I learned that his name is John. He served in the 25th Infantry Division, the Tropic Lightning, in Vietnam. In 1969, mostly. He was awarded a CIB ribbon. He, in his words, “volunteered for the draft, volunteered for the infantry, volunteered for Vietnam….was young and stupid.” But he’s here, now, remembering what it was like to come home from that service and be treated like dirt, like a criminal, to see that way our returning vets are treated now, and the difference. He’s here, with his 25th Infantry division hat, and his Tropic Lightning sticker on his car, sitting alone at the bar with his whiskey - or maybe tequila - on the rocks with a Corona back, a book to protect him against the possibility that no one will talk to him, a lonely man with painful and proud history, who has to wonder aloud how someone like me could be interested in that history or why.

And how do you explain to that combat veteran of that very unpopular conflict that at the age of 8 you were aware, and it hurt, and you couldn’t do a thing about it, and it haunts you to this day that you couldn’t help? You tell him about your uncle, and how he never spoke of it, and how your friends lost older brothers, and friends and uncles and fathers and that you understand what it means - this CIB and why it’s worn above all the others. And you promise to come again, and talk some more, and you think in the quiet drive home that someone needs to talk to these men, to capture these stories, to have them share the pictures and the ribbons and the papers and the memories and capture it before they are gone and can’t tell us what is was like to be there in that time in that awful place, to come home and live to tell, if anyone would care to listen, and go about an ordinary life, after living through the most extraordinary of horrors.

I learned something important today about a man I’d seen many times before, but never really “seen” and certainly never listened to. I learned.

It wasn’t grand, but it was eloquent. It wasn’t passionate, but it was inspirational. It wasn’t rosy, but it wasn’t discouraging. It was lofty, while being remarkably frank. No speech in recent years has been anticipated with such high expectation. It will have doubtless left many people disappointed for what it did not do. But for what it needed to do, for the tone it needed to set for the days and years to come, the inaugural address by President Barack Hussein Obama was right on the mark. He claimed America’s greatness and scolded America’s laxness in the same voice. He was firm about our defense and our posture toward the world - friend and foe. He was firm about our collective failure to oversee the freedoms this country makes possible. He was resolute about our ability to recover, to go on, to rebuild, and to stand as proud as we ever have. He was inspiring in his call to get involved, to pay attention, to be part of the solutions to come. He invoked history in several ways, but maybe his most effective strategy was his closing: invoking the future. “Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back.” He told us we were the keepers of the dream, called on us to leave to our children’s children the dream that was passed on to us, to be able to look at them and tell them we didn’t not let the journey fail on our watch, that we preserved it and kept it alive for them. Tingly, that.

And it’s a remarkable thing about this event: I’d been grading papers all morning in my jammies, but when it came time for the actual swearing in ceremony, I felt the need to be dressed. And when the audience was asked to rise, I stood too. When the national anthem was sung, I was singing with it, all alone in my living room. I can, usually, sing the anthem. Except when I’m really emotional, which is most of the time when the anthem comes up. Like today. I wish I’d been in a crowd of other folks somewhere, sharing all that energy and enthusiasm and emotion. But I wasn’t, so I cherished the moments and hope to talk more about it with all of you later.

Earlier today, Michael Eric Dyson was commenting on the events of the day and about Mr. Obama. He said he didn’t want to see him lose his particular style. He referred to it as “black male style that has been disciplined by grace and elegance”. I really liked that.

Tell me what you thought. The pundits keep talking about the history of the moment, but every moment is historical. What is it about this one that we all seem to know is such a big deal?

I suppose it is the kind of question that will be debated endlessly and never resolved, this question of “needing” a college education. But this month’s issue of the AFT publication On Campus really pointed out the inherent contradiction I see in this quest for quality education and global competitiveness for our younger generations.

First, the issue contains a column summarizing remarks made by the AFT president, Randi Weingarten, at the National Press Club in November. She made reference to “smart investments” in preK-12 education. Among these were providing universal early childhood education and “high-quality educational choices within the public school system” (2). She recommended give a “boost” to “high-achieving students from low-income households” and establishing community schools that bring together a range of family services, and concluded with “offering every student a well-rounded education that would stand in stark contrast to the ’standardized test score competition’ that has resulted from NCLB” (2). Each of these are laudable goals, and that last one is a beautiful and idealistic vision of what the ancients might have recognized as a liberal arts curriculum - language and expression, a little science, a little math, perhaps music. But that’s really the rub when it comes to public education, isn’t it? Who gets to say what a “well-rounded” education includes? Who gets to determine which activities or courses fit, and which ones should be on the side? The only thing “universal” about education is that everyone has a different idea of what a good one includes.

So we move on, both through the pages of this issue and through the years of the child’s life, until we arrive at the institution of college, where we have placed the burden of righting all the wrongs of the public education system in four short years of voluntary participation in a range of work that includes specialty areas of knowledge alongside generalist courses (like writing) that are increasingly seen as “remedial”. Whether by design or default, the issue has two articles on facing pages that point up the conflict in higher education as the fix-all for the problems of global competitiveness. The first, on the left side, is called “Education on the Cheap: Academic staffing crisis takes a toll on learning.” The article summarizes three recent studies, each of which concluded that there is a negative correlation between the percentage of adjunct faculty at an institution and the success or students. This is not because adjuncts don’t teach as well - the studies are careful to make this point. Rather, it is because the “psychological contract” between the institution and faculty members of all ranks is “broken for faculty members who work at institutions with large numbers of part-time faculty” and this breakage has a negative effect on teaching commitment across the institution. One of the studies suggests that if working conditions are improved for contingent faculty, it might mitigate the negative correlation. Hmmm.

Okay, on the right page, the article is called “Colleges cope with rising demand for remedial courses.” It includes information from a report by Strong American Schools called “Diploma to Nowhere” that estimates the number of college students enrolled in remedial courses at 1.3 million, with an associated cost of “between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion per year.” Now, right off the bat, my first question is why should we be spending that much on “remedial” instruction when we could be using it to improve the instruction at the point it is supposed to occur, and eliminate the remedial courses? Why on earth should college be about remedial instruction? After all the money, time, political capital and energy that has been wasted in developed test after standard after requirement after test, why should colleges be charged with the responsibility to re-mediate learning that was freely available prior to college?

The article poses the answer in responses by students surveyed for the report: Make high school classes “tougher so they would be better prepared for college” (5). The report goes on to suggest that stronger connections between K-12 education and higher education “that include[s] common goals and standards” would help too (5). I’m sure they would, which explains why there is already debate in some states of re-imagining the educational sequence as preK-16, making college the new high school.

See the sequence here? and the problem? High school courses should be more difficult to prepare students for college, but if high school courses are more difficult, then more students won’t be able to pass them, and that means children “left behind” which NCLB doesn’t allow so in order to meet the “standard” and remain a school, the courses must be tailored to allow all children to succeed at the test, which is not the same as preparing for college or life. But most importantly, nothing about the standardized test driven system emphasizes the need to create a self-educating population, either before, during, or after college. C. Wright Mills said, “The aim of the college for the individual student is to eliminate the need in his life for the college; the task is to help him become a self-educating man.”

Self-educating. The magic isn’t in the number of grades completed, or the number of tests taken, or the number of degrees held. The magic is in teaching students from the earliest years that they have the ability, the right, and the obligation to become self-educating all their lives. The information freely available to every student is astonishing, and there for the taking. What’s missing is the interest, the motivation for the student to do the seeking, the taking, the learning. The magic isn’t in the student sitting is a classroom and suffering out the 14 weeks of the semester, it is in the student recognizing the need to be accountable for the learning beyond that classroom, to add it to that which has been learned earlier to support and enhance that which will come later, to apply that knowledge across a full range of life experiences, from civic engagement to relationships to parenting to business, without waiting to be told exactly what to do and how to do it. The magic is in learning, not in teaching. And if we had that in our public school ethos, then we might be able to do away with this other blazing contradiction: “Students need a university degree in order to succeed in modern society and the global economy.”

I beg to differ. The university degree is a piece of paper that measures the number of days sitting in a seat in a room, the number of exams taken and papers written, but not at all the actual learning or applied knowledge the student has. The university degree is a key to success only insofar as it reflects the student’s ability to separate the information from the book or course it’s in and have it available in the mind to use to make decisions and life choices, which calls for judgment, which in turn calls for deliberation and sometimes debate. These are the things required for success. If every student has a university degree, what is the difference from every child having high school diploma? If everyone should have it, then the universal system already in place should be upgraded to provide the success tools needed for modern society and the global economy. To do anything else is to simply abandon the role of the first twelve years of public schooling and try to atone for it all in the four years of “university” education. Better to keep the student in the public school system long enough to have those tools as he or she enters adulthood, the society, and the economy. Better to re-mediate within the system already set up to accommodate the universal. Instead of Running Start or College in the High School, maybe we need Extended Stay and Success Education in the High School.

And what of the already existing problems revealed in this delegating upward educational push? As more students flood colleges, more campuses have higher percentages of contingent faculty to teach the classes, most claiming (rightfully) that they don’t have the resources to hire enough full-time tenure track faculty to handle the load. But the reports tell us that those higher percentages of contingent faculty have negative effects both on student success (degree completion or transfer) and on overall teaching commitment. University degrees are the answer, but the system isn’t designed for the university system to replace the public school system, nor to extend it, nor to take on its failures and try to make successes of them. And if we own up to that, and overhaul that system, then what is the next magic ticket to success? A foreign education? Graduate school? The latter is already happening, actually.

This contradiction, between the need for universal education and the desire for universal success at the level of the new information society and global economy, is enduring. But if it’s really going to be solved, it might help if we begin with clarifying the question. What is the role of public education in this country at this time? Is it to prepare well-rounded broadly education citizens of a free and democratic society? Or is it to prepare workers, whether for the knowledge economy, the global economy or the green revolution? I submit that you can have the second as a direct result of the first, but not the other way around.

You have to admit that it’s not often the inspection slip inside a shipping box is worth blogging. But these folks at Moosejaw are definitely on to something. (Their tag line is “love the madness). Every package that comes from Moosejaw has some very interesting stickers on it, including a “Sealed with a Kiss” sticker that include a bright red pair of lips. Mostly, I read them for the quick laugh, and then toss them. But this particular slip seemed worth preserving. It reads:

If you are actually reading this note you should be super happy. First, you have received your order, reading is fun and getting something in the mail (even if you bought it yourself) has got to make the day better.

Second, I put your order together all by myself. Sometimes people note that my packing job is so lovely that customers actually never remove their order from the bag or box, preferring to be awed by my personal work. I appreciate the thought but I don’t recommend it.

How can you not love that?

Read this and share it with everyone. He’s right, and we all need to stand up and say “this time we, the consumers, won’t support this play.”

I voted this morning.

I always vote. I think I’ve only missed one election in my adult life. So it’s not like a first time thing or anything like that.

But there is this crazy little moment of excitement in voting, pulling that lever back to open the curtains and record the choices made with the little flippers, hearing the grind of that mechanical device and knowing that I didn’t take my citizenship in this country for granted, knowing that I had a say in what comes out of today, knowing that people still fight and die around the world for the right to do what I so simply did.

I voted. I hope you do too.

In the last three days, I’ve read two very eloquent endorsements of Barack Obama for president of the United States; one from the New York Times, and one from The New Yorker.  What interests me about these posts isn’t that they endorse the candidate I’ve known for months I have to vote for, it is the warmth and depth of the endorsements. I’ve read these kinds of supportive treatises all my life, from the earliest days the words were intelligible to me (roughly, the non-election of Gerald Ford). I have an entire essay to write on this subject, about the rhetorical agility of the words in play, about the brief and measured nod to the problem of the opponent, about the sorrow with which I must concede, as the editors do in their language, in their word choice, the grave distance between the man they (and I) once admired and the candidate who became the product of his political machine.

It is a sad year for me. I have had to divorce myself from the party of my youth, my father, my entire lifetime. I’ve had to look hard at what I believe and value while understanding that my opinion, my party allegiance, my vote, my participation in the process we call democracy influences no one. I not only cannot vote for McCain, I feel compelled to plead with anyone who finds this small but very public message to vote FOR Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for the office of President of the United States of America. 

Please?

Thank you for your support.

Welcome to my new cyber-Thoughtful spot. I’m playing with themes and such, and for now this one works, despite its lack of appropriate Husky colors.

I’m working next on porting my existing blog to here, which I’m told I can do, but don’t know how yet. So for now, new stuff will be here rather than there.

While I’m getting the side bar up to speed, you might want to take a peek at the talented new member of our family. Beau joined us on July 15 at the age of two months. He’s a handful, as puppies are wont to be, and has kept me quite busy keeping him out of trouble. 

Lots of posts standing by about summer activities, fall plans and general observations of life, sports, and politics. Stay tuned!

After a few months of traveling and dissertating and forgetting to blog about any of it, it seems fitting to re-enter the sphere as a participant in the carnival Derek opened last week on an article in the newest CCC: “Sp(l)itting Images; or Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition” by Karen Kopelson.

Anytime I read an article that invokes the attitudes or ideas of graduate students, I find myself looking for my place in the continuum of those ideas. In this article, it’s hard to see that I fit at all. Joe Harris’s wonderful book A Teaching Subject was a primary inspiration for pursuing graduate work at all, but I did not come to Rhet/Comp as a disenchanted lit scholar. Like Brenda in the article, I chose this field for my PhD work precisely because I saw it as interdisciplinary in nature and because, like Brenda, I see it as “a great opportunity to engage any number of literary, theoretical, historical, and philosophical texts while resisting getting caught within a reductive ’specialty’…” (759). In short, I was interested in the field precisely because I am skeptical of narrow specialization as the defining hallmark of a scholar holding a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Like some of the students quoted it the article, I found the content of some of my graduate courses did not match their catalog descriptions. Some part of my comprehensive exam process emerged from the sense attributed in the article to a student who “echo[ed] Mulderig and Swearingen” in her concern that she would have a degree in rhet/comp without ever taking a course in classical rhetoric. That wasn’t my situation, but I did believe I needed a lot more of that history or even study of practices to honestly claim a degree in the field. Like Paul, I was asked to respond in my dissertation to why this topic is of interest to the field. While this is not precisely a “pedagogical” requirement, the discussion around that idea indicated that the pedagogical connection was at the heart of the request.

But like Clancy, I came to the field from a different path (though different from hers too). I always did like teaching, and did a fair amount of it in the financial services career I left to pursue it, but it wasn’t just the teaching that drew me to rhet/comp. I’m also a writer, and like many writers, I enjoy literature, but I am always interested in how the literature is constructed and what the writer is doing as much as I am interested in the content.

I found some omissions in the analysis. First of all, the step away from “service” is taken as a given, as in it is a given that no one in the field of rhet/comp wants to be considered to be in a service discipline or activity. I don’t mind one bit being in a “service” field. That is not to say that I believe I or anyone else in the field should shrink into the walls and take our marching orders from someone else, whether those someones are administrative or disciplinary. What I do mean is that investing time, energy, research and scholarship in developing my own skills with language across a range of communicative opportunities and being able to share that knowledge to enable students to communicate more effectively in what Harris referred to as “the discourse communities they already” or will choose to, inhabit, is a marvelous way to spend a life. To do so in an institution where effective communication is required of every student not only in every field of study but in the activities of life outside of and beyond their formal education is as rewarding a career as I could imagine.

The second omission I see in the analysis has to do with the nature of specialization, teaching, and interdisciplinarity. Kopelson cites Ellen Barton’s comment about “one-way interdisciplinarity” in the discussion of the “import and apply” tendency of the discipline. I’d argue that it is precisely the specialization required for academic success as a scholar that prevents rhet/comp as a discipline from having its work imported by other disciplines. If the relationship is one way, might it be because it is easier for the generalist to adopt the particular than the other way around? And I understand that for some, scholarship is the more interesting part and teaching is the price paid for it, but that’s not the case for me. I love both. I study composition as a means of professional development, because I get paid to teach. I research and study things I like and find interesting, in whatever subject, because I get paid by an institution that gives me both access to and time for these pursuits. I think we could end the question of what Zizek has to do with FYC for good if we as an entire field could embrace both.

That brings me to the conclusion, which Collin described as carrying the weight of “exhaustion.” I understand why it is so hard to move from the charge Kopelson makes (”that we make a concerted, collective effort to release ourselves from the pattern reflected here”) to the actual concerted, collective effort. The problem is that we don’t agree, even yet, on who we are and what we do vis-a-vis the rest of the academic world. So I have an idea:

What if we “flipped the script” on that service notion. What if we embraced the idea and promoted the nature of our discipline as what it is: the center of a university education. Writing and rhetoric are central to the academic enterprise. We teach students how to do that, we analyze and critique the texts from which they learn other subjects, we contribute to public advocacy and engage social and political topics in meaningful discourse. That seems worth celebrating to me. So I think instead of shunning the service distinction, we might consider reconsidering what it could mean to really embrace that position.

Me and my crazy ideas. But it is a carnival, right?

Posted new Module for students in Intro to College Writing course.

Vacuumed both the floor and ceiling of the dining room.

Vacuumed the carpet in the living room.

Vacuumed the floor in the kitchen.

Did “some” laundry.

Put on “out of the house” clothes and walked down the street to the big pond and back. It seemed like a long walk (it’s really the warm-up of the walk I used to be able to do every day).

Did Physical Therapy exercises (with only a minimum of vocal accompaniment and few cuss words).

Found updated assignment sheets for Analytical Writing class I was sure I had done but couldn’t find this morning, thus eliminating hours of new assignment development and writing.

Posted aforementioned updated assignments.

Discovered chicken in the freezer suitable for the grill and sufficient vegetables for the salad, eliminating the need to enter The Vehicle with the Broken Air Conditioner this afternoon.

Watered the daylilys that are still in their pots from last spring, which miraculously survived the winter in those pots in the shed and are already growing for the summer to come.

Some work, some therapy, some progress, and some wonder. A successful day.