More fun with used books

As you may know, Bradley and I frequent used book stores. Here's a recent find: Thomas Hardy paperback, circa 1965.

Writing out before revising in

I've spent a good chunk of today working on my paper for this year's meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. I'm working on a paper about the way that early modern conduct books gender childhood, which is something that redevelops some of my argument of my long-term book project (you know, the old dissertation to book thing).

When I write conference papers -- or even when I gave a talk on campus earlier this year -- I try to write out before I revise in. That is, I really try to draw in as much relevant stuff as I've already written (since this is part of an ongoing project) and write as much new material as possible within a given time frame. I'll often end up with significantly more than I need. For example, with this paper, I'm at 11 pages and I'll end up with quite a bit more in the next couple of days. Then, I'll excise a great deal of it to get back down to 10-12 pages.

This has all got me thinking about teaching students about the writing process. Students don't always believe me that early drafts (especially the ones no one sees) can be really bad. While the final product is incredibly important, as it's what others sees and what gets graded, the process towards that paper is equally important. Some students resist this idea simply because it takes a lot of time. I'm not blind to that. But I've got so many students who resist the idea because they are trying to make everything perfect before they even type it: those are the students who tell me they can't get their paper started at all because they can't think of a good first line. I can see this -- and I understand it. I'm not entirely sure how to convince students that this can work.

I suppose that's why students take an entire semester or two of frosh comp. It's all about learning how to get at the writing process -- and not just fixing the brain so we write it right the very first time out. I hope that we'll get there sometime this semester.

(I'm not complaining about my students. They're working hard and learning. But I'm still not sure that I'm able to convey some of the things about habits of writing that make it possible to be more successful college-level writers.)

More adventures in cooking

This is a recipe from one of my current favorite cookbooks Harumi's Japanese Cooking (okay, current favorites in that everything looks really yummy and more-or-less doable by me. This is the only thing I've attempted so far).

This dish is Tori to Piman no Itame ni -- it's chicken thighs with red and green peppers, flavored with red wine, onion, garlic, soy sauce, rosemary and basil. It's sort of a fusion of flavors, as you can tell from the seasonings.

But it is really tasty and really easy to make, so it's got that going for it.

Reading my world, the ongoing project

We live on the coastal plain of North Carolina, so snow is pretty unusual. We apparently had some little guests on our porch due to the snow.

Thoughts on Haiti

David Griffith has a really nice post about Haiti and American gluttony. If you've never read his stuff before, you should. He wrote A Good War is Hard to Find (one of those things that Bradley introduced me to). It's about violence in American culture -- and includes a great reading of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Anyway, just a recommendation for a reflective piece about the American impulse to give after disasters ...

Just a quick thought

I'm teaching Byron and Shelley this afternoon in my survey course. I just ran across this passage in Shelley's "Defence" and I think it's worth another look:

The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.

That's it. I just wanted to point that out.

Dinner experiment

It's early in the semester, so I'm feeling more adventurous with cooking. Last night's experiment: Chicken Jhalfrazi.

(fyi: I'm back to eating meat - I was falling into eating vegetarian junk food, and not enough nutritious stuff. Plus it's hard to do a lot with vegetables at this time of year in a very small town. fyi about the fyi: I spent from fall 2007 to this Christmas break as a vegetarian. It was an effort for health, and not just about animals. I like them too, but it really was about health/losing weight/the environment.)

Bradley at Brevity

"Julio at Large." Go read it.

That is all.

Technology in the College Classroom

At our institution, we have several smart classrooms, and for the most part, I'm assigned to teach in them. I've been thinking a lot about how I use the computer in the classroom -- particularly since I don't lecture much, and when I do I don't use power point -- and a post at The Chronicle of Higher Education has me thinking even more about it.

The post is about a new law in California that mandates the availability of electronic versions of all college textbooks. As some people note in the comments section, the very expectation of what a textbook actually is is a little vague in some disciplines (like literature, where we might have students buy a book from a smaller press or might have students buy multiple inexpensive books for a course -- as opposed to science or business, where the students buy a more traditional textbook). I realize that the law is only mandating the availability -- and not mandating the usage -- so I'm not sure I have much of an opinion either way on such a law. I admit that I'm ultimately a little skeptical about electronic versions of books, but I think that's my own love for the tactile experience of a book. Electronic versions of books might very well be a better choice in some fields. I just don't know and I wouldn't want to prohibit someone else's innovation in the classroom.

But that's not really what I'm thinking about. What I'm really thinking about are these comments by a legislative aid:

Senator Elaine Alquist, who wrote the bill, was unavailable for comment. Her legislative aid, James Schwab, who was involved with writing the bill, said that helping students save money was the primary motive. For instance, even today, one textbook with a list price of $173.33 is available electronically for $95.33.

Mr. Schwab also said that the law would encourage professors to integrate technology into the classroom; spark more student interest in science, engineering, and math; and give students marketable skills in using technology.

"Students these days, and kids growing up, will be used to -- and even prefer -- reading stuff in an electronic format," Mr. Schwab said.

I understand the desire to teach students skills in technology and I have no problem with that (though I'm not actually sure how ebooks do that); and I understand the desire to spark interest in STEM fields (though there are a lot of students in those fields -- and I'm also not entirely sure how this helps that, other than making the textbooks cheaper for students wanting to study there. I'd ask for some hard data on whether or not the high cost of science textbooks actually drives people from studying it, but I'm not sure anyone's got any information beyond anecdote).

But what I'm never quite sure about -- and it seems like a lot of legislators and policymakers are interested in this -- is what it means to encourage faculty to integrate technology in the classroom. What does that vague assertion mean? Are faculty -- especially STEM faculty -- really not integrating technology into the classroom? Or is this about encouraging faculty in the humanities to use technology more? And really, just what would we do there?

Part of my response to this may come from the fact that this feels rather micro-manage-y in the vagueness of the statement. The statement also suggests to me that the people behind the law don't actually know what happens in a college classroom.

Hmm. This wound up going in a different direction that I expected. So I guess I have more of an opinion on the whole thing than I thought. And perhaps some of it really does boil down to a bit of confusion/frustration/whatever on my part about vague assertions by people in legislative bodies about how to improve higher education (and I'm not suggesting we don't need improvements -- we do. I'm just not quite sure "technology is good" is an actual answer to the problems we have).

A book for future reading

I'm looking forward to this one: Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities by Martha Nussbaum. I'm always happy to read a polemic about why what we do in the humanities matters.

I discovered the forthcoming publication of this in an article in Times Higher Education. The article itself is well worth a read. The philosopher at the beginning of the article has some, let's say, strong opinions (and might be a wee hyperbolic), but overall an interesting view from another country where humanists feel under attack.