Author: Steve Krause

I suspect that my wife will have a unique appreciation for this short film, “238 Miles.” It’s a “documentary” of sorts where a guy listens to ABBA’s song “Dancing Queen” over and over and over and OVER again on his four or five hour drive from Iowa City, IA to Chicago, IL. Funny stuff, and the other movies at the site are good, too.

See http://www.error10.net/. I cannot believe that all of these are actually “real,” though as good as the Apple and OSX interface is, there are still plenty of weird things that pop up once in a while.

Yeah, that’s pretty much my grocery list for tomorrow, but because it’s a typed subject line on my unofficial blog and not a handwritten note, I don’t think it’s the sort of thing that is going to show up on grocerylist.org anytime soon.

I don’t know the whole story with this site, but I do know two things. First, the site, which consists of 700 or so (!) grocery lists scanned in or sent to the site’s creator and organizer Bill Keaggy. This is a site which he claims does not take too much of his time. Yeah, right.

Second, he linked to a post I had back in September about my enjoyment of grocery shopping with the title line “LOVE: The pleasures of grocery shopping.” It closely follows a post titled “HATE: I hate grocery shopping.” (I would have linked back to the grocerylist site, but the archive didn’t seem to be working.) A nice juxtaposition there, Bill.

Anyway, I’ll have to keep track of this site. And scan my grocery lists and send them to him via email again and again and again.

This morning I read what I thought was about the smartest critique of the SAT writing test I’ve stumbled across to date: “New SAT writing section scores low,” by Mark Franek (who is an English teacher and Dean of Students at the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia), in the February 15 Christian Science Monitor. This article was linked on the blog Number 2 Pencil.

You should read the article for yourself, but Franek carefully points out the problems of both the writing portion of the test and the grammar portion. And, in my reading, he does it without dismissing all standardized testing out of hand.

Let me quote from two portions of Franek’s article:

Second, the slew of multiple-choice questions about grammar that the College Board calls “improving sentences and paragraphs” is not what Shakespeare had in mind when he dipped his quill in the inkwell before sitting down to edit a draft.

From the board’s official Prep Booklet, here’s the first example of what to expect (possible errors appear in italics): “The students (a) have discovered that (b) they can address issues more effectively (c) through letter-writing campaigns (d) and not through public demonstrations. (e) No error.”

This sentence appears OK to me, even if it is a little clunky. According to the College Board, however, the error occurs at (d) because: “When a comparison is introduced by the adverb ‘more,’ as in ‘more effectively,’ the second part of the comparison must be introduced by the conjunction ‘than’ rather than ‘and not.’ “

Got that?

I’ve been writing and teaching English for a long time, and this question is pretty appalling to me, too. As Franek points out, the answer is not “d” per se; rather, the answer is a more complete rewrite of the sentence. And, as I think someone on the WPA mailing list pointed out, that might be an interesting way to go with the test: give students some passages like this to revise and then holistically score those revisions.

Of course, we’re not liable to get that or anything a whole lot better than what we’ve got for a while, and the reasons for that are crystal clear. To quote Franek again:

If the goal is to improve education, then I propose a portfolio-assessment approach where students are allowed to gradually generate (over the course of the year) multiple writing samples in various genres (the kinds of things found in any real library or bookstore) and then submit them by some agreed-upon due date.

Critics of this approach will say that portfolios are unreliable and that there is no way to guarantee student authenticity. But we teachers know the truth. The College Board would much prefer that their test remain mostly multiple-choice, which is cost-effective to score. Portfolios would require the Board to hire thousands of English teachers each year to read and assess over a million pages of student writing, much of it demonstrating genuine literacy learning. Now that would be a revolution.

Right on the money, IMO.

It begs the question: will Christo come to the Ypsi-Arbor area?

Probably not.

In the meantime though, I thought this link at the blog Curbed which links to a ton of other pages with pictures of the Central Park Gates is enough to do the trick.

I’ve been too busy and/or distracted with a host of other things (school and life both) to write anything new or original here lately. But I still have been reading some other blogs and I thought I mention a few items of interest:

• “Let the carnival commence.” Collin has started the long promised discussion of Wayne Booth’s book The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication. I think I’m going to try to read it at the gym while riding the stationary bike– it will give me a break from the treadmill anyway.
• “Teaching Writing, Collaboration, and Engagement in Global Contexts: The Drupal Alternative to Proprietary Courseware.” These are the slides from a presentation by Charlie Lowe, Samantha Blackmon, and David Blakesley at a conference at Purdue. I don’t know if Drupal (or open source software, for that matter) is always “the best” solution. But I do think that when universities adopt one “course in a box” platform, especially the CMS software that aren’t particularly flexible (things like WebCT), they paint themselves into a corner.
• Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff has a post where she ponders what texts she would pick for a first-year rhetoric or composition course. She writes about the distinction between “composition” and “rhetoric” (which I sometimes agree with, and which I sometimes think is a pretty artificial one), and contemplates what texts she would use if she could use anything. Personally, I’d use the book I’m writing. And along those lines, one other thing left out of the formula here are textbook companies and the weird relationship that scholars in the field have with them.
• From Johndan “datacloud” Johnson-Eilolia, I learned that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself and that the Powerbook 100 was named the “#1 gadget of all time.” Like many undergraduates (including Johndan), I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book that was actually passed around on my dorm floor. I also saw a “talk” that Thompson gave at the University of Iowa when I was an undergraduate there; really, it was more of a drunken press conference than a speech. RIP, Hunter.

  And my first laptop was a PB 100. I think I’ll have to see if it’s still in the basement or not…

In one of the more amusing postings I’ve seen on a blog I read which is regularly amusing, the writer of Ann Arbor is Overrated notes that in upstate New York, they serve a style of hot dog referred to as a “michigan.” Let me attempt to explain.

There are a few “unique foods” in Michigan– lots of cherries up north, and way up north, you’ve got pasties, the meat pies served with gravy oh so popular in the “U.P.” But in southeast Michigan, I don’t think there really is a distinctive food product. Oh sure, I suppose there’s a lot of good Polish and Middle Eastern food in this area, and Detroit does make a big deal out of the Polish jelly doughnut called a “Paczki,” but hey, when all is said and done, a doughnut is a doughnut. Unless, of course, it’s a Krispy Kreme, but that’s a whole different discussion.

The Detroit area does have these places called “koney islands” (or, sometimes, “coney islands”). “Koney islands” the places, are diners, and they almost always serve a food product called a “koney island,” which is a chili dog. No, I don’t have any idea why they call diners koney islands and chili dogs koney islands.

Anyway, AAO discovered this link to what he (I presume “he,” but I don’t really know) calls a “bizarro-world” in New York where they sell these “michigan” (with a small M?) hot dogs. Be sure to visit the comments– they’re more than half the fun.

All of this inspired a “Daddy-Will” dining experience on Friday at a Koney Island. Will didn’t have school, so we went to Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor and lunched at Kerby’s Koney Island, which is a local chain. I suppose we could have gone to a more “authentic” koney island, like Abe’s Coney Island in downtown Ypsilanti, but that’s a bit too skanky and smoky for a seven year old, let alone me. We took the more white bread approach. Incidentally, across from the Kerby’s Koney Island in the mall is a California Pizza Kitchen, and down the way two stores is a sushi place. That seems so Ann Arbor to me.

Will had the chicken fingers (where did they ever come up with that name, anyway? it always inspires a vision of mutant birds for me) and I, of course, had the coney (or koney) island. How was it? Well, it was fried chicken breast and a chili dog. We ate it, it tasted like food (more or less), and I, er, “remembered” my chili dog pretty much for the rest of the day. I don’t think I would not go back, but I also don’t think it will become my regular place.

But at least I’ve been once.

I thought this was very amusing and a lot of fun to play with:

http://www.googlefight.com/

No, I don’t mean a remodeling of this space. I mean krause.emich.edu/blog, which is where I used to keep an official blog with MoveableType, a software that continues to haunt me from beyond the electronic grave. That includes all the archives of my previous blog.

Why, you ask? Well, despite the fact that I had gone so far as to delete the MoveableType application from my computer, I kept getting these email spam messages informing me that I had some sort of trackback ping from some sort of Texas Hold’em Poker web site. Some days, I’d get 100 of these email messages.

So that’s it. I pulled the plug on that site completely. At some point, when I decide to redecorate this blog, I will probably put up some kind site that includes some previous blog entries, particular the ones that have to do with my “Happy Academic” posts, which is where I was getting most hits on the old blog anyway.

For me, these new spam messages are yet another reason to not use MT. I used MT-Blacklist and all of that, but honest to God, I shouldn’t be spending the time I spend to blog as it is. I certainly don’t have time to spend a ton of time deleting junk.

Or let me put it this way: MT is cool and everything and it has some features (like categories) that I wish were available on blogger. However, since I switched back to Blogger back in June or so, I have not had one piece of blog spam in the comments. None. Zero. Nada.

I’m going through one of those classic bad behavior cycles as a result of stress. “What stress,” you ask? Well, I’m in no mood to be too confessional, but it mostly has to do with work and, when I think about it, it is mostly “success stress,” if that makes sense. There are issues with potential positive changes with jobs and/or moves to different places, there’s a bunch of stuff I need to do to stay afloat with my teaching, I’ve got various reports and paperwork to write, meetings and more meetings, etc., etc. Like I said, none of this is bad (it’s not like I’m worried about being laid off or fired or something), but good things can make you stressed out, too.

My “coping” mechanism is not taking care of myself (eating too much and eating badly, not getting enough sleep, etc.), which in turn makes me more stressed out, so I take even worse care of myself, which makes me gain weight, which makes me even more stressed out, etc.

I should probably stop that, shouldn’t I?

But that’s not really the reason for this post. The reason is some interesting stuff I’ve stumbled across about professional eating.

Victor at “Steamed Rice” seems to share my fascination with this “sport,” and he’s actually done the work of collecting a lot of links and even some reporting on a grilled cheese sandwich contest in the Los Angeles area and on the controversy surrounding a chicken wing eating contest. There are a lot of links on his site, and he has a category called “Gluttony and Food” where most of this stuff shows up. Great site.

I doubt I’ll have time in this life to do it, but at one point, I was contemplating an attempt at writing a novel that had professional eating as the backdrop to the action of the book. Professional eating is such a bizarre and fascinating thing to me, a perfect metaphor for contemporary times. I mean, this is taking one of the original “seven deadly sins” and turning it into a virtue, a contest, and (inexplicably) a sport. For some reason, all the top competitive eaters are thin and Asian (the guy who is considered the best competitive eater in the world is from Japan) and not the big fat slobs you would expect. This would add an “international intrigue/nationalist spin” to the book, I think.

Anyway, I just think it has the makings of a very funny and strange novel. Maybe I’ll write it, but if you are reading this and want to beat me to it, feel free….