The Blogging Continues!

Joanna and I completed the 24-hour blogathon to raise money for Katrina victims in Pearlington, MS, but we aren't stopping there. We're going to keep going by adding at least one new thing a day to the Pearlington blog up until the Katrina anniversary on August 29. Please help us pass the word along, and if you weren't able to drop by to leave a comment during the blogathon, it's all still there. Come on over when you get a chance.

The Blogging Begins!

As you may or may not have noticed, the planned blogathon for Pearlington had to be postponed because I had a funeral to go to last weekend. Joanna and I are blogging all day today and all night tonight, however, on behalf of the small town of Pearlington, MS that was just obliterated by Katrina.

Come on over and contribute what you can, whether it's money, labor, or good old-fashioned good wishes.

Have Blog. Will Type For Charity.

Joanna and I are going to participate in Blogathon 2006 to raise money for rebuilding the small coastal town of Pearlington, Mississippi.

As anyone who has followed this blog knows, Pearlington was not merely devastated in Hurricane Katrina; it was decimated. I've done some volunteer work in Pearlington through University Baptist Church and The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Mississippi. I can attest first hand to how much the people of Pearlington have struggled this year and how much they are still struggling.

I will attest next Saturday, July 29 when we blog every thirty minutes for 24-hours straight for Pearlington.

Money donated through this blogathon will go to University Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It will be used to purchase building materials for people in Pearlington who lost their homes in Katrina.

Please help us spread the word, and if you are able, don't forget to click on the PayPal link at the Pearlington blog to leave a much appreciated donation.

Playing with Odeo

I've just discovered Odeo Studio, and I've taken that discovery as an opportunity to jump right in and do that pod thing everybody is so crazy about.

Podcasts, Access, Quality

I've been teaching online classes for the past few years that were really hybrids. They met on campus five or six times per semester, and the rest was online. Now we are converting those classes to fully online. This has all of our online instructors scrambling to make the online instruction a little more sophisticated. Currently, I'm experimenting with adding audio clips, and I have a few thoughts/questions.

(1) Should I be worried about whether I have students on dial-up who will have trouble accessing the audio files?

(2) Where can I get a better microphone than the piece of junk I got at Radio Shack without spending a whole lot of money?

(3) If I want to imbed some audio clips into PowerPoint presentations, how can I end up with a file that isn't impossibly large for posting online?

(4) Is it better for mini-lecture audio clips to be scripted and polished, or am I okay to just wing it and hope for the "natural" sound?

New Normal

This house is in Pearlington, MS. This is now a typical scene in Mississippi coastal towns. Many, many houses are sitting abandoned in this condition. It is overwhelming to think how much still needs to be done just to take care of storm clean up and meet basic necessities. At the same time it is heartening to see the sheer number of volunteers still showing up.

One group I met were high school students from Syracuse, NY on a civil rights tour of the South. They came to Pearlington for a service project as part of their trip. They learned important things that day like "Never open a refrigerator that's been sitting in a destroyed house for ten months." Some of them were also very excited about getting a close up look at some alligators.

Thumbs up to the teachers who put this together and the students who poured their hearts into the job.

Waveland

Monday evening I rode down the beachfront with a group of volunteers from North Carolina. I took this picture in Waveland. You can't really get the effect from the picture, but we were fascinated with this house because it was the only thing left standing for miles and because you could see from it just how high the storm surge had been. There had clearly been water in that third floor.

Also, we all agreed that we would have stopped to look at this house even before the storm.

To Pearlington I Go

I'm headed to Pearlington, MS this morning where I'm going work off and on this summer as a volunteer. Pearlington was absolutely wiped out by Katrina. The only business currently open there is a bar that is operating out of a tent. It once had a gas station, a grocery store, a bank, and a post office. All of that is gone now as are most of the houses.

I have to admit I'm pretty nervous about volunarily giving up things like flushing toilets and hot showers to camp out 70 miles away from my home, but the needs are tremendous in Pearlington, and I feel very humbled when I consider how the people there have been living all year.

Still, it's only about 25 miles from Slidell, and I'm not above burning up $3.00 a gallon gas in search of a clean bathroom. :)

Have a good summer, blogland. I'll see you soon. Probably very soon. My heart wants to help my neighbors as much as possible, but my back wants to come home and sleep in its own bed as much as possible.

Yo, Clancy!

Congrats!

Couldn't happen to a better blog.

Summer Reading

What's on your summer reading list?

I've been out of school for a week and a half now. So far I've read all seven of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, and Walking Across Egypt by Clyde Edgerton. I'm currently reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.

The Ladies Detective Agency books are just a pure delight to read. I can't think of a better way to relax, but you do need plenty of tea and cake on hand to read these books. :)

Housekeeping is incredible. I had read Gilead by the same author previously, and it is equally amazing. There is a sort of deep, philosophical grace to the writing style. If you don't read anything else this summer, my suggestion is to go with Marilynne Robinson.

Walking Across Egypt is just sort of silly. I enjoyed it, and I'd read more of the same. I even related well to many of the details of Southern culture depicted in it, especially those details of Southern Baptist culture. At times, though, the hillbilly slap-stick is just a little overboard for me.

I haven't gotten very far into The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time yet, but I'm already prepared to be impressed. A number of people recommended this book to me, and I fully expect it to live up to its reputation.

On my summer wish list are Bel Canto by Ann Pratchett, Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. These are all books I've heard good things about and have just never gotten around to.

I'm also planning to re-read Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. These are books I'm going to discuss with a summer reading group.

So what's on your list? Do you have anything good to recommend?

Hurricane Season is A-Coming

The Sun-Herald reports this morning that a major relief organization is pulling out of Waveland for the duration of Hurricane season.

The Morrell Foundation, a Utah-based relief group, has announced plans to pull out by Saturday, leaving a void in the volunteer effort to rebuild this Katrina-torn county.

The Morrell Foundation built a relief village at Buccaneer State Park just after the Aug. 29 storm, and has since housed thousands of out-of-town volunteers here to help haul debris, rebuild homes and just about whatever else was needed. The group also helped repair local spirits through holiday festivals and other gatherings.

According to a press release, the group is leaving the beachfront park because of the looming hurricane season. Weather conditions earlier this month that pushed saltwater over the beachfront road made it "abundantly apparent that our facilities would be unsafe for future volunteers," the release said.

I can't really blame them, but it still makes me sick to think of it. It also underscores the level of anxiety and uncertainty we are facing with the upcoming storm season.

The people who were living in solid houses that got blown away by Katrina are now in FEMA trailers or tents or cars. Places that were once used as shelters either no longer exist or have been banned by the government for use as shelters. And even without another hurricane, there are still whole towns along the Mississippi Gulf Coast where there are few jobs and essentially nowhere to purchase basic necessities. Residents could always drive to Slidell to stock up, I suppose--if they happen to have working vehicles, gasoline, and money.

We're looking at a grim, hot summer with or without the volunteer organizations. The steady presence of volunteers at least brings psychological comfort and the reassurance that things are being done. It brings hope that there is a normal to return to.

To watch a big volunteer group leave...

I'm sure I don't have to explain the psychological effect.

Remember Pearlington

Here is a blog with photos from Pearlington, Mississippi. I've been there several times this year to work as a volunteer. I've seen everything in these photos and more. Pearlington is in Hancock County at the mouth of the Pearl River. It, along with Waveland and Bay St. Louis, was really Ground Zero for Hurricane Katrina. This is where the eye made landfall. Pearlington, however, is several miles inland. The people there did not expect to be affected by the storm surge, yet their houses were completely submerged in water. Many of them did not have flood insurance. I've talked to several people there who lost everything and got almost nothing from the insurance companies. One house I worked on, for example, was about $2000 square feet. The owners are in their 60s and retired. They lost everything, including their grandchild's car and school books that were left behind when they evacuated. They got $8000 from the insurance company. That was for a tree that fell on the roof.

Anyone who stayed in Pearlington during the storm and lived to tell about it is a walking miracle.

TrinaTrauma

Doctor Daisy has a wonderful post on trauma theory.

I wanted to respond to it earlier, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to say. I still don't know. I want to say something probably for the same reason Dr. D. did. I'm very close to the subject of Katrina and trauma. My head is full of images of TrinaTrauma that I'm only just now starting to realize are not going to go away.

I have nothing smart to say about this.

All I have is the observation that I've now reached a stage where I want to say something.

At first I wanted to simply get out the information about what had happened or was happening. Beyond that I didn't know what I had to say.

I belong to a writing group, and most of the people in the group have said the same thing. They just aren't able to write in a creative way about Katrina yet. They might write in an informative way, but anything else falls into the realm of "nope, nope, not that, not yet."

Even now, I think the main reason I want to say something about the Trina is to abate my fear that people are forgetting. If I could take every single one of you by the hand and lead you through what I've seen and continue to witness in Hancock County, I would do it. If you could see for yourselves, you couldn't forget, and you couldn't not care, and you couldn't fail to want to do something to help.

So I'm going to give myself permission to blog about what it's been like to see absolutely nothing left in places where my memories used to live, what it's been like to watch my 74-year-old parents living in a gutted out house, what it's been like to learn how to use a hammer for the sake of total strangers who lived through the storm by swimming and climbing trees and hauling their grandmothers onto rooftops and their babies and puppies into boats.

Forgive me if I can't explain what it has to do with teaching composition.

Before and After, Green Oaks B&B, Biloxi

From The Sun Herald.

Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me

From the person who brought you the extremely nasty tirade against students that I linked to earlier...

Closed for Business

Not to be trite or to add to AP's feelings of persecution, but...um...grow up. Please.

The Grading Swamp

I graded 15 research papers today, and I feel like my head has been through the pea sheller (If you live somewhere where you don't have pea shellers, insert your own bad analogy here).

I've got to find a way to step it up. I've only just begun. Lot's more where that came from. And so forth...

I've also got to find a way to keep my sanity for the next few weeks, and I'm assuming most people who read this blog are feeling the same way right about now.

I don't have an answer, but my strategy so far is actually not much different than it was when I was the one turning in the research papers this time of year.

Eat lots of sugar. Drink lots of coffee. Let everything good and good for you in life fall by the wayside as you pretend someone else has been leaving the empty Funyun bags in your office trash can. Forget to go to committee meetings. Sign things only when people follow you to the bathroom waving them in your face. Let the mail pile up for days without looking at it (but obsessively check email). Skip lunch, but close the door and act like you went to lunch. Explain to the cats that what happens in the litter box stays in the litter box. Spend amazing amounts of time procrastinating by thinking about how much has to be done. Eat lots of sugar. Drink lots of coffee.

Did I miss anything?

Players and Haters

And I thought I was burned out.

Um...if you really hate students so much, have you considered that you may in fact be in the wrong profession?

Turnitin

I know there's a lot of hatin' on Turnitin going on out there in the Composphere, and I am sympathetic. I really am. I had my students submit their research papers to Turnitin, though, and I think I'm glad I did. They submitted rough drafts, not final drafts. I wasn't trying to do a "gotcha" thing. I just wanted to have an object lesson in paraphrasing without subjecting myself to reading 3000 (bad) paraphrases.

It's worked out pretty well. They bring me their reports from Turnitin, and I tell them which parts really should be reworded and which parts strike me as insanely silly. It marks things like "in the United States," for example, as plagiarized.

I have noticed that no one yet has submitted a paper Turnitin said was 100% plagiarized. My theory is that the people who were planning to cheat have opted instead to just not turn anything in.

So if I have a point it's that automated plagiarism catchers can be made into useful exercises if the power to decide to take their advice or not is in the hands of the students. That is all I have to say.

National Poetry Month

My first offering for National Poetry Month--Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Bad Deeds

This morning I kicked a lady out of my parking place. She was obviously not a student. She looked more like a distinguished guest, but I'm guessing she was here for a workshop or fund-raiser or some special event. She seemed very nice. The only thing I had against her was that she parked in my spot. I'm not that terribly attached to my spot, though I've been parking there a long time. I could find it in me to see other lots. It's just that if I park in another reserved spot, someone will get mad and call campus police. If I park in an unreserved spot, the students will get mad and key my car. It's a lose-lose situation.

And I bet you all thought I was a pretty nice person until you heard about me going all Nazi over reserved parking and making little, old ladies go park in the back forty and walk.

The whole thing made me wonder if parking is just as difficult on other college campuses as I remember and if anybody else out there has a love-hate relationship with reserved parking.

Also, by taking the time to post this, I've delayed getting started on grading by at least five minutes. :)