online education - some thoughts from the trenches

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

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

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

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

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!

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"

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

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.

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

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

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?

Orts of my life:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. 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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.