Monday, March 18, 2024

Not quite the morning news

If I had to write a news story covering the events of the past seven days in my life, I'd be hard pressed to know what to put in the headline--the shrieks in the night, the sweets in my mouth, the boys in the sun, the boy with the gun...it felt like a lot but it really adds up to not much. But I'll start with the gun because it was by far the most bizarre thing to happen all week, even if I was an uninvolved bystander.

We were enjoying a potluck lunch in the church fellowship hall (coconut cake--yum!) when a sweet church lady heard a knocking on the door. She opened the door to find a local urchin, maybe 12 years old, whose first words were enigmatic: "Tell God I said hello." The church lady asked him if he wanted to come in and get some lunch but he said no, his mom didn't know where he was. As the kid turned to leave, the church lady saw the gun in a holster hanging at his waist.

What was a 12-year-old kid doing carrying a gun? Was it a real gun? What did he mean by "Tell God I said hello"? A good journalist would have sought answers to these questions and more, but the kid was gone before I even knew he'd been there and no answers were forthcoming.

The presence of a gun tends to overshadow other events, so probably no one is interested in hearing about the community production of Death of a Salesman, which made me cry, or the student production of Medea, which made me wonder how the main character could do all that shrieking without seriously damaging her vocal cords. Both productions were very well done but I got annoyed every time someone blamed Willy Loman's failures on his old age. I kept wanting to jump up and yell "63 isn't that old!"

In between all that gallivanting, I graded exams, prepped classes, interviewed three candidates for adjunct positions, served as a judge at a cookie-baking contest, chatted with artsy folks at a reception for a visiting artist, and attended a baseball game in the bright spring sunshine.

That warmth seems to have gone on hiatus, however, as tonight's forecast calls for snow. This morning as I drove to campus near 7 a.m., I was surprised to see a crew shell skimming along the surface of the river. Twenty-eight degrees outside with the sun barely glancing above the horizon and there were my students putting their muscles to work on the cold, dark river.

It's dark and cold and we're barely awake but still young people are pulling their weight to move the boat forward--that's the story I prefer to tell, but it's hard to put that in a headline when there's a mysterious gun drawing attention just outside the door.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Wobbling on a shifty surface while trying to serve my students

Lately I keep thinking about the time close to 20 years ago when I attended a college event on a docked sternwheeler. I don't recall the topic of discussion, but the boat bobbed on the water and attendees enjoyed an open bar, so when an administrator got up to spread his arms wide and admonish us all to consider the needs of The students! The students!, he wobbled a bit. Looked like he might fall over at any moment, in fact. People sitting near the front braced themselves to catch him if he fell or at least avoid the carnage.

Today I feel like that dude--wobbly, trying to remain upright on a shifty and uncertain surface, but still devoted to serving the needs of my students even though I could fall flat on my face at any moment.

Yesterday there were many such moments. First day after Spring Break and the time change and I arrived in my office to find no heat in the building. Outside temps in the mid-twenties; inside, colleagues sitting in their offices in full winter coats, hats, and gloves. I put up with it as long as I could and finally turned on my space heater--just for five minutes, just to take the chill off--and promptly blew a fuse, shutting off power to all the offices in my corner of the building.

We lowly academics are not permitted to reset a circuit breaker, so I reported the outage to the building coordinator, who reported it to the Physical Plant, who sent someone over to restore electricity--four hours later. I guess they were busy. And so was I--trying to find a way to do my job without heat or electricity.

But I survived that. And I survived teaching in unheated rooms and sitting through a long, unnecessary meeting on a profoundly uncomfortable chair that made my bad hip so stiff that I could barely walk when it was finally over. And I survived three-quarters of the department chairs' meeting without any more than the usual amount of anguish. 

But then the Powers That Be unleashed the new departmental budgeting process (surprise!), which exposed my areas of greatest anxiety and incompetence: working with spreadsheets. At first I thought okay, give me some time to figure this process out and I can get it done, but then they announced the deadline. 

The ground shifted. My heart started racing, my brain spinning, my head wobbling. No way I can complete this complex task in that amount of time, I told myself, but then the tiny Puritans who live in my brain starting huffing and puffing about the necessity of meeting the deadline, but then my deep-seated anxieties about money started screaming that the deadline is impossible, and then those prim little Puritans reminded me that it would be unseemly and untidy to allow my head to explode in front of all those people whom I respect, and then I started silently drafting a letter of resignation.

An over-reaction? Maybe, but it was nothing compared to the way I reacted when I finally arrived home to discover that one of the ravening beasts who shares my household had eaten up all but a tiny sliver of the pineapple-upside-down cake I'd been saving for myself. After the day I'd experienced, the absence of cake felt unforgivable.

After a good night's sleep I'm still feeling wobbly and I'm waiting for the next shift in the uncertain surface I'm standing on while I try to appease the tiny Puritans and the anxiety monsters and the ravening beasts, but I haven't written that letter of resignation just yet, mostly because I'm devoted to meeting the needs of my students. 

The students! The students! I cry, hoping that someone catches me when I finally fall on my face.

Friday, March 08, 2024

Swanning about

After being away four days and ignoring a million emails and piles of work, I really didn't want to come home. As a delaying tactic, I took a scenic route that added nearly an hour to my journey but rewarded me with views of swans--and not just once but in several places. The stretch of Killbuck Creek below Millersburg widens out into wetlands where I saw herons, geese, ducks, and swans, which from a distance looked like white lights hovering above the dark water.

I need to get out on that water, I told myself, but it was too cold and I lacked essential equipment. Still, visiting Killbuck Creek gave me ideas, made me long for my canoe and some sunshine and a picnic lunch. Along the drive I saw forsythia blooming and then when I pulled into my driveway I was greeted by a host of golden daffodils bobbing in the breeze.

Spring is coming--I can feel it--and today, just for a while, I saw it all around me. It was an extra-long journey home, but I don't regret a single minute.



 

 

Thursday, March 07, 2024

Great weather if you're a duck

After two days of t-shirt weather, we bundled up yesterday to stand in persistent drizzle and cold wind at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, where my adorable daughter and I observed great blue herons building nests and courting, and then we took a quick jaunt alongside an old canal to see a beaver pond where ducks and geese dabbled contentedly. Poor lighting means bad pictures, but it was worth seeing the birds at work, unbothered by the weather.


How does he carry a stick that big?

Every black blob is a nest at the heron rookery.






I love the elegant pattern on the female mallard's back


Wood duck!

Evidence of beaver activity

 

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Sometimes it's hard to break away

My primary purpose this Spring Break is to distract myself from the ongoing situation at my beloved place of employment, and I use situation because I'm trying to avoid more descriptive phrases that require unwieldy words like apocalyptic and abandonment and thumbscrew-inspired decisions-making. 

But it's hard to avoid thinking about the situation when my inbox contains yet another email from a valued colleague announcing a move to a job in the private sector after 25 years of teaching, plus an outstanding student's request for a letter of recommendation so he can transfer his skills, intelligence, and passion to a different institution. Even at church I couldn't escape the situation. A congregant asked me questions about opportunities for a young relative to study in a particular program, and I had to work very hard to tactfully avoid speculation about whether that program will be fully staffed in the near future.

So I had to get away. My all-over-Ohio excursion was nearly thwarted 90 minutes into the trip when my tax person texted to let me know she needed a particular form signed by me and my husband right away. I sat in a Wal-Mart parking lot in nowheresville, Ohio, texting with a tax person who at first could not understand why I wasn't willing to drive back home to print the forms, find my husband, get his signature, scan the form, and send it back, and then after she agreed to send a version that could be signed online, she couldn't understand why I couldn't get my husband to sign it electronically immediately. (Because Monday is his day off and the weather was gorgeous and there's no wi-fi connection out on the tractor.)

But we worked that out without disrupting my trip too long, and then I spent a lovely day visiting an old friend, looking at overpriced hardwood desks at Amish furniture stores, visiting my  former favorite mall only to discover that many of the stores were empty, and spending a relaxing night far from home and campus and tax persons. 

Along the way I took a wrong turn and stumbled upon a boardwalk out into a wetland, and I made a note of its location so that I could head out there to see the sun rise over the wetland this morning. Except the parking area was blocked off and the boardwalk entrance was boarded up--"closed for repairs." Thwarted once again! But the weather was gorgeous (40s and sunny early, 70s and sunny later), so I found another park and took a hike through woods that will no doubt be stunning in a few weeks when the spring ephemerals start popping up. This morning it was just me and trees and woodland birds and some turkeys gobbling in the distance.

But I can't think about the situation while attending to turkeys or watching woodpeckers disassemble a tree, so the excursion was successful so far. The next leg of the journey will take me to the grandkids, and if their youthful hijinks can't distract me from the grim facts back home, nothing will.      

    

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Time flies when you're having whatever you call this thing we're having

It's the kind of day when people burst into the building shaking out their umbrellas and smoothing down their hair. High winds blew me all over the road this morning and I saw signs that tree limbs had already been removed from the road. The briefest foray out-of-doors results in rambunctious hair, so staying inside and grading seems like a good plan.

Students have papers due in the American Lit Survey this morning so naturally I'm fielding requests for extensions. I'm happy to give students until the end of the day if they think it will help, but I can't give longer extensions without a persuasive excuse because I need to grade these papers before midterm grades are due, which raises the question: how did we get to midterm so quickly?

They say time seems to speed up as we age and I can attest that it's true. Has it really been 20 years since we bought our house, 15 since our daughter got married, 10 since the birth of our first grandchild? Impossible! Two more years feels like a long time but when I look at how swiftly this semester is passing and how much I want to squeeze into the next four semesters of teaching, I fear that retirement will arrive before I'm ready.

And of course the recent campus cuts have resulted in frantic revisions to the General Education curriculum and the English major, which will affect what I'm able to do in these next two years. The Gen Ed revision means I'll never again teach two courses I took great care to design, losses that don't exactly break my heart. But I'm only slowly coming to learn what the changes to the English major will mean, and I wonder how many of my beloved courses I've taught for the last time without realizing it.

Next fall looks good, though, and my approaching retirement gives me an excuse to opt out of some heavy lifting. Yes, we'll need to appoint a task force to do a full overhaul of our General Education curriculum, but I don't intend to help design a curriculum that I won't be present to teach. Besides, I've already reached my career quota of new General Education curricula, and anyway, in ten years all our students will be Online Influencing majors taking courses taught by Artificial Intelligence, areas in which my expertise is hardly relevant.

And so I plod on, shaking out my umbrella and smoothing down my hair and responding to student emails demanding extensions. I'd like to request an extension on life, please, and make it ASAP. There's no time like the present to grapple with a diminishing future.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Peddling influence

I've been haunted by a disturbing article in the New York Times about parents who post their children's photos online and then attract sexual predators, which is appalling enough, but the detail I can't get out of my head is the claim that one-third of preteen girls want to pursue careers as online influencers.

I have questions! Most of them, though, place me firmly in the Old Fuddy-Duddy category, like "How do preteen girls even know what an online influencer is? Aren't their parents monitoring their internet usage?" But no, the article points out that at least some parents encourage their children's online presence, seeking to open doors to careers in modeling or acting or influencing.

But how can so many kids think online influencer is a viable career goal? It's like a pyramid scheme: the more influencers, the fewer people available to be influenced. And why don't the children aspire to be astronauts or doctors or writers or scientists or teachers?

All those careers can lead to immense influence. I mean, how many of us can point to a particular book that changed the way we think about the world, or a particular teacher who encouraged us to pursue a field of study? How many people my age watched the moon landing and were inspired to pursue careers in math or science? Maybe they didn't all become astronauts, but they may have learned a thing or two along the way and developed the skills to contribute something meaningful to society.

What will a child learn by pursuing a dream of being an online influencer? Maybe some marketing skills or effective camera angles? Help me out here! Is there really a crying need in our culture for even more young people excelling at the fine art of self-promotion?

I confess that I would like to have more influence than I do. If I could encourage more students to care deeply about the power of storytelling or the cultural value of poetry or even the effective use of the semicolon, I would feel that I've contributed something that might bear fruit long after I'm gone. But if online influencers keep influencing young girls to pursue careers as online influencers, we'll soon be so up to our eyeballs in influencers that we'll have no one left to be astronauts or doctors or writers or scientists or teachers.

But then I am an Old Fuddy-Duddy. Maybe someone can explain to me how to solve this problem, because I don't think I'm the right person to influence the influencers.