The Salt-Box

Now that various technical problems have been resolved, I’m slowly loading my fall 2008 material into my wiki and getting the various syllabuses (6! different! ones!) ready to go.

This semester, I’m teaching for the first time our intro-to-the-major course, which is asking me to think a bit about what English majors need to know.  Some of that is conceptual and intellectual, and some of it is just gruntwork.  One of the latter is MLA style, which more or less standard in our department, though students frequently assert that they’ve never been shown it.  (Sometimes they have been, but not under that specific name, sometimes they’ve just forgotten, and sometimes they really haven’t been.)

I’ve decided that I’m going to require them to turn in a correctly-formatted Lorem Ipsum paper before submitting any other graded work.  You can see the full assignment here.   The Lorem Ipsum generator lets them focus on getting the various details down, without worrying about content.  (And this way, later in the semester, when they turn in work for a grade–and there’s a rubric which includes formatting stuff–then they will have some muscle memory to draw upon.)

If you have suggestions, do please comment here.  The assignment doesn’t go live until Wednesday, so there’s still time for tweaks.

This dialogue between Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg about how to notice has gotten a lot of links since Jason Kottke linked to it(I also ran across it at Austin Kleon’s tumblelog). It’s good stuff:

Someone showed me a great user research training activity: circulate through an environment and note everything you observe, but using only one sense. First, observe from a distance—say, from on high—so you can’t hear what people are saying. Then sit in the middle of an active zone, but close your eyes. Students have told me how rapidly one sense fills in for the other. Of course sometimes that filling in isn’t accurate, so it also illustrates the importance of triangulating observations from a few different perspective.

This idea of mixing up your sensory inputs in a situation is excellent. In the context of teaching literature, it’s a particularly good way to find your way into a text, and potentially even to find paper topics. I’m frequently asked how to identify bits of a text that are likely to be fruitful for interpretation, or even what to do when faced with a difficult work.

My basic sense of how many students prepare for class is that they cast their eyes over the page once or twice. If the reading’s particularly engaging, they will read it more closely as time permits, but always in the silent theater of their minds.

Then, in class, we usually spend a fair (one colleague called it “startling” after observing a class) amount of time reading aloud. In part, we do this to focus our attention on that chunk of text. But we also read aloud because, if you do it right, you begin to notice more and more how the details of a text start to work together. You might not yet have the technical vocabulary to analyze the passage, but successfully reading a passage aloud (i.e., not in a flat, hurried monotone) represents a significant step toward producing a close reading.

Students so frequently say that they didn’t understand a passage until they heard it read aloud that I’ve stopped keeping track.

That’s my low-tech advice for honing one’s noticing skills when reading literature: Try reading some aloud. (Matthew Kirschenbaum once pointed me to this essay by Jerome McGann, which proposes “a commandment forbidding students (and anybody else) to talk about ideas in literature until they show they can sight-read fifty lines of verse without sending everyone howling from the room.” It’s a bracing strategy.)

Remember back in January when I was so excited about reading Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with our kid?  Well, right now, we’re reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and it is slow going.

On the one hand, the plot is engaging enough, and the 5-year-old has been following along with the plot, asking enough specific questions that it’s clear he’s listening.  On the other hand, we’re reading the Dover Thrift Edition, which I had an extra copy of after last semester, which reprints a translation by Philip Schuyler Allen.  Let’s just say mellifluous reading aloud was probably not high on his priority list:

Whence did it come? Why, it was in reality an almost infinite agglomeration of colored infusoria and globules of diaphanous jelly which were provided with threadlike tentacles.  As many as twenty-five thousand of them have been counted in less than two cubic half-inches of water.  And their light was multiplied by the glimmering peculiar to medusae, starfish, aurelia, and other phosphorescent zoophytes, impregnated by the grease of organic matter decomposed by the sea and, perhaps, the mucus secreted by fish.

It’s a testament to Verne that you can still catch a glimpse of Aronnax’s wonder through the “grease of organic matter,” but this is tongue-twisting work!  It’s even worse when you try to read it with any sense of expressiveness.  And at a chapter a night, we still have nearly 3 weeks to go . . .

(image by flickr user nicobilou; some rights reserved)

While reading up on things to do in Porto for my trip in 2 weeks*, I discovered that it’s a popular tourist destination for Brits on holiday. Awesome:

They are the ones, the locals say, who are carousing, brawling and getting violently sick. They are the ones crowding into health clinics seeking morning-after pills and help for sexually transmitted diseases. They are the ones who seem to have one vacation plan: drinking themselves into oblivion.

“They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit,” Malia’s mayor, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, said in an interview. “It is only the British people — not the Germans or the French.”

. . .

In Laganas, on the Greek island of Zakinthos, where a teenager from Sheffield died after a drinking binge this summer, more than a dozen British women were charged in July with prostitution after taking part, the authorities said, in an alfresco oral sex contest.

More alarmingly, a 20-year-old British tourist partied with her sister and a friend into the early hours in Malia also in July, then returned to her hotel room and — although she had denied being pregnant — gave birth. Her companions say they returned later to find the baby dead; she has been charged with infanticide.

Drunken cross-dressing, interrupted by outbreaks of vomitous singing, describes my usual conference plans. (I think that my longstanding conference buddy will vouch.)

After sobering up, here’s hoping there’s time to go here. (Because I just had to purge my working library of 100s of books to accommodate being involuntarily bumped to a much smaller office–clearly I need to fly to Portugal to get new ones.)

—

*Yes, that is the 2nd week of the semester. And, yes, that has been making syllabus-writing much harder than usual these past two weeks.

So, the 5-yr-old starts kindergarten in about ten days, which means we’re officially on the New Britain school district‘s mailing list. Today’s mail brought a calendar for the year, plus a letter from the superintendent. I learned many things from this newsletter:

• The school district has *both* a mission statement *and* a vision statement. It has *both* a “district brand” (“Students first”) and a “leadership brand.” The leadership brand is hilariously bad: “Uncompromising focus on improving instructional practice and student performance [so students aren’t even grammatically first–jbj]; demonstrating creativity and ability [d’oh! missing article] to think and act in unique ways [wtf? psychopaths also act in ‘unique ways.’ When did uniqueness become a value in its own right?]; establishing a normative environment that values continuous and progressive learning, collectively and individually.” I don’t think they know what uncompromising focus means: How can you focus on all those different things? On the other hand, what I like about the leadership brand is that it establishes straightaway that the school district’s leadership is probably bad (it can’t even compose a grammatically correct leadership brand!), and not to be trusted. So, in that sense, it’s meaningful.
• The superintendent really has no gift for style: “As you know the budget given to the Board of Education by the City required the Board of Education to reduce its budget by $10,600,000.” Oh, right: And the school board’s short $11million. Maybe omitting another article would save money: “We are working very hard to minimize the impact of [words like a, this, or the should be here] $10,600,000 budget reduction on an already inadequate budget.”
• While the school district’s short $11 million, it did have time to import a corporate fad–again, introduced in horrible prose: The new school calendar “includes many Thursday early dismissal days. [! “many early dismissal Thursdays.”] We named them Kaizen Thursdays. Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. We know this places a burden on you and that it reduces instructional time for your children. [I don’t think the superintendent understands what the referent of “this” is.] However, it is extremely important that we capture time for our teachers and staff to meet and train. We cannot afford to pay staff to stay after normal work hours. Yet, it is essential that the quality of work continuously improves. [Quick! Someone review the subjunctive mood.] We are striving to do more with less by creating a highly efficient ever learning school system [Maybe we could move the superfluous comma after yet in the previous sentence and interpolate it between efficient and ever.].” (I have no problem with the idea behind it. But get me someone who can write!)
• They also fired all the kindergarten support staff–but kept all-day kindergarten for most (not all–our boy is in half-day, fortunately) kids. So, bigger classrooms, with fewer teachers, for longer hours. For 5 year olds. That ought to work out well. Why not go half-day, and keep the paraprofessionals?

I know that mocking the prose of educrats is really Margaret Soltan’s beat, but she can’t be everywhere at once. Plus, this is my kid, in the school district where we live.

It’s going to be an interesting few years.

Update: There a robo-voicemail this evening to parents with children in the school system, announcing that meeting’s been called for this Thursday to discuss the blowback from implementing early-dismissal Thursdays.

A couple of years ago, I taught in a learning community with a colleague in psychology. Although neither of us has been moved to repeat the experience soon, that wasn’t because it wasn’t fun or interesting–it was just intense. (Partly due to all the planning of special events–such as a visit by Steven Johnson–and partly due to hyperbonding [scroll down].)

Anyway, one of the units with linked content was about AIDS. (My colleague’s research is in psychology & public health.) She regularly showed her students a powerful documentary about AIDS in Africa. I wanted students to think about genre, satire, voice, and, in general, the differences between a medical/scientific discipline such as psychology and an aesthetic/cultural discipline such as English.

I showed, in other words, John Greyson’s brilliant 1994 musical, Zero Patience, which sends up the epidemiological hysteria around AIDS in the late 1980s/early 1990s by imagining–I kid you not–an affair between the ghost of “Patient Zero,” the flight attendant who allegedly was the vector for AIDS’s arrival in North America, and a still-living Richard Francis Burton, now a curator in a Toronto museum. Here are some representative clips from the film: “Pop-a-Boner,” “Control,” and the title track. (Many people seem not to know about this movie–if that includes you, I *highly* recommend it, although it is . . . different. For example, a key moment is the “Butthole Duet,” in which Patient Zero’s rectum serenades Burton’s. It’s a funny choice, raising questions about sexual selfishness, about the physicality of desire — and plus it’s just a great visual gag.)

The students were shocked at the nudity, shocked at the subtitles, shocked at the frank acceptance of homosexuality, and they generally thought that the movie *endorsed* the marginalization of Patient Zero (that is, they read its politics backwards). It was, in other words, an excellent early-semester movie, because we got to talk about all kinds of interesting formal elements of interpretation.

And today, a student was moved to send me (via text message) this striking confirmation of my pedagogical design:

I literally just remembered the butt-hole song from freshman comp, you deranged freak

It’s moments like these, I think you’ll agree, that draw us into teaching in the first place.

There’s a new report out from Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research documenting the change in hiring practices at research universities with respect to dual-career couples. In their study, “academic couples comprise 36% of the American professoriate,” and the rate of couples-hiring “has increased from 3 percent in the 1970s to 13 percent since 2000.”

Chronicle subscribers can click here for the write-up; otherwise the executive summary and full report are both available online. The Clayman Institute has also launched a blog devoted to the logistical challenges of what used to be called the two-body problem, and even a Facebook group.

The report’s main conclusions–this is a big deal (of the 72% of surveyed faculty with employed partners, half were academics), employment status matters to couples, and universities need to be prepared for this–seem entirely appropriate.

Although A and I are both in the same department, we were not a couples hire in the sense used by this report; rather, A won out in a national search a couple of years after I was hired. And so we can vouch for the report’s conclusions in one sense: that employment status matters a lot. With 2 tenure-line appointments, it’s pretty unlikely that we’d ever move–or, at least, it would take a comparable situation for us to even begin to think about it. One way for colleges to compete for faculty is definitely to attend to partner hires. And, without getting too specific about this, I think it’s fair to say that we also believe that universities should think more seriously and explicitly about couples hiring than they usually do. There are hard questions of faculty recruitment and retention, fairness, faculty control over hiring, the balance between an optimistic view of academic partnerships, and the realities of contemporary divorce statistics–relying on the good intentions of people is not enough. (For example: A national search that results in a spousal hire will *always* be interpreted in diametrically opposite ways: some will say that it validates the candidate, while others will say it wasn’t a ‘real’ search, that various thumbs were on the scale.)

That we’ve been treated well by our own department doesn’t moot the problem.

Update: Be sure to check out Bill Wandless’s thoughts on this issue, viewed from the idiosyncratic position of the single male professor. I think that the correct answer to this problem is for grad students not to pair up, and for professors, by and large, not to mack on students, but both developments seem unlikely. (I know from experience: I met A in graduate school, and I also had a very early marriage . . . to a professor.)

I have the above t-shirt (from BustedTees), and have worn it a few times this summer on campus.  The reaction has been pretty interesting–apparently there’s still a fairly large contingent of faculty who scorn Wikipedia *more* than comparable resources (such as Britannica or whatever), and, by contrast, there are also a fair number of students every year who seem surprised that Wikipedia oughtn’t be your most-cited resource in a thesis or in an upper-division seminar paper.

To both audiences, then, a couple of points:

1. GearFire’s “4 ways to use Wikipedia” (via academhack) is mostly sound, although I think that “never cite it” is overblown. In a first-year paper, there might be many situations where a quick cite to Wikipedia is fine–especially if the point in question isn’t central to your argument.  (And, in general, I think good citational practice helps prevent so-called unintentional plagiarism, which, as McCain has recently shown, is a frequent problem with Wikipedia.)
2. Relatedly: A feature many people seem not to know about–which means it’s certainly not being taught to students, is the ability to link to a stable version of a page.  That’s what makes a citation meaningful: the ability for someone to go back to the source as you used it.  (It’s on the left side of every Wikipedia page, in the Toolbox section–click on “permanent link.”)  The implementation of that feature means that there really isn’t a generally valid reason to ban Wikipedia (again, assuming other general-audience reference works are permitted).
3. The % of people who get the t-shirt’s joke seems to be roughly 47.  A fair number have thought I was making some sort of deluded pseudo-political statement.  Many have correctly inferred that I’m just a nerd, and the t-shirt’s some nerd nonsense.  For something that’s such a big part of contemporary Google-driven discourse, folks need to pay more attention to its rhetoric.

The Associated Press has a story up this morning about the Amethyst Initiative, a movement of university presidents and chancellors to promote a debate about lowering the drinking age back to 18.  This is an excellent idea.  Raising the age to 21 has prevented . . . zero people from drinking.  Even when I was a teenager, alcohol was plentiful at high school parties–it’s just not hard to come by.  (How easy?  An early shaver, I’ve been able to buy alcohol in stores since I was 14.  Sorry, Mom.)

As Barrett Seaman documents in Binge (see my PopMatters review here), the main effects on college campuses of raising the drinking age are twofold: first, a rise in the dangerous practice of preloading (where you drink intensely in your dorm room in advance of a social event where you nominally aren’t allowed to drink), and, second, the rise of hookup culture.

Because the idea of lowering the drinking age is so commonsensical, MADD of course opposes it:

Mothers Against Drunk Driving says lowering the drinking age would lead to more fatal car crashes. It accuses the presidents of misrepresenting science and looking for an easy way out of an inconvenient problem. MADD officials are even urging parents to think carefully about the safety of colleges whose presidents have signed on.

. . .

[Amethyst advocate and former president of Middlebury John] McCardell cites the work of Alexander Wagenaar, a University of Florida epidemiologist and expert on how changes in the drinking age affect safety. But Wagenaar himself sides with MADD in the debate.

The college presidents “see a problem of drinking on college campuses, and they don’t want to deal with it,” Wagenaar said in a telephone interview. “It’s really unfortunate, but the science is very clear.”

It’s not the case that college president’s don’t want to deal with it; it’s that the current law puts them in an untenable position with regard to their students.  Actually enforcing the 21-yr-old limit in a way that also reduced the disadvantages Seaman and others cite would require a massively oppressive intrusion into their students’ lives.  (And, to be honest, Wagenaar and MADD can call their research science, but that doesn’t make its policy implications clear.  Science tells us facts about the world, which should inform our policy debates, but it can’t unilaterally dictate those decisions.)

A reasonable approach to alcohol would: 1) lower the drinking age to 18, 2) increase the use of graduate driving licenses across the country, 3) continue to emphasize the designated driver idea, and 4) promulgate accurate knowledge of peer drinking norms.  Also, in the homes, parents should be training their kids to drink (alcohol can accent a meal or a party, but shouldn’t be the focus), so that the young adults will be better prepared for independence.

Criminalizing the behavior of our 18-20 year olds is shortsighted, if good-intentioned, and teaches mainly contempt for the law.

And, I’m back from vacation.  (See here, here, and here.)  There’s no better way to capitalize on the traffic spike from InsideHigherEd.com than to . . . have it come while on a week’s hiatus.  Damn.  It did give me a chance to reflect a bit on traffic patterns to this tiny, tiny blog.   Judging from my stats over the past year (that is, since this post), the following things draw the most new visitors to The Salt-Box:

1.  Complaining about VitalChek

2.  Dickensian gay porn

3.  Neil Diamond concert reviews

The staying power of items 1 and 2* is amazing, especially considering neither of them are really within my ambit.  There are other posts that regularly draw traffic (such as “From dissertation to book contract” or “Wikified class notes”) but those make more sense.

*That people on the internet come to this site in search of gay porn, based on one wry little post, reminds me of a story: My first serious publication was an essay on Wilhelm Reich in a U of Chicago Press collection called Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. (Other authors in that collection, edited by Tim Dean and Christopher Lane: Foucault. Leo Bersani.  Lauren Berlant.  Jonathan Dollimore.  Many, many other prominent theorists and scholars. It’s really a very helpful collection.)

My mom asked–sensibly enough, for a person of her generation who’s not enmeshed in English-department-style cultural politics–whether it was possible, as a result of the publication, that potential employers might not think I was myself gay.  It turned out the *real* concern, I think, on the job market was that my two main publications to that point weren’t on Victorian topics (the other was on Arnold Bennett.)  Anyway.