Via the NCTE Inbox, I came across this story this morning, “Novelist saddened her Appalachian observations facing a book ban.” Normally, this isn’t the sort of thing I would spend much time with because while I do care about such things and I of course oppose them, stupid book banning happens all the time. But this is a book written by the woman who was my MFA advisor, Lee Smith. Lee is/was a super-duper writer, teacher, general smart person. I’m not writing fiction right now (someday again, hopefully), but I learned a ton about it and writing in general from her. So a shout-out to her.
The book that’s being banned here is Fair and Tender Ladies, which is a first-person narrative of a girl and then woman, Ivy, from the time she was just learning to write until her end. I was most interested in the form of the book, how Smith starts out writing the character as a child– with all the misspellings and grammar errors and that sort of subject-matter– and how Ivy evolves into adulthood. Anyway, I wouldn’t describe it as a young adult novel (in the article I link to above, Smith doesn’t describe it that way either), but I think it’s a PG-13 story in its most graphic passages. Though it’s been a while since I read this; maybe there’s a full-frontal scene I forgot about.
Anyway, it’s a good book and I hope that being banned helps revive it a bit– I think that’s the usual result. And once again, I am reminded that it is a small academic world.
The theme of the conference is “Open Source as Technology and Concept,” which I might or might not ignore, depending on what I decide to propose. My plan, which may or may not be acted upon ultimately, is to drive down with Steve B. and Bill HD and to bring the golf clubs. Besides many fine courses around Athens, I figure we can play on the way there and/or back. We’ll see how it turns out.
While I am certain (almost) I’m going to C&W this year, it does beg the “how many conferences” question. Originally, I was planning on going to the CCCCs this year, despite having my proposal rejected in a problematic fashion. But without going into any details right now, it is beginning to look like I’m going to a different conference in mid-April, and that has raised the “Is this Conference Necessary?” question for me. I am not quite the jet-setting academic eluded to in this article, but like most folks who are “active scholars,” I still go to a few conferences a year. Of course, at this stage, attending conferences is lot less important than when I was a grad student seeking a job (and needing to have something to put on my CV) or when I was a tenure/promotion-seeking professor. I spent quite a bit of student loan money going to conferences simply because it helped me get a job, and I spent a fair amount of time at whatever conference in order to keep my job. Now? Well, the mileage isn’t quite the same. Actually the mileage is pretty much zero, career-wise.
So, since conferences don’t count for me much anymore, I get to make choices. And I think I’m going to choose Athens and choose to stay home from New Orleans. Though I could easily change my mind.
Here’s a 6:18 video of my trip to New York City and the National Council for Teachers of English conference:
This little video is an unusual project for me because it’s very much a mixture of my “official” and my “unofficial” lives. Of course, conferences tend to be spaces where there is inevitably a blending of serious/scholarly things (giving papers, attending sessions, etc.) and not-so-serious/friendly things (cocktails with colleagues in the field, dinners, travel, touring, etc.). Anyway, since our session was about film/video making and writing, I thought I’d give it a shot.
I had a very mixed experience at the conference, frankly. On the one hand, I thought our panel was fantastic– great people, everyone was super-duper prepared, everyone had really interesting projects, everyone was really really smart and cool and all the rest, etc., etc. As I said in my NCTE prelude post, I went into this panel kind of as an accident and as a result of the CSW movie I made. I mean, I didn’t have that much specific interest in making movies, certainly not as a writing teacher. But I came out of this session really jazzed about the possibilities I saw from my fellow presenters, about diving into FinalCut Pro (or Express) and trying my hand at Garage Band, etc.
And I also had excellent “not-so-serious/friendly” activities at the conference. I got to hang out with my former colleague and still fantastic friend Annette S. a bit, I met a new bunch of people, I had a great dinner and great conversation with folks from the computer and writing world, Doug Eyman, Mike Palmquist, and Nick Carbone. Not to mention tourism in New York.
But on the whole, I’ve got to say that NCTE is not really my conference.
First off, we only had about 10 or so people in the audience. Now, normally, that wouldn’t be that big of a deal to me– I mean, let’s face it, that’s kind of par for the course at most conference presentations. But we were a “Featured Presentation,” we had an ideal time slot, and we had a hot topic– or so we thought. The only guess I have as to why the crowd was so small was because NCTE really is mostly about K-12, and those folks just aren’t interested in things like making movies in writing classes.
Second, the facility where this was being held was a problem. The amenities were, um, incomplete. We did a lot of planning via email before this session, and one of the concerns many in the group had was what sort of sound system we would have– or not have. Pete Vandenberg saved us on that score by bringing along a great system. We had assumed all along that we were covered with a projector to show the movies, but it turned out the projector the NCTE folks were prepared to provide was of the overhead variety. Fortunately, we did not have perform our movies; I brought a projector along from school as a plan B. I could go on, though I think this is whiny enough. All I’m saying is that if conferences like the NCTE (or the CCCCs, for that matter) actually want to give opportunities to presenters to talk about technology, they need to provide some basic technology.
But enough complaining. I had fun, I made it home, I’m ready for this coming week. Sort of.
In Inside Higher Ed today comes “When Student Writing Could be a Red Flag,” which discusses guidelines from the Virginia Tech creative writing program in light of the shootings that happened there last spring. I wrote about the shootings and the second guessing about “we should have known through his writing” arguments last spring in some detail here.
“Disturbing writing” is certainly not unique to fiction writing classes, and I guess I have some mixed feelings about the guidelines presented here. On the one hand, I am always nervous about guidance/advice to writing teachers about how to make judgments about the psychological state of their students since few of us (certainly not me) are adequately trained to make such judgments. I just don’t think that writing teachers should be practicing amateur analysis. On the other hand, as the new school year begins and I recall my experiences of last year when I was the Interim WPA, new college instructors probably could use the kind of calm and official advice offered in the Virginia Tech policy. BTW, you can get to that policy from a link in the IHE story.
About three years ago, I posted about ITT hiring online teachers. There’s no need for me to repeat what I said here– just follow that link and you can read for yourself, if you’re interested.
If you do go to that old entry though, be sure to take a look at the comments, nearly a dozen of them from folks from all over the world trying to get me to hire them as an English teacher. The latest was just posted today.
So, just to be clear: I never was hiring people to teach online, and I am not hiring them now. Not that anyone posting these comments looking for an online teaching job are going to read this post, but….
Just browsing Inside Higher Ed this morning, I read through this article “Surviving the first year” by Shari Dinkins, and by “first year,” she means the first year of a faculty person on the tenure-track. It’s all good advice, though if I had to pick two– okay, three– highlights from the piece, it would be “don’t fall into one camp right away” (meaning be careful how quickly you politically identify with one group or another), “STFU” (meaning that the new person needs to hold their tongues a bit), and “Prepare for a deeper level of commitment” (meaning that there is a big difference between being a full-time adjunct and a tenure-track faculty person– Dinkins describes it as the difference between “just dating” and being engaged).
I suppose that means I’m married to the institution at this point….
Anyway, I’m starting this school year as a newly promoted full professor. As I’ve mentioned here before, that is not as big of a deal as it is at many other schools– certainly tier 1 research schools– because everyone at EMU who manages to get tenure and who continues to have something resembling a pulse gets promoted to professor. That low standard and the general blues/bad budgets hitting EMU makes my promotion and current state a very mixed bag indeed. On the one hand, “it’s good to be the king,” it does mean something to have seniority, and the pay raise is nice. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean as much here since it’s a promotion everyone can be expected to receive, it’s the last pay raise I’m ever likely to receive, and it makes any more mobility to another institution all that more difficult. And given the metaphoric and literal shit that has hit the fan at EMU in the last year (an ugly faculty strike, a meddling board of regents, a murder cover-up followed by a weird media blitz by the ex EMU president, and, most recently, a series of very deep and troubling budget cuts), I’ve been thinking about mobility lately.
The truth is that leaving EMU would be difficult. Besides all kinds of complications being a full professor applying for a less than that level job, I’m part of an academic couple and a commuter marriage is not on the table. And complicating the matter even more is the fact that we live near the epicenter of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage debacle means that our chances of selling our house and not losing way too much money seems unlikely. Oh, and besides all that: if I were to leave EMU at the end of this year while I am on sabbatical, I’d have to pay EMU half my salary back. That ain’t gonna happen.
So, like I said, it’s a mixed bag. It is nice to feel empowered and secure, but it’s not as nice to feel stuck.
Kind of an interesting piece in yesterday’s Insider Higher Ed about the Spellings Commission report, “What Took You So Long?” Here are the opening paragraphs:
You’d have been hard pressed to attend a major higher education conference over the last year where the work of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education and the U.S. Education Department’s efforts to carry it out were not discussed. And they were rarely mentioned in the politest of terms, with faculty members, private college presidents, and others often bemoaning proposals aimed at ensuring that colleges better measure the learning outcomes of their students and that they do so in more readily comparable ways.
The annual meeting of the Career College Association, which represents 1,400 mostly for-profit and career-oriented colleges, featured its own panel session Thursday on Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’ various “higher education initiatives,� and it had a very different feel from comparable discussions at meetings of public and private nonprofit colleges. The basic theme of the panelists and the for-profit college leaders in the audience at the New Orleans meeting was: “What’s the big deal? The government’s been holding us accountable for years. Deal with it.�
Well, not so fast there, for-profit and career-oriented colleges. This is something I know something about, though that knowledge is fairly small and rather indirect.
Between about 1990 and 1993, I worked in a variety of jobs (first as a temp office grunt, and then ultimately as a “public relations representative,” which was really a job as a tech writer and desktop publishing document designer), I worked for the Virginia Student Assistance Authority, which was a student loan guarantor and processor. Interestingly enough, when I did a search, I discovered that in 1998, the VSAA was abolished by the state of Virginia, I assume because in the mid to late 90s, the student loan business went from a lot of regional players to consolidated and national ones. But I digress slightly. Anyway, most of this work was before the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1992 which held for-profit and career-oriented colleges to the higher standard they are complaining about now.
Do you want to know why they are being held to this higher standard? Well, from what I recall from my brief time there, it was because there were too many for-profit and career-oriented college scams going on. These “educators” were setting up these schools in bartending or massage or whatever, charging a tuition that was just high enough to allow the students to be eligible for certain kinds of easily obtained loans (and by “students,” these schools meant anyone they could find who would be willing to sign up– people on the streets, etc.), cashing the checks, and folding up the tent within a couple years. It was, in short, a con.
Now, I realize that this might sound all elitist and all coming from me, a guy who teaches at one of these fancy-panted, sanctioned, traditional universities. But I think these schools that have (as a cohort) a reputation for fly-by-night practices ought to be held to a different standard. Regardless, it’s clear that the whole Spellings Commission thing has a long ways to go before that group figures out just what the hell to do, if they’re going to do anything at all.
There’s been a smattering of readings out there today on the “smack-down” the congress has given to the U.S. Department of Education’s work on the Spellings Commission, which (in my very VERY simplistic understanding of all this) is the Fed’s way of trying to bring us all of the “successes” of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and standardized testing to the realm of higher education.
It perhaps goes without saying that folks in higher education have been resisting this, but what’s interesting to me with today’s news is that the congress is stepping in and saying, more or less, we’ll pass the laws and then tell you and your pals, Secretary Spellings, how to regulate and enforce the laws. Not the other way around.
I have to say I haven’t lost a lot of sleep over the Spellings Commission and its related topics prior to this news. There are several reasons for this, both bad and good:
I realize that topics like “assessment” are really important in my field of composition and rhetoric, and there is a body of scholarship out there about it, and it’s really a big deal, yadda-yadda-yadda. But I have to say that I find this kind of stuff dreadfully dull. I guess that makes me a bad compositionalist. Or a bad person. Maybe both. I will have to live with that….
I don’t worry about this stuff too much because there are far too many smart people already worrying about this stuff for all of us– for example, my colleague and friend, Linda “browndogsblog” Adler-Kassner. This would make for good blog fodder, Linda….
I think that a lot of academic-types (who are obviously looking at this issue from an insider’s perspective) are forgetting that there are a lot of “face value” problems with this kind of regulation among the public at large. Two examples immediately come to mind. First, while NCLB might (and that’s an iffy “might” in my mind, but okay) have some logic on the surface, the way it’s been implemented has been so bad that I bet if you ask parents of kids who have been impacted by this at all they would not have a favorable impression. If they knew what NCLB was at all.
Second, the motivations for calling for regulation of K-12 Ed don’t work with higher ed. It seems to me that regulating elementary and secondary ed has been reasonably popular with the general public because of reports on how U.S. kids compare to kids in Korea or Germany or France or wherever. But the thing is people from other countries keep coming to universities and colleges in this country, despite all of the challenges of this kind of study abroad in a post 9-11 world, in large part because US universities and colleges are considered among the best in the world. So, um, if they’ve done as well as they have up to this point, what’s the reason to change the way we’re regulating/assessing/accrediting them now?
For the time-being, I think I am in the same boat as Bernard Fryshman who wrote the commentary titled “Have I Been Watching this Movie Backwards?” for Inside Higher Ed. It probably isn’t such a bad idea for institutions of higher education in this country to at lest think a bit more systematically about assessment and accreditation, and the fact that universities and colleges are talking about this stuff is evidence that at least one good thing has come out the Spellings Commission. But before we go all wild about standardized tests and measures and numbers and stuff, we’d best figure out just what the heck we’re trying to measure.
Last night, I wrapped up grading for the two classes I was teaching last winter and thus I put an end unofficially to one of the toughest school years I have ever had. There was the faculty strike (which did actually finally get resolved a couple weeks ago), there was the murder of a student in her dorm room and subsequent cover-up of the murder by the administration at EMU. There were some internal “challenges” in the department I’d rather not discuss here, and there were my own challenges of being the Interim WPA.
And yet, Dickensesque, it was also the “best of times.” The turmoil of the strike led to the creation of EMUtalk.org, which in many ways has led me to my current (well, sorta current) research that is actually going to get me a sabbatical of sorts next year. Being the Interim WPA was a lot of fun and super-duper interesting. I’m coming off of some of the best teaching experiences I’ve had, especially the online version of English 516. And I’m getting promoted next year to “full” professor, which is nice.
One way or the other though, this break is going to be short and not much of a break. I’m getting ready to teach two classes during the 7.5 week spring term, and one of them, English 444: Writing for the World Wide Web, is going to be all online for me for the first time. That combined with the short term has me very worried, and getting ready for both this and the other class I’m teaching in the spring (English 328, which is the class I teach all the time) will make the next week not much of a break.
Still, the weather is supposed to be pretty nice and I’ve firmly committed myself to going into the office only once this next week. I might be able to sneak in my first 18 holes….
Anyway, here’s to the end, here’s to the next term around the corner.
