Steven D. Krause

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.

Well, as of 12:07, the faculty are on strike. Now, the last update via email and on their web site was at about 1:30 in the morning, so I suppose the situation could change yet today. But WEMU just now said faculty are indeed still on strike.

Two thoughts:

* Oddly enough, I’m playing golf this morning. The main reason for this is I wouldn’t be teaching this Wednesday anyway, and we were told at the union meeting yesterday that we should show up to picket when we would teach and hold office hours. The only tricky thing is I had a meeting scheduled this afternoon, and I might not know the news about a settlement when it happens if I’m on the course.

* At one of the many meeting this past week, our chief negotiator would say that going on strike would represent a “failure” on everyone’s part, including ours. I wonder if she still feels that way.

I’ve been riding my bike to school lately (and I will be until the weather gets nasty) because there’s been a lot of road construction around campus, it’s impossible to park at the beginning of the semester, and– oh yeah– I live less than a mile and a half from my office. Anyway, I rode in today for an afternoon EMU-AAUP “Support Rally,” and I was struck by what a great day it was for a protest, perfectly sunny, a light breeze, that mix between summer and fall. Really, a beautiful day.

The rally was good too– not really “beautiful,” but a good showing of around 300 or so faculty. Pretty well organized and a good “photo-op” for the media. I stood there with my sign, half-listening to the speeches (it was hard to hear) and mingling with colleagues, using the sign to shade the sun. Standing by Welch Hall, which is the administrative building, were some “suits” keeping an eye on things. Kinda interesting.

After an afternoon that actually involved doing some work, I went to yet another union meeting so we could take a vote to authorize a strike. We rehashed the issues, found out what had changed or not changed, etc., and after some other discussion (which I’ll get to in a bit), we voted to strike. And the weather was still really nice when I rode home.

A few thoughts on all of this (and a few other things beyond the meetings):

* My gut feeling, even after the vote to authorize a strike, is that the bargaining team is going to get a deal. I don’t know, maybe that is being overly optimistic, but it just seems to me that the faculty and the administration are actually pretty close. I mean, we might technically be on strike for a while this evening, when the contract ends at midnight, but I still think this is ultimately going to work out.

* The issues? Pretty much the same: hiring back more faculty, money, and continuing education. Insurance used to be a problem, but the administration backed down on forcing faculty into one plan. The continuing education is a relatively minor one to be honest, so I expect that one to drop away soon.

So, we’re left with hiring back faculty and money. Now, money-wise, the administration was offering a 2.6-2.3% raise for 2 years (I might have those numbers mixed up), and we were asking for 3.75% or so. Even the chief negotiator for the union doesn’t think we’re going to get 3.75% (at least that’s what the Ann Arbor News reported), so we’re probably talking about a 3% across the board raise for two years. That seems pretty straight-forward to me.

Faculty-wise, it’s a little more complicated. Basically, since the previous and infamous president was hired, EMU has hired a lot more administrators and non-tenure-track sorts of teachers (part-time and full-time lecturers), and we’ve hired a lot fewer faculty. At the meeting today, it sounds like we are getting somewhere with language where the administration commits to hiring a lot more faculty, but at the same time, the administration doesn’t really want to write this into the contract forever.

* One of the things I’m concerned about here are our priorities. The bargaining team says that the most important issue is hiring back more faculty, but what I’m worried about is the administration will offer us a 3% pay raise, do nothing about hiring back more faculty, and that’s the deal we’ll take. Personally, I think that’s kind of backwards.

* The controversy at the strike meeting– if it could really be called a “controversy”– was over how it was we were going to vote for a strike, with a paper ballot or a voice vote. I supported a paper and secret ballot and had big problems with a voice vote, basically because I thought this was too important to be one big “rah-rah” yell of yes.

Personally, I registered my vote to strike as “abstain.” I didn’t want to put my voice to a yes or a no, and I also don’t really know exactly how I feel about it all. Yeah, there are some issues left on the table, but going on strike is no fun, and if there isn’t much on the table, well…

* I do know this: I don’t know if we’re going on strike or not, but if the bargaining unit does call a strike, the administration is kidding themselves if they think that we’re either bluffing or if faculty split over this. Take me, for example: as unenthusiastic as I am about striking, there is no freakin’ way I’d cross a picket line. My guess is that this is true for about 630 or so of my colleagues.

Oh well. I’ll know by tomorrow morning. I just saw EMU’s “PR Tool” Pam Young on one of the channels out of Detroit, and I have to say that if this is the language that they want to use about what the faculty is doing, I suspect we might be starting classes a couple days late this year…

* On Sunday, Will somewhat unexpectedly said he wanted to get the training wheels off of his bike and to try to learn to ride it two-wheeled style. He may have been motivated to do this by a friend who is one year younger and who has matered the two-wheeled approach. Will, like his father, is a bit of a chicken, too afraid of pain and/or falling, so there was a lot of “don’t let go! don’t let go!” kind of crying. He was going to give up almost right away, but I promised a Dairy Queen trip if he was willing to keep it up for a while. We made some progress, though we will be working on this for a bit longer.

* Will and I both continue to enjoy the new PlayStation2. He seems stuck on a particular level of his Harry Potter game, though.

* Today is Will’s first day of school– second grade. Annette and I will be taking him in today so we get a chance to meet his new teacher and all that. I am planning on going to the gym right after words, so I’m going to be meeting this person looking pretty scruffy and smelling somewhat questionable. This look this morning will only be heightened by the fact that I haven’t shaved in a couple days and I very much need a haircut. Oh well; at least Annette will look like a grown-up.