Mount Rainier and a “Spiritual Menu.”

I’m in Tacoma for the Society for the History of Technology conference. I broke in the camera on my phone earlier today during a tour of Mount Rainier National Park. The result is above. When I got back to the hotel, I realized that I could see the other side of the same mountain out my window from sixty miles away! [It was either too dark or too foggy for me to recognize that ever since I arrived the previous evening.]

Speaking of my hotel, it offers the following “Spiritual Menu”:

* The Bhagavad Giva
* Book of Mormon
* Books on Buddhism
* The Holy Bible King James Version
* The Quran
* New American Bible
* Tao Te Ching
* The Torah
* Books on Scientology

And I was afraid I’d run out of things to read!

Mr. Potato Head eat your heart out.

I’ve been enjoying the National Archives’ new education site, Docs Teach, ever since AHA Today linked to it on Monday. However, it strikes me that the material from some of their periods are more useful than others. I liked the New Deal material, for example, but the 1870-1900 stuff was disappointing. It’s all way too heavy on Presidents for my taste.

Nevertheless, there are some wonderful pictures in this collection that strike me as being completely off the wall for your average secondary school teachers. I, on the other hand, will definitely find time to work in the one above. “Spud the Kaiser,” indeed.

Why do we hate each other?

Oh Lord, I just know I’m going to be reading about this essay for at least the next two weeks. I could probably write long posts on just about any of Benton’s many excellent points, but being a labor historian by training I feel like emphasizing this one:

Tenured professorships have become such a privilege, held by a small minority, for such seemingly arbitrary reasons, that anyone who holds such a position is quite naturally resented by someone who does not and probably never will. That is exacerbated by the tendency in our profession to think in terms of hierarchies—to look down on people—based on pedigree, academic rank, and institutional affiliation. We are unable to command respect for ourselves as a profession by working together across those divisions.

There are, of course, many other, less prominent reasons for the current anti-faculty climate. But perhaps it is enough to say that the reason we feel more “hated” than ever is that we deserve it. Instead of collaborating, we competed with each other. We focused on our research instead of on the needs of undergraduates. We even exploited our graduate students, using their labor to underwrite our privileges, and then we relegated most of them to marginal positions as adjuncts. We waited too long to institute reforms to our profession, and now—after 40 years of inaction—the reforms are going to be forced upon us.

Our own jobs are only as secure as those of the weakest of our colleagues. But what have most of us done to assist the weakest among us? Probably nothing. Seriously, can you even name all the non-tenure track instructors in your department? [I have an advantage since my department is so small, but then again this has been a special project of mine for some time now.]

Your tenure-track job was, is and always will be a job. Your working conditions are determined by factors outside your control. The security of your job – even if you have tenure – is determined by factors outside your control. As many of us have already found out, our vocation is not recession proof. Indeed, in this political environment, public universities are practically first in line on the chopping block.

Yet this is no excuse to forget about people who have it even worse than you do. What have you done lately in order to improve everyone’s working conditions on your campus? Are you just going to fiddle while Rome burns?

Here’s a little music to get you in the mood while you’re thinking:

Do you feel more empathetic yet? So what are you going to do about the injustice all around you? If you don’t have any better ideas, why not click here to at least get the ball rolling?

In praise of spontaneity.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since I read it first at UD’s place on Sunday:

You have to pick, and it’s not an abstract choice. College costs a lot. I teach at BC, where a year’s tuition, fees, room, and board currently add up to $52,624. What are the students paying for? What can’t they get online for free? In my end of the academy, the humanities, it comes down to one thing, in essence: the other people in the room, teachers, and fellow students. We can debate whether that’s worth the price tag, and we can debate the relative value of lectures and seminars (I think the best mix in the humanities is some of the former and a lot of the latter), but you’re paying for the exclusive company of fellow thinkers who made it through the screening processes of admissions and faculty hiring. That’s it. You can get everything else online, and you can of course do the reading on your own.

Your money buys you the opportunity to pay attention to the other people on campus and to have them pay attention to you — close, sustained, active, fully engaged attention, undistracted by beeps, chimes, tweets, klaxons, ring tones, ads, explosions, continuous news feeds, or other mind-jamming noise. You qualify for admission, you pay your money, and you get four years — maybe the last four years you’ll ever get — to really attend to the ideas of other human beings, thousands of years’ worth of them, including the authors of the texts on the syllabus and the people in the room with you.

It’s a nice sentiment, and I certainly agree with it. I also agree with the overall cause that sparked these two paragraphs: banning laptops in the classroom. The distraction is not worth whatever benefits they might bring.

But read those two paragraphs again and consider another popular subject in the blogs I read: online education. You can have community online. Just look at Facebook. Last night I spent twenty minutes just reading the #Phillies Twitter feed as they won their fourth straight division title and I hadn’t felt so connected to my old home media market in years.* You can create a virtual scholarly community online. You might even be able to do it in real time. The problem is that such a community, assuming enough really smart people were willing to pay through the nose to get access to it rather than a real college – and that’s a big assumption – is that such a community would be utterly lacking in spontaneity.

My favorite teaching moments have all come when students stop talking through me and start talking directly to each other. Learning through engagement, I guess you’d call it. While I don’t condone violence, I remember one of those moments in my first class on slavery when one student threw an empty Coke can at another. Teaching the history of food produces tons of these moments as people get very animated about what they like to eat and are forced to think on their feet when I ask them why. None of these moments are ever going to happen if students are at home taking college classes in their pajamas. In fact, none of these moments are ever going to happen if you’re glued to your laptop in class either.

So what are you paying for when you pay for college? To me it’s the same dynamic as when you all go to the football game on Saturday afternoon. You pay so that everyone (including the professor if they’re lucky) can learn together at the same time. Turn college into a video game and rigor isn’t the only thing that disappears.

* The top tweet of the evening was, “Homer’s tribute to baseball salutes the Phillies and their fans! Any town that can boo Mike Schmidt and Santa Claus is okay by me.” How true. How true.

Sister Aimee is all over YouTube.

This one is my favorite because she reminds me of Sarah Palin (at least before she starts singing):

Sam says…

Via Al Haug on that evil application known as Facebook.

Not all that bizarre, really.

I know this isn’t exactly way up there on the scale of achievements, but yesterday I left a question for Andrew Zimmern of Bizarre Foods on the Diner’s Journal blog at the NYT. Today, he answered them and picked mine. If you click here, mine is the last one.

Got notecards?

I’m blogging about Zotero again over at the Historical Society’s blog. If you don’t read it already, you really should (and I promise I would have said that even before they let me do a guest post).

Quote of the day (maybe the year).

From Michael Roth’s review of Mark C. Taylor’s Crisis on Campus:

Tenure might not be a great system for producing innovators, but the pressure of losing one’s job might create an even stronger spirit of conformism than already infects many campuses. Calling for tenure’s abolition will surely get attention (again), but it would have been helpful to think through the consequences of giving universities the same “flexibility” with their workforce that Walmart has.

Roth, by the way, is President of Wesleyan. The fact that it can get support from enlightened administrators is just more evidence that tenure is good for universities as whole, and not the cause of the current alleged “crisis.”

The coming iPad-induced academic sweatshop.

If you’re like me, then you run into a lot of stuff about the impact of the iPad on society and especially on classrooms during your daily Internet media rounds. This post from Wired Campus is particularly good for getting into the details about what iPads do for those of us who don’t actually own one yet. Here’s the part that really got me thinking:

Catherine Giunta, an associate professor of business at Seton Hill, said the technology has changed the way students interact with their textbooks and how she interacts with her students. While reviewing the margin notes of a student in her marketing class, Ms. Giunta was able to pinpoint and correct a student’s apparent misunderstanding of a concept that was going to be covered in class the next day. “The misunderstanding may not have been apparent until [the student] did a written report,” Ms. Giunta said. “I could really give her individualized instruction and guidance.”

My first reaction to this was: “Wow, I can review my students’ margin notes when they use an iPad?”

My second reaction was: “When am I going to find the time to read students’ margin notes?” It’s not like I’m a slacker in this department. I require drafts for all paper assignments above survey level classes, but this sounds more like scut work than empowerment. Seriously, are we supposed to require them to take margin notes so that we can evaluate their understanding of the text? Isn’t that what the paper is supposed to be for?

Don’t get me wrong: I still want an iPad. I plan to split it with my wife. She’s going to use it to run credit card transactions when she sells merchandise at belly dance shows.* I’m going to use it to read novels (specifically since I won’t feel the need to write in them or keep the overwhelming majority of them after I’m trough reading them). What I don’t want an iPad for is my classroom. Give me a better reason to teach American history with one and perhaps I’ll reconsider, but I haven’t seen that reason yet.

* As a matter of fact, my wife is much more interesting than I am. Why do you ask?