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 2002.09.15 EPISODE 2, in which "check guages" is not a suggestion
e were told, during the lengthy and overly air conditioned orientation, that graduate J-schools across the country and, indeed, the world use something called "The Wisconsin Method." This method involves some combination of faculty and students working together on academic research projects which, I guess, was developed here in Madison. And so, youth civic engagement. My 970 professor is involved in a project to outline the movement of social capital among youth civic organizations in Madison and that means those of us who don't have a better idea of our own are also involved in such a project. I might have gotten into something else but I've only been here a month -- what the hell do I know about social networks? So we got the group together for the first time this week and discussed what we figured we were supposed to find out. (As an aside, these group meetings mean my 1PM start time on Thursday has been bumped back to 10AM, which is really an affront to decency.) This consisted of lots of back and forth about what terms like "civic engagement" really mean except that it was kind of interesting. When you pick up a newspaper and read that juvenile delinquency is up 15% or hear on CNN that more ritualized church services are contributing to a drop in divorce rates, this is the machinery behind those numbers. There's somebody in a room somewhere, probably with grad students in tow, deciding what is or is not delinquent. This project is 60% of my grade -- the other 40% being the much loved class participation -- so I'm kind of glad it's keeping my attention, as is the class as a whole, really. This is a two-hour seminar about social networks and I'm having no trouble staying with it, unlike the one-hour-plus 658 lectures, which are physically cold and structurally sterile. The problem with 658 lecture, aside from the material all being really obvious, is that everything in the well laid-out Powerpoint presentations is right in the book. Inductive vs. deductive, idiographic vs. nomothetic, it's all there at the flip of a page. Lab is another story. It's TA-run, it's all grad students and it's a more involved environment. We spent a good deal of this week's session trying to come up with functional definitions of "epistemology," "methodology" and "ontology," though we weren't strictly successful. Much like during my time at Tech, I got into an argument with a Detroit chick. We also had our first quiz of the year, which will be my first grade since 1997. It was a little weird because who answers irrelevant questions for the approval of authority anymore? Who cares what a null hypothesis is? Honestly. Later in the class we tried to kickstart an example research theory, working strictly from a simple concept. Somebody offered up acculturation, and away it went. Acculturation is apparently the process of an immigrant adapting to his or her new culture. So before we can do anything with this, we have to figure what qualifies as adaptation, what culture is. Then we have to decide what's relevant to the acculturation process -- language, media, cultural distance, etc. It got to be kind of a mess, with a lot of people trying to formalize a process that's mostly meant to facilitate outward thinking. Acculturation may not have been the best starting point. After that, most of us went for drinks. It was really pretty necessary. We'd have gone for drinks Friday evening as well, and most of us probably did, except that my damn car picked Friday evening to die. And I mean die. It is dead. I just barely managed to get off the short freeway that connects my place to the downtown-bound boulevard before it crapped out. There's a service center right across from my building, thankfully, that, after an hour of calling around, I got towed to. They're not open until Monday, though, so the poor thing is just sitting over there in the parking lot with no juice. See, what happened is, my Check Guages light came on as I was leaving and I thought, yeah, that'd be a great weekend activity. A couple minutes later, the Anti-Lock light came on and I noticed the battery indicator had suddenly dipped a couple notches. And then I found the thing acting sluggish out of intersections; this was when I figured I ought to turn around. This decision came about half a mile too late. As I bailed from the freeway, I started losing everything -- brakes, steering, propulsion, etc. After the car rolled to a halt my hazards wouldn't even come on. I know essentially nothing about cars but I'm pretty sure it's the alternator. If so, I'm figuring on a few hundred to replace it. Whatever's wrong, I hope I can get it fixed Monday morning; I really don't want this hanging over me all week. After all, if I'm thinking about my invalid car how can I concentrate on the civic youth of the city? Aaron Veenstra is the managing editor of Etc. House Productions and a Master's student in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin. |
