Writing inspiration: keep going

Rachel Toor's article "Bad Brain Days" gives just about the right level of encouragement. You should go and read it, but the gist of it is this: keep going, even if you don't think what you're writing is working. Get it done, even if it's making you momentarily miserable.
Like Toor, I've finally figured out that sometimes, writing is not a joyful act and that sometimes it can make you feel as though your brain isn't working. What's been helping?
.. Recognizing that I'm too restless and energetic in the morning to write but that it's important to do something related to writing--reading, making notes, walking around. Once I'm a little tired, my resistance to writing goes down and I get at it.
--The key is to make something related to the project the first thing I do. If I warm up by reading things related to the project, I stay on task. If I check email or news sites at all, that concentration is gone. Those things are a trip wire to web distractions.
.. Counting, timing, goals, and rewards. Right now I'm excited about the work, but that leads to bouncing all around the manuscript, and that means not getting anything down. So I set the pomodoro time, write down the word count, write down a word count goal for the time, and get moving. It sounds mechanical, but there's something inherently gamelike in seeing if you can make or even beat the word count.
.. As Toor would say, keep at it. Or as another person told London Fog, "There will be good years, and there will be bad years, but it is always going to rain."

Writing inspiration post, Mad Men-style

Don, help me out here; I need to get this thing written.

 Don Draper via Henry V speech from Evangeline Morphos at WSJ:

This day is called the feast of Crispian…
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…
Prepare to take a great leap forward…
Every agency on Madison Avenue is defined
By that moment they got their first car.
When we land Jaguar, The world will know–
We have arrived.

(Shakespeare, Henry V Act IV, scene 3)

"If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation."

"If you think a lot about it and then stop, the answer will come to you." (Don said it better, but I can't recall the exact words.)

"Fear stimulates my imagination."

I'll write a real post soon, once I get the thing written. 

Come the revolution . . . the university could disappear

Maybe Facebook should hire Thomas Friedman to do its ads. His ad for Coursera (h/t Indyanna's comment at Historiann's) column on online education pretty much explains why the 100,000-person online class and the flipped classroom, with local professors as glorified tutors, is the way to go. The comments are good, and they ask the same questions we've all been asking and come to some similar conclusions.

But does a university have any other functions besides teaching students a specific body of information?

• The university is an economic system as well as an educational and social system. If there aren't any large lecture classes, those being the province of the 12 or so online superteachers left in the system once this revolution occurs, what pays for the smaller classes, including practicum classes in things like nursing?
• The university funds innovation, or rather it provides a support system within which researchers can compete for grants and so on.  What will support that kind of research once the professors and the university that supports them are gone?
• The university is also a place where diverse interpretations can be debated and creative thought can be encouraged. It's easy to say that this creativity and diversity of interpretation will be preserved, but simple economics says that if Harvard is promoting its brand via a course in 18th-century poetry for free, "free" will drive out "expensive" and there'll be pressure to adopt one course to the exclusion of others. 
• What'll happen when this course drives others out of the marketplace?  I'm sure it would be a fantastic course, but wouldn't everyone then be trained in the same way, without being able to talk to or question the professors in person?
• We all laugh at the "yellowing lecture notes" stereotype, but are the lectures that are produced and put in the can for these courses going to be updated every semester, as a professor's course would be? 
• Will the badges and certificates (which--sorry-- I keep picturing as being on a shoulder-to-hip sash like the one I wore in Girl Scouts) be accepted by companies by Microsoft, Apple, and Google?

It's hard to be against something that promises education for the multitudes, especially since Andrew Ng, whose 100,000-student class is a prototype, is so earnest and excited about it. It sounds so revolutionary to say "free education for all" or "steal this book" or whatever. How could you possibly want to withhold education from people who want to learn?

But those who are cheerleading for this movement aren't answering those hard questions with anything like the serious approach that they use for other topics.  Do they put on Unicorn Dazzling Rainbow Goggles before they write those columns?

And for the record, I don't think that all universities will disappear. High-status universities will always remain for the Eloi. For us Morlocks?  What's your guess?

The Five Commandments of Writing: A Response to the 10 Commandments of Twitter

At the Chronicle, Katrina Gulliver has written the "10 Commandments of Twitter" for those who want to break into this medium. Most of the actual commandments are pretty basic: ask questions, engage in conversation, don't just post news articles, and, implicitly, don't just use Twitter for self-promotion, although some well-known people do exactly that. She also recommends that you "show your personality" since it "impresses students."

Here is the key point I'd like to address: "Twitter can be something you have on in the background while you work."

That all depends on how you define work.  I can stuff envelopes and look at Twitter.  I can alphabetize student papers and look at Twitter.  I can grade and look at Twitter or organize my bookshelves and look at Twitter. I could certainly write a blogpost and still look at Twitter.

But write and look at those Twitter pop-ups every 10 seconds? Not so much. I'm ready to throttle the little TweetDeck bird after about 5 minutes.

I look at the advice from real writers on the sidebar, on the web, from a lot of my previous posts quoting writing experts, and from Boice and Silvia, and they all have just about the same Five Commandments:

1. Thou shalt leave the internet off or at least minimize distractions while you write.  
2. Thy writing should be thy sole focus for a period of time.  "Multitasking" is a myth if you're actually writing something worthwhile that requires thought. 
3. Thou shalt give thyself an extended period of time, if possible, so that thoughts can develop.
4. Thou shalt not interrupt the "flow" of writing that occurs once you get absorbed in your subject for the day, especially not for extraneous stuff like worrying about whether you turned in a report or whether X likes what you did that day. 
5. Thou shalt write every day, in the morning, if possible, or whenever works best for you. As Francis Ford Coppola puts it in his comments on writing, get up and write before anyone has a chance to be mean to you, to which I'd add "including you being mean to you," by giving space to that incessant internal monologue of tasks and worries. 

The thing is, as Gulliver correctly states, you can't just be on Twitter a little bit. The reason that's a problem is that it, like Facebook, has become such a primary means of scholarly communication for a lot of groups and scholars. Ignore these two, and you miss out on important information because that's where the information is being disseminated.  

So here is the quandary: 

• To write and eventually be part of the scholarly conversation, you need fewer distractions and as much time as you can manage to actually do the writing. You need to slow down, minimize interruptions, think, and pay attention to what's in your head.
• But to be part of the scholarly conversation, you have to pay attention to Twitter and Facebook on a daily (or, for Twitter, several times daily) basis, since there are resources there that you won't find elsewhere. You need to speed up, be ready to be interrupted, follow links when they occur (and everyone has a link to share), and give your attention to social networking. 

Someone needs to reconcile the 10 commandments with the 5 commandments. 

Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream (a non-academic post)

 . . . or not. It is summer, but it is academic summer, which means as much gearing up to write as the winding down of classes. Time to take stock? Okay.

• It was a heavy service semester, but the service brought some recognition from administrators whom I didn't think knew I existed, so that was good.
• It was a good semester for being more assertive, possibly because of all those service meetings in which I had to take a leadership role.
• And, in Mad Men thoughts: Joan would not have said "it is what it is." She would have said "that's just how it is" or maybe "and that's the way it is" and made a joke of it because that was Walter Cronkite's signoff line for years.
• And that song was perfect, although like Historiann and everyone else, I'm starting to worry a lot about a certain petulant character who is looking more and more fragile with every passing episode.  
• When I saw the title of the episode, all I could think of was the last line of Plath's poem: "And I eat men like air." 

More Questions on MOOCs

[Edited to add: As Joshua Kim points out at IHE, Brooks doesn't differentiate between MOOCs and regular online courses.]

Those questions about MOOCs just won't stop cropping up.  Jonathan Rees asks, "What's the difference between a MOOC and the University of Phoenix?" His answer is "branding" or "not much," but then he also wonders what MIT and Harvard are getting out of edX.

He and I agree on this one, which the writers in the previous post agree on as well: Eyeballs, baby.  It's all about the eyeballs.  Mark Zuckerberg and the Google team aren't the only ones who know how to measure and then monetize our increasingly tiny attention spans online.

That's the social contract of the Internet, or rather the web (since pre-web Internet didn't have this feature in the same way): you get free content, and unless the content was put there by an insanely idealistic person, what you give in return is your data. You type in personal information, and if you don't lie routinely when filling in web forms, your information gets used in ways that maybe you don't like.  Yes, there are lawsuits to prevent the more egregious abuses, but that's how it works.

Rees links to David Brooks, who like the 300+ commenters has some questions about online education. Now, Brooks has some questions but concludes that it'll be all rainbows and unicorns because the "best American colleges should be able to establish a magnetic authoritative presence online." The rest of them? Well, they'll wither away, because that's how capitalism works, but not to worry: something else magical will spring up to absorb that labor force, just like the magical jobs in manufacturing have sprung back.

But here are those pesky questions that Brooks dismisses, along with some possible answers.

Q: Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience?

A: Maybe or yes, depending on how it's done.

Q:  Will it elevate functional courses in business and marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like philosophy?

A. I'll let the philosophers answer this one, but what do you think? 

Q. Will fast online browsing replace deep reading?

A. That ship has sailed everywhere BUT in the traditional classroom. If we don't make deep reading   a sustained practice by teaching it, who's going to? On the other hand, Margaret Soltan appears to be teaching this in her UDEMY course on poetry.

Q.  If a few star professors can lecture to millions, what happens to the rest of the faculty?

A. As one of the commenters pointed out, a few weeks ago Brooks said those not at Harvard and MIT could become glorified graders. We'll be handmaidens to greatness. What's not to like about grading more papers without the satisfaction of teaching? Woo hoo!

Q.  Will academic standards be as rigorous?

A. Do they need to be, if no credit is being given? What's the system of checks and balances here? Who's giving credit, and to what end? Who's doing the assessment for these courses? This seems to me like asking whether you ought to fold the dinner napkin in the shape of a swan when no one has yet made a plan for buying the groceries, inviting the guests, and cooking the meal.

Q. What happens to the students who don’t have enough intrinsic motivation to stay glued to their laptop hour after hour?

A. They already have the motivation to stay glued to their laptops (or phones). The question is whether they'll watch a canned lecture when other sites beckon.

Q. How much communication is lost — gesture, mood, eye contact — when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students?

A. How would you answer this one?

(Oh, and David Brooks? https://www.chumplady.com/2017/05/might-want-rethink-character-thing/)

MOOC Roundup

It's getting hard to tell the MOOC players without a scorecard, so here's a scorecard or maybe a bingo card. I'd tag this with the label "MOOC," only the New and Improved Blogger doesn't give you any way to add them.

• Harvard and M.I.T. are teaming up with edX, a massive course platform built on the MITx version that MIT rolled out earlier this year. (NYTimes, Inside Higher Ed. I thought there was one at The Atlantic, but I couldn't find it.) 
• Coursera. Penn, Stanford, Michigan, and Princeton's version of the above.
• Udemy. This is the one that Margaret Soltan is using and blogging about over at University Diaries.
• Udacity. This one seems to be a computer science version exclusively.
• Not online but massive and reported on in the Chronicle, so I'll include it here: a 2,670 student class at Virginia Tech that is so inspiring that all 2,670 chimed in to say how awesome it is in the comments.

Any questions?

• Will any of these places give you course credit with MIT and Harvard names attached? Please stop asking rude questions.
• How will these courses be graded? "The edX project will include not only engineering courses, in which computer grading is relatively simple, but also humanities courses, in which essays might be graded through crowd-sourcing, or assessed with natural-language software. Coursera will also offer free humanities courses in which grading will be done by peers."
• What will happen to traditional universities? Mid-level ones ought to be worried, says "George Siemens, a MOOC pioneer who teaches at Athabasca University." 
• Why? “Online education is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better,” said Lawrence S. Bacow, a past president of Tufts who is a member of the Harvard Corporation. Dr. Bacow, co-author of a new report on online learning, said it remained unclear how traditional universities would integrate the new technologies.
• What role will faculty have? “What faculty don’t want to do is just take something off the shelf that’s somebody else’s and teach it, any more than they would take a textbook, start on Page 1, and end with the last chapter,” he said. “What’s still missing is an online platform that gives faculty the capacity to customize the content of their own highly interactive courses.” 

Random bullets of "Tuesday's dead"

• Yes, indeed--I've spent the whole day wondering things like "Why are the trash trucks coming around on Tuesday?" and only just now figured out the reason.
• The bad news part: I'm a day more behind on grading than I thought.
• The good news part: I was so absorbed in making writing discoveries that I didn't notice which day it was.
• The Mad Men predictions part: You heard it here first--Megan is French Canadian because she is going to turn into Margaret Trudeau, a vibrant young woman who marries a powerful, sexy older man but decides that it's not for her.  Next time, it won't be Don and Harry shilling for Heinz Beans backstage at a Rolling Stones concert; it'll be Ms. Zoobie Zoo (okay, Zou Bisou Bisou) herself, with a camera.  I know--MT is not French Canadian by birth, but let's see what happens. (Hence the 1970s clip below.)
• Back to writing and grading. 

Can a blog have an identity crisis?

Dr. Crazy's recent posts about the changing nature of her blog and whether it has jumped the shark inspired a whole lot of people, bloggers and anons, to come out of the woodwork and say "No, it hasn't, and we're glad you're here."

In the comments, though, a lot of bloggers who've been doing it for a while, including Flavia, profgrrrl, Historiann, New Kid, Notorious PhD, and itsprobablyphdme added  that they'd had the same feeling (and so did I). Our lives have changed, and the reasons we started blogging have probably changed, too, so why are we still doing this, and for whom? Historiann noted that everyone hits a wall from time to time.

I wonder if blogs that have been around for a few years, including this one, are thinking about these issues even if the bloggers didn't mention it over at Dr. Crazy's. In addition to the ones mentioned above, what about you,  Roxie?  Dame Eleanor? Heu Mihi? Dr. Virago? Bardiac? ADM? nicoleandmaggie? Dr. Koshary? profacero? Sisyphus?

Horace and Inktopia have already closed up shop recently, citing similar reasons.

For me, this is partly due to irritation: I'm sick of being lectured by those for whom the issues of tech in education are shiny new ideas. They want to Instruct me in new things like Twitter or how to use computers in the classroom, when I wrote about what they were saying years ago.

I've thought about this a lot recently and have considered going the "lightly pseudonymous" route of Roxie or Historiann or possibly moving and blogging under my real name.

But then I'd have to find evidence for all the claims I make on here instead of relying on personal stories (like vacuuming the cat). I'd have to pretend that idiotic ideas are good ones until I can find data to the contrary.

I would miss reporting on the details of my little writing triumphs and frustrations. I would miss the voice that I have here, which is not my professional voice. And I would have to be responsible and stop snarking about things like "let's kill all the libraries."

So is there such a thing as a blog identity crisis? Your thoughts?

On lectures: "I do not think that word means what you think it means"

Over at Hacked Education, there's another familiar "new! revolutionary!" idea about how the consummate evil known as "the lecture" can be banished to its rightful place in the netherworld of teaching:

It’ll mean that the university classroom can be “flipped” – with lectures pre-recorded and assigned as homework. Koller, who’s been flipping her classroom since well before Khan Academy popularized the term, says that universities have been reluctant to add “active learning” opportunities at expense of covering “the curriculum” via lecture.

I feel like my own recorded lecture here, or maybe I've just been writing this blog too long. To recap:

(1) "reluctant to add active learning"--seriously? And who defines "active learning"?

(2) "flipping the classroom" by assigning students to listen to an hour of lecture before they come to class: does that really happen? Do they listen or do they blow it off and then have the instructor repeat everything in class?

(3) and "cover the curriculum"? "Coverage" is a shunned term at Northern Clime, and I think we have to put 25 cents in a swear jar every time we use it.

How the haters define a lecture: recording an hour of cr@p that is a waste of time for students to learn all at once, when they could spend 10 hours "discovering" the principles for themselves outside of class because they would of course put in the 10 hours, since all students put in 3 hours for every hour of class time, just as the Education Fairy has always said they do.

How I define a lecture: an interesting talk (not an hour but maybe 20 minutes) on the subject that is intensely interactive, with student hands shooting up because they have questions and want to know more  as you talk.

You tell a story that weaves together concepts in an effective way, and, judging by their faces and reactions, you know what to emphasize, what to repeat, and what to leave for another time.  You can lecture on the same subject, but you never give the same lecture. Recording it would not be the same, since you tailor the lecture to the students.

A lecture puts everyone on the same page and in a similar frame of mind for the class activities that follow it. It demands participation. It asks questions. It engages students.  And they hear each others' questions, for isn't that why we're meeting in a classroom in the first place?

Food for thought: Have you ever had a student evaluation say "more and more group work, please, but no lectures"?

To quote Inigo Montoya, "I do not think that word means what you think it means." One of us is wrong, and frankly, I don't care if the educrats think it's me.

Robot grading

The interwebs are in an uproar over the latest annual software competition for machine-scoring essays.

See, for example, Jonathan Rees's take on this, the column at Inside Higher Ed, or Marc Bousquet's column, which has a beautiful explanation of a lit review that I want to stencil on the hands of all students:

That literature review in many circumstances will be comprehensive rather than merely representative. It functions as a warrant of originality in both professional and funding decisions (“We spent $5-million to study changes in two proteins that no other cancer researcher has studied,” or “No one else has satisfactorily explained Melville’s obsession with whale genitalia”). It offers a kind of professional bona fides (“I know what I’m talking about”). It maps the contribution in relation to other scholars. It describes the kind of contribution being made by the author.

Typically actual academic writers attempt to partly resolve an active debate between others, or answer a question that hasn’t been asked yet, what I describe to my students as “addressing either a bright spot of conflict in the map of the discourse, or a blank spot that’s been under explored.”

Bousquet's larger point is that if we want meaningful writing, we need to give meaningful assignments that matter to the students and make them feel as though they're part of a larger discourse community (agreed!).

But the best point I saw was the essay (in the comments section at IHE) that the machine graded as a "6" (perfect score). It makes no sense, but its grammatical structures are correct, and it must have hit some algorithmic high points for vocabulary and use of proper nouns. Sample quotation: "Teaching assistants are paid an excessive amount of money. The average teaching assistant makes six times as much money as college presidents." (I can't wait for this to be picked up and asserted as fact by certain higher ed-bashing news networks, by the way.)

A few thoughts:

1. If drill-and-kill grammar software never taught students how to make subjects and verbs agree, will the canned responses that the essay software have any better luck in helping students to write better?

2. A central tenet of writing pedagogy over the past 20+ years has been that writing is not so much a way of writing down what you think as it is a way of finding out what you think, especially through multiple drafts. That's something that most writers would say is true, too. Will students have a chance to find out what they think if they can write nonsense sentences and get a 6?

3. Where's the grading software that is going to spend half an hour going over an essay with a student as you sit face to face at a desk or on Skype, helping the student to understand how to work through an argument, sharpen the analysis, or even write a clear topic sentence?

4. This is the scary part: Will students write to the software and make everything correct but not bother to think about what they're really saying, if an absence of thought and fact garners them as much credit as actual thinking and supported arguments?

The perfect educational circuit of the future: student signs up for a MOOC course, interacts with other students for points toward a badge, consumes podcast lectures, takes online quizzes, and writes a content-free research paper graded by essay software that gives it a perfect score.

Still not an academic post: random bullets of Mad Men

After a hardworking but very discouraging week, I just don't want to think about academics. Here instead are some observations on this season of Mad Men. If you haven't seen it--spoilers ahead. If you're looking for a more academic blog post--look away, look away.

• Many internet words have been spilled on the issue of Don's birthday as celebrated with Megan's sexy song versus Don's actual birthday, with the consensus being that Dick Whitman is six months older than Don Draper. Say what? In an earlier season, when Don goes to the doctor and promises to cut down on smoking, the doctor tells him that he looks pretty young for a 45-year-old man (the real Don Draper's age). It emerges later in the episode that Dick Whitman is actually 36, and in the Korea flashbacks, the actor playing the real DD was older than Jon Hamm/Dick Whitman. In this season, has Don/Dick settled on his own real age (40) but the real Don's month and day of birth?
• Not one but two lovely moments of name-forgetting and remembering: neither Don nor Megan can remember the name of Ken Cosgrove's wife, and when Ken calls her by name, Megan blurts out "Cynthia" a few seconds later. There's another moment, though: when everyone at the dinner party is talking about the UTexas shootings, someone says that the shooter's name was "Charles Whitmore." "Whitman," Don corrects him quietly, and given that that's his real name and we saw him kill someone in a fever dream last week, he should know.
• Here is a question of vital importance: at what point did Dick/Don the "whorechild" and his mother come to the Whitman household? Last night he alluded to being raised in a brothel, yet every time we saw a flashback, he was on the family farm.
• Did anyone else think that the monstrous maple entertainment center--"Seven feet long! Wilt Chamberlain could fit in there!" Pete says proudly--when put in the center of the frame looked exactly like a coffin? Poor Pete, entombed in suburbia.
• Pete cranks down on the water valve, thinking that tightening down on the pressure will cure the problem--until it sprays out of control. Only Don knows how much tension should be applied and how to fix natural forces like water effectively (and look great while doing it, as anything that caused him to shed that jacket would have). I think we have a Symbolic Objects winner, ladies and gentlemen.
• After seeing Don humiliate himself so thoroughly last season, it was nice to see Don the Superman reemerge not once but twice: fixing the sink and declining the services of the brothel. All this AND wearing the hideous jacket that Megan wants him to wear: he really is a changed man, at least temporarily.
• Show of hands: who else wants to hear some of Ken Cosgrove's science fiction, which sounds to my inexpert ears perfectly pitched to the kind of scifi being published in the mid-1960s? Who else felt like writing after seeing him propped up in bed writing after what's her name Cynthia had gone to sleep?
• Historiann has a post (Mitt Romney, or Don Draper?) with clips, and in them, Don Draper looks like a baby compared to how he looks now. The presidency doesn't age a person nearly as fast as being in advertising, it seems.

Anything else?

If I were a rich (wo)man

Nicole and Maggie have a good post that is wonderful food for fantasy if you're tired of thinking about academe: What would you do if you didn't have to have a job?

I think I would be like the old joke about farmers:

Man from the state lottery to a farmer in the field: "You've just won a million dollars!  What are you going to do now?"
Farmer takes off his hat, scratches his head, and looks around the field: "Just keep farming till it's gone, I guess."

What I probably wouldn't do: buy a new house, a new car, or a trip to Disney World.

What would I do?

1. Pay off debts of all kinds.  Give some money to charity.
2. Buy myself out of teaching so that I can spend more time writing. I love to teach, but I could use a sabbatical.
3. Hire a research assistant.
4. Do all the travel I want to do. Go to archives. Never fill out another expense report again.
5. Get a 4G network plan for the iPad.
6. Travel somewhere that is not related to visiting family, going to conferences, or research. You know, like a vacation. I hear that people do that sometimes, but all my travel has been related to one of the above. First up: London.
7. And build a writing house.

Or, if I'm really rich: endow the Undine Chair of Spectacular Knowledge and make myself the first recipient. Do you really think that any university would refuse such an offer if enough cash were dangled before it?

I don't think I'd quit my job, but as the Undine Chair of Spectacular Knowledge, I'd be able to do more of what I love to do.

What would you do?

The Venn diagram of student musical knowledge

Profacero's post about "You Are My Sunshine"  made me think about "traditional American songs"--you know, the kind you learn in elementary school or through Wee Sing or maybe from your family.  

I asked my students about this the other day. Did they have to learn songs like "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean" and "The Erie Canal" and "Sweet Betsy from Pike" and "The Yellow Rose of Texas"? How about "America, the Beautiful" and all its verses, including the amazingly myopic verse about "Thine alabaster cities gleam/Undimmed by human tears"? Or Woody Guthrie's smart answer to it, "This Land is Your Land?" Or, yes, "Dixie," since that came up in a work we were reading? 

A few did, and most didn't.  Songs they know: "Amazing Grace" and maybe "This Land is Your Land."  Songs they don't: apparently a lot of the above, though a few knew them. 

It doesn't really matter, of course, although it's helpful if these songs come up in what we're reading. Mostly I'm just curious. I know a lot of old songs, including a few that my family sang that I've never heard anywhere else, so I don't expect them to know what I know. 

And they know a lot that I don't know. They all have different musical backgrounds, different interests, different kinds of expertise, some of which is a lot more advanced and useful than mine. 

I'd like someone to do one of those questionnaires about this, the kind that they do at the beginning of every school year--you know, the one that says that for first year students, vampire movie sequels have always been the hottest thing at the box office, or that they are too young to remember 9/11.

Sometimes I feel like an explorer trying to map out what they know so I can then find those intersecting points with what I know and make a connection or get them to see an allusion. It's a Venn diagram of what I can refer to in class with a reasonable expectation of being understood. 

#dayofhighered

Inside Higher Ed tells me that today is a #dayofhighered, which seems to mean writing a post about what we do all day, given that highly paid corporate types think we are all slackers.

Well, let's see. It varies from day to day, but it goes something like this:

Teaching day:
Get up at 5-6 a.m., get ready for work, and drive to campus. Think about current project and vow to write ideas down when you get to campus.
Get to campus. Fail to write down ideas.
Answer email throughout the day.
Prep class, meet with students, teach.
Schedule and plan committee meetings.
Prep some more.
12:00 Lunch at desk.
Teach some more (and repeat).
Read student drafts and write responses.
Attend committee meetings.
Answer email.
Look at Twitter. Become frantic wondering how all these people find time to write given that they are at conferences every week and tweeting every 20 minutes.
Attend presentation.
Fill out questionnaires and other random paperwork required by the administration.
Home at 7-8 p.m. Talk with family.
After that: Write if possible. Read books for class unless I fall asleep first.

Non-teaching day:
Get up at 5-6 a.m. Put on sweats and go to desk after breakfast.
Work on reading and writing.
Let cats in. Let cats out.
Write committee reports.
Let cats in. Let cats out.
Answer email.
12:00 lunch
Read books and articles for class.
Review manuscripts or grade papers.
Try to get out of the house while it is still daylight for a run/walk.
Cook dinner. Convince cats that they are not getting any part of the fish that you are cooking.
Talk to family.
After that: Write for a while when "second wind" kicks in at after 9 p.m., if it does, or read for class.
Sleep.

Weekend days: as above, with no teaching and lots of excitement along the lines of grocery shopping and picking up dry cleaning.

I'll bet your days are just as exciting, fellow slackers.

Is it education or is it training?

Dean Dad has a post up about an article at CHE about New Charter University, which offers courses on a new model. The model is sort of like an all-you-can-eat buffet crossed with a concierge service for doctors: all the courses you want to take for the low, low introductory price of $199 a month--or free, actually:

Anyone can create an account and start working through its self-paced online courses free of charge. Their progress gets recorded. If they decide to pay up and enroll, they get access to an adviser (who helps navigate the university) and course specialists (who can discuss the material). They also get to take proctored online tests for course credit.

As a business model for a business, this is pretty familiar to us all. Would it work for education?

My take is that it would work for training, which is what this really seems to be. To take one example of how this could work: say you want to work at a restaurant. Okay, you need to pass the state health test for food servers. You go online, read the manual about washing your hands and keeping hot foods hot, take the test, and then you are certified. You have been trained, but have you been educated?

This model offers the possibility of "course specialists who can discuss the material," but is that like a classroom discussion in which multiple viewpoints are brought out and examined, with teachers helping to guide the discussion? Or is it more like a student help tutorial, as in "I can't figure out problem #5; can you help me with that"?

I have only limited experience with any sort of model like this: A very long time ago, I was asked to grade an exam in my subject area for a student who had studied on her own but wanted to receive credit, which this exam would give. I don't remember the particulars, but it was a pass/fail essay exam arrangement and she would then be able to go on to later courses in a sequence, or something like that. I said "sure" (which you say a lot as an adjunct) and read the exams.

While they showed factual familiarity with the subject matter, enough familiarity that she would pass, there was not one idea in there that showed original thought or engagement with what she had studied. She was certainly smart enough, but what was lacking is what I'd call "leavening"--the kind of working through or chemical reaction needed to make flour rise, or the kind of nuanced thought that she could have learned by participating in class discussions under a live teacher. She got what she wanted, as did the administration, but I felt a little as though she'd been cheated out of an experience that could have done so much more for her--an experience that she didn't even know she had missed.

Reading WaPo: pull up a chair and have yourself a slice of outrageous misrepresentation

The article in the Washington Post: where to begin?

My first thought was "Is this WaPo or the Wall Street Journal, which regularly hates on higher education?"

Yes, the author has a lot of fancy pants titles and a big investment portfolio, but anybody who makes as many incorrect assertions and factual errors as he does deserves the title of being--well, let's say "misinformed."

• Those salaries? Not at my university, at least not in the humanities. Not even close.
• What is with the fallacious argument that professors "only" work when they are standing in front of a class? Has this person ever been a faculty member? As I've argued here before, that's like saying that a farmer only works for two weeks a year during harvest and has a cushy job the rest of the time.
• What's with the bait and switch about rising university costs being solely attributable to faculty salaries and rising compensation? WHAT rising compensation? We haven't had raises in years, and a lot of states have made faculty take furloughs.
• What about the part that athletics, administration, fancy new gyms, and the rest have played in rising costs, or the gutting of public universities, some of which are down some 60% in the amount of funding they get from the state?
• What about the rising prices for the various journal databases that we have to use to produce the research that will get us tenured, promoted, and possibly a raise, if there are ever raises again?
• This wouldn't have anything to do with deflecting attention from any company that the Washington Post owns, would it?

I have the feeling that the red flag of higher education bashing is once again being waved to deflect attention from the real issues: defunding of universities, rampant adjunctification and exploitation of the same, and the motives of extremely well-paid corporate types with academic connections who make fallacious arguments when they ought to know better.

Writing maxims and morals examined

If you are tired of posts about writing: click away, nothing to see here.

Some of these are maxims that I've tried to follow, but recently I had to throw them overboard because I wasn't getting any writing done.

1. Maxim: Write every day and get the words down. You can always edit them later.

Did it work? Sort of. I tried the Seinfeld chain, Pomodoro, and everything else that could make me write. I did write, and occasionally my brain even engaged. But I've found that there was no depth to the writing and that I had to rewrite every word, sometimes many times, before the sense of thing would emerge. I was trying for quantity, when what I needed was quality.

Moral: Write in haste and edit at leisure.

2. Maxim: Try writing on a bare screen (like 750words.com, notes in Evernote, etc.) and you'll have more ideas without the distractions of the other text.

Did it work? For some things, yes. But I wound up with a lot of disconnected passages that I had to rewrite, and I lost the sense of the manuscript as a whole. I was writing generalizations, not arguments.

Moral: That manuscript is not going away. Sooner or later you're going to have to look at it, so you might as well face it.

3. Maxim: Stop for the day when you know what you'll write the next day (the Hemingway technique). In this way you'll always have something to start with the next morning.

Did it work? Of all these techniques, this is the one that went the most disastrously wrong. Several days ago I stayed up writing and wrote down all the things I needed to do next, convinced I would get up and get at it the next morning. Need I tell you that I did not do this and that I couldn't face the writing for five days after that? And that the ideas that were once so fresh are now something I need to go back and reconstruct?

Moral: If you feel like writing, keep doing it. You can always sleep, but you can't always write.

4. Writing is a job, just like grading papers and prepping for class. Give yourself a couple of hours (or 20 minutes, or half an hour) each day and then quit.

Did it work? I said this to myself this morning in my best Boice/Silva vein, and I just didn't want to stop. My students aren't getting their papers back tomorrow, either.

Moral: Writing is exciting. It's discovery. If you're feeling that way about writing, the other stuff will get done in its own time.

Udemy and MOOCs: is this the future?

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries has been posting a lot lately about her participation in The Faculty Project, which seems to be part of Udemy.com, an online space for MOOCs (massive open online courses). I've been intrigued by this, since in addition to hating plagiarism, corruption in sports, online for-profit education, and Big Pharma, she's been as scathing about the use of technology in the classroom as she is about poor writing.

A lot of the courses at Udemy are how-to and technical courses that teach students how to program in Python, create games for the iPad, and so on. Soltan's course is on interpreting poetry, and since she analyzes a lot of poetry at University Diaries, this is a natural extension.

I keep seeing that the MOOC is the future of the university, if there IS a future for the university.

The New York Times tells me so, and who am I to argue with the New York Times?

Still, I'm curious:

• If you hate the idea of PowerPoint or technology in the classroom and also hate online courses, why would you participate in this?
• Is Udemy and its system of MOOCs something Soltan sees as a way to counter for-profit online education?
• Do the "best Professors from the world's leading Universities" (tm) get paid for participating in these, and do they have any responsibilities beyond recording lectures?
• Assessment right now is by computer-graded tests, and discussions are held in forums; the idea, according to the New York Times, is to get everyone to an "A+" level. How might this work in the humanities?
• When might Udemy decide that Udemy graduates or badgeholders who've taken a MOOC course would be "the best Professors from the world's leading Universities" and worthy to record courses, since the MOOC courses will not bear the name or logo of the university from which the current "best Professors" hail?
• Or are we in a beehive situation, where a select few prerecord wisdom for the MOOC worker bees and the bees can't hope to move from wisdom-ingesting to wisdom-dispensing?

Updated to add: Margaret Soltan graciously answers all these questions and more over at Inside Higher Ed: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-diaries/mooc-synthesizer-iii#dsq-form-area

More on creativity

A little Monday morning inspiration: The Wall Street Journal has a long article by Jonah Lehrer about creativity this week. A few snippets:

• Flashes of insight are real flashes: "Research led by Mark Beeman and John Kounios has identified where that flash probably came from. In the seconds before the insight appears, a brain area called the superior anterior temporal gyrus (aSTG) exhibits a sharp spike in activity. This region, located on the surface of the right hemisphere, excels at drawing together distantly related information, which is precisely what's needed when working on a hard creative problem."
• What helps? Surprisingly, comedy and alcohol: "And this is why relaxation helps: It isn't until we're soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we're able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain's right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those associations are often the source of the answer."
• Unfortunately, you need to do the slogging kind of work before that kind of creativity can descend: "There is nothing fun about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat and failure. It's the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. Nietzsche referred to this as the 'rejecting process,' noting that while creators like to brag about their big epiphanies, their everyday reality was much less romantic. 'All great artists and thinkers are great workers,' he wrote."
• When should we work and when should we take a shower or go for a walk? "The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions "feelings of knowing," and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don't require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we're getting "warmer" or not, without knowing the solution."
• Get more information. "Another kind of creative problem, though, is when you don't have the right kind of raw material kicking around in your head. If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed."

Update: This letter ("Persist"), via Notorious PhD, exactly describes the two kinds of creativity.

Update: If you haven't checked Dame Eleanor's writing inspiration posts yet, you should!

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means to me

An open letter to the interwebs, not to individuals. For the record, nobody said what's exactly in quotation marks, but it's an impression I've been getting.

Let me start with a premise: one of the fundamental principles of the humanities is that we can agree to disagree or even argue, but that we do so with a respect for the other person's expertise or body of knowledge. If we don't think the other person has much knowledge, we still try to understand his or her perspective and see it as an individual issue, not an indictment of the disciplinary specialty as a whole. That's one way that humanistic discourse differs from the mud-slinging invective that passes for political discourse in this country.

But.

If you tell me that you don't think it's important that students read, or that some of us teach, what might loosely be translated as "old s@#$% by a bunch of dead people" and that students ought to be held accountable only for what they can find and interrogate and theorize on YouTube and Facebook, I might have a problem with that.

If you tell me that exploring and learning about books from the 20th-century and back into the past is basically stick-a-fork-in-it done, and that learning about history and culture is passe, I might have a problem with that. I suspect that classics, medievalist, and early modernist scholars would have an even bigger problem with it.

Why can't we do both?

The thing is, there's space for all kinds of work in this discipline--YouTube and "old S@#$%," a.k.a. literature--so why would you say or imply that one has to replace the other? I respect what you do enough to know that there are many things about it that I don't know. We all have to assume this, or we could never have a functional discipline, let alone functional departments within a discipline. So can't you believe that there is some value in the "old S@#$%"--that is, show it some respect?

Dear interwebs, I may have misunderstood the import of what you were saying, and if so, I apologize. But do think about what I've said.

Placeholder post

Not a real post; just stopping by to say the tasks that shall not be named are eating me (or my time) alive right now but that I will post something soon.

Brain news: proving the attention span analogy

Time, which does think Americans are just stupid (whereas some politicos in this country are betting on the fact that we are stupid and proud of it), nevertheless proves my point about the Skinner box of email in this week's issue. Some fact nuggets from "Getting to No: The Science of Building Willpower":

• Kelly McGonigal: "Short bursts of dopamine that come from things like e-mail make it hard to focus on long-term goals."
• Addiction specialists doing brain scans of gamblers and non-gamblers found out that when there's a "near miss" on the slot machine screen (i.e., two cherries on one line and one cherry on the line down), non-gamblers' brains are all "eh, who cares" and see it as a loss, whereas gamblers' brains are on fire with "SO close!" and see it as a win.
• Replacing a habit is possible if you maintain the same trigger and reward system. When you get home from work, set your running shoes beside the door and go for a run instead of sitting on the couch. You can then reward yourself with tv or whatever. Soon you will not want to sit down and will totally want to run because of the reward, or so they say.
• Instead of getting up, thinking about the day's activities, racing out the door, and reading the always-depressing news online, we should "lie awake in bed, following our thoughts where they lead (with a pen and paper nearby to jot down any evanescent inspirations). We'd stand a little longer in the warm water of the shower . . . take some deep breaths" and drink some coffee, because "Caffeine increases the brain's level of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that promotes feelings of motivation and reward when we hit on a great idea."
• This bullet is for Sisyphus, who longed for M & M's: turns out your brain "needs a lot of glucose" and that test subjects who drank sugary sodas were able to defer rewards better than this who drank artificially sweetened ones, presumably since the glucose gave the test subjects better wherewithal to plan and use their willpower.
• The halo effect--when you go to the gym and figure, "aw, I deserve these fries after that workout"--is a real brain feature, as is the "what-the-hell" effect when you eat a little ice cream and decide that as long as you've broken a diet, you might as well eat the whole thing. I think this would apply to "I haven't written yet today, so it's a total loss and I might as well give up and not look at my work from yesterday."

In other brain-related news:

• Statins, which were recently touted by Big Pharma as something that ought to be given to everyone, regardless of age or heart condition, as a preventive measure are now found to lead to memory loss and confusion as well as diabetes and well-known side effects such as leg pains.
• Anticholinergic drugs, many of which are given to the elderly, may "cloud the brain": "The heart drug digoxin, the blood thinner warfarin, the painkiller codeine and prednisone are considered mild anticholinergics. Those with the most severe effects include Paxil, Benadryl, a drug for overactive bladder called oxybutynin, and the schizophrenia drug clozapine." Sometimes it's absolutely necessary for people to take these, but at the very least, say the authors, those taking these drugs should discuss the possible effects with their doctors.

The writing-related takeaway? Give your brain some rest, a warm shower, and some time to relax and be creative, preferably with caffeine.

Analogies

1. The Skinner box of the present is email. You press the bar, and out pops a new message; if it doesn't, you press it again, and again, and again. Doesn't matter if you don't want to act on the messages; the process is addicting. If you make a pact with yourself not to check email for a couple of days (a weekend or whatever), the first hour is hard, and the rest are easy. Unless I'm expecting to hear from the Nobel Prize committee-and I understand that they call you rather than emailing--there's nothing that can't wait for a while.

If you do walk away from the Skinner box for a while, you will become calmer and your concentration will be better.

If you walk away and only check email after a day or two, you will be surprised at how fast you can respond to everything. You'll reply and move on rather than looking at it, thinking about a message, signing out, logging in, thinking about it, etc. before replying.

If you have colleagues who like to send you reports or action items late on Friday, which (ahem!) might tend to make you feel martyred, as in "why should I spend my weekend responding to you?" pay attention next time to when Friday colleague gets back to you if you do respond over the weekend; 95% of the time it isn't till Monday, even if you spend Saturday in crafting your response. A slow learner, I finally realized that I don't have to respond until Monday, either. I also realized that Friday colleague doesn't necessarily expect me to respond over the weekend. What can I tell you? I'm a slow learner.

2. What you can do with this non-Skinner box time is write, especially once you realize that the world will still turn on its axis and that your colleagues are not necessarily waiting for you to respond.

3. Not to mix a metaphor, but the blogosphere is the cookie or the M & M that awaits you if you get your writing done. If you read blogs before your writing is done, they will not taste the same, because you will be consuming them with guilt sauce rather than "job well done!" sauce.

Writing inspiration link love

Some recent great posts that will definitely inspire you to write:

• The Grumpies (nicoleandmaggie) have a great post about hacking productivity, this time by writing a syllabus for yourself instead of your class.


• Tenured Radical, in another great post, says you can write during the semester, if you really want to, and I'm taking her advice to heart.
• Dame Eleanor Hull, in addition to convening a writing group, is posting fabulous writing inspiration every day to keep us going.
  
• Jonathan (the Prose Doctor) suggests switching topics if you're on a Seinfeld chain to avoid burnout.

If you'd like to clear your brain of writing and read a thought-provoking post on changing attitudes toward reproductive health, there's a great one (with comments) over at Historiann's.

Random bullets of writing

The number of days that you go without actually writing something on your project equals the number of hours (one hour for each skipped day) that it will take you to actually write something once you sit down to do it. Five days = five hours at the desk before my brain really engages.

Rewriting and even retyping what you have written is a good way to prime the pump for writing. You retype your own words, and the ideas start to change them as you write.

You might be in the midst of a writing project if every time someone gets introduced on Colbert, The Daily Show, or Fresh Air as "the author of a new book on X," you see it as a dog whistle-level reproach ("why is his book finished and mine not?") and inspiration ("someday that will be me, except without the fame").

Same conversation, many voices

Profgrrrl has a good post up about being no longer junior faculty technically but not feeling like "senior" faculty exactly, either. She's moving smoothly toward full but right now she isn't there: "And so I try to become both comfortable with being nothing or being in-between while motivating myself to move forward."

There's another conversation that people in this position sometimes have (and yes, I am keeping this hypothetical for now). It goes something like this:

Powers that Be: "Yay, you're an associate! How would you like to commit to an extended term of service on this project? It will look good when you go up for full."

You: "Sure! I'm on it!"

Time passes.

Powers that Be: "You did a great job with that term of service! How would you like to step in and do this one?"

You: "Will it help me with promotion?"

Powers that Be: "Maybe, but the thing is, we really, really need you to do it for the good of the department/college/university."

You: "Okay. It could be good experience."

Time passes.

Powers that Be: "How would you like to do this term of service/admin? You'd really be good at it."

You: "Do you think this will be helpful for promotion?"

Powers that Be: "We value research when we put someone up for promotion. That's just logical."

You: "No, I don't think so."

Time passes.

Powers that Be: "We'd like you to ---"

You: "I'm flattered and honored, but no. I'm working on my research."

As the chauffeur in Downton Abbey observes, "flattered is a word that posh people use when they're getting ready to say no," and I certainly want to be posh. But I am flattered, too, since PTB wouldn't ask if they didn't think I could do it.

But what's the dividing line here? You still need to do service. If you say no, you risk being seen as less competent than those who can get their research done and still do all the service stuff, although to be honest these people are more heard about than seen, like Bigfoot.

Yet it is crystal clear that with the best intentions in the world, and meaning no malice at all, the Powers that Be could flatter you into staying at one level forever instead of moving up to that big open meadow in the sky, where all the full professors do cool stuff.

[Edited to add: I swear this is my last post complaining about service. I want to talk about more exciting things, I promise!]

Harvard's new and startling teaching insights on teaching

Brace yourselves. At The Chronicle, "Harvard Seeks to Jolt University Teaching" is so revolutionary that you might fall off your chairs.

Insights:

"Faculty would need to provide timely and specific feedback, and move beyond lectures in which students can sit passively receiving information."

"The traditional lecture also fails at other educational goals: prodding students to make meaning from what they learn, to ask questions, extract knowledge, and apply it in a new context."

"Writing is often an effective pedagogical tool, too."

"Taking a test on something is a very effective way to learn about it."

Are you shocked and surprised yet?

Out in the educational blogosphere, we've been over (and over and over) these ideas, especially the whole "let's get rid of the lecture" idea that crops up as a brand spanking new insight every year or so. (And yet we're encouraged to do podcasts of our classes, which means capturing a lecture through visual or audio means.)

I'm of two minds about this article. On one hand, it's good that there's a conversation going on about effective teaching methods, especially in rescuing the much-maligned test as a teaching tool from the current disdain for it. On the other hand, there is not one single idea in the whole article that hasn't been discussed repeatedly and for years in other venues, which makes me think that nothing has changed.

Random bullets of diversion for those on a break

When cats sit on your desk and then stare fixedly behind you at a spot on the wall, and you look, and there's nothing there, are they saying to themselves "Ha! Made you look"?

Is there any phrase more ridiculous than "failure is not an option"? Failure is ALWAYS an option, even if no one likes to think so, and the imminent possibility of failure is likely to be the reason why someone says "failure is not an option" in the first place. What people mean is "we will try very hard not to fail." What's so difficult about saying that?

When caught behind a slow-moving bus, car, or 18-wheeler on a two-lane road, do you spend several minutes silently willing them to turn off at the next exit and give a mental "Yessss!!!" and fist pump if they do?

Do you think that your mental energy caused them to turn off? Discuss.

If you have to complete some service-related writing before your own writing, because otherwise the service writing will nag at you and break your concentration, do you feel pretty good, as though you accomplished something, when you finish the service writing?

On writing: stars and zeroes

I started out this month with such hope. I would Write! Every! Day! and give myself stars for the days that I wrote, a la jo(e)'s stars for self-care and Jonathan's "Seinfeld Chain" of writing.

This was supposed to have been a service-light semester for me, and it has instead been a service tsunami. Thus when I found myself having to leave the house at 5:30 a.m. for a campus meeting and not returning until after 8 that night, the writing just didn't happen. I just couldn't do it. My calendar for the week looks like a chain bracelet: 0 0 0 0 0. I read and thought about the writing every day; I just didn't generate any new words.

But it struck me today that this is the beginning of a whole new week, and a whole new chance for stars. That's the way to think about each week, right?

Adjunct faculty: steps in the right direction

Warning: heavy linkage ahead.

Dean Dad calls attention to Josh Boldt's post and a crowd-sourced Google spreadsheet of per-course payment at a number of institutions. The numbers might surprise anyone who hasn't worked as an adjunct. They sure didn't surprise me, because I have.

They would certainly surprise that Columbia philosophy professor (can't recall his name) who a few years ago caused an uproar by helpfully saying that if adjuncts didn't like getting paid ONLY $6-7,000 per course, why, they ought to go out and get themselves a tenure-track job. He also suggested that maybe we should just let students major in whatever is this year's trend ("water" was one of the disciplines, as I recall). Well, it was better than this, but you get the idea.

Anyway. This is part of MLA President Michael Berube's call for real change in treatment and pay for the new faculty majority: "Adjunct, contingent faculty members now make up over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities." The MLA has talked about this for a long time, including in its 2009 report, but there seems to be a new seriousness and urgency about it, as there should be; you can read more at New Faculty Majority. (For the record, the places I've taught have really worked hard to ensure long-term contracts, health benefits, and other issues of fairness for contingent faculty.) Somehow this new energy on the part of the MLA makes me think, or hope, that these are steps in the right direction.

The debate seems to have spilled over into the "I've got tenure--how depressing" thread over at the Chronicle, too. As I've said before, "post-tenure depression" frankly baffles me, but then, everyone has different stress or depression points. The comments over at the Chronicle break down into two categories: (1) "I felt the same way, too" or (2) "You have a full-time job! How DARE you complain?" [Note: Dr. Virago has a good take on this in the comments.]

At the Chronicle: Good Deeds That Are Most Punished, Part 1

David Perlmutter's article "Good Deeds That Are Most Punished, Part 1" over at the Chronicle will have, I suspect, more parts than the History Channel's endless repetitions of the multipart series The World at War. (Maybe it only seems as though listening to Lawrence Olivier's narration of the series takes more time to watch than the war itself.)

Back to Perlmutter. Here's a taste:

What if everyone just looked out for No. 1? The entire promotion-and-tenure system—which depends on altruistic volunteerism—would collapse. Nevertheless, there are many situations where taking too much time, trying too hard to do good, or doing good for the wrong reasons or for the wrong person can lead to career trouble, or worse.

Absolutely true. Spending lavish amounts of time on teaching is a good way not to get tenured, or, if you're tenured, not promoted.

"Good deeds most punished" goes for service, too. If you're organized and at all good at service, like Dr. Crazy, your reward is . . . MORE service heaped on you, which makes less time for research. If you're disorganized, not terribly present, or just difficult to work with, your punishment is . . . LESS service and more time to write.*

Come promotion time, guess who gets rewarded? The one who served on committees, compiled assessment data, wrote reports, killed a writing day to watch someone's presentation, and organized and ran meetings? Or the "no service, no thanks" faculty member who did none of these things and spent the time on research?

I'll bet that took a long time to figure out.

I'm thinking back to profgrrrl's great advice earlier this year: she said that, just we're advised to do on airplanes, we should put on our own oxygen masks first before assisting others. If you don't take care of what matters to you first, whether in scholarship or in your personal life, the rest of your time is going to be eaten up by others' priorities, and nobody is well served in that way.

It's worth remembering, even on 12-hour days when the first minute you have to think about your own work may be during the 13th hour.

*My colleagues aren't like this, but still.

Excitement and annoyance

Excitement:

• I like what I'm writing now. I find it interesting, so interesting that my patient family has to listen to me talk about it. It's a different approach to an already-published piece that I'm fitting into this chapter.
• Even after all the committee work, memo-writing, teaching prep, and so on I look forward to getting back to this piece. I want to see where it leads!

Annoyance:

• Oh, never mind. Let me just be excited about my writing!

"Louder!"

In preparing for the pointless exercise that is the annual performance review, I discovered something in the evaluations that I'd never seen before: several students in one class commented that they couldn't hear me.

I'm plenty loud, and no one has ever said that before in all my years of teaching. "Grades too hard"--yes. "To much writting" with exactly that spelling--oh, yes indeed. Never "too quiet," though.

What happened? I think it was a combination of the bigger-than-usual class and a large classroom with lots of external noise. I couldn't hear it most of the time, but it must have been louder toward the back of the class.

Here's the thing: not one person over the course of 16 weeks indicated that they couldn't hear me. Not one. I didn't even get "could you repeat the question?" when I called on people in the back of the room, or maybe I did but chalked it up to their inattention rather than my voice volume. I feel bad that they couldn't hear me; I could have done something about it if I'd known.

Why didn't they speak up? It might be that those who couldn't hear checked out mentally (hey, I've done that, too), or that they figured they would pick up whatever it was from their classmates' comments. I think part of it, though, was that these Northern Clime students didn't want to ask me to speak up because it might be rude.

Now the story part: a long time ago, I went to an event at a school where the population was largely from a city famed for its directness in speaking up. (I'm not saying people there are not polite; I'm saying that they have the reputation of being very direct and don't suffer fools gladly.) It was graduation, and the speaker was extremely distinguished internationally. He was also elderly and soft spoken. After his first few words, I heard a voice bellow from the back of the hall.

"Louder!"

He looked confused and stumbled over the next few words. Then a few more people yelled the same thing: "Louder!"

This was back before members of Congress would heckle the president, you understand, when yelling in this way was seriously rude, so I was mortified. He couldn't speak up much more (and why was there no adequate microphone?), but the calls stopped after a while and he finished his speech.

What I thought when I read those evaluations is that I wished I had had one of those students from Direct Expression City in that class just once so someone would have told me to talk "louder."

A Service Catechism

Theory

Q: What is the purpose of service at the institutional and professional level?

A: To ensure the smooth functioning of all academic pursuits: tenure, promotion, hiring, curriculum, assessment, conferences, and the advancement of scholarship by professional organizations.

Q: What is the effect of service at the institutional and professional level?

A: To suck up time--entire days and associated brainpower--that should be devoted to writing.

Q: Can service be completed in chunks of time so that you can ignore importunate emails during your writing time?

A: Not necessarily.

Q: What are the rewards of service? (Choose all that apply.)

A: (1) Promotion, (2) tenure, (3) status in the field (4) the gratitude of your peers, and (5) the knowledge that you're helping and are not being a slacker.

Q: Why do you participate in service activities? (Choose all that apply.)

A: (1) Promotion, (2) tenure, (3) status in the field (4) the gratitude of your peers, (5) the knowledge that you're helping and are not being a slacker, and (6) I'm just a girl who can't say no.

Q: Whose fault is it if service obligations eat into your time? (Choose all that apply.)

A: (1) Those who ask you to do the service and (2) yours. You can't control (1) but you can control (2) a little bit by saying no to some things.

Application

Did I say no to something this week that would have hugely inconvenienced me and sucked up a lot of time and energy in order that someone else would have all the benefit of it?

Did I refuse to travel somewhere and destroy a writing day so that I could be an appreciative audience for something that was not necessary? (Hint: Killing a writing day so I can go sit in an audience somewhere is one of my least favorite parts of service responsibilities.)

Yes. Yes, I did.

Do you feel guilty about it?

Nope--not a bit.

Term Papers vs. Blogs and Cathy Davidson vs. the NYTimes

Over at HASTAC, Cathy Davidson has written a great defense of her assertion that term papers should be abolished in favor of blogs. Like a lot of great lines, it was provocative, good copy, and not what she actually said, apparently (hey, academic superstar celebrities need publicity, too!).

Matt Richtel at the NYTimes is having none of it, suggesting that unnamed "defenders of traditional writing" propose a "reductio ad absurdum: why not just bypass the blog, too, and move right on to 140 characters about Shermn’s Mrch?" which Davidson rightly says is unfair.

I'm all for student-written blogs. I've been using them in classes for 10 years, and I think their use has helped students' writing, something that real researchers of this like Andrea Lunsford have confirmed (see Davidson's piece). I agree with all she says about students writing more and being more engaged when they're writing something they're (1) passionate about and (2) writing for a broader audience than just the teacher, which is what a blog gives you. Davidson's argument is attractive, and, in fact, is well established in the last 30+ years of writing pedagogy. Remember Ken McCrorie's Telling Writing and his (I think) railing against the comically stultified prose he called "Engfish"?

I guess I just have one question: what does Davidson mean by a "term paper"? I wrote something called a "term paper" in high school, but that was back when we incised the characters in cuneiform onto wet clay. "Term paper" seems to be the new whipping boy of writing alongside its maligned cousin, the five-paragraph essay, but are these really assigned in the same deadening way that she describes?

I'd never assign a "term paper" of the kind that she vilifies, but I would and routinely do assign papers that require an argument, with a thesis and evidence from the text and external sources. Students ought to be able to construct an argument and support it, shouldn't they?--and if they shouldn't, then why does Davidson couch her post about the issue in exactly that form?

The thing is, if you are in any kind of job that requires writing at all, you have to learn to write in a whole lot of different forms, including resumes and cover letters (her examples). You learn to see the conventions of these forms by writing in them and by seeing that conventions differ but that some good qualities of writing remain across them all. Isn't that what we're trying to get our students to see?

Despite the dramatic contrasts in which it's being framed by Davidson and the media, I guess I don't see this as a blogs vs. papers issue. What's wrong with "blog post -> short reading of a text -> longer argument -> presentation -> another blog post"? Or some other combination? Writing is a continuum, not an either/or.

Your thoughts?

Random bullets of Friday

Until I can muster the brainpower for a post on Apple's education initiative, here are some random bullets.

• Blogspeak is already serving as a placeholder in what I'm writing. I just reread a section in which I said that a character "was in dire need of an ethics makeover," which, while true, doesn't exactly pass for scholarly prose these days--or does it?
• My resemblance to Jean-Luc Picard may end at our mutual fondness for Earl Grey tea, but I wish I had one power that he had: the one where you say "make it so" and some minion does it. I'm thinking especially of scheduling meetings, which even with online scheduling software where people put in their preferences is a process with far too many to-and-fro messages and far too much wasted mental energy. This includes the gentle reminders to those who refuse to put in their schedules but greet every announcement of a meeting with "I can't meet at that time!" If I were Jean-Luc, I would say "Schedule a meeting. Send the documents. Book the room. Make it so." and it would be done. Actually, I would just say "Schedule the meeting. Make it so" and the minion would intuit the rest, instead of my wasting two entire writing days on scheduling and meetings this week.
  
• Speaking of Apple, I recently joined the Cult of Steve after yet another Sony computer's hard drive bit the dust one year two years after purchase, apparently taking some programs with it. It would warn me that I ought to back things up to the external hard drive, since the hard drive was failing, and, when I tried, gave an error message equivalent to "Nuh-uh, can't back this up. Fail!" With Dropbox, I still have almost all of my documents, but the lost email files would sure be nice to have. On the plus side, I'm still using the speakers and subwoofer from a computer I bought 12 years and 3 computers ago, which work with Steve's creation just fine.
• In addition to my slow learner status re: the short life of planned-obsolescence Sony products and my vow never to buy another one, I had been introduced to the Cult of Steve by gateway drugs such as the iPad and iPhone. Now it seems normal to have to hunt for files and be frustrated (but less so every day) by the inscrutable workings of a machine run by Powerful Beings who purport to know better than I do where my pictures ought to be hidden. (I'm allowed to tag them; I just can't find them.) It's good training for dealing with bureaucracies, anyway.
  

On writing: Starting over after a hiatus

It may not be exactly "starting over," but the poor book ms., abandoned in the flurry of MLA and associated paper-writing, not to mention the holidays and the start of classes, must feel, well, neglected.

How to begin again? Here's the plan:

(1) Print it out. Reading on the screen just doesn't give me the same perspective, and I will recycle the paper, so yes, that's necessary.
(2) Read it--all of it--while resisting the temptation to fix things at the sentence level.
(3) Go back through the research journal (printed version) and see what I've forgotten or missed. Highlight those parts and put an X through what's already done.
(4) Assess the roughest parts of more or less finished chapters and list the improvements needed--and then leave them alone for now.
(5) Generate some actual new text on the chapters not yet started and rough in some sections on the half-finished chapters.
(6) Go back to the "write every day" plan, even if that means using 750words.com again, since that really did help to establish the habit.
(7) Rev up the Excel chart again, since that acts as a conscience in tabular form.

As part of this new plan, I also have two resolutions:
(1) I'm going to try to reserve the computer where I write for writing and class work, not reading distraction sites.
(2) I want to have a complete draft of my next conference paper done at least 3 weeks before the next conference.

Random Bullets of MLA 2012

• Seattle, a no-snow and nearly a no-coat-needed city. Also, Pike Place Market, restaurants, and for the fans, two Starbucks stores on every corner. Great choice, MLA planners!
• Free wireless in the conference room block, in the well-lighted convention center, in the Sheraton session rooms--a godsend. The password was still a mystery for a while: It seemed to be passed from person to person, or so someone told me, and when I arrived at one session all ready to tweet it, I couldn't get in because I hadn't thought to ask someone for the password.
• Better spirits all around. Last year was all about the grim job market, or so it seemed. There was a lot of optimism in the air this year: better job market, enthusiasm about digital humanities, well-attended alt-ac sessions. People looked hopeful, or maybe it was just all that Starbucks caffeine causing those smiling faces.
• Really good sessions and papers.
• Lots of iPads and laptops, including use by presenters.
• Good tech support for presenters: there was a try-out room, and the technicians came by to check whether the laptops would project before tech-using sessions.
• Saw Rosemary Feal from afar at the big events and learned that her name is pronounced Fay-AL.
• Learned that the Twitter feed is best read judiciously, since it induces "I should have been there" session envy regardless of how fantastic the session is that you attended.
• Some sessions were tweeted by multiple people, but other great sessions weren't tweeted at all. Am not sure whether the tweeters are organized in some way so that the tweeting is distributed among sessions or whether they're all just voluntarily tweeting from sessions they'd be attending anyway.
• When people sit at the twitter/laptop table set up in the back of a room, I keep expecting them to hold up signs at the end of each paper: 5.5, 5.9, 6.0.

The Peter Principle of Software Development

A quiz for software developers.

1. If a feature has proven to be especially useful to users in the past, you should

a) Get rid of it.

b) Rename it so that users will not know where to find it (Preview developers, I'm looking at you. Why transform "Save as" into Export? Why?)

c) Surround it with three new pointless "features" that no one would ever want to use.

2. A feature is simple to get to in an earlier version, requiring only two clicks of a mouse. The next version of the software should require how many clicks to access the same feature?

a) Three

b) Five

c) Five plus a Google search for where to find the feature

3. If a feature is accessible through a fast keystroke combination, what should you do in the next version?

a) Make it accessible only by drop-down menu accessed from a mouse, so that it takes longer

b) Make it accessible only with a mouse AND rename it

c) Make it accessible only via the mouse AND tell the user to go remap the keyboard or write a macro if she's so keen to use keystrokes. Keystrokes are for peasants.

4. Should you, under any circumstances, explain how to do things in the users' manual?

a) Hahahahahahah--what a comedian you are!

b) What users' manual? You mean the giant .pdf with lawyers' warnings that tell me not to use the laptop as a tray to carry hot coffee and not to put the mouse in my mouth--in six languages?

c) No. Users' manuals build community by forcing people to Google the problem and find out the answer on various tech forums.

5. If a user minimizes or shuts down some feature by mistake, causing it to vanish, how long should it remain invisible to the user?

a) Forever. If you didn't write down what the feature was called--hey, your loss. Learn to work without it. It builds character.

b) It depends on the feature. If it's one that the user might want to use, forever, but if it's some pointless frill like sharing your private information with Facebook, it should pop up again and again.

6. For website developers: when designing a site where users have to enter important information that counts for something, should you have pointless pop-ups asking the user to donate money/consider visiting another site/choose between two equally incomprehensible options before continuing?

a) yes

Anything else you'd like to add to the quiz?