Midterm exam

I'm sitting in class waiting the last 40 minutes for the three students who are still writing an exam (oh, now Katrina's done, stapling forcefully, ready to go). Matthew gets up to sharpen his pencil - again. Kristi tilts her head to put her hair behind her ear, drink from a Nalgene.

The exam wasn't my best. I hate when I don't think I've asked good questions. The essay questions, especially, had a couple of clunkers, although the one that I added at the last minute seems to be the most popular: "Which one of the works we've read so far this semester has helped you begin to answer the questions we began the course with: What is America? Who are Americans? What does it mean to 'be American'?" Our of five question choices and 30 students, 15 students chose this one! I suppose that makes sense in an American Lit course (post Civil War lit).

I don't think the exam was hard, especially - but we'll see what the think. :-)

Committee work

Part of any faculty member's job, a part not many non-faculty people know about, is service to the institution. One form this service takes is committee work: joining and participating on committees that make up the infrastructure of the institution, committees that do the red-corpuscle work, delivering oxygen to the institution's vital organs so it continues to exist.

At universities and colleges with a traditional tenure-and-ranking system (with assistant-, associate-, and full-professor levels), this work is quantified and used for granting tenure and approving promotions. Some institutions even suggest the appropriate allocation of a faculty member's time: 30% of your work should be devoted to service, for instance, with 20% to teaching and 50% to research.

At a community college, however, this vital work is not required or rewarded in any way. At my college, for example, no faculty member is required to do anything at all other than be in a classroom for a certain amount of time each week and post some office hours when s/he is supposed to be available on campus outside of class.

So those of us who are temperamentally wired to contribute to our community, to make our workplaces work, choose to do so for the personal satisfaction it affords.

Or something like that. Maybe we choose committee work because we're easily bored and need variety.
Or maybe teaching our classes is easy and we need challenging work to fill our time.
Or maybe we crave conversation with human beings who are not our students.
Or maybe we used to have a research agenda but now don't (because it's not rewarded at a community college) and so we channel that research energy into other activities.
Or maybe we feel guilted into this work by our deans or department chairs.
Or maybe we feel an obligation to improve the health of the institution within which we work.
Or maybe we're adding lines to our CV so we can apply for jobs other places.
Or maybe a dean *is* rewarding us in a non-fiscal way for our work.
Or maybe we just like committees.

In my 20+ years in higher education, I've always been on at least two committees a year. The one I'm currently on, which is important and I'm very, very happy to be on, met for the first time this week. As I listened and participated in our conversation, I was reminded of a quotation, "All theory is autobiography," which I had read was attributed to Nietzsche (although googling it, I found Valery also credited, and the quotation as "every theory is autobiography" -- I'll have to do some more digging).

Thinking back to committees I've been on, this quotation also applies to decision-making: all *decisions* are autobiographical, in that we often decide something is the right way to go because we've experienced it before. Even in higher ed, where we'd hope that folks would make decisions based on logic or empirical evidence or objective reasoning because that's what we purport to teach, we are still human beings who make decisions based on association, personal experience, and our own reasons.

Plato and Aristotle -- and Quintilian and Cicero -- were right: logical reasoning *must* be taught formally, extensively, rigorously because it does not come most easily to human beings. We weak humans rely on logic least often when making decisions, yet to be truly educated, we should rely on it most often. It's a constant and ongoing project, this "education" thing. And ultimately, *that's* why I, personally, do committee work: for the education.

Free online learning?

So many kinds of online learning exist, obviously. I always use a CMS (Desire2Learn) with my courses at Century and at Metro State because it's what my colleges support. In the past, I've used other tools with my students (Yahoo! Groups, for example, and online tutorials for grammar/mechanics, and David A. McMurrey's online tech writing course as a supplement for my tech writing students). But I haven't really ever taken an online course myself - not wholly, just short-term workshops.

But lately, I've been wanting to learn HTML, something I know about and sort of know how to do, but not really. Today, I happened upon a great site called W3Schools for learning all kinds of things related to web building. The site even quotes 13th-century philosopher William of Ockam!

I'm enjoying playing around with the HTML tutorials, but like any language, it'll take me a while to achieve anything like fluency.

C & W Online

Here's the website for the 2008 Computers and Writing Online conference. This year's title: "Exposing the Sole of the Academy with Web 2.0: A Move Toward Radical Transparency."

Click around the site for great information about technology.

Plato's "Gorgias"

At the bottom of this blog's front page, I've listed books I've been reading lately: some textbooks, but mostly the "fun" reading I do in my "spare" time. (I do forget to add some of the things I read, but that's par for the course.)

Anyway, right now, I'm re-reading "Gorgias" and I'm not even sure why. I have always liked the campy opening scene, with Socrates coming late to a dinner party at Gorgias's home, arriving with his young pal, Chaerephon, who made them late because he was shopping(!). Another young man in the dialogue, Polus, gets a lot of Socrates's attention by taking Socrates's bait and answering questions that box himself in a corner, the corner Socrates wants him in.

But Socrates is a bit of a bully, I think, in this dialogue: he shifts the grounds for some of his questions, playing word games to entrap his interlocutors. In fact, the whole interaction seems to be a huge display of testosterone, a kind of ancient Greek antler fight between bucks. The different types of masculinity try to best the master masculinity. But he, through his superior (?) reasoning power, is able to emasculate them all by revealing their faulty thinking.

So why am I even bothering to read it, you ask? Well, I've been curious about the uses of analogy lately: when and how they're used. This dialogue includes SO many that are fun to study. It also contains, at least the translation I have (in Bizzell and Herzberg's The Rhetorical Tradition), plenty of casual language and metadiscourse that enables me to see the dialogue played out on stage: what would Socrates and Chaerephon be carrying when they arrive at Gorgias's house after shopping? What jewelry accessorizes Polus? How portly is Gorgias? And Callicles wears a vandyke for sure.

Words are fun

Scroll through the visual representation of the alphabet on this blog: abcdefghijkslmnopqrstuvwxyz by Dan Waber. He calls it an "acrylabet."

Poetry's power

I'm a poetry fan, and I like to teach students about sonnets: they're an example of formal poetry that most students recognize (think Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets From The Portuguese, especially "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"); they're also more sophisticated than the nursery-rhymey four-line stanzas that students think of when they think of formal rhymed poetry.

The writer who gets me most excited about sonnets is Edna St. Vincent Millay, who's a master of the Italian form (also called "Petrarchan" after the 14th-century Italian poet who perfected the form, some say). Sure, she uses ten-syllable lines instead of the strictly Petrarchan 7 or 11 syllables, but she uses the classic rhyme scheme: abba abba for the octave, cdc dcd for the sestet.

She also uses the classic content structure: a problem or predicament in the octave and resolution to the problem in the sestet, with the "turn" at line 9. The whole point of sonnets is to juxtapose contrasting ideas, to subvert expectations. Millay's a master at that. But we have to read her sonnets slowly, looking for the grammatical sentences instead of end lines to find her meaning: she's bold!

Here's "Sonnet xli" from 1923 - imagine giving a one-night-stand this kind of brush-off!

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,--let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

What I love about this poem - and Millay in general - is her full acceptance of her corporeality: she's joyful and insistent about being fully human, with all the contradictions and complications that come with living.

Applause for community colleges

On a website called Education Update Online, you'll find the following article from 2005: "Study Reveals Americans Support Expanding Community College System to Serve More Students". Although the article does not make clear when the study took place, with whom, or by whom, and although I can't say I find this particular publication very academic, I *can* say that the article helps me continue with my argument: that community colleges are *colleges* and should, therefore, be funded as such, supported as such, and run as such (rather than high schools or trade schools).

So I googled around the web to find the source of the 2005 article. It's based on a 2004 survey (survey and answers here) conducted by an organization now called Community College Central. This organization has also published an interesting article called "Higher Education More Important Than Ever To Americans, But Record Numbers Fear That Costs May Prevent Access For Many Qualified Students", first published by The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education to complement the 2005 article.

Food for thought as I consider what my colleague Kris told me today: that new full-time hires in the Minnesota community college system must take courses/workshops in the philosophy of community college teaching, among other things. This additional education is new. A good idea, sure, but it seems to me that all faculty, not just new full-time folks, should take it, especially when many of our new full-time folks come from our part-time ranks.

Budget Analysis

My son pointed me to this website, The Budget Graph: A Visual Guide to Your Federal Taxes, which contains a poster representing the U.S. federal budget.

As a technical writing teacher, I'm fascinated by the visual design of this poster. I'm reminded of Edward Tufte's work, especially The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information. (Equally important is his critique of PowerPoint, a version of it here:"PowerPoint is Evil" reprinted at Wired online.)

The graphic designer who created this poster, Jess Bachman, is a 26-year-old who invites folks to "spread the word" about his creation. Please do!

Persepolis

The book Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is Century's Common Book for this year, the first year of the Common Book project. It's a great idea: all college students, staff, and faculty are encouraged to read this book and incorporate it into their courses. We've had great preparation and support for the Common Book, such as summer workshops and presentations by Century faculty experts, a college common book blog, and lists of resources for teaching and learning. These resources and events were created, scheduled, and managed by the tireless and creative colleague, Cullen Bailey Burns.

Amazingly, Cullen was able to get Satrapi to come to Century's campus on April 10! Quite a coup, since Satrapi will be promoting her movie Persepolis, which is based on both our Common Book and Persepolis 2.

I saw the movie this weekend and can't recommend it highly enough. The animation is simple yet sophisticated, layered and nuanced: it takes talent to convey subtle emotions in the eyes of an almost-cartoon face, tweaking eyebrows and mouth sizes to show determination, confusion, fear, ennui. The stylized marionettes based on playing-card images perfectly capture the house-of-cards qualities of the army, leaders, soldiers. The charcoal and watercolor backgrounds are beautiful.

Art

I attended an excellent art opening this evening - my friend Mary Hark, formerly professor at Macalester College in St. Paul and currently professor at UW-Madison.

Her recent work comes out of her year in Kumasi, Ghana, on a Fulbright.

Need a class discussion?

Then watch this video:

"The Story of Stuff" is a 20-minute video argument that needs to be seen by everyone!

It's great for many, many reasons. For one thing, it'll explain to you why our government wants to send some citizens/taxpayers an "economic stimulus" check of a few hundred dollars but doesn't want to contribute an equal amount to things like education, health care, transportation infrastructure, etc. It'll also help understand something behind the partisan wrangling about the economic stimulus package.

Watch it until the end, too, to see ways to act.

New Look!

I'm trying for a cleaner look that still has space for the widgets and links I keep adding. What do you think of this design?

More new finds

I'm not sure what to call the paths I've been taking lately to find new and interesting information on the web: following hyperlinks? trails? serendipity? ADHD?

At any rate, I've found a blog called CyberEnglish today, which is written by an English teacher who's also interested in technology.

I've also watched "Text & Technologies," a talking-head lecture on YouTube. Very odd experience, but I've learned something, I think.

And finally, a person can find TONS of educational stuff online. Try this site "Free Video Lectures" for short courses in everything from Anatomy to Electronics to Philosophy to Web Design.