Temptations

• For the first time in many years, there are actually jobs in my field. I don't want to move, and I probably won't apply, but a lot of them seem to read like this "Wanted: Undine Specialty 1 with possible subfield in Undine Specialties 2 and 3." It's tempting.
• Some day, I am going to stand up in a faculty meeting and say, "This is not a karaoke bar. You cannot just stand up and hold forth to no particular purpose with all of us as your captive audience. If you're going to do that, at least buy us a round."
• A few months ago, I was talking with someone (let's call hir Fatuous Fool) in Undine Specialty 2 who'd been in the field for, oh, 20 minutes or so, and FF said, "Of course X isn't really a Specialty 2 project at all." "Really? Why?" I asked. "How would you define Specialty 2?" "Um, er, um," replied FF, after which I dropped it. I wish now that I had pursued it a little further and been a little less gracious, because really, who made FF the deity of Specialty 2? Well, maybe taking the high road was all for the best.
• I am tempted to rant further about reinventing the educratic wheel--"No more dreary lectures with our new ed-u-matic professor software!"--but fortunately Historiann has done it for me.

Touching books

In one of my classes this semester, the students (some of them) seem happier to watch and listen than to speak up and participate. It's as though all those crazy antics I'm performing at the front of the class--you know, asking questions--are less real to them than the PowerPoints I use to show pictures and key terms when I lecture. We've done groups, presentations, reading aloud, and lots of other things. I think they're coming around.

The other day, I was introducing an author, and I had them come up to the front of the class. It's not small class, but they all gathered around.

"You know, when you read from our anthology, it's easy to lose sight of the context," I began. "I'll bet you think that Famous Author lives in this anthology."

She's clearly lost it this time, their eyes said. How could an author live in a book?

Then I pulled out some books and some copies of the magazines in which FA had published. They passed them around and I talked about the kinds of places where FA had published, how authors usually published with the same publishing house over a period of time, and all that. I asked them to look at the jokes and drawings and what they noticed about the magazines.

They seemed interested and stayed that way even when we moved on to the next part of the class. How could you be indifferent to an author when you've held the actual publication in which FA published all those decades ago? At the very least, they don't think that FA lives in an anthology any more, and they have a pretty good sense of the kind of literary house in which s/he does live.

Writers' little helpers

Some technological, some not.

First the not-technological:

• First of all, the Another Damned Notorious Writing Group. It really did help to feel as though I needed to accomplish something and check in on Friday.
• Also, the ADNWG inspires bloggers to write about writing, as posts by its cofounders and also Sisyphus, Dr. Crazy, Dr. Virago, Dame Eleanor, and all the comments on the ADNWG posts attest.
• Opposite day. I think I've posted before that my natural time to write is in the evening, by which I mean that I have better concentration and interest then, and I can write more in 2 hours in the evening than in 4 hours during the day. Given every piece of advice on writing ever published, I've been trying very hard to do the "get up in the morning and write" thing, but yesterday I just gave up, did fun class-prep work all day, cruised around on the internet a little, and in the evening finally made the suckitude meter budge in the right direction on this get-it-out-the-door article that I have to finish. I wrote a bunch and can now see the end in sight.

The technological ones:

• Pomodoro. I finally broke down and bought Pomodoro instead of using my regular timer. Somehow, having its alien voice tell me to get started has helped, as has the game-type quality of having it enter the time spent automatically on my calendar.
• Google Calendar. It truly did make a difference when I actually wrote in "Write" as an appointment on writing days. It's all a Jedi mind trick, like the timers, but really, what isn't?
• 750words. It doesn't work for the kinds of editing and rewriting I was doing yesterday, but for generating text that you can then cut into shape, it works well.
• Freedom. Freedom cuts you off from the Internet for a period of time that you specify. The Windows version I tried didn't work, although whether that was due to Freedom or the general haplessness of Vista, I'm not sure. It works well with a Mac but--important--not if you are also running Pomodoro.
• Excel. I know I've posted before about a spreadsheet I keep (on the advice of Boice & Silvia) listing word counts for the day & a brief description of what I did. I recently opened a new workbook page and started keeping track just of the time I started with the beginning and ending word counts. I used to do this on paper, but except for planning and editing, I haven't felt like writing much on paper lately, and this works.

I do realize these are all toys to keep me entertained while I get to work, little shiny technological carrots, so to speak, but if they work, they work. I'm saving learning about Scrivener, which I own but can't figure out yet, for the next big writing push.

Small post on writing

With all due respect to Profacero, Dame Eleanor, Dr. Virago, and Jonathan at Prose Doctor, writing is not either* neither easy or fun right now. I'm still finishing up a promised piece that I thought I could get done before Notorious/ADM's writing challenge--the one I listed so confidently last Friday--but it isn't happening despite many long hours of working on it this week (and the week before that, and the week before that, and so on).

It's sucking up vast quantities of time that I'm supposed to be putting to other things. It's slow work, and it's harder work than it ought to be. Some parts are pretty good, some are okay, and some are bad but getting better. Instead of a word count meter, maybe I should put in a suckitude meter and measure the gradual progress in the right direction that way.

But it will get better, and it will get done.

*"Neither." Sheesh. See what I mean about the words not working?

Hacking the Academy: Transformative? Feasible?

The shorter version of the free, crowdsourced book Hacking the Academy is now online (via Profhacker) at this site: http://www.digitalculture.org/hacking-the-academy/. I've been reading through the "Hacking Scholarship" part.

The whole essay or series of essays, if it's not too old-school a term to refer to them that way, is exciting; you can feel the energy that went into this project. It's also exciting to see put together in one place ideas that have been out on the blogosphere for some time. Here are some excerpts, with comments and questions:

• "Say no, when asked to undertake peer-review work on a book or article manuscript that has been submitted for publication by a for-profit publisher or a journal under the control of a commercial publisher." (Jason Baird Jackson)

Cathy Davidson and other eminences may be able to get away with this, but if your university, like most, counts productivity in ways that engage with traditional publishing, this Bartleby "I would prefer not to" idea may not work.

• "The idea that knowledge is a product, which can be delivered in an analog vehicle needs to be questioned. What the network shows us, is that many of our views of information were/are based on librocentric biases." (David Parry)

True, and again, something that's exciting and potentially liberating, although I confess to being librocentric (a librophiliac?). I don't know about this "knowledge as product in an analog vehicle," though. Haven't we been talking about alternative ways to exchange/preserve/present knowledge for at least the last 20 years or roughly the Internet age? That's how long I've heard about it, at any rate.

• "In a world where the primary tools for finding new scholarship are tagged, social databases like Delicious and LibraryThing, the most efficient form of journal interface with the world might be a for journals to scrap their websites and become collective, tagging entities." (Jo Guldi) Guldi goes on to suggest a "wikification" that would allow a journal article to be crowdsource-reviewed for a year and to disappear if the author didn't make it a stronger article as a result.
  

Again, another interesting idea. Here the "survival of the fittest" ethos usually considered to be the province of official peer reviewers is crowdsourced--still Darwinian, in that a few will survive but many perish, but more democratic, maybe. Someone else suggested that reviews will still be "invited," so there will still be a hierarchy.

Meanwhile, the article dangles in the wind for a year, and if it is deemed insufficiently improved (by whom?) it disappears and the now publicly humiliated author . . . does what? Takes it off his or her cv, if it was on there to begin with? At what point does it count as "published," if we will still even have that category of evaluation?

• "But the key point is that we need to take back our publications from the market-based economy, and to reorient scholarly communication within the gift economy that best enables our work to thrive. We are, after all, already doing the labor for free—the labor of research, the labor of writing, the labor of editing—as a means of contributing to the advancement of the collective knowledge in our fields." (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

Can I get a big "amen"?

• "But, as Cathy Davidson has noted, 'the database is not the scholarship. The book or the article that results from it is the scholarship.'” (Mills Kelly)
  

True--and yet what about the work that goes into establishing, curating, and mounting a database for use, not to mention the technical details? Kelly says, rightly, that it's not considered scholarship if it doesn't make an argument. Isn't the selection of texts and choice of access media a form of argument or at least an intellectual labor?

More to the point: Kelly never says this and never puts it in this way, but I'm uncomfortable with what could be seen as a distinction between worker bees who create the database and the "real scholars" who use it. Don't we value editions? Why should a database be less valued? Tom Scheinfeldt provides an answer for this:

At the very least, we need to make room for both kinds of digital humanities, the kind that seeks to make arguments and answer questions now and the kind that builds tools and resources with questions in mind, but only in the back of its mind and only for later.

Anyway, even if you don't agree with all of it, it's an exciting way to think about the possibilities of scholarship, so go read it.

Your thoughts?

Monty Python wisdom

Sometimes it happens: didn't sleep well, woke up early, went back to sleep and had a bad teaching dream (they showed up in a room I hadn't been told about), and so on.

So in the rich tradition of interior monologues, as I was preparing to leave for the day, one part of my brain said, "I don't feel like teaching today."

Up pipes a John Cleese voice from the "Dead Parrot" sketch. You know the part where Palin tells Cleese, "Beautiful plumage, the Norwegian blue" and Cleese answers "The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead"?

Yes, a John Cleese voice popped up inside my head and said, "Your wanting to teach don't enter into it."

I laughed, got in the car, taught all day, and had good classes. It's true: when they're expecting you to show up, your momentary thought that you might not feel like it don't enter into it.

(Link to the sketch: Dead Parrot Sketch)

Where have all the bloggers gone?

Gone to the Chronicle, every one--well, two of them anyway: Tenured Radical and now Lesboprof. The Chronicle is not what you'd call enthusiastic about casual pseudonymous passers-by leaving comments (you need a Chronicle identity), so I won't be able to wish Lesboprof well in her new digs as I'd wanted to.

Inktopia? Gone to Scientopia (at least for a guest post).

Dr. Isis? Gone to her own domain: http://isisthescientist.com/.

Comradde PhysioProffe? Gone to a group blog: http://freethoughtblogs.com/physioprof/.

I know there've always been group blogs, and this is only a few instances, but I'm wondering if we're seeing some kind of consolidation wave taking place. This is good in one way because the Chronicle and other sites are recognizing the power of blogs, but on the other hand, the integration of blogs/Twitter/Facebook that sites are aiming for makes that cloak of pseudonymity even thinner than before.

Maybe the "thin pseudonym" people like Historiann and the moms at Roxie's Place have the right idea. Yet when I tried blogging a little bit under my own name, I hedged so much about everything that the posts were worthless (and I took the blog down almost immediately).

For better or worse, this feels like a real voice in ways that my real voice did not. How's that for a conundrum?

Dear Mr. Gates: Brick and mortar colleges need love, too

Dear Mr. Gates,

The Chronicle reported today that in a time of huge cutbacks and givebacks for brick and mortar state universities, where students learn by talking to one another and their teachers face to face, you have given $4.5 million to Western Governors University:

Western Governors University, the online institution emphasizing competency-based learning, has received $4.5-million to support its recent expansions into Texas, Indiana, and Washington State.

What's that you say? You support online-only educational ventures even if brick-and-mortar state universities, which are really, really hurting in this economy as states claw back money already allocated, have existing and well-established online learning programs?

Then why did you give the money for this, which is definitely not online-only?

The money, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be used to open brick-and-mortar offices, to market the university to prospective students, and to finance any future expansion in other states.

So let me get this straight: at a time when universities, including one to which you have been generous in the past, have taken percentage cuts in the double digits to their budgets once or twice a year for the past several years, you have decided to fund a new bricks-and-mortar building and to pay for marketing this (now not so much online-only) university? And you're going to give it money to compete with the definitely hurting state universities?

Does this mean that your company is going to hire more graduates from online-only universities and stop maximizing its use of H1B visas for those who went to brick-and-mortar universities elsewhere?

Anyway, at least you are interested in investing in education, even if we don't see eye to eye on how your money should be spent.

Love and kisses,

Undine

Soundings: Uncoverage and mosaic coverage

Like Dame Eleanor and Dr. Crazy, I'm tired but pleased after the first week of classes. I've also been thinking about the recent post at Profhacker on "uncoverage" as opposed to "coverage."

I've heard arguments against the coverage model many times, and the "uncoverage" model does sound attractive. Take, for example, the "mom and apple pie" idea implied by this sentence: "Taken together, depth and breadth mean moving away from the prepackaged observations and readily digestible interpretations that go hand-in-hand with coverage." Who could argue with getting away from "prepackaged observations" and the rest? It's like shooting arrows into the much-maligned five-paragraph essay.

Logically, however, this presupposes that either (1) you as a teacher are teaching these preconceived ideas by rote to a bunch of parrots or (2) the students need to be disabused of these rigid ideas since they already know them. I think the situation is more complicated than that.

The thing is, students don't necessarily know this stuff. They don't always have preconceptions that need to be shaken up about, say, what a metaphor is or what Romantic poetry might be, because some of them will never have heard of it to begin with. They can't tell obvious points from nonobvious ones, or logically sound points from crazy ones, because they don't have the frame of reference necessary to make those judgments. In short, they can't question a conventional idea and rebel against it if they don't know it exists in the first place.

That's where the idea of "soundings" comes into play. What we're doing, especially for the first few weeks, is taking soundings into the depths of their knowledge. What have they heard about the Romantics? What do they know about Dickens? It's only by uncovering what they do know that we can address what they don't know.

Maybe they have some good ideas, or maybe they have some misconceptions, or maybe they have limited conceptions, or maybe they have some combination of all these. What we need to do is provide a mosaic of "uncoverage" with enough "coverage" so that they can put the pieces together themselves.

Random bullets of back to school

• It just wouldn't be a syllabus, would it, without a mistake on it? I don't mean a typo (which there mercifully weren't any of), but a mistake as in put the wrong date and so on. Perfection is an insult to the academic gods. That's my defense, and I'm sticking to it.
• If they are half as excited as I am to start the new semester, we're all good.
• I have to keep reminding myself that in the total scheme of things, the administration does not give the tiniest damn* about the many, many hours I put into creating a course, nor to teaching it, prepping for it, or grading the papers for it, although of course they would say otherwise, and that this in turn makes absolutely no difference to the way I approach teaching. It does not prevent me from spending too much time (and, to an extent, having fun) prepping for the courses. Part of why we all get incensed about the "lazy professor" nutcase rhetoric out there now is that it is hard, demanding, and absorbing work that we do because we're committed to it and want to do it well. Go ask Matt Damon if you don't believe me.
  
• Anybody who says teaching isn't (or can't be) absorbing intellectual work is a fool. There, I've said it.
  
• Reader, I banned them--electronic devices, I mean, a la the airplane speech, although I didn't actually give that speech. We'll be using them at some times during the classes, but let's see if that creates a mass exodus from any of the classes.
• Now back to course prep.

(*as in all administrations would like teaching to be done well, but what they reward in terms of tenure and promotions isn't primarily teaching.)

A nice moment and a tech tip

Today I did something I don't do often enough: I went to each of the rooms where I'm scheduled to teach and checked to see if I could get the technology to work with my computer.

Since it was a Friday afternoon and school hasn't started yet, no one was in the classrooms. They were cool and dark until I switched on the lights, and the rooms had those freshly waxed floors that are never as clean as they are at the beginning of the semester. There's also that feeling of mild outlawry in walking into an empty classroom and taking charge of it, knowing that if anyone challenged me I'd just tell them I was a professor and they'd go away.

This was a geektastic little tour, too, because I figured out how to get everything to work--the computer, the iPad, doc camera, projector, and even sound, which is sometimes a dicey proposition. I tried PowerPoint, web pages, Keynote, and Youtube, playing "Trouble in River City" from The Music Man in all three of the rooms and wandering to the back to see what students would see from various angles.

Here is the nice moment: as I was in the largest of the rooms (before playing the YouTube clips), students kept wandering in singly or in pairs. They'd walk around a bit, look at the desks, and then leave. Some of them talked to me a little: "Hi, are you a professor? I'm just checking out the room before classes start." It was good to see students doing that, and it reminded me that we were both doing the same thing, in a way--trying to get acclimated to the space a little before classes start.

Here is the tech tip, as passed along to me by the Apple geniuses: some time in the spring of 2010, a MacOS upgrade made all the power settings on the laptop default to California power-saving standards, which sounds all eco-worthy and green except that if you were projecting video of any sort, the video on the screen at the front of the room was so dark that students couldn't see it, even if the laptop was plugged in. The same automatic darkening occurred when students would present their work and embed a video clip. I knew something had happened and figured out that it was probably somebody's idea of a feature rather than a bug, but it was maddening because there was no cure for it.

The Apple genius told me that it was a common problem and that this is the way to fix it: go to the battery icon (Energy Saver Preferences), and change the settings from "Better Battery Life" to "Higher Performance" under "Power Adapter." You will have to restart and log in again (not just log in again), but that should fix the settings temporarily. The settings will revert to "Better Battery Life" even if the computer isn't running on battery, so you will have to repeat the process if you shut down the computer.

This fix seemed to work today, so let's hope that it works if I show video in class this year. The last time, students tried to watch a movie that looked like Godfather II seen through goggles filled with dark coffee, and even their young eyes couldn't make out the murky doings on the screen.

Wishes (resolutions?) for the new academic year

I'm taking break from planning classes that start almost immediately to think about this year. What do I want to happen?

• Less time spent in faculty meetings where we might as well pass around the Festivus pole. You know what I'm talking about: the ritual airing of grievances, feats of strength (power struggles between individuals), and so on. Not all meetings are like this, but let's make none of them like this. (I'm not talking about raising legitimate problems but re-discussing past issues.)
• This goes double for meetings in which people submit things for discussion and don't show up to discuss them.
  
• Triple for those who make a lengthy point in an already overly long meeting, stand up, say "I have to leave now," and then walk out the door, leaving the rest of us holding the Festivus pole.
  
• Spend more time on writing early in the morning during writing days.
  
• Spend less time being irritated and tempted to fire off annoyed emails. I don't often send them, but the irritation is distracting. Twain said "When angry, count four; when very angry, swear." Both are better than writing angry emails in your head when you're supposed to be writing.
  
• Say no to pointless service obligations, the kind where I'm basically there to warm a bench rather than to play the game. I've done plenty of service, and it's time to get my other work done instead.
  

What are your resolutions?

A clip post on writing: Jennifer Egan and Michael Agger

Two quick clips on writing.

Jennifer Egan, via ia Perfect from Now On:

The second thing is, I feel like getting in the habit of it is huge. I guess that was my one accomplishment of those two years [with the first failed novel]— making it a routine is a gigantic part of it.
One corollary of that— and this is probably the most important thing for me— is being willing to write really badly. It won’t hurt you to do that. I think there is this fear of writing badly, something primal about it, like: “This bad stuff is coming out of me…” Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows.

And this, from Michael Agger's "How to Write Faster" at Slate:

The infamously productive Trollope, who used customized paper! "He had a note pad that had been indexed to indicate intervals of 250 words," William F. Buckley told the Paris Review. "He would force himself to write 250 words per 15 minutes. Now, if at the end of 15 minutes he hadn't reached one of those little marks on his page, he would write faster." Buckley himself was a legend of speed—writing a complete book review in crosstown cabs and the like.
. . .
Ann Chenoweth and John Hayes (2001) found that sentences are generated in a burst-pause-evaluate, burst-pause-evaluate pattern, with more experienced writers producing longer word bursts. . . . One also finds dreadful confirmation of one's worst habits: "Binge writing—hypomanic, euphoric marathon sessions to meet unrealistic deadlines—is generally counterproductive and potentially a source of depression and blocking," sums up the work of Robert Boice. One strategy: Try to limit your working hours, write at a set time each day, and try your best not to emotionally flip out or check email every 20 seconds. This is called "engineering" your environment.
. . .
Like many writers, I take a lot of notes before I compose a first draft. The research verifies that taking notes makes writing easier­—as long as you don't look at them while you are writing the draft! Doing so causes a writer to jump into reviewing/evaluating mode instead of getting on with the business of getting words on the screen.
Alas, the cognitive literature offers no easy solutions. The same formula appears: "Self-regulation through daily writing, brief work sessions, realistic deadlines, and maintaining low emotional arousal."

Assigning and grading essays this year? How old school of you.

As I begin to think about assignments for the semester, I find myself torn between the tried and true--assignments I've given before--and fancy new possibilities. Just in time to help, "Professors Cede Grading Power to Outsiders—Even Computers" at the Chronicle describes a couple of models of teaching wherein you assign essays but never grade them yourself, and Cathy Davidson at the New York Times questions whether we need essays at all.

The first is the model of online-only Western Governors University (there's no possessive apostrophe in that name, which may be a sign all in itself). WGU assigns students to a faculty mentor and "[n]o letter grades are given—students either pass or fail each task. Officials say a pass in a Western Governors course amounts to a B at a traditional university." All the grading is done by a cohort of adjunct professors, who never see the students and thus aren't swayed by issues of how hard the student worked or other external factors. It sounds like a no-classes version of the AP exam or maybe a CLEP exam.

This model of splitting instruction and assessment into two different areas is actually one that most of us are familiar with: exit exams, portfolio assessment, and programs like the first-year writing program at Texas Tech all use a form of this model, and as in those examples, the instructors participate in norming sessions to ensure consistency. Since the exam is everything in this model, what happens to all the pressure for instructors to evaluate students in multiple ways?

The second model gave me pause: using a program called SAGrader to grade the students' essays and give feedback on them. I remember seeing programs like this touted a few years ago, and they were easily fooled by both the bombastic say-nothing five-paragraph essay ("Weather is very important in this our world today") and the "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" variety of nonsense sentences. Here is what gave me the most pause:

When she announced to her class that software would automatically grade the essay tests, many students were wary. "The students said, I'm being graded by a robot?" she remembers. "I said, Anybody who doesn't get a 100, I will look at a machine, and I will see if the machine made a mistake."

So a perfect score--not just an A, but a perfect score--is the default grade for these essays? I went to the site, and apparently the model there is that students submit essays until they are perfect in some terms or other, though I'm not sure that creativity and critical thinking are part of those terms.

The third model is Cathy Davidson's in Now You See It. In "Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade" at the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan quotes Davidson as suggesting that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not within ourselves or in our underlings but in our assignments:

What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in school — the term paper — and not necessarily intrinsic to a student’s natural writing style or thought process?”

If we assigned tweets, blog posts, and wikis instead of essays--and quit teaching old-fashioned writers like Thomas Pynchon--we'd be doing everyone a favor, including our students, she concludes, because we're trying to prepare them for jobs that won't exist in the future instead of the 65% of all jobs that haven't been invented yet. Incidentally, in the comments to the article, I learned that some students are using an easier way to read online: Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting, which sets up a sentence to look like a poem.

There's something attractive about having students experiment with different forms of writing, but speaking as someone who has taught or used with students a lot of technologies only to see them fall by the wayside, I'm not sure but what she's missing the point. (Example: do you still teach them or have to teach them how to write HTML in Notepad? How to observe listserv etiquette? How to write an email address? I didn't think so.)

But technology aside, can't each of these forms teach something different? Is there something inherently better about a 144-word message or a 600-word blogpost than a short research paper where you have to synthesize, group, and critique ideas, adding some of your own?

Research World: On archives and concentration

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I was a little ambivalent about this trip to the archives; I had too much to do, and so on--all work that I was supposed to be doing and never actually completing. What I hadn't counted on is the magical powers of concentration that research libraries somehow beam in to the heads of those in their research rooms.

Think about it. You leave a very hot, humid space outdoors, where you're trying to figure out all the basic daily life in a new space (How do I get back to where I live? When does the bus come? How do I get my key/print documents/get some tea/do laundry?) and are consequently feeling frazzled.

Then you go into a cool, quiet research room where you know what you're supposed to be doing. Even though there's wireless internet in the room, you barely notice it except to look up something related to the archival materials you're reading. You don't fidget, and you don't think about the other writing you're supposed to be doing. You work your way through the folders, reading, taking pictures with your newly silent camera, transcribing, and otherwise doing the work you know you're there to do.

You're in Author space. Everything you do for 7-8 hours in that room relates to Author. You start making connections just because of the sheer volume of Author time you're putting in. Even when you walk somewhere for lunch and the heat hits you as you leave the building, your brain is still working on Author questions.

Best of all, you feel capable of making judgments now that you couldn't when you first started to look at the papers. You recognize not only Author's handwriting but that of various associates, so you can tell who is writing what. You get to know the issues that the letter writers are talking about, even if they're using some shorthand way of alluding to them.

Even outside the reading room, you don't want to let the world intrude except for some escapist reading or a little Netflix. You ignore the news and various crises in education; you stop looking at Facebook and Twitter. All of it seems too noisy and stressful if you're in Research World.

I'd like to bottle Essence of Research World and take it back home with me.

Thoughts from the archive

• Walking into an archive (and a town) I've never been to before doesn't feel strange, somehow, for as soon as I caught sight of Author's familiar handwriting, I felt right at home.
• It's completely irrational, but let's say Author has a side subject that ze is interested in writing about, like geometry or cutting out paper dolls. Every time Author starts talking about geometry or paper dolls (which other researchers have already discussed), I want hir to talk instead about what I'm interested in having hir talk about. See? Irrational.
• Those who (ahem!) have recently purchased a camera to take photos of materials like the cool kids do should be warned that they should test the camera before going to the archive. Camera manufacturers like to put in enough loud shutter clicks, beeps, and little musical flourishes when the camera turns on and off to embarrass the most intrepid researcher, especially when said researcher can't figure out how to turn them off without diligent Google searches for guidance. If you were in an archive recently and some fool had a noisy camera, that was me.
  

Writing houses again

Our family used to have a dog that did this: If she didn't want to acknowledge the presence of something she was afraid of, like a cat or something she'd chewed up and knew she'd get in trouble for, she wouldn't look directly at whatever it was but would turn away and look at it out of the corner of her eye.

I am that dog, looking slantendicular when I think about (1) the upcoming semester, which is coming up at the speed of light; (2) an upcoming research trip that I would normally look forward to but am not prepared for; (3) serious academic controversies as reported by diligent bloggers; and (4) a ton of writing that is not going well at all. You would think it impossible to avoid looking at everything on your desk directly, including the computer monitor, but you would be wrong, although I can safely report that a day spent trying and failing to write is much more exhausting than actually getting the thing written.

Fortunately, The New Yorker's article "The Rise of the Tiny House" let me escape into my writing house fantasy again for a little while. I'm pretty sure that will help. That and getting the writing done.

(I will write a real post soon.)

Home is where the dishwasher is

Historiann has an interesting post up about Michelle Nijhuis's "Not one more winter in the tipi, honey." It's about the gendered division of labor that creeps in when idealistic back-to-the-land-for-a-simpler-life types experience parenthood. The glamor jobs like siding the yurt win a lot of praise whereas the realities of invisible (and repetitive) domestic work like washing diapers don't, and the division of labor that usually attends these tasks often means that women bail out first on the Arcadian dream.

I think it's partly the invisibility of these tasks, as Historiann says, and partly their lack of glamor, but also the sheer amount of mental as well as physical energy that they take. I've never done anything remotely yurt-like in terms of pure back-to-the-landness, but being in the Land of No Internets in the summertime has given me a little appreciation for that life.

I used to get impatient when whoever was in charge of cooking would ask what we'd like for dinner hours before dinner time, but I have more sympathy for that now, though I try not to ask. Once you're the person in charge of cooking, baking, and the rest, you realize that if you don't think about it in advance--first at the grocery store, since it's a long trek back there if you forget something, and then counting back from dinner time to the preparation time you're going to need--dinner and breakfast and lunch aren't going to happen.

Now, to be fair, other family members always offer to take over some of this work, especially washing the mountains of dishes, and certainly at home we have an equitable division of labor: one person cooks and the other cleans up, and so on. I've chosen to take on the more traditional role at the LoNI mostly to give everyone else more free time and because I don't have to do this permanently. I've also done this as a kind of experiment in 19th-century living and as an exercise in shifting focus from one form of work to another.

A lot of commenters over at Historiann's mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, and I'm reminded of something the character Laura thinks about in The First Four Years. In this book, she's pregnant and feeling miserable, but she realizes that "the work must go on, and she was the one who must do it."

To get back to the "not one more winter in the tipi" idea: You can put a solar panel on a yurt or not, depending on how you feel that day, but for all the domestic tasks, the work has to go on whether you feel like it or not. That makes a difference.

Handwriting: a tipping point

Apparently Indiana has abolished the teaching of handwriting (cursive, I think, though the articles don't say) in favor of more typing.

• If you're at The Wall Street Journal, you see this as "the end of civilization as we know it," although I think Anthony Daniels is kidding.
• If you're at The Atlantic, you worry a little more about "how handwriting builds character."
• If you're Karin Harmon James, a psych professor at Indiana University, you talk about how "handwriting increases brain activity, hones fine motor skills, and can predict a child's academic success in ways that keyboarding can't." (The quotation is from the article and not from James.) What's disturbing is that James is talking about printing and not cursive in reporting this result: "The printing practice also improved letter recognition, which is the No. 1 predictor of reading ability at age 5." Eliminating practice of writing would thus have a negative effect.
  

There are class considerations here, too: little Sophie and Ethan* in the suburbs will just add another class to their over-scheduled lives between private music lessons and computer camp while those in regular public school will not. As long as students can still handwrite essays on exams, I don't care if they write in cursive or not, but maybe we're at a tipping point in terms of teaching the physical act of writing with a pen.

But I've discovered something disturbing: I don't much like to write by hand any more, and my handwriting is getting worse from disuse. This is almost as disturbing as discovering that I pay better attention to the books I read on the iPad, even though it's not as easy to mark them up as it is with a pencil. This feels like another kind of tipping point, and I'm not sure I like it.

Has that happened to you?

*Names chosen from the most popular names for 2011--no offense meant to any actual Sophies or Ethans.

Grading: top down or bottom up?

At various points in my teaching career, I've heard of classes in which students were told something like this the first day: "Everyone has an A in this class unless you don't do the work" or "An A in this class is yours to lose" or "If you complete these 5 assignments under our contract, you will get an A." The idea is that this would dispel the students' anxiety about the class and make them work harder for the sheer joy of learning.

I could see the traces of this kind of grading when students would get to my class, look at an essay exam or a paper that I'd handed back, and say, "Why didn't this get an A? Where did I lose the points?"

My practice, as I would always explain to the students when the first exam was handed back, has always been the opposite: a paper starts from zero points/grades and rises up the grading scale based on its quality. A B paper isn't an A paper gone bad in some point-driven way but a paper that began as a 0 and worked its way up to a B ( or"good," as students often forget) level. Better papers worked their way up to an A. Some papers worked their way up to a C.

It seemed to me that the "A is yours to lose" theory of grading would create more anxiety than it would solve, since the only way you could go in such a system was down. Every evaluation opportunity becomes a chance only to fail or to maintain the status quo rather than improve. The best you can do is break even and not lose, but you never really win.

I was thinking of this recently because of something a student wrote about this summer. Her assumption was that all teachers graded on the "points down from an A" model, and her suggestion was that teachers instead start from the bottom and grade upwards since that is more motivating and since that is what students are used to in every game they ever play on their iPhones. I hadn't thought of grading and motivation in terms of games, but it's a great metaphor.

What's your practice?