Time for details

(Or: an academic, blogospheric romance)

I haven't written much about Cosimo over the past couple of years, other than to note that he exists. Although this blog is more personal than it is academic (in the sense of focusing on a specific area of research or opining about Pressing Issues in Academe), it's my general policy to touch only rather lightly on the details of my personal life, especially those that don't have to do with my professional life.

As it happens, though, the two intersect here.

Cosimo and I first met several years ago, at a dinner stage-managed by a mutual friend at an academic conference. We wound up seated next to each other, and I took an instant dislike to him: he struck me as overbearing, loud, and just too much of a guy.

After the conference, I wrote a brief, eye-roll-y blog post about something he'd done that I'd found professionally objectionable. I couched it in general terms--I'd met this ridiculous person, who'd done this ridiculous thing--and my readers and I chattered back and forth in the comments for a few days about how very, very loserish that behavior was. Then I forgot about it.

Over the next year I ran into Cosimo a few more times at conferences, and eventually decided that he was okay: he was loud, yes, but also rather funny--without being one of those guys who has to be the funniest person in the room. And he seemed generous and supportive of his colleagues. We emailed a couple of times about professional matters and I assigned him to an outer circle among my work-friends.

Time passed. At some point I noticed that I had a new blog reader whose comments stood out in a variety of ways: thoughtful, funny, and rather more personal in tone than I'd have expected from someone I didn't know. From my site stats I traced him to an IP address at Cosimo's university.

I wondered if the new reader could be he, and I wondered if I should be uncomfortable if he were; I didn't know Cosimo well, and I'd been blogging about relatively personal topics recently. (And then, as now, I had no illusions that anyone who knew me in real life wouldn't immediately recognize me from my blog.) But I read back through my last dozen posts and figured, fuck it: I wasn't ashamed of anything.

That is, until I saw that he'd been going through my archives. And that he'd read that post. Three times.

Well, what's a girl to do?

This girl emailed him and apologized. And then took down the post.

We got into more frequent email contact after that, but still only in a friendly way: I'd been in a long-term relationship when I'd first met him, and by that point was dating someone else, and I still hadn't entirely shaken my negative first impression of Cosimo. Obviously, he was a decent (and, uh, gracious and forgiving) guy. . . but he was still kinda annoying, right? At least in person? I was pretty sure he must still be annoying.

Of course, I hadn't actually seen him in person for a long while. Then we went out for dinner one weekend when he was passing through town--and I had an astonishingly good time. And then there was a conference, and another conference. And by that point my latest relationship had ended.

We started talking on the phone, almost daily, sometimes for three or four hours at a stretch; I couldn't remember when I'd last been that excited to be getting to know someone, or that eager to do so. After a month I went to visit him.

And the rest, as they say, is unwritten blogospheric history.

No time for details

But nevertheless: Cosimo and I got engaged last weekend. In Union Square Park, in the benevolent shadows of Barnes & Noble and DSW.

I suppose I'm okay with the term fiancé/e (especially when pronounced with the comic upper-crusty accent on the "AN"). But I'm utterly opposed to "wife." Henceforth, I shall be lobbying for "spouse" as the all-purpose, gender- and sexual-orientation-neutral title of the future.

Hither and yon

Your faithful blogger will be out of town for each of the next three weekends: today begins a long weekend in NYC for some theatah, some friends, and many an overpriced cocktail; next weekend is the Big Football Game; and then, of course, it's Thanksgiving.

Hoping to squeeze in a post here and there--but if not, chalk it up to my fabulous, jet-set lifestyle.

College admissions blues

The other day I interviewed a local high school student who's applying to Instant Name Recognition U. This is only my second year as an alumni interviewer and she was only my second interviewee, but each time I've scheduled a meeting I've had some anticipatory misgivings.

I'll be frank: teaching at Regional U makes me feel differently about my alma mater. Now, I don't accept the claim that the Ivy League is a bastion of snobbery and privilege; for one, there's plenty of school-related snobbery to go around (where I grew up, it was an article of faith that people who went to the University of Washington were much smarter than people who went to Washington State), and for another, the Ivies and similar schools are actually incredibly economically diverse--much more so than the pricey St. Whoevers or Private Basketball/Football Unis that criss-cross this great nation.

But when one believes, as I do, in the mission of a place like RU, it's hard not to feel conflicted. I love my alma mater. But I also love my students. I see the differences between the two institutions pretty clearly, and I doubt that RU is even a safety school for most of the INRU applicants from this region. That makes me feel defensive and protective of my students--as if, somehow, they were the ones being judged.

The kid I interviewed last year did nothing to dispel this feeling. He showed up in a suit and tie, with a copy of his mile-long resume, and spoke like a frequent attender of "junior leadership" conferences. He was smart and personable and socially-conscious, but he didn't seem much like my students.

He didn't seem much like an INRU student, either, and he didn't get in, but the experience made me feel that much more ambivalent about going to interview my second candidate last week.

She was totally different. Charming and gawky and confident and nervous, she too had a long resume, but she had more than a resume. She didn't have a prefabricated bit to give me, but as she talked it became clear how boundlessly curious she was, and what a passion she had for breaking things apart and creating new syntheses--how studying physics transformed the way she thought about everything from sailing to singing, and how the quantitative gave her a means to understand the qualitative. She reminded me of so many of the students I knew or taught at INRU.

Curiously enough, she also reminded me of the students I teach at RU, or at least some of them: all earnestness and potential, ready to be set afire by a new subject or idea. They may not all be starting out with the same cultural capital as she, but they're not, actually, so very different.

Special collections

I've decided to start my own rare books library. A very small rare books library, mind, or a very special special collection.

But let me back up. On Saturday I took my grad students to the rare books and special collections room at the nearby University of Research (UR). Arranging the visit had been a bit of a production--the room isn't open late enough on weeknights for us to go during our regular class period; some of my students live 20 miles away; I hadn't previously met the librarians; I was worried about parking on the day of a home sporting event--but in the end it worked out marvelously.

I'd originally asked the librarian to pull only printed books from the seventeenth century, but after assigning my students a few chapters from Andrew Pettegree's The Book in the Renaissance I'd regretted not poking around to see whether the library had any medieval manuscripts. When I mentioned this to the librarian, he nodded. . . and in fifteen minutes returned with a cart of books of hours, incunabula, a Torah scroll, and stones with Sumerian and Babylonian inscriptions.

And then he left us alone, saying only, "be gentle." So we hung out in the richly-appointed seminar room, passing everything around from hand to hand--my students exclaiming at the feel of vellum versus parchment versus paper, and squinting up close to try to determine whether the red letters in the incunabula were printed that way, or hand-rubricated.

It's probably the best time I've ever had in a rare books room, but it inspired two conflicting emotions in me. First, excitement: it's not a large collection and its pre-1700 holdings are pretty thin, but it's perfect for pedagogical purposes; I'm determined to use it for every upper-division or grad class I teach from here on out. Lots of students at much fancier and better-funded schools don't have access to this kind of material, and it's a way to make up for my institution's more limited resources.

But at the same time, going to the collection reminded me of those more limited resources. The UR collection is itself pretty small (they have no early Shakespeare or Milton, for example) and, because it's half an hour away, hard to use in a casual way; I can't schedule multiple class meetings there, for the purpose of looking at just a book or two each time, and I can't use it for my lower-division classes even if they're small.

Thus, my plan: I'm going to build up my own rare books library.

I already have one lovely seventeenth-century book, a small folio, and I've been thinking about purchasing another, a duodecimo. Both are either necessary for or relevant to my research, but they would also be great show-and-tell specimens. I've purchased several books in facsimile for teaching purposes, and I plan on buying more--but they're not the same as originals.

So what more can I buy, cheaply? Well, ABE is selling individual leaves from a King James Bible for $60, and I imagine I could find other interesting leaves for similar prices. There's also a surprising number of intact seventeenth century books available, some for as little as $75, if content isn't important. And if all I want to talk about is bibliographic stuff--title pages or gatherings or watermarks or whatever--maybe content isn't important.

Or, you know: I could just add a PayPal button to this blog and solicit y'all's donations. Copies of Dunne's 1633 Poems are going for as little as $33,000!

Assignments for grad students

As my second semester teaching M.A. students starts to wind down, I've been thinking about the skills that I want M.A. students to have and the assignments that best develop or refine those skills--and I'm interested in hearing my readers' thoughts as well.

Personally, I'm not a believer in the 25-page term paper. I suppose a doctoral program could argue that 25-30pp. approximates the length of an article or a dissertation chapter, and thus it's important for students to master projects of that size. But a) RU is not a doctoral institution, and b) I was myself a doctoral student, and most of my own seminar papers were utter, flailing, blithering crap. Producing three 25-page papers, in less than a month, on subjects that I knew little about (in one semester: Keats, Spenser, and the respective attitudes toward culture of T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold) did NOTHING to prepare me for the much longer and more intensive process of researching and writing my first dissertation chapter.

So although there's virtue in learning how to write a paper of that length (and I definitely think M.A. students should write a couple of them during their time in the program), they have to be built up to. In each of the two M.A. classes I've taught, then, I've described our final paper as "15+ pages." More importantly, I've tried to devise shorter written assignments that prepare them for that final paper.

In my Milton class, my first assignment was a conventional close-reading essay; I wanted to get a look at my students' writing and interpretative skills, for one, but I also wanted to make sure that they were comfortable analyzing poetry and using the technical vocabulary of poetic analysis.

In my Dunne class this semester, I came up with what I think a much better version of a close-reading assignment--which was to have each student produce an "edition" of one of Dunne's poems based on the manuscript and early printed editions (a selection of which are available here). In making their editions, each student had to establish a copy text, provide a textual apparatus with variants, and then write a narrative explanation and analysis that justified, in literary terms, the choices she'd made.

It required a lot of preliminary work, but in the end produced better results. I think the interpretative work felt easier to my students (because the stuff they were focusing on was more obvious and more seemingly pragmatic: why prefer this word to that word? why leave the comma in or take it out? does spelling change the meaning in this case?), while actually demanding much more of them. We talked a lot about how manuscripts circulated in the Early Modern period and how they made it into print; whether and to whom authorial intention matters; and what editors do and where the texts in their Norton or Penguin editions come from.

The second paper I assigned in both classes was more straightforward, but no less practical: find an article or book chapter in a reputable scholarly source, and then write a short essay that engages with it--summarizing, critiquing, noting any theoretical biases or omissions or areas for further study.

My feeling is: if students can close read and if they can deal with secondary sources in a critical, responsible way, then they can write a longer work of scholarship--whether it's 15 pages or 25. But isolating and focusing on those skills matters.

*

From your experiences as teachers or students, what kinds of skills do you think are most important for grad students to work on--and what kinds of assignments have you found that do the trick?

When I wrote the ninety-five, haters straight up assailed 'em

For the past few months my parish has had a deacon serving alongside our regular priest; he's just here on temporary assignment, learning the ropes as he awaits his ordination to the priesthood in the spring. He seems like a nice guy--smart, a good homilist, and with a gentle, approachable manner--but I couldn't help wondering what his deal was: he's in his late forties, and wears what appears to be a wedding ring. I'd speculated that maybe he was a widower, or possibly a married Episcopalian priest who was converting. However, in my experience, priest-converts from the C of E tend to be a little scary and fanatical (running toward Rome as an escape from teh gays and teh wimmins they believe are taking over the Anglican communion). He definitely didn't fit that profile.

So it was rather wonderful to learn today, on Ninety-Five Theses Day, that our deacon is actually a history professor at a local college and a former Methodist minister--whose conversion to Catholicism twelve years ago coincided with completing his dissertation on Reformation Christianity.

Gotta watch out when you study religious history. It does that shit.

(Yeah, I know: I posted this video two years ago. But I love it so.)

Polyglot dreams

I spent last weekend in Toronto, crashing a conference that several friends were presenting at. It wasn't a huge conference, but it was an international one--and unlike most international conferences I've attended, it was multilingual: approximately one third of the panels were in French and the rest in English.

This fact barely registered on me when I first skimmed the program, and since the panels were segregated by language I didn't expect to have much interaction with the francophone attendees. Whatever, I thought. It's Canada. I guess that's what they do.

But in fact, all the conference-goers took coffee and cookies in the same entrance hall and we all attended the same plenary talks, and when people squeezed past or apologized for bumping into me they were as likely to say "merci!" or "pardon!" as "thanks" or "excuse me." The chair introducing one of the plenary speakers gave his opening remarks half in French and half in English (not translating: just switching languages midway through), and one speaker on a plenary panel did something similar, occasionally switching to French for a few sentences for emphasis.

It was a disorienting, strange, and rather wonderful experience, and one I'm pretty sure I've never had before. Whether at home or abroad, I'm used to being in a place where one language is the dominant one, and the other language or languages are used for private or domestic conversations: tourists talking to each other, immigrant parents murmuring to their children. But being somewhere that two languages were treated equally, and where no need for translation was assumed, was something new.

Now, I know that the politics of language are touchy in Canada, and that it's not a perfect bilingual paradise. Nevertheless, as foreign language departments are being eliminated in this country, it's hard not to look with longing toward a neighbor country that seems, at least from the outside, to be valuing language study in a way we do not.

And I should 'fess up: although I work in a period and on authors who are ferociously multilingual--and although my grad program required three foreign languages--French is the only foreign language I have any real claim to being able to speak or understand; I took it throughout high school and for a couple of years in college, but since I don't need it for my work, it's atrophied terribly. I have adequate reading knowledge of Italian, can work v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y through Latin (albeit with lots of errors), and a year's worth of ancient Greek in college left me with the ability to pronounce ANY WORD I SEE that's written in Greek characters (although I can no longer understand a line of it, if ever I could).

I have colleagues and friends with a serious command of multiple languages, and I wish I were among them. As it is, I sometimes think that I and many more academics than are willing to admit it are the PhD-holding equivalent of the kids who flounder through a year of college-level foreign language study, fulfill their requirement, and call it a day.

What can be coaxed out of the surfeit of language

My graduate class this semester is centered on the writer whose name I'll render here as John Dunne. Although we're not focused on him or on poetry exclusively, at least 75% of our primary texts are in verse, and non-narrative verse to boot. This has presented some pedagogical challenges.

Over the years (probably in part because my own undergraduate education in poetry was so patchy, not to say piss-poor) I've become somewhat of a poetry evangelist. I teach scansion and metrics in all my literature courses, and have developed lesson plans, handouts, and short assignments to give undergraduates a basic tool-kit for talking about and understanding formal verse. Still, I'd never before taught a course that was primarily non-narrative poetry, and I definitely hadn't taught such a course to graduate students. When I teach lyric poetry in an undergraduate class, I assign a bunch of poems but often spend most of each class period working through just one or two, modeling how we analyze and make meaning out of verse. But did I really want to spend a graduate seminar doing that kind of close reading? Every week?

The answer, kinda, is "yes."

I've assigned a lot of secondary readings, of course, many of them focused on larger issues to do with Early Modern reading practices, editorial theory, and history of the book, so we're not just close-reading poems. But it turns out, first, that my M.A. students don't necessarily have any more experience or innate comfort with poetry than my undergrads, and, second, that it's hard to talk about poetry in general terms without first getting down into the nitty gritty of the verse.

Last week, for example, in our three-hour class we spent at least two hours working through just two poems, an elegy and a satire. With long poems especially, I sometimes refer to this process as a "forced march": we take a few lines at a time, lingering to talk about this image, that rhyme, or untangle a particularly knotty bit of syntax. It's slow and deliberate, and with undergraduates I sometimes worry that I'm losing or boring them. But this particular class was lovely. I hadn't picked out the poems myself--I'd had my students choose them--so I didn't have a lesson plan, and it felt like a process of discovery for me as much as for them. I freely confessed when I didn't understand what a given part was doing, and then made them work it out, explaining how a particular metaphor or grammatical construction was really operating, or what the possibilities were and how each one changed the meaning of the whole.

Part of what I'm trying to do, of course, is convey why I love this material, and the ways in which real scholarship is at least as playful as it is earnest. So when I start to get punchy at 8.30 at night, or feel a tangent coming on, I don't always stop myself. At one point, upon realizing that a student was trying--overly-delicately--to suggest that a particular metaphor referred to sexual intercourse, I exclaimed, "Oh! You mean the word 'sheathe'? You think he means, like, penis-in-vagina sheathing? No, for once, it's just soul-in-body sheathing." [Looking around the room.] Hey! You guys all know that, right? That 'vagina' means 'sheath'?" Later, I somehow wound up suggesting that Ovid, Jonson and Dunne were good candidates for the game fuck-marry-kill (and then had to explain that game, when it turned out only one of my students knew what I was talking about and was laughing too hard to do it for me.)

Now, if talking about penises and vaginas and the fuckability of long-dead poets is what I'm remembered for, maybe they should take my Ph.D. away from me right now. But I like to think that I'm operating, in however impoverished a way, in the tradition of my betters. Among the many tributes to the late Frank Kermode in the London Review of Books, my favorite was that written by his former student, Jacqueline Rose. Here's the part that I've been thinking of as I teach Dunne:

What is it about a literary work that enables it to persist over time? Most obviously perhaps, the "classic" in [Kermode's] definition was a text whose plurality of meaning. . . kept it alive. It is because no reader can exhaust the meaning of such a text, because any one reading cannot but select and forget. . . that it will continuously be reinvented. A classic is a work that is "patient of reinterpretation". . . . [A] work. . . survive[s] by means of what [can] be coaxed out of the surfeit of its language.

If cracking bawdy jokes leads one of my students to coax something more out of a poem than she would have otherwise, then I defend the practice utterly.

Smart kids = boys

What I liked best about The Social Network (a/k/a "the Facebook movie") was its vivid portrait of smart kids creating and tackling an intellectual challenge: the energy, the enthusiasm, and the sheer geekiness of it all. In some ways, the movie felt like a response to my plea, last month, for more cinematic depictions of the life of the mind. I'm not a computer programmer or an entrepreneur, but I have been a college student, and the movie captured what it's like to be a nerdy obsessive surrounded by other obsessives. The scene near the beginning where Zuckerberg creates "Facemash" in a late-night blitz while his friends egg him on, as well as the later coding competition where a bunch of students at computers throw back shots of alcohol after every line of code written, both felt perfect to me. They reminded me of my own college experience (minus the coding and company-founding parts).

But the movie's authenticity only goes so far. As several commenters have noted, women, with the exception of the girlfriend who dumps Zuckerberg before the opening credits, exist in the movie only as groupies or psycho-sluts. I don't have a problem with the presence of a few two-dimensional floozies or even some gratuitous--and, I'm pretty sure, wildly inaccurate--scenes set at parties in Harvard's final clubs where the women strip to their underwear and make out with each other for the delectation of the male partiers. I mean, those scenes are lame, but whatever: women occasionally do that shit, and probably sometimes even at Harvard.

What I have a problem with is that there are no other women. Maybe it's too much to expect a Hollywood movie to show women who are as rumpled and nerdy as many of the men (although last time I checked, on actual college campuses unwashed hair and sweatpants know no gender). But surely there could be a cute smart girl or two? A pretty female coder? A Facebook employee who's not just a jailbait intern-groupie?

I didn't go to Harvard, so I could be totally wrong here, but in my years at Harvard-but-for-the-architecture, there were lots of smart women. Some of them were damn hot, too, and went to frat parties and may have worn spiky heels and low-cut blouses and tons of eyeliner. . . one night a week. But the rest of the time they were wearing jeans and glasses and setting the curve in their organic chemistry classes. Or staying up until two a.m. every night editing the school paper.

I'm mostly inured to the crappy depictions of women in movies; I say little hand-wavy things like, "well, the female characters are sappy and sucky--but it's still a great film." But perhaps because I've been thinking about depictions of the intellectual life in movies, or perhaps because I went to not-Harvard and felt that I recognized so much of the intellectual culture and nerd-energy of The Social Network, the portrayal of women in this movie (a movie that I mostly liked) really pissed me off.

Or maybe it's just that my college roommate got married last weekend, and in the days preceding my going to see Sorkin's movie I'd been thinking fond thoughts about her and the five other women I lived with freshman year. So since this is my goddamn blog, I'm going to tell you about those five women. None of them is a Mark Zuckerberg, but they all had obsessions, talents, and flashes of inspiration--not to mention feverish all-nighters or all-weekenders where they put together major projects--that are basically consonant with the way the movie depicts him and his exclusively male friends.

My roommates majored in Economics, Anthropology, French, Biology, and Physics & Philosophy (a double major). One went on to get an M.A. as a Fulbright Scholar and to work first in consulting, then for a famine relief organization, and is now the department head at a major British corporation. Another went to library science school and then became the director of a public library--where she's recently received some unsought national attention as a defender of the First Amendment. The third got both American and French law degrees and practiced law in France before becoming a jazz songwriter and vocalist, based in New York; she has a couple of albums out now. The fourth is a labor activist, and her work on behalf of illegal immigrant sweatshop workers was recently featured on PBS. The fifth got a Ph.D. in physics and is now on the tenure track at our alma mater. They were--and are--smart, fun, and hilarious.

And I can't help but ask: where are their undergraduate selves in movies about college life? Where are their adult selves, for that matter?

As the gourd turns

Last weekend Cosimo and I dragged a couple of squash and a pumpkin home from Maine. So you know I ain't lying when I say,

"It's fall, fuckfaces. You're either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you're not."

Death by paper

Apologies for going AWOL; a perfect storm of out-of-town guests, an out-of-town trip of my own, and the collation of fifty bazillion documents for my reappointment file conspired to keep me away from all you lovelies.

Regional U has both a three-year and a five-year review, the latter preparatory to going up for tenure in year six. The idea is to be able to make any last-minute interventions if the candidate isn't quite on track for tenure--or just put together a crappy file. It's a procedure that I heartily support, though it's also a pain in the ass: one three-ring binder constitutes a teaching portfolio, with tables of evaluation scores and grade ranges, sample syllabi and assignments, class observation write-ups, a statement of teaching philosophy, and anything else notable. The other binder holds copies of all the candidate's publications, fellowship award letters, book contracts (and/or correspondence related to same), along with a C.V., the past four years' annual reports, and narrative statements about research and service.

Basically, the application is an extremely long, heavily annotated C.V., with exhibits.

But although I was cursing the process for most of the long weekend that I spent revising and re-revising my tables of contents, printing out endless PDFs, and running back and forth to Staples to buy exhibit tabs and document sleeves, it's nice to have a tangible reminder of all the things we do that seem to melt into air: classes taught, papers given, thoughts thunk.

I found this to be especially true for my teaching. I have a C.V., after all, to remind me of everything I've published, and offprints stashed here and there. But tabulating all my evaluation scores and grade ranges, and deciding which assignments and handouts to include as representative samples of how I teach--that mysterious thing that we're always doing and thinking about without fully understanding--made me realize, with a start, that I actually do have a teaching profile and philosophy. There are things that I've decided to value and emphasize, across all my classes, without really knowing or planning it.

Better still, I like the teacher who emerges from these documents. She seems kinda awesome. Awesomer, in fact, than I am. (But maybe she'd be my friend?)

Job List open thread

So dudes: this year's JIL. What's going on in your fields?

I can tell you there are damn few Renaissance jobs, and though I don't have much personally at stake (I know almost no one who's going on the market, and none of them are first-timers), it's a field that hires pretty reliably at all levels.

On the other hand, CHECK OUT those eighteenth-century jobs! I thought there were a lot last year, at least relative to the total number, but this year is outta control. I wonder whether we're finally seeing a generational change, and how that might reshape the field.

But I'm curious how the view looks from where you sit.

The life of the mind, dramatized!

Over the weekend Cosimo and I went to see Agora, a movie set in fourth-century Alexandria and focusing on the female scientist and philosopher Hypatia. (The movie has had only limited theatrical release, but it's available next month on DVD.) The cinematography was stunning and the story potentially compelling, but in the end I found it disappointing: the narrative dragged, the Christians were cartoonish bad-guys--who nevertheless seemed more obsessed with defending geocentrism than debunking pagan gods--and there were countless missed opportunities to depict the movie's political and intellectual conflicts with more nuance.

Still, I was interested in the way the movie tried to dramatize the intellectual life. The filmmakers clearly didn't know how to portray Hypatia as a teacher: we see her instructing a group of young men on a few occasions, but they're awkward, flat scenes, and it's not clear that the men are there for any reason other than the hot pants (hot togas?) that Hypatia gives them. The scenes involving her intellectual investigations are a bit better, particularly toward the end; I liked the fact that the movie didn't shy away from some basic geometry or from a coherent explanation of the Ptolomaic universe and why it was so hard to escape that model.

It got me thinking about how hard it is to dramatize what we do, by which I mean, what we actually do, as teachers and researchers. There are plenty of compelling movies about teachers, though those movies tend to equate "good teaching" with having a charismatic classroom presence and endless amounts of compassion. But being a good teacher doesn't have much to do with the teacher's personality, and most of learning doesn't happen in the classroom. It happens inside students' heads, over a long period of time, in unpredictable and entirely undramatic ways. Movies can only hint at this, by showing us what we take to be external signs of those internal changes: the students start showing up for class and stop acting out. They speak excitedly and articulately. They pass tests and they win awards.

It's even harder to dramatize scholarship. The only even halfway successful movie examples I can think of feature research-as-detective-story: the scholar discovers new documents in an archive, or an attic, or some long-neglected record-books (possibly while receiving obscure threats from people in high places) and eventually OVERTURNS EVERYTHING WE THOUGHT WE KNEW.

Now, plenty of us work in archives on a regular basis. But even on the rare occasion that we turn up a shocking! new! fact! (that this writer was a secret homosexual or that that nobleman's poems were actually written by his sister), the discovery itself isn't the real work. We still have to spend countless hours working at home or in shabby libraries, reading crappy monographs and badly-photocopied articles, and cajoling the ILL librarian to order us just one more book after we've been blocked from the system. We write draft after draft, do more research, get some feedback, and revise. After a year or two or three, we might produce a 40-page journal article.

If it's good, that journal article will be referenced and wrestled with for thirty years. If it's really good, it could totally transform the shape of our field. But even if the response to a given work of scholarship is dramatic, there's not much dramatic about the process by which it gets researched and written. (Which isn't to say that it's not enthralling, at least sometimes, for the scholar herself; it just doesn't make for good cinema.)

But maybe I've just been watching the wrong movies. What are your votes for films that come closest to conveying what it is that we actually do, as teachers and scholars?

Welcome to the corporate academy, Times readers

Today's New York Times contains an Op-Ed entitled "Ditch Your Laptop, Dump Your Boyfriend." Its subtitle: "Advice for freshmen from the people who actually grade their papers and lead their class discussions."

Who are the six contributors who actually do such things?

Grad students, every one of them.