Happy New Year! (Retropost edition)

Happy New Year, everyone! I don't want to reflect on this year (too little done on the Laocoon manuscript, for one thing), but here are some posts to ease out the old year and bring in the new.

No MOOC rants or controversial subjects were harmed in the making of these links.  Nothing will raise your blood pressure.  Have a peaceful night!

What if?

• English Department of the Future 
• New Office Commons
• The Literary Stock Market
• Classroom as Airplane
• Inventions I'd Like to See

Conference advice

• The Hook
  5-Minute Conference Presentations
• Conference papers: the good, the bad, and the don't even think about that
  

Creativity and Writing

• http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2012/02/brain-news-proving-attention-span.html
• This is your brain on multitasking (part 2) 
• Decision Fatigue
• Writing House Fantasies
• Dither and Blather

MLA Job Market Statistics

Bardiac very reasonably asks whether the job situation is worse now than it used to be.  

I don't have the answer, but the MLA does: 

http://www.mla.org/pdf/report_jil_1112.pdf

This report has tables where numbers and percentages of jobs are broken down in most ways--by rank, by region, by month advertised, and so on. 

Among the conclusions of that report are that things are (slightly) looking up from the 2008-9 low and that more jobs are being offered after the big October issue. 

What about cohorts of previous Ph.D. graduates seeking jobs? Here's some older information from 2001-2002, from here: http://www.mla.org/professionalization

The Academic Job Search in English: A Statistical Representation for 2001-02

			Number	Percentage
Job Seekers
New cohort of PhD recipients			1,200
	Less new cohort members who accept postdoc positions		(   60)	5
	Less new cohort members who do not pursue academic positions		(  120)	10
		Total of new cohort who seek positions in four-year institutions	1,020	85
Previous cohorts of PhD recipients
	From 1 year prior		540	45
	From 2 years prior		360	30
	From 3 years prior		240	20
	From 4 years prior		160	13
	From 5 years prior or earlier		107	9
		Total of previous cohorts who seek positions in four-year institutions	1,408
ABDs			120	10
Total number of job seekers			2,548

Also, here's a comment that I left over at Historiann's post about the job market, addressing the issue of why search committees don't contact people at every step of the process, which would be more humane:

The thing is, no one on search committees behaves maliciously, I don't think, and certainly not in the ways that have been charged.  We have a detailed and much-documented process to follow, and HR is right there at our shoulders, seeing to it that we follow it every step of the way. It's ultimately to ensure fairness. 

Why don't search committees notify those who didn't make the short list? Let's say you have 350 applicants, a long short list of 40-50 for additional materials, and a maximum of 12-20 you can interview either at the convention or on Skype. What may seem humane--that is, notifying the 300--is, if seen through institutional eyes, 300 lawsuits waiting to happen, when even one would be too many. And what if there was a flaw in the selection metrics somewhere and all the files or some subset of them need to be re-reviewed after consultation with HR? 

The reality is that the job isn't filled until an offer is made and accepted.  

As Bardiac says, it may be that the search committee goes back to the longer short list or even the whole list, especially if it's a hard-to-fill specialty. In other words, it's not really over until it's over.

That said, we need to keep trying to improve the process and do everything we can to make it humane and responsive to candidates.

Merry Christmas and Happy Boxing Day!

I hope Christmas and all holidays were and are peaceful, restful, and happy.

Calm down, everybody: no one says you can't teach essay writing

Wow. Ignore the interwebs for a week or so and they blow up with a new issue.  Who'd have thought it?

Recently, Rebecca Schuman (you know, she of the declaration that tenured academics have "blood on their hands") wrote a piece for Slate  that said if students hate writing essays and teachers hate reading them, why don't we stop assigning them?  Readers were shocked, shocked! to hear this and inundated poor Professor Schuman with hate mail and her superiors with demands that she be fired.

Profhacker published an open letter defending the Slate piece as an issue of "academic freedom," which  may be a bit of a stretch, and condemning the uncivil tone of the attackers, which is a very real problem and no stretch at all.

But let's review:

First of all, internets: get a grip.

Come on. It's Slate, where all headlines end in a question mark and "We are clickbait. Snark is good." is on the masthead.  Slate lives to be provocative, not informative.  That's why it exists.  Why are you surprised that a provocative piece appears there?

Facts aren't important over at Slate, any more than they are on other entertainment sites (on one of which I read something about "Alexander Hamilton and his daughter Theodosia," never mind that the writer meant Aaron Burr, because hey, it was a long time ago and there was a duel and they're both dead, right?). So Professor Schuman judged the audience and wrote a snarky essay that would gain a lot of notoriety.  That is Slate success, so why pick on her for judging the audience correctly?

Second, so what if she stirs up the conversation by being provocative, at Slate, ChronicleVitae, and pankisseskafka, her blog? Does that mean the conversation isn't worth having?  The fact that talking about writing essays gets started by real (or satirically expressed) outrage doesn't make it invalid. And again: Slate. You notice that Slate didn't publish her carefully reasoned explanation of what she actually does, and why? No click bait here, so let's move along.

Third, the "no essay" idea isn't even new.  Cathy Davidson has been pioneering this approach for a long time, and so have a lot of other people. We can argue about ways of writing until the cows come home, and maybe learn something from the discussion, even if what we learn is the inspired lunacy of some approaches. No one's forcing you to adopt The One Best Way (yet). That's the time to begin the more reasoned conversation.

So let's take a break from the outrage and realize that this is what passes for literate entertainment and discourse on the interwebs--and that the best way not to get upset by it is not to engage it if it upsets you.

Random bullets of interesting news

1. You know how people are always warned to make hard-to-crack passwords and end up using "password" or "12345678" or something easy anyway?  Would it make you feel better to know that the people behind the nuclear launch codes felt the same way?

From Making Light:

Given how nervous many of us were during the Cold War, it’s just as well that we didn’t know the interesting fact recently reported in The Guardian and Gizmodo: for about twenty years, and in direct contravention of orders from presidents and defense secretaries, the U.S. military had the eight-digit nuclear launch codes for Minuteman missile silos set to 00000000.

Apparently they resented the eight-digit “fire only if ordered to do so by the president” security system imposed on them in 1962, as it made firing nuclear missiles slower and more difficult. They responded by permanently assigning the system a single launch code that was the moral equivalent of using “password” or “12345678” or “qwerty” as the overall password for your online account.

But it gets worse: 

[I]n case you actually did forget the code, it was handily written down on a checklist handed out to the soldiers. As Dr. Bruce G. Blair, who was once a Minuteman launch officer, stated:

Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel.

This ensured that there was no need to wait for Presidential confirmation….

Feel safer now? 

2. And in MOOC news:

Many speakers repeatedly pointed out that the cost of MOOC production -- which can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars -- has created classes of MOOC producing and MOOC consuming institutions. This creates issues for both groups; the former doesn't want to appear elitist, while the latter rejects content not created by their own faculty members.

“Maybe this seems obvious,” said Christopher Brooks, a research fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information. “Lots of things seem obvious in hindsight.”

Or maybe, for some, in foresight. 

3. In closer-to-home news, I'm trying the "append only a final comment" to their last papers based on advice you've all given.    The comment gives feedback on the paper, but I didn't put in any marginal comments. The students have all been invited (via the comment) to come and talk to me next semester if they want a more complete set of comments on their papers. Do my hands twitch to add marginal comments? Yes, sort of. Is the time tradeoff worth it? Yes.

Just keeping the plates spinning

Aren't we all keeping the plates spinning about now, just trying to get through grading papers, or calculating grades, or turning in grades, or holiday preparations, or buying gifts, or baking, or cooking big meals, or sending Christmas cards, or seeing family, or writing up syllabi for next semester, or getting ready for the (still mercifully in January) MLA?

I want to turn my attitude around so that instead of seeing all these as points on an endless to-do list, or too many plates to spin, I see the relaxing or happy spaces in between.  I want to sit and concentrate long enough to shift focus and see the dancer spin the other way.

Random bullets of thankfulness

Historiann, Dr. Crazy, Belle, and What Now are being thankful for/expressing gratitude at this appropriate season, and so will I, knocking on wood lest I anger the spirits:

• For my family, the ones who are here and the ones who left us this year. And for the fact that no one is traveling amidst storms this year, except via the magic of Skype.
• For a job I love that allows me the autonomy and authority to speak my mind and the ability to do what I think is right.
• For really enjoyable students despite my anticipated grumblings over some of their papers still to come.
• Still grateful that MLA has been moved to January.

A couple of truly random bullets:

• You may be an academic if your Christmas tree ornaments are held on every year with bent paperclips instead of the little wire ornament hangers because you've always got paperclips and who has time to go to the store for those little hangers?
•  You might be an academic if the big red circle on your calendar is for the date grades are due rather than Christmas (Hanukah is early this year, so that isn't in the running this time.) 

And now I give you Bing singing Irving Berlin for Thanksgiving: 
http://youtu.be/jyiJSpReL2Q

A rhetorical question: should teachers stay or should they go?

I can't stop thinking about something that Historiann said in her comments section in the post on "Death of an Adjunct":

Tenured Radical raises a point that the Anderson article touches on but doesn’t address directly: the question of age. I’m already feeling (mid-40s) like my hold on the students has an expiration date. I think it’s hard to relate and appear relevant to students past a certain age, no matter how able-bodied, vigorous, or determined one is. (At least, not 4 classes a semester, every semester.)

 On one hand, I see how this could be, and it's clear that, to put it kindly, the subject of "DoaA" should not have been teaching.  On the other hand, I keep thinking about all the teachers I had who were older than mid-40s but still were vibrant and relevant in the classroom.  Yes, I had a couple who should have retired a few years before I had them, but mostly the older teachers were impressive. They just knew so much more, not that they displayed that unless we asked questions.

The time to quit would probably be when you're no longer curious, passionate, and really engaged in the classroom and in the profession.  On a personal level, I still feel all this, and students still respond to it as best I can tell (class discussions, good enrollments, good evals, etc.).

Colleagues (not necessarily those at Northern Clime) who are retiring or have retired have done so because, as they explained, "I don't want to do this any more. It's just time." But as Historiann's comment raises the issue, how would you know "should I stay or should I go"? What are the signs?

Bullets of a few truths, maybe not so universally acknowledged

• During Sebastian Thrun's recent "aw, we were just kidding about MOOCs" statements (see Jonathan Rees and Historiann), someone, somewhere, called them "correspondence courses." Sinclair Lewis is rolling in laughter from beyond the grave.  
• The fact that MOOCs ended up catering to, basically, the Honors Students of the Internet rather than people struggling with jobs and difficult lives caught the MOOC cheerleaders totally by surprise.  Who could have predicted that people with great internet access, lots of success in previous academic settings, and time on their hands would gain the most from those courses? Apart from every blogger, ever, and everyone who doesn't teach at Princeton or Stanford, apparently no one. 
• Speaking of "difficult lives," four things from the news this week:
• Dow is over 16,000, twice what it was in 2008 when there was some blip of a recession somewhere, but that's all over and no one is hurting now, says the Wall Street Journal, except maybe some cranks and whiners who don't have jobs, which is totally their own fault. (I'm paraphrasing.) 
• Standard & Poor's 500 is close to a "perfect 10," which means that all 10 industry groups closed 10% higher.  American workers? Not so much. 
• Over in the other America, Wal-Mart advises food stamps and its employees hold food drives for other workers--because they are not paid a living wage. 
• Wal-Mart's CEO makes yearly as much as 796 Wal-Mart employees.  As Jean Hagen says in Singin' in the Rain, "put together!" Costco's CEO makes 48 times his workers' wages, which are actually living wages and come with benefits.  This is a big reason why I shop there almost exclusively, actually, except for independent markets. 
• "You've had a chance to look at papers graded both ways, with typing and with handwriting, so which do you want for this one? Show of hands?" A lot for typing, because as one put it, laughing, "you have terrible handwriting." I said, "but I thought it was fabulous," and we all laughed.  I'm going to miss this group of students. 
• I just want to be done with this book manuscript. I just want to be done. 

Off-topic: Does childhood reading shape your sense of what's good?

When I was a child, I read voraciously, as most of us probably did.  What I didn't have was any kind of framework for putting these books into context, and except for Laura Ingalls Wilder, I didn't really pay much attention to the authors' names, much less know who they were.  I knew the names of Kipling and Stevenson because of "Just-So Stories" and their poems, respectively, but the names didn't signify anything except entertainment.

Some of them were more important in the aggregate than as individual texts. There was a long series of juvenile biographies that I made a beeline for every time I went to the library. The ones on Elizabeth Blackwell and George Washington Carver made a special impression, but I ate them all up.

Two of my favorites were a couple of books of fairy tales, one with "The Little Mermaid" and  "The Tinder-Box" and "The Little Match Girl" and "The Snow-Queen"; I think I knew about Hans Christian Andersen at that point.  But I didn't pay any attention to the author of the other book, because I didn't know his name, though his stories"The Happy Prince" and "The Nightingale and the Rose" were ones I read over and over.  Who'd ever heard of Oscar Wilde, anyway? Not me.

And my very favorite books of all for a while,  which I picked out of a bargain bin somewhere because of their covers, had stories of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Cadmus and the dragon's teeth, and  Proserpina,  and Medusa.  One was Tanglewood Tales and the other was A Wonder Book. It was years later  before I figured out that Nathaniel Hawthorne had written them and a while longer before I figured out that he was also the person who wrote The Scarlet Letter. When I read them, though, he was as anonymous to me as those series biographers. I was only interested in the stories and not the style, especially the stories of Cadmus and of Proserpina, for some reason. I know that for a long time experts in children's literature thought that the Hawthorne books were too preachy stylistically for children, but as a non-expert child, I didn't find them so.  

So here is my question: I read a lot of other things, too, as did we all, and a lot of stuff I don't remember.  Was there something in those stories, some literary quality that I didn't have any sense of perceiving at the time, that was making them memorable? Was it style?

What made a book memorable to you, and did it have an effect on how you developed as a reader?

On the internets, mean is the new green

Historiann weighs in on the mean-spirited review of Disregarding Henry in The Chronicle and quite reasonably wonders why the reviewer bashes the author of a memoir about her experiences as the mother of a special needs child for telling the story of her experiences as the mother of a special needs child.  The substance of the review, which says little about the book in question, is that the author hasn't suffered enough and in the proper ways.

From what I can see, this review is an anomaly. The Chronicle actually has better standards and is less willing to publish mean-spirited stuff than they used to be.  I'm surprised, though,  they let this one get to press unless (cynically) they thought of it as conversation-inspiring click-bait, as some of Historiann's commenters suggest. 

Old-school journalism used to say "If it bleeds, it leads," and advertising says "sex sells" (though Don Draper begs to differ).

On the internets, although we do love our cuteness overloads and cat videos and 5 amazing tricks to lose weight/get money/be productive/be more eco-conscious, we have a new measurement of success. Mean is the new green. If you doubt it, check out any comments section except those of our esteemed preceptress Historiann and the academic blogosphere. (Or don't, because you can't unsee the meanness in the comments.) We can't get enough of schadenfreude or of Daffy Duck syndrome: "It is not sufficient that I succeed. You must also fail."

The biggest surprise is that in this case, meanness moved above the fold to become the article itself. I'm guessing, or maybe hoping, that it was a lapse that won't be repeated soon.

What matters/what doesn't

I see a lot of people, including bloggers, posting about what they are thankful for this month.  It's a nice trend, especially since the web seems to encourage posting about things that annoy or frustrate you (and I am no exception to that).

My version of that this month is thinking a little more about what matters and what doesn't, in life as much as in academe, and how things that used to matter often just don't, now, and vice versa.

Things that used to matter a lot or provoke a reaction but don't now:

• Whether women keep their own names or take their spouse's name after they get married. This seemed like a huge issue back in the day, with me getting into arguments that women should keep their own names.  Maybe it still is, but especially with the legalization of gay marriage (yay!), it seems wrong to declare that women must or ought to do X or Z about their names.  You ought to be able to declare your identity in any way that the law allows without getting a lot of lectures about it.  
• Whether the acquaintance or family member you're talking to actually listens to what you're saying. It used to frustrate me tremendously when a family member or acquaintance would ask a question about my work, let me get 10 words into an explanation, and then break off to tell an anecdote of their own or exclaim over the cute tricks of a dog or baby.  Now it doesn't. Once you realize that the person doesn't actually care about your answer, it's much easier and less tiring to keep what passes for conversation going by asking them questions about themselves. 
• Issues of citation and typography, m- dash versus n-dash, fonts, spacing, MLA versus Chicago style, and all that. I used to care about whether MLA was better than Chicago. Not any more. Tell me the style sheet and I 'll do what you want. I don't have to care about it to do it right. 
• Whether a student is telling the truth when he says he couldn't do the assignment because his roommate's grandmother's dog died or whatever.  I'm not the Dean of Students, and I'm not going to track down excuses, the way I've seen, at the Chronicle, instructors talk about demanding obituary notices before excusing an absence.  The syllabus is designed to allow some flexibility and some absences, partly for their convenience and partly for mine, so that I don't have to be the Truth Police. 

Things that still matter a lot:

• Plagiarism. Where that's concerned, I still am the Truth Police, and they get reported.
• Insisting on respect. Respect doesn't mean being docile at all costs, but it's possible to disagree without getting into rudeness or snide behavior. If you don't agree, you sure don't want to be in my classroom, meeting, or conference session. 
• Fairness. I've heard that preadolescents go through a phase of deciding whether things are fair and being outraged about unfairness; later, adults learn that life is unfair and they have to get on with it.  I don't think that any of us ever get beyond the fairness issue, even if we understand that life can be unfair, and we need to do what we can to alleviate unfairness when we can. This sounds trite (because it is), but it's still true. Even in a class setting, you can make something more transparent, distribute some benefit more equitably, or even the playing field by creating assignments that cater to different student strengths. 

What issues have you given up as "doesn't matter" and what ones are still important to you? 

At NYTimes: work for free? Or is the worker worthy of her hire?

At NYTimes.com today, Tim Kreider urges the slaves of the internet to unite http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/opinion/sunday/slaves-of-the-internet-unite.html?_r=0&gwh=46789F128D5F8269B0F908E0E442E731 and rise up against working for free. (The essay is not about the recent and shameful conduct of Scientific American; go read Dr. Isis for that.)  Kreider protests all the requests he and others get to write/draw/paint/act/play music for free because "it's good exposure." What I learned from reading some of the comments is that (1) Arianna Huffington doesn't pay writers as a rule, which may explain why HuffPo has gotten so stupid and pointless lately and that (2) a wise man once told his neighbor, "A free horse is worked to death." Words to live by, wouldn't you say?

As academics, we do our "work" (writing) but not our "course load" (teaching, advising, etc.) for free , because it's part of our job and because it builds our credibility in the discipline. We're paid partly in the coin of "you should do this because you love it," something that the blogosphere has hashed out before.  It's a slightly different animal from what Kreider describes, but we still have to think about it in these situations:

• Taking on an extra piece of advising, or a workshop, or some other piece of work because "it will benefit the university," says the administrator who is getting paid to convince you to do it. 
• Doing administration or service and being paid in the coin of  genuinely believing that this will make your department better or benefit students, even though it counts nothing, zip, nada toward promotion and tenure and will take you away from the writing that will help you achieve them. 
• Traveling to conferences to deliver papers--sometimes partially reimbursed, true, but necessary to do your job. 
• Reviewing: not just student papers but grant applications, books, tenure packets, scholarly journals and so on. Worth doing? Absolutely--but there has to be a balance. 
• And here is the one I'm most ambivalent about, in part because Open Access week raised awareness about it: Yes, information should be free.  Yes, information in journals would benefit more people if it were widely accessible outside the subscription databases.  

But am I ready not only to write the articles for free but also to fork over an ACA fee (payment to submit) that goes along with Open Access, whether that fee is $50 or $500? Can I come up with, and do I want to pay out of my modest salary, the $3500 (this is not a misprint; it's an actual fee quoted when I looked into it) necessary for the subscription databases to make one article free and OA?  Oasis (http://www.openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=265&catid=79&Itemid=256) says that universities will pay the fee, in some or most cases, and in the sciences, the fee may be paid from grants (http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676).
The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/21/open-access-myths-peter-suber-harvard) has useful information on the subject, too.
Your thoughts?

At Slate: "I Quit Academe" as a new essay genre

Over at Slate, Rebecca Schuman suggests that the "quitting academe" essay could practically constitute its own genre: 

Sarah Kendzior, Al-Jazeera English’s firebrand of social and economic justice, suggested this week that there should be a Norton Anthology of Academics Declaring They Quit, among whose august contributions she would place Zachary Ernst’s “Why I Jumped Off the Ivory Tower.” Ernst’s Oct. 20 essay is a deeply honest account of his acrimonious departure from what many would consider a dream job: a tenured position as a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri. 

Ernst’s contribution is indeed part of a raucous subgenre of “I Quit Lit” in (or rather, out of) academe, which includes Kendzior’s own acidic “The Closing of American Academia,” Alexandra Lord’s surprisingly controversial “Location, Location, Location,” and my own satirical public breakdown. All of us faced, and continue to face, the impressively verbose wrath of a discipline scorned, which itself is the completing gesture of initiation into the I Quit Oeuvre.

 Schuman may have a point. It may not be clear that academics are quitting at a greater rate than usual, but they're indubitably hustling over to their blogs to announce the quitting and the reasons for it.  Ernst, who has pride of place in her article, even stars in The Chronicle's entry in the begging-to-be-written Lifetime Original Movie this week, "Faculty Couples for Better or Worse," as one of the commenters points out.

I shouldn't be flippant, though, because these are real problems and real injustices that are happening. Since money is apparently never an issue--those who quit always transition effortlessly into a new career--the spectacular public bridge-burning genre of the "I quit" essay must be designed to make academe better, one blog post at a time.  How could you not admire that?

On writing: Richard Brinsley Sheridan's thought for the day

Sometimes when I wander over to writers' blogs where they're talking about writing a novel in a week or how many words they write a day, I wonder about a couple of things, especially with NaNoWriMo and its children coming up in November:

1. Who's reading those words?
2. Are those words worth reading?

If you're Margaret Atwood, writing 2000 words a day of Margaret Atwood-level prose is one thing. Same is true for Joyce Carol Oates or Anthony Grafton. But what about mere mortals like poor toiling academics?

I wonder this about academic writing when people tell about the many words they write in a day or promote their writing zealously on Twitter.  Sometimes those posts or articles are worth it, but only about 1/10 of the links that I've followed say anything genuinely new. Some books look totally worth it (like Rees's Refrigeration Nation) but others--maybe not.

Maybe that says more about the links that I've been enticed to follow than the quality of what's out there being promoted.  Maybe, too, it taps into a Calvinist distrust of "getting above yourself" like the one that Atwood and Alice Munro have talked about--that what's being advertised so heavily can't be good.

But as I slog my way toward inspiration and a completed manuscript, eking out words, I think of Richard Brinsley Sheridan:

You write with ease, to show your breeding;
But easy writing's vile hard reading.

On writing: Just say it!

I've been working on the introduction to the book manuscript, trying to write my way into Flavia's third stage of writing (writing excitement).  One of the things I'm noticing is where I'm hedging, and these are some words I'm replacing, along with the little lectures I'm giving myself:

• Basically. Why is it basic, and if it's basic, why do you have to tell the reader it's basic? 
• Also. Go ahead--I dare you to do this: copy & replace every "also" with nothing (I say to myself).  Does it make a difference? If it does, you didn't need it.
• In particular. Can't you see that it's a particular example? 
• Attempts to serve as, attempts to prove.  It does or it doesn't. Get off the fence and make this a more definite verb.
• Is also evident in. How about "informs," a more definite verb?
• Dashes and semicolons. Think about how your eyes glaze over when you see a semicolon-laden sentence, however nicely parallel the clauses are.  What are you, a writer or a mouse?  If you need a new sentence, start one. 
• Way in which. Is anyone really going to care if you say "how" instead? 
• Trendy words--er, important critical terms like "discourse." Do you really need these words?
• Thus.  If the inference really does logically follow what you've said, do you need to signal it? "Thus" is important when you're presenting a paper, but is it a signpost that the written paragraph really needs? 
• Just as . . . so too and Not only . . . but also.  Apparently First Draft Undine loves these parallelisms, but Subsequent Drafts Undine should learn that she is not the 21st-century Henry James of sentence stylings or Milton in writing epic similes. 
• This doesn't even count the places where I add in a critic who maybe wrote something that referred in passing to a text in 1992 and who I see in my imagination glaring at me and crucifying me in reviews if I don't cite him or her. 

It takes a long time to write a shorter version, so hedging in an initial draft is just part of the process.  I sometimes think, though, that we should track our manuscript words to give ourselves an extra bonus for writing fewer rather than more words in a day. 

What words are you deleting today? 

Common knowledge

I was recently at a conference, and as part of the trip back I was set to spend the night at a chain hotel at the airport before flying out the next day. After getting to the airport, I went outside to the hotel shuttle area.

"Do I need to call for a shuttle?" I asked the guy who was working there. (Sometimes you do, and sometimes they automatically make the rounds of the terminals.  On one memorably long evening, the hotel sent a shuttle with nothing to indicate that it was going to that particular hotel, so I didn't hail it for a long time.)

"Which hotel?" he asked.

"Airport Hellscape Inn."

"Which one?"

"The one at the airport."

"Which one? There are two."

"I don't know."

"Find out," he snapped, and turned away.

Now, from his perspective, how could anyone not know that there were two Airport Hellscape Inns at this particular airport?  It was common knowledge.  From my perspective, it had never crossed my mind that there would be two, so it was not common knowledge. I looked at the printout, found out, and eventually got there.

I thought of this because in my new admin tasks, there's a whole raft of things that everyone takes to be common knowledge that it has never crossed my mind to ask about. "Of course so and so teaches this--is on leave--is involved with this program," I'll hear, or "this course is part of X esoteric requirement--needs to be reviewed by Y assessment office--is only taught every third year." There's a fund of common knowledge, written down nowhere, that I need to learn.  I'm learning it bit by bit, by asking questions of my colleagues, who are far more gracious than the shuttle guy.

It's not as complex as "the Knowledge," which all London cab drivers have to learn, but it's like that in that I need to be there, asking those questions and, even better, being in conversations where a question that I didn't even know I needed to ask arises from the conversation.

Adapting to admin

My sixth-grade teacher once told our class that in a few years, people would evolve--yes, we believed in science back in those days--to creatures with giant heads to accommodate our brains and a big pod foot to push the gas and brake pedals of our cars, since no one would walk any more.  He was kidding, I think and hope, about the pod foot. Certainly his vision has nothing over the satiric view of us all in Wall-E as giant overfed babies watching screens and lugging our drinks with us as we travel in carts everywhere.

If he had predicted fingers adapted to flying over keyboards all day and the inability to cordon off time, he would have been onto something.  The admin tasks I took on as part of leaning in (thanks a lot, Sheryl Sandberg) are eating up my life and writing time, and while I'm not complaining and am appreciative of the opportunity--I said yes, after all--I'm trying to figure out how to do things more efficiently.

But that's the challenge and the fun of it, too: the tasks are interesting, and figuring out how to do things better than I'm doing them right now is, too. I just have to figure out how to turn off the admin brain that wants to play with these new challenges and get back to the old challenges of writing and teaching.

A little radio silence

Mightily inspired by Historiann's post on writing (the carrot of finishing the book) and Tenured Radical (the stick of not getting to full professor), I'm going to be quiet for a while here. Light blogging ahead.

The relatability factor

The Little Professor has a nicely argued, well-bred rant about how "relatability" is supposed by her students to be a core literary value. She raises the issue of David Gilmour, who has had his head handed to him by the media for this:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

So, no chick lit and no George Eliot, though as several commenters pointed out, he glides lightly over all the Proust on his shelves in his category of "serious heterosexual guys," boasting about how many times he's read Proust and the hours he's logged listening to audiobook versions.

I teach and have written on a lot of "real guy-guys," too, yet I am not in a Manliness Studies department because for me, relatability  is not THE point but A point. It's one to be made when you're trying to convert students from "I liked it/It sucked" reading judgments to something more substantial: critical thinking.

I get what he's saying about loving some writers and not others. Like our students, we find some authors more "relatable"--but the difference is, we don't stop there. It's my job, as I see it, to find value in literature and to find some "way in" to teach it, to find something to get excited about so that I can  honestly convey some of that to students.

As instructors, we always have something more to learn, and if we're closed off to that, either in what students can teach us or in what a piece of literature that we don't automatically like can do for us, we're not learning.  We're stuck in our own brains. We start pontificating instead of listening and learning.

Gilmour may be an inspired teacher, but if your "truly great literature" circle maps 95% onto "middle-aged white men" in a Venn diagram (exception: Virginia Woolf), you may want to think about how that affects the way your students are shaping their literary judgments.