Don’t Be Jerry

If I have one piece of advice for people applying to grad school, beginning grad school, or in grad school, it’s this:

Don’t be this guy.

Jerry, via Rate Your Students, is bitter and unhappy because he feels cheated, he did everything right and only now figured out there are no jobs.

You HAVE to get the PhD for yourself, not for the job.* When it stops being for you, it’s time to choose a new path, even if that means walking away in the middle.

*It follows from this that accumulating debt for the PhD is a bad idea.

Dear Cat Owners,

Is $95 worth the peace of mind from having the cat sitter come every day instead of every other day?

Just Bragging

A while back, on a flight I got reimbursed for, I volunteered to be bumped, which meant I arrived just two hours later than than my original-but-delayed flight. So I got a free travel voucher. Which I just turned in for an $850 cross-country flight to see my family. And I almost used it on a $350 flight in March, but I got smart at the last minute and saved it for summer and higher fuel prices. (Holy moly, $850! Insanity!)

Admittedly, there is a red-eye involved, but I’ve decided that there are some advantages to being on the red-eye from Hub City to Hub City, rather than stressing about catching the last flight out from Hub City to SmallTown Airport, and being trapped overnight if I miss it.

Blog for the Future!

Alternate title: For Fuck’s Sake, Bloggers, You Are Driving Me Fucking Crazy

Dear Bloggers,

When you write, can you think about someone trying to retrace this discussion next week, or next month, or next year?

How will they do it, when you randomly reference but do not link posts?

This means you have to link exactly to specific posts, not generally to the home page of a blog.

Yes, this also means that sometimes you have to link to yourself. So what? This is a conversation, and you are following the conversation. It’s okay to speak up more than once in a conversation.

Sincerely,

Dance

Notable Quotations

I hardly think that studying the Norman Conquest — an important, domino-knocking example of colonialism — is going to change a single vote, but it certainly gives us all a broader understanding of the subtle processes of power.

This Is Symbolic, Right?

Conversation at a dinner out, approximated.

Me: what’s the soup of the day?
Server: mushroom.
Me: is that creamy or broth-y?
Server: creamy.
Friend, rhetorically: when have you ever seen broth-y mushroom soup? What a silly question.
Me: Chinese soups…
Friend: We’re at a brew-pub! Do you think they are serving Chinese soup? Still a silly question!
Me: I like to be accurate about why I’m wrong.

The server was entertained.

Friday Cat Blogging

I think there’s a ghost in my bathroom.

Because my cats are really fascinated by it. They don’t normally curl around the toilet, lie on the bath rugs, or sit in the bathtub.

Notable Quotations

How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going? … The Muse visits during creation, not before. Don’t wait for inspiration, just plunge in.

These rules have saved me half a career’s worth of time, and gained me a reputation as the fastest writer in town. I’m not faster. I just spend less time not writing.

From Roger Ebert.

Bonus:

It was he who encouraged me to be a writer in the first place. He was an electrician for the University, who refused to teach me a thing about his trade, but told me: “I was working in the English Building today, and saw those fellows with their feet up on their desks, smoking pipes and reading books. Boy, that’s the life for you!”

What is Teaching?

Somewhat oddly, University Diaries only ever posts real philosophical claims in her comments. But here’s a good one. Some excerpts.

In front of the room a semi-comatose person stares sadly at PowerPoint slides which list the different sorts of volcanic eruption. The sad person reads what it says on the slide. Then he says Get out your clicker. What was the second kind of volcanic eruption? Click in the correct answer…

None of this is teaching. It’s data-transfer. With - whatever - a passive feedback mechanism.

Teaching, at the college and university level, involves a professor who models and encourages, through active human discourse with her students, living thought. Whether the subject is volcanoes or Volpone, the professor who teaches has in her own research and reflection learned to assimilate information into higher-level thinking about information generally.

In this scenario, information isn’t downloadable bits. It’s one element in a contested intellectual landscape, a player in a never-ending drama of scientific and literary and philosophical inquiry. If there’s no dialectical play in a university classroom between a professor’s mind and her students’ minds as, provoked by what she says and suggests about a subject of importance, they respond challengingly to her, and she to them, there’s no teaching going on.

Click for the full discussion, and context.

Digital….what?

Moving on from the Digital Native of previous. Paragraph City has been talking about Digital Immigrants. What is the word for those who grew up with the digital age? As I previously commented, comparing it to seeing a house being built as you walk to the bus stop every day, having a vantage point into the architecture of the digital world has put me in a very privileged position, I think.* What’s the shorthand for that, and what does it mean?

I took one typing class on a DOS computer, and two on a typewriter, and only really learned to type on the typewriter, and had no computer at home until my junior year of high school. But I wrote my BA thesis on a Mac with a GUI, the first computer I had ever owned.

I first had an email account that only worked within MIT during a summer program there, then was introduced to telnet and pine, and remember when they launched WebMail, to great acclaim, during grad school. Mulberry was somewhere in there.

Attachments used to be a very mysterious thing—I was into grad school and on Eudora before they worked reliably and you didn’t have to check to make sure people had the technical capability to accept attachments.

I remember a college friend explaining to me about “Gopher” and “Mosaic“, and researching grad school via the AHA’s Directory of Departments, a heavy paper guide. But I was booking flights on the web by the time I stopped going back to my mother’s house every summer.

* I’m currently a bit challenged with anything video, or social networking, and I don’t even IM. But I’m fully confident that when I decide I need those things, I’ll be able to grok them as necessary.

“Digital Natives”

Learning Curves dryly observes that her students, “digital natives” all, are in fact clueless about navigating the digital world.

This is a good question about Digital Natives. What does the word “native” really mean? Is there another parallel where “native” means incapable of using the basic tools or even knowing they exist? Is it possible that people are using “native” in the imperial/colonial sense of “ignorant and uncivilized”? Okay, I’m joking about that one (kinda).

The general attitude from professors, including me, is that “digital native” is simply a grand delusion, applied unthinkingly to anyone young, and often that student laziness and entitlement override any sort of digital proficiency. Or that students are digitally illiterate, like those unable to order without pictures on the menu.

The “lazy” meme has been done to death, so let’s not go there. Are these types of things actually equivalent to illiteracy? I’m wondering whether a certain degree of ignorance is actually part of being native—that is, having grown up with something, there is no need to acquire real fluency in it. For instance, do these examples of student incompetency reasonably parallel to the famed American ignorance of basic civics? (Of course, I don’t really need to know what the President does to navigate my everyday life.) Or should students be able to manage the web the way New Yorkers can navigate the buses and subways? I’m looking for an accurate comparison that might help us figure out what it really means to be “native”.

See also: Paragraph City, Digital Native vs. Lazy and Dull

Dollar-Cost Averaging

I remember my mother telling me about dollar-cost averaging and how was beneficial when I was still living at home, so I was less than 17. I may have been in elementary school, in fact.

A few days ago, at the age of 32, I finally set up regular transfers to an IRA. So sad.

Note to Self

In fact, you are living in the type of household WHERE YOU NEED TO LOOK IN THE OVEN BEFORE TURNING IT ON. Did you forget, and think you were all clean and organized? Because you aren’t.

“If You Like X, Try Y!”

My library does a whole series of these bookmarks. If you like Tom Clancy, try Clive Cussler! So, one summer, when I had re-read my way through the entire Brother Cadfael series about a 12th century monk solving mysteries, and was looking for more, I picked up the “If you like Ellis Peters…” list.

Uh-huh.

NO, I will not like a book with crappy dialogue, minimal character development, and zero history just because it’s a mystery set in a medieval convent.

If you like Ellis Peters, try Lindsay Davis. (ETA: and I guess I’ll try nominees from this award over the years, also)

PS. I kinda trust Amazon’s approach a bit more—”people who bought this also bought…” no promises about liking, no attempt to guess taste, etc. Just a statement of fact.

Discussions about History

Easily Distracted on how historians answer the “so what” question. (Lovely, pondering how best to use it in my class next semester—it might replace this book, which I’ve been happy with, but a free short alternative is always nice.) The Cliopatria version, with different comments.

My personal preferences are:

5. The past helps us make N as big as possible: it is a source of data for making generalizations, formulating models, constructing claims about human universals. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel; David Christian, Maps of Time.
6. The past challenges generalizations, models and universals through attention to particulars and microhistories. Carlo Ginzberg, The Cheese and the Worms.
7. The past is procedural: we study it to learn how dynamic processes or change works out over time (without worry so much about the consequences of the history we are studying)

a little bit:

8. Hindsight is 20/20: we study a frozen moment in time because we can understand far better the total spectrum of social relationships, causal relationships, etc. than we can understand the present (here we choose richly knowable examples to study).

and also:

12. The past is detection: we study it because we like solving puzzles and mysteries. Charles Van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies.
13. The past is entertainment or personal enlightenment: we study it because it has great stories, or because of the pleasures of narrative. John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive.

The Doctor Isn’t on making parallels to the present when discussing the past.