F is For Free/For Sale
Spring is coming, and my urge to purge is getting stronger. Each day I pull out some piece of clothing from my closet and cringe at how it fits, and how it makes me look. I remember this feeling, but it is different this time. In past Springs, this process almost always revealed that I had indeed gained 7 lbs over the winter and that clothes that barely fit last fall should not be worn in public this spring. Not this year. Everything is too big – which is affirming, but also frustrating. So in less than two hours, I have an appointment with a clothing consigner who will sift through the fabric of my life, keeping things she deems resalable and the rest will go to the Salvation Army.
One of the themes on the amples knitting list is a running coversation about knitting for yourself, at your size. What if you lose weight, will that knitting have been for naught? I must tell you when I knit each of the above sweaters, I never thought I’d actually lose weight – or enough so that wearing of the sweaters would be a problem. I knit sweaters that I wanted to wear in that moment. The black one on the bottom was my contribution for the Mirror Mirror project at MagKnits, the middle one a vest I made for my incredibly straight husband who declared even he wasn’t secure enough in his hetrosexuality to wear a sweater with those color combinations, and top one, my first shapely tee. Each was a process, a fun process, with mistakes and victories in each. And even though they are leaving my house today, the knitting will not have been a waste of time or yarn. I learned something about knitting and about myself in each of those projects. I learned that a big girl shouldn’t wear a sweater made out of big stretchy yarn, or that the bottom hem of the shapely tee should really be made with a seed stich, not rows of garter, or else it flips up on your tummy roll. I learned that my husband needs to pick out his own yarn before I cast on for anything I intend to have him wear. And I’ve learned what I would like to make again, only differently – like the corset from last winter, or another shapely tee.
These weren’t knitting mistakes, they were knitting adventures. And so to all the ample readers of this blog, I say embrace your body for who you are now. Knit to fit your bust, your belly, your arms and your hips and if, someday in the future, your no longer look fantastic in your hand knits – free them to the world, and make room in your closet for your next knitting adventure.
Good by suits, sweaters, pants and tops, may your next body find happiness putting on each piece.
A different kind of test
Assessment in Higher Education …
spotted over at Edwired
“Scholars need to–must, in fact–develop assessment tools that can demonstrate that our students have really learned something worth knowing. We have to come to clearer agreements on what that learning would look like and then show how, without multiple choice tests, we have assessed that learning over a trajectory of years. And, when we fail to meet our own benchmarks, we have to show what interventions we’ve implimented to address some lack of success among our students.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Learning Activities
Ah, learning exercises. Designing them may be the most creative part of the curriculum process so far. In thinking about my online course design, I’ve had to think outside my traditional box. My tendency is to think in terms of reading, writing and research but those aren’t learning activities; they are homework assignments that, if done poorly, amount to little more than busy work.
How can I transform those skills into actually learning activities that meet the goals of my course? Fink encourages us to routinely revisit the entire process, going back to the goals to make sure our learning activities are in alignment. To that end, I’ve included my goals here.
For this course, I am really starting at the beginning with the student and a writing/reading/editing activity.
a) The Place Where You Stand – The world as you know it depends on where you stand and what you can see. The author’s blurb on the back page of the book attempts to introduce the reader to the author and the perspective they bring. Please write your own blub, to be included on your profile page in Moodle. Please make it concise and relevant; what experience do you bring to this class that shapes the way you view the globtech economy.
b) When you are done, pick one classmate and review their bio. Is it concise? Can you edit the paragraph in any way to make it read better? Feel free to email them and ask questions. Now, rewrite their bio, if necessary.
c) Now, dig a bit deeper on Friedman – what do we know about him, that he hasn’t declared. Post your reply to this forum. Keep a searching journal (see sample journal to be included later) telling us where you searched and what you found.
What is the goal of this activity? To get students writing and engaging in an editing exercise to strengthen their core skills. We slowly begin to introduce critical thinking skills, first by asking the student to decide what is relevant and then by asking their partner to decide. Finally, we introduce some technical skills (the searching) that will require some logic (how do you search for Thomas Friedman and “The World is Flat” and not get online booksellers, for example) as well as some evaluative skills – what do we need to know about Thomas Friedman that he hasn’t told us yet, and why does this new bit of information matter? Finally, students learn that they can be the creators of content, not exclusively the consumers. I see this as a minor learning goal, at this point, so I won’t spent too much time on it, but I want to introduce it because we will be building on it as we go, once I am secure that the lower level goals have been met and or exceeded.
To model what I am looking for, I’ve posted mine. Students are welcome to edit it.
Amy Stevens
Ms. Stevens is a politically aware, libertarian-leaning feminist concerned with the intersection of technology and academics. In the past 15 years, she has survived riots in the nation’s capital, lived in a naked commune, endured a doctoral program in American History, published a book about radical social activists of the 1960’s and worked as a financial technology consultant to some of the country’s largest mutual fund companies. She is a married mother of two, living outside of Boston.
Becoming David Horowitz?
Growing up in a politically divided household, I learned early about partisan posturing and how to engage in different styles of debate. In a predominantly liberal high school, I found the easiest way to rebel was to become a Reagan Youth. In college, a cute boy introduced me to the errors of my way, at the same time a Political Science professor started indoctrinating me into the new left. A course on the history of American Feminism was the final blow and I returned home for Christmas break a radical feminist blindly quoting Marx and Guevara. I slipped further and further to the left, while ignoring the inner voices in my head that questioned many of the hypocrisies I saw before me. The two naked Marxists arguing over who owned the last piece of tofu lasagna, the Buddhist peace activist who proudly cheated on her taxes and scammed the local utilities so she could spend money on jewelry, the Earth First ecoterrorist who smoked Marlboro Reds by the carton, while screaming about the evils of big business and their lobbying ties to the Republican party. In the course of my dissertation research, I came across a book by David Horowitz, a former 1960s activist who had gone to the other side and became one of the leading critics of the new left and its aftermath.
In an early draft of my dissertation, I lashed out at Horowitz, seeing him as a traitor to the movement and to the cause. I reasoned that we couldn’t really take him seriously; he must have been a poser. As I aged and mellowed a bit, I revised and softened my references to his work, and was able to address a few of his concerns, without resorting to name-calling. But, I was always aware of my own political roots and conscious of the fact that it probably wouldn’t take much to move me back to the right.
I’ve followed Horowitz’s career, and hadn’t really thought too much about him until recently, when he published his list of the 101 most dangerous college professors. From the far left, the list is seen as a joke — you would have to assume that students would actually need to pay attention to their professors in order for their to be any real threat – and as a badge of honor, as recently as last week people were stuffing the ballots on Horowitz’s blog (http://www.frontpagemag.com/survey/vote.asp) trying to get themselves or their friends higher on the list. Then the factions started in – the feminist were urging everyone to vote for Eve Sedgwick, the African-American feminists were pushing for Angela Davis. Reading the blogs and watching the posturing was like watching the new left fall apart all over again as they engaged in a game of oppression one-upsmanship.
I don’t actually think it is a problem that American Colleges and Universities tend to “harbor” leftists, I mean honestly, there isn’t a huge market for Marxist theorists in the real world is there? When else can you play with politically impractical ideals and revolutionary ideology than in college – you certainly can’t do it in a cubicle farm on the 14th floor of some multinational widget conglomerate.
And playing with ideas is fun, it is part of how we learn and grow, for many it may be the only time in their lives where they get exposed to queer theory or Cornel West’s take on the cultural significance of rap music.
The flip side of the oppression status game the left has played so well, is the demonization of those who are different, who don’t think like you. It never bothered me when Republicans engaged in name calling – I expected them to, they never bought into the whole “celebrate difference” thing. But when the left does it, I am appalled. I’m constantly surprised when people I know and respect Republican bash in front of me. I’m suddenly sitting with Archie Bunker, complaining about “dagoes” and “spooks” waving a broad brush over what makes up slightly more than half of the American voting population. Suddenly I understand how once egalitarian revolutionaries in Africa become dictators, how neighbors could take up arms against neighbors in Yugoslavia, how civil wars happen.
The problem isn’t the bias, we all have bias and when pushed, most of us are happy to own up to it. The problem, for me, is that we are so quick to defend our bias as the correct one and that someone else’s bias is wrong, that it gets in the way of actual dialogue, in effect building up the walls and increasing the tension and polarization. The common ground becomes invisible and the difference isn’t something to be celebrated, or even discussed, it becomes something to be labeled and dismissed.
And all of this plays out in the classroom – it is why disagreements about Intelligent Design can’t be reconciled in a school board meeting but have to be fought out in courts, it is why we have state and federal governments administering irrelevant exams, rather than working with school teachers to develop curriculum that could help students learn better while still identifying incompetent teachers.
So I sit notice liberal bias in my classes, just as I notice conservative bias when I sit with my family around the dinner table. And I call my teachers and my classmates on it and I call my family on it as well. I haven’t turned into David Horowitz yet, but I understand where he is coming from and I can hold onto my name calling long enough to actually listen to what he has to say.