The Move

As I’ve mentioned before, my husband and I are both doctoral students (in fact, as of this month, we’re both ABD – All But Dissertation – congratulations, John!). We’re currently living in Baton Rouge, LA, which is the city where John is a student at LSU, and it’s located more or less midway between Lafayette, LA, where I’m a student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (about an hour’s drive) and New Orleans, where until this month I was a lecturer at Xavier University of Louisiana (an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half away, depending on traffic). Trying to teach full time AND be mom to a toddler AND work on a dissertation AND more recently bake bread every weekend because we’re trying to live on one lecturer’s salary and one grad student stipend has really been taking its toll on both me and John, which is why I said “until this month” when I mentioned my lecturership. John and I have done something that’s probably COMPLETELY insane and decided that in order to focus on my diss and my family, I would quit my job and we would move back to New York, where we would divide our time between his parents in the Hudson Valley and my parents on Long Island. Yes, for the next year, we’ll be living with our parents and in-laws.

On the one hand, we’re incredibly fortunate. We have not one but two sets of parents who are that supportive of us pursuing doctoral degrees in the humanities, even though they know what the job market is like. (Actually, having just typed that, I started to cry a little and the rest of this blog seemed a bit moot.)

While we’re already misty, here’s John’s parents with Danny when he’s about three months old, on his first visit to New York during Mardi Gras break 2009.

And here are my mom and dad with an almost-one-year-old Danny at our house this past Thanksgiving. *sniff*

To get un-verklemmt and continue, though, on the other hand, we are currently renting a two-bedroom house (okay, a small, falling-down two-bedroom shotgun shack – for real) and we have a LOT of stuff and we’re used to having our space. Again, the two sets of parents are being AMAZING about this. My dad is a United Methodist minister whose current appointment includes a parsonage that makes me feel a bit guilty for all those years I complained bitterly about how parsonages like the one on Seventh Heaven don’t really exist. John’s parents are going through every box in their basement to pare down and create a get-away space for us. These are PHENOMENAL people.

What John and I have actually been worried about? (Are you ready? This is absurd.) We don’t want to spend a year without access to our movie and music collections. That’s right: we don’t want to box up all our DVDs and CDs and put them out of our reach in the attic for a year and when we try to talk about which favorites we might want to keep accessible, you’d think we were talking about our children or at the very least, our cats.

(Our child meeting one of our cats about a year ago.)

So what we finally decided to do, and this will do us for the long haul until we are gainfully employed and can afford nice shelving/storage (and when we do that, books will come first, then music and movies -- and it might have to wait until we can buy a house and install built-ins), is put ALL our DVDs and CDs into books and box up all the cases for long-term storage.

We did all the DVDs Wednesday night and are now working on the CDs. Due to a combination of my having underestimated how many DVDs we own by about 150 (which means I’ve also underestimated how many CDs we have, total damage not yet known) and Target not stocking enough 256-disc books anyway, we’re going to need to buy some more materials, but here are the results of the DVD phase:

You see there nine bankers’ boxes of DVD cases and a total of four books containing all the DVDs from those cases; that is, two 256-disc and one 128-disc books of John’s and my DVDs and a 24-disc book of Danny’s DVDs, for a total of just shy of 670 DVDs (there’s some space in each book for new additions, but not a whole lot). I think even though we knew the movies would be a LOT more accessible this way, we were pleasantly surprised by the space-savings and are excited to do something on the same model with the CDs.

However: We have more CDs than we do DVDs. We're currently just about halfway done (as near as I can figure -- we're up to Ennio Morricone), and have filled a 320-disc book and almost filled a 256-disc book. I'm going to have to make another run to get more storage, and we've already bought out Target and Office Depot (the nice man at Wal-Mart told me they no longer carry CD albums). And we've already run into the first snag: CDs have liner notes that need to be archived in the books along with the discs, but they're exactly the same size as the pockets in the books and also floppy, which makes them next-to-impossible to get into the pages without damage. I got to somewhere in the Bs before I gave up on trying to archive liner notes, except in VERY special cases. And of course, that means that not all of the CDs "match" in the way they're archived, and that's the kind of thing that could send my obsessive-compulsive self into a tailspin in the middle of the night. But as sacrifices go, I think that's one I can live with.

I really, REALLY hope to be able to report soon that all the media archiving is done, the cases boxed, and the crappy shelving out on the curb (so if you're in the Baton Rouge area and in need of free, rickety CD or DVD storage, swing by and grab some!).

In Defense of Mr. Rogers

So, the reason I decided I wanted to start blogging again was that I was goofing off on Youtube and came across this (a couple years old) piece apparently from Fox and Friends about a study (from LSU of all places) demonstrating that Mr. Rogers is responsible for the Sense of Entitlement so prevalent in Kids Today:



This infuriated me for a number of reasons, and I had no idea where/how to go about expressing this. And I thought to myself, "Gee, if only I had a forum for expressing this kind of anger in an articulate fashion! I ought to start a blog! Oh, wait, I have a blog. Only, I haven't done anything with it in more than a year, and when I last wrote, all I did was put my foot in it and post PSAs from YouTube." So, I deleted all the old posts, changed the theme, and put up an introductory blog entry.  All preparatory to expounding exactly why it is that I got so angry about something Faux News said about Mr. Rogers three or so years ago (that is, half a decade after he died and PBS stopped airing his show).

First of all, there is the fact that I love Mr. Rogers and everything he stands for.

Second, there is the fact that my mom was probably the biggest fan Mr. Rogers ever had. I grew up on Mr. Rogers. I got my share of Bs and even the occasional C. I did not got to my professors at the end of the semester and explain that I really need an A, so could they just look my essays over and see if they can find a few extra points. This is not a value that Mr. Rogers espouses. He tells every child that s/he is special just by her/his being her/himself, but he also encourages intelligence, curiosity, and hard work. He just argues that a child is special even when s/he fails at a pursuit.

Third, there is the fact that it has always baffled me that Mr. Rogers was never the face of American Christianity. Christians in America are constantly laboring against this unflattering and often offensive vision of what they are supposed to be, espoused by non-Christians in America. This view is unfortunately not made out of whole cloth; it is based on the idiosyncrasies -- and often outright bigotry -- of very public Christian figures such as Jerry Falwell, Fred Phelps, and Pat Robertson. So here is Mr. Rogers, a Presbyterian minister who advocates that "feelings are mentionable and manageable," that we should get to know and love our neighbors for their individual personalities and strengths, that there is joy in the simple action of stamping a foot and wonder in the process of manufacturing chairs, and instead of saying, "Here's a positive role model!", that voice of the Right, Fox News, accuses him of being singlehandedly responsible for ruining two generations of young people and actually calls him "evil." Sure, he's a square; but my generation actually values nerdiness, so that could be celebrated as a virtue. He was a successful and compassionate public figure for four decades, with an unwaveringly, though not overwhelmingly, Christian focus, and the same people who stick up for Pat Robertson roll over on him. Why not celebrate him?

Fourthly, there's the fact that there is a much more sensible explanation for why college students over the last five years or so have suddenly become so disengaged for the length of as semester and then ready to beg for "extra points" during finals week. It doesn't make sense that it's Mr. Rogers' fault since he's been on the air since the sixties. Hell, I've only been teaching college since 2003 and I can attest that this is a problem that, on the grand scale at which it currently exists, has developed since then. Certainly, there have always been students who goof off all semester and then freak out around finals time, but this systematic withdrawal for the duration of the semester followed by a request for "extra credit projects" after final grades have been calculated is new, strange, and widespread. I'd estimate that my husband and I each get this kind of response from 5%-10% of our students EACH SEMESTER. Those of you drawing bell curves at home are saying, well sure, those are your Fs and maybe some Ds. Not so. Most of them are Bs hoping to be "given" As. And let me clarify now, I've never "given" a grade in my life; grades are earned, As to Fs.

However, something has been happening more recently that corresponds to this change in college students' behavior: a certain flavor of education reform (you can read about it in the New York Times here). There is this idea that teachers must be held "accountable," which is a fine idea; unfortunately, it has been decided by a whole bunch of people who have privileged, private educations themselves and for the most part, no formal pedagogy training deciding that the only way to measure a teacher's success is by measuring the standardized test scores of his/her students. The result of this kind of policy (and it's bipartisan -- No Child Left Behind and The Race to the Top both fall into this category) is that students are taught that the only important thing about school is the scores they get on those one set of tests at the end of the year. There is no love of a process of learning, and thus low engagement throughout the school year. And then there is a mad scramble at the end of the year to get high marks on one set of tests. Of COURSE those students flounder in college, where so much is self-directed and where all the scores and all the class meetings count. Hopefully, after a semester or two, they figure it out, but it's unrealistic to expect that after twelve years of marking time until the Big Tests, students will suddenly be able to redefine the way they learn in a single semester. But I hope that most of them do, and that they find reasons to actually enjoy their classes after that. And when they do, if they're my students, I will personally sing them this.

Hey, There

So, there was a blog here beginning a little over two years ago, and continuing until a little over a year ago. By then I'd had a baby. And a few disgruntled political rants. And I ran out of time and energy.

I still really don't have either time or energy, but I wanted to give this another shot anyway, 'cause I'm chock full of opinions and interests and stuff. And I figure, if my half a reader (or less?) wants to hear about them, that's awesome.

So ...

Things I expect I might be interested in and/or have opinions about that are likely to turn up here?

1. Grad School: I'm a doctoral student in the English Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, majoring in Children's Literature, with minors in Restoration/Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Early American Literature, and Rhetoric/Composition. So, you might hear about grad school itself, or about stuff I'm reading. Just to be clear, I'm All But Dissertation, so I'm not in coursework reading diverse materials; what I'm reading now is all related to one topic, the one covered in my diss.
2. News/Politics: I try really hard not to talk about this because it just makes me angry most of the time, but more often than I'd like I end up talking about stuff on the news, or about politics. To be clear, my own, personal politics tend to be a bit oddball, and revolve around everyone needing to be generally altruistic more often than not, which is a fairly unpopular ideology in the contemporary US.
3. Food and Sewing: Or more generally, stuff you might do in home ec. I'm kind of big on saving money and the planet by doing stuff myself rather than purchasing stuff ready-made. Most especially, this tends to revolve around baking my own bread (but as I don't grow my own grain or mill my own flour, I don't have too many illusions about the fact that while I save a TON of money doing this, I'm not doing much for the environment).
4. My Family: I've been married for going on four years to a talented playwright, fellow doctoral student, and all-around spiffy guy named John and we have an eighteen-month-old son, Danny.

So, those are the things you're probably most likely to hear about, but based on the eclecticism of those things, you probably have some idea how likely I am to stay on-topic. And it's entirely possible I won't discipline myself to post at all. But we'll see.