posted 2009/05/08 at 13:36
Ohio Christian school tells student to skip prom (AP via Yahoo! News)
Just when I thought this part of the country couldn't get more bad press after dealing with "Joe the Plumber" for the past six months, something like this has to pop up. In all seriousness, this is a news story I would expect to see in a newspaper from forty or fifty years ago, not in 2009. I'm not trying to be disrespectful of religious beliefs here, but at the same time, there is no doubt in my mind that, in this instance, Heritage Christian School is severely overstepping its bounds here by threatening to suspend Tyler Frost for engaging in legal activities on his own time. If the school wants to ban dancing or rock music on its own property, as much as I may disagree with their reasons for doing so, I can respect that as their right. When they threaten to punish a student for things he does off of campus grounds on his own time -- again, this is rock music and dancing we're talking about, not illegal drug use or drunk driving -- and even withhold him from his class' graduation procession, then I get angry and nauseated.
This was kind of a big issue for me growing up. I began having political leanings around the time I was in my junior high years, and some of my classmates from those years stopped going to the private school I went to after junior high, transfering to the various religious high schools around here. In almost every instance, when I saw the students later, they had become severely withdrawn, and their willpower and self-identity had nearly vanished. (One of the schools some students transfered to, Notre Dame Academy, was the same school Katie Holmes went to, to give you a reference point.) Children's rights became a big issue for me then, as these episodes cemented in my mind that children should have the right to practice their own religions, irrespective of their parents' beliefs. I was lucky enough to live in a household where my parents never pushed religion on me, except to learn about what was out there and make my own determination about what would work best for me. I think that's a right every young person should have, and this news story just reinforces, to me, the reasons for that.
Although I haven't thought too much recently about the episodes from my own youth, this is a topic I definitely deal with as a teacher. I try not to talk about my own beliefs -- religious, political, or otehrwise -- when I teach, and I always make a point to say on the first day of class that I grade based on the strength of an argument, irrespective of its position. I've assigned countless As to papers whose positions I wholeheartedly disagree with, because even though I disagree with the positions, the papers were written very persuasively, and deserved As. I often argue against my own beliefs in class when the need arises, because I want to encourage my students to think through opposing viewpoints, the whole Socratic Method thing. What I've noticed, though, is that for many students who come from these religious schools, who have had religion pounded into their heads from such an early age, when confronted with beliefs that are contrary to their own, not only do they show the same refusal to accept that people can hold different views that so nauseates me about modern conservative discourse, but some of them are even blown away by that fact, and get a glazed-over look in their eyes as I or other students explain the rationales behind the opposing viewpoints.
This just makes me worry all the more about our future as a country, because right now our education system is failing on all levels. No Child Left Behind and the rash of state proficiency exams that started twenty years ago have taken education out of the hands of the teachers, with education's goals and the methods taken to get there being put in the hands of people who have no training in education at all, no concept of how young people learn and what they need to know to function in our society. The financial "race to the bottom" has not only destroyed the arts programmes of countless schools to give students no creative outlets (because, after all, creativity encourages free thinking), but to cut costs students are often evaluated only by Scantron tests; you don't want to know how many students I've had who literally were never expected to write anything in high school. Corporate America has already trampled public schools with its sponsorships, further taking control away from teachers and further indoctrinating young people into consumer culture, and the charter schools that some (including President Obama) promote are about a thousand times worse in that regard.
One of my missions as a teacher is to open my students' minds to the realities and possibilities that are out there in this world. On the secular level, that's already being made painfully difficult by how high schools are turning into places where students are expected to do nothing but rote memorization of rules and nuggets of information deemed important by people who have no connection with the reality of today's youth, and hardly any connection at all with greater reality. Religious schools are even worse, as many students from those schools actively resist being exposed to beliefs and views that are in opposition to those they've been indoctrinated in for all of their lives. If we don't allow young people to vote until they turn eighteen because we don't think they have the capacity to make sound decisions until then, how can we say that they have the ability to choose their own religion? We need to take a serious look at the role religious schools play in this country, because it seems like a strong case could be made to banish those schools. How am I to be expected to open the mind of a young person whose parents, church, and teachers have been welding that mind shut for eighteen years?
Labels: rhetoric, teaching, toledo
posted 2009/01/23 at 17:56
Because the majority of my students fall between the ages of eighteen to twenty, I spend a fair amount of time on YouTube and Websites oriented towards that young adult demographic, so I can get a bit of a handle on what is popular in that age group. I'd watch television, but I just can't stomach American Idol and its ilk, and the radio on my stereo -- like so many parts of it -- just isn't working that well right now. I really need to catch up book-wise, though; I still haven't read any Harry Potter, and so many of my creative writing students are fans of Chuck Palahniuk that I feel obligated to read at least a couple of his books. Anyway, on the balance I find myself more aware of certain Internet fads than my students -- I had to explain to one class last semester what LOLcats were -- which is probably a sign that I shouldn't spend so much time researching this stuff on the Internet. (Hey, it's free, it's readily available, and I have an itchy mouse finger if I ever find something truly revolting.)
I had certainly taken note of rickrolling when it started a while ago, and yes, I've been hit by it more times than I care to count. It had seemed that it was a fad that had run its course long, long ago, but when Cartoon Network rickrolled the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade last year, all of a sudden I heard people who had declared rickrolling blasé long ago say it was the greatest thing ever. Since then I've been wondering just why so many Internet people switched tunes on the Thanksgiving rickroll; certainly it was rickrolling on a scale that no one could have ever anticipated happening, but there was something more to it than that. Perhaps Cartoon Network gets a pass because of their image thanks to stuff like the Adult Swim block and their other cult shows (Powerpuff Girls' tenth anniversary, anyone?), or because rickrolling such a huge event as the parade was truly unexpected, or because they actually brought Rick Astley out instead of just cutting to the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video. Whatever the case, none of my students last term brought it up, so I never mentioned it to them; the last thing I need is to seem even less cool than I already am (which is to say, not cool at all).
That being said, Nancy Pelosi rickrolling everyone on her YouTube account ... no. Just no. This is why you leave political comedy to the masters like Stephen Colbert and Rick Mercer; very few politicians know how to make jokes, particularly in relation to their own work and images. President Obama manages it well, which may make his presidency more bearable to watch these next few years, but he is one in a million here in America. (Seriously, everyone should watch Canadian political comedy television shows and see how much better both the comedians and the politicians are up there.) Pelosi inserting a rickroll into an already banal video smacks of a bad joke told months after everyone stopped caring about the joke in the first place. I know the Democratic press ate this up with a spoon, calling it yet another sign of good change in Washington, but I just shook my head when I heard of it and wondered if we could President Obama to write the Democrats' jokes for the next four years. He's got more important stuff to do right now, though.
Labels: internet, politics, teaching, work
posted 2008/09/02 at 18:18
Tomorrow I begin teaching at MCCC again; I've got three sections of composition this term, all on Mondays and Wednesdays, and all at the satellite campus. I won't be driving that much, and I'll have lots of days off, but I've never taught more than one class in a day before and now I have three to deal with. This should be an interesting challenge for me, especially since I'll be teaching MCCC's Composition I as a fifteen-week course for the first time ever. Even though all of my classes fall in a five-hour window, I am concerned that I may begin to run out of energy near the end. Still, if I want to teach full-time then I need to be able to handle three classes in a day, so this will be yet another trial for me as I work towards full-time employment. I've been spending today putting the final touches on my handouts and getting the course Websites designed, and as usual I'm feeling a bit of nervousness about how tomorrow will go. It would be a bad sign if I wasn't nervous, though; if I'm nervous then I'm on my toes, and more able to adapt the classes to my students' needs.
If there was a theme to this month or so of time off from work, it was catching up on things. Over the past couple of years I had bought a lot of books and DVDs that I had never gotten around to watching, which I kept in separate piles to go through at some point. The time for doing that never seemed to come, though, so I forced myself to work through those piles as much as I could. I finished the pile of DVDs this past Saturday, and although I couldn't get the book pile finished (there was just too much stuff there), I've got it down to five books, two of which I'm in the middle of right now. (The Scarlet Letter and Gandhi's autobiography if you care.) I'm glad to have those admittedly small weights off of my shoulders, and I'm hoping that this will allow me to focus on other things here, but I must admit that now I'm kind of eager to get some more DVDs to watch and books to read. (I won't be able to do that soon, though, since I won't be getting paid again until the middle of the month.)
In addition to those things, I also got back on track with a couple of things that I'd neglected after Dad's death, namely playing piano and playing DDR. I'll save the DDR details for my diet and dance game log as always, but it's felt good to get back to music after so long of an absence. I'm building my repertoire of other people's songs back up right now, and I'm hoping to get back to composing in a couple of weeks. One of the reasons I wanted to get a new computer was so I could run new composing software; I spent about $500 on composing software in my late teens, but the company that made the software went out of business long ago and my old software wouldn't even run on Windows XP, let alone Vista. I'm not sure where I'll find time for songwriting once I'm back in the groove of teaching, but I've done a pretty good of managing my time this break. I only hope that I can continue to do such a good job as I go back to teaching in the coming weeks.
Labels: personal, teaching, work
posted 2008/07/23 at 14:51
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not a morning person. As much as I enjoy going out to the parks and botanical gardens this time of year and marveling at the trees and flowers and the way the sun pokes through all the leaves creating wonderful kaleidoscopes of light, there is only so much sun I can take. Back before I went back to college, it seemed as if I could only work on my creative pursuits in the darkest part of night. Then again, maybe that had less to do with light than it did the fact that my backyard abuts Toledo's busiest highway loop. Anyway, although that has changed -- I attribute this to the fact that Dad never bothered to put blinds or drapes on my bedroom window -- I still prefer to be a late riser, and there are still certain activities that I find I can do better at certain times of day.
This is the main reason why this semester has been so hard on me. I have a very small class this term, filled with incredibly brilliant writers who I barely even need to teach; I can just give them a bit of guidance and turn them loose, and shortly thereafter get back a lot of top-quality writing. Combined with the fact that I'm teaching on the satellite campus, and thus saving about $30 a week on gas from when I was teaching on the main campus, and you would think that this would be an absolutely wonderful time for me. Unfortunately this class I'm teaching is also meeting very early in the afternoon. I have no problem getting up before noon -- heck, I'm only getting up about forty-five minutes earlier than my usual wake-up time -- but I'm having to cram an awful lot of activities into a very short span of time every morning before I teach. Combine that with the fact that I still have to stay up late at night to take care of other responsibilities, and I've felt totally out of whack for the past month or so. I can't get as much sleep as I need, it's been impossible to stick to a diet because my energy levels just won't stay stable, and I seem to go from long periods of cramming a million activities in a few minutes to long periods with nothing to do.
I didn't come here to blog about my schedule, though. (Although I do think this explains why my blogging has been so sporadic lately.) No, I came to talk to you about BBC America.
See, my sister and her husband moved out of the house on the first of this year, into their own apartment northeast of here. Less than two months later Dad died, and were it not for the fact that Heather and Mark are tied in to a twelve-month lease at the apartment, they probably would have moved right back in me and Mom. Heather's been over here on weekdays while Mark's at work, though, to help with cleaning and just to keep Mom company. In the fifty or so days Heather was a stay-at-home housewife (er, apartmentwife), she spent a lot of time watching television, and one of the shows she got hooked on was the BBC show How Clean is Your House?, a show where two British ladies go around to the dirtiest homes in all the United Kingdom, document how dirty and filthy and germ-ridden the houses are, and then clean the houses up with the help of the owners and a team of cleaners. It's the kind of reality television you'd expect the British to come up with, and I can see the appeal of the show, although it's definitely not the kind of show I would make a point of watching. Unfortunately I don't have a choice in the matter, as Mom and Heather insist on watching the show every day.
Normally I could avoid this just like I avoid everything else I don't like in this house, by shutting myself up in my room and working on things here at my computer while I blast some tunes to drown out the audio from the downstairs television. Unfortunately, BBC America, sadists that they are, decided to put on How Clean is Your House? starting at noon. On a day when I don't teach (or I teach in the evening), that's about when I'm having breakfast downstairs; this term that's when I have to grab a quick lunch before I dash off to the satellite campus. Our kitchen opens full-on to our living room, and the television faces directly into the kitchen. It's impossible to open the refrigerator or plug in the toaster without getting an eyeful of a refrigerator with more culture in it than a PBS mini-series, or a bathroom so grimy that not even Jigsaw would be cruel enough to chain anyone up in it. Needless to say, catching an eyeful of these images while I'm trying to eat my Cheerios does not make me very cheery-o.
I would like to just blame my sister for this; after all, I think the only reason she watches this show is because it gives her an excuse not to clean our house as thoroughly as it should be because, hey, at least it's not as bad as the ones on television. However, I have to wonder exactly what cleaning fumes the programmers at BBC America had under their noses when they decided to put this show on at noon. Noon being the start of the lunch hour is part of our American DNA; even in this day and age, the plurality of full-time jobs are from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, with a lunch hour break starting right at noon. I know that the British tend to take their lunches, er, dinners closer to one or two in the PM, but BBC America isn't just BBC programming on an American channel. If they're going to take the time to bleep out all of the curse words our tender American ears just can't stand to hear coming out of the telly, and if they're going to produce a dumbed-down newscast to compete with our American dumbed-down newscasts, you would think that they'd at least take the time to research our culinary habits and take a few minutes to think through the fact that we don't like to see cockroach nests and caked-on human waste when we're trying to eat our bloody lunches!
I'd really appreciate it if someone could present me some other reason why BBC America would schedule this show during lunchtime, other than that they're deliberately trying to make us nauseous. Until then, I may need How Clean is Your House? to come across the pond and come to my house, to clean up all the vomit in and around my toilet caused by watching their show.
Labels: personal, teaching, television, work
posted 2008/06/23 at 16:24
My first "summer" course ended this past Thursday, and after grading a bunch of portfolios I got to go right back to teaching the exact same course again a second time. I love teaching dearly, but I signed up for these classes back before Dad died, and I'm beginning to worry that I need a break soon to help me recharge and take care of a number of things I've been neglecting these past few months. I only have a dozen students in this class, though, so maybe my workload won't be quite as great as it has been lately. My commute is a whole lot easier as well, since I'm teaching at MCCC's satellite campus just across the Ohio/Michigan border; in addition to saving time, I estimate I'll be able to save at least $15 a week on gas as well. The class also ends on July 31, meaning that unless I pick up an extra course in the autumn, I'll have the entire month of August to myself, so I do have that to look forward to.
Still, unlike all of my other classes at MCCC which were in the evenings, this is an early afternoon course. Normally I'd be driving up to campus at this time of day, not already home and decompressing. When I first signed up for this class I didn't think that getting up earlier would be that much of a hassle, but I forgot just how much my body tends to gravitate towards the dark hours when we're this close to the solstice. I've always been a bit of a night person, and although I've gotten better at doing things in daylight, there's still a part of me that nurtures the darkness and wants to be awake for those late, late hours. I go back to teaching evenings in the fall, though, so unless I pick up another course, I only have to worry about waking early these next six weeks. I still get thrown off when I leave the house and the sun is in the eastern sky, though, just because I'm so unused to going out of the house that early in the day.
I should probably take advantage of this current schedule to go and do some photography after class one of these days. I've been meaning to get to Wildwood to take more photos here for a while, although I have a stronger urge to hit the Toledo Botanical Garden at the present moment. (I've been using my previous photos from there as desktop wallpaper on my new computer, which probably explains why.) I'd go out and work out in the garage now if my dance pads weren't messed up. I just hope that my body can get used to this new schedule, because it is definitely throwing me off right now to have the sun still be so high in the sky after work. At least I can count on the sun being there. (RIP George Carlin.)
Labels: personal, teaching, weather, work
posted 2008/02/11 at 20:38
In a lot of the business classes I took as an undergraduate, I would constantly run into these questions on tests where the wording of the questions and answers just completely threw me off. Some of the questions were missing vital information, some of the answers weren't very specific, and a lot of them used hedge words that made it nearly impossible for me to be confident with whatever answer I chose. Given that these were in classes where I was one of over a hundred students, and given how my teachers in these classes were adjuncts who were always short and abrupt in their dealings with students, it seemed foolish to go up during a test to ask for clarification. I tried asking for clarification a couple of times when I got these questions wrong, and the answers I got back were just slightly more polite rephrasings of "that's just not the correct answer" without any guidance as to what the correct answer was.
I always suspected that these instructors were just using test questions that had been prepared for them by the textbook company, but it was only about a month ago that I actually came upon one of these "test banks" when I got one along with the textbook for the business writing class I'm teaching this semester. Maybe it's because I'm a word junkie with a knack for finding all kinds of different ways to interpret words, or maybe it's because I'm so overly cautious about everything, but I can't figure out why these questions are written with such nebulous prompts and answers. Worse yet, I'm reading these test questions right after reading the corresponding chapters in the book, and I'm making notes on what I consider to be the important, overriding themes of the chapters, and then the test bank turns around and asks questions about some obscure statistic buried in the middle of a relatively unimportant paragraph. I don't know the process through which these questions are vetted and selected, but it seems really screwed up to me.
I'm not saying that test banks don't have a place in teaching, but looking back on my own days as a student I can now see just how they contribute to the laziness of some teachers. I can now look back on the tests I took in the Introduction to Business class I was in my first full-time semester, and the test bank questions literally look exactly like my instructor's tests were formatted. The instructor (a first-time adjunct who only lasted one more semester and who was almost universally despised by his students) must have just cut out the answer row from the test bank questions, copied that for the test, then filled out the answers on a Scantron sheet without even thinking about the appropriateness or quality of the questions. (He also taught from Powerpoint presentations that were obviously created by the same textbook company.) Being on the other side of the equation now, I understand that coming up with relevant, informative classes and methods of assessing what the students have learned is a difficult process, and yes, I think test banks are useful for instructors to have. Looking back on my own education, though, it seems like a lot of the instructors I had just took the Powerpoints and the test banks provided by the textbook manufacturers, talked for an hour and a half straight twice a week, and put little, if any, thought into just what they wanted students to learn and how best to help them learn those things. How can instructors expect their students to take the time to read and learn all of these things when they won't take more time to assess their progress than just running a bunch of Scantron sheets through a machine?
posted 2008/02/03 at 18:27
Someone has yet to explain to me the allure I've found in the past two years' Puppy Bowl broadcasts on Animal Planet. I'm not a dog person in the slightest, and I never watch Animal Planet any other time of the year. (We get enough animals coming around here to eat the food we leave out that I don't need to go to television to get my fill of animals.) There's something about the Puppy Bowl that just keeps me watching, though, and not just because there's nothing else on television right now besides you-know-what. Getting people to tune into the Puppy Bowl instead of the Super Bowl would be an interesting countercultural project, although I have a feeling it would attract more people who disliked teams in the game than people who wanted to make any kind of grand statement against football or the Super Bowl teams. Hey, I'll be the first to admit that if the Bengals were in the Super Bowl, I'd be watching that instead of the puppies.
All things being equal, though, I am going to flip over to the game every once in a while just to see how things are going there. My feelings about the Patriots and the Giants aside, the fact that the Patriots might go undefeated kind of adds an historical element to tonight's game that makes me feel obligated to catch at least parts of it. It's just one of those things that I feel a strange compulsion to watch, like Barry Bonds breaking the home run record or something along those lines. I imagine it's the same way for anyone with even rudimentary knowledge and interest in sports; when you know something historic may be about to happen, you feel obliged to keep track of it even if you have no personal investment in any of the players or teams. I guess it helps that in my favourite (North American) sport, the Red Wings have been the team breaking all of the records in recent years.
There's another reason I feel obliged to catch parts of the game, which is that I'm sure that my students will be watching as well. Even with as late at night as I teach, I'm sure some of them will still want to talk about the game, especially with Tom Brady being a University of Michigan player back in the day. I try to keep up with the music and television and such my students consume just in case I can find some teachable stuff in there (you'd be surprised how much of my class I devoted to stuff from Chappelle's Show back when I taught at UT), and although I doubt I'll find much to teach from in the Super Bowl (especially since my students will be doing peer reviews Monday and Tuesday), maybe knowing a little about what happens in the game tonight will make me seem a little less dorky than what I normally come off as.
Labels: sports, teaching, work
posted 2007/12/31 at 04:04
I'm writing you now ... well, because I always do a "Famous Blue Raincoat" post every year, whether on here or someplace else. This is probably the worst year for me to be staying up to do this post, too, because not only is my schedule such that staying up this late is harder than it has ever been before (yeah, I'm getting old, thanks for asking), but in about four hours here we're going to have movers coming in to get all of the heavy stuff out of my sister and brother-in-law's room to move to their new apartment. Given that their room is right next to mine, I'm guessing that I've doomed myself to less than a full night's sleep here, and of course I don't want to sleep through the change to a new year tomorrow night even if the passage of calendar years has never really been my thing.
I haven't made any actual resolutions for the new year in some time -- I prefer to make resolutions on my birthday -- but I guess I still kind of have wishes for the upcoming year. More than the requisite health and good luck for myself and my friends and family, I'm hoping I can finally achieve some clarity regarding my job/school situation that I wrote about a month ago. I do feel good that I was entrusted with an extra class for this coming term, and I'd like to think that my prospects for finding a full-time teaching job are looking up, but I'm still dealing with nagging questions about whether I may regret not going for an additional degree (or possibly even two). I don't think that my mind and heart are still split so evenly as they were a month ago between work and more schooling, but between the time and money I'm looking at investing here, as well as my own confused wishes, I'm still hesitating to commit one way or the other. Given how the deadlines for some of the schools I've looked at are rapidly approaching, I can't afford to hesitate much longer.
I was hoping that this vacation would give me time to clear my head about that mess, but of course then I had to worry about clearing my head of a hundred pounds of mucus in addition to everything else. I'm only just now getting back to a resemblance of a normal life, and two weeks from today I'll be back in the classroom again. (I'll actually start teaching my online course before that, but I'm still not in the same frame of mind for that class as I am for the ones I teach in the flesh.) As I teach more and more classes here -- if I don't get a full-time position soon then I'd like to at least pick up additional classes at other nearby colleges -- figuring out my schedule becomes more and more complicated. I'm not quite at the point where I'll need to start keeping a daily calendar, but I'm getting closer, and I'm having to deal with more uncomfortable questions about just how I spend my time. Perhaps I won't be able to make these "Famous Blue Raincoat" posts for much longer.
Labels: personal, teaching, work
posted 2007/12/27 at 21:31
Given how little most of my online friends have been updating lately, I guess I don't feel quite so bad about not posting these past few days. Of course, they're probably away on family vacations celebrating the holidays, whereas I'm still trying to shake the last of this bug off. I'm finally starting to feel like myself again, and I think I should be resuming normal activities here. I still have about two weeks of vacation, so I should have a good chunk of time here to handle the things I was hoping to handle over break, just not as much time as I would have liked. I really hope I feel well enough to start exercising again soon here, though, because I have put on a bit of weight these past couple of weeks (thanks to the combination of holiday food and going off my diet), and I want to get it off as quickly as possible.
I'm still kind of getting caught up on a lot of things, but I wanted to mention a couple of big changes in my life lately. I'm not sure if I said something about this earlier or not, but I was originally scheduled to teach two sections of composition next semester, which was going to be my first time ever teaching multiple classes in a term. Well, near the end of the semester I got an e-mail from my boss, and he asked if I could take an online section of introductory business writing. (The wait list for the online sections already offered was so big that they needed to create an extra section for the overflow.) I've never taught online before, and generally prefer to teach in the flesh where the students can interact with one another and I can help guide their conversations, and I'm definitely more at home teaching composition than business writing, but I took the assignment anyway because it's going to be a challenge for me, and, well, I like challenges. It also means more money, and it'll mean more stuff to put on my CV.
This does, however, mean that my reading load over vacation suddenly went sky-high since I have to familiarize myself with the text for the business writing class, and it's a pretty darn big one. My book pile was getting high enough to start with, and of course it only got bigger after Christmas. (I asked for clothes and books for Christmas and wound up with more clothes than books, which under the circumstances may actually be a good thing. Oh, and none of you bought me anything off of my Amazon wishlist, so expect more whining when my birthday comes up in March.) In spite of that I still went out tonight and picked up Keith Olbermann's new book, and there are still a lot of books I want to get as soon as I can. I have no idea where I'm going to find the time for all this reading, but maybe I can try to get caught up on it here before the next term starts.
The other bit of big news is that my sister and brother-in-law finally got their own apartment. They started moving things over today, and I'm guessing it will take them a few more days to get fully moved, but the house is about to get quieter, and given the antagonistic relationship I've had with them lately that's kind of a good thing. The bad part, though, is that they're taking Spyder to their apartment, and while we'll be moving Skooter into the house after that, I don't like that it'll be that much harder to see Spyder now. I'm hoping that the fact that I've already been trusted with an extra class in just my second term at MCCC means that I'll get a tenure-track position there soon, so I can start making enough money to live on my own as well.
Labels: family, personal, teaching, work
posted 2007/11/05 at 20:08
Antioch College to Remain Open (antioch-college.edu)
As an alum of Antioch (even though I never graduated from there, Antioch considers anyone who completed any course credit there an alum due to the academic and financial difficulties involved in getting all the way to the final degree), this news brought a huge sigh of relief from me. Not only do I still feel incredibly strong ties to Antioch from my time there and how it influenced me, but Antioch's historical influence on this country from the sixties onward cannot be overstated. I didn't like how little coverage the decision to close Antioch got this past summer, but this story seems to have hit a couple of more newswires, at least. Just like Kucinich doesn't seem to get that much press even though he's one of the few Democrats out there who espouses traditional Democratic values, I have to wonder if the American "left" is trying to sweep Antioch and its historical importance under the rug because of their misguided grab of the political centre.
On that level, I'm happy. On a professional level, I have to admit that I'm kind of sad. I've been thinking about my future a lot lately -- I'm still happy with how things are going at MCCC, but I'm agonizing over some possibilities that lay ahead of me -- and teaching at Antioch would be a dream for me. If Antioch had closed for those four years, all the professors there would have had to have found other jobs, and starting with a "clean slate" in 2012 would have put me in a much better position to go in and snag a job there. Now, not only is the college staying open, but it's cutting services and jobs, which means it will be all the more unlikely that a teaching job there will open up any time soon. I realize this is kind of a selfish way of looking at this announcement, but Antioch is a tremendously special place for me and it feels like my chances of ever landing a job there have just took a huge downturn.
That being said, I would love to give money to the college now so that they can stay open for these next few years, but I am just in no condition to do that right now. I'm hoping that I can pick up a second class to teach this coming semester to increase my steady income, but until then my finances will be kind of tight. You know, there is this one son of a former music professor at Antioch (the professor before the one I studied under, Dr. John Rinehart) who still lives in Yellow Springs and is kind of flush with cash ... and it sounds like he's feeling a wee bit guilty for leading a generation of young people to think it's okay to drop n-bombs all over the place ... just a thought.
Labels: antioch, teaching, work
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