Thanks for your note today; your mom told me you’d be writing to me to get some advice about how to make your second year at college better than your first.
Let’s begin: The best way to get off to a good start with your professors is to call them “Professor,” and, if they’re women, not “Miss” or “Mrs.”; “Ms.” is preferable to either of those, but I’d stick with “Professor” since you know the person whose advice you’re asking happens to be one of those.
It’s also good to spell that person’s name correctly. You didn’t. Not even close despite the fact that you had the correct spelling right there in the email address.
If I mention these details early it’s only to begin our relationship the way I hope it will be built: I’m delighted to help you determine what’s best for you at UConn–and UConn has a great deal to offer–but I’m not going to coddle you or let you off…
11. “Have you ever wondered about the stupidity of the term ‘o’clock’? Americans have happily incorporated into our everyday speech a term that makes us sound like leprechauns.” Gene Weingarten, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The Washington Post, from The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life. And Death.
12. Voice-mail prompt: “After the tone please leave your I.Q. or your blood pressure, whichever is higher.” Lewis Frumkes, author of How To Raise Your I.Q. by Eating Gifted Children.
13. On health foods: “To strengthen their argument [about eating unprocessed foods] they tell you that peasant boys in Cuba, those kids out in the fields, eat raw sugar cane and they have perfect teeth. What they don’t tell you is that they develop rickets. ‘Look at me, Ma! No cavities! But I can’t walk too straight.’…After you eat all this, you can wash it down with tiger’s milk. So help me…
George Carlin (HBO photo by Paul Schiraldi on New York Times site. Click to get to source page.)
1-3. “Regardless of what other people say, my tendency to overreact and lose all perspective makes me a theatrically interesting person”; “Because I unfairly demand too much of myself, today I will allow myself to act in distinctly untrustworthy and irresponsible ways”; “I take pride in the fact that my personal power comes from my innate sense of insecurity.”
–Ann Thornhill and Sarah Wells, from Today I Will Nourish My Inner Martyr: Affirmations for Cynics
4. “Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.” –George Carlin
5. Sideshow Bob has the following exchange with his brother: “You wanted…
So I just finished a brief radio appearance (CBC) on the subject of Massive Open, Online Courses (MOOCs). The main guest was George Siemens who, with Stephen Downes, helped pioneer these courses in Canada. Even though all of the press coverage has gone to the competing Stanford edu-preneurs behind Coursera and Udacity, Siemens and Downes have done much of the most important work, theoretical and practical, distinguishing between good and bad MOOC’s.
At the heart of the work of Siemens and Downes is connectedness. Both have written importantly about the social character of learning, the way that actual learning means entering a community of persons asking tough questions, with a shared passion, etc. Relatedly, both insist that knowledge is not “a thing to be acquired,” but an activity. As any working researcher knows, academic, professional, medical, industrial, and pharmaceutical…
Last week, Judge Louis Freeh, a former director of the FBI, released a copiously detailed, lengthy report about Penn State’s role in Gerald Sandusky’s sexual abuse of boys on campus. The report notes that there was a “total disregard” for the young boys who were the sexually abused victims of Gerald Sandusky—the former coach. According to Freeh, the most senior members of the university’s governing structure, “failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade.”
Indeed, to those closely following the investigation, indictment, and trial of Sandusky, the report provided important details, but was no surprise. Last year, when I first blogged about this issue, I wrote, “More curious is the statement released by Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier, who claims the perjury charges against [Tim] Curley and [Gary] Schultz are …
1. Only you can figure out how to manage your personal and emotional life; as advisers we can listen, challenge comfort, and offer guidance. The guidance we can offer most effectively is of the professional sort.
You must handle your domestic conflicts in the appropriate arena while keeping a check on how they affect your productivity. Please don’t ask us to assist you with anything apart from your work too often, too regularly, or with too much of an emphasis on the thought that we are somehow responsible for getting you into this in the first place (we didn’t get you “with doctorate” the way some fly-by-night lover might get a woman “with child”).
It’s imperative that you learn to find out what works for you and this is the time to learn it. This is the…
Let me clarify that: my husband’s book–Poetry, An Introduction (fifth edition), published by Bedford/St. Martins–appears briefly but decidedly in the scene where Spider-Man first shows up at her bedroom window. As the good high school student Stone plays, she has a couple of books displayed prominently on the bedspread and TA-DA! Michael’s is one of them.
I was delighted by the prospect of seeing this shot the moment a friend from marketing told us about it; I dragged us both to an early show. I believe we were the only adults there unaccompanied by a teen-aged boy, but that was fine: I was on a mission.
We were going to see the book.
The other time we’d seen Michael’s book proudly displayed on camera was on a television screen, where Michael’s biggest edition of the book–the full-fledged Bedford Introduction to Literature, coming in at around 2,000 pages–was right there…
Your letter about how amazing it was to talk with your graduate student–the one who really GOT what you were saying and changed the direction of her plans–and then asked me why I recognized earlier in life the pleasures that teaching provides made me incredibly happy.
I’m not saying that only because it’s incredibly generous to me. You’ve always been that. But I’m saying it because you helped to remind me why teaching–good teaching– matters.
Coming to the profession as someone who has accomplished much in her own field and so was asked to teach it at the graduate level, you’re seeing clearly what makes teaching worth all the rest of the trouble. I needed the reminder and I’m grateful for it.
When you teach well, you know you’ve been useful. When you’re teaching really well, you know you’re doing something nobody else could have done as well as you did.
1. “I have never allowed my schooling to interfere with my education.” Mark Twain
2. “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” Mark Twain
3. “I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch.” Gilda Radner
4. . “Why are they called illegal immigrants? They’re undocumented workers. If someone broke into my house and vacuumed my rug, I might be puzzled. But mad?” Wanda Sykes
5. “Laughter rises out of tragedy, when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage.” Erma Bombeck
6. “’Deep’ is a word like ‘theory’ or ‘semantic’ — it implies all sorts of marvelous things. It’s one thing to be able to say ‘I’ve got theory’ quite another to say ‘I’ve got a semantic theory,’ but, ah, those who can claim ‘I’ve got a deep semantic theory,’ they are truly blessed.” Randy Davis
Cary Nelson completes his third consecutive term as AAUP president next week. No one serving in that role has accomplished so much with so little against a mountain of obstacles that would have sent weaker personalities scurrying back to their carrels and laboratory benches. During his tenure, he averted near-certain financial collapse, calmed near-annual rebellions from the union affiliates, appeased traditionalists, weathered the unionization of the staff, oversaw the departure of two general secretaries, rode out nearly-continuous irrational litigation, renovated an appallingly dysfunctional membership operation, herded the cats of Committee A, and brought communications to the very brink of modernization.
He never gave up on his efforts to refashion the organization into an institution…
I’m writing to you not as a member of Brainstorm, but as a one of the many poltroonish souls seduced into clicking onto the piece titled “What Professors Make.” We are legion; even though we might not have the guts to go find out what our individual colleagues are actually pulling in, despite the fact that at public institutions–such as UConn, where I teach–the information is readily available.
Anyways, everyone knows what professors make. Professors make trouble!
(Get it?)
But seriously folks . . .
I knew all too well what I was in for: I knew I would be reading an article that would make me want to compare myself to all the Professor Joneses of this world to see whether I was keeping up.
Grades are in; graduation photographs are posted on Facebook. Amanda Tinder Smith, erstwhile graduate candidate, is now Amanda Tinder Smith, Ph.D.–and will be starting work as a faculty member at Southwestern Oklahoma State University in the fall. Sam Ferrigno, B.A., has an internship at Yale University Press, where he’ll get to know Niamh Cunningham, who not only works at YUP but has completed the first year of her M.A. program in English at Yale. Next fall Lisa D is starting her M.F.A. at Columbia in play writing; three other former students will also start writing programs elsewhere.
The ceiling in my office is fixed. Nothing has fallen on my head–at least not literally–for several weeks now.
So far, so good, right? Some great recent graduates are still looking for serious work (I can supply them with excellent references) but at least we’re off to a good start for the summer…
This week Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown tossed race in the fire of his heated re-election bid against Harvard Law Professor, Elizabeth Warren. At issue is Elizabeth Warren’s voluntary listing as a “minority” in the American Association of Law Schools’ directory, which reports how law professors self-identify (by race and gender). For a decade (1986-1996), Warren listed herself as Native American rather than white and felt justified, and in her words, “proud” in doing so because of her great-great-great grandparent’s American Indian status.
Scott Brown’s team demanded that Warren issue an apology or proof. But, to whom and why? Legally, U.S. legislatures and courts imposed a “one-drop” status rule that held all persons of any African decent to be legally—and subordinately—“negro,” thus denying those even 1/16th black the privileges and rights afforded …
This is what one of my students wrote about me and I have decided that it’s how I want to be known for the rest of my life:
“You are the loudest teacher I have ever had. It’s not only your voice that’s loud, although nobody would ever call you a ‘low-talker,’ but everything about you is loud. The way you dress, the way you express your ideas about the books we’re reading, and the way you call on us to make sure we make our own ideas are heard is inescapable. We learned within the first two weeks that we couldn’t hide from you. You learned our names and you asked us to step up. Nobody (except that one girl and then only once) ever put her head on the desk and that’s because you demanded that we were fully present. When you told her that she couldn’t do that in your class we all heard you, loud and clear.
“Not that everything was clear. Sometimes when you talk very fast in your New…
250,000 students pack the streets in largest demo in Quebec history
A guest post by Lilian Radovac. (BTW, SoCal readers may want to know that Marc is speaking at UC-Irvine a 4 p.m. 4/23 on New Media/New Protests.)
On an unseasonably warm day in late March, a quarter of a million postsecondary students and their supporters gathered in the streets of Montreal to protest against the Liberal government’s plan to raise tuition fees by 75% over five years. As the crowd marched in seemingly endless waves from Place du Canada, dotted with the carrés rouges, or red squares, that have become the symbol of the Quebec student movement, it was plainly obvious that this demonstration was the largest in Quebec’s, and perhaps Canadian, history.
In my upper-division literature classes, we always end up talking about those astonishing moments when characters understand that their fates are indeed in their own hands, and we also end up spending lots of time discussing those equally shattering moments when characters lose their innocence. Sometimes these moments coincide in a narrative–or in a life. Often they do not.
Greta Scheibel, who graduated from UConn a few years ago, joined the Peace Corps, and is now Executive Director of United Planet Tanzania. She wrote two pieces that illustrate these moments. I’d like to give Greta the microphone today so that you hear her voice as she describes her experiences. The first is an excerpt from her essay in Make Mine a Double and it gives you a sense of what her time in Africa was like when she was first fully accepted into her village as a respected adult and member of the…
"Insufficient number of supporting examples. C-minus. Meep." (Photo by Flickr/CC user geishaboy500)
A just-released report confirms earlier studies showing that machines score many short essays about the same as human graders. Once again, panic ensues: We can’t let robots grade our students’ writing! That would be so, uh, mechanical. Admittedly, this panic isn’t about Scantron grading of multiple-choice tests, but an ideological, market- and foundation-driven effort to automate assessment of that exquisite brew of rhetoric, logic, and creativity called student writing. Without question, this study is performed by folks with huge financial stakes in the results, and they are driven by non-education motives. But isn’t the real question not whether the machines deliver similar scores, but why?
A little ceiling leak's gonna slow things down? Nah. (Photo by Sam Ferrigno)
UConn President Susan Herbst’s recent article in the Huffington Post defending the role of full-time scholars and teachers was encouraging to those of us who work at the place where she’s the new boss. Herbst seems like she’s doing a good job: The last time she met me she remembered my name. Pretty much that’s all it takes to be my best friend.
Apart from spending too much time–as does everyone else–talking about sports being UConn’s “front porch” (which seems to be losing several of its central pillars to the NBA draft, not that I’m bitter), to her credit Herbst has made a dedicated effort to meet the faculty. She’s been a presence on the campus and has pledged to support the hiring of new tenure-track faculty.
(If you haven’t seen the film, this version will give you the executive summary.)
Of course I discussed The Hunger Games in my classes this week, comparing it in its loathsomeness to Titanic. “You didn’t even like Titanic?!” yelled one outraged young woman from the back of the room. “How is that possible? Don’t you have any guilty pleasures?”
Let me explain my problems with Titanic, which just happened to be playing right next to The Hunger Games when I went to the multiplex last weekend thereby giving me a kind of filmic return-of-the-repressed experience:
(Prologue: Before we even get to the movie, let me tell you what bothered me about the title–did the writers believe that, by omitting the word “The” the dialogue would sound all English-y, and that by saying “We’re on Titanic” the way the Brits say “I’m off to hospital” we were meant to believe this…
When I wrote my book about what it was like to be a student at Dartmouth—Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League—I wrote it from the perspective of someone who was an outsider: as a working class, Italian-French-Canadian kid whose parents had not graduated from high school and who had no idea what she was getting herself into when she signed up to start college in Hanover, NH. Recently out in paperback, Babes has done pretty well for a woman’s memoir, received surprisingly good reviews from a wide variety of places, and—last I heard—was being adapted into a play by a senior at Amherst for her honors thesis. I’m proud of it. It’s a fairly subversive little book.
The guy who is getting lots of press because of the article in Rolling Stone, in contrast, is not exactly coming at the “Dartmouth experience” as an outsider: his grandfather and brother…
Posts on Brainstorm present the views of their authors. They do not represent the position of the editors, nor does posting here imply any endorsement by The Chronicle.
is an evolutionary biologist, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, and author of more than 30 books, most recently Homo mysterious: evolutionary mysteries of human nature.
directs the program in history and philosophy of science at
Florida State University. His forthcoming book is Science and
Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.
is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the communications program at Columbia University, and a prolific author whose most recent book is a novel, Undying.
I was delighted by the prospect of seeing this shot the moment a friend from marketing told us about it; I dragged us both to an early show. I believe we were the only adults there unaccompanied by a teen-aged boy, but that was fine: I was on a mission.
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