Deb Aronson's RSS feed. http://www.debaronson.com/ For Jennifer Monson, the whole world is her classroom, from bird migration patterns that tie the corners of the world together to vast underground aquifers of burbling waters. You’ll rarely see the University of Illinois professor of dance at the front of a regular class setting - instead, her idea of a learning space involves watching birds in early morning, trekking through woods at night without flashlights, or imagining yourself a water molecule flowing through the dry streambed in which you’re now walking. Taking a class like that with Monson “was one of my most memorable college experiences,” says Isabelle Colazzo ‘11 FAA, a dance major who graduated in May. “We practiced different ways of knowing our body in these different environments. … We had lots of time to veer off into something we wanted to explore.” For Monson, who lived in the “wilds” of New York City as a freelance choreographer for 20 years, moving to a structured University environment in 2008 to teach dance was a dramatic transition. But it has been worth it. “This community is incredibly progressive; the University is full of the brightest, most creative people; and my own world has opened up in other ways … that have helped me understand my own work,” she says of her relocation to the Midwest. Art + science = creativity Upon her arrival on campus, Monson not only taught classes but began to create a project called “Mahomet Aquifer,” referring to the vast sand and gravel deposit underlying 15 counties in east-central Illinois and nearby Indiana which supplies more than 100,000,000 gallons per day of groundwater for public use. Monson, who double-majored in biology and dance (“Growing up, I either wanted to be [animal researcher] Jane Goodall or [dancer] Isadora Duncan”), is as comfortable with scientists as she is with artists. For this project she worked closely with geologists, hydrogeologists, computer scientists and others. By thoroughly immersing herself in aquifer research, Monson could then translate that information into choreography that reflects the vastness of the aquifer and evokes a sense of oceans of water, percolating, molecule by molecule, beneath our feet but out of our sight. Perhaps because of her own academic background, she draws a close connection between art (specifically dance) and scientific methods of developing and testing a hypothesis. “Experiment and see what happens,” she says in describing both areas. “That is so much a creative process.” She challenges her students to do the same. An agent for change Monson has a body that is small but not slight and bright eyes that shine from a weathered face framed by longish, graying hair. As she sits and chats, she is calm, her body quiet, yet you can feel the energy of her mind. She’s modest about her teaching abilities, however, particularly since she shudders at the idea of herself as an authority figure. “It breaks my heart to take attendance,” Monson says. “If you want to be here, you’re going to be here.” But she does see herself very much as a collaborator, and that is one of her strengths as a teacher. “Jennifer has adopted the idea of student agency, of students taking on their own learning,” says Jan Erkert, head of the dance department. For example, students in Monson’s “Environment and Dance Research” class are posed this challenge: Exchange ideas with a science student, then create a site-specific dance. Colazzo, who was interested in invasive plant species, met with Justin Meissen ‘10 LAS, then a UI biology major who was also president of the Red Bison Society, a University YMCA group that works to restore and re-create natural prairie environments. The biologist took the dancer on a hike through the prairie and showed her both native and invasive plants; Colazzo then explored how it felt, kinesthetically, to move in different areas - one that was overrun and another that was pristine and more open. Basing her dance on this experience, Colazzo brought the class to that outdoor spot for her performance. “It was a taste of what a dancer would do as a professional,” she says. Aquifer as art The aquifer project so far has been quite … fluid. At present it has had two iterations, with Monson envisioning even more. The first one involved a collaboration between students in the UI Department of Dance and experts at the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on campus. “You can tell people, ‘Here are the numbers,’ but another way of communicating that is [via] .. emotion, the experience through the body,” said AVL Director Donna Cox about the dance project. “There is always a challenge of rendering images in motion and projecting them in space that is unusual.” “It brought surprises, and that was fun.” The outcome, performed in 2008 by sophomore dance majors, included images - projected on the walls and onto the dancers themselves - of grains of sand (moving as they would in an aquifer), a 3-D model of the space the aquifer occupies, maps and diagrams of the aquifer’s composition. In another version, Monson collaborated with Steve May ‘08 FAA, a dance graduate student, and three Illinois dance alumni: Kyli Kleven ‘09 FAA, Amy Swanson ‘08 FAA and Stephen West ‘08. Their creative method included typical Monson-type activities. While camping in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, the dancers and their teacher floated in a stream, walked a dry creek bed and engaged in voice work and the physical and spiritual aspects derived from Qigong. The piece was eventually performed outdoors in 2009 - at nearby farmers’ markets, a local farm and a grain elevator - in order “to engage people, especially farmers, who rely so much on the aquifer,” says Monson. Much of Monson’s work, both in town and in New York City, is site-specific - as are her contacts. Because she continues to work in New York City as well as on campus, Monson is able to serve not only as a teacher but as a mentor and conduit for students looking to join the professional dance community there. Both communities are richer for it. http://www.debaronson.com/features/like_water_for_dancers/ 2011-06-21 When I walk into Billie Jean Theide’s metalsmithing class, I seem to have time-warped to the 1950s. High, wooden desks reminiscent of architects’ drafting tables fill the second-floor classroom. Gooseneck lamps provide an ambient glow. Radiators clank and hiss. We are warm within the walls of an old brick building, tucked amid greenhouses in a quiet corner of campus. Then Theide speaks, and I am surprised - a strikingly deep voice for such an average-sized woman. But ultimately her voice, with its cello-like timbre, her squared-off fingers and strong, jewelry-free hands suit this woman who is both stern and warm, demanding and supportive. Today the 19 University of Illinois students present their final project of the semester: a vessel. Theide pulls a black sheet of paper from an enormous roll to create a runner on a long, low table. The students, a mix of men and women, grads and undergrads, gather around and place their vessels on it. There follows a short tutorial about the etiquette of handling other people’s projects: Ask first before you handle someone’s piece; take off any jewelry to avoid scratches or other damage; don’t crowd the vessels close together; give them breathing space. Personally, I’m no artist, and the objects on the table appear unremarkable. My first, philistine thought is that there’s nothing there I’d want to buy. But as the students speak of the work - Theide has them talk about another student’s work rather than their own - I begin to see the skill and the intent behind each piece. Making objects “I have always thought of myself not as a teacher but as an artist who is sharing my practice,” says Theide (pronounced “THIGH-dee”). And Theide is a metals artist of international repute (primarily known for her teapots), though her projects range widely, exploring silversmithing, metals and most recently, porcelain. Her work is owned by more than 20 museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. She has been featured in more than 400 exhibitions around the world and in countless publications. Last year, Theide was named the James Avery Endowed Chair in the UI College of Fine and Applied Arts - an especially momentous honor since it is the first-ever endowed chair in the School of Art + Design, with FAA,(confusing part about Art and Design and FAA?) and a recognition of her stature in the art world, as well as her teaching prowess. The metals program ranks among the top handful in the country; since 1988, nearly 40 students have earned their master’s degree in fine arts there and have gone on to teach and practice as artists and designers. Despite her international reputation and travels, Theide has lived much of her life in the Midwest. She grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, where she had her first experience with metals in junior high school. “I was always drawn toward objects making,” she says. Theide double majored in graphic design (commercial art) and jewelry and silversmithing at Des Moines’ Drake University. After working briefly as a graphic designer, she was ready to learn more about metals and 3-D. She headed to Indiana University Bloomington and its well-respected MFA program in metals, where she looked to find “something to say with that material.” While Theide hadn’t considered a career in academics, after finishing up at Indiana she taught at San Diego State University for a year. She found she liked the atmosphere. “I liked being around young adults,” Theide says. “I would give them a problem, and it was really interesting to see what their response to that problem was.” After a brief stint at Drake, she arrived at Illinois in 1985. Finding their voice As a teacher, Theide is both organized — her syllabi are legendary — and flexible. If the “class seems sluggish,” she says, “if I can sense they need something else, we’ll take an impromptu field trip” - around the corner to Krannert Art Museum, down the highway to a St. Joseph antique shop to look at the silver plate or off to Chicago galleries to get the students thinking about the broader field of metals. Theide is deeply admired by her students, who liken her less to a mother hen, clucking over her charges, than to a hawk, watching from a distance and encouraging the “little birdies to fly the nest,” says Allie Cicero, a UI senior from Rockford. When she was trying to decide on her concentration, Cicero e-mailed Theide - whom she had never met - about why she had chosen metals. “She wrote me a novel,” says Cicero, in amazement. “I thought, ‘If she’s taking that much time to talk to a potential student, imagine what she’ll be like as a teacher.’” Theide, who has received numerous teaching awards, recalls a student telling her, “‘You gave me the confidence to make me think I could do it myself.’ “That’s probably the nicest compliment anyone ever gave me,” Theide says, “because that’s ultimately what I want them to be able to do - I want them not to need me when they graduate.” That’s why she is careful not to show her own work to her students. “I don’t want them to think they have to make things that look like mine,” she says. Theide’s goal is to help students find their own voice, not mimic hers. “The closer they come to finding that voice, the closer their work comes to being a cohesive whole and becoming known,” she says. “They build their own aesthetic.” In the metalsmithing class I visit, Theide never says anything like, “I love this,” or “This is good.” Her comments are uniformly constructive and nonjudgmental, like “It takes a lot of extra effort to make the material appear soft, like terra cotta”; she asks many “what-do-you-see, what-does-that-make-you-think-of” kinds of questions. Theide models how to talk about a piece, and soon the students do it, too. They speak of how a rim works in conjunction with the interior and the exterior of the vessel. They mull over the choice of patina and the orientation of a given piece. By the end of the class period, I feel as if my eyes have been opened so that I can see the artistry encompassed in these vessels. I am a newcomer who has learned volumes in one short hour. After a whole semester, I can only imagine the way her students feel. http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/object_lessons/ 2011-04-21 Want to be serenaded with “I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas” at 2 a.m.? No problem. “Come All Ye Faithful” … in Latin? Coming right up. It’s all in a day and night’s work for Snyder Hall’s Dial-A-Carol volunteers, who satisfy callers’ desires for Christmas carols, common and obscure, for one week every year. Dial-A-Carol marks its 50th anniversary this December. Ever since 1960, when, so the story goes, building secretary Betty Gordon thought it would be nice to spread some holiday cheer, students have been playing or singing seasonal carols to anyone who calls (217) 332-1882. While some things have changed — i.e. the entire digital revolution, from desktop computers, to Google, MP3 files and the like, the Dial-A-Carol spirit has remained the same. Students still man a conference room decorated with dime-store tinsel and cardboard wall decorations 24 hours a day for the week beginning at midnight of reading day (this year from 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 9 until 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 16). Thousands of people from all over the country and as far away as India, Australia and China, have phoned in annually to seek a bit of holiday cheer. The callers may request a sing-in-real-time-by-real-people tune or one played from a recording. The 100th person who rings up automatically gets a live rendition. When Shannon Pendleton Beesley called Dial-A-Carol last year it was late, she was alone (having been recently divorced)and she figured, “why not?” “A friend of mine told me about it and at first I called to test it out, was it really true?” she said. “Who in their right mind, especially during exams, would spend all that time, 24/7, answering the phone and singing carols?” In these days of Facebook, Twitter and every other digital distraction, what makes an event this old-fashioned draw callers year after year? And, most importantly, how can a residence hall, with a population that changes faster than the speed of Santa’s sleigh, keep up the tradition? Scott Griesbach, who was the resident director of Snyder from 1982-84, figures Dial-A-Carol’s longevity must be some kind of record. “I have worked in university housing for 30 years and I have never heard of anything else lasting this long,” now at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. “I think it’s a combination of mass appeal, with something a little unique and kitchy. I know it is something that the resident director would feel horrible if they didn’t continue it. I felt that way when I was at Snyder.” For Beesley there was something about the good will, even if the singing wasn’t top drawer, that just jingled her bell. It turned out that she was the last call of the 2009 season and, instead of requesting a specific song, she had the carolers choose. “I figured they probably had a favorite, and that they’d put more into it if it was their favorite,” she said. Their choice? “Baby It’s Cold Outside” (both male and female voices),, with perhaps half a dozen singers. “I could tell they were having fun with it,” she said. “Anybody can do iTunes but it loses something; this is a personal connection. I did it for kicks and giggles, it was really fun.” Although organizers say most of the callers are alumni scattered to the far corners of the world (as well as current UI students, faculty and staff), many hear of the program some other way. Last year radio stations in six states plus Canada announced the program and gave out the number. In 2006 BBC Radio got wind of Dial-A-Carol and called several times, trying to get the students to sing obscure (for Americans) Christmas ballads. They may have been poking fun at Dial-a-Carol, but most people call for the happiness quotient. Adam Wills, who has no University connection, heard about Dial-a-Carol from a friend. “I thought how the heck can they do this, so I called,” he said. “They were not necessarily the best singers but it was totally awesome. They were having a blast with it. It was goofy and fun in a dorky kind of way. My kids loved it (they requested “Jingle Bells Batman Smells”) and I posted it on Facebook.” The event typically attracts in the range of 1,500 calls, though with social networking Wills said he wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers are closer to 10,000 this year. Griesbach remembers having just one phone to handle calls. Last year three laptops and three phones handled the requests. Since 2008, students have been able to play songs straight from the computer into the phone, rather than playing a record, cassette or CD and holding the phone to the speaker. And carolers can, of course, look up lyrics online, a far cry from the days when, as one press release states, the carolers were limited to a box of 65 holiday records and cassettes in their possession. Dial-a-Carol doesn’t restrict its volunteers to Snyder Hall residents and finds the hardest slots to fill — not surprisingly for the college crowd — are 6-10 a.m. And the program attracts plenty of volunteers and callers who don’t necessarily celebrate Christmas. One of this year’s student leaders, Fazle “Mahi” Karim is a Muslim who grew up in Bangkok, Thailand. “It’s the biggest tradition that we have in our hall,” says Karim, who attended Catholic school and picked up his knowledge of Christmas songs by listening to carolers and watching television in his childhood city. Karim says that students stop by throughout the week to volunteer and absorb the good cheer. Singing puts everyone in a happy mood, he says, and often students call just before an exam to request a song for good luck. The good cheer and tradition go both ways, between callers and carolers. Griesbach, delighted to know the program is still running, “absolutely will call this year.” Likewise Beesley. “I’ll probably call multiple times,” she says, “and have my kids (ages 8,6 and 2) call too.” Same goes for Wills. “It’s now a family tradition,” he says. Get ready. It’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas. http://www.debaronson.com/features/unsilent_night/ 2010-12-10 Lois Duncan is one of those rare creatures who knew from a very young age what she wanted to do. “I was born wanting to be a writer,” she says. “I started composing rhymed verse as soon as I could talk. I submitted my first story to a magazine when I was ten.” And a writer she is, to this day. Duncan’s first article was accepted for publication when she was 13 and since then she has written hundreds of articles and more than 50 books. She is best known as a writer of young adult suspense novels, though she also has published poetry, picture books with rhymed verse and non-fiction for both children and adults. Duncan has received countless awards, including ALA (American Library Association) Best Book for Young Adults several times and the Parents Choice Book award, not to mention the highly prestigious Margaret Edwards Award for a Distinguished Body of Work for Young Adults from the ALA and School Library Journal. Two of her books have been made into big-screen movies. I Know What You Did Last Summer, which the producers turned into a slasher movie, much to Duncan’s disgust, and the humorous Hotel for Dogs. Many more of her books have been made into made-for-television movies. Duncan did not write any of the scripts for the movies based on her books, though she did get to be on set for the filming of Hotel for Dogs. Not bad for someone who describes herself as a pudgy, shy child with braces. Power of the Pen Someone might see this list of accomplishments and feel envious, but Duncan also has experienced excruciating tragedy. In 1989, her then-18-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn, was murdered. The police determined that the attack was a random drive-by shooting, but Duncan and others found evidence that the shooting was not properly investigated. That led to her writing Who Killed My Daughter? (1992). “The only weapon I had to prevent the facts of the case from becoming buried was ‘the power of the pen.’ So I used it,” she says. Although intended as a book for adults, Who Killed My Daughter? received the School Library Journal Best Book of the Year award and the ALA Best Book for Young Adults award. In addition, after the book was published Duncan was interviewed on “Larry King Live,” “Good Morning America” and “Unsolved Mysteries.” Duncan is in the process of publishing the sequel, Tally Keeper, about both more findings on her daughter’s murder and other unsolved murders that were not properly investigated. Polyester Pantsuits In addition, Duncan is undertaking an unusual project. Little, Brown and Company, publisher of Duncan’s suspense novels, has asked her to update many of her books. Duncan, who is 76, wrote her first novel on a typewriter before liquid correction fluid (aka Wite Out) was invented, so it’s no surprise her novels have no cell phones, computers or other electronic gadgets, or that her characters wear polyester pantsuits. Still, Duncan was pleased that, for the most part, her stories have held up well. “What surprised me when I reread those older books, most of which I hadn’t looked at in years, was how well the characters and plots had stood the test of time,” says Duncan. “The changes I had to make were superficial ones and had much more to do with the changes in the world around us, such as social behaviors and the development of technology, than the stories themselves.” For example, in Summer of Fear (1976), Rachel’s mother is a photographer and scenes of her developing film in the darkroom occur several times. Duncan solved that easily enough by writing, “Mom disdained digital cameras and thought Photoshop was a cop-out. She loved the challenge of doing her lab work by hand.” But in the same story, a key element of the plot involves the folklore that witches cannot be photographed and a character who was an alleged witch. Duncan has this character travel by airplane. That worked fine in 1976, well before 9/11 and the requirement of a photo ID to fly, but now Duncan had to find another way to get that character across the country. Duncan says you’ll have to read the new story next spring to find out how she solved that problem! Despite her many commitments, Duncan says she relishes the chance to take a break to participate in the November NCTE convention. “The stimulation of being with a group of enthusiastic people who are teaching the very same students for whom I’m writing is a lot of fun,” she says of the NCTE convention. “I learn from them and from the other speakers. I also love the exhibits where I get to see what all my colleagues are doing. “A writer’s life is solitary. Once in a while it’s great to be out where the action is,” she adds. Praise Them in Private While at the convention, she might speak to teachers about her own experiences as a teen. Despite her early success, Duncan was careful to keep her writing passion under wraps when she was in high school. Based on her own experiences, Duncan counsels teachers who have students like herself to “encourage them in private, not to embarrass them by making them stand out in class so their fellow students think of them as freaks or teacher’s pets. If the student is eager for constructive criticism, and the teacher feels qualified to give it, do so. If the students wants a mentor, become one. But if the student wants to be left alone, respect that.” Duncan also balances her solitary writer’s life through Facebook http://loisduncan.arquettes.com/ and Twitter (http://twitter.com/duncanauthor). To read her tweets is to see Duncan’s sense of humor: Today my dentist asked, “What shade do you want your new teeth to be?” I suggested pink. She did not think that was funny. Like many authors, Duncan corresponds with students via Facebook and email. She says these letters come in two categories. The first is “I have to write a letter to my favorite author, and since I don’t have one I’m writing to you. I have to ask you three questions so here are three questions: How old are you? What do you weigh? How much money to you make? If you answer this e-mail I’ll get an A.” “But then there are ones that touch your heart,” she says, “like this one from a girl who read Who Killed My Daughter. ‘Kaitlyn is a blessing god sent to me. I was in a situation similar. My boyfriend was involved with drugs and involved me too. I love my boyfriend but after reading your book I made my decision that I didn’t love him enough to put my mother through the pain Kaitlyn’s death put you through. Please, give Kaitlyn a message for me, she saved the life of a seventeen year old in Cleveland, Ohio.’” It’s messages like the last one that make any writer grateful for their craft, whether, like Duncan, it appears to be inborn, or developed later in life. Her advice to aspiring writers is “just do it.” “Just sit down every day and do it,” she says. “Writing is a self-taught craft. It comes with practice. There are no short-cuts.” Little Sidebar (138 words) Updated versions of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Don’t Look Behind You are scheduled for fall 2010 release; Stranger With My Face , Summer of Fear and Down a Dark Hall will be released in spring of 2011; Daughters of Eve and Locked in Time will be out in the fall of 2011; and The Third Eye and A Gift of Magic will be released in the spring of 2012. Although Duncan no longer does school visits, she has made a 35-minute DVD designed specifically for classroom use. She describes the ups and downs of her career and gives a tour of her home and office. Duncan also leads viewers step by step through her writing process, responds to the most frequently asked questions from readers, and shows what happens behind the scenes when a writer’s novel goes to Hollywood. http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/lois_duncan_a_born_writer/ 2010-11-15 Before you meet her, the credentials of Virginia Dominguez may intimidate you. The University of Illinois professor of anthropology holds a prestigious Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell professorship, plus she’s president of the American Anthropological Association, the largest and most visible international organization for anthropologists (“like an elephant in the savannah,” Dominguez says). For five years she was editor of American Ethnologist, one of the most respected professional journals in the field. She is a prolific scholarly author who co-founded and now serves as consulting director of the International Forum for U.S. Studies. But then you meet her, and you find a woman - with short, dark hair generously sprinkled with gray, wire-frame glasses, red lipstick, long, dark eyelashes - who is a blend of yenta, den mother and guru. Her face is a three-ring circus of expressions, and her entire being is animated with a kind of enthusiasm and energy that is nuclear- powered, burning strong and clean. At just over 5 feet tall, she has the presence of a much taller person. Wendy Finley ‘08 LAS, a first-year graduate student and legal anthropologist, couldn’t imagine that someone of Dominguez’s stature would be at all interested in helping her. “But then she started to reach out, [saying], ‘I haven’t heard from you in a while; how is everything going?’ And so I thought, maybe she is interested in my success. And it turns out she really does care.” And there in a nutshell is the key to what fuels Dominguez: a keen interest in all things anthropological and her energetic support of newcomers to the field. But what, precisely, is anthropology? The term derives from the Greek anthropos, meaning “human,” so anthropology - the study of human beings - covers everything that relates to people. That can include physical aspects, social and cultural practices, or archaeology (which looks at physical artifacts created by humans). “Anthropologists are interested in the varieties of ways in which humans organize themselves,” says Dominguez. “The variety of ways in which humans think, the variety of ways human societies do everything from laugh, cry, raise children, wage war, make art, speak to each other. That variety has been there as a main focus of interest for most of us.” Dominguez’s own interest in anthropology came from her peripatetic childhood and from her teachers at Yale University, where she was in the first class that included women. Dominguez’s family was part of the Cuban intelligentsia prior to Fidel Castro’s rise to power in the early 1960s. She lived in six countries (Cuba, the U.S, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Lebanon) in her first 18 years. As her support for her students shows, Dominguez enjoys people as individuals, but she also is fascinated by how groups of people see themselves and others. Her work has taken her to Israel, Hungary and Suriname as well as the Caribbean and parts of the United States. She speaks numerous languages, including French, Hebrew, Arabic, Hungarian and Saramakatongo (a Creole-based dialect spoken in Suriname). Dominguez asks questions about things like: In which societies is art considered worthy of fine-art museums, and in which is it shown as craft or “primitive”? Who makes that interpretation? Which languages are thought of as difficult but worth learning? Who believes the untrue statement that “everyone speaks English”? How does such an idea circulate, and who benefits when it does? “I’m mainly interested in power and politics when people aren’t always aware that politics are involved,” she says. The very breadth of human study can create some confusion, but it also creates opportunity - for example, in her own work, Dominguez has used legal research, public discourse analysis and census data. She has never hesitated to go wherever her curiosity leads her. “She has a unique commitment to interdisciplinary work and a willingness to engage in it,” says Michele Hanks, a sixth-year graduate student. “She draws from lots of areas, not all anthropological.” And Dominguez supports her students in doing the same. For example, Hanks is researching how knowledge about the paranormal is created and circulated in England through ghost stories and ghost tours. She credits Dominguez for supporting her admittedly unconventional research. “She did point out that some people might raise their eyebrows,” says Hanks, “but she said, ‘If that is where your passion is, then that is what you should follow.’” Beyond exhorting students to follow their passion, Dominguez provides concrete support as well. And, despite her jaw-dropping load of professional responsibilities, her students remain one of her top priorities. At professional meetings, Dominguez makes a point to go to every panel her students are on, “no matter how early or poorly attended,” says Hanks. Dominguez is there when students get so nervous they are hyperventilating, she is there to share in their triumphs, and she is there to introduce her students to her colleagues. “She’s a bridge [to established anthropologists] and makes a point to introduce her students to the leading experts in the field as opportunities arise,” says Finley. “She’s a great help with networking, she’s a great mentor, she’s a great adviser, and to do it while she’s so busy is crazy to me, but you never feel rushed at all.” Perhaps one secret to Dominguez’s success is that, while she takes teaching very seriously, she also clearly enjoys her students both as individuals and as a collective. After being sworn in as AAA president amid a crowd of anthropology “rock stars,” she could be found happily chatting with her students in the hotel lobby. http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/the_human_condition/ 2010-09-30 You may not have heard of Carl Woese, but his discovery shook the very roots of biology. At a time when scientists believed all life on Earth could be divided into two categories, Woese (rhymes with “rose”) discovered a third. He persevered in the face of strong opposition, and ultimately triumphed. In the process, he opened our eyes to the vastness and diversity of the world of microbes. Back in the 1950s, when the race was on to figure out how cells stored genes and passed them to the next generation—a race that James Watson and Francis Crick “won” by determining the structure of DNA—Woese, an elfin man with a powerful brain, was asking different questions. What did the earliest cells look like? How did they evolve into what they are today? Ultimately, Woese wanted to know how cells, the “most essential units of all life,” got here in the first place. While the rest of the scientific world excitedly studied the roles of specific genes in a given organism—biology in the here and now, in other words—Woese believed molecular biology and genetics could help trace life back to its very beginnings. Vanilla and Chocolate Until Woese came along, scientists divided all life on Earth into two “domains”: eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Eukaryotes (you-CARRY-otes) are organisms whose cells have a nucleus—a sac inside each cell that holds its DNA. They include many-celled animals, plants, and fungi, and some single-celled organisms such as amoebas. Prokaryotes, also called bacteria, have just one cell with no nucleus (their DNA floats freely inside). That was it: organisms came in just two flavors; vanilla and chocolate, day and night. Woese thought this too; he had no reason—yet—to question it. On this classical tree of life, there were many twigs devoted to the eukaryotes, which had been intensely studied. Prokaryotes, about which much less was known, occupied a separate branch. To get to the root, so to speak, of the tree of life, Woese sought the missing link—the most primitive cell in existence. “The microbial world was, basically, terra incognita for a long time,” says Woese. “I thought that’s what I would do first thing, bring in the prokaryotes.” No Stripes, Beaks, or Spots This might sound simple, but it definitely was not. Bacteria are notoriously difficult to study and to classify. Some need to be kept in a very special environment (one without oxygen, for example). And, because they can transfer their genes easily from one to another, that bacterium you think you are studying might have already changed. From the outside, all bacteria are either rod-shaped or spherical, with the occasional spiral thrown in. Without stripes, beaks, or spots, they can’t be classified as easily as zebras, toucans, and ocelots can. To complicate things more, no one could see inside bacteria, so they couldn’t be classified based on how they looked internally either. Microbiologists, scientists who study microscopic organisms, eventually threw up their hands in despair and lumped all bacteria into a single group—the prokaryotes. But Woese thought differently. Maybe it helped that he was not trained as a microbiologist, so he didn’t get the memo that classifying bacteria was a pointless and impossible exercise. In any case, he believed that to really understand the evolution of cells he had to determine how these single-celled creatures were related to one another, and for that he needed to create a family tree. “Evolution” might make you think of primates coming down from the trees and walking on two legs, or the ways in which finch species on the Galapagos Islands differ from their mainland cousins. But evolution encompasses all life forms, not just many-celled eukaryotes. “It was an intuitive leap to begin with,” says Woese, “when I realized what I’ve got to do is go study evolution.” But How? Fortunately, a new method of comparing the RNA or DNA of different organisms had just been developed. It used enzymes to snip strands of the genetic material at precise points into short sequences. Strands from one organism could then be compared to another to find similarities and differences. Results showed up as fuzzy spots in distinctive patterns on X-ray film. But, while the technique worked, no one had yet used it on bacteria. Woese believed he could, but he was heading into risky territory with no guarantee that his effort would pay off. [Instead of studying the bacteria’s DNA, which contained their entire genomes, Woese decided to use only the ribosomal RNA—genetic material inside the ribosomes, or protein-making machines.] “The question was how similar or different one taxon (or organism) was from another, and the degree to which two [RNA] sequences were similar or different,” says Woese. “If they were too similar you wouldn’t get anything meaningful, and if they were too different you wouldn’t see anything you could interpret.” Luckily for Woese, the sequences, like Goldilocks, fell right in the middle. It was mind-numbing, repetitive, solitary, and tedious work. It took him three years to sequence the RNA from about 100 bacteria and a few eukaryotes: duckweed, mouse, and yeast, representing plants, animals, and fungi. “I couldn’t get very distracted because I had to use my mind very intensely at a low level,” he says. “I was very involved with the analysis of these spots. They were not simple to analyze. It took a lot of experience, not a lot of intelligence, but a lot of experience.” Woese was one of the only people in the world who could read and interpret the X-ray films. Today, with computers and automated sequencers, the work that took him thousands of hours would take less than a week; sorting through the strands of RNA would take a computer less than one day. Woese didn’t mind the work. He persevered; he was patient, curious, and stubborn. His outsider’s personality also helped—he’s not unfriendly or a loner, exactly, he’s simply unconcerned about what others think. He asks the big questions, rather than shying away from them. “About certain scientific things I have what’s called the courage of my convictions, though I don’t view myself as a courageous man,” Woese says. “The data are either right or wrong, and if they’re right you’ve got to make sure they are right. I trusted my intuition and then the data.” Vanilla, Chocolate, and Strawberry In the course of his research, Woese found, as he had suspected, that the RNA of the eukaryotes and the prokaryotes could be divided into two very clear “classes,” which were different from one another. Then, one day in 1976, 10 years after he began this bacterial family tree, Woese’s buddy Ralph Wolfe introduced him to a new creature that changed everything. Wolfe liked to study outlandish prokaryotes that live in very hot, oxygen-free environments and produce methane gas (the stuff of farts). Wolfe finally succeeded in both growing these so-called methanogens in the lab and labeling them with radioactivity so that their RNA could be sequenced. When Woese began studying Wolfe’s methanogen, he expected it to fit nicely into the prokaryote side of the two-domain system. “The big surprise was when we finally did do one of these methanogens … uh-oh, it didn’t fit into the prokaryote signature,” he recalls. The methanogen didn’t fit with the eukaryotic signature, either. But it had certain spots in its RNA common to the prokaryotes, and certain ones common to eukaryotes. “We were clearly dealing with recognizably the same sequence, and it came in three different flavors instead of two,” says Woese. “It was this amazing walk through a garden of new plants. There’s something new here,” he remembers thinking. “We’ve got a fish on the hook.” A fish on the hook indeed: it was a new life form. Woese named it archaea (ar-KAY-uh). This finding was huge, thrilling, and completely unexpected: it was as groundbreaking as Copernicus’s discovery that the earth orbited the sun. And Woese didn’t stop there. He looked at more methanogens to see if they fit this new pattern. The more methanogens Woese studied, the more convinced he became that they represented a different form of life; the sequences that made up their ribosomal RNA were of a third form. And, because they share some characteristics with both eukaryotes and prokaryotes, Woese determined that the archaea are the most primitive cells, and the closest we have come so far to finding the common ancestor of all life on Earth. Once he was completely confident of his results, he and Wolfe published their findings. There are three forms of life—archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes—rather than two. Woese felt as if he had broken through an intellectual roadblock that had held people back in their thinking about evolution without their even realizing it. Annoyed but Undaunted But the belief that life forms belonged in two camps was very strong among scientists, even though no one had ever tested that assumption before. Some very important scientists pooh-poohed the announcement, even suggesting Woese was a crackpot, and that his findings were absurd. “The belief that [all bacteria should be lumped together] was very strong,” says Woese, despite the fact that bacteria had originally been classified together only because they were all microscopic. Wolfe, the methanogen expert, was friendly with Nobel Prize winner Salvador Luria. When the newspapers ran the story about the three domains of life, Woese says that Luria called Wolfe and told him, “You are in trouble; you’ve got to disassociate yourself from this chump. Your reputation is at risk.” Wolfe paid no attention to that advice, but it shows how some people felt about Woese’s findings. Woese was annoyed but undaunted. He was used to working on his own and, as he says, he had the courage of his convictions. So for another 20 years he continued his research even though some scientists, including some very important ones, shunned him. Meanwhile, Woese learned more and more about archaea. He looked at many archaea that lived in extreme conditions, either in hot springs such as those at Yellowstone National Park, where the water is so hot and acidic it can peel the flesh off your bones in a matter of minutes, or in deep sea vents that spew boiling gases into the oceans. Woese and others suggest that it may be in environments like these that life on Earth (perhaps in the form of archaea) first began. Astrobiologists are investigating whether archaea might also provide useful clues or ideas about what life might be like on other planets. But in the course of his research, Woese and others also realized that archaea are everywhere; they live in extreme conditions and in the soils of suburbia. Gradually, scientists began to appreciate that the bulk of living organisms are not the zebras and toucans and duckweed that we know so much about, but the meek and mild, or at least microscopic, microbes. Woese’s story of persistence has a happy ending. As more and more scientists recognized his accomplishments, he has been showered with awards and prizes, including the MacArthur “genius” grant, the Crafoord Prize (the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in molecular biology), and the Leeuwenhoek Medal, microbiology’s highest honor. (Antonie Leeuwenhoek is known as the father of microbiology because he worked to improve early microscopes and observe single-celled animals.) The Leeuwenhoek Medal is particularly apt, considering that, thanks to Woese, microbes—both archaea and bacteria—are finally getting the attention they deserve, as is Woese himself. http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/carl_woese_and_the_three_flavors_of_life/ 2010-06-30 http://www.debaronson.com/features/physician_educate_thyself/ 2010-06-22 The words “librarian” and “celebrity” are not often used in the same sentence, but in the case of Nancy Pearl, it happens often. Not only has Pearl, a librarian by training, written three books, she is a regular guest on National Public Radio and hosts a Seattle television show. To top it all off, she was the inspiration for a librarian action figure and is quoted on one of the Starbucks coffee cups.* “That’s certainly something you don’t expect that when you are 10 and think ‘I want to be a librarian,’” she says, chuckling. Ever since she learned to read at the age of three or four, Pearl has loved books. She discovered libraries as an oasis in a “not particularly happy home environment.” From the time she was 10, Pearl knew she would be a librarian, “just like Miss Whitehead,” the children’s librarian her Detroit neighborhood. And for most of her career that is just what Pearl has been, first in Detroit, then Tulsa and most recently Seattle. In 2002 Pearl’s life hit warp drive when a Seattle book publisher approached her about writing a book, titled Book Lust, about good books arranged by 300 somewhat random categories — everything from “Aging” or “Art Appreciation” to “Zen Buddhism” and “Zero” (books about nothing) with entries of 250 words each. “The thing I do best, my one talent, is that I can talk about books,” says Pearl. “I remember authors and frequently come up with plot details. “ The librarian action figure came out almost simultaneously, “but just by chance,” as Book Lust. “They played off each other,” says Pearl. “There was controversy over the librarian action figure. Did the shushing action reinforce negative stereotypes? About 20 librarians decided they didn’t like it, because they had no sense of humor — it’s meant to be ironic! So every time they talked to the press another 2,000 librarian action figures would sell.” And they’d identify Pearl as the author of Book Lust, which was great for book sales. As for the success of the book, Pearl says, “They ended up feeling they could trust me because I wasn’t a snob about reading.” Today, in addition to having written three books in the Book Lust collection (Book Lust, More Book Lust and Book Crush), with a fourth (Book Lust To Go) due out next year, Pearl also does hour-long call-in radio shows both for the Seattle NPR station and with Wisconsin Public Radio, a television show (Seattlechannel.org) in which she interviews authors — and sometimes readers — and a blog at nancypearlbooks.wordpress.com where she posts a new review weekly. But before she was an author, a radio host or the inspiration for an action figure, Pearl was first, and at heart still is, a librarian. In 1998 she developed the program, “If All Seattle Read the Same Book.” The goal of the program was to build new audiences for literature. Pearl wanted to center the program on book clubs. “I believe very strongly in book groups as a way to transcend our superficial differences,” says Pearl. “Talking about hard issues in a book is much easier than talking about them on a personal level without a book.” This “one city one book” idea has since been adopted by communities and schools across the nation and is, says Pearl, the achievement she is most proud of. Hand in hand with Pearl’s efforts to share her passion for reading is the mystery Pearl has spent her life pondering: why people like the books they like. “This is something librarians have been trying for decades to understand,” she says. “What is it in a particular book that has or has not drawn you in?” Pearl pictures books as having four doors by which to enter: story, characters (whether hobbit, dragon or human), setting (in time or location) and language. Every book has all four of those doorways. What’s different between books is the size of the doorways. Books by Dan Brown, for example, are all about story, and that is the largest door, says Pearl. People who read for language may not enjoy Brown as much as someone for whom story is key. Setting is another door, but although every book has a setting, setting is not always the biggest door. For example, although Ann Tyler’s books are all set in Baltimore, they could really be set anywhere. Her books are more about character. In Laura Lippman’s books, on the other hand, Pearl says Baltimore is integral part of her books, especially the mystery series. “People always thinks a book they love has all four equal doorways but they really don’t,” she says. The beauty of the four doors analogy, says Pearl, is it is not judgmental; there is not a hierarchy or an implication that one door is better than another. They just represent “descriptive ways to meet people where they are. The way people talk about books is a clue to what door is most important to them,” she adds. Pearl suggests that English teachers could think of these doors as they choose books to assign their students. She argues that, “assigning stories in school is wasted unless the door size matches the kids. One of the problems with high school assignments is that we give kids books at the wrong time of their lives.” “The biggest doorway for kids has to be story,” she adds. Pearl is very sympathetic to English teachers and suggests that they and librarians “have a lot to say to one another.” They struggle with somewhat similar issues, such as figuring out ways to help students love to read and understand what they read. Pearl also would argue that parents and teachers could help their readers pace themselves, picking books that match the reader’s own emotional maturity level. “One of the saddest things is you’re getting seven and eight year olds reading all of the Harry Potter books. The early Harry Potter books were written for seven and eight year olds, they were all action all the time. But as the books progress, those kids that were seven when the first one came out were growing up, so by the time the seventh Harry Potter came out those kids were able to handle the story, which is much more interior and much less obvious to story readers.” Although she agrees she’d probably start a riot if she really suggested this, she would like to see parents and teachers making kids wait to read certain books until they are at a proper age. It’s not, definitely not book banning, she says, more like book pacing. Since 2004, when Pearl left the Seattle public library, she has been leading workshops, teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of Washington Information School, and talking about the “doorways theory.” Despite the age of the Internet and Google, where information is so much easier to access, Pearl continues to believe in the importance of libraries and librarians. “You can sit at home and find out almost anything so what is the library to do? To me it is what the library has always done. It’s been a haven for readers and a place you can come to find people who love reading as much as you do. It’s a place to find your next good book with the help of a trained librarian and it’s a place where programs take place: book discussions, poetry reading, open mikes.” *Oh, and that Starbucks quote, cup #169? “Life’s too short to read a book you don’t love. At age 50 or younger, give a book 50 pages to see if you like it. Over 50, subtract your age from 100 and that’s the number of pages to read before you bail on a book you’re not enjoying. And when you turn 100, you get to judge a book by its cover!” http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/nancy_pearl_uber_librarian/ 2010-03-15 Janice Harrington’s recent success as a poet, author and college professor is deeply rooted in her more than two decades as children’s librarian and storyteller, where her work fostered a powerful ear for vivid rhythm and imagery. You could say Harrington’s latest incarnation as a professor in the University’s creative writing program started more than a decade ago when she invited Michael Madonick to give a poetry-writing workshop at the Champaign Public Library. When Madonick asked the children to write a poem about something important to them he urged Harrington, head of the children’s department, to participate as well. “Then he did a very bad thing,” joked Harrington. “He looked at my poem and said it was good.” Harrington went home, started writing and didn’t stop. “I had a full-time job but luckily I also had insomnia,” she says. “I could sit for four hours moving words around. It felt like playing. I love how you move one word and it’s exactly RIGHT.” The resulting poetry collection, “Even the Hollow My Body Made is Gone (2007),” won the A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry contest, designated for a first book of poetry. Most recently, Harrington was one of six writers to win the 2009 Rona Jaffe award, one of the only literary honors in the country devoted exclusively to women. Each recipient receives $25,000. Harrington will use that award to complete Nightshift, a collection of poems about her experiences working in nursing homes, during both high school and college. “I need to do something with all those lives, and people and faces that have stayed with me all those years,” she says. Harrington, who grew up in rural Alabama and Nebraska, weaves her life experiences into not just her poetry but also her picture books. Her first such project, “Going North” was based on her own family’s journey and started, not surprisingly, as a poem. She showed it to her friend and colleague, Janice Del Negro,a children’s author and former director of the Center for Children’s Books at Illinois, who liked it so much she asked permission to show it to her editor. That book subsequently won, among other awards, the 2004 Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library. Since then Harrington has published “The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar County” and “Roberto Walks Home.” Her next children’s book is based on an African folktale about a procrastinating chicken. Though Harrington was hired a mere two years ago, she is, by many accounts, an inspired and inspiring teacher. “[Harrington] is so passionate and knows so much about her subject,” says Jeremiah Childers, a creative writing major who settled on poetry after taking a class with her. “She has a compassion and genuine interest in people in that community of poets. And as an aspiring poet you are immediately thrust into that community.” “I’m not in the class by myself; I’ve got my crew with me,” she demurs, meaning fellow poets Williams Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, to name a few. Harrington includes her students in that crew, as well. The students “are fascinating to me,” she says. “I admire their enthusiasm, their bravery and daring. We face the same difficulties getting what we want to say on the page. I feel as if I’m among peers.” Meanwhile Madonick and other faculty members in the creative writing program who had been wooing Harrington for years, are ecstatic that she has joined them. “For us, the biggest problem was that [Harrington] is ridiculously humble and self-effacing about her abilities as a writer,” he says. “We had to convince her that she not only belonged but would probably outshine most of us.” http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/a_community_of_poets/ 2010-01-20 If Michael B. Johnson ‘88 ENG were a Pixar movie character he would be Sully, the large, furry, green-with-blue-spots star of Monsters, Inc. Like Sully (voiced by actor John Goodman), Johnson’s voice is deep and resonant; he is a hail-fellow-well-met; modest in an “aw-shucks-just-doing-my-job” way; and he is all about giving credit to others. For 16 years, the Chicago native has worked at Pixar Animation Studios, an entity synonymous with exquisitely rendered computer animation combined with heart-warming characters and imaginative stories. Since its first movie, Toy Story, hit the screen in 1995, Pixar has subsequently released A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters,Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Wall-E, and Up. The first six Pixar movies alone have generated $3.2 billion worldwide and won numerous Academy Awards. At Pixar computer software is critical, not just in making movies but also in managing the workflow. This is where Johnson comes in. As head of the studio’s acclaimed Moving Pictures Group, he writes computer software (or code) that helps make the jobs of the writers, artists, animators and other “Pixarians” easier and more productive. As such Johnson functions like the best of wedding planners — unobtrusive but essential to a successful enterprise. Want to make sure Editorial knows what Animation is doing? Johnson can write software code for that. How about being able to mark up drawings and then refer back to and manipulate those markings? Johnson has written code for that. Or, boy, wouldn’t it be great to see your drawings as a movie much sooner, rather than just a pinned-up collection of sketches? Johnson and his team have solved that with custom computer software that enables artists to make storyboards on the computer. Johnson’s adult career path began at the University of Illinois, which he chose over Princeton, and in electrical engineering, which he chose over theater. The National Merit Scholar packed numerous experiences into his college career, including working for IBM as part of the engineering co-op program; studying in Swansea, Wales; and learning from Nancy St. John, who had been hired from the Los Angeles computer graphics business world to start the Scientific Visualization Program at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on campus. “The NCSA experience was the first chance I had to work on campus with faculty and staff and see them as humans,” says Johnson. “Otherwise [for me], as an undergraduate, professors and TAs and the like were very mysterious.” (Perhaps to demystify himself, Johnson made a point of replying first to questions from numerous pre-teens who helped fill the Wohlers Hall auditorium at a talk he gave on campus last fall.) By the time he was a junior, Johnson realized his passion and skill lay in writing computer code, and switched to computer science engineering. After graduating, he studied at the MIT and its Media Lab, and joined Pixar as an intern via Ed Catmull, a member of his dissertation committee and a co-founder of Pixar. In the intense, creative and occasionally chaotic atmosphere of Pixar, Johnson has found a perfect fit for what he loves to do. “Our craft is coding,” Johnson says of his team, “And we have to code fast.” Part of that quick coding reflects the point of creating custom software — to overcome a frustration by improving a particular problem. For example, sometimes in the midst of a review, a person will have an idea that is most easily communicated by scribbling something on the existing image. “Lots of creative people finish their sentences with a drawing,” explains Johnson.) Thus “Review Sketch” came into being. The software records those drawings (done on a computer screen or tablet), which users can later edit or simply review. Creating “Review Sketch” meant “a lot of tension went out of the room,” says Johnson. “Beautiful, well-crafted user interfaces and work flows make people happy,” http://www.debaronson.com/profiles/what_lies_beneath/ 2010-01-15