CONFERENCED OUT

Time to catch up on the blog!

The last two weekends have found me at language conferences, the first at UCLA and the second at UW-Madison back in Wisconsin. (Apologies to those in Wisconsin whom I didn't have time to visit; time was very limited!) The main point has been to network with people in my future field, be "visible", and maybe get tips on where some hot jobs are. Oh, and catch up on what's going on in the language teaching field (a very distant fourth!). Registering for both I had to fudge a bit on my "academic affiliation", since I'm unemployed and out of a grad program at the moment. So I was Paul Sundberg from the University of Illinois -- which got confusing when I told people I was living in Los Angeles! Since I wasn't presenting, just attending, it made for a very relaxed and open opportunity to look after my own priorities.

April 21-22

The UCLA conference was for the University of California Consortium of Language Learning and Teaching -- let's see, that acronym is UCCLLT. (No cute acronym for this one!) The first evening's banquet and plenary session was at the very exclusive, hidden-away Luxe Hotel off Sunset Boulevard in a part of town that less than 1% of Angelenos can afford to buy a house in. Of course there was only valet parking. Since I was a "local", at least I didn't have to pay to stay there. The conference itself was really unusually affordable, however - just over $70 - so it really was an efficient use of money for my job search.

Very soon after entering the tone-y, but very minimal lobby, I met the chair of the consortium, a professor at UC Davis who regularly attends another conference I go to: CALICO (Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium). He was actually one of the last people I socialized with at Michigan State at last year's conference, and at the time he said "Well, you have the PhD now, which proves you can run the academic hurdles. The actual degree isn't so important." I'll be emailing him this weekend to see if there are any positions in the UC system of campuses that involve developing language materials.

The most helpful "contact" at the conference was a professor emeritus from UCLA, Tom Hinnebusch, who has been involved in Swahili and East African studies for many years and is currently working on a government grant program to catalog language resources for all major languges. I met with him at his home back in February, and he was the one who suggested the UCLA conference. He insisted on my joining him at the conference lunch and introduced me to several people. He's kind of taken on a mentor role with me, which I have absolutely no objections to! :-)

And at the UCLA conference he mentioned that he would be attending the Madison conference for Less Commonly Taught Languages that was coming up the following weekend. I had been dimly aware that such a conference was later in the year, but here it was a week away! I debated whether to attend or not but decided in the end that it was too valuable a networking opportunity not to go. Fortunately, even with such little advance notice, I could still find a plane fare on Midwest Airlines for just under $300. (If it had been over $500 I doubt I would have considered the idea much longer.)

April 28-30

The conference in Madison was for the National Council on the Less Commonly Taught Languages) -- or NCLCTL. (One of their acronyms is "nickel-tickle", which makes it all sound highly professional! One speaker from Stanford said she preferred to call it the "National Council on the Less Commonly Financed Languages, which comes out even worse: "nickel-fickle"!)

"Less Commonly Taught Languages" is the new catch-all term for anything that isn't Spanish, French or German -- basically, all the languages you can only find at universities, including some biggies like Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. Post 9/11 there is suddenly a new value on these languages for national security, and consequently there is a sudden flood of new federal funding for teaching them, including the big buzz at the conference, the NSLI program (National Security Language Initiative) that Bush announced just a month or so ago.

This was a three-day conference for marathoners. Most usually break up by Saturday evening, but this one continued doggedly on through Sunday lunch. But since I had no commitments to any particular speaker sessions, I could wander the exhibitor area and chat up the reps (keeping an ear out for job opportunities).

One booth had materials from a government-funded language program at Michigan State, one of whose exhibitors I already knew from other conferences. Talking to them, I learned that MSU had just been given a grant (less than a week prior!) to develop a K-16 (kindergarten through senior year in college) "flagship" program in Michigan schools. Since 9/11, the government has come to realize that it needs more citizens with real expertise in "strategic" or "critical" languages like Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, etc., and so it has started these flagship programs at various locations around the country, usually where there are "heritage speakers" of the language already present. For Chinese, for example, one model flagship program is in Portland, Oregon. Michigan, especially the Detroit area, has the largest concentration of Arab-Americans in the US, so that was a very natural choice for an Arabic flagship program. I immediately emailed the head of the program (not at the conference) to introduce myself and my Mideast background and inquire whether there might be newly funded positions as part of the grant. This is actually one of the most exciting (to me) prospects out there at the moment.

One other person who has been a key resource for me was also at the conference in addition to Hinnebusch - Dora Johnson from the Center for Applied Linguistics in DC. I had first met her at her talk on K-12 Arabic programs in the US at the Baltimore conference back in November, and we have been in email contact a number of times. She also took on a mentor role at the conference, introducing me to others she thought might be interested in my qualifications, including the head of San Diego State's Langnet computer project, which is gathering electronic language materials online as resources for language teachers all over the country. (I don't think she was impressed with me very much, since Dora threw us together just after I had gotten to the conference Saturday morning, a time of day when I am at my catatonic "best".)

I only had a day and a half for post-conference personal visits, so I only managed to meet with a few friends and family, including some old Aramco friends who live in the Madison area, Tom and Karen Witte, and Karen's sister Marge Johannsson, who was one of our family's best friends in Dhahran. We met, appropriately, at a Turkish restaurant on State Street. Sunday night I spent with Uncle Tom and Chris up in Plymouth, who are now living in an "empty nest" with all three kids grown up and working. Joe and Rachel are in the Minneapolis area, and Peter is in Milwaukee. My flight back to LA was early Tuesday AM, so it worked well to be able to stay over Monday night with some old Illinois friends, the Chubbuck's, who live close to the Milwaukee airport.

ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Well, May 15, 2006 will be one year since I graduated with my doctorate from U. Illinois. It's a psychological anniversary, as well. I have told myself over the past year that I would give myself one year "off" if necessary to get other personal projects done and research careers, but by a year later, I would have to start applying for real job positions. That anniversary is just one week off now!