Canned Goods

So K. was reading the paper yesterday and saw a story that included this tip: “Every night, she was to think of three good things that happened that day and analyze why they occurred.”

We’ve practiced something similar in the past (I negotiated for 1 thing), but we never did the analysis part. Now I can’t vouch for how happy it made me—maybe it has something to do with quantity (add two more items) and the lack of analysis–but as the days get darker and colder it’s probably a good idea to start doing this.

Three things from yesterday:
1) Had time to work on conference proposals
2) Finished Shaviro’s Connected
3) Will be picking up my wedding ring (tomorrow/today) after a much needed re-rhodium plating. My hand felt lighter than normal, and I realized how much I play with the ring.

Jeff wrote about hops and beer (hopicity) a while back, including Bell’s Hopslam, and since the brewery is in Kalamazoo, MI—my home for the holidays—I figured I try to get some straight from the brewery because Hopslam is a seasonal release (came out in October) and the chance of getting it in the store was, well, chancy.

After having no luck in the brewery’s store my step-father-in-law and I wanted to see if it was on tap. Without going into too much detail, you can easily get slammed by what I’ll describe as vibrant, “buddy” beer, but can it still be a beer at 9.2%? I remember a “beer-wine” from a small brewery tucked away in mountains east of Bellingham, WA that was 10.6%. Is there an established corner of the alcohol envelope that turns a beer into a beer-wine?

A combination of factors leads me to often think about getting that job after I done here, many financial such as the student loan interest report and this last social security benefits report (apparently I’ve never made more than $17000 a year). I’m on the WPA-listserve, and lots of positions get announced there; I also visit the Higher Ed Jobs and ADE sites occasionally to get an idea of what’s out there. But as I search place is the major factor. For instance, I’ve only lived in two places that were not near/on water–southern Arizona and west-central Louisiana–and I have a hard time imagining not living next to it, even if it’s a dream job. My most frequented states: Michigan and Washington (Great Lakes and the Pacific). Snow is important too. I X-country ski (no need to buy a lift ticket), and I’d like to add snowboarding, so Colorado, Utah, again, Washington. Then there’s mountain biking–trails. Madison is great for biking, but it’s a road bike town. Food and beer; those are important. A lot of my thinking is based on places I’ve already lived and considering the feel of the place. Each place felt different and some better than than others.

Then I realize I haven’t gotten to anything about the actual job. I wonder how others go about their searches.

I was scanning Wired this morning and read the story, A Sneak Peak at a Fractured Web, concerning several governments around the world filtering the internet. This is not new news, but I’m a few pages into Virilio’s Speed and Politics and thinking about dromology as it relates to the internet and participatory culture, and in this case internet filtering. Admittedly, I’m wholly unfamiliar with Virilio’s work, so forgive if I misunderstand what he’s saying and mis-apply it.

From the first page, he talks of “the masses” as being a “multitude of passersby” and that the “revolutionary contingent attains it ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed” (3). He asks whether the power of the bourgeois State is (is in) the street and describes rivers, roads, coastlines, and railways as “channels of rapid communication.” It seems that he is arguing that the streets (or paths through a city) and not the city itself is where power lies. And, perhaps, we can make the analogy that the “Information Superhighway” are the “channels of rapid communication” of today. I’m sure someone out there already has, perhaps even Virilio. And as he states that the “doors to the city are its tollbooths and its customs posts are dams, filtering [my emphasis] the fluidity of the masses, the penetrating power of the hordes” (7), I began thinking about these nations’ attempts to control the flow of information coming in and what their citizens can and cannot access, think, and do. The internet moves information so quickly it threatens a government’s ability to control and thus possess its territory.

As I have said many times before, the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light. And it is nothing else! Globalisation cannot take shape without the speed of light.

Again, perhaps, I stretch Virilio for my own purposes, but a fear of globalization is not only economic but also cultural, as in Farmers Branch, Texas and its new anti-immigration measures, “including one that makes English the official language.” So if your tollbooths (borderwalls) aren’t working, and you can’t filter the internet, you pass laws that limit participation.

Do any of you folks out there who are familiar with Virilio find my reading, admittedly limited to a few pages, problematic? And, as I’m mired in prelims reading at the moment, I’m debating whether to continue reading Virilio. So, as part of my Cost/Benefit analysis, do you feel Virilio would be useful as I study online participatory culture for one of my prelims essays?

I was checking out the mange tab on my blog which showed 26 referers. Strangely, two came from Yahoo searches. The first, for “canned goods,” finds my blog and the story of my lost cat at the number 3 spot. The second, for “Anne Haas Dyson,” gets me on page 9 in a search for her.

Don’t bother conducting a search for “canned goods” on Google, though. You won’t find me.

I gotta hand it to Wisconsin, at least Madison. In the last two elections it’s taken me less than 20 minutes to register and vote. Including travel time!

On both occasions–and I lived in two different, East-side locations–the polling stations were a few minute walk from my apartment, and all I needed was a driver’s license number and a proof of residence to register and vote.

I wonder, when people have the voting experience I have, what it’s like in neighborhoods unlike mine.

But even though I have it easy, I still worry about my vote getting counted. All I do is blacken in an arrow pointing to my selection on the scantron sheet and feed it into a machine. This seems like proven technology, but is it? Is any method infallible? What’s the best? And can I get a receipt, please?

At this moment I’m watching a video, on Alex Reid’s blog, of Bill Fitzgerald giving a talk about creating a student-centered course website. He begins with the homepage and how it communicates what the teacher finds important. In his example, you could put the schedule on the homepage or you could have the homepage aggregate the student’s blog–accessible with a click. Featuring the student’s work/content sends a very different message.

I spent a lot of time considering how to shape my 201 course website, and in the end, it’s structured much as a paper syllabus would be: intro, description, schedule, readings & materials, projects, assessment, resources, blog roll.

It’s a what-you-need-to-know organization, not a what-Rick-really-feels-is-valued org. Maybe I should list the blogroll first.

I would love to have my student’s content on the homepage. Knowledge is the real barrier for me right now. I’m considered a tech guru in my program, but I know so little.

Things I’d like to learn to use: Podcasting; wikis, CSS, social bookmarks/tags, and Drupal (or something that does what it does).

Last Friday we had a writing center staff meeting, wherein we divided into group and looked over a few scenarios that had been written up by a few of the TAs. I always have a problem getting inside a particular role because the situation is so decontextualized–I’m not this TA; I really have no idea what the student was really like; I’m missing every piece of sensory data I would use to judge the situation: the attitude and body language of student, for instance. Anyway, I’ll do my best to recreate what happened.

The Scenario (summary): A student comes in with the assignment to come up with a “controversial” claim regarding the possibility of paying reparations to African Americans for slavery and the results of it. This student takes a anti-reparations tack. The TA believes it’s a racist argument and is offended. What do you do? Just focus on the argument? Try to change the student’s thinking?

For me, there’s a lot going on here that I can’t do justice to in a brief blog. And even with a 20-30 minute conversation as a whole group, we never finished talking this scenario out. There may never be enough time.

But the general trend in the discussion went towards changing the student’s thinking. On a predominately white campus in a predominantly white city, racism is a problem. And many TAs felt it was appropriate to educate the student (and help their writing in a 30 minute session). The “fix ‘im” voices were becoming a chorus until, again, a comp-rhetor (gosh we’re smart folks) said she was uncomfortable with this and asked if we would question the claims of a student with progressive ideas. To me, the response of the chorus seemed to justify their ends, but another comp-rhetor asked if we needed to effect a wholesale change of the student’s thinking or perhaps we could work for “pockets of doubt.” Awesome! This is where I was signaling that I wanted to speak but it was already 5., and I was batting cleanup, if I got to the plate. End of meeting.

What I would have said was influenced by my colleagues’ comments. If I were in that situation I would have worked for those pockets of doubt, not to undermine the student’s argument or the fix ‘im, but rather to talk about argument, specifically the Toulmin model since it carries so much weight in English 100 and the TAs are familiar with it. What’s easy to forget about this model (especially when the former course textbook forgot about 1/3 of the model) is that it includes not just Claims and Support & Warrants and Grounding (Backing) but also Reservations and Qualifiers. They were not present in the text. And my research of comp textbooks presented a pattern of giving much more space to claims and support than anything else in the Toulmin model.

During my first semester teaching here the most common complaint from TAs was that they had trouble teaching what they didn’t understand: Warrants and Grounding. So, they focused mostly on Claims and Support–something familiar to freshmen, who often come in from high school knowing that when they make a claim they need to find support for it. Then it’s a “good” argument.

If I were in that situation, I would have found this a perfect place to discuss Reservations and Qualifiers. Perhaps this discussion would have worked to improve the argument and sew those pockets of doubt.

Of course, and this was brought up at the end, if you read the assignment prompt and it says write a “controversial” claim, how responsible do you hold the student for the claims made?