Archive for the 'Teaching' Category

Riled up at the NY Times

Published on March 15, 2010 in Teaching, real talk and riled up. 1 Comment

This weekend, a Berkeley grad with a heavy deadline spruced up a tired recessionomics trend piece by taking aim at the poors in trade schools.

These people are victims

It’s true that for-profit schools like ITT Tech and University of Phoenix draw big benefits from people returning to school. However, the article rests on the trifecta of incorrect assumptions on not-for-profit schools: namely, that they 1) aren’t gunning for people’s money, 2) don’t profit off federal funding, and 3) aren’t a huge beneficiary of the rise in recession education.

And yes, for-profit schools draw much of their profit from Pell Grants, which are awarded to students with the highest levels of financial need. Ignoring the fact that 89 percent of all independent students receive some form of financial aid and 58 percent receive federal grants specifically, why do the poorest students choose trade schools over four-year colleges and two-year not-for-profit community colleges? Some ideas:

  1. Students might not live near the 1,195 public, independent, or tribal community colleges in the country
  2. Students working full-time may not have access to education resources with online, hybrid, weekend, or night courses
  3. Students may not meet minimum educational requirements for admission
  4. Courses/materials available at not-for-profit schools may not meet student requirements

Holding up culinary arts as a symbol of the failure of for-profit education is a weak choice.  Culinary arts is the slow-moving target of the for-profit educational world, whether or not the training is coming from a for-profit or not-for-profit source. Every one of those quotes (“When they graduate and come in the kitchen, I tell them, ‘I’m going to treat you like you don’t know anything”) could have as easily referred to a culinary arts degree from a community college.

The facts as I see them:

  1. People can train for about a third of the careers on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Fastest-Growing Occupations list at for-profit trade schools
  2. In a recession, graduates of any school may have trouble finding work
  3. Accreditation is key: if a for-profit school is unaccredited, it doesn’t stand up to the same standards the third-party accrediting agency holds for all schools, for-profit and not-for-profit alike. Side-note, you can’t get federal funding at an unaccredited school
  4. A reporter soliciting his sources from the Career Education Corporation has probably never met anyone who has graduated from a trade school, excepting the girls at the salon where he gets his sustainable organic facials

When I read articles like this, I wonder what the point is. I’m all for fairness in marketing or regulations lowering some for-profit tuition. I’m against increased education standards for trade schools; with an accreditation process recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, standards at trade schools are set at the same level as public schools.

But it always seems that the point of these pieces is the classist sentiment that trade and for-profit students should have reduced access to financial aid or fewer options for accredited training, freeing up cash and resources for those lucky enough to have the means and ability to attend the sunny California school of their choice. In response, I’ll sum up the reaction I imagine from trade school students and graduates across the country: screw you, guy.

So hard / Too hard

Published on February 14, 2010 in Teaching and privet. 4 Comments

When I got home, I found a tiny plant growing out of my bathroom sink. I admired the delicate green leaf that had been unfolding for weeks, and then I unscrewed the stopper and ripped it out by its root structure.

Home means allergies. I realized in Singapore that I was actually breathing clearly through my nose, which I hadn’t really done in all my years in Texas and through most of my time in Arizona. It allowed me to close my mouth as I breathed, which, in turn, gave me a chance to not look like a huge moron.

we meet again

It was fun to see Michael in Albuquerque. I read and met with some fun UNM and PCA/ACA folk. Michael and I goofed around, went on walks, and found a tumbleweed larger than the both of us. I bought a lovely scarf that reminds me of a fish and a pair of Santa Lucia milagros for vision.

probably holding my breath here

For Valentine’s Day I’m giving my students edits on Paper 1. My sweet gnu is currently yelling at hotel laundry staff members in Bangalore, so the extravagant sentiment must be put on hold. I think I’m coming down with something, anyway.

On the flight back I read a good Steve Almond essay about rock music and Dave Grohl that was randomly in Southwest’s Spirit Magazine. I think I’ll read it to my students, along with part of the piece about how Warren Buffett subverts the cliche in his letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. This issue of Spirit Magazine made me want to subscribe or at least fly more often.

Mucus brain

Published on January 20, 2010 in Teaching and Total Wreck. Closed

Today I feel like a surgeon in Novolazarevskaya. I was on monster deadline Monday and it seeped into Tuesday. Today is some threats writing and comparing newspapers to wet babies. My face itches.

I need to update my syllabus for class Sunday. My friend is doing a food writing semester, brilliant, but I might head towards current events reading regardless. Read some newspapers, think some thoughts. I’m still curious to know what my students think about The Facebook.

PRIVET

Cedar. The scientists wonder how one human being could produce so much mucus. I’ve been meaning to post this picture of a blood orange. The blood orange is the poet’s orange.

my face seriously itches

A power line exploded outside my house the other day. I don’t think there is a transformer on that line but to be fair I have no idea what a transformer is. I was on deadline and there was this explosion that sent a baby ball of fire past my window. I called the fire department and they said that nobody should stand under the wires, so I ran downstairs and yelled at a homeless dude who was stomping on the fire that had started by the pole, and he yelled back but in a playful way, and stomped the fire out and threw some branches around then stood by and made fun of all the bystanders, and rightly so, but I was worried about him under the live wires and everything. Nobody was killed and the city came and fixed the wires. (“The city came.” The taxpayer entity  personified into this one guy with a hardhat and a cherry-picker truck.)

The American West

Published on December 22, 2009 in Cool, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Teaching and it is a mystery. 5 Comments

Yesterday morning I went outside with La Medusa and I sat on the porch and read. It was sunny and seventy degrees. I am in Tucson. The bit I read contained a paragraph that nearly made me cry with its simplicity. Vanessa Place is so cool. She writes for sound extremely well but I’m most attracted to the simple aching stuff. I knew I was going to like this book when I read the first page and a scene featuring a man eating a gas station cherry pie stuck itself in my head for a week.

Another thing is stuck but I can’t remember who said it. Something about how if you don’t read a novel in x amount of days you’re not truly experiencing it. Maybe DeLillo or Saul Bellow said it. Maybe it was my dad. Can’t remember.

Today was a good day for predators (hawks, bobcats) in my parents’ front yard. A dove flew into the glass door in front of the dining room table and a bobcat cold ate it off the welcome mat. My dad keeps saying “they’re getting their Christmas shopping done early.”

A couple weeks ago I said that writing is just the studious avoidance of cliché. I was talking words to see what they sounded like at the time but the more I think about it the truer it gets. Trouble is there’s cliché in words, phrases, sounds of words, ideas, plot maps, melodies, harmonies. Plus we’ve got our own individual clichés in the ideas we keep returning to over and over again because we can’t figure them. The best writing finds the unfamiliar in the familiar and the rest is some insidious cliché.

I thought you knew

I thought you knew

There’s a clock in this house that has chimed every fifteen minutes for my entire life and I don’t hear it anymore. It is the extrinsic intrinsic, the cliché. When I was explaining this idea to my students a few months ago, I said that I was just as vulnerable to the commonplace as they were. They looked at me as if they gave absolutely no fuck.

Now I’m watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my dad. It’s the episode where Riker is eating a lot of food and Picard is getting all judgy.

Well day

Published on October 16, 2009 in Cooking, Featherproof Books, Kyle Beachy, Teaching and Zach Dodson. 3 Comments

I’ve got meatloaf in the oven. It’s making the house smell nice.

The Chicago trip was crazy fun as anticipated. On Monday, I got in early and took one of those naps that divides one day into two. When I woke up, Blake was there and Zach took us to Mr. Pollo where we ate good chicken and two different types of plantains. We met Ally at No Coast and friends began to filter in, Angeline and Johnny and Jac and Mary and Lindsay among them. I met Kathryn Regina and Sam Pink, who each read funny and good words. It was a small room and a standing crowd, which gave it a party feel, like everyone just happened to stop talking to listen to someone tell a story. The mic was doing some reverb stuff the whole time, but my story was supposed to be kind of awkward and overloud so I tried to work with it. Blake read from “The Ruined Child,” one of my favorites from Scorch Atlas. A band played, a dance party broke out, a hole appeared in my jeans. We went to a late-night Mexican place that served a small plate of meat with a corn tortilla warm over top as an appetizer, and brought us a dish of limes when they saw we had beers. I leave Texas and eat nothing but Mexican food, go figure.

The next day, I went to H&M and Kyle Beachy‘s class at the Art Institute, where I read from AM/PM and a new story and his smart students asked me good questions. We talked about artists and the Internet, blogs, David Foster Wallace, Wittgenstein, and ritual. I could tell that Kyle is a smart teacher and a good one. Then I went back to H&M, then Angeline and Johnny took me to eat the greatest chicken pot pie made by human hands and then it was off to Quickies, where I read with a whole host of excellent folk and nearly all of the Dollar Store Tour roster, including Aaron and Caroline, plus Richard Thomas, who I had met the night before. Lindsay Hunter read a hilarious story and made everyone excited that Featherproof is doing her book next year. I read over the allotted five minutes and they whistled me off the stage but I fought hard and took Hunter’s whistle away and threw an elbow at Hamilton.

In the morning, I had brunch with Zach, Mary, Blake, and Aaron. I ate salmon and regretted it later when I sat on an airplane next to a man wearing a weightlifter’s tank top and shorts and smelling distinctly like a squat rack.

I’m glad to have an excuse to go to Chicago more often than once a year. I do think that if I lived there, I would spend all my money on good food and all my time at the gym, working it off. Speaking of, it turns out that cumin in the glaze is a nice touch for meatloaf.

A drum circle seems to have broken out under my window. I think it’s important for me to write some fiction tonight.

From the community college mailroom

Published on September 21, 2009 in Cool and Teaching. 1 Comment

MAN:
What class do you teach?

WOMAN:
Comp. We’re doing apostrophes today.

MAN:
Ah yes, apostrophes. Well, I hope that gives them pause.

WOMAN:
Heh.

MAN:
Pause.

WOMAN:
Hmm.

Don’t lose that number

Published on August 26, 2009 in Pictures and Teaching. 1 Comment
This is why I'm rot

This is why I'm rot

Spent the day alternately sneezing and looking dubiously out windows. No allergy attack can rightly convince me to step into a 103° Texas afternoon.

The rotting peach pit broke in half, revealing a sliver of a seed that looked like an almond. I peeled it out. It was soft and alive and I couldn’t bear to throw it away, so I stuck it in the peach flesh and threw the self-composting bomb into an abandoned lot. Maybe it will survive the drought.

I’ve been reading The Complete Butcher’s Tales by Rikki Ducornet. It’s so dead-on and risky, perfect nightmares. Kids putting dirty coins in their mouths, pious dogs, talking growths. Seriously feeling weird and good that Rikki Ducornet is out there in the world and that she was the inspiration for a Steely Dan song.

Here’s what happened on Weather.com when I tried to look up today’s temperature:

Fullscreen capture 8262009 42014 PM.bmp

well okay

School starts this week and fittingly, Stanley Fish posts a blog about what English composition should teach. It’s a real tinderbox of an argument, a must-read for comp teachers.

I need to write four thousand more words by Friday. All I want to do after is read celebrity news. My brain is made of steel-cut oats. This will be the year we all get genius grants.

Travels.

Published on August 6, 2009 in AM/PM, Matthew Simmons and Teaching. 3 Comments

The last editing day was a long day but the reward was the Pacific Northwest. My pal Ian is putting me up, driving me about town, and directing me towards the best things to order off menus.

I read at Powell’s with Suzanne Burns. Suzanne read her story “The Miniaturist” from the new book out through Dzanc. She has a strong poetic feel for reading aloud and it felt good to listen. Kevin Sampsell gave us a warm and kind welcome. Ian and I went to Voodoo Doughnut after and I felt like a kid getting a treat after a winning the t-ball game.

On Tuesday I rented a Mazda 6 from a guy named Brian who kept calling it my car (“you’ll need this insurance in case you get in an accident with my car”). The Mazda 6 was okay but I had to weld the petal to the floor to get sluggish acceleration after 65mph. Automatic transmissions. Mazdas.

Still, it’s a good feeling driving into Seattle on I-5 and watching the water and boats and the buildings. I said hello to Matthew Simmons at work and we joked and drove around and then I ate some cucumber gazpacho. I felt a kinship with Simmons; we share some old favorite teachers.

The Seattle reading was rocking, with a good opener from Evelyn Hampton and siren music from Lotte Kestner. I had to follow a song that made my body feel funny. In attendance were Snack Pack and Mary Miller; can’t wait to see them read tonight at Powell’s on Hawthorne.

Drank coffee and had good breakfast talks with Simmons, and drove out of Seattle with Lotte’s CD playing the perfect accompaniment to a hazy cold morning. I  pushed that crummy Mazda 6 real hard to get back to the rental place in time.

Back in Portland, I got to sit in on teen writing workshops and say hello to Van Wheeler, Natalie Serber, Gina Colantino, and host Jay Ponteri, along with friendly kind staff from M Review. I can’t wait to see some parts of AM/PM in the journal, which is tended to by people who care a lot about writing and design. Watching the teen workshops was cool; rooms of young people living in their teenage years and trying to write in the middle of that hurricane. Meanwhile they’re reading photocopied snippets of great writing and being guided through exercises by patient faculty. I kind of want this to happen to me when I am eighty. The teens were great and funny people, and the reading went well and they asked a lot of questions, and then a gaggle of screaming girls stopped my sister from driving away so I could get out of the car and sign their books and I felt for about three seconds like a singular nebbish lady Beatles.

I got to go see my sister’s new place. She moved to Portland from Tucson a few weeks ago and looks beautiful and happy in a city that suits her. She’s feeling optimistic about getting a job, and she lives in a neighborhood that is safe for bicycles.

Dinner and drinks and good talks about the hazy future with Jay and friends. Tomorrow Ian and I driving to Eugene, and I’ll read with my old friend Meagan Evans at the Wandering Goat on Saturday.

On the table next to me is a magazine called Secrets from 1925 which promises Actual Stories of Actual People and includes a story called “Love in Little Italy” with the preface: This little signorina tells you–in her own broken English–her confession of her struggle between her heart and her traditions.

Interview at The Scowl.

Published on June 4, 2009 in Five Things, Interviews and Teaching. 2 Comments

Today at The Scowl you will find a conversation between Tobias Carroll and myself. I talk about teaching, writing, and Five Things. It was fun; thank you, Toby.

Another squirrel ran by the window with a pancake in its mouth. Somebody in this neighborhood is handing out pancakes.

About a month ago, a few nice folks wrote me long, polite letters referring to my position on the stimulus bill. I think I just figured out why.

Novellas and the professors who love them.

Published on March 30, 2009 in Five Things and Teaching. 2 Comments

I finished the list of my favorite novellas and sent it to John Madera, who will soon post it on his blog. He and I started talking a bit about teachers as tour guides instead of taskmasters. He said a lovely thing:

I’ve also often thought the teacher’s role should be as guide, someone not only familiar with the lay of the land, but in love with its every ebb and flood, rustle and hum, chirp and howl, aware not only of the pitfalls and traps, but of the most inspiring, beautiful, intimate, secluded spaces.

Of course, we teachers have to get everyone to use proper grammar and cite sources, and soon enough we get all caught up in talking about metaphors and frame stories and students are left wondering what the fuss is all about. This is more towards teaching lit, something I haven’t done in a few years, partly because I never could find the balance between pointing at the ebbs and rustles and teaching the proper use of the semicolon.

problems

Students in lit classes don’t always like the tour guide stuff, anyway. They look at you like, When are you getting to the point? as if we might get a little more satisfaction out of the work if Bartleby rolled up his sleeves and showed us how to repair an HVAC unit. And rightly so, in a way; there’s so much stuff to be learned. It’s hard to get to the leisure of art when there’s stuff afoot.

We had another excellent Five Things on Friday and hit the trifecta again: great music, great words, great visual art. Pictures will be up soon on the show’s site.