The Salt-Box

You can be my contact on Flickr, too — just like Barack Obama*!

(Or on Twitter, or del.icio.us, or Twine.)

—

*Or, you know, some low-level campaign staffer . . .

William J. Turkel dreams up lunchtime conversation with first-years:

 If I were chatting with freshmen, say over lunch, I’d be looking for students who had heard of Eliza and the Turing test and had a well-developed sense of anachronism. That hasn’t happened to me yet.

Love the last sentence: Turkel’s a master of understatement.  I’d need to check with my wife, but it’s probably safe to say I’d buy a yearlong meal plan for a first-year student capable of having that chat.

And, at the Chronicle,  Mark Bauerlein laments the impoverished diction of his students:

 “Try an experiment,” I sometimes urge students. “The next time you’re in the cafeteria with four friends and the colloquy turns to Obama, mutter this: ‘Such mellifluous sonorities the man produces.’ See how they react.”

My students already think I’m crazy.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the local paper yesterday published this cheery claim about the New Britain public schools:

“We have 70 percent of fourth graders who aren’t meeting the standard and can’t read at the proficient grade level,” [Enrique E.] Juncadella said.

Now, I am not a mathematician, but I think that means only 30% of fourth-grade students in New Britain read at grade level.  That’s terrifying.

But what’s really scary is that the superintendent told the parents a couple of weekends ago that 84% of New Britain High graduates go on to college.  Now, granted, those are different cohorts, but those two figures suggest only a couple of interpretations: either NB public schools are populated by stone pedagogical geniuses,  who get 54% more students up to grade-level by the time they graduate, *or* a certain subset of those students are going off to college without the reading skills necessary to succeed.

This is Margaret Soltan‘s turf, but what the hell: This morning’s NY Times has a brief article by Thayer Evans about a Richard Southall’s decision to move his sports-related institute from Memphis to UNC, because of the “nonacademic image” of Memphis basketball.

In both the print and online versions of the story, Evans ends with a quotation from a current Memphis player, defending his team’s honor.  Here’s the bit online:

The sophomore guard Willie Kemp said he disagreed with Southall’s comments about the perception of the university’s basketball team.

“I don’t think it’s fair because we’ve got a great group of athletes on that team,” Kemp said.

Not bad.  Not a direct refutation, but not bad.

Here’s how the final paragraphs appear in the paper delivered to my house this morning:

The sophomore guard Willie Kemp said he disagreed with Southall’s comments about the perception of the university’s basketball team.

“That’s how he feel,” Kemp said.  “He a man.  When you think of Memphis, you think of the basketball team because we’re doing so well.  We have a great program.  Like 12 of the last 13 seniors done graduated.  I don’t think there’s really a big problem right there.”

What’s interesting about this version is that it’s simultaneously a more direct response to Richard Southall’s criticism *and* slightly self-damning in its presentation.  You can see why Evans ended with it–though I had always thought reporters tended to clean up off-the-cuff speech.

It’d be interesting to hear the rationale for the change, and what drove it–a complaint?  second thoughts about exposing the quick-hit thoughts of a college sophomore?

Local readers might be interested to know I’m giving a workshop on del.icio.us on campus next week: W Mar 26 at 1pm, in the Instructional Design and Technology Resource Center (Willard 15–the old FCC). It’s free, but there is registration.

Other upcoming workshops (not by me!) include: integrating Flash videos into Vista, podcasting, and crafting good discussion questions.

UPDATE: We rescheduled this for April 30.

The Hartford Courant has an article today (thx, Tom) about a review of the New Britain school system:

An independent review of the city’s schools paints a grim picture of the chronic problems the school district faces as it strives to help students become better learners, saying more needs to be done to improve communication and provide a clear blueprint to help increase student achievement.

The analysis by the Cambridge Group, a private consultant the state hired to evaluate New Britain and other underperforming districts in Connecticut, concluded that city schools do a good job of promoting diversity and extracurricular activities, but still need a lot of improvement in the critical areas concerning academic achievement.

. . .

Though acknowledging the many financial and socioeconomic constraints under which the district operates, the findings are nonetheless critical of several of Kurtz’s efforts to raise flagging test scores in the statewide mastery tests and other standardized tests used to evaluate the district’s overall level of student achievement.

In particular, the report noted that the district’s overall vision for improving achievement is often “compromised” by numerous initiatives that Kurtz has launched in recent years to help raise test scores.

Super! But there’s hope for the future, right? Well, no:

Because of the city’s low-income population and limited tax base, the report noted, the district will continue to have difficulty keeping up.

That’s terrific. Just terrific.

I’m a little unsure how to gloss “promoting diversity and extracurricular activities”: Does promoting modify diversity, or extra-curricular activities, too? I will say that the superintendent spent a couple of minutes during her opening remarks Saturday promoting the “highly professional” student production of Beauty and the Beast at New Britain High, and giving out free tickets to it.
I can’t say much about the particulars of the report, since we’ve not officially started in the schools yet, but obviously I’ll be watching this pretty closely. Not just because of the boy, either: CCSU is in New Britain, obviously, and so it seems to me that we ought to take a special interest in our hometown school district.

I just wanted to alert any interested parties–Nels?–to Donald E. Hall’s upcoming visit to CCSU next Friday, March 28, where he will be leading 3 events:

• a discussion of a chapter from his work-in-progress, Reading Sexualities
• a workshop on “Surviving under a 4/4 Teaching Load”
• a lecture on “The Value of Academic Service,” which is new material related to his recent book, The Academic Community: A Manual for Change

There’s a page about it here.  I’m pretty excited–he’s a great speaker/discussion leader, and his work is consistently fascinating.  (And he published my  book in his series at OSU Press, so obviously he has impeccable taste!)

So, I just dropped off A & E at the airport, so that they can fly off to an area she calls “the suburbs of Green Bay” in order to watch her niece, E’s cousin, be christened.  (On Easter Sunday!  No pressure or anything . . . )  That leaves me by myself until quite late Sunday night.  As far as I can tell, I have four very middle-aged fantasies about what might happen over these next several days:

• A maelstrom of research productivity, to make sure I get as many things close to completion as possible. (Of course, the library’s closed for 3 of the days . . . )
• A burst of grading & service productivity, to help the rest of the semester wind down gracefully.
• It’s my understanding that a major sporting event starts in a few minutes . . . I could watch without having to explain to the 4-yr-old that you can’t change who you’re rooting for every time the score changes.
• I could sleep . . . s-l-e-e-p . . . SLEEP!

What will probably happen is that I’ll do just enough of all 4 of these things to feel stressed about them all, plus screw around with this cool new semantic web tool that I got a beta invite for yesterday,  plus random web time-wasting.  *Sigh.*

What would you do if you were stranded without family for the last 4 days of spring break?

Next week we’re taking on The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu in my League of Extraordinary Gentlemen class, and it is a piece of work.  On the one hand, there is a lot of action, it’s pretty suspenseful, and the atmospherics are enjoyable.

On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that it’s the most indefensibly racist book I’ve ever taught.  Kipling and Conrad’s approaches to empire are complex.  Even Rider Haggard has a dim enough view of human nature that his work turns into something other than crude imperialist cheerleading.

But The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu is wholly different.  It’s all noble Brits and diabolical, hideous Chinese threats:

“Imagine a person, tall, lean, and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face liek Satan, a close-shaven skull , and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green.  Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resouces, if you will, of a wealthy government–which, moreover, already has denied all knowledge of his existence.  Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”

I like that it doesn’t matter which Eastern race–indeed, any will do, and Dr. Fu-Manchu, who combines disparate techniques like a pan-Asian chef juxtaposing unrelated “Eastern” flavors.  By contrast, here’s the true British stuff:

“A servant of the Crown in the East makes his motto: ‘Keep your word, though it break your neck.'”

Mercifully, it’s not all wizened old criminal masterminds and stiff-upper-lip chaps: There are *also* inscrutable, but devoted, exotic beauties:

Seemingly, with true Oriental fatalism, she was quite reconciled to ehr fate, and ever and anon she would bestow upon me a glance from her beautiful eyes which few men, I say with confidence, could have sustained unmoved.  Though I could not be blind to the emotions of that passionate Eastern soul, yet I strove not to think of them. Accomplice of an arch-murderer she might be; but she was dangerously lovely.

The best part is that I’m teaching from the Dover edition, which includes an introduction by Douglas G. Greene.  Near the end, he remarks:

 Rohmer’s novels remain popular not because they say anything about what was going on in the world in his time or in ours, but because they are almost pure fantasy, appealing to the armchair adventurer.

That is a relief–I would hate to think that the popularity of naked imperialist fantasy told us *anything* about either Edwardian England or ourselves!

Let’s not read that snark the wrong way: I’m not saying one can’t enjoy Rohmer, but I don’t think that one gets to dismiss the icky bits with a wave.  It’s not like it’s a minor detail–the undigested imperial fantasy is a core part of the story.  And unlike with Kipling or Conrad (or even Haggard), one can’t even take the strategy of defending Rohmer’s position in order to unsettle the pieties of tolerance.

Maybe I can just show Peter Sellers or Helen Mirren clips all week.

No, not that Alex, although he’s interesting, too.

Alex is a new voice that ships with Leopard. (Windows/Linux users can hear him reading from Edgar Rice Burroughs here. I think that file’s recorded at a slightly faster-than-normal pace.) I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to Alex while I copyedit the source texts for my forthcoming Alton Locke and Paul Clifford editions. Basically, my process is that I have two transcriptions of original publications, which I collate against one another to check for errors. Then, I have Alex read the resulting version aloud, paragraph by paragraph, while I check it against the original. I slow the voice down a bit, just for sanity’s sake.

I don’t mind saying that Alex reads Victorian fiction aloud better than 75% of my students, at least on their first encounter with it. I’m not making the comparison to run them down: Obviously Alex doesn’t have to deal with shyness, unfamiliarity, or any of the other foibles associated with undergraduate readers. But anyone who’s taught a lit class knows that the default reading-aloud voice is an inexpressive monotone, one that runs right over any subtleties of punctuation or other nuances. (Jerome McGann’s “The Alice Fallacy” is good on this–he 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.”)

But Alex catches some subtleties–not all, of course, but he’s a free software feature. He pauses, not just at commas, periods, and the like, but also at quotation marks. (Why do I keep calling him he? Alex breathes . . . !) His voice lilts upwards slightly at question marks, and there’s a slight intensification for exclamation points. British place names can be a bit of tricky for him, and hearing him try to do Sandy Mackaye’s Scottish accent borders on painful, but otherwise it’s really quite reasonable to listen to him for long stretches.

I got Leopard for Christmas, and thus far Alex & Time Machine are probably the two features that have had the most tangible effect on my day-to-day work.

Finally, watch/hear Alex sing Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”!!!

The Tenured Radical, as part of a post on cv-polishing for the secondary (i.e., adjuncting / visiting assistant professor) market, gets to the nub:

It is a real question whether you should get a full time visiting teaching gig; or whether you should stay away from teaching for a year, delay submission of your dissertation until April, and get some articles out to journals. If you can teach and write at the same time, fantastic. But also know that full time teaching is often consuming, even for a veteran teacher, and it is also really interesting, which means that you will want to spend time on and with your students that should probably be spent on your writing at this stage of your career. If you do not yet have publications and/or a polished dissertation, writing is a better use of your time in the long run, as long as you can find some other way to feed, house and clothe yourself, and as long as your committee will agree to keep you on the books for another year.

Because honestly? Showing that you are a mature scholar who can see an article through to publication and a person who has a clear sense of how the dissertation will become a book is going to help you far more than a year of teaching when, in the fall, you pull out your c.v., dust it off again, and go back on the market.

In general, this is right: taking the time to work on your writing is incredibly valuable, and it’s an experience you’re unlikely to get for a long time once you’ve gotten a real job.  If your committee’s still willing to read your work, then staying can be quite advantageous.  Having said that, I’m not sure there’s one-size-fits-all advice here; I think the best thing to do is to use TR’s post as the basis for a conversation with your committee and with your program’s director of graduate studies, who probably has a good feel for how people are doing on the market. (And also for how alumni are doing as they move into second jobs.)

There might be one bit of universal advice: Don’t even think about moving a long distance for a one-year appointment unless there’s a *very* good external reason to do so.  (You’ll be closer to your sick mother.  Your meth dealer is relocating, and you want to follow.)  By the time you get unpacked, it’ll be time to get job applications out, and you’ll feel behind the whole year.  You probably won’t be all that much better off as an internal candidate, either.

Fair play demands that I acknowledge, yet again, that I had a full-time teaching gig–a Brittain Fellowship at Georgia Tech–between my Ph.D. and my current job.  At the time, I took it for these reasons:

• It was right down the road from Emory, and so I didn’t have to move.
• I wanted to preserve some flexibility about timing, since A was also finishing her degree, and about to start her own search
• My dissertation director was no longer at Emory, so it seemed useful to be done.
• The post-doctoral certificate in digital pedagogy seemed appealing.

And I can also say this: The job that I have is (obviously) a teaching-heavy job, with a 4/4 load.  The Brittain Fellowship was 3/3, but it was all comp, and the class sizes at Tech were bigger than they are at CCSU.  I’ve been told by a couple of different members of the committee that hired me that that experience was an important positive factor, because, as they put it, “well, we know the load won’t kill him.”  (But research was still important–I had a piece in one high-profile collection and an article in this journal when I went on the market.  If either of those had been a *Victorian* article, of course, they probably would’ve stood me in greater stead, since I was on the market as a Victorianist . . . )

As is always the case in these situations, though, your mileage may well vary.