May 2007 Archives

One student gave an oral report on Starbucks.  Apparently, the founder of Starbucks was going through some sort of life crisis a while back.  He felt that Starbucks had lost its way.  He had wanted he said to import the coffee house culture he had found in Europe, especially Italy, into the USA.  Starbucks was to be an alternative place, a “third place” he called it, where people could hang out other than home or work.

will'scoffeehouse
 

I think there are about 6000 Starbucks world wide, and of course, now they look pretty much alike.  The founder was upset because when you went into one, since they had put in those new automated espresso makers, you couldn’t even smell the coffee anymore.  How the hell was a person to create a coffee house culture without the smell of coffee?  He shook up his investors for a while with this Hamletian torments, and then reassured everybody by saying he is going to have more Starbucks than MacDonald’s world wide.  He is aiming, I do believe, for 20,000 outlets.

The student giving the oral report when she is home hangs out in an “actual” coffee house.  She had pictures of it.  It looked warm and inviting.  The chairs she said did not match (a sure sign of a real coffee house) and they had one of those Italian coffee makers that has a big handle to pull down when you make the coffee, and all sorts of steam and other stuff shoots out.  She said that really she liked this old fashioned coffee house better than Starbucks.

Then another student, perhaps sensing a “criticism” of Starbucks, said something like he didn’t understand the problem since Starbucks was doing what Starbucks was supposed to be doing, which was looking like Starbucks and serving up Starbucks coffee.  Like what else could a Starbucks be but a Starbucks? 

I wonder if this is what Marcuse meant with his one-dimensional man, not the inability to be critical (god forbid) but the inability even to detach one’s self sufficiently from what is to begin to feel things might be other than they are or once were.

The founder of Starbucks must know that coffee house culture grew out of and was rooted in the long history of neighborhoods.  If they were all “unique” or “special” in some way that’s because there were neighborhoods, urban neighborhoods, with people all packed on top of each other and bumping into each other down at the coffee house.  But neighborhoods are dead and dying what with the creation of suburbia.  In recognition of this fact, Starbucks now has drive-thru’s.

How can a coffee house be a coffee house if you don’t even have to go inside?

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Above--Will's Coffee House--where Alexander Pope and other wits used to hang out.

UC Insanity

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Yesterday I guess it was, I open the LA Times to find:

Suicides a symptom of larger UC crisis

What’s the crisis exactly:

At UC Berkeley, 45% of students surveyed in 2004 said they had experienced an emotional problem in the previous 12 months that significantly affected their wellbeing or academic performance. Nearly 10% said they had seriously contemplated suicide.

At UC Santa Barbara a decade ago, an average of 21 students a quarter came to the counseling center to report they were experiencing an emotional crisis. Now, more than 200 students a quarter come for help, saying they are in a crisis.

So what’s the problem with the crisis.  Mental health services throughout the UC system are severely, not to say grotesquely underfunded, with little or no help on the horizon.

This is part, as I see it, of a larger pattern.  Undergraduates get the shaft.  The UC is a massive bureurcacy  research institution mostly interested in acquiring grant money from the military-industrial complex.  While footing a large portion of the bill, undergraduates are mostly a pain in the ass.

Buildings are going up all over the campus where I work, like goddamn mushrooms—millions and millions and millions of dollars spent—and they can’t find anywhere the few measly millions to hire some more counselors.

This is sickening and amounts to criminal behavior.

Education has got to be one of the dullest topics in the world.  Everybody has suffered through some form of schooling, so everybody thinks they know something about it.  I keep an eye out for any mention of education in mass periodicals, just to keep up with what people might be thinking about the subject if anything.

 

throwaway

 

 

The lead blurb in a recent New Yorker was about the pressure on today’s students.  This must be an indirect response to the VT thing.  The article just irritated me.  First it starts off with some silly analogy about going to college being like going to a sleepover at somebody’s house and being served a tuna sandwich very much unlike the kind one’s mother makes.  Is there some sort of law these days saying one must write in some sort of cute or clever or downright silly way?

College is NOT like going to a sleepover.  Of course, what would I know?  I never went on a sleep over, and I would never turn my nose up at anybody’s tuna sandwich because I would be happy to have it.

But the New Yorker is very, very middle class.  This is evident in the author’s claim that college today is a meritocracy.  This is complete BS.  It might be a meritocracy for the upper middle class but that’s about it.

I found this in the Chronicle of Higher Education, hardly a radical leftist rag:

Colleges, once seen as beacons of egalitarian hope, are becoming bastions of
wealth and privilege that perpetuate inequality. The chance of a low-income
child obtaining a bachelor's degree has not budged in three decades: Just 6
percent of students from the lowest-income families earned a bachelor's
degree by age 24 in 1970, and in 2002 still only 6 percent did. Lower still
is that child's chance of attending one of America's top universities.

I have a lot more stuff on this, but I won’t bring it up.  Conclusion, so far, college is NOT like eating a strange tuna sandwich and it is NOT a meritocracy.

Aside from the fact that the basic premises of the irritatingly cute blurb are completely WRONG, I do give the author credit for thinking a very little about the plight of college students today.  He says they are full of anxiety because college is so competitive.  Well, maybe, but not where I come from.  If they are anxious, it’s because THEY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING.  Here they are going to classes, and usually going into considerable debt to it, because they have been indoctrinated into the idea that they must go to college since the year zero.

One interesting observation thought, if it’s true: “The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of of Teaching, which classifies institutions of S higher education, no longer uses the con­cept "liberal arts" in making its distinc­tions.”

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A student in one of my classes this quarter sent me the above, of disposables in the student ghetto of IV California. 

Them Students

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The LA Times ran an article.  I think it was yesterday about all the crap students leave behind when they go home for the summer.  Some colleges report mountains of stuff left behind: clothes, pillows, beds, bicycles, desks, bookcases, and even those little refrigerators you can buy at Costco for less than a 100 bucks.  So much stuff that at some colleges they have gotten organized, collect all the abandoned stuff and sell it off for charity or something.

It’s a brave new world all right.  We have become a nation of wastrels.  But that’s the consumer culture for you.  I suppose we have to blame Bic that came out with those throw away pens and shavers and such.  I guess if you can buy a refrigerator for less than a 100 bucks and you can’t get it in your BMW you just leave it behind.  Why not?  What’s 20 bucks these days?  What’s a hundred bucks?

In other words, I guess this is not so much a commentary on “them students,” as it is on the consumer culture in which they have grown up.  It’s a throw away culture.  Not that I am immune to it, but I still have a bit of the waste not, want not ethic.  When I asked my students about waste not, want not—they hadn’t even heard of waste not, want not.  When I asked if they tried to use their “leftovers,” most thought I was crazy.  I mean I can’t stand to throw food out.  I have little plastic cartoons of extra rice stuck all over in my refrigerator.  I make sure I use the stuff.  I keep it around until I can or it starts to stink whichever comes first. But they just throw mounds of perfectly good food out….

Externally Reviewed

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Some external reviewers swung through the Writing Program this week.  I think this might be the fourth external review of the Program.  My memory isn’t too clear.  But this one surely is the last one for me. 

They gave each of us old timers, Continuing Lecturers, as we are called, 20 minutes with one of the external reviewers.  I didn’t want to talk with anybody about the WP, so I didn’t sign up to talk to anybody.  But somebody caught it and said it wasn’t a good idea for me not to talk to somebody.  So I said, sure, sign me up.

I brought a little laundry list with me titled “What Then Is To Be Done.”

I don’t know why.  I decided not to yuck it up but just said what I was feeling which went something like, “I have been thinking about this and I having been trying to figure out how to put it, but if I had a friend who wanted to work here in this program and asked if he or she should work here or not, I would have to say ‘no’.”

I was talking from way down in my chest.  I didn’t like talking like that, but what could I say, 8 classes of writing a year, with 25 students in each class is just way too much.  “You really can’t do your job with that many classes and that many students,” I said, “the best you can do is not screw things up or make things worse.  I have learned how to do a pretty good job of that, but it’s not enough, not really, not when I have wanted to learn and grow as a teacher, and now I am looking back and thinking I could have done much more with better circumstances and not feeling judged all the time by what the students say about me in their teacher evaluations.”

“I worked four years on a book on teaching.  I didn’t teach summer school.  I lost money and it practically killed me and then I am over in Cheadle Hall doing some union business and am told by an Administrator there that lecturers aren’t supposed to do publishing anyway.  We are supposed to be teachers. Oh man.  I mean I am altruistic and all that but to write a book and take all that time doing it and not really get anything for it and be told in fact that one wasn’t supposed to write it at all—well, that sort of takes the cake.”

“And oh by the way, while I am at it, it’s has not been good for my self worth to feel I am a second class citizen in the place where I work.  I am allowed, for example, to sit on Senate Faculty committees, as a representative of Lecturers, just as undergraduates are allowed to have their representatives, but I am not allowed to vote because as a Lecturer I do not or am not allowed to belong to the Faculty Senate and not being Senate Faculty cuts me off from possibilities that might come my way, like this one guy who was a Lecturer but then got security of employment (and so became Senate Faculty) and so was able to tool around the oceans, as a teacher, on a semester at sea program.  Not something plain old lecturers can do.”

So I talked like that—no joking around, as is my usual want—just the straight dope with little or no exaggeration.  I was not whining or complaining.  I was just saying and let the chips fall where they may.  It’s a sad thing for me alright, but I felt a bit better the next day I think for having spoken as I did.

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June 2007 is the next archive.

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