April 27, 2008, 3:42 pm
By Claire Potter
A couple weeks ago, I Googled myself. Admit it: you do it too. But it really is worth doing occasionally if you have become a blogger, because it gives you the illusion that you have some clue as to whether you are being needlessly slandered by others. Strangely, Tenured Radical itself is #5 in terms of hits for “Claire Potter,” whereas a paper I gave at the University of Connecticut five years ago is on the top of the list (I suppose because the paper was about J. Edgar Hoover, who is slightly better known than I am.) But imagine my surprise when I saw at spot #3 the phrase: “Claire Potter is arrogant and inflammatory….” Whoa, now. Imagine my further surprise when, upon closer inspection, the post was not located in any place where I am used to being bashed for my politics or my behavior, but on the website faculty love to hate, RateMyProfessors.com.
Since I asked…
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November 9, 2007, 6:37 pm
By Claire Potter
Those of you who have been following Tenured Radical since before the 2.0 edition may remember the day when I realized (with a hot bang) that I had written about matters close to my heart in such a way as to lead my students and colleagues to believe that they could, or thought they could, recognize themselves in my blog entries. One offended colleague even wrote a snarky comment accusing me of being unfit to blog because, in one post, I had split an infinitive (yes, people were that upset.) I can’t guess in what department that person works. Can you?
Note: despite the difficult syntax, I did not conclude the penultimate sentence in the previous paragraph with a preposition. Ho ho ho. The grammarians aren’t going to have me to kick around anymore.
So what I am about to say skates on thin ice, I am sure, but only because a great many students say and do the same things, not because I …
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September 19, 2007, 12:35 am
By Claire Potter
Its been awhile. But don’t worry. I’m back, blog-dudes and dudettes.
Since I started Tenured Radical, except for vacation, I do not think I have gone six days without a new post, as I just did. I do not, as some bloggers seem to, experience guilt for neglecting my blog (one of my flaws, I have been told in my deep past by women heading out the door with suitcases in hand, is that guilt and I are not as fully acquainted as we might be.) But I do miss my audience, and I miss writing freely. I miss stealing pictures. I miss Flavia.
One of the reasons I have been absent is starting school in my dual roles as chair of American Studies and the Director of the Castle: it’s a little like being Batman and Robin at the same time. There are endless small but necessary tasks to be done every day, from signing many student forms (“Holy oversubscription, Batman!”) to making sure we have a proper …
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September 4, 2007, 10:23 pm
By Claire Potter
I haven’t forgotten that post I said I would do about what visitors should expect from the institutions that hire them. I even thought I might do that post tonight, as I was enjoying oatmeal with brown sugar and fresh bluberries, and a large glass of fresh squeezed o.j. early this morning at the student center. But not now, and this is why; today, as I was leaving the Castle, dead beat from a day of being chair, one of our visiting faculty came out of his office. He leaned over the bannister, gave me a big grin and said good night. Now wasn’t that nice? And our other visitors are terrific too — I can’t tell you how terrific, since I promised not to write about others. But aside from saving my life, they are really great, smart people, and genuinely excited to be at Zenith, which is nice to see.
So, the night before I start my survey course for the umpteenth time, I began to have…
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August 26, 2007, 1:02 pm
By Claire Potter
Hello New Professors!
Welcome to XU. Right now, your life is a rush of new knowledge, for which graduate school prepared you not at all. Sure, there are some experiences you have already had, like having to get a campus map in your head while you were unpacking and finishing your syllabus. (Actually — have your belongings arrived yet, or are are you balancing your lap top on your bicycle rack while sitting cross-legged on the floor? That’s what I thought.)
And there are other things you know — you have at least been a section leader at CU, or perhaps you have even run your own seminar, so you have some idea of what will happen on the first day of class. You are vowing to memorize all your students’ names in the first week, and you have even written a number of lectures in advance before things get crazy. Perhaps you have been assigned a mentor, having just escaped your graduate…
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August 1, 2007, 1:15 pm
By Claire Potter
In this post at Center of Gravitas Gayprof tells a story about having been diagnosed as color blind by a school nurse when he was but a wee Gayprof. Since the nurse explained nothing, and told him to go home and tell his parents, Gayprof — assuming that this was merely a stage on the way to complete blindness and wishing to shield the parental units from this tragedy — kept it to himself and merely suffered in silence until Nurse Ratched had the wit to call his home. Isn’t school great?
This caused me to think, in turn, about the most peculiar thing I ever got wrong as a child. On the first day of nursery school, perhaps as a way of staving off tears from the most delicate of us, the teachers would say every once in a while: “Your carpools will be coming soon!” Now, I knew what a car was — I had arrived in my mother’s big yellow Mercury. And I knew what a pool was: I swam…
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May 8, 2007, 5:50 pm
By Claire Potter
Tuition for a year at Zenith: $36,000
What forty students each paid in cash and loans for my lecture course: $4,500
Average sum spent on books for the course: $100
Look on my students’ faces when I told them that I knew how hard they had worked all term and the final was optional:
Priceless.
February 2, 2007, 7:34 pm
By Claire Potter
N. and I have cut a deal this semester that Breezy the Dog comes to school with me pretty much every day so that N doesn’t have to break up her writing to do dog things. This is fine, as coming to Zenith is one of Breezy’s favorite activities: there are long jogs around campus, where you can often find an old sandwich under a tree, and lots of admirers who want to make much of her. One time the President’s office called me on my cell as I was walking with her across the front lawn and said, “Would you bring your puppy up to say hello to everyone?” I have a crate in my office, a baby-gate for the door, and I’ve loaded up on dog supplies for the term. Since, with the advent of e-mail and JSTOR, none of us needs the file space we once did, one drawer serves as a storage cabinet for Greenies, dog food, rawhide chews, treats and a box of 1-quart plastic bags suitable for “…
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January 30, 2007, 2:22 am
By Claire Potter
PERFORMANCE ANXIETY
I recently received an email from a younger colleague about how much pressure s/he feels to “perform” for students. This concern followed on a set of teaching evaluations that, the same email said, were the “best ever.” So it looks like the great teaching evaluations, instead of bolstering confidence, made this young teacher feel as though the bar had been raised. Last semester’s “good” could not be good enough this term…..oy.
I’m trying to think about how to respond to this in a constructive way, but it caused me to think of a couple other things about teaching that, when I remember them, I try to pass on to my untenured colleagues.
1. When you are really sick it is ok to miss class. I know a very famous historian who told me, years ago when I was working for her, that she had never canceled a class, ever. This made a huge…
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