More on Shadow Cities

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

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

Global cities

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

More about this later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T minus 365 days

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

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

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

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

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

weird, wild week

This last week was really full of weirdness and transitions.

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

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

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

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

which is more discouraging?

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

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

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

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

chalk-n-talk versus powerpoint

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

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

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

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