Bad at English dot tumblr dot com

While this project originally focused on the "bad at English" theme, over the course of collecting photos and stories for the blog I realized how important a critical consciousness on being a millennial educator has been to my professional development and career.

I'm not sure if my baby-boomer and Generation X colleagues realize that when they complain about millennial entitlement and overabundance of self-esteem, they are millennials in the room.  We are turning 30 every year!  We are getting hired by your departments.

It is important to me to speak back to these conversations, but also to draw on my generational background in social media and popular culture to challenge the norms of what it means to be a professional and a teacher.

I obviously have a lot more thinking to do about what this all means, but this project has been an important start.

Flower Crowns are headbands or other hair accessories created by stringing a number of flowers together. On Tumblr, these floral accessories have become an exploitable photoshop meme by adding them to photos of males who would not normally wear them.

Everybody at the conference really liked my flower crown and I got a lot of compliments, even from strangers.  (I think it looked especially good with my suit.  I wore it for my panel and everything.)  But I also got a lot of questions about whyyyyy I was wearing one and what it meant.

Flower crowns are a meme; they got picked up especially hard by fans of the tv show Hannibal, but putting them (via photoshop or sometimes in person) on masculine actors and characters is a very millennial way of queering and appropriating media.  I think.

For me, wearing a flower crown around an academic conference, and inviting other people to wear my extra one with me, had a few purposes:

feminist critique of the discourses of respectability

playing with my identity and visibility as a queer millennial educator in a venue that skews a lot older

it looked awesome on me and my tumblr friends egged me on to do it

I went to the Eiteljorg Museum while I was in Indianapolis for the conference: Pearson held a party there one evening so I got in for free!  I took some blurry and unhelpful pictures of the totem pole they have on display in the atrium: here is some information about its history. Narrative things like this pole harken back to my previous post about not turning things into texts!

I hung out for a bit with Malea Powell, my MA advisor, current PhD committee member, and past chair of CCCC one morning at the conference.  She was delighted to pose with a flower crown and I regret not getting these pictures up sooner.

I asked Malea her thoughts about being "bad at English" and she told me that colonialism assigns value to a very narrow set of skills (linear alphabetic texts) and devalues the same material rhetorics and practices she is most concerned with (making, crafting).

Which reminds me of her call in the Octalog 3 panel put on at CCCC to stop turning things into texts.  A thing demands a different kind of interaction than a "text"--our default mode of interaction is "reading" but material rhetorics ask us for a deeper engagement with all the facets of a meaning-laden object.

I talked to Victor del Hierro, a PhD student at Michigan State, after his panel and we posed in front of my webcam.  He gave an awesome talk beginning to theorize a hip hop rhetorics framework for digital humanities.

I asked him what he thought about being "bad at English"--he said, "I used to be really worried about it...but then I stopped caring.  Is that ok?"  It's totally ok.

My notes from the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students, of which I am a member.  We met today.  There were no outlets in the room so I had to do my note-taking old school.

I did get a new baby sparklepony this year (though I actually think I completed one of the quests the same way I did in Vegas last year…)  Two quests down, many to go.

I stopped by the C's the Day table to talk to Mary Karcher.  Turns out, she lives in my hometown and we had never realized it before.  We talked about how teachers can make students think they are bad at english by making "english" seem like an arbitrary series of rules about what words you are allowed and not allowed to use.

The more I talk to people about this, the more I wonder what I even mean by English, anyway.

I feel like spending part of your academic conference playing an game might by some definitions count as being "bad", but that's what gamification is trying to change--games are good!  Games can be part of being good at english.

Doug Walls and Franny Howes agree: being a bad speller can make you think you are bad at english, but thankfully there's more to it than that.

[Image: the login page for the con hotel wifi.  "High Speed Internet Access... Please click here to login to the internet"]

[Image: Me, a white woman with glasses and a large gold earring, staring into my webcam with my CCCC nametag, reading "Franny Howes Virginia Tech".]