The Undersea World of Clint Gardner

I have sadly neglected The Undersea World for far too long. I promise to update soon, as I have many updates and many ideas to post.

I will say, however, that I’m honored now to serve as Secretary of TYCA. TYCA is a great organization and it will be great working with everyone for the next three years.

I am also am honored to be giving the keynote address at the upcoming Arizona Writing Centers Symposium sponsored by Arizona State University in February. I’m going to be talking about the benefits of peer tutoring.

Well the summer certain was interesting. Not only did I find out I was elected as TYCA National Secretary, but the building the SLCC Student Writing Center was subject to a reverse flood. In other words, the roof leaked. A leaky roof, however, sounds rather benign, like throwing now a few pans to catch errant drips. The flood we suffered, however, was more like the house in movie version of Fight Club.

Suffice it to say, I was rather busy with physical things to post any update here. Talk about an Undersea World! Perhaps I am prescient?

I’ll write more about the TYCA job later.

Unfortunately, my old and beautiful Undersea template was vunerable to hacking. I’ve found a new one which allows me to post my own images in the header image. It is a functionally stylish template, but my goldfish image does not convey the breadth that the other one did.

Oh well, at least it conveys the limitations that I often feel.

It seems proper to bookend my rather sporadic blogging by posting a binary title for you. In any case, as you might imagine, I’ve been rather busy this first month-and-a-half of spring semester 2008. Mostly I’ve been dealing a great deal with class stuff. I’ve been out of the classroom for nearly two years due to professional, campus, and Student Writing Center commitments, save working with tutor education, and I was feeling a bit rusty at first. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was doing–I am pretty diligent, some might say obsessive about class planning, but I did feel a bit out-of-sorts since it seemed all new to me again. In all I was a bit nervous about that feeling, but then I fell into enjoying it again. I also realized I needed to review my teaching style to reach this particular group of students. They are a bright group who have an interesting perspective on things.

In any case, that’s why the long silence.

In other news, I’ve gone all out, and in true fashion, completely contradicted myself about the facebook.com issue. I’ve found that there are literally thousands of SLCC students active on facebook, and many, many peer writing tutors in writing centers. I have, therefore, created a facebook group for PeerCentered. It already has quite a few members, although there is not much activity. We’ll see. It is, however, the most interest the PeerCentered concept has ever received in its many permutations.

I don’t feel too badly in taking this thing to facebook: if that is where people are, then so be it.

The second “season” of the PeerCentered podcast begins with where we started, at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW). NCPTW 2007 was held at Penn State and was hosted by the Penn State Center for Excellence in Writing.

I hope that this season will feature more contributors. Harry Denny from St. John’s University Writing Center in New York expressed interest in the podcast, and perhaps some of the people now contributing to the PeerCentered blog from the Boise State Writing Center will want to participate.

There is a lot of potential for PeerCentered either as a blog or a podcast. I think I am going to make it my priority after I finish up as IWCA President this November.

The new writing tutors at the Boise State University Writing Center are carrying on quite the dialog over at PeerCentered. It has been a few years since PeerCentered has been as active as this, and I’m not sure it ever had such a cogent discussion of peer tutoring before. I hope that it will keep up for the whole academic year and that more folks get involved.

“How many side projects to I really need?” I thought to myself while riding the train in to campus today. ” I mean my hell! Do you really need another blog?” I’ve been wanting to fiddle around with WordPress more lately, given that it is the system that is currently in use on writingcenters.org. And I needed an index for my account on the Student Writing Center’s web server, Bessie (there is a history behind that name that I will explore at some point on UWCG.) I’ve been meaning to develop my account on that server given that all my previous professional work was removed from our old Student Writing Center web site because of a change over in how the web server works and general Community College policies. I find that people ask me questions that could easily be answer by a site like this, and I want to organize my work in ways that help me to understand it and, more importantly, remember it!

I am anticipating that any reader who would stumble upon this fine corner of sheer academic egoism is going to ask “why the title?” Here’s the story: when I was setting up WordPress, I got to the point when it asked for what I wanted to call the site. Initially I typed in “Clint Gardner” and immediately erased it as it kind of meant the page was me or I was the page. I then typed in “About Clint Gardner” and hit the backspace key immediately upon hitting the final “r” in my name. That was even worse and perhaps misleading since a text such as this site isn’t just about me. I want the site to work for me.

So at that point I was really stumped. I started running through all the clever quotations I could think of from writing center research, comp/rhet studies etc. I pulled out Beth Boquet’s Noise from the Writing Center and flipped through the pages. It then struck me that it would be awfully brazen to pull a catch phrase or a quotation from a fellow writing center colleague and use it as my own, so I put aside that idea, although Noise from the Writing Center would be a great name for a blog. (I would really love to see Beth create a blog with that title!)

Finally I turned to where I always turn for inspiration and ideas: poetry. Garcia Lorca came to mind as did De Cervantes. Nothing. I flipped through Larkin, Frost, Levin, Pinsky, h.d., Bishop and more but nothing struck me and it all just started to seem pretty pretentious and, frankly, stupid.

I was stuck, and just about to scrap the whole idea of using a blog to manage my academic affairs/projects when suddenly the opening sequence of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau popped into my head. Don’t ask me why, but I saw the bright yellow credits in that odd blocky type that Wes Anderson imitated so well in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

That random thought made me laugh and then I said it out loud: “The Undersea World of Clint Gardner: Nothing to do with oceanography in the slightest.” I laughed again and decided that had to be it–I mean one can only take one’s work so seriously, after all. Levity is a great leveler and a check upon one’s vanity and ego. Analogically, I suppose it does reflect my desire to find adventure in my work, as well as to explore ideas that are un- or under-explored.

So that’s the official launch, I guess. I don’t have a champagne bottle to smash on my fancy new WordPress Calypso, however.