interesting spam

I've been getting really interesting spam. I know, silly, right? But I can't help but think that some of these lines read like something created from the cut-up method we've studied so much this term (enough that I'll probably be sharing these from time to time, don't mind me):

When people ask me what really changed my life eight years ago, I tell them that absolutely the most important thing was changing what I demanded of myself.

Twenty years ago, the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife instituted an any

If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.

The watch is surrounded by ninety bezel set diamonds that weigh.

What do you think about this sleek and contemporary Zoppini.

Blue topaz is created by irradiating very pale topaz, and. Just about everyone who knows anything about the industry adds his two bits about how dangerous it is and how.

And I mean this with all due respect.

Let's talk necklaces to see which types of necklaces work best. Even in the knocks of life, we can find great gifts. Make sure you understand what is the right time and what is the wrong time!

a believer that he set up a worm composting bin in his garage at home

But Paisleys not your average citizen. bicycle in the back that had been stolen from a residential garage on Municipal .
If it's later in the evening and I'm alone, I'll take a cab before I'll leave my car in a cavernous parking garage.

One of the issues I hit while setting. The concept involves storing next-of-kin contact information in your cell phone under the acronym ICE so that EMT, police and other first reponders can quickly locate the information. said David Gilbert, co-owner of the Old Yellowstone Garage restaurant in .

Winter also accelerates the tendency of plastic to degrade over time.

He fused monoclonal antibody and synthetic peptide technologies and accepted a staff position at Scripps.

The results, no matter the cause, are horrific and devastating. Greasemonkey enables the execution.

In the meantime, they recommend you keep your recreational equipment inside a garage or at an off-site storage facility.

Thankfully for them fashion is no longer out of their reach

The reason is simple; the companies that store the cord blood tout the advantages to saving this once in a lifetime supply of stem cells.

In some cases hair loss is a medical problem but in many it is hard to find the exact cause for it. For some, that fascination with big trucks never wanes, these are the truck drivers of America.

These are now considered to be distant cousins of the everyday wheelchairs.

This is a very common procedure and can yield some very important information for the doctor as to your health and wellbeing. That could be metal pieces, wood chips, plastic shards or anything else that you work with on a regular basis. The DWI laws are changing faster than most people can keep up with them.

This is a process that requires additions of or removal of skin, cartilage, all in order to make the person more stunning in their own eyes.

If you have thought about learning to drive a tractor trailer, you might have questions about where to start and what to look for in a school.

No, buying a vehicle of any sort has become relatively difficult.

AFROMET supporter and British Member of Parliament Derek Wyatt has put down a motion calling on the British Museum to return a number. Maybe you have tried sleeping aids and found that they left you feeling groggy and sluggish the next day. These are used in the computer world and have been taken by storm in the gaming communities.


....
See what I mean? I'm thinking there's got to be a way to construct some kind of writing around these. Heck, I can just see me trying to make an assignment out of this (then again, most of my students probably get porn spam instead of my eloquent spam, oh well). I get a couple paragraphs worth of this a day.

I believe that this spam is trying to get itself past spam blockers by pulling off random words and groups of words from other sites or e-mails, no matter what, I think the weird combinations are kinda fascinating.

random unconnected crap

Doesn't that title make you feel like reading?

I've begun to wonder why people can't seem to discuss teaching methods and philosophies around these parts without fighting or getting upset, or at the very least not being very fruitful. I've heard a bit of this going on, and it's very very foreign to me, having worked two other places where since we had nothing else in common, really, talking about students and teaching was a nice neutral ground where we were, more or less, guaranteed to have a nice conducive discussion. Weird.

Of course, this is probably why Jeff doesn't let us discuss these things very often in class. I thought he was being persnickety, now I'm thinking he was being smart. Hrm.

I have discovered that there is a limit to the number of external drives my computer (mac) will find at boot up. I am amused. Next time I get one of these damn things I should get a bigger hard drive.

My mom's car died last Wednesday night, which is bad because I may need it Thursday (I have to sub and then will get 15 minutes to drive to campus, and it's supposed to be freezing rain/snowing then). Yes, it's warm now.

Now, I'm pretty sure I know what's wrong with it, so I wrote it down and had her take it to the dealer to have the part replaced. Apparently, since it is not setting a code in the computer AND they couldn't get it to "not start" then there's nothing wrong and she's out of $80. She wouldn't let them yell at me. They quiver in their manly boots when they see me coming.

And of course as of yesterday it was once again not starting. Technology had fucked us over, right?

But no no, I *like* computers remember? Even the one in her car that can't bother to record the 10-15 times her car is idling incorrectly and dying.

So I took my video camera, out for the project I'm doing for Jeff's class, and recorded the damn thing "doing its thing" and told her to take it back, camera with tape in hand, tomorrow. They can't possibly claim that nothing is wrong with proof right there.

All hail the glorious cyborg, for she screws with misogynistic mechanics. Whoot.

*pokes at her mac with a stick*

So I've discovered a great big rule: never throw anything away or copy over it if you MIGHT use it for school again.

The summer before I defended my thesis I was in a Vaudeville show. I wanted to tape it, but forgot to buy new mini dv's for that explicit purpose. So I taped over some raw footage that I had used in a project earlier that year (which I am now hacking apart for my "final project" for class) which was fine at the time. Not so cool when I figure out that was the tape that I had all my interviews on.

Yeah, I'm stupid. Don't mind me.

Fortunately I found a really nice cheap tool that FINALLY worked to pull off the video + audio and squish them back together properly from the DVD I have of the first project (it's 30 minutes long). What's bad is that I know there was some original video that would work better than what was left (and I did have about four hours anyway, just not what I wanted) but I guess I have to make do.

But what this leaves me with is pre-edited video, disembodied voices in parts over explanatory video, and a lot of talk about literacy that I flat out don't need for this project.

It also leaves me with a couple audio level drops that I can't fix without doing a lot of extra work (yes, I know about the clip volume adjustment thingy in iMovie, and I've been using it, and I know I could export the clip in question and increase its volume and then re-import it, but when I do that it gets static-y, and I KNOW I could use some expensive software I have to clean the damn audio by hand, but...)

Yeah, but. But if I were one of my students I'd tell them to leave it, that the message of the video isn't lost because of these 2 random audio drops. That they shouldn't spend HOURS cleaning up one section (though they would for a more professional, being paid for project).

I think if the computer were running more smoothly it'd be easy for me to say that I'm definitely going to clean it up. But as it stands I feel like I'm poking it with a stick and rebooting a lot just to get what I've got. Plus I couldn't even get iMovie to load the waveforms for my mp3s to line stuff up as well as I'd like, I don't think I have a chance in hell of getting any of my audio software to run that's more advanced than Audiacity (which I hate, with a bloody passion, but have been using anyway because it doesn't eat up all my processing power).

I dunno, I'm *not* my own student in this case, even though I'm doing my own assignment. Bah, maybe I'll finish some other stuff and see how much time I have left first...

flightless birds and missed kairos

I really had no idea what I was getting into when I went to see Happy Feet yesterday. I've seen the previews, I thought it'd be a cute kids' movie about an outcast who tap dances instead of sings, and I both sing AND tap dance, so how could it miss?

Well, the movie wasn't about that, it was a 2 hour rhetorical strike against the fishing industry, which doesn't count as a "miss" automatically in my book. But it DID miss, no matter what the critics tell you, and I'm pretty sure that if I had taken a kid to this movie that I'd be downright angry at the heavy handed rhetoric being forced onto my kid that I had NO idea about based upon the previews and all the toys.

So first, I'll warn that there are spoilers here. But if you have kids, some of these spoilers might be useful to you--I dunno. But if you wanna be surprised, stop here.

Still with me? Good. So here's where the movie's rhetoric shined, and shined so much I actually thought they were going to pull it off:

1. Near the end of the movie, Mumble uses his dance moves to communicate with man, bring man to his fellow penguins, and get man to help them out. The previews certainly did the same trick to me--the dancing penguins in the previews WORKED to get my ass into the movie theater.

2. Somewhere in the middle Mumble is playing with some new friends and they start an avalanche of sorts. You see this big piece of construction equipment fall off the cliff with them, seemingly randomly. In any order animated film this would be something to laugh at, some random visual element thrown in for laughs. But it wasn't, they used it, and did so well.

3. The movie adequately calls upon both the concept of the "Other" in Mumble and also sets him up to be the one true savior of penguin society--and if they'd left it there, it might have worked. The movie is obviously SET UP to be a myth, with a narrator and all, so using the same sort of character as The Matrix and Star Wars and other similar hero-quest myth stories makes absolute sense.

4. All the people in the movie are REAL people, not computer animated. That's when the movie stops being a myth abruptly, and it works. It's cool.

So what's not to like?

Well, after all that, the movie jumps the shark spectacularly. My ticket was ALMOST worth it just to discover that I could, indeed, call a missed kairotic moment "jumping the shark" and that it may very well be useful to do so to students "Well, your paper jumps the shark here..." because that terminology describes what's wrong with a lot of arguments so much better than other language (you know, once I explain what that means).

I had a lot of hopes halfway through the movie. They were obviously on an ecological bent--save the fish. Hrm okay. I'd recently read an article that says all the fish supplies will be gone by the year 2048 or something like that, so the timing on the article + movie was right.

Mumble ends up in a zoo, and goes kinda crazy and starts seeing things. I've not been a fan of zoos since I was at the Toledo one and this poor high school girl was stuck standing in front of the tiger exhibit, with the skin of their star tiger's HEAD, letting people pet it. Ew. That's cruel and gross, so I don't do zoos very well (though I still wanted the detroit one to stay open last year, go figure, if only to compete against the nasty tiger head down in Toledo).

Uh anyway, I can buy that. But then, it's like the studio execs said "we're running out of time! hurry up and shove it down their throats!" and they started dying on every single last move in the film. It's freaking PAINFUL.

First, a little girl taps on the glass at Mumble, and he remembers how to dance. The very next scene he's back on the ice at home and he's got a radio transmitter BUILT INTO HIS BACK. I mean, ow. It's clear people were excited about him and his dancing, but I figured he was just hallucinating again. You could see everyone in the entire audience (and it was packed with families because we're cheap and do matinees) looking around going "wtf?" to each other.

Because at least the grown ups know that no zoo would let a tap dancing bird into the wild again, even with a transmitter. Duh. And how'd he let them know he wanted to come back? How'd ANY of this happen? If you're going to have REAL humans in a computer animated flick, then they need to act like real humans, or else the fact you used REAL humans is utterly meaningless.

So he's back home, and the humans are coming, and he convinces everybody to dance for them, overthrowing the crazy christian like cult that this group of penguins lives in. And they dance, and it changes the world.

No really. The next few minutes is a series of shots of how people saw the penguins dance and immediately changed the world. There's this super fast animation of them pulling fishing boats away from the penguins' habitat and getting rid of them all, of people stopping eating fish COMPLETELY, and being moved by the dancing penguins. Oh, and the penguins don't become a vacation destination, like they undoubtedly would in real life.

This is all over in a matter of minutes, then we see that the fish are back, Mumble has a kid with his long time girlfriend, and pow, the movie is over.

And people applauded, but kids were looking around going "what the heck?" I was right with them.

The movie jumped it by first of all not spending enough time on the transformation. It was the most heavy handed move I've ever seen in any movie EVER: people did this and all the penguins were happy! YOU HAVE TO DO IT TOO!

Will this work on kids? I dunno. By that point, the movie is so damn slow they were probably bored out of their minds. The first half was fun, the second, more important, half was boring as all hell. So my guess would have to be no.

The sequence is so damn painful that I can't even begin to describe why. It wasn't painful in a "make you uncomfortable" sort of way either, it was just out of step with the rest of the movie. They seemed to be building up to something big and good, and I thought that maybe there would be a true moment of kairos here, but no--it just doesn't work. The penguins are flightless, so's the rhetoric.

But it did get us talking. The boy was talking about how there's just too many people in the world. I was puzzling over why they made that last really shitty rhetorical move. It could have been brilliant.

Except I can't think of a single OTHER thing they could have done. Had the people cut back fishing a little? Had the people start feeding the penguins? Have a fund set up that movie goers could donate to to help the birds? (actually, that last one is a little closer to what they might have done with a scaled back ending.)

You can't talk about overpopulation in this movie, though that might have been done in a different sort of one. You can't tell people that if EVERYONE in the entire world stopped eating fish that then they'd be eating something else, encroaching on some other poor animal's habitat (but that other poor animal isn't a cute and smart little penguin, so clearly that's okay). You can't do that, so at best, this movie might have made people THINK.

And that's what it fails to do, it spoon feeds a solution instead of making people think of a solution (or at least a bigger one, had they not gone for the rock 'em sock 'em ending that they did). Kids might never eat fish again, but they're parents are likely to tell them it's just a movie and to eat the damn fish sticks anyway.

Maybe somebody will be inspired by this movie to become an activist and someday take those fishing companies on. Maybe that was the point. Maybe they just wanted to create that one person that will change the world. But where does that leave the rest of us? If we wanted to help, we were given no way to do so. And even if we do care, that ending was so gosh darned wince inducing that I practically ran from the theater, embarassed that I had EVER wanted to see it.

Because it misses, that much, in those last few minutes. The critics are cheering that a kids movie took on a big issue--great. But if the big issues are taken on and the movie fails at it--what's to crow about?

x-posted over at my other journal.

Palimpsest

So listening to Jenna on Monday talk about palimpsests reminded me of an exhibit I saw this weekend, and reading her blog just now reminded me that duh, I had wanted to post about that.

Anyway, so I was in the middle of reading Haynes and stopped to go out for the afternoon. We decided to go to the Henry Ford Museum because we've got memberships and hadn't seen the new christmas exhibit yet (better yet, the usual upcharge exhibit is free this year--nifty).

It's a display on Tasha Tudor, who was famous for drawing christmas cards and writing children's books about Welsh Corgis. She apparently also was really obsessed with doll houses and dolls and played with them and told stories about them all her life. Yeah, so that last part is a little weird, but... whatever.

Her exhibit included a lot of early versions of cards with the final ones--which was really cool. It was interesting, not unlike the palimpsest that Jenna showed us, to see where changes were made and think of why that may be. Actually, I always find art palimpsests to be fascinating.

Then we walked around to the back wall and there displayed for the world to see was drafts of her writing with mark up included. My first reaction was to turn to the boy and go "Yeah, so if I ever manage to get famous--as unlikely is that is--and somebody hangs up my drafts in a museum after my death with my corrections all over them I will be back from the dead to haunt their ass faster than you can say 'mycoplasm'" which I had completely forgotten was from another reading and WASN'T the same thing as ectoplasm, but he's really deathly afraid of mushrooms so I guess in the end it got the same result.

Of course, I've been reading too much to not have to sit back and consider why that is. Why does the art palimpsest appeal but the written one, not so much? Why do I fear so greatly anybody seeing my early draft stuff?

Well, for one, I think my drafts suck--if they exist anymore at all. Second of all, if anybody dug up what I cared about as a child as museum quality work I'd want their head examined. To be honest, I did a lot of the things as a kid that were in this exhibit--I made tiny newspapers and books complete with tiny writing and illustrations for my My Little Ponies, I wrote elaborate stories based upon the characters that I thought they were (not the ones from the animated series), and so on. My mom proofread those stories for me... and then I'd correct them....

And really, the "palimpsests" that were given to us for this Tasha Tudor exhibit in the writing section really were just that--they were proofread. I don't think it's interesting that somebody at some point forgot to type a word before Microsoft could point that out to us. It would have been interesting to see that she had deleted a rather racially uh... "racy" ... section about "being the Nigerian" at Christmas, or maybe hadn't had it in at first, but nothing about these texts changed except spelling and missed words, so whatever thought process might have been in a more revised palimpsest just wasn't there.

So then, what makes proofread marked up text museum quality work anyway? If we can't learn anything about somebody's thought process that could paint really well but just might have been a little crazy, why hang it up at all? I kept thinking that "Tasha Tudor" must be some kind of author-function that I just hadn't been aware of before. After all, I'd be drooling to see original Shakespeare manuscripts (or even Derrida or Heidegger). So why not Tasha Tudor? Is it just because she isn't that popular or important of an author function for me? Or is it because palimpsests of minor superficial changes aren't really palimpsests at all unless there are major revisions to be seen?

hrm.

I find it interesting that in the writing center notes that I've been putting into the database when a tutor is going to say something negative about a student they nearly always reiterate the student's name. Why is naming the person you're going to say something bad about more important than naming a person you're going to say something good about?
And why tell us twice *or more* that a student is ESL?
Just hrm...

more feminist theory biting me in the butt

Today my boyfriend's mom is having a masectomy. We're pretty sure that once healed she'll be okay, although that will be a long process, so no, that's not what this entry is about.

Instead, I'd like to approach the language surrounding this whole "cancer" thing. Her doctors have gone on and on about how she never had kids, and THAT'S why she has breast cancer now (he's adopted, she's infertile, and so this is definitely not a "fault" issue). Except it really does SEEM to be a fault issue. "Well, if you had just done what you're supposed to do, and had kids the naturnal normal way, then you wouldn't have cancer now" ... or at least, that's how I'm reading a lot of the research.

I've actually seen a lot of news articles recently about how having kids prevents all sorts of cancers, and it's not surprising to see since birth rates are falling.

So it seems to be a "breed or die" message, and I don't particularly like it. In her case, it's utterly ludricrous anyway. Her mom had the same type of cancer, had the same procedure, and lived for years after, AND had four kids. Clearly, breeding was not the answer to cancer prevention here. So what the heck is up with the guilt trip?

Lastly, I will finish up with yet another complaint: on one hand, they're telling us to have sex, have kids, or die. On the other, a vaccine was recently released that would make having sex a lot safer, since we'd be less likely to get HPV and cervical cancer were we to get it. I asked my doctor becuase i've known it's been coming for a long time, not because of the silly commercials. This shot has been around for a long time but was blocked partially by groups that thought it would make women into whores, but uh, that's another post entirely. You want to know how much this thing costs?

Nobody's insurance covers it, it's a series of 3 shots, and it's $170 per shot. The women that could benefit the most from this will probably never be able to afford it. Hell, I'm still debating whether I'm willing to drop the cash or not. I'm not sure what the price is tied to--don't people want this? Don't LOTS of people want this and want their daughters to get it? Or do they just think we'll be whores if we get it? Or do drug companies just know that they can charge whatever they want since this is "teh big bad cancer" ("teh" used intentionally here).

just what sex are student pronouns anyway?

I remember the first time I read an essay that referred to all students as "her," and had two thoughts--one: the writer was female so must just be using her own pronoun, which I've been told you can do; two: what a nice change from the usual he/his or he/she or his/hers because no matter how much Vitannza loves throwing in those "/'s" and no matter how much I did the same thing in my latest Marback essay, replacing a singular personal pronoun with a "/" construction gets old about two pages into an article, let alone 20.

But when I was reading for this week something gave me pause. Cynthia Hayes reminds us that T.R. Johnson talked about students as sado-masochists in "School Sucks" and somewhere very close to the "happily bound and gagged" by writing line refers to students by the feminine...

I have, admittedly, been reading too many feminist bloggers recently. But I really began to wonder where this "student as female" set-up came from. Eveyrwhere else we as a country refer to unspecified people as male and yes, feminists complain about it. But think, just for a moment, all the things we usually say about students. Think of all those commonplaces that we have to think about students:

They can't write. They're bad writers. They can't think. They don't read the way we want them to. The way they respond to our assignments is boring. They don't care. They...

And I think that it's sort of strange that in the ONE field where we constantly make the statement that our object of study--students--are doing poorly but that WE--their opposite--have the magical bullet or pedagogy that somebody could use to turn that around--that we refer to all students as female.

I remember writing up the research study I ran for my thesis and avoiding personal pronouns like the plague. If I used "she" somebody would know what student I was writing about--I had that few female students. If I used "he" I was clearly being a bad feminist. But they were nearly all "he's," and thus I started designating students by letters--by fake names--anything, really, to keep from having to use a bloody pronoun.

I'm relunctant to feminize all students. Females are still considered the weaker sex, and if we're going to take on this pedagogy where student writing and circulation is important, if we're going to value abstract writing and juxtaposition, I don't think that we can ALSO consider students as weaker. That's going to either screw up our values or just prove that our values aren't quite in the right place to begin with.

Because, you know, students ARE weaker--right? Isn't that what some people are going to say? That they DO need to be shown the way and that it is our job--as the teachers, the male in this situation--to do that? And I'm sorry, but I'm not so sure. I've never been sure about that, and that's been the driving force of my pedagogy since day 1. Richard Grusin told us in a meeting on Friday that under the "old" program before this class, some students would graduate with their BA and be in the classroom 2 weeks later--well, that was me. And it changed me. Hearing all the other GTI's ripping apart students and saying they couldn't learn but oh THIS might work really truly hurt me because I had just been one. I'd crossed that invisible line to the other side and the way people treated me changed so drastically that I actually went home and laughed one day. "Oh you're one of us now, no need to be rude or denigrating anymore," yeah well, screw you I thought.

And I set out to teach in some way different, I suppose. I value student ideas and intelligence and I ask them to go above and beyond the projects that would normally be assigned in whatever class, and mostly, they seem to appreciate that. I actually have a few exceptions this term, and have to keep reminding myself that I cannot and should not change what I'm doing because one person or two people in all the hundreds I've taught the same material to is resistant...

Anyway, I'd like to close thinking about this sado-masichism thing. Johnson says we teach our students to value pain in writing, if it isn't painful it isn't good for you. And they learn to like that. All the while, this supposedly "female" student learns to like it. To be honest, that construction gives me the willies (if indeed, we are to write as if all students were female).

The BDSM movement is bigger than ever here in the great old USA, and I've even lost several friends to it. Once somebody is "in" they don't seem to be allowed any out. I knew a few female dommes, but to be honest, most of my female friends were subs. And I had to listen as they told about their chosen dominators asking them over time to do more and more ridiculous things--be held underwater, be held underwater and anally penetrated, as the beatings became more severe, and as they would say that the fellow didn't listen to the safeword anymore--but oh, that was okay, because saying "no" was "vanilla."

Yeah, so I lost a lot of friends that way. No, they didn't die, but they thought I was a prude for not approving, and for not diving right on in.

So yeah, what does that have to do with students? For one, I think that BDSM is bad for a lot of women. Likewise, I think that feminising students--whether consciously or not--is also a potentionally bad thing. Seeing students referred to as sado-masochists and all of us nodding and saying "of course?" Well, clearly things have to change. I'm not going to give you a magic bullet though (partially because I think the blender by the same name sounds an awful lot like a vibrator, which would fit into this conversation oh so nicely, but I'm not quite that depraved just yet). I'm not sure that ANY pedagogy picked up all around by all teachers could save our students from being submissive, I think that, instead, this is at least partially a function of teacher personality and teacher investment in the classroom. Last week at the writing center an adjunct marched a student in (as if she couldnt' do it herself--and it was a girl) and asked us to show this student, in front of him, how to do some things in Word. And when we didn't have time, proceeded to do so himself, very poorly--guy didn't have a clue, AND he was being kinda rude abou it. I finished up with my student and calmly and carefully helped this girl learn how to center text and set up a hanging indent.

I could almost see the invisible leash that fellow had his student on though--and that should make us all feel a little ill.

intellectual property

Not-so-hypothetical situation which is thankfully not my own:

A significant other gives you a computer. You use it, you write on it. You break up.
A year later or so he becomes enraged, lets himself into your parent's home, and takes the computer.
The police tell you that the files aren't yours, and never were.
He, according to them, has all rights to the writing, can post it, publish it, whatever. You don't really care about the computer.

I think this is a huge intellectual property issue. I recognize that when you type or work on school computers or for classes that the school essentially owns your work (especially if you sign a contract saying so, as I've had to repeatedly). I get this distinct idea that the law enforcement officials might be mistaken here, but then again, the significant other very carefully researched the law before he did this as well.

So who owns the writing?

And what does that *say* about electronic writing?

blogging... not driven by response?

I'm really curious why so many compositionists don't seem to think that blogging is being driven by response. It seems like they think that blogging is done for the self, for the heck of it...

And while that may be true, I think that blogging is also at least partially driven for and by comments.

After all, there are people (mainly the young people that are being talked about in these articles) that one day drop their serious discourse and whine "If you don't leave me notes/comments, I'm not going to post anymore" or "If you don't comment on me, I'm going to delete you from my friends list" (that one I see from adults a lot) or "People left me rude comments, I'm leaving the blogosphere!" after which they nearly immediately create a new journal under a different name.

People write to be heard, and I think that THAT is perhaps a connection that can be tapped into in class more than people writing to write. And maybe that point has been made somewhere and I either missed it when my dog pounced me or simply haven't read the article that states that yet, but I think that might be how I explain using blogging in my classroom to my students. It's a way to get heard. And if you've never done it before, then here's a chance in class to try it out and maybe someday you'll use it for something that you really care about.

I'm also inviting my students to post news articles and start discussions (pretty much about anything, but I'm moderating) via our shared class blog for extra credit (I grade on a point system, and this has done well before). I don't add in the extra credit till the end, and if you have late or missing assignments it doesn't count, but that seems to be a good way to get them involved in some sort of community discourse (I've done it with message boards, I'm curious as to how it will work on a blog).

Annnnd the students are whining during their test. So I'll bbl.

grad school vs. capitalism

It was said in class the other day that we have far too many unfunded graduate students (agreed) and that grad school isn't about making money (also true). But I think that's an ideal, and that there are only a few grad students in any given school that meet that ideal. To meet that ideal we'd have no dependents, preferably we'd even still be somebody else's dependent.

I only know my own situation, and I can't speak for anybody else, and I'm not going to try to. The more I've thought it out, I've realized that I'm being sort of Marxian about the whole thing, but it's late and this is a blog, not a seminar paper, so you'll have to forgive me the specifics of what he might have said about it all. (I'm also worried about people thinking I'm trying to garner pity, well.. I'm not. But there's complications here, and I think we all have them, and I think we're also often asked to ignore them or drop out, and to me *neither* is an option.)

In any case, as I've told some people, my dad had a stroke 13 years ago. He can't work. My mom stays home to take care of him. My grandma moved in with us back then, but just two years after she *too* had a stroke and my mom also had to stay home and take care of her. My mom got so used to being home that she's slightly agoraphobic and terrifically depressed from time to time, so despite my grandma passing away she still doesn't work. My parents helped me pay for my undergraduate degree, despite this, right up until the point when I got a real good look at their finances thanks to online banking and told them to bugger off.

Now, several changes in health care over the past two years have done a lot to screw them over. My dad's pension is beyond the poverty line, so there's no goverment assistance available. My mom refuses to get herself mentally checked out enough to go on medical disability, so she's not getting the benefits she could be, and believe me, I've tried. When extra money is needed, because my dad's union decides to stop doing things like providing good cheap health care to their retirees, paying for things around here falls to nobody but me.

Because, of course, there is just me. They helped me save when I was younger, and now I do the same for them. Stocks, various high interest short term savings accounts, really whatever's earning me the best interest, I'm putting that away for them now. Sure, some of you would probably say "Well fuck them, they're your parents and should be taking care of you" yeah well, they did. And I feel like I have two options, put money away for the inevitable NOW, or end up giving them pretty big loans later (and not all that later) that would be more difficult to manage.

At the same time, I'm of course also paying for all my own shit, and saving money. Hence, I work. And go to school. And find ways to make that work.

Now, given this, just why the heck would I come back to school anyway?

Well, I spent a year contracting editing/publishing/writing/computer work before I started adjuncting. It was difficult to put money away for anybody while doing this, because my pay rates changed pretty darn often. It was stressful, and a lot of long term positions were being sold to Kelly services and Manpower, and though I checked those out, I was making more on my own on average than doing the same work for just a little over minimum wage, despite that little over minimum wage being steady.

Thus, I found adjuncting. I love teaching, so I quickly started picking up more and more courses. But teaching, and being a faculty member at a private school that encouraged us to go to conferences and publish, just served to remind me of what I was missing. I wanted to go further in school, and I always knew that, but I knew that I wasn't alone in this. I'm in a steady relationship, I have other people that depend on me for some money and emotional junk, and ultimately I had to make the best decision for everybody--not just me.

And that is the decision I think everybody that goes back to school HAS to make unless they're completely alone, unless they're also comfortable being completely selfish. I'm funded right now for a variety of reasons:

1. It's more money for fewer hours per week than adjuncting
2. free tuition
3. I'm getting experience working in a writing center, which I haven't had before

Now, that situation might shift. We *could* be asked to work a lot more hours in the writing center for our money. At which point...

1. I'd be making a lot LESS money for my time than I could teaching
2. If I could spend those hours teaching I could make up for the free tuition
3. After this year, I've got the writing center experience line on my CV

So what, if anything, does that mean?
If it was just me, the first situation is always best. But even if I were being somewhat selfish, that second situation could still invariably blow up in my face at any time. If my parents went bankrupt, or one of them got sick and their insurance refused to cover anything (and I'm working on figuring out a way to get them on mine, though they aren't very happy about it), then wihtout considering funding vs. overall income level I too could end up broke. Or in debt. And I can't exactly afford to be in debt *and* be supporting some savings for older people *and* be considering starting my own family later.

So why be in school at all? It's funny, but I love doing this, and it's where I want to be. And I can make it work, so it's where I am. But I'm not a "responsibilities be damned" kind of girl, and I'm never going to be.

pedagogically speaking...

My second term as a graduate student I was enrolled in a course taught by Dennis Lynch about rhetoric, literacy, and pedagogy. Pretty much everything back then came back to "well, what does this mean about teaching?" which I guess is what happens when you are a grad student at a teaching school. In fact, we were pretty practical about making the move from theory to practice, transforming the theory language along the way. One of the conversations came down to a response we'd written on personal pedagogy.

I knew at the time that most of my success at teaching came from two places: I was nearly the same age as my students and had a very good sense of what they wanted and needed from the course, and could blend that expertly with what I thought was important as well, and I'd been a karate teacher not all that long before so I could scare the bejezus out of people into complying if need be. Apparently I can look scary. I think I've lost some of that second part over time.

But despite this, I realized I was relying upon youth and ethos alone, and let's face it--those things aren't going to last. Just a year or two in either direction and suddenly the 80s commercials that I was using to show students how rhetoric worked on them as kids wasn't going to be so strong anymore, and it wasn't like I had a whole collections of 90s VHS's of whatever younger kids watched then to fall back on because I had moved beyond wanting to see everything 60 times by that point.

And so I said that I knew I needed to continue developing or I was going to get stuck, but that I wasn't sure where to go from here.

I can't say that's changed much, except the incentive to "do this now" is stronger than ever. I've been able to put it off since so many of my students are older than me at Baker, and because I can rely on my knowledge of the software I'm teaching to muddle through the bad points. But to teach comp and to work at a higher level than teaching a test these people are going to have to take, well, I know I have to do more.

So what is that exactly? This term I'm thinking about some sort of "Designing Language/Composition" approach. I'm wary of "Designing Language" because it sounds like linguistics and linguistics gives me hives, but "Designing Composition" sounds a lot like page layout, and that's not it either by a long shot.

What I do know is that I want a series of assignments that shows the power of words, the power of juxtaposing words, the power of personal experience with language, and how different kinds of writing are related and are accessible through one another. (How personal narratives are tied to short stories are tied to dialogues are tied to essays, for example.) This, in turn, will allow me to lead back eventually into some of my own research and connect back up to it in new ways (though not this term) in that I researched how you can access writing through online instant messaging when students think it's speech, so yeah, this all lines up pretty gosh darned well.

I'd like to do some stuff with mystory, but I'm going to have to spend some time reading first. My earlier pedagogy clings to me like a static-ed sock--it's stuck to my ass until I peel it off. I don't think it's fair to ask students to do something I haven't worked through extensively and well, I'm just starting there. But I can see where this will eventually fit in with what I just mentioned above, and that's pretty cool. I definitely plan on teaching the research process available in via mystory though, so I'll be able to get some of the benefits immediately.

I know I know, I'm running scared right? But I dunno, right now this feels right. This gives me a place to talk about audience and rhetoric and composition and really nifty things you can do with language all at once. This gives me a place to start playing an argumentation boardgame instead of showing old commercials. This gives me a place to think about teaching to multi generational students instead of what I had at MTU--mainly younger ones. And it gives me enough open framework to start blending in theory seamlessly too.

In other words, I feel good till tomorrow when we go to class and I feel dumb again. But hey, that's grad school right?

national novel writing month and other crap

I'm beginning to think that a potentional damn good use of National Novel Writing Month (November) might be dissertation writing. I mean, why not? Sure it's supposed to be used for fiction...

Yeah, pity my committee. But having a built in non school support group to do lots of writing? That has potential right there.

Uh anyway, I was too busy reading Vico to start on next week's reading yet (That's tomorrow), despite that I've been thinking a lot about strange pedogogies I could invariably form up around stuff I "know." What would writing look like in a pedagogy informed by Soo bahk do? Ballet? The muppets? And I'm actually coming up with answers....albeit they're probably bad.

I think it's officially that time of the semester when I need to start sleeping more just to stay sane.