Do We Have Swine Flu? Or Do We Just “Have Swine”?

German has this wacky way of expressing good luck: “Schwein haben,” or having swine/pig. It’s clashing with the nomenclature of swine flu, which ain’t such great luck if you get it.
My sister tells me my niece is coming along well – she’s stopped puking, at least – but 19 out of 24 kids were absent [...]

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Endless Backlog Caturday

My dear departed Grey Kitty was the queen of hairballs. No sooner had she ejected one than another was in the works. My husband used to liken her digestion to a busy airport.
That’s an unfortunate but apt description of my endless pile of grading. No sooner have I ejected one set of papers … well, [...]

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Rapid Response at My University – Half a Day Later

In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, campuses all over the country beefed up their security. Mine did too. One of our new safeguards was an email alert system to notify members of the university community when an act of violence has occurred or is in progress. It’s basically a great idea. As usual, [...]

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Will Blackboard Save Us? The Folly of Swine Flu Planning in Higher Education

One of my vivid memories of graduate school is also one of the darkest. And I mean that literally. One day I showed up to discuss modern German history with my adviser and a few of my fellow students, only to find the lights off and the curtains dimmed. My professor was there, though, and [...]

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“Reverse Racism” – the Return of the Repressed

I don’t normally blog about frustrations in teaching. Well, I did vent about the flood of email I got last week (which has blessedly abated, and I’ve washed up on the beach like inert seaweed until the next deluge). As a rule, though, I don’t bitch and moan about student behavior. I don’t want my [...]

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The 24/7 Professor

Anyone with a desk job knows what a great labor-saver email has turned out to be. But if you’re old enough to remember how it was originally hyped back in the ’80s, you probably also recall that students didn’t contact professors outside business hours unless there was a dire emergency.
By the end of yesterday, which [...]

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Finally, Some Backup in the Homework Tussles

My little Bear is now in fourth grade, and that means heaps more homework. When he brought home the first batch last week, he ended up in tears, arguing that kids work all day and shouldn’t have to keep working in the evenings. They do have a longish school day (9 to 3:30) and I [...]

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How Blogging Is Changing My Teaching

If I’ve been a little less garrulous than usual this week, it’s because I’m finishing up my syllabi for fall quarter, which begins Tuesday. Not only have my teaching responsibilities been interfering with blogging, my blogging is messing with my teaching! I think it’s all for the good, though.
I set out to revise my Intro [...]

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Separate Spheres … for Recess?

I’m grateful that officials at my kids’ elementary school have far more sense than this:
Boys and girls at Sedalia Elementary returned to school Monday with some unexpected changes: They had to play in separate areas during recess and eat at different tables during lunch.
The decision to divide the two groups did not stem from an [...]

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Naw, ‘Wingers Aren’t Fascists

Over the past few days, a new commenter has been visiting my blog. He insists that it’s overblown to discuss any fascist tendencies among the American right wing and keeps talking about the stupidity of “you people,” though I’m still not sure who we might be. (I’m not going to do him the favor of [...]

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News Flash: Teachers Are Overpaid!

Today’s Columbus Dispatch features an article entitled “Teacher Salaries Raising Eyebrows.” As the child of two public school teachers, I had to wonder what could cause such eyebrow twitching. According to the Dispatch, teachers in “some districts” (note the weasel word “some”) aren’t bearing their share of the state’s fiscal pain. They’re still getting pay [...]

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How Much Profanity Can a Classroom Handle?

I’m feeling very torn about whether to ask my intro to women’s and gender studies class to buy the anthology, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape.
The pros: The essays are accessible. They’re written by young women. They speak to real problems that my students face. They elaborate on [...]

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Gates and the Invisible Knapsack

What does the Henry Louis Gates case have in common with a knapsack?
If you’ve ever taken an intro to women’s and gender studies course, you probably know the answer. Like most instructors who teach it, I routinely assign Peggy McIntosh’s article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” (It’s short, easy to read, and available here. [...]

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Awarding Bonuses for Grade Inflation

I’ll admit to being a fairly generous grader. If students turn in all their work and don’t massively screw up, they should be able to get a C or better from me. Earning an A is a little trickier, and I very occasionally get complaints about this. All in all, though, I’m sure I give [...]

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What Intersectionality Is and Isn’t

Hint: One thing intersectionality is not? Silly.**
Here’s what intersectionality is good for. It reminds us that the same person can be both an oppressed person and an oppressor, depending on how you turn the prism. I might be oppressed as a woman, but if I refuse to pay my housecleaner a decent wage? I’m an [...]

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How Underage Drinking Laws Enable Violent Crimes

A few weeks back, I mentioned that a former student of mine had been hurt by an abusive boyfriend. The campus judicial hearing was last week. In it, the accuser had to face trial herself.
Here’s the problem: Underage drinking laws and the equivalent campus rules deter victims of violent crime from reporting. As I learned [...]

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Charting Class Privilege

Daisy at Daisy’s Dead Air has put up a class privilege meme. It was originally intended to be a classroom exercise (full instructions are here), but Daisy’s discomfort in completing the exercise even anonymously online has convinced me: It’s as likely to shame the poor kids as the rich kids. That’s surely not its intent, [...]

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Universities are Not Corporations; Here’s How Not to Reform Them

Today’s New York Times has an op-ed piece by Mark Taylor, chair of Columbia’s religion department, that attempts to offer a blueprint for reforming universities. Some of his ideas are decent, but they’re not necessarily new. Some of them are – well, less bright that I’d have expected from a guy who’s obviously climbed far [...]

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My Mad Wish for an Anti-Violence Cloak

And I mean “mad” in both senses. I realize I’m a little crazy. And I’m deeply, frothingly angry.
The very first quarter I taught women’s studies, several students wrote about experiences with sexual assault. My heart hurt for them, and all I could do was hope that the class helped them make sense of their [...]

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My Real-Life Clash with Ev Psych

So it’s one thing to tangle with evolutionary psychology as a blogger. It’s quite another to butt heads with it in person. Or, as in my case, to get verbally head-butted by it. And I’m feeling a little distressed, because a student got traumatized in the process and I didn’t manage to stop it.
Though I [...]

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