Is it noble to spend your evening rushing around checking up on people who are falling apart, even though there’s nothing you can do to help them except tuck them in to bed and hope and pray they’ll be there the next day? If so, I should probably feel privileged to know that person. Despite the fact that in his own life things had taken an unexpected and horrible turn for the worse, C waited until the six or seven people breaking down in the corridor had been dealt with before (at three o’clock in the morning, when he was exhausted and drained by worry) I had the thought to ask him if he was okay, to mention any of what was wrong.

It’s fairly big; so maybe his determined efforts to shield everyone else were a way of distracting himself. If so, he did bloody well. But then again, they were pretty major distractions.

I’m not going to include myself in the same umbrella; I was concerned only about one person in that group. Thankfully, other people besides myself now know. Hopefully, it’ll be okay.

I could quite easily have gone to bed and fretted away in my room but ultimately switched the light off and slept and known nothing about the chaos that was last night until this morning. I’d probably have got more sleep. But the echoes of a conversation were searing through my head and (I’m oddly glad for this) I found myself awake, sitting on the stairs in silence at 1.30 this morning. Which is where C found me in a panic after having rescued someone direly in need of help.

I use ‘rescued’ in a broad sense. I don’t think anyone can ‘rescue’ someone else from themselves. But you never know. Maybe it will start to look up.

Either way, the boy had the nerve (or kindness) to worry about me too, to ring round in a panic when I disappeared for a walk, and to be glad when I appeared. I’m glad that I was in some way able to maybe (I hope) make things better for him in return by asking him to talk about his bottled-up upset. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll all survive this week and we’ll make it home, and then we’ll return after Vacation to find ourselves strong enough for the next term. Maybe next time we’ll make it to seven-and-a-half weeks before all hell lets loose.

At 5am, T on the phone told me I was being noble, for carrying a secret for five weeks. I don’t feel noble. I feel stupid, and tired, and angry. I want to shut everything out, now. I don’t want to see anyone. I want them all to go away, shut up and grow up, and leave me alone. I stayed silent because I was more worried about preserving a growing friendship than in protecting someone; I should have spoken out long before, but I didn’t. Let’s just hope it’s not too late, eh? For the person, or the friendship.

Some things are more important than personal gratification. 5am is a bad time to be awake. You think far too much.

I look in the mirror and worry that I might be you. That we are a reflection of each other – far too similar, I sometimes think. I scorn arrogance, while forgetting that I myself am more arrogant than most people I know. I look at your high-handed way of dealing with people, which (I begin to see) is merely an external presentation to avoid letting people in, and I don’t realise that that’s how I treat people.

Always being right is not a good thing. I do not treat people well, there is no give-and-take with me, and all the qualities I most hate in myself I scorn in you.

And yet, I cannot like you. I look in the mirror and see you, and I hate myself. And I don’t think you’re anywhere near this bad. Why is that? What are you?

I spoke to Phil some last night and I am very excited that we believe we can get our book done by March; we talked about what publishers to go with and how we could present it to schools and college faculties across the country. Our work, as noted before, is a reader: W.E.B. Du Bois and Religion: A Brief History with Documents (Forward by Edward J. Blum).  Co-edited with Phillip Luke Sinitiere, this is a collection of primary sources that reflect Du Bois’s thoughts on faith, spirituality, and the political implications of religion.  Documents include those that address religion from a sociological perspective, religious artwork, and spiritual fiction, among others.  This collection also includes a timeline of Du Bois’s life, bibliography, and study questions. One document that I intend on drafting an essay around looks at his political nature. Being a black intellectual, Du Bois grew frustrated that the American plight did not include the blacks. Thus, he like so many learned individuals, sought and admired the greatness of the Soviets, especially under the leadership of Josef Stalin.

In his eulogy drafted shortly after Stalin’s death, Du Bois praises a man who brought faith, confidence, and respectability to a proud nation. Du Bois, as did FDR, highly respected Stalin. I have long found that history books have been kind to Stalin; he killed more people than Hitler, he brought an end to freedom for many living in Eastern Europe, and he challenged the ideology of America until his death; it was his ideological challenge that most interested Du Bois. By the death of Stalin, DuBois had lost faith in American democracy. He claimed that it had failed the American negro….There was no faith in democracy or capitalism. The following document is one that I have used in my class before; it is a powerful piece. I got excited reflecting on Du Bois while editing and writing about this document for our book today.

Josef Stalin was a great man; few other men of the twentieth century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding his rightful place with dignity. He was the son of a serf, but stood calmly before the great without hesitation or nerves. But also — and this was the highest proof of his greatness — he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate.

Stalin was not a man of conventional learning; he was much more than that; he was a man who thought deeply, read understandingly and listened to wisdom, no matter whence it came. He was attacked and slandered as few men of power have been; yet he seldom lost his courtesy and balance; nor did he let attack drive him from his convictions nor induce him to surrender positions which he knew were correct. As one of the despised minorities of man, he first set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one nation out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality.

His judgement of men was profound. He early saw through the flamboyance and exhibitionism of Trotsky, who fooled the world, and especially America. The whole ill-bread and insulting attitude of liberals in the U.S. today began with our naive acceptance of Trotsky’s magnificent lying propaganda, which he carried around the world. Against it, Stalin stood like a rock and moved neither right nor left, as he continued to advance toward a real socialism instead of the sham Trotsky offered.

Three great decisions faced Stalin in power and he met them magnificently; first, the problem of the peasants, then the West European attack, and last the Second World War. The poor Russian peasant was the lowest victim of tsarism, capitalism and the Orthodox Church. He surrendered the Little White Father easily; he turned less readily but perceptibly from his icons; but his kulaks clung tenaciously to capitalism and were near wrecking the revolution when Stalin risked a second revolution and drove out the rural bloodsuckers.

Then came intervention, the continuing threat of attack by all nations, halted by the Depression, only to be re-opened by Hitlerism. It was Stalin who steered the Soviet Union between Scylla and Charybdis; Western Europe and the US were willing to betray her to fascism, and then had to beg her aid in the Second World War. A lesser man than Stalin would have demanded vengeance for Munich, but he had the wisdom to ask only justice for his fatherland. This Roosevelt granted but Churchill held back. The British Empire proposed first to save itself in Africa and southern Europe, while Hitler smashed the Soviets.

The Second Front dawdled, but Stalin pressed unfalteringly ahead. He risked the utter ruin of socialism in order to smash the dictatorship of Hitler and Mussolini. After Stalingrad the Western World did not know whether to weep or applaud. The cost of victory to the Soviet Union was frightful. To this day the outside world has no dream of the hurt, the loss and the sacrifices. For his calm, stern leadership here, if nowhere else, arises the deep worship of Stalin by the people of all the Russias.

Then came the problem of Peace. Hard as this was to Europe and America, it was far harder to Stalin and the Soviets. The conventional rulers of the world hated and feared them and would have been only too willing to see the utter failure of this attempt at socialism. At the same time the fear of Japan and Asia was also real. Diplomacy therefore took hold and Stalin was picked as the victim. He was called in conference with British Imperialism represented by its trained and well-fed aristocracy; and with the vast wealth and potential power of America represented by its most liberal leader in half a century.

Here Stalin showed his real greatness. He neither cringed nor strutted. He never presumed, he never surrendered. He gained the friendship of Roosevelt and the respect of Churchill. He asked neither adulation nor vengeance. He was reasonable and conciliatory. But on what he deemed essential, he was inflexible. He was willing to resurrect the League of Nations, which had insulted the Soviets. He was willing to fight Japan, even though Japan was then no menace to the Soviet Union, and might be death to the British Empire and to American trade. But on two points Stalin was adamant: Clemenceau’s “Cordon Sanitaire” must be returned to the Soviets, whence it had been stolen as a threat. The Balkans were not to be left helpless before Western exploitation for the benefit of land monopoly. The workers and peasants there must have their say.

Such was the man who lies dead, still the butt of noisy jackals and the illbred men of some parts of the distempered West. In life he suffered under continuous and studied insult; he was forced to make bitter decisions on his own lone responsibility. His reward comes as the common man stands in solemn acclaim.

W.E.B DuBois, March 16, 1953.

I appreciate how stressful it must be directing a play and coaching novice rowers. AND struggling with the workload they expect of us here.

But still, cut it would be nice if he could cut me some slack; I would have dragged myself into the ground for his damn race this week, I would have loved to be able to do it, but at the moment, I just can’t.

And it is not my fault that on Sunday I was better. I was well enough to do it. And then since yesterday I’ve plummeted again. That is not my fault, I could not have predicted it.

So yeah. It wasn’t the best way to spend my evening, on the phone to my mum and dad wanting to beg them to take me home. Yes, I’m in the home straight now, I can see next weekend, I’m nearly there, I’m nearly home.  But it has suddenly got too much for me.

I can’t cut him any slack, I can’t sit back and accept his bullying. I know how important and stressful it must be doing everything he’s doing, but it is NOT the end of the world. It’s not like he’s coaching the Blues, or this is like a big varsity race or whatever. He’s coaching the THIRD DIVISION of Novices. I like our boat and everything, but we really aren’t the end of the world.

Not impressed.

Here is this month’s installment in the papers I’m reading series:

• Schlager, W., 2009, Ordered hierarchy versus scale invariance in sequence stratigraphy: Int. Journal of Earth Science, doi: 10.1007/s00531-009-0491-8. [link]
• Brackley, H.L., et al., in press, Dispersal and transformation of organic carbon across an episodic, high sediment discharge contiental margin, Waipaoa sedimentary system: Marine Geology, doi: 10.1016/j.margeo.2009.11.001 [link]
• Mulder, T., et al., in press, High-resolution analysis of submarine lobe deposits: Seismic-scale outcrops of the Lauzanier area (SE Alps, France): Sedimentary Geology, doi: 10.1016/j.sedgeo.2009.11.005 [link]
• Kane, I.A., et al., in press, Submarine channel levee shape and sediment waves from physcial experiments: Sedimentary Geology, doi: 10.1016/j.sedgeo.2009.11.001. [link]
• Wittmann, H., et al., in press, From source to sink: Preservring cosmogenic 10Be-derived denudation rate signal of the Bolivian Andes in sediment of the Beni and Mamore foreland basins: EPSL, doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2009.10.008. [link]

-

Note: the links above may take you to a subscription-only page; as a policy I do not e-mail PDF copies of papers to people (sorry).

From Rolf Jeltsch’s colloquium in the Mathematics Department are the following:

[1] Euler was probably one of the earliest mathematical modellers: for example, he turned the Koenigsburg bridge problem into one of graph theory; and, apparently, he is also the first one to consider control volumes in fluid dynamics while the other hydrodynamicists were looking at the entire fluid under different circumstances and tried to describe its behaviour.

[2] Euler was pretty open by the then scientific standards; while his contemporaries were trying to keep their discoveries secret, apparently, he wrote expository pieces and circulated them, and, never indulged in priority disputes.

I have read great things about Euler through his great admirer (probably the greatest) Clifford Truesdell. After learning about his open science approach, I am more impressed.

Here are the ten simple rules for choosing between academia and the industry:

1 Assess your qualifications
2 Assess your needs
3 Assess your desires
4 Assess your personality
5 Consider the alternatives
6 Consider the timing
7 Plan for the long term
8 Keep your options open
9 Be analytic
10 Be honest with yourself

Link via Abi.

Via Abi again, I get this quote about corrupt academic world and the signaling techniques used  in it:

Gambetta calls the system “an academic kakistocracy, or government by the worst,” which is definitely an expression I can see catching on.This may seem like a tangent from comparative criminology. But Gambetta argues that the cheerful incompetence of the baroni is akin to the mafioso’s way of signaling that he can be “trusted” within his narrowly predatory limits

“Being incompetent and displaying it,” he writes, “conveys the message I will not run away, for I have no strong legs to run anywhere else. In a corrupt academic market, being good at and interested in one’s own research, by contrast, signal a potential for a career independent of corrupt reciprocity…. In the Italian academic world, the kakistrocrats are those who best assure others by displaying, through lack of competence and lack of interest in research, that they will comply with the pacts.”

Have fun!

It’s one of those weeks in academia:

• schedules for 2010-11 are due
• book orders for next quarter are due
• essays need to graded and returned
• that essay I promised to write a few months ago is due
• references still need to be written
• requests for sabbaticals are due shortly
• students’ grandmothers are dying left and right
• H1N1 has taken over our town
• colleagues are walking around sleeplessly and no one has cleaned the office coffee pot in days
• I’m watching Dexter to relax at night, and, despite that, I had a nightmare about something even weirder: Sarah Palin was chasing me
• did I or did I not buy my plane tickets for the MLA?
• and the house is a wreck and not at all ready for Turkey day

Luckily, NPR has an app for all of that: a ginger martini recipe.

Louis Menand recently published excerpts from his upcoming book The Marketplace of Ideas. Here’s one excerpt I found both challenging and troublesome:

The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with Ph.D.s, then universities should stop giving so many Ph.D.s—by making it harder to get into a Ph.D. program (reducing the number of entrants) or harder to get through (reducing the number of graduates). But this has not worked. Possibly the story has a different moral, which is that there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo. If Ph.D. programs were determinate in length—if getting a Ph.D. were like getting a law degree—then graduate education might acquire additional focus and efficiency. It might also attract more of the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having.

I’m not sure what he means to accomplish by making these goals the equivalent of a Ph.D. It sounds to me as though he has something in mind not unlike a really rigorous and flexible M.A. program–i.e., not one that aims to produce a Ph.D. lite, so to speak, but one that aims to produce a more rigorously educated person. But he’s stuck there, because professors of English (like myself) are trained to teach people how to do serious study of literature (or film, or writing, etc.), not to “educate them rigorously.” And what would that mean, exactly? This isn’t any longer the Victorian era when reading classics at Oxford prepared you for the job of running (or ruining, as the case may be) the British Empire. And one notes that Harvard English probably won’t be undertaking this kind of self-transformation, so who does he suppose will be the first one to do it?

I thought the best thing he said in that passage is the disincentive of going to graduate school in the humanities. I was one of the blissfully stupid ones who skipped off to graduate school singing “tra-la-la” and not worrying a fig about the job market. Now I’m thankful almost daily that I ended up with a very good job, but not everyone who entered graduate school with me has been so lucky. Menand states in an earlier section that Ph.D. training isn’t transferable. I know several people who have made the transition, but usually it wasn’t without a sense of bitterness. It’s a bad problem.

In the meantime, people like Rohan Maitzen and I will still be wondering whether our M.A. programs can be improved. Her recent post (where I also found the link to the Menand article) is good on some of the questions that can be profitably asked about the nature of the M.A. especially:

All of this mental muddle is particularly distracting because one of the things I’m trying to get done is course planning for next term, and particularly the plans for my upcoming graduate seminar on George Eliot. When I first taught such a class (in 1997-98), I thought it was pretty obvious what I should do: graduate courses are training for professional work in the field of literary criticism, right? That shouldn’t have seemed so obvious to me then (I didn’t take into account, for instance, that Dalhousie’s program includes a ‘terminal’ M.A. and thus serves a student population that is not necessarily headed down an academic path), and it certainly does not seem so obvious to me now. But what difference does, or should, it make that there seem to me to be a number of uncertainties about the purpose of their degrees more generally, our seminar in particular, and even literary criticism itself? Is a (real or mock) conference paper a reasonable goal, or a paper suitable to be revised and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal? Should I diversify the requirements to suit a wider range of possible applications of scholarly expertise–say, a resource-rich website, an experimental hyper-text edition of a chapter, a paper aimed at a general audience, a portfolio of book reviews, a class wiki? Is it possible to accommodate such a range and still to ensure equal workloads and fair evaluation? I’ve been reading and rereading a swathe of critical articles in preparation for the usual “secondary readings” requirements but if I can’t even be sure myself what we need to accomplish in the class, how can I choose what they should read? Probably I’ll just do what I usually do, which is pick some articles that seem particularly useful or interesting, or that stand for some reason as key or classic pieces; require a couple of short response papers, a seminar presentation, and a term paper (of the usual academic variety). It’s tempting to reinvent the course–but it’s part of a whole system of requirements and expectations, and so there I am again, reluctant to deviate from local norms, to point out that most of them will never need to do academic criticism (or get a permanent job in which it is required of them for tenure) and so we should really find something else to do about what we read.

To figure out how to change the system, so that there is some kind of hierarchy where you begin by learning more, and more things that might be relevant in the real world, and end with specialized training in scholarship, would not be such a bad thing. But if the people at Harvard–who after all are the ones who landed the plum-est jobs in the land and have the time to re-conceptualize graduate study on something other than the nineteenth-century German model–can’t come up with more than a vague notion that things should change, we probably shouldn’t count on it happening any time soon.

Mark Lewis is a distant colleague and buddy of mine; we met years ago at a conference held on the campus of the University of  Nebraska; he offers some interesting points on the “dumb” things students ask. Oh, he blames me for students asking the questions below.

I wanted to contribute to this discussion, so I asked Carson if I could submit two pieces of advice blog posts. This one is a less serious post than the other one Carson will post for me. Funny, but Carson and I were at a conference few years back when we were comparing his upper-school students to my college freshman. In the end, we concluded that there is little difference between a high school student and freshman and sophomore in college. Let me add this, on my campus, we do not practice open or easy enrollments, either. So, dear student, here are the type of questions you will encounter from your future students; I suspect at one point you have asked such questions.

1. “I can’t be in class tomorrow. Will you be talking about anything important?”
2. “Is this score on my exam the number wrong or the number right?”
3. “I got the exact same answer as my classmate, but she got a higher grade.”
4. “I can’t be in class tomorrow. And, I am not sure how to read the syllabus. What should I read?”
5. “Is this going to be on the test.”
6. “I knew the material. I just couldn’t give it back to you on the exam.”
7. “Do we have to take the final exam?”
8. “Can we drop a grade?”
9. “Do you grade on a curve?”
10. “Do we have to read the textbook?”
11. “Will you give us a study guide that explains exactly what is on the exam?”
12. “I know I should have come by to see you before the exam, but I don’t understand what we have been learning.”
    

As I noted in an earlier post, I was very excited to hear from a former student who is concentrating in history and wanted advice on the teaching profession. This student gave me the greatest compliment when she stated “I was inspirational in her career choice.” She will finish graduate school this spring and is open to any geographical region of the country as she seeks a teaching post at an independent school.

My first advice to anyone looking to teach is the most obvious: Know your subject and know it well. Knowledge of subject is the birth of effective teaching. I understand and do realize that courses in educational techniques are important, however, a command for what one teaches supplants all other things. Those of us that have been teaching for years realize the complexities of subject mastery. I am often asked how do I prepare for my classes? Simply — I read. And I read a great deal. I expect my students to read. The reality of course, is that there is always more to be learned. For me, I came to this realization during my very first semester of teaching; I never took courses in the study of world history; I took what might be amply referred to as regional studies. Hence, a course in African history, Western history, and Asian history. But never a course in “world history.” By the end of my first semester, I was way off my course outline and had made it only as far as the end of the classical period (collapse of Rome) by January term

It was at that point that I attended a seminar on “Defining World History” at Northeastern University. If you are like me, your teachers approached this discipline in a very regional way. Thus, by attending this seminar and reading Patrick Manning’s Navigating World History, I concluded that I knew Western history and regional histories, but not global history. Manning defines world history this way:

…is the story of connections within the global human community. The world historian’s work is to portray the crossings of boundaries and the linking of systems in the human past. The source material ranges in scale from individual family tales to migrations of peoples to narratives encompassing all humanity. World history is far less than the sum total of all history. Nevertheless, it adds to our accumulated knowledge of the past through its focus on connections among historical localities, time periods, and themes of study.

Keep in mind, the study of history and any particular field is a life-long journey; I am at times amazed at what I know and how much I still do not know. It is here that a new teacher should seek to engage in professional development that will allow he/she to grow as a knowledgable person. Keep a working curriculum vitae, noting your growth and contributions to your field. Do not just become a clerk, but look to be an active academic: write and submit papers for publication or to share with your colleagues at an association meeting/conference; join an organization such as the World History Association or the American Historical Association. Being a part of such societies will prevent burnout that can occur without the stimulation needed to grow as a teacher. Find a peer to work on a project with, perhaps presenting such work at a conference. Being active serves as an important position for any young teacher looking to expand his or her content knowledge.

The review of Manning’s book states:

Most new history teachers are prepared to teach an upper-level class in their field of research, but are most likely to be asked to do the opposite–to teach a survey of Western Civ or even more startling World Civilization. As a new colleague said in tones of whispered panic, “That’s everywhere, all the time.” Compounding the problem is the institutional disconnect in which surveys of World History are popular.

Being a member of various societies will permit…

1. you  to receive quarterly academic journals that contain a host of articles, book reviews, and field updates. At times I feel guilty for bypassing the articles and reading the reviews; it is impossible to read every book published. And seeing that on some university campuses people must publish a book to earn tenure, and another to be promoted — there is a lot of bad stuff out there. Thus, I read what I can but I never shy from book reviews; next time you are on campus, I must show you the sad fate of making annotations in the review of books section, which is half of the American Historical Review journal published by the American Historical Association.
2. you with conference discounts and updated emails on the field are great.
3. a feeling of belonging to something much larger than my campus. This is very important to me seeing that teaching can be the most isolated field on the planet. I have worked to avoid this.
4. a sense of excitement as you go towards your campus box to find the most recent copy of a journal there. I get four: American Historical Review, Journal of American History, The History Teacher, and Perspectives. I have yet to renew my subscription to Foreign Affairs — one I need to read that addresses more recent events. I also receive a copy of Independent School and get the Chronicle of Higher Education via my campus library.

In a recent issue of Harvard Magazine, one of my graduate school professors (before he was at Harvard), Louis Menand, encourages graduate schools to change directions:

Doctoral education is the horse that the university is riding to the mall. People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized, since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently.

After receiving my Ph.D. (and I raced through that degree, student loans gnawing on my heels, despite teaching at several colleges at the same time), I wrote an article complaining about the narrowness of my graduate school education.  While I spent days immersed in the appropriate biographies and fictions of my chosen authors, as well as feminist and literary theory, by 3pm I’d stop, watch a rerun of Thirtysomething to clear my head, then head to whatever college I was teaching at that evening, trying to “teach [my] fields to non-specialists”.  Despite one required class in Teaching College English, I was still a novice at teaching, creating assignments, classroom management, evaluating student writing.  I wanted my graduate program to offer me more help with the job I was so clearly “credentializing” to do.

And now, as I spend my weekends alternatively evaluating how well I did with that teaching (aka grading essays), and working on two articles “for a general audience” as well as  a presentation that is part of my own quest to “justify [my] work to people outside [my] discipline and outside the academy,” I take another look back at my graduate education, and remember that yes, there was one professor who took pains to explain how we could improve our writing, requiring that we read and respond to each other’s drafts, and another who encouraged us to present our work at smaller interdisciplinary conferences, thus forcing us to write for a wider audience.  I had hoped those rare professors of the early 1990s were much more common now, but Menand’s essay suggests otherwise—at least at Harvard.

Menand’s essay concludes with a warning, however, that graduate education should change directions, become more like a law degree in terms of efficiency (so at least 3 years in length but fewer than the 10 it takes many students?), yet still maintain its purpose of creating the next generation of cultural watchdogs, of sorts:

But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate. Academics need to look to the world to see what kind of teaching and research needs to be done, and how they might better train and organize themselves to do it. But they need to ignore the world’s demand that they reproduce its self-image.

I don’t work with graduate students beyond those few working on a teaching-centered masters degree, so I’m far removed from that world now.   But I know many academic bloggers do.  Is graduate school, particularly in English, changing in ways that reflect the need for less insularity? Is it a degree that can prepare someone to be not just an academic (in a market with fewer tenure track job openings annually*) , but also a public intellectual and someone who is seen as being an asset in other, non-academic, fields?  If so, how are they changing exactly? I’m curious.

* Added 16 Nov 2009: Mark Bauerlein blogged about the dismal job opening numbers in English and languages.

Here is a post that has appeared on my blog before. Because I have decided to devote a number of post to one of my favorite students and to those looking for a teaching position –especially one at an independent school, I thought I would repost this one. There are two lessons here: 1) do not assume too much about those that are interested in you, 2) and seek a post at a place in which there is a community willing to embrace you for being you; it can be difficult if you land in an envioronment that centers its focus not on your brillances and gifts, but on making you like them. Not all places are “really” committed to diversity. As the book the Excellence of Color: Hiring in Independent Schools Noted:

People of color, be they African American, Native American, Asian, Middle Eastern or whatever ethnic group, have spent years discovering their roots, developing a keen pride in their heritage, and accepting who they are. So don’t expect the current crop of prospective faculty to fit into your conservative profile. Many of them will not, and, frankly, I don’t think they should even try! Is that shocking? Is that unacceptable to you and your clientele? Then, perhaps, diversity is really not for you. If a turban or a dashiki pants suit offends, then so will diversity! Diversity by definition implies that the status quo will be upset.

Many of you may recall this post from before and this book being on my reading list in an earlier post too; I found the early historical approach of this work to be very good and wanted my current students to start thinking about race and communities; I have driven through a number of sundown towns as noted in Loewen’s book. One challenge many minorities face is choice of residence. Educated and well-credentialed Americans are blessed with a greater range of choice when looking for a job, a place to settle, and a community to raise a family; however, this is not true for minority groups. When I finished graduate school and started looking for a teaching post, or a position in publishing, I had to be mindful of the environment my wife and I would be moving to. Questions like this emerged:  Would my neighbors and the rest of the community be receptive of my presence, regardless of my academic credentials?

Two examples that come to mind when I entered the market were Cabot, Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee. My greatest concern when finishing graduate school was the lack of teaching positions available for history instructors. Moreover, this was compounded by the fact that I limited myself to particular courses I wanted to teach and certain types of schools I wanted to join, primarily elite and/ or mid tier level independent/ private schools. At first I limited my search to very prestigious New England boarding schools; however, those types of options only recently (past few years) became an option. Many of those boarding schools are located in very rural white communities. Thus, I naturally wondered if I would be accepted. Well, I was blessed with a number of teaching options. One such option was in Cabot, AR in the public school system. A year before entering the market, I had agreed to at least consider Cabot. Of course this was before more options were available. I clearly backed out when an upper administrator told me that I would be the Jackie Robinson of Cabot. Essentially he was saying that Cabot educational leaders had to select the right African American for this particular community. I was scared; I was scared because of the bad racial reputation Cabot had (it is on the sundown town list here). Rumors of cross burnings and various other tactics were known throughout Arkansas about this community.

In defense of Cabot, much of this is probably historical; however, it is such rumors whether a perception or reality that limits the options for minorities. Here is my Memphis example: I sent my curriculum vitae (or résumé) to a very elite private school that was conducting a national search. Let us call this school elite school X. Well, one of my teachers in college made elite school X aware of me. This teacher also encouraged me to apply. The great thing about a number of private schools is that you do not have to spend hours completing applications nor do you have to be a licensed teacher. They just want your CV. A few weeks later elite school X scheduled for me to interview with the department head and dean of faculty via phone. I was a hit. Later, I drove 2 hours to Memphis for a campus tour, departmental lunch, tons of interviews, and a nightcap with the headmaster.

I did not discover this until later, but the dean of faculty and dept. head at elite school X had no clue I was black. Better yet, they were so surprised that one current member of the faculty would later tell me how often they brought the topic up. I did suspect it was a surprise by their response to my entrance. Elite school X did offer me a position, although I would later reject it for the opportunity to start my teaching career off by teaching advanced courses at a private school in Little Rock. Please keep in mind that most students at elite school X are very advanced, which means I would have been teaching such courses anyway, just without the title. There reaction to me was scary – although not offensive.

begins here. It’s a sign of how self-contained and self-involved I am at the moment that the height of my week’s news consists of the regular Sunday-morning panic to get my essay done. And the occasional fight with the Library printer as I convince it that, yes, that last page, the one that has the bibliography on it, that one REALLY needs to be printed as well, otherwise I risk the wrath of supervisors.

Thankfully, because of the red/yellow flag this morning (and the fact that I am ill – but, luckily, getting better as the day goes on, hurrah – I can walk again…) there is no rowing this afternoon. I am not going to the Selwyn Orchestra rehearsal – if I was going to miss rowing for illness it wouldn’t be fair on them to go to something else, also – I have an essay to do.

And this time, I will try to get ALL the secondary reading done today. yes, that’s right. All of it. I will read it carefully, word by word, and think about it. I will take notes, read them through, and then have the time to go back to the primary texts, with what I’ve read in my head, and apply it to the novels, see what I think, and come up with my own, thoughtfully constructed, carefully nuanced and utterly non-cliched argument. I will then draw up a detailed and thorough (but not TOO thorough) essay plan, re-read my notes one last time, think carefully about each paragraph and each sentence before I write it, and finally hand in something that I can be proud of.

And it will be utterly ripped to shreds. Unsurprisingly. But this time, when it is ripped to shreds, I won’t be at first able to see the flaws, because I’ll have handed in my best work. I won’t be getting it back, looking over what has been written and thinking “yes, I knew that when I wrote it, but I just didn’t have time…” there won’t be any of those excuses. Laziness isn’t good enough any more.

Rowing and pit-bands, and reviewing and poetry and orchestras – they’re fun. But they’re not why I’m here. And from now on, I mean to make sure I remember that.

And if that means borrowing someone’s milk because I haven’t had time to go and get my own, then so be it. I shall repay them some other time. Perhaps with cookies.

I’m a horrible person, I realise. Tea is more important to me than my friend’s milk…

hum.

And that was a dull entry, I apologise. One of these days, I shall sit down and pay attention to the news in a way that does not involve Sandi Toksvig. I shall listen to the serious news. Huzzah.

I shall also pop into Sweaty Betty and swoon over the beautiful stuff they have, and pretend that I am enough of a sports…person to have earned it. In’t it lovely? Do I deserve it? …we’ll see.

Two letters in the Guardian this week past caught my attention. The first concerns the pauses in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Murray Marshall of Salisbury writes:

• The obituary for Timothy Bateson (Obituary, 8 November) mentioned the difficulties that original cast had with grasping the meaning of Waiting for Godot. The author himself was apparently not a lot of help. A friend of mine was assistant stage manager on the first production, and the cast and crew eagerly awaited Beckett’s visit to a rehearsal. They assembled after performing to be enlightened by the great man. After a suitably Beckettian interval, he said: “The pauses were not long enough.”

I also have a story about this, which comes from the horse’s mouth, or anyway, Peter Hall, who directed that first production in 1955. Many years ago, when I was taken to visit him at his house near Wallingford, he told us what happened when they played in Blackpool before coming to London, and the audience was mystified and bored. Someone noticed that the last train back to London on a Saturday night left before their scheduled finish, so in order to catch it, they decided to eliminate the pauses. The play went by like a flash, the audience found it very funny and laughed a lot, and they got their train!

* * * * *

The second letter is an altogether more serious matter. This is from almost 200 student union officers warning MPs that unless they sign a pledge to vote against an increase in fees, they will be named and shamed. As student leaders, they say, they are appalled by the parliamentarians’ attempts ‘to duck difficult questions on student fees and finance at the next general election (Report, 10 November). We are in no doubt that a review panel dominated by business and university leaders is designed to stitch up students with yet another inflation-busting hike in tuition fees.’

This has happened before—in 1997, when higher education was taken out of the election campaign by the appointment of the Dearing Committee, whose convoluted report the new government implemented hastily and selectively, using the summer recess to avoid any proper public discussion. It was the incoming secretary of state for higher education, David Blunkett, who proceeded to scrap grants and introduce means-tested fees in a form that Dearing had not recommended.

This was surely the first sign of New Labour’s consistently cavalier attitude to opinion both within the sector concerned and in the wider public on all matters of policy, culminating, of course, in Tony Blair’s disdainful disregard for opposition to the invasion of Iraq. (Well, not culminating, since it still goes on under Gordon Brown’s pathetic, lame-duck premiership.) According to the student leaders, opinion polls consistently show that the overwhelming majority of the public are opposed to higher fees. They also remind MPs that the student vote can make a significant difference to election results, and conclude that the message is clear: ‘candidates must vote with us, or students won’t vote for them’. But then the question remains: who will they vote for?

A former student of mine is preparing to enter the market and is seeking a teaching position at a few independent schools. I have done the market thing in the past. It is exciting, stressful, and exhausting. I was telling her that the process, if it is done correctly, could be more of an endurance test. I have hit homers in the past during a campus visit, but like any good ball player, I have struck out too. My best advice is not to be nervous. I have found during my experiences that nerves can be a killer; I have seen my nerves force me into a state of uneasiness. Though I have not always accepted jobs that have been offered to me, my best campus visits have been for positions that I would have wanted, but was not going to kill myself for. Hence, you become very relaxed. On the other hand, there have been positions I really wanted that I did not get; often times, I tried too hard because I really wanted it. Thus being one’s natural state was difficult.

For those of you who have real jobs (non-academic jobs), the process is very interesting. From my own experiences, private schools like to test a candidate’s endurance. For example, on my last campus visit, the agenda had me interviewing with 6 – 7 people between 8:00 – 3:30: Speaking to the dean of faculty, dean of students, department chair, headmaster, and having lunch with the department is common. We, as do many schools, ask candidates to observe a class then teach a class later that day. Of course, candidates know in advance what they are teaching; the course is usually in their area of expertise. I do not know about the experiences of others, but I always hated the last part of the interview — meeting the headmaster. This takes place during the last hour of the endurance test. By this point, you have no more questions to ask. You are thinking about your flight or drive home as well as the number of bad questions you asked. Teaching a course is a must for many places, but tends to be a poor way of evaluating a candidate. Classes operate best once a natural rapport has transpired. This takes time.

Here is a description of a school conducting a national search for a candidate. My best advice dear student is this: Do not over prepare for the interview. Walk in knowing that hey if I get it… cool — but if not, oh well. I assure you it will force you to relax.

Each year, after identifying our teaching, coaching and other needs, the Dean of the Faculty along with department chairs or administrative officers will review all the appropriate resumes and schedule interviews with candidates. Interviews consist of a day-long visit to the campus to meet with all relevant school personnel (the Dean of the Faculty, the department chair, Dean of Students, Athletic Director, etc.). A tour of the campus with a student is part of the process. A class visitation and lunch with department members is scheduled. Candidates are called upon to teach a class.

I am writing this post from 30,000 feet in the air; at the conclusion of my last class Tuesday, I jetted off to the airport in order to catch a flight to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma… where I spoke to a great  group on social progress and European course construction. As the invited guest speaker, I do believe the engagement went well. When I get invitations to speak at history related conferences or offer a paper of historical interest to an attentive group, I try to stay as real with the audience as I do with my students. The great thing about my students is that they are far more forgiving of my many flaws.

Those of you that read this blog know that I have a fear of flying. I do think I have grown moved beyond this fear. I can trace my slow progress beyond this anxiety to a conference I spoke at in New Mexico two years ago….This trip was three months after I had brain surgery to remove a tumor.

Below is the original post that launched me past my fears:

• you get to walk home past all the students in the bars.
• you see two raccoons.
• you briefly forget you have cats on arriving home.

Zuska explains how:

Wilson wasn’t saying science IS a religion in the sense that there’s no real underlying objective reality, everything’s all taken on faith, and we all get together and worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster at Friday seminar. But Jesus Christ, I was a grad student once, and I’ll be damned if there weren’t aspects of that experience that weren’t more than a little bit like being indoctrinated into some sort of crazy cult worship. There was a brilliant Chronicle piece some years ago by Thomas Benton analyzing the correspondence between grad school and religious cults. He was speaking about humanities students but, as I recall, it was all the rage with science and engineering students as well. Read it and see if you don’t find it chillingly applicable. My point is: what we do at the lab bench is Science. What we do socially, to each other, when we are not at the lab bench (and sometimes even when we are) can sometimes take on characteristics that very much feel like Science as a Form of Religion.

A thousand years ago, when I was a graduate student, we often used to grumble and joke amongst ourselves about the “sacred priesthood of science”. How you basically had to give up your whole life (including sex, because when did you have time for that?), and take a vow of poverty, to pursue your work. How you had to demonstrate your undying devotion to Science above all other things. And, of course, for us women, the sacred priesthood joke had special resonance, because damn, there were just so doggone many priests running the show and precious few priestesses to be found anywhere in the temples.

Imagine my surprise and amusement, some years later, to discover that our long-running joke had real roots in the way that Western science itself grew out of the ascetic tradition of the medieval Latin church – see: David Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science. There I was in grad school, joking about being inducted into the sacred priesthood of science – and here came David Noble to explain how Western science was shaped by and formed on a monastic model, designed in part specifically to exclude women.

Noble goes beyond this thesis of science as a religious calling in The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention.

For social historian Noble…Western culture’s persistent enchantment with technology finds its roots in religious imagination. Despite their varied guises and pursuits, science and technology suggest nothing more than our “enduring, other-worldly quest for transcendence and salvation.” The pearl of great value is Noble’s contention that science and technology aren’t guilty of amorality: that was never the intent. Rather, he claims, new technologies aren’t about meeting human need; they transcend it. Salvation through technology “has become the unspoken orthodoxy.” Such is the new Gnosticism. This is a dense, fascinating study of technology and Christianity. Not satisfied with easy equivalencies, Noble challenges the idea of post-Enlightenment science as a secular brave new world and quietly offers that what we’re really hoping for is our reentry into Eden.

Noble is hardly the first historian of science to delve into the ways in which science functions as a religion (though no in the way those crazy Intelligent Designers like to think). But I particularly love what he does in exploring how the ways in which Western science’s birth in the monastic tradition has had long-lasting effects for women’s participation in science.

There are many reasonable, sound, scholarly bases for examining the idea of how science might function as a religion functions, or how it might work to meet needs and fill roles that are in other cases met and filled by what we more normally think of as religions. It might seem scary to ask those sorts of questions in a time where people who have decidedly, virulently anti-science agendas (and deep pockets to help carry them out) wish to put forth their own poisonous notion that science is just another religion so that they can pour their religion into science classrooms and control the agenda of science. But I’d like to think that at least amongst scientists, we can have a conversation about science as science, as cultural practice, as an institution. That we can step back and critically examine what it is we do day in and day out.

If you think the concept of science as a religion is just sooooooo unbearably stupid, high school debate, not-worthy of ScienceBlogs, it may not be the concept that’s ignorant. Just possibly, there’s a whole wealth of information out there to ponder that you are completely unaware of.

Take a look!

I’m working on a paper and thinking back to the conference I just attended in Houston.

Oh — I meant to say why Houston was weird:  because it was big, expensive, glossy, and empty.  Even during rush hour, there were few cars on the streets or people on the sidewalks.  On Saturday and Sunday, every single downtown restaurant was closed.  Half the floors in the buildings were empty.  It reminded me of Charn.  I was glad to leave.

Anyway, the organizers of the conference had some bulletin boards up where you could put comments in response to different questions.  One of them was, “What would you like this organization to do in five years?” One post-it said, in big marker letters, “Where are the men, man?”

It’s absolutely true that faculty development has a majority of female practitioners; looking at the conference it seems to be about 70/30.  Maybe a little less, maybe 60/40.  Anyway, yes, there are more women than men — except, and this is the really interesting part, on the professional listserv.  The substantive conversations that take place on the listserv are begun by and mostly engaged in by men.  I could do a study on it and I’m sure it would be true that 80% of the conversations that end up as 5-or-more message threads are started by men, and that 80% of the exchanges are by men.  I could expand it and say that men’s posts are longer, too. This is not trivial, since the professional listserv is definitely a place of power in this organization — if you contribute often and wisely, you are respected.

So this is fascinating to me:  in an organization that prides itself on supporting all comers, we are seen in one venue as lacking the male view; in another venue, it’s clear that the main intellectual contributors are men.  What gives?

So, life. What’s been happening; good lord it’s been nearly (probably over) two weeks since I last wrote here. How shockingly remiss of me; I hope you’re well and aren’t feeling neglected, imaginary corner of the internet. Excuse me while I dust down your corners a little bit and open the windows. Let some fresh November (November?! How did it get to November already?!) air into you a little. [I've had this blog over a year now; how exciting. How things've changed. Grand.]

So, first things first – would you like a cup of tea? Good. Have a cushion, and a biscuit. And then I’ll fill you in on everything.

[Kettle boils; tea is made. Imaginary person takes a cup and settles down.]

So, since I last put anything on here, I’ve added a further two-and-a-bit weeks to my first term at Cambridge. I’ve only got two and a half Michaelmas terms left! Which is quite shocking. Though I should probably not think like that and tell myself instead that three years is a long time. Which, actually, it really bloody is. Everything happens so intensely  here that the amount I’ve done makes it feel like I’ve been here for three months rather than just one. It’s quite a timeless place.

Everything happens at very short notice, so first things first – I don’t know if I mentioned this – but I’m now a ‘boaty’. In NW3, how terrific. I’m not that great, although I’ve sort of got the hang of it now, and I pick it up very quickly. The annoying thing is that I missed yesterday’s outing, but I’ll get to that. Firstly, I wanted to tell you about the rowing itself. About how it feels when you’re in time and together, how the water moves with you, and the boat breathes with you, and everything is controlled and together and organised and everything you do just… fits. I love it so much, the actual act of rowing, because it calms me down, it concentrates me, it cools the heated buzzing in my head and for an hour or so all I have to think about, all I can think about is the physical motion of what I’m doing.

The fact that the extraneous aspects of rowing (like the journey to and from, and the time it cuts away from my time to work, or the amount it eats into other things) cause me untold stress (the thought of cycling to and from the boathouse gives me nightmares) is neither here nor there. The actual rowing part is usually worth it.

In other news, Prac Crit is terribly exciting; I love it. I feel like I improve with every essay I do. The same can not be said of my paper 4 essays, which is a shame. I never have enough time to do them justice, and even if I did have more time, I still wouldn’t do them well. But I’m sure I can work at that; I just need to get more organised. And I will. I damn well will. I’m going to make sure of that. Anyway; academic determination from me aside, onto the rest of life.

Quartets are, as ever, great fun. And a great way to relax and just enjoy playing music. Which is something I’m doing a whole lot more of than I thought I would, although I ought to have expected that, playing the viola and everything. But y’know… I’m still not used to the great demand my instrument’s in. It’s currently loaned out to my dear friend L for the evening so that he can play quartets. They’ve only just started, so I could have made it and played quintets with them, but I’m so tired. I think all I’ll be able to cope with tonight is possibly laundry and then bed. And hopefully a bit of reading of NON-COURSE stuff as well. (oh ‘eck, need to get hold of ‘Lord Jim’ from somewhere… urk)

As for the rest of the viola-related demands – I don’t think I mentioned the Freshers’ Recital, in which I played a piece for solo viola and apparently (although I thought the sound I made was anorexic, to say the least) sounded pretty good, to the extent that because of that – and the fact that a friend from home (now in her third year here) has been telling everyone that I’m pretty good – I’ve just been asked to play in a concert, I’m already playing in another concert that weekend, and I’m depping on the viola part in the pit band for The Wizard of Oz this week! Come and see it, it’s going to be good.

Besides all that sort of stuff, I’ve made some really good friends here. C is probably now one of the closest friends I’ve ever had, and I’ve only known her four weeks. That’s quite something.

Yesterday, thought I’d quickly mention, was hell. I had a rehearsal in the morning which meant that I was going to be late for rowing in the afternoon, and although I’d warned them this and they knew I was on my way, they still left without me, which was horribly upsetting, because the journey there had caused me so much stress and I’d had to leave the rehearsal slightly early to get there on time. But there we go. When the boaties aren’t being too horrifically ‘boaty’ about life, I do love rowing. They just do sometimes try to turn it into a huge and apocalyptic scenario if one person happens to have differently slanted priorities to theirs. But never mind.

That aside, here is wonderful and lovely and beautiful, and I don’t think I’ve found a place more wonderful and immediate and mine in a long time. Apart from home-home, but that’s different. Actual home has cats and turkish rugs and parents and a cooker and my own bed and my own carpet and a tv and the everyday shambolic happiness of the ordinary. It’s slower and calmer and quieter and mine in a totally different way to here. I can’t wait to get back; I shall sleep for six weeks. But I don’t want to leave, it’s good to not have time to sleep.

I hope you liked your tea! Come again soon.

(oh, I forgot to mention – I also wrote a review for ‘The Cambridge Student’, and I’m working on another one, and I have a lot of really talented artistic friends, and I’m reading Dante’s ‘Inferno’ in Italian. It’s fantastic. I’ll lock up, it’s fine. Do come back another time.)

For Human Emotions and Digital Technologies class, I am reading Paul Thagard’s book Hot Thought: Mechnanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition.  I will be presenting the first half of the book this coming wednesday in the class.

Chapter 1. Mental Mechanisms

Emotional cognition is thinking that is influenced by emotional factors such as particular emotions, moods, or motivations. (p.16). Thagard states that the aim of the book is to increase understanding of how emotional cognition works in situations where people don’t merely make decisions based on logic. He further asserts that “reasoning is often an emotional process, and improving it requires identifying and assessing the impact of emotions” (p.16).  According to Thagard emotional thinking is a complex mechanism that has cognitive, social, neural and molecular mechanisms.  These mechanisms provide explanations of how emotions often influence people’s decisions and other inferences. Before beginning his discussion on mental mechanisms, he talks about machines and mechanisms.  We need to specify components of a machine, their properties, and their relations to other parts in order to describe a machine and its properties. And, we need to describe how changes to the properties and relations of the parts with respect to force, motion, and energy enable the machine accomplish the task.

2 different views of how human mind works (pg.5)

1 – Human thought is the result of the interactions of atoms Lucretius(1969).

2- Understand human mind in terms other than material parts – Plato’s forms, Descartes’s soul, Leibniz’s monads….

Kinds of Mental Mechanisms

‘Mental representations are cognitive structures, such as concepts, rules, and images, that are manipulated by algorithmic process such as spreading activation of concepts, chaining of rules, and rotation of images.’ (pg.5)

Connectionist models vs. Neural mechanisms

Neural mechanisms involve artificial neurons and involve billions of neurons organized into functional areas such as hippocampus and various parts of the cortex.

Because human thought often involves interaction with other people, we need to attend to the social mechanisms that allow one person’s thinking to influence others. Social mechanisms involve verbal and other kinds of communication, including ones that make possible the transfer of emotions as well as other kinds of information.

Table – Constituents of mental mechanisms

Mechanisms  – Components – Relations – Interactions – Changes

Social – Persons and social groups – Association, membership – Communication – Influence, group decisions

Cognitive – Mental representations such as concepts – Constituents, associations, implications – Computational process – Inferences

Neural – Neurons, neural groups – Synaptic connections – Excitation, inhibition – Brain activity

Molecular – Molecules such as neurotransmitters and proteins – Constituents physical connection – Biochemical reactions – Transformation of molecules

The Nature of Complex Mechanisms

Thagard approaches emotions by keeping the mechanism-based view of explanation and characterize mechanisms as components and interactions organized such that they are productive of regular changes from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions. He states that “the reference to start and finish conditions are misleading because the mechanisms need to explain emotional thinking involve ongoing feedback processes rather than unidirectional changes.” (pg.7)

Understanding emotional thinking needs to integrate the cognitive, neural, molecular and social levels. He further argues that you “cannot reduce the social to cognitive, the cognitive to the neural and the neural to molecular.  Some emotional events require an explanation that involves all levels simultaneously”. For example, “an insult leads to cognitive and physilogical changes that indicate a fight. Thus casuality runs down as well as up the nested hiararcy of social-cognitive-neural-molecular mechanisms. “

Thagard states that he favors explanatory pluralism, which rejects bothe extreme reductionism and antireductionism. He aims to show a pluralistic, multilevel explanations based on multiple mechanism as an approach to understand emotional thinking.

Chapter 3 – Emotional Analogies and Analogical Inference (Paul Thagard and Cameron Shelley)

Three general classes of analogy that involves emotions:

1. Analogies and methaphors about emotions, for example a conventional metaphor in which sadness is represented as a low position (i.e. I am feeling down).

2. Analogies that involve the transfer of emotions, for example emphaty in which people understand the emotions of others by imagining their own emotional reactions in similar situations.

3.  Analogies that generate emotions, for example analogical jokes that generate emotions such as surpoise and amusement.

The authors introduces HOTCO as a new model of emotional coherence that stimulates transfer of emotions.

Analogical Inference: Current Models