Work Plans for the Summer May 30, 2012

My EN 101 class was cancelled this summer, which leaves me more time for other work. I have some ambitious plans to get lots of work done toward tenure.

• 3000 word book chapter to submit by October.
• Another 3000 word book chapter on a similar topic to submit by December.
• 2500 word conference paper for ASA in November.

These are the most pressing projects because they actually have time deadlines associated with them in terms of writing and possible revisions. So, I’m going to start working really hard on them.

I also have some other projects in the works:

• Chapter four of my dissertation…I think I’m finally ready to rework it. I want to split the chapter and add a few things to it. I’m thinking The Adventures of Don Chipote definitely fits with the first part of the chapter, while something else might go in the last; or there’s a possibility to just flesh out more of the last two novels based on teaching Pocho this year. Still thinking about it.
• I started a great piece on Susan Shelby Magoffin, but I hit a wall and I haven’t finished it. What I think is that this piece might serve as the basis for my next big work, so I might keep it simmering but try to yolk it with the piece I write for the conference in November and keep it all going through those avenues.
• I really want to revise my Caballero work with what I have from the archive. It’s pretty messy though, and I wanted to work on it last summer, but didn’t get to it, so we’ll see.
• Finally, I have some more stuff to say about Katherine Anne Porter and the archival stuff I dug up at University of Maryland. It’s in really not great shape though, so it too may end up with bullet point two on this list.
• And haha, that wasn’t finally…this is finally. I have some pedagogical work I want to do in thinking about teaching American literature and the ways that I teach it and certain authors we teach, but this may be a project for when I have a little more maturity.

Teaching plans in terms of work:

• Humanities Summer Institute: This is really cool. I’m working with two other professors and five students on a reading seminar on iHuman. It’s so fun. We are reading Medea for tomorrow.
• I’m the summer adviser, so I get to help all the new students plan their schedules. I’m directing all the cool ones into my classes. Just kidding.
• A few colleagues and I are working on Service Learning Initiatives in the English department and across the curriculum. We’re looking at ways (and actually implementing ways) of integrating service learning possibilities at all levels in our curriculum.

Things I want to talk to my chair about for the future:

• Getting the Vagina Monologues to campus–by this I mean staging our own performance in conjunction with my Gender Studies class.
• Working on an NEH grant in partnership with UNM.
• Getting a service learning alternative spring break trip in conjunction with one of my classes.

Plans with the boys:

• Beach. They love it, and now that I have an awesome sun hat, I will enjoy it too.
• More beach. This time in New Jersey.
• Swimming lessons for Seamus.
• Spanish Camp for Seamus.
• Lots of days at Gravelly Point, the Zoo, or the Mall.
• Cooking fun foods.
• Playing games–Seamus is finally ready for things like Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders!

Yay Summer!

Ethics Seminar May 17, 2012

This is a little bit of a cop out post, but I’ve been participating in Ethics Seminar at my university this week, so I thought I’d post the ethical considerations there are in my field that I’ve been dealing with. Also, I designed a couple of case studies that you might weigh in on as well–if you want.

When I think about my teaching and research, I generally assume myself to be an ethical participant in the learning and production of knowledge processes. Yet, in the process of thinking about what kind of ethical divides that might exist in my profession, I can identify several potential areas for examination. For the purposes of this exercise, I’ll limit to those most pressing to my teaching and scholarship over the next year; these include 1) the presence of a service learning component in my EN 101 Composition I course; 2) teaching canonical texts as a core requirement; and 3) engaging students in discussions of legitimate cultural relativism and morality in the areas of equality and gender studies.

My EN 101 class involves a service learning component that requires students to serve at a food bank, soup kitchen, or other location that helps alleviate hunger in the DC metro area. Students then write an observation report where they link their experience to the other information we’ve uncovered about hunger. While many of them cite the experience as a highlight of the class, I’d like to ground the experience a little more in questions of their ethical obligations. On the other side of this, I still have issues with my own use of this assignment with the potential for allowing students to use vulnerable populations as laboratories for their own learning. Furthermore, does this involve sympathy on the part of the students or do they harden themselves with logical reasons for hunger?

As a literary scholar trained in ethnic literature and studies, I value engaging these texts in my classroom. Yet, as a teacher in the liberal arts core, I’m expected to teach students a set of agreed upon texts of cultural and community value. This means that somehow I have to balance what I think it’s valuable for students to study without sacrificing their basic knowledge in the areas of literature they expect to see on the syllabus. This means putting someone like Benjamin Franklin in contrast with Elizabeth Ashbridge or Santiago Tafolla. Don’t know who they are? Blame the canon.

Perhaps most urgently, I seek to know to what degree it’s necessary for me to set aside my own emotional and logical reactions to texts and ideas to allow my students to engage with different value systems in the classroom. For instance, a student wrote her final paper on the presence of domestic violence in the literary texts that we read. She was looking for a cultural explanation for degrees of violence and number of incidences of violence. I come from a paradigm that believes culture is important to consider, but in the case of domestic violence, all women, no matter their ethnicity or religion, are potential targets due to power structures embedded in most societies. Therefore, arguing for long periods about who experiences “more” violence serves to divide women on an issue that has some degree of need for definition but a more urgent need for systematic solutions.

I told my colleague that I was going to write a 5 paragraph essay, hahahaha literary joke, but then I didn’t write a conclusion, so I’m even worse than the standard.

Case studies that relate:

Case Study 1

 

Your EN 101 instructor has just informed you that your assignment is to go to a food bank, soup kitchen, or other place that helps alleviate hunger in the DC area. You choose to go to a soup kitchen that you can access on Metro, because you don’t have a car. When you arrive there are many people standing around outside waiting for breakfast; a volunteer coordinator gives you a tour, and soon enough you’re set up at the pancake serving table waiting for people to come in. A steady stream of people go through the line. A couple of people try for a second serving, but the woman in charge of the line turns them away. You’re serving pancakes as fast as you can and you’re smiling at the people in line because the volunteer coordinator told you that everyone who comes to breakfast should get food, a smile, and a bit of dignity. You only notice a few people—a woman with short hair, a man in a Redskins coat, a man in a wheelchair.

 

When breakfast service is over, you’re ready to head back home. As you walk to the Metro stop, a man on the sidewalk asks you for some change. When you look, you realize it’s the man in the wheelchair.

 

What do you do? As a participant-observer in this situation, what kinds of ethics bind you?

Case Study 2

 

You are the donations manager at Mt. Pleasant Food Bank. While you generally have enough donations to meet the needs of your clientele, occasionally you run short—and you always run short on fruits and vegetables. However, you’ve managed to strike a pretty good balance with the demand for your services and the food you’ve solicited from donors.

 

Today, you are meeting a truck from a food distribution company who has offered you some supplies for the food bank. When they arrive, it’s a potato chip company “Fluffles,” and they’re offering your food bank 5000 bags of Blazin’ Hot Chili Loaded Potato Chips. They market tested these, and they were a huge flop, so they’ve been donating them to food banks across the country.

 

The Good Samaritan Act in your state has limited the potential liability of food donors, and the Fluffles company will get a tax deduction for the food that they’ve donated, if you accept it.

 

What are the ethical dimensions of this scenario? What are the “professional ethics” involved? What are the “general ethics”? Does one trump the other?

Some Food Websites September 23, 2011

My students have been researching Food in the DC Area. They came up with some great sites that I think are really going to help me mold this class into an inquiry-based, service-learning approach to composition in the future as I teach it. Explore…if you want. I welcome ideas for thinking about ways to increase their involvement in community.

Weblinks

DC Hunger A website dedicated to information about ending hunger in the nation’s capital.

DC Food Finder

Community Gardens A national website that discusses the philosophy and practicality of community gardens.

DC Foodies  Contains information about how the food tastes, certain events going on, quality of service, and nearby restaurants.

The Slow Cook  An online journal by Ed Braske that shares his experience with creating a vegetable garden in D.C., showing which vegetables grow best in the area, as well as articles about food in the local area.

Chef’s Salaries DC Information about the average salary for different levels of chefs in the DC area.

DC Food for All a blog website that allows people to post about the food around DC and the surrounding area

Capital Area Food Bank This website is about food banks in the DC area and what people can do to help (donating or volunteering)

Truckeroo

Open Table a website that lists over 600 restaurants in the DC area. It rates all of them with up to 5 stars as well as lists how expensive each restaurant is. On top of all that information, you can make reservations to any of the 607 restaurants on the site.

Top 100 Restaurants in DC from Washingtonian This is a list of the top restaurants in DC, MD, and VA but search can be narrowed to DC area only. Only the first 40 restaurants are ranked and the rest are listed alphabetically. Each restaurant is given a star rating from 2 to 4 stars for Good, Excellent, and Exceptional.

Eat Drink DC a blog referencing specific restaurants around the dc area that the blogger found appetizing.

Food Tours Dc metro food tours are essentially what it sounds like an entire food store experience. There are many different locals that one can go to this includes Georgetown and little Ethiopia. A group of people gather in one meeting place and discovers all that the DC Metro are has to offer. During the tours they don’t just have a quick bit but have something specially designed for them and actually eat the food instead of just eating food.

Farm to Table A website that connects Metro D.C. chef’s to products by farmers in the D.C. region; the company handles tasks such as inventory managment, planning and marketing.

Food Truck Fiesta Tracks food trucks and interesting/relevant news regarding food trucks, health inspections, etc.

Late Night Chinatown I thought this was a good site because every time I have been in DC late at night there’s almost never any place open to eat.

DC Central Kitchen  This website is of a program that focuses on using food as a way to strengthen the community through food distribution and enrolling unemployed adults in culinary schools.

Arcadia Food This website is about creating a more sustainable food source and culture for the DC area to improve community health and the environment.
Washington Youth Garden

A Letter to My Advisor September 20, 2011

The people in my department are just as great as I thought they were initially. A drawing of the Alamo hangs above my desk next to Emily Dickinson. She was left here by the office’s previous inhabitant, but I added the Alamo picture to be an ironic statement on history and what I’m doing as part of it. When we had the earthquake, it caused the frame to tilt, so I felt justified in my irony. Really, it’s probably more appropriate for Erin’s office in the future.

 

I like having space to think and do my work and taking responsiblity for my classes as a professor. That said, I feel a little panicked like–everything that I ever want to do has to be done right now!–while at the same time I see the long tem trajectory of–Ok, I can teach the early American survey as good enough this semester and keep an eye on how I want to shift it around in the future–how this place will be for me in two years, five years, ten years. I’m teaching Gender & Society next year. It’s on the books but hasn’t been taught in years. To revive it, I’m making it a designated Writing Intensive (WI) course which will draw students whose majors don’t have enough WI options.

 

All of us do advising and I’ll start in Fall 2012 with the Secondary Ed concentration in English majors. They tell me that’s complicated advising for a variety of reasons, mostly requirements.

 

Finally, I sent a book review to Western American Literature, and RR sent me one to review for Aphra Behn Online Women and the Arts some date – 1830. It’s about colonial women’s rights, so it’s very much in my field now, and I’m glad to have the publication there. I feel overwhelmed with ideas for scholarship because I’m not writing the diss anymore. There are so many possiblities I’m at a loss about where to start. I think though that I’m going to Metro over to UM College Park and look at the Katherine Anne Porter archives, as I’ve been wanting to do for a while, especially her correspondance with the US diplomat’s wife in Mexico. Might try to get something for the U of Louisville conf. What do you think?

 

The job is just right for me. Things at home are a little stressful because we still haven’t sold our house in ABQ, and it looks like we can’t without a huge hit. So we’re trying to rent it, but I’m not really sure how that’s going as I turned it over to a property manager. Essentially, we’re paying three mortages because rent here is 2x that of ABQ. But things are looking up; M called and she finishes course work this semester and would want to move into our house in Dec if I don’t rent it out before then. The boys are funny–jabbering away. Sometimes I think this is my lot for being so verbal myself. Maybe Patrick will rub off on them more this year.

Classes Begin! August 30, 2011

Yesterday was my first day teaching. It contained the known and the unknown. Of course.

It reaffirmed for me though that the last eight years have been worth it. I really do enjoy this work of teaching, research, and challenging myself to think and do more with the tools available to help students learn to write, to engage creatively with texts, and to have fun with their critical reading and thinking skills. They laughed about calling me Dr. Leigh, since I told them they could call me Leigh. That clearly made them uncomfortable. More than all this, I feel ready to do this job. And in a place of uncertainty every day about “Am I going to help the boys develop all their potential?” (My brother would say that this preceding sentence already answers itself no, because I refer to them as the “boys” thereby diminishing their individuality), it’s nice to have some assurance that the time I spent pursuing this field, this degree, this desire was worth it.

I did an activity I hadn’t done before with my classes, and I was really pleased with it. Comes from Malcolm Gladwell. They were in groups of 4, and I asked them to think of as many uses as they could for a brick. They had a lot of creative ideas! Then I told them that the next question had only one right answer. “Why is a manhole cover round?” In each class, someone got it, but many of them got nervous about being told that there was only one right answer. Others enjoyed the fact that their brains were warmed up prior to trying to answer the question. We then talked about narrow thinking and broad thinking, ways of seeing and asking, and in general, it was a great start to the classes.

I’m glad to be here. It took a long time to get here, but I feel lucky to have a job and to have one I enjoy.

What’s 230 Pages and (nearly) Done? February 23, 2011

That’s right. My dissertation!  I put it all together yesterday, with the version of Chapter 2 I’m getting happier with, adjusted the margins to suit OGS, and voila! 230 pages. I also started writing the conclusion yesterday. It’s been a long time since I opened a blank document and started working on it. As in, mostly I’m tinkering with, overhauling, expanding, or cutting something I’ve already written. I also do pastiche. A new blank document was a little intimidating!

In other news, Seamus and I had a rousing game of hide-n-seek last night. He got so excited to find me, but I had to keep giggling (tee hee hee) to keep him interested. However, afterward, he was way too worked up to sleep, and P and I heard him talking to himself in his crib long after we went to bed.

A think I love about New Mexico: My students are so thoughtful, diverse, and hard working (for the most part). I was reminded of this yesterday when teaching a literary selection from Luther Standing Bear’s My People the Sioux. One of my students began talking about how she didn’t like the pro-boarding school aspect of the selection because her great grandfather had been taken to boarding school and when he and another boy ran away, the other boy had been shot and killed! These real life connections happen all the time in my classes–although that could have something to do with my field and location–teaching ethnic and Chicana/o literature in the Southwest.

You know what gets me excited/anxious? Being almost done. And then on to a whole new set of challenges. Not the least of which is selling the house….It does feel good to post that title though!

February, the Month of Low Posts February 16, 2011

I realized how much I haven’t been posting this mont, especially compared to what I posted recently. And then look–last February, I only managed to post 3 times!

Today, I talked to my aunt on the phone while I pushed the stroller with the boys in it. Seamus was being a pill this morning and when he asked to go for a walk, it seemed like just the thing both of us needed so as to not drive each other crazy. But the conversation. My aunt was sharing some observations that she had written down about me when I was 10. The one that I think is the funniest is that I told her I was writing poems, but I wasn’t writing them down because I didn’t want anyone in my family to know what I’d written. I was memorizing them! So I was only writing haiku!

Speaking of haiku, my students recently read Basho’s “Narrow Road through the Backcountry,” a Japanese poem/prose travel writing. I’m grateful to my friend, Chris, for coming in to guest lecture on the day we went over it in class. He did a great job getting the students excited about the text, and his presentation reminded me about some of the things I want to try to remember as I do classroom demonstrations. Being excited about the subject material is contagious! I love what I teach, and showing that to students is very powerful. Yesterday, only 6 of my students had done the reading, due to a syllabus mix-up, but I had checked a children’s book about Sor Juana out of the library so I read it to them and we ended up having a great discussion. I did need a minute to regroup though, when most of them looked panicked as I announced the quiz–over material they hadn’t read…

January January 31, 2011

January had been a great month for those of us in the West! We’ve had almost nothing but sunny 50 degree days. Sorry for all of you battling snow up to your eyebrows.

I’m so behind on my stuff I’m just going to do a quick recap of the month, maybe adding some pictures later today.

Jan 4-9 Gil and I joined my parents, my twin Erin, and my delightful friend J. Indigo in LA for the circus that is the MLA. I had a couple of interviews that seemed to go well. I went to some great panels, and I’ll tell you having my parents care for Gilbert made it just great. (It didn’t hurt that Patrick and his mom were taking good care of Seamus at the time.) They carried him around in the Ergo, and if you have large babies, the Ergo is the only way to go, which he loved. I saw the Westin Bonaventure–the hotel of the horse and motorcycle scene from True Lies.

The 10-14 is kind of a blur because I was transitioning G to daycare which made me happy and sad at the same time. It also was a giant headache, because they do transition in the morning and G will only be going to pm daycare, like Seamus. The problem was that I didn’t have anywhere to leave S during G’s transition, so one day my friend J came through and watched both his son X and S. And you know, I didn’t think at all that he was a predator out to destroy my child.

MLK Jr weekend was so fun, especially because we began “Breakfastpalooza” which involved breakfast burritos, biscuits, babies, and mimosas. I got to meet a friend’s baby who is the snuggliest little six month old imaginable! I wish we could do that every weekend.

School starting has been good for me in that I’m loving being back in the classroom, teaching world lit, but I’m also realizing how much work there is yet to do before I graduate and trying to budget my time to get it all in. I still want to blog about some of the material I’m working with, but I’ll have to wait until things settle down. When I do though, hoo boy, there are some amazingly fun and interesting texts in this Bedford Anthology of world lit.

Seamus Says:

“Uh-oh. What happened?”

“Hot coffee. Mama’s hot coffee.”

“New diaper. Pink diaper. Purple diaper” Me: “Green diaper” S: “PINK diaper”

“Shhh. Baby Sleeping. Night night baby” (This would be sweeter if it wasn’t at the top of his lungs!)

Last night, he was still talking to himself while we were watching True Lies and P thought he was crying so I went to check on him. He was talking to himself, “Mac n cheese. Mac n cheese. Cottage cheese.”

Gilbert does:

Love playing in the jumperoo.

Sit up a little, until S tries to push him over.

Sleep pretty well.

Love going out shopping all afternoon with mom.

I hope your January was great!

PS I also had a birthday, and thanks to my friend who pointed it out, I am in the “Prime” of life. A prime number that is. I won’t be one again for six years. It was a great birthday. We got tickets for Wicked for next weekend!

Is there Bad in Here? January 21, 2011

One of my friends called me out a few weeks ago with a comment that my blog makes it seem like I am handling all of this (parenting, school, job search, exercise, eating, travel, writing, teaching) without any problems. She said it was a little intimidating. I get this a lot. But I still won’t allow myself to come clean if things are really getting me down. Sure, on this blog, we have the complaints about lack of sleep, miscommunication, nerves, etc., but you’ll notice that I rarely talk about what’s going on with my job search, my dissertation, or personal issues, partly because I don’t want to reveal too much in such a public forum, but also because I’m too nervous to really talk about it.

I like to share good gossip. In fact, secrets about new babies, surprise parties, big awards, and other accomplishments are some of the most difficult for me to keep. When people tell me horrifying secrets, I have no trouble filing those far back in my brain and never mentioning them again. I want everybody around me to be accomplishing good things and to be happy. I want this for myself too, so I find it really difficult to put out there when something isn’t making me happy or going the way I want it to. (Just to know: The job search is going fine; I’m right where I need/expect to be right now.)

I realize this may not make my blog as honest as it could be, and I also realize that people reading blogs want to hear honesty from the person they invest the time to read. However, as I look back over journals that I kept in high school and college, I mostly only recorded really unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and events–you’d think all I did at those times was brood. When I was happy and things were going well (which was most of the time) I didn’t write at all. The blog is kind of the opposite. I look back, and the times when I was not happy (February of last year when we were all so sick for the entire month) I didn’t write much. But this is only a loose correlation itself. Sometimes I didn’t write much when I was too busy having a good time visiting family or friends, hosting family or friends, or churning out chapters.

I think the public nature of a blog means that I’m likely to record events that I hope (maybe too optimistically?) other people will find interesting. And when I’m bored with my own internal griping, I can assure you that you would tire of it quickly as well.

There are dark moments. In class the other day (BTW, I’m loving teaching again, and I have a post planned soon for letting you in on some of the awesome thoughts that this World Lit class has already generated), a student said that perhaps the theme of the reading for the day was that “Once you imagine something, it’s there, you can’t unimagine it.” I don’t want my blog to be like those journals, where I look back and feel only the disgruntlement. I want there to be fun stories, and cute pictures, but I also want there to be honesty about what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling.

I was thinking about all this last night as I lay in bed, in between getting up to tend to Seamus and his belly-ache, Seamus and his teething, Gilbert and his hunger, and my own need to get up for a drink of water. This morning was rough after all that. I’ve been trying to figure out why, even with the wake-ups, I’m more exhausted after a few hours of being with Seamus than Gilbert. It comes down to this: S is going through major mood swings these days, and it’s really hard to stay level in the midst of all that. Things are hard (especially getting used to being back in the classroom, balancing that teaching time with writing, adjusting to sending Gil to daycare, spending more mornings a week with the boys, and helping Seamus enjoy and learn) but I have lots of fun stories for you for the future. I’m trying to get caught up on the blogging–including a recap of the LA trip, Breakfastpalooza, and the Cordelia Fine lecture I went to last night.

Moral: I don’t think I’m perfectly handling all this, or that I’m all that impressive. I’ve got a lot of loose ends to loop together, and I’m less likely to muse about them publicly until they’re tied. I think that I wouldn’t be handling anything if I didn’t have such good support of family, friends, daycare, colleagues, and strangers (who are so friendly to me when I’m out by myself with the boys). Thanks.

Dry Drugs May 22, 2010

I’m not really sure where the term “dry drug” comes from, but my parents use it to describe addictions that aren’t necessarily illegal. For instance, while their antennae wasn’t working, they referred to their TV as a dry drug. Mine is probably the internet. Seamus’s is his bottle, which when we get home, I’m going to try to get him to ditch. This has to happen before his little brother arrives. I’m a little concerned that we’re going to pressure him to grow up a lot in the next three months so that we won’t have so much to worry about when the next one appears. 

So in an effort to get their dry drug working again, my parents tried two repairmen (not sexist, they were men, supposedly). One ended up costing them a lot of money through misdiagnosis. And he ended up making me stop in Bowling Green down by the river at Tattle Tails to ask where some repair place was. Which I had to go to twice for parts that weren’t even necessary. Finally, my dad called in a repairman whose IQ was much higher who told him that the problem was a corroded switch my brother had left unprotected, so when they got all the rain here was ruined. New switch. TV works. Dry drug restored.

I like TV too, but tonight, I’m going to see the FSHS play Les Mis. The days have been pretty relaxing, and if you recall how I like to pack things into a visit, you’ll be happy to know that this visit, I’ve limited myself to one or two activities a day. It’s more relaxing, but it gives me more time to pit cherries with my parents and experience the tapes of childhood rolling over and over, and is not relaxing at all.