St. Val's Quiz

Since I want to be like Dr. Crazy in every way:

A Valentine's Quiz:

Your Candy Heart Says "Hug Me"

A total sweetheart, you always have a lot of love to give out. Your heart is open to where ever love takes you! Your ideal Valentine's Day date: a surprise romantic evening that you've planned out Your flirting style: lots of listening and talking What turns you off: fighting and conflict Why you're hot: you're fearless about falling in love

What Does Your Candy Heart Say?

I love that these things are designed so perfectly to be completely flattering while seeming to be revelatory!

Anyone else excited...

About Project Runway tonight? We find out (as far as I can tell) the Bryant Park finalists tonight...Though this hasn't been the strongest season, the show remains one of my primary guilty pleasures, especially now that we're over Rock of Love II at Chez Horace.

Settin' 'em up, Knockin' 'em down

The comparative lightness of this teaching semester--the familiar survey, and the intimately familiar grad class--has meant that I've pretty consistently been able to carve out time for writing, editing and revising. In the last week, I've finished edits on one essay and sent it out, made revisions to my own essay for the collection, and completed edits on two other contributions to the collection. The collection still has a few more substantive tasks involved (2 more essays to edit, the introduction to finish, and another co-authored essay to revise), and I've got this plenary talk to draft up (did I mention that I'd been asked to do a plenary?), but the light is at the end of the tunnel for the book project, which is a) related to the plenary, and b) already open in various documents on my desktop.

Next week, I hope to get a jump on the remaining pieces to edit, and start outlining the plenary, so there's definitely more to do, but I feel on a bit of a roll right now, to be sure.

Voting, and why we vote...

I saw a George Will column around somewhere (Online? in print? I can't remember) that basically suggested that the Dems would squander the opportunity to win the White House by not nominating Obama, but rather Hillary, who is to him, a supremely divisive candidate. The argument he made was that by nominating McCain, The Republicans had staked their claim to the center, and that Hillary would not pick up any usual Republican voters, and probably not many independents, either.

In doing so, Will mentioned casually the squandering of primary votes on Tuesday for candidates like Edwards, who was already out of the race, or even, on the Republican side, for Huckabee, who was essentially only a regional candidate.

I am no political scientist, but I seem to think that what Will implicitly raises is the purpose of a vote. So much rhetoric about voting suggests that our vote = our political voice, and that this equivalency means that we get to exercise our place in a democracy primarily through our vote.

This is, of course, bullshit, particularly in such a solidly bi-partisan political system. Neither Obama nor Hillary really speaks for me, even if they speak more like I do than any other viable presidential candidates. Edwards spoke more like I do, and I probably would've cast a vote for him were he still in the race.

But with my primary still in the future (we're late to that ballgame, and for once, potentially consequential), I am asking myself what I'll be doing when I'm voting.

In 2000, I voted for Gore, even though I agreed with more things that Nader was saying at the time. In retrospect, I feel even Better about that vote, since I've become disenchanted with Nader, and frankly somewhat more enchanted with Gore. But then, I was voting for one of two likely choices, Bush or Gore, where my preference was clear, even if my voice in that vote was obscured.

In my upcoming primary, I suspect I'll have the option of casting a vote for Edwards, a bit of a protest against the too-moderate-for-my-tastes available candidates. This vote is essentially inconsequential.

I could vote for Hillary, who I suspect actually supports more of the policies that I support, but whom I suspect might not win a general election. Or I could vote for Obama, whom I believe to be most electable, but the furthest from representing my actual specific concerns. Instead, Obama simply seems to be the most likely candidate to bring some less-conservative framework to the White House.

So what is my vote, anyway, because if my vote=equals my political voice, then my political voice is terribly indistinct, and pretty far from anything I might call my political convictions. This is not simply a lesser of two evils thing, either. Instead I believe it says a lot about the rhetoric of democracy. For if our vote is our primary way of participating in a democracy, then it's a poor way of participating, indeed.

Instead, this rhetoric seems to at once encorage political assimilation into one of two dominant paradigms, and simulataneously and implicitly de-fuse other kids of participation. I know that some people get angry when others don't vote, as if it is the single most important thing that a citizen can do. And while, yes, it's important, and more votes adds up to something like political will (except in years ending with the digits 2-0-0-0). But there are so many other substantive ways to enact citizenship that actually equal voice. I've been sending more and more emails to representatives, which is only a little more efficacious., but there it is. But activism, volunteerism, general political discussion is all important, on-the-ground, and voiced. And while power might be most visibly exercised in big grandiose chambers inside the beltway, it is also exercised in many micro-scale ways in every interaction.

So I'll figure out how I'm voting when the time comes. Perhaps by then it'll be a done deal. But what I'm not going to do is delude myself into believing that those few little onscreen buttons are all that is left of my political voice.

RBOC

• After a good class of the survey, I came back to office hours and got a visit from a former student who just wanted to say Hi. That's always nice, when students seem to remember that you're a person, and one they kinda like to be around.
• After the student left, I finished making final edits to the long article that's sort of about Harry Potter, and sent that puppy out. We'll see how it fares, since it is on a single text that isn't in and of itself supremely important. But that makes two articles out right now, so keep your fingers crossed.
  
• My annual evaluation scores are back, with highest marks in all categories from both the chair and the evaluation committee. Some nice comments in there too.
  
• One of my contributors for the collection contacted me after going over her most recent edits and said, "You're a really good editor," which is nice since a) she teaches editing, and b) I've never edited before.
• We're discussing revisions to the major here, which has been an interesting process. I put a proposal on the table, and after having seen the other proposals (which were in many ways similar to mine), I like mine a lot, but see that it might be a bit too big a change at this point for this department. We'll see.
• We've got another candidate in town today, which makes for a busy busy day.
• The elephant in the room is that my mom is back in the hospital. You may or may not remember the episode in the late summer where there was the hope of a diagnosis for the chronic illness that has escalated over the last 15 years. No diagnosis came, and her always-roller-coaster health has generally deteriorated. I am worried on the one hand, but on the other, she is very adamant about my sister and I not getting deeply involved in her health care (She hated how her own mother's health sucked in all of the people around her, and swore that she never wanted that for us). She remains fairly casual about things, even though my dad is torn up over this latest round. There's not much to do right now, and I hesitate to offer too much detail, but amidst all this other good stuff, there's this black cloud...
  

Long Days and the Things that Help Us Sustain Them

Willow is away at AWP this week, milling about book tables, hanging around sessions on contemporary fairy tales, short story collections, slipstream fiction, etc, and generally taking in the things that NYC has that BRU doesn't.

Since I'm typically the one who leaves town for conferences, I was eager to send Willow off on such an adventure while I kept the home fires, well, from having huge temper tantrums or wasting away from hunger. I didn't have a sense, when we scheduled all of this though, what yesterday would look like. Not only did I have to work around a grad class, but we had a candidate from the search committee I'm on come to campus, while some extended family crises linger in the background. Not to mention that little last minute VHS conversion issue that cropped up. so yesterday looked like this.

5:30--Imperia crawls into bed with me, saying that since Mommy is gone, she could come in and snuggle. Cute. But early.
5:35--Imperia decides she's not really interested in sleeping, but continues to lie quietly, if not still, for another 45 minutes. Daddy is not sleeping.
6:30--Imperia wants to watch some TV, so Winnie-the-Pooh goes on for about 20 minutes while Daddy showers and dresses.
7:00-8:20--Packing for the day, getting Rambunctious up, getting the kids fed and out the door. I am so glad I am not a single parent of twins. Those people are saints, and if you happen to know one, call her up and offer to help.
8:45--drop kids off at day care. hugs and kisses
9:00--Arrive at school, call Classroom Technology, and three local stores to locate a blank VHS tape for sale. Run around from bookstore to coffeeshop (sweet elixir!) to ClassTech back to office.
10-11:30--Read Course evluations from last semester. Prep for Survey class and grad class. Also write some blog posts (who had time for that?). Photocopy some stuff.
11:30-12:40--Candidate interviews with committee.
12:40-12:50--heat and eat lunch. Burn tongue.
1-2:15--Teach kick ass survey class on the sublime and the picturesque, featuring powerpoint involving 18th and early 19th c paintings by Constable, Gainsborough and Friedrich to illustrate the sense of the concepts, while helping them parse out Gilpin, Burke and Kant. Students agree that Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant, while also getting that the mind that Kant's sublime works in is the rational mind, while simultaneously understanding that Blake and (eventually) Shelley think of it as the imaginative mind. Happy with class, though we didn't get to Shelley.
2:20-2:40: Return to office, drop stuff, gather stuff , reread Judith Butler article in 15 minutes (which tells you either how familiar I am with it, or how shoddily I was prepping).
2:40: Run to ClassTech to pick up converted VHS (Thanks guys!), run to car across campus
3-3-45: Pick up kids, take them to friends house who are sitting for them. Feed kids carrots. Hug and kiss kids. return to campus.
4-7: Grad class. Goes well, though since the class of 12 has 4 Lit track, 4 creative track, and 4 professional writing track, they are chafing against the heavy dose of theory early on. Some of those specializing in creative non-fiction wonder (usefully, I think) about what the performativity of autobiography means to their craft. I swear it'll get better soon.
7:25 Pick up kids from friends' house. Apparently, they've been good. sigh of relief. Sure do love them kids. Drive them home. Imperia dozes off in the car (no wonder!)
7:50-8:53--Snack, bath, bedtime
8:56--Dad calls to talk about Mom's health and his business dilemmas. I eat dinner while on the phone with him.
10:00--Willow beeps in (on schedule, thank god), and I tell her I'll call her back as soon as I'm done with my Dad.
10:08--Call willow back, talk until midnight.
12:36--juice cups prepped for morning, cats fed, rest of house a disaster, I crash.

What helped me sustain that? A little sunshine, a job I love, great students, great kids, great friends, and Willow. I'm lucky.

Reading the Evals

Although we got the statistical reports on evaluations a few weeks ago, the actual forms with narrative comments did not come back to my mailbox until today.

I'm becoming a fairly popular teacher here, and so affirming narrative comments are embarrassingly common here. Not because I think I'm this amazing teacher, but because I'm beginning to think that the way students fill out evaluations is as much a function of their overall learning across many courses, as well as their general critical thinking acumen, more than what happens in one course. And that relationship is not necessarily a direct relationship, either.

Take the 300-level commonwealth course: The statistical scores were a bit more varied than other courses I've taught, with a few lower scores than I've gotten at this institution (though not other places--more about that in a sec). And yet the narrative comments say so much more than a 4.04 statistical mean on one score or the other. For example, the evaluation that answered the question, "Course material challenged students intellectually" with "usually" (3 out of 5), wrote in her narrative comments: "Horace is the absolute best professor I have ever had at BRU. He masters his subject matter, encourages critical thinking, and his enthusiasm makes you want to learn and participate. He is also incredibly helpful and has a great personality."

So wow. That's a dream comment, and I strive to live up to that kind of vision that some students have of me. But her decision to evaluate the questions individually instead of doing a straight-ticket evaluation tells me more about my teaching, and affirms my teaching more than the student who assigns all 5s. Why? because one of the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy of learning is "evaluation." Which is to say that this student has (or at least demonstrates) a clearer sense of what the critical task of evaluation is than a student who assigns straight 5s, or, for that matter, straight 3s, and then leaves no narrative comments at all. The straight 3s, by the way, come from the only student who anticipated a C in the course.

In fact, I find that this institution generally has a bit of grade inflation when it comes to evaluation scores. Listen, I think many of my colleagues are likely fantastic teachers. But I also thought that my colleagues at my last institution were also amazing teachers as well. And while I don't have access to anyone else's evaluations, I can guess that eval scores and Rate-my-professor scores probably correlate pretty generally. And I know that here, RMP scores for my department are really generally quite positive, and at my last instituion (andexpensive, private, USNews-top-50 school) my colleagues RMP scores (and mine, too) were pretty average, even mediocre.

I fear that what this means is not that here we're better, or here the students are nicer, but rather at the last institution, there was a culture of critical thinking that is not strong here. Now this is a tenuous conclusion, I know, and it privileges all sorts of things (class and geographic location among them) in drawing that conclusion. But I fear that indirectly, at least, the most uniformly good scores that I get on evaluations may be potentially a sign of a secondary failure, by me and by my institution generally, to really make critical thinking (including but not limited to evaluation, but also analysis, creativity, and other higher-order thought) a priority and an automatic response.

Furthermore, I am both selfishly happy and a little disturbed to see how often "enthusiasm," "personality" and "humor" are listed as characteristics of excellent teaching in these evaluations. Not disturbing in and of themselves: I know I tell some decent jokes, and I like to think of myself as a nice person. But the fact that evaluations generally have become so important in terms of faculty evaluation makes me concerned for colleagues who are, say, low key, or not very funny, but brilliant, and who actually provoke a great deal of learning without necessarily being, say, entertaining, or lovable. This kind of customer-service teaching sends us in many of the wrong directions; It's a lucky (and not necessarily skilled) teacher, who can strike a balance between rigor and likability.

In the short term, these evaluations give me some nice data for my annual report. But they also send up red flags about the culture of critical thinking at this institution (and perhaps many others), and more generally, for the reliability of teaching evaluations for determining teaching efficacy and faculty merit.