Random bullets of another semester ends, and spring is here

 

How's everyone doing? The Economist cover says it all, really.

• Teaching.This semester is all done & in the books, except for grading. Based on all of your comments a long time ago (2011! We were all so young!) I'm providing a summary comment along with the rubric and telling them to contact me if they would like more inline detailed comments. 
• I kept a chart this semester of who actually looked at the extensive feedback I gave, since Canvas allows you to see whether the student clicks back in to see the comments. You'll be completely shocked to learn that the rate of looking at the feedback was about 30%, about the same number that ever looked at the Panopto videos, etc. 
• It didn't change whether I gave comments or not, but it did make me a little more understanding about why they still can't tell whether to put quotations or italics in a title, etc., and that I could save my breath--well, my iPad handwritten comments--because they weren't paying attention to it anyway. 
• I have been lurking over at the r/professors subreddit, which is teaching me (once I ignore the bitterness) all about tools: tools to gamify, like Kahoot (not doing that), tools to grade (not doing that, either), tools to catch AI (many of which seem sneaky to me). But there seems to be (again, ignoring bitterness) a sense that students are struggling with basic thinking & reasoning concepts, with reading even short materials, and with speaking up for fear of failure. With an online class, it's hard to detect those things.
• Speaking of which: I have 100% in-person classes in the fall and am the only tenured person in the department to be teaching 100% in person. I didn't ask for this, since I do like to teach online as well, but I'm kind of excited about it, since the experience a couple of years ago with the old-school methods (writing papers in class, working on revising them in class, exams in class, class discussion, etc.) was great. 

• Writing and Research. I've been writing faithfully every day, though it's all notes circling the new project rather than actual paragraphs I could put into the new book project. That time is coming, though.
  
• Conferences. Going to conferences is surreal. Budgets are being slashed, academe is under attack (you're saying "tell me about it!") but in the conversations I overheard, everyone keeps talking as though nothing is happening--"And after this fellowship, I've applied for X," "Are you going to Germany for Y conference?" etc. Loads of themes about environmental justice and the anthropocene and pious hand-wringing over climate change, all while we are burning up the atmosphere flying to these things when we could be doing them over Zoom. I confess to laughing out loud when a colleague brought up flying to a European conference about something something climate change and said "Are you kidding? No academic who goes to an in-person conference gets to preach about climate change without a raised eyebrow from the rest of us" or something to that effect. 
• Service. Still showing up in person for stuff, and often the only civilian (i.e., non admin) there. 
• The rest of it. Trying to walk in the woods, and read real books, and spend time by the water as much as I can.

Edited to add: I'm trying to comment on your blogs, but Wordpress, etc. is hurling so many obstacles that I'm not sure the comments are showing--sorry. 

Random bullets to ponder in mid-February

• We should designate February the "Dream Big" month. We do this at the beginning of the school year, but maybe now would be a good time to think about this. How would you shake up your life or change, if you'd like to do that? 
• Thinking about Google's self-driving cars: Can I give a self-driving car a driving test under actual conditions?  Here's one, and it's not hypothetical or even uncommon: two-lane road, with a 4-foot shoulder and a 300' dropoff on your side, no guardrails. You see a set of headlights barrelling down the road in your lane. Okay, Google car, what do you do? Go.
• It's a link I can't find now (this one is close), but I'm surprised no one has written about corporations mining employee health data, including when women have birth-control pill prescriptions refilled, to predict in advance whether they're trying to get pregnant. "This would never be abused," the article piously stated, but in corporate thinking, knowing an employee is getting pregnant = about to tap into more medical benefits, leave policies, etc. What's to prevent this from being used against the employee in performance reviews and hiring decisions? Haven't we seen ample evidence that corporate interest is, to understate the case, not always aligned with the individual or public good?
• How happy would you be as a big donor to a college if your gift was going, not to students or faculty, but to the president's travel budget so that she can go to Davos and hire new administrators? 
• Every day in February where there's no snow and ice is a gift, even if it's raining. If you get up and there's no snow, it's already a good day.  I'm even seeing some delusional early daffodils coming up and am grateful.
• Those big splash panels demanding that you subscribe that now infest almost all web sites and that hold your phone hostage if you're trying to read there? I'm grateful to them, because I always click away--no article is ever worth it--and thus decrease my junk internet reading time. 
• For excitement in real life, I got a Netgear WiFi Range extender and am looking forward, more or less, to installing it this weekend.
• I'm on the seventh day of a chain of writing at least something every day, regardless of how tired I am. 750words.com is again my salvation on this. It tasks me, it heaps me, and I see outrageous strength in it, sitting there waiting for me to do something every day.

Random bullets of oh-please-don't-let-it-be-nearly-February

• Historiann nails it, as usual, by calling out the gendered mommy politics of "Hillary, can you excite us?".  I am sick to death of this "yeah, but she's not exciting" argument. "Not exciting," even if it's true (it's not), is a refreshing change from the Trump wackaloonery spectacle--or, as John Scalzi calls it, the "howling sampler box of Dunning-Kruger that is the current GOP field."  I'll be happy with any of the three Dems--there, I've said it--but would remind the "exciting" crowd that George McGovern was exciting and inspiring to hear, too, in 1972, and that got us the infamous "four more years" of Nixon.  Nader voters got to be all pure and pious in 2000, and I don't have to remind you how that one went.
• I am so far behind with projects that I need a time machine (a Tardis?) to catch up. I got up at 5 to write but wanted to write this blog post instead. That will inspire me, won't it? 
• I recently read the comments on my student evaluations, which were down slightly on the numbers in one class. The written comments were mostly really good, though, except for some that dinged me for telling them that they needed to write in complete sentences and use punctuation. Their other teachers think this is completely bananas and that only ideas should count, I was informed. So noted.
• Time to get to work.

Post-holidays roundup

• Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
• Turning into a cooking and cleaning machine for a couple of weeks is my favorite part of Christmas, except for seeing family, which is, of course, the reason I do it. Honest.  I love seeing people eat what I cook and bake. I love doing laundry and picking up.  I love the idea that if I don't bestir myself, there'll be hungry people milling around the kitchen wondering where dinner is and that nobody can get out of the driveway if I don't shovel it every day.  They offer to help, but I choose to do it. There's a beginning and an end point to it, and it's just very satisfying, probably because I can go back to wrestling with writing refreshed at the end of the two weeks. It's a good workout, too--I am really tired at the end of the day-- and, unlike the also invisible work of administration, people are grateful that you do it. 
• You can think about all the foods that you don't have to make or eat any more when you sing holiday songs. "So bring us a figgy pudding"--uh, no thanks. 
• It's easier to ignore the news and (justifiable) endless outrage on Twitter, if you're too busy to look at it. 
• Ditto for ignoring email, which I've been happily doing for more than a week. Grade-grubbers? Contact me in January, for you are not getting a response to the email you sent on December 24. 
• Sometimes I dance a little happy dance at the thought that I am not going to MLA this year. 
• Speaking of MLA, it does not have good tidings of great joy this year. From Inside Higher Ed:

"The MLA's annual report on its Job Information List has found that in 2014-15, it had 1,015 jobs in English, 3 percent fewer than the previous year. The list had 949 jobs in foreign languages, 7.6 percent fewer than 2013-14. This is the third straight year of decline in jobs listed with the MLA. And those declines have reversed the gains made in English and foreign language jobs after the severe declines that hit the disciplines after the economic downturn that started in 2008. The low point for jobs in that economic downturn was 2009-10. But the job totals for English this year are 7.7 percent below the English positions of 2009-10. The job totals for foreign languages are 7.3 percent below those of 2009-10."

Random bullets of November

• Flavia Fescue is right: "you should always ask."   In a quiet moment recently during an in-person exchange, I managed to ask an editor of a collection about an essay, tentatively accepted, that had me so stumped that I hadn't turned in the final version.  I wanted to ask "has that ship sailed?" but not in so many words.  Answer: no (hooray!).  I had been too chicken to ask via email, so this worked out well.
• It's energizing as well as exhausting to see people at a conference, as I'm not the first to observe. Have you ever noticed that conferences (some of them, anyway) are among the few places where we can praise each other face-to-face for scholarship, whether we're acquainted or not? Think about it.  How many other places, except for an invited talk, do you get to hear applause for your words and kind words for your ideas? There's a glow of good fellowship, if that's still a word, that can make quite a difference in the most Novemberish of November moods.
• On the other hand, you're always reminded that you can never work hard enough, fast enough, or long enough to get all the things done. To judge by the tone and number of emails that greeted me, I am pretty sure that some people never sleep and find you morally remiss if you don't email them from the plane on the way home.  This makes for a depressing return and a resumption of the feeling of hopelessness that has dogged me all semester. 
• It's like this: When one of my kids was little, one unusually busy day I asked hir, "Have you done X? How about Y? Z is coming up," until ze said, "Stop chasing me!" and I apologized. Without going into specifics, that is exactly how I feel right now: Stop chasing me. 
• But to end on a happier note: it will get done because it has to get done.  If it doesn't, people can be angry with me but unless they take to torchlight mobs and tumbrils, they can't actually hurt me.
• And soon it will be Thanksgiving!

Short takes on the week

• Marc C. Carnes's article on Reacting to the Past (history as RPG) is inspiring--really. I almost wrote "inspiriting," and it's that, too. It made me want to adapt some of these techniques for my own discipline. I already do some of this research-based and team-based role-playing as a learning technique, but this makes me want to do it more systematically.
• Dr. Crazy has a good post about "The Path to Full" and takes on the secret fear of "am I stalled at associate"?
• Tenured Radical has a good post about the practical dimensions of using research libraries.
• Historiann has taken this fabulous picture of the sign to my secret bunker on her travels. I hope she is going to stop in and say hello to the Henricksons and have a glass of rebellious wine with Barb.
  
• The Atlantic showers Nick Denton of Gawker with fanboy love for new media, albeit with a light dusting of skepticism, just as The New Yorker did a few weeks ago. It's a perfect subject because the old media gets to pull out the "journalism-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket" card while indulging in all the frivolous delights of new media journalism. Case in point: the media storm over Amy Chua, which The Atlantic got so excited about that it put BOTH of its women columnists (Caitlin Flanagan and Sandra Tsing-Loh) in the same issue instead of making them take turns the way it usually does.
  

Random bullets of back in the saddle again

I'm back at work (classes) but still in high spirits because of MLA, so here are some random bullets.

• The first thing I have to remember is that the reduced teaching load for this semester is a gift. It is not an invitation to spend exactly the same amount of time on fewer classes, even if the classes that you have are higher in enrollment. This week I spent all my time on teaching. I need to remember the "fewer classes = less time" rule and change how I spend my time before the papers start rolling in.
  
• In this teaching delirium, I had devised a plan that would have me on campus even more days than before for an extra-duty assignment. When I mentioned this plan to a Sane Person, the Sane Person said nothing and just lifted one eyebrow. Sane Person was right! I rearranged the schedule so that I will now be on campus less and complete the extra duty assignment much more effectively.
• Paying attention to news controversies (like the WSJ one about how to be the mother of perfect children; you know the one I'm talking about) and reading comment threads is a complete waste of time regardless of the train-wreck fascination that they can hold. I'm going to reinstitute my personal ban on those.
  
• About those controversies: I've found myself even paying attention to the stupid ones, like the astrology one and the "Two spaces after a period" one over at Slate. (The parenting one is stupid, too, but disturbing.) If you learned to touch type with two spaces, you'll type two spaces, and if you didn't, you won't, and in either case, Replace All will make everything right in the manuscript. Let's move on.
  

Random bullets of December

• I'm in the midst of a much-put-off task (work-related but not writing-related) that apparently I will do anything to avoid, including eating cookies, shoveling the driveway, and scouring the internet for amusement.
  
• Said scouring includes visiting blogs in search of amusement (thank you all!), but it doesn't seem fair to expect amusement and not give any back. However, this post can't really count as amusement until you get to the video below.
  
• Today's excitement includes finding a rebate card with some money left on it and buying two more Kindle books for the iPad. Free books! Score! Well, they seem to be free because I never remember to take the rebate card when I actually want to buy something.
  
• I've been reading a lot more for pleasure and semi-work since I got the iPad--that is, I get things that are maybe background or history for what I'm doing. So far, on any given day, I have a book going in the Kindle app and one in the Google Books app, and it's great to switch back and forth. If the sky ever clears up, I'm going to try out the Star Walk app I bought. You hold the iPad up to the sky, and it shows you the constellations and so on that you're looking at in whatever direction you point the iPad.
  
• One of the desk copies I ordered is apparently now only print-on-demand from a major publisher. "We'll get it out to you right away," Publisher said a month ago. Didn't happen, so I bought a used copy. It was under $10, and it's easier to get that way than to try to contact the publisher and hope someone's going to respond in the next few weeks. At what point do you figure it's easier to pay money than to fight with the publisher about a desk copy? I don't know the tipping point, but I'm not going to stand on principle in that situation. They may owe me a book, but my time is worth something, isn't it? Especially when I could be eating or shoveling or reading blog posts?
• Dean Dad writes about community colleges in California that are considering refusing to allow students to take the same class an infinite number of times (say, more than 5), since those who take a class for the third or fourth or fifth time are less likely to pass than those who retake it only once.
  
• Just in case you're not one of the millions of people who saw this already, here's a video of dancing in an Antwerp train station that made me smile.
  

Random bullets of gray November

• Here's a question: if the monograph is in trouble, dying, hard to publish, etc., then why does seemingly every presenter at a conference have a new book either just out or just coming out (or, in a bid to make the audience truly envious, both)?
  
• I think we ought to have an award patch for our blog sidebars that says something like "I survived my meeting with the Center for Teaching Awesomeness/Course Management System Gurus." These are often a requirement for getting access to modify the course no matter how much you've done in online in the past, so I kept my words to a minimum and my temper under wraps. On the 30th or so time I was told emphatically not to do something that usually works well because it would mess up their system of teaching for future people teaching the course, I finally said, "I don't really care about who teaches the course after me. Can't you just archive the course as it is now and put that one back in for the next person?" Archiving a course goes back to about 1999 in Blackboard if not earlier, so I think they could manage it. They said they'd look into it.*
• Why is it that budgets for Centers for Teaching Awesomeness never get cut, but budgets for paying fine teachers are being cut all over the place?
• I also plan to start a movement for the Abolition of Mayonnaise on Fast Food Sandwiches as a Default Option. Because of commuting and what's available, I have to eat at one of these places on some days and always order "no mayonnaise," something that gets ignored about half the time. When did mayonnaise become de rigueur on burgers,* anyway, and does anyone really need it who couldn't ask for it? (I told you these were random bullets.)

*Edited to add: An online course in which I am not permitted to add ANY external links seems to miss the point of online education, don't you think?

(** at least those with lettuce and tomatoes, which seem to trigger a mayonnaise auto-response.)

Random bullets at midweek

• How much do you remember about a book (criticism, not fiction) a few years after you've read it? After you've skimmed it?
• Do you remember the general subject? The argument? Examples?
  
• How embarrassed are you if a few years later, a student is reading the book because you said it was good and asks you about the argument--and you can't remember? (My answer: sort of embarrassed, but not as much as I'd have been some years ago.)
• You know all those writing techniques that say to get at the writing in the morning, putting everything else aside, and then stop? Well, I've gotten a piece just about finished, but the trouble is that I don't want to stop. It's like chips: you can't eat just one.
• Speaking of chips, how pampered are Americans, anyway? This is from the Wall Street Journal:

  Frito-Lay, the snack giant owned by PepsiCo Inc., says it is pulling most of the biodegradable packaging it uses for its Sun Chips snacks, following an outcry from consumers who complained the new bags were too noisy.

  Come on. Dude, you're sitting in front of your TV and the bag is too noisy? You're at home, for Pete's sake. The noise isn't going to kill you. And if the bag is too noisy for the place where you're trying to open it, here's a tip: any place where the bag noise is a problem is a place where you shouldn't be eating chips in the first place.
  

Random bullets of gray November

• Update on the rude people thing: kill them with kindness and professionalism. They will go away and stop bothering you. Excellent!
• Apparently the "kill them with kindness" school also works with campus-wide committees. I expressed my willingness to meet on days when I'm not usually on campus and have never heard from the scheduler again, not even after I sent a follow-up email.
  
• We need a name for a new kind of competition: the ecovirtue-fest. Haven't you heard people doing this lately? Example:
  
1. "I don't use harsh dishwasher detergent with phosphates.
   
2. "I don't even use the dishwasher."
   
3. "I scrub all my dishes by hand with organic plant matter and water I've dragged from the creek, and then I put it on the garden."
Apply to all other controversies (CF lightbulbs, disposable diapers, television watching and having cable), and you've got yourself a deathmatch.

• If I wrote everything at the snail's pace at which I'm writing during this month of InDaWriMoInaDWriMo, my next book manuscript would be ready in about 2023. It's about as fast as etching the words on glass with a diamond.
  
• When you get a journal acceptance and the readers' reports are complimentary, do you read the reports over three or four times just to savor them? I do the same thing when I get criticism, just to be sure that I understand what's being asked, so why not do so when the report is good?
• If a friend or someone from the media contacts you with a question that might require a little research, why does that question become immediately and completely more fascinating than anything you're currently writing?
  
• I like seeing the full moon, but I would like it not to be the major light in the sky when I leave in the morning and the major light in the sky when I drive home at night. Wasn't there a day in there, somewhere?
  

[Edited because I am terrible at acronyms.]

Random bullets of July

• Mark Twain wasn't supposed to write on Sundays, but he said once that a stretch of writing stolen on a Sunday beat all the other kinds hollow, or something like that. Likewise, a few hours of writing in a hotel room or on the computer just before you're dragged away to a trip that you'd rather not go on is a great way to make you concentrate and get something done.
• When a person tells you the exact same story 8 or 9 times over the course of two days as though you'd never heard it before, and you know it's not that she's senile (way too young for that) but that you're really just an audience for the Me Show that she's starring in and not, you know, an actual human being who registers on her radar screen, is it all right to laugh hysterically about it afterwards with members of your immediate family?
• Is it all right to laugh if this happens even after you supply the punch line on the 9th recital--and she doesn't even notice?
• Does anyone know of a way to copy and paste time, as in a full extra month, between July and August so that we can have more time to get things done this summer? Anyone? Anyone?

Random bullets. No, really. They're very random.

Horace's post about reading as productivity was right on target. I can read and read and READ and read and take notes--but that doesn't feel as productive as writing, however necessary it may be.

I am making a conscious effort to greenify, if that's a word, my daily life. I've been using my laptop instead of the big computer (it's cooler and quieter, so logic dictates that it is more energy efficient, no?), walking most places, getting the garden planted, unplugging the toaster and other instant-on appliances, and eating more leftovers. I had converted some time ago to CF bulbs and the lovely space-alien green glow that some of them give off (PR on these says "this doesn't happen," but they haven't seen them in my light fixtures), so I can't do any more in that way except use less light.

Does anyone else have a collection of small metal boxes left over from Altoids, loose tea, and spices? What on earth can you do with them? I hate to throw them away, because they look as though they'd be good for something, but they're starting to rebel and leap out of the cupboard because there are so many of them.

I saw a moose the other day when I was out driving, the first one I've seen around Northern Clime. It was a young one and seemed confused by the traffic. It can be as confused as it wants to be, as long as it doesn't leap in front of my car, which isn't much bigger than it is.

Random Bullets of Almost Summer

Does everyone put off all kinds of tasks (shopping for clothes, painting, various household things like buying a doormat) until summer, or is it just me? It's as though I've been underwater and come to the surface, only to notice that the car needs to be cleaned and that the nondescript dark wool stuff I wear all winter really ought to be put away, now that it's June.

I believe that my cat could run some branches of the federal government better than they are run now. Let's review the sequence:

1. Government announces that passports will be mandatory next January for travel to Canada and Mexico and that some new kind will be mandatory this summer.
   
2. People with travel plans in the works dutifully apply for passports.
   
3. Government is shocked--shocked!--to see that people are applying for passports in record numbers. From the Washington Post: "'We simply did not anticipate Americans' willingness to comply so quickly with the new laws,' Maura Harty, assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, said in a written statement to a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee." Apparently more than 110,000 passport applications are "piled in closets, the supervisor's office, and the break room."
   If you tell people they can't go out of the country if they don't comply, why would you be surprised if they try to comply? That's like being a McDonald's manager and saying "Who knew that people would show up for lunch and that there'd be a noon rush?"

The productivity apps are having an effect: I can see the clock ticking even as I'm writing this.

Now I'm off to get more house maintenance stuff done (oil change for car) before getting back to work.

[Edited to add: I forgot the big one! Summer school is over and the grades are in--whoopee!]