Questions about Fall at Carleton

Is there any manly – or even semi-masculine – way to carry those little wire-handled takeout boxes?

Have any students ever been injured after a collision caused by someone reading while walking?

Have any students ever been injured after being run down by someone biking at 15mph through a crowd of pedestrians?

Just how do you put those supertight jeans?

Is the male fad for wearing sleeveless shirts (even, apparently, to class!) somehow semiotically the same as the female trend (now standard, I guess) of wearing low-cut shirts?

Have Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars ever been out of style?

Why are there so few punks on campus? Skinheads are few and far between, and you rarely see mohawks, usually on jocks.

The 30 Days of Biking, By the Numbers

September was the second “30 Days of Biking” event. As I posted way back on August 31, I gave it a go, having successfully completed the first 30DoB in April.

Bike Commute
Bike Commute

Thanks to good weather, a great bike, a wonderful commuting route, lots of excellent road riding right near the house, and the bit of incentive that the event itself creates, I successfully rode every day in September  – and more importantly, I enjoyed it. The numbers:

Number of rides (counting each back-and-forth commute as one): 33
Total mileage: 282 miles
Total commuting mileage: 90.4 miles (average ride length: 4.3 miles)
Total training/fitness mileage: 181.1 miles (average ride length: 20.12 miles)
Total other mileage (errands, riding with the girls): 10.5 miles
Shortest ride: 2 miles with Genevieve on Saturday, September 25
Longest ride: 90 miles on gravel on Friday, September 17
Worst ride: a 2-mile ride home in a cold downpour on Wednesday, September 22
Best rides: the 90-miler, the 2-miler with Vivi, and a 2-mile ride home through the Arb after dark yesterday

For a variety of practical and – let’s just admit it – narcissistic reasons, I’ll keep riding to work all fall and winter, though now that the pressure of the 30DoB has been lifted, I can occasionally take the car (or, more likely, get a ride from the family) without feeling too bad – and to find another way to get in my weekend workouts.

Après moi, le déluge; mais après le déluge, le Bad Plus

Friday was flood day in Northfield. Others have covered the freak storm and flash flooding in great detail, so here I’ll just post a short clip of the river flowing well above flood stage, as seen from the Second Street Bridge in Northfield, MN.

Cannon River Flood at Northfield from Christopher Tassava on Vimeo.

The day of aquatic emergency ended on campus with a fantastic hit by the Bad Plus, my favorite jazz band (and probably my favorite rock band, too).  I’ve raved about these guys before. Here are a few seconds of one of their jams, featuring the inimitable drummer, Dave King. I could watch this cat all day.

The Bad Plus, 9/24/10 from Christopher Tassava on Vimeo.

Technology and Distraction

One item on the long list of great things about working at Carleton is that I can attend the weekly presentations offered by the College’s Perlman Center for Teaching and Learning (which is, perversely, called the “LTC”). Today’s presentation , conducted by a geology prof, a psych prof, and a student, was great:

Digital Nation: Electronic media are radically changing the way this generation of students thinks, learns and socializes–perhaps for the better, perhaps not. Join us as we view a brief segment from a PBS “Frontline” program that explores these issues, and discuss the potentially revolutionary implications of these changes.

The core of the presentation was a segment from Frontline‘s “Digital Nation” broadcast. Though I haven’t (yet) seen the entire show (which is available for viewing online), the featured segment unequivocally made the case that technologically-driven multitasking by college students (and, by extension, by others) is a practice that actually hampers the multitasker’s ability to accomplish tasks, alters the brain functioning of the multitasker, and even dumbs down American culture.

Those are heady claims, ones which the psychologst, Mija Van Der Wege, deftly qualified with information about multitasking and divided attention in general – not just the kind of technologically-driven multitasking villified (with some justice) by Frontline. The problem, Van Der Wege subtly argued, isn’t so much that technology makes us (pick your category: Americans, adults, humans) bad at multitasking, it’s that our brains are bad at it, whether the multiple tasks are checking Facebook, talking on the phone, listening to music, and writing a paper (the sort of scenario depicted in the show) or, say, tending children, singing, gathering berries, and watching for lions. We as organisms are just not wired to simultaneously do all that stuff – or, at least, not to simultaneously do all that stuff very well.

Van Der Wege’s point led naturally into a good Q&A session, which in turn led to a short post-presentation chat with a computer scientist (seriously: there aren’t many workplaces that allow a person to casually talk to scientists about their fields of expertise!) about the Frontline clip and the Q&A. As a self-described “technologist,” she didn’t take to the show’s contention (or the subtext in some of the Q&A exchanges) that technology per se was to blame for students’ multitasking, which jibed with my own reaction as an erstwhile historian of technology.

One key lesson that I gleaned from the history of technology is that problems that seem to be technological are often actually social problems which have been somehow folded into a machine, a factory, a process. Dividing the technical from the social often reveals that the real problem reside in social arrangements such as power differentials, resource allocations, or methods of learning. As one historian famously said, technologies are “frozen politics” – social decisions, capacities, knowledge, resources that have been literally engineered into a tangible form.

In the case of technologically-driven multitasking, the problem is less that our technologies allow, say, a constant feed of status updates from Twitter and Facebook and, I think, more that we have chosen to maintain many of our interpersonal connections through technologies. If the 24/7 social media world becomes too onerous, we could choose to disembed some of our relationships from technology, and in fact we see that happening with, for instance, “tweetups” – real-world parties attended by people who follow each other on Twitter. But the point here is that we’ve chosen, consciously or not, to allow technologies to constitute many of our social arrangements, and to shape many other aspects of life, such as how we read or write. As the Frontline piece pointed out, this isn’t new: the advent of print, for instance, destroyed the need to memorize huge quantities of knowledge – and the social role of those with that task. Similarly, the telephone has now been reshaping our social relationships for more than 125 years.

In questioning the value of being a “digital nation,” then, we should shift blame away from our technologies – with their seductive screens and sounds – and toward our own individual and collective decision-making. Just as we can choose to let Twitter and Facebook become tools for making friends (or to let the phone interrupt dinner), we can choose to turn off the smartphone and shut down the browser so that we can, say, tranquilly write for an hour on the laptop or sit in a comfy chair and read a book.

Which I’m going to do right now.

Registration Circus Tent

Carleton has a lot of good traditions, but those centered on “New Student Week” are especially good. The best one: upperclass students line up at the formal campus entrance and cheer – loudly and energetically – for the first-year students as they roll onto campus. The noise is joyous and wonderful.

Another good, if more practical, tradition involves putting many of the check-in activities under a huge tent on the campus quad. I’m not involved in that affair, but I do like to see literally all the first-year students (and their hovering parents) lined up and waiting for their life at the college to start…
New Student Week Registration Tent

Construction, Cows, Colleges, and Contentment

Re-roofing of Laird

The customary quiet of campus during the summer is gone, gone, gone this year. In addition to (seemingly) larger-than-usual contingents of high schoolers and others attending various summer camps on campus, a number of construction projects are underway in virtually every part of campus. Take the visual tour! (For realism’s sake, you should watch this slideshow while running a cordless drill near your ear and listening to hard rock on a fuzzy radio a few feet away.)

Quite a Day

Wednesday was, I’ll understate, quite a day. It wasn’t exactly “one of those days,” since I didn’t spill my coffee on myself or ride my bike into a tree or walk across fresh asphalt. But it was a draining, topsy-turvy day at work.

I knew the day was going to be intense, since my boss was out on vacation but we needed to submit a big proposal to a federal funder. I add the last bit because applying to a federal agency is pretty complicated, with small margins for error. I knew this at 8 a.m., when I sat down at my desk, ready to go. And whaddya know: the email message at the top of my inbox came from the program officer at the federal agency to which we were applying. I opened up the message and read, to my surprise, a polite but thorough takedown of our proposal – the one we were planning to submit by the end of the day.

Panic button! Calling around to others involved with the proposal, it became clear that the program officer was fundamentally misunderstanding our proposal, and – what’s more – apparently forgetting big chunks of her own grant program’s guidelines, which we had, of course, relied upon to shape our proposal. Dismaying, to say the least.

After spending the morning in discussions with stakeholders on campus and with my boss, via a shaky cell-phone link from somewhere in the Northwoods, we finally decided to go ahead and submit the proposal after modifying two key parts of the proposal in pretty important ways. I put my writing engine into overdrive and worked up two or three pretty decent pages of prose in about half an hour. This brought the proposal to the point of meeting some of the program officer’s points, though certainly not all of them.

Round about this point, I got the first of several calls from a faculty member who was preparing to submit another proposal to a different federal funder. Though the deadline was several days away, this prof was very eager to get his proposal done, so I wound up talking and emailing with him about the changes he still needed to make to his own materials. All this consumed a very valuable hour – though an hour that I could have burned the next day anyhow.

Finally returning to the first proposal, I worked with my boss’s assistant to make the finishing touches and submit, which finally happened in early afternoon. She headed home, having worked long hours on this proposal over the preceding week, and I turned back to some other tasks.

Whereupon I got a phone call from a friend who told me she’d just found out she has cancer. This is someone who’s had a rough twelve months, including more than her fair share of medical problems, so this was particularly hard to take. She has lots of supportive friends and family, including me, so she’s hopeful – but of course it’s still cancer.

On that note, I decided that Wednesday had done enough damage, so I went home too. Good riddance – and we’d better get that grant.

New View

The lovely view out my office window of a tree and passersby on the sidewalk was been lost for the summer by this view, of the scaffolding necessary to do some loud and smelly repairs on our building. As one of my coworkers said when we were sharing mild complaints about the noise and stench, “I’m just glad the College has the money to fix the buildings!” Hear, hear – but I can’t wait till I don’t have hammer drills going outside my window again.
The View from My Office

Goodsell Death Ray

All the construction outside Goodsell Observatory at Carleton means that the College has finally begun the construction of our long-awaited death ray.

Goodsell Projects

Once installed, sometime next month, we will conduct preliminary tests on people who’ve let their dogs off leash in the Arb. When the instrument is properly calibrated, we’ll burn a clown nose on the head of the rampant lion on the west wall of St. Olaf’s slightly-too-fancy student center, Buntrock Commons. Finally, with the ray fully operational, we’ll zap our competitors where we know it’ll hurt: in their endowment managers’ offices.

Money-Making $cheme$

In an effort to “juice” the endowment with cash revenues, the College has converted the upper level of the Rec Center into a greenhouse for producing Minnesota folding chairs (Chaairus folderol prairie). Conditions are perfect for growing, as you can see from this shot of the bumper crop. College officials hope to get three or even four crops from the greenhouse before it’s converted back to its intended purpose, holding ultimate frisbee tournaments.
Field House Farming

Summer Giddiness

I had an oddly happy, satisfied, excited feeling all day today. Absurdly, I initially chalked it up to having a quiet, meeting-free day at work in which to get a lot done. I did, and I did, but after dinner, playing outside with the girls, I realized that the sensation was much more due to the fact that today’s really the start of summer, complete with typical crazy summer weather that ranged from deafening thundershowers this morning to hazy, humid sunshine this afternoon.

Narcissistically, summer is full of things to anticipate with eagerness. In a month, I’ll take a work-related trip to a professional meeting that is always valuable and that leaves me energized for the rest of the summer’s work. July is dominated by my second-most-favorite sporting event, the Tour de France, which is as complicated, excessive, and political as it is impressive. The long summer evenings leave plenty of time for sitting out on the patio with a beer and a book – including several good ones that are coming out this summer. And as much as I love being outside in the winter, I also love being outside in the summer: it’s the best season for working out. The heat and humidity (“What does not kill me…”), the sudden squalls, the dusty roads, the greening fields… I plan to take a couple workday afternoons off to do some long bike rides, for instance.

Work changes dramatically when – as it has – campus empties out: three-quarters of the students are long gone, and the seniors are only here through the weekend, with commencement occurring tomorrow. Come Monday, we’ll be in ghost town mode at Carleton. Which is, all things considered, pretty nice, both in its own right (fewer meetings! a less urgent pace! lots of time for projects! summer dress code!) and in comparison to the happy hubbub of campus during the school year.

At home, today was our first pick up at our CSA farm, Open Hands, the produce of which pretty much means “summer” to us. Shannon and the girls went out there this afternoon, caught up with the proprietors and their dog, and brought home a nice trove of produce, including lots of greens and some tiny, fantastically sweet strawberries – which we enjoyed with homemade pizza for dinner.

And most importantly, today was Julia’s last day of kindergarten. She’s a first grader now, ready to soak up her first true summer vacation (even if she doesn’t yet know just how lucky she is). Vivi’s been done with preschool for a while, but many things have been on hold until Julia finished up. With K now history, it’s on to summer: soccer and swimming lessons for Julia, summer “school” for Vivi, picnics, lots of outdoor play – all the things that Shannon excels at planning and carrying out. They’re going to have a lot of fun – at least as much fun as these yahoos who were in my yard last summer.
First Swim of the Season