Rhetoric: April 2006 Archive Page

In graduate school, I ransacked the library in my quest for inspiration: it was a kind of archaeological excavation. Today, because of online catalogs and specialty Web sites, information can be targeted with pinpoint accuracy and accessed with stunning speed. Hence I doubt whether that kind of untidy, often grimy engagement with neglected old books will ever appeal again to young scholars. But it was through the laborious handling of concrete books that I learned how to survey material, weigh evidence, and spot innovative categorizations or nuggets of brilliant insight. Many times, the biggest surprises revealed themselves off-topic on neighboring shelves. --Camille Paglia --Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother (Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics)

Paglia is always stimulating, if not always comprehensible. (This is actually one of her more accessible essays.)

It was in Romania, while making a film about Ceausescu, that I first stumbled across the historical legacy of the communist joke. There I learned that a clerk from the Bucharest transport system, Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, had spent the last ten years of Ceausescu's regime collecting political jokes. He noted down which joke he heard and when, and analysed his total of over 900 jokes statistically. He measured the time gap between a political event and a joke about that event, and then drew up a graph measuring the varying velocity of Romanian communist jokes. He was also able to assert--somewhat tenuously--that there was a link between jokes and the fall of Ceausescu, since jokes about the leader doubled in the last three years of the regime. The story of Stefanescu, the statistician of jokes, was, ironically, much funnier than the jokes themselves. It seemed to capture the prosaic reality of the little man struggling against the communist universe. --Ben Lewis --Hammer & Tickle (Prospect)

In Georgia this week, the campaign manager for a candidate for governor resigned amid allegations he doctored the Wikipedia biography of an opponent in the Democratic primary.

Morton Brilliant was accused of revising the entry for Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor to add his son's arrest last August in a drunken driving accident that left his best friend dead.

The information was accurate and had been in the news. --Shannon McCaffrey --Wikipedia Ripe for Political Dirty Tricks (Breitbart | AP)

Thanks for the link, Mike.

Student Mike Rubino and I have been talking via e-mail with the director of our writing center, about how to get students thinking about the relative value of Wikipedia as a source.

I tell students that it's fine to refer to Wikipedia when preparing for an informal oral presentation, or as part of a blogged response to a reading assignment. In a research paper, however, it's not a credible source -- except if the research paper is on a very geeky, very rapidly changing topic related to the internet, or a meme that's currently spreading through youth culture, in which case the Wikipedia article is likely to have more up-to-date content than what you find in the mainstream media.

Congressman John P. Murtha will be the keynote speaker at this year's commencement, Saturday, May 13 at 11 in the Katherine Mabis McKenna Center on Seton Hill's Greensburg campus. --Alexandra Nseir --Murtha to speak at May commencement (Setonian)

I have heard both faculty and student grumblings about Murtha, who is, depending on who's talking, either pro-labor or anti-business, pro-life or anti-woman, pro-Iraq withdrawal or anti-American, and pro-2nd-Amendment or a gun nut.

I just hope he's a more inspiring speaker than the one who described getting high on marijuana on the day he graduated from college and basically told all the graduates that what they had just spent 4 years doing was crap, or the one that spent most of the time reading a sappy urban legend that's been going around the internet for years.

She was supposed to slam the door, but Baldwin held the door so tight, she couldn't close it.

"He made a drastic change in the blocking," she said. "He was showing me the door, metaphorically. The stage management apologized to me about it later."

Baldwin said, "If, in one show out of the scores of shows we have done, I changed the blocking in some modest way that wasn't to Jan's liking, I sincerely apologize. But Jan never said the lines in the play as Orton wrote them, and it wasn't my inclination to tell The Post."

Maxwell insists she knew all her lines: "Did I ever make goofs onstage? Yes. Did Alec? Yes. That's just live theater." --Curtain-Razing Baldwin Blow-Up: Off B'Way Star Quits Over Tantrums (NY Post)

Oh, those crazy artistes.

I'm not blogging this because I care about the personal lives of the actors. Instead, I'm amused by the different spins the two parties put on a core of facts about which they agree.

This is unusual because it doesn't seem to be the reporter acting independently to put a scandalous spin on a routine event. Each of the two parties is trying to use their celebrity, and the reporter's desire for juicy quotes, in order to attack the other.

The Connections class for fall 2006 is going to do a session on SHU etiquette centering around how students can appropriately present themselves to faculty and staff on campus. E-mail, phone, meetings, classroom, verbal encounters are all open for discussion.

With this in mind, will you please give your replies to the following so that we can relay to the students what SHU expects of them.

E-mail me your comments when done.

YOUR COMMENTS WILL BE ANONYMOUS!!!!

Thank You,

Lynda Sukolsky

Please share with others on campus that will have some comments to make on this subject


What is your best piece of advice on how to interact with faculty/staff appropriately?

What is your pet peeve in the classroom around student behavior?

How would you instruct a student to e-mail and/or phone you?

When meeting with a student, the student should....

Additional advice or "don't ever do this".

BONUS-- anyone have any real life stories they can share of what not to do? ALL PARTIES REMAIN ANONYMOUSWhat is your best piece of advice on how to interact with faculty/staff appropriately? (Seton Hill University -- Connections)

It's our obligation as members of an educational community to tell our students what behavior is appropriate, and to reinforce our expectations on a regular basis. Asking students to investigate the boundaries is a great opportunity to get them thinking about such expectations. This time of year, I'm sure plenty of SHU faculty and staff will share horror stories.

But I'm concerned that our contributions may contribute to the impression that we hate students, or that we think they aren't capable of improvement.

It's not only students who violate social norms. I've worked with professors or staff members who put girle pics on their screen savers (visible from the hallway), abused their positions of authority in the classroom during election season, mocked students behind their backs, misused university equipment (taking laptops home over the weekend so their teenagers could play games with it, then returning the laptop on Monday infested with a virus that incapacitated the software I was hired to use... I'm still bitter about that, in case you can't tell), hit "send" without thinking, and left telephone messages when they were too angry to see straight.

And while I have plenty examples of student missteps to contribute, every day I work with students who are better writers, more advanced thinkers, more socially conscious citizens, and simply better human beings than I was when I was an undergrad.

Dear Candidate: Thank you again for meeting with us at the American Historical Association's annual conference. We have narrowed down the applicant pool to three very strong candidates, yourself included, but we just can't decide among them! We hope you would be willing to come to the campus, along with the other candidates, and fight to the death for our amusement. --"Dexter Coisson" --Groundhog Day on the Market (Chronicle)

Five hundred quatloos on the newcomer!

--Dad shoots at computer, saying son spends too much time playing games (Tampa Bays 10 News)

Guns don't kill video games. Angry parents with guns kill video games.

Worried that I would not like him, my victim had used his humor to engage me, to make me laugh, to join in his witty barbs, and because I did like him, I had joined in. But we were not on equal footing and my comments contained a much more powerful threat because I did not have to like him, and he knew it. --Amy L. Wink --Navigating Whitewater (Inside Higher Ed)

A professor reflects after shutting off a class by getting too chummy with a jokester, and losing sight of where her obligation to teach must overpower the desire to join in the fun.

The gathering was the monthly meeting of "Dorkbot," a loose forum for the exchange of creative technological ideas that is developing a cult following around the world.

[...]

Repetto has finished a project called "foal table." The idea originated in a request from a friend working on a theater production to design a table that transformed into a horse. Repetto watched videos of foals being born and carefully calibrated a mechanical table to make it walk in the awkward, stumbling manner of newborn horses.

"What it's supposed to do is ridiculous because it's a table and there is no reason for it to be walking," Repetto said.

The idea is therefore perfectly Dorkbot ? a name that Repetto says is meant to appeal to people who like to stand back and experience awe in technology and creativity. --'Dorkbot' Meetings Develop Cult Following

Reading this article made me go "Ahhh!" Now that's taking control of technology.

This week I am going to ask you to participate in a media fast for TV Turn-Off Week, as part of the Media Fasting Reflection due on May 3.

If you give up TV, but watch DVDs on your computer, are you really making any progress? If you turn off the TV, but turn up your iPod, are you really taking control of the technology that defines our lives?

Confession time:

While we don't have cable TV, we do have a fairly big library of kid videos. Sometimes I'll put on a video for them and sit on the couch with my laptop, answering e-mail, despamming my blog, marking a paper, or fiddling with my digital camera. If the movie ends and I'm not finished, I'll get them interested in the bloopers or deleted scenes. So my desire to spend time on the internet leads directly to their exposure to more TV.

I've tried to address that by creating "the book game," which involves Peter (8) picking out a book, Carolyn (4) picking out a book, and me picking out a book. Peter and Carolyn will sit on the couch, and Peter will read all the books to Carolyn. Yes, on one level this is very good, but I'm conscious that I use "the book game" when I want to see what's happening on the blogosphere.

I also sometimes use "the book game" to avoid playing with my daughter's Barbie. So while naturally as an English teacher and a parent I'm going to say that books are good, here I'm turning to media -- books -- when my daughter is asking me for one-on-one attention. (It's not the idea of playing dolls with my daughter that bothers me. Why, the other day I was playing with my daughter's pony castle, and I made an army of insect peasants rise up in rebellion against their pony overlords. They fought an epic battle, and our leaders -- a horned beetle and Pinky Pie (tm) agreed to settle this dispute in single combat, then had a tea party, had a bath together, and took a nap. But Barbie just kind of lies there staring up at me.) --Dennis G. Jerz --Introduction to Media Fasting (Introduction to Literary Study)

McClure said that some students seem to feel "that e-mail is a casual form of communication, where professional relationships somehow do not exist as they do in the classroom -- students feel comfortable saying things in an email that they would never say to you in person." --David Epstein --Be Polite, E-Polite (Inside Higher Ed)

Nothing terribly ground-breaking in this article, but I'm blogging it because the examples are all university-related, and it might make a good discussion starter in this fall's "Writing for the Internet class."

The key word for me here is not 'Fun'. The concept of fun is well understood, I should think, after many years of games and many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of releases. There are theories of fun, analyses of fun, examinations of the fun of one aspect of a game or another, and whole schema devoted to separating out different kinds of fun.

No, the key word for me here is 'meant'. Meaning is an interesting concept, in both positive and negative, because it suggests purpose or exclusion. Saying that a product is meant to be a certain way can implicitly imply that it is not meant to be another way. Big Macs are meant to be tasty pleasures, they are not meant to be nutrition supplements, for example. They are designed with that intent.

What I'm driving at here is a kind of pre-judgment, and video games are unique as a medium (that I'm aware of) in that the greater majority of its creators, designers and producers otherwise actively pre-judge themselves and their work according to a 'fun' standard not as a key trait of enablement, but as the end goal in and of itself. --Tadhg Kelly --''Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun.'' (Particle Blog)

Via Grand Text Auto.

I liked this author's argument that in video games, "fun" is a means, not an end. Still, this passive-verb-heavy passage prompted me to post a bit about the intentional fallacy:

Novels need to be readable. Their basic craft requires that readers are invited to keep turning the pages until they get to the end. But what are novels 'meant' to be? Nothing. They're meant to be whatever the author intends for them to be. Ditto music, ditto poetry, ditto television, sculpture, comics and so on. In all these forms, the basis of aesthetics or pace or whatever are regarded as the core necessity.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. --The Bill of Rights: Amendment I

The First Amendment, among other things, prevents the government from arresting or silencing a citizen for expressing an unpopular or offensive opinion that powerful people may not want to hear.

It is also popularly misunderstood as a magical powerup that protects authors from the consequences of exercising free speech.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. Or, as the Ninth Amendment puts it, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Thus, your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness takes precedence over my freedom of speech.

The owner of a theatre has a right and obligation to other patrons to eject someone who falsely shouts "fire," just as an airline has a right and obligation to single out for extra security screening someone who makes a joke about carrying a bomb.

If an employee makes a racist or otherwise insensitive remark, the employer has the right and obligation to discipline the employee. Even if that employee remark does not amount to libel, the livelihood of co-workers who are not responsible for the employee's remarks may be affected if customers see the company as permitting insensitive behavior.

If a football player insults an assistant coach, the head coach can order him to run laps. If the player isn't willing to do the punishment, then he's free to quit the team. The coach is free to order the team to wear pink tutus and ballet slippers, and the NFL is free to discipline the coach, or give him a raise if they want to. But whatever happens, it's not a First Amendment issue, because the laws of Congress have nothing to do with the matter.

The First Amendment does not require that a citizen be furnished with a platform from which to speak. Thus, if group X invites Sally to speak at a meeting, and Joe shows up with a bullhorn to interrupt Sally's speech, Joe's rights are not being violated if the police show up and escort him out of the building. The First Amendment is also not a shield behind which one can hide after publishing libel, defamation, or threats against specific individuals or small groups. It does not insist that owners of private property permit protestors to camp on their front lawns, or spray paint graffiti on their walls. It does not require that city authorities stand by idly while marchers tie up traffic. It does not prohibit schools from disciplining students who post vulgar or offensive MySpace entries.

There are many good arguments for why tolerance and open-mindedness are the best default practice, particularly in educational communities where people need to be free to make mistakes in order to learn from them. However, in no case does the First Amendment protect the speaker from the consequences of the choice to speak freely. Those consequences might range from losing an election to losing your job; from losing a friend to losing your good name.


It's purely a coincidence that I'm blogging on the First Amendment the day after some Seton Hill students launched a petition to cancel classes on the Monday after Easter. That calendar had been set over a year in advance -- almost two years, really. I know both the students who spearheaded the petition, and think of them both as upstanding citizens. I have no sense that the administration can, will, or even might respond with sanctions.

The First Amendment protects their right "to petition the government for a redress of grievances," but since the Seton Hill administration is not "the government," the First Amendment would have absolutely no relevance.

None.

But if those students had chosen to libel, harass, threaten, or make personal attacks, the university would be perfectly within its rights to respond with sanctions.*

If you want to say something that violates a contract with an employer, jeopardizes your enrollment with an educational institution, or flaunts the conditions of membership in the local treehouse club, the government won't arrest you. But your employer, your institution, and your clubhouse president are likewise free to apply whatever sanctions they feel are appropriate.

* Just in case any student is worried that I've gotten inkling of some administrative crackdown, let me repeat -- I'm not actually blogging this First Amendment piece out of concern that there was anything wrong with the petition. (I signed it, by the way, and told my class that as long as they do the work that's due Monday, and participate in a discussion via their blogs, that's fine with me.)

One of our administrators pointed out that she actually proposed the Friday/Monday plan that the students want, but was pressured to change that to Thursday/Friday because, as a Catholic college (so the argument went) we should be more sensitive to the liturgical significance of Holy Thursday (the day Jesus shared the Last Supper with his apostles) rather than the Monday after Easter (which is.. I don't know? the day the apostles showed up to work late because they didn't make it back from Jerusalem in time).

I called a disabled colleague a spaz after hearing he'd spilt coffee over yet another expensive bit of computer kit.... I use the term with irony as someone who was regularly called a "spaz" in the school playground, though I'm visually impaired and not what we once called "a spastic".

To confuse the issue, a non-disabled colleague had overheard and told me that she found that term offensive and thanked me not to use it in front of her. I was offended that she was offended because I didn't feel it was her place to be offended... after all, it's not her word and she wouldn't have been taunted with it. --Damon Rose --The s-word (BBC News)

Because I regularly teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and because this year I'm teaching a collection of Flannery O'Connor short stories, I've had plenty of class discussions about racially charged language.

Lately I've been spending time in each literature class introducing the concept of disability studies, in part because physical characteristics such as missing limbs or scars are often used by authors as a short of shortcut to characterization.

But hearing that a company recently marketed a wheelchair called the "Spazzo" makes me completely confused. Perhaps I shouldn't be.

At any rate, this article reminds me that language is power, and that terms used by mainstream society to label subgroups, and terms used by subgroups to refer to themselves are often points of conflict.

The Times article adds, from the CIRP survey, that the proportion of students who applied to 12 or more colleges increased by 50 percent from 2001 to 2005. The article does not go on to note that the 50 percent increase brought the percentage from 1.4 to 2.1. Most of the students who are using such strategies, and who turn up in such articles, are from a relatively elite background, educationally and financially.
Kevin Carey, research and policy manager at the think tank Education Sector, pointed out that the statistic would have been far less intimidating had it been presented instead as a 0.7 percent decline in the number of students who didn't apply to at least 12 colleges.

"To me that's a pretty good example of how you see all these stories that really only apply to a small percent," Carey said. "For the majority, this whole phenomenon means nothing."

Carey said that acceptance rate at the most elite institutions are down about one percentage point, but that even at those colleges it's hard to tell if it's truly more difficult to get in. Because more applicants in that pool are applying to more places, it could just be that there are just more applications, not more applicants. If that is the case, "it's not harder to get in, it just seems harder," Carey said. "It's not that there are many more students going to college. It's going up a bit." --David Epstein --Out of Control Admissions Hype (Inside Higher Ed)

A good article that analyzes some of the statistics cited by media reports.

Shouldn't that be "out-of-control" (with hyphens)?

On one level, blogs are little more than personal journals posted on the Internet for all to see. They provide a forum for teachers to share ideas with colleagues around the world or simply talk about themselves and others. But under a wider lens, the sometimes funny, sometimes searing blogs paint what may be the rawest portrait seen of the teaching profession in transition -- and by some measures, in trouble.

Read some and find out why more teachers than ever -- some estimates say up to half in this decade -- are leaving the profession feeling exhausted, disillusioned and underpaid. --Valerie Strauss --Blackboard Blogging: Web Journals Become the New Fly on the Wall of Teachers' Lounges (Washington Post (will expire))

This article begins with the approach that blogs are gossipy and snarky vehicles of personal opinion: "Some teachers use blogs in the classroom to communicate with students and allow them to critique each other's work. But it is in the personal blogs that teachers have some of the most open, and occasionally brutal, discussions about themselves and their profession."

Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.

Does something not strike you as odd here? --Bob Carter -- There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998 (Telegraph)

I'm not really sure what I think. Certainly recycling and avoiding waste are sensible, but when well-meaning activists use bad science to back up their claims, reason suffers.

Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests. --!!! BREAD IS DANGEROUS !!!