Something Shiny! » School

At the library

emily — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:48:58 +0000

In the lobby, a tutor is helping a coed learn Trigonometry. I hear snippets of their (one-sided) conversation, but not more than that. “See, if it’s on the inside… then if it’s on the outside…”. His charge is staring off into space. After ten minutes, he has her work a problem by herself. Across the room, a guy with a grating, nasally voice is having a conversation for all the world to hear. He doesn’t seem to realize that there are twenty other people in the lobby, some of whom might not want to hear about what he did all day. “Yeah, and then I took a nap at about 11:30. Then I went to the gym. Then I showered and took another nap.” I silently hope that his sleep schedule isn’t interfering with his studies. Two guys studying next to me audibly hope that he shuts up soon. Meanwhile, the coed has finished her trig problem. It’s unclear if she was successful. Her tutor asks her if she has any questions, and when she doesn’t, he fires off a few of his own. She’s nodding her head, but it’s debatable that she’s taking in anything. Just as I’m contemplating whether or not I should move to a quieter area (though I’d miss the coed-trig tutor saga), Nasal Guy makes another phone call. Time to relocate.

New horizons, change of plans

emily — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:07:33 +0000

I’m all on track to defend my dissertation and graduate in August. All that’s left is to meet a couple of filing deadlines and submit my dissertation to my committee. I have it all planned out. And I like having things all planned out. I like knowing what’s next, what’s around the corner. Before Wednesday, I didn’t have a job lined up for fall or spring, but I assumed I’d be able to adjunct at our local community college. And then this past weekend, I got an email. From across the CLAS, I’d been chosen as one of five graduate students to teach an interdisciplinary humanities course for fall 2010 and spring 2011. It’s a highly selective grant, and it will look terrific on my cv. The only catch? I wouldn’t be able to graduate in August. Or in December. No, in order to take the job, I’d have to postpone graduation for an entire year from today. And that made this an incredibly tough decision. As I say: I’m a planner. I like knowing what’s around the corner. I was ready, in every sense of the word, to graduate. But something kept nagging at me: how often does an opportunity like this come along? How often do you get an email completely out of the blue telling you that you’ve won a grant? So I jumped. I accepted the job. Sure, it’ll mean that I’m ‘just’ a TA for another year. And yeah, it’ll mean that I won’t walk across the stage until a year from today, rather than a few short months from today. But if graduate school has taught me anything, it’s that a year goes by really quickly. And that having everything planned out isn’t always the right path. Sometimes it’s kinda cool to have a monkey wrench thrown into your perfect plan.

On loyalty and disloyalty

emily — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:30:59 +0000

During my classes today, we discussed the Cold War and how the fear that Communism would spread to the US led to an anti-Communist movement in the 1940s and 1950s. I wanted to get my students thinking about loyalty and disloyalty, so I told them that during World War Two, one of the things the United States government asked of Japanese Americans (before they sent them to the internment camps) was that they furnish proof that they had always been loyal to the United States. How many of us, I asked, could furnish such proof? Is it as simple as signing a loyalty oath? Is it singing the national anthem? Is it wearing an American flag lapel pin? And they came to the conclusion that loyalty wasn’t something that you can demonstrate. So I asked, if you question your country or disagree with your government, does that make you unpatriotic or disloyal? No, they said; our democracy can only flourish if people are allowed to question the government, and besides, freedom of speech and expression are built into our Constitution. I continued: did they think something like McCarthyism could happen today? No, they responded: as a nation, we wouldn’t let such a thing happen today. So I asked them where Mikey Hicks fit into the equation. Mikey, all of 8 years old, shares the name of a suspected terrorist on the no-fly list. Mikey has been getting frisked at airports ever since he was two. And I also asked them where Obama’s lapel pin fit into the equation. During the campaign, Obama was pressured to wear an American flag lapel pin, to demonstrate his patriotism. He responded, reasonably, that patriotism isn’t demonstrated by wearing a lapel pin; it’s something within. He used, in short, the same arguments that my students pointed to today. But then one of my students raised her hand: “Yeah, but you know, there’s so much with Obama and the American flag.” I asked her to elaborate. “I don’t know what to believe, you know? I heard that he went to an event where they burned the American flag and, you know, that his wife wrote things against the government when she was in college.” And I honestly couldn’t believe my ears. Here was the same person who’d defended the idea that patriotism came within, and that freedom of speech was protected. Did she not see the inconsistencies in her logic? Does freedom of speech somehow not extend to the first family? Burning the flag and criticizing the government may not be popular, I understand. But it is our right as citizens to speak freely and, some would argue, our duty to criticize the government when we disagree with it. It’s part of living in a democracy, is it not? If we’re forced to keep our mouths shut and quell dissent, can we really say we live in a democracy? They say that those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. And as American politics becomes ever more shrill, I have to wonder: are we repeating our own unfortunate past?

On teaching: the vagaries thereof

emily — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:25:39 +0000

A couple weeks ago, we took up the subject of legalized segregation in the nineteenth-century South. We talked about Jim Crow and how that played out at the time, as well as how the mindset of racism permeated society then and now. We discussed lynching and how it wasn’t just about killing or death, but how it was a public spectacle and how (white) people would come from miles around to watch. I brought in a copy of “White Women, Black Men,” by Martha Hodes, and read part of her epilogue. In it, she talks about how she went about researching nineteenth-century marriages between white women and black men. She recalls a conversation she had with a fellow researcher, a white woman, in which the scholar told Hodes she’d never find anything on the topic. Hodes says, “When I told her that I already had, she admonished me to ‘make sure you say they’re trash’ about the white women involved, thereby helping to prove the legacy of part of my argument.” It’s a powerful and disturbing message that those ideas linger still today. After I’d read that quote aloud in my last class, one of my students, a young white woman raised her hand. For a split second I wondered what she’d say, how she would react to what Hodes had to say, or what about that disturbing idea had moved her to raise her hand. She took a deep breath and began to talk: “Like, when I, like, hear things like that? It, like, I dunno… it makes me, like… sad.” And to emphasize how much racism makes her sad, she… she stuck her lower lip out.

It was one of those, like, profound moments. And stuff.

Newsflash

emily — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:22:52 +0000

I think the hardest thing about writing a dissertation is that it takes so damn long. I know, right? After six and a half years of graduate school, that’s my great revelation: writing a dissertation takes a long time. I’ll be accepting my Nobel Prize any minute now for this great contribution to knowledge. But yeah, it takes an awful long time, it’s hard work, and it’s so personal– I don’t think people on the outside, as it were, can quite fathom the process. From the outside, I’d guess, all that’s obvious is the sheer amount of time the whole thing is taking. From the inside, of course, there’s never enough time. There’s not enough time to conquer all the edits and all the tweaks and all the, well, writing. And on top of that, there are other things: applying for grants, applying for jobs, teaching, writing articles and presenting papers (so that you can get a job), oh and: eating, sleeping, living. For a number of reasons, none of which is that I haven’t been working “hard enough,” I’ve had to push my graduation date from May to August this year. Three months. Not a big deal, in the broad scheme of things. It’ll mean seven full years of graduate school, start to finish, which includes my MA. Which isn’t exactly a record, you know. The average PhD in history, including an MA, takes a full decade. And it’s not as if I’ve got a job waiting for me after August. (Heck, I’ll still be living in Gainesville for another year after graduation.) In fact, the job market is so bad that most professors here are advising PhD candidates to just postpone graduation indefinitely, until there’s a job offer. Because once you graduate, you’re stamped with an expiration date, as it were. You start to go stale unless you’re one of the lucky few who can land a job. And I know all of that. The logical part of my brain gets that. But even though I know that, part of me– the part with senioritis– wonders what’s taking so damn long.

Student wisdom

emily — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:21:35 +0000

As a teacher, and maybe especially as a history teacher, you have to understand that students aren’t going to have the same passion for the subject that you have. They’re not going to retain things. They’re not going to fully grasp everything you’re telling them. Heck, they probably won’t be able to tell you your name at the end of the semester. But I say, rather than bemoan these sad facts, we should embrace them! Look for the good in everything and everyone, right? To that end, I give you the sporadic wisdom of last semester’s students:

After the Revolution, some slaves moved to “Moron Communities.” [Maroon Communities]

Jonathan Edwards wrote “Sinners in the Angry Hands of God… or something.”

“Most of the workers in the mill were workers.”

On political parties of the 1790s: “On the one hand, there was the group without a name.”

“Catherine Beecher was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the brother of Henry Beecher.”

“The slave system did not start out as slavery.”

And, my personal favorite:

The Erie Canal was “one of the greatest technological marbles of the nineteenth century.”

Happy Thursday!

First day

emily — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:23:35 +0000

I met my spring semester students for the first time today and, as I’ve done for the past six and a half years, I had them fill out index cards with relevant (and irrelevant) information. The relevant contact information is obvious. The irrelevant information… well, it helps me learn all their names on the first day. I usually ask them to tell me what their favorite movies are, but this semester I decided to change it up a bit. I went with “what’s something unique about you?” and I emphasized that we’re all unique snowflakes in one way or another, so saying “there’s nothing unique about me” wasn’t an option. And wow, the answers I got to that question!

One of my students will be two inches taller next semester because she’s having surgery to correct two 45-degree angles in her spine. Zoiks!

One of my students can crack his knuckles an infinite number of times (and yes, he demonstrated).

One of my students has a fingerprint that’s neither swirls nor lines, but rather a series of dots.

One of my students is deaf in one ear (holla!).

One of my students is training for a half Ironman. When I asked her what got her into that, she said, “I was doing lots of triathlons and I got bored with that.”

One of my students is only seventeen.

One of my students was ranked #5 in the nation in three-pointers per basketball game, but he doesn’t play college ball.

What a great way to start the semester!

NaBloPoMo: The things we do

emily — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:37:05 +0000

This semester, I’ve been helping a former student edit some assignments for one of her history classes. Her Teaching Assistant, it seems, can’t help but express his annoyance and exasperation at having to (gasp!) answer students’ questions and pretty much makes it clear that he isn’t interested in helping her. She’s a great student– smart, witty, and deeply interested in history– and I’m more than happy to help. But I mentioned to John the other day that I found it funny that her TA seemed so disinterested in helping students. Why would he want to be a teacher, I wondered aloud, when he so clearly dislikes teaching? To which John answered, maybe he doesn’t want to be a teacher. Which, of course, is a valid point. Certainly not everyone who gets a PhD and goes on to become a professor in their area wants to teach. Many would rather work on their own research full-time and would gladly do so, if only it paid a non-zero amount. And that got me thinking about myself (natch). I got into this, erm, business because I love history. Because I worked in the “real world” for a few years after college and could feel my brain oozing out my ear as I wasted away answering phones and churning out form letters. (No offense to the secretaries of the world.) Luckily, my department has fully funded my graduate education in exchange for teaching. And, happily, I’ve discovered along the way that I really enjoy teaching. I love being in front of a classroom, I delight in teaching students about our vibrant history and its colorful cast of characters (like Sylvester Graham who, concerned that Americans were having too much sex, invented Graham Crackers as part of a bland diet system aimed at steering them down a more virtuous path), and I truly enjoy helping students. So I guess I’m lucky that I like what I do. What about you– do you like what you do?

NaBloPoMo: Nancy Reagan

emily — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:10:21 +0000

A week ago, I was teaching my class about early nineteenth-century middle-class women and their baby steps into the world of politics via benevolent organizations. I wanted them to understand that when we think about women and power in history, we have to think about power in a slightly different way than we do for men. So I asked them to write the names of ten men in American history and ten women in American history. The only rules were: these folks have to be dead, they have to have had a significant link to American history (by which I mean that Michael Jackson or Anna Nicole Smith don’t count), and they have to be famous in their own right (it wasn’t enough to say “Mrs. Lincoln” or “Mrs. Madison”). When it became clear that they were struggling, individually, to come up with enough names (COUGH), I brought everyone together as a group and had them call out names while I wrote them on the board. It was easy for them to come up with enough men; we could have come up with enough to fill the entire board. But for the women, they really started reaching, which led to some interesting conversations:

Them: “Florence Nightingale!”

Me: “Not an American.”
Them: “Martha Washington!”
Me: “Not famous enough in her own right.”
Them: “Nancy Reagan!”
Me: “Not dead!”
Them: “REALLY???”

Really. Sorry, Nancy, my students know not what they say.

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?

emily — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:26:22 +0000

Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned? Seriously, people, I need help. I’m teaching my students about Jamestown today and I wanted to get them thinking about who gets to tell our histories, how we know their version is trustworthy or not, and what the tellers have to gain in the telling. To illustrate this point, I’m using the story of Pocahontas (the legend we all know), the Disney version of the story, and the “facts” that we know. For the Disney version, as you might guess, I’m using this clip from YouTube– the song “Colors of the Wind” from the movie. And, sweet crickets, I can’t get it out of my head! It’s burrowed in there and it’s refusing to leave, like some kind of varmint! I watched it twice yesterday, to get an idea of what I wanted the kids to get out of it. I’ve watched it twice today, having taught two classes so far. And I’m about to watch it again, in my third class. If you see me on the street, and I’m babbling about how the heron and the otter are my friends, you might want to just walk away. You know, before I implore you to sing with all the voices of the mountain and paint with all the colors of the wind.