There's a whole list of "totally subtle but surprising things I've noticed since moving to Canada" in my head (did you know that kids' amoxicillan is BANANA flavored here? That's just wrong), but here's one that's particularly odd: the number of students I have whose last names begin with Mc or Mac is really high. Granted, across 110 students, there are only 6 of them, but that's three per class, and that's definitely, like, 4 more than I've ever had at a time. (I also spent a lot of time alphabetizing assignments, so I have to think about last names a lot.)

This made me wonder about relative ethnic makeup. I'm not surprised that I've got more students with obviously francophone last names in Canada than in the US (not least because I teach at a francophone/bilingual university, and a reasonable chunk of my students have French as their primary language), but the Mac/Mc thing is throwing me. Generally, when we think about the European-descended populations of the US and Canada, we tend to assume that they look similar. Do they really, in terms of country/ethnic group of origin?

So I went to Statistics Canada and the US Census Bureau's American FactFinder. FactFinder is great because you can get some pretty specific queries in there; I'm not as experienced at using StatCan for getting data, but I was able to get to ethnic breakdown fairly quickly.

Here's the tally: In the US, 35.7 million people said they had Irish ancestry, 4.2 million said they had Scotch-Irish ancestry, and 5.8 million said they had Scottish ancestry. The ancestry question allows for multiple answers, so we don't know if there's any overlap there. This means that 11.2% of the US population has some Irish heritage, 1.8% has some Scottish heritage, and 1.3% have some Scotch-Irish heritage. Now, obviously not every person with Scottish/Irish heritage has a last name starting with Mac/Mc (says an Irish-American named Regan*), but that gives us a potential universe.

For Canada, the stats are different. 4.7 million Canadians said they had Scottish origins, with 568,000 saying they had only Scottish origins; 4.3 million people said they had Irish origins, with 491,000 saying they had only Irish origins. (Canada doesn't have a Scotch-Irish category.) Now, these numbers are lower than the American ones, but it's important to remember that Canada has a population about 1/10 the size of the US population. So, of the entire population of Canada, 12.2% has at least some Irish heritage, and 13.3% has at least some Scottish heritage. The Irish number isn't much higher, but the Scottish is much higher. So the frequency of individuals with some Scottish or Irish heritage in Canada, as a whole, is likely higher in the US (caveat in place because overlap is always possible).

And, in fact, in Ontario (where the majority of my students are from), the situation is even stronger. There are 2.1 million Ontarians with some Scottish heritage, and 1.98 million with some Irish heritage. Ontario has about a third of Canada's population (the GTA alone has 1/6th, which is freaky), but still, this means that 15.5% of Ontario's population has Scottish origin, and 14.7% has some Irish heritage. In New York State, where I've done all my teaching, it's 1% Scottish, 12.5% Irish, and .3% Scotch-Irish; in Pennsylvania, where I'm from, the Irish proportion is about the same and the Scottish and Scotch-Irish are both equally low.

So, conclusions:

1. Yes, it is not surprising that I'm seeing more Mac/Mc names in my classes than I ever have before, because it's likely that a higher percentage of my students have some Irish and/or Scottish ancestry.
2. While the proportion of people with Irish ancestry in the US vs in Canada is fairly similar (a percentage point is usually inside the margin of error), the number of people with Scottish ancestry is much, much higher in Canada.
3. The ratio of Irish-to-Scottish in Canada is also much closer to 1:1 than it is in the US, where it's, what, 6:1? *does math* Yeah, 6:1 if you take only Scottish and don't count Scotch-Irish.

Without knowing anything, I'm going to guess this has something to do with the dynamics of Canada's relationship to the United Kingdom--whether this was about Irish non-immigration to Canada because of the UK relationship in the 1800s (before formal Irish independence from Britain) or high Scottish immigration to Canada (facilitated by the formal relationship), I can't guess. Of course, I'm sure there are also reasons to do with chain migration, and it wouldn't surprise me if there were immigration-law reasons as well. In other words, it's caused by stuff. (Anyone know the stuff?)

Now I really should start grading...



*Regan is the name of my more-Irish side of the family, which is also the only side of my family to have decent genealogy records**. I'm not terribly into genealogy, but I'm glad to know it when someone else has done the work...

**Fun fact: the only ancestor from Ireland whose entrance details I'm 100% sure...arrived in North American at Halifax, Nova Scotia, during the Famine. How she ended up in Glens Falls, New York is anybody's guess. Will that make naturalization easier, do you think?

This is a mantra I tell myself: not all students are like me. I remind myself of it a lot. Not all students are like me: therefore, I should not be surprised that they balk at being asked to read 150 pages a week. Not all students are like me: they may not be interested in doing extensive research papers, so I should make sure that they have opportunities to do different sorts of final projects that allow them to meet the educational goals I have for the class. Not all students are like me: they may not abhor the idea of group work, so I can provide opportunities for small group work in class and on projects. Not all students are like me: they may not feel comfortable speaking up in class, so I should provide alternative means of participation integrated into the classroom.

Some of this is temperament: I was a future professor, of course I'm different from my students who may not be the types to want to read and write and do research all day. Some of this is opportunity: I was living on campus and away from family, working no more than 15 hours a week, in a very traditional university environment; I'm neurotypical, I studied in my first language, and in an environment that was culturally matched to my experiences and identities. My students are not like me, and if I assume they're like me, I'll structure my courses in ways that don't do them justice and don't help them master the material.

I think I've learned this lesson, but then again something hits me about. This week it's this:

Why do my students want to do the reading so damn early????

I was always a "do homework the night before" type. I still am; the evening before I teach, you'll find me curled up on the couch prepping, and not a minute earlier than that. (Sometimes, if I'm very organized, I'll start prepping for Monday's class on Saturday evening.) I plan my schedule week-by-week, and usually day-by-day. One of my classes is scheduled Wednesday/Friday; I don't even think about it until Wednesday morning, unless I have grading to do.

Except my students all seem to want to do their homework so far in advance. When I hadn't uploaded the entire semester's worth of reading in the first week of class (because I had to find time to do all the necessary scanning), they started getting antsy. I get emails about the readings for Friday's class on Saturday (asking details about how to write their reaction papers). Students have been bugging me about this Friday's reading since last Friday (and I legitimately couldn't tell them what it would be, because I hadn't chosen it yet--we're doing topics they generated at midterm).

I can't really be mad, because they want to be responsible and on top of things. But it's very hard to remember that not all students are like me when they're asking me to do things differently than I want to do them.

Deep breath. Not all students are like me. Time to upload more readings.

Inspired by nanila and the Ten Hundred Words of Science tumblr, I wrote a description of my research interests using the Up-Goer 5 text editor:

I went to school to study how people live together and make their lives together good or bad. I wrote a book about how people from a far away place do this in the large city where I lived. I studied how they said things and had ideas about how to live together with people who are different. Sometimes people do not listen to what different people have to say about how they should live together and what is right. I wrote a book to talk about how to listen to each other better when we are different and like different things.

Now I work with people studying how the people who set things up make sure that all the people have the things they need, like houses and water and food. People have a right to these things that they need, but not all people who set things up write down that they have this right. I study how this works in the far away place where the people from my first book are from. The way that the people who set things up get money to set things up and the way that they have set things up to work makes different things happen with writing down the rights people have.

I am also studying people who move between the place where I live and the far away place talk about different things for how to set things up. I want to know how moving between these places changes their thoughts about what is good and what is bad in how their places should be set up.

Sometimes I am a teacher (but not right now). I talk with young people about how people set things up and how they have ideas about how to set things up. I want those young people to think hard about the right way to set things up, and how different ways to set things up hurt or help other people. I want them to know better when to say yes or no to ideas about how to set things up. I also want them to like to read and write and think about these things, because I like to read and write and think about these things, too!

I wasn't able to work out any way to explain the Middle East in the Up-Goer 5 lexicon, but I'm pretty satisfied with "people who set things up" as a substitute for "government," and "how people live together and make their lives together good or bad" for "political science." I couldn't use the word "rules." It was challenging.

Your turn!

I'm looking for people who use feminist ideas and feminist theory in their professional lives to talk to my feminist theory class--people who work in an area that is directly related to gender, women's issues, social transformation, or the feminist movement, or people who use a feminist/queer ethical base to drive their work. (And I'm open to any kind of feminism or critical encounter with gender as a social category--in fact, I'd like to hear from people who do things that don't match up neatly to contemporary mainstream American feminism.) Doesn't matter if you're not US-based. If you think this is you, and you'd be willing to record a five minute video for my students about what you do and how it interfaces with feminism, let me know, via PM, email, or comment here--I'd love to bring your voice to my class!

(For the record: it's an intro level feminist political theory class; we've read bell hooks on the feminist movement, Susan Moller Okin on justice and families, Fatima Mernissi on the public/private divide and Muslim social order, Wendy Brown on freedom and post-modernity, and Michael Warner on queer opposition to "normality" and alternate ethical visions. Most students haven't taken previous course work in women's/gender studies, or in political theory.)

My spring break began *checks watch* OK, technically it won't begin until my office hours are over, but that's not the point. SPRING BREAK, that's the point. Anyway, I wanted to share two things I did this week, because I thought they were both funny, and you might be amused. In both of my classes, students had papers due at the last class before spring break, and no reading assigned, so I decided we might as well enjoy ourselves (hopefully while learning something).

First, in intro to comparative politics, I played dress-up.



(description: a posterboard crown, reading "Lord High Sandalwhag of Khwollop, on my head)

If your first response is to tell me I spelled it wrong, a) yes, I know, but I listen to it on audiobook more than I read it and b) free pangalactic gargle blasters, on the house.

We were at the hinge point where we move from studying concepts of comparative politics to doing case studies, so I decided that clearly the best move was to dress up as the benevolent dictator of a fictional country, tell the class they were a consulting firm, distribute topics we'd discussed in class, and ask them to give me advice. For the record, Khwollop is an island archipelago off the coast of a continent, it has abundant agricultural resources, probably good mineral resources (undeveloped), and no modern educational system, it has three major religious groupings, and two major ethnic groups (one majority ethnic group with a religious split, and an ethnoreligious minority), and rule has historically been through the Sandalwhag, a hereditary position, who is advised by two bodies, a council of elders drawn from all three religions and a Sandalwhag's council made up of members of the majority religion. (If you have recognized this as fake!Indonesia, well, you're wrong; it's fake!Malaysia.)

The students had fun, both laughing at me for wearing a crown and advising me to build an army, develop domestic capacity so Khwollop won't be taken advantage of on the international economy, to build an elected parliament that assures representation from all ethnoreligious groups (possibly along the Westminster model), and to encourage economic development through education and robust social services. Under their guidance, I have great faith that Khwollop with grow peacefully and well.

As for my feminist political theory class, well, they met this morning, at 10AM on the Friday spring break starts, so we took it very easy. We watched Jane Austen's Fight Club (let me know if there are geographical restrictions on that, and I can find another link), Women's Suffrage Bad Romance, read a bunch of Feminist Ryan Goslin and Feminist Harry Potter, and talked about the feminist uses of parody. I think I may make the students come up with a feminist political theory macro project by the end of the semester...

If you've got a spring break coming up, or that's just ending, I hope it was/will be productive and pleasant! I've got two article revisions to finish, about sixty papers to grade, and hopefully some lovely weather to play with my kid in. Sounds like it's gonna be awesome.

[Details hopefully made abstract enough]

A student in your class says something, without intending malice, that drastically misrepresents the experience of an oppressed group of people they are not a member of, and is pretty clearly false on examination of the content of it. This statement is kind of incidental to a larger comment. (Not the example, but: "Now that gay marriage is legal, there is no discrimination against gay people; therefore, we should focus on migrants' rights, because they are really important" in the context of a conversation about migrants' rights.)

A member of the oppressed group, who has never previously spoken in class, gets a did you really say that absurdly stupid thing look on hir face, and looks directly at the professor, as if to say did I hear that right? Is zie for real?

As the professor, do you:

A) Call on the student making the face, and ask hir, "What do you think of what was just said?" and allow them to make the argument against it.
B) Let it slide, since it's tangential, and go after the main point of the argument.
C) Say something noncombative that manages to convey that the absurdly wrong thing is not true, but tries to salvage the student's point.
D) Tell the student directly that "whoa, that was a really awful thing you said, how can you believe that?"
E) Hope a student raises hir hand to tell the first student "whoa, that was a really awful thing you said, how can you believe that?"

***

I went with option C, for a variety of reasons. First, option B strikes me as the wrongest possible choice; it would tell the student making the face that the professor is not hir ally, and would allow the offensive thing to exist in the classroom as if it were true, and option E is close, since it, again, says I'm not an ally, and also runs the risk of turning into B when no one raises a hand. So the choice is A, C, or D. Option D might work for some people (I have a colleague who yells at her students when they say racist things, which, since she teaches about race, is a lot), but it's not my style; I'm not a confrontational personality. There's also the fact that I prioritize getting students comfortable with expressing opinions in my class, and being able to make arguments about our subject matter. I want them to be comfortable going out on a limb and trying to say something when they don't get the whole concept. I also want to be able to show them that, even if what they say is kind of incoherent, there's an argument or an idea within it that can be extracted.

Option A, on the other hand, would focus on getting the student making the face in a position to be able to say "what you said, it isn't true, and here's why," which is a valuable tactic and skill for someone wanting to argue back against sedimented power structures. But it would have forced hir to do it, without volunteering. It also would have said, "You, person in group X: explain the group X position on this issue." I, on the other hand, am again the ally here, and I do think that's important to show students.

So, I went with C, in the hopes of both letting the student who said the thing know that there was an idea worth salvaging in it, and in letting the student making the face know that zie wasn't alone. "Now, it's not actually true that discrimination against LGBT people has gone away, but you're saying that, if it's possible to change laws so that LGBT people get rights that had been denied to them, then we should be able to change laws to get migrants rights as well." The student who had made the face nodded vigorously, and I smiled at hir in a way that intended to say I know, can you believe it? Some people are clueless.

I'm reasonably sure that option C was the right choice for me, but I'm curious what others would have done--or if there are other options I didn't see here.

I don't know which I find more upsetting: this long list of tweets and Facebook statuses announcing that Kids These Days (tm) don't know who Paul McCartney is, or this long list of tweets wherein people announce how much they'd like to be brutally physically abused by a famous r&b singer. I mean, the latter is much, much wronger, but I actually expect people to have totally awful thought processes about domestic violence. Whereas I assume they know who the goddamn Beatles are.

***

One of the things I love about teaching is the moment when your students think things totally orthogonal to what you think, and it opens up a new train of thought. We were talking about long distance nationalism, also sometimes called transnational migration, with my seminar students. Now, long distance nationalism is crucial to a lot of my research on diaspora communities and their politics--but my students are now working through this idea, and they had all sorts of interesting objections to the concept, particularly its normative foundations. I still think that diaspora political engagement is both natural and politically useful, but it was still great to work with them through their ideas. tl;dr teaching is fun.

***

Dean Dad reported that Arizona is considering two bills, one of which would effectively demand affirmative action for conservatives in higher ed hiring, and the other of which would mandate the use of "G-rated" language. Dead Dad spends most of his time taking apart the absurdity of the first, but I found myself more caught up with the idea of the second. Partially this is because I'm someone who uses YouTube videos of Eddie Izzard routines to teach world politics ("Hitler never played RISK as a kid" is an incredibly useful teaching tool). Partially because I see in this an attack on gender studies, among the many things this could be an attack on: I definitely said the word vagina on the first day of my feminist political theory class. Probably a few times. Not to mention that explaining the sex/gender dichotomy without being able to say the word sex would be, you know, hard.

***

I have discovered a circle of hell Dante could not have anticipated: translating tweets. Seriously, you've got 140 characters, nonstandard syntax and spelling, use of colloquialisms, huge variation in transliteration techniques when they've been transliterated, and, of course, frequent typos. (It took me literally fifteen minutes to figure out that تسعمية was تسع مية, which is a difference of precisely one space. And I only got it because of context.) The amount of time I have spent sorting through these lately has both given me a headache, and reminded me how much I like translating. In small doses, at least.

***

I should have something to say about Syria. I don't. Because sometimes thing are just so horrible that there's nothing to say.

I was talking to someone about my fall course recently. Like many end-stage graduate students, I am currently more than a little burned out, especially when contemplating the potent mix of dissertation-completing, teaching, and job-hunting that will be consuming my life for the next, oh, six to nine months. "The nice thing," I said about my fall class, "is that, if I run out of time for prep, I can pretty much stand up in front of the class and bullshit about gender and politics in the Middle East [the title of the class] for 110 minutes without any problem."

"It's not bullshit," my interlocutor said. "It's that you actually know what you're talking about."

***

Over my recent vacation, my father expressed interest in my dissertation. I offered to let him read a chapter (well, a part of a chapter that I just article-ized) on my Kindle, and handed it over. He handed it back, with six pages of hand-written typo corrections and suggestions for cleaning up the language, and then we sat down to talk about the infuriating Hannah Arendt quote I used as my epigraph. (I chose it because, in the context of my chapter, it is so obviously wrong it makes one want to scream.) I started going off on Arendt's particular use of the notion of the political, and how her position is fundamentally insupportable, just ranting, really, and, behind me, I heard my twelve year old nephew ask my wife if I always talk like this. "Just when she's teaching," my wife said. "That's her teacher voice."

***

Some people worry about turning into their mothers; Lord knows I do. But I realized recently that I'm turning into my professors. In fact, a friend pointed out that my current styling in the classroom is deeply reminiscent of one of my favorite instructors in college, a recent PhD who hung around for a year teaching, and on whom I had a massive, massive crush. (Hey! She was hot and butch and spoke more than one Southeast Asian language! I was helpless!)

I realize now I'm only a year behind where she was.

I wonder if, when she sat at the head of that round seminar table and waved her hands around, she was as terrified as I am every time I walk into the classroom.

I wonder if every argument she made, she was worried that there was someone in the room who would call her on it, would take her down for it.

I wonder if the obvious fangirling of her that I and some of my friends did gave her the same sort of warm fuzzy feeling that I get every time one of my students friends me on Facebook.

I wonder if the reason she so vigorously kept things (like her political affiliations, and her queerness) as far away from the classroom as she did (much to my frustration) was because it was another sort of danger.

I wonder if she had to fight the desire to smile every time we called her professor, because, God, I'm the professor now.

***

How do we decide when we are bullshitting, and when we are experts? This is the moment when impostor syndrome is at its most powerful, when we are totally unsure whether this thing we do is a fluke or because we really have mastered the material we've covered. Once you're at this stage, there isn't anybody left to give you clear marks on your work, to tell you that you're doing it right or wrong. I don't know if I'm an A student anymore; there are no more As, and that is a terrifying revelation, isn't it?

So the only thing to do is go forward. Put your head up. Send your articles to journals and pretend like doing so doesn't make you want to cry. Don't show weakness, because students are sharks and blood in the water is a scary, scary thing. Wear your sternest suit and make sure you've got things planned out. And know that every time you cross that threshold, it's not the students you have to prove your worth to; most of them have assumed it, because your name was next to the course title.

It's you. You need to know you deserve it. You need to prove it to yourself.

As a teacher, I'm always struggling to figure out good assignments that will cause my students to think, engage with the material, explore their own interests, and, hopefully, present me with papers that won't bore me out of my goddamned skull while I'm reading them. (In case you didn't know, most professors consider grading the single most awful thing we do for our paychecks. I don't know, I think scanning articles for uploading is worse; occasionally papers are interesting.)

This semester, I gave my students an annotated bibliography assignment. Twice during the semester, they have to find 10 sources having to do with Middle Eastern diasporic communities, write a properly-formatted bibliographic entry for them, and then a short paragraph about how the material relates to class. A source could be anything--an event, a blog post, a YouTube video, a book.

I got a huge number of interesting sources from the students in their first round of assignments. From my perspective, this assignment worked--the students learned (mostly) how to use Chicago style to cite sources (a big problem in my previous classes), they read and watched other interesting things about Middle Eastern diasporas, and now I have a bunch of cool recommendations to read for later. I'll have to ask the students if they liked it, but this one might be a keeper for future classes.

(Incidentally, my attempt to do response papers was a total failure, as most of the class simply hasn't turned them in. Folks who are/were in American universities and colleges as undergrads: are several short response papers (2-3 pages) a part of your experience of humanities and social science classes? What types? I'm mystified by the fact that my students don't seem to understand that they have to do them.)

Here are some of the highlights from the assignment. From my students' computers to yours!

( graphic novels, interviews, and YouTube videos )