Kids These Days!

Check out what my students from my American Identities course have been working on this semester over at the American Identities blog when you get a chance.  The vast majority of the posts from this month are their Identification Projects, but I've also put up a list of the blogs some of them have created for their Final Projects.

Look for My Students' Writing at American Identities and sf@SF

I've got students in both my undergraduate classes this semester signing up as co-authors on the sf@SF blog, which is now on "science fiction--and more--at SUNY Fredonia." I've just posted a brief observation on the odd choice of commercials that run during Onegai My Melody on veoh.com and Ouran High School Host Club on youtube.com, just to kick things off. We should have several posts per week from a variety of student writers up there this semester. I'm also going to start posting identification projects from last semester's American Identities course over on the blog of that name. Check both out when you get a chance!

Bloggers and Gentlemen

Just a quick note to publicly acknowledge the utter awesomeness of Rob MacDougall and Marc Bousquet. Rob and his family drove much farther than I assumed they had to in order to meet the Constructivist clan at the Canadian Falls late this summer, while Marc put up with the perils of a skype-mediated conference call with my 11 students in Introduction to Graduate Studies in English yesterday afternoon (his time) in order to answer our questions on his book How the University Works.

We actually pushed the call with Marc back an hour later than planned because I had given my students the option of witnessing/documenting the largest campus/community protest I've ever heard of at my university--actually, an impromptu counter-protest, complete with speeches, musical performances, and skits against an anti-gay nutjob individual with full free speech rights whose point of view the more-than-2,000 people over the course of the afternoon respectfully but firmly declined to assent to--and three-quarters of tbe class took me up on my offer of extra credit to respond to it on our ANGEL discussion forum and perhaps more publicly. I'd like to think our campus made one transplanted western NYer proud. And I'm hoping at least some of my students make good use of the temporary privileges of Citizen SE authorship I've extended them. Stay tuned!

For those clickers from Inside Higher Ed checking out the obscurest blog on teh internets for the first time, please do pay a visit to Rob's and Marc's sites. Their writing, their voices, their scholarship, and their generosity make the academo-critical blogdustrial complex a better virtual space.

Announcing sf@SF: Science Fiction at SUNY Fredonia

My science fiction course begins in less than an hour, so I'm officially launching the course web site and course blog right...about...now!

Why We Should Sit in on Each Other's Classes More Often

Not content with sitting in on 6 of my new colleagues' classes this semester as their mentor, I also subbed for my chair the first day her class discussed Amitava Kumar's Passport Photos a couple of weeks ago and decided to sit in on the last day today. Talk about productive, for all of us. From the students' descriptions of it that first day, Kumar's book reminded me of a few passages from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, which I mentioned to the chair, who then passed them along to her students today. In the course of the discussion, a student pointed us to Kumar's response to Arundhati Roy's "banner of writerly protest": "If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic" (170-171).

A writer can do this. Declare that she is a nation unto herself! Even invite others. We're now open to immigration! The reason these bold declarations don't diminish my sense of alienation, and, in fact, only enhance it, is the quick realization that I'm not utterly mobile in history. There are miles of barbed wire. Of all sorts. And this becomes clear most of all when Roy rightly says: "However many garlands we heap on our scientists, however many medals we pin to their chests, the truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people." If I secede, if Roy secedes, we secede also from that difficulty. To put it differently, to secede is as easy as to make a bomb.

The real task, even for those who as diasporics think of seceding, is to contemplate that difficulty. Of how in our minds we allow ourselves to believe that it was ever possible to find a space of withdrawal. It is, also, inevitably, the problem of a collectivity, far beyond individual issues or even nations. Neither writers nor scientists can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely. That is the plain truth of the nuclear bomb. When it explodes, it finishes us wherever we reside in our mobile republic. (171)

Pretty useful stuff for starting to teach "The Custom-House" today. (And, for that matter, for plugging the WAAGNFNP.) Not to mention that the "Nationality" chapter from which this passage comes opens with a mini-reading of "Douloti the Bountiful," which I just taught last week in Postcolonial Hawthorne. Or that the "Date of Birth" chapter is particularly relevant for Hawthorne, who was, after all, born on the 4th of July. Or that the "Identifying Marks" chapter may prove crucial to my research on the picturesque, colonialism, and race. Or that the "Profession" chapter is perfect for the graduate course on professional development I'll be teaching next spring. All this from a guy who hasn't read Moby-Dick. Not bad.

On Blogging and Teaching

Teaching Tuesdays have been few and far between, not to mention short and anything but sweet. It's not for lack of topics but for lack of time. Well, not just that. It's more like one of my friends was saying about the announcers in the final minutes of the Bills' heartbreaking loss to Dallas: "Just shut up! Stop saying it's over! Don't jinx us!" It's not like I've been pitching no-hitters in all my classes, but somehow it feels like to blog about any aspect of them or to begin to reflect on the effects of the Fulbright experience on my teaching in the States or on similarities and differences between my Fukuoka and my Fredonia students would be to jeopardize a streak of some sort. But I think it would be all right to suggest that my blogging here at CitizenSE while I was in Japan was a way for me to process all the reading and research I was doing to prepare for my all-new preps there, whereas this semester I've basically been teaching modified versions of familiar courses that incorporate a lot of the ideas I processed in Japan. So I don't need to blog as much here on teaching-related matters because I did so much of that during the past winter, spring, and summer.

But I do have an onechan-related teaching story for y'all. With the tsuma taking courses twice a week and working at UB three times a week this semester, I'm now dropping the girls off at and picking them up from day care, as well as getting dinner started. When the girls get tired of entertaining each other and begin to bug me while I'm trying to get organized to begin doing something resembling "cooking," I give them a snack or a drink. But only certain kinds of things--nothing sweet, for instance. The tsuma and I have been trying to drill into onechan's head that you can only have dessert after you've eaten enough real food--stuff with protein so you grow big and strong, or things with vitamins so your hair grows long long long. (Yes, those things motivate her, even if she can't pronounce vitamins exactly right yet.) But onechan has a real sweet tooth (thanks to me, I guess), so despite our efforts she's always asking if she can have some forbidden item before dinner, and we're always saying no. For some reason, this evening when I was in the middle of getting ready to cook, she asked if she could have a Peco-chan candy right then, and I told her, "sure, but if you have it now you can't have one for dessert." I guess I was curious to see what kind of choice she'd make. Well, she got the funniest look on her face--kind of shocked and horrified and suspicious and tempted all at once--paused for awhile, and finally replied in a kind of scandalized tone of voice, "Daddy, I'm going to wait. You should eat real food first." Then she went off on this long soliloquy about how ashita (tomorrow) she was going to have Peco-chan candy for dessert, too. I think she couldn't believe I had forgotten the house rule and wanted to make sure I would give her credit for correcting me. Anyway, it was one of those moments when you feel completely ratified as a teacher--"she gets it! she actually gets it!" Nice.

I should note that in fact she motored through three servings of dinner--macaroni and cheese, yellow rice, and steamed fresh green beans (hey, I never said I was agood cook!)--just so she could get to dessert, but when the time finally came she decided to have a lollipop instead of the Peco-chan candy. Then she topped it off with some apple sauce, because "it's good for you, daddy." Probably she's right, as this was home-made stuff she and imoto made at imoto's day care out of the fresh apples they were too sick to pick on Columbus Day.

Notes Toward a Prolegomenon To All Future Golf/Academia Analogies

Scott Eric "The Red" (of eye, in the public eye, or at least that portion of it directed his way by KC Johnson!) Kaufman kicked it off. All the many people who have written glowing encomiums to and analyses of C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary moved the ball down the field. So you only have them to blame for the following series of plays I'm calling here. (The football epic simile is all my own.)

So what do golf/academia analogies have to do with teaching? Thanks for asking!

Way back when in Andrew Ross's Cultural Studies course in grad school my best friend and I did a teaching presentation on Beyond a Boundary. I hope it was more memorable to the class than it has turned out to be to me or my computers or my bookshelves, as I can't find any trace of it anywhere. But once, I'm certain, I did attempt to teach cricket to someone. Ross must have found it hilarious.

Which is the scenic route to my point: if you want a cricket critic, I am not your man. Nor am I trying to do for golf blogging what C.L.R. James did for cricket criticism. (Insert appropriate Zaphod Beeblebrox quotation here.) But I will try to convince you we can learn something from analogizing the academy through golf. So long as you provide the "something," no one will get hurt.

Grad School:Q-School. This one writes itself. Q-School, for those who don't know it, is a 6-round ordeal which only the top x in the field advance through to qualify for the top professional tour in the U.S.--PGA for men, LPGA for women. Of course, to even get into Q-School, you need to qualify. So your entire amateur career is like your primary and secondary schooling, undergrad is like the sectional qualifiers for Q-School, the pre-dissertation phase consists of the first 4 rounds of Q-School itself, the dissertation is the 5th, and the job search is the 6th. So you can end up with exempt status on the big tour (tenure-track job) or become a non-exempt tour member (off the tenure track) or not (try again next year or play on the Nationwide/Futures/Hooters Tour--more TAing or maybe community college adjuncting). The analogy breaks down a bit with that last option, as you figuratively have to start over at the undergrad level if you have a bad 6th round at Q-School. And actually a flaw creeps in before then, because you can get a job before you finish your dissertation, which would be something like the LPGA saying, "Well, you can finish your 5th round later, because the other 5 out of 6 were so good you're practically guaranteed of getting exempt status. Just try to get it in during your rookie year sometime." But otherwise it's a damn fine analogy. If you think playing center field is tough, try the last two rounds of Q-School.

Money List on PGA/LPGA:Renewal Process for Pre-Tenure Faculty. This one almost writes itself. If you don't make the top 90 on the money list in a given year on the LPGA Tour, you lose your exempt status; it's top 125 for the PGA. The higher you get on the money list, the more exempt you get (longer exemptions, more invitations to limited-field tournaments). And if you win a tournament, you get an even longer exemption. So losing your card is like losing your job (but at least you get to skip to the last round of Q-School!), doing well enough to be put up for a two- or three-year renewal by your department rather than staying to an annual schedule and to begin getting invited to give talks at conferences and public fora is like getting into the top 40 or whatever on the money list, and publishing your book is like winning a tournament. Now, there's really no tenure on either tour, so the analogy kind of breaks down there, but most professional careers don't last 7 years, anyway, so let's ignore that problem and move on to the next analogy.

Your Individual Career:A 72-Hole Tournament. What I like about this analogy is that it brings out how academia is unlike most sports, in that you should get better with age, and the stakes get higher the further you go. Break your academic career down into 9-year segments and make each segment equivalent to one round in a tournament consisting of four such beasties. Grad school and any relevant experience before it is the first round; pre-tenure is the second (assuming most people these days start out with some sort of adjuncting or visiting experience before getting on the tenure track); then comes the cut (only the top 70 plus ties in a 120-to-144-player field usually move on for the final two rounds--quite a bit harsher than the overall tenure rate in the U.S. each year, I'll hazard a guess); then the last two rounds are where you're going for the win, coasting to retirement, or something in between (a WD is ok, but make sure you don't do something that'll get you DQed). By this count, I'm already in the weekend of my academic career. They call Saturday "moving day," because it's the time when the lead pack pulls away from the field. So if each academic year is the equivalent of 2 holes (yes, I chose the length of my segments carefully), I'd better start making some birdies.

Course:Institution. Some courses are tougher and/or more prestigious than others. The tournament organizers might want to set the course up even tougher than usual or they might want a birdie-fest. So how high the rough is, how narrow the fairways are cut, how fast the greens are running, how close to trouble the pins are placed, and a million other factors--including the weather--determine how difficult a particular course will be playing, above and beyond the course architecture/layout. So make the tenured faculty, administrators, and trustees of a college or university the tournament organizers, the taxpayers, alumni, and other donors the tournament sponsors and course owners, the students, parents, legislators, and others who affect the conditions of teaching and research the weather, and the tenure-track professors the humble players trying to figure out where the birdie holes are and how to survive the monster holes and howling winds. So while this analogy, when combined with the previous one, assumes you stay at one institution your entire career, it's otherwise pretty good.

Stats:Assessment. Moneyball magpies and fantasy football freaks may think they've got the market cornered on which stats matter the most in determining player quality/value, and they've certainly got a point that on its face it's tougher to do this for a team sport than an individual sport like golf, but, face it, people, golfers and golf fans are the nerdiest stats people of all--been tracking stats, arguing over which matter the most, and using them to develop and tweak player ranking systems for much much longer and better than anyone else. Players themselves try to "close the loop" by looking at outcomes to figure out where to improve their games. I don't quite know what greens in regulation percentage, scrambling percentage, birdies per round, scoring average, majors and other wins, top 3s, top 10s, and annual and career money lists are equivalent to in academia, but if I had more time, I'd flesh out that analogy at both individual and institutional levels.

Some other time. In the meantime, feel free to propose further analogical possibilities in comments.

Rethinking a Course Blog

And by "course blog," of course I mean student blog. Too busy prepping and wasting time pretending to be the Commissioner of Women's Golf to do more than link to this announcement of a change over at American Identities. Go there and read the whole thing--it's short!

Third Try's the Charm?

I'm teaching my Postcolonial Hawthorne course for the third time this semester--first was at Kyushu University in Fall 2006, next at Seinan Gakuin University in Spring 2007, and now here. Those already interested in the intricacies of course design may find the differences between the first two and the last less boring than the vast majority of those whose lives will never be brightened by this post.

Apparently I was the last in my department to get the memo that postcolonial theory is dead. But that PMLA forum I missed in May will actually be perfect for the course, the basic goal of which remains to ask whether Hawthorne ought to be considered a postcolonial writer or not and why, with a particular focus on the implications and stakes of the answers to these questions.

Before/After

Before. After. Draw your own conclusions about the impact of teaching in Japan on my teaching in the U.S.