Class (Meta)

Choosing Authenticity

preterite Class (Meta), Class (Other), Composition Theory, Economics

I’d like to ask you to momentarily ignore the somewhat scary talk about ratios when Varoufakis writes that “When a person chooses between different combinations of quantities of two experiences/commodities X and Y, the Equi-marginal Principle suggests that she opts for a combination such that the ratio of the marginal utilities from Y and the marginal utility from Y equals the ratio of the price of Y and the price of X” (63). Sure, it’s easy enough to think through, but actually what I’m interested in here is the notion of choosing between two experiences. For now, let’s work with the neoclassical economic assumptions that experiences are scarce (i.e., in contemporary American culture, there apparently aren’t enough college educations to go around) and that experiences bear an opportunity cost (i.e., if you decide to become the world’s best shade-tree mechanic, that might rule out your dreams of an acting career), and finally the utility-maximisation thesis, “founded on the idea that people care ultimately about themselves” (76) and also on the idea that utility itself is scarce (scarcity being a concept that I think has recently become more complicated — but that can wait for another post).

So if we swallow all these assumptions, and we think about choosing between two or more experiences, let’s ask: what are the choices associated with the various models of socioeconomic class and class mobility?
Read more

CCCC on Class

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy

Ira Shor, Bill Macauley, Jennifer Beech, and Bill Thelin did a session titled “In and Out of ‘Class’: Repositioning Ourselves and Our Discouse So That Literacy Matters” that mitigated many of the problems of their panel last year that caused such acrimony in the question and answer session. Still, I had some pretty significant concerns, and I think the structure of much of their discourse was in some ways self-marginalizing. At the beginning, Ira suggested that the discourse of class in composition is “anemic”, and asked: “What does it mean to understand class?” Parts of the presentations took steps toward such an understanding — and other parts took steps retreating from such an understanding.

Bill Macauley had a fine beginning, focusing on the Marvel superhero Ben Grimm — The Thing, from the Fantastic Four — as “the only working-class hero” in comics. Of course, this immediately raised questions for me of what we mean by “working class”, and what we see as the differences between class identity, class position, and class background: in other words, my usual concerns about the vague and unfocused terminology used by people who talk about class in composition. I immediately wanted to say: what about Luke Cage? And how working class do we consider farming families of modest means like Jonathan and Martha Kent? (The first-generation college students who come to my rural Big State U campus from the surrounding farms are certainly the sorts of students who many folks on the Working Class Studies listserv would refer to as “working class”.) In any case, Macauley used Grimm as a metaphor for working class college students, and moved on to talk about “traditional academic writing” and “academe-specific” writing as a monolithic construction, and then argued that there are “other cultural contexts” towards which we should teach, and extracurricular literacies about which we should learn, as a counter to the “rarefied air of academe”.
Read more

Mondragón

preterite Class (Meta), Economics

Tonight I’ve been reading J. K. Gibson-Graham’s Critical Sociology essay “Enabling Ethical Economies: Cooperativism and Class”, about the Mondragón Cooperative System centered in the Basque region of Spain. Until now, I’d known little about cooperatives, and nothing about Mondragón, and had been content to dismiss cooperatives as idealistic ventures unable to survive in the face of corporate capitalist juggernauts: with “Fabian Socialists” (9) Sidney and Beatrice Webb, I assumed that “The taint of utopianism damned worker cooperativism on all sides” (15). So it was kind of an eye-opener for me to discover that a worker’s cooperative could be “Spain’s largest exporter of machine tools and the largest manufacturer of white goods such as refrigerators, stoves, washing-machines and dishwashers” and “the third largest supplier of automotive components in Europe” (Matthews 2, qtd. in Gibson-Graham 26). In light of Curtiss’s recent remarks to me — namely, that “If you can get your students working together on projects, you’ll be imparting a skill that directly inimical to the exploitation of knowledge workers: the ability to organize and cooperate” — this gives me something to think about.
Read more

Dishcloth, Water

preterite Asides, Class (Meta)

I’m still grading papers tonight, and even though I’m saving the last batch for tomorrow night, I’m still getting a little bleary-eyed, so it’s time for a short break. They moved from doing more reflective writing to more analytical writing, and they’re incorporating quotations and paraphrases, so — unsurprisingly — the incidence of sentence-level error has gone up, and some of the insights seem to be developed with slightly less rigor than in the earlier papers. I’ll hopefully follow David Bartholomae and others in taking that as a sign that the students are, in fact, learning how to do new things, and that’s why the older skills have seemed to slip a bit.

Jenny Cameron’s wonderful “Throwing a Dishcloth into the Works: Troubling Theories of Domestic Labor” has offered me, via the way Cameron thinks about gender, some productive ways for thinking about class. Cameron offers a possible “context where gender is understood as producing culturally intelligible subjects” (35) and I think class does the same thing. In my case, I’m looking at how class produces culturally intelligible subjects within the classed contexts of the computer classrooms of various educational institutions: the Hypertext Hotel at Brown University produces subjects very different from the print stations at Montgomery County Community College. Furthermore, Cameron contends that “the political task is not to do away with gender by neutralizing differences [. . .] but to work from within the heterosexual matrix to find moments when the heterosexualized coherence of sex, gender, and desire is transgressed and alternative configurations come into being” (34). Again, I wonder if I could construct a similar goal for my work with class: rather than looking at how class hierarchies are reinforced by the activities at Brown and MCCC, rather than looking for alignments and correspondences across vectors of class, would it not be more politically productive to search for the moments of rupture and transgression; to see where class doesn’t work, where it explodes, where it becomes incoherent, and use that fissure as a foothold for seeing potential remedies for the injuries of class? Well, it’s a start.

The girls are being absolutely rotten tonight, and last night too. Zeugma overturned a full glass next to my computer and ripped down a wall hanging, to the point where I put her in the bathroom and closed the door to let her cool down for a while; Tink is testing me to see how many seconds it takes me to squirt her with the spray bottle after she’s jumped up on the kitchen counter. Like at least twenty times tonight. I don’t know if it’s the changing weather or false heat (they’re already spayed, but it’s about the right time) or just them being teenagers, but it’s a pain when I’m grading papers. I mean, I’m sitting there on the couch in the living room, and I hear this splash-splash-splash from the kitchen, and I figure I know the only water in the kitchen is in their bowls, so I tell myself I’m not gonna look. Splash-splash-splash. Nope: they want me to look. Splash-splash-splash. Not gonna do it. Splash-splash-splash. Oh, hell. So I go in, and sure enough, there’s Tink looking wide-eyed up at me, one soggy paw crooked over her dish, and There’s. Water. Everywhere. All over and up the wall, all over the shelves, and this puddle that stretches halfway across the floor, and I’m just like: why?

Jean Anyon in Higher Ed

preterite Class (Meta), Education

There’s (as usual) an interesting discussion over at Invisible Adjunct, this one about the scant numbers of undergraduates earning history degrees. As the discussions there tend to do, it’s broadened its scope, to the point where I couldn’t resist adding something — the Adjunct’s is one weblog where I usually find myself lurking rather than responding, often because I feel strongly enough about the issues she raises that I can’t avoid lapsing into rhetorical bombast. (To offer a small defense, I’ll point out that the discussions there are often vigorous: I just know I tend to get dumber when I get het up.) While I was as usual unable to avoid overstatement, the discussion’s taken some productive turns, and the more I go back over it the more it engages me.

There’s some dispute over the examples of Amherst College and Swarthmore College and what they represent, and that dispute got me thinking, and — inspired (well, I’m pretty much completely stealing an idea of hers) by my neighbor and colleague Erin — checking out some links.
Read more

Back to Class with Crowley

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy, Metadissertating

Yeah, so I derailed some. On the good side, the chapter manuscript got sent in to the editors, so I don’t have to worry about that for a while, and I got my CW2004 proposal submitted. On the bad side, I look at my main page and see that I haven’t posted any dissertation-related writing in over a week. Time to get this research stuff back on the tracks, ‘specially if I’m gonna try to have a better draft of a prospectus within a couple weeks. What that means for tonight is burning through the rest of Crowley to try and get her out of the way, get an understanding of how her thoughts on class fit into the history of composition as a whole, and then finish Derek Bok and move on to The Knowledge Factory.

The project of Sharon Crowley’s “polemical” book, I should point out, is to do away with the universal first-year composition requirement: she doesn’t think all entering students should have to take a writing course, and offers a careful critique of the discourse of student need that’s well worth any composition teacher’s time to read. It’s enough to make me ask myself whether I think all (or practically all) students should have to take a first-year writing course, and in some ways, I’m inclined to agree with Crowley.
Read more

Who Computes Now?

preterite Class (Meta), Computers, Economics

So we’re supposed to have our first frost tonight and I brought the plants in and within two minutes the girls were chewing on them. Well, it’s not like I didn’t expect it.

Had a decent albeit long teaching day today. My lesson plan was a bit innovative, trying something new with peer response oriented towards structural revision on early drafts, and as such, it was also a bit of a failure. Still, despite its failure, students wrote, and I learned. I’ll know how to do it better next time, and it’s a nice new exercise that seems simple and powerful enough to try again.

Anyway: I’m asking for help here. What follows is a really rough, early attempt at a draft of a 300- to 500-word conference presentation proposal; said presentation being something I’m also hoping to work into an essay for publication. I’d be most grateful for any ruthless critical feedback on the proposal, particularly suggestions about what to do with the really unfocused latter section, as well as suggestions about how to make the language less dense while still trying to maintain whatever analytical rigor it might possess. So here goes.
Read more

Clark Kerr After Sushi

preterite Class (Meta), Education

I love Amanda’s semi-anonymizing habit of referring to her town as “Collegeville”. The town where I teach certainly has that rep, but the town where I teach is 20 miles away from the town where I live. And halfway in between, there’s a small city that houses another college and a huge array of boutiques and restaurants on its two main drags. I love the bookstores, but I could do without all the trustafarians and fauxhemians and Saab-driving yoga moms who make sure you know just how much they recycle and can’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to vote republican. I’m pretty dang liberal, but that kind of myopic elitism just bugs the heck out of me. Which is why — despite coveting Amanda’s name for her town — I’ll choose to instead steal from the good Dr. Thompson and refer to the happy municipality where I had sushi tonight as Fat City. And tonight, with the weather gorgeous, the flow of students on the sidewalks swelled to capacity: if there’s patchouli in the air, it must be September in Fat City. We had a really excellent dinner, and I later came back here to finish off Clark Kerr.
Read more

Free and Equal

preterite Class (Meta), Education

Many have commented on Bush’s frequent rhetorical deployment of the word “freedom”. One wonders how we might pin down a specific meaning for Bush’s usage: clearly, it’s a catch-all, a universally positive term meant to discourage rather than encourage critical thought, but we can try. What kind of freedom? Freedom from what? Freedom to do what one likes, we might suppose from Bush’s foreign policy agenda: freedom as supreme self-determination. But such self-determination does typically imply a freedom from certain things as well; things in the administration’s case usually constructed as concrete and specific agent-driven oppression: the bad guys holding you down. The market is free, or wants to be free, and so cannot be bad. We are told that lessening restrictions on the economy — making it more free — will make it more efficient, and therefore better. We hear, as well, that trade must be free in order to be fair. But, unlike the recent unfortunate case of Fox’s fair and balanced phrase, there’s a word many historically associate with freedom that we rarely hear these days. Whatever happened to the phrase “Free and equal”? Have we forgotten our historic privileging of the conjoined terms?
Read more

Education, Wealth, Research

preterite Class (Meta), Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac Issue came in the mail today. I’ve barely made my way into it; tonight I’m looking over the page 4 table that shows, by state, educational attainment, per-capita income, and poverty rate. (The “Attitudes and characteristics of freshmen” table on page 17 looks pretty interesting; the “Attitudes and activities of faculty members” on page 20 less so.) To do some initial rather unscientific work, I looked for the three states with the combination of highest per-capita income and lowest poverty rate, and the three states with the combination of lowest per-capita income and highest poverty rate. (A few states were anomalous: Massachusetts combines a high per-capita income with a moderate poverty rate, D.C. combines a high per-capita income with a high poverty rate, and Iowa combines a low poverty rate with a low per-capita income. Note also that some of the percentages below don’t quite add up due to rounding.)
Read more