Time Change

For most of the United States time "fell" back last night as everyone hunkers down for the winter. Of course in Indiana, Arizona, and Hawaii nothing happened because those three states don't observe daylight savings time. For Indiana, because we are on the line between Eastern Standard Time (EST) and Central Standard Time (CST) every time the nation switches into and out of Daylight Savings Time (DST) it looks like Indiana changes time zones.

For Indiana last night could well be the last time that we stay on its own and let's the states around us change times. Monroe County Schools (the county where Indiana University main campus is located) have an interesting page that describes the changes and the history of the issue. Yes it sounds like a trivial thing but there is a long and sometimes bizarre history. Personally I have to say that the current proposals for how time change will occur next spring are still more than a little bizarre. Under the new proposal five, of Indiana's 92, counties will be on CST, 17 countries had sought to be on CST some for no reason that is at all apparent to me. So the upshot of all of this is if we do change to DST in April that we will now know which other states we are aligned with in our one-and-only-one time zone but I can guarantee that we will not get a easy handle on which counties inside Indiana that are on the other time zone.

The Indianapolis Star has several articles on the topic, though none have the excellent graphic they put on their front page on October 22, that showed which counties had requested to be on CST and which were approved. Check out Time-zone battle is on again, Time zone plan to be hard sell, and There's no time for clock confusion.

Previous prolurker post on the topic = Indiana time

Posted by prolurkr at 07:00 AM | TrackBack

The Performativity of Naming: Adolescent Weblog Names as Metaphor

Well the NCA paper is finally done. It's been an interesting journey to this completion. I now have as many, in truth more questions than I did when I started. I will be interested to hear your comments.

The Performativity of Naming: Adolescent Weblog Names as Metaphor (pdf) is available through this link or under Links to my conference papers online on the left sidebar.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:13 PM | TrackBack

Photos of the NOLA’s 9th Ward

The Survival of New Orleans Weblog has photos of the devastation of the 9th Ward. Note that the picture on the left is of a refrigerator that has floated on to the house's roof. That means that water for about 20 feet deep at this location. Think about that if you will, refrigerators floating 20 feet above the solid earth.

There are some amazing pictures in the series, you can access them by either clicking on the picture or on the weblog link above. More than a few of the pictures are of places I recognize...now that is an weird feeling. Oh check out the series of pictures that show the barge sitting on a house on the second page. Plus the picture of the St. Bernard Parish barricade, on the third page, is very frightening.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:19 PM | TrackBack

Why I’m staying away from buses for the next 6 months or so

How will you DIE?
Name / Username
You will die	by being hit by a bus
At age	46
This cool quiz by Confused_Pete - Taken 754831 Times.

New - Kwiz.Biz Astrology and Horoscopes

Posted by prolurkr at 06:48 PM | TrackBack

*splat* It’s sticking!

The folks in the Whitehouse lie! They lie to the American people. Hell they probably even lie to themselves.

Cheney adviser indicted in CIA investigation. The indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

With Miers out, who may be next?

In Bush's speech this morning (10/28/2005) he again tied 9/11 and Iraq together. "I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 -- and al Qaeda attacked us anyway."

'Indispensible' Rove not yet off the hook

Let's review...the V.P.'S Chief of Staff, oh ex-Chief of Staff, and top advisor has been indicted, and Deputy Chief of Staff and presidential political adviser Karl Rove is still under investigation, so assuming they are guilty - yes I know but just for this argument - are we supposed to buy that neither of them ever mentioned what they were up to to the people the advise? Or is it most likely that the instructions came from above them? I know where my vote lies on that.

President Bush's overall job rating.

SPLAT!

Posted by prolurkr at 02:09 PM | TrackBack

Job searching is basically job searching no matter what the industry

The Chronical of Higher Education has, in today's feeds, an article - Common Job-Hunting Blunders - I Can't let slide by without comment. You see after 16 years in Human Resources I can hire anyone from a groundskeeper to a Ph.D. level Optical Scientist, or a CEO and I have done all of them, many many times. And I have always been amused by the commentary I hear on how "academia is different" than going through the hiring process for a public or private employer, because from my perspective it isn't enough different to even talk about.

Below are paragraphs from the article interspersed with my commentary.

Do not send a CV when an employer requests a résumé. Do not refer to your résumé as a CV. Turning a CV into a résumé is a painful but inescapable process for anyone who wants to work in a nonacademic job. Seek advice from your university career center and from people already working outside academe to make sure that your résumé is not a thinly disguised CV. Keep your résumé to two pages at most. Do not attach letters of reference, writing samples, or other supporting material unless the ad requests such documents.

Writing a resume is always painful. In truth lots of resumes received in response to announcements of job openings don't conform to the "rules for resumes." That said it is imperative that resumes come close to the mark. I've applied with companies that were ridiculously strict on this, to the point that one headhunter made me redo the document from the bottom up dictating font styles and paragraph lengths along the way. In truth by the time I was done with the rewrite I knew I didn't want to work for that company...Anyone that restrictive would definitely not like my style. My personal pre-grad school resume is three-pages long partially because some of the organization I have worked for have rediculously long names and addresses, and partly because I have lengthy experience.

Do create different versions of your résumé for different kinds of jobs. Your résumé should read as an argument for why you are right for this particular job. If a job requires strong writing skills, for example, you'll want to highlight your writing experience and leave out less relevant information. Try creating a master résumé listing every possible way of describing your experience and then mercilessly delete items one by one to create a teaching-focused version, a research-focused version, a management-focused, and so on.

I used to have a master resume that had skills statements for everything I could think anyone might want to know about me, that way I could simply cut-and-paste them into the new documents. This worked very well. Every once in a while I would have to write a new one targeted at a requirement that I hadn't thought of, and it was dutifully inserted into the master document as well.

Do not call or e-mail to ask if the employer has received your application. Even if an employer had time to respond to such queries, talking to a candidate that the employer has no intention of interviewing would be awkward and possibly misleading.

DO NOT CALL OR E-MAIL the employer, I know every book on the market say to do so but they are wrong. There are three reasons why they are wrong -

1. Most hiring processes are people neutral. Nowhere I ever worked did we track resumes by name, we tracked them by number...that way we were in compliance with federal discrimination laws. Guess what I simply don't want to know YOU applied for the job, I want to know if your skill set matches my requirements that is all I want to know at the early stages of recruitment.
2. These folks are busy...Far busier then you might imagine. I worked far more hours a week in HR than I do as a academic. I can usually, when I don't have to many deadlines, keep academics to between 50 and 60 hours per week. As an HR manager I routinely worked 70 hours per week and was on-call 24/7, it happened more than once that after working a very long day meeting my neverending set of deadlines I would be called out of my bed because there had been an accident at the plant. Then I would be off to spend the rest of the night at the hospital making sure the employee was ok.
3. Plus do the math, there is one opening, they get hundreds of applications - sometimes - and each one of those people calls weekly to find out the status of the job. Oh my god and people wonder why HR folks get nasty.

Do feel free to send a hard copy of your résumé. Send it by overnight mail as well as by e-mail. Delivery confirmation through an express-mail service is the best way to ensure that your application materials were received. In addition, an employer is unlikely to throw away an express-mail envelope unopened, thus giving your résumé a second chance to be seen.

Absolutely, you'd be crazy not to do this.

Do not send a generic cover letter. One-size-fits-all cover letters that speak broadly about skills that everyone claims to have (multitasking, analytical ability, teamwork) and could be applied to any job are a waste of an opportunity. Don't just say you have those skills, use your background experience to prove it. Conversely, do not be excessively personal in your letter: Employers do not need to hear about your frustration with the academic job market.

Do address the particulars of the ad in your cover letter. Instead of saying that you have "many of the skills requested in the ad," repeat the qualities mentioned and supply specific examples from your experience. For instance, you might say, "Your ad requested project-management experience: I have three years of experience in developing quarterly special reports from conception to final publication on the topic of children's health."

I often used a two column section on my resume that matched up the job announcements requirements with my own experience. Column one would repeat their request, and column two gave my experience that met or exceeded their requirement. My part was always in full sentences, though theirs often was not. This section was the customized part of my resume. Most of the rest of it was boiler plated, though I made editorial changes as necessary. One biggy on this is make sure you change the address block and salutation, you would not believe how often I got cover letters addressed to someone else inside...Even sent one out once when I had the flu. I won't say I never interviewed any of the people who did this but they definitely were at a disadvantage.

The most important advice I can offer about job hunting outside of academe is that you focus on how your experience is relevant to the employer's needs. Be as specific and concise as possible. That approach is a dramatic change from the perspective of the academic job seeker, who must produce a lifelong teaching philosophy and a research plan that will define at least his or her next seven years. But since the academic job search is (ideally) focused on filling a tenure-track position, it makes sense that a hiring committee would consider those long-term questions.

Ultimately, it's a question of emphasis: Companies still care about whether you have long-term potential. And academic-hiring committees are still interested in finding someone who fills their immediate needs. The balance is simply different, and therefore the job-hunting process is different. Taking time to show that you understand the small differences between academe and the outside world can go far in showing that you understand the big differences as well.

The essence of most of these comments in the article boil down to "know the rules of the industry in which you are seeking employment." Oh and "fit" is an important part of every job search. Yes there are laws to say no one should discriminate, and those are very important. But if one of the candidates shows up wearing a suit with the dry cleaning tags attached so that everyone knows he "is clean." (Yes this really happened.) Then it's a good bet he's probably not going to "fit" into the organization.

I ran into the "fit" issue often as a management job-seeker. I have pretty high ethical standards, you probably know that already, and headhunters would tell me that there were companies where they knew they couldn't send me even if I was the best qualified candidate in their pool. The company wouldn't like me and I sure wouldn't have liked them. So remember that fit cuts both ways. You really don't want to be somewhere where you can't fit in...It's no fun at all - been there, done that, got a t-shirt.

So no matter where you are looking for a job put your best foot forward. Job hunting is a process so understand how it works and what you part is in it. Breaking a few rules is ok, but don't break the important ones because that can be the end of your employment chances with that company.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:03 AM | TrackBack

A Friday morning meme

Taken from to many places to credit. To play you enter your name and "needs" into Google and see what comes up. Here is the list of comments that were on the first page of my search.

1. Lois needs a new hair style! (the exclamation point was in the original) - LOL No I do not...haven't had this one for all that long.
2. Lois needs quality - Personally? Gezzz what a diss.
3. Lois needs facility - Somedays that is so so true.
4. Lois needs a date - Ahhhh Not. Dating was hard enough when I was single I can't imagine doing it when I am married.
5. Lois needs help - So so true.
6. Lois needs rescuing - Oh now here is one that fits. LOL Me as Janette MacDonald. Save me, Save me. LMAO
7. Lois needs to do something - Lois needs to do A LOT of things
8. Lois needs a two-piece business suit (skirt and jacket, blouse) - Ahhh A two-piece suit, assuming that you want to be covered, would have to include a jumper and a blouse. LOL A "skirt and jacket, blouse" combination is a THREE-piece suit, ok a three-piece ensemble. And no I don't need one of those either. I've gotten rid of almost all of mine from my management days...Never was a good pantyhose and suit kinda girl.
9. Lois needs the help of Superman - You just knew he would have to be in there somewhere. I'm just gratified that he didn't appear until #9. See #6 above...which probably refers to Superman too now that I look at it.
10. Lois needs to be contacted - Aliens, oh aliens.
11. Lois needs to stop going nuts - Well and then there is that. *Sigh*

Posted by prolurkr at 08:11 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

A better mousetrap...ok at least a cheaper one

That's How It Happened caught my curiosity with their link "How to catch a mouse with loo rolls," that's TP tubes to us Yanks.  Ok so I had to click through to figure out how one would ever "catch" a mouse with a toilet paper tube...very nicely I bet after reading the post.  Though the tube isn't so much the trap as the conduit to the trap.  *S*

p.s.  Some of the comments on the post are a scream.

You know, I think with a little reworking, that could work with houseguests who've worn out their welcome too.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:27 PM | TrackBack

A new blog from the Speaker of the House

A somewhat amazing thing has happened Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House, has a new blog - no RSS feed thought - and it looks like he actually might have written it himself.  Absolutely amazing.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

One of those books you just keep going back to again and again

Today while working on my NCA paper I had one of those DAAAAA moments that everyone dreads.  As I have previously written I have been working through a personal tipping point as I have been writing this paper.  Well it hit me today that I have not gone back to my touchstone performance studies book to see what it might have to tell me, and as usual the answer is it has a lot to tell me that I can use in this paper.

My favorite performance studies book is:

Dailey, Sheron J. (ed.)  (1998). The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions. Annandale VA: National Communication Association.

This amazing volume never ceases to provide me thought provoking material.  I spent much of 2003-2004 academic year thinking about and presenting work that utilized just one of the chapters:

Langellier, Kristin M. (1998). Voiceless bodies, bodiless voices: The future of personal narrative performance. In Sheron J. Dailey (Ed.), The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions (pp. 207-213). Annandale VA: National Communication Association.

I need to reread the chapters I have tackled previously and finish the ones I have not yet abstracted.  If you are interested in performance studies I strongly recommend this edited volume as an entry point to the field.  I am no expert but with Dailey, Langellier, Bail, and Schechner I will improve my disciplinary vocabulary so that I can effectively use these theories to continue disciplinary boundary spanning as I look at adolescent populations online.

Posted by prolurkr at 07:21 PM | TrackBack

Countdown timers

I've added two countdown timers to the left side bar of the blog.  One tracks the days until my next scheduled conference submission and the second tracks the days until my next publication submission.  I added the new block to the bottom of the sidebar mostly as a test to see if I like these features.  The block probably should be higher in the series but if I do that I would have to reset each of the blocks so that the color alternation is consistent.  I'm not up to that much editing right now.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:24 AM | TrackBack

Write daily

D*I*Y Planner has a timely post on breaking through writers block that asks us to Do It Everyday.

The more you write, the better you get. It's a common koan, found in just about every book on writing out on the bookshelves these days. Not sure if it's true because I still think I write a lot more junk than I do "the good stuff." But I try and meet the page or screen at least once a day and hope that whatever comes out comes close to matching the image or thought inside my mind. Last week, after I got off my butt and resolved to take charge of my writing and artistic life, I decided it was also time it take up a new habit or two.

So I wandered over to my artistic bookshelf and revisited an old friend. The book's paper smelled musty, worn with age from having sat on the shelves for awhile now. The front cover said it all, The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. My best friend gave me this copy a few years ago, during a particularly stressful bout of writer's block. While I don't feel blocked now, I figured it was time to revisit the discipline and practices therein. More specifically, I've decided to start up the morning pages habit.

In this book, Cameron describes a wonderful practice where writing becomes meditation. She refers to this practice as "morning pages". The practice is deceptively simple: write 3 pages of long-hand every day, in the morning. Whatever is in your head, or not, goes onto these three pages. It sounds easy to do, but many people (myself included), make up many excuses not to write. No more excuses for me. Every morning, before my workouts, before the housework, before the reading and the naps, I crawl downstairs, grab my journal and pen and snuggle into my comfy chair. And I stay there until my handwriting covers three pages in the book. Everything and anything inside my head goes onto the page. No matter how good or bad it is. I write. And when I am done, I do not look back or reread it.

Writing like this, without looking back, is my meditation. I write like this every day to free my creativity and center myself. It gives me permission to write lots and lots of awkward phrases, horrible thoughts and criticism in private. It teaches my inner artist to dance and play while my inner critic isn't telling it to stop being so silly. It gets me ready for whatever the universe and life can throw at me. It's good practice for NaNoWriMo, which starts one week from now. And finally, it gets me writing daily. Because this is what writers do: they write.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:58 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Is there a formal format for email responses?

Today must be my day to run across interesting CMC related blog posts.  Posts that will probably wind their way into my CMC class next semester.  The Paperless Student has an interesting post on the social consequences of technology.  Since I spent some time this evening after class explaining what Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is to one of my undergrads, this post jumped out at me.  Here's a snip for you to ponder:

Here's something they haven't taught me in school, but should: How to properly reply to an email message.

After switching to from Outlook to Thunderbird for email, I noticed a difference in how the programs handle replies to email messages. Outlook puts the original message at the bottom and lets you type at the top. Thunderbird puts the cursor below the original message and lets you type after it. Which one is right?

Of course, in regular Internet style, I got massively distracted while searching for the answer to this. I found an entire page dedicated to Mail Format. Check out Dan's Mail Format Site.

Reply at the top? Reply at the bottom? What's the difference? For that, we can turn to a Wikipedia article on Top-posting. It suggests that quoted text always belongs at the top.

So which is it?  Does it matter?  Why of course it does since human animals tend to distrust things that appear out of the ordinary.  To much frame-shift and we are uncomfortable.  But don't you love it, I mean who set these rules?  LOL  And where is this kind of history catalogued?

Posted by prolurkr at 10:44 PM | TrackBack

Are you attending to what I say?

Josh at Sociolinguistics and CMC posted today about attending to IM conversation. His question revolves around how much expectation is there that when you are talking to someone on an IM they are paying close attention to what you are saying and are not involved with multiple other conversations. My experience tells me that there is one primary factor with two subfactors that will control the expectation of exclusivity in an IM conversation. The primary factor is experience, the subfactors are developmental level and experience with synchronous online communication. First I see young teens who expect that their IM conversational partner is talking only to them. This is mostly a developmental issue just like younger children want to sit close to the TV so that the picture fills their visual field, young teens don't have the ability to multi-task yet so replicate that expectation on to their communication partner. Second once users develop experience with synchronous communication environments they actually begin to expect that their communication partners are talking to multiple people at the same time, however early in their experience they may not have grasped this reality.

Here is a snip from the post (misspelling in original):

Does it bother you if you're having a conversation with someone else and they're not attentive to the conversation becasue you think they're having a conversation with someone else. This can often be signaled explicitly by mis-aimed interlocutions (i.e. you're having a conversation with someone about your bad day and they respond by mistake in your window to a conversation they're having with someone else in another window). Do we see this as acceptable, or do we think that our interlocutor isn't engagaed and focused on our conversation? Do we ignore these things?

To what extent do we expect to be the sole focus of attention during IM interactions (in diadic conversations)? In FTF settings, this lack of focus would normally be construed as "rude", where one person would in essence be having a conversation with 2 people at one time. Does this "rudeness" transfer to IM? Do people feel guilty about talking to 2 people at once, when one of the conversations is "important" (dealing with personal problems, exposing some weakness, etc.) Do we demand the attention of our interlocutors, or do we realize that IM is in fact different than FTF in this regard?

So does it bug you when you realize your IM partner is talking to five other people, listening to music, and writing War and Peace while they are "talking" to you?

Posted by prolurkr at 08:00 PM | TrackBack

Five though provoking tiles

On a peg next to my computer monitor hangs a group of five little tiles strung together on a narrow green ribbon.  The tiles are numbered 1 through 5 with sayings on each.  On the reverse of each are stampings including a plus sign and a capital "M."  They are in graduated sizes with 1 being the tallest and 5 the shortest.  Each tile has two holes one at the top and another at the bottom.  They are currently strung together through the bottom holes.  I picked the set up in a little hole-in-the-wall store on Canal Street in New Orleans last summer, they were in the markdown bin.  I think I paid a dollar or so for the set. 

The sayings on the tiles are as follows:

1. Free your heart from hatred
2. Free your mind from worries
3. Live simply
4. Give more
5. Expect less

I have absolutely no idea what the original purpose of this set of tiles was to have been, and I do wonder what it might have been.  But for me flipping through them is a nice soothing meditative act.  All of the sayings are values I hold dear, though have clearly not mastered.  Being reminded of these core values by rubbing your fingers over the raised lettering somehow makes the thoughts more tangible.  A dollar well spent.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:38 PM | TrackBack

Thoughts on performance and internet research...an intersection of personal crisis

The paper I've been working on has been near torturous to write, and that has been bothering me.  It's not a long paper, in fact it's rather short.  It's not for submission, rather it is for presentation and has already been accepted via abstract as part of a panel.  And it is on a topic I find very interesting that alone should make it easy to pull together.  So why has it been so hard to write?

It hit me this morning as I was weeding my way through chapters in Bial's The Performance Studies Reader, exactly what is tripping me up.  You see a few weeks ago Terri Senft posted on performance studies and internet research, in it she made the following observations:

It's interesting to me that performance studies is now entering its third decade as a discipline and most performance-based questions posed by Internet researchers turn on performance of identity. Sometimes someone brings up presence, but only as something to be managed. Also: Erving Goffman is great, but the field really has moved on from Performance of Self in Everyday Life. Performance theorists need to step up and start educating people outside our field about how to think about issues of presence, absence, liveness, words that do, images that speak, ethics of engagement beyond informed consent. I think I'm going to talk to some friends about proposing a new sort of performance panel at AoIR next year.

I read her comments and they immediately resonated with me.  You know it was one of those moments that your mental cheerleaders are doing their thing "That's / the work / you want / to be doing" they are chanting complete with pompoms and a lunge at the end.  So I copied the syllabus of reading she recommended and thought about when I would get time to read all of it...not this year for sure.  And then I went on with what I was doing.

But then, of course, it didn't take long for what I was doing to collide with what I was percolating in the back of my brain.  How do I take my Goffmanian based view of personal performance and transcend it into something deeper something more meaningful that sheds new light on the people and the spaces within my research.  That's my crisis of faith at the moment...crisis because I don't know as much about the topic(s), as though none of this is contested, of performance studies...crisis because I have a paper to finish and I'm realizing that no matter what, I am simply not going to like it...crisis because I need to find a way to immerse myself in reading before I do my diss proposal...crisis because life goes on while everything else is happening and kinda mucks up the best laid academic plans.

I decided to exorcise the demons by writing a blog post and admitting, as my grandmother would say "to god and everybody" that I am struggling with this one.  Though you know I do think struggle is good...very good in fact.  Struggle to me is the sign that I am working outside my comfort-zone, that I am trying something new and slightly dangerous, and that I can fail or I can win but in either case the result will be complete and it will be a definite growth experience.

So if you are coming to NCA drop by my panel on Sunday morning...you can watch me struggle with this in 3D and maybe give me a idea that will help solidify where this path is beginning to take me.

Reference List

Bial, Henry (ed.) (2004). The Performance Studies Reader. London: Routledge.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:26 PM | TrackBack

Living by the clock...time me please

Today I have been working to the clock...well the timer actually.  One hour on writing and one hour on grading and one hour on writing and one hour on grading...with some short breaks in there to rest or answer important email.  The process is a bit stilted but you know I've gotten so much more done this way. 

Silly though it may be I have timers next to my computers both at home and at the office but I have never used them so strictly before.  Me thinks this is a good way to work as long as you know in your heart that the plan can be disrupted by other things that take importance, like email from the students who are currently working on a test. 

Looks like I will be a timer girl for the foreseeable future, at least until I get everything mostly caught up and am past the due dates on the submission list.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:52 PM | TrackBack

Walking from London to Cape Town

I have never been a huge fan of travel films, not sure why but they just don't do it for me. I think part of it is the perspective...the journey is done and the speaker knows the outcome. Or maybe it's the retrospective editing that takes place before and during the presentation. Oh well for whatever reason I don't love travel films, I do love travel blogs. The story is unfolding for me in installments and the writer doesn't know much more than I do about what tidbit will become significant over time...sorta like daily life. *w*

Well this afternoon The World Is Not Flat (TwinF), which will be a cool travel blog once the trip is underway, pointed me to constantly. Constanttrek is a blog by a couple who are waling from London to Cape Town South Africa, hence their subtitle "Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time." Think about that for a bit...walking from London to Cape Town. I may be a country girl but I sure don't have that kind of trip in me, never did.

So I have added the blog to my Bloglines list, as you can see in the sidebar. I shall be keeping up with their progress and may even go back and read some of the archive...in my copious free time. LOL

Posted by prolurkr at 07:47 PM | TrackBack

The Professor as Personal Trainer

Inside Higher Ed has a very thought provoking point of view article, The Professor as Personal Trainer.  Give it a read yourself and put some thought into how you view what you provide your students...I am doing the same, but there will probably be more on that at a later date.

I like the image of the personal trainer because it provides a positive account of what people are getting for their money without modeling my job on retail or fast food. I provide students an opportunity to undergo a personal transformation -- an opportunity which they may or may not take advantage of. If you want to loose 20 pounds of intellectual flab, you can spend three hours a week in classes with me and I will show you how to do it. But I can't make you do anything, and if you never exercise at home by doing your home work and reading, you are never going to acquire the lean, rock-hard intellect that so many employers swoon over.

< snip >

Another reason I like the idea of the personal trainer is that it helps underline another, very un-PC aspect of the teacher-student relationship that I believe in quite strongly despite the prevailing egalitarianism of our times: I don't think students necessarily know what they want or need out of an education -- like Odysseus or Cinderella, they need patrons willing to use their awesome magical powers so that they can fulfill their destiny. I'm often struck by pedagogies that oppose the commodification of education with a notion that instead of producing customers who are satisfied they should be turning out students who feel "empowered." My hunch is that this sort of talk is already infected by a commodification which these teachers consider to be so tainting. I'm reminded of a line I heard recently from (of all people!) a Unitarian pastor who remarked to me that he didn't want his congregants to have a better self-image -- he wanted them to have better selves.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:21 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Girls' Studies Interest Group

The newly-formed Girls' Studies Interest Group of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) seeks panelists for our proposed sessions on Girls' Studies.

We invite proposals for 15-minute presentations on research with girls. We welcome diverse theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary perspectives.

Please email your proposals to both hains@temple.edu and rebekahb@temple.edu by October 28, 2005. Please include the following information:

- Name
- Affiliation
- Contact information (telephone, email, mailing address)
- A brief biography or c.v.
- A short abstract (300-500 words)

The 2006 conference will take place in Oakland, California from June 15-18. Conference details are available at http://www.nwsaconference.org/ .

Posted by prolurkr at 06:58 AM | TrackBack