Hump Day Happenings
Feb. 16th, 2022 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunabee341. I got a Valentine's Day card from misbegotten! <3
2.![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
journalsandplanners is hosting a Snowflake-type challenge for the rest of this month thanks to enthusiastic and enterprising members. Drop by and check out what people are saying, and maybe participate yourself. :)
3.gloss posted about Matthew Cheney's blog post The Strength of Kindness in a pedagogical context, which is phenomenal. Cheney references Contemplative Reading by Karolyn Kinane, an article which is not open-source. I have ILLed that sucker and have a PDF I am willing to share with anyone, so PM me an email address if you are interested in reading it.
Comment 1: I think that one of the reasons I have sustained a deep and affirming interest in Ouida is that my interest in her is not destructive, it's not about ripping her to shreds and tearing holes in her work. I don't think she's perfect. I think she's a flawed writer. I think she's racist as fuck, for example, and that those problems need to be foregrounded in any discussion of her writing. But I LIKE her writing. I enjoy it on a visceral level. I take pleasure and entertainment from it. My academic career isn't built on slashing and burning but on trying to share with others what I think is awesome because I want them to read it and think it's cool, too.
Also, I'm not above taking the tack that another critic is wrong, but because there are so few scholars who have written about Ouida, my scholarship is more collaborative in a sense--agreeing with what others have said and adding to it or simply creating it because it doesn't exist.
I think there are many reasons that people burn out in academia and many reasons people start to hate the topic they went into a dissertation loving. But I think surely one of them has to be that it's difficult to sustain an adversarial attitude for decades, whether that's an attitude toward the texts themselves or towards your fellow colleagues in the academy. It's negative and if all you're doing is constantly thinking of what you can say in your next article to prove someone wrong, that's not good for you mentally.
I mean, sometimes people are wrong! Good scholarship comes out of that undeniably. But it's not the only way.
Also, I've really been focusing on the scholarship of teaching and learning recently which in my experience is almost entirely collaborative, positive, and has none of these destructive, slash and burn tendencies.
Comment 2: I was just such a deeply tedious and unpleasant young scholar. I am so glad I went down a different trajectory. Honestly, as much as it was not a good thing in many ways, I think having a baby right at the beginning of grad school jolted me out of being such a jackass. I spent some fair amount of time trying on the adversarial persona; I wrote some papers about how my professors were wrong! To be fair, they were wrong. Ahahahahhahhahaa. And I got good grades on them because I was right. But lordy I was obnoxious.
And even in scholarship of teaching and learning, some ways of teaching are wrong. You have to call out damaging pedagogy. But even then, the main focus is on the positive thing you replace it with.
Futher Comments: I am really hit the hardest by this part of Cheney's post--Immediately, when I think of kindness I think of softness, of emotion rather than reason, of weakness. Obviously, this is the most basic, and toxic, way discourse both positions and devalues traits culturally coded as feminine. Caring gets seen as unmasculine, unmanly, emasculating. The work of caring, of emotion, of kindness becomes associated with a lack of power, a lack of value, a lack of seriousness. Such connotations are literally patriarchal. In addition to letting patriarchal connotations pass unchallenged, we may fall into eugenic thinking: a kind teacher is one who coddles the undeserving, who does not cull the failures, who lets the impure pass.
I think this is why some of my colleagues resist so strongly what they see as "touchy feely" pedagogy even when all the research supports it as best practice. And I know that it was why I resisted for so long--because I thought I had to be tough and strict and unyielding or else lose my authority in the classroom.
Kinane's article is really interesting. I read it today and need to still sit with it to think how it would take shape in my classroom.
4.
The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer's to Solve a Murder by Wayne Hoffman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this book. Its three threads (the history of the Jewish diaspora in Canada, the author's sorrow over his mother's decline into dementia, and the mystery of who murdered his great-grandmother more than one hundred years ago) form a fascinating narrative. I already knew Hoffman is an excellent storyteller from reading his other novels, but this novel outshines his earlier work and represents extensive research conducted over a number of years.
I highly recommend this to anyone interested in memoir, true crime, genealogy, and history.
View all my reviews
misbegotten! <32.
journalsandplanners is hosting a Snowflake-type challenge for the rest of this month thanks to enthusiastic and enterprising members. Drop by and check out what people are saying, and maybe participate yourself. :)3.
gloss posted about Matthew Cheney's blog post The Strength of Kindness in a pedagogical context, which is phenomenal. Cheney references Contemplative Reading by Karolyn Kinane, an article which is not open-source. I have ILLed that sucker and have a PDF I am willing to share with anyone, so PM me an email address if you are interested in reading it.Comment 1: I think that one of the reasons I have sustained a deep and affirming interest in Ouida is that my interest in her is not destructive, it's not about ripping her to shreds and tearing holes in her work. I don't think she's perfect. I think she's a flawed writer. I think she's racist as fuck, for example, and that those problems need to be foregrounded in any discussion of her writing. But I LIKE her writing. I enjoy it on a visceral level. I take pleasure and entertainment from it. My academic career isn't built on slashing and burning but on trying to share with others what I think is awesome because I want them to read it and think it's cool, too.
Also, I'm not above taking the tack that another critic is wrong, but because there are so few scholars who have written about Ouida, my scholarship is more collaborative in a sense--agreeing with what others have said and adding to it or simply creating it because it doesn't exist.
I think there are many reasons that people burn out in academia and many reasons people start to hate the topic they went into a dissertation loving. But I think surely one of them has to be that it's difficult to sustain an adversarial attitude for decades, whether that's an attitude toward the texts themselves or towards your fellow colleagues in the academy. It's negative and if all you're doing is constantly thinking of what you can say in your next article to prove someone wrong, that's not good for you mentally.
I mean, sometimes people are wrong! Good scholarship comes out of that undeniably. But it's not the only way.
Also, I've really been focusing on the scholarship of teaching and learning recently which in my experience is almost entirely collaborative, positive, and has none of these destructive, slash and burn tendencies.
Comment 2: I was just such a deeply tedious and unpleasant young scholar. I am so glad I went down a different trajectory. Honestly, as much as it was not a good thing in many ways, I think having a baby right at the beginning of grad school jolted me out of being such a jackass. I spent some fair amount of time trying on the adversarial persona; I wrote some papers about how my professors were wrong! To be fair, they were wrong. Ahahahahhahhahaa. And I got good grades on them because I was right. But lordy I was obnoxious.
And even in scholarship of teaching and learning, some ways of teaching are wrong. You have to call out damaging pedagogy. But even then, the main focus is on the positive thing you replace it with.
Futher Comments: I am really hit the hardest by this part of Cheney's post--Immediately, when I think of kindness I think of softness, of emotion rather than reason, of weakness. Obviously, this is the most basic, and toxic, way discourse both positions and devalues traits culturally coded as feminine. Caring gets seen as unmasculine, unmanly, emasculating. The work of caring, of emotion, of kindness becomes associated with a lack of power, a lack of value, a lack of seriousness. Such connotations are literally patriarchal. In addition to letting patriarchal connotations pass unchallenged, we may fall into eugenic thinking: a kind teacher is one who coddles the undeserving, who does not cull the failures, who lets the impure pass.
I think this is why some of my colleagues resist so strongly what they see as "touchy feely" pedagogy even when all the research supports it as best practice. And I know that it was why I resisted for so long--because I thought I had to be tough and strict and unyielding or else lose my authority in the classroom.
Kinane's article is really interesting. I read it today and need to still sit with it to think how it would take shape in my classroom.
4.
The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer's to Solve a Murder by Wayne HoffmanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this book. Its three threads (the history of the Jewish diaspora in Canada, the author's sorrow over his mother's decline into dementia, and the mystery of who murdered his great-grandmother more than one hundred years ago) form a fascinating narrative. I already knew Hoffman is an excellent storyteller from reading his other novels, but this novel outshines his earlier work and represents extensive research conducted over a number of years.
I highly recommend this to anyone interested in memoir, true crime, genealogy, and history.
View all my reviews
