19 thoughts on “Bigger Soap Box”

  1. My article, “Soviet Apartheid: Stalin’s Ethnic Deportations, Special Settlement Restrictions, and the Labor Army: The Case of the Ethnic Germans in the USSR” will be coming out in print in Human Rights Review soon. The electronic version is already available online at SpringerLink. The abstract can be found at various places including the url below.
    http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2012/01/abstract-for-soviet-apartheid-article.html
    If you want an electronic copy of the article, but do not have access to SpringerLink send me an e-mail at j.ottopohl [the at sign] gmail [the dot] com. Or you can email me at my university address which is listed on the information provided on the article by Springer on their website.

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  2. There was no math. I don’t remember how to read articles without a table giving a p values and the like.

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  3. Thanks J. Otto. I should have been more specific. I’m going to write on policy, political sociology, and pop culture stuff, like I do here, for Megan McArdle’s blog. I can’t write about comparative politics knowledgeably.
    I should do a self promotion blog post soon.
    I just wrote my first post about school integration and vouchers and stuff. I’m cooling my heels waiting for instructions about posting it.

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  4. On schools, our local public schools have been planning on moving up start times to save costs. At some high schools, it would be as early as 7:11 (which is before I get up most morning). This strikes me as cruel and hugely counterproductive if the main point is to get kids to learn stuff as opposed to annoying them for a set number of hours.

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  5. It is not comparative politics. It is comparative history in so much as such a thing exists. But, it does deal with policy and sociology in the past. It does not have any sophisticated math. History is pretty straight forward you do not need any special training to read it and understand it.

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  6. “At some high schools, it would be as early as 7:11 (which is before I get up most morning). This strikes me as cruel and hugely counterproductive if the main point is to get kids to learn stuff as opposed to annoying them for a set number of hours.”
    That’s totally contradictory to the emerging research on adolescents, isn’t it?
    “Two Minneapolis-area school districts decided to shift secondary school start times to 8:30 a.m. or later based on emerging medical research showing adolescents have a natural sleep pattern that leads to a late-to-bed, late-to-rise cycle. Medical researchers found this cycle is part of the maturation of the endocrine system. From the onset of puberty until late teen years, the brain chemical melatonin, which is responsible for sleepiness, is secreted from approximately 11 p.m. until approximately 8 a.m., nine hours later. This secretion is based on human circadian rhythms and is rather fixed. In other words, typical youth are not able to fall asleep much before 11 p.m. and their brains will remain in sleep mode until about 8 a.m., regardless of what time they go to bed.”
    http://www.cehd.umn.edu/research/highlights/Sleep/
    Oh, and here’s another thing. Since sleep deficits are associated with weight gain, this will also make the kids fat.

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  7. If the kids get fat then I don’t have to work so hard to maintain my relative attractiveness level as I get older. Also, if the kids are in school before I get up, I don’t have to wait for the bus. Double win, at least in the short term.

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  10. JOP,
    That sounds nasty, but college students are mainly old enough that it doesn’t matter–it’s primarily junior high/high school students who are affected by the need to sleep between 11PM and 8AM.

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  11. I will be interested in the meta-post about what it’s like to deal with the commenters at that blog :-).
    I tried to think about what’s “under the radar” and realized I’m pretty bad at it. But, some of the pop culture things that have been on my mind are the following:
    1) Title 9 (40th anniversary this year). I was nonathletic as a kid; I thought my kid was following in my footsteps through 5 years of soccer, but then, she tried basketball and then ultimate frisbee and broke out (was the top scorer on her team, lead them to a phenomenal, for the school, tying season). She’s become healthier and stronger and didn’t have any problem with towering over all the other kids. I credit sports(and Title 9). A common conversation among the mothers (we are a bit older than you, Laura), is how many more opportunities our girls have than they did (including tall women who played basketball and weren’t allowed to cross the midline and the lawyers and doctors who cheered, because that was the only activity available to them). (There’s controversy, since Title 9 was definitely social engineering; I bet the commenters at MM’s blog mostly hate it, including CA & Chastain & republicans).
    2) Teams & kids & expectations & sports development (including the new plan of developmental soccer to require year around play); the effect on schools and school unity
    3) Journalism blogs (neighborhood blogs, school blogs) that cross the line between journalism and personal and advocacy and the ways they succeed and fail (for example, the West Seattle Blog, neighborhood, and the Seattle School Blog, school, advocacy, political, and controversial). The author of the Seattle School Blog recently had an anti-charter column at the Washington Post educational blog/site, in which she took on all the big money players in Educational Reform (Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, TFA, Michelle Reese, ALEC). (Oh, and the Seattle School Blog was important in disrupting a transportation plan that would have moved high school start times to 7 AM or so, too).

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  12. Oooh, that’s good, bj. A sports post might be fun.
    re: commenters at the Atlantic. I’m a tad frightened of the commenters on that blog.

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  13. “A common conversation among the mothers (we are a bit older than you, Laura), is how many more opportunities our girls have than they did (including tall women who played basketball and weren’t allowed to cross the midline and the lawyers and doctors who cheered, because that was the only activity available to them).”
    My grandma played high school basketball in the very early 1940s in rural Iowa. She said that in that time and place, it was actually a bigger deal than high school boys’ basketball.
    Oddly, when her daughter (my auntie) was in high school in rural WA in the early 1960s, girls weren’t allowed to run in track events longer than 1/2 mile.
    My mom ran (briefly–it demanded too much time) at the college level at Seattle Pacific in Seattle in the late 1960s at a time when female students were not allowed to wear pants (SPU is historically a Free Methodist college).
    “There’s controversy, since Title 9 was definitely social engineering; I bet the commenters at MM’s blog mostly hate it, including CA & Chastain & republicans”
    Isn’t Title 9 notorious for killing minor men’s sports at the college level?

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  14. “re: commenters at the Atlantic. I’m a tad frightened of the commenters on that blog. ”
    But, you are a strong woman, and will thrive, as long as you remember that it’s OK that someone will be wrong on the Internet (because, mind you, some of those commenters will be horribly wrong).

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  15. Since you have this great forum – congratulations! – and you may be going back to college education policy, I wanted to bring up your earlier post on the “forgotten student” and all the comments people made. This topic makes my blood boil every time I think about it, in part because at my middle-tier state university and most other schools I know about, administrators are *obsessed* with figuring out what students get out of their education and how we can quantify it and put a report out that says exactly what one of our degrees will get them. I’m not saying that desire is misplaced, but I’ve been thinking about how difficult it is to find answers to these questions, especially for those of us who teach in the humanities. To take just one part of what was addressed in the comments on that post, I was thinking about the question of whether a professor’s research leads to a better educational experience for students. I’m pretty sure it does, but it is very hard to explain why, because there are a lot of things I don’t know.
    If I have to define what makes for a successful classroom experience, I would say it is when at least one student has some kind of an epiphany about the role of religion in politics, in ethics, or in people’s lives more generally, and/or gains a deeper understanding of these things that really sinks in. How much is that epiphany or understanding worth? I don’t know; seriously, I have no idea. What should the criteria be: is it that it will it lead them to act differently at some critical moment; to choose their career differently; to vote differently; to have more informed conversations;; to treat people differently? I don’t know. Is it good enough if just one student has it? I don’t know. To what extent is the epiphany caused by the fact that I’ve structured the course carefully, spent hours picking out each reading, poked around on the internet all morning or all day to find just the right combination of primary sources or current articles? I don’t know. How much does the knowledge of the field I have gained from doing my own research make it possible for me to structure that course and pick those articles? I don’t know, though I do know it helps. If I did a little less research, or a little more, how much would that change my ability to put the course together? I don’t know. How much of the motivation to put together these great courses and sets of readings is the result of the fact that I do research and am professionally engaged? Would I get burned out completely, stop finding new material, and be a worse teacher if I weren’t professionally engaged? I’m pretty sure these things are related, but I don’t know.
    Every good teacher I know worked like crazy their first few years, and I wonder if your own views aren’t shaped by the fact that you had those first few years, but didn’t then have to develop the stamina needed to do this for the long haul. I know that my teaching was pretty good in the first few years, but it has gotten better, richer, and more innovative because I’m more knowledgeable, and my goal is for this to continue for the next 20 years or so. Would this happen if I stopped researching and went from a 3/3 to a 4/4 or a 5/5? Again, I don’t know.
    Good luck dealing with the commenters! Selfishly, I hope they don’t migrate over here and cause trouble, because I always really enjoy the comments here.
    I’m curious – do you know Megan McArdle personally? Or is this a contact you’ve made just through blogging?

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  16. ha, thanks, af, for all the “i don’t knows.” Very helpful. 🙂
    I will probably do a very wonky post on higher ed. Like a comparison of various proposals to deal with student loan debt.
    I met MM through blogging. We’ve had coffee and beer on a couple of occasions.

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  17. af – I never called the end of all research in universities. I repeatedly said that it helped keep faculty fresh. I just questioned whether or not all professors needed to be doing research all the time and whether the balance between teaching and other professional responsibilities was out of balance.

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  18. I know MM personally — we were both at the same college at the same time with the same major.
    Oh, the stories I could tell if I didn’t think that telling that type of story in public would be completely repugnant . . .

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  19. “Every good teacher I know worked like crazy their first few years, and I wonder if your own views aren’t shaped by the fact that you had those first few years, but didn’t then have to develop the stamina needed to do this for the long haul.”
    That’s a very good point.
    Of course, it’s also true that some teachers do get lazy and teach the exact same thing year after year. At least in school teaching, I believe I remember hearing that teachers’ skill level does not improve after the 10-year mark.

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