Writing Maternity

gee, what a surprise

The only thing I could vote on or for yesterday was my town's school board.  So I went first thing (I care a bit about the schools in my town) and then went to work.  The local paper said that it would post the results first thing today, so I checked this morning and was pleased to see that the three candidates I voted for made it in. 

The next article down, under the title "Mask Parade Taps Student Creativity," was a brief piece about Hippie School's annual Mask Parade, always held the day before Halloween:

"Bright colors and student ingenuity paired up with a touch of technology resulted in a [Hippie] School tradition being carried out for yet another year. Featuring representations of what students are learning in the classroom, the [Hippie School] Mask Parade featured a bevy of themes ranging from oceans and volcanoes to animals from past and present in the east grass area of the campus."

Interesting.  You know, Neighborhood School also had a Parade of Masks at 10:00 Friday morning, and I can say that the masks were great and creative and fun: the first graders made deciduous tree masks, because they're studying forest biomes this year; and second graders -- who study arctic and antarctic biomes -- were either arctic wolves or vikings, depending on which class they were in.  In some of the older grades, each kid had chosen an animal or plant from the grade's biome, and walked around holding a sign for everyone to recognize.  Sixth graders had made Aztec mosaic masks, because they've been studying the Aztecs this fall as part of the social studies curriculum.  Oh, and third graders, masked as bison from North American grasslands, treated us to a brief stampede rather than the relatively orderly parade the other classes gave.  Each class walked around the grassy area at the center of the school to the tune of music they'd chosen.  It was great.  When the kindergartners walked around -- each as a different letter of the alphabet -- the entire school sang an alphabet song with them, because they'd almost all learned it with Ms. Froggie.

The comparative invisibility of Neighborhood School bothers me deeply.  It's a good school, but also a struggling one.  Test scores are not good, and given the fucking insanity  standards of NCLB, I worry that soon it will have less curricular freedom than it currently does as a result.  But it's also been abandoned by the town in certain ways.  I know ONE other faculty member whose child has gone there, and her daughter graduated from high school a year ago.  Even when housing prices were crazy high and young faculty "had" to live south of the tracks, in our neighborhood, they found ways to send their kids to Hippie School or HTSW or E.  I overheard another friend -- who lives out of the district -- talking at a party about how to game the system to make sure that his kids got to go to Hippie School regardless.

It's just this: Why wasn't the article about the Mask Parades at both schools?  Both are longstanding traditions that go back decades; both show kids' ingenuity and creativity; both show how the schools are integrating learning in a variety of ways.  So why only highlight one?

'tis the season

1.

Dear student,

I like you a great deal; I enjoy our conversations.  But since you've declared a major in a different department with fairly complex requirements, don't you think it would be more appropriate and helpful for you to have an advisor *in* *that* *department*?

All best,
dr

flattery will get you nowhere

Or, conversations with students . . .

Well, I appreciate the situation this puts you in, but this particular program policy lives at the intersection of several college policies. The whole faculty voted this particular policy in last year, and it would take the full faculty to change it.  In addition, there's really no structural way at this time to do what you want us to do -- should we even be willing to do so.

I appreciate that, WPA, but I have to say that one of the things I most like about this school is how -- unlike larger institutions -- it's really great at working with students and being flexible.  I've really appreciated how helpful everyone has been, even when you run into a problem with a policy like this one.

Repeat.

(As I said to a colleague afterward: Note to students: by the time you go to that particular argument, you've lost.  Give it up now.)

Dear Job Candidates,

If the ad says that the job is in "twenty-third-century prose" and you have a dissertation that's on twenty-third-century poetry (for example) but just so happens to talk about a novel or essay for a page and a half, or even if it takes an idea from a major novelist of the twenty-second century and traces its influence on twenty-third-century poets in an innovative way, DON'T APPLY.

This is true even if you have some experience teaching twenty-third-century prose.  And it's also true even if you've been advised to apply for everything remotely relevant.

If you want to disregard this advice, please do so.  But, in that case, please try to spin your page-and-a-half as revealing a fundamental interest in some aspect of narrative, or something else that is less, well, poetical.

Sincerely,

Overloaded Search Committee Member

bureaucracy

PROBLEM: I realize that I need to reschedule a meeting with 7 students because of a guest speaker next week.  Find (miraculously!!) another time during the week when all of the students can meet.

STEP ONE: I email the registrar's office to ask for a room.

STEP TWO (all is well, thus far): Hear back from someone there, that a great room is available at the time I need, in my own building.

Wrinkle: I have to check with someone in another office because he takes care of "single event" room reservations.

STEP THREE: I email that person, asking for the specific room that I know is available, and indicating that this is for a rescheduled class meeting.

STEP FOUR: He writes back to tell me that I need to fill out a form in order to book a classroom for my make-up class.  He tells me that I "can find it online" or that I can email someone else and have her fax it to me.

I seem

to have lost my attention span. 

If you see it wandering about, send it home, would you?

stay put, little girl

I've written before about the heart-wrenching few years my sister, W2, has had. It seems they aren't over yet: at 22 weeks pregnant, she's been put on 100% bedrest because her cervix is shortening (which precedes actual dilation). 

We know that this is happening because Bumblebee was born at 26.5 weeks about eighteen months ago.  There's no clear medical reason for his premature arrival (the technical diagnosis was "spontaneous cervical dilation"), but as a result this pregnancy has been monitored closely.  And that has turned out to be a deeply good thing, since her doctor thinks that this little girl is trying to follow her big brother's path into the world.  And right now, we're all hoping really hard that she won't.

I'm off across the country the day after tomorrow to try to help out.  I think of it as buying them the time to find a nanny they're fully comfortable with.  My mother will arrive a few days after I leave, while Top Gun goes to New State to close on their house. (They move in June -- and, yes, we're all trying to figure out how that one' s going to work.)

In short term, what I need most for W2 are book recommendations: all-absorbing, take-your-mind-off-it pleasure reads.  Any ideas?  She's partial to young adult fantasy, but, really, it's all about sending her to another world every night after Bumblebee goes to bed.

Update, 11:30 AM Friday: In the round-robin that is familial communication at such times, I just heard from my mother, who heard from Top Gun, that W2 is currently in the hospital having a cerclage done.  The ultrasound showed that she'd responded quickly and well to the two days of complete bed rest, so there's reason to be hopeful. 

time

Unclutterer talks about time, quoting H. Jackson Brown:

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

Sigh.

I say versions of this all the time -- and this is not to suggest that I think that I don't waste a perfectly respectable amount of time -- but I don't see any people on that list who were responsible for domestic labor.  No one, in other words, who was also cooking, cleaning, and raising children.

Let's be careful about the standards we set for ourselves.  Otherwise we set ourselves up for failure, and teach our children to be unforgiving of their own imperfections.

make your sacrifices

So, earlier today meg and I decided that we needed to figure out which Greek deity was in charge of things technological, because clearly it was time to start sacrificing incredibly huge herdbeasts of various kinds.  G and discussed the matter briefly over dinner, before referring it to the in-house expert.

Squiss considered the question carefully.  She then immediately pointed out that, when she thinks of Hera and Persephone, she thinks of them as *queens* of things, not *gods.*  (Of the gods of Olympus and the Underworld, respectively.)  So her first instinct was to think that one of them should be the god(dess) of computers and technology.  Reasoning further, she decided that Hera should be goddess of fairy princesses: because they have powers, and Hera likes power.  (That's what she offers to Paris, after all.)

That left Persephone as the goddess of computers and technology, and queen of the underworld.  She then went over to the fireplace ("where we sing Christmas carols") to say her prayer to Persephone to please keep all the family computers safe and working.  She reported that Persephone heard her, since gods and goddesses can hear you, even if you whisper, and even if you're very far away from Greece or Olympus.

G and I had been more inclined toward Hermes than Persephone, in our own meditations on the subject.  The trickster god, the god of thieves and travelers -- a crosser of boundaries, writ large -- strikes me as a good fit in this day and age.  But I'm more than happy to make my obeisances to both.  Persephone is a more generous and merciful personality than Hermes, and so I like having her there to temper his sense of humor.

(On that note, I'm currently writing this from my fully functioning laptop, connected to the home wifi.  The highlight of the entire 6 hours I've spent with various tech support people at Apple and Verizon in the last two days was, without question, the moment when today's second Apple tech started to direct me to find System Preferences.  Then he interrupted himself: "but I bet you know where that is, don't you?")

(Thank you, oh generous and merciful ones.)

geekery

One thing about having your primary (work) computer stolen is that it potentially inspires a complete revision of how your organize your computing life.*  Rather than have my institution replace my stolen laptop with another one, I opted to have them buy me an iMac and bought myself a Macbook.  I figured that I'd migrate everything from the iMac to the Macbook, use .Mac to sync iCal and the like (because when you use iCal and your computer is stolen, you lose every appointment and deadlines, too**), and then, in addition to routine back-ups to the school server and a whole variety of other things and places, I'd have two -- two! -- almost identical repositories.

That was the plan.  I still like this plan.  But it's still merely a plan.

The iMac arrived a couple of weeks ago, and I'm quite loving it.  The big screen is great, the keyboard is great, etc.  The Macbook arrived on Monday, and this is where my problems have arisen.  Feeling all clever, I hooked the two up with my FireWire cable and started migrating.  The migration seemed to go smoothly, and I thought that life was great.  Then, when I took the Macbook home at the end of the day and went to start it up and get going, I discovered a wrinkle: it seems incapable of logging me in if it isn't using the iMac as a target hard drive.

(Can I point out that this renders the two computer project, not to mention the laptop project, utterly useful?  I don't need two computers sitting on my desk at the office; I need one computer there and one at home and at conferences and so on.  Rrr.)

It's now three days later.  I've re-installed Leopard twice, thinking that I'd just wipe everything out and start over.  No deal: we always come back to the same problem.  At 9:00 this morning, I finally called Apple.  After two hours on the phone and multiple approaches to the problem, the product specialist (I've forgotten his name) walked me through the migration and seemed to think that I was peachy.  Foolishly, I let him off the phone at that point, because once I restarted I had precisely -- precisely -- the same problem.  I'm now back on the phone with them, and we seem to be trying a new set of approaches, eerily similar to the first.

* Combine this with having your daily computer BAG stolen and you have a recipe for a fairly radical work-life organization system overhaul.  The bag replacement process is almost happily complete.

** So, yeah, to address that problem I used some birthday money form my mother that I hadn't yet spent to buy an iPod Touch.  I'm liking it even more than I anticipated -- and I haven't had any setup problems there.

Update at 12:59: I just got off the phone with Jim -- another product supervisor -- and we seem to have fixed things!  (furious knocking-on-wood noises)  In my own defense, what I thought had happened had, in fact, happened, even though I didn't have the language to explain what it seemed to be.  So perhaps I'm not quite as much of an idiot as I was feeling all along.  Still isn't clear how it happened, though.