Axioms for a happier semester

Anastasia has a set of propostions for a new school year here and Natalie Houston over at Profhacker has another set (here).  I've already accumulated, or maybe I should say formulated, a few more:

• Yes, you made a schedule, but stuff happens. Get used to it, get over it, and don't let it derail you from your larger purpose. It's the old trap that people describe with diets: "I ate one cookie, thus I'm doomed, and thus I might as well give up and eat a bunch more." If you stayed up late working, you can sleep in until 6 instead of getting up at 5. Cut yourself a little slack, but just not too much.
• Be excited. Yes, you can resolve not to change your syllabus or assignments, but if you get a brainstorm for an awesome way to do something better, run with it as long as it doesn't derail everything. It's money, or an assignment, in the bank, and it'll pay off in the long run.   I stayed an extra hour at the office yesterday because I was writing up a new assignment (no extra grading, though!) and improving the old ones.  Not only is the new assignment going to improve something I already do, but it's going to enliven tomorrow's class, and, maybe equally important, make something I've taught before more exciting.  And next semester, I won't have to write this one up again; it'll be assignment gold in the bank.
• Be visible.  I know there's a lot of advice out there about closing your door and working being the way to go, and sometimes you need to do that, but strike a balance. Believe me, people see through the whole "face time" charade if you're strategically showing up/sticking your head in when it suits you and ignoring colleagues and students the rest of the time.
• On the other hand, playing "Where were you?" is a losing game.  You are never, ever going to be visible and available enough to satisfy everyone. Your students would like you to be there 24/7, especially the night before a test.  Your colleague who breezes in to teach a class once a week and doesn't see you at the exact minute that she expects to will decide that you're rarely around, your 4 days/30+ hours on campus that week notwithstanding. You can't win this game, so don't even try to play it and don't let it make you angry. 
• Prioritize. Ask yourself, "How will this outcome be changed if I spend 4 hours on this task instead of two? Will it change at all? Will it be improved?" If the answer is no, think about how you're allotting time to it.  Any academic life and maybe life anywhere comes with more tasks than can possibly be completed and more demands than you can possibly satisfy. It's like eggs in a basket: you have to balance them so that they don't break, but some will inevitably break if you put in too many or don't pack them carefully.
• Analyze the task: sometimes less is best.  This is part of prioritizing.  If an email asks you for X, do you then extrapolate from that that the sender wants you to answer Y and Z also, and to explain how they all work together?  And are you then disappointed that the sender responds only to what you said about X?  Don't make more work for yourself by second-guessing what you're being asked to do, especially if there's a discrete and limited task involved.

President Obama's Plan and Mine for Controlling College Costs

Over at The Chronicle, several articles lay out President Obama's plan to control college costs.  I think a look at the bigger picture is in order. To wit:

1. Make the "job creators" who have had massive tax breaks since 2002--remember those bank bailouts?-- work a little harder at developing and sustaining solid, middle-class jobs in this country. The Dow and NASDAQ keep going up, and Marketplace keeps playing its happy song "We're in the Money," but what does that mean for people who can't get a job? We keep seeing all these worried articles about "the American people aren't spending enough," and then someone speculates, "do you suppose it's because they don't have jobs or don't feel certain about the jobs they have?" Gee, ya think?

2. Do something about the student loan crisis.  I'm not an economist, and surely economics bloggers like nicoleandmaggie are cringing at my naïveté right now, but I fail to understand why large corporations can get virtually 0% borrowing and can declare bankruptcy if they have to pay pensions, but the best we can do for students is temporarily not raising rates to 6.8% and promising that they won't go above 8.25 (and way more for parents).

Students are graduating with the equivalents of unsaleable houses on their backs, mortgage-level debt in some cases, and they do not have the privileges of corporations in borrowing or declaring bankruptcy. If you want to know why young Americans aren't buying cars, here's a tip: it's not necessarily because they're save-the-earth hipsters. They can't afford it.

3. Think before you act on the MOOC model. In what may be an example of tongue-in-cheek understatement, the Chronicle observes that "Evidence for the effectiveness of MOOCs remains thin, if nonexistent." Thomas L. Friedman is invoked as though he actually has a ghost of a clue about what is happening in education.

Again: education is a good thing, and college graduates fare better than those who don't graduate, but simply focusing on flipping classrooms doesn't help with the one-two punch of punishing levels of debt and high unemployment.  

On writing: Charts, lists, and inspiration--fail, fail, fail

I'm usually a big fan of charts and all those little tools that help you fake inspiration until the real inspiration comes along.  What's that thing that gets said about Hollywood--"If you can fake sincerity, you've got it made"? It usually works for inspiration, too.

Today, though, the charts, lists, and inspiring words just plain failed me, or rather, I failed me.

First I looked at GetaLifePhD's post about making a template. Great! I've done that before, all color coded and everything. Make an appointment with your writing! Pay yourself (with writing) first!

But then I couldn't get Google Calendar to sync correctly with the iPhone and iPad. Appointments would show up on one or two but not all of them. Sometimes they'd show up twice. Of course I had to Google this and solve it, because solving tech problems is fun and is also a great way to avoid writing.

An hour and a half later I was much wiser in the ways of possible solutions but none of them actually, you know, worked.

Enough of the chart, I said.  Bardiac suggests lists. Fine. I like lists.  But wait: I have the wrong kind of notebook for keeping track of progress. I have a Moleskine here, but that is not the right kind. Moleskines are for writing, not for lists. I must look online for the right kind and read reviews of notebooks this instant.  Many minutes later, I learn that the right kind is not online but at Staples.

Feeling uninspired, I decide on some writing inspiration, which Dame Eleanor has helpfully provided for her Maygust group: a link to http://dailyroutines.typepad.com. With that link, I discovered that reading about writing routines is a lot like eating pistachios: "Just one more," I would say, and then "Just one more."

And they all said "write in the morning," when by now it was afternoon, so I had failed again.

All this while the various unsynced alarms and warnings were going off in Google Calendar and iCal, reminding me of what I was supposed to be--but wasn't--doing.

Good advice by bloggers, poorly applied by me.

But the night is still young, or youngish, and where there's time, there's writing hope.

Random bullets of beginning a semester

• The Gertrude Stein version: not ready no not not not ready not even ready no. Not. Ready.
• It was pleasant to see colleagues at meetings, though, and to talk with new people. 
• I love to see the groups of new students wandering around, trying to be cool in their 18-year-old way but clearly a little excited and overwhelmed to be on campus. 
• My syllabus, while not done, is on its way to being bulletproof. Kevlar is nothing compared to it. It is like Superman's chest, a masterpiece of deflecting "but you never told us that." 
• Hypothetical example to make a real point: Imagine that years ago you slipped on a banana peel and fell into a wedding cake. Everybody laughed, but you're still a little touchy about it. Colleagues have come and gone since then,  and you think people have forgotten, but then, in a meeting, someone says, "it's like the time Undine fell into a wedding cake. Am I right, Undine?" She did WHAT? you can see new colleagues asking each other.  Yeah, thanks for mentioning that one, guys. 

Movie Post: There's Always Tomorrow (1956)

[Note to readers: I'm not turning this into a movie blog, but I do want to write about movies sometimes just to remember what I thought of them and to get warmed up for writing. I'll mark these with "movie post" so that you can skip them if you're not interested.]

Last night, as I was trying to kick a vicious headache, I watched There's Always Tomorrow (1956) with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. Double Indemnity is one of my favorite movies, straight down the line, but this wasn't that  incarnation of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. Here they're neither the screwball comedy couple of Remember the Night (1940) nor the noir couple of Double Indemnity. They're halfway between Double Indemnity and their 1960s alter egos as pipe-smoking dad on My Three Sons and western matriarch on The Big Valley.

 Fun fact: MacMurray had it in his contract for My Three Sons that he could shoot all his scenes--reaction shots, dialogue, everything-- over the course of a couple weeks, MOOC-style, and then leave for the year, letting all the other actors emote to a blank wall when they were supposed to be talking to him in each episode. 

Figure 1. Shopping in style in Double Indemnity. Fun fact: the canned goods were rationed, since it was wartime, and guards made sure that no one took them away from the set after the day's shooting was done.

Figure 2: Classic Sirk, from the window to the reflection to the rain.

Anyway. As you see the camera angles, use of mirrors and screens, and copious amounts of suburban unhappiness, you'd start to think that this is a  Douglas Sirk movie, and you'd be right.  There's even a scene of Stanwyck looking out the window in the rain (as in All That Heaven Allows) and the shadows of the drops coursing down her cheeks like tears.

Clifford Groves (MacMurray) is a toy manufacturer in Los Angeles, married to a thoroughly domestic Joan Bennett. She's entirely wrapped up in their shrill, annoying teenage children and has no lines in the script that don't establish how indifferent she is to anything else, including Cliff.  The oldest, their insufferable son Vinnie, is played by William Reynolds, reprising his portrayal of the insufferable son of Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows the previous year and just as determined to put the kibosh on his father's happiness.

Figure 3. Pay attention to the robot. Like Hedda Gabler's gun, it shows up again later.

Norma Miller Vale (Stanwyck), a famous dress designer, comes to town with a trunk full of dresses and a gigantic torch that she's been carrying for Cliff all these years, as evidenced by the photo she carries of him during their relationship in earlier, happier times.  They meet, talk, and go to the theater after his wife won't go. Ignored by his family, Cliff starts to see Norma's charms all over again, since she's the only person who takes an interest in him.

Figure 4. They're happy, so of course it won't last.

When he has a business meeting in Palm Grove, the two meet there by accident. They swim, dance, and enjoy each other's company.  Palm Grove is their green world, although with characteristic Sirkian irony (foreshadowing?) it's actually a desert. They're seen by Vinnie and his friends, and Vinnie gets his righteous armor on to do battle.

Convinced that Something Is Going On, though everything's innocent, Vinnie starts listening in on his father's phone calls, despite the sensible protests of his girlfriend, Ann. "Nothing's going on, but I wouldn't blame him if he did stray," says Ann, to which we all say amen. 

The rest seems predictable: Cliff wants Norma to run away with him; Vinnie and his sister go to see Norma and plead with her not to take their father away; and Norma does the noble thing and gets on the plane for New York.

Figure 5. You can see it in her eyes: why not let them have it? Classic Stanwyck.

But what's not predictable is that before she leaves, Norma lets them have it: about how they ignore their father, taking him for granted so that he looks for affection elsewhere. It's a slightly skewed and far less creepy version of the logic in The Philadelphia Story,  when Tracy Lord's father says he wouldn't have strayed if his daughter had paid more attention to him.

Also not predictable: after Norma tells him that what they feel can't replace his family and bids him goodbye, there's a scene in which Cliff looks out into the industrial hellscape as the robot marches down a long, empty table. That's his mechanical life from now on, and he knows it. The movie continues, with Cliff going back to his family and Mrs. Cliff making small noises about neglecting him, but MacMurray's face looks haunted even as his family surrounds him.

The ending mocks the whole "man's return to the family after a vixen threatens it" plot of so many melodramas.  Sirk often hints at some kind of muted happiness after happiness denied, but the look on MacMurray's face totally negates it. The title says that there's always a tomorrow, but his look says there isn't.

This just in: NYTimes worries about privileged women. Again.

In "The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In," , Judith Warner revisits the famous "opt-out" group from ten years ago. KJ Dell'Antonia gives the numbers but somehow concludes that women wouldn't want to go back:

Among the anecdotes are numbers: roughly a third of “highly qualified” women leave their jobs to spend time at home; 89 percent of those who “offramped” said they wanted to resume work, but only 73 percent of these succeeded in getting back in, and only 40 percent got full-time jobs, often at lower pay or with lesser job responsibilities. 

 I'm not sure why the Gray Lady is so obsessed with the happiness choices of women of privilege.  Maybe it's like reality shows, where viewers can think, "Okay, you're rich, but you didn't get everything you wanted, did you?"

Or maybe it's to induce schadenfreude in readers like humanities academics, most of whom will never see a six-figure salary in their wildest dreams. Idealism says that the purpose is to  make women aware of the limitations of their choices, but maybe what NYT is saying is that women are justly punished for ambition. Ouch.

At The Atlantic, Magda Pecsenye puts her finger on a possible flaw in the argument:

Blaming struggles of a limited group on personal choice is bad social science. Warner doesn't look at how well the women who stayed in the workforce are faring now, or how the men in their cohort are faring now. Without these comparisons there's no way to know if the women who opted out are doing substantially worse than they might have had they stayed in. 

In other words, "Hello, recession!"

The original participants all stated confidently that they'd waltz back into high-powered jobs when they were ready and are shocked to discover that that's not the case. As Historiann says, "No $hit, Sherlock!  Duhhhhh!  Awesome!!!  Eleventy.  Are there any other cliches and verbal representations of my eyeballs rolling back in my head that I’ve overlooked so far?"

As Bardiac says, "I'm sort of despairing here because the women the article talks about were/are way privileged; they sound like they all had college educations, and they all went to college when feminism was important on college campuses.  They all had job opportunities beyond what most people have."   

Bardiac's right. I think they thought their class privilege would trump the disadvantages of being (1) female and (2) over 40 when they tried to go back to work, which in a sexist and ageist culture is a big mistake.

But academics, and academic humanities, are seemingly in a permanent state of recession (unlike other parts of a university; h/t Margaret Soltan), which is why quitting after tenure elicits such strong emotions.

This reminds me of the "dropping out" issue that Flavia highlighted a couple of months ago.  The thing that her classmate was saying, Paul Revere-style, was that if you make the choice to leave, or opt out, or "drop out," you might never get a chance to opt back in.  And as Dr. Crazy points out, it's only an option for partnered people.

The real question, which is kind of obscured in the NYT's interest in the emotional happiness of the women it surveys, is this: how will you support yourself? And what are you doing to ensure that you can?  This is a human issue, which is another way of saying it's a feminist issue.

Random bullets of checking in

• This place is warmer and more humid than Northern Clime, even though it's not a truly southern or tropical place. The insects make the trees hum at night, and the air seems to expand and contract with the cycles of their noises. Moss grows on the sidewalks. The flowering trees drip when I walk under them. Not being a horticulturalist, the closest I can come to naming the species is "tree with pink flowers that is not a rhododendron." 
• Flavia's recent post  helps me to realize that some times are family times and you can't think about academics all the time. Sometimes the best thing is to clean a house, cook a meal, hold a baby, give a hug.  Come to think of it, give lots of hugs.
• The Academic Year Express is roaring down the tracks, though, and it'll be here too soon.

Short hiatus

More unbloggable family stuff, some very sad, some very happy, so there'll be a short hiatus. Meanwhile, the MOOC posts over at Historiann's and Jonathan Rees's (including his Slate article) are saying way more than I could right now--go read them!

Writers on Writing: Anthony Grafton

At the Daily Beast, via Tenured Radical and Saved by History, Anthony Grafton (whom I know only through his comments at Historiann's and TR's) on writing:

Describe your morning routine.

Absolutely. When I want to write, at home, I get up about 5, make coffee, slowly begin to be conscious. I’ll do a fair amount of other work, check email and Facebook and news sites, then I’ll bring my wife coffee and read the newspaper. It’s a long day’s reaching consciousness. By 8 I like to be at the computer and I like to write until about noon.

Do you like to map out your books ahead of time, or just let it flow?

I write my first draft on the computer. I used to write everything out by hand, but just don’t have the time, patience, or legible handwriting to make that possible anymore. I like to write quickly, so in ideal conditions I’ll have done a lot of research, made a lot of notes, before I sit down. But I don’t do an outline. By the time I could do an outline, I’ll already know what I need to say, so I’ll just sit and write.

What do you need to have produced/completed in order to feel that you’ve had a productive writing day?

If I’m writing full-time I’ll get about 3,500 words per morning, four mornings a week.

Wow, that is amazing. I’ve done over 50 of these interviews now, and the vast majority of writers aim for 1,000 words a day. 3,500 per morning is quite something.

Well, I’m sure that their 1,000 is better than my 3,500, but this is just the way I do it. I always start by rapidly revising what I wrote the day before. So it’s very quick writing, and it takes a lot of revision, but this is the way I write chapters of my books.

What is a distinctive habit or affectation of yours?

With relation to writing, I have a couple. One comes to me from Mr. Hyde, my wonderful English teacher at Andover. He started each term with a trick, for example saying, “Gentlemen, this term you will learn to write without the passive voice. Please use the passive voice. As soon you do, I will stop reading your paper and give you an F, so you will be saving me time!” His point was not that we should never use the passive voice, but never to do so without thinking. This was a wonderful way of inculcating that principle. I still feel a pang of guilt when I use the passive voice. So I try for a very active style of identified subjects doing clear things to identified objects.

One of my favorite teachers at Choate, Mr. Yankus, had a similar warning against using the verb “to be” in any essay. Maybe there’s something about boarding-school English teachers that they’ve all agreed on the same teaching tactics.

That was the second term with Mr. Hyde: “Gentlemen, now you will learn to write without the verb to be!”

Is there anything distinctive or unusual about your work space?

Well. yes. I’m looking at a full-sized replica of Agostino Ramelli’s bookwheel, on which I keep my dictionaries, and which fills about half of the small study in which I write. This was made for an exhibit at the New York Public Library in 1992. They had no room for it, so I managed to get it. I can spin my chair from my MacBook Air on which I write to the many dictionaries I depend on for reference. I’ve also got, you know, a crocodile hanging from the ceiling, a skull, a scale, an hourglass—my wife is working towards making my study into a little wunderkammer.

You’d be astonished at how many writers I interview have crocodiles hanging from the ceiling of their studies …

There’s this wonderful verb in German that means “to hedgehog yourself in.” That’s kind of what I do to write.

Do you have any superstitions?

My main superstition is that when I’m writing a piece for a review, like The New York Review, I like to write the draft in one day. I don’t feel right if I can’t do that, writing it all in one sitting.

A few thoughts:

1. It's interesting that he doesn't get right at writing, as Francis Ford Coppola and others recommend, but looks at social media first.

2. I have the same superstition about writing reviews.

3. I have wanted a bookwheel like that for years. Years!  It would go in my writing house.

4. After seeing that Joyce Carol Oates video, I would love to see a similar piece on Professor Grafton, complete with bookwheel.

5. He sounds like a gracious man as well as a smart one. If this isn't writing inspiration, I don't know what is.

MOOCs: Can we say "I told you so" yet? Probably not.

No real post because of family events but --

SJSU has suspended its Udacity courses because of failure rates from 56-76%. See also Tenured Radical and Edge of the American West.

It's the lesson of MOOC 'n Bake: MOOCs may be great for self-paced learners seeking a tech credential, or those who just want to learn more about a subject, but a substitute for real fried chicken education they're not.

But evidence-based practices and actual student outcomes have never been a strong suit for MOOC enthusiasts. Quality and student learning are not their concern; efficiency and cost containment are.

As long as someone's willing to lavish grant money on MOOCs, and as there's money to be made by mass producing and "delivering content," MOOCs aren't going away anytime soon.

At WSJ: Education ain't what it used to be, or why the humanities shouldn't be taught

Over at The Wall Street Journal is an article  so clickbait-worthy for humanities professors that I hesitate to link--but hey, why not let you see for yourself?

"Who Ruined the Humanities?"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323823004578595803296798048.html?mod=WSJ__MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsThird

First of all, I think this is the same article they run every month under a different title and by-line. It goes something like this:

When I was at beautiful Ivy or Oxbridge back in the olden days, I had an extremely famous professor (this time: Frank Kermode) who inspired me with the timeless truths of the humanities curriculum. 

Alas, there were few such professors then, and there are none today. That pesky GI bill opened education to the masses, and now students want grades instead of reading literature for timeless truths. Literature has been sullied by the grade-grubbing paws of these students. Where is the pure love of literature of yesteryear?  

Now, I have a certain sympathy for the author's love of literature because I obviously think it's important, too, and what he says about the thrill of books--yes, I get that.

But is the best way to get students to have this relationship to books, where the books help them to experience their lives in different ways, to avoid teaching the humanities?

I'm imagining students, taking 15 credit hours, working 20 hours a week at Mickey D's. What happens if you toss them a copy of The Odyssey or Henry IV, Part I, and say, "Here, kid, this will change your life. Read it in your spare time"?

Maybe they'll read it, if they have the spare time of a Thoreau.

But context counts.  Reading together counts, and talking about ideas with other people who've read the same books counts, doesn't it?

MOOC leaders leap, wonder if maybe they should have looked

In "Beyond MOOC Hype" at IHE, Ry Rivard reports that some MOOC cheerleaders are starting just now to ask the questions that the rest of us have been asking since 2011. 

After showering MOOC enthusiasts with money, Dan Greenstein has an insight:

"It seems to me, at least with respect to MOOCs, that we have skipped an important step,” he wrote in an Inside Higher Ed op-ed last week. “We’ve jumped right into the ‘chase’ without much of a discussion about what problems they could help us to solve. We have skipped the big picture of where higher ed is going and where we want to be in 10 or 20 years.”

Yup.   And Carol Geary Schneider:

Carol Geary Schneider, the head of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, worries that MOOCs can amplify the “least productive pedagogy” in American higher education, which she calls lectures followed by multiple-choice tests. But she does see potential for MOOCs to help flip classrooms so professors can spend less time lecturing in class and more time engaging students. 

“It would be a tragedy if you substituted MOOCs in their current form for regular courses,” she said in an interview. “But it would be a creative breakthrough if you take advantage of MOOCs and other forms of online coverage to make more space and more time for students to apply concepts and methods appropriate to their field to real problems.”

So Schneider does see the lecture/multiple-choice question format as less than ideal, although she does not question the "flipped classroom" model.  I'm also a little worried about "coverage," which suggests a simple transmission model of pedagogy.

But it's a start. Now if we can make them go back and read all the bloggers' posts about this, they'll maybe have some answers for our questions.

Book love

Over at nicoleandmaggie's, there's a link to a story about weeding books at the Urbana Free Library.  When the Head of Adult Services was away for three weeks, someone created a spreadsheet, red-lined every book that was over 10 years old, and, because she wanted to use part-time workers' hours efficiently, told them to get rid of every redlined book on the list regardless of use.

A couple of lessons there: just because you put it in Excel doesn't make it efficient or wise, and just because it's more than 10 years old doesn't mean that it's useless. Valuable art books, gardening books--all expensive to replace--are gone.  What do you think the odds are that the library will actually replace them?

I've been thinking about this because I've been clearing out some of my shelves to make way for the results of a trip to the City of Books. I have no more wall space for bookshelves and couldn't justify them anyway.  Books are the items that most make me a candidate for Hoarders, since I keep thinking, "well, I haven't looked at it in 15 years, but maybe I'll want to read it again sometime."

That's a harder claim to make now, with web availability for a lot of the books. My main criteria for getting rid of some copies are estimated use and also duplication: I've finally convinced myself that I don't need three copies of Tom Jones or six copies of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. 

But the secondhand bookstore near me will only take certain books, and while I dropped some off at Goodwill, if they won't take them, I can't face putting them in the recycling bin. They're not kittens, but I still want them to go to a good home.

One set I'm not getting rid of is actually a partial set: it's dispatches from Gettysburg, part of a series of Civil War dispatches published in the 1880s or 1890s. On the recent 150th anniversary, I looked at a few of them, just in remembrance.

Where did I get them?

A library was throwing them out, and I snagged as many from the free books table as I could carry before they went into the dumpster.

Writers on Writing: Revision and Revision and Revision

Right now I'm working on a chapter and it feels as though I am not herding cats, but trying to put fish in a tank that will hold them all without injuring them.  The last three chapters have felt as though they ought to be books in themselves, but I don't have that luxury right now (because: deadline!), so I keep reminding myself that selection is a virtue. I don't have to write about every book that will fit the chapter's criteria.

Here are some pieces of writing inspiration on revision.

Craig Fehrman at The Boston Globe talks about how technology changed the way the modernists thought about revision. No more dashing off an inspired piece of writing until the Man from Porlock interrupts and then throwing your pen down and declaring the poem done. For Pound, Eliot, and Hemingway, revision was all.

In all this, the most important technology may have been the typewriter. Today we equate a keyboard with speed, the fastest way to get words down, but as Sullivan points out this wasn’t always the case. In fact, a typescript offered a chance to slow down. Most Modernist writers, like Hemingway with “The Sun Also Rises,” wrote by hand and then painstakingly typed up the results. That took time, but seeing their writing in such dramatically different forms—handwritten in a notebook, typed on a page, printed as a proof—encouraged them to revise it aggressively. “Much as I loathe the typewriter,” W.H. Auden wrote, “I must admit that it is a help in self-criticism. Typescript is so impersonal and hideous to look at that, if I type out a poem, I immediately see defects which I missed when I looked through it in manuscript.”

Joyce Carol Oates apparently still writes by hand but revises via computer in this three-minute video.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/video-joyce-carol-oates.html

Some highlights:
--She can "basically write all day long."
--She writes every day, as soon as she can, even before 7 a.m.
--She looks out the window and her cat keeps her company.
--Revision is "exciting and relaxing."
--Writing is "thrilling."

Yes, the video is inspiring. Yes, it will make you feel like an unproductive slug.

The Key

It was a hot day in August, and as a new grad student I had been filling out forms and getting through orientation. You know--meeting people, "here is the copier," and all that.

And then the administrative assistant handed me a small brown envelope and a card. "You have to sign here," she said. "Here's the key to your office."

I knew in some abstract way that, as a TA, I would have an office and that I would be sharing it with a few other people.

I signed, and she gave me the envelope. I shook out the contents.

It was a standard brass key, just the same kind of standard institutional key that we all carry now and don't think about.

But it was a key. And it was mine. 

I went out in the hall and just stood there for a while. I had keys, of course: apartment keys, car keys, mailroom keys. I had worked before, too: filing, cashiering, and so on. But I had never had a key in any job.

I went down to my office, unlocked the door, and put the orientation papers down on one of the chipped Formica desks. This was my desk, and this was my key.

For the next couple of days, as I was listening to various orientation speakers, I would pull out the key and look at it, and it gave me a little thrill or glow.

This was the key that someone had given me because they expected me to work and to come and go without punching a time card, something I had done in a previous job.

From this distance, it may seem a little silly or sentimental that I was so excited about this key. I've been issued a lot of them since then, and I never had that same feeling occur again.  But giving me the key was making visible and concrete and visceral something more important than what all the speakers were doing.

It was telling me I would have a place in the work world.

It was telling me that I had a voice.

A reporting question on "death of cursive"

I know I've talked about the cursive debate too much, but this time I'm intrigued with a difference in reporting.

"Is Cursive Writing Dead?" at Yahoo News:

Writing in general, regardless of whether it's cursive, may also boost brain activity, according to a 2010 study finding that preschool students who wrote out letters rather than just viewing them showed changes in brain activity when they later viewed those letters. "Coupled with other work from our lab, we interpret this as the motor system augmenting visual processing," said study researcher Karin Harman James of Indiana University in a statement. "In the case of learning letters, printing helps children recognize letters."

So far, so good. But take a look at Morgan Polikoff's statement in the article:

Anderson points critics to a recent study by the College Board, which found that SAT test essays written in cursive received a slightly higher score than those written in printed letters.

But Polikoff and others aren't impressed. The College Board study "is not evidence of anything," he told the Los Angeles Times. "It doesn't indicate that the knowledge of cursive causes higher scores."

"As we have done with the abacus and the slide rule, it is time to retire the teaching of cursive," Polikoff told The New York Times. "The writing is on the wall."

And at WaPo, a much less inflammatory and more nuanced statement. I've put the part missing from Yahoo! in bold:

Jacks and Asherson cited a study conducted by the College Board a year after implementing a handwritten portion to the SAT in which the student essay responses were coded across a variety of characteristics such as number of paragraphs, words and whether they were written in first person. The essays also were coded as print or cursive.

The study — based on 6,498 randomly sampled tests administered between March 2005 and January 2006 — revealed that 15% of the essays were written in cursive and received a slightly higher sub-score than printed essays.

"It's easier to read and easier to score," Asherson said.

Still, the study is not enough to convince Morgan Polikoff, an assistant professor at USC Rossier School of Education.

The percentage of essays written in cursive "is not evidence of anything," he said. "It doesn't indicate that the knowledge of cursive causes higher scores, but it might suggest that the kind of folks who write in cursive during SATs do so because they're probably smarter." [...] 

 "The simple fact is that cursive is not included in the common core," he said, and added that though states are able to choose up to 15% of the standards, few decide to add cursive.

"I think it's important to have nice handwriting, but the importance of having to learn two kinds of handwriting seems unnecessary given the vast method of communication is on a keyboard," Polikoff said. "One reason [to teach it] might be to be able to read historical documents and old journals that are written in cursive."

 Left undiscussed:

1. Do smarter students write in cursive because cursive helps their brain activity?

2. Or do SAT raters give them credit for being smarter because they see writing in cursive as a superior skill?

3. Is there a real correlation between cursive writing and better writing (better thoughts, better sentences, etc.), or is it just an artifact of the rating process?

4. If cursive isn't part of the common core but is taught in good schools (as nicoleandmaggie indicated), how might this affect the professed objectivity of the rating process for other standardized tests, since cursive writing could equal coming from a better school?

5. Why would Yahoo! report Polikoff's view as a "stomp out cursive" message and WaPo report his longer statements, which sort of undercut the idea that cursive is useless?

What feminism means to me

Flavia has a fascinating post up; it's by a woman frustrated because many of the women she saw at a recent Ivy League reunion had, in her words, "dropped out": they had children but didn't work (to which I silently amended, each time, "outside the home"). 

I agree with a lot of what the poster said. In fact, here's the first part of my comment over there:

 There was a TIME magazine article a few weeks ago about the "no alimony" thing. One of those interviewed said that the chances of a woman in her 50s with no work experience getting a job are slim to none. In this recession economy--and I'm sorry, but unless you're a one percenter, it's still a recession economy--they have no supports left. They live with their children, or with their families, or on disability (the new safety net), or in cars. It's horrifying. So yes, I don't know why that's not more of a concern to women who don't work outside the home.

But I part company with the poster here (from her post):

Why aren't women who drop out of the paid workforce being treated for depression, or at least urged to get counseling before they go? Just imagine the social and moral panic if a large number of upper middle-class men between the ages of 30 and 55 decided that they didn't want to work. Here's a useful tip: if you have a college education and unemployment seems like a good idea, seek treatment.

 Two or three things:

1. I don't see the decision to "drop out of the paid workforce" as a mental health issue, or a moral one, or even a "you're depriving the world of your talents" one. There are thousands and thousands of under- and unemployed lawyers, college professors, and other people, well-educated and otherwise, who don't have jobs in this economy. If you're not working, you may be depriving yourself, but you're doing someone else a favor.  Rather, I see their decisions as a personal or family issue governed by economics. 
2. Now, I may think it is foolish not to work because: divorce! poverty! old age!, but elite women don't have a duty to stay in the paid workforce today, any more than, 100 years ago when Teddy Roosevelt was urging "elite women" to have eight children and stay at home, they had a duty to do that, or 50 years ago, they had a duty to stay home. It's their choice.
3. I do get the economic argument. I have seen/known examples of the horror stories: of women impoverished when their husbands hid assets and took off with the girlfriend, convincing sympathetic judges that minimal child support was all that was needed. But still, if they know that and it doesn't scare them, it's their choice.
4. That, as I understand it, is the point of feminism: to give women choices, not to prescribe what they ought to do. I get that this may be "serving the patriarchy," but after pointing that out, we need to recognize that it's a choice.
5. I am also not worried that somehow elite women's voices will be silenced, although maybe I should be. As I read various media outlets, I'm confident that the world is never going to lack for elite women's voices, though other perspectives are a little less prominent. (Incidentally, I think the whole "elite" issue is a little troubling: is it just the elite women who can afford to opt out, or is it that they're the only ones that the media outlets are worried about because they are "more important"?)
6. Some men do "drop out." Some women make more than their partners or support stay-at-home partners. 

I sympathize with a lot of what the poster has to say, but the two things feminism has taught me, as I have listened to various "you should do this" prescriptions over the years, are these: (1) learn as much as you can, but trust your own judgment; and (2) if people make a different judgment or decision from yours, that's all right, too.

No more DOMA: Once in a while, the Supremes get it right

Not a real post: I just wanted to say hooray for striking down DOMA.  Once in a while, the Supremes get it right!

Mad Men Season 6 thoughts

Spoilers ahead!


Mad Men's penultimate season is over, and except for their making a guest appearance on this blog as my dream writing group, I haven't been writing about them here. There's too much other good commentary on the web (Tom and Lorenzo, Alan Sepinwall) to read out there, and also a lot of clueless commentators (really? draft status as "A-1" instead of "1-A"? Didn't you watch the series at all? It's a draft status,  not a steak sauce.). There was a lot to like this season (Kenny tap-dancing! A merger caper episode!) and a lot that was intended to, and did, make us cringe.

Here are a couple of additional observations about the last episode:

1. Set design for the win: As Pete and his brother sit contemplating their mother's death when she falls overboard on the SS Sunshine, all that's between them is a desk. And a model ship. And assorted other nautical knickknacks that signify old money but become humorously ironic given the circumstances.

2. Tom and Lorenzo probably have this one already, but when Pete and Bob are on the elevator--you know, the "Not great, Bob!". elevator--Bob is holding what's probably Pete's garment bag. It's in a Black Watch plaid that Pete wears often, including in his scarves, and Bob doesn't usually do plaid. He's holding Pete's future, is he? Yes. Yes, he is.

3. When Pete gets in the car at Chevy, the whole thing about going backward if he doesn't know how to drive stick didn't ring true to me.  First, if he didn't engage the clutch, which he wouldn't have because he doesn't know how to drive a standard transmission car, the gear would just make a grinding sound and not go anywhere. It takes practice to get the gas/clutch foot action right. If he did engage the clutch but didn't give it enough gas, he'd get the same sound, or the car would stall. The Chevy guys would yell the traditional "Hey! Grind me another pound of those gears" before looking disgusted by his ineptitude.

 Also, first gear is easy to find, as Bob tells him.  Reverse is always trickier. On every four- or five-on-the-floor standard car I've driven, it's always a little outside the standard H-pattern of the gears (sort of like a subscript of the H) and is harder to engage than the rest: you have to push backwards a little harder. That's to keep nimrods like Pete from engaging it, I suppose. That Pete could find it, get the gas/clutch ratio right, and go backwards without stalling is kind of miraculous, though it made for great unspoken theater.  "How are you at driving a stick shift, Pete?" "Not great, Bob."

4. Lots of commentary out there has focused on the poster (double Dons) and on all the doubling: Bob Benson/Don Draper, Sally and Peggy as "daughters" whom he disappoints, Ted Chaough as "good Don" to bad Don, Jim Cutler/Roger Sterling (and what a bonus both of them are to the show).  One of the best may have been the TV in the bar tuned to Bewitched just before Don punches the preacher. It was focused on Larry Tate, an adman whose sole character trait was being pathologically fearful about what clients would think.  Our Don? Not so much.

But what about Duck Phillips as another double? Don brought him in to Sterling Cooper and then forced him out. The two shared Peggy, Don platonically and Duck physically, and both have tried to poach her on occasion, Don for SCDP and Duck for his own agency after he'd been dismissed for drinking. Duck roams the SC halls and has a fight with Don, which is just about equally matched--two men of about the same age, war vets, alcoholics, with families that they've deserted. Don brings a dog home, and Duck leaves one behind. Both have a scatalogical reference moment, Duck when he goes into Roger's office and Don when Roger yells at him after the meeting.

But Duck is a survivor, a redemption story. Even after he drunkenly tries to get Peggy back to start his own agency and seems absolutely out for the count, Duck resurfaces as a reasonably successful headhunter. He calls Pete and tries to get him to look for another position, and he checks the references of Bob Benson. He's brought in --going up--on the elevators with the new candidate as Don is going down.

5. There's a trend in television now that I think of as Misery Theater: how much can you punish or torture the protagonist for his or her sins and still keep the audience's attention? For you Game of Thrones fans, let's call it the Theon Grayjoy rule, or maybe we should just call it Degradation Limbo: "how low can you go?"  I know that Don has to be punished mightily for cheating, lying, drinking, gluttony, avarice, lust, and whatever else is going on this season, else why would he have been reading *dun-dun DUN!* Dante in the first episode?

But come on, Matt Weiner. It's getting to be too much. We want to see more pitches, maybe, or some more mergers, or maybe just to see Don get a clue or Peggy and Joan catch a break.  We don't want this to turn into Breaking Don or Game of Accounts. Season 4 was grim and had Don hitting bottom and being redeemed, or so we thought. Then--fooled ya!--he's back hitting bottom again, doing the same things that destroyed him the first time. I don't think we can take another season of this kind of destruction without relief.

6. Speaking of injustice, in what world is it right that Jon Hamm has never won an Emmy for this role? He is brilliant in this series.

Your thoughts?

Slate: "In the Ivory Tower, Men Only"

In Slate, Mary Ann Mason suggests that for female academics, having children is a "career killer." 

She's a Dean and has done the research and all that, so I'm not going to argue with her, especially since so much of what she says is what we all recognize as true (and now have stats to back it up).

A few bullet points of response:

• "In our study of University of California doctoral students, 70 percent of women and more than one-half of the men considered faculty careers at research universities not friendly to family life." I wonder if this isn't more true at (1) top 10 universities (2) in the sciences than at other types of universities.  It's not that it isn't true, but is it equally true for the humanities?
• "There is some good news for women. The second tier is not a complete career graveyard. We have found that a good proportion of those toiling as adjuncts and part-time lecturers do eventually get tenure track jobs."  That is good news, and I'm glad that Mason's research supports this. 
• "Among tenured faculty, 70 percent of men are married with children compared with 44 percent of women." 
• "Women who achieve tenure are more likely than men to fall into the midcareer slump. They take longer, sometimes much longer, to be promoted to full professor, the top of the academic ranks. For the first time in the career march from graduate school, children do not make a clear difference in their career slowdown."  You know what does make a difference? Being asked to do just one more service thing, and then one more, and then one more and not saying no. Learning to say no is the key, I think, especially to things that are "collegial" but will go nowhere in your  tenure and promotion folder. 
• "Men and women retire at about the same age, but women have less income to rely upon in retirement; their salaries at retirement are, on average, 29 percent lower." Not a happy statistic, but good to know. 
• "It is important for women to become more assertive at faculty meetings, to negotiate starting salary, to argue for justice in the promotion process, as Sheryl Sandberg argues in Lean In." There's quite a bit of chicken-and-egg reasoning here. "Become more assertive at faculty meetings" as an adjunct (says I, who was one for a long time), and you might find yourself unemployed, although to be fair, no place I've ever worked operated in this way. Become more assertive as t-t assistant or associate, and you'll get the "Great idea! Why don't you study this and write a report on it" time-sucking committee laid at your door.   Being assertive is not an unalloyed good. What battles do you want to fight, and are they worth it if you are an untenured assistant or not-yet-full associate? You need to decide. 

• "For instance, at Berkeley, after enacting several new policies to benefit parents, including paid teaching leaves for fathers, job satisfaction scored much higher among parents, and more babies are being born to assistant professors." Again, this is good news, because if this more family-friendly attitude is going to spread, it has to start from places like that so that other institutions can see that it works. 

This issue of women in academe is different from Lauren Sandler's "great writers have only one child"  essay on the Atlantic's site, which I took to be one of its ongoing attempts to stir up Teh Wimmenz (hello, Caitlin Flanagan!) and looked at primarily for Jane Smiley's response.  

Does having only one child make a difference? Who knows? What are the other common variables? Did the great ones all eat granola for breakfast? The two main things seem to be (1) good child care and (2) having a personality best described as "driven," which really means disciplined and focused on writing. It's a little disheartening, though, to see how fast the commenters went to "X is a bad mother!" "No, she isn't!" to prove their points.

To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, I sometimes think that these sites are saying to us, "let's you and her fight" rather than something substantive by posting these things. Mary Ann Mason's post wasn't one of those but an honest attempt to look at a problem.