I'll be teaching Economic Geography in Spring 08 - we worked this out at the faculty meeting on Wednesday. It's a new prep for me, but I'm really looking forward to it. I plan on using a readings packet rather than a textbook, so that I can really build the course from the ground up based on what I want rather than what the textbook author wants.
In that respect I want to take a look at a new book by Richard N. Langlois (Williams '74) called "The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy." (Routledge 2007). The shift away from vertical integration of firms to specialized firms connected by markets and networks.
Then also, for urban geography in the future: "The persistence of poverty: why the economics of the well-off can't help the poor" by Charles Karelis (Williams '67). Yale UP 2007. A "new" understanding of poverty will generate more effective anti-poverty programs.
The poverty readings I did last summer were kinda dated: I'm looking for a fresh approach.
Back to population pyramids...
They are:
wealth without work;
pleasure without conscience;
knowledge without character;
commerce without morality;
science without humanity;
worship without sacrifice; and
politics without principle.
-Mahatma Gandhi
This book might be worth checking out (and it gives me the opportunity to clean out another file:
Landscape Narratives: design practices for telling stories. c. 1998: Wiley. Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton. He is a prof of LA at SUNY Syracase; she is a LA in NYC (and I used to play violin with her or perhaps her sister, I think).
It might be interesting to look at it from the perspective of cultural geography and "reading the landscape."
I find that I have a bunch of files (even though I cleaned them out in 2002) on design and gardens and landscape architecture. How does that fit into my current interests (if at all) I wonder?
I am still trying to manage the newness of my life: new job; new car; new commute; new handbag (sounds stupid but it's yet another factor in the "I can't find anything" routine that has become my life); newish house; new courses; new laptop with new programs; new colleagues.
This is probably why I am sleeping 9 hours a night again - just to reset the ol' brain from all that newness.
One reassuring un-newness: the library here at the college may be new to me, but the Library of Congress system hasn't changed. At the break between classes today I took a stroll through the stacks - including my old favorites in the HNs and PRs. Libraries are always so reassuring. I always feel right at home, even if I've never been in the builidng before.
It's the end of the day - of the "official" workweek, in fact. I teach Mondays through Thursdays, freeing up Fridays for research, dissertation, course prep, housework, errands. (More in short than can be done in a day or even in a three-day weekend.)
I am waiting a little while before heading home. Yesterday I left here around 6:15 - today I'm going to try it a little earlier and see how it is. This gives me an hour or more to get something done in a very focused way, since it's really quiet around here in the late afternoons. It reminds me of my planning job, and how productive I could be after hours when the phone stopped ringing and everyone had gone home.
Trouble is, I don't really feel like working on lecture prep, since I'm "free" until Monday. Bad attitude, I know. Perhaps a trip to get familiar with library resources?
I'm exhausted and hungry at the end of the day - and tomorrow will be even longer! Unfortunately I can't work on class prep for tomorrow right now because I don't have the textbooks handy.
I am going to keep diaries offline about my progress as a teacher. Today was good - students here are a lot more talkative than at UMN.
The parking situation is intolerable: faculty lots supposedly fill by 8 and I circled around the student lots for at least 20 minutes before I found a space, by some impossible luck. It's clear to me that the lots could be reconfigured to allow more spaces, but I suspect the parking issue here is much bigger than scraping an extra 50 spaces out of the collective real estate.
Yes, yes, all of it: "Magic" tape and packing tape and masking tape and double-sided tape, and there is a special circle of hell for the people who use those little adhesive foamy squares to adhere things (mirrored tiles for example) to HISTORIC PLASTER WALLS.
Use nails like a real human, dammit! It takes only a few moments to spackle the holes, and we have to do touch-up painting anyways.
If we ever rent our house again, there will be a clause that the evidence of any such adheisve products upon vacating will be immediate grounds for keeping the entire security deposit. I will be spending many hundreds of hours in the months to come stripping tape (and with it the paint) and then un-sticking the surface with a de-sticker, and then sanding and painting the surface.