transcription is EXHAUSTING

Hi.

I'm exhausted. (Although just reading this article in the Chronicle made me appreciate my lifestyle as a quasi-academic. No, an academic. I may be an administrator, but let's be honest and call it what it is.)

I just spent about 2 1/2 hours transcribing 30 minutes of tape. This is why I have in the past paid to have someone else do it. The problem is you lose the intimacy that you have with the audio file when you transcribe it yourself. The quality of their transcripts was fine, it's just that I wasn't disciplined enough to listen to the audio file and read through the transcript unless I was forcing myself to be the one doing the typing.

It is exhausting though and perhaps after a few more hours of it I will give up and give in.

One great quote, however (cleaned up a bit):

"Underlying all this that I'm going to say to you is based upon the anomaly in this country with regard to any kind of thing, and somebody once said to me, you Americans never do anything unless there's a crisis. So the first crisis was of course World War I, World War II, and we had decided that we ought to have Americans learn other languages." Dr. Alatis

Policy entrepreneurs don't only exist in Congress

I had a comment asking me about policy entrepreneurship and if Rahm Emmanuel was a policy entrepreneur. I'm sure he is, I don't really know since I don't study Congress. Well, I only like the small slices of Congress that impact foreign/second language education. Like the reauth of HEA!

Politics happen in all organizations at all levels. From union leadership to who gets the best classroom, power and maneuvering play an important role in who gets the biggest piece of the pie. I've just been doing research for the good old dissert on the Georgetown School of Languages and Linguistics, and a good half of the memos deal with how many Chinese faculty there should be, how much Instructors should get paid, why so-and-so's memo said such-and-such and how the Dean can't believe that he would contradict what the Dean had said in the Hall of Nations, etc.

The ability to break through the chatter and define the problem is one of the most salient, cut-to-the-chase tools of any actor.

He who controls the message controls the issue...

Players in a policy formulation process angle to have their definition of the problem rise to the surface. Problem definition holds political weight, because “some are helped and others hurt, depending on how a problem gets defined” (Kingdon, 1992, p. 111). If another player defines the problem as located in your department or agency, that player can deflect any scrutiny on his or her own turf. Players have real differences at times over goals, values, and even reality. Boleman (2003) states “[enduring] differences lead to multiple interpretations of what is important, even what is real.” (p. 204-5). Control over what is discussed is a clear advantage. Allison (1999) explains that “individuals may define a problem in radically divergent ways… the definition of the agenda and decision situation can be pivotal” (p. 282). The player who defines the agenda can frame the issue in a way that benefits their goals and priorities. Often those who have the ability to define the agenda are policy entrepreneurs who are able to capitalize on their power bases to get what they want (Kingdon, 1992, p. 179-80). Policy entrepreneurs see problems as opportunities to promote their own goals and agenda.

Just posting as a procrastination device for finishing this darn paper.

Education isn't a panacea. Richard Rothstein wrote a great article in 2002 called "Out of Balance" that suggests that if we look at equal investments in housing and education, it seems as if a greater return would come from housing. If a child spends 6 hours a day in school and 18 hours at home, which place has more impact on his or her life?

I'm listening to Meet the Press, which is having a roundtable about Obama and what his presidency means for American and for African-Americans. Wait, David Gregory is the father of 3 young children??? Anyway... he's showing Obama talking about pesonal responsibiliy and the home and family as central to children's growth and development. Both education and the home are essential to creating a good society. If parenting is important - how can we pursue public policies that help create safe homes for children that allow them to prosper? Obviously trying to get more people to own their own homes did not work. There have got to be good housing policies that help people succeed in their lives and their children succeed in school. Government isn't the only answer - people do have to step up and try to be good parents - but government should help give them the tools to do that.

Rothstein, R. (2002). "Out of Balance." http://tinyurl.com/9t7ym4

Nativism and Language

So I'm reading this book on American nativism, called Strangers in the Land by John Higham. He establishes three main patterns of American nativism, anti-Catholicism, a fear of political discontent (anti-anarchism), and racism. As we move from European immigration to immigration from other parts of the world, nativism takes a bent towards racism. It's an interesting book, although I have no one to discuss it with - I'm surprised at how isolated I feel not having any classes this semester. One would think that working at a University would allow you to come in and discuss big ideas with people, but it seems around here I get weird looks like, "How can you go home and read when you haven't filed the TPS report?"

I'm curious about the ties between nativism and language. So far, the only real mentions of foreign languages have been in the discussion of the literacy test that anti-immigrant factions tried to pass in Congress, but even that was not well-described. From this book it seems as if the literacy test made sure that the immigrant was literate in his or her own language, but that seems as if it would be difficult to administer - I mean, how many Americans at the time spoke Russian or Italian? I guess the recent immigrants did - and there lies the irony of having recent immigrants administer a literacy test to would-be immigrants, designed to keep them out of the US. The book also discusses Hearst and his attemps to influence immigrants towards Republican politics through the control of foreign language newspapers.

Outside of those two issues, it seems as if the language immigrants spoke is little discussed. I guess many lumped together Irish and Italian, one group speaking English and the other not, so it seems as if language mattered little. Was one group more quickly assimilated than the other, though, due to language? How did these immigrants learn English? And although perhaps its a more recent issue, the whole idea of "English Only" legislation seems to be powerfully tied to these patterns of nativism. We're no longer concerned about anarchists, but we are concerned about terrorists, and there's a push and a pull on both sides at once for more language skills in the populace and a need to control the language people speak.

Obviously there is a book here. A dissertation? I don't know. I feel as if I might be moving towards writing one part of it, which is why I picked up this book to begin with. It's time to focus on some of these historical patterns and see how they have impacted individual education programs, to tie together the cultural and historical trends with how insitutions decide to impliment, fund, etc educational programs.

It feels so good to write, to exercise free thought, in an environment where I feel circumscribed. I need to write, to read, to think in order to be happy.

Capuchins and Priests

I didn't become a active (and baptizes and confirmed) member of the Catholic Church until college. Then I graduated, and my church attendance fell off. Partly it was the priests scandal, partly it was the sudden transformation of a church I thought cared about social justice and the poor into part of the anti-gay, anti-woman Republican machine, and partly it was because it's also weird to go to church randomly and by yourself as a 23, 26, or 29 year old.

The pope visited and my boyfriend and I started talking about how we wanted to help the church care more about social justice than the regulation of people's sex lives. So we decided to join the church, actually the Shrine, across the street from us. Not only did we start attending mass, but we're also engaged now with a group of people who is interested in social justice issues and pursuing them. And everyone else is liberal too - but in the best kind of way, where they care about the poor and those who don't have the blessings we all seem to have.

My new priest is also a Capuchin, and I'm meeting with a college friend of mine today who's getting his PhD in theology. I'm hoping to ask him about how a Capuchin becomes a priest. My priest also wants to learn more about educational research, and how he can influence the order to see how having a college degree doesn't necessarily make one a better priest. I think he feels alienated from many in his order who are craftsmen rather than intellectuals. I'm hoping my research can help!

Ok, ok - I'm a horrible snob.

But this book seems dead-on to me. The review in the NYT is also funny. This phrase, thought, is what struck me as something that plays out in my daily life - at work, in my classes, in my encounters with students, on TV.

"something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way."

I recall a time I had an argument with a friend about a particular issue. I love this friend dearly, so I'm going to attempt to change details. It wasn't about the friend, really, but the idea expressed. We were having a conversation with a conservative about the issue of obesity in America. The view of the conservative young man was that people were responsible for their own weight, health, etc - it was their fault for being fat, basically. This view has been repeated on the Republican campaign trail - we need to create health care programs that encourage people to take care of themselves, realize the costs, etc. My friend was adamant that it was the responsibility of the government to regulate the things that make people fat. She started vehemently defending the idea that it's the availability of junk food that is making people fat.

I later asked her if she had any data on the issue, because there could be many reasons why people, especially in certain populations, are overweight. Lack of safe places to exercise, cultural factors that encourage heaviness, and an overabundance of junk food could all be factors. Without some information, thought, her argument was based on little more than an opinion.

Now she turned her ire on me - it was clear she was passionate about the issue, but knew little about it. "I'm not going to do research on every issue, Nicole, this is just something I feel." I tried one last time to make my case that a little information would help her to make a good argument when confronted with conservative, "pull yourself up by the bootstrap" jerk-faces, but then I gave up.

I know not everyone can/has the desire to attend a graduate program, but I believe that graduate programs improve your writing skills, teach you to verify your opinions and views with research, and generally improve your ability to think critically about issues. I don't like it when people argue with me and they've done no research, and I've done plenty. Not that all research is right, but if you argue with a basis of "this is how I feel...." it's impossible to argue with that. And then I'm left feeling as if my years of work and study on a particular issue means nothing in our culture.

I have so much more to say now that I've started writing about this - moral relativism, the academic tendency to believe in quantitative rather than qualitative data - but I'll hold off.


"Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?" (Cohen, P. The New York Times. 2/14/08).

Playing the Name Game

I received an email from my dad that was interesting and that brought me back to a class about links between foundations, funding, and activist groups I took last year. Since he reads this blog regularly :), I figured writing about it here is just as good as responding to him by email!

Emails that accompanied the video link all testified to its veracity and objectivity. So I checked it out, and immediately noticed in the intro the name of an author and an institution. So before watching the rest of the video, I looked up the organization. It's called NumbersUSA and suggests that visitors "Use this website to fight the U.S. population threat to environment, farmland, community quality of life, schools, wage fairness, and freedom." The text is on a background of snow-covered mountains (and they're based in Virginia... hmm. However, many people with the organization are from Colorado. Guess that explains the mountains.)

NumbersUSA has been around, at least according to tax records, since 2002. Now there are two organizations, NumbersUSA Action and NumbersUSA Education and Research Foundation. It's probably for a tax purpose that they have two organizations. In any case, it looks as if they paid their director Roy Beck $105,050 last year. Nobody else who works there seems to have been paid, though. That doesn't really matter, I guess, but I did find it interesting. Now, where does that money come from?

The only contributing group I could find, through mediatransparency.org (full disclosure: generally seen as a left-leaning website) was the Sarah Scaife Foundation, a group funded by the Mellon industrial oil and banking fortune (primarily through stock holdings in Gulf oil). You can see the Media Transparency profile of the Sarah Scaife Foundation as well. Now, people are allowed to do what they will with their money, including influence legislation. And the more money you have, the more you can influence legislation. I don't always like it, but that's the way our oligarchic-capitalistic society works. And I am free to refute your research findings - it's the beauty of the First Amendment. I do think it is important to know where information comes from, though, before making an ultimate decision on it.

I do find it interesting that in their list of links, the site has a link and an essay called "No to Immigrant Bashing," and when you watch the video, the speaker emphasizes this point.

The video itself focuses on numbers - numbers of immigrants, numbers of "native" born Americans, and the growth in these populations over the next several years based on census data. Mr. Beck, author and director of the center, also does this demonstration with jawbreakers, each one representing one million people from the third world. Basically, he argues visually that even though a million people from the developing world could come to America to have a better life each year, billions more would still be in their own countries suffering.

I have no doubt that Mr. Beck used real census data to come up with his presentation. However, data and numbers have no meaning outside of the context in which they are presented. As I watched the video, I kept thinking, "What's happening to the world population during this same time period?" (roughly the next 100 years). If the world population is exploding, I have no doubt the U.S. will experience the same amount of pressure. At some point, we're all going to have to learn how to share our resources regardless.

FLA part deux

FYI, the opinion piece in my last post cites the Koret Task Force. The Hoover Institution, a right-leaning research organization/think tank, funded the Koret Task Force. However, I've read Hoover posts for about a year, and although they're very liberal in the economic sense, I think they're pretty rational - not really a bunch of right wing crazies or anything. So Koret did a whole report on Florida, and if you'd like to look at it, here it is!