from digital to analog November 18, 2007
Posted by KC in writing.add a comment
A friend recently asked me for tips about keeping things “organized,” like how to capture information you come across daily so that you can find it later. I suggested some things like Backpack and Google Notebook, but it got me to thinking about my own move in recent months back to pen and paper as my primary organizational tools. I’ve spent my share of time and money on stuff like PDAs and organizational software, but I’m finding that I’m just more productive with a notebook and handwritten to-do list.
In this move, I was inspired by Bill Westerman, a previous “Big Palm Fan” who moved back to paper (check out his backstory here). Among other things, he writes that he “yearned to get back to scribbles, circles, arrows, and BIG FAT underlines when things were REALLY IMPORTANT.”
Of course, any system you could come up with will enable and constrain different practices. I used to value the sense of order imposed by technological tools, but now I think I prefer the freedom a blank piece of paper provides.
when students interview November 18, 2007
Posted by KC in teaching.add a comment
Since I teach a course in ethnographic writing, I find it necessary to give my students some practice in interviewing. In order to do this, I borrow a technique from k-ho called a “fishbowl interview,” in which students take turns interviewing me while everyone else observes.
This activity always makes me more nervous than any other day of class, mostly because I tell students that they can ask me anything they want. I set up a “context” for the interviews, such that they’re supposed to ask me things that help them understand our class as a subculture. But I’ve learned that some students, given the opportunity to grill their teacher, want to know way too much. I’ve been asked where I buy my clothes, whether I’m an “attention whore,” and which female body parts I prefer (asked in the crudest way you can imagine).
Of course, other students ask me great questions, like why I got into teaching in the first place, why I do the research I do, and why we do stuff like small group discussion in class.
To turn this ethnographic exercise back on itself, I think sometimes that the questions students ask me are glimpses into their own experience of school. I think it’s fair to say that professors and instructors are largely baffling to students, like black boxes in tweed. I always come away from these interviews with a renewed sense of the need at least to explain what we’re doing in class. Why am I putting you in small groups today? Why did we read this really dense, difficult essay? (That I seem to forget this lesson from semester to semester is probably a topic that deserves its own post.)
