Month: February 2012

Question to Ponder

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

Liss at Shakesville asks:

What pervasive negative cultural narrative kept you from trying something for a very long time that you ended up liking?

I’m a big contrarian Jew, so for me, the narratives that keep me from trying things are the positive ones. For years, I resisted trying the Italian food because everybody loved it, so it had to be horrible. When I finally tried it, I immediately felt in love with it. I never went to Florida because everybody else did (I’m from Montreal, which my students described as “the place where all the Canadians go”). When I finally did go, I adored it.

As we say, Jews get everything at a huge price. But they get everything.

How would you answer this question?

An Update From the Top Secret Writing Group

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

This is the post I wrote for my top secret online writing group yesterday and I wanted to share it with everybody:

Day 29 on the Seinfeld Chain and I have just sent the article to Jonathan for review. The article is far from perfect, of course, but it exists. I have only managed to write it because I have stayed on the Seinfeld Chain.

The plan for next week is simple: start reviewing and doing the necessary rewriting on the manuscript while staying on the chain.

I’m planning to stay on the Seinfeld Chain until I leave for Europe in mid-May. By that time I plan to have this manuscript undergo a final revision and submit it for publication somewhere.

And then in summer, I will start a new major project that I’m already doing some preliminary research for. The best thing about writing every day is that one can plan one’s research agenda for the future. This is the first time ever that I didn’t dread submitting my research goals for the year at my university. Usually, I find it extremely hard to plan my research so far ahead because I never know if I will have time to do it. Now that I write every day, though, this convenient excuse is gone and I finally feel like I know what I will be doing in the next couple of years. This reduces the stress of being a research scholar immensely.

My New Favorite Ring

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

This is my new favorite ring my mother brought me from Cuba. And just in time for the discussion about Cuba I’m starting in my Spanish class.

Isn’t it cool? We will be able to discuss the commodification of famous revolutionaries and what this process tells us.

We will also be watching a seemingly innocuous Cuban film about kids who travel across the country and unpacking the ideological message this innocent film carries.

And some people say that language classes cannot be fun!

Stupid Introduction to a Stupid Article by Stupid Clarissa

~ Clarissa ~ 15 Comments

I’m in a vile mood, people. The stupid introduction to my article isn’t working out. I’ve been struggling with it for a week and all I have is a bunch of ugly, unconnected sentences.

I’ve tried everything and it still isn’t working out. I’ve left it aside and worked on something else for a while. I’ve deleted it and started from scratch several times. I’ve walked around mumbling in different languages. I’ve reread the article itself 6 times. I’ve tried writing on paper. I’ve thrown papers on the wall, hit myself on the head, and tugged my hair. I’ve gotten so desperate that I even tried physical exercise.

And nothing works. And if the introduction doesn’t work, that means the entire article is garbage.

Shit.

Small Children and Personal Boundaries

~ Clarissa ~ 59 Comments

My two-year-old niece Klubnikis is a very fortunate little girl. Since the day she was born, everybody respected her boundaries. Nobody tried to hug or kiss her if she didn’t feel like it. When Klubnikis’s Mommy and Grandma want to take a bath with her, they put on swimsuits. Nobody exhorts her to eat and nobody ever tells her “You will not leave the table until you finish this” when she doesn’t feel like eating.

When Klubnikis grows up, she will know that the only normal situation is one where nobody breaches her boundaries without her express consent, nobody unilaterally decides to get naked around her or to initiate tactile contact with her. This is not a lesson that it makes sense to teach in adolescence. You can exhort teenagers to “just say no” until you are hoarse, but if since early childhood they have been getting the message that nobody cares about their consent or lack thereof, it will be way too late to start delivering that message.

What’s the Point of Testing?

~ Clarissa ~ 15 Comments

For me, everything that happens in the course of teaching should contribute to improving the students’ knowledge, and testing is no exception. If the only thing that a test (an exam, a quiz, etc.) achieves is to provide a number or a letter, it means we have all wasted our time administering and taking the test in question.

People often invest these numbers with a huge meaning and start “teaching to the test” when what they should really be doing is the opposite: testing to teach.

To give an example, I devise the oral exams in my language courses in a way that allows the students to achieve a significant breakthrough and improve the way they speak dramatically in the course of the exam. They think I’m testing them when, in reality, I’m pushing them to a new level of language competency.

This is why I am so profoundly opposed to multiple-choice tests and consider them a tool of a lazy, irresponsible teacher. All such tests do is suggest to the students that there is one correct answer that a figure of authority will provide for them, and all they have to do it is memorize it and circle the “correct” answer. For the most part, the knowledge students can glean from such tests is erroneous, since for every “correct” answer, there are several “incorrect” ones.

I think that the best thing we can do as pedagogues is stop obsessing over meaningless grades and start concentrating on the actual knowledge we are imparting to the students. Testing is important because it allows students to track their progress and it also motivates them. The far more crucial role of testing, however, is to serve as an inventive way of teaching students at the moment when they are not aware of being taught.

I have taken more methodology of teaching courses than I can tell you about, and we learned to create teaching tests in those courses. In such courses, we, the future language teachers, were taught, for example, the percentage of completely new words and idiomatic expressions that each test should include in order to be effective. According to the rules of the foreign language teaching methodology, I would be remiss as an educator if I failed to include any new words and expressions into the final exam.

Of course, many college profs never get an opportunity to acquaint themselves with this branch of knowledge. As a result, whenever I go to the copy center in our building (which caters exclusively to the disciplines in the Humanities, mind you), I see a multiple choice quiz left there to be copied by one of my colleagues. There are even people who are ignorant enough to assign multiple-choice tests for foreign language courses.

I spent the entire day yesterday grading compositions in my Advanced language course. I underlined every word or expression in the text that didn’t sound right and wrote what kind of a mistake it was (grammar, vocabulary, spelling, etc.) on top. I will return the compositions to students on Tuesday. They will rewrite them and hand them back to me. After that, I will grade them again. It would have been so much easier to hand out some silly fill-in-the-blanks activity instead and spend 20 minutes instead of 5 hours grading it. But the students wouldn’t learn nearly as much from it.

How to Deserve Hatred

~ Clarissa ~ 18 Comments

In his book España, Manuel Vilas says:

It doesn’t matter how many sincere friends a man has because if there is just one person who hates him to death, it means his life has been a failure. Hatred of one matters more than the love of hundreds. It’s true: the hatred of one person is a condemnation.

I think Vilas is absolutely right. Profound, true hatred is a costly and a very energy-consuming proposition. A person who hates you (and I’m not talking of a passing bout of anger here, I’m talking about real hatred that burns with a steady flame and stretches into eternity) willingly undermines his or her health and stunts his or her existence for the purpose of hating you.

One has got to be a really shitty human being to deserve something like that.

 

How Did We Get Here?

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

I started to read a post but couldn’t get past its opening sentence”

Adjunct professors now make up almost 70 percent of all faculty members in the United States.

If this is true, then it’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy for our entire system of higher education.

HOW DID WE EVER GET TO THIS PLACE?

P.S. If somebody has data showing that this is not true, I’m waiting to hear from you. I will dedicate a post to your general awesomeness.

My Sister, the Coffee-Hater

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

My sister hates coffee. My addiction to this beverage mystifies her.

“How do you drink this nasty stuff?” she asks.

Today, she called me from Paris.

“You won’t believe this,” she announced, “but it turns out that I love coffee. I discovered that what we get served in North America under the name of coffee is nothing of the kind. The real coffee, though, rocks.”

I remember when I got back to Montreal from Portugal (the place where they make the best coffee in the world), I couldn’t look at the huge basins of strange brownish stuff we got served as coffee.

And don’t even get me started on tea. If you want actual tea on this continent, you have to brew it yourself. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a chemically tasting stuff from a soggy bag.

When I travel to London in May, I’m planning to find out whether they serve real tea at five o’clock.

 

Sunday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion

~ Clarissa ~ 26 Comments

Religious fanaticism is defeated in Quebec. Note that the Libertarians, once again, stand on the side of barbarity and religious indoctrination. Because for them, as we well know, it’s all about defending the people’s complete and utter liberty to be bamboozled by fundamentalist brainwashing.

Are you sure you don’t have defiant hair? Because it’s supposed to be a huge danger to your marriage.

Racism hasn’t disappeared and racist terminology still hurts people. And more on the same subject based on the slur that was directed at Jeremy Lin. Two very good posts from different bloggers.

A talented writer and a popular blogger points out the Libertarian hypocrisy on the subject of “rape by the government” legislation. You’d think that Libertarians would rise up in protest when presented with such an egregious violation of individual liberty by the government, right? Well, not really. This is why I insist that North American Libertarians are just religious fundamentalists in a quasi-rational disguise.

The sad reality of women in Japan.

“The mistaken belief that “desire” is “supposed” to be spontaneous – like, you’re walking down the street or having lunch and you go, “Hm! Sex please!” – can cause a person to believe that if they have responsive desire they’re BROKEN. And if people believe they’re broken, then you get into medicalization of what is in fact perfectly normal, healthy, functional sexuality.”

Brilliant insights into writing: “The number of days that you go without actually writing something on your project equals the number of hours (one hour for each skipped day) that it will take you to actually write something once you sit down to do it. Five days = five hours at the desk before my brain really engages.” There is more, so do visit the link.

I missed this post when it first came out on February 10, but I’m very glad I have found it since then. This post on the egregiously stupid attitude of both the Republican and the Democratic governments towards the mortgage market is definitely the post of the week: “In 2004, President George W. Bush led the way with a bid to move four million additional US households into home ownership that they could not remotely afford. In 2012, President Barack Obama leads the way to try to limit the return of some or all of those households back into the US rental market where they truly belong.”

This is the kind of student every prof lives for.

New York Times pretends that fathers do not exist.

“In other words, hegemonic heterosexuality is the vast cultural conspiracy to describe all heterosexual relationships as the unending war between stupid people and crazy people. If that’s really the model of love you want to aspire to, then okay, you have that right. But don’t piss down my neck and tell me it’s raining, and don’t show me toxic relationships and tell me they’re normal.  I reject this model and encourage others to do so as well.” A very impressive post.

The official Spanish-language definition of autism is finally getting changed from its old and egregiously offensive definition to a better one. And who do you think gets all the credit? (Hint: it isn’t autistics.) The post is in English, so click away.

Why creative writing classes are useless.

This post is short but it makes a brilliant observation on what the problem is with the debate on the value of the Humanities education: “It’s missing the distinction between “intellectual pursuits” and “easy majors.” Highly recommended.

“There are people who complain instead about the low quality of the food people buy with their EBT cards, like using it at gas stations to buy Doritos and frozen pizzas.  How dare they? people say.  I don’t give my hard-earned money to them so that they can live off junk food!  People have such an attachment to their tax dollars when they see individuals using them in ways that they don’t specifically approve of, but a significantly smaller number seem anywhere near as angry with the way that governmental institutions use their tax dollars.” How very very true. It’s easier for many people to dump on food stamp recipients than to question the real black holes in the federal budget.

If you are (or are planning to be) on the academic job market, do read this detailed and extremely enlightening post on how to prepare a job talk. I only wish I knew all this when I was on the market. After reading the post, I realized how badly I have messed up some of my job talks.

A Dutchman’s observations on the differences between saying good-bye in his culture and in the US.

If you adore turtles as much as I do, make sure you check out this beautiful post with photos of newborn turtles. They are beyond cute. They have belly buttons!

A great strategy for jump-staring your writing.

A beautiful post on when one becomes on adult.

Research is important but taking care of yourself is even more important. I couldn’t agree more with this great post. Physical and mental health comes first, people.

When your husband can’t put a fire in your belly, maybe his career can. A funny interview with Santorum’s wife who “defended her husband’s performance” while loving a talk show host more than her husband. And I really understand her. With a husband like that, even Glen Beck seems like a sex symbol.

When you start following a blog, do you read its entire archive?

Finally, an intelligent analysis of a situation in Russia. Most Western sources have no idea about what is going on in FSU countries. Instead of researching and analyzing, they just make stuff up by the bucketful. The recent celebration of a musical group that was simply trying to make a quick buck as “feminist” is an example of such shoddy reporting. When it comes to more serious issues, Western media comes up with even more egregious stuff. This is why I’m glad to find a post that addresses the current situation in Russia insightfully and correctly.

Some people have such an unhealthy relationship with food, that even slicing a cucumber is too much work for them. So they dream of, get this, prefabricated salads and sliced cucumbers.

And, last, an observation: my blogroll has been populated by very long, gushy, poorly written and excruciatingly boring posts by male, formerly progressive bloggers who are trying to come up with extremely convoluted scenarios of how “pregnancies should not generally be permitted” or should generally be permitted, or whatever. Which is hilarious, given how pregnancies are not something they are ever likely to experience. So if you think that this unhealthy obsession with female reproductive system is limited to Conservatives, you are wrong. The desire to rummage (or verbally masturbate on the subject of rummaging) in women’s uteri is not about politics. It’s about profound psychological issues of folks who like to mask their problems behind pseudo-political and philosophical concerns.