Tag: Foundations

Welcome, Once Again, to Elliott RWI

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It’s been quite a while since I last updated my landing page, and a fair number of things have changed since then. More details are in my bio, linked below, and something of a table of contents for this webspace appears, well, right down there, too:

So you know what you’re getting…
Image is mine, severally.

I’m happy to take commissions for various kinds of writing and related work. Some more detailed information about the kinds of things I can do is here, but I’m happy to confer with you about your needs via the form below. And I am always happy to accept your generous support.

Proud member of Freelancers Union

Reflective Comments about the Sixth Year

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It has been six years since the first post to this webspace went up, six years that I have been working on Elliott RWI. As I write this, I have published 1,057 posts to the blogroll (this will be post 1,058), and I have revised individual pages, collecting 40,752 views from 15,872 visitors as of this writing. In the last year, therefore, I have made 155 posts and collected 14,822 views from 5,361 visitors (based on “Reflective Comments about the Fifth Year”). Performance is markedly up from last year (see the figures below), which I ascribe to the influence of the novel coronavirus and my own continued shameless self-promotion.

Figure 1 is posts per year by year of blogging.

Figure 6.1

Figure 2 is views per year by year of blogging.

Figure 6.2

Figure 3 is visitors per year by year of blogging.

Figure 6.3

I am pleased to be able to continue doing this kind of work, and I look forward not only to another year of it, but many other years of it. I hope I can count on your help to do that work; I’d appreciate you sending a little bit my way here.

Reflective Comments about the Fifth Year

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It has been just over five years since the first post to this webspace went up, five years that I have been working on Elliott RWI. As I write this, I have published 902 posts to the blogroll (this will be post 903), and I have posted many individual pages, collecting 25,930 views from 10,511 visitors as of this writing. In the last year, therefore, I have made 155 posts and collected 4,881 views from 2,398 visitors (based on “Reflective Comments about the Fourth Year”). Performance seems to be slightly up from last year and continues the general upward trend in my blog’s performance (see the figures below), which I ascribe to continued regular posting and integrating images into most of my online writing. I do note, however, that I had fewer unique visitors–but they seem to be looking at more things when they come by.

Figure 1 is posts per year by year of blogging.

Posts per Year of Blogging, Year 5

Figure 2 is views per year by year of blogging.

Views per Year of Blogging, Year 5

Figure 3 is visitors per year by year of blogging.

Visitors per Year of Blogging, Year 5

I am pleased to be able to continue doing this kind of work, and I look forward not only to another year of it, but many other years of it. I hope I can count on your help to do that work; I’d appreciate you sending a little bit my way here.

Reflective Comments about the Fourth Year

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It has been four years since the first post to this webspace went up, four years that I have been working on Elliott RWI. As I write this, I have made 747 posts to the blogroll (this will be post 748), and I have posted many individual pages, collecting 21049 views from 8113 visitors. In the last year, therefore, I have made 151 posts and collected 3638 views from 2560 visitors (based on “Reflective Comments about the Third Year”). Performance seems to be up from last year (see the figures below), which I ascribe to more regular posting and work to integrate images into more of my online writing.

Figure 1 is posts per year by year of blogging.

Fig1

Figure 2 is views per year by year of blogging.

Fig2

Figure 3 is visitors per year by year of blogging.

Fig3

I am pleased to be able to continue doing this kind of work, and I look forward not only to another year of it, but many other years of it. I hope I can count on your help to do that work; I’d appreciate you sending a little bit my way here.

Reflective Comments about the Third Year

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It has been three years since the first post to this webspace went up, three years that I have been working on Elliott RWI. As I write this, I have made 596 posts to the blogroll (this will be post 597), and I have posted many individual pages, collecting 17,411 views from 5,463 visitors. In the last year, therefore, I have made 121 posts and collected 1,774 views from 1,065 visitors (based on “Reflective Comments about the Second Year”). Performance seems to be down from last year (see the figures below), which I ascribe to teaching less; I have the sense that most of my viewership was students needing homework help, and I don’t have nearly so many of those at this point as I once did. I feel better about the quality of my work, though, so that much is to the good.

Posts per Year 2018
Figure 1: Posts per Year

Views per Year 2018
Figure 2: Views per Year

Visitors per Year 2018
Figure 3: Visitors per Year

My employment situation seems to have stabilized. I still work as contingent faculty, teaching classes at DeVry University in San Antonio as they are offered to me. Most of my working time is spent at the Hill Country Council on Alcohol & Drug Abuse, Inc., however, where I am a member of the full-time staff. It is a decent enough job, and one I am fortunate to have; I certainly had to struggle through enough to land it.

I also continue to work on my writing, as this webspace and others attest. Work on the Tales after Tolkien Society blog still presses on, and I get the occasional more formal piece put out where others can see it.

Contributions remain welcome and may be made here.

Since I Have It to Do Again–For at least One It…

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Not too long ago, I made a post to this webspace in which I noted the perils of “If I had it to do again” and laid out what I might do if ever I did. Also not too long ago, I made a post noting that I received another teaching assignment from the small bit of academe in which I remain. As I thought about the latter, the former came to mind, and, since I have it to do again in at least one small area, I figured I ought to give some thought to how I would do it.

Now, for some context: the class that I was assigned is a second-semester composition class. Students enrolled in it are supposed to have completed the first-semester class, so they should have some introduction both to the college environment and to how college-level writing (a term which is nebulous at best) or academic writing works. The second-semester class is supposed to build upon that introduction, traditionally culminating in a conference-length paper (i.e., eight to ten pages of double-spaced, 12-point text, or some 2,600 to 3,250 words, plus references). At the school where I am assigned the class, the paper emerges from a series of assignments that center around a set of general topics from which the students are asked to select one–and therein lies the problem.

The issue is not necessarily in the assignment sequence itself. While it could be improved upon (as everything can), it is reasonable and seems to work decently. What the issue is is the selection of topics. For one, they are too broad, requiring students to do more work to narrow their focus than most who sit for the class are equipped to do–even with explicit, targeted coaching and prompting. For another, they are supposed “high interest” topics such as dieting and gun control, topics which have been exhaustively detailed and on which no real progress in discussion has been made in the United States that I have seen. Worse, they are topics with which most of my students–adults who already have formed and largely set opinions–do not engage with, having little stake in them. They end up parroting media talking points rather than actually generating new thoughts and trying to create new knowledge, largely because they do not feel they are in a position to do so.

Because the topics are promulgated by the school as standards, I shall continue to accept them, of course. I can hardly not. But what I will do, since I do have it to do again, is suggest to my students, strongly, that they take up an alternative topic, one in which they have some investment and engagement–and one with which I have had success with students in the past (such as here). In effect, I will ask my students to look at their curricula, identify one major change that needs to be made, and argue why that change is the change that needs to be made. As such, the students will have a topic with which they have direct involvement, which is a motivating factor; they will have a narrow topic, which allows for detailed work and more sustained argument; and they will have a directly discernible audience, which will allow both for analysis of that audience and more effective address thereof.

I’ll be working up materials in more detail, of course, but I know that the students will have easy recourse to primary source material (their own course catalogs and other schools’), secondary source materials (the contents of ERIC come to mind, as does the Occupational Outlook Handbook, particularly since most or all of my students seek their degrees specifically for job prospects and career advancement), and tertiary/critical sources (namely accreditation requirements and theories of education both academic and popular). And I know that at least one student will argue that the composition course requirements should be lightened or eliminated–there always is at least one–and I have a wealth of information about that particular line of inquiry for reasons that I think are obvious.

Not many people get the chance to do things again, I know. I have been lucky in that I have been given the opportunity, and more than once. (I am less lucky in that I have also blown it more than once, but that’s another matter, entirely.) I mean to seize upon this opportunity; I hope that it will lead to a good end.

Reflective Comments about the Second Year

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It has been two years since the first post to this webspace went up, two years that I have been working on Elliott RWI. As I write this, I have made 475 posts to the blogroll (this will be post 476), and I have posted many individual pages, collecting 15637 views from 4398 visitors. In the last year, therefore, I have made 311 posts and collected 3043 views from 1315 visitors (based on “Reflective Comments about the First Year“).

My employment situation continues to be odd. While I still teach, I do much less of it in the classroom now than I have done, and I am working mostly outside academia for reasons I have discussed previously. I do still remain engaged in some scholarship, though, having recently sent off an article for review and pressing on, albeit only haltingly and with difficulty, with the Tales after Tolkien Society.

I have also tried my hand at creative writing, notably in the Points of Departure and Pronghorn Project lines. They seem to have been decently received, but my employment situation has kept me from doing more with them for a while. Whether I’ll return to them or go on to other subjects entirely, I am not sure. Still, the experience has been good; I am glad to have had it.

Donations remain welcome and may be made here.

The State of the Pronghorn Project

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At this point, I’ve been working on what I’m calling the Pronghorn Project for about two months, with posts going up at 6 in the morning (my time; I’m in US Central) each weekday. Readership has been fairly decent, although I would, of course, like to have more. As a way to get some of that “more,” as well as to disentangle the Pronghorn postings from some others that I push out each morning from another website, I think I’ll be shifting to having Pronghorn Project Posts pop up at noon, moving them to lunch from breakfast. Some of the social media work I have been doing suggests that that is a better time to have things go up, anyway.

So, starting tomorrow (1 March 2017), Pronghorn Project posts will go up at noon. They will still go up in the accustomed location, so nothing will move other than the time, so far as Asa Pemewan and the folks he interacts with are concerned. I hope you’ll still read along–and tell your friends. I think they’d like it, too!

More about the New Feature

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As I note in yesterday’s post, I am looking for ways to supplement my income stream, and since I already do a fair bit of writing, it makes sense that I would try to do so with the writing. I am still looking at Patreon–I am mindful of my good friend’s advice–but, in the meantime, I figure that I can continue to use the donation buttons I have long had (an example of which appears below; contributions are welcome). I know that they work, and I am happy to accept what others offer freely.

Donate Button with Credit Cards

The thing is that I have several ideas for what to address. I can, for example, follow the pattern I have in another webspace I maintain–the one that prompted my friend’s comment–and compose a cycle of poetry in these posts. (Indeed, I have one in progress already that might well serve.) I could also use this space to work on an idea I have long had, one detailing the workings of the large town or small city of Pronghorn.

Other ideas are possible, to be sure, and I have no doubt that I will pursue them now and again. For now, though, I will have to give the matter some more thought…

Comments on “Why All Humanists Should Go to Prison”

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Alex Tipei, in a 25 September 2016 Chronicle of Higher Education piece, “Why All Humanists Should Go to Prison,” relates experience as a volunteer instructor in Indiana Women’s Prison. She notes that having done so forced a critical reevaluation of her classroom methods, given both the divergence in physical circumstances between teaching inmates and teaching typical undergraduates and the systematic, structural similarities between the institutions of incarceration and higher education. For her, the experience of teaching in a prison–something she claims ought to be done by far more people than currently do it–helps to reaffirm at least one mission of the liberal arts in the wider world: the development of fuller, better-rounded, more humane people.

The clickbait tile of the piece is somewhat misleading, to be sure. Perhaps I have done too much reading in some less happy parts of the internet or attended too closely to the complaints made by no few people in the broader society of the United States, but the idea of punishing in one way or another those who study the humanities–and by some other means than the already-abundant social disdain and too-low pay–is something that I have seen voiced, and I found myself worried when my Twitter feed (yes, I am on Twitter: @GBElliottPhD) showed me that the Chronicle of Higher Education had run an article with the title. (Indeed, the clickbait worked; a carp, I rose to the bait and was hooked.) I am happy to have followed along, but I could wish not to see such misdirection at work in the publication.

Tipei makes a compelling case for the value of teaching in prisons, although I do have to wonder at the influences of the particular populations taught upon what revelations she distills from her experience. (That circumstances determine much is obvious. What those circumstances are is perhaps less so; I am not expert on the inmate population of the facility discussed, so I cannot speak to them. Perhaps some explication thereof would have helped.) I have to question whether such insights as emerge would have come from different populations–although my own experiences teaching those formerly on the inside says that they might well have, for certain instructors and in certain tenures of instruction. But I do not question the central view of the piece, that reaffirming the value of traditional instructional modes–lecture and discussion–and reminding those of us who teach the academic humanities that our goal is not so much to contribute to the digitally-enhanced (and, yes, I am aware of the irony of making such a comment in a digital medium) career readiness of our students as it is to help them become the kinds of people who can improve the world–empathetic builders of a more just and equitable world than we now have rather than more efficient technicians ready to be replaced by the next set of them to graduate under crushing debt loads, slowly being pushed into some new social stratum that we have yet to fully understand.

I am sure that there are other implications to tease out of Tipei’s piece. I may return to them in time; others might pursue them in the short term. But all of us can take something from the text–and I will see about putting what I get from the piece to use in my own institutions, whatever their sort.