Education

Third Person Equivocation

preterite Education

It’s been a long day, and a long week. Had two good sections of first-year comp today, and we got a lot of productive work done; I also had a morning meeting and and evening meeting and a couple hours’ work at the library, and didn’t leave campus until nearly half past eight. Despite the fact that I’m working on my annual fall cold, I’m feeling OK. Add-drop is over, my two sections are stable, and the students are learning the ropes: things feel like they’re working well, although I did get a comment today that things move so fast as to be pretty confusing. That’s something I’ll need to work on — while, as I’ve said before, I value the back-and-forth and varied activities, I understand how the cycling from whiteboard to screen to discussion to typing and back again during a single class can be incredibly disorienting.

Did some re-visiting tonight of economics texts I’d seen before, and found some useful stuff. Duncan Ironmonger’s excellent essay “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product” (Feminist Economics 2[3], 1996, 37-64) performs a wonderfully insightful (and firmly grounded) analysis of how many non-market economic activities are simply ignored by mainstream economic statisticians. According to Ironmonger, “In everyday language we have come to use the word ‘work’ to refer only to paid work. Thus, when people are challenged to consider everyday household chores they tend to think of these activities as ‘nonwork’ time, done in free time without the constraints of a work contract. People often say household chores are not work because they enjoy minding children, cooking or gardening; this enjoyment is a process benefit from the activity which cannot be transferred to another person. One coutner to this argument is to say that not all household tasks provide enjoyment and ask, ‘How many people enjoy cleaning the toilet?’ The point can also be made that, for many people, much of the time spent working in paid work is enjoyable. The level of enjoyment of the person working is not the criterion to distinguish between work and leisure. Meal preparation, whether in the household or in the restaurant, is valuable work because of the meals provided, not because of the pleasure the cook obtains through the act of cooking. The meals are the outcome benefits that are transferred to those that eat them” (40, emphasis in original). So too with housework, and Ironmonger makes substantial employment of time-use studies of household industries versus market industries and concrete valuations of household labor to draw the rather startling conclusion that Australia’s Gross Household Product is at least equal in size to Australia’s Gross Market Product. In other words, the household economy — the sum total of all household labor and production — is at least as large as the market economy. Yeah: yow.
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Does Velcro Help Learning?

preterite Education

A good friend of mine who teaches high school wrote this keep-the-computers-out-of-the-classrooms polemic. As you might guess, I don’t quite agree with everything he says, although I love the fact that a high school English teacher leads off with Stooges lyrics. His joke about Velcro got me thinking, though, about the ways we frame our discussions of computers.

Consider three examples:

  1. Someone poses the question, “Does technology help learning?” For many people, the impulse is to immediately respond, “Well, yes. Of course.”
  2. Someone poses the question, “Do computers help learning?” For many people, the impulse is to immediately respond, “Well, yes. Of course.”
  3. Someone poses the question, “Does Velcro help learning?” (Velcro is, after all, a technology.) For many people, the impulse is to immediately respond, “. . . Whahuh?”

If you think long enough about it, I’m sure that you can come up with some possible ways in which Velcro can be put to productive pedagogical uses. And that’s kind of the point: we’re so smitten with the computer as fetishized object that we’re blind to the particulars of pedagogical context and practice. (Charles Moran and Pat Hunter critique this inattention in their excellent essay, “Writing Teachers, Schools, Access, and Change,” in Todd Taylor and Irene Ward’s Literacy Theory in the Age of the Internet.)

Thanks for the insight, Jay.

Educational Comment Spam

preterite Computers, Education

I’ve been receiving comment spam lately from degreeusa.com (under the cover of other URLs), who claim an affiliation with the University of Phoenix (note the alternate non-.edu URL). Usually, I don’t worry too much about comment spam: just put them into MT-Blacklist (my personal blocklist now has over 2,000 entries, with many naughty words) and go along my merry way. But this comment spam I found particularly irritating, because it associated itself with for-profit education. Now, I’ve taught for the for-profit UMass Division of Continuing Education (note the non-.edu URL), and I have to say, I don’t much like them, both for the way they treat their teachers, and for the downright nasty practices they’ve historically engaged in against academic labor. But maybe this example will highlight the particular problems I see with online for-profit education:
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The Interlingua

preterite Composition Theory, Education

Check out the penultimate fifteen words of this comment thread at Crooked Timber responding to a recent ha-ha-ha-the-MLA-is-silly essay at The Believer, describing “millions of hours of English grammar and composition classes” as “the interlingua of global capitalism itself”.

First off, I don’t know of any colleges and universities that offer straight “grammar” courses, and this signals to me that the commenter has a rather distorted (albeit all too common) view of what first-year composition courses teach. But of course that “interlingua of global capitalism” thing totally grabbed my attention. I might suggest that many rhet/comp scholars would immediately protest, “No, no! That’s not at all what we’re trying to do!” But I wonder how many English Lit scholars — the types perhaps more likely to attend annual MLA conferences — might nod their assent, and think, “Well, yes; nice of those rhet/comp folks to handle the grubby little economic side of things, since we’re all about capital-c Culture.” (Yes, I know that’s unfair of me. I’ve been to MLA, and enjoyed it.) And then I wonder what global scholars outside of English departments and rhet/comp programs might make of the “interlingua” thing.

Thoughts?

Who Produces, Who Consumes

preterite Education

I recently mentioned the two articles in College English that evidence an explicitly economic focus in their titles; one from 1947, and one from 1977. I had the opportunity to read them both on my flights out here to the left coast, as well as the Henry Giroux article recently linked by the Happy Tutor, and a couple chapters from Zuboff and Maxmin. What I found was an interesting progression of economic rhetoric that helped me to solidify some of the conclusions I’ve started to develop about the nature of economic discourse in English studies, in academia, and in mainstream American culture.

It’s like this, see:
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Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout

preterite Asides, Composition Theory, Education, Writing

I did several JSTOR searches today, looking for how often people in English and in composition and rhetoric talk about economics. In JSTOR (which should be available via your nearest academic library, if not your community library), I searched for the word “economic” in the title and abstract fields for the journals College English and CCC. Results: two hits, both for College English. One an article from 1947, the other an article from 1977. Apparently, we only talk specifically about economics once every thirty years or so. Next, I searched for the word “economic” in the full text field for the journal CCC. CCC articles tend to run between 4000 and 7000 words. Volume 1 of CCC was published in 1950; since then, there has been a total of 3070 articles (or, very roughly, 16,885,000 words) published in the journal’s pages. In that time, compositionists have used the words “economic” or “economics” 207 times. (For much cooler wordcount fun, go check out wordcount.org. 4808 1427!) This gives me some additional information about the contours of economic and class discourses in English and composition; my next step will probably be to do the same sort of thing with The Bedford Bibliography.

In other news, Zeugma’s new favorite game is upstairs-downstairs. She loves being out on my second-floor little deck behind the kitchen, being able to watch the birds that come to the birdfeeder up close, and she wants to go outside every chance she gets. So I’ll go out there with a book and the laptop and do some work and make sure she doesn’t go down the stairs. Only lately she’s gotten quick and bold. She’ll dart around me and down the steps, then dash across the lower deck (the flower shop and restaurant use it) and up the other stairs to the bigger second-floor deck on the other side, behind my bedroom. I chased her a couple times, with her looking back every few steps to make sure I was following, and she was delighted to find that the other door led back into the bedroom. (It was a better option for me than carrying her, fussing and wiggling and clawing, back down and back up the deck stairs.) So now it’s a game: pick a time when Dad’s not watching, dash down the steps, let him chase you up the other steps and let you back into the bedroom, and then run around to the kitchen again.

OK, I can indulge that, at least for a little while. The problem came the other night, when I was refinishing some furniture and had the sliding door in the kitchen cracked for ventilation.
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Response to Curtiss & Jenny

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Education

It’s taken me a while to work through my thoughts on Curtiss’s recent comment to me, which is pretty much par for the course, since Curtiss’s thoughts always tend to offer a big, complex mouthful of analysis to chew on. (I know you work in IT, Curtiss, but damn academia could use a technology critic as insightful as you. You’d give Professor Feenberg a run for his money.) But Clancy was good enough to e-mail me a link to Jenny’s excellent recent thoughts on critical pedagogy, which I’d been lame enough to overlook, and some stuff started to click between what Jenny and Curtiss had to say. Let’s see if I can start to make some connections.

Jenny notes that the for-sale paper mills offer “a plethora of ready-made essays” in the “critical pedagogy” mode: “an analysis of gendered constructions in film, the hidden ideology of class within certain ads, the circulations of men’s magazines”, and so on, and such essays “are just as common as any other kind of ‘usual English essay assignments that can be bought at these sites.” These essays, Jenny suggests, “have now entered a kind of general equivalency”, in that their “analyses [comprise] a ‘universal’ vocabulary and methodology of critique”. In other words, they’re a genre, with easily recognizable and replicated generic conventions — which, Jenny points out, removes “such ‘cultural analyses’ from the actual content of cultural operation”.
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Some Reminders

preterite Composition Theory, Economics, Education

While the Zuboff and Maxmin book is fascinating and insightful, in reading it I sometimes find myself forgetting why I find economic concerns so essential to how I think about writing instruction and its intersection with technology. In a recent edition of James J. Murphy’s A Short History of Writing Instruction, I found some reminders. The book’s final chapter is by Catherine Hobbs and James Berlin, and deals with twentieth-century writing instruction. In the chapter’s second paragraph, Hobbs and Berlin write that “education in a democratic society is a site of contestation over the kind of economic, social, and political formations we want schools to endorse” (248): certainly a familiar argument, but one worth remembering. What I find more interesting (although it’s something I had begun to understand from the brilliant work of Raymond Williams) is their assertion that “The modern high school and the modern comprehensive university took their shapes as part of an economic shift from a laissez-faire market economy of unbridled individual competition to a managed economy of corporate and government alliances and planning” (249).
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Taylor and Derrida

preterite Education

I’ve recently started Shoshana Zuboff’s The Support Economy (having read her watershed work In the Age of the Smart Machine in Charlie Moran’s seminar on Writing and Emerging Technologies), and in the first twenty-seven page chapter, I’ve already got ten different Post-It notes. This is good, because it’s really helping me think through my economic ideas; this is bad, because it means more notes and analysis to work through for the dissertation.

However. Before I get to go there, I have to sort out my thoughts on Mark C. Taylor. For me, most of Taylor’s book was pretty familiar stuff — I’d read John Casti’s Complexification for pleasure as a new graduate student, and caught on quickly to its intersections with Derrida’s Writing and Difference (although such ideas weren’t terribly helpful in my Chaucer seminar that year). In the last hundred pages of The Moment of Complexity, however, Taylor starts to do some stuff that I found really helpful and relevant to my dissertation work. I’ll quote at length here: “‘Thought,’ Derrida insists, is ‘a dimension that is not reducible to technique, nor to science, nor to philosophy.’ Insofar as it has a goal, the pursuit of thinking is intended to ‘remove the university from ‘useful programs and from professional ends,” and thereby subvert the ‘powers of caste, class, or corporation.’ Thinking, like art, resists technological and economic interests by following an inverse economic logic: to think is to engage in an activity that is useless or even wasteful” (Taylor 253; sorry for the nested quotations). So yes, of course I was grinning and nodding while reading this; Derrida effectively critiques many of the instrumental ways of thinking frequently offered as neoclassical economic rationales for higher education, and in so doing links — for me — the ideas of Feenberg with the ideas of Gibson-Graham and Aronowitz.
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CW2004 Presentation

preterite Computers, Economics, Education

After an afternoon of swimming and enjoying the sun and sand (and a brief, sunny cloudburst) at Kailua beach, I’ve got that terrific comfortably weary feeling, and I’m sitting out on the lanai behind the cottage at about 8:30 p.m. Hawaii time, watching the garden’s lush abundance of tropical plants wave in the evening breeze, watching the geckos chase one another up and down the garden wall, and there’s an old calico tom who rubs up against my legs and complains to be petted. No internet access here, so I’ll have to wait until I go to the internet caf� tomorrow to post this, but I couldn’t ask for a nicer night. One of these mornings, I’ll have to get up early enough to catch a sunrise on the beach. The last time I was at the beach was eight or nine years ago, when I was in the Army, and we had a mission hauling eight or ten trailers’ worth of military intelligence spook stuff — electronic surveillance gear — down to the Naval Air Station at Key West for drug interdiction. After being here in Hawaii for a few days, I’ve gotta admit that eight or nine years is way too long.

Anyway. At Computers and Writing, I was on a panel with Matt Bunce and Joan Latchaw, and was delighted to discover the coincidence that Joan and I both earned our creative writing MFAs from the University of Pittsburgh, although hers was in poetry, ten years before I earned mine in fiction. Matt and Joan both gave fine presentations — I wish I’d taken better notes on what they had to say — and we had some excellent and insightful questions from our small audience. Mine was a little bit long, and I had to sprint some, which probably wasn’t very good for its intelligibility, since heavily theoretical stuff only gets worse if you rush it. And, like all my early drafts, it’s really quotation-heavy. Many parts of it may look familiar to those of you who’ve been so generous helping me shape, revise, and this material in comments here and posts elsewhere, and I hope the following text at least begins to do justice to the insights you’ve offered.

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