So I’ve finished the first draft of the prospectus. I’m setting it on the shelf, giving it a few days to cool, before I make any further tweaks and send it to the committee.
My reading’s bogged down. I’m tired of Derek Bok’s relentlessly mild perspective; Murray Sperber seems so spiteful and knee-jerk conservative as to call the Blooms liberal, and despises his students. And I know that’s an epithet Cindy and I have tossed around, but it’s there — both in Sperber and in not-that-Chris. (Not-that-Chris, I know I’m being unfair by not unpacking this fully, but by the same token, I’d be interested to hear what your impressions of Sperber’s Beer and Circus might be, especially in terms of pedagogy.) This gradually accretive sense of the meanings and mismeanings of class feels like it’s dissipating even as I look at the pile of library books and try to order their perspectives into some scheme.
At the same time, recent pieces in the New York Times and elsewhere make me demand: why do people refuse to see inequality? What about our culture invests us so in denying that some of us have it easier than others? Why is it acceptable to see wealth as its own justification, and unacceptable to admit that John Doe who prepped at Choate and took a Kaplan course got into Brown as easy as Sunday morning while Jane Smith who grew up in Anacostia and worked a counter clerk job had to struggle for Prince Georges Community College? Is it really that easy to say, “Oh, but my school’s SAT prep course pushed me really hard: I didn’t have it that easy”?
Anyway. The girls are still being rotten — Zeugma has this whole underneathness obsession, where she has to make sure that her toy (a binder clip: don’t ask) isn’t underneath anything else, so there go stacks of papers and readings, my keyboard, bills, whatever; thing is, when she finally remembers where she left it, she wants me to play with her, so she comes and spits out the binder clip into my glass of water. Thanks, babe.
Sounds like you need something fun to read. Consider Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It’s available for free download under an open source license. It’s science fiction. I think you’d be entertained by the voice while researching for your dissertation at the same time. Doctorow coined the term Whuffie in this text which has been described as reputation economics. I won’t tell you any more about it other to say that in the future setting of the novel, there’s no more money, but there are commodities. It’s one possible extension of where an open source style production economy could lead us.
correction to above. doctorow’s text is not under an open source license, but rather a creative commons one that is not open source.
sorry.
Be happy the cats are just playing with clips. Our dear old Thor has recently become averse to using the cat box and now leaves gifts all over the house. I have no idea how to potty train an OLD cat.
Sounds like maybe a medical problem, John. Or he’s pissed at you about something 😉
I’m sorry, Mike, but Zeugma sounds SO cute!
I had to stop reading the comment thread at IA, and I’m actually getting a little sick of the place in general right now. It’s a wonderful blog and resource and IA is terrific herself, but I’m feeling like I’m traveling in such a different universe. I go to campus and see students struggling so hard just to get to class because they are dealing with unreliable city transportation and unreliable childcare and difficulties with basic literacy, and these are some of the nicest damn people you’d ever want to know. But they’re invisible to the people at IA (pun intended). And then I read an article like the one in the Times about the public funding of the wealthiest colleges and it makes me ill.
But at least here and with John I feel a little less alone. . .
Charlie — interesting stuff, especially the “reputation economics” idea. I read and thoroughly enjoyed Doctorow’s “Ownz0red” so I’ll have to check out the collection. Thanks for the recommendation.
(And, BTW, I’ve taken a bit more time to go through your text this weekend, and am working on putting together a marginally coherent response. Thanks again for sharing it.)
Cindy, John — I’m with Cindy’s second suggestion, having known a couple foul-tempered old cats. And ditto the sentiment about IA — I can’t help but get het up at some of the perspectives expressed there, so it’s a relief to go elsewhere and see what the two of you are writing. But, to invoke a bit of composition-geek-speak, that would seem not to bode well for the possibilities for rhetorical identification in a world of diverse perspectives…
Here’s my take on some of the IA discussion. Many of the posters there seem to have internalized a kind of SAT view of the world. They worked hard to do well in high school to get into a selective university to get to the “top” (whatever it is that is supposed to be at the end of the ladder you climb for all those years). They have bought into the “select the best and forget the rest” message that is essentially the design of the American high school, especially in middle class and affluent areas.
So when someone argues that the point of education was intrinsic, not extrinsic, it’s disturbing. And there’s a sense that “those” people shouldn’t be around because they didn’t bust their butts to get top SAT scores (or GPAs, or whatever).
As Cindy noted several times, most community college students have a lot of demands besides school, and most still get a great deal out of their classes. We are very much “value added” institutions, though a student at a CC could make great progress and still not score at the same level as a high school hot shot. I’ve never understood why that threatens some university folks, but it seems to.
Anyway, it is nice that we’ve developed some shared viewpoints here. At one point, we did like a 1-2-3 at IA without even coordinating.