Tag Archives: teaching

A Brief History of the Modern Post-Ac (or Reform or Alt-Ac) Movement

Posted on December 27, 2012 by | 9 Comments

Hello, hello! I hope you had wonderful holidays. I completely and utterly enjoyed my first post-academic Christmas, the first time in my life I did not have stacks of papers to either write or grade while also doing the shopping and card-sending. It was blissful and rejuvenating.

dr

I’m back in the office the day after Christmas — so this is also the first Christmas in my life where I had responsibilities that instantly resumed at the close of holidays! But I’m not complaining: there are only 6 other people in my office, and once I answered a few student emails, I have been able to do whatever I want, which has included teaching my office neighbors to crochet, watering other people’s plants and hermit crabs, and working on our post-academic project.

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So I’ve been reading through archives of other post-ac blogs — mostly defunct ones — mining them for the best content so we can try and include all relevant info and not have to reinvent the wheel when we set up the website. We’re curates in a number of ways, and it’s occurred to me more than once that this feels like an historical project (in that we’re assembling a bit of history and crafting a narrative, not that we’re making history). I’m reminded of a few archival projects I did as a grad student in American Studies — one on the Hoover Presidential Library, and one on the KMA Kitchen Homemaker Radio Show — in that I’m gathering, gathering, gathering info from archives with no organization beyond chronology and at some point patterns start to emerge and the story matures in a way that’s meaningful and more importantly, writeable! (Except this time, I’m doing it for fun, with friends, and no deadline, and more than 1 person will read it).

I’ve been putting together a timeline that I think traces the roots and chronology of the modern “post-academic movement.” This is a placeholder/umbrella term I’m using to indicate the counter-academic movement within and without institutions broadly: critiques of academia from within (institutional critiques, etc), including concerns about labor structure, grad student exploitation/experience/professionalization, and the contingent faculty movements that have sprung up; and the proliferation of post-academic, ex-academic, and anti-academic blogs and advice books outside the academy. Not that these are equivalent in terms of impact, but more that they’re concurrent. I’m connecting dots here. This is a draft, it’s totally incomplete, and reflects my own background in composition theory and American Studies. Please, suggest additions, ask questions, question the premise, etc.

 

1967:

  • Doctor of Arts programs established — programs briefly flourish, then precipitously fade in the early 90s (seems related because it is a reformed doctoral degree focusing on teaching and application of research).

1960s-90s

  • Process theory gains momentum in composition classrooms. This is significant, IMO, in that it generates some serious cognitive dissonance in the academy, and those effects are borne out through the practices of graduate students.
  • Foucault. Come on.

1987

  • The Wyoming Conference Resolution opposing unfair employment/pay practices for post-secondary English teachers (that is, comp instructors and TAs).

1993

  • Susan Miller writes Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, which is significant IMO because it (a) uses cultural studies to study the institution itself (b) furthers a conversation about hierarchies and exploitation within institutions and departments and (c) talks about how grad students/teachers are complicit in their own exploitation. (There are many other important publications like this. This is the one I could remember off the top of my head.)

1993-2003

1997

1999

  • Paula Chambers founds the WRK4US listserv, which served humanities and social science graduate students in career changes. (See 2010 below.)
  • RateMyProfessor.com founded

2000

  • Re-envisioning the PhD project founded with goals of improving transparency, suggesting reform, and revamping doctoral education in the US.
  • The Responsive PhD project founded to enhance transparency, improve public engagement, and promote diversity in doctoral education. Concluded 2006 with “goals achieved.”

2000s

  • Composition starts to come into its own right as a discipline by becoming everything it hates (ok, that’s an exaggeration). But still, comp starts to feel its own cognitive dissonance as it gains institutional prestige and all the markings of legitimacy (departments! offices! tenure lines! a zillion conferences and journals with parentheses and slashes in the titles!) but continues to focus on vexing issues of racism, sexism, class, oppression, and exploitation in institutionalized practices and hidden pedagogy.

2001

2003

2004

2005

2009

2010

2011

2012

This post also appears at HowToLeaveAcademia.com

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Posted in Grad School Quittas, The Alt-Ac Life

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On another sad and bad day

Posted on December 18, 2012 by | Leave a comment

I wrote this on April 17, 2007, the day after the Virginia Tech shooting.

I’m really upset about the V-Tech shootings, which is not helping my productivity this morning.

I remember the Columbine shootings; I’ve taught about them. I have cried in the dark of my classroom watching the footage of students being killed by their peers.

I keep thinking about the Virginia Tech shootings despite being in medias Master’s Exam. I keep looking around my campus here, a school very much like V-Tech. I keep thinking about how I’m making my life’s work about these schools, these huge schools where students get lost, where you may not even know the people who live in your dorms. Where what happens upstairs or less than a mile away may as well happen a world away. I know that over the next weeks/months/years, enormo-versities like V-Tech will be scrutinized. My school had a similar (much smaller scale) tragedy fifteen years ago, when a grad student shot a bunch of people in his department when he failed to secure a fellowship. Why don’t you know your students better? Why don’t you have better communication? Why did this young man flip? Why didn’t you prevent this?

I imagine that the hostility between students and teachers at Universities – evidenced by Rate Your Students, Rate My Professors – will become a focus for anger and blame. Universities will have to figure out how to get information to people in some way OTHER THAN EMAIL. And we (teachers, parents, world) must ask ourselves these hard questions, because I feel like there has to be something that connects the anonymity of the “beer and circus” mega-school to this guy’s ability to kill the crap out of people he didn’t even know. Columbine was a big suburban high school. V-Tech is the kind of place that Columbine grads would go. It’s a place just like here. It’s a place like where I will work, always, for the rest of my life — where I will work with students, and teach in buildings.

I imagine that new TAs and RA Hall managers will have to learn how to deal with the possibility that someone might try to kill them, and their kids. ME and MY kids. I teach a 9:30 am section in a building crammed with classes. It could have been me, hearing gunshots, huddling with my own kids, my international students and struggling freshmen and returning students, against the wall of my room which (I can hear my silent prayers of thanks) is one of two doors that automatically locks in the entire building. What if I was in a basement room where there are no door locks, where the ground-level windows would mean easy entry, easy visibility? (I guess we could have escaped through them).

I don’t know how to talk to my students about this. Will they even register this as something that affects them? Will this penetrate their whirlwind lives of finals, papers, and end-of-semester bar crawls? Are they quietly worrying while they sit in lecture, like I’m worrying sitting in this coffee house, watching three undergrad women stare at the V-Tech footage on the muted tv? Will my Korean students be in danger? What is going to happen?

I’ve been thinking a lot about loving my students, about dealing with hearts and minds and whether that’s even a good thing. Would I die for them?

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Posted in Memoir

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Modeling Impossible Beauty

Posted on November 18, 2012 by | 3 Comments

If you missed this amazing post at Offbeat Mama, go read it now.

From “I’ve started telling my daughters I’m beautiful:”

“The thing is, my children are perfect… It’s easy to see that they’re beautiful. I am slow and I am tired. I am round and sagging. I am harried. I am sexless. I am getting older.

I am beautiful. How can this be? How can any of this be true?

I don’t want my girls to be children who are perfect and then, when they start to feel like women, they remember how I thought of myself as ugly and so they will be ugly too. They will get older and their breasts will lose their shape and they will hate their bodies, because that’s what women do. That’s what mommy did. I want them to become women who remember me modeling impossible beauty. Modeling beauty in the face of a mean world, a scary world, a world where we don’t know what to make of ourselves.”

I especially love the line about “when they start to feel like women, they remember how I thought of myself as ugly.”

Robin took this picture of me. What does she see when she sees me? What do I want her to see?

For all our/my talk about how we talk to girls about our bodies, it’s true that I focus more on their appearance than my own. On their bodily experiences. “That dress looks fun for playing! You look so comfortable! You seem so joyful!” But I don’t talk about my comfort, my joy, my feelings. Sometimes I worry that my body will be the elephant in the room as the girls grow up. I look at them and wonder what their bodies will become when they hit adolescence. I worry that they will be fat like me, or have breasts they can’t control. I feel sorry for them. I wish I could preserve their slender beauty forever.

The feminist Mom in me hates that. But I know I have to love myself for them to love themselves. It’s extremely hard. I have to work on this. Amanda writes:

“How confusing it must have been to have me say to them, “You think I am beautiful, but you are wrong. You are small and you love me, so you’re not smart enough to know how unattractive I am. I know I am ugly because I see myself with mean eyes. You are my child and I love you, but I will not allow myself to be pretty, for you. No matter how shining you are when you watch me brushing my hair and pulling my dress over my head. No matter how much you want to be just like me, I can’t be beautiful for you and I don’t know why.”

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Posted in Mothering

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Less is more, more is less, more is more

Posted on November 2, 2012 by | 4 Comments

I have a long standing joke with my younger sister that my life philosophy is MORE IS MORE. Her house, her style, her basic approach to life is understated, clean, simple, elegant. But me? I’m crowded, messy, saying yes to too many things, feathers in my hair, 3 kids in 5 years, more is more is more.

Last week, I found myself hunched over Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, prepping for class at the last minute, again, while trying to simultaneously answer phone calls and update my list of which mom was bringing cookies/juice/pin the heart on the skeleton/owl stickers to the preschool Halloween party.

I realized I’d been reading for 10 minutes by the clock but hadn’t actually read anything. And I didn’t know if cookie mom was also bringing the frosting. And the alarm on my phone that reminds me to go to class was ringing.

“I think my brain is full,” I said. “I think I’m doing too much.”

The lovely, amazing faculty member who shares her office with me stopped typing and said, “You always say you just need more time. But this is not that? You feel like you’re doing too much?”

And then she asked a really obvious question: “What do you want to do less of?”

And I was completely stumped. Less hands on time in my kids classrooms? Less time working at a job I love? The things I want to do less of I’m already neglecting: housework, for example.

I’ve been thinking about that question all week. What do I want less of?  What could I live with less of? What could I do better if I did less? What would I get more of if I was willing to let go of something else? I don’t have any answers yet. Letting go is my absolute worst skill. Like I said, I’m more is more is more. I hold on tenaciously. But oh, my brain is full these days. So maybe it’s time to rethink that life philosophy.

It’s NaBloPoMo! I’m blogging every day with the amazing writers at yeah, write. Because even though this entire post is about how I need to do less, at 11 pm on November 1 I decided that actually, I need to write more.

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Posted in Mothering

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Lamentations of a Teacher: What Advising May NOT Offer

Posted on September 29, 2012 by | 1 Comment

A couple weeks ago, I waxed rather rhapsodic about how some of the things I love about teaching can be fulfilled through an administrative position. It got some hits and even a link from one of the Chronicle blogs, which is nice. And all of those things are still true.

But.

In the last week and a half, I’ve been thinking more and more about the teaching. I’ve been, for lack of a better word, longing for the classroom. I miss it deeply. Last week, I dreamed that I went into a room full of my old students and walked around hugging them and talking to them. A few nights ago, I my eyes sprung open at 3 am and I had this singular, piercing thought: I have to be a high school teacher.

What's your superpower? Venspired.com (@ktvee) via Compfight

I’ve been thinking about why this is the case and wanted to write up the flip side of “Advising Magic,” about what advising lacks when it comes to fulfilling my inner pedagogue. I’m writing this from my own perspective: remember, I work in a specific place (each advising center has its quirks), and I have had a lifelong love for teaching. Depending on your background or goals, these may not apply to you. But if you’re a teaching junkie, read on… Continue reading →

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Posted in Books, Pop Culture, The Alt-Ac Life

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Advising Magic: What Advising Does Offer the Teaching Junkie

Posted on September 5, 2012 by | 3 Comments

Jen’s post about teaching prep had me feeling all nostalgic for the classroom. And I’ve admitted that I do miss that start-of-semester energy. This is my first year out of the classroom since 2004, and it has been tough to miss out on that freshly printed syllabus, stacks of books, brand new faces vibe that the rest of the campus is enjoying.

The Park Through the Sky Trey Ratcliff via Compfight

But, I did want to speak to some of the ways that (at least so far) academic advising has activated those same sensors in my teacher brain, even if I’m not teaching Hunger Games to a room full of first years. Continue reading →

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Posted in The Alt-Ac Life

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Hurts so good: Why I love new prep

Posted on August 31, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Fall semester is in full effect here: stacks of syllabi cluttering my table, mountains of student emails to be answered: Can I drop your class? Can I add your class? Can I stay in your class if I can’t buy the books? The bookstore is out of your books, did you know? Should I take notes when I read because I never did that in high school because we didn’t really read textbooks  but it sounded like in class you were saying we should do that.  (Yes, I really got that email yesterday.)

I don’t always like the first week of classes—people are still dropping and adding, I feel like I have to talk about the syllabus but students don’t really retain the information, first years wander the campus slowly, trying to look cool, blocking traffic by meandering across the street while texting. But I had a lovely week in the classroom, despite the usual first week challenges, in part because I’m teaching so much new material this semester that even familiar standby classes like Intro to Gender Studies feel really fresh. Of my 3 classes, only one is technically a new prep (a class I have never taught before), but I’m using a new textbook and The Hunger Games in Intro, and I added a book about the history of feminism to my theory class and revamped the writing assignments.

All of which means my prep will be considerably more time intensive this semester: I have to read new material, pull together the web links and films, revise quizzes and exams, develop assignment guidelines. But instead of feeling weighed down by prep, I feel strangely invigorated. My to do list is miles long, and it has tedious everyday stuff like make attendance sheets,  but it also has items like: Watch Persepolis again and see if the links to Reading Lolita in Tehran are strong enough to make it worth showing in class.

New prep is time consuming, but I admit, I find it strangely addictive. I love choosing books, thinking about the flow and connections of a course, pulling together the images and films and assignments that will push students to really dig in to the work. I love watching it come to life in the classroom, trying out new discussion questions, seeing how students respond. I’m energized by the challenge of having to really be present in the moment when I’m teaching because I haven’t seen students respond to these texts before. And sure, every once in a while something absolutely flops (I will never teach River Town by Peter Hessler again), but most days teaching new material leaves me tired in mind and body in the best possible ways.

A love for new prep has had practical benefits for me as well: my basic strategy as an adjunct has been to say yes to what I’m offered. I’ve prepped 10 classes in 3 departments in the 12 semesters I have been an adjunct. Gay life cycle? YES. Diversity in the US? YES. Women in the Developing World? YES. Full schedule, fat stacks of desk copies of new books in my mailbox. No worries that I won’t be able to get a section of my specialty at the right time on the right day to make my teaching schedule work with kindergarten and preschool and dance and gymnastics.  I’ve had seasoned faculty tell me this is a great strategy to demonstrate my worth to the department(s); I’ve heard just the opposite as well, that I’m crazy to pour my time into prep for departments who aren’t going to be able to create a full time position for me, no matter how much they value my teaching. I think on some level, these are both probably true. But when I think about looking for an admin or advising position, I worry about losing the excitement and energy of new prep, the joy of knowing that in addition to the dishes and the laundry, Behind the Beautiful Forevers  is waiting to be read and thought about and prepped for discussion. I would rather be watching Persepolis than doing most of what’s on my to do list today. Financially, it’s a black hole, but intellectually, it’s the best part of my week: what’s an adjunct who loves new prep supposed to do?

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Posted in Grad School Quittas

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In which the ice cream truck waits for no man

Posted on August 25, 2012 by | 6 Comments

Yesterday was terrible.

And by terrible I mean, bladder infection, 2 trips to Target, a trip to express care, still trying desperately to finish my syllabi which requires intense focus on details even though I feel awful and the girls are running wild around me.

By 8 pm, we were finished. Worn down. I put M in the stroller and told the girls we would walk around the block before pajamas. Evening walk almost always works to bring everybody down to calm: look for bunny rabbits, talk about whatever is on their mind, let my own stress from the day go.

And then the ice cream truck drove by, slowly, blaring high pitched music and quacking like a duck.

D was astonished. Is that an ICE CREAM TRUCK? (We don’t normally have them in our neighborhood, no idea where this one came from.) A small shirtless child went running down the street, chasing the truck, trying to hold his pants up. T and I looked at each other. Everything on our front lawn is moving in that incredible slo-mo speed that it does at the end of the day.

D is freaking out: LETS GO GET ICE CREAM!!! The truck stops about a block away. T goes in the house to look for quarters. Lucy decides she needs to ride her scooter. A big line of people forms at the truck. I had no idea this many children even lived in my neighborhood. We start making our way, slowly, down the block, but the girls insisted on riding their scooters and we only make it about halfway before the truck starts pulling away. D starts wailing. We are too far away to shout stop or wait. They are too little to run ahead and cross the street. L hits a bump on the sidewalk with her scooter and goes headfirst over the handlebars. Now they are both crying. Shirtless kid walks past us, down the middle of the street, still holding his pants up with one hand, and holding a box in the other hand. No idea why he doesn’t have ice cream. No idea why this is happening to me.

We roll slowly back towards our house and we can hear the truck on another block. D is convinced we can still catch it, so T hops on the bike and she hops on the tagalong and L and I keep walking, pushing M in the stroller. I’m not even sure we have enough quarters to buy anything even if we find the ice cream truck.

The search is fruitless. We end up back in the front yard. T loads the girls in the car to go to DQ, but D is still crying that she wants the ice cream FROM THE TRUCK DOES THE TRUCK PARK AT THE ICE CREAM STORE WHERE DO THE TRUCKS GO AT NIGHT PLEASE CAN WE FIND IT PLEASE? I am torn between feeling like a completely inadequate parent because I can’t even get my shit together to make it to the ice cream truck and feeling like I wish I had never had children.

T takes the big girls to DQ. M and I share a GoGurt. She is ridiculously happy and smiley. She has no idea what trauma has just unfolded around her. Eventually, the big girls go to bed and it’s just me and T and the baby, if we can still call her that, watching the guys on American Pickers ooo and aaahhh over ancient Indian motorcycle gas tanks. She asks to nurse, but she’s not ready to sleep, so I nurse her and then she bounces around the living room a while longer. T offers to put her to bed and I am intensely grateful: crawl in bed, read 2 pages of a biography of Abigail Adams, go to sleep. Begin again tomorrow.

I was stressing about the mess in the kitchen and living room and T said, wisely: Just let this day be over. You get another chance tomorrow. So here I am, morning after, drinking coffee, handful of antibiotics and cranberry tablets, surrounded by mess, stack of quarters waiting by the back door in case the ice cream truck comes back today. How lucky, that we get so many chances at this life.

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Posted in Mothering, This Is Not a Lifestyle Blog

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In Search of Ecstatic Experiences: Or, What I Learned from Rockumentaries

Posted on June 10, 2012 by | 5 Comments

My husband and I like to watch TV together after the girls (finally) go to bed: we go through jags of obsessive show-watching that become part of our shared language and repertoire of catchphrases and inside jokes. It all started back in ye olden days of TV shows on DVD, when we got hooked on The Shield and ended up at Blockbuster at 11:30 at night checking out the next disc. In the past, we’ve gorged on sitcoms such as The Offices both UK and USA, Arrested Development, and Spaced; and when parenthood wore down our ability to follow shows with plot (sorry, The Wire) or intense brutality (Brian did The Sopranos solo), we turned to non-fic. And lo, the umpteen series of Top Gear did flow like water, as did every available season of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. More recently, we’ve turned to rockumentaries because we are both rock afficianados, amateur musicians, and wannabe hippies. We’ve watched many a feature-length rock-doc (and highly recommend Stones In Exile, Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, and Pearl Jam Twenty), but favor the series Classic Albums, which offer recaps of some of the greatest albums ever made in an easily digestible 60-minute format. Continue reading →

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Posted in Grad School Quittas, Music, Pop Culture

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What Lauren Learned About Identity & Work via a Craft Disaster (aka “Do it, start it, FUCK THIS IT’S NOT WORKING!”)

Posted on May 25, 2012 by | 5 Comments

It’s time for me to ‘fess up: I did not do the Pinterest challenge assigned to me by Renee, the winner of the Pin Us To It prize at our 4K giveaway.

Now, I bet some of our newer readers, brought here by our connections to other post-academic blogs, are thinking “WTF is this Pinning shit?” So before I launch into a discussion of my crafting experience, let me say this about Mama Nervosa: it’s a non-niche blog. We don’t just write about being ex-grad students, or just write about being feminists, or just write about being Moms, or just write about secretly reading super goofy quasi-pornographic YA lit in sixth grade. We write about all of our experiences, and some of those experiences include stuff that’s very typically feminine or maternal. We simply aren’t interested in fracturing our identities into separate blogs or saying that how we feel about ourselves as brainy feminist women has nothing to do with being mothers or crafting disaster-ers. I’ll try to make some connections between this craft experience and some of the stuff I’ve been thinking as I quit grad school towards the end of the post, so stay with me!

From our inception as a blog, we’ve been preoccupied with Pinterest and lifestyle blogs because they’re such an integral part of the online mommying world (read this recent article from Jezebel for a taste of it). Jen is pretty ok with Pinterest: she recognizes its flaws, but overall, her experience with Pinterest is positive. I… let’s just say I feel differently. Continue reading →

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Posted in Grad School Quittas, This Is Not a Lifestyle Blog

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