~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
University classes start on Monday, and once I again I resume my task there of creating students who are “disciplined” to the “seamless into the demands of bureaucratic production.” To do this, we will adjust their very psychobiological nature as a human being to the demands of the university. There will be demands put on them to show up on time, study on their own time without direct supervision, and write papers about esoteric subjects of my choosing.…
Anyway, my kids knew where the Climbing Wall was when they attended a private Liberal Arts college. Somehow they never came home and told me about the Student Learning Outcomes that were presumably on their course syllabi. There is a very engaging article by Erik Glibert “Does Assessment Make Colleges Better? Who Knows?”
I have to finish my course syllabi for Fall 2015 this week, and will dutifully put on the Student Learning Outcomes of various programs because doing so is relatively harmless. …
Every once in awhile, I’ll revisit George Orwell. Last week it was for “Shooting an Elephant,” when I lectured here in Thailand about the nature of ethics and state/political power. The essay is great for teaching about the nature of state power, in this case using 1920s Burma where Orwell himself served as a British colonial police officer for several years.
But shooting rogue elephants peacefully eating by the side of the road was not the only thing that Orwell wrote about, or was called to do.…
I just came back from China—my fourth trip. This time it was to Jishou University in Hunan Province for a few days. Jishou is the capital city for the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao and Autonomous Prefecture and is in a remote mountainous corner in China. Still it has the hallmarks of every other Chinese city I’ve visited, including thirty story high apartment blocks, and a very social public square where during the evenings hundreds of people come out to do rhythmic dancing, and generally socialize in the evening.…
I taught Erving Goffman’s book Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity in Germany last month. One of the things that came up was how students are culturally and linguistically German (i.e. German is their first language) but racially “different” manage their identity as a non-white. In other words, they deal with the dissonance between a linguistic and cultural identity, in the context of racial beliefs about what it means to be German. …
Last week, I wrote about how “graduate students” are “cooled out” of PhD. programs in something of a pyramid scheme, i.e. how 60-70% of the students who are admitted eventually drop out of the program, while blaming their “failure” on themselves, and not the larger system.
August is the month in the United States where many adjunct faculty are being told “I’m sorry we don’t have any classes for you,” for reasons beyond the control of the Chair, Dean, or other administrator in charge of hiring.…
I have been in Thailand a week now, and have had plenty of chances to speak Thai, often because I have to explain about how my daughter broker her back last week. I speak Thai as a result of my Peace Corps and after experience in Thailand in 1980-1983, and some brush-up tutoring a couple of years ago. Anyway, I find that I speak Thai with a great deal of confidence after all these years—and why shouldn’t I?…
Introduction
We arrived in Thailand last Thursday to visit our daughter Kirsten who teaches English in a Thai school. Within a half hour of arrival we were informed that she had just had an accident. She was driving her scooter near a Thai market in the small city of Phrae, when a “white car” backed out in front of her. She hit the brakes, skidded out, and fell into an on-coming truck whose wheels gave her back a big whack.…
I’m leaving Germany after a two month long teaching gig at Leuphana University in Lueneburg, which is near Hamburg. Again I was impressed with the version of a university education that is being developed there—it values learning and investigation.
Here is a blog I wrote about German Bildung, the philosophy of education, two years ago: http://www.ethnography.com/2013/02/building-bildung-and-other-improbabilities-among-german-university-undergrads/
As a going away blogs, I’m also leaving you with two of my favorite Germany blogs, both having to do with Germany during World War II.…
Thinking about getting a PhD? Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt is the book to read. Already getting a PhD, ditto. Already have a PhD? You should also read this book, even though it was published way back in 2000, and relies on data from the 1980s and 1990s. It applies to today as well—little has changed. What is more, it gives an insight not only to how graduate schools seeks to shape and discipline a conservative cadre of future professors, the principles can also be applied to the pursuit of tenure for people who have made it that far.…
Still they ask you in court to “use your own words,” and more to the point of my profession, we tell our students to “use your own words,” and we even have fancy computer programs like “turnitin.com” that help us haul offenders off for plagiarism, which is the crime of using someone else’s own words which is, like I said above, is just about all I ever do.
The only people I can think of who made up any number of their own words are Charles Dickens, James Joyce, and Mark Twain.…
I have used this clip of Pete Seeger singing “Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore” in class for some years, now. The song is a great example of how the music of the American slave cabins moved into the mainstream American culture, and then moved all the way to Australia where this clip was made in 1962 or so.
It also, I think illustrates two things about the audience, first that audiences in 1962 were very open to a “sing-a-long,” The audience knew the words, and sang along with Seeger quite competently, and in their own ways enthusiastically.…