Hello, all --
Here is a reminder that the post about the Kalamazoo Blogger meet-up is here.
Also -- early medievalist types: I have tentatively responded "yes" to the Thursday night dinner. But I have to go to the SMFS dinner on Saturday, too. That means only Wednesday and Friday night dinners free. If anybody is interested in a breakaway dinner on Thursday somewhere more convenient and less pricey (because face it, it's going to be a minimum of $50 after drinks), please say so!
Monday, May 02, 2011
Sunday, May 01, 2011
It's May!
It's May! And I have not written my paper for Berks yet! Plus, I am giving two finals tomorrow! Argh!
But it's MAY! so here are things to ring in that particularly lovely month...
or, if you prefer the very disturbing original, it's here -- no embedding allowed
And of course, this vision of Walpurgisnacht:
On the other hand, this might be more to your tastes:
And of course, this:
Or, if you prefer something entirely sappy...
But it's MAY! so here are things to ring in that particularly lovely month...
or, if you prefer the very disturbing original, it's here -- no embedding allowed
And of course, this vision of Walpurgisnacht:
On the other hand, this might be more to your tastes:
And of course, this:
Or, if you prefer something entirely sappy...
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Bleg for book recs
I'm teaching what used to be our Historiography class next fall. It's in the process of being turned into a research methods class, with historiography. So I can't see that ordering Tosh's Pursuit of History is necessarily appropriate (although I'm up for being convinced otherwise). With or without Tosh (and I'm toying with substituting Bennett's History Matters there, too), is there any book out there that you think is great for teaching How to Do Research and Write a Paper?
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Cool teaching tools!
Hi all --
So at present I am buried under a pile of really poor essays. Really poor. So poor that I will have to write a post about why differential teaching and learning is good, but that it's very hard to draw some lines: where, for example, is the tipping point between making the good students better and making the failing students passable?
In the meantime, I am occasionally thinking about resources for a re-vamped historical research course. In some ways, I fear for this course. The intention is supposedly to teach students to write a research paper, so that we don't have to teach that as part of the upper-division courses where research papers are now mandatory. There are some who want to teach historiography proper, and something called 'an appreciation for the art of history' in there. If that means teaching big questions in the field and the arguments historians present, I can't see it. After all, I could teach such things, but they would make no sense to students who have never taken a medieval content class. I could teach the history of history-writing, but you know? I just don't think it's as important as actually learning by doing. At some point, we need to know that there is a tradition of historical writing out there, and that ideas of history change from Thucydides to Ranke to Bloch (and I don't have any idea about Americanist historiography). But I'd much rather teach that as part of my content classes than as part of a methods class: "here is a big question for medieval historians -- 'is there such a thing as feudalism/the feudal system?' and here are the major arguments and the people who are making them." In a lower-division methods class, if I'm teaching a paper with an annotated bibliography and/or lit review, then I can set the stage with the idea that historians don't agree and that approaches change over time. How this will all work out when it's a rotating course is going to be interesting.
Anyway, here are some fantastic tools that I think I will be using for teaching methods and in my survey classes, especially:
First, Sharon Howard has posted a tutorial for integrating zotero at the Old Bailey online. How cool is that? the tutorial goes beyond using that site, too! I've been trying to get students to use something like zotero, because they are crap at keeping their bibliographies up to date...
Then there is Wall Wisher, which I found through one of the links on the Old Bailey page. I'm thinking of using that for having students prep class discussions. That, and maybe have them use it for structuring essays and studying together.
There are other cool things linked, too -- I especially like the group assignments in zotero.
So at present I am buried under a pile of really poor essays. Really poor. So poor that I will have to write a post about why differential teaching and learning is good, but that it's very hard to draw some lines: where, for example, is the tipping point between making the good students better and making the failing students passable?
In the meantime, I am occasionally thinking about resources for a re-vamped historical research course. In some ways, I fear for this course. The intention is supposedly to teach students to write a research paper, so that we don't have to teach that as part of the upper-division courses where research papers are now mandatory. There are some who want to teach historiography proper, and something called 'an appreciation for the art of history' in there. If that means teaching big questions in the field and the arguments historians present, I can't see it. After all, I could teach such things, but they would make no sense to students who have never taken a medieval content class. I could teach the history of history-writing, but you know? I just don't think it's as important as actually learning by doing. At some point, we need to know that there is a tradition of historical writing out there, and that ideas of history change from Thucydides to Ranke to Bloch (and I don't have any idea about Americanist historiography). But I'd much rather teach that as part of my content classes than as part of a methods class: "here is a big question for medieval historians -- 'is there such a thing as feudalism/the feudal system?' and here are the major arguments and the people who are making them." In a lower-division methods class, if I'm teaching a paper with an annotated bibliography and/or lit review, then I can set the stage with the idea that historians don't agree and that approaches change over time. How this will all work out when it's a rotating course is going to be interesting.
Anyway, here are some fantastic tools that I think I will be using for teaching methods and in my survey classes, especially:
First, Sharon Howard has posted a tutorial for integrating zotero at the Old Bailey online. How cool is that? the tutorial goes beyond using that site, too! I've been trying to get students to use something like zotero, because they are crap at keeping their bibliographies up to date...
Then there is Wall Wisher, which I found through one of the links on the Old Bailey page. I'm thinking of using that for having students prep class discussions. That, and maybe have them use it for structuring essays and studying together.
There are other cool things linked, too -- I especially like the group assignments in zotero.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Because it's related to things medieval, in the most obtuse way
And because I'm having that sort of day:
Outcomes and Assessments: Point of Order
Some of you may remember that I am not antipathetic towards the outcomes and assessment movement. In fact, I'm rather a fan of the idea of faculty sitting down together and seeing how the students are doing and coming up with ways to make sure students graduate with a degree that means something. I like the idea of giving a common exam to all students on a course and having double-blind readings of the scripts. I like the idea of outside examiners. To me, those things are signals that there is some sort of conversation across a field about what is important, and it would certainly encourage me to work harder on content and on making sure I was better organized. I don't find such things threatening to my autonomy, as do many of my colleagues at SLAC and in other places. They are just reminders that I have to cover a certain body of knowledge, and not all students will answer all questions anyway.
I feel similarly about the sort of outcomes my department has, which are largely skills-based. Here I'm on very shaky ground and likely to really piss people off. Different historians have different sorts of skills expertise. We can't all be experts in all of them. I have a colleague who uses local archives all the time - I've never done local history, nor used an archive; at the same time, some of my colleagues have very different ideas of what it means to write a primary source analysis than I do. I think a student can write a perfectly good, and more importantly, rigorous, 5000-7000 word research essay that asks a question of a single source, perhaps a saga, or Orderic Vitalis' Ecclesiastical History; or perhaps of a few dispute charters or traditiones. Close reading is integral to what I do (so much so that sometimes I skimp on the literature more than I should). But if there is a single course that all students have to take to teach the skills we say we assess, it seems to me that faculty need to work together to define the skills and they need to give up some autonomy to make sure that, whoever teaches the course, the students can go on to all other classes in the department and be fairly successful without any one faculty member having to teach from scratch the stuff that students in their classes need.
In a way, outcomes and assessments done well and meaningfully are sort of a reflection of Rousseau's Social Contract. We all give up being able to teach only what we want,* or just our way of doing things, in order to make sure our students will be successful in other departmental courses, or if they transfer elsewhere. They have to have faculty buy-in and contribution at all levels, and faculty, even those who are willing, need to see the bigger picture.**
Lots of things can gum up the works. Lack of faculty buy-in, administrators who take far too dictatorial an approach (other than saying, "I don't care how you do it, but it needs to be done by X or we lose funding and accreditation."), Accreditation agencies and governments who are far too hung up on "accountability" when they have no bloody idea of what is important in a field (and everybody think they know what is important in history -- dog forbid that it requires anything like training to be an expert!).
But this week, I realized what the number one problem with having valid outcomes and assessments is. You could have the most cooperative faculty in the world and the most supportive administrators. It doesn't mean a damned thing if the students aren't prepared for university level work. If they can't manage, or won't do, the readings; if they don't come to class sessions, especially seminars and discussions, prepared; if they are ignorant of geography, how can we teach towards the outcomes we've set? How can our assessments and measurements of those outcomes be valid?
They can't.
If we teach at the university level, we have to have outcomes that reflect that level. But such outcomes are based on the idea that our students can work up to that level over the period they are at the university. How do we measure when we have to (and yes, this is true not just at my SLAC, but at colleges and universities all over the US) spend time on how to study, how to write an essay, how to read effectively,*** take notes, write an essay exam, become familiar with the most basic world maps of the present (let alone the past)...? Those things are just plain inappropriate as university level outcomes. Some of them belong in elementary school, for goodness' sake!
And how do we measure that the reasons students cannot achieve the outcomes we set, outcomes that should match up to those at other institutions like ours, are not necessarily because of our teaching, or even of student learning, are because the underlying assumptions of what it means to be ready to study for a university degree have not been met? Technically, it's not all that difficult to document, I suppose. We can ask students to self-report average time spent studying on a course (the are surprisingly honest!). We can scan and save student writing samples to demonstrate that students are not prepared, or that they have learnt something, but it may not be what they were supposed to learn for the course (mine usually write better at the end -- at least "write a well-argued analytical essay that answers a historical question, supported with specific detail," is one of our outcomes!
But I ask you -- how can assessment be meaningful if we spend as much time teaching students to be students as we do our subject? and how can the teaching in our subject not suffer if we are taking so much time away from it to give students the skills they need to succeed (to a point -- if students really are clueless and hopeless, I will ask them to drop). I have colleagues who simply fail such students, but there has to be a better resolution.
What do you all do, if you have to deal with such things? How will you, when you do?(which you might not if you are in the UK, since the Big Society mavens seem to be very happy with the idea of limiting uni education to the elite -- although they seem to have bugger all in the way of ideas as to what's going to happen to everybody else).
Update: Dave at The Long Eighteenth Century has pointed me to his very useful post on exactly this sort of thing! Thanks, Dave!
*Yeah, I know: most of us don't teach just what we want, but you'd be surprised at how many people think that academic freedom means complete control over the curriculum. There are things I don't teach, but it's not because I don't want to -- it's generally because I can't get to them because the most specialized class I teach is Ren-Ref!
**I will smack the first one of you that says this is a dean-ish comment. Just because I can think like an administrator doesn't mean I want to be one!
***this week I have had the fun of discovering that a student thought an incredibly common expression meaning "people were so focused on this thing that it became the driving force behind government and social policies," instead meant, "people discarded this thing and got as far away from it as possible." There was also the joy of having students tell me the only way they could learn was to bring their books to class and read along while we were discussing the information. No joke.
I feel similarly about the sort of outcomes my department has, which are largely skills-based. Here I'm on very shaky ground and likely to really piss people off. Different historians have different sorts of skills expertise. We can't all be experts in all of them. I have a colleague who uses local archives all the time - I've never done local history, nor used an archive; at the same time, some of my colleagues have very different ideas of what it means to write a primary source analysis than I do. I think a student can write a perfectly good, and more importantly, rigorous, 5000-7000 word research essay that asks a question of a single source, perhaps a saga, or Orderic Vitalis' Ecclesiastical History; or perhaps of a few dispute charters or traditiones. Close reading is integral to what I do (so much so that sometimes I skimp on the literature more than I should). But if there is a single course that all students have to take to teach the skills we say we assess, it seems to me that faculty need to work together to define the skills and they need to give up some autonomy to make sure that, whoever teaches the course, the students can go on to all other classes in the department and be fairly successful without any one faculty member having to teach from scratch the stuff that students in their classes need.
In a way, outcomes and assessments done well and meaningfully are sort of a reflection of Rousseau's Social Contract. We all give up being able to teach only what we want,* or just our way of doing things, in order to make sure our students will be successful in other departmental courses, or if they transfer elsewhere. They have to have faculty buy-in and contribution at all levels, and faculty, even those who are willing, need to see the bigger picture.**
Lots of things can gum up the works. Lack of faculty buy-in, administrators who take far too dictatorial an approach (other than saying, "I don't care how you do it, but it needs to be done by X or we lose funding and accreditation."), Accreditation agencies and governments who are far too hung up on "accountability" when they have no bloody idea of what is important in a field (and everybody think they know what is important in history -- dog forbid that it requires anything like training to be an expert!).
But this week, I realized what the number one problem with having valid outcomes and assessments is. You could have the most cooperative faculty in the world and the most supportive administrators. It doesn't mean a damned thing if the students aren't prepared for university level work. If they can't manage, or won't do, the readings; if they don't come to class sessions, especially seminars and discussions, prepared; if they are ignorant of geography, how can we teach towards the outcomes we've set? How can our assessments and measurements of those outcomes be valid?
They can't.
If we teach at the university level, we have to have outcomes that reflect that level. But such outcomes are based on the idea that our students can work up to that level over the period they are at the university. How do we measure when we have to (and yes, this is true not just at my SLAC, but at colleges and universities all over the US) spend time on how to study, how to write an essay, how to read effectively,*** take notes, write an essay exam, become familiar with the most basic world maps of the present (let alone the past)...? Those things are just plain inappropriate as university level outcomes. Some of them belong in elementary school, for goodness' sake!
And how do we measure that the reasons students cannot achieve the outcomes we set, outcomes that should match up to those at other institutions like ours, are not necessarily because of our teaching, or even of student learning, are because the underlying assumptions of what it means to be ready to study for a university degree have not been met? Technically, it's not all that difficult to document, I suppose. We can ask students to self-report average time spent studying on a course (the are surprisingly honest!). We can scan and save student writing samples to demonstrate that students are not prepared, or that they have learnt something, but it may not be what they were supposed to learn for the course (mine usually write better at the end -- at least "write a well-argued analytical essay that answers a historical question, supported with specific detail," is one of our outcomes!
But I ask you -- how can assessment be meaningful if we spend as much time teaching students to be students as we do our subject? and how can the teaching in our subject not suffer if we are taking so much time away from it to give students the skills they need to succeed (to a point -- if students really are clueless and hopeless, I will ask them to drop). I have colleagues who simply fail such students, but there has to be a better resolution.
What do you all do, if you have to deal with such things? How will you, when you do?(which you might not if you are in the UK, since the Big Society mavens seem to be very happy with the idea of limiting uni education to the elite -- although they seem to have bugger all in the way of ideas as to what's going to happen to everybody else).
Update: Dave at The Long Eighteenth Century has pointed me to his very useful post on exactly this sort of thing! Thanks, Dave!
*Yeah, I know: most of us don't teach just what we want, but you'd be surprised at how many people think that academic freedom means complete control over the curriculum. There are things I don't teach, but it's not because I don't want to -- it's generally because I can't get to them because the most specialized class I teach is Ren-Ref!
**I will smack the first one of you that says this is a dean-ish comment. Just because I can think like an administrator doesn't mean I want to be one!
***this week I have had the fun of discovering that a student thought an incredibly common expression meaning "people were so focused on this thing that it became the driving force behind government and social policies," instead meant, "people discarded this thing and got as far away from it as possible." There was also the joy of having students tell me the only way they could learn was to bring their books to class and read along while we were discussing the information. No joke.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
A few thoughts on Niall Ferguson
First, I sorta wish I could show his new series to my World Civ classes -- except that I would worry they'd just accept what he says over anything I say.
Second, I would like to see a bunch of post that point out that he is, like Laurence Stone, apparently, a big tool.
Third, I do not love his Eurocentrism
Second, I would like to see a bunch of post that point out that he is, like Laurence Stone, apparently, a big tool.
Third, I do not love his Eurocentrism
Sunday, March 13, 2011
New Space, no thanks to Blogger
Ok, I'm back up and running, having spent way too much time trying to recreate my blogroll, because stupid Blogger lost it when my template mysteriously disappeared.
AAARGH.
Please do let me know if you like or hate the new look -- and please pass the word about the Kalamazoo Meet-up (information HERE)
Also, speaking of the Zoo, is anybody going to the Early Medievalists' Dinner?
AAARGH.
Please do let me know if you like or hate the new look -- and please pass the word about the Kalamazoo Meet-up (information HERE)
Also, speaking of the Zoo, is anybody going to the Early Medievalists' Dinner?
Saturday, March 12, 2011
What the hell???
What happened to my blog, dammit?
ETA: OK, site construction now happening. Going to have to re-design. Bugger.
Update: New look for now -- anybody know how to get the picture to go across the top of the page?
ALSO: here is the post about the Kalamazoo meet-up
ETA: OK, site construction now happening. Going to have to re-design. Bugger.
Update: New look for now -- anybody know how to get the picture to go across the top of the page?
ALSO: here is the post about the Kalamazoo meet-up
Monday, February 28, 2011
Blogger meet-up at the Zoo
Blogger meet-up at the Zoo??
Hello, all --
has anybody else started this conversation yet?
I suggest we go for the usual Friday meetup at Mug Shots at opening time...
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Look! It's time to beat that horse again!
Look! It's time to beat that horse again!
Yeah, I know, I haven't been blogging much. Sue me. Actually, you should complain, and I should apologize. I need to blog more, if only because it really does keep me writing. And I need to write. I have two essays in the works at the moment, and in a way, the reason they aren't up yet has something to do with my response to this post at Dr Crazy's, from which I also stole the title.
Really, you should just go click the links in her post to get the background, especially the ones to Historiann here and here, Undine's response, and this post by Katrina Gulliver at Tenured Radical, which has pissed a lot of people off. There are plenty of other links, too, many worth reading. I'm adding my own $.02, as I get mentions! and I've been around the blogosphere a while, so it's my dead horse, too, in a way. I've been doing this since, what? 2002. 2002, people. That means this blog is in its ninth year. Dude, ADM is a brand name by now. Or something.
Seriously, it is my horse, and I am going to keep arguing my point (although Dr Crazy makes it far better than I do) as long as I need to. Which, given the attitudes of some people, may be forever. And now, a warning: if you are one of those people who thinks that pseudonyms are BAD!EVil!WAYS TO BE DISHONEST AND NASTY ON THE INTARWEBS! and nothing more,* there is nothing for you here. Honestly, if you can't look to a rich tradition of pseudonymous writing for purposes that are at least morally neutral and often clearly benign, then I am sorry your education has been so poor. If you are looking to re-state that point of view, this is not the blog you are looking for (this is not the blog we are looking for). Move along.
Now that that is out of the way, perhaps I should drag some old history into the brightness of the blogosphere: way back in 2002, almost all of the blogs I read were written by people using pseudonyms. A few weren't: Tim Burke's Easily Distracted was one, Crooked Timber was another. Cliopatria was a third. What did these blogs have in common? First, they were written primarily by established scholars and/or scholars whose blogs were public fora for the bloggers' own fields. The fields were also ones that were not all that far removed from the public sphere; blogging about economics, public policy, sociology, etc., was not all that different from having opinion columns on newspaper sites. So in many cases, the subjects were ones that have traditionally attracted public intellectuals and public discourse. Perhaps not coincidentally, the bloggers, like most public intellectuals then and now, were men. Some of the scholars were not too far along in their careers, but given that there was at least a clear indication that men with solid academic reputations could blog thoughtfully without threatening their careers too much, it's not too big a leap to see where junior (male) scholars might have felt a bit more confident in linking their blogging activities to their professional selves. I think it also says something about the way men and women see their work, and the type of blogging being done. These were, and are, largely blogs that focus on the scholar's field, and not on the scholar's life. The one might be seen as an extension of work, while the other merely a waste of time. Commenting on life, after all, even academic life, or even teaching, is analogous to spending time worrying about improving assignments and focusing on whether the students are learning: we're told it's important, but really, we all know the real measure of the professional academic is not how many lives we touch, how many students will go out and apply what we've taught them to their lives... it's how much we publish.** You may, if you like, insert here the cautionary tale of one Dan Drezner, whose blogging seems to have created difficulties for him when he went up for tenure, but whose celebrity may also have been connected to getting a better job where he did get tenure. I think both sides of the pseudonymity argument need to call that one a wash.
You might have gathered that I'm not a man (although early on, before ADM was better known, people frequently assumed I was a man, largely to my writing style and my willingness to argue with, like, logic! and facts!). I also wasn't writing about medieval history. I was writing about being a medieval historian who had just re-joined the profession after a hiatus, who was working as an adjunct, and who wanted to connect to other people and talk about the system, education, and generally what it was like to be in my position, but in a somewhat objective manner. I didn't want the blog to be the first thing people found when they googled my CV. I didn't want my students, colleagues, or family to read it and think of me first (or at all). I wanted to engage with other junior scholars in a way that didn't interfere with my daily life or put any of my colleagues in an uncomfortable position. And honestly, I wanted a job. Blogging under a pseudonym seemed a perfectly sensible way for me to join in and (although I didn't realize it at the time, I will now admit it might be true) help create a community of colleagues where I really didn't have any. Yes, once I had my first full-time, visiting assistant prof job, I did have colleagues -- but I was teaching at a community college where few people really bothered or needed to publish, and NONE of them were damned medievalists. I needed that community of scholars more or less in my field, and in the sort of positions I aspired to, to mentor me.
I also needed pseudonymity for reasons that I think Historiann mentions in her article, but that haven't come up much in any of the conversations lately. To myself at the time, I had tossed my life away. I didn't really want any of my friends from grad school, my advisor, my friends from when I was an undergrad... the people who had written me recs, kept me funded, got me extensions, and even worse, not berated me or told me I'd let them down when I put family first and taken a fairly well-paying job that was not only not at an R1, but not even academic. (Ok, I had gained a husband and kid and a great family and had demonstrated I could actually earn a living outside academia, but if you went to grad school, you know the feeling I mean, because you've ever felt it or you've looked at someone else in my position and heard/thought/said the same things -- and worse when looking at a woman, because of the whole perpetration of the 'why bother with women because they just drop everything for family' thing). ADM was me, but it was also a me trying to re-establish my own voice as a member of a community I wasn't sure would have me anymore.
The funny thing is, pseudonymity didn't give me just a new voice; it helped me find my own, old voice, too. People didn't know me, except through my words and the story I told them. It was a true story, as objective as possible, and one that I tried to make as honest as I could without revealing details that would have embarrassed the people in my life. It wasn't the whole story, but that's because of the format, subject matter, and audience. There are things I'm willing to share because they are things many people in my position might be going through. And frankly, I don't want to share everything with potentially tens (ok, actually, hundreds) of people I don't know. People got to know ADM, and they got to know me, and they got to know that both are me, and both are true. What's more, I got to know a bunch of people who are also pseudonymous. When I'm with them in real life, I think of them as their real-life selves. But when we are working in the context of the professional relationships we have built online, I still often think of them as the constructs that their pseudonymity helped to create. It's not that weird, if you think of it. We all have our professional selves and our private selves. Sometimes we never socialize with our colleagues, and they have much more to them than we might know. So how is this different?
It's different because, as far as I can tell, the internet is a different sort of place. Perfectly reasonable people who know about the rather honorable tradition of pseudonymity seem to see this as different. Why? maybe because people can comment anonymously OR pseudonymously. Frankly, anonymous commenters piss me off, too. I think it's chickenshit to comment without a name, because either they are committing drive-by insults or they frequently give the appearance of being the blogger's own sock puppet. But bloggers can prevent anonymous commenting, and sometimes the would-by anonym takes on a pseudonym, pseudonymity ends up being lumped in with anonymity, with cowardice, with throwing words like bricks through windows.
Having said all that, it still never ceases to amaze me that otherwise discerning people get their knickers in a twist over something that is pretty easy to figure out. There are bloggers who write pseudonymously, and choose to continue to do so, even after people know who we are. It allows us the freedom to write in ways that we might not otherwise. We are, to some extent, our pseudonyms, and if people can't recognize that the personae we have constructed are, in every way that matters for public communication,as real as we are, then perhaps they should stick to only reading the eponymous blogs of people they know in real life. I'm sure that they are entirely honest and uncensored. After all, people put their own names on them.
*and here I am looking at at least one blogger who has taken upon himself to try to out me at public meetings after being specifically asked not to, not to mention Kathryn Cramer, who has in the past outed anonymous/pseudonymous fan bloggers while deliberately ignoring the relative power and privilege her position in the sff community gives her...
**I will refrain from going off on a tangent about people who say this, shirk teaching and service duties, and still don't publish as much as some of the great teachers I know, and even then only manage to publish fairly workmanlike stuff..
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
A few thoughts on Tenure
A Few Thoughts on Tenure
Most of you readers know that I am a strong supporter of tenure and the tenure system. Most of you also know that I believe strongly in post-tenure review. Recent events have made me think of tenure in slightly different ways, so I thought I'd puzzle a few of them out here, rather than working on Syllabi.
Tenure is a Good Thing. It protects, or should protect, one's academic freedom. I think the guidelines of the AAUP are sound, although I am not as clear on their position on post-tenure review. In general, I think tenure is not supposed to protect people who are not doing their job well.
But this means a possible conflict. There's tenure, and there are our annual contracts. Institutions change. We all know people who were tenured when publication requirements were lower, or when accreditation agencies had less power, or even under other administrations whose rules were different. Tenure doesn't mean we faculty are not also employees. When institutions change, it seems to me that, whatever the rules were, whatever the contractual obligations were, when a person was granted tenure, the terms of employment change. This is true in any job. Companies are re-organized, industries and government agencies require new standards or new sorts of reporting, etc. I am not sure how tenure protects one from having to follow new versions of the Faculty Handbook, new requirements for reporting attendance for financial aid, adhering to FERPA, or any other such thing. And yet I know people, some at my own SLAC, who insist that the contract that was in effect when they were granted tenure supersedes any later contracts -- even when those new contracts have different wording that clearly includes new or slightly different obligations (as well as new amounts of money!). This seems to me to be a very problematic situation. I certainly wouldn't want our senior and tenured colleagues to have to go back and produce monographs to keep tenure, or anything like that. But I do expect that tenure not be a protection against increased work loads, service, or any other time-suck imposed on us by external agencies (or even against learning to use new equipment, software like Blackboard, or sim).
Discuss.
Monday, January 03, 2011
New Carnivalesque!
New Carnivalesque!
Hi all! The latest Carnivalesque is up at Kaye Jones' blog. It's filed with lots of stuff you might have missed over the last couple of months, so go and check it out!
And if your tastes run more to the Early Modern, the next edition will be held at Airs, Waters, Places on January 24th. Please send suggestions for inclusion to airs waters places at gmail dot com (no spaces, obvs).
Carnivalesque is certainly not just for academics. We welcome perspectives from a variety of fields, especially history, literary studies, archaeology, art history, philosophy - in fact, from anyone who enjoys writing about anything to do with the not-so-recent past. You can nominate your own writing and/or that of other bloggers, but please try not to nominate more than one or two posts by any author for any single edition of Carnivalesque, and limit nominations to recent posts.
Would you like to host an edition?
Potential hosts should be regular bloggers with some knowledge of and interest in pre-modern history (though, again, not necessarily academics). If you are interested in hosting an edition of Carnivalesque, please send us an email (see further down page for details), noting whether you are particularly interested in early modern or ancient/medieval, and telling us a little about your background and historical interests.
Let us know at misrule atsign carnivalesque dot org
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
The end of the year already?
The end of the year already?
Wow, it was so easy to blog during November, and then I fell off the wagon again. Right now, I'm in a cafe, unable to settle on work, so am going to say some stuff. I would tell you about my year, but it sucked. Actually, many good things happened this year, but the bad things were the sort of things that were in ways devastating. Not as devastating as my last breakup (and that's a whole nother thing, as they say). No, these things were devastating because they hit me at the core of my professional identity and involved going through something we probably all go through once we settle into a place, or maybe when we get tenure and become senior faculty. All of a sudden, we see more of the politics, and are on different committees (actually, not true in my case, but I know it is for some), and when we have the freedom to follow our own agendas a bit more. Or maybe it's just that academic politics can be very much like the schoolyard all over again, with cliques and hurt feelings and all sorts of things that shouldn't actually happen between reasonable adults.
Hm. I am having trouble writing about these things, at least in a dispassionate way.
Let's just say that I kinda love my job. I like the students I teach, even though I wish they were more driven. I work for great people who I really believe would like to pay their faculty more and who have been very supportive of me and my work, and of my colleagues, too. They have foibles, but I wouldn't trade them. I generally like my colleagues, although I am truly disturbed by some of the things I see, particularly those that seem to be the result of giving junior faculty too much responsibility too soon, with too little mentoring and oversight. And frankly, those same things might also be a result of not having a good feel for institutional wisdom and its importance. I love the town I live in, and enjoy much about small-town life. I have a house, and cats, and good friends. I feel loved and appreciated.
And yet
It would be nice if this year hadn't seemed to be a mash-up of Mean Girls, Lear, Middlemarch, and Gaslight.
Hey, it's still the bleak midwinter where I am. Look for productive posts in the New Year.
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Today's word
Today's Word
So I'm not signing up for the Reverb 10 thing seen here, at BrightStar's and here, at Dr. Crazy's, but I thought it might be fun to play along for a bit. So...
Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?
Wow... lots to choose from, but I think the word is really stress. I started the year taking over as department chair rather unexpectedly. I taught as many or more students than all my colleagues combined, plus doing admin stuff, trying (and often failing) to work on my own stuff, and watching everybody else get ahead on research to the point that I began to resent teaching -- the reason I was hired and what I do best. And of course, I beat myself up for it. I beat myself up for a lot of things, apparently. Who knew? Anyway, by mid-summer, I was waking up with clenched fists and feet and had managed to clench my jaws at night even while wearing a bite guard. So... lots of tired. Lots of inefficient use of time and lack of concentration. Lots more beating myself up. Or, to put it bluntly, more stress. And falling behind meant cutting out the gym to catch up ... I assume you're getting the vicious cycle here? Plus weight gain... on-again, off-again relationship, jugglers' balls bouncing everywhere and breaking things... plus a couple of fairly major work-related crises i will not be blogging about. Oh, and that whole buying a house thing.
I cannot wait for this year to be done.
Next year's word: together. Together is what I want to be. Having a grip on my life again, focusing on the right things, getting my head together, my health together, my finances together. And maybe even being together in the relationship sense, if that ends up being an option. Together in the work sense, too, both for me, and in a collegial sense. Together is good, because it's alone without needing others, and also not alone.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
NaBloPoMo 25 -- dinner and big cats
NaBloPoMo 25 -- dinner and big cats
So I am at a friend's/adopted sister's for Thanksgiving. Me, her, and her husband. And the cats. One is rather large .. 27 lbs and about 3 feet long, not including his tail. The other is also not small, but only in a normal not-small-cat kind of way. He's also very orange. We've been talking about life, and teaching, and departmental politics. One of the nice things is that both of them are modernists who sometimes do American history. So they can offer sensible opinions of what normal methodology is for people in their fields. This has been really helpful, both in validating my feelings that all of the people in my department don't mean the same thing when we use the same words (for example, in my world, document analysis almost always requires a close reading of the text, as well as demonstrating an understanding of the context; in theirs, it's far more about context, and close readings are optional at best). It's also been very helpful for my understanding where some of my Americanist colleagues are coming from. Apparently, when Americanists go to conferences, they don't really quiz each other on the use of evidence the way medievalists often do. For me, this is a little weird. I mean, if I went to a panel on Merovingian bishops, I'd expect to hear references to Gregory or maybe Venantius, or... you get the idea. There's a general sort of corpus of narrative history that most of us are at least vaguely familiar with, and we examine the use of those sources as much as anything else, I think. But apparently, this isn't true in all subfields. This explains a lot to me about some of my department's dynamics. It also means I need to re-think some of the ways I teach the methods course, so that the students working with the Americanists will have a better idea of what they need to do on their theses...
ETA: It's interesting that my friend described my approach to what I think of as documents or sources as more akin to a literary approach to texts: very old-fashioned; something that might have been acceptable 40 years ago, but would never be published today. In fact, she intimated, it was like the approach of lit people, where everything is reduced to a text, and context occasionally is missed out. For my part, I said I thought that the other approach was clearly good for synthesis and focusing on context, but the actual primary source evidence seemed to be getting short shrift. In some ways, it seems to me that it's the difference between starting with the primary sources and working outward and starting with a question and the scholarship in working inward. There should be a conversation between the two, obviously, and I doubt I will ever be convinced that the old-fashioned approach is therefore less worthy (in part because I will still always have the attitude of someone who is expected to have more tools in her toolbox to start with, but is also big enough to allow for more tools). But it is probably good to get the perspective of someone else, because this really plays into ideas of academic rigor and assessment.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
NaBloPoMo 23 -- Grading Jail
NaBloPoMo 23 -- Grading Jail
That's where I am. Forever. With a cranky cat. And a pleasant and sleepy cat. Guess which one is lurking over my grading! The weekend will be too short. Aargh!
Sunday, November 21, 2010
NaBloPoMo 21 -- back home
NaBloPoMo 21 -- Home again
Hey all, I'm forgiving myself for the lack of blogging because I was at a conference. I was at the SEMA conference, enjoying myself with people I like. There were some great people there, and some good papers -- especially those I heard on Saturday morning, which included a very nicely put-together one on Hildemar of Corbie and the construction of monastic space and my favorite (and not because it was given by The Cranky Professor): one on Agobard of Lyons and the Magonians. It wasn't really about space aliens, which made it all the better because we got to talk about them anyway.
Given the subject of the conference, it wasn't surprising that there were lots of papers that referred to revenants, ghosts, and other such things. Nor was it a big shock that many discussions included references to the impending Zombie Apocalypse. I was polite, and did not correct the person who used I Am Legend as an example of a zombie story. People. Read the book before seeing the movie. There were also some papers that had some iffy bits, I think. I'm not convinced we should consider John Donne to be a Tudor writer. Really, I think he is much more representative of the unpleasant James Stuart and his religion than any of the Tudors... In fact, there were a couple of lit papers I heard that could have been much stronger had the authors been better versed in the history they used to attempt to contextualize their arguments.
It's a funny thing: most of my friends who are lit people are really pretty damned good with the history. Most of the historians I know who use literature are pretty good at using it, too -- although I will admit that most of us tend to rely on the safer historical interpretations. Because of that, I tend to think of all medievalists and classicists to be interdisciplinary types as a rule. This experience reminds me that interdisciplinarity is not merely about using each other's sources, but having a rather firmer understanding of and rooting in each other's disciplines. It also reminded me that honestly? periodization across the disciplines can be sort of difficult.
Anyway, it was a very great time, and my esteemed colleague from VA Tech and Modern Medieval put on a really good conference. There were blogger meetups without planning them, and I got to report some fun stuff back to a person who probably needs a new nickname, so that was nice.
Otherwise, my weekend also included some interesting prospects on the personal front...maybe. And I have now officially started to worry about my writing commitments.
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