Crap in a can

HEY, BALLOONS BURN!

Last Thursday, the OC Reg reported once again on our county’s BIG ORANGE BALLOON (BOB). Now, I like BOB. I’ve been pumping BOB up for months.

Yesterday afternoon, Rebel Girl called me from the very foot of BOB. She and the gang were planning to take a BOB ride, but the wind was up and so BOB was grounded.

Then, last night, I noticed a news story entitled Two people confirmed dead in hot-air balloon tragedy, near Vancouver.

The story is awful. It includes phrases like “big ball of fire.” How can that be?

Shouldn’t these balloons be fireproof? I mean, what with the abject Hindenburgitude of the very idea of a friggin’ BALLOON, I just assumed they were! —But no. Not that one in Vancouver, anyway.

CRAP IN A CAN:

A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting my sister at the hospital. Owing to her kidney failure, she was required to drink some crap in a can. She told me about it. “What’s it called?” I asked.

“Beneful, I think,” said Fannie. “Something like that.”

I said: “Beneful? Isn’t that the name of some kinda dog food?”

Turns out this “Beneful” has a truly disgusting taste. It even smells bad. It was stinkin’ up the room.

Fannie’s friend Angela came by and sipped some of it. She gagged. (To be honest, Angela does more than her share of puking and gagging.)

Turns out lots of patients are routinely given this drink along with their lunchtime rubber chicken. It wasn’t just Fannie.

So Fannie told the doctors, “Listen, this Beneful tastes like shit. I guarantee that nobody’s drinking it.”

They stared. They sniffed it. They looked at each other. They stared some more.

Near as I can tell, it was later determined that, probably, lots of patients were dumping their Beneful instead of drinking it, cuz, well, it really does taste like shit. Medically, that was very bad, it seems.

Evidently, nobody had bothered to say that their daily Beneful tasted like shit. Some just held their noses and drank it. Others just passed on it. Nobody in that hospital had put two and two together.

MORE CRAP IN A CAN:

All this talk of post-Hindenburgian burning balloons and idiotic crap-in-can imbibery reminds me of our district and Raghu P. Mathur’s new contract. Somebody told me that there’s a rumor that Raghu has installed bulletproof glass in his office. If so, then at least he understands the absurdity of his new contract. You’ve gotta give him credit for that.

There’s a BOARD OF TRUSTEES meeting tomorrow night.

I perused the agenda.

The trustees are poised to adopt the Final Budget for 2007-2008 and a whole slew of new or improved board policies.

Among “information items”:

• Draft responses to the Accreditation reports (on the two colleges)
• The cost of security cameras

I’ll try to be there. I must be nuts.

Suffragette City

SATURDAY found Rebel Girl and her two men in attendance at the Women For Suffrage Day Celebration at the University Club at UCI.

What's Women For? Let's take a look at the recent write-up in the OC Weekly, written by one Andrew Tonkovich:

Women For is the local Orange County grassroots organization you’d point to if you wanted to mess with people’s minds, and who doesn’t want to do that? This Irvine-based progressive women’s forum hosts monthly public-education meetings in the heart of conservative South County when it isn’t sponsoring the Great American Write-In each spring. Sure, the nice ladies at WF: OC look harmless, but they’ve lately featured films, panels and speakers on global warming (against), voter-rights suppression (against), single-payer health care (for), uniting women in prison with their kids (for) and military recruitment in the schools (against). They pay for all this terrific agit-prop by dressing up once a year, having lunch together, and honoring some of the other riot grrrls and women who live and work in the OC.

This year’s Suffrage Day Celebration honorees include Professor Paula Garb of UC Irvine’s Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, Susan Kopicki of Democracy for America, Jeanette Merrilees of Save Crystal Cove and two Cal State Fullerton political-science majors who persuaded their campus to go sweatshop-free—which means you’ll have to find someplace else to buy a T-shirt sewn by exploited Central American labor. (See, I am messing with you, and it’s fun!) CSUF Criminal Justice Professor Jarett Lovell (host of KUCI-FM’s Justice, or Just Us?) introduces the young women, Caitlyn Whitney and Charlotte Samuels of the Campus Coalition Against Sweatshops, everybody enjoys some bitchen chow courtesy of UCI’s snazzy University Club, and then it’s back to kickin’ right-wing reactionary ass . . . er, I mean educating our citizenry on a variety of important peace, human-rights, social and economic-justice issues.

You get the idea. Some fun if you like this kind of fun. We do. Three years ago the group saw fit to honor Rebel Girl. So there we were, hand shaking with local activists and elected officials: Irvine mayor Beth Krom, former mayor and now councilmember Larry Agran and councilmember Sukhee Kang. (Did Rebel Girl ever tell about the time that she and Red Emma got arrested with Mayor Agran out in Nevada? No? —Another time.)

Anyway, nothing like meeting with a community college professor to make local elected officials gush about the great services the colleges provide the community. Really. That was nice. And when queried about the state of the colleges, (What do you think of Glenn? How's it going over there now? Any, uh, better? Who chose the color for the new Performing Arts Center? ) Rebel Girl took the high road for the most part. Really. Or at least the carpool lane on the high road. It was easy. These are smart people. They don't need Rebel Girl to confirm what they know.

Rebel Girl and her family were joined at their table by SOCCCD trustee Marcia Milchiker, who reported on one thing and another: her recent study abroad trip to Santander, Spain (that hot bed of international terrorism and anti-American sentiment), as well as the board's summer activities and developments. There's a lot going on but Rebel Girl won't get into here. It's not the time and place. Really.

Both Marcia and Rebel Girl were happy to see former IVC VP of Student Services, Pauline Merry in attendance, looking elegant as usual. Pauline, one of the early casualties of the current regime, had gone on to Long Beach City College and now, years later, has retired. She, too, was once an honoree at another Suffrage Day Celebration.

The lunch ended after the pair of students from Cal State Fullerton were honored for their successful campaign to persuade CSUF to drop their contract with exploitive sweatshops which made me want to rush right home and see where her IVC t-shirt was manufactured.

The answer: her Fruit of the Loom heavy cotton t-shirt was "assembled in Mexico of U.S.A. fabric." This means, Red Emma quips, that the fabric made the two minute trip across the border to the maquiladoras or, in American, sweatshops. The irony of American students wearing college apparel assembled by their systematically disenfranchised peers in other countries is pretty heavy.

Anyone want a cause this academic year? Rebel Girl is sure that the two Cal State Fullerton students would be happy to help.

Suffragette City

Amazing Grace Paley: Every Action Was Essential

NOT ONE SEMESTER HAS PASSED since I've begun teaching (remember, I recently received my 15 year pin!) when I have not taught something by Grace Paley or at least referred to her as a writer, poet, activist, teacher, an example to me, at least, of how to be in the world.

Grace Paley died Wednesday at her home in Vermont. She was 84.

I studied with her briefly in 1984 at a writing conference for women at UC Santa Cruz. I was learning how to talk to people then and I made myself talk to her even though I worried about sounding like a fool. I probably did sound like a fool. She was one who perhaps didn't mind fools as long as they were trying. She asked what I was reading, a typical teacher's question for a student.

Raymond Carver, I answered, and you.

Ray Carver, she said, shaking her head, I worry about him, so much darkness, so little hope.

No, I said, the fool slipping away as I began to speak about what I knew well. You need to read his new stuff, this story, "Cathedral." He has hope now, really.

Good, she said, I am glad to hear it. It's about time.

In workshop Paley advised us to tell the stories that only we could tell and to tell them in the ways that only we could tell them. Don't write the stories anyone could write, she said, write what only you can. This from a woman who, as a young student, had studied with W.H. Auden. At the time, she was writing poetry using British English. Auden asked her why.

This is advice I tell my creative writing students – and myself - every semester.

Much of her life's work is found in three collections of short stories. Margalit Fox, in today's New York Times, describes her work this way:

"Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailiness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind."

In the 1980s, Red Emma and I went everywhere Paley was if she was near. We saw her read when we could. Her cloud of white hair, her tennis shoes, her chewing gum. Her stories. Her poems.

Paley described herself as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist" and was a longtime active member of the War Resisters League (WRL), an organization that does exactly what its name suggests. I like how nearly all her obituaries identify her as "writer and activist." She would have written more, she once said, had she not been going to so many meetings, so many demonstrations. This was said without regret.

In this time of war, I like to remember what she said in an interview in the WRL magazine The Nonviolent Activist. It was in 2000, in their 25 Years Later: The Movement Against the War in Vietnam issue.

The question: How do you assess the role of the small radical peace movement in relation to the mass movement, to the large demonstrations of half a million people?

Her answer:

"Every big demonstration was absolutely essential. And every local operation was absolutely essential. There’s no argument about it, it seems to me. If there were no big demonstrations, we would never have known how many people in Minneapolis felt like us—I mean the joy of being in Washington and meeting people from Idaho, what greater sense of unity could you have? On the other hand, whenever we did something, whenever a draft card was burned, whenever one of the Berrigans [Dan and Philip, brothers and Catholic priests who founded the Plowshares movement by destroying draft board files during the war] or Women Against Daddy Warbucks [which also raided a draft board] took an action, they would say, “You’re turning people against us.” But that was ridiculous because the people were not turned against us, the people were interested. So I think they were both absolutely essential."

Every action is essential. There is life in those actions, big and small. In the poems. In the stories. The leaflets. The letters written. The signs. The marches, big and small. There is hope. Grace.

Those zany parade-loving Republicans!

UTAH TECH COLLEGE & G.O.P. PARADE FLOAT DEPOSITORY. A recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune reports that…

The Utah State Auditor found several misuses of public money at the Mountainland Applied Technology College, most of which illegally benefited former campus president Robert Brems and the Utah Republican Party.

…Auditors found [current campus president Clay] Christensen attempted to falsify documents in using public funds to pay for a parade float for the Utah Republican Party.

…[A]uditors slammed him for continuing with the float project even after being warned by the auditor and attorney general that it was illegal to do so….

They're droppin' out bigtime

.
From Monday's UC Berkeley News: Study finds early difficulty for community college students

A new report by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) finds that six in 10 students who enter the California community college system as freshmen with high school diplomas and aspirations to transfer to four-year institutions drop out or lower their academic sights after just one semester. The report recommends increasing support for these students….

Better than a crop circle

IT WAS summery and festive today at Irvine Valley College. At about noon, a nice bluesy band played, goofy blue and white balloons bobbed in the big blue sky, and students were everywhere, smiling and having a good time.

I liked the band's version of Red House, what I heard of it.

A very prominent "information" booth stood out in front of the college's Big Lawn, impossible to miss, and staffed by our best and brightest.


Nearby, at the periphery of the Big Green, an IVC police car stood. It regularly squawed forth stern warnings against parking on the turning circle. It was perfectly absurd.

Plus the cop car's presence might have discouraged registration by felons, and that's just wrong. I mean, let's not shrink the pool. And what about diversity?

It was still pretty festive, though.

Somebody told me to be sure and take a picture of the information desk just inside the Student Services Center, so I went there, and, sure enough, there was an info desk, and it did look impressive, though nobody was there to dispense info. Probably a fluke.


I ain't carpin'. It was a good day. Something tells me this is gonna be a good semester.

One more thing about that big lawn area at the center of IVC: years ago, I hatched the plan of scattering special posy seeds (or whatever) out there to spell out "Mr. Goo" or some such nonsense. I figured it was perfect: the message would just sort of gradually appear over months.

It would be better than a crop circle, boy.

Never did get around to that. That's my one big regret.

The “course shopping” study

.
From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: Course Shopping and Its Meaning:

How students add and drop courses is suddenly attracting more attention. …[O]ne of the largest studies ever of students’ “course shopping” behaviors is just out. The study is of an urban community college district (Los Angeles) … [T]he study suggests that course shopping is widespread, comes in different identifiable patterns, and that in moderation it’s not always harmful.

Linda Serra Hagedorn, chair of educational administration and policy at the University of Florida, was the lead author of the study, which was published in The Journal of Higher Education.

…Course shopping refers to a period in which colleges have designated it as appropriate to add and drop courses as a student finalizes her schedule. An official “drop,” in contrast, takes place after that time. In the community colleges studied, a student can drop a course up through the 14th week of a 16-week semester. During the first four weeks (when course shopping takes place), no grade is posted when a student drops. After that, a “W” is posted for withdrawn.

In the new study, based on an analysis of nearly 5,000 students, 38 percent were found to engage in course shopping.

The Hagedorn study breaks down course shopping into different categories:

• Cyclic shopping, in which students — typically early in the semester — drop a course and on the same day or soon after, add another one in its place. (A related group of frequent cyclic shoppers engage in this practice for at least 30 percent of their enrollments.)

• Bulk shopping, in which students sign up for more courses than they will ever take and drop half or more of them.

• Mixed bag, in which students engage in some of each activity.

Prevalence of Course Shopping

No shopping 61.4%
Occasional cyclic—23.7%
Bulk— 7.1%
Frequent cyclic—6.8%
Mixed bag—0.9%

The study found relatively little in terms of demographic differences among course shoppers, although women were slightly more likely to shop. By subject area, mathematics courses were more likely to be dropped.

In terms of impact on academic performance, the study found that — in moderation — course shopping may not be a bad thing in terms of grades. The grade-point average of non-shoppers in the study (2.66) was nearly identical to that of occasional cyclic shoppers (2.68) and bulk shoppers (2.67). Frequent cyclic and mixed bag shoppers had significantly lower GPA’s.

The study notes that there are a range of legitimate reasons to engage in course shopping: Students may be misinformed about courses or their requirements, students’ schedules may change, students may not like instructors, etc. At the same time, too much course shopping can give colleges a false sense of enrollments and may block students from getting into oversubscribed sections.

The report notes a number of findings…:

• Many students who drop English or mathematics courses end up taking courses in another subject altogether. If course shopping was taking place because of students being placed at the wrong level or not liking the instructor, such changes of subject matter would be minimal.

• For cyclic shoppers, about 60 percent of dropped remedial courses were replaced by non-remedial courses. There are any number of ways to interpret that finding, the study notes, and more analysis is needed.

• Bulk shopping, while frustrating to college officials, appears to help some students. The article compares the behavior of some bulk shoppers to a sinking cargo ship. Throwing off cargo may not be enough to stop some ships from sinking, but it will allow some to sail to safety.

…[T]he study offers several suggestions.

First, it urges colleges to post all syllabuses online, so that students who want to gain a better understanding of what a course is about can do so before registering. Second, it urges colleges to look for ways to find out more about why students are adding or dropping courses after the semester starts. If academic advising counselors are in short supply, instructors might be encouraged to ask students why they are leaving or entering a course. Third, the study suggests the consideration of “more overt” approaches to limit course shopping, such as a “three strikes” rule where more than three cycles of cyclic shopping result in some sort of action, such as a limit on future drops or required academic counseling.