“A man needn’t go far to find a subject, if he’s ready with his salt-box.”–Uncle Pumblechook
{ Monthly Archives }
This month’s issue of Macworld imagines a typical student’s writing process, and it isn’t pretty:
If you’re using Safari to do so some heavy-duty browsing, you’ve probably got multiple windows and multiple tabs open at once. For instance, when doing research for a paper, you may open Wikipedia in one window and Google in another, and then [apple]-click to open multiple tabs within each window.
Sounds like a C paper to me, magic Safari tricks or no.
One of my best things is not taking things personally.
Almost nothing has anything to do with me.
–Robert Lopez, A Part of the World
Unlike Robert Lopez’s narrator, “not taking things personally” is one of my worst things. I tend to take things personally. On the one hand, this can add some stress and paranoia to office politics; on the other, it also is a way of ensuring I’m engaged fully with a particular situation.
This week’s instance of “things I shouldn’t take personally, but do” comes courtesy of students who want me to admit them into my full sections of the British literature survey. (These are students I’ve not met before. Students I already know rarely present the same problem.) I have received four different messages since Thursday, all a single sentence, and usually without a salutation or even a signature: “will you let me into your closed course (crn xxxxx)?”
Now, these students are good at one aspect of e-mail etiquette: The action item in the e-mail is quite clear. (”Let me into your class!!!”) And, at the margins, an additional student or 2 in a 200-level class isn’t going to kill me.
Here’s the thing: The students *are* asking a favor. And it’s not a cost-free favor, either. There’s the additional administrative responsibility (keeping up with the student’s attendance, etc.), the extra grading (goes without saying), and all the other stuff that goes into having a body in the class. Beyond this, adding students beyond the enrollment caps irritates the departmental Powers-That-Be, because it implies that the courses could be bigger. (In fact, our survey courses are capped at the stupidest number imaginable, 30. 30 is too big for a proper discussion-based or writing-based class, and too small to achieve any of the potential economies of a bigger class.)
So, please: Help me want to incur these costs. First, tell me why you’re looking for this course so late? Did you fail Brit Lit II in the spring, and again in the summer, and really need it again now? Are you a transfer student? A new admit? These courses were open for months . . . why did this just occur to you?
Then, give me a reason, a real reason, why I should let you in. Don’t ramble on for a paragraph about how you really love literature or something, or tell me you read my rmp.com rating and feel a spiritual connection. But explain to me why you need this particular gen ed requirement fulfilled this particular semester. There are *always* sections of Brit Lit II. Why this one?
For me, a good example of a real reason is that you’re in either a supermajor or an incredibly scripted major, and if you miss getting the gen ed done now, you’re in trouble down the road. Or, maybe you’re a transfer student, looking to major in English, and you need to get cracking on the surveys.
If your reason is “conflict with your job,” then that’s a less-real reason. Not because your job’s not important–believe me, I know that it is–but because that’s just bad planning. If your job’s *so* important, then you should’ve registered for the class earlier. Or, take the course in the spring, and give your boss lots of notice so you can move your schedule around.
It should be possible to let me know in just a sentence or two that you’ve thought about your schedule and about your audience for the e-mail.
Finally, if you do get into the class, make sure you follow up! If I’ve let you into a full class, then I know your name, and I know that I’ve done you a favor. As a result, I expect you to be a good citizen–to come prepared to talk, to have your book, to participate in the online assignments, etc. It’s not reasonable to expect both to be admitted into a full class *and* to recede quietly into the background of that class.
If the student center changes their fries (to “steak-cut”), shouldn’t they have to run that by the faculty senate?
Steak-cut’s gross.
(It may well be, of course, that they’re just out of regular fries. But isn’t it convenient that they’d make this change in the summer, when the senate doesn’t meet?)
My weekly post is up at Bookslut. Topics include Darrell Grayson, “poetry therapy,” mathematical poems, an astronomer’s complaints about Whitman, and more.
I think some interviews are likely to go up soon, and there’s something interesting coming in a few weeks.
Yesterday, the following message went out to departments located in a campus building:
Toilet partitions will be replaced in the second and third floor bathrooms of . . . Hall. The third floor restrooms will be closed tomorrow and the second floor restrooms will be closed on Friday. Signage will be placed on the impacted restrooms.
“Impacted” in this context is a stroke of genius.
(Yes, yes, I’m basically 4 years old. It comes naturally, from being on childcare detail so much this month.)
The North American Victorian Studies Association spring 2007 newsletter, which includes the big list of member books, is now up.
Urmee Khan has a terminally silly post this morning at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site, arguing that only middle-aged white guys like HBO’s brilliant show, The Wire. Her chief objection to the show is its treatment of women:
It is misogynistic. All the main characters are men, apart from one woman. It is a world of men, in which many of the women are portrayed as subservient, lap-dancing gangsters’ molls.
This isn’t really true (there are several women who’d count as main characters) as a description of facts on the ground, and it’s just insipid as cultural commentary, inasmuch as it confuses a representation of misogyny with its endorsement. The show signals pretty clearly indicts even its most sympathetic characters for their attitudes toward women.
She’s not much better on race:
The white characters in The Wire inhabit - usually - a sort of post-race world, where friendships and enmities with black men are denuded of racial tension. There are questions about how realistic this is, but for the purposes of the show, race in The Wire is a background hum rather than a dominating theme. When, in season three, a white detective kills a black colleague, under the mistaken belief he’s a criminal, the “racial element” (as it’s referred to) of the resulting controversy is shown as something unreasonable.
This isn’t an especially reasonable reading of season 3, which includes in it a ludicrous white cop who insists on singling out black cops as character witnesses for the shooter. It also glosses over racial tensions depicted in the first two seasons.
But my main reason for writing this post is just anecdotal: As far as I can tell, women love The Wire. That’s how it came into our home, through word-of-mouth from West Hartford moms. (Think Little Children, and you’re not far off.) I’d heard of the show for a couple of years, but never queued it on Netflix because I figured A. wouldn’t be interested. But then Every Single WH Mom she hangs out with started watching it obsessively, plowing through those first 3 seasons on DVD over and over again, and talking about it nonstop at playdates. So, we started watching, and got hooked.
Frankly, the first scene of the first episode caught us: It’s the greatest opener to any television show. “This is America–everybody gets to play.”
Via Digital Digs, here’s Walk Score, an interesting Google Maps mash-up that “calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc.”
Our house scored a 28, or Not Walkable.
Which is funny, because we in fact walk everywhere (except the grocery store, but that’s usually because we have the 4 year old in tow). In particular we walk to work, which for both of us is the fair-sized university about three or four blocks from home, and which doesn’t show up at all on the Walk Score results. So while the neighborhood might not be extraordinarily walkable in general, we actually bought the house in order to walk.
Their algorithm is a little peculiar: It sees the campus bookstore as the closest bookstore, but it doesn’t see the campus library. It also misses the bar right across the street from campus, but it counts the local head shop, Snotlocker, as a “clothing store.” I don’t think it distinguishes “movie theater” from “theater for plays,” and, again, for both it omits campus as a venue for these.
(I think this is a general problem with the way they harvest data–when I plug in my first address from graduate school, freely available campus resources don’t show up. As a result, it gets a mediocre walk score, when in fact I lived without a car for three years.)
Those caveats aside, it’s an interesting project–focusing attention on the practical realities of getting around is a good idea.
These three things are all related to Victorian literature and culture, and are very, very strange.
Finally, this has nothing to do with Victorian literature, but: I forgot to post a link to last week’s post at Bookslut.
I’m grateful to Chuck and Alex for their encouraging comments about my plan to make my grade distributions public, and it still seems like a good idea to me.
However–and maybe this is just me–it is slightly anxiety-provoking. Last night, for instance, not long after writing the post, I went to sleep, and dreamed that the provost read the post, and ominously called me in for a meeting to discuss it.
I do think there’s a shame that can attach to grading, at least in the humanities. “My, that’s a lot of A-s . . . ” or “You really thought she was a B writer?” or “What was wrong with you that semester? So many Cs . . . ” And then I get defensive. But that’s part of the reason for pursuing this–to try to open up that shame to sunlight.