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Ladies and gentlemen:  It is time for the main event, the forever battle over students getting worse and worse as time goes on.  Let’s get ready to

RRRRUUUUUUMMMMMMBBBBBBBLLLLLLLEEEEEEEE!!!

Representing the world champion, the “going to hell in a hand-basket,” the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish’s “What Should Colleges Teach?” on his New York Times “blog.” Judging by the many comments here that repeat “oh yes, the students are so much worse today than they used to be,” he’s clearly the champ and the crowd favorite.  And why wouldn’t he be?  Isn’t it much more satisfying for grown-ups to note the weaknesses of youth?  After all, to do so simultaneously suggests that the grown-ups of today are both “better” than the current youth, and it suggests that the previous youth (e.g., today’s grown-ups) were also better than the current youth (“When I was their age, we learned this stuff.  But now…”).

In the challenger’s corner, we have Clive Thompson and his WIRED article “The New Literacy,” in which he argues that “it’s not that today’s students can’t write.  It’s that they’re doing it in different places and in different ways.”  Boos from the crowd; looks like Thompson has an uphill battle.  Let’s see how this works out.

(Ding-ding-ding!)

Fish opens with what he even admits is a pretty old attack:  the problem is that composition classes in college don’t teach the craft of writing, and they instead teach something– well, something else.  Political stuff.  Saving the world.  Not writing and grammar and rhetoric.  “As I learned more about the world of composition studies,” Fish writes, “I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research.”  Those bastards in composition!!

Thompson’s opening anticipates and parries this old attack: “As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?” Right. Oh wait, the idea that the kids can’t write isn’t right? Perhaps we will read on….

Fish argues that his position now has “received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.”  What could possibly be wrong with these folks?

Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is “an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure college and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state of higher education.

Ouch.  Having a right-wing group supporting your position on education is always a little, um, uncomfortable.  What have you got, Thompson?

Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

Ah-HA!  One of those evil compositionalists!  Of course she is saying this! The problem is though that Lunsford actually uses this stuff that academics like Fish and Cheney are supposed to respect, this stuff– oh, what’s it called?  right!  Actual research with actual student writers.

I think the thing that Fish gets most wrong is to assume that somehow, it is even possible to teach “grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.”  Grammar and rhetoric are always about something; you can’t just teach rules are about how to persuade and not have some kind of content.  And I think where Thompson and the Stanford study get it most right is to recognize that students (and everyone else) need to write with some kind of purpose and for some kind of audience, and they do this often in out of school settings, like Facebook and blogs and Twitter:

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

This fight ends sort of  like the first Rocky, I am sure:  the upstart still loses.  But who knows?  Maybe after a dozen sequels, we’ll finally get a round where the good guys win.

We had our annual Mardi Gras party last night. I say “annual” because we’ve had it three times now, which I guess makes it an event that is more than a one time deal. Basically, Annette and I throw two big parties a year: the “Indian food party” and the Mardi Gras party. The Indian food party tends to be smaller, a dozen people tops, and it usually features as a “guest of honor” a new hire in the English department. The Mardi Gras party is the bigger, more blow-out of the parties.

Here’s a set of Flickr picts.

Of course, one of the main attractions is food, mostly food that I make. This year’s menu was pretty typical: stuffed jalapenos, fancy cheeses, and veggies and fruits, but mostly New Orleans (esque) fair. Most of my recipes came from a site I like a great deal, The Gumbo Pages. This year’s recipes from that site included a vegetarian version of red beans (I grilled up some andouille sausage for a side with this, all of which immediately disappeared) and King Cake (which is actually an Emeril Lagasse recipe and, with its cream cheese filling, was excellent). I also made my version of a Lagasse shrimp cake recipe that is too complicated to recount here, and a gumbo that I make on a fairly regular basis that I will describe:

Krause’s Fatty Club Gumbo

This is my interpretation of a gumbo recipe from a Weight Watchers cookbook we have. The original WW recipe features a fair amount of crab, which a) I’m not all that crazy about in a soup, and b) is kind of expensive. Gumbo purists will probably turn our their noses at this version since it does not involve a roux. But it is easy to make, it’s mostly healty, and it seemed to be a hit the other night.

Like all gumbos, this is one of those recipes where there is a lot of room for substitutions and modifications. But this is the basic version that has worked for us around here.

1 or so tablespoons of olive or veggie oil
1 green pepper, diced
1/2 an onion, diced
6 or 8 green onions, sliced
2 celery stalks, diced
2 boneless skinless chicken breasts, thinly sliced
1/2 of a ring (I guess 1/2 a pound?) of low-fat turkey or pork kielbasa sausage,* cut into small pieces
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tablespoon of cajun seasoning
1 teaspoon thyme
salt and pepper to taste
1 package (16 oz I guess?) of frozen and sliced okra, defrosted
1 can of diced tomatoes (15 oz)
1 quart of chicken stock
1/2 cup rice
1/2 pound to 1 pound of frozen raw shrimp with the tails on, defrosted and cleaned to your preferences**

• Heat oil on medium-high heat in a large pot (I like to use a dutch oven for this), and sweat green peppers through sausage. The idea here is to “cook” all of this stuff without browning it too much.
• *I generally like to use turkey sausage for this, but when I made this for the party recently, I used a low-fat pork sausage that I liked a great deal. In any event, the choice of sausage here is up to you. If you use something like andouille or chorizo, your soup will be a lot more spicy and a lot less fatty-club friendly. But hey, that might be pretty good too.
• Add cajun seasoning (I use Emeril’s– you know, BAM!– but there are many others on the market), thyme, salt and pepper to taste, and okra, and cook for a couple of minutes. Don’t skip the okra because it really is an excellent vegetable in this recipe and it thickens up the soup in a pleasant way without the roux.
• Add the chicken stock and the canned tomatoes, bring up to a simmer (just barely a boil) for about 10-15 minutes.
• Add the rice and keep simmering for about 8 or 10 minutes.
• Add the shrimp and keep simmering for about 8 or 10 minutes.
• **My preference for the shrimp is medium to large shrimp that are cleaned but with tails on, mainly because I like the little extra flavor the shrimp tails give the dish, but I am too lazy to clean fresh shrimp for this, and I frankly don’t think it’s worth it. On the other hand, I wouldn’t use previously cooked shrimp because I don’t think they taste as good in a dish like this. In any event, the choice is yours.
• Serve with your favorite hot sauce and bread and whatever else you want.

• Everyone I talked to today seemed to be in a fine mood about Obama winning and such, but everyone I interacted with today seem kind of sleep-deprived.
• While Obama was running, it was for the most part not really about race. And yet, the “big media” story today seems to be about race– that is, everyone is really excited that Obama won because he is an African-American/person of color. I’m happy about that of course, but I am mostly happy about Obama winning because he is so smart, he’s got fantastic ideas, he sees and understands complexity, he wants to talk to other people around the world, he didn’t have a freakin’ mental collapse when the shit hit the fan about the markets (ala McCain), he’s actually in the prime of his life and not near the end of it (ala McCain), and he was so pain-stakingly the obvious best choice that I was worried that Americans were going to do the stupid thing again.
• I would say more about how it’s probably a little too early to say “all is well with race issues now in America since Obama won,” but Deb Hawhee said it better and first, so there you have it.
• Hate radio is going to have a field-day over the next few years, and I’m worried about what will happen (or not) to the Daily Show.

Day one: Earthquake Soccer wrap-up. Saturday morning was the last game of the fall season for Will’s soccer team. Because Jim the “real coach” was at a conference, I was in charge. (I see myself as somewhere between an assistant coach and the team manager). The kids played a good game, but came up a couple goals short. Still, the best season by far, 2-3-1, and, if most of these kids come back in the spring, I think we’re going to be good.

The “highlight” (or rather low-light) of the game came from the other coach. For non-soccer people (and I am just barely not one of them myself): when the ball goes out of bounds, the other team gets to throw the ball back in. To do so, the thrower must keep both feet on the ground and throw the ball with two hands, over the head, with no spinning or anything. If you throw it badly, the ref will call it and give the ball to the other team. Here’s a helpful wikiHow entry.

Anyway, both teams were getting called on this, probably the other team more than us. Things were going along, and then, kind of all of a sudden, the other coach totally and completely über freaked out. He screamed louder than I have ever screamed (and that’s saying something, believe you me) “THE NEXT ONE OF YOU WHO DOES A BAD THROW IS OUT FOR THE REST OF THE GAME!!! C’MON!! THIS IS FIRST GRADE STUFF!!!” Or something to that effect. It was kind of scary, actually.

The team went out to celebrate after the game for pizza and such (beer for the grown-ups, happily) and opposing team coach’s freak-out was a topic of conversation at both tables. The grown-ups thought that was maybe a wee too much intimidation and intensity for a township rec league for kids 12 and under. The kids (or so I am told by Will) just thought he was kind of a jerk and mean.

Day two: pumpkin carving/halloween decos. We’re quite late in getting our Halloween decorations and pumpkins together this year. And it isn’t the same as it has been, either. Will and I usually to go to this one field and do a “pick your own” kind of pumpkin experience. Well, unless I couldn’t find the right place (entirely possible), that field this year was planted with corn.

Originally, I was going to try to attempt carving with power tools, but that proved to be more trouble than it was worth. I used a drill for some of this, but it was basically a big goopy mess. I did discover two pumpkin carving things this year that I will have to remember for next year though. First, a drywall saw was a super-duper handy tool, much better than the old hacking with a kitchen knife technique. Second, using a template was a good idea and pretty easy to do. My handy-work:

The “scar mouth” pumpkin was from a template, as was my attempt at a Barack O’ Lantern. I’ll post some pictures at some point when they are lit up.

Day 3: Fine punkin party. Hosted by Daye The Frenzied Wren and Dickish MacBastard. All I’ll say now is that it featured a pig roast, hanging around in a (kinda cold) barn, and a band of young kids from Milwaukee. Lots and lots of fun.

Oh, and then we came home relatively early and watched Persepolis. Three and a half days of fun. And now I’d better read for English 505 or I will be in trouble come Monday night….

Will turned 11 today, which capped off a fine weekend of birthday oriented activities for the boy. Things got underway in earnest on Sunday with a trip to Zap Zone. Basically, it’s a place where you play laser tag, and, when not involved in combat where you shoot people on the other team with beams of light, you play arcade games. The web site says it is a “family fun center,” but it seems more like a teenage boy who hasn’t quite caught on to the whole girl thing fun center– though to be fair, there were several women/young mom-types playing in one of the rounds. I thought it was kind of fun; Will and his friends thought it was fantastic.

During the day today, Will and I took some time and went on a bike ride/picnic through Gallup park. We went out to this island of sorts in the river that Will and I had “discovered” on a previous ride. The idea was to have some quality time in a quiet place, but the park and the island were both pretty busy on this last day of the summer. Still, a nice time.

And then this evening we went with the DeWapps to Ichiban, a Japanese Steakhouse and Sushi place between Ypsi and Ann Arbor that Will is especially fond of. This is one of those places where they do the whole performance in front of the grill– probably not as good here in Ypsi-Arbor as it might be in the big city or in Japan, but still a lot of fun.

Here’s a minute’s worth of video highlights from the cake scene at the end of the Zap Zone party and from Ichiban:

I didn’t get the singing at Ichiban, but it involved more gong playing. As I think the video shows though, Will was pretty thrilled with the whole thing, so that’s all that matters. That and no one got hurt.

And tomorrow, it’s off to school. Finally.

First off, let me back-track a bit and fill in a few more details on what I’ve already mentioned about C&W and this trip:

• The “very good session” I went to on Friday morning before Jay David Bolter’s talk featured Rik Hunter, Dan Anderson, and Alex Reid. Follow the links for more info on the presentations. Actually, in Rik’s and Dan’s case, you can literally see what they did: both of them had everything pre-recorded and just “delivered” it by cranking up the computer and pushing play. Alex did his the old fashioned way– just talking. All were very good, but it was kind of strange to see the presenter standing there while his movie plays his presentation.
• Speaking of Alex Reid, congratulations on the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award for Digital Digs!
• I wish Jay David Bolter’s talk was online someplace, and maybe it will be at some point– they videotaped it. I thought it would be a really interesting teaching tool because he made a bridge/connection between the hypertext experiments of the early 90′s (remember StorySpace?) with gaming experiments (newsgaming.com, for example), poetry that plays on your iPod or your cell phone when you are in certain points of the Atlanta subway, a podcast tour of a cemetery, etc. It reminds me that I need to work gaming back into English 516 the next time I teach it.

Now on to the “part 3″ or concluding episode of Computers and Writing 2008 from my pov:

• My session was at 10 AM on Saturday, and the “prime time” seemed to help us draw a pretty decent-sized crowd. Before me was Gian Pugnucci with a talk called “The WikiBib Project: Exploring the nature of Teaching Collaborative Scholarships in a Wiki.” Basically, he was talking about using a wiki as a means of facilitating collaboration on an annotated bibliography assignment in a graduate class. I’ve talked with Gian about this before and I think we’re going to try and work something out together on this for his and my grad courses next year.

  I was second, and I’ll pretty much let my presentation speak (or not) for itself:

  A slight tangent here: I actually managed to forget the do-hickey for hooking up my laptop, so I spent a few moments thinking I was screwed. But it turns out I was doubly covered. Since this was the computers and writing conference after all, someone in the audience (Carl Whithaus, actually) immediately volunteered his adapter. But besides that, the fine folks in Georgia were completely prepared for this, too. The guy doing tech support for UGa told me he had a whole bag full of the adapters I needed and was very confident that he could get the projector set-up to work. Quite a contrast to the way the projectors often work (or not) in Pray-Harrold.Anyway, I got some great feedback from folks on what to do with the whole “finished blogger” issue, and as we discussed during the session, my use of the word “failure” in my talk is probably not right. “Not finished,” “abandoned, or and as often as not, “ended at the appropriate time” are probably better terms. In any event, helpful ideas from attendees.

  The third presenter was Natalie Szymanski from Florida State with a talk titled “Wikis and Composition Pedagogy: Avoiding the Bandwagon.” Basically, she was suggesting that maybe we ought to slow down a bit on all of this stuff like wikis. While I didn’t agree with many of the things she had to say, I had to give her credit because it’s nice to see someone at this conference have the guts to point out that we’re in the “writing business” and not the “isn’t this software I just learned about cool business.”

• And then it was time for golf. I was part of a foursome with Steve Benninghoff, Gian, and Nick Carbone out at the University of Georgia Golf Course. In hind-sight, I think we should have picked a more “accessible” course since Benninghoff and I could have used a bit of a “palate cleanser” after the challenges of that course in Kentucky, and Gian and Nick, neither of whom had swung a club in over a year, could have just used something easier. This was one bad-assed hard hard course, certainly in the top 2 or 3 in difficulty that I’ve played, and a course that made me wish for an easy one like Pierce Lake or Eagle Crest.

  But hey, it was a friendly game, and a good time was had by one and all even if the play wasn’t great. Actually, it got a lot more fun when we started the back nine and we played a cart versus cart scramble, but Nick had to leave a little early, so it just kind of degenerated into some sloppy play at the end of a long death march of a round.

• Steve B. and Gian and I had some BBQ that I thought was pretty so-so, and then we went off to Kingpins Bowl and Brew for the ritual of the bowling night. I managed to catch up with a few folks who I didn’t get a chance to talk to much during the conference itself (including Courtney, who is doing great), had a few more Terapins, and even managed a little bowling (I scored 100– I had forgotten that real bowling isn’t as easy as Wii bowling).
• And then Sunday was the long drive home. I managed to prod my more leisurely traveling companion onto the road by 6:30 and we were back in Ypsilanti in less than 12 hours, which, when I think about the expense and general pain in the butt of flying, makes me think that driving was a good idea, with or without the golf.

So an excellent conference/roadtrip. Well done, UGa, folks! Here are some pictures of the whole things– eventually, I’ll add some info about all these pictures.

Next year, C&W is going to be at UC-Davis and it is going to be toward the end of June. I don’t know if I’ll be going yet or not, to tell the truth. On the down-side, the CCCCs is in San Francisco this year, and I don’t think I can afford 2 trips to California just to conference. On the other hand, Annette and Will and I might want to make this part of a west coast “pilgrimage” back to Ashland. We shall see….

We had our second annual Mardi Gras Party last night, and a good time was had, me thinks. Annette and I have done a fall party of Indian food for several years now, and we decided last year that February was a good time to have another party, especially since it is cold and dreary and kind of the low-point of the school year. So Mardi Gras it was then, and Mardi Gras it was this year.

Well, sort of. Purists will note that “Fat Tuesday” was last week, so technically, we should have had this party last weekend. But scheduling conflicts and all the rest postponed it. No one seemed to mind.

The pre-party planning/work started with a bit of a bang, and I mean that in a bad way. I slipped and fell about halfway down the basement stairs and I managed to land quite hard on my ass in the process. I don’t think I broke anything too significant, but I had the wind knocked out of me pretty good and I was kind of dazed for about the first hour or so of the festivities. This morning, I’m not so much hung over as I am sore. Sitting down is a delicate matter.

I uploaded a boatload of pictures to my flickr account here, or, if you’re a facebook kinda person, you can go see them over there, too. I didn’t actually take any of these pictures– Becky S. started playing with the camera, and, 70 some odd pictures later, I had a bunch to share. Note how many of these pictures Andre manages to get in. My favorite is this one where he must be going for the cover of Teen Beat.

Of course it was great to have so many good friends, work colleagues, neighbor-types, kids, etc. But what I like most about Mardi Gras is the food, and we had WAY WAY too much of it. Here’s what we had, along with my own biased reviews:

• Muffuletta sandwiches. I vaguely followed this recipe on Food Network. They were pretty good, though I think they could have been a little juicier/oilier.
• Vegetarian Red Beans and Rice. Mine was based on this one, without the meat of course. They disappeared, so I guess that’s a good sign, but personally, I kind of thought that they needed something… like sausage….
• Chicken and Sausage Gumbo. With a kind of lame roux, lots of okra, etc., and based on a Weight Watchers recipe, so sort of healthy. I’m planning on it for dinner tonight.
• Shrimp Jambalaya. Something of a disappointment because the rice never really cooked to my liking. I tried a recipe from a Cajun cookbook that said to cook it in the oven instead of on the stovetop, and I think that was where I went wrong. Some people liked the slightly crunchy rice though, and it did make for excellent left-overs for lunch today.
• Annette’s Mom’s Famous Jalapeno poppers, which are halved jalapenos stuffed with breakfast sausage, cream cheese, and parmesan cheese, and then baked for about 20 minutes. Excellent as always, though we made way too many.
• Shrimp cakes, which is a Emeril Lagasse recipe that features an amazing cream sauce. I thought these might have been a mistake when we were frantically getting stuff ready at the last minute because they are a little on the complicated side of things. But man, are they good.
• King Cake, which is more of a sweet bread/coffee cake than it is a “cake” cake. There are a bunch of different recipes out there, but I followed this one and it turned out pretty darn good.
• And assorted fruits, veggies, and fine cheeses, and some goodies just for the kids.

So by next year, maybe we’ll figure out how to streamline this a bit and how to gauge how much food we actually need. And now, I’m going to go wash some more dishes.