment, I note that any source the student uses (the OED, for example) must be cited.

And yes, the student cites the OED in the text, appropriately.

Dog, I hate plagiarism.

Why do students use crappy web things? There are pretty decent web resources around, but for some reason, they usually use the crappy ones.

(Yes, I hate the sort of plagiarism that copies whole papers without citation of any sort even more, but at least I can reasonably take those to higher levels. This sort, well, it doesn't quite seem appropriate to try to get a student expelled for being stupid, does it?)

Go Iowa!

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled unanimously to strike down a ban on same sex marriage.

Iowa.

Here's a link to the legal opinion of the Iowa Supreme Court. Read!

I'm not very knowledgable about legal issues, but it's interesting to read through and see what the court considered in its opinion. I found the argument about immutability especially interesting in the way the court handled it.

What was the Question Again?

Sometimes, I feel pretty darned inadequate in the face of a piece of literature. How the heck do I even approach teaching this? I'm totally clueless myself.

I mean, I know the words. And I can put two and two together in a basic way.

But holy cow, I'm a total idiot, and I really don't think I'm understanding this poem in a very deep way at all. And yet, stupid me, I put it on the syllabus every single time I teach this course.

I usually start with the title.

More Hating Meetings

So, wanna-be administrator read-aloud guy didn't read aloud today, thank dog.

But, as he's talking along, he says something along the lines of "The fort has to approve it."

I looked at the colleague on my left, a super smart person from over in businessland and asked super quietly, "fort?" She shrugged.

I looked at the colleague on my right, librarian to the core, and asked again "fort?" He shrugged.

I looked across at the social sci type who knows the history of NWU better than almost anyone I've ever met, and mouthed "fort?" She shrugged.

Maybe "fort" is what the porch club boys call the main administrative building? It's sort of a fortlike structure, and certainly sometimes the administration seems to be more ready for a seige than for open communication.

A moment for questions opened up, so I asked, "what's fort?"

And administrator wannabe says, "Foundation for Opportunities for Responsive Technology."* And then in the most condescending voice possible, just dripping, told me not to worry because "that's how we learn."

I wonder if the creator(s) of the acronym have thought for even a moment that the name they've given this tiny group might just be pretty darned off-putting and unfriendly. (Guess who created the tiny organization name?)

But if you need educational clicker technology, now you know where to go, eh?


*The name has been changed to protect the stupid, namely, me, from someone on campus accidentally finding this because he does a google for the acronym. But the spirit of the name is very close.

I Hate Meetings: Reading Aloud Edition

I checked the meeting agenda to prepare for my meeting this afternoon. We're being revisited by one of those folks who really likes to hear his own voice. He likes his voice so much that he reads aloud the stuff he brings forward. And he reads aloud badly. (But, lest we forget, he hangs out on the porches of the powerful around here, drinking and bonding with the other men who have power.)

Imagine, if you will, a dramatic reading of a budget report. And not with Patrick Stewart or someone like that doing the reading.

I've heard at least three different versions of this material read aloud in various meetings so far.

Yes, I know he's reading it aloud so that people will pay what he feels is sufficient attention to the immense amount of labor he puts in. Seriously, I recognize that the stuff is important but also boring enough that we don't actually want to spend time reading it. And, he doesn't send it out ahead so that we can prepare it by reading it ourselves so we can just ask questions or whatever.

I'm at the point of thinking:

Crappy Meeting vs. Playing on the Freeway in Hopes of Being Killed, and playing on the freeway is looking not that bad.

Or maybe I should think:

Crappy Meeting vs. Unemployment because I've been fired for being mean to one of the good old boys.

One hour of really crappy meeting looks a little less bad, doesn't it?

I wonder if I can find a way to become incredibly, dangerously, contagiously ill for just about an hour this afternoon? Is it any wonder I turn to sugar?

Weirdly Satisfying

I just spent half an hour doing the planning and forms for special meetings and presentation and responder sign-ups for one of my classes. It's the sort of thing that either a student worker can't do (figure out my schedule to arrange extra times to meet with students) or that it would take longer to explain than it does to do myself, probably.

I find this sort of thing weirdly satisfying. I'm all set for this part of class tomorrow, and that's nice, but I also have little papers to show for my effort.

So much easier than grading!

Great Moments in Literary History, #1

Guess what poem I taught today...

Double points if you can name the poem I taught with it!

Grading Block

You've heard of writer's block, when a writer either just can't get started writing or gets stopped by something and can't go further.

I have lots of ways of helping students get beyond writer's block.

Unfortunately, I have grading block.

Sometimes, I look at this huge stack of papers that I need to grade, and I find it too overwhelming to start. So I put it off, and that's a problem.

The other side is that I'll start grading a stack, but then run into something in the stack that's really bad, really frustrating, or something similar. Then I put the stack down, and I have difficulty getting started again.

I need to find a way to get beyond the blockage because once I get behind in grading, things just get worse. And worse.

Of course, eventually, I force myself to just grade, and do get the work done, but life would be so much better if I just got over the blockage and graded.

I need better strategies. Help?

Meet the Deanling

I have a student who's missed class since about the second week of classes. Stu hasn't turned in much in the way of required work for the class (a couple quizzes from the first week, that sort of thing).

Stu, as you might have guessed, has a serious medical problem. We've been in touch by email, and I helped him get in touch with the proper campus folks early in the semester.

Yesterday, I got an email from a deanling in that office basically asking us (the collective instructors of this student's classes) to do what we could to help him catch up. So this morning, I emailed back for clarification, giving the deanling the numbers about work completed and work not completed, and suggesting that withdrawing was the best idea for this student.

This afternoon, I was coming out of a meeting in the big shots' building and saw the deanling. He waved me over and asked for a minute to clarify the email. Sounds good.

The deanling, let's call him "F the deanling," said that it wasn't a good idea for Stu to withdraw because he'd lose eligibility for [sport]. I clarified, asking if [sport] was happening this semester. Yes, F the deanling assured me, it is, and Stu has been doing well and is getting a lot of support from the coach.

Then F the deanling suggested that maybe Stu could catch up on the five weeks he's missed, if I could give him more help. I'm sorry, I said, but I just don't have the time to teach an extra five hours a week. F the deanling then suggested that Stu could work with the tutoring center, or the professor involved in directing the tutoring center, to catch up. I asked if F the deanling thought that teaching a class might require more than a tutor, and suggested that the professor directing the center might not have an extra five hours a week, either.

F the deanling then suggested that Stu could take an incomplete, and I could help him make it up over the summer. And here, having tenure, I told F the deanling that I wasn't working unpaid over the summer, and that it was unreasonable to ask. And to F the deanling's credit, he agreed that he shouldn't actually ask that.

Then F the deanling wondered if Stu couldn't just do the work left to do for the class and make up what he could in order to pass. Like pretty much every college class I can think of, this one builds skills so that students need to have practiced and learned the skills in the early assignments in order to succeed at the later assignments. Imagine saying, well, the student missed the first half of German 1, but hey, they'll just finish the rest of the class and that will be fine. So I said I didn't really think that would work. F the deanling frowned.

So I asked how he expected Stu to catch up in all his other classes. If a student has missed five weeks of a full class load, it's pretty nigh impossible to catch up over the rest of the semester. There just aren't that many hours in a week. That's when F the deanling told me that Stu had been going to the other classes, more or less, along with [sport]. (But then, Stu apparently told F the deanling that he had done a fair bit of work for my class, too.)

So, Stu is well enough to play [sport] and attend some classes, but not mine? Yeah, I'm afraid I'm less than fully sympathetic.

F the deanling emphasized how important it is to maintain Stu's eligibility to play the sport; it's one of those cases when being in the sport is all that is keeping Stu focused on college. (Stu must be really good at this sport, to be playing already as a first year, eh?)

I know I'm a bitch, but really if a student is well enough to play [sport], s/he is well enough to fail a class.

I'm really pissed at F the deanling, seriously irritated. It's not that the student was BSing with me; this was a deanling, someone who should actually be focused on helping students get an education not maintain eligibility.

Grading Question

I'm grading essays about the liberal arts and such for my writing class. Several of the students have written that, basically, they're lazy, so that's why we should have requirements. Alas, so far, each of these essays is underdeveloped with minimal thought to why someone should force them to get an education and what requirements they think are important.

It's difficult not to write in my little note that their laziness shows in the essay they've written.

I wonder if they even think about that when they write about how lazy they are?

Spoken too Soon

I appears I may have welcomed spring in just a tad too soon.

It snowed yesterday evening; I drove the last hour or so through it, and it was hard driving. But then, I'm a whuss about snow driving.

It wasn't much snow, and it's already melted from the driveway and road near my house (and I suspect other roads in the area). That melting really brings home what I've heard about the ways concrete and asphalt store heat way more than plants and soil do, because the snow's still on the lawn and soil a little (though it is melting).

There's a reason I keep posting pictures of the same crocus. There's only one. Yep. There are other crocus plants starting to come up, but this is the only flower starting so far. Keep your fingers crossed for more!

(One of the bonuses to taking out the ugly bushes in my front yard is that I'll be able to put in a bunch more crocuses and other bulbs for early spring hope next year.

Caption Contest

I went to a marsh today to see if I could see some birds. I know what you're thinking. This isn't a bird. It's a muskrat! (At least I think it's a muskrat. I don't know that I could tell a muskrat from a marmot without a better look at the tail.)

Mostly, I was too early for many migratory or nesting birds. I did see a few scattered pairs of Sandhill cranes. I saw my first Bufflehead. I saw a few Common Goldeneye.

I saw lots of Red-winged Blackbirds, LBJs, a couple raptors (Redtail, I think, and a Northern Harrier), and lots of these:



Write a caption, win an imaginary internet kudu!

Endurance Trial - Campus Visit

I wrote this a while back, when searches were on. But now that they're not, it might still be interesting in the future.


It occurs to me that it might be good to talk about what a campus visit for our department is likely to look like.

So here goes.

First, we're not easy to get to, so usually candidates get into town the day before formal stuff begins. Someone is assigned to put together a low key dinner at the hotel restaurant.

5:30-8:30pm - dinner (person in charge makes sure the candidate has a copy of the schedule, phone numbers, etc)

8am - breakfast, pick up at hotel, take to campus, to first meetings

9am - first meeting (dean, perhaps)

10am - second meeting (research support office, perhaps) (someone will guide the candidate, and that may mean waiting at the first meeting space because it's impossible to repark and that means that you have a 10-15 minute walk, and you don't want anyone getting lost without winter clothes! Make sure the candidate can get a snack, water, whatever along the way.)

11am - get to department (again, someone's guiding the candidate), intro around.

11:30 or so - a small group of faculty takes the candidate to lunch (at least one lunch is just "probationary" faculty)

1pm - teaching presentation (because we're a teaching school)

2:30pm - interview with chair, chair drives candidate around town, talks about housing, etc

4pm - candidate back to hotel, down time

6-8:30pm - dinner with small group of faculty


8am - breakfast, someone takes candidate to first meeting

9am - first meeting (provost, perhaps)

10am - second meeting (search committee, perhaps)

11am - down time, maybe campus tour with student

noon - lunch with faculty

1pm - down time

2pm - research presentation (because we also require research, and we can't decide what we're doing)

3pm - campus tour, time with students, whatever

5:30 - 7pm - dinner with faculty group

7:30 - 9pm - reception for candidate, back to hotel

next morning - candidate escapes, vows never to come to our frozen hell.


Typically, our candidates have sit down meetings with the college dean, someone from the provost's office, the head of research support, the chair, and the search committee. The big shot meetings are usually 20-30 minutes. Sometimes candidates do one presentation, sometimes also teach a class. Yes, we don't do that part well because we have a research requirement, and think that's important, but we also know we all teach a lot, and we want candidates to be good teachers from the get go.

Typically, the candidate walks around campus a bit, but... here's the thing, we have a really beautiful campus; it's a selling point. BUT, you don't want to freeze the candidate too much. You also don't want someone feeling lost when it's 5F with a bad wind chill, because that's just miserable. So someone guides the candidate, at least the first day (and yes, every office is spread out among weird buildings). Our typical candidate has been in five campus buildings by the end of the visit.

Typically, the chair takes the candidate around town a bit, talks about housing prices and stuff. Housing is fairly cheap, and that's good. But the cheap houses are generally not all that nice looking, or in charming neighborhoods. (Okay, even our pricy houses are cheap compared to most areas, but so are our salaries.)

The best thing we do, probably, is have the candidate eat with "probationary" faculty. That's the time for folks to talk candidly. You might be surprised that everyone in the department so far as I've seen (from all three angles now) considers that really private. No one asks and no one talks outside their lunch group about the questions or what's said.

We know that the job market sucks for candidates. But we also know that top candidates are likely to have other interviews and other campus visits, so we know we're also competing at this point.

And it's tough competition.

We're not a research I school, and it shows. It shows in the teaching schedules posted on doors, shows in the library, shows in the hallways of classroom areas, which are narrower than in R1s. Most candidates want the lower teaching load and high value research opportunities at an R1, and we can't offer those. In the English department, we all teach comp. Period. I know we don't get applications from lots of folks who don't want to do that. (And far better that they not apply, really, because it's a fact of life here.)

We're far from easy access or many city conveniences. Most people coming here have to take at least one connecting flight and a long shuttle drive. Same for leaving. We don't have some city amenities, even the ones you might not think twice about: Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Ikea, etc. Nope. Art museums, more than local history museums, museums of technology, science, etc. Nope. (We do have a children's museum celebrating the same mythic figure as every other small town in the upper midwest.) Other colleges/universities where spouses might teach? Nope. If you get slightly sick, we have decent health care, but if you get really sick, you go to another state. We have meth houses, areas of deep poverty, homeless folks, hungry folks.

Winter. It's effing cold, and lots of people don't want to live far from family in the cold.

We have budget problems. Those show in our salaries and in our infrastructure, not only on campus, but across town, when we negotiate ever-growing potholes on the main streets.

The area is pretty conservative. People have weaponry, not only in their cars but in their basements and gun lockers. Blaze orange is not just a fashion statement.

On the other hand, we have some positives.

First, we offer a low salary, but decent benefits.

We have a pretty good department. Yeah, I complain about the sexism, but I've been in far worse places, and I have friends in far worse places. If you get sick here, people will bring you hot soup and make sure your classes are covered.

We have pretty good students. Yeah, they're often first generation college students and don't "know the rules" the way more elite students do. But they don't pull some of the stunts and excuses I read about other students on the web. They're mostly pretty decent people who are scared about how they'll make a living and such. And mostly, they want to get an education. They're more likely to miss a day of class for a band tour or family hunting day than for a trip to the Bahamas.

And while our infrastructure sucks, when you look up, even in the middle of campus, you'll see trees, and you may see a bald eagle flying by. And we'll tell you about the trails (biking, walking, running, skiing). And just the beauty. Winter has it's own beauty, but when you see our campus in spring, summer, or fall, it really can take your breath away.

Our housing is cheap, and traffic jams are more likely to be momentarily caused by wild turkeys crossing the road than by too many cars.

The difficulty is in giving candidates a balanced view, making sure they realize we're not someplace where they'll teach six hours a week, have TAs to do the grading, and a research assistant, but that we are a place where people try to be humane and do a good job educating our students.

Hope and Despair

Spring really is coming. My crocus says so!

News about budget stuff just gets worse and worse. In a nearby state, there's talk about having state employees pay more towards their health insurance benefit. We're looking likely to do furloughs here. One of my colleagues says they should just admit they're making pay cuts. I'm wondering if calling it a pay cut means it never comes back, while calling it a furlough means we go back to the regular pay eventually?

I have a contract letter that says how much I'm supposed to be paid for the year. Can they force me to take a furlough and earn less? How does that work as a contract?

NWU has been doing a big budget study project; the project is supposed to help the administrators decide in a reasonable, informed way, what goes, because some things are going to go. I have no idea what those will be, however.

All the departments and such did comparison studies with data about campuses similar to ours, and by and large we found that we get paid less and teach more students AND produce more research than those schools. In my department, that means we teach way more students in comp classes than our similar campuses do. It doesn't mean we do as good a job teaching as they do, however.

So, with the budget crisis, we're looking at adding more students to each class. Add a couple students to each comp class over the semester, and drop a whole comp section (one taught by an adjuct, of course) and save money on that adjunct's salary. That sucks for the adjunct in major ways, and for instructors across the board, and for our students.

There's the rock.

Educational assessment is always aimed at saying that we're doing a good job; there's never any benefit to saying we aren't. So, we assess writing and say that yes, students are improving, though not as much as we'd like. We have no way to compare how well we're teaching with comparable campuses.

And that's the hard place.

We can't get at how much better we might do if we taught smaller classes, nor is there money to pay for instructors enough to teach smaller classes. Instead, we'll get more students, and then that new number will become the new standard, and that will never go down. Even if I could prove that teaching 16 students instead of 28 meant that each student learned 20% more, it wouldn't matter because no one with real power really cares about our students enough to vote to pay for it.

The dean and chairs are talking about ways to mitigate the added load of additional students in our classes. In some classes, profs will start using bubble tests, but it's hard to imagine how to teach writing without actually having to grade writing, and that goes not only for composition classes specifically, but for philosophy classes, history classes, and so forth, all of which are writing intensive fields.

I'm looking at the rest of my career and figuring things will never get better.

I used to think it might, but the more I hear people complain about paying taxes, the more certain I am that things won't change for the better in public education.

So as I look at the rest of my career, another 15-20 years, I'm wondering if it's worth it? Or what the alternatives are.

Grumpy

I woke up yesterday grumpy, and I woke up again this morning even grumpier. I'm not usually a grumpy person, either. Not that I'm the most cheery in the world, but I'm more on the cheery than the grumpy side, mostly.

Is it: hungry (need protein?), thirsty, hormones, nasty wind, carryover from worrying about budget stuff (personally and professionally), worrying about grading I still have to do, winter blues?

I took care of some stuff today, and then, because it was nasty windy, in that gusty ucky way, not quite the Santa Anas (because not dry), but still, too windy to make riding fun, I decided to garden. Mostly this involved cleaning away dead stuff from last year, trimming some things, and filling in where rabbits have been digging (at least, I think it's rabbits).

Look what I found under one area of dead stuff! Irises! These are some split offs from the German Iris plants I bought when I moved into my first house here, and some friends came to help me get my garden going. In June, they get a deep dark purply-blue flower for about ten days. And that's that. But the foliage is nice for several months, too. And the rabbits don't seem interested, so WIN!

I detest whomever put river rock "mulch" throughout the front yard. It's a pain to weed around (and no, the plastic sheeting underneath doesn't keep the weeds out for very long) and worse to try to plant through.

And here's another shot of the crocuses, growing a little bigger each day.

I feel a lot better after gardening for a couple hours, a lot less grumpy.

I got a ceramic wren house from a local potter yesterday, when I went out galavanting with a friend for a couple house. I'm trying to think where to hang it. The trees I planted when I moved in aren't strong enough for it yet, I don't think, but I want it on the south side of the house (because there's a bird house on the north side, and a house, feeder, bat house and suet feeder in various places in back (the west). I'm wondering if I can hang it from the gutter without causing problems?

Crocus!

Look!

I saw the first crocuses coming up today in my front yard, so I thought I'd share with you. Look closely; they're not very big yet, but there they are!

In the past couple days, I've also seen my first Robins of the season and the first Juncos of the season.

I even went without long johns today, for probably the first time since December.

My bike ride was short, slow, and glorious!

I love spring!

Classes before break

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm going to complain about how few students showed up for classes today.

Yeah, there were a few missing.

But the poetry students, most of whom were there (and turned in their papers) were just great today. Before class, we were waiting in the hall while the previous class finished a midterm, and some of my students were teasing me about letting them go early so that I'd have more time to start grading.

But when we got to work, talking about Hero and Leander, they were really good; lots of people contributed to small group discussions, and a good number reported back well to the class.

I think the absolute brilliance of the poem may have had something to do with it, but maybe I just got lucky! And yes, this is an afternoon class.

Mileage Memory

3385 miles on the odometer at the beginning of the year.

The goal is 2000 miles this year.

14 miles today; slow, but it felt SO good!

Just so I can look it up easily!

Break Planning

Here's the plan; let's see how much I actually accomplish:

1) Grading
--peer editing for all three classes (yeah, the timing is especially stupid)
--essay for writing class
--revisions for writing class
--poetry essay thing for poetry class
--midterms for poetry and drama classes
--quiz for writing class

2) Garden
--chop down overgrown, nasty bush BEFORE birds start nesting there again.
--clean out one nesting box (another is already clean)
--repair third nesting box.
--fantasize about how many bulbs I can put in where the overgrown bushes that I'm chopping down were, and about putting in a couple small trees (serviceberry, maybe)

3) Fun
--visit marsh
--visit river to see buffleheads that are supposed to be there
--visit crane or eagle place
--visit local history museum (I know what you're thinking, but we have a pretty darned good local museum, and they have a new exhibit!)
--read a book a friend lent me
--have lunch with a pal

4) Class Prep
--prep for library visit for writing class; meet with librarian, maybe?
--order book for next year's common text
--reread plays for the rest of the semester, at least two of them
--prep a week or two of poetry class

5) House
--hunt down and kill the nasty beetles that AREN'T ladybugs!
--clean
--vacuum
--call the repair place about getting my drier fixed (it's been a couple months, but who has time to take a day to wait around for a repairperson to get the drier fixed?)

6) Exercise
--bike! BIKE!!!! It's supposed to get above 40 this coming week!
--clean ski stuff out of the car and wax the skis. Figure out where they live during the summer (laundry room, I'm thinking)

7) Other
--feed and medicate friend's cats

Egad, I'm exhausted just looking at this!

Blah

I hate being female.

When I was, what, 12? I thought I was bleeding to death for a couple minutes when I first got my period. Then the realization kicked in, sort of. What I didn't quite realize was that the crappy way I felt--the feeling that my gut was being twisted to shreds with a pair of pliers--would last far into my adulthood without any real relief (though I did develop a taste for bourbon, which was way more effective than an aspirin). Yes, it's true, I was not one of the brighter or more sophisticated adolescents ever. In spite of having watched a couple years worth of film strips about the wonders of womanhood, I was mentally unprepared.

And now middle age.

I think I'm getting hot flashes. I'm not really sure, but then, I'm not a much more bright or sophisticated adult than I was an adolescent. Still, it's super cold here, and I'm all tucked in warm in my bed sleeping last night, and suddenly, I'm either dying of a fever or having a hot flash. So I throw off the covers, wait, and then I'm freezing. I couldn't find a reasonably comfortable medium for what seemed like forever (because even three seconds freezing is too long). In reality, it was long enough to really wake me up so I couldn't get back to sleep easily. And since I didn't die of whatever (though that seemed like a fine alternative at the time), I'm guessing hot flash. I'm still mentally unprepared.

What I want to know, why can't I get a hot flash when I'm walking across campus and it's minus 8 wind chill? Then it would be delightful. My face wouldn't hurt! I hate being cold!

Seriously, I figure one thing out and get on with my life, and blam, my body comes up with some other misery.

Off Stride

It's seventh week now, and I feel like I haven't found my rhythm for the semester. First there were multiple searches, complete with campus visits (I've participated in about 7 campus visits this semester, some for merely a meeting, some for hours at a time). Then there's the budget disaster, which our campus officials are increasingly characterizing as "calamaty" and "catastrophe."

And endless meetings. We're talking about ways to save money, including furloughs. While I'm grateful to have my job, I'm not looking forward to unpaid furloughs. Word is that the administrators are thinking about basically a half month unpaid. So I'm wondering if, since I'm paid on a 9 month contract, that means I will lose 1/18th of my pay rather than the 1/24th that someone on a full year contract would lose. That's a chunk out of my income that I'm a bit worried about. And yet, I also recognize that there's a level of pettiness to my worry. But that doesn't stop me from worrying.

The amount of money we could save by furloughing the whole campus for a half a month is substantial, but not compared to the budget cut the state is imposing. Basically, across the system, I'm told, the budget cut to the system could be balanced by completely cutting two NWU campuses the size of this one. That's a heck of a big budget cut, and our share is overwhelmingly large.

There's a point in budget discussions, here and nationally, that my brain just gets overwhelmed and befuddled, and I'm at that point pretty much all the time. I don't know how to solve the economic problems; I don't know how to even begin to address them. I only know that even doing all the things I was supposed to be doing (living within a budget, saving for emergencies, saving for retirement, getting a realistically affordable mortgage, minimizing credit card debt/use), I'm still scared. And I'm lucky to be only scared so far.

***

I was walking to a campus visit thing last week, and passed by a group of trees on campus with a bunch of Cedar Waxwings! I usually see Cedar Waxwings in the trees outside my office window (I know, you may be jealous on so many fronts: office, window, trees visible!) a bit later in spring, so I was surprised to see them already. I'm guessing the spring migration is ON!

We've got spring break from classes next week. There's a big marsh a couple hours south of us which is known as a great place for migration birding. So I'm thinking of taking a day out of the break and going to visit the marsh.

Yep, that's me: an exciting spring trip to southern parts in search of wild birds. Who knows, there may be feathering involved for some of the birds!

I've got my fingers crossed for an early spring, even though we're expecting snow this afternoon and tonight.

SAA Meetup?

Anyone else up for a meetup?

Advertising Snarl

Has anyone else noticed that if you click through to a different place using someone's blogrolling list, you get this redirect thing that adds in advertising (a bar across the top with moving stuffs) that slows my loading the heck down.

Ewww.

Go away, blogrolling ads!

Thoughts on Composition Teaching and the Job Market

My department had several searches this fall, though most of them have now been cut, alas. Although this year's a mess, and things aren't going to get better fast, I imagine that we'll be searching for English department literature positions at some point in the future.

Every time we do a lit faculty search, we put up front in our ad that composition is about 50% of our load. And when I am (and my colleagues are) reading 100+ applications for a lit position, we look for evidence that the job applicant can teach comp. Maybe that evidence comes through in the letter, or in the CV, or in the letters of recommendation, but in order to get past my first cut, an application has to give me a sense that the person can teach composition.

So I have this to say to job applicants:

1) If you can't bear the idea of teaching about 50% comp, please don't apply for our job.

2) If you want to be a strong candidate here, know how to teach comp well, and make sure that comes through in your letter, CV, and maybe even letters of recommendation.

3) If you sound enthusiastic about teaching comp and working with our students, that will make your application stronger. If you sound insane, we won't believe you anyway.

Now, the paragraph on teaching comp that will help get you past my first cut isn't going to help you getting an R1 job. Depending on the R1, being able to teach writing well may or may not be helpful at getting you to the next step. (It may be helpful if you get hired.)

I'm willing to bet that most English lit faculty at other regional comprehensives, at SLACs, technical universities, and community colleges teach a fair bit of composition. So if you're willing to apply for those jobs, it makes sense to prepare yourself to teach composition well.

That means, if you're applying to grad schools, you should think about what sorts of training and opportunities they offer in composition teaching. If they provide neither, then that's something to think about. Maybe you'd rather leave academics than teach composition, and so you're making a good choice.

If you're already in grad school, and your institution doesn't offer good training and opportunities, then you need to think about what you want. And then you either need to decide you don't care because you're going to teach at an R1, or you need to find a way to get some training and some experience. Maybe that means taking a class or two at another school. Maybe that means working for a tutoring center or trying to find other teaching opportunities.

If you're already in grad school and your institution does offer some training and opportunities, then I'd strongly recommend you take real advantage of them. Put aside the comments from folks who think teaching composition is a waste of time, and make connections with the people who do it well, whether they're other grad students or professionals who teach comp/rhet. Yes, I know that's a lot to learn, but you don't have to learn to do research in comp/rhet; you have to learn to read research and to take advantage of research in order to teach well.

Yes, it's a different field, but learning to teach writing well will help you teach writing in lit courses, too. And it will also probably help your own writing.

What if you're already finished with your phud and don't feel qualified to teach composition?

1) When your grad school/department does the alumni interviews for assessment, make sure you tell them they screwed up.

2) If you can't stand teaching comp, find something else that makes you happy.

3) Put the skills you learned in earning your phud--research and analysis skills, especially--to work and learn about teaching composition.


From the comments I've been reading, I get the sense that there are a number of folks out there teaching comp in programs where control of composition is pretty tightly held by administrators (or someone).

I'm of two minds about that. The first is that if you're not already confident and well-trained in teaching comp, having an imposed structure might actually help, even though it feels awful (and I'm sure it does). But if you're already confident and well-trained, then it probably just feels awful. I'm sorry.

I've never taught anywhere post-phud like that (and that's three jobs). I can only imagine how utterly frustrating such a program is. My experience has usually been that everyone was WAY too busy to try to control my work in the classroom (except to collect syllabus information, do observations and responses, check evaluations, and provide critical feedback).

I don't know how I'd manage within such a program. I like to think that I'd be able to find a way to teach well, but who knows?

And now, I'm off to grade, because grading truly is endless, even when it's not comp.

Thinking about Teaching Comp

Some of the responses to my last post got me thinking, especially one that asked for a book recommendation.

I understand the impulse, the desire to get one book with the answers, or at least a solid background. The thing is, composition studies is a huge field, and there's no book that's going to do that, any more than there's one book that will teach someone what they need to teach Shakespeare at the college level. And really, comp studies is a wider field than Shakespeare studies. I'm not even a comp specialist, just someone who tries to do my job, which includes about 50% comp teaching. (I did a certificate in teaching composition, way back when, which included 1 undergrad and 3 grad courses.)

But even if you asked a really great comp specialist, s/he'd have to know where you were starting.

Do you know about process research, for example? What do you know about brainstorming techniques, or responding effectively, or writing assignments, or any number of other things, because comp is just so huge.

That said, I do have a suggestion.

First, make yourself a list of things you think are important for teaching comp.

My list would include (with no attempt at parallel structures or anything, just brainstorming!):

What do I mean when I say "Writing well." What makes good writing?
What do my colleagues think counts as "good writing"?
Making effective assignments. (What do I mean by "effective" here?)
Making assignments that don't make me want to rip out my eyes.
Teaching writing processes for different learning styles.
Responding and grading effectively.
Organizing the flow of an assignment (readings, pre-writing, etc) over a period of time.
Organizing the flow of the course over the semester.
Helping students read effectively.
Helping students use outside information, ideas, materials ethically and effectively.
Making plagiarism so painfully difficult that students won't likely do it.
Figuring how much (if any) grammar stuff I need to teach my students (passive voice, dangling verbals, punctuating appositives, whatever)
How to help my students proofread.
Using short/informal writing effectively.
Figuring out how to use a textbook, if any, and choosing one (if I want).
Helping students read critically (especially other people's work).
Helping students revise.
Getting students to take revision seriously.

Second, use that list to make up a list of questions. For example, I might want to ask what the relationship is between reading students do in college and writing improvement.

Or maybe I want to ask how to organize a revision process into my syllabus.

Maybe I'm in a really practical mood and I want to learn how to respond more efficiently to student writing.

Once I have a good list, I'd prioritize. Figure out which answers are likely to help you most in your teaching.

Then, find someone on your campus, or from your old grad program, or at the R1 three hours drive away. On my campus, we have a writing person (well, there's a whole big fancy title) who's the only actual comp/rhet phud on campus, and she's friendly, so I chose her. At my former school, which was very tiny, I would have got together with a couple of the adjuncts who were friendly and great teachers. Now, I can also email a former student who's studying for a phud in comp/rhet. You should be able to find someone with more expertise than you have.

Then tell that person that you're working on teaching comp better, and that you'd really like to learn what's what about this question. What do they think? Can they recommend a resource (a book, an article or two, whatever) to help you learn more.

I've never had a comp person react negatively to my asking for help like this, or asking if what some specific thing I'd learned in my comp program was out of date now. BUT, I know that at some R1s, comp directors get abused a lot by TAs and others; they're treated really poorly. So, if you're at a place like that, make sure you approach the question with respect. On the other hand, if you're at a place like that, there are probably comp grad students, or grad students trying to teach comp, who are also trying to put things together, and you could try approaching them.

To my Colleague, on Composition

Or, what I want to say in the lunchroom when my colleague complains that s/he wasn't trained to teach composition and hates composition and teaching composition is beneath him/her and the students never learn anything and blah blah blah.

Remember when you applied for this job, how we listed on the JIL that the job was about 50% composition? And when you came for the interview and we told you that everyone in the department teaches composition for about half our load?

Your letter of application talked about how well-prepared you were to teach composition, how much you took time to think of interesting and challenging assignments, how innovative you were in your approaches. Remember that? I do.

So, what, you forgot? Seriously?

Yes, I know composition:literature or creative writing =/= basic math:advanced math. I know it's a totally different field.

But this is the job that we advertised, and you applied and accepted the offer. And there are 100+ candidates who'd apply for your job in an instant if you decided to leave.

And your being far too amazing and wonderful to be asked to do such demeaning work? You should have taken the R1 offers you had, the ones in better geographic locations with better pay and benefits.

What's that? You deserved an R1 job, but you didn't get even an interview nibble? Remind me again how you deserved an R1 job because you went to Old Ivy and and you're white and male but the world is mean to white men.

So here we are together. It must be dreadful for you to have to share the lunch room with the non-Ivy likes of me.

I wonder why your students don't learn anything? Want to talk about that?

***

Yes, teaching composition is hard work. It's the hardest work I do, consistently, every semester, the hardest work. It's harder than writing someone's tenure letter, by far.

But in the pantheon of difficult jobs, I bet it's not in the top 100.

And since I knew from grad school that I'd be likely teaching composition for the rest of my career, I took some classes to prepare, and I read some research to keep up, and I struggle with it. I talk to our comp person to get ideas; I get ideas from other instructors. I even share some ideas. And it's still a struggle.

If you don't want to do HALF your job and do it well, then leave. Just leave. Either go to that R1 that's begging for the privilege of hiring you, or leave academics and do something else.

If I were Robert Browning, this would have been in blank verse. Alas, I'm not.

Imagine, though, the kick-ass assignments Browning would have come up with: "Write an argumentative essay asserting the rectitude of killing your wife."

Poof

Every open job at NWU just got put on hold.

We have an assistant headmaster position search - on hold.

We have the search in Underwater Basketweaving - on hold.

All the other searches across campus - on hold.

All those candidates who really need and want a job? This is horrible news for them. Every search on campus is gone, and probably not going to be re-opened for a couple years. We're just later to do it than most campuses, which really means that we've given people false hope for longer than the other places. So we're crueler.

I figure I've spent 50+ hours on the UWB search between this semester and last. And poof, that work means nothing.

The way faculty time works, we're just asked to do search committee work on top of other stuff; I didn't drop any of my other committee responsibilities, nor my teaching responsibilities, nor advising, nor research. I just added an extra week's worth of work to evenings and weekends and the break. And that doesn't "cost" the university anything visible because we just add it on as part of our responsibilities.

The money we spent on advertising, interviews, campus visits, that is, the money that's way more visible than faculty time, gone. Also gone is the time our administrative staff spent organizing the search materials. (And if you've never seen an office staff organize a search with 100+ candidates, making sure that everything gets where it needs to be, you need to know that it takes a load of work.)

Canon to the Right of Me

Curricular discussion, yet again.

One of my colleagues laments. It's okay, s/he asserts (and I'm paraphrasing), that we teach [lit of people of color in whatever century/place], but really, we need to make sure students really know [lit of white men from that century] from that period. That's really central. The other stuff is okay, but only once students really know [lit of white men from that century]. The survey really needs to focus on [lit of white men from that century].

I teach mostly lit by white men. It's true. So far as we know, Shakespeare was white and male.

In conversations, I can tell that several of my colleagues assume that I must therefore agree that the white male canon is far superior to any other literature. I try to disabuse them of this notion pretty much every time, but it keeps coming back. I think they sort of don't hear me, because their assumptions are so strong.

What I'd like to say is that I don't think that white men have written anything interesting for the past 200 years, so we should, indeed, focus on writers of color or writers who are vaginally endowed.

It's not true, though. White men are still often fine writers who write interesting books. It would be fun to say it aloud, though, just to see the look of horror on their faces. But then they'd believe I really meant it, even if I said I was teasing, because they feel that white men are under siege, under attack (along with Christmas). It's one thing, I gather, to make sexist jokes about women, and quite another to make a joke about men. The one they take as funny because it's "just a joke," while the other they take as part of the war on all that makes life worth living.

But it is true that I don't value white male experience as central to what's important in literature.

It's going to be a long meeting, isn't it?

Another Poem Quiz

Here goes: What poem am I teaching today?

Thoughts on the Oscars

Let me admit right up front that I watched a program on Fats Domino rather than the Oscars last night, but I did look at the list of things that had already been awarded before I went to bed. And I had two questions.

I noticed that Slumdog Millionaire was nominated in all sorts of categories, though none of the acting categories. It won the best picture award (I learned this morning) without a single performance "worthy" of a nomination? I wonder how often that happens? (And I bet a movie buff could tell us within minutes.)

It makes me wonder if there wasn't a subtle (or not so subtle, but probably not really conscious) racism in play among the nominating voters. Racism doesn't always take a big systemic organization; sometimes it's the result of lots of little racist decisions, many of which aren't even consciously racist.

Then I noticed that among there was little overlap in the best picture and best actress/best supporting actress nomination fields. I think Kate Winslett/The Reader was the only overlap I saw.

I'm guessing there's not at all subtle sexism at work throughout the industry that makes fewer good roles for women because what "counts" as a good film is very masculinist and tells male stories. What sells isn't necessarily a great female actor, but male-centered films which often valorize violence and patriarchal values.

I wonder what sorts of roles Katherine Hepburn or Myrna Loy would find these days? I don't mean to be nostalgic, because it's not like Hollywood was ever a hotbed of feminism, but it seems ever more masculinist. We need more female producers, directors, and writers, don't we? (Though, to be honest, there would also have to be more women controlling disposable income spent on going to films, and I'm guessing most adult women have less time to go to films than most 13 year old boys. And do we really want to spend that much of our disposable income at films when there are bikes to be ridden, snow to be skied on, and books to be read?)

Terminally Cute

My weekend visitor. She's maybe 6 months old.

For a pup, pretty much everything has play value. Everything. I'd sort of forgotten this, after having an aging dog for many years.

I think my blood pressure has probably dropped by 20 points just from laughing at her antics, playing, and petting those soft ears. However, my work hasn't gotten done at all.


Edited to add: I tuckered the puppy out! We played stick "chase and chew" out in the yard for about 40 minutes, and she's been sleeping for the past hour or so, that hard puppy sleep: she's plopped in her kennel snoring. Want to bet that within the next hour, she'll wake up more mischievous than before?

A Night at the Movies: Milk

I went with some friends to see Milk last night. And as much as I get frustrated by the conservatism here, I must say that I was impressed to see how many people were seeing Milk last night. And they laughed at the jokes, and looked somber at the end.

The first thing I want to say about the movie is that I'm really glad it got made. And boy oh boy is Sean Penn superb.

Really, it's a good movie. It brings back some of the feel of the late 70s without being all in your face about doing techy stuff. The old images of folks like Carter and Jerry Brown worked well with the modern film stuff; they didn't clash like they do with some film because the colors feel really different or something.

So go see it.

I do have a couple of issues. The film momentarily noticed the sexism (especially against Lesbians) and racism of the gay movement in the 70s (at least as it played out in the Bay Area), but didn't critique those in a meaningful way. And they both deserve critique and examination. I get that doing lots with a critique would take away from the time devoted to something else, but I think it's important.

Tied to that was the representation of Jack. He was played in a really over-the-top way, and that representation fits all too tightly in with the ways white culture portrays Latino males as overly emotional, needy, and so forth. So that left my crowd wondering if the movie was just being orientalist, or if it was trying to make a point (was that supposed to be sort of how Jack looked to the "good boy" white males), or if a historical Jack really fit the stereotypes so bizarrely.

And where the heck was Diane Feinstein? Seriously. I mean, they showed her from afar once, and we heard her voice from offscreen, but you wouldn't know that she was coming up in party and as a supervisor.

Seeing Milk made me think about some "what ifs." I'm guessing, within the "what ifs" that Diane Feinstein wouldn't be a senator now if she hadn't become mayor after Moscone's assassination.

Seeing a representation of the gay male community in the late 70s made me think about HIV/AIDS. How much further would we be if we hadn't had to spend so much energy and time, and if we hadn't lost so many people to HIV/AIDS? It's rather horrifying to think, especially since California Prop 8 passed last November.

On the other hand, the lesbian reaction to HIV/AIDS had a lot to do with the gay male community's increasing acceptance. Without HIV/AIDS and Lesbians coming out to support and care for men, would we have found common ground? (If you think about it, there's no "natural" common ground, given that a lot of homophobia is scared of male penetration and that makes men a bigger target, while lesbians have less economic power, less political power, and face different challenges. We used to come together over fewer issues, with lesbians being secondary. Has that really changed that much?)

Within the film, there's one lesbian character, Milk's campaign manager, who is accepted grudgingly by Milk's close followers (at least at first).

It's as if lesbians can only be accepted so long as we're serving men and taking care of them, both in the film and historically. I don't think that's changed a whole lot in the past 30 years, but it needs to change, and we'd better not have to wait 30 more years.

Favorite Line

Some lines, when you read them, just speak to you, you know? At least that's how it feel. So, today, before a meeting, I was prepping for tomorrow's first class, and read,

This is hell, nor am I out of it.

And I thought, yes. It somehow seemed so appropriate for the meeting at hand. For pretty much every meeting, just in case.

I've racked up nearly three hours of meetings today, though two ran under, and one over. The long one was actually helpful and turned out well, I thought. It's good to work with adults. The others were fine as meetings go.

And now, I have hours of grading before I sleep.

Joy

I went for my first bike ride since Thanksgiving weekend today! It was pretty cold, and I didn't go very far, but boy oh boy is it way better than running!

It felt really awkward at first, clipping in, feeling the bike move under me (which it doesn't do on the trainer), and then there was the cold (supposedly it's 34F!).

There's a men's pro bike race in California this week; they were showing it on tv a bit yesterday, and it looked really rainy and nasty. So, biking today, I realized that I have two huge advantages for riding in the cold over those pro racers. Now, I know it sounds weird to say that I have advantages, but I'm serious.

First, they go way fast, so you know the wind chill thing has to just be horrid. There's a huge difference between the way a cold wind feels at 14 mph and the way it feels at 30. Advantage Bardiac!

Second, two words: body fat. They have none, and I have some. Advantage Bardiac!

I've also decided that I go just as fast on hills as they do. The difference is that it's their uphill speed matching my downhill speed.

I was so happy to go riding. It felt good! I'm so full of joy.

(And I'm also very pleased that I don't have to go when it's rainy and miserable out, like the pros do. Advantage Bardiac!)