April 03, 2008
February 27, 2008
Human tendencies to think in hierarchies
This is the follow-up to my earlier entry on Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives and our very human tendency to think in hierarchies, even where inappropriate or misleading. (The great chain of being or evolutionary ladder metaphors are other examples.) It's frustrating to me as a teacher, but as an academic, it's a fascinating phenomenon.
After talking with a few clever adolescents (my children and a limited selection of their friends), we developed a few hypotheses:
- Humans are social animals, and our history of seeking and defining social pecking orders reinforces hierarchical thinking.
- Humans have all sorts of ways in which we make distinctions: two easy examples are taste and scent preferences, which are often very strong. Those preferences establish and reinforce hierarchical thinking.
- Humans already have spatial metaphors we use for abstract concepts, such as time (which we move through, or sometimes time passes by us; we move meetings up, or sometimes back; life is a journey, etc.: see Steven Pinker's book The Stuff of Thought for a lay explanation). Our hierarchical thinking may well be a carryover from whatever gave us those spatial metaphors, or possibly the converse.
This is all speculation; any evolutionary psychologists are welcome to contribute some more rigorous thinking and possibly sources of evidence... anyone want to check with experimentation whether those with stronger senses of taste or smell are more likely to think hierarchically?
February 10, 2008
Notes on a college visit (sort of), days 3-4
I'm lagging behind on the college visit notes, because we had to get up early for yesterday's flight, and I've been too tired today to write until now.
Friday, we did not tour a college but instead toured the area. I incurred the justifiable irritation of my daughter for not having planned where to go but just picking a direction. We found a (lost-)tourist information center and while I engaged the very friendly employee in a discussion of the area's history, my daughter planned a state-park visit using the center's maps. So we headed out again, found the state park, spent some time tramping around and getting a bit cold (or I did), and then drove back to the hotel where we collapsed. "Why am I tired from sitting in a car for a few hours?" she asked. Well, at least she didn't do the driving.
A few hours later, we walked around the center of the college's town with its very college-town-like boutique stores. She had dinner makings in the hotel room, but I didn't, so I bought a sandwich from a local bakery (very good bread), we window-shopped and laughed/cried at some of the fashions, and then crashed (after eating dinner). (No, I am not an abusive father: I asked her to eat out, and she declined.)
Yesterday, we spent far too much time in airplanes and hotels. Today I've been very inefficient at almost everything, so I volunteered to shop so I could at least be useful without too much of a brain. But...
The January 29 This Week in Science podcast has a shout-out to our zebra finches at the end of it. Thank you, Dr. Sanford! (Earlier in grad school, Kirsten Sanford worked in a lab researching the memory of zebra finches.) Yes, I'm a sucker for science podcasts. TWIS has the same AM morning-drive feel to it that the Fordham Foundation's The Gadfly podcast has. It doesn't work for me when it's a standard AM radio station, but for topical podcasts, I like it better.
I'll probably have the brains for a post mortem tomorrow, or the day after.
February 03, 2008
All-American dad... sort of
So here I sit, a few seconds from the end of the Super Bowl, rooting for the Giants to pull off a miracle, with beer in hand... but with no television... and the beer is gluten-free* ... and in a mug, not a stein or the bottle. I knew the Giants should have gone for it at fourth-and-one with 8 minutes left. But did they hear my advice?? No!
At least the mug has pictures of grape bunches on it. Properly bacchanalian, but I don't think my kids will believe it. My daughter is practicing violin and starts with a speedy folk tune. I suppose that's appropriate somehow.
So this time, when forced to, the Giants went for it on 4th and won the first down. They're alive, still, but Eli Manning is not the quarterback I'd want in this situation. This is torture even for a relative nonfan like me. 3rd and 5 on the Giants' 44.
Tyree! First and 10 on the Patriots' 24. Maybe this isn't quite so hopeless... but they always raise your hopes before dashing them. This is a great ending, no matter the result.
One-yard loss. Damn. Incomplete pass, and now it's third down. Several hundred million are now in sports agony.
First down on the Patriots' 13. The next three plays determine the game.
Touchdown!!!
The rest is denouement, and rather sad for Tom Brady, to get sacked at the end. I feel sorry for Patriots fans. They had a perfect season, or thought they did.
* - No, not because of my health. And I should've put the other variety in the fridge, since the bottle I drew is less well hopped than I'd like.
January 27, 2008
Active listening can be too active
When reading Profgrrrrl's account of two admiring students' comments, which left her in very different places afterwards, I had the same reaction as she did. Very briefly, one student projected a whole bunch of assumptions onto Profgrrrrl's life, while the other didn't.
Projections are dangerous, especially when you're doing it because you're trying to reach out to someone. I know that because of my own experiences having others project onto me when they're trying to be nice or solicitous. I try to keep my grumbles to myself.
And if I ever forget, my daughter will remind me that "active listening" can be too active. "You must be-" "No, you don't know what I'm thinking." And I don't.
So with all due respect for Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish (whose books are otherwise wonderful for parents of young children), projecting psychological conclusions onto someone else's words or actions is pretty foolish.
December 26, 2007
Basex: addressing management problems in deep ways?
Basex, Inc. has successfully promoted its 2008 problem of the year in a variety of news outlets, and I'm sure you'll hear about it by tomorrow morning. The problem: too much information overload through e-mail. Never mind that we're not in 2008 yet, and this is more a matter of promoting the (who ever heard of them before?) company's consulting business than serious analysis.
And if you want more information on tech trends from Basex: Subscribe to their e-mail newsletter, which will... give you more e-mail information overload. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to return to editing a journal article, after this minor distraction.
December 19, 2007
7 random things you probably don't want to know about me
Thanks, Eduwonkette. I'll skip tagging 7 others (if you're reading this, consider yourself tagged, with response optional).
- I have a cold right now.
- When he was in office, I once asked former California Senator Alan Cranston what he was doing for wild horses.
- I have solved a Rubik's Cube, but I've forgotten the solution.
- My high school debate partner and I are now both academic historians.
- When I was in high school, my state senator was thrown off the John Birch Society National Council because he embarrassed them.
- My oldest sister sits on the Orange County (Ca.) Board of Education
- I saw Prick up your Ears because I was told it was a hilarious comedy.
As I expected yesterday, I needed some down time after grading: I fell asleep at 7 pm. This morning's task: organize my time during the semester break.
November 25, 2007
Small bits: gratitude through use and reciprocity
If you're the parent or teacher of an adolescent, or an adolescent looking for concrete study skills, the best way to thank the folks who put together James Madison University's Learning Toolbox is to use it. It contains a concise description of various study skills.
A different way to be thankful for opportunities is to reciprocate. I have absolutely no experience with the self-organizing conferences known as BarCamps, but an educational variant has sprung up, and I think the next one is EduCampNYC, December 1 in Teachers College. If you're attending, please tell us how it goes/went!
November 07, 2007
Hug Threat Level: Orange
In Mascoutah, Illinois, Megan Coulter was suspended for hugging a friend. In Taiwan, meanwhile, the military quickly suspended its new program begun October 1 to welcome new soldiers with a hug. Hugging is dangerous stuff, whether in the military or in schools. Apart from the documented threat that teenaged huggers will spread dangerous diseases such as the tendency to say "like" repeatedly in sentences or the even more life-threatening Leo Buscaglia Syndrome, there is surprisingly little research on hugging as it pertains to education policy.
Therefore, I hereby announce my policy recommendations on hugging:
- Hugging should be a matter of choice. I don't particularly care whether this is a public or private choice, but as long as there is no money attached to hugging, I don't think anyone would care.
- Performance pay for hugging is right out. Don't even think about it.
- The ordinary rules of expression in schools should apply to hugging: schools may put time, place, and manner restrictions on hugging, but in general, as long as it is nondisruptive, it is absurd to ban hugging.
- Hugging is not the same as freak dancing. Anyone who confuses the two (whether student or educator) needs to get a life or take a cold shower (depending on the circumstances).
Somewhat more seriously, stories about students being suspended for hugging friends or bringing ibuprofen to school illustrate a level of rigid regulation that can easily rise to absurdity. Schools should be able to ban necking without banning hugs, and schools should be able to create a drug-free environment without banning students from bringing tylenol or ibuprofen to school.
October 31, 2007
"Man in Black" (Halloween version)
After the series of photoshopped education "costumes" on Eduwonkette, I should confess that I didn't put on any costume, or so I thought when I went into work. An undergrad work-study student showed up as a flower child, and another coworker came in orange and black. I thought for a second, looked down at my black trousers and black shirt, and said, "This is the closest I'll ever come to being Johnny Cash."
What are you dressed up as, today?
October 27, 2007
From confectionary to connected reasoning
Occasionally, I have students or colleagues who provide a stream of oddly (and sometimes randomly) connected chunks of material as if the stream is sufficient to carry an argument or thought. In the past I've had little trouble understanding why such streams are illogical but great trouble understanding why the author of the stream thinks it makes sense. It is not stream-of-consciousness material; the modules of the argument are stuck together with some conscious glue, from what I can tell, not just following in a sequence of associational steps.
I'm slowly coming around the conclusion that under stress, people tend to operate with the type of conjoint causal reasoning that David Hume asserted a few centuries ago: stick things together, and they must be connected. Hume's argument doesn't work with more rigorous reasoning, but it sometimes appears to hold with the panicking or too-quickly-talking person in front of me. There is nothing inherently wrong with sticking things together and seeing if a combination of ideas work: that's the art of speculation or brute-force brainstorming (a term that is not an oxymoron, though the explanation requires its own separate entry).
Perhaps we can borrow a concept from Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations, a book that has a chapter on confections, or visual representations of complex processes through multiple (and varying) uses of images. The premature expression of speculations often appears as a conceptual confection, layers material whose connections are self-evident to the author or speaker, if not to me as listener or audience member.
The sticky part is reducing the confection to a more easily consumed finished piece. In many cases, the original confection and the reduction process are fascinating, comprising a type of mental candy; my favorite blogs often serve up experimental fare that is quite tasty. As a teacher, my job includes helping students with their own confectionary reasoning, encouraging them to boil ideas down to their essences, and discouraging final papers with half-baked ideas.
But since guiding that process is part of my job, I am not sure why I have such distaste for other intellectual confections, mixes that I want to hold at bay so I don't have to smell them too closely, let alone taste them. In those cases, the raw meat and processing of ideas are closer to the production of sausage (or legislation): don't show me all the steps, just the final stuff I can choose to consume (or not). Is the distinction a matter of aesthetics, the random tastes of my intellectual palate, or is there something more substantive in the distinction between the speculations I want to examine more closely and those which I would rather just go away until they're presented on a plate?
October 19, 2007
1000
The first entry for this blog is dated March 24, 2001, with 2400 days between that entry and this one. (For those who check permalinks, there are two reasons why this entry is number 1053 instead of 1000: some entries get uploaded twice by mistake, so one copy must be deleted, and there is another, rather quiescent blog using the software and database, and those entries are part of the count.) When I started blogging, I was a tenure-track assistant professor and one of a handful of historians or education folks writing in this new online journal form. It started on Livejournal and then moved here a few years later, when I decided an eponymous domain was useful. Now, everyone and her brother has a blog, and I am but one voice of hundreds of thousands, and that trend is just fine. On average, I have written something every few days on topics ranging from my classes and research to education policy, academic freedom, and various bits of my academic life, and while I am not Samuel Pepys, some of you would surely disagree.
Ivan Tribbles of the world aside, blogging fulfills the commandment of Russell Jacoby, Go thou into the world and speak, lest thy thoughts waste in the vault of academe. He didn't quite say that, but he did call for academics to spend more time as public intellectuals, and I cannot think of a more public and accessible forum than a blog.
October 18, 2007
The day I've been waiting for
Exercise. Catching up with my online class's discussion board and adding the starter for a new thread. Reading and accepting three revised manuscripts for Education Policy Analysis Archives. Writing two (and with this, three) short blog entries. More small tasks to come.
In other words, today has been a perfectly mundane day. I needed it.
October 15, 2007
I am not Spock Sherm
Twice in the last day, people who know me a little but are not particularly close have called me "Sherm." This occasionally happens both face-to-face and on e-mail, but I'm wondering if others take slight name mangling as a subtle signal about interlocutors. (Others misspell my last name, especially customer-service folks who find it hard to distinguish Dorn from Dorm on the phone, but Sherman is easy to spell.) I'll answer to the name, certainly, but I'm curious how it is that people don't listen when I introduce myself and don't ask whether abbreviations are preferred.
October 10, 2007
Caribbean Frost
In the honors class I'm teaching, I'm trying some without-a-net activities each week to connect technology with social and cultural history. One recent week, I asked students to describe the aesthetics of everyday objects. In a plurality of cases, students discussed the commercial choices involved in consumer-product design--i.e., that the aesthetics are shaped as part of product marketing. (Anyone who has seen Monty Python's Michaelangelo sketch can wonder if perhaps that dynamic holds true in the creation of highbrow culture as well, if in a personal relationship with patrons.)
One of my students chose to examine as one of her two objects a bottle of blue-green nail polish and discovered that its official name is Caribbean Frost (and you can see the colors at Wet n Wild's website, if you wish to confirm this oxymoron). I live in Tampa, north of the Caribbean. It's mid-October, and the high today will be around 90 F. Who do they think they're kidding?
These weekly adventures are worth a small portion of the semester grade, but I hope they're engaging for students, and in some cases students have made some interesting connections. None yet, though, between nail polish and Leonardo da Vinci (where we started the course).
October 09, 2007
Please tell me it's August or November
What is possibly worse than being sick in a temperate-climate February is being sick in early October when the temperatures are in the upper 80s outside and when you know part of the reason why you're not well yet is because you drove to another city 2 hours away three times in the last two weeks. D***it, I'm already behind on too many things. I don't have time to be sick.
My body begs to disagree, and my body has won the debate, at least for the last few days. Consequence: I haven't had the catchup to catch up. By Monday morning, I barely finished the prep-work for two of my courses, stuff I normally would have handled in about half the time. Regional campus visit today? Cancelled, so I can rest and get some work done at home.
I need to turn the clock back to August so I can get some work done or turn it forward to late November so I can look forward to the end of the semester. Right now, I don't particularly care which.
Update (10:40 pm): I think I'm fine as long as I'm drinking tea. I downed an entire pot of TAZO minty something in an hour while waiting for my daughter's orchestra rehearsal to end. I can plug away at things as long as I don't need a great attention span and can collapse a few times a day. Tomorrow is my long teaching day, until 8 pm.
A bit of reflection on this: I think I'm reasonably organized now, and my professional life is still tripped up by outside events such as a state budget crisis or a minor cold. I am not the professoriate, but my strong suspicion is that the days of being an absent-minded and successful professor are just about over. No matter what institution you're working for, no matter how out-of-touch one may be, you either have to work very hard or be very organized or (more likely) both to succeed in academe.
September 29, 2007
If I had a million hours
My life this week brings the Barenaked Ladies song to mind:
- Watching nervously over the state budget situation and engaging in various tasks around that
- Finishing and submitting my promotion portfolio
- Assigning and circulating manuscripts for Education Policy Analysis Archives... and receiving a bunch of yes and no responses that require some individual attention (without time for that yet)
- Teaching for three classes (two in-person, one on-line)
- Meeting with students I'm advising
- Preparing for a meeting that was canceled
- Getting called by a St. Pete Times reporter about NAEP results (getting the last word in the article was a surprise; I think the lesson is that I'm more likely to get a soundbite quoted if I make the reporter laugh).
- After reading an article about USF's outsourcing some security operations Wednesday, I was very alarmed but had my long teaching day, so didn't get a chance to respond until late Wednesday night... the column was printed Friday. (Of the two grammatical errors I spotted, one was my fault, while the other was introduced by the student editors. No, you don't hear from me which was which: I'm responsible for it all.)
- On Thursday, driving my son to his martial-arts class, driving my daughter to a "college night" at her high school, driving myself to Orlando for the Florida Education Association delegate assembly, and possibly driving myself nuts.
- Being at the delegate assembly yesterday and today, doing some work simultaneously, talking with a student on the drive home, and spending time with my family this afternoon and evening.
How's your week been?
September 18, 2007
Unable to celebrate tomorrow
Tomorow's my long day this semester, which is darned unfortunately, because otherwise I'd be worshipping the 18th letter of the alphabet for Talk Like a Pirate Day (song) (lyrics). I'm sure that there's a good education policy joke in there somewhere, but it's too late for my brain to figure it out.
September 16, 2007
Of promotions and cranberry wine
I just finished the draft of my promotion-packet narratives. The whole thing is due at the end of the month, and apart from proofreading, there are other tasks to complete:
- Collect information on journals and my books' publishers for my chair
- Collect and confirm grant information
- Check for consistency between tenure packet and cv
- Create a checklist for documentation (Yes, faculty up for tenure or promotion need to provide documentation. Loads of it.)
- Decide what documentation is hard-copy and what is electronic (I'm tempted to just put copies of my book and coedited volumes, together with a vitae, and put everything else in my Blackboard collection, both as a statement of what's important and also so people don't have to sit in their office to read my materials. But I suspect people generally want to read things in hard copy, so I need to guess what they'll want access to in paper.)
This is only the list for my promotion materials. You don't want to see my full, metastasizing to-do list. Really you don't. And I think before trying anything else on that to-do list, I'll have a glass of the scandalously-consumer cranberry wine I bought last night.
September 02, 2007
Work dross
There is something about spending six hours in a chain cafe on Sunday that is either gold or dross. In the last year, I have occasionally knocked out loads of work when leaving my family alone to relax (I hope!) while I work. Today has been humbling in terms of the lack of concrete accomplishments on my to-do list.
That isn't to say I haven't been working. I've helped an EPAA contributor submit a manuscript, answered student questions, collected reviewer comments for several manuscripts, reviewed those manuscripts to prepare disposition letters, and worked on my promotion portfolio. I suspect I've done a bunch of other things as well, but there's nothing I can really point to and say, "Ha! See what I've done!" [Competing metaphor about partially-weeded plots deleted here to avoid the barbs of my favorite Scathing Online Schoolmarm.]
Fortunately, I can put such days in perspective, especially when I've had a succession of them as I have in the last week. I may get nothing at the end of today but the lump of impurities that has slowly coagulated since 9 am, but I'll get something later.
For those in the U.S., please accept my wishes for a great Labor Day. I won't be blogging tomorrow, at least here.
August 30, 2007
One of those days
The bear is currently chewing on me.
Extra credit for the correct identification of the folk reference (no, it's not dirty).
August 28, 2007
Today's priorities
On the agenda today: working on my promotion packet and on Education Policy Analysis Archives.
August 24, 2007
A Full Life
The details for the last 24 hours:
5:20 a.m., alarm clock
5:30 a.m., get into shower
6:00 a.m., wrangle son into car to get to bus
6:10 a.m., bus picks son up
6:11 a.m., head to early-morning cafe to work on simulated case for undergraduate class I'm not teaching (something a group of us have worked on over the past few weeks)
7:15 a.m., send draft of case to key person who then distributes to the faculty group
7:17 a.m., receive phone call from spouse. Chat for a few minutes
7:19 a.m., start work on the general-education recertification of the course mentioned above. This includes finishing the answers to various questions such as How are we to trust that you're actually going to do what you say you are? (phrased more politely and specifically) as well as creating a revised syllabus.
Intermittently read a few e-mails and decide whether they're urgent, not urgent, or distractions when my concentration wanes on the other stuff.
12:40 p.m., finish the draft of the gen-ed recertification answers and revised syllabus and distribute to colleague group e-mail
12:44 p.m., ask cafe staff for an empty coffee cup, cup lid, and cup jacket.
12:45 p.m., leave cafe, head to health-food store for lunch supples
1:00 p.m., get home and eat lunch, read paper, call tech support line for something I received in the mail yesterday.
1:20 p.m., get back on computer, make final decisions on whom to invite to the Education Policy Analysis Archives' new-scholar board and send e-mail invitations and regrets to all applicants.
2:15 p.m., start drafting e-mails to the editorial board summarizing the process and identifying the new-scholar board invitees
2:30 p.m., swear vigorously, realizing I have to stop and pick up my daughter
2:50 p.m., arrive at daughter's school, having remembered to take the back way in to avoid major traffic, park in the faculty parking lot, and get to the front door before the flood of adolescents washes over the sidewalk.
3:06 p.m., my daughter exits the school, and we head to her violin teacher's house
3:34 p.m., a kind neighbor of the teacher tells me the code to get into the subdivision's gate
3:38 p.m., realize that without a map, relying on dead reckoning and a several-months'-old memory of where the teacher lived, we're at least a few blocks beyond the teacher's street; hand cell phone to daughter to call her teacher. Daughter leaves message
3:39 p.m., realize where the teacher's street is, after all
3:41 p.m., find the house
3:45 p.m., open laptop clamshell and realize that without wifi, I can't send out an e-mail. Switch to editing syllabus of masters' level course.
4:35 p.m., leave violin teacher's house.
5:05 p.m., arrive home. Leave laptop in car trunk hoping to find a cafe after the next event. Have dinner. Bring in mail and realize that the Santa Cruz Comic News is in it.
5:25 p.m., wife and son arrives. Son writes down list of classes and teachers.
5:35 p.m., leave house for son's middle school with list in hand and laptop in trunk of car.
6:05 p.m., get to middle school, start open house rounds.
8:20 p.m., finish open house rounds. Head directly home instead of to cafe for a few reasons. Receive phone call from fellow union activist about a fairly urgent matter.
8:40 p.m., get home. Start cleaning kitchen and some other household tasks.
9:40 p.m., spouse and daughter gets home from self-defense weapons class. Debrief spouse on middle-school open house. Talk with daughter.
11:30 p.m., handle a few other e-mails. Finally open laptop again.
11:40 p.m., reboot computer, as it's having a rough day when I didn't pay enough attention to it.
12:25 a.m., finally finish e-mail to EPAA editorial board about new-scholar-board decisions.
Still undone:
- Presentation for talk to grad-student workshop tomorrow on academic integrity
- Completed syllabi for all courses
- Find 5 more objects for the undergraduate course's first-week activity.
- Do more work on Education Policy Analysis Archives, including both getting the next article into shape and also addressing some long-term needs.
- Writing a piece for the union newsletter on intellectual property and online courses.
- Lots of other things that I can't remember at the moment.
The day reboots in a little over 4-1/2 hours. Time to sleep, if you'll pardon me.
August 19, 2007
On working when sick
I'm a fairly healthy adult, on the whole, and lucky to be so. Apart from whatever genetic proclivities I inherited from my parents and the tendency to be too sedentary when work piles up, I'm not sick too often, have reasonable control over my faculties, and consider myself temporarily able-bodied, with some luck staying that way for a few more decades. So when I get the occasional cold, I consider it a temporary delay in whatever needs doing.
What I find frustrating this weekend is the drained feeling I've had a few times each day, exhaustion that has no accompanying congestion or fever. Part of the exhaustion is from headache, I know. I don't (yet) have the painful headache I had each of the prior two days, but I'm having to rest after each activity and pace myself carefully. So I shopped, and then I had to rest without having to concentrate on anything. (Sorry, my dear spouse, for not thinking coherently about the family calendar then!) I've finished one chunk of writing right now, but I need to pause before attacking the second (of three "chunks" I should finish today).
Once again, my spouse provides the right perspective: how can a union activist complain about needing down time? Got me there. So I'll sit here and rest a bit before starting the next chunk of work. You may even get another (blathering) bit of blogging.
August 16, 2007
The Library of Congress has webcast notices by feed
The Library of Congress webcasts looks like an amazing collection of lectures available through RealPlayer, and the announcements on the relevant pages are now fed through rss. I wish that LOC had automated the system so that they would be podcasted, but I suppose you can't have everything.
August 07, 2007
Florida no longer has the silliest school calendar
As the Dayton Daily News observes, Believe it or not, school's back in... in Ohio. Thanks to a state law, Florida public schools cannot open earlier than two weeks before Labor Day, a move to forestall the nutty shoving of the school calendar further back into the Sweaty Season to eke out a few more weeks before Testing Season. There are some problems with this limit, but it's preferable to starting August 3 or 4.
Dayton schools are starting in the middle of a heat wave. At least in Florida one could say that it doesn't make a practical difference whether the two extra weeks of school are in early June or early August, because the schools will still have to pay for air conditioning. But in Ohio???
Update: I have to remember not to blog at 1:30 in the morning any more... had to fix two typos in the heading.
August 06, 2007
A double-dare for Eminem and 50 Cent
From Confessions of a Community College Dean:
Word you never hear in rap: azalea.
For extra credit: put orange at the end of a rhymed line without using door hinge.
July 24, 2007
Appointment snafus
The first problem with the morning, my putting one appointment down for 9 am instead of 10, is entirely my problem, but I've had to cancel a 10:30 meeting in another part of town for it. Not fatal, just mortifying.
The second problem is about an afternoon meeting and a conflict between the legitimate need for auditable trails for soft-money people, on the one hand, and the legitimate rights of a union for a particular issue. I know how it's going to be resolved (there's only one way to resolve it that I can tell), but there are going to be a few raw feelings I'll have to smooth over.
Since I have a few minutes thanks to the snafu'd meeting times this morning, I'll try to write a blog entry about ordinary collegial sadism.
July 14, 2007
At work on Saturday
I have a bunch of things to catch up on, mostly with EPAA and teaching, so I'm here at my office. But don't worry: as a reward for reading my blog, you get a video!
July 12, 2007
Wasted another perfectly good hour...
Other fans of Car Talk will recognize the title phrase that Tom and Ray Magliozzi use at the end of their show, and right now the number one site on a Google search leads to another blogger's noting the dissipation of time. In my case today, I had glorious intentions to spend the whole day on journal editing tasks... until I had two long phone calls. Ai. And an emergency student request that really is an emergency. Double ai.
So I'll have a decaf tall double ai with cream and two blues.
July 10, 2007
Academic joke
In lieu of content today, a joke:
A political science professor, a mass comm professor, and a math professor were watching the news together. "To know the president and just get off like that, scot-free?" asked the political scientist. "I want to be Scooter Libby."
"You got it wrong, Jane," said the mass comm professor. "To get out of jail, be an idiot on television the same day, and get paid a million dollars? I want to be Paris Hilton."
"You both got it wrong," said the mathemetician....
The punchline is left as an exercise for the reader.
July 05, 2007
Free trade doesn't cover this one
The general principle with travel is to leave footprints and take pictures (and memories), so I didn't return with much physical stuff, other than two Anders F. Rönnblom albums, two postcards, one book on international historical perspectives on child labor, and a copy of the Daily Mail to show my children what tabloid papers are really about.
What I regret not discovering until the last morning, and what no free-trade policies will cover, is that there is a flavor of sugarless gum that exists only in Europe: salty licorice. It's wonderful. It also doesn't exist in the U.S. (though some may remember Black Jack quite-sugary licorice gum). Here is the polite and useless e-mail I received back from a Wrigley's representative:
Unfortunately, Extra Salty Licorice is not available in the U.S. Frequently we tailor specific products to local consumer demands and desires and therefore not all of our brands are available globally.
Currently, we do not sell any international brands directly to our U.S. consumers. The only suggestion we can offer is that perhaps you can make arrangements with your friends abroad to send you a box or two of Extra Gum.
Sigh.
I know: I haven't blogged in substance about the Supreme Court decisions last week. I'm still catching up on work...
July 04, 2007
Norrköping trip photos, set 2
More photos from the Norrköping trip, just from the last evening in Copenhagen. I was exhausted by the end, but you should be able to identify the photographs related to my research. (I'll highlight it in another entry in a few days.)
Panoramic photograph of Kongens Nyrtorv (or King's New) Square at sunset after the jump...
(Full image available on clicking.)
This panorama includes four constituent photographs. Can anyone spot the obvious stitching error?
July 02, 2007
Norrköping trip photos, set 1
You can now see photos of the trip to and the environment of the conference. I'm doing my best to stay up a few hours longer so I can get the pain of jet lag out of the way by tomorrow morning. So while I have loads to catch up on, a little travelogue:
June 26: Tampa-Atlanta-Copenhagen flights. Overnight flights to Europe are not designed to be fun. I anticipated getting little sleep, so at least I wasn't disappointed by the occasional and incomplete napping. Zonked in Copenhagen, shocked to discover something in the airport that's in the photo album linked above, frustrated that there was no Swedish train-line agent there to see if my ticket for the 12:44 train could be changed to the 10:44 train that I might have been able to make, disoriented when my train was canceled but I had to luck into finding out the way we're supposed to handle it (hop a commuter train unpaid to Malmo and get the ticket reservation changed there, in Sweden), and relieved to get the train reservation changed in Malmo, where I found a quaint and very pleasant coffeehouse.
But my adventure wasn't over: heavy rains had warped or otherwise damaged tracks over a small stretch, so everyone had to get off the train and onto buses. I was probably the only passenger happy with the detour: As Bengt Sandin confirmed, tourists often pay high prices for precisely the rural-Sweden bus tour I got without any extra charge. I had a dermatologist sitting next to me, and we talked about how our 15-year-olds are environmentally conscious. This was either foreshadowing for something the hotel did (show Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth over and over again on one of the movie channels) or just a common concern. In any case, I finally arrived at the hotel late at night, a little before sunset. I met some colleagues on the deserted main street at 10 pm (2200) and discovered the dearth of nightlife. Ah, well.
On the whole, the conference was quite good, in part because organizers had arranged for an online upload, so we could read a bunch of papers before the conference. There were several I discovered I hadn't but wanted to download after the conference. The repository is a nice feature that many conferences are now using. I heard 2 of the three plenary sessions, and they were linked thematically, though without any conspiracy. Kriste Lindenmeyer argued that Americans haven't shown the capacity to understand and cope with dependency as a concept, and Linda Gordon argued that the innocent child rhetoric has been damaging to children's interests when applied to public policy. Both are firmly rooted in historiography in the U.S., but Gordon's message is the one that I suspect is hardest to swallow, in part because of the deep roots of "child saving" and other patronizing reform movements.
One of the very nicest experiences was a conversation I had with one of the other presenters after his session and a Major Scholar whom I knew strongly disagreed with the presenter's perspective. The Major Scholar didn't try to browbeat but just asked factual "how did this happen?" and "what happened to this?" questions, listening intently, finally asking a few questions designed to prod the author to rethinking a basic perspective. I don't know if the author picked up on the clues, but it was one of the gentlest acts of intellectual criticism by a peer I've seen in years. For those who encounter intellectual sadists, there are better ways and better colleagues.
The return trip by train was much smoother, and I had enough time to visit the center of Copenhagen, having dinner and then walking briskly as far as I could in the 3 hours before sunset. Those photos aren't up yet, and I'll have a bit more to say, because a few are directly connected to one of my areas of research. All I will say is that I saw plenty of cows, white hats, and European architecture, and I ate well. It was good.
When I returned to the hotel, I heard about the Glasgow car bombing attempt. I also saw the short clip of new British PM Gordon Brown talking to camera from a hallway in 10 Downing Street. Definitely not the glitz of Tony Blair, but I suspect the British public will welcome Brown not as the dour Scot but as the sensible Scottish PM. It doesn't hurt the impression I received of him that he has a history Ph.D.
The plane flight back yesterday: Copenhagen-Paris (Charles de Gaulle)-Atlanta-Tampa. Charles de Gaulle is a horribly confusing airport, and I'm one who takes O'Hare, Atlanta, and Dallas-Ft. Worth in stride. I made the plane without fuss, but I saw the panic in other passenger's eyes. Air France is definitely a different airline. Delta flight attendants on the way over announced that passengers over 21 could have one complementary (alcoholic) beverage with dinner. Air France was willing to give you a glass of wine whenever. (I had two glasses of red wine in the 9 hour flight. Gasp. Horrors!)
I returned with photos, one scholarly book, two Swedish folk-rock albums, two postcards, and two newspapers (an edition each of the International Herald-Tribune and the Daily Mail). I have a few dozen e-mails and a bunch of tasks to organize, and it's back into the fray.
Photos coming
Unlike profgrrrrl, I don't yet have photos of my trip to the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth meeting online. My bags didn't make the transfer in Atlanta, and my digital camera (and its memory card) were in one of them. And I'm a touch jet-lagged after a 23-hour day, though going west is much easier than going east. (And after talking to some Australian colleagues, I will never complain about that again. I'll just be disoriented, quietly, without a word of complaint. This isn't a complaint, just a touch of loopiness and exhaustion.) But there will be photos.
My last evening was in Copenhagen, and while there I saw hordes of young men and women literally whooping it up in the streets, yelling at passers-by from what looked like produce trucks, and climbing statuary in a public square. This public celebration is intimately connected to one of my research areas, and anyone who grew up in Europe will know instantly what I'm talking about, but I have to get my photos online before I can blog about it in detail.
Loads of things to catch up on at home (teaching, some writing that's overdue, union stuff, etc.), and I'll start that today in bits and pieces. I'm glad I took the college iPod and the portable iPod mic with me, so I could say a few things when class-related subjects came up from the trip: the tacit knowledge I lacked when one of my trains was canceled, my embarrassment in Europe at being essentially monolingual, the youth celebrations mentioned above, and a few other matters.
June 16, 2007
This blog is now a podcast
You can now subscribe to this blog as a podcast. Just click on the picture 
or save the URL and paste in your favorite podcast aggregator (you can also click on this handy iTunes one-click link). The podcast uses text-to-speech technology, so you don't get my voice, but it has decent production values given the fact that I'll put no more effort into it. There are also no ads in the podcast. I tried both Talkr and Odiogo and chose the program that didn't pronounce sign as sig-nn. (Unfortunately, many of the Talkr feeds already available only have the teaser text translated into speech.)
June 15, 2007
Off to Arizona
My son is going with his grandmother for an Elderhostel trip along the Colorado River next week, so I'm chaperoning him to Phoenix today, spending the weekend with family, and then flying back. I have an article to finish preparing, some other stuff, and who knows what else. I'm exhausted from trying to combine a week of union conferences and my other obligations, so I may sleep on the plane.