The Women’s Studies department I teach in has a sort of open adjunct/student lounge with computers and a small library and a table and such — a place to hang out and get a little work done or chat online or whatever. This student was working on some algebra, and was clearly frustrated. She turns to me and says, “Why do we have to learn this stuff?! When am I ever going to need to know about imaginary numbers?”

Two things you should know about me. First, I started my academic career as an engineering major — aerospace, to be precise. While I quickly bailed out of engineering, I have a great respect for the applied sciences, and the sciences in general.

Second, I’m a strong believer in the “Renaissance man” idea (though I’d like to give a hat tip to all the Renaissance women out there, too), and in the principles of the Enlightenment, and in the idea of a well-rounded liberal education. That is, I think that it’s important to know a lot of stuff about a lot of topics, just to get by in the world.

“You need to know it,” I said, “because it’s the core of the physical sciences. Because it’s the closest we are able to come to understanding how the world works.” I spent some time talking about e and natural logs and Golden Rectangles and nautilus shells and such.

I was clearly losing her. Blah blah blah. I re-grouped.

“You need to know this because science education in our society is dismal. Because there are people out there who want to control you, and who will use the fact that Americans know virtually nothing about science to exercise that control. So when you go in to get birth control, someone will deny it because they think it’s the same thing as abortion, which it clearly isn’t.”

The biggest debates in our society right now are science debates: stem-cell research, abortion, cloning, genetically-modified foods, the energy crisis, global warming, the status of gay, lesbian, bi, and trans persons, and more. And most Americans are “funnels” on all these matters — they take in huge amounts of blather from the media and other sources, and uncritically spit it out the other side.

Science isn’t going to resolve all these debates. Science is not and never has been or will be the end-all-be-all of knowledge. As a card-carrying postmodernist, I’m dutifully aware of the cultural-constructedness of scientific knowledge. BUT science is certainly part of the way we as a society have to deal with these issues — not just the facts and figures that science produces, but the mindset that science inculcates, the critical and evidence-based consideration of those facts and figures.

An effort called ScienceDebate2008 has emerged to get this year’s presidential candidates to devote an entire debate to issues of science policy. There really are no excuses for our candidates to decline a science-based debate — but I’m sure that’s what they’ll do. Neither Obama nor McCain (nor Clinton, if she wins the nomination, which I kind of doubt) is going to risk looking absolutely idiotic on national television while the “geeks” and “nerds” grill them. But I still think we have to make them say “No”, to get into the public consciousness just how crucial this stuff is and to force the candidates to acknowledge that — and risk everything by becoming the anti-science candidate. So sign the petition.

More importantly, start talking about science. Start learning about science — I promise, there’s very little that’s painfully dull. Grab a copy of Galileo’s Commandment, which highlights the best science writing in Western history, or Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and go from there. Make an effort, a real, concerted effort, to explain to your kids why math matters, why this goofy crap they have to learn in Algebra or Pre-Calc or Geometry matter, how it relates to the “real” world. And, of course, resist with all your might the wrong-headed, wrongly-implemented, and entirely bad-faith-based No Child Left Behind, especially it’s implicit rejection of science along with the arts, world culture, social science, and indeed, reason itself.

Every time I bring it up, I ask if students have any questions. The questions I get are always about teh same damn thing: formatting. “Does it have to be typed?” “What size margins should I use?” “What style do you want the references in?”

I can only imagine that other professors and/or high school teachers hammer students over formatting, without paying much attention to their ideas — which are, ostensibly, what we assign papers to help students get at and express.

I’ve never once, in 5 years of teaching, been asked a question about ideas.

Ideas are not more important than content, any more than respiration is more important than circulation — formatting is part of the expression of ideas. A reference is a piece of data — it helps answer the question, “how does the author know what s/he claims to know?” A section heading or a footnote is part of the process by which an argument is structured and developed — they aren’t extras.

At the same time, students’ (and teachers’?) emphasis on form seems to miss the point that good presentation without ideas isn’t any better than good ideas badly presented. Is it any wonder that much of what we read is a vapid rehashing not of the course materials but of Wikipedia entries. I mean, if the quality of ideas doesn’t matter, what does it matter where they came from – as long as it’s nicely formatted and search-engine friendly?

Here’s my advice for students: consider formatting not as something separate from your ideas, but as a part of them. Your entire paper is a presentation of ideas — and your design choices are one of the ideas being presented. Every reference, every footnote, even the margins and line-spacing should serve that end.

That doesn’t mean to ignore the standards — APA for a psych paper, MLA for a lit paper, etc. Those standards exist because they are tried-and-tested ways for ideas to be expressed well. But learn them as ideas, not as meaningless frills.

And ask a professor how to write a persuasive argument in your discipline once in a while. That matters, too.

Each button is 2 inches across, and they’re nicely made. They cost $2 US, or you can get 10 for $19.00 or, if you’re feeling really wild, you can get 100 for $180.00. Get one for everyone in your department! I’m not getting rich off these or anything — I just think people who teach might enjoy them.

Order here

But I’m stalled in teaching. I’ve made some great big financial mistakes that mean I’m probably never going to get my PhD; nobody at my university even knows who I am anymore. I’ve chugged along at my dissertation for years, but for the last year or so it’s gotten harder and harder to motivate myself to work on it because, to be honest, neither my heart nor my soul is in it any more.

That should be sad, but it’s not, because I don’t think I ever really wanted to be a professor; I think I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, a professor does research, writes books, gives presentations — and occasionally, when everything else is done, teaches a class. A teacher, on the other hand, teaches — whether in a classroom, on a website, in a book, whatever.

The reality of the academic market is, I’m not going to be a professor at a “top school”, even with a PhD, because I care too much about teaching. Which is fine, except I have a family to feed and a life to live, and I can’t do that on an adjunct’s salary.

In my other career, I’m a writer. I’m pretty good at it, I think — I’ve gotten my fair share of diggs and trackbacks and thankful comments on my writing on the web, and my off-line writing gets a pretty good response. At lifehack.org alone, I have upwards of a million readers a month. And I have a good understanding of the marketing and relationship-building strategies that matter for writers in the new media. More and more I think this is where I should be focusing my efforts.

Especially since BlogWorld Expo in November. There I saw an entire professional world unfolding before my eyes, and a little glimpse of what the future holds. I mean, I’ve been blogging since 2000, but it wasn’t until BlogWorld that I really saw that one could build a career on the Internet without being a coder or a designer.

So now Affiliate Summit West is heading to town. That’s one of the nice things about living in Las Vegas — conferences come right to your doorstep! Of course, the downside is, you need a lot of money to go to them — Affiliate Summit is $1449 for the whole conference, and a couple hundred just to have a look around.

But John Chow is giving away a free full pass and a couple of free floor passes, so all of a sudden it’s worth thinking about going. I have to admit, I have a really hard time wrapping my head around affiliate marketing. Not the concept itself, which is pretty straightforward — you link to products your audience would enjoy, and if they click through and spend money, you get a piece. But few sites do this well, and from the outside, doing it well seems to be such a large job that it would eclipse the actual writing that’s supposed to be the star of the show.

I’ve made a goal for this year: By the fall semester, I plan to cut my teaching load in half. And I plan to do that not just by replacing the pay those classes bring in but by doubling it. That means, effectively, I have to hit $25000 in non-teaching income by September, which is very doable. (I’ve already accounted for about 1/3 of that with existing work, actually).

Which means that the time is now to figure out how this stuff all works — affiliate marketing, social networking, contextual advertising, all of it. If I want to write for a living, I have to figure out how to live by writing. BlogWorld was a step in the right direction — it gave me a real big push towards bringing this all together. Something like Affiliate Summit West would be a great next step!

As usual, I finished about 33% of what I wanted to get done over the break. It’s always that way — the prospect of all that unscheduled time throws me into a tizzy, and I over-plan considerably. Of course the holidays always throw me off — I always think they’ll be less time-consuming than they actually are. But the reality is, in my father’s inimitable words:

Waxes work best when Waxes work.

Which is to say, without the discipline of a schedule to follow and deadlines pressing, I have a hard time staying motivated. When I’m dead busy during the semester, I know I’ve got only this specific block of 45 minutes to do x in, and I get it done. Give me 28 days, though…

I try to whip up some fake urgency, but I’m too smart for myself, I guess. I scheduled myself down to the minute over the break, and when I’m working I regularly set a kitchen timer to help keep me focused on short, 30 minute or 1 hour, bursts of work. That helps — when I’m working. But when the Tivo calls with the whole last season of The Office (which I was far too busy to watch when they first ran), well… There’s always tomorrow.

So, now it’s tomorrow, and this semester is looking to be busier than ever. I’ve got a full load of classes, I’m taking part in an experimental co-teaching class with 3 other profs that, when we did it last semester, was about twice as much work as a regular class, I’m doing most of the day-to-day work of running lifehack.org, I’m editing a staff of some 25 writers, I’m doing the weekly podcast (Liz Strauss this week!), I have a book coming out (March release in the US), and more. And I’m made a commitment to my family to be home and available after 6pm at least 3 weeknights (one night I have an online meeting with lifehack.org’s corporate headquarters in Hong Kong, and one night I have a class until 9pm), and at least one weekend day.

If Waxes work best when Waxes work, then I’m going to be a productivity powerhouse this semester!

Most of that stuff won’t go away now that the break is here, but at least I’ll have time to get everything in order, maybe even get a little ahead of the curve!

Huzzah!

This week was the first week of the summer session of my women’s studies class, “Gender, Race, and Class”. While I’ve taught about a half-dozen summer sessions of anthropology at the community college, this is my first summer session at the university and my first in women’s studies. Summer classes are a ton of work — class prep every day, unmotivated students, only a couple weeks between intros and mid-terms, and then again between mid-terms and finals. They tend to be breathless, jus-in-time affairs.

So, naturally, I use them to test out new ideas and teaching practices. This summer I’m experimenting with student blogging; each student has to post twice a week and comment on three other posts on the class website. I’m doing this for two reasons: First, because I want to shake up the typical teacher-student relationship where I find out all sort of interesting and useful information about each of my students but they never find out anything about each other. Which is a shame: especially in a course about gender, race, and class, the diverse experiences and perspectives of their fellow students is easily the best resource they could draw on. Blogging will, I hope, provide a channel for the sharing of this resource. Secondly, the field of women’s studies is based on a pedagogy of public engagement. Blogging forces students to write for a public audience, which means they have to give at least cursory thought to their relationship with the rest of their society.

So far, it’s been pretty successful, though all most of my students have written is their introductions. And the class itself has been moving pretty well, though I somewhat evilly assigned some really difficult reading to slog through the first week. Approaching the start of every new semester is worrisome, because each group of students has its own personality, and you never know when you’re going to get a class that, for whatever reason, just doesn’t work. Every professor has, at some point or another, no matter how good or popular they are. So it’s been a relief that this class has, so far, been pretty responsive, and there’s already been some pretty productive in-class discussion.

I’d be happy to hear from other professors who have integrated blogging into their courses; I’ve done a lot of web-searching and mostly turned up K-12 educators who use blogs, not many folk in higher ed. If that’s you, please drop me a line!