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Thursday

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14
May 26

The grocery getters

I am grading. I will finish tomorrow. Using the power of will, I will will it to be done. It will be done. I have made great headway, but the alternatively best and worst thing is the little counter that shows me how much more there is to go.

Actually, maybe that’s the worst thing. The best thing is seeing people turn in good work and watching their grades improve. This has to do with how finals are weighted, maybe someone finally took it seriously, or it just all clicked into place. Whatever the individual reason, the grades are going in positive directions. I haven’t seen anything scary or negative. May the trends continue.

I was sent to the grocery store because my lovely bride had done the regular shopping, but forgot an ingredient for tonight’s dinner. So I volunteered to go. What’s one brief trip for one item compared to all of the shopping she does? You just go back to the dairy aisle, confront yourself with the modern age of dairy products, and grab the thing you need. Also, you might cruise by the cereal aisle for something you’ve lately been craving. There’s no need to get all the things you’ve been lately adding to your mental list, because why be efficient when you can go back again? What, then, is one brief trip? It is a pleasure to provide some brief relief to the bringer of groceries, the standard in lines, the regular pusher of the shopping cart.

But let’s talk about what you’re driving to the grocery store. Why are these trucks taller than the car? What do you think you are buying at the grocery store? You certainly aren’t filling the bed of the truck. It’s a sizable store, but I know you aren’t because you are doing the TikTok Combat Park Challenge for no reason whatsoever.

The person driving the truck on the left here, I saw them loading groceries. (In the cab, of course.) The man driving the truck on the right was sitting in his truck. You shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, but you can tell the price, and in this case, it is hard to imagine these trucks living a heavy duty lifestyle.

I bet they feel pretty gratified, right now, about gas prices, too.

Anyway, ricotta acquired. Self-check out checked out. I had determined to stop using those things, but the checkouts with employees were backed up considerably. Maybe that means other people are also over the whole “You aren’t paying me to do the work you are no longer paying your employees to do” concept. We’re all going to come to that conclusion before long, I think. Next time I go to the store, this will be my stand.

After I marvel at the oversized vehicles out front.

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?

This is Horn Head.

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7
May 26

Score one for edtech

Today was finals day. Two classes had their finals due this afternoon. These were done remotely and submitted online. To celebrate we, of course, went for a bike ride. It was a fast 20-miler, and then I got right back to it. I started the day knowing I had 144 papers to read, and knowing that 48 of those were going to come in today.

And for that hour, just a bit more than an hour, my empty mind drifted over to the questions I’d asked on the two finals. One class had four simple questions. Two hypotheticals I was asking the students to work through, and then two questions that were a tiny bit subjective. In the other class I had the students watch a program and answer a bunch of questions about it. You can run through all of those questions quite a few times while you’re not thinking about anything else.

I hope I caught all of my typos. I hope the students did well. I hope it was all clever enough to let them show what they’ve learned, how they’re thinking, what they’ve possibly gained from their time in my class.

Not too long after we got in, Canvas, the platform the university uses for online classwork, crashed and died.

One class had finished their allotted final window. The other was mid-final. About four people hadn’t submitted their final yet. Well.

Also, my online students have their submissions due on Monday. Who knows how long Canvas will be down? And some of those students manage very regimented schedules. Well.

There was nothing more from the university than that. During finals. Well.

(Update: It came back overnight, in fact, not too long after I shared my contingency plans with all of those students with work still outstanding. Problem solved. Can kicked down the road. Everything is now due next Tuesday.)

But I can start grading that one final right now. (Mini-update: They’re doing well.)

That is the view at Ballymastocker Strand.

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30
Apr 26

Suddenly the last day of class

I mentioned, Tuesday, my new custom-made lapel pin. Today I wore the second one I made and ordered. This is what I say at the end of each class, and it’s the last thing I say in my last lecture, which I build to all semester long.

Thanks for coming today. See you next time. Until then …

If that’s the way people think of me in the final analysis, then it’s worth repeating it.

And so I did it twice today, for the last two times. Weird, I always feel like I’m just getting to know the students, and that we’re all starting to feel comfortable in the room, when it’s time for the semester to end.

But it ended in a big way! In Rituals and Traditions we were joined by a colleague, the assistant athletic director for compliance and academic support, and the deputy athletic director for strategic initiatives and external engagement. They heard from five groups who have been working all semester on proposals for things that our athletic department to build traditions, increase student and community buy-in and improve the gameday experience. Those people were not prepared for how well the students did. Everyone was impressed, even the other students. One person said, “I thought our project was pretty good, but I wasn’t expecting everyone else’s to be so great.” No disrespect to that project, but that was a fair read.

I was proud to see their work come to fruition, and excited to see all of this come together in the context of this class I conceived out of my own interests, and then found plenty of literature to draw from will designing and implementing this class which I invented from whole cloth.

The athletic department people learned a lot because of their work, and because of their hustle. We conducted a survey and got 252 responses on the thing. The instrument told our students a lot and they leveraged that well, today.

Perhaps some thing or things that were said today will provide an inspiration or an impetus to the athletic department. That’s the idea. For certain the people that came to visit were impressed by what they heard and saw, which is great. I’m doing this class again in the fall. I hope to make the class even better.

In Criticism we closed the term by watching the almost avant-garde June 17, 1994.

We had just enough time at the end to talk about a few elements of the doc, and I gave them the final lecture, and someone came in to proctor evaluations.

In both classes I asked them, one more time, to be safe and be kind.

Outside tonight I was looking up at the moon and the clouds thinking about how fortunate I am to get to say that to groups of young people, over and over, for three months.

It was 9:22 when I took that photo. And after that I started thinking about how fortunate I am to have, now, the next couple of weeks to wrap up the semester’s work.

We watched that sunset at Downpatrick Head.

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16
Apr 26

Sing a little sunshine song

We made it up to 89 degrees today. In a highly variable spring, this feels like the signal day, the one that convinces you that spring is actually, ya know, going to stick this time. It could be the sweat, on the small of your back. It could be that the sweat is telling you that this will probably turn right into summer. You’d like a nice long mild spring. You probably won’t get it. You’d definitely like this to happen before the second half of April.

That also means we’re in the final month of the semester, and boy, it feels like it. A nice warm, sunny, day like this, and we’re all ready to be outside already.

But first there was class. Today in Rituals and Traditions we talked about unhealthy ones. There’s a thing in Pittsburgh where people are stealing traffic cones and taking them into baseball games. It’s silly and probably fun, but also potentially dangerous and certainly theft. We also talked about sports where diet and weight issues create unhealthy rituals and problems for athletes, and some of the people that emulate them. We discussed the running of the bulls in Pamplona. I discussed the old Aggie bonfire and a whole host of things at the University of Mississippi.

We touched on hazing, binge drinking, and the Indians, Braves, Chiefs, and Redskins. We discussed the Seminoles earlier in the semester, and someone brought them up as a sort of contradiction today, which was great. Florida State makes a great effort to work with the local Seminole tribe and treat their imagery and representation with authenticity and honor. But not all of the Seminole approve. You’ll never get universal acceptance, and this is an important consideration. And so is your thinking and your receptivity to different stakeholders, and what you need to be mindful of, prepared for, and what it means to work through perceptions and circumstances that aren’t good for your team, your fans, or your league.

In Criticism we watched Slaying the Badger. This is a documentary about the 1989 Tour De France, one of the greatest editions of the modern race. I picked this because we have recently watched a football documentary and a basketball documentary, and there’s a lot to learn about watching something in a sport you don’t know very well. It says something about what we perceive, what we lose, and how we learn. Plus, it’s just a great story full of real and human drama.

This documentary lets you talk about multiple perspectives and different sides of stories, who’s here and who is not, and the effect of time, memory, and recollection. Also, it is a great film.

I’m buying the book and reading it this summer, finally.

I’m going to do a lot of reading this summer. That’s what I’ve decided this spring. First I have to finish catching up on everything. Or catch up on finishing everything. And also keep up on everything. And do the other things. It’s a lot to think about.

Which is what I thought about on the bike today. Good thing, too, since this was this week’s Worst Ride Ever™️. I didn’t know it when I started out, standing there staring at the wild almond.

I didn’t know it here, at the dogwood.

I was starting to figure it out around this tractor, though.

Here’s my shadow selfie. I think my shadow knew all along.

Same tractor, on the way back in.

And then the last little bit of road on the way back in.

This week’s Worst Ride Ever™️ was still (a very slow) 73 minutes on the bike.

That’s from our brief stop at Trah Dhumha Goirt.

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9
Apr 26

No one is eating that

We are traveling for a conference. Flew yesterday — conferencing today and through Sunday with almost every moment explicitly or implicitly booked. It’s a nice feeling, I’m tired already.

We saw this while we were out and about. And, if I may, a short reply: No.

I suppose it’s nice of this vending scheme to give you the directions across the top of the machine. Select – Pay – Enjoy. I did not get close enough to select, and you’d think my saying that now would imply some regret, but it does not, and there are two reasons. First, I didn’t want to push any buttons on that device for fear that some chemical scent would leach onto my fingers and give me away the next time I had real barbecue. If there is a food that deserves some sort of dye pack for authenticity, it is this one. And that leads me to the second reason I did not approach that machine. Where I come from, barbecue is a serious endeavor. It comes with a cultural pride and historical traditions, a fusion of many different communities and one of our omnipresent commonalities: the odds are good that we know slow cooked meat better than other people do. There’s heritage, history, and pride in those foodways, and they come together even as they diverge. You don’t get this out of a casserole or a catch of the day. This comes to you because your elders gave it to you, because their elders gave it to them, because just a few generations farther back they knew that this food just barely missed the cut among the classical elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Barbecue would have made the list, but everyone fell for the propaganda of aether for a brief period. (Also because, sometimes, there wasn’t even enough low quality meat to slow cook.)

This is not to say that the people that handed this down to my people are the only people with a food in such an important position. Plenty of cultures have specific food that should be viewed comparably — as they should!

But you’re also not getting me to buy sushi or tamales or bibimbap out of a machine. I’d like to be more respectful of a chef than that. And the food itself! Look, the only way to enjoy this is to have a bad experience with vending machine barbecue and then tell the story, ironically, to everyone you meet for the next 10 days.

Furthermore, I’m not paying for any of that — or the acute food poisoning that must surely follow.

Seriously, how often is that machine’s inventory swapped out? And who knows if they leave the power on overnight. Even the sauce is supposed to be fresh and this isn’t it.

Also, their URL doesn’t work, further depressing my confidence in this product.

To be clear, I would try their barbecue in a conventional model, in a store, fresh off the grill as the grill master intended. I would savor and enjoy it and compliment everyone involved, then I’d buy the sauce as a home product, in great big styrofoam cups or jars at the store, as commerce and transportation convenience demands.

Not out of that contraption.

The conference is a good one. We’ve been coming to it for years. Seeing and working with friends is a joy. It is a shame we can only see them once a year. I have, for ages, suggested we create our own department, our own school, our own university. Or a consulting firm. Or just a nice country club where we can sit and tell jokes. One day they’ll catch up to my vision.

My first responsibility at this particular conference was to serve as a respondent to a panel session titled Consumers Caught Between Giants: Social Media Economics. There were two scholars presenting their work. The authors talk for about 20 minutes on what they’re doing. This is an opportunity for them to share some updates, get some feedback and make some nice professional connections than can inspire ideas for their continued work. One of the scholars is a grad student exploring the motivations of platform users to move to a premium tier, things like exclusive programming and various consumer perceptions. The other is a talented new faculty member. She is looking at, among other things, the value of trust and credibility in a word-of-mouth scenario when passing along social media influencers.

It was a great room, one of those sessions where the conversation at the end was robust, lively, and well received by the people doing the research. The best part was in seeing how much room there is to explore in each of these areas. The only down side was they had to hear me talk for a few minutes about their work. But I knew the people in room wanted to have a go at this, so I tried to keep it light and proficient. Two quick compliments, something you might consider considering, and a question for each of you. Now, let’s hear from everyone else. Because everyone else had a lot to say. And they did!

Sessions like these are great, particularly for newer conference goers like these. Maybe we’ll create some long-time members out of both of them. Unless I talked too much.

Tomorrow, I’ll be participating in a panel. Two more on Saturday. I’ve also filled my schedule with seeing other sessions, networking with friends and colleagues and generally trying to present a reasonably professional, or at least serious, face.

Not to worry, I know the sheep videos are doing well. I’m going to show at least one more, next week.