On another note

I have been considering whether or not to post the YouTube video of a bunch of boys (some quite young) harrassing a man after Sunday's Pride festival. Now that MPR has written a news story about it, I'll pass it along.

If you check out the original YouTube video, you'll see that some of the commenters just turn their hatred on the Somali boys: as if two wrongs make a right.

And one comment confirms Suzanne Pharr's assertion that homophobia is a weapon of sexism: the comment reads "you have to feel sorry for the guy, but in the few times you see him speak, he's handling himself like a 14-year old girl." Clearly, acting like a 14-year-old girl is NOT a good thing. Right.

Wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world where acting like a 14-year-old girl was a COMPLIMENT? Something to aspire to? To admire?

No Dumb Questions

This weekend I "worked" (it was just as much fun as it was work) for the college at the Twin Cities Pride Festival. Although I was pretty frustrated on Thursday (schlepping boxes, a tent, a table drape -- all at three different locations on the campus, all involving parking in weird and even prohibited spaces, all while in a long skirt on a hot-and-humid day), by Sunday evening with the re-packing of my car I was happy and energized, reminded why I do this important work.

I probably talked with nearly a hundred people: some current students, some alums and former students, some really interested prospective students, a few faculty members, and many random interesting folks.

The stories I heard made me think about this good website, "No Dumb Questions," which provides video clips of LGBTQA folks -- stories we all need to hear. Here's a good example:

Woolf

Virginia Woolf's brilliance still shines out through the Hollywood hype that's become her life story: a testament to her genius. Although students wanted to know if I thought Woolf was bi-polar (why does it matter, I asked back), they also wanted to wrestle with her formidable imagination and intellect.

We talked about "A Room of One's Own" today, and despite the students' insistence on talking *way* too much about the title's significance (yeah, duh), the conversation did turn around to her important honoring of the legacy of women who wrote despite *not* having that room (Austen, Bronte, Bronte, Eliot, Cavendish, Behn).

Her work gets better every time I read it: at 20, I didn't understand much but knew I liked her non-fiction more than her fiction. Now I think Mrs. Dalloway is one of the most *true* novels I've read.

What a great opening line: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

Data!

I've just found out about a couple of pretty amazing websites:
"City-Data.com" -- type in your zip code to find out TONS of information about where you live
"Wolfram/Alpha" -- type in names, dates, equations, you name it

The web is becoming a space/place where we can find out almost any countable thing . . . which means we have to remind ourselves of a sign hanging in Alfred Einstein's office: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

This sentence is reversed at a terrific website: Philanthropy Potluck, the blog of the Minnesota Council on Foundations.

MIA

This morning's class meeting held some surprises for me: the good one was the *excellent* activity our facilitators devised for discussing Jane Austen's "Love and Freindship" (a parody Austen wrote at age 15!). They had pairs of students write *response* letters to Laura, imagining what Marianne might write. Most of the young women students were *really accurate* in their Marianne voices: a pleasure.

The not-so-good surprise had to do with the presence of three students who haven't been to class in a l...o...n...g time:

• One had only attended the first day, May 26, and has missed the last five class meetings (out of 17 total meetings).
• One emailed me yesterday to say she'd had strep throat AND had just moved (ahem) to explain why she's missed the last three classes. I read and responded to that email yesterday afternoon.
• One emailed me last night at 1:00 a.m. to say she'd been in Chicago (her brother was injured and her parents, who are on vacation in France, asked her to go check on him) to explain why she's missed the last four classes. I read that email after class this morning.

Now I'm not quite sure what to do. I thought they'd all dropped! None of them has posted on the class discussion board. They don't seem to have read the attendance policy for our course, and when they asked about it, I couldn't remember the nitty-gritty details myself (I tweak my policies for every course, depending upon the time-frame and subject matter, but the overall idea is that I allow a certain number of absences for any reason before consequences kick in).

Evidently, my attendance policy this summer semester (for a six-week course that's supposed to be the equivalent of a sixteen-week semester) isn't clear -- here's what the syllabus says [emphasis in original]:

"You can earn up to ten (10) attendance points per face-to-face class period, which I determine based on your attendance and participation, for a total of 170 possible points. If you must miss a face-to-face class meeting, you can recoup some of those lost points by contributing a substantial discussion board posting within 24 hours for the class period you missed (by 8:00 a.m. on the day after the missed class). This posting can earn you up to five (5) points. Missing two class periods without posting to the discussion board will cause your final grade for the course to drop by one whole grade. Missing four or more classes without posting to the discussion board will result in an automatic F grade for the course. Missing four or more classes even with posting to the discussion board will cause your final grade for the course to drop one whole grade."

I suppose all that is confusing when you look at it in a big block of prose like that -- I should format the information in a box/chart/table or something. But the numbers seem pretty clear to me, and we note this paragraph on our first day of class when we review the course policies.

Also, I guess it's just fine for students to attend a course that they've already earned an F in . . . some learning can still take place (not that taking a class has anything to do with learning for most summer students -- ouch, I'm cynical!). But most of the students said they were taking this summer literature course because it "was cheaper" (two students are earning master's degrees at two of our local private colleges, and this 200-level community college literature course somehow fulfills requirements for them!).

Hmmm. Thoughts?

Frankenstein

Video clip of the 1994 Kenneth Branagh movie: much more faithful to Mary Shelley's novel than the Boris Karloff versions! Although the relationship between Robert and Victor isn't quite right, at least Robert Walton shows up -- as does the icy North Pole!