Culture: December 2005 Archive Page

The idea that religion can bring material advantages has a distinguished history. A century ago Max Weber argued that the Protestant work ethic lay behind Europe's prosperity. More recently Robert Barro, a professor at Harvard, has been examining the links between religion and economic growth (his work was reviewed here in November 2003). At the microeconomic level, several studies have concluded that religious participation is associated with lower rates of crime, drug use and so forth. --Wealth from worship (Economist)

The article carefully notes the difference between association and causation. Be sure you read all the way to the end for clever bit.

I saw one ray of hope -- a "popular writing" program at Seton Hall University, where nontraditional students (i.e., grownups with day jobs) could earn a degree and, more to the point, gain serious professional training without having to attend a university full time. The fact that one school had dared to attempt such a thing suggested that maybe, someday, the teaching methods and subject matters I had developed over the years might be put to good use with serious students of writing. --Orson Scott Card --Why I Am Teaching at SVU -- and Why SVU is Important (Meridian Magazine)

Almost but not quite... isn't he talking about Seton Hill University's Writing Popular Fiction program?

The article itself is noteworthy because it presents Card's politically incorrect belief, as a Mormon, that Christian values are important to a society that wants to survive.

It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers ? 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure. The moral panic over violent video games is doubly harmful. It has led adult authorities to be more suspicious and hostile to many kids who already feel cut off from the system. --Henry Jenkins --Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked (PBS)

Gender in the Workplace (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

When two students followed me to my office after an exam, they gasped when I opened my door.

Student 1: "Dr. Jerz -- your office is clean!"
Student 2: "Did your wife come here?"

The shocked guffaws from myself and Student 1 attracted the attention of a colleague from across the hall, who said she wanted to see my office for herself.

For the record, I told everyone that I'm man enough to clean my own office.

Electronic-entertainment giant Take-Two Interactive, parent company of Grand Theft Auto series creator Rockstar Games, released Stacker Tuesday, a first-person vertical-crate-arranger guaranteed not to influence young people's behavior in any way. --New Video Game Designed To Have No Influence On Kids' Behavior (The Onion (Satire))

In the 40 years since Derrida paid that visit to Johns Hopkins, succeeding generations of scholars have had time to fall in love with theory, fall out of love with it, and learn how to live with it. As in any long-term relationship, there's a continuing re-evaluation and reimagining of what works and what does not. Rei Terada, chairwoman of comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine, says: "As the 60s becomes a historical period... we can make finer distinctions and groupings among things that seemed all of a piece closer to the time. ... People are starting to sort out such legacies." No one still believes, for instance, "that all French theory is politically progressive," she says.

It may be neither fair nor accurate, decades after Theory hit its high-water mark, to keep using it as a whipping boy for everything that has gone wrong with literary studies. "The problem of the humanities is funding, lack of institutional support, lowering enrollments, lowering numbers of hires, the rise of part-time labor," says Andrew Parker, a professor of English at Amherst College. "This is the real crisis, not whether we have theory with a capital T or a small T." --Jennifer Howard --From the issue dated December 16, 2005 (Chronicle)

They enjoy learning. For nearly all professors, the chance to review and expand their own youthful education in a variety of fields is a treat that almost transcends the educational needs of their children. Mathematicians, for example, relish the chance to reread the literature they half-missed when they were mastering geometry, and English professors, like me, enjoy the chance to relearn the astronomy they once loved before calculus crushed their hopes for a scientific career. They often see themselves as learning with their children rather than simply teaching them.

They are confident in their ability to teach. Professors often see teaching their own children as part of a continuum of pleasurable obligations to the next generation; they seek to integrate the values of their profession with the values they live at home. Since professors often teach the teachers, they tend to believe -- perhaps with some hubris -- in their ability to teach effectively at all grade levels. But more often, they recognize their limitations and seek collaboration with other parents -- often professors themselves -- with different areas of expertise. --W. A. Pannapacker --For Professors' Children, the Case for Home Schooling (Chronicle)

Pannapacker's list doesn't don't completely overlap with the reasons my wife and I homeschool, but I enjoyed reading it.

Of particular interest to me is the one about how much time is lost shuffling students around during a typical day in what my son calls "the school building":

Without all the crowd control and level seeking, the formal requirements of education can be completed in only a few hours a day, leaving lots of time for self-directed learning and play. As a result, home-schooled children generally learn faster and with less boredom and less justified resentment.

I'm always extremely nervous about wasting time passing out papers or doing other housekeeping during class. Maybe too nervous.

I was surprised to see how prominently Pannapacker mentions bullying. Junior high was difficult for me. I remember horrible Machiavellian power struggles on the bus, where I spent an hour and a half each day, ducking spitballs. Desegregation meant that I was bussed past two junior high schools in more affluent suburbs, to a third school in a less affluent area. I remember a gang of tough girls tried to get me to hit one of them, presumably so they could tell their boyfriends to "protect them" by beating me up.

I remember my first week in Catholic high school, when it felt like I was floating down halls full of kids in crisp button shirts. Once a jock with four or five of his buddies dared me to step outside, but I had just dumped a carton of chocolate milk over his head, so I can understand why he was mad at me. I ended up getting out of the fight by confusing him.

Him: Why'd you throw chocolate milk at me?

Me: I wasn't aiming my chocolate milk at you, I was aiming at this total jerk who's been throwing food at me for three days in a row. He's really stupid and cowardly, since he only picks on me when he's with a group of his friends. You should go pick a fight with him -- he'd probably be a lot more challenging to pick on than a wiry, pasty-skinned loner who'd really rather prefer to study for his Latin test. But thanks for the suggestion that I'm a severe threat to your social status, such that you are forced to retaliate with violence.

Him: Why'd you throw chocolate milk at me?

Me: Were there some words in there that you couldn't understand?

Lunchroom Crowd: Ha ha!

Him (blinking): Why'd you throw chocolate milk at me?

(I got that survival tactic from "I, Mudd," a classic Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk confused a planet full of androids by flooding them with illogic.)

Scientists are no different in their level of objectivity than are other professionals. They are careful in the analysis of evidence and in the procedures applied to arrive at conclusions. With this admission, it may seem that this myth is valid, but contributions from both the philosophy of science and psychology reveal that there are at least three major reasons that make complete objectivity impossible. --William McComas --Ten Myths of Science: Reexamining What We Think We Know

A 1996 article.

Doctor Says Long-Term Video Game Playing Is Likely Cause

A central Iowa mother woke up over the weekend to find her daughter having a seizure.

After a trip to the emergency room, a family learned that the cause was most likely from playing video games too long, Des Moines television station KCCI reported.

Doctors said such incidents are not common, but they do happen. Certain people are prone to it because of the way their brains work. --Girl Has Seizure After 5 Hours Of Video Gaming (WTAE-TV)

The videogame marathon was not, in itself, sufficient to cause the seizure. The article does specify that some people's brains are susceptible to seizures induced by flashing lights.

Note the mom-focused anecdotal lead and the prominence given to videogames as the cause (as opposed to patterns of flashing lights, which can be distributed in other media). Theatre performances often mention whether strobe lights or other startling special effects will be used. See also the news coverage of Pokemon seizures.

Now if the story were about a guy who had a seizure after spending five straight hours of marking final exams -- that would be news I can use.

In the modern retelling, the Cat in the Hat indeed comes back...but with a vengence! Wearing a full-body mech suit and accompanied by his Thug 2 and Thug 1, the Cat comes back to go head-to-head with the bon mot spouting goldfish. Invariable, the goldfish will triumph over the Cat (as Order must triumph over Chaos) - but that pesky Cat always escapes in the end, shaking his fist in the air, and promising to get his "Wacky Revenge." Fish taunts his foe by brandishing a shiny, hi-tech three-handled family gredunza whenver he's in public. --Where Have All The Flowers Gone? Long Time Passing? No! Updated for the Youth of Today. (Sarcasmo's Corner)

Via Girl Meets World.

In a larger university context, I can’t be open and honest, I fear, because of my lack of tenure, lack of position, lack of a terminal degree. I’m reminded often that only those with tenure have the freedom to “take risks” with students because with tenure, one has some protection if the risks don’t work out. Yet I’m working with students who have great needs and who present great risks. But there is no protection for me if the risks don’t work out.

[...]

They resisted the work, resisted me, and resisted the system that had them in such a foreign place. They resisted and behaved badly because they were afraid of failure, because they had so many other pressures placed on them, and because by behaving badly, they could gain a little respect from their peers by not appearing “stupid.” Yet we all knew what was going on…. we all knew about the resistance and the face-saving. The students and myself, we all knew. And we all knew that many times they just played me. They sometimes played me because they are in a system where everyone is played in some manner because someone has to win and someone loses. That’s just the way it is. They put on a face that allowed them to survive a difficult and foreign system and that face was one of belligerence and defiance. But I wore a face, too. My face was one of the educated, of the elite. They would never see themselves in my face because they couldn’t see through the mask.

Look how we all lost.

How could I expect them to remove their masks if I didn’t remove mine? Removing my mask would have been to tell my story (or part of it), to be real to them, to be a little vulnerable. Yet I couldn’t. I feared. I failed. I failed them. --Rubicon --Basic Writers and the Academy (Pass the Rubicon)

What’s the magic formula? How do I take the “good” and catch it in a bottle, and let it out when I need to ward off the “bad”? Sometimes I feel like Willy Loman pleading with the image of his fantastically successful brother – What’s the secret?

Of course, there is no "right answer," but I'm pursuing this line of thought because in myself I can see elements of that first-semester freshman sitting in a classroom, furious and terrified, alienated from a discussion everyone else seems to understand, silently pleading that the professor would stop talking about concepts and rules and theories, and just write on the board the answers to the questions that will be on the final exam.

Beldner, an artist, teaches a St. Mary's College class called "Pranks: Culture jamming as social activism." Among his students' projects this term was the distribution of a news release touting a fictional bar to be opened near the Moraga campus.

The news release was sent to the Times, the Associated Press and several other Bay Area newspapers. None published the information as news, although the Times ran a brief item on the hoax itself after a reporter spent several hours researching the nonexistent bar. --Matt Krupnick --Prank class tries to fool news outlets (Contra Costa Times)

I teach my news writing students about Joey Skaggs, and we all had a good laugh when I told them about his annual April Fool's Day Parade press releases.

But I hope the college looks very closely at the ethics of teaching students to lie for credit.

I'm using this sabbatical to work on a longer, more complex novel than I've ever written before. Even though I'm giving my writing, and my child, more of myself than they've ever had before, they both cry out for more. "Mommy, I wish you were there when we sing "Come In, Grown-Ups," my daughter says, referring to the fact that she goes to extended care after preschool, while some kids are picked up by their parents. Never mind that last year, she was both taken to preschool and picked up by the extended-care team.

Meanwhile, my book's pull is fierce. I've never had time for perfectionism before, but now I find it hard to let go of any pages. The book's demands sometimes out-shout my daughter's none-too-quiet voice. "Go play," I snapped at her this morning as I tried to finish a complicated scene, and then felt guilty when she melted into tears. --Lee Tobin McClain --Mom on Sabbatical (Chronicle)

Lee is my colleague down the hall.

After a faculty meeting ran a bit long yesterday, I dashed home, grabbed my seven-year-old son without giving him time to finish his daily root beer, and headed back out again for his piano lesson. We usually make it right on time, but the slightly late faculty meeting and a string of red lights meant that we were 20 minutes late to his half-hour lesson.

After the lesson, we came back to campus to help decorate the cafeteria for Christmas. While my son was worried that the event would cut into his computer game time, he had a grand time eating pizza and talking with our Spanish and French teachers. One of the Sisters of Charity handed him ornaments, one a time, bending the little metal hooks for him so he could hang them on the tree easily. Meanwhile, I strung Christmas tree lights. I dropped by The Setonian office just in time to watch the students resolve a photo caption crisis, and then went home.

When I woke up this morning, I realized I didn't want to go to work. I could have used a full day as Dad. My wife had cleaned the rugs and put a lot of stuff away, making room for bringing out our Christmas tree. The sight of big empty stretches of carpets, with neat piles of toys and stacks of library books, just made me want to stay home and have adventures with my daughter’s ponies, teach my son’s home-school lessons, and read aloud the six or seven chapters we have left until we finish The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

If I were working at a dot-com, or selling furniture, I wouldn't at all feel comfortable admitting something like that.

There was nothing about today that I was particularly dreading. In fact, the semester is winding down fairly nicely for me.