The Salt-Box

The Tenured Radical, as part of a post on cv-polishing for the secondary (i.e., adjuncting / visiting assistant professor) market, gets to the nub:

It is a real question whether you should get a full time visiting teaching gig; or whether you should stay away from teaching for a year, delay submission of your dissertation until April, and get some articles out to journals. If you can teach and write at the same time, fantastic. But also know that full time teaching is often consuming, even for a veteran teacher, and it is also really interesting, which means that you will want to spend time on and with your students that should probably be spent on your writing at this stage of your career. If you do not yet have publications and/or a polished dissertation, writing is a better use of your time in the long run, as long as you can find some other way to feed, house and clothe yourself, and as long as your committee will agree to keep you on the books for another year.

Because honestly? Showing that you are a mature scholar who can see an article through to publication and a person who has a clear sense of how the dissertation will become a book is going to help you far more than a year of teaching when, in the fall, you pull out your c.v., dust it off again, and go back on the market.

In general, this is right: taking the time to work on your writing is incredibly valuable, and it’s an experience you’re unlikely to get for a long time once you’ve gotten a real job.  If your committee’s still willing to read your work, then staying can be quite advantageous.  Having said that, I’m not sure there’s one-size-fits-all advice here; I think the best thing to do is to use TR’s post as the basis for a conversation with your committee and with your program’s director of graduate studies, who probably has a good feel for how people are doing on the market. (And also for how alumni are doing as they move into second jobs.)

There might be one bit of universal advice: Don’t even think about moving a long distance for a one-year appointment unless there’s a *very* good external reason to do so.  (You’ll be closer to your sick mother.  Your meth dealer is relocating, and you want to follow.)  By the time you get unpacked, it’ll be time to get job applications out, and you’ll feel behind the whole year.  You probably won’t be all that much better off as an internal candidate, either.

Fair play demands that I acknowledge, yet again, that I had a full-time teaching gig–a Brittain Fellowship at Georgia Tech–between my Ph.D. and my current job.  At the time, I took it for these reasons:

• It was right down the road from Emory, and so I didn’t have to move.
• I wanted to preserve some flexibility about timing, since A was also finishing her degree, and about to start her own search
• My dissertation director was no longer at Emory, so it seemed useful to be done.
• The post-doctoral certificate in digital pedagogy seemed appealing.

And I can also say this: The job that I have is (obviously) a teaching-heavy job, with a 4/4 load.  The Brittain Fellowship was 3/3, but it was all comp, and the class sizes at Tech were bigger than they are at CCSU.  I’ve been told by a couple of different members of the committee that hired me that that experience was an important positive factor, because, as they put it, “well, we know the load won’t kill him.”  (But research was still important–I had a piece in one high-profile collection and an article in this journal when I went on the market.  If either of those had been a *Victorian* article, of course, they probably would’ve stood me in greater stead, since I was on the market as a Victorianist . . . )

As is always the case in these situations, though, your mileage may well vary.

This weekend we went to the kindergarten registration kickoff event for our school district, a two-hour affair where they plied us with free coffee, pencils, magnets, and books, while trying to set the tone for kids they referred to as the high school class of 2021, and the college class of 2025. (It’s getting a little dusty . . . )

Parts of the morning verged on high comedy. The assistant superintendent gave a presentation on busing which explained, in part, that now that our district offers full-day kindergarten, the kindergarteners will ride on the same bus as the other elementary kids (except at this one school which is also a middle school, so they’ll ride with 8th-graders there, too). He said, “your kids might hear some inappropriate words, but that’s life.” During his presentation, he also said:

• “We’ve only lost a kid once in my memory — a couple of weeks ago, this one boy got off the bus and his teenaged sister forgot to pick him up “
• “We try to keep kids from having to cross busy streets, but that’s not always possible. In fact, this one kid got hit a couple of months ago, and hurt his arm a little.”
• “We have cameras on all the buses, but not all of them work. They all have blinking lights *as if* they work, and we periodically change around the functional ones.”
• “Oh by the way, your kids are on the bus right now.” (They took kids for a trip around the parking lot in a bus.)

A. started making this high-pitched, panicked noise until I reminded her that the boy won’t be riding the bus in the fall. We’re too close to his school (click the link for a retro use of the marquee tag!).

But the real highlight of the event was the superintendent’s opening remarks, which she chose to use as an exhortation to get involved in your child’s education. At first, I thought she was just preaching to the choir–after all, these were parents who’d already given up a Saturday morning to get orientated to kindergarten, which, after all, most of us successfully passed.

But then she started to go on and on about reading to your kid. Children who are read to regularly arrive at kindergarten tens of thousands of words ahead of other children. You can predict, she said, success on standardized tests and college admissions by the number of books in a home and how often they’re read. But then she said, “Look–you may not like to read. But read a paper. Or a magazine. Make time to read to your child–tell them, ‘I don’t want to do this, but it’s important.’”

Because that’s the message to send to kids: This reading stuff is stupid, but you’ve got to do it for school. That’ll make ‘em into lifelong readers! Bonus message: I resent–and will tally up against you–making time for your education.

A few minutes later, one of the Parent-School liaisons said, “Do what I do–read your child’s books! They’re quite clever and enjoyable.” I guess that’s true: I enjoyed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a great deal.

Some more practical advice might be: Try audiobooks, from the internet if that’s possible and the library if it’s not. If you *hate* reading, are you really going to communicate anything else to your child when you read?

A little alarming.

(Not the best education-related weekend, as we also had to sort out whether to sign the permission slips for the preschool’s safety sessions, including the “don’t let anyone touch your privates!” lessons. We range from skeptical to dubious about this, but also can’t quite figure out what will happen if we don’t sign–will they lock him in the bathroom for the duration of the lesson? And doesn’t refusing to sign the permission slip equal a “hey, prey on me” sign? On the plus side, we’re successfully signed up for t-ball!)

I’m “a reader” in the footnote to this post at The Reality-Based Community.  It’s almost like the time I got quoted in the TLS, or that other time in the Chronicle!

(I love The RBC’s epigraph, which is reflected in their URL: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”)

It just goes to show that I will push that rockdots screencast (by Jon Udell) on *anyone* who will listen.  You hear?  Anyone.

From the BBC:

A tiny chemical “brain” which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented.

The molecular device - just two billionths of a metre across - was able to control eight of the microscopic machines simultaneously in a test.

. . .

“If [in the future] you want to remotely operate on a tumour you might want to send some molecular machines there,” explained Dr Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the International Center for Young Scientists, Tsukuba, Japan.

“But you cannot just put them into the blood and [expect them] to go to the right place.”

Dr Bandyopadhyay believes his device may offer a solution. One day they may be able to guide the nanobots through the body and control their functions, he said.

“That kind of device simply did not exist; this is the first time we have created a nano-brain,” he told BBC News.

It’s time to register the 4-yr-old for kindergarten next year.  Here’s what the local school board says about reading and writing in kindergarten:

Meaningful activities which involve the child in reading and writing in a variety of ways are the foundation of the Kindergarten program. The child is helped to observe carefully, to note likenesses and differences in the appearance of objects and pictures, and to listen carefully to similarities and differences in sounds.  They learn letter names and sounds.  As Kindergarten children engage in discussion and experiences with others, their vocabularies and conceptual understandings grow, thus providing a richer background for reading.

In Kindergarten the child is introduced to the world of books and printed symbols.  As children thumb through books on the library shelf, they “read” the pictures and perhaps make up stories about them.  As they listen when the teacher reads to the class and as they notice signs and labels on various objects in the room, they gradually understand that writing is another way of communicating. 

Considering that the boy can already correctly interpret those scare-quotes, let’s hope that there’s some *actual* reading going on . . . . !

Saturday is the school district’s kick-off orientation for registration.  We’re a bit ambivalent.  On the one hand, we can use the sleep; on the other hand, reading pamphlets like this does make you wonder–”is our children learning”?  (That same educational philosopher-king also has said, though, that “childrens do learn,” so maybe I should just relax.)

This comment from the weekend has stuck in my craw a bit.  Aside from its slightly sanctimonious air, what’s puzzling about it is that it seems to assume that there are no costs to infinite creativity.   But that’s just not true.

This semester, I have 2 wholly new courses (the League course & the Digital Literary Studies course), and an extensively re-tooled one (the Victorian Age).  Next semester I have 3 new preps–one team-taught course, a topics course on cyberpunk (which has to be different from the last time I taught this, because of new rules affecting certain gen ed courses), the department’s intro to the major course–plus, again, a retooled course (the Victorian novel).  The next time I get to run out a largely set syllabus is when I teach the survey again in Spring 2009.  But, that semester I’m teaching a grad class for the first time, which I hear is prep intensive.

On the one hand, all these courses are pretty exciting.  I stay fresh; I get lots of repeat students; I’m pretty good at putting together interesting reading lists.

On the other hand, all this new stuff leads directly to my worst professorial habit: A wholly unjustified frustration, verging on fury, when some students turn out not to be all that engaged in the class.  When I propose the schedule, every time I think, “well, it’ll be a lot of work, but think how much fun it will be–and think of how much people will like the course!  We’ll all learn so much.”

Inevitably, though, not all students will like a particular class, and that dislike/indifference will be manifest both in their in-class affect (what I’ve sometimes called being “aggressively sullen”) and in shoddy work.

I react to this in a couple of different ways, all of them bad–the occasional outburst in class, holding on to papers for a r-e-a-l-l-y long time, depression–in effect, I mourn the gap between the class in my head and the actual class’s enactment.  I’ll find myself thinking, “you know, I could’ve just recycled the same old material semester after semester . . .”

But this isn’t exactly fair, and is just a product of being tired.  When rested, I’m perfectly capable of admitting, even encouraging, students in their different interests, and recognize that student disengagement isn’t always (often?) about me.  I even remember that the fact that *some* students aren’t interested doesn’t mean that some/many are.

So, I stand by what I said before: it’s not necessary to constantly re-invent everything about your classes, and, more than this, doing so can have unexpected costs.

. . . the only place on earth where frontin‘ gets its terminal g:

  “Fronting,” v., bluffing, posturing, pretending to be something one is not. Putting forth a false identity. It seemed to embody the current moment, one in which the newspapers were full of people who were full of it: an abandoned-baby hoax; a fictionalized diary entitled “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” in Esquire; not one but two faked memoirs (Holocaust survivor, gangbanger). “Fronting”: the word of the week.

You can feel for Laura Collins–the pursed lips of the New Yorker’s style police haunt this “Talk of the Town” item throughout.

But don’t take the bald, doughy, 36-yr-old white academic’s word for it: Here’s the KRS you’re looking for.

On I think at least 2 occasions, my wife has thrown out a debit card or credit card when it arrived in the mail.  Steven Levy thinks somone–his wife, or maybe himself–threw out . . . his brand new Macbook Air:

So what happened? In lieu of the presence of a poltergeist with techno-lust, I have developed a theory that I first viewed as remote, but now believe explains the fate of my Air. On Sundays in my apartment, the coffee table where the Air sat becomes the final resting place for the bulky New York Times. It is not unusual for other magazines, and newspapers from previous days, to accumulate there as well. My wife, whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to the trash-compactor room just down the hall from our apartment, dumping the pile into a plastic recycling bin. Sometimes the whole mess gets so nasty that I even perform this task myself. Could it be that somewhere in the stack was a Macintosh computer so thin that its manufacturer brags it could fit inside an envelope? I believe so. (For the record, my wife does not subscribe to this theory.)

As humiliating as it sounds, let me repeat: the MacBook Air is so thin that it got tossed out with the newspapers.

To forestall this in my own future, I’d better start keeping better track of my piles of stuff.

In today’s Times article on Margaret McCaffery, wife of the current Siena basketball coach, we find the following mark of human suffering:

“[McCaffrey] knows the game, obviously, so he can talk to her about it if he wants,” said Digger Phelps, a former Notre Dame coach and current ESPN commentator. “My ex-wife, I had to talk to her about literature.”

It *is* disappointing that a college coach’s wife might expect him to be able to chat a little about books.  Honestly!   The nerve . . .

(Though, of course, the set of “men who complain about what their ex-wives wanted to talk about instead of their own interests” is a well-populated one, and so perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on poor Digger.  If he would like to sit in on my Brit Lit II class some semester, I can probably fix him right up.  Or, I think I’m teaching a world lit survey this summer–maybe that would suit?)

. . . not because I’m no longer in touch with popular culture.  (I’ve never claimed to be cool.)

. . . not because I suddenly turned gray or anything.  (I was balding badly anyway, until Headblade saved me.)

. . . not because people started calling me “Sir.”  (That was years ago.)

. . . not because I’ve hit some milestone birthday.  (My birthday’s a long way off, and it won’t be a milestone.)

No, this is the semester I’ve become old because my longstanding system of at least one all-nighter every other week during the semester no longer works.  I can’t bring myself to do it, at least not with decent results.  Get by on 4 or 5 hours of sleep every night during the week, sure.  But get things done after about 3am?  Nope.

I’m holding out hope that the problem is that I’ve been sick for three weeks now, and when I’m fully recovered–perhaps after spring break–everything will be back to normal.  And, of course, I had been looking forward to transitioning all-nighters out next year, when the Little Man goes to kindergarten.  (If he’s in school every day, even at half-days, then I can do my work then, like a normal person.)

It’s sad, in a way.  If I’d known it was going to go, then I would have had a party.