The Salt-Box

Via Ed Champion comes a hilarious story from Tod Goldberg, the upshot of which is that Tod gets called out by a parent for using the phrase “serial killer” while a child (of indeterminate age) is within earshot. He wonders why parents are constantly pulling this sort of nonsense. Ed points out that while he tries to limit his fucks when he knows children are present, some invariably escape, and parents act outraged. (Their posts are both funnier than this summary, so you should read the posts.)

A few comments, because I’ve been thinking about cursing recently:

1. The “serial killer” parent needs to unclench, and, on behalf of all parents, I apologize to Tod Goldberg. If you can’t spin a nonsense definition of “cereal killer,” then you shouldn’t be allowed out in public with your child, and your child should be required to wear earplugs. Frankly, I’d be disappointed if my kid didn’t, after hearing that phrase, look down at an empty bowl at breakfast and say, “I’m a cereal killer,” or if he didn’t call *me* one if I finished a box of cereal.
2. I also absolve Ed for his fucks, especially as he tries to limit them.  In general, I give a pass to people who aren’t involved with kids at home on a daily basis.  There are really only three categories of cursers who drive me crazy:

–Preteens and teenagers. Because they’re cursing to show off their protoindependence, these kids–or at least the ones who irritate me–tend to curse *more* if they’re around a kid and a parent. This is, of course, infuriating, because 4-yr-olds think preteens and young teenagers are awesome. Bastards. Thus far, not reacting to the cursing has seemed to work.

–People who absolutely lose it in public over some minor inconvenience, because they’re not emotionally competent. (Not because it’s a genuinely bad day.) Since the thing that 4-yr-olds struggle with is managing affect, witnessing this is a doubleplusungood.

–Parents who curse at their kids, even affectionately, in public. At the public pool, for instance, there’s one guy who insists on loudly calling his 6-yr-old son “my motherfuckin’ nigga.” There’s another mom who spends her time at the kiddie pool on her cell phone, periodically screaming at one or another of her kids to give the other one “the god-damned toy.” I’m not here to judge these parents for how they speak to their kids. And if I were invited to their homes, I’d not say a word about it (though I might be slow to return). But we’re in public. At the kiddie pool. If someone curses freely at their own home, we can explain to the 4-yr-old that different homes have different rules, and he accepts that. But that answer doesn’t work in public situations.

3. Since I have been known to curse in front of students, it is perhaps surprising (or, if you like, hypocritical) that I don’t curse at home. We’re just not ready for the 4-year-old to start dropping f-bombs, mostly because we’re not totally sure of his grasp of social settings. (It’s not hard to imagine him meeting, say, the provost, and giving him a “Glad to f*cking meet you.”) As a result, we try to keep the aural environment tidy.
4. Parents who reproach other people for cursing in public are, I suspect, engaged in a weird sort of projection, because casual comments don’t register with kids as “worth repeating.”  Kids key off the parents’ reaction.  If you make a big stink over some expletive, or over something as trivial as “serial killer,” you’re just spelling out for your kid what buttons to push.

One more post on the workload of an assistant professor: Picking your service commitments. Viewed narrowly, service is less important to one’s career than teaching and research. I’ve heard of extraordinary teachers being tenured despite scant research portfolios, and everyone has heard of highly productive researchers being tenured despite an inability to communicate the most basic ideas to undergraduates. I don’t think *anyone* has ever heard of someone being tenured because they’re good on committees. (This is probably why most committee
As a result, committee work is frequently viewed as an imposition, or as onerous make-work. Most places shield first-year faculty from significant committee work, in order to buy them some time to cope with the extra teaching and advising that come with a job.

I like university service. It gets you out of your department, and you learn about the challenges and needs of other faculty. (At my school, for instance, the English department is as big as 2 or 3 other departments combined. Such disparities produce differing perspectives on various initiatives.) You learn about opportunities that otherwise you might have missed. And you meet different people. My major university service commitments include the faculty senate, the information technology committee, directing the undergraduate research & creative achievement day, NEASC accreditation work, gen-ed assessment, working with the AAUP, and a few others.

A few observations based on this experience:

• If you’re seeking out service commitments to strengthen your promotion portfolio (update: that is, because you’re worried your teaching and research won’t cut it, not because you need to show you’ve done anything at all), make sure you pick a committee your dean values. Unfortunately, this probably means being on a committee that meets regularly, and does some actual work. Just listing some random committee that meets once a semester probably isn’t going to help.
• Even if you’re on a committee that’s time-intensive, like senate or curriculum, people can tell pretty quickly whether you fall into one of three categories: attendee, contributor, or crank. You certainly don’t need to contribute all the time, or even most of the time, but, then again, it can’t be “never.” A quick analogy: I frequently tell students at the start of the semester that if it’s getting to be about a month into the semester, and they think I might not know their name, that’s probably a sign they’re not contributing enough in class. Similarly, if you’ve been on a committee that meets biweekly for a year or so, and no one outside your department knows who you are, you might speak up once in a while.
• A hard lesson for me to learn has been that you can’t just pick committees based on your interest in their charge. You also need to think about whether you can contribute effectively to that committee. For the past two years, I’ve been co-chair of a committee that eventually nearly ground to a halt, largely because I didn’t understand my own affect about the topic. It’s a topic that I’m keenly interested in, and that I can talk about pretty intelligently one-on-one or in the classroom, but in groups I start to play this stupid game of swapping war stories. Yet I don’t like spending meeting time telling depressing anecdotes. As a result, I would unintentionally but consistently procrastinate when faced with this work. The committee is potentially an important committee; the other members were perfectly lovely–but, at least right now, I’m not suited for it. Rather than continue to drag the committee into my dysfunction, I stepped down from it.

It’s true that there’s little direct, tangible benefit from university service. But, then again, you do make friends in other departments, and can (hopefully) win a reputation for being reasonable, or productive, or even just polite/decent. And that does have consequences. (I suspect, in fact, that the distribution of some opportunities follows a power law.)

Others probably have more to say about this; I especially expect that academics who aren’t straight white guys may well have significantly different takes, since they are usually expected, either silently or explicitly, to take on certain kinds of service roles as a function of their identity, often over and above the usual expectations for academics. (Which can have the perverse consequence of giving hetero white males a break from service.) But, in general, I would encourage people to participate more fully in university service than required by a strict construction of promotion/tenure guidelines.

Standing on line at the Genius Bar Wednesday night, I overheard the end of a transaction between the Genius and a Customer:

G: You’re all set . . . just pull your car to the door in parking lot B1, and I’ll have someone meet you with your iMac.

C:  Great!  But I don’t need anyone to meet me–I got a spot right outside Nordstrom.*  I can carry it that far by myself.

G: Yes, but Nordstrom complains when people walk through their store carrying unboxed computers.  (G & C share an eyeroll.)

Stay classy, Nordstrom!

*Nordstrom is two doors down from the Apple store; it’s easily the most convenient entrance.

Dr. Crazy has a great post this week about the intensity of an assistant professor’s workload, and how that’s different from graduate school. I also teach at a “regional comprehensive” university, and so have a roughly similar mix of teaching, research, and service expectations. She says more or less everything I would want to about work; this post is about mindset.

The biggest difference for me–apart from service expectations–was a more fully-realized consciousness of teaching in a department, and the idea that one is responsible to one’s colleagues (and vice versa). When I taught in graduate school, and afterwards as a Brittain fellow, it was predominately composition. I worried about surviving the paper load, about helping students to write a bit better, and that was it. I didn’t really need to think about how the course’s content fit into a broader curriculum. The times I got to teach an upper-division class, I could think of those as quasi-autonomous entities, little self-contained jewels. My vision of my students was strictly one-semester: It wasn’t like I had students from composition turning up two years later in my Dickens and Dostoevsky class.

But now, almost every semester I teach courses at all levels of the curriculum. (Though, weirdly, I have no first-year courses in the upcoming year.) And it’s interesting to see the same students again and again on a regular basis, either as they progress through the major, or as they come back for electives. It makes tangible the (obvious) point that students progress through time, have different needs at different moments in their education, and so forth.

And teaching a course that’s more or less required* both for the major and for gen ed–such as, for instance, Brit Lit II–requires, I have found, more thought than I would’ve given to it as a grad student. Majors and nonmajors arguably need quite different things from such a course: Majors need some orientation to periodization, strategies for reading, and so forth; nonmajors might benefit from these, but one also wants to “play the hits” a bit. I’ve also found it strange to teach the Victorians in the survey, inasmuch as one feels obliged to teach–how to put this?–”things other people would expect students to know.” That’s a set that intersects imperfectly with “things I’d want people to know about Victorian literature.” Plus, one ends up trying to recruit a bit for one’s classes: since students can easily navigate the curriculum without a Victorian novel class, I want to bait the hook a little bit.

Then, when I teach that Victorian novel class, or the junior-level Victorian survey, I try to think of how the course fits in with other courses being offered, and how it intersects with the overall emphases of our department. (When I taught T. S. Eliot under the auspices of “Major American Authors,” rather than as a “Studies in British Literature” section, this became an explicit theme for the course.)

Having a multi-year vision of my students changes lots of things. In composition, for example, I try to focus on thesis-based writing, because that’s prevalent in the humanities. But in my survey and upper-division courses, I’ll sometimes overplay born-digital assignments because it’s my impression that many students aren’t being asked to do them elsewhere in our curriculum. Aside from the sheer # of students, fitting courses into a sequence has required the most thought in my time on the tenure-track.

(And, hey, in two weeks I’ll officially be an associate professor–I can start making snarky comments about “the junior faculty,” and “these kids just out of grad school”!

Update: Welcome, InsideHigherEd.com readers!  You might also be interested in this recent post on service.

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*Technically it’s not required for either. But students do have to take a literature course to fulfill gen ed, and many do this with a survey. In the past, when Brit Lit II counted for international credit, nonmajors would use it to double dip, fulfilling two requirements at once. (It’s not required for the major because the dept offers 6 surveys–World Lit I/II, Brit Lit I/II, and American Lit I/II. You can’t have 18 credits of the major be surveys. [How do Americanists fill a whole year?] Still–lots of people take it.)

When you spend three minutes staring out of your office window wondering how to figure out whether it’s stopped raining, the better to return books to the library . . . you may be an absent-minded prof.

Not good.

(One sign you’re a hopeless Apple dork: Your first thought, when thought finally comes, is, “Oh, I’ll check my iPhone.”)

Fleshbot is reporting a new film version of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist:

In case you were wondering: yes, “Oliver Twinks” is the homo porno version of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, just in case that sad looking waif asking “Please, sir, I want some more” on the promo notice didn’t tip you off already. The movie is the latest release from PZP Productions, the twinks-gone-wild studio who also bought you “BeTwinked”, “Desperate Houseboys” and “The DaVinci Load” . . .

They’ve also got “plot” details and a link to the trailer. (I’d assume this is NSFW.)

(See also: A month ago I wrote about the upcoming Zemeckis/Carrey version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Frankly, Oliver Twink sounds more appealing.)

Update:  Via Ed, word of a non-pornographic, (presumably) non-animated Old Curiosity Shop.

“Seeing lousy movies / but only for the a.c.”

–The Hold Steady, “Hostile, Mass.”

What happens when you visit your parents during the hottest week in southeastern Virginia in a decade? Underdog on Monday, The Bourne Ultimatum on Tuesday, Live Free or Die Hard on Wednesday, and The Simpsons Movie on Thursday.

To be fair, Bourne was pretty good, and the Die Hard update was ok–but that’s still a lot of mainstream movies right in a row.

According to the news, it’s still 90 degrees here at 11.30pm. Looking forward to returning to the upper 80s and lower 90s in another day.

Update: And the a/c’s broken!

Here’s a sentence I’ll be quoting forever when my students complain that I make them memorize poems:

One poem per week…how difficult can that be?

At 32 poems, Deborah Ager’s agitating for September to be “Memorize Poetry Month,” with participants pledging to memorize a poem a week.

(via looktouchblog)

I don’t think this information has been disseminated very widely, so:

According to the list’s main page at the UPenn website, the list is (at least temporarily) dead:

Due to technical and administrative difficulties, we can no longer offer mass mailing functionality. Submissions will appear only in the archives, sorted by category.

It will take about 24 hours for the submissions to appear in the archives.

Please do not email anything to cfp@english.upenn.edu. Messages will be silently dropped. For the time being, subscriptions to the list have been halted. We hope to recreate the original CFP list functionality in the near future. Alerts will be posted here and sent out through the mailing list.

So, right now it’s web-only.

Today I found out that my parents check up on A’s and my teaching by reading RateMyProfessors.com regularly.

Awesome.