b l o g o s

hail, speech!

Today's Chronicle has a first-person piece on the voice and teaching. It's a little too late for me to try any of its tips, since all I have is exam day and pancake day (that's right, pancake day), but--but!--I do like how this piece calls attention to teaching as delivery. It's something we all kind of know, right?

Maybe it's because I've been wading through a lot of eighteenth-century material on elocution, or maybe it's because I've been listening to Josh Gunn's repeated calls for reclaiming speech in communication studies, but vocality doesn't seem to get the kind of attention it might well deserve.

It strikes me too that I am not the main audience for this Chronicle piece--or rather I'm more like a member of the choir who doesn't necessarily need this preaching. Two statements help me see that I'm not really part of the audience Lang is all that concerned with. The first is the way he assumes his readers oppose performance and learning:

As much as we might want to resist the notion of teaching as a performance -- thinking that our focus should be on student learning -- it can't be denied that our voices, gestures, and movement in the classroom can help or harm student attentiveness.

Resist!? I have banked the better part of my scholarly career on the relationship between learning and performing and am quite amenable to teaching as performance, as I think are a lot of teachers I know.

And then the partner-opposition that left me scratching my head is this:

It might help to think about this issue as one of communication rather than performance.

Sigh. Rhetoric, to me, is largely a matter of communication-as-performance. Up with performance! Up with speech!*

*And lest you Derrideans--yeah, you!--think I'm privileging speech over writing, I think there's plenty of room for writing-as-performance as well. I'm just diddling with some other, slightly more surprising, binaries this piece introduces, like speech/communication; speech/performance.

mediocre people do exceptional things all the time*

Just not today. In light of our recent water main misfortune, and also in response to the stunningly gorgeous weather, JM and I decided to hang out on the quad (near a building with running water) for a combo picnic-work-lounge-play session. But we ended up stopping in a park on the way to eat because I was so hungry. And Tillie was a little too tired to play frisbee, so she just sat in the grass and watched as two guys threw a baseball back and forth, back and forth, her head snapping into place each time the ball hit a glove. The sun got too hot so we moved our blanket into more dense shade, after which we all promptly dozed off, dogs included, all curled up between us, my head resting on a 3-inch-high pile of articles my awesome RA got for the textbook.

*Hat tip to OK Go. Oh, what the heck, here's the video.

I'm thirsty.

Well, then. A water main broke on the wrong side of the sidewalk (a.k.a. the house side, which means we, and not the city, are responsible). Thanks to the required 48 hrs notice to the city before doing any digging and because of the weekend and also because of the apparent commonness of this digging-and-repair procedure relative to the uncommonness of specialists licensed to perform said procedure, our house will be without water until at least Wednesday, the last day of classes.

And yet there are numerous things to be grateful for, like how close the gym is, and how we're not selling our house, and that we were thinking of landscaping someday anyway, and most especially for the ride Katka gave me to pick up our newly-repaired car, thereby helping us to avoid the perfect storm of breakdowns, and giving us an easier means of transporting water than, say, our bike trailer.

metaphors, only slightly stirred.

Earlier today, as I lay on my back in the thinly-curtained physical therapy room, neck in a heat wrap, wondering what the inventor of drop ceilings had against the world, three people--a PT patient, a physical therapist, and the PT patient's companion--conversed on the other side of the curtain. Apparently the PT patient's doctor wants him to switch PT clinics so that she might better keep an eye on his therapy. I followed the exchanges just fine until they started speaking in some mysterious boat code.

PT patient: "I don't want to switch boats in the middle of the river, you know?"

physical therapist: "Yeah. That ocean thing doesn't work."

PT patient's companion: "Yeah, 'cause sometimes then you're left without a proverbial paddle or a boat."

in anticipation

I know it's not here just yet, but May has always been my favorite month in these here parts. The semester ends; the back-yard sitting picks up; the weather tends to be cool, the trees lush. And so in celebration of our decision to hang around, in May that's pretty much what we will do. 

This May will be simple. In any waking moment, I will most likely be doing one of four things: 1) revising the textbook; 2) reading one of three dissertations with May defense dates; 3) grilling; 4) seeing live music.

It's this last bit that has me excited--nothing against the textbook or the disses!--because in the course of about three weeks, starting this Thursday (okay a little before May proper, but I've been working a week ahead for some reason), JM and I are going to see three super fun and/or kind of awesome and/or painfully hip-looking bands, all in the midwest. Thursday, it's OK Go in Urbana--remember those treadmill guys? Yeah, them.

In mid-May, though, we'll be venturing out to see The Hold Steady and The Arcade Fire (L) in Madison and Chicago respectively. I can barely contain myself.

OK, back to revising.

little does anyone know

The movie "Stranger than Fiction," in addition to Will Ferrell, the main character who is, well, a main character, also features Dustin Hoffman playing an English professor, a literary critic who has taught an entire course on the phrase "little did he know." Hoffman's character is busy--teaching five courses in addition to advising doctoral students (!) and serving as the faculty lifeguard (JM's favorite feature of the character's c.v.)--all the while writing about what the script rather ineptly calls "literature theory." Hoffman's character ends up being the most hubristic of the bunch--even, in the end, more hubristic than the omniscient narrator/author (Emma Thompson)--because unlike her (the author), he (the critic/theorist) believes a masterpiece is worth dying for.

At the end of a typical week, this character with his five-five/doctoral advising/lifeguarding load would have given me a good chuckle. And it did that, but this has not been a typical week, and so there is, it turns out, a rather dark side to the portrayal of Hoffman. In the aftermath of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, one can't help but notice one of the minor characters--in fact a whole set of minor characters--in the media blitz has turned out to be English professors. For the most part, the writing teachers who had Sueng-Hui Cho in class have been presented in a sympathetic light, as people who encouraged him to seek counseling and even contacted the authorities.

But there's a darker, smaller response to their efforts, found in the comment section of The Chronicle's news blog's brief report entitled "English Professors Formed Task Force to Help Cho."

In response to the piece, some rather ill-informed commenters claim, variously, that the English profs were "out of their league"; the department "punching way out of its weight class" by taking the matter into their hands (ftr, these folks fail to realize that the very point of the task force was to help get Cho professional help by those qualified, but that gets clarified by other commenters). One commenter who calls herself Kelly and is--or claims to be--"a scholar and clinician who has published extensively in the areas of social deviance, criminal justice, and the personality of psychopathy," lashes out at the English profs with comments like these:

"It does not surprise me, nor does it surprise any of my colleagues (some of whom have been on interviewed [sic] in the national media), that an English Dept. had the hubris to imagine it could somehow keep an eye on Cho."

"Kelly" goes on to ascribe partial blame to the English department for its "hubristic" behavior, for what she reads as the professors' collective belief that a task force replaces mental health care (again: no VTech English prof that I've seen interviewed ever purported to believe in such a replacement). Now, it's tempting to shove aside Kelly's response as one among a thousand desperate and blaming responses--and for the most part that's what I choose to do.

But I am pretty interested in the particular conception of English professors that Kelly holds and that she obviously hasn't just conjured out of the air. It is a conception that the makers of "Stranger than Fiction" toy with--that Hoffman's levity depends on--and it is one I have encountered in countless campus or mixed-discipline meetings: the overly-confident, overly-favored, underqualified English department, the place where 'expertise' is at worst not expertise at all and at best irrelevant. Sometimes it's what people say, as when a classicist once said "how is it that the ENGLish department gets all the students? what do THEY offer that we don't?" Or the paleontologist who asked me "what do you research in English, METAPHORS?" But most times it's how they say it--"The ENGLish department"--as if the enormity of the egos can only be balanced by the wispy triviality of its subject matter, the stressed ENG by the lightweight "ish," held together by the stretchy, gummy L.

And while the cultural conceptions of English professors is pretty far from the most important issue to come to the fore last week (see this post for my thoughts on that), Kelly's and others' finger-pointing arguments rest on some troubling misconceptions about what we English professors do and who we think we are.

new saturday rules

No job-related work.

Only books that don't require pens are allowed.

Movies are great, as is manual labor.

Very light computer use: the idea is to enforce a break from certain physical positions.

And absolutely no email under any circumstances.

Phone convos however are awesome.

aporia

I stopped in to the bike store yesterday to buy a new seat, and upon my asking about whether all seats fit all seat posts, the bike store guy replied, well if it doesn't work out for you, bring it back. Then his eyes shot up from the register: but if you scuff it, it's yours.

No problem, I said. Okay, he said. Then he handed me my change and with wild eyes and no prompting from me began to outline his plan to shield the U of I from a Va Tech-like tragedy. It involved a five-siren alarm system, with each sound indicating something different. Terrorists, firearms, gangs, he listed. I zipped up my backpack and told him about our department's emergency calling tree--something I've found irrationally comforting of late--but he waved me off: they do it for tornadoes and fires. Why not for other danger.

He has a point, I guess. Campuses are so spread out, like cities. Email is probably not the answer--too silent, too ignorable; email comes from old people, E's students at RIT tell her. What happens when a killer is loose in a city? Emergency broadcasts, those painfully-pitched, unchanged-from-the seventies beeps that would cut into so many radio songs. For campuses, figuring out a way to pipe an emergency bulletin through ipods and cell phones might be a good start. Someone should get on that. (Yes I know it might not be possible. This is my point.)

The thing is, my gun control rant notwithstanding, I have a hard time imagining how something like this could have been--or could be--prevented. The U of I chancellor's message about the event, urging cautious awareness, pretty much captures how difficult it is to anticipate and respond to snap-occurrences. In this case so many snaps happened--in Cho's faculties, in the chain padlock, in the glock magazine. They snapped.

But what is the bike shop guy to do besides think and plan? Campus officials and teachers and mental health workers and politicians should all think and plan as those freakishly-staged images Cho made of himself and his bullets loop on tv and the internet, the stuff of a crapass, unimaginative horror flick. And we'll work through, maybe try to change things that--here's a useful southernism--might could make a difference, no one can know.

   

guns don't kill people,

people who can walk into a gun shop in a state with some of the nation's most lax gun laws and buy a .9 mm glock almost as easily as a pez dispenser, rub off its serial number, and set it aside for a month--Virginia's waiting period to buy a second gun--then pop into a pawn shop for a .22 like it's a pack of gum, all the while methodically plotting what would be the largest single-person massacre in this country to date

kill people.

[UPDATE] Also, thanks to JM for pointing out the BBC's Q&A on the matter, all of which focus on the US's gun laws and are best imagined posed with a calm but incredulous english accent.

looking around

When I went in to my class this morning, where the students had already self-organized into their presentation planning groups, we made screwy wtf faces at the newly-missing glass on the window to our door. Some laughed a little as a late arrival peered in to the blank space that used to be glass. There are still shards hanging from the top, but that's it--it's not clear what happened, but an administrator walked by muttering about vandalism.

One student raised his hand to ask if the groups might be able to meet outside, and I looked at them all packed into the classroom, then at the bright outside and said "absolutely." But instead of packing up and heading for the door they all just kind of looked at me. I could tell they were thinking about what happened yesterday, and so I just said that it seemed like we were all feeling a little clingy after what happened at Virginia Tech--me included--and that's understandable. One outspoken student said she was scared to come to class, and I just nodded and said I knew. The students started looking around the classroom, at the walls and the windows, the room silent with imagining, and so I told them it's probably best to head outside. I've never so welcomed the zips and shuffles, students packing their things.