B and I were talking about logistical things we are learning along the way.
1. Build in some flex into the syllabus, to account for snow days, sick days, family emergencies and the like. Then, have some free-floating lesson plans that relate to the course objectives but don't have to be in sequence, to fill in if you haven't missed any class meetings. I was sick on Monday, and I am really stressing out about catching up: my syllabus is a finely-tuned instrument and if I get behind it will cause all sorts of other problems.
2. Set up a directory system and naming conventions for documents BEFORE THE SEMESTER STARTS. I spent a bunch of time this morning looking for a document I'd renamed. It got into the wrong folder somehow.
3. Likewise, use the Save As function to make new documents AS SOON AS YOU OPEN THE ORIGINAL. Otherwise you lose old material because you mistakenly Save. It really doesn't matter a huge amount in the particular mistakes I've made in the last couple of days, but I don't have a full archive of what I did last fall anymore, which is kind of too bad.
4. Spend some time learning how to foster useful discussions in class. I spent a lot of time with this last summer, and it worked, but I've gotten out of the habit at my new job - partly because it is SO HARD to get them talking that sometimes I am just not up to the effort. College as a spectactor sport; the professor as a sort of live TV screen. Harrumph.
This pedagogy category is mis-named. I really am posting content ideas for teaching here, not ideas about methods of teaching.
From two recent letters to the Globe, in response to Adrian Boutureira's 11/5/07 op-ed piece on how free trade cuts manufacturing jobs in Massachusetts:
1. Kamran Dadkhah, an assoc prof of economics at Northeastern, writes that Mass lost 80,000 manuf jobs in the 1990-93 period, before the implementation of NAFTA, and has lost 120,000 in the 13 years since. He writes that the growth of manufacturing jobs ended in 1969, and job losses began in 1979. Manufacturing job loss nationwide from 1993-2006 was 2.7 million, but in that time the index of industrial production (whatever that is) has risen 62% and the value of manufacturing output in constant dollars has increased by 54%.
2. Andreas Waldkirch, an asst professor of economics at Colby, adds that it is misleading to attribute manufacturing job loss to NAFTA, because it has happened in ALL industrialized countries, while the number of services sector jobs has increased and more than compensates (not the same wages, though, Professor Waldkirch!).
I find myself more and more interested in this question of sectoral shift, especially looked at on a geographical basis.
Just finished skim-reading V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street. I found it quite by accident on the shelves in the library - it's not cataloged separately from the other two selections that it is bound with, which are The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira.
The book flap calls Miguel Street "delightfully comic" in contrast to his later, dark, violent novels. Perhaps so: but I just found the stories dated and a bit elitist. And not offering any insight really into the geography of the Caribbean. I have made a copy of part of his non-fiction novella (?) The Return of Eva Peron because it describes Montevideo, but I am not sure if the Montevideo of 1972 is really relevant for teaching purposes in World Regional Geography.
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...
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?
Oh, yeah, another rant. I watched a documentary on Levittown produced by Hofstra in 1994. Really terrrible: annoying, cloying music snips; repetitious; a bunch of acontextualized reminiscences you wouldn't care about unless you knew the speakers. Some great, rare footage of construction, though. I wanted to know so much more about the geography - why that particular area? What were the economics of building and the economies of scale? How has the town matured and changed? What have been the challenges of living there?
(Kind of a poignant note in one interview - a woman who has lived there 40 years and still hates it and hates the suburbs.)
Then I watched "Suburbs: Arcadia for Everyone," thinking it was an ironic title (Pride of Place series, RAM Stern narrating, 1986) but alas, no. Turns out that the example of 20 or so new single-family manufactured housing units dropped into the South Bronx shows that the suburbs are for everyone, even poor blacks. (They come with bars already on the windows; I am not making this up.)
There was some good footage of historical suburbs but Stern isn't a very gifted narrator and the overall premise was flawed. Not that I am bashing the suburbs (he does a little of that with the strip) so much as questioning the premise that everyone should live that way.
While I've been preparing the lectures for urban geography this summer, I've come across so many ethnographies that I'd like to read some day - partly just for sheer enjoyment, partly to enhance my understanding of urban processes.
G. Sjoberg (1960), The Preindustrial City (challenges the Chicago School generalizations about urban life)
J. Feagin's case study of Houston (ditto the challenges)
Orum's study of Austin, possibly Urban Aff Q 1991.
H Gans, Books on Levittown and Boston's North End
Lynds, books on Muncie IND
W. Warner's book on my hometown (I read it when I was a teenager; I'd get much different things out of it now)
"The dependence on Chicago as a basis for generalizing about urban life is challenged by and today the generalizations of the Chicago School have come under attack from other perspectives: for example in Feagin's (1988) case study of Houston" (Feagin, Orum and Sjoberg 1991:44).
Updated 7/12/07
I was all excited to read Feagin's book Free Enterprise City: Houston in Political-Economic Perspective, especially chapter 2 "theories of urban development," which I thought would help me fit all my chaotic reading into a neatly organized package. Alas, it doesn't really do that.
Sjoberg's book is great, although it's more of a review of then-existing literature on pre-industrial cities. He takes some good jabs at his fellow sociologists - good fun. I am about halfway through. His purpose is to show the commonalities between pre-industrial cities, and show how they are different from industrial cities, using the comparative approach that he says has fallen out of favor in sociology. He rejects the Chicago School (especially Wirth) for failing to appreciate the importance of social organization in urban life (for them it's all anomie and disorder). He rejects the urban ecologists for thinking of technology as something "outside" human ecology rather than a product of human minds. He rejects the focus on cultural and social differences (between cities; idiographic?) of Firey, Kolb and Max Weber. He recognizes the importance of looking at power as a differentiating factor, but his main focus is technology as the main independent variable: "technology both requires and makes possible certain social forms. This viewpoint does not commit us to technological determinism, however, for recognized is the impact upon social structures of other variables - the city, cultural values, and social power - all of which can affect the patterning of technology itself" (7). [there's a certain Yoda-like structure to some of the sentences...]
I just finished reading two commentaries and a rejoinder on how research agendas are/should be set, and it strikes me that these would be really good reading for an intro class on geographical epistemology or research methods, or for a capstone seminar (here at the U that'd be Geog 4001, 8001/2, and 3985).
The original forum piece is Jay R. Harman, 2003, Whither Geography? in The Professional Geographer, 55:415-421.
Not sure why it took so long for the commentaries to appear, but they are at p 99 and 104 in the Feb 2006 issue of PG (58:1), and are by Mark Pendras and Rich Heyman respectively. Harman's rejoinder follows at p. 106.
How are research agendas in geography determined? Is use value important? If so, who determines it and how? What about critical perspectives? How important are they? In some sense it's the old social constructionism debate all over again, but the articles are pretty accessible (unlike most of the s.c. stuff) and I think it would be really interesting to hear undergrads (in particular) thinking and talking about such issues.
In one of the classes I TA for (ah, the joys of a "split appointment"), attendance and participation in the recitation (eeew, what an old-fashioned term) sections is worth 10% of the final grade. Quizzes are worth another 40% or so, with papers worth the remainder.
Quizzes aren't announced, but are "more or less" every other week. There's been a pattern apparently of students figuring out that when they've had a quiz in section, they won't have one the following week, so attendance drops like a stone.
My question is, how do you make class discussion valuable? How do you make it something that students "want" to attend? What has to happen there for it to have enough "value" to attend?
My premise is that higher education is different than it used to be. Back in the day, students went to college full time. Other than work-study, they did not work. They went to class (unless exhausted or too hungover) because going to class was their job, regardless of what they thought they might "get out of it" and how it might directly affect their final grade.
Now, it's all different. Students have a lot of demands on their time (perhaps more than can be managed in the time allotted) so they have to prioritize and make decisions: what will happen if I don't go to recitation? I will maybe lose one point out of my 10% participation grade, and I won't sit there for 2 hours listening to my classmates yak about the subject matter.
Hm. In this age of instrumentality, do we HAVE to demonstrate value-added? If so, what IS the value-added of discussion?