The Classroom Conservative

Tipping On The Tax

On a stormy Friday night, we took my parents for dinner at one of their favorite chain restaurants.  There were more people there than expected during inclement weather, and the place was understaffed.  Still, the service was not bad: they were a little slow, and they forgot to bring my soup, but we had no complaints.

The young woman waiting on our table deserved the standard 15% gratuity.

The Canadian media has recently been abuzz with stories of restaurants in Toronto adding an automatic 20% tip to all bills, regardless of the experience its customers have had.  Proprietors argue that it is perfectly acceptable to opt out of this gratuity, but the distinction is far from subtle.  The assumption now is that the service will be exemplary, and it is the responsibility of patrons to signal any displeasure by actively removing an expected bonus.

I understand that wait staff are underpaid, and I accept that we are asked to supplement their incomes.  However, it is important to be able to signal okay service (15%) from exemplary service (20% or more).  One night, years ago, a friend and I used an excessive tip to compensate a young woman whose other table ran out on their bill.  The restaurant we visited with my folks last week sought to help us out by providing three gratuity options, chosen from a menu on the credit card console.  Again, there is an assumption that a tip is warranted, but one can choose 15% or 20% or 25% -- or, presumably, some different amount altogether.

If one chooses the automatic 15%, this number is unlikely to be a whole number.  For awhile, I used to tip, even on credit cards, in order to achieve a round number.  Say, for example, that the bill came to $24.22.  I would tip $3.78, so that the total was $28.  A friend pointed out that no one wanted my 78 cents; I should just tip $4.  Whether the cash is kept behind the counter or tallied electronically, no one wanted pennies.  But, of course, if one chooses to let the credit card console do the calculation, there is no chance to round up.

For some people, calculating the gratuity is often a hassle.  When GST was 7%, folks in Alberta would double the tax and round up to determine the tip.  (If the service was great, we could triple the tax.)  Now that GST is 5%, we triple that tax to calculate an average tip.

So, spare some thought for me as I sat in that restaurant in St. John’s.  Is tax there still 22%?  No?  It is 13%.  (When did that happen?)  That will not help me.  I find it simple, of course, to calculate 10% in my head, and, if I add to that amount half as much again, I can find 15%.  But wait.  The number is not adding up to the 15% recommended by the credit card console.  The subtotal is $80.  If 10% is $8, and half of that is $4, then a 15% tip is $12, right?  Why, then, is the recommended tip actually $13.56?

The answer, math fans, is that before recommending a 15% gratuity, this large chain restaurant first added the HST.  They wanted me to tip on the tax. 

We were happy that we did not order alcohol, as one traditionally does not tip on that amount, either.

Beaten Fair And Square

For the first time since 2008, the professional football team I have followed since childhood, the team that has broken my heart more times than I can count, won a playoff game.  Saturday night’s 45-10 victory over the Denver Broncos snapped the New England Patriots’ playoff draught, but the most interesting sports coverage on the weekend had to do with a game that was played on December 4.

The first meeting of the season between New York and Green Bay suggested that the Giants would give the defending champions a game in the divisional round on Sunday, but before kickoff everyone was still talking about the moment, more than a month ago, when Hakeem Nicks beat Packers’ defensive back Charles Woodson for a touchdown.  Quarterback Eli Manning had the ball, second-and-goal on the four yard line.  Woodson had perfect coverage; it really was.  But when Manning lobbed his pass, Nicks reached out and grabbed the ball with one hand.  There was absolutely nothing else Woodson could have done, and, in the moment after the play, he reached out his hand to congratulate his opponent.

I remember thinking, at the time, that the gesture was unusual, but I never imagined that it would elicit such comment.  Players on both teams thought that it was inappropriate, that Woodson should have been upset about having been beaten; if he wanted to congratulate his opponent, he should have waited until after the game.

I have been struck by a realization of just how potent raw energy can be during sporting events.  Clearly, as fans, we get caught up in the same emotion as the players feel, so why should I be surprised?  In a recent documentary, for example, Bill Belichik, Patriots head coach, was shown chewing out his players for not flocking to a teammate to celebrate a good play.  Could that frenzy be that important?  I have always admired the pre-game demeanor of football players, dressed as suited assassins, filing off their bus and into the stadium.  Is that steely, confident determination really counter-productive once they get on the field itself?

To my mind, Charles Woodson did not lose his focus during that December game.  God knows that, between the television time outs and the instant replays, there are all kinds of interruptions.  I had, and still have, no problem with a competitor stopping to acknowledge something unusual, even when it is done by a competitor.

Talking To The Taxman About Research

Every six months or so, I clean out my inbox and take down from my tackboard all the receipts for my professional expenses.  For a couple of days, I get to play amateur accountant, looking for all the world like the cliché of an American small business owner preparing to engage the IRS with a shoebox full of slips.  It is not that I am complaining: I am fortunate to have a job where the costs associated with teaching, research, and service can be reimbursed.  But these funds are a negotiated benefit, of course; if we did not have them, we might have a higher salary or different medical coverage.  While it is fabulous to be able to afford to order from the United States an edition of a textbook not yet available in Canada, please do not begrudge me my grumbling as I try to determine the proper exchange rate to use when indenting for said purchase.

I love my accountant friends, but I am not an accountant.

The kindly older gentleman who used to oversee the ham-fisted attempts of academics to manage their petty expenditures used to call our submissions, with great affection, our “swindle sheets.”  It is not that we try to mislead; it is simply that some of my colleagues are woefully inexperienced in the close tracking of money.  I remember once applying for and receiving a travel grant, $1,100 to give a paper in Quebec City.  By using airline loyalty miles, I discovered that I could continue on to Philadelphia to give a second paper, only to learn that, because I did not list this gathering on my initial application, none of my incidental expenses (hotels, meals, taxis) could come from that fund.  Still, it was in my dealings with another financial officer that I reached the end of my rope.  I used research funds to travel to an archive to review manuscripts.  “Why?” he asked, with no hint of humour, “could you not just go to a library in Calgary?”

If my attempts to impress upon my professional colleagues something of the research world have not always been successful, I have embraced the strange world of financial auditing with enthusiasm.  Combined with my love of speaking with people about their jobs, I have bored hotel clerks and cabbies around the world with explanations of how we track money at the University of Lethbridge.  On a recent trip to Arizona, I told the woman on the desk at our hotel that I needed more than the invoice that had been slipped under the room door that morning.

“My receipt must show a balance of zero,” I explained.  “Otherwise, my institution might think we had cheated them.”

“Cheated them?” she looked surprised.

“Imagine that this invoice asked for $500, but you agreed to charge me $200 in cash,” I continued.  “With an invoice that requests $500, I might be reimbursed for an extra $300 that we had arranged to split.”

“Oh, no, I could never do that!”  Her look turned to one of horror.

“I wasn’t proposing that arrangement!  No, no!” I tried to reassure her.  “I was trying to explain why I need to show my employer how I actually paid you $500.”

She looked wary.

I should have explained to her the joy of a library archive.  Right, I am going back to my receipts now: all showing balances of zero, I assure you.

Remembering Fred Gamberg

On a summer night in 1995, Fred Gamberg drowned in Flatrock, Newfoundland.  Because I was away at school, I did not hear the news.  I did not know Fred well; when I worked at Sam the Record Man in the Avalon Mall, he was a frequent patron, looking -– as anyone who knew him at all will attest -– for Dead Kennedys imports and encouraging us to give punk CDs their own section.  When I moved back to St. John’s after graduation, I was confronted by this mural while walking downtown.

Now, obviously, had Gamberg been a friend, I suspect that I might have known about his death.  As it was, it was quite a shock to see an old acquaintance thus depicted on a retaining wall next to the LSPU Hall.  Peter Evans painted this commemoration quite spontaneously.  It was graffiti, strictly speaking, but I always thought that it fit well with the surroundings.  It also generated a lot of debate, I have heard, as Gamberg was far from a public figure in the city.  Those of us of a certain age were aware of him, and his short life underlined for me the fragility of our existence: he died at a time that few of us were even thinking about death.

Part of the debate about the mural had to do with the city’s tolerance of it.  It was not removed; it was, unquestionably, a work of public art, in the way that some graffiti clearly is not.  I observe, for example, that much of the highway across Newfoundland runs through small bluffs where one teen’s love for another is spray painted for all drivers to see.  Some of these proclamations, passed frequently, fill me with nostalgia, but they cannot be called public art in terms of their composition and execution.  Whether you think that a young man with a small circle of close friends deserves a public memorial in a Canadian city, you cannot question the efficacy of what Peter Evans created.

Over time, however, the mural began to disintegrate.  To my mind, as the next generation of downtown youth painted over Gamberg, they added to the mural, even though the face of the original subject was eventually obliterated.

 

As the paint began to peel, the work became an eyesore to some.  It had never been commissioned by the city, of course, and so did the city have any role in maintaining it?  Eventually, St. John’s stepped in and made a great decision, to my mind, in having it “renewed.”

I can imagine that the old work was beyond restoration, but -– by repainting Fred Gamberg -– the city's committee on murals has affirmed the contribution of the original piece.  I will miss the old one, certainly.  Had it been my decision to make, I would have liked to have had it redone from old photographs.  But this new mural is a work of art in its own right, the interpretation of yet more people embodying the spirit of downtown St. John's.

Midnight In Paris

Having suffered through a busy autumn, I am a little late to the discussion of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.  Mr. Allen is at a point, after having directed more than forty films, where people simply ignore his projects when they do not work and draw great attention to those that connect with an audience.  He benefits from low expectations, perhaps lower than any current artist who has been so prolific and so successful.  For me, his last unqualified success was Match Point (2005), though it was, essentially, a retelling of my favorite Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).  I am level-headed enough not to buy the hype associated with the vastly overrated Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and to be disappointed with Whatever Works (2009).  Still, I can be charmed when stumbling across something I missed, like the forgotten Sweet and Lowdown (1999).  I acknowledge Woody Allen’s unmatched success through the 1970s, and I will admit to having asked for, and received for Christmas, a DVD of the charmingly nostalgic Radio Days (1987).

So, with some authority, I can say that Midnight in Paris is good, respectable.  It is something that can stand on its own merits.  Owen Wilson is a fine protagonist, and Rachel McAdams is deliciously shallow and mean as his fiancée.  Michael Sheen gets to imagine what the McLuhan “fan” outside the theatre in Annie Hall (1977) might have been like as a more-rounded character.  Marion Cotillard is the pleasant diversion she must be for the plot to move along.  If, like Chekhov’s gun, a firearm introduced in the first act must be fired in the second, Léa Seydoux proves that every pretty girl dwelled upon in an Allen movie must become a love interest.  The conceit at the heart of this film is that, having once gotten lost at midnight, Owen’s character Gil can find his way back to the same spot each evening in order to ride in a vintage automobile back to the 1920s.  Try not to think about it too much – after leaving Ernest Hemingway in a bar, Gil loses ninety years in a flash, but at other moments he can walk around Jazz Age Paris at will by himself – and you can have a lot of fun.  Allen allows himself the farcical touches that season his best work: Adrien Brody’s Salvador Dali, obsessed with rhinoceroses; Detective Tisserant pursued through Versailles; Gil outlining the eventual plot of The Exterminating Angel (1962) to a bemused Luis Bunuel.  Paris, present, past, and more distant past, is beautiful onscreen.

But the lingering question I have after watching Midnight in Paris has to do with the background an audience must possess to engage with art, a question interrogated by my class in the Fall as they struggled through the footnotes to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.  Obviously, to enjoy fully what Woody Allen is doing in this film you need, at minimum, to know that American writers spent profitable time in Paris between the world wars.  This is what motivates Gil.  It helps to know Scott Fitzgerald, though you might wonder if – “old sport” – he really spoke as did his most famous character.  Do you appreciate Hemingway, all puffed up and played as a caricature here, unless you know enough about him to know that Allen collapses three or four stages of his development into the mid-to-late-1920s?  If you know that much, you might know that he was not speaking to Gertrude Stein by this time, and so he would never take Gil to Stein’s salon, where he meets the brother from whom, in reality, she had been long estranged.  You will not catch Gil’s joke about Djuna Barnes being butch unless you know enough to know that Eliot would have likely slammed the door on him for complimenting, ten years later, the juvenilia that first made the poet, by this time turned to serious poetry of religious iconography, a sensation.

Look, I am not trying to be a “Paul,” the pedantic lecturer Allen has Michael Sheen play in order, for all I know, to deflect this kind of nitpicking.  By all means, as I said, suspend your disbelief and have some fun in an era I have studied for twenty years.  But, as I sat on the couch, thrilled at the unearthing of Bricktop while questioning the commercial value of certain modernist canvases before the Stock Market Crash, I marveled at how difficult it is for any artist to rely on an audience to bring some knowledge, just enough, but not too much, to get the most out of a work of the imagination.

Teaching, Week Fourteen: Those Late Withdrawals

The university changed its withdrawal policy this year so that students might remove themselves from courses until the last day of classes.  Previously, a student had to make this decision by the end of the ninth week.  Out of a class of thirty, I had two students withdraw after week nine, related undoubtedly to frustration with preparing their term papers, but I had no one leave at the last minute.  The term paper results were average, and there was nothing there to chase anyone out, I allow.

Some of my colleagues complained about losing people after putting in a lot of effort grading their work, and I understand the frustration.  On the other hand, it never feels any better to assign a student an “F” for a course.  I see that as wasted effort, as well.  Due to some ancient rule, the pedigree of which no one can remember, individual faculties would get the tuition only for students who completed courses; if a student withdrew, central administration would get whatever was not refunded.  Under these new rules, students would get no more money back by withdrawing in the ninth week when compared with that last minute withdrawal, but the faculty would still get paid for the latter.  So, in a perverse way, instructors would, indirectly, realize compensation for fruitless late effort where they go unacknowledged for the work of a half term, only.

The rationale behind the change, beyond the fact that the policy exists amongst our competitors, is that students get to leave classes they would otherwise fail.  It is a retention initiative, and I will be interested in seeing whether grade point averages rise.  One of the unintended consequences, however, has been a reconsideration of what kind of feedback a student deserves (and when) and when a grade has been assigned (and a course is over).

It used to be that a student expected to have a meaningful evaluation returned before the ninth week.  For many of us, that meant having the mid-term or calling due the first essay at some point in the first two months.  But with the “W” deadline moved back, is it fair to expect that the whole term mark be prepared by the last day of classes?  I take in term papers in the last fortnight, and I can usually turn them around.  If an instructor is used to asking for term papers on the last day and returning them at the exam, is that arrangement now unfair?  Equally puzzling is the common situation where, in lieu of a final examination, a colleague has a “last test” in the last two weeks.  If this is done through moodle or graded electronically, the final grade may be calculated before the last day of classes.  Is it fair for a student to know, precisely, what grade will be assigned before deciding whether to withdraw from the class?

Teaching, Week Thirteen: Term Paper Nuts and Bolts

I was up early this morning, grading student essays, and I caught the end of a television program where the evangelist talked about how God has numbered, and tracks, the individual hairs on our heads.  If this is the case, there are more to sort on my pillow than there are anywhere else.  What I do not pull out seems simply to fall out.

I find essays disheartening.  My expectations are so high, and it is clear that some students fail to put in adequate effort.  Too often, I read summaries of class notes, declarations that have little to do with the actual questions asked.  When I first started teaching, I remember agonizing over whether to assign one essay a “C” or a “C+.”  I cringed a little when I returned it, only to overhear the student afterwards: “Cool!  I passed!”

We have motivated majors, students who pass through on the way to law school, but many of our best students are training to be teachers, teachers who might never have to touch on the full significance of analysis in our field.  As I wrote here, recently, it is great when all the strands of these analyses come together at the end of the term, but too infrequently does this translate to the essay page.  There is a disconnection between their interesting ideas and their writing exercises.  Perhaps essays bear too little resemblance to the lectures they, too, will soon undertake.

There are two minor errors that I see all the time, little pet peeves that are indicative of larger weaknesses: the first is the use of “scare” quotation marks, as I just invoked, and the second is a reliance on unintegrated quotations.

Perhaps we suffer in the age of hypertext, but I suspect it runs deeper than that.  When students get to a point in a sentence where they wish to emphasize something, I mean really ‘emphasize’ something, they will often put a word or two in single quotation marks, to differentiate this from actual quoted material.  As I told them last week, as single quotations marks are reserved (in North America) for quotations within quotations, they might as well set off their emphases with four strokes, as with just one or two.  Why does this bother me?  The frequency of this utility makes it seem quite lazy; I suspect that if they could put things in a different color and underline them three or four times, they would.  The truth is that a properly constructed sentence, within a properly framed argument, should draw attention to itself.  It does not need bells and whistles.

I have weaned my students from overusing the long, block quotation by exaggerating and telling them that I never read these passages.  But instead of sewing a quotation into a proper, grammatical sentence, I will often find, in the middle of a paragraph of student prose, a sentence belonging to another, usually properly cited but without a tag.  It is as if those words were cut and pasted out of a secondary source and into a student’s argument.  It does not belong; it sticks out like a sore thumb.  Instead of an argument that asserts something, brings in an example, draws a conclusion, and relies then on an authority to reinforce that conclusion, I am supposed to interpret the presence of the words of someone else as a justification for what the student says.  It is as if they stand to the side, point to the authority and say to me: “See?  What did I tell you?”

Some mistakes are simply explained away as a lack of concentration, too little attention to detail.  Students will, in a list of works cited, fail to refer to the same kind of material properly, twice in a row.  But some mistakes, I think, tell us a little more about their intentions when they write.  And these errors remind me that we all have a long way yet to go.

Teaching, Week Twelve: What Is It All About?

For the most part, I have abandoned any in-term justification of our learning outcomes.  There are venues for this discussion, of course: recruitment evenings, advising sessions, and planning exercises.  Because we spend so much time teaching students to format, for example, there is hardly time to stop to reflect upon why it is important to pay attention to details.

But if a course progresses well, some of its practical significance should become clear, even before we undertake a summary.  We had a week like that this week, when the perpetual relevance of a study of the historical avant-garde presented itself to us all.

One of the surrealist challenges to the institution of art questioned the standing of the artistic artifact.  If one lived ones art, if it was impossible to make any distinction between art and life, was not the identification of a work of art – a book, a play, a film – a bogus activity?  Do not get me wrong: the surrealists painted canvases, of course, but they rejected any distinction between that canvas and the artistic standing of a conversation they had with someone, or the creative activity of taking a walk in the park.  When André Breton talks about the text he is writing, there is a palpable discomfort, but there existed for him no more appropriate nomenclature.

This examination of the artifact in conceptualizations of the institution of art leads us to a discussion of the artifact today.  What standing do the actual manifestations of works have with our students?  When Marcel Duchamps bought and signed a plumbing fixture, selling it as a piece of art, he was thumbing his nose at the idea of bourgeois appropriation of artistry.  A fortnight ago, Imaginus brought their travelling caravan of poster reproductions to our campus and did a brisk trade.  Except for the proliferation of images of women in their underwear kissing each other, very little has changed over the past generation.  We have all hung Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, or at least its inexpensive reproduction.  This is not the case with music.  Dorm rooms used to be filled with album sleeves, eight-track tapes, cassettes, and compact discs.  Students now download their music and store it electronically.  Why do they no longer feel the need to possess their music, as they once did, to hold the commodity over the heads of their friends?  On the other hand, when I was young we went to films and waited for them to be shown on television.  The idea of “owning” a film was foreign to us.  Dorm rooms now are littered with DVDs and Blu-Rays.  What is the significance of this distinction?  What does it tell us about the future of commerce and art?

Ultimately, the whole purpose of the historical avant-garde was to stand outside the society in which it existed to challenge the status quo.  How is it possible to do so?  It is as if one could levitate above a current along which one swims to watch fellow swimmers.  This problem was encountered by “Occupy” protestors, dependent as they were on the electronic gadgetry rooted in a manifestation of the system of capital they hoped to renounce.  These kinds of paradoxes presented themselves to the surrealists, as well.  The still had magazines and exhibitions; they hoped to use the tools of the artistic trade to undermine that trade, itself.  Are these protests valuable simply to draw attention to realities, or can they ever hope to achieve real change?  Looking up from their desks this week, I think that some of the students thought anew about what they hope to do when they emerge into a world that expects, at some level, their conformity.

Teaching, Week Eleven: Migraine

I wrote, recently, about conference travel during the semester.  The flexibility to cancel a class or two comes from the fact that, depending on the timeslot one is assigned, some classes meet more often than do others.  I burned two classes on conferences this term, using all my reasonable flexibility.

But this week I suffered from a migraine.

I have had them since at least my undergraduate days.  I have come to associate their onset with sleep deprivation, the consumption of chocolate, and the threat of a chinook wind, the last being a common occurrence in southern Alberta.  Over the past eighteen months, I have been getting them about once every six or eight weeks, but this autumn, on account in part of the pleasant weather, I had gone about three months without one.  On Wednesday, just after noon, I started getting symptoms.  By three o’clock, it had set in.  I cancelled a social engagement for six o’clock and hoped a short nap might break the cycle of pain.

No such luck.

A migraine sufferer knows all one needs to know of hell.  How could I possibly face preparing Thursday class notes?  Luckily, I needed only to add a few details: I try not to leave anything to the last minute.  But the larger question looms: what should a teacher do when ill?  These days, many of us have an enlightened view of not spreading contagion in the workplace, but even a necessary absence can be disruptive, if it has not been previously announced.

I am no hero, but I am proud to have missed only one class, unannounced, over the past twenty years.  And, clearly, if I did not have a class on Thursday morning, I would have gone nowhere near campus.  But unlike my colleagues whose syllabi assign topics by the fortnight, those of us who assign specific topics to individual class meetings find disruptions to be very, well, disruptive.  I think I did a poor job with my Thursday lecture, but we did cover what I wanted to cover, one week before term papers are due.

I often try to remember what it was like when I taught in St. John’s and in London, Ontario, two locations that are prone to weather cancellations.  What did my syllabi look like then?  Clearly, they were disrupted on a regular basis.

Clearly, as well, I did not use any discretion or flexibility afforded me back then to travel to conferences.

Teaching, Week Ten: Hurray For Surrealism

We moved this week from Virginia Woolf to André Breton, and it was if a great light was turned on.  Some of our assumptions about students are true: they are, for example, drawn naturally to establishment challenges.  The surrealists refused to make any distinction between art and life; Breton wanted to live his art.  The historical avant-garde challenged everything about how works were created, disseminated, and received.  Although they found Breton’s primary work as impenetrable as everything else in the course, the class took to his ideas, asking pointed questions and providing insightful comments.

It would be unreasonable to expect that we teach only things that engage easily our students’ imaginations.  Of course, it is our job to engage their imaginations with everything from Ezra Pound to Eugene Jolas, but when our job is made easier, when the ideas sell themselves, we have to be ready to take advantage of those moments.  As a result, we had the two best classes of the semester this week, and that was not just because we turned back the clocks and benefited from an additional hour of sleep.

Surrealism appeals to students, but it did cross my mind that, after a couple of months, the class does have enough background in the subject to follow enthusiastically all the discussions in a course on modernism.  Is there anything we can do, I wonder, to speed along their coming up to speed?  Are there more background documents, more introductory material that can be taught in the first weeks?  Should we have a more restrictive set of prerequisites to ensure that students have more background before the course even begins?  Would moving to full-year courses leave us bored in January, or could we look forward to months and months of informed debate?

It comes down, once again, to the hermeneutic circle.  You cannot understand things until you have seen it all, and you cannot appreciate what you are seeing until you understand it.  The most gratifying part of teaching is seeing that light go on and benefitting from that glow.  We can do everything we can to rush to that point, but we spend each semester building to that moment, praying for it to come.

How that feels, how this week felt, is why I do this, and faith that it will come again and again is the best reason for a teacher’s optimism.