Saturday, October 08, 2005
Friday, October 07, 2005
art of indirection
>excerpted from timetable for Friday, October 7
5-7 pm.
Finish "embodying tec--" tekn-- ok, fine, Datacloud.
5-7 pm.
Finish "embodying tec--" tekn-- ok, fine, Datacloud.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
getting it from both sides
last night my two best friends got really mad at me and yelled. One of was them mad at me for being too smart and the other one was mad at me for being too dumb.
dumbest advice ever
"Avoid sudden changes in temperature or humidity". National Eczema Foundation, tips for avoiding flare-ups.
patches of eczema: 1 (note: "patch" covers entire body)
patches of eczema: 1 (note: "patch" covers entire body)
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
science fair project: findings
Total time spent "responding to student writing":
175 minutes
Time spent on task ("extreme grading"):
75 minutes
Average time spent responding to 1 draft: 6.9 min.
Total "negative" or off-task time:
100 minutes
Findings:
Teachers of writing frequently express concern about spending a "normal" amount of time responding to student writing. Most trequently, that time is measured in number of minutes/draft.
However, these findings show that more than half of the overall grading time is spent on off-task activities such as checking email, getting coffee and updating a blog. Therefore, to effectively limit time spent on student writing, teacher should focus on limiting the number of minutes between drafts rather than the number of limits spent responding to each draft.
175 minutes
Time spent on task ("extreme grading"):
75 minutes
Average time spent responding to 1 draft: 6.9 min.
Total "negative" or off-task time:
100 minutes
Findings:
Teachers of writing frequently express concern about spending a "normal" amount of time responding to student writing. Most trequently, that time is measured in number of minutes/draft.
However, these findings show that more than half of the overall grading time is spent on off-task activities such as checking email, getting coffee and updating a blog. Therefore, to effectively limit time spent on student writing, teacher should focus on limiting the number of minutes between drafts rather than the number of limits spent responding to each draft.
science fair project: data collection
Research question: what's a normal time frame for responding to students' written work?
In the interest of science, here is my response time log for 10 drafts of Assignment 1:
Draft 1:
1:26 pm-1:37 pm (10 min).
Note: Talked to K. Lacey about exhibitionist nature of blogging while calculating draft grade.
Draft 2
1:40-1:47.4 (7.5 min)
Note: Kim made me a champion bracelet for beating above response time record. How she made the bracelet is, telling me I could take the sleeve off her coffee and wear it. Am blinging.
Draft 3
1:52-2:00 (8 min)
Note: appended files contribute to slow response time.
Draft 4
2:05-2:12 (7 min)
Note: Nicole's story about 2 girls washing their feet in the Writing Center bathroom sink looped surreally over my written comments.
Draft 5
2:17-2:23.5 (6.5 min)
Note: Have effectively turned task of responding to student writing into a computer game
Draft 6
2:29-2:36 (7 min)
Note: Faint background noise
"milkshake"
"feet!"
"DIA"
Am lost in super mario comment land.
got dizzy and lay down
2:36 pm to 3:23 pm
(normal for me with hypnotic experiences)
Drafts 7 and 8 (back to back)
3:27pm -3:43pm (15 min)
4:02
Exquisitely beautiful girl enters Writing Center: grading stops
Hilary finds inner strenght for peer tutoring
Draft 9
4:04-4:12 (8 min)
He thought that if he just kept looking at you, an appointment on Friday would open up.
Draft 10
4:15-4:21 (6 min)
computers+writing=Bad News
In the interest of science, here is my response time log for 10 drafts of Assignment 1:
Draft 1:
1:26 pm-1:37 pm (10 min).
Note: Talked to K. Lacey about exhibitionist nature of blogging while calculating draft grade.
Draft 2
1:40-1:47.4 (7.5 min)
Note: Kim made me a champion bracelet for beating above response time record. How she made the bracelet is, telling me I could take the sleeve off her coffee and wear it. Am blinging.
Draft 3
1:52-2:00 (8 min)
Note: appended files contribute to slow response time.
Draft 4
2:05-2:12 (7 min)
Note: Nicole's story about 2 girls washing their feet in the Writing Center bathroom sink looped surreally over my written comments.
Draft 5
2:17-2:23.5 (6.5 min)
Note: Have effectively turned task of responding to student writing into a computer game
Draft 6
2:29-2:36 (7 min)
Note: Faint background noise
"milkshake"
"feet!"
"DIA"
Am lost in super mario comment land.
got dizzy and lay down
2:36 pm to 3:23 pm
(normal for me with hypnotic experiences)
Drafts 7 and 8 (back to back)
3:27pm -3:43pm (15 min)
4:02
Exquisitely beautiful girl enters Writing Center: grading stops
Hilary finds inner strenght for peer tutoring
Draft 9
4:04-4:12 (8 min)
He thought that if he just kept looking at you, an appointment on Friday would open up.
Draft 10
4:15-4:21 (6 min)
computers+writing=Bad News
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
thinness
is boring.
having 5 lbs to lose is far more interesting, like trying to save the earth from a giant asteroid.
having 5 lbs to lose is far more interesting, like trying to save the earth from a giant asteroid.
Monday, October 03, 2005
tree of reasoning
Name deleted breathed a sigh of relief and said, "I see: name deleted is like a giant redwood tree, the largest collective organism on earth. Yeah. You can quote me on that on your blog. Tell them name deleted said that".
Sunday, October 02, 2005
empathizing
With my sense of academic disconnectedness, Johndan replies: “this divide is part of why I’ve moved out of both tech comm and rhet/comp; my experiences were similar to yours”.
On a brighter note, he welcomes the “recent move in rhet/comp to begin working on a lot of the issues that tech comm has been dealing with for decades—service learning, usability, media, etc”. However, rhet/comp has made this move “without acknowledging the fact that their colleagues in tech comm have been studying this work for some time (or, in some cases, simply using that work but not acknowledging it)”.
For now, Johndan encourages me to continue to approach the discipline of rhet/comp through the sub-discipline of Computers and Writing: “since much of the work in C&W could be characterized as also tech comm work, it’s become sort of a back door into rhet/comp for people who are primarily in tech comm.”. More informally, he advises me to stick around and “hope things change”:
I’m not really involved in either field in a substantial way any longer, so it’s possible that there’s been some progress since I dropped out.
After all, Johndan is my kind of academic and professional hero: an incredibly successful dropout.
On a brighter note, he welcomes the “recent move in rhet/comp to begin working on a lot of the issues that tech comm has been dealing with for decades—service learning, usability, media, etc”. However, rhet/comp has made this move “without acknowledging the fact that their colleagues in tech comm have been studying this work for some time (or, in some cases, simply using that work but not acknowledging it)”.
For now, Johndan encourages me to continue to approach the discipline of rhet/comp through the sub-discipline of Computers and Writing: “since much of the work in C&W could be characterized as also tech comm work, it’s become sort of a back door into rhet/comp for people who are primarily in tech comm.”. More informally, he advises me to stick around and “hope things change”:
I’m not really involved in either field in a substantial way any longer, so it’s possible that there’s been some progress since I dropped out.
After all, Johndan is my kind of academic and professional hero: an incredibly successful dropout.
office hours
From friend's email (appended to picture):
hilary,
does the lopsided office hour card signify something about you? Do you
feel like a misfit in the department? Or is it a statement of defiance?
Slightly off kilter these days?
Saturday, October 01, 2005
spark: a novel about electron transport
"And that's the problem, particilarly for our graduate students: the discipline thinks its going from literature to culture, and the market tells us we're going from literature to technical writing" (O'Dair, p. 47).
For those of us who have already gone "from literature to technical writing", this is extremely reassuring news: we are going with the flow of the academic job market while the literary scholars, well, deconstruct themselves. However, O'Dair concludes that graduate students should not be prepared to "obtain tenurable positions" by reading Piers Plowman; rather, the academic job market "would likely improve by sticking to technical writing" (47).
This assumption--that literature and technical writing are intrinsically different--makes me cringe: and not with indignance at literary scholars for dogging the gritty industrial/orginizational focus of tech comm. Here, I would rather argue the assumption literature and technical writing are different is responsible for a lot of lame, bad and humanistically shady traditions in technical writing. In contrast, some of the most exemplary--ie, intelligeable, searchable and useable--peices of technical writing are exuberantly literary.
For wildly successful examples of "literary" technical communication, check out:
Angell Daie's "The English Secretorie", a secretarial manual that is written in the form of an epistolary novel. Marginal glosses transform the novel into a searchable textbook on professional writing.
Dyer's "the fleece", a diagnostic poem about diseases of the sheep. The poetic form allows for frighteningly vivid descriptions:
That dire distemper sometimes may the swain,
Though late, discern; when, on the lifted lid,
Or visual orb, the turgid veins are pale;
The swelling liver then her putrid store
Begins to drink: ev'n yet thy skill exert,
280 Nor suffer weak despair to fold thy arms:
Again detersive salt apply, or shed
The hoary med'cine o'er their arid food.
The Kama Sutra, an intricately diagrammed web of process descriptions about how to have sex, employs narrative to annotate and clarify the diagrams:
"Imagine..In his garden there are two swings, one revolving and one ordinary. Now sometimes, alone, he switches from one to the other until his head spins. But his favourite swing has neither ropes, nor wood, nor cushions" ("The Swing).
This narrative draws on the literary figure of analogy to clarify a complex sequence of actions. (Note: The narrative style of the Kama Sutra is brilliantly parodied in Christopher Moore's novel, "Lamb").
Here is a more contemporary example example of creative nonfiction in tech comm: Planned Parenthood's "STD petting zoo", an interactive cartoon about sexually transmitted diseases.
Taking these examples as a starting point, O'Dair's claim that graduate students are not getting anywhere with Langland's Piers Plowman becomes harder to evaluate. Like many technical communicators, Langland realized that people pay attention to abstract concepts when you draw smiley faces on and make up stories about them. Conceptually speaking, the structure and function of the soul (as described by Medieval scholars on the Greek New Testament) is as complex and "technical" as the parts of an amoeba. The anthropomorposized "parts of the soul" in Piers are created to help readers grasp and therefore modify the content of their souls. For example, the anthropomorphosized "Vices" in Piers--
And then came Covetousness · I can him not describe,
So hungry and hollow · Sir Harvey him looked.
He was beetle-browed · and blubber-lipped too,
With two bleared eyes · as a blind hog;
--are an analogous textual ancestor of the lively, anthropomorphosized STDs in Planned Parenthood's STD Petting Zoo.
In summary, Piers Plowman may have more to tell O'Dair's graduate students about technical and professional writing than she realizes. For example, that human readers are better able to grasp abstract concepts when they are presented as "characters" and explanations when they follow the structure of a story.
Those graduate students who can read Piers Plowman and apply Langland's anthropomorphic style of depicting "Vices" on the stage to (say) a better design for "idiot lights" on a dashboard might be the first ones to obtain tenurable positions on the academic job market.
For those of us who have already gone "from literature to technical writing", this is extremely reassuring news: we are going with the flow of the academic job market while the literary scholars, well, deconstruct themselves. However, O'Dair concludes that graduate students should not be prepared to "obtain tenurable positions" by reading Piers Plowman; rather, the academic job market "would likely improve by sticking to technical writing" (47).
This assumption--that literature and technical writing are intrinsically different--makes me cringe: and not with indignance at literary scholars for dogging the gritty industrial/orginizational focus of tech comm. Here, I would rather argue the assumption literature and technical writing are different is responsible for a lot of lame, bad and humanistically shady traditions in technical writing. In contrast, some of the most exemplary--ie, intelligeable, searchable and useable--peices of technical writing are exuberantly literary.
For wildly successful examples of "literary" technical communication, check out:
Angell Daie's "The English Secretorie", a secretarial manual that is written in the form of an epistolary novel. Marginal glosses transform the novel into a searchable textbook on professional writing.
Dyer's "the fleece", a diagnostic poem about diseases of the sheep. The poetic form allows for frighteningly vivid descriptions:
That dire distemper sometimes may the swain,
Though late, discern; when, on the lifted lid,
Or visual orb, the turgid veins are pale;
The swelling liver then her putrid store
Begins to drink: ev'n yet thy skill exert,
280 Nor suffer weak despair to fold thy arms:
Again detersive salt apply, or shed
The hoary med'cine o'er their arid food.
The Kama Sutra, an intricately diagrammed web of process descriptions about how to have sex, employs narrative to annotate and clarify the diagrams:
"Imagine..In his garden there are two swings, one revolving and one ordinary. Now sometimes, alone, he switches from one to the other until his head spins. But his favourite swing has neither ropes, nor wood, nor cushions" ("The Swing).
This narrative draws on the literary figure of analogy to clarify a complex sequence of actions. (Note: The narrative style of the Kama Sutra is brilliantly parodied in Christopher Moore's novel, "Lamb").
Here is a more contemporary example example of creative nonfiction in tech comm: Planned Parenthood's "STD petting zoo", an interactive cartoon about sexually transmitted diseases.
Taking these examples as a starting point, O'Dair's claim that graduate students are not getting anywhere with Langland's Piers Plowman becomes harder to evaluate. Like many technical communicators, Langland realized that people pay attention to abstract concepts when you draw smiley faces on and make up stories about them. Conceptually speaking, the structure and function of the soul (as described by Medieval scholars on the Greek New Testament) is as complex and "technical" as the parts of an amoeba. The anthropomorposized "parts of the soul" in Piers are created to help readers grasp and therefore modify the content of their souls. For example, the anthropomorphosized "Vices" in Piers--
And then came Covetousness · I can him not describe,
So hungry and hollow · Sir Harvey him looked.
He was beetle-browed · and blubber-lipped too,
With two bleared eyes · as a blind hog;
--are an analogous textual ancestor of the lively, anthropomorphosized STDs in Planned Parenthood's STD Petting Zoo.
In summary, Piers Plowman may have more to tell O'Dair's graduate students about technical and professional writing than she realizes. For example, that human readers are better able to grasp abstract concepts when they are presented as "characters" and explanations when they follow the structure of a story.
Those graduate students who can read Piers Plowman and apply Langland's anthropomorphic style of depicting "Vices" on the stage to (say) a better design for "idiot lights" on a dashboard might be the first ones to obtain tenurable positions on the academic job market.
a renewed slap in the face
every time I think about name deleted. If the form of harm had been less abstract, it could have faded over time.
from where we're standing, you look ghetto
The final page of Scholes' The Rise and Fall Of English turned with an unintentional slap of reality:
“But when professors became philologists, scholars, or literary critics, they deeply resented helping students with a prose that was neither literature nor anything else, but just “composition” –just as students resented and resisted learning a kind of writing that seemed to have no function beyond school” (p. 190).
Like Bonhoeffer, who got so innured to dungeon life that that he forgot about his imprisonment in Flossenburg "for weeks at a time", I blithely forgot about my own confinement:
“This {production} is the part of English that is usually put beyond the pale--as “creative” writing-- or down in the dungeon--as "composition" (p. 159).
Therefore, sentences like this one had to be read and reread for meaning:
“The useful, the practical, and even the intelligeable were relegated to composition” (p. 35).
Waaaaait a second, I thought. We're the ones who do the "relegating" around here! Why just the other day Sharon's student brought in his big dumb deconstruction book, and she calmly said,
"nooow, if you want to use that in your literature courses, that's perfectly fine.
Yeah. She relegated his head straight".
What even well-intentioned and perspicuous literary scholars liek Scholes fail to realize is that, like most indigenous peoples, composition scholars are not pressing our noses against the stained glass waiting to be "discovered":
“What I finally realized was that English departments need composition as the “other” of literature in order to function as they have functioned” (p. 35).
The above sentence is at once heartwarming and insulting. We built this department 1 syllogism at a time so you could have a place to deconstruct stuff (or whatever): You've finally noticed us?
On a second reading, I came to immensely appreciate Scholes' move toward a rapproachement. Still, though, scholars within the fields of composition, rhetoric and technical communication should remain critical of "integrationist" claims such as this one:
“Under this sign, there is no difference between the theory of composition and the theory of literature” (p. 36).
As Malcolm X points out, anyone who has been systematically enslaved should be critical of steps toward "integration", especially of integration initiated by the people who were doing the enslaving:
"Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing "We shall overcome ... Suum Day.. ." while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against ?The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every op pressed people in the world: the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, ... Cuba - yes Cuba too" ("El-Hajj Malik-Shabazz", p. 456).
For composition scholars, the danger of overarching alliances with literary scholars "is not a case of wanting either separation or integration.The use of these words actually clouds the real picture" (Malcolm X, "missing page numbers"). Rather, any initiative from within literary studies to disolve the disciplinary boundary between comp. and literature presents the risk of subsuming composition into a power structure that swears that, with our dedicated help, it can stop being exploitative.
“But when professors became philologists, scholars, or literary critics, they deeply resented helping students with a prose that was neither literature nor anything else, but just “composition” –just as students resented and resisted learning a kind of writing that seemed to have no function beyond school” (p. 190).
Like Bonhoeffer, who got so innured to dungeon life that that he forgot about his imprisonment in Flossenburg "for weeks at a time", I blithely forgot about my own confinement:
“This {production} is the part of English that is usually put beyond the pale--as “creative” writing-- or down in the dungeon--as "composition" (p. 159).
Therefore, sentences like this one had to be read and reread for meaning:
“The useful, the practical, and even the intelligeable were relegated to composition” (p. 35).
Waaaaait a second, I thought. We're the ones who do the "relegating" around here! Why just the other day Sharon's student brought in his big dumb deconstruction book, and she calmly said,
"nooow, if you want to use that in your literature courses, that's perfectly fine.
Yeah. She relegated his head straight".
What even well-intentioned and perspicuous literary scholars liek Scholes fail to realize is that, like most indigenous peoples, composition scholars are not pressing our noses against the stained glass waiting to be "discovered":
“What I finally realized was that English departments need composition as the “other” of literature in order to function as they have functioned” (p. 35).
The above sentence is at once heartwarming and insulting. We built this department 1 syllogism at a time so you could have a place to deconstruct stuff (or whatever): You've finally noticed us?
On a second reading, I came to immensely appreciate Scholes' move toward a rapproachement. Still, though, scholars within the fields of composition, rhetoric and technical communication should remain critical of "integrationist" claims such as this one:
“Under this sign, there is no difference between the theory of composition and the theory of literature” (p. 36).
As Malcolm X points out, anyone who has been systematically enslaved should be critical of steps toward "integration", especially of integration initiated by the people who were doing the enslaving:
"Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing "We shall overcome ... Suum Day.. ." while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against ?The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every op pressed people in the world: the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, ... Cuba - yes Cuba too" ("El-Hajj Malik-Shabazz", p. 456).
For composition scholars, the danger of overarching alliances with literary scholars "is not a case of wanting either separation or integration.The use of these words actually clouds the real picture" (Malcolm X, "missing page numbers"). Rather, any initiative from within literary studies to disolve the disciplinary boundary between comp. and literature presents the risk of subsuming composition into a power structure that swears that, with our dedicated help, it can stop being exploitative.
review of "she's gotta have it"
Spike and I can now the our trial separation caused by whatever he was thinking, or smoking, when he directed "X" (a film so disappointing that it really does incite hate crimes).
Cost of atonement: 4 dollars (approx.)
Cost of atonement: 4 dollars (approx.)
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