Withdrawal symptoms

You know how I whine about being in hell, and how I said I'm not on facebook, in my usual slightly snotty, somewhat superior tone? Well, now I'm really in hell. I can't even get on to the Internet, let alone onto facebook. Yep. My worst nightmare has come true. I'm offline.

We are having Weather. Not real weather, not tornados, thank God, not a hurricane, just a little wind, a little snow, some mildly freezing temperatures. It's not even worth writing about. But apparently, the wiring in my old apartment building is sensitive to temperature fluctuations. At least, that is what Craig, my supremo guru at my Internet service provider says. I have DSL. Apparently the wiring is so twitchy that I can sometimes get connected if I call my landline using my cell phone. Except that only worked twice, and now it's not working at all. Blink... Blink. That's the DSL light on my modem. A faint, feeble cry for help.

I'm sneaking time from work to update my blog. Not that anyone would know if I updated it or not, but my commitment to myself was to update it at least once a week. Because I'm at work, I don't have access to all my drawings, so this post will go unillustrated. (If I could illustrate it, though, the image would be one of me, wild-eyed, strangling one of my Access students for interrupting me every fifty-six seconds with inane comments: "I don't know where I left off." Like I keep track. "Where's the document tab? Oh.")

It's late. I'm whipped. I had my nap, but I'm still exhausted, and being disconnected from the Internet is not helping. Why is that? It's not like I can be home, online. And what would I be doing anyway? Checking my email. Writing this blog post. Nothing of consequence. Actually, if I were home right now, I'd be lying in a hot bath, reading some smutty vampire romance.

Why am I feeling so malcontented about not having Internet access? It is pathetic how attached I am to being connected, even if I am not home to use it. Even if I'm just doing banal tasks like checking email. I would rather my car break down. I would rather not have phone service. In fact, I'd gladly trade my landline for DSL service. How come my phone works but DSL doesn't? No idea.

I may be offline for a few days. The phone company has promised to visit me on Sunday, if you can believe it. I'm not sure I do, but that is what they said. So I'll be home, waiting. Twiddling my thumbs. Staring at my modem. Blink. Blink. Blink.

I surrender

If you are an educator no doubt you have had to endure many hours of in-service training. We had ours yesterday. On a day already crowded with grading and prepping, the five people in my department dropped everything and scurried down to our main campus 20 miles south on I-205, where we were treated to a taco bar (I abstained—no corn, no dairy, no wheat, no sugar, no fun), followed by three hours of butt-numbing "workshops" designed to improve our ability to teach.

First up, what to do when a student brings a gun to school. Yep, knowing how to handle that problem would definitely improve my ability to teach. In fact, it might improve me right out the door. I used to think such a thing could never happen at our school, but in reality, it has happened. A gun made it as far as a parking lot. Knives have made it into the hallways. Now that I am more familiar with the for-profit education world, I can understand why students feel the need to resort to violence to make their point. "What do you mean you don't have my financial aid check? Maybe this big KNIFE will help you to find it!"

OK, so now I'm informed about what to do if students get violent. What do we do if they suddenly keel over from a heart attack? Apparently nothing, unless we are trained to use the shock machine. And even if we are, we'd sure better get it right—no hiding behind the Good Samaritan law on this one. If you are trained to use the AED and you screw it up, you can kiss your ass good-bye, apparently. As in major lawsuit coming your way. I had no idea. Guess I'll think twice about helping someone in trouble. And I'm sure if I'm the one who keels over, I'll be turning blue waiting for the paramedics, because my colleagues sure won't be hurrying to help.

The next workshop was a gripe session about our low-down, cheating, plagiarizing students (the pesky scamps). The questions we must ask: Did they know they were plagiarizing? Have they done it before? And should we kick their sorry-ass souls out the door? In this age of the disappearing college student, I can just hear upper management cringing at the thought of letting a live one slip through their fingers. "Surely you can rehabilitate this habitual cheater!" they will cry.

With each new plagiarist exposed, we get angrier and angrier, feeling more and more maligned and disrespected. But we should remember it is not about us. Hell, if I were an adult student—hey, wait a minute, I am!—I mean, if I were a person of less integrity (ahem), I might succumb to the pressure of allowing my smarter classmate to share her paper with me. I might brag about the great speech I wrote without revealing that I stole it off the Internet. I might be tempted to let my 5th-grader do my math homework for me. The burden of being alive is sometimes overwhelming. I wish I could cheat sometimes. I wish I could hire someone else to live my life for me. I surrender, I submit, I give up.

And finally, in the third workshop, we were regaled by the lecture from the sage on the stage, the instructor most intoxicated with the sound of his own verbiage, who absolutely had to share with us in a loud and passionate voice his new discovery: groups! He has discovered the wonders of having his students work in groups! Eureka, it is a miracle! And he proceeded to tell us not only what happened when he sorted the students into groups, but made us watch PowerPoints of each group's presentation. Was I the only one who surreptitiously sneaked in one earbud so I could listen to my mp3 player?

After we were sufficiently bludgeoned into being better teachers, we stumbled out into the rain and drove back to our shabby campus, where we frantically resumed our grading and prepping. New start on Monday, a handful of new students to "teach." What will I be teaching them? Don't bring your weapon to school. Don't cheat. And get used to group projects, because after day one, I'm not saying another word.

Obama asks higher education, "What are we getting for our money?"

The aggressive push of the Obama Administration to make higher education accessible, affordable, and effective is stoking a heated debate. In an Associated Press article posted today on msnbc.com, the author described the Administration's position on the role of higher education in American society.

Federal student loan funding is being used to fund students who are unlikely to graduate or get a job in their field. Some critics say some of those students should never be allowed to go to college in the first place because they can't read and do basic math. In his State of the Union address, Obama expressed his intention that every family in America should be able to afford to go to college. He didn't say that every person should go to college.

It seems to me so much of the disagreement between factions stems from a basic question: What is the purpose of a college education?

If you are a leader in a publicly funded institution of higher education that offers degrees in fields like art, music, and philosophy, you might be worrying that so much focus on "gainful employment" is the kiss of death for your liberal arts programs.

This saddens me. I can relate. If I had been left to pursue what I loved, back in the 1970s, I would have studied painting. I would never have listened to people who said I would never be able to survive as a painter. I would never have switched my major to graphic design (commercial art), which ended up to be a hopeless endeavor for me, because I am constitutionally unable to produce "art" to order.

I think of the artists and musicians and other creatives who are being allowed to study what they feel passionate about, without the threat of future unemployment looming over their shoulders. I'm sure they think about their career prospects. But vocations choose you sometimes. If you don't bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you in its efforts to come forth. Ignore your art at your peril.

Vocational education and liberal arts education are different things—they shouldn't have to compete. Unfortunately, they are being forced to compete because taxpayer dollars are being used to fund both "useful" occupational programs and "useless" pursuits such as art and theater. The value of higher education, then, has become all about the money, and the measure of a quality education has become simply whether or not the student graduates and pays back his or her student loans.

I am a believer in lifelong learning. I hope I never stop taking classes somewhere to expand my skills and my mind. But I don't believe that everyone should have a college degree. I think there should be multiple definitions of higher education, multiple avenues toward learning. Certificate and diploma programs should focus on the job skills demanded by industry. Let academe offer four-year and advanced degrees.

My life is a farce

I'm back in dissertation hell. I'm four weeks into my first dissertation course, waiting for my Chair to give me feedback on my concept. We've been playing email tag. Then voice mail tag. I keep asking the same thing: I need feedback on my concept. For four weeks, I've been... well, I've been writing this stupid blog. Waiting.

At last we connected by email, chose a time to talk on the phone. I was set to call her at 12:30 pm. At 11:00, the phone rang while I was in the process of burning my eggs. It was my Chair, calling from somewhere in the deep South. "Just thought I'd try you," she warbled. "What can I help you with?"

I came right out with it. "I want feedback on my concept paper." I didn't add the part about, remember that concept paper I wrote four months ago, that you never gave me one speck of feedback on? What's up with that weird sh-t?

After some short chit chat, she casually remarked, "Why don't you upload the paper to the course room and I'll take a look at it over the weekend?"

I was aghast. What! All this time I thought she had the paper. She was my mentor during the course where I wrote the thing, how could she not have the paper? Argh.

"Ok, I'll upload the paper right away," I sighed. "I wish I'd known that you didn't have access to the course room."

She laughed. "Yes, they don't tell you that, do they?" I wasn't finding this amusing, but she clearly was.

Some more small chit chat, and then she sang out. "Thanks, Sweetie! Bye-bye!" And she was gone.

So now I'm Sweetie. I assume that she calls all her learners Sweetie. Probably that is what they do in the South, I don't know. I don't mind being called Sweetie if it makes her feel connected and helpful. I just wish she really was connected and helpful.

We have plans to talk again on Tuesday. Like that is going to happen. I guess I'll send her another email. Maybe I'll sign it "Sweetie," and see if that helps.

I am the anti-christ of marketing

You can define marketing as "a practice employing methods of communication to persuade people to do, think, feel, or believe something." In that sense, you can call marketing a form of brainwashing. That's how I think of it.

I love the essence of marketing, which to me is the fascinating challenge of understanding consumer behavior. I love figuring out why people buy what they buy, love what they love, believe what they believe. I love style, I love self-expression. The best qualities of marketing are about answering the questions, Who are you? What do you believe in? What do you prefer? What makes you uniquely you? That's why I love marketing research. It's all about asking the questions and trying to understand the answers.

Unfortunately, the part of marketing I hate is the persuasion part, because the objective of so much marketing is to sell more stuff to people who already have too much stuff. Have you seen The Story of Stuff? You should.

I sometimes teach introductory marketing classes. The students invariably are interested in marketing only to make money. They get that it is a game of scheming and manipulation. They are used to it, being experienced consumers themselves. They rarely care about the environmental impact of producing and marketing products in an endless cycle. They don't seem to understand the finite nature of earth and its resources. The world seems like one big mall to them.

They assume that whatever brilliant product they devise for their class project will be of riveting interest to the entire population of the planet. And that everyone has the resources to purchase said product. And of course they assume everyone in the world has a computer, Internet access, PayPal, and Facebook. Don't get me started.

I show them Sut Jhally's Advertising and the End of the World. Yes, it's old, and the scary monster from the 1990s was the hole in the ozone layer, but that was just the harbinger of global climate change. The concepts are still relevant, and the commercials are compelling. My local library used to have a copy, which I borrowed and showed to several marketing cohorts. I'm not sure it did much for them, but it scared the crap out of me. That is how I became the anti-christ of marketing.

Marketing is just a set of tools. Marketing is like fire—it can keep you warm or burn your house down. In unscrupulous hands, marketing is part of the machine that will destroy our planet and us along with it. In the right hands, marketing is a tool that can be used to persuade people to rethink their consumption habits in support of our common welfare. How many hands do you think are in the second category?

Relationships are highly overrated

It's Valentine's Day. I read some stories today about how being in a relationship can help you live longer, improve the quality of your life, help you lose weight, and improve your sex life (really?). All I can say to that is bah humbug.

My position may be somewhat unusual, I don't know, but I do know this: My health improved, my mood improved, and my sex life definitely improved when I finally made the choice to become single.

From 1980 to 2003 I was always in a relationship (four all together, one at a time). I never made time to find out what it was like to live successfully on my own. I was too scared, I think. I thought I couldn't live without a relationship.

Unfortunately, I don't have a very good partner-picker. I chose partners who were not all that good for me and who were unlikely to change. Not a happy combination. Lucky for me there is a Twelve Step program for magical thinking.

All those years I spent orbiting other people's lives took a toll on me, emotionally and physically. When I finally allowed myself to claim my independence in 2003, I made a promise to myself that I would never again allow someone else to invade my mental and physical space without my permission.

So, here's to Valentine's Day. Maybe someday I'll find the love that some other people have been lucky enough to find. Until that day, I'm content to be with myself.

What happens next?

I'm trapped in dissertation limbo, waiting for my Chair to respond to my submission. While I'm waiting, my constant question is "What happens next?" As if I can't wait to get out of this present moment into the next one. I'm not sure why, since I don't know what is happening now, let alone next.

Is it human nature to constantly want to know what happens next? Like if we just had some inkling of the disasters awaiting us, we could be more prepared? Right. What would you do if you knew there was going to be an earthquake in your neighborhood next Saturday at 3:00 a.m.? Would you take the week off from work to pack up your stuff and head for the hills? Would you buy earthquake insurance? Tell the truth.

A long time ago I attended a meditation group. I don't remember much, probably because I slept through much of it, but I do recall the teacher exhorting us to stop asking unanswerable questions and strive instead to be empty boats. What would an empty boat ask? That is a trick question. An empty boat would ask nothing. Boats can't talk. An empty boat would simply be. Floating on the river of life.

Sort of like my cat, I guess. He floats on the river of life. Existing in the moment. The master of the next right thing. Well, the analogy is interesting, but not all that helpful, since the cat doesn't have to earn a living, write a dissertation, or take out the recycling. Wouldn't life be grand if it were all about eating, peeing, pooping, and play? Hey, wait a minute. Isn't that retirement? More like institutionalization.

Retirement is an elusive impossibility for an under-earner like me, but institutionalization, that is not hard to picture. I'll be there soon enough, don't rush it. I'm not anxious to find myself sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a bib while someone feeds me cake and wipes my drool. Much as I dislike the prospect, though, there is something comforting about knowing that even if I can't lift a finger, I will be fed, clothed, and sheltered until I am dead. Unless Medicare and Medicaid give out. Then you can set me adrift in an empty boat.

That pesky sense of entitlement

A distressing number of my students seem to think they are exempt from the rules.

The conversation goes like this:

• Student: I deserve an A in keyboarding!
• Me: Why do you think you deserve an A in keyboarding?
• Student: Because I worked really hard!
• Me: But your performance failed to meet the criteria for A.
• Student: But I still deserve an A!
• Me: But you haven't earned it.
• Student: You should make an exception for me.
• Me: Why?
• Student: Because I'm special. 
• Me: What makes you so special that you should be exempt from the rules?
• Student: Because God made me perfect!

And there you have it. What do you say to the spiritual exemption? At that point, I just smile and nod. If the student and I are alone, I mention that she may be perfect spiritually, but her character, attitudes, and performance still need some improvement. And then the student smiles at me in a superior sort of way and says something along the lines of: "No. I'm perfect just the way I am."

Who am I to argue with God's perfection?

My own personal seven dwarves

Despite my new lightbox, I started my day feeling somewhat grouchy and grumpy and realized I was once again in the company of my dwarves. I have a lot more than seven. Grouchy and Grumpy are just part of the crowd. There's also Foggy, Groggy, Bleary, Logey, Weepy, Sneaky, Snippy, and Morose. And don't forget Snotty and Catty. They are always lurking in the dark corners of the Hellish Handbasket.

Carol's Brain

I was hoping the new lightbox would be a magic bullet to ward off my SAD, which is beginning to fill the crannies of my mind with fog. It's a feeling I associate with winter and spring. A brain filled with cotton. Because I am virtually non-functional, it makes sense to have my dwarves step in for me. My avatars, if you will.

There is a guy at work, I'll call him Frankie. After I started hallucinating a kitchen full of cranky dwarves—hey, that's another one, Cranky—I thought, I wonder if other people have dwarves that reflect their personalities too. Like Frankie, for instance. What would his dwarves be named? Probably Happy, Sunny, Chummy, Chipper. Don't forget Helpful and Skippy. Smiley and Beamer. For some reason it's harder to think of optimistic names. I don't know if you can tell, but I sometimes have disparaging thoughts toward Frankie. I say I am confounded by his eternal optimism. He says he appreciates my point of view, because he doesn't "think that way." He's too ebullient to judge me the way I judge him. He's like a freshly opened can of 7-Up. Me, I'm like a two-day old cup of cold bitter coffee.

The idea of having my own set of pessimistic, cynical, angry dwarves is utterly stupid. But it points out to me how ridiculous my self-obsession can get, especially on a gloomy, rainy winter morning.

Perplexed and confused as usual by my students

I'm still in dissertation purgatory, waiting for my Chair to respond with feedback to my concept paper. Even a response to my email asking for feedback would be a step in the right direction. What am I doing wrong (besides not asking my advisor for a new Chair)?

On the plus side, I have time to do stuff around the shack. Clean the cat box. Shake the litter out of the rugs. Organize my envelopes (I have so many sizes, yellowed with age—Who sends mail anymore?). Read some trash paranormal romances. Lay around and eat bonbons. Write in this blog. La la la.

Because of this lengthening delay in receiving feedback from my Chair, I'm in a constant state of panic. Mostly I keep it tamped down to a slow boil. Sometimes, though, it comes out sideways, in the form of nastiness toward others. I always feel really bad after I say something I shouldn't have. But it would be better if the nastiness had never happened. In my defense, it's not like I'm criticizing their choice of footwear, not that nasty. More like general snippyness, cattiness, and snottiness. (I think those are real words.) I have my reasons (malcontentedness combined with roiling panic), but I admit, it's no excuse for being snippy, catty, or snotty.

This constant low-grade panic is especially noticeable in my level of tolerance toward keyboarding, keyboarders, and my students in general. I'm to the point where teaching keyboarding is like scraping all ten fingernails on a dirty chalkboard. I have no patience with keyboarders who argue with me about where the fingers go. (I'll tell you where the fingers go! Finger this!) And I am seriously fed up with students who check their engrade score every five minutes. I love engrade, but it's the bane of my keyboarding existence sometimes.

In a discussion of the dual role of the student in the "business" of higher education, Meirovich and Romar (2006) used the terms customer and grade-seeker. The authors weren't using the terms in a negative sense, but more to simply describe the roles of the student in juxtaposition to the roles of instructors as service suppliers and retention-seekers. I use the term grade-seeker in a strictly negative sense to describe students who check their engrade scores multiple times a day, who ask questions like, "What do I have to do to get a C in your class?", who take all five absences as part of their attendance strategy, and who rarely if ever check the syllabus to find out what lesson they should be on this week.

Am I sounding snippy? What can I say. I'm trying not to panic.

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Source:

Meirovich, G., & Romar, E. J. (2006). The difficulty in implementing TQM in higher education instruction: The duality of instructor/student roles. Quality Assurance in Education, 14(4), 324-337. DOI: 10.1108/09684880610703938

The proud, the many, the chronically malcontented bloggers

One day last week while I was admiring how lovely my blog looks, I noticed the link at the top of the window that says <<Next Blog>>. Since I only have one blog, I wondered where the link might take me. Wow. There are a lot of malcontented people in the blogosphere.

Maybe Google uses keywords on my blog to transport me to blogs of like-minded malcontents. Or maybe it's just a random link to the next bizarre example of someone's self-expression. All I know is, I'm not alone. And I'm just a malcontent wannabe when it comes to whining. Some of these bloggers are masters at the art of martyrdom, sniveling, and moroseness. I bow down.

After I perused a few blogs, I noticed that some of them hadn't been updated in a long time. Like, years. Then I realized that abandoned blogs litter the blogscape like ramshackle cabins left from gold rush days. Apparently people felt a need to express themselves, they expressed, and then they moved on. Sort of like the way we use portapotties at the local park.

We got rid of another one of
your paintings today, honey!

And who can blame them, these casual bloggers. It's free and easy to start a blog. Anyone can do it. I think my mother could do it: She's 82 and typed her zip code into her dial-up account instead of the provider's dial-up number, but hey, that's a mistake anyone could make. She can type, ergo she can blog. I asked her what she would like to blog about. She thought about it for a moment, and then she said, "I think I would like to talk about how to be a friend." I was like, right on, Mom.

So, anyone can set up a blog and write a few things for a week or two, maybe even for a month. But day after day, week after week? Now, that is hard. Look at me, I've been blogging for what, three weeks? And already, I'm blogging about blogging. I'm meta-blogging. That's sort of like using one credit card to pay another. The kiss of death.

Some abandoned blogs were obviously for groups. Social groups, families, a place that was intended for members to gather and celebrate the group's existence, share accomplishments, make plans. These blogs remind me of half-built hotels. They ran out of funding, lost their investors, and now they clutter the blog horizon. You can't stay in these blog hotels, but you can tour the ground floor and get a sense of what it could have been. Is there an unlimited capacity to store these derelict blogs? What will I do when I have neglected my blog for a year and can no longer remember the password?

To all the bloggers who came before me, thank you for blazing the blog trail. Thank you for decorating the blogscape with your personalities, observations, complaints, and shouts of glory. Even if you have moved on, you've left behind an environment of creativity and self-expression that I find both inspiring and hopeful. Inspiring because after seeing your blogs, I know I'm capable of doing what you did, and reassuring because if I abandon my blog in three months, I will be in good company. Here's to us, bloggers young and old, here and gone.

Back in dissertation hell

I knew this would happen. I'm two weeks into my first dissertation course, and already getting feedback from my Chair is like pulling teeth. Argh. I feel like I'm being gaslighted. I can't believe she would deliberately be so--what's the word? Schizophrenic? What do you call it when someone's actions don't match their words?

She approved my (laughably unrealistic) timeline. She emailed that she would read the paper over the weekend. (That was last weekend). She sounded so enthusiastically supportive in her email, so chatty and encouraging. And then, nothing, not a peep, not a word of feedback, not even, "This sucks. Resubmit." Nothing.

This is what I hate about... life, I guess. That people are at times so predictable, and other times so frustratingly perplexing. I want so much to trust her. I want to have faith. I will forgive her almost anything. But her actions, or lack thereof, erode my ability to trust. Eventually I will be reduced to an automaton, saying whatever it takes to get through this and leave her behind. It's so bleak, and we've only just begun.

What if I were to have a conversation with her about my concerns? What if I emailed my advisor? Lots of luck, is what I think. I suppose communication breakdowns happen in any institution, but it seems particularly destructive when it happens in an all-online environment, where all we have is email and the rare phone call to communicate our frustration and reassurance.