Beanie

One of the other mothers in Beanie's ballet class e-mailed this to me - taken at the dress rehearsal for her recital, which will be held tonight and tomorrow night.

Beanie is the smaller one in pink.

How can she look so little and so big to me at the same time?

From the trenches of Higher Ed

There are times when – typically, in the evening, at the end of a day especially filled with frustration on multiple fronts – StraightMan and I look at each other and sigh a single word: “Thwarted.”

It is a word that StraightMan and I not infrequently use.

While it can apply to parenting (e.g., our plans to enjoy a deliciously spiced dinner become thwarted by our daughter’s preference for plain butter pasta with anything and everything else on the side…), we typically use it to describe our teaching and especially our scholarship. As in: The lecture and discussion that we have prepared meticulously and even enthusiastically for a reading that especially fires our ire become thwarted by the fact that the sun shining this afternoon means that too many students will have skipped their assignment for the next day. Or as in: Our goals to prepare an article or a book chapter or a research grant become thwarted by everything else.

On days of thwart, StraightMan and I frequently follow our sighs with a question: “What happened?”

By which we mean: What the hell are we doing, mucking around in the trenches of Higher Ed? By which we mean: Were we not trained – nay, formed – for the idylls of Academia?

StraightMan and I teach, respectively, at a small, private liberal arts college of which neither of us had heard until he applied for the job, and at a middle-sized public comprehensive college that until recently had been known primarily as a party school.

I will take the risk of sounding arrogant: I confess that these were not necessarily the kinds of jobs that either of us had imagined for ourselves. I see this now not so much as hubris and more as naivete. StraightMan and I met in the final days of our senior year at a small, private liberal arts college that appears regularly at the tops of lists that “rank” schools. He and I received our PhD’s from the top programs at private (his) and public (mine) research universities. At such places, one is sheltered - and one feels, rightly or wrongly, that one is being cultivated for Academia.

So, this is not a complaint about the quality of our colleagues or even our students. At our respective institutions, StraightMan and I have colleagues with impressive credentials as scholars and inspiring gifts as teachers. (Then there are the ones whose retirements are awaited eagerly, I acknowledge.) We have students whose parents I hope to meet because I wish to congratulate them on raising such thoughtful, kind, motivated, and diligent children - and ask them how they did it. (Then there are the ones who make us mutter darkly about the good old days when a high school diploma might have sufficed.)

I could be describing almost any college or university in America today.

Sitting in my Ivory Tower, I had little inkling of the existence of Higher Ed until I began to work in it. It is a lot harder work than anyone in Academia ever advised me.

This brings me to a recent post on the anthropology blog, Savage Minds, which muses on what happens now with the contraction of Academia / Higher Ed:

One concern that I’ve heard which seems almost equally universal is that in a shrinking job market the most likely people to get shafted are the newly-minted Ph.D.s from ‘not-the-top-schools’. I’m not sure this is exactly true.

The blogger then describes where the jobs are - or rather, what the jobs are today: Not Academia, but Higher Ed.

Now, I am not sure that I am right about all this, but if I am then I think we can see what the implications are: although Top Schoolers might be best positioned for jobs in terms of their cultural capital, the best people to meet the demand for new jobs might be the Second Stringers of people who come from perfectly decent but not spectacular schools.

Leaving aside any distaste or disagreement with the blogger's terms themselves, I see the issue as less about Top Schoolers and Second Stringers - and more about underestimating and under-appreciating the skill required to be effective, productive, and successful in Higher Ed.

Not to mention - dare I even say it - the skill required to be happy.

On days of thwart, StraightMan and I occasionally invoke the names of Academics we have known, either as our teachers or as our fellow students. Most of them, we figure, never could do the jobs that we do in Higher Ed. Or be happy.

PowerPoint-less

The mind boggles.

A colleague in my department forwarded the slide, which I initially thought came from The Onion.

Then I followed the link to this article in The New York Times today.

I use PowerPoint in my teaching, mostly as an organizing tool to help me keep my thoughts connected as I talk and to provide a "map" for students to follow - I think it helps them maintain focus. Also, I admit, I sometimes like to have them look at something other than at me.

I do not, however, regard PowerPoint as imaging information any more than I imagine myself necessarily conveying information. I see myself as a guide in the process of learning how to ask and think and answer. In other words, I see part of what I do in my teaching as arguing and persuading. So, I found this striking in the Times report:

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point.

As a college professor who received an undergraduate degree in English and aspired (and still aspires) to write, it warms the cockles of my heart to read such complaints, coming from the military chain of command.

Cursing and swearing

Although it could, the title of today's post is not necessarily intended to describe my current state of mind or being.

Rather, it is referring to the class that I am preparing to teach. For Friday, I plan to have students in Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology read an excerpt from Jesse Sheidlower's The F-Word, which is a dictionary (published by Oxford University Press) of f-words, beginning with absofuckinglutely and ending with zipless fuck.

"The word fuck definitely did not originate as an acronym, as many people think," Sheidlower writes. So much for what you might have heard about the f-word's purported origins as "fornication under consent of the King" or "for unlawful carnal knowledge," which I think I remember hearing from, believe it or not, a CCD teacher. "In reality, fuck is a word of Germanic origin," Sheidlower tells us. "It is related to words in several other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, and Swedish, that have sexual meanings as well as meanings such as 'to strike' or 'to move back and forth.'"

Why is it that the f-word has come to be considered "cursing" or "swearing"?

Linguist Timothy Jay, in his book, Why We Curse: A Neuro-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech (2000), reminds us that cursing "refers to several uses of offensive speech. Technically speaking, [however,] cursing is wishing harm on a person (e.g., eat shit and die). But the term cursing is used comprehensively here to include categories such as: swearing, obscenity, profanity, blasphemy, name calling, insulting, verbal aggression, taboo speech, ethnic-racial slurs, vulgarity, slang, and scatology" (9).

Anthropologist Ashley Montagu, in The Anatomy of Swearing (1968), reminds us: "Swearing serves clearly definable social as well as personal purposes. A social purpose? But has not swearing always been socially condemned and proscribed? It has. And that is precisely the point. Because the early forms of swearing were often of a nature regarded as subversive of social and religious institutions, as when the names of the gods were profanely invoked, their use in such a manner was strictly forbidden" (1).

Fan-fucking-tastic, no?

Spring cleaning, part 3

During my break, I indulged in a little spring cleaning of the small stack of magazines that I have not read: Back issues of Bon Appetit (for which I confess to having not much taste, but which we felt forced to accept when Conde Nast shuttered Gourmet, after we had renewed our subscription), The Nation (which I read for Katha Pollitt, for arts and books coverage, and for the occasional need to feel righteously enraged), and The Economist (which might be the last newspaper standing to cover international news and science journalism in any meaningful way).

I skimmed. I clipped. I recycled.

It was from The Economist that I clipped an item on “The rise of the handyman” in Britain. The Economist reports:

Domestic help has long been a mostly female preserve, involving nannies, cleaners and laundry maids. That is changing, according to a forthcoming study by Majella Kilkey of the University of Hull and Diane Perrons of the London School of Economics. The pair reckon that nowadays 39% of domestic helpers in Britain are men, up from 17% in the early 1990s.

Now, the article, in its lede, gives the impression that professional men themselves are hiring handymen to take on odd jobs so that they can spend more time with their children. Not until the penultimate paragraph does the report note “it is mostly mothers who contract and supervise the workers.” (The article also adds “for the most part fathers do – whatever the cynics suspect – spend the time thus liberated with their families, rather than in the office, at the gym or in the pub.”)

I am curious to know about whether or not the trend holds in the United States, but I can imagine that here, too, not only are traditional men’s odd jobs being “outsourced” (e.g., the task formerly known as mowing the lawn being assigned to landscaping companies that employ migrant workers), but the outsourcing itself creates another form of house work (i.e., domestic management) for women. In my experience, it is typically the women who trade suggestions and recommendations and circulate the names and numbers of plumbers, electricians, contractors, and so on. Not to mention the women who make the arrangements to be at home for the service call or take the car for the oil change or the repairs.

In other words, as odd jobs become outsourced, the task becomes "shopping" for service, which falls into line with already existing ideas, in American culture and society, about what men do and what women do.

(For the record, StraightMan and I look on this type of home management as work that we share. Like laundry and meals and parenting. Which is part of the reason why I like him so much.)

In fact, StraightMan and I talk about the fact that as much as we need a wife - the kind who packs lunches for her Brady Bunches - we also need a husband. The kind with a tool belt. StraightMan seems secure enough in his masculinity to admit to the fact that while he is handy enough, he is not especially handy. Also, coupled with the demands and pressures of working in Higher Ed, he is not especially inclined toward doing odd jobs on the weekends. He really sees as his priority to be with Beanie and Bubbie (and with me).

So, I see parallels between the devaluing of odd jobs and, say, cleaning. The devaluing of odd jobs both shapes and mirrors shifts in ideas and practices of what it means to be a man today. The devaluing of odd jobs for professional men is not unrelated to their outsourcing to other men - for example, migrants and immigrants who are paid less and seen or heard little.

I think about Beanie and Bubbie: If children grow up with parents who do not clean the gutters, regrout the tub, and so on, then they learn nothing about the existence of gutters or the need for grout, much less about the tools of the trade, to say nothing of the skills required. They lose not only appreciation, but the ability to appreciate at all the effort and energy expended and the practice gained. They simply do not know or even notice.

I also see a distinction that is made between these kinds of work and, say, cooking, knitting, and woodworking, which arguably always commanded at least a bit of respect as "craft" and today have become revalued. (As an aside, I think there is much more to say about the interest in "craft" in academia - for example, The New Yorker published this review of the books Shop Class as Soulcraft and Richard Sennett's The Craftsman.)
By revalue, I do not necessarily mean a "return" to previous value, but the assignment of still other (new-to-them) value.

Spring cleaning, part 2

Having been raised as an American and a female, too, I find that accessorizing improves my impression of almost any task at hand. For example: On a whim, I have enrolled, with a few friends, in a cupcake decorating workshop. If you know me at all, then I might as well have said that I will be taking a a class in organic chemistry or a seminar on strip tease. In any case, the point is that the workshop requires that I bring a cake decorating kit, which I do not, or until last week did not, own because I am more the butter-knife-and-a-can-of-Betty-Crocker type. So, I bought said kit because I started to think that a significant reason why I have no frosting / icing skills (aside from the availability of artfully decorated cakes for purchase, not to mention my complete lack of interest until now) is exactly because I do not own the right tools.

The importance and meaning of accessories do not end there.

Recently, I replaced our indoor broom with a Casabella animal print broom that I admit I had eyed for a time. The broom says: I sweep, but I also have a sense of style and humor. Grrr.

But wait, there's more!

I confess also that when we lived in a place with a Whole Foods, I spent inordinate time in the home products aisle, considering the virtues of bamboo-fiber scrubbers and the like. At our local natural foods market (formerly known as a health food store), I like to browse the bottles of Life Tree Home Soap and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day All Purpose Cleaner. In my office on campus, I keep an Eco-Cloth in my desk drawer.

I am a fool for "design" and the marketing of consumer items pertaining to the green-and-simple house and home. Like other domestic arts that became reframed as drudge work that are becoming re-reframed as crafts - knitting and cooking come to mind - cleaning, too, is being packaged and sold.

Not production, but consumption - and I seem to be buying it.

Spring cleaning, part 1

From my wise and wonderful friend’s blog, I followed a link to wise and wonderful words from writer Anne Lamott – on how and why we need not be over-connected and over-busy. “Time is not free—that’s why it’s so precious and worth fighting for,” she writes.

I enjoyed Lamott’s musings about making time for living until this bit near the end:

Will they give me one hour of housecleaning in exchange for the poetry reading? Or wash the car just one time a month, for the turtles? No? I understand. But at 80, will they be proud that they spent their lives keeping their houses cleaner than anyone else in the family did, except for mad Aunt Beth, who had the vapors?

I would like to defend cleaning. Social anthropologist Mary Douglas described dirt as “matter out of place.” Cleaning, for me, is putting in place. At the end of the day, I sweep the Cheerios under the table into the dustbin, wipe clean the kitchen counters of coffee grounds, pick up the wooden train tracks and the building blocks on the living room rug and return them to their baskets.

Indeed, the tracks and blocks have baskets because everything must have its place - if not, then I will find or make one for it.

So, I am not talking about cleaning of the back breaking, shoulders aching, bones creaking, and clean squeaking kind, at least not on a regular basis :) The fact that we hire help on that front has contributed to the balance of 2 jobs + 2 kids.

I find the work of cleaning, and certainly its effects, satisfying. I take pride in having my house "clean" - that is, in order. It will be a fine thing to remember me by - or it would be, were cleaning not so belittled.