Lovecraftian Pre-writing

A "page" from Lovecraft's notes on At the Mountains of Madness was posted on Slate's Vault yesterday.

A lovely - if not slightly disturbing - reminder of how much chaos goes into pre-writing.

 Fun stuff.

Assessing the Professors

This TechCrunch article has its flaws, but it prompts an interesting question: 

If we were able to devise an assessment of the quality of a university professor's teaching, what would that assessment look like?

I know we'd mess it up if we designed the measures in today's political atmosphere - one that stresses a very limited version of job-readiness. 

But what if we scholars were able to devise their own assessment system for how well we teach?

Side note:

I followed the link to this TechCrunch article, because its title suggests the existence of a labor union for professors.

That seemed unlikely.

Turns out that the author mislabeled the American Association of University Professors, which is a professional association. There is a union component called the AAUP-CBC, but that is not the group that issued the statement on performance based funding. 

Rhetoric at the Airport

At the airport after a great CWPA Conference, and my head is in just the right/wrong place to deal with these texts.

The Closure Rule in Critical Discussion

The US is going to pay off down $35 billion of debt in the third quarter.

You heard that right. Despite our decision early in the recession to go with stimulus instead of austerity, the US is going to reduce its debt this year.

This flies in the face of the predictions conservatives made during the 2012 election.

I was told by the conservatives around dinning room tables, on internet forums, and over the airwaves that Obama's re-election was going to lead to increased debt and deficit.

There was no doubt. Obama's policies, in the eyes of conservatives, would lead to nothing but more debt.

I was told he wasn't cutting spending - he was increasing spending. Any claim the President made about cutting spending was trickery according to those with whom I argued.

When I told these conservative I thought they had it wrong, they told me I didn't understand the math. I suggested those conservatives were bending the truth, and they told me the President and the media were bending the truth.

Now we are paying off a portion of the debt.

This is happening around the same time the economic argument for austerity has been exposed as shoddy, and around the same time research has demonstrated the very rich have done just fine despite accusations of Obama's policy being class warfare.

According to the Closure Rule from Pragma-Dialectics rules of critical discussion, "A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it".

I'm waiting... but I'm not holding my breath.

Now We're Cooking

The tremendous and undeniable benefits of cooking your own food were on display in Mark Bittman's recent piece on Michael Pollen. But it was Pollen's call to bring back Home Economics Class that prompted me to write today.

I cook. My wife cooks. Sure, we occasionally go out or grab take out, but most nights we spend an hour or so preparing a meal. We enjoy it. We often talk about food and cooking.

But here's what struck me while reading Bittman's piece: My wife and I don't think about cooking as an optional activity. We assume that 4-6 nights of our week will involve cooking. Most of our breakfasts and lunches are made at home.

For us, cooking is an essential skill, and we have trouble understanding why anyone would think otherwise. It is, after all, the ability to prepare you own food. 

It's true; we know people that don't cook, but we cannot understand how they live in the world. We are baffled by the economics, the health, and the lifestyle brought about by an inability to cook. In this way, it is not all that different from illiteracy - different, sure - but not as different as I thought before I started writing this. 

When I stumbled over that analogy I realized what Pollen's call means.   Teaching young people to cook is something society has done for thousands of years. It is considered, historically, one of the most basic of skills. 

For today's young people, however, for whom only academic skills are evaluated and/or rewarded, where education is about creating a "job-ready" population, cooking as a skill has lost its essential status. 

The discussions about education have become focused on such a narrow set of skills and learning environments, that we need a progressive 'food thinker' to remind us that grownups should know how to make their own dinner. 

We should probably be embarrassed. 

In a Facebook comment about the Bittman piece, I wrote that cooking should be considered an essential part of the most basic set of competencies: Reading, writing, math, exercise, music, creative problem solving, and cooking.

Are there any other skills you'd add to that list?

.

Hypocrisy in Blue

Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee has gotten people even more fired up on the issue of gun regulations with his recent post on the Tea Party Perspective. He opens his piece with these sentences: "Shame on liberals for exploiting tragedy once again in our country and try (sic) to use tragedy as a reason to take our rights away.  Liberals are shameful."

Then, two paragraphs later, he writes, "All of these suggestions about the need for gun control are the mindset of sheep.  Once the wolf is at the door, you’re helpless.  Sure, run and hide from a sociopathic killer.  See how far that gets you.  You know where that ‘ll get you?  26 dead at Sandy Hook School."

I'm all for public figures speaking their minds on issues like this. The Sheriff is in a unique position of authority on the subject, and his voice ought to be heard.

That said, I didn't even have to use the scroll bar to find the most blatant example of hypocrisy in Sheriff Clarke's post.

He writes "shame on liberals" for using a tragedy to further their cause, and then he turns around and uses that same tragedy as evidence that we should further his cause.

Rarely do I see such a horrible abuse of rhetoric in public discourse. This is one for the books.

If you agree with the Sheriff, I suggest you volunteer to proofread his next rant.

If you disagree with the man, talk slowly as you explain the concept of hypocrisy to him and those who have rallied behind his post.

My New Five Disk Playlist

Once upon a time, I listened to music using compact disks.

I know, right?

When I wanted new music, I would head out to the record store and sort through racks and racks of CDs in jewel cases, sealed shut with that sticky security tape, then wrapped in plastic and clamped into plastic theft-prevention/display racks. It was like the dark ages.

But I loved my CDs. The collection was growing at its fastest rate during those years in which I was sorting out my identity. The collection was one of the first things I composed that said something about who I was.

As an undergrad, my favorite time of day to listen to my CDs was as I cooked and ate dinner.

I had a five-disk carousel CD player.  I would load it up and hit "Shuffle All."

I had friends who bemoaned "the end of the album," who worried that shuffle mode and playback programming meant there'd never be another

or

or

But I couldn't keep myself from enjoying the five-disk shuffle option my stereo afforded me. I got to pick five favorites. Each new song was a pleasant half-expected surprise. And oh, the suspense at the end of each song as I listened to the spent disk drop, the carousel turn, and the next disk spin into action. 

More recently, I've been uploading all my digitized music to a cloud service.

When the whole library finally loaded today, as a celebratory gesture, I created a '5 Disk Playlist.' Just like the old days, I dropped all the tracks of five albums into the list and hit shuffle. I'm listening to the playlist now. I have to wear headphones because my wife and son are sleeping, but other than that, it's a very 1996 listening experience. 

Except, I can listen to the list anywhere I go. And I can make another list for every month until I'm 50 years old, and I'll be able to listen to every one of those lists anywhere I can access the internet. Beyond that, I can allow an online service to read the contents of my collection and generate a playlist that combines my music with music suggested by what my collection says about me. 

I don't think this kind of change is bad. In fact, I love this kind of change, but I do miss mix tapes, album art, lining up at midnight to buy a new release, the clunks and clicks of record players. There is nothing wrong with technology changing the way we listen, but I would like to go on record saying this: There is also nothing wrong with being reluctant to let go of the quirks that a fading technology  imparted on our experience.

I'm working on a paper and a presentation about introducing electronic portfolio software in writing classrooms. E-portfolios have been around for a while, and people a lot smarter than me have demonstrated how effective they are as a learning tool. But it is still difficult to get programs and teachers to adopt the technology. 

The project I worked on at school went smoothly. Last quarter nearly 500 students composed electronic portfolios using open source software and online sharing tools. I'm thrilled with the results. Students developed their digital literacy. The reflective portions were displayed in a more authentic reading space than a series of 8" x 10.5" sheets of paper. Teachers delivered the tools to students effectively. Good stuff, sure, but I'm not going to pretend it was easy. There was a ton of trouble shooting. There was a fair amount of resistance from teachers and students alike. The days leading up to the end of the quarter were brutal.

When I took on the e-portfolio project, I hadn't yet considered the long and tortured route of music recording technology as an analogous cultural process. All the lost conventions, anachronistic jargon, obsolete equipment, and the bitter late adopters - it's all familiar. 

Tonight I gained access to my music through a new and exciting technology, and what did I do? I tried to recreate the listening experience shaped by the specifications of a stereo component from the mid-1990's.