running

I'm starting to train again, starting tomorrow. I'm most likely training for another half marathon, but my running buddy wants to do a full marathon (you go, girl), so I think I will start training for that with her and see how it goes. The Illinois Marathon lets you change your race up until a certain point, so I have some flexibility.

I'm nervous, though. After the Kenosha half, I stopped running regularly. I sorta trained for Ragnar, but not really -- and I stopped running again after the relay (granted, I got injured...but I also lost interest.) I fear that training for, and completing, another big race will turn me off from running again. I guess I tend to take the post-race recovery period wayyy too far.

But for now, I definitely feel inspired. I had a great run with a great friend over the weekend, and we both ran much longer and farther than either of us had in a loooong time. I'm looking forward to training with my new running buddy and experiencing the roller coaster of emotions that comes with training and racing. Here we go!

And even though I feel so excited and inspired, I'm trying to remain grounded:

grammar and racism

Today, I observed a class for preservice teachers. I'm considering applying to teach this class next year, so I've hung out in there a few times, re-familiarizing myself with the material from a teacher's perspective. It's a course that I took while doing my undergrad, and I really enjoyed it (it helped that I had an awesome teacher who helped me understand the necessity of social justice in the classroom...thanks, P.Brady!)

In the class today, two students had to teach grammar in context (as opposed to grammar in isolation). They handed out copies of a text excerpt; the passage was a dialogue between two characters: one spoke in AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) and the other was a white character who spoke with a Southern accent (the text was written somewhat phonetically). The students explained that there were a lot of "mistakes" in this text and that our task was to "correct" them.

I was horrified. First, there's the slightly-weird fact that we were being asked to correct a published author's (Charlotte Perkins Gilman's) stylistic choice. I guess I can let that slide -- as long as there was a discussion of style that went along with the lesson. Second, and more importantly, we were being tasked with "correcting" AAVE. I almost could have been ok with this lesson if we were asked to "translate" the AAVE to "Standard English" (a term I'm not entirely comfortable, but will use for the sake of this post). Perhaps we could have discussed the style and talked about what was lost and gained by reading the text in AAVE vs. SE.

But none of these discussions occurred. We were supposed to view the AAVE as wrong English and fix it.

I asked the instructor, while the students were working on their "corrections" how she was going to address this situation. She said that they work a lot on issues of sensitivity and diversity in the spring semester, so she would deal with it then. Also, this was the students' first experiences teaching, and it was supposed to be a safe space to screw up and not get slammed for it, so she didn't want to make them feel awful. Both of these reasons are totally valid, and strategically, I support her. But damn, it was REALLY hard to keep my mouth shut during this lesson.

If someone actually did this lesson in a classroom, especially a classroom with students who grew up speaking AAVE, it could have traumatizing impacts on the kids. They would think that AAVE is just bad English. There was no discussion of the grammar system of AAVE, the legitimacy of it as a dialect, or it's ties to culture. Can you imagine how damaging that could be to a child? Indirectly, you're telling them that the way they and their family and maybe even their whole community speak is wrong, bad, and in need of fixing. Dang.

academia: hatin'

I'm currently feeling really frustrated by one of my classes. It's cross listed between the English and Curriculum & Instruction departments, but the only links to C&I are related to teaching first-year undergraduate writing studies courses -- and those links are few and far between. It really shouldn't be cross-listed.

And the readings, oy, the readings -- if I never think about rhetoric again it will be too soon. It's not my field, I'm not interested in this stuff. It's all academia for academia's sake, and although theoretically, I support the idea of people exercising their brains and engaging in pointless debates with one another, in practice, I'm just so sick of it. All these articles I'm reading have little-to-no relevance to my life as a teacher, which is what I came here to develop.

Besides that, I can't help but think about how much all these people are getting paid to think and write -- which again, theoretically, I support. But then I start daydreaming about how all that money could be going to our public schools (which is what I daydream about whenever I hear that someone's being paid an exorbitant salary), and I just feel disgusted.

The field of writing studies was developed to figure out what should be taught in first-year composition courses, but it has morphed into a weird conglomeration of texts on rhetoric. It's no longer doing anything practical for the world, except allowing more writing studies professors to get tenure (and oh, how I loathe tenure.) I know I should appreciate the fact that people can make money and build a life off of their ideas, but after being in the teaching trenches, I just don't support it.

The drop deadline is in a few weeks. I can't decide if I should stick it out (I really do like the professor) or jump ship.

inert knowledge

"Inert knowledge is knowledge that can usually be recalled when people are explicitly asked to do so but is not used spontaneously in problem solving even though it is relevant." --"Anchored Instruction and Its Relationship to Situated Cognition, by The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt


...aka, most of what we learn in schools.

words that are[n't] words

I encountered an old frenemy today: the squiggly red line in Word, telling me that the jumble of letters I just typed has no real meaning. I had quite a few run-ins with the red squiggle in undergrad too. Please note, this is not because I'm a bad speller. I'm a pretty good speller (although, admittedly, I'm getting worse with age and more consistent use of auto-correct). The squiggled lines are underneath words that I sorta kinda made up -- but really, they make sense! And most of the time, professors don't notice (except once...I got an essay back with a word circled and a comment: "This is not a word.")

My favorite word that I made up in undergrad was "childization." I needed this word, though -- I was describing a woman (in a novel) who was being treated like a 5 year old by her husband. The closest word to it is "infantilization," but it felt inaccurate -- he wasn't treating her like an infant. I know that infantilization actually means to treat someone like a child, but it doesn't sound like that's what it means, so it felt wrong.

In the paper I just wrote, I had four red squigglies:

1. Rhetorics: Um, duh, this one is totally a word. It was even in the title of one of the articles I read recently. Suck it, Spellcheck.

2. Rhetors: Pretty self-explanatory: people who do rhetoric. Maybe this one shouldn't be a word, if only because I'm kinda sick of talking about rhetoric.

3. Memorialize: Brian correctly defined this one immediately, so that means it counts as a real word in my book.

4. Problematize: This is every grad student's favorite word: to create a problem or view something as a problem. On every grad student's diploma, you could replace their degree title with "Problematization" and they probably wouldn't mind.

one sex?

Weirdest thing I learned from grad school today:

Prior to the eighteenth century, people thought that there was only one sex, and men and women were both within that sex. They thought that women's bodies were "essentially male bodies" without the necessary "heat" for internal structures to become seen outside the body.

Basically, they thought the vag was an inverted, interior penis, so women were categorized as deformed men.

And that's my "wtf?" of the day.

wedding things that i despise

The color pool blue.
The word pew.
The idea of swags. (Even worse -- swags that hang on the church's pews.)
Things that are described as blingy.
Overlays. Seriously? You need a tablecloth on top of your tablecloth?
The concept of a boudoir photo shoot. Shudder.
High-boy tables. They just look silly.
All the horrific spelling on the wedding websites. It's TULLE people, not tool or tewl or toole.
The amazing amount of money that people spend on new stuff. Almost all (read: all but 3 things) of my wedding decorations are coming from garage sales and thrift stores. If I made a blog post called "wedding things that i love," the first thing on the list would be garage sales. If my mom reads this, she will undoubtedly be embarrassed for me. Whoops!

/endrant

Update: I just encountered the phrase "pew cones." ewewewewewewewEW.

on reading queer studies articles while planning a wedding

I've read a few articles lately for various classes that concern queer studies and its place in the classroom. Most of them were referring to the college composition classroom, but these ideas apply to younger grades as well.

The basic premise is that being anti-homophobia and LBGTQQ-inclusive is not enough in the classroom. By simply speaking out against the marginalization of LGBTQQ people, we are neglecting to examine how this oppressive discourse has affected everyone, including non-LGBTQQ people. Queerness in the classroom should also analyze how our society's oppression has shaped the identities of heterosexual people, which will hopefully lead to reconstructed notions of our identities and the heteronormative/heterosexist language we use.

Of course, the articles present many more nuances and issues that than, but that's the big idea that I took away. The first question that comes to mind when considering this is, what will this look like in my classroom? I struggled a lot when teaching at Rudy with issues of homophobia in the classroom. I was just barely scratching the surface of the first method that these articles mention (anti-homphobia in the classroom) and not even coming close to the second (analysis of how LGBT "othering" has affecting everyone's identities). At first, I was thinking that these practices needed to be implemented sequentially -- but now, I'm wondering if the second method could actually be used in order to shed light on the first; that is, if students consider how society's discourse around LGBT issues has defined their worldview, perhaps they would become less homophobic (although obviously, not all students are homophobic).

The second question I'm pondering is how can my wedding resist heteronormative discourse? It's tricky: I'm a chick marrying a dude. We have chosen to get married even though gay marriage is not legal in Illinois, a decision that I am not entirely comfortable with. We are going to be performing a lot of traditionally gendered activities. We're getting married by a Catholic priest (also he, himself, is not homophobic). To counter all this, I'm trying to use vendors that make their anti-homophobic views visible (for example, I'm STILL searching for a photographer who has pictures of a gay wedding up on their site). But it doesn't feel like enough. I guess it's far too much (and a bit ridiculous) to want my wedding to make people examine their identities as constructs of our heteronormative, oppressive society.



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