So it's somehow fitting that just as I'm reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, which is a funny take on familial embarrassings, imoto decided to show me what it's all about. At this semester's Women's Studies symposium the other day, she got it into her head to head for the podium, try to stare down the speaker (a new colleague who specializes in 19th C American women writers), and then toddle off, yanking off her tank top as she went. As there were only about, oh, 20 people out of the 50 there with an angle to see her doing this, it wasn't so bad, but by the third time she tried it (yeah, I kept bringing her back in the room after wrestling her shirt back on in the hallway--victory of hope over experience, fine line between bravery and stupidity and all that), pretty much everyone had checked out her belly button.
So was this as embarrassing as onechan's love of "exercise," which entails finding the nearest pole-like object (it started as the kitchen table leg in our apartment in Fukuoka, but quickly graduated onto many other tall, thin, cylindrical things) and kind of, well, embracing it, suspending herself above the ground for as long she can? Well, yeah, except for the time at the wedding of one of the tsuma's best friends a few weeks ago when onechan found a pole holding up a tent covering the outdoor dance floor and proceeded to get her exercise in front of, oh, about half the guests at this very big post-wedding dinner.
Clearly imoto was just hot and onechan wants a strong upper body so she can climb to the top of any playground structure whenever she feels like it, but to be on the safe side I'm brainstorming ways to talk them out of exotic dancing as a career path. Just in case.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Thursday, September 27, 2007
On Leaving Academia
For those wondering what life after leaving the tenure-track can look like, I'll briefly note that one of my best friends who did this is working on an investigative documentary TV series that just won an Emmy for this episode. Watch them all!
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Hump Day
We've switched our monthly department meetings to Wednesdays from noon to one, away from the usual Friday from three to whenever slot. Today's our second meeting and I can already report that I'm liking it. Somehow the week seems more than halfway over already.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Speaking of Storytelling...
What kind of mental state do you have to be in to believe that the consequences of doing this won't be worse than just taking the damn test?
Maybe I should be assigning "Fancy's Show Box" in my Postcolonial Hawthorne class to help my students deal with the trauma of getting an afternoon off on a nice sunny day. We've already read "Young Goodman Brown," which seems relevant in a different way.
Maybe I should be assigning "Fancy's Show Box" in my Postcolonial Hawthorne class to help my students deal with the trauma of getting an afternoon off on a nice sunny day. We've already read "Young Goodman Brown," which seems relevant in a different way.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Onechan's a Storyteller
Already. Just don't be taken in when she says with a straight face that her imoto is solely responsible for the mess in the playroom or just pulled her hair! (She's going to have to learn to stop lying to her mom eventually, right?) After telling her I played great for the first time in a long time in the faculty noon-time basketball games I've been joining fairly regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays since I returned from Fukuoka, onechan regaled me with a long story about how she played basketball, volleyball, and soccer with her sensei and tomodachi at the Fredonia hoikuen yesterday--and even "all by myself." I don't know what Plato or Zora Neale Hurston would say, but I'm certainly enjoying her stories.... And no, the fact that she painted me my birthday present yesterday has nothing to with it. Nothing, I say!
(Yes, I'm a little bit more relaxed about her adjustment into English and western NY now. If only I could say the same about imoto.)
(Yes, I'm a little bit more relaxed about her adjustment into English and western NY now. If only I could say the same about imoto.)
Thursday, September 20, 2007
On Devi and Rowling
Remember when I said it would take about, oh, a month to start some Deathly Hallows blogging? Me neither. Let's just say that never happened, shall we? Why? Well, I'm ready with Harry Potter 7 spoiler #1, of course! Are you sitting down?
Too bad I have no idea how to put things "below the fold," because this one's a doozy. I'll be as coy as possible in case anyone's even further behind the fantasy zeitgeist than I am. (You know, besides the three-quarters of my students in my Postcolonial Hawthorne class today, my dad....) The good news for you is that you don't even have to go back to my now-7-months-old-and-more Devi blogging to get this one. Quite the opposite--it's actually one where Rowling clarifies Devi.
Let's put it this way: remember how The Boy Who Lived lives up to his name towards the end of Deathly Hallows? How he's unexpectedly (if you're anything like me, that is) empowered by his acceptance of his own death and transformed by his courage in acting on it? Assuming you do, you'll appreciate how weirdly similar this is to the acceptance and transformation Devi details for the Nagesias in "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha." That is all. A cross-cultural structural parallel that may well top my Douglas Adams-Salman Rushdie one. You may go.
[Update: Uh, wait! Before you go, check out the slyly disguised Harry Potter 1 reference in paragraph 3 of this otherwise deathly serious article. My year will be complete if Martindale owns up to it here!]
Too bad I have no idea how to put things "below the fold," because this one's a doozy. I'll be as coy as possible in case anyone's even further behind the fantasy zeitgeist than I am. (You know, besides the three-quarters of my students in my Postcolonial Hawthorne class today, my dad....) The good news for you is that you don't even have to go back to my now-7-months-old-and-more Devi blogging to get this one. Quite the opposite--it's actually one where Rowling clarifies Devi.
Let's put it this way: remember how The Boy Who Lived lives up to his name towards the end of Deathly Hallows? How he's unexpectedly (if you're anything like me, that is) empowered by his acceptance of his own death and transformed by his courage in acting on it? Assuming you do, you'll appreciate how weirdly similar this is to the acceptance and transformation Devi details for the Nagesias in "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha." That is all. A cross-cultural structural parallel that may well top my Douglas Adams-Salman Rushdie one. You may go.
[Update: Uh, wait! Before you go, check out the slyly disguised Harry Potter 1 reference in paragraph 3 of this otherwise deathly serious article. My year will be complete if Martindale owns up to it here!]
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
On Classroom Observations
As associate chair of my department, I'm responsible for mentoring new hires during their first semester on campus, which includes writing an observation letter on their teaching. The way we usually handle this in my department is to give our new professors as much choice in the process as possible: among the classes I am free to attend, they are free to choose which course I will observe and when my two visits will take place (usually toward the beginning and toward the end of the semester). No pre-observation or post-observation meetings are required, but they can of course request them, and since we're meeting as needed to discuss any questions and problems they may have over the course of the semester, it's easy to discuss their classes and students along the way. All I ask for before my first visit is a syllabus. Since they go up for renewal for the second year sometime late in the fall semester, thanks to our nutty renewal and promotions schedule, I'll be writing up the letters over Thanksgiving Break so they can get them right after it and decide whether to include them in their files or not.
The point of these visits is to give useful feedback on their course design, pedagogy, classroom management, and so on. What I usually try to do while observing a class is figure out how the lesson is structured and why, how it relates to the overall course goals, and how the students are responding to it and to the professor. Obviously my being there changes the classroom dynamic to some extent, which is why only about a third of my overall focus is on their responses, especially during that first visit. But that doesn't mean I don't do a lot of student-watching. I like to come to a class early and watch/listen as the students come into the classroom, so I can see how they change as the professor enters the room. If there are any group or team discussions or activities, I like to place myself in a location where I can listen in on several teams (while appearing to be focused on taking notes). The great thing about students at my university is that from their words and body language it's very clear what they're thinking and how engaged they are with a lesson plan.
Still, especially for new faculty, that's not the be-all and end-all of an observation, particularly the first one. I've been here long enough (it's the start of my 10th year, if you count the year away) to have realized that it's how the students change over the four (or more) years they're here that matters most, so you have to think in semester-long arcs as well as shorter ones. If a particular class doesn't go as planned, you still have many more chances (and many many more than in Japan, where they meet only once a week for half the overall contact hours as in U.S. universities) to meet your goals for the semester. Of course, in my second visit, I'm looking to see whether/how the class atmosphere has changed, along with the quality of student engagement and discussion, particularly if the professor wasn't happy with how the first class went. But like I said, how the students respond to a new professor before any word-of-mouth has gotten around the student grapevines, which helps students self-select professors who match their own goals and learning styles, is not the biggest of deals to me.
What is is seeing how the professors are adjusting to the students in their class. Coming to a new institution, it's difficult to anticipate what student expectations and habits are with respect to reading load, in-class participation, individual and team assignments, taking responsibility for their own learning, and so on. In your first semester at a new place, you're basically gathering intel for the future--the next class, the next week, the next unit, the next semester--and looking for patterns in student thought and behavior. What can you expect from English majors? from English Adolescence Education majors? from Early Childhood Education English Concentrators? from students from the arts? humanities? social sciences? sciences? What about the mix of first- through fourth-years in your classes? What are their (often different and conflicting) expectations for this course? And so on. The goal is to figure out what the assumptions about them that you might be making that could be getting in the way of teaching them better, as well as what assumptions they seem to be making that they need to be disabused of or lead away from.
By adjusting to the students, then, I don't mean pandering to them, patronizing them, or catering to their every whim. I mean figuring out what are reasonable challenges to be presenting them with at what time in the semester, figuring out what you need to do to prepare them to do as well as possible on the assignments you've laid out for them, figuring out how to get and keep the group of students in front of you (or around you) motivated to push and challenge themselves. I mean thinking realistically and pragmatically about how to achieve your goals in the course. And maybe rethinking your goals and methods for the next time around.
Not all this shows up in my observation letter, of course. A good part of the letter is simply describing what I saw, in as much detail as I can muster from my notes and memories. Along the way or at the end, I usually include a mix of interpretations and assessments and suggestions. In doing this I tend to be more about options and roads not taken (but might be in the future) than about armchair quarterbacking or backseat driving; I consider alternate ways of achieving the apparent goals for the class meeting or adjusting them in light of the course goals. I try to convey to the professor and to anyone else who might happen to read the letter someday the complexities of and subtleties in teaching well.
Which means these things take a long time to write. But I usually learn a lot about teaching from visiting my colleagues' classes and writing up my observations, so I figure I should only return the favor with a letter they may be able to learn from.
The point of these visits is to give useful feedback on their course design, pedagogy, classroom management, and so on. What I usually try to do while observing a class is figure out how the lesson is structured and why, how it relates to the overall course goals, and how the students are responding to it and to the professor. Obviously my being there changes the classroom dynamic to some extent, which is why only about a third of my overall focus is on their responses, especially during that first visit. But that doesn't mean I don't do a lot of student-watching. I like to come to a class early and watch/listen as the students come into the classroom, so I can see how they change as the professor enters the room. If there are any group or team discussions or activities, I like to place myself in a location where I can listen in on several teams (while appearing to be focused on taking notes). The great thing about students at my university is that from their words and body language it's very clear what they're thinking and how engaged they are with a lesson plan.
Still, especially for new faculty, that's not the be-all and end-all of an observation, particularly the first one. I've been here long enough (it's the start of my 10th year, if you count the year away) to have realized that it's how the students change over the four (or more) years they're here that matters most, so you have to think in semester-long arcs as well as shorter ones. If a particular class doesn't go as planned, you still have many more chances (and many many more than in Japan, where they meet only once a week for half the overall contact hours as in U.S. universities) to meet your goals for the semester. Of course, in my second visit, I'm looking to see whether/how the class atmosphere has changed, along with the quality of student engagement and discussion, particularly if the professor wasn't happy with how the first class went. But like I said, how the students respond to a new professor before any word-of-mouth has gotten around the student grapevines, which helps students self-select professors who match their own goals and learning styles, is not the biggest of deals to me.
What is is seeing how the professors are adjusting to the students in their class. Coming to a new institution, it's difficult to anticipate what student expectations and habits are with respect to reading load, in-class participation, individual and team assignments, taking responsibility for their own learning, and so on. In your first semester at a new place, you're basically gathering intel for the future--the next class, the next week, the next unit, the next semester--and looking for patterns in student thought and behavior. What can you expect from English majors? from English Adolescence Education majors? from Early Childhood Education English Concentrators? from students from the arts? humanities? social sciences? sciences? What about the mix of first- through fourth-years in your classes? What are their (often different and conflicting) expectations for this course? And so on. The goal is to figure out what the assumptions about them that you might be making that could be getting in the way of teaching them better, as well as what assumptions they seem to be making that they need to be disabused of or lead away from.
By adjusting to the students, then, I don't mean pandering to them, patronizing them, or catering to their every whim. I mean figuring out what are reasonable challenges to be presenting them with at what time in the semester, figuring out what you need to do to prepare them to do as well as possible on the assignments you've laid out for them, figuring out how to get and keep the group of students in front of you (or around you) motivated to push and challenge themselves. I mean thinking realistically and pragmatically about how to achieve your goals in the course. And maybe rethinking your goals and methods for the next time around.
Not all this shows up in my observation letter, of course. A good part of the letter is simply describing what I saw, in as much detail as I can muster from my notes and memories. Along the way or at the end, I usually include a mix of interpretations and assessments and suggestions. In doing this I tend to be more about options and roads not taken (but might be in the future) than about armchair quarterbacking or backseat driving; I consider alternate ways of achieving the apparent goals for the class meeting or adjusting them in light of the course goals. I try to convey to the professor and to anyone else who might happen to read the letter someday the complexities of and subtleties in teaching well.
Which means these things take a long time to write. But I usually learn a lot about teaching from visiting my colleagues' classes and writing up my observations, so I figure I should only return the favor with a letter they may be able to learn from.
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