In today’s mail

came our permanent residency cards. We can now officially leave the country and return (as well as stay in it). Some facts of note:

–the card expires. In 2011. I don’t see anything about renewal though obviously that’s an option. But by 2011 we could be dual citizens. And Carrie will have tenure. And the sky will open and the sun will shine and birds will sing and harps will play gently in the distance. Oh wait, that’s something else.

–they give you a protective “pouch” for the card. But it raises the question: is a permanent resident card the kind of thing you carry around in your wallet, or is it the kind of thing you keep with your passport for when you travel? I have no idea which category this fits under.

–they sure do make you pour on the ugly sauce before they take your picture for these things. I look like a cross between a mad lumberjack and a serial killer.

–you only have to live in Canada about 60% of the time in a 5-year period to stay a permanent resident, but you must abide by the unspecified conditions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. I’m going to have to look that up.

And now, a short post about course planning

One of my major activities for the week was nailing down the details for my big lecture undergrad course in the winter. It’s a complete reworking of the department’s largest course (200 students), which has moved from a “telegraph to the internet” sort of history of communication course to “introduction to communication studies.” I always struggle with how to balance introducing students to some canonic names and approaches vs. contemporary material, as well as what the minors might need to know (we only have a minor, no major) vs. the people for whom this will be their only course in the field, ever. I’ve made my peace with that, so it’s on to how to actually set up the class.

Every time I set up a class, I find it to be a huge hassle to move around assignments and dates on my word processor as I experiment with different sequences and so on. So this time, I did something different. I laid out post-its on the table with dates for each class meeting. I then wrote in the permanent stuff like “midterm” and “no class, professor out of town.” I then made post-its for all my topics/reading sets. I was able to move stuff about at will and play with different arrangements of assignments. It was all immediately clear to me how things fit together. And then I brought Carrie over, and talked with her about the course. When she suggested a major reorientation of the material, it took just a few seconds to move the unit at the end up to the beginning and vice-versa.

I’m going to plan all my courses that way in the future.

Now if I can just settle on an assignment structure, I’ll be golden.

What’s Old is Even Older

Attention cultural studies geeks. I am always fascinated by the degree to which things repeat themselves in academic culture. The 70s mass culture debates restaged those of the 40s and 50s, and on and on.

This morning I went looking for an electronic copy of Georg Simmel’s essay on fashion, and I stumbled upon this table of contents. You may access to JSTOR, which I think you can only get if you’re logged into a university account (sorry, other readers, if this is the case) but it’s quite an interesting list of topics. Here we have sociologists writing about popular music, fashion, fads, bars, leisure, grooming and audience participation. The terminology, methodology and political stance is definitely 50s, not 00s, but I’m always struck with a sense of the uncanny when I see how familiar some of the discussions are in this older body of work.