Excellent Movie

I highly recommend Gus Van Sant's Milk. See it immediately. Tell all your students to do so, no matter what you teach (hey, you remember that you teach *students* don't you?).

The film's content still resonates 30 years after Harvey Milk's murder. His message of hope is familiar to us, of course, but so, unfortunately, is the message of hate spread by some "religious" people. What I especially like is Milk's insistence that he wasn't the important thing: the movement was the important thing, the simple force of the simple *rightness* of the simple equality of all people. It's a simple, powerful, necessary message.

What's to learn?

I received a forwarded email, containing an article called "Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy: Stunning Break with Last Eight Years." No attribution with the email, no author or originating website or source. These absences made me suspicious, of course, and I suspected that the article might be a spoof.

But the article cited a University of Minnesota professor of presidential history, Davis Logsdon, not a name I recognized, so naturally I googled him.

Turns out the entire article was written by Andy Borowitz, a writer who skewers politics and popular culture. Like Stewart and Kolbert, Borowitz's satire asks us to be critical, to see stupidities, to think.

How can I use satire with my students to help them think critically? I have so many students who don't want to read to learn, who instead want to be told. They ask, "What's the point?" and "What am I supposed to learn?" and "What do *you* think - you're giving me the grade?"

Something to work on, as usual.

BOT Awards

How to get the word out? That's the challenge in any large institution, like our college or the system within which our college exists, the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. Such a communication challenge is especially difficult when the intended audience holds strong preconceptions about the message, as MnSCU faculty do about a terrific program created by the MnSCU Board of Trustees: the BOT Educator of the Year Award.

The preconception about this award is that once nominated, a faculty member must go through an onerous process of putting together a portfolio to document that excellence. However, the process doesn't have to be onerous at all: perhaps the (sorta cheesy) video below will motivate folks to see that?

Additions

So I thought I'd already ordered my books for next semester -- through the college bookstore's website, which is multi-layered, multi-stepped, multi-confusing.

A few days ago, I decided to add another book to my Engl 90 course, a terrific textbook called Considering Literacy by my most-excellent colleague Linda Adler-Kassner. I haven't read the entire text, but it seems perfectly suited for the course, which is supposed to help students develop college-level writing skills.

As I logged into our bookstore site, I found out that my previous order had never been processed: I don't know where the information went. I don't know why my previously ordered books did not appear. I don't know why.

Maybe I need to develop some "literacy" skills myself when it comes to reading/navigating websites, especially those designed without any consideration of users!

Curious

I received an unexpected email from a student today, a student with whom I spent 45 minutes in conference on Wednesday talking about the research question for our course's final research essay. I was actually looking forward to what the rough draft would be like for today's class workshop, but the student was absent. Now I know why:

email in total:
I wanted to inform you that I am dropping your class. I have felt that ever since you told me that it is undetermined as to whether or not I will pass this semester, it seems pointless to take that risk and have it affect my GPA. I have spoken with a number of students about what has happened throughout the semester and have found out that I am not alone. I am very disappointed with my decision, but I feel that I am left no other options; which you proved to me more thoroughly on Wednesday with our meeting when you said that you can’t guarantee that my paper will be successful because you don’t understand my viewpoint - I left your office feeling very disappointed and very frustrated. Since then, I have had time to think about my decision over the weekend and still did not know up until a few minutes ago, but I plan to meet with a counselor this week to discuss what has happened and I will let you know if there is further information that I need in order to drop.

I suppose it's good news that the student is talking with a counselor. Perhaps it's required since it turns out that my office mate has had this student in class three times before, and the student has already dropped FYC twice: my class was the third attempt at taking the course. Perhaps the student is on probation or something.

I'm especially curious about the "guarantee" language: I wonder how many other instructors ever guarantee that a student "will be successful." I wonder if there's a "money-back" clause now in applications.

The New Age

Associated Press writer Beth Fouhy has an excellent, thought-provoking news piece in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Obama to pioneer Web outreach as president."

The opening lines begin like this:

"Transition officials call it Obama 2.0 — an ambitious effort to transform the president-elect's vast Web operation and database of supporters into a modern new tool to accomplish his goals in the White House. If it works, the new president could have an unprecedented ability to appeal for help from millions of Americans who already favor his ideas, bypassing the news media to pressure Congress."

Despite its seeming cheesiness, I like the "Obama 2.0" catch-phrase for all it signifies: the soon-to-be-leader of the free world recognizes the age in which we live, the ways in which we are connected, the media within which we exist. It's about time.

Here are a couple more quotations, perhaps offering teachable moments for us rhetoric profs:

• Obama's team is determining how best to convert his army of online activists into a viral lobbying and communications machine. Staffers are reluctant to discuss specifics, but Obama clearly is poised to become the first truly "wired" president of the digital age.

• The transition operation has a new Web site, www.change.gov, designed for anyone who wants to post a message of congratulations, offer suggestions for the new administration or apply for a government job. People are invited to submit their names and e-mail addresses, with the goal of creating a new list for the president-elect to tap when he wants to communicate directly about a program he's promoting or seek help urging members of Congress to support legislation he's proposed.

• [D]irect online contact with voters could . . . present a challenge for reporters covering Obama, since the new president will in many ways be able to bypass traditional media while also taking advantage of it to reinforce his online messaging.

  "He can do a half-hour YouTube address every Saturday, addressing millions," [Joe] Trippi said. "The networks would never give the president that much television time each week, but the press is still going to have to cover what he says on YouTube."

  Aides say the Obama team will staff a robust "new media" operation out of the White House and plans a complete overhaul of the White House Web site to make it more interactive and user-friendly. On the campaign trail, Obama promised to use the Internet to make his administration more open, such as offering a detailed look at what's going on in the White House on a given day or asking people to post comments on his legislative proposals.

How about a writing assignment that asks students to analyze the changes to the White House website? Or to post a comment and track the responses it generates? Students could write to the *President* of the United States as a writing assignment! It's amazing.

Didn't do it

Of the twenty-two students in my afternoon FYC class, only two came with the completed homework today: a ten-item annotated bibliography. They'd had a week to do it.

Some said they didn't understand what "annotated" meant (okay, didn't hear me talk about it in class, didn't read their textbook). One said she didn't know what "item" meant (okay, I should have said "ten-source bibliography" I guess). Four hadn't been in class a week ago to get the assignment (indeed, have missed the last two weeks and so were woefully behind in our whole research process toward the researched essay).

As a result, I had to completely revamp what I wanted to do in class. We did *look* at this rubric for evaluating sources, but we couldn't *do* it or *use* it with our own sources because folks hadn't prepared.

How are they going to do their essays in the next two weeks? The past two weeks were supposed to be about finding and reading sources.

Grading, Grading

Grading never ends: conferences tomorrow to hand back all the essays I've graded today. Some of the conversations are going to be tough because it seems to me that I've done more research/writing on some students' research questions than they have. Not good.

What do I say to someone who dismisses out-of-hand Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe (and admits to not understanding it) yet embraces whole-heartedly Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle?

Good news

Courtney's doing okay - considering. She's got friends and family around her, and as she said: with the hospitalizations and illnesses these past few years, she's been preparing for this end all along. She's amazingly philosophical.

The memorial service is Saturday. My colleague Brian and I will attend for sure.

Another death

One of the students I'm closest to at Century is Courtney, the current president of the Q&S Club I advise. This morning, I was on campus at 7:40 to pick up Courtney and possibly another student in order to drive them to the Minnesota OUT! Campus Conference in Mankato.

After waiting almost 20 minutes for the uncharacteristically tardy Courtney, I called her cell and got her sister: Courtney wouldn't be attending the conference because her father'd died that morning. Courtney had gone in to wake him for a ride to campus and found him.

I'm devastated. I'd met him once -- he'd tried to hand me a $20 for gas money when I drove Courtney home from Pride this June -- and he was a kind, odd man. The two of them lived together, and I can't even imagine how Courtney is going to cope. Her family is fragmented, so I just can't imagine. And I have so little knowledge of how to act in this kind of situation.

Just for fun

Any cat fans out there?

From my colleague Brian.

What a week

I have to say that I've been nervous since my last post: I wasn't sure about the Presidential election outcome. I still remember the shock of 2000, of going to bed confident that Gore would be our President and waking up to the horror of Bush. Some friends had asked what I would do if Obama didn't "win"; I would joke about moving to Canada, but seriously I started quaking when contemplating a non-Obama future.

(This week, I've had a seriously hard time focusing on work, and I'm behind grading student assignments. I haven't talked with them at all about the election specifically (too many students with huge McCain Palin stickers on their notebooks), but we have had many discussions and exercises about detecting argument moves, conducting rhetorical analysis, uncovering logical fallacies. That's the most I could manage; I suppose I was fearful I'd have to engage in some kind of argument with a person whose strongly held values come from their parents.)

This year, I watched the formerly-red states turn blue on the big screen TV at my friend's house, watching the numbers roll in with my politic son and his smart friend (masters degree from Brown in public affairs and public policy). It's terrific to see history happening with smart, like-minded people, to watch a Harvard law grad give a calm, intelligent speech that suggests the calm, intelligent decision-maker and leader he will be.