Spellings of the future

Here’s a misspelling so strange that it must be a spelling of the future, traveling backward in time to give us a foretaste of our language’s evolution:


[As seen in the wild, really.]

This fence must have been installed by Shakespeare and Company.

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Orange Tweed art

My daughter Rachel gave me this beautiful piece of orange crate art. It’s the real thing, 10" x 11", from 1929. Feel free to contemplate the extreme care with which I scanned it. Thank you, Rachel.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange mug art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art

The Adjunct Project

The Chronicle of Higher Education has created a website for The Adjunct Project, which collects information from instructors on adjunct salaries in American higher education. Some adjunct teaching pays well: at Harvard, the salaries reported are $9,500 to $12,575 per course. But the national average, according to the project’s data thus far, is $2,987 per course. And adjuncts at sixteen schools report salaries of less than $1,000 per course. Notice, whatever the amount of money involved, how the language of adjunct teaching echoes the language of migrant labor, where workers are paid by the bucket. Adjunct faculty who travel from campus to campus to put together a living indeed form something of a migrant community within higher education. (The Chronicle reports on one instructor who left Vermont for California in search of better pay — shades of the Joads.)

Think about the numbers: $1,000 to teach a fifteen-week course — really a sixteen-week course, if we include a final examination. That’s $62.50 a week, fifty cents more than Ralph Kramden made driving a bus in 1955. Even if one underestimates the time required to do the weekly work of a course — three hours in the classroom, perhaps one talking to students outside class, perhaps four of preparation, perhaps another four grading papers or exams — that work comes out to $5.20 an hour, far less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. Subtract Social Security and taxes, and the numbers are even more dire.

The exploitation of adjunct labor is the shame and scandal of American higher education. If Frank Donoghue is right, college faculty of my generation may well be “the last professors.” I don’t mean to suggest that “college” itself will disappear. But tenured and tenure-track faculty form a smaller and smaller percentage of teaching personnel, and I suspect that the four-year residential experience will be available to fewer and fewer students. Mitt Romney’s grandchildren will “go to college,” of course. So too, for that matter, will Malia and Sasha Obama. As less fortunate students turn to so-called massive open online courses (MOOCs) — courses soon to be “monetized,” the possibilities of teaching even as an adjunct will be fewer and fewer.

Faculty sometimes joke — cruelly — that college would be a great place without the students. Now, I think, administrators are beginning to see it the other way around.

[In The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), Frank Donoghue noted that tenured and tenure-track professors then composed only 35% of college teaching personnel in the United States. The percentage continues to drop.]

Recently updated

The greatest pencil story ever told Sean has added an epilogue to the story of his journey to Stein, Germany, home of pencil manufacturer Faber-Castell.

Bernhard’s cat

When Daughter Number Three identified the typeface on an old title page as Bernhard Gothic, she suggested that I look up the designer, Lucian Bernhard (1883–1972). So I did.

My first discovery: Bernhard was a graphic designer as well as a type designer. The second: Bernhard was an important figure in the development of the modern advertising poster, particularly the Sachplakat or object poster, which depicted an object, a brand name, and little or nothing more.¹ It didn’t take long for me to realize that I’d seen Bernhard’s work before, in an early-twentieth-century Pelikan advertisement. What I didn’t know is that Bernhard’s work was to be found in the advertising of my childhood, most memorably as the logo of the Cat’s Paw Rubber Company, maker of heels and soles.² Here are two versions of Bernhard’s cat, patron cat of "master shoe repairers” and “favorite shoe rebuilders”:


[Life, April 4, 1960. Click for a larger view.]


[Life, October 4, 1963. Click for a larger view.]

The best items about Lucian Bernhard that I found: an essay and a slideshow-lecture by Steven Heller.

¹ Apple advertisements seem to me to owe something to the Sachplakat. I’m not alone.

² I found three different dates for the cat design: 1936, 1941, 1947. Choose the one you like.

[I’ve tinkered with the color in the second ad to make up for Google’s lousy scan. Cat’s Paw products are still available.]

How to be a student a professor will remember (for the right reasons)

[As the semester begins.]

Here are five suggestions. They assume a professor who is willing to engage in dialogue with students and a student who is interested in such dialogue.

1. Don’t blend in, and don’t tune out. Sit near the front of the room. Put away your phone and earbuds well before (not when) class begins. Have the relevant reading at hand. Listen and take notes.

2. Take part in the action. If a class is devoted to discussion, pitch in. Make your contributions relevant to the flow of discussion: if your professor has just posed a question for students to consider, don’t raise your hand to introduce a different topic.

4. Try to get a conversation going. Ask questions after class every now and then (good questions, not “What’s my grade?”). Talk to your professor during office hours, at least occasionally. You can do these things without being mistaken for a would-be confidant or a pest.

5. If you come across something in the larger world relevant to the work of the course, e-mail your professor about it. Everyone appreciates news about things that interest them.

These suggestions have nothing to do with sucking up and everything to do with what it means to be a participant in a community devoted to learning — which is not the same as just being in college.

[I know there are only four suggestions. But five is a magic number on the Internets. That’s Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold to the left. “Everyone appreciates news about things that interest them”: yes, I think singular they is okay there.]

*

January 9, 2014: In a comment, Steve Woodland suggests a candidate for the missing no. 3: it’s Rule 7: “The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.” Rule 7 is now no. 3. Thanks, Steve, for the perfect addition to this set of suggestions.

Word of the evening: hobbledehoy

“I have no time for training young hobbledehoys”: Mr. Carson, in tonight’s episode of Downton Abbey.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains: “A youth at the age between boyhood and manhood, a stripling; esp. a clumsy or awkward youth.” The OED traces hobbledehoy to 1540 and calls it “a colloquial word of unsettled form and uncertain origin.” Here’s a wonderful citation from the Pall Mall Gazette (1891):

There is nowadays an immense public of hobbledehoys — of all ages — and there are even men of culture and critical capacity who take a perverse pleasure in affecting hobbledehoyhood.

Still the case, I’d say.

Why am I watching Downton Abbey? It’s about as deep as a paper plate. But there’s some fine acting.

Our future selves, ourselves

The New York Times has a good article on research into self-perception. Psychologist Daniel T. Gilbert:

“Middle-aged people — like me — often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin . . . . What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”

Cliffs and metaphors

John Boehner today: “With the cliff behind us, the focus turns to spending.”

Wait a minute: if the cliff is behind us, doesn’t that mean that we’ve already — oh, never mind.

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