Through the looking glass

How bad is my schedule that I now look forward to plane flights and classroom lectures as brief windows of comparative relaxation?!?

Waterloo?

"Waterloo," Jim DeMint, you psychotic asshole?

Yeah, it is, you fucks.

Yours.

Jiggity-jig, one more once

Slowly digging out here. For a Spring "Break", there sure has been a hell of a lot of eventuality in the past 7 days. Got back from a family affair on Wednesday, leaving for Dallas with a van-load of students today. Where exactly was the "week off", again?

"Aw, c'mon, we're not all named Paddy, y'know..."

Beannachtai la feile Padraig, ya feckin' eedjits!

Sorrow

Sometimes sorrow can crack open the heart, so that healing pours in.

That's what I saw today. I hope.

Beyond burnout, but worth it

Battlefield Band rocked the house. Not only fantastic virtuosos, with an incredible, high-energy, and off-the-cuff hilarious stage show, but also easy-going, friendly gentlemen--the antithesis of prima donnas. I'll have a post for another day on the things that having been road musician in your own past tell you the visiting road musicians might want, or not want, to deal with--and how that helps improve the hospitality you can figure out to offer.

Gig dropped at 8pm, they played the last note--joined by the TTU Set-Dancers and your numble narrator--at around 10:30pm. Sold over 100 CDs, which was fantastic news in terms of the bottom line, but deferred escaping the building.

Back to our crib 11:30pm, for an after-party that stretched toward 3am. Fantastic crack with the lads, introduction and re-introductions that crossed decades between meetings (nice to see The General and Alan Reid get re-acquainted, after a good 25 years). Around 3:15am, boot 'em out the door, so we can spend an hour cleaning so Taiyo doesn't have to do it, and then leave for the airport around 4am, to check in for the 5:15 crack o' dawn flight.

Connections in Houston and Chi, arrive Hartford to be met by Dharmonia's mom. Quick trip up the Mass Pike, and now crashing big-time.

Helluva lot of events in precisely the past 24 hours.

Aw haw hey!

Battlefield Band in the LBK hizzouse.

Titanic.

digital gratitude

I absolutely flippin love dropbox.com. And my feelings for code-slinging computer-superstar student assistants ain't far behind. Thank you Glen Hunt!

Still standing

Enduring some losses, but still here, and grateful for beloved friends and students.

Van Jones goes after Glenn Beck, Beck pees himself with fear...

Incredible speech from Jones, who Beck character-assassinated right out of the White House "Green Jobs Initiative" post:

Jones instead had kind words for the Fox News host:

Last thing I want to say is this: To my fellow countryman, Mr. Glenn Beck. I see you, and I love you, brother. I love you, and you cannot do anything about it. I love you, and you cannot do anything about it. Let’s be one country! Let’s be one country! Let’s get the job done!

Beck won't be able to handle it--any more than a cockroach running from the light--but Jones has hit on the best possible way to hit back at the toxic opportunists and psychotic fanatics of the modern "conservative" movement. Or, to quote Gerrald Winstanley:

To conquer them with love, Stand up now, stand up now,
To conquer them with love, Stand up now
To conquer them with love, As it does you behoove
For He is King above, No power is like to love
Stand up now.

Gassho.

Quick hit: retraining after the coffee break

Just back from the Delta blues gig: once a week (Thurs nights) in a coffeeshop where the clientele can, on any given night, be overladen with too many posing (and loud!) high school students, oblivious to those few others who might've actually come out to hear the music. But on other nights it can be OK, if the ambient noise level is reasonably low and my hands are working reasonably well. Not the best night tonight, playing-wise, but not the worst either.

This next picks up from a comment over on the ProfHacker blog (where a Dr Coyote article on teaching to large classrooms will appear in the next couple of weeks), where the PH crew asked for suggestions about "15 minute activities that improve the next day's efficiency."

Was working earlier today with teaching assistants on the materials for the Friday discussion sections, the balance to the Monday/Wednesday lectures when, on Fridays, the TA's take over in order to create a different interactional dynamic. The kiddos need the contrast--because having to deal with Dr Coyote two days a week is quite sufficiently intense--and they need to take responsibility for their own interactions with one another.

Down-side, of course, is when/if certain little criminals decide that the Friday meetings are somehow "less important" or "not real classes", it means a week away before the next Wednesday when I can bring the hammer down upon them. And, even when they're not criminal, it can be damned difficult for them to hold onto the continuity from Wednesday to Wednesday, if the Friday content is chunked-out separately or unrelatedly. So we try to have Friday group tasks & chores pick up from Wednesday lecture, and feed-into shared activities on the Monday morning--it makes for much better continuity.

I also work on continuity from one class meeting directly to the next. Immediately after every meeting of a class, including the MWF 50-minute sessions with the undergrads and the TR 80-minutes with the grads, I send a Blackboard email "further to meeting of XX-XX-XXXX [date]", in which I reiterate the meeting's topic, point to new resources relevant to the day's discussion (at the same time, I am converting and uploading the day's Flash slideshow--I teach music history so audio and video embeds are important for student review), cite next due dates, and so on. I find it keeps the continuity from the end of one class session through to the beginning of the next--in musician terms, this would be "connecting the energy at the end of one phrase to the beginning of the next"--as well as providing a concrete, succinct, cogent summary, meeting-by-meeting, of that course's progress through the semester.

It's a little more than 15 minutes, and it happens after each class meeting rather than once a day, but it certainly seems to help both students and professor with continuity.

Wisdom is wisdom, the Dharma is the Dharma...

...whatever the forum.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, spiritual (and quasi-political) leader of the Tibetan people in exile after the Chinese invasion of 1950-51 (and captured most harrowingly in Martin Scorsese's mournful Kundun) has a remarkable ability to take the most banal questions in the most asinine, dumbed-down situations with the most predictable answers and turn them sufficiently on their head that he can elicit insight, even from Larry King.

Case in point:

King asks: "the American people want both trade with China and independence for Tibet; how can they resolve this contradiction?"

HHDL: "... Tibet does not want independence from China! We are a landlocked technologically backward country; we need China's help. No, we want autonomy and the preservation of Tibetan culture--but NOT independence."

Talk about redirecting energy from tired paths to those with new possibilities!

Remarkable. I am privileged beyond measure to have had the opportunity to take refuge vows with the man himself. The Vows are the vows, and the Dharma is the Dharma, no matter where, from or with whom.

But it damned sure is easier, as a fallible human, to stick to the Middle Path with a leader like that as inspiration and role-model.

Single-tasking

It has become all the fashion on the productivity blogs to bash multi-tasking, while at the same time, on the education blogs, self-consciously "progressive" types are bashing hidebound *resistance* to multi-tasking.. I think, however, that such trendy bashing proceeds from somewhat different critiques. On the productivity blogs, the critique is that multi-tasking, which is conventionally understood as "doing two or more things at the same time" (editing, talking on the telephone, monitoring social-networking feeds, etc, etc), actually erodes productivity--that the illusion is believing that either one of the tasks being performed simultaneously "to save time" is being executed as well as either could be executed sequentially.

For the edu-bloggers, the contrary argument--in terms of their contrasted clientele of students--is that 21st century youth (and in this I'm including anybody anywhere in any formalized educational system, age 5 to around age 26) spend nearly all of their waking hours multi-tasking anyway (cell phone, facebook updates, text messaging all occurring simultaneously with, oh, I don't know, operating an automobile, "studying" for a test, "taking notes" in a lecture) that it's artificial, probably uncomfortable, and certainly counter-productive to insist that they suddenly switch gears entirely and become one-pointed in their attention during the tasks that we think should be accomplished by mono-tasking.

Historically, in the K-12 world, as I understand it educators have finessed this by diagramming the durations of attention of which children are capable at various stages of cognitive development: 90 seconds at age 6, two-and-a-half minutes at age 10, and so on (the likely inaccuracy of my time estimates here revealing my embarrassing unfamiliarity with educational technique). This strikes me as an OK/not-bad solution to the existing situation--but not one that is really applicable for a college-age clientele who are supposed to be learning how to expand and focus their concentration, in terms of both topics and durations.

But I don't think the edubloggers quite have hold of the right of the stick either. There's an old saying back from all those years ago in the 1970s, "If you studied stoned, you better take the exam stoned." (Parenthetically, I can still say that, four decades later, I still see undergrad music kids operating from the same numb-skulled presumption--trumpet players never change) I don't hold with trendy parallel current view about multi-tasking's suitability. I think contemporary college students don't know how to concentrate and that part of our job is to teach them how.

On the other hand, people do sometimes comment on the work-load I carry, and/or the degree to which I can "multi-task," thinking of it as revealing higher-than-normative productivity. I don't happen to believe that--I'm crucially aware of what I could be producing and of the colossal degree to which I'm constantly falling short--but that repeated assertion has made me think about what it might be they think they're seeing. And I don't think it's multi-tasking; there's something else going on here.

What I think is being observed is something I learned years ago, as a survival skill, somewhere in the twelve years we were in graduate school, or maybe even before that when I went back to finish the aborted undergrad degree, or maybe even before that, when I was working as a bookstore night-manager, or restaurant cook, or framing carpenter. I learned that I was never going to have the number of hours, or the extended blocks of time, that would let me practice uninterruptedly as long as I wanted or in open-ended ways.

When I was carpentering, I learned to get up at 4:30am and practice until I had to be at work at 7:30, because trying to practice chromatic approaches after a full day of framing houses, and a shower, was a recipe for falling asleep.

When I was cooking, I'd work double-shifts three days a week (14 hour days: 9am-11pm), so that more days were open for practicing. I'd get out of the restaurant at 11 and walk three miles home across town, trying to unwind enough so that I could sleep readily and get up early.

At the bookstore, I'd work 7-midnight, take a last train from Cambridge's Harvard Square, sprint for the last bus at Government Center in Lynn, and hope that bus in turn made a connection that would take me all the way up to my home town on the North Shore so I could walk only a couple of blocks to my friend Larry's house--if I didn't make that last connection, I'd walk 5 miles there. And get up early to practice.

Night-managing the guitar studio, I'd get up and get to the studio two or three hours before opening time, so I could have the place to myself, away from distractions or noisy apartment neighbors, and better concentrate on the practicing. I'd sit behind the desk once we opened up and play scales and patterns on the house acoustic guitars for hours upon end, driving everybody in the waiting room crazy, when Larry & I weren't playing Irish tunes on fiddle and mandolin and driving them crazier.

I taught myself to sight-read on the Brookline Green Line train heading to the Studio every morning and, late night, riding home at night. I still remember the workbook: an early edition of Clough's Chords, Keys, Scales, Intervals, and Triads.

When I went back to school, I'd read the 4th edition Grout Music History textbook on the Red Line to Dorchester, when I wasn't sitting there, book closed, practice piano fingerings (Stravinsky's Les Cinqs Doigts and Bartok's Mikrokosmos) on its spine.

One of the most amazing guitarists I've ever heard, Wisconsin's Jack Grassel, said to me, "if you work at home, keep the guitar out, on a stand, so if there's only a few minutes free, you don't have to waste time pulling it out of the case."

I'd sit there in the late-night Wednesday or sign-on Sunday shifts at the Bloomington public radio station, my throat raw and voice shot from screaming over the 9-piece horn band the night before, the mic shut off, and play Dave Baker's 101 Bebop Licks and 33 common-practice bebop heads in 22-minute increments while the LP's of Bruckner and Brahms spooled through their sides. I'd sit at the station's sole MS DOS desktop, which ran the AP ticker and was embedded in a wall of World War II surplus sound-gear about 5 feet off the ground, so I had to use a high stool, and transcribe classroom lecture notes onto floppy discs, with the on-air feed turned up loud so I could hear it.

I learned to carry along a primitive walkman everywhere, so I could block out ambient noise wherever I was. Studying for my doctoral exit exams, I had three huge 5-inch loose-leaf binders, one for each major topic area (Baroque, American, 20th century), so huge they wouldn't fit in a knapsack, so I strapped them all together with a martial-arts belt, and carried them everywhere.

Nowadays, I stand or fall on the hour-by-hour scheduling of the Outlook planner. I tell students asking at the end of class for a meeting time to please send me an email, because I can only guarantee that the time is available (and will be reserved) if I'm sitting there with the Outlook planner open.

I block out the week literally hour-by-hour, always making sure, as I've blogged before, that there's not only prep-time for each class or meeting, but also followup-time. As I've said, nowadays I'll write a followup note (kind of "minutes or "action-items") for every meeting: student, faculty, survey, or seminar class. It means that almost every hour of the week is locked-in, and for some people would "feel" terribly rigid, but for me it's actually liberating. Because I can be reasonably confident that there will be time to do everything that needs to be done within the constraints of the timetable on which they need to be done. But it has to happen right then, not later, and not optionally--it has to be right then.

And it can all go to hell, of course, if the inevitable unpredicted interruptions overwhelm the small chunks of time in the schedule allocated for them. These days, with a parent failing, also by the hour, it's particularly difficult to stay focused.

But it's particularly important, now, in the job I've held these past 10 years. Because now, the blocked-out hours and half-hours and quarter-hours are not only essential to getting my own work done, but absolutely essential to the viable progress of my students--especially graduate students--in their own life-plans. I spent 12 years in graduate school and I do have some grasp of how overwhelming every single hurdle can seem. What that means is that they have to believe that, meeting by meeting and semester-by-semester, I am totally locked-in, for that particular chunk of time together, on helping them every way I can, right there and right then.

It matters that I've learned, over the past 30 years, to single-task--to apply one-pointed attention--in the pursuit of my own long-term goals. It's even more important, now, that I apply that attention to the long-term goals and well-being of my students.

Talent = chance; effort = guts

Jesus, what an incredible insight, from the much-missed John Fahey (a/k/a "Blind Joe Death"):

''I never considered for a minute that I had talent,'' he wrote in 1994. ''What I did have was divine inspiration and an open subconscious.''

Gassho.

Stress & skillful means

Welcome to the sandbox.

It's not in my division, unit, or even college...but in an institution not too far away from here, I'm having to deal with some people who, for me, define "stress" in two classic fashions:

(1) "that feeling you experience when you are constrained from choking the living shit out of some asshole who desperately deserves it"; e.g., some "colleagues" who do not know how to behave "collegially"--expecting a level of sycophantic knocking-head (kow-tow) simply because they have been able to finagle the title "Dean", and calling into questions one's own competence when their *own* is manifestly lacking (as one of the embarrassed subordinates said, after one such session, "I could not believe that he questioned your credentials...I mean, all he'd have to do is google you!" to which I replied "yeah...and what do you think a search on his name would reveal?" to which the subordinate said "I know, I know...we're really embarrassed on your behalf", to which I refrained from saying "then why the fuck don't you speak up to this asshole?", and the big one:

(2) they jack with students. And, far beyond the reaction eliciting when you jack with me, if I see you jack with students, you're toast. If it takes years, I will never forget what you did to that kid.

As Twain said, "the reason that the battles in the Ivory Tower are so ferocious is because the stakes are so small." And, mostly, he was right--because entirely too many academics behave entirely too self-righteously about entirely too trivial issues of entitlement or power.

But some of the stakes are not small--sometimes, they are life-or-death. Sometimes it is worth going to the mattresses on behalf of a student, or a program, or an event which is being fundamentally compromised and exploited.

One such, involving this not-too-far-distant unit, was a couple of years back, when the chief officer of the unit decided he wanted to read the thesis of a student in his unit which was being supervised, at the student's request, by me. It's my suspicion that this Chief Officer knew that his department's productivity (e.g., successful student recruitment and graduation) was down and that he was seeking outside factors upon which to shift the blame.

At any rate, after having received less than no coherent or consistent information regarding that department's expectations, timetable, and/or requirements for a senior thesis, the CO decided it was necessary to call me on the carpet for the "problems" with the thesis for which he and his department had been a total absentee landlord. I entered the situation with the clear internal intention that, regardless of whatever candy-assed bullshit went down, I was going to keep the student's own long-term best interests at heart.

And it's a damned good thing I did, because the CO (good-hair, trademark starched white shirts with the sleeves rolled up to demonstrate that he was a "regular guy", telltale drinker's high color and red nose) began the meeting by saying "what is the basis for your qualifications to supervise this thesis?" And it was all downhill from there. I had to tell him--because he obviously had not taken the trouble even to read the faculty bio, much less run the above-mentioned google search--about the range of my own scholarly research and publication activity, while his subordinates, both junior and senior, ducked their heads in embarrassment.

Finally, I observed "we are not here to interrogate my qualifications. Your department requested that I take on the additional, unremunerated duty of supervising this thesis, to which I assented because I wished the best for this student. Can we now please talk about that topic? What would be best for this student?"

Of course he immediately backpedaled, insisting that he "wouldn't think of questioning" my credentials--when in fact that is precisely what he had been doing--and I managed to direct the conversation back to the thesis and what could best enhance the writing. It became apparent--obvious I think to the embarrassed subordinates who'd felt unable to speak up to contradict their "boss"--that there had been massive, systemic failure, of design and of execution, in his own department's procedures for vetting, supervising, and confirming the thesis work. Within 5 minutes of conversation, the CO was saying "well, what sorts of things would you do differently in contrast to the existing procedures?"

So I let the bastard have it, and detailed over a dozen different tweaks, adaptations, re-sequencings, and additional stages which I thought could help close the loopholes in his division's ill-conceived existing procedures. He sat there, nodding sagely yet visibly disinterested, while his subordinates scribbled frantically, taking notes on my suggestions.

Six months later, the two subordinates are gone. Every one of my (uncredited) suggestions has been incorporated into their vetting procedure. And the CO is still there, good hair and starched shirts in place, while his division continues to hemorrhage students, faculty, and quality.

I don't give a shit about the credit--I get way more than my share as it is--but I could wish that crap didn't so entirely too often to the top of the university pond.

It ain't right.

Why true scholars matter

Because in the wake of a shooting spree that killed her UAH colleagues as they sat around a faculty conference table, Debra Moriarty said this, in refusing to join the hysterical cries for ever-greater denials of civil liberties:

"There is evil in the world; it is unfortunate that good people are hurt by that. But a university is a place of free thought and freedom to explore ideas and to search out new knowledge and you don't want to put anything in place that dampens that."

That is the courage of a true scholar. Thank you, Dr Moriarty.

Privilege. F*ckin' privilege

Too many West Texans have seldom if ever consciously encountered a functional, non-dismissible adult human who they are prepared to admit has better-informed opinions than their own. Addicted to the paranoid propaganda of Fox "News", they believe what they believe--a mish-mosh of childhood programming, corporatist lies, and a deeply-unexamined, internally self-contradictory and hypocritical set of "small town values"--in the face of any empirical, factual information to the contrary. And when challenged to rationally defend their convictions, they default to one of two positions: they respond by parroting the latest, most simplistic talking points spoon-fed to them by the Right-wing noise machine; if that fails, if they actually see that their points fail in the face of logic, they retreat to an obstinate, know-nothing stance of "well, you might think that 'cause you've got all this information, but I believe what I believe because those are the values I was raised with"--because, in their world, "values" trump, and can be held in the face of direct contravention by, objective factual reality.

Case in point: sitting in the breakfast room of the TMEA hotel, a place very popular with conferencing students and tourist families as they'll supply cots, trundle beds, wireless, breakfast, and a watered-drinks happy hour, all free of charge; some of these folks are obviously making 2 meals a day off the self-serve waffles at breakfast and the chili dogs at happy hour.

Sitting at breakfast, alone at a table for four as I wait for Dharmonia and the General and the Sergeant to make it down from the room, I'm approached not once but twice, by two different spherical white ladies laden down with stacked plates of the waffles whose self-serve status they've obviously exploited, and asked pointedly, "excuse me, are you here by yourself?"

And when I reply, "well, no ma'am, I'm actually waiting for three people who are just about to join me," instead of being satisfied with that response--precisely, of course, the response they would give themselves if the situation were reversed--they look visibly displeased, even resentful, before reluctantly turning and waddling elsewhere. And you think, "why on earth are they resentful? You'd think they'd be more pissed-off if I said 'actually, no, I just prefer to sit here by myself'".

And you realize that this resentful sense of entitlement results from a pre-existing conviction, unsupported (because considered unnecessary) by any factual empirical evidence, that the large long-haired person in black with the earrings, sitting by himself at a table drinking coffee and eschewing the carbs, can't possibly "deserve" to have a table "to himself" when Good Christians like themselves can't find seating for their double-wide asses and their stacked plates of waffles. And even though they would say precisely the same thing, if the situation were reversed (or even if they were in fact by themselves, but didn't want to share), in the face of outward contradictory reality, their inward sense of entitlement still shapes their view of the world.

In the event, when the plan has changed and my party is ready to leave, and a Hispanic gentleman with friends at the next table says, "Excuse me, sir...do you mind if I take one of your chairs" so he can pull-up to his friends' table, I say "well, sir, I'm just getting ready to leave. Please do feel free to take this table." And--as often happens in this part of the world when Hispanic folks have to interact with Anglos---he goes out of his way to say profuse thank you's, and adds "well, I don't want to run you off," and I say "Oh, that's okay...I been run off out of better places than this!" and we both laugh and part friends.

In this city--the very city where a bunch of Anglo claim-jumpers and soldiers-of-fortune tried to found an empire based on the premise of slaveowners' rights--I'll quote the great James Gandolfini ("Tony Soprano"),

I hate privilege.

Gopi Podila, Adriel Johnson, Maria Ragland Davis; Luis Cruz-Vera, Joseph Leahy

Because they, not the poor twisted madwoman who attacked them, should have names and faces:



Gopi Podila (RIP),
Adriel Johnson (RIP),
Maria Ragland Davis (RIP);

Luis Cruz-Vera,
Joseph Leahy.

May their names and the constructive energy of their lives continue to resonate after we are gone.

Gassho.

To neither generalize nor particularize - UAH

There is no point in trying to "make sense" out of things that are by definition senseless, to "find the reason for" things which are without reason. Yet those is what so often, too often, happens in the wake of shootings like the one at University of Alabama.

Here's what I wrote over on Dean Dad:

Well-put and apt. I would certainly agree that the rush to generalize (as in "just another case of...") or particularize (as in "somebody must have made an error somewhere, which, if only identified, could prevent this happening again...") are both equally inapt. As I expressed to a friend, the mainstream media's tendency to try to find some failure of security or record-keeping, some "red flag", which "should have" been a warning signal, proceeds from a unsubstantiated conviction that tragic events are never random and can always be prevented, which is not how the world works.

That said, we both have experience of working in academic bureaucracies (or as bureaucrats) in which we can recognize that certain persons manifest inappropriate responses (e.g., potential "red flags") of varying magnitude. And in a bureaucracy bound by OP's, the path to containing the behavior or terminating the employment of such a person can be very difficult.

I will be interested to see, if we ever hear, any commentary from the tenure committee or other UA-H colleagues about why the shooter might have been denied tenure. It does not appear to have been a problem with productivity (grants recorded around the web) or student satisfaction (as of yesterday, she was well-regarded at ratemyprofessors). Was her tenure denied because of inappropriate conduct? It seems possible.

If there is a lesson, it is that life is short, and unknowable, and that we damned better live our lives with that in mind.

"I'm talkin' to the wall here!"

My admired stepfather, rest his soul, an Italian stonemason and bebop drummer/saxophonist, used to say this when someone--typically one of his daughters--was refusing to see things his way. I don't often have occasion to use the line, as most of my students are receptive and smart (or maybe I just think they're smart, because they behave to their professors as if receptive--not a bad skill in a grad student), but I was reminded of it upon reading an article in the London Financial Times about witnessing the semi-legendary entrepreneur/motivational speaker Malcolm Gladwell. The author is a proponent of a perspective about "spontaneity" which I try to train my students out of:

I also make a point of not writing out my speech. My theory is that it is more interesting to hear someone talk, than to listen them read a prepared text.

As I tell my students, such a perspective really means, as a subtext, "I think I can improvise something as precise, articulate, coherent, relevant, and well-timed as somebody else can pre-compose and I rehearse." And they ain't too many who can actually do that. I am an adamant and insistent advocate, especially in the context of a scholarly thesis exposition of the sort that I train my students to provide, of writing that sucker word-for-word, and then editing remorselessly for content, clarity, and timing.

As Gideon Rachman relates, Gladwell agrees:

First, he is a master of the “look no hands” style of speaking. He just stands up there, with a button mike and talks - and it all sounds very spontaneous, with little asides and jokes, and messages tailored to his audience. Second, he tells stories - there are theories attached to the stories - but the bulk of the talk is made up of charming anecdotes to illustrate rather simple themes.

And how does he do it? Rachmann asks him, and Gladwell replies:

“I know it may not look like this. But it’s all scripted. I write down every word and then I learn it off by heart. I do that with all my talks and I’ve got lots of them.”

Quoting my stepdad: "Am I talkin' to the wall, here?!?"

I sure hope not. :-)