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April 30, 2005

Ivory-billed update

Like Eli, I hadn't thought of birdwatching as political. But Eli's take on this near extinction is highly recommended reading. Via Majikthise.

Posted by senioritis at 03:32 PM | Comments (0)

Intersections

I'm blogging about faculty contempt for their students; Mike is blogging about the Keynesian-neoclassical economics that would prevent us from recognizing student writing as capital. Which, to my way of thinking, offers another explanation for that professorial contempt for students—and another twist on Bruce Horner's contention that faculty think of their writing, not their teaching, as their "work."

*Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. Ithaca, NY: SUNY P, 2000.
**Still pretty clueless about finding the URLs for trackback pings; I'm stumped by Mike's platform, alas.

Posted by senioritis at 09:43 AM | Comments (2)

Hangover

I am in the throes of a monster hangover—not from booze but from smoke. Last night BP had a cookout for his students. "Cookout" here does not mean a gas grill with shrimp and veggies; it means an open fire on the back forty with hot dogs, hamburgers, and smores. And I have a chemical sensitivity to smoke. And we were out there for hours. And then I slept, fitfully, for 9 hours and woke up with a headache, a powerful thirst, and a fuzzy brain.

So what do I do with my fuzzy brain? Blog, natch.

Incidentally, during the fitful sleep I dreamed that Jen and I were designing an independent study on the rhetoric of cooking. She was going to observe a cooking class and read old cookbooks. Uh-oh; I'm starting down Amy's path of wacky dreams!

Posted by senioritis at 09:21 AM | Comments (2)

April 29, 2005

End o' year reflections

Following the lead of Steve and others, I'll try to capture this academic year in a list:

  1. This year I learned that I'm not oriented toward teaching honors students. I had an honors FYC in the fall and struggled with it. From my perspective, too many of the students (let me very specifically say not all of them) had too much insensitivity toward each other, were too culturally and socially indifferent, were too confident of their own ideas, and were too disinterested in learning anything other than editing from me. (One memorable moment was when the class saw, in an overhead projection from my laptop, that I had the 365 Gay site bookmarked. But that's for another post, another day.) Anyhow, give me a developmental course any day. In fact, my best teaching experience ever was in a 1996 summer pre-freshman developmental course that was populated by students who might or might not have known that they had a lot to learn (some of them came from prep schools and so were surprised to discover they were behind) but who were eager, able learners. I'm still in contact with people from that class. All this is not to say that I shouldn't be oriented towards honors students; on the contrary, I believe I should, and I believe that they deserve capable teaching as much as anyone else. But as I can see the conclusion of my teaching career approaching, I'm just not motivated to become that capable teacher. Here's the senioritis in me speaking: Let somebody else do it. Lotsa people are eager for the opportunity; let 'em have it. One thing from my experience in that course that I'll apply in all my future teaching: attention to issues of diversity has to happen early and be very explicit. First, students have a lot to learn; and second, it establishes (whether implicitly or explicitly) some ground rules for classroom conversations. I have a lot, lot, lot more to say about what I do and don't see as the necessary connections between writing instruction and diversity, but that's another post, another time.
  2. This year I taught my first-ever grad course in pedagogy. It was a beautiful experience. We had some serious talks about pedagogy there, and I learned a lot from those conversations.
  3. This was, of course, the year that I kicked off my second semester with a big car wreck that totalled my car and my semester. As as result of the wreck, I now have a truck instead of a car; I didn't get to teach an advanced course in style; and I was very disappointed in how my comp history grad class developed. Not disappointed in the students, but in the course; it didn't accomplish what I'd intended. Missing the second, third, and fourth weeks of school and then coming back not yet recovered from post-concussion syndrome just isn't the way to develop a course. Whether it would have gone well without the wreck is an unanswerable question. Maybe, too, my expectations for what we'd accomplish were too high. I simply don't have the objectivity to figure that out. I just have to content myself with the bits that we did accomplish.
  4. This year I didn't schlep across the country for CCCC. That was hard—I love conferences—but instead of wearing myself out during spring break, I rested. So it was a good idea, one I'm going to stick with: no more long-distance conferences. Unmedicated diabetes management is much easier when you're not exhausted.
  5. This year I've continued on my path to reduce my involvement in PhD exams and dissertations. I hadn't gone excessively overboard on that, but for awhile there I was definitely carrying more than my share of the load. So I've been working toward (and think I've actually reached) a normal or at least near-normal load. I haven't yet had to compromise a high-quality level of involvement in grad students' projects, but I have compromised my own writing. So rather than reduce the quality of my involvement in grad students' projects, I've been reducing the quantity and am happy with the level I've hit.
  6. This year our writing program developed its undergraduate curriculum. We now have a minor in writing and are well underway in designing a major, as well. What we're remedying is the all-too-common scenario of an undergrad curriculum dominated by FYC—i.e., dominated by what is widely (however inaccurately) regarded as normative instruction. Writing programs all over the country are doing work similar to ours, trying to maintain and develop a meaningful FYC but not have the curriculum defined by or confined to FYC.
  7. This year for the first time I got to meet the undergrads who will be my students this fall. I'll be teaching an upper-level research course to pre-professional (mostly pre-med) seniors, plus some writing majors. I've conferenced with one of the writing majors and met with seven of the learning community women and come away from those meetings with lots of ideas from the students about what they'd like. And they've heard my ideas, as well.
  8. This year the authorship book that Tracy and I edited was published, and I'll have that as a text the next time I teach authorship.
  9. This year Sandra and I started working on argument theory and pedagogy together. Our C's proposal will be part of that, and we'll also develop a textbook.
  10. This year I started a blog. It has served me exceptionally well through this spring semester, helping me feel connected while I was recovering from the accident, and helping me through the depression I've experienced as a result of the trauma and the consequent collapse of my semester. I pledge to cease wrecking my car and to continue blogging.

Posted by senioritis at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2005

Grail bird!

I remember when NPR ran a story a couple of years ago about a disappointed excursion in Louisiana, searching for the ivory billed woodpecker, a species last sighted in 1944. Yet incredibly, they actually do still exist, in Arkansas. Even if you're indifferent to birds, this is big news. There are survivors—at least one of 'em, and hopefully more. It's both concretely and symbolically important.

Update: Metafilter has some links, notably to Mary Scott's moving account of sighting the bird. She concludes,


The strangest thing about seeing a living Ivory-billed Woodpecker was that it was just a bird, albeit a magnificent one, going about its life in the swamp. We humans tend to project our angst about the damage we have done to our natural world on icons of loss, like the ivorybill. Happily, the bird I saw was doing fine. He was cruising around a beautiful world, on a beautiful day, and although he may have been wondering if there was a female around, or how his little family was doing, he wasn't burdened with gloomy thoughts of extinction. That is our burden to bear.

Posted by senioritis at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)

About analysis

Sanctimoniousness has been a theme running through some of my recent posts, and I've also been paying attention to teachers' derision of their students. That derision is, I think, complex: part of it may be a way of laughing about our own frustration; we so much want our students to learn, and they fall so short of our hopes for them. Our derision may also express our contempt for our quotidian work: we blog about the books we read, speaking both negatively and positively of them, but I've seen precious few (zero come to mind) blog entries about specific student-produced texts. We don't blog about our students' texts qua texts. Much. And as my last entry on the topic suggested, our derision may actually be an attempt to demonstrate that we do understand how contemptible our work (i.e., our students) is.

But now about analysis: The fact that I am blogging about this does not mean I'm innocent of it (though it does mean I'd like to be innocent of it!). Analysis is seductive, establishing an (apparent) distance between analyst and object and establishing, too, an apparent superiority of analyst over object. That's where sanctimony comes in. One is seduced by one's own analysis into believing in one's superiority. So just as our derision of students' texts may be an attempt to distance ourselves from our (contemptible) students, so my analysis of that derision certainly is an attempt to distance myself from that derision. Yet as a previous post admitted, I am not in fact always distanced from that derision. I just wish I were.

Analysis is dangerous, too, for its apparent conclusion to a sequence. Once one has analyzed an object, the case is closed. The illusion is first that analysis accomplishes the distancing, absolving the analyst from complicity. But it's also that analysis will reveal error and instruct the erroneous. Once we see the problem, the problem will disappear. In this case, once we see how bad it is to make fun of our students, we not only will quit making fun of them but we will quit wanting to.

And that's itself an error. There is no there out there.

Hence the activist pedagogy and scholarship that some of my colleagues are engaged in: Analysis doesn't effect change; it's just a first step. Active intervention effects change. It's not enough to correct consciousness; we also have to remediate being.

I don't have a conclusion here, because there's so much more to say.

Posted by senioritis at 02:22 PM | Comments (2)

April 27, 2005

More on student-bashing

On WPA-L, Bill Condon offers his own thoughts on student-bashing. He relates it to discrimination—what I would call class discrimination. He recalls a 1960s text entitled "Student as Nigger." I recall a more recent text: Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. New York: St. Martin's P, 1992. From my reading notes:

"Since the 'mass' is an imaginary construct, displacing the unknowable multiplicity of human life, it can be reshaped at will, in accordance with the wishes of the imaginer." Intellectuals gained control over the masses by exercising language to reshape them (23), depriving them of their humanity by fictionalizing them (24) or making them "scientific specimens" (25). "Denial of humanity to the masses became, in the early twentieth century, an important linguistic project among intellectuals" (24-5).
And of course Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgment and Taste. 1979. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
Insensitive pedants judge the quality of an individual according to the attribution of taste, based on formalist criteria of propriety or on upper-class notions of taste as a sure sign of nobility. Both of these bases deny the social (11). "Hidden behind the statistical relationships between educational capital or social origin and this or that type of knowledge or way of applying it, there are relationships between groups maintaining different, and even antagonistic, relations to culture, depending on the conditions in which they acquired their cultural capital and the markets in which they can derive most profit from it." But in analyzing the role of the social in the distribution of cultural capital, we cannot escape our own role in the social and thus cannot be objective (12). "Academic capital is in fact the guaranteed product of the combined effects of cultural transmission by the family and cultural transmission by the school (the efficiency of which depends on the amount of cultural capital directly inherited from the family)" (23).
Less well-known is Atherton, Catherine. "Children, Animals, Slaves and Grammar." Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning. Ed. Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 214-244.
"It has long been recognised that teachers both of basic literacy and numeracy and of broader literary culture tended to have humble, even unsavoury, reputations amongst the élite whom they served, most markedly under the early Empire" (219). This may be because they sold their services to the élite, or it may be because what they taught was relatively easy to acquire (220). "The source of the grammarian's low social position, I would suggest, was the very fact that he exercised his skills and his authority on children" (228). And, Atherton establishes, children were closely associated with animals.
So there's my answer to my own question, and it readily comports with what Bill says. We deride our students in order to separate ourselves from and place ourselves above them. Because of course there is far less distance between "us" and "them" than we would like.

So yeah, I know: sanctimony. But still.

Posted by senioritis at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)

Book-closing

The BBC reports, "US closes book on Iraq WMD hunt." And Becky closes book on B*** regime.

Posted by senioritis at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

CD replacement

So the Chieftains have to go from my list; I love that CD, but I'd get sick of it on the desert island. (Same with Patty Larkin's Red = Luck, Etta James' Seven Year Itch, & many other faves.) If I had Blood on the Tracks on CD, this would be a no-brainer. But it hasn't been uploaded from LP yet. So I'm trying to decide between

  • Pearl Jam's eponymous CD;
  • The second disk of the Double White album (I figure choosing a multi-disk CD would be cheating);
  • Elephunk.
    Howinhell do I choose amongst those?

    Posted by senioritis at 08:33 AM | Comments (1)

    Garden bulletin

    The snap peas and asparagus have broken ground; the lettuce, maché, and burnet will soon need to be thinned; the rhubarb is surviving despite perennial neglect; and the garlic is booming.

    Posted by senioritis at 08:23 AM | Comments (0)

    April 26, 2005

    About student-bashing

    They're students, so they know less than we do, write less expertly than we do, and care about our subjects less than we do. Can we talk about why we teachers derive such glee from deriding our students? I ask this question with deeply tempered sanctimony; I don't approve of student-bashing, but I do find myself giggling at this sort of thing from time to time. And I think the possible reasons for that impulse are interesting, important, and worth mulling over.

    Posted by senioritis at 11:58 AM | Comments (1)

    5 CDs/LPs for the desert island

    BP and I are doing this one, and then we're going to spend a day with our combined list of 10 in CD rotation. Here's mine:


    1. Acoustic Blues, which has several (terrific) songs from each of these: Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willlie McTell, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and John Lee Hooker;
    2. The Chieftains, Long Black Veil Beatles, Double White disk #2
    3. Eels, Souljacker
    4. Screaming Blue Messiahs, Gun Shy
    5. Duke Ellington, Live at Newport, which has that amazing performance by Paul Gonsalves.

    I'll letcha know what BP chose once he's finished his list. This was his idea, but he's so much a perfectionist that it will take him days to deliberate, I think.

    4/27/05 update: Second thoughts about that Chieftains choice. That one will need to be replaced. With what, I don't yet know. But fortunately, BP is still deliberating.

    Posted by senioritis at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)

    What's 500 divided by 3?

    The realistic answer is, damned little. The mathematical answer is, 166.

    Three colleagues and I are doing a Cs panel proposal. Four people, three papers. Here's what I've got so far, for my 166 words. Pretty jumbled at this point; suggestions solicited.

    Laura K. Krishna and Information Literacy:
    The Challenge for FYC

    As a specific topic for composition pedagogy and scholarship, information literacy needs to be differentiated from digital literacy. There is close relation: digital literacy is a necessary prerequisite for information literacy. But in the Information Age, the tasks of retrieving, evaluating, and synthesizing information are redefined by the quantity of available information; the speed at which it is available; the means by which it is accessed; and the ways in which these phenomena change information itself. Teachers of first-year composition must pay attention and catch up; otherwise, we may be teaching our students only a fraction of what they need to know to function as writers in contemporary education and society. This presentation will offer a case study of the 2005 weblog "event" of Laura K. Krishna's plagiarism to illustrate issues of contemporary information literacy and will propose concrete means whereby FYC pedagogy can position students to use sound, ethical information management in their writing.

    (For those of you who know I was working last month on a proposal in comp history: I think that two colleagues and I are going to do a panel proposal for RSA on that.)

    Posted by senioritis at 08:19 AM | Comments (1)

    Samantha made me do it

    You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
    Song of Solomon. It's a world unto itself.

    Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
    Nancy Drew.

    The last book you bought is?
    Hot Text: Web Writing that Works. Cuz I'm tired of being ignorant and tired of pestering my better-informed friends. It's in the mail.

    What are you currently reading?
    Not enough. Stamina for reading is still not 100%. BP sez that's entirely psychological. Whatever. Brideshead Revisited. It's pretty boring, so it puts me to sleep at night. What Writing Does and How It Does It. Excellent research methods textbook that's informative for advanced scholars, as well.

    Five books you would take to a deserted island: Bourdieu's The State Nobility because it would keep me mad; Faulkner's Sanctuary because it would remind me of what I got away from; Morrison's Song of Solomon because it's my favorite novel because it's my favorite novel because it's my favorite novel; Joyce's Ulysses because maybe I would finally get through the damned thing; my own handbook because being on a deserted island would perhaps enable me to finish it.

    Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
    Amy because she loves to be provoked; Ty because I haven't seen him do a meme; Denise because I want to know her better.

    Posted by senioritis at 07:27 AM | Comments (7)

    April 25, 2005

    Feathers

    A couple of weeks ago, Marie published this amazing picture of a robin with ruffled feathers. I was stunned by it and have gone back to it several times.

    And then a downy woodpecker was sitting on a branch outside my study window yesterday, right at eye level. Now, if you click on the link that I've provided, you'll see that the male downy has a red smudge on the back of his head. Just a smudge; not much more. But when the wind is coming from the west and the woodpecker is facing to the east, those red feathers get ruffled up into a magnificent crest. And I don't think I ever would have seen it if I hadn't already seen that robin through Marie's lens. So thanks, Marie, for helping me see this familiar little bird in a whole new way.

    Posted by senioritis at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)

    April 24, 2005

    Classroom/campus/scholarly conflict

    It's sobering to read the New York Times account of how the new pope became an entrenched authoritarian. My interest in the story is from my perspective as a teacher, a teacher of graduate students, a teacher in a department with strong commitments to activist pedagogy and scholarship, and thus a teacher who is no stranger to passionate disagreement and even confrontation. I'm also, as an individual, inclined toward strongly held beliefs rooted in a sense of social justice, even when very few share my beliefs. Hence a character failing that I have to fight against is that of sanctimony, the certainty that my beliefs are right; that those who disagree are wrong; and that they should therefore be ashamed of themselves for their moral inferiority. (I figure some who are reading this and who know me well have just snorted their coffee through their nose.) It's a character failing, one that must be resisted.

    So deep chords are struck as I read this account of the pope's interactions with campus radicals at Tübingen University in the 1960s. He reacted to radical aggression by withdrawing into sanctimony and authoritarianism. Here's one chilling passage:

    "People of his age and background panicked at the thought that a new, radical, dictatorial and totalitarian regime might come out of the '68 uprising," said Gustav Obermair, a liberal physicist who was president of Regensburg University, where Father Ratzinger went after leaving Tübingen in 1969. "Of course, this was a complete misreading of the '68 movement. But that is what they thought."

    Professor Mieth remembered a time when perhaps 25 students invaded a meeting of the faculty senate at Tübingen. Most of the faculty, he said, took it in stride and talked with the students.

    Only one, he said, picked up his things and left, and that was Joseph Ratzinger.


    My concerns about this story aren't specific to the papacy nor to any events in my own teacherly life. But this account of Ratzinger raises a lot of concerns I have for my own conduct, not only as a teacher but also as a colleague:

    Professor Mieth recalled a battle with one of a well-known radical Belgian theologian, in which Father Ratzinger more than held his own. "Edward Schillebeeckx came to Tübingen to lecture on the relationship of theology to the Church Magisterium," Professor Mieth said. Afterward, there was a panel discussion.

    "Küng described the future of a reformed church," Professor Mieth said, "and Joseph Ratzinger said nothing at all. He just sat on the left side of the podium and remained silent. Then somebody in the audience stood up and asked Ratzinger, 'What is in your mind about these questions?' so Ratzinger was forced to say something."

    "He issued a massive critique of what his colleagues had said," Professor Mieth said. "He was indirect. He didn't say that what the others said was nonsense. He was very informed about the history of theology and church, and he provided a lot of quotations that he knew by heart by a lot of people, like Hegel and Schelling and others to make his point that the position of his colleagues represented a simplification."


    Something in this just chills me. I so value inquiry and dialectic, and I am so in terror of the prospect of retreating into isolation and authoritarian pronouncements. Surely it is Dante's 11th circle of hell, the place where no teacher ever wants to find herself.

    Posted by senioritis at 07:16 AM | Comments (4)

    Copyright on crack, pt. III

    In composition studies, Andrea Lunsford is the person whom I have heard address the problems of appropriation of indigenous folk art. Lunsford has described the ways in which capitalists (whether individual or corporate) have copyrighted the collaborative work of an entire society. When I have heard her address the issue, she has not moved to a totalizing solution, but has instead posed it as an illustration of the conundrums inherent in the very notion of copyright.

    The World Intellectual Property Organization, alas, lacks the subtlety of Lunsford. Eric at Intellectual Property and Social Justice links to commentary on BoingBoing about an article on Ghanamusic.com. At the instance of WIPO, some countries are moving to protect their folk heritage by "'nationaliz[ing]' folklore and charg[ing] foreigners for using folk art elements in commercial works." An update on the BoingBoing post implicates Paul Simon in Ghana's effort to give "prison sentences for Ghanians who sell art based on folklore, traditional knowledge, dance or song." Not that Simon recommends such action, but that his paying Ghana $16,000 for his appropriation of a folk song inspired them to further profit from their heritage.

    Garth's commentary on BoingBoing refers to Simon as a "well-meaning human" who "paid $16,000 to the Ghanaian government for a song that he lifted for his album 'The Rhythm of the Saints'." What Garth doesn't reference is the flap of yesteryear, when Simon recorded (some pretty damned good) songs on Graceland (1986) with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the Soweto Rhythm Section and was subsequently accused of cultural appropriation.

    Anyhow. Instead of viewing the problem of cultural appropriation as an indictment of copyright, the WIPO has tried to fit collaborative cultural work within the notion of copyright. And the government of Ghana has responded by demonstrating just what a bad, impossible fit that is.

    Posted by senioritis at 04:14 AM | Comments (0)

    April 23, 2005

    Splain this one to me

    In three days the Eels release their new double CD, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations. How come Amazon is offering it for $13.99 but iTunes has it for $19.99? I thought that iTunes only works if they always offer everything for less than other vendors.

    Posted by senioritis at 10:42 PM | Comments (4)

    No comment necessary

    From CNN World: "Workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana, a British study shows."

    Posted by senioritis at 08:40 PM | Comments (2)

    Hamilton details

    If you've heard that Tyler Hamilton has been given a career-ending two-year suspension from cycling for blood doping, you may be interested to know that the three-person arbitration panel was not unanimous and that the dissenting judge suggested that the IOC deliberately influenced the proceedings. According to Cycling News, Hamilton is going to appeal the judgment.

    Posted by senioritis at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)

    It's our fault

    And I apologize. Yesterday Tom and I were touring the garden and remarking that we were approaching the end of a snowless April, which would be the first in our 21-year upstate residence. Hence today's Norwich radio forecast is for snow on Sunday and Monday. Our bad.

    Posted by senioritis at 09:06 AM | Comments (0)

    Kicking a new addiction

    Three years ago I had heart surgery that cured my long-term struggles with a pernicious arrhythmia. And the surgery made it possible for me to drink coffee! I've been good; it's taken me three years to develop a genuine addiction to caffeine, but I did finally attain that state, and now I'm struggling to free myself of it. I hate being addicted to anything; it's never, ever good, not even when it's something that's apparently "good," like exercise and work. And I'm one of those natural-born addicts: if it's addictive and I touch it, I'm hooked. Twenty-five years after I gave up smoking, I still dream that I smoke. I have in the past nearly killed myself through addictions to exercise and work. I'm totally serious. So once I recognize that yet another addiction is upon me, I exit stage left. Which means that right now, I'm in a caffeine-deprived fog.

    Posted by senioritis at 07:41 AM | Comments (6)

    Defining plagiarism

    Inside Higher Ed has a story on one of the North Dakota State profs who has been accused of plagiarism. Claire Strom has been exonerated: "The [faculty] panel found that while there were some minor mistakes in documentation, they were neither intentional, significant or unusual." The story is interesting for its comparison of the plagiarism policy of the American Historical Association with that of North Dakota State. Had the AHA guidelines been applied, Strom's work would have been deemed plagiarized. According to Inside Higher Ed story, however, the university's policy allows for "honest mistake," and it was through this policy that Strom's textual transgressions were interpreted.

    The "honest mistake" provision must be contained somewhere other than in the university policy that the NDSU English Department posts online. It's not in the Code of Academic Responsibility and Conduct, either. Is it in a policy someplace else that applies only to faculty?

    Posted by senioritis at 06:03 AM | Comments (0)

    April 22, 2005

    Important bulletin

    The first asparagus sprouts have broken ground in the garden Chez Howard. This means healthy, happy smiles for Les Howards.

    Posted by senioritis at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)

    April 21, 2005

    Where do you read what—and with what props and tools?

    Recreational reading: My recreational reading is almost exclusively fiction. (I finished Trollope's 6-volume Palliser novels while recovering from the wreck, and now I'm reading Lattimore's translation of the Iliad. It's much more of a page-turner than is his translation of the Odyssey—but maybe it's the stories themselves rather than the translations that are so unequal.) I'm always reading a novel when I go to bed, but I fall asleep so easily that I seldom progress beyond a page or two. I have an enormous old chair in my study and a hassock for a footstool, and I do most of my recreational reading curled up there.

    Scholarly reading: I do my scholarly reading whilst seated in front of my computer. I mark all over the book (assuming that I own it; marking on library books is a mortal sin in my religion), and at the same time I take online notes, putting them in my hard drive commonplace book. I may do a fast read of a scholarly book whilst away from the computer, but if the book matters to me, I'll then sit down at the computer, get out several different colors of highlighter pens, fire up Microsoft Word, and go to work. And I don't mind reading online texts when they're scholarly sources; I'm crazy about pdfs and library databases.

    News: I get almost all my news online (except for salon and bathroom reading; see below), from blogs and MSM sites. My fave newsblogs are in my blogroll; for MSM news I regularly go to the LA Times; the NY Times; Chicago Tribune; BBC News; Boston Globe; Washington Post; SF Chronicle; Seattle Times; and St. Petersburg Times.

    Junk: I read People while I'm at the salon waiting for my roots to turn red.

    Magazines: The New Yorker, Z, Harper's, New Left Review, and Atlantic are bathroom reading (though I'm letting my Atlantic subscription lapse; I've been finding their stuff just too repulsive.)

    Manuscripts: On airplanes and trains I read student texts and also articles and book manuscripts that I have to review. I also do review-reading from the comfort of my reading chair, as well as at the computer. Occasionally I review stuff while watching sports on TV, but usually that's just for the first quick reading, not for the more intensive response-reading. ("Quick reading" for me is flipping through the pages, reading subheadings and topic sentences, getting a preliminary sense of the argument, making a few marks on the text or jotting down a few notes.)

    Where I won't read: On my cell phone? Nah. I just can't see ever wanting to read fiction on my cell phone, no matter how good the liquid-crystal display is.

    Posted by senioritis at 03:01 PM | Comments (0)

    April 20, 2005

    About your dissertation committee—

    You don't want one of these guys on it.

    (Via Chris Anson on WPA-L.)

    Posted by senioritis at 09:54 PM | Comments (1)

    Blurred lines

    While people at North Texas State and Syracuse are getting worked up over Howard Johnson's appropriation of other institutions' academic plans, administrators on WPA-L are sharing five-year plans. Susanmarie Harrington has done some interesting (but not yet published) work on text sharing and ghostwriting amongst teachers and administrators. Blurry as the lines are between imitation and plagiarism for student and professional writers, it's even worse for administrators, because the textual practices in that group are so different. I don't know whether Howard did a bad thing or not, but I do know that if he did, it's only a degree different from the practices that are commonplace and ethical amongst people in his line of work. When teachers share assignments, it's pretty silly to cite the source. The same is true of a great many administrative documents; they circulate and morph, unattributed.

    Posted by senioritis at 07:06 AM | Comments (0)

    April 19, 2005

    Clancy Made Me Do It

    And now that I've found the site, I can't get off it. Here, for example, is my putative "real" age:





    You Are 25 Years Old



    25


    Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe.

    13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world.

    20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences.

    30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more!

    40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

    What Age Do You Act?

    One of the options at this site, by the way, is to find out at what age you will die. Uh, pass.

    Posted by senioritis at 10:32 PM | Comments (5)

    Authorship, IP, plagiarism miscellany

    1. A journalist for the Tallahassee Democrat offers a remarkably reflexive meditation on plagiarism:
      In ways, plagiarism is on the brink of extinction. With the Internet and its casual indifference to giving credit where credit is due, only the most extreme advocates of intellectual property rights are still wringing their hands over borrowing or copying phrases or sentences, word for word.

      This is a big change from considering plagiarism a clear-cut ethical crime - in literature especially where it's more or less been decided that copying is never acceptable.

      Right now I'm borrowing, in part, some of the information that Malcolm Gladwell has written in an article on plagiarism in the Nov. 22 New Yorker magazine. I'll try not to use any of his exact phrases, because as a journalist I know that's how you keep things on the up and up. You write your own version of some nice, clear explanation or summary of an event or issue that you found in the archives, but you don't do it word for word. Then it's OK.

      I suppose.


    2. Josh Mitchell overviews the latest assault of the recording industry upon college students.
    3. From the April 16 New York Times: "A major biography of the poet E. E. Cummings that was published last year contains numerous passages that echo or directly copy parts of a well-regarded 25-year-old biography of Cummings, according to an article in the May issue of Harper's Magazine, which will go on sale next week." In the April 18 issue of the Guardian, Sawyer-Lauçanno regrets having failed to cite sources but denies he's a plagiarist. Huh?
    4. The SU student newspaper reports a predictable range of responses to the North Texas State provost's appropriation of other institutions' academic plans: reproach, indignation, vengefulness, and pleasure. And before anybody gets all worked up about Johnson's innovation in appropriating other institutions' academic plans, please remember that Thomas Mallon reports that the University of Oregon plagiarized Stanford's plagiarism policy. (Mallon, Thomas. Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989.) And about the "legal action," aka "plagiarism suit" that the DO says that RPI, one of the aggrieved institutions, is considering: folks, there's no law against plagiarism, just against copyright infringement.
    5. As a result of the surveys he's conducting, Don McCabe reports a rise in plagiarism among college students.
    6. And in closing, just a li'l note about the amount of money that's changing hands on the plagiarism issue: One small college is paying $2300 per year for the Turnitin service. D'you think the Turnitin folks are turning a profit?

    Posted by senioritis at 04:49 AM | Comments (0)

    April 18, 2005

    About Working for Corporations

    So given that I share Samantha's indignation, one might ask how I feel about having a book under contract to McGraw-Hill. The truth is, I feel fine. My editors are simply wonderful; they're doing a great job of working with my manuscript so that it will sell and so that it will also accomplish the cultural and intellectual work that not only I but also they want it to. They are firmly on the side of pedagogical and intellectual innovation. They fully understand and work within what I would call the Hodges Mandate (again, see Hawhee's article)—that handbooks must be organized in certain ways and must include certain materials organized in certain ways. And they do a remarkable job of making sure that the Hodges Mandate doesn't get in the way of authenticity and innovation. I am crazy about working with these people.

    Do I like working for the corporation? No. When I was working for HarperCollins, I didn't like working for Rupert Murdoch, either. I've also had objections to every single university I've worked for. Corporations err on the side of capital; universities, for example, now allow the U.S. News and World Report rankings to affect internal decision-making. In composition, where so much staffing is done by part-timers and TAs (which lowers one's ranking), that's significant. It can be a boon to a writing program, resulting in more full-time jobs for the part-timers. It can also be a disaster, resulting in the shrinking of the program in order to shrink the numbers of part-timers. But it's done not in the name of social justice nor good pedagogy, but capital—the capital that accrues to a university as a result of high U.S. News rankings. The debate that rages in the press about whether universities are bastions of liberal hegemony is hilarious, when you think about it, because the universities themselves are for the most part very conservative. On two different occasions, working for two different universities, I have had the experience of meeting or dining with members of the board of trustees. Let's just say it was not my kind of group. Nor do deans, vice-presidents, or presidents tend to be social activists.

    So my question, as I choose a university or a publisher to work for, is the extent to which they will allow and even enable the sort of work I want to do. And the way I answer that is at the local level within the corporation. The higher you go within a corporation, the more driven by capital the decision-making is. My question is whether I am comfortable with the local ethic in the corporation for which I work, and the extent to which it will be affected by the more capital-driven ethic at higher levels.

    Hence I'm thrilled to be working for the English division of McGraw-Hill. I'm comfortable with the dialectic between market forces and pedagogical innovation that's involved in developing the handbook; I appreciate that my editors are going to see this work distributed to the widest possible audience. I abhor the decision made in another division of the corporation, to capitulate to conservative forces in Texas. I have no reason to believe that decision is part of a larger corporate policy.

    Thanks for raising this, Samantha. It's given me the opportunity to think through the dialectics, compromises, stances, and decisions I make as I navigate my teacherly and scholarly life.

    Posted by senioritis at 07:16 AM | Comments (1)

    April 17, 2005

    About textbooks

    Samantha Blackmon vows not to use McGraw-Hill textbooks because the company caved to Texas pressures against equal rights for marriage. She is justly outraged about what more than one textbook publisher agreed to: "The publisher caved to right wing pressure from the Texas school board and is publishing texts for them that 'define marriage as a "lifelong union" between a man and woman.' Texas school board members wanted to remove what one woman called 'asexual stealth phrases' such as 'individuals who marry.'" Gack.

    Her point is an important one: textbooks are a window on the world, and they can shape how learners view marriage, war, and politics. Another example: demonstrations are taking place in China over Japan's textbook cleansing of its wartime record. Writing for the BBC, William Horsley reports,

    [O]n this trip to Japan I could not avoid the conclusion that a new mood of nationalism has . . . begun to take hold in this country which has been publicly devoted to peace and economic prosperity for so long.

    One sign is the Japanese authorities' approval of several new school history textbooks written by known right-wing scholars.

    One book which has angered the Chinese failed to make any assessment of the number of Chinese civilians killed in the infamous Rape of Nanjing.

    The internationally accepted view is that hundreds of thousands died in an orgy of sexual violence and killing by Japanese troops.

    And Japan's largest national newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, in what I take to be blatant disregard for the known facts, has called on its readers to celebrate, because the new textbooks have cut out all mention of one of the greatest of all the humiliations inflicted by Imperial Japan on its neighbours: the use of large numbers of women in conquered Asian countries as sex slaves for the Japanese army.

    It was right to set the record straight, I read, because the accusations "had been shown to be untrue".

    Surely I thought modern Japan could not give in to the poison of such deceit and hypocrisy ever again.

    And Will Richardson makes a case against all textbooks everywhere. Really, his argument is not against textbooks but against textbooks: "We have a long way to go in our thinking about all of this, but the age of dynamic, interactive content is here now, and we should be pushing our teachers to move away from just depending on a printed text to deliver their curriculum." I agree; let's get everything online, not just as an alternative way of publishing but as a way of transforming learning.

    But Richardson's post is contiguous with a familiar anti-textbook discourse; he says,


    Here's what you can do with a text book: read it. You can also lose it, rip the pages out, deface the cover, and generally abuse it until it has to be replaced. But as far as a delivery vehicle for content goes, you can basically only consume it by reading it.

    I take this as a statement in favor of active learning, of the sort that Richardson believes (as do I) that interactive online instruction would promote. But look how readily it aligns with David Bleich's argument. Some tidbits from my reading notes:

    "[T]extbooks seem to assume the emptiness of the students' minds" (35). Composition textbooks, unlike other types of textbooks, don't supercede older books (16). "[E]specially when used by inexperienced teachers," they "reinforce socially coercive constraints" (19). They don't call upon readers' experiences and don't ask readers to contribute to the discussion (16-17). They set up a one-way transmission of knowledge from teacher to student (34). "The patronizing language of textbooks helps to perpetuate the hierarchical structures of society. These structures render coercive speech by an authoritative class of people to a less authoritative class. . . . . [I]n teaching, there is no way to authorize the equivalence of students' language experiences to those of teachers because teachers' judgments rendered through grading ends every course" (35). "Textbooks in writing do not ask students to relate their own knowledge, experience, hopes, and wishes to the problems of writing and language use" (32). They don't challenge their own tradition (28). They substitute for the teacher (17), who is typically underprepared for the task of teaching writing (18).
    —Bleich, David. "In Case of Fire, Throw In (What to Do with Textbooks Once You Switch to Sourcebooks)." (Re)Visioning Composition Textbooks: Conflicts of Culture, Ideology, and Pedagogy. Ed, Xin Liu Gale and Fredric G. Gale. Albany: SUNY UP, 1999. 15-44.

    Meanwhile, I peck away at my keyboard, pestering my friends for samples of students' writing that will go in a writer's handbook. That I have under contract. With McGraw-Hill. Irony á go-go. I make my own contribution to pedagogy and to the historical record about good writing practices. If I do well, I will help writers write. And teachers teach. The handbook struggle is a daily, yearly one: the challenge is to write what I believe to be true about writing, but within the framework that Friend Hodges established lo these many decades ago (see Debbie Hawhee's CCC 50.3 article, allegedly online for NCTE members, although the archives aren't working for me ce soir), a framework within which teachers and programs have become accustomed to moving, a framework whose absence from a handbook means the handbook will not be purchased and hence will not have the opportunity to change writers and the world. It's a far greater challenge than I ever could have imagined, even though my friends Bob Schwegler and Andrea Lunsford, themselves handbook authors, warned me. And before too many more moons pass, my handbook will finally be published, in its first edition. And then I will take my place among the pantheon of textbook writers whose work constructs writers and the world in ways the author never imagined but which readers will perceive and seize upon. I enter the fray knowing that my book will, because it is a composition textbook, perform negative cultural work that I failed to anticipate and ward off. I enter the fray hoping that my book's positive cultural work will tip the scales far in the other direction.

    I don't have any grand conclusion here. The best I can do is to say that I don't think textbooks are themselves a problem. Bad textbooks are, and so is bad pedagogy. I can also say that textbooks will always, painfully, demonstrate to us the ways in which the teaching of composition is complicit in a hierarchical society. Getting rid of textbooks doesn't fix that, because it doesn't change the hierarchical society of which the academy in general and composition specifically is an instrument.

    Posted by senioritis at 07:25 PM | Comments (0)

    April 16, 2005

    Outside!

    Last year I bought a round picnic table with an umbrella and found a fine place outside for working, one where I could get decent signals from the battery phone and the wifi. I bought a big plastic box to hold writing equipment (paper, pens, PowerBook cord) as well as essentials such as Kleenex, bug repellent (though the black flies haven't arrived quite yet), and sunscreen. And then it rained, and rained, and rained. We had an awful summer, cold and wet.

    This year is better so far: lots of sun this spring. Right now it's in the mid-50s, forecast to rise another ten degrees by afternoon. And so I am outside to write, for the first time in 2005. The sun is on my body but thanks to the umbrella, not on my computer screen. My hoodie is keeping the wind off my ears. I'm under a tall Norway spruce. Just in front of me is an enormous forsythia that I think will bloom this year, despite a hard freeze this week. Beside me is the rose bush that came from my Newfoundland ancestors. My grandmother had it at her home on Martha's Vineyard; my mother had it in the back yard in West Virginia; and I have it here in New York. It blooms for a week in June, covered with small, white, fragrant blossoms. When it blooms, I'll be sitting beside it, working on the handbook.

    Meanwhile, our neighbors who not only have a B&B but have bought the house next to them for even greater B&B accommodations are busy brushhogging what stands between our property and theirs. They've made great picture windows in the upstairs bedrooms, so that their guests can enjoy the quaint vista of our pastures and us working in our garden. BP says he feels as if he's gardening naked, and he's plotting ways to obstruct the line of sight. Damned if we want to be scenery for city folk.

    But that's another problem for another day. Right now, my job is to put together an illustration of critical reading strategies for Chapter 8.

    11:00 update: The question, of course, will be whether I can actually work out here, or whether this will be like holding class outside. So far I've watched Geraldine sunning herself; the squirrel working its way cautiously around me; and the spider crawling across my screen. But I'm not giving up yet: Derek has succeeded, and I may, too.

    1:00 p.m. update: I'm not getting a lot of writing per se done, but I am sorting through student writing samples and students' permissions to publish. So yeah, I'm working. Having put on my reading glasses helps; everything 4 feet away from me is a blur. But a writer who wants to work outdoors in cow country, especially in the spring, has to have a high tolerance for the aroma of manure that's just been spread on neighboring pastures.

    Posted by senioritis at 10:30 AM | Comments (2)

    Want to bitchblog?

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation recommends that you blog anonymously and that you not say anything about your workplace that would identify it.

    Whoops.

    Posted by senioritis at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)

    April 15, 2005

    (Automated) Writing for All

    Although yes, of course, everybody's talking about automated pedagogy and online plagiarism right now, I swear to god, I hadn't read Dennis Baron's post to WPA-L when I blogged about automated pedagogy. Jes' synchronicity. Of the juicy variety.

    Posted by senioritis at 01:31 PM | Comments (0)

    Caution to researchers

    Anyone wanting to work in archives at Colgate University needs to know this:


    As many of you may know, Case Library is closing for construction starting June 15 and will not reopen again until Fall 2006. During this time period the entire archive will be boxed and stored off-site. . . . No archival question requiring more than the archivist's best memory can be answered on this end, no matter how important. It will not be physically possible to retrieve from the off-site boxes. We hope to be up and running again as soon after September 2006 as possible.

    from Carl Peterson, University Archivist.

    for real.

    Posted by senioritis at 12:01 PM | Comments (2)

    Blundering verbally

    In the Self-Help Hall of Fame, this one should surely have a place. It's a peculiar piece of journalism.

    Posted by senioritis at 08:40 AM | Comments (1)

    April 14, 2005

    (Automated) Comp for All

    Writing and writing instruction are everybody's business and everybody's expertise. We have the physicist John Barrie writing the highly successful Turnitin program—and with it a whole pile (and I do mean pile) of pedagogical apparatus. The comp publishing company Prentice-Hall actually picks up Barrie's service and packages it with their marketing junk. When they drop it, Wadsworth picks it up and packages it with InSite.

    Oh, goody. And a marketing prof has now decided that people should take Microsoft Word's grammar checker seriously and should improve it, so that it can help non-native speakers.

    Yowza and wowzer.

    Hell, I can just retire. Who needs comp/rhet when all these geniuses are going to automate our work? Both text production and text reception can be done so very, very handily by these dandy lil programs.

    Posted by senioritis at 09:36 PM | Comments (2)

    Down-home legislation

    Forwarded by Jon: English-only comes to the hills by the back door. Donnez moi une break.

    Posted by senioritis at 01:10 PM | Comments (0)

    April 13, 2005

    jobspam

    Just got one from ITT Technical Institute, directing me to this site. No surprises here; just the sensation of someone walking over your grave.

    Posted by senioritis at 03:24 PM | Comments (1)

    Genres of evidence

    Chuck Tryon blogs a wonderful genre of evidence—one that, in turn, reopens for me the question of the validity of eyewitness testimony. Is videotape a part of eyewitness testimony, or an improvement on it?

    Posted by senioritis at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

    Rock star

    What fun—I've just learned that Adam Olshansky, one of my more beloved former students, is doing well in an eponymous band. And how wonderful it is that Adam provides background on his writing process for three of his songs. The Colgate student newspaper profiles the band and Adam himself. They refer to his living out of his van for awhile—and what a van it was! He stopped by here in it, and it was like nothing I'd seen since the early seventies.

    Adam Ezra's albums are on iTunes, and they have some free downloads at their website, if you'd like to listen. It's pretty darned good stuff. I would like it even if I didn't know it was Adam Olshansky. But it's wonderful to know Adam's doing well; great to listen to fresh new good music; and delightful to hear Adam's voice again.

    Posted by senioritis at 06:47 AM | Comments (0)

    April 12, 2005

    Andrea Dworkin

    I've been saving this one, hoping for some sort of brilliant thing I might add to what's already been said about Dworkin since her death. But finally I've decided that repetition has its own merits.

    A brave soul has departed. Her work enriched my understanding of myself. She enraged a lot of smart, good people, but she also expressed a point of view that needed voice. And thank god she did. Ms. doesn't add much information to the Guardian announcement of her death, but it does give some background on her life—interestingly, without directly mentioning Intercourse, which probably annoyed the largest number of smart, good people and which was her one work most influential on my own thinking. The links from Ms. do, however, talk about that work, especially here. And Rad Geek says it well:


    I don’t know how to say how much her life and her work meant to women’s movement. I don’t know how to say how much she meant to my life. I don’t have the words. I could say that she is one of the most important, controversial, uncompromising, threatening, and brilliant women of Second Wave radical feminism. I could say that her works changed my life. I could say that every cruelty and every uncharitable swipe taken at her—by the pimps and the pornographers, by self-satisfied liberal men and by critics from within the movement—was a testament to how much she mattered and how important it was that someone was there to tell the truth without flinching, that that someone was her. All of these things would be true. But they don’t even begin to touch it. Nothing that I could say would.

    "Changed my life." Yes. I can trace several significant moments in the political course of my life, and reading Intercourse was definitely one of those moments. And I have no words to describe its effect on me; that effect was too visceral for the analytic articulation of words, even though Dworkin somehow managed to put the catalyst for those effects into powerful words.

    I don't talk about Intercourse much, because either one gets it or one does not, and those who don't get it are mad as hell about it. Those who do are grateful—and some see implications beyond her explicit argument. One of them: that binary gender lends itself to all het sex being rape. Binary gender is, I believe, one of the deep-seated problems of our culture, and certainly in my own life. Intercourse details its heinous consequences.

    Andrea Dworkin's death is a great loss.

    Posted by senioritis at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)

    Teaching argument

    In yesterday's faculty meeting we were talking about possible upper-division courses in Writing. One of the things we touched on was a course in argument and argumentation. Such courses, taught from the perspective of New Rhetoric, were for a while a staple of UD writing curricula (on the occasions when such curricula had anything but a course called "Advanced Composition").

    I'll be teaching a junior-level course this fall in researched argument, and while I never quite synched with New Rhetoric, I do think that argument is a valuable staple of a writing curriculum—both the reception and production of argument. In yesterday's faculty discussion I touched on this but didn't (ironically) argue passionately about it; I really felt I needed to think about it more, think about why I think the study of argument is important still/today.

    I think it's maybe more "today" than "still." Perhaps I'm doing nothing more than echoing George Orwell's concern for the operation of propaganda. I think it goes beyond that, though—or maybe it's that the concerns that fueled Orwell are intensified in the environment of new media, where images, ideas, data move faster than ever before. (And so I suppose I'm also echoing Henry Adams' concern, from a century ago, about the ever-increasing speed of information.)

    And it's definitely political. As I read posts such as this one from Poor Man, I'm struck by how important it is that readers, writers, and citizens ask, predictably and consistently, about the evidence for claims. And that's one important value of having an argument course in one's upper-level writing curriculum, beyond the argument that's taught in the intro course.

    Posted by senioritis at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

    April 11, 2005

    Yet more sources

    1. A fabulously uninsightful "insight" into Bush's new ghostwriter.
    2. An undated, anonymous article at UMagazine warns that purchased term papers may not be good ones and that the purchaser might get caught. Now, there's a newsworthy insight.
    3. Concerns about blog-to-blog IP and plagiarism issues. . . .
    4. North Dakota State seems to be energetically pursuing professorial plagiarists. SUNY-Plattsburgh has fired a plagiarizing professor. (You have to scroll to the bottom to get the news item.)
    5. The magazine Hawaii Business does a pretty decent job of differentiating the oft-conflated copyright infringement and plagiarism.

    Posted by senioritis at 09:45 AM | Comments (0)

    April 10, 2005

    Swapping swamped for swamp

    Fatigue. Lack of concentration. Low self-esteem, morale. Continuing inability to work except in small bursts. I feel old and incapable.

    Many positive remedies available, but perhaps best of all is to hike to the big willow tree on the edge of the swamp behind our pastures. The swamp is about the size of our property, something on the order of 4-5 acres. Sometime early in our tenure at this place—probably 15 years ago—I discovered the tree. It's an ancient willow as willows go (though I don't know much about their actual lifespan). It has 4-5 major trunks, only one of which is upright. The others are splayed out horizontally over the swamp. A frisky, agile person could venture quite a ways over the water by crawling out on one of those limbs. Instead, I sit in the crook of the willow. The big upright trunk, more than 3 feet in radius, serves as a fine chair back to lean upon. In the crook of the willow is old moss and leaves—quite soft, if a bit damp. I sit and let the sun and silence wash over me.

    The silence of swamp noise. Today the swamp was full of peepers. (We first heard them last night—a little late this year. Folks in Earlville are laughing that the peepers are late because they're having to swim back upstream from Pennsylvania, where the floods washed them.) Today the peepers were singing, the grackles chuckling, and the redwings shrieking the boundaries of their territory. The sky reflected in the dark-bottomed water was an implausible blue, and the moss covering the horizontal willow trunks that stretch out over the water was a bright spring green. A beaver meandered by, indifferent to or ignorant of my presence.

    To return home, I again cross the winter-battered cornfields, the dry husks and stalks rustling and crunching underfoot. The snowmobilers have cleared a wide path across the cornfields; it's good that in occasional small ways they are useful rather than reprehensible.

    As I cross the old canal bed, I notice snowdrops in the underbrush. They're near a spot where an ambitious groundhog a few years ago excavated an old brick canal building that had apparently burned, probably a century and a half ago: charred bricks and bottles were dug out in the name of groundhog habitation. Could these snowdrops have been there since then? How else would they have gotten there? When they were planted, it would have been on the bank of the canal, very close to the brick building. No later than the 1850s. On close inspection, I find them quite different from the snowdrops I'm familiar with: they have a little fluted cup like a daffodil.

    I return to working at my computer not healed but at least soothed. Everybody should have a big old willow on the edge of a quiet swamp, a place where nobody else but the muskrats go.

    Posted by senioritis at 08:22 PM | Comments (5)

    April 09, 2005

    Authorship sources á go-go

    1. In the April 5 entry "Blogs: The New Stocks?" jocalo provocatively refers to "the college student in Illinois soliciting a paper from a comedy writer . . . exemplif[ying] my concern: the use of blogging as a public shaming device." Sorry I can't link to the exact entry, but I haven't been able to decipher a permalink/trackback system for that blog.
    2. Burned on a plagiarism rap, the Seattle Times develops guidelines for its journalists.
    3. Design Observer applies questions of plagiarism and attribution to copycat visual images. Thanks for this one, C.
    4. The SU Daily Orange has a story about former SU administrator Howard Johnson, now provost at North Texas State, plagiarizing an early draft of an academic plan for that institution. This is an interesting case, blending as it does into the business and political practice of ghostwriting and non-attribution. The DO, a student newspaper, publishes an editorial describing the incident as an ethical breach, a "mixed message" to the students of North Texas State.
    5. At Chico State, the faculty stay away from a plagiarism workshop in droves. The Harvard Crimson decries the high incidence of student plagiarism and the hypocrisy of plagiarizing professors' escaping unsanctioned. A similar sentiment is expressed in Nebraska.
    6. The Guardian worries that academic mentors are ignoring their students' plagiarism.
    7. More recently, the Guardian describes what I suppose Foucault would call the author's-face function.

    Posted by senioritis at 03:02 PM | Comments (2)

    April 08, 2005

    Friday cat blogging

    In response to popular demand, I offer pictures, at last, of Fred (the brown tiger) and Geraldine (the grey, probably-pregnant one), our feral friends. They live here. And now that we're outside working in the garden, they hang around, watching our activities from a safe distance.

    Posted by senioritis at 10:00 PM | Comments (1)

    You know you're a yard slut

    —when you finish raking the autumn leaves in the spring. But I derived some small comfort from finding a 1949 penny in the garden.

    Posted by senioritis at 03:43 PM | Comments (0)

    Authorship sources

    1. Via TalkLeft: reference to the very interesting publication Campus Progress and especially Ezra Klein's column on young writers in media and activist organizations.
    2. Forwarded by Carrie Leverenz to WPA-L, a link to a story about a paper-writer masquerading as a tutor. Discussion on WPA-L under the subject heading "FW: Newsweek Article" (and, no doubt, on WCenter).
    3. Via Arete, the effort to patent pbjs.
    4. At freshcomp, a comparison of two wonderfully similar cartoons.
    5. Forwarded by Nick Carbone to WPA-L, the link to a term paper site that makes the following argument about the ethics of authorship:
    There are strong reasons WHY your cooperation with Custom Research Papers cannot be labeled as cheating:
  • you DON'T STEAL anything from us
  • you pay a FAIR PRICE for our services
  • our writers get both financial and spiritual REWARD for their work
  • you simply DELEGATE your tasks and focus only on those things that REALLY MATTER IN YOUR LIFE
    • The learning that takes place in the writing of a paper would not, of course, be on students' lists of what really matters. And I am delighted to know that writers for term paper mills benefit spiritually. I was wondering what church I should join; now I know. The Church of Custom Research Papers. Write for them and be redeemed, healed, and saved.

    You just can't make up stuff this good.

    Posted by senioritis at 11:48 AM | Comments (2)

    April 07, 2005

    Another aspect

    D said today that she has a little regret about the impending end of the semester: "Just when I'm starting to get it, it's over!" A good point to remember. Even while everyone's dying for the semester to end, there's also the level of quality, both collaborative and individual, that's possible only at the end of the semester.

    I started this semester in my grad history class in the belief that I shouldn't just teach the course from my perspective, and I now think it was a mistake. Like some/all of the students, I only start to get it—whatever "it" is—at the end of the semester. Everything up to that point is preliminary. Hence my late decision to add an Afrocentric U.S. history text to a comp history course. And hence my decision today to go the whole way: in our next text-based meeting (next week's class is a project workshop), I'll present my argument for an Afrocentric approach to comp history. (I know Afrocentricity is an antique concept, but I'm an antique theorist, so there's some symmetry.)

    I was telling Sandra recently that I've decided that all my courses henceforth, both grad and undergrad, should be "about" the work that I actually do. Heretofore I've avoided that, in the effort to teach core materials, surveys, etc., etc. Teaching one's "own" stuff in a core course is tricky: the students need that survey, that sense of wide perspective, that understanding of shared, received concepts. But they also need to know how one inserts oneself into these discourses, and that's what teaching my own stuff potentially brings. The students don't have to go there themselves in order to benefit from teacher-based teaching.

    So this is a principle I'll be applying in all my courses, from FYC to grad seminars. Part of the course will be "about" the work that I actually do. Or the survey-type materials will be contextualized "in" the work I do. Or the work I do will be contextualized in the survey-type materials. Or. But not teaching one's own work when it is pertinent is just another form of the fantasy of ideology-free pedagogy. That's a fantasy I long ago relinquished; I feel comfortable in the classroom, stating my own perspectives and beliefs without imposing them on my students. Well, my work is part of my perspectives and beliefs. So in two weeks the comp history class is going to explore the possibility of Afrocentric composition history. And next fall, my 105 will begin with a unit on plagiarism—including, of course, why one shouldn't do it, yada yada, but also why it matters so much to our culture and why our culture is so hypocritical about it. And my 303 will incorporate substantial work in contemporary information literacy. Work that I do.

    Do I sound like I'm making a resolution? I am. It's time for me to teach the work I do. I don't know whether I should've been doing it all along—I rather suspect that I personally have benefitted from not teaching my own work all the time—but at least at this point in my career I think my students stand to benefit most from a change in policy on that issue, and I'm sure I won't suffer from it, myself. I think one of the reasons I've been slow to adopt this stance is that I started my post-doctoral teaching career at a liberal arts college that deliberately assigned all its faculty to teach interdisciplinary courses in which they did not have complete expertise. The underlying principle had to do with a commitment not just to interdisciplinarity but also to teacher/student co-discovery. And it was a remarkable opportunity for me as a teacher: I am much more widely read in Plato's work, for example, than I otherwise would have been, and I know a lot more about nineteenth-century philosophy; medieval architecture; and Impressionist art than I otherwise would have. I've read a boatload of scholarship on W.E.B. DuBois and Homer. Etc. So I've gone through my whole career with a commitment to co-inquiry and co-discovery. I'm not surrendering that; but I am turning to a pedagogy that is teacher-driven—or most accurately, driven by the work that the teacher—moi—does. We'll see how this goes.

    Posted by senioritis at 08:10 PM | Comments (2)

    April 06, 2005

    April absolution

    Teachers all over central New York should just suck it up and give their students a break on April 7. Because April 6 was not only the first day of the year when temperatures were in the 60s, but it was the first day when they were in the 70s, as well. I walked outdoors at 4:00 p.m. and said, "Whoa~! What's this?" And I didn't go back indoors again till 7:00. I hope everybody had a terrific day outdoors and blew off all their so-called responsibilities. Nothing matters like the first warm, sunny day of the year. They should have a statement to that effect in upstate university catalogs and student handbooks. And faculty handbooks, as well.

    Posted by senioritis at 07:46 PM | Comments (2)

    More trucking songs

    Oh, my word. Out of the heap of LPs, Beloved Partner has exhumed this, and burned it to CD:

    Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen,
    Hot Licks, Cold Steel & Truckers Favorites (1972)
    1. Truck Stop Rock 2:43
    2. Truck Drivin' Man 2:50
    3. Rip It Up 2:50
    4. Cravin' Your Love 3:54
    5. It Should've Been Me 3:07
    6. Watch My .38 5:54
    7. Semi-Truck 2:23
    8. Kentucky Hills of Tennessee 4:03
    9. Looking at the World Through a Windshield 2:26
    10. Diggy Liggy Lo 1:55
    11. Mama Hated Diesels 5:18
    12. Tutti Frutti 2:50

    Also on the CD that BP just burned:
    The Flying Burrito Brothers,
    Last of the Red Hot burritos(1972)—side 1
    13. Devil in Disguise 3:51
    14. Six Days on the Road 3:05
    15. My Uncle 2:23
    16. Dixie Breakdown 2:08
    17. Don't Let Your Deal Go Down 2:27
    18. Orange Blossom Special 3:47

    It's interesting to listen to this stuff again. Southern rock just got harder and harder to listen to, especially as the artists began responding to Neil Young's "Southern Man." Those responses pushed them to obviously indefensible positions, and our discomfort with how well Southern rock lent itself to white supremacy—sometimes deliberately—made it just too hard to take. "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," for example: musically, I just love that song. But how can you tap your toes to a celebration of the Confederacy? It's not quite like watching Birth of a Nation to while away your leisure evening, but it's not that far off, either. Ironically, I can listen to Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" with a smile: to take it seriously would just be too ludicrous, and musically, it's a great song. But then again, am I not just in denial about the ways in which others might take up that song?

    Anyhow. In digging around for trucking music, we've unearthed Southern rock that we're able to enjoy, at least for the nonce.

    Posted by senioritis at 09:21 AM | Comments (0)

    April 04, 2005

    Trucking

    So if you were driving home on a Monday and had a wreck that totaled not only your car but somebody else's; if you were hospitalized from the accident; and if then you bought a pickup truck to replace your totaled car--
    What compilation CD would you make?

    The Truck Song Lyle Lovett
    Monday Wilco
    Ol' 55 Tom Waits
    Grand Prix Penelope Houston
    Driving Sideways Aimee Mann
    This Wheel's On Fire The Band
    Crackin' Up Bo Diddley
    Wasted On The Way Crosby, Stills & Nash
    Get Myself Arrested Gomez
    Hospital Food Eels
    The Medication Is Wearing Off Eels
    Emergency Surgery Gomez
    Drivin' Wheel Emmylou Harris
    On the Road Again Canned Heat
    Brand New Cadillac The Clash
    3 Speed Eels
    Don't Look Back Peter Tosh (with Mick Jagger)
    Don't Look Back Fine Young Cannibals
    Tiger In My Tank Eels
    Thunder Road Bruce Springsteen
    Woman Driving, Man Sleeping Eels
    Gasoline Alley Rod Stewart
    Truck Driver's Queen Moore And Napier

    Posted by senioritis at 07:19 PM | Comments (9)

    Funniest line in a rock & roll song

    What's your nominee? Mine's from the Clash: "Jesus Christ! Where'd you get that Cadillac?" Runnerup is from Outkast: "Lend me some sugar/I am your neighbor."

    Posted by senioritis at 10:48 AM | Comments (6)

    April 03, 2005

    And the rains came

    Our house is on high ground, secure, but some folks down the street have their houses standing in water. We went out a while ago to see how extensive the flooding is, and the answer is: pretty dang. Spring flooding is a spectator sport for us up here; it has none of the true menace that it does in, say, southwestern West Virginia. But these are the highest floodwaters we've seen up here, and this is our twentieth spring in central New York. A bit of context for the link above: Williamson, West Virginia, is where the Starter Husband and I parted company, in 1976, one year before the flood archived by the Charleston Gazette.

    Posted by senioritis at 02:33 PM | Comments (0)

    April 02, 2005

    Commonplace links

    Not building an argument here; just logging in some sources for possible future use:

  • Another story of professors plagiarizing from grad student work. And professors plagiarizing from professors. And universities trying to do something about it. And trying to figure out how they feel about what they've done. And institutions themselves plagiarizing.
  • Recent news on the charges of plagiarism against Ward Churchill. An editorial on the case.
  • Plagiarism amongst those who bring us the news.
  • Some of the conversation on WPA-L about teaching machines has turned to Turnitin.com as a "teaching machine."

    Posted by senioritis at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)

    Conceptual and lexical advances

    Taking a break from a handbook chapter I've avoided drafting (the chapter on paragraphing, avoided because it lends itself to so little innovation; paragraphing is a highly codified aspect of pedagogical discourse), I find this delightful post on TalkLeft. Delightful for many reasons: first, the notion of "trolls" and "chatterers," which so aptly captures the two most aggravating species of commenters on heavy-traffic blogs. Second, the notion of limiting known chatterers to four posts per day. Third, the very idea that one's blog would be so active as to need such strictures.

    Okay, back to Chapter Six.

    Posted by senioritis at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

    April 01, 2005

    Turkeys 3,000, Tom & Becky 0

    They're at it again. The wild turkeys have already invaded and started eating the tops off our tulips. They're getting a head start this year: usually they wait until the flower is just about to open, and then they eat the head off; apparently that's when the tulip is tastiest. And when they encounter daffodils, they dig 'em up, apparently in a rage at their not being tulips.

    This is the only time of the year that the turkeys come into our yard. And they come because Beloved Partner planted thousands—literally—of bulbs several years ago. Little did we know that it was simply an invitation to dine. We thought it was for human visual rather than turkey epicurean delight.

    Sometimes we get to see the tulips. But only sometimes. And there are some tulips that we've never seen. Each year they come up, and each year they are Turkey Lunch.

    Looking at this picture, I know, it's hard to imagine an invading flock of wild turkeys. This looks altogether suburban. Alas, no. We live in a village of under 800 people, and our property is 5 acres; in the 19th century, it was a chicken farm. So our back yard blends into our pastures, and beyond our pastures are swamp, more pastures, river, hills. Turkeyland. You might say that our neighbors on three sides are the Youngs, the Jantzens, and the Osbornes. And on the fourth side, the turkeys, the deer, the groundhogs, the skunks, the foxes, the raccoons. Wild Kingdom.

    Posted by senioritis at 09:29 AM | Comments (4)