(US History post in progress–y’all said such thoughtful things, I figure it needs a thoughtful response. In the meantime, something else.)
I first started this by saying something like “is it completely unreasonable of me to not want to do business with people who can’t write an adequate or competent email?” but I changed my mind about that phrasing. I don’t actually think it’s that unreasonable, and I don’t see why I should pretend just for the sake of an empty rhetorical question.
But good lord, people, how hard is it to write a basic email? I’m not talking about being fussy with typos. I’m talking about a specific wedding-related vendor who I’ve been communicating with whose emails are just, gah, I mean really. She’ll write half a sentence (the middle half) all in caps, changing case mid-word. Punctuation is used irregularly, if at all, and line breaks appear at intervals that bear no relation to the ends of sentences. Much of the communication is sentence fragments and texting-abbreviations, and you know, I don’t actually care if she -is- sending all of this from her Blackberry, it’s still professional communication and I expect a baseline level of professional behavior. Oh, and on top of it, the email address she uses for this business communication is a goofy personal nickname.
At this point, I’m cringing whenever I see email from her in my inbox. This is not a feeling that is going to lead to my wanting to give her a large sum of money in exchange for her participation in my wedding. (And on top of that, she’s got a kind of hard-sell style, multiple emails that are all “you shd book asap, pls let me have yr cELL SO I CAN followupwith you”, which makes me even less interested.) No, this isn’t an automatic “no” and it’s probably not going to be the primary deciding factor, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a strong secondary factor.
And I kind of did think that I might be being unreasonable about not wanting to do business with someone who can’t write business emails, but then I realized that she’s the only one. I’ve been in email contact with a whole lot of different vendors in different fields (many of them in her field!) and she’s the only one that’s like this. It’s not like I’ve set my bar really high, you know? Maybe that’s a positive note to end on, then, that despite dire warnings about The End of Grammar As We Know It, my experience suggests that competent and professional writing isn’t actually dead yet. So that’s something.
Dan asked for a syllabus post, I believe, and who am I to say no? (I’ve mentioned before that teaching high school has made me much more cautious about what I say about my job, both for student privacy reasons and for general public-exposure reasons. But I’m not going to say anything here that I wouldn’t say to my students in the classroom, and in some cases I’ve already talked to them about some of this. I’m a big fan of transparency as regards educational objectives, etc.)
I’m teaching US History this year, for the first time. I have plenty of experience in US History, but this is the first time I’ve had to put together a full syllabus for a full survey course. It turns out to be something of a challenge. I’m in an easier position than I might otherwise be–I have a lot of support from my colleagues, I don’t have to navigate through a thicket of state standards, and my students are generally motivated and well-prepared. I also have the advantage of being a big geek about this kind of thing–I’ve been thinking about these issues (what’s important to know about US History, and why) for years.
Oh, but the challenges. The biggest one is that these kids only have one year of US History. I think it needs to be a two-year class, especially because a lot of these students haven’t ever had a real US survey before. They’ve had bits and pieces, and a lot of them have seen a decent amount of US history through a New York history class in middle school, but this is the only straightforward survey of US history that they’re going to get before college. (Not that I necessarily expect that they’ll take history in college. But they might!) I have one school year to teach them everything I think they really need to know about US history, while also teaching them about the structure and function of our government, and -also- continuing to develop core history skills. (Essay writing, argument structure, critical analysis of sources.) If I were Queen of the World, this would be a two-year course, with the end of Reconstruction as the breakpoint between the years. I am not yet Queen, though, so I have one year to work with.
One more thing: I really, really, really want to get past the Second World War. Part of why I think US is such an important class is that it helps us understand the country that we’re living in, but how much does it actually help if the kids never learn anything about the Cold War or Vietnam or counterculture or the Christian Coalition? Okay, fine, getting to the 1990s is extremely ambitious, but really, I should be able to get at least into the Cold War, right? That’s a totally reasonable goal.
Getting to that goal, though, requires winnowing. When I’m choosing what to cover and what not to cover, I keep asking myself, is this more important than the Vietnam War? Is this more important than mutually assured destruction? Is this more important than second-wave feminism? It’s so difficult because it’s essentially all subjective. Are the Intolerable Acts more important than the Kennedy assassination? Is the “slavery a positive good” argument more important than the Korean War? Is The Jungle more important than Watergate? I don’t think there are right answers, which is probably why every single teacher at my school teaches US a little differently, because we all answer these questions in different ways.
Before I talk about how I’m answering these questions, I’m curious what you guys think. Were there things that were included in your high school US History classes that you think could have been skipped? Were there things that weren’t included that you think you needed to know?
Dear Susan-on-12/31/99:
It’s going to get better. I remember being where you are–the boring and frustrating computer job, the sense of being trapped and stir-crazy, the growing suspicion that your friends don’t even like you, feeling most days like you don’t even like yourself. It’s going to get better. In a couple of months, UC Berkeley is going to accept you into that graduate program you applied to, and everything is going to change very quickly. By the end of the summer you’ll be living in California, in a lovely one-bedroom apartment with smooth dark wood floors and gorgeous airy light, an apartment you can only afford because it’s in such a bad neighborhood. You’ll live there for three years, and in those three years the garage in back will be burned down and your neighbor across the hall will be held up at gunpoint on your front steps, but you’ll also learn to grow houseplants in that gorgeous light, and you’ll be happy.
At Berkeley, they’ll teach you to be a historian, and you’ll love it. They won’t teach you to be a teacher, but you’ll figure that part out on your own, and you’ll love that too. It’s not all going to be good–you’ll be worried about money a lot, and you’ll spend a lot of time feeling like you aren’t good enough at what you do, but both of those are pretty normal for graduate students.
Before this year is done, you’ll have signed on as an editor with this new science fiction magazine. Being a science fiction editor is going to change your life as much as being a historian. Next spring, you’ll get talked into attending a science fiction convention in Wisconsin–you’re going to be suspicious, because that one time you went to Arisia it was so awful you swore to never go to another convention again, but that’s going to be awesome too.
Before this decade is done, you’ll have driven cross-country four times, and spent a total of seven weeks roaming around the middle of the country for other reasons. You’re going to make a lot of amazing friends. You’ll attend so many weddings that you lose count, and your friends are going to have some really awesome kids. The Red Sox are going to finally win the World Series, and then they’ll do it again. You’ll give up knitting and take up quilting, you’re going to get really into mystery novels, and you’re going to learn to make pie crust from scratch. It’s going to be a rough decade in a lot of ways–the next presidential election is going to be weirder than you can imagine, and that’s only the start of it. I don’t know that you’d believe the rest if I told you. On a more personal note, you’re going to lose both your grandmothers, and that’s going to hurt. But there’s going to be a lot more good than bad in the next ten years, at least in your life, and by the end of the decade you’re going to have a job you genuinely love. (Oh, and you’ll be living in New York. No, really.)
Everything’s about to change. Have fun. (Oh, and just so you know, that on-again-off-again boyfriend who you’re going to be so awful to at the Ossippee party tonight? In a couple of years he’s going to move to California for you, and in 2010 you’re going to marry him. I don’t know that he’ll ever stop teasing you for being so awful tonight.)
All my love, Susan-on-1/1/10
And, of course, the day that Matt and I decide to get back on track with weekday cooking, the pilot light has gone out on our stove. Or something that creates symptoms like the pilot light, namely, the oven does not get hot. The stovetop still works, but not the oven. I feel as though the universe is trying to tell me something, but why would the universe want to deprive me of yummy roasted root vegetables? I don’t understand.
——
The BBC has just posted a video of an octopus running along the ocean floor while carrying a coconut. It’s the most insane thing I’ve seen in a long time. (More insane than that creepy military robot-dog thing! Because this is nature, not engineering.) The accompanying article explains that this particular octopus population demonstrates tool-using behavior, turning these coconut shells into protective habitats. (They’re like hermit crabs! In coconut shells! Hermit octopi.) Nature is always weirder than you could have imagined. (No, really, go watch the running-octopus video. Weirder than you could have imagined.)
——
There’s a new initiative at my school, coming out of the guidance and counseling office, to try and help students (and faculty!) reduce stress. A number of faculty and staff went on a mind-body awareness retreat a month or so ago, one of my coworkers has been leading a faculty yoga class, and the students have started a yoga club. During tense periods this fall (midterm week, early-decision college application deadlines, etc.) a few teachers were having their kids do breathing or stretching exercises at the beginning or end of the class period. As much as I love doing yoga, I don’t feel that I’m temperamentally well-suited to leading a classroom full of teenagers in yoga exercises.
What I did instead, during crazy tense midterms week, was show all of my kids a cute video from ZooBorns. Spend a minute and a half watching a video of a baby sloth trying to climb out of a cardboard box (and falling asleep halfway through) and it’s hard to stay tense.
I’m not sure yet if “creepy yet awesome running octopus” works as effectively as “sleepy baby sloth”.
Monday morning, the alarm goes off at 5:10. I manage to get up pretty quickly, and spend a little while shuffling around the kitchen, washing dishes and making coffee. After showering and combing my hair and whatnot, I spent fifteen minutes or so blearily checking blogs and news and stuff, and then (once I’ve woken up enough) another twenty minutes or so writing comments on student homeworks. I’m dressed and out the door around seven, stopping to pick up some more coffee on the way. The drive to school is mostly uneventful, and I’m parked and in the door and at my desk at around a quarter to eight, which gives me almost forty-five minutes to finish prepping my morning classes. Monday mornings are always like this somehow–before I left on Friday, I thought I was all set for Monday morning, but when I show up at school there’s somehow all this other stuff that needs to be done.
So. First period is ninth-graders, part three of a four- or five-part set of lessons about the transatlantic slave trade, where we discuss the economics of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How did the slave trade turn a person into a commodity, and who profits as a result? Second period is AP World, where we’re looking at how Europe rebuilt both politically and socially after the Black Death. (Over the summer, my department head found a stack of classroom maps on world history topics, and I’ve been rotating them through the classroom when they seem appropriate. The map set feels kind of old-school, but can’t actually be that old, since they’re all in excellent condition. The “Mongol and Turkic Conquests” map from a few weeks ago was followed by the “Christendom and the Crusades” map, but as we’re moving into the early modern period I replaced the Crusades map with “The Peoples of Europe”, which is basically just a political map of Europe with over 30 different linguistic groups marked off by region. It feels almost gloriously useless, as maps go, but it’s very pretty.)
Third period, I’m back in the department office, sorting out my papers and finishing the last of my (now very cold) coffee before starting to make phone calls. Later this week, we have a day set aside for parents to come in and have conferences with their kids’ academic advisors, which makes this week a little more hectic than usual. I spend all of third period on the phone: responding to a few conference rescheduling requests, collecting information from my advisee’s teachers, giving information to other advisors, that kind of thing. (And somewhere in the middle of it, fielding a weird message from my mother, who had just come across a stack of my old high-school literary magazines and was demanding to know who I was in love with in tenth grade that had prompted me to write such sad things. I mean really.) Third period on the phone, fourth period split between answering emails (more advisor requests for information about how the kids in my classes are doing) and more class prep (among other things, trying to find a balance for my tenth-graders, in terms of how much they need to know about the Mexican-American War).
After that, it seems like the rest of the day slides by too quick to notice. Fifth period I eat lunch, down in the faculty cafeteria, and it’s nice to have a little break and talk with other teachers, although really all we talk about is the upcoming parent conferences, and anyway I leave a little early in the hopes of getting some more grading done. Sixth period is the “economics of slavery” lesson with a different class of ninth-graders, and once again I am surprised (as I am almost every day) how the exact same lesson plan can execute so very differently with different students. Seventh period I don’t teach, but instead have back-to-back meetings with students about various course-related issues, and eighth period is my tenth-grade US History class, where we combine Manifest Destiny and the aforementioned Mexican-American War material.
After school, I have a window of about ten minutes to enter my attendance for the day and answer a few time-sensitive emails, and then I’ve got a departmental meeting, where we’re discussing the paper assignments upcoming in some of our classes. Without going into too much detail about the meeting, I just want to say that I have wonderful coworkers. One of the many things I enjoy about my job is the frequency with which I get to have these great conversations, full of thoughtful and insightful points about both history and pedagogy.
Anyway. By four-fifteen or so I’m in the car and heading home, and traffic isn’t too bad today, so I’m back in Brooklyn before five. But then I remember a bunch of errands that need doing, and it ends up being more like six-fifteen that I’m finally back in my apartment. What with having been sick all weekend and not sleeping the night before, I’m exhausted, and once I’m in my house and sitting on the couch I suddenly realize that I’ve basically been running on borrowed energy all day. I get fifteen or twenty minutes of sitting floppily on the couch and being exhausted before I realize that I’m starving, and Matt suggests our cozy neighborhood Chinese place, which coincidentally is just across the street. We have a lovely dinner, but by the time we get home I’m basically done for the night–I have just enough brainpower to watch a little TV off the TiVo and poke half-heartedly at a computer game, which means I don’t in any way have enough brainpower to grade, or answer more email, or update for the first day of Holidailies.
The days aren’t all like this! And please understand that I don’t mean to complain. Every single thing I had to do on Monday was satisfying and enjoyable and a fully-justified part of my job. I love what I do, and this is all part of what I do. But I did miss the first day of Holidailies, and will undoubtedly miss more days of Holidailies, because while not -every- day is like this, a lot of them are. Some days just feel like I’m running the engine until the tank is empty.
The plan to cook more during the week is not going as well as I might have hoped. We have good weeks, where we cook dinner three nights a week, and we have bad weeks, where it’s restaurants and takeout every night. At the beginning of my school year, good weeks outnumbered bad weeks. By now, it’s all bad weeks. Excuses are just excuses–we’re not keeping up with grocery orders, we’ve both been fighting off colds (and in some cases succumbing), full work days are really tiring. Whatever. No matter how many excellent restaurants are nearby (and seriously, I have finally found Mexican food out here that’s up to my spoiled ex-California-resident tastes, which makes me happier than you can possibly imagine), I really like cooking, and I wish I was managing to do more of it on weeknights.
We are kind of making up for it, at least a little, on weekends. Thanksgiving weekend in particular was fabulous–we did family stuff on Thursday and Friday, but Saturday was a big cooking adventure. It started with the local farmer’s market. Ours runs year-round, but during the core winter months it’s pretty much just root vegetables and dairy. (I’m guessing on that, by the way. Once the snow and ice sets in, I’m a lot less willing to walk the ten blocks or so just to check out the farmer’s market.) We came away from there with apples, pears, carrots, leeks, potatoes, and onions. The next stop was the newly-opened Brooklyn Kitchen Labs, which absolutely lived up to the hype, and where we spent way too much money buying steaks for dinner. Grass-fed dry-aged beef, though, which came complete with cooking advice from the butcher.
Oh, hey, wait, I forgot something. The plan for dinner was pan-grilled steak with roasted vegetables, finished with apple-pear-ginger pie for dessert. Looking back at a distance of a whole week, I’m remembering the eventual feeling of victory, and almost forgot about the pie disaster.
I like making pie, and I think I’m pretty good at it, but I’ve always used store-bought pie crusts. Over the summer, I decided to learn how to make my own pie crust. I read a bunch of cookbooks, I bought a pie pan and a rolling pin, borrowed my mom’s old food processor, and set to. And my pie-crust attempt over the summer was a stunning success, so I figured I knew what I was doing! After we got back from food shopping, I started working on the pie crust. Flour, butter, a little sugar, a little salt, zipped together in the food processor, drizzled with some ice water, mashed into a ball and stuck in the refrigerator for a little bit. When it came time to roll it out into a crust, though, it became clear that whatever I had, it wasn’t dough. It was a dry and brittle mess of flour that sort of could be squished together but would never, under any circumstances, look or act like a pie crust. I have a couple of tentative theories as to what went wrong, but whatever the cause, the outcome was incredibly disappointing.
That was the only problem, though, in an otherwise amazing meal. And a really simple one–I bought Matt a really nice cast-iron skillet for his birthday last year, and with a good skillet like that, cooking an excellent steak is about the easiest thing in the world. The vegetables were easy, too, just rough-chop and toss in the roasting pan and wait for it to be awesome. The trickiest part was remembering to put the softer vegetables, the leek and garlic, into the pan after the onion and carrot and potato had already been cooking for half an hour. The pie thing even worked out okay; when I picked myself up enough to go out and buy some goddamned pie crust, so that my stupid dough failure wouldn’t prevent us from having dessert, I discovered that the Van Leeuwen ice cream truck was in the neighborhood, so we got to have amazing ice cream too.
There’s something just deeply satisfying about all of that. It’s not weekday cooking, at least not when you take into account the time spent wandering the neighborhood collecting ingredients, but it’s good happy cooking, which makes for good happy eating. I want to do more of that.
—
I also want to do more of this! So I signed up for Holidailies. We all know that there’s no way I’ll actually write every day, but maybe I’ll write more, even if it’s all food and book posts. (I have so much to say about both!) It doesn’t technically start until tomorrow, but consider this a down payment on a good-faith effort to come out of isolation!
You know that thing that happens sometimes, where you have something to tell someone, and for some reason you don’t do it right away, and then after a little bit of time has passed you start to feel like it’s weird to tell them -now-, because you should have told them last week? And then how that feeling just intensifies, so that it’s harder to say something because you haven’t already said something? And then you start to feel ridiculous because this is so clearly irrational and counterproductive behavior? And then you find that you can’t talk to anyone about -anything- because this thing is just -looming- over you?
Or maybe this only happens to me.
—–
In a totally unrelated announcement, Matt and I are getting married! We got engaged at the end of the summer, while on vacation. (On a cruise, actually. Sailing from New York to Canada, five days, with stops in St John and Halifax. Cruises are a little goofy, but there was something deeply appealing about the idea of spending five days at sea, with no phone or email contact. It was the most singularly relaxing vacation I’ve been on in years–pretty much all I did was read, play blackjack, sleep, watch for dolphins, and read some more. It was also a lovely setting for getting engaged; Matt proposed to me while we were sitting on the balcony of our stateroom, watching sunset over the ocean somewhere off the coast of New England.)
Answers to the major questions people have been asking when I tell them we’re engaged: No, we’re not already married, although I can see why one might have assumed that. My engagement ring is tanzanite and diamond, but mostly tanzanite, which I adore beyond all reason. Yes, my mother is thrilled. The wedding will be next August, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. And yes, I’m incredibly happy about all of this.
So there’s that! We now return to our regularly-scheduled program of radio silence and sporadic discussion of books. Except that I’ll probably talk wedding here occasionally as well. Hopefully not in a boring way!
I’ve been working on a post about the Strange Horizons fund drive, but the comprehensive and well-thought-out post I had in mind is going to have to wait until Monday, because today I’m just all squee-ful and excited.
This morning, the totally wonderful John Scalzi and his equally wonderful wife Krissy (see a picture of the happy couple here) announced that they’re matching donations made to the Strange Horizons fund drive today. If you kick some money our way between now and midnight PDT, John and Krissy will match it, up to a total of $500. Our website has information about how to donate. I’ll talk some more next week about why you should donate (in case you don’t already know how awesome Strange Horizons is, that is) but if you were already inclined to donate, today’s a great day to do so.
I’m back from the seminar, which was both excellent and exhausting. And I’ve got all these open tabs to close, so.
- We went on a trip to Mount Vernon, and I took a lot of pictures. Our trip to Mount Vernon was focused less on Washington-as-statesman and more on the experience of slave life on the plantation, so there are a lot of pictures of the slave quarters and the agricultural areas (and none of the interior of the manor house).
- One thing that came up at the seminar was that there are a lot of amazing resources online for teaching about the history of slavery in the Americas. One example: the Virginia Runaways database. It’s a collection of runaway slave ads from Virginia newspapers in the 1700s. (We looked at this one in class, which is interesting for the clothing details if nothing else.)
- On a different note entirely! I’ve been very impressed with the writing James Fallows has done about China (and very nearly assigned Postcards from Tomorrow Square to my AP World History students, except that we spend so little time on modern China). At the Aspen Ideas Conference, he did a session on China with Niall Ferguson, a prominent historian who has written a lot about the historical nature of empires. The full session has been posted online; I haven’t watched it yet, but based on Fallows’s own description of it, I’m really looking forward to watching. (I linked to Fallows’s blog post about the video, rather than the video itself, because the post also has links to his commentary on the session.)
- And, by the way, everyone should be reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog at the Atlantic Monthly, because he’s engaging and smart and awesome. Two posts in particular that caught my attention recently: “The Importance of Being Ivy League” and “The Girls Step Up to This“.
- This clip is… look, I get that the nature of twenty-four-hour cable news is such that you get a lot of people who are paid to just keep talking, which means they’re inevitably going to say something really dumb. But this seems to go above-and-beyond in terms of “dumb”.
I think that’s it for now.
Sunday morning, driving on I-95 somewhere in the middle of New Jersey, I passed an exit sign that indicated “Shore Points” and I was immediately struck with the powerful urge to take that exit, to head down the shore and spend the rest of my day at the beach or on the boardwalk, somewhere sun-soaked and crowded. Best I can figure, it was a perfect confluence of sense-memories; the wide blue sky through the windshield, the hum of the road under the car wheels, the green-and-white highway signs, the sun warming my arm through the driver’s side window. I could almost smell sunscreen in the car, and it felt like being in high school again, senior year and the summer after, when we’d all pile into cars and head down to spend the weekend in Point Pleasant. Eric’s mother had some investment properties down there, and kept a tiny apartment for herself, just two blocks from the beach, to stay at when she had to manage the rentals. We would fit seven, eight, maybe nine people into that one-bedroom apartment.
Driving part of that same route now is different than it was at seventeen, of course. I’m no longer terrified of the trucks on the parkway, I now drive a car that can accelerate even when the air conditioning is on. The biggest difference was the quiet–on Sunday, it was just me and the highway hum, plus a little bit of singing along with the radio. (”We play the songs you grew up with” might be my new favorite radio slogan.) In high school, the drive always involved too many people in not enough space, Jean and Devon bickering over control of the radio, and god help you all if Dennis got bored. Dennis was a professionally-trained singer, and when he got bored in the car he liked to play what he called “The Dennis Gets Louder and Louder Game,” which consisted mainly of using that professionally-trained voice of his as a vicious weapon.
Memory is tricky, especially at a distance of fifteen years or so. I remember the shore trips most clearly through the driving–I think I drove a lot of the time, because I had a regular-sized car (unlike Eric’s pickup truck, which could only take one-and-a-half passengers, really) and because, while I probably wasn’t a great driver, I wasn’t a -bad- driver (unlike, say, Dave, best known for coming to a -dead stop- on the freaking -Parkway- because he thought he’d missed an exit). I remember the long mornings, sitting around in the wee living room in the apartment, all of us listlessly flipping through fashion magazines while we waited for the morning shower rotation to work its way to the end. I remember waking up before everyone else one morning, having instant coffee and cinnamon red-hots for breakfast and watching my friends sleep. And I remember all the sunscreen-and-salt-water smells, but somehow I don’t actually remember ever being at the beach, or even the boardwalk, although I do think I remember Eric almost getting into a fight out at Seaside one night because he was a little too loud making fun of some over-hairsprayed girl near the haunted house.
You can’t ever go back again, right? It’s all Heraclitus, that it’s never the same river (and never the same you). I haven’t seen some of those friends in over ten years, and the ones I’m still in touch with are scattered all over the country. And anyway, I’m years past being satisfied with sleeping six-to-a-floor just to be close to the beach, and years past the age where Seaside Heights still has any real charm. (Sorry, Seaside.) But just for that one moment, it was all a gorgeous sunshiny haze.
#
In any event: if not heading for the shore on that lovely Sunday morning, what purpose in the drive? I was on my way to Maryland, where I’ll be for the whole week, attending a Gilder Lehrman Institute seminar on the history of slavery in North America. Full title of said seminar being “North American Slavery in a Comparative Perspective”, which makes this useful material for all three of the classes I’ll be teaching next year. How did slavery in the New World compare to slavery in the Old World; how did Anglo American slavery compare to Iberian American; how did slavery in New England compare to that in the Chesapeake, or lowland South Carolina, or the Mississippi Delta; how did North American slavery change (or not change) from 1620 to 1860; and so forth.
I’ve been telling people that it’s like going back to grad school for a week, and in many ways that’s true–we have assigned reading, and homework to complete by Thursday evening, and a lot of intense (and occasionaly tense!) seminar discussions. But wait, there’s more! Tomorrow we’re going on a trip to Mount Vernon, to see how George Washington’s slaves lived and worked, and later in the week we’re taking a day trip out to the Eastern Shore to visit the plantation where Frederick Douglass spent his early years. I’ll try to remember to post some pictures for y’all.
Recent Comments