A spontaneous urban memorial sprang up outside the convenience store where Raphael Ward was shot last month. His friends left balls, a bat, stuffed toys, candles, flowers -- the toys of a young person not far out of childhood. People wrote messages of grief and solidarity on the wall in sharpie, as high as people could reach, around the corner to another wall.
The wall was painted over some time yesterday. We've cleaned "RIP Sadonte" (his nickname) off our car. Most of the things left in his memory have been removed. All that remains is a box, set up on its side to shield a dozen tall memorial candles from the sleet.
The incident leaves me with an ache in my heart and a chill in my bones.
I ache for Raphael's friends and family, and most of all, for his mother. I ache for the families of the Sandy Hook children and for the family of Hadiya Pendleton. I hear that as of February 1, 1280 more people have died from gunshots in the US since the Sandy Hook shootings -- that's six weeks -- and I ache some more, and my heart starts to go numb.
I fear for my own son, who lives in a world in which a dispute among teenagers can so easily escalate into deadly confrontation instead of ending in a fistfight.
We must have an end to this plague on our nation.
08 February 2013
06 February 2013
Back on the Bike
Two weeks ago, I attempted to take the train to work, but after sitting on it for half an hour with no information available to the train crew about when we might leave the station, I got off, biked back home, got my car, and drove to work. Arriving four hours after I'd first left the house to walk The Offspring to school.
Continued cold weather (it freezes the switches), and then high winds... I drove every day for two weeks. I didn't think too much about the privilege involved with that, until last weekend when I was out on my bike and caught up with a bike messenger and realized he'd been out in every kind of weather.
I'll admit, the first couple of days of driving I enjoyed sitting in my own private, warm, mobile cocoon, with a soundtrack of my choice and a cupholder. But it got old fast.
This morning it was a comparatively balmy 32 degrees, and sunny, and the East River bike path had a dusting of snow that gave a little extra sparkle to the morning light, and I thoroughly enjoyed my ride once again.
-----
At the start of the year, I decided to try not to get all worked up about people who drove or walked or biked into my path, but just let it go.
I pretty quickly realized that that meant I also wasn't going to post on Facebook about the frustrations, because polishing the incidents in my mind, rolling them around and trying to extract little 15-word nuggets that would be at once pithy and humorous and profound, doesn't help much with letting go.
I've been enjoying my rides much more since then. I notice, sometimes, how cool it can be that gazillions of people manage to navigate this fair city in cooperation, rolling up against one another like so many river-bottom stones, polishing one another just a tritch and then continuing on their way.
Continued cold weather (it freezes the switches), and then high winds... I drove every day for two weeks. I didn't think too much about the privilege involved with that, until last weekend when I was out on my bike and caught up with a bike messenger and realized he'd been out in every kind of weather.
I'll admit, the first couple of days of driving I enjoyed sitting in my own private, warm, mobile cocoon, with a soundtrack of my choice and a cupholder. But it got old fast.
This morning it was a comparatively balmy 32 degrees, and sunny, and the East River bike path had a dusting of snow that gave a little extra sparkle to the morning light, and I thoroughly enjoyed my ride once again.
-----
At the start of the year, I decided to try not to get all worked up about people who drove or walked or biked into my path, but just let it go.
I pretty quickly realized that that meant I also wasn't going to post on Facebook about the frustrations, because polishing the incidents in my mind, rolling them around and trying to extract little 15-word nuggets that would be at once pithy and humorous and profound, doesn't help much with letting go.
I've been enjoying my rides much more since then. I notice, sometimes, how cool it can be that gazillions of people manage to navigate this fair city in cooperation, rolling up against one another like so many river-bottom stones, polishing one another just a tritch and then continuing on their way.
05 February 2013
Green Garbage
Throwing away huge quantities of paper may not seem like much of a green moment, even if they're going into a recycling bin. But read on...
I changed offices last summer. In the process, I got rid of a fair number of books. Duplicates and old editions of teaching texts went off to Better World Books, where they'll be resold or donated.
But then I moved all the files from my desk drawers and file cabinets to the furniture in the new office, leaving them pretty close to full.
I have notes from courses I took in graduate school, from studying for doctoral exams, from courses I've taught going all the way back to when I first came to this university ... in 1998. I've typed up a lot of those notes, and revised a lot of the materials, but I still have folders full of hand-written notes and photocopies of handouts. Semester, after semester, after semester. Plus hand-written notes and photocopies of articles related to papers I've given at conferences and subsequently (eventually) published.
And so I'm facing a choice made across the nation in all kinds of contexts: downsize or upsize.
The average size of a home in the US ballooned from 1400 to 2700 square feet between 1970 and 2009. Meanwhile, the average household size decreased by half a person.* So what accounts for the near doubling in the size of all those houses?
Stuff.
We own more clothing, more electronics, more furniture, more kitchen appliances... more of pretty much everything than people in our parents' generation. And we build ever bigger houses to store all of that stuff. We probably store more files, too.
Quick calculation: what percentage of the items in your home have you actually used in the past 12 months? (Challenge: take a walk through your house, including basement, attic, garage, and really pay attention.)
So I have a choice: I can buy a bunch of file boxes and file those excess papers and store them someplace, or I can go through the files and get rid of the papers that I don't need any more. Duplicates of exercises that I've since revised; hand-written class notes I'll never refer to again; rosters, attendance records, printouts of articles; photocopies handed down from my predecessor.
So I've been going through a folder or two a week and getting rid of almost everything. One file drawer is almost empty. By the end of the term, I may no longer need a filing cabinet.
Meanwhile, I'm also going through computer files and deleting old versions of assignments, syllabi, handouts, and materials for use on line. It turns out that data storage, though it feels free because it's paperless, in fact uses a huge amount of energy.
If we keep stuff under control, we'll never be tempted to move to a bigger space just to store more stuff. As often happens with these kinds of choices, the environmental impact is mirrored in a positive impact on the wallet.
-----
* Isn't statistics fun?
I changed offices last summer. In the process, I got rid of a fair number of books. Duplicates and old editions of teaching texts went off to Better World Books, where they'll be resold or donated.
But then I moved all the files from my desk drawers and file cabinets to the furniture in the new office, leaving them pretty close to full.
I have notes from courses I took in graduate school, from studying for doctoral exams, from courses I've taught going all the way back to when I first came to this university ... in 1998. I've typed up a lot of those notes, and revised a lot of the materials, but I still have folders full of hand-written notes and photocopies of handouts. Semester, after semester, after semester. Plus hand-written notes and photocopies of articles related to papers I've given at conferences and subsequently (eventually) published.
And so I'm facing a choice made across the nation in all kinds of contexts: downsize or upsize.
The average size of a home in the US ballooned from 1400 to 2700 square feet between 1970 and 2009. Meanwhile, the average household size decreased by half a person.* So what accounts for the near doubling in the size of all those houses?
Stuff.
We own more clothing, more electronics, more furniture, more kitchen appliances... more of pretty much everything than people in our parents' generation. And we build ever bigger houses to store all of that stuff. We probably store more files, too.
Quick calculation: what percentage of the items in your home have you actually used in the past 12 months? (Challenge: take a walk through your house, including basement, attic, garage, and really pay attention.)
So I have a choice: I can buy a bunch of file boxes and file those excess papers and store them someplace, or I can go through the files and get rid of the papers that I don't need any more. Duplicates of exercises that I've since revised; hand-written class notes I'll never refer to again; rosters, attendance records, printouts of articles; photocopies handed down from my predecessor.
So I've been going through a folder or two a week and getting rid of almost everything. One file drawer is almost empty. By the end of the term, I may no longer need a filing cabinet.
Meanwhile, I'm also going through computer files and deleting old versions of assignments, syllabi, handouts, and materials for use on line. It turns out that data storage, though it feels free because it's paperless, in fact uses a huge amount of energy.
If we keep stuff under control, we'll never be tempted to move to a bigger space just to store more stuff. As often happens with these kinds of choices, the environmental impact is mirrored in a positive impact on the wallet.
-----
* Isn't statistics fun?
03 February 2013
Background Check
Open a bank account
Get a credit card
Rent an apartment
Buy a home
Buy a car, rent a car, lease a car
Get a job
Get a welfare check
Get admitted to college
For all of these things, you need to submit documentation and submit to a background check.
Don't want a background check? You can get a library card... and in many states, any gun you want.
Get a credit card
Rent an apartment
Buy a home
Buy a car, rent a car, lease a car
Get a job
Get a welfare check
Get admitted to college
For all of these things, you need to submit documentation and submit to a background check.
Don't want a background check? You can get a library card... and in many states, any gun you want.
Close The Door! A Public-Service Rant
Apparently, many New Yorkers are unaware of the fact that if they hold the door open, cold air will blow in and warm air will blow out.
Actually, it's worse than that. See, heat rises. So the warm air inside the door rushes with gale force out and up into the sky, to be replaced at floor level by the heavier cold air, which in turn pushes what's left of the warm inside air up ... and out the door.
So when you (whoever you are) stand there holding the door wiiiiiiide open, waiting for your entire posse, or perhaps family, still ten feet away, to approach, going in or out, you're letting the warm indoor air out and replacing it with frigid air from outside.
And, in all likelihood, freezing a security guard or a doorman or the employees of a building, and perhaps also its patrons and/or inhabitants.
And a thermostat is triggered, and somewhere in the subterranean depths a furnace turns itself back on and burns a couple gallons of oil to heat the frigid air you just let in.
So for the love of God, or the environment, or even just your fellow human being ... please, please, shut that door.
</>soapbox
Actually, it's worse than that. See, heat rises. So the warm air inside the door rushes with gale force out and up into the sky, to be replaced at floor level by the heavier cold air, which in turn pushes what's left of the warm inside air up ... and out the door.
So when you (whoever you are) stand there holding the door wiiiiiiide open, waiting for your entire posse, or perhaps family, still ten feet away, to approach, going in or out, you're letting the warm indoor air out and replacing it with frigid air from outside.
And, in all likelihood, freezing a security guard or a doorman or the employees of a building, and perhaps also its patrons and/or inhabitants.
And a thermostat is triggered, and somewhere in the subterranean depths a furnace turns itself back on and burns a couple gallons of oil to heat the frigid air you just let in.
So for the love of God, or the environment, or even just your fellow human being ... please, please, shut that door.
</>soapbox
01 February 2013
What Professors Do: Committee Work
I was talking to The Offspring this morning about some aspect of what it is we do as professors and it got me thinking about the fact that a lot of it is pretty opaque to people outside the profession. So here is one salvo in what may or may not become a series.
I'll start with committees. People in a variety of professions groan about having to go to committee meetings, and professors are no exception. But faculty governance is crucial to a well-run institution of higher education: It should be the faculty who make decisions about changes to the curriculum, but also to a wide variety of other issues.
One of the major issues in higher education in the past two decades has to do with what role new technologies should have in teaching, and I've served on a handful of different committees investigating various aspects of this question.
If it's to function well, a committee needs a clear mandate, which may come from a department chair or a school dean or from a different faculty committee, and an effective chair who can delegate research and analysis tasks to the committee members and then write a clear report with specific implement-able recommendations, all within a relatively short time frame.
A couple of years ago I chaired a committee that dealt in part with a question about class size for hybrid and on-line courses. Hybrid courses combine on-line assignments with traditional, face-to-face teaching, usually via course management software that allows students to interact from computers or tablets at various times during the week or the semester.
Some of the questions we thought about: What's the optimal size for a graduate seminar in the humanities? How does that change if the seminar is taught on-line? What if it's a hybrid? We looked at the practices of institutions similar to our own and we searched out research evaluating faculty work-load and student engagement at various class sizes.
It turns out there's been a decent amount of research on on-line classes. (The magic number: 16.1. Good luck finding that one-tenth of a student.) We had trouble finding work on hybrid classes, so the next step was to seek out colleagues in various disciplines who were teaching on line and ask them about their experiences.
Some might think it's easier to teach a hybrid class than a traditional one, because you don't have to get dressed up and show up in the classroom. Instructors know that writing up a lecture can take a lot more time than delivering it in person, and managing an on-line community is time-consuming. But we needed to document this in order to make a convincing case to set policy.
Other committees might look at what courses students should take, or review syllabi to make sure courses in a given category are comparable (e.g. in the amounts of reading and writing assigned, or in the amount of student collaboration required), or ask what should be done about grade inflation....
It's pretty much endless. But I think that's the way it should be.
I'll start with committees. People in a variety of professions groan about having to go to committee meetings, and professors are no exception. But faculty governance is crucial to a well-run institution of higher education: It should be the faculty who make decisions about changes to the curriculum, but also to a wide variety of other issues.
One of the major issues in higher education in the past two decades has to do with what role new technologies should have in teaching, and I've served on a handful of different committees investigating various aspects of this question.
If it's to function well, a committee needs a clear mandate, which may come from a department chair or a school dean or from a different faculty committee, and an effective chair who can delegate research and analysis tasks to the committee members and then write a clear report with specific implement-able recommendations, all within a relatively short time frame.
A couple of years ago I chaired a committee that dealt in part with a question about class size for hybrid and on-line courses. Hybrid courses combine on-line assignments with traditional, face-to-face teaching, usually via course management software that allows students to interact from computers or tablets at various times during the week or the semester.
Some of the questions we thought about: What's the optimal size for a graduate seminar in the humanities? How does that change if the seminar is taught on-line? What if it's a hybrid? We looked at the practices of institutions similar to our own and we searched out research evaluating faculty work-load and student engagement at various class sizes.
It turns out there's been a decent amount of research on on-line classes. (The magic number: 16.1. Good luck finding that one-tenth of a student.) We had trouble finding work on hybrid classes, so the next step was to seek out colleagues in various disciplines who were teaching on line and ask them about their experiences.
Some might think it's easier to teach a hybrid class than a traditional one, because you don't have to get dressed up and show up in the classroom. Instructors know that writing up a lecture can take a lot more time than delivering it in person, and managing an on-line community is time-consuming. But we needed to document this in order to make a convincing case to set policy.
Other committees might look at what courses students should take, or review syllabi to make sure courses in a given category are comparable (e.g. in the amounts of reading and writing assigned, or in the amount of student collaboration required), or ask what should be done about grade inflation....
It's pretty much endless. But I think that's the way it should be.
Be My Fair-Trade Valetine
If you're thinking of chocolate for V-Day, please think Fair Trade.
Last fall, Hershey finally made the commitment to stop buying cocoa beans from farms that use children, some of them slaves, to harvest the beans. As of 2020. Hershey was the last of the major manufacturers to agree to eliminate child labor.
That's seven more years of children being sold into slavery to pick cocoa beans by impoverished parents. Eight, at the time they made the announcement. Does it really take eight years to change the supply chain?
Fair Trade chocolate, on the other hand, guarantees a living wage for the farmers. So they can send their kids to school rather than sending or selling them off to work in the fields. Organic chocolate gets a premium price from the bottom of the supply chain, and allows even better financial conditions for the growers.
If you have a good health food store in your neighborhood, look for the Fair Trade label on the bar; bonus, buy chocolate that's both organic and fair trade. Here's some more information about good fair trade chocolate.
It's a luxury. We don't need chocolate. We really have no excuse to buy the cheap stuff, knowing the labor practices it enables.
(Also: it's true, if you live in the Northeast US, you can't get local chocolate or coffee. Something else to mull over.)
Last fall, Hershey finally made the commitment to stop buying cocoa beans from farms that use children, some of them slaves, to harvest the beans. As of 2020. Hershey was the last of the major manufacturers to agree to eliminate child labor.
That's seven more years of children being sold into slavery to pick cocoa beans by impoverished parents. Eight, at the time they made the announcement. Does it really take eight years to change the supply chain?
Fair Trade chocolate, on the other hand, guarantees a living wage for the farmers. So they can send their kids to school rather than sending or selling them off to work in the fields. Organic chocolate gets a premium price from the bottom of the supply chain, and allows even better financial conditions for the growers.
If you have a good health food store in your neighborhood, look for the Fair Trade label on the bar; bonus, buy chocolate that's both organic and fair trade. Here's some more information about good fair trade chocolate.
It's a luxury. We don't need chocolate. We really have no excuse to buy the cheap stuff, knowing the labor practices it enables.
(Also: it's true, if you live in the Northeast US, you can't get local chocolate or coffee. Something else to mull over.)
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