Changing Gears

Thank goodness my carefully curated interior design will not be disturbed.

The left hand finally figured out what the right hand is doing.  The granting organization which thought it wouldn't let us know until July has, with some gentle nudging from my department chair, director of graduate studies, and advisor, realized that they need to respect university deadlines, and let me know today that I got the grant.  Which is good!  It's only one day before the deadline for a lot of stuff, and about three months late for notifying my landlady about whether we're renewing our lease, so it means a lot of scrambling, but it also means that I came in with five years to finish my dissertation, and now I have six.  Considering I'll start Year Four this fall, that's good news.  And it lets us stay to finish our CSA and our garden.

When we thought that we wouldn't know until July, J and I started to make plans like we would both be moving at the end of his current contract in September.  We made plans about what to sell when (most of the furniture, mostly in August).  We started looking at the apartment markets in cities we're likely to move to.  So we've got all these plans in motion which need to be put off six months.  J's job in theater is mostly on an academic year schedule.  There's summer theater, and there's winter theater, and they more or less line up with the academic calendar neatly, which is great for us long term (It just worked out that way.  I had just gotten into grad school and he had just declared his theater major when we started dating, so we hadn't really thought about the long-term compatibility of our career choices).  There is no theater in Overcast during the winter, and jobs elsewhere start in September, so he's moving in September no matter when I move.  We did two years of long distance already; I'm not looking forward to another semester of it.

But.  Getting this grant puts me off the academic year calendar.  Our current lease is on the academic calendar, which makes dealing with the move in December or January pretty complicated.

ETA: There was originally a lot more whining about our lease situation and how terrible life is generally, etc, but after a. a trip to the farm to pick up our CSA share b. talking with a good friend on the way there and c. talking with the landlady about renewing our lease for the fall only (until Jan 1), life looks much better.  We're moving Jan 1.  We have a firm date.  J may move before then; we may be long distance between September and December, and we may not know yet where we're moving, but at least we have another six months or so to figure it out.

Sewing and Errands

I've finished the handsewing for my RTW jacket (all the padstitching and interior taping) and it looks ok.  I think the interfacing may have been a poor choice for this project, because it's delaminating around the edges of the pieces which have spent a lot of time in my bag, but it'll be sewn into the seams, so hopefully that will keep it from coming all the way off.  Plus there's plenty of interior sewing holding it to the shell fabric. 

I don't quite know if my pad stitching is going to do what it needs to do, since this is my first time padstitching anything, and I'm not sure if I helped it roll or just puckered the fabric.  I suppose we'll see when it goes together.

 

I thought today was going to be spent sewing and doing some research work, but that's not to be, because I need to find a new power cord for my computer.  The computer is fine, thankfully, but the powercord no longer transmits electricity, so but I need a new one in order to use my computer.   I finished my current round of grading, though, so at least I'm not pressed for time until exams come in in about two weeks.

Speaking of grading:  I usually try not to take student misbehavior or slacking personally, since 9 times out of 10 it's due to something non-academic, and I did my own fair share of it in college.  But without getting into the specifics, I'm more than a little annoyed at a paper that a student turned in.  The paper is about a politically sensitive subject, and bases a rather vague but well meaning argument off of a lot of fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of American government and about religion.  The problems of the framework are not wrong because I disagree with them politically: they're just factually wrong.  

This is bad enough, from a graduating senior who is an American, and, presumably, is qualified to vote.  But the students also had to turn in a proposal on which they got feedback early in the semester, and I spilled a lot of ink informing the student of the errors in hir* framework for understanding the interaction of religion and government, and explaining in a basic-civics kind of way how the American government actually works.  I also met with the student in person a few times, and we discussed at length how religion and government interact in relation to the student's paper topics, the student asked questions, and kind of sounded like zie* got at least the basics of how the Supreme Court is in fact different from the legislative branch, and does different things.  

But, I get the paper, and the same fundamental misunderstandings are right there, and underpin the whole argument of the paper.  IF those the student's assumptions were true, it would still be a bad paper due to poor writing, lack of sources, and vague argumentation.  BUT it also has these deep factual errors, making it both wrong and incomprehensible.  

Normally I would chalk it up to just not getting it and move along, but I met with this student on a number of occasions, talked hir through the problems of hir framework, and made detailed suggestions about where to look and how to reframe the topic so it was based on factually true things.  And the student did none of them, so I was kind of pissed while grading the paper.  I've assigned a grade, but I'm going to wait until grades are due to put an official grade in for the paper, because I'm not sure if I'm being more harsh because I spoke with the student so many times than I would be if I hadn't spoken with the student.

*What's all this "hir" and "zie" business?  If you haven't come across it before, hir and zie are used as gender neutral pronouns.  I prefer them when talking about students or about anyone else I want to keep anonymous.

Conference clothes?

I've been thinking for a while that I need another good blazer, so next month I'm going to do the pattern ~ scissors ~ cloth RTW Tailoring Sewalong.  I have this vintage Evan Picone blazer that I just love:

It just goes so well with everything, it has a nicely distinct waist (I tend to look lost in boxy silhouettes) and it's got nice structure without feeling stiff or rigid.  I really like it for teaching and conferences, because it's comfortable and can make jeans look professional, but since I only have the one blazer, I can't do that look for all three days of a conference or too often in a month of teaching.  So I'm thinking about doing this jacket:

It essentially has the same lines, and I'm not sure if I should stay with three buttons or go down to one.  I tend to like one button cardigans and blazers better than more buttons because I have a short torso and I don't like being all buttoned up, but it might be nice to have some variety.  I'm trying to clean out my stash, so these are the fabrics I'm thinking about:

The pink and the purple on the sides are lining fabrics, and the stack in the middle is the suiting wool.  I have a TON of the black and white plaid on the bottom (something my mother gave me) but I don't really care for it. It's very soft, and it's got kind of a slubby finish, so it reads a little too much like something my mother would wear.  Maybe some of it will go into a pencil skirt one day, but there's like seven yards of it.  The others are a periwinkle, a gray, and a maroon:

I like the idea of the gray best, but I already have a gray blazer!  I think two of essentially the same cut and color would be a little much.  The periwinkle reads as fairly gray in most light, but it's so light in color that I'm not sure whether it would go with my professional clothes.  I like the color of the maroon, but it just seems odd for a blazer to me.  I originally got it for the center look of this pattern:

But I think this pattern reads as more "light coat" than blazer, so I've been putting this off because I already have too many spring/fall coats.  I have this awesome houndstooth:

But there's only a yard of it, and my blazer pattern needs two yards.  The houndstooth might go into this little Butterick Retro vest at some point (the B look on the left):

So I guess the point of all this is that I don't know which fabric to do, and I don't want to buy more fabric (I have an entire dresser and a rubbermaid of stash fabric!).  Is maroon an odd color for a blazer?  Maybe I could get away with it if I wore it with something dark and more sedate.  Help me out, I need to get rid of some of this fabric.

Snow Day

Snowmaggedon '11 continues, and for this, I present the Punch Buggy (actually J's creation): brandy, black raspberry brandy, orange liquer, blueberry liquer and lemon.

I drove J to work today in order to have the car for errands, and ended up stranded at the coffeeshop next door to his liquor store for several hours.  Fortunately one of my errand stops was in the same complex as his store, so I was able to buy many, many buttons before camping out in the coffeeshop and writing a few paragraphs for a paper I'm presenting in a few weeks.

J's work actually ended up closing early due to the bad weather, so I made him drive home, but it really drove home how fortunate (privileged?) I am in academia that I was able to cancel section last week due to bad weather with nothing more than an email to the prof and the students.  That's part of the benefit of being salaried rather than hourly, in that the hours I am in-building don't directly translate to the pay I receive, as J's hours in retail do.  My wages, benefits, and hours aren't the direct effect of union efforts, but it really worries me that the system I benefit from is under attack.  And not just because I benefit from it--because it seems to me the best way to maintain a happy, stable country.

I'm following the Wisconsin/Ohio/Indiana/anti-labor and anti-women news lately rather closely, but I'm having trouble making sense of it and I don't really know why.  I'm teaching anti-labor history in the course I TA right now, but the motivations as explained to me and as I read them in the materials for the course are so cartoonishly evil that they're easy to dismiss.  (Maybe this is part of the reason why my students find it so easy to dismiss connections between what they read and what they see?)

I think part of the problem is that, whether because of my liberal-midwest-elite-SLAC education or my liberal-poor-working class upbringing, I've come to see unionization, progressive tax codes, education, reproductive choice, and social safety nets as so self-evidently intrinsic to this functioning of this country that I can't see the logic of Republican attacks on them.  And there must be some appeal to that logic, or so many people wouldn't have voted Republicans in last election cycle.

But if the other side's logic is really so hard to find, is it much of a logic at all?  I can concisely state the pro-choice, feminazi socialist agenda is three sentences or less; I can't do the same for the pro (unborn) life, fiscally retrogressive capitalist agenda, and not for lack of trying.  I think it's emblematic of the problem that the right uses partisan rhetoric while the "left" tries to hang on to discourse or dialogue without another participant to dialogue with.  (And I am skeptical and disappointed in the state of the left in this country, which anywhere else in the world would be the centrist or even right wing).

So I suppose the point is this: booze good, politics disappointing and disheartening.

I want to be middle class when I grow up

The fellowship dress in action

Or, in which my supa-sekrit identity is revealed.  It was tights weather here for few days, so I made the mistake* of wearing my new dress to school.

(*I once TAd for Dr. Smackdown, a very senior and well-regarded female historian of women, and one of the first tenured women faculty, who told me and the other TA to never wear skirts when teaching lest we lose the students' respect.)

Anyway, I've spent the last few weeks conquering my bibliography and sputtering in incoherent rage over what's happening in Wisconsin and in the GOP's war on women and born children.  I just taught Grapes of Wrath today, and it felt much more like teaching a realistically near-future dystopia than period fiction.

My students were unimpressed when I tried to bring up the possibility of parallels between the anti-unionism in the novel and current anti-unionism.  They think the Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, etc, anti-collective bargaining bills can't possibly succeed, and even if they do, there will still be unions, won't there?  And it's not like people would be reduced to getting five cents a hundredweight of peaches without unions, because we've come so far since then, people wouldn't stand for it.  

They're very optimistic.

What to do?

So after maligning my students again yesterday, they were pretty good in section today.  It might have been my expectations were modified; it might have been the reading was complicated enough to work through without being so complicated they couldn't get through it all; it could have been that Dr. Comrade (the prof in charge of the course) emailed the class last night to ask if it was worth continuing to hold sections if only 6-8 people are making use of it.  I mean, I would love to have my Fridays clear, but I got a lot of panicked questions today about whether sections were going to be cancelled because I had something more important to be doing, and please don't cancel section, because it's really helpful.

What?  This was from students who text all during class, and in fact were texting as they asked me not to cancel section.  That's supposed to mean they're bored and not engaged.  I don't know how to gauge interest.

The students who have been to every section said it's made the readings much clearer; the students who come occasionally said it was good to have a resource when a particular reading made less sense than usual.  And then we had really good discussions about the intersection of religion, race, and politics in American history.  (Which is another one of those areas I have to fake my way through--I bet no one enrolling in a 20th century course thought they would learn so much about 17th century theology, but that's what I know).  So I don't know what to do.  If five people out of forty are getting good use out of section, does that make it worth it?  The prep time is the same for me.

It just feels odd to try to lead discussion when there's only two people, and the scattershot attendance means that if something comes up from a previous discussion, anyone who wasn't there doesn't know what's going on.  Regular attendance at least means that even if they haven't done the reading, they got the jist of the important parts of the readings and the ideas to keep in mind for next time.  I try to pick up key themes to carry through the semester and throw discussion back to previous weeks to help students make connections between the readings, but that doesn't work so well if not everyone in the room was there.

In the mean time, though, J and I have been productive.  The blueberries are out of their vodka, tasting ok.  There's not much blueberry taste.  3 cups of blueberry vodka took 1 cup of 2:1 sugar syrup and 2 tsp of lime juice to bring out what blueberry there is.  It's more of a grassy taste, like in a blueberry ale, with a lot of alcohol burn to finish.  I think it'll be more pronounced over ice with some seltzer water or something.  J's shirt project is coming along, although he's monopolizing my sewing machine, and his carpenter brain could not get around the idea of easing a sleeve to match an armscye.  That's a whole nother mess of teaching problems.

Teaching the willing

The homemade orange liqueur in action

So, after my maligning of my over-worked seniors, I went to give a talk to a class of 6th graders about archaeology.  And it was pure, unadulterated awesome.  The wife of a friend in the history department I'm in teaches social studies and science at the middle school one town over, and they're doing a unit on Egypt.  I don't work on Egypt, but I do a lot of my research with archaeological collections, so it's not that big of a jump.

They were interested, excited, and asked a lot of good questions.  I used to work at a museum doing school group presentations and workshop days, and I love working with middle school groups.  They're at just the right age to know a little about everything without being so old that they can't be excited in front of everyone.  I decided to go to grad school rather than get a teaching certificate in part because I felt like I found that excitement again in college, after hating high school, and in part because I didn't want to teach to the test or have my curriculum dictated by evolution denialists.  And college students are excited.  Sometimes.  It's just a lot harder to get them excited about the rhetorical differences between socialism and marxism than it is to get sixth graders excited about gold rings and mummies and playing detective.

It was also odd to have such a large age difference: I came into grad school straight out of college, so especially when I'm teaching seniors, I'm sometimes less than three years older than the students I'm teaching. Really, age shouldn't have much to do with it, and I try to present myself older than I am, but even the women in my department who are much older than me or the undergraduates are treated as if we were much younger than our male peers by the students.  Academic drag helps, but there's only so far some severe glasses and a blazer can take you.

Once, when I was TAing a US history course and we were getting ready to study the French and Indian War, the professor told the other TA and I: "Really emphasize to the students how young George Washingon was when he started the war."  (At age 20, Washington unintentionally triggered a global war by letting some French soldiers he was negotiating with in the backwoods get killed under his command).  "Really emphasize to them how young and stupid he was, only their ages and in command of all those people!"  I think I was 22 at the time, and in charge of a room of 18-20 year olds.  It didn't help much that the prof I was TAing for obviously didn't think much of twenty-somethings.

I'm sure I wouldn't be romanticizing sixth graders this way if I taught them every day, but it was just so nice to go into a class room where they were excited to talk about something, where they were so excited that we ran out of time, and where I didn't have to position myself defensively.  I felt like I had so much energy when I was talking to them that I could just keep going for hours.  When I get in a bad section, I can't wait for it to get over either and I look at the time as much as my students do.  If I could figure out how to bottle that energy and excitement and take it with me, I'd be set.

What I do have in bottles is the orange liqueur, which we made sidecars with tonight.  1oz orange liqueur, 1oz brandy, and a half oz of lemon juice per person shaken over ice and it's just heaven.  Super simple, and the taste of the clementines really comes through.

Can only teach the willing . . .

Where the magic happens

I've been thinking about teaching lately, since I'm not doing much of it this semester. The 20th century political history course I complained about having to TA has been, so far, a whole lot of nothing.

The way classes work here is the students attend lecture two days a week with the professor, and one day a week attend a discussion section with me.  I am responsible for attending lecture so I know what the students know, leading the discussion section, and grading most of the exams and papers.  The prof may, if he feels like it, grade half of the final papers.  This is a little less grading than most profs here do--most split the grading evenly--but not abnormal.

Except that the sections for this class are voluntary--attendance neither hurts nor helps the students' grades, so they have no incentive to go except to hang out on Friday afternoons with me and other students with nothing better to do and talk about the development of 20th century American Socialism.  So they don't go.  The first week of classes I had 8 students, the second, 5 students.  I'm guessing this week will have even fewer.  

This, paradoxically, makes more work for me, or at least less return on the work I put in.  I still have to put enough time into the readings--more than 200 pages a week--so that I can lead discussion on material I've never seen before.  That takes the same amount of time no matter how many students show up to class.  And now I've had several students emailing me saying they can't make it to the scheduled section time, and could I please email them the discussion questions.  And I figure that as long as I email them to some students, I might as well email them to everyone, so that at least when the exams roll around I'm not flooded with "I don't understand the readings, can you explain what the important parts are?"  Which is almost a certainty.  

But I don't know if that will just encourage students to not come to class.  And am I obligated to go out of my way to do more work if the work I'm supposed to be doing doesn't show up for class?  I want everyone to do well--I want them to get the material, and if discussion questions will help that, then great.  But showing up to discussion would help that more.  I don't know.  Some days I want to help as much as possible, and some days I just don't care.  I've got almost 2000 photos from the disastrous State Capitol research trip to go through--I guess this week I don't care.

Progress

Of a sort. I finished Dr. Asiago's book, and I feel horrible saying this, but it was so boring. He does military/political/diplomatic history, and I'm much more interested in social/cultural/diplomatic history. We're interested in many of the same historiographic issues, and of course, the same groups and periods, but very different approaches to them. Not that I have issues with them as scholarly work--there are parts that I'll be re-reading because they say complex things very clearly, but the military/political angle puts me right to sleep.

Also got some writing done. J was off work Tuesday and Thursday (his days off are intermittant and a little random, since he's working retail) and he did some huswifery while I shut myself away in the office to write. Tuesday we got a lot done; we're starting to experiment with making liqueurs, so while J was rolling out forgotten Christmas cookie dough, I put some clemantines and cloves in brandy to sit. Hopefully in 2-3 weeks it'll turn out like homemade Cointreau. Also we drank beer while J made cookies and I wrote fellowship apps and my prospectus; a beer with lunch makes fellowship apps much easier to get to.

I feel like I spend the majority of my time applying for money to do research instead of doing research. They've definitely gotten easier to whip out once I get going, and doing the prospectus has given me some good canned answers to "why this topic? what the historiographic significance?" but they're still so time consuming. They all want slightly different things, and there's so much groundwork before the writing even starts. I just need time away from Overcast Town with no teaching to keep pulling me back here so I can get some research trips in. The library at Snooty U is good about ordering material and getting microfilm, but I hardly have time to keep up with the reading for the class I TA, let alone sit in the library basement for days on end and read microfilm. Especially if I keep getting assigned to teach 20th century courses I have no background or training in. Seriously, why assign an early Americanist to TA courses on 20th century music and politics? I know there's a value in teaching outside the comfort zone, but I barely had 20th century feminism in my comp fields for women's history, and there's not the remotest chance that I'll ever have to teach a 20th century survey.

But I've finally finished J's Christmas socks, so I'm starting a hat for me (pictures later). Yesterday we also finally got our pear cider bottled, after it sat in secondary fermentation for several months. We brewed it in October right after my exams, but never had time to bottle with the holidays, so the upside is that as soon as it's done carbonating, it'll be ready to drink immeadiately. It's definitely smoothed out quite a bit since it was racked. Tomorrow before J goes to work we're going to pitch a blueberry mead (honey wine) and put up a blueberry liqueur. We're just using frozen grocery store blueberries, but I'm excited, and it should be a pretty color.