Geeky Mom

One more day of the workshop and then back to my regular life. I’m ready for it. It has been an invigorating workshop, but I’m ready to get going on some other projects, some related to the workshop itself. I’m still trying to figure out a way to organize everything, really prioritize things.

I have the summer program to attend to, so I definitely need to check in with all the students and see how they’re progressing.

I have another writing workshop to run next week.

I have a paper to write.

I have shorter workshops to run and a workshop series to plan.

I have a class to prepare for.

I have a lab to reorganize and prepare for the fall–order new equipment and software.

I have a website to revamp.

I have a blog server to revamp.

And I have some goals unrelated to the above.

How do I fit it all in? I’m dying to just sit down for a couple of hours and figure all of it out and how to get cracking. Because I think doing these things will be really good for the whole school. It’s gonna be a wild, but fun ride!

To balance out the heaviness of the last couple of posts, I bring you shoe blogging!

First, Geeky Girl’s new sandals:

Now, my new shoes, which will debut tomorrow at work:

And just for fun, my favorite sandals, purchased in Key West last year:

Mr. Geeky turned in his tenure packet. Now we wait until December/January to find out the results.

It’s odd how there are so many benefits to academic life–the freedom, the semi-flexible schedule, the “life of the mind”–but the cost at which those benefits come is so high. How many hoops must one jump through just to keep a job? And Mr. Geeky is lucky. How many academics have a job made possible in part by the underpaid part-timers who teach the classes considered too “elementary” for senior or now, even junior, faculty? And let’s not even talk about the cost to families and spouses. I’ve given up two careers already for Mr. Geeky’s and I doubt I’ll have to give up my current one, but the toll is exacting and in some couples we know, too much for their relationship to withstand. How many times can you uproot a spouse or family before they start to resent you?

Mr. Geeky and I were discussing how difficult this whole process had been and how much more difficult it would have been if both of us were going through it. There were lots of reasons for my not finishing and pursuing an academic career. First, I just didn’t enjoy it, not just the writing of the disseration, which no one really enjoys, but the whole hierarchical way the system works, from internal hierarchies of adjunct to full professor to external hierarchies based on US News rankings. Value gets placed on the wrong things. Second, I didn’t see any good job prospects out there that required a Ph.D. Thanks to the hierarchy, I wasn’t qualified for a job at a “good” school with a decent workload. I was only qualified to teach at “lesser” schools with a heavy workload, something I knew wouldn’t work given my family life and my husband’s workload. Though I could see myself teaching, I could not see myself teaching 4 classes a semester (or 5 in some cases). Maybe now I could, but I do like having a life.

Frankly, I think the whole tenure system is messed up in most places. It encourages conservatism in a lot of ways. Innovation isn’t rewarded; having the right number of articles in the right places is. And the old guard often decides what those “right” places are. Trying out new teaching methods is likely to backfire since it will result in bad student evaluations. Using student evaluations exclusively is problematic in and of itself. And the system creates this weird situation where younger/newer faculty are afraid to speak their minds for fear of retribution when it comes time to review their work for tenure. So curriculums don’t change; policies and procedures don’t change; things stagnate. And the expectations for tenure keep creeping up and are often not articulated clearly. Many things are not in writing. Under publications, the guidelines might say, “sufficient.” What is sufficient? 3 articles, 5? a book? two books? Smaller institutions start imitating resource-rich ivy leagues in their tenure requirements, leaving faculty to compete for grants and publications with faculty who have legions of support behind them.

Don’t get me wrong, I think tenure can be a great thing. Academic freedom is important, but aren’t there ways of ensuring that without this arcane system? Isn’t it crazy to think that after all this effort and work and contribution to a field of study that Mr. Geeky will not just be denied a raise (which is what might happen in a corporate environment) but will be fired? Six years of good faith effort, of real work–teaching, research, service–might end in a pink slip.

tenure

And by class, I don’t mean classroom. I mean cultural/financial class. New Kid mentioned in her post about class last week that she feels insulated, about not being able to have conversations with people outside of her class so that she doesn’t forget what it’s like to be of a lower class or to understand what it’s like:

What I find hard is figuring out where the kinds of conversations you talk about can happen. So many of the activites in which any of us take part are already divided by class. for instance, if I go workout at the Y, I’m talking to people like me who’ve got enough money to pay for a Y membership, and who’ve got time to go to the Y, and who don’t work manual labor jobs where they’re too exhausted to go to the Y. And if I go at certain times of the day I’m probably only going to run into other professional types. The grocery stores I shop at are firmly middle-upper class stores – why? well, because they have the things I want to buy, and I find the experience of shopping there pleasant.

I got a good dose of cross-class conversation at my hairdresser’s this morning. Her entire family has a gambling problem. She used to have a gambling problem and other addictions. I know that wealthy people also have gambling problems, but it seems to me that more people in my hairdresser’s realm–lower-middle class perhaps–are more likely to gamble. We live very close to Atlantic City. It’s about an hour’s drive away. It’s very easy just to go for the night. My hairdresser and her family routinely go and spend hundreds of dollars gambling. As she said, it’s not a problem if you have the money to do it. It’s like going to an expensive hotel or something. But if you start tapping into the money that you need for bills, then things are getting bad.

The allure of gambling to her and her family seemed to be the promise of extra cash to buy stuff. She said her sister went to Wal-Mart and spent her winnings immediately. She’s not an educated woman and neither is her family. They are stuck in dead-end jobs. They own houses and cars; they’re not on the verge of poverty, but they have no way of moving up except by gambling, winning the lottery, etc. For most of the people I’m friends with, the way to moving up is to do better at your current job or get a better-paying job primarily by gaining experience or education. Or we scrimp a little, put money aside to buy a bigger house, bigger car, better vacation (or vacation at all), nicer clothes, etc. Saving is not an option for many of the people I see just below my class level (it’s barely an option for me). They’re already living paycheck to paycheck, sometimes as a result of poor financial decisions (buying a plasma tv on credit, for example), but not always. Saving requires some discipline and delayed gratification. Our society doesn’t really teach this. Buy now! Only 29.95/month! 0% interest for the first six months! Cut taxes and start an expensive war! Borrow money to pay for Social Security! Somewhere we need to teach those lessons. People say parents should do it, but so many people have parents that need to be educated and it’s hard to combat the ads, the movies and tv shows that throw glamorous lifestyles on credit at us every day.

I did not say anything to my hairdresser. If she wants to gamble, that’s fine. But I also wanted to say that Donald Trump is counting on people like her to make his fortune. The rich make their money from people who are trying hard to be just like him. But there’s no way she’d see that.

Tangled And Dark–Bonnie Raitt
Dark Time For The Light Side–Doris Henson
Dark Star–Grateful Dead
Darkness–Kelley Hunt
Still Dark Out–Let’s Active
My Dark Hour– Steve Miller Band
Whistling In The Dark–They Might Be Giants

a la Kathy and Scrivener

Interestingly, none of us have the same songs.

random10, fridayshuffle

Michelle, a colleague of mine, has a great post on the hidden women of science. It’s definitely worth a read.

I’m still processing a lot of information, so I haven’t worked out exactly what my thoughts are, but wanted to get them down. And since we’re transitioning from one blogging software to another at work, this is doubling as my “work” blogging.

Today was the technology day, the day we paraded a bunch of different technology options in front of them and talked about how they might use it to give better feedback on student writing. We had everything from Acrobat to Word to DyKnow to Blackboard. I did the Blackboard part, which I didn’t really like doing (which probably showed) because I really think that Blackboard is a good administrative tool and a bad pedagogical tool. Fortunately, we have a plug in for Blackboard that creates a wiki and blog-like areas, so I focused on those.

I actually like the wiki area because it’s much easier to use than regular wikis. There’s no additional code or markup to remember. It’s very easy to figure out how to use and it has lots of possibilities. You can upload files and and images and generally create a pretty decent-looking web site. You can even get to the html underneath and do some fine-tuning. You could also do things like highlight and change text color and you could track changes by looking at the page history. So you could see a project evolve over time. It was hot and I was tired and they were tired, so I didn’t quite enthuse enough about some of these possibilities.

I was thinking about some of the responses I’ve gotten to the previous post and about some of what I think I’m hearing about writing from the participants. This formal structure thing is *huge* and unfortunately, it’s something that’s mostly foreign to humanities, even writing folks. It’s not that writing in the humanities doesn’t have a structure; it does. But that structure is not explicit. For example, a lit paper may lay out a kind of lit review or methodology section by reviewing the previous research on the topic at hand. But this is done in a a kind of narrative fashion and there’s no heading that says “Literature Review” as there often is in quantitatively-oriented papers.

When I was studying composition and rhetoric more formally, we would call the formal structure of a science/social science paper an artifact or an indicator of the discourse community. Students would struggle with figuring out what the structure was and how to write so as to appear part of the community. So what I was thinking was that the structure, since it is so formalized, is easy to master. It’s the more subtle aspects of that discourse community that are difficult to master. And so what we were trying to do was to find ways to encourage that mastery among students without having to invest an enormous amount of time.

There were two things that seemed key. One was writing a good assignment and making sure that within that assignment, your expectations were clear. This does not mean creating a 5-page treatise on what to do and not do, but creating a simple, clear description of the task.

Another key was letting go. And this was the doozy for a lot of people. The key to mastering writing (at least one of them) is practice. Give the students an opportunity to practice a lot. This means letting them participate in discussions and review each other’s work with the professor merely checking in once in a while to make sure things are going in the right direction. There were a few people who expressed concern about this because they were going to lose control of the situation. What if they do something wrong? But they don’t need to discuss things with each other in writing because they can do that in person. What this boils down to is, what if they don’t need me anymore?

When I worked at a greeting card company years ago, we had a card with an unfortunately close typesetting. The card read, at first glance, “LET GO GOON!” It became our motto for those stubborn folks who can’t seem to let go of something; they’re gnawing at a bone. It really read, of course, “LET GO GO ON!” And that’s what I want to say sometimes. If you let go of x and let the students really work on it (with guidance from you once in a while but not your controlling presence), then you can go on to y or z. And the students will know x a lot better than you might think.

Because I get to have conversations with people like this.

We’re in the middle of this Writing in the Quantitative Disciplines workshop, which is absolutely fascinating–from a technology standpoint, from an ethnographic standpoint, from a pedagogical standpoint–just fascinating.

One of my favorite moments came at the reception when Bryan and I began talking about tagging. And we’re both pretty excited about it and we’re explaining it and basically riffing off of each other. We were already on one side and the faculty on the other, but the space between us seemed to widen a bit. They weren’t quite ready for folksonomies yet. It was quite amusing.

Lots of good conversations have taken place and it seems like people are really processing a lot of ideas here. One of the things that a group of us were talking about later was that we (being humanities people) don’t always understand what the Quantitative Discipline folks meant by writing. Which sounds weird, but it seemed like they were trying to make a distinction between the kind of text-based writing that humanities people do and some other kind of writing that science people do. Writing is writing, right? It’s just the conventions and style that change? What’s your definition of writing?

Happy Birthday Geeky Girl! I hope you enjoy six as much as you seemed to have enjoyed five. Even though it may drive us crazy sometimes, I hope you keep talking and telling us stories. Just pause every once in a while to breathe and listen to what others have to say.

A while back over at Jody’s place, she was talking about refilling her cup and the possibility that it has a crack in it and that it’s impossible to fill. I’m feeling much the same way lately. When I first took this job, it filled my cup. It was interesting work. The people were interesting. I enjoyed. When I think about it, it’s still mostly that way, but what do you do when your work is draining you and your home life is draining you. There’s nowhere to go to fill your cup. And if your cup is cracked anyway . . .

I know exactly why I feel the way I do right now. It’s not just the stress of projects at work and kids’ birthdays and inlaws visits. Those might give me a sort of manic high if I weren’t hormonally imbalanced at the moment. Seriously, having your emotional life determined by hormonal fluctuations is no fun. Because your brain says, “Man, you’re being bitchy and grumpy for no reason,” while your emotional center feels about 12 and wants to cry about everything. This is all because I failed to pick up a birth control prescription on time. It’s amazing what that stuff does for my emotional balance.

That said, I did have a truly horrific day at work yesterday. The air conditioning in my building was broken so it was about 85 degrees. They started pouring concrete next to my building and the fumes from the truck were filtering right into my office. I couldn’t leave my office because I was working on the workshop for Thursday. Then I realized that said workshop is taking place in a room with construction next door and will have to be relocated. The best alternative location is already taken. And people were calling me all day for little problems, including one phone call to assist with hooking up home DSL. People, that’s why there’s tech support for these products. One more time: I am not tech support for your home computer.

Then I came home and was a total grump to my whole family. I feel bad about this, but my eyes were burning from the fumes and I’d been sweating all day and I didn’t get any kind of down time. I hate that. Oh, and I was going to do a couple of things last night and we had a huge thunderstorm and the electricity was out until midnight and now I feel like I have license to say–good enough, it’s good enough. I don’t care anymore.

I just have to get through this workshop which ends on the 13th and my summer begins. I can work on projects, guide the students through theirs and soon it will be vacation time and planning for the fall and all will be okay.

One thing’s for sure, I’m not forgetting that prescription again!