A Touching Experience

As I've said a couple times here, I'm living on campus now. This, of course, is a pretty odd experience, considering the fact that the only other time I've ever even spent a night in a dorm room was at my induction week as a freshman in 1991.

Anyway, that's a little off topic. The thing about living on campus that I've found most awkward is that I now share a living space with strangers, convivial strangers, but strangers nonetheless. What this means is that I will invariably have the most disappointing discussions with people who I normally wouldn't talk with (not because I'm better than them, mind you, but because we don't have anything in common).

For example, over the last month of so there has been a Japanese woman who is here as part of her sabbatical from her Japanese university. Her English isn't very good, but, I must admit, it's a damn site better than my Japanese, the extent of which is one phrase that wouldn't make a very good impression in mixed company. She and I chat about the weather, which is pretty much what any two people who don't have much in common talk about, but she also talks about her fondness for a white duck that lives close to the dorm. She has taken a real liking to this duck, even going so far as to feed and comfort it as it was nesting with a clutch of eggs.

The other day, apparently, the duck's eggs hatched. She was now the proud mother duck to a group of little ducklings. I, of course, had no idea, since I don't really care much for duck, even of the a l'orange* variety, but I learned of the arrival of these ducklings from my suite-mate. The conversation started much as most of our other discussions had, namely, her saying hello, me saying hello back, and then me looking furiously for a way out of the kitchen (which would have been pretty awkward since I was in the middle of cooking my meal). She started talking about the white duck again, at which point I really started thinking about leaving my food as if that's what I had intended to do from the beginning, and then the most touching thing happened. She invited me to go and look at the baby ducks. Not, I should mention, with her...it wasn't like she said, "Hey, I've got a great idea...let's go check out some ducks." Rather than that, she simply said that the ducks had been hatched, and that I should go and check them out sometime.

Maybe it was something about the way she said it, almost as if she were looking for someone with whom she could share the most fantastic experience she's had while away from Japan. Maybe it was just the limitations of her English, and what she really meant was "hey, go see them, or don't...no big whoop," but she really seemed to be wanting to make a human connection with me and all she had to offer was a fondness for ducks.

I went and saw the ducks...

I'd like to say that it was amazing, but really, they're just ducks. Nothing I haven't seen hundreds of times before on various animal planet shows. The fact remains, however, the ducks are what I will always remember of this woman, and that's a pleasant thought.

*just kidding, I actually love duck a l'orange.

Art

When does art go from being fun to being serious business?

There's an exhibition of student artwork on campus that I went and had a poke around this morning. Some of the stuff was really well done and interesting, but what I really got a kick out of was reading the descriptions that the students had written for where they came up with their artistic vision. These descriptions, while almost universally being well written and articulate (something that can't be taken for granted when reading student work), also were pure hogwash. As I walked around reading what can only be described as overly-analytical gobbledy-gook, I started thinking about the artistic process. When I was younger we would paint because it was fun, and I don't think I'm being an "old fart" when I say this...I truly believe that art is a fun activity and that is why little kids like to draw and paint and mold things with clay. The problem is, somewhere along the line, the fun is lost, and is replaced with statement. Let me explain, every description that I read today was trying to explain the statement that the piece of art was supposed to be making. Whether it's to show the overindulgence of consumerist behavior or to make an indictment of unhealthy eating habits or to demonstrate the illusion of capitalist culture or to intimate the destructive process of being in a relationship with another human being, each of these pieces of work was trying to make what the author felt to be a statement, and some of these statements ran to two or three pages of text.

Maybe it's just me, but I think they might just be taking themselves a little too seriously. I know that if I had a painting or sculpture in the exhibit, I would write a very simple phrase to explain my creation:

I started this because I could
I stopped when I thought it was good

Anything more than that is just gobbledy-gook.

Job Search Update

Okay, I realize that it's been a while since I posted, but I honestly have an excuse...I've been in the US and didn't have much interest in internet connectivity. Primarily, my trip was to visit family and to have a short reunion with my wife and son (both of whom I hadn't seen for two months), but I also had to spend some time trying to find a job.

Towards this latter goal, I did a fair amount of traveling while I was back. I made separate driving trips to Trenton, where I had been offered a job by Thomas Edison State College, and Philadelphia, where I am a finalist for a tenure track position at Drexel University. I would have loved to have been able to facilitate both meetings in one trip, since these two cities are only about 45 minutes apart, but unfortunately, I didn't even know that Drexel was inviting me to come to campus for an interview until the morning I was leaving for Trenton...that doesn't leave much time to actually arrange any meetings.

The job at Thomas Edison was very appealing...a major step up in pay and responsibility, with supervisory oversight of five people, but it would have put me on a managerial career track, which is not really what I want to do. In fact, what I really want to do is teach. This is one reason why I turned down the Edison job, and am patiently waiting to hear back from Drexel, which would be a great opportunity. The other, and more major, reason why I turned down the Edison job was because my wife had a bit of a meltdown about living in the Trenton area (some of which is beautiful by the way). As a very good friend said to me, no job will ever be as rewarding as my wife...truer words were never spoken, and so I turned the job down.

My wife, on the other hand, wouldn't be happy about living in Philadelphia, but then again, she wouldn't be happy about living anywhere if it weren't within 30 minutes of her folks. Needless to say (but being said anyway) this greatly restricts the job opportunities that I have open to me.

I've also been offered a job at a school division local to where my wife wants to live. They are offering me a position as an assessment specialist, which really only deals with the evaluative elements of assessment, not the testing aspects. Without being too boring (and hopefully, I haven't already fallen into this and bored any perspective readers to tears), this job is acceptable, but it is not the best suited for my future goals. I would primarily be completing evaluations of school division programs (and lord knows there are more of those going on than anyone wants to admit) to judge their effectiveness against stated objectives and goals. This is interesting, however, I have an equivalent interest in the actual classroom applications of assessment (for example, how to design tasks to truly measure what should be measured), and this job wouldn't offer me the opportunity to look at those too closely.

So, what this all comes down to is that I'll hold out until I hear from Drexel, which is my first choice, but if that job isn't offered to me, then I will accept the school division job and work towards a higher ed teaching position from there. I hate to say it, but the school division job would be just that...a JOB...not a career.

Once a decision has been reached, I'm sure I'll be blogging about it...if for no other reason than to bitch about how things turned out (hopefully, said bitching won't be necessary since things will have worked out the way I wanted them to)