Steamrolled

Do you remember the ending of A Fish Called Wanda?  When the one "bad guy" (the Kevin Kline character) gets run over by a steamroller? 

Or all those Road Runner cartoons where poor Wile E. Coyote would get steamrolled by an Acme steamroller?

That's how the semester's feeling for me right now.  I keep reading about friends elsewhere on fall break, but we don't have a fall break (because the legislature has legislated that we can't start until after the tourist season so that public university students can work at tourist season jobs), so I just look jealous at their posts.

I could really use a four day weekend, just long enough to really sleep and take care of yard stuff that needs taken care of, and grade and prep and so on.  I've managed not to fall horribly behind, but I often feel that I'm on the edge of falling horribly behind.

And midterms soon!  Someone needs to write my midterms, and then grade them.


I have a long committee meeting this evening.


And then a committee job that was way busy in the first weeks of the semester, but which has since been quiet, is going to get wildly busy again.


Go go gadget Bardiac!

Sins of Teaching

Actually, this is more a mistake of teaching, but "sin" sounds so much racier, doesn't it?

Here's my mistake of the semester, so far:  I gave my students an assignment that's good in many ways, but that I'm not quite sure how to grade.

It's not a huge assignment, but it's a bit complex to think how to grade.  So I've been procrastinating about grading, which has made it even worse, of course.  (Procrastination about grading is my prime teaching mistake, I think.)

I really, really need to just sit down with this and grade.

Hmmm, I wonder if I get a radio for the front part of my house... I should look at radios!  And maybe go out to buy one!  Yeah... because that will be a useful strategy, right?

The List

Each fall in my department, we get "the list."  Basically, the list puts down the whole array of courses the department expects to offer in the coming year, and asks us to choose our top choices in each of several categories.

There are the central courses, the ones that every major has to take.

And there are lower-division courses.

And there are upper-division courses.

And then there's composition courses.  We have several composition courses; the form asks us which we would "enjoy" teaching.  So I left that blank.  I don't "enjoy" composition courses.  I do them, and I try to do good work on them, because that's part of the job.  But "enjoy"?  Nope.


I've come to accept the fact that I'm lousy at cutting the special deals some people around here manage.  Usually the special deals have to do with not having to teach composition.  I have one colleague who plans never to teach composition; I don't know if that will work in the long term, but that's the plan (it worked for this year).  I have another colleague who's negotiated her way out of composition for two years for taking on a position that had included a course release, but not composition.

But I've never been good at negotiating these sorts of deals. 


The list is good, though, because it does give us some sense of agency, even though most of the agency comes through hiring.  So, for the lower division classes, I typically put Shakespeare, and an early modern class, and then poetry or drama.  Another Shakespeare person might put women's lit rather than the early modern class, or whatever.  But there are three people who pretty much put Shakespeare at the top of their list.  It only gets weird when someone decides that they really want to teach a course outside the area they were hired for.  So, if I decided that I really wanted to teach the American Ethnic lit courses, that would be weird.  And thus, the three people who will put Shakespeare first.  (Some courses are assigned by area committees, because there's no need to put linguistics courses on the list for everyone when we have few linguists, and they can figure those out between them.)

In a couple of weeks, the schedule committee will get together, and figure out who's going to teach what.  It's usually a pretty good system, though there are times I've found it frustrating.  (I didn't have a Shakespeare class for three semesters in a row, which made me extra cranky.)

Then, once they've done that, we get a piece of paper with our course assignments on it, and get to fill in a "here's the schedule I want" thing.  You get to choose preferred days/times for each of the courses, and preferred room configurations for some (do you want a computer lab?  individual chair/desks?  shared tables?  a circle or rows?).

I really love this aspect of how we assign schedules.  The committee spends pretty much all day going through and figuring out who wants what, when, and works through so that there's a spread of times and days for different courses.  The idea is that we don't teach a bunch of senior seminars all at the same time, so seniors can take several if they need to.  And we don't schedule all the intro creative writing courses at the same day/time, so the student who has a Tuesday/Thursday job schedule can find a section that works.  And the committee assigns our priority classrooms, so we keep them occupied from the start of the day until afternoon.  It's like a massive, multi-dimensional puzzle (people, courses, times, rooms, requirements), and yet after a whole day of work, the committee mostly manages to give us schedules that are pretty close to what we ask for.

(The committee also schedules IAS folks with their choices, to the extent it can, and tries to give humane schedules to the new hires we hope to make.)

All in all, it's a really good system, WAY better than systems where one person decides, based on what's been done for the past 20 years or on their own preconceptions.

Logos

One of my students wears a political t-shirt fairly often.  Think the Che t-shirts, where you have to know it's Che Guevara to know it's political, or the "Who's John Galt?" t-shirts, where you have to know a miniscule bit of information to know it's political.

It seems to me, these shirts are a bit of wearing one's politics on one's sleeve.  Or chest, rather.  I'm happy for students to do it, but I don't feel comfortable doing so as an instructor, because of the power differential and such.

I tend to think that I'm not overtly partisan in my classes, but then I think, well, I bet the t-shirt student doesn't think zie's being overtly partisan, either, but I certainly read the shirt as a partisan statement.  So I wonder if, in fact, I'm more overt about my politics than I think.  (I think I'm pretty overt about some of my politics: I'm pretty overt about respecting people as people, including women as people, and I'm pretty overt about trying to fight racism.  And I'm pretty overt about LGBTQ rights.  Of course, to me, my positions about those things seem centrist and, well, moderate.)

Anyway, as I think about the political t-shirts I see on campus, it strikes me that they're mostly worn by white men.  Do white men think their politics need to be shared more than the rest of us?  Or do I just notice more?

And do I notice the Galt t-shirt more than I notice the Che t-shirt?  And does a more conservative person notice the Che t-shirt more than the Galt one?

Is it a Play, or is it Real Life?

I was prepping a play for today, and then had to look up some dates.  Guess which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Energy Saps

One of my colleagues is dealing with a plagiarism case, and we were talking the other day about how much energy it saps from you to deal with plagiarism.  There's plenty of time in tracking things down, making sure you're doing the process correctly, making sure you know the ins and outs of the rules, talking it through with the chair and contacting deanlings.  But beyond that, it just saps energy.

To a lesser extent, students who want to get all legalistic sap energy.  You know the ones, the ones who stop in to see why they "lost" a point and didn't get that B they really think they deserved, when they got what you (the instructor) sees as a generous C.  Just thinking about those students saps my energy.

I find the same sapping when deanlings want to come to meetings and talk at us about whatever it is they think is really important.  For example, we have one deanling who, whenever he's explaining anything about advising, wants to start with pre-admission test scores and HS class standing as indicators of college success.  And I just die inside, and want to get him to actually understand that we don't do admissions, so we don't care about those indicators; we care about the human being we're trying to teach or advise.  We teach and advise any student who enters our class or office, because that's the way the university is set up.

What work stuff saps your energy?

Fear and Loafing

There was a moderately big assignment due yesterday (Monday) in my senior seminar, but on Friday, after several panicked meetings, I emailed the class to give them an extension until this Friday.  And since then, I've had several more meetings, less panicked, but productive nonetheless.

It's like suddenly they realize that what they thought they could do in four or five hours is really much more time-consuming than that.  And now many of them are actually doing it, or trying to.  It's a lit review sort of assignment, though, and the ones who started too late to get books on interlibrary loan are sad right now.

The thing is, they're seniors, mostly, so if they haven't learned to start early on projects by now, they're probably not going to learn it in my class.  If they get decent jobs, they'll either learn it or not.  Meanwhile, senioritis hit a few.

That's not to say all, because I know a couple of the students were really on top of things.

And then there's the one who didn't bother to check his email all weekend and then complained to me that he hadn't gotten the message.  I must admit, I wasn't very sympathetic, but did offer to accept his assignment if he wanted to hand it in.  He didn't.  (This same person had asked on Friday if I'd answer questions by email, and I had.  Ha!)

In another class, we did a review thing yesterday with a small assignment they turned in, and I think it made them (as a whole) realize that they have a lot of studying to be prepared for the midterm.  What amused me is that one of the students came by before class (and thus before she'd seen the assignment) with a review grid prepared to help her study for the midterm.  So she, at least, is really on top of the learning curve.

The review thing we did asked them to basically be able to define some basic terms and be able to think about them with regard to a text, a text that doesn't fit literary conventions at all.  From the way they were working, I got the definite sense that some of them are just figuring out that college classes move fast and require a lot more than just doing the reading.  Better they get that sense now, a week and a half before the midterm, than while taking the midterm!

The good news, on two counts, is that they found the small assignment useful, and seemed to be taking the review thing seriously, and thus fount it useful, too.

I hope they all rock the midterm!

From the Other Side of the Divide

One of my friends from another department, let's call it Mathematical Forestry, called to vent.  It turns out one of our deanlings quit deaning and has returned to the ranks this year.  Naturally, the department welcomed him back with open arms, gave him a reduced schedule for a bit, and some prime classes, an intro Mathematical Forestry class, and an umbrella senior MF class for next semestser.  My friend is in the Pines sub-division of Mathematical Forestry, and the former deanling who studied tropical Evergreen (Spruces) MF way back in the day, but who was hired to teach statistical forestry, is now hot on teaching Evergreen MF again, because he was never that interested in the statistical stuff and never kept up, and now, with seniority and what not, has declared himself an Evergreen MFer.

But now, according to my friend, the former deanling is having an open panic attack in the hallway about teaching the umbrella senior MF class.  He was thinking about doing an Evergreen class, but he feels so far behind.  But he's assured my friend that he can do a Pines class, because he always did like Pines.  And he can't do Spruces, because he hasn't kept up in Spruces, and besides, students aren't interested in Spruces.

So my friend (who reads widely in Evergreens, because she has to teach lots of Evergreens all around), started imagining this amazing course that would tap into student interest in Spruces, which are amazing MF subjects.  And the former deanling was all sad and panicked because he would have to catch up on a lot of recent work that my friend mentioned.

He was also shocked that there was recent work in Spruces.  Who knew?  Spruces!

So maybe, he thought, he'll do a Pines class, because he knows all the Pines.  (And seems to think that there's been no work in Pines in the last 15 years or so.)

So all you Pine MFers, be aware, your last 15 years counts for naught in the eyes of the administrivials.

Television Makes Me Cranky

I happened to catch the BBC? PBS segment (it was 2H4) of the second tetralogy today.  It was okay.  I found it hard to understand some of the dialog, but that may have to do with my television set up.  And certainly, I'm not as good with British accents as most British folks probably are.

But then, there was the few minutes of director and actors talking about the production.

OMG, people! 

It was like they actually believed all the propaganda about how wonderful H5 was, and didn't notice any of the critical/questioning Shakespeare brings in.  Seriously, the glory of H5 is that it makes you squirm about H5, and thus about political speech and propaganda.


Did you not notice that Henry doesn't remember or care about any of the "unnamed" people who died at Agincourt?  Or that despite that speech, no one that I know of celebrates St. Crispin's Day in honor of the battle today?  (Okay, a few crazy Shakespeare folks, but really?  No one in Shakespeare's day did, either.) 

Did you not notice that final epilogue, which acknowledges that all those deaths weren't even successful at garnering French territory for England for very long, and that, indeed, Henry screwed up as king in the most fundamental way by dying before his son was old enough to be an effective ruler?

And finally, Jeremy Irons dissing non-professional live performances?  Sir, you're wrong!  (I declare it on the intertubes!)  Live performance is absolutely superior to introduce people to Shakespeare.

Okay, I'm done.

Did any of you see it?


And did you think the whole thing felt really dark?  (I have a less than big screen TV, so that may be part of my perception about darkness.)

Academic Job Seeking? Read This!

That is, read this post from Notorious, PhD. about writing statements of teaching philosophies.

I love when you read something and it helps you understand something that you'd been bothered by, but never quite understood.  Notorious does that in this post when she talks about the difference between a teaching philosophy and a teaching methodology.  The method is what you do, the philosophy is why.

And reading teaching philosophies for past search committees (and writing my own), I was dissatisfied, but I think that clarification by Notorious explains my frustration.  Thanks, Notorious!

I Have a Cunning Plan!

It's the Text of the Day!

A fairly obvious one, probably.  And about time, I say!

We Are Where We Are

The market's heating up, or, more truthfully, getting ever so mildly warm.

Last year, since I was on a search, I was thinking a lot about search stuffs, so I posted a lot about search issues.  If you're interested, I made a list of the job posts at the end of last year.

Earlier today, I was reading Pan Kisses Kafka (what a GREAT name, no?), talking about the difficulties of the job search in German, and especially about the problems of searches in specific areas (the South, rural communities, communities far away from support networks).

I'm mostly sympathetic to Rebecca Schuman, the blogger who writes Pan Kisses Kafka. 

The market is horrible in good part because taxpayers have decided that public education is not a public good, but a private one, and thus that students should pay for their private good with their own money.  That's been happening for a long time.  Public colleges and universities have responded by raising tuition and using more and more contingent labor to save labor costs.  (I think private colleges and universities are responding to somewhat different stresses.)  Let's stipulate that the market is horrible, and that PhD producing institutions are producing a lot more PhDs than academic markets can employ.


But I'm also, well, a tiny bit unsympathetic, I suppose.  (Maybe because I'm part of the "internet full of morons.")  And I write this as someone who's on the other side of the job market now, but who spent three tough years on the market, who moved to a very rural area, and who moved to a less rural area, both far from anyone I knew.

First, even in the best of times, labor often has to go where there are jobs (that's true in socialist economies, too; can't blame capitalism as much as I'd like to).  Even in the best of times, some of the jobs PhDs got were in rural areas and in areas far from established support networks, great libraries, and so on.

So, if you look at a job we're advertising, don't blame us for advertising a job up in the Northwoods, where it gets very cold, in an area where there aren't great libraries, and where culture sometimes seems to involve watching football in an icehouse.  It's where we are because it's where our students are.

You may decide not to apply here, and that's okay.  Decide what's best for you.  But don't be mad at us because this is the job we have available, and it's not geographically inviting to you.

Second, I'm suspicious of blanket statements about how "fit" guarantees that everyone hired will look just like the people already there.  For one thing, there may be a lot more diversity already there than you realize, because that horrible job market for the past 20+ years means that there are a lot of people who've moved all over for academic jobs for a good long time.   In my experience, here, at my previous school, and when I interact with people at other schools in my system and beyond, there's a whole lot of variation in how departments/schools approach hiring.  In some, yes, there are a lot of people who look like younger versions of the old pictures on the wall.  In others, there aren't.

Anyway, good luck to all who are on the market.  Know that you may be fantastic and wonderful, but that there aren't enough jobs in academia for all the fantastic and wonderful PhDs.  It's horrible.  I don't know how to change it, though, short of convincing taxpayers to consider public education a public good, and, at the same time, convincing PhD programs to produce fewer PhDs (without limiting opportunities for people who aren't already privileged by race or social class).

Out of Touch

I got an email the other day from a friend of mine who's moved into administration, and moved a couple schools away now.  This friend and her partner (who is retired) are planning to go on a cruise during Thanksgiving week of next year (so planning way ahead) and have sent information to a number of friends, encouraging us to sign up for the cruise, too, because it would be way more fun to have a bunch of friends on the cruise.

It would be more fun, of course.


I emailed my regrets, because there's that whole teaching thing that means that some of us can't just take off for 8 days in the middle of the semester.  And my friend emailed back that she'd hoped I could make arrangements since there's so much lead time.

It strikes me that my friend's sort of forgotten what faculty life is like, eh?  I mean, yes, I have a lot more flexibility to travel in summer, but pretty much none during the semester.  She has much more flexibility in terms of when during the school year, so long as she can make arrangements ahead.

And then I wondered how the deanling here with my friend's same basic job would feel about faculty deciding to take off during the middle of the semester and make other arrangements.  How about if we all did it!  (The deanling below about my friend's current level is the deanling who sends us emails about not canceling classes on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, with admonishments that we have to be there, but should be forgiving of students who aren't.)

And then I wondered if maybe people really can do that?  I mean, I can see how you might be able to pull it off if you teach two classes a semester, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and you decide to cancel the one Tuesday class, which pretty much gives you a week plus a day on either end, and voila, you're there?

But someone who teaches an 11 credit load?  Four days a week?  That seems like a lot of canceling classes, doesn't it?

(My friend taught and administered here for a bit, so knows our load.)

I know of a faculty member who makes other arrangements (has his students do on-line stuff) so that he can go to the first day of hunting season every year.  But he doesn't do it for the whole week, I don't think.


(To be honest, I don't think cruise ship stuff is much for me.  I did go on a cruise once, on a 41 foot boat with three crew and four passengers, for five days in the Galapagos, but that seems like a world of difference from this sort of trip.)

Critical Mass

This year, something's changed about my department.  It's not a bad change, just a change.  At least it feels like a change to me.

Suddenly, I find myself being one of the faculty who's been around a long time.  And there's this group of faculty who seem very young.

We hired a few new people this past year, and I think they've made a critical mass with the people who've been here two or three years, and to me it feels like there's much more of a community of young faculty, and I'm definitely not part of it.  That's okay, just a bit weird.

I think one of the things that makes it weirder is that we mostly use some of the same social media, so I see posts about their trivia nights at the bar and so on.

But, of course, I'm one of the older folks, so I'm not very savvy about this newfangled internet stuff.

The good thing is that when I was hired here, I know the senior colleagues at the time looked at my cohort and thought how young we were.  And they were gracious about that, and welcomed us as members of the department, listened to our contributions in meetings, and so on.  They were a good model for me, I think.

Still, it's weird.  And I'm amused that I find it weird.

Text o' the Day: "Before the Film"

What text am I teaching this week?

The Cake!

One of my student bakers actually took a picture and sent it to me, along with permission to post it.

So here, with permission, is evidence that my students are way cooler than yours!

It's the Northwoods

In one of my classes, we've read Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" and a chapter from bell hooks Yearning on quilting in African American women's lives, especially about her grandmother.  We've also looked at a couple picture books and websites focused on the African American women's quilting community surrounding Gee's Bend, Alabama.

And today, two of my students brought in the most amazing crazy quilt cake.  They must have spent hours baking, cutting the baked cakes into "pieces" for the crazy quilt part, and then putting frosting between.  It was amazing and creative and oh so cool.


They didn't bring any way to cut the cake, though, or napkins.  So I sent a classmate down to the Social Forestry department on the same floor as our class, where the admin assistants are super nice, and told her to ask if she could borrow a knife for me.

And a few minutes later, she came back carrying a 10 inch knife that looked like Crocodile Dundee might pull it out as an extra.


Can you imagine in some places, a department member lending some random student a huge knife, and that student walking down the hall without raising even an eyebrow?

There are good things here, for sure!

Filling Time

I sometimes feel that if I had one less big thing on my plate, I'd do everything a whole lot better.  I feel that this semester in a big way.

I'm somewhere between just about caught up on everything and devastatingly behind.  And right there in the middle is I want a nap.

Again with the "Kids These Days" Things

I've seen this article a couple times in my eff bee feed.  It's "Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy," and basically sets up an argument (that's generous, perhaps) that back in the good old days, young adults worked really hard and were very serious, and then finally they made good, and their grass was green (seriously, it's like a lawn care metaphor).  But kids these days, the "Generation Y Yuppies" the article calls them, are unhappy because they think they're special, and they aren't willing to work hard, and they look around and think everyone else has longer, greener grass with flowers and unicorns and such.

It does this narrative about a character called "Lucy," apparently a middle or upper middle class woman.  (I think the character is female for a reason, which I'll get to.)  Her parents, the narrative says,

were born in the '50s -- they're Baby Boomers. They were raised by Lucy's grandparents, members of the G.I. Generation, or "the Greatest Generation," who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II

And then it goes on to tell us that,

They were taught that there was nothing stopping them from getting to that lush, green lawn of a career, but that they'd need to put in years of hard work to make it happen.

And fortunately, so the narrative says "after graduating from being insufferable hippies, Lucy's parents embarked on their careers."


Even putting aside the "everyone's white and middle or upper middle class" sort of narrative, this bit took me by surprise because I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and by the time I could read, watch the news and TV, and listen to the older generation, I heard a whole lot of complaining about how the boomer generation were lazy no-good, spoiled, unwilling to work, entitled, privileged, and you can add your own adjectives.  I heard it for years.  It wasn't the sort of narrative I heard once and then everyone thought it went away.

If this narrative thinks that generation "graduated from being insufferable hippies," it should also recognize that young folks these days will likely "graduate" from their self-involvement, also known as "being young adults in relatively well-off circumstances," and turn into adults who muddle through being happy and unhappy just like their parents and grandparents.


So let's think back.  And let's start with the idealized WWII generation, post war, raising kids.  You remember them, the generation where white women were lamented for taking tons and tons of tranquilizers and anti-depressants, where books like Valley of the Dolls satirized middle class white women's lives, and The Stepford Wives expressed fears of patriarchal control of women?  Happy times, right?

And remember those same women looking around and holding consciousness raising sessions because they were so damned unhappy with their middle-class white lives?  Of course they were mocked by the patriarchal media, but they were out there.


What this narrative's Lucy needs, I'd say, is some time (which she'll get if she's lucky).  In all likelihood, she and her generation will grow up, be more or less happy, more or less unhappy, and then at some point, write narratives about how their generation went through a short, rocky period, and the current generation of young people are lazy no-good, spoiled, unwilling to work, entitled, privileged, and you can add your own adjectives.

For better or worse, I probably won't be around to be irritated by that particular iteration.

And really, really, I'd like to see someone in the mainstream press think about narratives that aren't about middle and upper middle class white folks.  I bet that narrative about the wonderfulness of the 50s would change a heck of a lot when told by African Americans or Asian Americans. 

For what it's worth, my observations of my students lead me to believe: this generation is tied to their phones in much the same way teens were tied to phones in 50s and 60s TV shows, except they can carry their phones with them.  This generation has people who are hard working and who are lazy, and a lot do both at times.  It has people who are entitled, and people who are humble, people who are self-involved, and people who are actively committed to stuff, people who are apathetic, and people who are on fire to do something important.  Same as the old days.

Amused

I'm a bit amused that a couple colleagues who've had course release for various administrative stuffs are complaining about how hard it is to teach a full load.  And thus, they shouldn't be expected to take on certain service tasks until they readjust.

The thing is, with these administrative stuffs (not necessarily all, but these specific ones), there's a steep learning curve, so that really, the first year, the faculty member absolutely needs serious course release.  But by, say, year three or four, there's not a steep learning curve, so certain people have been able to direct their energies where they want.

And then, suddenly, they have to direct their energies where the rest of us have been.  (Yes, the learning curve eases a lot after, say, your second or third year of teaching.  But if you're doing a good job, there's still a heck of a lot of work involved.  So say I, teaching basically three new courses this year.)

(I have a couple other colleagues whose work is probably easier now that they don't have the administrative duties for which they got course release, too.)

Circular

Some students put up an effbee page about what we NWU instructors talk about.

And naturally, some NWU instructor found out, and posted on effbee about the page.  So all the friends of that NWU instructor have looked at the page.

And one of those folks submitted to the page that s/he longs to be quoted on the page.

I'm more than willing to guess that more than a few students know that the NWU instructors are chatting about the page on effbee, as well, and teasing each other about who's been quoted and what they've said.


What happens on effbee stays NOT on effbee.

(And yes, I'm already quoted.  I'm both weirdly happy and amused, and horrified.  There you go.  My sense of being a bit daring is overwhelmed by feeling that with all of us saying stuff, everything is just mundane.)

(I have a feeling this is probably something that gets action for the first two or three weeks of a semester, and then dies down until the next semester.)


ADDED:  And now, on the faculty page post, we have a comment assuring us that zie isn't worried, and another saying that zie doesn't find these that amusing.  Apparently, those of us in touch with our inner 12 year olds (and that's the level we're talking, as you can imagine) were thinking that this page was going to have a far more lasting impact than that video of the dog riding the roomba thingy. 

Making Sausage

This thing I'm doing, it feels sort of like people in the past were making sausage, and not well.  As in, I'm surprised no one got food poisoning from the sausage.

A Bit of Frustration

I put in my SAA (that's the Shakespeare Association of America) registration choices today.  There were one or two things where I thought, okay, I could make that work.  And then, not so much.

But I chose two more.

This sometimes happens, and then I get the third or fourth choice, and by the time I get it, I'm buried in the semester, teaching my 11 credits, and digging through committee stuff.  So sometimes, all too often, I pull out of the seminar because I just don't have it in me to do the paper.

I wish they'd let me just put in for two seminars, and if I don't get those, I just know I'm not going.  Maybe for people who aren't overwhelmed by teaching, or who have better research facilities, or who have more self-discipline, this system works.  It worked better for me when I was finishing my dissertation.

But now, not so much.

On the other hand, my classes seem to be going well, and it's now the end of the second week, almost.  I've been feeling like I'm getting good work done pretty much every day this semester, so far, and not feeling hugely frustrated by committee stuff (there's plenty of it, but it isn't as frustrating right now as it was last year).

I've already graded small assignments for every course, so I feel as if I'm getting to know the students a bit.

And I'm so happy to be teaching all literature type stuff this semester!  This week:  Lanval, "Everyday Use," Book I of The Faerie Queene (well, the first few stanzas, so far), and The Shoemaker's Holiday.  Good stuff!

Textual Arts

And, the text of the day is?

(This is, perhaps, more loosely tied to the text than my usual complete accuracy.)

Multiple Majors?

I talk to students and advisees, and a surprising number of them seem to think that they should have more than one major and minor. 

I have one advisee who has an English major, a science major, and arts minor, and a second humanities minor.  There's not much overlap, so that's 120 credits without any other requirements (and there are others beyond majors/minors). 

Most of these students are worried about getting a job someday, and they're trying to do that something extra that will help them feel like they're going to succeed and it will all be okay.  I'm sympathetic to that.  It's terrifying to look at our economy and think about looking for work.

On the other hand, I'm just not at all sure that an extra major or minor convinces employers that this applicant is the one.

Has anyone seen evidence that having multiple majors/minors helps job seekers?

There are also those who do a major in something they don't really like, but think will land them a job, and another major in something they really like, but don't think will land them a job.  I worry about these folks.  First, if you don't like it, will you like your job enough to make it worth while getting up in the morning?  And second, if you really like, say, creative writing, do you have to declare a major in it, or could you just take some classes and enjoy those?

The Fort folks are worried about the time to degree for our students (we have a very low 4 year graduation rate, and a reasonably respectable 6 year graduation rate).  So would it make sense to limit students to one major and one minor?  Or maybe one major and two minors?  (They won't do that because it's much easier to beat up faculty about the graduation rates than to tell a student "no" to anything.)

What can public universities do to help their graduation rates?  Legislatures care about the graduation rates, so we have to care, but should we try to convince them otherwise?  Or are they right to care?

(Given that our students take out loans and often work a lot of hours, an extra year in school costs them a lot in the long run, even if it doesn't seem like a lot up front.)

Initiatives from Above

This past year, we got a bunch of initiatives from the Fort.  One of them is that every student on campus is supposed to fill in a special degree plan form on the campus computer system.  Guess whose fault it will be if someone doesn't fill it out?

I have nothing against students figuring out what they want to take to finish their degree.  I think it's a great idea, and I've been helping students do it for a good long time.  But I don't want to be treated like I'm lousy at my job because the student didn't fill in a form on a computer.


Another big initiative has to do with trying to get students to graduate more quickly.  We have a dismal 4 year graduation rate, right along with most other regional comprehensive public universities.  It is what it is.

So the Fort has sent over a command that all advisors are supposed to look at their advisees' credits, and do something to ensure that the advisees will graduate in a more timely manner.

I'm not sure what they want me to do, though.  Do they want me to email every advisee who's within a semester of graduating and tell them exactly what to take?  And threaten them with what if they don't? 

I'm not sure.  Some students who are close to graduating come in and chat, and we go over their planning carefully.  But students who have junior standing don't need to see an advisor at all, so they can change majors, add a second major, add a second minor, whatever, without an advisor's input or advise.


I have to go to a departmental function shortly.  I went out with friends last night, and I had the best time, and I'm thinking that's going to contrast hugely with how this evening's thing feels.

Defining Terms

As someone who changed fields in a pretty big way fairly late (after my bachelors), and who sometimes felt alienated because I didn't understand the "lingo" my peers in classes often took for granted, I try to be pretty careful to define even fairly basic terms in classes when I first use them.  Today, for example, I defined "rhyme."*  Yes, I'm pretty sure my students have heard the term before, but when I define it, I get them to slow down and think about what it is.   And that means when we define "alliteration,"** it's not this weird repetition thing, but one of several different repetition things.

That's not to say I'm prefect, by any means, but I try to remember not to assume that everyone speaks "lit crit" or whatever.


In one of my classes, we're reading Bennett and Royle's Intro to Lit, Crit and Theory, which I chose because I read it as I was choosing books, and it seemed really good.  And I think it is.  But last night, reading the second chapter as I was prepping for today, I noticed that it used terms without defining them.  For many of these, there are definitions in a glossary in the back.

So students who are aware can look stuff up in the back, or look stuff up in a dictionary or wikipedia or whatever.

But while they define "poststructuralism," they never define "structuralism."  How are you supposed to understand the post part without the base part?

And they use "postmodern" but never define it, nor do they define "modern."  Do most early career college students feel comfortable with those terms?

They start the chapter with "Ozymandias" and call it a sonnet (and it's the first one in the book, I think), but "Ozymandias" (while lovely and wonderful in itself) doesn't do a lot of the basic sonnet stuff that most sonnets do.  It's like using "sit com" and using Southpark as your example.  It's a sitcom, but it challenges the typical form in all sorts of ways that make it hard to get a sense of the genre.




*  Rhyme is the repetition of sounds, usually end sounds, or end of a syllable sounds, often at the ends of word and lines.

**Alliteration is the repetition of sounds, especially consonant sounds, usually at the beginning of words or stressed syllables.

New Definitions

A good day this semester, I think, is a day when I cross more things off the to do list than I add.

A potentially bad day is when I add more things than I cross off.

I was pretty much busy from 7:30 to 6pm with stuff:  prep, committee work, three and a half hours of classes, a meeting, and advising a student.  I did have lunch for the better part of an hour, but other than that, there wasn't much down time.

And yet I added more to my to do list than I crossed off.  If I can get a couple things done this evening, I may bring the cross-offs up to the adds.  And yet, nothing horrible happened today.  There were minor problems, but nothing really bad.

I did find out, for example, that the edition I use has different pagination than the edition the rental system has.  But we were able to straighten that out in class.  (The same readings were there, just on different pages, in that anthology way.)  I couldn't get the campus advising program to work, but then when I asked for help, it was working fine.  And my advisee really needs to panic less and look up stuff more.  I hope she'll get there!

And now, to cross some stuff off the list if I can!

86 and 116

Today, the first day of classes for me, I decided to try something.  I wore my heart monitor to class.

You should know, I'm one of those teachers who totally runs on adrenaline.  I feel like I'm just going all Robin Williams on the class.  I'm not quite, but you know, it feels pretty energetic.

My heart monitor is pretty basic, and keeps track of the high, average, time, time in zone (That's supposed to be the heart rate where you're getting the "best" exercise or something), and calories.

My average for the two hours of class was 86, and the high was 116.

I'm surprised it wasn't higher for both categories.  My resting heart rate at the blood donation center is usually in the high 60s or low 70s, and when I bike, I can get into the mid-170s when I'm really pushing up a steep hill (which I can't keep up for long, so I pretty much have to sit down and just try to keep pedaling squares).  Biking, I can average in the 150s for an hour or so and feel tired but not unable to continue.

There we are.  Apparently, I have a heart, which should be good news to my students, anyway.

Another Special Day for XKCD

If you don't read XKCD, you should.  Todays is beautiful and sad (that's a link to it).  (You should click on it, because then you get the cursor over thing, too.)  The title is "Bee Orchid."

 

 

According to wikipedia, though, there's still a bee that pollinates it in some areas of its range.  And it's hardy.  So maybe it isn't dying.

 



Common Nighthawk

Last night, I went out to play with the dog I'm dogsitting in the yard, and while I was waiting for the dog to figure out that I wasn't going to chase it to get the ball to throw again, I glanced and saw a bunch of birds swooping around over a neighbor's yard down the block.  Being me, I got all fascinated and went to get my binoculars, and then the camera.  The birds were fairly big, say Kestrel size, but with narrower, pointier wings, and a slight V to the tail in regular flight.  (It rounded when they turned, which they did a LOT!)

They were dark, but with a distinct stripy part on each wing, back to front, just past the mid-joint.

There were a fair number, at least 15, I think, flying and swooping like swallows almost.

After I had a pretty good handle on what they looked like, I got my birdbook and looked, and they were Common Nighthawks!  It was my first time seeing them, so I'm pretty excited.  (The pictures aren't great, but you can get a sense of their general shape and see the stripe.  The deep wingbeats are also, according to my Sibley's, an important thing to notice.)

Bustle

I walked across campus a bit today, and there was a marked bustle about the place, with lots of young folks walking purposefully from here to there, or hanging out chatting with other young folks.

It's quite a change from the fairly quiet hallway, though there are lots of faculty around intensely prepping our classes.

One last weekend, coming up!

Self-Inflicted

I was at a meeting the other day where the basketweavers brainstormed about ways to get the basketweaving majors to feel like part of a group based on the major.  It's a nice thing, to feel part of a group.  I get that. 

Folks suggested we have an evening once a week where faculty and students got together in a lounge to chat about books and read, since we all read anyway.

And there were suggestions that we should do programs elsewhere where we get together to talk about books.

And we could have a potluck or picnic.

And so on.


It's not that any of these ideas are bad in themselves, but that I've been around long enough to not want to promise that faculty will show up for things where I'll be one of two faculty to show up, and I sure didn't want to be there.

I see our students doing lots of good stuff, but I have my doubts that most of them have time to spend an hour or two a week (or whatever) hanging out in the lounge area.  A few will, of course. 

And, of course, I want to say, for every hour that someone suggests I should do an additional X, I'd like them to tell me what I can drop from my duties to make the time work out, since I already have a full time job, and I get tired, and so on.

I tried not to rain on the parades at the meeting though.  But gosh, I felt like a fogey.


I worked on my last syllabus and calendar yesterday, and now they're all in at least rough shape.  Today, I'll work on making them more coherent, set up the web-based learning system thingies, and maybe even put in all the copies to get done.

In other news, I got GREAT news on the small grant proposal I wrote in summer (funded!), finished one important task for the basketweavers committee.  I feel like I'm finally getting THAT to the point where it makes sense for now.  I still have stuff to do, but the stuff to do makes sense and can be done.  If that makes sense.

Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

Not today, but August 28th, and it will be the 50th anniversary.

I remember being sort of expected to know about it, but not actually being taught about it.  The Smithosonian website now is doing a series on the history of the March.  For me, it's been really helpful being reminded how conflicted white folks were, and how worried.   Here's the program.  There's an oral history article.  And there's a great article on the logistics of getting food to everyone.

There's a video!

And finally, a link to related stuff at the Smithsonian.


Here in the Northwoods, I'm working on class and committee prep, and enduring meetings about assessment, endless assessment.

What I Learn at Meetings

I'm not on a search committee this year, but I'm on another committee, the Basketweavers' Committee.  And for that committee, I had to go to a special meeting, along with chairs and Basketweavers' Committee's people from across the university.  I've gone to this sort of meeting before, led by the same administrator.  This administrator was brand, spanking new to the job the last time I went to this meeting, and back then, kept saying stuff about how he was new and so and so wasn't his responsibility (except, of course, it was).  This time, he just did his job.

It's the other people at these meetings that I learn from. 

I learn from their questions that their departments are a whole lot of dysfunctional messiness compared to mine.

I learn that some people are much more focused on preparing for really rare problems than I am.

I learned that I can like and enjoy a colleague away from work, but would be driven nuts by that person if I had to be in department meetings with them.

What White People Can Do

Here's a video linked on effbee.  (I couldn't get it to embed.  It's from "Upworthy" and entitled "Joy DeGruy: A trip to the Grocery Store.")

The story, in short, involves the speaker's sister-in-law, who looks very white, intervening when the speaker was being harassed at a grocery store (the clerk asked for additional ID and then did a search through the bad check book, neither of which she'd done when the white-appearing sister-in-law wrote her check a moment before).  The sister-in-law used her white privilege to question what was happening, and thus was able to get the white manager and other white customers to recognize that the harassment was wrong.

The caveat, of course, is that we white folks need to also be wary of thinking that we're "saving" a person of color.  We want to do the right thing in working against racism, but we don't want to fantasize that we're saving someone.  (I'm not getting this out right, but it's a common enough thing to fantasize, and discussed in anti-racism contexts.)

Meeting Introductions

It's yet another day of meetings.

At each of them, we tend to go around with each person introducing themselves.

And it occurs to me that the people who seem to feel most vulnerable spend the most time introducing themselves.  Not the people who have the least status, necessarily, but the people who feel the least status, if that makes sense?

A typical person, for example, might say, "I'm Bardiac and I teach deep water basketweaving in the underwater basketweaving department."

But someone who feels really vulnerable will refer to their degrees, their history with underwater basketweaving, and so on.


I feel sort of bad that these folks seem to feel so vulnerable.  I especially feel bad that they feel so vulnerable in the meeting where I think no one is likely to be condescending or snide about qualifications and such.  (My thinking may be wrong about that, of course.)  And I feel bad because the longer introduction made me think they felt more vulnerable.  (My read on that may be totally wrong, I suppose.  They may be staking a claim in this discussion that other people don't feel the need to stake, and feel totally not vulnerable in staking it.)

The Meeting

The meeting I was worried about (because I'm chair) was today.  And can I say this: I love my colleagues.

We have smart people.  We have hard working people.  And we have decent people.  And they are all the same people.  They step up and take responsibility.  They treat each other decently, and often with great kindness and generosity.

Remind me of this if I get bogged down later in the year, okay?


One of the best things about a meeting is after the meeting, when people hang out in each others' doorways, catching up from the summer, when people stand in the department office sharing tales about their kids, or swapping plans for committee work.


And now, I have a lot of work to do!

Read All the Rules

So, I'm chairing the Basketweavers' Committee this year, and a bit overwhelmed.  Maybe more than a bit overwhelmed.

I have learned one thing already: read all the rules.

Yes, I started reading the Basketweavers rulebook this afternoon, after chairing the first meeting of the Basketweavers' Steering Committee, and learned that I had done one thing slightly wrong, and hadn't realized we needed to do another thing.

Fortunately, these are both things that can be corrected for the Basketweavers' Committee meeting tomorrow, and I think the Steering folks are grateful that someone else is doing the job, and thus forgiving at this point.  I don't expect them to be forgiving of more serious lapses, or of lapses once I should reasonably have the hang of the job. 

But for now, it's okay.

And it's a good thing I read the rules.

A few years ago, I was on a flustercluck of an ad hoc committee.  It was one of those sorts of committees that almost never happens, so when it does, there's little institutional memory and no one really knows what's happening.  So there we depended on the knowledge of a deanling, and the deanling didn't know what zie was doing.

And then the person chairing the committee read the rules, brought everything to a stop, and basically we started over again, following the rules.  So it worked out, but it took longer than it would have if we'd all gone in having carefully read the rules.

You would think I'd have learned from that to read the rules well ahead, but you'd be wrong.

However, now I've read the rules, and I've got the rulebook in front of me, and I have a better idea of what needs to be done and how to do it.  And we do have some institutional memory, which is a great help.

I have a couple goals for every meeting I chair: get the work done and do not waste peoples' time. 

So I try to be prepared, try to have things ready for people (handouts color-coded and such), and try to keep things on track. 

I have to watch myself, though, and make sure I don't cut people off short because I'm too focused on keeping on track.  It's a balancing act I haven't perfected yet.

I've now spent a whole lot of time working on Basketweavers' stuff, and now it's time to turn to planning my classes, because they are coming soon!

Wish me luck, please!

A Time for Lists

It's the first day of the contract period, and I need to start making a list and checking it twice.

In other news, we have some new colleagues, and I feel old.  On the other hand, I didn't go clubbing much when I was younger, so maybe I was always old.  (Except there was a short period of my life when I did go clubbing a bit.  And then I decided to go back to school.  And thus ended my clubbing in favor of long visits to libraries and reading lots.)

How can I already feel so overwhelmed?

It's like I don't even know where to begin the lists!

Time for tea, maybe?

Park to Park

Well, not quite.

But it was a long ride for me today, and I'm tuckered.  I did have a really great chocolate malt, though, and a beautiful, nearly flat ride from one state park almost to another (I turned back figuring that I would be tired enough without the extra three miles going all the way was likely to mean).

I got to my house, unloaded what had to be unloaded from the car, lied down on a couch and slept for almost an hour without moving (except for breathing), because too many of my body parts were too tired to move.  And when I woke, it took a good, long while to make myself move off the couch.

On top of yesterday's ride, I'm tuckered.  But in a good way that means I will be ready to go to work on class stuff tomorrow.

Our bike trails around here are beautiful.  This one was along a river for most of the way, quiet, and not near big roads.  So that was quite different than the beautiful but busy road yesterday, which I shared with a LOT of motorcycles out for a beautiful day (and road construction; road construction zones that have one lane of traffic going through at a time, in one direction or the other, aren't designed for cyclists who go so much slower than the 45 or so the cars go, which means that there were several times when I was biking along, looking at oncoming single lane traffic coming while I tried to get beyond the construction area.  Still, it was good!).

Cidery

I went out for a bike ride a ways away today, and on the way back, stopped by a local cidery.  They had tasting, like wine tasting (they also had wines), but of ciders.  I tasted two "still" ciders and three carbonated ciders.

One of the carbonated ciders they make with whatever apples they have around, so it tastes different with different pressings.  The other they make with Honeycrisps, and boy, is that good!  Very light and refreshing.

They also have tours, but you have to arrange ahead of time, and I didn't know.

Lovely ride (with a super yummy piece of lemon buttermilk pie along the way), lovely peaches (after), and lovely cider.  A good day all around.

Why Does it Seem, Always...

...that any time I need to ask an administrative type a specific question, they are on vacation or away?

When I wanted to ask for help with a grant proposal, and people had suggested that I ask administrator X to read over it for me, telling me that X was always happy to do so and very helpful, Administrator X was on vacation during the week preceding the grant deadline.

And today, when I wanted to ask a different administrator a question so I could finish up something for next week, at 3:30 on a Friday afternoon, there's no answer in that office.  My call rolled from the number I called to an another administrator's voicemail (same office). 

Want to bet that if these folks all expect me to be in my office to attend to whatever their concerns are at the exact moment they call?  You know they do.  I wonder what the folks over in the Fort would think if I left town the week before my students had a major paper due, so they couldn't ask for help? 

Obviously, I think administrators do work.  I just never seem to catch them at it when I really need help with something that's their bailiwick.

Coolest

Our local arts paper has a back to school section where it lists 9 semesters of classes, with no logical connection I can see, other than that the author thinks they'd be cool classes.

And guess whose Chaucer class is listed in semester five (along with, oddly enough, an intro to college life class).  Still, it's fun to see a Chaucer class listed along with the "coolest, most interesting" classes. 

(I didn't recognize the writer's name, so zie wasn't in the class in the past few years, and no one else has taught it in say five years.  The paper does tend to be heavily staffed by our grads in their first year or two out of school, with a high turnover as people move on.  It's a neat paper for our area, too!)


My chair sent out a strong admonition the other day; zie said that the writing director and the chair had been getting many requests for overloads into our first year comp classes, and said that they'd resisted these requests and hoped we all would resist these requests, too, since they'd put huge work into getting the class sizes for first year comp made sane and reasonable, and didn't want any administrators deciding they could creep class sizes up.

I love my chair.  Zie is not perfect, but zie has ethics and a backbone.

Tenured Radical on Campus Rape

You should read this, because she's smart!

Read the comments, too.  I think there's a huge problem in having whatever authorities take rape seriously, whether on campus or through the police and prosecutors. 

I read recently that the most dangerous time for a college woman is her first weekend on campus.  What a horrible thing, isn't it?

I wish I really had some idea how to change that.

Colonel Mustard, in the Front Yard, with a Scrubbrush

I went out early this morning to water some container plants, and was shocked to see what looked like bright yellow paint slashed across my neighbors' (X) garage door, front door, mailbox, and driveway.  I thought about calling them, but it was early, and I figured they'd notice it when they got up.  So I went back in and had my coffee.

And after a bit, another neighbor (Y) came by and asked if I had X's cell number, and had I seen.  Y said he'd checked, and it felt tacky still, but he doesn't have much sense of smell, so couldn't identify it.  We called X, and X said that one of the kid's friends had gotten egged recently, so it was probably something like that.  But they were away for the weekend.

Y and I agreed that we'd wash it off, after I took some pictures (just in case it was serious) and he had some breakfast with his family.  Then I put on shoes and went over, and as soon as I got near, I could smell the mustard.  Wow, that much mustard smells strong!  But that was good news, since mustard is pretty washable.

We started hosing and scrubbrushing, and another neighbor came and brought a big broom and used that to help wash away the driveway mustard.

Is mustard the new thing? 

One Man Away

Historiann has a piece up on the NYT "Opting back in" article that's well worth reading.  Go read them both, if you haven't already.


When I was growing up, back in the bronze age, there was a saying that every woman was one man away from welfare.  I grew up pretty middle class and very white, and there was a definite expectation that married women would pretty much stay at home and raise a couple of kids, two being the preferred number, keep house, volunteer in the community, and so forth.

But even then, the women my Mother's age talked about lost opportunities, how to support oneself if/when a marriage fell apart or a husband died, and so on.  I remember a point in the 70s when my Mom made a point of getting a credit card in her name.  (This wasn't a source of conflict within my family, but the bank had to be convinced.)


I guess pondering this article, and thinking that these women didn't learn the lessons of my Mother's generation (the 60s and 70s adult women, say), I wonder:  how can we convince young women who have opportunities to value their careers more carefully?

No, that's not quite right.  I don't know how to put it, exactly.  Here's what I'm after:

How do we convince young folks that you can't "have it all" if you define "all" as a high powered, high status career and full time stay at home parenting?

You can, if you're darned lucky, have it all if you define "all" as meaningful work and meaningful family/social relationships.  But luck plays a huge part, doesn't it?  I mean, I don't think I ever felt my work was especially meaningful when I worked in retail.  And I doubt working a factory job would feel meaningful.  Maybe?

How do we convince young folks that women AND men can parent, and that actually making equitable relationships would be better?

How do we convince everyone that pay inequity hurts us all?  (There's a hint in some of the stories in the NYT article that women made/make less money, so it was "natural" to have the woman stay at home and the man work full time.  Ending pay inequity would help us see that as not "natural.")


I'm sort of despairing here because the women the article talks about were/are way privileged; they sound like they all had college educations, and they all went to college when feminism was important on college campuses.  They all had job opportunities beyond what most people have.

And yet they thought they could use the social structures that feminists in the 60s and 70s had critiqued as disempowering women without being subject to disempowerment.

Did they miss the most basic Marxist base/superstructure discussion?  (Yes, of course there are problems with that idea, but it seems at play here, doesn't it?  Reproduce the economic structure of the 1950s middle class household, and you reproduce the social structure, too.)


Maybe what I'm after is trying to convince young folks to rethink "all"?  Or the desire to "have" it all?


I need to go finish up my syllabi.  I'm teaching Paradise Lost this semester.  Talk about a great text to discuss what it means not to have "all," eh?

Changing Tides

You know how sometimes you recognize a change only after it's happened?  And then you say, wow, when did that happen?

I feel sort of like that.  I was looking for some stuff in my home office last night, and I looked at some of my books, and thought, I haven't read that in years, and I have no urge to read it.  Maybe I'll take it to the free shelf at school?  (We don't have a good used bookstore in the area, and these are outdated lit crit/theory sorts of books that I don't think would have enough resale value to make it worth loading them up and taking them to a bigger city.)

It's not that I don't buy books still, but I have far less of an urge to keep books I don't find useful.  Some books I find endlessly useful, even though they're as old as these that I don't find useful.  In grad school and for a long time thereafter, having the books was really important to me.  Now, maybe not all of them are.

I'm going to take a few of them into the free shelf every month or so.  Or not.  If it feels good after a couple of trips, then sure, I will.  If it doesn't, then I won't.

But really, do I need several books by Jane Gallop?  I haven't read them in years, and I think I can live without them.

XKCD Project: Time

Animated, here: XKCD Time

Here's a bit on it at Boing Boing.


(Hat tip to While Looking for Something Else)


(And now, look!  There's a site dedicated to deciphering the language in *Time*!)

Countdown

As of tomorrow, I have two weeks before the contract period begins; this time, more than most, the two weeks when we're under contract but classes haven't started yet will be filled with more meetings than usual.  That means I need to get my courses pretty much ready ahead of time.

And I need to make a list and decide what summer stuff I want to do before the contract period begins.

My list may include some more birding, more biking, some cleanup around the house, reading, and of course writing.  How about yours?

The Usual Suspects

My school didn't pay moving costs when I moved here, and so far as I know, doesn't even now.  (Other schools in the system do, though.  I guess it's a school decision at some level?)  That means that sometimes new department members ask for moving in help.  Usually, someone in the department is in contact and then puts out a call for help on the department mailing list.  And sure enough, someone is coming into town tomorrow, and there's been a request for help.

I emailed back and said I'd help, and then yesterday got an email to a small group, giving us timing details.  So I know who else has offered to help.

It's pretty predictable, pretty much always the same people who come out to help with these things.

And the same people who offer to do practice interviews with adjuncts who are trying to move on, and so forth.

Now, I can totally understand when someone doesn't want to help people move furniture from a uhaul into an apartment or whatever.  There's a point when your back just isn't up to it.  I get that.

And I know we're all busy during the school year, so helping an adjunct with a practice interview isn't convenient.

I also know that I'm not one of the usual suspects who goes to hear the department music group play.  And I'm sure there are other things I just don't do that other people do.

I'm conflicted between being frustrated by the many people who never show up to help, and being happy that those of us who show up are fun to do stuff with.

And no, it's not that different from who's willing to volunteer to take on extra tasks, committee work, and so on.

Chasing Pop Culture

I'm reading more Brummett for the intro to our major class, and thinking about how frustrating the study of more or less current pop culture must be.  There's this constant chase after the newest, coolest (heck, that's probably just another sign of my outdatedness), whateverest pop culture phenomenon, but then, by the time the book's out, and used for a year or two, whatever was new then seems hopelessly outdated, even to me.

And five years, when you're working with an audience of 18-25 year olds, is a long time.   So whatever was cool when this book was published (2011), probably isn't cool now, and certainly won't be in three more years.  Is Lady Gaga still a thing?

In contrast, really old stuff never loses whatever appeal it has/had, because it's hopelessly old anyway.  So students may like it or not, but that liking level doesn't seem to change radically from year to year.

What the hell is with the whole "Sharknado" thing?  Did anyone actually see the movie, or is this just so out there that people pick up on it to laugh at?  (Chaucer doth tweet has it down, naturally.)

And vampires and zombies.  Bored.  Didn't we do vampires endlessly in the '70s?  (And zombies in the '50s?)


I have a colleague who tried to tell me, now some years ago, that rap was so wonderful and blah blah.  And while I certainly enjoy some rap, most of what I heard at that point was misogynistic and violent, and aimed a lot of violence at women.  So I said that, and then my colleague countered that I shouldn't listen to mainstream rap, but to these other artists.  But I don't want to have to go digging through a pile of misogyny to try to find something that's not endorsing violence against women.  Life's too short.

And for some reason, Shakespeare's misogyny bothers me less.  (And here "Shakespeare" stands for all of early modern and medieval lit and culture that I might teach.)  I suppose it's because I think we're more comfortable talking about the misogyny as misogyny?  We're more at ease being critical of that, while finding pleasures in the text(s) as well?


I'm going to have a birthday soon, and I think it's not too early to say I've turned into a fogey.  Now, you kids, get offa my lawn!

Questing?

A friend of mine on effbee linked this site (Nerd Fitness) to another friend, and being a nerd, I took a look.

The head nerd approaches things sort of in terms of gaming, and has this great list of life quests.

Some of the things on his list sound fun, some not so much, but they're his list, so he gets to choose.

It's like a bucket list, I guess, except with a nerd approach.  The idea is he has this list of goals, and each one accomplished counts at 20% of a level, with some counting a full 100% of a level.

Thinking for me, what would I put on a list?

What would you put on one?

(It seems like I've accomplished some things that could have been put on a list if I'd started at 22 or something.  But it seems unfair to put them on now, no?)

Anyway, on my list would certainly be:

Teach my new senior seminar iteration.
Publish the article I've been working on.
Do this Chaucer project.
Finish teaching all of Shakespeare's plays (two to go!)
Visit Machu Picchu.
Visit Antarctica.
Visit Alaska.
See a bear (not in a zoo).
See a river otter (not in a zoo).
Visit Glacier National Park.
Regain fluency in Spanish.
Read Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.
Reread War and Peace.
Reread Anna Karenina.
Reread The Brother's Karamazov.  (These are things I read as a teen, without any guidance, and I'm sure I'd understand them a whole lot better now.)

What else?

Zombie Argument

Here's a book review (well, not quite a book review, more a short commentary that mentions the book it's supposed to review?) about Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge UP, 2013).

I could take bets that this book won't convince anyone who's already totally convinced that Oxford did it.  In the study.  With a pen.

The Bad Advisor

Me!

Not really, I hope.

I have this advisee who's trying to do a special programming thing, not unique, but not super common, either. 

The thing is, there are complications.

So zie has been emailing me this summer, not tons, but fairly regularly, asking for help with this or that.  These are the sorts of things I can advise on, but don't have power to change, and probably not the knowledge to make a decision to change.  So I've been emailing back, answering and so on, even though I'm not on contract, and should have just emailed right away that I'm not on contract so zie needs to contact the chair.

For example, zie wants to count a thing there for a requirement here.  The transfer office said no, it wasn't close enough to the same.  So zie emailed me, and I said, it sounds like the transfer office said no, so no.  Then zie emailed me again, couldn't I make it count anyway?  And I emailed my chair and so forth, because I don't have that authority. 

The mistake I made was that I didn't also email zie telling hir that I'd emailed the chair to ask for follow up.  And that was a mistake because zie got impatient and emailed the chair and so forth.  And the so forth answered, and said, no, because it wasn't close enough.

So now my advisee has totally given up on me, and has emailed various deanlings, asking for help resolving this problem.

And dutifully, the chair and the deanlings have been copying me on their responses.

At one point in this process, the student apparently emailed several faculty members, asking if they'd do on-line independent studies this coming semester, so that zie could do specific requirements while at this special program.  I don't know if zie got responses, but I'm guessing they either said no or didn't respond (because people are on vacation and out of town working on stuff, and so on).  So zie emailed me asking for help setting up independent studies.  And when I said, well, you can email faculty, but since we all feel pretty overworked, it's unlikely anyone will be able to take on the additional work of designing and organizing another class. 

So then the student emailed the chair basically asking hir for help with the independent studies.  And the chair responded pretty much as I had (and cc'd me in the response).

I'm sure from the student's point of view, we all look like obstructionist walls who don't want to help hir accomplish hir goals.  From the tone of the emails, zie sounds increasingly frustrated.

But from our point of view, things look different.  Zie is asking for special help with these requirements because zie hasn't previously completed the requirements.  There are a lot of reasons for that level of incompletion, but it isn't that the requirements were insane or suddenly imposed without warning.

The upshot, though, is that I look like a crappy advisor (because, hey, it's all about me!).  My advisee hasn't done some basic stuff we expect, stuff most students should have finished by this point in their careers here. 

And while I know that the chair and deanlings know that advisors can't force their students to do anything, I think they will still tend to think that I'm a crappy advisor because my student is emailing them with problems zie shouldn't be having, and that I should be able to solve somehow without them having to be bothered.

Micro Mini Success!

A storm was coming in this afternoon, so we changed our plans and did an indoor triathlon of sorts.  We swam 10 minutes, biked 15 minutes (we wanted to bike 25 minutes, but the person who was kind enough to let us sneak in and bike in the back of her spin class had to leave), and then ran 15 minutes.

I was happiest about my run, oddly enough, because I managed to run for the whole 15 minutes, and I went a mile and an eighth (I was hoping for a mile), and then we went out to dinner. 

It was way more fun than I would have thought.  We didn't rush through "transitions" or anything, which is totally unlike real triathlons. 

I have a massage scheduled for tomorrow, and I have a feeling I'll be very happy about that.

Anyway, it ended up I swam more than I'd planned for the micro mini outside, biked less (a lot less), and ran a bit more (my friends measured the run, and mine would have been under a mile outside).

So, success in a fun afternoon! 

Micro Mini Triathalon

A couple of my more athletic friends are doing a friendly triathalon, and they've talked me into playing along.  Except while they do an Olympic length tri, I'll be doing a micro mini one, with 1/8 of a mile swimming (we'll all be in a pool where that's 4 laps), 15 miles biking (I think we're all riding road bikes), and about 3km running (along a trail; my turnback point is an underpass).  I expect to finish in about the same time they do. 

If I can't walk on Friday...

I haven't run in a LONG time.  I do bike fairly regularly and swim sometimes.  So I expect I'll be walking during the run part.

Wish me survival!

Ready for College?

This post probably isn't about what you think it's about.  Oh well.

My niece/nephew is about a year away from going to college (well, I hope, we hope!) and has a birthday coming up.  And it's really hard to think of things for a birthday for this kid.  To be honest, that's great, because hir parents have enough money to provide the necessary stuff and more, and do.

So I'm thinking, what should a soon-to-be college student get for hir birthday?

I, too, have a summer birthday.  And between high school graduation and my summer birthday, I got some really great stuff for going away to college:

electric typewriter!  (Yeah, not so much now, but it was helpful then.)
stapler  (I still have it and use it in my home office.)
pencil sharpener (still have it, but mostly use mechanical pencils these days.)
luggage (well, a big steamer trunk.  My sibling got regular luggage, though.)
dictionary (again, still have it, and still works well for most dictionary tasks.)


Help with ideas, please!

Reading a Rhetoric Text

I'm reading the newest edition of Brummett's Rhetoric in Popular Culture, a text my department has pretty much used in one edition or another for our gateway to the major  class.  I haven't taught the class since about 2004, so I'm prepping with the newer edition we have in our rental system.

There's good stuff, and it explains things well.  And then it gets to this:

It probably used to be the case, many centuries ago, that any given person lived within one large, overarching culture.  Such a culture may have been complex, but it was not multiple.  If you had lived in Britain during the Dark Ages, for instance (say, around 900 C.E.), everything around you, everything you encountered during the day, probably everything you knew about, was part of the same system, the same group identification, and thus the same culture.  You saw and spoke only to others of your own group.  Different aspects of life, such as work, religion, or government, were all closely interrelated; they all manifested the same overarching culture to you.  The same situation may still be found in some tribal cultures around the world, where people are primarily enveloped in a small, single group of people and surrounded by the artifacts that represent that single group.  (24)

So, where to begin?

I'll let you at it.

Marston?

I just finished reading The Malcontent.  I'm thinking of teaching it in my comedy course this coming semester; it's in the anthology I've chosen.  But I don't know.

Has one of you taught it?  Thoughts?

I liked it better after I finished it than I did while I was reading, if that makes sense. 

I can see it pairing with Epicoene, in terms of the way disguise works, sort of.  And it's a very different sort of comedy from some, which would be good.

I'm still not sure, though.


I was bothered by the way scenes worked.  Maybe I'm too biased by Shakespeare's typical scenes? 

In Shakespeare, most scenes end when the stage empties.  In French plays (continental plays?) I'm familiar with, every new entrance marks a new scene. 

The Malcontent sort of had it both ways.  Often, when a new character entered, it marked a new scene.  (And it wasn't just the edition.  The copy text, the third printing, seemed to have the same scene divisions so far as I checked it, which wasn't far.)  But not always.  Some characters entered sometimes without making it a new scene.

Let me give you an example of why this bothered me.  In, say, Lear, the play opens with Gloucester, Kent, and Edmund chatting, setting up the Lear division of the kingdom bit.  And then other folks enter, and voila, you are in the midst of the play.

In The Malcontent, there were bits that just felt like vamping, but they were a full scene by themselves.  Sometimes, it seemed like there was a fairly important scene with Malvole (who spends a LOT of time on stage in this play), then the stage would empty, and a couple minor characters would come on, set the scene a bit, so that you'd know it's different, and then Malvole would enter.  But Malvole's entrance would be a new scene, so that little set the scene bit felt, in print, like it didn't need to be its own scene.  (I'm sure in playing it would work just fine.)

So, Marston's Malcontent, or no?

Lunch with the New Hire

I just had lunch with a colleague who is leaving non-TT work with us for a TT position.

I'm so happy for hir!  The new job sounds good, and zie sounds happy, but realistic about the hard work ahead.

Last fall, our chair offered assistance with application letters and so forth to folks who wanted to move from non-TT here to TT somewhere else.  This colleague took the chair up on the offer.  And when zie got an interview (which turned into several interviews), folks in the department stepped up to do a mock research talk with hir and mock phone and campus visit interviews.

I feel good about how our department (and especially our chair) helped this person with job market preparation.

We also have someone who got their MA a while back, who's been adjuncting for us, who decided to move on to a PhD program.  And I know some folks were really helpful to hir in preparing letters of application as well.


The new hire and I chatted for a bit over the congratulatory lunch, and I learned what zie found most useful in our help (job letter help, mock interview, mock research presentation, and mock campus visit interview), and what zie could have used more help with (preparing for the teaching demo).

My question now is how to help folks prepare for a teaching demo?

Thoughts?

That Sinking Feeling...

...when you realize you can't find the book you thought you had, and were going to work on the syllabus with.

And it's a third edition in the rental system, but now the fourth edition is out, so the publisher won't send you a third edition desk copy.

Maybe it's at home, right?

A Guide For White Folks: How to End White Violence Against People of Color

As a white person, I know some of us white folks are worried.  And we should be worried.  White violence against people of color is out of control, and has been, at least in the US, since before the US was a US.  Some people say that we whites just can't help ourselves, that there's something deep down wrong with us and we aren't responsible for our actions.  But I don't like to think that.  I think we can be reasonable, intelligent people. So, in hopes of being a credit to my race, and to helping us white folks do better, I have a guide to help us end white violence against people of color.

1.  If you see a person of color, don't shoot them.

2.  If you see a person of color, even if you think they shouldn't be in your neighborhood, don't shoot them.

3.  If you see a person of color, even if you think they shouldn't walk around with a hoodie, don't shoot them.  (In fact, even if you don't like the fit of their pants, the color of their shoes, or whatever, don't shoot them.)

4.  If you're a police officer, and you see a person of color driving a car, don't pull them over for "driving while Black."  And don't shoot them.

5.  If you see a person of color, don't lynch them.  Also, don't put bombs in their houses or churches, or burn crosses near their yards.

6.  If you see a person of color, don't stalk them.  (You may, if appropriate, politely indicate your interest, introduce yourself, and ask them on a date.  But don't be a jerk about it if they say no.  And don't stalk them.  Don't shoot them, either.)

7.  If you see a person of color, don't send a drone after them with bombs.

8.  If you see a person of color, don't beat them up or harass them.


I think that pretty much covers it.


Some things, I just do not understand.  I am sorrowful today.

Fill Out All the Forms

I've been working on a small internal grant, and just finished submitting it.

It's been frustrating.  Not because the project is frustrating, since it's not at that point.  And not because I've done some procrastination thing, since I haven't.

It's been frustrating because the forms are totally non-intuitive to me, and I don't use them well.  (Look, I already whined about the forms at the beginning.)

And it's been frustrating because the forms need to be "routed" electronically in certain ways, and the first way is through my chair (who is supportive and fine and all), and my chair is going out of town during the actual submission period, so I need to submit it early to get it through that step.

Anyway, I'd written the description and narrative stuff, and wanted to talk to my chair about it (since it's sort of her field, though not in a bad way).  But then zie was busy, and so couldn't see me until the next day.  The zie and I went through it, and zie liked it, but had a lot of good revision suggestions.  So I made those, and then went to talk to the writing center guy, and he did the same, and then I revised again.

And then I filled out all the budget stuffs, and finally, hit submit.

And nothing.

Now the form says that you should get an immediate email from the grant office and to let them know if you don't, but of course it was late afternoon, so the grant office was closed.

I sent them an email, and let my chair know.  And my chair sent an email to the grant headperson, but zie is on vacation.  (Which I knew, because someone had advised me to go ask hir to give me feedback on the grant, and I'd called to see if I could do that, but the admin assistant said zie wasn't available, and not to worry because it would be fine, blah blah blah.)

So this morning, I tried again to submit, and nothing but the computer busy thing.

So I called the admin assistant, and zie walked me through, and it turns out that if you click from the "work in progress" area, it doesn't work.  No, you have to click in from the "my work" area.

Doesn't that seem counterintuitive?  I want the work in progress, because I'm working on progressing.

And so finally, it worked.

Anyway, I'm excited about this project, and think it will be interesting.  I'll probably try to do it even without the grant, but the grant would pay for a student collaborator, and that would be good!  (It's a SOTL type thing, that grew out of a paper the student did.)

Cross your fingers for me!

In the News: Salaries at UW-Stevens Point

Here's an article from Inside Higher Education on Salaries at U of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and a bit more generally.

Ouch, eh?