Stop and smell the chlorine

It’s summer. We need to have some relaxing moments. And while I wish I had access to a salt water pool still, I will not dismiss the good of any water I can plunge into, even if it’s chlorinated. I need photosynthesis in the spring, summer, and fall to make it through the winter. Not sure how I managed when I lived on the 43rd parallel in Boise, Idaho. I didn’t last long there, though. I appreciate the lakes and rivers I could dip into and raft on, but the water was pretty cold until July and August, and then, still chilled a bit more than I’d prefer. I’m in love with the South and the warm waters of the South: fresh, salted, or chemically altered.

Periodic Table of Elements & Cl, Chlorine

You’ll see here that chlorine is a chemical on the Periodic Table of Elements (PTE)–upper right in yellow, second down from the top, “Cl” is just a bit more bold than the others. I love this stuff: charts, categories. I memorized the PTE when I was in high school chemistry. Why? Because I was one of those kids–I counted everything. In church on Sundays, I could tell you how many light bulbs were in the whole church, how many squares in the barrel-vaulted ceiling, how many railings at the alter, the number of pews. And when I couldn’t pay attention in school, I counted things and memorized them. Mrs. Frye sat me right next to the PT chart (which was smaller then, by the by), and so that’s what I did.

I love what the web has done for the PTE. There are dynamic PTEs (linked above) and entirely new ways of looking at this information that makes up the guts of our world. Data visualization makes me so happy. I love this sort of thing (visual learner). This is one of my favorite alternate models of the PTE:

Periodic Spiral of Elements: Wheeeee

In just a few minutes, I’m going to go out and smell the chlorine as I swim for a bit. It’s summer, we have to have some moments when we stop thinking, writing, working, dusting, cooking, managing, fretting. My moments include photosynthesis–hence, the photo that will be my theme this summer: a corner of a pool.

I would stop and smell the roses, but the chlorine sort of takes over. Sometimes, it’s best to just give into “better living through chemicals.” At least I can see to the bottom of the pool and don’t have to worry about creatures from the deep coming up to snatch at my legs. EEEK.

In the rush and fuss of working and school and family, it’s good to find a time to rejuvenate. Don’t forget why you’re doing what you’re doing and give yourself a break now and then.

Or find something fun to occupy your brain for awhile…

If you like data visualization, like I do, then you’ll want to visit this guy’s site: David McCandless’s Information is Beautiful. He’s got a Ted.com talk, too. If we do writing across the curriculum, then this guy does visualization across the curriculum.

Stop and smell the chlorine whenever you can. But not too much–it’s toxic to humans.

The value of a college education and, of course, WAC

This morning I wandered upon an interview with Mike Rose, a professor at UCLA, on NPR. Rose’s book Lives on the Boundary was deeply influential to me as a younger teacher; he’s written a lot of books about education and blogs about higher education.

It’s a short interview–just over six minutes–but worth listening to because he confirms what some of us are doing in this class and in college. We may have gone to college to better our economic situations, but is that the only reason we stayed?

His blog post from June 2, “Remediation at a Crossroads,” was a piece a group of us read earlier this year (originally published at Inside Higher Ed on Apr. 21, 2011–preview for next fall’s class: we’ll be reading this short article by Rose and very likely portions of his blog!).

Seven of us worked for many months to redesign the basic writing course and lab at AUM, moving from what we had (not a bad model) to another model (better, we hope) to help students re-envision what college education can and should be. With the new curriculum, we urge new college writers to value the knowledge they possess, the communication skills they possess, and then help them build upon that prior knowledge to grow as writers, emerging users of English language conventions, and innovators in thinking (and writing across the curriculum–not a coincidence). We even went so far as to rename the course: PreComposition (not officially, but we’re working on it). We started a web site for PreComposition that still needs a lot of work, but we started it and that’s something.

(By the way, the work is far from finished. If you’re interested in writing for that course, and getting a writing line on your resumes, or being involved in some way–there are plenty of opportunities to be part of this project–including attending and presenting at conferences next year. Just say the word and I’ll show you what’s available to do and you can be involved as you desire.)

Our idea, if you read around a bit on that site, is that we will eventually have a whole PreComposition course built on open software, using open educational resources, that we can use for any students, and that anyone can use anywhere, any time for their students. You’ll see that each of the folks who worked on the concept contributed something (the tabs at the top–based on the habits of mind laid out in the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. (This document was put together with help from the Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project–that I just blogged about the other day.) You’ll also notice the the essay on “Open” that I’m writing is not there yet. Got side-tracked a bit. But I’m getting there–with luck and bluster.

Our idea is to grow this site–get teachers and students to write, contribute, and make it a wonderful place for anyone to start their composition life. And most importantly, for our WAC initiative, we want our students to see that writing is thinking, it’s creativity, it’s communication in every single moment of our lives, in our world. Without textual skill, students will be lost, in fact, it’s likely they may cease being students. So we’re trying to blow up old notions of what knowledge acquisition can be in college and embrace a remix mentality that supports WAC–mashups are at the core of any across/in/through the curriculum or disciplines program.

We called our project this spring, Operation PreComp: Remixing Basic Writing.

What we’re doing in our WAC class is Operation WAC: Remixing Writing. We are rethinking what writing is across the curriculum, where this idea came from, the impact it has on universities in specific situations (case study), the impact it has on us (through our writing and responses), the change it makes in the world, how the message gets disseminated (book reviews), and all that jazz. We are rethinking ourselves are writers, but writing in this blogosphere and how writers connect to create new knowledge and how that can be share effectively and quickly through the ether of cyberspace.

What a cool thing to do with higher education… or it feels that way right now.

And right now, I can say with certainty, the value of my college education goes way beyond economic comfort (that matters–being able to eat regularly and have a nice place to live is good) but it’s also about: 1) my quest for life-long learning; 2) my participation in many communities as an advocate of writing, reading and open; 3) my network of colleagues who keep me intellectually hopping; and last in the batting order, but number one in my heart, 4) my students who keep me inspired and invested in learning collaboratively.

Open education. It’s one way to combat the rising costs of education, texts, and also a way to get educational materials into the hands of anyone who wants to learn. And if we’re working to improve writing across all disciplines through open, why, that’s very WAC, indeed.