ugh. the paparazzi.

Signing up for my ASA membership and the conference. Is this new?:

By attending the Annual Meeting, you give permission for images of you, captured during the conference through video, photo, and/or digital camera, to be used by the ASA in promotional materials, publications, and web site and waive any and all rights including, but not limited to, compensation or ownership. Unless this permission is revoked in writing to the ASA, by virtue of their attendance all conference visitors agree to the use of their likeness in such materials.

Also, again this year I did not have the guts to check a lower-dues income box than my actual income. It remains kind of sucker proposition, though. Whatever impressions some may try to foster to the contrary, it’s not like ASA costs $X to run and so we need to figure out what’s the equitable way to raise that X. Instead, it’s just price discrimination posing as social justice.

the smajda solution to print journals

No more journals? Academic writing out in the public? With comments and discussions in real time?
Who is this Smajda guy, and where does he come up with these radical ideas?

too busy teaching for america

The New York Times featured a good long article about a study by Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt, scheduled for publication in the next issue of Social Forces, which assesses the long-term effects of serving in Teach for America.  McAdam and Brandt find that people who served in Teach for America score higher on measures of their attitudes towards civic engagement.  But unlike Freedom Summer participants, McAdam and Brandt find that on measures of actual civic or political activity, people who served in Teach for America lag behind those who dropped out of or declined acceptance to the program.  Former Teach for America participants even vote at lower rates than those who dropped out or declined acceptance.

I can’t wait to dig into McAdam and Brandt’s analysis but Social Forces hasn’t published the article online yet (or anyway I can’t get it through NYU yet). Meanwhile, two things strike me as significant here.  First, are these findings counterintuitive?  Freedom Summer participant were volunteers.  But Teach for America participants earn salaries, benefits, and postponement of federal student loans payments during their two years in the program.  In other words, Teach for America participants aren’t volunteering, they’re starting careers. According to the Times, Teach for America is the top recruiter at more than 20 colleges and universities. In 2008, 13 percent of the graduating class at Harvard and 25 percent at Spelman applied.  As Rob Reich, an associate professor of political science at Stanford and former Teach for America participant told the Times “Unlike doing Freedom Summer, joining Teach for America is part of climbing up the elite ladder.”

Second, the Times reports that McAdam and Brandt’s study “was done at the suggestion of Wendy Kopp, Teach for America’s founder and president, who disagrees with the findings.”  Kopp had read McAdam’s Freedom Summer and ostensibly expected him to find similarly high degrees of civic or political activity among former Teach for America participants. Setting the findings aside, I think what’s encouraging about the study is that Teach for America was interested in outcomes – not just for the students they teach, but also for the workers who serve.

xmas at the freese family farm

So, given the retail-sector of some key family members, we had Xmas this weekend back on the farm. Because I was in Australia last Xmas, I had a year and a half worth of travel presents to give away, from Taiwan, Australia, and Malawi. In many cases, I had bought a gift knowing I’d give it to somebody without knowing whom. An example would be a stone-carved hippopotomus from Malawi that I was wrapping while my mother sat at the kitchen table:

1 in 50 americans living on food stamps alone

If you haven’t seen the recent NYTimes article on Americans living on foodstamps, you should check it out.* According to the Times, one in fifty Americans now lives in a household where the only source of income is a food stamp card (that’s about 6 million people). That means no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay. Just food stamps (and perhaps section 8 housing). Many of these folks seem to be cobbling together benefits by living with family or partners who have some kind of housing benefit or other government subsidy. But I find these numbers astonishing.

“This is craziness,” the Times quotes Representative John Linder (Georgia, R), ranking minority member of the House panel on welfare policy. I agree. But what’s crazier is Linder’s take on it.

i understand the $40/month difference, but not the other difference

From CNN.com:

As initially described, customers would pay Apple $30 a month for streaming access to the best of TV. Cable companies charge Americans an average of more than $70 a month for huge bundles of programs, most of which their subscribers never watch and didn’t ask for.

Apple’s service would be more like a streaming music service that offers all the content you want for a flat monthly fee.

inverse correlation, or causality

Headline at CNN.com:
Megan Fox voted worst – but sexiest – actress of 2009

best of alternative 2009

It’s time again for the year-in-review lists, and here is my fave of faves, Husband’s 2009 Best of Alternative Music list (iTunes link–should take you to the Canadian store*). I’ve mentioned before that Husband is a long-time list maker, and this was a good year for this genre.

I was also going to point out how much more awesometastic the Canadian list is than the American one (which is usually more boringly mainstream), but then I found out that the US store doesn’t even have a Best of Alternative list! It’s a tragedy for all the Rob Gordons of the world, who would be dying to spend 100+ hours to make such a list and donate it to Apple just for the love of music. And lists.

*To get to the Canadian store, click the little flag circle at the bottomest right on your iTunes main page.

ask a scatterbrain: when to give up?

I hate to post another ask a scatterbrain so soon after Andrew’s rather solid example, but I have a related issue. When my students prepare for their final exams I often tabulate how well each would have to do on the final in order to get an A, B, C, or D for the course as a whole. Normally this is a fairly uncontroversial process for me and students often appreciate the concrete knowledge. This semester, though, I have a student who will have to earn a grade on the final that is several letter grades higher than s/he has ever achieved on a test in order to pass the course at all. This student has also not asked me to tell them about their situation. Now, I am certainly hoping that the student manages to pass, but I’ve started wondering: if you have a student who can’t pass even if they get a perfect score on the final, is it appropriate to tell them not to bother taking it? On the one hand it seems like you’d be doing them a favor by telling them, if only so that they can devote more energy to other classes. On the other hand, it just seems wrong somehow. Again, my student does have a chance so I think s/he should take the final, but I’m curious whether anyone has ever tackled a situation like this before.

ask a scatterbrain: what is adequate?

Feeling grumpy this morning…. a student came to me after the final exam to complain that s/he hadn’t received a B- for his/her work, which was generally pretty poor. Apparently s/he and “a lot of others in the class” were confused by the following language in my syllabus:

Completing these requirements adequately will earn you a B- in the course. Completing them exceptionally well will earn you a B, B+, A-, or A, depending on the quality of work.

The student said s/he had taken the class as an elective and “didn’t need it,” indeed “would have dropped it” if s/he had understood the policy correctly. In fact, s/he went so far as to say “I don’t even understand the concepts of the course. I stayed in it because of the contract,” by which was meant the excerpt above.

We had a conversation about it this morning. Apparently “adequate” was interpreted as “to my ability,” i.e., whatever is turned in should receive no less than a B- since its very presence is prima facie evidence of adequacy. I offered this page in response. Am I just becoming a grumpy old man? Am I one already? Should I rewrite the syllabus language?

old friend found too late

My spouse spotted the NYT obit for Dennis DeLeon, an old friend from high school we have not seen since our wedding reception in 1970. Our last communication from him was a note saying he’d get our wedding present to us later. It’s a common name so we wouldn’t know it was him without the picture (which looks just like we remember him) and corroborating biographical details. He was an important part of the speech/debate team, the small circle we spent most of our time with in high school in California, and was my spouse’s debate partner in their senior year. We wondered over the years what had happened to him. Now we know. He was a prominent human rights activist  in New York who announced that he had AIDS in a 1993 NYT op ed . His activism is not a shock, as he was already a student leader in high school and at Occidental College. Nor is his sexual orientation, although it wasn’t anything we were aware of at the time. We were a nerdy crowd and people were not dating much anyway. I sure wish we’d known where he was — it would have been great to see him.

more on the ontology of public opinion

I’ve written before (here, here, here, and more)  on how we think about public opinion and where (and what) the “public” is in all this.

Recently the best-respected North Carolina polling firm, Public Policy Polling, conducted a poll asking Americans if they thought President Obama should be impeached for what he’s done thus far. 20% said yes, including 35% of Republicans. The comment:

I’m not clear exactly what ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ they are using to justify that position but there may be a certain segment of voters on both the right and the left these days that simply think the President doing things they don’t agree with is grounds for removal from office. I don’t think Obama has a lot to worry about on that front.

Well, duh! My guess is that two things are going on here. One is that impeachment has become less extreme to call for (if not to do) in part because of Clinton’s impeachment, which is widely viewed as essentially political antics, and in part because of the polarization of opinion communities. The other is that, when people are asked questions about which they have no opinion, they manufacture one on the spot. The modern individual is an opining subject; ask it a question and it will give you an answer. Particularly on a poll that uses Interactive Voice Response (IVR), where you’re supposed to push one button or another.

films and cartoons in social theory classes

My undergrad social theory class is organized around a modernity => postmodernity schema, with modern social theory merging to postmodern social theory. I like to show a movie or two to demonstrate elements of these themes; in the past I’ve used Star Trek for high modern theory and Blade Runner for postmodernism (pace David Harvey). Warning: some danger of spoilers after the break on Bee Movie and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

grades: inflation, compression, systematic inequalities

I chair UNC’s Educational Policy Committee, and we are in the process of seeking some new policy initiatives to address grading. A reporter for the Daily Tar Heel asked me a while ago why I am such a grading “hawk”, meaning that I worry about grading problems (more on the identification of these problems below the break). The reason for his question is that I am a relatively humanities-oriented scholar in a department and discipline not exactly known for rigorous grading policies. Below the break I’ll discuss what I see as the problems, possible solutions, UNC’s current status with regard to these solutions, and why I care so much about them. Warning: this is a long and somewhat rambling post.

when you are called racist

For those who may find it useful for teaching or awareness, I have posted a longish memo when you are called racist over on my own blog.  I sent it to my students after a class discussion. In it I sketch two alternative world views, the minority/Black person who is sensitive to discrimination and racism and the majority/White person who believes that the r-word is hurtful. I end by suggesting strategies for dealing with the situation. If you have comments or reactions, I’d appreciate them.