My Adorable Daughters

beach-watch: Done for an English project. Me eight years ago; me now. :)

gogglesque: It gets better. The first image comes from a project her sister did eight years ago for the same teacher. That sister was me: 

LumpenProf is their photographer/father.

Nhhngh!

Over the break, I watched the anime series Akagi with my oldest lumpkin. The plot consists solely of mahjong games being played out as if they are epic battles. I know nothing of mahjong, yet I found the series gripping. Below is a fan video composed entirely of the stunned reactions by minor characters to the various mahjong tiles being played during the matches. I think it's hilarious. I may be the only one though.

"Who Is Bill Murray?"

This morning, on the way to school on this most auspicious of election days, my littlest lumpkin asked me out of the blue "Daddy, who is Bill Murray?" I said something about him being a comedian and actor. Then, curiosity got the better of me and I said "Why do you ask?" She replied, because I have this song stuck in my head, and this is what she sang for me:

123456 Pokemon, Pokemon
123456 Pokemon, Pokemon

Who ya gonna vote for? Barack Obama
Who ya gonna vote for? Barack Obama

Don't worry, Bill Murray
Don't worry, Bill Murray

She knew Pokemon and she knew Barack Obama, but the Bill Murray reference escaped her. I confess it escapes me a bit too in this context. However, the song was stuck in my head too now.

I went to vote shortly after this surreal pop-culture and politics exchange with my grade-schooler. I voted for Barack Obama.

This has been my very favorite election day ever. I'm looking forward to staying up late tonight with my daughter to watch history be made. I'm going to make us root beer floats. 123456 Pokemon!

Work Study

Curtis Bowman has posted a very interesting review of Marc Bousquet's How The University Works. The review is wide-ranging and I recommend the entire article to you. One passage in particular, though, struck a chord with me. Discussing Chapter 4: Students Are Already Workers, Bowman writes:

The growth of work-study jobs, as is to be expected, has come at the expense of full-time staff members, i.e., secretaries, library workers, and the like. Consequently, an ever greater percentage of staff-related work is performed by students.

The LumpenProf's oldest Lumpkin has just started college, and along with a host of other brand new experiences has come the new experience of a work-study job. She's working in the dining hall during lunch twice a week. This is part of her financial aid package, and has been a welcome alternative to student loans. But the notion of work-study has always made me uneasy, in much the same way that using prison labor makes me uneasy. The goal of teaching students, or of rehabilitating prisoners, does not fit easily with the notion that an institution might also benefit directly from the cheap labor of these populations. That there is a conflict of interest here should be obvious. And even though Karl Marx himself writes in The Communist Manifesto, that there ought to be a "combination of education with industrial production," I have never been terribly impressed with the revolutionary potential of that particular goal.

Faculty, parents, and students themselves, often tend to focus on the positive aspects of these work-study relationships -- building character, job skills, minimizing student debt, etc. But as Bowman correctly notes, it also means universities are free to hire fewer full-time staff. This union-busting aspect of student work-study perhaps should be an issue in much the same way prison labor is when used to compete with outside workers. And parents and students might also notice, as Bowman writes, that "such steps obviously lead to a decline in the quality of the very institutions that cut costs in the above fashion. Such measures are really little more than a form of slow-motion institutional suicide."

There is also a downside for faculty that often goes unnoticed. Each semester at my institution I meet the new cohort of student workers manning the phones and copy room. But after a recent three-day back and forth over how to send a fax (that ended with me sending the document by snail mail), I begin to suspect that I may be disadvantaged by not having more full-time professional staff helping me in my day to day work.

I was initially very happy about my daughter's work-study arrangement. But now I'm starting to have second thoughts. I think work-study may just be evil. It's difficult for me to imagine, though, turning down the work-study offer and taking out student loans instead. It's equally difficult for me to imagine going on a crusade on my own campus against the use of student workers. I don't think students, faculty, parents, or even staff would support it. What do others think about this? Is this a real issue? Or is the LumpenProf just worrying too much?

Buying College

The LumpenProf's oldest lumpkin has just started college this Fall. She's attending a SLAC (that stands for a Snowy Liberal Arts College). And I'm ridiculously proud of her.

The process of searching for, and applying to, colleges has been extraordinarily stressful -- both on her, and on her poor family. So stressful, in fact, that I haven't even been able to bring myself to blog about the process until now when things have, more or less, been successfully negotiated.

She is now moved into her dorm halfway across the country, has a very cool schedule of classes, and is currently just dealing with the parts of first-year student angst and stress that I'm more familiar with. This is the part I see in my own students. I'm even one the folks that inflicts some of that anguish in the form of impossibly hard readings, incomprehensible lectures, and soul-crushing exams -- the staples of academic life.

But despite the fact that I'm fairly knowledgeable and savvy about academic institutions, being on this end of the transaction has been eye opening.

Let's start with paying for college. OMFG.

First off, forget about that quaint notion of "saving for college." This is just a bizarre idea. I can not imagine any scenario where saving even a fraction of the enormous sums involved would have been possible on a professor's pay. But even if by some super-human feat of scrimping and saving we had amassed such wealth, we would have been screwed. Any money families manage to "save" for college is taken first. Then, they look at the rest of your income to see how much how you can pay. Anything beyond this is your "financial need" and is the basis for any need-based financial aid awarded. That is, saving for college actually reduces the total financial aid award. You will have to pay just as much as before -- up to the bleeding edge of what can be squeezed out of your income. And you will pay that amount for four years. The rest will be covered by the college's financial aid award. The money you "saved" for college will simply be a gift you pass on to the college that first year, which they will happily accept and then deduct from the total amount of financial aid awarded to you. You will have succeeded in saving the college money, but not yourself. "Saving" will actually cost you. Fortunately for our family, we were already mortgaged up to our ears with no real savings, so our financial aid packet was great!

So here's the LumpenProf's advice if you have a kid about to go to college. Do not save. In fact, buy a new Lexus instead. That increased debt will actually increase the financial aid you are awarded. Plus you get a Lexus.

Wilde Cosplay

Kids today are much cooler than when I was young. Oscar Wilde. And Cosplay. How cool is that?