We begin

Today's the start of the fall semester: faculty and staff gather for our three-day "in-service" sessions where we learn about the new light bulbs purchased by the college, the special ink used to print the reams-and-reams of marketing materials because we don't have enough students.

My first year at the college, these "duty days" (awfully perfect name almost all faculty persist in calling them) included a wonderful and inspirational talk about teaching: Chet Meyers reminded me why I teach, why I love it, and why it's important to remember these things. We haven't had such a motivating beginning since. *Sigh*.

Georgia on my mind

I've been to Tbilisi, Georgia, about 10 years ago on a research trip with the American International Health Alliance (a branch of USAID that is now defunct, from what I've heard). My research partner and I spent about four days in that city, interviewing doctors and other medical professionals (medical school professors, hospital "chiefs" and technology experts).

During our stay, I remember excellent food and a city that was pleasantly brownish, dusty streets competing with a few dusty trees leafing out to green, not much grass, and a few really stunning old buildings and cemeteries that reflected the long history of a people who'd lived in these mountains. (See some accurate photos here from an interesting blogger.) I remember a proud, intelligent people, professional and knowledgeable about the West, ready to jump into the 21st century.

Our hosts took us Americans on a picnic one afternoon, van-ride through the countryside to a lake surrounded by a thinned forest, no beach but a swimable lake where families were picnicking like us: blanket spread with the familiar flat bread, cheese, sausage, tomatoes, two kinds of pesto/mushroom spread made with wild greens, fruit, wine, coca cola and fanta. Many Georgian folks swam in their undergarments, but not our hosts, some of whom were wearing high heels in the woods. And I was the only American woman to swim, which made me popular with the fellows.

The Georgian people were my favorite of all the folks we met in our three-week, eight-country tour: I said to them that their country would be the only one I'd consider bringing my family to so we could hike to the castle/church/city buildings from the 9th century, eat the famous soup and bread-with-goat-cheese baked into it, shop along the tree-lined market street in Tbilisi. I wonder if I'll get the chance to do so? Maybe I'll make the khachapuri and kharcho myself.

Text Message Abbreviations in Irish

(Click here or above.)

Thanks, Omniglot - The Blog (not to be confused with its parent, Omniglot: Writing Systems & Languages of the World)

What's old is new

I found myself in an online article from the Wall Street Journal called "When Lit-Crit Mattered."

I'm not usually a reader of the WSJ, but this link was provided by "Arts & Letters Daily," a helpful, informative online "service of The Chronicle of Higher Education."

The article reviews the book Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, a collection of essays about New Criticism edited by Garrick Davis.

Reading the summary of New Critics' commitments and practices confirmed for me what I've always suspected but didn't quite know: I was trained in New Criticism. I've been a close reader of texts for most of my life, and those skills were honed by literature professors at St. Kate's and Penn State. At the U of M's rhetoric department, close reading became "discourse analysis" as a research method. I was also encouraged to read *everything* using such a method, including non-canonical authors thanks to my professors who practiced if didn't overtly teach feminist and critical theory. So my education didn't suffer from the narrowness-of-canon that New Critics are accused of perpetuating.

Because my grad school experiences were interrupted by child-raising, I missed the intense training in things like the cultural-studies-type of literary theory, structuralism, or deconstruction. Therefore, my classroom activities center around the ways-of-reading I found most effective. I've taught my own students critical reading practices that foreground the text even though students most often want to foreground the authors' lives as a way to understand the text. I've never encouraged that because it seems to take all the power out of an imaginative work, and the human imagination is what we praise in literature, if you ask me, not the life led by the author.

Another book for me to read in my spare time.

As we end

The summer session class meets for the last time tomorrow night. Despite the fact that the syllabus, the calendar, and the class website say our final will be ONLINE, not during the last class meeting, students were surprised last night to find out that the final class meeting would not be an exam.

Just goes to show the power of precedent: the midterm exam was in-class with a short-essay portion that could be taken home and returned online.

The way I set up my courses, students can take either the midterm or the final exam (or take both and the highest score will count). So students who did poorly on the midterm want to take the final; oddly enough, these students are the ones who didn't get that our last class meeting is an *actual class* not the exam.

Just goes to show that the weaker students are weaker in more areas than one: they're not great readers, writers, or planners.

I have one who was going to skip the last class because s/he's working at WE Fest. Another student missed last night and was hoping to miss tomorrow too, in effect taking a 15/16-week literature course in 5 weeks (and using it to substitute for another course at her/his home university where the course would have cost about $2800.00 instead of $450.00).

Hmmm . . . maybe I've got it wrong: maybe these students are very good planners . . . ! At any rate, I've answered four panicked emails today from students who need extensions or something because of their life situations and the grades they've earned this semester. I do wish I could encourage more responsible behavior on the part of students: how do others help students stay current with the course requirements, short of hand-holding and acting like the students' mother? I'm just not interested in that (mis)understanding of so-called "ethic of care" pedagogy.

What does this sentence mean?

Here's the opening sentence from a student's "field trip report," where s/he is supposed to analyze the experience of going to an independent bookstore, Amazon Bookstore Cooperative, and connect it to the course we've been in: Engl 2061 - Women's Literature: British and Colonial:

"There has been a long, withstanding tradition of preserving women through literature."

I have to say that I get images of orange marmalade in my head . . . :-) And what word should the "withstanding" in that sentence be? I can't figure that one out at all.

Just for More Fun

The Onion Radio News has radio podcasts. Here's the "Rules Grammar Change" from yesterday, Aug. 2, 2008. (Warning: the sound is loud!)

Just for Fun

From the techrhet list: sharing a goofy video from College Humor -- it's called Font Conference, but it's really a little super-hero story. Check out the font chosen for the hero -- and the font chosen for the villain -- not to mention the poor victim!

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

In Class Demonstrations

The brief post from yesterday was typed on-the-fly in our classroom as I was doing a bit on technology: the opportunities and limits of web searching/web sources.

Because we were talking about "colonialism," we googled in different ways: the web, blogs, scholar, images, videos (almost all of these new to students, who are used to clicking the first google hit, usually wikipedia, which some consider an unreliable source -- we did change the wikipedia entry for colonialism to say it was the name of my pet golden retriever; in about 90 seconds, we got a message saying that our addition looked "unconstructive.").

To see if the Google blog list would be updated with my own blog's mention of colonialism, I asked students to give me something to say. That's when Mike said, "Colonialism is good."

We never got back to seeing how long it took for our post to show up on Google's blogs list, but it's there now, WAY down the list.

Classroom discussion

Tonight in class we're talking about technology in teaching. One of my students has said, "Colonialism is good." We're trying to find balanced sources on the web.

What to do

I'm curious about what folks do when faced with a academic dishonesty issue, one I've wondered about in the past and now has occurred again today:

I've had students deliberately, knowingly plagiarize, and when I tell them that I will be following the consequences for this act (student earns an F for the course), the students withdraw from the course. That way, a W shows up on their transcripts instead of an F.

What to do, if anything, about this inaccuracy? Oddly enough, I had this situation occur last year with a fellow going into *law enforcement* -- not quite a rule-follower, that fellow.

Pretty good exam

The midterms are almost graded -- one of the students earned 97 of 100 points! I'll look forward to the second half of the "semester" if this good work keeps up.

Which way to approach . . .

. . . Jane Eyre? So many possibilities, so little time.

And I can't even trust that all students have read the novel: they'll come to class to find out what I or others say about it so that they'll know what'll be on the midterm exam. Another summer session quandry.

This YouTube video by Zuxana of Slovakia compares three versions of the famous "falling off his horse" scene, which is the first time Jane Eyre meets Rochester, although she doesn't know it's him. The variety of interpretation might interest my students . . . .

My "pretty okay" class

Teaching in summer is whirl-wind: compress sixteen weeks into six and call it an equivalent? I don't think so, especially when it comes to a literature course where one must read -- really read -- the texts and not just the SparkNotes for the texts. One of my colleagues at the U of M even called a lit course in the compressed summer session "unethical."

Interestingly, the course is full of non-Century students, at least three of whom already have degrees and one of whom is currently a high school teacher getting some continuing ed credits (he's taught for a dozen years, so I'm curious about his take on my style). None of the students is especially bright, although most are perfectly nice. No one stands out as a pleasure to work with -- one or two seem eager but not very skilled or practiced at reading or talking about reading. A couple make LOTS of excuses all the time. A couple never seem to do any of the course reading. But another couple of them may surprise me.

Most of the non-Century folks are from local private colleges, earning their "gen ed" credits where it's cheap. That feels a bit funny because their *experience* is cheap, too: a thin, diminished experience with literature when a college education should include a rich, robust experience with all that literature reveals/teaches/brings/invokes/stimulates.

But I'm a liberal arts gal, one not interested in "consuming" education. I'm out of step with my times, really. But I have to say I'm okay with that.

Good colleagues

This weekend, I worked hard for the college, making good impressions, as did my wonderful faculty colleague Sue Powell from Nursing and my extraordinary student colleague Courtney Kokkler.

Both women hung in there when the other two volunteers didn't show up.  Both women spoke eloquently and informatively about the college's programs.  

Our booth's visitors picked up all of the admissions information and fun stuff I brought -- as well as almost 350 pens printed with the Q&S at Century student club logo.  "The best pens at the Park," I shilled, telling the truth.

I spent over $10.00 just on Smarties candy this year, over 500 pieces. "We're a college; have a smartie" I said on Saturday.  "We're a college; have a smartie, be a smarty" I said on Sunday, thanks to the talented Jeanne Cornish from Metro State.

Getting ready to get back

The first task of my return after sabbatical happens before my official return.  This weekend I will again, for the fourth year, staff the Century table at Twin Cities Pride, one of the largest GLBTQ festivals in the nation.  Check out this documentary video!  

I do so in my capacity as faculty advisor to the student club, Q & S at Century.  The advisor who has been taking my place this last year is not interested.  I've managed to find three wonderful faculty volunteers and two student volunteers.  I'll be working most of the weekend myself, I think.

For the last four years, the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Diversity and Multicultural Division has reserved six or eight tables for MnSCU institutions.  Century's been a regular, along with Metro State, MCTC, Bemidji, and Moorhead.  I've also seen Anoka-Ramsey, Inver Hills, and Dakota County send folks.  

All of these institutions send their Admissions staff people, the folks whose job it is to attend community festivals and events in order to promote the college and encourage new students to attend.  Our Admissions office does not.  The director believes, rightly, that the staff cannot be everywhere at once and must select which events to attend.  But the rationale is odd:  "Admissions [staff members] attend events which will have the best yield potential for Century College in terms of application and enrollment numbers."  

My question: how can an event that attracts almost 425,000 people, most of them under 40, not be the "best yield potential"?  

Berks Conference

I attended the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians yesterday at the U of Minnesota. Huge attendance! The session I attended, "Before and After Sexuality: Rethinking Continuity and Change in Lesbian History," helped me think more fully about a course I'll be teaching this fall, WGST 1071: Introduction to GLBT Studies. The course is interdisciplinary, but I'm not a historian or a social scientist, so I've come at the course as a literature person who's learning on her own about the issues/approaches/questions in the other disciplines.

I've taught the course three times already, and I do try to establish with students that GLBT Studies looks at history, but it also examines definitions: what GLBT means and to whom and who gets to decide what the categories entail. This session helped me think through the entire problem of categories, the problem of asserting a historical identity, such as "lesbian," when those identities didn't exist (although behaviors may have existed that are the same as current behaviors that determine identities).

The session helps me with something I've been trying to emphasize with students: that GLBT people -- or people who now fit under the current handy rubric of GLBT -- have always existed all over the world: GLBT Studies is the study of such people in order to learn more about human beings as a whole.

Not-so-Good book, Good book

Narrative voice always charms me: in the beginning of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, the narrator beguiles with simple exposition, seemingly profound in his observations because of their easy clarity. But the novel doesn't ascend from that point; instead, the story slows to a watery ending, thin as broth. Disappointing, but it's just a first novel by Dinaw Mengestu.

On the other hand, The Yiddish Policemen's Union charms AND sustains that charm with its thick stew of dialect-smeared complexity. An entire layered world created out of whole cloth, it's a testament to the mature imagination of its author, Michael Chabon.

A New Resource

I was online ordering an examination copy of Graff and Birkenstein's They Say/I Say, and on the Norton Website I found a GREAT companion site: Norton/Write. The exercises are especially good and include immediate feedback/scoring.

Give some of them a try!

A Bit of Bragging

I simply must post this email message I received last week from a colleague: makes my day -- no, my semester!

Julie
Just thought I'd pass along a positive comment from a student in your Lit 342 [American Literature] course. He's an Individualized BA student that I've had in PRSP 301 and PRSP 499 (and was my advisee). He's very technically focused and in the military. He was really lacking the "liberal arts" component of his BA and I encouraged him to take Lit 342 to expand his horizons.

He just emailed me to thank me for recommending this "great course with a great instructor." It's clear that you opened his mind to literature when he was very reluctant to expand his perspectives in that direction. It makes me happy to work with colleagues who are genuinely expanding our student's minds. I appreciate your efforts.

Out of Touch

I've been traveling for 10 days -- to Philadelphia and Lancaster, PA, visiting a friend who's a professor at Franklin & Marshall. Ah, the life of a small, liberal arts college in the Amish hills of eastern Pennsylvania.

This idyllic setting seems to be the assumption many people have about where a college education should happen: brick buildings, ivy, intellectual conversations under tree-leaf canopies (remember Plato's plane tree in the Phaedrus? F&M does indeed have sycamores, our name for the plane).

When I returned from my travels, my son asked if I'd read an article called "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" in this month's The Atlantic magazine, an article that bemoans the state of higher education. Of course, I realize that this bemoaning is nothing new: every professor remembers the past rosily; every new generation of students is dumber than the last; every social force conspires to erode the idyllic intellectual investigation that's supposed to happen in college.

Coincidentally, this article is being discussed in one of my online lists, where many folks take issue with this Professor X's attitude and approach to his/her students. Others decry the institutional pressures that make such attitudes/approaches necessary. Still others recognize the hazy-memory assumptions behind what's supposed to happen at an institution of higher education.

What interests me most is something not many folks are talking about on my list: the centrality of writing to the educational project. Professor X notices that his/her students "cannot write a coherent sentence." These students fail as a result -- and this failure happens in their composition course, the one Professor X is supposed to be teaching, the one upon which most other courses rest. Other departments/disciplines depend upon our composition courses to "teach students how to write" so that said students can communicate their learning in a complex way, a more complex way than memorizing facts and filling in bubble-sheets.

So I would posit that writing coherent English prose (what we used to call Standard American English or English for Academic Purposes) is a *necessary condition* for the educational enterprise, not simply a *sufficient condition*.

Yet, sadly, while many educational practitioners are aware of this necessity, they're woefully out of touch with how those writing skills/habits/practices develop or can be developed. They're out of touch with their own working conditions in their own classrooms and institutions. They're out of touch with how they, themselves, developed these skills/habits/practices. They're out of touch with the hard work we rhetoric/composition instructor/scholars do to help remedy the situation.

*P.S.* I've ended on a pretty depressing note, which is NOT where I want to end. I don't want to be the same kind of doom-and-gloom emoter as Professor X or as Alan Charles Kors, who's written "On the Sadness of Higher Education" in The New Criterion.

What's up with the world that we higher education professionals, people with some of the best, most important work on the planet, are getting depressed?

Most days, I think my work is profound, useful, a gift. My students are curious, ready, willing (this to me is the most important emotion) and able. My classrooms are dynamic, friendly, inquiry-based sites for real learning, real knowledge-making, real community. Most days I "love my job" so much that it's not a job: it's my way of life.

"Brilliant!"

This BBC3 video comes via The Garance.
What if Facebook was our real life? What if it already is?

Graduation

Most people wouldn't think that I'm a formal-event-type person, that a graduation ceremony would be something I'd attend. After all, why do we have to get gussied up and parade around with mortarboards to acknowledge what we've earned when *we* know what we've accomplished?

But this ceremony is one that matters, I think, as the concrete manifestation of our educational achievements.

And it's almost always a good celebration, even if ours is held in a hockey arena and feels like it: graduates and faculty down in an almost-pit, family members and friends on wooden bleachers without backs jutting out of concrete numbered steps. Even without regalia (didn't do the paperwork required since I'm just not on campus), I'll attend tonight, sitting on those bleachers, mingling after to shake students' hands. I expect to see some of my favorites -- I've been missing them this sabbatical!

It'll look/be different

Coming back after sabbatical, I will be part of a department that I will only partially recognize. The number of leave-takings surprises me, and I hope everyone who's moving on is going to something good/better.

P.S. Speaking of "different," I found this blog article called "Blogging: Content is King" full of definitions, tips, thought-provoking assertions. Not sure, yet, what I think of it. You can find it on a blog called "one cool site: wordpress blogging tips," which may be a sponsored blog created by the folks at wordpress, I don't know for sure.

Online tools for writing

In the wake of my reading the Pew Internet and American Life study called "Writing, Technology, and Teens" (press release is here; PDF of the whole report is here), I've been thinking about what kind of online tools could help students write. I've learned about a few -- I'm trying to decide if it makes sense to tell students about them.

Dr. Paper: not free and originally developed for high school students, supposedly formats APA style correctly

Paper Calendar: free, will make a schedule for your paper-writing tasks

Late Night Writer: free, will ask questions to take you from topic to thesis to supporting paragraphs to finished (if disjointed) essay

yWriter4: free, writes a novel for/with you

Google Docs: free, create, collaborate, share documents online (I'm thinking of using this for class)

Buzzword: free (for now?), like Google Docs but an Adobe product

More to come, perhaps.

Backlash is Back (Did it ever leave?)

It's been a while since feminists I know have felt compelled to use the word "backlash" to talk about the current dismal and disturbing misogyny all over the place. The term felt too dated - remember Susan Faludi's book?

But now there's a fabulous article by the brilliant Katha Pollitt in The Nation that brings us up short: she calls it "Backlash Spectacular" and itemizes some of the most egregious messages our culture regularly dishes out about the female gender (teaching pole dancing to children? mass consumption of a video game that asks players to have sex with prostitutes and then kill them to earn points?), not to mention a most recent outrage: white supremacist and anti-Equal Rights Amendment activist and lunatic Phyllis Schlafley being awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Washington University. Makes you think a doctorate isn't worth much, isn't really about intellectual capability if it's awarded to someone who thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre can be blamed on the English department.

Now more than ever, feminism needs to be promoted, taught, insisted upon: the kind that Rebecca West called "the radical notion that women are people." One good source for helping us analyze media messages about many things is Media Education Foundation.

Retirement

How can it be that a colleague from MCTC is retiring? I was there when he was hired, Steve Kaufman my office mate and friend, father of Maddy and Chloe who're the same ages as Stefan and Zoe.

Tonight's gathering to honor him with energetic English instructors made me long for the days when I was younger, linked to the boundary-pushing folks who had a campus full of diversity, unlike my own campus where I'm the oddity, extremity, weird one.

Meeting folks I'd heard about for years was another plus: Morgan Grace Willow, Michael Seward stayed until the almost-end. And of course I saw pals Kathleen Devore, KateLynn Hibbard, and Linnea Stenson. Bonding over bourbon makes for "buy in" doesn't it?

But reminiscing is fine, too: remembering the old guard, angry and bitter, gone to make room for the twenty-first century. I'm glad we're in the new millennium.

"Apostrophe to Man"

For some reason, this Edna St. Vincent Millay poem is on my mind.
(This photo is of her gravesite at Steepletop Cemetery in Austerlitz, New York.)

Apostrophe To Man

(on reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again)

Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing airplanes;
Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade;
Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia and the distracted cellulose;
Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies
The hopeful bodies of the young; exhort,
Pray, pull long faces, be earnest, be all but overcome, be photographed;
Confer, perfect your formulae, commercialize
Bacateria harmful to human tissue,
Put death on the market;
Breed, crowd, encroach, expand, expunge yourself, die out,
Homo called sapiens.


I guess my student Matt is right: I should prepare and teach a seminar on Millay.

Another Good Book

Louise Erdrich's new novel, The Plague of Doves, is getting good reviews. I heard her read from in on Friday at Birch Bark Book's reading space, Lake of the Isles Lutheran Church -- powerful and intriguing.
While waiting for her to sign my book, I watched her gracious greeting of every person: a kind professional.

Not New, Still True

And funny! I've posted this video before: The The Impotence of Proofreading by Taylor Mali.

Facebook Surprise

Today I found out that my brother-in-law, who teaches art at Mercyhurst Prep in Erie, PA, has a Facebook group devoted to him: it's called "I have a shrine to Dr. Borowicz in my closet."

Pretty awesome.

Good Book

Friday night's reading at Birch Bark Books: Nine of the 21 contributers to Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers. The book's edited by a community college colleague and pal, Kate Kysar, who's done a marvelous job bringing together lots of Minnesota writers, many of whom I've met either as acquaintances, teachers, colleagues, or because I've read their work: Jonis Agee, Barrie Jean Borich, Taiyon Coleman, Allison McGhee, Heid Erdrich, Wang Ping, Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, Morgan Grayce Willow.

I love them

That's all I can say about this batch of students: I plain love them. Quintilian would approve: he says good teachers love their students.

Tonight was the last class meeting, turning in reading journals and final essays, having a discussion about what should be on the final exam (I keep telling them my philosophy about exams, that they're opportunities for them to show me what they know -- so I ask for their input about what they'd like to be asked), having a "wrap up" discussion.

The discussion went well, prompted by a listserv debate going on right now about the value of a literature survey course (the kind I teach): one fellow thinks they're a waste of time. I asked the students what they think, which is that a "buffet style" as I like to call it allows them the chance to find folks they really connect to and read further. Plus, as one student said, she now knows the answers to some Jeopardy questions!

This semester, I modified my "closing activity" so that it didn't involve matzo. Instead, we used tickets (everyone took 32, the number of students and me) and wrote their names on the backs. Then I asked them to go around the room and say something to every single person, something they remembered or noted or got from this person. Then exchange tickets. As my Somalian student said, "I didn't understand why we were doing this, then I got it: we're saying goodbye." Yep, and thanks.

Many students complimented each other in a way that was heartfelt, I think, and I got a chance to say something positive to everyone as we departed. Also, students commented positively on the class structure (and me, which was nice to hear). One said his parents were both English professors, and this course was one he learned the most in. Another thanked me for "keeping it light." Another said I was the best reader of his writing he'd ever had in college. Another said she *wanted* to come to class every week because of how it was run. Another claimed to have never thought English was "for me" but now wants to read a book a month.

And then some folks went to Gabe's for food and drink and more discussion of the course texts (Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" and Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" all struck nerves). Josh came, too, our guest speaker who made a good impression on a sizable minority of students. The fellow who's off to Iraq in June bought an appetizer platter and wished us all well, hugs and handshakes all around.

What a good bunch.

Cross-College Colleagues

I spent the afternoon yesterday with a couple of tremendous people: Steve Kaufman and Kathleen Devore over at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Kathleen graciously allowed me to sit in on a class -- and even chime in with a story of my own, no matter a bit off-topic -- and observe her teaching, her students, her milieu. I learned about a book I'd never heard of: Contemporary Plays by Women of Color.

These kind of conversations and collaborations are absolutely essential, I think. It's so easy to get caught up with the issues on our own campuses, with our own colleagues, in our own classrooms. A simple visit to another college, to another colleague's classroom opens that trap we'd been "caught up" in.

It's risky, though: most of us don't like the idea of someone else observing our space, our interactions with our students: why is that? The ever-present fear of evaluation? Most of us have been graduate students where evaluation was personal, or so it seemed, and had serious ramifications. Others of us have been observed by deans and supervisors, folks whose job it is to grant us better or worse working conditions. Others of us are just private, I suppose, although a truly private person probably doesn't go into teaching much.

The biggest thing I learned, though, is something I keep learning over and over from my colleagues: that good teaching and learning happens in so many ways, through so many small and serendipitous events/acknowledgments/comments, with so many different kinds of people/artifacts/questions/constraints.

One teacher's plea re. plagiarism

"Plagiarism at Uni: An open letter to students by English teacher Suzanne Linder" by Katherine Allen.

Suzanne Linder teaches English at University Laboratory High School in Urbana, IL. She writes calmly and sensibly to ask students to quit plagiarizing, to think for themselves and create original work. What good ideas.

Be sure, too, to follow the comments thread: more good ideas there, especially about the limits of certain kinds of assignments and the benefit of consistently re-examining our pedagogical practices. Also, click on the audio link to hear Linder explain what prompted her to write the letter.

I received the link to this article from Jennifer Veltsos's message on a wonderful listserv I read, TECHRHET, a space/place I've mentioned before, a place/space for great discussion about technology and teaching composition/rhetoric. It's a list hosted by InterUniversity.org.

Join the discussion. Find colleagues. Educate yourself and others.

Period Trick

I found this trick on Steven Krause's teaching blog (found to the right on my higher ed. blogs), entry for April 8, 2008.


http://view.break.com/232903 - Watch more free videos

Perhaps this lesson will be a "public service" to my colleagues and a reason NOT to specify page-lengths with essays/papers. Word counts might be a better way to let students know how much depth you want them to go into.

What I did . . .

. . . last night so that everyone could contribute something to the discussion when not everyone had read everything:

I asked each student to read aloud from one piece they'd read for class (they'd had some choices about what they could read).

I gave them some time to choose 100-150 words (a paragraph or two, a stanza or two), and then we simply went around the room (in alphabetical order based on their middle names) hearing everyone's voice.

I asked each reader to tell us page numbers so we could follow along, author's name, and selection name. After each read, I asked them to explain why they chose this passage, this author, this selection.

Results? What a fabulous discussion we had, and I heard extended speech for the first time from a couple of very shy students who almost never say more than six or seven words. The whole exercise took about an hour with my 28 students.

One more (unexpected) benefit: Many students chose the same selection (Adrienne Rich's poem "Power" came up more than once, as did Audre Lorde's poem "Power," Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" and John Updike's "Trust Me")

This repetition, hearing variously accented student voices, allowed listeners to find/hear different things in each new reading: for example, the Power poems became incredibly powerful when read by a range of readers: middle-aged white male, young African American female, young Asian American female, not-so-young white female.

I will definitely do this activity again.

What to do . . .

. . . in class tonight: too much reading to "cover" adequately because we cancelled last week's class meeting. Students have prepared something for their "facilitation," but I fear it'll consist of "here's research we did" rather than any real facilitation of learning.

And then there's next week's class, the last one, originally scheduled as the final exam. But I think I'm going to make it a required meeting to tie up loose ends, come to some closure, and make the final a take-home exam.

Thoughts?

More Morrison

It's a complete cliche to say that Toni Morrison's novels stun and jolt and amaze the reader -- I mean, she's a Nobel Prize winner -- but it's completely true: the early two, The Bluest Eye and Sula, are teachable (and frequently show up on reading lists, in online paper mill repositories, in Cliff/Sparknotes) because they're more-or-less chronological, focus on young people, and have a clear, if unsatisfactory, ending.

The next two, Song of Solomon which I read in college and Tar Baby which I reread last week, are less . . . what: I wrote "tidy" and realized that's not accurate, then "packaged" which gets at what I mean a little bit (they're not "coming of age" novels in the way the first two are), but ultimately the next two are not as concerned with youth. And I like that: I'm tired of the first two, having read each at least four times so that I can teach them well each semester I teach American Women Writers. But let's see Morrison's progression as an artist.

Then we get to Beloved, the novel that knocked me out for two days after I read it; I was such a wreck emotionally that I'm afraid to read it again, but I suppose it'll impact me differently this time since I don't have young children any more.

To follow Morrison's chronology, Jazz is next, which I just finished this week for the first time. What a perfectly-named novel. And I'm thinking I'd like to teach it in conjunction with Gatsby: same time period, basically; same city (Harlem vs. Long Island); same iconic American story, author, genius. I should have paired them this semester, but I didn't know Jazz. Next time.

Next is Paradise, which I'm currently rereading having forgotten I'd read it, a lovely set of chapters like beads on a chain but brutally broken. Brutally. Then I see her next novel is called Love, and then this year's A Mercy. If these titles are any indication, we can expect more intense emotionality. Pathos in spades.

Listen to her read - and to her friend the poet Reynolds Price - at Duke University. I heard her speak once at the U of Minnesota, in Northrup Auditorium. She wasn't sweet, was strong and brave and irritating. She made us uncomfortable and energized. We need these voices.

Media/Genre

I've been thinking about the difference between media and genre ever since Friday, when Geoff Sirc mentioned the distinction at a workshop I attended. He was making a point about digital literacy, that digital writing may be a different genre of writing altogether, not simply writing with new media.

I'm going to have to think about this distinction, one Satrapi mentioned last week, too, when she insisted on being known as a cartoonist, someone who creates comics, not a graphic novelists: her medium is ink, and her genre is comics.

What's the relationship between genre, media, and then the electronic interface with with we readers/consumers engage with words/images/ideas/others? These things all blur/blend/bleed more quickly and widely now that the speed-and-reach of the Internet is here. (How can anyone even articulate anything without the virgule these days?)

Marjane Satrapi

Last night, heard Marjane Satrapi at Century: what a treat.

She's such a wonder, such a good speaker for our campus: intelligent and funny, worldly yet approachable, creative and opinionated. She sat and talked to us, a ready-made "speech" delivered extemporaneously with grace and good humor, genuine thanks.

Here's a trailer from her movie Persepolis made from her two books:

Day 6-of-5

Disaster struck.

Disaster stuck.

I'm both mad and sad.

Institutional processes can be, and in this case have been, rigid and unhelpful; they can, and in this case did, disallow the human contact and truthfulness that makes for good human relations and good decisions. I feel as though my hard work has been for naught: not a good feeling.

Writing takes time

We writing teachers know that writing takes time, but others don't seem to think so: in fact, they think that if we're English teachers, we must be "good at writing," which often becomes synonymous with "fast at writing." But neither is automatically true: I think I'm best at editing, actually, an activity I've spent most of the afternoon and evening doing.

The Board of Trustees Educator of Excellence Awards event is scheduled for April 16. For that fete, lots of stuff is planned: a short video, speeches, lots of handshaking and congratulations -- and a booklet/brochure with bios and photos and other praise-worthy stuff that must be written by someone (right now, my pal Ray, and I've been helping him edit). I'm also supposed to write a short paragraph about what the award means for faculty, especially since I've been on the selection committee and seen a range of excellence, which is true. But what do I write? How do I start?

It's been easier - although time-consuming - to edit Ray's work than start my own. Starting my own writing has been postponed for two other "very good" reasons: because it's easier to edit the docs from our English search committee that'll go to our college president. And it's easier to edit the proposal (and send at least six emails justifying) for the MnSCU women's studies discipline workshop. And it's easier to read Toni Morrison's Jazz.

So guess what I still have left to do before I sleep?

Day 5-of-5

We're done! We came to consensus easily - as PhiloFact said in her comment on Day 4-of-5, when you find the one (or in our case, the ones), you know it. I'm happy that the collective knew, too. What *great* colleagues we have and will have.

Bierstube time - hurrah.

The Student List

Inspired by Timna's "my steady 12," I want to list my Thursday evening wonders, but I have 31, too many to describe individually: Alaina, Angele, Cathy, Chris D, Chris G, Chuck, Cynthia, Dan, Darren, Julia, Karen, Katie, Katrina, Kristi, Laticia, Louis, Margaret, Matt C, Matt W, Michelle, Omeca, Peter L, Pete S, Rachel F, Rachel L, Rosanna, Said, Sara, Tiffany, Tina, Travis.

But there are patterns:

--the English majors who read with intelligent relish, finding authentic ways to describe and analyze texts (Tr, Da, An, Ju, RaF, Lo)
--the English majors who skim for plot details and simple metaphors, tossing out random soundbites (Ti, MaW)
--the English majors who silently nod, offering passionate, accurate analysis only in small groups (Ti, Ka, MaC)
--the full-time workers who arrive after 10-hour days, still ready to wrestle with ideas (Ka, Cy)
--the quiet sideways glancers, who often surprise me with their contributions (Ma, PeL, Kr, Ca)
--the bombasts, not afraid to look silly, often succeeding (ChD, ChG, PeS)
--the dependents, offering as their own snippets culled from the web (Sa, Ro)
--the blanks, unwilling or unable to share anything they're thinking, if they indeed are (Al, Mi)
--the steadies, not bright but not unaware (Ka, RaL, Sa, Ch, Om)
--the oblivious talkers, willing to share even if no one cares to hear (Da, La)

My favorites because they offer thought-filled, beautifully messy views: Angele, Cynthia, Darren, (sometimes) Julia, Louis, Matt C, Rachel F, Travis.

Day 4-of-5

Three unknowns this time: at least to me. I don't think I've ever been as shocked about an interview as I was today. Not just a lack of preparation (it seemed), but also a lack of awareness of what it is we do at the community college, who we teach, why we exist. Not that I have all the answers to these things, but community colleges are uniquely positioned. We're not universities yet we must provide something like it to our transfer students. We're not trade schools yet we must honor the need for work that many students bring. We must be flexible and fair, intellectually grounded and increasingly agile. We need faculty members who are, too.

Day 3-of-5

First time I've listened to someone I want to have as a colleague for the rest of my time at this college. It was lovely to hear passion, authenticity, intelligence. Inspiring.

My input

We were asked to offer our experiences with the technology conversion our college just went through, specifically experience with classroom problems. Even though I'm not teaching, I sent the following response. It'll be interesting to hear if my sentiments get sent on; they're rather incendiary:

"Thanks for this opportunity to offer input about the IT debacle: although I'm not teaching this semester, I'm on a search committee, and the conversion caused major problems for anyone trying to do work for the college. For example, I could not access my email from off campus until I called the Help Desk (they were friendly); I could not access my files from off campus (still cannot - despite following the instructions). Both of these things are/were needed for me to do my job.

"In my opinion, the extremely huge number of problems resulting from this conversion should result in the FIRING of the people in charge. I'm serious. Many of the "problems" that resulted should have been anticipated; that's the job of an IT team, to anticipate and then prepare so that problems of the magnitude we've experienced do NOT happen.

"I'm very, very serious in my opinion here: this rollout was mishandled in a way that points to utter incompetence, utter disregard for the college community and how it does its work, utter disrespect, really. And now the college community is being lied to about the conversion and its aftermath. We've been lied to before about what's possible/impossible with our technology (at least when compared with what's possible/impossible on other two-year campuses), but the magnitude of this particular event astounds me.

"Please convey my sentiments to anyone who is in a position to do anything. The more pressure the faculty puts on administration, the better, I think. We're not luddites and not resistant. We're professionals who need our colleagues in non-faculty positions to be equally professional.

"Thanks,
Julie"

Some people have said that every IT department works at odds with the rest of the institution, but it's not true: conflict, lack of awareness, and outright falsehood do not have to be the MO. We'll see.

At the Delegate Assembly

Little things go a long way: just spending 10 minutes to listen by one bargaining team member can be completely wiped out by a three-second "you haven't been listening to me and I'm done talking about it" from another with more power.

I'm disappointed - again.

Day 2-of-5

Didn't post right away - should have. Odd day for day two, all inside candidates, all over the map: the confident professional who spoke so fast she blistered me. The perennial candidate who didn't seem to have prepared at all, sometimes staring off into space instead of answering. The newbie who oozed sweetness and light, innocence and energy, making my teeth hurt. They're all assets to our department - in different ways and in different doses.

We committee members are getting used to each other, joking around and eating Girl Scout cookies, sharing events from our vacations, our frustrations with the IT department. This kind of work is a way to bond with colleagues - necessary work and good.

What's cheating?

An interesting article on Slashdot makes me ask the question. The article's called "Student Faces Expulsion for Facebook Study Group," and the comment thread offers a bunch of takes on the issue. (For a fuller version of the article, read "Student faces Facebook consequences.")

Seems to me that study groups are always helpful for learning something and that technology is just a magnifying glass, letting those study groups happen more quickly and remotely. In fact, students say that a Facebook study group is a "valid studying technique in the information age." Makes perfect sense -- as a technique for *learning* stuff.

But the way for instructors to find out if any particular student has learned anything [either with the help of a study group or not] is to provide some kind of opportunity for said student to show s/he has learned. In fact, I call tests and quizzes "opportunities to show me what you know" whenever I give them in class.

So I can't see why Facebook study groups would be cheating: if they're used to take exams, when those exams are not group exams, then they'd be cheating.

Day 1-of-5

The process is unwieldy and doesn't yield good colleagues: I'm talking about the hiring process for faculty members. We must ask exactly the same questions, in exactly the same order, by exactly the same questioners (members of the interview committee). Supposedly, the "union requires" this process, but I have my doubts: just who's interpreting the contract?

What's good is listening to colleagues talk about their teaching practices, innovative assignments, pedagogical commitments. Today I heard at least three ideas I'll steal (okay, borrow with attribution) for my own courses. And I also heard, twice, a name that I thought I knew and found out I didn't: David Bartholomae is not the same person as Donald Bartholomae, who's the guy I'd read and been familiar with. Harriet Malinowicz also talks about the confusion she had with them, too, in her JAC (formerly the Journal of Advance Composition) article here.

It's always good to find out you're wrong is you can find out how to correct it. Thanks, folks.

"Software Updates" Update

I was able to access my email only after calling the college's Help Desk (and I *hate* to ask for help like that - I want to figure it out myself!).

But the Help Desk phone number is nowhere to be found on the college's website, so I had to call the General Information number. The "operator" instantly had the number for me, which made me ask, "Have you been getting lots of calls for the Help Desk number?"
"Oh, yeah," she said. "The college just transitioned to Microsoft Office from Groupwise, you know."

Yes, I did know. I'd been warned ad nauseam to clean out my email boxes and transfer the files that were saved on my office computer because they would be *gone forever* (never mind that I haven't been able to access that machine since July because another person's using the machine and locked access to it; therefore, I have absolutely no idea what or whether I've lost anything of importance).

The helpful help desk employee answered my questions with more questions:

"Could you please help me access my email? My current passwords don't seem to work." [I wanted to let him know I'd tried my best and wasn't just calling him as a first resort.]

"What is your login?" [This word "login" can mean many things, and luckily I chose the right answer, which is a combination of letters also known as my "username" and my "Domain/user name" and my "Century Direct username." Consistency of terminology would be nice; it's a principle I teach my tech writing students.]

"It's {blah-blah}."

"Just a minute." [He then put me on hold for a few minutes and came back on the phone.]

"Are you Julie Daniels?"

"Yes."

"Go to Century homepage."

"Okay, right now?"

"Yes."

"Um, just a minute - I'll have to move to my computer." [A couple of minutes pass.]

"Click on 'employees' at the bottom [this way of logging in is not the usual way we've been taught . . .] - do you see?" [This last question is quite important because the link for employees on our college's homepage is extremely tiny and buried in a list of other words/phrases. You've gotta know it's there to find it, really, because the homepage is not designed with employees in mind, according to the web design team: our college's homepage is a marketing device, designed to market the college, whatever that means, and I have strong opinions about "what that means" that I'll talk about some other time.]

"Okay, I'm on the Employee Services page." [You'll see a LOT of information on this page, yet I just need my email access . . . .]

"Click on 'Outlook Mail' to the right." [To the right of what? Okay, the right-hand column, which is divided in two, okay I see the "Quick Links" with "Outlook webmail" as the fourth item in the list - who decided these should be the "quick links"?]

"Yeah, I got it and see how to login. I've typed my username."

"Password is {****}."

"There, okay, I'm in. Thanks. Can I change the password easily?"

"Yes. It's with 'Options' on the Outlook page." [Where the heck is "Options"? Oh, upper-right hand corner.]

"Okay, I'm set. Thanks a lot."

My helper was kind and knowledgeable, patient, too. His accent made it difficult to make out everything he said, so this conversation isn't quite verbatim. I bet he's had hundreds of these exchanges in the past 48 hours - poor guy.

But I'm finally able to access my email and things look similar to our old email client. The only missing piece I can see that I didn't expect: my email signature is missing, so I'll have to retype the "Earthworms are so pleasant" quote from Zoe.

Now I just have to figure out how to access my work files so that I can send an old conference proposal to a Metro State colleague who wants to use it as the basis of her own proposal. I've heard that the PDFs we're "required" to read before remote login are not helpful at all. Let's see how that goes!

Software Updates

Why would said updates have to take three days, during which no one could access her college email/files/electronic anything? And why when a faculty member is finally able to access her email account again, none of her passwords work? And why does the "document" said faculty member is supposed to read before accessing her electronic *files* NOT contain any information about how to access her email?

The infrastructure at my college is woefully inadequate [I originally typed "inadequote," a neologism I think I'll keep for my students: inadequate use of quotations!], and I can't figure out why: how come people do not/cannot do their jobs?

This frustration is not new, but it continues to sadden me. Institutions are not perfect, surely, but ours seems to be getting worse and worse and worse: yet we advertise madly at state athletic tournaments, so madly that my friends ask, "Is your college hard up for students?" Nope, I say, in fact we can't handle all the students we currently enroll. I really don't know why our marketing campaign is so intense and so aimed at "traditionally aged" students: we have plenty and can't address their needs already.

A frustrating mystery, sort of like software updates.

Midterm exam

Tonight's class is the first after spring break. I'd graded midterm exams over break (okay, I graded them today), and over a third of the class earned A grades: out of 30 students (one missed the exam), I had these eleven scores in the 90s (out of 100 possible points, up to three extra credit points)
-- 99 (yes!), 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93 (two of 'em), 91 (two, too).

Also plenty of B grades: 88 (two), 86, 84, 83 (two), 82. Add it up, and you'll find that 18 of 30 earned an A or B. That's 60% of the class - really great! They're getting it.

But the sad thing is that some students *completely* bombed the exam: one person only earned 39 points out of 100! And there was a score of 47, a 58, a 59, and then a 69 (that's four Fs and one D). I wonder if they've been listening or reading the material? A couple are students who never say a thing during discussion, so perhaps they aren't preparing. And another couple low scores are from students who say things, but I've suspected that they're parroting what they've found on the web or from outside source, not their own brains. Perhaps this exam score reflects that problem.

Our Shrinking Faculties

What's with the over-administration of higher ed? Sure, I know that the for-profit educational corporations have WAY more administrators/managers than they do faculty members (I know lots of these employees), but it looks as if traditional higher educational institutions are following suit.

In the latest issue of InsideHigherEd.com, you'll find the following data about "full time professional positions" in higher education: 50.6% faculty to 49.4% administrators in 2004, (in community colleges the ratio's a bit better: 63.6% faculty, 36.4% administrators in 2004).

But get this: in 2006, *every single type of institution* saw a rise in administrators and decline in faculty so that the overall percentages are now 48.6% faculty, 51.4% administrators (it's 61.4% faculty, 38.6% administrators in community colleges). So nationwide, the institutions that have been predicated on teaching, that exist precisely to teach, have less than half of their "professional positions" doing that teaching.

Of course, another way to interpret the data is to see that the teaching is not being done by "full time professional" folks; rather, contingent labor is the money-saving tactic used by those "full time professional" administrators. The teaching's done by part-time folks, adjuncts, contract workers.

Just what do all the administrators do, I wonder?

Thanks to The Cranky Professor for pointing this out.

News from the BBC

Why is it that the US news, as read on NPR, differs so much from the BBC? I get my news from NPR and the NYTimes online, and I haven't heard either of these two stories, which were on the BBC Worldservice tonight:

1) The first (and top) story I heard tonight on the radio is the resignation of William Fallon, U.S. Commander in the Middle East, our main military decision-maker in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Esquire magazine wrote a article saying he was the primary thing standing in the way of war with Iran, since our commander-in-chief seems bent on invading Iran. Bad idea, says Fallon, and so he gets canned. The NYTimes cover story is about the Spitzer prostitution scandal - who cares? The NPR top story was about Spitzer, too.

2) The third story I heard tonight on the radio was about sexually transmitted diseases in American teenage girls: evidently over one-quarter of girls ages 14-19 have at least one STD. Lots of questions arise, of course: What are the implications for health and fertility? Who's having sex with these girls? Where are the diseases coming from?

The main pedagogical conclusion to reach is that we have to help our students listen to the world's news to find out about ourselves: non-US media sometimes covers the US better than the US media. Duh!

BOT Awards

I'm on a committee to select MnSCU Board of Trustees (BOT) Awards for Excellence in Teaching - today was our first day-long meeting, 8:30-8:30, to select from among the 20+ portfolios submitted from about 15 campuses across the state. My own campus had one submission, which was too bad: we could have had three!

What a great group of people to select these awards. I'm meeting and working with faculty and administrators from as far away as Fergus Falls, Hibbing, and Grand Rapids. Also on the committee are administrators in the main MnSCU office who are just terrific: smart and committed to higher education in this state.

And what great portfolios; I'm already going to use some of the ideas I'm finding in them, especially around how to design syllabi, assess learning, engage with students. I have to say that we really have some extraordinary faculty members out in these two-year colleges. Students just don't know how lucky they are.

Last year was the first year of the awards, I think. It'll be interesting to see who's selected this year.

Toastmasters on YouTube

I've just discovered this guy named Taylor Mali. Check out what he says in response to "What do teachers make?" and his monologue called "The the Impotence of Proofreading."

And just for my pal PhilosoFact, here's a comedian called Don McMillan with "How NOT to Use PowerPoint." Enjoy!

Words = People, Places, Things?

Check out this video, found on Rhosa's Blog. I really dig typography.

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.