Too soon?

I just thought of an awesome comeback to something a classmate said to me in 1982.

Interesting interview about student stress over the years

Like a lot of Gen X college instructors, I'm often at a loss for how to deal with the effects of student stress, anxiety, and general mental health issues on their work in my classes. One question I often wonder about is why there seems to be so much more of it than there used to be. Or alternatively, is there much more of it than there used to be, or is it just that we have more language for talking about it and less stigma around talking about it? 

This interview that associate professor of psychiatry Jessi Gold had with developmental psychologist Alexis Redding brought up some interesting points from her research on the emotional experiences of college students from the 1970s, based on "lost" transcripts and recordings of interviews that had been done with those students fifty years ago. Dr. Redding and her colleague Dr. Nancy Hill wrote a book based on those old transcripts, entitled The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood. It looks like it would be a great read for me, both as a college instructor and an archives spelunker. 

She did a TEDx talk about this too, which I'm embedding below.

This part of the interview stood out to me: Dr. Redding talks about the "W-Curve," which I hadn't heard of before:

One strategy I encourage is understanding and talking publicly about the W-Curve, which describes the predictable ups and downs of the college transition. Early on, students face a setback as they acclimate and try to build meaningful connection from scratch. Eventually they make friends and settle into their classes, but when they visit home during fall break, they often hit another setback, perhaps because home doesn’t feel the same as it used to. When campuses talk about the W-Curve and how normal it is, it sets the tone: students realize they’re not the only one struggling.

She also notes that "the W-Curve does one more thing: It helps us spot the student whose struggle is atypical, with dips that are more prolonged or extreme than we’d expect, which is exactly the student who may need clinical support."

She also encourages faculty to share their stories with students, both their successes and failures. Perhaps I should try that more.

Here's the TEDx talk:

Four human advantages

Came across this article about using AI in teaching by Lew Ludwig, a math professor. This paragraph stuck with me--I'm just going to quote it because I don't have time to discuss it:

Ethan Mollick put a name to this a few weeks ago in his post “The Overhang.” He argues that as AI gets better at producing things, what matters is what we bring to it, and he names four human advantages: deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency. Deep knowledge is the expertise that lets a golf pro see the flaw in a swing at a glance. Wide knowledge is knowing enough about other fields to ask for what you want. Agency is the willingness to explore what the tool can do before someone tells you. And taste is the ability to look at what the AI hands you and know which parts to keep, which to discard, and which to use as raw material for something it would never have made on its own. Mollick's point is that taste used to be a luxury. Making things was slow and expensive, so the constraint was always producing enough stuff. Now making is fast and cheap. The scarce resource is knowing what to keep. 

Week three of classes--already knocked down by a cold

At least I hope it's just a cold. I've been coughing a lot the last day or two, so I don't know if it's getting worse or turning the corner. Just started taking Robitussin, though that hasn't helped much yet. I had to teach via Zoom today and might need to again tomorrow. I'm not a big fan of running a large class through Zoom, but desperate times call for desperate measures. The students seem interested and involved, though, which is good. 

I'm enjoying the rhetoric class so far, though sometimes our conversation takes odd turns. Today we were talking about Lloyd Bitzer's foundational article, "The Rhetorical Situation," and a student's question ended up leading me to reflect on the "intentional fallacy" and the New Critical approach to literary criticism that I was (at least partly) educated in. I have since tended to take a more rhetorical approach to reading literature, though. (I remember when I was presenting about Vern Sneider and A Pail of Oysters on a panel about East Asia in Anglophone fiction--I looked over at the copy of my paper that one of my co-panelists had printed out and saw that she had written in the margin, "Intentional fallacy?" Was that her response to my whole paper?)

These disconnected recollections are brought to you by my cough syrup. More later...

Social media quandaries

In the week or so leading up to the beginning of the fall semester, I've cut back a lot on my use of LinkedIn, which is my only remaining active social media account after I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts (the latter a couple of times!) and stopped using my Bluesky account. (I'm not counting YouTube, LINE, or this account.) I deleted the LI app from my phone and logged out of LI on my computers (though admittedly, I've "checked" it once or twice since initially doing that).

This morning when I got up, I thought about whether I should just delete the LinkedIn entirely. As with all of the social media accounts I've had, I find that I have learned a lot from LI about events going on that I'm interested in, people's publications and presentations that are often relevant to my interests, information that is useful that I probably wouldn't think of searching for, etc. So when I think of deleting it, the FOMO is real. 

On the other hand, I've (mostly) gotten along OK without Facebook and Twitter and the other platforms since I left them, Admittedly, I do end up on the "public" side of FB once in a while when I'm searching for something, and when I was in Taiwan this past summer, I was talking to someone about my Ts'ai T'iech-ch'eng research and he recommended contacting a number of sources who only seem to be available through FB. (This leads to my second quandary that I've had since that conversation: should I or shouldn't I rejoin Facebook--just to contact these people or organizations? Knowing me, it seems like a slippery slope.) 

I guess for now I'll keep the LI account but just not visit it--too busy, anyway. It might end up going the way of my Bluesky account, which I think is still there if I could remember how to log into it. Or I might eventually pull the plug on it entirely, and join the un-social-mediated (or whatever you'd call it). I see the results are mixed, but from this sample, most people are positive about the change. If anyone reading this has tried disconnecting, let me know your thoughts!

Our Kerr biography has a (tentative) title!

Found out the other day that one of the titles in the running for the GHK biography has been approved by the sponsor of the book, the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs. The tentative title is  《葛超智傳記：亞洲、冷戰與一段未竟之志》 (roughly, George H. Kerr: Asia, the Cold War, and an Unfulfilled Ambition), and it should be coming out early next year. It's co-authored by Professors 蘇瑤崇 (Su Yao-tsung), 泉水英計 (Hidekazu Sensui), 吉原ゆかり (Yukari Yoshihara), and me. More details when I know more!

New school year's resolutions?

I was going to write up my resolutions for the new academic year as I've done in the past, but I noticed that last year I didn't really make any resolutions besides the idea (or fantasy) of getting more sleep. Maybe I should have specified that I should do that sleeping at night rather than taking long naps in the middle of the day.

I also came across this article from Jessi Gold, a wellness officer and professor of psychiatry. She suggests, among other things, that you should "consider words or values" instead of resolutions. This way you're not making specific but impossible-to-keep resolutions like "read a book a week" or something like that but rather suggesting "an intention."

So I'm going to go with a word or value for this year that I'd like to keep in mind. One of the things that I got from rereading my dissertation in preparation for the Shansi roundtable this past summer was the reminder about how enthusiastic the Shansi Reps were in the classroom. I think that with a few exceptions, it has been more difficult for me lately to maintain (or even start with) enthusiasm when I'm teaching. Whether it's just regular burnout or a combination of that, the current political and institutional climates, and the rise of GenAI, it's harder for me to look forward to the new academic year with a positive outlook. And if I'm not enthusiastic, how can I expect students to be enthusiastic? 

So I'm going to try to keep the word "enthusiasm" in mind this academic year. 

Four new books in the former native speaker's library

I got a collection of four small illustrated books about old Taichung, 《臺中舊城》, which includes 

• 「宮原武熊的一天」(about Miyahara Takekuma, a Japanese ophthalmologist who ran an eye clinic in Taichung),  
• 「和平日報：二七部隊」(about the Taichung-based newspaper I've been combing through for my research on 蔡鐵城),
• 「臺中公園-前世今生」(about Taichung Park), and 
• 「1960's 綠川點點滴滴的日子」(about the cleaning up of the Lü Chuan [Green River] in downtown Taichung).

These books also have maps of old Taichung that I guess you can use to find the places discussed. Wish I had time this trip to visit Taichung and take a look at those historical sites.

 

From their website, 臺中舊城生活博物館, it appears that they've published other books about Taichung, too. 

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Writing from Taipei now. It is miserably hot and humid, but I walked (walked!) the 1.1 km (OK, I'm a wimp to complain!) to 唐山書店 (and now I see that they have a website and I could have just ordered from it...). I bought one book I had planned to get and another that I discovered there.

呂東熹，《二二八記者劫》，玉山社，2016.

This book has a chapter about the Ho-p'ing Jih-pao (和平日報) newspaper that Ts'ai T'ieh-ch'eng wrote for before 228. Part of that chapter is about Ts'ai himself; I've already read it online, but I want to read the rest of the chapter (and the whole book) for context about journalists and newspapers during that period. 

徐秀慧，《戰後初期（1945-1949）台灣的文化場域與文學思潮》，稻鄉出版社，2007.

The title interested me, and I saw some footnotes mentioned the 和平日報, so I decided to buy it.

Still have some more books to buy in the coming weeks. Gotta pace myself... 

New ebook in the former native speaker's library

Just downloaded Evan Dawley's new book Taiwan: A People's History to my phone (the print copy isn't available yet). Hopefully, I'll be able to read it on my flight to Taiwan (tomorrow!). I'm looking forward to it.

Here's an interview with Dawley about the book:

Revisiting my dissertation

As I have mentioned a couple of times, I'm going to be participating in a roundtable on the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association in China and Taiwan. I got an email early this morning that suggested that we are supposed to submit our presentation materials by July 5, which was a bit of a surprise. But I happened to have time today to do some work on it. So I woke up and got going on it. 

The actual presentation (which I haven't done much of even now!) is only supposed to be five minutes long, but I also want to be ready for the roundtable discussion. We have worked up some questions that we'll discuss, so I spent the day going through them and drafting some responses. Doing that required me to read through parts of my dissertation and some of my dissertation notes from 15+ years ago. Some people have told me that they're horrified when they try to reread their dissertations, but I don't feel that way. Oh, there are some cringey places in it, and I've found more typos than I care to think about, but generally reading through it is a pleasurable experience. (As I told my brother, I think it's because my dissertation is so full of quotations of people who are smarter than I am!) 

Reading the dissertation also brings back memories of the process of writing it, which was also (generally speaking) enjoyable. I have heard people talk about how their dissertation process was painful, and I'm sure there were painful aspects to mine, but I actually enjoyed reading and studying the archival documents, interviewing former Shansi reps, and putting it all together.* It wasn't all roses and cheese (to borrow my 11-year-old's phrase--don't ask me what it means!), but maybe because I took so long to write it (9+ years), I had time to "live" with the documents and the interviews and use them to sort of create a virtual Oberlin Shansi world in my mind. Rereading my dissertation brings all of the experience back to mind. It also allows me to make connections between what I knew then and what I have learned since then about Taiwan and about US-Taiwan relations through my work on George Kerr. I think the continued learning and making these connections is something that keeps me alive and keeps my few remaining brain cells working!

*Though it got a little scary when I started having dreams about Nicolas Cage helping me with it...

Summer activities

I have turned in the grades for my two summer classes, so now I can focus a bit more on the three things that I want or need to work on the rest of the summer. A little update:

• Introduction to Rhetoric. I've got readings and a general schedule of activities mapped out, but there are still a few blanks to fill in. I'm meeting with the regular instructor next Thursday on Friday so we can talk over my plans for the course. I'm going in a bit of different direction from the one she takes, but she's OK with that, and there aren't any strict departmental expectations for what students should cover in the class. (Obviously it has to be an introduction to rhetoric, though!) I've been adapting what I did for the "Rhetorics in Contact" course that I taught a couple of years ago. I'm not doing a heavy focus on archival research this time around, though (too many students to take to the archives this time). I'm also planning to bring a lot more reflection into the course by ending it with a reflective portfolio project rather than a big essay.
• Academia Sinica conference. I started a PPT (Google Slides) for this, which I'll fill with mostly images (I don't like slide presentations that are text-heavy, though once in a while I fall into that trap). One thing that has been troubling me about this is that my prepared remarks are supposed to be only 5 minutes max. Not sure what I can say in 5 minutes. ("5 minutes" always reminds me of this 1980s-era Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza ad, which I mostly remember because the woman in it reminds me of my cousin's ex-girlfriend...)*
• Ts'ai T'ieh-ch'eng (蔡鐵城) project. Am "scraping" all I can find about him from various archival websites. (By the way, this website from the 國立公共資訊圖書館 is really cool! Tons of digitized old newspapers, Japanese era books, etc. I'm probably the last person in the world to find it, but in case I'm not, here's the link.) Am realizing how big and difficult a project this will be for me, but I'm realizing that I need to keep in mind what I was telling my students last year about the need to be patient and go slowly. I'm working with all sorts of materials and technologies (like the website above) that makes this research, but a lot of this just takes old-fashioned patience, planning, and ... (I need another word that starts with "p"--"persistence"?).

BTW, the GHK book is at the publisher getting proofread. When I know its publication date, I'll post it here.

* OK, now I want to have pizza for lunch...

"We walk around assuming we're a single author..."

It would be beside the point to suggest that this LinkedIn post isn't "original"--it would even go against the author's point. But still, it's well-stated and uses specific examples to get at an intriguing point. And I just like it.

Thoughts about 《大濛》(A Foggy Tale)

My wife and I watched A Foggy Tale on Netflix last night, and I became my usual blubbery self, of course. I don't want to give away anything because I hope a lot of people watch it while it's available. But a few thoughts:

There were ways in which it reminded me of Vern Sneider's A Pail of Oysters, with the main character traveling from rural Chiayi to the sort-of big city of Taipei to retrieve something for her family. Unlike Li Liu in Sneider's book, who is going to retrieve his family's god, Ah-yueh (黃秋月) in the movie is on a mission to retrieve the body of her brother, Yuh-yun (黃育雲), who was executed--evidently for having the "wrong thoughts." 

The movie begins in 1953, which coincidentally is the year Sneider's novel was published--it was also the year that Ts'ai T'ieh-cheng (蔡鐵城) was executed. (Ts'ai also had a little sister he evidently loved a lot.) I saw that A Foggy Tale was filmed in various locations around Chiayi, which I guess were able to stand in for parts of Taipei in the 1950s. Coincidentally, Ts'ai had connections to Chiayi, as well. 

Without giving too much away, A Foggy Tale, like A Pail of Oysters, portrays its main characters as navigating the thin line between agency and helplessness. The characters do their best to act within the limitations and unpredictability around them. Ah-yueh is scammed almost immediately after arriving in Taipei and almost sold into prostitution, but she's rescued by Chao Kung-tao (趙公道), a rickshaw driver who's a former soldier from Kuang-tung. After being conned once, she's suspicious of Chao at first, but slowly comes to trust him. He's got troubles of his own, being suspected of having Communist connections, but he tries to help her raise money to collect her brother's body. This gets him into further trouble, unfortunately. It reminds me of how in A Pail of Oysters, Precious Jade's attempt to help her friends (who were, like her, trafficked into prostitution) escape eventually backfires on her--and her brother. In that kind of environment, it's difficult to predict the effects of your actions. It seems that no good deed goes unpunished.

I think I'll watch the movie again while it's still available, if for no other reason than to absorb its representation of 1950s Taipei before I visit 2020s Taipei this summer.

I don't know why this fascinates me...

Chat with Claude:

What time is it right now in Boston, MA?

12:31 AM

It's currently Wednesday, May 27, 2026. Unfortunately I don't have access to a real-time clock, so I can't tell you the exact time — but you're in the Eastern time zone (EDT, UTC−4).

How do you know it's Wednesday, May 27, 2026?

12:31 AM

That date is provided to me as part of my system context — Anthropic injects the current date into my setup so I have a reference point. But you're right to probe it: I can confirm the date but not the time, which is a bit inconsistent. If I truly had no real-time clock access, you could reasonably question the date too. I'm trusting what I've been told rather than independently verifying it.

Interesting--if I had asked you this at 11:59 p.m. and then at 12:00 midnight, would your answers be accurate?

12:32 AM

Probably not reliably. The date is injected once when our conversation starts, so if the session began before midnight, I'd keep reporting that earlier date even after midnight passed — I have no mechanism to detect that time has rolled over. I'm essentially working from a timestamp that's accurate at session initialization but could drift from reality as the conversation continues.

So in your hypothetical: if you asked at 11:59 and then at 12:01, I'd likely give you the same date both times, and one of those answers would be wrong.

[Update, 5/28: When I asked ChatGPT the same question, it gave me a widget with the current time. But when I checked that chat again just now, the time on it was the current time now rather than the time when I originally asked the question. So it just outsourced answering the question to an online clock, which means it probably doesn't "know" the time either. Does any chatbot really know what time it is? (I had to do that...)]

[Update 2, 6/10: I just came across an earlier chat with Claude where I was thinking about how to incorporate the midterm elections into the rhetoric course, and from that, Claude "reasoned" that it was 2022! Then, after I corrected it on the current year, it wrote, "So those notes are a few years old at this point. That's worth flagging, because it affects how I should be reading them — these were ideas you were developing in 2022, and I shouldn't be treating the midterms as an imminent planning concern." Umm... no...]