Facebook Weirdness

I mentioned here last month or so that I decided to do a facebook thing. So I did. I found some cousins and an uncle, reconnected with some college pals. I friended some of the folks I hang out with. I found a couple of Peace Corps friends.

And then I got a friend request from a student. I'd decided that I wasn't going to be posting pictures of my at wild drunken parties, mostly because I'm not much of a wild drunken party type. I'm more a late at the library type. And so I'd decided I'd accept friendship requests from co-workers and students.

The other day, I put up an old picture from my PCV days, and the student responded that I was "gorgeous." I have to be honest, I'm at best plain. I'm just not physically attractive, haven't been since I was a little kid. (I'm sure I got the Funny Looking Kid comment on the pediatrician's file.) I'm not putting myself down about this. Some of us have to be below average, you know? And that's where I put myself.

The thing is, the "gorgeous" comment felt totally weird and wrong to me, and I'm trying to figure out why.

I don't think, for example, that the friends I have who are administrators will get me fired.

I don't think my old college friends will suddenly think badly of me. Nor my Peace Corps friends, nor family.

But maybe it feels weird to be judged that way by a student? Is this a social status thing for me? If an old college friend had posted "gorgeous," I probably would have laughed. If my cousin or aunt had, I'd have known it was because we're family.

Is it because it feels so false and bullshitty?

Is it because I don't much respect the Lake Woebegon attitude that we're all just lovely and wonderful?

Visitation

I just got back from a visitation. I've never been to a visitation before; I don't think they're part of my subculture of whiteness or something. Maybe they're regional?

The visitation was for the mother of one of our staff members; while our faculty tends to be drawn from afar, our staff folks (except for those who are partnered with faculty or administrators) tend to be local people who grew up in the area. Most are helpful and do their jobs well, and they can help folks from elsewhere figure things out around here. This staff member, though, is exceptional, and though I don't know her well, she's helped me find my way through some faculty duties with great generosity and kindness.

I didn't stay long, and I didn't go look in the casket. It seems like a weird idea to have the only time I see someone be in her casket, you know? And mostly, I wanted to let the staff person feel a bit supported in a difficult time.

I guess it's better to say awkwardly that you're sorry for someone's loss than not to say anything, right?

A Rough Start at College, Pt 2

I have a student who's facing suspension. The student got a note from the dean's office saying s/he is suspended but can write an appeal letter if s/he wants the appropriate deanling to reconsider the case. When the student emailed me, I realized that the student really had no sense of how to write the appeal. I'm guessing some students would know, but a lot wouldn't, especially first generation college students. So I thought I might be able to help a tad.

I'm only considering grade problem suspensions, here, though some of what I have to say may apply in other sorts of cases.

If you get one of these letters, you should start by sitting down with yourself and thinking about what happened. You might lie to a prof, and that's irritating, but if you lie to yourself, that's plain stupid. So be totally honest and think about why you had grade problems.

Next, consider if you really want to be in college, or if being suspended is a good chance for you to do something else for a year (or forever). If you don't want to be in college, do something else. There are lots of meaningful ways to spend your career or earn a living. Find one and try to do it well. Focus on making your live worth living. If that means getting a college education, fine. Maybe taking a year and going to a community college would work well for you. If so, do that.

If you decide that you want to appeal your suspension, read the suspension letter carefully, and see what the letter says in terms of an appeal process or reinstatement. If you want to go to that school, take those instructions seriously.

If you have an opportunity to write a letter appealing your suspension, view it as an opportunity. There's some person on the other end who's going to take time to read your letter, take time to review your record, maybe make a couple phone calls. Don't BS that person around.

Further, in all likelihood, that person wants you to succeed and wants an excuse to let you come back. That's how people in student services are. But, if you don't succeed, they may be held partly responsible, so they aren't just going to let you return for the fun of it.

When you're ready to write your letter, write down what you know about why you failed. Did you party too much? Did you get sick? Whatever it is, write it all down.

Now look at the list and think about how you can change the things that contributed to your failure. Can you change your living situation? Can you get yourself into a study group? Can you go to a math center? Write every idea you have down. If you have time, visit with your advisor or a tutoring center or whatever on campus, and see if they have ideas.

Now, again, be honest with yourself: are you willing to do what it takes to change the things that contributed to your failure? Can you make that commitment? Really? If not, then quit writing and do something else.

If so, then write down how you're going to change what you can change.

Then start drafting your letter. Have someone else give you feedback on your draft, preferably someone with a good deal of college experience.

Here's what I think the dean wants to see in the letter:

1) Yes, you take responsibility for the failure.
2) You have thought about why you failed; explain in short what you did (or what happened) that contributed to the failure.
3) You have thought about how to change what you can change, and have already taken some steps to make those changes. Explain in short what you've done so far.
4) You have thought about what further changes you will make once classes start, and can outline your plans.
5) A thank you for the opportunity to appeal the suspension, and an appreciation for someone taking the time to reconsider the suspension.

That's it, I think. That's what a dean wants to see. If the dean is convinced you can succeed, s/he may allow you to enroll again. S/he may suggest that you take specific steps to help yourself succeed. If the dean thinks you're not going to succeed, s/he won't allow you to enroll, but may give you suggestions to help you prepare to request reconsideration in another semester.

In either case, if you want to go to that school, take those suggestions seriously and follow through on them. Take your commitments to change seriously and follow through with them. You can't control a lot of things, obviously, but you can control some things.

The Local News

The local news here is leading off the past couple of days with bits about local people who are in Haiti (local student on a church group trip, safe) or were in Haiti at some point (local person volunteering with a church group). Then they do a network feed on Haitian people.

It's totally weird that the news thinks that what's most important about the Haitian earthquake tragedy is that local visitors were there.

Dear local news: really, sometimes people from the upper midwest are not the center of the universe.

Do other areas of the country do this? I don't remember this sort of thing at all in the local news when I lived elsewhere. (Then again, they didn't have daily coverage of the local HS football training, either.)

A Bird in the Hand

I recently got some of my Peace Corps pictures digitized, so I thought I'd tell you a bit with some pictures:

When I moved to my site as a Peace Corps volunteer, I was the only PCV in the area, or so I thought, until I heard about R, who lived up the road about 15km. So I went to visit R on weekend, and was lucky to find him around. R was, well, odd. His site was an otherwised unused set of buildings from when an oil company thought they'd find oil right there, and things got a little developed, and then the oil wasn't there after all.

R's project (bats!) involved using mist nets, and so he'd also get birds in the nets. He'd put some of these birds in a big room with tree branches. Once I got to know R, I would go up on a weekend day and we'd go out to the mistnets and such. I learned a lot of cool stuff about birds and bats. At some point, I asked him and he said he'd give me one of the parrots from his room. I had to go back and arrange to make a cage (metal frame and chicken wire, and that was the ugliest cage ever), and then I went and got my small parrot (a conure, actually) and took it on the bus in a pillowcase. (The cage was huge and wouldn't have fit inside the bus.) R clipped her primaries on one side, so she couldn't fly. I called her Lacy, after the Doonesbury character. But that wasn't her name, of course. (I don't get when people "name" wild critters; you can call an animal whatever you want, but we people need to recognize that calling them something is for our convenience, and really not much to do with the wild animal at all.)

At the time, I was living in a boarding house, and there wasn't much for me to do in the evenings, so I spent a lot of time trying to tame the bird. And eventually, she (R thought she was female because of the way she behaved with the other birds in the room) became tame. So instead of living in the cage, she lived more on top of the cage or wherever she wanted to be in the room. (I put little branches inside and on top of the cage so she'd be able to climb around and move her feet into different positions and grip different diameters and all, and chew.) I covered the cage at night, and if she wanted to, she'd climb down and go in, but mostly she tucked her beak into a wing and slept on the branches on top.

It was about this time that I started experiencing the single most hedonistic wake up ever: she'd come over to my bed when it got light and get on my forehead and preen my eyelashes, one lash at a time. In case you've never experienced bird preening, and you're thinking, that beak! it could rip your skin to shreds! Yes, she could take out quite a chunk of flesh when she had a mind to. But her beak was warm, her tongue like a warm damp eraser, and when she preened my lashes, I could barely feel each lash being individually groomed. Talk about attention to detail. I probably had the best groomed lashes in human history.

Then, about eight months in, a couple more volunteers moved into town, and S (one of the new volunteers) and I decided to rent a house together (scandalizing the local US missionaries). We fairly quickly acquired a dog and a cat,* so the bird lived mostly in my room unless I was around. When I was around, she'd be with me riding around on my shoulder or exploring. She went to the store with me, did dishes, whatever. (That's Lacy supervising from the faucet.)

When she molted into new primaries, she could fly well again, but she pretty much stayed on my shoulder when we were out, except for one time when she ended up screaming in a tree til I climbed part way up and she hopped back onto my hand, grabbed my shirt as hard as she could and wouldn't let go for HOURS. (Usually, I'd flip her back to her cage every few minutes where she'd take a dump and then fly back to me, but she would have none of THAT on that day.)

Sometimes, the neighbors' bird would come walking over (its primaries were clipped), and the two would get into some serious preening. I don't know if parrots of different species hang out together in the wild or anything, but I've seen loose parrots of different species hanging out together in LA, and heard of them doing so in SF. (Were I to want to be a biologist now, I'd want to study parrot populations in urban US areas; are they breeding populations? What do they eat? How do they intermingle? It's just fascinating!) (That's gentian violet on my hands, not some scary disease. I'll tell you about the gentian violet another time.)

I didn't teach Lacy many "tricks." Other than getting used to being on a hand, a shoulder (a head, whatever) and learning to enjoy being groomed by a clumsy human, mostly, she thought of things she wanted to do and I worked around that. I learned to hide books (or anything else I didn't want chewed), and to wear a towel on my shoulder. I learned to give a proper under the wing massage. I learned to share whatever I was eating, though sharing chicken seemed a little weird at first (I realized it was no weirder than me eating another mammal, but still).

The one thing I taught her was to lie on her back in my hand. It was a stupid idea, but there you are. I was (and perhaps am still) stupid at times.

In my minimal experience with birds, I gather even the most finger friendly tend to want the fingers below them until they're ready to relax and get their neck groomed. They tend not to like their backs touched unless they're really in the mood (usually part of the under the wing massage, which could pretty much get Lacy totally in her happy place). So, to put my hand on her back (while she was on the other hand) was the first step. Then she let me turn her over with my other hand still in place, firmly gripped by her very strong feet. Finally, I could withdraw my other hand, and she'd lie for a moment, turning her feet a bit this way and that. But if there was the slightest noise, a noise that normally she'd barely notice, she'd be instantly in flight, maybe calling, and then on my shoulder holding firmly. (It's a bit blurry, but you get the idea. We're outside, and about 15km from where she was mist-netted. But by this time, I was her flock, so she hung out with me.)



*Today, I'm ashamed at how careless we were in getting Lacy, Kiddo (the dog) and Oliver (the cat). When we started, two years seemed like forever, but when it was time to go, it was in reality a very short amount of time. My roommate, S, was in country for a while longer than I, and got a new PCV roommate, who then took on Kiddo and Oliver. I'm not sure what happened to them after that.

How stupid and young I was. We took the precautions of getting rabies and distemper vaccines, but we didn't think about the long term.

When I was getting ready to leave, I looked into bringing Lacy back with me; she wasn't of an endangered or protected species, but she was wild caught, so from what I found out, she'd have had to stay in caged quarantine for about six months. I couldn't imagine leaving her alone in a cage for a week, much less for six months. She was strongly socialized with people by that time, used to being with someone a lot of the time.

So I gave her to another PCV who liked her lots and was responsible. But she got in a bit of trouble because he was in a restaurant with her one day and she flew into the kitchen and scared the cook, who got really mad at him. He decided to clip her wing again, so that he could take her to the restaurant and town as always. And then one day he came home from work to find no bird, only some feathers strewn about, and he thought one of the local cats had gotten in and caught her. And that's the last I know.

How to Help Haiti

I've been through two big earthquakes, but I was lucky enough in both cases to live in wealthy areas that have strict building codes which were amazingly effective in minimizing deaths from building collapses. Haiti isn't so lucky, of course; it's a poor country and now with the huge earthquake, the folks there could use some extra help. Michael Leddy, who blogs at Orange Crate Art, has put up some helpful resources here.

The US State Department has a page with resources.

The Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC has a page up with links, too.

Because of my regular contact with the local blood donation center, I think of the American Red Cross for such occasions. Here's a page they have up about how they're already working to help.

There are lots of aid organizations doing good work around the world. Peace Corps is my favorite, but they're not in Haiti. Feel free to share your favorite(s), and I'll be happy to add them to this page if they seem appropriate for helping Haiti at this time.

****

Edited to add:

Feel free to link, of course.

LenapeGirl suggests Doctors Without Borders. Here's the link.

Susan suggests Episcopal Relief and Development. Here's the link.

Dr.GunPowderPlot suggests Oxfam America. Here's the link.

Panic Mode

It struck me today, as I was making arrangements to meet with a local librarian to try out the technology for a library series I'm doing, PANIC! Gulp! EEP!

The library series starts next Wednesday, so I have just over a week to be fully prepared. I'll be talking with some community folks about Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, focusing first on the General Prologue, then "The Miller's Tale," "The Nun's Priest's Tale," and "The Franklin's Tale." It's basically Bardiac's favorite short Chaucer. The first day we'll talk about the GP, a little about the three pilgrims, a bit about pilgrimage, and a bit about the quitting game. I'm going to bring in some sound files of reading, and that's something I need to put together quickly.

I stopped by the Fort today (since I was there for a discussion of anti-racism) to ask the admin assistant for guidance about a committee I'm chairing this semester, and had a weird (not unpleasant, just unexpected) interaction with one of the administrative biggies. I made an appointment to talk to a deanling about the committee, since the admin assistant is out for a family thing for next week (after another anti-racism discussion).

I'm teaching Shakespeare for the first time since spring '07. That's two and a half years, and feels way too long. I'm sort of psyched and psyched out. I asked our new writing specialist for help in designing some assignments for writing for the class, and she's wonderful and gave me great help.

And then I'm teaching Chaucer again, The Canterbury Tales. I think most of the assignments I used last time worked well, and will need some tweaking, but not full out tweaking.

So why was I suddenly overwhelmed?

***

The anti-racism discussion was really good. They mix folks up so we've got some very theoretically informed folks, some staff folks with less reading knowledge, some folks from here, some from far away. It's really helpful for me to get a sense of how it was to grow up here, and especially how very different from my experience growing up far from here.

As a white person in the upper midwest who cares to work against racism, I have to recognize that I've had way more opportunities to know people of color, and yet mostly I socialize with other white folks. I socialize with faculty of color, but not much with people of color in the city or local area (and there are plenty). So why should someone with less opportunity do better?

We were discussing the Harry Reid comment, and commentaries in the media that make it sound like new information that African Americans who are lighter in color experience less intense racism at times. Is that really new information to most white folks? I remember learning that in grammar school, having it articulated, even.

Riverwalk

One of my friends and I went out snowshoing yesterday. My friend lives near a couple of big parks, so we started in one of them, and then after a bit, crossed the road to walk in the park next to the river. We were on the river bank, and could see that someone else had snowshoed on the river, and fairly recently. We thought for a bit about going and walking on the river ourselves, but neither of us knows much about ice stuff, so we decided not to. It seems like a bad time to go swimming, you know?

But, it's been well below zero for a good while here, since before Christmas except for one day when it got to a balmy 35 or so in December.

We walked along the bank, though, and it was beautiful, with the snow full of sparkly crystals, the sky blue, and the pine trees with just a bit of snow set off against their dark green. We walked up next to the boat ramp, where we saw that someone had driven a car or truck out onto the ice.

We figured any car was way heavier than we are, so we went down onto the ice. We brushed aside the snow to look at the ice; there were sort of little bubbles in there that gave an impression of depth, but who knows.

Gradually we grew confident enough to follow the other snowshoe tracks to a little island maybe 20 feet off the shore. It was funny how liberating and almost wild it felt to be out walking on a river, knowing that underneath us there's moving water.

Fudge Follies

When I was a kid, my Mom used to make the best fudge ever. She also made fudge sauce. You may think some store makes the best fudge but you'd be wrong.

I haven't had the fudge in years. Probably decades. She didn't make it often, even when I was a kid, but when she did, it was fudgasm.

Sometime before Christmas, I began thinking about trying to make some fudge, and asked for the recipe. My Mom revealed that she'd given me one of those cookbooks women's groups put together in the 60s and 70s to raise money, the Local Schoolhouse PTA Cookbook, that sort of thing. It turns out I have four of those from different fundraising things. And my brother does, too, she says. (I guess she was thinking ahead, eh?)

I didn't get around to trying to make fudge during finals, but I took the recipe book with me to my siblings, and it sounded appealing to all. So one evening my Sister-in-Law and I started making fudge. We read the directions, mixed the sugar, cocoa, and salt well, added the milk, and started heating, stirring occasionally. We were consulting and working together.

But apparently, we weren't doing it right, or so my Mom said, when she said, no, not like that, like this, here, let me show you. And she took over, with an assist from my sibling. My Sister-in-Law and I stood by, watching, and keeping out of the way.

It took me back to being a kid, and trying to do something in the kitchen, and being told, no, that's not right, let me show you, and then I'd stand around supposedly watching and lose interest. You might think, well, B, you should have stood your ground, but I learned quickly that if I stood my ground, I'd inevitably do something imperfect, and then I'd hear about that for a good long time. So I learned to not even bother to try. (It's a bad thing to learn.)

So I have a theory about cooking with kids. It's easy for me to have a theory, since I don't have kids to test it, but here it is: it should be okay for stuff to not turn out perfectly, especially the first few times. It should also be okay for there to be a bit of a mess, so long as blood is on the inside. Again, I don't have kids to test the theory.

Back at the ranch, the fudge turned out pretty soft, too soft to really cut, and more something you'd eat by the spoonful. Eating by the spoonful wasn't a problem for me. It still tasted really good.

Towards the end of my visit, when the previous fudge was gone, my Sister-in-Law and I decided to try again. Once again, we read the directions, got out stuff, and started following the directions. This time we even found a candy thermometer. We were doing fine, and then my sibling decided that no, we weren't actually doing fine, and that we should do something different, so he took over.

It's clear that one of us bred true, isn't it.

That time, the fudge came out like a rock. We had to break it with the edge of a heavy pan and stuff rather than trying to cut it with a knife. The good thing about fudge, though, is that even if it's totally hard, it's very water-soluble, so quite easy to clean up. And even rock hard, it dissolves in your mouth and still tastes pretty darned good.

And then I left and came home.

So, that first week home, I bought a quart of milk and decided to try making fudge myself, all by myself, so that if it didn't turn out well, I wouldn't have to hear about it. It was even softer than the first fudge over break, so soft that it didn't even hold its shape when you spooned some out. It still tasted good.

So, tonight I tried again. I thought I had it, but it's still too soft.

:(

(But it tastes very good!)

Syllabus Hell

Sometimes it feels like writing a syllabus is an exercise in trying to prevent students from finding loopholes so that they can blame me for whatever goes wrong.

It's the "but you didn't say on the assignment sheet that we had to cite the text, so how can you grade me down for that?"

And, "but you didn't say I couldn't copy from S*notes to do the assignment, and it's too hard to do myself!"

Or, "but I emailed it to you before midnight, how could you count it late?"

So then I end up writing in the syllabus that I don't accept work by email but then there's a student who has a health issue and needs to email things and doesn't think I'll accept it, so I add a phrase about "without express permission," and before long, I'm handing out a 6 page syllabus that sounds like bad lawyer language and doesn't convey anything about how exciting it is to study Shakespeare. The next phase is that I cut out a bunch of the lawyer language, and try to get across my excitement about the texts, but them someone insists on handing in scrawled assignments and complains that I didn't tell them that they couldn't handwrite their work, and the legalistic stuff starts in again. And around I go.

But it doesn't matter, because even if I put in there that I don't accept emailed assignments, students still email me assignments because they don't remember seeing it on the syllabus or going over it the first day, and why would they, since it's an 8 page syllabus by that time.

And we're all supposed to tell students on EVERY syllabus what the goals of the school are. (Does anyone else have to do this?) Because somehow, if students know what the goals are, then they'll tell the assessment folks that yes, they know what the goals of the school are, as if somehow us telling them that they're supposed to learn critical thinking skills actually contributes in any way whatsoever to their actually learning critical thinking skills.

I wonder how much paper we collectively waste every semester with our goals statements? I'm less bothered that we put in statements about accomodating people with special needs or how to get help from the deans' office. But I hate the goals statements. At least no one is telling me I have to put a FERPA statement and a full explanation of their FERPA rights on every syllabus. (Just wait, though, some assessment person will read this and think, hey, what a great idea!)

I have one class pretty much done, calendar, syllabus, and all assignments.

I have another class partially done, calendar, assignments thought of but not written down. Syllabus can be partially canibalized.

I have another class hardly worked on. I got to the point in the calendar when I need to do a library day, and I don't want to have to totally rearrange things if the library can't do the day I've requested.

I have one big committee task done, two thank you letters (one more to do) and some office cleanup.

I wish it would warm up enough to make going outside minimally pleasant. (While it's in the teens, the wind chill makes it closer to 1F. That's minus 11 and minus 17 for the Celsius folks among us. Celsius always makes winter sound much tougher, doesn't it?

Good Day

I met with a new advisee today, someone coming back to school after messing up the first time and working for a couple of years in between. My experience with students who return a couple years after messing up is that they generally do quite well; they're focused and ready to work hard (or they wouldn't be coming back), and they've usually matured a bit. We had a nice talk and framed out the next couple of years with some room for exploration. I hope this student will kick ass, because my other returned-after-a-mess student is about to graduate with a nearly four-oh gpa in classes since the return.

After that, I cleaned up my shelves a bit (returning books to their regular places after a semester on the "in use for a class this semester" shelf) and putting some over in the free book area.

I wrote a couple of thank you letters to faculty folks who came to talk to my class this semester to help my students understand stuff I didn't know well. (In poetry and drama classes, I teach up through the 20th century, and that's a stretch for someone who thinks the world got a lot less fun when they closed the theaters in 1642.) I need to get better at these, and certainly need to make sure to do them every time. Anyone have a good structure for these? (They get cc'd to the appropriate department chair, too, of course, so they can't just be me saying, "thanks, you rock!") I still have one more to do, but forgot about it earlier.

Then a colleague and I went out snowshoing for a while in the fresh snow at a local park. It felt great, and tiring. The fresh snow resting on the pine and spruce trees was just lovely; it's like walking through a Christmas card, only way better.

I got home and realized that I had a good bit of digging to get my driveway clear, but I got bonus puppy therapy from my neighbors' dogs. Is there anything much better than dogs playing in fresh snow? One of the dogs is an aging golden, but in the snow, he must have felt just great, because he was running around having a great time.

All in all, it's been a good day, and now, it's 8pm, and I'm so ready to sleep.

The Uh Oh Sign

It's the sign you get from a student before classes begin that makes you realize this one's going to be trouble.

I don't know quite what it is about the email. In general, a student who emails ahead to get information about texts is just someone who wants to get the texts on-line. But then sometimes, there's this extra bit. And the extra bit doesn't quite go with what went before. And if that's how this student's class discussion skills work, things will be difficult, non-sequitors, extra commentary that doesn't have anything to do with the class discussion, that sort of thing.

Okay, I realize I sound like a jerk. Maybe you're thinking, eww, B doesn't like people with Asperger or something.

I don't know that I've ever had a student with Asperger syndrome. I've certainly had a few students who wouldn't stop making off-topic comments or who kept interrupting discussion or being rude to other students. It makes class way more work and way less fun.

Maybe I'm totally wrong about the email. Yeah, totally wrong. Watch, this student will turn out to be the delight of the semester!

Projects

After starting with Goodwill packing, I decided to do a couple more projects today. I called and found a place that will digitize slides. As you can tell from the picture, I have a goodly number of slides, mostly from my Peace Corps days. (If you click on the picture, you can see a picture of the Maroon-tailed conure I lived with and the house we lived in, along with another volunteer, a dog, and a cat.)

I sorted through and chose some to have digitized, 83 in total, and a few photos as well (the piles on the right are the slides I've chosen to digitize). I'm really excited and will be posting some of these for fun.

I'd been thinking about doing this for a few years now, but was worried that the slides would have degraded badly. They seem to be in pretty good shape, though.

***

I moved the furniture in my bedroom around; I liked the way it was except that the dresser was in front of the heating vent, so the room was always way colder (in winter). I've got things arranged so there's nothing in front of the vent now, and I'm hoping that will make things a little more pleasant in there.

***

I finished Kingsolver's The Lacuna. The final 50 pages were the best, though the rest of the novel was really good. The final 50 pages bring things together beautifully and horrifically (the red scare thing) and wonderfully. I'm going to be recommending this one! Consider yourselves warned.

Next up: last year, my friend/colleague leng me Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water, and that's next up for me. I started it but got caught up in other things, so didn't get far. But now's the time.

Going to Goodwill

I dropped my landline yesterday and went cell phone. I think it should work out well for me. This morning, I collected the phones and answering machines and put them in boxes to take to the Goodwill.

Henry VIII as teapot decided to jump in. There's also a car toy now.

There are things that, although I might find them cute in stores, they just aren't my style and I don't want to dust around them. Henry VIII as teapot fits that description.

A Rough Start at College

I got one of those emails today, from a student who had a rough start last semester and failed my class. The student wants to know how to do better next time around. I don't remember the particulars of this student's difficulties, but there are a couple basic problems a lot of first year students encounter. The good news is that a lot of these problems can be changed for the better.

The other good news is that most professors don't think a student who messes up the first term is a loser or stupid, or whatever. Most of us messed up at some point, and the rest of us have friends who messed up at times.

Here's my short list for doing better in college.

Go to class. I know it's hard to get up early, but being there is one key to doing well. Go prepared, take notes, review your notes after.

Do the homework. Even if it's not required or turned in, do the readings, work problem sets, whatever. This is especially important for language, math, and other classes where you build skills as you go. If there's language lab or a math lab, do your homework there, especially if you can get help easily.

Get help early and often. Your college or university almost certainly has tutoring available. Use it. Talk to your professors about your questions early. Most professors don't bite and aren't evil. Some of us are better explainers than others, but most of us will try.

Study in groups. Get connected with your classmates. Study with them, get to know them. Exchange phone and email information so that you can get notes if you miss class (or give your classmates help if they miss, too). One of the best tests of your knowledge is explaining things to someone else. Studying in groups helps you learn to explain, and so helps you learn.

Do the work. Read your assignments carefully and do them with attention and care. Small assignments add up to a lot over a semester, so take them seriously. Give yourself time to do your assignments well.

Those are my top five; what are yours?

Between Wars/Between Books

I often have three or four books "going" at a time. A book on CD in the car, a book on tape in the bedroom (for falling asleep), a book or articles for work (more than one when classes are in session), and a book for pleasure. I don't generally choose the CD or tape books with a lot of attention; mostly, I look for anything that's not a mystery or Brown-type conspiracy "thriller." (And in our local library, that leaves pretty slim pickings.)

I took a road trip to visit my sibling, which got me started on Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. I picked it up at the library, which is where I get my CDs and tapes, because I vaguely remember reading something by Waugh in my first 20th century British novel class, the same semester I fell in love with Shakespeare (and out of love with 20th century novels). It wasn't the fault of the novels, really, but I had three outstanding instructors that semester (for Shakespeare, Chaucer, and a criticism class) and two sexist nits (for the 20th century British novel and the 20th century American novel). I'm not quite sure what the Waugh we read for the class was; compared to other things, it didn't impress me much.

Brideshead Revisited (so far, I'm about halfway through the CDs I guess) is narrated by a WWII army officer, Charles, who's training in England, and goes with his company (I think that's the military designation) on train to a new training area, which he recognizes as Brideshead, an estate. He reminisces about his first encounters at Brideshead, and that leads him back through his years at Oxford (starting about 1923), friendship with Sebastian Flyte (the younger son of the owners of Brideshead). I'm at the point where Charles has fallen out with Sebastian's mother (Lady Marchmain), is studying art in France, and has just learned that the alcoholic Sebastian has escaped along the way to a "cure" in Germany.

(I have to admit, though I've read enough about servants to get the idea, I still can't quite grasp the lifestyle Waugh depicts, of adults out galavanting at all hours, hunting, sitting around, touring through Europe for months at a time.)

Thus, the novel so far is mostly between the wars, with WWI coming back through Lady Marchmain's reminiscences and writing about her brothers, all of whom died in the war, and Lord Marchmain's decision to remain on the continent after WWI. It's framed on the other side by Charles being an officer, though seemingly less than effective, training during WWII.

For Christmas, my sib and sister in law gave me a couple books, including Barbara Kingsolver's new Lacuna. Lacuna is told mostly through the diaries and writings of Harrison Shepherd, a Mexican American growing up between the wars. It begins in 1929, and follows the narrator through living with his mother in Mexico, going to a boarding school in Washington, DC for a bit, and then back living in Mexico and (at least at the part I'm at now) living first with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo's household (as a cook) and then working with Trotsky as a secretary. I'm about a third of the way through (it's 1939, so Trotsky hasn't been assassinated yet), so there's lots more to come.

But again, it's between the wars, influenced less openly by WWI so far, but through the Rivera and Trotsky involvement, deeply interested in the Bolshevik Revolution and fractures within socialist and communist movements. ***edited to add: There's also a section on the veterans "bonus" camps in DC in the 1932, when Great War vets were trying to get their promised bonus money for serving.***

As someone from the US (a USian?), I have to admit I know very little about Mexican history. I know a more British history (but not so much after 1660). Most of what I know about the period between the wars comes from Fred Astaire movies and books about the Great Depression. So I'm finding these two books interesting, not only for their very different takes on the period (upper class England and Europe vs working class Mexico) but also for the things that overlap, especially the interest in art (Charles is an artist, and the narrator of Lacuna works with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Each also depicts a wealthy household (or more) with servants, but from different angles.

Both books are also interested in how small moments can affect the world, chance meetings, a misplaced note, that sort of thing.

And finally, everyone in the books seems to have a lot of sex. (Hey, I'm a Shakespearean! I notice these things!)

So far, I'm enjoying both books. I liked Kingsolver's first couple of novels a lot; she seemed to have a light, feminist touch and a great sense of humor. This novel's a lot deeper and darker, but very well written. In a way, it feels sort of like some of Isabel Allende's works, in a sense of scale, and in another way, almost like Sandra Cisneros's ability to represent the borderland of Mexican and USian cultures and languages. The narrator's name is part of that. Early on he's "the boy," and then in the US school, Harry, and now Frida has given him the nickname "Insolito," which she shortens to "Soli." (Add accent marks.) I don't think Kingsolver's quite as easy with Spanish as Cisneros, but there's a sense of being in different languages and cultures that comes through pretty well.

Kingsolver is doing really interesting things here with the narrative through the diaries and other entries, and I'm really enjoying the way this text unfolds.

Here I am, reading my way into the new year. Happy New Years, all. I hope this one is better than the last for many people (because the last year, the last decade, have been miserable for much of the world).

Old and New

I woke up this morning to NPR's report on the financial crimes of the decade in the US. And it got me thinking about my decade.

In 1999, I moved to a new job, bought my first house (with the bank owning most of it, of course), had a dog, and had my father die. My niece and nephew were rug rats.

Over the past ten years, I've lost some weight (though I should lose more and have instead regained some of what I'd lost), played and quit EQ, put my dog to sleep, lost my great aunt M (who I was close to), bought another house (also with the bank's considerable investment and significant help from great aunt M), gotten a new car. I've taken up biking, gone skydiving, started learning to cross country ski, and done some kayaking. I've made some good friends here, people I really enjoy spending time with. I've enjoyed good health, better than in 1999 even, probably (since I exercise more). I've tried to be a good aunt and increasingly enjoy my niece and nephew.

I've been to Yellowstone twice, once on a bus, once on my bike. I've taught in Japan for a semester, seen Orangutan in Malaysia.

I've taught a lot, served on endless committees, and tried to do some other work less successfully. I've had a lot more wonderful students than not, for which I'm endlessly grateful.

All in all, it's been a pretty good decade for me. The last few years have been a lot rougher for most people than for me

My hopes for the new decade? More and better effort on research. Less BS on committees. Continued teaching, biking, skiing, kayaking, good health. Deepening friendships. My niece and nephew are more fun all the time; I hope it stays that way and look forward to seeing them become adults. I hope my ratio of wonderful to not wonderful students continues.

Spa Day

at Bardiac's shack:

I figure the border between cat person and crazy cat person is four cats. I'm not sure what the border is between biker and crazy biker, but this can't be a good sign.

But yes, that's the dork disc still on there, along with the side reflectors. I guess that's the way I roll.

Magical

I drove back home today amidst a rather magical looking landscape. It looks like it should be a movie landscape, and an ice dragon should be out there, somewhere, or maybe some other sort of icy monster. As I drove, it got sunnier, and the frost wasn't sticking to the trees any more. But it was still pretty darned wintry.


Here's a self-portrait of me snow-shoing. I haven't actually gone anywhere snowshoing yet, just around my sibling's yard. It's funny how light my feet felt when I quit, though.

Committee Anxiety Dreams

This was a new one for me. I've chaired committees before, but I've never had an anxiety dream about prepping for a committee meeting.

Up for the semester: secretary to one committee, chair of a department committee, chair of a maybe committee (it's complicated, but maybe doesn't exist now), and chair of a college committee (but only for the semester).

The first is going to be full of weekly meetings, the second is going to involve two or three big meetings (and possibly some contentious decision making), the third is going to involve at least one painful meeting, and the fourth is a weekly thing, mostly rote but with mataphoric quicksand and ROUS along the way.

***

I want to get out and do something. I think my biking and stuff has changed my sense of self enough so that I get more antsy now if I don't play outside fairly frequently. My Mom would be ready in an instant, the others, not so much. I have to say that for my Mom: if I said there's something to do and we need to be ready at 6am, she'd be ready at 5:45, and rarin' to go.

It sometimes amazes me that two so very different people came out of one family as my sibling and I. I'll eat pretty much anything, and would rather try something new than something familiar mostly. My sibling seems to feel just the opposite. I'll try almost anything new sportsy/physical (except for boxing and bungi jumping); my sibling will try things if I make it very easy to do, and then like it well enough, but not do it again. On the other hand, my sibling is quite good at the one or two sports he does, and I'm not nearly as good at the sports I try to do, even biking.

My sibling is much better at some things than I am, and those are important things. For example, my sibling can cook and tries new sorts of cooking things, and me, well, I'm an uninspired cook, and I don't enjoy it enough to want to try a lot of new things.

Something Useful

I've pretty much finished Tatum's "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", and I found it interesting. The part I found most provocative was the idea of actually putting up front on job ads the requirement to have demonstrated experience/effectiveness in working in multiracial settings (124-5). I think we could probably use something like this in our job ads along with the demonstrated effectiveness teaching comp and so forth.

It's important, and if it's important, we should be looking explicitly for those experiences in our candidates.

Like many English departments, ours has more diversity than some other departments on campus. But, also like many English departments, our diversity is based on people of color teaching the literature of people of color. We've got a poor record of hiring people of color to teach theory or Shakespeare or romanticism. (And our local population includes a far greater percentage of people of color than either our student body or our faculty. So this is a matter of recognizing and serving our community.)

Can you tell I'm feeling housebound and antsy? It's true. The freezing rain hasn't helped, either. Now I'm on to some Shakespeare reading.

The War on Christmas

A typical modern Christmas film was played on the dvd the other night, a rather poor and moderately reprehensible, but totally typical film. Every modern Christmas film has basically the same plot: the spirit of Christmas is threatened by people (or kids or dogs) who don't believe in Santa. Someone has to learn to believe in Santa and the spirit of Christmas, and helps Santa deliver presents, and so the whole of Christmas is saved. (This one turned one character's Buddha statue into a snowman. Really. So much for multi-cultural respect, eh?)

As the film started, it came to me that the people who think there's a war on Christmas have seen way too many Christmas films, and believe the propaganda.

Really, no matter how many people don't actually think there's a jolly elf living at the north pole, there's no war on Christmas. And no matter how many people believe there's a fairy flying through the sky controlling things, there's really not.

But if getting together with family/friends and giving each other good food and stuff makes one happy, then the whole fairy business isn't really necessary.

But please, for the love of dog, can we stop making such bad movies?

Another Night, Another Academic Anxiety Dream, and a Chaucer Bleg

After my anxiety dream last night, I looked up the times, made up the calendar template for my classes this semester, and then roughed out the Shakespeare calendar for the semester.

So, of course, last night's anxiety dream was about Chaucer. I was looking for a book on Chaucer and couldn't find it. I think it was one of those Cambridge Companion to books, and I know where it is in the office (I think), but of course I'm not there to get it.

So, I'm going to attempt to relieve my anxiety by asking the medievalists out there: what's the best book about Chaucer stuffs (esp CT) out there in the last 5 or so years? Feel free to disagree and tell me why your choice is better.

Thanks!

The Schedules Dream

I had an academic anxiety dream last night, the one where you're supposed to be somewhere because it's the first day of classes, but you don't know which classes or where, so you don't go. It's a bad dream when you're a student, but somehow worse when you're the instructor. Or not. I mean, no one is going to drop me from the class for not showing up, right?

So I looked up my schedule and wrote it down in my book, and I'll do out my syllabus calendar, and hope that helps.

I'm reading a book for our anti-racism work on campus, Beverly Daniel Tatum's "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?". So far it's pretty good. I'm about a third of the way through, and there are some helpful insights, stuff I just hadn't thought about.

The best one for me so far is on page 60 where she explains an incident on page 59, in which a school teacher made some offhand comment that a Black student took as racist, but a white student brushed off in the "he didn't really mean it to be racist way." But other Black students, the kids at the Black table, understood immediately that there was a racism issue and the student wasn't being too sensitive or whatever.

I hadn't really thought about the experience of having other kids not affirm or affirm a Black student's experience of racism, I think because I think of teachers and students interacting more than I think of students and students interacting.

And then when it's pointed out, it's so obvious, isn't it? I feel like duh, what an ignorant so and so I am.

But what does one do to change the white kid's reaction or to help the Black kid get the affirmation s/he needs to process his/her experience? Tatum talks about one program which had Black students get together with an adult facilitator to provide that support in a formal way to students at a school where there were very few Black students and they didn't have the support otherwise. But it seems to me that we need to change the white student's perceptions as well as provide support for the Black students.

At any rate, it's helpful to change my thinking about the Black table as a positive rather than a negative thing in many ways.

Living with a Panopticon

I'm going a bit nuts here.

I can be having a conversation with X, and Y walks in, and insists on asking what we're talking about and being caught up. The same thing happens if Y is in the next room over and I'm chatting with X. What? What? What?

I have an evil urge to say that we're discussing masturbation, and I'm wondering if Y prefers a vibrator or not. Did I mention I'm evil?

Y also keeps a fairly constant running commentary on everything, most of it negative. No one is up to snuff, especially me. I'm so tired of being compared to a couple relatives. No, I'll never be as wonderful as they are. I get it. Thanks.

Hope whatever holidays and new year's stuff you celebrate is lovely!

I wish I could just stay home and be by myself.

So I Think a Bit More 'bout the Foot and the Door

I think I've begun to figure out how to articulate the problem I have with giving academic credit for non-academic stuff. I think that there are skills everyone should learn as a young adult, including lots of life skills about how to live, survive, and hopefully thrive in one's culture/society. For folks in the US, that means learning how to file taxes, figure out a budget, live with others (whether as family, roommates, or neighbors), do laundry, cook a basic meal, follow a recipe or directions, manage time, show up for work every day on time, all those sorts of things.

People don't go to college to learn those things, they take steps towards independence after a long adolescence. And it's not like everyone becomes great at all of them, but most people learn these skills as they move into adulthood. Sometimes young people are thrown in the deep end and learn the skills early (I know someone who became emancipated at 15 and did just fine), other times, well, some people never learn some things. Some people get lots of help from parents in learning these skills, others, alas, don't. But most folks in the US do get the basics.

Maybe we should consciously teach some of them earlier, so that as people approach young adulthood they know how to sew on a button, figure a basic budget, do taxes. If we need to teach those skills in school, though, we need to teach them early so that all students get to learn them. (I'm thinking junior high or earlier.) They're important, and worth teaching.

But the things students should learn in college specifically should be academic. They should learn to think more critically, understand experimental basics, analyze information (numeric, graphic, verbal), manipulate data, communicate better, and so forth. They should learn information/skills specific to a field/area of study, and be able to work in depth with that information. And they should refine their skills in learning so that they can learn what they need to learn better. That's what makes college different from getting a job. Yes, we all learn on the job, but college should push you further, faster, harder to a greater depth of critical thinking and analysis.

A Foot in the Door

I had coffee the other day with a student, one of my favorites. Also there was a youngish male, Joe. I'd thought at first that Joe was a student, but he's a youngish looking student life administrator.

Joe was talking about a project he wanted to work on, a project aimed at teaching young men not to sexually assault women. That's a laudable project, for sure. Go Joe. His specific idea was to hire an administrator to run this project and also teach a joint class in two departments, one male dominated, one female dominated. He said, this would give them a chance to "get a foot in the door."

A foot in the door?

Let's just admit up front that I wasn't nearly as politic as I should have been. But seriously, we need to hire a new administrator of teaching men not to rape women? And that person's going to design and teach a class for academic credit to teach men not to rape women?

Did I mention we already have an office of sexual assault prevention on campus? The difference is that he wants this administrator to be a male in control, because that's how we teach men not to rape women. And no, that person can't be part of the current program.

It made me realize how totally different Joe's and my views of education are. And, alas, Joe's is winning. We will, I'm guessing, hire someone whose job it is to teach men not to rape women (and while this is a laudable goal, do we really need that to be a job description?). They can put the office right next to the people we've hired to make sure our students are aware of alcohol. We've hired several people into new positions related to student life lately, while losing tenure track lines in academic fields.

We have a small number of courses in adjusting to university life and learning to study, each of which carries academic credit and is taught by someone without a terminal degree.

So is this just me being a snob about academic credentials and academics?

I'm guessing the reason Joe really wants to attach academic credit to the course is that academic credit counts. It shows up on a transcript and counts towards the credits a student needs to graduate, and that means (some) students may be willing to use it to progress towards their degree though they wouldn't participate in it without the attached credits. Of course, the men who most need the course wouldn't take it anyway, unless it were required. But men who need to learn about resisting other men's rapes of women might take it. And they'd probably learn something. At the baseline, students go to college for academic credit; they don't pay all that money just to hang around in the dorms (well, mostly).

But does this potential course deserve academic credit? My tendency is to think it doesn't.

My tendency is also to think that the more feet the non-academic folks get in the academic door, the worse for the university. I'm sure they'd disagree and tell me that lots of student learning occurs in dorms. It does, but that doesn't mean I think we should give students academic credit for living in a dorm, either.

(It's easy to see how the competencies stuff some assessment folks love so much compounds our fundamental disagreement. The idea of competencies is that students should be able to demonstrate competencies; they could demonstrate competencies without classes or after taking classes. It's a lot cheaper, too, if students can demonstrate a competency and not actually take classes. Credit for life experience; I'm sure you've heard about that, right?)

I don't know where to go with this. I can't articulate my position well enough. And the student life folks are very, very good at articulating theirs.

But I actually think students learn a lot in classes, through reading, writing papers, studying, discussing, trying out ideas. And I don't think just putting people together without a real purpose accomplishes much. Taking classes and working towards a degree, while individual goals, are also group goals, and I think the groupness contributes to individual learning. That learning is both academic and social/non-academic.

Creativity or Disaster

There's a stereotype among professors about students whose grandparents seem to get seriously ill or die at key moments in the term, preventing the students from attending, taking midterms, turning in key assignments, and so forth.

I've had very few ill or dying grandparents in my teaching career. Either my students are more creative, or they have real problems.

The big one seems to be depression. I spent part of the other day talking to a student who'd decided to go back on hir depression meds after pretty much near failing the term. I'm glad ze's going back on the medicines, since I've known the student for a couple terms, and ze's generally a good student, and so I have hopes that things will work out better.

I spent another part of another day talking to a student who may be depressed (or not, because Shakespeare really doesn't qualify me to say). I tried to talk hir into seeing a doctor or counselor to get checked out and get some help, but ze resisted because ze doesn't want to become dependent. Our culture has this fantasy that if we try hard and just pull on our bootstraps, we can do anything, and that anything includes dealing with chemical problems. Well, some chemical problems. I've never heard anyone talk about diabetics being "dependent" on insulin in a bad way, for example. Nor do any of the folks who can avoid bad migraines seem to feel morally inadequate because they've found better living through chemistry. But depression seems to be one of the areas we most have that fantasy about.

I've wondered if I've been depressed at different times in my life. But, being full of the cultural fantasy, and scared of the potential truth, I've never really sought to find out. And, even at its worst, my lows were way less difficult than the lows some of my students seem to experience. So I at least somewhat understand the reluctance to subject oneself to medicalization or whatever. And while I can talk the talk about not being biased about depression or medicine or whatever, it's sort of like racism: I know I've been raised to be a racist, so I fight it. I also know I've been raised to believe our cultural fantasy about bootstraps, but do I fight that as conscientiously?

I wonder what the real rates of depression are for college students in the US? And I wonder if it's worse up here with so little daylight during the winter?

But depression's not the only thing. This semester, I've had students sick with flu (to be expected), deal with family/friends' suicides, cancer diagnoses, unemployment, displacement, and so forth. I wish I thought my students were being creative rather than having real problems.

Even having real problems, though, isn't always a full excuse. One of my students has a time-limited documentation of a problem. Ze came to the final, having missed almost every class during the semester and having turned in no assigments. (Ze did fail one quiz and take the midterm with an okay grade.) Ze stopped at the desk after turning in the final to tell me that Ze had emailed me all hir work for the semester. Having checked my email for something else just moments earlier, I told Ze I hadn't received the email. And then I asked ze why I should accept the work that hadn't been turned in before the time-limited problem, how that would be fair to the students who'd turned in their work on time. Ze looked at me. I said that it was a real question, that I really needed to understand why ze thought that would be appropriate or fair. Ze said it wouldn't. (Yeah, I'm sort of expecting to hear from a deanling about this.)

Let's hope for a less disastrous new year, with classes full of students who don't get sick, who don't have friends commit suicide, and whose parents are employed.

Writing Exams

It's finals season here in the Northwoods. For students, that means studying and taking exams. For faculty, that means writing exams and then grading them.

Here's my ideal for exams: a good exam should be a miserable experience for anyone who hasn't come to class or done the reading, should allow most students to show how much they've learned and to put things together in a way that helps them learn something more about the subject of the course, and should give a really good student a chance to shine through with how much they've learned and put together and worked.

The stakes in writing exams are high because a poorly written exam almost inevitably leads to poorly written student exams. It's the rare test taker who can rise above a poorly written exam. But it's incredibly hard to write good exams because you have to try to think of what will help students write and what will confuse things as minimally as possible and what will lead students into errors that aren't revealing anything about how much they've learned.

One of the difficulties is that you have to write an exam specific to the class focus and discussions, so my Chaucer exam wouldn't necessarily look like another Chaucer prof's exam even though we're both good, concientious instructors. I may focus on gender issues a lot, while the other prof focuses on economic underpinnings or religious understanding. There's too much in any good lit to cover it all in one class or exams, so our exams have to reflect and build on what we taught students.

Another difficulty is that it's hard to get good feedback on exam questions. When I have a chance, I get a colleague to give me feedback, but that colleague isn't generally in my field, and so can give me general feedback about what's confusing or interesting. S/he also hasn't been in class, so can't speak to how well the question speaks to class discussions. On the other hand, my colleagues do a great job helping me write less confusing questions, and I'm grateful for that.

Finally, a good exam question should elicit essays that don't make me want to tear my eyes out a la Oedipus.

So, I thought I'd put up an exam question from a class I taught a couple years ago, and ask for your feedback and suggestions about exam writing. Help me write better exams, please!

This is from the essay portion of the exam, for a sophomore level Shakespeare class covering four play genres. It speaks to something I love to talk about in drama classes (though not all Shakespeare profs do, of course). I expect students to spend about an hour writing this essay; they should have a general sense about three possible essay prompts during the week before the exam (because we work through possible prompts as a way of reviewing).

First, here's the general assignment:

Write an essay in response to ONE of the two prompts. In the prompts, I try to ask some questions to help you get started thinking. You don’t have to answer all of those questions, but may focus on whatever issue in the prompt you wish.

Take a few minutes to brainstorm and outline before you begin writing. You may brainstorm on this paper or in your bluebook. Underline your thesis statement.

Be as specific as possible; give examples from the texts. Write on at least three texts, including one from before and one after the midterm.

And now, here's one of the prompts:

During the semester, we've talked a lot about the ways that Shakespeare uses metadrama, a term indicating a self-reflexive practice of using drama to explore what drama is and means.

Choosing three or four texts, including one from before and one from after the midterm, make an argument about the effects of metadrama in Shakespeare's plays. Do metadramatic moments make you think differently about what you're experiencing when you read or see a play? If so, how? Do metadramatic moments make you think about the world as a sort of stage, with all of us merely actors upon it, full of sound and fury and such?

Should we differentiate the ways that metadrama works in different genres? Is disguise always a tool for metadrama, or is it only sometimes used to set up metadrama? How does gendering work (especially cross dressing) in metadrama? Does class cross-dressing tell us something about the ways that the plays conceive human being and character? Does metadrama feed into or provide tension against essentialist themes in plays (essentialist themes might include, for instance, ideas that people are born into a specific social status, and that their birth has more effect than the way they've been raised).

What do we learn from watching deliberate staged stagings of scenes that we wouldn't learn otherwise?

So, wisdom of the internet, help me write better exams, please!

Responsibility

My plan was to grade at home today, and maybe if it's warm enough, go outside for a bit of exercise with a friend. But then I got an email, and there's a paper I need to sign because I'm the secretary for a committee of people who pretend to have power organization (C3PO). And it has to be signed today, though I didn't even know it existed and signed the other part, the part I knew about, last week sometime.

But because I'm responsible, and something good could happen for a colleague as a result, I'll head on in and sign.

A friend is moving in with another friend; I'm very happy for them. One of them has cats, the other a cat with FIV, so apparently the two can't be mixed or the healthy cats will get sick too. (I'm guessing you can't teach cats to keep their bodily fluids to themselves any more than you can teach them not to get on the kitchen counters when you're not in the room.) They've asked me to foster the FIV cat.

The thing is, I'm not a cat person. I'm perfectly happy to catsit for friends on occasion, and can give pills and stuff. I'm happy to get a little kitty therapy when I visit, and will pet the cat that comes by and seems to want to be petted when I visit.

I am a dog person. I know that dogs are dirty and disgusting beasts, but they stir my heart. Maybe it's my overblown ego, and the easy adoration of most dogs feeds it. I'll go out of my way to interact with dogs.

Part of me feels a bit bad saying no. But I don't want the responsibility of finding a cat sitter when I leave town or even the responsibility of cleaning a litter box daily. And while it's supposed to be short term ("fostering," not adopting), I worry that once the cat is in my house, the previous owner would feel a lot less pressure to find another home. The difficulty is that cat people already have a cat, and you can't just add an FIV cat to the household. So you have to shop around for a non-cat person who wants a cat. Even if you're really energetic about searching, it's tough, and the toughness is why they've asked me. All the cat people they know already have at least one cat, but here I am, catless.

I'm responsible enough to drive to campus to sign a form, but also responsible enough to now want to be responsible for a cat.

Just Wow

These are craft kits. You unfold them and there are several pockets inside where you can put your craft materials. They're gorgeous. The tan one has a wooden button!

I try to find unique sorts of gifts, and I think I hit the mark with these. Now I want to send my aunt one, too!

I don't usually do advertising stuff, but here's where you can get craft kits: Artbeco on Etsy (Disclosure: One of my long and good friends makes these. She's a wonderful artist in all sorts of ways.)

Off to the Finish Line

One of my seniors did her big presentation today, and did a fine job. For some reason, I think that the big presentation reflects on the prof who's class she did it for, so I was sort of stressy about it. I really wanted her to do well because she wrote a good, interesting essay and I wanted her to get that across.

She seemed much more relaxed and happy afterwards. Me too.

I finally ordered my texts for the third of my courses next semester. It's always a sort of hard decision which Shakespeare texts to teach; if I taught out of an anthology, I could just figure it out as I wrote the syllabus. But I've abandoned the anthology in favor of paperback editions. They're a bit more expensive for students, but they're a heck of a lot better as editions, generally, and way easier on all our backs. I'm planning to further my quest of teaching every Shakespeare play by teaching All's Well for the first time next semester.

Other than that, I'm not planning to teach any new texts in any of my classes this coming semester. That's a big change for me, after teaching three new plays in one class, and new texts in each of the other classes this term.

Now up: grading, mostly senior work, most of it pretty good from my first impressions.

And I have to write a final exam. Oh, that.

One class is all graded, though I haven't done the spread sheet math.

A Weekend of Grading

I've been grading the final essays for the writing class this weekend; mostly, they're pretty good. A few are really good.

I switched around the assignments this semester so they turned in their research essay a couple weeks ago, and then we did a short reflective essay for the final essay. I was able to return the research essays and give them good feedback. And now I'm almost done with their reflective essays, and am giving good feedback on these. It worked out really well for me and the class, I think. (And I got the idea from a good colleague. Yay colleague!)

The thing about weekend grading is that it's flexible. I'm about to settle into the final few essays and other work to get it all done by tomorrow. On the weekend before finals, I have no classes to prep, no committee work to prepare for, just grading. (And an exam to write during the week.) It's amazing how much less stressful it makes the weekend.

I went skiing earlier, for the first time this season. The hip/thigh muscles that pull my leg forward don't get nearly enough exercise biking compared to skiing. And my elbows are sore from poling. I think I need to grip the poles more loosely. Yeah, loosely, as in relaxed. That's a tough one for me, but I was looking up about elbow soreness, adn this is the same soreness I get kayaking, and I think I probably grip too tightly in both cases. Maybe there's a tendon stretching exercise I can do to help it?

Last Day of Classes

My drama students did a really good job writing draft essay questions for that part of their exam. My goal for an exam essay question is that an okay student should be able to write an okay exam, while a student who's really worked hard and put things together should be able to write something that synthesizes material and shows their learning in some interesting way. So I have some more work to do, but they're on the way.

***

I'm tired of students putting work in my box late and pretending it's on time. Yes, my syllabus states that work is due in class. I know it's hard to actually print stuff out ahead. And staple technology is apparently well beyond some people. But I'm tired of the constant bits of lateness. And no, I'm holding the line today.

I'm tired of last minute excuses. You didn't participate in peer editing TWO weeks ago and you want me to somehow find a way for you to make that grade up today? Seriously? What do you suggest that would be fair to the people who put effort into peer editing?

I'm tired of students wondering why I haven't responded to their email while I'm in class, a meeting, or a conference with another student.

I'm tired of students who can't do basic percentages. It's like they know what percentages are, but when faced with figuring out their grades, they can't put the workbook math into real math or something. Well, some of them can, but others can't.

I'm just tired. I should be grading.

***

On the other hand, I just got an email from a colleague responding to my bemoaning the dearth of grading gnomes at my house. She said she's a few elves short of a workshop. I just laughed.

Not Electric Sheep

I woke from a dream at 4am. I'd dreamed about running; I was running, and was trying to cross a big bridge to get back to my starting point, but there was bridge construction that wasn't otherwise marked, so I was near the end of the bridge heading when I realized there was a huge gap and no way to get across. So I asked a worker, and he said I had to go back. And only then did I realize I'd basically been running on a freeway and hadn't noticed there were no cars on the bridge.

Also, I was running way better than I do in real life. My stride was smoother, and easier, and I was running way further. That was quite satisfying. It would be great if dreaming about running actually counted as running. I don't remember ever dreaming about biking, though.

And then suddenly I became deeply concerned with literacy in classical Rome. That concern turned to curiosity about their writing technologies. Did they use vellum? Papyrus? It seems weird to think of using stone, but then didn't the ancient cuniform writers use clay tablets? I asked The Wayward Classicist on his blog, so hopefully he'll be able to allay my concerns.

How did I get from not being able to cross a bridge (and what sort of weird Freudian interpretation does that get? And does it matter that I'm pretty sure I know which bridge it was, having grown up in a place of bridges and bridge dependency? Except somehow that bridge got translocated here, where it would basically take up the whole city.) to worrying about Roman literacy rates? I'm not quite sure. It's one of those weird 4am things.

There was also something else I was deeply worried about, but then I fell asleep and so I can't remember.

The Low Tide of My Patience

My patience is running low these days. I was going to say I was having a neap tide of patience, but I looked up neap tide; I'd thought a neap tide was the lowest of a low tide, but instead I find it's the lowest high tide. I love dictionaries.

We had a snow day, and I had to make some adjustments for final work. (You know, having it turned in the next class day, or making the final assignment optional because some people who couldn't do it because of the snow thing.) And now I'm inundated by people wanting to make sure that their special case is indeed, very special.

Some want to be assured that if they do this optional assignment, it can only help their grade. No, if someone does F work on the optional thing, it's an F, and unless your grade is already an F, it will tend to hurt it.

One wanted me to say whether s/he should do it or not, as if somehow I can predict what grade s/he'll get without seeing the work. I emailed back asking how the drafting and revision process was going so far. I haven't heard back. I'm guessing I won't get the optional assignment from this student.

I got emails on the snow day asking me to look over papers and give feedback. So I did. One of the students sent back an enthusiastic thank you with a couple specific questions. I felt really good about that. It was worth doing. The other didn't even bother to acknowledge that I'd read the paper. I didn't feel as good about that. (But it was still worth doing. At least I'm going to tell myself it was.)

Someone else desperately emailed me asking about his/her grade in the course. I wanted to tell the student to pull up his/her big kid pants and do the math because we'd gone over the math in class, and s/he has everything graded back, and I don't have my grade stuff here, nor do I memorize their grades. I didn't. Nope, I've learned that it's always better to answer an email like that after an hour of shoveling snow, when whatever sunshine/exercise chemicals are at their winter max for me. So I was polite, and suggested that while I didn't have the grade information at home, s/he could use the handout on figuring out grades to figure it out. She emailed me a polite and thankful response, so I'm glad I wasn't rude.

I was reading a group blog, and a guest poster is an undergrad taking a first year college course and complaining that some assignment isn't appropriate but is a grad level assignment. How does an undergrad in a first year course think s/he has more understanding about levels of assignments than someone who's actually been to grad school? I didn't write a response. I tried going out and digging some more snow, but even that didn't help, so I just clicked it closed.

It's cold outside, with a wind chill that makes it even colder. So I have to ask, does the wind chill just count for people and stuff (that is, living organisms that change their chemistry in some way to deal with temperatures), or would a piece of metal also be colder because of it were it to be hanging out in the wind?

Finally, I'd like to ask what stupid idiot forgot to get raisins at the grocery store so that I could at least make oatmeal raisin cookie dough to get myself through the snow day.

At this point, I don't even have patience with myself.

Snow Report

This is a self-portrait of me digging out. Yes, it snowed. I made the mistake of opening the back sliding door to toss out some seed for the juncos, and a load of snow fell into the house (it had been built up between the glass door and the screen door). Then the ice made the screen door come off its track and it's too iced up to get back on.

I don't think we even had a blizzard. (I looked up, and a blizzard is supposed to have winds of 35mph or higher, and mostly we didn't.) But it was darned windy and snowy anyway. Compared to the high Sierras, of course, we barely got snow. But it was plenty to dig through.

I put some seed on the deck for the juncos, and later, I saw a Downy Woodpecker actually land on the flat surface and pick up a big peanut piece. I think the hanging feeder and suet thing were just too windy for it, maybe? Anyway, I haven't seen Downy's land on the deck surface before. I'm guessing just because it's cold and windy doesn't mean you don't have to eat if you're a bird!

And now, back to student papers.

We Need Another Internet Law

You all know how there are ten internet "laws" right?

We need another one, maybe related to Godwin's law (that's the reference to Hitler and Nazi-ism one). I'm not quite sure how to word it, but it's gotta go like this:

When any feminist criticizes patriarchy or male privilege, no matter how gently, someone will tell her to lighten up or explain that feminists have no sense of humor.

So that's it, more or less, but it needs to be worded better.


As an aside, Twisty has taken time to explain that feminists do, indeed, appreciate good comedy.

Thinking Back about the Drama Course

I teach three courses a semester, in general--a writing course, a lower division course, and an upper division course. It can be hard to figure out the workloads for a given course, especially since I don't often teach the same course from one term to the next, or one year to the next, even (except for the writing course).

I'm trying to figure out a better way to balance the lower division course. I think I've assigned a tad more work than I should have (and thus given myself more grading), though I think each of the assignments has been valuable in itself.

Here's what they've had to do:

A short performance project
A short response to the performance project (writing)
A short response to seeing each of two plays (writing)
A short analytic essay (writing)
Midterm
Final
(Quizzes)

I think the four writing assignments could easily have been two, but which two should I have dropped?

I think having them see plays is really important for those who haven't been involved in theater; that's about half the class at least. But my sense is that students think a lot more about their experiences if they write about them. I think writing an analytic essay is important in developing analytic and critical thinking skills. Finally, the performance project is usually really wonderful to get students thinking about what they're doing, and again, they think more about it if they write something.

How much writing do you require in a lower level (freshman, sophomore) lit course?

In addition to the grading excess, I hurt myself this semester by teaching three plays I've never taught before: an American mid-century play, a play by an African writer, and the Ionesco. The American play was the least stretchy for me, but the others were really good experiences. I think I learned a lot and did some good teaching. Still, it's a lot of extra work. Were I to teach this course every year, I'd build a stronger repertoire within a few years; but I've taught it three times in 10 years, and not really regularly. Using plays the theater folks have chosen to perform is important, but it will always be likely to challenge my teaching repertoire for the class (since they seem to teach things other than Shakespeare for some reason!).

I'm feeling like I'm digging out of the grading burial (until I get three sets on Friday), so I'm starting to think about how to do better another time.

I Have a New Motto!

On the one hand, I'm feeling deeply disturbed.

On the other hand, I'm feeling pretty good about my teaching.

What's the text for today?

Shocking, Perhaps?

Dear Football Coach,

I have four members of your football team in my first year writing class. If I recall correctly, they've missed a total of four classes. That's pretty darned good.

In addition to being in class every day, each of them has done all the assignments in a timely manner. It would be nice if they didn't sit together at the back of the room, but they willingly move around for group work.

None of the four is exactly a shining example of active class participation, but each will respond when called on. And often enough, they have something smart and interesting to say when they respond; at the least, their responses indicate they've been following the discussion.

Two of the four have worked really hard on their writing and peer editing; the peer editing is especially impressive. They've really improved their writing, and their research papers are quite good.

In conclusion, you're doing something right. I hear about study sessions and fill in the progress reports, and I gather you're encouraging your team members to take their classes seriously and work hard. Each of these men in my class seems to have learned something about mutual respect, teamwork, and effort through their football experiences. So even though I gather the team has a losing record, I want to encourage you to keep up your good work.

Sincerely, Bardiac

ps. I'd be happy to have more of your football players in my classes.

A Basic Checklist for Turning in Papers

Sometimes, I just get so tired of telling students the same thing over and over, so I'm thinking of handing out a basic checklist. Here's the first draft.

1) Name. Put your name on the paper. Don't put just your first name, but also your surname. If you want to put the instructor's name, the class, and the date, too, yay you.

2) Title. Your paper should have a title, and that title should not be "Essay #2" or "Title of a Famous Piece of Art." Think of a title that communicates something about your paper. Unless otherwise instructed, center your title near the top of the page, not too far below your name. Don't put your own title in quotations marks, or italics, or in 24 point font.

3) Format. Use reasonable margins. 1 inch is good. Number your pages. Left justify your paper unless otherwise instructed.

4) Font. Use a reasonably sized font, say a 10, 11, or 12. Use a readable font, one that will inspire confidence in your reader.

5) Paragraphs. Indent paragraphs.

Don't add an extra space between paragraphs. If you have the latest version of Word, and it's set to add an extra space, change the setting.

Here's how to change that setting:

a. Open Word. (I start at the beginning.)
b. Click the "Page Layout" tab at the top.
c. About 2/3rds of the way to the right, find the "Paragraph" box. Set the "before" and "after" spacings to 0 pt.
d. Celebrate with me!

6) Sources. When you use a source, introduce it in some way, even if you're paraphrasing. Cite your sources at the end of the paper, in foot or end notes, or in whatever way is appropriate to your class. If you're in a literature class, it's likely that you need to use MLA. If you're in a social or natural sciences class, it's likely that you'll need to use APA. If you're not sure, ask your instructor!

Cite any source you use; give people credit for their ideas, words, and cultural productions (art, graphs, and so on).

If you didn't know something before the term began, then figure out how you know it now, and cite that. You can cite your textbook or a lecture.

7) Titles. In typescript, use underlining or italics for the titles of journals, magazines, newspapers, books, plays, films, TV series, long poems. Use quotation marks for the titles of articles, short stories, television series episodes, short poems. The general rule is that if something is published in a stand alone format, it gets underlined or italicized. If it's published as part of something else, it gets quotation marks.

Your own title doesn't get either.

8) Punctuation. If you're in the U.S., periods and commas go inside quotation marks, and we use double quotation marks unless we're quoting within a quotation.

9) Staple. Staple your paper in the upper left hand corner unless otherwise instructed. (With thanks to MommyProf [see comments]. See, even on a blog you can acknowledge other peoples' ideas!)

A Piece of Advice for All Writing Students

You can never go wrong citing your sources. Really.

If you paraphrase a bit from a play, cite it! If you read something in a textbook, cite it! If you interview someone, cite him/her!

Please, for the love of all that is Shakespeare, cite your sources.

This message brought to you by the letter A.

Little Things that Bug Me

We have a bookshelf full of free books in the hall near my office. We put books there for students to pick up, and (we hope) read and enjoy.

We also have numerous book buyers coming around; they come around and pay some minimum money for fairly new books we might have around that we don't want. Mostly, they're interested in freebie textbooks we've been sent that we didn't adopt, but that they can resell where someone else has adopted them. Okay, free enterprise and all that. (I tend to donate my books to the student organization with separates out the ones that might be useful for overseas donation and sells the rest off for money to mail the useful ones. If the book buyers were offering real money, I might be tempted to sell them. Most of what I have, they wouldn't want anyway.)

But it bugs me when the book buyer goes from my office to peruse the free shelf. It shouldn't, right? But it does.

***

We worked on thesis statements in the writing class today. One of the students had a word up, and didn't know what it meant. Not just wasn't sure about double meanings, but really hadn't thought about it at all.

It bugs me when people don't think about the words they use in a writing class.

***

It also bugs me when someone puts a thesis up in the writing class and then acts all bored by a basic question. If someone in class asks you for an example of something related to your thesis, you should have a better response than "I dunno" with a side of shrug.

In all honesty, I should not be thinking harder about your essay than you are at this point.