Liking Ike

I can't believe I missed this anniversary, but one of my favorite American speeches turned 50 a couple days ago. It was overshadowed by the mainstream media's hoopla of the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's inauguration, so I'm dragging it into the light here.



Read Eisenhower's farewell address.

A few gems from Stephen Colbert

Colbert is on fire this week. If you haven't seen these clips, take a break--you deserve one!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Run for Your Life
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The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Disintegration
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Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Mika Brzezinski Experiences Palin Fatigue
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Playgrounds

What I'm about to describe is going to sound a little kooky to many of you, but I feel moved to share it.

I spent most of the last week in Portland, Oregon at a little place called the Playground. Founded last year by Havi Brooks, the Playground is home to several different interesting events, all led by Havi. I attended a Rally specifically for folks who have been members for at least a year of a group run by her.

We began each day with some really, really difficult Shiva Nata. (Disclosure: For me, all levels of Shiva Nata are difficult; there's a reason, after all, its practitioners frequently refer to it simply as "the flailing.") At one point Havi had us do some level 7, which is unbelievably brain-scrambling and resulted, for me at least, in a day-long series of epiphanies in a week already packed with them. Shiva Nata was followed by savasana, and then by some reflective journaling and setting of intentions for the work we'd like to accomplish that day.

There were ten of us on the retreat, all of us working on separate projects and giving one another mutual support when we became stuck on a particular part of our projects or when we felt stymied in a more general way. My fellow Rallions were all bright, creative women who were so delightful to finally meet in person after a year of communicating online. I suppose the best way to describe Rally is as a silent retreat punctuated by whimsy and play (and profoundly fabulous pie from a nearby café.) I accomplished so much in three days—lots of writing and planning, but after doing the work I felt less intellectually exhausted (my usual state) than exhilarated.

I've been reflecting, then, on how I can bring the spirit—and some of the physical aspects, because they're also central to the experience—of Rally with me to my home and work.

Some ideas:

• There was one pattern-recognition exercise in particular—it involved various kinds of walking with intention—that I'll be trying out on my students when I'm teaching the capstone writing seminar this semester.
• I'm noting, now that I'm back home, a distinct lack of floor pillows in my house, and they're much needed, particularly when I play with Lucas on the floor of his room.
• Candles! Funky lamps! Plush monsters! A hammock (and we already have a hammock chair ready to mount on the back patio when it warms up).
• I'm going to recommit to practicing Shiva Nata. I was doing it every day for a while about a year ago, but then I stopped, and I'm not sure why. It provides some light, much-needed physical exercise, and I could benefit from the brain workout, too.

Mostly, I want more play—more playgrounds—in my life at home and at work.

What about you? What are you trying out this semester or this year?

Writing Guide Assistance?

I'm writing a very practical, step-by-step guide aimed at undergrads in the humanities or social sciences (but also probably useful to advanced high school students and grad students who need a review) about how to write an argumentative essay. After a dozen years of teaching writing-intensive courses, I'm pretty confident about teaching the essay, so I'm approaching the guide as an (organized!) download of my brain onto digital paper. I'm going to give it to students in my classes and also maybe make it available for Kindle or as a PDF through ejunkie or some such outlet.

I've already received some great ideas about what should be included in such a guide, but I'd love to hear your thoughts as well. What would you want to see included?

I've drafted about half of the book, and I'm thinking it will come in at 40-50 pages single-spaced—longer once formatted into a book—plus worksheets and appendices. It's not a guide for last-minute, night-before-it's-due essay writers, but rather for students who really have no idea where to start and need a good deal of hand-holding between receiving the essay prompt and turning in the paper. Most importantly: I'm not looking for it to be the be-all, end-all compendium on student writing; I want to keep it under 100 pages when it's formatted.

On this first pass, I'm using a hiking/camping metaphor, though I may abandon it because it might be too precious—and it might not resonate with students who rarely leave an urban environment. Anyway, here's a rough section outline:

• Packing Your Knapsack: gathering your tools
• The Trailhead: examining your topic
• Mapping Your Route: preliminary brainstorming
• Foraging: gathering more information
• Mountaintop Vistas: crafting your argument
• Setting up Camp: organizing your essay
• Campfire: revisiting (and possibly revising) your argument, and getting feedback
• Packing Up: final clean-up

Additional topics covered in subsections or sidebars (listed below in no particular order):

• making a checklist from the assignment instructions
• how to narrow your topic if the essay assignment is wide open or vague
• how to figure out if your instructor believes there's a "correct" answer, or if she's less interested in a "right" answer and more interested in seeing how well you make your argument
• how to articulate the thesis statement
• paragraph structure and transitions
• using tables for brainstorming
• advanced strategy: using metaphors effectively
• using a rubric for assessing the paper
• primary vs. secondary sources
• scholarly vs. popular sources
• clustering
• outlining
• plagiarism
• citation styles
• reference librarians are your friends
  
• revision strategies
• recommended resources (e.g. Strunk and White's Elements of Style)
• 20 most common errors of grammar and usage (at least in my classes)
  

As always, your thoughts are much appreciated.

Common rites

As I write this, the midnight hour sweeps round the world, ushering in a new year. It's a half hour 'til midnight here, and I'm the only one in the house who remains awake.

I'm remembering tonight the New Year's eves of my childhood. We'd spend the evening at my grandparents' house, a classic bright yellow, brick-porched California bungalow just a few doors down from our own home. Perhaps folks would drink a bit too much, but usually my sister and I didn't notice--we were drifting to sleep as my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles laughed at The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

At midnight, we'd run out onto the porch, banging pots and pans with wooden spoons. Some of the older neighbors joined us in this rite. At some point during these years, my grandfather declared it was an old Scottish tradition to run around a tree three times at midnight for good luck. We're not a superstitious people, but we gave in to Pops's tradition, circling the block's palm trees.

Fang and I don't have any New Year's rites, though I suppose we will concoct some as Lucas grows more cognizant of the significance of a new year, and how in one moment we can be in (for the nation) a truly awful year like 2010 and in the next moment be completely free of it, at least temporally.

2010 has been a dynamic year for my little family. So that I might pursue a tenure-track job, we uprooted the family and moved to Boise. It's a move I don't regret, as I really do love my job and adore my new colleagues, but at least once I day I think of California and feel very much as if I'm in exile from where I ought to be. After all, California is more than just a place I was passing through--my family has deep, deep roots there. I suspect one day I'll return, though not any time soon, as I have lots of exploration and growth waiting for me here.

One of the things I've learned in my first semester here is that faculty here really do have a great deal of autonomy. I'm enjoying that tremendously, and I plan to write more here about how my teaching might change as a result of that independence. The expectations for my position really do seem to be wide open, and folks have seemed interested in whatever I propose. 2011 may, then, be a very interesting year intellectually.

On the home front, I have more work to do. We need more grounding in this place, as individuals and as a family. I need to help Fang find what he needs here—and that means both meeting physical needs and finding him greater intellectual and emotional fulfillment. He is, after all, a newspaperman in an era of newspaper extinction. What do you do when you're almost fifty years old and your entire industry disappears--especially if you don't have a college degree? Fang says he suddenly feels sympathy for hoop skirt makers, but I suspect under his humor there's a good deal of pain and perhaps even some fear about how he fits into our new life here.

So we need to spend more time together, to establish rituals and common rites, and to aid one another's intellectual, personal, and professional development in this next stage of our lives. I need to remind Fang that the advice offered to Seamus Heaney's narrator by the shade of James Joyce applies to both of us, even though our recent move was driven by my career, not Fang's:

‘Your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you do you must do on your own.

The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

Here's hoping 2011 brings both roots and wings.

I'm heading outside now to thrice circle a tree. I'll take an extra lap for you and yours. Happy New Year.

This Friend speaks my mind

Chuck Fager, director of Quaker House, on the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell:

This change has two important effects, I think:

First, it will enable thousands of present and future soldiers to pursue their careers on their merits, which is only as it should be.

Second, beyond these individual cases, repealing DADT strikes an important blow to the identification of war with masculinity, with heterosexuality, with America, and all three with God.

This identification is idolatry, pure and simple. But it is all too widespread in American Christianity, and it is way past time for it to be broken up.

Enough

Someone who is close to me recently returned from six or seven months of service as a Marine in Afghanistan. He drives trucks for the military.

Earlier this year, family members were informed he had been involved in an "incident," but they weren't given details. Today I learned a bit more about the nature of this event.

I wasn't surprised to learn that a truck he was driving hit an IED. He regained consciousness in a helicopter.

Physically, he's allegedly recovered. But now that he's stateside, he has terrible PTSD. He can't sleep or drive, and even riding in a car is apparently too much for him. He cries a lot.

What's his family's response to this? They're criticizing him for not being sufficiently masculine. They can't make the connections among the Bush-era anti-terror wars they supported, the crappy economy made worse by Bush administration policies, this guy's joining the Marines because he felt enlistment was his one ticket out of Hellmouth, Arizona, and the total shattering of his life because of his service in Afghanistan.

The family's proposed solution is that he accept Jesus and go back to Afghanistan like a real man.

Fuck you, conservative America.

Band names inspired by grading my students' papers

• Sketchy Secondary Sources
• The Successionists* (a Civil War-era band)
• Captain Obvious and the Weak Theses

Play along in the comments!

* Yes, multiple students managed to write research papers about the South's succession from the Union.

RBOC, Transitions (and Buried Lede) Edition

More quasi-random bullets, because that's all I have in me. (Now with subheads!)

Teaching

• I'm finishing up my grading for the semester. I'm down to the single digits on my lower-division students' research papers, and then I have their final exams as well. I hope to finish tomorrow, and then submit grades on Friday, assuming I can figure out the LMS gradebook.
• That means--yay!--I've finished my first semester on the tenure track. Two course preps down for the year, and two to go--though the next two should be significantly less time-consuming than this semester's.
• One of the students in my public history class said she thinks she's found her calling as a public historian, instead of the schoolteacher path she had always imagined for herself. She's had a really rough time of it lately for reasons that have nothing to do with her academic ability, and it's nice to see her really come into her own as a critical and creative thinker who's willing to try new things. She also discovered her classmates valued her for her informally learned knowledge of local history; they dubbed her "Boisepedia." She talked to the department's internship coordinator today, and I'll be writing her a letter of rec for what sounds like a good position for her.
  
• One of my lower-division U.S. survey students wrote me a really nice note that went a long way toward soothing my I'm-not-a-papered-historian impostor syndrome. She explained she had hated history since fourth grade because that was when she first received a B in any subject, and that my course marked the first time she had been invited to engage meaningfully with history rather than memorize dates and consider only privileged people's histories. She said she now "loves history as a subject" and wants to study feminist theory. Also, there's this: "Most importantly, you helped my writing. I never thought that a history teacher could better strengthen the papers I write. I learned more from you than my [redacted] class. You showed me to come to my own conclusions about the sources I had, not let the sources guide my paper. I will apply this in any future writing I have to do. . . So thank you, Leslie, for making history important to me once more." Her note makes me sad about the state of history in K-12, but for now I'll just enjoy the warm fuzzies.
• I'll be teaching a section of the capstone writing course next semester. Apparently the seminar raises a tangle of issues about students' patchwork preparedness for historical research and writing. This course has, I'm told, been designated one whose products are to be used for assessing the efficacy of the history department in teaching its majors to think critically and write well. In theory, I suppose I should feel some pressure about that. Still, I'm approaching the course more like Icarus than Sisyphus; we'll see how long it takes for me to plummet to the ground, my wings destroyed by my own hubris.
  
• I'm teaching a graduate course next semester called "Introduction to Applied History." I applied for a grant to partially subsidize mobile devices for students in the class, so up to 15 of the students (so far there aren't 15 registered for the course) will each be able to buy an iPod Touch at a 50% discount. We'll be exploring the possibilities engendered by existing apps, sort of a "small pieces loosely joined" approach to local digital public history.
• We'll also be contributing to a very, very large project I began to organize this week. It's a wiki for Boise. It will be modeled on the absolutely fabulous Davis Wiki, but we'll be doing some structured experiments on public history themes as well. I'll also be watching to see what happens when we give members of the public a relatively easy-to-use platform and invite them to create pages on topics of interest to them, as well as edit others' pages. I'm still working on some domain-mapping issues and getting the site ready for launch, but I'll share the link with you when it's ready for a soft launch. There's also some grant writing I need to do related to this project, so it will keep me very busy next semester.
  

• I'm really happy here. Like crazy happy. I like the students and adore my colleagues.
  

Research and Writing

• Goal #1 for the new semester: Revise an article that was deemed very interesting, but "not a good fit" for one journal, and submit it to one (which I've already identified) that is both a better fit for the article and, really, for my work more generally.
• Goal #2: Gather and process materials for another article. This will likely involve travel to archives in Northern and/or Southern California.
  
• Goal #3: Use materials from Goal #2 to craft a chapter to replace one in my dissertation. I'm aiming to have a draft of a book based on my dissertation by the end of summer 2012.

Faith

• I attended Friends meeting again, and I'll likely be going again this Sunday, er, First Day.
• I've been adding blogs by Quakers from across much of the Friends spectrum--from liberal, unprogrammed Friends to orthodox plain folk--to my RSS reader. I've also been lurking on the forums at QuakerQuaker.
  
• As I wrote in my initial blog post about recent developments in my faith journey, what I suspected would happen did indeed come to pass: some folks are seeing my attendance at Quaker meetings as a sign I'm going to be "born again"--that Friends meetings are but a first step toward my permanent embrace of their own denomination. This is incredibly frustrating for me--like I-want-to-scream frustrating because of the arrogance and presumption.
  
• In case any such people are reading this blog, allow me to say this: I'm committed to the Friends for now. If that doesn't work out, I'll likely take some path through Unitarian Universalism, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodists, with a seasoning of Daoism. Any church that uses the phrase "Bible-believing" as a primary way of differentiating its members is not even on the list. I don't mean any offense to friends or blog readers who attend such churches; it's just not my path, and I don't want anyone to have any delusions that it ever will be.
• Another sign that the Friends General Conference may be a good home for me: the yearly meeting takes place at my alma mater. Out of all the tiny towns in the U.S., they pick one that matters tremendously deeply to me. I haven't checked to see how the meeting jibes with my summer teaching schedule, but the seed has been planted. . .
  

Miscellany

• I've been watching The Wire. Fang has all five seasons on DVD, and I'm one episode from finishing season 4. It took me half a season to appreciate the series, but now I give it my highest recommendation. The writing and character development are impressive.
• Because of how busy I've been, this year's Christmas shopping is being (literally) brought to us by Amazon Prime. How I adore that program!
• I need to get back with the Weight Watchers program. After initially losing 15 pounds, I've put a few pounds back on because I became lax about counting points. I eased myself back into it today by having meals that I know are reasonable, but I didn't count the points. Tomorrow I'll begin accounting for points again, which will initially be a headache under the new points system, but I'll adapt.
• Lucas went in for his annual well-child check-up, where he was treated to five separate vaccinations. I had, finally, the new Tdap vaccine for adults. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know I had some whooping cough fun earlier this year; I was also diagnosed with pertussis a few years back. The injection site on my arm is still sore, so I can only imagine what Lucas's legs must feel like, as he was due for another round of DTaP, chickenpox, and MMR vaccines; a polio booster; and--according to his records, though I vaguely remember him already having one--his first Hep A shot. The clinic staff were terrific, though; the entire sequence of vaccines--administered by two nurses synchronizing the injections--took less than 45 seconds. Still, it's not easy to hear him howling with every new stab of the needle.
• I went to a birthday party with Lucas last night and connected with some more local parents. That's a very good thing.
  

What are you up to these days? Toss me some random bullets in the comments.

Public Service Announcement: For Folks on the Job Market

A good friend is hiring for a position in her organization. She instructed her assistant to run Google and Facebook searches on each applicant.

I present, then, an object lesson in why folks on the job market need to set their Facebook wall posts to be private. Here's the most recent update from one applicant:


And yes--as the applicant in question might say--THAT SHIT'S REAL.