Category: Uncategorized

Just thought I’d mention two press releases on the EMU web site. First, there’s this item, “Schollaert resigns, Loppnow named interim Provost; legal affairs department reassigned to president.” The article talks about how Schollaert had been thinking about stepping down as Provost for months because he wanted to get back to teaching, etc., etc. Hmmm. A likely story. Somehow, I think the deal with the infamous house, the fact that both the board of regents and the faculty generally had bad things to say about his work, the faculty union wanted him fired outright, and there has been a fair amount of “house cleaning” around here with the new (interim) president and such, somehow, I think that Schollaert was, er, encouraged to find his way out of administration. His resignation is effective next week, and he’ll spend the rest of this academic year on “administrative leave,” whatever that means.

The other piece of news on the EMU web site is that James Knapp has been named as the interim director of honors at EMU. Jim is a colleague of mine in the English department and a good friend– he came into the department at the same time I did, his kids play with my kid, etc. Jim will be good at this gig, though I personally hope he only does it for a year or so because we need him back in the English department. Of course, the thing is he even looks like an honors director, so I’m worried he might end up staying in that job for a while….

I’ve spent most of my day today working on some materials about technological needs in the department I need to pass along to my department head (who in turn needs to pass it along to the dean and so forth). It’s been a committee effort, though I am more or less the lead person on this in the department. I will spare the details here, but I will note two things:

* Every time I make these lists, I realize how perpetually behind my department is in terms of the technological equipment readily available. Judging from what I know from folks out there in the computers and writing community, I’m not so sure that things here at EMU are really all that different than they are at a lot of comparable schools. Still, that doesn’t make it less frustrating.

* As Yogi Berra said, it’s deja vu all over again. Working on this stuff over the last couple of days with colleagues in the department has been satisfying in many ways, but a lot of what we’re asking for in this latest round of technology requests is pretty much the same sort of thing my colleagues and I have been asking for ever since I came to EMU in 1998. Again, probably not that unusual, but still frustrating.

In order to make sure I got into the 2005 Conference on College Composition and Communication, I was part of proposals for a few different things: a pre-conference workshop, a panel presentation, and a “Special Interest Group” (SIG) on creative writing. Well, there’s some confusion on the mailing lists and such about what has or hasn’t been accepted yet, but it looks like the only one of these things that “made it” was the SIG presentation.

This presents a bit of a dilemma for me. Basically, I can afford to go to one “big travel” conference a year, and both the CCCCs and the 2005 Computers and Writing Conference are going to be in San Francisco. On the one hand, I always like the CCCCs, I didn’t go last year, and considering the fact that it is the major conference in my field, it is one of those things I probably should go to as often as I can. On the other hand, because my panel and workshop (probably) didn’t make, I’m not sure it’s worth it to go for my relatively minor speaking role in the SIG, and I am also not sure which friends of mine are going, especially folks around EMU. Oh, I’ll know people if I were to go the CCCCs by myself, but right now, I’m not sure if I know anyone I can split a room with and such, for example.

Now, I went to C&W last summer in Hawaii (ahh… Hawaii…), and as much fun and as important as that conference is to me, I’m not sure that’s a conference I need to go to every year. So, on the one hand, I probably could/should skip C&W this time around, especially if it is a choice between it and the CCCCs, and I should probably go to the CCCCs. On the other hand, I know I’ll know more people (and frankly, have more fun) at C&W, I’ll probably be able to split a room with someone, and I will probably be able to have a more significant speaking role at the conference.

One other issue is timing. The CCCCs is in the middle of March, while C&W is in the middle of June, arguably a more convenient and pleasant weather time for me to go to San Francisco.

What to do? Who out there knows they are going to the CCCCs in March, anyway?

One of the things I can do with the management tools for this this site domain is see what phrases people typed into a search engine to get to the pages on stevendkrause.com. Here’s a list of some of the more odd examples of what words brought readers here:

* advantages and disadvantages of consuming drugs

* sexy women’s beach volleyball pictures

* ‘bad teachers’ (I take that one personally…)

* girly man al franken

* lactose intollerant doughnut

* mcdonalds salad south beach

The web is a very strange thing, isn’t it?

This is one of those things that sort of walks the line between “official” and “unofficial” blog material, but I thought I’d put it here:

My wife Annette and I went to a wedding this afternoon, the first one we’ve been to since my youngest sister got married about five years ago. A very nice ceremony and all of that. For the dinner and such after words, we were seated with two older couples who we didn’t know but who turned out to be very nice folks. During the course of chit-chat, we talked about what we did for a living, and it came up that I was a writing teacher. People often assume (as they did here) that I teach creative writing, but I then have to explain that I don’t do that. As a sort of simple explanation, I usually say something like “Remember that first year composition course you took? I teach courses like that.” If they want details, I will go on.

Anyway, tonight, in the course of my first year composition spiel, this guy, who said he graduated from high school and took his first year composition class in 1955, told this story about how he had written this essay about how he had cut his hand badly at a boy scout camp during a ceremony in which he was dressed like an American Indian, which, for the time, meant he had on war paint and a loin cloth. He went to the hospital and was treated by a Chinese doctor, who, according this guy, didn’t really know what to think of the outfit. This guy, who had to be into his mid 60s if not older, talked about how his 1955 comp/rhet teacher had read this essay to the other students in the class and how proud he was of that essay and the impact it had on the other students in the class. This guy, well into retirement and with his college days long gone, obviously remembered this classroom experience so fondly that it was a story he told in situations like this one.

This is one of the reasons why I’m happy to be a college writing teacher.

PS: Just in case you were wondering, I’m aware of the “cultural awareness” problems of the story this guy told me– a white kid dressed up like an Indian performing some sort of fake ceremony, being treated by a doctor who was “Chinese” (which probably meant someone who was some form of Asian, not necessarily Chinese), etc. But hey, this guy was in FY Comp 40 years ago; I got to cut him a break…

-14.5 or -16 pounds or so

I think there are two things that have put me back on track in terms of the diet. First, school has started, and I have found myself at work without time or even interest in eating. In other words, there’s no “I have nothing else to do– I think I’ll eat something” kind of eating. Second, I’ve been able to get to the gym again pretty regularly.

Still, I might need to get a new scale. It has always been somewhat suspect because moving it around a bit or stepping on it at a slightly different angle can change things by a pound or more. But it seems to be doing that more lately. And besides that, going back to the gym again makes me wonder about the accuracy of it. They have one of those “doctor office” kinds of scales in the locker room. The last time I got on it, I was at about -16. That’s 2 pounds less than I was on the scale at home, and that’s in my gym clothes and after a light breakfast.

I know, I know, we’re only talking about a pound or two. But hey, a pound or two is all I’m losing each week on this diet, so I’ll take all of ’em.

There’s been a couple of interesting things on some of the blogs I frequent about teaching in community colleges. There’s this post and this post from John “A Writing Teacher’s Blog” Lovas. John has a certain “street cred” here because he teaches in a community college and he has a long-standing scholarly record in the comp/rhet community. Then there’s this smart post from Jeff Rice, and also this smart post from Derek “Earth Wide Moth” Mueller. Derek wasn’t talking about community college stuff originally, but it went that way in the comments.

This talk about the difference (if there is one) between writing pedagogy in four year colleges and universities versus community colleges comes at an interesting time for me because my colleagues and I have been talking casually about how our MA program has been changing and how we might need to change, too. It used to be that about 70% or so of the students enrolled in our “Teaching of Writing” program were practicing junior high and high school teachers. I don’t know what the numbers are now, but there are significantly fewer of these secondary teachers now then there used to be. Conversely, we have a lot more students who are interested in pursuing PhDs in composition and rhetoric and/or who are interested in teaching at community colleges.

So maybe what we need to do in our program is to figure out a way to address some of the issues of teaching in community colleges. We have a “topics in” series of courses, and I was kind of thinking that a “topics in teaching in the community college” might be interesting. Of course, one of the problems (besides the fact that, as the above links suggest, it is debatable if there really are a lot of differences in writing pedagogy in universities and community colleges) is that all of the folks who might teach a class like that have little or no experience in actually working in community colleges. That’s not to say we can’t learn, but it isn’t something we can do on the fly, either.

I have more than enough on my plate right now, but I think it’d be an interesting class to explore and research. We’ll see….

I don’t think this is exactly the “end” of faculty strike news because the union leadership has still not informed members any of the details of the deal and faculty have to vote on it. But practically speaking, it appears that the strike is settled and everything is back to normal around here. There are a few rumors worth noting. I’ve heard from reliable sources that faculty are going to get an “across the board” raise of over 3% for each of the two years of the contract and the interim president has promised to hire 25 or so faculty above and beyond the 47 the administration was trying to search this year as the result of a retirement buy-out plan.

I don’t know who “blinked” first in these negotiations, but I have to think it was the administration. After all, faculty were getting ready to go onto the picket lines Wednesday morning. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of being on strike, but I was certainly prepared and assuming that I wasn’t going to be teaching the first week or so of classes. There was a fair amount of area TV and other media coverage of the whole thing, and given the oodles of bad press the administration had already had to endure over the last year or so, I have to think that they didn’t want to create the photo op of faculty picketing in front of the “University House.”

I’m glad we settled, but damn, that would have been some rally….

I went for a haircut at my usual place in the Arcade in downtown Ann Arbor just now, and while the cut was fine and I happily didn’t have to wait at all, the woman cutting my hair had on some religious TV show on. The preacher, who was also a woman, was speaking about ways we all have to fight the devil in our minds by citing passages from the Bible. Pretty kooky stuff, if you ask me.

I thought about getting her to change the channel, but I decided against it. For one thing, it would have been kind of rude. For another, she might have used that as an opportunity/excuse to really screw up the haircut.

Anyway, simply yet another example of how hard it is for me to find a good place to get a haircut, I guess. Over the last fifteen or so years, I can think of three people who I thought did a really good job. One was this kind of punk woman in Richmond. She worked at this funky place in the Oregon Hill neighborhood. I assume I was the only client she had who had a “normal” hairstyle. Then, when Annette and I were grad school in Bowling Green, we used to get our hair cut by this quasi-closeted man named Bob. He did a great job and was dirt-cheap, too. The two things about him were you had to schedule an appointment like a month in advance because he was so busy– I’d usually just set an appointment right after I got done. The other thing was he cut my hair REALLY fast, I mean unnervingly fast. I was usually in and out of there in 10 minutes.

I haven’t found anyone as good in the AA-Ypsi area. Maybe I’ll just start going to that place in the mall…

I (along with everyone else) got an email at 7:28 this morning that said that the union reached a tentative agreement and we’re not on strike anymore. Good news for now; more news later.