A hypothetical situation

Okay. Say you belong to an organization and that the organization has a newsletter. Say that you've volunteered to lay out the newsletter in Publisher because you are a soft touch, aka a sucker. Because it's Publisher, and you know how to wrestle it into a form that looks nice, you do this for the organization.

Bear in mind that you are not an art professor, nor are you a trained expert in design. Even after you've designed the masthead and the layout, it takes a good three hours to lay out the publication.

This is three hours during which you are not doing your own research, grading papers, preparing for class, or sitting with your feet up and having a glass of wine. You are sitting and obsessing about the relative space occupied by text boxes when you ought to be grading the papers that your students have patiently been waiting to see.

When someone who's responsible for the content and proofing then says to you, "You know, I think this bit from page 3 would look better on page 6," and you know that that means moving everything in between, with all the headaches of moving anything in Publisher, what would you do?

a) Say "You sure have a good eye for that! I'll get on it right away."
b) Ignore the suggestion.
c) Address the situation by making an even more creative suggestion as to what the person who made the suggestion can do with the newsletter.

Me and My (Deadbeat) Shadow

In department news: many meetings, but nothing I can blog about. I did learn some important lessons (not in a situation involving me) about whom the department will and will not support once push comes to shove, though.

I also got two phone calls on my cell phone yesterday, neither of them for me. When I got a new cell phone number about a year ago, I didn't realize that it came complete with the ghost of past owners. I'm still getting 2-3 calls a week for "Todd," my deadbeat shadow.

I've learned at least a few things about Todd.

He apparently liked to gamble. A lot. I get a lot of calls alerting me to hot tips at some gambling site.

He apparently didn't have a day job, since if I don't keep the phone turned off, it's apt to ring in the middle of a meeting at any time of the day.

He also was apparently a person of considerable interest to a Chicago law firm, which liked to call and leave very long automated messages on my voice mail demanding that Todd call them back immediately. This went on for a long time because whoever was responsible for sending out the messages apparently never listened to see whose voice mail it was. I finally called the law firm and told them to stop calling.

He wasn't too good with handling money, since I get calls from collection agencies demanding that Todd call them back immediately. A live person actually called yesterday, so I was able to tell him that "Todd" hadn't owned this phone in quite some time. Maybe that'll stop a few of the calls.

I do want the calls to stop, but it has been sort of interesting piecing together the life of my deadbeat shadow.

OT: In other news . . .

I see that Jane Wyatt has died. As an old movie buff and John Galsworthy fan, I remember her as Dinny Cherrell in One More River, but to everyone else she's Margaret Anderson of Father Knows Best, and, more famously, Mr. Spock's mother on Star Trek. Although I don't usually associate family members with movie stars, Jane Wyatt has always reminded me strongly of my mother-in-law (still with us, fortunately), with all that serenity and graciousness. They even went to the same college.

And, in other news, I downloaded the new Internet Explorer 7. As a longtime Firefox fan, I was a little amused: see, the new IE has these cool things called TABS, so you can OPEN MORE THAN ONE WINDOW AT ONCE. What a concept! Seriously, it has some nice features, like a separate button for Google Scholar. It'll still be useful for those occasions when I'm trying to see some video (which, except for YouTube video, my beloved Firefox just cannot seem to find the right plugins for viewing).

Sunday walk, continued

Abandoned stone building
Originally uploaded by undines.

It's an abandoned building on the path beside the river, but it doesn't appear to be very old.

Sunday walk

River view 1
Originally uploaded by undines.

After giving a talk yesterday to a local group (prep time: about 10 hours for a book that I've taught frequently), I thought a walk by the river today might be nice. I was right.

Election ladies

Our state has gone to mail-in ballots, which means the end of polling places for this fall's election. The reasons were cost, "convenience," blah blah blah. Something will be lost, though.

Ever since I started voting, the polls have always been staffed by people, mostly women, who were well on the other side of 70. I'm sure that they had an official title, but I always thought of them as the "election ladies." They'd look up your name--it usually took two of them, one to pronounce your name and the other to look it up--and then you'd sign the book. They'd give you your ballot (punch card or paper ballot or a Scantron sheet and Sharpie marker, depending on the state) or point you in the direction of the mechanical voting machine. Usually there was a cheerful election lady on the way out to see that you put your Scantron sheet or punch card into the locked box or machine. Sometimes she gave you a sticker that said "I voted!"

This felt like democracy, somehow. There I was in a place where I'd never usually be (an evangelical church was the most recent site for our district), with a lot of people I'd never usually see. We were all doing the same thing--voting--and if it felt like a little slice of a Frank Capra movie, that wasn't such a bad thing.

If you think about it, the election ladies were the first generation of American women (born circa 1920s) who came of age knowing that they could vote. Their mothers probably voted after the Nineteenth Amendment passed, but that generation had known what it was not to have a vote (as many other groups have known, to the eternal disgrace of the U.S., right up through the 1960s). Maybe the election ladies served as WACS in WWII. Maybe their mothers had impressed on them the significance of being able to vote, a right that women have had in this country for less than a hundred years. Maybe (let's not get too sentimental) they just wanted to get out of the house for election day. Whatever their reasons, the election ladies have volunteered to be at the polls every time, and now they won't be needed.

I'm going to miss the election ladies.

A day in the life

Some days are made for writing, or so I hear, and some days are just days like this.

• I spent the morning on business/administrative/class stuff: sending e-mail followups resulting from the big meeting at the conference, writing an exam, and all that kind of thing.
• For the first time, I asked to attend a department meeting via phone hookup, since the commute for the meeting takes three times as long as the meeting itself. I'm not a slacker--I'll be doing the 3-times-as-long-commute for a meeting on Wednesday--but figured that maybe this would be an acceptable alternative.
• Approximate amount of the conversation I could hear: 20%
• Approximate amount that I cared that this was all I could hear: 0%
• Exact amount of gratitude I had for the administrative professional who set this up: 100%

• Since I'd been away and the law of the land apparently dictates that only pizza can be eaten in my absence, there wasn't any food in the house, so I went to pick up some groceries. We don't have Wegman's, Trader Joe's, or Whole Foods, but we do have a local chain with three types of stores: Standard Supermarket, Upscale Organic Market, and Funky Downmarket Store. I usually go to Funky Downmarket, since it has a lot of the same variety as Upscale Organic but also carries a full slate of 1950s brands for the over-80 crowd. For some reason I really like seeing all those brands (Barbasol, Gleem--for all I know, it carries Burma Shave); it feels like time travel. It also carries a full array of strange regional candies from independent candy companies, which I figured out after reading Candyfreak.
  
• More later.
  

Conference snippets

I'm in Big Airport returning from a conference, waiting for a flight that's been delayed about two hours (as they have all the way along the line) that will take me to Northern Clime airport. The conference itself was too busy to report on at the time, but here are a couple of observations:

Most presentations that I saw were excellent. You could really learn something from the papers, and they seemed to get the audience (me included) fired up about the topics and about our own work. Although I always dread going (expense, the stress of travel, and having to talk to people being the top three reasons), conferences do energize you. (Question: How many conference-going cliches can you find in this bullet point? They're true, anyway.)

Why does a hotel in a relatively warm climate (50-70 degrees this time of year) feel the need to have (1) windows that don't open, (2) a thermostat that only can be turned down to 64 degrees at night, and (3) a big pouffy down comforter on the bed? So that my eyes will look big and pouffy like the down comforter all day long? If you love the cold and don't do well in heat, though, there was some consolation in that the conference rooms, which felt perfect to me, caused everyone to come in and complain about the low temperatures.

Even at a conference at which many of the panels address class and injustice, and at which grassroots organizing is seen as important, no one seems to notice the class hierarchy of institutions represented at the conference (Elite institutions and R1s = many panels; smaller institutions and community colleges = very few panels.) If community colleges and smaller state and private institutions constitute the place where many working adults or first-generation college students receive an education, why aren't there more panels accepted from these institutions?

Running through Jello

You know those nightmarish dreams where you're running through Jello or mud trying to get away from something and can't make any progress?

Today I thought I'd put down some estimates for how long tasks should take and compare it to how long the tasks actually took:

Creating two questions for graduate exam when I'd already read the student's bibliographies and supporting materials. . . Estimated: 45 minutes; Actual: 60 minutes. (This isn't bad; it's down from 45 minutes per question.)

Writing a 700-word newsletter article and sending it (with supporting pictures) . . .
Estimated: 45 minutes; Actual: 2 hours, 24 minutes.

Updating a study guide . . .Estimated: 20 minutes; Actual: 45 minutes

Collecting & editing & sending some handouts to be printed. . . Estimated: 15 minutes; Actual: about 45 minutes.

Academic jello. I definitely need to run faster.

Dead week

At the end of the semester, a lot of campuses, including ours, have "dead week." For us, this means that you can't have papers due, can't give exams, and generally must go easy on the students.

This was a different kind of "dead week," in that they were so quiet that signs of life were few and far between. Mild provocation didn't work ("Did you want her to kill Annoying Character?"). Softball questions didn't work very well ("What do you think the author meant by calling Character X 'Obviously Symbolic Character Name'?"). Humor worked a little, but not for long.

I couldn't get mad, somehow; it's midterm week, and they're tired. They look tired, anyway. They need a day off, and they'll get one because I'll be away at a conference. They may not need a midterm, but they're getting one of those, too.

OT: The Wal-Mart Way

From today's New York Times,:

Wal-Mart executives say they have embraced new policies for a large number of their 1.3 million workers to better serve their customers, especially at busy shopping times — and point out that competitors like Sears and Target have made some of these moves, too.

But some Wal-Mart workers say the changes are further reducing their already modest incomes and putting a serious strain on their child-rearing and personal lives. Current and former Wal-Mart workers say some managers have insisted that they make themselves available around the clock, and assert that the company is making changes with an eye to forcing out longtime higher-wage workers to make way for lower-wage part-time employees.
. . . . . . .
“They need to be doing some of this,” said Charles Grom, an analyst at J. P. Morgan Chase who covers Wal-Mart. It lets the company schedule employees “when they are generating most of their sales — at lunch, in the evening on the weekends.”

I wonder if Charles Grom works for minimum wage part time, with no health benefits except as he is "encouraged" to use Medicaid as Wal-Mart workers are. I wonder if he is called into work at varying times of the day or night, disrupting family life and sleep schedules.

Human resources experts have long said that companies benefit most from having experienced workers. Yet Wal-Mart officials say the efficiencies they gain will outweigh the effects of having what labor experts say would be a less experienced, less stable, lower-paid work force.

Sarah Clark, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the company viewed the changes as “a productivity improvement through which we will improve the shopping experience for our customers and make Wal-Mart a better place to work for our associates,” as Wal-Mart refers to its employees.
. . .
Tracie Sandin, who worked in the Yakima store’s over-the-counter drug department until last February, said, “They said, if you don’t have open availability, you’re put on the bottom of the list for hours.”

The view varies, apparently, if you're being paid the big bucks to abuse the noble art of rhetoric by spinning self-justifying lies, as Sarah Clark does, or whether you actually have to, you know, work under these "productivity improvements."

The article also goes on to say that since Wal-Mart began its plan to exterminate fire its older and disabled employees, it has removed stools and other items that allowed people with back and hip problems to work comfortably at checkout counters. Last year, an executive also favored making all employees go out and get carts, lift heavy boxes, etc., to get rid of those who might even possibly need health care. What's next? Races in which the first 10 employees getting to the finish line can keep their jobs and the rest are fired?

In addition to the obvious inequities of the Wal-Mart way for the company's employees, what troubles me is that the Wal-Mart way creeps into the academy, especially in the exploitation of part-time faculty (been there!), despite all the noble resolutions passed at MLA every year. It isn't news that there's an increasing pressure to treat students as customers by being available around the clock, teaching only that which is entertaining, and so forth. The comparison isn't fair--Wal-Mart employees don't have any options, and academics presumably do--but it's an uncomfortable reminder of where things could be headed.

Better than movie day

As an undergrad, I loved "movie day" in a class; who didn't? The class got to see and do something out of the usual routine. Students still like "movie day." That doesn't mean they're slackers. It just means that a change is as good as a rest. I don't show a lot of videos in class, but there are some times when it just plain works better than more readings or more explanations from me (for example, if you're reading novels about a manufacturing process or Moby-Dick).

Even better than a movie day for breaking up the mid-semester slump--which I haven't yet seen but might be on its way--is a class in which there's a guest lecturer or student reports. A friend of mine used to refer to these as days on which you could "put your feet up and relax." Of course, I still listen, take notes, and so on. But it's a day on which someone else is primarily responsible for keeping the class going, presenting information, and asking questions. It's good for students to hear someone else's voice and respond to someone else's questions.

Last week I had a day like that: a grad student taught a portion of the work we're reading. She did a good job, and class got to hear someone else's voice, figuratively as well as literally. Since I was sitting in their midst and apparently thus rendered invisible, when she had them do group work, I was able to hear how they were talking about the work.

So: working but in a way not working. Seeing and hearing something different. It's not only better than a movie day; it's almost as good as a snow day.

It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .

that if you have, say, two standing meetings, neither of these will be held on the days that you teach, nor will they be held on the same day so that you can go to campus and get them both over with at once.

that if you have office hours from 12-1:30, and your office has thus far been so quiet that you can hear crickets chirp, on the one day when you step out for five minutes to get a sandwich for lunch, a student will come by, find you gone, and write you an email about it.

that if after a diligent search for a book in your library catalog, you give up and decide to order it, you will receive a note (sometimes an indignant note) from Acquisitions pointing out that it's in the library even if it isn't in the catalogue.

that the one student who has been missing in action from class is the only one for whom you, and apparently the university, have no email address whatsoever.

that if the day dawns gray and rainy, and you put on a sweater because it's 45 degrees outside, the weather will turn warm and sunny so that you look like a refugee from December, stuck in the wrong time. This one I don't mind, if it means good weather.

A car & driver illusion shattered

Well, maybe not shattered. Maybe slightly dented.

Driving up the road to campus today, I saw another Prius. They're not too common around here; I see maybe one other one a day.

As I turned onto campus, I saw a student starting to cross at the crosswalk and stopped. The other Prius zipped right by us on the right. Since the students have sensibly concluded that it's rare for cars to stop, even though they're supposed to, the student of course slowed down and wasn't injured.

But still. According to PriusChat, all Prius drivers are brave, loyal, trustworthy, cheerful, thrifty, reverent, obedient and the rest, and when they're not bragging about their gas mileage (their only vice), they're out saving the whales.

The Literary Post Office

This wasn't a conversation I had expected to have at the post office today, but it's a nice one to report. After dropping off a package to be mailed, I asked for some stamps.

Me: "The Katherine Anne Porter ones, please."
PO counter man: "Have you read any of her work?"
Me: "Yes, lots."
PO counter man: "She mostly wrote short stories, didn't she?"
Me: "Yes, and a novel--Ship of Fools. It took her twenty years."
PO counter man: "Really? She wrote Ship of Fools, eh? That'll be $7.80."

Nice to know we have a literary as well as literate post office.

A different PSA about the MLA Job List

Flavia posted a PSA the other day announcing that the MLA Job Information List is now online. Like Flavia, I kept up a sporting interest in looking at the list even after I had a job (and tenure), but that changed after serving on (and on occasion chairing) search committees.

I have a PSA of my own; it's basically a few pleas for job seekers based on experiences past and current. (BTW, this post is a snark-free zone, unlike some others I've posted.)

Please do think about whether you're really interested in the institution and the general area of the country before you apply. If you're not really interested, don't apply. For example, if you get an interview and end up asking questions that basically ask how often/how much you can stay away from the institution/the area, we know that we've pretty much wasted our time and interview money on someone who doesn't want to be there.

Ditto if you tell us that your advisor thinks this would be a good "first job."

If the ad specifies a specialist in Subject Y, and you taught one course in Subject Y back in grad school but your major area and dissertation are in another field, please think twice before applying and trying to spin this into a major area for you. We'll figure this out in any case when we read your materials.

Proofread your cover letters carefully. Concluding with some variation of "and that's why I'm a perfect candidate for [Not Your Institution]" doesn't inspire much confidence.

If your research is exciting to you, and teaching is exciting to you, make sure that that comes across. You don't have to jump on a couch, but if you want to spend your life doing these two things (teaching and research), the search committee, and later the interviewers from the committee, ought to be able to figure out why it's exciting, what the possible research implications might be for the field, and so on.

This gets said over and over again, but try to personalize your letter for the institution to which you're applying. Printing out a boilerplate letter is faster than tailoring one to the job, but reading the same phrases in densely printed boilerplate about dissertation, teaching philosophy, and so on, especially in the increasingly long letters that we get, is a MEGO moment (my eyes glaze over).

technorati tag: grad-compendium

A little silence

(Sorry--I had to take down the last post but will post again soon.)

Teaching Carnival 11

Check out the Teaching Carnival by George at Wordherders. You won't be sorry.

The library: an enemy to books?

From the Chronicle about Harold B. Schleifer, Dean of Libraries at Cal State Polytechnic in Pomona. This is the kind of thinking that I fear:

***********
After getting an estimate of $240,000 to move and store up to 200,000 books, of the library's collection of about 700,000, Mr. Schleifer proposed to trim that figure by $80,000 by asking his staff to find 70,000 or more books the library could throw out. If a book hadn't been checked out in a decade, and if copies were available at nearby libraries, or if it was damaged, it could be pitched. (my emphasis).

The librarians were disturbed enough to write a strongly worded memorandum to Mr. Schleifer. The collection-management staff called the idea of discarding more than 70,000 books to save $80,000 "penny-wise but pound-foolish" and "antithetical to our professional values."

"If the decision is made to discard books at this level we will not be able to help you explain the decision to the campus community," the librarians wrote.

************

I know that the library's mission is changing toward digital media, and maybe that's all right for public libraries (though I really don't think so). But for a university library?

What about the faculty members who need the books, even if "they haven't been checked out in ten years"? I'd estimate that roughly a quarter of the books I check out haven't been checked out in twenty to forty years. (I've even been known to check out a few extra old books just to keep the library from exactly this sort of misguided lunacy.) That doesn't mean that they are useless books. It means that just maybe, they're books that need to be recovered or rediscovered; they're books that shed light on classics or are classics themselves. They're books that we'll never discover if the library, following current trends, decides that more coffee shops and computers are the answer to users' needs.

What about students who'll never know about these books or see them, if they're gone or at a nearby library?

And what counts as a "nearby library," anyway? Many students don't have cars; those that have enough interest to go down into compressed stacks to look for books may not have the transportation or the interest to go to a nearby library. The "order it and get it 24 hours later" model of keeping materials off-site may be necessary sometimes, but it's a pain in the neck and definitely a second-best choice regardless of whatever "strategic plan" rhetoric tries to justify it. Also, many libraries charge students for Interlibrary Loan materials (mine does: $2). Do we really want to put MORE impediments in the way of students having access to materials?

What about serendipity--finding something you'd never find if you weren't physically in the stacks looking for something? Sometimes you copy a journal article and discover some related materials that never come up in even the most careful database search. Also, it's sometimes faster to copy something or even skim through it on paper than to wait for those hefty .pdf files from JSTOR.

And about those digital resources? Guess what--they can, and do, go away. Library budgets get sliced all the time, and there's no guarantee that the archive that exists this week will be available a year from now. It's the same process: someone in administration decides that you don't need it, and so it's cut. Also, although I'm a huge fan of online resources, they aren't perfect. Sometimes the links don't work, or the journal isn't available as advertised. Or, as happened to me this summer when using microfilm, pages are just plain missing. It's clear that UMI is probably never going to go back and re-microfilm the last few missing pages of a newspaper issue from 1910. (This is apparently not a unique problem.) That's now the record of that publication, and if it's a flawed record, I guess we're supposed to say "so what?"

The heroes in all this are the librarians who wrote the "strongly worded memorandum" to Dean Schleifer. I'd like to raise a virtual toast to you all.

[Update (from the comments):

thought you might appreciate another update. I have an online petition up and running and have been using my lunch hour to give out information to students here at Cal Poly on the book dumping situation. Yesterday the campus police questioned me and about my activities.

HELP!!!!!

go to the website to sign the Save Our Books petition

www.calpolylibrary.com ]

Teaching

George Williams (link thanks to Mel)asks some interesting questions about teaching. I've been thinking about how my teaching practices have and haven't changed over time.

One thing I learned (and have written about on this blog) is that the either/or of the "sage on the stage" vs. "guide on the side" model has its limitations. Although I'm convinced that students learn most when they're coming up with the ideas, they don't always value their insights unless you're there writing ideas on the board as the students articulate them, nodding, actively listening to what they're saying. The best classes aren't taught; they're built from the insights of the students. It's invisible teaching and the hardest kind to do.
And sometimes a short lecture works really well. Admit it: don't you like to listen to a well-told story, one with some point and drama to it, especially if it's clear that the person telling the story is passionate about the subject? I do. Good lecturing is a higher level of good storytelling; it conveys ideas vividly and sets the stage for the discussion to follow. Like a good storyteller, a lecturer ought to know when to shut up. I heard a moderator say this one time at the beginning of an all-faculty meeting: "Remember, if you're the speaker, no one in the audience is having as good a time listening as you are talking."

I've also learned that it's important to realize that you may not see yourself as a performer, but the students do. As Slaves of Academe says in a post about teaching,"Put down by critics on the left and the right, academics are some of the hardest working entertainers in the Biz." It's a tightrope performance, and it can leave you breathless, figuratively speaking, especially in those moments when the students' ideas converge and there's an "aha!" moment.

I also learned early that the no-fault, full-disclosure syllabus is your friend. What I mean by that is that if you build in some "get out of jail free" cards (drop a low quiz grade, set a fair attendance policy), you won't have to play Queen for a Day (remember Alice Walker's mention of this in "Everyday Use"?) as students vie to come up with the most pathetic excuses. They're adults; we ought to treat them that way.

That brings me to a difficult issue: how do we ensure that they're doing the reading? I've tried a lot of possibilities (weblogs, questions, reading journals, short writings, listservs, Blackboard/WebCT discussion boards, etc.) and still use some of them; in fact, I'm especially pleased with the blog assignment I've devised for this semester.

But I also use (avert your eyes) the much-despised quiz on occasion. Although I agree with Dr. Crazy that these can be "infantilizing" to students, I don't think they have to be.

Here's why: quizzes helped me to learn to read literature. As an undergrad, I had a professor in a Victorian novels course who'd give us daily quizzes, which at first the class hated. Some of the questions were logical, and some, we thought, were insanely specific: "What kind of flower did X send to Y?" "What was the title of the book that A gave to B?" "What brand of perfume did Z buy before the party?"

Now, anyone can cruise through a Sparknotes site and get the general idea of The Scarlet Letter or Vanity Fair, but questions like this are too idiosyncratic and detailed for the Sparknotes crowd. When writing an in-class short essay, Sparknotes students can gas on for quite a while about plot and character, even themes, and if they're good writers, as teachers we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. But the quizzes in that Victorian lit class separated the sheep from the goats when it came to the reading. They made us learn to mark up our books and write notes in the margins. They kept us honest.

More than that, we (okay, I) got to like them. It became like a Jeopardy game to see how many I could get right. And better still, it taught me to look, really look, at the details and ask why. What did that choice mean? What did it say about the character and the work? Why would a character choose a rose and not a violet, for example? That led to discussions about the language of flowers, courtship rituals, and the rest, discussions that wouldn't have been possible unless we'd read the book closely. Like a lot of students, I could be led but not pushed, and those quizzes led me by piquing my curiosity and, let's face it, by stimulating my sense of competition. Haven't you ever gone over a quiz in class and heard students saying "Yes!" as they get the answers right? It was a test, but not a high-stakes one, so there wasn't any pressure. But it was a test, so a natural competitive drive makes you want to get it right.

So although it's not at all fashionable, and although I use a lot of other methods as well, I still think that the lowly quiz has a place in the classroom: five to ten questions, short answer, know it or don't. And I still remember some of the questions--and answers--from that Victorian novels class.

technorati tag: teaching-carnival