Weepy

When I feel overwhelmed with work--and I definitely am overcommitted right now with responsibilities--it's easy to feel depressed. But sometimes, late at night, when the morning's antidepressant has worn off, I can get downright weepy with slight provocation.

Tonight's weepfest is brought to me by Pete Seeger's latest album, At 89, and more specifically the song "Little Fat Baby." Here are the lyrics:

Someday, you'll be able to walk
Someday, you'll be able to talk
No more diapers, you will wear pants
You'll be able to sing and dance
And then, oh then, oh then, oh then
I'll wish I had that little fat baby
In my arms again

Someday, you're going to be fully grown
Someday, you will be leaving this home
No more clamoring up the stair
No more clothes strewn everywhere
And then, oh then, oh then, oh then
I'll wish I had that tough teenager
In my arms again

Someday, you'll have a child of your own
Someday, you'll know the things that I've known
And grandmother will help you through
As your child grows as all children do
And then, oh then, oh then, oh then
You'll wish you had your little fat baby
In your arms again

Someday, we will be saying so long
Someday, it'll be time for me to move on
No more discussions over a glass of beer
No more generation gaps appear
And then, oh then, oh then, oh then
You'll wish you had your dear sweet papa
In your arms again

Someday, you'll be able to walk
Someday, you'll be able to talk
No more will you poop in your pants
You'll be able to sing and dance
And then, oh then, oh then, oh then
I'll wish I had that little fat baby
In my arms again

If you're a parent, I challenge you to download the song from iTunes and not weep.

I've voted. Have you?

Fang's absentee ballot is sitting on the table, mostly filled out. He always gets after me to get stuff done, so. . .

Confluence, Context, and Community (Part II)

This post is the second in a series. Be sure to check out Part I for more explanation.

After September 11, there was much ado in the media about people not wanting to be out and about in public places and the resulting trend of "nesting" in one's home by outfitting it with greater personal comforts. For many of us, one of these comforts was high-speed internet access, and with our faster browsing speeds, we discovered ever-greater numbers of virtual communities to which we might belong. One danger of this retreat to the Internet is the further withdrawal of individuals from their geographic, place-based communities. Through the establishment of her Centers for Community Digital Exploration (CCDE), Barbara Ganley seeks to use online social media to reinvigorate connections among people in their local communities.

One liability of this project is that it might be tempting to take the simpler route of establishing centers in communities according to a general blueprint, almost on a franchise model, where any outsider trained in the protocols of the CCDE's operations and mission could go into a community, set up camp, and get the ball rolling. In reality, however, every community is different--in terms of cultural diversity, socioeconomic class, and even Internet access--so there is a danger similar to that faced by Glenn Wharton in his restoration of the statue of Kamehameha in the king's hometown and by countless ethnographers: outsiders come in, stir up resentment because they don't understand the community, and then the social experiment fails.

Barbara's approach is different. Already she is negotiating a contract with a foundation interested in community planning. Barbara wants to persuade community members in four geographically diverse, small rural towns to tell stories both face to face and using various digital media. Through talking with them about the stories and through the sharing of these stories throughout the community--and perhaps through the establishment of CCDEs in each community--Barbara will help communities identify their core values and their specific desires for features of their communities. She will, in short, be turning story into action, which is, after all, the goal of so many contemporary museum exhibitions (and particularly science exhibitions that promote better living through, say, the embrace of local foodways, a reduced carbon footprint, or conscientious attention to and eradication of invasive plant species).

There's a lot museums can learn, I think, from Barbara's own conscientiousness about community, from her contemplative slow blogging, and from her fierce independence from models of educational practice that are less than democratic, that constrain individuals and communities, and that always privilege critical over creative thinking.

Confluence, Context, and Community (Part I)

(cross-posted from Museum Blogging)

This past week I experienced one of those wonderful confluences of thought and experience that make me thankful for my tendency to snatch up whatever interesting opportunity that comes along, no matter how overcommitted I already may be. I spent Thursday evening through Saturday afternoon visiting my friend and colleague Barbara Ganley in Vermont, where I was joined by Barbara Sawhill and Laura Blankenship. BG just finished up 19 years teaching writing and literature at Middlebury College, but she's starting a new endeavor: the Centers for Community Digital Expression, and she wanted to bounce some ideas off of us. I spent the weekend gorging myself on Vermont artisanal cheeses, excellent bread (one especially delicious loaf handmade and delivered by Bryan Alexander), and salad greens plucked from Barbara's garden. In short: Good food, excellent company, and terrific conversation. These women inspire me.

On Sunday and Monday, I participated in a colloquium at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, where I teach a museum studies course. What I heard at the colloquium resonated all the more because of my trip to Vermont. This is the first in a series of posts reflecting on the confluence of these two events.

Over the course of the two days of the JFKU colloquium, we were treated to three excellent talks, but my favorite was given by Glenn Wharton of NYU and MoMA, who recounted his efforts to restore the painted statue of King Kamehameha (PDF) in North Kohala, Hawaii. You can read many of the details of the project in the report at that link, and I encourage you to do so, as it's a model of community engagement. Wharton is white and an outsider to Hawaiian culture, but he earned the respect of the community by honoring their own processes instead of trying to impose his own.

Within his intriguing and sometimes humorous talk, Wharton's comments about the special privilege of the conservator really struck a chord with me--and by privilege, I mean disciplinary privilege, judiciously applied. Wharton pointed out that few contemporary anthropologists would have the opportunity (or, I think, the unmitigated chutzpah) to walk into a community and engage them in discussions about ethnicity and skin color--a necessary conversation, as the community needed to decide what color to paint the statue's skin. Nor could an anthropologist wander into a community, remove the eyes of a statue--which Wharton did as part of the conservation effort--and ask community members, "Hey, what do you think about that?"

As a Ph.D. in cultural studies, a disciple of material culture studies, and a fan of all things American studies, I'm fascinated by the various ways scholars of culture provoke--and more importantly, permissibly provoke--communities into talking about themselves. In the poorest of these cases, the community is left feeling impoverished for the experience and betrayed by the scholar. In the best of these situations, both outsider and community benefit--the scholar gets his or her data and paper or book, and the community has an opportunity to consider issues they might not have contemplated together prior to the outsider's arrival.

Retail therapy

Spent way more on shoes during my lunch break today than I should have. But aren't they pretty?

If you ever wonder. . .

. . .what it's like to share a house with a 3-year-old boy, a 1-year-old largely untrained 50-pound puppy, and Mr. Trillwing, this video should give you a fair approximation:



(video via The Edge of the American West)

In which I write about politics

I have a post up at Small Town Mamas for Obama, a blog Barbara Ganley has put together for women (and men!) who want to blog about the election and why they're supporting Obama.

A must-read article on white privilege in the U.S. presidential campaign

It's by Tim Wise. Go check it out.

Matt Damon on Sarah Palin

I'm not a huge Matt Damon fan, but what he says below really nicely sums up my feelings on the Palin situation.

(as seen at ClizBiz)

How to frame college for first-year students?

Steve Greenlaw has a very thought-provoking post about engaging students early in a first-year seminar up at Pedablogy. I started to leave this post as a comment there, but it became too long, so I'm posting it here instead.


Sounds like a very interesting course.

My first year of being in a Ph.D. program was at the University of Iowa, and I was assigned to instruct two sections of my own course (with no prior teaching experience--eeek!) in the university's General Education in Literature Program. They had a pretty good mentoring program set up, and one of the faculty told us that our primary job was not necessarily to teach literature (even though we had to cover four genres in the class, teach one Shakespearean play, etc.), but rather to re-instill in students the love of reading they probably had as little kids. So in my class we talked about what they read as kids, why they liked the books they did, and at what point--and why--they stopped reading literature for fun. One student from Michigan had last finished a book in eighth grade: Lord of the Flies. The conversation was eye-opening for me. But taking that little walk down memory lane really helped the students reconnect with words and the place (I felt) literature should have in their lives.

Connecting students with their high school experience is trickier because there's such a wide range of experiences. I don't think it will backfire on you, but to be honest, one of the reasons I left the University of Mary Washington after a single semester is because the classes I happened to take didn't challenge me a whole lot. They were easier than my high school classes. Like your student, I was one of the last to register, and so I ended up in classes that weren't my first picks. I was interested in the topics, and became more interested in them as the semester progressed, but they lacked intellectual rigor and opportunities for self-reflection. They felt like general ed classes. (I wish I had taken one of your classes instead!) My point is that comparing college to high school would have been (a) difficult for me because I was still learning what college was all about--for example, I didn't know that college students only attended class for 12-16 hours a week; I thought it was going to be more like high school, with class all day, and (b) even if I did have some college experience under my belt, my high school classes were more thought-provoking than the college classes I was taking, so the comparison wouldn't have been a favorable one. That said, the questions would have helped me better frame my experience and think earlier rather than later about what I was supposed to be getting out of college.

The college I finally did graduate from--Grinnell--eschewed general ed requirements in favor of trusting students to choose their own paths. We weren't allowed to overdose in any one department (I think 48 credits was the max allowed per department) or division, but our only requirements were a first-year tutorial (which I didn't take because I entered as a sophomore) and whatever requirements were required for our major. And because of the type of student who attended that college, most of us took a very broad range of classes. The stats--and my memory is a bit fuzzy about these--during my tenure there were something like 90 percent of students took math courses and 95 percent took literature courses.

If I were teaching a first-year seminar (and I hope to do so for the first time this spring), I think I would feel compelled to provide the students with a critique of the university system of which they were a part. At my current institution, we have a boatload of general ed requirements--of which first-year seminars are not one. But I would want to ask students why the general education requirements are in place, what is the meaning of a liberal arts education (and can you really get such a thing at a university with class sizes as large as 750)?

My big question for you is this: Are you going to lead students away from a discussion on personal responsibility and move them toward one about possibility and social responsibility? Grinnell framed this nicely for us as incoming students by explicitly framing our experience and privilege as training for community service of all stripes or, as the college calls it in its mission statement, "the common good." That was an awakening for me. I wish someone had told me earlier that my college education was not really about me. Yes, my college years were an excellent time to reflect and grow, but that reflection and growth was in service of a higher ideal--not to get a job, not to get a degree, not to please my parents, not to be recognized as the graduate of an elite liberal arts college, but rather to figure out how best to serve people. I chose education. When I read my class's alumni newsletter, I'm thrilled to see how many people, even 11 years after graduation, are teaching or working for nonprofits or for the government or as doctors or who performed service abroad or who practice law in the public interest.

At our commencement, our speaker, David McCullough, told us that within a week some jerk would say, "Welcome to the real world." He reminded us that the liberal arts endeavor, with its intellectual challenges and cultural critiques and ethic of service, was the real world. I don't think enough undergrads at my current institution share McCullough's view.

Steve, you're a very reflective teacher, and I'm sure whatever path you take with your students, the course will be one they look back on with fondness. Thanks for the invitation to share some thoughts!