The Salt-Box

I’ve been very late to the cameraphone thing, in part because it was a pain to get pictures off of our old phones, and in part because most of the pictures I’d ever seen were pretty stupid.  There are pictures of the kind Alex (the Church Mouse-in-Chief) describes below, and then there’s the time a colleague in my department had an upskirt photo taken of her during class . . . .  (How do I know?  Well, if you’re stupid enough to take an upskirt photo of your professor, then you are probably also stupid enough to brag  & show it off to classmates.)

However, Friday I *finally* hit upon a reasonable use for a cameraphone.  At lunch on Friday, The Little Man agreed that the following picture constituted objective proof that he needed a nap:

(Don’t worry–he didn’t eat all that ice cream by himself.)

Now, as you can imagine, my plan is to follow him around like a stalker, snapping pictures until he concedes that he’s tired.  That seems *much* saner to me than crafting a “family mission statement” or some such horror.  Ok, “saner” probably isn’t the right word–but then again, I was kidding.  The mission statement people seem to be serious. (H/t to mom for the FMS buzzword!)

Many (I dunno, 3?) years ago, I joined Facebook during the summer.  It was back when the site automatically matched people up based on their class schedule.  About a month before school started, I quit: As students were populating their schedules, they were showing up as friends on my profile page, frequently with pictures taken at some party or another.  (Heavens!  College kids partying . . . what *will* we tell the elders?)

The problem was that I hadn’t yet met most of these students, and I was pretty sure they weren’t looking to have me “meet” them by seeing a picture of them half-naked, flipping off the camera.  So, I wrote it off as a student thing, and closed my account.

Now that it’s all safe for grown-ups, though . . . I’m back.  (Mostly due to some steady nagging from various people.)  If, for some reason, you’re desperate for more JBJ content, or just need more Facebook notches, you can find me here.

If you’re looking for actual interesting internet content tonight, try last night’s Bookslut post, or the updated links in the post below.

I’ve talked before about how I require students to memorize poems. In a class focusing on a single period (the Victorian Age, Modernist British Poetry, etc.), and in my old survey classes, I have students memorize & recite “40 consecutive lines” of some poem from the anthology. This semester, I re-tooled the survey assignment, asking students to recite 14 lines 3 different times during the semester: a romantic poem, a Victorian one, and one from the 20thC. Then, on the exam, I asked students to reflect on the experience of memorizing them–whether one was easier than the others, differing prosodies, etc.

I did this for a lot of reasons: to make students worry less about the assignment, but also to play up its centrality to the course and to have students think a little more about the way poetic language works.

Not all students recited 3 poems over the course of the semester, and, on the exam, most of these wrote pretty honestly (”I forgot”; “I’m an accounting major”; “this course is just for a requirement, so no thanks.”) about it rather than try to BS their way out.

One student, though–a particularly excellent one, who’s been in a class with me before–wrote on his exam: “I don’t believe in forced memorization, and so I refuse to do it.”

Now, one the one hand, I think the student’s wrong on the merits here. (That is, this assignment isn’t just rote memorization–it’s clearly linked to a learning outcome for the course, and I ask students to reflect on the experience during the exam. Plus, I do not believe you can become fluent in poetry unless some of it is branded in your neurons.) On the other hand, you have to admire the student’s willingness to say, in effect, I think the assignment sucks, and so refuse to do it, consequences be damned!

It’s also interesting to me how deeply the education-school bias against memorization has seeped in: Invariably, students report that this is the first time since grade school they’ve been asked to memorize–and sometimes, they say it’s the first time ever.

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Update: Scott McLeod has a post up about memorization in the 21st century, following up on a couple of posts (1,* 2) by David Warlick.   McLeod’s point–that in a world awash with information, insisting that  students memorize facts can verge on silliness–is a reasonable one, and is close to my student’s objection.  However, memorizing poems is quite a different matter: It’s precisely the difference between “information” and “literature.”

*Warlick’s first post is about the horrifying prospect of SparkNotes by SMS.

I love new toys, and am always delighted to play experiment with new software or hardware that might improve my life.  This holiday season, however, once again taught me a cruel truth: Even very cool technology that “just works” can’t save you from being an idiot user.

• Example 1: Leopard.   I got this for Christmas from A, and installed it on New Year’s day.  It took 3 tries, and, along the way, taught me the joys of booting from a Firewire backup.  (Yay for backups!)  The problem?  My failure to realize that 5 is a smaller number than 7.  (In my defense, math is hard.)  De-gunking my hard drive cleared the necessary space, and all was shiny and new.
• Example 2: HeadBlade. I got this because it seems stupid to pay $15 every 3 weeks for a clipper job, especially since, during the semester, finding the time for such a haircut is a pain in the ass.  Using it really is fun, and The Little Man loves looking at the razor, so all-in-all it seems like a win.  Having said that, it would have been a clever thing to actually *get* a haircut before first use, rather than just scraping away at 3 weeks’ worth of head-stubble.  Stoopid Jason.
• Example 3: My new work coffee pot.  My other main holiday gift: A very simple coffee pot/hot water brewer for my office, since there’s no *especially* convenient coffee on my end of campus.  No problems here at all: The first time I made coffee, it saved me the 10 minutes (round trip) of walking to various other locales, and, more important, saved the temptation of buying non-coffee products.  Excellent–not even I could screw this up.

And a bonus theory related to those non-coffee products: Ordering pastry at Dunkin Donuts is slightly akin to shopping for pornography in public or playing Truth/Dare: There’s a small range of generally accepted variation in one’s order (glazed, chocolate, jelly . . . ), which you waver from at your peril.  Ordering, say, a vanilla frosted donut with sprinkles in front of a colleague provides excellent fodder for raillery or outright derision.

While at MLA, I picked up Donald E. Hall’s* new book, The Academic Community: A Manual for Change (Ohio State UP, 2007), which is a follow-up to his helpful book about The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual (Ohio State UP, 2002). I’m not done with it yet, but it has plenty of interesting commentary on how to be productive in a program, department, school, or university, as well as chapters on u/g and graduate teaching. Anyone with service commitments or students will probably find at least something useful here. For readers who might not know Hall, he spent many years at a teaching-intensive university in California, so he’s familiar with the demands of a 4-4 load.

In the spirit of the new year, and a fresh start, here’s Hall’s overall thesis, which I fully endorse:

To put it bluntly: no one has more responsibility than you do for making your department, college, or university a better place in which to teach, conduct research, and live a multifaceted professional life. Others–deans, provosts, or presidents–may be paid far more than you are, and may even be explicitly assigned that task of improvement, but if you don’t like certain aspects of your institutional environment, then it is your responsibility to try to do something about, albeit carefully, responsibly, and in self-protective fashion. (7)

Just so. The past three months have been very hard, and I’m looking forward with more fervor than usual to the idea of rebooting my productivity/organizational systems. Hall’s book will be a help–and I’ll probably reread The Academic Self, too.

Parenthetically, I might add that there’s an implicit argument in the book for academic blogging, especially the pseudonymous variety that openly examines the motivations, frustrations, opportunities, and complexity of the job search or tenure process. (And a citation to the blog that Mel organized to discuss The Academic Self!) For, just as in the earlier book, Hall brings a textual emphasis to our lives:

Our professional lives are narratives of sorts, and I have long believed that we need to hear about and learn from a far wider spectrum of those narratives. Only by placing narrative against narrative (against narrative against narrative), do we acquire some marginal ability to rewrite, synthesize, or even reject the stories that we have internalized or embraced as the singular truth about professorial life. (1)

Though, of course, part of what’s so exciting about such blogging is that it requires no particular justification. Witness, e.g., this new year’s reflection on narrative (via Flavia), or this, quite different example by Horace. I’ll try to be better about this, too.

Happy New Year!

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*Full disclosure: Hall edits the Victorian Critical Interventions series, in which Lost Causes appears.