"Customer service" in higher education

From a piece by English professor Rob Jenkins on the use of the phrase "customer service" in higher education:

After 20 years as a community-college faculty member, I think I can speak for most of my colleagues when I say it's not the "service" part of that thoroughly despised phrase we object to. We all understand that teaching is, at heart, a service profession. That's why most of us got into it in the first place.

What bothers us is the suggestion that our students, while sitting in our classrooms, are customers. Because words have meaning, and that particular word carries some pretty dangerous connotations in an educational context.

For one thing, when students hear it, their first association is with that famous if not necessarily correct adage, "The customer is always right."

You can read the rest via the link.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Instructor (Chronicle of Higher Education)

There'll always be an England

There'll always be an England
While there's a country lane,
Wherever there's a cottage small
Beside a field of grain.
There'll always be an England
While there's a busy street,
Wherever there's a turning wheel,
A million marching feet.

Here's news that gives new meaning to the "turning wheel": Manchester has been chosen as the location of Britain's first Las Vegas-style casino.

Manchester wins super-casino race (BBC News)
"There'll Always Be an England" (Wikipedia)

Catalog card generator

Catalog Card Generator (blyberg.net)

Diana Higgins

Other dowdy world posts
Dowdy. World. Mourns. End. Of. Era. Stop.
The dowdy world goes to a party
The dowdy world on film
The dowdy world on radio

Joyce Randolph

[From left: Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Audrey Meadows, Joyce Randolph]

Joyce Randolph, 82, is the last of the Honeymooners:

She signs her name to Playbills and cocktail napkins. “But I know what they really want is the name Trixie Norton,” she said. “So I sign that, too.”

It has been 56 years since Miss Randolph assumed the role of Trixie, yet she is still revered as the surviving goddess of the celebrated screwball comedy from the golden age of television.

“I am the last one left,” Miss Randolph said a bit later, without drama. “Even the girl who held the stopwatch, Joan Reichman Canale, is gone.”

From an article in today's New York Times:

For TV's Trixie, the Honeymoon Lives On

Related post
Ralph Kramden on Christmas

Glenn Gould's chair again

"It is a boon traveling companion, without which I do not function, I cannot operate. It has been with me for 21 years."

"Do you actually mean it's been as close a companion to you as Bach has been in your musical career?"

"Oh, much closer actually."

I just found a wonderful clip on YouTube, Glenn Gould talking about his chair with filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon. I suspect that this conversation, like other Gould-Monsaingeon conversations, was scripted by Gould.

Glenn Gould talks about his chair (YouTube)

Related post
Glenn Gould's chair

WALK

In a small town without public transportation (semi-rural sprawl, it could be called), getting into one's car or mini-van or pickup-truck or SUV to drive a mile or two to "the store" seems to most people as necessary and unremarkable as breathing. My wife Elaine and I prefer to walk, whenever possible, to do this sort of errand. And we thus become, at times, figures who prompt curiosity. For we are simply walking, not in exercise clothing but, more conspicuously, in what my high-school gym teacher used to call "street clothes." People tell us that they saw us walking back from the grocery store and wondered if our car was in the shop. Then, they say, they realized that we were just walking.

Our town is not friendly to walkers. The traffic signals at our major intersection (which spans four lanes of traffic and two turning lanes) flash WALK only briefly before beginning to hammer out a warning. Even the fastest of walkers (me) cannot cover more than three lanes before the warning begins. A major thoroughfare near our college has nothing more than a flashing yellow light to make it easier for people to cross, and for most drivers yellow seems to mean Keep Going, Don't Slow Down -- certainly not Yield.

And speaking of college -- college students are about the only people in town for whom walking is a standard mode of transportation. In our elite subdivisions, one can drive on street after street and never see a biped. In my more modest neighborhood, there are many people whom I have never seen leaving the area on foot.



The saddest indication of our town’s preference for wheels: the only parts of town with significant foot traffic (older streets with student-rental properties) are also the parts with the poorest sidewalks.

[Photograph by Rachel Leddy]

Related, antithetical reading

A city before cars (Sign Language)

Isa Chandra Moskowitz

Isa Chandra Moskowitz, vegan chef, on chickens, eggs, and Brooklyn:

“I would love to live in a world where I knew the eggs came from happy chickens. But in Brooklyn? That’s not going to happen."

From a profile in today's New York Times:

Strict Vegan Ethics, Frosted With Hedonism (NYT)
The Post Punk Kitchen (Isa's site)

He's back

Jeanne Meyers called my attention to this news item:

A clutch of modern pagans honored Zeus at a 1,800-year-old temple in the heart of Athens on Sunday -- the first known ceremony of its kind held there since the ancient Greek religion was outlawed by the Roman empire in the late 4th century.

Watched by curious onlookers, some 20 worshippers gathered next to the ruins of the temple for a celebration organized by Ellinais, a year-old Athens-based group that is campaigning to revive old religious practices from the era when Greece was a fount of education and philosophy.

The group ignored a ban by the Culture Ministry, which declared the site off limits to any kind of organized activity to protect the monument. But participants did not try to enter the temple itself, which is closed to everyone, and no officials sought to stop the ceremony. Dressed in ancient costumes, worshippers standing near the temple's imposing Corinthian columns recited hymns calling on the Olympian Zeus, "King of the gods and the mover of things," to bring peace to the world.

Modern pagans honor Zeus in Athens (AP)

Thanks, Jeanne!

"A lot out there is conspiring to distract you"

More on continuous partial attention and reading habits:

I recently spoke with a junior who was stressed about her decreasing ability to focus on anything for longer than two minutes or so. I tried to inspire her by talking about the importance of reading as a way to train the brain. I told her that a good reader develops the same powers of concentration that an athlete or a Buddhist would employ in sport or meditation. "A lot out there is conspiring to distract you," I said.

She rolled her eyes. "That's your opinion about books. It doesn't make it true." To her, the idea that reading might benefit the mind was, well, lame.

A library's neglected shelves reveal the demise of something important, especially for young readers starved for meaning -- for anything profound. Still, I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet.

From a piece by librarian Thomas Washington in the Washington Post:

A Librarian's Lament: Books Are a Hard Sell

Glenn Gould's chair

Elaine Fine just alerted me to the web presence of a company marketing a replica of Glenn Gould's chair (news found via Soho the Dog). The chair is the creation of the designer René Bouchara and the Italian furniture maker Cazzaro.

Glenn Gould's piano chair is a story in itself, and Kevin Bazzana tells it in his biography Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould. Bert Gould customized a folding chair for his son in 1953 (what used to be called a bridge chair, for use at a cardtable), cutting several inches off each leg and adding a bracket and half-turnbuckle so that the height of each leg could be adjusted. Gould used the chair for the rest of his life. In the 1959 film Glenn Gould: On the Record, the chair can be seen (in Columbia's Manhattan recording studio) with white tape strengthening the intersections of legs and seat. In later photos the seat's stuffing is spilling out from the back. Later still, the seat disappeared altogether, leaving only a wooden frame. One of the most poignant photographs I know is this shot (by Lorne Tulk) of Gould's Toronto apartment, taken in 1982 shortly after the pianist's death.



The replica chair (seat included) sells for 990 euros ($1282). With a price like that, perhaps the manufacturer can invest some of the profits in a better English translation for the website. Here's a sample of what's there now:

Gould's chair cannot certainly be considered of the universe of design. At maximum it reminds a style chair, which original model has been modified for two times. The first time because the mechanical of the folding chair had damaged its shape. The second time because Glenn’s father, Bert Gould, had stricken on it a deathblow [!] by cutting off ten centimetres from every leg and by fixing on them a jack. . . .

Since Gould chair has become famous together with him, until becoming indivisible from his image. While the piano player became a legendary, his «chair-object» became «chair-worship».

Alas, this project reminds me of fake Rosebuds and Casablanca barware. And I'm put off by the slightly sniffy tone in the above passages ("cannot certainly be considered of the universe of design"). But I do want to get to Ottawa one day, to the National Library of Canada, where the Gould chair, the thing itself, now sits on display in a glass case.

The Glenn Gould Chair (Cazzaro) [Link’s dead.]
glenngould.com

Other Glenn Gould posts
Glenn Gould chair project (with a $35 Costco chair!)
Glenn Gould's chair again
A Glenn Gould story
Classical music for beginners
The Search for "Pet" Clark
Three records