No Shakespeare left behind...

Measure for Measure

Assessing Student Learning Outcomes across Institutions

Connecticut State University System Assessment Conference

April 24, 2009

Eastern Connecticut State University

Willimantic, CT

The first two proposed titles for the workshop?

A Comedy of Errors and Much Ado about Nothing...

Let me just say this about the chimp incident...

Let me admit this right off: I don't want a pet, and I don't understand pet people. I have enough trouble taking care of myself, my wife, and my two daughters; the last thing I need is the responsibility of taking care of creatures who can't talk to me! (It's hard enough dealing with the ones who WON'T.)

Here's what it all comes down to for me:

The decisive difference between the concepts of "inside" and "outside" is not what Barney taught about the appropriate voices for each. It's that that the latter is where all animals belong.

I don't care if it's a hyena or a tabby cat or a pit bull or a hamster or a chimp.

What separates humans from animals is that we build better homes -- and animals don't belong inside them. And we certainly shouldn't invite them in!

I don't care if it's a tenement or a mobile home or a McMansion. Each is far better than the best bird's nest or beaver's dam or bear's cave. Until the animal kingdom can develop indoor plumbing on their own, they belong outside.

Finally, if there are rules on the books about prohibiting the keeping of "exotic animals," don't make exceptions...exceptions only lead to horrific instances like the one in Stamford, Connecticut.

I obviously need to design more interesting polls...

Recent results of CT Wit polls (all landslides):

Favorite Sinatra duet partner: Rosemary Clooney

Funniest member of the Rat Pack: Dean Martin

Best non-musical Sinatra film: Manchurian Candidate

A trio of songs...

...with audible inhaling from the lead or back-up singers:

The Beatles' "Girl" (John sounds more like he's one toke over the line than cooing over some young lady.) 1965

Sam Cooke's "Cupid" (It's the sound of the cherub's arrow going "straight to my lover's heart.") 1961

Bob Dylan's "Caribbean Wind" (Here at least the singers get to exhale loudly too!) 1981

Feel free to offer more examples!

The sky is falling (well, maybe)

News of the collision of US and Russian satellites in space earlier this week -- and the current watch on how the debris will fall to Earth and/or scatter in space -- transported me back to July 1979 when, a junior at Xavier University, I was working at a Cincinnati chili parlor, Skyline Chili, in nearby Norwood, Ohio.

(Yes, that's the "sweet" chili that's served on spaghetti with shredded cheddar cheese, onions, and beans that's not Texas, Memphis, or any other kind of chili of which most people think when they hear "chili," but don't condemn it unless you've tried it. It's GREAT. )

Anyway, it's 11 July 1979, the day Skylab I is scheduled to plunge to Earth "scattering debris across the southern Indian Ocean and sparsely populated Western Australia." Well, they say they know where it's gonna fall, but I'm no dummy: scientists predict things all the time that might or might not happen, so I'm taking no chances. I wear a hard hat to work at Skyline.

When I arrive at work, running into the restaurant like it's raining outside with my hand above my head, my boss, Corky, looks at me, looks at my hat, rolls his eyes, and asks,

"What's with the hard hat, Gil?"

(Corky was a great boss and put up with me a lot, but I don't think he ever quite understood that I was the kind of employee who, if Skyline had a theme song like McDonald's or Burger King, that I'd sing it all day long, while mopping the floor, wiping down the steam table, or cleaning the grill -- just like they do in the commercials!)

"Skylab's falling today, Cork. I want to be prepared"

"It's falling in the Pacific, Gil."

"So they say. You never know."

"So, you're going to wear that all day?"

"Yep. And I'm not going outside again until it's time to go home. Skylab's falling today."

"In the Pacific."

"So they say."

"What if I ask you to make the deposit at the bank today?"

"I won't go. I can't go. Skylab's falling today."

(If I were better read at the time, I probably would've "Bartleby'd" him, "I'd prefer not to," but I was but 17, and my Latin literary knowledge was better than that of the American Renaissance.)

"Oh, you're going, Gil."

(Somehow I knew he'd say that!)

So when the time comes to make the two-minute trip to the bank across the street, and using my best TV-learned spy/soldier/sneaking-around-teenager moves (slithering along the walls and the store-front window with frequent skyward glances), as the crosswalk signal turns green I dash across to the bank.

You'll be happy, if unsurprised, to know my trip return was without incident -- due, of course, entirely to my caution. Remember: Skylab fell that day.

I enjoyed myself tremendously that day at work. Corky got a headache, but that frequently happened to him when I worked.

Go figure.

For the next couple days, take a glance upward occasionally and watch out for space debris!

Happy Birthday, Cotton!

Yes, it's Abraham Lincoln's and Charles Darwin's birthday, but let's not forget Cotton Mather -- born 12 February 1663.

In 1713, he became the first and only American clergyman to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and, in 1721, he was the most prominent and vocal proponent for small pox inoculation -- which he learned from his West Indian slave, Onesimus.

Oh, sure, in 1692 he defended the Salem Witch Trials with his Wonders of the Invisible World, but, hey, you can't be right all the time!

Give me a good venereal disease any day of the week

Today at noon, as part of the Central Authors television series I help organize (official title: producer; actual role: booking agent), I attended an insightful and enjoyable talk by Heather Prescott, a colleague in the CCSU History Department, on her new book Student Bodies: the Influence of Student Health Services in American Society and Medicine. As she traced the history of student health services, developing in response to increasing diversity on U.S. college campuses, the subject of sexually transmitted diseases, not surprisingly, arose.

Then it dawned on me: what exactly was wrong with the term "venereal disease" (or even "social disease," for that matter) that demanded the uninspired, and pedestrian, name of "sexually transmitted disease." Have we, as a culture, become so dim, so poorly read, so imaginatively bankrupt, that any term not patently obvious needs replacement?

"Venereal," after all, is an adjective that derives from the Latin name of the Roman goddess of love and sex -- Venus, Veneris (stem vener-) -- and, as such, specifies that any things so described are sexually related.

When I raised this question after the talk, a young man in the CCSU bookstore (who hadn't even attended the talk) came by, apologized for interrupting, and suggested that perhaps it was because the Latin derivation was gendered -- that it somehow blamed such diseases on women.

Not a bad theory, but hardly convincing. Remember, the Roman philosopher Lucretius in his epic Epicurean poem on atomism, De Rerum Natura, invoked Venus as neither god nor woman but as the driving creative (read: sexual) force in the natural world.

Venereal = sexually transmitted - history/lore/tradition

We continue to fall ever further from the rich poetic/mythic roots of our language, and we're the poorer for it.

Also remember the name for syphilis came from a character, Syphilus, in a 16th-century neo-Latin poem by physician/poet Girolamo Fracstoro.

Before the poem, the French called it the "Italian Disease, the Italians the "French Disease, etc...."

Now THAT'S how you name a disease.

We can't leave this topic without quoting the chorus of "Social Disease," the Elton John / Bernie Taupin composition from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road :

I get bombed for breakfast every morning
I get bombed for dinner time and tea
I dress in rags, smell a lot, and have a real good time
I'm a genuine example of a social disease

But I won't count on that either....