Guppies: A Cautionary Tale

The guppies and I had an understanding, and it involved cannibalizing their young.

Let’s rewind a couple of months:

As a reward for earning his yellow belt in Taekwondo, Fang promised Lucas a fish tank.  Not just goldfish, Fang emphasized—real fish.

I think Lucas may have had visions of a 50-gallon saltwater tank filled with yellow tangs and angelfish, live coral and maybe a small eel.  Something you’d see in a doctor’s office waiting room.  Maybe Fang did, too, not realizing the cost and maintenance involved in such a set-up.

In the end, it fell to me to set up the fish tank.  My parents kicked in a gift card to a chain pet store as a birthday gift to Lucas so we could get the tank, and they sent along as well some aquarium decorations. Fang and I purchased all the other little things that come with setting up a new tank: dechlorinator, living plants, gravel, pump filters, water test kits, freshwater aquarium salt, siphon, starter bacteria, and more.  I printed out a fish compatibility chart and explained to Lucas that the 10-gallon tank could hold only five or six fish, and that most of the fish for beginners liked to school, so it’s likely we’d be able to get only one or two types of fish.

We set up the tank and let it settle for a few days, knowing that we were going to cycle the tank with fish.  The water’s pH was very high, so we opted for guppies, which apparently can thrive in high-pH water.  I read more than I ever dreamed I might about Poecilia reticulata. At this point  in our adventure I was confident I could write a damn good literature review, entitled “Advice to New Freshwater Home Aquarists, with Special Attention to Rising Ammonia Concentrations.”

Guppy enthusiasts remain divided as to the ideal female: male ratio.  The textbook answer is two females to each male, but vast anecdotal evidence on the interwebs suggests that it really all comes down to the temperaments of the individual guppies.  Still, patterns emerged: If you have only females, one will likely become an alpha and abuse the others. If you go the male route, and one male guppy is a total asshole, then he’s going to harass any guppy, regardless of sex.  My ever-vaster reading made clear to me that guppy tending falls somewhere, though I wasn’t sure exactly where, on the spectrum of “Great Introduction to the Aquarium Hobby” and “Total Crapshoot, Kids.”

Need I point out that I wasn’t interested in getting into the business of fancy guppy breeding?  And that I didn’t want to have to console a seven-year-old when the adult guppies devoured the babies? I explained to Lucas that it would get Darwinian pretty damn quickly in the tank—meaning I enthused, “Guppies make their own food!” Lucas said, with far too much sangfroid for my taste, that he was “okay with blood.”

In the end, we went with the fish store employee’s advice to get two females and one male, though she confessed she herself had three males and one female that apparently never became pregnant.  We brought the fish home and while at home, I did little but fret about guppies.  (Alas, I inherited, through nature and nurture, a visceral aversion to animal suffering, no matter how small-brained or short-lived the creature.)

My Facebook updates quickly descended into guppy management angst. I had committed to twice-daily partial water changes and lots and lots of water testing.

The guppies, meanwhile, had committed to procreation.  I’m pretty sure one of the females was pregnant before we reached home.

Soon it became evident that, promised guppy cannibalism aside, Lucas expected to keep some of the baby fish.  I procured a second, smaller tank.

A few weeks later, Lucas was excited to see the teeny tiny guppy fry in the tank, and encouraged me to scoop them out.  This process has repeated itself several times, so that we now have about 20 tiny fish in the nursery tank–waaaaaaay too many for an aquarium that size.

From my reading, female guppies birth between two and 200 fish at a time.  Wikipedia reports, “Guppies have the ability to store sperm up to a year, so the females can give birth many times without depending on the presence of a male.”  We have two females. You do the math.

We could be talking about a lot of guppies.  Yet we have seen fry swimming around in the tank, then suddenly they were gone. In fact, Lucas has had the pleasure of seeing one of the females eat a newborn guppy.

I figured, then, that once we had found homes for, oh, 18 of the fry in the secondary tank, we would have reached guppy detente: Guppies are born.  Guppies get eaten.

Why, then, did this week the guppies break our social contract?  There are four fry swimming around the tank, and they’ve been there for about 48 hours.

Anyone want some guppies?

UPDATE: I just went into the kitchen and discovered THIRTY guppy fry.

Being Strategic about Whatever Comes Next

(This is another über-post.  I’ve been feeling some bloggers’ block lately, and this is my attempt to just get The Big Issues out there so I can refocus.)

Since I came to Boise, I have thrived professionally.  (This isn’t to say that I’ve garnered major grants or become a publishing machine, but I’m establishing a strong foundation for whatever comes next.  My departmental mentoring committee has assured me that I’ve checked all the key boxes for tenure, though I still have two years left on that clock.)

I can attribute this phenomenon primarily to a few things:

  • A clean slate: I tend to do well with a fresh start; I step up to new challenges.  And switching disciplines (from cultural studies → history) while also starting out on the tenure track has been, well, both mind-boggling and fun.
  • Supportive colleagues: my department is ridiculously collegial. My colleagues are open to my crazy ideas and have encouraged an attitude I might describe as “entrepreneurial.”
  • A spouse who is, for too many reasons to list, the best possible dad to Lucas.
  • My (often naïve) fearlessness in speaking my mind, particularly when it comes to technology.  (Maybe more on this in a future blog post. . .)

I am grateful the stars have aligned in such a way.  I’m involved in all kinds of interesting collaborations and initiatives.  If everything continues as it is now, I’d be content to spend the rest of my career here.

Except.

(You knew there was a “but” coming, yes?)

The people I brought with me to Boise are, for reasons I won’t go into here but which aren’t of their own making, not thriving to the same extent I am.  It’s becoming ever clearer that it might be beneficial for us (all of us, not just Fang and Lucas) to be closer to family, which ideally means Southern California, where just about all my family lives in the same zip code, and where a pillar of Fang’s family also resides.

Am I actively searching for a job?  Did I even look at the academic job listings this fall? Have I applied for any jobs?  No.

Consider this post a me-putting-it-out-there-to-the-universe that within the next 5-7 years I might like to relocate.  I have some projects I want to finish, or at least see take on lives of their own, and Lucas has expressed a desire to move to California when he’s finished at his current school.  (Is this an announcement that I’m leaving Boise State? Not at all.  In fact, it’s unlikely I will, as no one in my department has left eagerly (retirees possibly excepted) in living memory.  Still, I’m open to change.)

Pivoting

I landed on the tenure track at a pivotal moment in higher education–by which I mean that I can see many universities, including my institution, beginning to pivot away from an instructional and academic model that interests me to one that decidedly doesn’t.  I feel compelled to stay long enough to discourage such pivoting–or, rather, to encourage the institution to pursue a smarter trajectory.

For example, there’s something chafing about being in a college of social sciences at a moment of where the larger university is emphasizing analytics. Suddenly we’re having to input all our faculty activities into a database that–because it’s called “Digital Measures”–I suspect has some kind of algorithm, programmed by the university, that spits out a quantitative assessment of faculty work.  As a humanist, this is problematic on a number of levels–first, as a junior faculty member doing unconventional work, my efforts are especially resistant to quantification.  I’m having a hell of a time fitting my work into any of the drop-down categories, and I don’t know how to handle the first/second/third author thing on conference panels where everyone contributes equally.  Second, and perhaps more obviously, I have a deep-seated philosophical resistance to such quantifying measures, a resistance that goes way beyond my own puzzling situation.

On the instructional side of this pivot, I’m skeptical, nay critical, of MOOCs—or of any online instructional model that assumes students should sit through lectures to learn content that can be tested using multiple-choice exams.  Universities seeking to scale the delivery of content are headed in the wrong direction; they should be looking instead to both broaden and deepen student participation in critical and creative thinking.  Massive courses, especially those driven by students’ content mastery, are not the way to cultivate an intelligent and engaged citizenry.

Which brings me to a related point. . .

Being a public historian in the academy is a sticky wicket

I have launched myself into a paradoxical career space.  I was hired as a public historian, although I wouldn’t necessarily have considered myself one of that species prior to my arrival here.  The further I explore public history theory and practice, the more I find myself emphasizing a vision of historical practice that pretty much goes against what typically happens in academic history, which suggests maybe the academy isn’t the best place for me, philosophically, though it certain is the best place for me temperamentally.  (Again, a subject for another post.)  In brief, I believe that we’re at a technological and cultural moment when it’s silly to continue teaching (in K-16) the same sweeping courses (the Pleistocene to 1877 survey, for example), and that it’s more important to teach students to be thoughtful citizens of the republic–by which I mean that we should be having students do considerably more primary source discovery and interpretation than I’ve seen in the classroom (here and elsewhere).  (I’ve heard a lot of lip service paid to such pedagogical practice, but have observed insufficient implementation.)

We should be emphasizing the necessity not of knowing history well, but of doing history well.  For me, “public history” comprises not merely history undertaken by professional historians for a public audience, but rather the ways the public undertakes and understands history.  With such a perspective, it’s kind of a no-brainer that I need to teach my students how to do history well–which means more that content mastery or writing a good essay in response to texts we have read in class.

I have colleagues (and readers, I’m certain) who believe doing history well means having a foundation in the facts (for example, the canonical history portrayed in U.S. history survey textbooks).  I have to ask: How’s that model been working out over the past century or so, in terms of the historical and scientific literacy of the American public?

I want to be part of an educational solution, and I’m not certain I can do that most effectively from within the undergraduate (or graduate) history classroom.

My own pivoting (or, too damn many paths before me)

One of my favorite career-finding books, and one I recommend regularly to my students, is Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose.  In it, she describes “scanners,” bright people who are simultaneously and/or serially interested in diverse and sometimes divergent subjects and careers.  She categorizes scanners according to their intellectual and behavioral patterns, then details the possibilities and pitfalls that accompany life as a scanner. As someone with an M.A. in writing poetry, a Ph.D. in cultural studies, a tenure-track position in a history department, and a professional background that is a crazy quilt of journalism, educational publishing, arts marketing, development communications, hands-on science learning, exhibition development, museum studies, academic technology, and higher ed pedagogy, I definitely identify with Sher’s taxonomy of scanners.  I see many paths available to me, as an academic, employee, or entrepreneur.

Instead of being excited, however, I feel stuck.  That’s largely because financially, moving to Boise was a mistake.  Not only did I take a big salary hit that wasn’t offset by a diminished cost of living, but Fang also had his hours cut and had to become an independent contractor instead of an employee, which means he both took a pay cut and has to pay self-employment taxes.  We’ve been dipping into our meager reserves more regularly than I’m comfortable admitting.  I’m very conscious, then, that my next move must be financially remunerative in a big way.

That stuckness also comes from being overcommitted (as academics are wont to be, but I’m perhaps more entangled in projects and programs than is considered normal in these parts).  It means I don’t have a lot of spare time to explore reasonable new paths.  I hereby declare 2013, then, as the Year of Letting Things Go.

Unfortunately, “letting things go” doesn’t mean just kicking back–in fact, at first it might mean kicking everything up a notch.  So, what might “letting things go” look like for me?

  • Relinquishing responsibility for or participation in projects and programs that aren’t benefiting significantly from my participation.
  • Saying no to most invitations to contribute or collaborate, even though that might mean not extending my network as broadly or deeply as I’d like.
  • Recommitting to, or doubling down on, projects to see them finished up or launched into other hands.  (I’m looking at you, Boise Wiki.)
  • Getting those various half-finished articles out the door.
  • Helping Fang get to a point in his in-progress and proposed projects so that he feels confident carrying them forward.
  • Handing off potential projects and collaborations to grad students to use as their Master’s theses or projects.
  • Hiring and mentoring interns to tackle things that would help them to develop key skills (e.g., writing for a public audience, archival research, technological savvy).

What are the benefits of letting things go by reinvesting in these projects before divesting myself of them?

  • Seeing my little projects and programs out thriving on their own will give me a sense of satisfaction and raise my profile locally and in the field.
  • Clearing brain space for more strategic thinking about with what kinds of projects and programs I become involved.
  • Allowing more time for my extracurricular writing, including blogging and those essays I’ve been wanting to write.
  • A small corps of undergraduate digital history interns tested and trained by me before they apply (as they tend to do) to our public history M.A.
  • I can focus on projects that, assuming I navigate the university’s sponsored projects and intellectual property officers correctly, might actually bring in a little additional income.

What about you, readers and friends?  What’s keeping you occupied these days, and what are your plans for moving forward, in 2013 and beyond?

Feel free to share

 

(From the desk of Pete Brooks)

An interesting way to introduce yourself to your first-grade teacher

Submitted without comment–but you should feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

 

Innovative professor, or shill for Apple?

You decide. . .

 

(I totally should get a commission from Apple; many of my students bought their own devices following this experiment.)

Because I don’t already have enough to do. . .

I’m going to try to keep up with the EdStartup 101 MOOC.  I’m not planning on blogging about it here at The Clutter Museum, but if you’re interested in that topic, please join me in the MOOC.

I’ll be posting my assignments at a new mini-blog I created for the course, (Technically) Doing History.

More Living-In-Idaho Moments

. . .brought to you, I hope to God, by stereotypes about this place I live, rather than actual retail metrics.  Check out the top ad:

 

Of course, it’s a companion piece to my photo from yesterday’s post:

I do have one question: if Idahoans are allegedly so hellbent on survival, why did I see EIGHT young children riding in the bed of a single pickup truck on the freeway?

Haze

Thanks to wildfires in Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, and even California, the Treasure Valley, where Boise lies, is shrouded this week in dense smoke. The haze obscures the mountains in all directions, and it even makes it difficult to see the local foothills. We can not only see and smell the air–we can taste it. Our latest houseguest joked that the tomatoes harvested from our garden come pre-smoked.

This haze, coupled with the heat—we’ve had highs of 100 degrees or so for the past couple weeks—means that my final couple weeks of summer, which I traditionally aim to spend puttering in the garden, reading on the shady patio, and taking long morning walks with the dog before the day gets too hot, have been, and will continue to be, spent indoors. I’m one of the lucky folks to fall into the “sensitive groups” mentioned in air quality reports, so I especially resent being taken hostage by the smoke, colorful sunsets be damned.

While I’m most plagued by the literal haze, I must acknowledge the equally dense metaphorical haze that has settled over our household.

I’m not super comfortable with uncertainty, but Fang is even less tolerant of it, and right now our vision of the future is hazy at best.

Endcap at bookstore displaying survivalist literature

A regular feature at many Idaho bookstores: a survivalist literature section.

Fang is going back to school for the first time in 32 years—very part time, as a history major—but he also is taking on a half-time job in the History department office as front-desk staff. He’s going to continue to do his freelance graphic, web design, and photography work, but he (well, we) decided he needed to get out of the house more often.

Still, Fang, ever the optimist, sees the new job as the beginning of the end of his life. He feels—and who can blame him?—that at age 50, he shouldn’t be accepting jobs that pay not much more than minimum wage. Plus, it doesn’t help that we’re never certain when work from his biggest freelance clients will dry up—such is the danger of working for clients in the newspaper industry, where Fang’s expertise (and freelance workload) is strongest.  Too much uncertainty!  Too much change!*

Last year, he finished a novel, but because it’s long—666 pages, to be exact—he’s had a hard time persuading busy friends and family to read it and offer feedback.  I made it all the way through, copyediting and offering suggestions, and—shhh! don’t tell him, because he doesn’t like to talk about it—I’m doing another read-through in the hopes of getting it to the point where we can talk to an editor or agent, or we can publish it on Kindle and print on demand. Because nobody else bothered to read it, though, he’s feeling very much as if his dream of being a writer is dead.

That’s disheartening to me, because (and maybe I am biased here) he’s one of the sharpest writers I know.  At the same time, some very smart folks I know who read his blog have told me, completely unprovoked, that it’s one of their favorites.  I’m hoping the new job, with its regular schedule and its human interface, will remind him that he can make—and has been making—valuable contributions in any number of social, cultural, and political spheres.

In the meantime, if you do read Fang’s blog, do me a favor and leave a comment from time to time, OK?  You needn’t praise him, of course, but comments let him know someone is reading and appreciates what he’s doing.  Maybe it will help clear the haze around here.

Thanks, and I’ll let you know when his novel is available.  :)

 

* Fang once explained, “It’s only a rut if you’re looking down on it.  If you’re in it, it’s a groove.”

A brief announcement from Captain Obvious

 

“Report finds for-profit colleges serve shareholders over students”:

“We uncovered two very big problems in for-profit higher education,” Harkin said in a statement. “One, billions of taxpayer dollars are being squandered. And two, many for-profit schools are doing real, lasting harm to the students they enroll.” ….

The colleges studied spent 23 percent of their revenue on marketing and recruiting, the report found, and 17 percent on instruction.

The publicly traded companies that operate for-profit colleges yielded an average profit margin of 20 percent in 2009 and paid an average $7.3 million to their chief executives, the report found.

The companies are successful largely because they charge high tuition. Associate-degree programs at for-profit colleges cost at least four times as much as comparable programs at public community colleges, $34,988 vs. $8,313, the report found. Internal company documents showed tuition hikes were enacted “to satisfy company profit goals,” rather than to cover increased costs of educating students, the report states.

Company documents reveal the recruitment effort at for-profit colleges as “essentially a sales process,” the report found; at many companies, everyone from the CEO to junior recruiters “was rated at least in part based on the number of students enrolled.”

As of 2010, the for-profit colleges studied employed 35,202 student recruiters, far more than the staff charged with supporting the students who had already enrolled.

Who the hell pays $34,988 for an associate’s degree?  And how do people who charge that much for an AA sleep at night?  Clearly, we need to add “critical thinking” to our K-12 education standards.

You can download the report from the Senate website.

There’s some language in this report, I’m guessing, that we’ll see used to describe MOOCs when they’re evaluated as a genre some years down the road.

Ten

Ends up ten years is both a very, very long time and hardly any time at all.

A decade ago, on July 20, I made Fang an honest man.

Apparently, I was barely beyond a zygote at the time.

In spite of ourselves, we’ve held it together, and I’m more in love with the man than ever.

Thanks, Pete, for everything you do for our family.  Here’s to the next ten!