Linguistic laughs

I am having one of those I-probably-should-not-laugh-but... moments while sitting here, hunched over my keyboard while eating my Kashi Sweet & Sour Chicken for lunch and reading this post on nicknames for Mexican drug kingpins, which appeared on The Economist's language blog. Which itself is called Johnson. Which makes me want to laugh, too... My favorite is "El Pozolero" for its contextually clever, gruesome wit.

Stand up for your work

A link to this thoughtful op / ed piece in the NYT just circulated on a teaching listserv to which I belong, accompanied with a comment that it was relevant not just to elementary / secondary school, but also in higher ed.

In particular, author Susan Engel's concluding remark resonates with me - that testing ought to be "one tool among many for improving schools, rather than serving as a weapon that degrades the experience for teachers and students alike."

We are only in the first few weeks of first grade at our house, but already I have become aware of the long shadow that standardized testing casts over teachers and students. I think about Beanie's teacher, whom we already have come to respect and admire in just the few weeks that we have known her: I cannot imagine that assessments and measures are what motivated her to become a teacher in the first place. She seems like a caring and creative teacher with a lot to share, but the more that the "job" of teaching becomes degraded to test preparation, the less room there is for the exercise of talent.

The imperative to assess is being felt also in higher ed. The perceived recalcitrance of faculty, I think, ought to be understood, at least in part, as the stand we are taking on the importance and meaning of our work. We do not want it - and our students and ourselves - to be degraded.

We the Nacirema

The other night, while prepping for my class on the Anthropology of North America, StraightMan suggested that I read this Onion piece from 2004. I finally got around to it today. It hurt to read it. A lot. I did not laugh. At all.

Later, reading martinimade's QOTD made my day. I interpret it to mean that Jon Stewart agrees with me - or at least that I agree with him - about "sucks" being the new normal: Except that he calls it "shit taco".

1 in 7 Americans now live in poverty, defined as about $22,000 a year for a family for four. The Washington Post noted:

Since 2007, the year before the recession kicked into gear, the country has almost 4 million fewer wage-earners. There are more children growing up poor. And for the first time since the government began tracking health insurance in 1987, the number of people who have health coverage declined, as people lost jobs with health benefits or employers stopped offering it.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to remain employed on the one hand feel grateful, but on the other hand also insecure and uncertain. Not to mention overstretched in almost every domain, with pressure to do more with less at work and at home.

I suspect that expectations already had been increasing even before the economic downturn, which then becomes referenced as the reason to "explain" (or justify) so-called austerity measures, which become promoted as "temporary" and as "shared" sacrifice.

Or it just might be time to wake up and smell the shit taco.

The radical agenda

A bit hectic here on the parenthropological home front: I was invited by the honor society at my campus to give my "Famous Last Words" lecture. So, I wore a suit that I thought might be appropriate to be buried in, and gave a talk about anthropology and reproduction last evening. I am happy to report that two students in my Anthropology of North America class today told me not only that they had attended (without the carrot of extra credit...), but that it seriously made them think that when the time came, they wanted to have their babies with midwives. Two cheers for the re-production of culture!

Yesterday, I also enjoyed a Leftist Moment with a colleague during a Women's and Gender Studies reception. Hmm, I am beginning to think that the reason why there are so few opportunities for faculty to co-mingle and converse is that THEY want to keep us alienated and mystified, divided and conquered. B/c imagine all the righteous lefty talk that professors could engender... Which brings me to this item from Inside Higher Ed. Which I admit that I clicked on because of the titillating title, "Christine O'Donnell on 'Orgy Rooms' at Colleges":

All eyes are on Christine O'Donnell, the Tea Party-backed candidate who won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Delaware on Tuesday. Among the various quotes from her past that surfaced on Wednesday were some views on coeducational dormitories. Salon found quotes she gave to The Washington Times in 2003, criticizing coeducational dormitories. The article excerpt:

"What's next? Orgy rooms? Menage a trois rooms?" asked Christine O'Donnell, spokeswoman for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Del., which publishes a college guide.

All this coedness is outside normal life, said Miss O'Donnell. "Most average American adults don't use coed bathrooms - if they had the option of a coed bathroom at a public restaurant, they wouldn't choose it." Coedness "is like a radical agenda forced on college students," she said.

Get thee to a nunnery.

For-profit education

No punditry or wisdom in store for today: Just prepping for today's classes :)

In the course of doing so, however, I started watching this Frontline documentary on for-profit education in the United States today: College, Inc..

Clearly the journalists approach this topic with a story to tell: They adopt the skepticism that they assume their audience will share.

Now, I pride myself on being in touch with the industry news, but I had no idea that so many students were taking courses through for-profit colleges and universities. So, I might re-evaluate the stance that Frontline takes.

The interview with the executive at the University of Phoenix raised my hackles. I think a lot of us feel that academia / higher ed is where good ideas come to die: Like, serve on any committees lately? The cynicism of faculty concerning service is not that we do not like to do it, but that we do not like to do it when it comes to naught. Which even in my four-going-on-five years, I perceive is what happens more often than not. For example, the standing committees on which I serve, representing my department, hold "advisory" status. Which means that the time and concern that we commit to this service will not and cannot effect change. So, the Phoenix model of Getting Things Done can seem appealing.

Faculty at "real" colleges and universities, like where I work, talk with disdain about for-profit education, but I think we need to pay attention to what they do. The faculty at for-profit colleges and universities are not unlike us. They even might be us. I bet a lot of the professors there do their work quite capably.

Of course, the students and the faculty are not the "targets": For-profit education treats them as opportunities and costs. I really think this is not the approach that academia / higher ed ought to adopt.

So much for keeping my promise about no punditry. Back to prepping today's classes...

Further proof

Further proof that "sucks" is the new normal: The incorporation of routines like the morning nit check and products like Lice Shield - "a new line of hair care products demonstrated to repel lice while, at the same time, gently cleansing and conditioning" - into the body rituals of the Nacirema (or at least a few families that I know).

StraightMan lamented this morning that the days when a single rinse of pesticide shampoo could visit devastation upon the lice have gone: This is now a nit by nit battle. The guerilla warfare / new world order / post-9/11 / counterinsurgency tensions surrounding such a statement make my skin crawl as much as the idea of lice makes me itch.

I feel so colonized.

Note that the Web site photo for "Lice Shield" (above) is a child dressed as a knight engaged in sword-in-hand combat. Which seems to prove StraightMan's point. What a frustrated parent like myself really wants to see is a mushroom cloud swirling around that child's head, with stone cold lice on their backs and their six legs pointed skyward...

Uh oh. I seem to have lapsed into Cold War nostalgia. I am way too young for this.

Can't. Hold. On. Much. Longer.

I have 10 minutes to kill: That is the prescribed amount of time to leave in the lice removal shampoo that I applied earlier this evening to Beanie and to Bubbie, and now, after rinsing and combing their hair and changing the sheets on all our beds b/c naturally, this morning, both kids climbed into bed with me to snuggle, as StraightMan is out of town at a conference, so the kiddos felt like they needed extra cuddling.

Sigh.

This is why it is best that I avoid other means of self-expression / self-indulgence like Twitter. Besides which I think it actually might drive me insane (not to mention others insane with boredom) to report minutely on such happenings as have occurred here during the last 48 hours or so:

Thursday 6:30pm. StraightMan has departed for the airport about 30 minutes later than he had hoped b/c Bubbie had a meltdown at Mama Nina's, where they went to pick up the pizza that was supposed to spare us a lot of trouble at supper.

For the record, Bubbie also had a meltdown earlier in the day, when we dropped him off for his first day at nursery school. Given that he has been attending a child care program since the age of six months and that he already knows the teachers and other children at the nursery school, we are a bit surprised. Also, irritated, in my case. I need to finish prepping two classes for that afternoon, including a lecture / "discussion" that is not unlike pulling nits off Beanie's head, and a hands-on seminar, the reading for which I have completed. (My usual prep time on Wednesday afternoon became swallowed whole by chatting oh-so-helpfully with a couple of students after my back-to-back intro classes, then attending a department meeting.) So, by the time I arrive at home after a mercifully quick meeting with Anthropology Club, for which I am co-adviser, I am reminding myself that I encouraged StraightMan to attend the conference - between the two of us, he really is the better scholar - so it is unfair of me to be sending darts of dark thought at his back as he closes the door.

Perfectly formed tear drops fleck Beanie's long, long lashes. Her great-grandfather on StraightMan's side would have said: A rooster could stand on that lower lip.

Thursday 10:30pm. Dishwasher that was run last night still has not been unloaded, which is required before I load it again with today's accumulated mess. Students e-mailing their troubles and worries about the weekly quiz, the paper due next week, the realization that their major in fill-in-the-blank is not that inspiring, and that anthropology might be calling to them. Hang up, I am tempted to tell them. Ignore.

Friday 10:30am. Bubbie woke about 6:45am, demanding that we make Mickey Mouse pancakes for breakfast. This means putting all the ingredients in cups and bowls for him to dump into a mixing bowl, then combine with a wooden spoon. Miraculously, we make the pancakes, the kids eat them hungrily, and they are dressed and reasonably clean when we leave the house. I drop off Beanie at her friend's house, so they can walk to school together. Then, in lieu of my morning run, I take Bubbie in his stroller to his child care program. Not to go on for too long, I am dressed and reasonably clean when I arrive on campus. I chat with a couple of colleagues, then with a student whose independent study I am advising. I teach my back-to-back intro classes. Blurgh.

Friday 3:05pm. On our way out, Beanie's teacher gestures to me to wait a moment. She tells me that another child - whose coat hook is next to Beanie's - has been sent home with head lice. Frak.

I have Beanie change her clothes on our back porch, washing and drying everything on high heat. We get Bubbie from child care, then open the Netflix that arrived - "The Princess Bride." Toward the end off the the movie, I notice that Beanie has fallen silent after a steady stream questioning and commentary. Is something bothering you, I ask. As she nods, the tears drop from her lashes. She is glad that Inigo finally got his revenge on the six-fingered man, she says, but Inigo's father is still dead, she continues, and that makes her think about how her own daddy will not be home until Sunday.

Saturday 12noon. I am cursing this ridiculous American middle-class notion that we ought to give children "choices" in order to help them feel more control / less frustration. Yadda yadda yadda. Does Bubbie want a slice of pizza or a roni roll? A roni roll, he tells me. So, that is what we order. Pandemonium ensues.

Saturday 2pm. Bubbie is in his crib, Beanie is in her bed, and I am in my bed. I do not care what they actually do, as long as I am unaware for at least the next 30 minutes.

Saturday 4pm. One by one, we wake. Life... feels like it could be... enjoyed.

I ask the kids whether or not they might like a treat - to have supper (and dessert) at Friendly's. Walking to Friendly's, drivers stop their cars to allow us to cross. Sorority girls remark audibly on "how cute" Bubbie is. We see the dog poop on the sidewalk in time to avoid stepping into it. Sunshine day... All through supper, we look and even act like a happily functional family. The children even lick clean their little saucers of mandarin oranges and apple sauce, which they ordered (instead of fries) as their side dishes. We order candy shoppe sundaes for dessert.

Saturday 10pm. I am wearing lice removal shampoo in my hair and blogging to kill time. I had checked Beanie's hair in the am, but found nothing - I check again before bedtime and find dried little nits. Hmm... Then I check Bubbie's head and find three larger gelatinous nits. Frak. I shampoo both kids' hair. Bubbie's is so short and fine that it seems lousy for lice (ha!), so I hope that takes care of it. I comb out three dead bugs from Beanie's hair.

This is our third lice experience since June. I cannot understand it. Is it that we just never got rid of it the first (or second) time around, or is it that the larger circle in which we move (school, summer camp,, and so on) just never got rid of it, or both? Not only do StraightMan and I read and follow the instructions on the lice removal kits, but we wash and dry clothing, linens, towels, and so on on high heat; have dry cleaned other things we cannot wash; quarantine stuffed animals and pillows in plastic bags for a month (in fact, there is still a batch stashed in the attic right now); vacuum rugs, couches, and curtains; and check for nits every day. We are not lackadaisical about all this. In fact, I feel like we are a bit over-the-top daisical.

All of this is happening at the same time that I am feeling that creeping anxiety about: The classes that I have not prepped for the coming week. The exams that I need to write for next week. All alongside two committee meetings that will cut into the time that I would have used to prep the classes, write the exams, and do the following: The application for a salary adjustment that is due this coming week, along with the application for funds to attend a conference where I will be presenting. Not to mention a proposal (due in three weeks) for a talk (in November). The talk that I will be giving next week. The presentation that I am giving in one month. The research poster that I will show in one month. The research poster that I will show in two months. The research for a different project that I need to complete for the revision of my book manuscript that I intend to resubmit in February. The renewal file, due in January, which leads to the reappointment and promotion (tenure) file that I will need to prepare next fall.

The thing that kills me is that I am not entirely convinced that it all needs to be done. Not in the sense that I individually choose or do not choose to be a parent, a college professor, and so on, but that the expectations for each of these roles has become so much. It just seems like things that a generation ago were good-to-do (like teaching and publishing...) have become required-to-do. Or else.

As a parent, I become a logistical contortionist in order to create an environment of unharriedness and unhurriedness for my children. So that I am not always telling them "some other time" or "later," and that I have the patience and presence of mind to listen and engage with them or just take them around the block on a bike ride or to Friendly's for supper and dessert.

Yet, I am not, as a person, unharried or unhurried.

Way past time to rinse the lice removal shampoo. Which I hope kills the nits and bugs before it kills me.