Fred: And while you’re out, get me some applejack, some mineral oil, and some Pluto Water.
Lamont: Pop, what do you need all that stuff for?
Fred: The applejack make me sleep. The other stuff make me get up.
(via a random NPR podcast)
Fred: And while you’re out, get me some applejack, some mineral oil, and some Pluto Water.
Lamont: Pop, what do you need all that stuff for?
Fred: The applejack make me sleep. The other stuff make me get up.
(via a random NPR podcast)
At the beginning of the summer, I formatted my office PC and told WIU computer geeks they could use it for someone else. When I returned to campus in August, it was still in my office. So I decided to give Ubuntu 10.04, the Lucid Lynx, a try. I had been running a previous version of Ubuntu for a year or so, and it would have been time to upgrade anyway. The default installer asked if I wanted to encrypt my home directory. Why yes, I do!
Installation hung up at the end. That worried me a bit. But after a hard reboot, things worked great. I can’t believe how fast it is. Startup takes less than 30 seconds. Restarts are even faster. Firefox loads nearly instantly and runs great. (Part of that is my decision to go without Flash, at least for now.) Same for OpenOffice, emacs, and Thunderbird.
Fonts still suck, as they always have. Other than that, Ubuntu impresses me again.
Bad news first. I am sad to acknowledge that for the second time in 18 months, a chair search for English & Journalism has been halted by the WIU administration. This void is particularly painful since an offer was extended, accepted, and once-incoming chair Derek Parker Royal formally introduced to the faculty and college. The department was visited by the provost August 19 and was visited by the president today, August 30. Information is scarce, like last time, and that’s deeply frustrating. My department is really hurting, and I can’t help but feel guilty about stepping away to focus on my research. Though I have mixed feelings about it, I will disengage–I skipped a faculty meeting last week, the first time in years–but it’s very hard to ignore what’s happening, and impossible not to be simultaneously outraged, sickened, and ready to walk away.
Add that to Lumper’s death and other family matters, and that’s why I wrote on Facebook: Dear September, I see you out there on the horizon. Please be less intense than August. Thanks! With that in mind, let’s shift to the many things in my life which, like my girls, are pleasantly intense:
And now back to that reading and writing.
At Western, courses started last Monday, and though we don’t have the ten-day numbers yet, I’m still thinking about declining enrollment in my department, particularly our composition program, and my WPA presentation about it, which I’m slowly expanding into an article. (Yay, sabbatical.) At the conference, I heard about several other schools in similar situations, including Northern Illinois. And every community college faculty member I encountered spoke of huge increases. For example, Eileen Ferretti at Kingsborough CC noted they’ve seen a 40% jump in enrollment over the last year. They’re having trouble finding room for classes. These are just two stories, preliminary evidence that the changes we are seeing at Western are not unique to us. The conversations I’ve had confirm my thinking: it will be very hard to reverse this trend by enacting new requirements, changing transfer rules, or otherwise trying to force students back into courses. All of those actions amount to trying to preserve our monopoly on composition. I don’t think we can continue thinking only in terms of protecting that monopoly (weak as it is). We have to strengthen other parts of our program, and find ways to become more flexible.
As usual, I turn to computing for inspiration: what about Agile? There’s a strong parallel between many writing programs and traditional software development methods Agile position itself against. Both are focused on single products which take years to develop and change infrequently. Both are organized in a “waterfall” pattern, with clear delineation between stages, and linear progression: programs are designed, coded, debugged, and shipped; in composition, students are tested, placed, and sequenced. Both traditional development and traditional composition assume, perhaps unwittingly, that customers will keep coming back—and have to keep coming back.
I think we can adapt Agile’s core values to build a new philosophy for writing programs. What would it mean, like the Agile folks, for writing programs to favor the left side of these oppositions?
Certainly, we can map some things already happening in writing programs onto these broad ideas: WAC hopes to build university-wide relationships; portfolio assessments ask students to think about writing over long time spans, etc. But the point here isn’t to find correlations between existing practices and Agile; that may be interesting, but it’s more evaluative than generative. Rather, I want to conceptualize approaches and practices better fitted to what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of our programs today–not last year’s, or those from five years ago.
I’ll post another update once those 10-day numbers come out.
Two recent articles in the New York Times made me hear helicopter parents in the distance:
A perfect combination. This week, as classes started, I’ve seen parents escorting their children around campus. Some, like me, were taking their under-5s to preschool. Some were… err, I’m not sure what they were doing. Meaning well, I think, but probably not helping. First-year college students have a lot in common with kindergarteners. Both are dealing with a new institution for the first time, making a huge move away from parents, facing a new and quite stiff intellectual challenge, and likely dealing with a new set of friends. No wonder the parental response is similar. And similarly misguided. Both kindergarteners and first-year college students need, badly, for their parents to step away. I can’t understand the obsession with protecting kids from, well, anything short of unmitigated success:
Ms. Finke’s son, Benjamin, is soon to start kindergarten at 5. “There will be boys in his class who are a year or more older than him. They’ll be bored in class and then the bar will be set higher, and the kids who are the right age will find that they can’t keep up.” What will happen in gym when the larger boys are picked first for brute force, leaving the pipsqueaks languishing? “I’m afraid my children will feel inferior.”
I hope Ms. Finke doesn’t think that kindergarten won’t be the last time Benjamin has to deal with bigger, smarter, or just plain different kids. Though it’s no fun to watch your children get bullied, intimidated, or overshadowed by others, stepping in to make five-year-old Benjamin feel a little better won’t help him learn how to deal with this problem when he’s fifteen–or twenty-five, for that matter.
I don’t mean to belittle the parents in these articles, particularly in the second one. I’m thinking about the same issues, too, given that Madelyn reads very well, uses our Mac proficiently, does some addition and subtraction, and is getting more and more creative. Will she be bored to distraction (literally) when she hits kindergarten, at five years and nine months? Will she be upset about being separated from her friends? Then what? Will Erin and I be dealing with the principal weekly? And then again with Amelia? Even if we didn’t have that worry–I totally hear the argument that American schools start too early. Some of those four year olds whose earnest parents put them in kindergarten early will be the seventeen or eighteen year olds who are one-and-done in college because they are just too immature to handle the freedom which often makes the first year more beer and circus than books and classes.
But for everything Madelyn does well, there are things she does rather poorly. Her fine motor control isn’t very good, and she’s impatient. When combined, that makes quite a few tasks very hard. Like writing: Madelyn flat out doesn’t like it, and does very little beyond signing her name. She prefers to type. I don’t want to say Madelyn isn’t well-developed emotionally, but she’s certainly quicker to cry or get angry than most of her peers. That’s changing quickly; just this morning she waited out a problem with her seat belt instead of crying about it. But still.
Which is to say that Madelyn, and Amelia, all the children mentioned in the articles above, could be considered ahead, behind, gifted, challenged, blessed, deficient, talented, and under-achieving… in some way. Fixing too much on ratings and rankings, especially at age two or four or five, is a fine way to get unnecessarily worried about kids who will be dealing with all kinds of expectations soon enough. Yes, let’s identify and deal with genuine developmental problems. But for heaven’s sake, let’s wait a moment to see how our kids respond to broken toys, difficult homework, or agonistic schoolmates before jumping up to handle those things for them.
Before we got married, Erin and I lived together in an apartment in southwest Gainesville, not far from Norman Hall. Two rednecks lived in a house on the same property. One day one of them yelled over to us, “We got a cat!” He showed us a impossibly small kitten in a dirty shoebox on his front porch. After about two hours of listening to the cat crying, Erin had enough. She stormed out of the house and confronted our neighbors. “I’m taking this cat!” she yelled. They didn’t move. One of them nodded.
When I saw the cat up close, I was worried she wouldn’t make it through the night. She had a hernia, her gut was bloated from worms, and she was covered with fleas. Her fur was matted with blood and flea poop and who knows what else. And my goodness, was she tiny. After a haircut, bath, flea comb, and dinner, I held her in my lap. Then-kitten Big Kitty (d/b/a “Ricochet”) eyed her from a distance. She curled up in my cupped hands and fell asleep. A day or so later, the vet teared up when we brought the cat, now named Lumper, to her. “I’ve never seen a cat this small with worms this bad,” she said. But she made it. The vet corrected the hernia that gave Lump her name, and she grew up to be a sweet, gentle kitty–not to mention an able mouser.
Sixteen years later, we have said good-bye to our little girl cat. The digestive problems that plagued Lumper from her first day out of the shoebox (hence her nickname) just got too severe. Euthanasia is a very strange thing. We put it on the calendar, like getting the oil changed in the car, or going to dinner with friends. Erin canceled one appointment, and rescheduled. I took Madelyn to school and went to the office. That day, Erin took a few pictures.
Finally, the time came. The girls were great. Madelyn wrote Lumper a sweet good-bye letter that, later, we buried with her. She helped me dig the grave and picked flowers and asked questions I was very hard-pressed to answer. (Man, is that kid smart.) As Erin left to go the vet, Amelia said, “Good bye Miss Poo Poo,” and this morning, “Miss Poo Poo is sleeping.” Yes, she is.
If you know my wife, you might drop her a line and wish her the best and remind her that without her intervention, Lumper would have ended up riding that shoebox to the landfill. Instead, she had a long life with a family who will remember her with great joy.
Me: Who’s Amelia?
Amelia: Me.
Me: What’s your name?
Amelia (with big smile): Madelyn!
Me: No! Your name is Amelia.
Amelia: No! I’m Lorelei.
(Repeat with Mama, Daddy, Grandma, Big-Wig, etc.)
Madelyn: Daddy! I’m ready to go back to school.
Me: Funny you say that! You get to go back Thursday.
Madelyn: Because I’m almost five!
Me: That’s right.
Madelyn (staring at the calendar): What day is today?
Me: Monday.
Madelyn (after 20 second pause): Is it Thursday yet?
Me: Nope. Still Monday.
(Repeat last two lines 8x.)
Erin and I have been pushing hard the past week or so to get our front and back porches renovated, working pretty much all day every day: cleaning, making repairs, prepping, painting. Thankfully, we’ve reached the stage where intensive work is no longer needed, and our pace can slow down. So far, the only major problem was that two lights I purchased from Lowe’s were both defective. Bleah.
Now if the rain to the west would blow through so I could get another coat of paint on the front porch floor…