60 years ago, lookin' 18

     As you know, I've spent a fair amount of time scanning old family photos, a project I thought I had completed, but no. A few days ago, my little bro Ron showed up with a stash of old slides and negatives he had squirreled away and forgotten about. So I've done some more scanning.
     Here are pictures of my folks, fresh immigrants in their new home—eastern Canada (Hamilton, Ontario), circa 1952. My dad was 20 years old and my mom was about 19. They seem to be posing—and wearing matching outfits!
     —Or maybe they took turns wearing one outfit. That seems more likely. They were seriously broke in those days. (More here.)

Pop took some "glamor" shots of mom, too. I can't show all of those, if you know what I mean.

Bookstore Blues

It's Week 4 of our 16 week semester. Nearly a quarter of the semester has passed. Do your students have their books yet? One can only hope.

Rebel Girl can tell you that trying to teach a literature class without textbooks is sort of like trying to make an omelet without eggs: a hot pan with butter, some burnt cheese, smoke.

Possible explanations:

Backorder: students report that the books were sold out at the bookstore – and that textbooks are on “backorder.” These “backordered” textbooks will arrive tomorrow, the next day or next week.

Instructor Fail: numerous students report to their instructors that the bookstore claims the instructors had failed to order textbooks. Some instructors insist they had ordered the textbooks, as early as last spring. They print out their emails attesting to this. Still the information posted by the bookstore suggests otherwise, resulting in resentful students and the erosion from day one of the perceived competency of the instructor.

Enrollment Numbers Discrepancy: the number given to the bookstore by the college differs from the number of students actually enrolled – and apparently has no relation to the number of students given by the instructor when the original paperwork was filled out – let alone the number of students shown enrolled online.

For example, Rebel Girl’s literature class had been “full” and “closed” for at least two weeks before the first day of class – she checked its status online. She was not surprised. Last year the same class had filled. When she put in an order for her textbook, she estimated the enrollment at 45.

Come the first day of classes, less than half of the 45 students had the single required textbook, a first edition of a brand new long-awaited Norton anthology. Upon inquiry, Rebel Girl was told that the bookstore had ordered enough for the number of students enrolled in the class, a number given to them by the college.

What number was that, asked Rebel Girl, ever curious.

13, was the reply.

How can that be? asked Rebel Girl.

No one seems to know. There seems to be some kind of problem with a system that asks instructors for a number, then seems to ignore it; a system which also allows all to view the actual number of students enrolled in classes – but then ignores that and instead relies upon a different figure.

The Amazon Estimate: Some instructors have been told that the campus bookstore estimates that a certain number of students will do their shopping online. Students do testify to this, complaining about the inflated prices for textbooks at the college store. The inflated textbook prices are often defended as necessary and even a boon for the coffers of student government.

One wonders whether or not the majority of students would choose cheaper textbook prices over various student government events funded by the inflated prices from Follett Higher Education Group.

That aside, an estimate like this can also result in unavailable textbooks, since it is, of course, an estimate – thus forcing the students to delay purchase until the “backordered” textbooks arrive (see above) OR inspiring them to seek out other options, such as online textbooks purchase.


The Communication Factor: One wonders about a system that also seems weak in terms of communication, communication that could, if put in effect, address some problems before the first day of class.

Why can’t the bookstore send a confirmation message to the instructor that announces they have ordered a certain number of textbooks? (Thus, if there is any discrepancy the instructor and the bookstore can act before the first day of class.)

Why can’t the bookstore send an email to an instructor noting they have yet to receive an order for textbooks at all? (Thus perhaps setting into motion the discovery of a lost order or the placement of a late order.)

Why can’t the bookstore send an announcement to an instructor that they have run out of requested textbooks and have put them on backorder with an estimate of an arrival date? (Thus avoiding that awkward scene in class when it becomes obvious that students, many students, have yet to purchase books.)

OF COURSE, this comes as no surprise as it seems that management of the bookstore changes nearly annually and what institutional memory there is appears lost with each departure.

Still, considering how essential books are to instruction and considering how essential instruction is to fulfilling the mission of the college, some reform is needed. One imagines that everyone is trying very hard to make sure the first week of classes goes as smoothly as possible – you know, classrooms, parking spaces, syllabi, BOOKS.

The elusive, lost "Craig Justice" lecture

Craig at Chaffey

     Chaffey College is in Rancho Cucamonga. I've never been to that town, but its name won't do. Makes me think of jungles. But they've got no jungles, not even close. (The name actually refers to a tribe of Native Americans.)
     Anyway, Chaffey's Faculty Senate has a website, and it lists, among other things, past winners of “Faculty Lecturer of the Year.” The list goes all the way back to 1969, identifying thirty or so lectures. (The lectures ceased during some of the Carter/Reagan years. Hopelessness, I guess.)
     The site explains the "Faculty Lecture" honor, revealing it to be impressive and striking:

     Faculty Senate elects a Faculty Lecturer for each academic year. In the spring the Faculty Senate seeks nominations … of a colleague to become the Lecturer for the following year. … The individual selected is notified and receives one class reassigned during the upcoming year to research and write a paper and prepare for their lecture/presentation. The paper is published as a journal and distributed at the event. The individual chosen selects his or her own topic for presentation to the campus community.
     This event was initiated in 1969 by the Faculty Senate. All campus constituencies are invited and formal invitations to attend are extended to college administrators, members of the Governing Board, and the lecturer's guest list.
     Faculty take this award very seriously. To be selected is an honor, carrying with it a significant responsibility. ... Many of our Faculty Lecturers have been interviewed and highlighted in local and regional papers….
     This … program … is highly valued on our campus. It draws a capacity crowd every year. ... It shows us at our best. ... We are all, faculty, administrators, and classified caught up in our daily routines and work isolated from one another. This gives the academic community an opportunity to "see" the talent and dedication that usually occurs behind closed doors. We come together to celebrate what it is that we are about.

Chaffey College of Agriculture, 1885

     Wow. Hopefully, none of the honorees has gone on to defraud taxpayers or invent homeopathic office products.
     At least given what I see here, this honor and series is indeed impressive. For instance, refreshingly, the lecture titles skew toward the serious and the academic:

• Signals Through the Flames…Resiliency Theory and Chaffey College (Communication Studies)
• Auschwitz and After: Moral Philosophy in the Shadow of Birkenau (Philosophy)
• The Biological Adaptiveness of Lying (Biology)

     Golly. (Years ago, one of our Math instructors gave a presentation during Flex Week on how to build a bookcase.)
     In recent years, IVC’s Academic Senate has managed to sponsor some serious and academic lectures, including some by our own faculty. That’s a change and a very good one.
     Still, Chaffey’s tradition is particularly impressive. Imagine! Granting someone a course release for two consecutive semesters just to write the lecture! That would never happen at IVC—unless, of course, the instructor were an important Republican or a curvy sports figure—or maybe a successful taco entrepreneur. We’d throw money at that hooey all day long. Then we’d bestow certificates or plaques on everybody who had anything remotely to do with it. We’d take lots of pictures. Then we’d display pics and artifacts in a big dumb glass case in BSTIC.
     Meanwhile, everything else would go to hell. Maybe the library would fall into itself, leaving a pile of rubble and porn printouts.
     Another impressive aspect of Chaffey’s lecture series is the availability of each of the lectures—there’ve been thirty of them—in digital form! The links are right there on the page! All the way back to 1968-9! (“Who’s Listening?”, philosophy)

Cucamonga, 1884

     WELL, ACTUALLY, there’s one exception. It turns out that the recipient of this honor for 1996-7 was one “S. Craig Justice, Economics.” Why, surely, that’s our Craig Justice—i.e., the current Vice President of Instruction at Irvine Valley College—who is known to be from Chaffey and whose degree is in Econ. (I think I heard him quote Adam Smith once.)
     Craig’s lecture was entitled:

Fact, Fantasy, and Faith in Economic Analysis: Is Economics Truly a Science?

     First of all, let me say that I am impressed—and not at all surprised—that Craig received this honor. My hat’s off to the dismal fellow.
     The title of Craig’s lecture is intriguing. Who doesn’t have an opinion about the dismal science and whether its practitioners really have anything to offer? I’d love to read or hear about that. Who wouldn't?
     For some reason, however, it is Craig’s and only Craig’s lecture that isn’t available. “No booklet,” it says right there on the page, in black and white among all the brownish red.

     I’ve got a theory. Maybe he nailed it and there’s a conspiracy to protect us from the awful truth!
     Bring on the full horror, I say! Inquiring minds wanna know!

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "a grafted pulse, an inventory of the world"

"Full Flight"
by Bill Hickok

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building.
It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers
is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin
a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud
inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire
and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right
resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers
came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it
and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape
it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind
of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight
variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water
and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth
of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America.
People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee,
sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern
of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations
and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest
we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone,
I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top
fell through the bottom and a cloud made of dust and memos
and skin muscled across Manhattan. I remember feeling
I could finally touch a rifle, that some murders
are an illumination of ethics, that they act as a word,
a motion the brain requires for which there is
no syllable, no breath. The moment the planes had stopped,
when we were afraid of the sky, there was a pause
when we could have been perfectly American,
could have spent infinity dollars and thrown a million
bodies at finding the few, lasering our revenge
into a kind of love, the blood-hunger kept exact
and more convincing for its precision, an expression
of our belief that proximity is never the measure of guilt.
We've lived in the sky again for some years and today
on my lap these pictures from Iraq, naked bodies
stacked into a pyramid of ha-ha and the articles
about broomsticks up the ass and the limbs of children
turned into stubble, we are punch-drunk and getting even
with the sand, with the map, with oil, with ourselves
I think listening to the guys behind me. There's a problem
in Alpena with an inventory control system, some switches
are being counted twice, switches for what I don't know—
switches of humor, of faith—but the men are musical
in their jargon, both likely born in New Delhi
and probably Americans now, which is what the flesh
of this country has been, a grafted pulse, an inventory
of the world, and just as the idea of embrace
moves chemically into my blood, and I'm warmed
as if I've just taken a drink, a voice announces
we've begun our descent, and then I sense the falling.

*

Perry: a Man of the Stupid People

They voted, see

Divining Perry’s Meaning on Galileo Remark (New York Times)

     In one of the more curious moments in the Republican debate on Wednesday night, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas invoked 17th-century science in discussing his doubts about climate change. He cited the astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei — often called the father of modern science — in suggesting that the current thinking that climate change is a result of human activity could be overturned. “Galileo got outvoted for a spell,” he said.
     On the surface, though, his example seemed to illustrate the opposite of the point that Mr. Perry might have been trying to make. Galileo, whose astronomical observations confirmed the Copernican theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun, was basing his assertions on empirical knowledge and faced opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, which supported the Ptolemaic view of an Earth-centered universe.
     Mr. Perry, by contrast, has said repeatedly that he does not believe the empirical evidence compiled by scientists in support of climate change, but that he does adhere to faith-based principles.
     Was Mr. Perry trying to depict Galileo as a maverick among scientific thinkers of his time? If so, the governor was wrong, says one historian who has studied the trial of Galileo.
     “If Perry means to say that at some point some body of scientists said Galileo was wrong, that didn’t happen,” said the historian, Thomas F. Mayer, who teaches at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill.
. . .
     Perhaps, then, Mr. Perry was referring to the church’s trial of Galileo on charges of heresy, in 1633, in which the astronomer was convicted and sentenced to house arrest. In that case he was “outvoted” not by other scientists but by church leaders.
. . .
     The 1633 trial was not really about science, many historians say. It was about Galileo’s disobeying a 1616 order to abandon Copernican views….

Check out Rick "Dunce" Perry's college transcripts. A sampling:

An F in organic chemistry--the second time around.

Perry greets our own trustee Tom Fuentes, et al., Thursday 

Jesus blows off Rick Perry; pandas, munching bamboo, eschew meaningless agitation; OC gets gassy new Ford taxis

New Taxis in OC. Natural-gas powered Fords.

     Today, venerable and curmudgeonly physicist Bob Park opined as follows:

Jesus let him down.

TEXAS GOVERNOR CONVENES A CHRISTIAN REVIVAL.
     Rick Perry led a prayer meeting of 30,000 evangelical Christians in a Houston football stadium last month, calling on Jesus to guide us out of our national travail....
     The big question then is, how did God respond?
     It didn't take long to get an answer. The crowd had scarcely left the stadium when God set Texas on fire. It’s still burning. In fact, when God sent Tropical Storm Lee ashore, he had it dump record rains on the other Gulf states, while leaving Texas parched….

The Earth moved

EARTHQUACKS: IT'S TIME TO STOP BEHAVING LIKE ANIMALS*.
     At the urging of a 5.8-magnitude earthquake centered in Northern Virginia, thousands of books in the University of Maryland Library sought a lower energy configuration, moving from the bookshelves to the floor. Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, ABC, and NBC, high-strung inmates at the National Zoo like orangutans began to screech and scramble to higher perches "minutes before" seismographs sensed anything.
    —Like maybe they had some special sense that humans don't? 
     Or so the media reported. Were reporters already at the zoo waiting for a quake? Zoos are always in turmoil. Inmates chase each other, fornicate and have food fights, except the laid-back types like pandas that just sit on their ass through it all, munching bamboo.

     *Pace "animals"

Fuentes greets Perry in Newport Beach

     Apimages.com reports today that SOCCCD trustee Tom Fuentes attended a rally for Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The GOP rally was at Roger's Gardens in Newport Beach.
     Check out the photo and report here.
     See also Perry Launches Presidential Bid – Gets Rousing OC Reception:

A very warm reception was also provided to former OC Republican Party Chairman Tom Fuentes who literally left his death bed to do the invocation.