Love and Disdain

RBOC: First week pandemonium

2012-01-29T12:56:00.000-06:00

I feel like it's bad form to just throw post after post of random bullets of crap on the blog, but there are times when you can't get it together to do more than note everything flying at your head. (And then duck.)

I kind of feel like I will never again hear good news from Hometown. This past week's bad news was so out of left field that I hardly knew how to process it. I'm used to two or three different kinds of bad news from home, but I discovered a new kind this week. Fuck.
I feel like I'm clicking into the brute survival mode that got me through my last semester of dissertation writing. For months now, I've been laboring with the unhappy sensation that accomplishing everything that I have to do might kill me. Somehow, I have transitioned into survival mode, which feels more like I am going to accomplish all this even if it kills me! Once again, it is life during wartime.
This means that I suddenly feel more capable (because I have to be so), and therefore a little less tragically depressed. I can actually laugh to myself, rather than cry at the fact that one of my students emailed me in confusion, upon learning that zi could not buy books at the library. Just when you think you've heard it all...

Now, for the more positive bullet points:

My Pseudology of Area Studies course seems to be off to a good start. I scared away a few students who admitted to themselves that this class wasn't for them, which means the total registration now stands at fourteen: excellent size for seminar-style discussions! I rather suspect that almost none of my students will do the reading for the next session, even though I went to some lengths to point out that this stuff is heavy-duty. (That was one of the scare tactics.) I've accepted that most students need to feel some heat under their asses to start studying for real, so they will likely find out this week what it feels like to sit in dead silence, waiting for someone who actually read the piece to say something. Like I told 'em, I can outwait them. And if that doesn't tell them to study, the quiz they'll have to take this week should drive home the message.
I'm getting a little detached and less emotionally invested in the success of my students in Introduction to Pseudology. This makes me happier. Most students in that class take it to knock off a distribution requirement, and they don't really give a fuck. I'm going to teach those classes, do them well, and not lose sleep about how they do. I've made the syllabus easier than last time, and the tests are fucking jokes, so I rest easy in the knowledge that passing the course will be pretty easy. Those who want to learn something for real will do so, and the rest should be able to slide by with little trouble. I've made my peace with that.
I was planning to forego conferences for this year, since I was so wrung out (and broke!) from last fall's double-header. But this morning, I got an email from a senior colleague inviting me to join hir panel, which zi and another colleague are organizing. Both of them are heavy-hitters who have written crackerjack books that I have not only read but studied closely. And the theme of the panel is on one of the big theoretical topics I've set myself to develop from my field research! After catching my breath at the thought of how much money I'll have to spend to go to this year's Big Giant Pseudology Conference, I admitted to myself that I'd be a damn fool to pass up this invitation. I'm psyched at the thought that I might get to sit on an invited panel alongside scholars I admire, and pleased (albeit a little scared) that this means that I must attack this paper with a lot more theoretical rigor than I devoted to the one I gave last year.
Speaking of research as well as life during wartime, today is one year and a day after I began one of the strangest, scariest adventures of my life. But an adventure it remained, for me, and led to some fondly remembered times with some old friends and some new friends — Shedding Khawatir and her husband foremost among the latter. The whole business, as vexing as it can be to analyze professionally as a pseudologist, is going to shape my career for years to come. Now that I listen to the song I keep name-checking, I'm a little stunned to recognize some lines as things that have actually happened to me. The sound of gunfire off in the distance, I'm getting used to it now. I've got some groceries, some peanut butter, should last a couple of days. Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock, we blended in with the crowd. I hope I make the best of all this. I hope my friends back in Research Country do, too. Al-sawra mustamirra, y'all.

This ain't no party; this ain't no disco; this ain't no foolin' around. The war is on.

RBOC: Spring 2012 semester edition

2012-01-25T21:56:00.000-06:00

It's been an emotional rollercoaster for me this week, just like the rest of January. I'm increasingly convinced that Ghosttown, for a variety of reasons, is actually bad for my mental health. It is therefore uncomfortable to speculate on the possibility that my only hope of employment for next year may be begging to have my current contract renewed for another year. Sick irony, anyone?
My therapist seems to have zeroed in on my emotional distress as rooted in guilt, shame, and self-loathing. I find myself agreeing with this and, at the same time, wondering, Are there survivors of graduate school who don't fit this profile?
The semester kicking off doesn't do much good for my emotional stability, since there's the inescapable fear that I will somehow screw everything up and scar my students. I'm calming down from that one, as the classes start to knock themselves into shape. The add/drop period makes everything so chaotic that I have totally abandoned teaching actual material for the first week, since so many people register late. I feel good about this choice, now that I've tried playing it both ways. This is definitely the more efficient way to go. The students may be bored the first few days, just going over the syllabus, policies, study skills, etc. But hell, it's not like students won't be bored anyway.
Even faster than last semester, students are dropping my courses (or the idea of them) after getting a look at the requisite work. Effort appears to frighten them intensely. I feel I chose wisely this time around by forcing the students to go through the entire syllabus with me so I can explain to them what college professors mean when we say things like "read" or "take notes." No one seems to arrive at Ghosttown U. with any study skills worth a goddamn, and I figured that out too late to really address it properly last semester. Now that I'm walking them through the processes en masse, and am forcing them to confront the reality that they will have to read for nearly every single class session, a few more of them seem to be jumping ship during the first week.
My favorite example of this so far: a senior came by my office today after class, apologetically explained that zi had just registered a few minutes before, and wanted to know what zi might have missed the first few days. Zi seemed on the ball, well aware of how college operates, and I was fine letting hir know where we'd be picking up. I printed out a syllabus and the little sheet I concocted this morning about reading and note-taking skills and gave them to the student, who seemed almost insulted by the thought that zi would have to read such elementary instructions. I practically apologized as I gently urged Stu to read them through to understand my policies, even though I was sure zi knew all of this stuff already, and explained that these things were intended primarily for my first-year students. Before the work day ended, Stu had already dropped the course. I believe zi was on my roster for approximately two hours.
Not that this is brag-worthy, but I have managed to write bits of my book manuscript more days than not, so far this week. This evening, I was puzzling over which chapters to focus on preparing for my potential book editor's review, and I suddenly realized, while fiddling the wording of a footnote, that Microsoft Word doesn't include footnotes in the word count. (Is this a Mac thing?) I can't for the life of me find whatever widget in Word would change this scenario. But anyway, I created a separate document and copied all of my footnotes from all my chapters into the body text, so I could see the count. It expanded my manuscript word count by nearly 3,000 words! Celebrate!

Tornado?

2012-01-22T22:43:00.002-06:00

I am sitting anxiously at my desk right now, during the first serious tornado watch of my life. We had these things occasionally in DOU-Town, but they were kind of a joke: the landscape, as I was told, did not easily permit such things to form, and tornadoes were exceedingly rare.

Apparently, that is not quite the case here in Ghosttown.

I have vast experience in comporting myself appropriately in, say, heavy rainstorms, snowstorms, ice storms, sandstorms, hurricanes, cold snaps, and heat waves. Been there, done all that. I do not fear them very much. (Even though ice storms are a godawful pain in the ass to cope with afterward.) But I'm afraid of tornadoes. *whimper*

We're only half an hour into the "peak severe timing" for this tornado watch, and the weather service, which I am now checking obsessively online while I am still blessed to have internet access, says there are already tornado warning sirens going off in half a dozen towns and cities not so very far away from Ghosttown. There have been periods of intense rainfall tonight, and some high winds. I've been through all of that many times before, and wouldn't really think much of it if I didn't know the larger forecast. The peak severe timing – what does that mean, anyway, 'be even more afraid right now'? – isn't due to end for another four and a half hours. Seriously, until 3AM! How the fuck am I supposed to get a decent night's rest when I may have to somehow rouse myself to stand in my bathroom as Dorothy's express commuter service rips my house off its foundation?

Needless to say, this is not how I hoped to unwind on the evening before my first day of classes. It's entirely possible that both professor and students will be frazzled and underslept tomorrow in my classrooms.

I guess I'll have a shot of whiskey to calm my nerves, and then prepare for bed, where I will sleep with my iPhone by my ear, in case Ghosttown U.'s alert system sends out a "take shelter immediately" warning.

*whimper*

Evaluations and syllabus revamping

2012-01-19T22:31:00.002-06:00

I had all kinds of bad physical feelings today: I resolved this morning that I need to man up and review my students' evaluations of me, which I've been avoiding. One way or another, I need to know what's in those documents, since they will factor into my job hunt in a few different ways. After fighting off the very real urge to have a whiskey first, I sat down after lunch and downloaded them all.

I'm kind of shocked to see how positive these evaluations are, all in all. Class by class, my students were remarkably high graders on every metric that the university uses. Thankfully, this seems to be due to the tendency of the disgruntled students to chuck the survey altogether, and of the happy students to effuse about their success and whatever they perceive to be my role in it. The only class that seemed generally less contented was, of course, the one composed primarily of lost souls who scored way below their peers in my other classes. Can't say I'm surprised to see that I didn't rate quite as highly with them.

The critiques my students gave ranged from the totally absurd – one in particular seemed aggravated that attending class was a needful part of the course – to the dead-on accurate, which was generally the suggestion that I chill out a bit. I'm never going to be Zen master-mellow, but I can recognize that the students are right that I tend to come down harshly on people who screw up. I need to remember that those who screw up will be penalized for it in their grades, and that attempting to goad them into getting it together comes across as shaming and counter-productive. Let the grades tell them the story, let the grades tell them the story. I can do that, I think.

I've also thinned out the readings, over my instinctive objections. Some of the readings I tried last semester are simply too hard to comprehend without more prior knowledge (or – sigh – better reading skills), and I'll be able to communicate the material better by interactive lecturing than by making them read. Where I could, I also trimmed the lengths of the readings I kept. No doubt I will always get complaints on evaluations that there was too much reading, but I'm hardened to that: way too many students come to college with the apparent belief that reading should not be required at all. I've made my peace with the reality that some students will skim, and some will skip a reading completely, and they may even have good reasons for doing that, but all of this does not mean I shouldn't assign a useful reading anyway.

On the other hand, something I plan to try to avoid a bit of this is to hand out the syllabus in hard copy. Last semester, since I had a huge number of students to deal with, I decided to just upload the syllabus to Blackboard and let them download at will. This led even some smart, hard-working students to give into the temptation not to read the syllabus at all. I'm hoping that sticking a copy under their noses will make them a little more aware of what awaits them. (And, in a perfect world, encourage the real slackers to drop during the first week.)

Finally, I'm also planning to spend part of the first week walking students through how one reads in college, and how one takes notes on that reading. I figured out way too late in the game last time that most of them didn't know these study skills at all, and I had to tell them on an individual basis, which meant that only the students who came to my office hours ever heard that talk. Clearly, I need to take the bull by the horns here.

I have some other issues to deal with for my new class, Pseudology of Research Area. This one will be a brand-new experience for me all the way around, and I'm a little freaked out about not screwing it up. I never even TA'd for an upper-division course, and now I have a course of my own and a TA. Good heavens, how will this work out? I settled on what I think – I'm probably wrong, but whatever – is a really light, doable reading schedule for the syllabus, one which will let us read two full books closely, and take in a bunch of articles and, depending on how crazy I feel, a little multimedia. My enrollment is all over the place, so I have no gauge of how this will pan out. Most of the registered students are pseudology majors, but a fair minority are not, and many of those are only sophomores — and this is an upper-division course.

One might ask how or why such students could even register for my course. The answer is that, for some politicky purposes that I hope will eventually serve someone's interests (preferably mine), I was not permitted to impose any prerequisites on registration. I'm not actually certain that I won't end up having a frosh or two. It's weird, but as long as registration doesn't go much higher than it already is, I'll be content. Ideally, this class would function as a smallish round-table seminar, and we're already on the hefty side of that. If a few more students sign up, I'll have too large a class for my preferred style of interaction, and the course will necessarily skew more toward lectures and less toward student-to-student interactions.

To combat this, insofar as I can, I've arranged for the first few readings to be on the harder, theory-oriented side of things. That, plus a few early quizzes, ought to clue in the idler students that they need to, in the words of Junior Soprano, "come heavy or not at all."*

*In the metaphorical sense ONLY. Don't even get me started on the topic of concealed firearms on college campuses.

RBOC: Storm and Stress edition

2012-01-18T10:19:00.002-06:00

I feel curiously ambivalent about today's haphazardly observed information blackout protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Not about the protest itself, mind you – it's essentially a low-grade civil disobedience project, and I'm cool with much stronger forms of civil disobedience than that – but about the sensation that this fight is in some ways between two sides composed of large and powerful entities. Congress is considerably more powerful than, say, a software company, but I can't help but get a feeling on the back of my neck that this current brouhaha is not necessarily about protecting my personal access to unfettered information. My political voice is being courted by Google, Yahoo, eBay, and other corporate business endeavors that make an awful lot of money, and see themselves on this issue as in opposition to other large moneyed interests like the MPAA, the RIAA, and a host of companies that seek to defend their copyrighted stuff. I can see the validity of both sides' arguments here, although I admit that I instinctively lean toward opposition to the bill as a matter of protecting free speech before protecting intellectual property rights. At the same time, I'm a little put off by the implication of some of the rhetoric of taking down content before the gubmint can do it. And I feel pushed around by both sides. Hmm.
You know those fights that happen between friends that seem to come out of nowhere, all because something came out of someone's mouth a little oddly and someone else took offense to it? That happened on the internet a few days ago. I resigned myself to not following it closely, because it seemed like everyone involved was getting progressively angrier and more accusatory, and I was afraid I would be sucked further into it as well. I quite like Historiann's blog, as a rule, and feel bad for her that her digital front porch sometimes plays host to flame wars. I was kind of blindsided to see how quickly tempers rose, since almost all of the early commenters, to my knowledge, are at least internet-level friends of Historiann, and the interactions are usually pretty cordial. It upset me a bit, perhaps because it reminds me of analogous scenarios with my family. :(
I had my second therapy appointment yesterday. After hearing me go off about everything messing with my head for a second time, the therapist seems to be getting a clearer picture of what's eating me, and how zi might help. Hope zi's up to the task. Zi had originally believed, from our first meeting, that my problem was stress. Stress? Really? I survived eight years of grad school, two years of field research, a dissertation, and ongoing job hunt with no end in sight. I'm actually pretty good at managing what some might call stress. Zi eventually got the picture, though, when I spoke for almost an hour about all the horrible emotions that my family brings out in me. Stress = no big deal. Horrible emotions = big deal.
Why must I keep encountering racists in Ghosttown bars? I felt like I'd crossed into the Twilight Zone last evening when a guy next to me at the bar struck up a conversation, and went from perfectly pleasant chit-chat to advising – in that thinly coded language we pseudologists recognize so well – that black welfare queens were going to destroy this country, and I should get myself a second passport and move to some nice Third World country where there's at least less corruption than the US, and topped it off by outing himself as a birther.
*headbar*
I suspect that I keep attracting this sort of vermin in bars because I look white, and I dress on the conservative end of professorial haberdashery, as pseudologists go. In other words, I think tipsy people mistake me for things that I am not, but which they assume as normal around here: a) a Republican, b) a white supremacist, c) a wealthy person with unsentimental class interests to protect, or d) some combination of the first three.* They're invariably older people, as well: not a one of these characters I've had to talk to at my favorite bar is under sixty. Maybe I need to start politely ignoring tipsy old people?

*With apologies to any of my readers who may be (a) but neither (b) nor (c).

Is this the better way to spend the day?

2012-01-14T16:16:00.000-06:00

I am still here, folks. The last few weeks have been some of the worst and most painful that I can remember since I was in the depths of dissertation despair. I've been so depressed and miserable that I couldn't work. Clearly, that state of affairs cannot last if I want to keep feeding and sheltering myself. I would like to think that I'm starting to come out of such low places now. I started seeing a therapist this week, who freely acknowledges that zi cannot solve my problems (no one could), but who hopes that zi can help me to work on some coping skills.

It took tremendous effort on my part to focus at all this week, but somehow I managed to complete the assigned reading lists and course packs for both my syllabi. And today, wonder of wonders, I actually did some fiddling with my book manuscript for the first time in months. (Without the stupid course packs hanging over my head, I felt better able to tackle the book.)

I don't want this blog to become a constant stream of doom and gloom. I think it may depress me as much as anyone else to read that here. Now that I have a professional to talk to about the bad stuff on my mind, I shouldn't feel quite as driven to use this blog for personal one-sided talk therapy.

In any case, though, I still have a penchant for posting music clips. That will continue indefinitely, have no fear.

Trouble in belly

2012-01-02T23:06:00.001-06:00

Groan. As if I didn't feel bad enough already, I managed to start off the new year by poisoning myself with my cooking. I'm reasonably sure that the culprit was the catfish I made last night – it was still good, on paper at least, and I bought local stuff – although it's a toss-up whether the larger issue was the freshness of the fish or the dreadfulness of my cookery. I tried my hand, on a whim, at dredging it in flour and preparing it in something like Southern style. It all went so badly, though: the butter burned in the pan, the seasoned flour I prepared had no flavor to speak of, even though I added enough cayenne to make me choke on the fumes, and the thicker parts of the filets didn't even cook through by the time the ends were burning and filling my kitchen with noxious smoke. (On a side note: if that mess didn't set off my smoke detector, then it may be non-operative. Hmm.)

My guts have been causing me to whine out loud all day long, even though I live alone and there is no one to hear me bitching. Remind me never to let fish sit in the fridge overnight before cooking it — at least, not while I'm living in Ghosttown, which seems incapable of getting truly fresh seafood in the supermarkets. Ow.

On the plus side, I've just cooked up a beautiful pot of Indian-style lentils with spinach, which is already making me feel (a tiny bit) better. Now that my grumpy belly is newly filled with lentil soup and red wine, I have several multimedia observations to make.

First, meaning no offense either to singer or to fan, I'm having trouble getting into Florence and the Machine. Leaving aside the lyrics (hit or miss, with me) and her voice (undoubtably strong and beautiful, but disturbingly close to Celine Dion), I find myself unsettled by Florence Welch's gestures. The things she does with her arms when she's not even singing, you know? Tragically, she keeps reminding me of this bit of Cold Comfort Farm:

Sorta takes the wind out of Flo's sails, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, if you want a groovy live performance with great vocals, how about this?

Trouble in mind

2011-12-30T18:12:00.001-06:00

Dame Eleanor's comment on my last post reminded me that I should say something here, lest my readers think I've taken a turn for the worse. It's been a very long ten days. I am generally feeling pretty terrible after this family visit, and wondering if my low-rent university health insurance will pay for any therapy visits.

I can't write any more about this stuff here. Listen to music instead.

Music for hard times

2011-12-19T16:37:00.000-06:00

Sigh. I'm gearing up for a week and a half up in Hometown with my family. As usual with these things, I will not go into details. I need to vent here, though, that this visit is going to hurt. I am dreading this visit the way I used to dread going to the dentist. As a lot of us know, there's no ultimate cure for the kind of bone-deep wounds that family relationships can inflict. The best we can do is salve the wounds a little. Hence the music.

June Tabor – The Great Valerio

Mary Gauthier – Mercy now

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings – Hard times

Sarah Jarosz - Come on up to the house

Wardrobe update

2011-12-16T14:34:00.000-06:00

Like all good bargain hunters, I know that half of the battle is a matter of patience: you need to wait for the really good sales to roll around. Finally, a good one came up, and gave me the chance to update my wardrobe a bit from "harried and impoverished grad student" to "harried and semi-impoverished professor." I am particularly pleased that I've finally bought myself a second sport coat, and – oh, happy, geeky day! – sweater vests.

I feel so...so...professorial. :)

RBOC: Post-grading

2011-12-14T15:00:00.000-06:00

Most of my students ended up doing tolerably well, I'm pleased to report. Most of them, I'd wager, ended up getting pretty much the grades they wanted. The rest of them got the grades they deserved.
We are now in the post-finals grade-grubbing period. I will never entirely understand why students believe they can get their grades adjusted upward just by asking nicely. It's not second helpings of pie, kids; it's an evaluation of your performance. Live with it.
Speaking of grade-grubbing, I'm amazed that some students are so self-deluded that they don't understand why they failed. Look at your grades on Blackboard, you jackass! How can any of this be a surprise?
In one impressive case, a student seemed to believe that zi was destined to pass, despite skipping half the work throughout the semester, and failing almost all of the rest. All of this is clearly delineated in a web page to which Stu has access. How does zi not know this? And whence comes the chutzpah to ask me if I can just give hir a passing grade? I won't do this for anyone, but it seems additionally bonkers to ask it of a professor for whose class one has exhibited virtually no effort at all.
I feel like I need to vent about this here, because my inclination is not even to dignify the grade-grubbing email with a response. Partly, this is due to my sense of principle: the grades are published, there's nothing else to be done. And partly, it's because I fear my own capacity for sarcasm under such circumstances. I don't know that I'm capable of composing an email to someone who irrationally believes they should pass, in which I point out an almost unbroken chain of disastrous failure leading to a failing grade, without sounding sarcastic about it.

Post-conference exhaustion

2011-12-11T00:07:00.001-06:00

I'm feeling a little knocked out right now, after going through finals week as a professor for the first time ever. Please accept my apologies for saying so little online lately: I couldn't think much about the blog this week. A week ago, I was just getting back to Ghosttown from the Major Area Studies Conference, where I got to see Shedding Khawatir again, and had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with Ajnabieh. (See my sidebar for their respective blogs.) I had a fine time there, and enjoyed feeling a little bit more like a scholar on the loose than a kid at the grown-ups' table. Much like I did at the Big Giant Pseudology Conference, I savored the chance to see my old friends again; the smaller number of such friends at MASC is tempered by the sweetness of seeing a number of people who live quite far overseas, including some countries that are prohibitively expensive to visit without a grant or an expense account.

Right on the heels of the end of MASC, naturally, I came down with a cold, which I've been enduring all week while administering final exams to my classes and, when time permits, grading them with my TA. It's lucky for me that I have so little pride — otherwise, I suppose, it would have been embarrassing to arrive at a grading session with a huge box of tissues in hand. (My nose has been running all day.) But tonight, I uploaded all my final grades to the university system, and they have been finalized. I AM FREE!!!...for a few days, anyway.

I guess that, after a day or two of seeing colleagues getting 'faced on cream-based cocktails at the local pre-Christmas parties, and grappling with the maddening conflict between Nyquil, Dayquil, and bourbon, and other post-Finals Week issues, I need to focus a little attention on my sorely neglected writing. And then, of course, I need to plan out my syllabi for next semester for reals. Lord help me, I'll be teaching my first-ever upper-division course, and I will use this blog as a way to vent the sad fact that

I have no fucking idea how to do this.

Please don't tell anyone.

I haven't been in an upper-division course targeted toward pseudology majors in, gulp, twelve years. And that was back at Alma Mater College, which was quite a different place from Ghosttown U. I've already planned out a pretty feasible reading list, I think/hope, with the assumption that I shouldn't slam my students the way we were slammed at AMC. But I need to do the fiddly work of scheduling weekly assignments and so forth, and I guess I'll just have to learn through trial and error how to lead a discussion-based seminar course. (Moan.)

On a side note, I assume that a lot, if not most universities are going through the same finals-and-grading stampede right now, so I'm willing myself to be calm and detached about all those prelim interviews I had a few weeks back. Nearly all of them told me they'd let me know the status of my application some time this month. I'll probably start climbing walls and forging prescriptions for sedatives in another week if I don't get some good news about those jobs, but I'm okay. For now.

Meanwhile, I'm going to swaddle myself in woolen clothing, because it's fucking cold here in Ghosttown, and try to get myself to the supermarket so I can buy some more generic cold medicine so I can try to fall asleep without feeling like my nose is revolting against my body's structural order.

Useless heap of conference-going flesh

2011-11-29T22:32:00.001-06:00

Another night before I fly to a major academic conference, another night that I find myself helpless and paralyzed in the face of a presentation that refuses to write itself. On the plus (?) side, I have no job interviews to prepare for at Major Area Studies Conference, so I can devote a little more of my intellect to making this shit make sense. So it goes.

RBOC: post-T-Day, inter-conference edition

2011-11-26T08:58:00.001-06:00

It occurs to me to mention that, although I brought my suit with me to the Big Giant Pseudology Conference, I never wore it. I actually put it on the morning that my interview onslaught began, but as soon as I saw myself in the hotel room mirror, I knew it wasn't right. (It doesn't help that the cut of the suit somehow makes me look like an undertaker.) I wanted to look professional and respectful at my interviews, but a suit would be going way too far. I ended up substituting my sport coat for the suit coat, and wearing the suit pants as separates. Felt much better.
For those of you who find yourselves in a similar position to mine, try bringing a suit and something just a little less formal (but business-appropriate) to your next conference. Scope out the scene before you have to swing into action. I think that I saw only five men at BGPC wearing suits, the entire time I was there. Sometimes a suit just isn't what you need to look professional.
Coming off the BGPC and getting ready for the Major Area Studies Conference coming up soon means that I was actually back in Ghosttown for Thanksgiving, which in turn meant that I spent Thanksgiving by myself. I felt a trifle sorry for myself about this, even though Thanksgiving is one of those holidays where I feel like I'm supposed to be with other people because everyone tells me I should. (Valentine's Day is the worst offender of these.) In time-honored fashion, though, I stopped feeling sorry for myself after a ten-minute phone call to my family in Hometown. As they passed around the phone so I could send greetings to everyone, I could clearly hear three of my close relatives yelling at each other in the kitchen about how to do the cooking prep — especially when someone put the phone down for a solid minute without anyone else picking it up. I know exactly where all of that was going, and when the call ended, I gave thanks to whatever powers might exist that I was nowhere near Hometown that day.
And really, I get a little more uneasy about celebrating Thanksgiving every year: all this stuff and nonsense about "what are we thankful for this year?" seems to me a band-aid for our consciences, given that the source of the holiday is really a celebration of successful colonialism and the establishment of a toe-hold of British imperialism in the New World by "some Mayflower-cruising Jesus freak corn rustlers."
Since I've been having trouble focusing on work after BGPC, it's only yesterday that I really began to write my talk for MASC. Of course, I never make things easy on myself, so I've also begun to fiddle around for the first time with iMovie, so I can edit together bits and pieces of things for my presentation. I'm not sure I can make this work, but I'm hoping to knit together some clips and some subtitles, and have it all come out looking good. No doubt this will require many hours at my computer muttering under my breath as I learn on the job how to use iMovie. But at least that's more productive than spending many hours at my computer surfing YouTube clips, repeatedly checking hobby forums, and generally skiving off work.
The other thing gluing me to the internet for long stretches of time is the current wave of unrest in Research Country. It's arguably worse than earlier this year, for a number of complex reasons. And now, to be self-centered for a moment, it hurts me more, because it's beginning to hurt people I know. (I knew people involved from the start, but they all caught lucky breaks at that time.) I won't go into details here, for the sake of their privacy and mine, but it's giving me and a lot of my friends gray hair. I'm supposed to share a hotel room with an old friend at MASC, and now we're not sure that zi will be able to travel out of RC. Not that zi is likely to end up in a dungeon or anything, but the sense of instability, to say nothing of potential travel bans by the government, may make it seem more prudent for hir to stay in RC with hir family. I certainly couldn't blame hir if that's what happens, but I'd be sorry to miss out on seeing an old friend — which, as I've been saying lately, is the best thing about academic conferences.
And, naturally, it raises everyone's anxiety to think about why people would have to make such choices. The beauty of non-violent civil disobedience can also be its weakness: it doesn't push violent people from power. We're, uh, coming to the end of the non-violent phase of RC's political transformation, I fear. (Really, it ended quite some time ago, but here we would have to start parsing language about who is coordinating violence in premeditated fashion for political ends.) There are many violent people still in power in RC, and they are willing to kill whomever they think they have to kill to maintain that power. Getting rid of them may require RC to endure a proper civil war. I don't know how any of this will pan out, but it seems a sure bet that there's going to be a lot more death and destruction before the dust settles.
The neighborhood that I lived in for several years, and where I spent untold amounts of time during my doctoral research, is turning into a genuine war zone. A lot of my area studies colleagues and I have similar experiences there, due to the presence of a major academic institution in the area, and we're all heartsick to look at the videos on YouTube that show our former stomping ground transformed into a battleground, complete with front lines, field hospitals, and poorly observed ceasefire agreements. It's hard to see such things, even when your professional judgment tells you that these sorts of events had to occur sooner or later to sort out long-standing political disputes. It's...it's just hard.

Big Giant Catch-up

2011-11-21T21:40:00.001-06:00

Please insert your prophylactic superstition of choice here, because I don't want to jinx the fact that I feel like I kicked ass, for the most part, at my interviews at the Big Giant Pseudology Conference. I had prelims for four different tenure-track positions, and two contract jobs. I feel that I acquitted myself very well at all the t-t interviews, as well as at one of the contract jobs. There were little things here and there, but really, with the five interviews that went well, my only doubts are essentially about the level of my rapport with the interviewers. There were moments at three of them when I worried that my "I am so awesome and cool" hypnosis was weakening, but the two others went just beautifully, and I'm really hopeful that I will hear encouraging news from those two soon.

The sixth interview...well, it was the classic bad interview scenario in which the interviewer couldn't shut up about hirself. I was astonished to see this: usually, it's the interviewee under scrutiny who screws things up by getting nervous and droning on and on. But here, the interviewer, who basically has nothing at all to lose no matter what happens, seemed bent on ruining the possibility of determining my potential usefulness by talking about hirself constantly. Zi went so far as to cut me off when I was beginning to answer hir question about being in Research Country earlier this year to tell me at ungodly length about the fun zi had as a tourist in RC ten years ago. Srsly? Why have an interview at all?

Anyway, that crappy interview was for, by a long shot, the worst position that seems interested in me thus far. I have absolutely zero desire to lose a year of my life to the sinkhole in which the institution resides, and even less desire to take on a high teaching load for a one-year position that cannot under any circumstances be extended. Now that I think about it, I also would be perfectly happy never to encounter that interviewer again, either.

But enough about the low note. I did well (I think, I hope) at five interviews, four of them t-t positions! And I gave the worst conference talk of my career thus far, I admit. But hey, I told you all last week that I would — no surprise there. I took it on the chin for that from a friend and colleague of mine during the Q&A, but that's what happens when you try to be hip and timely. (And, to be generous to myself for a moment, that's what happens when you have to submit a conference abstract when you're living in evacuation from world-changing events in your own field site, and you can't really bring yourself to think about business as usual.)

Plus, I had the chance to sit down and meet with my potential book editor. I feel really good about where this book project is going, after feeling out what the editor would like to see. In a sharp distinction from my admittedly crappy talk, my (potential) editor clearly wants to see well-theorized and carefully crafted work, even if it takes a little while. I can gladly do that. Now I need to channel that good will into a fresh burst of writing.

Finally, I had the chance to see some dear old friends again, whom I never get to see otherwise. This is rapidly becoming my favorite part of the Big Giant Pseudology Conference, which had heretofore felt like an albatross around my scholarly neck. Now that most of my closest friends from grad school and I have graduated and moved on to positions in far-flung locales, we really can't see each other except at BGPC. It's just wonderful to see them again, and catch up on the personal news, and see how they mostly look just like I remember, except for the stray gray hair or post-pregnancy pound. The best moments at BGPC are almost inevitably the ones that happen with old friends over dinner or drinks.

And, once my head clears tomorrow from the tequila I'm drinking now, I need to start preparing my talk for the next conference I'm going to, the Major Area Studies Conference. MASC isn't nearly as crucial to my career in most ways as is BGPC, but in my recollection, it's more fun — when you don't have as much riding on your personal interactions at a conference, it gives you more room to relax and enjoy yourself. The hotel bar at MASC, last time I attended, was a crazy place in the evening. Guess I'd better script that talk, so I can earn my drunken bonhomie at MASC.

Big. Giant. Pseudology. Conference.

2011-11-16T17:09:00.001-06:00

Just a short post, since my time isn't exactly my own this week. I'm here in beautiful Conference City, and am enjoying the taste of urban and urbane sophistication. Plus, I'm seeing all my old friends again! And I'm giving a paper, naturally, although I can't pretend that I consider the research I'm presenting as quite ground-breaking. (Haven't worked through enough of the implications to get that far yet.) Most importantly for professional purposes, though, this is My Big Year of job interviews: I've lined up six prelim interviews at BGPC, which my more senior colleagues tell me is a really big number. Coolness! The next step, of course, is to do well at those interviews. The blitz starts tomorrow, so now I need to put the finishing touches on my talk and then steel myself for a lot of interview scariness. But hey, I already feel a little ego boost from my friends' reactions to my schedule! I can do this, right? I mean, I CAN DO THIS!

Off I go.

Pre-conference anxiety

2011-11-10T14:13:00.001-06:00

I'm not usually the type to get tied up in knots prior to conferences. I like to hobnob, and catch up with old friends, and generally feel professional and professorial. But this year, I have a sense of dread, largely because I feel a distinct lack of confidence. (Thanks a lot, Journal of Pretentious Self-Justification, for taking the wind out of my sails.) I'm still struggling to put the subject of my impending talk into words that don't sound superficial and played out, since that journal rejection seems to think exactly that of me. And that journal's home discipline is, ostensibly, less theory-centered than my home branch of pseudology. Can I offer any analysis that will not yield a shower of rotten vegetables from an enraged audience? My blood runs cold to wonder about this.

The fear is ratcheted up as well by the fact that a friend of mine is chairing the session, and zi is pretty well up to date on my work. I feel personal pressure not to repeat too much of what zi has already heard, although zi is certainly more intimately familiar with my research than 99% of pseudologists. And I'd die of shame if I left myself open to a serious criticism from my friend about my methodology or my analysis. Avoiding shame would be nice.

Speaking of fear, shame, and colleagues, have I mentioned that I'm on the job market this year? Lord love a duck, I've lined up three preliminary interviews at the Big Giant Pseudology Conference so far, as well as a face-to-face chat with the press editor I've been corresponding with about my manuscript. My intellectual knowledge that I have acquired a sophisticated repertoire of questions and answers for job interviews is at war with the id-like fear that I will only continue to humiliate myself the way I did the last time I attended BGPC. I've already had one prelim interview this year via video-conference, and it was a struggle for me to speak about my research, because the criticisms/dismissals in the article rejection were so fresh in my mind. I was afraid to say what I was working on, because I was newly aware that people might all but say out loud that it was stupid. That I'm stupid.

We all go through moments of this, right? I just need to get my theory brain going again — I feel like I've been spending entirely too much time thinking about my classes, which is exactly what everyone and his mother warned me not to do. And I need to get my game face on for impressing potential manuscript-buyers and hiring committees. I need to spend a little time thinking of myself as a functioning scholar, instead of a contract teacher. And maybe I also need to drop by the haberdashery, since I just realized that my dressier shoes and accessories are all black, but my only sport coat and my best non-suit trousers are both brown. In my anxiety, I'm planning to pack both my (charcoal gray) suit and some more professorial clothing, and I find it easier on these business trips to pack a wardrobe that goes with a single overarching color to match or complement.

And yes, I am aware that this clothing-buying impulse is probably yet another way for me to avoid writing my conference talk. FML.

Bad week, good week

2011-11-06T17:24:00.000-06:00

BAD: My journal submission got rejected hard this week. The peer reviews were little short of scathing. I'm not sure if I totally misjudged the inclinations of the journal, or if those reviewers were especially invested in a particular direction for publications. In any case, they hated it. It looks like I have to go back to the drawing board in a serious way for this article. In an annoying twist, I had selected this journal in the first place because I thought the article made a better fit for them than other pseudology journals. Apparently not.

GOOD: I've lined up a few preliminary interviews so far, and I'm hoping to add a few more, since the Big Giant Pseudology Conference is coming up soon. It's good to hear from people interested in me and my work, since some others have been so, uh, unenthused about it lately.

BAD: I got shot down by two different women this week over in Large Regional City, which put a damper on my interest in driving up there for a day trip this weekend. I've got a lot of prep work to do for BGPC, and the only reason I would absent myself from that is to go try to have a dating life in LRC — there's a distinct shortage of single women in Ghosttown, in case I haven't mentioned that yet. LRC ain't showin' me no love, y'all. Back to the salt mines with me, for lack of anything better to do.

GOOD: Lately, I've had a number of 'light bulb' moments with students, where I could actually see the flash of understanding on their faces as they processed some new ideas. It's really gratifying to see them begin to understand something for the first time, right there in class. You know what I mean, when their faces change expression and they look vaguely surprised as they realize that they know what I mean now? It's awesome.

Stuck with a syllabus

2011-10-27T22:57:00.003-05:00

I've come to the conclusion that, for the long haul, I will have to severely re-tool the syllabus I've been using this semester. For a number of reasons, it doesn't always work as effectively as I hoped it might, and in a few ways it actually seems to be counter-productive. I'm not going to be super-negative and say that this is due to the intellectual inadequacy of my students — because that's genuinely not true. I will, however, lay the blame for this largely at the feet of the great state of _______, which has apparently been bent on robbing its public school students of all critical thinking skills and allowing their nascent intellectual muscles to atrophy. One of my students, whilst explaining to me why zi had found the course curriculum challenging, clued me in to the fact that the state educational structure encourages high school students to get their 'hard' courses out of the way during 9th and 10th grades, and then they do little (memorable) for the latter two years of high school other than study for standardized exams. Historiann has sounded off on this topic before, and she's got lots more statistics and fleshed-out ideas about this than have I, so I'll let you play with those links and cede my time to her. I gotta say, though, that I was stunned to hear from the horse's mouth just how little serious education high school students got, and how much time was devoted to studying for tests that literally would not help them after they matriculated to college.

Anyway, my point is that I think there are some structural problems with my syllabus, given the level of student preparation that I can expect to encounter.* In the long run, this won't be a really big deal to fix: give me a few weeks of downtime with a few textbooks and readers, and I'll be able to put together something more suitable that will more easily reach the students "where they are" while still challenging them to go further. But in the short run, I am – as are my students – stuck with the syllabus more or less as it currently exists. I'm teaching four courses at a time for the entire academic year. I'm firing with all cylinders on the job market. I'm trying to write my first book. I simply don't have time to cook up a new syllabus and its accompanying entirely new slate of lectures. Practically speaking, I'm unable to divorce myself from my current syllabus, except perhaps to swap out a few readings where they proved seriously unworkable.

I'd ask for advice here, if I thought there were any to give. All I can see is that I must do a little triage work on the parts of the syllabus that clearly do more harm than good, and then do what I can to present the rest of the syllabus in a more sugar-coated fashion. Largely, this means accepting that diligent first-year students are going to try their best to do the reading, but will not understand it to any significant degree. Therefore, I need to walk them through the meaning of each reading, instead of assuming that they'll get at least the gist if they try. It also means that, next time around, I need to assume that no one has even taught them the basics of how one does college, and that as a result, I'll have to demonstrate to them in the early weeks how one engages with a piece of academic writing. That in and of itself will eat up some time in the semester, giving me less time to deal with readings and concepts — but, then again, maybe that's not the worst outcome anyway.

Meanwhile, I'm exhausted from spending way too much time this evening parsing out the meaning of tomorrow's reading for students who have no idea how to pull ideas out of a relatively simple text.** (Relatively simple = written for perhaps a 10th-grade reading level, and assuming little if any prior knowledge of the subject.)

* And, in the case of a few readings, sometimes I just blew it, and a particular piece wouldn't really register for students no matter what university they're at or how much college prep they've experienced.
** And yeah, I'm the first one to point out that a few of my top performers actually do get this stuff, and are stimulated by it. But I don't want to face my judgment someday before the Flying Spaghetti Monster and have to explain why I directed my courses to the top 5% of the enrollment, and let the rest stumble around in confusion.

Repeat applicant etiquette

2011-10-22T21:10:00.000-05:00

Ah, another dubious pleasure of academic job-hunting: seeing the same institutional names again, as one attempts to get a position at a university that rejected one from consideration last year. Aside from avoiding the sense of failure resurrected, there's a particular trick about these that I'm still not sure how to do right. Is it appropriate to refer to one's previous application, even if it was for a different position within the same department? I'm tempted to say to Repeat U:

Please refer to my academic transcript from my previous application to your department.

It is, after all, sort of stupid to have to pay DOU-Town to send the Pseudology Dept. at Repeat U the exact same transcript that they sent last year. It's not going to change at this point. But good applicant etiquette demands that I do this anyway, doesn't it?

For that matter, in general, should I not mention my previous application? In the case at hand, Repeat U is a pretty small place, and the Pseudology Dept. therefore is a very small place. I'm already personally acquainted with the intended recipient of this letter as a result of last year's application process, if only by correspondence. It seems somehow odd not to acknowledge this fact, especially since a lot of the form of my letter is the same from year to year — although, obviously, some pertinent facts have changed about my CV, and the nature of the position being advertised is also different in focus. But does etiquette demand that we politely ignore this reality? Must we (pretend to) start fresh?

I'm quite interested to see what readers have to say on this topic, both my fellow job-hunting rookies and more senior faculty who have served on hiring committees.

Clock it

2011-10-21T16:20:00.003-05:00

I received my first rejection email of this job-hunting cycle today. And we're off!

On the plus side, I had a freakishly good week of Q&A sessions with my students. Who knew that they would have such an appetite for, uh, Fruit Studies?

*waves at Sisyphus*

In these shoes?

2011-10-16T23:31:00.001-05:00

Hmm, shoes. The responses to my last post suggested I may need to upgrade my footwear for teaching purposes, to help ward off lower back pain. (And yes, I get it, I should also be exercising.) Since this relates to an earlier post in which I wondered about buying new shoes versus repairing old ones, I am now considering afresh what to do about the damn things. (Obviously, I never made it to a shoe repair shop this weekend. Midterms.)

So first of all, here are the shoes I've been wearing pretty much consistently for the last few years. I don't like to think too much about this stuff, so I buy a pair in tan and another in black, and I'm covered for almost all wardrobe situations in my working and private life. They work fine with business-casual trousers, they look great with jeans, and on occasion – including my memorable campus interview this past winter in a heavy snowstorm – I can even get away with the black ones when I'm wearing my charcoal-gray suit.

These shoes have several virtues in my eyes – versatility and comfort – but durability is kind of a problem. A year and a half walking around DOU-Town did in my last pairs, and less than a year in Research Country accomplished much the same thing to my current pairs. So, with that in mind, as well as my aching back, I'm no longer sure that I should bother to repair these, or even buy new pairs.

So, tell me, O internet, what other options have I, as a dorky academic who just wants a nice pair or two of plain-toe* oxfords for all occasions that fit comfortably and are good for my health?

Yeah, yeah, I know, Dr. Martens are supposed to be nice. But I never really understood the point of these shoes, once we all graduated from college and were no longer allowed to look like...well, like college students. That stupid-ass yellow stitching and creepy-colored sole utterly ruin color coordination with anything that didn't come out of the $1 bin at the Salvation Army. And really, I never went for wingtips. Wingtips are, from my perspective, kind of douchey. Even the ironic ones. For that reason, I'm not much fonder of these (non-ironic?) Dr. Martens. As a final complaint on these shoes, I find the heel very thin and knife-like whenever I've tried them, and I really hate shoes that make my heels blister. Comfort is key!

Swinging in the other direction, there are some seriously cushy-heeled shoes out there, like these Tims. And Timberlands, as I've found, are pretty hardy shoes. But these? They're a little too boot-like for my taste. As far as I can see, they are Timberland boots, except with a lower top that doesn't go over the ankle. But this doesn't make them look like any classroom-to-dinner-date shoe that I've ever seen; it only makes them look like industrial-strength safety shoes. (Don't they look like they should have steel toes?) I can't imagine wearing these to a conference, especially in a year like this year, when I'm on the market and, pace Historiann, should be prepared to wear a suit or something close to it for my (fingers crossed!) preliminary interviews.

Now these more formal Tims are closer to what I'm looking for. Nice simple lines, no wingtip nonsense, no ooh-look-at-me ironic-hipster trimming, and even a little cushioning around the heel. Frankly, the only thing I worry about with these – apart from the obvious fact that I won't know how they fit unless I buy a pair online or trudge all the way up to Major Regional City and go shoe shopping – is that the sole may not offer the level of support that I need to teach on my feet all day long. Well, that, and the inescapable fact that they cost $120 per pair. The Dockers I've relied on for years cost half of that. But perhaps this is one of those situations in which you get what you pay for.

I dunno. Can anyone lend me some fashion brains for a few minutes?

And, lest the post title leave you hanging...

*Cap-toes can be fun, but a little ostentatious for me. I have a ridiculously over-the-top pair of cap-toe oxfords that I've worn with my gray suit for ages, though. Maybe I should get something a little less flashy and workaday, but I can't bring myself to do it, given that I wear a suit about four times a year and want to enjoy the occasions as they come.

A cry for help

2011-10-16T08:37:00.003-05:00

Friends, I need your aid and support at this time. Support in particular. I have discovered that my teaching regimen of four lectures a day, three days a week is giving me serious lower back pain. As a practical matter, I have to stand in order to lecture — otherwise, I can't make eye contact with too many students, I lose energy and focus, and in any case, I have a tendency to pace around the stage or podium area as I talk.

Clearly, I'm getting old, since I never used to notice that standing and walking gave me lower back pain. What am I supposed to do, or wear, or avoid in order to stave off feeling achy and exhausted three afternoons a week? Surely other professors have experienced the heartbreak of backache.

I noticed this especially last week when I proctored midterms for all my sections. My TA and I were both groaning and muttering by the end, and zi is way younger than I am, so I'm hopeful that this is not entirely a function of my being a broken-down old coot.

Rigor, reason, and reality

2011-10-09T14:09:00.001-05:00

Continuing a bloggy conversation that Dr. Crazy started this past week, I've been doing a lot of thinking about, well, look at the title of this post. I've been bitching and moaning for weeks now about my disappointing students, and some blogging colleagues have offered various suggestions for getting a handle on my anger and frustration, and for finding more useful ways to explain information to students. In the meat world, some colleagues and I have also been commiserating about all this, particularly those of us who are all new hires at Ghosttown U.

From one angle, at least, I feel a lot better than I did before: I have learned that the students' evaluative narratives count for precious little towards my future job prospects. Thus, I don't have to fret before bed each night that I won't get another job because my students here, irked at being made to think hard, are going to write "OMG wurst prof evar, to hard, donot take any classes with this jerk!"

And on my end of things, I am making my peace with the fact that some of my expectations for my students here were simply too high, and I will have to adjust them as much as I am able within the confines of the course requirements, and fix them more fully in future semesters. I've heard universal exclamations from my newly hired colleagues here that the students at Ghosttown U. cannot handle the same level of work that students at a wide variety of other big state universities could do. My former students at Dear Old University are but one example of this phenomenon: I was at a collegial party last evening, and I lost track of how many different state universities were mentioned in exactly the same way. They could handle what Ghosttown U. students cannot.

Obviously, this means that I have more work to do on my syllabi than I wanted, but that's the way it is. Challenging and pushing my students is one thing, but it's a kind of cruelty to set them up for failure by presenting them with reading material that, by all accounts, they cannot yet understand at all. In practice, this means that I will need to ditch two or three readings on my current syllabus that aren't working out: students come to class without having really tried to read, because they are dead certain that they cannot do it. As pathetic as that sounds, that's the truth. The few super-bright students in my classes will not be harmed by not reading these things; they'll likely encounter them later, as they qualify for and seek out successively harder, more ambitious classes. I'm teaching an intro course, after all. It also means I have to lower my expectations for one or two readings this semester: the students will suffer with them, not get them at all, and give up. And, as I remain aware, I do not want them to give up if they are really trying in the first place. I don't grade primarily on effort, but I pay a lot of attention to effort when looking for ways to engage them.

That's not to say that I'm not going to challenge my students at all, and just pat them on the head for spelling their own names right. The challenges will continue. But I'm developing a sense of where the boundary lies between "tough but possible" and "impossibly tough" for the majority of my students.

I'm also going to fiddle with the current syllabus a bit – it ain't no legal contract, after all – and institute some pop quizzes on the readings. I'll have to go easy on this in practice, lest I simply demoralize them with the sense of constant testing. But I'm seeing even some of my better students acting on the belief that it's okay for them to slide on some days. I'm okay with them struggling with the readings, but not with neglecting them. I thought that the pace of the standard quizzes would keep them current, but I was wrong. Too many of the students assume that they don't have to read if I haven't expressly warned them of a coming evaluative assignment. Like I said, part of the problem is that I overloaded them with reading material that they find too difficult, but another part is that they think that they only have to read before quizzes and tests. Well, we'll see what happens when they learn that any day (...or every day?...) can be Quiz Day.

As for not being heartsick and agonized to behold the continuing downward spiral of public education in this state...well, I'll have to toughen up about that. In some ways, it just sucks for my students that they have run into a professor who runs a tougher class than some others do, and who thinks that even an intro-level class should make students sweat a little. But I'm going to try very hard to demonstrate to them that, in some ways, this is not only good for them, but will feel good, too.

Acting like an imbecile

2011-10-04T10:02:00.000-05:00

I've not been in a good mood lately. I've been avoiding answering emails as well as checking in on the blogging scene here, because I have so much negativity built up. I'm just frustrated with the apparent inability of my students to think straight, to understand that it's not appropriate to waltz into class twenty minutes late and then start texting on the cell phone, to recognize basic facts of reality. I'm a little worn down by the realization that the closest place where people aren't exactly like the residents of Ghosttown is a full hour and a half away by car, on poorly maintained roads that throw gravel at your windshield and make you wonder why we stopped investing in the railway system. This whole place makes me feel lonely and isolated.

Rather than dwell upon this any further, I am going to try to cheer myself up with a music video that involves synthesizers, Morris dancers, and what I can only assume was a huge amount of cocaine and pills.

Accentuating the...well, you know

2011-09-30T13:30:00.000-05:00

I really hate that song, but people around here seem to bring it up from time to time, in an effort to keep me from devolving into a little storm cloud of vitriolic bloggery. So I'm trying not to be worn down by the little stuff. And trying to focus my mind on the better things swirling around me. I'd accept some friendly advice, though, about the small stuff.

The pseudology building at Ghosttown U. is under construction repairs right now. My large and lovely window affords me a fine view of the crane that is hacking, hammering, and beeping all day long. Now and then, it also affords the workers on the crane a view of me in my office, on their way across the sky to beat the shit out of the roof right next to my office. It's, um, noisy. Cranking my iTunes does not seem to solve the problem. I'm not a huge fan of earplugs for these occasions. Anyone know a meditation practice that will keep me from feeling like I'm about to be run over by a backhoe?
A piece of gravel hit my car windshield yesterday, putting a crack in the center of it. It's not huge, but it's certainly noticeable in the middle of the windshield like that. I've never dealt with this before. Is this the kind of thing that must be fixed right away and damn the cost, or can I ride around without fretting about it? It's not line-shaped, but a little round flaw, kinda like someone fired a bullet but without the excessive damage associated therewith. I remember a friend's car whose windshield had incurred some linear crack from debris: that line-shaped crack began to spread one evening when the heating in the car was on, until, in the course of half an hour, it had spread nearly all the way across the glass horizontally. That clearly needed to be fixed. Will I be in similar trouble, or can the car live with the flaw?
I discovered yesterday that the rubber heel-grip of my left dress shoe has broken off, so the heel is currently a layer of wood. The rest of the sole is smooth leather. I was careening around like a drunken figure skater all day; it's a wonder I didn't do myself injury. Now I'm wondering what my peers would recommend with these eight-year-old shoes: do I seek out a cobbler to re-sole the broken heel, and maybe try to tone up the other parts that have just worn down over the years? (I don't think there is a cobbler at all in Ghosttown.) Or do I consign these shoes to dustbin of my personal history, and go shopping for a new pair? Remember, we're talking about a dressy pair of men's cap-toe oxfords, not something of more transient fashion value. I've been known to hang on to clothes past their natural lives, but I do so because I don't want to spend even more money that I don't have. Not sure what makes more sense here.
In better news, I've got a fresh nibble from that book press editor! Can't say I've hooked a contract yet, or even a solid offer to bring it to the board, but there is some progress there. Basically, I need to write more of my manuscript for the editor to consider. Where's the coffee, again?
It's a new year – for some of us, anyway – and I begin by noting that, all my complaints aside, I'm actually in pretty good mental, physical, and emotional shape. That's more than a lot of people I know can say about themselves. I'm lucky.

A short rant about stupid academic titles

2011-09-27T20:23:00.000-05:00

All right, listen up, all of you who want to host a conference or organize a panel to showcase your own work, but can't really justify other people's presences except to validate you. Also, all of you professors who have vague and inchoate ideas of what might constitute a reading group on subject X, and don't have the guts to admit that they're brand-new to the field of inquiry and will need to reduce themselves to MA-candidate level just to begin their reading. Finally, all of you who want to publish your unexciting (if not actually half-assed) research and don't want to own up to its modest contribution to human knowledge:

Every one of you motherfuckers has to stop inventing bullshit titles like these:

Verby noun, nouny verb: Abusing the English language without mercy

Fucking stupid, stupidly fucking: A history of one-night stands

Asshole of the gods, God of the assholes: Dane Cook in context

Academic jizzing, jizzing on academia: I needed to write something on my travel reimbursement form, didn't I, jackhole?

All y'all ain't fooling no one, as the locals around here might put it.* These stupid-ass would-be puns are the lazy and confused academician's way to try to tart up an unexciting, uninspired idea. I've known this for years, but I'm especially aggravated about it lately, when an inexplicable bumper crop of them has littered my email inbox. The unifying factor in them appears to be the author's unwillingness to say out loud, "I haven't yet worked through all the ideas here, and I cannot claim any authoritative voice here, but I want to enter into the conversation and do what I can." It wouldn't fucking kill you to be a little humble about your position as a scholar, would it? You will not dissolve into a puddle of ooze by admitting that you don't know as much as you want to about a given subject, and that is why you want to form a reading group of your peers. You will not spontaneously combust if you give your unsexy but perfectly respectable conference talk a useful indexical title, a la Analyzing official correspondence between junior Episcopalian clergy in 1820s England. Yeah, it sounds a little dry, but no one actually sits through a conference panel to be dazzled by CNN-style sensationalism. You'll just have to trust that the interested parties will remember to gulp their coffee beforehand, and you'll have to work up the courage to ignore the senior scholars who drift off into a gentle, snoring doze after ten minutes.

And here is the most damning part of all. All of those faux-clever reversals of words that you think will justify your departmental expense accounts and seduce journal readers? To the best of my knowledge – literature scholars, please correct me as necessary – those are all a type of rhetorical device called antimetabole. Do you know with whom all of us who are older than, say, thirty associate with antimetabole?

YAKOV. FUCKING. SMIRNOFF.

I hope I have made my point clear.

*I mean, if they gave a goddamn about education past the age of seven.

RBOC: Colossal foolishness of students

2011-09-24T00:06:00.002-05:00

My students appear to be prudes, for the most part. The subject of sex as a social science topic came up today, and people tried all kinds of verbal acrobatics to avoid saying the word. Several of them seemed almost involuntarily to speak about "marriage," even though I kept reminding them that "marriage" was not the topic under discussion. What I really wanted to say was, "This is not about people getting married. This is about people FUCKING. Do you understand that those are two separate phenomena?" Some of these students may swallow their own tongues when we get to the gender studies component.
I had not one but two students come to the same class today while visibly, audibly ill. One of them was in such bad shape that zi couldn't fully stand up. They both came to (attempt to) attend class, and give me doctor's notes to explain why they hadn't been in class for the last quiz. Kids, when you're so ill that you look like you could keel over at any moment, DON'T COME TO CLASS. I now fear that I will contract whatever microbes are messing with you, thus causing me problems I don't need, especially due to the fact that you are total idiots.
I had a student spend two weeks avoiding class, because zi had done poorly on the first quiz and thought (completely erroneously) that this meant that zi had already failed the entire course. Stu: read your fucking syllabus. DON'T PANIC. I explained this to Stu, who seemed hugely relieved, and promised to start attending class again, now that it seemed worth the trouble again. Stu promptly failed to show up to the next class. *facepalm*
Almost no one seems to be doing the reading, with or without proper note-taking habits. Including, as far as I can tell, most of the students whom I counseled one-on-one about this. In most of my classes, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of students who actually know what the fuck is going on.
Almost no one did the reading for today, either. No big shock there, I guess. But I can't help but think it's additionally foolish and counter-productive not to read an assignment for a class that the motherfucking professor wrote himself. Once again, I learn by experience that the professor's ego is worth very little in this complex equation. I intentionally scheduled my own reading for a day that didn't matter much, since it's more complicated than the basic this-is-what-your-friendly-neighborhood-pseudologist-does lesson. But boy, I didn't know how wise that was.
Seriously, I can't get over this in its entirety. I understand blowing off a reading here and there. I can even understand a clever, cynical college student figuring out that the professor's own research publication is relatively unimportant for study purposes, and deciding to skip it. But if you're going to do that, then why the fuck would you show your ignorant ass in class, where I can call on you and ascertain in a public forum that you didn't do the reading? Why would you scowl at me when I do this? You could have taken the day off and avoided looking like an asshole in front of the class, and you didn't. Your fault, not mine.
I have to grade the more recent quiz this weekend. I'm kind of dreading it, based on the responses I noted in passing while collecting papers from students. Just like with the reading, a select few seem to comprehend the very basic concepts being examined, and the rest are stumbling around in the dark. Figuring out a fair rubric for these things is bad enough, but I can usually handle it once I reach a place of serenity in which I can see some useful effort in mostly mindless responses. What is worrying me now is what I will have to do, based on the grade breakdown that I end up with. Dr. Crazy suggested I send a warning to students by threatening to zero out the grades below C if they don't come in for a consultation, and maybe suggest that they should drop the course if they incur this result. I like this idea in theory, but unless I get myself in a frame of mind to grade with great leniency, then I will essentially be threatening to zero out a huge majority of the quizzes. And, if my last experience is any guide, forcing them to come in for consultations accomplishes nothing if they're not actually already on the ball. I'll look into my options for this next semester, but right now I feel like I'd be overstepping what little authority I have by suggesting they drop a course they're failing. (The phenomenon seems far too common at Ghosttown U. for a youthful VAP to make some moral stance out of not letting people trudge along to failure.)
Depressingly, I keep coming back to the realization that lowering my grading standards through the floor makes my life easier and less angst-filled, despite the angst that I feel at the idea of not really holding my students to a standard of achievement higher than what everyone else the Dumbest State in the Motherfucking Union expects of them. It actually feels worse, to my surprise, to hold them to high standards, see them fail, counsel them on how to succeed, and watch them fail worse than before. It's even worse when I, unlike the students themselves, have a clear understanding of the kind of dead-end nothing to which they will need to resort, once they either fail out or drop out of college. Dead-end jobs in this part of the country are pretty grim.

Deadwood students

2011-09-18T18:03:00.001-05:00

I'm having trouble getting my mind around how my students think. On a superficial note, I had to throw out one from class, and issue a stern warning to another about not using cell phones in class. (I couldn't quite see for sure what the second student was doing until class ended, although she kept looking down to do something in her lap.) I guess students have always tried to get away with things they know are forbidden, and they always think they can avoid getting caught. It irritates me that they refuse to understand that using their cell phones in class is disrespectful, but I freely acknowledge that this is partly my own ego talking: they are disrespecting me much more than their fellow students, especially when they oh-so-cleverly sit in the back row and then tack back and forth between looking at me and the iPhones in their laps. And, as we all learn at one point or another, the professor's ego is largely an expendable item in good classes.

I'm more perplexed by the culture of ignorance that seems to suffuse Ghosttown U. Most of my students seem totally unmoved by my explicit warning that they failed the first quiz because they didn't know what they were doing, and my concomitant offer to explain all of this to them if they came to my office hours. I understand why the students who hacked out a good (or at least passing) grade might skip this; I probably would have done the same as a freshman. But failing? I'd have been unable to get a decent night's sleep until I found out exactly how I had managed to bomb something like that. It seems that most of my students are literally not bothered by the thought of failing. WTF?

I guess my colleagues warned me about this, but I didn't fully grasp the scope of the phenomenon. It's no secret that education in this entire state sucks the dog's balls, so I expected to see a lot of unprepared students who needed to be brought up to speed pronto. But I hadn't realized how many of that bunch would be so fatalistic, or accepting, or just plain apathetic that they wouldn't bother to do anything about a class that they had begun to fail by the third week. To my mind, that first quiz was a wake-up call, a warning siren, a fire under the ass. To them, it seems to have meant...nothing. (The number of students who sought me out to discuss the quiz were perhaps a quarter of the total. Maybe less.)

Trying to fathom how or why a student would approach college in this way feels like staring into the abyss: existentially terrifying. In a way, it even makes me nostalgic for the previous bane of my pedagogical existence, the grade-grubbers. Haphazard Musings has a post up now about these and other hobgoblins of her classes, and I am envious of her conclusion that the real problem students are only "a small handful" of the total. In my case, it seems that only a small handful give a flying fuck about whether or not they fail out of college.

Business cards for profs?

2011-09-13T20:08:00.003-05:00

I've never had a strong feeling one way or another about business cards as a professional academic. I've been getting them printed since my last year of grad school, when I was on the job market for the first time and [foolishly believed that I was] getting ready for a blitz of interviews everywhere. Obviously, that was not how it worked out that year, and I felt kind of silly sitting at home, filling out online applications that never called me back, a big pile of business cards that announced my identity as an ABD. They didn't cost too much, but naturally every cost was a burdensome expense at that time. And of course, since I really had to finish up that year, I did so, which made those business cards obsolete.

Then I got a bunch of new ones made when I got to Research City for my postdoc. Those, at least, made sense to have: business cards are a very common part of everyday life among professional and artisan classes in RC. People were visibly pleased to take one from me, in contrast to the times when they asked for my card and I could only offer an email address. I didn't use them much at all in my job hunt that year, but I certainly made good use of them in my research.

Those cards, of course, are also obsolete now, since they declare me as a fellow of a now-past postdoc, and give my former address in RC. And, you know, half of them is printed in RC-ish, which almost no one involved in any aspect of my job hunt this year can read.

So am I expected by hiring committees and conference attendees and/or poobahs to get another set of cards printed up, declaring me a VAP at Ghosttown U. in the pseudology department? My very limited Stateside experience with such things suggests that they're just window-dressing. People handed them out sometimes after chatting about common research interests, but I can't quite see the purpose, now that we have Academia.edu and Facebook and websites for every college department in the universe. But I'd hate to come up short if someone were intrigued by my book manuscript or thought I should consider an open position somewhere, and asked me for a card to keep my name fresh in their heads. On the other hand, I'd hate to spend whatever larcenous sum of money Ghosttown U. or its local competition might charge for a professional-looking business card, and then hand out about five of the 150 cards I had to order.

Those of you in the know, please share: are business cards useful among academics at conferences and on the job market? Or are they a waste of money and paper?

Drunken Master Chicken

2011-09-07T21:56:00.000-05:00

I've been eating out a little more than I should lately, mostly out of laziness about cooking at home. I decided to focus on my cooking skills this evening to unwind from a long day at work, since that third class of the day makes me want to bang all of my students' heads on their desks. (Is there some device that expedites this process for the busy professor?) Anyway, I had bought some chicken breasts, and I've recreated my usual kitchen-sink-style spice cabinet in my new place, so that seemed the thing to work on.

The last time I cooked chicken breasts, I tried for a nice soy-lime marinade, and only half-succeeded: too salty, too acidic, and not enough depth of flavor. I was puzzling over what else I could add to dilute the negative qualities of the soy sauce and the lime juice, and after a while a brilliant idea struck me: WHISKEY. A few internet searches later, I had an idea what I would do. And, I am pleased to announce, my latest improvisatory recipe was wildly successful!

Behold, DRUNKEN MASTER CHICKEN!!!

1.5 pounds or so of chicken
soy sauce (don't go overboard here)
lime juice (don't go overboard here, either)
1 tbsp. allspice
1 tbsp. ground ginger
rye whiskey (what the fuck, go a little overboard here!)
green onions
garlic cloves (overboard!)
spinach or other greens

Mix the green onions, garlic, spices, lime juice, soy sauce, and whiskey together in a bowl wide enough to marinate all the chicken at once. Trim the fat and gristle from the chicken and marinate it for at least an hour, turning it over halfway through. After marination, cook it in a big frying pan with a lid, along with the spinach. Once everything is laid out in the pan, cover it and check it every five minutes or so. You want all the veggies and chicken to steam a bit more than they fry, so the moisture isn't all boiled off. Thick pieces of chicken, like split breasts, may take about half an hour of this, being turned over now and then, before they're cooked all the way through.

Serve with either a glass of the same whiskey used in the marinade, or a red wine light enough to let you savor the delicate balance of the marinade/glaze.

Grading drives me to drink

2011-09-05T23:07:00.000-05:00

NB: This blog is FERPA-compliant. No small animals or cute large animals were harmed in the making of this post. Don't ask about the big ugly ones, though.

Except for a few stragglers who may or may not provide me with acceptable excuses for make-up quizzes, I have graded all of my students' quizzes this weekend. The scores, to be frank, suck. I mean, damn. I've never seen such a bottom-heavy grade distribution, across every class. One the one hand, I kind of expected this, and intended the quiz as a diagnostic both for myself, and for them, to let them know that they'd have to take the progression of readings and assignments a lot more seriously than they seemed to believe necessary. (Sure as hell hope that works!) On the other hand, I was expecting the bulk of the grades to fall somewhere in the C range, not all the way down at F. If anything, my students appear to have inverted the bell curve — the second largest group was the As. Bizarre.

So now I'm a little anxious about what people (my students, my colleagues, my chair, even?) will say about all this. Am I really so draconian that most of my students were bound to fail? I really don't feel like that — from my perspective, I've been telegraphing to them exactly what they need to do to excel, and they just stared back at me in a stupor. I've tallied up more failing grades than all other grades combined. How can that be normal?

...Is that normal at Ghosttown U.? Or am I the outlier, the deviant, for expecting students to perform at minimal college level? Hmm.

Naturally, I'm drinking now. Apropos of Dr. Crazy's post about self-medication, I am choosing to massage my aching brain and nerves by thinking about things I like to drink. So, along with my semi-rhetorical lamentations about grading, I'll ask my readership: what do you like to drink as a balm for your academic woes? I have been known to indulge in whisky, wine, beer, tequila, and rum, and lately I've even discovered a cocktail at my favorite local bar that makes gin palatable for me. Tonight's balm is a so-so pinot noir, since all the rain has made it feel somewhat chilly for the hefeweizen in my fridge. If things really go off the rails, I also have a bottle of rye in the house at present.

Random Bullets of Student Crap

2011-08-31T19:00:00.000-05:00

No, I will not tell you what you missed in class. You're lucky that the only thing I tell you to do is to get a classmate to share lecture notes.
Well, I suppose you may add the class at this late date, if you really want to. But you're going to blow the first evaluative assignment – I guarantee it – because I know damn well that you are not going to go out, buy all your books, read the assignments, and catch up on two weeks' of lecture notes in time to know your stuff for the assignment. Perhaps if I simply show you a list of all the things I expect you to do in the next twenty-four hours...oh, what's that? You've changed your mind about adding my course? Ah, quel dommage!
I seem to recall you saying that you would bring in the form for that matter you mentioned. You haven't brought me that form yet. Doesn't make any difference to me, yet somehow I know that you're going to come hollerin' to me when you are displeased with your grades, as though I did something wrong by not knocking at your door at all hours to remind you about your paperwork.
Seriously, ladies, where the fuck are your pants? Did some malevolent spirit visit all of you in the night and replace all of your mid-thigh-length-or-longer clothing with denim hot pants? And how is it that I never see such clothing in stores, and yet all undergrad women seem to own them?
Come to think of it, when did I become so goddamn old that the sight of young women in hot pants is no longer arousing, but makes me shake my head in mild disbelief while wondering what they could be thinking?
Maybe around the same time that I began to feel the compulsion to wear long trousers and a proper shirt even in the baking heat, because "it looks more professional." Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's a correlation in there somewhere.
All right, I admit it, maybe the intense heat that will not go away is a good reason to wear as little as possible, as long as you are not professionally obligated to dress up. I'll acknowledge that I'm getting really tired of getting into my car at the end of the work day, and finding that everything has heated up so much that my sunglasses actually burn my face. (And they were in shade all day!)
Given what I have observed so far of Ghosttown and Ghosttown U., and what I have heard from my colleagues, I'm curious and terrified in equal measure to look ahead to the part of my pseudology classes dealing with race. That material is going to hit them like a ton of bricks. I gather that students here often think in pretty crude (in all senses) identity politics terms, and are not above blaming their unhappy grades on a teacher of name-your-cultural-Other-of-choice who "hates" name-your-own-category.
This last possibility is so serious that some of my colleagues actually urged me not to declare my own identity constructions to my students at all, lest it come back to haunt me. (As I have mentioned before, there is the distinct sense that Members of the Tribe like me are ambiguously white around here. And, as I have been hearing, some of the Christian students here can be shockingly intolerant of the idea of learning about other religions.) No doubt it would frustrate and anger my students even more if I ducked the question, but better that than opening myself up to frivolous internal review cases. It might even prove pedagogically useful.
Frat boys: those visors you wear make you look like fucking idiots. I don't care if they keep the sun out of your eyes. They just look fucking stupid with your button-down shirts and your pressed seersucker and khaki shorts and your boat shoes. You all look like you fell to earth naked and had to swipe clothing from three or four successive open windows in consecutive houses in order to dress yourselves.

First week of classes

2011-08-27T14:43:00.000-05:00

I have now survived my first week of teaching as a titled professor. It's not so bad, for the most part. There are a few little irritations, but they're nothing I can't handle. The worst is seasonal in nature: it's goddamn hot and humid here in Ghosttown. Walking from building to building, as I must each class day, is unpleasant. But, as Haphazard Musings pointed out to me, this will soon seem delightful, once the summertime intensity cools off and we settle into whatever passes for autumn here.

The most unexpected aspect of my classes for me is how much the character of the class seems to be determined by the time slot. My early morning class? A little foggy while the caffeine does its job, but they're game to try their best. My noontime class? A bunch of zombies, most of them. My afternoon classes fall somewhere in between those extremes, and I haven't worked out the finer details yet. People can still add and drop through next week, albeit with less ease, so things may be fluid for a while.

I am amazed at how little common sense college students have. My syllabus has a huge wealth of information on it about how the class is structured, things they need to do, etc. And they bring the dumbest fucking questions to me, all of which reveal that they haven't clapped eyes on the syllabus at all. No, the course reader has not sold out — you went to the wrong place to buy it. No, I will not tell you what the readings for next class session are, because you ought to know already. It's not some goddamn state secret. The statistics tracking in Blackboard clues me in that a little over half of the zombie class hadn't even downloaded their syllabus by Friday. How on earth do they expect to do anything? No wonder my pals from grad school are always ranting "read your fucking syllabus!" on FB.

My first impressions of my students is that they, as a rule, not terribly well educated. Based on accumulated data about public education in this state, that's hardly a surprise. Apparently, it's in the running for Dumbest State in the Union*. That's a harsh idea to process, one which would rankle me to no end if I were from here. On the other hand, most of them give me the impression that they are willing to learn, if I can show them how to go about it. I don't know how many are willing to put in the effort for close reading, but I guess I'll find out. I tried to emphasize that skimming will get them nowhere, and they might have to – gasp! – read things twice in order to understand them thoroughly. I'm sure a lot of them will blow this off and, consequently, do poorly in class, but I'm starting to accept the idea that all I can do is provide good advice for how to succeed in this class, and then let them make their own mistakes.

It's eternally frustrating to witness – and participate in? – the phenomenon that Dr. Crazy and many others have discussed, the structural discouragement of working-class kids in college. I can see it right away: the kids who look uncomfortable among their middle- and upper-class peers, the ones who seem not to understand anything about high-level study skills, the ones whose body language communicates to me that they want to do their best, but they just don't know how in this environment. Most of them – hell, most of my students in general, more likely than not – could easily have gotten to Ghosttown U. by coasting through K-12. When the public educational standards are really low, a smart kid can figure out pretty fast how to sail through with minimal effort, and look super-smart and accomplished to boot.

But pseudology isn't a subject they would have encountered in school before, and lord knows that I am not the kind of teacher that they have probably gotten used to dealing with. I know that a bunch of my students, and not just the ones from the lower socioeconomic strata, are going to hit the rocks as soon as the first evaluative assignment comes, but relatively few of them will heed my call to come to my office hours and ask for help. They are used to hiding from teachers when they don't have to see them. A few of them will shut down when they see a low grade, perceiving it as confirmation of their fears that they don't belong there. They'll stop coming to class, and then they'll drift away from college altogether.

It angers me that they come in with the idea in mind that their peers kinda-sorta don't even want them there, and that this is their starting point. I want to tell them that the best way to show up their snooty, preppy classmates – who are no brighter than they, but have been trained and conditioned to succeed in both classroom and in elite social situations – is to kick ass at their studies and come out of college prepared to do something better than drift back to their little hometowns and do whatever Mom and Dad did for a living. But, for a host of reasons, this is not practical to tell them. Sigh. I really hope at least a few start coming to my office hours after the first assignment, when they see the difference between what I expect and what they were prepared to produce.

On another note, I made the choice to forbid all electronic devices in my classes. These students are going to have enough trouble concentrating without dicking around on Facebook and shopping online. While I'm not going to let myself get sucked into policing over teaching, I have found that this ban has forced me to pay more attention to people who seem to be playing with smartphones in class. One of them definitely was, because zi didn't listen to me or read the syllabus. The rest, though, weren't — they were just doing other stupid shit that caused them to lower their eyes and hands toward crotch level. This has brought into focus for me just how much college-aged dudes pay attention to their crotches, in one form or another. Five minutes adjusting your belt buckle? Obsessively trying to scratch out a stain at the bottom of your t-shirt? Guys, it can wait. Was I this crotch-focused when I was eighteen? I'd like to think not. I mean, if nothing else, I had enough sense not to give the impression that I was literally jacking off in class. (We had no smartphones back in the dark ages, so there was only one reasonable assumption to draw about such behavior then.) Clearly, I need to go Zen about delivering my lecture to the students who are looking at me, and tuning out the fuck-ups who have drifted back to their junk.

*That's not the formal designation for the statistic, but you get the idea.