Oddball Weather Events

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Oddball weather week here in Goleta, right next door to Santa Barbara.

We had a weather event, as they call it, on Tuesday. More specifically a rain event. I don’t know why everything has become an “event.” One expects to hear trumpets or something announcing the coming “weather event.”

So the event occurred as predicted. Rain Tuesday night, slacking off in the morning, and coming back much more heavily in the afternoon and early evening. But the strange thing about the event was that the high for the day was 63 degrees and so was the low. In other words, it was 63 all day long.

I don’t remember when that last happened. I think having the same temperature all day long qualifies perhaps as an event, but a pretty uneventful one. Really.

Oh the rain event was attended also by a wind event. Though the wind event was not as intense as predicted.

There was also the possibility of landslide events because of previous fire events that had burned the vegetation off the hills. But that didn’t happened.

And then today out of nowhere we have a heat event. They were predicting 77 degrees for today but instead we hit 93. I don’t know if this heat event is connected or not with the weather event previously described.

For no known reason I began to think about phytoplankton and their role in cloud event formation. Apparently these tiny creatures emit a a chemical of some kind that goes up in the air and sort of serves as seeds for clouds. This particular contribution of the microbial kingdom to the functioning of the weather cycle was not and still is not completely understood.

Why I should think of this and where I learned it, I am not sure, though I think I heard it in lectures I used to attended in biology when I was teaching the research paper to biology students. I learned many things then most of which I have forgotten. I learned about diatoms for example. I am pretty sure they also play a significant role in the weather cycle.

I remain 98% water.

The Dumbest Generation

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Trying to get my head around the affect of the digital age upon young people, I picked up The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future by Mark Bauerlein, a Professor of English at Emory. Based on my calculations the students I am teaching at this moment–born in1989, 90, or 91–are on the cutting edge–if that’s the right phrase–of Bauerlein’s dumbest. For every one kid you might read about in the Ivy League who studies him or herself into a stupor or constant panic attacks, Bauerlein argues, there are thousands who don’t study at all and don’t know diddly.

While I think Bauerlein is aiming for something deeper than a mere information deficit model of dumbness, he starts with that exactly: look at all the stupid things these kids don’t know. Like, as aired on the Jay Leno show, “Where does the Pope live?” And the young person doesn’t know. Or what was the last book you read, and the young person doesn’t know and seems even confused about what a book might is. I have taken these sorts of how-dumb-are-you-quizzes myself and I always miss a couple of them even though I do have a Ph.D. and am pretty well educated. I can’t remember the Second Law of Thermodynamics to save my ass, and I assume it’s a pretty important law. Though not as important as the First, which I also don’t know.

OK, so this is a defense of my own lousy education, but I don’t think knowing the “facts” is all that important. What does it take to know the facts–well, first you have to be around people who know the facts, or in a situation where facts appear, and usually you have to repeat a fact a couple of times to remember it, and that gets to the core of it. Information dumbness or smartness involves the old gray matter only at the level of memory. A very, very important thing–no doubt–but not the stuff of intellect (one might say). I grew up with guys who knew the name of every damn part of a car engine (because they lived for cars) and who could give a damn who John Adams was.

And this gets to another point. Who the heck gets to decide which facts are important (as an indication that one is educated). The educated? I don’t know but this seems sort of like a circular reasoning or a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s pretty easy for the educated to dream up a raft of questions that the uneducated don’t know the answers to. And really who is to say that what the “uneducated” do know is not as important as what the educated know. This is simple “classism, and let’s face it education–and whether one gets some of it–has a lot to do with which class a person is in.

Once I taught a writing class that tied to a political science class. The Professor on the first day quizzed the students about what countries belonged to the EU. After, a student came up to me, with alarm written all over her face who said she thought she should drop the class because she thought Europe was a country. OK, so how does one get to be 19 years old and not know that Europe isn’t a country. But what the heck. No big deal, I said. Don’t drop the class. Now that you know Europe is not a country, tell me the names, I said, of some of the countries in Europe. And then she named off a whole pack of them.

Facts are easy. I am not about to conclude on the basis of those that my students belong to the dumbest generation.

The New Communications

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I was born in 1945 and spent my first decade in the rural south. We did not have an indoor toilet much less a TV set. I now teach and have taught writing at a California Research University for 30 years. The young people I teach right now were born in 1989 or 90; they grew up in a world vastly removed from the world of my childhood. Some of them have not seen a live chicken. I cannot and probably will never learn to text-message.

I don’t understand my students and their lives in fundamental way. I try to use the distance between us as a teaching point. Look, I say, we are different, and I would like to learn in class conversation and through what you write how you look at the your lives and experience the things around you. I really would like to know because the fact is, given my age, students are my eyes into a future I will not live to see. Although I don’t put it to my students in this way. It sounds a bit morose.

So I asked them to read a chapter from Suzuki’s book “The Big Picture.” There he writes, for example:

Without perspective, being constantly online and plugged in (a phrase meant to evoke the modern computer era, but already outdated) becomes the normal state of being. But being connected electronically is not the same as being connected physically. In fact, paradoxically, being electronically connected all the time has actually made us less social and less community oriented.

This is what Suzuki says. I am having a hard time finding decent articles on the digital communications and their deep down affect on human relationships. I would be happy to be turned on to something better. But at least he writes clearly, which cannot be said for a lot of writing on digital communication. Of course, he is saying nothing new or that hasn’t appeared or been echoed in a thousand places.

But is it true? I don’t know partly because I don’t have any experience to draw on. I have barely adapted to the cell phone; and I don’t have a hand held, like an iPhone.

I brought up these issues in one class and they just took off–and discussed the matter for an hour and fifteen minutes straight. I had other things planned, but as I said, they took off and I let it go.

I don’t know that I came away the wiser. Mostly they could not imagine living in a world without cell phones and hand helds and iPods. OK, I could have guessed that. They did talk about their feelings about the new technologies and these appeared to be a little mixed, though more positive than not. The more temperate advocated “moderation” when it came to the use of these technologies. OK, but I have read my Aristotle on moderation, so that didn’t help much.

One thing did pop up that seemed to me more concrete, something to try to get my head around. They said life with the cell was more “spontaneous.” One student said he did not like the idea of saying you would meet somebody say next week or tomorrow, and in the old days (without text messaging) one would actually have to be where one said one would be. But today with the cell, one could text and say, I won’t be there, and can we meet at another time or place. But then one student said, yea, this was true, but as it worked out in practice, what with people changing plans all the time, nobody ever seemed to meet up with anybody else, as if they were all sort of moving from one potential meeting place to another all the time. I didn’t quite understand what he meant.

This is something I need to think about–though I don’t know how to exactly–since it would seem to have concrete material implications for the way people behave (and even something to do with a different sense of time) in the era of new communications. 

Got to Have It

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In his The Big Picture, David Suzuki starts his chapter on the effects of consumer society on the environment, “The True Cost of Gadgets,” with:

Imagine if you decided to throw away your cell phone, close down your Facebook account, disconnect your high speed internet modem, unplug your satellite television receiver, put away your Blackberry, shut down your iPod, turn off your DVD player and abandon your HDTV. Friends might think you’ve lost it. Family members might suggest counseling. “What’s wrong?” they would want to know.

And you could tell them you’re leading a completely modern life, circa 1995.

Boy, does time fly. I was alive in 1995 and can almost remember it. Was I still using dial-up, and wasn’t the big telephone thing what sort of clever or unclever message one put on one’s answering machine. And I would get those big old VHS things at the local video store (there were lots of those and not just one Blockbuster) and stick them in my machine. I thought at the time that was pretty cool, and didn’t feel, since I didn’t know what was coming, that I was missing anything.

Were those the good old days or what?

I had my students–most of them born in 1989 or 90–write about this passage.

A few of them waxed nostalgic, saying it might have been nice to live in simpler times.

Why is the past always a simpler time?

I don’t remember 1995 as having been any simpler than now.

I got my first “Personal Computer” or “PC,” as it came to be known, in 1984. We had a friend who worked with IBM, and they had a family plan where an IBMer could sell a PC to a family member for half price. Our friend claimed we were family and so we got an IBM for half price. It was just a little box that sat on you desk, you put your monitor on top of that tin box, and the screen was green with a little drop down menu. I used word perfect and I don’t think I knew anything about Windows or Microsoft at that time.

At half price the damn thing cost 3500 dollars (in 1984 dollars). Hard to believe I would pay that much for anything back then. Hard to believe I had that much money to spare. I just had to have it.

As my students claim, a cell phone is not something you want or desire as opposed to something you need. No, you absolutely need it. 

H1N1 Again

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I have lots of coughing students.

We all got an email from the administration:

We have received reports that Student Health is getting inundated with students who are ill with the flu in search of written excuses for missing class. Please remind all faculty, lecturers, and instructors in your department that Student Health does not have enough staff to provide any written excuses for ill students; all faculty and instructors have been asked to not require a written medical excuse until further notice.
Thank you for your immediate assistance with this situation.

I don’t know what H1N1 is exactly, if I mean it is worse than your normal flu. But it surely seems to be hitting more people at once. I have never received an email of this kind before…not in 30 years; of course 30 years ago there was no email.

Meanwhile on the soccer front, the soccer team had to cancel practice yesterday because 10 people on the team were going to a Dance Concert downtown required for Carol’s classes. Carol has two lecture classes in Dance with a total of around 700 students with no TAs to help her out and no secretarial support.

Below students in Carol’s classes do a “Victory Dance” (African in origin) after one of them scored a goal in a recent soccer contest.

victory dance.jpg

And for streaming video of this goal.

If it’s not one thing…

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Classes started last week.

Both of my sections had 25 or more crashers. All the seats in one class were full and I had a student sitting on the floor by the door.

That had never happened before.

Also, I had a sheaf of emails already received from students asking to be put on the waiting list, with stories of a kind I had not previously heard. One student wrote that unless he could get my class, which he needs to be able to take classes in his major, that his parents were arguing he should not attend at all.

I found it pretty upsetting to have to kick out those 25 crashers in each section. But all the people enrolled in the classes, except one, showed up on that first day.

This is the sort of thing that is bound to happen when classes are cut; and they are being cut all over campus because of the UC Budget Crisis.

Thankfully the authorities had sent an email to all students saying that the problems with classes were not the fault of instructors like me. So nobody got angry with me, at least not directly to my face.

That was the first day of class. The second day of class, they all showed up apparently completely exhausted; this was most true of the 3:30-4:45 section.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

The day before classes started the laptop I bought to use as part of my teaching died. I borrowed one of the laptops from the Writing Program, but I don’t know how long I will be allowed to keep it.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

Last night before going to bed, I checked the weather on the net. I do that every night. We live right on the fog line and the temp can fluctuate significantly. They said the temp was going down to 51 at night and then I mistakenly clicked another link and found:

…TSUNAMI ADVISORY IS IN EFFECT FOR THE IMMEDIATE COASTAL AREAS OF SOUTHERN AND CENTRAL CALIFORNIA… THIS IS NOT A TSUNAMI WARNING OR TSUNAMI WATCH. REPEAT…THIS IS NOT A TSUNAMI WARNING OR TSUNAMI WATCH. …TSUNAMI ADVISORY IS IN EFFECT FOR THE IMMEDIATE COASTAL AREAS OF SOUTHERN AND CENTRAL CALIFORNIA… THIS IS NOT A TSUNAMI WARNING OR TSUNAMI WATCH. REPEAT…THIS IS NOT A TSUNAMI WARNING OR TSUNAMI WATCH.

I was happy that it was not a tsunami warning or watch, merely an advisory. Still, I went to sleep thinking I might wake to a flooded house. We live less than a mile from the Pacific.

But I am happy to report the downstairs was not flooded when I woke and remains unflooded.

I am exhausted.

Response to Yoda Yudof interview

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Being who I am I was inclined to write off my response to the Yoda Yudof interview as the result of my unresolved Oedipal Complex.

But I do believe it touched a nerve also with others less unresolved.

One colleague reported that reading the interview made her feel as if she were falling into the abyss.

Another friend turned me on to some URLs out of Berkeley that also indicate considerable dissatisfaction with the interview. See especially the attempt of 19 people to provide YY with better responses to the questions.

And another colleague was moved to share a quotation:

To bring an area of life into accord with “rational choice” is to force life into the mold of a specific complex of metaphors for better or worse, all too often for the worse. An example is the trend to conceptualize education metaphorically as a business, or through privatization to make education a business run by considerations of “rational choice.” In this metaphor, students are consumers, their education is a product , and teachers are labor resources. Knowledge then becomes a commodity, a thing with market value that can be passed from teacher to student. Test scores measure the quality of the product. Better schools are the ones with higher overall test scores. Productivity is the measure of test scores per dollar spent. Rational-choice theory imposes a cost-benefit analysis in which productivity is to be maximized. Consumers should be getting the “best education” for their dollar.

This metaphor stresses efficiency and product quality above all else. In doing so, it hides the realities of education. Education is not a thing; it’s an activity. Knowledge is not literally transmitted from teacher to student, and education is not merely the acquisition of particular bits of knowledge. Through education, students who work at it become something different. It is what they become that is important. This metaphor ignores the student’s role, as well as the role of the role of the student’s upbringing and the culture at large. It ignores the nurturing role of educators, which often can be very labor-intensive. And it ignores the overall social necessity for an ongoing, maintained class of education professionals who are appropriately reimbursed for the immense amount they contribute to society.”

–George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), p. 532

TP Controversy

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Some time back when I was in college, the phrase–“the personal is the political”–started making its round; and by god, the political seems to be getting more and more personal every day.

Now even what one might call “anus management” has fallen under the sign of the political.

Apparently a feud is brewing over the production and sale of three and four ply toilet paper, designed to produce a heavenly wiping experience as the only appropriate climax to a good dump.

The creation of this soft as a baby’s bottom stuff requires, according to the LA Times, the cutting of mature trees. Sure TP and facial tissue (I suppose this is Kleenex) account for only 5% of the mature tree killing, but environmentalists say it’s too much.

“At what price softness?” asks an official allied with the recycling industry.

That’s what we would have if the environmentalists have their way. Toilet paper made from recycled paper. That’s the kind of thing you can find in public toilets or at the Gray Hound Bus Depot. And from personal experience, I can testify this paper can be plenty rough, having on one occasion–I swear!–picked up a splinter from it.

I guess this problem will only be resolved only we can answer the pressing question: “Just how delicate is the average American anus?”

Yudof Interview: Stand up or Send up?

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The impression Mark Yadof, President of the UC system, makes in his interview with the NY Times is so down right bad, I thought it had to be a send up. A joke, from its inception through its rather poor execution. That at least was the only excuse I could find for it.

If that is not the case, then Yodof is a graduate of the Dick Cheney school of the flip quip, as in, you know, “stuff happens.”

Having decided to eschew any appearance of “depth” or “thoughtfulness,” Yodof appears a wise ass bent on the humiliation of his interviewer.

But the world is run by talking heads, and Yadof apparently wants to join that fatuous crowd.

In any case, he appears an embarrassment to himself and the system he represents.

Maybe he was hired for his PR skills.

Education as Commodity

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The La Times reports:

UC regents reluctantly backing proposal for more student fee increases

By Larry Gordon

September 17, 2009

Reporting from San Francisco

Proposals to sharply raise student fees at University of California campuses this winter and again next fall, and to further restrict freshman enrollment, appeared to gain reluctant support Wednesday from the system’s governing board. Yet, the plan also triggered angry opposition from students and employees that led to 14 arrests.

Meeting in San Francisco, some UC regents said they wondered whether it would be fair or even legal to raise fees in the middle of the academic year.

But given grim forecasts about the state budget, the board seemed prepared to impose a midyear increase of $558 in January, on top of the extra $662 in fees already approved for undergraduates this fall. The proposal calls for an additional increase of $1,956 to be charged next fall.

If the plan is approved in a vote scheduled for November, basic undergraduate fees for California residents next year would rise to about $10,300, not including room, board and other campus expenses. That figure would be 44% higher than in fall 2008.

In all, most UC undergraduates living in on-campus housing would pay more than $26,000 a year under the proposal, although officials said needy students would receive enough additional financial aid to cover the increases.

Regent Eddie Island, who has opposed previous fee increases, said he would support these because the 10-campus system already has cut staff pay, laid off employees and reduced class offerings.

“I’m sad to come to this position,” he said.

David Partida, a UC Santa Cruz student majoring in community and legal studies, said higher fees would force some students to drop out and send prospective freshmen to community colleges rather than directly to UC schools.

“You are closing the door to so many students. And that’s not right,” Partida told regents in a public comment session.

However, UC President Mark G. Yudof said that without the fee increases, course offerings at the university would be reduced further, which would hurt students more in the long run by stretching out the time needed to complete degrees.

Yudof also said he did not want to extend current employee furloughs into the 2010-11 school year.

“Students ought to be angry about the fee increase proposal. . . . I’m angry about it too,” Yudof said. “I like the old system: The closer it was to being free, the happier I’d be. But that’s not the world I live in.”

Near the beginning of the meeting at UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus, about 100 demonstrators briefly disrupted the proceedings with chants. The protesters, mainly union activists, said they were upset about recent layoffs and the fee hike proposal.

Fourteen people were arrested and escorted out by UC police. They were cited for trespassing and unlawful assembly and released without bail, police said.

Such opposition to the UC administration is expected to be on display again on Sept. 24, when some faculty, staff and student groups are urging a systemwide walkout on the first day of classes for the fall quarter at many UC campuses.

In November, the regents also are expected to decide whether to cut freshman enrollment by an additional 2,300 students, similar to a reduction this year that brought the class size to 35,300.

In response to regents’ concerns about timing, UC attorneys said that enough advance notice would be given to make the midyear hike legal. However, some regents also expressed worries about another Yudof proposal that calls for undergraduate upperclassmen who major in business or engineering to pay an extra $900 a year in addition to the other increases. The cost of educating those students is especially high, Yudof said.

Regent Charlene Zettel called the idea misguided given what she described as a shortage of engineers.

Under the fee proposal, professional school students in areas such as medicine, law and dentistry also would see steeper increases over the next three years. For example, by 2012-13, a UC Berkeley law student would pay $51,818 per year, or 40% more than this year, and a UCLA medical student would pay $34,616, or 33% more. Those figures do not include the costs of living and books.

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This is just staggering.

These developments back up Peter Gates when he writes:

This uniquely American ideal — the promise of equal educational opportunity — is close to vanishing unless we change course. Education is becoming like health care and so many other aspects of American life where money rules the system. We are creating a system in which ability to pay is the main thing that separates those who go to college from those who don’t go to college.