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And where are my chili peppers?!

Also in Inside Higher Ed, a report on a study done by James Felton, a professor at Central Michigan University, finds that there is a correlation between “hotness” and “quality” on the dubious web site Ratemyprofessor.com:

As far as students — or whoever is rating professors on the open Rate My Professor site — are concerned, nothing predicts a quality instructor like hotness.

Felton found a positive correlation of 0.64 (0.00 means there is no correlaton whatsoever, and 1.0 describes a perfectly linear relationship) between the “hotness� and “quality� — quality is a composite of “helpfulness� and “clarity� — ratings on the site. “Hotness� is determined by evaluators choosing “hot� or “not hot,� with each click counting as either +1 or -1. “Quality� is on a simple 1-5 scale. (Felton may be an exception on the correlation — while he doesn’t get any hotness points from RateMyProfessors, he does well on quality.)

I wonder if, by teaching online, I can somehow increase my hotness factor….

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Student Loan Follies

Inside Higher Ed has an article about the piece on Sallie Mae last night on 60 Minutes. It’s sort of an odd article because it seems to be defending Sallie Mae in a way; is there some advertising dollars at work here?

I saw this story on 60 Minutes last night, and on the whole, I agreed with it. The student loan business really is a no-lose proposition for Sallie Mae: if students default on a loan, the lender gets money from the “guarantor” (thus the phrase “guaranteed student loans”), meaning the bank can’t possibly lose. Further, unlike most other forms of debt, students can’t negotiate it down or erase it through bankruptcy. So it makes sense as to why Sallie Mae was described as one of the most profitable businesses in the world.

On the other hand, the students they talked to about their debt load seemed a little uneducated about the whole process. These former students expressed shock that when they borrowed $60K, it turned out that they now all of a sudden owed $100K or more. Uh… this is called interest; it’s how banks make their money and why banking is lucrative in the first place.

What was completely missing from the show was any discussion as to why students have to borrow so much money to go to college in the first place. Essentially, the state and the federal governments have steadily decreased its funding for high education over the last twenty years or so. If a young person wants to earn a college degree (and young people are repeatedly told that if they want to “get ahead” in this country, they need a college degree), then they need to find a way to pay for it. Unless Mom and Dad have the cash, they have to work; and generally, jobs delivering pizzas or waiting tables aren’t enough to pay all the bills. Thus the loans.

I would have liked to have seen a bit more in this report something about the relationship between increased student loan debt and decreased government funding for higher education. And I wouldn’t have minded some sort of discussion about priorities for spending in the U.S. For example, the “education president” is pursuing a war in Iraq that has so far cost the government about $280 billion dollars (and rising, of course). Think about the number of full-ride scholarships we could have given to students attending colleges and universities.

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Miscellaneous Spring/Summer Resolutions and To-Do List Items

Annette and Will and I are engaged in a game of Risk which I have just conceded to Annette, who is essentially the queen of world domination when it comes to this. In any event, while Will and Annette engage in a “mop-up” exercise, I thought I’d post a few thoughts here about the spring and the summer.

You see, as an academic-type, summer (and most of spring) time is where I get a break. It’s not that I stop working; it’s just that, with a reduced teaching and service workload, my schedule is even more flexible than it was before. Now I have time for scholarship, but I also have time for, well, anything I want. So, without any exact ordering here, these are the things that I hope to accomplish this spring/summer:

  • Lose weight. I’ve started the process, though to be honest, I’ve been a bit disappointed to date. It seems to me that the last time around with the South Beach Diet, I had lost at least 10 pounds by a month into it. This time around, I am hovering at around 7 pounds lost, and it seems that it doesn’t make a lot of difference if I religiously follow it or if I am moderate to less than moderate cheater. Diet plateau-ing is common of course, but I had hoped it would have happened after about 15 or so pounds. Fortunately, this is the time of the year when I really do have the time to get more exercise.
  • Write a book about eating. Ironically enough, I have also been reading lately about competitive eating and I am hoping/trying to write a (very) rough draft of a novel set on the backdrop of a futuristic world of professional competitive eating during the summer. Long story short, I’ve been interested in competitive eating in a sort of fascinated/horrified way for a while now, and I recently purchased two non-fiction accounts of the current state of the “sport.” I have wanted to try to write a novel about this for some time, sort of in the vein of National Novel Writing Month, which is sort of an unofficial contest on writing a draft of a novel– even a bad one– in 30 days. We’ll see how it goes. Oh, I should point out that I have more official/job-related writing projects this summer too, but that’s a different story.
  • Get up stupid early to write eating book and to work on academic projects. I’ve always gotten up pretty early, but lately (well, the last week or so), I’ve been getting up at 5 am to work on stuff– taking notes on the novel, working on getting my spring/summer teaching ready, miscellaneous other reading and writing tasks. What I’ve been finding is that after I get over the initial shock of being awake at 5 am, I am really productive for a couple of hours. True, I’m ready for bed by 10-ish, but as far as I can tell, all that means is I miss some “late night” television. Big deal.
  • Not touch the computer on Sundays, which is one of the reasons why I am typing this post right now. I want to plan on spending my Sundays this summer doing things like yardwork, making day-trips, and/or reading the newspaper for a change of pace. It’s probably the way I ought to do things during the school year too, but it rarely works out that way. Normally, Sunday ends up being at least a partial work day for me.
  • House cleaning, house maintenance. We’ve got stuff to do around here like a little painting, a lot of cleaning (especially in the basement and the garage and such), etc. Will and I have a major rearranging of the basement in mind that will allow us to once again use the ping-pong table as a ping-pong table. And the yard. I could go on here– but I won’t because it might be the subject of future posts.
  • Learn some basic Italian phrases. Annette and Will and I are going to go to Europe in August, first to Italy and then to Germany. There will certainly be more discussion here about this later. But for now, I’ll just say that I bought a “course” on very basic Italian phrases so that when we get over there I know I’ll be order a cup of coffee and find a place to pee and such.

I’m sure there’s more coming, but that’s enough for now. The spring has begun!

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15 Weeks vs. 7.5 Weeks vs. 12 Weeks (Online)

I stumbled across this blog entry by Liz Kleinfeld lamenting the length of the 15 week semester the other day; essentially, she contemplates the potentially benefits of a 10 or so week semester.

Actually, I more or less experienced this with my first tenure-track job at Southern Oregon because they were on the quarter system. If I recall, it was either 9 or 10 weeks, including finals. Now, I had a number of problems with this job, so perhaps my judgement about the quarter system has been tainted. Nonetheless, I thought it was not a good idea for a couple of different reasons. First, while I appreciate the notion that 15 weeks is perhaps too long, 10 weeks is too short. There was just too much work for both students and instructors crammed into those 10 weeks. Second, and this was perhaps a problem unique to Southern Oregon, but a typical course there was four credits, meaning you met either four times a week or twice for about two hours at a time. Combine this with the fact that most people taught three courses like this for three quarters in a row and you’ve got some stressed-out and over-worked folks.

Third, the quarter system meant that the school year lasted WAAAAY too long. We started in mid-September and went all the way through early June, which made schooling a rather unpleasant experience for students and teachers alike in mid-May. Which reminds me: EMU wrapped up winter term classes last week (technically, my classes had finals on Monday).

No, ten weeks wasn’t good. Of course, the way that most of the spring and summer courses are taught here at EMU isn’t necessarily a very good idea, either. Spring term (the term we just had, which most schools call “spring,” is actually called “winter” term here) starts on Monday, May 8 and goes through the end of June, and summer runs from then until the third or so week in August– in other words, 7 and a half weeks.

Now, these 7.5 week courses do meet for about six hours a week, and, given that it’s the spring and/or summer terms, this does work reasonably well. But it isn’t ideal, and, in my experiences, it makes teaching writing and/or a course with a ton of reading a bit of a high-wire act.

Which brings me to this year’s 12 week experiment. This spring/summer, I’ve managed to carve out a deal where I will be teaching an online class, English 328, for 12 weeks. I thought that teaching an online class in just seven and a half weeks was just crazy, and I also thought that 12 weeks sounded just about right. We’ll see how it turns out; I hope it goes well because I like the idea of teaching online in the summer (if I’m going to teach then at all…).

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Mother this, buddy…

The main reason I’m posting this is because Annette and I saw a blurb about this on the news last night and her reaction to it (as was mine) was “what a crock.”

You may have seen or heard the story, that some “study” has suggested that U.S. mothers deserve a salary of around $134 K a year. Here’s a quote/passage from this Yahoo News article:

A full-time stay-at-home mother would earn $134,121 a year if paid for all her work, an amount similar to a top U.S. ad executive, a marketing director or a judge, according to a study released Wednesday.

A mother who works outside the home would earn an extra $85,876 annually on top of her actual wages for the work she does at home, according to the study by Waltham, Massachusetts-based compensation experts Salary.com.

To reach the projected pay figures, the survey calculated the earning power of the 10 jobs respondents said most closely comprise a mother’s role — housekeeper, day-care teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, chief executive and psychologist.

First off– and this is where I’m putting on my academic hat briefly– this study has enough holes in it to taxi a 747 through. People don’t hold ten different jobs at the same time. All of us– moms, dads, kids, etc.– multi-task like this. In our household, these tasks are not all neatly assigned to “mom,” either. I mean, I’m more of the laundry machine operator, cook, and computer operator in our corporation er household than Annette, I think. I could go on, but at face value this, is just freakin’ stoopid.

And it’s also patronizing, ultimately. We all know that the “job” of “home maker” has been traditionally undervalued, and we all also know damn well that there’s no way there’s going to be some program to pay mothers. So what can we do to make mom-types feel better? I know! Let’s invent some crazy dollar figure for how much they are worth– but not too crazy, not like “millions” of dollars, just six figures. That will give some moms the chance to say “see, I am worth it.”

Agh! I’m going to food engineer some breakfast soon….

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Pseduo-anonymous "discourse"

Jill Walker has two interesting blog posts back-to-back, the kind of posts that ask to be cited in the vague and foggy book project on blogging and the “writerly life” I have in a corner of my brain. The first is yet another post on the whole pseduo-anonymous thing. She points out again that one of the (apparent) appeals of the pseduoanonymous blog is the play of it all, the “I’m going to take a picture of my eyes and make vague references to a region of the country; can you guess who I am? Have you seen me at the store or the coffee shop?”

In particular, this bit struck me:

I think what fascinates me about the hide-and-seek of pseudonymous blogging is that that is what we all do when we blog. In psuedonymous blogs the blogger gets to play with that. Real-name bloggers like me – well, we may only blog 1% of our lives, but people still seem to think they’re getting the whole picture – I’ve been asked at many a late party or conference how I can stand that people know me so intimately.

I very much had this experience (relatively) recently in Omaha. I received a ride from the hotel I was staying in to the conference by a Creighton professor who was also attending the conference and who I had not met. We exchanged some pleasantries, and then she explained how it was strange meeting me face to face since she had read both this blog and my unofficial blog and she felt like she knew me already. When of course, she didn’t; or at least she only knew a part of me.

Anyway, the second post on Jill’s blog of interest to me this morning was about a meme on what’s the last word in your dissertation. Kinda cute, I thought, so I pulled my dusty copy off of the shelf and looked:

discourse

I’ve decided to take this as an omen.

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“Mission Accomplished”– not

Lots of stuff happening today, May 1. I’m all for the various protests that have to do with the legislation out there dealing with immigration; if you’re interested in a kind of “educational” video on it all, especially as it relates to things like making English the official language and the Spanish version of the National Anthem, click here.

But let’s not forget something else that happened this day a mere three years ago. What’s that, you ask? Why, this is “Mission Accomplished” day, the day that W. declared victory in Iraq. Here’s a sad “by the number” statement on the whole affair; and here’s a few pithy words from G. Gordon Liddy about Bush way back when.