Mae
Is this a day in-the-life story, a story about bar as a center of a community, a profile of the bar, of you and the clientele, or what? I feel that this lacks a focus and that makes some of the details of the story, although interesting, go nowhere. I think that the most interesting part of the story is the two women, Wheezy and Brenda, as workers who are managing two central places in the middle of a specific neighborhood with specific clientele. It even seems like they might have a relationship with one another given their comments. I bet they have a lot of stories to tell that speak to the area. The last paragraph Brenda’s personality starts coming through and it’s the most lively and interesting part of the piece.
Austin
Your unexpected/unexplained performance might be the key here. I know in class you said you wanted to talk about people who are glbt and some other minority and how they balance, think about, defend, use their identity. Your own experience with this, especially in a setting that moved you to stand up and join in community and connection with other people is perhaps evidence for the success and/or the need of Pulse and/or spaces like the Fire Gallery --or even how roles or the feeling of membership to a certain group or identity is shown to be both positive, a way to make connection, and ludicrous and unfair as is obvious through the way strangers in this space can communicate and connect because they are in boxes and not despite of it. I don’t know how the actual experience was so forgive me if I’m making assumptions. I do think that you should trust your own instincts and experiences here though, especially with how well you can communicate a mood and the reasons people do what they do in social settings.
Toni
This is well written, as are most of your rough drafts of your pieces. Your ability to incorporate quotes and give vivid details is wonderful but I was frustrated sometimes with this piece because I wasn’t sure where you were going or more accurately I suppose, why this topic matters. It is only interesting because you write well but I need convincing of why this is something that we should pay attention to given all the other things you could write about.
Martin
I think that your piece is too individualized, if that makes sense and is a word. The topic could appeal to a wide audience but the way you incorporate yourself somehow closes it off. I think if you spend more time on the dunes or on other characters it might help but try approaching this problem from a different angle. See how far you can get with using yourself and even if you can’t write the whole piece without “I” then at least you will see more clearly where it will actually help strengthen the piece, not just fill and tell. The conflict of someone being an environmentalist and not changing his or her lifestyle completely is pretty widespread, but I think your piece could be more provocative than that.
Regis
Bummer that it didn’t work out for this guy. It must have been hard trying to figure out what angle to take. I think the teamwork thing is interesting but I don’t know if it’s enough. I also think that the entrepreneur kid angle can be interesting but you don’t quite give enough to convince me that that is the whole story either. Bottom line is that I think you can do both and make it intriguing but you need way more detailed attention to character and tighter scenes. There is plenty going on and plenty of people around but no scene or person is very vivid. Keep going with it, I think it can turn into something great.
Elizabeth
It appears that you have several stories running through this rough draft and you haven’t been able to focus or get excited about any of them. The story about race and staff is a totally separate story than one about how students treat security in general. And the ridiculous things parents call about or that security has to deal with every day could be something else as well. Also, the strange close-minded quote from the freshman threw me for an even bigger loop. I think that you should go with what most interests you, what most gets your fingers moving across the keys. Take another angle, do another interview but stick with what is interesting and what you want to write about.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Draft, too long, still has notes in, more interviews coming will shape it more. Would love feedback!
Imagine being a graduate of a 4-year private liberal arts college. Last weekend you stepped across a stage heavily draped in white cloth, shook the president’s hand, and received your laminated and leather-bound diploma in front of family and friends.
Flash forward a few weeks. The horns playing your Alma matter still echo in your ears and the inspiring words of the $2,000/hour commencement speaker (“Go forth with this knowledge bestowed upon you and change the world…”) still mock you. Unemployed and uninsured, you sit down at your mom’s kitchen table and stare at the envelope in front of you. Your first loan repayment is due in 4 weeks.
The bright-eyes of college graduates are looking unusually dim and as the media consistently reports, for exceptionally good reason. Students don’t need someone reporting the really bad and even worse, as the Wall Street Journal did with its recent “The Curse of the Class of 2009.” Graduates are well aware that their money, their time, their education is being called, usually with little finesse, useless.
With the current economic hoo-hah, college, especially of the liberal arts variety, is quickly being discovered to have little to do with getting a job and making a living. Current liberal arts college students, the recently unemployed, and especially recent graduates and are rightly questioning the organization of our education system that led or is leading them down a road to NO JOB.
Evidence of this is in Kalamazoo, a city of about 250,000 in the great depressed state of Michigan. Kalamazoo has been in the news in the last few years for its luck in formally housing an exceptionally rich person interested in education. This anonymous person gave not only students but the entire city an enormous boost, and the Kalamazoo Promise has been heralded as remarkable and innovative by many.
Outwardly, it is not completely apparent that the city is feeling the strain; it’s not the picture of depression as is Detroit , two hours northeast . The roads are often in disrepair but a new skate park, tennis court, and basketball hoop sits next to the public pool. A new multi-million dollar condo complex and award-winning public library sits next to the abandoned Pfizer headquarter buildings. (the company still hasn’t taken down banners proclaiming “the science of being a good neighbor” and "we love where we live.” )
One of the most obviously surviving locals, appearance-wise, is Kalamazoo College, a 4-year private liberal arts college gaining notoriety among elite institutions for its first-year experience, study abroad, and service-learning curriculum. It is one of three main institutions of higher learning: a community college, a private liberal arts college, and a state university.
On the high hill that Kalamazoo College sits on, spacious emerald green lawns kiss red brick streets, flowers bloom, birds sing, young and optimistic intellectuals move on sidewalks sans a single weed in the cracks.
The panic comes from within. The college’s endowment has dropped over 30% and stress over the potential of lost income due to dropping enrollment numbers had the college’s administration putting admissions workers on attack.
Downtown, Kalamazoo Valley Community College is feeling good. They have had record numbers apply and enroll this year. INTERVIEW COMING
ENROLLMENT NUMBERS
What is going on here?
In an economy where getting and having a job is becoming more difficult than ever, critics of the humanities usefulness in preparing students for practical, useful work are getting our attention. It is easy to imagine that college education, both undergraduate and graduate is becoming, as Colombia professor BLANK wrote in the New York Times, is becoming “the Detroit of higher learning,” in the eyes of potential students, their parents, and even those already involved in academia.
Perhaps KVCC, which has majors like BLANK, offers an education that offers certainty that appeals to many in this uncertain time. A narrowly focused, carefully applied education seems to provide a solid anchor and security when things go sour. Perhaps it’s just that it’s cheaper. Maybe the unemployed are going back to school. Most likely it is all of the above.
Should those colleges on the green grassy hills be worried? Should education adapt to market forces? Is it right not to prepare students for obtaining an actual paying job?
Regardless, the liberal arts army is on the defense.
It’s bad though, quite a jungle out there. When graduates, professors, and even current students are questioning their choice of education not because of the lack of quality but because of a lack of practicality, a rumble’s a-coming. An argument for survival will beat an argument for lofty thought everytime. And right now it appears that it is about survival. If college education can’t translate into a better shot at a higher living, SOMETHING HAS TO CHANGE>
It’s a struggle of class and prestige. It’s almost impossible to defend liberal arts philosophy in this economy and this point IN EXISTANCE without sounding like ELITE/ catchy phrase.
It sounds as if those highly educated are freaked out that the educational hierarchy order is being disrupted.
Silently, they are asking questions that have everything to do with class hierarchies: Am I really less valuable/going to have less to show in this economy then people who can repair AC’s or cut hair? As a society we tend to associate prestige with wealth, while simultaneously skewing our definitions of worth away from manual labor.
Joellen Silberman, Vice President of Enrollment at the private liberal arts based Kalamazoo College, is nervous about anyone recommending that liberal arts colleges start “behaving” like community colleges and narrowing the focus of study.
“If you think first about the fact that the definition of liberal arts is, from way back when, what are the skills that a free person, at a time when there were free and non free people, need to live in the world? And then there was a set of manual skills that individuals who were not free needed to learn…so that is where the term first came from, what are those skills?”
This doesn’t help defend liberal arts as entirely mind-opening and open-minded.
From the nation's founding through at least the nineteenth century the liberal arts were reserved for the few who had the resources and leisure to pursue them. A liberal arts education groomed upper-class men to assume what were seen as their natural positions in society—almost all others were excluded by dint of sex, race, and class.
The system is failing. Our upper classes, our upper echelon of students, are being called “cursed.” The stack of rejection letters is growing as they lose their health insurance and write their first loan payment check. Even if their parents are writing the check, there is a lot of head-rubbing going on. (“Didn’t I put my kid on the right path? 1400 SAT score! Math and English honors all the way though high school?! They volunteered at the homeless shelter for God’s sake!”)
Economists now say they have told us for years that it was a fact that the bubble economy was unsustainable and the current young generation would be the first in history to not surpass the standard of living of their parents.
This told-you-so attitude and the very mention of an “economist” is enough by now to makes any college-aged person want to beat their head against a wall. The job market has reached mythical status for recent college graduates. It is a fairy tale, a imaginary place the old folks reminisce about, like drive-ins or the old south.
Flash forward a few weeks. The horns playing your Alma matter still echo in your ears and the inspiring words of the $2,000/hour commencement speaker (“Go forth with this knowledge bestowed upon you and change the world…”) still mock you. Unemployed and uninsured, you sit down at your mom’s kitchen table and stare at the envelope in front of you. Your first loan repayment is due in 4 weeks.
The bright-eyes of college graduates are looking unusually dim and as the media consistently reports, for exceptionally good reason. Students don’t need someone reporting the really bad and even worse, as the Wall Street Journal did with its recent “The Curse of the Class of 2009.” Graduates are well aware that their money, their time, their education is being called, usually with little finesse, useless.
With the current economic hoo-hah, college, especially of the liberal arts variety, is quickly being discovered to have little to do with getting a job and making a living. Current liberal arts college students, the recently unemployed, and especially recent graduates and are rightly questioning the organization of our education system that led or is leading them down a road to NO JOB.
Evidence of this is in Kalamazoo, a city of about 250,000 in the great depressed state of Michigan. Kalamazoo has been in the news in the last few years for its luck in formally housing an exceptionally rich person interested in education. This anonymous person gave not only students but the entire city an enormous boost, and the Kalamazoo Promise has been heralded as remarkable and innovative by many.
Outwardly, it is not completely apparent that the city is feeling the strain; it’s not the picture of depression as is Detroit , two hours northeast . The roads are often in disrepair but a new skate park, tennis court, and basketball hoop sits next to the public pool. A new multi-million dollar condo complex and award-winning public library sits next to the abandoned Pfizer headquarter buildings. (the company still hasn’t taken down banners proclaiming “the science of being a good neighbor” and "we love where we live.” )
One of the most obviously surviving locals, appearance-wise, is Kalamazoo College, a 4-year private liberal arts college gaining notoriety among elite institutions for its first-year experience, study abroad, and service-learning curriculum. It is one of three main institutions of higher learning: a community college, a private liberal arts college, and a state university.
On the high hill that Kalamazoo College sits on, spacious emerald green lawns kiss red brick streets, flowers bloom, birds sing, young and optimistic intellectuals move on sidewalks sans a single weed in the cracks.
The panic comes from within. The college’s endowment has dropped over 30% and stress over the potential of lost income due to dropping enrollment numbers had the college’s administration putting admissions workers on attack.
Downtown, Kalamazoo Valley Community College is feeling good. They have had record numbers apply and enroll this year. INTERVIEW COMING
ENROLLMENT NUMBERS
What is going on here?
In an economy where getting and having a job is becoming more difficult than ever, critics of the humanities usefulness in preparing students for practical, useful work are getting our attention. It is easy to imagine that college education, both undergraduate and graduate is becoming, as Colombia professor BLANK wrote in the New York Times, is becoming “the Detroit of higher learning,” in the eyes of potential students, their parents, and even those already involved in academia.
Perhaps KVCC, which has majors like BLANK, offers an education that offers certainty that appeals to many in this uncertain time. A narrowly focused, carefully applied education seems to provide a solid anchor and security when things go sour. Perhaps it’s just that it’s cheaper. Maybe the unemployed are going back to school. Most likely it is all of the above.
Should those colleges on the green grassy hills be worried? Should education adapt to market forces? Is it right not to prepare students for obtaining an actual paying job?
Regardless, the liberal arts army is on the defense.
It’s bad though, quite a jungle out there. When graduates, professors, and even current students are questioning their choice of education not because of the lack of quality but because of a lack of practicality, a rumble’s a-coming. An argument for survival will beat an argument for lofty thought everytime. And right now it appears that it is about survival. If college education can’t translate into a better shot at a higher living, SOMETHING HAS TO CHANGE>
It’s a struggle of class and prestige. It’s almost impossible to defend liberal arts philosophy in this economy and this point IN EXISTANCE without sounding like ELITE/ catchy phrase.
It sounds as if those highly educated are freaked out that the educational hierarchy order is being disrupted.
Silently, they are asking questions that have everything to do with class hierarchies: Am I really less valuable/going to have less to show in this economy then people who can repair AC’s or cut hair? As a society we tend to associate prestige with wealth, while simultaneously skewing our definitions of worth away from manual labor.
Joellen Silberman, Vice President of Enrollment at the private liberal arts based Kalamazoo College, is nervous about anyone recommending that liberal arts colleges start “behaving” like community colleges and narrowing the focus of study.
“If you think first about the fact that the definition of liberal arts is, from way back when, what are the skills that a free person, at a time when there were free and non free people, need to live in the world? And then there was a set of manual skills that individuals who were not free needed to learn…so that is where the term first came from, what are those skills?”
This doesn’t help defend liberal arts as entirely mind-opening and open-minded.
From the nation's founding through at least the nineteenth century the liberal arts were reserved for the few who had the resources and leisure to pursue them. A liberal arts education groomed upper-class men to assume what were seen as their natural positions in society—almost all others were excluded by dint of sex, race, and class.
The system is failing. Our upper classes, our upper echelon of students, are being called “cursed.” The stack of rejection letters is growing as they lose their health insurance and write their first loan payment check. Even if their parents are writing the check, there is a lot of head-rubbing going on. (“Didn’t I put my kid on the right path? 1400 SAT score! Math and English honors all the way though high school?! They volunteered at the homeless shelter for God’s sake!”)
Economists now say they have told us for years that it was a fact that the bubble economy was unsustainable and the current young generation would be the first in history to not surpass the standard of living of their parents.
This told-you-so attitude and the very mention of an “economist” is enough by now to makes any college-aged person want to beat their head against a wall. The job market has reached mythical status for recent college graduates. It is a fairy tale, a imaginary place the old folks reminisce about, like drive-ins or the old south.
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