Category Archives: University life

The week that was

Posted in University life, What I'm reading by

This week was more of a backward slide than a forward march.  I:

– rescheduled my office hours, cancelled a writing group, missed lecture, and cancelled a guest lecture

– went to the doctor’s office three times in two days

– convalesced by watching the Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice (1995) – not to be confused with the more recent Keira Knightley version (which I also watched)

– Checked and made varying degrees of comments on 80 pieces of student work and taught two, two hour labs.

– was warmed by offers from friends and neighbors to buy my groceries, drop off movies, and clear a pile of branches from my back yard

– read articles on the dilemmas of increasing open access to scholarly knowledge here and here

– said to my lunch companion, “This is the life!” as we sat down to eat at the college cafeteria – not because the food is so great, but because the view is

– enjoyed this beautiful bunch of ranunculus in my bathroom

The spring break that was

Posted in University life by

This spring break I:

  • graded 180 one page essays and another 160 pages worth of research proposals
  • made my peace (I think) with my university’s intricate purchasing and hiring process…
  • gratefully watched my neighbors chop up and cart away the massive section of a redwood tree that made its way from their yard to mine during a big storm
  • read about the Wisconsin Republican Party’s attempt to get environmental historian William Cronon’s e-mail correspondence through a Freedom of Information Act request (here, and in his own words here)
  • expressed my undying thanks, again, to the geniuses at the Apple Genius Bar
  • worked on getting an article ready to send out for publication – after a much-needed kick in the pants from a former advisor
  • cancelled my day-trip to the hot springs in Big Sur after the highway between here and there fell into the ocean  : (
  • contemplated doing my taxes
  • watched an awesome movie about pastry chefs competing for France’s top pastry-chef honors.  The suspense almost killed me!
  • stocked my freezer with 6 jars of Vegetable Jalfrezi made from the recipe in this cookbook
  • cleaned and renovated my chicken coop, and moved in four adorable new little fluffballs!  : )

(inspired by my friend Annie’s regular The Week that Was posts on Bird and Little Bird)

Hate in my beloved California

Posted in University life by

I know I live in a beautiful bubble here in Santa Cruz, but I was still deeply saddened today see this recent footage from elsewhere in my home-state:

The things being yelled by the crowd are so vile that when an elected official came on screen to denounce what was happening as evil, I thought a voice of sanity was finally speaking.  But no, by evil she meant, according to the video, the American Muslim families attending a benefit to raise money for women’s shelters, hunger and homelessness alleviation here in the US.  I hate to think of my few, cherished Muslim friends ever having to go through this, but know they probably do encounter it, though in less dramatic ways, in their daily life.

Heard around campus

Posted in University life by

I gotta say I love overhearing the student conversations going on around me on campus.  They always add a bit of levity to my day.  Bus rides between classes are a particularly good place for them.  Here are a few of my recent favorites:

Probably after a class on food systems:

  • Student 1:  “Dude, I hear if you’re sick, you should go to McDonald’s for a burger.  There’s so much antibiotics left over in the meat it’ll like, knock out whatever you have.”
  • Student 2:  “No Dude.  They have super-bugs in the meat.  They’re pesticide resistant, so when you eat them you’ll become pesticide resistant too.”

On our modern times:

  • “So I asked this girl out on facebook, and she never responds.  Then the next day I see she’s updated her status to ‘Which boy should I go out with?’  I was so annoyed.”

Death threats and sociologists

Posted in Participation, public sociology & campus-community collaboration, University life by

Death threats and sociologists aren’t words you often hear in the same sentence.  Since I’m in training to be a sociologist, this is a source of some comfort to me.

Given how tame my life has been, I have a perhaps unreasonable fear of death-threats, knocks on the door in the middle of the night, and other forms of intimidation.  I’ve known a few people who’ve had to deal with them, but they’ve almost always been doing much more controversial work than my own, and they’ve hardly ever been scholars.  So imagine my dismay this week when I learned that the right-wing attacks against sociologist Frances Fox Piven have escalated to the point of death threats.  This is especially alarming since Piven is the kind of scholar that I often hold up as a model for myself.  She’s spent her life studying social movements and politics in the US, and tries to make her work speak to audiences beyond just other scholars.

Piven is a prolific writer, and I’ve only read a fraction of her work.  She’s certainly on the political left, but hardly off the deep end.  Here’s what I’ve read by her so far:

And here’s some of the press on her frightening circumstances now:

2.15 update:

How well do you know your university?

Posted in Teaching, University life by

I’m working as a teaching assistant this quarter for a class in UCSC’s Latino and Latin American Studies department.  Right now we’re covering Latinos in education: graduation rates from high school and college, cultural differences with their teachers, etc.  Yesterday Prof. Jonathan Fox showed us a print-out of some of our school’s demographic data for this year’s freshman class. Hidden amongst the wall of numbers on the spreadsheet were these little nuggets:

Among this year’s freshman class:

  • 25.3% are Latino
  • 43.2% come from homes that speak a language other than English, or that speak both English and another language
  • 43.7% are part of the first generation of people in their family to go to college.

I was surprised by the numbers, and the students even more so.  One student raised her hand and asked if the rest of the faculty knew about these numbers, because if they did, maybe they would treat the students differently.  I tend to agree.  It doesn’t happen often, but there have certainly been times when I’ve seen faculty try to personalize their lectures with vignettes which could be taken right out of Leave it To Beaver.  It’s hard to imagine many of the students being able to relate. For my own part, knowing how few of our students grew up with parents who went to college makes me want to pay more attention to what kind of things I mistakenly assume my students already know.  Finding out what they do and don’t know before they step into the classroom seems like half the battle of good teaching, and something I’d love to learn to do better.