New for the New Year

I recently found out that I can add the New York Times to my blog. I chose the "Front Page" option (although seriously considered "Books") because I thought a "current events" option makes pedagogical sense. See it at left (obviously). I do wish I could figure out how to have a shorter list of items: must be a way.

Christmas Messages

The Royal Channel on YouTube is the official website for the British Monarchy. Here's the link to Queen Elizabeth's 2007 Christmas message. Important and sincere, I think, and with an acknowledgement of technology's power.

In contrast, here's the Christmas message from the U.S. White House this year. This static written message, taken in conjunction with the President's weekly radio address, do touch on some of the same themes as Queen Elizabeth's message. The rhetorical strategies differ significantly, of course, and so the U.S. message seems much less inclusive, much less sincere, and much less moving.

That's too bad.

Community College English?

This Chronicle online article sounds familiar . . . "The Petition"
Happy Break.

Negativity

AT this time of year, negativity is the last sentiment I'd like to write about, but listening to today's MPR interview with Mitch Pearlstein of the Center for the American Experiment was *full* of negativity.

The Midmorning host Gary Eichten said Pearlstein was talking about "reforming public education." Instead, he talked about destroying public education - not that he thought anything about it was good anyway - by letting vouchers and the free market take care of the "problems" of our public educational system. He acknowledged that more money provides access to better education when he asserted that poor "black" families should get vouchers so they can send their kids to "good private" schools rather than the "poor public" schools in their neighborhoods.

So he would rather see that money go to individuals than to the public schools themselves. But the public schools could use that voucher money to reduce class size, provide more one-on-one education, and reconfigure themselves so that they have some of the characteristics of so-called successful privates.

He had nothing but bad things to say about teachers' unions, too, setting up a false dichotomy (one of many logical fallacies in his comments) between unions and "neighbors and community members." "When people see that the choice is between these two groups," he said, "they'll choose the right group."

I am SO tired of the negative public rhetoric about public education, teachers, and schools. We hear this lambasting at every level: our governor, legislators, media (including supposedly "liberal" MPR), every-day citizens. It's come to be a commonplace to say "our schools are failing," when Minnesota's public school system is one of the best in the entire country: despite the disrespect for teachers, teaching, and education for citizenry (which our founding fathers had in mind when they created a public education system).

Teaching professionals persist by and through herculean efforts and despite the constant barage of public disrespect: they're committed to their profession, their subject areas, and their students, and this commitment and achievement simply must be part of the public dialog.

Come on, teachers: let's start combatting the negative rhetoric of "failing schools" by getting vocal about our achievements despite odds, our joys tempered with sorrows, and our pride in the strong students we've nurtured.

Writing Matters

Especially technical writing and usability testing so that people who need to use a document or website can actually use it!

If you don't believe me, read this New York Times article called "Technology's Untanglers: They Make It Really Work."

Ultimate Performance

I just attended the final class meeting of a colleague - he graciously invited me to sit in on this last class of his last course of his last year teaching. He's been at it for 37 1/2 years, and he's on the top of his game.

The course was Shakespeare, the final play "The Tempest," and Ray pulled together the bard's life and work, the power of Prospero, and the power of the humanities in general when it comes to educating human beings. His "lecture" (read "performance" as he so eloquently said) inspired me and another faculty member in attendance, and perhaps even some of the students. A tour de force.

Enjoy the rest of your life, Ray. You've made a difference.

Keeping Up

It's tough managing all the interesting things to read - books, articles, newspapers, email messages, discussion list postings. It's also tough to manage all the things to watch - YouTube, movies, the cats. And then there are those "multimodal" artifacts that I both read and watch: webpages, Facebook, blogs.

I'm finding so many interconnections between the academic listservs I'm on (WMST-L and techrhet are my two most active), especially when it comes to discussing how our students use technology (most of them, anyway). One poster even said that to teenagers, 2 or three years is a generation gap. Sure, but an even bigger gap might be the one I've been living in: I remember using a computer when you couldn't see much on the screen (remember the Osborne?) or when I could watch the cursor speed greenish across a gray/black screen, stopping (throbbing!) to wait for me to type in a command (see this blog for an example). Doesn't seem that long ago, somehow, yet eons ago in other ways.

Here's an interesting take on this odd speeded-up time/gap, especially in terms of what kids are doing with communications technology/social networking (what we called "CMC" or "Computer Mediated Communication" in the old days): "The Death of Email" at Slate.com/

So the question for me now becomes, "How to teach?" Or maybe, "What to teach?" Or maybe, "What is teaching?"

And here's a random list of cool online things to make me think even more about change:
**a YouTube Video "Did You Know?"
**an online journal "Said It: Feminist News, Cuture, and Politics"
**a quasi-academic article "A Professor Pokes Fun at Copyright"
**a blog "Feminist Philosophers"

Two great reads

The early 20th-century Australian writer, Henry Handel Richardson, is someone I teach in my course "Women's Literature: British and Colonial." Her short story "Two Hanged Women" appears in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, my foundational textbook for both women's literature courses I teach. I love the stylistic economy of the story.

The novel I've just finished reading is Richardson's masterpiece: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, which consists of three separate novels: Australian Felix, The Way Home, and Ultima Thule. The protagonist is based on her father, say most critics, and I recommend the entire 900+ pages.

A second good book, Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House, is a collection of essays about writing fiction. I'm just starting it and already I want to copy the essays to use in class.

Student [and other] Writers

MnSCU has a student literary magazine! It's online and called Inkling. Check out the first edition here: here.

I'm no critic of student creative writing: I can't tell if anything's good or not. It's terrible, really, because I'm finding myself being so impatient with mediocrity these days (okay, many of you will say "So what's new about that?") and so I can't read student creative writing. Essays, okay, but poems? Stories? There's just too little time in the day already to read poetry - I don't want to spend that time on student work.

Speaking of poetry, I picked up four good volumes yesterday at Half Price Books:

--- John Balaban - Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong (he translated this 18th-century concubine's poems: really beautiful. Also he was a professor of mine at Penn State, even gave me some advice about poems I wrote as a youngster)
--- Jim Daniels - M-80 (an amazing urban voice that I thought was African American until I saw his photo here - I don't think we're related, and I'd never heard of him, but he's published many volumes)
--- Edna St. Vincent Millay - Conversation at Midnight (really more of a drama than a poem, but the book I bought is a 1937 edition, lovely paper, a gift from one lover to another although I can't make out every word of the fountain-pen-inked inscription)
--- Adrienne Rich - Sources (scroll down this site to see this rare book, a volume of Rich's I don't have, and I'm trying to round out my collection of her work)

Trying to get [out of] it

Decision making is tough, I know. So many considerations, so many complications. And then to have to make decisions for events that will transpire in almost a year - like course offerings for summer 2008 - asks for a fortune-teller of impeccable reputation (or an administrator with accurate data).

Despite not attending the summer course selection meeting, I've been asked to teach a literature course for summer 2008 - I'm happy to do so in order to ensure that the course won't be cancelled. Being a good departmental citizen is important to me, and I'd also like our literature offerings for summer to continue to be robust.

Because faculty members can select the literature courses they'd like to teach - within reason - I reasonably chose one that fulfills two certificate programs (Women and Gender Studies, Global Studies) and two Minnesota transfer curriculum goals (Humanties/Fine Arts-06 and Global Perspective-08) in order to make the course an attractive choice for students. The more bang-for-their-buck, the more likely they are to select a course. It's also a course that will not have been offered any other time during the entire 2007-08 academic year, follows well in sequence with another course we offer, and is one I like teaching.

The last time I taught such a summer-session literature course, it was two-thirds full, mainly with students who were full-time at another institution: intelligently (if we consider the marketing message our community colleges send out), the students were "fulfilling their generals" at a "cheaper price" so that they could continue with their four-year degrees at Augsburg, Bethel, Hamline, St. Kate's, Kansas State, River Falls, the University of Minnesota.

Thus, although I don't have scientific data to support my choice of a summer course, I do have some experiential data and some good intentions.

But I'm told that it's not a good choice because it's a women's lit course and they have "problems with enrollment." Yikes. Surely that assessment can't smack of the sexism it implies. I guess I'll need to have a conversation with a dean even as I try to extricate myself from campus activities - something that's been tough for me on the sabbatical year. How does one truly "rest" and get away when the long arm of the schedule reaches out for another victim?

Addendum: Had the talk with my department chair listing the above reasons, and he's going to talk with the dean, who "will probably go for it" but wants me to know the course is "still a gamble."

Technology Survey

I just had my "in person" interview today on the phone with Amir. It felt good to air some of my concerns - frankly and bluntly and directly. I hope that what we faculty have to say finds its way to decision makers. That hasn't happened in the past, if you ask me.

Now for a couple of videos about the future of education:
TED Talks: Sir Ken Robinson is kind of funny, and his British accent makes his message more palatable.
EDU@2020 looks bootlegged, but Katz's video needs to be seen by lots of us!

Oh, here's the script for the Michael Wesch talk I heard on Friday. I also had a great talk about Educause with an IT expert from Carleton College

Rethinking/Reteaching

Okay, maybe I should just write "thinking" because that's what Michael Wesch reminds me to do. See his videos here: "A Vision of Students Today" and "Information R/Evolution"

Great stuff. But he's challenging educators to give up a bit of their status/cache as "knowers" when he asks them (us? me?) to give students tasks that are meaningful instead of teching them in a 19th-century way.

He also reminds me to tag my entries here - which I keep forgetting!

And St. Thomas University, where I'm typing this and which hosted him, has ended his talk with a spread of food that's embarrassing in its luxury: white linen table-clothed tables with bbq'ed meatballs, chicken satay, cheese and crackers, shrimp cocktail, bacon-wrapped water chestnuts, egg rolls, artichoke dip, red and white wine, pop and bottled water. All to serve 100, but only 60, max, attended his talk. I guess that private school tuition pays off.

Just in Time

The guy who made this YouTube video, "The Machine is Us/ing Us," is Dr. Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. He will be at St. Thomas University tomorrow, and I just registered to hear his presentation called “Human Futures for Technology and Education.”

Another cool thing I've just been reading about on my techrhet list is a website tool called "Late Night Writer." It's a fabulous series of prompts to help reluctant writers (and who hasn't been one of those?) compose either a review or a report. Aimed at junior high and high school students (I think), it looks useful for community college composition students, too!

Forgetting and remembering

I've been forgetting to update the list of "what I've been reading" that appears at the end of this blog page. (Perhaps because it's at the end of the page! Design really is everything.)

Right now, I'm working on Grace Paley's short stories; she's our bookclub writer this month. Her Collected Stories is out, but I have two old copies of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and The Little Disturbances of Man. I hadn't opened them in years, and when I did yesterday, I happily found that Grace had signed them to me. I saw her read when I was at St. Kate's - probably 25 years ago now. Wow. I remember her energy and wit and white hair - and especially how different she was from any woman, younger or older, that I'd ever known or seen. I'd never met a "city woman" before, and she made me want to visit New York City.

In this 1998 Salon.com interview, she claims that "all my habits are bad." You've just gotta love a writer (or any person) who claims this identity.

Clearing/Cleaning

Out and/or up - I never know which verb phrase to use when I'm sorting through my email inbox that is crammed full of messages. I've found a bunch of interesting things, though, from the techrhet list I'm on (a really good listserv with smart people sharing/conversing about the use of technology in rhetoric/composition courses).

Interesting courses:
at RPI called Teaching Communication in Technologically Mediated Contexts
at Miami University called Writing and Writing Studies in a Digital Age
at the U of Minnesota Teaching Digital Writing

This article about "literacies" from a K-12 journal (but still applicable to community college professors/students) called "The New Literacies" provides some good "spoof websites" (including one for a tree octopus!).

College Life

- Or should I say "University Life" - surely is more robust with extracurricular activities. Tonight I watched the University of Minnesota's women's volleyball match against Illinois. The Gophers lost, but what a pleasure to see these athletes perform. The university band was terrific, too.

A community college just can't replicate this kind of enrichment - what can we do instead??

The people knew

Back in the day, as the students say, in the 2000 election, the voters in this great country chose Al Gore for their president. Now he's won a Nobel Peace Prize.

(P.S. Anyone remember the Butterfly Ballot from the 2000 election?)
(P.P.S Speaking of elections, anyone care to look at the REAL distribution of votes in the 2004 election, a visual representation that shows the HUGE bias in the media's "red state, blue state" characterization? Scroll down to see accurate color coding. This cartogram was prepared by professors at the University of Michigan.)

Three Big Surprises

They're from Ben Reynolds of the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. Today, in an email sent to a listserv I'm on, he wrote that we higher education professionals have the job of telling undergraduates these three surprises:

"Everything some grownup puts in print isn't True."
"Some questions have no one, correct, answer."
"We [professors] want to know what you think."

A great list, I think, and I'd like to think that all three of these are true for my colleagues, too.

First One

In my sabbatical plan proposal, I said I would be doing primary and secondary research on pedagogy. My primary research would consist of observing colleagues from other campuses.

So tomorrow is the first observation: Dr. Ruth Cronje in the English Department at UW-Eau Claire, has graciously allowed me to sit in on her first-year composition course and her scientific and technical writing course. She'll be teaching about summaries in the comp course and syntax in the stc course. It'll be great!

Beautiful October

Today's the kind of weather that I remember from the past five years' worth of first weeks in October: it's sunny blue sky, yellow leaves, bright windy sun. The past five are memorable to me because I've spent them driving to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter for the annual Nobel Conference. The drive follows the Minnesota River for quite a while: a lovely valley. I didn't go this year - and yesterday was full of rain, so not going was a good thing.

But I'll get my driving fix in this weekend when I go to Chicago for the TYCA Conference, where I'm on a Saturday morning panel with folks from Century. Still not sure what I'm going to say! But the drive should give me good thinking time.

This noon, I had a shiatsu massage for the first time. I'm getting Rosy of Blue Heron Bodywork to help with my old shoulder injury. She's a former student of Josh's, and he gave me two sessions with her as a Christmas present. Today's session felt great, although I'm ruining it by sitting at a computer!