I saw this on the WPA-L listserv; I can think of a few people who, if they're teaching basic writing this year, could be contenders. <-- What I'm trying to do there is make it clear that community college composition courses do not automatically equal basic writing courses; I see this conflation too often, and it bugs me.

Conference on Basic Writing's 2007 Award for Innovation

The Conference on Basic Writing's Award for Innovation recognizes
writing programs for innovations that improve educational processes for
basic writers through creative approaches. Please note that only
innovations that have been implemented will be considered for the award.
The award will be based on

Originality - the creativity and uniqueness of the innovation
Portability--the extent to which the innovation lends itself to
application in other institutions or contexts
Results and Benefits - specific details, data, and observations derived
from the innovation, focusing on specific educational benefits to
students

Please note important deadlines:
December 1, 2006: Nominations due
January 2007: Award recipient notified
March 2007: The Winner will be honored with the presentation of a
plaque at the CBW Special Interest Group (SIG) at
CCCC in New York. The winner will be invited to give a
brief presentation about the winning program
to the SIG attendees.

You may know that there are lots of web sites that consist of collections of brief quotations uttered by political leaders. They're decontextualized sound bites, pretty much. I tell my students that they may not use these sites as sources for their papers; this is because the quotations are insubstantial and out of context, and they simply will not suffice as evidence to support an argument (it's in the syllabus, even). Imagine my disappointment, then, when I saw the following in the October 2006 PMLA, by brilliant feminist critic Susan Gubar:

It's no laughing matter that the Supreme Court is being reconfigured, along with our traditional civil rights and liberties, by a president whose commitment to education remains in doubt ("You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test"), whose military aggression has harmed people here and around the globe ("I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace"), and whose tax cuts injure many health and welfare programs ("They misunderestimated me"). As large numbers of women are put at risk by the widening divide between rich and poor ("I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family"), by the incursion into civic arenas of religious ideologies that reinstate traditional sexual hierarchies while failing to mask proliferating ecological disasters ("I trust God speaks through me"), have the goals of feminists been put in jeopardy?

The source cited in the bibliography is The Complete Bushisms. So maybe I'm a fuddy-duddy, but in my opinion this use of sound-bite quotations is not witty or clever. It's lazy, it undermines Gubar's credibility, it alienates a segment of the audience, and it mucks up the otherwise articulate and important points Gubar is making. It aids in lowering the level of political discourse to which I aspire and to which I hope my students will aspire. How can I not allow students to make this type of move when an eminent scholar is doing it in one of the field's top journals? (I mean, I'm still not going to allow it, but there it is.)

Calling once again. Any takers? I'm browsing through the program, and I notice at least one person I hope to see. (Someone else too, but he probably won't pick up this crumb on the referrer trail.) I'd love to hang out with people in Charlotte, so let me know if you're up for it.

Guest blogging at Feministe, Ilyka Damen poses this question, and the comments are terrific.

Looks like soon in New York City, you'll be able to change the sex on your birth certificate without undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. The whole article is interesting and worth the read, but I wanted to extract these particular passages:

The change would lead to many intriguing questions: For example, would a man who becomes a woman be able to marry another man? (Probably.) Would an adoption agency be able to uncover the original sex of a proposed parent? (Not without a court order.) Would a woman who becomes a man be able to fight in combat, or play in the National Football League? (These areas have yet to be explored.)
[. . .]
Joann Prinzivalli, 52, a lawyer for the New York Transgender Rights Organization, a man who has lived as a woman since 2000, without surgery, said the changes amount to progress, a move away from American culture’s misguided fixation on genitals as the basis for one’s gender identity.

“It’s based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes,” she said. “In reality the diversity of nature is such that there are more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated sexes may really belong to the other.”

Progress indeed.

I figure if they're going to stick me with needles, I want all the protection they can offer. This morning I went to my gym/wellness center's drive-through immunization clinic and got a tetanus shot, a flu shot, and a pneumonia shot. That ought to keep me healthy...actually, a few summers ago, I had decided to get all caught up on my vaccines. I ended up getting one course of the varicella (chicken pox) vaccine, but I never got the next two courses. Maybe in the next few months I can redo that one and get the hepatitis vaccine, which I was also intending to get.

It actually hasn't been that painful, either. I barely felt the shots themselves, and I've been keeping my arms active (cooking breakfast, washing dishes) since then. My arms are a little sore, but I'm convinced the soreness isn't as bad if you keep moving.

After reading a post on Becky's blog a while back, I decided to download DevonThink for reading notes. After playing around with it, though, I have realized that I don't really get this tool and why it's better than just storing all of one's reading notes as text files in the same folder and then searching them with Spotlight or Google Desktop when you need to find something. I guess what I don't quite understand is the tagging system.