On the Search for the Genuine

Finally something besides LiLo and Clay…

Posted by Jen - 24/09/08 at 07:09:26 pm

Just stealing a few moments here before my next meeting since nobody booked into office hours…

Apparently it takes impending global financial armageddon to push celebrity stories to the bottom of CNN.com’s agenda.  Although I am still disturbed that stories like “Nicole Kidman says waterfall helped pregnancy” (and no, I am not planning to offer you the web link…who would want to read such a thing!?), at least “Lindsay Lohan confirms she’s dating a woman” and “New dad Clay Aiken says he’s gay” are sinking to the bottom of the “Latest News” heap.

On the other hand, I worry if people really “get” what’s happening on Wall Street.  Sadly, I’m not sure I would get it myself if it weren’t for the this infamous and somewhat offensive stick figure presentation on Google Docs and this ridiculously great episode of This American Life about how the housing crisis unfolded and a lot of great macroeconomics classes at UVA. I sometimes wonder if the only reason that the markets haven’t collapsed completely is that the average American investor has no idea what’s going on.

Musings from the first week of Fall Semester

Posted by Jen - 12/09/08 at 06:09:30 pm

So it’s been a fascinating 8 weeks here in the Candy Cave.  I suppose I could try to detail all of it, but let’s face it, blogs were designed for appetizer-sized chunks of info, not torrents of info at once!

What’s been on my mind lately is the intersection between academia and so-called “real life”.  One of my new colleagues at the Sweetland Writing Center asked me at our pre-year retreat if it was “nice to get away from school” when I go out to visit my horse about 20 minutes outside of town.  It made me start to wonder if I ever really get away from being a comp teacher, even when I’m physically away from the office.  I stand in the grocery line and consider the visual argument being made by the National Enquirer’s cover.  I watch a CBS news story about Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” gaffe and wonder at the speed with which semiotics can evolve–just two weeks ago, the “lipstick” didn’t have “Sarah Palin” smeared all over it.  And just this past Tuesday, I stopped mid-stride with two huge bags of groceries to marvel at my Kroger receipt, analyzing their complex (and ultimately foolish and deceptive) breakdown of manufacturer’s coupon savings, store coupon savings, Kroger Plus Card savings, and overall savings.  It’s like they want you to feel like you’re saving a little money, but not too much–they found a way to make my 54-percent-off-retail savings look much smaller than it really was.

I tell my students every day that being an academic is about discovering new ways of thinking, critically reevaluating the way things have been done in the past, and looking for new challenges, all by using the tools of whichever disciplines seem most applicable (which might explain why psychology is such a popular college major–understanding human emotion and thought is a dandy way to get through one’s everyday mundane tasks.)  So should I be happy to find myself walking the walk and talking the talk that I sell my students, walking around the world and relating to it in my very composition-teacher kind of way?  My husband, who is studying to be a radiographer, says that I think too hard and tire myself out.  No wonder so many of us writing faculty find ourselves holed up with books in corners on the weekends–at least in that world, there’s no worry that analytic thought will “infiltrate” somehow.  It’s already there, a foregone conclusion, and we can feel comfortable and happy to put on our Rhetorical Analysis Hats without feeling like it’s leaching into the rest of our lives.  We get to live the illusion of being able to close it off behind us when we close the book.

I wonder if this is true for every kind of professional.  Do lawyers secretly read the fine print disclaimers at the bottom of every magazine ad?  Do chiropractors walk around looking for subluxations and dislocations in the people who walk by?  Do police officers find it hard to stop looking for concealed weapons and reckless driving long after they’ve shut their departmental locker for the day?  In other words, does our profession end up dictating the dominant way in which we see our entire universes, even beyond the office door?  Or does this only happen to people like teachers, for whom there is no true 9-to-5 schedule–there is always class planning and student emails and reviewing new course materials, and that often infiltrates the weekends and evenings.

This raises the question of whether I would wish this discipline-tastic way of seeing the world on my students, but I’d guess that it would be myopic to assume that they’d prefer my composition-teacher model of the world to the other models they’re exposed to in other classes and other activities.  After all, I didn’t always view the world this way–when I was a college student, I was exposed to dozens upon dozens of ways to envision the world from all sorts of disciplines, people, and professions.  The question, then, is whether we are doomed to approach the world from whichever academic or professional specialty we ultimately choose.  I like to think that I approach the world from the perspective of someone who’s been to a lot of places and been trained to think in a lot of ways, that having worked in a historic home and played college polo and built an ant colony that measured colony movement with piezo strips and served hot dogs to Congressmen all have something to do with how I picture the world today, and maybe that’s true too–in fact, it would make a fine topic for another blog post.  But I suppose that’s enough epistemology for today.

So that’s what’s been on my mind.  Well, that and the presidential election, but it appears that the rest of the blogosphere is doing a bang-up job covering that.

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