How College Works

 
 
How College Works

by Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs
Harvard University Press

2014

 

 

In my previous life as an adjunct college sociology instructor, one class I was assigned to teach was intended to be a writing-intensive course, but didn't have any specific content requirements. I taught it using books on the sociology of education, intending to help the students understand their own situation better and think reflexively about how what we were learning might apply to their own experiences.

 
If I'd known about How College Works back then, it would have been an excellent addition to the class. I really enjoyed reading it over the last week, and I'd recommend it to anyone I know who still works in higher education.

 
Chambliss and Takacs are writing about the findings of a decade-long research project that intensively studied student learning at a liberal arts college. (Many other researchers participated and published articles from the same project.) Their writing is remarkably clear and well-organized, perhaps because they hope to influence an audience of administrators and trustees.

 
My best summary of Chambliss's findings are that college 'works' by immersing young people in a rich environment of face-to-face interactions at a formative period in their development. To succeed, students must make friends and join the community, find teachers and peers who motivate them to learn, and receive trustworthy advice that helps them navigate through the college bureaucracy. The process is contingent on meeting the 'right people' at the 'right time.' Early successes create more potential for later accomplishments; early difficulties foreclose later opportunities.

 
Students arrive at college with some intrinsic motivation and some idea of their own interests. Without friends and community, they will likely become emotionally detatched and may drop out. Those friends, in turn, help shape their interests, recommending classes, clubs, sports, parties, and other activities, and providing a model for how much to study, how hard to try. Good teachers make students want to learn, and can turn an elective into a major. Bad teachers, or teachers who are a bad fit, can turn students away from entire fields of study, regardless of their earlier plans.

 
Learning happens because students are motivated to show competence and avoid embarrassment in face-to-face setiings with their classmates and teachers. Writing well and public speaking are mostly learned from practice and feedback, and turn out to be among the most valuable skills a student can acquire.
 

Some of the most important insights from this study at first seem counter-intuitive. The dorms students want least (quad rooms, shared bathrooms) expose them to the most new people early on, helping them make friends quickly. Small classes and selective majors may help the students who take them - but the students who don't get in to those still end up somewhere, possibly with a worse experience than they would've had otherwise. And mandatory small seminars result in lots of students getting stuck in a topic they didn't want, because their first choices were all full.

 
Some of the easiest things schools can do to help the most students are to create lots of opportunities to meet others face-to-face, and to identify their most charismatic lecturers and give them large sections at attractive times, to make it easy for more students to get inspired and motivated as early as possible. A little personal attention and mentorship from even one professor can also go a long way. 

 
Online classes mostly do the opposite of what's needed, using up student motivation without giving much in return, rather than increasing it, as face-to-face interactions tend to.

Yellow Kayak

 
 
Yellow Kayak

by Nina Laden
art by Melissa Castrillon
Paula Wiseman Books

2018

 

 

When I went to visit my little nephew, I saw Yellow Kayak in the guest bedroom, but didn't have an opportunity to read it, so I sought out a copy from the public library.

 
The story here is very simple, and aimed, I suspect, at the very youngest children. A child and giraffe paddle out in a yellow kayak, away from their home in a log cabin on a forested island. They see some wildlife, endure a storm, see more wildlife, and are pushed home by whales.

 
The text is told in 4-line stanzas with simple ABCB rhyming structure. Each line is only two words, so Laden's economy of words is pretty impressive. 

 
Half (or more) or the narrative emerges solely from Melissa Castrillon's art, which I would say is the main attraction of the book. Castrillon works entirely with a few shades of warm yellow, orangey-pink, and blueish-green. The text and outlines are a dark blue, softening the appearance further. Her illustrations feel gentle; all the animals have curious eyes, and most have smiling mouths. The ocean and storm feel powerful, but not frightening. There are a lot of botanical details that make it all look lush and alive.

Laden and Castrillon give us a simple, gentle story of a child's first adventure out into the world without parents, and the successful return home. The trip isn't perfect, and might include moments of doubt, but friendly strangers are willing to help. It's the same story, I realize now, that's told in every episode of that Japaenese television program that shows young children's first times running errands.

Temporary

 
 
Temporary
by Hilary Leichter
Coffee House Press
2020
 

 

Temporary is a short, surreal novel about the precariousness of temporary work. The unnamed first-person narrator is a Temp, as was her mother, and grandmother, who works job after job, hoping to find her Permanence.

 
Nearly all the jobs we see the narrator perform are fantastical in some way. She briefly fills in as the chairman of a board of diectors, as a barnacle, a ghost, an assistant to a witch. We see other temps too - replacement girlfriends and mothers. Almost all the temps we see are women.

 
The narrator has longer, more consequential placements on a pirate ship, as the assistant to a hitman, on a bomb-dropping dirigible. The compromises everyone has to make with the organizations they work within are literalized as being ordered to commit murder, with her continued placement and the quality of her recommendation on the line. How much does she want her Permanence? What is she willing to do to earn it? And what will happen to her if she keeps refusing to make that one fatal compromise? The plot reaches a crisis point when the narrator finds herself unemployed and, she fears, unemployable, and then resolves.
 

Leichter's prose is very lively, with a lot of alliteration and prosody and riffing and repetition with variations. She knows her story is silly, but tells it straight. And the emotions of fear and uncertainty that accompany precarious employment come through as authentic. It's a lot of fun to read, and by the end, surprisingly moving.

 
One of my favorite details is the narrator's abundance of boyfriends, who she sees on different days of the week - the culinary boyfriend, the tallest boyfriend, the favorite boyfriend.  I think there might be a new one every time she talks about them, and they're just a fun little extra in a short book stuffed full of fun extras.

Far Sector

 
 
Far Sector

by NK Jemisin

art by Jamal Campbell

DC Comics

2021

 

 

Far Sector is a year-long space comic told in 12 monthly chapters. It's a Green Lantern story, but starring a new, different Green Lantern, and the titular 'Far Sector' is physically outside the continuity of any ongoing space comics. (It's sort of like the Xindi season of Enterprise in that way.) It was published by DC under their Young Animal imprint, under the editorial supervision of Gerard Way. And of course, author NK Jemisin is pretty famous in her own right.

 
Jo Mullein is a human, a Black woman, a former police officer, and a former soldier before that. She witnesses but fails to stop her cop partner from beating a Black suspect, plans to testify against him, then gets fired for violating 'social media policy' when a friend tags her in a BLM post. And the she gets recruited to become a Green Lantern and help keep the peace in the City Enduring, an artificial planetoid with a population of 20 billion, made up of three main groups.

 
One group is basically human-looking aliens who also have fish-like tails and fish-fin-like wings growing out of their backs, another are carnivorous plant people, and the @ AT are sentient AIs that physically manifest as holograms. The humanoids and plant people all have 'the Emotion Exploit' coded into their genes to prevent them from feeling emotions. The @ AT use memes as both food and currency, and because emotionless people don't produce many good memes, the @AT are collectively impoverished and food-insecure.

 
The Emotion Exploit is there because in the past, the three groups went to war and destroyed their original planets in the aftermath of being colonized by some other aliens who aren't really part of this story. That war was blamed on excessive anger, so a powerful religious minority forced the gene edit on everyone, where it remains today. Some people use an illegal drug called Switchoff to temporarily experience feelings.

 
Anyway, shortly after Jo arrives, the City has its first murder in 500 years, a crime that's blamed on Switchoff abuse. The suspect is also killed as part of what appears to be a cover-up. There's a pro-emotion protest that turns into a riot, police firing in civilians, and Jo trying to keep the peace and understand the causes of the crimes. She has a cute @AT assistant called @iCanHazCheezburger (or 'CanHaz' for short), and there's a handsome brooding City councilor who both wants to romance her and seems connected to all the unrest somehow.

 
Because it involves city politics, police violence, drugs, forced labor, and eventually an attempted coup, the crime part of the story has a real noir feeling. The alien worldbuilding is interesting, and I'm particularly fond of the @AT. Jo is easy to root for. She falls short of her own high standards, but she tries to be a good person, even when it's hard. We don't learn a whole lot about her personally beyond her desire to protect people and secure justice, but we do see her enjoying alien food and having relationships with two locals without feeling hung up or conflicted about it.

 
The comic keeps mentioning that Jo's Green Lantern ring is 'special,' but since I don't really read the other comics, it's not totally clear how so. Apparently it recharges differently and has less overall power, which I guess makes Jo and her techniques more grounded. She's willing to spend her power when she needs to though, and it manifests in creative and visually interesting ways. Artist Jamal Campbell does a good job at showing faces when people react to information and at composing really dynamic action panels. I think this is one of the better superhero comics I've read in awhile.

The Cardboard Valise

 
The Cardboard Valise

by Ben Katchor

Pantheon

2011

 

 

I learned of the existence of Ben Katchor from seeing examples of his comics in the annual America's Best Comics series I've been reading. The Cardboard Valise collects both reprints of pages Katchor published in newspapers and magazines as well as material original to this book. 

 
Valise kind of tells the narrative story of an individual traveler, and kind of meanders through an off-kilter alt-historical America. Each page functions as a vignette, so it's easy for Katchor to take a minor character from one page and give them the next page for their own little story. As a result, the narrative is never continuous or uninterrupted. The first quarter or third or so of the book tells the traveler's story, mostly, and then he doesn't really reappear until the end. In between, another character recurs but has no particular narrative, just wanderings and musings.

 
It's hard to describe The Cardboard Valise as being about anything in particular, but I would say that Katchor is interested in travel, mass consumption, and I guess at the intersection of those two, globalization. Most of the people we meet are tourists or immigrants, and Katchor turns a faux-anthropological eye on the rituals individuals and communities invent to imbue mass-produced junk with meaning. Katchor describes a world that seems to have no original art or music as we understand it, only the repurposing of found materials.

 
In one city, the locals eat only canned food, in another they're wild for shoe shines. A charismatic preacher explains unwanted knick-nacks in general stores as a sign of the eternal appetites of the dead. Audiences gather to watch sculptors create ephemeral shapes as they eat their soft-serve ice cream cones. 'Puncto' is invented as a universal language inteded to be incomprehensible even to fluent speakers. My favorite is the 'diurnarama,' an indoor street scene that perfectly recreates natural light passing through the day-night cycle at half the normal speed, where people come to while away the afternoon enjoying the illusion of a slower passage of time.

 
What narrative we get concerns Emile Delilah, who buys a giant cheap suitcase, packs up his entire apartment, and goes on vacation to Tensint Island to see the ruins of public restrooms. The island later evaporates due to too much dry-cleaning solution soaking into the soil. We see Emile again much later. 

 

After that, we take our own leisurely tour through the two-dimensional country of Outer Canthus and the unmapped town of Fluxion City, NJ. We repeatedly see Elijah Salamis, whose personal project is to reject all traditional and national culture in favor of new customs arising from human needs interacting with globally-available mass-produced goods.

 
Katchor has another collection that I think is loosely about city life that I want to check out soon.

Arm of the Sphinx

 
 
Arm of the Sphinx
by Josiah Bancroft

Orbit

2018

 

 

Following Senlin Ascends, the second book in Bancroft's quartet, Arm of the Sphinx is a little uneven, but its second half is consistently good, and has me very excited to read the next two volumes.

 
The book opens with Senlin and his friends having already failed and given up as air pirates. They think Senlin's wife Marya is in Pelphia, the 5th story 'ringdom' in the Tower of Babel, but they can't get in past the militarized port guards. In the mean-time, they've been stealing just enough to survive using cunning stratagems to outwit merchants and other pirates. But they realize they can't continue, and in desperation, chase a rumor that there's a secret passage into Pelphia from the former Silk Gardens in the abandoned 6th story.

 
The airship gets ambushed by the military and barely makes it to crash land on the 6th floor. They discover the secret headquarters of an army of escaped slaves (called 'Hods') being led by a rebellious former 'Wakeman,' one of the cybernetic agents of the Sphinx, the same mysterious entity who gave Edith her cybernetic arm. Their barely repaired airship gets ambushed again by the Hod army, and they again barely escape. Entirely out of other option, the crew follows Edith's directions to the lair of the Sphinx, fearful of the price he will demand for help.

 
The problem with this part of the book is that it's clear from the title and other early foreshadowing that we're all going to meet to Sphinx. It seems like Bancroft couldn't figure out how to skip straight to the good part, but neither could he disguise that this first half was all set-up for the part he really wanted to write. 

The 'last days of piracy' section has all the suspense of a foregone conclusion. I think if Bancroft could've started earlier, shown the crew's pirate days as present tense instead of mostly already flashbacks, and shown them giving up as a conclusion they're pushed toward instead of a choice they've already made, it would've been more compelling. The visit to the Silk Gardens is actually pretty good, because it contains some interesting set-pieces and surprises along the way. Senlin thinks he knows what they'll find, Edith thinks she knows, and they're both wrong, which is great.

 
It's in the second half of the book that everything really springs to life. The Sphinx is clearly a canny negotiator. He wants Senlin's information about the rebellion, and even moreso, the painting he stole in the first book. He makes a deal to replace Edith's broken cybernetic arm, fix their ship, and help the crew get into Pelphia to look for Marya if Senlin will please just sign this contract and spend two weeks finding a book in the Bottomless Library...

 
While Senlin is away, Edith tries to hide Adam from the Sphinx, which results in them going to the roof which is rumored to be covered with trees of silver and rivers of gold. They learn the truth, and Adam gets hidden, but not in the way Edith wanted.

 
Voleta sneaks around and meets the Sphinx privately, the Sphinx takes a liking to her, reveals his true face, shares some secrets, and seemingly chooses her as a successor.

 
Iren's story is mostly character-driven. She begins coming to terms with the fact that she's getting older and that she has real friends now. She's no longer just an enforcer. I imagine her looking like Scorpia from the new She-Ra cartoon, and I've really warmed up to her.

 
During his journey, Senlin, among other things, realizes that he can't keep chasing Marya forever, that he's changed and she probably has too, and that he has romantic feelings for Edith. He decides Pelphia will be the last place he looks, and that he can no longer assume a straightforward reunion if he finds her. At the end of the journey, the Sphinx tells Senlin yet more secrets, including about the Brick Layer who organized the building of the tower, and some information about the stolen painting. Given the long lifespans of these people at the top, I wonder if the Sphinx is the person in the painting?

 
Edith gets a better new arm and a promotion from the Sphinx. Senlin gets recruited as a spy. The crew gets a shiny new ship and a robotic crewmate to accompany them into the next book. I doubt that my description does this part justice, but the prose is lively, the characterization is dynamic (everyone goes through a period of self-reflection and change), we learn a lot about the world, and the stage is set for a three-way conflict between the agents of the Sphinx, the Hod rebellion, and the corrupt Ringdom governments, like the one in Pelphia.

The Bookstore Cat

 
The Bookstore Cat

by Cylin Busby
art by Charles Santoso
Balzeer + Bray
2020

 

 

I wanted to buy a book for my little nephew, the son of my childhood friend. So what better than an alphabet book that teaches you with drawings of bookstores and cats?

 
In the forward, Busby explains that The Bookstore Cat is based on an old parlor game where you take turns describing the minister's cat with the next letter of the alphabet. So we learn that the bookstore cat is cuddly, intelligent, patient, sleepy, etc. (He's also sometimes bossy, naughty, and zigzaging - he's got some life in him too!)

 
We see a typical day-in-the-life, from the cat demanding breakfast as the shop is opened to getting hugged goodnight at the end of the day. In between, he lounges around the shop, watching the customers, occasionally getting jealous of the attention being paid to a cute dog tied up out front.

 
Charles Santoso's illustrations are a nice mix of cartoony roundness and realistic texture and detail. I don't think they're done in colored pencil, but they have a similar feel. My favorite image is the cat being 'regal' posed in front of a book with a crown on its cover so that it hovers just above the cat's head.

 
Hopefully, my friend's son will enjoy having it read to him too.