I was explaining the hypotheticals in my Advanced Spanish class. I love grammar, which is why my delivery of the material is always very passionate. In the midst of my fiery delivery of the rules governing the formation of unreal conditions, a student exclaimed, “What are you doing here?!?”

“Where?” I asked in complete confusion.

“Here, at this university,” the student insisted. “You are so brilliant, you should be at a more famous school.”

I hadn’t known one could be gratified and peeved at the same time, but at this moment I discovered that one definitely could. On the one hand, I’m glad that my students admire me. What else can a teacher want? But on the other hand, I feel like I’ve really had it with these suggestions that my dream should be working for a more prestigious university or, as a colleague recently put it in a very shocking way, “writing my way out” (meaning, out of this university). I know from sad personal experience that prestige does not equal intellectual rigor or fair treatment of employees.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m too old to chase prestige as a valid life goal. The very idea bores me. In high school, it mattered to be popular. By the age of 30, however, I had achieved a crucial milestone of my personal development which consisted in never allowing the value systems and priority lists of other people to have any influence on my life.

What really matters to me in terms of my workplace is (in this order):

1. Whether I feel respected.
2. Whether I respect the people I work with.
3. Whether I feel exploited or treated unjustly. (And, believe me, it takes very very little for me to feel that.)
4. Whether there is nepotism and corruption, or any sort of institutionalized unfairness. (A single spousal hire that I have to approve creates an intolerable working environment for me.)
5. How much freedom I have to teach what, when, and how I want. (If I have to teach 3 days a week while a colleague teaches only 2 days a week and we never alternate, this is not a place where I want to work.)
6. How much free time I get. (This semester, nobody saw me on campus outside of my 2 teaching days a week. And nobody minded. I got really good research done, too, while teaching a 3-course load. Jealous yet? 🙂 )
7. Whether the place is adjunctifying at a rapid pace. (The suffering of adjuncts traumatizes me, so I can only be happy in a place that keeps hiring tenure-track people. Since I’ve come to my current department, we’ve hired one person with tenure and opened 1 tenure-track position. No new adjunct positions have been created.)
8. How much I like the students. (It is easier for me to like students who have three part-time or one full-time job than those who keep asking, ‘So how do you say “trust fund” in Spanish?’)
9. How well I get along with the colleagues. (I find working with gossipy, clique-promoting, intrigue-loving people to be very painful on every level.)
10. Whether the remuneration for my work allows me to live decently while having a lot of free time.
11. Whether my partner can get good employment in this geographic area.

My current university fulfills my expectations in all these categories. My previous three (hugely famous and super duper prestigious) schools failed in every single category. Now, please tell me, what kind of a hopeless idiot would I be if I entertained the hope of abandoning all of these great things in search of the dubious pre-adolescent joy of bragging that I work for a famous university?

Unless the administration of my university goes nuts and starts messing with the great things I listed above (as we say, a fish always starts rotting at the head), I’m SO staying put at my current great university.

A colleague shared the following story. Like any modern totalitarian regime, North Korea realizes that its greatest enemy is the information revolution. The Soviet Union suffered a great blow when video cassettes from abroad started penetrating the country, and people could see what the daily lives of their peers in “rotting capitalist societies” were really like.

Today, North Korea faces the same problem. In order to prevent people from watching tapes and DVDs smuggled from the West, the Secret Police uses the following strategy. A police truck arrives at a neighborhood and cuts the electricity in the entire block of houses. This makes it impossible for the residents to eject cassettes and discs and destroy or hide them before the police officers get to their apartment. Then, the officers only have to walk from one abode to another, collecting the equipment that, more often than not, does contain illegal Western viewing material.

After the Russian Justin Timberlake, Dima Bilan, won the Eurovision in 2008, I stopped following the contest as a sign of protest (if you hear or see Bilan, you’ll understand). As a result, I missed the hilarious entry of a Russian group of singing and dancing grannies into Eurovision. A colleague at the Eastern European roundtable had to tell me about it.

I really dig the babushki because this is a culture where women willingly transform into hopeless old ladies with no interests other than gossiping and whining about everything at the age of 50. This has been changing in big cities, but in the country-side that the grannies represent with their folk costumes and music, this tradition is as alive as ever.

The grannies will not win Eurovision but, at least, they will have a good time. And maybe even inspire other babushkas to do the same.

I came up with this great review activity for an Intermediate or Advanced language course that I wanted to share.

The activity takes two class hours. In the first session, students create a final exam for the course in pairs. You give them a list of grammar topics and vocabulary they have to cover, and they create their own exams.

In the second session, they exchange the exams and each group completes an exam prepared by the other group. Then, they hand the completed exam back and the group that created it reads and grades it. They discuss the mistakes together and come up with a correct version.

I just tried it, and the students totally dig the activity. It is very creative, fun, and it also lets them appreciate how much work I invest into creating their graded activities.

Ashley Judd has published a funny piece decrying the bad mean objectification:

The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at (and marketed to) us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.

This might have some value if it didn’t come from a Hollywood actress, a person whose only job is to look pretty and get paid huge sums for that. If you bring absolutely nothing to your job but a cute face and a skinny figure, then why shouldn’t you expect to have them picked apart and analyzed from here to eternity by consumers? What I bring to my job are my teaching and my research and I routinely undergo the very unpleasant procedure of having them picked apart, analyzed and criticized in very harsh terms.

Judd wants to extrapolate her reality of  a Hollywood starlet who needs to be fresh in order to be attractive to consumers onto every other woman, which is why her repeated use of “our” rings hollow. Unlike in Judd’s job, in my profession nobody gives a rat’s ass about my celestial beauty. I can have the most perfect face and the most statuesque figure in the world but if I arrive at my yearly review with no publications, no service activities and lousy student evaluations, my contract will simply not be renewed. I’m not objectified at work and my personhood and accomplishments are not dismissed for the simple reason that I’m selling the products of my intellectual labor. If Judd chooses to sell pictures of a cute ass, it is hardly a huge feminist issue that the product she sells has an expiration date.

It’s also hilarious how Judd used to be completely fine with the Hollywood objectification to which she contributed as much as she could by offering her photoshopped appearance to the world on every occasion that presented itself. Now that she can’t sell those manufactured looks as well as she used to, she starts ranting against “objectification.” Like a local greasy spoon owner who gets outraged when a McDonald’s opens in town and who starts denouncing the evils of fast food to malign his competition, Judd is upset that the system she has benefited from enormously and that made her extremely rich and famous cannot be milked in perpetuity.

After a passionate diatribe against all those horrible people who only care about women’s looks, Judd tries to persuade her readers that, contrary to popular opinion, she is still quite ready for consumption:

My skin is nearly flawless, and at age 43, I do not yet have visible wrinkles. . . When I have gained weight, going from my usual size two/four to a six/eight after a lazy six months of not exercising.

Our anti-objectification activist protests against women being held up to impossible standards of beauty and, in the same breath, brands those who have visible wrinkles at age 43 as “flawed” and those who are bigger than size 8 as “lazy.” And then she wonders why women are not rushing to defend her when the same labels she puts on others are attached to her. What a blathering hypocrite.

What I find especially entertaining is that many pseudo-feminists have started jumping on Judd’s wagon, promoting her as some kind of a feminist. They don’t even notice that, in  a highly misogynist gesture, Judd consistently refers to herself as “an actor.” What other evidence do we need that she does not have an ounce of respect for those very women in whose name she claims to speak?

People are reacting in interesting ways to my newly short hair.

N simply failed to notice any change.

“So?” I asked him when he came home.

“This is a beautiful dress you are wearing,” he said.

“Forget the dress! There is something more important going on.”

“Huh?” he responded.

I’m taking this as a good sign. The man adores me with or without hair, what can be better than that?

Then I told my sister about the haircut over the phone.

“This is very unexpected! I’m not sure I can deal with this! This is too much,” she said.

“Look, I haven’t worn my hair this short for 23 years,” I explained. “I decided it was time for a change.”

“But these were good 23 years!” she responded in a tragic tone she will use when delivering the eulogy at my funeral seventy years from now.

Let’s see what my students say tomorrow.

I have realized that the time has come for me to liberate myself from the pernicious myth that femininity equals long hair. So I went to my salon and had my hair cut shorter than I’ve had it at any time in the past 23 years. It’s been blow-dried, so the extent of the shortness cannot be fully appreciated right now. After I wash it the next time, though, it will form a curly cloud around my head and will probably not even reach my shoulders.

I feel very grown up.

Reader el left a link to a very good post on homeschooling:

For most children, school becomes a primary agent of socialization alongside the family. This does not happen for homeschoolers, though, who generally continue to go where their family goes, see who their family sees, and be where their family is. The family continues to be the primary agent of socialization.

The main argument that the homeschoolers roll out whenever they hear that they are selfishly robbing their miserable children of normal socialization by keeping them away from school as if they were toys is, “But I organize many playdates! But I take them to many activities! But I create a rich social life for them!” Of course, the idea that growing people need to have their own existence outside of their parents sphere of influence does not occur to homeschoolers.  They aren’t raising independent human beings in their own right, you see. They are bringing up creatures who will continue servicing Mommy’s and Daddy’s needs for as long as possible.

At the same time, homeschoolers don’t get an opportunity to grow into their adult roles gradually:

Homeschooled children like myself shift straight from a family life based on affection to an adult life based on performance. This transition can be grinding and abrupt, and it can be a difficult one to make.

Notice that this is yet another adult who was homeschooled and is now sharing how undermining this experience was.

People always wimp out and start denying their own ideas whenever homeschooling is discussed. After being cyberbullied by a bunch of unhinged, hysterical, homeschooling housewives with no lives of their own and with a long experience of interacting only with those who will never dare contradict them, I can understand this fear. The author of the quoted post chickens out a little bit by the end of the article but, still, this post is an important contribution to the discussion of the crippling effects of homeschooling.

This is an actual ad running in Toronto buses:

You’ve got to be such an insensitive, cruel, mean, condescending, self-involved creature to come up with something like this. . .