Ugh, it's been forever since I posted. Not much has been happening to speak of, really -- Henry is growing, of course; he has his two front lower teeth, but those top teeth have been taking their time coming in. He laughs all the time, especially when I laugh at something. I'm watching him gum Cheerios right now. We're finally getting his nursery in shape; I just bought a 4-in-1 crib that converts into a toddler bed, a day bed, and a full-size bed. I also got him some wall-mounted shelves for books and these prints, which I hung up in a windowpane configuration.

I have a ton of research work and teaching prep to do, as one would expect, and not much time for it. However, I am making one much-needed trip to Florence, AL before the semester starts. I leave tomorrow. More soon.

By the way, I am so glad I'm not at MLA.

For years now, I've been wanting my mom to send me our old Christmas tree ornaments, of which there are boxes and boxes (and boxes!). Now that we're homeowners, she has sent us these boxes. I've had this craft project planned since probably 2006 or so; I know we had some very nice ornaments, but we also had some cheapo ornaments too. I thought I'd upcycle them into a wreath. Finally I have had the opportunity to do this, and here's the result on our door:

human milk
formula
apple juice
applesauce (baby kind)
applesauce (adult kind with cranberry and raspberry)
rice cereal
barley cereal
prunes
pears
whole wheat toast
yams (at a restaurant I gave him a bite of mine)
hummus (ditto)
peas
yogurt
"green vegetables" with brown rice, which he hated
butternut squash, which he also hated
carrots
oatmeal (Quaker Nutrition for Women kind, vanilla cinnamon flavor)
smoothie (Naked brand, the green one)
bananas (both fresh and pureed)

• Today I bought four bags of books at my university library's used book sale. Score!
• Henry has TWO teeth now, and he likes to chew my fingers with them.
• I'm doing a conference presentation at LACC on Saturday, and I think I might do a ten-minute presentation containing the primary information/argument, then use whatever time I have left for some outtakes. The title is "'No More Than a Year': Isocrates and the Assessment of First-Year Writing." With this presentation, I may or may not be embarking on a new series of research projects. I am definitely entering an area that is not very familiar to me (assessment) and another area that is outside my main specialty (classical rhetoric). The outtakes, which have to do with ideas of natural ability, are interesting, but they don't quite fit into the main focus of the presentation.

He's good. Two weeks ago today, we saw him for Henry's six-month visit, and I showed him Henry's shaky sitting-up technique. He took one look and said, "I give it two weeks, then he'll be sitting up without assistance." One week and six days later, Henry did it. Here's a video from earlier this morning:

In case you were wondering, immediately after I shot this video, I covered up that electrical outlet in the background with a couple of those plastic dummy plugs.

• "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" -- Whitney Houston
• "Hey Ya!" -- Outkast
• "Yeah!" -- Usher, Ludacris, Lil Jon
• "Bad Moon Rising" -- Creedence Clearwater Revival (played by a cover band on the float)
• "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" -- Cyndi Lauper

Apropos of a lecture I attended yesterday by Bruce Horner* and some general thoughts I've been having lately about this issue, I've decided to collect as many reasons as I can think of for assigning some sort of "personal essay" as the first assignment in a college writing course. These are reasons I've heard other people cite and reasons I came up with myself when examining this question as a thought exercise. I'm not saying all of these are good reasons by any means, only trying to compile a list. Please let me know if you have other reasons.

1. Start inward, go outward: or from individual concerns to social concerns. This is one of the ideas Horner critiqued, actually; he argued that it rests on assumptions that those two things are uniform and monolithic (I would add, not to mention mutually exclusive).

2. Building blocks: provide students "an initial experience in expression" which they can build on as they move on to argumentation.

3. When content is irrelevant: personal experience provides expedient subject matter when the subject matter of the essay (and the student's mastery of it) is not what one wants to assess. For example, personal experience is often used as a topic for diagnostic essays in which one wants to assess students' grammar, mechanics, sentence structure, vocabulary, etc.

4. In the interim: students may lack experience with research-based arguments, so the teacher doesn't want to jump right in with that kind of writing yet. As the instructor is in the process of teaching research and argument, s/he assigns students to write about something they know, so that they're always doing some writing.

5. Descriptive skills first: the teacher wants to start off the class by teaching a certain skill set which includes vivid description and specific detail.

6. Unlearn: the teacher wants to get students beyond the five-paragraph essay format they may have had in high school, and as quickly as possible. As a personal narrative doesn't lend itself well to the FPE structure, it hastens this kind of unlearning.

7. Hailing students as writers: the teacher wants students to think about themselves as writers from the very beginning of the course, so s/he assigns a literacy narrative type of assignment to facilitate students' reflections on their past experiences with writing.

8. First contact with theme: the particular FYW course has a theme, and as a way to get students thinking about that theme (gender, cyberspace, labor, what have you), the teacher assigns a personal essay about the student's experience with the course theme.

And here are some other reasons for assigning personal writing which I'll include for the sake of comprehensiveness. These reasons, however, are reasons for assigning personal writing in general. I'm more interested in "Essay 1: Personal Narrative" reasons that call for putting a narrative first in an assignment sequence.

1. Empowerment: if personal writing is the province of the socially and politically privileged, assigning this kind of writing helps students have access to this discourse.

2. Self-knowledge/student interest: college is thought of as a time to learn more about oneself. I've asked in classes before as a short in-class writing assignment, for example, "what do you most want to learn?" The overwhelming majority of students write "I want to learn about myself/find out who I am."

3. Find your voice: personal writing can be a way to discover what one's voice sounds like. It's a way to cultivate an ethos and style that a student can (potentially? presumably?) take with him/her to other genres and contexts.

4. Site of negotiation: I got this one from Horner. It conceives of the personal as a site of negotiation with issues of ethics, politics, epistemology, social construction, etc.

* abstract here:
"Rewriting the Personal"

Examining the contradiction between those calls for incorporating
personal writing into scholarly texts to defy the strictures of recent
critical theory and those calls for using personal writing to comply with
those strictures, I argue that confusion over what constitutes the personal
has led to this discrepancy in positions on its use and prevents us from more
productive engagement with the personal in public discourse in both our
writing and our teaching.

The Wall Street Journal news feed is always kind of screwy in my experience, but I got a kick out of this. It seems they couldn't just pick a verb and stick with it:

I'm being asked by a few folks to circulate the following call for proposals for the next Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, which follows below. Bravo to Michigan State for taking out the parentheses -- as in feminism(s), rhetoric(s). If we're going to use the plural, let's use the plural.

One bit of criticism I have, which isn't necessarily directed toward Michigan State's department, or even the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, is that I wish we could start putting conference sites in ONE place, like all FemRhet conference sites could be on the Coalition's site. We tried to do that with Computers and Writing, but it didn't catch on, as Stanford did their own site for 2005's conference, Texas Tech did their own for 2006, Wayne State did the same for 2007, which doesn't seem to be there anymore, and UGA created a site for 2008's conference.

The problem for Feminisms and Rhetorics, though, is more serious, I think. At least most of the Computers and Writing conference sites are still available. Try to go to the conference site for 1999, and it's not there. 2001's conference in Decatur, IL doesn't have a site available either. Ohio State's 2003 conference site redirects to the English department's main page. I couldn't find sites for Michigan Tech's 2005 conference or even the most recent one, 2007's conference at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

I understand if universities want to create their own sites for conferences they're hosting. Still, I don't think these sites should be thought of as ephemera. They're historical documents about fields of study. I think it's important to at least archive the files at some stable site that represents the organization and isn't hosted on a particular university's web space. If Michigan State does this, I will be very impressed.

Michigan State University / East Lansing, Michigan / October 7–9, 2009 *

The 2009 Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) conference will be hosted by the
Rhetoric & Writing program at Michigan State University. We invite proposals
that:

• *reflect* the complexity and diversity of who "we" are as a scholarly
community;
• *make manifest* the deep structure of the connections, intersections, and
overlaps that actually
make us a community;
• *help articulate* who "we" are as a deliberate community of scholars, and
what that means about our responsibilities and relationships to one another
across scholarly areas and institutional positions;
• *highlight* scholarly and teacherly activities that deliberately create
space for more complex notions of scholarship and teaching within the
discipline of Rhet/Comp;
• *include* and significantly engage communities outside of the academy;
• *focus on* antiracist pedagogies and scholarship; present
interdisciplinary scholarship in Afrafeminist Rhetorics; American Indian
Rhetorics, Chicana Rhetorics, Asian American Rhetorics, post/neo-colonial
rhetorics;
• *highlight* the intellectual traditions of women's communities, especially
communities constellated around specific identity markers such as race,
ethnicity, class, sexual orientation issues, geographic origins;
• *explore* the relationships between written, oral, and material discursive
production;
• and other topics that *address* the connections in the conference theme.

We also welcome proposals on relevant topics not directly addressed above,
that significantly engage disciplines other than Rhet/Comp, and that have
consequences for communities located outside of the academy.

Although traditional presentations are acceptable, we encourage participants
to create formats that go beyond the read-aloud academic paper. Interactive
sessions that include discussions, dialogues, and performances are
especially welcome. Proposals should be uploaded to the FemRhet 2009 web
site (www.femrhet2009.org), and can be for:

• 20-minute individual presentations (250-word proposals)
• 90-minute 3–4 member panels (500-word proposals)
• 90-minute workshops or roundtables (500-word proposals)

Please plan to submit a title, a proposal the length indicated above, and a
program-ready, booklet-friendly 50-word blurb for the presentation.

Proposal System Open: December 15, 2008
Proposal Deadline: February 1, 2009
Acceptances Distributed: April 30, 2009

For more information: Contact Malea Powell (powell37@msu.edu), Nancy DeJoy (
dejoy@msu.edu), or Rhea Lathan (lathan@msu.edu).

Enculturation and The Writing Instructor, two journals that had gone a few years without publishing, are back online. I'm happy to see them.

It's a little late to try to circulate this ad (deadline is tomorrow), but I'm going to do it anyway. CCCC is looking for a web editor:

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is seeking applications from CCCC members for a new position as CCCC Web Editor (to be distinguished from CCC Online Archivist). The CCCC Web Editor’s term will be three years (non-renewable) beginning as soon as possible after the application deadline and ending in December of 2011. This is a volunteer position.

Actual programming or Web building is not required. Instead, the CCCC Web Editor will have the responsibility of orchestrating uses of new Web building structures made available in the coming months (e.g., blogs, Wikis, Face Book and so on), moderating new community spaces, publishing relevant information, and working with NCTE/CCCC to develop a stronger Website with new features. We anticipate that after the initial restructuring period, no more than 5 to 10 hours per month will be required of the Web Editor's time.

Persons interested in applying for the CCCC Web Editor position should send a cover letter of application to be received no later than October 1, 2008. The applicant letter should be accompanied by the applicant's CV, one sample of published writing, and a one-page statement of the applicant's vision for transforming the CCCC Website into an active community space. Two reference letters from CCCC members attesting to the applicant's qualifications can be sent under separate cover. Please do not send books, monographs, or other materials that cannot be easily copied for the Search Committee.

Applications should be mailed to Kristen Suchor, CCCC Web Editor Search Committee, NCTE, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096; faxed to (217) 328-0977; or emailed to cccc@ncte.org.

I originally intended to post this as a "be part of the solution" exhortation, as several of us have expressed criticism of how CCCC has used the web in the past. For example, when they started a blog, some of us weren't impressed. I took a look at the CCCC blog right before writing this post, though, and I was very impressed. The blog had lain fallow throughout late 2006, all of 2007, and the first half of 2008, but now Joyce Middleton has started a series of posts titled Conversations on Diversity. She's featuring essay-length posts by -- so far -- Victor Villanueva, Krista Ratcliffe, Malea Powell, Paul Kei Matsuda, Haivan Hoang, Jonathan Alexander, and Mike Rose. Check it out; I will very likely be assigning this series of posts in my pedagogy classes.

Cross-posted at Kairosnews.

It's starting to feel that way, isn't it? I dread seeing our next TIAA-CREF statements, ugh.

is what we say when he makes the following face:

I am thrilled to be NOT on the job market this year, and I hope I never have to do that again. I do have to chair a search committee (again, sigh), this time for a Writing Center director. Please don't hesitate to apply if you have some interest in this area and Writing Center experience.

Also, I've been asked to help circulate these two ads -- I'm happy to do my part. One for the University of Texas:

The Department of Rhetoric & Writing (DRW) at The University of Texas at Austin is accepting applications for an assistant professor position in emerging communication technologies and digital media, including video and gaming, and with emphasis on production.

DRW faculty members have the opportunity to teach a wide array of courses designed to contribute to the undergraduate major in Rhetoric and Writing and the graduate concentration in Digital Literacies and Literatures -- all with the support of our nationally renowned Computer Writing and Research Lab (CWRL), which operates state-of-the-art computer classrooms. As a member of the DRW faculty, the selected candidate will be expected to teach at all levels of our curriculum, to direct dissertations, MA reports, and honors theses, to publish actively, and to offer service to the Department, the College, and the University.

The successful candidate will demonstrate both a scholarly and a pedagogical commitment to the intersections of rhetoric and technology studies and should have completed a PhD in rhetoric and writing or a related field prior to start date.

The DRW boasts a dynamic, collegial, nationally and internationally recognized faculty with interests in the history, theory, and criticism of rhetoric, composition theory and pedagogy, technologies of writing, visual rhetoric, empirical research, writing in the disciplines and professions, rhetoric and poetics, and language and literacy studies. Sub-units of the DRW include the Undergraduate Writing Center, the Computer Writing and Research Lab, and the College of Liberal Arts Writing Across the Curriculum Initiative. Teaching load is 2/2; salary is competitive.

Application deadline is October 31, 2008.

Email a letter of application, curriculum vita, dissertation abstract, and statement of teaching philosophy (no longer than one page) to Search Committee Chair Clay Spinuzzi at clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu.

Also submit three letters of recommendation via U.S. Mail to:

Clay Spinuzzi, Search Committee Chair

Department of Rhetoric & Writing
1 University Station B5500
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-0200

Position funding is pending budgetary approval. A background check will be conducted on successful candidate. The University of Texas at Austin is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

And one for the University of Minnesota:

The Department of Writing Studies in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota invites applications for a full-time, nine-month faculty position beginning fall semester 2009 (August 31, 2009). Appointment will be made at the rank of professor with tenure or associate professor with tenure, depending on qualifications and experience and consistent with collegiate and University policy.

Required Qualifications: Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition, English, Technical Communication, or a related field, and at least six years experience in an academic position; record of scholarship and teaching that meets the criteria for tenure and appointment as professor or associate professor at the University of Minnesota; established reputation as scholar and teacher with significant and innovative research agenda and experience

Preferred Qualifications: Familiarity with and enthusiasm for providing scholarly leadership for writing studies as an emerging academic field; demonstrated ability to bring visibility to the department and its programs through a nationally recognized and ongoing research agenda; ability to contribute to the department's existing and developing undergraduate and graduate programs; demonstrated successful teaching at several levels; success in or potential for mentoring and advising graduate students

We seek the strongest candidate in writing studies regardless of sub-field; however, we have interest in the following areas: visual communication; digital literacies; technical communication; rhetoric and composition; medical or health writing. We will favor candidates whose dossiers demonstrate scholarly distinction and on-going record of publication.

Candidates will be evaluated according to the overall quality of their academic preparation and scholarly/research profile, evidence of commitment to teaching and skills as a teacher, and strength of recommendations. We are most strongly interested in a full professor but would consider an advanced associate professor whose record demonstrates the ability to be promoted to full professor within the year.

For more information about the position and the department, please visit the job posting web site at

http://www2.cla.umn.edu/admin/faculty-research/CLAFacultySearchesFY09.html

(scroll down to Writing Studies and click on the link)

or contact Professor Mary Lay Schuster, search committee chair, at mmlay@umn.edu
or Professor Laura Gurak, department chair, at gurakL@umn.edu