Visits from Arabic Language Professor and U.S. Ambassador

I finally finished the first draft of the journal article I've been working on for seemingly ever. Every time I think I'm done with the research, I find something else that needs to be looked into. It has been a humbling experience. Next it goes to my supervisors for feedback and then off to the journal for review.

But I still have another journal article to work on, and that one is on pedagogy (teaching). Let me tell you, researching pedagogy is like going into a huge black hole: there is so much out there and you can easily get lost in it. However, it's quite interesting reading about what people have to say about what makes the best teaching practices, and I find myself reflecting on my own experiences at school and what worked and didn't. I have learned and continue to learn a lot about teaching this year.

I was involved in a second session of teaching/leading at the tutoring center and it was quite fun preparing for and presenting because the topic we chose was holiday celebrations. I made a quick 5-minute presentation on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas in the U.S., and everyone seemed to enjoy all of the pictures and my stories of shopping and making cookies and decorating. I told them all that they need to try pumpkin pie at some point because it is so good. I can't wait for October to be here so I have an excuse to make lots of pumpkin treats. Sure, the Libby's Pumpkin is $5 a can, but it's so worth it.

The bookstore on campus had a further reduction in their clearance books -- only $2 each! -- so I couldn't resist buying several. Okay, maybe 14. But most are gifts!! Much cheaper than buying a Secret Santa gift, and it's good for people to read. :)

We also popped by the British store that we haven't been to since we arrived to see what they were stocking. It was taken over by new management so the prices were a little better. They have boxes of Shreddies which I think I can use as a Chex replacement so I can make Chex Mix and other treats requiring that kind of grid cereal. D bought a can of Heinz Spaghetti with O-shaped pasta (looks like Spaghettios but unfortunately doesn't taste like it) and we both got packages of Bachelor's pasta which we had almost weekly while in the UK. It still tastes the same!

Professor Sahar Amer (Chair of the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney), whom I heard at the ANZAMEMS conference this past July, was visiting the university and gave two presentations on Muslim women. The first was on "Gender Trouble in the Seventh Crusade" and focused on the first female sultan of Egypt, Shajar al-Durr, whom I had never heard of. The second was on "Muslim Women's Rights in Post-Colonial Europe" and discussed modern Muslim women and veiling practices. We learned about the rising Islamic fashion industry which is becoming a substantial source of revenue for Europe; she played a clip of award-winning British Asian Muslim comedian Shazia Mirza poking fun at her culture, as well as a clip from The Hijabi Monologues. I was glad she had brought these things to our attention, as I know I had never encountered them before and probably wouldn't have otherwise.

Finally, the US Ambassador to New Zealand, Mark Gilbert, paid a visit to the university. First, the International Recruitment Officer said a few words about how great it was that U.S. students were helping expose New Zealand students to new ideas (and helping fulfill part of the new graduate profile: "being globally aware"). He said he travels a lot in the U.S. and finds that the two peoples are quite similar in values and being hardworking and motivated. I was thinking, where do you get that idea?! I have not found many people here who have the same work ethic that I find in the U.S., but maybe in different circles or in Auckland things are different. Next the Chancellor spoke about the importance of a strong relationship between the two countries. The Ambassador got his chance to speak and reflected some on his career moves from Major League Baseball to 30 years in the banking industry, and then becoming part of Obama's campaign and getting this position. He spoke about how many entrepreneurs he's met across New Zealand and advised us to try to see some of the cool things going on on-campus, like drones. Very business-oriented, but that's to be expected from his background. He did make a funny joke about feeling less wind chill in his house in Florida during a hurricane than in New Zealand because of the poor quality of insulation and window thickness. He said New Zealanders could learn some things from the U.S. and we all laughed because we know how cold it is here!

Ambassador Mark Gilbert with U.S. students studying abroad

White pigeon young-lings at school

Japanese cherry blossoms

Rigid Systems

Health

I received a care package from home (yay Chex Mix!), but unfortunately it was intercepted by MedSafe and they confiscated some of the supplements inside because New Zealand's nanny-state health system requires a prescription for them. In the U.S., melatonin is a sleep aid and sold as a supplement. The letter gives you 30 days to get a legitimate prescription from a doctor (and if you have more than a 3-month supply, the doctor has to take anything over 3 months' worth and dole them out to you gradually) or they destroy them. The letter tries to convince you how bad it is to order drugs online because they could be harmful. I really don't like the health care system here. Also just found out that the junky student health insurance they sell us is really only intended as a travel insurance, so that's why it doesn't cover anything. The government discontinued students getting onto the good health insurance in 2011 apparently.

My Presentations

I had my one-year confirmation oral presentation with my supervisors, a moderator from the department, and a friend who wanted to come along. I'm glad she did because then I could complain about it afterward with someone who had been there. It wasn't too bad, but I get frustrated at constantly being told I haven't include this, that, and the other French theorist for some point, and how the paper won't pass if I don't include them. Research has gotten so bogged down in these theory fads; it used to be psychoanalysis, but of course that went out of vogue. Now it's poststructuralism, but that too will pass eventually. It seems to become more about pleasing others than making a good, original contribution to the field that is accessible to not just a minority.

One of my former students invited me to give a lecture to the public downtown for International Parking Day, where people buy a parking spot and protest cities being made for cars instead of people by setting up alternate things in the parking spot (like a living room set or a table with leaflets and hands-on activities). There weren't too many passers-by in the early afternoon, but I still got a chance to practice presenting and time myself on my Digital Humanities presentations. We had some good conversations before and after about education and travel, so it was a nice experience.

Got to meet the cutest white German Shepherd walking by!

 Others' Presentations

There continue to be interesting presentations that fill me up with all kinds of ideas. It's what I am enjoying most about being back in school. One of the Digital Humanities ones was on the shift from product-based capitalism to financial capitalism where people make money off of money and digital things like data. Basically, we're giving away our data for free when we use social media and other apps that harvest our data and sell it to advertisers. It's digital sharecropping and we should be cautious about further enriching the .0001% (Google, Facebook, etc.). Hard to disagree that we're being taken advantage of.

Peter Singer, who helped start the animal rights movement in the 70s, was in town speaking on effective altruism, utilitarianism, and rationalism. He believes that people should give their money away to charities and places where it will make the most impact, so like to African charities that provide very low-cost mosquito nets to combat malaria. He says saving more people is better than saving fewer, even if that means not helping people in your community because the money will make more of a difference to really impoverished people. He specifically called out things like walk-a-thons that require a lot of people's time that might be better spent working and earning money that could then be given away. But some people do things for the psychological benefit and so aren't being as altruistic as they could be. It was an intriguing talk with some good audience questions afterward.

An Emeritus Professor of Political Science gave a lecture on throwing out the political science canon (Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau) because it limits people's perspectives and the ability to make new connections. He said there is no reason we need to keep reading these men's works as if they are the only way of looking at political issues and motivations. I had to agree with him, more in the context of my own field (see above on my confirmation) where a handful of theorists now dominate the perspective one can take when critically examining literature. But the only reason he can say this is because he's retired and has the freedom to challenge the canon.

Diane Foreman is one of the most successful women in the Asia-Pacific region, and the university's entrepreneurship program invited her to give a talk on her successful business career. I had just read about her in a magazine my friend gave to me so some of the information was repeated, but it was cool to hear about some of her business experiences and how she thinks of herself as a capitalist feminist. She believes in treating her employees well and incentivizing them to do better, which has been missing in a lot of my former workplaces. She also talked about the issue with selling time, a point raised in the magazine article. Kids are encouraged to grow up and enter the professions: doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc. But the problem with these pathways is that you can only make money by selling your time. You might bill out at $1,000 an hour, but you aren't making money without billable hours. As a business owner, though, you can make money without having to physically be at your business. You aren't at the mercy of needing others to pay you for your time. She said we should be encouraging kids who have the entrepreneurial spirit to become business owners. I would add that we should be teaching basic business and financial skills to everyone, so even those with Art and Science backgrounds can go into business if they desire. 

The second annual university Feminist Society day conference went well, and I learned some interesting things, including some scary facts about how radicalization is affecting kids and women in the Middle East. There are no easy answers.

 Education

My friend recommended a TV show where several Chinese teachers go to a British school and teach the kids in the "Chinese method" for 3 weeks and see if it is more effective than the British method of teaching. He thought I would be against the Chinese method because it is so rigid and involves 10-12 hours of school per day, but I told him that I had a similarly rigid method of teaching at some points in my education and am all for it. I didn't know how many hours Chinese kids go to school though. He said in junior high and onward, they are constantly at school or at home studying; they have very little free time. Everything is geared toward passing exams to get into a good college. [The BBC documentary was called Are Our Kids Tough Enough? I watched it on YouTube, but it has since been removed for copyright complaints from BBC. It might be available elsewhere.]

Speaking of education, the more I learn about the NCEA high school education system here, the more concerned I am for this country. I had to help a student who is constantly being marked down for his bad grammar and punctuation and said he has a tendency to write long sentences that are incorrect; when I asked him if he knew how sentences work (with a subject and verb and stuff like that), he gave me the saddest face and shook his head and said no, he didn't. Where do you even go with that? It's incredibly difficult to try to explain why something is grammatically incorrect if they don't know the parts of speech and how sentences fit together with punctuation. I learned from the Chinese vs. British show that the UK stopped teaching grammar in the 60s, so I assume that carried over to New Zealand as well. I know some schools still do it, but it's probably only the good ones. I'm hoping the U.S. hasn't given up on grammar; I know they were still teaching it when I went through.

When students here try to apply to PhD programs in the U.S., they are completely intimidated by the GRE tests since they don't have to take anything like the SAT or ACT to get into college. If they don't pass their high school classes here, they can wait until they turn 20 and get in without any requirement. And since there are a lot fewer requirements for what they take in high school, the last time they took a math class might have been junior high! I would venture the rate of doing well on those kinds of tests is not very high; they're hard enough for those of us who've been conditioned to the standardized test system!

Spring is finally coming!

Proposals Accepted and International Antarctic Centre

Academic Proposals Accepted

I have some good academic news: I have been fortunate to have three proposals accepted in the last few weeks! I will explain how the process works for those not in academia. Usually, journal editors and conference organizers put out a "call for proposals" or "call for papers" (CFP) several months in advance of the publication or conference date. This CFP gives the specifications of what they are looking for and what they want submitted. The standard is to ask for a brief abstract and bio. The interested scholar then submits an abstract which addresses the topic and shows their particular analysis of it. This saves them from having to write a full-length paper which then might not get accepted. A blind peer-review panel (blind means they don't receive your name or bio attached to the abstract so they can be impartial) then reads all of the submissions and chooses which ones it wants to accept.

So, my best news is that I submitted an abstract for a special issue of a U.S. academic journal issue on science fiction and fantasy and was accepted! I also was given the comments from the blind peer-review panel and they were very positive and said my proposal was well-written and sounded very interesting. Now I have a few months to take the short abstract that I wrote and turn it into an actual, full-length article of academic quality good enough for publication. It will be reviewed again by the editors and if they have any corrections or changes they want made, I will have a chance to fix them and resubmit. Publishing is the name of the game in academia, especially nowadays with so much competition for jobs, so having my first proposal accepted is really exciting! And it is on my research topic too, which is even better.

Of the other two proposals accepted, one was for a feminist conference being held in Dunedin, New Zealand, at the end of the year. I will be presenting on the gender imbalance of Wikipedia editors (mostly high-school-age white males) and how various groups are trying to encourage other women to edit and contribute to Wikipedia through events like Storming Wikipedia. Considering how many of us use Wikipedia as a go-to reference, it is a pressing issue.

My other proposal was for an exclusive new-scholars conference for postgrads and early career researchers before the main Digital Humanities Conference we are going to in Sydney in a couple months. We aren't presenting papers, but we will be brainstorming before the conference on our digital humanities projects and what we want to work on together. It is designed to be an opportunity for a small group of us to network and share ideas and resources. It also comes with a small chunk of funding which will help cover my expenses getting to Australia. Double win!

Tutoring Adventures Continue

With only two tutoring weeks left, the number of students is dwindling fast. Assuming they wouldn't have read or finished Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, I prepared for more general discussion topics. This last week we discussed single-sex education and some of the essentialist arguments for it (girls and boys have different learning styles and needs). Single-sex education is a lot more common in NZ, coming from the British system, than I am used to, and one young man in each class had actually gone to a single-sex school. One liked it and the other didn't. The students had quite strong feelings against single-sex education, and I hope I helped them think a little more critically about education and the decisions they might face if they end up in charge of sending a child to school.

In my tutoring at the tutoring center, I had to be observed by one of my bosses to see how I was doing (all of my peers did too). I don't remember the last time I was observed in a job situation, and it was a bit uncomfortable. She said I did fine but still had some things that I could do better. You definitely are a lot more aware of what you are saying when someone is taking notes.

We also had additional training on the differences between the students at the Education campus and the main campus (the School of Education only recently merged with the University for budget reasons, but their student demographics are noticeably different), as well as the different philosophies. The Education lecturers emphasize the bicultural aspects of New Zealand and use Maori words quite often in their assignments and lectures. Apparently, the government has a goal of a bicultural, bilingual country by 2040. I think the South Island will have more difficulty reaching this goal since there are significantly fewer Maori present.

International Antarctic Centre

Since our buy-one-get-one-free coupon to the famous International Antarctic Centre was about to expire, we finally visited it. It had a lot of interactive things and quite interesting information on all of the research going on down there, as well as the harsh living conditions. I froze in the simulated Antarctic storm, enjoyed the penguin feeding, rode on a Hagglunds all-terrain vehicle up hills at 26 degrees and through water that went halfway up my door, watched some of the HD film of the beautiful landscapes, and got splashed a lot in the 4-D movie experience.

Arts and Fireworks

School & Work

Admittedly, I haven't done much for my research since the trip to Queenstown. I've been working on several editing projects and planning upcoming trips to the North Island and Australia (finally booked our flight to its east coast -- very much looking forward to it!). The English PhD student in the cubicle next-door who is rarely there and never speaks finally talked to me and actually offered me a grading job for the semester! Also found out that her research is something to do with Star Trek television shows. She needs a group of people to grade papers for the one writing class that engineering students have to take (because employers complained that recent grads couldn't communicate). Add that to my other three part-time jobs and I will have quite a schedule when the school semester for undergraduates starts on February 23rd. Of course, I don't have a schedule yet because everything is done so last-minute.

There were two research presentations on-campus by the two candidates for a part-time English faculty position, so it was interesting to see this part of the job interview. The first just received her PhD last year and is looking at representations of women in horror films; the second is an American who moved to NZ over a year ago whose research is on contemporary women's representations in literature and film through the lens of literary theory. They were very different, so I have no idea whom will be chosen. The first was a graduate of the department, so there could be some bias there, although the decision-makers might also be looking for a fresh perspective.

D and I have been having several discussions about arts education, and a particularly intense one after I read aloud parts of this long but informative article on liberal-arts education (link below), how it has changed, what people think it means, and whether or not it is still valued/valuable in various societies. I haven't yet formulated an essay on the topic, but I feel like one is in the works in my mind.
The Chronicle of Higher Education's "The Day The Purpose of College Changed"

In a similar vein, one of the reasons I nominated myself to be on the committee of the university's feminist society/club was to help ensure there are opportunities for education on women's issues and civil rights on-campus. Along with the recent cutbacks in many of the school's Arts programs (including American Studies) was the removal of the Gender Studies programs, which means that currently there is only one class on gender, in the Sociology department, which is only offered occasionally. This seems odd for a well-regarded university of over 14,000 students. So I was successfully voted in and will be doing my part this year to incorporate educational events for interested students into the club's schedule.

Outdoors

We went on a hike in the Port Hills which was particularly hard because it was a hot day and all uphill. The hills were brown but we still enjoyed good views of the ocean and harbor on either side at the top.

Another day we went on one of the trails at Halswell Quarry Park. The blue-gray Halswell Stone from there was used to build many of the city's buildings. The city has done a nice job of preserving the history with several boards around the 30-minute trail. 

For some reason, Christchurch likes its fireworks shows. The third show since November was on January 31, called "Sparks". The Christchurch Symphony Orchestra played movie themes for two hours beforehand. The weather was bad -- it drizzled the whole time and was windy -- but that didn't deter them from lighting off the fireworks.

Home

D had a packet of San Francisco sourdough yeast mailed to him and, after days of prep, successfully made a loaf of bread with some of that sourdough tang he so enjoys. Later, he made another batch and will keep the starter going in the fridge to help it become even more sour-tasting. This kind of bread-making is definitely an intensive process. I made pumpkin pie (with a homemade crust) for the first time for a friend's going-away board game party. It turned out pretty good! Thank you, Libby's canned pumpkin. I advertised my financial guide ebook on social media (a little side project I finished last year) and enrolled for a short cooking class at the local community center which starts tomorrow. My sunflower bloomed and our car passed its Warrant of Fitness test (required every 6 months for older cars). Yay! And today we went to the park to hear the Scottish Society Pipe Band play bagpipes and drums.