I got a message from blogger that suggested they'd delete this blog, so I'm creating some "activity" to try to ward that off.  I'm going to need to figure out how to save my posts here (for posterity, you know) before it all goes *poof*.

On reading today's NY Times most-emailed list

When the media discuss academia, and in this case the tenure track's apparent demise, I always find myself getting irritated. (I also bristle at any movie about classical musicians, the only other professional world I know anything about.) The article's main thrust is that students are getting a lesser education with the growing reliance on adjunct teachers at big state universities, even though (and this is reiterated every time, and it is true) adjunct teachers are often as good as (if not better than) tenure track teachers. The main problem, according to the article, is that these part-timers, often teaching as many as 6 courses at 3 or 4 different institutions in a semester, are rarely around outside of class time, and thus cannot adequately support their students.

From my perspective, the main problem isn't so much the impact on students, but the impact on intellectual life in general. By assuring professors "academic freedom" (a concept that has lost any real specific meaning these days), tenure provides an absolutely essential secure environment for the pursuit of sometimes abstract, abstruse, not-immediately-applicable ideas and research projects. Such space for intellectual pursuit is increasingly rare--among professional intellectuals as well as students--to the point that it doesn't even come up in an article like this.

The point is not necessarily that more serious intellectuals make better teachers--we all know they often don't, though some of my "worst" teachers in college, who mumbled or strayed from the point or designed poor assignments or failed to put time into grading papers or never showed up for office hours, were the ones I learned the most from because, at one point or another, they said something really profound, different, thought-provoking that changed things for me.

The point is that academia has been, and should continue to be, one of the rare places in our hyper-capitalistic, consumerist, over-worked, stressed-out society where thinking for the sake of thinking should be allowed to happen.

And adjuncts simply do not have time for this, unless they have other sources of income and are teaching merely for fun (which does account for some, actually). Most, however, are working their asses off with little or no job security and mounting resentment against the academic caste system. Few have time to spend on research projects, going to conferences, or (my preferred mode of intellectual activity) just sitting and thinking. Few get to design new courses or consider larger curricular issues, and most get plugged into existing courses, and sometimes even existing syllabi.

Which means fewer and fewer people, besides the increasingly powerful administrators, have time or space to think seriously about what it means to be an educated person. (And don't even get me started on all the time the shrinking pool of t/t profs are now required to spend thinking about "assessment," which, in my experience, is mainly about providing nice digestible sound bytes for syllabi and administrators.)

OK, time to get off my soapbox and get some work done!

Back to School

Well hello there, blogland.

I'm thinking that if I start this blogging thing up again, I should probably start a new blog, since I'm now in an entirely new place in my life. That, of course, would require coming up with a new blog name, the thought of which exhausts me, so for now I'll just keep using this one.

So, here I am, on the other coast, back at work, back near family, back on the academic track. How do I feel? No easy way to answer that question. At times, exhilarated*; at others, despairing; most of the time, though, simply exhausted.

While for the last two years my life was uncomplicated, slow-paced, and pretty much the same domestic routine every single day, now my (waking) life is divided up into three distinct kinds of time, each demanding something different from me: work-time, mommy-time (with a child who is not getting enough of mommy these days, though clearly enjoying the new and improved daddy-time) and partner-time (with a partner who is now unemployed and full of angst and perhaps regret about our decision to leave his job).

At work, which is today's focus, I'm teaching a mega-huge survey lecture course (140 with only one TA), a regular-sized (30) course on a special topic, and a small grad seminar. I'm also chairing a program, and two committees. I'm also commuting 1.5 hours each way, three days a week (though most of that time is on public transportation, where I can get work done). There are plenty of people out there who easily manage such a schedule, but, alas, I ain't one of them. It's hard enough for me to keep my energy level high enough to remain enthusiastic, focused and articulate for all my courses and meetings. But even harder is having to shift gears between very different modes of presentation--to go from lecturing, to lecture/discussion, to discussion modes of teaching, to leading a meeting of my peers, sometimes one right after the other. And I haven't even mentioned research mode, which frankly hasn't happened yet this semester aside from a few stolen moments here and there.

But what's really kicking my butt this semester is being confronted with the remarkably low level of literacy, writing skills, and, most troubling of all, curiosity of the majority of my students. Many if not most of the students at the big state school where I teach come from working-class backgrounds, many are first or second generation immigrants, most of them are busier than I am, holding down full-time jobs, raising and supporting families, on top of going to school. They are, on the whole, interesting, smart people, but they are also, on the whole, not at all prepared for college-level humanities work. By which I mean, for example, that they feel put upon when asked to do something so strenuous as to actually read a whole book. Reading is difficult and unpleasant for them, something to be avoided at all costs. Many of them, I'm learning, don't even buy the books for class--they just catch what they can from lectures and the endless supply of cliff-note type material online. When asked, as I ask them periodically, to write in class about what they're reading, many can't even remember, let alone spell, the main characters of the novel we're talking about.

This still has the power to shock me. I somehow FORGOT that this was the case (and was it this bad before I left? could it have gotten worse in 2 years?). I came back into the classroom wanting to talk about the things that are interesting to me, rather than trying to discover and work from the things that are interesting to them, or, more importantly, to market to them the very idea that reading is worth their while. There is a huge gap between where I'm coming from and where they're coming from. I'm not being a snob here, I'm just stating a fact, one that has everything to do with the differences of class and race/ethnicity between me and the majority of my students. While part of me is deeply committed to trying to bridge that gap, and trying to inspire my students to become readers and thinkers, another part of me doesn't feel up to the task.

Don't get me wrong. Many of them do try, and a number of them blow me away with their insights and writing skills. I'm just kvetching in the way we all do in this profession.

Basically, teaching is damn hard. And now I must go grade midterms, since that is what this time is slotted for and time is of the essence these days.


*Apparently, this is not a word I write often, since I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make the squiggly red spell-check line go away, and had finally to look it up.

Teh craziness

Oddly (or perhaps predictably?) I've found myself wanting to blog lately, just as my life has turned waaay crazy with pressures of every stripe. Unfortunately, I don't really have time to give any of my envisioned posts the attention they require. This is why they invented random bullets, no?

• We're moving in two weeks. TWO WEEKS. I only just began packing boxes to mail two days ago.
  
• I start teaching again in a little over a month. I'll have something like 150 students and no TAs. They will all be writing at least two papers, plus exams. Remind me why it was the right decision to go back to my job?
• I want to write some kind of tribute to Phantom Scribbler, whose blogging somehow (I mean in ways I both can and cannot articulate) made a real difference to me these last two years. Instead--suffering from a fear of embarrassing her as well as myself--I'll just leave it at that. Thanks, Phantom!!
  
• We're having a yard sale tomorrow, selling most of the bigger toys we've bought for my daughter while here. She'll be with friends during it, but I'm really worried she's going to freak when she eventually sees that certain items are no longer around the house.
• On a different note: I had an analytical NPR moment yesterday, while listening to Bush respond at the press conference to the question of whether he feels at odds with democracy in going against the will of the people in his Iraq policy. His answer was: though he like everyone else wants to "be loved," he doesn't make decisions based on their "popularity," but rather is guided solely by "principle." He repeated the word "principle" several times. My brilliant insight: By rhetorically reducing the idea of representative government, of democracy itself, to a "popularity" contest, and to the desire to be loved, he basically skirted the question (no surprise) while effectively giving democracy the finger. And to suggest that leading solely by "principle" is a good thing, that having principles in and of itself makes one capable of leadership whatever those principles might be, strikes me as highly, and dangerously, undemocratic.
  
• Enough of that. On a lighter, but for me equally fear-inspiring note, even though it's also a good thing: I finally started trying to get a publisher for my book, and how have at least one editor expressing serious interest and wanting to see the whole manuscript. You'd think that by now (and I'm not even going to say how many years, off and on, this project has been on my plate) I'd have a complete manuscript to send. But, alas, there's that darned introduction to write, not to mention fine tuning of two of my chapters. So, on top of moving and preparing three courses, I have to finish my book. In the next month.
• Did I mention the craziness of my life right now?
  
• I think I'll stop there, though, believe me, I could go on and on.
  

imaginary friends

Before I abandon this blog forever, I have the urge to write a little about something that's been intriguing me lately.

For the last couple months, my 3.5 yo daughter has developed an elaborate imaginary world of "sisters," by which she means, if I understand correctly and I'm not sure I do, very special friends about whom she has privileged knowledge, not unlike the knowledge an omniscient narrator has about her characters.

These sisters number from 5 to around 10--they "die" occasionally, while "new" ones appear--and live in various places including "California," "a different California" and "Neptune." They all have names, and ages, and she keeps very good track of who's who. She doesn't seem to imagine their actual presence--she doesn't play or talk with them in real time, as far as I can tell--but instead tells stories about them, usually stories that are linked in some way to what is going on in her life or in the immediate moment. During this morning's drive to school, for example, she said, "My sister Molly likes pink cars. She doesn't like dark blue cars like ours." At the pool yesterday she said, "My sister Nala is 8 years old and can swim by herself in the pool." After visiting a friend with a cat, and being reminded that I'm allergic to cats and so we won't be getting one soon, she said, "Mommy, do you know my sister Esme has 3 cats?"

I have some concern that, as an only child (whose mom is allergic to anything with fur), she is expressing/compensating for her loneliness with these sister stories. When I asked her, once, if she wished she had a real sister, she exclaimed, "But I do have real sisters!!" Whatever their source, these phantom siblings are playing a rather important role in my daughter's life.

A friend of mine who was once intensely involved in Waldorf schools recently explained to me why Waldorf schools delay teaching reading until kids are 7 or 8. Apparently the idea is that as kids learn to read, they begin to stop making up their own stories, ceding narrative authority to the written word. The longer they are encouraged to tell their own stories, and to live in a kind of oral cultural world, the more likely they will be independent, creative thinkers when they are older.

Now, I have no idea whether or not this is true; and I do know that some kids simply will learn to read earlier than others, if only because they want to. But this idea that storytelling is developmentally central to early childhood is very compelling to me, and helps me to see how my daughter's imaginary life, whatever it says about her only-child status, is also about her learning to create characters and tell stories about them. Which is also about her learning to create her own character, and to make decisions about what she will do, be, prefer in her life.

I can't help but wonder if any Republicans look at this picture and feel sick to death of having yet again to choose among a bunch of white men in dark suits whose only distinguishing features are their hairlines and tie color...

Parents of the NYT

This quote encapsulates what bothers me about all of the recent NYT articles about parenting:

'Sonia, for one, likes to contribute her two cents. “It’s nice because I feel like I’m not being spoken down to,” she said. “Ninety-five percent of the time I feel most kids are spoken down to.”'

In other words, the children represented by the article--those whose parents look to them for advice about what the hippest consumer products are, basically--make up about 5 % of the population (if we, like her mother, think Sonia knows what's what; which, apparently, I do, at least in this case).