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.