My neighbor is a jerk.
He’s out in the yard teaching his two-year-old grandson to say “What the hell?” and “Screw that noise.”
Sometimes, we’re entirely too nostalgic about extended families.
Just thinking aloud
I have been thinking about the recent uptick of LDS kids doing really well in talent reality shows. There’s Benji, Heidi Groskreutz, Lacey Schwimmer, Allison Holker (Winner and near-winners of So You Think You Can Dance?). There’s Julieanne and Derek Hough and Ashley DelGrosso — super-pros ballroom stars on Dancing with the Stars. (Of course, you can major in ballroom dance at BYU — no shit. About 6000 kids at BYU are involved in their social dancing program and they’ve got a huge enrollment in their technique program as well.) They put on dance festivals all over the place — I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.
Then there’s the LDS singers, like David Archuleta and Brooke White…
I know that there’s a dream of mainstream acceptance through popular performing arts — somthing I’d refer to as the Lemmon/Osmond syndrome — and there’s certainly an emphasis on spending time in self-improving ways. There’s a sense in which the dance floor is an acceptable place for couples to break lose and be sexual in a way that is frowned upon in private settings. And then there’s the relentless public outreach and training kids to be emissaries of the faith from a very early age. I guess I’m just wondering what it is about Mormonism (in contrast to evangelical Christianity) that permits and even encourages kids to embrace secular entertainment forms (like the guy in The Killers, or the kid in Panic at the Disco) without seeing it as a step off the moral cliff.
Of course, it could be as simple as looking at who is broadcasting and where they do their casting. Disney — which owns ABC — has always had a close connection with LDS church. (Walt’s wife was an LDS member, as were a number of his animators.) High School Musical was shot in Salt Lake City, Utah. Dancing with The Stars is shooting in Las Vegas, which is home to the growing cohort of Mormon families.
Just thinking inconclusively. I had a point with this and now it’s frittered away.
Season of the Spirit
Christians celebrate Pentacost today. Shauvot is coming up on the 22nd. Of course, it’s Mother’s Day. Spring is all around us.
Honor and celebrate the animating spirit of life becoming.
Which lives matter?
Two things you really should read:
A new memorial to the disabled victims of the Nazis and a blog post by imfunnytoo. She poses some tough questions about which lives matter to us and why…
Got me thinking anyhow.
Explaining it all
Gerald and I have both noticed that our classrooms have a higher percentage of slackassical despondent students these days. There’s a subpopulation that cheat obviously and don’t seem too upset (or will get aggressive) if you catch them doing so. This is not me being a crankypants. I’ve been teaching a long time and the level at which I can pitch my intro material declines every year. I fail more students just for stupid stuff — not doing the required developmental work, not showing up for the classes — than ever before. Not only are my students more unprepared than ever to do college work, they are more unaware than ever that it’s their responsibility to work if they aspire to achieve anything. I have been finding this confusing.
I was talking to a group of students a while back and they, as a whole, are pessimistic about their future prospects. They don’t expect financial stability as a consequence of getting their degree. They don’t even really know if they want the career path that often comes with the degree they are pursuing. They are going to college because…and they trail off, because they don’t know. They can’t risk following their passion (too expensive and risky, mom and dad have mortgaged the house so that I can do this), so they plod along trying to do what they think is expected of them. Their big concern is failing out of their courses and having to go back to live with mom and dad — the fear is one of social loss of freedoms rather than an intellectual loss of the opportunity to think big thoughts with other smart people. They try not to be too obvious about their smartness, not to run too far out in front because it’s socially awkward. They don’t see their education as somehow connected to the life that they will lead after college. It seems like it’s just another punch on their life card: High School (punch), College (punch), Marriage (punch), House (punch).
Now, though, many of my freshman wrapped up their exams knowing that this was the end of the road for them on my campus. They didn’t fail out or anything; it was just that their parents are out of money and they can’t take out more loans and so, they just have to drop out and maybe go to the local community college or maybe to a public u. Our campus is in that category of ok middling private colleges that this economic downturn is going to nail hard. Under that kind of circumstance — knowing that it doesn’t pay to dream big because it’s probably not going to work out for you — can’t you see where there’d be some disaffection? If I were 18, I’d probably be out on the campus green playing hacky rather than hitting the books to learn calculus, especially if I thought (as all my students do) that the fun stops the minute you get out of college.
I’m getting deja vu on writing this. Now that I’ve been blogging for a while, I’m convincing myself that I’ve said everything at least once.
Very hard grader
It’s that time of year again. The time where students who haven’t cracked a book all semester long complain that I’m a hard grader. You know how they know? “She corrects my writing and stuff, I hate this class.” “She marks all my papers up and I worked really hard on it.” “I failed my multi-choice exam she grades mad hard I think she is the worst teecher hear.”
Ok, deep breath. My essays I grade according to a rubric I distribute with the assignment; they know exactly how they will be scored and what elements of writing I look for in each assignment. The essay requirements get more demanding as they gain more experience writing essays and we discuss how and why the bar is being raised. I hold office hours before each paper is due for students to come in and get help. We have a writing center on campus and I give them the contact info for how and where to make appointments. We talk about writing in class — what makes a good piece of historical writing, how do you use citations correctly, how do you craft a persuasive argument, how do you get documents to talk to you, and a lot of other analytic writing pointers. We review the document sets on which their analytic papers are based in class, thinking through various successful and less successful ways to approach material. With those pedagogical obligations met, damn skippy I expect some effort on their part. It pisses me off when I get people turning in academic papers that look like they typed them with their thumbs on a Blackberry keyboard on the busride to school.
The exam? The “really hard” exam I just gave? I distributed every single question on it two weeks in advance, even the multiple choice questions. Every single blessed one. It was a comprehensive exam. Reviewing and studying it on their own is the way to make stuff stick. If a student fails my exams, it’s because they didn’t prepare. Not much I can do if the objective portion is completely ass-backward — it’s either right or wrong (that’s why they call it objective). I take no delight in failing students, but they need to get their heads around what they do well and what they do poorly at the moment because it’s my expectation that they will want to (and can) improve.
College is for learning things and working your butt off, not for being told how great you are. I realize that a lot of this is just 18-year-old magical thinking and immature chagrin, but finals week is the time when I wonder if I would have gone into college teaching had I realized that I would age, but my students would always be 18.
Maybe I need a career change to a place with more non-trads.
Gonna have to build a trophy case.
Man, she did well. This was one of those insanely tough competitions that you wind up with sometimes, crazy good in tap, with some studios putting the same ten kids up on stage twenty times, all of whom are just performance machines. There was a lot of inventive things going on — it was a very enjoyable program. Overall, our studio just was too small to compete with some of the larger dance companies and got pretty seriously shellacked in the overalls, but it didn’t look like any of the girls really cared.
The nice thing about this one is that they entered the kids according to how many hours they logged in the studio each week and how much performance experience they had, so people like Kid who only have a couple hours a week of lessons didn’t have to go head-to-head with the studio owner’s child that dances thirty hours a week. Kid really blew a hole in her level.
Here’s the results:
Jazz solo — 1st place in category, 5th place in age group (for her level).
Jazz duo — 1st place in category, 2nd place in age group.
Tap trio — 1st place in category, 3rd place in age group.
Jazz small group — 1st place in category
Tap small group — 1st place in category
Hip-hop — 1st place in category, 1st in age group.
And the really fun parts were just dancing for the fun of dancing. She really loves ABBA and we got to bust out to Dancing Queen.
Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance.
Dance competition all day today. Kid’s entered in six different things — meaning that I’m going to be a combination of pit crew, coach, therapist, short-order cook, costume mistress, octopus, and A-#1 fan. The day started early (hair and make-up takes about an hour and a half) and now we’re just waiting to go to the venue. No pics — having seen the kind of searches that land people here, I’m aware of the freak factor and I’ll do nothing to feed it.
Wish her luck. She’s so looking forward to it.
Last day of classes for spring semester
We’re actually already in our finals week but I am a real softy and am teaching an extra “review” class on my own time today. I won’t take formal class time to do it — I’m already scrambling to teach what amounts to 400 years of human history throughout the Atlantic littoral (but with special emphasis on North America) in 26 class sessions. (My peers in the “from 1865″ class have a much easier task.) I also don’t know how much review classes help — I tend to think that they delude weaker students into believing that they are better prepared than they are and that the stronger students don’t need them. However, this is a generation of students who have been socialized to have review classes for every test they’ve ever taken (yet another way NCLB wrecks student learning). If I can spend an hour answering questions all at once, it’s better than spending thirty hours on email typing individual responses.
