Choose your own textbook

The New York Times has an article called "The Future of Reading" about an admittedly small trend in middle schools: students picking their own books to read instead of having teachers select the books. They don't all read the same book; they each choose a book, read it, blog about it, present the work to the class, and so on. The idea is to encourage kids to read, regardless of the content.

It's not all about student choice, though. If you read between the lines, it's clear that the class is assigned poems so that they can learn about symbolism, imagery, and so on; also, if the teacher believes that the student has chosen a book that's too far from literature (a Transformers comic, say), she'll recommend that the student move on to something more challenging for the next book. Students who don't choose more challenging books hear about it, although it's not clear if this has an effect on their grades.

I'm intrigued by this idea because, as the article notes, not everyone is able to connect with the classics chosen for the classroom. When I was in school, the principle seemed to be Great Authors' Books That Have No Sex in Them: Silas Marner but not Adam Bede, Death Comes for the Archbishop but not My Antonia, Ethan Frome but not The House of Mirth, and Julius Caesar but not Romeo and Juliet. Those pretty much bored everybody equally (sorry, but back then it was true), but more recently there've been attempts to break it up by gender. Depending on whether the current trend is "OMG! We are leaving behind the boyz" or "OMG! Why should we always read what boys want?" we get either male adolescent adventure or How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents. Considering the alternatives, the "choose your own book" idea sounds really great.

I'm wondering how this might work in a college classroom, or whether it could work there. (I'm not talking about grad seminars, where it could work very well.) We already give students some choices about what they read, but if students had as a common reading only the poems that were assigned in a survey course, for example, what would we do about discussion?

Could we have a choice of readings from a menu (which would sort of defeat the purpose)? Would you be able to refrain from assigning something that you know "teaches well" and really let the students have a voice?

If you were teaching a class in Chaucer or early American lit, would the students know enough coming into the class to choose their own readings? Do we have any responsibility to introduce students to certain works (the Wife of Bath's tale, for example)?

What would you tell the students who come up with variants of the following: "You're the expert, not me. What do you think we should be reading?"

What's going to happen when students who've had free-range reading through middle and high school get to college and see a book list?

As usual, I have questions. I don't have any answers.

Edupunk: "Classes? We don't need no stinkin' classes!"

Dean Dad has a good post about the Edupunk movement, which, once you get past the bad boy rhetoric of the people talking about it, is about taking free content--a course from M.I.T.'s Open Courseware here, an online lecture from Stanford there--and making your own university program out of it, the better to (1) tap into the insatiable desire for electronic content on the part of today's students and (2) bring down costs.

Here's the part that caught my attention: "While it has yet to get accreditation, the not-for-profit [Peer2Peer University] plans to offer bachelor's degrees in business and computer science using open courseware and volunteer faculty; fees would add up to about $4,000 for a full four-year degree."

Uh-huh. "Volunteer faculty." What's not to love about working for free? I'm waiting breathlessly to see if the M.I.T. faculty who put their courses online will also forgo their magnificent salaries to participate in this model. Of course faculty who have car payments, mortgage payments, and student loans with lenders notoriously uninterested in being told "sorry, I can't pay you--I'm working for free" will be a little skeptical about this model. Western Governors University has a model that's slightly above free: "For every 80 students, a PhD faculty member, certified in the discipline, serves as a full-time mentor."*

Let's skip over the salary issues and look at what actually counts: student learning.

It's possible that students, especially in technical fields, will be able to learn enough to pass the necessary tests. Can this happen in the humanities? I'd like to think that it's possible. Given truly motivated students, a lively online community conducted by wikis or discussion boards or blogs, and interaction with dedicated faculty, the model could work. Some online classes already use the "canned course" model in which everything is put together by a "master teacher" and delivered by someone who's paid to grade papers and deliver the course.

It seems to me that we (traditional faculty) already use a lot of online content in teaching our courses, but we put it together with a lot more of our own content in ways that create a coherent whole. We discuss the material with our classes. We answer questions. We respond to student writing, and we know when to encourage and when to push the student a little harder. We talk to them. They talk to each other. It's a community of learners. I have an investment in seeing that they learn what they need to learn and that there's a depth of understanding as well as of knowledge.

But if someone comes to you and says "I've put together these 56 sites and am ready to be tested in this for credit; I just need you to sign off on the fact that I know what I'm talking about," what's your answer going to be?

*To be fair, WGU isn't working on the same model as P2P, and having 80 students to mentor may work out to the usual courseload that someone in a trad university would carry.

Clearing the decks

It's the academic new year. Notorious Ph.D. has sent off her book manuscript, Bardiac now has a clean desk, Bittersweet Girl has cleaned her office and made discoveries, Dame Eleanor Hull has been excavating and throwing out old PMLA issues, Dr. Crazy is getting into the groove, Fretful Porpentine is outsmarting her smart classroom, Profgrrrrl is contemplating service and has a handy faculty retreat scoreboard, Lesboprof's planning orientation activities and contemplating being a full professor, Ink is feeling first-day stress, and Horace isn't feeling the usual excitement about the start of the new semester.

So it's time to buckle down here at Chez Undine, too. The MPF-Famous Author article has been sent, and I need to tear myself away from the curio cabinet of fascinating distractions (the Whatnot of Wasted Time) from which I procured that and get going on Major Project.

• The first step is saying no (as Historiann pointed out) to service requests. Others in my position are not showing up on campus, and they're not making excuses for it, either.
  
• Saying no includes some other service scholarship requests, including requests for book reviews and maybe some manuscript reviews. I have two new mantras for this: "I can buy the book. I can't buy the time that I spend reviewing it" is one. The second is "Would you rather be reviewing this manuscript for the press or getting your own sent out?"
  
• The second step is to stop clearing the decks literally (cleaning my desk) and to start doing this metaphorically, by getting to work on the project. When I clean, I break down the task into smaller pieces so that it seems manageable and I'm not overwhelmed. I need to do the same for the project.
• The third step is to stop thinking that this is an endless summer just because I'm not showing up at class with a syllabus in my hand on Monday at 8 a.m.

My desk is cleared, and so, in a manner of speaking, are my decks. Time to sail, I think.

They're playing songs of school . . .

They're playing songs of school . . .
. . . but not for me, because my being on sabbatical.

Or are they?

1. "Hi. I know you're on sabbatical, but we're having this all-day meeting where we'd really like your input because you had so much to do with this project last year."

2. "Could you come in and meet with these students? It'd be great if you could. Of course, you're on sabbatical, but I think it's important."

After reading about faculty shirkers over at Historiann's, I felt guilty, even though I'm not one.

There are lines between really shirking, being perceived as shirking, protecting your time, and learning to say no (one of the Lessons for Girls). On the "perceived as being shirking" front, you can be on campus a lot, but if you don't live close by, you hear things like this:

"You're on campus today?" (Looks like it, doesn't it?)

"Hope you didn't come all the way to campus just for this one meeting." (Yes, I did.)

"I didn't expect to see you here." (Why not? Have I missed one of these meetings/gatherings yet?)

So I said yes to #2. And I found that the only excuse for not doing #1 was to say, truthfully, that I had already arranged to meet with a student elsewhere.

But if this is going to be a real leave with real work accomplished, I have to let the guilt go and learn to say "I can't"--not "I won't," but "I can't." There's a difference.

Edited because every blog post would be better with a soundtrack.

Working as procrastination

It just hit me today that working on this essay about MPF is unfortunately a really stellar means of procrastination.

While I keep reading and looking things up, trying to find out obscure details of an obscure person's life, I keep catching sight of Major Project sitting in the corner.

I'm obsessing about whether MPF ate corn flakes or Cheerios, and in the meantime Major Project is waving at me.

"Helloooo--you there! Look over here! Remember me?"

I catch that set of books out of the corner of my eye, the way a dog looks sideways when it knows it's done something wrong. I can't answer back, because what could I say? "Sorry, but I'm trying to find out whether MPF would have met another equally obscure figure at a party on November 30 of that important year."

I guess there's only one way out of this dilemma: dialing the level of detail back a notch and going not around but through the essay on MPF. In the meantime, Major Project is going to have to wait, but she's looking kind of impatient to me.

Seek and hide

Still working on the puzzle. The published edition of the selected letters of Famous Author has one letter to MPF, but in keeping with some principle entirely unrelated to my convenience or that of other researchers, declines to give the collection name, let alone box or folder numbers, for that letter. The notes indicate only that the letter is in Well-Known Research Library.

Well-Known Research Library's finding aid for the collection on Famous Author has no record of the letter, or indeed of any letters or information relating to MPF under any of his names. WKRL has nothing on MPF in any collection, finding aid, or reference in the catalogue.

The letter's there, along with (probably) others to MPF, but is it really there if it can't be found? If a tree falls in the forest, and no one sees it fall--oh, never mind.

I guess it's time to write to WKRL, and I'm dreading it a little because the research librarians I've written to or had contact with in the past have primarily been of two types: fantastically helpful or eager to snub researchers. Most have been the former, but as someone wrote recently in a blog post about feeling as though she's finally arrived because famously snooty librarian deigned to answer a question for her, that's not a given.

Crowdsourcing in peer review

Michele's comment in response to the crowdsourcing post made me think again about Kathleen Fitzpatrick's post at Planned Obsolescence on "The Cost of Peer Review." The whole post is worthwhile, but here's the essence of it:

In that case, we’d be much better served, I believe, by eliminating pre-publication peer review. Perhaps the journal’s editorial staff reads everything quickly to be sure it’s in the most basic sense appropriate for the venue (i.e., written in the right language, about a subject in the field, not manifestly insane), but then everything that gets past that most minimal threshold gets made available to readers — and the readers then do the peer review, post-publication.

This is an attractive idea in some ways, but I can also see some problems with it.

Especially in the sciences, wouldn't there be a risk of factionalism--that is, supporters of the author giving the article a thumbs-up and those opposed to his or her theories a thumbs-down? I say "the sciences" because I understand that STEM disciplines really place a lot of weight on numbers of citations as well as grants as indicators of professional development.

Print publications have only so much space, a limitation that they've carried over to their (subscription) web versions. While this seems to be a bad thing at first--why limit yourself to 5 articles when the server can contain 100 for the same issue?--this could fall prey to the same consumer behavior that happens when people are confronted with too many choices. Recent research suggests that people given a huge number of choices are less likely to buy, say, a jar of jam than those given only 5 or so, because they're overwhelmed by the numbers. If you're confronted with a Table of Contents that's even 50 items long, are you more likely or less likely to read all the articles and vote on them?

Let's say that you've decided that you really want to find out about this subject and are going to read some of the articles; wouldn't the arrangement of the articles count? For example, would an essay by Amy Aardvark get read more than one by Zeb Zebra? Would people just go through looking for famous names? Or, if the ratings system made some articles rise to the top of the Table of Contents, wouldn't those lower in the pack get less attention? Would people be tempted to game the ratings system to get their article placed higher? In a perfect world this wouldn't happen, but at Amazon this happens a lot, apparently.

Here's another scenario: although the English Romantics aren't your field, you're teaching an entry-level introduction to literature class and you want to find out some of the best current ideas about Coleridge's "Christabel" for Wednesday's class. You go to a special issue on this subject and are confronted with 30-50 essays. You could read them all to decide, but you have to move on to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" on Friday, and life's too short. What do you do? How do you decide?

In keeping with the need for numbers in "crowdsourcing," what about if you're in a small field where only about a dozen of you are really expert enough in the field to judge, but maybe the field is hot or trendy enough (or the author or subject popular enough) to attract a lot of readers/voters who don't know the field as well?

These are just questions. I don't have any answers.

The plot thickens

Thinking about the "failure" hypothesis for MPF, here's what I come up with:

Hypothesis 1: "Failure"--does that mean simply failure to become as famous as Famous Author? Problem: Like most writers, Famous Author had a lot of friends who hadn't become famous or indeed ever left his home town, but he used the concept of failure primarily for this one. Is it just that MPF didn't live up to Famous Author's expectations? Other references speak of MPF in glowing and affectionate terms.

Hypothesis 2: MPF died fairly young and on a significant national holiday. He was a military man, so did he maybe kill himself? Problem: See #3.

Hypothesis 3: A letter of condolence to MPF's widow speaks of MPF and his loved ones being "prepared" for his death and his dying in peace (so much for #2). It also speaks of remembering the good parts about MPF and his life. Now, this could mean that he had an illness (TB, cancer, etc.) that led to some kind of physical deterioration. It could also mean something like alcoholism, which could help account for an early (and expected) death. Problem: MPF, as a public figure, apparently gave eloquent speeches, although I haven't found any yet. (That'll have to wait for the microfilm to arrive.) Of course, all the stuff about "peace" could simply be standard condolence rhetoric.

What's interesting about this, to me at least, is the way in which it affects my reading of the letters. I read a sentence and think, "Is that genuine praise of MPF or the praise of pity?" It's like reading the letters and a negative of the letters in which everything could have two meanings.

I'll have to receive more documents before I can unravel this.

The Puzzle Factor

Lately I've been trying to find out more about a minor public figure's relationship with a major author.

Even Major Author spells MPF's name in various ways, and since it's a common name, it's not easy to distinguish MPF's information from that of others. Sure, Scott Fitzgerald always misspelled his friend's name as "Hemmingway," but we all knew who he was talking about. Think "Smith" and "Smithe" for the names, along with various spellings of the (common) first and middle names (like "John" and "Jon"), and then project that out into looking at census records.

Score! Obscure publication from a far-away state with information on MPF is actually in our library.

Double-score! An out-of-print regional history has a reference to MPF that links him/her to major author. I love you, Google Books.

Helpful transcriber, I appreciate the efforts you made, but in looking at the originals, I can see errors in the transcriptions. I guess that's why we always want to look at the manuscripts ourselves.

Definitive Biographer of major author devotes only one passing reference to MPF and then only to quote Famous Author as calling him/her a failure. All the documents I'm seeing show a pattern of success--not earth-shattering fame, but a respectable life. Why is MPF called a failure?

Now I'm off to the library to pick up more books to keep trying to solve these mysteries. Maybe this is why I don't read murder mysteries. The puzzle factor in this kind of research is enough to keep me going for days.

Death of handwriting--really?

Time Magazine, which I've been checking out of desperation as Newsweek becomes increasingly newsless, has one of its trademark scare articles this week: "Mourning the Death of Handwriting." After the obligatory "here are my fascinating memories" intro by Claire Sudduth,* the writer, there's this little factoid: "And aside from the occasional grocery list or Post-it note, most adults write very little by hand." The article goes on to cite standardized testing, a post-1980s emphasis on learning to write cursive, and computers as major reasons for the decline.

Is handwriting really declining, and do adults really not use it very much?

About the "decline": I can see that fewer people write messages by hand, but the poor quality isn't a new thing, is it? All of you who've read handwritten letters from earlier centuries can attest to the fact that some have that whole Palmer Penmanship down to an art form as if Sister Mary Agatha is still watching, and some, well, don't.

About use: The "decline in use" is probably true, but "write very little by hand"? Is this true in academe? What about essay tests? Annotating books? Taking notes in class? Commenting on papers? I know--it's possible to do all these by typing, but it's actually faster to do some of these by whipping out a pen.

When I ask students who write poetry how they write it, it's often with a pen. In other words, one kind of writing that means something to them is writing they do with a pen.

Since Time is happy to provide proof by anecdote, maybe we can follow its lead: Do you think that handwriting is really "dead"? Does most people's yearly output of handwriting consist of a couple of postage notes and a thank-you note or two?

*Do you really care when she entered third grade? No? I rest my case.

[Edited to add this, because of Carl's comments: When I was at the archives this summer, one of the librarians said, "Your handwriting is so legible! You must have taken calligraphy!" It isn't usually that legible, but I felt as though she'd given me a gold star. Maybe handwriting instruction went out with gold stars?]

Update: Sisyphus, in the comments, has a good perspective on the article:

The article is not about the death of handwriting, which she says is an umbrella category, but of cursive, claiming that people born after a certain point just never stuck with cursive anymore.

That's totally true in my case ---- I write things out by hand all the time, but I never use cursive. Everyone I know who's roughly my age prints things. And I even had an old-school mother (much older than everyone else's) who decided my cursive was so bad that for an entire school year she fought me by making me practice cursive for hours after school every day.

I had never thought of this as a generational thing and had conflated the two-- writing = cursive--but Sis is absolutely right.

Crowdsource Grading

From Cathy Davidson's "How to Crowdsource Grading" at HASTAC via The Chronicle:

So, this year, when I teach "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," I'm trying out a new point system. Do all the work, you get an A. Don't need an A? Don't have time to do all the work? No problem. You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart. You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points. Add up the points, there's your grade. Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the system. Clearcut. Student is responsible.

And how to judge quality, you ask? Crowdsourcing. Since I already have structured my seminar (it worked brilliantly last year) so that two students lead us in every class, they can now also read all the class blogs (as they used to) and pass judgment on whether they are satisfactory. Thumbs up, thumbs down. If not, any student who wishes can revise. If you revise, you get the credit. End of story. Or, if you are too busy and want to skip it, no problem.

This sounds lovely, in theory. But, as usual, I have a few questions:

1. Since this is "mastery grading" rather than "quality grading," wouldn't this be one of the cases where A = Adequate rather than excellent? Some professors don't have a problem with that, of course, but it makes me uncomfortable, since the professor is the one ultimately putting the A on the gradesheet.
   
2. What about the retro soul who, having paid Duke U's high tuition, wants to know what an outstanding scholar like Cathy Davidson thinks rather than what his or her peers think? One comment that I used to get from time to time if I relied a lot on group work was "I'm paying to see what the experts think, not what my classmates think, about my work," and there's some justice in that position.
   
3. As a corollary of the previous point (and this comes up in Jane Tompkins's A Life in School, too, where a similar method is described): do students ever get curious about what exactly the professor is doing to earn her salary? I don't think this is a question that ought to be posed, but I wonder whether students think about it anyway.
   
4. So there are no petty jealousies, no cutthroat grad students, and no factions that might influence a student's willingness to make someone rewrite a post? I don't know grad students who would behave this way personally, of course, but there's a lot of trust involved with this system.
   

Thoughts?

Homer nods

In preparation for a new project, I've been reading my way through an author's works and have finally come across a moment--all right, several moments--in which the most generous thing to say is that Homer was nodding at that point.

Are there any authors whose works are consistently even and excellent? Don't most authors have books excused with phrases like "She was going through a bad patch" or "She had to make some money with this one" or "If only she hadn't let Editor X get hold of it"?

Sometimes, if a work is flagrantly awful, we can excuse it in a different way: "It's a satire of a bad novel, see? That's why all the situations are so clichéd; it's an ironic take on that form."

I have a certain weakness for flawed books, if only because they show that the author is trying to do something different. I'm not exactly talking about bad fiction, which can be fun in a whole different way, but good fiction gone horribly wrong in some way, the kind that makes you want to knock on the author's tombstone and ask, "What were you thinking?"

So now I'm at the end of a novel whose main character is supposed to be a great figure and whose author has endowed him with what ought to be admirable attributes--and I can't stand him. Let me put it this way: I not only think he's a less-than-admirable person, but he's drawn poorly--his motivations make no sense, the foils that surround him are thinner than the paper they're printed on, and his actions are inconsistent. Oh, and the book, while well written generally, abounds in clichés like "piping hot," for which I have an irrational aversion from reading too many tray placemats describing the coffee at McDonald's over the years.

Maybe I'm just not getting it--always a possibility--but then again, maybe Homer is nodding here. Am I just asking too much? Are there any authors who haven't written a clunker from time to time?

(And please list some memorable clunkers in the comments!)

Days in Slothland

I'll get back to posting soon, but I had to make a deal with Writing Self. Writing Self is apparently a shy forest creature easily distracted by the presence of the internet. In order to coax it from its hiding place, the internet has to be nowhere in range, but I've had visitors and so the internet couldn't be turned off during the day until today.

Writing Self still isn't back, but I'm hopeful that the lack of internet tomorrow will bring it back.

Blogging the lost: motivation

I've been gone more than I've been home since the end of school, and throughout all these travels, I kept saying, "When I get home, I am going to have so much energy to write! All that's keeping me from it is being away."

You know where this is going, right? When I sat down to work today, it felt exactly like going back to the gym after lying in a hammock for a month doing nothing. All the bribes in the world (including a new chair!) couldn't make me pay attention to what I was supposed to be writing. The brain isn't a muscle, but if I'd taken a picture of it, it would have looked like the Before shot on a fitness infomercial.

Blogging the lost works for profgrrrl and others, so here it is: if you come across my lost motivation and will to work, send it my way, will you?

When is a book not a book?

From Pogue at the New York Times:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

The best part? In a plot development that would have any creative writing teacher saying "Can't you be a little less obvious in your symbolism?" the deleted book is (wait for it). . . 1984.

So you can't trust a Kindle edition, huh? Well, thank goodness for paper editions.

As the late Billy Mays might say, "BUT WAIT--THERE'S MORE."

Scribner's has just reissued Hemingway's A Moveable Feast in a "new and improved" version by Hemingway's grandson. The blurb at Audible.com says that the original edition was cobbled together by Mary Hemingway out of fragments and doesn't represent Hemingway's intentions.

Not so fast, says A. E. Hotchner, a Hemingway friend who was there when Hemingway retrieved the notebooks that formed the basis for the work, discussed the work in progress, and ultimately read the manuscript on the way to delivering it to Scribner's: "When I was leaving for New York to give the manuscript to the editor of Life, Ernest also gave me the completed manuscript of the Paris book to give to Scribner’s president, Charles Scribner Jr. I recount this history of “A Moveable Feast” to demonstrate how involved Ernest was with it, and that the manuscript was not left in shards but was ready for publication."

It's hard not to think of this in terms of other works changed after the author's death: Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, John Lennon's demo versions of a song later issued as "Real Love," and even cartoons and movies from which embarrassing racial representations have been silently excised and sent down the memory hole. The thing is, though, that we have to make choices about these editions all the time when we order editions for our classes. Because they exist in physical form, both versions exist.

But with the Kindle, it's possible to make the whole book disappear even after you've bought it. If that can happen, it should also be possible to remove (wirelessly and silently) a version of a text that had been downloaded but had some flaws--typos, for example. I'm not saying that correcting flaws is a bad thing, but if that can happen, it's also possible to change other things about a text--remove a passage or term that appeared in the paper version but has been deemed too offensive for modern sensibilities, for example. The issue is that this can be done silently, without warning, even after we think we've ordered a stable edition for class.

Time and Hemingway scholars will sort out the issue of the "improved" paper edition of A Moveable Feast. One or the other will disappear, or both will be required. But the disappearing 1984 edition? Amazon says it won't ever disappear books from users' Kindles again for problems with a Kindle edition. Honest. No kidding. You can trust us, says Jeff Bezos. But I still think the whole issue of having a stable, authoritative edition just took not a small step, but a giant leap toward complexity.

The Rules

Sisyphus has a good post up in the Lessons for Girls series about insisting on asking for help, part of a response to Historiann's post about mentoring. Sisyphus talks about her friend Brilliant Grad, who in addition to being brilliant has had a whole lot of other gifts heaped on him, in part because he meets people and "thinks about how they could help him," which she's too kind to call a utilitarian view of human relationships (so I'm saying it here).

Although this is in part a gender issue, it struck a chord with me because it's really a class issue, too. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the class dimensions of learning to get what you want, using the example of J. Robert Oppenheimer (who was able to talk his way out of attempting to poison his tutor) as an instance of a kind of social intelligence that's necessary if intellectual intelligence is to result in success. That social intelligence comes in part from class privilege, which teaches you that the world is there to serve you and also teaches you how to talk to people to get what you want. Remember Cher in Clueless, who was so proud to have argued her C grade up to an A? I don't condone that kind of grade-grubbing, of course, but the attitude she showed about shaping the world was exactly what Gladwell was talking about.

As I said in a too-long comment over at Sisyphus's blog, if you were raised with working-class values (as I was, and which transcend technical middle-class status), you thought that when someone told you the rules, they were really the rules. You didn't realize that you could argue your way out of them and convince people to do your bidding, because that's not how the world works for you if you don't have class privilege to back it up. And then, when you saw others sail past the rules that you'd abided by, you felt angry and betrayed, because you'd played by the rules and they hadn't.

If you let the rage define you, you're stuck with that outlook forever, always blindsided and hemmed in by rules that may or may not have a good reason for existing. But if you use that rage, turn it into observation, and study what others privileged by class (or gender) are doing to remold the world to their advantage, you can learn from it. The most valuable thing anyone learns in this position is that there's a difference between the Official Rules and the Real Rules. If you're born with class privilege, you know this already. If you're not, you need to figure out where that gap lies and what its parameters are.

And you can pass it on. That's mentoring.

Update: Dr. Crazy has some good advice on this subject:Reassigned Time: Scripts for Getting Mentorship: Crazy's Version, as does Historiann.

Back

In the end, I took three books: giant spiderkilling hardcover biography, which I reread; giant spiderkilling hardcover collection, in which I read some lesser-known pieces and made notes about them; and book I'm reviewing (which I finished). I also read some .pdf books that I'd downloaded from Google Books, Antonia Fraser's Faith and Treason about the Gunpowder Plot because it was already in the house in the Land with No Internets and most of John Berendt's City of Falling Angels (on the plane on the way back).

I didn't write a lot, but I did think a lot. I thought as I was taking almost-daily walks to one of the earlier settlements in that part of the country--5 miles round trip from the old house I was staying in. I also cooked, baked, washed immense piles of dishes three times a day, and did a lot of wash, the latter requiring that I fill the ancient, quirky washer using huge buckets of water, which has done wonders for my upper-body strength.

I shooed flocks of wild geese off the lawn early in the morning and went kayaking when the water calmed down as the sun was setting. That was usually when the heron flew out of the woods and made his way across the water to another set of trees.

Sometimes, instead of reading, I watched the rain pour down and listened to the thunder, or I tried to figure out the different eras of the wallpaper peeling away from the lath-and-plaster walls.

There was no television and no newspapers, so unless I was visiting relatives and someone mentioned the news, I didn't know what was going on. I didn't miss it a bit.

It was a nineteenth-century sort of trip, come to think of it. In terms of scholarship, it wasn't very productive at all, but it was very satisfying.

Desert island game and some random thoughts

There has to be a better way. I'm heading to the place of no internets, where I'll have no distractions, no office that I have to go to, and nothing but lots of time to strike a nice balance between hanging out and doing some writing. That's the good part.

The bad part is that, as if I'm playing the desert island game, I have to choose only about 5 books to take with me. (I'm not paying for an additional suitcase this year, now that fees are applied for the first bag.*) I only have .pdf copies of a couple of books, and one of the books has to be one I'm reviewing, so that leaves four. Should they be criticism? Primary texts I know really well but will need to cite? Humongously heavy biography that is really a useful reference but could double as a blunt instrument in a murder mystery because of its weight? If I'm really desperate, there's a library about 2 hours away that will have what I need, but of course I won't be able to check out books from there.

There should be a way to bring books and solitude together, shouldn't there? I know I've ranted about this before, but if we can download entire movies or TV just by paying for them at Amazon or iTunes, why can't Google make this happen? (I know, I know--copyright issues--but couldn't they get some kind of licensing in place that would allow it to work?)

* And about those bag fees: I hate them but I pay them because a flight anywhere from Northern Clime involves so many changes of planes (and usually races through the airport) that I don't want to deal with a suitcase, too. On the several flights I've been on recently, many people seem to be putting the suitcases in the overhead bin, which seems to be working out fine.

On the other hand, when the cheerful flight attendants remind us to put our computer bags under the seat so that people who didn't pay the luggage fees will have room in the overhead bins, they never explain why my legs should be doubly cramped so that someone else doesn't have to pay a fee to check a bag, so the computer bag goes in the overhead bin whether they like it or not.

Last archives post::what's major and what's minor?

Notorious Ph.D. has an interesting post about the two broad research patterns that researchers follow when going to archives: one is "casting about until a pattern emerges" and the other is to go in search of a specific person, text, or idea and see where the search leads you. In the comments, Tenth Medieval quoted something from Robert Darnton (or maybe it was on his blog) that resonated with what I'd felt during my recent trip:

As the tenor of a life begins to emerge from the manuscripts and I see a story unfold from one document to another, I have the sensation of making contact with the human condition as it was experienced by someone in another world, centuries away from mine. It may be an illusion, and I may get it wrong. I may sound like a romantic. But the archives, in all their concreteness, provide a corrective to romantic interpretations.

That sense of an emerging narrative--that's what's so seductive about working in the archives, especially if it's a story that you haven't seen someone else tell. The problem is, of course, that not all stories are going to be of interest to anyone but you, which adds a third dimension to Notorious Ph.D.'s questions: Which parts are major, and which ones are minor? How can you tell which leads are worth pursuing because they'll actually be important, and which leads are just the means of satisfying your own curiosity about a particular idea? And, more importantly, is this a distinction that you should even be making as you're looking at materials?

Frankly, unless you're looking for something very, very specific, I don't think that you can make that distinction when you're in the midst of working with materials, although it's hard not to, given the time constraints involved in being at a research site. You can't know what's major and what's minor at that time, although you can know what's been published and what hasn't, which can tend to guide your search. If Author Y's love letters have been well mined for articles, you need to know those articles going in so that you don't "discover" a narrative that's already been written.

Also, the work you put into getting some information may be vastly disproportionate to the space it ultimately occupies in the finished work, but it may be very important nonetheless. In a recent biography that I read of Author X, for example, only a paragraph or so was devoted to one part of his life, yet I knew (because I knew the author of the biography, which took him many years to write ) that finding this information had involved painstaking research in half a dozen archives, just for a seemingly minor piece of information.

So what if this one small piece of information that you found in the archives proves that Author X really did read and respond to Author Y, or really was present in, say, a war zone even though generations of critics have said that that didn't happen? Some theorists might say "Who cares?" and that it's a minor point, given that queer theory, postcolonial theory, or whatever says that theory Z explains it anyway without the need for facts, and what are "facts" but an artificial construct based on hegemonic and ideologically driven narratives, blah blah blah, etc. But the thing is, if it's a point that no one has mentioned before, it deserves to be seen and heard, doesn't it?

I can see that this post is "casting about until a pattern emerges" and not getting there, so I'll finish with this: Part of what archival research is about is letting the narratives that are there in the documents, and the narratives that are not there but are implicit in the documents, teach you what narrative you ought to be constructing once you're away from the archive. So, in other words, you need to pursue those insights but also let them rest at the same time so that you can discern the patterns.

Update

I've been back for a couple of days, which is really just long enough to do laundry and pack, this time for a trip to the land without internet.