sex and tenure

Yesterday I had what is likely to be a first of many meetings for my new half-time appointment for which I'm leading professional development efforts for faculty. It was a good meeting; I got useful information and offers for help; he paid for lunch and encouraged dessert. I feel supported but not micromanaged.

All that said, I still felt like there were plenty of hints that there will always be something to write about. (At some point, and now I can't remember when or where, I mused that having a position where I worked with administration and faculty all day long could lead to great book material. Unfortunately the title "Clueless in Academe" has already been taken.) I learned in only 20 minutes of time that there are certain catch phrases that can be connected to specific people (in this case it was, "now that being said," as a beginning to a second paragraph of whatever essay he was composing). I also almost started to laugh when he rolled consonants (e.g., rellenos, Fernandez, Argentina, etc.) with a particularly Spanish flair at the Mexican restaurant, which just sounded funny to me. That's probably because I heard a reading of David Sedaris making fun of this in another university professor, and anytime a Sedaris reading comes flying into your head when you aren't expecting it there's a good chance you could snort enchiladas out your nose. But best of all was this quote:

"If you've not been through it, you're a little bit embarrassed to ask."

This was referring to . . .

. . . learning about the process of getting tenure, and how my office can help new faculty with this. And it's a very appropriate description, but I kept thinking (while eating my cheese enchiladas) it was an equally appropriate description of someone in their youth, considering the mysterious abstraction of sex. And then I realized that the two processes, learning about sex and learning about getting tenure, are remarkably similar. Except that getting tenure is way less climactic, but people congratulate you for it anyway, even though they seldom really understand it.

free metaphors

The other day as I walked through campus I noticed a small sign reading, "free metaphor." "Metaphor" is the name of the campus literary journal that comes out annually, and there was a stack of the small volumes, offering themselves up for public consumption.

For me, I liked the sign even better than what it was advertising. What a great service, offering up "free metaphors" to be used as you see fit. I tried to think of what the image of "free metaphor" itself would be a metaphor of. Stuck, I realized that it was not a metaphor at all, but instead the real possibility of a place where one could retrieve metaphors for use. In my classes, I'm often molding metaphors out of the ether, matching up some common but non-physical situation to create an image of the real physical reality I have to teach in class. It seems backwards: Instead of using the image of a pendulum to describe political swings, I might be found telling the story of financial investments and debts to explain how the pendulum goes to and fro. It's funny and fun to play with. I also really appreciate a good metaphor that maps the physical environment to a social phenomenon. Recently the comparison of yards and lawns has helped my perspective. In any case, a good metaphor is a useful tool for understanding something in a new way, a hammer that drives a nail home.

One thing that I don't think too much about is where a next metaphor, analogy, or other image will come from. The "free metaphor" possibility reminds me that there isn't a stack of these images somewhere that I can page through. So, wouldn't it be great to have a pile of these somewhere -- all brand new, never driven before, or at least not pre-owned at actually put to use to complete the other side of the metaphor. For example, I've been working on a passage for the book that likens a group of scholars at an academic conference to a group of hunting and gathering nomads. (Feel free to insert your favorite academic into a loincloth and march them across the savanna.) But now the metaphor is already used once I revealed the other side of the coin, the reality to which the image maps. Similarly, if I refer to "a broken record," you already know what I'm talking about even without a record player. That metaphor is well worn and understood.

I'd like to have a service where brand new, yet-to-be connected metaphoric images are stacked in front of me, or on a shelf, ready when needed. So lately I've been paying attention to some that might be useful to someone, even though I haven't taken them out for a test drive. That is, I haven't completed any analogy or simile. For example, here's one pile of free metaphors. All free and without restriction for future use:

• a bacon wrapped scallop
• a ball of yarn
• a tangle of yarn
• an out of tune piano
• a violin bow without rosin
• a fan spinning backwards
• a cat licking its own butt
• a newly planted tree
• a worn penny
• the first tulip of spring, before it's opened
• freckles
• a flag pole sans flag

Unlike all the world's pendulums swinging, hammers nailing, and suns setting, these images (and so many others!) are looking for a second job and renewed meanings. Personally, I'm going to try to put that bacon wrapped scallop to use as soon as possible. As soon as I know what for.

by the numbers

Since I've been home from the trip, I've been trying to make sense both of what happened in various session and meetings, and what has been happening since I've been home and working the "normal" job. So I've made a list that enumerates things.

1. "That was the first time I've cried at [this conference] for the right reasons," stated by a friend the evening after Trouble and I gave our presidential invited session. It was strangely flattering to hear this for various reasons. It was also disturbing, given the last four words needed to qualify the statement.

2. Two beers fit nicely into my leather satchel, in nestled around the conference program and other folders, to share in the hotel lobby after a day of sessions.

3. I've been working on a three pronged rationale and set of objectives for the next round of our professional development project. This stemmed from, well, a lot of things, but mostly from the dinner conversation we had with our NSF program officer who was pushing us for important, measurable impacts. The problem for me was that the more I thought about it and the more she described what she was talking about, the less I could justify anything I do as being impactful. And I just got quieter and quieter as I started to realize this. Visiting a school and getting high fives for doing science with kids isn't measurable like a massive research project in which we study the stats of schools throughout a district and correlate these to "performance" on standardized tests. Hosting a gathering that changes the very essence of how people think about their profession and their work is similarly vague. It would be fine if this only meant that for us the initials of "NSF" stood for "no such funding." I'm fine working without funding. Yet, I was realizing that the real meaning behind this was that there wasn't a value to the work I'm doing in a grand scheme of things. I got quieter throughout the evening and have been thinking about this ever since.

4. Four days in southern California, and not a single stop in Disneyland. Sigh.

24. The number of people we had sitting at one family-style meal at an Italian restaurant. It was deafening and wonderful. I ate gnocchi and tiramisu.

40. It cost $40 to get to the airport quickly, so as to make sure I both made it through the last session and still caught my plane.

90. The number of minutes we had for our invited session. It was a luxury. We used most of the time, and filled the rest with questions and discussion.

2061. The year we kept talking about, as though we're from some weird cult that predicts the return of some race of space aliens to take us back to the mother planet.

Infinity. Today in class I finished multiple things: All of physics, the universe, and the course, culminating with the question of gravitons and their application of special relativity and quantum mechanics to understand a bit about what gravitons could "look" like. It's a nice example of how clever we are, demonstrating how something can travel infinite distances. At the end of that we had two minutes left on the clock. I looked at that and then stopped and reminisced a bit, stumbling as I explained that this is one of my very favorite courses to teach, that I am always so proud of the students (I'd admitted I was being sappy), and that I had just finished the last lecture for the course for a very long time -- I won't teach the course again for at least a few years. And then suddenly everyone started clapping. It was nice, flattering. I could have said something about how they were applauding because I had finally stopped talking for once, but for once I had nothing to say. I just blushed and fumbled with papers and tried to tell them that I didn't mean for them to do that. They kept clapping.

And since then I've figured out that maybe there is value in the work that I do in the day-to-day. It won't translate as valuable in any NSF report, but it means enough to a handful of people that they could suddenly disarm me. And maybe it means that the value in my work is in the cracks in between the things we can measure. For now that's the story I'll let myself hold onto.

  

leavin' on a jet plane and other musical themes

Here's how it started. No, strike that. I don't remember how it started anymore, exactly. Somehow in the midst of getting ready for conference presentations, papers, travel, and the like, three of us from various spots in the country started exchanging a few song lyrics, which turned into an exchange of songs. Since then, I create a soundtrack (the playlist is here) for the preparations and anticipation of the meeting itself. It goes like this:

1. Round and Round (Bob Schneider)* -- suggested by me as a song about general angst, including my favorite line, "you wring your hands but the blood pours out ..."
2. Grandpa Was a Carpenter (John Prine) -- My friend "Trouble" suggested this, not for any particular reason but a favorite in his home, and an amusing contrast...
3. Totally F****d (Brian Johnson et al.) -- The above reminded our friend H.C. to really sum up the situation, efforts towards getting ready for big events like this, which in turn made me think of the rest of this list.
4. Heartless (Kanye West) -- reminding me of a friend who talks about having to "put on [her] armor" in getting ready for a conference, anticipating the heartless critique that we face.
5. Conversation With Myself (Jason Mraz) -- Sometimes the act of presenting not only feels one sided, but downright lonely. It's a little painful when someone launches into a critique of your work (and sometimes it's actually really fun that way), but it's especially disheartening when people have nothing to say. Which leads to the image of the next track.
6. Where's the Orchestra? (Billy Joel)  -- This is an image I've proposed before. The song itself is about being in a culture that doesn't mesh with one's general schematic; the video portrays Joel sitting there on a hotel bed with a lit "Applause" sign on his lap. This seems to be the potential result, after months of work going into a presentation and paper, you are often moved aside for the next 12 minute set of slides.
7. Your Mind Is On Vacation (Mose Allison) -- I started listening to Mose Allison because of the jazz piano tracks he lays down. His lyrics are fun because they match exactly a stereotype of some 50's hipster be-bop jazz. Everything rhymes, to a fault. "If silence were golden you couldn't raise a dime, because your mind is on vacation and your mouth is running overtime." Mose is no doubt talking about the individual who raises a hand during a question period and starts in with, "This isn't so much a question as it is a comment . . ." Then they themselves begin singing song #5.
8. Beyond Here Lies Nothin' (Bob Dylan) -- This is a new song of Dylan, and I like the accordion especially. The title simply reminded me of the future of most of the work presented. It's all finished, and this stop is often the end of the line for research questions.
9. Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters (Indigo Girls) -- General disenchantment with others generally leads me to this song, covered by the Indigo Girls, who then remind me (together with their representative H.C.) of
10. Hammer and a Nail (Indigo Girls) -- The reminder that there's more to all of this than any and all of the above. If I really believed in the total uselessness I've described then I wouldn't be leaving my family for 4 days to participate. The truth is, I get to meet with extraordinary people and advocate new lines of work; I get to have others push my own scholarly identity and my efforts; and in turn I get the chance to push on others. Papers on how we even think about working with others, how we work with teachers in new and exciting ways, and (jump up and down exciting!) an invited talk with Trouble to really question and push scholarship in the community. That will really be fun, and "fun" is actually part of the theme of the talk. Speaking of which, I need to finish the slides for that joyful event -- here at 30,000 feet and with 73% battery life remaining.

____

*

Round & Round
music & lyrics by Bob Schneider

When your head falls off your neck
And hits the ground with a smack
And you're back on the wrong track
Where' your at when you lost you're head
Get out of bed that's what I said
And you're feeling like the dead seeing red
Reborn where's my porn
My pants are torn up damnit where's the wine
Put my body in a pine box baby
Bustin' clocks changin' my locks
I know the time it's time to get up
And get out and get over this
But I don't know how and I don't know why

And the world goes round
And the world goes around
And the world goes round & round

When your bets been beat and they turn up the heat
And you feel a little weak and you can hardly speak
And the coconuts come to your house with a bomb
And blow up the cake you got from your mom
And your diapers aren't dry and the neighbors all die
And you feel a little high a little higher than the big blue sky
And you wring your hands and the blood pours out
And the blood pours out

And the world goes round
And the world goes around
And the world goes round & round

When your friends evaporate and you can't catch a break
And you're tied to the stake and everything you hate
Comes crashing down on your big round
Golen greazy crown and you can't make a sound
And you feel like your drowning and you stumble through the dark
And the dogs start to bark and you're fired on a lark
And your skin starts to spark and you're burning up inside
And your dentures start to slide

And the world goes round
And the world goes around
And the world goes round & round

value

This is the bill/receipt that accounted for my (and my mother's) hospital stay when I was born.*

In summary, I cost a grand total of $7.00. I'm not sure what the exact return on this investment has been, but I hope it has at least been positive.

___

*Am I really so narcissistic that I'd think that scanning this into an electronic format and posting a journal entry was valuable? Well, probably. But, actually, this was for a completely different purpose, a conference presentation next week. No, this isn't the scholarly norm, and that's exactly why it will be so useful.

daily dose

After a long day and still more to do tonight to help a student write up some data, I'm reflecting on the hilarity today that followed me wherever I went:

• Standing in line to get a sandwich, two male students talked behind me:
  "You gonna go to class, dude?"
  "I totally don't want to. But I guess I will 'cause I don't want to go wait for the bus now."
  So there's a testimonial for a course: Better than waiting for the bus in the rain.
• Grace got to throw a pie at her principal's face, a reward to the top two readers in each classroom. 640 elementary students flooded the gym and screamed as a handful of kids took turns throwing the pies. I heard about this through another parent after a meeting on campus. She was completely appalled, while I was just amused. I think she couldn't see any redeeming value in throwing a pie at anyone, not to mention a principal. I thought it was just a way to blow off some steam and generate some school spirit. Besides, it's positive reinforcement for reading. "Better than throwing pies in the face of the two lowest scoring readers in each class," I told the aggravated mother. She wasn't amused. I don't think she was even listening.
• Our campus's first ever "technology symposium" was held today, a forum for those who use technology driven pedagogy to present their innovative teaching methods. Only, in one of the presentations [This is so predictable!], when they couldn't get their server to work -- "This has never happened before!" -- they resorted to drawing out on a white board how their interactive web video chat thing would work, if it were working. (The dry erase markers kept fading, adding insult to the situation -- even dry erase technology was foiling them.)
• Tomorrow night K and I are going to a dinner, hosted by a someone who's basically profiting from a loan to a charter school whose board I'm on. The funny twist is that we'll be going with another friend and board member who's Jewish. On Good Friday. Who better to celebrate Good Friday than a friend from the Judaic community? And, we're going to a steak house. I'm pretty sure this would all give my good Catholic mom a heart attack.
• Tonight, as I'm trying to figure out how to explain the story behind some data, I'm looking at typed transcripts of some interviews of teachers. In one passage the teacher is talking about the activity and writing process of a "vexation and venture," but this got transcribed and transposed to "fixation adventure." Not exactly the same, but amusing.

building a metaphor

Sometimes I feel like progress looks something like this, where the things we build are the result of what we take away from other places, sometimes our very foundation:

Personally, I realize which day of the week it is, what must be done for class by tomorrow and what simultaneously must be done to make sure data are analyzed and papers are written. The scheduling of a day or week or semester seems to be the manipulation of one block after another, creating progress as I borrow time from other activities. Personally, I always think of this balancing act as a temporary borrowing of one resource to make space for another, but I can imagine that this can only be sustained for so long.

On bigger, more structural levels (e.g., a university, a school district, or even an entire state), I sometimes see exactly this kind of Jenga™ kind of "investment." Short sighted and short term, many of the building blocks we put into place are just so that the very top of the structure has integrity, but sacrificing the base of the structure. I tried making this argument to my local school board a few weeks ago, but if I had the opportunity to do this again I might want to wear this t-shirt.

disparity and outliers

On Sunday morning I got to read two chapters, notable because it was two chapters in a row. After the swirl of events this week, sitting down to read a book during daylight hours, cup of coffee next to me, was a delicious treat. To be able to read and still be awake after even one chapter is rare enough, but two chapters especially so. Of course, I have a certain set of privileges. First, questioning the very nature of that Jesus character means that my sabbath mornings are pretty relaxed, even on Palm Sunday. Second, and more important, I have a career and culture that allows me a bit of leverage. I can elect not to grade one morning and I'll still have employment the next day. Planes won't fall from the sky if I'm a day behind; mail will still be delivered whether I complete a list of tasks on my 'to do' list; setting aside a paper draft for another day will only impact one or two other, forgiving people.

Yesterday I was reading more about Outliers and the privileges given to children of middle class families. Rather than simply being more financially secure, an entire culture of advantage surrounds them. For example, Karyn was out on Sunday afternoon delivering permission slips to all the members of Troop 2366 so that they can take an educational trip to the city landfill today. (There should be an entire blog entry about that.) Being able to go to a neighborhood school, sign up for a Brownie troop, have parents and mentors that have the flexibility to volunteer their time to contribute to their experiences, play soccer on Saturday mornings and go to violin on Tuesday afternoons -- these all require a specific structure and culture that aren't endemic to all children and families. If we were single parents, if we were both forced to work more, if we didn't advocate for our children in their classes, and if we didn't have a sense ourselves for the value and culture within school, our kids would be predisposed to a much different trajectory through life. This all made me think of basketball.

On the same day, I saw an NPR story about this disparity between graduation rates of members of women's versus men's college basketball teams. UConn's basketball teams, for example, graduate 100% of their top rated women's squad while only one-third of the men's team earns a diploma. At first, I felt the draw towards not being surprised, but then I realized I was making my own assumptions about the character of these different players. So I started to challenge the assumptions I was making and found that I came up with no good reason for why there should be this great discrepancy, unless there are outside factors that make the UConn women's basketball team the outlier that it is, on its way to an undefeated season and a legacy of perfect graduation rates. Perhaps, I wondered, there is something embedded into the academic programs, mentoring, and advising of successful student athlete programs that all of our more general academic programs should pay closer attention to. If a school can recruit students first to play (and win) basketball games, and also assure them of academic success, shouldn't a program like this have something to inform us about how to create academic achievement in all of our students, regardless of background? Or do we dare to exert so much effort? Have we decided not to look at and consider these examples of success that could inform problems in academic disparity? And if we considered these successful examples, would we be bold enough to follow their example? Or would we just continue to label them as "outliers?"

J.S. Bach and 10000 Hours

This is one of those weeks where tasks at hand are from a smorgasbord of offerings. An exam, a grant proposal, interview and class observation for the award, a student defending a senior project, preparations for multiple projects this summer, papers to write . . . the list goes on. All fun things. Culminating the week is the physics open house, so that I found myself at the grocery store at 6:00 AM this morning buying dish detergent, corn syrup, glycerin, and pickles in bulk amounts. Today I used the self checkout, but usually I watch the gears in the cashier's head when I'm buying supplies like this, wondering what kind of fetish they're imagining.* In the meantime I'm figuring out what this year's "Circus of Physics" will look like; how to get my 6-year-old daughter to lie on a bed of nails and whether or not it will be safe to fill a 5 gallon jug with flammable fumes.

But these aren't the things that are worrying me the most. Rather,

1. My co-authors on two different papers are wondering what the hell I'm doing.
2. I'm not sure if I should lead 6-year-olds in soccer practice tomorrow, in the snow, right before I'm supposed to be getting ready for the open house an hour later.
3. Anna's playing violin for a recital on Saturday morning and need accompaniment on the piano.

It's #3 that's been the most stressful of all, a combination of awful timing and the fact that I need to play Bach. Oh, Johann Sebastian, you asshole. Why have you ruined my life with baroque stylings and fingerings that are just tricky enough for me to mess up as I run a simple scale from the right down to the left hand? I like to play a big chord in the right hand with a clunky bass line in the left hand; baroque calls for meticulously articulated lines that run back and forth, one note at a time, from one hand to the other. It's tedious and frustrating; and I just got the music yesterday. Yes, yesterday I started practicing, and now after about 2 and a half hours of practice I think I have it just barely well enough. We'll see on Saturday, especially since I'll be doing physics all day tomorrow and tomorrow night; no other time for practice.

The reason that this all made me think hard enough to write something down is because I've been reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and just finished the chapter about the 10,000 hour rule. What's that? We learn that people who become expert, virtuoso at some skill generally do so after about 10,000 hours of practice. To me this is both intimidating and a reason for hope. It's a lot of work, but it's basically saying that if you have the opportunity and the perseverance to stick with something long and hard enough, you could get really good at it. The thing is, I'm pretty good at piano, but when I think back on all my practicing and playing and just goofing around, I've probably put in about two or three thousand hours of time sitting on a piano bench. Plus the two and a half hours I've been working on Minuet #1. The reason this relatively easy little piece is difficult to sit down and learn immediately is not because I'm not capable, but because I'm not expert.

On the other hand, I was wondering why I wasn't more stressed about facing hundreds, maybe thousands, of people and teaching and "doing physics" for them all night tomorrow. (A real party!) While in the shower, I did a rough calculation: Since I started graduate school, I figured I've put in about 40 weeks per year and 20 hours each of these weeks thinking and/or doing physics teaching. That's (sadly?) maybe a low estimate. That's 800 hours per year, and at that rate it would take me about 12 and a half years to reach that point which will happen . . .

. . . right before my sabbatical last year. So I'm now on the other side of that 10,000 hour mark as a physics teacher. And, when I think about it, most days I never look at my notes and many days I just craft something as I go along and it all works out just fine. Maybe this 10,000 hour rule has something to it after all -- I was pretty skeptical at first.

At any rate, I haven't reached that point with my piano playing. And J.S. Bach is laughing at my expertise in physics -- a lot of good that will do me on Saturday morning.

_____

*I've been tempted to replace the glycerin with some other glycerin-based "personal lubricants," as they're called, based on some other bubble solution recipes I've seen. But I can't imagine the response I'd get for this. "Yup, all 12 bottles you've got there on the shelf . . . unless you've got more in the back?" I also can't imagine what the accountants and auditors who check and reconcile my university accounts would do with this. It's difficult enough for them already.