Over the last month, I’ve seen such amazing opportunities for online professional learning communities (PLCs). I spend so much time on my computer, but there are so many things posted on the internet that I don’t know about . . . including information directly related to my academic interests. I love the concept behind Diigo, a social bookmarking site that allows people to share what they’re reading, to highlight and annotate websites, and to share their annotations with others (both within and outside of their groups). Recently I set up a Diigo group: Teaching English in Central California. I sent out a couple of invitations, but so far I’m the only member of the group. I’d really like to get this going. Please either join my group or send me suggestions about how I can get others to see the possibilities of such a group.
Here’s an example of what Diigo can do. I’ve taken a screen shot of an article I read, highlighted, and annotated. Readers can read what I said and reply to it . . . multiple times. So Diigo allows a group of people to have conversations, to question, to express excitement, to argue about what they read on the internet.
I’ve used delicious in the past as a way of accessing my bookmarks from any computer, but Diigo can be an online repository for your bookmarks AND it has these capabilities, too. It also allowed me to import my bookmarks from delicious so that I still have all the information that I used to keep there.
I know, I know. I’ve gone totally AWOL over the last month. What can I say except that I’ve been really busy and productive in other ways.
For now, let me fill in the gaps briefly:
Life is an adventure.
Teaching is a really satisfying career.
Diigo and all the other techie stuff I’ve been learning about rock.
Ask me to tell you a story–that’s what I’m working on right now.
That will have to do for now. Two more days of teaching. Big projects to grade. I’ll be back when I’m either done with grading . . . or when I’m avoiding grading.
Two years ago: I blogged about my friends Chuck Rhodes and Sandy Godfrey Wallentine. Chuck died in his early 20’s; Sandy in her late 30’s. A year and a half ago, my friend Roger Nelson also died. All three were close friends at one point in my life, people that I still miss.
One year ago: I was in Bergen and Stavanger having a difficult weekend for a variety of reasons which I won’t blog about now. But after spending last year telling Norwegian students about the Day of the Dead quite frequently, it only seems fitting that this year Day of the Dead should take on special significance.
This year: I went to my friend Alex’s house for a Day of the Dead celebration. All day I thought about my grandfather who died at age 98 two and a half years ago. At Alex’s house, we piled pictures and mementos on altars in honor of our loved ones. We ate food that had significance in the lives of our loved ones. Alex made tamales from his mother’s recipe. John brought “funeral potatoes,” a Mormon mix of potatoes and cheese common at funerals in Utah. I brought Snickers bars, my grandpa’s favorite candy. After he got diabetes and could no longer eat Snickers, he still had a bag of them in his room to share with his visitors. Someone brought pate, another brought spaghetti. The people we had lost came up in conversation all night. In a private moment, John and I both admitted to each other that it had been a teary day.
Altar for my Grandfather
Today I found out that someone I knew years ago, Dan Foote, died last week. He was too young to go . . . and I’ve felt on edge all day thinking about him and what he meant in my life.
I don’t know how to end this post, except to say that over the last few months I’ve felt more grateful to be alive than I have perhaps ever. I want to live life to its fullest, so that whenever I pass on, I’ll have no regrets.
Fresno. When I lived in southern California, we called Fresno the “armpit of California.” I’d visited the city because my dad was giving a lecture and spending time with his sister and her family who used to live in Fresno. All I saw of Fresno back then was my Aunt Eloise’s house and a Mormon church. When I had my interview in Fresno, my flight was canceled so I ended up spending less than 24 hours in the town. I didn’t see much of Fresno, but I was quite sure that I didn’t want to spend my life in small town Texas, that I wanted to be back west, back in California–so I accepted the job, packed up my things and moved to Fresno. I’ve lived here for 10 years now and, after a year in Norway, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to me to have made my home in Fresno.
Fresno is a city with an inferiority complex. The most common praise for the city is that it takes only 3 hours to drive to the Bay area, Los Angeles, the coast, national parks. Yeah, the best thing about Fresno is leaving it and going somewhere else. But I think Fresno has more to offer that that.
Let me use this weekend as an example. Thursday (I know, not technically the weekend, but I’m starting there), our former colleague Steve Yarbrough who left this year to teach at Emerson College in Boston was in town. He gave a reading on campus, and then many of us went to Connie and John Hales’ house for a party. I arrived there at about 10 p.m. and the party was in full swing. I sat in the living room talking with Samina, John, Alex, Tanya, Linnea, Matthew, and others about the reading (which I had missed), about the Young Writers Conference, and about Fresno State’s upcoming intersession in London. Living in Fresno has brought writers I hadn’t heard of before into my consciousness, including my wonderful colleagues past and present: Steve, Alex Espinoza, David Anthony Durham, Liza Wieland, Connie, John, Steven Church, Tim Skeen, Ruth Schwartz, and Lillian Faderman (to be fair, I had heard of Lillian, a seminal theorist of lesbian history, before I arrived here). Last night, I went to a reading at Palominos with some local poets: Tim Hernandez, Mike Medrano, Marisol Baca, Lance Canales (I may be mis-remembering his name) and Connie. Mike mentioned Juan Felipe Herrera, who spent years here, and all the poets celebrated the local experience. Also last night, I went to Audie’s Olympic where a local band, the Suppressors, performed, including a piece about the Marcus Wesson ska (an infamous local who fathered children with his children, many of whom were killed or committed suicide together). So, what’s my point here? The Valley is a fertile place for creativity and self-expression. Locals and transplants both find inspiration in this agricultural, sometimes dysfunctional, but always interesting town. So, that’s one reason I love Fresno.
Another reason I love Fresno is embedded in the previous paragraph: I have great friends here. Staying in Fresno as long as I have has allowed me to develop friendships over a long period of time. I’ve always made friends easily (a skill learned from moving around a lot), but the great thing about living somewhere so long is that I’ve had the chance to really find friends who stick, who I trust and love, who I hope will be in my life forever. These last few years in particular have been quite rich in terms of my friendships–and after a year away, I’m also making new friends and deepening relationships with people who have been in my life for years. I appreciate the openness of people here–it feels easy to socialize with old friends and new. Friday night, John and John invited Tanya and I over for game night and dinner. John, a fantastic cook, made a cheese souffle, sauteed green beans, salad, and roasted potatoes. It was all so good. We also played Scrabble. John B. won, as he always does, and, even though I get rather competitive with games, I still was so happy to lose . . . because it meant I was hanging out with people who are really important to me. . . . oh, and because I love playing Scrabble and I don’t get to do it enough. Last night, Kristie and I met in the Tower district: we went to the aforementioned poetry reading at Palominos, ate dinner at Veni, Vidi, Vici’s, saw the Suppressors at Audie’s, and hung out at Livingstone’s until about 1:15 a.m. Kristie and I have known each other for years, but in some ways, she feels like a new friend, new because we’re getting to know each other better. We laughed a lot and I had so much fun jumping from one place to the next in the Tower. So, yeah, there are amazing, wonderful people who live in Fresno, and I’m lucky to count so many as my friends. I think Fresno’s inferiority complex adds to the sense that people who are interested in the arts want to stick together, to support Fresno’s efforts to celebrate the arts, and to take advantage of the cultural opportunities that Fresno offers. I can go to events by myself and encounter people I know, even though Fresno has a population of almost a half million people. Sometimes, Fresno feels like a small town that way.
This morning, I slept in late, skipped my morning walk (which is another thing I love about Fresno, walking around the Fresno High/Fig Garden area), mowed my lawn, trimmed some trees/bushes, and picked up fallen fruit in my backyard. I love my house–it’s comfortable, pretty (at least I think it is), and homey. It was built in about 1945 and is in an established neighborhood with quiet, tree-lined streets, friendly neighbors, and beautiful yards. I’m grateful that my job has given me financial security, allowing me to be a home owner in such a charming neighborhood. I don’t know if I would have ever been able to afford a home if I’d stayed in Huntington Beach.
Recently, a friend posted a great Facebook update: “John Jordan loves Fresno–maybe for no good reason, but he does.” Many of us agreed–and some posted good reasons why. I guess this blog entry illustrates some of the reasons that I love Fresno.
In response to the California budget crisis, CSU faculty voted to accept furloughs this academic year that would result in about a 10% cut to our pay. As expected, the CSU administration has failed to demonstrate that our furloughs have actually saved jobs. In fact, from what we’ve heard, next semester there will be even more layoffs, and the administration is talking yet again about raising tuition. From my vantage point, it looks like furloughs have not accomplished the goal of saving faculty and classes.
These furloughs have, however, changed my relationship with my job.
First, a confession. I’m a (recovering?) workaholic. For my first three years of work at Fresno State, I had the equivalent of a course overload every semester so that I could work with a tutoring center at a local public school. In my years at Fresno State, I’ve frequently sacrificed a personal life in order to work hard for the good of my students and my institution. I’ve volunteered to be on many committees and to serve in leadership positions. I’ve done workshops at local schools and districts, most of the time not receiving any payment except the satisfaction of knowing that I’m helping schools, teachers, and students (which is a great reward in my book). My philosophy has been that I can fit it in if I really care about it.
When we submitted our furlough plans (we were allowed to choose some of the days we would be on furlough), we also committed not to work on those days. For the first time in my academic career, I’ve had work-free days . . . because, yes, I have almost always worked on weekends. I’m still adjusting to this concept since furloughs happen in the midst of a busy work week. But I’m also learning to fill those days with socializing, yard/house work, my own personal projects, and exploration of new terrains and interests.
The result has been a surprise to me. Finally, I actually feel like I have a satisfying balance between a personal life and work. Moreover, furloughs have made me rethink what I do on weekends. I know I can’t have my weekends be completely work-free, but I’m going to do my best to at least avoid grading on the weekends. And I’m feeling much less guilty about weekend time spent on things other that work. I think the furlough system is curing me of my workaholic ways–and many of my colleagues are experiencing something very similar.
Furloughs aren’t fair to students who are paying higher and higher tuition, only to be forced to stay in school longer because they can’t get into the classes they need. They aren’t fair to faculty who have devoted their working lives to providing a good education and working for the good of the university. I will continue to spend 90% of my working life doing the best job that I possibly can. But for the 10% that constitutes my furlough days? The doctor is out.
So . . . I’m really enjoying my classes this semester. It feels good to be back teaching the same group of students over a period of a few months–I missed that in Norway when I’d have students for just a day. There’s just so much more I can do with students when I get to know them and what they need.
I have two classes this semester. I’m teaching a Popular Fiction class for the first time. This is only the second G.E. class I’ve taught in a regular semester–and because I’ve never taught the class before, I’m still figuring out what I want my students to leave the class with. I know I want them to enjoy reading, to be willing to make forays into unfamiliar genres, to make competent and informed analyses of literature. I think we’re doing that so far, but it also seems like I should be giving them a deeper understanding of genre and the history of literary production. I’m still working on these. So far, we’ve read a detective novel, In the Woods by Tana French, and we’re in the midst of reading a Western, Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage.
The students were really engaged with the French novel which has an unreliable narrator who is also a detective. We had great discussions about whether we could trust anything this narrator told us. And the ending of the novel lent itself to discussing the expectations of the detective novel genre and the ways that French subverted those expectations. It totally worked–and I’d love to teach this novel again.
The students aren’t quite as excited about Zane Grey–but they are willing to explore and analyze the novel. They’ve asked good questions and excelled at character analysis. I think this novel will work all right–and it’s a great example of an early novel which set the path for future Westerns. I’m loving these students and their willingness to participate and try out new genres.
The second class I’m teaching is one I’ve taught for years: English Teaching Methods and Materials. The majority of the students in this class are doing the first part of their student teaching, so they are motivated to learn how to teach English/Language Arts. The class this semester is enthusiastic, funny, a little whiny (students in this class always are, so that’s okay), and intelligent. I love teaching this class. Today, I switched gears in the middle of class because a student said that she wasn’t really getting the chance to try out the ideas she was learning in this class. Because we were discussing an article by Marty Nystrand on dialogic discussion, I was planning to do a Stop and React activity with a chapter from Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street–and I realized that I could have some of my students lead the discussion. I explained the activity to them, then asked for volunteers. With the first two students I had to intervene frequently to help them frame appropriate questions (they wanted to be much more directive than they should in this activity), but students quickly got the hang of how to use more open ended questions. I had to bite my tongue a lot because there were things I would have asked or ways I would have responded–still, I liked that this activity gave my students an opportunity to practice how to create a more dialogic classroom. And afterwards, a student waited quite awhile (lots of students asking questions) to tell me how much he had learned from the class and expressed the hope that we’d do this type of thing again.
Today, it felt so good to be a teacher. I love my job.
On Thursday, I attended one of the events commemorating the Fresno Feminist Art Movement. In 1970, Judy Chicago, whose collaborative work “The Dinner Party” is one of the most important feminist art pieces, taught for a year at what was then Fresno State College. 15 students studied art in a collaborative setting, resisting the “genius who works alone” model that is such a prevalent practice in art. Many of these students followed Chicago to Cal Arts to continue their studies . . . and many have made their career in art.
The first presentation I attended was by Vanalyne Green. Green’s current project focuses on “provisional moments of utopia”–she has interviewed the chaplains for both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate . . . and she has interviewed people about which days’ prayers they would like to read. She also went to a cemetery in Chicago where different Wobblies and activists are buried under strident and still confrontational gravestones. It was a fascinating presentation.
Nancy Youdelman began as a costume designer and has continued to create art using dresses. Especially interesting was her work incorporating letters written by 30 different women to one man, Allen Watkins. Youdelman talked about how they share a narrative arc: love, insecurity about why the man hasn’t responded, and finally anger. I love that she uses materials bought on e-Bay in her work. Youdelman also showed pictures and told stories about “A Studio of Their Own,” the Fresno State studio where she worked with Judy Chicago.
Both these women made me think about artistic production–using non-traditional forms and materials to produce thoughtful responses to the world. I love what YouTube has done to expose the work that even amateurs do to pay homage to or even parody the contemporary world. I love the use of found objects in all kinds of artistic production. I love texts that experiment with how to tell a story. I love that all kinds of creativity have expression right now.
When John B. came to visit me in Oslo, we spent some time at the National Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s an interesting juxtaposition: the cutting edge art work in a staid old bank building. We really enjoyed many of the pieces, and two in particular have stayed with me. One was a series of photographs taken by Sophie Calle, an artist who worked as a maid in a hotel. She took pictures of and created captions describing the detritus that travelers leave behind in the “safety” of their hotel rooms. The photos and captions provide a cautionary tale for travelers, but they also invite the voyeurism that has become such a prevalent part of contemporary society.
Another interesting piece was created by Jenny Holzer, an artist known for her combination of text and art. Holzer’s piece was a lengthy list of adages or truisms that invite the viewer to read, ponder, and wonder. I found myself laughing at some of the statements that I might have taken seriously in a different setting. There was something so incongruous about reading this representation of received “wisdom” viewed in an art gallery where we are more accustomed to viewing shapes and forms.
Recently, I’ve been talking with an art professor about co-teaching a class on art and text. He referred me to the Korean group Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries who create internet-based presentations that pair music with words. I’ve watched a couple of their pieces–they have made me laugh, wonder, and think. I don’t love them, but I admire this group’s innovative high tech/low tech approach to art.
I’m looking for more artists like these, if you know of any.
The necessity of universal health care has become a very personal issue for me. Two years ago, my then 16 year old niece had kidney failure–her family didn’t have health insurance. A year ago, she experienced a failed kidney transplant and was in the hospital most of the summer (accruing enormous hospital bills which, again, would not be paid by insurance since she had a pre-existing condition). She pulled through, managed to graduate from high school, and is currently waiting a three-way exchange of kidneys that will involve her mother donating a kidney to someone else while my niece will get a kidney from a complete stranger. Because my brother and his wife are educated, understand systems, and dogged in their determination to get help in paying the medical bills, I think their family is going to be okay. However, they have had to expend a lot of energy worrying in addition to doing a lot of paperwork to make sure the bills are paid.
Moreover, my favorite neighbor, a single mother who works part-time, has to worry about paying for expensive prescriptions to treat a thyroid condition. Her insurance company wants to use an alternative drug instead of the medication that has proven successful in her treatment.
I don’t understand why anyone would think that either of these conditions is acceptable. All human beings should have access to treatment for illness; health care should not be available only for those who have enough money to afford it.
I recently read an article which cogently articulates what the U.S. can learn from other countries. It’s worth your time to read:
