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How to not write a textbook

Debrah “blogos” Hawhee had a post today titled “one. more. week.” where (as she wraps up a new edition of a textbook she has co-written) she lists her necessary conditions for textbook writing. I possessed none of them. To quote:

1. You really love the material you are working on. I mean, really, really love it, and you must feel it is important (politically, morally, whateverly) to make the material available for teachers and (even more) for students. Just wanting to make money is really not enough IMHO.

Nope, not me. I mean, I think I thought what I was doing was useful and interesting (for a while), but no, I didn’t love it. Or maybe another way of putting it: if there wasn’t money involved, I would have never attempted to write this book.

2. You are willing to work your ass off every five years for a new edition–that is if it goes into new editions.

Nope. Far from it. Of course, I never got to the first edition, so…

3. You are surrounded by loving people–near and far–who will put up with your muddle-headedness and who will understand when you say nothing is new.

Sorry, no. I mean, not counting “loving people” like my wife and son and friends and such. But they weren’t really working on the book. What I needed, to be honest, was some loving (or at least “liking”) book publishers.

4. You don’t mind being consumed for a very long stretch of time.
5. You can adhere to deadlines. These deadlines are quite serious.

No and no. I’ve heard similar things from other successful textbook publishers, actually. I had some kind of shifting deadlines from the publishers for a bunch of different reasons (and that made the deadlines more complex), but as the project lingered on, I did indeed started minding being consumed by the project.

6. You can find a good research assistant who will respond to your piles and pleas, even though the work can be a real bitch (search engines simply aren’t equipped for the kind of hunts we do). Relatedly I have some public library observations to be made at a later date.

Research Assistant?! Nope, didn’t have one of those. Actually, at EMU, I think there is a bias against giving too much in the way of institutional support for any kind of book projects that might actually make money.

7. You have a coauthor who is smart and honest and supportive and whom you admire and respect a hell of a lot.

Also something I lacked and also something that seems to be common in successful textbook writing projects– though I have to say that I don’t know if I could put up with a co-writer for a textbook project, given all of the other necessary ingredients.

Oh well. Live and learn. Or just slap it up on the web when the publishers don’t want it anymore.

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Testing yet again (and possibly changing directions entirely)

I don’t know why, but I’ve had a series of blog freak-outs lately. Let’s see if this works any better.

Update:
I am not guessing I’m going to get a lot of feedback on this, but I seem to be having some blog problems that perhaps boil down to a sort of accidental mish-mash of different versions of WordPress. I think I’m going to try to attempt a major reinstall of WordPress– that is, totally erasing the current directory and replace it with all squeaky-clean and fresh WordPress 2.2– and see if that does it.

Frankly, I’ve been contemplating lately going to a system where I just keep one blog anyway– that is, combining this space with my unofficial blog space, but doing it in a way that allows for readers to still choose what to read. Maybe have RSS feeds for the categories “academia” and “life” or something.

In any event, sorry for the less than tidy blog right now. Maybe it will improve soon.

Update #2:
I will spare folks– especially all three of my readers, none of whom care about this– the technical details, but as far as I can tell, my previous WordPress theme just stopped working for some reason. My hypothesis is that it has something to do with my upgrade to the newer version of this software. I’m not sure.

In any event, for the time-being, I’m going to keep this current theme, “greenart.” I kinda like it, actually. Beyond the short-term though I still wonder about the idea of merging this official blog with my more unofficial “life” blog. I have mixed feelings, but no time to worry about those mixed feelings for now. So, for the time being, enjoy the new look, even if it’s likely not permanent.

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Possible drive-in field trips?

Whatever happened to drive-ins? I recall them as a source of grand fun and “partying” as a high school young person in Iowa, and I’m pretty sure that my generation was among the last to experience this on a regular basis. They’re not around anymore, certainly not in my town where those big screens and lots were paved and/or built over a long time ago.

Or so I thought….

There was a blurb in the Ann Arbor paper today about a summer only drive-in theater thing at the Compuware Sports Arena, which is just down/up the road in Plymouth. Basically, this is a hockey rink, and they’re using the parking lot in the summer for drive-ins. No movies have been announced yet, but it could be a fun deal.

And then I did a google search and came across Drive-Ins.com, which has a database of drive-ins. And from there, I discovered that right in our own backyard (well, Dearborn), we’ve got the Ford-Wyoming Drive-In, which boasts itself as the largest in the world! Who knew?!

So, maybe a family-friendly movie show?

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Don't worry about the government

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.

See this CHE piece, “House Panel Moves to Bloc Accreditation Changes While Increasing Pell Grant,” and this Inside Higher Ed piece, “Congressional Timeout for Spellings.”

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.
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Just call me Skippy




dwellstickers

Originally uploaded by steven_d_krause

For the last couple years, mostly as an experiment on what mailing lists I end up (but also just because it’s fun), I’ve been subscribing to various magazines with slightly fake names. For example, when we subscribed to TV Guide (briefly, and only as a result of Will’s school’s magazine drive), the name of record was “Sophie Wannamaker,” aka “Stupid Dog” or just “the dog.” Surprisingly, Sophie didn’t receive much mail.

My latest name adventure has been with WIRED magazine, under the slightly fake Steve Skippy Krause. So far, the only junk mail that has come to Skippy has been from something called dwell, which is a sort yuppie/urbanite/sophisticate/quasi- house porn-like magazine– you know, where to get your stainless steel kitchen appliances, where to pick out the perfect $1000 light fixtures, art projects made from cardboard boxes, and so forth. Something I’d thumb through at the dentist office or even accept as a gift, but not something I’d order on purpose.

I had received two pieces of mail from the dwell people so far: something I threw away a long time ago, and then that which is pictured here: some mailing labels (which I had ignored and which Annette rescued for me). Sweet, huh?

So call me Skippy, but don’t call me late to dinner.

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Some version of justice

From MSNBC (via my Google account though, actually) comes this news, “Teachers’ porn conviction overturned.”

A substitute teacher was granted a new trial Wednesday after her conviction for failing to prevent students from viewing pornography on her computer raised thorny questions about who is ultimately responsible for screening unsavory online material.

The woman, Julie Amero, 40, of Windham, Conn., adamantly denied clicking on pornographic Web sites that appeared on her classroom’s computer screen in October 2004 while she was teaching seventh-graders at Kelly Middle School in Norwich.

Amero was convicted in January on four counts of risk of injury to a minor, but computer security experts and bloggers across the political spectrum rallied to Amero’s defense when evidence later emerged that her computer had been infected with spyware that caused pop-up ads to take over the screen.

First off, I don’t quite understand the way the law worked in this case– was this thrown out on appeal? Did a judge look at the jury’s decision and say “oh, this is just stupid,” and call for a new trial? It kind of sounds like the second one happened.

But second, I’m glad that someone came to their senses. I’m too lazy to go back and look at those articles now, but the level of dumb bunny -ness demonstrated by the jurors and other participants in the last trial on all this was startling. So Amero is getting a version of justice here for sure, but jeez, what an awful year or so it has been for her.