Green computing: everything old is new again?

From Inside Higher Ed: is Rockhurst College's move to "green computing" the wave of the future?

The new computers, which are about the size of VHS tapes, are literally stripped of their guts. They have no need for hard drives or memory, because the servers will store everything instead. That means less material is needed to produce the units, one of many factors that Rockhurst touts as “earth friendly.”

(I wish they'd show a picture of the monitors, too, since the VHS-size computer by itself doesn't give enough detail.)

Hmm. I think that just maybe we've been down this road before (can you say VAX, boys and girls?), and yet I really like the philosophy behind this. A loose and very impressionistic history of computing on campus would go something like this:

• 1970s: Big mainframes and scheduled times to use them. Computer users easily identifiable by the rubber-banded stacks of punchcards and green-and-white printout pages they carry.
• 1980s: Computer classrooms that non-CS people get to use. Big mainframe systems and "dumb terminals" with monochrome monitors that glow amber or green. Rudimentary e-mail clients. Later in the decade, rooms of stand-alone computers. Wastebaskets are overflowing with long, ticker-tape-like ribbons of paper torn from the sides of printer paper. Students must save their files to a central server.
• 1990s: Networked computer classrooms. Students could talk to each other and, after 1995 or so, could connect to this newfangled thing called the World Wide Web. Monitors sometimes hidden below the desk with a glass screen inset into the desk to view them. Later in the decade, classrooms with laptops or laptops wheeled in on a cart, thus making the fixed desk-monitor-chair positioning of the traditional computer classroom optional.
• 2000s: Laptops everywhere, the better to check Facebook and Wikipedia in class. More multimedia authoring and technology, which still makes the computer classroom viable for a lot of places. Individuals can carry their files with them. Later in the decade: students must save their files to a central server?

Here are some questions/observations:

• Back in the 1980s, students had to print things in a computer lab because printers were too large and expensive. As printers got cheaper, they'd hook up their computer to a printer in their dorm room. Now, however, since computers have become so mobile (very small laptops, using iPhones, etc.), are students going back to printing to central locations because it's easier than messing with an individual printer? I know there are still some of the latter, because at the end of the semester I get handed blue/pink/washed-out black papers as the student sheepishly explains "My printer is just about out of ink." But is the individual printer becoming a thing of the past?
• For that matter, is the computer classroom/lab getting phased out in favor of something else? Is this happening on your campus?
• The photo accompanying the article shows a flash drive attached to the thin client. I'm assuming that this means they can access their files on the server from their laptops, if they have them, as well as saving them to the flash drive, but are we going toward saving it all to a central server or online? Are flash drives (in student perceptions, anyway), the 5.25" floppy disk of the future?
• And a philosophical question: does saving one's classwork to the central server while maintaining other devices (iPod, etc.) for things that are important to one's life serve to create a distinction between work that somehow belongs to "them" (the university), since it's kept in "their" space, and work that belongs to "me," since it's kept in "my" space?

Barak Obama and Jonah Lehrer on thinking and creativity

Support for taking large chunks of time for thinking and writing, for working in the morning, and for going for a walk or otherwise distracting yourself at intervals while working.

From the New York Times, via 43folders:

Mr. Obama: . . . actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be …

Mr. Cameron: These guys just chalk your diary up.

Mr. Obama: Right. … In 15 minute increments and …

Mr. Cameron: We call it the dentist waiting room. You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.

And Jonah Lehrer, "The Eureka Hunt," in the July 28 issue of The New Yorker:

Shorter Lehrer: A lot of new studies in brain science are demonstrating the power of the right hemisphere in producing insight, which is physically as well as intellectually distinct from the kind of problem-solving produced by analysis. The article isn't online, but here are some extracts:

The insight process, as sketched by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. but, once the brain is sufficiently focussed, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will produce the insight. "The relaxation phase is crucial," Jung-Beeman said. "That's why so many insights happen during warm showers." Another ideal moment for insights, according to the scientists, is the early morning, right after we wake up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right brain hemisphere is also unusually active (43).

In his 1908 essay "Mathematical Creation," Poincare insisted that the best way to think about complex problems is to immerse yourself in the problem until you hit an impasse. Then, when it seems that "nothing good is accomplished," you should find a way to distract yourself, preferably by going on a "walk or a journey." The answer will arrive when you least expect it (43-44).

"You've got to know when to step back," Kounios said. "If you're in an environment that forces you to produce and produce, and you feel very stressed, then you're not going to have any insights." [He goes on to say that Adderall, etc. can help concentration but "may actually make insights less likely, by sharpening the spotlight of attention and discouraging mental rambles. Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity" (44).]

Random bullets of July

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

Message to editors

*poof*--message seemed too much, somehow.

Productivity tools

If all of these really worked perfectly, I'd be done with this article by now, but here's a sort of assessment/update/review of what helps:

1. Turn off internet access. This one is pretty obvious, but it's not always practical if you are doing bibliographic searches, say, or downloading articles.
2. Xobni. I installed this a few months ago, and, if you use Outlook, it really is helpful for finding phone numbers and especially file attachments. It does more, too, like showing you when you typically get e-mails from those on your contact list.
3. Leechblock. This is the new and improved version of the Greasemonkey script that blocks certain web sites for specified periods of time; it's a Firefox add-on, and you don't need Greasemonkey to use it. You can tell it to block the sites for certain periods of time (7-5, for example), or set up a different set of rules to allow yourself X amount of minutes on certain sites. It's almost as good a timesaver as turning off the internet access.
4. [Edited to add] Eggtimer. This is still useful for doing "sprints" of writing. You lucky Mac people have a free version.
5. Music. The music CDs that Dr. Brazen Hussy suggested look good, but if you've already spent your stimulus check, there are alternatives.

• If you already have a lot of this classical music (Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Vivaldi, etc.) on CDs or in iTunes, you can group them in playlists so that they mimic the brain effects of the CDs (at least I hope this is true).


• Also in iTunes: try the Classical tab for radio stations. Good ones for working include the Adagio station, All Classic Baroque, WCPE, and even Whisperings, although the free version of the latter plays the same tracks over and over. Some of the public radio stations work well, too, although the big city ones tend to play "challenging" and modern--i.e., too noisy for work purposes--classical rather than the quiet stuff, and they interrupt the quiet music with opera at odd moments, a total distraction.


• Pandora, of course. Pandora has a lot of generic classical stations already set up (although Piano Solo, Romantic Period is heavy on Schubert), or you can create your own by specifying a composer.


• Local classical radio stations. These are good for times when the internet is off, although if your local station has jumped on the "challenging" bandwagon or prefers a lot of rousing marches, you're out of luck.

More tips?

Service and productivity

After getting all energized by Dr. Brazen Hussy's post on productivity, I broke my IHE fast when I went to Planned Obsolescence and read what she had to say about the article on service expectations for women in academe: "Women, often socialized to prioritize responsibility for the functioning of groups over the demands of personal projects, are far more likely than men to find their research agendas derailed by administrative responsibilities."

These two are more connected than you'd think. The whole David Allen GTD idea is really attractive in a lot of ways, and reading about how it has worked for Dr. Brazen Hussy makes me want to try again. (If GTD was a religion, I'd be the backslider promising that this time I really want to be saved.) On the other hand, what Planned Obsolescence and the IHE piece say is something we already know: if you're an administrator, your time is not your own, since you can't anticipate what is coming through the door or into your inbox. If you're still following the religion metaphor: GTD says your time--your salvation--is your own; it's up to you to get with the program. Administration (in the IHE's take) says your time is not your own, and your salvation can only be achieved through service to others. To be fair, these are two entirely different things, yet both are ways to measure out a scarce commodity: time.

Some people can do both; they're very productive but have administrative responsibilities. I know people who are perfectly cordial, yet they manage their time so well that I have never had a conversation with them that was not in the furtherance of one or another of their research or service agenda.

 This also makes me think of listservs that I've been on for a long time where the gods of the profession--those senior scholar names invoked by the regular posters--never post about anything unless they have a research project that they need some responses for or a new book that they're promoting. They use the listserv, but they don't contribute to it, preferring to reserve their ideas for publication.

Is this collegial? I don't know. Is it efficient? Very definitely.

Pencil and paper

It is summer, and I do not want to work. I do not want to write, read, annotate, wade through criticism, and did I mention write? Similarly, I do not want to read about Big Departmental Plans for the Fall, see Back to School posters, or take even one glimpse at IHE or CHE. Instead of Academic Batman, solving problems and being productive, I want to be Bruce Wayne. Repeat 5,000 times, and you have every blog post that I might have posted over the past week.

I want the summer that an acquaintance imagines when she said recently, "Oh, summer school's over? You must be glad to have the rest of the summer off." This is the same person who, when I tried to describe what I do besides show up in a classroom for a few hours a week, said, "Writing about literature? You mean . . . like for a book club?" What can you say to that?

a) "Remember when you took English classes in college and had to write papers based on criticism? You were quoting from the kind of thing I write."
b) "Not exactly."
c) "So, are you going to Hawaii again this year?"

This week I'm forcing myself to go back to pencil and paper for notes, summaries, and so on. I'm always grateful when I rediscover articles that I've annotated in this way ("I read this? Really? I thought THIS about it? Really?") and thought that engineering this kind of close attention might make me weep with gratitude when I can finally get back to the much faster computer keyboard.

Two observations:

1. Writing with a pencil is a misnomer; instead, you have to have a whole cupful of sharpened pencils, since they go dull really fast.
2. Writing in pencil makes me feel like John Steinbeck.

Back

I'm back from the land of no internets and thought you might like a picture of where I was for some of the time. A few thoughts:

• It is much, much more peaceful living without newspapers, NPR, internet, and television. (Actually, there was a television that got two whole channels, one of which was in English, but it was hardly used.)
• It felt like culture shock to go to a conference, as though I was traveling from the 19th century into the 21st, although I had my computer to anchor me to the present day.
• On the other hand, it is pleasant not to have to go on Spider Patrol before going to sleep at night. I know that Arachnids Are Our Friends when it comes to keeping down the bug population and that spiders are inevitable if you're by the water, but after a couple of nasty bites, you stop preaching peaceful coexistence if the spiders are near where you sleep.
• I tried one more Panera run before returning, but the experience of getting online there was even more disorienting than before--not Panera's fault, but the fault of the culture shock. You know how when you open the oven door when something is baking and you feel a blast of hot air? It really felt like that, although there weren't even any stressful emails.
• Those books I insisted on lugging with me and paying the extra money for another suitcase? I used maybe 1/5 of them.

It's good to be back.

Notes from underground

Well, not actually underground, but with no internet access until today (the land of no internets).

Without access, I started reading more and writing more. If I couldn't think of an answer to a minor factual point in two seconds, it really didn't matter, since I knew I'd find the answer eventually. "Eventually" is a word that doesn't seem relevant in a Googleized world, but I'm warming to it.

Without access, I still wasted time, but I wasted it in different ways. I looked at the floorboards where I'm staying, which are a good foot across, and the crossbeams supporting the house, which are just peeled logs, and wondered when the last time trees that big were in this area. I wondered how, when the place got retrofitted for things like bathrooms and kitchen sinks, the owners decided where to put them.

Without access, I spent more time outdoors and in the sun.

When I finally drove the many miles to a place with a Panera and got online, I thought I'd be glad to be back in touch. Instead, though, it felt like an assault. I felt dazed as I sorted through the emails, as if Panera had melted away and left me with this world.

Then I got angry: why were people nagging me to do things? Of course they weren't doing anything but proceeding on the normal assumption that everyone is responsive to email 24/7/365; that's not their fault but mine for opening up the emails.

There's a lesson here someplace, but I'm not quite sure what it is. I think I'll drive back and stare at the floorboards some more.

Grading translation

As I finish grading the last projects for the summer course, I've invented a new comment to use (thanks, autotext!). I won't write the real version of it, but Spouse, to whom I showed it, translated it as follows: "I am tired of commenting on this mistake, which you have made numerous times before, and so I am not going to comment on it henceforth in this paper. This won't stop me from considering it when I assign your grade, however."

My version is more polite and positive, but you get the idea.

And again: thanks, autotext! I have been looking longingly at Macs recently, but they come with some flavor of Word 2007/2008, and I can't find the autotext feature at all. This is a dealbreaker for me.*

*P. S. Autotext isn't autotext if you have to use a mouse. Real backwoods computer users should be able to get everywhere--everywhere in Word, anyway--by using the keyboard. I learned this back in pioneer days with WordPerfect 5.1 (Anybody remember that? Hello? Hello?), where flying fingers and function keys were the name of the game.

Watching the robins

If you look directly at the mother robin, she waits on a branch until you turn your head slightly away. That means that you don't know that she's there and are less likely to be a predator. Only then will she fly up to the nest and stuff the upturned beaks with food.

The babies are in the nest on top of the porch light. It's a terrible spot, since people go in and out of the door all day long, but apparently it's a deluxe spot if you're a robin.

I've been away and Blogger thinks I haven't had internet access, or at least it has been giving its inscrutable error messages when I've tried to post. I soon won't have any access for a week or so.

But I did get an article sent out and can now work on other things.

That, and watch the robins.

All over but the grading

Summer session has ended--all except the grading, of course. As their final papers came in, I read and reread their messages, especially those who said they'd enjoyed the class or learned a lot or wished me a good summer (or all three). The papers may be another story, especially those who seem to have completely ignored the advice I gave on their drafts, but the messages were a pleasure.

Nobody I have ever met teaches summer school for the Joy of Teaching; you volunteer for it so you can make enough money for plane fare or what have you. And yet at the end of the day, it gives you pleasure to see that they liked or learned from (or both) materials that you worked hard to put together or that your feedback on their work was helpful.

Yes, they could be apple-polishing or hoping that a nice message will help them in the end, but I'd like to think this isn't the case.

And, best of all, we'll all shortly be done.

Laptops in classrooms (again)

This is more of an update than a regular post. From The Chronicle:

But professors who have banned laptops from their classes say there is no going back. Classroom discussions suddenly come alive when the laptops are gone, they say.

"If half the people are checked out, then the conversation just isn't going to be as rich," says David D. Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

Apart from the problem of Web surfing, Mr. Cole and other professors say, laptops encourage students to become mindless stenographers during class. Since taking notes with a computer keyboard is much faster than with pen and paper, students busily take down every word uttered by professors instead of carefully listening and selecting the important points to put into writing.

A lot of us have been saying this for a long time now, but if the law school professors say it, it must be true.

Be careful what you wish for, weather division

Yesterday I thought, "I wish this cold, gray rain would stop."

I got my wish.

It turned to hail.

Then I wished that the hail would stop, although it was small enough to be kind of cool rather than scary.

Today I got my wish.

This morning it snowed.

The flakes melted when they hit the ground, but still.

I am done with wishing for better weather.

The next step might be a plague of frogs.

Vacation (?) misery

I started work at 5 a.m. today and feel as though I should have gotten up at 4.

I'm in vacation panic mode, which means that I have to leave soon and have a ton of deadline-driven work still to do. I will have to take it with me, along with the books that there's no Netflix for. I will have to make trips to a library an hour away to supplement these instead of hanging out with family. This is my own fault, of course, so as an extra added bonus I get to berate myself hourly for not working faster and avoiding the problem.

If I could send an avatar away on the trip I'm supposed to take and let the real me stay here and work, I totally would. Can't they hurry up with that cloning stuff so that I can have another me to work?

Oh, and why do some academics only admit to "research trips" and travel to conferences during the summer? Did they spring fully formed from the head of the academy? Why do I feel as though I need to hide the family part of this trip and emphasize its work part, which will indeed include a conference and some travel to collections, when I'm describing it to others? Could it be that, like the Marines, academics value toughness and a total devotion to the Corps over family life?

In The Atlantic: the decay of reading?

I don't mean that people don't read any more, the factoid with which fluffy-haired tv journalists like to scare us on a slow day. No, the July/August "ideas issue" of The Atlantic has an article called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (Spoiler alert: the answer is yes).

But the really interesting part of the article occurs at the beginning, when the author, Nicholas Carr, has this to say about his current reading habits:

My mind isn't going--so far as I can tell--but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case any more. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. . . . What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. . . . My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances--literary types, most of them--many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

This is unnerving. As we used to say in grade school, I resemble that remark. I thought that being distracted just signified an epic case of procrastination, but even in reading long blog posts, I've become the master of the topic sentence, skipping from paragraph to paragraph. Isn't the genius of New Kid's Random Bullets of Crap concept (I think she invented it) [Edited to add: It was actually Ianqui who invented this. Thanks, Dr. Virago, for mentioning that in the comments.] is that it's perfect for blog posts on days when you don't want to write a Henry Jamesian disquisition on what you're thinking?

Or--here's a contrarian view--is this kind of reading maybe just efficient? If Francis Bacon was right that "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested," and we have more reading than ever to taste these days, doesn't it make sense to skim some things? And on the admittedly many occasions recently when I've skimmed something and forced myself to go back and read every sentence, guess what? There was usually enough repetition in the text, with extra examples and the like, that I'd gotten the main points the first time around anyway.

But "deep reading" really is a better system; for one thing, it feels less frantic than moving from point to point, topic to topic. What disturbs Carr, and what disturbs me, is that "deep reading" isn't the default any more; skimming is. Have you found this to be true, too?

I'd tell you about the rest of the article, but, in truth, I can't. I just read the first couple of pages and skimmed the rest.

A second reality check

Imagine that you have an online class and that all but one person is having no trouble with finding the site, finding the materials, completing the work, and so forth.

Imagine, too, that you have multiple e-mail addresses but that you have instructed your class (via the syllabus, Blackboard, e-mail messages to them, announcements, and so forth) to use one specific e-mail address.

What are the odds that the same person who couldn't see that there are writing assignments in the class if they were written on the side of a barn door has managed to sleuth out your least-used, most-obscure e-mail address, the one you rarely check, and has sent you multiple messages complaining that he or she can't understand how to access the course materials?

a) Nah, couldn't happen.
b) Infinitesimal.
c) A hundred percent.

You'll never guess this one in a million years.

I want a Netflix for books

File this under inventions I'd like to see: Netflix for books. If Netflix can do instant, on-demand viewing, why, oh why, can't university presses get together and create a service like this?

Like a lot of people, I'll be traveling this summer, and like a lot of academics, I need to take books with me. In the past, this wasn't as much of a problem. I'd pack a suitcase with clothes and a suitcase with books, and away I'd go.

But now, with the airlines waging unceasing war on passengers (my theory: Amtrak is pulling the puppet strings so the airlines will wither and die) and charging for extra bags and extra weight, that's not feasible. I would kill--well, pay, anyway--for access to books that I didn't have to lug in a suitcase.

The databases for journals have made this easy, but there's still no comprehensive option for books. What are the alternatives?

University of California Press has made some of its scholarly books available for free, bless its heart, but not all of them.

Google books has full-text versions of some useful books, but for most of them you just get the maddening striptease that they call "limited preview."

Questia has quite a few books, but many are older.

Netlibrary has a ratio (for my field, anyway) of about two scholarly books to about 25 repackaged public domain books that I can get anywhere.

Kindle looks promising at first, but its offerings are a lot heavier on the Eat, Pray, Love and Tom Clancy kind of thing than on the Arcades Project, if you know what I mean. In other words, stuff that I can buy in an airport bookstore I can also get through Kindle. Stuff that I can't get there, I can't get through Kindle, either.

What would a Netflix for books look like?

It would have to have affordable subscriptions or purchase prices, not the gazillion dollars that Project Muse and Ebsco extort from libraries so that individuals can never afford it.

It wouldn't have a proprietary device attached. Maybe it would come in .pdf versions that you could mark up.

It would be easy to access and have a good search feature. Maybe it could even emulate Amazon's "people who bought this book also bought X" feature.

It would allow you to get a "twofer"--an e-copy with every paper copy purchased. You could also just buy or rent the e-copy, for less money.

It would be centralized so you didn't have to go on a scavenger hunt to find the book you wanted.

I know, I know: digital rights, copyright laws, royalties, blah blah blah. But the movie companies aren't exactly holding hands and singing on a mountaintop when it comes to digital rights management, and Apple and Netflix have managed to make a go of things.

So I ask again: Netflix did it. Why can't academic booksellers?

And how was your day?

I've been working on something I'm very interested in and want to get sent out soon. No, that would not be one of the pieces with deadlines hanging over my head like a portent of doom; why do you ask?

So. I've been writing on this, immersed in it, until today. This morning was all about the online class, which has some hard deadlines if they're to get the information on time. This afternoon, 12-7, was all about a piece of work that is (1) pretty much a thankless task and (2) a monumental time suck.

Oh, and tomorrow is more of the same.

I see that What Now? has joined the Academic Writing Club for motivation, but even being motivated is no protection against tasks like this.

Oh, well. There's always this evening.

OT: Tech tips--why the fuss over Roku?

Updated to add: This reads very differently in 2021, when I am totally in love with Roku and it is my friend.

I'm confused about the fuss over Roku, a box that allows you to watch streaming video from Netflix for only $8.95 a month. The reason I'm confused is that Netflix members can already do this for free. You have to have Internet Explorer (it won't work with Firefox) and download the free player, but as far as I know, Netflix members have just about unlimited viewing for free. And the TV part? You just need to hook up the laptop to your TV as if it's an external monitor using an SVGA cable [or an S-video cable] and an audio cable. If you had an HDMI cable and a port for that on your laptop, you could probably use that, not that I've ever been able to make an HDMI cable work. Fellow tech nerd souls, what am I missing here? [Updated to add] An anonymous commenter has kindly explained that the $8.95 is for the cheapest Netflix subscription; if you already have Netflix, you wouldn't have to pay an additional amount to use Roku, just the $99 to buy it to begin with. Although the current system works well for now (laptop cables to TV), it sounds as though Roku might be worth a look. [Updated 4/24/09]: If you have a newer laptop with an HDMI port, an HDMI cable works even better than an SVGA or VGA cable plus audio cable.]

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

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

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

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

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

OT: A reminiscence sing

My mother called recently with the news that an elderly (and not close) relative had died at the age of 94. I knew her in a weddings-funerals-and-Easter-gatherings kind of way and had not seen her in some years.

Still in her teens, Great-aunt X had married in the depths of the Depression and had gone to live on her new husband's family farm, where the household included a fairly, um, exacting mother-in-law, assorted relatives, and eventually six children of her own. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of work that she had to do every day to keep everyone, including a bedridden mother-in-law, fed, clothed, and clean, let alone to do the work that women did on farms back then.

She lived on the farm, by herself but with family nearby, until going into the hospital about a week before her death. She was living there last summer and, at 93, was still canning peaches, tomatoes, and sweet pickles as she had done for the last seventy years.

She was the most cheerful person I have ever met.

Although I don't usually talk about my family, I mention her here because for years when I've wanted to whine about how much work I have to do and how demanding people are and--well, you know how those whines go--I would think of Great-aunt X and the work she did. What it reminded me was that there's the work I do, and then there's work.

Conference notes

Being at a conference: useful. Getting back from a conference: priceless, and worth every one of the premium chocolate-covered almonds that I scarfed down as a reward when I got home.

My paper went well, as did the other obligations I had at the conference. Secret message to panelists in the session I chaired: thank you for presenting your papers in the time allotted.

Secret message to people who congregate outside the open door when a session is going on: yes, we can hear you. No, we don't want to hear you; you're drowning out the panelists. Go away or shut up, please.

Secret message to the person who sat behind me and coughed and coughed and choked and coughed and coughed, only to leave momentarily, return, and begin coughing again: I know you want to hear the panel, but the rest of us do, too. Please reconsider sitting in the audience instead of standing by the door.

Is it a compliment to hear someone praise a point you made in the previous session if that person announces the point as though it has just struck him at a new idea? Is there such a thing as oral plagiarism?

Did you ever noticed that for some people you see at conferences, you only have about 5 minutes' worth of conversation and after that you don't have much to say, even if you like them?

The best part: taking a long walk through the city in absolutely perfect weather, seeing all the signs in a language that I couldn't read, smelling the fresh and dried fruits that I couldn't identify, and watching the people going about their daily lives because it's not Fabulous City to them; it's just home.

Conference world

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth; I've just been in conference world, a rewarding place in many ways but also a busy and tiring one. They could have held it in my back yard for all that I've seen so far of the Fabulous City where it's being held.

Reality check

If you were a student, and you knew you had signed up for an online course, and you knew that it was being held in Blackboard, and you knew how to sign in to Blackboard and had even posted comments on the discussion board, what would you say if you saw the following?

An announcement on the first page that announced the WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

An email from me announcing the first WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

An icon, obviously clickable, that led to the week's work, which included a page called WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

Lecture materials that referred on every page to the WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

A menu item, visible from all pages, that said "Syllabus," which coincidentally discusses the WRITING ASSIGNMENTS for the course.

A menu item that says "Lecture Materials," among which is the page for the WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

Would your reaction be this?

"I didn't know we had any writing assignments in this class."

Just checking.

[Edited for punctuation.]

What is to be done?

Two recent stories, one at The Atlantic and the other at Inside Higher Ed, raise an uncomfortable issue: what happens when the official policies of a college or university rub up against an instructor's standards?

The story at Inside Higher Ed is of the professor at Norfolk State who was denied tenure for failing too many of his students. Now, there may be issues here that aren't covered in the article--issues about expectations, for example--but this part is especially pertinent: Although school policy is that students must attend 80% of class sessions, many do not and receive passing grades anyway, since "there is a clear expectation from administrators — in particular from Dean Sandra J. DeLoatch, the dean whose recommendation turned the tide against Aird’s tenure bid — that 70 percent of students should pass."

The Atlantic story, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," is Professor X's meditation on the spot--between his shoulder blades, to be exact--where the good ideal that everyone deserves a college education meets his underprepared student, Ms. L:

By passing Ms. L., I would be eroding the standards of the school for which I worked. Besides, I nurse a healthy ration of paranoia. What if she were a plant from The New York Times doing a story on the declining standards of the nation’s colleges? In my mind’s eye, the front page of a newspaper spun madly, as in old movies, coming to rest to reveal a damning headline:

THIS IS A C?

Illiterate Mess Garners ‘Average’ Grade

Adjunct Says Student ‘Needed’ to Pass, ‘Tried Hard’

No, I would adhere to academic standards, and keep myself off the front page.

I'm troubled by both of these articles, so let's apply a little Lenin to the subject: what is to be done?

Institute more remedial preparatory courses at the college level? But in times of cutbacks, state legislatures and students taking out loans are both disinclined to lengthen the time it takes to get a degree.

Stop admitting "underprepared" students to college? This is troubling on a whole lot of levels, especially given this country's history of class, race, and gender prejudice.

Hire a lot more people to work one-on-one with people like Professor X's Ms. L? See the first point: who's going to pay for this?

Slide along and adapt grading standards so that the students who work hard can get the "gentlewoman's C-"? Isn't this what's happening, though, in the high schools where parents bully administrators to admit their kids into AP classes and then immediately start a campaign to water down the content since the classes are "too hard"?

Decide that college isn't for everyone? Professor X suggests this, but until there's equality of income and status for those who pursue alternate career tracks, it's not likely to fly.

What are your thoughts?

Graduation

"Watch the shoes," my colleague whispered as we settled ourselves into our seats, no small process where robes, hats, and hoods have to be adjusted lest they fall off at comical angles. She was right.

At graduation, the students are, for the first time in four years, all dressed alike. In fact, they are dressed like us: we all move somewhat stiffly under the unfamiliar dignity of robes at first, marching self-consciously to "Pomp and Circumstance." It's easier for faculty to relax, because they've been to a lot of college graduations and the students haven't. Then the students stop worrying that their caps will fall off and start to relax, too.

So, at the risk of sounding like a bad comparison and contrast essay, we are the same, yet different. They're wearing the regalia, varied only by the leis, stoles, and honor cords that signify their membership in various communities, and they're all there because they've achieved something important, as the smiles on their parents' faces attest.

Yet (comparison and contrast transition alert!) they are all different, too, and they--at least the women--want to express this through their shoes, the only part of the wardrobe that they have a choice about showing to people. I saw a lot of fashionably high heels with very pointed toes, and even though the wearers didn't always look terribly steady in them (these were very high heels; I have a pair and can only mince along in mine), these suggested women who weren't afraid that they'd fall on their faces in front of several thousand strangers when they got their diplomas. I also saw boots, sandals, sneakers, and some well-beloved shoes that were only a step up from flip-flops. I was later told that choosing shoes is a big deal, since they know that the shoes are the only thing people can see.

Yes, I listened to the speakers, heard all the songs, and was duly proud of the students I knew. Maybe it's just sentimentality (and I freely admit to being moved by ceremonies, even as I try to avoid them), but somehow I liked the idea that they were making this effort to be part of something that cost them time and money, that celebrated what they'd done, and that on the face of it emphasized how they were the same but that they'd adapted to show, even if just by their shoes, that they're all different.

OT: Tech tips--Xobni and Autotext

These are probably not news to everyone, but they are to me, so I thought I'd mention them here.

Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) is an indexer for Outlook. I usually use Google Desktop to find things, but this is faster. (Also, Google Desktop will sometimes tell you that you do have a message from the person you're looking for but won't open it, tantalizing you with its vagueness.) When you click on a message in your inbox, Xobni tells you the person's phone number (if the person has ever sent it in an e-mail) as well as telling you who else is in this person's "network." This freaked me out a little at first, because I thought there was some kind of web magic involved, but it turns out that it's all based on what's in your inbox already.

Autotext in Word. I've been using Word for years, but this was a revelation; it's perfect for inserting repetitive text ("You need a comma here") into student papers. If you're still running Word 2003--and everyone I know who has 2007 wants desperately to go back to the 2003 version--here's what you do:

1. Highlight the chunk of text you want to have as autotext.
2. Click on Insert, Autotext, New.
3. Give it a name in the box that pops up.
4. To use Autotext, Click on Insert, Autotext, Autotext, and scroll down until you find the short name that you gave it. I kept all the names to 2-5 letters for maximum speed.

Now, if you're like me and would prefer a faster way to do this than messing around with the mouse and toolbar, try this keyboard shortcut:
Alt-I-A-X and type your short name. The autotext appears in the document.
Want to put this into a comment? First, insert the comment: Alt-I-M. Then Alt-I-A-X (these don't have to be capital letters) and the short name.

I had never tried Autotext because of being scarred by Word macros at a tender age. To this day, one of my ancient computers has a copy of Word that, when you open it, opens Visual Basic first and demands that the macro be completed or canceled. I obviously screwed up the macro-making process badly at some point but could never get Visual Basic to stop harassing me. If I'd only known about Autotext, I'd have realized that I didn't need a macro after all and have spared myself two years of shutting down Visual Basic before I could open a document.

The benefit of all this is that I am, yes, actually looking forward to the first set of assignments from the summer school class because I'll get to practice my mad Autotext skillz on them.

Break between semesters

The grades have been turned in.
An old movie and a nap.
Summer school begins.

"Your generation"

Here's a hint to faculty members of all generations: do not use this phrase. No good will come of it.

Example, overheard in the hall, from shiny new faculty member to a senior (in rank) one: "I don't know if someone of your generation would know this," thereby placing the senior faculty member in age as being somewhere between John McCain and Methuselah.

How is the listener supposed to respond?

"That's right. In my day, we didn't have theories like that. We were too busy walking uphill both ways in the snow to teach our classes."

"Hadn't heard about that. I was too busy canoodling with my sheik in his Stutz Bearcat, drinking from a hip flask and reading that hot new novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald."

"Hey, kid, get off my lawn!"

It goes the other way, too, with implicit "your generation" statements:

"We did that twenty years ago, and it didn't work then, so let's not try it again."

"Who needs all this newfangled technology? The best teaching is done with a great teacher and a piece of chalk." (This may be true, in certain cases, but it's no reason to condemn all technology.)

"Technology has made all this so easy for you. You don't have to look up things the way we did."

There's a fine line between departmental history and Grandpa Stories, and sometimes one crosses over into the other.

I don't have any words of wisdom, except maybe this: when you're tempted to say something about "your generation" or to say something that starts "In my day," think again. It's possible to make a point without emphasizing the differences that divide us from our colleagues.

What's wrong with this picture?

As seen at The Edge of the American West, Fox reports on a possible "Lincoln-Douglas" debate.

They have entirely the wrong Douglas(s) and haven't even spelled Frederick Douglass's name correctly. Other than that, it's a swell graphic.






Don't history classes in grade schools teach about the debates between the Little Giant (Stephen A. Douglas, left, from the Library of Congress) and Lincoln any more? Surely they teach about this in college courses, don't they?

Or is history one of those frivolous liberal arts that are somehow dragging down the curriculum at places like the University of Toledo?

And not a bad reason for higher education, all in all

Steven Levy interviews Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, in Newsweek, 4/14/08:

Q: As a young man, you worked summers in a slaughterhouse. What did you learn from that?

A. To go to college.

Math and writing: I see a pattern here

The New York Times recently had an article about some research done on the way math is taught. It turns out that learning abstract concepts like equations can actually help rather than hinder learning.

The students who learned the math abstractly did well with figuring out the rules of the game. Those who had learned through examples using measuring cups or tennis balls performed little better than might be expected if they were simply guessing. Students who were presented the abstract symbols after the concrete examples did better than those who learned only through cups or balls, but not as well as those who learned only the abstract symbols.

It reminded me of the recent article in the Chronicle about Berkinstein and Graff's book.

Both rely on formulas, in a way, but--and here's the important part--they don't begin and end with formulas. The abstractions allow students to apply the concepts but NOT, as detractors fear, to stop at applying principle A to material B in a bad, evil, wicked, formulaic, five-paragraph essay kind of way to make students march in lockstep as prescribed by Satan's minions who want to stifle creativity. Instead, they allow students to conceptualize ideas in new and different ways.

It's like riding a bicycle. If you had to think about how to ride a bicycle every time you rode one, or reconceptualize it every time lest you not have the "true and authentic" experience of discovery, you'd be exhausted and you'd never get anywhere. You'd be so busy learning to ride that you'd never find the pleasure in riding.

Isn't there room for both discovery and actually learning--all right, even memorizing--a few concepts? I honestly don't see the problem with this.

Explainers

Professor Zero's post about an exasperating conversation and the comments on the post linked to an essay by Rebecca Solnit, "Men Who Explain Things." In it, as an aside to a larger point, Solnit tells of a man who was so eager to pontificate about her book on Eadward Muybridge, River of Shadows, that he didn't register that she had written it.

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

I've had this happen to me; haven't we all? It happened today, in fact, when I wrote a message to someone who not only missed the point by a country mile but, after assuring me that he took my concerns very seriously, used the occasion to boast about his experiences and lecture me about the Great Importance of his Field. What else can you do, but say, with the cutting irony of a Miss Manners, "Thank you for setting me straight"?

I have to say, however, that the particular combination of stupidity and arrogance that drives some individuals to patronize others under the guise of instruction isn't exclusively a guy thing. Although I have been instructed in this way by some males, including a male relative who said he would send me his first-year paper on author X (a person I've written about) so I could "learn from it," such a drive to instruct is an equal-opportunity curse.

Librarians have explained to me that the Dewey Decimal system was "really quite different" from the Library of Congress system and that typing a search term in the keyword box at the library site could yield some results.

A preschool teacher suggested parenting tips for my toddler as her own child sat in the next room, sucking her thumb . . . at the age of 6. In fact, various parents used to raise their voices above their own children who were screaming like banshees and trying to hit each other with cardboard bricks to suggest parenting tips for me to try out.

So it's not just stupid and arrogant men who explain things. Stupid and arrogant women explain things, too. You can argue with them, but they won't get it. Your best defense is to get away from them. In the meantime, practice this response:

"Thank you for setting me straight."

[Edited to add: Unlike the Mr. Arrogance who lectured Solnit, I've read her book, and it is very good.]

End-of-semester certainties

It's said that there's nothing certain in life but death and taxes. I disagree. If you teach, here are a few things you can count on:

1. The university's server will slow to a crawl and grind to a complete halt periodically as students try to access materials that they've cheerfully ignored all semester.

2. Students you haven't seen for a few weeks and whom you've assumed have dropped the class will write back to say this: "Hi! I was just really busy with the paper for another class, so I haven't been to your class for a while . I thought I'd drop by your office during finals week so we could discuss what I could do for extra credit to make up for the absences."

3. A flurry of awards ceremonies, receptions, and parties, although welcome and necessary, will cut into your grading time

4. You will find your affection for your students competing with your ethical sense of grading standards and will be reluctant to assign grades. Alternately, you will assign grades and then berate yourself for being (1) too lenient or (2) too harsh. You will vow to be better (more rigorous/less exacting) in the fall.

Any others?

OT: Nonacademic needs and wants

What I needed to do this weekend was to grade final projects.

What I wanted to do, now that it has finally stopped snowing, is to get the garden ready for planting and go for a run.

Guess which won?

Are quill pens next?

There's something strangely retro about these news items:

From the Pew Charitable Trust's report "Writing, Technology, and Teens"(.pdf file):

Nearly three-quarters of teens (72%) who write for personal reasons say they usually write longhand, similar to the 65% of teens who usually write by hand for school. However, teens are much more likely to write only by hand when doing non-school writing. Nearly one third of teens (32%) never use a computer at all when writing for their own personal enjoyment; by contrast, just 9% do their school writing by hand only (19).

This is fascinating. For years now, we've been told by the pundits and educrats that the "digital natives" wouldn't know a pen if it bit them and that writing by hand was so 1970s. And yet the pen hasn't lost its charms, it seems, for writing that you really want or need to do--writing song lyrics, maybe, or recording a breakup in language that's too personal for MySpace.

And then there's this:

Some teens noted the benefits of learning a quick shorthand for taking notes in school...
I think [instant and text messaging abbreviating] helps sometimes because like when we’re taking notes we have to hurry up and take them and knowing the text language it helps to abbreviate. ... faster. – 9/10th Grade Girl, Midwestern City (46).

I have an inexplicable interest in shorthand, maybe because of its associations with journalism (do journalists still learn shorthand?) and Victorian authors, so of course this stood out for me. If you look at old magazines, you'll see ads for a word-based rather than symbol-based shorthand that read something like this: "F u cn rd ths u hv a futr n jrnlsm." What is this but an early form of text-message language, an abbreviation system like the one that 9/10th Grade Girl is using? As long as it's not used for writing-to-be-turned-in, isn't it possible that this may help with taking notes?

And finally, the laptop-in-class argument erupted again in the comments to an Inside Higher Ed column called "Hey, You! Pay Attention." In what could be seen as another retro step, the University of Chicago has apparently blocked Internet access in its law school, and the commenters rounded up the usual arguments:

1. Pro: Students from this-here new multitasking generation learn better if they multitask.
   
2. Pro: How is surfing the web different from doodling?
   
3. Pro: If I want to waste time on the web instead of listening to the professor, it's his fault for being boring.
   
4. Con: It's disrespectful and distracting when everyone is paying attention to screens instead of participating in class.

The thing about the web is that it's always going to be too enticing if you have access to it in a class. You know how they say that people tend to eat more when they're in an office where people keep jars of candy or boxes of cookies out on the desks? The internet is a jar of candy, and nobody's going to pass out from the lack of it for an hour or two when learning is supposed to be going on. There are times when it's useful in a class, but as a regular thing it's sure to promote cookie-eating (no pun intended) when abstaining would be better for everyone.

Still here, and a slave to Microsoft

It's nearly the end of the semester, which means this:

Grading and more grading.

Correcting proofs for an essay that'll be coming out soon. Yes, it is worth reading those twice and carefully: I missed some things the first time around.

Thinking about the summer class.

And did I say a slave to Microsoft? Picture this scenario:

Students are giving an end-of-year presentation. They are a little nervous. They're using my computer to project things on the screen.

The screen goes dark, and they look alarmed: "What did we do?"

Nothing, apparently, but you know how Windows usually gives you a choice about when it's going to shut down to do some of its incessant updates, nagging you every 5 minutes until you shut it down? Not this time.

The computer shuts itself down, warning that it needs to install the updates and that that'll take a while. The poor students have to finish without showing the things that they'd planned to show. I tell them it doesn't matter, and it doesn't, of course; that wasn't their fault.

But wouldn't you think the Dark Lords of Redmond would contrive to do the updates at some time that isn't the middle of a work day?

The hook

Pilgrim/Heretic recently posted about conference etiquette from the conference organizer's point of view. I'd like to ask readers what you do when you're the panel chair and you have to give someone the hook when he or she is rambling on far past the 15-20 minutes that are allotted for the presentation and far, far past the audience's patience.

In vaudeville days (or so I understand) or at talent competitions, there used to be an actual hook that would emerge from the sidelines and drag people off the stage, to hoots and jeers from the audience. I've only seen this happen in old movies, so I don't know if it really happened or if that was just a plot device.

But at conferences, sometimes you're the chair and you have to get the presenter to shut up so that someone else might have some time. What do you do?

Here's what I've seen:

Panel chair sits in the audience, moves to the edge of her chair, and beams at the offender with a bright and determined smile, trying to catch his eye so that he knows that time is up.

Panel chair sits at the end of the table and tries pointlessly to catch the eye of the presenter, who is now gesticulating wildly at the podium as other presenters cross big chunks of text out of their papers.

Panel chair sits next to the presenter, who's standing at the podium. Chair tugs at the presenter's coat, since it's obviously not possible to catch his or her eye.

Panel chair passes a note. Sometimes, if the chair is sitting at the end of the table, you can see all the stages of this: chair looks at watch, writes something in large letters on a piece of paper, passes it along the row of panelists (each of whom looks at it with something like relief), and finally sees it in the hands of the startled presenter, who says, "Oh! I will just have to skip to my last three points and my conclusion, then."

Well-prepared panel chair has the sign already made up and passes it along to the presenter.

A year or so ago, the MLA tried installing lights (green, yellow, and red) that panel chairs and presenters were supposed to use, but I didn't see any of them go off. In the sessions I saw, most of the lights were unplugged and left up at the podium. So much for the technological hook.

Is there any really graceful way around this dilemma? Have you seen any panel chairs that were really good hook-wielders? Inquiring minds want to know.

The value of formulas

At the Chronicle, Cathy Birkenstein and Gerald Graff have an opinion piece that is right in so many ways that you should just go read it.

Their point, although they make it much more elegantly, is one I've made before: a formula, even a 5-paragraph essay, can be liberating and not restrictive. Instructors were so busy not hampering my creativity, for example, that I was in graduate school before I ever heard of a thesis statement or the five-paragraph essay. Of course, my general cluelessness and inattention was probably a big part of it, but--here's a thought--aren't students just maybe as clueless and inattentive as I was?

Here's some of what they say. I can immediately see how this would translate into some good class conversation during writing days:

A far more engaged writing formula can be found in the work of the composition theorist David Bartholomae, who recalls a professor of his suggesting that, when stuck in his writing, he use the following "machine":

While most readers of ____ have said ____, a close and careful reading shows that ____.

Similarly, the composition specialist Irene Clark, drawing on the work of John Swales, Joseph Williams, Gregory Colomb, and others, asks graduate thesis and dissertation writers to fill in these blanks:

My thesis will address the following question: ____.

It will fill the following gap in the literature: ____.

Formulas like those help students make arguments without abstracting themselves from the conversations that surround them. As a result, they have all of the benefits of the five-paragraph theme without its liabilities.

Building on Bartholomae and Clark, we teach our own students that persuasive writing rests on a single ur-formula, which we call "they say/I say," in which you summarize someone else's argument (they say) in order to set up your own (I say). Some versions of this include:

Although it is often said that _____, I claim ____.

I agree with X that ____, and would add ____.

Group X argues ____, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, . On the other hand, ____.

I used to think ____. Now, however, after ____, I have come to see ____.

Debates over ____ tend to dominate discussions of ____. But these debates obscure the far more important issue of ____.

At this point you will probably object that ____. While it's true that ____, I still maintain ____.

Far from turning students into mindless automatons, formulas like those can help them generate thoughts that might not otherwise occur to them. And such formulas aren't set in stone. Students can and should be encouraged to modify them to suit particular arguments and audiences.

Many students fail to pick up those moves on their own, however, either because they don't read widely, or they don't read with an imitative eye. That is why representing the moves in explicit formulas is often necessary. Teachers who think they are being progressive and student-centered by rejecting such prescriptive methods are passing up a chance to demystify intellectual practices that many students find profoundly puzzling.(emphasis added)

This might not be for all writing assignments or all students--but if it helps a student get unstuck, wouldn't the dangers of prescriptiveness be worth it?

Quick thoughts on pseudonymity

At the Chronicle, Peter Plagens has a column opposing anonymity for "First Person" columnists, and the three people he calls out for it respond by saying why they'd prefer to be anonymous. Plagens's points are more or less these:

Don't be such a chicken about getting tenure. Heck, if you're denied tenure, you can always sue the university. [Yeah, that's a great option.] You didn't want that job anyway; just go find yourself a new one. That shouldn't be too hard, not in the job market these days.

Don't hide behind academic freedom. You were worthless toadies before getting tenure, and getting tenure isn't going to improve your Uriah Heep-like qualities.

And your personas are boring, too!

What you're writing is pretty dull and general stuff anyway, not like the column of a certain P. P.

Dr. Crazy and Profgrrrl have responded beautifully and at length (and with much less snark) on their blogs, Dr. Crazy addressing the pseudonymity versus anonymity issue and Profgrrrl explaining patiently why someone might not want to have blog posts be the first thing you see when you Google someone's name.

I admire the people who post under their own names, like Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Miriam Burstein, Claire Potter, Amardeep Singh, and Michael Berube, but I don't want to do it--and, to judge from the far more articulate blogposts about this, others don't, either. Why?

Blogspace is really more like the old Lingua Franca; remember that magazine? It went under in the early 1990s, I think. It was irreverent, and although it published good pieces, it didn't have to be deadly serious about everything all the time. It wasn't obliged to be the Newspaper of Record for academia, so it could take some chances. IHE and CHE are very nice, but blogs also have a part to play in talking about academics.

In his discussion about tenure deliberations the other day, Dean Dad said something interesting: he said you could either have transparency or tell the truth, but you couldn't do both. Some of his commenters disputed the idea that this applies to tenure deliberations, but it does apply to blogs. I'm not saying that those courageous people with named blogs aren't telling the truth, but I do think that the kinds of things they can say might be different.

The biggest difference might be this: if everyone posted under a real name, would bloggers feel equally free to be, well, silly? funny? tired? stuck in the process of writing something? Some might say that these aren't feelings that ought to be shared, that the people who write this would be mere "bloggers" and not true "academic bloggers."

In short, your blogging identity, as opposed to your scholarly identity, is more or less in your control. In real life, whether something is published or not, what people think of your scholarship, and so on are all outside your control. In blogworld, your identity depends on how you present yourself: honest, irreverent, angry (like the Angry Professor), or whatever else you choose to be. Plagens might say that this is inherently dishonest, because you're not using your real name, but then, does blogworld have to answer to the demands of the real world, or just to report its absurdities? I'd say the latter.

On the lighter side

If you would like 84 seconds of make-you-smile cat humor, here it is. As seen at Planned Obsolescence:

English Department of the Future

The time: some decades hence.
The place: The University of South Jetsonville, a large state university.

The Grand Administrator is speaking to one of his minions about what used to be called the English Department. Although there are four faculty members who still comprise the "English Department," most of the department, and its chair, have been "restructured" and have disappeared in the name of increasing efficiency. Curiously enough, the number of administrators has only increased. We enter in the midst of the conversation.

The Grand Administrator: "What can you tell me about how we're achieving excellence in the English Department?"

Minion: "Well, our single section of English 101 is a success. The accrediting agency is happy that we have moved to weekly Scantron grammar quizzes instead of actual writing, since it's impossible to be accredited without measurable outcomes. There's nothing more measurable than a quiz."

GA: "What about Instructor X? How is he doing?"
Minion: "We asked the students about that last week. 1,495 of the students in our section of English 101 thought he was doing a good job, but 5 of them thought his grading scheme was too hard."

GA: "Hmm. That's not good. Those 5 deserve better for their tuition money; we have to keep the customers happy, you know. It's a good thing we don't have to rehire him in the spring. Do we still have the instructor bids from the fall?"

Minion: "Yes. Of the 350 applications we got, at least five or six of them offered to teach the class for very close to what Instructor X is teaching it for, although none of them offered to pay for all their own photocopying, as he did. I think we can get someone for around $2,000 to teach this course.

GA: "No benefits, of course?"

Minion: (Laughs) "Of course not!"

GA: "What about business and professional writing? Is that going well?"

Minion: "Yes, although the business school and the science departments have demanded that we teach actual writing in those, so we have to pay the instructor a little more for that section. We live to serve those schools; they bring in the money, you know."

GA: "What about our section of Shakespeare? Remind me again about why we kept a literature class. It seems so useless and out of touch with the modern world."

Minion: "Well, the trustees and regents seem to like it. It reminds them of when they went to the University of South Jetsonville and tells them that we are Keeping Up Standards by Teaching the Classics. The president likes it, too, since he can talk to alumni about Achieving Excellence through the Humanities. Granted, alumni don't shell out for Shakespeare the way they do for football or basketball, but a few misty-eyed English grads will always give a little if we keep the Shakespeare course."

GA: "Professor Y, who teaches it, is getting pretty old. Shouldn't we be putting Dr. Kervorkian on speed dial for him pretty soon?"

Minion: "No, studies have shown that students rate male authority-figures in lecture-driven classes the highest of all when they fill out course evaluations."

GA: "What about Professor Grant Superstar? Tell me--what does she teach again?"

Minion: "She doesn't. We have her on board to add class to the place, what with her NEH grants and all."

This was inspired by all the talk about a tenureless university. I'm kidding, of course; at least I hope I'm kidding.

Want to add some dialogue of your own?

The Tenure Wars

Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle have posts on tenure, with the latter citing Tenured Radical, Lumpenprofessoriat, Oso Raro, and Professor Zero. There are lots of good and thoughtful ideas in these (go read them; I'll wait), but I wanted to mention two in particular, the comments of Professor Z and The Constructivist/CitizenSE:

Professor Zero:

I think the abolition of tenure would be an CEO-administrator’s dream. The entire workforce would be contingent, and certain research and development stars could be retained through very high salaries and the elimination, for them, of all but the most specialized teaching and all service except on projects which directly benefit them.

The Constructivist (comment #20):

As for the supposed glut of dead wood in academia, I challenge J and AHA to visit my department and identify the tenured people who should be fired. (Sorry that we don’t have any lab space to be wasting at taxpayer expense.) Identifying deadwood from afar is about as productive by judging the state of the English profession by titles at the MLA convention, the prevalence of classic literature in curricula by titles in the course catalog, and the legitimacy of a judgment by “in my personal experience.” Which is to say that it happens all the time, even in comment boxes.

I don't deny that there are abuses in the tenure process, especially in dysfunctional departments or universities, but is this a good reason to abolish the whole system?

To echo The Constructivist, where is all this supposed deadwood? At the risk of proving his point about evidence-by-anecdote, those senior faculty I've known, at my institution and others, have been highly productive. If they aren't, they're the ones who are in the faculty senate protecting faculty interests from rapacious cost-cutting by central administration, or mentoring younger faculty, or doing advising. Some take the time for undergraduate students that tenure-track people can't spare. Who's going to do this if tenure is abolished? Those who want to find themselves out of a job, that's who, since in a free market, the only thing that will be valued is what can be measured. Human interaction and working for the good of the whole can't be measured. Scholarship stats can. Which one will a faculty member in a new tenureless system spend time on, do you think?


And Professor Z is right about the corporate model. We'll be like Target and Wal-Mart, which fire managers when they hit 45 and get in younger workers who'll work for cheap. Frankly, I'm a little shocked by the ageist bias I see the comments at IHE and CHE: would it be all right to say "let's get rid of the women, because they're always having babies and messing up our scholarly productivity stats anyway?" Of course not, and yet somehow it's entirely acceptable to say this about senior (in age, not rank) faculty.

Institutional quality could suffer, too. We already see the "consumer service" model being promoted by administrations; who's going to hold the line on plagiarism or teaching difficult topics if a disgruntled customer student blasts you on a teaching evaluation? With tenure, that's not as much of a concern. Without tenure, we'd have to cater to the interests of a shallow few rather than the genuine intellectual curiosity of those students who are there to learn.

I hadn't paid as much attention to this topic as I should have done, because earning tenure didn't change what I did or how I approached the job; I didn't feel depressed or let down, and I didn't feel trapped, all comments expressed on blogs and the CHE forums. But without it, I might feel compelled to teach a course in the literature of Facebook or something instead of equally interesting things that demand a little more effort.

[Edited to add: Actually, I'd have to teach "The Literature of Facebook: The Movie," if I really wanted to reach every student. The majority aren't like this (shallow), but under a tenureless system, the class could conceivably be run by those who are, and that's what I fear.]

Random bullets of TGIF and grammar goodness

My students are great, both undergrads and grads. I don't want to say any more lest any of them venture into this tiny corner of the internets and recognize themselves but they're interesting, they have good ideas, they're prepared, and they seem interested in what we're doing. I come away from classes energized and full of ideas of my own, and isn't that a great feeling?

That said, I was so tired last night by the time I got home, and so glad to be home, that I wanted to hug the floor. I settled instead for crawling into bed at an ungodly early hour.

I know I promised to stop complaining about the weather, but I want it to stop snowing. I want the roads to be dry, not icy.

For some grammar geek goodness, check out the interview with Merill Perlman, Director of Copy Desks at the New York Times. A sample: "As for your second question, Internet and Web are not proper nouns in the way that New York Times is, but common usage started out with them capitalized. I suspect that, before too long, they will become generic, like television or telephone. Our dictionary (and our stylebook) leaves them uppercase for now. (At the beginning, e-mail was almost universally rendered as E-mail, and is fast becoming email.)" I have a now-antiquated Wired Guide to Style from the 1990s that still has these capitalized, and it now seems almost quaint to see the way we were told to write "Web site" (always with a capital, always two words), "Internet," and so on.

"Kill your darlings"

Wasn't it Mark Twain who said that the first rule of a writer is to "kill your darlings"?

At the Chronicle, Rachel Toor has an essay called "Goodbye to All That" (one of my favorite titles, by the way, and taken from Robert Graves's autobiography) that gives similar advice. Here's a little of it, with the sentence that particularly struck me in bold:

In a passage that should elicit whoops of assent from his former colleagues at university presses, he [William Germano] gives advice on titles: "Avoid titles that quote literature (and especially avoid titles that use quotation marks to set off the borrowed words). Shun titles that insert punctuation in the middle of words (Re:Vision, De/Construction, and other once-new formulations that are tired now.) Avoid the academic double-whammy of an abstract title and a concrete subtitle separated by a colon."
. . . .

During a three-hour run with my friend Dean, he told me about his dissertation. A strong runner and Ironman triathlete, he slowed his pace so that I could keep up, and as we covered miles of trail ascending Stuart Peak, I asked him a barrage of questions.

By the time we'd climbed the hardest part, it was clear to me how he could revise his dissertation for publication. It would take a lot of work — an overhaul of the entire structure and some serious rethinking — but the ideas and the research could be shaped into a terrific book. It would mean saying goodbye to all the pages he had worked so hard on, and hello to a new project.

I've been thinking about that a lot as I work through the writing that I am doing right now and as I've been reading work by my students. It's easy to get carried away with your own thought processes, and the longer and more painful the process of writing a section is, the harder it is to think about tossing it out. Even if it's a section, an organizational scheme, or even an argument that fails to come together, it's still hard. Part of what struck me about what Toor was saying was the sense of excitement she felt--as an editor, someone disinterested but not uninterested--because she could see the phoenix in the ashes, so to speak, although the author can only see the ashes at that point. I'd like to think that that excitement is what I convey when I'm meeting students about their papers and explaining why they have to kill their darlings.

Of course, what makes this process possible and tolerable is knowing that earlier that day I'd had to kill my own darlings, so to speak, by jettisoning sections of painfully written text. I guess that's what gives us empathy as well as credibility with the students. Part of learning to write is learning to be, as much as possible, your own Rachel Toor to separate the phoenix and the ashes, because unlike a real phoenix, a piece of writing isn't going to rise by itself.

Easter snow

As a northern person from way back, I always get a laugh (okay, a bitter laugh) out of the pictures of green grass, Easter egg hunts, chicks and bunnies, spring clothes, and all those images of general sunshiny goodness that the news likes to promote. As I think back, the only holiday with consistently worse weather than Easter in a northern climate is Halloween. (I have yet to experience a Halloween without gale-force winds, snow, rain, or all three, but it seems appropriate then.)

It's not snowing today, although we got close to a blizzard a couple of days ago. The freezing rain is pouring down on the brown, dead grass, and the sky is the same unvarying gray that it has been since what passed for sunrise this morning.

But sometimes you have to go with what you believe rather than with what the objective sensory experience of the weather tells you.

When I was little, I liked wearing new clothes and shoes for Easter even though no one would see them, since we were stuffed into a snowsuit and boots for the trip to church.

As a teenager, I had some very un-Easterlike arguments with my mother about whether I needed to wear full winter gear over my new spring dress to go visit the grandparents. "It's Easter! It's spring," I insisted, and won, though my legs beneath my stockings were mottled blue with the cold and my teeth chattered in the icy wind and snow.

In contemplating what seems to be a dead season, you have to believe it's alive. You have to will yourself into being Shelley.

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Teaching: that was then; this is now

A friend recently wrote that because of various schedule conflicts she was going to drop the last book on her syllabus. She added something like this: "I would have agonized over that choice when I first started teaching, but not now."

Along those lines, I discovered that I had left an entire week off my otherwise detailed and carefully planned syllabus for this semester. When I first started teaching, explaining this to the class would have made me worry: would they think I didn't know what I was doing? Would they complain because now I assigned additional readings? This week, however, I went in with a new syllabus for the rest of the term, explained it briefly, and joked that although I obviously could read literature, I clearly couldn't read a calendar.

I'm thinking of other things, too, that once took a lot of time (and sometimes distress) on my part that I don't think about now:

Fielding the "when will you give our papers back?" question.
Then: I tried to calculate when I could get them done and went short on sleep to be sure that I got them done.
Now: "When I get them done." Smile.

Confronting a plagiarist.
Then: Talk to other teachers about an appropriate penalty (rewrite? report it?), get worried, and brace myself for the discussion.
Now: Know what the penalties are. Tell the student I need to see him or her. Apply the penalties.

Having a student talk in class or acting up in some way.
Then: Get angry, but don't show it. Get flustered.
Now: Give the Steely-Eyed Glare (tm). Ask the student to speak to you after class.

Having a student ask you a question that you don't know the answer to, or challenge you about an answer you've given.
Then: Backpedal desperately, maybe. Worry that you don't know as much as the students.
Now: Say "I don't know. Can you tell me more about it?" or "That's amazing; I didn't know that. Can you explain that further?"

Linked to this is the knowledge that about some subjects, students will have a deep well of knowledge from some special interest they have. For example, instead of launching into an explanation of some historical or cultural event now--the Battle of the Marne, maybe, or Gettysburg, or the meaning of "elegy," or the history of the light bulb--I ask if anyone knows something about it. Often, they do, and once they've given their explanation, I can expand on it and bring it back to the class discussion.

What about you? What do you do differently now that you've taught for a while?

Lessons from Lucy

You know that I Love Lucy episode where Lucy tries to wrap the chocolates but they keep coming along the line faster and faster until she's overwhelmed?

Yeah, it's like that right now, but I will write a real post soon.

Woods walk

  For those who want something to look at besides unfinished writing.

Random questions with a few answers

Questions that have drawn me away from writing in the past 24 hours.

Everybody knows that Charles Dickens became a crack reporter of parliamentary doings, but what system of shorthand did he use? Gregg? It hadn't been invented yet. Pitman? Maybe. (Answer: Gurney.) Did he and other writers who began as writers of shorthand (e.g., Arnold Bennett) keep using it for short notes and things once they began writing novels?

Is there a life cycle to academic book prices? I've been pricing two books I want to buy, one from 1992 and one from 1997, and they're both ridiculously expensive. Does this cycle sound right to you? Freshly published: full price or discounted at MLA; 5 years out, may be discounted and show up on Scholar's Bookshelf; 10-15 years out, priced like a Shakespeare First Folio; 20 years out, $2 on eBay and abebooks.com.

Will I ever get to see the wronged wife of a cheating politician haul off and smack his face on live television, just once? Am I the only otherwise nonviolent person who hopes fervently to see this?

Mark Bauerlein: Break out the chocolate and put your feet up; you're working too hard

Over at the Chronicle, Mark Bauerlein has ignited a firestorm of controversy (for the academic world, anyway) with his post "Stop Pushing Yourself." A sample:

But if we look at tenured professors in the humanities and in many other disciplines, it seems to me that much of the work they do is entirely self-generated. The conference papers that have to be written, the scholarly articles they want to complete, the book projects that hang over them . . . these are not required. They are elective. . . . So why do they do it? Is it really worth sweating all those months getting that manuscript in order—which upon publication will sell only a few hundred copies—just to boost your annual raise a few hundred dollars?

New Kid had a good take on this, pointing out (as did some of the original commenters) that this applies only to the most privileged portions of academe, and Michael Berube points out that service work isn't being counted at all in Bauerlein's model. Eric Rauchway makes the point about privilege but with more charts and graphs for added outrage, and jbj at the Salt-Box says that maybe and in a very loose sense some of the activities are optional, but they're only optional if you think that things like advising, faculty governance, and paying attention to your teaching are optional (which apparently Bauerlein does).

I've said before that no one, and especially academics, likes being told "I'm so busy that I don't have time to do X, but would you do it?" It's a pistols-at-dawn remark to tell someone that you don't think he or she is as busy as you are, and, in effect, this is part of the sore spot that Bauerlein has hit with a sledgehammer. He's saying, in effect, "You're busy, but you don't have to be, and so your busyness doesn't count. In fact, a lot of what you do doesn't really matter." That's right up there with "I don't have time to read this manuscript/write this committee report/learn how to use Blackboard/meet with this student, but I'm sure you wouldn't mind taking it on" as an incitement to rage. His point goes deeper than that, however, as the bloggers mentioned above have discussed so well, so I just have a few questions:

Did Mark Bauerlein see his two books as optional? Would he have been promoted to full professor without them?

That "few hundred dollars" may not mean much to him, but to someone who takes coupons to Costco and is elated when she saves $15, it's a lot. I guess it depends on whether you already have a lot of money, but $300 is a lot to most of us, especially, as several have pointed out, if it's added to your salary base and extends over a lifetime.

And those readers? Are we to give up if we don't sell books like Dan Brown and Tom Clancy combined? Channeling Milton: "Still govern thou my song, / Urania, and fit audience find though few" (PLVII.30-1)

Isn't the incessant whining about and fear of academic deadwood that goes on in the Chronicle and elsewhere proof that "pushing yourself" is not only encouraged but required in academics? Does anyone expect this culture to change?

If he doesn't think that contributing to a store of knowledge is important, what about teaching? What about the extra time we take to just sit down and talk with students who want to talk? Is that time wasted, too?

I wonder if Bauerlein isn't part of a more general trend that's always being written about: you know, the corporate executive who quits everything to raise goats in New Hampshire or open a cafe or whatever. He makes a pile of money and then writes a "My Turn" in Newsweek pontificating on the joys of rural living and the bad effects of corporate stress. Maybe that's the case with Bauerlein. He's done what he needed to do and now wants to cut back (maybe; this is speculation), and, because he doesn't see how others might not be in the same place in terms of salary or career, he's eager to see other s do that too. In other words, the most charitable interpretation of what he's saying is that he's made this discovery and wants to share it with the rest of us.

Of course, such an attitude rests, as it always does to a greater or lesser degree, on privilege--not just the academic privilege of having a 2-2 load at a private university but having the salary that goes with it, the kind of salary that maybe allows you to kick back, open a box of chocolates, put your feet up, and relax.

If you want to offer me that salary, give me a call. In the meantime, I'll be writing.

You might be an English professor if . . .

. . . you hear Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" on the radio (and it seems to be on constantly), and you listen to "If I lie here / If I just lay here," and, instead of being moved by it, you think this:

No, you're still in present tense, so "lay" should be "lie." "Lay" is the past tense of "lie" or an entirely different verb altogether. Get with the program!

On writing: learning to sprint and other enticements

I turned my internet connection off today, and, sure enough, I got more writing done. By "turned off" I mean unplugged, which means that to override my "no internet" ban and give in to temptation I would have to root around underneath my desk and plug it back in, a real disincentive. By the time 5:00 rolls around, I'm eager to get at my email, which I would have been checking all day except for the ban. You know what? There was nothing interesting or important there, nothing at all. It's a good lesson in just how indispensable email can be.

(Incidentally, e-mail or email? NYTimes seems to favor the hyphen, but most people don't use it. I feel a little like a 1920s person writing "to-day" when I use it but, like Miss Manners, I want to be perfectly correct.)

The other technique I tried is something I thought of as "sprints." With the idea that I can stand anything for 20 minutes, I set the timer for 20 minutes and write down my progress at the end. It may be a lot of words or only a few, but it looks like progress. An alternative system is to stop at the end of each hour and count the words.

Now, counting words isn't the measure of whether a piece is good or lousy, or even whether you'll have to scrap what you've written because it's so bad or goes in the wrong direction. But what it does is allow me to say this to the voices in my head: "I'm sitting here in the chair. I'm not reading election news on nytimes.com or talkingpointsmemo.com. And I am writing words. The only way to get from here to done is to write words, and I am doing that."

Deepak Chopra or some of the other fancy spiritual folks could probably make something high-sounding out of this (can you tell I have never read him?) but plain and practical is good enough for now.