Ansel Adams Manzanar Photos at Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

Ansel Adams photo at Bainbridge Island Historical Museum

 We stopped at the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum because I saw poster saying there was an exhibit of Ansel Adams photographs of Manzanar - one of the internment camps for West Coast Japanese Americans during WW II.  My first awareness of the these camps came in the 6th grade when I moved to a new school and there was a Japanese girl in my class who had been born in a camp.

All the pictures originally were in a book published in 1944.  Copies of a newer addition were on sale in the museum.










A poster on the wall explains that Adams, living in Yosemite in WW II, was visited by an old friend, the director of Manzanar, who invited Adams to come photograph the camp.   Then:

You can read Ansel Adam's book, Born Free and Equal online from the Library of Congress.  Page five has the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.  Then this statement follows:

. . . . As a nation we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.”  We now practically read it “all men are created equal except Negroes.”  When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.”  When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty. . . . where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base allow of hypocrisy.

Watching the Video

Pretty strong statement, but the references to the Know-Nothings means this probably isn't Ansel Adams writing.  Turns out it was written in a 1855 letter from Abraham Lincoln to John Speed.  

We watched a 15 minute (or so) video about Manzanar.  There are a number of videos on Manzanar online, but I couldn't find the one we saw.  I chose this one because it connected the events of WW II with today.  It's the story of Muslim-Americans visiting Manzanar in 2008 and learning about what happened from Japanese-Americans who had been interned there.  Some of the footage was in the film we saw. 

Two Married Kids Now

On a beautiful sunny day, with cranes and eagles and geese and Mt. Ranier in the background my daughter got married.  It's a momentous day and it was good to have our family together, including my mom. 

"Religious-economic idealism is the belief that the free-market works because God is guiding it"

Paul Froese, in a Religion and Politics article, "How Your View of God Shapes Your View of the Economy" argues that the thesis of Thomas Frank's book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? is false.

Frank championed the narrative that working-class Americans vote against their economic interests, having been lured into the GOP tent largely with what he sees as insincere religious rhetoric. “The people at the top know what they have to do to stay there,” writes Frank, “and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.”

Instead, Froese, writes that there is no dichotomy between the economic and cultural interests of many Republicans.

 " . . . approximately 31 percent of Americans, many of whom are white evangelical men, believe that God is steering the United States economy, thus fusing their religious and economic interests. These individuals believe in what I call an “Authoritative God.” An Authoritative God is thought to be actively engaged in daily activities and historical outcomes. For those with an Authoritative God, value concerns are synonymous with economic concerns because God has a guiding hand in both. Around two-thirds of believers in an Authoritative God conjoin their theology with free-market economics, creating a new religious-economic idealism. Nearly one-fifth of American voters hold this viewpoint, signaling that it can be a major political force.

Religious-economic idealism is the belief that the free-market works because God is guiding it. (Its adherents are, of course, not your typical laissez-faire, Ayn Rand devotees.) The popularity of this ideology explains two supposed paradoxes. First, it indicates why some religious working-class Americans have embraced the GOP. It is not that these individuals ignore their class interests, but rather that they believe issues of abortion and gay marriage are linked to whether God is willing to help solve both social ills and their economic woes.

Second, the fact that income does not predict whether an American believes in an Authoritative God indicates that this is not a class-based ideology. Instead, it is a cosmic worldview, which appeals across economic divides. Most clearly, it benefits the wealthy because conservative economic policies tend to favor them. But wealthy Americans with an Authoritative God can also have a religious-like devotion to their economic conservatism. In this way, their economic pragmatism transforms into a type of religious dogmatism. And dogmatism does not bend to changing circumstances and outcomes, so that we can expect believers in religious-economic idealism to cling to laissez-faire policies even when they appear not to work.

It's an interesting explanation worth thinking about.  Thanks to J1 for the link. Here's Froese's whole article.

Another Anchorage-Seattle Flight

We flew to Seattle Monday.  Wednesday my baby gets married.  It's a very small family event.  But I'm supposed to keep family matters to a minimum here, so let's leave it at that.  There was rare thunder Sunday night and the big clouds were still hanging around when we left, but it was sunny and warm (pushing 70˚F). 

 There was a recent issue in Anchorage about the airport wanting to swap part of the coastal trail for some other land.  But from up here across the inlet, you can see how much land the airport already takes.  It's that gray blob in the center right.  It would be interesting to figure out how many times downtown or the university are would fit inside the airport land. 

For a few minutes clouds blocked the Chugach, then it was just snowy peaks and puffy clouds.  That's Turnagain Arm in the upper left.

The non-snowy land is Girdwood valley, again with Turnagain Arm in the background.

This is the east end of Prince William Sound, Whittier is at the end of the lower arm, if I had my bearings right.   And soon enough it was mostly cloudy and read and snoozed.

There were breaks in the clouds and here we're crossing back into the US from Canada. 

Seattle was covered in thick clouds.

William Cruz Wants You To Vote

William Cruz, in the video below, says he set a goal to register 100 new voters.  Since we did the video last Friday, he says he's gotten six so far.

This is a democracy, and William and I agree on the point that voting is important.  If you don't vote, you've given up.  Many argue that there are no good choices.  I would argue that when we are down to two candidates, there's generally a better and worse candidate.  But I'll acknowledge that the current system sets up all candidates to be in debt to the people who fund their campaigns.   And so they are required to be polite and responsive to those who pay.  And to spend an obscene amount of time raising money instead of legislating or governing.  The Citizens United case is making money even more important.

But the fact of the matter is that a democracy doesn't work if people aren't involved.  Our last Municipal election, 65% of eligible voters didn't vote.

Say there's a storm coming and your house might get flooded.  You can get things out or move them upstairs.  You can put up sandbags.  It won't be easy. You can work your tail off attempting to save your house or you can just give it up and say it's impossible.

Giving up on democracy is a pretty radical concession. But we are facing a flood.  The current Supreme Court has made some critical decisions, starting with Bush v. Gore and including Citizens United. If the next Supreme Court justice is of the same ideology as the Citizens United majority, our chances at saving Democracy get even slimmer.*  If we keep electing enough people who vote to protect the 1%, life in the US is going to get grittier and grittier for the other 99%.

If the candidates aren't any good, then it behooves people to make sure good candidates run.  Voting is important, but we also have to get good candidates on the ballot and help make sure they get elected.  We simply have no choice but to be involved unless we just give over our governments (the various local, state, and the federal governments) to those with deep, deep pockets.   Our job is a lot easier than it was for individuals to fight the Nazis or to help slaves escape from the South or to demand change in Egypt*.  It involves investing time and money in good candidates.

We aren't risking our lives. Or even giving up much of what we have. At least not yet. OK, that's my soapbox for today.  Here's William's story.  The last minute or two is in Spanish.




 I should disclose that William took two classes from me a six or seven years ago and that he did invite me to do this video. We did a couple of questions more than once and I picked what I thought would best tell his story.

*OK, I know that these statements sound fairly absolute but I recognize that the scourge of many right wing politicians - the ACLU - was on the winning side of Citizens United, so it's more complicated.  The idea of corporate personhood is not something the court created.  The change in Egypt is not necessarily going to be for the better.  So, I'm letting you know that I know down here.

How Do You Know?

I've been reading Jeffrey L. Buller's The Essential College Professor, as I'm thinking about this mentoring program for new faculty.  I thought I'd pass on some ideas from the chapter on Assessing Student Learning. This is probably the hardest and most time consuming (if done well) activity of teaching.  While for some this is well known, I'm sure there are those for whom this is new or needs refreshing.

Buller points out that you have to know what your learning goals are for the students before you can assess them.  And as part of this discussion he identifies different ways people have described 'knowing.'

Column 1Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning and Knowing Processes (1956) Knowledge Comprehension Application Analysis Synthesis Evaluation

Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences (1983) Musical Bodily-Kinesthetic Logical-mathematical intelligence Linguistic intelligence Spatial intelligence Interpersonal intelligence Intrapersonal intelligence PLUS (2003) Naturalist intelligence Spiritual intelligence

Anderson and Krathwohl’s Respose to Bloom (2001) 6 Cognitive processes Remembering:  Recognizing, recalling, and retrieving relevant knowledge from long-term memory Understanding Applying Analyzing Evaluating Creating 4 Kinds of knowledge Factual knowledge Conceptual Procedural Metacognitive The links will give you more information on each model.

Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning Foundational Knowledge.  Understanding and remembering: information ideas Application.  Utilizing skills thinking  - critical, creative, practical managing projects Integration.  Connecting: ideas people realms of life Human dimension.  Learning about: oneself others Caring.  Developing new: feelings Interests values Learning how to learn by: becoming a better student inquiring about a subject improving as a self-directed learner

HTML Tables

It's useful to recognize that there are different ways of 'knowing' and different kinds of intelligence. Mostly college grades focus on logical-mathematical intelligence, but as Gardner points out, there are other kinds of intelligence that are important.

The chapter doesn't really tell us how to apply these models to construct class goals and to assess student work except in the most general way.  It does highlight an important thought on teaching:

Truly effective instruction is not measured by how much college professors teach, but by how much college students learn.

That ought to be posted above every college professor's desk. 

Blooming in the Yard

Don't be fooled. Our yard looks much nicer here. where I can focus where you look, than it does in real life

Iris

Himalayan Blue Poppy

Chocolate Lilies

 

This one is new this year and I can't find the tag that tells me what it is, but I like it.

Lamium

 I tried to find where I posted this once before and a reader identified it.  But I couldn't.  Anyone know?

Flax

The flax are about dime sized and they come up each year on delicate stems that sway in the gentlest breeze and make it hard to capture in the camera.

Daisy and friend

Phlox (not to be confused with the flax above)

I also filtered some of last year's compost to get rid of the bigger twigs and roots and added this to the top soil I put into the side of the garage where I added that insulation last fall.

Citizen Group on Election Meeting Now with Assembly Attorney

I'm at the City Hall listening in a a meeting between the Citizens Group that ponied up the $1500 to pay for the recount of 15 precincts from the April Municipal election.

This post is being written on the fly.  So bear with they typos.  Plus I got to this meeting late because I had a previous meeting so I might have missed something that happened before I go here.  The meeting is still going on. 

People here include  most of the Citizens Group folks,  the Assembly attorney Julia Tucker, the Municipal Clerk-to-be Barb Jones, and two other employees of the clerk’s office who have worked on elections, and two Assembly members - Harriet Drummond and Dick Traini - and a representative of the ACLU.  








The citizens group presented a 110 page report of concerns and recommendations to make future municipal elections more secure.

It will be interesting to compare this report created by volunteers who paid, as a group, $1500 to have the election recounted, to the official report the Muni is paying up to $30,000 for.  I understand the two reports aren't reviewing exactly the same thing.  

There were six different topics identified in newsprint on the wall:

1.  Accuvote issues


2.  Protocols for
    a.  recount
    b.  ballot accountability
    c.  Precinct stamp to track ballots and questioned ballots by precinct
    d.  determining # of ballots by precinct
    e.  Training
    f.   procedure for hand count






3.  Title 28
    a.  ballot accountability report
    b.   determining # of ballots by precinct
    c.   Election worker/trouble shooter training
    d.   28.50.090  suspect qualifications
    e.   % of precincts that should be counted by hand
    f.    Recount - absentee and Questioned ballots 
          28.90.040C  needs to conform and make sense with the code
                 clarify “separate precinct” when they are pooled
4.  Questioned Ballots
    a.  to be counted by precinct or race
    b.  if precinct, then machine count or hand count?
    c.  what is NOT a questioned ballot?
    d.  numbering questioned ballots envelops
    e.  if by precinct, then
        1.  where voted
        2.  where actually reside

5.  Value Issues
    a.  Security, space, organization
    b.  Ballot bag review
    c.  Public observers/Tech for machine programming
    d.  Ballots should be numbered/ not stub only

I must say that the tone in this room is very open and people are listening to each other and asking serious questions about the problems being raised and how to resolve them in the future.   I've got some video which is not comprehensive, but which does give a sense of the tone of the meeting.

How Creatively Do You Lose Things? Disappearing In Plain Sight

I think I should get a prize for how well I lost this punch card to the Spenard Jazz Festival.  We came home from the poetry night.  I knew I'd put the card in my shirt pocket.  But the next day I couldn't find it.  I called the Organic Oasis to see if anyone had found the card.  No.  It wasn't in the car.  Not on my desk.  Not in the cubby hole I put things from my pockets. I couldn't find it anywhere in the house.  We at least got two punches used up of the five.   When I finally find things, I usually try to note where they were, so that I have a list of places where to look for, say, the keys, or other items that I can't find.  So, this is a note for all of you.  A place where a small card can disappear in plain sight. 

Yesterday I was sitting on the bottom stair putting on shoes.  Now look at this picture and see if you can find the punch card. 

You can see (above) why I couldn't find the card.  But let's look a little closer - which I was able to do when I was putting on my shoes.

All I can imagine is that I pulled the various pieces of paper out of my shirt pocket at the stairs and the card somehow flew out and, against the odds,  got caught in the molding.  There are a lot of things that I misplace, and fret that I should have been paying better attention.  I feel no guilt over this one.  It was just a freak event.  Now, if the card had slipped in there facing the other way around, I would have found it easily as you can see in the next picture.

I'll just have to chalk this up as a donation to a non-profit that does a lot with very little.

[UPDATE 10:00am:  In the comments, Barbara says she's reminded of Beethoven's Rage Over a Lost Penny, Vented in a Caprice.  So, here, via Fledermaus1990's Youtube you can vent over whatever you've lost today.





In an untitled piece in Notes (June 1950) retrieved through JSTOR, Jacob Avshalomoff writes that Rage over the Lost Penny, Vented in a Caprice is 

“a title made up by the first publisher, Diabelli, when he issued the work posthumously in 1828 from the same manuscript used by Dr. Hertzmann.”  

He goes on to say that Dr. Hertzmann’s edition after the manuscript resurfaced in 1945 is far superior to the Diabelli edition.  He also tells us more about the piece itself:

Dr. Hertzmann demonstrates quite convincingly that the piece was not a late work, but was probably sketched by Beethoven between 1795 and 1798.  He thinks that Beethoven did this as some preparatory “homework” for his frequent public demonstrations of ‘improvisation,” and that this is why the composer did not finish up the piece and have it published.”

Thanks Barbara for the tip here.

What New Faculty Need . . .

First, each new faculty member is unique, so each will have different needs, but I think they all need a support system of other good local faculty across disciplines and they all need ways to make the best use of the time they have.   They'll need some straight talk on how the tenure and promotion system works and how they can best prepare.  And an introduction to this campus and to Anchorage and Alaska.  Beyond that, some will want help with teaching issues and others with research issues. 

I met with some folks at UAA yesterday to talk about setting up an informal group of new faculty for the fall semester.  As someone who has taught for many years here, it seemed like something I could do.  I used to go to the new faculty reception and look for the most interesting new scholars and get a small group together at lunch.  It gave them a chance to meet people in other fields and me a chance to connect with interesting new scholars.   I went to the library after the meeting and pulled out some books just to see what others are saying on this topic.

The black book on the bottom was a nasty piece of work.  Anonymous - he said he had to be anonymous so he wouldn't lose his job - trashes everything about universities.  The faculty don't do any work, the students don't either, and the administrators are former faculty who couldn't teach or do research.  If it really was a faculty member, he would have been the kind he was complaining about.  But if it really was a faculty member, then the reason he had to be anonymous was because the book was so bad, no documentation, and totally unbalanced.  The tone starts off with a dedication to Hubert Humphrey:

"who, AFTER LOSING IN 1968, BECAME A PROFESSOR - AND THEREBY PROVED THE CORRECTNESS OF MY VOTE FOR RICHARD NIXON"

That's probably the most objective part of the book.   It was published in 1972.  The publisher, according to Wikipedia, 

Arlington House, Inc., (dba as Arlington House Publishers), now-defunct, was an American book publisher of jazz discographies, as well as conservative and anti-communist titles.

This book seems to be part of the early anti-public university movement.

I could tell you lots of things wrong with universities - but for the most part, faculty work incredibly hard.  Yes there are those who abuse the system, but the others more than make up for them.  So, I've got to write up a little more on this project.  If we can make it work, maybe next year we can bring in some other retired faculty to work with more faculty.  The other books have more useful content. 

When I first came here, all the faculty were pretty much in one building and people in different disciplines had offices near by and we all went to the faculty senate meetings.  But nowadays, it's harder for new faculty to find the people they ought to know in other fields.