Liz's Bloglet - Wednesday 25 April 2012

V unir jbaqreshy, oevyyvnag fghqragf jub pbhyq unir tbar gb fbzr snapl-cnagf cevingr fpubby ohg ner urer orpnhfr svanaprf be bgure pvephzfgnaprf znxr guvf gur evtug cynpr sbe gurz. V ybir gurz naq ybir grnpuvat gurz.

V nyfb unir fghqragf jub tbg bss genpx n srj lrnef ntb, be unq gb yrnir pbyyrtr ng fbzr cbvag va gur cnfg, be whfg arire gevrq uneq npnqrzvpnyyl orsber, ohg jub ner jvyyvat gb chg va gur rssbeg gb yrnea ubj gb fghql naq qb gur jbex gb pngpu hc naq or fhpprffshy pbyyrtr fghqragf. V ybir gurz naq ybir grnpuvat gurz, gbb. (Fbzr qnlf V ybir gurz zber guna gur svefg tebhc. Gur fvatyr zbzf rfcrpvnyyl ner zl urebrf znal qnlf.)

Gura V unir fghqragf jub ner obgu jbrshyyl hacercnerq sbe pbyyrtr naq jub oneryl frrz gb pner nobhg pbyyrtr naljnl. Gurl cyntvnevmr bss bs jrocntrf nvzrq ng xvqf naq znxr zr pel. _
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03:03:09 PM, Wednesday 25 April 2012

I'm starting to think about what I'm going to be doing for research exactly, and I was wondering who one talks to about stream restoration in Georgia these days. I know most of the Southeast experts, but I wasn't sure who is working on it here these days.

Apparently, based on Googling, the answer is still me (first link is my site at UGA, last updated in 2002).

Yes, we are all doomed. _
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11:33:25 AM, Tuesday 10 April 2012

They're remodeling our old house! _
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09:41:58 PM, Monday 9 April 2012

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Artemis did not appreciate her "calming collar". _
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09:32:02 PM, Monday 9 April 2012

Pretty, tiny headwater stream behind the big administrative and classroom building. I'm kind of in love with this one, but very concerned that it's going to dry up any day as the drought gets worse. _
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08:28:14 PM, Wednesday 4 April 2012

George

The out-of-focus really helps express the nature of our very sweet, but very ethereal, little cat. All cats are weird. George is weirder. _
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09:45:03 PM, Tuesday 3 April 2012

Georgians call this "wild honeysuckle". It's easy to understand why from the shape of the flowers and their sweet smell. It's actually one of our native azaleas. This bunch are growing in a small stream valley behind our big administrative and classroom building.

I'm trying out photoblogging for April. We'll see how it goes. _
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08:12:51 PM, Monday 2 April 2012

Agave plants grow decades before flowering once and dying. So they make that one time count. _
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04:07:21 PM, Saturday 31 March 2012

It's going to be a weird semester in the fall. I'll have two classes without labs (biology without lab?), evolution and the intro class that is genetics/evolution/ecology for non-majors, and then the same intro class I've taught the previous semesters (genetics/evolution/ecology for majors, with a lab).

I am laughing inside because I am one of the only biologists here who professes to be religious and I'm the one teaching evolution, which I know will raise eyebrows among my (non-liberally educated) colleagues who think religion and evolution are incompatible. This of course drives me crazy because the number of biology majors who are not-religious is virtually zero (a good mix of Christians, Muslims, and Hindus and undoubtedly a few Jews, Buddhists, and maybe Animists for all I know as well. I've seen a few Sikhs on campus--what do Sikhs think about evolution? Jainists?). There is a campus "radicals for reason" club but I don't actually know any students who are in it.

I hear things all the time (like the eternal favorite, "We didn't evolve from monkeys; if we did, why are there still monkeys?") that make me think that if someone actually taught them more about evolution most of them would be comfortable with it, but instead we have a small gang of "New Atheists" who have convinced them that they have to choose, and so many of them have chosen religion, unsurprisingly given that A) this is Georgia and B) many of them who are not native to GA are part of tight-knit immigrant communities. Good times. _
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11:51:58 AM, Monday 19 March 2012

So, I feel like I ought to be in Durham for the funeral of a little girl, one of my favorite colleagues was just found unresponsive on the floor of her house, and now they're testing the campus emergency announcement sirens (also known as the anti-campus-shooter sirens). Can I just cancel today? _
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11:37:09 AM, Wednesday 7 March 2012

At the end of the day, sometimes I just want to cry: why do they hate women so much? It is just so exhausting to defend my right to take up space and have opinions, let alone my right to self-determination, over and over and over.

I still maintain that the most important moment in the Program is the one where Huck says, �All right then, I'll go to hell�.

If following your moral code makes you do evil, whether that is returning your friend to slavery or bashing gay folks and calling women names for seeking healthcare, then maybe it's your moral code that's screwed up. And maybe it's better to go to hell than to follow your god. _
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08:33:04 PM, Monday 5 March 2012

Emails I did not get while teaching at Pseudo-Ivy:

"I'm having a transportation problem. The girl who normally gives me a ride is sick. I have to wait until check cashing place near me opens at 10:00 to get the money to afford the bus and a taxi."

There is no bus service to campus. The nearest stop is more than a mile away, with no sidewalks in between. The check cashing place issue is the reality of life in recession-era Georgia.

This is one of my hardest working students, who always has questions and ideas of things she's seen in the news or on nature television shows.

Going to college should not be this hard. _
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10:56:40 AM, Wednesday 29 February 2012

I am one of many peopke who has mentioned The Handmaid's Tale recently. But that is honestly a far-fetched scenario. Amanda Ching may have nailed where we are really heading in a few years with her short story ILU-486. Warning: this is the most disturbing fiction I've read in some time, made only more so because of just how close we are to this no longer being fiction. _
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06:03:20 PM, Saturday 25 February 2012

"Four white men talking about contraception without saying "women" and immigration without saying "immigrants.""

Melissa McEwan on last night's debate. _
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11:07:12 AM, Thursday 23 February 2012

I cannot truly want what I am toldI must have

Yet another brilliant post from Melissa that I will not be linking from Facebook.

I listen to NPR on my commute every day and worry about that tiny sliver of goodness and decency left in society which is all that stands between a monster like Rick Santorum and the presidency, all that stands between me and the loss of my bodily autonomy to a bunch of theocratic thugs. I sit in my office and imagine a Handmaid's Tale world.

Are we just powerless to stop any of this? When did birthcontrol become controversial? When did science and medicine become things disparaged by both the right and the left? _
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06:24:28 PM, Wednesday 22 February 2012

This. _
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06:26:19 PM, Wednesday 15 February 2012

A Friend on religious freedom and politics _
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11:39:02 AM, Friday 10 February 2012

This is good and I want to save it to read again later. And to remind me that I want to check out Mireya Mayor's National Geographic videos because she is both feisty as hell and discovered the world's smallest lemur. _
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03:38:46 PM, Friday 27 January 2012

The labor market still needs more than 10 million jobs.

I haven't said much here about this fancypants new life we have. Part of that is the googleability and the difficulty in talking about my job in this very specific unique college in a way that remains general. The fact that this blog formed originally as part of a network of blogs by people who went to a very specific unique college is fairly ironic. I am still gleeful to talk about St. John's in specific terms to anyone who will listen (although with all kinds of reservations and conditions about very expensive private education while working at a place that is very much the opposite). But talking about my current job raises issues, because I am a state employee, because although we now have ~8000 students our school is still a very tight-knit community with a small college feel, because I come to know my students very well and want to tell their stories because they are important, wonderful, terrible stories that say so much about where we are in this country, because I know that both propriety and FERPA prevent me.

Like many colleges, we have professional development programs for faculty, and the workshop I chose today was on advising pre-health students, an obviously relevant topic to a biology professor. The speaker was one of my colleagues, actually the founding member of the biology faculty, who was hired for her expertise in advising pre-health students among many other reasons. She talked us through pre-med and pre-dental and pre-vet and pre-physical therapy. But she spent the most time on pre-nursing--we don't currently have a nursing major, but we have many, many students who will do their first two years with us and then transfer to one of the larger state schools to finish their BSN. She made the point that most of the other programs we talked about attract a huge variety of students, many of whom come from middle class backgrounds (or used to be until the past few years) with parents who went to college. But our pre-nursing students frequently fit a common profile: they are smart young women whose parents didn't go to college, who now want a different life from the hard one their parents have had. These young women go on to graduate with their BSN and get good nursing jobs. They may be able to buy a home, which they are likely to share with their parents. Some of them already have children when they start college, and others will have kids later, and their kids will grow up with a higher standard of living and with much more certainty that they too will go to college. Nursing, my colleague said, is a major that changes whole families, not just the lives of individual students.

Education is about changing lives, just like we were always told, and I think it is actually morally wrong to deny the importance of skills gained as part of a liberal arts education (because I strongly feel that a liberal arts education is what we provide) in the life changing that education can do. I had the luxury of not caring about vocational skills in college. The skills I did gain served me well in the 12 years between when I graduated and when I finally got a real job with the (to be frank) vocational skills I gained from a whole lot of grad school. But the driven pre-nursing students that I've talked to, these smart, enthusiastic young women, are every bit as engaged in their education and in love with learning as any Johnnie, while recognizing that where they (and their parents and their kids) are going to live and what they are going to eat are also perfectly valid questions worthy of inquiry and concern.

And sometimes I walk through the ivy covered brick buildings of the little liberal arts college up the street and think that I probably really belong in a place like that, celebrating learning for its own sake, with well prepared students who don't have to work 40 hours a week, like I always thought I would be. But then I drive back to the 'burbs, to our weird office park of a campus, and I see that my students' passion is just as genuine and their need is so much greater. And maybe it is all a ridiculous experiment doomed to fail, and maybe my career will crash and burn when the college does, and I will just become another one of those 10 million people who need a job (and maybe that will be very soon, if the next governor is not so enamored of our college), but it sure is a neat project to undertake.

So that's where my head is these days. _
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05:50:21 PM, Tuesday 24 January 2012

Liberals who think we really ought to support Ron Paul should comsider one of his friends _
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10:41:13 AM, Sunday 15 January 2012

Should I go to a Pseudo Ivy alumni event at the Carter Center with President Carter and his grandson Jason (PI class of 1997) who is running to be our state senator? On the one hand, President Carter is one of my heroes and it would be amazing to meet him, and his grandson sounds pretty neat, too. On the other hand, Pseudo Ivy alumni. _
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12:11:29 PM, Wednesday 11 January 2012

Of all things, today I am thankful for professional golf, which has given the world not just one but two players playing with spondyloarthropathies and in Mickelson's case really doing a fine job being a spokesperson who says useful things like 'changing to a vegan diet didn't help, what helped was taking Enbrel.'

Before that, all we really had was Mick Mars. _
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06:34:27 PM, Wednesday 4 January 2012

Yet another study finding there is no real difference in math abilities between men and women/boys and girls.. This time, it's a meta-analysis comparing scores both within and among countries with both different math scores, different educational systems, and different treatment of women. It shows that even the "male extremes hypothesis" of Larry Summers fame is nonsense--there are countries where men are more variable than women in abilities, where there is no difference in variance, and where women actually fit the extreme abikities hypothesis. These things are actually entirely culturally dependent. (it's shocking, I know, that teaching women to do math as though they were capable of it means that they learn to do math.)

The coolest finding is that there is also no net loss--one of the big concerns in this country is that when girls and women start to do better it is at the expense of men and boys. Yet their study found that where women were better at math than in other countries, men were also better at math than in other countries. Take that, Patriarchy! _
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10:58:57 AM, Wednesday 28 December 2011

And ye beneath life's crushing load
Whose forms are bending low
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing.
Oh rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing.

Merry Christmas, y'all. May the coming year be nothing but better!
_
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09:36:37 PM, Saturday 24 December 2011

Just finshed The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. That series is truly the best thing I've read for a very long time. I am excited to see the American version of the first movie, although I've been told to skip it and rent the swedish one instead. I am so very sad that Mr. Larrson did not live to see the success of these booms and that I will not be reading anything else by hm. I have a new found fascination with Scandanavian crime fiction, which I understand is legion and tends to have neo-Nazi villans more often than not.

I admit to being completely perplexed by their popularity in the US though. In a country where the only dirtier word than 'feminsm' is 'socialism', how did such explicitly left-wing writing become national best-sellers?

I like to thnk it means that US readers at least are a lot more left-wing and a lot more feminist than I had previously thought. But it may just be that they were holding their noses against the politics fo the sake of a good story, the way I do when ai read most US mystery/crime fiction, which is frequently so reactionary right wing, misogynist victim-blaming that I just have to give up in disgust.

When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it's about violence against women, and the men who enable it. _
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10:14:40 PM, Thursday 15 December 2011

Gur pneantr:
Va zl vageb pynff, 2 N, 1 O, 8 P, 5 Q, 3 S.
Va zl rpbybtl pynff, 1 N, 4 O, 2 P.

V qba'g srry onq nobhg guvf--V xabj gung zl grnpuvat jnf abg ubeevoyr naq V xabj gung zl tenqvat jnf snve--ohg V qba'g srry tbbq, rvgure. _
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10:06:18 AM, Tuesday 13 December 2011

What it's like to have 3 cats:

at any given time, two of them are scuffling, either destroying furniture or hitting each other on the head while the third makes some other kind of mischief somewhere else in the house

or

all 3 cats are asleep. _
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08:00:15 PM, Thursday 8 December 2011

Nerds of the sort that I am might enjoy reading a summary of Newt Gngrich's dissertation on Belgian educational policy in the Congo..

I Never knew that he had been denied tenure at West Georgia College. From my point of view from within the Unversity System of Georgia, that was likely not a common occurence. West Georgia being a small, undergraduate public college, not unlike my own, my best guess is that he was a terrible teacher, which would not be shocking given his public persona. _
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08:51:03 AM, Saturday 3 December 2011

I try to be hopeful about the world that I am sending my students into. I hope that arming them with an excellent education is enough. But then I see that Andrew Sullivan, now admired by many on the US left, is still pushing pseudo-scientific racial theory of intelligence, and I despair. The Bell Curve was thoroughly debunked when it was published many years ago.. (when it was hugely promoted by The New Republic, which Sullivan just happened to be the editor for at the time.)

It is completely unfair to tell African-Americans "not yet...just wait a few more years and the hate will finally go away" for the thousandth time, while we educate yet another generation against hate backed up by bad science. _
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09:19:21 AM, Wednesday 30 November 2011

Never was in love with good ole Pseudo Ivy, but Dr. Davidson usually has good things to say, and this is unusually good, given, as she points out, just how common students camping out on college campuses is (when they're waiting for sports tickets). _
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11:19:35 AM, Friday 25 November 2011

These days, I'm really scared of cops. _
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07:37:00 AM, Wednesday 23 November 2011

Perfect. _
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09:15:23 AM, Thursday 17 November 2011

I've been thinkng a lot about success and failure, lately, as we approach the end of my first semester as a professor. What Dr. Crazy says bears a lot more on my school and my students than what the pundits are saying. _
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05:23:44 PM, Sunday 13 November 2011

Thank goodness for Sady and all those who have come before her

There once was a time on this blog where I thought being reasonable and explaining myself thoughtfully was good enough and, like Sady, I thought the misogynists' minds could be changed through links to awesome material and reasonable discussion. You all may remember the circumstances under which that changed, how I went from someone proud and comfortable on the internet to someone who just wanted to be left alone to talk to my friends in peace without constantly being insulted for my crimes of being female and having opinions. That this blog remained and remains public is a testament to the person I used to be and how I used to think the internet would be. Luckily, we are so obscure, and that person finally got bored, so that this blog and the Blogmass stand as a snapshot of our naivete and hope 10+ years ago. May it remain that way as long as Moss is willing.

These days, I rarely try to change minds, In life or online, and rarely engage in that act that the Shakesville folks call "teaspooning"--speakng up, speaking out, doing a little bit every day to try to make the world better. My students are giving me hope, and giving me an outlet where I could do clear good, especially for women, but oh my goodness, I am so done with trying to change people's minds on the internet. _
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07:25:48 AM, Tuesday 8 November 2011

Nccneragyl V arrq gb jbex ba gur jubyr flzcngul abg rzcngul guvat. V pnaabg fbyir nyy bs zl fghqragf' ceboyrzf, rfcrpvnyyl gubfr gung gurl unir pnhfrq sbe gurzfryirf. Vg fhpxf gb trg pnhtug purngvat, ohg V pna'g znxr gung orggre sbe lbh. _
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09:28:06 AM, Friday 28 October 2011

My new favorite post ever about gender essentialism at the dogpark. _
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06:52:19 PM, Tuesday 25 October 2011

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