Rhetoric: June 2008 Archive Page

Fantastic narrated slide show on the impact of drugs on a community. Striking black and white images, with an equally powerful interface. (Brenda Ann Kenneally.)

Inside Higher Ed goes to hell.

Job Listing #666. University of Hell at Seventh Circle. Visiting Assistant Professor, two years (with possibility of converting to tenure-track position at culmination of two-year appointment). Beginning September 2009. Teaching load of forty-three courses per semester, with no more than thirty-nine preparations (i.e. instructor will teach more than one section of some courses). No official committee duties, but will be expected to contribute occasionally to departmental administrative work. Competitive salary, given local economy. Candidate must exhibit evidence of strong potential for both research and teaching, and significant flexibility in his/her expectations. For further information, repeat the name "Mizrakreth, Chair of Hiring Committee" three times.

Raymond stroked his chin thoughtfully. After a minute he began chanting "Mizrakreth..." After all, it couldn't hurt just to get a bit more information.

The Chronicle Review ponders the effects of Grand Theft Auto IV:

You need to be honest with yourself. Go outside and find a locked car -- or go to the back alley where missile launchers hover in a glowing light waiting for you to pick them up, or go drive down that street in your town where all the strippers hang out waiting for you to pick them up -- and see if you're tempted.

But not just tempted. Not just amused or excited by the possibility of becoming a dark hero of the criminal underworld. You need to determine if you're actually willing and able to act on those temptations. You need to determine whether it's possible for you to change from whoever you were into someone completely different, someone who no longer recognizes the conditions and regulations of a society that, until you played the video game, were all you knew and believed in. That is, you need to find out just how stupid you really are.

I don't attend many science/technology conferences, so the genre of the one-minute poster presentations is brand new to me.  The genre is akin to the haiku or flash fiction -- it's a research paper bared down to the bones.  Flash scholarship?  60-second-scholarship?

About 20 people pre-loaded their slides onto the conference room computer, then lined up in the aisle. Each was given one minute to present their ideas. The host had an ooga-ooga horn that he squeezed when the one minute was up.

It's painful to watch someone cut off in mid-sentence, but it's a fascinating genre. Plus, this one-minute pitch is designed to get the conference attendees to stop by the presenter's table later on.  It's an efficient way to for conference attendees to sample all the posters, and it's a good chance for the presenters to encapsulate why their work is worth a closer look.

Okay, now that I've processed what I think about the genre, I'm ready to shift my focus to the content of the talks.

Paper 15 and 16, on on improving/expanding browser functionality were the most relevant to my interests so far. Paper 18 explicitly mentions blogs, so naturally I'm interested.  Paper 19 "Social WebEx Usage" is an educational tool that interests me; from the quotes from students it seems to be teaching Java, which is not an application I'd need.

Students whose posters are rated the best will give 10-minute talks tomorrow, and the winners of that will go on to the next phase.

As long as those pesky neighborhood kids stay off of Joseph Epstein's lawn, the rest of us can read his Weekly Standard essay about the generation gap in education. I went to a Catholic high school, where I figured out that the whole point of requiring uniforms and "Yes, Sister... No, Sister" was to give the kids something concrete but harmless on which to focus their rebellious energy.  I could come to school in mismatched socks and a garish tie, and nowhere in the student manual did it say I was doing anything illegal.

I always pictured the sisters snickering behind their office doors. "Young Jerz thinks he's hot stuff because he managed to get ahold of a stack of signed hall passes." (I used them to get out of class so that I could work on the sets for the theater productions, but of course the teachers wouldn't have let me out of class if they thought I would cause trouble or fall behind.)

Epstein makes a good point about the role of feelings in literary analysis. I always cringe when a student dismisses a text because "It didn't hold my interest."  (Bad book! How dare you challenge my world view or create an occasion to reflect on something outside my personal interests?)  Since Seton Hill University markets itself as a caring place, and I chose to work at an institution that would reward me for expressing a personal interest in my students, Epstein would probably see me as part of the problem that he's identifying here.

What do you think... does he go too far? Am I defending the coddled millennials because I identify more with them than I do with Epstein's generation?

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn't become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint--and maybe a touch of the fear, too--that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were.

So often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to--but did not--write: "D-, Too much love in the home." I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement.

Schneier on Security:

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about -- the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 -- no photography.

My kids are playing on the floor as I carry out my online routine.

Carolyn is mixing and matching from different Lego sets in order to create characters from the "Magnificent Blimpship" steampunk bedtime stories I've been telling her.

She aims Captain Rod Gearhart's gun at her brother's minifigure.  "I just killed you."

"No, I killed you," Peter retorts.

"But I killed you first!"

"I killed you first!"

This goes on for some time.

Finally I turn on them, with a voice registering about 7 or 8 on the "parental authority" scale: "Children, please play together nicely, and take turns killing each other."

Peter notices that I cracked a smile before I finished the line, but Carolyn pauses to think about the conundrum.

The article made sure not to phrase the poetry lessons as punishment -- the one who actually bought the beer served a few days in jail. This sounds like a creative and proportional way to respond to the problem. USA Today (Thanks for the tip, Rosemary.)

More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost's former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.