LY #135 Following Directions and Dissertating

A. Ray Olpin Student Union, U of Utah

Today is the first day of my last spring break.  I just posted my grades into Banner, now operating under the friendly appellation of "Bobcat Web."  (Banner is the super software that runs the school.)

Although I had many friendly, likable students, this wasn't my favorite quarter ever, as previous posts will attest.  Besides the poor choices I made in delivering my classes, I also had students who were making poor choices.  For example, the failing students who asked me to clear them to drop the class.  I did so and then sent them emails telling them that they had to finish the process by contacting the admissions office.  They never did so I was giving out Fs this morning, something I don't like to do.  Or the student who wanted an incomplete but who was not willing to fill out the incomplete contract form in order to get the "I" on the transcript.  And finally there were the students who seemed to choose not to read the directions for assignments. 

Why do people choose not to read the directions or not to follow the directions?  I  usually put everything a student needs to know about what is required for an assignment in the assignment directions.  When I don't, I'm always ready to hear student arguments about their grades.  I used to work with another teacher at COCC who would say, "I can't say what an 'A' speech is but I know it when I see it."  I thought this was and is a deeply immoral way of managing classroom economics.  Students should be able to figure out just what they need to do to get an A.  What I can't figure out is why students with grade concerns don't read the directions.  So, this wasn't a great quarter.

But it doesn't compare with the horrible winter of 1993.  I was reminded of that quarter last night when I went out to dinner at the Tumalo Feed Company with my friend Carolyn.  She said when we first met, "You didn't like me."

I begged to differ.  I said, "I may have been brusque and rude, but I didn't not like you.  I can just be an asshole sometimes."

She said that at the time I was really focused on my dissertation.  And then I remembered that period and realized, though I didn't want to say, that I probably wasn't thinking about anyone but myself at the time.  That was the winter when I got my worst ever student evaluations.  I believe that one reasons for the low evaluations was that  I was focused on defending my doctoral dissertation and also editing my only journal article based on one of its chapters.  

The defense marked the end of a long struggle with my doctoral committee and chair.  I wasn't sure I was going to make it.  The academic hazing that would not be complete until I survived two hours of questions.  I knew that the 350 pages of writing weren't going to stand up for themselves and that I  needed to prove that I was worthy of entering the gang.  Even as I was flying down to Utah (not as fun as Flying Down to Rio) my Chair was calling my spouse trying to get him to stop me because one member of the committee was having a family emergency.  Once I got to Utah and checked in I found that the defense had to be moved up a day.  So I unscheduled and rescheduled a room in the Olpin Union and ordered coffee and a fruit and pastry plate.  Then, on a Friday or Saturday morning (I forget which) I got to the union early and placed 4 talismans (good luck charms) in the four corners of the room.  Oh, yes, I was calling on all possible forces to aid me in my endeavor.  I remember that Dr. Fox met me at the Olpin coffee shop both before and after the defense, each time giving me a hug - the first for good luck and the second as "Congratulations!"

So the academic pressures I was under that winter sadly slid into my classrooms.  I was quite cranky and sarcastic at times.  Oh my, did I get some low low scores.  Deservedly so.

This morning after I input grades I looked for those two-decades-past evaluations so that I could share them with you.  A cursory examination of the appropriate file drawer did not reveal the 1993 forms.  I did see some from earlier and later in my career.   That led me to think about what I'll be doing with those files.  Perhaps I'll share some on my return from break and then burn them.

On Monday, March 31, I'll start the final countdown of my last 55 working days.  

LY #134 If I Were Going To Teach This Again . . .

I would certainly do it differently.

That's what I've been thinking about my new Visual Rhetoric class as well as this quarter's face-to-face interpersonal. 

I'm not sure why I'm unhappy with the results of the Visual Rhetoric class when I was very happy last spring with the Rhetoric of Film.  In this winter's class they needed to make a still image while last spring they were required to make a short movie.  It was obvious to me that most students did more work last spring, and not just because movies are more work than photographs.  I was over-the-moon about last spring's student movies.  This winter, however, several of their final project visual texts looked thrown together at the last minute.  Then there were the analyses they did on them.  Right there in the directions I wrote that As would be applied only to essays with researched sources in them.  I provided several examples of those possible sources in class.  But how many of my students had sources, even googly ones?  ONE. That's right.  Just one!

Ack.  And after I showed them in class and in their homework how to super-fast-find supporting evidence on the web? 

Well, at least I got to teach the class.  And teaching it gave me the chance to return to the work of John Berger and readings I enjoyed even though my students didn't.  And, yes, because of my own obsessions the class was too theory heavy and if I taught it again I would place much more emphasis on the performative aspects of visual rhetoric and communication so that it was more closely related to our advertising and marketing classes rather than a replication of my own ancient graduate student interests.  (In my beginning is my end . . .)

And then there's the face-to-face interpersonal.  I wasn't happy with it for a variety of reasons.  First, I didn't do my work of memorizing their names very well.  It was a once a week class and what with the day lost to fake snow danger and my own trip out of town my mind just wasn't sticky enough to keep the names present to me.  Second, a good chunk of them didn't have the textbook  in a timely manner (i.e., by midterms, for f---'s sake) and so they didn't keep up with the  material.  I've faced that issue for 2 1/2 decades, however, so it "shouldn't" have ticked me off but for some reason it did.  Maybe because this was the last time I was teaching the class live and I was hoping for more.  Finally, I'd changed one of the assignments in class from writing/thinking to thinking/test-taking.   I made this change to get the live class more parallel to the online sections.  Big mistake.  It saved me the time usually spent in reading and grading but it didn't push them to think through the material as much as written homework would have done.  The quizzes also did not do their job of encouraging reading before class meetings.

Oh, well.  It's all done except for the complaints.  I've given my online interpersonal communication students until 5:00 pm this afternoon to write to me with any complaints they may have about my assessment of their course projects.  They need to read my assessments first, however on Grademark.  I sent out two course emails with links to how to find the Grademark materials and even then I received an email from a student who continued to read Grademark as "GradeBOOK" and kept looking for comments where they weren't.  So I'm not the only one with "technirritation."

LY #133 FREE SCHOOL!

Senator Hass' Golden Retriever

While I'm thinking of the joys of being free OF school, Oregon State Senator Mark Hass (D-Beaverton) is spearheading the legislative effort to make community colleges free of tuition.

In an AP story by Steven Dubois printed in the March 19 issue of the Bend Bulletin, Senator Hass was quoted as saying, "I think everybody agrees that with a high school education by itself, there is no path to the middle class.  There is only one path, and it leads to poverty.  And poverty is very expensive."

(Well, the Taxpayer Association of Oregon might note that poverty is only expensive if liberals like Sen. Hass choose to vote to provide medical and other benefits for those who can't afford them.  But I digress.)

The free tuition movement is also a response to increasing college debt loads and America's declining ability to compete in the global skills race.  Will it work?  According to the article, Governor Kitzhaber "ordered" a state commission to examine the question.  According to my own Googling, however, State Bill 1524, voted on by both houses, actually "ordered" up the commission (with no "no" votes in the Senate and two Republican "no" votes in the house).

So who is the Higher Education Coordinating Commission that is charged with this research?  According to the state gov. website, it's a 14-member volunteer board "dedicated  to fostering and sustaining the best, most rewarding pathways to opportunity and success for all Oregonians through an accessible, affordable and coordinated network for educational achievement beyond a high school diploma." 
A quick look at the members of this volunteer group shows three people associated with community colleges:  Frank Goulard, math teacher and Charlene Gomez, both of Portland Community College, and Betty Duvall, who is either a dead confederate spy or former executive dean at PCC and more recently a director of the Community College Leadership Program for Oregon State University's School of Education.  The Oregonian had a story about the latter two last June.

The Oregon effort follows one that just this week passed both the house and senate in Tennessee. The Tennessee plan, originally proposed by Republican Governor William Haslam, draws on state lottery funds.  It has proven controversial in part because it's diverting funds from four year schools.  Democrat Steven Cohen is quoted in the Times Free Press as saying that  "the governor's 'promise' actually cuts funding from high-achieving students beginning four-year degree programs."

Could Representative Cohen's concerns arise from his association with organizations linked to faculty at these four-year schools?  Not that the $14,000 he got from Public Sector Unions is all that great a benefit.  He actually got a lot more money from business.  Nevertheless, it seems as though some Oregon unions are not happy about the suggestion that our state follow the South. 

Back in the AP story, "Patricia Schechter, a Portland State University professor active in the faculty union, worries that students will be induced into taking the community college route — 'arguably against their interests' — and about the effect on public universities, whose students won't get a tuition break."  

Hmmm.  Really?  How is it against student interests to save many thousands of dollars by getting their first two years free?  I think what she might mean is that it's not in the interests of members of the faculty union that more people go to community colleges than universities.  And why would that be?  Well, I don't know about PSU but I do know that in other universities, such as the one I attended back in the day, lower division courses, especially those meeting general education requirements like oral communication and writing, are often taught by graduate assistants.  And how is it in the interests of their students to be taught by people with little or no experience teaching?  

It's not.  But it is in the interest of full time tenure track faculty.  The  teaching assistants are often able to afford their graduate school largely because of their assistantships.  Thus the required courses  with their meagerly paid teachers provide support for the upper division and graduate courses taught by those full time tenure track professors who make up the membership of faculty unions.  Fewer graduate assistants might mean that senior faculty would be required to teach lower division again.   More students!  Not as interesting to teach!  Ouch!  So it's just not in the interest of university faculty to encourage lower division students to go to community colleges.


 

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2014/03/18/3332707/states-looking-at-0-community.html#storylink=cpy

  

LY #132 Technirritation

This will be a very short post because it's the middle of finals week and I have a boatload of grading.

Right now I am annoyed with technology and my own inability to have it work smoothly. Yesterday I found myself annoyed with Blackboard because of its complexity and mysteriousness. 


First of all, unlike my old handwritten grade collector or even Micrograde, Blackboard's many functionalities (which, I agree, are special and make life better for those who like a lot of choices) require me to select or write five different times for every column in its Gradebook.  Sometimes I forget a click.  My second issue with the Gradebook is that sometimes Blackboard doesn't "feel" the number I type in and if I'm not looking right at the screen (for example, when I am recording a list of scores written down on a paper in front of me) I won't notice my error until a student calls it to my attention.  These two BB Gradebook issues occured yesterday in a single class.  While I encourage students to keep track of their grades and police my input skills, I still have the occasional pang of embarrassment if I have to be questioned more than once about a single score.

  And finally, a special BB issue that came up for me yesterday is that Turnitin Grademark was acting differently in my school desktop Windows mode than it does on my AppleOS home laptop.  I was  not able to select anything on a student paper.  Why why why would it act that way?   I'd already told my online students that I'd have their papers finished by the end of the day.  But rather than going through the effort of either solving the mystery myself by Googling for "windows, Blackboard 9.1, issue, Grademark Turnitin" or contacting the helpdesk, I just decided I'd finish up today, Wednesday, instead.  So I BB spammed out a note of apology.  Then  I literally "threw up my hands" and stalked away from my desk to the coffee cart and got a snack.

So yesterday combined two of the primary reasons I'm so so so so ready to retire:  grading and wonders of always improving technology. 

LY #131 Meeting Ex-Students

They're all over town, my ex-students, though I don't always recognize them. 

Yesterday I had my blood drawn at the Red Cross by a gentlman who recognized me though I didn't recognize him until he reminded me about one of his speeches.  I'd asked him if he'd given a speech about how to draw blood because over the years I've had several phlebotomists or future phlebotomists in my public speaking classes.  He said that no, he'd given a speech on how to make an artificial leg. 

Then I remembered him.  It was the only speech I've had on that topic I've had in almost three decades.  He himself was missing his lower right leg and often wore shorts above the metal foot and calf attached around his knee.   His honesty about his loss as well as his willingness to deal with the squeamishness of others made his speech memorable.  I told him that his energy and humor had helped energize the class itself.  I enjoy students who infect their fellows with positive intensity that helps move the nervous out of speech anxiety.

I also see three other ex-students regularly at my local supermarket.  One of these did not do all that well in my class.  Nevertheless we are friendly.  This may be in part because I make it possible for any student to contest any grade they feel has been applied unfairly.  I have always done my best to manage my teacher-identity and self-present as friendly, reasonable, and open to having my mind changed.  How well I've performed that identity, however, would need to be determined by others.

 Of course the perceived friendliness of former students may be purely because they are friendly to everyone and I'm nobody special to them.  Just somebody that they used to know.

LY #130 When is a Compliment "Real"?

From Emergency Compliment site

Got this as part of an email from a student who has been doing well in my Visual Rhetoric class: "Also, I wanted to let you know that I really really enjoyed your class. I loved everything you taught us and really felt like I understood the topics and concepts. It made me rethink my career path, actually. I am extremely grateful that I took this course, thank you for offering it."

This compliment felt good to get for a variety of reasons having to do with both the sender/encoder  and the receiver/decoder of the compliment.  Well, honestly, all the reasons have to do with the receiver/decoder, myself, because I take power difference and sender motivation into account when I receive a compliment.  If I don't actually quiz the person giving a compliment (which I don't) I need to run through my own list of possible purposes.

1. Compliments are given to create identification with an authority figure in order to receive something from that authority figure.  This is called "Flattery."  When flattery is the intention, one cannot believe the content of a compliment because a flatterer will say something positive to a person in authority whether or not it is based on fact or not.  Of this motivation the bard has warned us often, most cynically in Timon of Athens: 
   O, that men's ears should be
   To counsel deaf, but not to flattery!                                                   
2.  Compliments are given because they are a shared communal practice and thus an expected performance.  Such compliments may be based in fact or not, depending on the situation and the self-concept of the person giving the compliment.  If a person thinks of him or herself as "honest," then they will be motivated to give an compliment based in fact.  If people don't mind being dishonest then they will bend the truth in order to keep the peace.
3. Compliments are given out of a desire to "make" another person feel good.  Such compliments may be based in fact or not.  They may arise from the following aspects in a sender's psyche.  a)  The sender may have a desire to have all people in the vincinity feeling good about themselves because that's the way the sender can feel comfortable in the world.  b)  The sender perceives the receiver as "broken" and needs to fix the break.  c) The sender seeks attention and gets a neurotransmitter "ping" when the complimented person smiles.
4. While the sender may have many unexplored psychic reasons for giving a compliment, the sender perceives that compliment as arising out of an honest and direct response to an experience of the receiver's performance or appearance.

 For a more scientific view of compliments, the reader might want to review such work as Ming Chung-yu's "Sociolinguistic competence in the complimenting act of native Chinese and American English speakers: a mirror of cultural values," in Language and Speech (March, 2005) in which she offers a great literature review and finds the following:  

"It is argued that the main function of compliments is to establish solidarity between speaker and addressee . . .In other words, compliments can be considered social lubricants that serve to "create or maintain rapport." Compliments may also be employed to serve other functions . . . A commonly seen phenomenon in human interaction, for instance, is that people frequently offer praise to reinforce or encourage the desired behavior in specific situations, such as teaching and learning. Another possible function compliments may serve is to strengthen or replace other speech acts like apologizing, greeting, reprimanding, or thanking, or to soften acts such as criticism, or even to serve as acts like sarcasm or a conversation opener . . . " 

The Journal of Politeness Research also offers a variety of articles on compliments.

No matter my perception of the motivation for a compliment, I always say, "Thank-you."  BUT, how much of the compliment I "take in" as having anything to do with me, personally, depends, as I said above, on my perception of the sender's motivation.

When it comes to compliments from students my perception is colored by the student's grade status and his or her previous displayed honesty.  I will tend to accept a compliment as "genuine" and a believable response to the sender's experience of me or my behavior if

• the student  has been receiving As and I have received no compliments from that student previously. (So I assume that there is no motivation for higher grades and also that the compliment is not just a habituated practice)
• the student has problems with controlling utterances in the classroom:  has a tendency to "blurt."  (So I assume that the compliment arises from an ungoverned honest response to experience.)

The reasons I felt good about the compliment above are

• The student has been doing good work in the class
• My previous behaviors could have been interpreted as being hard on the student by requesting she send me a scan of a hospital receipt when she claimed an emergency visit.
• My own discomfort with how the class has gone.  I've been presenting the class by the seat of my pants and would do it completely differently if I were ever to teach it again.  I have been highly critical of my own performance.  Thus, to be honest, as a receiver/encoder I am motivated by a hunger to hear that the class wasn't as incoherent as I thought it was.

Now I want to finish up my discussion of compliments by talking about two other situations of their occurrence.  I do not mention here the motivations of the "decoder."

 When a comes to compliments from institutional workers with less status than I have, I accept the compliment if

• both of us know I have no power to influence assessment decisions made about that person
• I have never heard that person offer a spurious compliment to another co-worker who they have previously or afterwords trashed

When it comes to compliments from institutional workers with more status than myself, I accept the compliment if

• it isn't followed by a request to do more work.

LY #129 The True Rhetorician

Yesterday morning's posting and deposting were the finale to months of interior wrangling about whether or not a particular section of my old 1988 notes about teaching could be shared.  I think my final decision -- no, it should not -- boils down to one primary reason -- I'm too cheap to hire a lawyer without the particular expertise a writer requires.  Or perhaps I'm just too cheap to hire a lawyer. 

A few years ago I looked around Central Oregon for a lawyer who could advise me regarding the use of real people's identities in published work. I found no one.  Perhaps someone with a background in art law has settled down here since then.  I don't know.  But even if there is one, it's hard to imagine paying big bucks for someone to review material that will not actually make the client who hires that lawyer -- myself of the Scottish heritage -- any money. 

To be perfectly honest I did put a lawyer on retainer once, 15 years ago, but in another situation entirely.  (I still carry her card around but have no idea if she is even in town.)  In that situation I pretty much paid her $400 for the hour during which I told her my story.  It turned out that that the concern over which I worried never developed.  Nevertheless, it was useful to have her there in her office, sitting like a big watch dog on the back porch of my mind.  Her presence was kind of like the weaponry I carry in the car every time I travel.  It eased my mind in case of . . .

In case something that "no one could have predicted" or "anyone could have predicted" happens. 

Which phrase is chosen depends on the rhetorical point the communicator in question wants to make.  The person who says about an unexpected consequence that "anyone could have seen" said result arriving is often trying to show his or her greater knowledge and awareness and/or trying to shame or put down those who acted in spite of such obvious risks.  Contrariwise, the person who articulates the unpredictability of the universe is usually trying to display a degree of consubstantiality with those caught in the backdraft of events.

Consubstantiality.  This is a term I have never taught in my classroom and used only sparingly in my own writing.  It's important in Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory.  It means "of the same substance" and its use is most notable, before Burke, in the Christian theology of the Trinity.  There's a very thoughtful discussion of the Burkean term in Syracuse rhetoric student Allison Hitt's blogpost of a year ago.

Neural Pathways in Decision Making

To the true rhetorician, almost all communication is persuasive.  This is because almost all communication displays its identification with one way of being or another and calls on us to accept its construction of the world as that way.  But what do I mean by "true rhetorician"?  This is my tautological term to describe a person who has fallen into the study of rhetoric after growing up within a family system that very early on showed that there are always at least two sides to every issue and that each family member was required to pick one side or the other and that once a side was chosen it required symbolic defense.  Thus true rhetoricians are people who have the struggle of symbol systems pressed into their neural pathways at an early age.  If such people are lucky enough to have a "good" education they may discover in later life that this constant clash of symbols may be defined and understood through the study of rhetoric.

I'm not sure, however, that I personally believe that there is any communication that is not rhetorical.  Burke himself thought that sometimes people expressed symbolic messages as birds do, for the sheer pleasure of making the sound.  But do birds ever sing for pleasure?  Do people ever express symbols without purpose?  If a tree falls . . .

What makes any issue regarding the interpretation of symbols so challenging, of course, is because meaning lies in the minds of both the creator and the consumer of the symbol.  And thus we get back to the riskiness of any form of public expression.  As Jesus (the Rhetorician) makes so clear in the parable of the Sower and the Seed, the value given any message depends on the mind on which it lands.   

Thus unexpected consequences are always part of the expectable outcome of any utterance.

LY #128 Deleted

Well, some of you may have seen the previous #128 post but after due deliberation I decided to delete it as too controversial.

LY #127 Required to Report

 As an Oregon community college teacher I am "required to report" any known or suspected abuse of someone under the age of 17. 

My long Tuesday (which ended early at 7:40 pm) started at 8:00 a.m. with a visit from administrator Sharla Andresen to our Fine Arts and Communication Department meeting to talk with us about about this requirement.  She went over her understanding of what we are required to report and what we are not required to report and how if we have any questions about issues on the job we could talk with her or Seth Elliott, our campus safety guy.

I have been wondering about a memory from my past that I included in my Bendnotes letter to Utah on December 5, 1988.   I've sent an email to Sharla asking her if the memory is likely to get me into any kind of trouble, legal or otherwise.  It involves something a student shared with me over two decades ago in her class journal during what was a particularly difficult first quarter of my first "big job."  I've been thinking and thinking about whether the material is publishable even in this almost unread space. 

As I wait to hear from Sharla about that, I'll let you know that I was happy to find out that I don't need to report one of our neighbors letting her kids play on a trampoline unattended.  Seems this is much safer than I thought it was and even if it weren't it's negligence rather than abuse.  Here is what our college policy, Human Resources 3-6 says about the requirement to report:

"Effective January 1, 2013, all community college employees are required by Oregon law to report suspected cases of child abuse to the Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS) or law enforcement officials.  This duty is personal to the individual community college employee and applies twenty-four hours-a-day, seven days-a-week whether or not you are on work time.  You must immediately report to DHS or local law enforcement when you have "reasonable cause to believe" that any child with whom you come in contact with has suffered abuse, or that any person with whom you come in contact has abused a child.

In addition, college employees must report to the Risk Manager at 541-383-7208 or the Campus Public Safety Supervisor at 541-383-7750 instances of inappropriate conduct when they witness, receive a report of, or reasonably believe an instance of child abuse has occured through the course of their employment.  This requirement applies to cases of abuse that allegedly occur on campus, on property owned or leased by the College, or while memebers of the faculty, staff or student body are participating in a College-connected activity off campus.  Reporting to the designated College official does not satisfy the legal duty to report to DHS or local law enforcement.

"ABUSE" means:

• Any assault of a child and any physical injury to a child which has been caused by other than accidental means;
• Any mental injury to a child, which shall include only observable and substantial impairment of the child's mental or psychological ability to function caused by cruelty to the child, with due regard to the culture of the child;
• Rape of a child, which includes but is not limited to rape, sodomy, unlawful sexual penetration and incest;
• Sexual abuse;
• Sexual exploitation, including:

                 1.  Contributing to the sexual delinquency of a minor;
                 2.  Allowing, permitting, encouraging or hiring a child to engage in prostitution or patronize a prostitute;

• Negligent treatment or maltreatment of a child;
• Threatened harm to a child, which means subjecting a child to a substantial risk or harm to the child's health or welfare;
• Buying or selling a person under 18 years of age;
• Permitting a person under 18 years of age to enter or remain in or upon premises where methamphetamines are being manufactured; or
• Unlawful exposure to a controlled substance, as defined in ORS 475.005, that subjects a child to a substantial risk of harm to the child's health or safety.

"Child" means an unmarried person who is under 18 years of age.

LY #126 Consequences of Being Yourself

In my last post I wrote about a rude remark I made being interpreted in an unexpected manner.  On Monday I spoke to the person at whom the remark was thrown and he didn't even remember it.  He thought that my mention of it was an attempt to get him to read my blog! 

Well.  Perhaps. 

 But in my head I was just "checking in" to make sure I hadn't actually offended my young colleague.  As I noted in my last post, relaxing my guard and "being myself" are at times in opposition to being a professional.  I am in a profession that, like most, has certain rules about behavior.  Many of these rules are not written down.  They are assumed.  As in this paragraph in the Human Resources Procedures manual:

"Central Oregon Community College must maintain an atmosphere that encourages the full realization of each individual's potential. This effort is promoted by professionalism in the relationships that faculty and staff have with students and each other. These relationships are intended to foster a free and open exchange of ideas, productive learning, and the work that supports it."

What behaviors are included in the concept, "professionalism"?  The paragraphs below this one make it clear that one aspect of professionalism is reporting one's "romantic" relationship with anyone over whom one has authority (students, staff, or junior faculty) to "the appropriate College officers." 

Another aspect of professionalism would seem to be not harassing anyone  "based on his/her age, disability, gender, marital status, national origin, color, race, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status."  But what constitutes harassment?  Is it what a "reasonable person" of the group being insulted thinks?  What is a "reasonable person"?  I went to the website of the Society for Human Resource Management, but found only descriptions of situations and assumptions rather than a definition.   According to Granovsky and Sundaresh, "Super Lawyers," "A 'reasonable person' can vary with the judge. The concept is meant to approximate what an average person would do in the plaintiff’s situation."  Farris, Riley and Pitt would disagree about the concept of "average" for they note that the "reasonable person" is "above average, always obeys the law, always makes the right decision."

All of which brings me to a recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a fracas around perceptions of unprofessional behavior by a professor who sent out an email and the student who made hay with it.  One sent out an email laying blame on Republicans for lack of access to important online databases during the sequester.  The other "broadcast" a screenshot of the email.  Talk radio, university administrators, fellow faculty and others got involved.  Much threatening, flapping about, yelling, whining, and bloviating on all sides ensued.  Mistakes were made.  The long article gives an overview of each side's point of view and makes clear that there was nothing in the university's policies and procedures to show that any rules were broken:

"Nothing in its handbook had clearly barred Ms. Slocum from sending her government-shutdown email, nothing in its student code barred Ms. Johnson from distributing that email far and wide, and nothing in its policies spelled out an obvious response to the furor the professor’s words had caused."

So one moral one can take from this story is a warning about being oneself in the professional setting.  Comments that seem right and true or that simply seem innocuous may be a match to the lighter fluid in another person's head.  As I suggested in my speech class last week, this is one of the main reasons I'm looking forward to retirement.

LY #125 It's Always Sunny . . .

in Central Oregon" is not a true statement, at least it hasn't been this week.   Nevertheless my public speaking class has been in its usual good mood, in large part because of the high energy folks it contains.  Some of this energy gets misplaced on occasion as folks chat too much when other people are at the front of the classroom.

This week one of the excessive sharers explained his constant joking in this way:  "We have to be serious all the time in the program [Criminal Justice] so when I can I just want to be myself."

I responded with, "Why do you think I'm retiring?"

He laughed and gave me a thumbs up.

As someone in a profession that values a certain level of, well, professionalism, I need to repress many of my baser instincts both in the classroom and among my colleagues.  Although I have many Selves (like most post-modern individuals), the one that come out for opportunities of hilarity is something of an ass, not unlike Nick Bottom.

Take last night, for example.  I was feeling comfortable and friendly with my colleagues at one of our quarterly Faculty Forum soirees.  I saw the opportunity for a joke based on the physical appearance of a friend and, sadly, made it.  BUT, the annoying and rude meaning that I intended -- "you are very muscular and busy at outdoors activities but the last I heard you weren't promoting your intellectual labor enough" -- was instead given a very different annoying and rude meaning: "you've put on weight."

I will not share what I actually said and ask for arbitration because that would entail revealing the identity of my colleague.  Let's just say that as soon as I realized how my comment had been interpreted I was aghast at the taste of my foot in my mouth.

Ad for the Fox TV show with a warning for me.

I was perplexed by this colleague's sanguine response to my perceived insult until he recommended the television program It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia which he described as a guilty pleasure that pushed the boundaries of the acceptable.  So as soon as I got home I watched the first three episodes of season one on Netflix.   The wikipedia entry on the show says, "Each member of the gang shows varying degrees of dishonesty, egotism, selfishness, greed, pettiness, ignorance, laziness and unethical behavior, and they are often engaged in controversial activities."  As I watched I recognized classic vaudeville moments updated for an age that pretends to a greater politesse than the early Twentieth Century.  I also noted that, at least in the first three episodes, the shows could be analyzed as an ongoing argument between between political correctness and its lack as it positioned the viewer as someone who buys into liberal humanism and then as someone who criticizes it.

After watching these episodes I gained a greater understanding of why my younger colleague could suffer my "being myself" with such equanimity.

LY #124 More Lasts

"It's a pun, son."

The past couple of weeks have been a time of lasts.   Today was my last lecture in my last new prep, Introduction to Visual Rhetoric.  Tuesday night was my last live lecture in an Interpersonal Communication class.  And last Tuesday afternoon I gave my last lecture in a weekly public speaking class.

"And how do you feel about that Dr. Huck?"

Happysad?  Excitedanxious?  Bemused?

Happysad because I will miss sharing ideas that are important to me but I will not miss sharing them with people who are filled with the psychological noise generated by their own concerns about other classes, their next meal, their interpersonal relationships, and all the other issues that suck the air right out of any belief I might that more than a fourth of what I'm saying in class is actually being received.  (This statement is based on the linear model of communication, a better model than the transactional when one is viewing the lecture setting.)

Excitedanxious because I'm looking forward to new ventures but leaving structures that are familiar and manageable. 

Now, bemused is an interesting word.   It arises from the word "amuse" which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it comes from the Old French amuse-r to cause to muse, to put into a stupid stare.  While "amuse" is a verb that has come to mean something more like being entertained, "bemuse" still has that original French flavor.  It means to be confused or muddled.  The OED identifies Alexander Pope as the earliest published proponent:

1734   Pope Epist. to Arbuthnot 15   A Parson, much be-mus'd in Beer.

According to GoogleNGram, the use of the word shot up at the beginning of the 20th Century and saw continued growth in use until this century.  I am not bemused by the growing use of a word that expresses befuddlement in our eras of extreme and constant technological and sociological change.

LY #123 Death and the Movies

Maybe you missed the pop-up Sunday night, the one that appeared right after Bette Midler sang "Wind Beneath My Wings" and right before a commercial.  This announcement of the death of Sarah Jones was added in this afterthought to the In Memoriam sequence of Oscar's broadcast.

Why add the name of a minor player, a mere second camera assistant, lowest of the low, to this august list the recently dead?

Maybe it has something to do with the massive online campaign by others in the industry, especially other p.a.s, to get her name added.  A social media movement called Slates for Sarah pushed for Sara Jones to be remembered publicly.

And maybe it has something to do with the long film-making tradition of considering the injuries and deaths of crew folk and actors just collateral damage in service to the "vision" of directors and producers.

For those who haven't heard yet, Sarah Jones was killed on February 20 when a train struck her while she was setting up a shot on a trestle in Georgia.  It sounds as though the director and producer did not have the proper permissions nor had they established proper safety precautions for the crew but that issue will, of course, be settled by investigation and in a court of law.  Bloggers in the industry have responded with horror and warnings.  The Anonymous Production Assistant tells all people working on a movie set to "just say no" if they think the conditions are unsafe, all the while admitting that this is a very difficult thing for young people in the business to say.  Scout, producer and photographer Jamie Vesay considers anyone putting others in harms way unprofessional.  Writing "An Open Letter to Young Filmmakers," Vesay calls on producers, directors and photographers to "Stop putting people in harms way" and noting that

"My plea is not exclusively to moviemakers. I have seen many photographers shooting local fashion or the next music video – draping their models on train tracks or having them swim in a polluted, high current river. Graduation and engagement pictures are being taken on rickety fire escapes or in abandoned private properties that have weak floors, broken glass, and numerous environmental hazards."

It's that vision thing, I think, the idea that what's cool is what's right, no matter the risk.  And there's also the concern among some that it's time consuming, difficult, and occasionally expensive to get permissions and take safety precautions.  So lives are put at risk these days in the name of "guerrilla filmmaking," independent work done on shoestring budgets.  But lives have also been put at risk time and time again on big budget works as well, ever since the beginnings of the trade.

A brief glance at the history of the film industry shows that budgetary need and creative vision have often trumped safety.  A quick google brought up a few lists of accidents, including a well researched Wikipedia article going back to the 1920s and a recent Australian News list of "horrific accidents" that happened to important stars.  Anthony Slide's book Hollywood Unknowns

A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins, reveals the hard lives and unsafe working conditions experienced by those who were necessary but expendable in Old Hollywood.  

One of the most famous "visionaries" who put his workers at risk on a regular basis was Cecil B. DeMille.  A 2014 article by Anton Karl Kozlovic in the European Journal of American Studies makes a very interesting point about one of the planets most famous producer/directors.  In "DeMille and Danger: Seven Heuristic Taxonomic Categories of His Hollywood (Mis)Adventure," Kozlovic found that DeMille expected his workers to embrace personal discomfort as danger and risk-taking became "normalized" aspects of his film sets.  He writes that DeMille

"was professionally enamoured with the pursuit of sensationalism, authenticity and realism for his crowd-pleasing productions. Whilst pursuing this filmic quest, many of his crew were subjected to real danger, distress and injury, sometimes mortally."

But DeMille was also cheap.  Like contemporary guerrilla filmmakers.  And he also encouraged long hours and pushed people past their limits, like many producers in today's film industry, both independent and studio.

The problem of film people doing more work than they should and not getting enough sleep is the focus of Haskell Wexler's 2006 documentary, Who Needs Sleep.  Wexler talks about his own near-death experience, wrecking his car after working 14 hours, as well as the deaths of others caught on the high demand treadmill.  Sometimes the people who work too hard are their own masters.  At other times they are subject to the people in charge.  Who often just don't care.

The issue for those of us who consume the products of the entertainment industry is, do we care?  Should we care?  And how can we show our caring?

As for Sarah Jones, I'm happy to hear that her death is being treated by the Wayne County, Georgia, Sheriff's Office as a homicide. 

LY #122 And the Oscar goes to . . .

whatever communication expert came up with the change in discourse from the old days when presenters said, "And the winner is . . . "

But this post isn't about the Oscars.  It's about a speech I gave on the Oscars my first year at COCC.  Back in the day, when the college was smaller . . .

Wait, let me try that again.

Back in the days when the college was smaller . . .

I'm not sure which form I prefer.  The meaning change is negligible but the first form seems more contemporary. 

Anyway, two score and five years ago when I was new here there was a monthly lunchtime activity in which folks from around the college gave presentations on subjects of interest to themselves and others.  At the time of my arrival these Lunch and Learn activities took place in the cafeteria at the top of Grandview, before that space was cut into separate, smaller rooms and then once again reformed completely into classrooms. 

I believe that sometime in the fall someone suggested that I offer one of these presentations.  Of course I would!  What a great idea!  The new speech teacher should definitely step up and show her metal!

Yeah.  That may have been the response of my public, "presenting" self but inside I was saying, "Nooooooooooo!"  I had then and still have communication apprehension, more commonly known as speech anxiety or stage fright.  And the thought that this would be the first time many other faculty would see me perform was part of that fear.  So I needed to come up with methods to manage that fear.

First, I decided to give my speech on the history and politics of The Oscars -- the awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences .  This choice managed my fear in two ways.  It put off the scary challenge until winter quarter.  But more important, it was a topic I enjoyed talking about.  Although no longer the enthusiast I once was, I've seen almost every Oscar telecast since Sam Spiegel accepted the best picture statuette for Lawrence of Arabia from an overly couiffed Olivia de Havilland (another girl from Los Gatos). (See a Youtube video of the moment here.)  I thought that explaining Oscar advertising and politics, topics not not as familiar to the general public then as they are now, would be fun and thus reduce my fear of the telling.  

Next, I talked to a friend about my fear of failure in the endeavor.  In my mind I saw myself being fired right after giving a terrible speech.  Failure = job loss.  But she assured me that this was a dumb thought because, "Job searches are expensive." 

I also went to a couple of these Lunch and Learn events in the fall and found that the actual speeches being given were not all the astonishingly perfect and wonderful performances I'd imagined.  I was most happy to see the presentation given by my predecessor, the still not-quite-retired-yet Orde Pinckney.  He gave an overview of  Neil Postman's recently published critique of television, Amusing Ourselves to Death, without adding much to Postman's ideas.  I knew that I couldn't compete with Orde's compelling oratorical style, but I could outdo him in research.

So I did a bucket-load of research over Christmas vacation (not yet called the Holiday break) so that I would feel controlled and competent with my data.  I practiced delivering my speech in front of the mirror and also while walking up and down the street (my preferred mode of memorization.)

Finally, I arranged a special anxiety management tool with my friend and colleague Lilli Ann.  I asked to have a spotlight brought up to the top of Grandview from the theatre.  This device made it impossible for me to actually see the audience for the first half of my presentation.  If I couldn't see them (and the terrible, disgusted faces I knew they'd be making) then I couldn't fear them.

And it all worked.  Of course I had some hand and knee shaking, as per usual.  But my voice was strong because I'd already spent years managing the rise in pitch and speed that used to appear with nervousness.  At least I think I did.  You'd have to ask someone who was there.

And since that day I've never had nerves in front of an audience.  Hah!  Not true.  But I get better all the time and I'm sure that when it's time to give my funeral oration I'll be completely relaxed.

LY #121 Presidential Candidate Visit #3

Patrick Lanning on left*

As a feminist I hate to say it but I liked the dude the best of the three.  Dr. Patrick Lanning is from Prineville and I have a feeling that COCC would not be a springboard for him to better places.  He said that this was the only place he was applying -- that he wasn't on a job search.

I like the idea of a college president who stays for ten years or more.  Would he?  In his autobiographical statement he mentioned that his mentors in the trade of academic administration (both women) had advised him to move from Lane to Chemeketa for more and wider experience.  So I could be wrong about reading him as wanting to make a longer term commitment to COCC.  Yet at the end of his presentation he spoke about wanting to return to Central Oregon to be with family here.  Some of what he talked about seemed a bit too personal and yet not atypical for this part of the country.

What I liked about Patrick Lanning was his quiet focus on others combined with some self-awareness of both his strengths and weaknesses and a good dose of humor.  He had a speaking habit of closing his eyes when beginning to answer a question, as though blocking out extra stimulation so that he could think clearly about what he was being asked.  (He also had the old Eddie Foy spit problem when he was excited and at one point apologized to the folks in the front row.)   He was more aware of some of COCC's challenges than the other two candidates seemed to be.  He showed some concern about our faculty being too part-time and adjunct heavy.  His talk about planning six years into the future and finding out more about where people are at now rather than barging in with lots of vision was nice for my financially conservative little heart to hear.

I especially appreciated the answer he gave me when I asked him a question about his dissertation, The Implementation of a Year of Shared Governance at a Vanguard Community College.  I'd looked at the abstract and some of his findings a couple of weeks ago but I hadn't noticed that Jim Middleton had been a member of his doctoral  committee.  In the dissertation, Lanning analyzes the effectiveness of governance councils and other aspects of shared governance. He has great concerns about the involvement of stakeholders in institutional decisions that impact their lives.   I wanted to ask him about how he differed from his former committee member.  So after identifying myself as a soon-to-be retiree, I asked about what if any philosophical differences he saw between himself and Dr. Middleton.

He smiled and hesitated and laughed (there was general laughter in the room).  Then he said, "I'm not sure what to say" and went on to say that he'd really only gotten to know Jim over the past two years  after working with him on various statewide community college issues.  He said that he didn't know if Jim had this motivation but that "I am passionate about the community college's job of lifting people out of poverty."  He then went on to note, "I enjoy working closely as a team and I trust the people I work with."  It wasn't clear if he thought this was also a "difference" between the two of them.  He also said that Jim had helped him to get better at interjecting his own opinion rather than always standing back as he used to and spend too much time listening.  He finished his answer by pausing and then saying, "However all that fits with how you see Dr. Middleton."

I thought this answer a combination of directly stated values and slyly critical observation.  But I could be wrong.

 The only thing that seemed a bit flashy about the quiet Patrick Lanning was the honking hefty emerald in that college ring flashing green sparks throughout the Q n A.


* In photo from Oregon Community College Association website:
Patrick Lanning - President, Yamhill Valley Campus, Chemeketa Community College
Ed Dodson - Board Member, Chemeketa Community College
Judith Ervin - OCCA President and Board Member, Clackamas Community College

LY #120 Drag at Disneyland

When I told him I was going to Disneyland, my young colleague Justin Borowsky asked if I was going to do the usual academic "thing:"  go to Disneyland and then write an article deconstructing it.  I told him, "no, I'm not planning to write about Disneyland.   It's been overdone."  It's too easy to write about the links between the Kingdom of the Mouse, capitalism, and post-modernity.  The best known work, of course, is Jean Baudrillard's work on hyper-reality. 

But I have to diverge from my plan to say nothing thoughtful about the magic kingdom because I saw something there that really amazed me:  a drag act!

Drag Daughter and cute young guy

Much has been written about drag, of course, and its contested sphere of performance.  Is it transgressive, as argued by writers from Esther Newton's 1979 Mother Camp to David Halperin's 2012 How to Be Gay?  Or is it just another example of masculine misogyny, as argued by many feminists?  Recent discussions of Ru Paul's Drag Race articulate many people's concerns over the political meaning of drag.  I'll direct those interested to Sarah Tucker Jenkin's master's thesis, Hegemonic "Realness"? An Intersectional Feminist Analysis of RuPaul's Drag Race, and a Slate article by Jordan Alexander Stein, "'Drag Race': Reality TV Feminism."  

But whether it was transgressive or misogynistic or both, it was certainly surprising to witness a drag act at Disneyland.

The act was a short (15 or 20 minute) performance at The Golden Horseshoe in Frontierland.  I was tempted into the theatre by the barker at the door who let passers by know that a show would be starting soon.  I drifted in after hearing that a food purchase wasn't required in order to see the show.  The day and hour I attended the show was performed by The Laughing Stock Company, a Disneyland acting group.  Here is what their website has to say about their shows:

"The Laughing Stock Company is a Frontierland comedy show that performs that performs inside the Golden Horseshoe Saloon on days when Billy Hill is not on the stage, and outside the building (sometimes on the second floor!) when he is. Each show is different and includes a set of zany Wild Western-style characters. A particular favorite of ours is the "find a suitor," where three unsuspecting members of the crowd are selected to answer questions from the Mayor of Frontierland's less-than-handsome daughter (played by a man)."


The performance I saw had that Dating Game structure.  The story is that the Sheriff has decided that he doesn't want to marry the Mayor's ugly daughter so the Mayor and Sheriff grab three men from the audience and encourage the daughter to choose among them.  Many jokes are made about the ugliness of this woman before we see her.  I was getting ready to leave when the "daughter" appeared and I realized I was watching a drag act.   A Youtube video from February 2013 shows that the same set-up as the version I saw but with different actors taking the main roles.   In the version I saw the "daughter of the mayor" was performed by the shorter, more slender actor.  I was also lucky enough to see a version of the act with three very good looking "members of the audience."  In fact, one of the young men was so good looking I wondered if all three were "plants."

Now, I wouldn't have considered this show in any way transgressive but for some of the signs used to indicate the masculinity of the drag character.  These moments are typical in drag shows targeting largely queer audiences.  In the "find a suitor" version that I watched the signifiers included the following:

• the Daughter's voice dropped an octave at one point while stage whispering in the ear of one of the male volunteers.
• when the very good looking volunteer said that his favorite song was "Buffalo Gals," the Daughter said, "I'd come out tonight for you, Sweetie."
• the Daughter stopped a moment as center stage and purposefully adjusted her bust.
• when the youngest volunteer said that his favorite food was chicken the daughter said something like, "Mine too and I could just eat you up."

  In one of the online videed versions of this scene I also heard these references to the "reality" of the daughter's undisplayed gender.  As the mayor talks with one of the audience members he says "Your big burly manly tattooed arms nestling up against her big burly manly tattooed arms."

So, what is the meaning of this Disneyland drag?  Transgressive?  Conservative?  Misogynistic?  A cross-eyed containment of gender identity confusion in late consumer capitalism?

Whatever its meaning, it was funny work by funny men.  I laughed.