Charlie and the Trade Secret Factory

Once upon a time, there lived a man named Willy Wonka. He built a biiig candy factory, but he ran into a problem. Namely, the other mean candy makers kept trying to steal his candy recipes. Now, sometimes Mr. Wonka looked like this:

like this:and like this:

But no matter what Wonka looked like, there was always one constant. And I'm sure you all know what it is, right? Top hats! Okay, two constants. His business model was always based on his intellectual property decisions. When other candy makers started stealing Wonka's recipes, why didn't he take it to the courts? Why didn't he sue them instead of investing in oompa loompas to prevent industrial espionage? Because he couldn't.

When a person invents something, they have two options as to how to protect it. The first is to get a patent. You get a lawyer or a patent agent, fill out some paperwork, and send it in to the government. If the government decides to grant your patent, yay! For most types of patents, you get twenty years of protection, meaning that any time someone tries to steal your invention, you can drag their sorry behind into court. But then, when that twenty years is up, no more protection. Anyone can do anything they want with your invention. That's why there's always a gap between when a prescription drug comes out and when the generic version becomes available. It's a trade off: guaranteed protection for a certain length of time, but you have to make the information public, which means it's free for use when your time is up.

But if twenty years doesn't seem like long enough, and you don't like the idea of making the information behind your unique invention public, you go the Willy Wonka hire-a-bunch-of-oompa-loompas-and-feed-them-nothing-but-chocolate-so-they-never-leave-the-factory-and-no-one-can-steal-your-secrets route. Otherwise known as the trade secret. If you look up how to make Thomas' English Muffin nooks and crannies or the exact blend of spices in Old Bay on the US Patent and Trademark Office website, you won't find them. Those companies don't want anyone to be able to reproduce their special products. Ever. They don't have to worry about people making legal generics and knock-offs in twenty years. But they do not get government protection. This makes them vulnerable. This is how Slugworth could steal the secrets of Wonka's candy and reproduce it without fear of reprisal. How do you choose which to do? It's six of one, half dozen of the other. Guaranteed protection for a limited time or keep it proprietary and risk theft of your idea.

Now, admittedly, Willy Wonka lived in England (or quite possibly Wales, as Roald Dahl was Welsh), and the patent laws are different there. But that's beside the point. And the point is...well, there wasn't really one. Other than these are the kinds of connections my brain makes, whether I really want it to or not. Isn't it amazing the things that children's books can teach us? Well, that's it for today's educational segment.

(Editorial note: I have been informed by my mother, who knows much more about patents than I do, that you can technically sue someone over a trade secret. The tricky part is keeping the trade secret secret during the trial. All in all, if you're going that route, it's best to stick with the oompa loompas, if you ask me.)

Live long and prosper!

Check out Life at the Lilly!

Hey everyone! This is your friendly neighborhood library science student here! So, I'm doing an internship at the Lilly Library this fall. As part of our internships, we're required to keep a journal on what we're doing and what we're learning, and we're allowed to keep them as blogs. So, that's what I'm doing. If anyone has the desire to follow yet another blog, please check it out: Life at the Lilly.

Otherwise, I hope that everyone has a fantastic Labor Day weekend!

How to Recognize a Library Science Student II: Attack of the Clones

Well, your friendly neighborhood library science student is back, with another list of ways to identify library science students outside their natural habitat (this, of course, being the library or class). Enjoy, but use these with caution. Taken individually, they might (for the most part) apply simply to extremely nerdy people. So, just because you hear people laughing about LARPing does not mean that you should go ask them how library school is. You have been warned.

5) LARPing becomes a euphemism.
Somehow, during a conversation at my apartment, the topic of LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) came up. Well, I guess we decided that LARP sounded much more inappropriate than it actually is, so for the rest of the evening, sentences like "A whole group of people LARPed all over campus when I was in undergrad" became hysterically funny.

6) Their first reaction on seeing a book is "how would I catalog/index this?"
I have heard tell that a fellow student of mine, upon picking up a copy of the Bible, in a church, while waiting for a wedding to start, began to wonder how he would catalog it. I also must confess that, since starting my Indexing class, I have taken to looking at my non-fiction collection and wondering what the forms of knowledge and topics are. What this obviously means is that library science school gets into your head and slowly starts to warp your worldview. And once that's happened, you can never go back.

7) When they come across a disturbing passage in an old book about parents fondling their children, their reaction is to wonder if the word meant something different back then.
I had sent a friend of mine an Awful Library Books post about a book on marriage from 1953, and naturally he went and found the full text online. While perusing this book, he came across a sentence about how teenagers aren't ready for the "caresses of marriage" but are too old to be fondled by their parents. He shared this with me and after being profoundly disturbed, his next reaction was to wonder if fondle meant something different back then. Well, I ended up pulling out my dictionary and finding the following definition, labeled as obsolete: "To treat with indulgence and solicitude; pamper." That made us feel better. Slightly. Because that definition still doesn't seem to work in context. But, hey, we tried.

8) They will find the line "It's like Boolean logic!" extremely funny.
While watching the final of the World Cup, a group of us began an ill-fated conversation that I choose not to recount because I enjoy my sanity. I will say that it was about two things such that A is always a kind of B, but B is not always a kind of A. As I said to them, it's like squares and rectangles. Well, one of my companions carried it further by replying that it's like Boolean logic. And then we all laughed hysterically. So, actually, I guess that story is just a whole bunch of nerd-tastic moments rolled into one.

If anyone has any other methods of identification from their own personal experience, please don't hesitate to share!

Misconceptions of Librarianship

I was visiting my mother's family for the Fourth this weekend, and I was able to catch up with relatives I have not seen in years. At one point, I was describing library school to one of my mom's cousins, and he asked what kind of job I hoped to get. I explained to him how I want to do reference, but that I also really want to get into information literacy and instruction, helping undergrads learn how to use resources and information effectively. He thought it was cool that my experience of not having good information instruction in undergrad made me want to be able to give that to other students. He also commented that it meant that I'd be more than a librarian if I did that. It brought to mind something I have been wondering about and wrestling with since before I started school here at SLIS: what, exactly, is a librarian?

Well, because I'm a nerd, I naturally turn to the dictionary. This is the definition I found in my American Heritage College Dictionary:

Librarian n. A specialist in library work

I find that definition profoundly unsatisfying, because it begs the question of what constitutes "library work." I would be willing to bet if you asked twenty different SLIS students what a librarian is, or what library work is, you would get twenty different answers. And we like to complain that the public harbors misconceptions about what librarians do, such as the thought expressed by my mother's cousin. But if we, the actual librarians, cannot even define what we are, how on earth do we expect to educate the public about ourselves?

For many people, a librarian is the person who helps them check out books when they go to the public library. That puts us in a bit of an awkward position, because that is not what most people who call themselves librarians do. It's certainly not what I plan on doing. I have friends here who want to curate rare books collections, work in archives, help create digital libraries and repositories, and so much more. I don't even know how many of us will end up with the word "librarian" in our job titles. And I think that it is the public conception of what a "librarian" is that is leading the profession to come up with a large pool of other job titles. But does "information specialist," "archivist," or "manuscripts curator," really mean that much more to people outside the profession? Not really.

A major topic of conversation these days, particularly with this economy and the widespread use of the Internet (which can apparently tell everyone anything the need to know), is how to justify the existence of libraries and other similar institutions, how to make our work seem relevant and useful. I think that we need to begin by demystifying who we are and what we do for the public. But to do that we need to figure that out for ourselves. We cannot continue with simply defining ourselves by what we are not. Public libraries aren't day care centers and law libraries are not places to pick up future husbands. Well that's lovely. So what are we? Only once we can answer that question are we going to find ourselves gaining the respect and support that we would like from the public.

Perspectives

So a couple of months ago, a part time job at my church found me. Yes, you read that right. I was in the right place at the right time and knew the right people. It's a slightly new twist on the work I've done before in the church and a most welcome way to pass time while waiting for a permanent job. (side note--social studies teacher looking for a full time teaching position. MD certification grade 7-12, available to start work August 1.)

Anyway...what I've found in all my time working in parishes is that there is this dual experience of reality, or at least there is for me. There's the clinical "what's next, where are the people, is everything going the way it's supposed to go" detail-oriented mentality, and then there's the realization that real people are experiencing real things, like birth, marriage, and death.

And death is the real kicker. What I'd been told the last time I worked in the Roman Catholic church was that funerals sort of follow a feast-or-famine pattern. In the church where I grew up (which is a very large parish), you might go three weeks without having a funeral come in followed by weeks of 8 funerals. The same is true in the rural parish where I currently worship, although on a much smaller scale. And we're in a busy period now. There were two funerals at the end of last week, and another one came in yesterday (scheduled for next week).

Too often, we forget what really matters and instead get caught up in stupid stuff. Case in point: office drama broke out mid-morning last Monday. And it was DRAMA. There ultimately was a staff meeting to sort everything out. But that's another story that I won't tell here. But here's the back story. A person who is (and whose large family is) well-known and loved in our parish passed away on June 19 after being sick for some time. On June 18, our beloved Padre met with a different family about a memorial service for a different parishoner. The funeral was scheduled for Friday the 25th, the memorial service for Saturday the 26th. And 45 minutes before the widow is due in to the office to plan the Friday funeral, the drama breaks out. Padre's response was one of the greatest lines I've probably ever heard:

"I've got dead people. Which means I need to be doing priestly things. I don't have time for this [this being the drama]."

Padre calls them like he sees them. But there's a more profound truth behind this comment. At that moment, families were grieving as the rest of us were confronted with another reminder of our own mortality. Meanwhile, some individuals were more worried about who said what to whom.

Fast forward to yesterday morning. Another important thing I've learned about parish work is that some days are ordinary. Others, however, are not. And yesterday was one of the latter. Within 10 minutes of Padre and I sitting down at our respective desks, Padre in a slightly anxious tone asked me to get checks for him to sign. He was listening to his police scanner and heard a call that meant that he might have to run against the clock to the hospital. Sadly, though, this parishoner's funeral is Wednesday in our mission church in Rock Hall. I won't go into detail about this case, but it was surreal listening to it play out on the scanner and really contemplating this reality. I was reminded of something another boss of mine at a different job said when one of our coworkers there passed away very suddenly in February:

"Tomorrow isn't guaranteed for anyone, and no one gets out of this alive."

And that's the reality. In the Bible, the psalmist writes, "Seventy is the sum or our years, or eighty, if we are strong." That's basically the bottom line. We've got a short time here. Is it worth it worrying excessively about who said what to whom? The rest of that verse (Psalm 90:10) reads: "Most of them are sorrow and toil; they pass quickly, we are all but gone." Certainly not the most optimistic perspective, but just as certainly on the money on many levels. Yes, life is filled with struggles and trials, but how many of these trials are our own creation? And how much of this is due to our own (narrow) perspective? Do we really have time for them, or is Padre the only one who doesn't?

So it seems we have two choices. Get stuck in the mire of who said what to whom, or realize that some people's numbers are up, others have bigger fish to fry, and time flies whether you're having fun or not.

And maybe that's the difference between seventy and eighty.

How to Recognize a Library Science Student...

So, in all the time since graduation last spring, I have not talked at all about what I am doing, now that I have my B.A. in History. So what am I doing? I am in library science school. And I can tell you that library science students are a unique breed. But how can you tell when you've invited a library science student over to your house? Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1) They comment on the organization of your movie/book collection.
There have been quite a few times where one of the first comments from my guests has been, "So, you alphabetize your movie collection." This then leads to a discussion of the relative merits of different organizational schemes, possibly followed by shifting the conversation to the organization of my bookshelves.

2) They will offer to lend you any books or movies that they own.
This might be more common when you visit the apartment/house of a library science student, but let's face it. We like sharing our books and movies. The evening isn't complete unless they've offered to lend you at least one thing.

3) If you ask them a question they can't answer, the reply will be "Why don't you try Ask A Librarian?"
Here at IU, we have an online reference feature called Ask a Librarian, where you can have a live chat with a reference librarian. It seems that library science students enjoy coming up with special questions to pose to the poor librarian on the other end.

4) If they invent a serial killer, this serial killer will choose his/her victims alphabetically.
Naturally, when you and your friends get together, you will do fun things like making up a serial killer, simply because someone has decided that Silent Angy sounds like a good name for a serial killer. Well, when this happens, your library science students will decide that said serial killer will kill alphabetically by first name. It will then take them half an hour to realize the irony of this.

None of these are foolproof, of course, but they should give you a good start toward recognizing all those future librarians in your life.

Score One for the Humanities

An op-ed in today's New York Times argues why it is important to study the humanities in college. Makes me a tiny bit proud to have a degree in a humanities field, and I agree with the points he makes.
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To whet your appetite:
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"Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.
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"Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod....
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"Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison--Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and gibbon, you'll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.
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"Finally, and most importantly, studying the humanities helps you befriend The Big Shaggy."
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"One Cubic Centimetre Cures Ten Gloomy Sentiments"

When I first read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, I had recently read 1984 and I was curious about the drastic differences between Huxley's and Orwell's visions of the future. 1984 focuses on the soul-crushing dangers of totalitarian government. Brave New World takes the future in a different direction, instead focusing on the dangers of science and consumerism. At the heart of this futuristic society is a drug called soma. It is "euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant." In essence, it is the perfect, side effect free drug.

Huxley published Brave New World in 1932. Twenty-two years later, in 1954, he published The Doors of Perception, a work describing his experience with the drug mescaline. I had always wondered what inspired the drastically different approaches to the future taken by Huxley and Orwell. I knew that 1984 was inspired by the political climate in which Orwell lived, but reading The Doors of Perception finally gave me some insight into the creation of Huxley's future. In his tradition of borrowing his titles from other works (Brave New World took its title from Shakespeare's The Tempest), this work's title (which inspired a certain 1960's band) came from a poem by William Blake:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

But the book is more than a celebration of drug use. It explores many issues, including mental illness and religion, among other things. And when I read it, aspects of Brave New World made so much more sense. People who are familiar with Brave New World might recall the community sings. These sessions were designed to reinforce class solidarity through the use of soma and orgies. In The Doors of Perception, Huxley discusses the role of peyote (which is essentially mescaline) in Native American religious rituals. His belief was that one of the reasons religion seemed to be falling by the wayside was that most people could not achieve truly transcendental religious experiences. This is partially because modern religion frowns upon the use of intoxicating substances (with the exception of a tolerance of alcohol). As not everyone can realize religious transcendence through ritual, he believed that the creation and use of an intoxicating substance with no ill after affects would bring religion into the present and bring people back to religion.

Now, he wrote this belief after Brave New World. One is led to believe in that book that the boundless use of soma is one of the evils of that future. And yet, years later, Huxley advocated almost exactly the same thing in The Doors of Perception. So, had the actual use of drugs changed his mind, or was the point of the earlier book that the use of soma had gone to far, to the point of swallowing up a healthy life? I would like to believe it was the later, moderation in all things. Yet I cannot help but find it interesting that underneath the hellish reality of his dystopian future, just barely beneath the surface, lies a future he might actually have wished for. Which I suppose underlines the truth: our idealistic views of what life could be tend to be corrupted in the making, unless we are very careful.

Young Americans Embrace Rigors of the Bolshoi

This really fascinating article about two Americans, 15-yr old Joy from Texas and 12-yr old Julian from Montana, who are studying ballet at the Bolshoi Academy in Moscow was in the New York Times this morning. Read it here. There's also a slide show and a video (and in the latter, there were lots of Moscow landmarks that I've seen in person :)

Now which is more likely to happen: Ten Page returns to Russia or Ten Page becomes a ballet dancer (again)?

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Milestones

April 11: attended final concert of retiring music professor
April 23: visited with friends who are having a baby
April 26: had lunch with history prof who is going on leave
April 27: went to a job fair
April 30-May 11: did work for retiring education professor
May 8: went to friend's birthday party
May 11: went to former boss' retirement party
May 15: went to a graduation party
May 16: went to a college graduation
May 17: went to a farewell dinner for high school seniors at church
May 18: got my teaching certification
.............registered for yet another French class
May 19: went to a funeral
May 22: went to a wedding and a going-away party
May 27: screening interview for teaching jobs
June 12: went to an ordination
June 15: my birthday

I guess it's silly to ask that the life changes be slowed some. Ten Page doesn't like change (and has never liked it), but I guess she's going to become more accepting of it...

Man of Faith vs...Man of Faith?

In honor of the pending series finale of Lost, I am hijacking this blog to discuss Lost.

I've been re-watching the first two seasons, back when Locke was still the man of faith and Jack was all about getting off the Island. In the current season, Locke (aka the Man in Black) is all about getting off the Island, and Jack has become the man of faith. But faith seems to mean two different things to these men.

Before he came to the Island, Locke was a very angry person. He had good reason to be. His relationship with his con-man father began on an off-note and degraded to the point where he pushed Locke out a window. All of that could easily conspire to make a man bitter. But when he got the Island, things changed. Or did they? He could walk, he was respected as a hunter and protector. He found faith in the power of the Island. But it didn't really make him less angry. When his trebuchet failed to open the hatch, he became angry. When Boone became injured, he found himself pounding angrily on the hatch. When Desmond abandoned the hatch after destroying the computer, Locke yells at the Island again. Each time, he complains that this wasn't what was supposed to happen. Faith shouldn't bring you anger. It should bring you peace.

Enter season five Jack. He has survived detonating a hydrogen bomb and discovered that he is a candidate for some mysterious purpose. Like Locke in the early seasons, he now does not want to leave the Island. He has faith that he has a purpose. And it has created a marked change since the beginning of the season. Jack was angry at the Temple (though he could have simply been having a negative reaction to the weak plot point). When he found Jacob's magic mirror, his mirror smashing tantrum was impressive. But after he recovered from the experience, he had made a profound mental shift, to the point of telling Hurley that he is not longer going to be in charge, making decisions. He is going to let go and follow.

To me, Jack's faith exemplifies the Taoist concept of wu-wei, essentially, go with the flow. Whatever life throws at you, role with it and trust things to go how they should. It has the imagery of floating comfortably down a river rather than fighting the current. And since his mental shift, that's what he does. Richard Alpert tries to blow himself up, Jack calmly sits down with him, secure in the belief that he cannot die. Even when Locke tries to blow everyone up on the sub, Jack remains calm (well, as calm as possible). Locke had faith, but he also had expectations. And when they weren't met, he fought tooth and nail. Jack has no expectations. He is willing to see how the game plays out without any preconceived notions about the endgame.

I suspect that this is the same sort of peace that we see with Desmond in sideways world and that we saw on his face when he woke back up on the Island. I personally cannot wait to see what happens when are newly peaceful Jack and Desmond meet each other. It should be quite different than when they met in the hatch all those years ago.

Well, that's all my wisdom. Thank you for joining me on this Lost-inspired trek.

A Trip Down Nostalgia Lane

NB: The subject matter of this post was in no way approved by my co-blogger. I would like to make it absolutely clear that she DOES NOT like the Doors, and no assumptions are to be made about her feelings relative to the content of this post :)


(click on the strip for a larger image)

My love of the Doors in general and Jim Morrison in particular have become well known to my friends, particularly those who have watched the Doors perform on Ed Sullivan with me. Thus, one of said friends e-mailed me the above comic strip. Naturally, the strip is only funny if you agree that the idea of a 25-year-old hamster is as ridiculous as the idea of Jim Morrison living to be 66. Anyway, receiving this comic strip has inspired me to actually finish and post a blog entry I began over winter vacation.

Because I am a true music nerd, I was ecstatic to receive a record player for Christmas. For those of you who don’t know, records, also known as vinyl, LPs, 45s, etc. are those shiny black disks that you’ve probably seen in your parents’ attic or, depending on your age, have in your own attic.

Not really having much in the way of my own vinyl collection (a.k.a. I only owned one album), I naturally needed to borrow music from my parents for testing out on my latest toy. This meant not only exploring the records my parents had out, but dragging out boxes (and I mean drag; those suckers are heavy!) from storage and the garage.

The first things I played were selections from their classical collection, because that’s mostly what they’ve kept out over the years. And really, short of hearing it live, there’s nothing like listening to good classical music on LP. And it wasn’t just about the music. I got to hear my mother talk about how an ex-boyfriend of hers who played trombone introduced her to Janáček’s Symphonieta because of its excellent use of brass. I also got to see how much she loves listening to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture, which led to a discussion about Tchaikovsky’s amazing ability to tell stories with music. Of course, all of this led to the excavation of the other boxes.

In one of these boxes was my father’s collection of classic pop and rock. I wouldn’t have expected to see him with more records by Elton John and Chicago than The Beatles. And "Black Dog" and "Stairway to Heaven" are even more glorious on vinyl. But the group I have become sincerely attached to since then is the Doors. (And it’s not because of Morrison’s leather pants. Honest.)

I’d never thought myself to be particularly familiar with the music of The Doors, but there isn’t much classic rock that I don’t enjoy at least a little. Well, while my family chilled at home on Christmas, we watched a DVD of classic performances from the Ed Sullivan Show, which included The Doors performing “Light My Fire.” It was one of those songs I’d always heard, but never knew (or thought about) who sang it. And it kind of got stuck in my head. So, when I found that my dad had an album with that on it, I listened to it. And it is much longer than the version they performed for Ed, and has some fantastic instrumental solos.

Well, it’s more difficult to listen to single tracks on LPs, and I always like discovering new good music, so after listening to the first side (which conveniently opened with the 7 minute long “Light My Fire”) quite a few times, I finally flipped over the record, not expecting to hear anything I knew. But as soon as the first song, “Touch Me,” started, I knew what it was. It was one of those songs I’d always heard on classic rock radio that my dad listened to when I was younger. I always knew it as the Stronger Than Dirt song because whenever it came on the radio, my dad would crank the volume up so that we could hear what Morrison was singing at the end.

As I listened to it, I wished that I’d actually listened to more classic rock regularly when I was younger. I couldn’t help but think about listening to the Backstreet Boys during some of my formative years of adolescent growth and hormones. One could say that the Backstreet Boys were better. None of them were known for being alcoholics or hardcore drug-users (so far as I know, anyway). But none of them were Jim Morrison, either (or John Lennon, or Mick Jagger, or Gary Puckett, for that matter). I can’t help but think if I was a hormonal teenager in the late ‘60s lying on the floor of my bedroom listening to Jim Morrison sing "Touch Me" or "Wishful Sinful," I probably would have melted straight through the floor. Let’s face it, they don’t make music like they used to. And can any group today make hordes of pre-teen girls scream and faint quite like The Beatles (and, apparently, the Rolling Stones) could? No way.

This is not to say that modern music has nothing going for it. That would be a lie. I have my fair share of good music that has come out in the time I have been alive. But I think that my generation, the Starbucks, iPod, instant gratification generation, has come to expect different things from our music. I’m not sure quite what they expect, but I think that the revolutionary sounds of groups like The Beatles and The Doors are no longer new. But because of things they did, there’s very little new that modern groups are doing. Weezer has the Red Album, the Blue Album, and the Green Album. The Beatles had the White Album. Except it actually had a title. The Beatles. But I understand why no one calls it that; we can’t speak in italics, after all. We’d end up sounding like a bad Abbot and Costello sketch (-I listened to The Beatles this afternoon. –Awesome! Which album? -The Beatles. –You said that, but which album? Who’s on first?).

My generation isn’t going to be shocked and possibly scandalized by listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (though "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" still sounds trippy), and no one is going to think twice about hip swiveling on TV (in the Ed Sullivan performance we watched, Elvis was filmed from the waist up, but the screams from the audience gave some indication of what we weren’t seeing). They may have been completely trashed all the time or have been having lots of sex with women they weren’t married to, but, come on, after Tom Cruise couch-jumped and Lindsay Lohan went into rehab for the ump-teenth time, who really cares? I’m sure some of the greats of early rock had onstage antics to match Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl (Jim Morrison and the Miami Incident, anyone? He was arrested! Multiple times!), but then as now, those things seldom stop people from following artists that they like.

And I had all of these deep and obviously profound thoughts because of getting a record player for Christmas. Betcha can’t get all of that from a new Blu-ray player. So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go listen to Jim Morrison and melt.

620 Books

I'm an academic. I read for fun. Don't judge me.

So says my Facebook profile. At various points in my life, people have belittled me (with varying degrees of seriousness) for the fact that I read a lot. I don't really care anymore. I like to read, it is a stress reliever for me, and I would love to be able to call myself "well read" (although being well read is a full time job in and of itself).

So I was just looking at my refrigerator, and the green index card that's at the top of it caught my eye. It reads 620 books. The backstory is that nearly four years ago, I was having a hellish fall semester as a college sophomore. At fall break, I went home, and I was telling the story of all my assignments to a friend from church. This friend has a son who is a Ph.D student in history at Emory University, and at the time, his son was preparing for his Ph.D comps. My friend told me that his son had a list of 620 books that he had to know for his exams. So I went back to school, wrote "620 books" on a green index card, and posted it on my desk (where it remained for the next 2.5 years) as a reminder of how my workload could be worse.

So as I gazed upon this green index card this evening, I thought, "I haven't even read 620 books in my entire life." I know I've only read about 380 since I've been keeping a reading log (roughly 2000), not including required school reading.

Pope Benedict owns 20,000 books. I'm sure he's read most, if not all, of them.

I guess I have some work to do.

A Week in the Life of Ten Page

So I was talking with my Ed Block friends yesterday, and one of them, upon hearing about what I had been doing and reading my Facebook statuses, suggested that I start a blog. I told her I already had one, and she remembered seeing this on Facebook and then suggested that I put a list of what I do in a day on said blog. And I thought, "why the heck not."

This week, my to-do list had 34 items on it, even though I don't have a job at the moment. My rallying cry all week has been, "Who has time for a job?!?" So here's the recap:

Monday
-Mass at Sacred Heart with Alyssa and Jen
-stop by History Prof's office to pick up stuff for this week's Phi Alpha Theta induction, which I was in charge of planning along with one of the other alumni officers.
-stop in Education Prof's office to set a time for a meeting that had already been rescheduled twice.
-type up recollections from Open House presentation for aforementioned Education Prof
-give update to other Education dept Chair on how I went about getting my teaching certification
-wash windows
-Finish reading The Chocolate War (absolutely read this book!)
-hike over to campus to meet with Lydia and History Prof to plan induction
-run into Jen, Mandy, English Prof, other History Prof
-call supervising teacher to get latest on KCPS consolidation
-meeting with Education Prof to discuss conference presentation
-dinner
-send several job-related emails and completed one application
-call Brenna
-Bible Study at Mandy's

Tuesday
-Mass at Sacred Heart
-chat with Krista while we both wait for Education dept Chair, then we both meet with her
-visit former bosses in Writing Center
-call Caroline County HR
-20 mile bike ride
-read articles on field trips for conference presentation
-reading briefly and gladly interrupted by dinner and quick errand with Education dept Chair

Wednesday
-Communion Service at Our Mother of Sorrows
-prepare important gift
-H & R Block end of season survey
-online application for my teaching certificate
-finish draft of conference presentation
-empty dishwasher, do dishes
-drop papers for credential file off at career center
-shop for drinks and paper products for Phi Alpha Theta induction
-drop off drinks and plates etc off with History Prof
-chat with Education Prof
-play phone tag with Steve
-CCF end of year picnic
-Sacred Heart spaghetti dinner

Thursday
-Mass at Sacred Heart
-walk over to Acme and buy Kent News. Read Kent News
-15 mile bike ride
-pack for home
-group meeting to work on conference presentations
-Phi Alpha Theta induction
-go home to Western Shore

Friday
-Teachers of Promise Institute in Baltimore
-dinner with lovely WaC friends who now live in Western Shore neighborhood (kinda)

What does next week look like?
-field trip to DC
-finish The Romance of the Rose
-work on conference presentation
-follow up on some job applications
-lunch with Lydia and History Prof
-ODK induction?
-Conference on Saturday, 5/1
-townball on Thurs?
-Bible Study on Mon & Tues (need to plan Tuesday, since I'm probably going to lead the discussion)
-acutally get my teaching certificate and finish assignment from Education dept Chair?

Yeah...who has time for a job?

The USA as Humpty Dumpty: Musings of a History Teacher

In the first leg of my post-college life, I've been teaching 8th grade US history. At this time of year, 8th graders learn about sectionalism, Andrew Jackson, and the problems of the 1820s and 1830s that festered and eventually exploded into a civil war (yet that war was not necessarily inevitable, as my students seem to think. 20-20 hindsight and teleology, however, are subjects for another day). This is a period of time that I have not studied since the 11th grade, but I'm starting to develop a new appreciation for our nations past as I probe these issues in order to teach them to my students.

The issue I'm pondering today: Why did we have a civil war?

I've been in conversations where people will shout simple answers until they are blue in the face. The debate goes as follows:
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SLAVERY!!!!!! Or STATES' RIGHTS!!!!!

.(if you live in the north) (Maryland and points south)

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When I was in 11th grade, my teacher led my class in a discussion on this very topic. We listed probably thirty reasons for the Civil War and then went back and labeled the reasons that involved slavery in some way. And that was nearly all of them. So I left high school with this vignette in my back pocket ready to explain when people said to me, "You study history? Tell me, what caused the Civil War?" (never mind the fact that I studied European history.) My boss (at my part-time, non-school related job) adamantly claims that interstate commerce caused the War Between the States. Interesting theory. One to which I will return later. So let's add that to our list:

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SLAVERY!!!!! STATES' RIGHTS!!!!! INTERSTATE COMMERCE!!!!!

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In light of my recent lessons on the Missouri Compromise and the Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833, I think the issue is much more complicated than any of these positions would lead us to believe. And I think understanding these complexities will give us a new and perhaps more holistic understanding of how our country was put together, torn apart, and then put back together again.

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The United States wasn't always the one nation, indivisible, that it seems to be today. From colonial times into the early 1800s, people saw themselves as citizens of a state, not a country, and politicians were more often interested in the best interests of their region than they were in the best interests of the Union (perhaps this is still true today...but that would be another essay). Sectional (read: North/South) divisions complicated the writing of the Constitution and resulted in the notable compromises on slavery and representation and the composition of the legislative branch that became part of the new system of government.

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These differences played out during the administrations of the first few presidents and only deepened as the West expanded and the North and South developed different economies and different societies. These tensions manifested themselves and could have brought the nation to war as early as 1820. In this year, the Missouri Compromise provided a temporary resolution of sectional tensions by maintaining the balance between slave and free states and defining how slavery would expand as the country expanded into the Louisiana Territory. It was less about the question of slavery than it was about two contrasting ways of life (political, economic, social, philosophical) and how those ways of life could be housed in one country under one federal government.

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Fast forward to 1828 and 1832. Congress passed tariffs designed to protect American manufacturers and promote the purchasing of American goods. Reasonable, yes? Well, the South depended on European manufactured goods bought with the proceeds from cash crops (namely cotton), and they balked at the thought of paying more for European goods. Enter John C Calhoun and the philosophy of nullification. Calhoun's South Carolina refused to pay these tariffs and threatened in 1832 to secede from the Union. The subsequent conflict, which saw the passage of another compromise and of an act authorizing the president to use force to enforce federal laws within states, was not really about tariffs or slavery (slaves after all produced the cotton sold in return for manufactured goods and drove the Southern economy). The conflict was really about the authority of the federal government and how that power and the authority of the states fit together. It was about defining federalism. Calhoun made it about the source of federal power--he argued that it came from the states, while folks like Daniel Webster of New England argued that federal power came from the people. Thanks to another compromise from the hand of Henry Clay (architect of the Missouri Compromise), another argument was resolved. But sectional tension persisted for the next thirty years and exploded at various points during that time before the pot boiled over in 1860 and 1861 in what we know as the start of the Civil War.

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So why was the Civil War fought? To preserve the Union? Maybe. South Carolina and ten other states left, and Lincoln sent troops to bring them back. To secure states' rights? States' rights to own slaves, nullify federal laws, develop their own political and economic systems without the interference of Washington? Maybe. To free the slaves? Depends who you ask. Abolitionist sentiment had been simmering in the North for decades, Uncle Tom's Cabin caused a ruckus, and slavery was intimately involved in the problems in Missouri and Kansas in the years before the war broke out. But Lincoln didn't issue the Emancipation Proclamation until 1862 after a major Union victory at Antietam, and then the declaration only applied to the states that had seceded, leaving slaves in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri still enslaved. According to an op-ed piece in the New York Times last weekend, Ulysses Grant, the great Union General, did not seek the abolition of slavery. Even though he thought the South's "peculiar institution" would be a casualty of the war, he was motivated more by the threat secession posed to "democratic republican government, of which Lincoln said...there was no "better or equal hope in the world.""

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So where does that leave us? Maybe it's a tragic oversimplification to say that the Civil War was fought over slavery or states' rights or interstate commerce. Perhaps these are manifestations of some larger questions. What if the War Between the States was fought in order to find out:

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1. How is our country put together? Where is the power? Where does it come from, and how do we share it?

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2. What if a state that joined the Union voluntarily by democratically ratifying the Constitution disagrees with the direction of public policy and/or no longer wants to be part of the Union?

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3. Who does our government protect? If power comes from the people, who are "the people"?

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4. How do we resolve our problems? Is there room in the Union for a very diverse set of interests and cultures?

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Perhaps by asking these questions of the past, we might understand better the tensions that

brought us to a civil war and the answers the war and Reconstruction provided. Maybe also these are questions we need to ask ourselves and our own political leaders as we face new tensions and new divisions in our modern, indivisible, one nation.

Judge in Memphis Grants Asylum to German Home Schoolers

This is an interesting case--for the article, click here:

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I read about the Romeike family in this week’s issue of Time Magazine, and today’s New York Times carried an article about how an immigration judge in Tennessee granted political asylum to this German family because they fear persecution in their home country. Why? They wish to home-school their children, which is illegal in Germany. Now, I’m surprised at this law simply because I know nothing about such policies in other countries, and I find this an interesting case because the family hails from the same German state where my penpal lives. As an American, I have known many people who were home-schooled for one reason or another, so the fact that this practice is not common or allowed in other countries definitely gives me a changed perspective on things. In conclusion, I have learned something about other societies that I did not know, making me a more informed citizen.

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Yet, the critical point here is that I am an American. The judge in the case is an American. In America, we have the right to educate our children however we want.

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But there’s another critical corollary to this discussion:

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NOT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD IS AMERICAN OR SHARES AMERICAN VALUES.

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The writer for the Times explains the judge’s ruling as follows: "In a harshly worded decision, the judge, Lawrence O. Burman, denounced the German policy, calling it “utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans,” and expressed shock at the heavy fines and other penalties the government has levied on home-schooling parents, including taking custody of their children."

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That would be fine. German laws (or the laws of any other country) can resonate poorly with us here in the US of A. It happens. But, the people in Berlin who made these laws are NOT Americans; they are Germans, and their legislators DO NOT answer to the American status quo when they make their laws. If they want to outlaw homeschooling, it’s their right. It’s our right to disagree. That’s why we make our own laws here. If the Romeike family wants to leave Germany and home-school their children someplace else (like the USA), that’s also their right. The judge’s ruling, however, is blatant cultural imperialism, and no judge in this country has the right to attempt to impose our values on other societies. We have enough trouble in this country dealing with debates over whether judges should or ever do inflict their perspectives on our own society (read: judicial activism) that we have no business criticizing the legitimate social policies of other nations. Hasn’t this gotten us in enough trouble already?