Jonathan

Guerrilla Archiving. Sounds about as bad ass as it is.

 Posted by on Thu, 12/15 at 6:48pm  report & response  No Responses »
Dec 152016
 

Read this: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-a-Guerrilla/238696?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=1904d9b3b76b4e15a650f6d1cd866468&elq=98c6a2c6229148c0a830248f479b6c1f&elqaid=11846&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=4736

So, Penn started to save and archive all US government environmental data that is still on the web. PDFs, spreadsheets, websites, data sets, grocery lists, and did I mention entire websites? This is what I mean by Trump being scary: a whole shit ton of people see this guy get elected and, believing he’ll erase and censor information, have begun saving it in the way ants store food. As if everyone senses a Flood coming.

http://www.ppehlab.org/datarefuge/

I know it does, I know it connects to us, I just don’t fully grasp it yet. I’m a humanities major and my stock and trade has been so harried by censorship that I’ve had curricula based just around banned books. Knowledge is not power. It isn’t even the capacity to act, really. Being able to suppress or disseminate knowledge, on the other, is a tool of power. #DataRefuge, then, may actually become a truly guerrilla sorta deal when we find out what kind of informatic fuckery the Trump administration will pull; if it is no longer safe to leave information in one place (on a website’s server, for example) because our government is erasing data or neglecting its host server to death then preserving that information will fall on everyone who cares to share knowledge and believes it should flow freely.

By everyone I mean I want hordes of nerds saving and sending data all around the world. Huddled, sticky fingered, hunched over screens and keyboards. We the groaning, facepalming, and memeing multitudes will be needed. Are needed. Always already.* We don’t get to play around in academe because we know but because we swore to not stop knowing more. I hope. It’s a noble calling, I was told. We are the players and the shape of the game is much clearer to the public now: the winners control the Web, the nexus and mausoleum of so much information.

This intimation of clarity only means to me that the game is about to change again. We can expect new rules to be bought into play (pun intended) as universities struggle further with privatization. We can expect whole new appeals to ignorance and mistrust of bodies of knowledge and we can expect that to show up as the same pressures as always: state demands about profitability and student demands that are shaped by state demands. Students won’t pay us mind as readily when we say “research” if public faith in government information management takes a hit; state concerns will be that universities “cannot provide access to reliable information” and the effectiveness of public higher education will diminish.

Again, I feel like a game that’s only becoming less than completely fuzzy is about to become about as clear as stirred Turkish coffee. I hope the experience isn’t as bitter.

*snerk

Unrelated but maybe not and then definitely not.

 Posted by on Sun, 11/20 at 2:55pm  Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 202016
 

This these are some biggies. Cover letters. Personal essays for applications to scholarships. Writing our bios for when we submit for publication.

It sounds daunting to me. Mystical. And it should be the furthest thing from it. So I want to share our experiences somewhat. We’re all working on a teaching philosophy in 6700 and all that theory is super but I want to know approaches to the businessy side of things. I’ll look in your posts for advice but anything I find I’ll post about.

~~~~

Actually about teaching, though, for reals.

I’ve been looking at the ideological kerfuffle, the sudden urge to teach ideology. Yes we need to talk about this. Sure. And I think that’ll have to come through from now on in our professional communications for a time to come. Do I need to only talk about my commonalities with the university’s ideology? What if I see things as systemically fucked and I’m trying to be the bug in the machine but not the rabbit eating the power cables? Forget about it in the classroom and in the office and in all my professional communications? I’m beginning to see that will be a fun, essential thing to consider before acting, but will come at the cost of there being times I won’t want to hold back. We’re freaking out about Trump right now and how he narrowly lost the popular vote. Now all these proud closet Trumpers and bona fide evangelists (I use this word to rag on the god-emperor jokes themselves), too are feeling like they won, and they did. But we think the people who won don’t like us, our peoples, or at least don’t vote that way.

And in case you haven’t read this, here’s a decent spot to start considering what you align with in academe-politics: http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Now-/238422

It’s there even if you did read it, too. It doesn’t go away.

Iron Fist?

 Posted by on Sat, 11/19 at 4:05pm  remedy  No Responses »
Nov 192016
 

I have a student who seems to present me with more trouble than the rest combined. You know. That one. I entered class one day and he’s up at the whiteboard. “Teaching.” I stood there. I stared. Things were awkward and I was angry. I said nothing and he sat down and as I walked past he had the nerve to say “Can we just agree I’m basically the teacher’s assistant?” in front of everyone? “No.” I made no eye contact and my posture was rigid as I went up to the front. And I thought my tone made it clear that this wasn’t okay. That I found it incredibly disrespectful, even ignorant, of my walk uphill in the sand both ways. Even knowing it was that I felt slightly threatened and insulted because my position as a GTA is very, very new it played on repeat in my head. I’m still not sure if there’s a best way to react.

When he called himself the TA next time I shut it down. I told him that it was disrespectful and didn’t let him try to talk his way out of it in front of the rest of the class, nor after when he came to apologize. I gave my “you haven’t walked uphill in the snow both ways” bit. I don’t know what I should have said. The problem went away after that. He chilled out a bit after that, though I catch him parroting and wonder if saying anything about it would be reasonable or just me shutting him up because he’s annoying. And even trying to get him to just listen and relax is a struggle. He’s professed horrible ADHD and I know he’s on some sort of post-Vyvanse recovery ride; he was prescribed it but stopped taking it because of how it affected him and I empathize with him. And he wants to argue and talk and espouse common knowledge and I don’t want to tell him he isn’t saying anything anyone in the room hasn’t heard before, that the majority of the class wishes he’d shut it.

So? The interim fix? When he’s really there, really in class and having a good day, I’ll happily engage. I’ll guide not problematize his ideas–not that I see this as . I’ll answer truthfully when he asks if he can write something and say whether or not it’s an accomplishable goal in the parameters of the semester, even though I hate telling people to walk before they run and to run before they jump.

Ranting about, well, a psychic distance issue.

 Posted by on Sat, 11/19 at 3:42pm  reflection  No Responses »
Nov 192016
 

I’ve been thinking about a student. I have him pegged now, even more so than when he made clear exactly what kind of person he was. I know why he moved down to South Florida and I know exactly what he means when he says he’s “turning over a new leaf” and it doesn’t mean much more than “I think this exactly what you want to hear,” and he isn’t following through. And there’s no new leaf and there’s no fucking work coming from him. And he’s irked me from the beginning. He parrots everything I say and he tries to sound smart and he reminds me of someone who I can no longer in good conscience speak to.

And that’s the nugget of it. I did not expect to see aspects of my struggles so crystallized in my students. It’s nauseating to see how people are in so many ways the same everywhere and it’s refreshing and sometimes both at once. I see in this student where my friend, who is my age, is probably heading. To the rude and stunted emotional level he was always so critical of. I can teach this student, however, and not my friend. They are separate people and while my student may be exactly as I first pegged him, I don’t have any history earlier than August with this guy. No past revels or conflicts.

This student and I as well, seem to share degrees of the same weakness: unfulfilled or empty promises. I have had time to learn this and to begin correcting the pattern. I know it’s procrastination, largely. A displeasing mirror, another crystallized problem. And there is no way or need for me to do anything about this young man and this doesn’t mean anyone is out of time or luck. It doesn’t mean anything about me as a person, student, or teacher. I have my barrier, my professional degree of emotional remove, and I work to keep it on the mellow side. I expect to have many similar students, those who act like they can’t get their shit together, and I’ll probably feel like one of them a lot and it might make me more fit to teach them.

Students comments about degree inflation and maybe confetti

 Posted by on Sun, 10/23 at 8:43pm  reflection  No Responses »
Oct 232016
 

During the first two essays they had to consider what a college education is or should be and what it is worth. They all said that if more people had diplomas, a college education wouldn’t be worth as much. And now I think, why shouldn’t we just make a Masters degree worth more. (Bachelors as well but us first, please.)

This isn’t just doing more in the field while in a program. I mean the aims, the goals, and the difficulty of achieving them. I should present at conferences and submit for publications as much as I want. Sure. That kind of stuff, superficially, is a pursuit of experience and renown. Super. Is that a part of the graduate school experience that most people know exists?

What I mean, people, what I’m talking about, is understanding. I can’t say completing some form of higher education deserves more respect, but it should be worth respecting. I just don’t know we can make that happen.

It’s possible we could use our time as teachers to talk about the worth of our degrees. Personal anecdote seems just as good a route as praising the Masters and Doctors we respect greatly, or as conveying an air of respect that translates and outside academe. Maybe it’s a bit much to say that we are all seen as having done a good deed by getting our Bachelors degrees, but it was more than monetarily valuable. If there’s social pressure to “get a degree” in order to “start a career” then it’s a plus to at least have a degree. We are a different sort of contribution to society’s intellect: we try to bring reason and variety, merriment between chaos and order in the storm. We’re sensible.

I remember the contempt with which my stepmother, my very successful stepmother, spoke of her MA in English. Or whatever degree it was. It hurt to hear it days before I (effectively) got my BA in English, which I had begun to feel proud about. But she was expressing a real concern and I tried my best in the moment to appreciate it. The prestige and opportunities granted by a college degree weren’t there like they were.

“Aren’t as many trees in the stupid forest now that they started making paper. Damn it all.” That’s really what I make of that argument about degree inflation. I’ll throw it at my students tomorrow while talking about the way context can make the same exact sentence very different.