Top post of 2021

Don't think this will change by the end of the day: I was amused (or is it bemused?) to see that the most-visited posting on this blog from 2021 was a one-word negation of the hope expressed on the last day of 2020 that I would be more hopeful about 2021 on the first day of the new year. I'm not going to link to that posting because I don't want to push up the hits more than necessary; you can just look for a one-word post.

Coming in a distant second, with less than a third the number of hits as Number One, was a posting from July about how to interpret supposedly graphically violent language in a speech by Xi Jinping. Not sure why that got more hits than the other stuff I posted. It's a big mystery. 

Anyway, I don't know what 2022 holds for us. I'm getting too jaded to be hopeful, though. I'm guessing it's more of the same or perhaps an accelerating downward spiral. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, though.

Jonathan Spence's acknowledgements page

When news of the death of China historian Jonathan Spence reached me yesterday, I immediately thought of the acknowledgements section of his massive 1990 book The Search for Modern China. 

It ends with what is to me a most memorable word of thanks:

This book was written, in just about equal parts, either in Yale's Cross Campus Library, or in Naples Pizza on Wall Street, New Haven. I would like to thank the entire staffs of those two admirable establishments for providing two complementary worlds in which to mull over, and then to pen, this record of the past four hundred years of China's history.

I visited Naples Pizza on a visit to Yale about twenty years ago and wondered where Professor Spence might have worked on his book. I imagine him sitting in a booth (though I can't remember if they had booths) "mull[ing] over" notes and documents as he literally "pen[ned]" his manuscript. For me, as for any writer or would-be writer, this image is both familiar and inspirational. Since reading that book in 1990, I have worked in a lot of eating establishments when writing my dissertation or other articles, though I have been neither as productive as Spence nor as faithful to one restaurant as he was. 

I wonder, too, what the staff of Naples Pizza thought of his thanks. It would be interesting to see in one of Spence's obits a quote from someone who worked there when he was frequenting the restaurant. Unfortunately, like Professor Spence, Naples Pizza (later known as Wall Street Pizza) is no longer with us.

[Update, 1/14/23: Just saw this on Twitter--it adds some good detail to what I wrote, like the facts that Spence wrote the book on legal pads and that the Naples restaurant staff called him "Johnny."]

Mary Louise Pratt on the relations of movers to "stayers"

Came across this seven-year-old talk by Mary Louise Pratt on "The Rough Guide to Geopolitics," about travel as relationship of people who are in place (the "stayers") with people who are displaced (the travelers or movers).

She takes this idea from a variety of perspectives. Maybe I can use this video in my travel writing class if I get to teach it again.

End of semester thoughts and questions

It's the end of the semester (grades were submitted yesterday), and I am thinking about how I'm going to teach my first-year writing (FYW) course next semester. I've got some ideas, based on this semester's events and on some related readings I did, for changing the grading scheme to a kind of contract grading approach that has been gaining popularity in the last decade or so. I more or less do contract grading anyway, at least in the sense that for major assignments, at least 50% of the grade is based on labor/process. This will take it even further, though, by making everything complete/incomplete, including final drafts of papers. To me, it's a logical outgrowth of my feeling that final drafts of papers--at least in a FYW course--should not be treated as some high-stakes product that should be weighted more heavily than the process that went into it. So I'm cool with trying out the contract grading approach for FYW and seeing how that goes.

The problem (as always) is in figuring out what to do in the class--whether to adapt stuff that I've done before or go in a really different direction (or in a different old direction). This semester I let students do research on their own topics that they developed in consultation with me. It was a diverse batch of topics, but very enlightening in some cases as to what is on the international students' minds. A sampling of topics written on this semester:

• Boston (public transportation and Chinatown)
• various aspects of social media and technology (pros and cons of social media, internet and online gaming addiction, VR, social media in advertising)
• climate change and the environment (the Brazilian Amazon, climate change and crop production, air pollution, animal extinction)
• politics, race and media (anti-Asian racism, multiculturalism in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hip hop and politics)
• mental and physical health (the uses of melatonin, factors influencing sleep, international students' mental health, Asperger Syndrome)
• various other topics (beauty standards across cultures, pet abandonment, online vs. traditional learning, and others) 

It's always a challenge to work with students on so many different topics, and though I learn a lot in the process about all kinds of things, the process was rather exhausting. So I was thinking, for next semester I might narrow the range of topics they can write on and use some common readings for the research so that I can help them more efficiently with issues such as source usage, critical reading strategies, and other issues.

But then in my course evaluations, I saw this sentence from a student: "He let us choose topics by ourselves which is very good in facilitating inclusive learning." So now I'm back to the drawing board. Fortunately, we don't start classes until January 18, so I have some time to think about this.