… I have two classes involving PRS, and the bugs still haven’t been worked out. In fact, last week, the system did not work at all for my chemistry class, and in biology it took more than a few minutes until the system was up and running properly.
So, does this spending of extra money and effort mean enhanced learning? The PRS is supposed to let professors see if their lecture has “stuck” with students, and if not, adjust accordingly. It also stimulates classroom participation, but listening and interacting is still in the hands of the students. With the introduction of PRS, the focus is shifted from actually understanding the material to making sure you get an answer into the system to get credit for the day.
I see how the PRS is effective in bringing people to class, but having to sit through an entire lecture just to press a button is a bit ridiculous. The PRS does not enhance my ability in the classroom, it just makes me resent having to lug around another piece of technology while wasting time to get it to work when the professors should just be teaching. I have a hard enough time getting my lazy self to go to class. I don’t need to have to remember to bring this random clicker.
Luckily, most professors drop about 10 PRS grades over the span of the entire semester. This amounts to a lot after one takes into account how many times the system collapses on itself and forces professors to give out free points. Professors also find other ways to counteract the failings of PRS. In my biology class, the professor gave a survey for extra PRS points, and I expect other professors do the same. Professors try to accommodate … the faulty system, but it doesn’t always work.
… Fred Zinn, Sr., designer of instructional technology at the Office of Informational Technology at UMass, described possible reasons behind trouble with PRS reception in series of blogs. Although very helpful, the blogs suggest that incorporating PRS into a course is a huge burden.
According to Zinn’s blogs, PRS could be adversely affected by its receivers being too close to laptops, low batteries in the remotes of the students, and more than 200 students using the same receiver. The blogs also report faculty losing data by minor mistakes when using the system.
The web page suggests that instructors having difficulty should set up a one-on-one consultation with the Instructional Media Lab. Professors already have enough on their hands, it isn’t necessary to bog them down with even more.
As class sizes continually get larger, devices like the PRS will become more prevalent, even though this contributes to their failures. The only method of teaching proven to be glitch-free is writing notes on the board and taking notes with a pen and paper, and that is what we should be doing…
PowerPoint, laptops, clickers – universities cynically load them on “as class sizes continually get larger.” And it looks as though students are beginning to get the picture.
Are you and your professor being turned into robotic nullities?
Click A for Yes.
UD‘s extremely proud to appear in the following first paragraph in an Anthony Grafton essay in The New Republic:
Morning, nowadays, means coffee and the Times, as it did for my parents. But it also means something they never experienced: a trip across the Web. Slipping from link to link, occasionally falling in and spending a few minutes in one place, I pass from TNR to NYRB to Bookforum, from Atrios to Steve Benen, from Easily Distracted to University Diaries to Tenured Radical to TigerHawk, from Historiann and Arts & Letters Daily to Cliopatria and Athens & Jerusalem, from Andrew Sullivan to Megan McArdle to Ta-Nehisi Coates—and, for perspective, to the obituaries in the Telegraph.
Talk about being in good company.
Tony’s reviewing Mary Beard‘s latest book — UD and Mary are longtime mutual blog admirers.
UD thanks her friend Christina for noticing the TNR essay.
It’s just gossip. But it features one of the most important professors in the world, plus amazing quotations, like the one in my title. So why not.
Niall Ferguson, whose comments about Scotland have appeared on this blog, has left his wife for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali human rights campaigner, currently under a fatwa.
… in the hallway, the sun shines bright on the Rockville Pike, and UD sits up in bed, reacquainting herself with heat and electricity.
She’s at the Legacy – a boutique hotel, all angular lamps and ochre walls. The guests are mainly, like UD, ‘thesdans thawing out. It’s been quite the blizzard, and it ain’t over yet.
The snow came down thin and sifty like confectioner’s sugar, but when it finally stopped the whole world was whipped cream.
Evergreens leaned and creaked and spilled limbs all over town.
We sat quietly in our cold houses, marveling at how precisely we could see, in winter sunlight and with a backdrop of snow, the wing patterns of birds.
For heat there was the fireplace, and pots of water simmering on the stove, and piles of throws on the bed.
We took turns shoveling the walk and the car, and we managed to keep a path to Rokeby clear.
At night we settled under the throws and held little battery lamps to our chests so that we could read. I chose A Short History of Nearly Everything, a funny, well-written scarefest (asteroids! viruses!).
Hello! This is Carolyn, the webmistress of University Diaries, here to let you know that my aunt Margaret is without an internet connection at the moment, thanks to the blizzard. She asked me to inform you, her readers, that she will resume posting once her internet connection is restored.
Umbrage, high dudgeon, the taking of offense, the mounting of one’s high horse, Up Yours!ism, Well, I Never!ism — SOS has warned you against this sort of writing for years. She has directed you to this Onion article as a cautionary tale. She has provided real-world examples of what she calls Harrumphs.
Harrumphs are often letters to the editor, in which writers, offended by bad reviews, lose all restraint (Emotion, SOS always says, is the enemy of good writing.) and let their wounded egotism rip. If you want your writing to work for you, to persuade your audience to take your side, it’s a good idea not to reveal yourself to the world as an arrogant thin-skinned fool.
Here’s a recent rather amazing Canadian Harrumph, from Victoria’s poet laureate.
An English professor from Camosun College reviewed the laureate’s latest book of poetry (It was a perfectly ok review… thorough, not particularly exciting… critical here, admiring there…), and the laureate blew a laurel.
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I wasn’t going to dignify the badly written, inaccurate and savage review of my book Muscle Memory in last week’s Times Colonist with a response. [Harrumphs always, always start like this. I wasn’t going to write! I have better things to do than stoop to that! I’m busy doing the Lord’s work!]
I considered the source and decided to ignore it. [Consider the source — a playground cliche.] The record speaks for itself. It is the first negative poetry review in a lifetime of writing and most of the poems have been published elsewhere and won national and international awards. [Never got a negative review, eh? Think that’s a sign of a strong poet, do you? Along with all the awards you just boasted about?]
… That the Times Colonist would publish hate mail in the form of a book review at a time when the world is focused on the devastation of lives in Haiti is in appalling taste. [Now we’re right round the bend. What does this sentence mean? Can you figure out what she’s saying? I can’t. It’s absolutely mad.] The newspaper insulted the suffering [and] insulted the city that has chosen me to be poet laureate …
Yes, well, word is getting around about semi-literate medical school professors credited with having published 2,785 scholarly articles. It just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Scientific American describes the phenomenon and summarizes a recent study of the subject:
Scientists credited for research articles that were secretly penned by ghostwriters from pharmaceutical companies often are not reprimanded for their misrepresentations; rather, their ranks and career trajectories often improve.
Although this practice of undisclosed authors (with undisclosed commercial interests) writing articles under the pretense of unbiased scientific inquiry raises serious concerns about academic integrity, few institutions have policies to discourage it.
… Once medical publishing’s “dirty little secret,” ghostwriting is no longer under wraps, thanks in part to a 2009 federal court decision to release 1,500 documents describing the strategic placement of marketing messages into peer-reviewed medical literature. In their article [the authors] say these cleverly crafted advertisements from pharmaceutical companies shape the literature in subtle but important ways, and can even affect how clinicians perceive and prescribe treatments.
“Your typical family practice physician is bombarded with glossy reprints,” [one author] explains. “The more prestigious the university and the researcher’s name on it, the more weight that’s going to carry with the doctor.”
Ah yes. If Cardinal Newman were writing The Idea of a University today, he’d write The idea of a university is to gain enough prestige to make its medical faculty worth ghosting.
From the Bowdoin College obituary for professor of mathematics Steve Fisk, who died at the age of 63:
Fisk’s love for mathematics… continued to the very end of his life.
“He was a person who loved mathematics more than anybody I know,” said [a colleague]. “And I know a lot of mathematicians.”
When [this colleague] visited Fisk at the Gosnell Memorial Hospice House in Scarborough, Maine on Friday afternoon, Fisk asked [him] for a particular math book called “Roots to Research.”
“I came back and I tried to get a copy—I didn’t have one myself, and couldn’t find any copy anywhere. Amazon could send it, but it wouldn’t arrive until Monday, and I sensed that was too late.” …
Instead, [he] called Visiting Lecturer in Mathematics Leon Harkleroad, who drove two hours from Brunswick to deliver the book early Saturday morning.
“Steve did read from it that day,” [he said]. “His wife told me later that he actually had left it bookmarked on the fourth or fifth page, where the authors describe the concept of length of game.”
Fisk’s obituary, written by his family, considers the concept of length of game symbolically.
“While Steve’s length of game may have been shorter than most of us would wish, the numbers he chose along the way gave him—and all of us—great joy,” it reads.
UD‘s buddy Jon sends her this ‘thesdan dispatch:
[Bethesda resident] Paul Pickthorne [hosts bondage and discipline parties] … in the castlelike, 3,600-square-foot McMansion he rents… The cost: $20 for a basic ticket, $50 for VIP treatment.
… [His neighbors] convened a meeting in someone’s living room last week, then fired off indignant e-mails to county council member Roger Berliner (D), whose district includes their Merrimack Park subdivision.
“I share your sense of outrage that a sex club is operating in your lovely neighborhood,” Berliner wrote back. “I want you to know that my office has been advised that our County has moved aggressively to put an end to this blight on your community.”
The county moved all right. Pickthorne got a written warning from a zoning inspector Monday. But hold on. Suppose Pickthorne stops charging admission, as he says he might? Suppose he complies with the inspector and hosts all future BDSM gatherings as strictly noncommercial functions in accordance with Section 59-C-1.31? What then?
“Well,” says Berliner on the phone, hesitating. “Certainly one has to respect everyone’s constitutional rights.”
In other words, if no money changes hands, and the kinky people don’t cause a noise or traffic nuisance, the First Amendment would ring clear: Party on!…
… at Portland State.
It’s early in the story, but apparently an economics professor there, in class a few days ago, suddenly launched a long and elaborate verbal attack on one of his students.
… John Hall, who has taught at PSU for 24 years, began the class with a lecture relevant to the course material but about halfway through the two-hour long class, he began to describe his experiences with law enforcement in places including Eastern Europe, according to a student who wished to remain anonymous.
Hall claimed to have been surveilled at times throughout his life and then told the class that an FBI informant and agent provocateur was in their midst. Hall said this person served as a sniper in the Israeli army and called him a killer with access to a personal arsenal.
He then pointed at Bucharest and identified him as the informant in question, according to the unnamed student.
Bucharest, a student at PSU since the fall of 2006 … sat silently throughout the ordeal, according to students in the class.
… Hall accused Bucharest of trying to organize students to participate in violent acts against the university, according to the unnamed student.
Hall also said he believed that Bucharest is at times armed while on campus. He then put a letter on the document projector that he wrote to the FBI’s Portland Field Office. In the letter, Hall claims to know Bucharest’s identity as an agent. He then handed Bucharest a copy of the letter and told him to give it to his superiors.
After a time of silence, Bucharest got up and said that some of Hall’s claims about his military background were true, but that other claims the professor made were not. Bucharest left the classroom after being told by Hall to leave and not to come back to PSU, according to students…
Let’s pause there for a moment.
One of many strange aspects of the story is that this account, published in the PSU newspaper, is no longer available. I got it from a blogger who reproduced it on his site. Why did the paper take it down? Is the student on whom the reporter relied for the account in fact not reliable? Bucharest apparently has a lawyer – does the paper fear legal action? Has it been asked by the university’s administration to take the piece down?
Anyway. Here’s something we can say with some confidence, assuming we’re getting something reasonably close to what went on. Whatever the background of this student, the professor’s behavior is paranoid and outrageous.
Hall, who has been removed from the classroom — indeed, from the campus — while PSU investigates, has issued a comment to the newspaper (again, I’m assuming the comment indeed came from him, etc.) which does nothing to weaken suspicion that he’s paranoid:
“I decided to take a stand. I observed the situation becoming extremely dangerous, not only for me but for about eight of my very finest students…. I felt that what I had to do should not have been my responsibility. …I understand the students’ privacy is to be respected, as defined by the codes governing PSU… I felt the level of danger had grown to such an acute level that I felt it fully in order to engage in an ‘emergency exemption’ of student privacy.”
This is nuts. The student might be malsain, might talk violence, might even carry a concealed weapon, but you respond to all of that, if it scares you, by going to the administration. Worst case scenario, you go to the police. You don’t stage a tribunal in front of the class.
So here we go again – D.A. Powell’s poem.
My first post about this poem is directly below this entry.
Click on the link over Powell’s name – or look at the post below – for the poem unhampered by UD‘s commentary.
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coal of this unquickened world
[We’ve already talked about the source of this title in Philip Larkin’s poem, Night-Music. But while Larkin’s focus is mainly on the natural world, with subtly gathering implications for humanity, Powell’s will turn out to be very personal. The coal is himself, his mind, his spirit, a dead, dull, blackened substance unable to lend itself the least bit of brightness. This is a poem about depression.]
midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand
[Midnight gradually establishes itself as total blackness. The poet, let us say, sadly holds his head in his hand as one would hold an obsidian arrowhead. His bleak thoughts – painful, sharp glass is what an obsidian arrowhead amounts to – wound him.]
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last
[Notice how the word india is almost embedded in the word obsidian – the poet plays with words, with near rhymes.]
must be going blind: eyes two pitted olives on a cracker
a draft of bitter ale, a kind of saturated past
poppy seeds: black holes large as my head. my head
[The poet tries this and that metaphor to convey his reduction to a burned-out deadhead; his olive eyes are empty (pitted) and share the shiny inexpressive blackness of the obsidian arrowheads. His past is pitted – saturated – with black holes. These holes designate the memory hole of bitter recollections.]
dirty as a dishrag, crudely drawn imp, a charcoaled dove
disappearing down alleys with a pail from the chimney
[The self-hatred of the depressive. My worthless mind, once innocent as a dove and now filthy with bad thoughts and motives, blackens itself.]
this carbon: no graphite or diamond it’s ordinary soot
[I’m nothing. Nothing special. No diamond in the rough. I’m plain old soot, animated dirt. Carbon of the lowest form.]
dress it up: say “buckminsterfullerene” or carbon 60
but it’s just common, the color of a boot
[“A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. … The first fullerene to be discovered, and the family’s namesake, was buckminsterfullerene C60 … The name was an homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles.”]
a slate on the ground. a petroleum bubble above
smothering in the walrus suit,
[He describes himself as a bubble of crude covered in a walrus suit — a ridiculous, but also catastrophic image, since – I suppose – once the bubble bursts, the oil spill will destroy the walrus. This is a very endangered, on the edge, person.]
the cloud of smoke
the shroud and the deathmask. blitzkrieg black sun choke
[Well, there you go. The bubble bursts in a cloud of smoke, and the black liquid chokes the poet to death. He’s blitzed.]
Notice a couple of fascinating things about Powell’s style here. Though you don’t really register it, this is an exceedingly formal poem, a fourteen-line sort of sonnet complete with end rhymes and a final couplet. You don’t register this formality because of the very loose graphic style of the poem, which plays against the tightness of its rhyme scheme. There’s no capitalization, little punctuation, and sometimes there’s just guttering unrelated words: blitzkrieg black sun choke.
These final words suggest a concluding explosive chaos, everything blown to bits; yet the hyper-controlled structure of the poem works against total disintegration…. In other words, there’s an exciting tension in a poem like this one between a content which conveys flat-out clinical melancholia, and a form which shows the creative mind working at full capacity.
… is the author of
Tea, D.A. Powell.
From the New York Times Arts, Briefly blog:
In its continuing unofficial mission to prove that a poetry career need not condemn an author to a life of destitution, Claremont Graduate University has announced the winners of its highly lucrative Kingsley and Kate Tufts poetry awards. The Kingsley Tufts Award, which comes with a prize of $100,000, will go to D. A. Powell for his [latest] collection “Chronic” (Graywolf Press), the university said in a news release. Mr. Powell, a poet from the San Francisco Bay Area, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s poetry award, also for “Chronic”; his previous collection “Cocktails,” was also a finalist for that honor….
Let’s look up close at one of Powell’s poems from Chronic, coal of this unquickened world.
Powell got his title from Philip Larkin.
In 1944, early in his writing life, Larkin wrote this poem.
Night-Music
At one the wind rose,
And with it the noise
Of the black poplars.
Long since had the living
By a thin twine
Been led into their dreams
Where lanterns shine
Under a still veil
Of falling streams;
Long since had the dead
Become untroubled
In the light soil.
There were no mouths
To drink of the wind,
Nor any eyes
To sharpen on the stars’
Wide heaven-holding,
Only the sound
Long sibilant-muscled trees
Were lifting up, the black poplars.
And in their blazing solitude
The stars sang in their sockets through the night:
`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’
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Powell will hyper-literalize Larkin’s coal and turn out, as we’ll see in a moment, quite an amazing poem – a poem without the sad formal measure Larkin gets with his TS Eliotish short, short lines (Wallace Stevens gets an effect like Larkin’s here, in Domination of Black.)
Larkin’s pulled back lines let him express the pulled back midnight world, very silent except for the sound the sibilant poplars make in the wind. The poplars are green of course when it’s day; at night, they become, like everything but the stars, black.
It’s a wiped-out world. No one’s awake, except the poet recording the silent world with its bit of song from the trees. Everyone’s asleep, ushered out of consciousness into the weakly-lit theater of dreams. The world of the dead too is meager, thin. They lie “untroubled / in the light soil.” No eyes are open to “sharpen on the stars’ / Wide heaven-holding.” (In After Greece, James Merrill’s ancestors are “anxious to know / What holds up heaven nowadays.”)
Larkin in many of his poems loves to record the ghostly insinuating life of the world that goes on without us, while we’re sleeping or while we’re dead. His most famous rendition of this weird activity appears in An Arundel Tomb. “Pre-baroque” lovers are buried beneath a stone sculpture of the two them lying side by side, hand in hand. The poet imagines the long centuries during which the world’s life has revolved around their motionlessness:
Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground
Thronged is wonderful.
*************************************
Back to Night-Music, and the way Larkin conveys with all of his images the perilous delicacy, the fragile contingency, of earthly existence.
We have no eyes, but the stars have eyes; the song they sing “in their sockets through the night” is a magical invocation to the wind to wake us and our world up again:
`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’
This black cinder globe with yet a bit of fire in its ash — blow on it, bring it back to life, quicken it. Our time here is brief and perilous, but, pray, make our cheeks ruddy…
Those three hard k sounds are gorgeous – coal, unquickened – but it’s more than this that drew Powell to the line. Here’s his poem.
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D.A. Powell
coal of this unquickened world
midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last
must be going blind: eyes two pitted olives on a cracker
a draft of bitter ale, a kind of saturated past
poppy seeds: black holes large as my head. my head
dirty as a dishrag, crudely drawn imp, a charcoaled dove
disappearing down alleys with a pail from the chimney
this carbon: no graphite or diamond it’s ordinary soot
dress it up: say “buckminsterfullerene” or carbon 60
but it’s just common, the color of a boot
a slate on the ground. a petroleum bubble above
smothering in the walrus suit, the cloud of smoke
the shroud and the deathmask. blitzkrieg black sun choke
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Let me take a break from this post and then return to talk about Powell’s poem.
… for a longer, more existential view.
Don DeLillo, in the New York Times.
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DeLillo’s getting sketchy: The NYT review of Point Omega.