Responding to art

Today in class we did some writing assignments in response to Frida Kahlo's painting The Two Fridas (1939). By coincidence, I found this video through Tumblr this morning:
FOUND by Carina Garcia from Van Maximilian Carlson on Vimeo.

"Canción del pirata"

I learned from my daughter (who has spent time in school in Spain) and also from colleaguesm, that Spanish schoolkids are required to memorize the poem "Canción del pirata" by José de Espronceda. I was treated to impromptu recitations, and told that a heavy metal band called Tierra Nueva had turned the poem into a song.



Of course, the mash-up with Pirates of the Caribbean was absolutely necessary.

History lessons as earworms

I bow down before the "historyteachers" YouTube channel! Their original lyrics give history lessons, set to popular songs, and combine their love of dress-up with clips from films to make learning fun. There are 47 as of now, and they are history teaching gold.
Some are tongue-in-cheek like this lesson on prehistoric anthropology to Britney Spear's "Toxic."

Others are oddly gripping like this lesson on the Vikings set to "Personal Jesus"("And when we expire we set our boats on fire")


I like how they the Canturbury Tales to the tune of "California Dreaming," and included a recitation in Middle English!


The Lady Gaga "Revolution in France" vid has received the most views, I think ('Bread bread bread, off with her head!") but I really like this one about the Odyssey.

Images of collaboration

Casteller from Mike Randolph on Vimeo.

My presentation went well, and I have a lot to think about, regarding collaboration. How about this image? Yikes!

Getting it right is hard

I'm working on a presentation about collaborative learning. It's leading me to think hard about when my teaching works and and when it doesn't. What are the things I can control, and what are the ones I can't. I can try to create an atmosphere or a vehicle or a structure, but student motivation is complex. What seems like an invitation to experiment and play for one student is perceived as a lack of structure by another.

By emphasizing multiple ways to engage in low-stakes writing activities, in which the evaluation is not based on such factors as grammar or correctness, but rather on effort and communication, I'm continuing with a philosophy of second language teaching called "the communicative approach." It involves active learning, a more student-centered approach, and support for making mistakes. But the fact is that most of my own language learning (and teaching) background ALSO emphasized repetition, drill exercises, and the internalization of correctness as essential building blocks for good (better) communication. Sometimes the tension I experience between these two tendencies makes me tired. But then I read this passage by Timothy Mason in this post on teaching grammar:

"Grammar is surrounded by similar anxieties. Grammar is, indeed, the fruit of such anxieties. Rules of grammar are rules of comportment and the grammar teacher is a dancing master. Like so many other aspects of language, good grammar is good posture.You cannot teach it without attending to social nicety. Which is to say that any such attempt needs to be fully sociologically informed."

So, some of my anxiety about correctness in communication comes from my awareness that I want students to be able to move between informal and formal registers, to have more control over how they are perceived by a variety of audiences. I want them to be able to code-switch, between slang and formal, written discourse. That's a lot for students to absorb, and takes a lifetime to learn. So maybe I need to lighten up.



Sometimes I find myself turning into a "tongue-clucking grammarian."


A mashup created by YouTube user saintblackangle using MC Frontalot's song "Tongue-Clucking Grammarian." Mc Frontalot is an exponent of nerdcore hip hop.

The jaded mentor

This one is making the rounds of the higher ed blogs and even sites like mefi. I should note that none of this is new. When I started grad school in Comp Lit in 1980, there were no jobs. I don't see that the situation has actually changed that much, just shifted.

So you want to get a PhD in the Humanities?



But don't despair! the "practical" professions have their own versions.
So you want to be a lawyer?

Wiki wiki, who's got a wiki?

One of my summer projects is to learn how to use a wiki as a resource for teaching. As is evident from my first link, I use wikipedia all the time to start searches, often in both English and Spanish, although I usually don't start from the portal page; I get to it by googling a word. But by fooling around on the portals, I can have a different experience, more like browsing in a bookstore. I'm sure there are much better analogies, and that is something I will check out with colleagues who are working on just these topics: what is the relationship between something like an Encyclopedia and wikipedia?

One feature of Wikipedia I want to explore is the Wikimedia Commons, where I can find media files that are made available for free and without copyright issues.

There are many stories about how Wikipedia came to be. I like the image associated with this one. Hah! I did not know this: "Wiki isn't an acronym. It comes from the Hawaiian word for "quick," and derives from the name of the first wiki, "The Wiki Wiki Web."

Note to self:Cool tools to explore: PMWiki and the Google Suite GoogleSites which is, according to Jude, "spiritually a wiki."

Howard Rheingold on teaching.

Howard Rheingold is an inspiration to me as a thinker about new social media and our digital world, but also as a person whose engagement with the world and with people is total and joyful. He is also an artist.

Education, creativity, the wonderous brain

TED talks, my Internet crush, has introduced me to Sir Ken Robinson. I want to make the leadership at the University where I work watch this and apply it to transforming our mission and how we do things.


Two things I take away from this as a teacher that underpin his lecture: he establishes contact with his audience ("how are you?" "amirite?" "do you?"). He uses jokes and stories to make his points, which he then also spells out clearly and concisely. It's a lot harder than it looks to do this!

And also "The whole purpose of public education is to produce University professors," and as a University professor who has studied teaching and learning styles, I think he's right.

His bio on the TED site says:

A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government's 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was published in January 2009.

If you like this, you should also watch the amazing talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who talks surviving about her own stroke. She, like Sir Ken, talks about the corpus callosum, but on the most profound, fundamental level.

"Kids today!"

I begin teaching tomorrow and I'm not quite ready, but I will be! Meanwhile, here are some things I've been thinking about as I prepare my syllabi. Prof Hacker reminds those of us who teach that if we are complaining about students today being unteachable it probably means we're doing something wrong. And I agree; it's just as hard to teach well now as it ever was.



Do we as teachers want to sound like Mark Bauerlein, author of "The Dumbest Generation"?

Isn't that a little like Monty Python's "4 Yorkshiremen" routine? Here's a Spanish parody of "kids today!"

On being a girl nerd, part one

Last night, Fresca and I had a fun conversation about our respective degrees of geekiness, nerdosity, and dorkitude as adolescents. The meanings of these words have changed since we were in high school and are not always as perjorative as they once were, although they still get slung around as insults.

I think any academic is someone who is being paid to be a nerd. This video shows a man who is happy happy happy that his professional life as a physics professor has met up with his younger, comic-book reading, science-fiction fan self by writing a book The Physics of Superheroes. He was asked to be the science consultant for the (warning! spoilers)film version of the graphic novel The Watchmen. Ignore the nerds and geeks flaming each other in the comments to the video; they're just jealous that he got to be on the set and they didn't!

The ugly underside of geek culture (which has its charms sometimes) is the relentless misogyny. Junot Diaz's book The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao is, among other things, an exploration of the intersections of successful and unsuccessful performances of masculinities that can be manifested in some geek subcultures, especially some of the comic/graphic novel versions. I just read the book last month, and I need to read it again.

The life of a language instructor

I saw Life of Brian with a friend who was a TA in the Classics department. This was his favorite scene by far!

Meme: Passion Quilt

Professor Zero tagged me with the Passion Quilt meme. What is an image of what I am most passionate that my students learn?

Change your perspective.

The image is from the Upside Down Map page, which reminds us that "it needn't be a Eurocentric world."

What other ways can we change our ideas about who we are in relation to others? What kind of difference can we make if we listen to the stories other people are telling us about the way they see themselves in the world? My first teaching experiences were language instruction--French and Spanish. The first literature class I was able to teach in English was about women's autobiographies. Since then I've gone on to teach about the literatures and cultures of many regions of the world, but my hope as a teacher is always to have students make a connection to their own lives, so that they might see that the way things are is not necessarily the way things have to be. My most recent "teaching" is not in the classroom, but as a member (an ally) of the Transgender Commission where I work, because we can't teach and learn if we do not feel safe and welcomed. When some students came to me to asking for help in working to make the bathrooms more safe for them, as people who were assaulted because their gender presentation did not match the expectations of people they met in the bathrooms, I had to do some learning so that I could be a more effective ally.


Do you want to tag yourself? I am tagging Gugeo and Thinkery, for now.

Here are the guidelines:
+Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.
+Give your picture a short title.
+Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt.”
+Link back to this blog entry.
+tag five other educator-type blogs.

This post appears to be the origin of the meme: Miguel Guhlin.
There is a Flickr Passion Quilt pool.
You can see some of the other Passion Quilt images here.

"T R N A! Peptide bonds! woooo!"

Yesterday, I was unable to show my nifty multimedia presentation because the laptop connection to the projector was not working. Probably a contact is burned out by all those frustrated instructors bashing the button repeatedly. I had to revert to the ancient technology of showing a DVD. Tomorrow, I will probably be forced to bring in a boombox and play CDs!

This awesome video, via Kottke, shows what one could do to with a little imagination to create teaching aides, even when there was not wi-fi in the classroom.



"Protein syntheis: an epic on the cellular level." Something like this, well sort of like this, is going on all the time! in our bodies!

When I was in college, I thought of majoring in physiology. I took chemistry, biology, and all of the prerequisites, but then got sidelined by my other interests and ended up majoring in the humanities. I still remember my organic chemistry course, though. There were 700 students, and the stage of the auditorium rotated, so that the previous class's lab set-up would disappear, and our professor would appear along with his lab set-up, ready to demonstrate the latest concept! (I wish I could remember his name!) Just a few years earlier, before there was powerpoint, before there was Moodle and WebCT, this amazing film was created to illustrate the concept of protein synthesis. It starts with a blackboard, different colors of chalk, and an unsmiling chemistry professor. So far, very familiar. But it also has interpretive dance, people with balloons on their heads, one of those "96 tears" organs, flute, the Jabberwocky, and something that emits smoke. I sure hope my students come up with something half as imaginative when they present their group projects at the end of the semester.
"O frabjous day! caloo callay! the protein chain came streaming out!"
Oh, and don't forget to click on the video response to hear "The Dendrite of Spring"!

I will read the syllabus, I will read the syllabus...

Passive aggressive notes is a blog I like to visit instead of replying "Dear student, WTF?" to passive-aggressive student email.
"I will not be passive agressive to my students..."
Want your own Bart Simpson chalkboard image? Go here. Aren't the Internets wonderful?

On alienation and faculty life

In his blog "Reality Check"John Lombardi, one of the academic bloggers who writes regularly for Inside Higher Ed, has an extremely smart piece called Deconstructing Faculty Work on the major changes that have occurred in academic life and the ways the institutions are measuring our "productivity." He shows how the life of the tenured professor has been reconceived around the metrics of the faculty activity report, and how this has changed relationship between tenured faculty and non-tenured, or contingent, faculty. I think he is absolutely right about how this change is redefining our entire enterprise, affecting the way we teach, the way we conduct research, and how the institution is forcing us to comply. What he doesn't mention is the toll this taking on the mental and physical health of people who have made a lifetime commitment to the academic life under an older model, one which we internalized in order to achieve success in a highly competitive and insecure world.
Yesterday I had an argument with colleagues about how the College was dictating the content and standards of our first year language courses, how the fear of bad student evaluations has warped the way our non-tenured track faculty teach, and the impact this has had on the quality of the preparation of our students.
If the College wants us to dumb down our language courses so the non-majors who are only taking the language to satisfy their language requirements don't get mad, if our third-year students are being taught by instructors who are afraid to hold them to higher standards because they'll get dinged on evaluations, and if our faculty are so unaware of this dynamic that they think they can redesign the curriculum AS IF our students were of the same quality as our aspirational peers (those institutions where we got our degrees) then the experience of teaching our under-prepared students is going to be extremely frustrating.
I highly recommend reading it to understand the disconnect between what most of us were trained to expect and what our jobs really are. We will either take this change into account as we plan our curriculum and think about our work, or we will be buffeted by these winds.

For the institutions, however, the deconstruction of faculty work offered a great incentive to reduce their commitment to an inflexible work force of tenured faculty and increase their investment in short-term, highly efficient faculty dedicated to specific purposes for specific periods of time and whose productivity and performance could be reliably maintained. The argument about whether it’s better to have part-time or full-time contingent faculty is surely important, but it may obscure the remarkable transformation of much academic commitment from an investment in a person who produces many products over a lifetime to the investment in specific products that ensure the competitive position of the employing institution.

Things that make me want to take out my red pen

For that anal-retentive writer or teacher in your life, here are some hilarious blogs:

The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks "making fun of bad punctuation since 2005."

Literally, a weblog
An English language grammar blog tracking abuse of the word "literally."

Apostropher Abuse. Because its everywhere! and an apostrophe can't defend it's self!

lowercase L. This one was new to me, but now that I've seen the photos, I will be looking out for those signs that say PlEASE.

Do you know any other snarky language sites?

National Coming Out Week

This semester I came out to my students as a member of a Rainbow Family: I'm a straight woman who co-parents with two men who are married to each other (legally! at least in Spain). I didn't think about it for a long time; it came up naturally when a student said she wanted to study the differences between gay marriage arguments in the US and in Spain. There was no particular reaction, at least not a public one. I've been reading some coming out stories, and tomorrow I'll attend the National Coming Out Day luncheon at the Convention Center. I'll get to sit with co-workers who have become friends through the work I've been doing as an ally on the Transgender commission and as a networkers for GLBT faculty and students. Next week, I'm bringing someone to campus who has been working to incorporate sexualities into university curricula in a number of countries. I hope the visit make possible some new connections, projects, relationships among folks with common interests.

I've been feeling like one of those Tinker Toys, the round part with the holes where you stick the spokes.

AAUP report on New Orleans Universities after Katrina

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an organization that exists to protect academic freedom, has sent out the following message about its report on how Administrations of institutions of higher learning took advantage of the crisis caused by Hurricane Katrina to restructure and fire tenured faculty, without cause or due process:

A few months ago, the AAUP reported to its members on the results of the largest investigation we have undertaken in half a century. We were faced with fundamental violations of academic freedom and tenure not just at one school but across an entire region. Under the cover of unsubstantiated declarations of various versions of financial exigency, university administrators at five institutions engaged in a “nearly universal departure from (or in some cases complete abandonment of) personnel and other policies.” It has been called the storm after the storm, or the perfect academic storm. I am referring to the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina on universities in the New Orleans area.

Many tenured faculty were fired with scant notice, no meaningful due process, no stated reasons, and no appeal save to the very administrators who released them. Faculty were not consulted about these actions or given an opportunity to suggest alternatives. Some found out they had already been taken off payroll and health care. Departments and programs were closed without appropriate review. While a number of institutions had suffered serious damage from the hurricane, we found no justification for this wholesale abandonment of due process and shared governance. Indeed, as the report eloquently declares, this is exactly the kind of challenge that requires wide consultation and full participation by the faculty before drastic actions are taken.

We believe all members of the higher education community need to know the story of how the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina was unnecessarily compounded by administrative fiat. That is why we are sending this e-mail.

The report is a warning to all of us about how not to handle a crisis, a warning as well about the dangers we face if our shared governance guarantees are not strengthened. Four administrations were censured at our annual meeting in June because of their post-Katrina actions. Negotiations continue in order to gain justice for New Orleans faculty and restore due process to the region.

The full report is available online.

Cary Nelson
AAUP President

Across the Universe

Julie Taymor is fearless. People seem to either love this movie or hate it. Count us in the first camp.

ETA: This Beatles' "Internet Album" is a great site for Beatles' stories!