Possibly more exciting—I have two one-year contracts that guarantee I will not be homeless or unemployed anytime soon. I have no intention of using that second year, but it feels nice to have. That was the verbal deal, but it’s nice to see the signed pieces of paper, as both my chair and I were just assuming that I would not be busted down to adjunct with a big pay cut. And indeed, same rank and salary.

My eye doctor has taken me off progressive lenses. No more feeling like an old lady! No more paying $800 for super-thin lenses made in Germany!

Unfortunately, I did the glasses hunt in August, when I expected to get progressives (meaning I could not get teeny frames) and before I cut my hair to ear-length instead of past my shoulders.

Now I have to redo it, but at least I know there is really only one store worth checking, since I’m committed to buying glasses that come with magnetic sunglass clips.

I missed Robert Darnton when he came through to speak about the future of the book, but in the Wall Street Journal:

In “The Case for Books,” he described the ideal book he imagined a decade ago. He envisioned a pyramid, with the top level a text monograph with links to supplementary essays. Readers could then “continue deeper through the book, though bodies of document, bibliography, historiography, iconography, background music, everything I can provide,” he wrote. “In the end, they will make the subject theirs, because they will find their own paths through it, reading horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, wherever the electronic links may lead.”

Technology is about to make real this sort of deep engagement with information. Mr. Darnton’s next book, “Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in 18th Century Paris,” will be a history of street songs in the French capital. There were no newspapers and half the population was illiterate, so news was spread by song. “Parisians wrote new verses to old tunes literally every day,” he says, “tunes being a great mnemonic device for spreading the word in a semiliterate world.”

He found the original tunes in the National Library in Paris and had a cabaret singer record them for a modern audience. These recordings can be incorporated with text to create a full information experience. Combined text and audio seems like a perfect offering for the iPad.

I was talking about the problem of essay exams in large classes recently….

I once was a TA for a history professor who offered a Matching section on the exam—match this quotation to this person, about 6-8 pairs. Students really needed to be able to identify the philosophy expressed and associate it with the right person, and it was a class on Russia, so there were some fine details they needed to recognize (e.g., both Lenin and Trotsky might have said A, but only Trotsky would have said B, and neither A nor B were quotations that had been focused on in class, so they really had to think about what the words meant)—-and in short, it achieved that holy grail of grading, a scantron-able question that demanded real knowledge and analysis from students.

A call for help—anything else you’ve done or seen people do that could act the same way?

Oh, this first one is for the student: the problem with having your photography teacher write your letter of recommendation is that the things he can speak to—your artistic ability to set up a shot—are not really the things I need to hear about for this particular scholarship application, as unfortunate as it is that the system works that way. I’m doing what I can by giving you credit for “an eye for detail.”

(We tried to stave off this type of problem by saying letters need to come from a teacher who awarded a grade on the transcript. Did you know some schools give grades for “Leadership”, aka serving on student council? You know what’s not impressive? A letter of recommendation that doesn’t have anything to say other than that the student organized prom—really well!)

* * *

“Perfect, teacher’s dream.” Can you back that up with some supporting evidence other than “a pleasure to have around.”? I got some suggestions here.

* * *

When the reason your student has zero honors or AP classes on their transcript is because your school belongs to an organization making a philosophical rejection of the AP system, it would be nice if that were mentioned somewhere, say on the transcript, or maybe you could train your teachers to include it in the letter, seeing as how you are sending out a standard dossier and all.

* * *

“She has distinguished herself with a class rank of 110 of 755!”

* * *

Dehumanizing? I mean, I’m annoyed by those series of checkboxes to rank students, too, but dehumanizing? Also, it’s actually pretty useful for me to know whether the student is one of the best you’ve had in your career, or in the top 2%, or the top 5%. Top 5% in discussion but only top 25% in writing—that tells me something.

* * *

You’re teaching high school, recommending students to college. You don’t need to write your letter in Comic Sans.

Ta-Nehesi Coates writes:

Kenyatta is about the sweetest person you’ll ever meet. Exceedingly kind and generous. She’s the sort of person who, literally, volunteers on behalf of battered women.

Huh. In my imagined world, women who volunteer on behalf of battered women are tough. They are the women who will face down your abuser and his brother while you pack. They are the women who encourage you to be angry.

It is not the supporting point I would pick for “sweet”.

All-White Basketball League (I implore you, do not read the comments at that link. I only read a few, but you just KNOW.)

Clint Bryant, athletic director at Augusta State University, laughed when he heard the news.

“It’s so absurd, it’s funny, but it gives you an idea of the sickness of our society” he said. “It shows you what lengths people will go to just to be mean-spirited. I think at any basketball level, no matter if it’s all black, all white, all Hispanic, all Asian or anyone else, the players should just be a basketball team.”

Don “Moose” Lewis, the commissioner of the AABA, said the reasoning behind the league’s roster restrictions is not racism.

“There’s nothing hatred about what we’re doing,” he said. “I don’t hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here’s a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like.”

Lewis said he wants to emphasize fundamental basketball instead of “street-ball” played by “people of color.” He pointed out recent incidents in the NBA, including Gilbert Arenas’ indefinite suspension after bringing guns into the Washington Wizards locker room, as examples of fans’ dissatisfaction with the way current professional sports are run.

“Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?” he said. “That’s the culture today, and in a free country we should have the right to move ourselves in a better direction.”

Nope, no racism there. The default assumption that white players never grab their crotch? Totally not racist.

Why not define the league around whatever “fundamental basketball” is—no dunking? pass three times before every shot? Immediate ejection for grandstanding?—instead of around race, and somehow just happen to only get white players? That’s how you do racism—you gotta institutionalize it, not spell it out. Who taught these people how to hate?

And what’s the American-born about—they don’t like Steve Nash?

It is pretty funny, though. Hat tip to the twitter hashtag #allwhitehoopleague.

As an amateur family historian, I have scoured wills and bills of sale of Southern landed gentry in search of the names of my great-great-grandparents among the fine china and horses. Once you have done that, it is hard to look at the mythologizing of antebellum Southern culture as benign.

From comments on the original post:

You would be hard-pressed, I think, to find a band from California named Lady Internment Camp.

If the Antebellum Fantasy is largely a white women’s thing, maybe the rough equivalent for men is the modern conception of the “Old West”?

And I would not be surprised to find bands out of California named something like Mine Bar Diggings, not at all. I don’t know enough about the Chinese experience in the Old West to determine how akin it was to slavery in degree or scope, though.

I’m borrowing from others here:

And it’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality. And so today we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

From Edge of the American West and Racialicious, respectively.

Eight of us went out to dinner. Complex counting ensued when the bill arrived, because you know professors, they don’t do that “just split it evenly thing.” Normally I try to avoid being the officious one who counts the money, but this time I did it.

Anyhow, so we delayed a bit after leaving, and a group was waiting for our table, so as I got up, I cheerfully said to a woman, “Sorry. We had to give the waitress a chance to count the money and make sure we hadn’t stiffed her.”

And instead of doing the sort of half-smile, I’m being polite but why are you talking to me?, she said “Oh, did you enjoy your meal?”

Because I’ve lived here some years: “Oh, yeah, good as always here. The dessert was excellent.”

“Oh, what did you have?”

“Espresso pot de creme. Wonderful!”

At which point I managed to get out the door.

I may have posted about this before, but it was my second or third year before I realized that it wasn’t that somehow I was always in line at the grocery store behind someone who knew the cashier, but rather that in this town, appropriate chit-chat at the cash register includes things like:

“Oh great—we’re going on vacation next month.”
“Cool. Where?”

So, the key to managing information is having it available when you need it, but not letting it clutter your mind or life until then.

A potential approach, for the geeky-minded Mac user. If you’ve ever wondered what use Automator or AppleScript might be, here’s one way I use them. Even then, this post is probably really boring.

I keep notes on the projects and photogifts I am working on in iPhoto, in a quick-to-launch TextEdit file. I never need these notes unless I am actually in iPhoto, doing stuff.

So, I made an Automator workflow that opens my iPhoto Notes file, and saved it in the script menu that always sits in the main Mac menubar.

So—information accessible in two clicks when I need it; but entirely out of the way and not cluttering my OS-wide Favorites menu since I don’t need it that often. Nothing for me to remember about where I saved a file or what I named it (or what words I used in it—full-text search isn’t really the end-all, be-all of file organization, if you ask me). To keep the script menu from becoming cluttered, I saved the workflow in username/Library/Scripts/Applications/iPhoto. Putting it in an application-named folder inside Applications means it will only show up in the script menu when iPhoto is active. (Huh. Maybe you’d think an Apple application might have its own script menu, to make it easier to use AppleScript? Apparently not. Thank you, Apple.)

This is Microsoft’s idea—it’s my attempt to replicate the Work menu in MS Word, which lets you pin certain files that you want quick access to, but that you don’t access enough to keep them in the Recent Documents menu. My Work menu generally consists of my current syllabi, and the Extended CV file where I enter every little thing I’ve done re teaching workshops, showing up at a prospective students day, etc.

The other use I’ve found for this approach is reminding myself to what size I want to crop a photo for my blog header, information I need maybe every 3 months (except for using it 3 times in the last week or so). For this one I used an actual script in Script Editor rather than an Automator workflow (thank you, Apple, for doing a half-assed job with Automator so it isn’t nearly as useful as it could be).

tell application “Acorn”
display dialog “Ocean Mist Theme, default header size is 736×229.”
end tell

“Display dialog” pops up a little dialog instead of launching TextEdit to show me a file, a wee bit quicker for short bits of information.

(I don’t understand how it is that Acorn 1 understands “display dialog” but doesn’t seem to be scriptable such that I could just automate the resize and the crop setting, but okay.)

Cut off my hair in August. Short hair requires thin headband. Thin headbands are basically just big rubber bands.

I have a big head—not excessively big, but at the top of the average range for women, as far as I can tell.

Every day, between about 3pm and 5pm, I pull off my headband because it is making my head feel tight.

Every morning, I can’t find a headband because they are scattered around—in my office, in my jacket pocket, my jeans pocket, etc.

Periodically, I buy more headbands.

Mammograms leave me depressed. I’ve reacted this way before, even in mid-summer. I feel poked and prodded, and all I want to do is curl up in a ball and let my mama rub my back.*

However, I got a nice little nap on the ultrasound table—a few winks during the ultrasound, and then some minutes while I waited for the tech to come back and tell me:

“oh yeah, we know all about that third lump your doctor found—there’s definitely something there, they’ve seen it before, they just hadn’t documented it. But it hasn’t changed, not a problem, looks like the same type of fibroadenoma you came in for before.”

Another one for the annals of WTF is up with our medical system: HADN’T DOCUMENTED IT? HADN’T MENTIONED IT TO ME? I mean, I’m pretty lackadaisical about my health, but not that bad, and my doctor went through the earlier reports from the mammogram people before she sent me for an ultrasound two days later.

And actually, when I said “well, nobody mentioned it to me, six months ago when they found the second cyst and told me about it, and my doctor looked at the file” the tech was all “well, that’s what I understand, that it shows up on earlier pictures, I think that’s what they said, they’d seen it, but I’ll check what they sent to your doctor.” Because, you know, you don’t get to talk to the person who actually knows the images mean.

For fuck’s sake.

* The virtue of buying at the natural foods convenience food cancels out the self-indulgence of junk food, right?

I’m asking my students to create a chapter from a hypothetical primary source reader—eg, they pick a topic, find some sources that speak to it, write a little introduction and some analysis of each source. Any suggestions on doing this, before I finalize the assignment?

So, Blackboard 9 has an Assignments feature, Calendar, and Tasks.

You might think, that if I created an Assignment, and gave it a Due Date, maybe it would automatically show as a Task and on the Calendar. Maybe, from the Calendar, you could automatically click to go to the Assignment where the handout and instructions are.

But you’d be wrong.

Okay, let’s dial back my expectations. Calendar and Tasks are both about helping students manage their time, so maybe Tasks will automatically be put on the Calendar even if there is no integration with Assignments.

Still wrong.

Oh hey, the new course home page offers direct reminders to Calendar and Tasks. That’s cool, but wait— Gee, Calendar only shows stuff in the next 7 days. And Tasks shows a list, but you have to click More to see the due dates.

Seems sub-optimal.

Hey, how about a “download calendar events and import into my calendar” button. JUST KIDDING! Blackboard would never be that useful.

Despite knowing how screwed up this is, I decided to enter all the assignments as Tasks, and the major due dates in the Calendar. More crappy decisions made by the Blackboard designers:

• all new tasks default to Low Priority. Really?
• default shows 6 tasks per page. WTF? Plenty of room on the page.
• doesn’t list My Tasks in date order, but in creation order. Too bad I skipped Essay One first time around, hope my students aren’t depending on this bullshit system.

Damning with faint praise: BB 9 does appear to have improved something such I’m willing to even press the little buttons to experiment with these features, instead of just logging out as soon as possible. On the other hand, I’m avoiding doing syllabi, so it didn’t really jump a high bar there….

Fucking Blackboard.