Friday poetry challenge: Excavating buried treasure

I found buried treasure in my campus office yesterday, and it would be selfish not to share. 

I've been clearing out a filing cabinet and sending piles of documents to the shredder, mostly dating from the time before electronic everything. A two-foot-tall pile of student advising folders: gone. Hard copies of old syllabi, quizzes, and handouts--gone. A bulging folder labeled bad papers and a thinner one labeled good papers--gone. Hard copies of evidence from ancient plagiarism cases--gone. What's the statute of limitations for a plagiarism case from 2006? 

I quickly leaf through the files to remove paper clips and I see lots of names I don't recognize. I remember the students in the messier plagiarism cases and even more from the good papers file, but most of the names evoke not an iota of recognition. In the bad papers file I glance at a few opening lines, but they all sound like this one: "The surroundings that go on in the world today hurt many Americans; various people have their own way of living and their own thoughts of behavior." Gold star to anyone who can identify the topic of that paper. 

But hidden among the unmemorable and outdated files are a few items I can't discard. Years ago a student illustrated a handout introducing Baudrillard to literature classes, back when discussing Baudrillard was a thing, and while I haven't used the handout in years and I'll certainly never use it again, I'm keeping the student's drawing. 

And I'm keeping a paper that served as an excellent example of the Bumper-Sticker Essay--a feast of vague generalizations supported only by slogans from the NRA. I love the fact that it repeatedly refers to guns as "utensils," which makes me wonder whether I ought to stash a Luger in the kitchen amongst the spatulas.

I've set aside for further consideration a folder full of old transparencies for overhead projectors, including the ones I used in the teaching demonstration that won me this job. Mingling within the same crowded folder are a photograph of three space aliens from some cheesy B-movie, a detailed portrayal of the Great Chain of Being, a drawing of Abe Lincoln's top hat, and a photo of Charles Whittlesey, a noted geologist who surveyed the Indian Mounds in Marietta in 1837 (and also a distant relative of my mother). I don't know what to make of these oddities but I can't let them go without a thought.

The treasure I can finally share is an email from a student defending his decision to cheat in my class more than 20 years ago. I think this was in Postcolonial Literature Survey, back when I was still giving multiple-choice reading quizzes--five simple questions that anyone who had done the reading could easily answer. On the first quiz I thought a particular student had looked at a classmate's answers, so for the next quiz I made three versions. Sure enough, this student's responses were incorrect for his version of the quiz but correct for his classmate's version. I sent him a very brief email suggesting a meeting, and in response he sent me a screed two and a half pages long, a classic of defensive rhetoric. Here are a few excerpts, with distinctive syntax and spelling retained:

Here's the deal. I did not do my reading for this week. When we took the quiz, I was trying to answer to the questions until the girl sitting in front of me raised her quiz to check on her answers....This is when I decided to write down the answers she had on her paper thinking I might have a better chance to not get a zero....

Just like most students (I presume), I from time to time might have used the homework of somebody else before class to turn in one of mine. But I don't think this is dishonesty because most students do the same....

Now as for possibility that this behavior might be a usual habit for me, I would just like to let you know that I always sit in the front row when I'm in class (this semester, your class being the expection because I came late the first day).....

I'm an honest person and I don't believe in getting out of college with a degree without being able to show some degree in professiency in the subjects I studied as a major, minor or else. I'm ready to take any test you would like me to do in any subject I took so far to attest this.

If you see I did this regretable act for this quiz, it's for the following reasons: first of all in my opinion, this is just a quiz. Second, as I told you, I don't care too much about this subject I'm taking because hopefully, it will never help me to an important degree for any of my possible future careers....

I have high respect for the  subject you are teaching but I don't see a direct connection for me in it when it comes to giving me a job in the future....

[Deleted long paragraph about how hard the student had to work to get to college.] 

I regret this incident happening because now at least you will not see that and it's just as if all my efforts where waisted. And for what???? A quiz! 5 questions not even important in the sence that they don't even require any critical thinking, any analysis or anything related to the use of our brains to solve, create or investigate. The only think I needed to do was to read the book!!!!!!!!! I did not have time to do this and I sincerely regret not doing so. I thought about guessing the answers (actually you can see that on the first question) but I was like "Hell! this is not a big deal...it's just a quiz and this is not very important stuff!"....

I hope this will not have any direct consequences on my scholarships because I can not afford the tuition fees. (I'm almost laughing about it because that would be really odd and funny to loose all that work for something this insignificant for me)....

And on it goes.

The student was right about a few things. It's true that the quiz required no critical thinking, and that's one reason I moved away from multiple-choice reading quizzes and started instead giving questions requiring some analysis. It's also true that all he had to do was read the book, but that would have taken more time than writing a lengthy email defending his right to cheat.

What ever happened to this student? No idea. The name means nothing to me now, but he was perfectly suited to any career requiring the construction of irate screeds--a skill AI may have made obsolete. 

Just like me! 

So many obsolete files sent to the shredder! What will be left of me when my office is empty?

"I've piles
of files
to shred,"
I said,
a mound
I'm bound
to toss--
no loss!
I'll take
a break
to read
a screed--
a mess
express-
ing heat.
(The deets
long gone.
Doggone!)
I'll trash
this stash
of stuff,
enough
to force
a horse
to choke--
no joke!
And then
I'll pen
a note.
I quote:
"Retired."
Inspired?
Agree
with me:
attempt
to empt-
y drawers.
No more
to say.
Away
I'll wend.
(The end.)

That sudden abrupt stop seems appropriate for a career heading inexorably toward the exit, but I'd love to see some more poetry on my way out the door. Who will sling some rhymes?    

 

Just a tiny sampling of the treasures I've amassed.

 

Writing outside the barn--er, box

My favorite Writing Wednesday moment of the summer occurred when a serious history scholar explained that she'd been searching a database to find authentic Viking names to christen a fictional herd of cows. As one does.

On this final Writing Wednesday of the summer and probably of my career, I've been looking back at what these scribbling scholars have accomplished over the years. Colleagues have worked on scholarly books and articles, polished essays, massaged data, and contributed their expertise to various branches of the scholarly community. I've seen the names of my Writing Wednesday colleagues mentioned in the acknowledgments of published books and articles, and I've justified the existence of the group by convincing the Provost that meeting in a room to write for one morning each week builds our influence as scholars. And the Provost has shown appreciation by treating us to lunch at the end of the summer--which would be today.

But some of us have also worked on less scholarly projects during this time. Of the three articles I polished and submitted earlier this summer, only one was strictly scholarly; the other two were a bit of memoir and a humor piece. I've reached the point in my academic career when I have nothing more to prove to the scholarly community, so why not attempt to extend my influence outside the academy?

And I'm not the only one thinking that way. One of my colleagues this summer has spent his Writing Wednesday time polishing mini-essays for his Substack newsletter, which I highly recommend (click here).  David is an expert on religion, history, music, and social justice, all of which appear in his latest post, which movingly describes his recent visit to the southern border and the people who sacrifice to serve the needs of border-crossers.

Another colleague, the one seeking Viking names for cows, has been writing a series of romantasy novellas involving nuns and barbarians on a magical island (click here for info). She publishes under an assumed name because she's not eager for students to stumble upon her spicy texts, but exercising creativity this way fills her with the kind of joy so rarely inspired by scholarly writing. It's been fun to watch my colleagues follow their own paths toward different kinds of influence.

And what am I working on now? Well, my retirement shindig has been scheduled for the Friday of Homecoming weekend, and I've been asked to give a talk that appears on the Homecoming schedule as "Bev Hogue's Best Lecture." The pressure's on! What if I instead deliver my second-best lecture? How would anyone even know? So I've got some work to do, distilling a lifetime of scholarly wisdom into a lecture that can appeal to whoever happens to wander in during Homecoming. 

These days it seems everyone's greatest ambition is to be an influencer, but even we who sit in a campus classroom and write for hours at a time all summer long can wield influence in our own quiet way. We may not get millions of views on TikTok, but we still use our skill and creativity to make a mark on the world, one article or Substack or Viking cow at a time.

A birthday wish: more dullness, less drama

Would a grown man feel silly carrying a Happy Birthday balloon around a hospital all morning long? If he did, he didn't admit it. 

Yes, my son celebrated his birthday with chemotherapy--not exactly the top item on his wish list but he'll take it. Hospital staff gave him a birthday balloon at his first appointment, and everywhere he went for the rest of the day total strangers smiled and wished him a happy birthday. 

We had a little time to kill in Columbus afterward so I drove us up to Belle's Bread, a Japanese-owned French bakery known for its curry donuts. I bought some baked goods to take home and then my son wandered into the nearby Asian market and looked with longing at the sushi selection, knowing that raw fish is not a good choice for a guy with a compromised immune system. I remember the first time I ate sushi again after finishing six months of cancer treatment. There's nothing better than that long-delayed first bite--but it'll be a while before he tastes it. 

He stayed the night in Columbus so he can get more chemo today, so I was a long way down the highway before the big event: our daughter and son-in-law drove to Columbus to take our son out to dinner with his nieces and nephew. Chemo can make things taste horrible, dull the appetite, make swallowing painful, and even inspire vomiting, but this time he was able to enjoy a meal without too much drama.  

It wasn't a normal birthday but this hasn't been a normal year. My mother used to insist that normal is just a setting on your dryer, but after four full months of cancer treatments, we're really hoping that next year's birthday will involve more fun and less drama, more cake and fewer needles and nasty chemicals that make swallowing painful. Maybe it could even be a little, dare we say it, dull. Enough with the drama already! (But a few balloons wouldn't hurt.) 

Friday poetry challenge: Singing the bubbling-brine blues

You can't live and work near the confluence of two major rivers without becoming deeply interested in water. Our waterways bring daily pleasure, whether we're driving to work beside the Muskingum, riding a historic paddlewheeler on the Ohio, or watching great blue herons fish in our creek. We faced our first flood a week after we moved to the area and many more since then, so we spend a lot of time thinking about where our water comes from and where it's going.

Our well at home is fairly shallow and far from the reach of the fracking brine injected into wells far beneath Marietta, but I work in Marietta and eat at local restaurants, so when our little town's water system gets into the New York Times, I pay attention (click here for gift article).  That's my colleague Dr. Dave Jeffery sharing his considerable geological expertise on the topic of local geological formations that enable fracking waste brine to bubble up into gas and oil wells; he reminds us that no one seems to be doing the necessary tests to see how far the fracking wastewater has already migrated and how it may affect local drinking water.

Nobody is surprised to learn that once again Appalachia has been treated like a landfill. The 2019 film Dark Waters detailed the legal fight to force DuPont to take responsibility for polluting area drinking water with C8 just downstream from Marietta. Extractive industries left their mark on this part of Ohio for years, leaving behind strip-mined land and derelict gas and oils wells--including an orphaned well that injured six people when it exploded in the Wayne National Forest last fall (link here, though it may be behind a paywall). Chunks of coal from abandoned mines wash up in our creek regularly, reminding us that generations of individuals and companies that have profit from local resources while leaving behind a mess. And now a company wants to build a huge data center just a few miles up the Muskingum from us, drawing on the river's water for its cooling system.

I'm not an expert and I don't know the best way to address these issues while allowing necessary development, but let's give the scientists time to do their jobs, testing waters and examining environmental impacts before it's too late. We love our waterways and we need clean drinking water so we probably ought to sit down and take a breath instead of blindly opening the floodgates to more pollution.

That's too serious a topic for doggerel, so maybe it's time to sing the blues:

Well Pennsylvania sent its fracking waste to the Appalachian part of Ohio;
Yes the Keystone State sent fracking waste to darkest Appalachian Ohio;
They didn't want that gunk in their own state, 
So where's they expect that nasty brine to go? 

Well the fracking brine is seeping into cracks and gaps and bubbling into wells; 
I said the fracking brine is seeping underground and bubbling upward into wells;
Will it pollute the local drinking water?
Only time (and serious testing) gonna tell.  

Anyone want to take a stab at some blues? I'm too sad to add more verses.  

 

Take Your Maggot to Work Day?

When I first arrived at Marietta College, the English department offered courses focusing on the concepts of tragedy and progress but nothing on comedy or nature, and while some African American texts were included in survey courses, we offered no course fully dedicated to the subject. The first thing the department asked me to do was to design a course on African American Lit, which became a favorite. No one ever asked me to design courses focusing on comedy or nature, but I did it anyway. And now I will conclude my 26-year tenure here by teaching, in my final semester, African American Lit, Concepts of Nature, and a senior capstone focusing on comedy. It feels right to end with my three favorite teaching topics.

Other courses I've designed over the years have been more ephemeral: a Sports Literature class designed for remedial writing students; a Postcolonial Survey that I taught many times before it died for lack of enrollment; a condensed course on humor writing that died with our short-lived attempt at offering a January term; and a course focusing on literature of place that enabled my all-time favorite teaching experience--taking the California Literature class on a Spring Break tour of California, where students gave oral presentations on authors in places they wrote about. 

I hope my contributions to diversifying our offerings have made a difference, but I won't mourn if they die in my absence. Students' interests change and new instructors bring different areas of expertise, so the curriculum will evolve with or without me, which is fine. Change is good! Even small changes in existing courses can open doors to new insight.

Yesterday, for instance, while working on the Concepts of Nature syllabus, I came up with a new grouping of poems that made me laugh out loud. I've given up on the anthology I used for years; many pieces are outdated and students often refused to buy the book anyway. I'm still assigning a novel and novella, but in place of the anthology, I'm assembling pieces available online or via pdfs. Freed from the limits of the anthology, I've come up with way too many readings, so now I have the delightful task of winnowing the list and putting readings together in ways that will inspire interesting discussion.

Early in the semester we talk about the relationship between people and animals, and in one class period I'll ask students to discuss four poems: Walt Whitman's "I Think I Could Turn and Live with the Animals"; James Wright's "A Blessing"; Robinson Jeffers' "Vulture"; and Yusef Komunyakaa's "Ode to the Maggot." What a progression: from "I love animals!" to "Animals love me!" to "Animals will eat my carcass when I'm dead, and that's okay!" Maybe the class should sponsor a "Take your maggot to work" day. A colleague from the biology department is auditing the class--maybe she can dig some up for us. Wouldn't students relish an opportunity to cuddle with maggots?

I'm joking, I think. I mean, if I want to bring in examples of every animal we read about, I'll have to find a reliable source for weasels, wolves, bucks, herons, and whales, among others. And, sadly, we won't be able to visit all the natural landforms we'll read about; I'm afraid the classroom can't quite accommodate Mt. Katahdin, Kilauea, the Pacific Ocean, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

But what fun we'll have on those imagined journeys. All journeys must eventually end, but I intend to make this last leg of my teaching career a wild, wonderful ride through courses I love to teach--just one last time. I won't even complain if some maggots want to come along for the ride.

Getting the machine moving again

Mouse clicks, computer blips, quick checks with a colleague on items that need her input--these are the sounds of summer break moving swiftly toward its close, the sounds of deadlines looming and colleagues making decisions that dump work on my back, the sounds of the great education machine being prodded back into action.

Persistent piercing beeps from a bit of equipment in the moldy office building--why won't someone put that thing out of its misery? My office door sticks, swollen with moisture, and I've brought along a student worker (tall) to lift down books from the top shelf where the moisture is thickest. The books are slightly damp but don't appear to be moldy, and the tall person says the top of the shelf looks dusty, with some black smudges in the farthest corner. I'd like to take a look at my framed diploma and awards to see if they're moldy on the back, but they're hanging too high for my tall helper. The cleaning crew will have to take them down when they're working to de-moldify my office.

I fetched some undamaged books and took home my regalia plus the lovely teal-and-midnight shawl a retired colleague knitted for me years ago, a shawl that, unfortunately, I had left draped on a chair where mold patches grew. The shawl can be cleaned and the regalia shows no signs of damage, but I left it hanging outside in the sun all afternoon Saturday just in case. A hot, dry day with a light wind and plenty of sunshine can work wonders, or that's what I hope.

Mold makes no sound at all, creeping into dark, damp spaces and establishing invisible outposts before we're aware that we've been invaded. It would be much easier to manage if it came charging in accompanied by bagpipes, but apparently the universe thrives on the element of surprise.

The rest of campus remains mostly quiet, but here and there I encounter pockets of activity. The clock is ticking and the to-do list is calling, which would be fine if new items didn't keep getting added. (Surprise!)

I'm done preparing for New Faculty Orientation but suddenly I have to add a very recent hire to the list and replace a presenter who can't attend--and oops, I'd better go ahead and order lunch. You can't require people to meet for seven hours straight without feeding them.

Syllabi for my two fall courses are coming along, but classes start four weeks from today (!!!) and suddenly I have to add the senior capstone to my schedule, thanks to a long-delayed shift in staffing. I taught the capstone two years ago so I can recycle my previous syllabus, with updates to account for changing conditions. How do I teach a senior research class in the age of AI? I guess I'm about to find out.

And while my to-do list grows, some habitual tasks fall away. Normally in July I'd be working on my annual review, but what's the point of filling out a pile of forms to prove my worth as an employee when I'm retiring in December? And I've completed what I hope will be the last department assessment task of my career. I also set up an assessment plan for the grant I'm administering, but all the assessment activities will take place after I pass on leadership of the grant to another colleague. Yes: assessment is slinking out of my life the same way mold slinks in--unheralded, sans bagpipes.

In the quiet of the library I click and the computer blips and the colleague confers and we slowly, steadily, quietly get the gears of the great machine moving again. My final semester of teaching, already full of quiet surprises and promising more. I hope they are the happy kind and not more mold.  

Friday poetry challenge: The flood giveth and the flood taketh away

What's the oddest bit of flotsam our creek has ever delivered to our property? Floods have brought us chunks of brick, glass, dishes, clay, and coal, plus trees (whole and partial), zip ties, drainage tile, a child's car seat, broken toys, a car's gas tank and an LP gas tank, plastic 50-gallon barrels, mangled tires, and unidentifiable rusted bits of appliances and farm equipment. This is the first time, though, that a flood has delivered a saddle.

Someone must be missing it, right? I think you'd notice if your saddle got snatched away by a raging torrent. I thought about driving upstream to see which neighbors still keep horses, but the creek forks and stretches far into the next county so that's a lot of ground to cover. The neighbor who constructs floating docks came by and collected the plastic barrels and the LP gas tank, so now the saddle is propped up beside the road in hopes that someone will recognize it and take it home. 

The flood giveth and the flood taketh away. Our downstream neighbor pulled his mangled pickup truck and tractor out of the creek, but his garden shed is probably in bits at the bottom of the Muskingum. My husband spent untold hours scooping up gravel that had washed from our driveway into the neighbor's field, and two truckloads of gravel and lots of labor made the driveway usable again. To look around, you'd never know that we were living in the middle of a disaster area, unless you took a look at our garden. 

I keep telling myself that we've fulfilled our quota of disasters for the year, but the minute I say that, the sky will open and drop--what? We've suffered hail, flood, mold, cancer, marauding raccoons, and intransigent colleagues--what next? If we're suddenly called on to ride herd on another horde of marauding disasters, at least we've got a saddle ready.

Coal bits, clay chips, plastic, glass,
tires, barrels, zip ties;
the flood destroys but brings new toys,
disaster's sodden flip side.

Best I can do after the week we've had. Anyone else feeling creative about disaster?

 

Saddke up!

Big chunk of tree.

Nice catch!

Debris under the bridge, and above.