Who will design the official faculty tramp stamp?

This is either a brilliant idea or--well, you decide:

Yesterday the committee I chair was talking about what sorts of door prizes might inspire faculty members to attend a training workshop, and today one of my students mentioned that the best way to lure students to attend events is to have a drawing in which the prize is a gift certificate to a tattoo parlor.

You can see where I'm going with this, right?

Why not offer tattoo parlor gift certificates as door prizes at faculty events? Or, better yet, bring in a tattoo artist to ink 'em up right here on campus?

Think of the possibilities: the college mascot inscribed on our biceps, departmental logos on our ankles, important concepts from our disciplines on our foreheads. Soon departments will be competing to sport the most impressive tattoos, with math profs adding ever more digits of pi while chemists show off diagrams of carbon compounds.

What sort of tattoo would the English department select? Years ago we had a major who wanted the word liminal tattooed on her arm, which is amusing on a visceral level (but only to people who know what liminal means). Should we deck ourselves out in diagrammed sentences, allow our arms to pay homage to authors, or adorn ourselves with quotes from classic works of literature? I'd love to carry with me every day the last two lines from "To the Stone-Cutters" by Robinson Jeffers: "Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found / The honey of peace in old poems." Or maybe just the last line of Denise Levertov's "The Jacob's Ladder": "The poem ascends."

That line might look nice ascending up my neck, except it would probably just make my neck look unwashed--and besides, who would ever get close enough to read a poem off my neck? 

So okay, the idea needs some work, but I'll bet I could find some faculty eager to put in the time to refine it. Far more fun than tackling the pile of student projects and papers coming due in the next couple of weeks.

Maybe I'll get the entire text of Pride and Prejudice micro-printed on the back of my hand. It might look like a blob of ink to others, but wherever I go I'll have on hand something well worth reading.

(Some) visiting writers rock!

In 2009, Anthony Doerr was a cheap date: he came to campus, met with a creative writing class, had lunch with English majors, and read from his work in a public reading, all for the pathetic honorarium our department was able to scrape together. We invited him on the strength of his short stories and Four Seasons In Rome and we paid him just enough to tempt him to fly cross-country. This was before the novels and the Pulitzer and the movie deal, so there's no way our meager budget could lure him here today--but if we did, I have no doubt he would spend quality time with students. He was great with students. Alumni still rave about the writing advice he so generously shared.

We've been lucky over the years with many of our visiting writers, pleased with their willingness to share their expertise with students. Sarah Vowell was fabulous. Dan Chaon was great. Joni Tevis was a gem. And the first visiting writer whose visit I arranged--the poet David Citino--read students' work with care and offered focused encouragement. A year later when I learned he'd died, I was so moved by the memory of his patient attention that I cried in front of my class.

But some visiting writers have not been so accommodating. I guess I understand, a little bit: if some big-name writer takes time out of a busy writing schedule to travel out to darkest Appalachia, flying in and out of annoying little airports and staying in a chain motel next to the interstate, they might want to get out of here as quickly as possible, arriving on campus in time to read but avoiding the classes or lunches or opportunities to meet with students. They're tired. They're busy. They're big stars in the literary firmament, and we are nobody.

But do they have to rub it in? I remember one pretty well known writer--whose name I won't mention--whose imperious attitude left a bad taste in my mouth. She openly expressed contempt for our students' work, and while I'm not surprised that a student's writing might not meet the high standard expected by a successful writer of literary fiction, I don't see the need for contempt. But this same author also treated the chair of the English department like the hired help, so maybe contempt was just her usual way of being in the world.

A visiting writer who hates students probably ought to stay away from students entirely--read the work, be inspiring, go away. Fine. But I keep thinking back to that visit by Anthony Doerr, when no one knew that he would someday become THE Anthony Doerr: he convinced our students that their writing mattered, and the students responded by writing more and mattering more.

Next month, because of an unusual conjunction of events, we have two authors visiting campus. One will visit a class and have lunch with English majors and departmental faculty; the other will arrive on campus 30 minutes before the reading and leave immediately after. Guess which one is being paid a whole lot more? In the literary world, success means never having to bother with students. 

Pig-headed about Pygmalion

It didn't surprise me at all that my first-year students have never heard of Pygmalion. I mean, why should they? Is anyone seriously teaching Ovid or George Bernard Shaw in high school these days? I was a little surprised that none of them admitted familiarity with My Fair Lady, but why should twenty-first century college students watch a musical released in 1964? Old news. Nothing to see here.

What surprised me most, though, was that when they encountered a reference to Pygmalion in Tara Westover's Educated, none of them looked it up. It appears at a pivotal moment: a scholarship has enabled the unschooled Tara to study in Cambridge, where she suffers deeply from impostor syndrome and feels her unusual childhood ill suits her for academic life. She doesn't know what to wear, what to read, or what to think, and her mentor, Professor Steinberg, is titillated by her ignorance, seeing her as a blank slate ready to be molded into his idea of a scholar. "It's as if I've stepped into Shaw's Pygmalion," he says, and my students just read on without stopping to wonder what that might mean.

Pygmalion was a dude who fell in love with a statue, I tell them, and I show them some images showing a sculptor crafting a beautiful woman in marble. They are unimpressed--like, why do they need to know this? So I explain: Pygmalion was disgusted by the women available to him, finding some flaw in every single woman he saw, so he set out to make one of his own, crafting the perfect woman from marble and then falling in love with the work of his hands. What can you say about a dude who falls in love with his statue? The word desperate comes to mind--like a twenty-first century guy who can't deal with real women and so creates his own AI-generated sweetheart. But today's Pygmalion has no Aphrodite so moved by the depth of his love that she transforms the statue into a real live girl ready to meet his every need. No word on what Galatea thinks of the deal, but whatever.

My students' eyes glaze over.

Look at the image, I tell them. Who has power here? They look: Pygmalion dominates the scene, making and crafting and designing. Galatea is passive, submissive, silent. Who wants to be that girl? 

Here I should probably note that I have only four female students in the class (out of 17), and all but two of the men are athletes, mostly football or basketball players. But that shouldn't make a difference: anyone with a few functioning brain cells ought to be able to look at the representation of Pygmalion and Galatea and understand that the myth envisions the ideal woman as silent, submissive, passive, and designed primarily to serve the needs of men. 

But my students don't want to talk about that.

So I turn back to the text: Tara is trying to reinvent herself in an academic environment that will free her from the restrictions of her home back in Idaho, where she was repeatedly (and violently) shoved into certain models of feminine behavior promoted by her church, her community, and her father (who referred to six-year-old girls in tutus as whores because they were showing too much leg). Young Tara hopes academe will free her to become her own person, but the first mentor she encounters at Cambridge takes glee in viewing her as Galatea to his Pygmalion.

Why would Tara Westover compare her mentor to Pygmalion? How free is she in this scene? No one wants to touch the question. No one wants to consider the irony involved in creating an AI-generated image of Pygmalion sculpting Galatea. No one wants to explore who has the power to craft our identities or what sorts of constraints might deter today's students from becoming their best selves. 

It's possible that I see myself as playing the part of Pygmalion in my students' lives, trying to craft them into the scholars I hope they are capable of becoming. But even if I admitted this out loud to my students, how many of them would be willing to look up the words?

Friday fragments, with pulchritudinous yodeling

I've been meeting with a million first-year advisees this week so my brain is a little fried, which may explain why I'm struggling to comprehend reality.

A student is currently earning an F in a math class but assures me he'll bring it up to an A by the end of the semester and I think no wonder he's failing math, but then maybe it would be possible to bring an F up to an A if the prof hands out a whole lot of extra credit. I remind the student of a common advisor mantra--D's get degrees--but he sees an elusive A gleaming on the horizon and thinks it's easily within his reach.

A student in the Nature Writing class wants readers to care about the harm we're doing to our pulchritudinous planet but I tell her I hear pulchritude in the voice of W.C. Fields so maybe she ought to choose another word. She doesn't ask me who W.C. Fields might be so maybe she knows, but she doesn't know for pulchritude.

All the commuter students in my 9 a.m. class were a little late this morning because the Oil and Gas Expo taking place in the rec center has resulted in big trucks taking up the parking spaces commuter students need. Maybe I should have warned my commuters to attend class via Zoom while circling the lot. 

I'm getting a cortisone shot in my sore knee this afternoon from an orthopedist who can't understand why I'm not begging for surgery on both knees, because the X-rays reveal that the arthritis is worse in the left knee, which doesn't even hurt. He says the cortisone shot might provide some relief to the sore knee but it won't last so I'd better get used to the idea of a knee replacement tomorrow if not sooner, but instead I'm getting used to the idea of seeking a second opinion.

My partner in faculty training tells me about a dream in which a vendor is supposed to be training faculty in a new technology but instead he's standing at the front of the classroom dressed in German folk garb and yodeling while his young daughter dances nearby, and while my partner is trying to signal to the presenter that he's lost the plot, I'm rushing around the room passing trays of food, presumably because it's impossible to yodel with a mouth full of cake. This scenario may be a dream, but it doesn't feel too different from what's going on in my world right now.

Attack of the AI bots, plus AI-induced paranoia

So yesterday a colleague in another department asked her students to explain specific ways they use AI in their classes. Do they ask an AI to help them come up with ideas for papers, summarize readings, or find sources for research projects? The first kid to raise his hand said, "I cheat." Then he explained, in detail, how he cheats. Brazen but not surprising. At least he was honest, I guess, if that's what counts as honesty these days.

Now I'm dealing with AI-generated blog comments. It's nice to find in my inbox a comment full of fulsome praise for my prose, except when it includes an embedded link to a sketchy website shilling certain goods and services. And why does the comment sound like it was written by a particularly sycophantic robot? I like praise as much as the next blogger, but I'm not interested in robotic sycophancy!

Of course this makes me question other comments as well. I have moderation turned on for posts more than a week old, but couldn't AI comments sneak into more recent posts without my awareness? I've long suspected that many of the thousands of purported visitors to my blog are bots, but how often do they fool me into believing they're real people? Maybe I'm paranoid, but in the current environment it's a well-deserved paranoid.

My paranoia went a little too far yesterday when I convinced myself that the weather was targeting me personally. I had to walk down the hill to pick up a tray of sandwiches and then walk back up the hill again to deliver them to a meeting, but the sky got dark just before I stepped out the door and the rain poured down throughout the process of fetching sandwiches. Then within minutes after I'd stepped back inside, the sky cleared and the sun came out. Good thing I had a (borrowed) umbrella! And good thing my bum knee didn't fail me on the slippery steps! But if we must endure a 20-minute downpour, why does it have to happen just when I can't avoid being outside?

The weather may hate me, but the AI bots love me. Honestly, it's nice to be appreciated by someone, although I'm not sure what really counts as honesty these days.

Red, yellow, and not too blue

I drive home along the river and marvel over the autumn leaves turning brilliant red and yellow, but at the same time I'm reminded of one Sunday years ago when the pastor asked the congregation what they were thankful for and some nice church lady mentioned the beautiful fall leaves, only to have another nice church lady intone darkly, "The leaves look nice now, but soon they'll all fall down and the colors will go away and everything will turn dark and bleak and make me think of death." 

Well sure, that's one way to look at it, but if I had to think about death every time I saw a colorful leaf, I'd stop looking. But I can't drive home with my eyes shut so instead I glory in the beauty of nature, even when I'm in pain--or especially when I'm in pain.

Having a diagnosis for my bum knee is a bit of a relief--torn meniscus, severe arthritis--but I'm definitely looking forward to getting some treatment, which will probably start with steroid injections. The knee is not quite so painful at night these days but it's excruciating when I have to stand for long periods of time. At church I can generally get through one hymn without too much discomfort, but last Friday at the inauguration of our college president I had to march in the academic procession and then remain standing through the national anthem, the invocation, and the college hymn, by which point I was grasping tightly to the chair in front of me to avoid falling over from the pain. The colleague next to me whispered You can sit down if you need to, but people were taking photos all over the place and I didn't want to go viral as the evil professor who refused to stand for the national anthem--or the prayer, or the hymn. In these troubled times, I didn't want a personal, practical decision to be interpreted as a symbolic act.

Despite the pain I went for a walk up my road Saturday morning just to see how far I could go. I took my husband along to distract me with conversation, which helped. Our creek is mostly dry right now and looks like a river of leaves, but we heard kingfishers chattering and saw the friendly smiles of neighbors, which also helped. One of our close neighbors killed himself last week--Who knows why? It all got to be too much for him--which made me sad for his family, who will see the lovely colors of autumn through grief-tinged eyes.

Or maybe the lovely colors will provide some comfort. I know they cheer me up, even if I'm well aware that winter is coming. I may be a little blue, but I refuse to encounter the beauty of autumn except with eyes wide open. 

  

Our creek looks like a sea of leaves.

 

Mind-reading their way toward educational goals

Extra credit to anyone who can read my mind right now, I said, and a student said, Seriously?

I didn't hand out any extra credit this morning but I did give a student an imaginary gold star for guessing what I was asking for when I wrote WWTD on the whiteboard. 

My first-year seminar class has reached the point in Tara Westover's Educated where young Tara has to seek help her reach her educational goals. She goes to office hours to ask a professor how to improve her performance in class, asks a friend for tutoring, gets her pastor to help her apply for a government grant, and even submits to her roommate's instruction on the importance of washing her hands after she uses the bathroom. (Because yes, she was that clueless.) 

On Friday my students will start learning about the complicated process of creating an educational plan and selecting classes for next semester, so today I wanted to draw connections between what they were reading in Westover's book and what they'll be doing in planning their own educational goals. So I asked them to write down specific educational goals for the short term (passing that next chemistry exam, for instance), medium term (getting into a major class next semester), and long term (studying abroad, getting an internship). Then I asked them to get into groups, talk about their most challenging goals, and then answer the question I wrote on the board: WWTD? 

Does anyone know what this means? I asked, adding, I doubt it since I just made it up.  

That's when I offered extra credit for mind-reading, and they fumbled toward an answer: Who Wants To Dive, What Would They Do, What Would Timmy Do--and then I said, Close, but not Timmy. 

What would Tara do said a voice from the front row. (Gunners in the front row, as usual.) 

Gold star! (Except I didn't actually have any gold stars.) What Would Tara Westover do if faced with the challenges you've been discussing? And where can you find that kind of help here? 

They came up with great answers, so at least for today I know they know how to use campus resources. Will this result in a sudden influx of students coming to office hours? If so, I need to top up my supply of gold stars.