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I got a request from Person asking me to work 9.5 hours, three days in a row, for about $15/day, to review MTTC test items. I was glad to be asked. Excited even. I certainly know a lot in this area. Here’s what I wrote them in response:
Thank you for this invitation. I read it with great interest seeing as though I have been teaching about this topic and conducting research on it for decades. I can’t accept your invitation. Here is why:
You are asking for 9.5 hours of labor a day, up to three days. This is an unrealistic request for professionals who already have jobs. You cannot be serious. Furthermore, you are offering to pay $150 a day, for “sessions attended of two days or more.” This rate amounts to about $15/hour. You are offering minimum wage for highly specialized expertise. You cannot be serious.
Here’s the kicker: all of this shows that you have a test development system that undermines the validity of the test itself. Your labor request and inequitable compensation all but ensure you will not have the expertise needed to review these items. Let me say this again: Your test development process (in this case, item review) work to exclude the very expertise you need to review these items for a fair test.
Start over. Do better.
Enrolling as a student in music school is one of the best sabbatical decisions I made. So much fun. Great to be a novice. A trip to have professors again. Cool to have classmates (“So what’s your major?”). Love doing assignments. Love getting feedback even more. Feel myself getting sad the semester is almost over. Glad it’s not the last one for me.
Is there a future for the academic social capital held on twitter? - Impact of Social Sciences
There is an element of the Ponzi scheme about social media use by academics, in so far as that the continued value of the visibility a user accumulates depends on the continued use others make of it and the steady introduction of new users into the network.
East coast friends:
We’re back!
We relocated to north Jersey this summer. It’s been a busy move with many twists and turns, but we’re here. We’re getting settled. And we’re getting ready.
The move made good sense as Anica starts her new job at Rutgers University-Newark this fall. She could not be more excited for this new job and season. And for me, I am on sabbatical + research leave for the year – and very grateful for the MSU resources that make this possible. It’s my first sabbatical – ever! In the fall I’ll be a visiting scholar with the Racial Literacy Project at Teachers College, Columbia University, and in the spring I’ll be visiting at Rutgers-Newark in Urban Education.
These engagements are products of other people’s generosity toward me. And in that same spirit, these engagements will bring in many of the artists, organizers, collaborators, etc. who have been a part of my work over the past few years. There will be a performance/teach-in, an open studio session, and some other stuff. There will be plotting, there will be planning, there shall be music and laughter.
So friends in NYC, Jersey, Philly – shoot, all the way to DMV! – let’s (re)connect! Because (say it with me now…)
“In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of ‘critical mass.’ It’s always about critical connections.” -Grace Lee Boggs
I swear half of my writing is meta-writing: it’s the set up, telling you all about what I’m going to do, giving you all the hand holds you might need. I like doing that, actually, because there are so many points I want to make about how I’m going about the topic — why I took a left and not a right back on Front Street, what the metaphor is that’s guiding my thinking, why it’s thread of work and not a body of work, and the likes. But what I love about Greg Dimitriadis’ writing is how he jumped right in without all the meta-writing. You were in the analysis alongside him before you knew it. His writing was so narratively friendly, and I think that’s another quality that made the jump-in analysis work so well.
I am noticing the transitions between states of form tell us as much, if not more, about the forms themselves than studying them directly. I focus my attention on the moment just before the square emerges. What will we find in the moments when light becomes shadow, then light again? When the curve of the bamboo passed through the inflection of a straight line on its way to another curve?
Siobhan K. Cronin in “Form as Passage” from SLOW READER
“If I move slower, how many forms will I find?”
I thought I would need to seek out forms, but discovered that, through the act of play, forms would find me. Discovery becomes the by-product of a practice of attention where hypotheses are developed experientially as movement. How many forms exist between a sphere and a cube? My hands and eyes seek out the answer. By slowing down my movements I begin to discover the threshold; how the number of forms is limited only by the speed of my hands and my ability to detect change. If I move slower, how many forms will I find?
Siobhan K. Cronin in “Form as Passage” from SLOW READER.
I’m about to give feedback on these critical race discussion assignments in my YA Lit + Antiracist Teaching course. It’s the second time I’ve given this assignment, so I’m curious what the results look like across both years, especially as the larger national and global context in which students are completing the assignment evolves – and doesn’t. I’ve shared this assignment with a lot of people. Maybe I’ll circle back with some insights when I’m finished.
I have this idea for a podcast — which I’ll never do because 1) time and 2) podcasts are about finished — and it’s to apply the Heat Rocks music podcast format to the discussion of a single academic article. So, it’s not having a guest discussing a recent article they wrote. Even journals try doing that for increased readership. I mean the guest chooses a classic, heat rock article (a fire, sure shot banger all the way through), and that’s what the episode is about — why that’s a heat rock to them. I like this format because it’s not about recency, and it’s not necessarily about esoterica. It’s just about something so good that you still have it in rotation — reading, teaching, or citing it. Two hosts, one guest, and one article each episode. So if I’m the guest, I might choose JDA’s 2007 “Gangstas, Wankstas, and Ridas.” Heat Rock all the way through. Still in rotation for me. Or Joyce King’s “Dysconscious Racism” from 1991. Yep, that’s the one I’m bringing. Functionally, this format cuts through some of the more prevalent ways people learn what they think they should read and cite. It’s like finding something new to listen to outside the Spotify algorithm. I like that. And as a host, it gives you the chance to read or reread things off the clock. The closing routine of “if you liked this album you should also listen to…” would transfer over well too.
It just hit me, while typing up field notes, that I spent a small portion of yesterday – Dilla’s birthday – sitting with two middle school students making micro edits in a midi grid. We weren’t playing. We were programming. Or maybe de-programming. Especially during one portion when something wasn’t vibrating quite right. “There’s a glitch in there,” J. says, trying to describe some low frequencies that were stacking on top each another too heavily in the mix. He’s right. I heard it earlier but thought I’d just fix it on my own later. I was doing the adult thing, underestimating the fine tuned listening and care of these two youth. “I think it’s that half-piece,” J. says, pointing to a single midi note in the grid. B. agrees: “Yeah, I think it’s that half piece.” I delete it from the grid, but it isn’t the right one. The “glitch” is still there. We go through this process a few times: Listening to the sounds, watching what they look like in the grid, and subtracting little ticks from the grid. Repeat until we finally get it. Satisfaction. We aren’t doing Dilla. We aren’t putting the grid against itself. At least not yet. Or maybe not at all. We are in that grid world together.
This week the participatory research team listened to a 9-month old recording of our students debriefing a song they wrote about freedom. We looked for insights that might apply to the work we are doing right now with the same students: supporting them writing and composing songs that mean something to them. The recording reminded us of how brilliant and thoughtful they are — honestly, things we don’t always have at the forefront of our minds in the midst of schedule changes, cancellations, the ongoing trauma of Oxford up the road, and more. For me specifically, it reminded me of how students often follow our lead when we are vulnerable and honest. Our vulnerability as grown ups can be a support to them.
Most importantly, we are learning that making collective and collectively making is like building a qanat, it is like digging a hole together. With enough effort, that hole can be extended into a tunnel, possibly connecting to other holes, becoming a channel, gradually intersecting with others to form a network, now open to flows of new relations and different ideas, forming an imperfect and ever changing whole. We could then sediment together, forming collective habits, rhythms, and motions. This means preparing together and training together to tunnel under whatever may come. We can always dig a little further, but we cannot fully predetermine, or even less own, the spaces e have dug.
“Learnings from the Underground Waters,” Francesca Masoero for QANAT.
We watched White People Won’t Save You in YA Lit + Antiracist Teaching today. It jumps us into talking about white savior tropes and who has agency to save, and to save whom. But the site design matters so much too. You can’t tell if it will stop, and theres no button to stop it. You either watch or decide to shut the whole thing down.
FreshRSS