Greetings visitors from Boing Boing!

My original post on the books from the Houdini Collection is here. It’s not exactly world-class blogging, but the picture is pretty cool.

Who remembers the Kinko’s packet?

Who remembers the Kinko’s packet? I’m talking about thick copy booklets with plastic binding that used to be a mainstay in college education. Since I was a history major, I remember them in practically every class in college. As I’m currently looking at the two-part monster I got for my Economic Sociology graduate seminar in Fall 1993, I can say with certainty that they lasted into the 1990s….until the Copyright Police took them away.

Might the iPad serve as their functional equivalent? From the Atlantic online:

Apple hasn’t yet released the particulars of its iBook app, but it heralds a potential textbook revolution for three reasons. First if the online store allows chapters to be purchased individually, professors and students will enjoy unprecedented freedom to assign chapters rather than volumes. That would be welcome news for cash-strapped students since textbooks can easily run $300 or more a semester, even though much of the content goes unread.

Please, let it be true. Please.

Howard Zinn was a breath of fresh air.

I must be doing something right as a historian since my e-mail box started filling up with Howard Zinn tributes before I even saw the news that he had died.

I went to a Howard Zinn speech before I ever read one of his books. It was Madison in the early-1990s and I must have been the only history grad student in the audience who had never even heard of A People’s History of the United States. I distinctly remember my reaction, though: I couldn’t believe he was saying such things. I had simply never encountered an all-out assault on the Heroic Master Narrative of American history before. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but the notion that one could even contemplate mounting such an attack was absolutely exhilarating

Running into Zinn’s actual scholarship, I was less impressed. I loved A People’s History the first time I read it, but the more I learned about American history in general the more I realized its flaws. I think of it as a book to give precocious 15-year-olds who think that history is boring. Hopefully, it can then serve as a gateway to better-researched stuff.

To me Zinn’s best book is his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. Besides the fact that the title is the best metaphor for discussing historical bias that I’ve ever encountered, it is much easier to enjoy without qualms as you can’t expect him to be objective when he tells his own story. Lifting a sentence from it quoted in the Boston Globe‘s obituary:

“From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’ ; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

As I remember it, he argues that since kids grow up with the Heroic Master Narrative of American history their whole lives, he doesn’t need to give that side of the story. We all already know it far too well.

I think this perspective is why his books have sold so well. People who don’t know anything about history from the bottom up are probably just as surprised by his arguments as I was when I first heard him. He will always be a breath of fresh air to people who pick up his works for the first time.

Quote of the day.

“Consenting to seven to ten years in wage slavery as the necessary precondition for liberation is no longer rational if this simply precedes a still lower salary as an adjunct faculty member. The only thing the PhD now reliably confers is the potential for lifetime poverty and underemployment.”

- Cary Nelson, “Don’t Mourn, Organize,” Academe, January-February, 2010.

Herbert Hoover at the Republican National Convention (1960).

More direct contact can only happen with fewer students.

This is what happens when a bunch of college administrators get together and try to improve teaching:

Likewise, several speakers argued that the recession is no reason for colleges to be complacent about the quality of their instruction. “In this time of complete free fall, there are plenty of opportunities to grab,” said Ken O’Donnell, associate dean for academic-program planning in the California State University system’s office of the chancellor.

Mr. O’Donnell is working with campuses to adopt what he calls “high-impact practices”—including classroom models that involve more-active student learning and less rote lecturing—in introductory courses where students often struggle.

Those reforms do not involve any substantial expense, he said—and they can reap financial dividends if students’ dropout rates decline.

[Emphasis added]

The Washington Monthly College Guide (where I got the Chronicle link above) makes the obvious point:

The trouble with this is that talking about improving instruction in terms of motivating professors to care about instruction is that, as one commentator pointed out, is that “this whole push ‘to motivate professors to improve their teaching’ is that it doesn’t square with the reliance upon cheap adjuncts to teach a larger and larger proportion of those ‘introductory courses where students often struggle.’”

I’d argue that this proposal is flawed at an even deeper level: If you really want to encourage “more-active student learning and less rote lecturing” you have to destroy the large lecture course, the mainstay of large state systems like the two in California.

Twenty is a good class size for a discussion. Forty is doable, but not great. By the time you get to Sixty I’d argue that any teaching method but lecturing is completely impossible. Think of the ambient noise when half an auditorium full of students tunes out their fellow classmates since they’re questions won’t be on the test! Think of the problems repeating both sides of a conversation if the room actually wants to hear them. Turning such sections into manageable numbers would require hiring more instructors, not less.

This brings us back to the Washington Monthly argument. Do you think this guy from the Cal State system is assuming that adjuncts would take over the splinters of defunct large lecture courses (thereby spurring a cost-savings) or does he think he’s going to convince someone teaching three hundred students to start teaching like they’re only teaching thirty?

My money is on the former. After all, he’s from California, isn’t he?

Obligatory self-promotional link.

This is a rewrite of a CSU-Pueblo press release. I’m still hoping the Chieftain will do a feature once the reporter who does the history stories reads the book.

The Harry Houdini Collection at the Library of Congress.

The Harry Houdini Collection from the Library of Congress is available (at least 30 or 40 full texts of published materials) through Google Books. Somebody ought to tell Boing Boing.

A college education is a long-term investment.

I hear enough stories from frustrated graduates about the current job market to make me wonder about the efficacy of what I do for a living. However, the risks associated with an undergraduate degree and the rewards commensurate with it aren’t like graduate school in the humanities. It’s more like an investment in yourself than a lottery ticket, which makes this article seem patently irresponsible to me:

Being “upside-down” means owing more on your house or car than it’s worth. Right now, Patricia Summers is upside-down on her college degree.

She owes $18,000 on loans taken to get her degree in advertising from the University of Missouri. Her college time will end up costing more than $50,000, not counting what she could have earned from a full-time job had she not gone to college.

But that job probably would have been a dead-end, low-paying service job, advocates of higher education contend. Which is exactly what Summers is doing now: serving burgers at a Sonic drive-in.

“I learned a lot of skills I couldn’t have gotten if I hadn’t gone to college,” she said. But she added that if a decent job doesn’t come along soon, her feelings about the value of her degree could change.

Notice how they don’t tell you when she graduated? The recession isn’t going to last forever. If she’s still working in Sonic in ten years, then maybe the degree wasn’t such a hot idea. There’s a reason that all those studies about the value of a college degree project the earnings difference over a lifetime.

“Whether college is worth it depends on how much you pay for it,” said Kevin Carey, policy director at the Education Sector, a Washington-based education think tank. “It’s not worth much if you pay too much for a degree that has no value in the market, or one that pays too little to pay back what you borrowed.”

Again, no timeline. And this is particularly frustrating:

Yet college is still the only way to go, right? Don’t ask Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple, Michael Dell of Dell, Larry Ellison of Oracle or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. They all dropped out.

Clearly college is not for everyone, but statistics and studies still show a college degree usually translates to a higher income.

That’s right, a few people with computer skills and no college degree hit the big time so people should weigh that against a representative sample of everyone when deciding whether to go to college.

I’ve come to think of it this way. College is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. It also might not make a difference in your life once it’s over. However, don’t go to college and you’re closing off lots of opportunities for making an interesting living.

Even in a recession like this one I’d still take my chances with college than take my chances by not going at all.

Hang together or we’ll all hang separately.

No wonder I’ve been so grumpy lately. From a blog at the Boston Globe (via the Washington Monthly College Guide blog):

While the inflation-adjusted earnings of workers with bachelor’s or masters degrees have increased very slightly since 1999–a rise of one percent or less–the story was quite different for the doctorate. Employees with Ph.D.’s can expect to earn 10 percent less, in real dollars, than they would have a decade ago.

This trend undoubtedly signifies the effect of adjunct labor on full-time, tenure-track faculty and is why everyone who falls into that second category should do everything in their power to bring people in the first category up to their level.