The Salt-Box

Hey, did you know that kids like the winter holidays?  Shocking, I know, but I have proof:

• This is the first year he’s been interested in jumping into raked leaves.  Lots of merriment. (What I particularly like about these pictures is that, in addition to Himself, you can also see the ludicrously oversized house that our neighbors built across the street over the past 18months or so–a house that literally destroyed our single favorite feature about our own house.)
• We went to NYC for Thanksgiving.  I like these two pictures–one, two–of Himself looking at the Macy’s window decorations the best.
• Last night, we staved off the horrible “what to do until Mom gets home” hour by going to see the local Christmas tree illumination.   I took pictures, including the post-cookie smirk captured above.

We still have two weeks (!) of classes, plus exams.  Hell, in one class, we’ve got three novels left . . .

On the one hand, it seems certain that the recent NEA report alleging a steep decline in reading is alarmist and overdrawn, relying on a tendentious understanding of the history of literacy and underestimating reading in new media.

On the other hand, this morning I found myself in need of a standalone copy of The Tempest.  I went with the boy to our local Borders, where, I am ashamed to report, I found no copies of the play by itself.  I did find two–TWO–versions of the play “translated into modern English.”  Now, I’m not here to make fun of readers of these translations–though if you’re reading Shakespeare in one, you’re probably not really reading Shakespeare–but of the bookstore: How can you have *two* brands of modernized translations, but none of the play itself?  Would commerce decline so rapidly if there were *one* updated version (perhaps packaged with a DVD! or manga!) and one copy of the regular play?

It could be a symbolic tribute to what we used to think of (in, yes, a very idealized sort of way) as our shared culture.

Monday at preschool, The Little Man was asked what he would be thankful for on Thursday.  His answer: “The food, because if the Indians didn’t share their food with the colonists, then they would all have died.”  (We like to interpellate them young at our house.)  The teachers loved this, and had him repeat it to the other kids.

But then, he got a little braggy.  “I’ve *been* to an Indian restaurant before, and met real Indians, and they gave *me* food, too.  I went with Mom, and Dad, and [names redacted].  I had mango lassi, and rice pudding, and chicken, and vegetables, and flat bread.”

It’s not clear that anyone ever cleared up the difference, alas.  He and I are going on a field trip* tomorrow, to Indian Rock.  Here’s hoping he doesn’t ask for a sample lassi.

–

*Ok, so this field trip I understand.  But they’ve been studying jungles for a couple of weeks now, and *that* unit is going to be capped with a field trip to . . . wait for it . . . the local Rainforest Cafe!   I’ve got nothing against the cafe as such, but as the culmination of a study unit, even in preschool, seems a bit much.

<pouting>

Special thanks to the League of American Theaters & Producers for wrecking Thanksgiving:

The latest round of talks between the producers’ league and the stagehands’ union broke down last night, leaving no end in sight for the strike that has darkened most of Broadway for nine days.

Soon after the breakdown, the League of American Theaters and Producers announced that it was canceling performances of the 27 shows affected by the strike through Sunday.

. . .

The producers decided to cancel the performances, she said, so that tourists coming to town for the Thanksgiving weekend could make other plans.

We’ve had Lion King tickets–hey, no snickering! We have a 4-yr-old!–since August. (What I particularly like about this is that we probably won’t get our money refunded until *after* the trip, since you’re supposed to allow 5-7 days for processing.)

</pouting>

(Update: Wintuk instead.  Hopefully that’ll be ok.  And, to be clear, all our venom is directed at the producers here, not the stagehands.)

While glancing briefly at my gmail spam folder, I found these lovely seasons’ greetings:

Man power, sex-mas is comming soon!

It’s nice to see them getting into the holiday spirit, instead of relying on fear and self-loathing.  I almost sang a carol.

(Edited to correct copy-and-paste error in the snark.)

I have a “Views” essay on InsideHigherEd.com this morning, urging faculty to see assessment as a force for good.  From the point of view of actual experts on assessment–which I am not–it probably has a bit of a “water is wet” feel to it, but given the widespread faculty skepticism about assessment, it may be interesting.

In it, I talk about a number that surprised me to no end: At our school, a first-year student’s first semester grades predict, with remarkable accuracy, time-to-graduation.  Finish that first semester above a 3.0, and your chances of graduation in 6 years are 63%.  Earn below a 2.0, and the six-year graduation rate drops to 9%.

You might be teaching a gen-ed class if it’s November and it occurs to you that not all of your students know your name. (In fact, I discovered this when a student was reduced to describing me to A, whom he didn’t know was my wife. “He’s got no hair . . . he wears glasses, and a tie. He teaches Brit Lit.”)

*Sigh.*

One remedy: The Mountain Goats.

(Update: In-joke for local readers deleted out of deference to yesterday’s campus news.)

For the second year, I’m teaching a section of the yearlong thesis preparation sequence in my school’s honors program. To ensure continuity of expectations with the other sections, we use the same basic assignments, which in the fall culminate in a presentation of their thesis idea and a sample chapter. The students, by the time I see them in year 3, have become accustomed to using PowerPoint.

You can already see the problem: Unless you’re quite the wizard, PowerPoint doesn’t really encourage interesting presentations, and so what I was getting was these crazed outlines, bullet lists, and citations. The main problem was that they lacked life or energy, and so it was a little hard to tell why people cared enough about their topic to pick it for a yearlong thesis. Plus, people tended to pack lots of different kinds of information into the presentation, to show that they’d been working, so they tended to be long.

This year, I’ve changed things slightly. Instead of asking for a presentation that previews their thesis, I’ve asked them to tell a story about their thesis, one that explains why they’re interested in it, and why people might care. Details are below the fold. I can say, though, that the first couple of these have been great, very energetic, and it was always clear that there was an actual person doing the presentation. It’s not an assignment that would fit every presentation situation, but I do like it as a way of introducing, in a preliminary way (none of the students have completed even a single draft of a chapter yet), one’s work in class.

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This is probably the wrong semester to plug this, as some of my vaunted organizational skills have succumbed a little under the pressure of some, um, interesting campus developments, but I did want to draw people’s attention to the public launch of Sandy, the “personal e-mail assistant” from the Values of N.

I think that Sandy is basically a thinly anthropomorphized interface for Stikkit: it lets you remember anything worth remembering (dates, phone numbers, to-do items), schedule meetings, collaborate with others, and so forth.  In practice, it looks somewhat like having a secretary: In an e-mail to a student, for example, I can simply copy Sandy and write at some point, “Sandy, remind me on Thursday to bring a spare copy of the TagCrowd assignment to class .”

Thursday morning–and possibly at other times, depending on exactly what I write in the e-mail, and how I’ve tweaked various settings–I’ll get an e-mail, reminding me to bring the assignment.

If you’re working with others who are on Sandy’s system, I think she can broker a meeting, and perform other basic functions, too.  What’s nice about Sandy is it that it harnesses our own bad habits–in this case, a general tendency to use e-mail as a to-do list–in ways that are potentially more productive.

Since most readers of this blog–faculty, grad students, undergrads, Mom, and searchers for Oliver Twink pics–don’t have a personal secretary, I’d recommend giving Sandy a shot.

Today’s Doonesbury is about teaching in the laptop era:

Zipper clearly needs to visit Inbox Zero to manage his e-mail.

This strip raises some questions for me, though: Aside from the e-mail joke, what do you take to be the target?  Is it these multitasking kids today, who use their fancy technology to do anything but the task at hand?

The setting, though, appears to be a large lecture hall, and the professor is spending class time asking elementary questions.  It’s hard to know what kind of course this is, although given Zipper’s history (like his uncle’s) of being a professional student, it’s probably a gen ed course of some sort.  I’ll concede that Zipper seems pretty unprepared, but my sympathies are still with him: The professor has given him no reason to prepare.

If class time is spent delivering information that’s probably in the textbook, and in grilling students on their recall from the text, well, that’s a pretty stupid use of the limited time one has with students.  We need to think about how to use that time better: to make students want to prepare, certainly, and perhaps also to leverage the technology that seems ubiquitous in this strip.  It might not look very much like a lecture, and that classroom might need to be redesigned, but it will give students reasons to learn the material.  Sufficiently motivated, even Zipper can do interesting work.