worried? or just plain paranoid?

My students' first blogging assignment is simply to create their blog. The assignment is now posted. I'm hoping it is not too rudimentary, but of my sixty students only around three or four of them have ever blogged before.

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Today at the end of class I was talking to a student about blogging, while the next class was coming in (not sure what class it was). The instructor overheard me and asked if I am using the new blogging feature in Blackboard. I told him no, that we're using wordpress. He proceeded to tell me a bit about the new BB feature. I told him that I am familiar with it, and that it is "quite nice." Why did I say that? I don't think it's "quite nice." I think it limits student creativity and that the money could be better spent elsewhere. Finally I said to him, in barely a whisper, that I'm opposed to Blackboard/proprietary software in general. I whispered as if I have to keep my class plans and pedagogical philosophies on the "down-low." But when I read things like this, I can't help but worry. I mean I've never received explicit instructions from CSR to use only their server/software, but then again it just seems to be assumed that EVERYONE at CSR uses BB. The entire campus community uses it to communicate. Using BB has just become so naturalized. It's frustrating. And it's ridiculous to feel like I need to sneak around to give my students an open source model of education and to simply give them some amount of creative control over their blogs (which BB gives them none).

first day of school

Not a lot to report. Completed one (of three) section of ENG105. My first time teaching in a computer lab, but I'm excited about adding technology to my courses, so it makes sense to have this kind of access. I asked the students to indicate on their questionnaires if they blog--only two out of twenty do, so for most of them this will be an entirely new experience.

I've already caught the start-of-semester-cold, which made it rough to talk at length today, but with three-quarters of the class new to college, I wanted to be particularly thorough in my explanation(s).

I still think wordpress was a solid choice for student blogging, but I'm having my own difficulties with it in that it won't really allow me use code or HTML of any sort. It will only allow me to modify and create using its tools, so I'm having trouble embedding google calendar into my sidebar. I've created the class schedule for the year at google calendar so that they'll have an online version that they can access. For now I've provided links on a separate page. I also need to figure out the best way of posting PDF files.

On Wednesday and Thursday I'll be assigning the students to set-up their wordpress blogs, so I'll have more of an update then.

Tonight it is all exhaustion...and it is deceivingly hot outside, but still I have Dar Williams' "End of the Summer" in my head. It seems that every year at this time I walk around humming this song to myself (hopefully just myself):

The summer ends and we wonder where we are
And there you go, my friends, with your boxes in your car
And you both look so young
And last night was hard, you said
You packed up every room
And then you cried and went to bed
But today you closed the door and said
"We have to get a move on.
It's just that time of year when we push ourselves ahead,
We push ourselves ahead."

triage

I guess I am in what could be described as triage mode in terms of studying for exams. I've tossed the strict text/day study shedules and now keep referring to this map, which I keep playing with, altering, updating, etc. I am using it as a "kind of" outline to writing the second and third chapter sections of my prospectus--trying to ensure that I adequatetly provide the history of critical pedaogy and the connections between critical pedaogy and composition that will be crucial for my dissertation. I'm also using it as a guide to the texts that I need to quickly review, read through, harvest quotes from, etc.

For this revision/studying/review task I am also using a combination of what my friend Tara has dubbed "Tasks Not Time" and the use of an alarm/timer to take breaks that don't extend into long projects. 43folders has suggested this life hack called (10+2)*5. It has seemingly worked for many folk, but for me it is a little too ADHD/manic for me...or at least for this particular task. I can't possibly work on writing my prospectus in ten minutes increments and expect to produce break-through thoughts and any amount of sustained, serious inquiry, so instead I implement Tara's "TNT." I'm sure she could explain it better, but essentially it involves covering up the clock and focusing on the task at hand, getting in the "zone," and spending a seemingly unknown amount of time working on that. As I start to get tired, I set a last minute goal for myself (this is my addition to TNT)--something like getting a particular thought down on paper or reading one more paragraph or page. Then I allow myself my "break." This is where the ever-helpful timer comes in. In fact, I downloaded Pester, which has proved invaluable. My "breaks" involve still working, but not working on my prospectus--so I might deal with email for ten minutes or blog (as I'm doing now).

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Updated "map":

Exercise in mapping and classifying:

Lineage of Cultural Studies: Hoggart – Williams – (rereadings of/with/through Gramsci and Althusser) – Hall (slightly more marginal figures: Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Angela McRobbie, Jorge Larrain, Stanley Aronowitz)

Compositionists working with Cultural Studies: James Berlin, Richard Ohmann (kinda), Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Alan France, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Bruce Horner (?), John Trimbur




Lineage of critical pedagogy: Freire – Shor – Giroux – Ann E. Berthoff (compositionist) – McLaren – bell hooks

Compositionists in critical pedagogy: Amy Lee, William Thelin, Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Andrea Greenbaum, Joe Marshall Hardin, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Richard Miller, Russell Durst

Texts to review/read through:

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2003.
Fitts, Karen and Alan W. France. Left Margins: Cultural Studies and Composition Pedagogy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.
Giroux, Henry and Peter McLaren. “Radical Pedagogy as Cultural Politics: Beyond the Discourse of Critique and Anti-Utopianism.”

organization obsession

So I've been playing around with flock's blogging option because I'm probably going to have my students utilize flock for both RSS reader and blogging. It feels strange to launch my posts from this unfamiliar text window--strangely, makes me feel like I'm going to forget something, but it is surprisingly clean and easy.

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Lately I've become obsessed with "life hacker" stuff, getting things done, etc., reading sites like 43 folders, but as I think often happens with these organizational techniques, I start to spend more time looking at options to become more efficient than I do actually doing things. I get on the computer and all I want to do is clean, sort, file, see how fast I can read through my RSS reads, download programs, interrupt myself by figuring out how to deal with interruptions, etc. It's bad. Instead of streamlining my reading, I seem to be adding more and more sites that will "help" me get things done more quickly and efficiently. But is is working I wonder?

Still, as the fall semester rapidly approaches I find it important to get organized. So now I'm thinking about the kinds of folders I will need to purchase...maybe today?

So far I have yet to find any suggestions for what to do on those days when you just *cannot* concentrate. Those days when your mind wanders repeatedly, when you've been on the same line of text since for an hour. My approach is to generally set a very short period of time for myself. Yesterday it was fifteen minutes. I told myself that if I simply read for fifteen more minutes I could leave and take the rest of the day off!!! I ended up reading for about twenty-five minutes.

My BIG distraction is biking. I've become obsessed with biking...and...of course...thinking about biking. I'm in the market for a mountain bike, as I'm increasingly frustrated with riding in traffic and think that unless I'm commuting or doing a long ride somewhere without a lot of cars, I should be off-road.

So I've added some bike blogs to my reading as well, and oil is for sissies is my favorite so far.

blogging project for fall

I am busy experimenting--getting ready to finally use blogs as a part of the first-year writing courses that I'll be teaching this Fall. I am trying to decide between hosting these blogs directly through wordpress or hosting them through edublogs, so I've set up two blogs to play with, experiment with:

expos-i-story

an exposition of writing

I will be documenting the experience--getting set-up, logistics, the pedagogy, etc.

more testing

here is blah blah blah

testing flock

After the bloodiest day for Israel in the Middle East Conflict, the Israeli death toll has topped 75. Twelve soldiers were killed Sunday in the town of Kfar Giladi and three civilians were killed in Haifa. As the world awaits an official comment from Tel Aviv on a long-awaited UN ceasefire proposal, we go to Haifa to speak to Erez Gellar of the Israeli relief service Magen David Adom. [includes rush transcript]

Democracy Now!: radio and TV news

Friday dog blogging

the picture we don't see

Read this haunting, beautiful piece from salon.com
How Lebanon rescued me by Alia Malek.

I think it does a wonderful job of counteracting the images we are so often given by the media. Even without photos, it paints the picuture we don't often get to see of the Middle East.

in praise of thought as material/action/activism

Interestingly, after, earlier today, struggling with alix olson's definition of an activist, I returned to an article by Eric J. Weiner, which I'd forgotten all about: "Beyond Doing Cultural Studies," and he reminded me:

Unfortunately, thinking theoretically as a political practice has been denigrated by those on the right and the left and must be re-legitimized as a form of pedagogical praxis. On the right, the logic of the bottom line encourages thought primarily as it applies to accumulating capital. On the left, the production of theory is seen as both a luxury of privilege and an excuse for not engaging in 'real' political work.... Common sense tells both that meaningful 'work' is constituted by the production of material things and is essentially pragmatic. (59)

How susceptible I am to this line of thought--the naturalization of theory as not "real" of thought as not "work"...even when I think I'm not.

alix olson--on the one hand--mac specific programs on the other

I have designated this morning as play around with the computer and try to increase productivity morning. This of course came after watching an episode of work out.

So far I've downloaded: text expander; quicksilver; flock; and net news wire. I think that is all...well, in addition to DevonThink of course. I maybe went a little overboard, setting myself up for frustration in terms of the learning curve, but so far I am quite enamoured TextExpander. It's pretty magical. For example, I get so tired of typing out critical pedaogy and cultural studies over and over in my work. Now I need only type the abbreviation CP or CS and voila out comes critical pedaogy and cultural studies. Flock and NetNewsWire are programs I'm playing around with in order to potentially utilize them in the Fall when I start using blogs in my classes. All of these programs are mac specific, and this all is thanks to my friend Dave over at academHacK (and he has some references to PC equivalents as well).


On the other side of all this computer use and my great enthusiasm for the ways in which it could/can make life easier, is the fact that it also makes me feel a bit ADD, raises my anxiety, and might contribute to depression...? Sometimes I have so many applications running that I forget what I'm doing. Sometimes I surf in haphazard fashion when I should be doing something else entirely. I feel like the fragmented individual that so many have written about. Two mornings ago I went to the library--sans computer--I just read, stayed focused. It felt nice.

Technology offers so many overwhelming possibilities, and I feel the need/want to take advantage of them all--until things like uploading photos to flickr stays on my "to do" list for weeks at a time. Blogging ends up there often as well. Each day it seems I have more little post-its in various places that say "blog this."

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In other news...

We went to Brattleboro this weekend and saw alix olson. She was wonderful, as always--even funnier than I've seen her before. I think this is because she is really striving to find happiness, joy, laughter amidst the anger and frustration that art and activism can embody. She had this great metaphor about having a duplex inside of us. In one side is that activist--angry, enraged, paying attention, and frustrated. On the other side of the duplex is the happy, nature-lover, who says lets go canoeing, life is great and wonderful. Often the duplexes are in conflict, but we are the landlord--they have to work it out...somehow.

She also defines an activist as anyone who even *thinks* about what is happening the world today. I struggle with this definition, because I don't know that I agree with it, though I'd like to, as I constantly struggle between the academic/activist parts of myself. I feel like academe is a much safer haven than "actual activism," but again, Olson would disagree with this split--maybe I should take that to heart a little bit.

Exercise in mapping and classifying

Lineage of Cultural Studies: Hoggart – Williams – (rereadings of/with/through Gramsci and Althusser) – Hall (slightly more marginal figures: Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Angela McRobbie, Jorge Larrain, Stanley Aronowitz)


Lineage of critical pedagogy: Freire – Shor – Giroux – Ann E. Berthoff (compositionist) – McLaren


Compositionists in Cultural Studies: James Berlin, Richard Ohmann (kinda), Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Alan France, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Bruce Horner (?), John Trimbur


Compositionists in critical pedagogy: Amy Lee, William Thelin, Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, Andrea Greenbaum, Joe Marshall Hardin, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton, Richard Miller, Russell Durst

This is not so much a comprehensive mapping, but rather an attempt to organize the scholars, theorists, pedagogues whom I will be most often addressing. Still, am I missing anyone? Other versions of these maps/histories?

Now, the difficult part is to revise my prospectus so as to incorporate these histories and make clear the relationship(s) between cultural studies and critical pedagogy and composition.

quote of the day

This is my favorite quote that I read today. Taken from "The Writing Class" by John Carlos Rowe.

The rhetorical power of postmodern capitalism is its capacity to translate its products into different discursive registers and achieve even a limited proliferation that opens markets for yet other acts of representation. In this context, the traditionally defined proletariat is defined less by the theft of its physical power [ala traditional Marxism]—labor power per se—than by its exclusion from the diverse media through which the economy produces its effects. The primary basis for formulating class interests and articulating class consciousness would thus have to begin with redefining what we mean by rights to the mass media and the technologies they embody. Such rights or competencies would have to be understood today as the political and economic refunctioning of the narrowly educational rights to cultural literacy.

I love the way Rowe manages to pack into one powerful punch—the debate around cultural literacy, the debate over theories of class, a reformulation of class theories, and a critique of mass/corporate media control. Rather than simply falling into the trap of seeing cultural literacy issues as purely social issues, Rowe ties them to the economic.

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Today I ended up getting wrapped up in this article, and while I had difficulty getting through it, ended up taking almost three pages of notes. I didn't get to the other two scheduled article/essay. And I have to get ready for tonight's tennis match. Hopefully I'll have enough energy when I get home to cover the Bizzell piece.

debate: student blogging: proprietary vs. open/free

On Wednesday I attended a workshop at the institution where I will be employed full-time this coming year. The workshop was a Blackboardtraining, focused specifically on some new additions that CSR has purchased for this software (though these additions were purchased from a different company—Learning Optics (?)): “journals” and “team sites.” “Team sites” are supposed to be the equivalent of wikis, and “journals” are supposed to emulate blogs.

While I am philosophically opposed to using proprietary software, I have been using Blackboard and WebCT over the past few semesters, because with teaching four courses/semester and working toward exams, I had little time to construct an alternative. This coming semester I want to begin having students blog and assumed I would use wordpress or blogger for this purpose, but thought I should check out this workshop anyway. Unfortunately, the lure of using Blackboard is strong once again—the “journals” option is so eeeaasyyy. There is very little “set-up” time involved. No teaching students how to use RSS feeds in order to easily read each other’s blogs. Etc.

Here is what I am wondering/thinking about: If the students don’t know the difference between keeping their blogs on blogger versus keeping their “journals” on blackboard, does it really make a difference in terms of where they keep them? The way this question is worded is kind of a cop-out—a kind of “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” concept. I guess the more important question should then be—do we make explicit our choice and explain the difference to them?

Overall, I believe all of this sounds a bit weak on my part—like I am trying to rationalize the easier route. I’m not. I just want to know a bit more about how or if we should involve—in a pedagogical way—the debate around proprietary vs. open source/free source/open knowledge. And also to get the views of others on the differences between using University sanctioned (but closed/privatized) software and other open/free versions.

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In other news...
Yesterday: did 31.3 miles on the bike--Lake George, NY

plan of study--two more weeks

Week Three 7.24 – 7.30

Monday 7.24
France, Alan “Assigning Places: The Function of Introductory Composition as Cultural Discourse”
Rowe, John Carlos “The Writing Class” from Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture ed. Mark Poster
Bizzell, Patricia “Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies”
(also finish notes on Judith Goleman’s Work Theory)

Tuesday 7.
Crowley, Sharon Composition in the University

Wednesday 7.26
Ohmann, Richard The Politics of Letters

Thursday 7.27
Grossberg, Lawrence “Formations of Cultural Studies”
Althusser, Louis “Ideology and Ideological State Apparastuses”
Adorno, Theodor “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”

Friday 7.28
Williams, Raymond Marxism and Literature

**Saturday = catch-up, catch-all day—finishing notes, organizing lists, etc.
also, go see alix olson at the Hooker-Dunham Theater in Brattleboro, VT
**Sunday hit my old stomping grounds--The Brattleboro Food Coop on our way back home…. And back to work.


Week Four 7.31 – 8.6

Monday 7.31
Marx: Capital

Tuesday 8.1
Marx: German Ideology

Wednesday 8.2
Eagleton day
“Base and Superstructure Revisited”
“The Contradictions of Postmodernism”
“The Rise of English”

Thursday 8.3
Jameson, Fredric “On ‘Cultural Studies’” from Social Text no. 34 (1993)
--- “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”
Williams, Raymond “The Future of Cultural Studies”

Friday 8.4
Morley, et. al Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues….


**daily goal of 2-3 pages single spaced summary and integration of other notes, blog entries, etc.

brief update

Stayed at parents' house an extra day--so difficult to leave the water in a heat wave--so I've really thrown myself off in terms of my study schedule.

Yesterday after traveling back home, I did twelve miles on the bike.

Today I will devote myself to Amy Lee's Composing Critical Pedagogies. Plus at some point I'd like to read the latest College English cover to cover.

Oh...and I thought that while I was visiting the 'rents, I would be able to finish House of Leaves. No such luck. I still have to read it in spurts, which is not ideal for this particular novel, but regardless, it really messes with a person. I swear the book writes itself while I'm sleeping or something.

call for a critical critical pedagogy

As Berlin argues in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, no category of investigation can ever “be given an unquestioned first place in analysis” (76). Here he is borrowing from Teresa Ebert’s idea of “resistance postmodernism”—meaning that even modes of investigation (and my interest is primarily those of composition pedagogies) need to realize their situatedness; that their methods are never transhistorical/universal, but historically specific. My fear for much of composition theory/pedagogy is disciplinary/intellectual stasis. It is not enough just to examine and offer critique, which is what, I contend, too much of cultural studies and critical pedagogy does, but instead it is necessary “to inquire into the power relations requiring such suppression” in the first place” (Ebert qtd. in Berlin 75). In this instance Ebert is referring the suppression caused by/created by hierarchy and binaries (the focus of much postmodern inquiry), but I believe this can be extended to the work that cultural studies and critical pedagogy attempt to do when in their “unveiling” mode—the uncovering of social injustice. The goals of critical pedagogy are, according to Amy Lee, to do this kind of rewriting that Ebert points to in her rendition of “resistant postmodernism.” Lee writes, “Critical pedagogy does not propose that we tell students about democratic possibilities or espouse radical empowerment. Rather, it proposes that we work toward these goals with our students, reflecting on and working to alter the conditions that impede them” (106). This is also what Ebert insists “resistant postmodernism” can do—work for “equal access for all to social resources and for an end to the explitative exercise of power” (75). But too often, I’ve found, cultural studies and critical pedagogy get caught up in mere ideology critique; thereby inadvertently (I believe) avoiding the conditions of the historical moment. Because I believe that the University as TNC would certainly impede both “democratic possibilities” and “radical empowerment,” I hold critical pedagogy, particularly that critical pedagogy of the writing classroom, as responsible to and as in need of responding to the bureaucratic University that Readings lays out for us. And instead critical pedagogy, with its explicit reference to the act of critique and/or critical thinking and/or analysis, ends up adding to the vocabulary that is, what I describe as the “vocabulary of ‘excellence.’” That is, “critical,” has become empty in much the same way that Readings has described “excellence” as empty—lacking a referent or signified. “Critical” and “excellence” are both terms we, particularly in academia, assume to be uncontestable ground. But “excellence” is the language of accounting, which is the language of businesses and corporations—pointing to critical pedagogy’s complicity in the University in “ruins.”

But all of this also points to the ability of critical pedagogy and cultural studies to help us read and respond to the “ruins.” As Berlin puts it, “resistance is always possible, since the contradiction between signified and signifier…continually provoke opposition to hegemonic ideologies” (75). It is this continual opposition that we can see as a possibility for Readings’ idea of the open-ended dialogue and community of dissensus. For example we have our signifiers—“excellence” and “critical” let’s say—and then we have the actual conditions of the University as corporatized—and possibly in the conflict and struggle between these signifiers and the actuality of the University’s contemporary situation we can create the resistance to excellence that Readings so strongly calls for.

history

In going over all of these Berlin texts for the past few days it is interesting to note that while I often feel resistant to reviewing the history of English Studies, rhtetoric, composition, and their relationships (because I feel like I'm missing out on the pulse of what is currently happening), it is so important (and often scary) to remember the ways in which history repeats itself in our field. Frightening to note the lack of change in attitudes and the debates.

i hate disclaimers

So I’ve spent a day and half (yesterday and today) getting off track/schedule. Yesterday I hardly made a dent in the coverage of Cultural Studies in the English Classroom that I wanted to accomplish. I did spend a lot of time reading blogs and writing. The night before, I had sat up reading my new book, and in it she talks a lot about simply accumulating pages (much in the vein of freewriting); she encourages a lot of writing in order to think and putting down on paper (or screen) every glimmer of an idea. These are all things I know, of course, but sometimes reading a book like this is like giving yourself permission to actually do these things. My committee members have also given me this advice/permission, but it seems that for much of this experience I’ve remained paralyzed by the thought of writing.

I also know that many of the blogs I read are comprised of seemingly well thought-out and carefully constructed entries containing bits and pieces of that particular writer’s project, and maybe that will come, as I’m further along in my own process and have accumulated all of these pages of text that Bolker talks about, but for the moment, yes, this is my disclaimer; this is that start of glimmering ideas and following them no matter how seemingly silly and/or irrelevant; and this is what I thought about yesterday:

At this point much of the argument that I want to be making about cultural studies and critical pedagogy (within composition studies) is, that even with their Marxist roots, they seem primarily interested in ideology critique (the idea of “unveiling”) as opposed to focusing on the present conditions of the corporate University within which they are working. But what does the classroom in ruins—the classroom that acknowledges those ruins—actually look like? What does it mean to have a classroom that creates present value in writing? Maybe it is that the text is no longer a reader or writing handbook, but the campus and its policies—the construction of the campus itself—or a study of NAFTA, or of corporations and their increasingly trans-national tendencies. I’m just not sure…. Does picking some sort of social investigation equate to a cultural studies approach? But what about giving that investigation value in the present? This seems to be the point at which publishing student texts comes into play, but that also has its own ties to capitalism and the system that is the corporate University. Another aspect of acknowledging the “ruins” would be to work toward changing the immediately oppressive circumstances within which we work and teach: “such as the way part-time faculty and students are successfully silenced within our own departments” (CS in Eng Class 21).

I also have this idea that creating a composition classroom in keeping with a Marxist/materialist philosophy would be to have (harken back to) a current-traditional approach (and this is not a positive/answer). Here are some similiarities between Marxist though and current-traditional rhetoric:

• the “real” is located in the material world and truth exists prior to language
• rhetoric as science
• truth is to be discovered through “correct” perception, through an objective examination of the material world

Here really is the problem with notions of Marxism within rhet/comp theories: Current-traditional rhetoric does seem to share these philosophies with Marxism, but of course the outcome, as Berlin tells it in Rhetoric and Reality is that “the doctors or lawyers or engineers or business managers—having been certified as experts, as trained observers, in their disciplines—felt they were surely correct in discovering that economic and political arrangements that benefited them were indeed in the nature of things” (37). Then we have the expressivist rhetoric, which could potentially be looked at as resisting the corporate structure of higher education, but which ultimately is complicit in it through its focus on “rugged individualism,” autonomy, and the private. These are two of the approaches to writing that have withstood the test of time and are the basis for much of what is thought within composition studies even today. Though there have been the alternatives: social/poststructuralist/rhetoric of pubic discourse, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy. These alternatives have come along to say—hey, what about the cultural and the social, and with CS and CP’s ties to Marxism, I expect them to say—hey, what about the economic? Only, they often fail to acknowledge the most immediate economic structure within which they are located, and that is the corporate University.

The similarities too between the social constructionist/poststructuralist/rhet of public discourse that Berlin describes in Rhetoric and Reality and his definition of cultural studies in Cultural Studies in the English Classroom are also striking:

• preparation of students for participation in the democratic process
• “While social reality is bound by the material, it is everywhere immersed in language…. [Reality] is the result of the interaction between the experience of the external world and what the perceiver brings to this experience” (R&R 47).
• While subjectivity is understood differently than this (last bullet) within CS (where the subject is comprised of multiple constructions shaped by myriad signifying practices), CS is described as the “study of the ways social formations and practices are involved in the shaping of consciousness, and this shaping is seen to be mediated by language and situated in concrete historical conditions. Signifying practices then intercede in the relations among material conditions, social arrangements, and the formation of consciousness” (CS in English Classroom ix).

So ultimately the social turn of the 80s with its poststructuralist bent (e.g. Bartholomae, Bizzell) is entirely relevant to the social turn that can be described through the rise of cultural studies and critical pedagogy. Yes, CS may use the vocabulary of Marxism, but it has a particularly poststructuralist slant, which might be part of why it has been taken on by composition studies (and probably also explains why I am drawn to studying/working with it).

goals

Today I came up slightly short of my goals; yesterday I was right on:

Yesterday
--three articles
--three pages single spaced notes/musings
--tennis match

Today
--3/4 of Rhetoric and Reality
--1 1/4 pages of notes
--threw frisbee ("disc") for about an hour

I am leaving Friday morning open as a kind of "catch-up"/"catch-all" time.

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For my birthday I received a Barnes & Noble gift certificate (online purchases only) from two of my friends. I went ahead and purchased myself a copy of Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, as recommended by culture cat, who gives a number of helpful tips for the dissertation writing process.

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TVland: Very, very excited tomorrow kicks off Project Runway