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Jan 11

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Day 11: Teaching To and Through Blogging

I spent my day writing syllabi, and so I’ve been thinking about what to do to inspire learning and what I’ve done that seems to have led most successfully to student learning.  Last fall, I taught an upper-level course in which students had to post or comment on the class blog for every class session.  I am here to testify that it raised the level of discussion in class and the depth of written work for the class better than anything else I’ve tried.  This post is for those of you who might also be preparing to begin your semester, who are wondering whether having students blog is worth it and how to set it up. Read more

Jan 10

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Day 10: Sicario and the Rule of Law

Last night I saw the film Sicario, directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Taylor Sheridan. All I knew about it was that it starred Josh Brolin, Benecio Del Toro and Emily Blunt. This film is the rare example of a film that you don’t really know what it is about until the last half hour, because you don’t really know what is motivating various decisions and what the goals of the various characters are. I mean you do kinda, but you don’t. You know it is about the American government’s effort to fight the drug cartels whose violence has spread into the United States. You know that they are trying to track down a particular head of a drug cartel. (Some spoilers ahead.) Read more

Jan 9

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Day 9: Reflections on the Public Philosophy Panel at the APA

The APA Committee on Public Philosophy hosted a panel yesterday entitled, “Navigating the Perils of Public Cyberspace: Toward New Norms of Public Engagement.”   Read more

Jan 8

Day 8: Advising Students on Applying to Philosophy Graduate Programs

At the Mentoring the Mentors Workshop yesterday, four faculty at philosophy doctoral programs (UNC Chapel Hill, Marquette, University of Oregon and Brown) talked about how to advise students about graduate school. This is the kind of information that is difficult to find in print, although some advice can be found in the blogosphere here and here, and Brown’s program offers advice here.  Beware: the one thing I took away is that different programs run their admissions process differently and so advice about how to apply to one program might be the anti-advice for another program. Read more

Jan 7

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Day 7: Mentoring the Mentors Workshop at the APA

When I heard that there is a growing trend among public institutions, including my former institution to refuse to count mentoring as service work, I was aghast. How am I still surprised?  This move would contradict their stated commitment to retain working class students and students of color.  I take it to be a great privilege to work at a place that recognizes the link between successful learning and good mentoring and the link between retention of students at risk of not finishing college and good mentoring, but I really wish these links were more widely recognized.  Yet even when we do recognize the importance of mentoring, we don’t necessarily know how to do it well.

So I was delighted to be invited to participate in the workshop organized by previous directors of PIKSI-Rock (Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Institute at the Rock Ethics Institute), Ellen Feder and Mariana Ortega.  The workshop aimed to develop a set of best practices and shared experiences for philosophy faculty who send their students to PIKSI and thus demonstrate an investment in attracting and retaining diverse practitioners of philosophy to the major and to graduate school and to graduate students involved in PIKSI. Read more

Jan 6

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Day 6: That Time I Worked for Rick Santorum: A Political Conversion

The summer after my junior year at the College of William and Mary, I interned for Rick Santorum in his Washington, D.C. legislative offices. I got the internship because my family had been very involved in anti-abortion activism, like Operation Rescue involved. In high school in Philadelphia, I had worked for a local anti-abortion activist organization and the director, William Devlin, knew Santorum’s Chief of Staff, Mark Rodgers. So he hooked me up. I think I interned for 10 weeks, but maybe it was 8. When I graduated from college, I went to work for Brabender Cox, Santorum’s political consultants who continue to advise Santorum in his presidential campaign. Read more

Jan 5

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Day 5: Making of a Murderer and the End of the Symbolic Order

I’ve been watching the Making of a Murderer.  I’m on Episode 4.  If you haven’t started it yet, don’t worry, there are no spoilers here.  I think this is an unspoilable series because, well, you know everything when you start watching.  Not everything, but the gist, and that’s why you start watching.  The gist is that a man in Wisconsin was falsely convicted of sexual assault, spent 18  years in prison, was exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence, and then, was possibly framed by police when he sued the police department for wrongful conviction.  It was that last bit that motivated me to watch. Read more

Jan 4

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Day 4: A Gluten-Free Life. Really, It’s Just Been Six Months

I have always been someone who prided myself on being willing and able to eat whatever was put in front of me.  Once, the guy who lived in the apartment downstairs from me in West Philly invited me to an after-hours event at Vientiane Café, a Thai restaurant on Baltimore Avenue.  He was hosting a private dinner where they were going to serve even more authentic Thai food.  This included water bug pâté, which I ate.  So the first time I had to positively answer the question whether I had any dietary restrictions, I was embarrassed.  Even just last weekend, when a friend asked, “You guys eat everything, right?” I took it as a point of pride that we were thought to be “those kind of people,” the people who weren’t fussy.   Then I had to say, well, no, I’m gluten-free. Read more

Jan 3

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Day Three: Conversion Practices

On New Year’s Day, I visited my Uncle Jon in Chicago.  He is a member of JPUSA, a Christian commune in Uptown.  He’s a feminist progressive Christian who is more aware of his white male privilege than any Christian man I know, so it’s refreshing to spend time with him.  He was telling us about his changing views on evangelism.  He described a certain perspective on efforts at conversion that he called, “dive bombing.”  “Dive bombing” is when you come from above and attempt to strip your target of their (false) understanding of the world so that you can then replace it with yours.  This approach, he pointed out, is very condescending.  And it works by establishing that someone else is wrong.  So it’s basically gaslighting evangelism. Read more

Jan 2

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Day 2: The Greeks Exhibit at the Field Museum

On New Year’s Eve, I went to the Field Museum in Chicago to see its special exhibit on the Greeks.  The Museum has collected 500 artifacts from Greek museums, which cover 3500 years of history, beginning with the Minoans on Crete and other Cycladic islands.  I had seen many of these pieces in their home museum, which admittedly, is already pulled from the original context, but seemed at least to beckon to the sense of the place from which they were found.  Seeing them all pulled together robbed them of their aura (in the Benjaminian sense), it seemed to me.  I’m glad they could pull it together for people to see, but I just want to put the plug in for going and visiting places and the museums in those places.

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