Curmudgeon Girl says: happiness is no late grading

What is making me happy right now is that for next semester, I'm gonna put a drop-dead deadline in my syllabi that 1-2 weeks after the assignment is due, I won't accept late assignments anymore. Period.

There is a little wave right now of LATE LATE work propelled by whiney, pleading students who feel that their life stories are so very exceptional that they should be exempt from the rule that EVERYTHING (no exceptions) was due last Friday. Oh, my car. Oh, my disk (back) problem. Oh, oh, oh.

And I would bend, in the holiday spirit - but how fair is that to students who actually took the deadline seriously and are adult enough to conclude that they fucked up, move on?

You can just imagine the QUALITY of this late work, right? Yeah, overall, it sucks bigtime. Take the 50% reduction for late work that thankfully my syllabi already incorporate, and you wonder why these students even bothered. But then again, math is seriously not their strong point, so it's no surprise that they are overoptimistic about what this work will do for their final grade. Why let algebra intrude on their "feeling" about what grade they've earned?

Bottom line: classes ended yesterday. If they haven't talked to me about their "issues" by now, they are out of luck.

winding down

This semester, like past semesters, is poised to end with a fade rather than a bang. Two of my classes ended Friday; one ends tomorrow - so this weekend was a lot less focused on class prep than usual. Then, I administer exams and grade them on alternate days for the next week, but there will be plenty of down-time to make cookies with Mom (one of our fun holiday traditions) and decorate the tree and the house a little, and do the little bit of shopping we need to. The adults in my family don't exchange gifts anymore, and even buying for the kids has turned into a gift-card thing, which is pathetic, but less pathetic than being the aunt and uncle who give the weird/useless/laughable gifts.

After Xmas, we are going to buckle down and work like dogs, I on my book, and B on his paper.

Huh. I wonder if we really will?

Christmas usually puts me in a mood. We have scaled back immensely from the whirlwind we used to undertake, which is good. It was to stressful and tiring. But now there is more time to contemplate, and so I can see that all the "joy of the season" is mostly manufactured by the advertising agencies to get us to buy more: so depressing to be manipulated this way. There is no critical examination of the proposition that everyone "should" be get-get-getting - and so beyond the depressing weight of what to get for all the people who already have what they want is the guilt of not donating ENOUGH so that all the people who can't get what they want can maybe get just a little something. Toys for Tots, Globe Santa, etc.

To say nothing of the curmudgeonly post I could write about how everyone is so damn grumpy at this time of year. Especially drivers on the commute - what's up with that??

end of semester roundup

In the first half of November (and late October too, probably) I was having trouble keeping up with the day job with all the other stuff - research work, grant app, service-related paperwork, etc. - that was competing.

And in the latter half of November, up til and including now, I have been swamped with grading. Thus, rule #1 for spring 2010: ASSIGN FEWER ASSIGNMENTS. I think I do a pretty good job designing assignments (although I've learned from some mistakes made this term, mostly along the lines of my assuming that students know how to do college-level research: WRONG!!!) but I don't necessarily enjoy reading the results. And I really HATE having to assess them with a grade.

Another good thing about spring: the classes will be smaller. Grading 37 of anything is a tough slog. Let's hope that my WRG course enrolls enough students to run though!

More on Shadow Cities

I had hoped that Neuwirth's Shadow Cities (see previous post) might be worth assigning to a class - or at least a chapter of it. But it's too anecdotal and not analytically rigorous enough for college reading. More, the focus is on the author and how he reacts to things and sees things - not nearly enough about slum residents and what THEY are doing. In short, although his experiment to live in four global city slums is interesting, it doesn't add up to enough to be useful in any of my courses - including the one I'm working on for next fall, Global Cities.*

*I need a more intriguing title than that. Feel free to suggest one in the comments.

Global cities

Just finished reading Shadow Cities: A billion squatters, a new urban world. Robert Neuwirth. Focus on Rio, Nairobi, Mumbai and Istanbul.

More about this later.

11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month

Unlike most people of my age, I am unusually invested in the history and emotion of World War I, and especially in the impact of the losses. This preoccupation stems from a study trip called "The History and Geography of World War I" in 2001. It was life-changing in many respects, not least because of the amazing poetry and literature and memoir I read as background for my seminar paper.

This sonnet by Charles Hamilton Sorley is one of my favorite (although emotional) poems of all time:

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.

Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,
"Yet many a better one has died before."
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Thanks to world-war-pictures.com for posting this so that I could grab it.

T minus 365 days

Today I am 49. These birthdays that end in '9' are harder than the ones that end in zero, somehow. I remember angst at 29 and 39...

My mother (who grows more delightful every day) recently confided that she didn't think I looked close to 50 at all! Thanks Mom!

B cooked a wonderful surprise steak for me tonight, which we had with our own Peruvian (blue) potatoes (mashed) and fresh green beans. Still no hard frost: we could have had a salad of arugula and nasturtiums if I'd have gone out with the flashlight to find them. IT'S GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE, PEOPLE.

Got a comment in the last entry from a friend of an old friend, now gone. Chris M was my age, and died way too early, of melanoma. Birthdays are a time for taking stock: I've been reading some old notes and thinking about things. We can't know when the Fates will snip our thread of life, so it's best to live "life to the lees" (Tennyson). Case in point: driving off to work today, B remarked how, in a pre-industrial time, we could have stopped to watch the magnificent sunrise unfold in all its glory - all purples and oranges and pinks. Awareness of that sunrise was my gift - as I stole glances at it, driving along at 75 mph in the wheel of life, I tried to live in that moment.

From the birthday girl: I recommend you all try to do the same, if only for a moment, every day.

weird, wild week

This last week was really full of weirdness and transitions.

1. There's the weather - it snowed on Friday driving to work, and again this evening. I don't remember snow EVER here on the coast in Massachusetts in October. I haven't finished harvesting my garden or planting perennials yet!!

The heat in the house is full-on now and we are battening down the hatches (storm windows, Mortite). I look at the pile of clean clothes to be folded and it seems weird that I was wearing tank tops and teeshirts within the last week.

2. File under retrograde: I was asked to help with vetting candidates for the position I left in 2002. Little has changed there, and it is SO WEIRD to be back in all the Drama. It reaffirms my sense that I did the right thing by leaving. I could almost double my salary going back there - but I am having so much more fun now. And summers off!

3. It is mid-semester, and the grading stack looms large. I have worked all weekend on two encyclopedia articles (done!) and a reconfiguration of 3 lectures into a single lecture, with a "jigsaw" assignment for students. We'll see tomorrow (unless it is a snow day!) how that goes. It's a fractious class; my expectations are fairly low. Since I am teaching no new preps (although I am always updating), it's my goal to incorporate much more student activity. 100 minutes is WAAAAY too long for a lecture.

which is more discouraging?

Friends, we have two options: the ill-prepared students; and the incompetent administrators.

Poor students, all they have been socialized to understand as "learning" is the memorization of terms. One bright young woman asked me today, "So, if I just memorize the class slides, I will do fine on the midterm, right?" I tried to explain about deep thinking, and applying ideas and concepts, and synthesis, but she looked a little blank.

I have seen my students making flashcards of terms we use often in class, for heaven's sake. So narrow a conception of learning: "as though to breathe were life."

Then on the other side of things, we have people who just aren't ready for primetime trying to do real jobs. There's the IT staff who fluffs off all reports of problems with "oh yeah, we're looking at that, we'll get back to you." (They never do.) There's the coordinator who responds to questions about how to find info about his program with, basically, well, just send out the info to everyone since we don't know how to reach our target population. There's the dean who never listens because his mind is busy working on the next riposte (or the next job opp?). It's a pathetic, not-ready-for-real-life group and sometimes I just want to scream out in search of competence. Do your fucking jobs, people: is that too much to expect??

chalk-n-talk versus powerpoint

Teaching seems more manageable lately than when I wrote my last entry. But there are other part of life that have been occupying my time: guests from overseas; contract writing assignments; family events; buttoning up the yard for winter.

I've been working this evening on a class session on cultural geography. I have a bunch of slides from previous iterations, and I'm thinking about taking out the very "texty" slides and talking to those points instead. Some of my more "progressive" colleagues pooh-pooh PowerPoint, and God knows, there is lots to ridicule there. I've been trying to shift my ppt use to things I can neither say nor draw/write on the blackboard. Thus: maps, charts, photos, links to video clips, etc. I usually don't annotate them very well in the slides (I have to redo this when I use them in online courses) because they are supposed to be complements to the activities in-class, for the bodies in-class, not a substitute for coming to class. That is, if you skip my class and think you can get all the "Material" from the slides posted online, well, poor sad you. That's not the way I roll.

Yet I am always tempted to write what I call "organizer" slides: headers with 3-5 bullets that show in outline form what I am about to talk about. I talk through these too, but I always feel that SEEING it in words reinforces what I am saying out loud. Lately I have been replacing these organizer slides with writing on the board. I guess my thinking is that it seems more spontaneous and dynamic (although frankly it's all scripted, like 90% of what I teach) and that it engages students differently because it's happening in real time, like a performance, right in front of them.

But then the chalk dust (I wear a lot of black, so there's that), and my poor handwriting. Is chalk-n-talk really qualitatively different than a slide of the same information?

treadmill

I am experiencing now what I experienced for years working in local government: that treadmill feeling in which you struggle to get through every day with enough preparation and performance not to embarass yourself or your organization, and stay up too late all the while craving the escape of sleep, only to wake far too early only to do it all over again.

This for 5 days, then the sweet, sweet release of the weekend. On Friday afternoon you feel great, thinking about all the work you'll achieve in 2 days off. You take Friday night off. On Saturday you try to catch up with some household stuff, and the day flies by. On Sunday you wake up in mild panic and before you know it, it's evening and you are facing piles of stuff that can't possibly be finished, leaving you with the same old catch-up routine in the week to come.

If all I were doing was course prep, my workload would be manageable and even enjoyable, because I love just about everything (except grading) about teaching. I love writing curriculum plans and lesson plans. I love thinking up classroom exercises to make students apply and think about the readings and concepts. I love just talking to students.

But now that I'm on the tenure track, I am trying to do so much more: co-authoring a textbook; writing encyclopedia articles; trying to finish research for a paper to be given in November; trying to write up articles from my dissertation; supervising an independent study project; leading a study trip next spring. It's just TOO MUCH.

I always think that better organization will get me through it. Yet truthfully: the days roll by and mid-December will come, and then what is done is done; what is not done will not be done. The delight of the academic is in starting fresh every 4 months.

class and achievement

I confess to a certain wistfulness when I read the alumni publications of my undergrad college, especially articles about how undergrads have helped faculty refine and expand their research or develop new research directions. Could that ever happen in my professional life?? It seems we are talking about two parallel universes of higher education.

The majority of my students are in front of me because someone, somewhere, has convinced them that a college degree is a desirable (or necessary) accessory to a better life (usually meaning better-PAYING). This irritates me on two levels.

I am especially irked at the whiney assumption some students have that they are automatically disadvantaged because they go to state college instead of Ivy League. (That idea is being instilled in them by the Marxist element, and it's total bullshit.) (George Bush went to Yale; need I say more??) I believe that my students, if they READ the assignments, and think about them, and engage with their classmates and me in interrogating them, could get just as deep an education as the average student at the Ivy League.

NCLB: creating a new generation of sheep?

Really, I DO want to blog on a daily basis. But I've been a little freaked out lately by the onslaught of work (teaching prep, and the giant lurking shadow of Publish Or Perish) and trying to keep the household together too. B had the flu week before last (he is still sick with a cold) and I had a cold last week (I am still not 100% but a lot better). So the week before last I made some sort of soup every night (he has dental issues too).

Now we are on to solid food. Lobsters tonight!!

My human geog students are working on a demographics project involving retrieval of census data. I give them a little guidance for how to find what they need, but I wonder what would happen if I gave them NOTHING? I've had a couple inquiries along the lines of "could you send me the link to the data, I can't find it with your instructions," to which I gently respond that the goals of the assignment are partly about the skills of info-retrieval without a recipe or step-by step "then click this" type of listing.

It's only a couple of students so I shouldn't generalize, but I have found lack of creative problem-solving and ability to deal with the unknown to be characteristic of today's college students. Sometimes, in my more cynical and paranoiac moments, I theorize that the rationale for standardized testing (like the MCAS in MA) has nothing whatsoever to do with knowledge or learning or competence, and has everything to do with socializing a population to be compliant, fill-in-the-bubble oriented, and totally incapable, by training, of independent, critical, or creative thinking. Just what a repressive, totalitarian, controlling Republican administration would want.

Please tell me I am wrong about this. Please?

odds and ends of my life - the orts, so to speak

"Ort" is a commonly-occurring crossword puzzle answer. We have started to use it in normal conversation for the bits and pieces of "whatever" - refrigerator leftovers; useless parts of the Sunday paper; bits of clean laundry that fall out of the handful en route to Laundry Mountain.

So here are some orts of my brain:

1.Man, this day job business really gets in the way of regular blogging!

2.People in my immediate circle known to have the 'flu: my husband; 3 of my students; the father of one of my colleagues. My sister-in-law has a really bad cold.

3.Fourth-grade-playground attacks on Obama's health care plan (death squads etc., oh, hi, Sarah, didn't see you there, how ya doin'?) get on my nerves not because the Republican operatives are acting like assholes (which they are) but because evidently there are people in this country stupid enough to buy their propaganda.

4.The only child of one of my childhood friends died last week in Iraq. I can't stop thinking about it. In fact, every other trouble I can think of pales in comparison to her heartbreak.

5.Classes are going well: students seem motivated and cheerful. I am in a much better mood about teaching than ever before.

I am going to try to post more often, even though there is a lot going on...

defining difference (and distance) in virtual space

P.M. Forni, whose old-fashioned ideas about civility and the erosion of it I've quoted before, has an interesting observation about the "flattening" of space online.

"Recognizing and accepting difference is the premise of our recognizing and accepting value. Unfortunately one major aspect of their experience with the Net inclines our students not to perceive difference. On the Net every single thing is equidistant from every other thing and from the person at the keyboard. It takes the same amount of time and the same effort to access anything you wish. [He's incorrect about that, but ok, let's provisionally accept the bigger point...] When everything comes from the same source - the mysteriously endless and spaceless warehouses of the Net - everything reveals itself under a varnish of equivalence."

My major disagreement with Forni is that he equates "difference" with "difference in quality." He is an aesthete, and he is looking to develop habits of discrimination: we recognize masterpieces, for example, and in so doing, we recognize that other works are NOT masterpieces. Fair enough.

Yet much of difference does not equate to lesser or greater value, and of course geographers in recent decades have theorized extensively about differences that do NOT imply greater or lesser value - race, gender, etc. etc. Much of what we teach in World Regional Geography is implicitly underlaid with a goal of getting students to appreciate diversity WITHOUT making a value judgment. Thus Americans are not better than some other nationality because we are richer or have more stuff or have more freedoms or supposedly more equality, for example. We are trying to teach a culturally-situated appreciation of other ways that will help students to live in a world of difference and to understand and appreciate the lifeways of others.

Curmudgeon Girl asks...

...when did it start to be normal for boys (and no, I don't think I mean young men) to wear caps indoors? I sat in Convocation this morning and looked out at a sea of baseball caps.

Seriously. I talk about this in my segment on cultural geography, and the class is shocked (shocked, I tell you!) to learn that there was a time in the not-so-distant past when males did NOT EVER wear hats in buildings (unless they were in academic regalia at Convocation, ha ha). Sometimes I tell the story of traveling through Europe with student groups, and nudging some boy to remove his cap IN A CHURCH. Some semesters, I think they think I am making this all up.

It was worse in the construction management class (duh) but still. Convocation?? My college convocation, more than 30 years ago now, was quite solemn, and as I recall, we dressed up a bit. There were solemn dedications to our shared purpose, some honorary degrees, non-denominational hymns perhaps - and in the august setting of a wood-paneled, stuffy auditorium that had probably seen 75 convocations or more. The state schools like to ape the Ivy ways, but it just doesn't have the same impact. Call me a snob if you like.

College students these days...

Locally, a 20-year-old young woman was arrested this week for 1) having sex in public (at a playground filled with kids, during the day!); and 2) underage drinking. On the online version of the newspaper story, oh-so-helpful commenters posted a link to her myspace page (hello, who uses myspace these days??) so that we could all see her youthful exploits with partying, drinking, and use of illegal drugs. Her 31-year-old boyfriend was not able to post the $40 bail. Must've spent all his money on the beer!

She is...(wait for it)....a criminal justice major at a state college in the area.

I could not make this stuff up! Thank God that ever-alert local reporters and the blogosphere are on the case.

a tale of three cities

We spent a few hours yesterday in Haverhill, MA (say 'HAIV-rill') and it was quite interesting. Haverhill was a major shoe production center back in the day, along with Brockton, Lynn, and to a lesser degree, Newburyport. Before that it was a market town for the upper MA and southern NH Merrimack River valley area. I dimly remember (or remember hearing about) a disastrous downtown fire, and then the misguided redevelopment efforts of the 1970s. (A bank building of that era provides ample testimony.) In my growing-up years, Haverhill was a sad place: downtown of vacant, weed-infested lots. Polluted river. Left-behind commercial area "anchored" by the Registry of Motor Vehicles. (If you are from Mass., and over the age of 35, you will understand what a cruel irony the last one is.)

Right now, in the midst of economic doom-and-gloom, Haverhill seems HOT to me. I'm intrigued, and interested in teasing out the differences between it and other, not-hot places on the North Shore of Boston.

Let's compare with two other cities: Newburyport; and Peabody.

Pop: Haverhill 56K, up from 46K in 1980. Wow! What's THAT about?
Newburyport: about 20K
Peabody: about 50K

Economic base: Haverhill: not sure
Newburyport: tourism downtown; industrial park in the swampland south of town
Peabody: Northshore Mall, Centennial Industrial Park

Place promotion "hooks": Haverhill: Merrimack River, John Greenleaf Whittier; shoes.
Newburyport: Merrimack River and sea access, historically significant architectural assemblages
Peabody: George Peabody, low taxes for biz; what else?? (commercial district is tiny; prevailing community attitude in historic areas favors parking lots, vinyl siding, and chain link fencing)

State and federal funding: Haverhill: not much evidence of it: T station might be a bonus - it's on the Amtrak route to Portland; ancient streetscape improvements on River St. Everything lately appears to be grassroots; there is no evidence of recent major dollars for upgrades.
Newburyport: Congressmen really brought home the bacon in the 1970s - the renovated downtown is spiffy and oh-so-Federalist, but a bit of a stage-set.
Peabody: $6M in downtown infrastructure in the mid-1980s, but it looks a bit tired now. The focus on "getting the traffic through" to Salem makes downtown a bit of a traffic sewer to Salem, not pedestrian- or retail-friendly.

I was impressed with the can-do, make-it-work attitude I could see expressed physically in Haverhill. No waiting for grants; just get in there and slap some paint on the walls and open up a brew-pub -- or antique store, or gallery. In the end, that spirit will make this place successful, and make it endure.

It seems to me that one could develop an index (hello, Richard Florida!) as to the predictors of success of such small cities. As I say, I am intrigued...and thinking about this.

7 days out

I am trying to segue into a routine and some self-discipline, after a summer of doing what I wanted, pretty much when I wanted. (Even the online course offered quite a bit of flexibility, at least on an hourly basis.)

That means: going to bed earlier and toughing out insomnia instead of succumbing to the lure of laptop video. It means getting up early, in prep for the 6 am alarms. It means staying on top of household chores so they don't get out of control (Laundry Mountain, anyone?).

Also, this term, it's gonna be really important to keep up an active research and writing program, not just on my "research day" but consistently, every day. So today I resisted the urge to fiddle around with my syllabi, and instead conference-called with my co-author on the chapter of our book on traditional cities (still have to make an outline out of the notes), and read, cover to cover,
Edgar M. Hoover's scintillating 1937 Location Theory and the Shoe and Leather Industries for a research project I intend to present at a conference in November.

Oh, and I read Sunday's NY Times and the local papers. I urge my students to keep up with events, so I have to walk the walk.

It's 7 pm, so I think I'll "take the rest of the day off," which is what my boss used to recommend at 6 pm when he stopped in my office on his way out of the building. Ah, those were the days!

shift-share analysis for the toddler set

I've been working for what seems like weeks but is probably only a few days on my last syllabus for fall, Economic Geography. Last time, I took a very traditional approach: theory; basic concepts; four economic sectors; trade; transportation and communication. I did a bit with local economies and wanted to do more (eventually I will probably teach a course on community and economic development and we'll take it up there).

My lecture material was dull, and I was dull, and the textbook was so boring that I routinely fell asleep while reading it. So this time I am trying to be more lively and introduce more relevant topics. About half of my students are in our globalization track; the other half are in early childhood or elementary education. The latter is especially a challenge in terms of making the course meaningful. I am trying to think of how they might use this stuff in their teaching. Doesn't every preschooler need to know something about the global economy?? Sigh.

In other news, it has been a very social few days, and it's weird to be sitting alone at my desk all day again.

out-curmudgeoned!

"Many students are simply not prepared to engage in serious academic work and do not know how they are expected to behave on campus. Most of them bring a consumer mentality to school and very little concern about approval from the older generation. That their own generation was raised on oversized portions of self-esteem is part of the problem, not to speak of their massive exposure to coarse popular culture on television and the internet."

P.M. Forni, professor of Italian at Johns Hopkins, from the Fall 2008 issue of Thought and Action, the NEA Higher Education Journal.

cherry strata

I experimented yesterday with the strata form, seen in such classics as B's family's Christmas Bake and a more modern twist, New Year's bake. This one is not terribly sweet and is a terrific way to use up bread leftover from BBQs and the like. I have a new cherry pitter which is a blast to use! Probably any other kind of summer stone fruit or berries could be substituted - just vary the spices accordingly.

About 8-10 stale hot dog rolls, or whatever other miscellaneous bread is on hand, torn into 1- 1 1/2 inch pieces
8 oz cream cheese, cut into 1/4 inch cubes (yeah, THAT'S a good trick in this heat)
most of a bag of cherries (standard supermarket size), pitted and divided: 1/2 cooked gently with 1/4 C sugar and a couple spoonfuls of water; the other uncooked and sliced for garnish
4 large eggs
2 C milk
2 t ground cinnamon
1/4 t ground cloves
1/2 t almond extract

Layer 1/3 of the bread in a buttered casserole dish.
Top with 1/2 the cream cheese, dotted in place.
Top with 1/2 the cooked cherries.
Layer another 1/3 of the bread.
Top with the remainder of the cream cheese and cooked cherries.
Layer on the last 1/3 of bread.
Beat the eggs, milk, cinnamon and almond extract in a large bowl. Pour over bread mixture and press bread into the egg mixture until all the bread is saturated, taking care not to disturb the "layering" too much. Refrigerate for a bit - overnight is ideal, but if you are like me, you have about 30 mins of chilling before you have to bake it to be ready for dinner guests.

Bake 350 deg for about an hour uncovered until puffy and golden. If the casserole dish is very full, slip a cookie sheet under to catch any overboil.

Spoon onto bowls/plates, and serve with the sliced uncooked cherries. Whip cream garnish if you like.

helpful study "stick" or useless busywork?

B has finished final grades for the traditional class - a relatively even distribution of As, Bs, and Cs, with a couple of Ds. That's unusual for us - we usually see reverse bell curves - a bunch of As and a bunch of Cs and Ds, with a gap in the B and high C range.

Possibly the higher grades are due to the fact that students were REQUIRED to take reading notes and turn them in for a grade, before the classroom work began. This meant that, even if they did a half-assed job of typing out some definitions and chapter subheads, they had had to engage even if in a desultory way with the content of the day. Thus they understood more in class and did better on the exams.

But should we require notes to be turned in for college students? I tend to think that they have been informed as to what constitutes useful study practice, and they can do it or not as they see fit. (I always wanted to take reading notes but rarely could keep up with it.) Are we as professors obligated to MAKE them do better by putting in place this sort of policing of class preparation? I am of two minds about it: on one hand, part of the job of college is becoming fully an adult and learning for yourself how to learn, even if (perhaps especially if) you make some mistakes along the way. On the other hand, if we can make good preparation for the class session happen simply by requiring (and grading) notes, then shouldn't we do it? It would certainly improve the pre-learning and up the sophistication of what we could do in the classroom.


but then: who the hell wants to grade reading notes?? Yuck.

on the road

My mother-in-law turned 75 yesterday - big fete today. A very chilled afternoon with the family - despite the fact that when 3 overthinking overachievers plan a party, there is bound to be some lack of coordination.

I have been reading the very inspiring story of B's cousin Joe, who was seriously injured in an auto accident in Italy 3 1/2 years ago. He has made a remarkable recovery - yet his life (and the lives of his family) has been irreversibly altered. It is a bit of a wakeup call to appreciate more what we have and how much richness of life we take for granted. See http://joeprogress.blogspot.com.

science phobia

One of B's students opined the other day that he hates science and finds it difficult. I find this weird: is not the entire structure of modernity - our worldview - based on the paradigm of scientific inquiry and rational explanation? Are we not completely saturated in every aspect of our lives with a belief in rationality and human progress in knowledge?

I assume that the scientific method is taught in grade school, and I know that students in the primary grades are also taught to justify claims with evidence. However, while modernity may operate on a "verify the facts" basis, students don't always internalize this.

Are people in general LESS convinced of the scientific method? One sees the new agey stuff, polls that suggest people believe in miracles and UFOs and Elvis sightings and the power of crystals. But in fewer or in greater proportions than in previous decades?

Plus our media-saturated culture encourages us to accept "truth" as frequency of message rather than evidence supporting it: "If you say it often enough people will believe it."

I can't help thinking that science phobia at its most elemental equals lack of curiosity about how things work, and THAT is really scary, but lack of curiosity is what I observe in many of my students. Many of them accept the world as it is and have no interest in WHY things are the way they are.

My Marxist colleagues make this a class issue, something along the lines of "our working class students are too oppressed to imagine a world in which they have the power to change." But for me, college is exactly the first step: the knowledge of WHY the world is as it is is the beginnings of power to imagine and effect change.

the so-what question

I always spend a lot of time (too much) working up the first several sessions of a course. Right now I think the approach is wrong. Rather than spending several sessions talking about basic concepts and epistemology, maybe it would be better to dive into a substantive issue or two and USE the concepts/epistemology to show how we can make sense of the issue.

Otherwise it seems like forever before we get to something we can sink our teeth into, and I fear the class can't really make sense of the abstractions of concepts. I always try to be governed by "why should we care about this?" as a grounding question and - for example - I have to think that being able to define and give examples of site and situation is of no use in and of itself. How can that be USEFUL in a particular context or contexts?

Not to be too instrumentalizing about it...

week out of time

For a variety of reasons in life, sometimes there are just periods that are "out of time." A family member is sick and in hospital, say, and you spend every free moment there or getting there or thinking about being there. Or you have houseguests and your normal routine is disrupted. Or there is a crazy storm. Or no internet. Or whatever.

I am not making excuses for not posting, but the last several days have been very much out of the routine. I am looking forward to getting back in it tomorrow: walking every morning; writing; working on my lists of to-dos.

RIP Jack Brennan

A former colleague died yesterday, someone I haven't seen since before my sojourn in the Midwest. He was a civil engineer and long-time public works guy, the kind of guy who knows the location and history of every manhole and drain line in town.

He taught me how to write specifications for road projects and how to develop a mutually respectful, productive relationship with contractors. He had a great love of history and could talk with you on all kinds of subjects - always easy, friendly conversation that left you feeling enriched.

I will miss him.

consumerism, or, an afternoon of retail therapy

Spent the afternoon at an outlet mall a couple of states over. (Yeah, in New England, such things are possible.)

I always suspect that these outlets are where mass-market chains sell poorly-made merchandise they are sorry they bought. True to theory, our trip started badly, at the "Corelle" store that used to carry open stock Revereware. Turns out they have abandoned the signature line of copper-bottom saucepans (copper must be rising on the world commodities market) and have some "new improved" line. In short, though: no open stock, and a store full of plastic dishware in cutsey patterns (that's the Corelle part) and cheap plastic gizmos that will break at the first use. More, the sales staff was snotty and superfluous.

I call my theory about this outlet stuff the Walmart Theory, because it's all about "Low Prices."
Here's the gig: if you can offer the customer a well-made, steel potato masher for $19.99 and a cheaply made, will-break-at-the-first-mashing masher for $10, the customer will invariably buy the $10 item. Your profit margin is substantially higher on the $10 item, because it is made in China of cheap plastic. If it breaks, no sweat. They are not gonna drive back to Maine to get a refund on a $10 item. And they are so entranced by the (relatively) inexpensive goods in your store that they WILL return, even if they keep buying cheap crap that doesn't last. So there is no point in stocking the $19.99 item.

I, on the other hand, although I am Yankee-cheap, am willing to pay more for tools (kitchen, yard, etc) because I do value quality and I want these things to last more or less forever. So we bought the $19.99 masher (at Villeroy and Boch) and expect to use it for the next 20 years or so.

Also at Villeroy and Boch: a sweet deviled egg holder (great gift!).

Then, the underthings. Every couple of years I grit my teeth and buy all new stuff. I'll spare you the details (google "bras suck" or "bras are evil" or "buying swimsuits" or any such phrases and you'll get lots of bloggers who write eloquently about the pure evil that is foisted by the corporate fashion industry upon women and their body image(s)), but suffice it to say, mission accomplished, and I even got some new sox in the bargain.

Dinner at an awesome, elegant yet casual restaurant, the Dockside Restaurant on York Harbor. I highly recommend it. Lobster cocktail: inspired! Elderly couples sucking down lots of wine and whooping it up! Fantastic!

New digs

I spent some time yesterday moving my office stuff from the adjuncts' office (which I shared with B last year) to my own, single-person office. I didn't push the move; I was happy in the other one, but the new chair INSISTED. "Every tenure-track person gets their own office; that's how we do it here."

In part she wanted to get the guy who was retiring to clean up the office just for the general health and safety of the campus. There were a couple of dumpster-loads of stuff in there. He surprised everyone by really buckling down to it, and this past week it was painted and cleaned and the floor refinished, all for me.

I didn't think I'd be so excited about it, but I kind of am. It's huge, and since I mostly work at home, I won't be filling it with books and papers. It will probably remain rather spartan. The spartanness is a bit deceptive - those of us who are bit more technology-oriented actually have a lot of files and information - but it is all on our laptops.

I am vaguely looking around for some objets, or at least some creature comforts, that I can bring down there to put a bit of personality into the space. I suppose that the anonymity of all my past offices is a reflection of my belief that the work happens in the space of the mind, and that the physical space doesn't matter. I've never found the need to "personalize" work offices, unlike so many people I know.

the art of the search

A student emailed me today because, OMG, she had spent, like, 3 HOURS looking for a particular piece of information required for her last paper. (Due tonight, naturally.) And she has to work tonight, and can she turn the paper in tomorrow, etc etc. The usual last-minute drama.

(Not for nothing, this is the same student who has already emailed to say that she "needs" at least a B to get a particular internship she has applied for. I resisted the temptation to be snarky and respond that, well, then she "needed" to do ALL the work and "needed" to do at least B level work throughout.)

It took me less than 10 minutes online to find the information she needed. And this isn't the first request of this sort I've gotten - always with the same results on my part. Which made me wonder: is there any sort of systematic instruction for high school or college students in effective use of Internet resources? The older generation of the professoriate tends to sniff and harumph at the Internet and its information. Yet, there is tremendous value there, and even greater value in knowing how to evaluate the reliability of various sites. I wonder if our nostalgia for print and our snobbery about refereed work blinds us to what can usefully and practically be taught, in order to prepare our students for the Information Age.

online learning: a reflection

Classes end tomorrow, and then there is some catch-up grading, and then the posting of final grades.

Online teaching requires a LOT less mental energy than classroom teaching. Once you've prepped the course, you've already developed your expectations about what students will take away from any given reading or assignment. You might make adjustments if student work is not what you expect, but the basic framework is there.

For me, less mental energy means less involvement. During the regular school year, I think about my courses and my students all the time. In the online environment, I mostly think about students only when I am reading their work and figuring out how not to sound snarky in my comments. There's a lot less of ME in all of it - I've already done the interesting work of choosing subject matter and readings and making the assignments. Now it's basically just the assessment of student learning. The involvement in learning that is a normal part of the classroom doesn't really exist online - there is very little access to the "aha" moments that I really treasure in the classroom.

For me, as for the students, less involvement means more freedom, consistent with the "in your pajamas" claim of online education. I did feel tethered to the Internet in some respects; I checked my mail and the discussion boards about 3x every day most days, perhaps less on the weekends, and I was really cross when we were away and unexpectedly couldn't have Internet access (which turned out not to matter in the least). (My students generally did not post on the weekends, up until the last couple of hours on Sunday nights when things were due.)

With everyone only writing, not talking, the "classroom" dynamic is very different. Although I feel readers can know me through my writing, I think that students don't have the same facility or the same nuance when they write, so that it's much harder for me to know them. For a lot of my students, writing in standard English is either not a priority or not a skill they possess. (That's weird too: I proof EVERYTHING I post online multiple times; I reread everything for clarity; I look critically for unintentionally loaded words and replace them.)

If 80% of human communication is non-verbal (dependent on cues received in the face-to-face environment) one can imagine how much is foregone in online education. Yeah. Maybe that last sentence is a summary of my experience the past 4.5 weeks.

Other observations:
1. I do not yet have a good set of strategies for managing discussion. Because I want students to "converse" with one another, I am loathe to jump in too often and insert my opinion. Yet, if I wait until after the deadline for posting has passed, I am afraid that my comments become irrelevant. Do they ever read all the words I've posted this month? (Heh, sort of like this here blog...)

2. The discussion board is a really artificial "conversation." What would make it more "real"?

3. I do agree that online ed requires students to be more self-directed, and more in charge of what they learn, since there is no one at the front of the room lecturing at them or telling them what they need to know, or explaining the tough stuff. However, this alone doesn't mean that more, or better, education is going on. Do students have the tools to learn on their own? Are they effective researchers, paraphrasers, reasoners, thinkers? There is potential here for a new paradigm of learning, but no scaffolding to allow it to be built.

I feel, therefore I think

Today I graded (oh, how I graded!) a variety of discussion board posts, blogs, and assignments for my online course. The common thread was an inability to present and then support with evidence a rational opinion. Instead I got the same tired lame "feelings" about how the world is or should be. One gem (when asked for a rationale for statehood of a nation of one's choice) envisioned a utopian Gaza Strip, complete with women's freedom to wear whatever they wanted, a new Gaza-language, and immigration from all over the world from oppressed peoples. As if Gaza does not have enough problems already!

My sister, in fourth grade, teaches the argument-plus-three-pieces-of-evidence. Evidently this is something that needs to be reconstituted for 13th grade.

The half-blood prince

I've been visiting my in-laws, but that's no excuse for not posting, since they FINALLY have internet. (Ah, the 90s, what a marvelous decade.)

We all saw the Harry Potter movie on Friday, and it was most enjoyable. That doesn't stop me from having critical "issues" though:

1) the characters seemed flat and shadowy, merely sketched-out, so much LESS than their personality-driven selves in earlier films;
2) the whole adolescent crush/romance thing reads as a weird distraction. Is this a teen film about romance, or an adventure/magic story? The film doesn't do a good job of integrating both.
3) I missed a compelling, forward-driving goal or narrative impulse here. The story arc isn't much of an arc.
4) The climax (no spoilers here!) is not really played for what it could be, and the film suffers dramatically because of that.
5) Revelation of what the title means seems thrown-off, a bit of exposition just to clear up all the stray bits. In fact, I still don't understand the implications.

Apparently, I never read this particular volume of the series. My SIL says it has a LOT that didn't appear in the film, so perhaps I will read it in August.

August! One small month of summer remains! I must make it COUNT!

curiosity and initiative in students, with a side order of pride

Argh, yesterday's post apparently got filed in the ether. I sort of remember clicking on the publish key, but maybe I closed IE too soon thereafter?

What has happened in my online class (it happens in the regular classroom too but for some reason (less contact overall, probably) it's more noticeable (and annoying) online) is that students who don't know how to do a thing I have asked them to do simply don't do it. I ask them to submit a single file but they don't know how to cut and paste things: they submit 3 files. I ask for a Word file as an attachment but they are using macs and don't know how to Save As a word file: they dump all their work into the body of the email, with crazy-sloppy formatting. Or they are using a different program and submit whatever file format their program defaults to. (Which reminds me of a possible Curmudgeon Girl post on MS Works: wtf?)

This happens with more substantive matters too, like reading a text and not knowing what the words mean, but not looking them up. When I tell them college readers LOOK UP words they don't know - it's part of reading - they just shrug and look vacant.

I think that college-age students are more proactive about other aspects of their lives (let's hope) but it's so weird to me that they have so little curiosity about HOW to do things and so little desire to do them as expected. This is reflected in classroom behavior too: very passive, almost never any questions about content, just about "what do we have to know about this for the test? How long does our paper have to be?" etc.

Some educators take the position that we aren't making the content relevant enough, so that it becomes just a pointless memorize-and-forget exercise for students. I appreciate that, and I've gradually modified the content of my courses to try to reflect issues and questions that I think students should be interested in. Nevertheless, I am leery of the position that student inclinations about relevance should govern content. Their worlds seem very narrow to me and I think it is part of my job to open up the doors and windows and let some new ideas in.

Textbooks: don't even get me started

I am still trying to decide between my usual textbook or none at all for Human Geography (I've taught it twice just with readings, the first time poorly, this summer more successfully - but it is like working without a net); and between 2 textbooks (have used neither) for Economic Geography. The old EG textbook SUCKS, so booorrrrrring.

Book orders were due back in April. I do love the non-accountability of being a professor.

I think I should just flip a coin and place the order(s) and see how it works out. The students mostly don't read them anyways, so I am investing a lot of mental and emotional energy in a decision that has limited impact.

student-centered education versus consumer-centered education

Online ed is a real winner for college administrations: lots of dough rolling in; reduced expenditures on physical plant; trend towards adjunct faculty, who have neither the clout, nor the time, nor the emotional connection to the institution to protest being abused; no pesky in-person students - thus no on-campus drinking, violence, or vandalism.

Adminstrators can tout the convenience: no commuting time! No parking hassles! Do schoolwork when and where you want! In your pajamas!

There is little if any discussion of the pedagogical benefits of online education: it's all about the consumer convenience. As if education were a 6-pack of soda, made available when and where you might be inclined to desire it. As if education were just another errand in a busy day: drop the kids at daycare; hurry to the office; mail some letters at the post office; do some online learning.

I am old-fashioned but this to me devalues higher education. (Thus I wonder about Prez Obama's plan to increase the number of students in college; do we really need to do more of this low-level type of "higher" education?)

We collectively oversell the convenience, but surely we undersell the commitment and self-discipline and TIME that it takes to do well in what is essentially self-directed learning. I think students are allowed to form the idea that if they check in a couple of times a week, do some reading, and write a few paragraphs here and there, then they have done the work of a full-credit, in-the-classroom course.

(Rude awakening for my current students, although they have not complained.)

the student's annotated bibliography

Not that we even HAVE a research methods course in our department, but if we did, and if I were asked to teach it, this article would probably be useful:

"Scaffolding and reflection in course-integrated library instruction" by Bordonaro, Karen; Richardson, Gillian in Journal of Academic Librarianship; 30 (5) Sep 2004, pp.391-401.

The idea is to require students to keep a research journal, which is a sort of bloggy (thus chronological) annotated bibliography. I required annotated bibliographies last fall and got lists of weblinks from the more conscientious students (NOT annotated) and NOTHING from the others. It was worth only 10% of the paper, as I recall.

I don't do a lot with research methods, and I probably should, even in the intro courses.

curmudgeon girl and her fantastical electronics

I have, at various times, imagined some useful electronic devices:

1.The one that, when pointed at some jerk's boombox on the subway, really does cause the boombox to boom, exploding all over the jerk and then settling into plastic fragments of silence after a gentle rain of applause from the other passengers.

2.The one that, when pointed at some idiot driver on his/her cell phone, would terminate the call. (The deluxe model would render the cell phone permanently unusable.)

3.The one that, when pointed at some slacker student's cell phone while they were secretly texting in class, would cause the phone to terminate the texting and then play a silly song like the Chicken Dance. There would be no way for them to silence it, and I would make them stand up in front of the entire class and do the dance.

See? Electronics COULD be our friends! Bwah-hah-hah!!!!

ramping it up on the writing front

We had the "kickoff meeting" with the publishers today for the textbook project I am working on with a colleague.

It's exciting! My favorite part of a project is looking at the single sheet of paper that outlines with great clarity all the integrated parts that will come together seamlessly just according to the schedule. (Ah, if life imitated my dreams!)

Also, due in part to one of the academic blogs I often read, I've been thinking about a book proposal for my dissertation. I had originally been against the idea (so sick and tired of the topic!) but I am reconsidering, and I wish (oh, how I wish) that I had been more open to this at my defense, as I most certainly would have gotten a bunch of useful advice about how to proceed.

I would want to compare the work I've done on communist heritage tourism with the same phenomenon in other places. I figure I could brush up on my German (already far superior to my Polish language skills) and go to Berlin next summer with my startup money! Then maybe the Czech Republic thereafter; I have to think about that.

It's been good to be away from the dissertation research for 7 months. But looking over some of the text, I am sort of anxious to be back in it. (Which is a gift from the universe; articles MUST be written and submitted this summer!)

lost threads

I have a scribbled post-it note here for blogging that says "eco-ridicule" but alas I have no idea what I meant when I wrote that two days ago.

There is a week available to "cover" political geography in my online class. I am thinking about working through some basic concepts, sketching various historical conceptions of geopolitical reality (the empire, colonization, the nation-state) and then spending some time on the geographical dimensions of current conflicts. One student is interested in North Korea; another is in the Army so has definite opinions about Iraq and Afghanistan.

I, of course, am still lost in a Cold War fog. I read recently that Mackinder's 'heartland' concept was making a comeback, about 100 years after its birth.

community character? How define? Legal to enforce?

Someone in our town is proposing to rip down a single-story office/light industrial building in our downtown and build a suburban-style cul-de-sac instead. The existing building is no great shakes, but I find the light-bulb style proposed roadway (50-foot right-of-way; 120-ft diameter of asphalt at the bulb, just for 3-4 house lots) just such an aesthetic shocker - so out of scale and character with the traditional downtown street grid - that I wonder what arguments can be made to stop it - or at least build it differently.

Land use law in the US affords little scope for fitting developments to their particular circumstances. Our town could have adopted a different set of regulations for areas like downtown (this is what the neo-traditional planning codes are all about) but we haven't. So we get one-size-fits-all regulations, in which applications MUST be approved, because what is required for a 1000-lot subdivision out in the countryside is the same as what is required for a 3-lot, one-acre property smack in the middle of land that's been developed for the last 300 years.

The hearing for this sucker is next month. I'll be interested to see if anyone shares my views on this.

the value of time off-grid?

In 1988, I went on a camping trip to Isle Royale, in Lake Superior. We got dropped off by the ferry at one end of the island, and the ferry picked us up at the other end, 35 miles distant. We saw maybe 3 other parties of 2-3 people in our 7-day jaunt. I thought there would be lots of time in the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other routine for sustained contemplation of my life, my goals, and my path. In reality, I looked at scenery; I thought about how hot and achey I was; I slapped at bugs; I dreamed of my next meal: and there was very little contemplation of the ethereal in favor of the material.

(To this day I don't eat Rycrisp, or drink Wyler's powered drink mixes, because of how much of a staple those items were on this trip and how very tired of them we became.)

Yesterday, I was out of town and without Internet for about 24 hours, and hoo-boy did it make me twitchy. I hear a lot about the value of shutting out all that electronic noise, but really, I think I thrive on it. It feeds me and stimulates my mind. I need that: I don't achieve much without it. No, that doesn't make me a digi native (too old; and I prefer the term digital SAVAGE (thanks, B)) but there is something au courant about the constant stream of information (and most importantly what we make of it) that defines this time.

on not bowling alone - Fourth of July issue

Last night, as dusk fell, I sat alone on the front stairs for a bit and listened to the sounds of my neighborhood celebrating - people laughing; kids shouting; bottles clinking; fireworks popping or booming; fighter jets screaming through the sky. You could just sense the contentment and happiness.

Having good weather after about a month of rain of course contributed to the sense of well-being. But I like to think it was something more - a feeling of solidarity and community in celebrating our nation's birthday.

We don't get much explicit sense of this, which explains Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone. But there are flashes of it, and they are worth noting. (Even the crab-master who whined in the comments on my other blog that if our town REALLY wanted to raise some money, they'd be ticketing all the owners of the illegal fireworks going off in his neighborhood is building community, in his own curmudgeonly way.)

The Evolution of God...

...is a new book by Robert Wright that is getting excellent reviews. It's a sort of cultural history of the idea of God. (In a similar vein, my students will be writing a (very) short cultural history of the idea of nature week after next. Good fun.)

Wright's book is an intimidating 567 pp so I don't know if I'll tackle it, but the idea of reflecting the idea of God through the dominant culture is an intriguing one.

Curmudgeon Girl asks...

...since when did it become ok for service industry people (pumping your gas - and yes, the RP is too delicate a flower to do it herself - serving your takeout coffee, ringing up your groceries) to text or chat on their cell phones WHILE THEY ARE HELPING YOU? And then you are a bee-atch if you return to the counter because the coffee is all wrong?? Or if you sigh loudly when the cell phone gas station dude takes 2x as long to pump the gas because he only has one free hand?

What, I ask you, is this world coming to??

books to skip

Sometimes it's valuable to keep track of things that got tepid reviews, so that I won't spend my limited time slogging through them.

Two in that category:

War of Necessity, War of Choice by Richard Haass. Reviewer Geoffrey Wheatcroft opines that it covers little new ground.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton. Botton is bored by his interviewees, which makes the book mocking and condescending. We can't all be famous French essayists, surely. I'd much rather read the Crawford book about the joys of shopwork - in fact I am planning on it.

Industrial giants

As usual, great richness in this week's NY Times Book Review section. I'm intrigued by Gavin Weightman's The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914. The basic thesis is that the Industrial Revolution should be viewed as a series of opportunities taken with emerging technologies and infrastructures, rather than quantum leaps by Great Men. We see much further when we stand on the shoulders of giants, etc.

The reviewer, Stephen Mihm, faults the book only for its failed attempt to draw grand unifying theories out of the stories of individuals.

some informal empirical evidence about recycling

I have been trying to walk a bit (about 1.5 miles, I'd guess) every day - not easy in the perma-rain we have been experiencing for the last several weeks. Today is trash/recycling day in the hood.

1.Recycling rates are highest in the single-family areas inhabited by retirees. (They also have the least trash - like one tiny bag per household.)

2.Recycling rates are almost non-existent in the two-family and three-family areas. I could be all sanctimonious about this (because we recycle extensively) but there is a strand of thinking that says that curbside recycling is mainly just a eco-feel-good mechanism for the middle class. What we need to do is have/use/buy less stuff in the first place.

3.Most of what is being recycled in my neighborhood is plastic. That's bottles for water, milk, juice, and sports-type drinks, as well as plastic containers for food (like the ones berries come in). Also some styrofoam, like doggy-bag containers - I didn't know those were recyclable. Very little paper. We, on the other hand, recycle a LOT of paper, with our two daily papers plus the NYT Sunday, and now I'm recycling junk mail too. This is apparently not the common thing. Very little glass and metal.

4.At around 3:30 this morning, the bottle harvesters came through. There is an old guy with a shopping cart who makes the rounds around dinnertime on Mondays and sometimes makes a second pass early Tuesday. This was more organized: in a car, quick, and relatively quiet (I've been known to go down and yell if they make a racket). When I checked the bins this morning, all the redeemables were gone.

5.I will be interested to see if the regular trash dudes pick up my neighbor's yard waste. They aren't supposed to, but sometimes they do. (Although not usually from my neighbor; there is some sort of favoritism thing going on perhaps.) Yep, the yard waste is being taken! Score one for the neighbors!

6.All our trash was taken. We put a lot of wood out this week, left over from the garage cleanout 2 weeks ago. Next up: the shed cleanout. Summer vacation fun never ceases!

Bait and Switch: a second look

I was too hasty in my previous post. The last chapter of Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch contains some provocative ideas. (Come to think of it, this was the problem with Nickeled and Dimed too - her analysis of her experience, in the final chapter, was a lot more interesting than the bland details of the indignities she suffered. Sometimes common experiences aren't bonding; they are just boring.)

Some observations:
1.If we can generalize from her experience and those of the job-seekers she met, corporate America is as age-biased as ever. This is a bigger and bigger problem on 2 fronts: there will be more and more middle-aged people in America; and people will work more and more years to close the pension gap and the impending blow-up of Social Security.

2.The old Weberian idea that "you work hard and you will be rewarded" is no longer true (if it ever was, although it's very much the foundation of the 20th century middle-class psyche) and white-collar workers, no less than blue-collar workers, have to adjust to uncertainty and a rapidly changing occupational mix. Their main loyalty must be to themselves (and their brand) because they will not get any loyalty from their corporation - they are completely expendable.

3.The white-collar unemployed could be a powerful force for social and economic change in this country. They have skills, education, intelligence, resources, access. Yet they tend to be marginalized into self-help job-seeking groups of the many kinds she journals. Moreover, the attitudes and activities of these job-seeking groups reinforce passivity, victimhood, isolation, and silence. Unemployment continues to be shameful, especially for white-collar workers, and especially for men.

4.Current corporate infrastructure (and accountability to shareholders) rewards job-cutting, which betters the short-term bottom line. No CEO ever got atta-boys from his board by saving jobs or cutting his own perks so that subordinates could remain employed.

5.Corporations blather endlessly about diversity and teamwork, but in fact LACK of diversity and individualism are what get you ahead.

6.Many of the so-called professions of corporate America don't have clearly defined tasks and barriers to entry (marketing, say, or PR) and thus employees in those fields are vulnerable to the perceptions, rather than the realities, of those evaluating them.

It would be useful to think about how these points could be tested and operationalized, as a part of the larger project of looking at sectoral shifts in labor markets.

Bait and Switch...

...is the name of a book by Barbara Ehrenreich about the soul-sucking depression of the white-collar unemployed (even before the current financial melt-down; imagine if she were researching and writing it now!).

On impulse* I picked up a copy for $2 at the Friends of the Library booksale this morning, and am about 2/3 through.

It is so thoroughly a downer that I believe I will throw it away when I am finished. I can feel its bad karma seeping through the house. I NEVER throw books away; I've only done it once before, and that was after the pure revulsion of reading the first several chapters of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. I saw his Glamorama at the library this morning too and gave it a wide berth. Yuck, yuck, YUCK.

*I am planning on using a chapter from Nickeled and Dimed in my economic geography class this fall, but Bait and Switch is mainly about those who profiteer from "coaching" the unemployed on networking, dressing-for-success, resume-writing, etc. They are a seamy and exploitive (although pathetic) bunch. Ewww.

The kid could sing and dance. And almost crash the Internet

RIP Michael Jackson, 1958-2009. Wow! - I think of him as a young adult, though ageless. Yet he was older than I. A boy-child: ever-thinner, ever-whiter, and thus ever less threatening. I saw him a few years ago on TV on one of those E-rehabilitation shows and his speaking voice was that of a shy 10-year-old’s. Perhaps it’s naïve, but I always thought he was truly misunderstood, a simple song-and-dance kid exploited by the craven media. All the sexy dancing was that of a kid, doing the steps, not informed by adult passion. He was incredibly talented, yet all that was turned into breathless fodder for the hungry celebrity press.

He was an entertainer who knew his craft: yet a figure of pathos in recent years on the tabloid stage. I hope his wealth and fame were able to bring him joy in his last years. (I doubt it though, poor soul.)

The purpose of college

Somewhere last night I flew by a blog entry that spoke of the choice that higher education must make to survive: between teaching students to think and training them for employment. The cynical among us (no, not me, never!) would suggest that those are antithetical - because, really, the last thing the Workplace Bosses want is people to think critically: questioning authority and all that. Yet I think it's incredibly dangerous and impoverishing to cast this as a choice. Students need to learn stuff - facts, theories, techniques, skills - but they also need to learn how to place all that in context, which for me is really the substance of critical thinking.

One school is premiering a new way of teaching based on introducing students to disciplinary ways of thinking (read about it here, http://bohemianseacoast.blogspot.com/2009/05/teaching-concepts.html) - and yes, that's the same model of teaching that Harvard just dumped in their revamp of the core curriculum, see my June 2 entry). The questions faculty should be asking themselves in this model go like this:

1. What is the main purpose [goal] of geography?
2. What questions [problems, issues] does geography ask?
3. What information [data, facts, experiences] is most useful to geographers?
4. What possible conclusions [interpretations, inferences] do geographers draw?
5. What concepts [theories, principles, models] are used by geographers?
6. What assumptions do geographers make?
7. What are some of the consequences [implications] of the work of geography?
8. What is the point of view of the geographer?

I find that students are super-bored by this sort of epistemological navel-gazing. Not that that means we shouldn't teach it. But how to teach it effectively? I think you have to model real-world problems or issues in which it is useful to think about these questions.

But really, I don't have many ideas about how to do this. And unfortunately, during the regular academic year, my brain is just not set up to think this way.

resistance is futile

I have been working for about a month on reconfiguring one of my courses from classroom-based, 15-week semester to online-based, 4.5 week semester.

Our course management software (Blackboard) has it's own weird logic: that's the kindest I can be. I suppose though that it's like any other software package written by a group of people. You have to work with it for a long while before you begin to discern its interior logic so that using it becomes more intuitive. I am anticipating that students will have a lot of problems using it too, and that those difficulties will interfere with learning. Starting on Monday, we'll see how it goes.

planning and preserving the post-industrial city

I've recently joined a couple of community organizations involved in 1) historic preservation; and 2) local planning. Of course, this responds to the third leg of the academic footstool (teaching, research, service) but is also, on a personal level, a way to give back to the community I've been so invested in for so many years. I have strong technical skills in these arenas and quite a bit of experience with organizational dynamics so I am hopeful of being able to make meaningful contributions after a brief start-up, "new kid" phase.

It feels weird to come back into the civic arena after 7 years away. Many of the players are still the same, and as I gather, the game is still the same. (I noticed in the Midwest, at a Planning Commission meeting, that the game was the same out there too - so there may be regional differences in exactly HOW things get done, but the basic tasks, the personal inclinations, and the personal and ideological conflicts remain essentially the same. This was a bummer for me, but partly because I was so soured on the provincialism and narrow thinking of the Northeast at the time.)

Some features of that game:

1. A constant tension between individual rights and community ideals about a greater good that trumps individual freedoms. In planning, these freedoms mostly center around rights of property, and when I teach my segment on planning law, I speak of the boundary between the rights of the individual and the rights of the community and how that boundary is always shifting in current case law. Both of my organizations are pretty sensitive to the right of the individual to do what she will with her property, and they are relatively transparent about the thinking process that produces that sensitivity, which is interesting to observe.

2. (Relatedly) A very pragmatic understanding of the limits of power of the particular organization, and a great unwillingness to come anywhere near the line of unconstitutionality. (As an advocate for community ideals over the individual right to, say, trash the environment, I do hope, eventually, for greater risk-taking here.)

3. (Sadly) An entrenchment in "The System" that tends to reproduce the same sorts of thinking and decision-making again and again. In part this is a familiarity with process and a comfort with the same old faces that tends to favor a go-along, get-along approach. No one wants to be the obnoxious one who makes the process come to a grinding halt. I'm told that the organization members are mostly long-time members; and that newer (and younger) members have served a short time and then moved on. That hints at frustration or simple recognition that change is not immediately possible.

4. Relatively transparent debate about competition for scarce resources. This isn't new, but the economic downturn makes it more salient than ever. People really have to think about what is worthwhile and what is MOST IMPORTANT.

Despite all this, I am optimistic that there are ways to use the skills I have to make a difference, in ways that were not really clear to me in my previous engagements with these organizations. Time will tell.

World War II books

One of the things I thought I'd do last summer (and didn't) was inventory all my old projects and try to update some of them into publishable articles. I did some of the inventory but never any more research or writing.

This comes to mind because every so often I see an article or image or whatever that reminds me of once having invested a lot of effort in time in a particular subject.

Today's tickler was WW2. I had done a lot of work on the journalist/writer Martha Gellhorn a few years ago, with an eye to pitching a collection of her work. I spend more time with my dad now, who reminisces often about the war. My sister is writing his story.

Some graphic novels on the subject: the very famous "Maus" by Art Spiegelman. Now, "A Good and Decent Man,"part 1 of a projected trilogy called "You'll Never Know" by Carol Tyler.

Another book for interesting reading (not a graphic novel) is Red Orchestra: the story of the Berlin underground and the circle of friends who resisted Hitler. Anne Nelson, the author, is a journalism professor (Columbia) and has spent time living under totalitarianism in various places in the world.

Last, Masters and commanders: how four titans won the war in the west 1941-1945 by Andrew Roberts. An insider look (lots of diaries and other archival material) at the interpersonal relationships between leaders (FDR and Churchill) and their top commanders, and how the commanders had to work together to make sure their respective bosses didn't implement dangerouly wrong military strategy.

The Green Fuse

Yesterday I cut the grass with the new Reflective Professor-powered reel mower. It moves like a dream, but gives a more informal cut than a rotary mower. (The sparser the grass blades, the greater the likelihood that they'll just be brushed down, only to spring up again uncut. Overseeding is indicated to build up density, as is hand-weeding. (I could write a passage about the meditative power of hand-weeding.).)

I think I am ok with all this. The funny thing is that with an RP-powered mower, I stop often to do other things, whereas with the gas-fired mower, I was more "on task." (Simpsons reference: "that dog has a fluffy tail; that man is my exact double!") So now I stop for branches, and stones, and a weird birdcall, and some weeding, a shaft of sunlight, a thought in the ether, whatever. Focus has never been my strong suit!

Bonus: upper-arm soreness, which means, muscle-toning in progress. Vive la verte!

Tomorrow: some thoughts on my new service to my community. I am working through a draft now!

Ottoman Empire

I am a little weak on Eastern European history as it relates to the Ottomans. Therefore, a new book by Andrew Wheatcroft titled The Enemy of the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe might be helpful. It's reviewed in this week's (6/14) New York Times book section by Eric Ormsby.

Ormsby's problem with it is that it's very Euro-centric, describing the Ottomans as fierce warriors (and thereby perpetuating certain stereotypes). Yet the basic outline of history would still be useful.

film about globalization of food

I am not very good about keeping lists of films where I need them so that I can find a reference when I want to.

But here's one for teaching globalization of food: "Our Daily Bread" (2005), Austrian, Nikolaus Geyrhalter. According to a viewer, the film "exposes current food production processes in a manner likely far more unsettling" [than films reviewed by Kim Severson in an article titled "Eat, Drink, Think, Change" in the 6/7/09 New York Times].

Wonder if it's subtitled?

Thinking different(ly)

B and I approach problem-solving (especially in the material world) in very different ways. I don't think this is a Venus-Mars thing - although maybe I am wrong.

If 200 pounds needs to be carried from Point A to Point B, B will grab it, gloveless and equipment-less, and wrastle it over there in a single, dramatic but probably painful trip. I will make 20 trips and carry 10 pounds each time, taking probably 10x as long. Before I start, I'll have changed into appropriate clothing and found my work gloves.

I am careful, slow, reflective, and protective of my body. I do everything in small increments, using as few materials as possible. B puts his whole soul into everything, using materials and equipment and his body with gusto. (Resulting in extra destruction and sometimes injury.)

I think this also plays out in intellectual tasks. For example, I would rather dispose of 100 emails a day for 10 days than spend a giant block of time disposing of 1000 in a single setting, as B would prefer. I would rather write every day for an hour and do that for 2 weeks than try to crank out a rough draft in a single marathon day.

Probably we both need to learn from each other. It helps me to consider what a larger, more ambitious intervention would be (even if I choose the usual small-scale one). Probably he would be helped by thinking and planning and starting small.

Stuff and less of it

We have a couple of rainy-day projects lined up for when we can't stand staring at the computer screens anymore, and one of those was cleaning up the basement, which we did today.

Normally, I treat such projects as "free" shopping expeditions, because I discover old junk that I either forgot I had (ooh, cool!) or find leftovers from other people that maybe can be reused or repurposed.

The basement was soooo gross, though, that I wasn't tempted in the slightest to save anything or repurpose or fix up or clean up ANYTHING. And it was oddly liberating.

(Pity the trash dudes, who will have to deal with it next trash day.)

Archiving: the email edition

So, I have a really old laptop - 6+ years old. And it runs reeeeeallly slowwwwly.

(I'll stop typing that way now.) Part of the problem, I thought, might be the 2300 messages in my inbox, which load everytime I open up Outlook. So I've been deleting or moving them, 100 a day. I am down to less than 500.

My plan is to archive them so that when I'm in the Home, I can relive the glory years. But what criteria to use to save or delete? I asked B, and he saves everything. I decided to delete anything that was just about logistics; time-sensitive materials (like conference announcements, CFPs and the like); and the plethora of weblinks that people love to send their friends, since already the links are likely no good. (I am back to 2005.) Everything else I am saving.

It's a bit of a nostalgia trip to skim through all this old stuff and read what preoccupied us all in grad school. I feel as though I've just been talking to all my friends. I can see myself enjoying a trip down memory lane every 5 years or so. Reading through all the emails is a window into the the daily triumphs and setbacks that tend to fall out of memory.

Also I've been thinking of memory lately because a friend is working on an architectural competition to design a house for the age of film. It's a maddeningly simple brief, and we've been talking about the universe of implications. For me, film is the illusion of being/moving "in" 3D space in a way that pictorial space (whether painting or still photo) can't achieve. Thus I think the age of film has potentially interesting implications for new ways in which space can be conceptualized and designed.

That's pretty basic - there is also the idea of film as narrative, and most vexingly, the possibility of film as memory. I see film more as a dream state or individual imaginary than as a collective, but of course there are various theories of psychology that posit the existence of collective memories.

Further, how can we talk about film as a generalization? What does 'Terminator' have in common with 'Chelovek s kinoapparatom'? What sorts of common narratives or collective memories are at work here? And how does the intervention of the filmmaker in staging, lighting, arranging shots etc all complicate these concepts?

meta-cognition

Much of the "New Pedagogy" is about getting students to reflect on what they are learning, how they are learning, and I suppose why it all matters: thinking about thinking, in other words.

So, for example, in the first bit of my online course, I don't just tell them what the course goals are (as I would do in an "Old Pedagogy" course). I share my goals, and then I ask them to write about what THEIR learning goals are. I am curious to see how this will work - in the past I've asked students to write briefly about what they hope to learn in the course, and I usually get variants of "everything about Human Geography." Usually they don't really know what human geography is (and who could expect them to?) so they really don't know what to say. I am hoping that thinking about their own learning goals will produce thoughts that are more useful.

We'll see.

early morning walk

Yesterday I woke up before 5 and since I couldn't get back to sleep, I got up and did my sometime "walk around the block." It takes 23.5 minutes, so I'd say it's about 1.5 miles. I don't power-walk, but neither do I stroll. I am looking for moderate exertion, and the feeling of being totally alive.

What an experience! We were expecting rain yesterday, but the sun was rising just over the horizon, and the looming clouds tinted the sky all shades of pink, purple and orange. The birds were singing and for a stretch I felt that I was the only person in the world. Usually I associate that thought with various apocalyptic and thus scary notions, but yesterday it really felt cool and wonderful. June is a great time to get up early.

(Of course, when I got home, the clouds rolled in, it got cold and damp in the house, and I crawled into bed for another 2.5 hours of sleep. So much for carpe'ing the diem.)

RIP lawnmower

The reel mower STILL hasn't been delivered (what up with that??) but today we brought home my sister-in-law's mower, cleaned it up, gassed it up, and cut the rest of the grass.

When I finished, I taped a sign on the ol' mower -- "motor runs; blade cuts; wheel-well worn through" -- and left it at the curb, as it is trash day tomorrow. B. put it on craigslist as a freebie drive-by. In exactly 63 minutes, it was gone. I am sad; I was really fond of it.

Maybe the guy is just going to sell it for the scrap metal, but I like thinking that he can fix it up, or use it for parts. I like the idea that things I can't use anymore (because I am too unhandy to fix them) can be useful to someone else, and I love that the internet and websites like craigslist help put stuff and potential users together. (Also, the people who cruise the streets on trash night - hey, I've been there too.)

I was anxious to get the grass cut because it's supposed to rain the rest of the week, and the grass would otherwise be a foot tall by Saturday!

pedal to the metal

David Byrne had a book review of Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities by Jeff Mapes in last week's New York Times. (Yes, THAT David Byrne.) According to the bio blurb at the end of the review, Byrne has a book called Bicycle Diaries coming out in the fall.

I did some local cycling in grad school, although I felt ridiculous at my age pedaling around the city. The generously wide streets, explicit bike lanes and general lack of road rage in the Midwest made it comfortable. I hesitate to do the same here: roads are maxed out with cars and the drivers deliberately don't want to share the road. Creating bike lanes on city streets seems like an unnecessary pitting of drivers against cyclists (there is only so much real estate) but more than that it's the culture of driving. We've made driving too easy - like sitting on your couch watching TV. When it's harder (curvy roads; narrow lanes) drivers can't deal with it, and that's when accidents happen.

(Don't even get me started on cell phones and texting. What I see in my commute! - incredible.)

things fall apart

I've been babying my 18-year-old gas-powered lawnmower along ever since the end of last season while I wait for the new reel mower to arrive. It's hard to start, stalls frequently, and the blade has never been sharpened. (B and I disagree on whether the oil and sparkplug have EVER been changed: I say no.)

Yesterday, the left rear wheel fell off, as it has been threatening to do for some time. The metal body of the mower is completely worn through around the hole where the wheel attaches, and since the wheel is only bolted on (no axle), the wheel assembly can just slide right out. B tried to undo the assembly so that we could use a giant washer to plug the hole, but the wheel assembly was fused together with 18 years of rust, dirt and grease, so no dice there. He improvised a solution with a bunch of wire, but that didn't last 10 feet.

What to do? Buy another gas mower new? Seems crazy, when we just shelled out $$ for the reel mower. Find one used? Seems crazy to pay $100 for someone else's trash. Finally, an inspiration! B's sister wanted to give us her mower (2 years old) because she has a service. I had declined at first, but now I believe I will take her up on it. Win-win: she wanted it out of the house; I need a part-time gas mower!

I have another series of rants forthcoming about small plastic do-hickeys that snap off and render whole appliances useless,* but I really can't complain about metal corrosion on a tool that's been used hard for 18 years. (Well, I COULD complain...but I won't.)

*Braun coffeemaker; air pump for balance ball.

summer term versus regular term

Summer courses meet for 5 weeks rather than the usual 15 during the Fall and Spring terms.

If we use the American higher ed rule-of-thumb guideline for in-class to out-of-class work (2 hours of homework for every hour spent in class), then for my usual courses, a student should spend 4 hours a week in my classroom and an additional 8 hours reading and doing assignments. When I asked about the institutional culture on this point at New Faculty Orientation a couple of years ago, after one of the administrators had been going on and on about the need for rigorous standards, he basically admitted (in not so many words) that the expectation at my institution was considerably less. HOW much less, he would not say.

(Thank you very much for THAT guide to cultural norms, dude. I believe they call it "don't ask don't tell" in other contexts.)

So now comes the summer course. Forget for a moment that it's online and thus that students already expect it to be easier and/or less work. If it meets for 1/3 the time as a regular-term course and students get the same amount of credit as for a regular-term course, then they should be putting in 12 x 3 = 36 hours a week on my course.

Yeah, like THAT could possibly happen. Yet another one of the institutional lies of higher ed.

I want to be a LEETLE more rigorous than the norm, but I don't want to go crazy.

General education in the liberal arts college

Liberal arts colleges have for decades prescribed a distribution of courses taken across a range of liberal arts disciplines, in order to help create the "well-educated person" with exposure to concepts and ideas that the citizenry "should" know.

When I was an undergraduate, this requirement was extremely minimal: 2 courses each in humanities; social sciences; and natural sciences. I don't recall that specific courses were listed; I think you could just take anything. Since you majored in SOMETHING, two of your major courses counted in one of the three areas, so really, the distribution requirements only amounted to four courses outside what you might ordinarily be interested in.

Harvard revised its distribution requirements in 2007. (I'm a bit late to the party, here, but this is important for me in the light of ongoing discussions at my own college about our revisions to general education.) Whereas the prior incarnation, called the Core Curriculum, was intended to introduce discipline-specific ways of thinking, the new general-education curriculum "introduces undergraduates to ways of thinking about the world that will shape their lives beyond college" (Harvard Magazine Jan-Feb 2009; p. 51).

I find this shift in intentions extremely interesting. The former is abstract, an intellectual exercise of sorts; the latter is applications-oriented, practical, real-world, implicitly interdisciplinary.

At my college, we have a vast GenEd system: 12 specific educational goals to be met through a menu of specific courses that meet those goals. Between the weird scheduling blocks, the four-credit system (don't even get me started!), more-specific requirements for GenEd for some majors, and other scheduling issues like field study for teaching preparation, students often have a difficult time completing these requirements, and they tend to make decisions based on what fits in their schedules rather than what courses might best for their educational programs. More fundamentally, students do not understand the purpose of GenEd, and understanding is further hindered by the way that advisers tend to talk about the program: "git yer GenEds out of the way early."

In essence, GenEd is reduced to a bunch of boxes that must be checked off on a form required for graduation. There is little explicit discussion of the REASONS for GenEd. However, if you DO look into the rationales, you find it's along the old models. For example, many of my courses meet the social sciences goal: "an understanding of the principles of behavioral and social sciences and/or institutions, together with a critical appreciation of how scientific knowledge has been constructed, including methods of validating the results of scientific inquiry in studying human behavior." Notice how this is all about epistemologies and methods that are expected to be discipline-specific, as opposed to an issue-specific or problem-specific approach.

In my view, this is one reason why GenEd doesn't resonate with students. It is framed on ways of thinking rather than on problems/issues students might face.

miscellany from recent reading

Here are some possibilities for various teaching projects:

1.Alex MacLean, Over: the American Landscape at the Tipping Point (Abrams). Aerial photos on the (destruction of the) American landscape.

2.Michael A. Wolf. The Zoning of America: Euclid v. Ambler. UP of Kansas. Good if I ever get to teach planning law. (Not that I really need a primer on Euclid v. Ambler, which I read every time I teach a short segment on planning law.)

3. Michael Porter. On Competition (Harvard Biz Press). I'm attracted by the description of it as brisk outline of his principles, followed by some real-world applications.

Children of Jihad, by Jared Cohen

As promised earlier in the week, here are more comprehensive comments on Children of Jihad, which I finished reading yesterday. This book has been chosen as a common reader for first-year students at my college, so I am reading it through the lens of how I might use it in the classroom.

I have two major concerns about teaching from the book, and one additional stylistic, admittedly more personal, criticism.

Cohen's stated purpose is to give a first-hand account of the ideas, feelings, aspirations, etc. of the youth of the Middle East (from his time in Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Kurdistan). I feel that his account lacks nuance - young people tend to be painted with the same brush (they are just like "us;" they like to party and drink and flirt and dance). There is really no recognition that there, as anywhere, there is a whole range of people with different inclinations, likes and dislikes, and attitudes. For example, I think that Cohen is saying that in Iran, most young people despise the regime. But that's not really news, is it?

When I teach the geography of the Middle East, I want to break down the stereotypes too. But, unlike Cohen, I don't want to replace one stereotype (religious fanatics) with another (party animals). I think that he observed a particular segment of society that he approached or that approached him, and that he has not fully accounted for the diversity of attitudes and ideas that one can find in the youth of the Middle East.

My second concern is that the book, for all its historical background (in the form of digressions from the memoir), does not really do a very good job explaining how this region has come to have its current geopolitical configuration. Cohen obviously knows a lot, but he has trouble breaking it down in a way that college-age readers can digest. There is too much detail, too many names and dates, not enough signposting or overall summary and interpretation.

My last issue is perhaps a stylistic quibble - and that is that there is just too much of Cohen in the book. Gosh, isn't he daring and wonderful for undertaking this dangerous journey to help us understand the youth (and thus the future) of this region? And such a quick study too: it took him all of five days in Tehran to figure out how to outwit his government handlers to see the real thing. I would like MORE thoughtful analysis about the attitudes and ideas in this region, and less meta-narrative about how Cohen personally is processing it all.

I don't think my students will like this book -- it's too complex, there is not enough context, and there is not really much of a story arc. Also, I am not sure how to use it in a class - I'd want to contrast it with something else, perhaps. I am not comfortable relying on Cohen's view as the "Truth" - I'd want to set it up as "one peer's impression of how the world is."

Perhaps I'm being unfair - but the author of a book with no footnotes or sources or explicit methodology cannot expect his work to be taken as a serious academic endeavor. Show us HOW you got to the conclusions you draw! Otherwise, this is a bit of a travel memoir, and frankly, not a very compelling one at that, despite the great potential interest of the subject matter.

world at a click

In some respects, I suppose I'm a luddite. I think Twitter is stupid; I think Facebook is a complete waste of time (unless you are a business trying to sell things to people) and I am irked when students feel they have to check in with their friends every 60 seconds or so (especially in my classes, but just generally, too). How many of these have you heard one side of?

Guy A: wassup.
Guy B: nuthin'. wassup with you?
Guy A: nuthin'. watcha doin'
Guy B: jus' got outta class.
Guy A: goin' to lunch?
Guy B: yeah, you?
Guy A: yeah. see ya over there.

These are the same two guys who have lunch every day together so, really, was this phone conversation necessary??

But I digress. I LOVE that when I am reading a monograph about Fascist architecture and I read about a building I have never heard of by an architect who is completely unknown to me, I just google-image it, and I get hundreds of photos of it. Now THAT is information!

Perfecting the Renaissance

Taking a break from the Middle East, I'm finishing reading a book on Fascist appropriations of the Italian Renaissance. It's a top-notch book, meticulously researched from archival sources, and comprehensive in its scope, from urban planning, to tourism promotion, to festivals.

I am mostly interested in urban renewal in Florence, but there are some other interesting places too. The story of Arezzo (which so many Anglo-American Tuscanophiles had found dull) is one particular case in point. In fact, it seems to me that Arezzo was promoted on our recent Florence trip as an unspoiled hill town, when in fact, I have now learned, it was nothing of the kind, being re-created as a sort of Renaissance stage-set in the 1920s and 1930s. Hm: you don't get THAT in the guidebooks!

Good lessons for "remaking" a place:
1. Choose a predominant time period that is associated with values that you want to promote. (In Italy, this tends to be Medieval. In the U.S., something colonial has often worked.)
2. Demolish the buildings in town that "pollute" those aesthetics and system of values.
3. Rebuild the "good" buildings by getting rid of any "polluting" additions, and adding whatever features of the "good" period you like, whether or not they are authentic to the particular structure. Characterize your work as "discovering the original building" even when you are adding features that may not have been original to the structure.
4. Assiduously promote and hype your work, both locally as a product of locally-produced values, and to a wider audience for tourism purposes.
5. Marginalize nay-sayers by questioning their commitment to the good local values you have chosen. (Or, in the case of the Fascists, I suppose you just execute the nay-sayers: no need for pesky and time-consuming arguments.)

D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle and Tourism in Fascist Italy.