Review: Faculty Meeting in the Red Room

It was another long night: El Presidente presided over a room full of bundled-up professors only tenuously aware of the subtleties of parliamentary procedure. Why were they bundled up? It's chilly in the Red Room.

Unlike the last time the Faculty Meeting packed this venue to capacity, when a bedraggled junior faculty member ran in after the gavel had fallen, snagged the last available comfy seat and thrilled to pie charts through a ninety minute set and 17 encores, last night the Faculty Meeting was devoid of pie charts. And pie.

What's the first to hit the chopping block after a budget crisis? The high-end snacks.

Undaunted by a singular choice of cookie, however, the Faculty kicked out the jams last night: motions were proposed, amended, and voted on. Amendments were amended. Points of information were obtained and held up to the amps for spine-numbing reverb. The question was called, twice. Someone fell asleep.

Having played this room a mere two weeks ago, mesmerizing rowdy meeting-goers with a long, improvisational jam session, the Faculty were clearly eager to shake up the set list, and the unanimous vote to establish a "Middle Eastern Certificate Program" was an absolute stunner with quick riffs and a haunting and impassioned plea. And who would have guessed that they would dig up a rarity like "Commendation of the Women's Hockey Team"? No one called for an encore. We had seen enough.

The next time the Faculty Meeting plays the Red Room -- and they will -- they'll surely bring back some old favorites -- "Pie Charts," "What's the Difference Between Writing Intensive and Writing Attentive?" and "Dogs on Campus Policy" -- but can anything top last night? Stay tuned.

Opening for the Faculty Meeting was a woman sitting to my right who ignored my feeble attempt at conversation and expected me to take off when the students were asked to leave the room.

South Padre Island, MA

Last year a friend and colleague of mine at Amherst told me that although the first year of a new faculty position is stressful, the second year hits you like a ton of bricks. He was right.

I'm halfway through the second semester of my second year, it's Spring Break, and I'm going to use this week to pick myself up off the ground, dust myself off, shake off the haze and get ready to power through the rest of the year.

What would I rather be doing this week than reading Spanish major comprehensive exams, sending out book proposals, reading for my classes for next week, making a list of books the library should buy before they run out of money, editing a senior's thesis chapter and starting to work on a conference paper for this summer? Lots of things.

Maybe I'll just post some inane stuff on my blog, though, and pretend it's a vacation.

A for Average

This article in today's Times -- "Student Expectations Seen As Causing Grade Disputes" -- hits the nail on the head in describing the culture of grade inflation and college students' sense of entitlement to As and Bs just for having shown up and done the reading (or written the essay).

The causes of said entitlement are beyond me, but I can attest that between the students' belief that they won't get a job (much less a good job in our current economy) after college if they don't get all As and the (junior) professor's belief that they won't keep their job if they don't get good evaluations from their students, the once lofty goal of learning for learning's sake has flown out the window.

It's a sad state of affairs when a freshman takes your class pass/fail because he doesn't want to risk a B on his transcript and when a professor makes it clear on the first day of class that everyone on the class list will get an A, regardless of their performance and effort in the class. I've been getting my "your goal in this class should be to learn something, and not solely to get an A" patter down, but I'm not sure anyone's paying attention.

It's actually 11:36

Overheard in the classroom next to my office: "Wake up everyone! It's 11:30! It's the middle of the day! So start talking!"

This strikes me as a heavy-handed way to spur classroom discussion, but hey, we do what we gotta do.

Spring 2008 by the numbers

Weeks in the semester: 14
Total students: 19
Courses taught: 2
Total class meetings: 69
Times I was mistaken for a student in the library: 2
Times I told them I was actually faculty: 1
Corncob pipes gifted to me with the express purpose of demonstrating my advanced age to library staff: 1
Dinners eaten at the student dining hall, and approximate time of meal: 1; 5 p.m.
Packed lunches eaten in office: 3
Packed lunches eaten in department lounge: 24
Lunches at the faculty dining hall I was dragged to because the French department found my lunch-eating habits too pathetic: 1
Swings to piñata at end-of-year department party: 3
Direct hits: 2
Papers graded: 114
Oral presentations attentively listened to: 37
Novels taught: 5
Films taught: 13
Evening film screenings: 4
Evening film screenings canceled for lack of an audience: 1
Spanish majors who chose me as their adviser for next year: 4
Percentage of them named Sara(h): 25%
Theses read: 4
Combined total pages of theses: approx. 433
Performances of Don Quijote involving shadow puppets and trapeze artists seen: 1
Faculty meetings: 3
Faculty meetings that ran over the 2 allotted hours: 3
Faculty meetings scheduled during key Tuesday primary contests: 3
Tears shed in my office: 0 (whoo-hoo!)
Total F'07-S'08 regalia wearings: 3
Academic years as Assistant Professor down: 1
Academic years as Assistant Professor to go: TBD

Diagnosis: Senioritis

The scene: a student wrapping up a 25-minute discussion of his final paper, due in one week
Where: Seated around a seminar table, in a classroom on campus
When: 5 minutes before the end of class on the Monday of the last week of classes
Who: a notorious senior, witnessed by five classmates and the professor

[Translated from the original Spanish by SJB]

Profa SJB: And, by the way, "fall in love" is English usage. It's "enamorarse" in Spanish.
student: Oh, really? "Caer enamorado" is all over my paper.
Profa: Right. So you should fix it before you turn it in.
student: Really? But it's already finished!
Profa: No, actually, it's not. That's why we've been doing this workshop. I highly recommend that you edit your paper taking into account what we've talked about in class today.
student: But there's so much to do this week... there's the Senior Cocktail party!

Bueno, bueno, bueno

What goes around really does come around: I'm teaching La familia de Pascual Duarte by Camilo José Cela in my Postwar Spain and the Novel course right now. I first read this book in Sr. Zintel's Spanish 5 class in high school, and remember being scandalized by the pig that eats little Mario's ears before he falls into a jug of olive oil, Lola and Pascual gettin' it on on Mario's grave, and Pascual shooting his dog in cold blood and later stalking and killing his mother, among other cheery moments.

I've read this book a couple of times since then, but it never fails to transport me right back to that second floor classroom of West High, where generations of necios would sing "Lola, la la la la Lola" (by the Kinks, although I didn't know that at the time) to Sr. Zintel's goofy-tied delight and mock-horror. SKBK (né SKB) and I would follow that up with a rousing round of the Police's "Sending out an Eso es," while dl004d and Leo countered with "Too legit, la tía Tula legit." Good times.

Anyway, now I get to be the one reveling in delight and mock-horror. Not a bad gig.

Gunn to Profs: Coiffe it!

According to Tim Gunn, swanky Project Runway fashion guru and once-frumpy academic at the design school Parsons, step one to being a well-dressed professor is combing your hair.

Sounds easy. Gunn also suggests, in this interview from the Chronicle of Higher Education, that elbow patches aren't that bad, the right pair of jeans can communicate that important hip prof look, and backpacks are soooooo undergrad.

The three most important sartorial elements for the put-together professor, according to Gunn? A jacket, a nice pair of shoes "that don't look like they were wearing them when they were 14 years old," and a watch.

That's all very well and good, but has Gunn ever heard of female professors?

Fall 2007 by the Numbers

Weeks in the semester: 14
Courses taught: 2
Total students: 24
Individual classes taught: 61
Oral presentations: 31
Oral presentations in which the presenters threw candy at the class as a motivational tool: 1
Essays graded: 92
Essay re-writes graded: 31
Final papers yet-to-be graded: 24
Movies shown: 5
Video projects created by students: 3
Catalan folk songs played: 1
Inopportune moments the photocopier broke down: 2
Packed lunches I was organized enough to bring to campus: 0
Lunches at the faculty dining hall: 28
Lunches at the faculty dining hall in which all the food was named after Red Sox-related minutia: 1
Free lunches attained at the faculty dining hall through frequent diner card: 1.91
Appearances at the Spanish Table: 1
Faculty meetings attended: 2
Faculty meetings canceled: 3
Faculty meetings almost skipped to see Bruce Springsteen: 1
Clandestine visits the dog paid to my office: 3
Number of times tears were shed in my office: 3
Emails or meetings I had with students who had missed class but wanted to prove that they'd still done the reading: 2
Times this happened at Berkeley: 0
Students with perfect attendance: 4
Combined absences of everyone else: 54.5
Hawks spotted outside my building: 1
Percentage of time I biked, drove and walked to campus (approx.): 32%, 59%, 9%
Department scandals averted, generally speaking: 2
Times I locked myself out of my office after hours: 1
Buildings on campus I can reliably identify: 21 of 89
College sporting events attended: .5
Times I was almost beaned by a puck: 1

TYPO

Last night I was TYPO'd by four of my students: with cash in their pockets from the Dean, students can Take (Your) Professor Out to dinner at a limited number of dining establishments close to campus. They are alloted $14 a head, no tipping over 15%.

Dining with four 21-year-old students at Panda East was a casual but raucous affair. They would not let me speak in Spanish -- this was decided before I arrived -- and they at times seemed to forget that I was there, spinning tales about stealing mascots and boozing it up with other faculty. Alternately, they were on their best behavior, asking me why I decided to become a Spanish professor and about my dissertation, and offering their thoughts on Brazilian movies and the experiences of studying abroad.

I learned many things: "baller" is apparently a new term for "cool" (as in 'That Prof. so-and-so is a real baller; he took his students to a bar at 2 in the afternoon!"); Smith and Mt. Holyoke girls are really smart, and being the only guy in a 40-woman course on Sexual Revolutions is tricky; one of my colleagues wrote a "spicy" autobiography, while another dated Bill Clinton (and also wrote a spicy autobiography); and don't count on undergrads to budget enough for a tip when they take you out for dinner.

Still, despite having to kick in $10, it was really sweet of them, and I'm hoping that maybe, just maybe, it will be an investment in my future cult of personality on campus.

Professor SJB: a baller, too?

Homework in action

A conversation in Amherst Coffee on Sunday became a very cool professor moment. I was asked if any of my students were there, and, scanning the room but not recognizing anyone, I replied that no, they were probably off in their dorm rooms doing all the homework I'd assigned, haha. My coffee companion's follow-up question: did I really assign a lot of homework for this weekend? Reconsidering my first answer I responded that no, I didn't really assig-- oh wait, that's right, my Barcelona class is starting a novel this weekend; they have the first 12 chapters to read, at which point I look up and out the window, and spotted one of my students sitting at an outdoor table, deeply immersed in said novel, pencil in hand, dictionary within reach. Synchronicity!

Professor discovers she's still human

A weekend jaunt to New York City has reminded me that life isn't all about add/drop, grammar review Fridays, are the students keeping track of how many times I've worn my red shoes this week, chastisements from the library for Interlibrary Loaning books already in the collection, finessing strong thesis statements, anarchosocialism in early 20th Century Barcelona, finding a seat in the Faculty Dining Hall, endless class planning, trying to remember the name of the woman from the Dean's office you've met five times, and reminding everyone that in Spanish class se habla español siempre.

It's also about the not-so-funny stand-up comedians who go on at 1am; $10 cocktails; $5 umbrellas appearing on every street corner two minutes after it starts to rain; steamy subway cars; roasted pork buns; Magnolia Bakery cupcakes; impromptu drinks with fabulous city dwellers; cockroaches; splitting a black and white cookie so that you both get half black and half white; remembering that one time, in that one bar, when we heard "Purple Rain," when was that?; hot corned beef sandwiches consisting only of meat and bread; wandering through the West Village recalling how fun it was to live there; H & H bagels in Central Park on a sunny Saturday morning; knishes in Riverside Park on a sunny Sunday morning; and shopping at somewhere other than Target for a change with someone who knows you well enough to get you to try on something you never would have picked out for yourself, but that -- of course -- looks awesome.