Raining Cats and Dogma

Perhaps you've read her work: Caitlin Flanagan is a regular contributor to The New Yorker or The Atlantic, and her headlines are always intriguing--from the "nanny wars" which headlined at The Atlantic a couple of years ago, to a little piece about the creator of the Mary Poppins series not long ago in the New Yorker. And she has a book coming out soon.

And she always, without fail, infuriates me.

She is, as far as I can tell, a quite well off writer in a very traditional relationship (which she frequently hypes up) who believes that feminism is the bane of modern existence. No matter what the topic, (and it is indeed usually gender-oriented) she finds a way to get a little dig in on feminism.

Of course, her most frequent tactic is to set up FEMINISM as a straw man that elides multiple feminisms while vastly oversimplifying any individual feminist arguments, taking the kind of cheap potshots at an abstract ideological bogeyman that she says FEMINISM does with PATRIARCHY.

But whatever about her. She is the Ann Coulter of the Mommy movement, and I think I waste my breath tearing her down. She does, for what it's worth, always make me think, and her fallacious arguments often help me crystallize my own (hopefully more sound) arguments.

In the most recent Atlantic, she has an article (subscription required) on the "Teenage Oral Sex Epidemic," which would be most frustrating for its potshots against feminism, if weren't also occasionally racist and homophobic. But one sentence in particular sent me off on a tangent. In this particular segment, she was railing against feminism for encouraging girls to be sexually aggressive in a way that rivals boys, a message that she suggests leads to a debased and ultimately woman-decentered approach to sexuality.

She writes, "Society has let its girls down in every way. It has refused to assert--or even acknowledge--that female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure."

My beef with her essentialism of femininity aside, I actually am prompted to think about what she seems to suggest about male sexuality: that it is about gratification and pleasure at the expense of kindness and trust. And for many men, it is, simply because the discourse of sexuality frequently teaches them this.

How, then, can male sexuality be connected to kindness and trust as I believe and hope mine is?

I wonder sometimes if the emphasis on women's access to traditionally male power and authority (not, I recognize, a uniform feminist approach) does not ultimately valorize cultural values of maleness. Can we imagine a feminism that instead of, or in addition to opening up once-closed male spaces to female access, works hard to really open up traditionally female spaces and mindsets to male participation?

This is, I recognize, difficult cultural work, since (as I well know) accusations of effeminacy are incredibly potent weapons of gender discipline, especially (but not only) for heterosexual men. But to risk the "we've-come-a-long-way-baby" fallacy, maybe it's time for a shift away from doggedly enabling women's empowerment for a shift toward encouraging men to find less authoritative positions culturally and personally rewarding.

Stay-at-home dads are unfortunately more often a punch-line than a reality, sharing housework usually means "he helps," and I still get dumbfounded looks when I mention that Ann proposed to me, not the other way around. We've done well to teach women to be more assertive, more empowered; we haven't (with any success, at least) taught men that it's ok sometimes not to be.

The shift begins, perhaps, with sexuality, with teaching our male children (as I hope to one day teach my son) that sexuality is as much about kindness and trust as about gratification and pleasure, to use Flanagan's terms of the exchange.

It's a lesson that I hope I can help teach my daughter as well, but frankly, it the boy I'm worried about. In one sense, Flanagan is right. We have let our girls down, in large measure by letting down our boys as well.

Posted by at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In fact, I think he’s probably chuckling to himself over this one.

Posted by at 11:15 AM | Permalink

When I say that I don't usually do memes, I am understating: I've never done one on this site. But thanks to my old pal Jenn over at Yo Ambro, I've been tagged.

And as one who doesn't like to break the rules I'm going to play along.

This is the "Ten Things You Don't Know about Me" Meme, although, as Jenn notes, who "you" constitutes will determine whether you know this or not. For example, if Ann, my wife, is reading, she will likely know all of these things. But most who don't know me IRL will find all of this terribly revelatory. or boring.

Anyway, onto the meme:

1. Although I am a feminist, an English geek, a theatre freak, a home chef, a wine snob, and am addicted to Project Runway, I subvert the trend of all of these personality indicators by being an avid sports fan: football (Go Steelers!), college basketball, and tennis are my favorite to watch (which I do too much of), but I have been know to watch soccer, baseball, pro basketball, hockey, and once even golf, for pleasure. I also play tennis, and now squash (three times a week!), and hope to join a co-rec soccer league this summer.

2. I spent a year working in a collections agency, as a (in order) receptionist, data entry boy, customer service rep (for the clients, not the "debtors"), and legal assistant. I sleep at night because I never, ever had to actually tell someone that they owed money. I know I am deluding myself, but I have to tell myself something.

3. When I was in first grade I answered the question "What do you want to do when you grow up?" by saying: "Physicist during the week, night club singer on the weekends."

4. If you count Gilbert and Sullivan (and you shouldn't) I have sung opera professionally.

5. I sometimes pray to the goddess Sheila (who rules over parking spots), and the gods Blobbo, (Blueberries), and Blellyn (Small, individually wrapped snack cakes).

6. I count Tom Clancy among the authors whose worked I have enjoyed immensely in my lifetime (although not since I was 22).

7. Both my first and most recent live concerts were Toad the Wet Sprocket, whom I have seen now 5? 6? times, often with Jenn.

8. I have almost 50 ties, most of which I quite like.

9. I have unusually high arches, which means had I been coordinated enough to dance ballet, I could have. But then again, maybe not, since apparently, I have fairly limited turnout.

10. My thumbs are double-jointed in a way that grosses out most people.

Posted by at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I remember that when I was getting advice about job market interviewing, one of the "Questions to expect" was "Would you be willing to teach composition?" and the recommended answer was, "Of Course!" the underlying assumption here, is that we don't really want to be teaching comp, but that we should show ourselves to be willing to take one for the team.

I resent this attitude to a large degree. Even though my position is in British Literature, part of the reason why I was excited about this job was that even though we're a large research institution, we would have the opportunity to, and even be expected to teach writing courses, both in the major and as part of the general curriculum.

Some people make the counter-argument that we weren't really trained as compositionists, and that good literature scholars are not necessarily good writers, and I think this is hooey.

Accordingly, I've found myself deeply involved in composition since the beginning of my career, and am even now on the Undergraduate Writing Committee. I am deeply committed to this activity, and here's why:
* Teaching writing, though it may be housed in English Departments, is effectively outside the disciplinary structures of the university: students can try out majors, if they like, but more importantly, this setting provides me a way to ask them to think about their discipline from the outside. You want to do a topic based in economics? Fine, but make sure you think about the ethical implications. You want to write about public policy? Fine, but weigh those policies against the science / philosophy / sociology that gives you insight. It can teach students that disciplines can be blinkered, and that knowing that going in can give you a critical edge.

* Teaching writing is about citizenship. 18- and 19-year olds have just become citizens, and they don't necessarily know what that means. In few other classes are they asked to develop an idea that impacts beyond the walls of their classroom as they're learning. I want students to think about how their writing gives them power in the world beyond the university. This was easy for the hyper-polished and hyper-ambitious students I taught at GW. Here at WVU, that is a more difficult, and therefore more important task.

* Teaching writing means that students get to know you early on in a way that they don't often know their other professors. My writing students often ask for recommendations from me early on, because they claim that I know them better than most of their other profs--the smaller class sizes and high level of feedback facilitate a connection that research shows in crucial for retention and for students' satisfaction with their education.

* Teaching is so tangible teaching. Those in non-humanities fields may not find this to be a problem, but I know that teaching literature often means that it's easy into teaching the material, rather than teaching the students. I know that it's not an either/or distinction, nor should it be, but I find it very difficult not t0o actively teach my comp students.

Yes, composition pedagogy often means more time grading and less time reading the materiual that turns us on intellectually, but I have to say, I'm just as psyched to teach my comp class, (a prep I've been teaching more or less for 8 years) as I am about my lit classes.

I'm not going on this little line of reasoning just to be self-righteous about composition, though. I also want to change the discourse about it because of the social inequities in our field that come from regarding composition merely as a service class, and therefore, regarding those who teach it exc;lusively, or even a lot, as second-class citizens in the academic community.

This idea that teaching composition isn't intellectual production helps us justify the terrible inequities associated with adjuncts in English Departments. And never do I think about the act of teaching as hard as I do when I'm teaching comp. That's labor, and it's valuable, whether I also teach lit classes, or am "merely" teaching writing.

Posted by at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I have posted about Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" before, but last time, it was only to vent at how much I really don't like it. Turns out, I think, that I wasn't approaching it as a teaching text--as an opportunity to teach about the struggle of reading.

I was just struggling with it.

So this semester, instead of trying to wrestle it into 50 minutes, and move on, I'm giving it more space, tying it together with the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, and using it as a central text to talk about ways into a dense text.

Of course, I am still struggling with it, wrestling with the ambiguous diction, and vague prounoun referents the way Jacob wrestled with the angel. Except that I don't expect to get a new name and a destiny to father a great line of English majors after finishing it.

This is the third class with this group, and we're already in this deep. Here's hoping it's not too much too soon.

Posted by at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I am good at remembering names. I have terrible trouble with phone numbers, but that's a no-brainer: I'm an English prof, and I jsut don't math (I do turn "math" into a verb whenever possible, though).

I like to do this little game when on te first day of class in a class small enough--usually a composition class, where I can manage it while they students are writing a diagnostic. As they are writing, I am silently going over their names, backwards and forwards, so on the last minute of class, I, "just to see if I can do it," recite their names back to them, and individually welcome them to the class.

So ok, it's a gimmick. But we've got a minor retention problem here at WVU (we can keep 'em until their sophomores, but graduating them is tougher), and I really believe that taking time to learn my students' names (sometimes very quickly) means they are that much more likely to stick around. They believe, rightly, I hope, that I respect them enough to actually learn their names.

However, I do have this class of 40, and THAT, my friends, is a harder prospect. I'm going to try to have half of them down by the end of tomorrow's class. We'll see.

Posted by at 9:43 PM | Permalink

Ancarett's Abode brings us a glut of reading to do. How's about checking it out?

Posted by at 9:38 PM | Permalink

While I know several others posted their thoughts on course evaluations at the end of the last semester, I wanted to wait to see what mine said before I processed my thoughts on them in this space.

See, typically, I earn very good evaluations. I am notoriously pretty difficult, so it's not grade inflation, but I am a performer. I use a lot of humor, I mix up lesson plans, and in good classes, the repartee usually whizzes around the room pretty quickly. I tend to treat students as peers who simply have fewer years of education under their belt, and they like me for that.

Accordingly, the evaluations from my "best" class last semester were astonishingly good: a full quarter of the students in that class said something like "Claycomb is the best professor I've ever had." Even in the class I was most frustrated with, my general "teaching effectiveness" scores were in the 83rd percentile for the College of Arts and Sciences.

I wonder, though, what these really measure. Yes, to the bottom-line-oriented administration (and I don't know enough about mine yet to say whether they are or not), these numbers fairly accurately tell them that I am likely to be a popular professor, will enroll courses generally well, and keep some butts in the seats. My popularity may have a positive impact on retention. I may attract a few extra students into the major (whether that's a good thing or not).

But are these students actually measuring their learning and my teaching effectiveness, or their pleasure in coming to my classroom and my performance acumen? I won't deny that they may be related in some ways, but I know that last semester was not the best I've ever taught. I know that I was tweaking things as we went along, and that I've made some significant changes to the way I am teaching both the Brit Lit class, and even the composition class (after 8 years in the writing classroom). I have several colleagues here who have a lot to teach me about teaching.

So while on the surface, these positive evals are great, the downside is that the fun students have in my class is something of an opiate: they don't see clearly what they're not getting, and accordingly, are not as equipped to tell me about their needs through evals.

Or perhaps they know that these things are used by chairs, faculty evaluators and tenure-granters as indicators of my performance, and since the students like me, they respond accordingly.

The other factor that these students cannot see is how much the classroom environment is crafted by them. In the two sections of Brit Lit II I taught, one was gregarious, engaged, and while not necessarily more talented, a bit higher performing. The other, as I repeatedly mentioned here, was more reticent, often even stubborn, about their passivity. For that class, I was far more active in developing lessons to get them to participate more actively, some of which were fairly successful. So how did the two classes respond to the question "The instructor stimulated class discussion"? Section 1 responded with a 4.96 out of 5, 96th percentile in the college. Section 2, where I worked harder to acheive results, responded with a still not terrible 4.51 out of 5, or 44th percentile. The difference? Not me, but them. The students themselves in this case were responsible for that difference.

You can drive yourself batty reading these tea leaves. So instead of spending too much time congratulating myself on good scores (which seem to be an expression of personal approval), I'm looking at what suggestions actually get made: that I work on getting quizzes back more quickly, and designing paper assignments a bit more manageably (something I adjusted some last semester, but may need to continue to work on).

Ah well, at least I don't have to worry about chili peppers on my Ratemyprofessors.com scores!

Posted by at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As seen at Reassigned Time and elsewhere,

It's National Delurking Week!!!

So if you read this blog, regularly, or not-so-regularly, please leave a comment below just to let me know you're out there and thinking of me.

See the comments link below? Yeah, right there. Click on it, scroll down, and type your comment in the little web form. Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

Posted by at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

We're having no fewer than 6 candidates for a few positions come to campus this week, and I've already been to two receptions and one dinner this week, with another dinner tomorrow.

I am finally on the other side of the table, now (which I sort of was at GW last year, too), and yet I can't help shaking the feeling that I'm still an applicant. At talks, dinners, receptions, all of it, I am still conducting myself as if this entire year (and it has been a year now since I first set foot on this campus as an interviewee) has been one extended job interview. I have several potential explanations for this:

1) I am experiencing the same get-to-know-you anxieties than come with any entrance into a new community--even though the candidates for these new positions may view me as part of the whole, i haven't fully integrated simply because I haven't been here that long.

2) I was on the market for three straight years, and I haven't shaken that mindset--perhaps it is MLA-related Seasonal Affective disorder, but instead of getting depressed, I get more animated and nervous.

3) The whole experience of graduate (and even undergraduate and secondary) education was a series of tasks to acquire approval. Tenure, of course, is another, and since I added interpersonal charm to the list of necessary skills for the job process in general, I am treating those as just another skill I will continue to be measured on.

Perhaps someday, (after a few years, after tenure, after I retire?) I will start to feel like I am actually part of this place, that I can inhabit it not as a passer through (as I did in grad school and my first contract job), but as an inhabitant.

It's funny, I lived in one town and two houses until I left for college, and even then I went to a new metro area and stayed for 13 years. And still I have this feeling of habitual transience. Maybe still feeling like a candidate is merely my most recent metaphor for the uphill side of learning to call a place home. And since I still feel like the last place is home, in this place, I can only ever feel like an aspirant.

Posted by at 11:31 AM | Permalink

I mentioned earlier that I had been abruptly assigned a new section of our sophomore rhet/comp class at the last minute. This isn't really an issue, since I've essentially been teaching comp or mentoring composition intstructors more or less constanbtly for the last 8 years. One more sections is no skin off my back to be sure.

But I teach thematic comp courses, for a variety of reasons (it's harder to plagiarize, the theme allows for a deeper and more complex grounding for in class discussion, the students get occasionally distracted from the drier nuts and bolts of comp, etc). With the exception of one semester, I've been teaching this food studies course, one that centers on Fast Food Nation and its attendant discourse. It has been more or less successful overall, but sadly less successful at WVU specifically. And so, with four days before the semester began, I decide to switch up themes.

This semester: "Ad-building and Ad-busting: The Branding of America," where we'll take a look at the most common thesis statement in the U.S.--"Buy this now." I put myself through grad school in part by writing ad and marketing copy for a computer reseller, so I've got some practical experience with the genre, but also some serious misgivings about the ethics that are exercised in that field. So it'll be part "lessons we can learn from advertising rhetoric" and part cultural critique.

We'll do some stuff from Klein's No Logo, and I'm going to teach the cereal ad chapter of Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Beyond that, though, I'm looking for suggestions (and hoping my students will understand the higher-than-average TBAs on the syllabus). So, dearest Internets, what can you show me?

Posted by at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just as Dr. Crazy moves to a new space, introducing us to the term "Reassigned Time," I;m experiencing re-reassigned time.

Now mine wasn't so mucha course release for other responsibilities, but rather, as I've mentioned before, the scramble to deal with an under enrolled course. So mere hours ago, I thought I'd be starting Monday's classes with 1 course and a lot of time (and responsibility) for research, I have instead picked up an additional section of composition to cover for an instructor with a family emergency.

I can hardly complain. I now have a lighter teaching load, but the same preps as last semester, and next year I don't have a 3/3. And sure, I was salivating over the writing time, but because of the way the schedule works out, my writing time isn't really deeply affected.

And you know, taking on a course four days before the semester starts earns those nifty "team-player points." And I love those.

Posted by at 3:43 PM | Permalink

When I turned thirty, I felt no older. It was the same for most any birthday, and while, like many people, I tend to think of my year beginning when the fall semester begins in late August, I still love New Year's Eve.

In fact, it's the 31st I like better than the next day, since unlike in late August, I am less interested in marking with optimism the upcoming year starting in January. I am instead far happier taking stock, and celebrating the good and the bad of the past year. And this year has been one to contemplate and celebrate for many reasons.

I've gotten a new job about which I'm ecstatic; we've moved into a new town with which we are fairly content, into a home about which we are thrilled; I've advanced my research agenda in big and small ways; we've made some new friends in this new town, and been very lucky to have old friends keep in close touch; our children have grown happily and healthily, and are talking up a blue streak.

Of course there remain huge challenges for our new year (which we saw in through closed eyes), but I'll tackle them as they come. In the meantime, I'm raising my toast not to 2006, but to a 2005 that deserves one last flute of champagne.

Posted by at 9:22 PM | Permalink

The holidays are barely behind us, the College bowl season is still in swing (For the sports fans out there: Did you see us last night?), and the new semester is imminently upon us. We start quite early here, as in next Monday, and so I'm already frantically getting my syllabus and assignment sheets ready.

Of course, that's syllabus singular, since I'm only teaching one section of course next semester, with no other particularly onerous service burdens. I haven't been this free to pursue my research since before I was dissertating (I worked a second job through much of PhD work).

Because we are evaluated annually, I need to have some writing in the pipeline for next year, when I make up for this teaching lag with a 3/3 (I know, hardly a killer), so here's what's on my research plate right now.

1. Minor revisions to an article already under contract: Due 1/15
2. Conference paper of brand new material: 2/25
3. Conference paper that builds off of older material: 3/30
4. Conference paper that lightly rewqorks existing material: 4/6
5. Revise and Resubmit article that's been back in my hands for almost a year now. Some revisions are significant, but the argument is generally intact, and there may be more cutting than anything else. Personal deadline: 4/26.
6. Artile rejected by last submission, although I'm not sure the reader's comments take it in the right direction. Minor edits to signpost better, than off to a new journal. Personal Deadline: June 1.
7. Book proposal and cfp for co-edited Anti-disciplinarity project. This needs to get rolling sooner than later, to be sure.
8. And finally, I have this dissertation with a very clear revision plan, although I think it goes on the back burner for a bit, unless I get all of these other things done by June 1 (as if), which means I can futz around on it over the summer.

So that's what's on my plate. Whaddya think?

Posted by at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)