Thesis mode

My memory is odd. Looking back I get the impression that I've spent the last six months in general idleness, avoiding work and skiving off, and present Sara hates past Sara because of it, because when the looking back occurs present Sara is usually hustling to meet a deadline and wondering why past Sara didn't take care of it. But when I flip back through my diary it becomes clear why past Sara didn't take care of it, because past Sara generally does far more hustling of other types than present Sara remembers.

Today was the day that the first rough draft of my critical thesis was due to my supervisor. A week ago today was the day that I actually began working on it, because in the month before that I owed Henry 20,000 words, taught for FLY, presented at a conference, spent a week in the US doing research, judged a short fiction prize, had Annual Progress Review, and more or less kept up with the planning of my own conference. So the acrimony directed at past Sara was generally groundless, as very little skiving took place.

I've been writing up my research periodically as I've gone along, more as notes on what I've done than as actual readable material, and I've churned out a handful of self-contained pieces, so writing the first draft was less 'writing' than 'figuring out what part of what I already had was useable.' And if I'm bad at remembering what I've done, I'm even worse at remembering what I've already included in a document. So instead of approaching the thesis with any dignity, I took the arts-and-crafts line of attack:

Print it out, cut it up, sort like with like, put it back together, throw away the extra pieces. Just like Ikea.

I don't remember when I started doing it this way - no surprise there - but 'cut it all up and put it back together in an order that makes sense' seems to be the only way that I produce nonfiction that's in any way readable. 

It's kinda depressing to think that that's my critical output for the past three years. 

The risk, of course, is that all of the cutting and pasting and sorting out will take up so much time that the draft will be done in theory when the deadline pops up, but won't have made it back onto the computer. So far that hasn't happened, but I won't be surprised if one day I wind up hand-delivering a nine-foot sheet of taped-together paragraphs in lieu of a Word document. 

The whole was finished and sent at about ten this morning, with much fear and trembling because it's both far longer than my supervisor is expecting and far rougher than I was hoping it would be. Though, when I first sat down a week ago and looked at what I had, I hid under the desk and refused to come out because I thought I had absolutely nothing to show for the past three years, so I suppose I'm in a 100% better position than I expected to be.

Missing in Action

At the moment I'm sitting in a surprisingly large hotel room in Morristown, New Jersey, trying to find the will to sort my suitcase out, because it's going to have to be dropped tomorrow morning into the trunk of a car that's not mine and transported to the airport. I'm naturally going with it, but since nobody is going to be weighing me on arrival I require much less sorting.

Yesterday afternoon I presented the paper that I dropped off the face of the earth a few weeks ago to write as part of a panel dealing with censorship in public education. The room was surprisingly full, the questions were interesting and answerable, and I've finally met another human being who spends a horrifying amount of their time looking at textbooks. And since I presented on the first day, I got to spend today actually enjoying other peoples' papers instead of trembling in the corner with nerves. Even with the trembling, it was wonderful to finally feel as though I'm a part of an academic community; my research doesn't have much in common with that of the rest of my cohort, so a lot of the time I feel like the madwoman in the corner, pegging away at something that no one cares about. Meeting even one person who already gets it, let alone over a dozen, was worth the distance travelled.

This is probably the most productive trip I've ever been on: about two weeks ago I flew into DC and bribed my younger sister to drive me so that I could do a final round of location research for Belief, then spent nearly a week harassing relatives about their memories of their misspent youths, also for Belief, then dragged myself several states north for the conference. And now I get to skedaddle back to England to do something with it all before too much time passes and I can't understand my own notes.

And, of course, get back to helping organise a conference at UEA for this December. I'm sure the other plotters are just thrilled with my recent inability to answer email.

The wreck's progress

About a week ago, as I was toddling back up to Norwich, I realised how many days weren't left in January. But my sense of time is rather bad, so I didn't start seriously fretting until I got the email from Jason that essentially ran, 'It's the last week of the month... where's the book?' At which point literally everything else was dropped, and anything that couldn't be dropped I brought my computer along to so that I could tweak lines during slack moments. So on Friday at half two in the afternoon, while sitting in the postgrad bar, I found myself unexpectedly at the end once again. And I sent the new draft off to Jason before I could talk myself into messing with it some more. And then I walked home feeling like my arm had dropped off, because it's been the only thing I've thought about in the past month and suddenly not needing to think about it felt wrong.

And then I got sick again. 

I've always spent term time getting whatever was going around, but this year's been a little ridiculous.  It's gotten to the point that I grab cold medicine every time I get groceries, because I know it'll be used. 

Between having finished a major project and spending the weekend being useless and miserable, I figured a reward was in order. So I went to the children's section of the uni library (we have a children's section; it is excellent) and had a poke around. And found this:

My love for this book and the age when I first read it probably explains a lot. 

When I was nearly nine my parents moved us from a tiny house right down the street from my aunt to a much bigger house in the county where most of the dying in the American Civil War took place, and where everyone I met was (is) still obsessed with it. 

I hated it. 

The only redeeming feature of the place was the size and quality of its library system. My sister was born weeks after the move, so no one paid much attention to what I was getting out. So the first (and for a while, the only) thing that made me happy in that place was Joan Aiken's books. After a while I began branching out, but I still vividly remember sitting on the cold kitchen floor on a blazing June afternoon, all the lights off and no one making a sound because Dinky and Mom were asleep, reading Blackhearts on Battersea as slowly as I could because it was almost over and I didn't want to come back to reality. They were the books that first made me want to see England - and now that I have seen England they're more than overdue for a re-read.

The cover's different from the one I first read, but the illustrations are the same!

And on the subject of books: when I got back a heap of them were waiting for me, because I'd had the presence of mind to do all of my overseas ordering before I left for Christmas. There are some good ones that I've been looking for for a while, but my favourite by far is:

Answer: it depends on whether or not you consider teaching your kids critical thinking to be 'harming' them. 

I'm still useless and miserable, but the next book is one step closer to done. Next should come line notes, then copyeditor's notes and page proofs, then a bound proof, then it's all over but the shouting. And when I think of it that way, August doesn't seem far away at all. 

What is wrong with these people?

The weekend has been given over to the writing of the article I was meant to send to Rachel about a month ago, which means a lot of today has involved using Google Books to search for lines I half-remember from sources I got out on Inter-Library Loan last year but couldn't use for my actual thesis draft because there's only so much insanity that can be packed into 30,000 supposedly academic words. Specifically, I spent two hours searching for the sources where I first read about the event described below, less because it was the perfect lead-in for the section of the article I'm working on and more because it's so twitch-inducing that I've wanted to use it somewhere since the first time I read about it:

There is a long history of pressure groups influencing the content of textbooks in the United States, but the history of religious and specifically Christian pressure and influence has the longest standing. An incident that goes a long way towards providing sufficient historical context is that which occurred in Philadelphia in 1844, one of many such incidents that took place in the United States at the time, which is best summarised as a lengthy dispute between the Protestant majority and Catholic minority over Bible reading in the public school. It will probably surprise a modern reader somewhat that the issue was not that the Bible was being read, but that the version used was not in keeping with the practises of the Catholic Church of the time, and both parents and bishops objected to the Catholic student minority being forced to participate.  The initial request that Catholic students who refused to read the Bible aloud in class not be beaten for their refusal was generally ignored by school officials, and further requests were met with violent anti-Catholic demonstration on the part of Protestants who believed that the failure to fully ‘Protestantise’ Catholic children would lead to a Catholic takeover of the United States.Other religious minority students, such as those of the Jewish and Quaker faiths, faced similar challenges, and it appears that the school boards generally considered having the teachers flog students who made protest on religious grounds as opposed to expelling them outright to be a more than sufficiently merciful accommodation of their beliefs.[i]

This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I could timehop a few hundred years into the future to see what our descendants think of this whole censorship matter, especially the part where adults are so determined to keep teenagers and young adults from learning about things like biology, anatomy, and critical thinking (think I'm joking? Wait until I get around to the next article). But then, if I was offered the chance to see where this goes I probably wouldn't want to take it. If the past is anything to go by, it's even odds that our descendants will be just as committed to a slightly different yet equally disturbing vein of censorship. 

 

---

[i] I haven't found all of the sources from which this paragraph draws, but the major one is Joan Delfattore, The Fourth R: Conflicts Over Religion in America's Public Schools.  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 32-46.

Banned Book Week

Funny, it seems like 2014's Banned Book Week was only yesterday. I've made just about zero progress on my own research into banned books, but I'm still going to leave a few things here, to mark the occasion:

The ALA's top 100 banned books of the previous decade

A few words about how foolish it is to try and keep young people from reading

And a handy little list of recently banned books to remind us that we have yet to reach the age of permissiveness

And now I will return to trying to make sense of my research.

In the abstract

After roughly a year of keeping my eyes peeled for conferences into which my subfield could logically be shoehorned and turning up approximately zilch, my supervisor put up her hands and declared that I might as well stop worrying myself and try for publication instead. There aren't loads of journals out there to which my work is especially suited (Religion? Kinda... Education? Also kinda... Censorship? Yes but not the way you're thinking.), but as opposed to calls for conference papers, journals aren't moving targets: I can find one, get my act together, and send them some work without having to freak out about a deadline passing me by.

So I'd gotten comfortably wedged in to spending the next month or two reworking a tiny segment of my proto-thesis into something that might be a good fit for one of the handful of journals that's specifically interested in the interdisciplinary and non-traditional. And then I had coffee with Sara Helen on Monday and found out that there's a call out for papers on (among other things) rewriting and censorship. Which closes at the end of the week.

No, I never find out anything through the formal channels. I'm not sure if this means there's an issue with me, or an issue with the manner in which information on such things is disseminated. Either way, the best things in life are discovered through word of mouth.

Funny thing about paper abstracts - they're short and pithy and, to a great extent, prospective, because they don't really expect anyone to have already written the piece that they're proposing to talk about. But back to short and pithy: the abstract has a limit, in this instance, of 300 words, which is far more difficult than 3,000 words, because there is absolutely no space for fat. So the majority of my processing power over the course of this week has been taken up with shoehorning the most salient aspects of the past two years' worth of work into approximately five very dense sentences. If this bit of writing were a physical object, it would be a brick of gold. A very small brick of gold, but a brick of gold nonetheless. This linguistic alchemy was performed using the guidance of Dr. Karen, whose work is probably going to turn into yet another form of procrastination.

Fingers crossed that something will come of it...

A bit about censorship for Banned Book Week.

I realized on Monday that it was Banned Book Week, and, given the nature of my work, I decided that I really should put something out into the world related to censorship.

This realization was repeated on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and this morning. So it should be apparent what kind of week this was. And, I suppose, what kind of summer it's been. So before I procrastinate myself into next month, I'm going to say a few words on Textbook Content Guidelines.

To reduce the past year's research into a few bullet points:

1. Textbooks must conform to certain sets of content guidelines if they are going to be printed or bought by schools.

2. Some of the guidelines are written by school boards, others are written by the textbook publishers for internal use.

3. Though the impulse directing most of the guidelines is usually noble, the results are often ridiculous.

Not surprisingly, lists of guidelines tend to be a bit difficult to track down, especially the ones used by publishers to pick through their own textbooks before release. But the ones that I have tracked down, besides being key to my thesis, tend to make an amusing read when I can suppress the knowledge that they're shaping the education of U.S. children and teenagers.

So, with just a bit of commentary, here are some real textbook guidelines that have made my supervisor laugh with disbelief:

Topics to avoid on tests, because they might upset or distract the student:

Yachting

Witchcraft and witches, except in historical context in Massachusetts. (Because the Salem Witches were the only real witches, I suppose?)

Vacations in faraway places, ski trips, and other expensive items beyond the reach of all. (guess that means healthcare in the States is out.)

Unhealthy foods (because if they don't mention it, kids will stop eating cookies.)

Typhoons

Transportation

Thanksgiving

Sports

Serious car accidents (implying that funny car accidents are a-ok.)

Rock and roll music

Rats, mice, roaches, snakes, lice

Pumpkins

Native American religious references

Movies

Life on other planets, aliens and flying saucers

Brand-name products or corporate logos (would a band-aid, by any other name, still fall off in the bath?)

Aspirin or any other drug 

Birthday celebrations

Blizzards

Getting more specific, Foods to avoid in textbooks:

Bacon or salt pork

Butter, margarine, or lard

Coffee

Dougnuts

Gravy

Cakes, including Birthday cakes, or pies

Candy

Jams, Jellies, Preserves

Pickles

Salt

Sugar

Tea

Which, I suppose, rules out all of the dinner table scenes from the Little House on the Prarie books that are most of what I remember from being read them before bed when I was little. 

Moving right along, Topics to avoid in Textbooks:

Anthropomorphism in nonfiction

Conflict with authority (because if we don’t give students the idea, they’ll never find out that teenage rebellion is an option)

Controvercial people, such as Malcolm X (Along with all the other historical figures worth writing about)

Creation myths that present alternatives to Biblical creation 

Dialect (Everyone speaks the same, don't they?)

Ethnic groups in desperate situations 

Poor nutrition and eating habits

Stories about slavery

Unpunished transgression (life is always fair!)

Winter holidays

Under normal circumstances, I'd properly cite all of these, but their authors (the publishers) have made it clear that they do not want to be associated with the guidelines. That and all of my critical notes are up in Norwich and I'm down in Reading.

And since it's also roughly related to banned books: One-Star Book Reviews has spent the week posting the covers of banned books accompanied by the most outrageous challenges made to them. Check it out.

And now, kindly excuse me while I go spoon my hot water bottle and will my cold away.