Six, and Eighty-eight

September 5, 2011 By

Six

Fang has already written a paean to five.  (And he totally stole my idea for a blog post, the bastard, and then did a far better job than I would have.)

Six years ago today (Labor Day–ha ha) at around 1:30 p.m., I finally delivered baby Lucas into the world. Forty-plus hours of labor produced a lovely but cranky baby boy who would, it ends up, not sleep through the night for fifteen months.  Add his only-weekly bowel movements and colic, plus the thrush and mastitis that he caused in me, and you can begin to see why we stopped with just one child.  (Another significant data point in that study: $50,000 in daycare and preschool costs over 5 years.)

Knowing how it all turned out, these six years later, if we had the financial werewithal and physical energy, we’d be jonesing for a sibling.  Lucas is bright, inquisitive, funny, creative, and sensitive.  He’d be an awesome big brother.

I am so very grateful that in the cosmic genetic lottery, we ended up with this child.  I’m thrilled that Fang is his father, as he’s ensuring that the quirkier aspects of our joint DNA experiment are channeled productively in an environment filled with love, understanding, and creativity.

Congrats to all of us, then, on six.

Eighty-eight

Yesterday my mom and her sisters held a memorial for my grandmother, who died last month at age 88. Like many family weddings, it was in a backyard. Despite my grandmother’s assertion that everyone she knew was dead, 52 people showed up.  We’re not a particularly religious family, but I imagine it was a service infused with tremendous spirit and gratitude.

I say “I imagine” because the memorial ended up being scheduled on the day between Lucas’s birthday party and his actual birthday, and I didn’t think it was appropriate to drag him to such an event on what should be an awesome, Lucas-focused weekend.

Still, my parents opted to read aloud some of Fang’s blog post from last spring, as well as the letter I wrote to my grandmother the week before she died. When my mom read the letter to my grandmother a month or so ago, Grandma apparently announced, with typical grandmotherly pride, that the letter needed to be framed and hung on the wall, as well as published in the newspaper.  (Cute, yes?)

Anyway, I had thought the letter was the kind of thing that she’d want to keep private between us, but apparently she wanted it shouted to the world, so I’m going to share it here.  If you’re family, get out the tissues. . .

Dear Grandma,

I know you’re going through a really bad time right now, and I wish I could do much more to help. The best I can think to do right now is to put in writing—so that you can read it, or have it read to you, more than once, if you like—how grateful I am to have you as my grandma.

I love you. You’re not only the best grandmother I could ask for, but also one of the best friends. I’ve been wandering around this world for 36 years now, and I’ve realized something:

Everyone else has old ladies for grandmothers.

I have you.

I have pinned up on my bulletin board at work the photo of you that was printed in the newspaper—the one where you’re emptying sand from your shoes. It makes me smile every day. I wish I could have known you then as well as now; how fun it would have been to be young together!

Regardless, I’m so happy for the time we’ve spent with each other. You have created an absolutely amazing family of women—daughters and granddaughters—dedicated to the public good through education.  I’m so grateful to be a part of that clan, to be a recipient of that heritage. I’m so glad that Lucas feels he knows you well—he’s more [Surname 1] and [Surname 2] than you may know.

You contributed so much to my growth, not only by taking care of me before and after school, but also by letting me live with you for a time. I treasure all those memories.

Some things I remember:

  • Making kites from dowels and white butcher and tissue paper on your kitchen table, and gluing onto them pictures of jewelry you helped me cut out of the J.C. Penney catalog. Pops and I flew the kites on the playground at Fremont.
  • Thirty-six years of frosted and sprinkled sugar cookies.  (It’s a miracle, really, I’m not diabetic.)  I have your recipe, and I make the cookies with Lucas.  He loves to add the sprinkles.
  • Drawing portraits of each other while sitting at the old marble table in the living room. I was in elementary school. You drew a really funny, ugly picture and we both laughed really hard.
  • How much you helped me with my tricky “Think Pages” while I sat at the big round table in the kitchen. They were really hard for a third grader, but it was fun to have you figure them out with me.
  • When I once said a bad word, you told me you were going to wash my mouth out with soap, and then you asked, “Where’d you learn that crap?”
  • You knew, somehow, that [Fang] was going to propose to me on my 26th birthday. I remember leaving your house for a fancy dinner, and you asking me, “What if he asks you to marry him?” I think of you several times each day when I look at the wedding ring you gave me. I still have the envelope in which you handed it to me, with the business card from the jewelry store.
  • Looking for four-leaf, and even five-leaf, clovers under your lemon and grapefruit trees. One day we found six or seven of them. You taped them to pieces of notepaper, and we wrote the date on them.

The last time I was at your house, I went out into the yard and looked for four-leaf clovers, but there weren’t any. I wish I could send you a bouquet of them.

Mom told me you’ve been praying. I hope it’s helping you with all the awful things you’re going through. I was reading some poetry recently, and a few lines of a Walt Whitman poem jumped out at me, as it captured this idea, I think, that you’ll always, always be a part of this family, and of me especially:

We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

You have definitely contributed to my soul, to the woman and mother I am today. Thank you for that. A million times thank you.

[Fang], Lucas, and I love you very much. Please know that we’re thinking of you all the time.

Love,

Leslie

Filed Under: Mamablogging, Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst

In memory of my grandmother, who passed today

August 23, 2011 By

Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses–
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads–
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

— Robinson Jeffers

This poem is packed with comforting metaphors for me today, but also my grandfather was for a time a lighthouse keeper at Pigeon Point, just a bit up the coast from Carmel. Grandma had prints of the lighthouse in her home, and she had as well a model lighthouse with one little light burning, so I know it meant a lot to her.

Fresnel Lighting of Pigeon Point Lighthouse by Sudheendra Vijayakumar, and used under a Creative Commons license.

Filed Under: Whining Exhortation and Angst

“Interning” as a teaching assistant

August 19, 2011 By

Let me throw out a (ahem) hypothetical situation. . .

Say (again, just for the sake of this entirely hypothetical situation) that this week I took over the department’s internship program.  Pretend I have the power to approve or reject any internship that would earn a student academic credit from the history department.

Say a Master’s student contacts me and says she wants to “do an internship in” a colleague’s large-enrollment class.  By which she means basically be a TA, do grading, etc.  (We don’t have Ph.D. students, nor do we have standard TAships; grad students pretty much just work as readers/graders in my department, and we only have a handful of those positions each year.)

The student would not, I imagine, be paid for this “internship.”  In fact, she’d be paying for the internship credits.

My questions:

  • Should students “pay to play” as TAs?*
  • What does the willingness of both professor and student to set up this “internship” say about the present and future of our department, especially considering many prospective grad students already turn us down for schools with better offers?
  • Is this really a history internship?  That is–is this historical practice?  Would such an internship be better run through the education department? If so, should we be letting other departments oversee internships in our classrooms?
  • Should an M.A. student earn graduate-level academic credit for grading papers?
  • If the student has done this same “internship” before, should the student be able to repeat it for academic credit?
  • If it came out that this internship-supervising professor is on the student’s thesis committee, and has done this before, and has worked this same student way beyond the internship’s allotted hours, what would you do when the student contacted you for internship approval?  (Remember–you’re a very junior professor.  Imagine, too, that you’ve talked with other colleagues about this, and they’re divided about this internship’s appropriateness.)
  • What if, hypothetically speaking, it emerged that these large-enrollment classes supported by “interning” TAs allowed all the tenure-line folks in the department to teach fewer classes each year?  Would that affect how you approached your colleagues, if you were going to do so?

Your (hypothetical) thoughts?

 

*I think you know my answer to this question. After all, I received medical and dental insurance, tuition/fee remission, and a salary as a TA at both institutions where I was a graduate student.  Still, I’d like to hear your opinion.

Filed Under: Sometimes I teach, Whining Exhortation and Angst

When difficult letters become easy

August 17, 2011 By

It may not always be apparent from this blog, but when I put my mind and heart to it, I can write quite well.  I usually overcome writer’s block pretty quickly, too.

But not this time.

I’ve been trying for months to write a letter to my grandmother because I want to thank her for everything she’s done for me.  (I did tell her last time I saw her how grateful I am for her love and support, but I wanted to put something in writing so that she can refer to it when she’s feeling down.)  I wrote countless drafts of this letter but never sent one.

Until tonight.  I learned that she has very little time left—days or weeks—and that she’s so weak that she can’t sit up to read, and probably can’t even hold a letter. She isn’t taking phone calls. I asked my mom if she would read something aloud to her, and Mom agreed.

So I had to keep it short. I was amazed, really, that when it really counted, I was able to finish the note.  I’m pretty satisfied with it for now, but doubtless in a few weeks I’ll think of something else I should have said.

The letter is just over one page, and it comprises paragraphs of gratitude and bullet points of happy memories.

As I wrote the letter, I realized a couple of things.

I wrote to her,

I have pinned up on my bulletin board at work the photo of you that was printed in the newspaper—the one where you’re emptying sand from your shoes. It makes me smile every day. I wish I could have known you then as well as now; how fun it would have been to be young together!

And I do wish such a thing. Over the past decade, Grandma has been telling me she’s been seeing long-dead friends and relatives in her dreams, and that while she finds the experience a bit unsettling, she enjoys spending time with them again. I hope I get dream visitations not only from Grandma as I know and knew her, but from young Dorothy as well.  She looks fun, no?

The other thing I realized is that I need to get back to reading poetry regularly again, as of course even lines I thought I knew well shift and deepen as I age.  I was looking for some scrap of poetry that spoke to the way I feel, and I found it in Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”  I included these lines from it in my letter to my grandmother.  She’s taken to praying lately—even though I never knew her to be a religious person—so I hope she finds in them some little bit of happy eternity, some understanding that she has had an enduring influence on me.

We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Whatever you believe, I’d appreciate it if you’d send some kind thoughts in her direction.  She could use some relief, some peace.

Grandma and her most recent great-granddaughter, a few months back.

Filed Under: Mamablogging, Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst

On Lecture Capture

August 1, 2011 By

This past week I received an e-mail alerting me that, because I teach in a particular classroom, I can have access to lecture capture this fall.  The e-mail, from the campus’s tech folks, reported that of students with access to this technology, 70 percent watched at least one capture per week, and 78 percent of students said they would like more classes to use lecture capture.  The lectures get posted to iTunesU and also to Blackboard.

Those of you who know me well know that I have been an evangelist for the use of certain kinds of technology in higher ed–particularly blogs, wikis, c0llaborative mapping, and certain uses of mobile devices–but I’m deeply uneasy with lecture capture technology because I think it’s a step backward from the best uses of technology for instruction.*

Lecturing and lecture capture are by their nature unidirectional. Yes, both lecturing and lecture capture could be made interactive–lecturing by peppering the class period with questions and activities, and lecture capture by adding some kind of commenting or discussion function wherever the audio and video are posted.  I have yet to see anyone use institutionally sponsored lecture capture in this way.

The lectures can be shared most easily within corporate repositories–Blackboard and iTunesU–rather than to open-source, not-for-profit educational repositories.  Yes, iTunesU has some fabulous stuff on it, but I’m not ready to share there.

It’s also too easy for the university to repurpose content in online courses that could be adjunctified. I’m not sure what the policy is at my current institution, but I signed away a lot of intellectual property rights at my last one.  In an age where people seem to think that education is just a matter of “delivering content” that translates into mad workplace skillz, I’m uneasy about providing the university with any multimedia content that could be aggregated into a enormous-enrollment course taught by a grossly underpaid and underinsured Ph.D.

There also may be a misunderstanding or miscommunication on the part of tech folks and their student workers that faculty should be driving this bus. A colleague was teaching in a classroom where a student was in charge of running the technology. She was going to review answers to a quiz they had taken in class, and she asked the student worker to turn off the lecture capture for that time period.  The student refused, saying she’d need to check with her boss.  Because the lectures can be posted automatically, the instructor wasn’t certain she’d have the opportunity to edit out that portion of the class (nor should she have to, I might add–the lecture capture should be at the instructor’s request).

There definitely was a gap in understanding between me and the technologist with whom I communicated about lecture capture. I asked if the system could capture students’ portions of class discussion, and I was told that the system captures only the instructor’s audio, and thus–and I’m quoting here–“we train faculty to REPEAT all questions before answering them, so that they are on the capture.”

This assumes, of course, that students–and not instructors–are asking the majority of the questions.  (It also assumes instructors can be “trained,” which made me LOL, since one of my previous job titles–one I don’t think I’ve ever admitted to–was actually “faculty technology trainer” and even then I knew going in that faculty are not easily housebroken.  This faculty member, I assure you, does not sit. lie down. roll over.)

Lecture capture is about delivering content

I do understand the utility of lecture capture.  As faculty are asked to teach increasingly larger courses, lecturing seems more “natural”–because how could one have a live conversation with 200+ students? (Trust me–it can be done!)  As more courses offer online sections, it’s efficient for faculty members to repurpose in-class lectures for their online students–and it ensures all students receive the same content.

But again, this entire form of course presentation is predicated on a belief that higher education is about acquiring content knowledge and not about encouraging critical or creative thinking.  See, in my Women and the West course I could in a lecture repeat and reinforce what my students have already read in some textbook about 19th-century women’s contributions to, for example, early business development in California (they ran boardinghouses during the Gold Rush–surprise!)–and then test students on that knowledge. . .

What were the three most common forms of women’s entrepreneurship in mid-nineteenth-century California?

. . .Or I could provide them with primary-source materials by, say, Theodosia Burr Shepherd and her daughter Myrtle Shepherd Francis–pioneers of horticultural entrepreneurship in California and cultivators of plants that students likely have growing in their neighbors’ yards or have seen at Home Depot**–and ask them larger historiographical questions.

  • Why might women have been early pioneers of California’s floricultural and horticultural industries?
  • What challenges do you think faced women entrepreneurs between 1865 and 1900?
  • Why, in “The Woman in Floral Culture,” does Shepherd suggest women’s clothing is the greatest encumbrance to their entrepreneurial success in floriculture? Based on your knowledge of the era, do you concur? Why or why not?
  • Why might have nineteenth-century California provided more fertile ground for women entrepreneurs (and scientists!) than states east of the Mississippi?
  • Why are early women entrepreneurs not better represented in today’s history textbooks, especially considering we live in an era that celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit?

The answers to those kinds of questions are unlikely to be cleanly and clearly articulated, either by me or by my students.  And lecture capture is, it seems, all about decisive articulation of disciplinary facts.  (And I so do not do disciplinary facts.)

Lecture capture wish list

I do occasionally “lecture” in five- to seven-minute chunks that students might find useful to revisit.  So. . . What would have to be in place for me to use lecture capture?  (Maybe some of these options exist, but I’m sure others do not.)

1.) Ways to record multiple, simultaneous small-group discussion by students–and a simple way for me to provide some kind of feedback on those discussions, perhaps using video or audio.  (The name of the lecture capture system–Echo360–would imply that technology exists to capture and play back all audio in the classroom, yes? Alas, not yet.)

2.) Ways to annotate the classroom-generated audio and video with text, so that if I wanted to share a link related to a certain moment in the video, I could.

3.) Fully accessible–the software should generate an automatic transcript that I can edit when I find transcription errors.

4.) Video and audio must be fully, and easily, editable by me.

5.) A setting that ensures only I, and no one else, can upload the videos.

6.) A choice of how open I’d like to make the videos–that is, I’d like to make them easy to upload to YouTube so that I can embed them on a (publicly accessible) class blog.  Other instructors would likely prefer Blackboard, but since I only use Blackboard to calculate grades (and I hope to use Excel for that in the future, but I’m innumerate, so I rely on an LMS) and share an occasional document, I don’t want any of my content uploaded to Blackboard.

What about you?

Have you found a satisfactory way to use lecture capture–one that is more about achieving your desired learning objectives rather than student convenience and efficiency of content delivery?  I’d love to hear about it. . .

* Granted, my unease with lecture capture is rooted in a deep distrust of lecturing as a teaching tool.  A select few do it well, and a select few students learn best from lectures–but after working as a teaching consultant for a few years, I observed that most people don’t lecture well, and most students retain next to nothing from the average lecture.

** Doubled, fluted, frilled, ruffled, and pinked petunias! Blue morning glory (Ipomoea ‘Heavenly Blue’)!  Eschscholzia californica ‘Golden West’!

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Technobabble, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Sesame Street and radical acceptance

June 21, 2011 By

Cross-posted at The Multicultural Toybox

I grew up with Sesame Street. As a child, I loved the colorful sketches and songs, and pretty much any scene that had a Muppet in it, but especially if it featured my then-favorite, lovable, furry old Grover. (Today I’m more of a Cookie Monster fan.)

These days, when I watch Sesame Street with my 5-year-old, I enjoy it for a completely different reason: its gospel of radical acceptance. Long before Lady Gaga had her hit “Born This Way,” Sesame Street preached both self-acceptance and acceptance of others, no matter what their attributes or quirks.

I think this is, at heart, what troubles conservative critics of the show. Here’s the latest attack on Sesame Street; it’s expressed during a panel moderated by Sean Hannity, and it aired on FOX on June 1:

Ben Shapiro comments on Sesame Street

I was especially interested in these bits of the conversation:

Ben Shapiro, author of Primetime Propaganda: I talked to one of the guys who was originally at Children’s Television Workshop originally, and he said that the whole purpose of Sesame Street was to cater to black and Hispanic youths who don’t have reading literature in the house. There’s kind of this soft bigotry of low expectations that’s automatically associated with Sesame Street. If you go on the Sesame Street website, it talked about ‘when you’re bringing up your child, make sure that you use gender neutral language. Make sure that you give your boys dolls and make sure that you give your girls firetrucks.

Ah, there’s so much to unpack here, isn’t there? First, it’s too easy to dismiss a desire to cater to underprivileged children of color as a “soft bigotry of low expectations.” If we look at the actual history of Sesame Street‘s founding, we find the show was the first to be structured entirely on sound educational research.

Sesame Street was (and is) driven by data, not sentiment

For anyone interested in the history of television, in children’s informal learning, or just in the story of how the first children’s educational television developed, I highly recommend G is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street.* In the first essay in the book, Edward Palmer (an early member of the Children’s Television Workshop staff) and Shalom Fisch tell the story of how CTW and Sesame Street came to be, and they emphasize how thoroughly the show relied on research rather than on some liberal agenda or sentiment:

What distinguished Sesame Street (and, to a lesser degree, the contemporaneous Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood) was the combination of narrowly focused and expertly planned educational curriculum, its attempt to forge the most effective possible methods of televised teaching, and its accountability to bring about rigorously measured educational results.

That isn’t to say that Sesame Street isn’t a product of a particular historical era; it very much is, and Palmer and Fisch explain how the confluence of the Civil Rights movement, greater government interest in and funding of education, and the rapid growth of public broadcasting led to the development of the first show of its kind. Specifically, they write,

CTW’s sole initial mandate was to create, broadcast, promote, and evaluate an experimental educational television series of 130 hour-long programs that would seek to advance the school readiness of 3- to 5-year-old children, with special emphasis on the needs of youngsters from low-income and minority backgrounds.

Palmer and Fisch cite research studies of the era, including those by Benjamin Bloom (1964), Carl Bereiter (1966), and Martin Deutch (1965), which taken together showed that:

  • greater than fifty percent of “a child’s lifetime intellectual capacity” is formed by age 5;
  • beginning in first grade, low-income children of color tested substantially lower than their white, middle-class peers;
  • this education deficit continued to grow after first grade; and
  • upon achievement of a basic level of literacy, children’s and adults’ opportunities for employment, as well as other opportunities, are vastly expanded.

CTW, Palmer and Fisch explain, “could not determine which group of children would cross that line [of literacy achievement] first, [but] it could—and did—aim to ensure that the maximum number possible would do so.” With 97 percent of households in the U.S. owning a TV, and most of them within the broadcast range of a public television station, CTW had the opportunity to improve the educational levels of millions of preschool children.

Sesame Street was not founded, as Ben Shapiro claims in his book and in his interview with Hannity, on low expectations and bigotry. It was founded, rather, on sound research into children’s learning, and its charge was to improve the educational readiness of all children (since children of all backgrounds would be in the broadcast area of the show), but with a special interest in providing additional support to children whose parents were unable, for whatever reason, to provide them with a first-class preschool education. The long-term goal was to help people rise out of poverty by giving children the early start they needed to develop as much intellectual capacity as they could by age 5.

But wait. . . there’s more

From the Hannity interview:

Sean Hannity: The values of young people today scare me. Cause we’re robbing them at easrlier and earlier ages of their childhood. They know more, they do more.

Kirsten Haglund: It’s very concerning. They have an access to more media at a younger age than at any other time of our nation’s history. And what you’re also seeing is more parents at work, away from their children, not monitoring what they look at. . .

Hannity: I grew up watching Green Acres and Andy Griffith.

Shapiro: Yeah, before the shift. That was before the shift.

“The shift”? The shift from portrayals of an era that existed only in white American nostalgia to. . . what? Television diversified its content and practices so quickly during the four decades following the first broadcast of Sesame Street that I’m not really sure what “the shift” signifies, other than “not rural or suburban whiteness.”

The interview continued with comments about how artists (including those involved in television production) are more liberal than the rest of a society. (I don’t buy that, but I’ll let it stand.) I immediately thought of how totalitarian regimes try to purge intellectuals and artists from their states. Ken Blackwell, however, identified a different target of such governments.

Ken Blackwell: If you look at any big government regime, any authoritarian, totalitarian regime, they attack two basic intermediary institutions–the family and the church. And that’s what’s happening in our culture right now. And it sets up an appetite for governmental largesse, government becomes the family. . .

Yes, because helping 3- to 5-year-old children establish greater intellectual capacity, with the long-term goal of ending cycles of urban poverty, is clearly an attempt to replace the child’s actual family with Big Brother.

The next couple of excerpts, however, deliver the coup de grâce:

Hannity: Liberals. . .feel like they can circumvent the values of parents when they go to school, teaching ’em things that they themselves are teaching the opposite of. They don’t do the basics, reading, writing, and math. . .

If liberals don’t like the basics–reading, writing, and math–why has the Obama administration embraced so much of No Child Left Behind, which focuses on reading and math? Why is the administration, along with conservative congresspeople, trying to defund programs like the Teaching American History grants that strengthen the teaching of history in K-12? Apparently Hannity thinks teachers are having kids watch video productions of the Communist Manifesto and whatever Judith Butler has written lately.

Haglund: But it’s a basic difference in worldview, in that usually liberals and people on the left, secular humanists, believe that human nature is ultimately good. Whereas conservatives believe it’s not. . .

Did you catch that last bit? Let me quote Haglund again: It’s a basic difference in worldview, in that usually liberals and people on the left, secular humanists, believe that human nature is ultimately good. Whereas conservatives believe it’s not. . .

I would go further and say that, in my observations of television pundits, bloggers, newspaper columnists, conservatives believe that humans who are unlike themselves are especially possessed of a nature that is ultimately not good. These pundits are not going to accept as moral or worthy of a broadcast platform anyone whose vision of the U.S. differs from their own. These unacceptable people clearly are the ones who are responsible for “the shift” in television, for the move away from Andy Griffith and toward Sesame Street. (Never mind all the corporations that conservatives court are the ones putting the real crap on TV.)

These folks could benefit from a good dose of radical acceptance, and particularly acceptance of the people whose lives have been made better by Sesame Street, who relied on the program to give them a crucial intellectual start in life. It’s time to sit Shapiro, Hannity, Haglund, Blackwell, and others of their ilk down in front of a season of Sesame Street. They need to learn to listen, to trust, and to have empathy. And I suspect Elmo, Abby Cadaby, Grover, Cookie Monster, Ernie, Bert, Big Bird, Telly, Rosita, Snuffie, Baby Bear, Oscar, Zoe, Alan, Chris, Maria, Luis, Leela, Bob, and all the other cast and crew of Sesame Street could help them learn the kind of empathy and radical acceptance of others that might make for a more productive civil discourse.

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Fang’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Era

June 20, 2011 By

Fang has had a hard week.  And month.  And year.

But this last week was a bitch.

First, there was my pneumonia, which required him to step up to do all the parenting.

Second, he found a new dentist–one he really likes.  However, after years of well-meaning dentists who used a Pickett’s Charge strategy in the battle to save his teeth, Dr. W leveled with him: it would be waste to throw any more reinforcements onto that slippery slope.  She said that sooner, rather than later, he’ll need to get all his upper teeth pulled and replaced with dentures.  We had been hoping to go the implant route, but at around $3,000 per tooth, and with Fang’s bones likely weakened by the same thing that ruined his teeth, it’s more than we can afford and the implants might eventually be rejected by his body.

Third, he learned that the mole he had removed and biopsied is cancerous.

Fourth, he’s having that “two ships passing in the night” communications problem with a new freelance client.  He speaks web, and she speaks academic journal, and neither of them seems to know a single word in the other’s language.

Fifth, he did some volunteer work for Really Cool Activist Nonprofit, and they seemed enthusiastic about having him take some photos at Boise’s Pride event on Saturday, but then–even though they’re really good about contacting volunteers–they didn’t follow up with him to get him a photographer’s lanyard so that he move around more freely at the event.  He didn’t want to be Persistent and Slightly Creepy Guy Who Seems To Have A Predilection for Photographing Underdressed Drag Queens.  I’m thinking that in all the event planning, RCAN just forgot to contact Fang; Fang thinks he didn’t pass their political litmus test, and since he’s been a supporter of the national RCAN for years, he was pretty depressed.

Sixth, when he finally did feel the tiniest bit of contentment on Saturday and was messing around with my phone, texting a mutual friend of ours, I was snapped at him, and that took the bloom off the evening, even though it was super awesome roller derby night with family friends.

Seventh, his best friend for life had some really crappy stuff happen, and Fang’s absorbing some of that sadness.

Eighth, he took out an ad in Craigslist for other beginning guitarists to play with, and he didn’t get any responses.

Ninth, he’s far from family and friends, and he’s feeling that distance especially acutely right now.  He works from home, so it’s not as if he’s running into a bunch of potential new friends.

Tenth, another doctor told him he needs to stop eating just about everything he likes.

I’m sure there’s stuff I’m leaving out.

But throughout it all, Fang has been an awesome father to Lucas.  He listens.  He translates the world for the boy.  He’s teaching him to ride a bike.  He’s encouraging him to be adventurous, to try new things.  He’s taking him to movies, buying him comic books, and ensuring his fluency in the Marvel superhero canon.  He applies sunblock liberally.

This from a man who spent the first 14 months of his life in an old-school Catholic orphanage, who was abused physically and emotionally as a child and teen, who had to endure an adolescence in working-class Tucson, who dropped out of college after a semester, who became addicted in his teens, 20s, and the first half of his 30s to just about everything.  On paper, this is not the profile of an ideal candidate for Father of The Decade.

And yet he is.  Despite all the inner demons he wrestles with day in and day out, he’s an amazing dad.  Lucas has no idea, really, that Fang is depressed and frustrated.  Quite the opposite–Lucas calls him “silly.”

So while Fang may feel as if he’s fallen into yet another unlucky streak of gloom and doom, I’m feeling exceptionally fortunate to have found such an awesome dad for our son.

Thanks, Sweetie.  It’ll get better.

Psssst. . . I’d really appreciate some yaying and cheerleading for Fang in the comments, as I know he checks The Clutter Museum regularly.  The guy could use some cheering up.

Filed Under: Mamablogging, Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst

New moan ya

June 14, 2011 By

I save all my best illnesses for the late spring and early summer, apparently.

There was the time I caught the flu–a really bad flu that almost killed me–in July.  (Now I get flu shots every year.)

Whooping cough hit me in late May.  (I recently had the vaccine for that, too.)

Yet apparently I have not been vaccinated for the bacteria flourishing in my right lung this week.

That’s right, friends–I’ve managed to get pneumonia.  This is a new low, even for my lungs, which like to throw out the welcome mat for any passing bacteria or virus.

Sunday afternoon was bad.  Yesterday was worse.  Fang took me to the urgent care clinic in the morning, and when a breathing treatment didn’t raise my blood oxygen, the PA ordered a chest x-ray. And thus I added a new word to my (thankfully slim) personal medical vocabulary: infiltrates!*

Today the antibiotics appear to have kicked in a bit, and I can sit up in a chair.  I decided to water our little garden, and that about exhausted my energy.

Tomorrow I hope to be able to stand up for five minutes–in a row!  Wish me luck. . .

*Other terms I wish I didn’t know: triiodothyronine, thyroxine, thyroid-stimulating hormone, propylthiouracil, iodine-131, propranolol (see iodine-131), levothyroxine. Share your own “faves” in the comments. . .

Filed Under: What passes for science around here, Whining Exhortation and Angst

University teaching centers and the bureaucratic imperative

June 7, 2011 By

The Slithergadee has crawled out of the sea.
He may catch all the others, but he won’t catch me.
No you won’t catch me, old Slithergadee,
You may catch all the others, but you wo–

Shel Silverstein

During my 2006-2010 stint on the staff side of academia, I became quite familiar with the bureaucratic beast.  In fact, during my last couple years at in a teaching center, I felt its bite quite acutely; it’s kind of like the bite of a Komodo dragon–you die from the venomous saliva, not the ferocity of the bite.

I recall there has been some venom toward centers of teaching and learning from the academic blogosphere over the past couple of years, and I was kind of surprised to hear it, as it seemed the faculty at UC Davis who used the teaching center were quite fond of it.

One of the reasons for this affection, I think, was the fact that (aside from TA orientations), we didn’t mandate participation in any of our workshops or events.  Nor did we allow ourselves to be used as a tool in others’ requirements of faculty.  We insisted that our workshops be optional–that we were there to help, not to compel, for example, when a vice provost needed all 100+ departments to articulate undergraduate learning objectives for the reaccreditation process.  And while we kept up with the research on teaching and learning, most of our advice came from our own time spent teaching students and from the ideas shared by other campus faculty.

Still, despite our attempts to hold our ground against bureaucratic intrusion, the teaching center’s corner of the university became increasingly bureaucratic, with administrators putting ridiculous new requirements in place.  So, for example, they required that administrative staff members’ relatively new Macs be lobotomized so that they only functioned as Windows PCs.  It doesn’t help when all the Ph.D.-holding employees and the non-degree-holding employees are divided into camps, especially when we’d worked very hard as a center to break down those silos.  Yet the bureaucrats, barely feinting at consulting with front-line staff, decided that half the teaching center staff should report to an administrative middle manager and half to the center’s faculty director.  That slowed some work and decreased our motivation significantly, as middle management is about efficiency, while center directors focus on vision and mission.  There were other decisions, too, that were made without consulting those of us who actually worked with faculty and graduate students to improve teaching.

For teaching centers to do their work well, they need to be free of bureaucratic restraints, and their staff certainly can’t be see as enforcers of administrative dicta or as professionals offering one-size-fits-all (Blackboard!) “solutions” to teaching challenges.

I’ve been impressed by many of the offerings of the teaching center at my current university, and I’ve participated in several programs coordinated through that office, most notably a semester-long pilot on using mobile devices in the classroom.

The university is revising its core courses (which is très trendy, I know), and one of the requirements is that departments submitting courses–new or existing–to be included in the core send representatives to workshops on designing core courses.  (Surprise! Many, if not most, of the reps sent to these workshops are adjuncts, though I will say the history department appears to be sending only tenure-line faculty.) I offered to attend as a representative of the relatively new History 100 course, Themes in World History.  (N.B.: The last time I took a world history course was in the eighth grade. Wheeeeeeeee! Course design without content knowledge–playing to my strengths!)

The workshop basically exists to help me fill out a form that includes me to write the course title; a table listing learning objectives, assessment plans, and learning activities; a plug-in-your-course-name-and-description required syllabus statement; and a disabilities statement?

That kind of work should take me 60-90 minutes.

Have I mentioned that the workshop is scheduled to run from 8:30 to 4:30 for three days?  (cue terrifying music)

To be continued. . .

After a full day of outcomes-ing, I’m tuckered out, but I’ll share more thoughts on this soon,* as there’s a lot of the usual error going on.

* Previews!

From a faculty member: “Blind students can’t do electrical engineering.”

Bureaucratic fiat: “Yes, all faculty teaching sections of the course must use the same assessment plan.”

Filed Under: Grist for the cultural studies mill, Sometimes I teach, Whining Exhortation and Angst

Fragments of nostalgia

May 12, 2011 By

I.

When he was sifting through his father’s papers, my cousin Ian found an essay I wrote in 1996, and he kindly forwarded a digital copy to me a couple years back.  (I had sent the essay to my great-uncle John 15 years ago because he helped me out by providing some photographs to illustrate the paper.)  The essay, written for an undergraduate course in nature writing, weaves together family history and seismology.  I was not yet 21 years old when I typed it on my Mac Classic II in my dorm room at Grinnell College.

I was rereading the essay tonight and retyping it as my computer isn’t recognizing the text of the PDF.  And you know what?  It holds up.  All that stuff my high school teachers and undergrad professors told me about being a good writer?  I really should have listened more carefully and maintained those narrative nonfiction muscles.

Honestly, I wrote better as an undergraduate than I do today.  That’s pretty depressing.

II.

My grandfather died 20 years ago yesterday.  I still miss him.  I called my grandmother yesterday to see how she’s doing.  I really enjoy our chats, however brief they may be.  She wasn’t feeling well at all–she’s dying too slowly of the cancer, just as Pops was two decades ago in an adjacent bedroom of their bright yellow California bungalow.

It sounds as if the doctors are giving her a fairly aggressive treatment so that she doesn’t die of the cancer–colorectal cancer is apparently a pretty horrifying way to die, but I’ll spare you the details–but rather of something else:  The treatment?  A common cold + a compromised immune system?  An overdose of pain medication?  Who knows? (This is difficult to write, but I remember my writing profs saying that the uncomfortable stuff makes for the best writing.  I’m not buying that at this moment.)  The result is that the combination of radiation, chemotherapy, and pain pills, coupled with the confusion of managing and combining all her prior meds with the new ones, is making her miserable.

I knew I couldn’t bring up the anniversary of Pops’s passing.  And maybe she herself had forgotten the anniversary, though I suspect not, as she is cursed–a few months ago, before her diagnosis, I would have said blessed–with a clarity of mind that makes coming to terms with her own illness all the more difficult.  Her mind and pain are both exceptionally sharp.

III.

I was following an Internet rabbit hole yesterday and happened to click on a photographer’s portfolio of family portraits.  In the background of one was the play structure at a park in Davis where Lucas and I often met a good friend and his kids.  I choked when I saw the yellow slides that Lucas was at first so hesitant to go down.  I remembered the welcome temperature of the shade, the cold concrete of the picnic table’s benches, the heavenly sandwiches half-wrapped in waxy paper from the deli of my favorite grocery store.

I’ve gained so much here–great colleagues, academic freedom, autonomy, a clearer sense of my intellectual self, a renewed vision for my own public history practice, great students, and a recovered self-confidence.

But.

IV.

I miss California.  A lot.  Not enough to pull up stakes and go back right away–I’m committed to pursuing tenure here, as I think the department and university are a really good fit for who I am and what I do, and Lucas has landed a spot in what may be the best school in the state–but enough that I think about it every day, wondering when I can return and thinking about whether I’d prefer northern or southern California, as I’ve lived in both regions and both have their charms.  I fantasize about entrepreneurship, about kickstarting something big with Fang that will allow us to move into a home within reach of Pacific breezes.

I also recognize this is a pattern.  I long to be wherever it is I’ve left.  More than a third of my Master’s thesis for my M.A. in poetry writing is about missing central Iowa.  When I was in Long Beach for a year between a stint in Iowa and moving back to Davis, I thought constantly about Davis’s idyllic charms.  In Davis I thought about the big, sunny rooms in my parents’ house, and how three generations of my family still live on the same block, and how nice it was to be able to wander half a block to Grandma’s house to share a cookie and lemonade with her and to talk about her cats or whatever reality show she happened to be hooked on at the moment.  When I was an undergraduate for a semester in Fredericksburg, I kept envisioning the pastel wallpaper and semigloss-white windowsill next to my bed in my childhood bedroom, and I wanted nothing more than to stare at that corner, which in my previous residence in the house had seemed so prosaic.

V.

Things that would help in the short term:

  • Moving to the other side of Boise.  It’s where all the ex-pat Californians live.
  • Spending more time downtown, among the funky shops and in the humanely-scaled urban streetscape.
  • Exploring the foothills.  Hikes.
  • Bicycling.
  • Fresh spring and summer produce.  (If fruits & veggies would finally show up at the just-reopened farmer’s market. . .)
  • Gardening.
  • A long spring.  It’s still too early to plant tomatoes here–as the locals point out, the snow is still on Shafer Butte–and I’m going to be pissed if we get only two weeks of spring before summer gets blazing hot.
  • Lots of writing, lots of processing, sparked by a more intense Shiva Nata practice.
  • Maybe Friends meetings.  Discernment.

How do you ground yourself in place?  How do you live in the now when past places sing their siren songs?

Filed Under: Tall tales and true, Whining Exhortation and Angst
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Header image credits

origami beetle by Emre Ayaroglu, mounted butterflies by Black Country Museums, First Lady Sarah Polk's dress and the Jefferson Bible source book by the National Museum of American History, and lionfish by Martyn Steiner, all used under Creative Commons licenses.

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