The Salt-Box

My four-year-old has listened with mild disbelief for a couple of weeks now whenever I’ve mentioned that people would be lining up outside the local Apple store to buy phones.  He’s seen the phones (or, at least the videos and the mockups), and thinks they’re cool, but he couldn’t get his brain around “lining up for hours to buy a phone.”  (And, yes, Alex, I’m getting one, though I didn’t go today.)

So, he did what he always does when he can’t get his brain around something: He modeled it.   He built an Apple store out of Lincoln Logs and PlayMobil accessories, and then queued up the customers.  (All photos linked below–both of his model and of the real customers–are by my kid.)

Here’s the customers lining up, here’s a tighter shot, and here’s a close-up of the pile of iPhone boxes on a deliveryman’s hand-truck.

At this point, my wife, who *also* couldn’t get her brain around “lining up to buy a cell phone,” decided to take him to the mall (Westfarms, in West Hartford, CT) to see whether Dad was right, or just insane.  She made sure he brought my camera: First he took a picture of the sign, to show where he was.  Then he took a picture of the people on line.  But then he got distracted by the security guard, who seemed on the verge of doing something interesting.  Alas, the guard turned out to be friendly.  Finally, The Little Man snapped a picture of the guard’s cool hat.

He definitely is on board with getting a real one now.  Maybe Fake Steve can send a shirt.

My two summer classes end today!  July and August will be the first two months I’ve gone without teaching since 2003.  I scarcely know what to do . . .

(Well, Alton Locke is due to Broadview in August, and I’ve got interesting summer plans at Bookslut & at Re:Print.  So it’ll be a busy summer–just not a *teaching* summer.)

This year I’ve been experimenting with a variety of digital replacements for my conventional “3 explication papers + one short paper + one medium-length paper” assignment set; for the purposes of this experiment, I’m not requiring formal papers at all.  This has had some hits and misses, and I’m looking forward to ending this experiment soon and moving back to a mix of born-digital and conventional assignments.

One student this summer took a look at the assignments and bolted, but not before sending me an e-mail asking “What ever happened to discussing works in class and then writing papers about them?”  I’ve gotten similar questions from some colleagues and friends.

My first answer is that nothing’s happened to them–there are many such courses on offer in our department.  But my real answer is to turn the question back on itself: Is the point of a literature class “learning how to write papers,” or is it “learning about literature” and “learning to write”?  In other words, I don’t think that the learning outcome of English classes ought to be, “learn how to write critical analysis papers at X pages in length.”  Instead, people assign papers because they think that the sustained work of writing a paper might facilitate other learning goals.  But papers are, or ought to be, just a means to an end.  Certainly they’re a means we’re comfortable with–but there’s nothing magical about them.

Speaking for myself, this  has been a real benefit of working on assessment over the past year.  In the past, when pulling a syllabus together, I would start from the probable due dates of papers, and work backward from that. “It’s an English class, so there should be papers.”  (Note: I still think that “It’s an English class, so there should be *writing* of many forms.”)  I’m trying to get better at fitting assignments to the learning outcomes for a particular class.  Thinking more seriously about why I’m choosing assignment X over assignment Y–and what the tradeoffs are for each option as the class tries to achieve certain outcomes–has helped the design of my classes significantly.

Over at Academic Commons, my first post is up: It’s about the so-called Voluntary System of Accountability being promulgated by the American Association of State Colleges & Universities (AASCU) and the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC) in response to the Spellings Commission.

Inasmuch as the VSA program relies on standardized testing to assess general education / liberal arts outcomes, I have misgivings about its utility.  And since it’s trying to capture “value-added” education, the problem of student motivation seems insoluble: The VSA methodology suggests testing random samples of first-year and senior students.  But, almost by definition, the assessment can’t be part of the student’s grade for the class.  Why any senior would take this seriously is beyond me.

Having said that, I’m probably a little bit more sanguine about the public reporting of assessment data than some colleagues.  On the one hand, I’ll admit that too much federal control of this would be disastrous; on the other hand, I do think that colleges have been so high-handed about the sanctity of their mission, and so blithely confident in the effectiveness of their methods, that unconventional methods are called for.

Anyway, read the whole thing there.

My weekly post at Blog of a Bookslut is up. Topics include the new book of Guantanamo Bay detainee poems, a new edition of Blake’s illustrations of “Comus,” the “Immanent Willy,” and more.

Good to see some things never change.  This from Dickens’s short sketch, “The Election for the Beadle.”  The captain and the overseer lead opposing factions in the local parish; the overseer represents the vested interests, the captain instinctively opposes them:

Then the captain . . . boldly expressed his total want of confidence in the existing authorities, and moved for ‘a copy of the recipe by which the paupers’  soup was prepared, together with any documents relating thereto. ‘  This the overseer steadily resisted; he fortified himself by precedent, appealed to the established usage, and declined to produce the papers, on the ground of the injury that would be done to the public service, if documents of a strictly private nature, passing between the master of the workhouse and the cook, were to be thus dragged to light on the motion of any individual member of the vestry.

It looks like The Salt-Box is back up and running.  It may take a day or two to get all the tires kicked–esp. w/r/t feeds and archives–but regular blogging will commence immediately.