The reason why I teach Spanish 101 is not that anybody at the university is an evildoer and is thwarting my teaching ambitions but simply that there aren’t enough students to fill 6 advanced courses per year just for me.
And it’s not just here, it’s the same everywhere. Why do you think tenured professors at Yale teach one course per year? They wouldn’t be able to scare up enough students to fill six courses per professor no matter what they did.
Most of what we do in college is remediation. Students come to us after taking 6 years of Spanish and can’t say “My name is Jack.” I mean this literally: they don’t know how to say it. And it’s not only Spanish, of course. They don’t know continents, they don’t know what Israel is, they don’t know who fought in WWII, when and for what reason.
In four years we do manage to get some of them to the point where they can benefit from my expertise in my actual field. But before that happens, somebody has got to teach Spanish 101, 102, 201, etc.
Of course, we could solve the problem by giving Spanish 101 to eager part-timers and leaving me in peace to work on my research. But it’s impossible to explain to the general public why what I do out of the classroom matters. I’m hoping that my blog, which is a sort of a rough draft for my research, will help people see how what I do can enrich their lives with insights and ideas. I’m not saying the world needs an army of people like me but having a certain number of folks who read, think and generate ideas is crucial for all of us.
Clarissa's Blog 
\I’m hoping that my blog, which is a sort of a rough draft for my research, will help people see how what I do can enrich their lives with insights and ideas.
The problem is that your insights and ideas (seemingly) enrich only or fellow academics or this blog’s readers. That’s why most people don’t understand what academics do all day and may not always value academics’ work as much as it deserves to be valued.
I had been thinking for a while already (long before this post) that it’s a pity most academics neither publish articles in newspapers nor write books truly accessible for non academics.
Your posts about the development of nation states were a completely new world for me and very interesting, yet when I asked for recommendations, you could not think of accessible literature on the subject. I wonder whether you could not write a book about the development of a state (what forms existed before nation states, unique characteristics of nation states and present developments / new state forms rising). Or is it not connected to the field of literature?
I think you could write such a book and in today’s climate it could become very popular among general public. But it most likely would not bring academic prestige or count as research, if it were accessible to “a man on the street.” Am I right?
Btw, if I am interested in the subject of (nation) states’ development, can you recommend any novel(s) in the English literature one would benefit from looking at? I mean English-speaking culture, not only novels from England. I would love to investigate nation state development via English literature, yet am still unsure how and where to begin.
LikeLike
“I wonder whether you could not write a book about the development of a state (what forms existed before nation states, unique characteristics of nation states and present developments / new state forms rising).”
“The problem is that your insights and ideas (seemingly) enrich only or fellow academics or this blog’s readers. That’s why most people don’t understand what academics do all day and may not always value academics’ work as much as it deserves to be valued.”
“But it most likely would not bring academic prestige or count as research, if it were accessible to “a man on the street.” Am I right?”
As for newspapers, the kind of academic they want to publish is the freak I quoted earlier today.
LikeLike
\ The first half of The Shield of Achilles by Philip Bobbitt does precisely that.
Thank you! I will try to find it. You do think this is a good book in general, right?
As for English lit novels dealing with the transformations, nothing comes to mind? May be, one of other readers can recommend something?
\ What can I do? Run after people in the street …
Write a book.
🙂
I thought about something like Freakonomics (which I haven’t read) in accessibility, only about nation and non-nation states.
\ Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is the debut non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. It was published on April 12, 2005 by William Morrow. The book has been described as melding pop culture with economics. By late 2009, the book had sold over 4 million copies worldwide.\
May be, this Freak-book is horrible, I don’t know. But it answered the demand in the easiest language and brought a fortune to its writers.
LikeLike
“You do think this is a good book in general, right?”
LikeLike
Any comments on the latest lame ass Spanish election? My first impression was that it was Elecciones Generales II: ¡Bugalú eléctrico! * but I could be wrong).
*In US pop culture Electric Boogaloo! is a reference to any unwanted and/or unneeded sequel
LikeLike
“Students come to us after taking 6 years of Spanish and can’t say “My name is Jack.” I mean this literally: they don’t know how to say it.”
I’m not sure to get this. After 1 year of Spanish, you should know how to say “Me llamo Jack”, I think..
LikeLike
Of course, those who take Spanish 101 doesn’t know that kind of stuff.
LikeLike
The version they routinely produce is “Mi llama es Jack.” I’ve been to the best school in the region, and the teacher simply never says a word of Spanish in a Spanish class. It’s an endless discussion in English of how to speak Spanish.
LikeLike
Not the literal “Mi nombre es Jack”?
LikeLike
I’d even be fine with the simple “soy Jack.” But mi llama persecutes me. Even pictures of cute llamas don’t always help.
LikeLike
“It’s an endless discussion in English of how to speak Spanish”
From what I hear English classes in Spain are largely made up of learning how to formulate rules of English grammar in Spanish (and the ‘grammar’ is many decades out of date).
LikeLike
This is the Soviet method of language teaching that was aimed at imitating language learning while ensuring that nobody should ever learn a foreign language for obvious reasons.
LikeLike