fall semester, 2024

the word semester shows up in at least 130 of my past blogposts, which is a little more than 10% of all the posts I've thus far posted. considering that this little blog has always been roughly half focused on various academic and intellectual pursuits, this makes plenty of sense. semesters are like seasons.

the word itself is not even 200 years old, the etymology dictionary tells me: "...semenstris 'of six months, lasting six months, half-yearly, semi-annual,' from assimilated form of sex 'six' (see six) + mensis "month" (see moon (n.)). The word, and the idea, were picked up in the U.S., where the German higher education system served as a model."

apparently the Latin-y adjective forms semestral and semestrial are a few centuries older. interesting. 

anyway, I'm glad our semesters are not a full six months long these days. four months is plenty. 

and for these upcoming four months, I'm teaching three batches of students, including a few repeats from past semesters. the longer I hang out at this institution, the more that will keep happening I suppose.

COM 221: Technical Report Writing
counting the two sections I have this semester, I've taught practically a million versions of this course (okay, 15 total sections. that is still a lot). it's becoming a bit of a struggle to not get completely burnt out and bored of it, but I'm doing my best to keep it interesting for me. we're only in week 3, so I'm still getting to know the vibe of the students. we'll have some fun together I hope though.

HU 356: Audio Production & Podcasting
this one is going to be interesting no matter what-- it's a brand new class, only recently outlined and designed and proposed by me for our catch-all Humanities & Communication department. I am pretty excited to see how this goes. so far I'm having students practice various little audio recording tasks, then we'll level up to remixing all those clips into some fun story-arc, before finally moving on to pitching and workshoping individual podcast projects. the students all have great ideas so far. (wish me luck persuading the one who simply wants to copy Mr. Rogan's insufferably long-winded (at least it is to me) format into doing something at least slightly more inventive.)

what else? I signed up for a weaving class next month. some family is visiting next week. we have some more camping planned for during fall break. we're having a brand new screen door installed sometime soon. and our Monday evening D&D group is on the brink of moving up to level 8. in November, our crazy puppy will turn 1 year old.

at some point we should work on the mish-mash garden projects and other household tasks that need doing. and eventually figure out our holiday plans. 

or maybe we let go of shoulds for a while and enjoy the almost-autum while it's here.

and spring semester 2024

eleven years ago, back at the very beginning of my academic career, I trekked 6 hours west from Lubbock, Texas, in my very old leper of a car (the paint was all but totally peeled way from its poor hood), to attend my first ever academic conference in Albuquerque.

this week I'm gonna trek 6 hours east and attend the same conference, this time in a rental car, with way more academic experience, an institutional credit card for travel-related purchases, and a significantly different research agenda. I'll be presenting this Saturday all about how I designed and get to teach a fun little class on podcasts. 

 {the title slide, so far anway}

 

and I'll get to see some of my old professors from USU. very excited for that bit. 

it'll be fun, hopefully. I hope I'll meet some other cool new interesting fellow scholars along the way, too. we shall see, given how sunny and warm it looks to be in Albuquerque this weekend, how much of the conference I actually sit through.

in the more normal weeks of this semester, I'm teaching a couple sections of technical writing. the same old basic tech writing course, only slightly different every time by virtue of new students and a new me and a new world.

besides teaching, I'm also working on a book chapter about podcast transcripts and leading various faculty from various other programs through a series of mushy but important assessment adventures. friend Caroline and I are still working on soliciting content for a new issue of the campus literary arts magazine (the second since we took charge of it last year). maybe we'll have an official reading event at the library with the creative writing class-- fingers crossed. 

it's all nearly haflway over, this set of 16 work weeks called spring semester. at the moment the halfway point feels encouraging. time ticks onward. work gets accomplished. knowledge is made and shared and reinforced. skills are modeled, practiced, learned, forgotten, re-learned.

in other news, I'm also finally getting to see some work from the past year come out in official publication! perhaps the coolest online academic journal of all, Kairos, made space for my multimedia oral history-ish interview piece all about two colleagues who recently retired.

and then colleagues and I have a co-authored piece in the most recent issue of Programmatic Perspectives (the differently cool but still very awesome journal from the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication). some awesome Purdue colleagues have an article in the same issue, which is quite cool to see. 

time ticks onward. I've been here 4 years. 2 more until hopefully they give me tenure. 

in the meantime, age and experience accumulate. some days I feel older and other days not at all. 

next January, in the auspicious year of 2025, it'll be 20 years since I started this blog for a class. how will we celebrate that, I wonder?

I, pedagogue (spring semester, 2021)

back in the day, I thought I'd never want to teach. and then I realized that in some ways, everything everyone does can involve a layer of teaching somehow. even if it's a very subtle one.

even still, for these past seven years of wading deeper and deeper into teaching college writing classes of various kinds, the real practice of teaching (with all the planning and record-keeping and decision-making and performing and grading and authority-wielding it typically requires) has not often been my favorite part of academia. it's fine. but it's hard. and I never feel very good at it, so it simply can't be as naturally rewarding as all the other corners of academia where I feel far more skilled.

for better or for worse, my two full-time assistant professor jobs so far have been quite teachingcentric. twelve credit hours of teaching every semester, plus a few during summer semesters, until this year. dozens and dozens of students show up in August or January or June for whichever iteration of professional writing I'm teaching this time, working and sharing and hopefully learning, and then they disappear again.

this year, I have one course release for being brand new in town. it gives me a chance to get used to things a bit.

they also gave all the new faculty a copy of the book What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain. a few colleagues and I read through it together last fall semester and talked about ways to apply the findings in our own classrooms.

the book and our little faculty discussion group made me think much more intensely about my teaching than I've cared to thus far. it also gave me some concrete hope that maybe I can become better at this thing I don't feel very expert in at all. 

so. what am I trying to do a little better this spring? what have I begun to internalize from Bain's research?

possibly more things than I can articulate very well in a little blogpost. but here are a few:

> talk about your own learning journey with students. model or reenact the kinds of transformation you hope that they will undergo as a result of your class.

> trust students and treat them like whole humans with a million shifting priorities, just like you. this is something I already knew and practice decently, I think. but I took particular comfort in it this past year. my course is a small droplet in the ocean of everything these students are trying to learn and become. if my teaching isn't perfect, they probably won't notice or remember for too long.

> ask students big, meaningful, authentic questions--the kinds of questions that professionals in your field will ask and try to answer. (this is particularly tricky in writing because writing, for most people, in most important contexts, isn't very often about itself. its actual subject is the everything else that we write and communicate about.)

I think I do pretty well being authentic and open and compassionate as a teacher. but I have been guilty in the past of assuming students could never be all that interested in the big questions that I study. we don't have time for that, do we? especially at a fancy aeronautical university where nobody is an English major and everyone mainly wants to design or build or test or fly airplanes and other such contraptions-- how could any of those students care about a communications course?

but if Bain is to be believed, the enthusiasm of a teacher combined with the sparks of a big, meaningful question can draw students in, motivate them a little, even if they didn't think they'd care very much about a communications course. 

and I can be good at questions, surely. 

especially big ones! like: how do you know what anyone means? how do you know what anyone else thinks you mean? how people really ever understand each other enough to make good things happen in the world? and what does it mean to read? to write? or to do those things effectively?

the trick now becomes figuring out how much time to spend getting philosophical about definitions inbetween all the more "practical" work of practicing reading and writing and revising and all that. I still think students learn most from doing things, more than they can from reading about things or discussing them or whatnot.

but anyway, I added this little linguistics video to my list of assigned readings. I opened the first day of class reading from Celeste Headlee's book We Need to Talk, which recounts the tragedy of an ineffective conversation in an airplane cockpit. in technical writing we spent the first day exploring informal crowdsourced technical descriptions on Reddit.

and when I listened to this recent episode of So Many Damn Books with George Saunders I felt more affinity for Saunders's love of teaching writing than perhaps I might once have felt. his advice is to remember that you're never just teaching 20-somethings who barely know what to do with their adulthood when you meet them-- you're also teaching the 40-something-year-olds that they'll become. I like that. (not all college students are 20-somethings, but the concept holds. we are all humans-in-progress.)

maybe I'll go back and give the Pedagogue podcast another chance, too, now that I feel more hopeful and less grumbly about this whole teaching business.

August aspirations

goals, of a sort, for the last two weeks of summer break:

sewing. last weekend I cut out pieces for two sundresses and picked apart a long skirt to transform into a third sundress. I also have some trousers to mend and probably a few other random small projects too.

reading. I'm still working my way through the Audre Lorde collection from the library. I also have five tabs open right now that need the attention of my reading brain. (there are usually much more than five, but I'm trying to be realistic and abandon any that have been open for more than a week; I know deep down I won't get around to them anytime soon after all.) one of those tabs is this article, which I've read already but want to plan on rereading every semester for the rest of time, as a reminder that however lazy or unmotivated students may seem, it's more complicated than that. if there's time, I'll also fit in some more short stories from Tor.com, one of the most useful online venues for new and intriguing short fiction that I've come across.

seeing the Grand Canyon. I haven't visited this landmark since I was fourteen, I think. we're just going to make a day of it. drive two hours north. bring snacks. take photographs. indulge in a moment or two of reverence for nature and its grandeur.

writing. even after this month of blogging-every-day is over, I have chapter revisions to work on for an edited collection on user experience research. I have letters of recommendation to write. there are also a few more editing projects to tidy up in the coming weeks, not to mention syllabi and lesson plans. will there be time for fun writing, too? I hope so.

gaming. I completed my second playthrough of Horizon Zero Dawn not long ago. only one irritatingly difficult hunting task was left incomplete. I'm now working on Detriot: Become Human-- a unique sort of game where almost all the choices you make change how the rest of the game goes. yeah, it's got problematic elements, but it's also thought-provoking and intense, which is interesting to me.

of course at some point I also should probably figure out how I want to arrange my new office-- not that I'll be there that often, since in-person office hours are prohibited this semester-- and make sure I'm as ready as possible for teaching three hybrid face-to-face technical/professional writing courses. it's a lot.

but two weeks is also a lot. fourteen days or so. more than three hundred hours. not counting the hundred-ish I'll spend sleeping, that's an abundance of time. hopefully I end up happy with how I use it all. even if I don't officially accomplish all the things I'm presently imagining I might.

commence contentment

it feels like I used to have so much to say. I was just ambitious enough to be confident enough to recognize all my self-doubt and still ignore it.

is ambition something you grow out of? it does seem easier to have when you're young--when you haven't yet heard so much of what other people have said or thought or done, the world feels so much more ripe and open for everything your little human brain could possibly imagine into it.

and then you grow up, and get tired, and everyone around you and before you is doing so much already. how can you keep up?

I know it's a bit silly to worry about keeping up. I'm in my own lane and it isn't a race anyway. 

today I attended fall commencement at NSU. gymnasium full of chairs, lots of bright purple, congratulatory speeches, cheering, decorated mortarboards, lines and lines of accomplished humans, etc. the music was gorgeous, too--a string quartet and a vocal quartet performed excellently during the processional, the anthem, and the alma mater. I came away from it all thinking about the value of letting yourself appreciate things as fully as possible. that might become my mantra for 2020: appreciation.

I never attended my own college or grad school commencements. I probably didn't miss much, really. it just now so happens to be part of my job to go and sit with the other faculty and applaud on cue. it's nice to feel like a part of something and to pay attention to all these students' achievement.

the speaker this year was Denise Lewis Patrick--prolific writer, Natchitoches local, and 1977 alumna (she has a blog too, such as it is). I appreciated her talk for its down-to-earth encouragement and its brevity. she spoke about all the post-college things she'd learned--about people, organizations, and changing technologies. she promised today's graduates that they would similarly need to learn many new things, no matter how prepared they might feel for their futures.

feeling prepared might be a little overrated, anyway. how much ambition does a person really need in their life, after all? I might be just fine with a little contentment now and then and a decent supply of curiosity.

reflect, revise, reset

I am preparing to teach an online technical communication course for a handful of graduate students.

it is an exciting and slightly daunting prospect, and I'm really grateful for the opportunity. teaching online is fun. teaching graduate students will be new. hopefully I will love it. hopefully the students will love it too, at least a little bit.

as I've started putting together assignment sheets and syllabus sections, I've gone back to the files I have from my first semesters as a graduate student, way back seven years ago. my experiences from then are inspiring my preparations now in a messy but helpful sort of way.

the class I will be teaching is not going to be exactly like the first technical communication course I took in 2011. there are no PhD students at my new Louisiana institution, and there isn't quite a full tech comm graduate program, either. we offer a certificate in Writing for Business, Industry, and Technology and a related MA degree in Writing and Linguistics. my work here will fit into the little tech-comm-shaped niches around and among those programs and the offerings for our undergraduate emphasis in professional writing.

it's been interesting to look back at the work I did as a brand new graduate course and revisit the thoughts I was thinking about everything I was learning. one of the essays I turned in to Dr. Kelli Cargile Cook at Texas Tech in 2011 starts out, after one boring sentence that sets the stage, with a million semi-rhetorical questions:

"Who is qualified to create or enforce a definition of technical writing? In the face of rapidly changing technologies, will a static definition be at all important or useful? What is the clearest, most accurate way to make sense of our place as people who write and communicate among extremely diverse communities? What commonalities among those communities are worth emphasizing? Are any of the basic truths about technical communication universal enough build a profession upon? Will it be possible to include all the essentials without being completely vague? These questions and many more continue to shape the process of figuring out who we are, what we do, and why it matters."

that's six questions, all crammed into one opening paragraph. another professor of mine, Dr. Richard Johnson-Sheehan, always gave me pointed critiques when I included too many rhetorical questions in essays for his courses at Purdue: "your reader is going to lose patience with these," he would say, implying his own quickly waning interest.

I think I've learned to agree with him, by now. I do still love questions, but I understand now that they can be a tiresomely slow way to introduce one's main point.

one day soon I may remediate that whole long, rambly essay into a less-long, less-rambly blogpost. that could be fun. for me anyway. possibly useful for anyone out there who might wonder what I really think I'm doing with my academic life, too.

definitions of technical communication (and of rhetoric, or writing, or art) are still, forever, being debated. my own place in this disciplinary debate is still debatable too. malleable. amorphous. emerging.

I know a lot more now than I did in 2011. and I know much, much more now than I did seven years before that when I returned from studying abroad, declared myself an English major at Utah State University, and eventually started this blog. a whole decade and a half of experience has ways of teaching one things. sometimes without you even noticing.

it's August, 2018. new things are happening. the world and me look so different than they used to. it feels like a beginning--expansive, wild, wide, and uncharted. a chance for new rules. better habits. but it's hard to know what the best new habits might be. so much of this new life is going to be unfamiliar for a while. disorienting.

teaching experience and academic credentials have piled up on top of me over the years. those things have given me some grounding amid all the chaos of finishing one thing and beginning another. the transition has felt long. May 18 was almost a dozen weeks ago, and my new semester at Northwestern State is still weeks away. as much as this feels like a beginning, it's just as much middle, and partially an ending, too. as soon as August 4 gets here and Purdue's commencement ceremonies are over, I'll officially officially be Dr. Amelia Chesley, with a real PhD and a diploma in the mail, with an exciting tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor. soon enough I'll have this office in Keyser Hall arranged just how I want it. I'll have a phone in that office, and faculty meetings to go to and everything. 

I still have a million things to learn, at least.

reflections on teaching online

the online summer class I've been teaching ended last Friday, when all the last final projects got turned in. as of five seconds ago, all the grades are tallied and posted and submitted. hurrah! two weeks til fall classes start...

did any sort of learning happen over those 8 weeks of summer term? on my end, definitely yes. I hadn't taught online before. during the spring and beginning of the summer I attended conference panels galore about online writing instruction. my wonderful mentor Kelli Cargile Cook spoke about the best practices she's developed and studied over her career. friend David Grover from Texas Tech presented on his dissertation research--all about how underprepared graduate students are when they get the chance to teach writing online. at Computers & Writing, I met the brilliant and generous people behind the OWI community website. so many awesome resources and inspirations. it was terrifying, but encouraging.

I was arguably more prepared (on paper, anyhow) for this course than for anything else I've ever taught in my life. most other things I've ever taught involved sticky notes with tentative 6-point outlines and thoughts, all scribbled down mere hours before the lesson. sticky notes don't work for online classes, though. instead, there were dozens of PDFs, a screencast video introduction, a website thing, bits of Blackboard fiddling, many many emails, and many Slack messages.

the slick, fancy Slack messaging app suggested itself as an especially appropriate online teaching tool for professional writing. I'd been hearing about the app on all the podcast advertisements, and I figured my bundle of Business Writing students could benefit from some exposure to it. with help from friend Michael, I poked around and tested things out and got everything set up just how I needed it for the various sections and projects of the class. hosting the whole class within Slack was disorienting for students at first, but most of them caught on quickly and enjoyed the interface. we didn't have quite as much fun as this Zach Whalen fellow seemed to have with his students on Slack, but ah well.

as the course got busier and summer ticked itself relentlessly into the past, I found myself wishing I could be sure my students were reading the announcements I made and the updates I posted. is there such a tracking device? my search just now brought me to this detailed list of Slack shortcuts and tips. there is a way to see who has logged in to Slack-- I'll have to explore that option next semester. it may or may not tell me who has read which channels. this piece might be something to share with students as they set up their Slack accounts for my class--hopefully they'd find it helpful. I need to remember the "reminder" function and the "pin file" function, for important information that students might lose track of too easily. the user-name policy also sounds pretty useful-- one way to maintain a sense of professionalism.

benefits a face-to-face class include students seeing each other and talking to each other a lot more, instead of merely performing for me and my syllabus of requirements. I'm not sure how well my students got to know each other. I did create an "off-topic" channel and let students have it to themselves (I checked now that class is over to find 4 lonely little posts there). our Slack space stayed very to-the-point and business-oriented, a place where work got submitted and readings got "discussed" within minimum wordcounts and with little dialogue. next semester, I'll have to incentivize more student-to-student communication and discussion. this boils down to an odd form of pandering bribery and forced-ness, which my soul squirms and recoils about just a little. I like to think that as an undergraduate student I would have been utterly happy to talk to my fellow students of my own accord (very not true). who needs incentives for that? but that's my vaguely-more-enlightened and far-less-shy gradstudent self talking.

my course was 99% asynchronous, and I so wished that I could have all 17 of my students in one channel at the same time. more focused, immediate discussion could have been way more useful. all the best online courses I've ever taken have included a synchronous Skype or chat-room element. but the way online courses are marketed in this program means students sign up expecting to work at their own paces and not expecting to show up to be counted at any particular time. because of that, I didn't feel like I could design a course with much, if any, synchronous discussion time in it at all. this summer, I asked students to sign up for one-on-one video conferences, so at least there'd be a sliver of synchronous discussion. this worked pretty well. for next semester, I may consider assigning small-group conference meetings, perhaps to discuss peer review work more directly. the institutional constraint here is a challenge to work around. perhaps it deserves to be brought up with my supervisors and program directors. we'll see.

this weekend I talked with a few potential community partners about linking my fall Business Writing assignments to their local, real-world business contexts and needs. it's lovely to know people who run small, local businesses in this lovely college town. wish me luck getting myself organized to incorporate some of those ideas for the next batch of scattered, disembodied online students.

spring semester, 2016

this, if all goes according to the sketchy plans I have sketched in collaboration with the English department and my advisor, will be my last semester of coursework. the last time I sit in a classroom as a graduate student.

it feels like a very different semester already. an edge. a transition.

the season and the weather seem to echo this. or at least that is the way I am going to write about it all.

today it is raining in spurts, like a chilly and unkempt spring. Tuesday's snow is long since melted. it'll be back this weekend. the universe is giving us yo-yo-ing seasons, somewhat drab all the way through, with occasional bright sunset smudges.

the trees are bare. my apartment windows open onto more distant views than they did in summer and fall. at night, more and more streetlights perpetually leak into my bedroom under the edges of the blinds. I notice the faces of buildings I have never seen from such an angle before. expanses of roads and curb and green up the hill peek out between branches. it's the same neighborhood. but different. a few days ago it was all white and grey, snow and shadow. today it's still grey, but more slick and shine, a little warmer, and soggy.

this semester feels different too, barer than others have been and yo-yo-ing in its own way. class on Mondays, teaching on Tuesdays, alternate thusly for the rest of the week. research meetings and office hours, writing time, scraps of reading, planning, list-making.

English 631 World Englishes, with Dr. Margie Berns
this is my linguistics requirement. it's been a long time since I took a class that met more than once or twice a week. World Englishes is a one-hour thrice-weekly seminar. short, but interesting. and full of students from other programs, too. it should be pretty chill and relatively basic, for my last bit of coursework ever. I am already pondering project ideas. various Englishes as used in online volunteer communities... or various Englishes as they are negotiated/tolerated in social media somehow.

English 699 Research Hours, with Dr. Patricia Sullivan
not a class, really, but a placeholder to make the registrar's office happy. the credits I earn here are up to me to direct. this is time to plan the rest of my graduate career and start writing a prospectus. what will it all be about? to help me figure that out, I'm revisiting some of my previous projects and pondering the feedback professors have given me. I feel like I'm off to a slow start, but maybe that's okay. everyone says not to compare yourself to your colleagues. so I won't. some of them have their dissertation projects outlined and their committees chosen already. I do not. but I will, eventually.

English 421 Technical Writing
I get to teach a new professional writing class this semester. my students seem pretty cool so far. they have plenty of experience to share and our discussion yesterday went pretty well. texting vs email vs. facebook, and how you figure out the best way to communicate (or not) using all these options.

I look forward to figuring out the rhythms of the next sixteen weeks. so many kinds of work-- teaching, researching, scholaring. there will be grading and analyzing and writing and reading. I need to think about making a reading list for myself. put deadlines on calendars. two more years isn't that long.

might as well

I think it is a cardinal there building a nest outside my bedroom window. she flies away when I move too suddenly, so it's hard to get a decent look. watching the nest take shape in the crook of those little branches is pretty awesome.

will there be baby cardinals hatching, eventually? that will probably be awesome too.

every time I startle that bird into rushing off, every time I interrupt her nest-building, I wonder if she'll be gone forever. if she'll abandon the work and find somewhere less window-adjacent to build a little nest. so far she keeps coming back, and the twigs keep accumulating.

it would be sad if she left. but I'd probably understand.

slowly, I have been working on designing classes for fall semester. I'll be teaching a new approach to English 106, and I'll be teaching English 420 for the first time, too. it's going to be crazy, I feel like. hopefully good-crazy and not overly-stressful-crazy.

teaching still (and might always) feels like the hardest and most mystical thing. planning one's teaching is a little more concrete and manageable, as far as planning goes, but there is still a made-up-ness to it, a pretending, a humongous hopefulness with sprinkles of optimistic assumptions on top that still makes it really hard.

did you know syllabus isn't even a real word?

I might possibly be in one of those whyamIevendoingthis? sorts of moods again. yep.

summer has given me time for reading random books, and here is one of them. Syllabus by Lynda Barry (she has a tumblr where she posts class notes, too). I blogged about one of her other books many years ago. my relationship to this one is a little different, my place and my wants significantly shapeshifted. the way Lynda Barry does art isn't gonna be the way I do it. the way Lynda Barry teaches won't be the way I do that either, no matter how much I might pine for her style and concision or how much I admire the slice of her prompts and questions.

using Syllabus for a textbook would be pretty neat, but I get to use this for one instead. it is fat. colorful. we'll see how much the students complain about it.

they'll complain no matter what textbook they have to buy, I'm sure. students are funny and I don't know if I will ever figure out what exactly to do with them. maybe that's okay.

outside these syllabusy readings and note-takings and thinking and such, I've been reading other things. I did finish friend Sam's copy of Metaphors We Live By. yesterday I got to the end of Tim Ingold's Lines: A Brief History, which I have because of my Professional Writing Theory course last fall. it was too short. I'll possibly have to go read more Tim Ingold books to make up for this.

these whyamIevendoingthis? moods try to get in the way of life. I'm learning not to let them. why read all these books? because I like to. why bother thinking about how to engage your students with words and ideas? because even if I don't remember them all, I had teachers who must have done something like that for me and I can't thank them enough. why bother writing this stupid article draft? I have a few smart things to say. even if they don't matter any huge amount, this knack for observation and description might as well do something scholarly while it's here in this gradschool space.

listen to this and this and this

tomorrow, a drive to the east and the north, to Michigan. exploring and helping friend Chalice settle in a bit.

today, packing and cleaning house a bit, and thinking about all the writing I said I would do this summer. is my head in writing-mode? sometimes.

I've also been catching up on things I bookmarked to read later. I've had time to wander into nooks and crannies of internet places I didn't have much time for during school-time.

a good chunk of these nooks have been audio nooks. like this song. mm. and I listened to this interview with Lynda Barry the other day. I brought her book Syllabus home from Kentucky with me and will spend some of the summer flipping through it for teaching inspiration. could I get away with having my students all choose code names to use in my class? would that be interesting? hm.

more listening awesomeness: The Allusionist. the most recent episode is about the word brunch. if you have any sort of affection for words, etymologies, or the webs of interwoven meanings among this or that family of phrases, you must go put some of this podcast in your ears. it's pretty great stuff.

one non-audio nook is The Pastry Box. they publish daily short essays on lots of life + internet topics. I tend to like them. maybe you will too. Eric A. Meyer's piece from earlier in the month got me thinking about my habit (or should I call it a weird talent?) of remembering really random dates, some conventionally significant and others very not. September 25 was the day my friends and I in sixth grade all decided to wear our hair in pigtails. April 5 after midnight was the day that one boy said "...but how about a goodnight kiss?" and February 26 was the first of a few breakups with that redheaded, too-tall, long-gone first boyfriend. August 7 was the end of summer semester a few years back.

these are some that I can remember without checking a calendar, without looking at timestamped status updates. plenty more dates and events, significant and non, are at my fingertips if I want to look them up. journal, planner, social media. lots of records are being kept. life + internet = data, piling into great huge piles.

and that all reminds me of this book, Demiurge, two chapters of which live in a little online alcove here. friend Chris linked me to it a while back. I haven't read far. not sure what to think yet, but data and copies the control/regulation of those things are the scary futuristic themes of this story. of course I am intrigued.

so much to read and hear and consume. also to write and bake and give, along the way. I don't know if my balance is quite right, whatever that means. my head is in writing mode sometimes and in listening mode other times. all the modes are allowed to blur together, I think. hopefully my head doesn't get too confused living in different modes all at once.

twentythree: idiomanimals

for the past fifteen Thursdays, I've been assigned to lead a one-hour conversation group for the Writing Lab. it's great fun.

this week's theme was "idioms and slang," so we talked about all the odd, poetical, metaphorical, idomatic phrases that we use in English. a million of them involve animals. to count chickens before they hatch. to let sleeping dogs lie. to open a can of worms. to rain cats and dogs, or let the cat out of the bag. we also noticed a bunch of cloud-themed idioms. on cloud nine. head in the clouds. clouds with silver linings.

I also asked my conversationists about idioms from their own languages. it took them a few minutes to think of some, but I learned three that tickled my brain most delightfully. I feel so grateful to have stumbled into a place where I got to have them explained to me. I wish I could spell them in Chinese or Korean, but these less-than-exact translations will just have to do. they are all animal-related, too. if a dragon counts as an animal, and why wouldn't it?

"a dog catching a mouse" (Chinese)
someone who encroaches on another person's responsibilities, or oversteps their bounds somehow by trying to do more than their own job entails. it's as if the dog doesn't think the cat is doing it right, so he has to but in.

"drawing feet on your picture of a snake" (Chinese)
when you think you can add just a little bit more or keep working a little bit longer on a project, but the extra work you put in ends up ruining the whole thing.

"to paint the dragon's eye" (Korean)
this one is sort of the opposite of the snake-with-feet idiom--it means putting the perfect finishing touch on something. traditionally, the eye of the dragon is painted very last.

I love all of these concepts. aren't they awesome? if you hear me trying to use them in conversation, please play along.

three: unlearning

I shared this quote with my students this week, pulling it up right here where it lives on the little tumblr quote blog I keep. (who even knows what the students thought of the fact that their English teacher has a tumblr. are tumblrs cool anymore? were they ever? does it matter?)

“the most successful of our students have a worldview shift during our program, an entire change in their demeanor towards the built world around them. They come to see rules as malleable, power structures as changeable, and culture as embodied. They see design as a vehicle for slow but influential behavior change, and they recognize that over time, this behavior change impacts the landscape of the world. Over the course of the program, they see that they can design things (products, services, interactions, and policies), and these things cause the world to change.”

the quote is from this piece by Jon Kolko. he is interestingly the Vice President of Design at Blackboard, and Blackboard is the online course software I've been using to teach my writing class. my twenty students are analyzing space and the rhetoric of the built world around them. I am asking them to break apart the ways staircases and windows and furniture send certain kinds of messages. I want them to see that the way things are is not an accident, nor is it inescapable. the first step is paying attention.

reading Kolko's article made me feel a few millimeters better about my teaching. that failure and frustration are okay--that they are even crucial in the learning process--is something I always forget. or don't think about. I get too idealistic about the whole endeavor, too enamored of that Dead-Poets-Society-style magic, and then when almost nothing about the five hours a week I spend in a classroom every semester actually goes so smoothly or culminates in such exciting epiphany, teaching becomes very meh.

there are other articles and bits research and pedagogical theory I've latched on to with similar reaction. Robert Brooke's “Underlife and Writing Instruction” is one. the little summary comment-note I added to the top of my pdf copy includes the line "I found this very, very comforting."

teaching is hard. and it seems like we talk about it too much in extremes. that lesson you planned either falls on deaf ears or it lights up with fantastic sparks of insight. or maybe it's just that I selectively remember those extremes. class time is great or it's awful. we are either completely failing our students or we are doing all the right things for them. and our students are either complete slackers or overachieving superstars. these extreme stories are the most fun to tell, after all, whether to yourself or to your colleagues.

there are a million other stories.

learning doesn't necessarily happen on paper and it doesn't have anything to do with points for writing smooth transitions or points for drafting a logical thesis statement. it doesn't have much to do with the lesson plans you scribble in your notebook or the not-so-fabulous teaching evaluations you get.

I need to remember that getting things wrong and messing things up and wandering around on the wrong track are all useful learning activities. failures are probably more useful than "perfect teaching" or "perfect studenting" could ever be (not that either ideal is at all easy to imagine, from here). my frustration and faltering with this teaching gig... that's part of my own shift, too. don't forget. the failure is useful, for them and for you.

adaption

starting this week I've had my students doing reading presentations with selections from our textbook Convergences (it's an old book, but look, it does have one of those publisher-sponsored companion websites--full of dead or dying links).

I had each student choose a piece to practice and measure and then read aloud to our class. it's my way of forcing them to 1. actually pay some attention to that textbook they paid a non-insignificant chunk of money for and 2. think about literacy and reading from a more auditory and external perspective, not just a visual/mental/internal one. will it work? so far nobody has complained too terribly much.

our first two presentations were on Thursday.

one student began with this piece by David Brooks.

thought-provoking. guilt-inducing.

next, his fellow student abridged Matt Snyders' write-up of one week at the Mall of America and threw up a little powerpoint to go along with the story.

we cringed. we laughed.

presentations next week will include excerpts from Richard Rodriguez's "Gangstas." there might be costumes.

it's an old textbook, compiled of articles that exist in many other media incarnations--books, articles, photography collections, poems, comics, reviews. seeing how the students abridge and adapt these pieces for a potentially very bored audience is going to be very fun.

if my class didn't already hear too much from me every day of the week, I'd be tempted to read something to them as well, to join in the project. something from David Eagleman's Sum, perhaps. or one of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales.

our adaptations in class are pretty simple. but they're leading into our last unit on media, where we might have room for talking about re-mediation of all kinds. book-to-film-to-comic-to-stage-to-radio-to-thesis-to-interpretive-dance and everything.

maybe I will show them some of these, from the marvelous and very sweet-seeming Yulin Kuang, one of the brains behind Shipwrecked Comedy.


isn't that lovely? all of it--the voice, the light, the wide outdoors and cozy twosome?

yeah.

postscript 1:
in my poking around after details on Marina Keegan the other month, I came across this rather fantastic channel featuring the Yale spoken-word-poetry group. does Purdue have an organization like this? should we start one? eh, friend Priya?

postscript 2:
and did I ever mention The Moth? someday I'll perform a story for The Moth. but which one?  

me and mine

several weeks ago I had my students read and respond to these two online pieces: Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Cultural Appropriation by (which also has a part two) and But Why Can't I Wear a Hipster Headdress?

each puts up a different perspective on how the average consumer might consider and deal with instances where culture seems not to belong to the people who are making use of it. where it seems like these colorful, textural, symbolic wrappers we wrap our identities in get stolen. or at least thoughtlessly borrowed. to be bought and sold.

the boundaries between cultures and subcultures and groups are complicated. the beginning to a recently reposted episode of This American Life includes an interview with Jared Diamond (who incidentally is the author of a short essay my Texas Tech students had the option of writing about a whole year and a half ago) on the subject of groups and the costs of inclusion. and exclusion. no man is an island and all, so this stuff is important. belonging and contributing are both important.

the value of these things isn't exactly quantifiable. it's hard to measure all the tradeoffs and sacrifices and perks that get thrown around in any arrangement of human beings (or any living organism, come to that). these things don't have price tags, usually.

this fashion piece does. so do memberships to things and applications for citizenship.

membership and belonging don't seem quite the same though. and monetary costs are not the only kind. does wearing a fancy headdress make you a member of a certain group? or do a certain lifestyle and certain shopping habits even moreso? paperwork and legal distinctions might hold lots of weight, but can those things reflect the essence or core of any nationality?

belonging could be a matter of action rather than of paperwork or decree. yeah? but then I want to ask whether acting and being are the same. impostors and decoys and spies say of course not. Jared Diamond's bit explains that well enough.

so my next idea is that belonging, being included, is a relationship. nobody can belong anywhere without both action on their part plus a reaction of some sort on the part of the group. this of course seems pretty fundamental--a group defines itself through such relationships. members of a group have to be related somehow, even if only spatially or by the colors of their shirts. but I don't only mean that kind of relationship. we're all related some way or another through such abstractions. that's too easy.

the groups that seem to matter more are groups that make us negotiate our way into them. they ask things of us. they have conditions.

in a few hours, I'm going to join the group of people (how many are there, I wonder?) who are currently hanging out in the state of Utah. when I get there I'll sleep for a bit before being stolen away for a star-gazing camping trip down in the canyony, National-Park-ridden southern bits of the state. I have plenty of more thoughts to spin out about groups and requirements and ownership, but the conditions of my getting to Utah include getting in line to board an airplane just about now. we'll continue this blogpost somehow later on...

friday, afternoon, sunny

I was going to blog this week about how two weeks ago I was losing sleep over a ridiculous little four-page essay on Roman law and modern rights of authorship...

but then, just today, as I walked from campus over to the crazy-eclectic book/music/clothing/knick-knack shops to see if they would be able to sell me a pitch pipe, I witnessed an unusual-to-me encounter and immediately began reformulating its colors and sounds and emotions into a written account. what good will it do to write this down? I don't know. maybe none. maybe only some fraction of imagined documentary-esque good.

a shiny, bright red sports car, a white-skinned polo-shirted boy leaning on its horn. I still cannot discern why on earth he felt the need to honk so impatiently.

there is shouting. I stop and turn to watch the black vehicle (vanity license plate, ending with a very hip Z) in front of him slow way way down. both drivers' side windows are open to facilitate enjoyment of the gorgeous weather as well as an exchange of offensive gestures. shouting. red sports car guy grumbles, gestures, shouts, "you f#&%ing terrorist."

the other driver stops. as he gets out of his car I note his skin color in a way I hadn't noted it before. a very deep caramel. "did you call me a terrorist?" he yells, striding aggressively just close enough to sports-car-guy to be threatening. all traffic has stopped. nobody tries pulling around this confrontation. denial: "no--just go, I said. go!" more shouting. I almost consider rushing across the two lanes of asphalt between me and these men, wondering whether if I could look them in the eyes, their behavior would make more sense to me. what could I say, to make this situation not horrible? I watch the insulted, slurred ethnic minority growl and demand an apology, which prompts a hasty, impatient "I'm sorry, alright, just--" and behind the red sports car is a city bus, whose driver has begun rapping on his big, flat windshield.

I turned back to my sidewalk and traffic swept the whole thing away from me then. it wasn't so long ago and not much else has happened since then (Vons does not sell pitch pipes, after all), but I already doubt my memories. understand that the above is admittedly less than pure accuracy. it might not have been a polo shirt. that kid may have been wearing a baseball cap. caramel may not be the best skin-color analogy. the bus driver may have been a woman.

I hesitate to call this whole event shocking. it has its profoundly, poignantly upsetting side. it has its intricately incomprehensible side. but going another forty minutes back in time would put me chatting with officemate Jen (she has a blog too!) about the conversation she'd just had with some students, on McCarthyism and The Crucible and the reality of modern-day fear mongering. one student proposed that we must be better than that now--today we don't irrationally judge entire groups of people or let anxiety or stereotypes dictate how we treat them, how we talk about them. Jen had to set this student straight, she told me, and as she was talking I only had to think for a split second about which groups we as a country and society are so afraid of now. maybe it should be shocking, but it isn't.

lunch date with Dublin

on Tuesday last, I landed in Ireland at something like half eight in the morning (also known as half three in the wee hours of what could almost still count as Monday five timezones back). I'd only slept a little on the plane, but since my flight from Dublin to Paris did not leave until six o'clock that evening, I had nine hours for adventuring. plenty of time.

friendly Irish airport staff pointed me toward the city, handed me maps and bus routes, and made recommendations. I sat sleepily on the top level of the bus, relishing so much green, wondering what I would find exploring Dublin.

first I walked around Trinity College.

there were beautiful, chained off grassy spaces and whimsically fat trees. I wanted to climb them, but: fences.

I saw this sign propped up against a wall, and big green ribbons tied around the columns of buildings. I guess it was green week, though I don't know what that means here. green as in College Green? green as in sustainable and eco-friendly? green as in Irish and St. Patrick and luck? not sure.

doesn't that look like the most glorious tree for climbing? in a few months, when (or is it more like if at this point?) summer returns to Indiana I will designate a 'tree climbing week' for myself.

I felt both like a student (like any other student) and not like a student. I am, of course, endlessly a student. an endless student. but I am not a student at Trinity College. that makes perhaps more difference than it seems to.

then I got hungry and made my way to the Temple Bar district for food. I peered at menus outside cafe after cafe until this one on Essex Street caught my imagination. Brick Alley Cafe in dark shabby slab serifs over the door, window-menus boasting dozens and dozens of hot chocolate varieties, a long narrow bar above which stood a really neat clock, tables covered with local indie-looking zines and cards and such--I should've stayed there all day reading the Aristotle I'm supposed to be reading.

this is the lovely white chocolate with marshmallow the shy-seeming barista served me. not pictured: an even-more-delicious-cuz-I-was-so-hungry-by-then tomato and cheese ciabatta sandwich.

I did not sit all day in the cafe reading Aristotle. I walked across and along and around the River Liffey, people watching and looking into shops every once in a while. I bought a few postcards.

I took lots of photographs.

I browsed a few awesome bookshops, considered buying a magnet with Oscar Wilde's quote "Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong" on it, decided against that idea, and then had a berry scone with butter on it while I wandered back to the bus stop on Dame Street.

I was no less sleepy on the top of this double decker bus. the sun was setting out there behind the reflected bus-innards. it kept setting as I skipped through short security lines to wait by the windows for our gate to open, and it kept setting as I found my window seat, and it kept setting as we took off for Paris.

I'll have to write about Paris some other time.

spring semester, 2013

so this has been the first week of quite probably my last semester at this place called Tech. the ramifications of all that timing have not sunk in. they probably won't for a while. so it goes. here is a bit about the classes I'll be in:

Usability Studies with Dr. Brian Still
I've been assured by some of my colleagues that I will love this class. we'll be learning lots of fiddly technologies and systems for studying users and the ways they use things. I hope I'll be able to think up some awesome project to work on. maybe more Pinterest craziness?

Field Methods with Dr. Rebecca Rickly
another research-y class, this one. Dr. Rickly will have us choose one area of interest to work within, and we'll get to really delve into what methods of research are best for that area and why. Pinterest keeps coming to mind here, too. the site could potentially combine a few things that I find really interesting and somewhat important: digital publishing, digital copyright issues, the technology/craftsmanship dichotomy, and a bit of feminism.

Intercultural Communication with Dr. Rich Rice
the main textbook for this class is beautiful. it's just theoretical enough to keep my inner theorist absolutely delighted, yet practical enough to keep her from drowning in abstraction. I think. Dr. Rice is going to have us visit the ELS center of Lubbock, where we'll get to observe and contribute to ESL classes. that should be really fun. we are also collaborating online with students in India and China. I've recycled this other blog, again, for this class. in this class and Field Methods, we'll be talking about research and ethnography and it all seems lovely and overlapping.

lastly, I suppose, there's the second half of our first-year writing course, Advanced College Rhetoric, which I hope won't kill me. I'll teach Monday mornings, which thanks to dear Martin Luther King, Jr. and his holiday, gives me an extra week to prepare. nice.

fall semester, 2012

here we are again, in the delightful throes of another autumn, another wonderland of academic adventuring. don't be jealous. you can go to grad school next year, if you want. and if you don't want, you can find a library and read some Aristotle or Ong on your own. I promise it's interesting stuff. check out Ong's Orality and Literacy, and then we can talk about it for a few hours sometime. really. I would love to.

my classes this semester are crazy-similar. they even have one textbook in common--a fat green anthology called The Rhetorical Tradition.

Theories of Argumentation with Dr. Booher (and Dr. Carter)
this is just what it sounds like. we're arguing about arguments: what they are, how they're made, what they're supposed to do, by what methods, and why these things might be worth studying. so much interesting debate. hopefully we don't have too much fun pulling apart the nature of reality, value, truth, knowledge... the ways we argue and the ways we analyze arguments betray the ways we see the world and what we esteem important. is there anything under that beyond inexplicable, irrational, personal human preference? I don't know.

Rhetorical Theory with Dr. Baake (and Dr. Booher)
similar arguments happen in this course. how do our perceptions shape our methods of communication, persuasion, influence, life, everything? should we be diligently chasing some universal objective essence, or just situating our poor selves within whatever context seems most useful at the moment? what're the best terms to use for talking about all of this, and where do those come from? are they good enough? what kinds of responsibilities do we have as rhetoricians? says who? why? there is a ton of theory already lying around (see that fat green anthology sprawled open on my bedroom floor, for some examples), but has any of it really answered these questions? will it ever? if not, why are we wasting our time?

Essentials of College Rhetoric with . . . me
I'm teaching two sections of this beautiful monster: English 1301-65 and English 1301-69. Sixty-seven little undergraduates file into my classroom on Thursdays and stare at me while I do my best to explain why on earth rhetoric is important to them and their futures. it's been fun so far, and I'm sure it's going to teach me a ton about why on earth rhetoric is important. getting to know sixty-seven undergraduates and helping them navigate their first college writing class will hopefully not kill me. I might even love it. and then....

I'll run away to get a PhD somewhere so I can teach rhetoric and writing to roomsful of undergraduates for ever and ever. maybe? this idea seems absolutely enchanting. but we ought to be wary of enchantment, oughtn't we? at any rate, we will see how one semester of the teaching gig goes. wish me luck.

summer semesters

I haven't been in summer school since middle school when I took gym to get that P.E. credit out of the way. but this summer, partly to keep my assistantship and partly for a few random other reasons, I have had the pleasure of taking two rather nice classes. the first came on the heels of spring semester, during the three week seminar/break period they call the "maymester," and the second came directly on the heels of the first. at Tech they split summer into a semester I and a semester II, just to give students lots of room for accessing whatever their choice of academic torment. it's very complicated, but somehow it's turned out that I've technically been in classes non-stop since January. when fall semester gets here I am not going to have much trouble transitioning back into school-mode, am I?

anyway. now that the summer is 81.2% over, I'm going to write here about my two classes.

Geography of Eastern Europe with Dr. Jones (and her TA Brittany Walker)
this was my excuse for wandering around Europe a few months ago. we can blame Kolby for suggesting it and Dr. Jones for giving me a thoroughly convincing spiel when I sat down in her office to find out more. it was a marvelous trip, and it did have its educational moments, I promise. there were seven of us, plus Dr. Jones, and we all started a class blog. we learned about architecture, and maps, and history. I can now say 'thank you' in Hungarian, Romanian, and German. I have some Slovak written down somewhere and two memory cards full of photographs.
one of our projects for the class was a photo essay centered on something tourists don't usually pay much attention to. I chose the undersides of awnings for mine. here, for your enjoyment, are four of my awning pictures, one from each country.

should I give out a prize for anyone who wants to guess which is from which? call them white, orange, green, and crumbling and match each with either Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Austria. and then suggest some nice but not outrageously extravagant prize you'd like to win (hmm.... hand-drawn postcards? a set of crochet slippers? personalized poem? lessons on how to properly use a semi-colon? ignore these options if none of them suit you), and I'll think about it.

History and Theories of Composition with Dr. Rice
this is a much more rigorous class, I must say. we meet online every Thursday evening and discuss how all the theoretical developments over the last thirty or so years might help us be better writing teachers. it's cool stuff, for the most part. my classmates are from all over the place, and they do all-over-the-place things. science stuff, editing and publishing stuff, high school english stuff, and aerospace stuff. we are a diverse bunch. our conversations get pretty interesting. I love it most when we get asking questions about what all these words we throw around mean. what is "composition" or "voice" or "literacy" or "plagiarism" or "error," really? and for this class I also have a blog. supposedly, this summer educational jaunt will prepare me for teaching two sections of ENGL 1301 in the fall. I hope it does. it won't erase the sheen of terror that has been painted around the very thought of being a grown-up instructor named Ms. Chesley to several dozen college freshman... but hopefully it will give me a sharp enough razor to scrape through the fear. wish me luck.

variable infinities and stuff

so I just found out my baby sister (look: she and her husband have a blog), in whose company there is always much silliness to be enjoyed, has been finishing up an undergraduate thesis about stars. how cool is that?

and even cooler is the fact that I get to proof the thing for her. mm, my favourite thing to do. and in the process I may learn a few bits about astrophysics. or something.

{ photo borrowed from this kind soul on flickr. }

compared to some families, ours isn't the most tightly knit group. perhaps it's my own fault. me, the wandering reclusive one, and perhaps the rest of them keep in touch better. I doubt it though. my guess is that we all keep in touch tolerably with mum, and the rest of us only talk when there is some news or a need. like all the times I call my genius brother when I have questions about computers or programming.

how long has my sister been working on this thesis? I have no idea. probably a long time--it's nearly 40 pages long. I might sort of remember hearing about this observatory once. but a thesis? do I find it strange (unfair?) that she, the baby sister, has written an actual, legitimate thesis at a little school in Idaho while I, the graduate student, will not dream of doing any such thing for many years, if ever at all? that's the difference between the humanities and the sciences, I guess. science is all about research. hard facts and numbers and complicated equipment.

it's not that fields in the humanities don't include research. it's just not as overtly recognizable (or never was before, to me) as the testing-things-in-a-lab kind, I guess. the complicated equipment of an english major's research might not be anything at all like the night sky or a telescope. it might be a the cultural implications of the circulation records of a small library in eighteenth-century britain, instead. a little more micro than this variable stars business, but still part of helping us all better understand our universe, I think.