In case you were wondering, here’s how I feel about the fight to extend marriage benefits to all couples regardless of sexual orientation:

I think the LGBT rights movement is far too fixated on this issue, at the expense of some other really important issues that need our attention. I think marriage remains an institution of questionable economic and social value, and one that’s steeped in racism, classism, and religious bias. Even if extended to all individuals regardless of sexual orientation / identity, it would remain a deeply heterosexist institution.But jeezy goddam chreezy, friends–there is just no good reason to limit anyone’s access to marriage, if that’s what they want for their lives. So cut it the crap out, is my position.

And as soon as this issue gets resolved, we get to move on to the more pressing issues that need our attention. So the sooner marriage equality is attained, imho, the better for everybody.

Without his father’s knowledge, he auditions for the role of Puck in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His father finds out and orders Neil to withdraw. Neil asks Keating for advice and is advised to talk to his father and make him understand how he feels, but Neil cannot muster the courage to do so. Instead he goes against his father’s wishes. His father shows up at the end of the play, furious. He takes Neil home and tells him that he intends to enroll him in a military school to prepare him for Harvard University and a career in medicine. Unable to cope with the future that awaits him or to make his father understand his feelings, Neil commits suicide.

It’s hard for me to put into words how powerfully I reacted to Neil’s story. Twelve-year-old me, tortured by a constant feeling that I was different, that I was wrong, felt a deep connection to Neil. It was right around this time that I realized I was gay; that realization was paired with a certainty that I would have to hide my gayness from the world for my entire life. I felt in Neil a queerness that matched the queerness growing inside me.

So, when Neil chose suicide, my heart broke for both of us. I sobbed through the final minutes of the movie, cried quietly in the car, then slunk off to my room to cry in privacy for god knows how long.

Last night, at this year’s LGBTQ Pride Film Festival, the Quarryland Men’s Chorus performed a song by Stephen Schwartz called “Testimony.” It’s a song written in response to the “It Gets Better” Project, and although there’s no footage that I know of yet from the Quarryland performance, I’m including a video of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus singing the song.

Watching this performance last night, I was brought powerfully back to my experience of watching Dead Poets Society, sitting in the dark, surrounded by my family and very much alone. It gets better, I’m happy to report. It gets amazing. But I didn’t know that at the time. At the time I only knew that I couldn’t be what I knew I was. At the time I only knew that I didn’t know how to live inside myself.

 

Image source: http://cogdogblog.com/2012/07/17/mooc-hysertia/

You may have heard that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are going to revolutionize and/or destroy higher education as we know it. A MOOC, in case you need a quick primer, is a free online course, generally offered through a university or through one of a small handful of educational technology companies (Coursera, Udacity, and edX are the most prominent these days). The goal of the MOOC model is to open up education–to make it possible for unprecedented numbers of people to gain access to college-level knowledge. As a recent New York Times article notes,

The shimmery hope is that free courses can bring the best education in the world to the most remote corners of the planet, help people in their careers, and expand intellectual and personal networks.

Of course, not everyone is quite so enamored with the MOOC model. Media scholar Douglas Rushkoff, for example, worries that the MOOC craze reduces education to the mere acquisition of skills. Rushkoff explains:

For pure knowledge acquisition, it’s hard to argue against [an increased emphasis on online learning models], especially in an era that doesn’t prioritize enrichment for its own sake. But it would be a mistake to conclude that online courses fulfill the same role in a person’s life as a college education, just as it would be an error to equate four years of high school with some online study and a GED exam.

Rushkoff’s view has its own problems: For one thing, it assumes that the goal of a college education is, and should be, less about credentialing workers and more about crafting people. Which is fine–except that the “crafting people” model has baked right into it a set of assumptions about what makes a “good” and “educated” person, and it turns out that these assumptions align pretty closely with Eurocentric, masculinist, and middle class ideals. Which is fine, unless you don’t happen to believe that those ideals are necessarily the ones we should want to bake right into our people.

Still, Rushkoff’s point is worth considering. What does it mean to embrace a higher education model that emphasizes knowledge acquisition over acculturation, that emphasizes quantity (thousands, perhaps millions of students learning about science and math and business and writing!) over quality (very little interaction with instructors, and sometimes very little interaction with classmates!)?

Here’s another reason to worry: Recent evidence suggests a deep gender disparity in who teaches MOOCs. Lisa Martin and Barbara Walter explain in an LA Times op-ed that the vast majority of MOOC classes are developed and taught by men–even when the classes are in more woman-heavy areas like the humanities. They explain:

One consortium, Coursera, offered 205 courses with named instructors at one point this month. Only 34 are taught by female instructors; 157 are taught by male instructors; the remaining 14 courses are taught by groups of both men and women. Even in fields in which women are a majority of doctoral recipients and recent faculty hires, such as the humanities, the vast majority (72%) of classes at Coursera are taught by men. Udacity, another major provider of MOOCs, has almost no women as sole or lead instructors in its course offerings.

The gender disparity becomes even more obvious when we look at individual universities. At Princeton, for example, 33% of the permanent faculty members on campus are female, yet none of the courses offered by Princeton through Coursera are taught by women. At the University of Pennsylvania, women on campus also represent 33% of the faculty, but they teach only 12.5% of the courses offered through Coursera. Only MOOCs offered by Stanford, which has 25% female faculty, come close to a representative level.

The authors note that since the selection process for MOOC course instruction is generally fairly opaque, it’s difficult to decipher exactly why MOOC instructors are predominantly male. They point out, however, that

it surely can’t be because women don’t want to take advantage of this exciting opportunity and the potential resources that might flow from it. And it does not appear that women are under-represented because MOOCs are choosing only the oldest and most established professors, most of whom are male. The ages of the instructors range from fairly new PhDs through long-tenured professors.

My view, as a reformed Open Education evangelist, is that there are three main reasons for the gender disparity described above. First, the MOOC model is an offshoot of the broader open education movement, which has roots in the open source software movement, which has a long and storied history of gender bias, sexism, and exclusionary practices. Although the OpenEd movement is working hard on the “gender problem,” it’s not easy to shake free of all that yucky history.

Second, the MOOC model, with its reliance on lectures and content delivery, is misaligned to certain pedagogical approaches. If you embrace a feminist pedagogy, if you favor culturally relevant pedagogy, if you believe good teaching requires responsiveness and flexibility and an effort to come to mutual understanding in collaboration with your students, then you may consider the MOOC to be incompatible with your epistemological commitments. This is not to say, mind you, that no MOOC could ever be taught using one of the above approaches–I’m sure that some instructor, somewhere, has found a way to shape a MOOC to fit these and similar commitments. It’s only to say that developing a MOOC gets harder the farther you get from the “traditional” lecture-based approach to instruction.

Which leads me to my third point: the MOOC model doesn’t really help female faculty all that much. Let’s say you’re a female-bodied university professor–which, by the way, means you overcame some odds: Although women make up nearly 60% of all college undergraduates, they’re far less likely than are their male peers to begin a doctoral program and far less likely to earn their Ph.D. Women are also less likely to secure faculty positions at top-tier universities like Stanford and Princeton and MIT and the University of Pennsylvania–which are among the most prominent proponents of the MOOC model.

Ok, so you’re a female-bodied university professor at one of those universities. You know you’re going to have to fight harder than your male colleagues to earn tenure. Your students are probably going to give you lower evaluations than they give your male colleagues. And teaching a MOOC, while it may be an intriguing project, is probably not going to help you overcome these obstacles. So why would you bother?

The MOOC model has been embraced as a potential equalizer, as a way to confront educational inequity on a global scale. I don’t disagree in theory with this–making more information available to more people has to be viewed as an important project. In practice, however, MOOCs are still very much part of the broken system they purport to fix.

I’ve pasted my course syllabus below (minus a few details, omitted only for privacy’s sake); you can download the full syllabus, as a Word document, here. I hope over the next several weeks to write about my experiences with this class, and to offer up my lessons and activities for other people who might find them useful. I’ve found that there’s a depressing dearth of online resources for people teaching this sort of class, and I plan to work on remedying this problem.

EDUC-P250: General Educational Psychology

Spring 2013 ~ T/Th 11:15-12:30

ED 1006 (Wright Building)

Instructor: Jenna McWilliams (jenmcwil@indiana.edu)

Office: Wright 4009J

Office hours: Thursdays, 12:30-2:00, and by appointment

Required resource: Ito, M., Baumer, S., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Cody, R., Herr-Stephenson, R., et al. (2010). Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: Kids living and learning with new media. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge: MIT.

Course Overview: how, where, and why do people learn?

The field of educational psychology focuses on theories of how people learn, what motivates them to learn, and how what they learn can be applied to new situations. This class will use the principles of educational psychology to consider how learning happens in a range of learning environments. In particular, we will focus on learning in the following contexts:

• The college experience: What (else) is college for? In addition to coursework, the college experience is filled with new academic, social, and professional opportunities. We will consider how learning happens throughout the college experience and how these experiences prepare students for life after college.
• Learning online: Is it true if I learned it on the internet? The emergence of social networking technologies has led educational psychologists to think differently about how learning happens and why. We will consider the kinds of learning that are made possible through participation in online communities, exploring what motivates people to join these communities in the first place and why they stick around.
• Video games as social learning environments: What can video games teach us about learning & literacy? Recent research suggests that video games can be powerful tools for learning, and that people who play video games have access to special learning opportunities that are not available to non-gamers. We will consider why people are motivated to play video games, what they can learn from gaming, and what we can learn from them.
• Semi-formal learning environments and the “hidden curriculum”: How do museums, libraries, and similar learning environments support learning and development of cultural competencies? Educational psychologists are interested in gaps between learners’ access to culturally valued ways of thinking and behaving. One way of bridging this gap is through the development of semiformal learning environments such as museums, art galleries, and libraries.

The class will be divided into three sections, each linked to a major theme in educational psychology:

• Theories of knowing, learning, and development (weeks 1-4)
• Metacognition, critical thinking, and creativity (weeks 5-9)
• Motivational theories (weeks 10-15)

Course structure and assignments

This course is designed to expose you to some of the big ideas of educational psychology and to help you to apply these ideas to learning in a broad range of learning contexts. To really understand why it’s useful to look at learning in these contexts, it’s important to experience the learning that is possible in the contexts we’ll be discussing. Therefore, this course will include a combination of out-of-class reading assignments, lectures, and immersive learning experiences.

• Reading assignments. Readings from the required text will be supplemented by a combination of articles available online and through OnCourse, as well as a selection of readings from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Please note that Wikipedia should not be considered a definitive resource on any course topic; our goal is to consider Wikipedia as one example of how knowledge is constructed and negotiated collaboratively. As I note elsewhere in this syllabus, you will need to bring a copy of all assigned readings to class on the date they are listed; this means that you will be expected to either print copies of articles available online or bring a laptop or other reading device to class in order to access those materials.

• Lectures. In-class lectures will be used to supplement assigned readings; they will detail and elaborate on key ideas and are therefore an important resource for you. You will be responsible for all material covered in lectures. If you miss class, be sure to ask for a classmate’s lecture notes. I will make as many lecture materials available in Oncourse as possible.

• Immersive learning experiences. Throughout the semester, we will spend class sessions exploring variety of video games, online resources, and other learning tools. We will also take at least one class field trip, to the Wonderlab—a children’s science museum located in downtown Bloomington. This field trip will occur on Feb. 7; please be prepared to pay an admission fee of $5. If you cannot afford this fee, please let me know. If you do not have a car or other transportation, I will help make carpool arrangements.

Assignments overview

Your grade in this course will be determined by the following:

Major assignments (choose 3 out of 4): 45%

• HOMAGO personal profile [15%]
• Semiformal learning environment profile  [15%]
• Creative production + creativity fair + reflection  [15%]
• Game play + game fair + reflection [15%]

Reflection papers (choose 3 out of 4): 15%  

• Wikipedia edit + reflection [5%]
• Wonderlab reflection  [5%]
• Fan group reflection  [5%]
• Personal motivation profile [5%]

Midterm and final exams: 20%

Small group activities and additional assignments: 10%

Participation: 10%

Assignments are described in greater detail below.

Major Assignments (choose 3)

Each of the assignments described below is worth 15% of your grade in the course. Because the assignments emphasize a range of skills and areas of interests, you may opt out of one of the assignments in this category. In the first few weeks of the semester, you will notify me which assignments you plan to complete; this will serve as our contract for the semester.

A note on multimodality: I want you to think broadly about how to conceptualize and present your ideas about learning, metacognition, and motivation. In general, each of these assignments is designed to allow you to use multimodal (visual, audio) materials in addition to text to communicate your ideas. While multimodality is not required and should not be used as a replacement for substance, I encourage you to be creative in your approach to these assignments.

HOMAGO personal profile (due 2/7)

The required text for this course focuses on three genres of participation: Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out (or HOMAGO for short). In this assignment, you will develop a personal profile in which you map these genres of participation across your life and learning experiences. Since you are a college student, your learning ecology includes but should not be limited to the classes you take here at IU; it should also include other communities in which you participate and learn, and other activities that support your learning and moral, ethical, and social development. For this profile, consider:

• Where do you engage in each genre of participation (and why)?
• To which affinity groups do you belong, and what sort of participant (legitimate peripheral, full, somewhere in between) are you in these groups?
• What role do social learning, the ZPD, and scaffolding play in your life / learning ecology?

Semiformal learning environment profile (due 2/28)

On Feb. 7, we will take a class field trip to the Wonderlab, a local children’s science museum. The goal of this visit is to experience firsthand how some of the big ideas of class apply to one semiformal learning environment. In particular, we will focus on the norms, values, beliefs, and skills that are emphasized through the Wonderlab experience and on how these relate to the concept of the hidden curriculum.

For this assignment, you will choose another, different semiformal learning environment to profile. It can be a museum, art gallery, library, or similar learning context. You will be expected to visit this learning environment and draft a thorough profile of this context. You will then use this profile to analyze how learning is supported here, what norms, values, beliefs, and skills it emphasizes, and how it reinforces or challenges the hidden curriculum.

Creative production + creativity fair + reflection (creative work due in class on 3/21; reflection due 3/28)

Creativity is an important aspect of both educational psychology and of researchers considering what motivates people to make things. For this assignment, you will use a piece of technology to generate a creative product, which you will present in an in-class “creativity fair.” You will then write a short reflection that draws connections between course concepts and the process of creating your product. Sample creative products include a YouTube video, a fan fiction piece or fan video, a website, or a musical mashup or remix. Whatever creative product you choose, you must have access to the tools necessary to complete the product and you must be able to bring both the necessary tools and the final product to class in order to present and discuss your work.

You will submit for a grade:

• The creative product;
• A reflective production log which documents the number of hours you spent completing the project (minimum 5 hours) and your experience of creating the product;
• A short (1-2 page) reflection that draws connections between course concepts and the process of creating the work.

Games, motivation, metacognition and learning project (game fair 4/18; reflection due 4/25)

Research suggests that we can learn a lot about what motivates people to learn and about how knowledge we gain in one context transfers (or doesn’t) to another context. For this assignment, you will spend time playing a game of your choice and use this experience to make an argument about motivation and metacognition. You will present your game in an in-class “game fair” and will submit for a grade:

• A brief overview of the game and rationale for choosing this game;
• A gameplay log which records the amount of time you spent playing the game (minimum 5 hours) and documents your experience of playing the game; and
• A short (1-2 page) reflection that draws connections between course concepts and the game you’ve chosen.

Reflection papers (choose 3).

You will submit three short reflection papers over the course of the semester; these reflections are designed to help you apply the big ideas of the course to specific learning experiences and opportunities. You may opt out of one of the reflection assignments described below.

Reflection #1: Wikipedia edit + reflection. Wikipedia is one context in which people engage in meaning-making collaboratively. After we have spent a day working with Wikipedia and learning how to edit it, students will be required to tour Wikipedia and edit at least two pages. The reflection has them apply the notions of zpd and scaffolding in particular as they think about their experience.

Reflection #2: Wonderlab reflection. We will be visiting the Wonderlab as a class. All students will be required to submit a reflective piece in which they consider how the wonderlab supports social, moral, and ethical development OR how it supports development of metacognitive skills.

Reflection #3: Fan group reflection. The final section of this course focuses on motivation: What inspires people to learn and grow. In one class period, we will have a guest speaker: Erin Policinski, a superfan of Notre Dame football, who will discuss her experience as part of one particular fan group. For this assignment, you may choose to write a reflection on her talk, or you may profile another fan group of your choosing.

Reflection #4: Personal motivational profile. In the final weeks of the semester, we will focus on theories of motivation. For this reflection, you will draft a personal motivational profile in which you apply these theories to your own experience. When and why are you intrinsically motivated? Which motivational theory best explains you, and why? How does knowing about your own motivators help you to strategies about how best to motivate yourself?

Midterm and Final exams

The midterm will include material covered in the first half of the semester. The final exam will be due during Finals week and will be cumulative.

Additional assignments and small group activities (2+)

Small-group activities will be completed largely in class, but they may require some out-of-class work as well. I will also administer in-class reading quizzes and require additional assignments where useful or necessary. All quizzes and additional assignments will contribute to your grade in this category.

Participation

This class operates on the assumption that learning works best when it is social, collaborative, and focused on active construction of knowledge. Because of this, your participation is essential for your own successful learning, for the successful learning of your peers, and for the successful operation of the class community.

Your participation grade will be determined based on your success in the following categories:

• Preparing. Coming to class prepared means completing assigned readings and assignments on time and bringing required materials to class. Since we will be discussing and analyzing required readings, if you don’t have the text with you then you aren’t prepared for class, even if you have read the assignment. This applies to the hard-copy reading assignments as well as readings available online through OnCourse and elsewhere.
• Engaging. Ask questions about required readings. Ask questions during lectures. Be curious and offer your interpretations of course materials. Challenge yourself and your classmates to think critically about course topics. Try new things, even if they seem challenging or weird.
• Supporting. Learning works best in environments of mutual support. The minimum requirement for this class is that you share your perspective and challenge the perspectives of your classmates in a productive, courteous, and respectful manner. (For more on this, see the class policy on “diversity.”) In addition, you will be expected to engage in several small-group activities for this class, and you will be expected to support your group in completing assigned activities. This means taking on your share of the work and completing it in a timely and productive manner.

Attendance policy

Attendance: If you want to do well in this course (earn a good grade, master core concepts), you need to show up to class. Missing class means missing in-class assignments that cannot be made up; it also means missing discussions, lectures, and other activities designed to help you understand and apply core concepts.

Show up to class. Show up to class. Show up to class. Show up prepared. Show up having completed assigned readings. Show up having completed written assignments. Do these things and you will do well in this course.

The only absences that will count as ‘excused’ in this class are: Absences to participate in university-sanctioned events and hospitalization due to severe illness. Absences for any other reason, no matter how justified, will count as ‘unexcused’—this includes illness that does not require a hospital stay (even illness that requires a visit to the doctor) and family or personal emergencies.

You may accumulate up to 4 unexcused absences without penalty to your grade. Upon the 5^th absence, I will begin lowering your grade. At 9 absences, you risk failure of the course.

Additionally, missing class for any reason (excused or unexcused) does not excuse you from completing class assignments—all assignments are due on the date listed, with no exceptions. Please note that missing classes, for any reason (excused or unexcused), may result in the loss of points for in-class assignments or quizzes, which cannot be made up.

Additional information & policies

Paperless classroom policy: We live in a world of dwindling resources. This class will be partially paperless: I will limit the printed materials I provide you for this course. All relevant course materials will be made available in electronic format through OnCourse, eReserve, or similar sites.

Please note that it is your responsibility to bring copies of the assigned readings and some supplemental materials to class. If you choose not to print course readings and materials, you may bring electronic copies on a laptop or eReader (Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc.).

Electronic technologies: As noted above, you may choose to bring a laptop, eReader, or similar learning tool to class. During class time, these tools should be used for class purposes only; use of these technologies for non-class purposes may result in a loss of participation points.

Academic Integrity: Typically, when instructors talk about “academic integrity,” they focus primarily on plagiarism. In fact, the Indiana University Code of Student Conduct lists plagiarism as one of at least 6 distinct forms of academic misconduct. These are: cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, interference, violation of course rules, and facilitating academic dishonesty. Misconduct in any of these areas is grounds for discipline and may result in failure of the course. Significant violations of the Code can result in expulsion from the University.

You can view the full description of each category, along with a detailed description of what counts as academic misconduct, at http://www.iu.edu/~code/code/responsibilities/academic/index.shtml.

Diversity: The Indiana University Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities, and Conduct guarantees all students’ right to protection from discrimination and harassment:

Students have the right to study, work, and interact in an environment that is free from discrimination in violation of law or university policy by any member of the university community. Students at Indiana University are expected to respect the rights and dignity of other students, faculty, and staff.

The university will not exclude any person from participation in its programs or activities on the basis of arbitrary considerations of such characteristics as age, color, disability, ethnicity, sex, gender, gender identity, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status.

This course will be one of many opportunities for you to practice respect for diversity. Degrading language, bullying, harassment, or any other form of discriminatory behavior will not be tolerated.

Religious Observances: Indiana University respects the right of all students to observe their religious holidays and will make reasonable accommodation, upon request, for such observances. To view Indiana University’s policies and procedures regarding making accommodations for religious observances, visit https://www.indiana.edu/~vpfaa/academicguide/index.php/Policy_H-10.

Reasonable Accommodation for Disabilities:  If you require assistance or academic accommodations for a disability, please contact me after class, during my office hours, or by individual appointment. You must have established your eligibility for disability support services through the Office of Disability Services for Students (http://studentaffairs.iub.edu/dss/) in Franklin Hall 006, 812-855-7578.

Syllabus Changes: To ensure that this class meets the needs of both you and me, I reserve the right to amend or change the course syllabus at any time during the semester.  In the event that any changes are made to the syllabus, I will notify you in advance.

Extra Credit: If a worthwhile opportunity for extra credit arises, it will be offered to the entire class.  Extra credit will not be offered on an individual basis.

Lennox, stolen shelter kitten abused by Bloomington man, found alive

By Abby Tonsing 331-4245 | atonsing@heraldt.com
December 5, 2012, last update: 12/5 @ 1:53 pm

Lennox, the 3-month-old orange and white kitten, stolen from the animal shelter and later abused by an Indiana University student is alive. The found kitten is expected to make a full recovery.

Bloomington police said 19-year-old Christopher Charles Gugliuzza admitted he slapped, threw and tied a computer cord around the neck of the kitten he admittedly stole from the shelter on Monday. He told police he wasn’t sure if the cat had died.

Laurie Ringquist, director of Bloomington Animal Care and Control, said that as she was reading online comments on a news article about the cat abuse Tuesday evening, she found some from students, saying a stray kitten matching Lennox’s description had been found.

“They just found her there in a wooded area near those apartments,” she said.

Police and animal control officers picked up Lennox between 9 and 10 Tuesday night, Ringquist said.

The cat was taken to College Mall Vet, where a microchip verified it was indeed Lennox.

“The xrays didn’t show any damage to her organs or fractures to her ribs or limbs. She is running a fever, so the vet wanted to keep her another 24 hours for observation.”

“We’re really grateful, and they did the right thing by taking in a kitten, seeing an animal in need and taking it in and giving it the care it needed,” Ringquist said. “I’m just very grateful and pleased that they were willing to step up and do the right thing by this kitten.”

Police first arrested Gugliuzza, 365 E. Varsity Lane, on a preliminary charge of theft after he admitted he stole the kitten from the shelter because he had no money.

As Gugliuzza was being released from the jail after posting a $705 bond, Bloomington police took him into custody for the second time Monday after a woman reported he may have killed the cat he stole and detailed his history of killing and abusing other cats.

The woman told police she saw Gugliuzza throw Lennox against the wall of his residence several times, choke the cat with his hands, use a computer power cord to tie around the cat’s neck, drag the cat around the apartment and into a nearby wooded area and throw the cat into trees. She told police she saw Gugliuzza pick up a large rock and throw it at the cat, causing the cat to go limp and stop crying. She told police she wasn’t sure if the cat died, and police could not find the cat on Monday.

The woman told police that Monday’s incident with Lennox wasn’t the first time Gugliuzza has abused or killed cats, according to Bloomington police Sgt. John Kovach.

Gugliuzza admitted to police he strangled and killed a cat named Misty, because he was mad that it had scratched him, and buried that cat in a wooded area on 17th Street. Police found the remains of the buried cat on Monday.

He told police he had another cat, Rosie, that died in its sleep after falling down the stairs.

And then there’s Peaches, who Gugliuzza said ran away after it hurt its ankle after jumping off a counter. But the woman told police Gugliuzza returned from a visit to a veterinarian to say Peaches had to be put to sleep.

Police arrested Gugliuzza a second time on Monday, this time on preliminary charges of preliminary charges of cruelty to animals. He was released from the Monroe County Jail at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday after posting a $905 bond.

This, for the record, is one reason why I feel sort of yucky about the decision by many animal shelters (Bloomington’s included) to promote free or very cheap animal adoptions. This summer, the Bloomington Animal Shelter participated in the ASPCA Rachael Ray $100,000 Challenge, which was a national competition among 50 shelters to find homes for as many animals as possible, as quickly as possible. One strategy used by the Bloomington shelter was a promotional event called “Free Feline Friday.” On Fridays, for several weeks during the summer and early fall, the shelter waived adoption fees for all cats and kittens. (Presumably, adopters were still responsible for medical costs.)

This is a bad idea, you guys. Everybody knows that if you want your kittens to go to good homes, you have to charge people to adopt your kittens. Everybody knows that free kittens are way less likely to find a good home than kittens who are sold–even if they’re sold for a pittance, like five or ten dollars.

Now, god knows I’m not suggesting that people who adopt free kittens will go on to torture and kill them. In fact, a lot of people who adopt free kittens go on to become excellent, excellent cat owners. (I have adopted two free kittens, myself, and I consider myself to be an excellent cat caregiver.) But events like Free Feline Friday and its accompanying attitude of “let’s find a way to send everyone who walks through this door home with a pet!” cheapens the act of committing to animal ownership. It emphasizes getting animals adopted over matching animals with owners who are ready and willing to take on the commitment.

Because here’s the thing they don’t tell you about owning pets: It’s really freaking hard. A cute puppy with boundless energy can tip so, so easily into a behavior problem. Dogs need your time and your discipline. They need you to be their alpha dog, and if you can’t do it they’ll tear up your shoes and bite your neighbor and pee on your floor. Even if you do it right they’ll still sometimes tear up your shoes and bite your neighbor and pee on your floor. (I know it was you, Lucille Suzette.) Cats track litter across your counter and eat your favorite houseplant and climb across your face at 4 a.m. and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Even if you do it right, even if you and your pet are a match made in heaven and you’ve learned how to discipline your cat or dog and you’ve gotten into a rhythm and you’re happy, happy, happy together, some day your cat or dog will get sick. Dogs tear their ACLs like they’re movie tickets, and surgery is expensive. Dogs also eat things like pennies and the shoe they tore up yesterday and the neighbor’s trash and EVERYTHING YOU HAD IN YOUR CUPBOARD and then they need to get that fixed too. Sometimes cats get sick so young, you guys, and you have to spend thousands of dollars and half of their lives trying to keep them well.

It always ends the same: You love them, and then you have to help them die. And there are very few things in life that are harder than that responsibility, the responsibility of knowing when it’s time to help your pet die, and doing the right thing when that time comes.

It’s worth it. It’s fucking worth it–worth every minute of pain and frustration and sadness and grief.

But it’s not easy. Don’t ever think it’ll be easy. And don’t let things like Free Feline Friday trick you into committing to a responsibility that you’re not ready to take on.

*As I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog, the publishers of the Herald-Times have decided to erect a paywall around its content. Since it’s the only local daily newspaper in this community, this amounts to limiting residents’ access to important information. For this reason, I choose to copy and paste the Herald-Times’ web content here when necessary.

–and here is where I left the video running while I got up to refill my coffee mug, because the story Weil tells is one that I know so well that I no longer pay attention when it’s told. I mean, I don’t know the specifics, but I know the broad strokes: Global economy / items sold cheaply in the U.S. at the cost of the quality of non-U.S. lives / poisons and toxins that disproportionately hurt the poor and the nonwhite and so on and so on and so on.

Zoe Weil argues that it’s unfair not to provide kids with what she calls a humane education. I wonder if she has thoughts on the risk of a humane education leading to total emotional shutdown. This may be especially likely for kids, who don’t have the kind of agency over their lives that (we like to think) adults do. I’m an adult, which means I make my own money now and can decide whether to use it, for example, to buy an entire week’s worth of groceries at Kroger or an entire evening’s worth of groceries at Bloomingfoods. I can decide whether to buy cheap, socially yucky clothes at Target or cheap, socially less yucky clothes at a thrift store. I get to make decisions about where to put my energy and money and time, and for the most part I’m committed to making the better decision on most things. But once you learn that there is a better decision for most things, you learn that everything you do has all these consequences, and that if you want to be better, you have to try to be better about everything.

What happens when we teach this lesson to kids, who have almost no control over where they shop and what they buy and what they eat and where they go?

Then, on Facebook, I posted this:

I really do believe in the importance of people coming out as LGBTQI allies. If queer and questioning folks who are afraid to come out know that they are surrounded by people who will love and support them and will try to keep them safe, they are far more likely to come out, and stay out. I say this not only as a queer myself #smashALLtheclosets but as a queer who, out of fear, stayed closeted for decades.

Dudes, I knew I was gay. I knew it when I was 11 years old. I knew it, knew it without a doubt, and I believed I had to hide it from everyone, and I spent 20 years trying to make myself straight. I spent 20 years feeling like a total fake, 20 years feeling miserable and sad and alone. I can’t tell you how lonely it was, all those years I spent sitting in that dark lonely closet.

This is the thing that I think is hard for people to understand. If you have this huge secret that you’re trying to hold on to, you can’t afford to let anyone get close to you because there’s this whole part of you that you have to cordon off and protect. This isn’t just about romantic relationships–you can’t have close friends, either, because what if they find out? And your friends, no matter how awesome they are, no matter how close you feel with them, will never never really understand you because you have to keep this piece of you, this really fucking important piece of you, buried deep inside.

Anyway, here’s something awesome that happened for National Coming Out Day: All of my immediate family members changed their Facebook profile pictures to this:

My entire immediate family. My mom and my sisters. They all, independently, without me asking them to, changed their photo to an LGBTQI Ally badge. Because they’re awesome. And because they love and support me.

I’m critical of the well known “It Gets Better” video campaign, for lots of reasons. (1. It presents a white, middle class, upwardly mobile picture of queerness, which means it exercises its own form of oppression on nonwhite, non-middle class, rural queer and questioning youth. 2. It avoids pushing people to take responsibility to make it better, and treats bullying as if it’s just the gauntlet that we all have to run, instead of loudly proclaiming that bullies suck big-time and it’s the responsibility of anyone who’s willing and able to fight bullies with everything they have. 3. It paints a picture of queerness as ‘just like straightness except with different body parts,’ which I think is not only inaccurate but also problematic because it erases the experiences and needs of non-mainstream queers.) But my frustration with the “It Gets Better” campaign has nothing to do with the campaign’s primary message.

It does get better, you guys. It gets so much better. Like, better than I ever imagined it could get. When I was that scared, closeted kid, I truly believed I would just never be happy. I believed I would never fall in love–I believed I was incapable of love. I believed there was something broken inside me that made love, and joy, and happiness impossible for me.

And I was wrong. I’m not broken. Well, at least no more broken than we all are. And I think that no matter what happened after I came out, I would still have found myself capable of experiencing love, joy, and happiness. Even if my family had disowned me and my friends had walked away. But my family and friends have largely chosen to stay. And yesterday, my immediate family members, independently and without any prompting from me, chose to publicly show their support for me and for other LGBTQI folks. Which is pretty goddam awesome.

Thanks, guys. You’re pretty great and I love you a lot.

And this one, the title song from Out of Range:

So that was cool, especially for a babyfeminist who was trying to figure out the politics of being a ladydude in a culture that doesn’t particularly like ladydudes. I was 20 years old, and I was starting to get angry, and also by the way I was starting to worry about how grossed out I was by biodudes and how interested I was in bioladies and whether I was going to have to figure out that whole sexuality thing if I ever wanted to try being, you know, happy.

At the time, when I was 20 years old and basically a naive white kid from suburban Detroit, I really liked Ani’s brand of feminism. It was simple and clear, and contained a few key talking points:

Dudes aren’t really all that nice to ladies.

“I am not a pretty girl / that is not what I do / I ain’t no damsel in distress / and I don’t need to be rescued / so put me down punk / maybe you’d prefer a maiden fair / isn’t there a kitten stuck up a tree somewhere” (Not a Pretty Girl”)

The Man wants to stick it to you, primarily by banning abortions.

“I opened a bank account / when I was nine years old / I closed it when I was eighteen / I gave them every penny that I’d saved / and they gave my blood / and my urine / a number / now I’m sitting in this waiting room / playing with the toys / and I am here to exercise / my freedom of choice / I passed their handheld signs / went through their picket lines / they gathered when they saw me coming / they shouted when they saw me cross / I said why don’t you go home / just leave me alone / I’m just another woman lost” (“Lost Woman Song”)

 

Ladies are pretty and I can have sex with them if I want to.

“We can touch / touch our girl cheeks / and we can hold hands / like paper dolls / we can try / try each other on / in the privacy / within new york city’s walls / we can kiss / kiss goodnight / and we can go home wondering / what would it be like if / if I did not have a boyfriend / we could spend / the whole night” (“The Whole Night”)

 

And of course all of the above points are totally valid and important to address. But they’re also the easiest parts of feminism to embrace, because they place the blame elsewhere and open up space for some good old righteous anger. In this respect, they represent an an early, immature version of feminism–a kind that can, given time, proper care, and lots of sunlight, mature into full-blown, complex and nuanced feminist politics.

As a feminist gets older, if she’s paying attention, she starts to see that the world is a little more complicated than she thought, and that a lot of different types of prejudice and oppression are acting on people all at the same time, and sexism and racism and classism and ableism and heterosexism and other forms of oppression are all wrapped up together. As a feminist gets older, she starts to see that the way a man treats a woman is just a symptom of a larger illness: Institutional disease. Our institutions–culture, education, government, religion–are all wrapped up in perpetuating oppression as a means of keeping themselves afloat. It’s baked right in to everything we do, every interaction, every transaction.

Not only that, but an American feminist–if she’s white and middle class–should start to see how “mainstream” feminism tends to focus on issues of relevance to white middle class women, to the exclusion of the interests and needs of nonwhite, non-middle class women. (It often takes a while, if you’re a white, middle-class feminist, to realize that your feminism can be a form of oppression of women who don’t look like you.) And she should start to see how feminism cannot stand alone as a belief system: A feminist who wants change needs to be critical of government and the law, needs to see the complexities of social action wielded for the public good. A feminist needs to be critical of feminism. She needs to be critical of herself. A feminist needs to change, in other words. She needs to get more complex and use that complexity to treat the world she’s fighting through as more complex as well.

Since Ani DiFranco is, as Wikipedia explains to me, “widely considered a feminist icon,” I’ve been holding out hope that her music would move from that immature, buzzword feminism to a more mature version that embraces complexity and confusion. But instead I got this, the title song from her newest album, which is a remake of a Pete Seeger protest song:

Let me just repeat some of the lyrics, in case you missed them. Heck, I’ll just go ahead and include the entire song!

They stole a few elections,
Still we the people won
We voted out corruption and
Big corporations

We voted for an end to war
New direction
We ain’t gonna stop now
Until our job is done

Come on all good workers
This year is our time
Now there some folks in Washington
Who cares what’s on our minds

Come one-come all voters
Lets all vote next time
Show ‘em which side are you on now
Which side are you on

Which side are you on now / Which side are you on / Which side are you on now / Which side are you on

Which side are you on now / Which side are you on / Which side are you on now / Which side are you on

30 years of diggin’
Got us in this hole
The curse of Reaganomics
Has finally taken it’s toll

Lord knows the free market
Is anything but free
It costs dearly to the planet
And the likes of you and me

I don’t need those money lenders
Suckin’ on my tit
A little socialism
Don’t scare me one bit!

We could do a whole lot worse
Than Europe or Canada
C’mon Mr. president
C’mon Congress make the law

Which side are you on now / Which side are you on / Which side are you on now / Which side are you on

They say in Orleans parish
There are no neutrals there
There’s just too much misery
There’s too much despair

America who are we
Now our innocence is gone
Which side are you on now
Which side are you on

Too many stories written
Out in black and white
C’mon people of privilege
It’s time to join the fight

Are we living in the shadow of slavery
Or are we moving on
Tell me which side are you on now
Which side are you on

Which side are you on boys / Which side are you on / Which side are you on boys / Which side are you on / Which side are you on boys / Which side are you on / Which side are you on now / Which side are you on

My mother was a feminist
She taught me to see
That the road to ruin is paved
With patriarchy

So, let the way of the women
Guide democracy
From plunder and pollution
Let mother earth be free

Feminism ain’t about women
No, that’s not who it’s for
It’s about a shift in consciousness
That’ll bring an end to war

So listen up you fathers
Listen up you sons
Which side are you on now
Which side are you on

Which side are you on now / Which side are you on / Which side are you on now / Which side are you on

So are we just consumers
Or are we citizens
Are we gonna make more garbage
Or are we gonna make amends

Are you part of the solution
Or are you part of the con?
Which side are you on now
Which side are you on?

Ok, so a couple of things:

1. Actually, feminism is about women. That’s actually the definition of feminism. I’m on board with you arguing that feminism is for everyone and that a natural result of feminism is peace, but don’t tell me that feminism isn’t about women. Two big middle fingers up on that one.
2. Uhhh ok so this song includes a lot of buzzwords, dudes: I don’t think any song in the history of ever has found a way to include Reaganomics, socialism, free market, patriarchy, and mother earth ALL IN ONE SONG! So that’s cool. But on the other hand…buzzwords suck as lyrics. The first rule of creative writing, as you probably know, is show, don’t tell. Buzzwords tell. And they are therefore not the most awesome language to use in song lyrics.
3. I wonder if Ani really thinks we the people really did win in the last election. Sure, we got a better President than any we’ve seen so far this century, but by no stretch of the imagination can anyone argue that electing Barack Obama led to a mass exodus of corrupt politicians and corporate lobbyists from Washington, D.C. Politics are as corrupt as ever, our Supreme Court is invested in maintaining corporations’ power over legal and political institutions, and most of the time when we watch “Congress make a law” these days it’s a law that works against the best interest of those who are most in need of Congress’s help: Women, the underclass, gays, nonwhite minorities. These days, I prefer that Congress not make a law, thank you very much.

If a person has been identifying as a feminist and practicing feminism for more than two decades, as Ani DiFranco has, we should hope that her politics would become more finely honed with time. Instead, this latest album has Ani relying on buzzwords and the most simplistic political messages: Vote, you guys! If you vote, the people win! It’s a disappointingly naive message, one that echoes the simplistic messages of her earlier albums–only this time, without the righteous anger.

Ani DiFranco is a female folksinger who has fought her way to her spot as a prominent contemporary folk singer who has been selling out concert venues for two decades. Along the way, she’s not only had to battle an industry that didn’t particularly want her, but she’s also had to deal with her fans’ criticisms of her life choices. Most significant among these criticisms was the shock, outrage, and disappointment expressed by her lesbian fan base when Ani got married to a man–and then divorced him and married another man. I’m not trying to judge Ani DiFranco as a person here–she’s had enough of that over the years. (Although I’m firmly in the camp that believes that she can do whatever she wants with her personal life, but if she chooses to talk about her personal life in her music she shouldn’t be surprised when people are disappointed in the paths her life takes–she made her life choices fair game for analysis when she decided to include them in her lyrics.) But I do think that what happened to Ani DiFranco can serve as a cautionary tale for younger feminists. Our society wants you to get your righteous (and deserved) anger out while you’re young, then it wants you to settle in to a set of political beliefs that don’t cause too much hassle for anyone.

There will be so many different pressures on you that are set up to turn an angry young radical feminist into a calm political moderate. By “political moderate,” I mean “anyone who thinks that voting for the better of two choices for President of the United States is sufficient to lead to victory for ‘we the people’.”

It’s our job as feminists to stay angry for as long as we can sustain our anger, because there’s plenty to stay angry about. It’s our job to put our queer shoulders to the wheel.

Both words come from the latin root seminalis, or seed, from which we also get the word semen.

Now: seminal, disseminate, semen. All linked to the notion of the seed, the germination of all things that can grow: the sowing of ideas, of genes, of the next generation of people, texts, and theories. The terms, though we may not think of it in daily use, are innately masculine–innately male. A seminal idea is one that has taken root, has grown, has spread; it engenders offspring in which we can see (genetic) elements of the initial idea, text, or approach. There’s not even a feminine equivalent. What would we say? He’s an ovulant thinker in his field?

As a female scholar, I resent the notion that my ideas may, if I’m lucky, be likened to the very masculine process of impregnation. I resent the paradigm that leads us to consider seminal ideas that allow other thinkers to bear fruit.

Since that post, I’ve made some headway in convincing some members of my scholarly circle to either replace those words with the dozens of alternatives provided within the English language, or to use those words but be aware of the way they sound to some Alert Feminist Readers.

At the same time, I’m still finding myself in conversation with people who think I’m a) overreacting, b) looking for something that’s not there, or c) being overly simplistic in my analysis of these terms. Lately this issue has taken on fresh meaning for me, since I’m studying for my qualifying exams and the word seminal, in particular, keeps rearing its ugly head.

So, at the risk of repeating myself, I want to reiterate my objections to the ongoing use of these terms. This time I’ll do it by outlining some general principles:

1. Cultures simultaneously reflect and reproduce belief systems. These belief systems include ideas about what counts as knowledge, what kinds of behaviors, values, and beliefs are “better” than other kinds, and who gets to be in charge of things like government, schools, law enforcement agencies, universities, and religious institutions, and what sorts of authority we’re going to bestow upon those leaders and the institutions they lead.

2. Language is one key area in which a culture simultaneously reflects and reproduces its belief systems. This includes not only the words that come into use (or fall out of favor) in a culture but also extends into how a language is structured, what sorts of words, metaphors and analogies are available to its users and how words are appropriated and recruited for use in new contexts. For example, in America we use the term “kindergarten” (German for “children’s garden”) to refer to a child’s first year of school because it aligns with our schoolish metaphor of cultivating learners. But “kindergarten” is not a universal term for that first year.

3. Over time, a culture’s vocabulary changes. This is true for a big huge pile of reasons, three of which being that certain words or terms get recognized for limiting our thinking, for being too limited in scope for some new purpose, or for being overtly offensive. For example:

The word meme was first coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, but took off within the last decade to account for the wildfire spread of new cultural products, inside of which were contained new behaviors, values, or ideas. Think honeybadgers, lolcats, someecards.com, and Antoine Dodson. Before the emergence of the internet, there was no need for the widespread use of the word meme, and now there is a need for such a word.

In America, the terms Negro and colored to describe Black people and American Indians to describe Native Americans or First Nations people have long fallen out of favor and are generally viewed as racist.

4. Some words in a culture may reflect yucky aspects of that culture’s belief system. This is so regardless of whether individual speakers of a language are explicitly aware of the connection between that word and its connection to yuckiness. This is why we tell kids to stop saying “that’s so gay” even if they aren’t aware that the phrase is linked to homophobia and heterosexism.

5. Individuals who are part of a nondominant group (i.e., are removed from power by dint of their gender, race, class, physical attributes/abilities, neurologies, or other characteristics) are far more likely to recognize words that reflect yucky beliefs about their group than are individuals who come from dominant groups. For a long time, I used the word “lame” to refer to things I didn’t like. I used “lame” like it was going out of style. As a non-disabled individual, I wasn’t primed to notice on my own that “lame” is a term that is characteristic of ableist language.

6. If an individual from a nondominant group (or an ally who is not part of that group) is able to articulate why she thinks a given term reflects yucky cultural beliefs, the person who has used that term is responsible to either justify continued use of the term or agree to abandon that term.

7. Justifications that do not count as reasonable include:

• “But there’s not a better term to replace it with!” (Because if a word reflects yucky cultural beliefs, there’s always a better term, although it may require you to think harder about language than you want to.)
• “I think you’re overreacting / seeing something that doesn’t exist / focusing on something that doesn’t matter.” Members of nondominant groups (and their allies) often see things that are not recognized by members of dominant groups. Because dominant groups get to be dominant, they get to spend a lot of time ignoring people who see things differently. That doesn’t make them right; that makes them oblivious. It’s not even necessarily their fault! They’re conditioned to be oblivious by a culture of power whose continued existence relies on nobody questioning the culture of power.

8. Justifications that do count as reasonable include:

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9. Because if a term feels yucky to a member of a nondominant group, why in the name of all things awesome would you want to keep using it? Seriously. That makes you part of the problem. And who wants to be part of the problem?

The words seminal and disseminate are yucky to me. Because they are linked to the word semen, and because the word semen is a definitively masculine term with definitively masculine connotations in our culture, they reflect masculinist views of knowledge production and reproduction. Dissemination–the literal spreading of semen, or seed–often happens without consent, and is therefore a matter of physical violence, most commonly perpetrated on women.

Dissemination–the literal as well as the metaphorical ejaculation of semen, or seed–also reflects a heterosexist worldview. If I’m a seminal thinker, that’s because my seeds have germinated–because they were fertilized, and took root, and grew. Because the spreading of seed also requires germination, now we’ve headed into the world of male-female sexual activity. You can tell me the root of the term is botanical, not biological, but you can’t argue that the root word, semen, is more strongly botanical in our culture than it is biological. Which means that in general use, the words semen, seminal, and disseminate are at least more strongly linked to the biological activity of heterocopulation than to the botanical activity of plant reproduction.

Here are some other words you can use. They may require you to think more deeply about what you’re trying to communicate, because each of these words means something slightly different than the others, but that’s what Good Thinkers do anyway!

seminal: critical, crucial, fundamental, important, influential, original, primary, distinctive, distinguished, esteemed, extraordinary, famous, foremost, incomparable, leading, notable, noted, noteworthy, preeminent, prominent, formative, generative, ingenious, innovative, unprecedented, untried, unusual

disseminate: distribute, scatter, broadcast, circulate, diffuse,disperse, promulgate, propagate, publicize, publish, radiate, sow, spread, strew, radiate, bestow, deal out, deliver, devote, disburse, dish out, dispense, mete, communicate, declare, decree, make public, spread, proliferate

A bunch of queerfolks around the world plan on queerin’ up Chick Fil-A today as a counterprotest to “Chick Fil-A Appreciation Day” (aka: “take a stand against those fags”).

I won’t be participating.

This is one of those instances of small groups of like-minded people stepping up on public platforms and talking directly at themselves. People who hate gays enough to spend thousands of dollars to bus people to a fast food restaurant don’t care what a bunch of queer activists have to say. And queers who are angry enough to mobilize around a counterprotest…well, you’ll forgive them if they don’t care to listen to anything a group of homophobes has to say.

Protests work when they change opinions. Political demonstrations work best when they show the world that more people than anybody previously believed care about x or want to change y. In this case, though, media coverage of Chick Fil-A Appreciation Day is going to outshine the simple fact that Chick Fil-A has dropped in general public popularity in the days following its COO’s announcement that it opposes gay marriage and, well, gays in general:

I imagine the popularity drop was only partially about Dan Cathy’s anti-gay marriage stance, since it has been known for a while now that Chick Fil-A money was being directed to anti-gay organizations like Exodus International. I suspect that people are just annoyed that politics has officially marred their enjoyment of what is by many accounts a really good chicken sandwich.

I guess another nice side effect of political protest, as a friend and coworker just now noted to me, is the ability to connect with like-minded folks. I bet that’s going to be awesome, the meeting and connecting with like-minded folks. But in my neck of the woods, protesters plan to hang out at the KFC just down the street. You guys, KFC got a mediocre rating–45 out of 100–on the Human Rights Campaign’s Equality Index report. And Greenpeace International reports that KFC is one of several companies complicit in destruction of our rain forests.

I guess you can’t win for losing, these days.