Starting over (as an advisor)

In most areas of my transition to a new institution I have been able to draw on my previous experience as a tenure-track faculty member. This has been similar to my mostly-smooth transition from graduate school to life as a tenure-track faculty member. There is one area, though, in which my years as a tenure-track faculty member have not left me feeling any more prepared than I did during my last transition: advising.

Although I’m still part of a sociology department, there are some major differences between my current institution and my former when it comes to advising. The primary difference is that my current department has many fewer majors than my previous department, so while I had 40-60 major advisees at my previous institution, I currently have seven non-major advisees. This is an area in which I have no experience.

Previously, I was challenged with learning the departmental curriculum and the institution’s general education curriculum in order to advise students to complete all of the necessary graduation requirements. Currently, I need to know both of those things as well as enough about each of the other majors on campus to advise students until they officially declare, which must be done by the spring of their sophomore year. Although there is a lot of guidance available in the form of quick-reference sheets, lists of courses to start with, etc., it feels like the risk of screwing up somebody’s academic career by giving bad advice is magnified.

I’m sure that I will eventually get used to this, like I did at my previous institution. Until then, I’m glad that I don’t have many advisees to ruin the futures of!

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Free TRAILS (finally)

Reading the September “ASA News and Notes” e-mail, I noticed that TRAILS, the ASA’s online database of teaching materials, will finally be free to members, as it always should have been. As stated in the e-mail:

At its meeting in August, ASA Council approved a proposal to make full access to the TRAILS online database of teaching resources a new benefit of ASA membership for 2016. Pending the launch of the 2016 application and renewal system on October 15, paid member subscriptions have been discontinued in advance of the transition to free access. However, any member may sign up now for free access through October 15 using a special promotion code. Active your free subscription today!

This will hopefully encourage faculty members who can’t (or don’t want to) pay extra to access teaching resources when preparing syllabi, assignments, and class exercises. Better late than never!

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Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to sexiness

Last year, Target stopped me from making a huge mistake by labeling which Halloween cards were for boys and which were for girls. This year, though, Target has stated it will move away from gender-based signs for toys and children’s bedding. Because gender differences in Target have been completely obliterated for kids, I worried that adults shopping at Target would have a hard time deciding which Halloween costumes to buy for themselves. What if this year’s “sexy” costumes were gender neutral?! What if there were no “sexy” costumes at all?!

Given these legitimate concerns, you can imagine how relieved I was to see that Target had not failed me after all. Although fans have apparently been concerned for years about the fact that there may not be any female stormtroopers, this confusion was caused by the fact that they wore the same armor as their male counterparts. Target has eliminated the need for confusion by revealing a new stormtrooper uniform that does away with those pesky masks and pants that led people to conclude that they were all men:Gender equality in the Star Wars universe doesn’t stop at the lowly stormtroopers, though. Even the leaders of the Empire have the possibility of being women once we remove all the clothing they’ve been wearing. Darth Vader, for example, might not be a crusty old white man. Maybe Darth Vader is a woman. To find out all we have to do is remove that pesky mask and those damn pants. Ta da! Darth Vader is a sassy woman and she will force choke you (if you’re into that sort of thing)!

With stormtroopers and Darth Vader upping the sexiness ante this year, I was disappointed to see that sexiness appears to be reserved for those on the dark side of the force (though I guess it makes sense, since Yoda warned: Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to sexiness). Those who want to dress as Princess Leia’s are stuck with this full-length gown, even though she unleashed her sexiness all over Jabba the Hutt’s palace in the movies:How are we supposed to know she has legs under there? Her lack of sexiness is surely the reason that nobody trusted her with a “sold separately” blaster or lightsaber like the women in the other costumes. Target knows that a hand on your hip doesn’t cut it. You need to show some skin if you want to be taken seriously as a sexy badass!

Keep your head up, Leia. Maybe next year you’ll be able to take on sexy stormtroopers and sexy Darth Vaders in your sexy slave girl costume and they’ll give you more than a finger gun to do it. Until then, use the force, I guess.

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Digitizing my workload: Microsoft Wedge Mobile Keyboard

In my reflections last spring on a semester of electronic grading I noted that, “At the end of each assignment I typically used the iPad’s on-screen keyboard to type some longer comments, the speed of which would have been greatly increased with the purchase of a Bluetooth keyboard.” A new academic year has brought new assignments and I did not want to spend another semester fumbling with the iPad’s on-screen keyboard, so I went online to search for a Bluetooth keyboard. I settled on the Microsoft Wedge Mobile Keyboard, largely because it was cheap (about $30).

Opening the box, I was surprised at Microsoft’s advances in presentation. Apple seems to have had a positive influence in packaging design. Although the specs don’t specifically mention that it works with iPads, I was able to pair it just fine and haven’t had any problems with operation. They keyboard itself is fairly small and thin, probably too small to comfortably type on for a long period of time but still infinitely better than an on-screen keyboard for a paragraph or so of comments at the end of an essay. The design also resembles Apple’s older iPhones and current iPads, with its metal sides and chamfered edges (it would match my iPad even better if the front of my iPad were black). Most of the keyboard is roughly the same thickness as an iPhone. The only awkward part is the bump:

As you can see, the back of the keyboard has a significant bump, which holds the two AAA batteries that power it and helps it stand at a nice angle. This makes storage more difficult but I’ve found that I can place it on top of my iPad with the bump overlapping the edge to sit relatively flat in my bag.

In terms of functionality, the only downside is that there is no dedicated power button, so turning the keyboard on and off (which I do frequently since I only use it to write comments at the end of papers, not throughout) requires holding down the function and escape keys for several seconds. Otherwise, the keyboard works well for what I require of it.

Other than the bump, the only other issue is that the keyboard’s cover is a bit of a pain to line up. The cover is made of a thick rubbery substance, with tabs that lock over the keyboard ends. If Apple had designed it it probably would have been held on by magnets, making it easier to align and quicker to put on and remove. The cover does have a useful feature: it can be folded and the tabs can be used to hold up a tablet:

I have an iPad cover and don’t need to stand it up to type a few sentences anyway, but this could be convenient for those who don’t have a separate tablet stand. I’ve never actually bent my cover like this because there is actually quite a bit of resistance but it is a nice option to have as long as the bending mechanism can stand up to heavy use.

Overall, I think that this is $30 well spent, as the number of mistakes I make while typing has been greatly reduced compared to last semester and it is easy to use the keyboard only when needed. Now all I need is for my students to actually read the comments that I write!

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US News liberal arts rankings vs. teaching rankings

Last week, US News released the annual rankings for liberal arts institutions. It also released a bunch of other rankings, including “Best Undergraduate Teaching.” “Wait,” you may be thinking, “How different can the best liberal arts schools and the best liberal arts schools for undergraduate teaching be?” The answer is, “More different than you would think.”

You may recall that the overall rankings for national liberal arts institutions are strongly correlated with endowments. Apparently, the things that make a school good at teaching in the eyes of US News differ from those that make a school good overall. Interestingly, the methodology for determining best teaching is similar to that for determining the best graduate programs. Namely, they ask people about their perceptions: “College presidents, provosts and admissions deans who participated in the annual U.S. News peer assessment survey were asked to nominate up to 10 schools in their Best Colleges ranking category with a strength in undergraduate teaching.”

Like the graduate school rankings, then, the undergraduate teaching rankings reflect others’ perceptions rather than a formula that schools might try to game. It turns out that, unlike the national liberal arts rankings, these perceptions are not strongly correlated with a school’s endowment (only .226 vs. .78 for the national rankings). Although there are similarities, some schools are rated much differently in the rankings for undergraduate teaching. Hendrix College has the largest difference between its overall ranking (82) and its teaching ranking (29). Other schools that are at least 40 spots higher in the teaching than overall rankings include: Beloit, Wheaton, St. Olaf, Lawrence, Berea, and Wooster.

Of the schools appearing on both lists, Bowdoin looks the worst, with its overall ranking of 4 and its teaching ranking of 29. Many high-ranking schools in the overall rankings, though, don’t appear on the list of the top 30 teaching schools at all. Eleven schools in the top 30 national rankings do not appear in the top teaching rankings, the highest-ranked of which are the US Naval Academy and Claremont McKenna, tied for 9th in the national rankings.

The takeaway from all of this seems to be that a school’s reputation for teaching is not nearly as dependent on financial wealth as its overall rankings. I think that the different methodologies for different rankings are also interesting, since graduate programs are essentially ranked by those in similar programs, who would seem to know best. Undergraduate teaching is ranked in the same way, but US News is not willing to allow these peer-nominated rankings to make up its most publicized rankings like it is for graduate programs.

Of course, both types of rankings are probably connected only tenuously to actual student experiences at various schools, but by publicizing their overall rankings, US News ensures that they will keep schools focused on the small things they can do to try to climb the rankings, while an emphasis on the perceptions of others may allow schools to shift their foci to the bigger picture, considering what is best for students instead of for US News.

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Students, get your shit together

The Add/Drop deadline for students at my school is two weeks into the semester. It was roughly the same at my previous institution. I’m not sure whether it is something about the students at my new institution or just the fact that I’m teaching Introduction to Sociology again for the first time in several years, but this year I received more requests to enroll in my class during this time period than I ever remember having before. About 2/3 of them came in the second week of the Add/Drop period, some at the end of the week, which meant that they wanted to enroll after missing two of 15 weeks, the first assignment, and over 100 pages of reading. I nicely explained this to them as my reason for denying their requests.

I know that some students cannot register when they are supposed to due to payment issues or academic probation, but it seems that at least some students must be treating the first two weeks of class as a trial period for their courses before determining if they will commit to a full semester. A few advisors also seem to be dropping the ball, suggesting that students change courses long after the spring advising sessions, though it is possible that students just didn’t show up for spring advising. The annoyance of all of this is probably increased by the fact that I never changed my schedule after the beginning of the semester during my own college days.

Of course, the most likely explanation is that the sheer awesomeness of sociology and, beyond that, my teaching of sociology spread like wildfire through the campus in the first week of classes, causing the huge number of requests to join my course.

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Mad Max: Fury Road depicts a brighter future

Much has been written about the feminism of Mad Max: Fury Road, but in light of my recent post noting that we still expect female musical artists to be all things to all people, the importance of seeing women onscreen in a wide variety of roles cannot be overstated. Young women, old women, pregnant women, women without arms, women who kill, women who die. When there is more than one woman with a speaking part in a movie, all of these representations are possible. Unlike movies where women die in order to provide motivation for men to become heroes, in Fury Road, women die because they are fighting for themselves.

As important as the numerous women in the movie is the way that they are framed. I am referring to the literal framing of each scene in the camera. In order to allow audiences to follow the action during fast cuts, director George Miller employed the use of “center framing,” in which the main focal point is in the center of each frame. Equally important was what he perceived the main focal point to be. This post compares the focal points of trailers for Fury Road to those of San Andreas and Avengers: Age of Ultron. The latter focuses on women’s bodies while the others focus on their faces. No amount of women will make a movie “feminist” if they are just there as objects for the male gaze.

To return to the title of this post, I should note that the actual future depicted in Fury Road is terrible, but Fury Road itself shows that an action movie centered on female characters can be successful on both cinematic and financial levels if they are treated as characters rather than objects. It is true that there is more room for racial diversity in Fury Road‘s cast, but on that front at least the “bad guys” are pale white instead of dark-skinned.

Maybe the real lesson of Fury Road is that the best big-budget action directors are those who have been making movies focused on animals for the past fifteen years. (Something about staring at penguins and pigs all day must wash away the need for objectification.) Until this is true, at least we have the miracle that is Mad Max: Fury Road.

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Only men can whine

A week or so ago, Alanis Morissette showed up at a Taylor Swift concert to sing her breakout hit, “You Oughta Know.” This prompted Taylor Swift fans to ask, “who the hell was that?”, which prompted Amanda Marcotte at Slate to answer, “Alanis sucked, you’re better off for not knowing.” Marcotte explains:

Alanis Morissette was a singer who, in the mid-1990s, capitalized on a small but growing trend of “angry woman” rock acts, such as L7 and Hole, and made an absolute killing, selling 33 million copies of her album Jagged Little Pill worldwide. But while her predecessors wrote songs protesting sexual harassment and rape, Morissette’s big hit protested guys who break up with you.

Although Marcotte compares Morissette to other “angry women” in the mid-1990s, I think that a better comparison is mid-’90s rock music in general. (I’ll also set aside the direct line from “You Oughta Know” to Taylor Swift’s catalog of songs aimed at people who have wronged her, which suggests that Swift’s fans are familiar with this form of protest with or without knowledge of Morissette.) The ’90s were, for better or worse, a particularly whiny time. From Pearl Jam’s “Black” to less-remembered songs like Stabbing Westward’s “What Do I Have to Do?” lots of men were singing about unrequited love. Hell, Weezer’s Pinkerton, with songs like “Pink Triangle” and “Across the Sea” helped launch an entire genre of music made by whiny men.

In this context, it seems unfair to deny Morissette the ability to whine about a failed relationship just because some of her less popular female peers sang about more serious topics. “Jagged Little Pill” is no “Little Earthquakes” or “Not a Pretty Girl,” but it wasn’t intended to be. That it sold many more copies than all of these other other albums by “angry women” put together speaks to its broader relatability, regardless of its misuse of the word “Ironic.” Marcotte seems to think that the world would have been better off if Morissette had simply said, “boys will be boys” and moved on with her life, though I bet that Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood disagree.

Whatever you think of “Jagged Little Pill” or Alanis Morissette’s music in general, Marcotte’s criticism seems to be rooted in the relative dearth of female-fronted rock bands, whether in the ’90s or today. As Shonda Rhimes has noted, when there is a lack of diversity in a particular medium, the depictions of those in underrepresented groups are expected to meet a higher standard. A lot of white men in the ’90s could whine because white men made nearly all rock music and, between them, covered the entire range of emotions and topics. If anything, the presence of L7, Hole, Tori Amos, and Ani DiFranco in the ’90s, with their music about serious issues, made more room for Alanis Morissette to talk about things that were less serious, or serious in different ways. To expect every female musician to be all things to all people indicates that there aren’t nearly enough female musicians.

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2015 Scavenger Hunt Results

It’s a new low!

In Chicago this year I felt particularly busy. Between sessions, meetings, and hanging out at Kitty O’Sheas, I hardly had any time to explore the conference itself. I never made it to the book exhibit or poster presentations, I never found the unisex restrooms, and I never even posted on social media about ASA or ate a meal alone! I did, however, manage to wander around the various floors of the Hilton wondering how practical it was to give each floor its own confusing layout. I also found the ASA App to be useful, though I wish that it would have been more friendly to those without wi-fi or wireless signals by only updating when requested.

In the end, I completed 13 of 30 scavenger hunt items, including: 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 17, 19, 20, 21, 28, 29, and 30. Next year promises a new location that is even more distracting since I’ve never been there, but can it match Kitty O’Sheas and Meli Cafe? I’ll let you know in 12 months.

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