The Salt-Box

My review of Rose George’s The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters appeared a couple of weeks ago in the New Haven Advocate & the Fairfield Weekly.  I will say that shit never gets old–it’s always interesting:

We are schizophrenic about shit. On the one hand, we laugh at it in grossout films and in elementary school. We revel in strange details, such as Martin Luther reportedly eating a spoonful of his own excrement each day for medicinal purposes. On the other hand, we tend to think of the bathroom as an intensely private space, so much so that many of us will flatly refuse to do anything that makes a noise while another person’s within earshot. Both perspectives imagine excretion as shameful or abnormal even though, as children’s book author Taro Gomi taught us long ago, everyone poops.

As ever, read the whole thing!

Grades are due at 8am tomorrow, a deadline I will largely make.  Also, winter session courses start tomorrow, which will be a little dicey . . . but I’m pretty sure I can get us through the opening of Bleak House.

But I’m poking my head up from a self-created grading hell to celebrate my favorite two typos of the late paper rush:

• One author apparently writes about “climb mate change,” which I think is what happens when you decide to get some new hiking buddies, or when your sex life dries up.
• In one of my favorite persistent typos ever, a student wrote an entire final paper on a woman named “Charlotte Brönte.” I love this because, on the one hand, the student’s detail-orientated enough to know that the umlaut is important, but, on the other hand, not quite enough to notice the right location!

Not typo-related, but still worth reading: Jonathan Goodwin’s got a specific scholarly desire, and Scott McLemee has noticed something about the way academics discuss journalism.

Writing in his Chronicle-sponsored blog today, Mark Bauerlein notes that psychologists have identified rising rates of narcissism among teenagers over the past several decades.  There are multiple causes for this, the research suggests, but Bauerlein focuses on one in particular:

What a temptation the MySpace page and blog diary pose. To think that you can record the events of the day and week and have someone read and respond, to believe that what happens to you on the way to school might be meaningful to others, to realize that your life is, indeed, something special and different and unique and worth sharing . . . well, the new tools are the answer.

It’s natural for 17-year-olds to be and think this way, but maturity means outgrowing it, not indulging it. Let’s face it, 90-plus percent of the things that happen to you during the week are of little or no significance to anyone else. They don’t merit a blog post. Realizing that sad fact is part of growing up. It’s not a pleasant process, to be sure, and the new tools, Twitter and the rest, enable the young to delay it long past its proper moment.

Let me start by saying that I’m usually pretty sympathetic to Bauerlein, and to arguments critical of boosting self-esteem.  But this isn’t his best moment: On the one hand, he’s quick to say that most things that happen during the week aren’t significant, yet on the other hand he’s just acknowledged that people do nevertheless comment on one another’s blogs.  Even their sad little LiveJournal and MySpace pages.  So there is at least some meaning.  (And you could equally say, of course, that most social conversation in the real world is pointless chatter–which it is–but that doesn’t make it deplorable.)

More generally, I think that this is a moment for education, not for condemnation.  I’ve argued before that I don’t think students are as familiar with technology as grown-ups tend to think, and this is probably a good example.  It may be the case that students turn to such tools as Twitter for endless self-validation or for mere self-expression–but I don’t think that’s the best use of such technologies.  Merlin Mann gets at the crucial issue:

And, you know. Just since it bears repeating: If you think you know people from reading Twitter, you probably don’t get Twitter. Or people.

One of the things social media let us do is reflect in more sophisticated ways on self-presentation and on the differences, perhaps, between the self we present to the public and the self to whom all the meaningless events of a day happen.  In other words, there’s no reason at all why Twitter, like everything else in a liberal education, can’t help us learn to get over our small shivering selves.

We have a new IT governance committee* on our campus, thanks to lots of arm-twisting by the CIO, and some (ongoing) redefining of the faculty senate’s information technology committee.  (For background, see these two pdfs.)  What’s interesting about this committee is that it brings together . . . everyone.  Faculty are represented, as well as student affairs, but so are HR, and admissions, and facilities, and the registrar, and the police.  Students, too.  The idea of the committee is that all of these groups consume IT resources (bandwidth, sweet sweet bandwidth, but also money/time/people), but there hasn’t been a formal process for articulating their concerns with one another.  It’s been more or less up to the CIO to decide who gets what–that’s not shared governance, as he constantly reminds us.

The first meeting was today, and it was . . . fascinating.  First, just from a geek point of view it was interesting to hear about all the different projects going on, and also to hear straight talk about budgets and such.  Second, it was interesting to learn about shared gripes.  For example, faculty–especially part-timers–frequently complain that we don’t support automatic forwarding of university e-mail.  HR also hates this, because it’s hard for them to communicate reliably with our (ginormous) population of part-time faculty.

Finally, it was also interesting to hear about different constituencies’ interests in particular topics/technologies, and to think about the ripple effect changes in one domain might have in another.  (For example, campus police is interested in GIS, to provide information to first-responders who might not know the campus; we should be certain to coordinate with, for example, the Geography department.  If approx. 80% of our students have a web-capable phone, and we’re upgrading our security cameras across campus, shouldn’t we investigate software that lets students see the cameras in public spaces?  If all those students have smartphones, does *every* classroom have to be a smart one? &c.  [Note that none of these were discussed formally today. If they were, it’s not at all clear I could voice them here.])

In this vale of tears, I’m sure that the committee will often be frustrating or contentious–after all, everyone wants their project funded first, and these are not exactly flush times for a regional comprehensive state university.  But it is an interesting idea, and the last part of today’s meeting was awesome, in a way committee meetings rarely are.

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*And of course I’m chair.  Criminy–I’m on four committees this year, and am chair of every last cotton-pickin’ one of ‘em.  In this instance, it’s probably helpful that a faculty member chair the committee.

From yesterday’s New Britain Herald:

 A brazen bank robber pulled off a drive-through heist at the Bank of America on West Main Street Monday afternoon by making a “significant threat of violence,” police said.

Police declined to comment on the threat the man in a small blue car made, but he implied he had a weapon and said he would harm employees if his demands weren’t met.

“It was a significant threat of violence to the employees,” Lt. James Wardwell said. “No weapon was displayed, but the teller took the threat seriously.”

The robber pulled up to the drive-through on the side of the building around 1:44 p.m. and handed the teller a note demanding money, Wardwell said. He drove off with an undisclosed amount of cash.

No one was harmed during the incident. Wardwell said drive-through bank robberies are very rare. Police have the note that was given to the teller, he said.

I bet drive-through robberies become a lot more common once word gets out that you don’t even have to flash your weapon!

A nearby town, Vernon, has Dickens Days every year: a holiday celebration loosely organized around a Victorian theme.  Students in my Victorian novel class could get extra credit if they went and could prove it.  (In the interests of anthropology, of course!)  A handful of students went; most brought flyers and a cell-phone or digital camera picture.

One student, though, bought this ornament, allegedly depicting Dickens:

I’m not sure who this is–but it’s not Dickens!

(This isn’t quite my slide presentation, but a list related resources.  Here’s the slide presentation itself.)

It’s nice to start with an epigraph.  Here’s Jo Guldi on what humanities pedagogy could look like today:

 A characterization of humanities pedagogy based on risk-taking, insight, and pattern-finding is very exciting. It pushes past the monotony of the college essay and re-emphasizes the skills of perception upon which the humanities have traditionally been based. It creates richer minds and broader sets of experience.

(Definitely click the link: Her “5-minute map” idea is awe-inspiring in its simplicity and potential.)

If you are wholly new to blogs/social media, here are three videos I  recommend:

• Social Media in Plain English (CommonCraft)
• RSS in Plain English (CommonCraft)
• The Machine Is Us/ing Us (Michael Wesch)

There are lots-n-lots of academic blogs out there–if you search [your field] blogs . . . you’ll find something worth reading.  (Here are 3 to start: University Diaries, academhack, and PrintCulture.)
Rather than turn this into a long post, here are my previous posts on Ivanhoe & Twitter, plus some bonus teaching-with-technology goodness:

• Ivanhoe
• Twitter
• Wikified class notes
• Delicious
• Timeline
• How to read three Victorian novels in 2.5 hours

I am a sucker for Dickens-related holiday humor, and so can’t help linking to Yankee Pot Roast’s

(even if it is a year old).

A local blogger is reporting that a New Britain Herald reporter was arrested over the weekend on DUI & drug charges.  I’m not one to moralize when someone’s down, and in general I have a fairly libertarian take on the drug problem, but this is disappointing:  According to NBGrrrl, he was “arrested in Hartford.”

What, I ask, about the hard-working New Britain dealers?  Is the man up the street short this month?   Is there *nothing* going on downtown?  In these difficult economic times, surely the right thing to do is buy locally.

I have terrible handwriting.  This doubtless follows from various moral failings, but it is literally true that I was never properly taught cursive handwriting: I was promoted out of 2nd grade, when they were first starting to teach it, and then my 3rd grade teacher tried to make me switch to right-handedness.  (I went to elementary school in the 1920s.)

It’s not *wholly* inaccurate to say that, while I reverse fewer letters than he does, my five-year old’s handwriting is probably more consistently legible than mine.  Jerk.

(True story: It is, or was, customary at debate tournaments to write your names on the board at the start of a round, for the benefit of the judge.  Once, at a tournament at West Point, a tournament where I won a speaking award, I had chalkboard duty in an early round.  When the judge, who happened to be on the faculty there, walked in, it became clear he was having trouble reading my writing.  I nervously laughed and apologized for the bad penmanship.  His answer: “No, your writing’s ok . . . but I think you need to press harder on the chalk.  It’s ok to use your muscles!”  There’s nothing quite like being told to man up right before a college debate round.)

This doesn’t come up a lot every day, at least not since I switched to electronic formats for virtually all assignments.  But yesterday, while chairing a committee meeting, I had to provide the group with possible language for a faculty senate resolution.   There was a whiteboard in the room, so I scrawled out the wording.

Jaws dropped as the various professors around the table squinted and leaned forward to try to decipher my malformed, crowded letters.  After a fair amount of bantering, one of the professors insisted that she had no problem reading what I’d written.  “Of course,” she added after the table quieted, “I work with LD kids all the time.”

Note to self: Make sure the data projector is turned on in all future meeting rooms, so that I can TYPE in front of the committee.  *Sigh.*