out but not down

I have only to administer and grade the final.
I created a lovely eggplant parmigiana the other evening.
My so-called works-in-progress presentation went quite well. Much interest and many questions.
It is not my fondest desire that the next time I teach I will be teaching as an assistant professor but it is up there in the top 10 or so on the stuff-for-myself-alone list.

The History of Love was fine but, really, it wasn't all that. However, Bird was a riot. If I were going to pick my role in the movie adaptation I would either be Bird or Bruno.

help wanted

Seeking responsible and caring individual to stand in for exhausted mother, lecturer and graduate student. The appointment will begin immediately and conclude on December 13. Responsibilities include: preparing and delivering lecturers, grading assignments, and responding to student needs; clothing, feeding, bathing, and supervising the activity of a wobbly toddler; completing grant applications and upcoming dissertation presentation, creating winter interview schedule, and overseeing survey scanning and commencing analyses.

google-ized

So, I feel like every time I go to blogger, they are making it more difficult for me to stay old school. Are they going to force this google-ization on me? When? Should I move over to typepad or some other platform?

I used to be a fan of google but am beginning to feel like they are getting to be a little too big for their britches. I know their employee practices are commendable and all but do they really need to acquire absolutely everything ? Yes, I know, the bottom line, increasing profits, etc. etc. but what about monopolies and separation of powers and all that?

meh.

I'm on campus using my prehistoric laptop (external wireless card, big and heavy, blue line down the left side of the screen, red line down the right) trying to get some work done (teaching of course, the works-in-progress presentation I'm giving in a couple of weeks is sadly mistitled) and am about to head over to the gym after quite a long hiatus (approx 6 weeks).

The winter doldrums set in early this year - during that mid-October spurt of cold and grey. At this point I am underwater - hoping that I will be able to hold my breath until the semester ends. I optimistically imagine that I will resurface with an exuberance and joie de vivre that will carry me through until the new year (my new year, folks, the hint of spring).

Anyway, I am truly off to the gym and not looking forward to the scale or watching how quickly my heart rate soars - likely reaching my target rate while climbing the stairs up to the cardio theater. I am looking forward to sweating and listening to my return-to-the-gym ipod playlist which includes toe-ticklin' tunes from MSTRKRFT, Spouse, Kekele, Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins, The Bravery and New Order, among others. On a related note, have I mentioned that I am enjoying the resurgence of the "post-modern" sound in some contemporary music?

if I were you, I would expect a quiz on Monday

I know lots of folks who feel badly about failing those who attend class. In general I concur that it is kind of crappy to fail students who are regular attendees, engaged in lecture and clearly putting in effort to prepare for class and exams.* It seems like nearly every semester I have a student or 2 who falls into this category - just doesn't seem to get it - and I spend significant time with them trying to get them to learn how to read, write and take tests. Anyway, these students I get. I am baffled by the students who come to class and do nothing and yet somehow expect that I will pass them despite their poor performance on exams and other assignments.

I hit an all-time low with one of my sections this week. One of my students entered before class and put her head down on her desk to sleep. Once class began her head stayed down so I called on her. She popped up and answered (albeit in a way that demonstrated she hadn't done the reading) my question and then put her head back down. I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt - paying attention with head down - a few minutes later however, there was a slapping noise which was the result of her hand (in her sleep) dropping on to the desktop. Further, there was much less student involvement than usual (e.g. no one responding to questions and comments) and one student, who made no mention to me of an early departure, packed up and left. Meanwhile one of my most annoying students (annoying in that she is outspoken in class at the same time that she doesn't prepare, generally late, AND to top it off added the class at the beginning of the semester to get an A to bring up her GPA (assuming, apparently, that my class - Sociology, after all - was an easy A)) closed her notebook and put her head down on the desk too. I had reached the limit.

"So," I said, "I am sorry. I didn't realize that this was such a horrible lecture. Should we just forget about it and I'll see you next week?"
[Silence]
"I mean," I continued, "I've got 2 people sleeping down here in front, other folks leaving and most of the rest of you sitting comatose. If my lecture is that painful for you all, let's not waste any more of our time, OK?"
[At this point a couple of my tried and true regulars said that they were paying attention and interested. Then the annoying student spoke up.]
"Well, I didn't do the reading so I really don't understand."
"Oh you're not prepared. All the more reason not to pay attention to a lecture in which I am going over the material you should have read before today."
[Silence]
"I will continue the lecture for those of you who are interested. However, I would like the rest of you to pack up. If you have a need to sleep, I highly recommend the sofas in the Union on the 3rd floor. We'll wait a minute so you don't disrupt us further on your way out."
No one moves. After a minute I recommence the lecture and abstain from soliciting any class participation. The sleepers are awake, wide awake. At the end of the period, most students exit through the back. I am still livid and, further, the lecture needs to be completely revamped.

*When this happens, I tend to fault the university for admitting students who are not up to the work and then not following through with services. The university I'm at now does a great job of making itself accessible to those from the community who are interested in being students but I do think that, if you are going to take tuition $$ from folks, you should make a commitment to helping them through successfully.

the stars at night

We were away the last 10 days or so - in TX. We spent time in Austin. Eh - not a fan - kind of a bigger even more all-the-inconveniences-of-a-city-with-none-of-the-perks town like Madison. South Austin wasn't bad and the bats were kind of cool. Then it was San Antonio. What a nice city! An old and walkable city center. The coolness (meaning temperature) of the somewhat over touristed riverwalk. A great place to visit. Last was San Marcos (pronounced locally sanMARcus) which ended up being a pleasant surprise. The outlet malls were on the outskirts and there was a nice little village center and even some good food (best vittles of all 3 locations).

Other things learned:
1. The smell of barbecue (I'm from Maine so the spelling is a guess) makes me ill - burnt flesh with a few spices rubbed in. It permeates everything. I can't even eat the bread or the beans without tasting it and feeling like I'm about to toss my cookies.
2. One can only spend so much time eating cheese enchiladas, rice and beans.
3. At the young age of 14 months I would guess that E has consumed less than 1/8 the sugar of the typical American toddler. I suspect one of the things she is going to enjoy about traveling as she grows older is all the crapola she gets to eat.* We have a pretty established diet of whole grains, unprocessed/sweetened fruits, veggies and legumes, and organic dairy products without additions. So, on this trip, we couldn't give E her normal whole milk organic plain yogurt and ended up with those typical yoplait and dannon-type things. 3 of the first 5 ingredients are some form of sugar! They averaged 12g of sugar per container (less yogurt than E usually eats at a sitting). They also contained less calcium and protein than a typical serving of whole milk plain yogurt. I can't believe people think of those things as part of a healthy diet.

*Incidentally, I didn't travel growing up (barring the trip to the mainland to shop at the mall and our annual family trip to "Funtown," a 30 minute drive from the ferry terminal and, in my mind, basically another country). All the same, my parents ruined their credit on a family trip to DisneyWorld when I was in 7th grade. They purchased a package which included meals at resort restaurants. I think I ordered a steak pretty much every night. Toward the end of the trip, as I was finishing off yet another steak, I turned to my mother and said, "I really like steak, but, when we get home, do you think you could make a green salad and macaroni with butter and pepper?"Sure enough, mom made that for our first dinner at home. She also made it for all my subsequent homecoming meals - home from college, home from Russia, first meal after the Nutcracker closed, etc.

[]

so very busy and exhausted and overwhelmed and...
E has given up her morning nap. I generally blogged, tidied up, and took care of self-grooming during this time. The house is a mess, my teeth are fuzzy and my hair greasy, and the obvious.
I am eagerly anticipating next semester - no teaching! My thoughts on this life, the academic one (always tempered by the all-the-time me), swing wildly between 2 poles. Some days I am invincible, a happy parent of a wonderful child and a budding sociologist with an exciting and important research agenda. Other days I cannot tell if it is mental fatigue or physical exhaustion weighing me down but all the same I cannot imagine a life in which I am any more than the something less than part-time academic/educator-in-training that I am now - at least until E and any subsequent siblings are off to school.
detours and derailments. some days they are a pleasure and others...

[rant]

I don't have much time because I have to go downstairs and start cutting up fall vegetables for roasting however, I just sat down to check my email and am doubly annoyed.

First, human subjects is still stringing me along.

Second, I received an email from a student. Not inherently problematic but get this:
This student has been registered for my class since the beginning. I first heard from her the third week of classes (via email) in which she explained her reasons for being a no-show up to that point. I sent her the syllabus and suggested that she should read it. I told her that I run a tight ship and that she had already missed 2 assignments and a quiz that could not be made up. She said that she would be able to catch up. She attended not the next class but the class after that and vanished for the next 4. Today she emailed me explaining why she was absent the last 2 weeks, asked for make-up work and inquired into what she needed to know for the impending midterm.

You've got to be kidding me!

What I want to say is:
THERE IS NO MAKE-UP!
THE EXAM WILL COVER 5 WEEKS OF MATERIAL ABOUT WHICH YOU KNOW NOTHING AND A BOOK YOU INDICATE YOU HAVE NEVER EVEN HEARD OF MUCH LESS PURCHASED AND READ IN ITS ENTIRETY.
I AM HAPPY TO SPEAK WITH YOU ABOUT HOW TO APPROACH COLLEGE EDUCATION BUT PLEASE DROP MY CLASS.

release me!

In all seriousness, IRB, you are messing up my life right now. Not only should I have been collecting data THIS WEEK, I cannot complete a research fellowship application requesting support for research that I do not yet have permission to do.

In my experience, the second you say you are going to be looking at how racial, ethnic and religious difference is interpreted and managed, they assume you are out to do harm. Even if you are gathering data on TECHNIQUES and CURRICULA they claim up and down that the people WHO WILL NOT EVEN APPEAR IN YOUR RESEARCH PRODUCT are at risk.

This is really an interesting case of the university managing knowledge production. I mean, I say I want to go hang out in a poor neighborhood to look at racial tensions and that's fine. Poor people are interesting reading and they don't sue. You say you want to find out how notions of diversity are produced and disseminated by power players and next thing you know we've been strung along for 2 months and asked to navigate all kinds hoops and hurdles clearly designed to get you just to give up.

Office update

As you may remember, I've been redesigning my office in order to create a space conducive to completing a dissertation. This will be particularly crucial when I lose my Milwaukee office at the end of the semester at the same time when the winter doldrums tend to set in.

At any rate, I LOVE my desk - so spacious with loads of leg room and surface area and I can look out the window when I need to move my eyes to something else for a minute.


While I've had the desk for a month, I just put up my new shelving unit today. It's Smart Furniture, but discounted stuff from their outlet store. As you can see, we can grow into the existing space and this unit is modular so when we move we should be able to reconfigure it to fit in our new space. We could also add on to it if need be.


Last major item on the acquisition list is a lateral file. This photograph shows where it will go and some of the material waiting to go into it.


We were hoping to get one "on loan" from one of our workplaces but, alas, none are available. I'm keeping my eyes peeled but if I haven't found something by the next credit card billing cycle I'm going to get the one that matches the desk.

On the wish list: an office chair and corkboard.

Apropos

best student typo ever:
excreta instead of etcetera

ode to human subjects

your hands around my neck
my voice is distorted, muted, silenced
knowledge/power culture/power corporate power
you protect those without need
and perceive risk only to your own skin
you limit what we may learn
and determine what can be known

verily

1. Teaching a repeat class is a good experience - allows you to work on balancing your teaching with research, service, etc.
2. Perfect weather today - hot in the sun, cool in the shade, memories of summer and hints of what is to come.
3. Here's something to do with all that CSA corn:

Preheat oven to 425
Cut kernels from 3 ears sweet corn and spread on cookie sheet
Spray with olive oil
Bake until golden (15 minutes-ish)
Drain and rinse one can of black beans
Chop (and all other sensical prep), combine and pulse in food processor
1 red onion
1 cup cilantro
2 gloves garlic
2 jalapeno peppers
4 -6 ripe roma tomatoes
1 red pepper
3 tablespoons of cider vinegar
1 tablespoon of vegetable oil
Juice of 1 or 2 limes
pour into large bowl and fold in the beans and completely cooled corn
add 2 diced avocados immediately before serving

whoops

A journal editor has asked that I review a manuscript. I suppose this is a CV builder too even if it can't be placed under the "publications" heading.

Is it just chance that I am getting this request? Seems odd but the editor made no mention of my advisors and I know they are clear that I want to be a BOOK reviewer.

on reviews

Apparently it is appropriate to have your advisor recommend you as a reviewer. If you're faculty I suppose you're supposed to make the contact yourself.

rapt

Today I was lecturing and noticed that we were running out of time. I began to speed things up a little and noted that no one had so much as capped a pen. This is uncommon in my teaching experience at this and my previous place of employment. In fact, I tell students on the first day that I find it the height of rude when folks pack up before I stop talking and request that they refrain. In general people comply with my request but, all the same, usually there is discernible change in the tenor of the class in the last 5 minutes. Today I thought to myself, "Damn, I knew this was a good lecture but I didn't realize it was that interesting."

Finally, about a minute after the class-time, I used my "I'll leave you with this [somewhat debatable statement] and we can pick up here Wednesday. Still no one moved and slowly it dawned on me. "We still have another 15 minutes don't we?" To which there were universal nods and a few snickers.

to all 2 or 3 of you

traffic is down lately. i feel a little disgruntled about it too. blogging without the help of jfw's sidebar is a little more lonely. seriously. anyone out there?

so i've written the first draft of a stellar book review and i've got some "feelers" out to figure out how to get it picked up. if things are going too slowly or not going at all, i think i'm just going to be brazen enough to email some editors and tell them that i've got reviews and, since they are in the review business, at least in part, we should get together.

doesn't this earthbound organic/natural selection foods thing bug you a bit? i did a little snooping around and it seems to me that natural selection foods is the packaging arm of earthbound and they also package for all kinds of other folks - many of whom are not organic. here are my questions: are all the greens sold under the earthbound label produced on the earthbound farm? if not, why is there no mention of that on the label or on the company (FARM!) website? are the other greens packaged by natural selection produced on earthbound acreage (meaning that the farm is not completely organic)? finally, what, if any, work is done to insure that organic greens are not processed with conventional greens or, for that matter, that the organic greens remain free of pesticide and other chemical residues introduced into the packaging facility by the conventional greens?

it's weekends like this that make me happy for community supported agriculture even if I am up to my ears in sweet corn and carrots.

2 things

1. To those who keep leaving copies of the new testament on the bench in front of my gym locker, on our steps, and in my office mailbox: thanks for being worried about my salvation and all but although it is true that I have not accepted Jesus Christ as my savior, it is not for lack of access to the New Testament.
2. Also, perhaps this is only hilarious if it depicts your current life fairly accurately but I laughed so hard I cried.

what was i thinking when...*

If I were put together enough to run any regular kind of posts, one of my regular "segments" would be entitled "What was I thinking when..." In these posts I would detail some glaringly stupid thing I had done.

For example:
1. What was I thinking way back when I was 5 years old and at Feeney's grocery on the island with Mitzii (yes, really) and her mom and I just popped a piece of gum in my mouth without waiting to pay for it or even asking if Mitzii's mom was willing to buy us a piece of gum?
2. When I agreed to teach 2 classes this semester?
3. When I stupidly announced that a faculty member had been offered and turned down a job at another department and I did this in a very public setting in front of that faculty member even though I had no idea how public that information was and I learned it through a member of the faculty at that other department who has his foot in his mouth even more frequently than I do?
4. When I said, "I swear to God" while giving a lecture?

Of course, if I were going to really do it up, I would elaborate on these stupid acts, including the lead in, how quickly (or not) I realized I was an idiot, exactly how bright red I became and for how long, and how my stupidity continues to affect my life even today.

*incidentally, I imagine this is the kind of post that prompts my partner to believe my blogging is risky activity.

Last night when I was giving E her bath before bed, she was splashing around like usual and she slipped and went under - the first time ever on my watch. I was right there. I saw it all happen and recall the detail so well it was one of those seconds that lasted forever. One minute she is laughing at the water she is causing to fly about and the next minute she is staring up through the water with a look of complete shock on her face. I pulled her out instantly and held her, getting soaked. She made a couple of futile attempts at gasping for air and then coughed a little, fussed for a second, and started to squirm in my arms. I thought to myself, "Well... she's OK so it's probably best to put her back in the tub for a second so she can end the bath on a good note and not develop an aversion to bathing or the water." I placed her very gingerly in the tub and she started laughing and splashing again - this time reaching across the tub for one of her bath toys. "Be CAREful," I said as she began to slip again and I took her arm to make sure she stayed alfoat. She laughed again!

At this point I decided that I was the one developing an aversion to her baths and pulled the plug both literally and figuratively. My partner took care of bathing tonight. As for me, I'm thinking she's old enough for the shower.

To blog or not to blog

My partner and I differ a little bit when it comes to our notions of privacy and risk. When we first moved in together, it was a constant battle between having all the shades up, the windows open, and the doors unlocked and living in a "locked down" facility. We've both regressed toward the mean a little. He doesn't feel the need to close all the downstairs windows every time he goes upstairs and sometimes he even leaves the outer door unlocked when he takes out the dogs although he is still pretty strict about keeping the blinds down and curtains drawn. I actually frequently lock the doors when I am inside and am not constantly running around the house undoing all the closing up he does. However, I still don't worry about closing the shades at night or drawing the curtains so that folks don't see me streaking from the shower to my bedroom closet.

My generally unarticulated philosophy on privacy goes something like this:
1. If you have nothing better to do than hang around waiting for a glimpse of me streaking to my bedroom, I feel for you.
2. If you happen to see or hear something "private" because the shades are up, I expect you to show me the courtesy of turning away and moving on. I would do the same for you. Privacy is, after all, a social arrangement. Living in close quarters (there is not more than 14 feet between our house and the next and there is only a wooden fence separating our backyards) means that we are privy to all kinds of information about one another. Instead of policing the public/private boundary, ultimately a futile task, it makes more sense to maintain norms for respecting the difference between public and private behavior.

Remember Goffman's story about how the Shetland Islanders would walk into one another's houses (same holds on my island home) but would make sure to announce themselves by approaching noisily? Were they to walk in on anything (within reason) private, they would likely turn a blind eye.

So here's the thing. My partner thinks I should discontinue my blog in light of my impending foray into the job market. He thinks that much of the information I disclose is too private and would be a problem if it became known to potential employers and he takes it as a given that my potential employers will discover my blog.

I tend to think that's baloney. First, I think potential employers have better things to do than trying to find out if I have a secret blog somewhere. Second, even if folks were to learn about this blog, I fail to see how it would color their opinion of me as a candidate provided the blog was not used to account for some previously recognized problem with me as a candidate. Lastly, although my posts here aren't constitutive of some joyous and empowering Whitman-esque (Whitmanian??) "yawp," I do value the opportunity to make a "peep" every now and then. SO, dear reader(s), I solicit your help in 2 ways. First, if you would be so kind as to respond to the poll, I would be much obliged. Second, comments are welcome.

Plan of Attack

Here's the plan. What do you think? Actually, unless you are going to tell me things that reinforce my fragile self-esteem, just remain mum, OK?

This semester:
1. Send out 2 (possibly 3) book reviews so as to take small steps toward overcoming the fear of disseminating research (to be completed by October 15 ath the LATEST). I'm much more comfortable commenting on other people's work so why not navigate the process a couple of times with written work that I feel OK about? I know, I should have been doing this all along.
2. Complete and clean up dissertation chapter 2.
3. Send it out to folks for comment.
4. Prepare thesis (I know, I know. This should have been done ages ago) for submission.
5. Find folks to read revised thesis and send it to them.

The break:
1. ASA submission- first run at chapter 3 based on data collected in initial field site (try to hijack panel with like-minded co-conspirators)
2. Revise chapter 2.
3. Revise thesis.

Next semester:
1. Send chapter 2 out for publication.
2. Send thesis out for publication.
3. Begin chapter 4 interviews.
4. Ongoing chapter 3 data collection in follow-up sites and writing.
5. Hunger data analysis and policy brief.

E's photo of the month: 1 year old

Can you believe it?

middle

there are so many mediocre books in the world. hopefully the not so random sample of books I've read over the past few days are not indicative of some accelerating devolution in research around race and ethnicity, particularly the African American middle-class and educating African American youth.

Sheesh. Can't we do any better than The Dreamkeepers and Black Picket Fences*, folks? Am I missing the really good stuff?

*I'm inclined to cut Patillo a little slack. It was her dissertation, after all. She deserves props for just getting the manuscript out. Further, I attended a presentation she gave at the ASA and liked it. Ladson-Billings, however, is too senior to have produced the book she did. I decided to use it to replace Bad Boys on my students' reading list because I generally have a number of future teachers and last semester they were hoping for a book that offered a plan of action instead of just spelling out how schools reproduce inequality. Ladson-Billings offers a plan of action. However, it hinges upon having the same cultural frame of reference as the students. She profiles 8 teachers (6 African American and 2 white). However, of the white teachers, one has an African-American cultural frame of reference and the other spent a great deal of time in African and has an equal number of white and African American friends. I fear that my mostly white suburban education students will come away from the book thinking that they don't have the ability to be good teachers of African American students.

refrigerator blindness

I'm back to Jeffrey Alexander again but only for a moment.

He's reaching on his application of the autonomy of culture and his requirement that cultural sociological analyses take culture as an independent variable. Ultimately, or at least based upon his own work, one must conclude that his theory cannot make predictions and only appears to have value when used as a retrospective explanatory tool. Furthermore, actors, interests and values, and other spheres of social life are left out of his "thick descriptions of culture." Yet they come sliding right back in again when Alexander attempts to explain cultural change and the succession of social theories. Instead of self-interested agents, economic incentives, politics, or other "non-cultural" factors, Alexander's theory rests on theory itself as an actor seeking self-preservation and ascendancy ("Broad theories can defend themselves by defining and protecting a set of core propositions, jettisoning entire segments of their perspective as only peripherally important" (Meanings of Social Life, p. 205)). Alexander constructs culture as an actor the same way states are constructed by Skocpol, individuals are constructed by rational choice theories, corporations by organizational theorists, etc, etc.

Ultimately Alexander is so adamant regarding the independence of culture that he really has no way to bring culture back into the world of material consequences without jettisoning that which is most important - an understanding of culture as the affective, dramaturgical and discursive context in which all action is carried out.