Yeah, there's no right time. Anyway, I was impressed by Sara's post a short while back -- she has done it both ways: one child during graduate school and one while on the tenure track. She says graduate school is a better time, which seems to be the consensus when I've read threads on the topic on places like the Chronicle forums, Mama PhD, etc.

I only know it one way: I've had both of mine on the tenure track. It has its stresses, but sometimes while doing child care I'll look at Jonathan and say, "Wouldn't it have sucked to do this in grad school?" He agrees. I've never been able to put my finger on why, exactly. After all, you aren't expected to spend much time on campus while in graduate school. But for me, after graduate school, there was this feeling of out-from-under that has, I believe, made me a happier and better parent than I would have been before. This post about a mock interview experience, written by a person I'm looking forward to getting to know better (on-blog, that is), captures the "under" feeling very well. I'm sure that a lot of people experience "under" while on the tenure track too, which is a probationary period, after all, but having kids during these years was best for us.

My favorite things and my hobbies/pets circa second grade:

From Nancy Fraser's article "Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History" (NLR Mar/Apr 2009, p. 114, my emphasis):

[Feminism works as] a general discursive construct which feminists [as participants in a social movement] no longer own and do not control -- an empty signifier of the good (akin, perhaps, to 'democracy'), which can and will be invoked to legitimate a variety of different scenarios, not all of which promote gender justice. An offspring of feminism in the first, social-movement sense, this second, discursive sense of 'feminism' has gone rogue. As the discourse becomes independent of the movement, the latter is increasingly confronted with a strange shadowy version of itself, an uncanny double that it can neither simply embrace nor wholly disavow. [...] This formula of 'feminism and its doubles' could be elaborated to good effect with respect to the 2008 US Presidential election, where the uncanny doubles included both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.

I couldn't resist posting this. The article was published in spring 09, so Fraser probably wrote it at least a couple of months earlier. Palin's book was published in November 2009 (I think), and I don't remember if the title was common knowledge for a very long time before that. I hope Fraser's construction here is the simultaneously dismal and delightful coincidence I want it to be. Here's more on the confrontation of feminism with its evil twin.

This is just a collection of links to files associated with my administration of my university's first-year writing program. I may add files here later:

Instructor Manual

Syllabus for English 509: this is my syllabus for the teacher-training course I'm teaching this fall. Our program requires two pedagogy courses, one that leans toward the theory end and another that leans toward practice; this is the latter.

English 101 <-- This is the syllabus for my English 101 course this semester.

^clicking image goes to larger version. I estimate that I wrote this obtuse little story sometime around third grade.

I've been off-and-on planning my English 101 class this fall. We have just made some biggish changes to our writing curriculum -- different textbooks and somewhat different assignments -- and I wanted to be sure to teach 101 so that I'll get this new curriculum internalized and have a solid understanding of how our students respond to it.

The book I'll be using for 101 is Writing Arguments, you know, the one by Ramage, Bean, and Johnson. I'm trying to decide if I'm going to use anything from Writing Spaces as well, and if so, which essays. I'm thinking about What Is Academic Writing, I Need You to Say “I”: Why First Person is Important in College Writing, and So You've Got a Writing Assignment. Now What?. I also think the one about the writing center looks promising.

Actually, I may assign some of these in my teaching practicum for graduate students...especially the essay about first person. I find that inexperienced teachers often cling to arbitrary rules when grading student writing.

My little guy:

He loves to tell everyone where the location of a ball is. When I take him to any kind of store, he hollers "THERE'S the ball!" whenever he sees something spherical (fruits in the produce section, Easter eggs, anything!). Here we're pointing to a ball in one of his favorite books, Our Kind of Bird (a Sesame Street title). In that part of the book, a tee-ball game is taking place, and Mr. Snuffleupagus is at bat. Big Bird is cheering him on, and Grover remarks that Big Bird is very kind because he always cheers for his friends.