Annie’s First Anniversary
Posted by: annieem on: November 22, 2009
My very first blog posting as Annie Em one year ago today was nothing special: a self reflection on why, in the midst of a very busy November, I was even starting a blog. November 22nd is one of those days in Annie’s personal, only-a-mother-would-care history: I was supposed to be born on this day 46 years ago. My strong, single 20 something year old mom was sitting in a rocking chair, all packed, waiting for her first little bundle of joy to be born (the doctor SAID I’d be born on this day, so of course he was right, despite also telling her a few years earlier that she was “barren”), while her own mother nagged her about this and that (undoubtedly about her hair and her impending single motherhoodness).
But, perhaps, in my first feminist act, I chose not to be born on the day the sexist prick of a doctor ordered. Or perhaps, having heard about the assassination of JFK, I simply refused to enter a world where my birth would be overshadowed by such a national tragedy.
And 45 years later, I started a blog. I’m sure there’s no coincidence whatsoever.
And since then, I’ve also joined Facebook (mostly for sharing photos with friends and family members), and, a few weeks ago, Twitter (mostly for professional contacts). But only here am I free to be Annie Em, not beloved daughter, silly friend, or colleague.
Now, how to celebrate an anonymous blog? I’m thinking of changing the blog’s theme. Or, writing a posting about my favorite-least favorite-most embarrassing postings (a sort of belated response to Dr. No’s call for postings).
Or maybe I’ll do nothing. After all, I’m only a 1-year old blogger. I should just smear cake all over my face, grin for the camera, and gurgle with glee while playing with the wrapping paper.
Friday Funny: Buffy Does Edward Cullen (In)
Posted by: annieem on: November 20, 2009
Shaken, not all stirred up
Posted by: annieem on: November 19, 2009
It’s one of those weeks in academia:
- schedules for 2010-11 are due
- book orders for next quarter are due
- essays need to graded and returned
- that essay I promised to write a few months ago is due
- references still need to be written
- requests for sabbaticals are due shortly
- students’ grandmothers are dying left and right
- H1N1 has taken over our town
- colleagues are walking around sleeplessly and no one has cleaned the office coffee pot in days
- I’m watching Dexter to relax at night, and, despite that, I had a nightmare about something even weirder: Sarah Palin was chasing me
- did I or did I not buy my plane tickets for the MLA?
- and the house is a wreck and not at all ready for Turkey day
Luckily, NPR has an app for all of that: a ginger martini recipe.
Changing Directions
Posted by: annieem on: November 15, 2009
In a recent issue of Harvard Magazine, one of my graduate school professors (before he was at Harvard), Louis Menand, encourages graduate schools to change directions:
Doctoral education is the horse that the university is riding to the mall. People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized, since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently.
After receiving my Ph.D. (and I raced through that degree, student loans gnawing on my heels, despite teaching at several colleges at the same time), I wrote an article complaining about the narrowness of my graduate school education. While I spent days immersed in the appropriate biographies and fictions of my chosen authors, as well as feminist and literary theory, by 3pm I’d stop, watch a rerun of Thirtysomething to clear my head, then head to whatever college I was teaching at that evening, trying to “teach [my] fields to non-specialists”. Despite one required class in Teaching College English, I was still a novice at teaching, creating assignments, classroom management, evaluating student writing. I wanted my graduate program to offer me more help with the job I was so clearly “credentializing” to do.
And now, as I spend my weekends alternatively evaluating how well I did with that teaching (aka grading essays), and working on two articles “for a general audience” as well as a presentation that is part of my own quest to “justify [my] work to people outside [my] discipline and outside the academy,” I take another look back at my graduate education, and remember that yes, there was one professor who took pains to explain how we could improve our writing, requiring that we read and respond to each other’s drafts, and another who encouraged us to present our work at smaller interdisciplinary conferences, thus forcing us to write for a wider audience. I had hoped those rare professors of the early 1990s were much more common now, but Menand’s essay suggests otherwise—at least at Harvard.
Menand’s essay concludes with a warning, however, that graduate education should change directions, become more like a law degree in terms of efficiency (so at least 3 years in length but fewer than the 10 it takes many students?), yet still maintain its purpose of creating the next generation of cultural watchdogs, of sorts:
But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate. Academics need to look to the world to see what kind of teaching and research needs to be done, and how they might better train and organize themselves to do it. But they need to ignore the world’s demand that they reproduce its self-image.
I don’t work with graduate students beyond those few working on a teaching-centered masters degree, so I’m far removed from that world now. But I know many academic bloggers do. Is graduate school, particularly in English, changing in ways that reflect the need for less insularity? Is it a degree that can prepare someone to be not just an academic (in a market with fewer tenure track job openings annually*) , but also a public intellectual and someone who is seen as being an asset in other, non-academic, fields? If so, how are they changing exactly? I’m curious.
* Added 16 Nov 2009: Mark Bauerlein blogged about the dismal job opening numbers in English and languages.
Writing, or I Want a Margarita and I Want it Now
Posted by: annieem on: November 11, 2009
- In: writing
- 7 Comments
Since I teach writing, I make it a point to write regularly. No, not just blogging (where I’m not exactly regular), but writing for publication: writing that will be evaluated by others, just as my students’ writing is evaluated by their peers and by me.
I usually try to submit an essay or article a year, sometimes more. And I tell my students, too, sharing my progress on my essays, as I show them the various strategies for developing ideas, drafting, revising and editing.
Yesterday, as she left my office after a rather cheerful discussion of a fairly decent rough draft, a student asked me (not without a bit of a smirk): “So, how’s YOUR essay coming along? You haven’t mentioned it lately.”
Well. She’s right. That’s because it was still stuck in that early process stage, or 13 pages of notes and ideas in not quite any logical order (the “down draft” or “child’s draft” according to Anne Lamott). This for an article with a 1000-word limit. So today (a holiday in our state) I’ve been focusing on selecting, organizing and editing. I’m down to 6 pages now–about 3 pages too much–but it’s nicely readable.
Yet, it’s also at that stage where the editing can get a bit painful. I LIKE my ideas, my words. You mean I have to keep cutting?
So I thought I’d spend a few hundred words complaining here instead.
Now that I’m finished, however, I need to go sharpen my knife editor’s pencil.
Is it happy hour somewhere yet?
I Ran (So Far Away) Like Hell
Posted by: annieem on: November 8, 2009
- In: Running| music
- 5 Comments
[Thanks for the new ipod music, Inky]
I Ran Like Hell
Posted by: annieem on: November 5, 2009
- In: Running
- 7 Comments
Despite the injury I’ve been recovering from; despite running a 5K earlier in the morning as part of my weekly group training; despite being dressed up in an apron and donning red braids and a plastic cap, I ran like hell on Halloween during a local 5K race: 27:46.
[Serious runners, please stop laughing. Everyone else, bow in awe.]
Since it was a fun run, I also placed higher than I ever will again: 2nd in my age group (and in my town, mine is quite the competitive age group), 41st overall (out of 150+ runners).
Not bad for an old hag!
[Correction Nov 11, 2009: It seems I HAVE run a faster 5K recently: s recently as June I ran a 26:06 3.1 mile race. Great. Now THAT'S my goal for the turkeyday run.]
On When I Misread a Student
Posted by: annieem on: November 4, 2009
I had her pegged so wrong.
She is young, beautiful, polite, a good student and writer, but with a lovely inner stubbornness. On the first day of class when I ask each student to introduce themselves she gave us her name and said that she is a proud Christian. (Not an unusual demographic at our college, with the local mega-church across the street.)
She struggled when asked to choose a topic for the rest of the term’s projects (a review of the literature on a controversial issue, and then an argument essay on that same issue). First, she investigated the issue of dating, and whether dating led to divorce.
This topic confused me at first, until an ex-fundamentalist Christian I know filled me in on the idea that some religious groups believe that young people should not date, but that their relationships should be arranged by their elders. The theory is that dating different people sets one up for a failed marriage in the future (because of the memories of those cool dates? that part I can’t quite figure out).
But the young woman student didn’t find any sources on that subject, interestingly, even after I tried to point her in the direction of arranged marriage (not where she wanted to go).
Now her topic is Are fathers necessary? And she has found many sources on the subject: those arguing that fathers are not necessary for raising (rearing?) children; those that argue that fathers are necessary economically and for socialization; and those that take the middle ground (a father figure is necessary, though not necessarily the biological father).
I, naturally, assumed she would argue that a father was necessary; however, since their first essay is an objective review of the research, I don’t know for sure where she stands.
Until 3am last night, when it occurred to me that she is probably pregnant (I’m noticing weight gain, and odd food choices during class). And that the biological father is probably not sticking around. And that this is a serious issue for her.
I have no intention at this point of asking her: I’ll just see what I see in her writing. But this young, stubborn girl fascinates me. She is such a good student, a good writer, yet she tells me she’s leaving college after this term (more evidence, I realized at 3am, for my 3am brainstorm). I can’t wait to see her essay.
Or should I talk to her?
On the Joys of Teaching First Year Composition
Posted by: annieem on: November 3, 2009
One of the real pleasures of teaching the first year composition courses is that I encourage students to choose their own topics. Being on the dreaded quarter system, we teach three levels of first year composition (the first two are required for most students, while the third is required for transfer students):
Comp I: Students will be submitting their informative researched essays tomorrow. Topics range from What is up with NASA? to Why the latest Vocaloid is Cool to How the history of tea houses intersects with political revolution. There are also at least two papers on Zombies that I’m truly looking forward to reading.
Comp II: Students will be submitting their researched exploratory argument essays next week. Topics range from Are fathers necessary? to Why has Harry Potter causes such a ruckus in literacy studies? to Is separation of church and state truly viable?
Comp III: Students are working on their extended researched essays, and have just submitted their formal outlines in anticipation of drafting their essays this week. Topics range from What roles do angels play in various religions and cultures? to How has US action and influence, guided by current foreign policy, affected our citizens and the developing nations involved? to Has the way society treats transgendered people changed, and if so, it is enough?
As one student put it today, I must be great at party small talk after reading a batch of essays on such a variety of topics.
I’m looking forward to reading and learning, but evaluating/grading–not so much. I plan to stock up on tea, gin and cookies for the next few weeks.
Would you please please please stop talking?
Posted by: annieem on: October 30, 2009
I love my colleagues–I really do. Most of us have been working together for 14 years, so we’re well established in our family roles. The three new folk also seem to be negotiating their own positions in the family, too. Thus, our meetings tend to have the same ebb and flow each year.
This is particularly true when we have meetings with just the full time faculty: that’s rare, since we at least try to welcome part timers to our department meetings. But each fall only the full timers meet to “discuss” who gets which literature and humanities classes for the following year. You see, literature and humanities classes are the gold ring: we don’t teach enough (composition courses are the bulk of what we offer) to allow everyone to teach them, thus only the full timers get these gems: but only 1 gem per quarter per instructor.
Perhaps you can imagine the negotiating that goes on during a meeting where we each try to get the course we want during the days/times we want to teach it (we can’t all teach on TR at 10am, for example).
In a successful attempt by our last two chairs to delegate, I’ve been tasked with planning and leading this particular meeting each fall for years. It makes me quite popular: during the weeks leading up to this meeting, I get e-mails and office visits from faculty who want to lobby for a particular course and time slot. Most of us are generalists and can teach many of the literature/humanities courses; those courses that do require more expertise, of course, are usually assigned easily. But then there is the limit on the number of courses we can offer, and the requirement to offer a variety of Humanities courses on various campuses in various formats and times. And then there are those courses that are very, very desirable.
We are mostly collegial and polite, so it always works out in the end, but the meeting itself can be a frustrating deja vu, as the paternal figure of the group begins by announcing his courses and times, interrupting others during the meeting to make changes as he contemplates the schedule I’m showing on the overhead.
Then there’s the maternal figure of the group, who is as demanding and loud as the paternal figure, but her interruptions are more about what she thinks others would really want (such as, I know so and so here has children, so he shouldn’t be asked to teach at night).
Then there is the ne’er do well or blacksheep of the family, who, of course, doesn’t attend the meeting but sends me a list of desired courses and times. We are all aware that the blacksheep’s enrollment has been suffering, and thus we have a polite, beat around the bush conversation rearranging the blacksheep’s selections in such a way that we think will help enrollment in those sections (popular formats and times).
Then we have the younger child, the older child, and the middle child playing out their various roles, from “It’s MY turn to get that course/time” or “I think we should offer JargonyPostModCrit as a general education course!”
I’m rather tasky, so the meeting moved along despite the MANY interruptions and glitches, and personal tales.
But the toughest thing for me is saying (several times): “I’m sorry, I’m trying to hear so and so speak” or “I’m sorry, but I believe so and so was speaking.” Or variations on the theme.
And trying very hard NOT to say, “Would you please please please please please stop talking?“
