Employment Rates
The Washington Post (and other news outlets)
reported today that the job growth rate for the month of June was not as high as analysts had predicted it would be, only 112,000 new jobs instead of the 240,000 that had been estimated.
But what gets me is this tidbit at the end of the article: "June's Labor Department report showed that average hourly wages rose by a 2 cents to $15.65, a 0.1 percent increase, less than the 0.3 percent expected. The average workweek fell by two tenths of an hour to 33.6 hours. Total hours worked in the economy dropped 0.6 percent."
$15.65 x 33.6 hours x 50 weeks = $26,292.00
That's not a good wage in today's economy, with housing, heating, and food costs being what they are. It's certainly not a wage one would want to support a family on.
And I would venture to guess that many people who are in these new jobs are making less pay than they did in their old jobs. I would also assume that while they were out of work, that they may have chewed up savings and/or increased debt. Coming back to work for less under those stressed circumstances is better than not working at all, but it's hardly cause for celebration.
And at 33.6 hours, what kind of benefits are these people getting, if any? Are they jobs in places where you need to work a full forty hours a week to get health insurance?
The economy may be on the mend, on paper, and by all economic theory, but going back to work for only $26,292 isn't the kind of thing that would make me at all excited about endorsing Bush's economic policies.
Meanwhile,
businesses are being encouraged to offshore more jobs to survive. Again, according to the Washington Post: "In blunt terms, the report by the Boston Consulting Group warns American firms that they risk extinction if they hesitate in shifting facilities to countries with low costs. That is partly because the potential savings are so vast, but the report also cites a view among U.S. executives that the quality of American workers is deteriorating."
So the good paying jobs get outsourced more cheaply and what new jobs American workers can get offers fewer hours and less pay. These same workers who have increased productivity dramatically over the past decade or so are now deemed inferior.
And
Bush and Cheney are bragging about this? They're proud of what's happening to working families and they think this is a good economic outcome?
I wonder if they will say what percentage of the tax cuts they love so much go to companies outsourcing jobs?
Follow Up: Blogs and Teaching
1.
From BLOG THREE HUNDRED NINETY-ONE:A less obvious answer lies in getting teachers open to change, to examining carefully all their practices to ensure that the writing they ask students to do is grounded in interest, choice, value, and authenticity.
2. See also BLOG THREE HUNDRED EIGHTY-EIGHT, A Guided Tour To Blogging.
Blogs and Teaching
I've been puzzling over how to think about blogs in a writing course. Well not puzzling over whether I might use them were I teaching a course at the moment -- I would in heartbeat, but how.
As a teacher, the technology behind a service like Blogger is too good not to experiment with and in; it's a really a good pedagogical playground. I could use a Blog as simple course interface -- a place to post a syllabi. I could ask students to keep blogs, assigning them different prompts or activities to post.
They might keep a blog for research projects. Or as shared and public reading journals. Or really, anything else we can think of to write on that's course related. With any luck, some would come out of the experience with a newly discovered writing voice, along the lines/along the way
Austin Lingerfelt describes in "(this) space", an essay on blogging and writing.
Though at this point, my thinking is that blog use in the course would be better used as a way to simply introduce students, if they're not already blogging in some form, to the technology and possibility offered. It would be optional to make the blogs public, though for some that's half the fun -- being read. And like any kind of writing tried in a writing course, the goal would be to find enough ways to prompt students to write interestingly, or rather to find an interest in what they're writing despite the fact that it grew out of a required course (as first year writing courses, the kind I most like to teach, are).
Much would depend upon where I taught, the context for the course I was offering, and what I was contracted to do by the program as an instructor of that course. But choosing to experiment wouldn't be an easy choice to make.
The harder question for me, and frankly the more interesting question, is what's the future of blogs as pedagogical tool. Not among the trailblazers, like
Jeff Rice and the folks he links to in his "TechRhet" entry (an entry that comments on a techrhet email list discussion about the role of blogs, a discussion I took part in and that forms the basis of this rumination). Trailblazers and people who jump and make use of a new, or relatively new technology and do cool things are interesting to study and learn from. And a lot of them are in fact asking questions about blogs and teaching.
But I'm always more interested in what to say to instructors who are not pioneers.
I ask this because I spend a good part of my job for
Bedford/St. Martin's traveling to campuses, often giving workshops on teaching with technology. And not just technology we offer as a college publisher, but very often on helping people use the technology at hand, whether that's word processing software in a networked computer lab, a course management system they have on campus, or an amalgamation of freeware, including blogs.
The thing I find is that there needs to be a compelling reason for teachers to change what they're doing and the technologies they're using. Sometimes teachers are self-compelled. They might stumble across an essay like Austin's (linked above), and be moved to try blogs. They might hear a good teaching story at a conference. (I heard several at
Computers and Writing 2004.) They might be motivated by a technology grant or teaching and technology program on their campus.
Unfortunately too, many teachers are compelled by circumstances not of their choosing. The department might be feeling pressure to do more with technology in way or another. And so instructors might all be given course WWW sites and asked to use them in some way. Or they might be under pressure from students to do more online.
And there are the vast majority of teachers who simply see no reason to switch what they're doing; they remain uncompelled, or unmoved by arguments others find compelling. And often for good reason: what they're doing is working for them. How they teach writing fits into their course loads, their lives, the way they manage their time, how they respond to students, when and where they do work, and so on.
So for these teachers, what advantages do computer-based, and more significantly, blogs, however you want to define them, offer? Why use a blog, why add a new technology layer onto what one is doing? How can we make clear the advantages? How do we help teachers learn how to shift the way they work? How do we keep learning curves gentle rises and not rock-face climbs?
Those are the questions that I think matter not only with Blogs, but with any new technology. They were the questions that mattered 20 years ago and 10 years. They mattered with email lists and file sharing and MOO's and chatrooms; they matter now with Blogs and they'll matter in the future with whatever new technology or innovation changes the way students and teachers write and teach and learn writing.
