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Yesterday I sent an article off to a journal for consideration. Now that’s complete, I have sadly vowed not to open up fascinating research file folder in hopes of writing the next article in very different subject area.

No, I’m going to be good and work on my Kzoo paper (which has nothing to do with rabbits, alas, but is giving me as many headaches as poor NK describes). Once that’s done, I can get back to playing with my Norsemaniacs.

To be honest, once I lay out my sources, I’ll probably feel the excitement over this topic. I just need a couple of quiet hours on Monday to set up the structure of the analysis, start pulling specific references into the paper file and then it’ll be good to go.

• one student essay proposal (graded, happily, but now not to be found — I only hope someone picked up two by mistake)
• a very cool earring (presumably when I was out shoveling snow)
• my sanity (promise me that the marking will be over soon!)

Not students, but subjects. I’m closing the term soon on the second half of Western Civ (French Revolution to the present). The last time I taught this was January 2004. I don’t expect to teach it again anytime soon. In fact, I’m rather bemused to have been teaching it this year since, if we want to talk about who’s the farthest from a modern history expert in the department, that’d be me, thankyouverymuch. (But it’s fun to teach because of the whole “busman’s holiday” aspect of the period.) I’m always finding something new to teach, however, so the powerpoint files from my last offering are entirely revised for this outing. A few anecdotes slip in every offering, but I’m incorporating new information and arguments that, at least from my perspective, revolutionize the class.

Next January I’ll be teaching a course in women’s history that I haven’t taught since I was pregnant with eldest. She’ll be making her picks for high school when I’m teaching that course again. Scary, no? At that point, it’s really a new prep because I’m looking for new texts (currently considering Women and Gender in the Western Past ), new topics and new approaches to the material coming out of my research and readings in the intervening years. I know that I’m going to be able to do a lot more with religion and the history of the household than I managed the last time I tackled this subject area.

Ironically, even the courses I last taught in 2006-7 and that are back on the books for 08-9 will change a great deal. I’ll often trash three quarters of the old reading list for these seminars in close rotation (currently every other year but moving to a once-in-three-years rotation). This term’s Life-Cycle seminar really sparked with the addition of Alexandra Shepard’s excellent Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England to our reading list. Next year’s Tudor and Stuart Britain seminars will probably feature entirely new reading lists (except for my opening seminar in Tudor which I sentimentally reserve for Edmund Dudley’s Tree of Commonwealth which I’ve transcribed and annotated for student use). I just have to carve out the time to figure out exactly what’ll be featured.

How do you tackle repeat courses? How do you keep from going nuts with subjects in regular rotation? How do you revive an old course that’s long been forgotten?

I celebrated by not logging into my university email. It’s an official holiday (and the start of our four-day-weekend, so let the worries wait until tomorrow.

Today in Western Civ we talked about totalitarianism and the Depression. And I mean we talked.

Usually, in this class, the students talk extensively at the outset of class (responding to a discussion question I set in the syllabus). Maybe they’ll offer a few more comments as the class wears on and usually I’ll field several questions before our time is up. Today’s opening question was about the appeal of fascism, which provoked the usual amount of lively and varied comments.

When we moved on to the discuss the events leading up to and the worldwide experience of the Depression, at first? You could’ve heard a pin drop. They were riveted. And then the hands popped up. Comments and questions poured out. Analogies to what they’re seeing in the news today were inescapable. One student brought up the rate of foreclosures. Another fretted about the soaring price of gold.

In all my years of teaching, the Great Depression has never seemed so real as it did today and not only for me.

Apparently, Germany kept an interesting relic from Nazi times until this century, criminializing one’s use of the title, Dr., for an academic degree if it was granted outside of Germany. (In the 1930s, the law was firstly used to punish those who left Germany, including many prominent academic exiles, but I think it also perfectly illustrates a strong historical attitude amongst German academics towards those from elsewhere, to wit, that anyone else’s doctorates weren’t as good as German doctorates.)

In 2001, Germany finally legalized the use of the title “Doctor” for people who’d taken their doctorate at EU institutions. But, apparently, last year, some legalistically-minded crackpot noticed that American Ph.D.s at the Max Planck Institute were *gasp* calling themselves “Dr. So-and-so”. These complaints inspired the police to summon the offending academics in for interrogation and a surprising introduction to the rules that even their German-educated peers hadn’t know: they should title themselves “First Name Last Name, Ph.D. (Doctoral Institution).”

Belatedly, the German government’s decided to permit some American Ph.D.s to use the title “Doctor” but only those who took their doctorate at American institutions on the Carnegie List.

Still waiting are not only a host of other graduates, but, as the Cultural Ministry noted in its recent press release, Regelung der Führung ausländischer Doktorgrade:

Das Sekretariat der Kultusministerkonferenz wird beauftragt, hinsichtlich der Staaten, bei denen der Doktor-Titel ohne fachlichen Zusatz, jedoch mit Herkunftsbezeichnung geführt werden muss (Australien, Israel, Japan, Kanada, Russland), eine Liste von Hochschulen vorzulegen, bei denen analog verfahren werden kann.

So, until they get around to creating a list for Canadian doctoral-granting institutions they wish to recognize in Germany, I’ll be giving the thought of any visits to the ol’ homeland a miss. At least as long as I have my business cards in my purse!

I’m free of marking until 12:30 tomorrow. Whee! Wheeeeee!

My DIY abilities are not so great as to recreate this gem but you can join the admiring throngs virtually clustered around an Etch A Sketch Clock (Digital, obviously).

This would have made today’s asinine “Spring Forward” into Daylight Savings Time a lot more bearable, let me tell you.

If you’re feeling all nostalgic now, take a trot on over to Etchy to do some virtual etch-a-sketching yourself.

Apparently, I’m some kind of doofus to keep seeking to hammer out another article or conference paper when, according to one Mark Bauerlein, I should “stop pushing myself” and, if you’re also an academic, so should you!

But if we look at tenured professors in the humanities and in many other disciplines, it seems to me that much of the work they do is entirely self-generated. The conference papers that have to be written, the scholarly articles they want to complete, the book projects that hang over them . . . these are not required. They are elective. Yes, they can enhance a career, extend a CV, or even contribute to the historical record—sometimes. But the fact is that the degree to which the vast majority of conference papers and articles in the humanities effectively change the working conditions of professors doesn’t come close to justifying the number of hours they spend on the projects.

New Kid does a good job highlighting the breath-taking privilege behind that remark. Michael Bérubé (whom I ♥ in a totally academic sense) also illuminates the hypocrisy and contradiction in Bauerlein’s stance.

Me? I’m making notes as I read another article, trying to get a jump-start on my next pointless, non-contributory research project. Silly me!

One of my father’s favourite stories revolves around the disconnect between detailed theory and practice. The engineer had a young son who one day asked his father to explain how a refrigerator worked. The proud papa went into a detailed discussion of compressors and cooling technology while the young boy’s eyes glazed over. Finally, his mother walked by and said, “You plug it in.” Satisfied, the child thanked his mom and ran off.

The moral? Sometime people just want to know how to get things done. Read more »