V V V w v w w v _ w v w w Th Mihia Dai - nsdy Mac 7,S006 THE EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK with WALTER NOWINSKI iablef C (tetft. A look at the big news events this week and how important they really are. Conveniently rated from one to 10. Wednesday, March 7 2007 - The Michigan Daily 7 3B THE JUNK DRAWER What's hot and what's not in cur- rent events and pop culture. 4B STRAIGHT TALK What complaining about GSIs' language skills says about us. 2 IF THEY WON'T BUY, SUE Students are some of the last people in the country listening to music released to by major record labels, and they aren't paying for the songs. The Recording Industry Association of America is ready- ing its legal artillery, so watch out. WITH OPPORTUNITIES LIKE THESE Gov. Granholm called the news that a major bank was moving its headquarters out oftthe state an "opportunity to attract 10 banks who want to headquarter here." Maybe the Gov. will consider it a success if a payday advance shop occupies the Detroit offices vacated by Comerica. NOW CHENEY'S SEEN IT ALL Vice President Dick Cheney's trip to Afghanistan got offto a dra- matic start when a suicide bomber 1 attacked the airbase where he was. The VP walked away unscathed. JESUS IN THREE EASY PAYMENTS Producer James Cameron found the one thingthat makes a bigger splash than the o 10 Titanic: Jesus' tomb. His upcoming show 4 begs the question: Can you run com- mercials for Oxy Clean during a TV show purporting to solve a mystery of faith? BLACKER THAN THOU Fending off charges that he is "not black enough," presidential hopeful Barack Obama spoke about civil rights in Alabama. Just a 0 10 few hundred yards away, Hillary Clinton; 4 whose husband was sometimes referred to as the first black president, tried to portray herself as the candidate of black Americans. IT COULD BE WORSE Dick Cheney's former chief of staff I. Lewis Libby was convicted of obstructing justice. The upside for Libby is that a 25-year pris- o 10 on sentence is a good excuse toget outof dove hunting trip with the V.P. this spring. PERSON OF THE WEEK 6B SEX AND EDUCATION Romance at the Univer- sity over the decades 8B A MAN AMONG WOMEN One of three male actors in "The Vagina Monologues" describes what it was like to play the bad guy. rule 22: This isn't Vegas. What happens in Ann Arbor doesn't, always stay in Ann Arbor. rule 23: Ihad a good Spring Break. Stop ask- ing. rule 24: If you can't parallel park in three tries on State Street, give up.. - E-mail rule submissions to thestatement@umich.edu. STEPHEN GRANT Anyone who strangles and dismembers his wife, as Stephen Grant allegedly did, doesn't deserve much sympathy. But Grant deserves scorn for more than just the wanton cruelty of his crime - he simply isn't competent. He ditches the pieces of his wife's body in a park, but then once the sheriff's office gets suspicious, he retrieves the torso and puts it in his garage - leaving other minor parts (her head, for instance) behind. When a search war- rant is issued Grant takes off - in an inconspicuous bright yellow pickup. Police find him wandering around in the snow in a state park up north after he's spent a night trekking through the woods. He doesn't have a jacket or shoes and he has to be hauled away, suf- fering from frostbite and hypothermia, in a Coast Guard helicopter. ARCHITECTURE From page 2B First, there was the North Campus Redux two years ago, a plan championed by Archi- tecture and Urban Planning Dean Doug Kel- baugh. The Redux project recognized that the campus has an "anemic and incomplete sense of place." When coupled with its dis- tant location, this lack of identity means that although North Campus is "home to a stu- dent population as large as that of Yale Uni- versity, there are few reasons for people to voluntarily visit or spend time there." Next came the new Computer Science Building, giving the North Campus Quad a better sense of enclosure. Complete with an idiosyncratic hodgepodge of materials that work surprisingly well together, this engineering building triumphantly con- quered and renegotiated the hill that was once the Quad's only northeast boundary. The building's southern glass atrium space houses a sensational spiral staircase that spills the building's inhabitants out into the North Quad lawn on a nice day. Although the "Northern Diag" is still tremendously over- scaled, it now reads as an actual space. Before it was a lopsided accumulation of buildings. Then came the Walgreen Drama Center, a building that is fueling the critical density ACCENTS From page 5B alongside a picture of a white woman than alongside a picture of an Asian woman. A 2005 experiment by Stephanie Lin- demann showed that the average stu- dent college student has a more negative impression of Chinese, Russian and Mexi- can accents than of standard American English. The students in Lindemann's study ranked Chinese accents as the least prestigious. Complaints by students about hard-to- understand GSIs might be a kind of hidden racism, Campbell-Kibler said. Axelson said she spoke to an Italian eco- nomics GSI who experienced discrimination based on his accent. The GSI, who was white and dressed like an American, had already lived in the United States for two years and was fluent in English. "He was pretty at home here," Axelson said. "Based on his looks, you could easily think he was American." As the GSI entered the classroom and prepared for the beginning of class, he felt positive vibes, Axelson said. When he spoke with his Italian accent, though, everything changed. "People's faces closed off and they became hostile," Axelson said. "That whole friendly atmosphere disappeared, and he then had to win them back." Some students misbehave in the class- room out of contempt for international GSIs, Axelson said, "I've seen students just do their e-mail in class," she said. "They'll hang out at the back of the room, talk to their friends, snicker about the GSI. That's really demoralizing and undermining." Perhaps American students don't under- stand the importance of understanding dif- ferent accents because they're lucky enough to grow up speaking English, the interna- tional language of business. The international graduate students understand, though that's one reason many of them study in the U.S. in the first place. The Arthur Miller Theatre just makes a bad campus worse. Magaine Editor: Anne VanderMey Editr iChiet Karl iamvIl Managing Editor: effreyBloomer Cover Art: reterSchottenfes, llin Glhaman Photo Editor'. Pete. Schotenels Desigers: BrdgeO'Donnell and Al__ lin Ghaman and making North Campus seem normal. With such progress, I began to think that eerie feeling of emptiness I once had while traversing through Pierpont Commons might soon be unwarranted. The only remaining eerie feeling is the notion that the panda's eyes on the Panda Express logo in the food court in Pierpont Commons keep following me, but that's between me and the panda. The improvementcouldn'tlast, though. Just when I thought that North Campus was com- NEW SLANG Nine international graduate students watched movie trailers in a Modern Languag- es Building classroom last month. The stu- dents, from different University departments and schools, listened carefullyto the dialogue from movies like "Welcome to Mooseport," "50 First Dates" and "Shrek," silently mouth- GSIs' accents don't stunt learning, they facilitate it. ing the words. They used the trailers to learn American slang and colloquial English. In the class, English Language Institute 338, called Pronunciation in Context, ELI Lecturer Brenda Imber teaches internation- al students to speak like Americans so they can communicate effectively with students and faculty. Some will become GSIs down the line. Others will stick to research.a One graduate student spent 10 minutes before class writing e-mails to College of Engineering faculty in impeccable English. When the class started, though, he struggled to distinguish "they're" from "they are" and "we're" from "we are." It's the little things that are hard for non- native English speakers to master, Imber said. She told her students to mentally replace the word "they're" with "there." "Nobody can tell the difference," Imber said. That is, nobody besides their students. The University has an extensive program in place to ensure that GSIs speak good English, but for some it's not good enough. Are the little things really a substantial setback to com- munication? To study at the University, international students must pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Although all interna- tional graduate students have proven profi- cient in English, many have little experience ing up roses, Arthur Miller Theatre proved me wrong. I had seen the building's design ren- derings and eagerly waited with anticipation for the glowing, phosphorescent cube to be completed. During construction, I gazed at the steel structure and imagined the cool, clean building that would emerge. The design is sim- ple and elegant, but its realization is not. The glass cube was supposed to provide an ephemeral translucency that exhibits the material coolness coveted by contemporary speaking English in a classroom context, Axelson said. In ELI classes, GSIs learn what sort of language is expected in interactions with students and faculty, she said. "It's finding outwhat people actually do in an actual context," Axelson said. "If I want to establish a rapport by having small talk, what kinds of things constitute small talk?" Many international students have to relearn greetings because the ones taught in textbooks are rarely followed in practice, Axelson said. "Textbooks teach you a certain kind of greeting- the 'hello, how are you' sequence," Axelson said. "It may come as a surprise to hear interactions where people don'trespond to 'how are you?' That's a weird one to hear if you've learned a pattern, which is 'fine, thank you, and you?"' TEACHING THE TEACHERS In 1984, the University had no training program for GSIs. Faced with an increasing number of inter- national graduate students who struggled with English in the classroom, the Universi- ty began to require that all the international graduate students take tests to gauge their command of academic English. The English Language Institute stepped in to become the primary form of English instruction for graduate students. "GSIs are better teachers than they used to be," Axelson said. All international students must now pass ELI's Academic English Evaluation to become GSIs. They take the two-hour test at the beginning of each semester. Based on the results of the test, students are assigned to various English for Academic Purposes courses taught by the ELI. Cours- es for GSIs include Spoken and Written Grammar in Academic Contexts, Academic Speaking and Graduate Student Instructor Communication Skills. No matter how much English a GSI knows, terms like "electronic override" are going to be baffling at first, said assistant mathemat- ics professor Dale Winter. That's why GSIs need to practice common classroom conver- sations before teaching classes, he said. architectural theory. Although the idea is sweet, the installed glass appears cloudy and opaque, homogenous and flat. In addition, mechanical equipment clumsily protrudes from the roof of the connecting Walgreen Center, interrupting the cube's simple geom- etry. The design relied on its materials to take the Arthur Miller Theatre into a realm of cool they couldn't reach alone. An awesome, glowing cube is designed to be cool. But it isn't. And so, failing that, all other design attempts to be trendy seem just plain dumb. For example, the staircase is disjointed and unnecessarily large for the atrium's simple centerpiece. The interior's exposed concrete provides a giant surface with a stylish texture but minimal integra- tion. The exterior letters on the cube say "Theatre" twice, once merely larger than the other. In a gracefully coherent building with successful materials, these features would be architecturally hip. In Arthur Miller The- atre, they merely exacerbate the notion that the building is trying hard to be cool and cut- ting-edge but not succeeding. North Campus continues to improve, and Arthur Miller Theatre could have been a giant leap forward. I guess North Campus will always provide me with a disturbing unease, if not from its peculiar void of vital- ity but from the glass box that has disap- pointed me so. International students taking ELI courses make presentations and hold simulated office hours as part of their training. ELI lecturers also teach graduate students about American educational culture. There are major differences between the way teachers and students interact in the United States and other countries, Rhea said. One Chinese postdoctoral student teach- ing Math 115 was popular even though he originally struggled to speak English because he made it clear that he cared about his stu- dents, she said. When a handful of administrators from Chinese universities visited the University's mathematics department and spoke with the graduate student, they asked him why Amer- ican students liked him so much. His answer cracked up the administrators. "In America, you have to care about the student," Rhea said, imitating the graduate student's Chinese accent. "The administra- tors laughed like that was a real bizarre idea." Many departments at the University - including the math department - train their GSIs beyond the courses taught by the ELI. After receiving certification, math GSIs must take a month-long department-specific course before they can teach a course. They also "shadow" GSIs alreadyteaching courses to learn how to grade assignments and interact with students, Rhea said. "We truly do not want to put someone in the classroom that we know we're going to get complaints on," she said. Granted, it can be difficult to understand an international GSI unfamiliar with Ameri- can classroom culture, who speaks accented or poor English. The experience, however, is what students make of it. The Internet and increasingly free trade have made English a lingua franca that allows people from different countries and native speakers of different languages to communicate. Students have in international GSIs an opportunity to gain exposure to the myriad varieties of English that cross the telephone lines and fill the boardrooms of today's international world. All they have to do is listen. Why North Campus is so creepy I'Ovr Yur Head IJArchitecture Column . . 'i.. a ,.: ven though I have been a North Campusite who has trekked to the beloved Art and Architecture Building for many years, that "other" campus has always given me an odd feeling. For those accustomed to Central Campus, walking through the North Campus Quad is like vis- iting a Twilight Zone version of the Diag. These two Michigan campuses share common fea- tures - a bell tower, a union, a big library, a couple of dorms - and yet something feels strange about the northern counterpart. But what? I searched for an answer and immediately accused the reclu- sive engineering students, but I soon realized they are not to blame. Curiously, neither are the musicians or the Bursley folk. I then thought North Cam- pus' peculiar aura could be due to its architecture. The cam- pus features some pretty crazy brick concoctions like Charles Moore's Lurie Tower, Eero Saarinen's Music School and the Duderstadt Center, whose design came from the offices of Albert Kahn. These facili- ties look like an outdated 'BOs A walk up north can feel like the X-Files. movie that attempts to depict the future. Still, an ugly build- ing may induce nausea, but not goosebumps. There had to be another reason that North Campus was so creepy. For years, that question plagued my mind. The solu- tion remained elusive until one quiet night it came to me: North Campus feels strange because it is so eerily vacant and lacks any energetic vitality. It's not the people, it's not even the build- ings, it's the lack of people and it's the wide open spaces. Central Campus has the benefit of location, situated adjacent to urban Ann Arbor while North Campus is about a 10-minute drive from most everywhere. This fact also par- tially accounts for how spread out North Campus is - parking lots take up space. Constrained by the University's original 40 acres, the Diag is framed by an enclosure of structures neces- sarily nestled together. Conversely, North Campus buildings are fragments that dis- sipate into the trees and do not shape the spaces in between. In recent years, however, North Campus has been losing some of its X-Files vibe. See ARCHITECTURE, page 7B