Category: The Happy Academic

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In response to Michael Bérubé on Crooked Timber

It’s not often that Michael Bérubé responds specifically to me, as he does here in the comments on this post on the blog Crooked Timber called “More about adjuncts.”  I don’t expect anyone to read all those links, so to very briefly summarize:  under his leadership as president, the Modern Language Association has taken up the cause of non-tenure-track labor by arguing for things like a 3-3 load with salary of around $41K and benefits, and Bérubé writes about it in this post.

I’m all for all sorts of working people getting the best deal they can get– and that includes part-time college teachers, tenured professors like yours truly, the person who sells me fish at the Food (W)hole, etc.  But I’m skeptical of the MLA’s approaches.  As I said in my comment, I think the money per section MLA is suggesting is ridiculous (why not demand everyone who teaches part-time get a free pony?), this does nothing to address the very long-standing problem of supply and demand, and I think that what really needs to be questioned is the idea of encouraging anyone to cobble together a living by teaching part-time in the first place.

Anyway, I posted my comment a week ago and wasn’t thinking much about it until a conversation on the WPA-L reminded me of it.  So I went back and looked and I saw this comment from Bérubé:

Steven D. Krause @ 79:

It is interesting to me that the MLA is taking on this cause—and it is a noble one—when the organization and many of its members doesn’t seem to think very much of composition and rhetoric, which is where most NTT faculty work in English departments.

I just don’t know where this comes from. Is there a document somewhere, or a series of statements by MLA staff and/or elected leadership, that suggests that the MLA doesn’t think very much of composition and rhetoric? Because I hear this fairly often from rhet/comp teachers, and after all these years, I still don’t get it. What did the MLA do/not do to earn this rep, and what should it do to get rid of it?

Because as far as I’m concerned—and I know I share this conviction with the rest of the MLAleadership—the working conditions of NTT faculty are of critical importance for higher education regardless of whether those faculty members are teaching composition or Keats.

But it looks like I looked back a little late because comments on the entry were closed.  So I thought I’d post my response here:

Continue reading “In response to Michael Bérubé on Crooked Timber”

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The CCC Online Now (and before and before and for how long)

The other day on the WPA-L mailing list (this is the main electronic mailing list/exchange in the composition and rhetoric world), Bump Halbritter announced the CCC Online, version (edition?) 1.1.  Here’s a link to the public table of contents.  Since I have some history with previous versions of the CCC Online and even with this issue (and since this came up in some Facebook comments too), I thought it over and decided to write a response to the announcement.  A long response.  And I decided to post it here, too.

Read on in the continued part.  Hopefully, I don’t ruffle too many feathers and/or get into too much trouble….

Continue reading “The CCC Online Now (and before and before and for how long)”

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The year that was 2011

As I look back at past blog posts from this year, it occurs to me that 2011 has been a year that has taken me further away from a lot of blogging, writing, and reading activities. And it occurs to me that I’ve done a lot of other quasi-administrative and otherwise not writing/reading/blogging things this year– being on the search for the department head for example, not to mention all of the things I mention in this post.

So while there were plenty of highlights from the last year, not as many of them seem to have made them to the blog this year.  Among those posts and events I’ll remember though:

I’m leaving stuff out, of course.  I was kind of surprised to see it, but it doesn’t look like I blogged at all about our travels through the UP to Minnesota or to Glen Arbor, for example.  But you get the idea.

I don’t usually have New Year’s resolutions since I always think of the “year” starting when school begins in August, but I do have a few resolutions I’m hoping to work on starting this January:

  • No mornings at EMU.  And as a related resolution, not be up at school quite as much.  I was there almost every day/all day this fall and, as I think about it, close to that much last winter.  A lot of that had to do with teaching an overload and “ramping up” as I was stepping into the writing program coordinator job, but now that the dust has settled, I can settle in a bit too.  I already have things on my calendar that will break this “no mornings at school” resolution, but still, a boy can try.
  • Get serious about the “immediacy” book thing.  The most satisfying writing experiences I had this past fall was practicing what I was preaching in ENGL 621 and “touching it every day,” and by “it,” I mean going back to my dissertation in an effort to revive that project into a book, something I should have done literally a decade ago.  I don’t know if I’ll get there or not, but it is worth a try.
  • School myself on HTML 5 (which I’m teaching this term) and PHP/MySQL.  We’ll see how that goes.
  • And the usual eating right/losing weight/exercise thing.  I have more thoughts on that, but I don’t want to jinx myself here, so let’s just say I have some goals and plans I’ll keep to myself for now.
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Bloom, Iowa, and academic locales: a few thoughts

I read about Stephen Bloom’s Atlantic article about Iowa not first in InsideHigerEd but in an email my father sent around to family.  Bloom, who is a journalism professor at the University of Iowa (this will matter in a moment), wrote a piece about Iowa as a primer for people wanting to learn more about the Republican caucuses that will be happening in a couple of weeks.  I suppose he was trying to be tongue in cheek funny, but he missed. Pretty badly.  For example:

In this land, deep within America, on Friday nights it’s not unusual to take a date to a Tractor Pull or to a Combine Demolition Derby (“First they were thrashin’, now they’re CRASHIN’!”). There are few billboards along the washboard-bumpy, blacktop roads that slice through the countryside, only hand-drawn signs advertising sweet corn, cattle, lemonade, or boar semen.

Now, I grew up in suburban Iowa– Cedar Falls/Waterloo, which probably has about 100,000 or so people in the area– and I lived for four years in the decidedly college town of Iowa City, IA.  This is not the country area that Bloom is presumably describing, and as this critique of Bloom points out (and there are many critiques of Bloom out there), most of Iowa isn’t this area either. “Just 6.3 percent of Iowans are ‘farm operators,’ and in the last decade Iowa’s metropolitan population grew by 9.1 percent while its rural population decreased by 7.4 percent.”

Anyway, I never went to a tractor pull in Iowa and I didn’t go to one when I lived in Bowling Green, Ohio as a PhD student, the home of the national tractor pull championships. And yes, I missed the combine demolition derby too, though I won’t comment on the boar semen remark.

Then there’s this:

But relatively few rural Iowans are employed in the business of wind energy. The bulk of jobs here are low-income ones most Iowans don’t want. Many have simply packed up and left the state (which helps keep the unemployment rate statewide low). Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.”

Almost every sentence here is obviously not true. And in another part of his commentary that really bothers me, he even gets corn wrong.  Corn does not, as Bloom suggests,  “crackle” as it grows, and no, most of the corn planted in Iowa is not meant just for pigs; it’s meant for the many byproducts of corn (plastics, food products, syrup, paper, cardboard, ethanol, etc., etc.) that are in pretty much anything you buy in a grocery store anyplace in the western world. And if I had a dollar right now for every east coast/west coast self-satisfied Atlantic subscriber who read that passage about crackling corn and who then said to some fellow quasi-elitest bastard “Hey, guess what?  Corn crackles when it grows!” I’d have have enough money to buy all the meth in Iowa.

I came to Nate Kreuter’s “Go Native, Be Happy” after the original Bloom and his critics.  Kreuter’s take is on the problems of certain academic locales and he argues that Bloom’s problem is that he has failed to embrace the “challenges” of his college town.  Here’s a quote from that:

Do you imagine that you’ll secure a tenure-track appointment in San Francisco or New York, despite all the evidence to the contrary? If so, statistically speaking, you’re delusional. San Francisco and New York are wonderful cities, and I love to visit them, but wonderful as well are Fargo and Roanoke and Pittsburgh. Wonderful as well are the truly rural areas of the country (yes, all of them), where your college may be the largest community for very many miles around. There are a lot of great places to live in this country, and not only the metropolitan cities or quaint college towns. In some parts of the country, and depending upon your own interests and personality, you may have to work harder to find the things and people you’ll connect with, but every locale has things and people to recommend it.

I find myself here indirectly agreeing with Bloom in theory but Kreuter in practice.  What I mean is this: there is no doubt that a lot of great colleges are in kind of shitty towns.  I earned my PhD at Bowling Green State University, which was a great school but in the remarkably icky town of Bowling Green, Ohio.  There are lots of places like this, great schools in less than great towns. So while it is true that there are plenty of “wonderful” places not on either coast (and I think Fargo, Roanoke, and Pittsburgh would all be fine places to live and work), there are places in this country I am simply unwilling to live, and some places where I do not think the locale does have recommendable characteristics.

But Bloom’s whining about the problems of Iowa and (indirectly) the academic locale of Iowa City proves he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  Iowa City is a nice town, a great town, actually.  I can’t speak with a lot of authority here since I moved away from there almost 24 years ago and I know that downtown isn’t quite as vibrant as it once was because of malls and suburban sprawl, but basically, Iowa City is both a classic college town and a cultural oasis in terms of restaurants, shopping, movies, etc.  Bowling Green it ain’t, which makes the Bloom piece all the more puzzling.

Incidentally, my father sent me another editorial from the Waterloo Courier, “U of I president disagrees with Bloom’s observations.” It recounts the widely circulated rejection of Bloom’s points by current U of Iowa president Sally Mason.  And then the editorial ends with this:

Bloom is on one year of leave from Iowa as he teaches at the University of Michigan.

Considering that, we would also be interested to see what Mary Sue Coleman has to say about the article. Coleman, the University of Iowa president from 1995-2002, is now at the helm at Michigan.

Perhaps she might have a stake as well.

If exaggerations and stereotypes – and we believe some inaccuracies – about Iowans are what Bloom comes up with after two full decades of living in this state, who knows what an article titled “Observations from Just 1 Year of Michigan Life,” could entail.

I do wonder if Coleman will weigh in on this….

 

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Misc. reflections on the close of Fall 2011

In no particular order (other than as they came to me while I was typing):

  • I did a lot this semester.   A LOT.  I am teaching an extra class, which was in some ways a good idea and many ways not.  Two of my classes were basically new, one brand “never been taught before by anyone” new and the other one might as well be new. I was a reviewer (although not an attendee) at HASTAC 2011— well, unless you count going out with folks I knew who were here.  I wrote up one (maybe two?  I can’t remember) external tenure reviews.  I started a blog on iPads (for a month) and did a talk about it.  I did the finishing touches and signed off on a book chapter (though note to self, I have more to do on that, it turns out).  I’m chairing a search.  I have (unwittingly and unintentionally) annoyed people.  And this is the stuff I’m just willing to mention in a list.
  • Oh, I helped run a conference that went really well.  More on that soon enough I am sure– we are very late in generating a summary report on all that.  Oh, and we moved back into Pray-Harrold, which had its own set of issues (though it’s mostly a lot nicer than it was before).  And just as part of my every day work, I’m still the program coordinator, which means paperwork, advising, running meetings, scheduling, etc.
  • In any event, I mention all of this stuff in those two previous bullet points to remind myself that there’s a reason why I am feeling a little overwhelmed/overworked right now, and I need to try to remember this as something to studiously avoid in the winter 2012 term.
  • For the most part, my students do not seem to like Google Docs much– or rather, I don’t think they like handing things in for me to comment on/evaluate with Google Docs.  I like it because I can see a history of what changes have been made, but as far as I can tell, many of my students don’t like it because they can’t control the formatting in a way that they’re used to doing.  Or maybe they just don’t like it (well, many, not all) because it’s doing something different from what they’re used to with MS Word.
  • I think the point in time where my English 354 class started to “come together” was with the last assignment.  In fact, when/if I teach this class again, I think I’ll start with this assignment first in order to establish the need in a class like this for students to “play” with the tools and try to re-think and re-visualize the way they use things like word processors.  I mentioned this to students yesterday and they thought this was a good idea too.  And while I’m on the topic, I think an online version of this class would be a good idea….
  • I don’t think I was at my best in English 328 this semester, and I kind of feel like the general sentiment is that this is a course in need of a major overhaul.  That’s a faculty group project coming up this winter.
  • I haven’t seen class evaluations and I haven’t yet read their projects or the take-home final, but I’ve heard indirectly good things and I’ve had pretty good feelings about the way that English 621 went.  Honestly, at this stage, I don’t think I will do a whole lot different in that class when I teach it next fall though a lot of what was great about it this semester was a group of students who will (hopefully soon) be getting on with finishing up their degrees and on with their post-EMU lives.
  • I am very much looking forward to next term where I am not teaching an overload and where I am teaching online and in a hybrid format.  Oh, I’ll still be busy and coming into work plenty for meetings and advising and the like, but I am quite certain I will not be around as much as I was this term.  And while I would like to spend my time right now planning for next term and getting on with some other projects, I need to first worry about actually ending this term.  So back to that.
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Not much about “iPads” or “Learning” at yesterday’s “Workshop”

Yesterday afternoon, I went to an event sponsored by Apple Education Seminar thing featuring Apple-sponsored speakers and employees that was called an “iPad Learning Workshop.” I’m going to emphasize the positive aspects of it over on my slowly growing academiciPad site, but frankly, I thought it was pretty awful.

It began with an Apple-employed speaker/PR/marketing wonk whose talk was stuff anyone who had heard of the iPad would have been able to figure out and that was about it.  “You can install apps!  You can check your email!  You can watch movies!”  This and she showed not one but two short videos/commercials that were essentially animated text with Apple-like piano music and a few pictures of iPads.  At some point, someone interrupted and asked what I think is a completely reasonable question: given that our students are coming to classes with laptops, what’s the point of an iPad? What is unique about the iPad? And you know what? She didn’t really have an answer to this question.

Really. Really?

This was followed by one of Apple’s teaching experts.  He had some interesting things to say, but it was all about secondary school, not the target audience for this group even if most of the people there were in the College of Education.  Most of what he had to talk about had nothing to do with iPads in particular but more about technology in secondary schools– and specifically, this guy talked about private and religious secondary school he works at in Holland, Michigan, a school which, judging from the pictures, is a completely different world from any public school in the area, not to mention EMU.

It was really striking.  I left that thing thinking a) maybe there is an audience for my month (maybe longer) web site experiment about iPads, and b) I ought to try to go into the educational technology consulting business.

But the other take-away was about universal access.  To the extent that the Apple marketer had anything interesting to say about iPads in teaching, it all assumed that students had these devices in their hands.  The guy from the private school in Holland talked about the enormous initiative at his school to get laptops into the hands of all students and staff and to even remodel/rebuild the school building to provide spaces for folks to collaborate together with those laptops.

So it seems to me that the iPad initiative that I’m a part of this year is completely backwards in that we shouldn’t be giving these things to a few select faculty, but rather, we should be finding a way to get these things into the hands of as many students as possible.  And I am reminded once again that the smartest thing that EMU could do is to push into the late 20th century and require all students to have a laptop computer that meets certain basic benchmarks in terms of processing, software, etc.

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Post WIDE-EMU (#1)

Enough puns about Emus already:  the on-the-fly/on-the-cheap (un)conference of sorts that Derek, Bill HD and I set up, the WIDE-EMU, went off with pretty much no problems on Saturday.  It was all rather amazing to see, frankly, though my pictures and video of the day are all pretty lame, mostly people sitting around and listening.  I’ll have to work on that for next time around.  And I will try to put up the video of keynote session up online later today or so, too.

Where did this thing come from in the first place? My recollection was that germ of the idea emerged during a long car ride back from the CCCCs in Atlanta and a conversation about how so much that we value in conference is the face to face interaction and exchange over the standing and delivering of papers.  And we also wondered about the costs of conferences which has always struck me as too high.  Long story short, we kept talking about this stuff over the spring and summer, and the WIDE-EMU was born.

There’s lots of stuff at the web site— links to “phase 2″ proposals, an agenda of the day, a robust twitter stream represented on Storify, and (eventually) there will be the video of the plenary session with Troy Hicks, Danielle DeVoss, and a distant (via Skype) Elyse Eidman.  We had around 40 people registered, though I am certain there were many who didn’t get around to registering since we didn’t have people do it at all until they were on site and we didn’t really require it.

I’m obviously biased and we’re still waiting for some survey data to return, but I thought it turned out to be fantastic event, and not just because of the localness/”proof of concept” point I’ll get to in a moment.  I thought there were some legitimately great conversations/presentations.  A big part of it is we just so happen to be geographically located within an easy day’s drive of a lot of places where the idea of studying digital writing is being taken seriously.  But I also think our process helped.  Basically, we asked anyone and everyone to start by submitting a title in one of three different types of presentations, “talk,” “make,” “do.”  Lots of people came up with ideas.  But then we asked people in phase 2 to submit something more.  It didn’t have to be a lot or particularly complicated, but it had to be something– a few paragraphs, some slides, a short video, a web site, etc.  So since people had to come up with something before the conference actually began, people came to the conference prepared.  And I think that showed.  The stuff I saw was just as good as what I typically see at overpriced, oversized national conferences.

But again, I go back to the proof of concept issue:  I think what we demonstrated here is that if you have a “free” meeting space, if you use “free” electronic tools, and if you eliminate other elements that cost something (notably food and fancy speakers), you can do these kinds of conferences with only a modest amount of organizational labor and with no charge to participants.  And for me, this begs the question about what is it that we are paying for when we go to Computers and Writing or the CCCCs.

Obviously, size matters.  We had about 30 individuals/groups giving the equivalent of presentations, and these were more or less “self-vetted” in that the people who went through the process of proposing something for phase 2 got on the program.  And again, I think that worked.  If we had a lot more people proposing and we needed to make some real choices about who is in and who is out, then it would have been more complicated and labor intensive, probably.  Still, I’ve reviewed proposals for both C&W and the CCCCs and as far as I can tell, no one gets paid for that service.

And size matters in terms of the number of participants.  I think we could have easily handled twice as many attendees, but if we had become 200 people, then I suspect we would have been forced to contend with some more complex organizational issues– for example, I’m not sure we could have gotten away with telling that size of a group that they were simply “on their own” for food, beverages, nametags, programs, etc.

I also think cost matters in interesting and paradoxical ways.  In the “DIY” spirit of things, we didn’t charge anyone for this, but one of the possible implications of this was that the conference wasn’t seen by some as having “value.”  I talked with folks about this in the last session of the day, and Tammy Conrad-Salvo told a story about a dairy farm that used to offer free tours and had virtually no customers, but then started charging for the tours and they had many more customers.  That’s entirely possible with something like this too:  had we charged a modest fee– say $20 or less a person– we might have had more attendees who saw the conference as a “serious” and “real” thing.  On the other hand, charging money would have meant significantly more labor for the organizers.  We would have had to have done something to actually collect money (not always the easiest thing in the world at a public university), and people would have expected some basic stuff for that fee– a program, nametag, coffee and doughnuts, etc.  In other words, still more labor.

There are a lot of other issues here too that I’m still wrapping my head around.  I guess what I’m left with though is I wondering about the “major conferences” in our field.  Don’t get me wrong; I like the “working vacation” of the CCCCs or C&W or whatever as much as anyone, and I realize that these kind of conferences have to pay for space.  Still, I wonder if there aren’t ways to do these things differently.  Maybe we need a lot more smaller events like this.  Maybe the bigger events need to do a better job of using easily available electronic tools to crowdsource conference organization and planning.  Maybe we need to cut costs a bit by getting rid of some of the doo-dads that aren’t really that necessary.  And maybe if the CCCCs and NCTE (for example) are using their conferences for financing their existence as organizations, maybe they need to rethink that, too.

 

 

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The Office, the new season

Things have been quiet around the ol’ blog lately because the new fall term is upon us with a vengeance, mostly because of the move back into the the remodeled but not completely done/sorted out yet Pray-Harrold.  Heck, it’s taken me a couple weeks just to write this little post!

If you were one of the three people who attended the panel I was on about “Pray-Harrold in Exile” in Atlanta at the CCCCs (or if you are one of the 100 or so people who saw this video on YouTube), or if you have read some of the posts and comments on EMUTalk.org about this, then you are aware that my department (and many others) were temporarily uprooted out of our previous office and teaching space, Pray-Harrold Hall, deposited in dorms and other odd places for about 16 months, and now reassembled in slightly different order back in our previous building.

It’s mostly good, with some bad and some frustrations thrown into the mix.  The old building features a lot of new fixtures:  new bathrooms; new flooring, walls, ceilings, lighting, windows, doors, and the like; new technology in the regular classrooms; and much better infrastructure in terms of the “guts” of the building, HVAC and electrical and the like.  The bad part of it all is it’s still the same old and huge building, and a compelling argument could be made that we should have torn this thing down and started over.  And there have been a ton of frustrations regarding little things like keys and pretty big things like not very good at all tech support and other problems.

But I don’t want to dwell on that.  I just want to contemplate the office.

Office View #3

On the floor that hosts (most) of the Department of English Language and Literature, there are “interior” offices that are small-ish (10 X 12 or so, maybe a little less) and that lack a window, and “exterior” offices that are close to twice as big and that have a window.  Now, in the pre-remodeling configuration of things, if as a faculty person in the department you wanted your own office, you got an interior one;  if you were willing to share (usually with a part-timer or lecturer), you got an exterior one.  This represented a certain balance in that there were obvious pros and cons to each choice.

Office view #2

For institutional/insider reasons not worth going into, this has changed.  Now exterior offices go to faculty based on being a program coordinator (which was the case before as well) and based on seniority, interior offices go to less senior faculty and full-time lecturers, and part-time instructors are in a different building entirely.  So, as the program coordinator for written communication, I get one of the larger and windowed exterior offices (the one pictured here) all to myself instead of my previous smaller and windowless office.

This has had the effect of both upsetting the previous pro/con, yin/yang balance of one’s office, and it has also meant that some folks have come out much better, a few (almost) exactly the same, and a few much worse.  If I weren’t the program coordinator right now, I would have had an interior office because I’m not quite there seniority-wise.  If enough people retire before I am finished being coordinator and nothing else changes, I’ll get to keep this larger, windowed office.  Maybe.
Office View #3There’s been some grumbling about this arrangement.  I have to say I have a certain amount of what I can only describe as “survivor guilt” about all this because I have definitely come out ahead in the office shuffle, while others have either come out about the same or even a little behind.  And there probably is a more robust way to decide who is in what office.  I know of at least one senior colleague in an exterior office who is never there, for example.  It seems a bit of a waste that this person gets one of the nicer, bigger offices, doesn’t it?

My own way of dealing with this is I am trying to make much more use of my office and I have once again shifted my scholarly/professional “stuff” into that space.  When I first came to EMU back in 1998, I had almost all of my stuff in my school office because we lived an apartment that wasn’t that big.  Then when we bought our house, Annette and I both set up offices in our basement, and over the next eight or so years, my stuff migrated back home and to different places in the house.  In fact, by the time I had to pack up for the move out of Pray-Harrold into Hoyt for our year in exile, there was really nothing in my office anymore I really needed.

So now, I’m circling back to the point where I started at EMU and have shifted everything back into Pray-Harrold.  I even bought some extra shelving.  I tell myself that I am trying to make a clearer division between “life” and “work,” with the work stuff staying up in Pray-Harrold; though I still have a home office and desk space too, and I am sure I will continue to do plenty of work here too.  But at this point in my career, I suspect I won’t be shelping all this stuff back home until I am completely done and retired.

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CCCCs in St. Louis: I’ve been accepted and it’s not even September; what’s wrong with these people?!?

My tongue is firmly packed into my gift-horse mouth with this post, but go figure!  First comes news that my proposal for the CCCCs in St. Louis was accepted.  It’s a talk (or something?  I might make a lot of video for this one) called “Amateur Auteurs:  The Problems of Teaching and Assessing Multimedia in Writing Classes.”  I’m interested in the things I say I’m going to talk about in this talk quite a bit because I have been interested lately in a variety of different ways with the dilema of writing professionals teaching and producing what can only be described as “amateurish” multimedia work.  I have a couple of examples in mind, and most of them are my own.

But it was a proposal I put together pretty quickly because– oh, I don’t know, I’m not all that interested in going to St. Louis and because I’m kinda all filled up on conference presentations.  As I was discussing with someone today, reworking/updating my web-based CV made me think that at this stage of my career (e.g., a full professor at an institution where I’m happy and where I’m likely to stay put) I don’t really need to do anything, let alone spending tons of money to go to lots of conferences all over the place. So go figure that my rather ambivalent proposal gets in.

And it is in at a good time, 9:30 am on the Friday of the conference.  AND notice was sent out to folks way WAY earlier than usual!  I don’t know if this a result of snafus in the process last year or what, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard one way or the other about this conference this early.  Again, go figure!

Now if you will excuse me while I figure out what it is I am going to do for this thing….

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Readings and thoughts for the coming school year

We don’t start the fall term here at EMU for another two weeks, but I have a very specific sense of “the summer is over” this morning.  Annette and I are back from “Grownup Camp 2011,” our time up north while Will is at camp, and now it is time I face the to-do list associated with the new school term.

I am not alone in this feeling.  Lots of stuff showed up in my web reading this last week about education in some fashion or another; for example:

  • In Doonsebury, a discussion between a university president and a dean about what exactly it is higher education is supposed to do.
  • Via Aaaron “One Flew East” Barlow comes this interesting infographic about how students love technology.  There is some “truthiness” to this, but there are also some bullshitty claims here too.  I know plenty of students of all ages who definitely are not even in “like” with technology.
  • Pitched to the typical college student, Lifehacker has a bunch of tips for getting it ready for school.
  • Or not– why not opt for the UnCollege approach?  This is all fine and good I guess, but the main problem I have with such things is it confuses the abstract and philosophical concept of “education” with the bureaucratic and pragmatic goal of a “credential,” e.g., a college degree.  Hopefully a credential will lead to an education, but no amount of educating one’s self will lead to a credential, and I am cynical enough to recognize that universities are in the credentialing business first.
  • And there’s some secondary ed stuff out there too worth checking out.  The  LA Times has an op-ed column “The myth of the extraordinary teacher” by Ellie Herman, who is herself a secondary school teacher, explains in stark terms the conditions that she’s working with.  It’s probably not surprising for anyone who actually works in the schools, but it might be a bit surprising for all those folks out there who have made teachers– particularly secondary school teachers– out to be the lazy bad guys.
  • There’s also a great piece in the September 2011 Harper’s about the experience fo going back into secondary school teaching called “Getting Schooled” by Garret Keizer.  No link I’m afraid, but it might be worth buying the print version.

I could go on, but that’s enough.  I’m not sure what to think of all of this vexing over schooling as of late.  My default position to such “hell in a handbasket” kinds of critiques is generally we’ve always been going down hill, ever since at least the ancient Greeks and probably before that.  Still, it does seem a little different to me as of late, perhaps because I’m getting too old.

In any event, I still haven’t come up with any new school year resolutions of note yet.  I want to continue my too slow and too inconsistent readings and reviews of journal articles because it seems to me like not many other people out there read them.  I am prepping for two new classes.  I am trying to concentrate on not eating white food and/or low carbing it.  Etc.  One way or the other, time for not getting stuff done is over.