Category: Uncategorized

My colleague and friend Bill Hart-Davidson sent me this image and said I should blog about it. In a way, I kind already have in the recent past. For example, there was this entry from the old blog back in May (my apologies for the blog spam there– this was always the drawback of movable type for me). In that story from the Chronicle, we hear the story of a woman who teaches completely online and who claims to be making $90K + a year. And then there’s this entry about the SAT folks looking for readers of the upcoming essay part of the exam. I have (and I guess continue to do so) thought about signing up for this for the extra cash and the experience of it all.

Now ITT is getting into the act, apparently.

There are a lot of problems with the academic system that perpetuates the use of unempowered part-time labor to teach classes like first year composition, and, increasingly at places like EMU, more and more advanced classes, too. I’m against that, obviously.

On the other hand, from a worker’s point of view, if you are going to work part-time as a composition teacher, it seems to me there would be huge advantages to doing it from home. For one thing, instead of having to be a “road warrior” forced to drive around from campus to campus, literally keeping your “office” in the trunk of your car, you could travel between different schools electronically. So I don’t know; it might not be that bad, relatively speaking.

Jeff Rice has some interesting posts about Writing Program Administration issues, here and here. You might be better off getting to that second link by going directly to Jeff Rice’s main index page, because the links to some snappy WPA (as in Workers Progress Administration) posters that seem to have a lot of connection with Writing Program Administration. Take a look and you’ll see.

One of the things that caught me with this talk on Jeff’s site is the postings from Nick Carbone, an all-around smart guy and good writer who works for St. Martin’s press. I like what Nick had to say on Jeff’s blog and then on his own blog, but what pleased me more was that Nick is back in the blog business in earnest! I thought he’d kind of stopped blogging….

Anyway, I try to keep a delicate balance when it comes to first year writing.

On the one hand, I kind of agree with a lot of the critiques that Jeff has of the system, of the need to order, of the influence of the “textbook business” on the process. A part of me also agrees with the critique of Sharon Crowley, who (basically) argues that first year composition is more or less a waste of time and the way that it is staffed (largely with under-paid and disempowered part-timers and/or grad students) is unethical.

On the other hand, the textbook business, while indeed a “for-profit” business, is more or less propelled by academic folks like both me and Jeff. I mean, I’ve had a textbook in the works for years, and Jeff has one out right now. There is the textbook business “out there,” but a lot of the textbook business is made of the people who critique it.

Apart from the textbook issue, I actually think first year writing courses can do a lot of good for both the students who take it and the people who teach it. With all the problems of large first year writing programs (and every Writing Program Administrator knows there are a lot of problems with even the best of programs), I still think they overall serve students well in the sense that students learn a bit more about writing, about culture, about academic life.

It seems to me the biggest problem with first year composition is actually unrealistically high expectations about what the course can accomplish, this idea that if students were to just take this one course, all of their writing “problems” will be fixed forever. That never did work, it never will work, and we as a profession need to do a better job at lowering these expectations. And that actually gets me back to what Jeff is writing about: there is a tone to a number of the textbooks for the class that they can “neatly” solve writing problems that can’t be solved. In that sense, I am not sure that the textbook business and the people writing for the textbook business are making the job of Writing Program Administrator any easier.

See this article, “Ditch the Boyfriend,” by Elizabeth “not her real name” Fleer. It is another in a seemingly endless string of articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education that essentially argues that an academic career is more important than, well, anything, and certainly more important than a significant relationship. To quote from some of the beginning of it:

“Rule number one: Don’t talk to the media,” a senior faculty member told me as I prepared to attend a meeting of science journalists last spring. As the date for defending my dissertation fast approached, he and other faculty members at my institution were concerned that I hadn’t landed a job and were showing an increased interest in helping me out with the rest of my life, too.

“Any other words of wisdom?” I asked with a smile, since he knew full well that I tell my story of water resources and climate change in California to anyone who will listen.

“Rule number two: Don’t teach. Rule number three: Don’t fall in love.”

“And what about children?” At this point, I was egging him on.

“Definitely not! As a female scientist with the potential to do real research, you cannot have children. My wife stayed home with my children, but you can’t afford to do that. You need to focus all your energy on publishing peer-reviewed papers.”

The article goes on with Fleer discussing how she broke off an engagement to pursue her graduate program, and how, now that she was at the end of it, she was in danger of having to live in a distance relationship because her boyfriend was the one with the tenure-track job on the East Coast.

Toward the end of the essay, Fleer writes “Am I dreaming too big? Will my boyfriend and I manage to find permanent positions in the same town? Or will the strain be too much for our relationship?” (Cue soap opera organ music). Voiceover: “Tune in next time, as ‘The World of the Academic Who Dares to have a Significant Relationship Turns!'”

I’m not going to even pretend to have an answer to the particular situation that Fleer finds herself in, and I also realize that my status as a male and tenured professor makes my commentary problematic at best. But I am also one half of an “academic couple,” one where my wife, Annette Wannamaker, is under-employed as a lecturer in the EMU English department. Currently, we are “on the market” (as the saying goes), with the goal of us getting into a situation where we both have tenure track jobs. So I feel like I have some right to say something about all this.

In no particular order, here is “something:”

* I am really sick and tired of reading this “advice” to young academics that careers are more important than relationships, that the sensible course of action for Fleer is to “ditch the boyfriend.” I don’t know, maybe it is– I suppose it depends on how serious the relationship is. But a job in academia is just that, a job, which ought not to be more important than relationships and family.

* I think people who follow the advice repeatedly offered in these columns in the Chronicle– which is to always give up the relationship in favor of the academic career– are setting themselves up to become very unhappy and bitter academics indeed.

Again, I’m not saying it’s an easy choice; it isn’t. Annette and I are happily married with a child, so for us, the idea of maintaining a relationship and a family over a distance (me on the East Coast, her on the West, for example) is out of the question. I’m aware that not everyone has this strong or important of a relationship, and it might make more sense for some to take the job over the casual boyfriend/girlfriend.

All I am saying though is this blanket advice offered again and again in articles like this is ludicrious.

* Inevitably, the “trailing spouse” in these columns are always women. I suppose that is most frequently the case in “real life” too, though I’m certainly familiar with some situations in which the man was the follower. In any event, if it is a case where the man of the relationship is unable or unwilling to make any compromises in his career to give his partner a chance of getting into a tenure-track job, well, there’s something wrong with that man.

In my own case, if Annette was offered a tenure-track job some place and I had to give up tenure or even the tenure-track to follow here, I’d do it in a heart-beat. Given the sacrafices she’s made for me, that just seems right. The only thing that would get in the way of that is finances: we couldn’t afford to make significantly less money than we make now, which means we probably couldn’t afford for me to drop to “part-time” status even if she did get a job as an assistant professor. But my point is simple: my relationship is a whole lot more important than my career, and it seems pretty easy to make sacrifices to my career for the sake of my family.

Being an academic is great in all sorts of different ways. But there are a lot of things more important in life than an academic career. I realize that the Chronicle is primarily about academia and careers in it; but would it kill them to once, just once, to offer some sort of advice that would put an academic career in some kind of perspective?

If you’re going to live in Ann Arbor (and within the realm of Detroit, for that matter), there are a few “cultural events” you have to experience, even if you’re not actually that interested in the event itself. For example, in Ann Arbor, you’ve got to go to Art Fair at least once– and, unless you are a fan of huge crowds and sweltering heat, you’ll probably only go once. Another example: a couple years ago, I went to the Detroit Auto Show, even though I don’t see cars as much more than an appliance and, at times, a necessary evil.

Another one of these sort of events is attending a football game at the University of Michigan’s stadium, referred to by the fans as “the big house.” We did this yesterday, and to add to the experience, the game we were at was against my alma mater, the University of Iowa Hawkeyes. Annette and I got these tickets from my friend Bruce, who I met about 20 years ago in the Quadrangle Hall dorm at Iowa. He lived right across the hall from me and had air conditioning in his room, so we got to be friends in a hurry and have remained friends ever since.

Anyway, Bruce is a HUGE Iowa football fan, had tickets to this game, and couldn’t make it. So I bought them and Annette and I went.

Let me first set the context here regarding our “relationship” with football: I am not that big of a fan. I never actually went to an Iowa football game when I was an undergraduate, and while I’ll watch it on TV once in a while and I certainly cheer for Iowa, I don’t watch it that much. Annette, on the other hand, is not even remotely a fan; in fact, I think it’s fair to say that she barely gets the rules of the game. What I’m getting at is we aren’t exactly the rabid and involved type, the kind of guy who yells “THROW THE BALL!!!” at the top of his lungs, despite the fact that he is literally a quarter of a mile from the field.

So, how was it? Well, a bit like the Detroit Auto Show: it was something we were glad we went to at least once, but I don’t think we need to do it again. Here’s a “play-by-play:”

* We’ve experienced “game day traffic” in Ann Arbor, so we well understood the need to park far, FAR away from the stadium. We parked on the State street commuter lot and walked through the golf course. It took us about a half-hour to get there, and, for Annette in particular, it was one of the most pleasant parts of the day, with great views and lovely scenery.

* When we got to the gate, they wouldn’t let Annette take in her purse, which really REALLY pissed me off. We emptied it out and left it by the gate (and happily, it was still there when we left).

* I thought about wearing some sort of “Iowa” outfit, and there were plenty of people who were there to visibly support the Hawkeyes. Annette of course didn’t care one way or the other, and while I wanted Iowa to win, I didn’t want them to win so badly as to experience the sea of Michigan fans yelling things at me. I saw more than my share of signs and shirts that said stuff like “Iowa Sucks” or “Fuck Iowa” or something like that. So I thought I’d make a wardrobe choice that would be difficult to anger anyone, and who can get mad at Spongebob Squarepants?

Even this outfit had risks, though. I got a lot of looks from people along the lines of “what the hell is that?” and one guy I walked by outside the stadium yelled over “Is Spongebob a Wolverine or a Hawkeye?” I said he was kinda neutral.

* These seats were both bad and good. They were “bad” because we were in row 93, three or four rows from the tippy-top of the stadium, and we were in a corner. On the other hand, they were “good” because it was in a pocket of Iowa fans, which meant we could cheer for the right team and not get beaten. Incidentally, that blond blob in the lower left-hand side of the picture here is the top of a dramatic helmet-head hairstyle on an old lady in front of us.

* Michigan Stadium seats 110,428– thus the term “The Big House.” A few years ago, the stadium only sat 105,000 or so. How did they add 5,000 seats? Did they build more of them somehow? No; what they did was they rearranged the numbers on the bleachers so people are even closer together than they were. Let me put it to you this way: a full coach flight was positively roomy compared to this. And just to add to it, we were being squished on all sides by drunk men of various ages, all of whom seemed to be giving off fumes that smelled of beer, chilli, and fart. And testosterone: some drunk Iowa undergrad seemed willing to “take it outside” with all of “you Michigan fucks.” What made this behavior all the more charming was this idiot was right behind a guy with a little kid. Lovely image, huh?

* The Michigan Band’s halftime show was covers of 1980’s metal and hair-band rock– Guns ‘n Roses, Poison, Bon Jovi. I kid you not.

* How was the game? Well, Iowa lost, so not so good. We left near the start of the fourth quarter after Michigan intercepted, scored, and went ahead 20 points. Iowa did score again, so they tied the spread of 13 points. At least the gamblers broke even.

* All in all, it was fun, and I might do it again if it involved some pre-game and post-game tailgating. But by and large, I think the best way to watch one of these games is in front of the TV with a beer and a bag of microwave popcorn.

I don’t have a whole lot to add to it, but I thought I would link to this post by Mike at Vitia about teaching in community colleges. It’s a good conversation and post, and I added to it, so I thought it worthwhile to point there from here and to remember it for future reference. Another reason to potentially offer a course in teaching in the community college at EMU….

PS: John Lovas has a great post about this stuff right here, too.

My Sims playing has been going okay. I have tried to be careful about not playing too much, though I do think I’ve been losing a bit of sleep lately and I have a lot on my plate with work right now, so I will try to cut back on my play in the coming week. Just as well– I think I’m on the verge of getting a bit bored with it again already. No question, there are differences with this latest version of the Sims, as I list below here. But at the same time, the game isn’t that much difference from the old game, either.

A couple of highlights/observations from recent play:

* I created a character I named “Stevie Honest,” with the goal/plan of trying to play “honest” in the sense of not just getting a big pile of money and doing whatever I want. I cheated big time with my first family creation, the “Kaching” family (and the reason why I called them that is because that’s what you type to get more money in the cheat code, “Kaching”). Besides the fact that it got kind of boring to have everything, the elaborate house I built and all the stuff I put into it slowed down game-play A LOT.

* Which again speaks to the hardware requirements of the game. If you “keep it simple” in terms of what you build and how many Sims you keep in play, I suppose the minimum requirements are enough. But I certainly wish I had a much more beefy system than I’ve got.

* This version of the game asks you to create different sorts of aspirations for your Sims, aspirations that significantly influence their motivations, what they do for work, etc. I made Stevie Honest’s aspiration to be a “knowledge seeker” type (seemed appropriate), and he embarked on a medical career. Frankly, he has climbed the ranks pretty easily, it seems to me. Or at least it seems easier than the original Sims game.

* Stevie Honest met, fell in love with, got engaged, and ultimately married to this Sim named Nina. It all seemed to happen quite easily… a bit too easily, in fact. Well, after Stevie and Nina moved in together, I think I figured out why it was so easily. Nina, whose aspiration is to be a “rommance seeker” type, is a bit of a nympho. While Stevie’s aspirations include goals like “gain another mechanical knowledge point” and “stargaze with a telescope,” Nina’s aspirations are things like “make out with three different Sims,” “WooHoo (that is, have sex) with three different Sims,” and “WooHoo in a public place.” She wasn’t all that crazy about getting married (I guess that cuts into the sex for her), and as far as I can gather from what limited experimentation I’ve done so far, she’ll have sex with anyone who is willing to have sex with her. I guess this is a computer game developer’s definition of “romantic.”

As an aside, I think my next Sim experiment will be to put a bunch of roommates together in the same house who all aspire either to be “romantic” (like Nina) or to be “friendly” (which I think means have parties and stuff), and see what happens. I predict a Sim-orgy.

* At this point, I’m sort of curious to playing this group out to the “next generation.” In theory, Stevie and Nina are going to have a baby one of these days, and I assume that eventually, Stevie and Nina are going to die. There are ways to prevent that– there are “magic formulas” and things that your Sims can take to extend life– but actually, I’m kind of curious to see what happens if they just die, especially if they leave offspring behind. Can the children, hopefully old enough, inherit money and property? Can Sims have grandchildren? We’ll see.

I haven’t had a chance to write here lately, in part because I’ve been busy with school, and in part because I’ve been spending what free-time I have playing “The Sims 2,” golfing, gardening, etc. I do think all of these activities are winding down for the school year though, only to return in the spring.

Anyway, I thought I’d share what I found to be a profoundly “teachable moment” on Thursday. For my graduate course, Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice, we just started reading the Pamela Takayoshi and Brian Huot’s book, Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction. A couple of the essays in the first part of that book repeat the classic bit of wisdom that teaching with technology requires teachers to have a “plan B.”

Earlier in the day, in my undergraduate class called Writing, Style, and Technology, I experienced such a moment. I was planning on showing students how to work with basic HTML with the help of a paper hand-out and a web site I’ve created to teach this sort of thing, Krause’s How To HTML Site. The only problem was that the server that hosts this page and the server available for students, faculty, and staff at EMU to hosts pages, people.emich.edu, was down. In fact, it seemed to go down about a half-hour before my class started. I was in immediate need of a plan B.

Luckily, I had several alternatives. I have an older version of the site up and running on a different server, so we used that instead. Plus I had created a hard-copy of the instructions for that day’s class, which didn’t require students to upload files to the server (that’s Tuesday’s class). And also, luckily for me, this was about the 100th time I had done this sort of thing, which gave me the comfort and confidence to go to a plan B. I have to wonder if things would have gone well in that class (which they did, even though the server didn’t come back online until about a half-hour after class) if I hadn’t had a lot of previous experience teaching with technology in general and HTML in particular. How far would a plan B gotten me if I was overly stressed out about the server failure and disruption of my “plan A?”

Anyway, I used this as “teachable moment” in my grad class Thursday evening, talking a bit about how I had just that day had to go to an alternative to what I had planned to do with technology in my teaching. I’m not sure the extent to which my grad students recognized the importance of having an alternative in the face of technological failure, though. Perhaps it’s one of those things like the advice about backing up your files in case you have some kind of problem with your computer. The only people I know who back stuff up on their computers are people who have actually lost important files on their computers in the past. Maybe it’s that kind of experience you need in teaching before you get serious about plan B, too.

From the NCTE Inbox comes this Boston Globe article, “At high schools, more students logging on to learn.” Three interesting paragraphs from the article:

The Peak Group, an educational consulting firm, estimates that more than 1 million American high school students are currently taking Internet courses, up from 571,000 last year and 378,000 the year before.

The virtual classes have a maximum of 25 students, who receive regular high school credit if they complete the course.

The Internet courses, also referred to as distance learning or e-learning, expose students to a much broader range of courses than a single school could possibly offer. Among the more esoteric topics are ”Contemporary Irish Literature,” ”The Golden Age of Classical Greece,” ”Meteorology: A Study of Atmospheric Interactions,” and ”DNA Technology.

I think this is the right way to do online classes for at least two reasons. First, the numbers of students (at least for these online courses) are small, a mistake that has been made in the past by administrators. Second, these online courses are offering “extras” that would be hard to do in all but the most wealthy and/or large of school districts. It isn’t replacing the “basic” courses.

We aren’t at a place in terms of the technology or anything else where it makes sense for high school and college students to take all their courses online, but I think we are at a place where it makes sense for nearly all high school and college students to take at least some of their courses online.

-14.5 pounds or so

On the one hand, things on the diet aren’t going that well. I’ve been stuck again in a complete rut for the last couple weeks, and really, I’ve been stuck somewhere between -12 and -15 pounds since we got back from Hawaii. That’s frustrating.

But there are a couple “other hands” here. For one thing, I don’t feel like I’ve been “suffering,” which is perhaps one of the reasons why I’m stuck. I’ve been sticking pretty closely to a diet somewhere between “Phase 1” and “Phase 2” of the diet– with an occassional cookie, usually in a coffee shop– and it strikes me as a pretty easy and healthy way to eat. It’s a hell of a lot easier to stay on this diet than it was to stay on a low fat diet.

A third hand: there is more evidence to doubt the scale and my overall weight loss. Annette went to the doctor the other day, and while I won’t be discussing her adventures in dieting in any detail here, there are two interesting things worth mentioning. First, fully clothed and after lunch, she said she weighed less at the doctor’s office than she did on the bathroom scale that morning. Second, the weight she was at in February (according to the doctor’s office) was higher than she remembered.

Now, I don’t know for sure, but I think I’m in a similar space. I use the same scale as Annette does, and I do think I was probably about 5 pounds heavier in February than I was when I started this diet on April 1, which would put my total “loss” since February or so at more like -20 or so pounds. This might not seem like much to celebrate, but I have to say that when you’re in a diet rut like I am now– stuck with the same scale and total loss numbers for such a long time– you have to take solice in whatever you can get.

Or something like that– that title is my first pass at what I would call an academic article about the new computer game, “The Sims 2.”

Not that I’m going to write that article; I have too many other things on my plate right now as it is. However, having bought and played the newly released The Sims 2 a bit, I can say with some authority that it would be a good article.

Now, in my practice of keeping this “official” blog (where I try to keep to things that have to do with academia, scholarship, teaching, and the like) seperate from my “unofficial” blog (where I write about things that have to do with the rest of my life), I’m not going to write here about the ups and downs of actually playing this game. You can read what I’ve posted about playing The Sims 2 (so far) by following this link; all I will say is that I have been reasonably effective in rationing my game play to times I would be sitting around watching TV, meaning it hasn’t cut into my work. Yet.

Anyway, I am serious that someone ought to write an article about the role of electronic communication in this game. There have always been elements of communication among player’s characters (referred to as “Sims”)– they obviously talk face-to-face, and they also talk on the telephone– but the new version has Sims communicating (and thus developing friendships and “community”) with their computers with email and chat. For at least one Sim I have created, chat seems highly addictive, too. Problematically (at least for me), the level of “social” satisfaction this particular Sim gets from chat is the same as he gets from face-to-face interaction.

Perhaps the more interesting communications though is among the players of the game as facilitated by The Sims 2 web site, particularly the community section of the site. Again, this has always been a part of the game because players have always had fan sites and they’ve had the ability to exchange different items from the game (house designs, Sim skins and clothes, furniture and other objects, etc.). This new version of the web site supports a BBS forum, a chat forum, and– if you follow the “MySim” link— blogs. I’m pretty sure you have to register your game with the site (probably a pretty good way to keep down on the illegal copies, too) and my guess is that all of this is “moderated” to the point of censorship. I doubt I could create a blog on the Sims 2 web site that speaks badly of the game. Even with these limitations, I think it’s interesting.

I don’t know what else I would say about all this in an academic article– yet another reason I’m not going to write it. But it seems to me that there are some interesting and potentially problematic blendings between the real and the “sim”ulated here.