We have a pear tree at my house. While I was in Europe, most of the pears on the tree ripened and fell off. My new roommate decided to salvage and can them. Over the past week, she’s made pear preserves, pear sauce, basically anything you can can with “pear” in the title. Our pears, while tasty, brought with them some little guests. Fruit flies.

In my experience with fruit flies, they go away once the fruit is all gone. But these ones have stayed and multiplied. I find the little bastards everywhere — in my bread cupboard, on top of the freezer, around the bathroom sink. They’re obnoxious, and we had so many in my kitchen that I worried some would fly into my mouth if I ate in there.

On Tuesday, while making cookies for the new grad students in my department, I decided to do something about it. Leaving my boyfriend with his hands covered in cookie dough, I drove to the closest grocery store, on a mission to find fly paper and Raid. Raid turned out to be a little too scary for my tastes, and both the grocery store and the drug store next door did not carry fly paper. But the grocery store did have one thing that could help me. Bob.

Bob is my new Venus Fly Trap. I brought him home and let him loose in the kitchen, where he can eat flies to his little plant-heart’s content. It’s kinda cool watching him — he waits until a fly is right where he wants it, and then slowly starts to close the capsule, trapping the fly in his sticky embrace. I’ve become somewhat obsessed with watching Bob kill the fruit flies. I placed him next to the window by the sink, so I can watch him kill while doing the dishes.

Bob’s doing a good job, but I think he’s a bit lonely. There may be too many flies for one little plant. So, I’m thinking about buying Bob a Venus Fly Trap companion. She’ll be sweet, sexy, and an efficient little fly-murderer. I think I’ll call her…Lillian.

– Anna

It’s 11:30 AM on a Wednesday, and a crowd of undergrads are standing in the middle of Red Square, listening to a rap duo. The music is so loud that I could hear it in Savery Hall, the home of the University of Washington’s Sociology Department. I swear it shook the windows.

It’s 11:30 AM on the first day of the quarter. Why aren’t these undergrads in class?

I should probably take a break to introduce myself to you. My name is Anna. I graduated from Whitman in 2004. I’m the one who wrote the super cool baseball thesis Peter mentioned in an earlier post. I’m currently a graduate student at the University of Washington, where I am also employed as a teaching assistant. The latter allows me a distinct window through which to observe the decline of public undergraduate education.

Welcome to the party, people. Why go to class when there’s a rap concert right here, on Red Square? Why go to class at all when there are so many fun things to do? This week is “Dawg Daze,” a celebration of all things purple and gold. There are free concerts, comedy performances, free food, and a whole host of other events that sound way more fun than going to class. Besides, it’s the first week, and nothing ever really happens the first week, right?

I have at least five students a quarter who never, ever attend my sections. When these students barely pass the class (and pass they usually do, since many professors and teaching assistants don’t want to deal with the consequences of failing students), many of them come whining to me the following quarter, wondering why they got a 2.0 instead of the 2.5 they deserve. I think a “C” is far too generous for students who never come to class.

While in lecture, I frequently observe students texting each other on cell phones, messing around on Facebook and Myspace on their laptops, and whispering to each other. Many roll their eyes. Some even fall asleep. What’s going on?

At Whitman, students who fell asleep in class received a stern wake-up (or other form of public embarrassment) from professors. We whispered to each other, sure, but I don’t remember many cell phones ringing in the classroom. If I did poorly in a class or on a paper, and my professor clearly thought I could do better, she let me know. My professors challenged and respected me. In turn, I respected them.

We took plagiarism so seriously that, when my presence was requested by the head of Whitman’s Sociology Department right before graduation, I thought that I hadn’t been careful enough attributing my sources. Maybe I’d cut corners, accidentally plagiarizing someone else (even though I went over my thesis several times to ensure this hadn’t happened.) It turns out that I’d received some departmental recognition for my work. In one of the sections I TAed, the same exact quote appeared on five papers, unattributed. Students here don’t know that yes, you do have to cite Wikipedia, otherwise you’re plagiarizing.

And there’s more. Many fraternities have test files with all the answers. One of my fellow TAs caught a student who turned in the paper his friend wrote as his own work. Some students use online paper databases in lieu of actually doing the work of writing one. Cheating is not an uncommon phenomenon.

Who is to blame? It’s easy to say students — after all, they’re the ones engaging in deviant school behavior. But take a look at what they’re up against. At the University of Washington, intro-level classes have hundreds of students in them. Imagine being a freshman in a class of 700 students? In a class that large, professors must lecture. It’s difficult to have much individual interaction with many students in a huge class. TAs end up being the ones doing small-group instruction. We at the UW are lucky, in that we have pretty intensive TA training. Many universities do not offer training to teaching assistants, according to Murray Sperber, author of “Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education.”

Professors at large public universities do not really want to teach. Many of them consider teaching to be a chore. The first day of grad school, I was told by another grad student “get a research assistantship as soon as you can. That’s how you get noticed by faculty around here. Teaching comes secondary to research.” Professors get tenure through research, not teaching. Therefore, there is more incentive to do research (and get published) not to teach. Again according to Sperber, at some institutions, professors can “buy off” classes by getting grants or (ironically enough) winning teaching awards with the prize of a year off of teaching.

The system is so broken that many students at large public universities do not respect their professors. I don’t blame them. If you’re taught by professors who don’t want to teach (and who don’t learn your name), caught in a bureaucracy that makes you feel more like a number than a person, would you feel enough respect for your professors and your classes to refrain from cheating? Students don’t cheat if they feel like their opinions, and their presence in the classroom, are respected and valued by their teachers.

The system must be changed. Perhaps universities ought to require a teaching portfolio as part of the tenure process, giving it the same weight as published research. Maybe there should be tougher admissions standards at large schools, to bring class sizes down (and help branch campuses like UW Bothell and UW Tacoma grow). Something has to give here. In five years or so, I’m going to have a tough choice. Do I go to a large public research institution to “make a name” for myself in sociology? Or do I make the choice to work at a smaller, liberal arts or junior college, to devote myself to teaching sociology? Unless the system changes soon, I’ll probably do the latter.

So party on, undergrads. Go to your rap concerts, to your keggers, to your frat parties. Sleep through class, and give your TA an excuse for doing so. I wish you’d put your energy elsewhere. I wish you’d stand up and demand the education you deserve — smaller classes, classes taught by full professors, active participation rather than passive reception. See, if you went on strike, demanding the education you deserve for the money you and your parents pay, the universities would have to listen to you. After all, they don’t want to lose your tuition dollars.

– Anna

Sunset across the Nile, our first night here. By the time we get back to the hotel, we smell definitively like Cairo, an intriguing mixture of dirt, soot, smoke and who knows what else.

The lady at McDonald’s hates me. It started as a little bit of a scowl when I first approached her, using some mangled form of Arabic and English at once to order two bottles of water (ethnayn miya madanaya for those who are curious). I think she pretty quickly labeled me as one of “those expats.”

We are, after all, hanging out in a wealthy suburb of Cairo until Sunday, one inhabited by well-off Egyptians and a significant population of expatriates: Americans, Germans, Asians and other non-Muslims are all in the mix. My walk to the office is about 25 minutes, taking me down tree-lined streets that are not entirely unlike a hotter, drier, flatter version of Palo Alto, minus stop signs and traffic signals. About a third of the people I pass are expats. Our hotel is across the metro tracks from Road 9, which is one mecca of expat commerce in Maadi. Greco’s Coffee is a smaller, cheaper version of the University Coffee Café; Lucile’s is the American restaurant, serving up such specialties as hamburgers, onion rings, chili con carne and chicken fingers. The entire menu is in English. Take a little stroll and there’s Pizza Hut, KFC, Quiznos and McDonald’s all within a few blocks of each other.

Which leads to my conundrum ordering two bottles of water. The menu boards are in English and Arabic. What language to use? Try to fit in and use Arabic, even though I am a blatant foreigner and could never become a local? Or just go for English, and risk being the foreigner who doesn’t even try? The mix I concocted didn’t do the trick. Neither did handing over my 100-Egyptian-Pound note to pay the 6.50 LE (about $1.10) total. The note was a winning from one of my ATM withdrawals, and while it’s worth less than $20, it still buys you an awful lot here, and many small merchants refuse to change it. Needless today, after she shook her head and asked for smaller change, I paid with a 20.

Round 2. The wireless here is delicious. But being surrounded by people eating lunch during Ramadan (the overwhelming majority of the patrons in here are expats or non-Muslim), we were feeling a bit hungry ourselves. I moved to the menu boards again. Sound out the Arabic, and sound like a fool, or use English that I had already established the cashier had only a faint grasp of? I went for English, since “Big Mac” in Arabic is still “Big Mac”. We sprang for the more unusual item on the menu, the McArabia, a piece of grilled chicken with lettuce, tomato and onion inside pita bread. I was hoping it would dull the fact that a good chunk of my money would wind up back in Des Plaines, Illinois. This time, with the total edging near 30 LE for two meals, I whipped out the 100 LE note. The lady rolled her eyes, grudgingly accepted it, and proceeded to root around for all the change I’d need. I got a pile of tattered bills in return, which is par for the course with Egypt’s seldom-reprinted currency. A few minutes later, the woman delivered the food to our table, refusing to look at me and giving Danica a curt smile as she lowered the tray.

Globalization in action.

It’s been almost a year since I started this here beast, so what better time than to do a little bit of expansion? One of my old co-hosts on the original Weekday Hump Show is joining me contributing to the Weekday Hump Blog. DJ Banana, aka Anna, graduated a year ahead of me from Whitman and is climbing the Ivory Tower on her way to getting a PhD in Sociology at UW. Oh, and she’s been to the Balkans, which is pretty cool.

It’s been a couple days now that Danica and I have been in Cairo, basically one “whoa” after another, leading to a sort of visual/cultural overload at all the big and small things that are different. So different, I will admit, that after our first day wandering around, finding our apartment, and getting a SIM card and two phone cards (though no functional cell phone), we took refuge in the Hard Rock Café for dinner. It was the most surreal dinner I’ve ever had. Being the first evening after Ramadan started, the place was void of tourists. We were the only customers for the first twenty minutes, with the cavernous space, kitschy relics and 80s music videos all to ourselves.

Cairo is a beige-ish blur of honking cars, occasional donkey carts, fruit stands that spill across the sidewalks, more honking cars, water that looks fine but tastes like a swimming pool, and yet more honking cars. But we’re adjusting. We have cell phones now, an afternoon-long expedition that took us to Muhandiseen to a Nokia store (the phones we got look frightfully like the one I had when I first got to Whitman, but with the addition of a speakerphone and musical ringtones) and then to a hole-in-the-wall cell phone shop where I’m not quite sure what happened because we had both gotten rather dehydrated and things just weren’t making sense.

It’s Ramadan here, which means a number of things. Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, which means no food, water, smoking, booze or sex. It also means being on your best behavior for the entire month, and we’ve met some incredibly friendly locals (though we’ve been worn it won’t last long, as people start getting uppity toward the end of Ramadan). Ramadan also means that most shops close around 3 p.m. and don’t open again until 7 or 8, after sunset and after people have partaken of iftar, the breaking of the fast. Needless to say, Danica and I thought we’d make a good-faith effort to join the fast. After eating our own breakfast around 8:30 yesterday, we went most of the day without water (until we found ourselves ridiculously dehydrated) and made it to iftar without food.

Cairo’s pollution is the worst I’ve ever experienced. Stepping outside of air-conditioned buildings, you’re overcoming with the smell of forest fires meddling with oil and petrol. Cars here don’t have much in the way of emissions controls or seatbelts, and public transportation is pretty limited. That means tons of driving, tons of cars, and in a city of 18 million people with 1,000 new people every day, that adds up to pretty gross air. But at least you get your money’s worth. The cab rides are second to none when it comes to cheap thrills. Our ride from the airport at 2 a.m. the other day had us grazed by a truck driven by a drunk driver. Our little Fiat with no seatbelts would not have stood a chance. Egyptians don’t really use lanes, and signals are such a rarity that when you do see them and they’re actually working, drivers unilaterally ignore them. The roads are ruled by the horn, something that I am sort of getting used to, though I’m also finding myself wanting to smack some of my cab drivers for honking when there is absolutely no other moving object near them. Thankfully for both of us, my Arabic does not yet include the words to get through that.

It is, however, good enough to haggle a bit over cab fares. There are no meters; you step out of the cab and just start throwing out prices. With luck you can get from our hotel to downtown for 10 pounds, or less than $2.

But the mango juice. Man alive, that mango juice, freshly squeezed with all the pulp, chunks and all, is amazing. I might have to bring back a few gallons.

We’ve been in Paris ten days now, and our soiree is quickly coming to an end. Much to much to list here, but it has given me lots to mull over about video cameras and maintaining one’s cultural heritage as an expatriate.

We’ve hit at least five museums, eaten at least five crepes each, and consumed far more than five bottles of wine. We also bought 400 grams of fine French chocolate, ate many a baguette (including a hot one, which was the most amazing flour-based experience I’ve ever had), and watched in mild glee as people got wrecked by the uncompromising closing doors on the Paris Metro. The Metro is grand and rustic at the same time, but sometimes walking is better. Like the 5-ish miles we tromped around Versailles last weekend, including checking out Marie Antoinnette’s crazy fake mini-village (idyllic picture above)…or the two miles we walked while under the influence of Bordeaux, from our apartment to the Eiffel Tower, because we can see it from the balcony and deduced that therefore it must not have been too far away. It was. Oh, and our compact washer has the most extreme spin cycle I’ve ever witnessed, to make up for the lack of a dryer. I am at once fascinated and intrigued by its sound, which is not unlike a King Air starting up. A little part of me (the one shaped like a wallet) is glad we’re leaving soon, since the Euro is hardly a steal, and I have no doubt Citibank is tacking on massive fees that I will have no choice but to fight…eventually.

Already Cairo has presented its first challenge to me, one that dawned on us a couple days ago. The Muslim holy holiday Ramadan starts not in early October, as we thought, but this weekend. Lots of shops will be keeping odd hours for the next month, and it will benefit our own adjustment to try to stick to the fast (no eating or drinking during daylight, but I see us bending that a lot, at least to start). I’m sure there are plenty of things taken for granted now that we will find unavailable as a result, but I have no idea what, yet. The saving grace of it all is that A has agreed to pick us up at the airport…at 2:05 a.m.

In stateside news, my parents sprung for a 42-inch plasma TV the other day, which makes me a little bit jealous. No HD programming yet (they’d have to get a different satellite dish I think, plus there’s the issue of sitting down to watch TV), but I’m hopeful.

Well, online anyway. I’ve you’ve frequented the New York Times’ Web site lately, you’ve probably seen their ongoing Q-and-A series about how their newsroom operates. Here’s my contribution to it all, as it appeared online on Friday, September 15. I thought their response was illuminating, if nothing else. And it’s nice to see this kind of interaction with what is regarded as one of the world’s best papers. I sent my email to them on Thursday afternoon, Paris time:

Q. As a longtime reader on the West Coast and a reporter myself, I am often intruigued by the NYT’s decision to play stories very specific to New York (e.g. the funeral of a firefighter last week) alongside the international and national stories I expect. With other papers more focused on local New York news and the NYT so established as the leader of the American news cycle, why not leave the New York news to the “New York Report” pages in the A section unless it has broader appeal?
– Peter Sachs

A. Too many New York stories on A-1? I hope my colleagues on the Metropolitan Desk see this. Sometimes they take us to task for not putting enough of their offerings out front.

The beauty of the Times is that we try to do it all: Our goal is to offer the finest coverage of the New York region, the finest foreign coverage, the finest Washington coverage, the finest national coverage — on and on. So, every day we grapple with how best to play stories and satisfy readers with broad tastes and interests. You may read us for our national and international coverage, but New York is our home and the center of our universe, and part of our mission is to give a sense of that place, its history, culture and politics. Think about football teams. Some teams have a great offense, some teams have a great defense. But every team has to go out a play both sides of the ball in every single game. Without beating this metaphor to death, we strive to be that team can drive down-field against the clock when we need to, and stop a drive in its tracks.

Do readers in this city expect local news or national and international news? We figure they want it all. And we aim to give the most important stories of the day on the front, no matter where they unfold, leavened with a mix of lighter pieces and maybe a project or two.

That said, we recognize that some New York stories may be too parochial for our readers beyond this region. But as mentioned, the people who buy this as their local paper are hungry for local news as well. One solution that we hope satisfies this broad spectrum of readers is to “swing'’ a New York story. That’s when a story which runs on Page 1 in the New York City editions, “swings” off of the front page (likely into the Metro pages) and gets replaced with a story that has greater national interest in the rest of the editions (i.e. - National ed., Washington ed., New England ed.).

Both pieces still appear in all the papers, they are just played differently.

In the past, I’ve felt that we may have deprived our national readers of wonderful New York stories by reflexively swinging them off the front page in the national edition. Now I think we’re doing better at mixing the elements as the news and quality of writing dictates.

Take, for example, the fascinating piece this week by Sam Roberts about one of the first immigrants to Ellis Island that ran on the front in all our editions. As it turns out, Annie Moore is not the person everyone thought she was. That’s a New York story, but also one that I’m sure had readers hooked everywhere.

We didn’t put the firefighter funeral on page one. But the deaths of firefighters and police officers are important news in the city. And once in a while, it wouldn’t hurt for people outside the city to read about them on the front page.

Note to self, avoid flying U.S. airlines ever again.

Note to airlines: Please take a moment to consider why you are bankrupt. Namely, your business revolves around providing a service, yet you provide virtually no customer service to your paying passengers. (The notable exception here being the tech support people for nwa.com, who apparently have more authority over changing seat assignments than reservations people or gate agents. Go figure.). Your terminal-side employees are bitter, unsympathetic, and unappreciative that at the end of the day, their paychecks come from my airfare. Your aircraft employees, while personable, are brimming with snark and sarcasm because you have run them into the ground so.

Of course, we don’t just rant aimlessly here at the Weekday Hump. No, we provide rock-solid recommendations, too. So here goes for you, U.S. airlines.

• Consider the whole passenger and his or her luggage when making baggage allowances. One bag that weighs 57 pounds weighs less than four bags that are 50 pounds each, but 200 pounds together. The latter is free, but the former is $25. We’ve all experienced this, but airlines used to be more flexible when enforcing this. Airlines, give your employees the power to make some exceptions, like when a passenger has only one checked bag, and it is only a few pounds overweight.
• Please stop scheduling three flights to leave within 16 minutes of each other from two adjacent gates with only eight seats in the terminal between them all while we wait. Just stop. There are so many things idiotic about that setup it’s not even worth explicating.

Once we made it onboard our flight, the flight attendant with the soothing British accent by the door had this conversation with a passenger behind us:

FA: Ah, I see you brought your lunch today.
Woman: Yes, I made a sandwich at home.
FA: Well it’s a good thing you did. We’re serving garbage today.

FA: We just swept up all the leftovers from the last flight and put them in little boxes for you guys.

Yup, this is a flight attendant who, along with everyone else in his union, is facing getting a terrible new contract from an airline that has already fired its mechanics and forced the pilots into taking two rounds of pay cuts. Which leads to recommendation number three…

• Boost employee morale. The surest and fastest way to do this is to raise their pay to something livable and fair for the skill and experience required. Since you guys are in the business of moving people around the country at high velocities, the particularly vital employees are the ones directly involved in making that happen, i.e. pilots, FAs and mechanics.
• Some of you (coughcough) are flying planes that are more than 30 years old. They are more expensive to maintain and operate. Stop it. Upgrade your fleet and save some money.

There. I’ve just solved all the problems of our godawful airlines. I’ll be overseas for a while, where I’ll be flying national carriers (admittedly heavily subsidized by their respective governments) that still care about their passengers and serve hot meals on every flight (cf. SAS, British Airways, KLM, Lufthansa, et al).

Oh, and I’m in Paris now. Photos are here.