Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
I was asked to speak at Ocean County College during their women’s history month celebration. I spoke last week to about 30 people , which was a period I was heavily invested in during graduate school. There are numerous references to Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, F.R. Leavis, Storm Jameson, and Mulk Raj Anand, amongst others.
I will have a podcast of my lecture up as soon as I figure out how to transfer it to mp3 from my phone.
On the desktop, I run my email through Thunderbird. I check my email, and clear it, via my phone during the day, but I sit down at night and make sure it syncs to Thunderbird each night for backup. Thunderbird has developed a lot over the years. It used to be buggy and hard to use. These days, it is very clean and easy to run. I run a lot of color coded tags for my email, particularly my work email and Thunderbird makes this very easy to do.
One of the programs I really rely on is Tomboy. Tomboy is a note taking application for Linux/Windows/Mac that keeps organized notes which can be synced over a number of computers. A fear I have had in the past about these kinds of programs is losing my notes. Tomboy makes it easy to move the notes folder to a folder in my Dropbox account for easy backup.
As you may have noticed on the sidebar biography, I have been hired to a full time lecturer position, starting this semester, at Burlington County College. I am very happy about this turn of events. After a year and a half of hard work as an adjunct, and way too many years as a student, it feels great to gain a large reward. Not a lot has changed on a day to day basis so far; we are still working out my long term schedule, an office, and other issues. I have to speak with HR today about health benefits. Wow, health benefits finally at 31!
Now that my life will, hopefully, be stabilizing a bit I am expecting to write here more. Stay tuned.
Recently, I’ve thought a lot about Courtney Stoker’s recent post about attempting to avoid teaching her students to look for “objectivity” in writing. Objectivity, I agree with Courtney, is a mirage, a fallacy that should be removed from classroom discussion. Instead of teaching my students to be objective or look for objectivity in research, I try to teach them to look for biased arguments instead, whether their own or an authors.
When looking for bias, I ask them to consider a few simple concerns. Does an author present themself as well-informed about an issue? More importantly, something I focus on a lot, do they consider alternative “sides” to the issue at hand? Do they present other arguments against their viewpoint and then defend their view against them? If not, there is a good chance the writer’s argument will have flaws or insufficient. I don’t really care if a writer comes into an article without a shred of objectivity, as long as they consider the issue in a meaningful way and consider different perspectives on it.
In their own writing, students often come to me asking if “they can have an opinion” in their papers. I tell them, YES, of course they can, but they need to not just say “I believe _____.” Have a viewpoint, but also declare that viewpoint proudly, consider other viewpoints, defend your viewpoint against them using evidence from other sources and your own argument. This seems to work for most of my students.
After taking part in their manuscript review survey for the latest edition of , I have been thanked in the acknowledgment portion of the preface. I know this is pretty casual and normal for academics, but I am pretty excited to have participated in this process and now see my name inside the book I use for my composition classes.
Two pictures taken from my new cell phone. I’ve never had a camera phone before, so I apologize for their poor quality.
Zotero Library
