November 2009

I am not sure I will use these for my Southwest Texas Popular Culture conference paper, but I should read them anyway.

First, Mercedes Lackey writing on the multiplicity of Guineveres. (I’m guessing this is like Maria for Spanish and various other names.)

I have not read this book yet, even though I am a Lackey fan. I’m not as die hard as I used to be, but I still tend to find her works delightful.

The other work is a graphic novel. I have been re-introduced to those recently (though I read early ones just to be reading them). I don’t know how good it will be, but some of the graphic novels are actually amazing and amazingly well done. So, this is a must-read for me at least over the Christmas break, if not earlier.

Both these books give me a reason to look forward to a down time in school. That’s coming Dec. 15.

Art Scheck, writing for The Chronicle tells of attending what I assume is a library sale and garnering armloads of old books. (I was just going through my last sale finds myself, culling overenthusiastic choices and reading through the good picks.)

He speaks of finding a vintage English handbook and purchasing it, delighting in the recorded grades of the student who owned it. He revels in the long division computation of her averaging and remarks, quite accurately to my experience, of the difficulty students have figuring out their own grades with a calculator. (My aside on this is that I weight grades and students must double some grades. Unless I tell them how to figure out their grades, they cannot do it, even when I write the weights on their grades.)

He details another book he found, with 71 (!) essays in it for the reading section, specifically describing one essay.

Called “‘They Write Worse and Worse,’” it’s the work of Adeline Courtney Bartlett, a professor of English at Hunter College in New York City. The piece first appeared in the June 1940 issue of Harper’s magazine, but it could have been written last week.
…
Speaking to an imaginary colleague she calls Professor A, Bartlett says, “When you were an undergraduate a class of twenty-five to thirty members might have had two A students, five or six B students, eighteen to twenty-three C, D, and F students. The classes you teach divide in much the same way.”

He goes on to discuss problems she mentions that still plague teachers today.

It is a delightful article. Please go read it.

After you do, you might also want to peruse Bartlett’s original article, which is available from Harper’s archives.

Erin O’Connor writes the bare truth:

In the entire country, there are openings for 9 medievalists, 14 Renaissance scholars, 7 eighteenth-century scholars, 6 Romanticists, 7 nineteenth-century scholars, and 12 twentieth-century scholars. Odds are that each opening will receive well over 500 applications–that’s how it goes even in better times.

Community colleges normally don’t post until the spring, and sometimes the summer, so those jobs will be available as well. Those jobs are for generalists and compositionists.

David Evans wrote on the search for a flexible candidate.

One of the more interesting comments at a panel [at the CIC conference] was about how hard it is to find new faculty members who are genuinely interested in teaching general-education courses, and who are, more broadly, willing to expand their teaching into new areas to meet the needs of an institution that probably has fewer faculty members than the specialties in a discipline might ideally call for.

So, be willing to teach gen ed classes and other courses outside of your specialty if you want to work for SLACs or smaller schools.

The Chronicle has an article on two universities who will not buy more Kindles until they are more user friendly for blind students.

If the only reason they bought Kindles was for blind students, that makes sense. Otherwise it does not. Regular textbooks aren’t friendly for blind students.

I love the Kindle’s reader feature.

I doubt the Amazon folks were thinking about blind users when they created it. However, I am sure the functionality can be improved.

The real life saga began many years ago today.

Timothy McSweeney’s has a funny on ‘Grading the Life of an Adjunct.’

NCTE’s ELQ has an article on literacy learning and content. I am working on an article in this area right now, so I went and read it.

Emphasizing content knowledge with little consideration for reading and writing and thinking skills may go down in history as the greatest educational error of all time, second only to thinking that English teachers are the only ones responsible for teaching literacy skills.challenge these days.

I purchase mine from ClassroomClipart.com, but you can also find usable art through Creative Commons’ licensing. See ProfHacker for details.