A shout out to editors

Because I've been doing minor revisions on a piece for a collection that's in its final stages before production, I've been thinking a lot about the process of editing. My conclusion is that (drum roll) it makes writing better.

Now I know that sounds like a no-brainer, but sometimes I've heard people complain about the editorial process as one in which their deathless prose was mangled. I'm not sure if anyone writes deathless prose any more, now that Henry James is dead, but my guess is that everyone can use a little help, even if you're enraptured with your own prose right after you've finished writing it. Most of us do a lot of self-editing before we send something out (although I've reviewed manuscripts where someone apparently thought, "Commas? I don't need no stinkin' commas!" and sent it), so it ought to be in good shape.

But here's what editors can do, if they're good, when they're responding to a manuscript*:

• They can praise the right things, and praise them in the right proportions. I know that this is the "carrot before stick" approach that we use in student papers, but we use it there because it works, so why shouldn't it work on us as well as for us? This is the sugar high that gives you the energy to tackle all the work that you know you're going to have to do when you revise.
• They can point out, tactfully, when your wilder flights of fancy have left the building, so to speak, and can ask questions that can bring you back down to earth.
  
• They can suggest phrases to cut while still retaining the sense of the piece, phrases that you'd labored over for so long that you can't really see for yourself that they aren't needed.
• They can question you on matters of fact and on items that you'd thought were obvious (but weren't).
  
• They can also, through their questions, make you think about the issues in new ways.
  
• Although you have to try to conform to the citation style, it's their job to make sense of the style, which sometimes is MLA, sometimes Chicago A or B, and sometimes a little number that the publishing house has whipped up all on its own, like Chicago with a soupçon of MLA and a dash of CBE.
  

Of course it's initially frustrating to receive a request to cut 1000 words and add another line of argument to what you'd already considered done. Also, occasionally there are problems: in a recent piece, the editor had changed a sentence so that it was a grammatical error, and I appended an explanation of why I'd changed it back in the proofs.

But by giving this kind of careful reading to your work, they can do something that you can't entirely do for yourself. It's sort of like carrying a suitcase: you get to a point where you can't carry it any more, and they pick it up and carry it for you. When they hand it back to you, you have a new energy and can take it further than you ever could have on your own.

*(and this is where I knock wood so that some kind of editorial nightmare doesn't befall me after I've written this.)

Lessons for girls: trust your instincts

Historiann, Dr. Crazy, and Profacero have a series of excellent posts that Historiann has grouped under the title "Lessons for Girls."

I have one more: trust your instincts. By that, I mean judge people based on how they treat you, not based on hypothetical models of how people behave.

For example, as a feminist, I believe that women can and do help each other, can fight against injustices, can support each other against exploitation and harassment, and so on. But people are individuals, and individuals have their own flaws and their own agendas.

[I redacted the rest of this post because, upon reflection, it didn't fairly reflect the person I wrote about--sorry.]

Productivity: more good advice to ignore

This is really a placeholder post, put here as a reminder and a reproach to myself, from John Tierney's article in the New York Times:

She [Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life] recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

Gallagher says in a follow-up answer (to "Sarah") that "Like dieting, getting control of your craving for novel information requires rationing and self-control."

Now, I know this. You know this. So does Paul Silvia, the author of How to Write a Lot, who recommends the same method.

So why is it so hard to follow through, except by actually turning off the internet connection? But Gallagher has inspired me. I'm going to pull my funds from the investment bank of Facebook and put it under the mattress known as Word.

On writing: morning five and evening five

I've been working on a piece of writing and have noticed a certain, shall we say, refrain at the beginning and end of days.

Morning.
1. How could it suck so badly when I worked so hard yesterday?
2. How did that sentence get in there?
3. What delusional state was I in to think that there was an organizational plan here?
4. I still have how much to go?
5. Well, that part isn't too bad.

Evening.
1. At least I have more words than when I started.
2. All right, the bad parts are better now.
3. I think I know where I want it to go tomorrow.
4. I still have how much to go?
5. I can do this. It's getting there.

Fine lines in the road to promotion

Recent articles in the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed discuss the MLA's report on slower promotion rates to full professor for women. (The Chronicle's is behind the subscription wall, but you can get all the information at IHE.) Here's an excerpt from IHE:

Many women report being punished for performing the parts of their job in which they may take the most pride. One woman is quoted saying that her career had been “helped and hindered by my own propensity continually to propose new courses or substantially revise existing ones" and by "the unusual time/effort I put into grading written work by both undergraduate and graduate students.” Another woman surveyed said she hurt her career because of a "difficulty saying no."

The issue about saying no is really partly an issue of energy. In the case of BSS (whose most recent bullet I dodged, by the way) saying no, and knowing that you'll say no, still eats up time and emotional energy. I think part of the issue for female faculty is calibrating the kind of response to give. If you're too pleasant and accommodating, well, there are always other faculty out there looking for an Academic Handmaiden who'll take your pleasantness for a strong wish to be one. If you muster the energy to say no--and it does take more energy to say "no" than "yes"--sometimes it may come out in a more strident way than you intended, just because of the unintended vehemence of your answer. Then you look like someone who's "not a team player"--or worse.

Time spent in the office. My theory is that although admin would like people to be in the office a lot and students would like us to be there 24/7 in case they get a random impulse to drop by, women faculty who make it to full professor are in their offices less than those who seem to be stuck at associate. In short, the culture of a place may encourage being available (and police it through pointed remarks like "oh, are you on campus today?") but it rewards staying away and getting research done. Could mentoring help this paradoxical situation? I'm not sure how, since there's a double message here: "Be on campus and available" and "Stay away and write if you want to get promoted." Balancing the two is another of those fine lines.

In the comments section at IHE, one commenter ("Jen") mentions that she's on sabbatical but is going to go in for a meeting since there otherwise won't be a woman on the committee. Would I do this? Not on your life; if you're on sabbatical, you're gone. Committees are eternal, and the mills of academe grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small, so there's little chance that something major would transpire while you're away. Yet I wonder if women aren't more prone to the "my department can't get along without me, for who else would do X?" syndrome than men are.

News flash: First person column in Chronicle reveals depressive self-absorption

I don't want to turn this blog into the Chronicle's loyal (or not so loyal) opposition, but this caught my attention today.

The Mediocre Professor. Shorter Chronicle: Professor Mediocre laments his mediocrity. Some might find this depressing, but I find it irritating. He wants suggestions? I've got suggestions.

Take some vitamins and show a little energy. The students respond to your energy. If all you're showing them is sighs and ennui, guess what they'll reflect back to you?

If you speak the way you write, try turning your efforts outward instead of inward: the point of teaching is communicating directly, not being Henry James with well-turned sentences. I'm not criticizing your writing; I'm just saying that teaching demands something different.

Teaching is like playing tennis, not like performing Hamlet. Students are not interested in watching you dramatically stare out the window as you ponder self-doubt and despair; leave that to the student from Wittenberg. They're adolescents, or just out of adolescence. They have enough self-doubt and despair for the both of you. It's your job to get them to hit the ball back and keep the discussion going. If they don't hit the first one, lob another. They want to talk about the literature, but you may not have served them something that they can respond to. Try a different approach.

If you really think the students are right and that the humanities are a dying carcass, have you thought about doing something that you would really like to do and giving your spot up to one of the eager hordes of Ph.D. jobseekers out there? I don't want to sound too much like Willy Loman, but in a way part of your job is to sell the humanities. You can't sell a product that you don't believe in.

All those laments about "digital twitterings" are a red herring. If you think the students are uniquely indifferent nowadays, you should look back at the laments about students from ancient times to the present.

Also, "digital" means a different form of expression, not a killer technology that swallows up books. This isn't a deathmatch between digital media and the humanities, however much the news media like to propose that it is. They're in love with the "digital natives" idea and celebrity culture, too, but that doesn't mean that they're right.

In fact, that isn't a bad starting place for a discussion with your class. How about it?

At the Chronicle: "Against Readings"

Dr. Crazy has a long and fine post about Mark Edmundson's "Against Readings" at the Chronicle. Her analysis is more, well, analytical than mine is going to be, so go and read it. She agrees and yet doesn't agree with him, and I can see why.

Edumundson's argument is really seductive in a Culture and Anarchy kind of way: "the best that has been known and thought." When you're reading that book for the first time, especially as a naive reader, you just want to say,"oh, give me the touchstone, Matthew Arnold, and I'll be as good and sensitive a critic as you are--I promise." And certainly we've all read our fair share of the kind of mechanical-application-of-theory-to-texts-criticism he's critiquing, as in "here are five things that Judith Butler says about performing gender, and here are the five points in X text that prove her point."

(And I can't help taking umbrage at this: "Prius-proselytizing." Hey! You talking to me?)

But this seductive vision of reading also demands some absolutes, or maybe binaries, that make me squirm. For example, if you read between the lines, it's clear that there are two kinds of books: the kind that transforms your life, and the kind that doesn't. The first kind is literature, and the second kind isn't.

Here's the problem: while he's right about "befriending the book" in the sense of reading it with an open mind as to its possibilities, and to teaching it in the same way, it's possible to befriend a book that you don't like and that hasn't transformed your life at all, especially if you've chosen to teach it for some reason.

For example, haven't you ever worked up enthusiasm to teach a book that personally left you cold? Heck, I've befriended some texts I didn't care for to the point of going steady with them, but what made that unholy partnership possible was my understanding of how well they performed some particular literary or cultural task, an understanding made possible by understanding some theoretical frameworks, even the New Criticism that's at the heart of his "no criticism" idea. I think what he's saying is that the book that left you cold--say, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent*--but that you could understand conceptually was great might transform a student's life.

I always feel a little dishonest in presenting the books in this way, though, and if I'm going to make Blakean ecstasy and the power to change lives criteria for course books, that creates a problem. How can we know which books will change lives until we teach them? And since as far as I know there isn't a Norton Anthology of Changing Lives and Creating Ecstasy in the Reader, the judgment is still going to rest with us as teachers to balance what we like, what we know students like, and what gets across the concepts that we hope will catch fire with students.

*I know it's supposed to be great, but years ago it just plain left me cold. Are there any books that you feel this way about?

Service and servitude

Because of a situation that came up recently, I've been thinking about the difference between service and servitude in academe. We all perform service for our departments or institutions, and we're supposed to pitch in with the service needs of the profession at large (chairing and organizing panels, serving on committees, and so on).

Service to the profession at large is more complicated, however, because you're not reporting to an academic hierarchy (chair/dean/etc.) and you're all on the same level ground, meeting as professionals in the field.

In this situation, it's service when there's a collaborative effort involved and everyone pitches in: "You do X and I'll do Y, and then we'll get together with the result." In this case, you say "yes" and get on with it.

It smacks of servitude, though, when one person tries to get others to do the work: "You're so organized; can you contact these 200 people and find out X?" or "You're so good with computers; can you look up this information and get it back to me?" or "I'm so busy right now with some writing; can you do X for me?" In these cases, the polite answer would be "No." The impolite answer would be "You may be busy or inept, but that's not my problem. Do your own work."

But some people seem to have difficulty in separating service from servitude. Let's keep this hypothetical: say a Beloved Senior Scholar (BSS) contacts you about a scholarly project that you've worked on successfully but that he is now taking over. You're at a peer institution and have been a professional on your own for some years. Yet when you've worked with BSS before, you had to deflect suggestions like this: "Why don't you go through the MLA Directory and see if all the institutional affiliations for our membership lists are correct?" or "I'm really busy with a writing project right now, but why don't you contact all the people who have published on this subject in the last five years and ask them if they would like to join our organization?" To this, you suggested that you were yourself very busy with a writing project and that he should hire a research assistant to do those tasks or do them himself. You also extricated yourself from the professional partnership as soon as possible.

BSS, it seems to me, confuses service and servitude. I don't know whether it's a generational thing or a gender issue, or maybe both. If it's a generational thing, it may be complicated by the idea that incompetence at and disdain for understanding machinery (i.e., computers) was a status marker of a Deep Thinker in the Liberal Arts back in the day. If it's a gender thing, well, maybe the traces of the "wives are there to type our papers" school of thought are coming out in these suggestions. Or maybe he's just one of the many academics who have a hard time seeing beyond their own research interests and recognizing that other people have their own necessary work to do. All I know is that when I hear from BSS, I start thinking of graceful ways to say no and stay calm before I even hear the question.

Do you know people like this who confuse service with servitude? What have you said to them?

My plant wants to go home

I need to get back to posting soon, but there's something I've noticed in my office.

My plant wants to go home. More specifically, my plant wants this semester to end. I've always prided myself on not being one of those people who could tell you down to the last nanosecond how far into the semester it is. I had a colleague like that once: "It's week 6, and they're acting crazy, just as they always do," she'd say. I never knew what week it was, or, without looking at the syllabus, the date that the semester would end. But my plant knows.

Sure, the end of the semester is busy--isn't it always?--and I'm really pleased with how my students are doing. This should be a busy and a happy time, since they're doing good work. But the plant just sits there, wanting to be taken home, telling me through some kind of plant telepathy that we've only got a few weeks left and it is so done with this semester.

If it were me, I'd be embarrassed at how ready I am to pack it in and call the semester over with. But it isn't me. I'm pretty sure it's the plant.

Blogworld creativity

All right, it was a dream (hence the OT qualifier), but I think it says something about the relationship between blogging and "real writing," so I'm posting it. I think it was inspired by a message I received recently from an acquisitions editor at a press where I've reviewed several manuscripts, asking me to have coffee at an upcoming conference.

In the dream, a colleague and I were part of some focus group about academic blogging, and he began to pontificate at great length about it. In real life I like and respect this colleague, but you know that Mark Twain saying "it is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"? It became clear that he knew nothing about blogging, although that didn't stop him from expressing a lot of opinions dressed as theories, and that I had a whole lot of ideas about it just from reading blogs and from writing this one for three years.

The editor and I walked to a nearby coffeeshop through a thicket of blogs, which were posted on beautiful wooden signposts (all of your blogs on the blogroll were there) on gentle green slopes, and the comments pages were paper pages left beneath them where people could write things with the attached pencils. Once at the shop, I outlined something like a theory of blogology--if not like Mr. Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies--and the editor thought this should be a book.

Now, I'm not writing a book about blogs. Instead, I think it signifies a lot of things that blogs seem to mean to us all:

The ability to try out ideas and be heard by a supportive (but honest) community, even if it's largely a pseudonymous one.

The ability to be playful in writing.

The liberating quality of writing about what you know, and what you know you know even if it doesn't square with someone else's theories (as Professor Z often discusses).

The beauty of a writing space--for it was very much a space--in which writing does not need to respond to deadlines, is never stressful, and makes the writer feel as though the expression of ideas and emotions is a good thing.

In short, I think it was about the ways in which blogs foster creativity, and who could say that that's a bad thing?
[Title changed to be less confusing]

Reading criticism irreverently

When I'm reading a sentence like "My project is to stage an intervention into X," my first thought is "Why? Does it have a drug problem?"

(With apologies to profgrrrl for stealing her blog title.)

OT: Cat 1, Printer 0

I'm sure you all saw this a few years ago on YouTube. Apparently one of my cats watched it, too. Today as I was duplex printing (Save the trees! Save the earth!), Calm Cat came to watch, as he always does. The HP printer I use prints one side, spits out the page part way for the ink to dry, and then draws the page back in to print the other side. This is clearly an affront not to be tolerated, so Calm Cat kept grabbing at the page and tearing it up as it was drawn back into the printer.

Did Calm Cat vanquish the printer? Of course. The print head got stuck, and I spent the next half hour with a pair of tweezers, picking shreds of paper out of the printer's innards. The printer is working now, and it now has an ally against the depredations of Calm Cat: the Spray Bottle of Doom, which is going to work its magic if he gets near the printer again.

From the Chronicle: Are senior scholars abandoning journal publication?

From the Chronicle, "Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis":

Senior scholars, the A-list of academic publishing, seem to submit fewer unsolicited manuscripts to traditional humanities journals than they used to. "The journal has become, with very few exceptions, the place where junior and midlevel scholars are placing their work," according to Bonnie Wheeler, president of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. . . .

Several journal editors said they had observed this trend, and had different theories about it. Maybe it's a natural winnowing, as disciplines evolve and careers move forward. Humanities fields like history and literary studies have become more specialized over the past couple of decades, making more-general journals like PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association, perhaps less tempting as venues. Journals go in and out of fashion. Eminent scholars get busier. . . .

The vogue for edited collections may also be distracting scholars. In 2005, James Eli Adams, an associate professor of English at Cornell University, published an article in the Journal of Victorian Culture called "The Function of Journals at the Present Time," in which he argued that the "explosion" of edited collections has tended "to siphon off a great deal of article-length work from senior scholars."

The article goes on to quote Craig Howes as saying that "a book [of articles] is valued more," although as the author of the article, Jennifer Howard, points out, articles in journals are read by more people because of database access.

Any thoughts about this? The last I'd heard, journal publication was a kind of gold standard, with edited collections considered to be maybe 14K to the 18K of journal publication; also, I had heard that edited collections were even harder to place than monographs, due to publishing constraints. What have you heard?

No wonder full professors are disgruntled if they don't get promoted

From the New York Times, via University Diaries:
In a contentious Feb. 26 deposition between Dr. Biederman and lawyers for the states, he was asked what rank he held at Harvard. “Full professor,” he answered.
“What’s after that?” asked a lawyer, Fletch Trammell.
“God,” Dr. Biederman responded.
“Did you say God?” Mr. Trammell asked.
“Yeah,” Dr. Biederman said.

Tech tools and writing inspiration

From BoingBoing, via Academhack, comes Steven Johnson's account of "How to write a book" (it's all worth reading, but I've cut it up here because I don't want to steal the whole thing):

The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text -- and each little snippet I just drop into Devonthink . . .

When it comes time to actually write the book, I usually have a pretty clear sense of how the chapters are going to be divided up. . . . And so in the last stage before I actually start writing, I create a little folder in Devonthink for each of the chapters. And then I sit down and read through every single little snippet that I've uncovered over the past year or so of research. But I read through them all, and in reading through them all, I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I'm at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that's coming together, instead of hints or hunches.

. . . I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I'm looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It's a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

I've never used Devonthink because I don't have a Mac. I've tried Evernote (seemed cumbersome) and OneNote (but I only have a trial version), but I keep coming back to plain old Word, which I use in somewhat the same way. Mostly, however, I rely on a blizzard of Post-It notes stuck in books that are piled 6 deep all around my desk, typed notes, scraps written during dull conference presentations, and so on.

Do these tools really make a difference? Or is it the part I've bolded at the end, about starting in a file already full of notes, that makes the difference? Do any of you use these tools?

In which Mr. Thoreau reads my mind

"It is a great relief when for a few moments in the day we can retire to our chamber and be completely true to ourselves. It leavens the rest of our hours. In that moment I will be nakedly as vicious as I am; this false life of mine shall have a being at length."

Henry David Thoreau.

When worlds collide

I was looking over the list of contributors to an essay collection in which I have a piece coming out and started musing "X . . X . . . where have I heard that name?" Then it hit me: X is someone who blogs under his or her own name. There will thus be two bloggers in that collection, at the very least, but only one of us will know that.

It gave me pause, for a minute, although I don't know why it should; I've seen other bloggers on panels at MLA and elsewhere, even though I've never been to a meetup or tried to learn the IRL identities of any pseudonymous bloggers.

But since meatspace and blogworld do ultimately intersect, wouldn't it be great if there were some way, some secret handshake or something, by which we could say to each other "I'm a blogger, too"? Maybe a Masonic handshake or something?

Writing is fun. Starting is hard.

At the risk of semi-disagreeing with Professor Zero's "A Heretical Post," I have to qualify what she says when she says "Writing is fun. Publishing is easy."

She's right about the writing books that moan about writing and about the Frail Souls who put their hands to their foreheads when telling you how busy they've been. Maybe they have been busy, but they haven't been busy shingling roofs when the temperature is 104 degrees, nor have I, so let's not kid ourselves about the kind of hard work we do. So when is writing fun for me? (Your mileage may vary.)

1. Writing is fun when you're in the flow of it. Unfortunately, that "flow" experience sometimes gets spent on other things, like a piece of grad student writing I was commenting on the other day. My brain was pumping, I was making suggestions that will make the writing better, and I was enjoying that "flow" experience through commenting--but it didn't contribute one word to my own writing.

2. Writing is easy, but starting writing, and thinking about what you want to write, is hard. Over the weekend, when my colleagues were variously skiing, hiking, enjoying conferences, and visiting tropical places, I sat stubbornly in front of the computer monitor while trying not to bang my head on the desk while I tried to think through some concepts for a deadline-driven proposal. I'd like to think that doing worthy things like going to the gym or washing the floor or finishing an article review would help by breaking up the process, but all that does is say to my brain, "Why, you've worked a lot already today, haven't you? I guess you're all done."

From various comments, I'm guessing that my colleagues don't go through this long, slow process of gearing up to write. I've asked them about how they get started writing or if they get stuck a few times, and they look at me as if I've grown two heads. They're more like the people Boice describes in Professors as Writers, or the ones that Silvia describes in How to Write a Lot, who never experience anxiety because they know that they will write every day at a set time, without any of that nasty agony about ideas.

3. Writing is fun once you've finished a piece. Have you ever noticed how right after you finish something, you sort of love it for at least a few minutes? Everything, however minor, gets some admiration right after I finish it, from a politely cranky letter to a state politician to an article that gave me grief. Of course, two hours later I am dissatisfied with it again, but in that immediate glow of relief over finishing something, I'm happy with it and with myself for getting it done.

4. Writing is fun when you see your work in print. Again, like the "I've finished it!" afterglow, this doesn't last. You get the book or journal, you start to read, and soon you notice a sentence that you would totally revise if you had the article back again. But that's the nature of creating anything, isn't it? I've heard of famous directors who had to be barred from the projection room even after their films were released, because they'd try to go in and recut things.

So yes, writing is (or can be) fun, else why be an academic or keep a blog? But if it were easy, I'd be a few thousand words into the next project by now instead of trying to procrastinate by writing a blog post.

Sven Birkerts mourns loss of cuneiform, clay tablets

I have a confession to make: despite all the rational reasons for not getting a Kindle, I have been reading far too many reviews of the new version and lingering over pictures and videos of the Kindle 2 in action. "Rational reasons" can't entirely stamp out the lingering techno-envy best expressed by "Shiny! Want it!'

So Sven Birkerts's "Resisting the Kindle" in The Atlantic ought to supply some more ammunition for rationality, shouldn't it? I thought so until I read this in a passage where Birkerts is bemoaning the ability to access the internet and look up something using a Blackberry, claiming that such an ability "abets the decimation of context":

Literature—our great archive of human expression—is deeply contextual and historicized. We all know this—we learned it in school. This essential view of literature and the humanities has been—and continues to be—reinforced by our libraries and bookstores, by the obvious physical adjacency of certain texts, the fact of which telegraphs the cumulative time-bound nature of the enterprise. We get this reflexively. . . .
That is the trade-off. Access versus context. As for Pride and Prejudice—Austen’s words will reach the reader’s eye in the same sequence they always have. What will change is the receiving sensibility, the background understanding of what this text was – how it emerged and took its place in the context of other texts—and how it moved through the culture.

Here are the problems with that argument:

1. Umm, Mr. Birkerts? That ability to look things up instantly? Not going away any time soon.

2. Also, wouldn't the ability to look things up help to PROVIDE rather than erase context? Doesn't access enable context rather than erasing it?

3. And having a little knowledge about context creates a desire for more, doesn't it? That's why (trumpet flourish) investing in the humanities is a smart idea. "Context of other texts" and "how it moved through the culture"--wait, what's that murmur? Why, it's a chorus of humanities professors saying, "That's what we do! If you want to learn more, we have a wealth of information to share with you, and we want to hear your ideas, too!" For example, I've seen various history blogs make gentle fun of the History Channel enthusiasts out there, but honestly, doesn't the History Channel (at least until it eschewed history for "Haunted History" or "UFO History" or "Big Shiny Man-Gadget History" or whatever it's doing now) help to nudge people toward history courses?

4. Birkerts envisions this context as being transmitted through libraries and bookstores as people scan the books on the shelves. Now, nobody loves browsing in libraries and independent bookstores more than I do, but this option presupposes (1) the leisure to hang out in libraries and bookstores; (2) an acculturation process that values and promotes such an activity; and, for the bookstore, (3) the money to buy books.

I somehow don't think he's envisioning the kind of chain bookstore where Ten Things I Learned from My Dog Morley or Addiction Memoir Confidential or The 365-Day Cat Golfing Calendar are the featured big sellers. Here again is class privilege in action: he's picturing a big-city library or independent bookstore experience for people who have the leisure and means to appreciate it and the cultural tools, granted by a humanities education, to understand what they're looking at.

So the Kindle isn't the problem. Even a dead-tree book won't have the proper context unless there's some kind of additional learning involved. The answer isn't to fret about the Kindle and wish ourselves back in time; it's to support the humanities that make that context possible.

The influential writers meme

The estimable Professor Zero has tagged me for the influential writers meme, and, although I fear that my list can be neither as rich as hers or as critically astute as Lumpenprofessoriat's, here it is. As I understand it, this is supposed to name authors who've inspired you or made you think. I took this to mean writers who had influenced me at an earlier stage of my life (hence the "greatest hits" nature of the list). Also, they don't have to be great writers, but I've left some off that at one point were important to me (how else to explain reading the entire "Strangers and Brothers" series of C.P. Snow one summer?), though I now can't remember why.

Bear in mind that this is done quickly and in no particular order; also, some obscure authors' names have been omitted to protect the guilty (me), and I'm not including critics.

1. Raymond Chandler
2. Jane Austen
3. Laura Ingalls Wilder
4. George Eliot
5. Henry James
6. Emily Dickinson
7. Thomas Hardy
8. Andrew Marvell
9. T. S. Eliot
10. F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. William Shakespeare (it's true!)
12. Ernest Hemingway
13. John Milton
14. Charles W. Chesnutt
15. Kate Chopin
16. William Wordsworth (and Dorothy Wordsworth)
17. Edith Wharton
18. Emile Zola
19. Willa Cather
20. W. Somerset Maugham
21. Emily Bronte
22. John Webster
23. Jean Toomer
24. Charles Dickens
25. James Joyce

And now for the tags, also in no particular order (and since I can only tag 25, please consider yourself tagged even if your name is not listed. I tried not to tag anyone who doesn't seem to do memes.)

1. Bardiac
2. Mel
3. Profgrrrl
4. Lesboprof
5. Sisyphus
6. Dr. Crazy
7. Horace
8. Fretful Porpentine
9. Heu Mihi
10. K8grrl
11. Bittersweet Girl
12. Dr. Virago
13. What Now?
14. jo(e)
15. Dance
16. Philosophy Factory
17. Dr. Brazen Hussy
18. The Salt Box
19. Moria
20. 10eleven
21. Historiann
22. New Kid
23. PhDme
24. MuseyMe
25. Cheese and Responsibility

The magic box of writing talent

Bardiac has a great post about teaching composition, and I was with her right up to the point where she suggested driving somewhere and asking a comp specialist for suggestions about how to approach teaching certain things. While I respect the field and the research in rhet/comp, and I enjoy being in a group setting (like a conference or a meeting) in which such ideas are discussed, I'm a little wary of this approach. Over the years, I've had some great advice coming out of such one-on-one meetings, and I've also had some less-than-inspiring advice. To wit:

• A venerable Mina Shaughnessy-inspired exercise that would have had me counting the numbers of errors and keeping a chart of them so that I could then comment on papers by saying things like "Great job! You have 4 fewer apostrophe errors than before!" At least I think this was the idea, because I never followed through with it, because here (although no one asked) is my philosophy of teaching writing: You and I are working together to make you, the student, a better writer. Any exercise that makes me spend more time on your writing than you do by keeping such charts on your writing makes me the owner of your writing, not you. But successful writers have to own their writing, warts and all, or it isn't theirs. If you want to be a successful writer, you have to take responsibility for your writing, and this kind of record-keeping (which I'd find a little creepy and humiliating if I were the student) makes your writing my responsibility and undermines your success.

• An opposing philosophy that said, in effect, don't pay attention to things like agreement errors ("his, her, their--what's the difference? The language is changing! Get with the program!"), apostrophe errors ("It's dropping out of the language anyway"), and comma splices. If the students wrote enough, they would figure it out eventually, and, given that explanations that didn't rise out of their own experience were useless, it was best to spend the time on writing rather than explanations. Focus on content, not on style--or, to reverse an old saying, "Count the pounds, and the pence will take care of themselves." I do believe in focusing on content, but I also comment on structure, punctuation, sentence construction, and style.
  

Here's where the magic box of writing talent comes in. I've had a sense sometimes from my upper-division students that they believed that the composition courses they had taken had absolved them from paying attention to these issues. I am not saying that this is what they were taught; as we all know, it's possible to teach something in depth and have a student claim never to have heard of it when it is mentioned the next semester. (I've probably done the same thing when zoning out in a committee meeting.)

No, what I'm saying is that some juniors and seniors come in as if they have been given a magic box of writing talent that they carry into the classroom with them by virtue of their standing as juniors and seniors. This magic box, or certificate, or whatever it is, doesn't need to be opened and erases the need for comments on grammar, style, and punctuation. They're then shocked, and not in a good way, when they get their first papers back and see that comma splices, misplaced quotation marks, and labored sentences have been marked and do count, along with the ideas in the paper. "No one's ever told me not to do that before," some will say (which may not be the case), or "I didn't know you'd be looking at punctuation."

But the thing I want to convey to them is this: no one ever gets a magic box of writing talent, at least one that doesn't have to be opened occasionally to brush up the talents within. It's in fact not a magic box but a toolbox that has to be used consciously, with additions made throughout a writer's lifetime. The tools are accumulated through contact with teachers and editors and the editorial self, who may be even more attuned than editors to the stylistic tricks that a writer overuses ("not just as . . . so too again!"). It's a toolbox and not a magic box because writing is work, not magic, and it's work we all need to learn how to do.

Respect for humanities, not humanities, in decline

The New York Times is wringing its hands over the decline in the humanities, and, as usual, Dean Dad nails the flaw in the argument, noting that the money quote, near the end of the piece, states that the number of humanities degrees has remained constant for the past ten years.

The real problem is that for much of the past decade, the culture isn't listening to what the humanities have to teach. Let's just take a few examples from English, American history, rhetoric, and philosophy, shall we?

• Rhetoric. A culture that took rhetoric seriously wouldn't have fallen for the fallacious arguments (concluding with "He tried to kill my dad!") that had the U.S. searching for terrorists in Iraq instead of Afghanistan just because "Iraq had better targets." Some columnist said at the time that by that logic, you should look in the garage for the keys you lost in the driveway, because the garage has better lighting. But by stating contrary propositions on different days as though they were fact--and were reported as such with a straight face by, yes, The New York Times and other news media--enough people were duped to lead the country into an unstoppable series of events.
  
• Writing. An economic culture that took writing and language seriously (not to mention math) would have said that the Emperor of Derivatives had no clothes. Difficult terminology doesn't necessarily mean that you're stupid for not understanding it. It may mean that the language, as Orwell predicted, is designed to hide chicanery--and so it was.
• Literature. Speaking of Orwell, those who had read 1984 in one of those despised humanities courses would know what was being said, when, after 6 years of being told "stay the course," we were told that the president was "never about stay the course." It's the same as being told that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia in Orwell's novel, as Leonard Pitts pointed out at the time.
  
• Philosophy--logic and critical thinking skills. An education in critical thinking skills would have told a prospective homebuyer that paying no money down + no interest + more money than she makes in a year = massive FAIL. The figures don't add up, didn't add up at the time, and will never add up. Did the executives at Countrywide and the other mortgage lenders really not grasp this?
  
• History. The only glimmer of historical memory in all this is the refusal of the U.S. population to go along with the dog-and-pony show of 2004-early 2005: "Let's privatize Social Security! C'mon, it'll be fun! The brokers will make a fortune! And the stock market can never go down, so what's to worry about?" Somebody, somewhere, had a dim recollection of October 1929 and subsequent events, and enough of those people refused to go along with the hype so that the cumulative disasters mentioned above weren't compounded by this one.
  

So to all this talk about cutting back on the humanities because they aren't useful, I would say this: they aren't useful if you don't use them. If you do, and if we had, we'd be in a much better place in this country right now.

Happy Terminalia!

According to my rusty recollection of Roman history courses and the ever-trusty Wikipedia, February 23 is the day (Terminalia) that splits the month into two odd-numbered parts and is the end of the religious year. Did the Romans split it up because it was both unbearably long and ridiculously short? Was it called Terminalia because the Romans had reached the end of their patience with eternally gray skies by the 23rd?

After all the administrative tasks of recent weeks, I want to make a fresh start even if spring is still months away, so here are some Terminalia resolutions:

• In the spirit of Terminalia, I replaced my aging computer and its faulty monitor, which everyone in my family refused to use because they said it gave them eyestrain. I can now have the new computer on AND talk on the phone at the same time, something that the noise factor of the old one made impossible; also, my eyes aren't red and watery by the end of the day, which together with my family's approval makes me think that this monitor is A-OK. Also, new and shiny (but not expensive, amazingly enough) is even better than chocolate for revving up excitement about writing, wouldn't you say?
• I'm going to try to get back to writing in the mornings, especially if I wake up early (4 or 5 a.m.). Productivity rules, or so I hear, and it sure beats the bad dreams that happen if I fall back asleep. This morning's dream after waking up at 4: I had to write my Ph.D. prelims by hand, using one of those slow Bic ballpoint pens. On black paper, where no one could read what I'd written. Yes, that was surely worth staying asleep for.

So is Terminalia a do-over for those January resolutions that didn't quite get off the ground? I sure hope so.

Edited to add: I wrote this on the 23rd but put it into a draft post from Saturday, one of many that never got finished recently--sort of in the spirit of Terminalia, really.

Rainbows, lollipops to sprout from trees shortly thereafter

Another long, long week, and . . . oh, wait, you mean it's not over yet? I will get back to posting soon.

In the meantime, here's "Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes":

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

Okay, we've all seen that scenario. But at the University of Wisconsin, there are special seminars for first-year students that are designed to combat this attitude:

The seminars are integrated into introductory courses. Examples include the conventional, like a global-warming seminar, and the more obscure, like physics in religion.

The seminars “are meant to help students think differently about their classes and connect them to real life,” Professor Brower said.

He said that if students developed a genuine interest in their field, grades would take a back seat, and holistic and intrinsically motivated learning could take place.

I'd like to think that this is true and that the people at Wisconsin are tracking the program to see if students develop a keen interest in "holistic and intrinsically motivated learning" instead of grades. As long as the "external rewards" of med school, business school, and jobs are on the line, however, do you think that concern over grades will take a back seat to "intrinsically motivated learning"?

[Updated to add: I just saw that Female Science Professor has posted about this, too.]

Stanley Fish's straw man

In the New York Times, Stanley Fish has a column about Professor Denis Rancourt of the University of Ottawa, who was apparently fired for (1) announcing on the first day that all his students in a physics class would receive an A+ and (2) defending what he calls "academic squatting" (teaching about the oppression of the system rather than physics), which he cast as an exercise in academic freedom.

I don't know about the case and suspect there's more to it than Fish lets on, but it's this statement that caught my attention, a hypothetical instance that Fish poses to his course in the law of higher education: "Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or came late, blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims, abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients. What would happen to you?" Fish goes on to say that, a la Rancourt, you'd be celebrated for standing up for academic freedom instead of being fired, as you would in industry.

Is he right? Not where I teach.

1. "Skipped meetings or came in late." The crucial part here is which meetings? Skipping class meetings? A professor who's habitually absent or late for class is going to get crucified on student evaluations, which are, in many cases, the only evidence that the administration admits for the "teaching" part of the teaching/scholarship/service component of yearly evaluation.

Skipping department meetings is another matter. Some people don't show up for years at a time, unless something upsets them, while others try to go to every one. In what seems to be an academic parable of the vineyard, both are apparently treated equally at evaluation time, so Fish may have a point about that.

2. "Blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims." Absolutely not. Aren't we now in the era of the iron-clad syllabus, where we're held to the syllabus as we are to any other contract? Students may like exciting classes and variable activities, but when it comes to assignments, they hate change. Like most reasonable people, they want to know what they have to do and when they have to do it.

And how is Fish defining "whims"? One person's "whim" may be another person's brilliant idea of how to make the pedagogy work better. There's usually a way to make those kinds of changes, and they aren't "whims." "Whim" is just a pejorative way of saying "idea."

3. "Abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients." Okay, Fish may have us there. Everyone knows or has heard of the academic whose rudeness or ruthlessness is legendary but whose scholarship/grant productivity is such that he or she is untouchable by ordinary mortals and their disciplinary procedures. Still, these types are more rare (aren't they?) than they used to be, or is that just a Panglossian view of the academy?

So would this person be an academic hero in your department? Fish says he would.

Nobody knows anything

By "nobody," I don't mean the estimable Dr. Crazy, New Kid, and Sisyphus, all of whom have excellent posts (responding to Thomas Hart Benton at the Chronicle) about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of attending grad school in English, with New Kid emphasizing that the often-offered panacea of teaching at a community college isn't one and Crazy rightly protesting that Benton's formula would have only the super-privileged continuing to be the super-privileged. They know something, all right: that the job market is terrible and that getting a Ph.D. in a humanities discipline is risky.

But when those eager undergrads come to us holding out a dream that goes "I want to be a professor!" we ought to be able to do something more productive than smash it. What are the alternatives?

This is why I say "nobody knows anything." We gesture toward some alternatives, sure, but what do we know about them?

• Law school? But there are a lot of unemployed or underemployed lawyers out there. As I understand it, the law profession has been undergoing the same adjunctification, if that's a word, as the academy, with big firms scooping up fully qualified attorneys and paying them a pittance without the prospect of being an associate or making partner (equivalent of t-t and tenured).
• Tech writing? Yes, this is a good option in normal times. But in a job market where even the mighty Microsoft is laying off employees, is it a realistic one? What are the prospects out there?
  
• Foundation work and grantwriting? Again, communication skills are important, but what are the prospects like in this economy?
• High school teaching? I tell my students (truthfully) that high school teachers are better paid than professors, but they still would need to get certified, unless they're willing to teach in a private high school. If the "want to be a professor" dream is really about wanting to teach, this would be a good option. But several states put caps on the number of teachers that can be trained, so this could be a limited option.
• Going into another field--science, maybe? It's not as farfetched as it sounds. If the student is generally strong academically, apparently medical schools are looking for people with varied backgrounds, as long as the person can also pass organic chemistry or whatever. And if it's research that attracts the student, why not get a Ph.D. in nursing? The desperate shortage of nurses is due in part to a lack of faculty, since practitioners can make more than Ph.D. nurses who teach, so there's a growth industry.
  

If you look at a list of what English majors do when they graduate, it's really eclectic. Some go into their family's business, or go into sales, or work as a tech writer, or teach, but the paths that take them there are individual paths. But I don't think it's enough when they come to us about wanting to go to grad school and we say, dramatically, "Do something else, anything else." That's probably the same advice they're getting from their history, art history, and languages teachers.

The question is this: what do we (the academy) tell them? I don't know enough. Do you?

Nobody knows anything.*

[*For the record, this is William Goldman's famous quotation about Hollywood in Adventures in the Screen Trade. I'm stealing it but didn't want to plagiarize or anything.]

From the Chronicle: Who needs library chairs?

From the Chronicle about a new library opening at Fresno State:

“The collection level below the first floor is arguably the largest single-floor open compact shelving in the world,” Mr. McDonald said. It “can hold on a single floor upwards of 1.3 million items. So the books as such remain in the building, it is just that they are significantly compacted to make room elsewhere in the building for user centered services and seating.”

Although I still tend to think that books and not "user centered services," should, you know, be the focus of a library, I'm very glad that they've found places for the books and haven't thrown them away, even if it does mean Adventures in Compact Shelving.

And I'm willing to bet this: if Fresno State is like most campuses, it probably has a lots of chairs stashed away somewhere. Think about what chairs it probably has and what the library could do with them:

1. Those light-colored maple chairs from the 1950s could go in one area, along with the carved-in-graffiti tables from the era--a piece of history.

2. The steel chairs from the 1960s that were meant to withstand a Soviet atomic blast. You can bet they're still around.

3. Those plastic Eames chairs that came in back when the world was groovy. They were supposed to be so, so comfortable because they were shaped like your body and were so, so not.

4. The library chairs with padded seats and backs covered in woven fabrics that someone unwisely judged would be impermeable to spilled coffee and general crud. Those came in in the 1970s, and that's what most places have now. You can judge their vintage from the colors: 1970s = mustard yellow/avocado green; 1980s = patriotic red or blue, etc.

In short, there's probably only really a NEW chair shortage. If you grouped the old ones and made them seem a piece of library history, you could probably have a chair-filled library that would work for the present.

What's valued and what counts

It's annual review season, and as usual, we are asked for the same information sliced-and-diced in different ways for different purposes. One of the forms for upper administration asks us to count things and has specific requirements for what we can include.

1. What counts: number of books published.

• What doesn't: time spent warming a chair in colleagues' presentations in order to show support.
• Attendance at faculty meetings.
  
• Showing up at various university functions for which the organizers get a vita line and glowing praise for putting on such a successful and informative event.
  

2. What counts: articles published.

• What doesn't: time spent preparing courses, grading, and talking with students. Advising.

3. What counts: giving papers at national and international conferences.

• What doesn't: working at the organizational level (committees) to make those conferences happen.

But at the department level, all those things are valued. As a recent meeting made clear, at a department level, we ask those questions: who's advising students? Who does a good job in the classroom? Who, at the most basic level, is here and doing the things that make the place run?

The old Woody Allen dictum is that eighty percent of success is just showing up. Upper admin only cares about the other 20%, but the department does care about the 80%.

Conference panels: a pop quiz

I'm getting the Inspiration Award post ready (thank you, profacero!), but in the meantime, here is a pop quiz about putting together conference panels. You may think these are no-brainers, but I've heard arguments put forth for all the options over the years. (My answer to #3 is below.)

1. You are putting together a panel for Big Conference, which encourages you to have an "expert in the field" (i.e., a famous person) on the panel or as a respondent. A friend of yours, very junior, has submitted a brilliant proposal. Which one do you include?

a. Famous person. Academe is cutthroat, and having Big Conference on my vita is important.
b. Friend. I am not THAT soulless yet.
c. Get them both, if I can.

2. You're in charge of a panel that you know will run because you're the Division Head or Discussion Group Head or whatever. You have a number of really good proposals from graduate students and several that could be good from Dr. Famous and the Oldbloods, who have been writing about these issues for years. What do you do?

a. All grad students. Dr. Famous has had his say; let's hear from some new blood.
b. Grad students and Dr. Famous or one of the Oldbloods. Dr. Famous is a draw, so having him on the panel brings exposure to the grad students.
c. Dr. Famous and the Oldbloods. They're famous for a reason.

3. You want a panel that will go well and people who won't go over their allotted time so that you have to suffer through a terrible presentation or use the hook. Whom do you choose?

a. Graduate students.
b. Mid-level scholars who've been doing this for a while.
c. Dr. Eminent

4. Panelist A wants to use A/V media in her presentation. Where do you put her on the panel?

a. At the beginning to draw people in.
b. In the middle, so that it wakes people up.
c. At the end, because fiddling with the tech stuff and using PowerPoint or media always, always takes longer than expected. Besides, this gives people something to look forward to.
d. I can't believe you're shallow enough to think about this. Put the presentation wherever it fits thematically and don't worry about it.

5. What is the best method of giving the hook to a panelist who is well over his or her allotted time?

a. a card or note saying that time is up
b. tapping on your watch
c. an air horn

Answer to #3: Trick question! All levels can give great papers, and all can give poor ones. Think about how often you've seen these:
--the grad student who brings in an unedited diss chapter and flips through it while muttering "I'll skip this part, but here's what I say in it"
--the mid-level person who has a paper of the appropriate length but feels compelled to gloss every sentence with commentary
--Dr. Eminent's intense love affair with his own voice and confidence in his mad skilz at extemporizing, which results in a scenario in which you get, say, 25 minutes of background on something that everyone already knows. No kidding: I once heard a presentation for which the closest analogy would be telling a group of American historians who Abraham Lincoln was.

What are your answers? There's extra credit on the line here.

Blog trifecta: human hibernation, Malcolm Gladwell, and writing

I guess you'd call it a trifecta of blog obsessions, anyway: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers not only has a lot to say about what creates success in writing (and everything else) but also, yes, weighs in on human hibernation.

It's a really interesting read (er, listen), even if it does have a little of the "2 + 2 = 5" quality I mentioned earlier. A sample of what I have learned:

• The 10,000 hour theory. Exceptional performance has less to do with natural ability than with the capacity to work hard and consistently at a task. The Beatles got to be The Beatles by playing the Reeperbahn in Hamburg 7 days a week for 8 hours a night. Bill Gates was ready when the opportunity came because he'd already been programming for, yes, about 10,000 hours. This is also why a longer school year would be better, as Gladwell shows with statistics.
  
• Being born at the right time helps, too. If you're a hockey player, it helps to be born early in the year so that you're big enough to get the extra practice and coaching (see: 10,000 hours) that will help you succeed. It helps to have only a few people in your cohort (fewer New York lawyers born in 1930) or to have skill sets that no one else does (Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York who could sew in the early 1900s.) Oh, and privilege (better schools) helps for some things, too, you'll be shocked to learn.
• You are your ancestors, basically. The nineteenth-century "culture of honor" in the South originated in rocky highland regions (Gladwell cites Scotland and Ireland, but the same would be true for Albania) where herdsmen had to defend their property--goats, cattle, or sheep--because the property could be taken from them if they weren't prepared to fight to the death for it. Gladwell shows that this persists in Southern students even in the North in the 21st century, but is this the only reason?
• There are three things that make work meaningful, and two kinds of intelligence. Unfortunately, I can't remember the names of them but will look them up when I get the book version.
  

A couple of things seemed a little too pat; maybe they're footnoted in the book version, but my eyebrows went up.

• I had no idea that European farmers were such lazy people* (I'm paraphrasing) in medieval times, especially in comparison to Asian rice farmers. I thought Piers Plowman and company worked pretty hard, but according to Gladwell they worked only until noon in the spring and fall and then sat around all summer. Life after noon was just hanging out waiting for the next kermess or for harvest, whichever came first. This doesn't sound like the farmers I've known or read about, who work very hard indeed, but maybe I'm missing something.
  
• Annnnd--human hibernation. Gladwell accepts uncritically the accounts of travelers who said that the French peasants and the Russians went to sleep after the first frost; he even quotes the same accounts that I had posted about previously. "They deliberately weakened themselves so as not to use up too much food or energy," snuggling together spoon fashion to keep warm and sleeping all the time. So I ask again:
  
• If this is true, how did they get their strength back in time for spring planting?
• Who took care of the animals, if they slept all the time?
• Cooking anything, and making bread especially, is a muscle-intensive activity, as the bakers among you know. Assuming that the hibernation cases ate, what did they eat? Who nursed the children? Or was it just the men who slept while Gretchen and Matilda kept the pot stirring? And how did they get the two-year-olds down for a six months' nap, when any toddler worth her salt won't sleep for two hours without a fight?
  
• Now that we've mentioned toddlers, what about the conventional wisdom that more babies are born in August, September, and October than in other months? Was this not true in medieval times?

[*Edited because I felt like it.]

OT: Obama and Fred and Ginger

President Obama, Inaugural Address: "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking."

I knew that our new president had echoed Thomas Paine and Lincoln, but Fred and Ginger? Nice.

OT: Inauguration

To repeat a post from November: Obama! Yay!

His speech was just right. He is just right. I hope there's a moratorium on all the pundits' dissections of speeches, because, just now, for once, let's dispense with rhetorical analysis and just revel in the moment of hope that he's providing.

Next stop: Academic Idol

From The Chronicle :

The chancellor of the Texas A&M University system wants to give faculty members bonuses of up to $10,000, based on student evaluations, but some professors are raising concerns about the plan, saying it could become a popularity contest, The Bryan-College Station Eagle reported.

Faculty members can decide whether to participate in the pilot program, which is being offered at the system’s flagship, in College Station, and at its Kingsville and Prairie View campuses. Though details are preliminary, officials said, the goal is to offer awards starting at $2,500 to the top 15 percent of participating instructors.

Instructors, you've won a ticket to College Station to compete on Academic Idol, except that the voting will be without the benefit of comments by Simon Cowell and company.

What might this change?

1. Teaching styles. There's no question that this could affect people's teaching styles, but would it do so for the better? Philip J. Tramdack, one of the commenters at the Chronicle, says that if he had to teach again (he's a librarian), he'd pull out his popular "lounge act" style of teaching instead of the "casino act" in which he actually asked students questions. Sometimes you can teach students difficult concepts AND entertain them, but not always.

2. Syllabus. Hmmm, what to choose--800 pages of Bleak House or the graphics novel version of Bleak House? Or Bleak House in text-message format?

And what about writing assignments? Writing is hard, and no one likes to hear anything but "superb job! brilliant!" when turning something in. We all, professors included, have to learn to take criticism about our writing, however, and it's only natural to have a hard time separating the messenger from the message. With a fortune like $2500-10,000 hanging over your head, would you be more likely or less likely to wield the red pen as usual, even it if means student displeasure?

3. Academic rigor. Another commenter mentions that the evaluations ask about things like "this course challenged me" and so on--in other words, students are asked to judge the academic rigor of the course.

Here's the problem with those kinds of questions: students all want to take challenging courses as long as they can get an A in them. There's no glory to getting an A in an easy course. On the other hand, if the student doesn't get a good grade, it's the instructor's fault for making the course, as students sometimes put it, "to hard" with "to much writting."

It would be nice to reward good teaching, but making evaluations the sole criterion is daft. To quote our soon-to-be-ex-president, the question that's not being asked is "Is our children learning?"

Archives and fresh starts

Mel's post on archiving and cleaning out old letters (with a link to Flavia's post) struck a chord.  Yesterday I was on a cleaning out rampage, and a lot got thrown away.

What got thrown away (or put in the recycling bin) are things like empty spice jars and a couple of broken colanders.  What is still sitting in the garage and in my filing cabinets taking up space is the detritus--or should I say impedimenta?-- of academic teaching and service: notes from meetings, final exams from classes that have long since graduated, and reports on long-dead issues that have since either been resolved by policy changes, or, in the usual course of things, left to gather dust.  In any case, none of this is material that needs to be saved.  

I've gone through a few of these boxes and have gotten rid of some things.  About twice per box, I'll come across a teaching exercise that I had developed and forgotten about that could still be useful.  The rest of it is just paper, and it gets dealt with accordingly:

1.  Anything with student numbers on it gets shredded.

2. Anything printed on one side that won't wreck a printer gets put into a pile for draft printing.

3. Everything else, including anything with a staple in it, gets tossed.  

What isn't clear is why I kept a lot of this stuff in the first place. Documentation in case anyone ever wanted to know what a committee said in Section V, subsection 3 of a report? Backup in case a disgruntled student came back 10 years later and wanted to know why he got an 88 instead of 90 on his final exam?  Teaching notes in case all the computers on which I'd stored ecopies (office and home) went up in flames at once?  This last one is particularly puzzling, since I try to reinvent the teaching each time I teach a course anyway. 

The only good side to this is that the flip side of the impulse to archive is an impulse to get rid of things, for there can't be an archive without selection, can there?  As the semester begins, that impulse to get rid of things takes over. It gives the filing cabinets some breathing space, anyway, and us a fresh start.

What I'm wondering is how much of this kind of stuff is what academics usually keep and how much of it is extra.  What do you end up keeping--class notes? Papers that students don't pick up? Meeting minutes? Old photocopies of articles? Any of it? Or have you gone entirely electronic with these?

A noble ideal, but will it fly?

At Inside Higher Ed there's article on a joint report by the MLA and the Teagle foundation. (Read it. I'll wait.)

While I can see where the recommendations are coming from and I like them overall, I'm trying to fit these ideals into the university systems that we all know and love. Here are the four and some possible real-world reactions.

1. English majors should be able to read literature in a second language. The short version is that about 4/5 of universities had this requirement forty years ago and about 1/5 have it today. Is the MLA on crack?

No, that's too harsh. I think this is a praiseworthy requirement for all the reasons that the report mentions. But is this a realistic requirement? At a minimum, English majors could decamp in droves for less demanding departments. Also, there are only so many credits that a university can require, so many courses that it can offer with a given number of faculty, so many classrooms, and so forth. So what gets tossed out of the Graduation Credits Lifeboat to make room for, say, 15 hours of foreign language instruction?

2. Coherence of course sequences and requirements. Nobody ever says, "Hey, let's make an incoherent course sequence." All the reasons for course requirements seem logical at the time.

But over time, course requirements are subject to mission creep. Maybe the administration has a pet idea that it thinks all students should be exposed to and mandates* required courses in that area. Maybe Dr. Famous Senior Scholar thinks all students should learn about the poetic qualities of widgets and bullies the curriculum committee into making a required course in Widget Poetics. The best use of this part of the report may lie in getting departments to rethink these requirements.

3. The primacy of the study of literature. Again, I like the idea (this being my job, after all), and at first couldn't see any harm in advising that students learn to read complex texts and write well about them. On second thought, though, I can see how all this talk about richness of literary texts, discussing complexity, etc. is going to bring out faculty with the long knives who hate any signs of life in F.R. Leavis and the Great Tradition. Also, new forms of media get mentioned only as "information retrieval systems." Ouch. That isn't going to please people working in this area.

4. Inclusion of all faculty ranks in decisions and teaching. Absolutely right, although again: how might this work in the real world? I don't mean shared decision-making; I mean the recommendation to have senior people teach first-year and gen ed courses.

This would be beneficial in a lot of ways, but here's the problem: How will you get them to do this, aside from making some kind of mandate? Who's going to tell Professor Senior Scholar, Endowed Chair, that he's been assigned an Intro to Lit instead of Widget Poetics? Unless every, and I do mean every, senior person signs on to this and understands its value, it won't happen.

So am I being too much of a pessimist here? How would these work at your university?

*[Edited to add: Not "mandates," of course, but "suggests," as in suggesting that if you ever want to see adequate funding again, you will consider teaching courses in this area.]

I am the captain--no, make that the James T. Kirk-- of my fate

As I sat at my desk today, not wanting to go out (if you saw the weather here, you wouldn't, either), I looked around the study.

Extreme left on the bookshelf: books for teaching.
Near left: books for project I've been working on.
Nearer left: shame pile of a book for review.
Piled high on the left-hand side of the desk: books and journals I've just finished using.
Above the desk: books for another project for which I'm making some minor revisions.
Right side of the desk, both on the desk and on the floor: file folders in wire holders.
Two lamps, one on either side of the monitor.
Straight ahead: computer with writing and .pdf articles on it.

Then it hit me: this feels like the command deck of the Starship Undine, and it has a mission to get as much possible done before classes start. No wonder I'm treating incoming email as if it's the Tholian web.

OT: Themes and resolutions

Since everyone's posting either end-of-the-year memes, themes (here , resolutions (here and here), or no resolutions, here's mine:

It's just one, and I had thought about this one even before Profgrrrrl wrote about it in a more elegant post than this one: mindfulness. Instead of a resolution, I'd like to call it a theme or maybe even (so as not to jinx it) a suggestion.

Mindfulness means a lot of things. It means paying attention to what I eat instead of eating out of stress or work avoidance.

It means distinguishing between what really needs to get done, what I need to do, and what someone else wants me to do. Their wishes do not have to become my to-do list, and their wish for an immediate response to something that isn't important doesn't need to push that item to the top of my to-do list.

It means making time for the things I need to do, not being on campus just because people like to see me in my office in case they happen to want something. Chief among those things I need to do is making time for writing.

It means wasting less time on news sites and checking email, because, all dreams aside, I'd rather let Obama handle the anxieties of managing this country and, as my experiments with turning off the internet have shown me, email can almost always wait.

It means treating reading blogs as an after-dinner dessert instead of something to snack on all day.

In short, mindfulness means paying the same amount of attention to my own life and priorities that I routinely pay to those of others.

Last bullets of 2008

• I dreamed last night that I was at the inauguration. In fact, I was Obama. Do I want to take over the world, or what?
• Reading all the MLA reports makes me feel both relieved that I didn't go and sad to have missed some of the good times.
  
• Eager colleagues are at it again, going through their to-do lists and firing emails at me. The next one gets a throwdown challenge: "Do you want to meet tomorrow at 8 a.m.? No? Then shut up and leave me alone." No, what I'm really doing is much more insidious: I am rudely not wishing anyone a Happy New Year who contacts me with it-surely-can-wait work details. Yes, no one will probably notice.
  
• I have been loving having this time to read and work. I've written a fair amount during the break, and now I'm getting ready for classes in a very random and relaxed way. It's actually a lot of fun.
• Happy New Year to you all!
  

Brave new technologies: online manuscript submissions

The publisher of one of the pieces I had promised to do this fall (now finished and submitted--hooray!) required the work to be sent to the editor AND uploaded to its manuscript submission site. MLA does its program copy for the convention this way, of course, and ASA has an elaborate online system for panel and paper proposals, as do some other conferences. Most of the manuscript reviewing and program committee work I've done for conferences, however, has been done the old-fashioned way--via email and sometimes paper.

Here's what I want to know: I know that online submission of manuscripts to a database is common in the sciences, but is it widespread in the humanities?

If you've had experience with this (as either a submitter or as a reviewer), what was that like? Is it a better system? Worse? Easier? More frustrating?

The grass is greener, academic edition

After several years in a row of going to MLA, I'm glad that I didn't go this year. Grateful. Relaxed. Happy. Christmas was wonderful with the family.

And yet . . . lots of the cool kids are at MLA, so there's a little twinge that says "we're having a party, and you're not there."

Proof positive that academia is an addiction, don't you think?

Edited to add: I didn't realize that What Now and Sisyphus were there, too.

We pause for this message from the holidays

Despite two more messages tonight from eager colleagues (stop, already!), I'm going on an academic fast for the next week--nothing but family, too many cookies, and a little writing, if I'm lucky.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Secret message to eager colleagues

To all those who are contacting me this week, when there is not one single administrative thing I am responsible for doing or can do until spring, about

--policy discussions that you want to have right now but that can wait until next semester
--procedures that you think ought to be discussed at length but can also wait until next semester
--handwringing about the terrible state of the economy in regard to certain cuts in the university budget
--hypothetical "what if?" scenarios for program development that will never come to pass (see previous point)
--whether I plan to be in the office next Wednesday to discuss any of the above

my answer is this:

--I am not going to deal with any of this right now.
--Chill out.
--Back away from the computer.
--Get a life.


If you don't, I will be forced to use the dreaded Annoying Autoresponse as a defense shield.

[Edited to add: Anything discussed or decided this week would have to be redone at the beginning of next semester anyway, because so many people are already gone. Having these discussions twice seems like a waste of time and effort, to put it mildly.]

It's not you--it's the market

This is bad news and good news.

From Inside Higher Ed:

Today the Modern Language Association is releasing information on just how bad the situation is: The number of job postings in the MLA’s Job Information List will be down 21 percent in 2008-9, the steepest annual decline in its 34-year history. For English language and literature, the drop will be 22.2 percent and for foreign languages, 19.6 percent. . . .
For English jobs, the 1,420 positions the MLA lists this year is a drop from 1,821 last year. While the English totals hovered between 1,000 and 1,200 for several years during the mid-1990s, they have not been as low as this year’s figure since 1997-8. For foreign languages, this year’s MLA total is 1,350, the smallest number of jobs since 2003-4.

Over at the Chronicle, on one of the job boards, there is--or was--a little bragfest going on in the guise of problem-solving: "I have twelve MLA interviews and just don't know how to schedule them."
I submit to you, the jury, these ideas:
-- such claims are either highly exaggerated or just plain false
-- the job market is as bad as it has been in a long, long time
-- especially for Americanists
-- and that if you don't have an interview, it's not necessarily about you, your publications, your teaching, or anything else that you can control.

So the bad news is this: It's about the market, which is awful.
The good news, such as it is (and it isn't much), is this: It's not about you.

Updates in two words

Grades: done!

Weather: snow.

Article: sent.

School: none!

Malcolm Gladwell on teaching

There's an essay by Malcolm Gladwell called "Most Likely to Succeed" over at The New Yorker this week. After having read (and listened to) some of his stuff, I always am a little suspicious, because everything seems to end up with the equivalent of "And that's why 2 + 2 really does equal 5!" Since I'm used to literary criticism, though, that doesn't bother me too much, and what he says about teaching does seem to make good sense.

Gladwell makes two major points: (1) for some occupations, you can't tell how good someone is going to be until he or she is actually practicing that occupation; and (2) good teachers have a quality that he calls (after Jacob Kounin) "withitness" and that I've always thought of as watchfulness. What this means is that a good teacher is always aware, as far as possible, of what's going on in the class--not just the activities, but the level of engagement.

It's easy to tell if students are engaged in a class if they're talking, but what if they aren't? Someone once commented after watching me teach, "you watch faces." I don't know if that's good or bad, but watching faces enables me to see if people are paying attention before they completely check out. Of course, no one can do this all the time; if that were true, Planner Girl wouldn't have gotten as far as she did with checking out of the discussion because I'd have noticed it earlier.

I've observed a lot of people's classes over the years, and "withitness," the ability to relate to individual students while keeping the group together as a whole, really stands out as something that keeps students engaged and motivated. Gladwell gives this example:

Then there was the superstar—a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt. “So let’s see,” he began, standing up at the blackboard. “Special right triangles. We’re going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas.” He drew two triangles. “Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can’t, we’ll all do it.” He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn’t easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can’t, we’ll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who’d evidently missed a few classes. “See what you can remember, Ben,” the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: “I’m going to give you a way to get to it.” He made a quick suggestion: “How about that?” Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. “That’s all right!” He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.

That's why, I think, teaching takes so much energy and we all talk about how tired we are at the beginning of the semester. If teaching doesn't take a lot out of you, in the immortal words of LOLcats, "Ur doin it wrong."

40 inspirational speeches in 2 minutes

From overthinkingit.com, as seen at Lifehacker.

(As for the literary connection: there's a little Dead Poets Society in there)

Printed blogs?

I guess you could call this another nail in the coffin of print culture, but in this case, the magazines are the ones shooting themselves in the foot with the nail gun. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)

As a magazine junkie of long standing, I've stayed faithful to--and subscribed to-- some of the old standards for years: Newsweek, The New Yorker, The Atlantic. I've bought subscriptions for family members year after year. I stuck with The Atlantic after it stopped publishing fiction. I even stuck with The New Yorker when the only articles it published were the ones about Hollywood deals (aka the Tina Brown years).

But lately, I've noticed something about the writing in Newsweek: it seemed familiar, somehow. That tone of knowing smartassery. The factual errors in the snarky opinion pieces that pass as cultural criticism. Beginning every story with a long personal anecdote, preferably one that emphasizes the writer's snark credentials or (if it's a serious story) something that Makes the Reader Empathize with the situation being described. (I've taken to skipping the first five paragraphs routinely, just to get to the news.) Trying to be provocative and fun, even if it means asking supremely stupid questions in the interview section. Then it hit me: Newsweek is trying to be a blog. News blogs started out by imitating and modifying print culture, and now print culture is imitating online culture.

You can't blame Newsweek for trying. Readership is down, and the magazine is " trying to be more provocative." It's the same impulse that The Atlantic is now following: it ran a long article about Britney Spears earlier this year and a medium-length article about a boxer in the most recent issue, and its redesign makes it look like Esquire without the ads.

But wait--don't we already have blogs? For free? The Wall Street Journal article says that Newsweek wants to have fewer readers and charge a higher price. The media critics (of which I am obviously not one) can better predict how this business model will work out, but as a longtime subscriber and a blog reader, I'm not convinced.