Teaching, Learning, Thinking...

New fave cocktail

2011-09-11T17:30:00.000-07:00

For years, I've been a beer- and wine-drinker only. Lately, though, I've noticed the craft cocktail bandwagon circling around, and I'm ready to jump aboard. On Friday, a friend had some sort of gin/basil thingy at one of our moderately-hip places, and I was able to recreate it this evening:

Basil-Gin Smash (It really needs a hipster name- like Gin Basilico)

Muddle a handful of fresh basil leaves and 1/2 lemon in a cocktail shaker (it's more effective if you squeeze the lemon juice onto the basil leaves and then muddle and then add the lemon quarters and muddle again);
Add ice; 1 oz simple syrup; and 1 1/2 oz gin to shaker;
Shake vigorously until your hand is like to freeze off (c 30 sec);
Pour over rocks glasses filled with ice;
Garnish with basil leaf.

So, I made some simple syrup this afternoon. That and fresh fruit juices, I think, are key to the awesome cocktail (also true of my craft margarita, which uses fresh lime juice instead of Rose's.

social norms

2011-09-07T19:12:00.001-07:00

Convocation this week. (From the Latin, con = with, vocare = to call --> calling together, assembling). In addition to the president's neoliberal remarks about mission statements (last term it was some nonsense about "every student must succeed" -but what if they choose to skip class and never do the work - is that to be blamed on instructors??), I was paying attention to social norms.

1. Is it normal to put the right palm over the heart for the Star-Spangled Banner? Some did, and some didn't. Did we used to do this for Flag Day back in the 1960s Land of Patriotic Conventions? I don't remember.

2. How is it that students don't know to stand up for a faculty procession, and even when you gesture, they are a bit unwilling?

3. On the other hand, they knew to clap before and after a person came to the podium - upon introduction and upon the conclusion of their remarks.

I'm intrigued by the apparently random transfer of social norms of behavior. My students don't "get" taking off hats in buildings. (A real cultural problem when traveling with them in countries like Italy. They think it is perfectly ok to check phones for texts, and return texts, while they are in a social setting. But they also get the respect for elders and the flag. There is a research paper in all this, I'm sure - but it doesn't have geographical dimensions, other than to say the flag-fetish is an American thing.

how I write

2011-08-29T15:39:00.000-07:00

This summer I've written lots of lecture notes and online materials, and more recently, the purpose statement for the preliminary round of a national stipend program and a book review.

The lecture note stuff is easy; I just write as though I were writing a blog or in my journal, and then I go back and edit to make sure it's super-clear and the tone is neither too stiff nor too casual.

On the other hand, writing the grant app was tortuous and so was the book review. However, I learned a couple of things about how I write that are worth keeping in mind as I begin to draft a new article. Typically I "write to learn" - that is, I learn what I know about a subject and what I want to say about it by writing it down. However, I'm also a stylist, and so each sentence I write has to be as perfect as I can make it, which means I revise incessantly as I write to learn. And because I really work on diction and end focus, my sentences tend to lead in directions that are hard to change around to where I think I should go next. In a way, this is a fancy way of saying that I'm a better editor than writer. (I think most people are.)

What this means is that it takes FOREVER for me to produce finished work (I started the 700-word book review in May and finished it yesterday) and also that a lot of my writing ultimately gets left on the editing room floor. This is inefficient both from a mental exertion standpoint and from a time-to-finish standpoint. I need to learn to write more quickly and efficiently.

So: two helpful hints I discovered while working on the book review:

1. Even though I'm not big on outlines, my new thing is to make an informal outline, at least of the main content, and then work from it as I write. I have ALWAYS hated outlines - so artificial and stiff! - but some sort of plan for the overall work, even if it's just snippets and phrases, helps me to write more efficiently. In the book review I changed the outline somewhere in the middle of writing, but at least there was a Plan to be changed.

2. With the outline at hand, write it all down as fast as possible. Deliberately write bad, awkward sentences if necessary, just to keep the ideas rolling. (It helps me to have been drinking a little - inhibits the inner editor.) Be as colloquial as necessary just to keep the ideas flowing. But: write in complete sentences; fixing fragments is a pain.

Let's see if this can help me write an article for a planning journal in about a week. My (very ambitious) goal is to get through a rough first draft by next Tuesday. That's ambitious b/c I have to be at school on Wednesday (90 minutes of advising will basically kill the whole day) and then B wants to drive to the State of Insanity (gah!) to see the folks. I can't say no to that (even though we just saw them a couple of weeks ago). Then Labor Day weekend and then, hello, first day of school.

Squirrely Bulger

2011-06-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

The grey squirrel that visited the gutter outside our BR window every morning at 6:30 am yesterday branched out, first into the other end of the same gutter, then inside the walls somewhere, ending up behind the kitchen sink. That was IT for me.

So we captured him, easy-peasy, using the Havaheart trap and some PB crackers. Then he was "disappeared" into "the Witness Protection Program." The neighbors are actually pretty psyched - he was chewing on their house too, as well as their shed and, they said, eating bird eggs out of a nest in their eaves.

We don't "do" due process and there are no public defenders. Good thing Whitey didn't end up over here.

winds of change

2011-06-22T12:15:00.000-07:00

B is working on his thesis again. When I thought I would get a job in his department, I promised his chair that it would get finished this summer. Well, I didn't get the job and I wish I hadn't promised such a thing that is so out of my personal control.

He's keeping a blog as a way to keep track of progress/achievements/next steps, which I think is a really great idea. Researchers always think they'll remember everything they've been working on, but how quickly and easily we forget. Basically his blog will very easily be turned into a Materials and Methods chapter for the thesis.

In other news, my laptop wouldn't turn on this morning. B was able to take out the hard drive and connect it to our backup drive so as to back up all the files (whew!) but the laptop itself is dead. I have an appointment on Friday with the college laptop fix-it people, and I've already begun to agitate for a new laptop. Mine is 4 years old; I use it at least 16 hours a day; and it's my only computer.

e-portfolios?

2011-06-21T18:54:00.000-07:00

Just got a newsletter today with some feature articles about portfolios as a way to encourage students' making their learning their own. We have this feature (e-portfolios) in our learning mgt system (LMS), although I've not used it before.

I like the 3-fold system: students select work that shows their learning; they explain how/why that is; and professors comment.

I like commenting with a pen on student papers (although I have excreble handwriting and sometimes students ask, "what does this say?"). But for longer papers for more advanced students, I also like writing comments on the computer, either as a markup to their papers (if problematic) or as a word document of general comments (if the papers are reasonably good) This only is productive if there aren't too many students. I use this for indep studies and also for the cultural presentation in my World Regional Geog course, in which there are maybe 2-3 student groups presenting every week. I comment less on grammar/typos and more on substantive critical issues. That's the nature of the medium, actually.

I am thinking of pioneering e-portfolios for my week-long study abroad course next spring. Paris! Mostly I do indep studies for this (having less than 5 students) and the course template is already set up well for portfolios, as students do a pre- and post-trip reflection, a project of their own devising, and some mapping and a "review" of a cultural attraction.

I have them read some stuff (I have LOTS of stuff for Paris) and explicitly try to integrate it into a paper. It's a bit artificial, but they HAVE to engage with the ideas of the pieces even if it's unnatural. Teacher-cop: "did you read what I assigned? Show me!" (Surprisingly-to-me this strategy was used in a couple of my doctoral grad seminars. The assignment was to write a reflection/analysis of some papers assigned for the week. If you didn't explicitly work in ALL of them in equal detail, and make them relate, you got marked down. Silly me: I wrote about what grabbed me and skim-wrote about the rest, not understanding that this assignment was about gatekeeping, not intellectual engagement.)

My diss advisor had a similar assignment in HIS seminar, but if you wrote an intelligent 5 pp about one article and ignored the other 3, he was fine with it. RIP. He's been gone just a little more than a year now. Seems like forever.

Administrivia

2011-06-20T14:50:00.000-07:00

Our dept is working (in violation of our sacred contract that bestows summer vacation free from required committee work) on tasks that I think the chair was supposed to have assigned during the regular school year. My part of the first task took about 15 minutes, which was less time than it took me to read all the emails from my colleagues opining that we shouldn't have to do this task in the first place.

Three of my colleagues have filled out the mandated paperwork incorrectly, which has already been pointed out via email by our most senior colleague. It's a simple fix, but Senior Colleague chose to read their errors as disagreement with his position, which will probably lead to a bit of hurt feelings.

But the analytical fix (Senior Colleague complains of the lack of analytical rigor in our program and I guess some of the faculty suffer the same malady!) is simple: if you are filling out a course matrix for program planning, the number of boxes with the same unique course options has to be equal to the number of unique course options in the box. That is, "Course A or Course B" can only appear in two boxes. If a student takes Course B the first time, and Course A the second time, then what does she take the THIRD time you list "Course A or Course B"?

For the second task, which has to be done by the chair, no one noticed (or commented) that he is conflating a reporting of what WAS done this year (annual report) with our strategic plan for next year (goals we developed during a very painful session called "faculty retreat"). My question is, will the Dean read closely enough to notice? And if she does, will she kick it back to him for R&R? Or is she just collating this admistrivia and passing it up the chain of command?

Back to course planning, which is infinitely more interesting than all this stuff!

take me to the shredder

2011-06-14T19:01:00.000-07:00

May-June is always a good time to clean up the home office. (The office office is spare and requires only about an hour's worth of work at the end of the semester to tidy and toss out.)

I think I didn't do a very thorough weeding of files last spring, because I was trying to get ready for my research trip to Europe. This year, the file drawers are bulging and the cleanout must be done.

The old paper-versus-electronic copy rages in full force: e-copy means out of sight, out of mind. But there's soo much more room in the file drawers if you toss everything you have electronically! I am also tossing dated newspaper articles (yep, I'm one of THOSE people!) and background materials I've had for a couple of years but have never used for courses.

And then I'm tossing all the stuff I collected for projects I'll never do in part because the materials are so dated. Example: all the ads for econonomic development in magazines I collected when I was in Poland in 2005. If I am able to get a book contract to write up my work about tourism in Eastern Europe, it will NOT focus very much on economic development. It was a topic I could never make much headway with because it's vast and has always been tangential to my smaller subject.

I'm also rearranging as I go: my concept of how to organize my stuff is always in flux, as new interests surface and old ones die. So some topics need more files; others need to be weeded or tossed altogether.

Also, I don't tend to keep old lecture notes in paper copies anymore, unless I am planning significant course realignment in the upcoming semester. I am doing that for the spring in the global cities course, and a bit in the fall for economic geography. Otherwise, bring on the shredder. I estimate that in less than 24 hours, I'll be able to see the surface of my desk again!

I am NOT a Luddite

2011-06-09T11:40:00.000-07:00

The title should give you fair warning on my defensiveness, right? Here are a couple of recent examples that made me shake my head.

1.My department bought those of us who wanted one an iPad. No training, no account setup (and Academic Computing is really PO'ed that we have them without being part of a coordinated effort run by THEM. They are so proud that THEY just got iPads and they are running a pilot this fall in a different department. Nothing like my department trying to steal their thunder!).

Nevertheless, Academic Computing has some really nice, helpful staff, and they tried to get me started. We looked at the features of the device (Wow! I can change the wallpaper! - if you know me in the slightest you know that how the display is is about one-millionth on my list of things to care about) and they tried and failed to end-run the system to get me an account without giving up a credit card number.

So B got me the account and I've looked at some free or cheap apps. Either they are things I do competently other ways already (I still use a paper calendar; I can't bear to switch to device-based as long as I can scribble a quick note) or things I have no use for. I don't need an iPad stopwatch (try dragging THAT on a long walk) when I have a perfectly fine free one on the laptop, which I use for timing presentations. I don't need two cameras on one machine (although the res is pretty good and I could probably figure out how to email the files to myself). Bottom line: the iPad has not yet demonstrated its value and I'm not willing to spend countless more hours "playing" to see if I can wrest value out of it.

2. Steve Jobs and his iCloud. I like my programs and my documents right where I know where they always are: on my laptop, which I back up reasonably conscientiously. I don't like being dependent on some infrastructure "out there" in the ether to do every single thing that I do and manage all the information I manage. I know that the Internet is redundantly structured, but it seems like there are a LOT of things that could go wrong between me sitting here (wherever "here" is) and my information: ISP breakdown; telecomm overload (every time there is a "natural" disaster the cell network is the first casualty); even terrorism.

3. At one of the workshops in the previous entry, one of our tech people suggested we deal with banning cell phones in the classroom by allowing students a start-up reward at the beginning of class, which is to use polldaddy to answer a question. And then make them put the cellphones away. Seems ass-backwards to me. How about a reward at the END of class? Why give them license for cell phones at the BEGINNING, when they have just seconds ago checked for new texts?

4.On the other hand, why isn't our campus working on ways to let us text students, since that is "meeting them where they are," which is always touted as our go-to strategy?

5. I am really tired once again of hearing about "digital natives" who take to any technology and dive right in. Here is the technology our students hate most and seem to need the most help with: the Learning Management System (LMS) for which we make them buy laptops. It's a clunky system to be sure - but they just try one thing and can't do it (which apparently absolves them of any responsibility of completing the relevant assignment) or whine that they couldn't find what you wanted them to read, or it wouldn't load, or they couldn't print it, or whatever.

In better news, I've finished the first of six modules of my online course, all but testing the links. It looks my course at the other college may not run, although I won't know for sure for another 3-4 weeks, and I'm only short one student for their minimum enrollment. There is significant start-up for THAT class so it won't be the worst thing if it doesn't run.

Pedagogy central

2011-06-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

After the spring semester, I usually spend about a month on a combination of pedagogical activities, organizing, and thinking strategically about courses. (I should spend the time writing articles for publication, but that's a different story.)

The week after finals, I attended four workshops on pedagogy in various forms, plus a planning meeting for an institute I'm teaching in August. These events tend to be heavy on broad concepts and light on applications, but if you can spend some time after the fact thinking about how to apply them, it's not totally wasted time.

First up was a workshop on assessments using a modified Kitchener-King cognitive development model. Allegedly our students are best at memorizing random chunks of information. They don't think critically about this - meaning that they can't sift through evidence to find out what's valuable and what's garbage, much less synthesize all that into a cogent argument.

I don't totally agree. Some students come in with this capacity but what they lack is enough knowledge of "how the world is" or general life experience to be able to contextualize what they know properly. (I am forever making assumptions about what they know - often wrong. For example, although all of them have had at least one year of world history, I can't assume they remember that WW2 was in the mid-20th century or know what (generally speaking) the sides were, Allied versus Axis.)

Two days later, another workshop dealt precisely with this point - how to understand your students and what they know and care about. Not a lot of answers (the mood at our table was fairly cynical) but at least we are asking the questions and trying to put ourselves in their shoes. But I hope that I bonded with my co-facilitator for my first-year class, and we met the following week to hash out some of the scheduling stuff.

The worst was the strategic planning retreat. Working with my colleagues to try to dream up new initatives within the framework of our institutional core values was pure torture.

I teach at a teaching college. It's interesting to see the rigor (and cookie-cutter-like methods) taught TO students in the name of early ed pedagogy. But are our young students better educated because of it? Many of my students rail against standardized testing. I don't; to me it's a first step. You need knowledge and perspective to be able to think critically about ANYTHING.

online education - some thoughts from the trenches

2010-07-28T20:13:00.000-07:00

Online ed is growing as a cash cow all over the place, and why not? From the institutional point of view, there are minimum site costs (no electricity, AC, or maintenance of buildings); the software and support costs are marginal (more about that in a moment); and thus the financial equation is more or less, "is there more tuition revenue coming in than the cost of paying the instructor going out?"

Probably I oversimplify this a bit, but you get the point.

To teach online in my shop, I was required to take a 5-week course in Teaching Online, taught, naturally, online. This is a pretty brilliant move - in making the educators students in the online environment, we got to experience the full range of moronic classmates (yep, even in the rarified world of PhDs); unreliable software/internet; and inconsistent attention from our profs.

In the way that online learning (OLL) is conceptualized at my institution, we should be coldly and critically analytical: for every chunk of knowledge/facts/skills, we should be thinking "why should students need to know this?" and "how will I assess their learning?"

I have some mixed views about this. I am not a fan of instrumentalizing knowledge in this way - yet I see the value of thinking about value of knowlege, not just blindly transmitting "the wisdom of the ages" because someone told us in grad school that this was important stuff.

Along with the "what should they know?" and "how will I know they know it?" comes the so-called paradigm shift from teacher-centered education to student-centered education. Lifers in academe may scoff at this as just another fad in pedagogy, but here again, I see some value, even though, interestingly enough, this approach is about 180 degrees from the prevailing test-and-punish mentality that pervades K-12 in public education.

Teacher-centered education is a leftover from the medieval period, when books were scarce, and university education consisted of having precious books READ to you in lecture halls. (In fact, the word lecture has its roots in the Latin verb "to read." Professors read books to students because books were rare and precious and students didn't have access to them. Thus was knowledge transmitted.

Since Gutenberg, this notion is increasingly antiquated, and now with the electronic age, probably completely superfluous. In the regular "lecture" classroom, instructors either recap what was assigned for the reading, or they strike off in new territory, or some combination. (I regret to say that I've been in the former camp too often, not from a firm belief that it was necessary to recap the readings, but from an uncertainty about what should be done instead. (I am mindful too of advice given by one mentor - there is nothing wrong with reviewing what's in the textbook - students need help understanding it.))

Imagine now online teaching. There is no "you" in the classroom, only documents you put on the website. (Our classroom management software is really lame, but that doesn't really affect the whole CONCEPT of online ed.)

a smorgasbord of thoughts

2010-07-26T18:50:00.000-07:00

Here is what is going on over here:

I have joined Weight Watchers (International) and now am in week 3. I lost 6.2 pounds the first 2 weeks. I will never write of this again: hearing people talk recipes and "points" and motivational strategies is dull beyond belief. There is some interesting anthropological work that could be done on the discourses of dieting though: the invocation of morality ("I've been good/bad this week"); the weird possessive relationship with food ("drinking my water" "eating my fruits and veggies") - but I am not the person to do such research. Lots of blogs explore the fraught female relationship to food and body image.

I am on the brink of jettisoning my book contract for the textbook I was supposed to write with my now-deceased co-author. It was to be a HUGE amount of work even jointly, and I think my limited research time over the next 18 months could be more productively spent. So that involves some get-up-and-go on pitching new projects.

Blackboard sux sux sux. Did I mention that the online learning system called Blackboard sucks? If I did not need a little extra cash for the summer, I would not be teaching online. I am seriously considering other work options for next summer than this. I could write an entire post about my experiences with online education (and I should): the soundbite version is that online ed is not completely worthless if you really work at the paradigm of guiding students in their learning rather than teaching AT them, but if you are spending hours working the fix-it game in html coding screens, something is seriously amiss. (Just to be clear: I do not teach comp sci and I have no business meddling with html code.)

I think I like HB 0.7mm leads better than the 0.5 in mechanical pencils. (B bought a new desktop today, and I got some new pencils. They ROCK.)

Speaking of office supply, everyone is doing "back-to-school" already, so sad. I walk by the kids in summer school every morning on my 28-minute constitutional, poor bastards. (They are mostly boys, btw.)

We are "borrowing" some friends' CSA share while they are away, and it is AWESOME. It's some work to drive up there and get the stuff and go out in the fields to pick, but it also is very relaxing and satisfying.

Lately there is a skunk in the 'hood in the evenings. Sigh.

stateside

2010-07-22T18:16:00.000-07:00

How has it been so long? This past weekend, I worked through all the accounting (ugh) for my trip reimbursement. It was tedious and a pain-in-the-ass, but I also was reminded of how much we accomplished, and how many articles it can potentially translate into. :)

(When I ever get the time - this online class is sucking my will to live.) Ok, I could type forever about online education (scam-o-rama) and the particular hell that is known as Blackboard ("Captain, I'm an educator, not a html-coder!") But I'd rather summarize differences in European and American lifeways - albeit from a very consumer-oriented, pedestrian point of view.

First: things that Europeans should definitely import from the States:
1. window screens. Hello!? You have insects, especially at night! Stop lying to yourselves (and us) about it and keep them out!
2.Ice. In drinks; in hotel ice machines. Not just for cooling drinks either: maybe we like an ice pack on our feet or head or [insert body part here] after a strenuous day of European sightseeing. And see also the next item: ice would help!
3. Air conditioning. "Oh, it's never THIS hot!" Bullshit! I have lived in Europe 3 out of the last 6 summers and it's been unbearably hot. And I wasn't there the tragic year when all the French old people died of heat exhaustion! Global climate change, people! This is not 1816-and-froze-to-death! (google it) Figure out how to make yourselves comfortable!
4.Deodorants. On the subway: "Sir, for the love of God, please put your arms down!" Yeah, we Americans are over-obsessed with cleanliness and washing. Riiiiight....

On the other hand, we of course can learn from the world's second-largest economy. Here are some examples.

1.Health care. B got a very bad foot blister. He went to a doctor recommended by the hotel; they saw him at once; and his treatment (cutting and bandaging and 'scrip) cost less than $40. NO INSURANCE! TRY THAT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

2. Vacation. 5 weeks is normal. What is this two-week routine in the States? Do we live to work, or work to live???

3. Celebrating outdoor living in summer. Of course, we were in the dense historic urban cores of Germany. Cafes everywhere - coffee or beer at any hour. (We chatted up a mom and 15-year-old son celebrating his birthday in Berlin. The boy was having a beer at 10 am.) World Cup - sit and nurse a drink as long as you like. By contrast, we watched the World Cup Final at a Pizzeria Uno in Swampscott MA and the server would NOT leave us be: "Would you like to order food? Another drink? The check?" NO, WE WOULD LIKE TO WATCH THE GAME! IN PEACE!

We drove by some little sandwich shop this week and there was a valiant (but pathetic) attempt at urbanity - two picnic tables in the parking lot, marked off with some yellow police tape. My hypothesis is that Americans really WANT this pedestrian-oriented, walkable lifestyle - they love it as tourists! - but they just can't reconcile it with the auto-oriented, sprawl lifestyle that is our paradigm.

Bottom line: I could live in Europe and work there (if I could conquer the language). I am really feeling pretty good about that, which is a relief after my years of Polish angst.

Traveling at top speed through Central and Eastern Europe

2010-06-18T12:46:00.002-07:00

This blog would have been a great place to write about our trip, had I started it right after the Hamburg post. I didn't write about the Fulbright program (although one of my colleagues did) because I wasn't sure how public I wanted to be about my musings on the German Sozialstaat.

Anyways...meeting up with B on the train worked out just fine, although his pocket got picked in the process and we spent HOURS in the lobby in our place in Prague skype-calling the credit cards to cancel them and get replacements sent to our hotel in Dresden. The fucker got nothing, though - although he tried cash advances on every card. We were less successful with the MA DMV (no surprise there) - apparently the possibility that a MA resident should lose his/her license while out of the country and have to have a replacement in order to rent a car has never occurred to the Provincial Geniuses who run the DMV. (Why would anyone even leave the state? I ask you.)

I never did get my bearings in Prague but we saw the city museum on the first day (Sunday) - interesting but not really research-relevant. Interesting special exhibit on a 1920s furniture designer and architect from the Czech Republic whose name escapes me this moment. Also we saw the monument to Jan Palach and later, the Museum of Communism (REALLY great!). Later we stepped into a brand-new club called Propaganda that is full of leftover artifacts from the period. The next day, Monday, we took Communism tours from two different tour companies - same content, quite different approaches - but lots of parallels with the tour industry in Krakow/Nowa Huta (Poland).

We met a delightful French couple in our hotel and talked with them every day at breakfast. I am glad to report that I am able to be sarcastic in French as well as English. We sort of bonded over our frustration with Stumbledumb, the weekend desk clerk.

On Tuesday, we grabbed the train to Dresden. More to follow.

confidential to JW

2010-06-18T12:46:00.001-07:00

Has our electrical power been off? We can't connect to our hard-wired databases over the internet, suggesting that the power was off and the system needs to be reset.

auf wiedersehen, Hamburg!

2010-06-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

Tonight is our last night in Hamburg, and tomorrow I board a Prague-bound train, and hope that B finds me when the train stops in Berlin! It will be a fraught 2 hours - because if he's not there, then what???

I'd better grab some hotel info right now. And check the weather - it's supposed to be rainy.

The seminar program has been so intensive and so interesting - yet in ways tangential to what really interests me, which is the question of identity formation. I'm also interested in the economy - but our work on that was tangential as well. The first thing would be to go through the notes and see if I can synthesize our work. Then, I have to figure out what use to make of all this.

Hamburg is potentially very interesting - but due to working on "real" work last night I feel I have no grasp of the city. Some good photos of the port, though - and our farewell dinner was on a converted fireboat in the harbor - really stunning views.

Ooh, B! Later...

"Ich bin ein Berliner"

2010-06-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

Ja, Herr Prezident, ICH bin Berlinnerin. Wir sind ALLE Berliner!

So, ok, today after the guided tour of the Reichstag (equivalent of the U.S. Capitol building), I stepped into the Kennedy Museum at the Brandenburg Gate, influenced by the fact that it was close and they probably had a bathroom (yes!) and maybe a cafe (no).

It's the equivalent of about 3 rooms, mostly archival photos but also some artifacts of a lesser sort - a dress shirt, JFK's designer briefcase, handwritten notes, pens. There's quite a lot of material about JFK's 1963 trip to Berlin and how he sort of went off-script vis-a-vis the administration's policy of appeasement of the Soviets, because he was so incredibly appalled by seeing the Berlin Wall. (They took him on a 53-km drive of the wall in Berlin, which was the majority of his eight hours there.)

A side note: Some interesting notes from Jackie directing the addressees not to pay particular bills that she or Jack or others in the family had incurred. There was no context given for this, but my guess is that some stuff was "loaned" (jewelry, say) and other stuff was to be paid for by friends or the campaign rather than the Kennedy family personally.

I am not sure the Berlin Wall thing fits into my research outline but it's pretty interesting that there is all this stuff in Berlin. The museum was not well attended though. Taking photographs was not allowed (lots of copyright-protected iconic photos by famous photojournalists) unfortunately, so I ended up staying longer than I really wanted, to write down photo captions. Then in the bookstore I saw two books about JFK in Berlin, so probably this is well-covered territory. But, no one has yet analyzed the textual materials in this particular exhibit, I'd say. So there is room for some peripheral treatment, by me. Gotta write my field notes while all is fresh. More later.

interpreting the past

2010-06-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Berlin on Tuesday afternoon. I toughed out the jet lag by visiting the Topography of Terror installation (the Nazi SS headquarters site, now excavated to show the basement remains), with interpretive panels and a new Documentation Center with facsimiles of photographs and other documentation of the SS atrocities.

This is one way to interpret history - present the evidence and hold the interpretation to a minimum. Even so, what's opaque to the viewer is the selection process - which pieces of evidence were selected? Which were passed over? In a museum setting that judgment is not just a matter of historiography but also a question of aesthetics to some degree: what documents will "read" best for the viewer?

Yesterday I visited the DDR Museum, a documentation of a different sort. The approach taken here is to use the actual material culture (of communism) in display cases, but find ways to make it interactive, through the way the displays are framed and through supplemental activities incorporated in that framing. I am not usually a big fan of the multi-sensory "hands on" approach because I think it often results in "hands on" for its own sake - and that is partly the case in this instance. Also, the frame often (and in this case too) visually and experientially overshadows the artifacts. Materials for this kind of frame are usually cheaply constructed because intended not to be permanent. However, I think the interpretive text panels are very well done.

The message I received: communism was a time of scarcity (that theme is very prominent, due probably to the focus on daily life) imposed by possibly well-meaning but certainly incompetent leaders. Actually, now that I think of it, there's little agency in the text pieces: it's "the Party" or "the GDR" or simply the agentless passive voice.

I'm glad I'm writing this - I wouldn't have caught that absence necessarily otherwise. In textual analysis, absence can be hard to see.

milestones, birthdays, etc.

2010-06-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

It's been 6 days since R. died and between that and the dread that I feel when facing a solo trip (especially abroad) I have been in a bit of a funk.

There has been an outpouring of online tributes to R., most of which I (harshly; B says this is about me, and surely he's right) find WAY too self-involved. My grief is private and I don't feel it necessary to share it on my university list-serve. Also NB: 90% of the tributes are written by men. R. had some women students (not many, and all outside the mold of traditional feminine, whatever THAT is) and a lot of women colleagues, and yet women have not found it necessary to proclaim their sorrow online to their colleagues.

We celebrated Mom's 88th birthday today. My brother asked if she ever dreamed she'd live to be 88, and of course she did not, but she mentioned that both her mother and mother's sister died at 88 so clearly she's thought about that. She is as sharp as ever - up on all the news; clearly articulated views; lots of hobbies and activities.

I am melancholy about old age, even middle age. To me, it's roads not taken, friends lost to death, and abilities reduced. Maybe after I lose 30 pounds (my birthday gift to myself this year, starting when I get back from Europe) I will feel differently about the reduction in abilities. Let's hope. I am definitely NOT feeling that surge of middle-aged delight that Carol Gilligan has written books (a whole genre) about.

Sorry. The next post will be more cheerful, I promise you.

feeling blue

2010-06-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

The blue haze that hung over us yesterday from the smokey fires in Quebec matched my mood. My advisor (see prior post) died on Sunday afternoon, and I learned the news yesterday morning.

There has been a lot of emailing about our collective shock and grief, but we don't have any information about arrangements. Yesterday I threw myself into ferocious gardening, but today it's raining so I'm at my desk, with too much time to think.

If there is any consolation to be had, it's that R. went out doing what he loved: riding his motorcycle on a cross-country adventure to visit friends. Had he survived the crash, he would not have been satisfied with a life constrained by the effects of his injuries, which were severe.

Feeling inadequate

2010-05-26T16:41:00.000-07:00

Today I was part of an interdisciplinary faculty team of about 6 people that provided advising and registration help to about 30 entering transfer students who are undecided as to their major.

It was just deeply, deeply unsatisfying on every level. First, the goals and agenda for the session were provided less than 24 hours in advance. I am the kind of person who mentally prepares for things in advance - meaning that if I have a presentation to give in a couple of weeks, my mind (on some level, if washing dishes, showering or even sleeping) is thinking about this at odd moments and envisioning what I'll say, how I'll respond to questions, what I need to know to prepare, etc. When I have no time for this, I feel mentally unprepared.

Second, we as faculty are completely unprepared to advise outside our own discipline. We can get students to find the major worksheets online (none were provided on paper) but we don't know the optimal course sequences, prerequisites, or conventions of scheduling - how often a course is taught, and which semester. Why not require ONE rep from each department at each advising session to deal with this? My session had, like 3 English profs, 1 chem person, and a communications person. Some fashion people showed up later. NOT a complete effort. Not a complete slate of resources.

Third, there was no handy reference sheet of General Education courses that are offered in fall. (These are the 12 (!) courses that every student must take to be well rounded and whatnot.) This lack is part of a larger problem - the misplaced desire for paperless advising - but it's a mistake. ONE sheet of paper in the packets could have solved a lot of problems - it's just too hard to toggle back and forth between different queries on Gen Ed on the screen.

Fourth, students were dropped into the lab and the on-line registration system with little or no help as far as I could see. No one was in charge, and it was that chaos of working with a class all on computers: you walk around learning tips and sharing them as you go, but it's all VERY haphazard.

Fifth, the organizers did a very BAD job managing expectations. Turns out that transfer students are in the worst position of all for fall registration. Lots of courses are still entirely reserved for first-years and there were very few seats available in the required Gen Ed sections. There was no general discussion of how to deal with this through the summer - monitor the system; check in after first-years register; contact profs for overrides, etc.

One girl I was helping was quietly crying as we worked. She kept turning away to blow her nose and wipe her face. I felt so bad for her. Can't we do better? This is a horrible introduction to our college.

Vacation? What vacation?

2010-05-24T17:47:00.000-07:00

Orts of my life:

The semester has ended, and yet I keep finding myself on campus - a meeting, two (!) days of training, graduation, another meeting. I have two meetings on Wednesday this week, and a local meeting on Thursday (part of my service to the community, expected of college professors), but tomorrow is ALL MINE.
For those of my readers who know me IRL, my dissertation advisor was in a very bad motorcycle accident six days ago, and is in an ICU unit in Ohio. He was on his way here to see his son graduate from college, and he and his partner planned to stay with us for about a week (she had planned to fly out). He has a lot of broken bones, but more seriously some head trauma and now a blood infection (not unusual in this type of situation, the doctor says). I spent a couple of days in a bit of an emotional tailspin last week: it's so frustrating not to be able to DO anything for him or his family.
Also I have had a bunch of pernicious computer viruses, and finally ended up getting my computer re-imaged today to get rid of them. Computing has been ad hoc and improvised lately; I found myself in the GIS lab today (of all places) reading emails and printing out stuff I have to read for the Fulbright seminar. Now I am re-installing all the files I backed up last week (boy were they impressed in the IT office that I actually had a backup! Thanks, B, for being my IT God).
Mom and Dad came over for dinner and just left a little while ago. I like how we can just be casual and have them over for something relatively simple. For dessert, we grilled pineapple - as we've had in our favorite Brazilian BBQ place - and B totally nailed it. Fabulous.

Joe Sixpack goes to college

2010-05-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

I have been to two pedagogy workshops in the last several weeks that touched on (to me) a very disturbing set of beliefs that some college professors have about their students.

The assertion is made that our students are predominantly from Working Class families and thus have been socialized much differently than we have been as the Professorial Class. Therefore, it behooves us to understand the habits of The Working Class and how they affect students' ability to adopt the (desired) behavioral norms of the college environment.

I have so many problems with this line of thinking that I scarcely know where to start. First, I find the terms "working class" and "middle class" problematic these days. The speakers tended to use them as metonyms for particular lifeways, somewhat (although not totally) independent of household income. Thus a Working Class family stresses the importance of family, obedience to authority, no interest in their children's development as thinkers, and no focus on enriching their children's cultural or intellectual lives through family trips to museums and the like. The Middle Class family, on the other hand, values the intellectual growth of its children; they "perform" at the dinner table by reporting on their day, and the parents validate, probe, question, show interest. They are taken to museums and given other cultural opportunities that connect them to a wider world of ideas and diversity. And so on.

All this strikes me as wildly stereotypical and not a little bit elitist. Second, since class distinctions usually relate to income levels, it's curious that at my institution, the median family income is over $90,000 a year, not really very working-class in my opinion.

Third, these faculty members seem undecided about the degree to which they should be pushing students to adopt traditional collegiate values over the ones they've supposedly grown up with. There's a sort of awkward cultural relativism at play: on the one hand, these professors profess to believe in open inquiry, questioning authority, pushing for social change, celebrating cultural difference and the like. On the other hand, their left-leaning inclinations make them not want to privilege these elitist values over the proletariat's values of family, obedience and all that. But they can't have it both ways: what values SHOULD they be teaching?

Fourth, there is something very patronizing about the notion of a bunch of college professors sitting around looking down from on high at the proletariat they deign to teach, and talking about what backgrounds they have to "deal with" and what values they should be inculcating, and that REALLY bothers me.

Fifth, this business of generalizing by the unclear marker of "class" reduces students to known, simplified (and simplistic) categories and encourages faculty to deal in abstractions rather than the flesh-and-blood reality of the student in front of them. While I know it's the business of the so-called social sciences to categorize in order to explain, I don't find the categories persuasive or useful.

The offending professors are quite a bit younger than I, so this isn't some ivory tower rose-colored dream about "how students used to be." Rather, it's a bizarre manifestation of some grad-school-learned radical ideas run amok.

Reading books: overrated?

2010-05-11T14:32:00.000-07:00

What is (or should be) the function of the college library at a state college, in today's technological world? I am the departmental liaison to the library at my institution: that is supposed to mean that I evaluate requests for books, journals and other materials from my colleagues, and funnel them to the library staff. We have a budget of a couple of thousand dollars a year, which seems generous enough (although we are kind of weak in the periodicals area). We can also buy books or videos (teaching orientation) with departmental funds.

I thought, when I took on this task, that building up the library's collection of recent classics in geography - important works that have withstood the fads in the discipline - would be worthwhile. The collection is very weak in newer books (1990s and thereafter), although it's clear that in earlier decades, someone was paying attention to what was being purchased, especially in environment, in planning, and in physical geography (our historical strengths).

B, though, raised some good questions about the function of a college library, 1) in a small state school and 2) given emergent technology.

cleaning it all up

2010-05-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

Lots of parties this past weekend - feted my mother on Saturday and B's mom on Sunday.

I finished my grades on Friday and have sort of been waiting for the other shoe to drop. So far, only two email questions along the lines of "um, you made a mistake in my grade?"

It's that pesky MATH thing again. Different assignments are weighted different amounts, and missing work is a grade-killer. Students seem to think they can average what they've done and that'll be their grade. Sometimes I play along a little, and inquire how they graded themselves on class participation. (Mean, I know. But full credit for class participation is clearly defined in the syllabus, so if you sat there all semester and never said a word, you are VERY far from "full credit reflects a meaningful contribution at EVERY class meeting.")

I have put away the materials from 2 of 3 classes, but have yet to clean up the electronic files and archive them and back them up. On Wednesday this week, B and I are going to work together on getting our online courses organized for the summer. I should do textbook orders on Wednesday too. Meanwhile, the first of my writing assignments beckons (once I clean up this sty). Onward!

quantifying learning

2010-05-07T17:32:00.000-07:00

I guess this is a coup: my college has just gotten a six-figure grant to focus on student assessment. For readers new to this particular conversation, the hand-wringing about measuring student achievement has slowly been drifting upwards from K-12 into post-secondary education:

What are our students learning?
What SHOULD they learn?
How do we measure that learning?

Reactions are varied. Old-school (and tenured): "that's bullshit! Just more eduspeak to clog up our in-boxes and take time away from teaching!"

Administrative types: "We have to demonstrate our VALUE to society in the form of the skills/knowledge gained by students in college through their investment (tuition, fees and the like) and their opportunity cost of not working for 4 years." (The economic argument is a non-starter and also a slippery slope: once you go there you can't escape, but that is a subject for a longer, more philosophical post about what college is really ABOUT.)

I see the value of the approach, but I also can visualize the pitfalls. In MA, quantifying learning has been reduced to scores on standardized tests. Yeah, it's damn hard to do it through portfolios, or essays, or other broad measures that really demonstrate what a student has learned. So let's bubble in some Scantron (TM) sheets that can be scored by a machine.

Full disclosure: I NEVER use multiple choice questions. First, the clever students know exactly how to game them - they've been doing it since they were 5. Second, my students SUCK at MC as written by me - they are not used to having to THINK while they take a test. The tests they've taken reward a particular set of skills, memorization/regurgitation, that are not helpful in the college setting - nor in, dare I say it, real life.

It's easier to quantify fact-based learning on the physical side of geography ("what is rain shadow?") than in human geography ("what is globalization?") but I was amused when this came up in a recent conversation and all my colleagues in human geography were so adamant that we all teach differently and there is no commonality for a test. That too is bullshit: there are plenty of commonalities: we just don't want to have to do the work to sit down and figure out what we can "agree" on as far as testing. Yet with some work, I bet we could agree on 5-7 essay questions, and a rubric for evaluating them.

stick a fork in it, it's done

2010-05-06T07:47:00.000-07:00

I still have final exams to grade and final grades to calculate for two classes but otherwise, it's so OVER, baby.

As usual, the last days were full of drama. Two students emailed to say they wanted to take their finals at a different time than scheduled. Well, wouldn't life be grand if faculty were basically on 24/7 call for exam week, and students could pop in whenever it was convenient to their schedule. But, alas, no. There is a makeup session at the end of exam week which is a pain in that the prof has to hand-deliver the exam and then pick it up in person (after pretty much everyone else is gone from campus), but convenient for profs at least in the sense that it is proctored at the academic support center, so usually once I dangle THAT option, students find that their schedule allows them to attend the regularly-scheduled final after all.

Then another student has been in regular contact about the possibility of not passing. I calculated his grade last weekend, and found that even if he got 100% on the final (highly unlikely!) he would still fail. So I advised him of this via email, and when he finally got the email (yesterday morning) he freaked and showed up at my office at the crack of dawn yesterday to beg and make vague references to terminally ill family members, the crisis in Haiti, and ill-defined car problems. I packed him off to the academic support center, where apparently he is well-known, since he has been on and off academic probation most of his THREE YEARS in college. The guy over there called me later and congratulated me for doing the right thing by not caving to The Begging. The admin types at my school are of the tough-love variety, mostly, which is really a blessing, when you consider how many academic blog posts complain about how the admin mostly caves to student whining, thereby undermining the faculty.

I was surprised to see a couple of other long-missing faces at one of the finals, students I'd assumed had dropped without really dropping. (For health insurance, or sports, or financial aid, apparently it's better to take the F than drop to part-time status.) So there are three other Fs in that course in the works in addition to The Beggar.

That's a new record for me, but it's not because I'm a hard-ass. If you don't come to class and you don't turn in the assignments, why would you expect to pass??? (Oh, yeah, they are also bad at math.)

Well, let's go see if I can crank out some grading, and some mathy spreadsheets (oh, soooo complicated!) of my own.

and throw away the keys

2010-03-28T18:33:00.000-07:00

Today we visited a real estate open house (one of my favorite forms of free recreation) at the former jail in the next town. The main building was constructed perhaps in the 1830s, of massive granite blocks. The developers have carved new window openings (oddly placed in the units, generally) out of the walls and the floor-to-floor height is very large, so that smallish rooms have tall ceilings, like 12-15 feet tall.

The challenge must have been (hello, capitalism!) to maximize the number of 2-BR units. It's cleverly done in a developer sense, but not so clever in terms of the feel of the spaces. I am pretty sure that the people who laid out the units have no sense of the spatial quality of the rooms thus created. It was a plan-puzzle exercise rather than a 3D spatial exercise. But it must be very costly to gut the interior and build these units so I can't say I blame them for trying to maximize return-on-investment.

Some of the building was still open to studs (their insurance co must have been unaware of the open house) and I have to say that the construction sequencing was puzzling. They are at sheetrock and skim-coat in many places where they still haven't sandblasted the exposed brick walls. Shouldn't they have done all that prep work first??

But anyways, an interesting afternoon, and Mom came with us and found it interesting too, so a good day all around.

heart of empire

2010-03-27T19:29:00.001-07:00

We've been back from London (spring break tour with about 85 people from our respective institutions) for about a week, and London already just seems forever ago.

If I had to sum up my impressions of the week, it would be in this: "Empire abides." My point of view is a bit slanted, sure - but in all the museums and sights, the sense of trade and growth and more trade and global connections was just so strong. Of course it's a major narrative point of the museums and the economy - and has long been, but I wonder if the average Londoner feels that too?

Back at the day job, we are at the point in the semester when all the problem-people finally come out of hiding and begin to negotiate for their fate. Should someone be allowed to continue in the course when they haven't attended since early February? So many students seem to think that personal tragedy ENTITLES them to special consideration. I don't mean to be harsh - but I really don't buy it. If you just do the readings and the assignments and tests and never come to class, is that an acceptable substitute for contributing to the classroom community?

In my grading schemes, about 25% of the final grade is based on doing the in-class work and on class participation. I suppose that even if I allow these tragic souls (their stories are the stuff of Lifetime movies) to carry on, they are unlikely to pass - which represents a cruelty of a different sort on my part - better to cut their losses while they can, in my opinion. They never see it - youth is so optimistic.

news part 2

2010-03-02T19:14:00.000-08:00

The more cheery part of what all happened last week, is that I GOT MY FULLBRIGHT GRANT!!!

Nach Berlin, baby! I will be there from June 9-19 and longer if/when B and I can arrange the schedule. I will be in seminar (classes?) for about a week and then hopefully can arrange to do some traveling/researching in support of my book project.

So much to arrange! But so exciting! I have a sheaf of A4 paper (their size is different than 8.5x11) on my desk with all the forms and whatnot that I have to sign - UPS'ed to me from Germany!

a newsworthy week

2010-02-28T21:07:00.000-08:00

First off, my uncle died last Sunday, 2/21. He was 87, and had been in a nursing home situation since July when he had fallen and broken his back. My parents saw him in November and reported that he was alert and responsive, but my aunt and cousin have both said that he had significant mental losses and although he could recognize voices on the phone, he just "wasn't totally there."

(Heartbreaking: when I greeted my aunt this morning in church and murmured my condolences, she said, "Don't be sorry. I'm SOOO jealous of him: now he is with P. in heaven and can talk to her" (my cousin, who died of cancer about 2 years ago).)

Well, B and I sat through an aggressively activist mass and then we deconstructed the texts afterwards. (Foucault would be proud.) This church (which my grandparents helped to found in the 1950s) has always been socially responsive at all scales - to the homeless in Cambridge; to the sick and dying of the members; to responsible eating (there was to be a CSA session at the social hour following) to the current crises in Haiti and Chile. I am sort of ok with that - active involvement in the world rather than spiritual navel-gazing. But the texts du jour were so militant that it was shocking. The covenant with Abraham: Israel "should extend" from the Nile to the Euphrates (look it up: Genesis, I think ch 15); all the battles and fighting and killing.

We were appalled. I began the day thinking that I believed in God (although organized religion mostly pisses me off) and shortly thereafter that I could not believe in any deity whose "might" would intentionally kill thousands through "natural" disasters. Oh, it was just a rhetorical horror-show. Much more thinking about this is needed....

generalization versus particularity

2010-02-14T17:18:00.001-08:00

I am working on class notes for two sessions on planning and zoning law (one of my favorites, and one that I know a lot about, so the question is always, what must I cut?) and all of a sudden a memory of my grad school frustration (design school) with certain classes came into view.

Our professors would NEVER tell us anything about usual practice or rules of thumb in actual construction, and it made us nuts. How many inches of gravel (or is crushed stone preferred?) under a brick walk, we'd ask. "Well, it depends on the situation," they'd say. I began to think that they really didn't know - that they were so far removed from actual bricks and mortar that they really weren't able to tell us.

Now I am feeling a bit the same way - I am starting my Wed class with a broad philosophical discussion of the concept of property. I want to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of zoning in contemporary thinking about land use, not how to measure a front setback. Yet there might be real value in locating the general into specific practice, through some exercises.

Such exercises feel a bit too easy for me - but if there sadly is one thing I have learned about teaching at state college, it's this: what seems like a 6th grade exercise to me is usually a challenge for at least 1/3 of my class. (This was borne out by my fall classroom evaluation, by the way, in which the evaluator opined that I went too fast, tried to cover too much, and didn't give students the context (he meant indoctrination into the "correct" way of thinking, actually) to make the proper value judgments about the topics.)

workers of the world untie

2010-02-12T17:44:00.000-08:00

Well, I've been sick nigh on two weeks now, but am finally on a variety of medications to clear up what is apparently a collateral-damage sinus infection.

In addition to revising lecture notes every day as I try to manage my ever-changing course schedules (lost 2 class days this week AND a snow day) I've been trying to do some reading for The Book.

First up: an archival look at Moscow's proletariat in the 1918-1929 period. I had had the picture of enormous intellectual and social ferment in the 1920s, most of which of course comes from an architectural history lens. Constructivism, the influence of the International Style - real excitment about making new forms for new ways of living.

Yet my most recent reading paints a different picture: for the masses, Moscow (and the other Russian cities) was hell on earth - low wages, famine approaching starvation, no fuel for heating and transport, tremendous shortages of housing. Crime, prostitution, drug use. And the parallel universe of a limited market economy that the overlords deemed necessary to ease the transition to pure socialism. So while you were starving, you could see your merchant neighbor digging into a juicy roast in a spacious, overheated apartment.

It's a bit peripheral to the larger story of how a political system imposes order - yet some really useful bits.

pictures from the past

2010-02-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

My father's aunt (his father's youngest brother's wife) died last week, the last of that generation. My dad's cousins sent a giant envelope full of family photos and we looked over them last night. They were mostly taken by my grandparents, and many are annotated on the back.

A poignant touch - my grandmother labels herself simply as "Fatty" in some of the ones that include her. (I guess I come by self-deprecation and body image issues honestly enough, then.)

My grandfather was one of eight children, fairly spread out in age, and my father doesn't really know or keep up with his cousins much. This makes the photos all the more delightful - that they took the time to sort and send them. One of my favorite ones (unlabeled) was what I think is my grandfather's whole family. I recognize his father, whose portrait hangs over my bureau, but I can't tell which of the boys is my grandfather. Plus, there are only seven kids, so I don't know if the portrait was taken after one of the oldest boys had died, or whether Uncle F. hadn't yet been born. Unfortunately, I don't think Dad's eyesight is good enough to sort it all out - the photos are small and faded.

Aunt G. was 94, so that's Dad's new benchmark. His mother was 94 or 95 when she died. We kidded him a little - "Seven more years!" He professes not to want that much time, and he talked last week about funeral plans, so obviously this topic is something he's thinking about a lot.

I have no voice

2010-02-06T19:33:00.000-08:00

This is usually a metaphor for talking about the marginal and/or disenfranchised - their opinions cannot be heard in the political forum.

In my case, though, it's quite literal. My throat has been sore all week and it has been difficult to generate the vocal volume necessary to teach. I REALLY tried hard yesterday - and then after work, my voice was just gone. Today I feel ok, though. Just the silence.

I keep forgetting about it -- and it's frustrating too for B, who has to be looking at me to read my whispered lips. If it's not back by Monday, I'll have to improvise - type on a screen; have someone else read my lecture notes; whatever. On IM, B and I are discussing what films would fit for the topics I'm covering right now in the Tuesday classes....

the suspense is, you know, killing me

2010-02-05T18:22:00.000-08:00

So, back in early November I applied for an overseas summer fellowship that would take me to Europe for about 2 weeks. We should have been notifed in late January - still no word.

That can't be good - they've notified the winners but are waiting for acceptances to notify the losers, in case some losers can become winners by attrition? I really thought this one was a go. Sad.

In other news: a word many of my students didn't know on today's quiz: "facilitate." I sometimes forget that, in general, they aren't readers. (Yet this is the class with all the Latin and French and German language training - unlike the usual section, which is, yawn, a semester or two of Spanish. I remember signing up for high school courses in 8th grade - I chose Spanish because I thought it was more relevant to daily life (even then) and my English teacher (a bit of a literary snob) talked me out of it because there was "so much great literature to read in French.")

me me me: blah blah blah

2010-01-31T14:32:00.000-08:00

I'm working right now on a research statement for a summer institute that will allow me to travel for a week to a fun although not exotic place I've heard a lot about.

Writing about yourself and your ambitions and goals is SUCH a drag, yet self-promotion is the bread and butter of academe, especially on the research side. I think the idea is to create a coherent story about yourself and in this case, to be cutting edge enough so that the organizers want to hang out with you for a week. (All expenses paid, did I mention that?)

Over the last several weeks, I have begun to craft a story that shows that all my research work is organized around questions of economic restructuring. Let's see if I can get something logical out of THAT.

urban planning paradigms

2010-01-27T20:33:00.000-08:00

While en route to an urban design studio review via public transit (which always makes me feel like an anthropologist!) , I sketched out an organizational scheme for planning approaches that really makes sense to me. This has been a thorn-in-the-side - I've been mulling over how to talk to my class about 3 very different readings for several days now. Hooray! finally light dawns.

In short: who is doing the planning; whether the method is process-oriented or outcomes-oriented; whom the plan is for; and what values are implicit in the method - these are my main data points. We will do a graphic organizer; and then we will apply these approaches. Yay. I love it when I am able to organize ideas from my readings into some sort of coherent pattern!

rhymes with cheepy's

2010-01-20T16:05:00.001-08:00

B and I have been talking about buying a new bed for years, due to the interesting and ever-more-prominent topography of our not-so-old mattress. On New Year's Day, we went to the establishment mentioned in the title of this post, and the amount of cliches-made-reality was both astounding and sort of hilarious. (Well, it WOULD have been hilarious if B hadn't had to spend, like 20 hours on the phone getting back the ripoffs into our bank account.)

First off - the salesman. Not only was he wearing a wrinkled, stained white shirt and no tie, with a snowstorm of dandruff covering the shoulders of his cheap jacket, he proceeded with an amazing set of lies:

1.He used to work for the competitor (rhymes with Nob's) due to a family connection, and their comparable products (we purchased a memory-foam mattress with a 20-year guarantee) are complete shit and will barely last a year. Hm, wonder what he told customers at Nob's, when he worked there, about Cheepy's products? I surmised that he used to be married into the Nob family, and after the divorce, they fired his sorry ass.

2.After some dickering about the price, he agreed to match the Nob's price, but then, oh wait, the computer wouldn't "let" him enter that price, so he "had to" charge us $30 more, so he "threw in" a mattress pad, retail value $100, so we actually "saved" $100. When Brian pointed out that the "savings" was actually net $70, he seemed really confused. But wait, it gets even better: the next day we saw the Cheepy's ad for this mattress that promised a) FREE mattress pad; and b) beating any competitor's price by 20%.

3. He told us that Cheepy's charged $15 for taking away the old stuff. This turned out to be $15 PER PIECE and since we had a king bed with the split box springs, that was actually $45.

It took some time on the phone, as aforementioned, but the regional and corporate guys ultimately threw this guy under the bus ("oh, he's not one of our regular salesmen") and made good on the $30 and the mattress pad and the 20%. And then Brian finished off the poor SOB by calling back the online help dude at Cheepy's (who ALSO works on commission) and giving him the purchase info so that he could claim his 50%.

Moral of the story: don't take any shit from Cheepy's. You might as well walk out during the sale writeup if they are doing it wrong. It'll save considerable time post-sale, and you'll ultimately (I think) get all you're entitled to. (Or you can just go to Nob's.)

The bed is deeply, deeply comfortable. No more lower back pain (well, except after the shoveling. But that is a whine for a different day).

Curmudgeon Girl: memo to the Scott Brown campaign

2010-01-18T09:07:00.000-08:00

Not that I would have voted for your candidate anyways (although I am not a huge fan of Martha Coakley due primarily what I perceive as the political expediency, bend-with-the-wind, nature of her positions this fall) but for the LOVE OF GOD, Scott, did you really believe your handlers were giving you sound advice when they pitched the call-unenrolled-voters-seventeen-times-a-day-with-recorded-messages idea? Wtf???

This strategy makes you sound either desperate or wack. And since we have WAY too many wackjobs in Congress already, I'm going with the Coakley option. Did you really think voters would vote for you if you harassed them with incessant calls? Really? REALLY?

Happy New Year!

2010-01-05T19:02:00.000-08:00

Only two (emailing) disgruntled students from the fall, and neither one so disgruntled as to constitute a problem. Students don't really "get" how grades are weighed: see current thread on Chronicles of Higher Ed fora about math incompetence.

I think the most interesting thing I learned this semester was about ecological economics: the proposition that a resource value (say, a forest) is not automatically equal to its cash value, because once turned into cash, the transaction is not reversible. Hence the conceptual failure of neoclassical economics. Woot!

Otherwise, my classes were reasonably attentive and motivated. I really enjoyed the practice of teaching, which is something new for me. It felt much more relaxed and collegial this term.

I am not getting my hopes up. Spring semester is always a tougher slog - as the popular wisdom goes.

Curmudgeon Girl says: happiness is no late grading

2009-12-15T20:57:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-13T15:02:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-06T10:52:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-18T13:56:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-11T15:25:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-18T20:09:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-10-14T19:40:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-11T19:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-24T17:56:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-09-20T19:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-12T19:43:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-09-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-09-01T17:35:00.000-07:00

...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...

2009-08-29T10:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-27T18:44:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-24T14:43:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-08-19T06:04:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-08-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-08-15T17:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-14T20:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-09T17:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-06T16:50:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-02T18:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-30T13:15:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-29T18:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-27T21:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-26T18:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-19T20:25:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-18T18:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-15T20:25:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-14T15:29:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-12T19:18:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-07-10T08:45:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-07-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-07-02T11:22:00.001-07:00

...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...

2009-07-01T19:11:00.000-07:00

...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

2009-06-30T17:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-30T17:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-30T09:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-29T15:25:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-06-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

...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

2009-06-26T15:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-24T08:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-22T14:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-18T19:44:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-17T19:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-17T17:31:00.000-07:00

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?