Light and Momentary

Trainblogging news you might be able to use

Mid-November, time to head to my discipline’s annual convention. This year I just have one presentation, so I’m hopeful that it will be mellower than usual. Although— maybe it’s not possible to put a five-digit number of people in an enclosed space and get something mellow as a result.

This year I tried something new with my poster: I used Spoonflower to print it on fabric. If you’re an academic you already know the poster hassle. It’s a nuisance to transport something that’s three feet long and unfoldable.

Spoonflower prints images on fabric for customers, including academics weary of hauling poster tubes around. You guys, this poster cost $18 shipped! It is nestled in the bottom of my bag, taking up less space than my pajama bottoms.The one fiddly thing about the process was using the registry editor to change the default dpi in PowerPoint. It was so worth that small hassle!

Strong Support

I wasn't expecting to hear from the department committee about my tenure application until next month, but my chair is a person who Gets Stuff Done. She popped her head into my office today, envelopes in hand, and asked if I had a minute. They'd drafted the letters to the college quickly, because she wanted us to have them before our big disciplinary conference this week.

Their letters, you might remember, are a big deal-- the college almost always follows the department's recommendation. And the department's verdict is...: heck yeah, tenure Jamie Gladly. Unanimous vote for promotion, unanimous vote for tenure, supported by an enthusiastic letter from the committee, which mentions that my external reviewers were unanimous in their support for my application. "We are writing in strong support of Dr. Jamie Gladly's application for promotion and tenure," the letter begins.

OH THE RELIEF. I have been a little frustrated with myself about my agita over the tenure process. I keep thinking that a wiser, more mature person would have just completed her application unflappably. I have not been that person over the past few months.

Elwood picked me up and took me out for a delicious pre-celebratory lunch. Nothing is final until May, but this is really good news. 

Thanks, Google

This afternoon I went searching through my email archives. I have a plane to catch later this week, and I couldn't remember exactly when I was leaving. Gmail obligingly pulled up a United reservation for me, but it was a one-way reservation.

I did a little more looking, with a few different search terms, and my heart began to sink. Had I really only bought myself a one-way plane ticket? Had I somehow left the other half of it unpurchased back in August? I checked on the airline's site. Yep, it was a one-way reservation.

A cold chill snaked through my middle as I tried to imagine how much it would be to buy a plane ticket at this late date. Help me out here, Google, said I. How many zillion dollars is this going to cost me?

At the top of the page of search results Google put a box with my profile picture in it. You're flying out at 5 pm on Wednesday, it said. On American.

When I bought tickets back in August I booked them on two different airlines so I could optimize schedule and ticket price. All memory of this decision went sailing merrily out of my head as soon as I clicked "purchase," apparently. It's a good thing Google is smarter than I am.

Sara Crewe Revisited

A Little Princess was one of my very favorite books when I was a kid. I couldn't tell you how many times I read it-- enough that I can still recite parts of it. I never once read it to my sons, though, and so it's been a long time since I dove into that riches-rags-riches story.

Stella loves it, which is really fun. I am finding myself a little skeptical about Sara, which feels disloyal. Can we talk about Sara?

I'm having the same reaction to Sara that I did to Esther Summerson when we read Bleak House for one of those AMDRALs. Virtue takes practice and maturity, and young girls who leave shining trails of virtue behind them, like garden snails clad in gauzy Victorian-era frocks, arouse my ire. The idea of a 7-year-old who is unrelentingly patient, generous, polite, and unflappable seems less plausible to me in adulthood than it did when I was 7 myself. Why would Sara have needed to cultivate those virtues in her years of fabulous wealth and ease? How could Esther have cultivated those virtues in her years of deprivation? Why would anyone want to teach kids that virtues arise ex nihilo? 

I suspect my skepticism will intensify as Sara moves from the parlor boarder suite into the attic. If memory serves, she slides capably into a life of servitude.

One of the early chapters sparked an all-but-forgotten memory of a conflict at Girl Scout camp that I tried to resolve by channeling Sara Crewe. "We," I said imperiously to the doubtless puzzled ringleader, "are not little gutter children." 

It worked better in Sara's schoolroom.

It would be unfair to expect Frances Hodgson Burnett to write in a way that isn't quite so classist and colonialist; we're all products of our times. It doesn't seem unreasonable, though, to expect her to write in a way that has some connection to the actual moral development of actual children.

The Mittens of Uncertainty

Stella and I were walking together earlier this week when she said, "I wish I had a pair of mittens in fall colors." I asked her to tell me more. Flame orange, she thought, perhaps with some golden yellow.

Coincidentally, I had stumbled across a leaf-patterned mitten when I was in my Rav library on Tuesday night. (You guys, the election temporarily broke my brain. Do you remember that stretch on Tuesday evening when Nate Silver started revising his House projections downward? I just-- I couldn't do anything. I cast on a new brioche project that was supposed to be a pleasing distraction and I couldn't manage it. I have never met a knitting pattern that was too hard for me, but I unraveled my cast-on attempt and set it aside, confounded. When I start it over and add it to my notebook I will have to give it a suitable name, like maybe Free & Fair Elections Forever.)

I went stash-diving that very day and asked Stella to pick two of the three yarns I found. She chose a beautiful red-orange paired with a cheerful golden yellow, and I cast on last night while we read A Little Princess together.

I am not entirely sure about this mitten, you guys. While in theory the colors should remind one of a grove of beauteous autumn trees, I fear they are more reminiscent of ketchup and mustard. Some of the acorns are looking like they were attacked by famished squirrels before they made it to the mitten. Here, I'll show you. In person the yellow is much brighter. It's pretty much Lego yellow. It's lovely on a tree. Some find it delightful on a hot dog. The jury is still out on Lego yellow mittens.

There's also a possibility that the finished item will be way too big for Stella. It's an adult-sized pattern. I tried to scale it down by using DK yarn and smaller needles, but she may still end up with a lot of extra room. This is a theme across my knitting posts. There was the hippopotamus cozy hat, and the hippopotamus-friendly socks, and now it seems that Stella will be able to tuck a pet pangolin into her mittens when she heads outside.

I hope her pet pangolin likes mustard.

Milestone

Last week I got an email from Research Gate. "Jamie," it said, "you have a NEW CITATION!" I clicked. The full text of the article was available, and I skimmed through to see why they were citing me.

I found the sentence where they wrote about my paper. I frowned at it. It sounded very familiar. It sounded...too familiar. It sounded like ME, dernit.

I pulled up my original article and CTRL-F-ed for the giveaway verb. Sure enough, they had pasted in my very own words. There were a couple of minor tweaks to my sentence, but it was unmistakably my work.

Probably the only thing I'm going to do about it is write this post. It's in an OMICS journal, which means that your pet tarantula has higher ethical standards than the publisher. I once agreed to review for an OMICS journal, back before I knew better, and it was an eye-opening experience. I said, "It is imperative that the authors with undisclosed formula industry connections complete the required disclosure forms accurately." It was egregious: transparent pro-industry bias evident in the manuscript, multiple industry relationships apparent within minutes of googling. I recommended that they reject the paper. Surprise! They accepted the paper. There were no disclosure updates.

Scholarly papers often include the timeline for the submission process: when did the manuscript first cross the editor's desk, and how long was the revision process, and how long has it been in press? This journal used the framework established by more reputable outlets to undermine its own credibility: submitted 8/24/17, returned for review 8/31/17, accepted 9/14/17. Those dates do not suggest a rigorous peer review process. That's how the predatory journals roll: they persuade academics to pay for the privilege of being published quickly.

Academic writing is kind of a lonely gig. You sweat and labor over papers only to hear that the reviewers want you to rewrite them and the editor isn't sure she can accept them. You finally parturite* them out into the world, only to discover that hardly anyone reads them. 

*I am coining that verb to describe the uniquely struggle-filled oxygen-deprived soul-depleting puuuuuuush required to propel a baby out into the world-- the kind of push that leaves a person bruised in her tenderest places and utterly exhausted. Can I get an AMEN from my fellow academic writers?

But hey! Somebody read my paper. And liked my writing, evidently, at least enough to repurpose it. If the author were my student I would give him an F. Since he's not, I'll just shake my head and blog about him.

Set in its ways

Every year my body clock is a little less inclined to listen when I tell it that time change weekend has arrived. Last week I thought, "Maybe I'll just stay on DST myself -- move back my bedtime, and get up when the clock says 5:10 instead of 6:10." Instead I've been going to bed when the wall clock says it's bedtime, and waking up when the body clock says it's morning. 

Anybody else still muddling blearily through? This strategy is not great for my mental acuity. So: short post, early bedtime, fresh start. 

Fences on the Range

This is our thirteenth year at the little neighborhood elementary school, and I'm noticing a change in the drop-off norms. It used to be that parents who drove would stop their cars in front of the school. The kids would grab their stuff and scoot across the parking lot to the front door as the parents pulled away. 

The new trend is for parents to leave their vehicles idling on the street and walk across the parking lot with their kids.

I find this totally perplexing. The parking lot is blocked off with sawhorses for all of drop-off, so there are no cars moving through that might pose a hazard to the kids. I guess the kids could...run into a parked car? or make a break for the playground? or run all the way through the playground and over the fence to take a nice refreshing dip in the creek behind the school?

It seems more plausible to me that increasing congestion on a crowded narrow street will cause a car accident, an event much more likely to result in harm to a school family than an unplanned playground detour.

Drop-off is always staffed by a pair of teachers. Rain or shine (or sleet or hail), they stand in a spot where a parent can ask them questions from the street, while at the same time they can see the school's front door. I suppose it's possible that there's been an epidemic of weeping or confused or defiant children melting down in the parking lot while the overwhelmed teachers look on in horror? Maybe? 

As you have no doubt deduced by now, I suspect that the real epidemic is parents who don't want to be under-supportive. If your kid tells you that Braden and Jaden and Hayden get to say goodbye to their parents at the front door, then maybe it starts to feel like an expectation instead of an anomaly. Maybe you begin to wonder whether all the good moms are walking their kids to the front door.

At the same time, fewer kids are walking from our neighborhood, and an even smaller number walk without adults. When my oldest sons went to school there, a big noisy crew walked from our block every morning. It was easier to be a free-range parent when the kids traveled in a pack and looked out for each other. There's a new batch of neighborhood kids who could form their own noisy crew. But most of them are driven, most of the time.

There's evidence suggesting that walking to school is good for kids' executive function and self-regulation. Day to day, kids who walk are more able to focus their attention once they're inside the school building. I'm more curious about long-term outcomes, though, and here I know of no data. What is the effect on kids when their parents don't think they can handle walking a half-mile without an adult?

What is the effect on kids when their parents don't want them to walk across the parking lot without an adult?

All stressed up and no way to know

I'm not sure that post title makes any sense. But I am ALL hopped up. SO SO SO hopped up. I thought I knew how things would go down tonight in one of the races I'm following, but it's so close. 

"Jamie," says Elwood, "we're not going to know until 3am." I have an 8am meeting and I teach twice tomorrow morning. BUT HEY-- 3 am is not totally unreasonable, is it?

Okay, it is actually totally unreasonable.

Here I am, being a responsible grownup and heading off to bed. I will sleep a little more peacefully tonight, feeling relieved that I will not have to move to Belgium after all.

A boy named Chip

I went to high school with a boy named Chip. In my memories he wears his wavy hair in a mullet; he has a wispy mustache. In the right hip pocket of every pair of jeans he owns there is a faded ring, left there by his ever-present can of snuff. We were never friends but we were friendly acquaintances; we have many mutual Facebook friends.

Chip left our small West Virginia town for the Carolinas, where he still spends time with his crew of WV expats. He shows up all the time in comments on friends' posts. I knew he was a Trump supporter. I knew he eschewed what he labeled "political correctness."

I didn't know he'd gone off the deep end.

One of my Facebook pals posted about a Trump rally in Tennessee. Her college-age kids had attended the protest outside the rally, and she was posting in support of the protest with a side of worry about the potential for violence.

Chip showed up spewing nonsense about triggered libs, the snowflake left, and the failure of my friends' children to recognize the Greatest President in History. I rolled my eyes and kept scrolling. But it got worse: when another commenter pushed back, he erupted. "I hope some migrants come my way," he said, "so I can use them for target practice."

Target practice.

I reported him to Facebook for hate speech, a first for me. Today the post is gone. I'm curious about what happened-- would Facebook take the whole post down and not just the offending comment? Is there a way for me to tell how they called it?

Generally I don't get in arguments on Facebook and I certainly don't go around reporting people there. Live and let live and go complain on Twitter, that's my motto. But I'm still thinking about the boy I knew. Chip remains friends with one of the few out gay men from our high school class, who treats him with surprising patience. He is still close to the son of an immigrant from the Philippines, who seems not to have been marked out for target practice quite yet.

I feel confident that Chip's grandpa took him hunting when he was a little kid. I bet he got a rifle of his own sometime in his teens; gun culture is huge there. I also feel confident that the people who taught him to shoot were very clear about suitable targets.  

In the wake of the attempted pipe bombings and the Pittsburgh shooting, there's been some debate about the actual impact of Trump's rhetoric. He's just shooting off his mouth, you snowflake-y liberals! He's not actually radicalizing people!

Something surely is.