“Adjunct faculty are being particularly hard-hit by the financial crisis at the state level. They deserve to be represented in collective bargaining, and their collective bargaining agreements should be respected.”
And yes, I know the first quote sounds bad, but I think she was referring to the economic realities of contingent academic labor rather than the commitment of individual faculty members.
I saw this live in Denver this afternoon and still haven’t quite gotten over it:
I’ve run into two links today that are worth mentioning here. The first depressed me, the second looks like good news but depressed me nonetheless.
The first is from NPR (via Think Progress) and has me fundamentally depressed. It’s about the end of a program called “Reading Rainbow” which I never saw, but I’m guessing I would have liked:
Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading — like phonics and spelling.
Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read — but that’s not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do.
“Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read,” Grant says. “You know, the love of reading — [the show] encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read.”
So once they’re literate, they’re on their own. We don’t want children to learn ideas, or God forbid think for themselves, do we?
Here’s the good news from Wired (via RYS, of all places):
[Y]oung people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as [Stanford University's Andrea] Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
Yeah, much of this makes me happy. I was particularly worried about the effects of text speak on formal writing, but these are Stanford students after all. They know what formal writing looks like, otherwise they never would have gotten in? If you don’t read much formal writing, where are you going to pick up that convention? And with Reading Rainbow gone, whose going to convince the next generation to spend the time to read it?
This is just strange, but it does give me an excellent excuse to post this:
Does Slate have a camera in my office?
Indeed, there’s no empirical evidence that unfettered access to the Internet turns people into slackers at work. The research shows just the opposite. Brent Corker, a professor of marketing at the University of Melbourne, recently tested how two sets of workers—one group that was blocked from using the Web and another that had free access—perform various tasks. Corker found that those who could use the Web were 9 percent more productive than those who couldn’t. Why? Because we aren’t robots; people with Web access took short breaks to look online while doing their work, and the distractions kept them sharper than the folks who had no choice but to keep on task.
The author also mentions something I’ve been considering doing for a long time now: switching over from Outlook to G-Mail as my sole e-mail interface. Can anybody tell me if there’s a downside to that idea?
Thanks to the AHA Blog, I was reading the first fifteen pages or so of Michèle Lamont’s How Professors Think. Again, my initial reaction was something along the lines of “tell me something I don’t know.” Consider this key sentence:
“It may be possible to determine the fairness of particular decisions, but it is impossible to reach a definitive, evidence-based conclusion concerning the system as a whole.”
Presumably then you study academic decision-making then so that one discipline could understand what another is thinking and they can all come together and sing Christmas Carols. I’m not against interdisciplinary peace. I’m just not entirely sure it’s possible.
But then then the intro goes downhill from there. Here’s the precise paragraph where she lost me:
“Despite all the uncertainties about academic judgment, I am to combat intellectual cynicism. Post-structuralism has led large numbers of academics to view notions of truth and reality as highly arbitrary. Yet many still care deeply about “excellence” and remain strongly committed to identifying and rewarding it, though they may not define it the same way.”
If I am having a cross-disciplinary argument about excellence, it is my responsibility to explain my criteria for judging that standard and then convince others to join me. It is not my responsibility to understand where the other side is coming from and meet their definition. I want to bring them to my side.
The key here is the difference between arbitrary and subjective. Any criteria of excellence is going to be subjective, but if I can explain it well it is not arbitrary. I say let the best criteria win! Anything else is just nihilism to me.
I’ve been running into this article everywhere over the last couple of days:
Texas high school students would learn about such significant individuals and milestones of conservative politics as Newt Gingrich and the rise of the Moral Majority — but nothing about liberals — under the first draft of new standards for public school history textbooks.
And the side that got left out is very unhappy.
As it stands, students would get “one-sided, right wing ideology,” said Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, chairman of the House Mexican American Caucus.
“We ought to be focusing on historical significance and historical figures. It’s important that whatever course they take, that it portray a complete view of our history and not a jaded view to suit one’s partisan agenda or one’s partisan philosophy,” he said….
The first draft for proposed standards in United States History Studies Since Reconstruction says students should be expected “to identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority.”
This story is a classic example of why history standards are useless. I happen to include both Newt Gingrich and the Moral Majority in my US history survey course. Both are very historically significant. However, I guarantee that what I say about them wouldn’t go over well with the Texas State Board of Education. And if some of my students don’t like my interpretation then it’s all for the best as we’ll all learn something then.
Teaching history is really about teaching students how to think. You can do that with any curricula, even if it’s written by narrow-minded partisans.
There’s a really remarkable article in this month’s Harper’s called “Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school.” It’s subscribers only now, but it is well worth picking up the magazine for it alone (not to mention a new Naomi Klein article) as it beautifully illustrates the corporate culture that’s been slowly taking over American education for a generation.
Here’s my favorite part:
The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult—to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization—not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their “product” not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their “success” something very much like Frost’s momentary stay against confusion.
They are thus, inescapably, political. Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of.
I find it very hard to add to that, but this is a blog post so I’ll try anyways.
One of the things I always find myself saying in class is that the wonderful thing about history is that the answer to the question is never 11. To put it another way, my grading philosophy is based not on what you say but on how you defend your position.
To me the most valuable democratic value is the ability to think for yourself. Certainly graduating young people who end up being unemployable is a bad thing, but if the only criteria we apply to education is whether you can work a cash register then we are all in trouble.
Besides, working class people are citizens too. Aren’t we all better off if they understand the world around them better from an early age? Or maybe that’s what proponents of corporatist education fear.
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