How do you spell burlesque?

The Globe covers the strip spelling bee phenomenon. Pshaw. Just another Saturday night home alone at my place.

A slightly more cerebral variant on burlesque, Tjia’s Strip Spelling Bee began in Montreal in March of last year. Although it attracted immediate attention, Tjia says it took a few attempts to “work in the kinks” and tweak the pacing. After its Buddies debut last week, Strip Spelling Bee joins Slowdance Night on the list of events that he has successfully imported to Toronto.

“I didn’t expect that so many participants would get completely naked,” says Tjia, a medical illustrator and graphic novelist who enjoys creating quirky events for quirky hipsters in his spare time. Contestants get to decide if they want to keep their underwear on or not, and a strict no-booing policy and ban on audience photography help to generate a safe and inclusive atmosphere

SFU supports open access publishing

Simon Fraser University is officially supporting its researchers publishing in open access journals that are free online. Does this mean people will actually start reading academic journals? Probably not. But at least we can if we want to!

Canadian writers in (digital) person

Thanks to Open Book Toronto for pointing out the Canadian Writers in Person archive, videos of notable Canuck writers reading at York U. There’s some great stuff here. Where was this kind of thing when I was in university?

Canadian Literature magazine offers free downloads

Canadian Literature has made issues 1-100 available as free, downloadable PDFs. This is no doubt handy for scholars both inside and outside Canada.

Overheard at McGill

Oh my — does every university have one of these sites?

Girl: Right before he passed out in the hall he peed on your door.
Boy: There’s only one way to solve this; I’m peeing on his door.
-Molson

Which book would you add to the high-school curriculum?

The Post is asking Canadian authors what book they would add to the high-school curriculum and why. The feature kicks off today with Andrew Pyper.

Personally, I think the way to get the young ‘uns reading is to tie the books into a broader social event. After all, the popularity of the Harry Potter books isn’t a literary phenomenon, it’s a social phenomenon (sorry, publishers). That’s why I’d pick Max Brooks’ World War Z. It’s got the zombie trend, and it’s gonna be a major film with big stars — possibly even Brad Pitts. Oh yes, and there’s all sorts of things in the book about viruses and body changes and other timely stuff for high schoolers. Look, they’re even making fake trailers for the film already, using other blockbusters:

Rob Sawyer’s Flash Forward could be a possibility too, given its TV adaptation, but it’s hard to say with the speed they’re cancelling TV shows these days.

U of T’s flat fees are outrageous

The University of Toronto is introducing “flat fees” for tuition in arts and sciences. This means students will be charged tuition for a full-time course load even if they aren’t taking five courses.

Tomorrow, the governing council is expected to approve replacing per-course tuition with a flat fee for full-time arts-and-science undergraduates at U of T’s main campus.

It could mean a $10 million boost for the university. But for incoming students, who will have to pay $5,000 for as little as $3,000 worth of courses, it is not such a good deal.

Some students choose to take less than a full course load so they can work part-time to pay for school. Others, who struggle academically, choose to take fewer courses so they can keep their grades up.

I was one of those people who worked part-time to pay for school, at least for the first few years. Having to pay full-time tuition would either have a) discouraged me from attending university at all or b) forced me to not work and take a full-time course load, thus increasing my student loan debt. This move really screws poor people, or people with family/life obligations that make it difficult to attend school full-time (single moms, anyone?).

Well, at least U of T is making it clear it sees itself as a business first and an education institution second.

“Mi’gmawei Mawio’mi: Goqwei Wejguaqamultigw?”

This Magazine reports on the first PhD dissertation in Mi’kmaq.

This June, York University student Fred Metallic hopes to make a bit of Canadian university history. That’s when he plans to complete the first draft of his PhD dissertation, tentatively titled “Mi’gmawei Mawio’mi: Goqwei Wejguaqamultigw?” (The English working title is “Reclaiming Mi’kmaq History and Politics: Living our Responsibilities.”) Written entirely in Mi’kmaq, it will be the first PhD dissertation in Canada completed in an aboriginal language without translation.

Globe readers split on tenure

I checked back on that Globe poll about whether tenure should be ended at universities and found it’s still tied at 3,530 for axing tenure and 3,511 for preserving it. Somebody should form a committee.

Concordia reinstates Facebook

Students’ grades set to drop.

On a separate note, I’ve been wondering how long it will be before some enterprising student combines Facebook with RateMyProfessor.com to launch RateMyStatusUpdate.com. It would be good to be able to research those friend requests before you commit.

Should tenure be retired?

The Globe is running a poll asking whether tenure should be ended at universities. The votes are pretty close at this point — it’s a 50/50 split. Presumably it’s inspired by this NY Times opinion piece, which has been making the rounds online and generating a lot of discussion.

Only three poets in Canada? Pity.

The Poetry Foundation thinks we have only three poets. I thought we had at least 30.

Students of mediocrity? Or prof of mediocrity?

J-Source points to a couple of columns in the Ottawa Citizen by journalism profs. The first, Students of mediocrity, by Andrew Cohen, criticizes today’s students for being lazy and having a “lack of intellectual depth.”

In the age of instant gratification, the Web is king. It’s not unusual to assign essays and find no books listed in the bibliography. Many students use Wikipedia alone and don’t hide it; they consider it the first and last word in research, just a click away.

In class discussion, which is usually animated, it is striking how few students mention an argument, an event, or a book. Their knowledge is superficial, and their view is often impressionistic. It is “I feel” rather than “he thinks.”

Of course, they always know what they feel, but less often, what an expert thinks. The student is the authority.

Curiously, Cohen opens his column with one of those legendary stories about a crazy exam scenario told to him by a colleague, but doesn’t seem interested in finding out if it’s true or not.

The second column, It’s what students can do when they leave us that counts, by Dave Tait, says the kids are all right. He also tracks down the truth behind the exam story.

True, many students come here with a shaky grounding in fine points of grammar and many haven’t yet learned to proofread carefully — or why it’s so important. This is actually one big reason we exist — it isn’t just to make sophisticated conversation about ideas; it’s to teach. This includes teaching basic skills to otherwise smart folks who, for whatever reason, haven’t learned them yet.

That’s why it’s so important in a professional program for teachers to work closely with students, use up every available moment of teaching time, mark assignments themselves instead of passing them off to teaching assistants, and make extended one-on-one conversation outside of class an integral part of the student experience.

My concern as a teacher isn’t what my students can do as they come into my hands; it’s what they’ll be able to do once they leave me.

Denis Rancourt on The Agenda

Steve Paikin talks to Denis Rancourt, the University of Ottawa professor who was recently fired for grading irregularities. Rancourt apparently gave students in one of his classes A+ grades in an effort to remove their anxieties about passing and encourage them instead to pursue independent, critical thought.

Previously:

• Professor getting the axe for giving everyone A+ grades
• Academic freedom or serial irresponsibility?

University of PEI to study why people sing

The project will try to answer such questions as why boys don’t sing more, what the health benefits of singing may be, and whether American Idol is the first new virus of the 21st century.

UPEI music professor June Countryman is one of the 70 people taking part in the Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing, or AIRS, study. Countryman sees singing as innate, and will focus her attention on why some people, such as boys, don’t sing more.

“We don’t have the answer yet,” Countryman told CBC News Friday.

“Being able to look at it from the point of view of music cognition, and neuroscience, and cultural anthropology, all of these different fields, I think we’re going to come to much deeper, richer understandings.”

CUPE calls for academic boycott of Israel

Which means the union has backed away from its previous call to ban Israeli academics from Canadian universities.

The committee, which represents the union’s university workers, called on the union to develop an education campaign on what its proponents label Israel’s “apartheid” practices, such as building a wall around Palestinian territory and invading the Gaza Strip in December; asks the union to back an international campaign of sanctions and boycotts against the country and asks the national union to start researching Canadian connections to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Scholastic controversy on Q

George Murray of Bookninja infamy spoke to Q about the Scholastic Book Club marketing games and toys to kids in schools (audio link).

Academic freedom or serial irresponsibility?

Over at the New York Times, Stanley Fish weighs in on the case of Ottawa physic professor/activist Denis Rancourt.

It is this belief that higher education as we know it is simply a delivery system for a regime of oppressors and exploiters that underlies Rancourt’s refusal to grade his students. Grading, he says, “is a tool of coercion in order to make obedient people” (rabble.ca., Jan. 12, 2009).

It turns out that another tool of coercion is the requirement that professors actually teach the course described in the college catalogue, the course students think they are signing up for. Rancourt battles against this form of coercion by employing a strategy he calls “squatting” – “where one openly takes an existing course and does with it something different.” That is, you take a currently unoccupied structure, move in and make it the home for whatever activities you wish to engage in. “Academic squatting is needed,” he says, “because universities are dictatorships . . . run by self-appointed executives who serve capital interests.”

Previously:

• Professor getting the axe for giving everyone A+ grades

Professor getting the axe for giving everyone A+ grades

Zach Wells points to the Globe story about Ottawa physics professor Denis Rancourt, who’s been suspended and is facing dismissal because of his teaching methodology: everyone gets an A+ so they can be liberated from the pressure of evaluation and learn to think for themselves. Or maybe he’s getting fired for his activism. Hard to say. The comments thread is pretty lively. Here’s his RateMyProfessor page.

I’ve heard of profs doing this before, but it usually originates out of laziness rather than pedagogy (“I’ll give you all an A+ if I don’t have to read your papers”).

York U strike is over

Students will head back to school Monday.

The strike has kept 50,000 students out of class since Nov. 6. The legislation received third and final reading after Liberal and Progressive Conservative members voted in favour of it. It was opposed by members of the New Democratic Party. But with only 10 NDP members in the legislature, the legislation easily passed at 10:32 on Friday.

The McGuinty government introduced back-to-work legislation last Sunday during an emergency sitting of the legislature. Premier Dalton McGuinty said he had no choice but to intervene after talks broke down between York management and the union representing 3,300 teaching assistants and contract faculty.