Sad News for People whose lives have been brightened by Mr. T. Pratchett

Sad News for People whose lives have been brightened by Mr. T. Pratchett

This is very sad news via Paul Kidby's Discworld site. He aten't dead, but good thoughts are in order.

I think the phrase is, "WTF??"

I think the phrase is, "WTF??"

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said teachers who refuse younger students access to the site are "bad educators".



Is there enough snerk in the world to respond to this adequately? I think not.


ETA How do people feel about a Saturday morning breakfast?

AHA Meetup?

AHA Meetup?

Hello, all. Is anybody going to AHA, and if so, do you want to have a blogger meet-up? Also, are any of you female types looking for a roommate for one or two nights?

Thank goodness it's a meme!

Thank goodness it's a meme!

Squadratomagico tagged me for a meme! yay, a reason to blog. Actually, I'm working on a post about balancing teaching and writing, but I owe a very cool editor a review and will not write my post till I finish that. So this is the seven unconnected things I don't think I've revealed about myself before:

1. I have a real fear of my body being disposed of before I'm really, dropped-a-house-on-me-and-saw-my-feet-curl-up dead.
   
2. The first time I named a pet, I chose "Six Spots." I was only 2 1/2, but I was not allowed to name another pet till I was much older.
   
3. I have met a real DC Comics super hero -- or at least an actor who played him -- when he was doing a signing (in costume) on location. I was about five, and I think this may have been my first brush with fandom.
   
4. I was a co-founder of a Star Trek fan club in 7th grade. Our leader is now a professor of physics (he does quantum stuff) at a large midwestern university
   
5. I once received a hand-coloured original picture from Mike Mignola as a Christmas card
   
6. I'm comfortable riding horses in three different types of saddles, but I'm not particularly great at any of them
   
7. I don't really do jealousy, or even envy.

Here are the (slightly modified) rules:


1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog. On it.

Everybody I can think of who would do this has been tagged, so if you haven't, consider yourself obliged. Or not.


Ooh! and from Pilgrim/Heretic, another!

Your Score: Fennel

You scored 50% intoxication, 25% hotness, 75% complexity, and 25% craziness!

You are Fennel!

You're a cool cat. Crisp, clean, fresh, and extremely complicated. You're like quantum physics or modern jazz. Think Niels Bohr meets Ornette Coleman. You may look normal now, but once you sprout, you look kind of, uh, funny.

Link: The Which Spice Are You Test written by jodiesattva on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Carnivalesque XXXIII

Carnivalesque XXXIII

Hello, all, and welcome to the 33rd edition of . It's been a while since I've been able to really enjoy looking at blogs, so the theme for this Ancient/Medieval version is "some really cool stuff I wish I hadn't missed the first time 'round." With any luck, you may have missed some of this, too.

Even though it's not always considered history, I thought I'd start out with some prehistorical discoveries. First, and this is absolutely not historical, but I heard it on the news this morning and thought y'all might be equally amazed, here be dragons? Seriously, has anyone done any work on whether tales of dragons and other mythical creatures might have been discoveries by early fossil hunters?

To get to something a bit closer to our time period, Ancarett points us to prehistoric fashionistas. Meanwhile, both The Antiquarian's Attic and The Cranky Professor report on the discovery of a support village for Stonehenge. It might be Neolithic, but I don't think any ancient or medieval historian would debate that these big honking stone circles and the debates over their purpose and their builders haven't affected concepts of pre-Roman civilizations. Not to mention their importance to Asterix and Obelix! And, it appears, to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.



Digs at more recent archæological sites are also in the news. Over at Memorabilia Antonina, Tony Keen recounts the possibilities, likely and imagined, of finding a Latin Library at Herculaneum. If you're interested in whether or not Alexander the Great was an alcoholic -- and many of my students are, for some reason -- World History Blog has been reading up on the possibility For those of you who are really interested, there's an even older article out there, I think either in The Lancet or in The New England Journal of Medicine that is an attempt at a forensic report based on what our ancient sources tell us about Alexander's life and death. IIRC, the result was that he was probably not poisoned.

I'd like to stay in chronological order, but really, this time I can't. You'll see why. Moving forward to the Middle Ages, though, there are some really interesting tidbits. My favourite all-around cool thing is this very cool video of a medieval church being moved, lock, stock, and barrel -- again, posted by Cranky Professor. And what's a church without saints? Or at least, saints' days? Over at Executed Today, we find that Saint Brice's Day in 1002 was not a particularly good day for Danes living in England. While you're there, you might also check out somewhat macabre tale of Frederick of Isenberg. Ick.

On a possibly less gory note (if we try to ignore those 4000 Saxons, at least), Magistra et Mater looks at the management secrets of the Carolingians. I don't completely agree, but it's good reading, and I'm very glad to have found her blog, because, well ... another blogging female Carolingianist!!!! I found her through Jonathan Jarrett over at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe. Jonathan also has a post up that is drawing some great comments. In the post, he addresses that perennial question: "what is our purpose?"

Apparently, most of our purpose these days is to talk about Beowulf. The movie, not the poem. My Long Distance Whatever and I saw it the other night. Take two early medievalists who are also sff fans and put them in front of a CGI-assisted film version of a poem they've both taught (and he's actually taught an entire course on the damned thing) from a historical perspective and see what happens. And no, X, we did not bore each other to death! Actually, we did both have to cover our eyes a couple of few times. Neither of us found too many nits to pick, possibly out of Gaiman-loyalty, possibly because for me, at least, the CGI really made it a bit alien to me, and I just felt the film was ... detached? from the poem. There's a lot to say, but really, I think some of our colleagues have done better jobs. First, The hype at In the Middle. Then,Dr. Virago asks, Hwaet the Hell? and later, tells us what she really thinks! Meanwhile, over at Got Medieval, LL Cool Carl waxes philosophic about Angelina Jolie's CGI breasts. No critique of modern views of the medieval could be complete without Matt Gabriele's review at Modern Medieval. And, of course, someone had to help with all the work -- I started collecting these when the film came out, but trust Scott Nokes to have beat me to the punch and posting. What I've missed, he's found. Enjoy!


As a final message, Ralph Luker over at Cliopatria would like me to remind you that The 2007 Cliopatria History Blog Awards are underway. Please check them out and nominate/vote for your faves.


Update: Links now fixed.

Carnivalesque Coming Soon

Carnivalesque Coming Soon

I hope it will be up by this evening, PST, but there's a chance it won't be up till early Wednesday, because I'm about to lose my internet connection!

Introducing my newest Reader

Introducing My Newest Reader

So I called X on my way to Fabulous European Capital to say hi and goodbye in case the plane crashed. And he said he'd found this blog and was reading it! So everybody, meet X. X, meet everybody. I hope you like each other. And you know, I guess it says something about the way I feel about him even now, that he's the person I wanted to talk to, just in case something happened. We weren't the greatest of partners, but I think we've managed to be pretty good friends.

Carnivalesque Bleg

Carnivalesque Bleg

Aaaaargh!! I am not just Another Damned Medievalist, but I'm another so screwed medievalist! I had these grand plans to host a Carnivalesque next week, because I was going to have cleared my desk of all work except for editing LDW's book, and was going to try to enjoy my Thanksgiving week with him in Fantastic European Capital. My desk is so not cleared! I feel like I haven't read blogs in forever. So ... if you can think of any particularly good Ancient/Medieval posts from the last two months, please feel free to send me (or post) links. All I can say right now is that there will be a Beowulf section -- with a review if it's opened in Fabulous European Capital.

We remember the day

We remember the day, but we seem to have forgotten why.

History Carnival 58

History Carnival 58

History Carnival 58 is up at Aardvarchaeology.

Sorry for the late notice, but I am in grading jail, had a mild case of 'flu, and it's advising week.

Non-Punitive Quizzage

Non-Punitive Quizzage

In this post, I talked about students not doing the reading and how I didn't want to infantalize my classes by giving quizzes. I got lots of great suggestions that made me do a little re-thinking, and in the last two classes, I gave quizzes. I'd actually warned the first class -- the teeth-pulling one -- that there would be a quiz. Despite this, the results were largely pathetic. But the results of the class period were much better. After the students completed the quiz, I collected it, looked all of the quizzes over, and returned them to the students after getting an idea of where they were. Then we arranged our chairs for a discussion and went over the possible answers (it was an amazingly open quiz -- name five major things that happened in what had been the Roman Empire between that emperor who legalized Christianity and the guy who won the battle of Lechfeld, for example). Most of them had little to go on from what was written down, but if one person knew something, someone else could add to it, and then someone else could come up with another related thing, and so on. So I was able to demonstrate to them that they knew more than they'd thought, AND that they all needed to study more.

The second class erupted in protest. And then a couple of them said, "but we're usually prepared -- you should make it a group quiz!" So I told them that, as long as we could get really good answers to all the questions, we could do that. So we got in a group, and they were all over it. And they ribbed each other about wrongish answers ("Dude! That's like a hundred years too late! What are you thinking??"). It was really fun.

Best thing is that I managed to review a ton of stuff I'd been trying to get to, clarified a lot of things people were having trouble with, and tied it up with a big overview ribbon! I think I may start doing this more often, and earlier.

What will be on the final?

What will be on the final?

Dear Students,

If I keep trying to get you to discuss a certain question in class and online, it might be because I think it's important. If it's a question about my own area of expertise, I probably think it's important. If it's an issue that I think you are letting popular knowledge get in the way of reality (like the ebil Catholics ran the world from the time of Constantine to Luther's reformation), or that the Emperor kept the Pope in his pocket for the same period (despite considerable time spent on the Eastern Roman Empire, Barbarians, etc.), I might think it's important. If I keep saying, "but what about ...?" and "I think you might need to think again about issues of time and geographical location, among many other factors that are right there in your textbook and that you are ignoring ...", I might think it's important.

If I think it's important, there's a good chance it will be on the final. kthxbai.

In college reading is optional

In college reading is optional

Or so a plurality of my students seem to think. I never took a class in community college where faculty gave quizzes. I never took a class at Beachy U where faculty gave quizzes. Ok -- maybe in language classes. But not anything else. I'm damned if I'm going to start. But if the alternative is waiting for several minutes for students to look in their books for answers to really basic questions directly from the reading assignment ... ? One of my colleagues says that this what was expected in high school. Hmph. Blogging will recommence when I am less grumpy.

PS -- it's only half my classes. The others are prepared enough to at least ask questions. Most of them. A couple actually come with prodigious amounts of notes. This makes me very happy.

Update: Well, shoot. Now I'm thinking quizzes might not be awful. the first three comments make it clear that I should probably have a serious re-think.

My week thus far

My week thus far

Saturday, I had a most wonderful day -- close to perfick. Sunday, I rowed with another friend because of an incredibly stupid misunderstanding. Today, I come to my office to find that it's frakkin' freezing. As in, "need my gloves" freezing. As in, "I'd turn on my space heater, but it hasn't worked since the pipes burst in my office and drowned the circuitry. SLAC won't replace it, needless to say. At the moment, I'm looking forward to 5 hours worth of classes. Yep, it's a Monday all right.

Carnivalesque 32

Carnivalesque 32

I was semi-incommunicado this weekend, and so missed yesterday's appearance of the latest , which is up at Serendipities. Lots of cool Early Modern stuff, especially stuff on duelling and a cartoon!

The next edition will appear right here, on or about 20 November. It will be Ancient and Medieval, natch, and will not be likely to include turkeys ... unless I can think of some way to deal with that particular anachronism!

Suggestions for inclusion are always welcome -- email them to me at another_damned_medievalist AT hotmail DOT com, or use the handy submission form.

Also, we are always looking for hosts -- January and March are open for Ancient/Medieval volunteers, and I know there are some of you out there!

Wednesday Already?

Wednesday Already?

OK, so I think I need to figure out a way of adding more structure to my classes. Or learning how to be a crankier medievalist. Or maybe find more motivated students? I've taught 7 classes this week -- down from the usual 9 by the end of Wednesday, because I had scheduled student progress meetings for one class. It has occurred to me that very few of my students are doing as well as they should. Even my good classes are not as on top of the information as they should be. I'm having to work very hard at getting the students to participate, rather than at getting the information across.

Yes, midterms were last week -- why do you ask? I think I had one A in all of my classes. Most of my students seem happy with B's and C's. Lots aren't doing that well. But some are. I don't take credit for that. The students who are doing well are driven and engaged, and seem to think that they should be doing the best they can. I do think they are getting something valuable out of my courses, but that's because they are genuinely putting something into them. I think most of my B students are also getting a lot out of the courses, but they could all be A students if they just did all their work and did it on time. But they all seem OK with what I would consider unacceptable grades.

I worry about them, and I worry that the apathy might be contagious. I need to find a way to make my classes more demanding on the students without disproportionately increasing my work load ...

Art Imitates Life

Art Imitates Life

What makes a blog successful? Over at Making Light, Patrick Nielsen Hayden points us to a post at John Scalzi's blog wherein Scalzi eviscerates a "how to make your blog successful" article. As far as I can tell, these people count blog success by number of hits. The advice they give is how to network to get more hits. I don't really get this.

When I started blogging, lo, those 5+ years ago, it was because one of my best friends, Cranky Professor had pointed me to the now sadly-defunct Invisible Adjunct. At the time, I was in the process of returning to academia, and was myself experiencing the woes of adjuncting. After a short while, I was commenting at lots of blogs, and it seemed only polite to set up my own place where I could hog all the space I wanted, rather than hijacking other people's comment threads. So Blogenspiel was born. I still wish I'd given it a second 'g' for phonetic reasons.

The first readers, and some of the people who are now RL friends, were also readers of IA's blog. As we read each other's blogs, we also added new blogs we'd found through each other to our blogrolls, and made new blog friends and acquaintances. Or at least I did -- I can't really speak for anyone else's process, except that it seems to me that mostly this has been pretty organic. I suppose this could be called networking, but really, it's much more the way we meet at conferences when colleagues who are also friends introduce us to other colleagues who are also friends. Unquestionably the professional connections are important, but I still differentiate between meeting as colleagues and meeting as friends who are also colleagues. But then, I'm kind of a sad person in that I don't have all that many friends who aren't connected through academia. When I was married, I did, and I still have friends through X. I've started to meet a larger range of people in the last year or so, especially in the sf/f community, but even there, most of the people I know are connected to the academy in some way. Hell, I met Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Kazoo last year, and I probably wouldn't have met her otherwise, at least not till LDW makes good on this promise to take me to a con -- maybe Worldcon in Denver? (I'm thinking the SFRA paper might not happen. I have good ideas, but my dean will shoot me if I present a third paper this year before getting a medieval article in press!).

Somehow, while all that was happening, a bunch of people started reading this blog. The numbers have gone down as I've stopped writing as regularly -- and probably as I stopped writing about my divorce and job hunt? But I figure people aren't reading as much because there are lots of other interesting people out there who are writing regularly. I'm also not reading as many blogs, nor am I commenting as much, mostly because I am still feeling very overwhelmed with the living of the new T-T life -- which I still haven't managed to chronicle. Part of this is not being able to objectify some of the constant drama at SLAC, especially in my department. Part of it is just that I feel like, even though I've got 13 hours of face time in classes a week, a couple of new preps, and committee work (not to mention a whole passel of advisees), I am now in a position where I really have to show myself and the world that I am a productive academic type. I don't have the excuse of a constant job hunt or a long commute anymore (even though my time has been sucked up by other things!).

But anyway, I don't consider this blog any more or less successful than I ever did. It just is. Ironically, however, I'm giving a paper on blogging and networking this year. One of the points I'll be making is that blogging, even anonymous blogging, can do wonders for one's career. It's not why I started blogging. That was about feeling like a medievalist in the wilderness. At SLAC, I still feel that way. But whatever my intentions, blogging connected me to a wonderful group of medievalists, some of whom are now participants in a locked-down work blog; it reconnected me to some old and very valued friends, one of whom gave me my first opportunity to present a scholarly paper; it connected me to another bunch of medievalists who became RL friends, and who also invited me to present with them; it connected me with another RL academic service opportunity, which I really enjoy -- and through that, to a number of book reviews; it's given me a collegial community with which I can exchange ideas about teaching and from which I can beg for help with readings; and it has inadvertantly garnered me an invitation to fill in at a prestigious conference where I'd never have dared to submit. So ... from the points of view of the people Scalzi complains about, I guess the blog has been a route to their kind of success. But it wasn't planned. I just wanted not to feel so damned isolated. Funny how things work.

Just another day

Just Another Day

I did not know this:

Hello? World?

Hello? World?

Um ... hi. So, in the past week and a half, I have written, given, and graded 70 midterms, written a postdoc app, and started the late book review. Also, I apparently miscounted the days till going to fabulous European capital to see LDW. It's 30 days as of today. Hmph. On the other hand, that still means I have time to read his MS. After the book reviews.

In other news, my nose is still above water, but I've been missing out on lots of blog stuff. I just noticed that Mike Drout has been posting all kinds of cool stuff on Beowulf, which I need to read if I'm going to teach it next semester. Speaking of which, I need to think about a book order. I'm thinking Collins for the main text (LA and EM is the course), but does anyone have a better choice? LDW mentioned that a book by Olsen (Lynette?) might be decent ... OH!!! and how much does it say that today in class when we were talking about an excerpt from the Rig Veda, Indra killing the dragon, and a student compared it to part of Genesis, all I could think of was, um ... Beowulf?

Let's see ... I don't have a volunteer for the next Ancient/Medieval Carnivalesque in November, and am thinking I haven't done one in a couple of years, so I might do it myself if no one minds ...

In the meanwhile, I've got to read a ton of a Greek historian writing about Rome about wars with the guy with the elephants for Friday, write the review of a ginormous book which can only be glowing, and a review of different book by reasonably famous types, and write an application for the Dream Job. Now I just have to worry whether to use letterhead for my cover letter.

ETA: apologies to all for the plethora of misplaced and dangling modifiers. I blame two things: drive-by blogging and a drink called a pear blossom.

RBO Consternation

RBO Consternation

• There is a collegial issue. I am Switzerland. Or sometimes the clueless looking guy in the light blue helmet.
  
• There is a facilities issue. I worry that it is an indication of larger issues.
  
• There are tech issues. These actually are indications of larger and completely insoluble issues. But they have caused faculty to move beyond biting nastiness right into slightly raising their voices, and reduced undergraduates to tears.
  
• 1/3 of the students in my upper division class did not turn in their first paper. They will now have to pull 100% on each of their other assignments to get a middle B in my class. But ... WTF? Who doesn't turn in papers? I mean, I know I say I won't take late work, but I've never actually refused anything if the story is good enough and the student is willing to take a cut in the final grade.
  
• Speaking of late ... Nice Book Review Editor, if you are reading this, really, I am kinda working on it and will have it in ASAP.
  
• I am so far behind on applying for a postdoc that I don't know if I can pull it together at this point, because I really don't want to annoy my referees.
  
• I so have to publish something academic, so that I can get someone in my field as a referee for the next application.
  
• My FIVE classes are all ok. I like almost all the students, and dislike none. I am not especially fond of one of my classes as a whole, because there are some serious time-wasters, and I am close to asking people to leave. As it is, they are so confused that they confuse me. Er, by confused, I mean that several of them say in class that they are confused, but part of why they are confused is that they refuse to believe that I am not going to reiterate what's in the textbook, and they won't do the reading or bring notes.
  
• I am counting the days (30) till I jet off to fabulous European Capital to visit LDW. I anticipate much enjoyment and much library time. Some day, I hope to have a vacation with him when we are not working or conferencing. Still, it's good to have someone I can work and conference with. Crap. I have 30 days to read and comment on his MS.

How are your lives?

UPDATE: Because Nice Book Review Editor really is nice, and because my referrees are stars, I think I will be getting in the postdoc app and get going on the review and start editing LDW's book. I've just realised that I can work on that on Monday nights, too, because I teach almost all day on Monday and am usually too tired to do anything else!