What debate was like

When I was in high school and a bit when I was in college, I was on the debate team. Without a doubt, it taught me more about reading and research than any class I took in high school, maybe even in college. But it’s kind of a hard event to explain/describe to people who haven’t been a part of it. I don’t think my parents ever “got it,” and I think the same is true for everyone I have ever known who wasn’t involved in it.

Well, thanks to a link I received from a friend through another friend (all former debaters, btw), I found out about a documentary that I’m going to have to watch, Resolved. Here’s a YouTube preview:

THis looks like the kind of thing that might make it to the Michigan Theater, and if it does, I’m there.

The second of a couple of animal videos: Hippo swimming in Toledo

I took this video of a hippo swimming in the “Hippoquarium” at the Toledo Zoo:

Two “fun facts” about both this and my previous animal video of the turtle on the golf course: first, I shot both with my Canon PowerShot SD 850 IS. I’ve been very pleased with this camera– I’d recommend it to anyone. Second, I tried to upload these videos to YouTube and I ran into errors with both of them. They’re just .mov files that opened right up in QuickTime and that uploaded in a matter of minutes to Flickr. I don’t know what the deal is.

Not that stupid after all

For reasons too complicated to go into, I found myself with about a half-hour/forty minutes to kill, which was not quite enough time to go on the “power walk” in a nearby park or to go to the gym before picking up Will. So I took the quasi-lazy way out and decided to catch up on some email, a bit of teaching work, and some web reading. This included the recent Atlantic Monthly article with the provocative title “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. I was all set to be angry about it because, frankly, the title itself is kind of stupid.  “Um, no, stupid,” is basically my answer. But I guess the folks at the Atlantic didn’t think an article with a title like “What Google has to do with previous technologies of the mind and artificial intelligence” wouldn’t sell a lot of magazines.

I don’t agree with everything that Carr is saying here, but I actually do agree with a lot of it and I think this will be a good addition to my “invent your own technology” assignment in English 328.  Carr makes specific references to folks like McLuhan, Nietzsche’s reflections on the typewriter, Alan Turing, re-mediated ala Bolter/Grusin, and even Plato’s Phaedrus, and throughout the whole thing, I hear a sort of “back-current” of Walter Ong on the shaping power the external technology of literacy on human consciousness.

Not stupid at all, but like I said, stupid sells magazines.

I think this will certainly be something I include in the revamped version of English 328 I hope to roll out in the Fall term.

The first of a couple animal videos: turtle at Eagle Crest Golf Course

For father’s day today, Jim K. and I played golf at EMU’s Eagle Crest Golf Course, which is described in this web site as being part of the “Eagle Crest Resort.” Well, if a corporate hotel and a golf course count as a “resort,” then I guess this is what this is.

Anyway, in the midst of my rather terrible play, we encountered a turtle on the fairway of number 15:

Note that this first video (one or two more animal videos are coming) were posted on Flickr, which I haven’t experimented yet with video. The preference for the service is clearly for short videos.

Even more flooding news

My father tells me that the local news in Iowa is nothing but flood and more flood. The water surge/battle against the river has moved on to Iowa City and the University of Iowa. Here’s a picture from this Des Monies Register article about the impact of the flood on the University of Iowa. The Iowa River (which comes off of the Cedar at some point) runs right through the middle of campus, and these folks are passing up 500,000 books from the storage facility in the basement of the main library, which is normally quite safe, on higher ground about two blocks away from the river. My guess is that my old stomping grounds of the “English Philosophy Building” (EPB) is pretty soaked right about now.

My father also told me that FEMA and the Red Cross (or some kind of combination) set up a center in this giant Hy-Vee grocery store about 1.5 miles from my parent’s house in Cedar Falls to feed people who have been put out of their homes and otherwise displaced by the floods. He said that I-80 and I-380 are closed through Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, which basically means that if you are traveling east-west through eastern Iowa right now, you aren’t going anywhere. Yikes.

Flooding in my homeland

I haven’t been able to watch much news today, but I did come across this AP article via Google News, reported out of Cedar Falls: “Flood evacuations ordered along Iowa’s Cedar River.” And then there was this even more inspiring article from the (Cedar Rapids, I think?) Gazette: Volunteer sandbagger saved downtown Cedar Falls. Well, that should have been volunteers, but I get the point. Good article about folk pitching in.

There are also more articles about evacuations in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, and other various points up and down Northeast Iowa. My parents, btw, are in a very “high and dry” area; I would bet they have some water in the backyard and the sump-pump may be running, but they are no where near the rivers.

Stay dry, my fellow Iowans….

A slight update:

I’m from Cedar Falls, where the downtown (my father reported to me in an email)  stayed dry.  On the other hand, Cedar Rapids, which is a much bigger city about an hour south of Cedar Falls/Waterloo and down river on the Cedar, is very very wet.

The new style manual is here! The new style manual is here!

How big of a nerdy English/writing type of person does one need to be to appreciate the fact that the MLA has come out with a new edition of the style manual?  And does it make me an even bigger looser enthusiast that the first thing I want to look at in the newest issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing is a review of this new style manual?

Regardless, it’s an interesting piece by Kevin S. Hawkins, who is an electronic publishing librarian over at the University of Michigan.  The rest of the journal looks interesting this time around too.  Based on what Hawkins is saying, it sounds like MLA has made some advances in dealing with electronic resources and in acknowledging the fact that almost all of the writing/editing done in academic/humanities-type journals involves computers.

And for me, this observation brought back unpleasant memories:  “I’m glad to see that two holdovers from the days of the typewriter have finally been put to rest: underlining and double spacing after periods are out, and italicization and single spacing are in.”  Twelve years ago, when I was trying to wrap up my dissertation in the summer before I began my first tenure-track job, I was in an epic (well, for me) battle with a thesis/dissertation reader in the Bowling Green State University graduate college.

In those days (I assume this is still true, though I don’t typically have to deal with such things at EMU because our graduate students do “projects” and not “theses” that adhere to such strict rules), this was the final stop for a dissertation, a hoop soon-to-be PhDs had to jump through even after a defense.  The staff in this office was made up mostly of MA students on an assistantship, and their job was to proof-read for your run-of-the-mill errors and for adherence to a style manual– in my case, the MLA style manual.  This reviewer did catch a number of errors I was able to tidy up, but this person (who was always anonymous to me) also tried to argue that I had to eliminate all contractions (I dare you to find that rule in the MLA style manual) and to change all italics into underlined text.  I had a lot of italics in my diss, both for book titles but also for emphasis— probably a little too much emphasis– and I thought then (and think now) that underlining is ugly.

Well, long-story a bit shorter, I actually went back and forth via email with this person for a while, and I ultimately had to get a “supervisor” involved in order to remind this office that I had successfully defended my dissertation.  I ended up presenting this person with a quote from that edition of the MLA style manual (the second?) which said italics were at least an acceptable substitute for underlining.  I finished, went on with my life, and became the tenured professor you see before you today.  I don’t know whatever happened to this reviewer, but I am guessing they are not happy with these new MLA changes.

Depending on what happens with English 328 next year, perhaps this could be a reading for that class….

What were computers like in the old days?

Via a site I found while surfing around and doing some BAWS research, “Take a Stroll Down Computing Memory Lane,” via Neatorama. This might actually be good territory to cover in a class like English 516, especially given that a lot of the students in that class are now too young to remember the “old days” of computers. Or perhaps I am now too old….

Farewell Estabrook, farewell public schooling

Will graduating from EstabrookI picked up Will from school today, and we both realized on the walk home that he would never have to go back into Estabrook Elementary unless he wanted to. We both had complex feelings about this.

To be clear: on the whole, we’ve been very happy with Estabrook Elementary, part of the Ypsilanti public school system. I remember volunteering in Will’s first grade class and learning so much about teaching and pedagogy and literacy among kids that age. Completely fascinating (thanks, Mrs. Thompson!). Mrs. Rust was great for both second grade and safety patrol. Mrs. Micallef was a great third grade teacher, as was Ms.Lava-Kellar for fifth grade. Though to be honest, none of them can touch Will’s fourth grade teacher Mr. Morrison, who retired the year after Will was done with his class. He was by far Will’s favorite.

So on the whole, Estabrook was a good experience for Will and for all of us. Really. I’d recommend it to anyone. Still, it was far from perfect, and I guess there some things about the whole “farewell” ceremony that didn’t quite set right with me. Early in the festivities, the principal, Mrs. DeRossett, warned all of us that we do not woop and holler at Estabrook; we clap politely. Thus I was no longer allowed to yell “Yea!” with every award and/or performance.

After a mini-recital of various fifth grade musical talents (which included a friend of Will’s playing the James Bond theme on piano), a bunch of awards were given out. Most dubious to Annette and I was the “Principals Award,” which Will is holding in the picture. First, as far as we could tell, this was an award that was handed out to all of the kids who did not cause some kind of “trouble” or something, presumably trouble with Mrs. DeRossett. About two-thirds of the kids got this award, which obviously singled out to one and all who the trouble-makers were. Second, almost all of the white kids received this award, and I don’t think it does a whole lot to build community among the racially diverse Estabrook community to do leave a bunch of African-American and Arab-American kids sitting down while almost everyone else gets this prize.

And third, it should be Principal’s Award, as in the possessive apostrophe s, the award “belonging” to and from the principal. I will grant you that as an English professor and writing teacher that I am perhaps a little more critical about these things than most, but passing out a certificate with a grammar error like that doesn’t exactly instill a lot of confidence in Ypsilanti educators.

In any event, with the farewell to Estabrook comes a farewell for Will to the Ypsilanti public schools. While we were pretty happy with the Ypsi elementary experience, we were not confident about taking the chance on the Ypsi middle schools or high school. The original plan was to go to Ann Arbor, which has notably better public schools, but when we got caught in the collapsed real estate market and it became clear that we could not afford to move, we decided to explore our other options. We decided on Greenhills, which is an independent school in Ann Arbor.

I think we have kind of lucked out in reverse. Had we moved to Ann Arbor, I think Will would have done fine in the public schools there and I think we would have adjusted easily enough to the subtle but noticeable lifestyle differences between the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. But Greenhills is a really really great school, and I know Will is going to have opportunities he’d never get in any public school system. Instead of sitting in crowded classrooms where the teachers have to spend too much time worrying about mandatory testing and keeping the kids disciplined, Will will actually be able to learn and do some really cool and interesting things.

And we really like our house and our neighborhood and the fact that we can walk to work— well, we can walk when we aren’t carrying a lot of stuff and when the weather is decent at least. Neither Annette nor I are exactly “Ypsi proud,” the types who are all about the great things that Ypsilanti has to offer and who scoff at the snootiness of Ann Arbor. We try to put a foot into both places, liking a lot about about towns. But we’ve been here for ten years now and we’re starting to do more Ypsi-specific things. For example, last night we were out with family and friends to The Corner Brewery. This morning, Will and Annette are out and about at the annual Normal Park yard sale, which includes about 75 or so sales all in the neighborhood (as I have written this, they have brought back a snow globe and golf balls for me, and Will was inexplicably given a giant stuffed gorilla by someone). And this afternoon, we’re off to the last games of Will’s Ypsilanti township soccer league.

Still, I have some liberal guilt. Because of my line of work and my own politics, I kind of feel like that we shouldn’t be part of the “problem” of flight away from the public schools. More than one Ypsi friend of mine has thought of folks who have moved out of town and/or who took their kids out of the public schools as “traitors,” and I felt rather sheepish talking to some parents outside of Estabrook the other day while waiting to pick up Will– ah, no, he isn’t ready for West Middle School. Um, yeah, we’re going to send him to Greenhills….

But I’ll get over it, and I guess I’ve come to see over the years that schooling choices that parents make are ultimately rather personal, complex, and even contradictory. I can still support the public schools in general while taking advantage of other opportunities. And maybe this will get me to get more involved in Ypsilanti the community, especially if we decide we’re going to stick around in town for a while longer.

By the way, I have a movie/montage of Will’s Estabrook days I’m putting together. I’ll get it posted here sooner than later.