Pouring

It’s pouring down rain and has been all day long.  It’s supposed to keep this up for the next few days, too.  I wish we had some way to catch the millions of gallons of water!

I’m looking forward to a few days from now when the rain stops, the clouds lift, and the mountains to the north will stand brilliant with snow against a blue sky.  One night last month, the Astronomer and I walked home from the village and we could see moonlight on the snow, twenty miles away.  It was worth moving here to see that.

What Should I Do?

At our campus as at many campuses these days, Budgets Are Dire.  People have been furloughed, essentially losing 10% of their income.  People are being and will continue to be laid off.  Programs are being targeted for closure and consolidation.  Service units are being mushed together.  Our center lost its director; she went back to teaching because the university could save a few dollars that way.  She wasn’t happy, not that she minds teaching, but because she worked really hard to build the center back up after about 5 years of neglect, and she was rewarded by…being shown the door.  People are very, very, very upset.

My question is, and it just occurred to me to put this on my professional listserv too, what should the center do?

Specifically, there’s a big event we’re planning soon, a “triple” event in fact.  It’s a campus symposium on teaching, a traditional luncheon that we have every year to say basically Hooray for Faculty, and a recognition of the [large number] anniversary of our center.  I’m about to send out letters of invitation to deans, associate deans, and department chairs, and it occurs to me that such an invitation might be about as welcome as a rat in the kitchen.  How do you “celebrate yourself” when chances are some time in the next month, you’ll be told that you no longer exist in any self-recognizable entity?

In short, I’m about to put on a big party (not a terribly expensive one, but still) and I’m afraid that nobody will come, and even worse, they’ll be pissed at me for asking them!

A VERY BAD Mood

So stay out of my way!

I had a doctor’s appt this morning and the following things happened:

• The tv in the waiting room drove me crazy
• The guy next to me playing music on his iPhone, sans earbuds, drove me crazy
• I sat in the examination room for 90 minutes, waiting
• 80 minutes of those 90 were sans clothing. Thank GOD there was no radio or tv.
• No place to hang my own clothes
• Exam room was freezing cold
• I’m going to skip the joys of the examination itself and leave it to my female readers’ imaginations
• I get migraines, which means I have to change a prescription so I don’t get a stroke some day
• The final indignity, the doctor commented on my weight!  I am officially fat!

I am very grateful that I have health care, good preventive health care, and that I’m really as strong as a horse.  That’s fantastic.  I’m glad that I have a doctor who is willing to talk about things like weight.  (Speaking of which, why am I exercising my bee-hind off but gaining weight?  Guess it’s because I eat too much.  I blame it on the faculty center; we have snacks around here all the time.)

But DAY-um, what is with America and its freakish obsession with electronic stimulation?!?!  I need noise-canceling headphones to carry around with me, because 10 minutes exposure to blabbering tvs makes me so crazy that I want to scream and flail about.  Instead I clamp my teeth shut and sit there quivering.

Bad, bad, bad, bad mood.

Standing Inside the Fire

I saw an editorial or something recently about how Americans in general are so separated from the reality of living that they make up things to get emotionally involved in.  The current flap over Avatar and its silly, stereotyped portrayals of just about everybody is a perfect example. Get real.  Another example is the sneering commentary from academia about “God and Haiti”; hey, if you’ve never been pulled out of a collapsed building, don’t criticize someone who has when the first thing out of their mouth is “Thank God.”  Get real.

One of my friends back east is having the hardest time imaginable (I won’t describe it here as it’s actually none of my business).  She didn’t ask for it.  It’s not her fault in any way, shape, or form.  It’s made worse, lots worse, by bureaucracies.  It’s also made worse by our American…I don’t even know what to call it, zeitgeist? whatever, that if you’re in trouble it must be your fault and so society at large is not responsible to you.  Your friends might help if they are able and so inclined, but not the collective community.  The situation is heartbreaking.

And yet.  It’s real.  When she writes about the struggle, I have a feeling of envy.  Because I know I’m not strong enough to deal with this amount of reality.  She is.  Under all the pain and shrill screaming frustration, there is a bass note of real and strong, so deep that it should be audible only to elephants.

Bless my friend.  If anyone reading this is lucky enough to have something real to deal with, then bless you.  If anyone reading this is standing outside the fire, then bless you too — but don’t mistake watching and talking about the fire for helping to put it out.

And One More Thing, Totally Unrelated

Just to be clear, I despise abortion.  It pretty much turns my stomach.  I am no supporter of abortion rights — I am a supporter of education, availability of birth control, and other wimpy sorts of social interventions, okay.

But I’m really mystified by the logic of some anti-abortion activists in saying that Scott Roeder should not have been tried for first-degree murder, but a lesser charge, because he had a “sincere belief that abortion is murder and he was acting on that belief.”

What in the world is the difference between that and a Muslim extremist killing people because of his “sincere belief that they were infidels and deserved to die”?

Another thing about Mr. Roeder:  I think he should have pleaded guilty.  Because if you have convictions that you’re willing to kill other people for, better be willing to die for them yourself.  Or at least serve life in prison.

Sorry to bring up such a fraught topic, but it’s been on my mind since I heard the news last night, and I just heard it again sitting here writing.

Back off

Yesterday I was with another group of faculty, who are working on scholarship of teaching projects.  One of them has a project to find out why students are not doing good projects when he gives them detailed directions about what he wants.  He admits to being a real micromanager and his initial hypothesis is that the problem is that he’s stifling their creativity and will to work by giving them so many detailed instructions.

One of the other faculty, a physicist, burst out laughing and related the story of his laboratory.  Over the years, he found himself giving ever-more-detailed instructions for doing the lab assignment, in response to questions and difficulties the students had.  He realized that the thing had probably gone too far when a student approached and begged for help in calculating a percentage.  The professor said, “I just taught them to be helpless!  I think I could un-teach them how to read if I went far enough!”

This particular group of faculty is one that I don’t have the resources to do the things I’ve done with previous SoTL groups — a 2-day retreat plus release time.  And with a couple of 2-hr conversations and some reading, they are all much farther along with their projects than any other group I have worked with.

So for my student responsibility group, one thing I might recommend is — back off!

Responsibility for Learning

What a boring title.  You can tell I loved Jimmy Carter!

I’m working with a group of faculty on this topic.  We got a bit of money from somewhere to investigate ways to structure courses or assignments to encourage students to take responsibility for their own learning.

My first question is, OF COURSE: what does it mean to be responsible for your learning?  What does that student “look like”?  I can list a few obvious things:  shows up, does the reading, turns things in on time and formatted correctly, is not a jerk.  You know.  A decent, well-meaning student.

But is that really what being responsible for one’s own learning is?  Not at all.  Those things just make you a nice student to have around.

The faculty wrote little proposals to join the group.  They wrote about issues like this:

• Students don’t do the reading, so they can’t perform the field studies to an intense enough degree.
• They can’t calculate their own grades, so they can’t assess their progress.
• They don’t work well in groups.  The course needs another term.  They have to learn a lot outside of class.
• They think that my comments on their papers are editing comments, not suggestions for improvement.
• I have really held their hands with a particular assignment and I need to let go of that because it sucks up hours of time.

I’m wondering how much of this is about slack student behavior, how much is students being novices, how much is faculty behavior (the last one admits it freely).  What would satisfy the faculty in each situation, and why?

Actually, that is a very good question for discussion for Monday’s meeting.  Thank you, blogosphere!

“The Direction of the Country”

The latest poll from Whomever shows that 38% of adults think that the country is headed in the “right direction.”  This is up from 25% in January 2009, so that’s good, I guess.

I don’t know what the pollsters actually asked to get this number, of course.  As I think about “directions,” though, I have to think about something I saw yesterday that really bummed me out.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,583360,00.html

Now, I know that Fox News is hardly a haven of critical thinking and even-handed discourse, and that the writer in this case is paid to be a stinging gadfly.  In this case, he earned his pay because, well, it did sting:

“The fact is, if we actually measured the success of liberal ideas throughout history it just wouldn’t be fair to liberals. Which is why liberals become historians.”

With respect:  ending slavery, the Civil Rights movement, cracking down on child labor and unjust labor conditions in general, real religious freedom, environmental caretaking, education for everyone, freedom of speech and the press, due process…I could go on, but those all seem like pretty “liberal” ideas to me and some of them are what today’s conservatives love most about America.

I’m open to being corrected on any of the following:  Conservatives appreciate rules imposed by a moral authority.  Liberals challenge these rules by asking one main question:  Who benefits from the rules?  Conservatives tend to conclude that the people who benefit are the people who deserve to benefit, while liberals tend to conclude that the people who benefit are the ones in power already.  No wonder the groups have a hard time getting along — one group feels that the other group is trying to take their stuff, while the second group feels that the first group is selfishly holding onto it and denying others.

Setting aside the political definitions, the word “liberal” means open-minded, tolerant, generous, willing to give in large amounts.  “Conservative” means disposed to preserve existing institutions or conditions, cautiously moderate or purposefully low, disposed to saving.

These are both good things, and what troubles me the most about “the direction of the country” right now is that there is so much contempt between two groups of people who need each other so badly. We need each other so that we don’t veer off into insanity:  for example, you get too conservative and you end up with women not being allowed to vote because they never were allowed to vote in the past; you get too liberal and you end up with Haight-Ashbury.

For now, I’d think that the country was going in the right direction if people on both sides of the continuum could keep the words “liberal” and “conservative” from sounding as if they should have four letters.  And especially from using four letters, because it really — really — doesn’t help when someone says, I think in some seriousness, “Conservatives are objectively, demonstrably wrong about everyfuckingthing.”

It would be great if every kid could have a pony, too.

Excellent Quote

“Don’t assume that those who disagree with you are evil, stupid or greedy. And even when they are, that doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility for making a constructive and convincing argument.”

Russ Parsons, in an article about food and farming, but relevant 100% of the time.

Last night I was pounding the treadmill and flipped through the channels on the cardiotheater.  On MSNBC and Fox News, people were calling each other morons.  Constructive and eloquent as that was, I thought that watching Burn Notice was a better use of my time.

Weapon of Choice

Let me get this straight:  there are guns with sights on which are printed Bible verses being usedby the US military in Afghanistan.

I’m going to ignore what everyone else is all in an uproar about (sending guns with Bible verses to people trying to make it in Muslim countries, separation of church and state, and whatever) and ask this instead:

Christ is the “Prince of Peace,” the “Great Physician,” the “Lover of Mankind,” “Emmanuel,” the “Lamb of God,” the guy who said “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love those who persecute you.”  Which of his followers should be making and selling weapons for war in the first place?

I understand that war is a fact of life and that Christians have always been involved in wars — sometimes the wars have even been just ones.  But putting verses on the weapons seems to me to be somehow pretending that Jesus is okay with war.  If there’s a Bible verse on the weapon, somehow what that weapon does — kill someone — is less bad?  Or maybe if you pray while you pull the trigger.

Should Christians not be working to END war, not trying to make it a bit more spiritual while it lasts?

I mean really:  What Gun Would Jesus Use?  I. do. not. get. it.

If we have to put bible verses on gunsights, how about this one:  Luke 23:34.