Just fine, I guess. And you?

Lots of questions came up at the all-campus convocation yesterday but the one I had most trouble answering was "How was your summer?" So simple! I thought about saying something like "I certainly don't recall poking out the eye of Poseidon's son, but I must have done something to make him angry." But then people would want to talk about the new Odyssey film, which I haven't seen.

My summer was....complicated. I submitted three essays to various publications and I eagerly await a response (story of my life). I waited, sometimes patiently, to find out whether I would be teaching a certain course this fall and then scrambled to write the syllabus, which ought to be done today. I presided over a whole mess of meetings and took care of logistics for more meetings. 

I found mold in my office, started packing up books to move them out and found more mold, left empty boxes in my office for a few days and found them damp and sagging, and now await the results of the deep cleaning that allegedly made the building where I'll do most of my teaching inhabitable.

I dealt with one disaster after another at home: a flash flood, falling trees that knocked out power, a less damaging flash flood, and a third flash flood that may leave my driveway unusable for the next week. The resident Mr. Fixit has promised to leave a ladder down at the edge of the bridge to enable us to clamber up and down as needed, but I don't relish doing all that clambering in teaching clothes, much less walking across the silt deposits in my best shoes. And I don't mind parking my car at the edge of the road while there's no rain in the forecast, but it's parked on a spot that was under several feet of water two days ago. If the storms start up again, I'm leaving.

I drove my son to Columbus for chemotherapy and treatments and tests, cooked toddler foods when he couldn't swallow solids, did everything in my power to make his life more pleasant, and tried not to fret about his prognosis (which is good! Really!). But cancer is a topic not easily introduced into light table banter at a festive event.

In fact my whole summer was a bummer, and who wants to spread a dark cloud through a crowd of (mostly) happy people? We have a lot to celebrate on campus: record-setting fund-raising, good news from the accreditors, a really great group of new faculty, and, best of all, my impending retirement. So I put on a smile and say "Fine," which is enough for most people. For those who really want to know more...ask Poseidon.   

It's deja vu all over again

I scared the bejeebers out of a cleaner this morning just by pressing the elevator button in the library on campus. She was cleaning inside the elevator, which kind of astounded me because I don't believe I've ever seen anyone cleaning the inside of an elevator before but of course it must happen or they'd be a mess. When the door opened, she just about jumped out of her skin. She wasn't expecting anyone to be in the library at 7 a.m., but there I was. (The library opens at 8:30--good thing I have a key pass!)

I explained, as coherently as I could considering everything, that I needed to get up to my office to brush my teeth. I couldn't get home last night, see, and while I was able to do some shopping and put together an outfit to wear today when I have to present information in front of the full faculty, I had neglected to buy a toothbrush, so this morning my mouth felt like I had slept in it. (Not that I got much sleeping done at all, but never mind that.) I keep a toothbrush and toothpaste in my office, which now is in the library while my former office recovers from the mold infestation. 

Am I making any sense at all?

In the 22 years we've lived out in the woods, our driveway has been under water maybe once a year, and the ramp up to the bridge has been thoroughly washed away three or four times. Until this year. I wrote already about our previous flash flood a few weeks ago (click here), but I didn't write about the much smaller flood two days ago that left our driveway difficult but still driveable. The July flood required us to bring in a truckload of gravel, some of which washed away Saturday night. 

And the rest washed away yesterday, along with...well, that whole chunk of driveway. There's no way to get up and over the creek until we can find a gravel guy who isn't already tied up with everyone else's flooding problems.

I knew our driveway was in trouble yesterday without even seeing it. I turned in at the end of our road and saw how high the creek was there, and I knew I wasn't getting across all that water. I drove far enough up our road to encounter a neighbor, who convinced me that proceeding further was futile. So instead of going home, I went shopping (so I don't have to wear yesterday's jeans and T-shirt in front of the full faculty this afternoon), and then I found a room in town and failed spectacularly at getting any sleep.

Today while I'm feeling my way around campus trying to appear competent, my extremely competent husband will be trying to track down some gravel and cut up the trees blocking the bridge. Will I get home tonight? No idea. If not, at least I know where I can find a toothbrush. 

 

See all those trees? Not ideal!

Nobody's driving over that.

This rainbow greeted me as I stepped out of Kohl's yesterday. A sign?

Friday poetry challenge: Small but mighty

I was sitting at a laundromat waiting and sweating and swatting bugs and wondering how a business dedicated to the pursuit of cleanliness could accumulate so much filth when suddenly, in the midst of all this mess, I received a text stating that electricity had been restored at my house. 

Hallelujah. Just a little over two days without power had transformed me into a gibbering idiot. I don't know how people live without easy access to electricity and running water, but I also don't know how profs function without access to Microsoft Word, which my college laptop suddenly refused to run this week. I had hoped to keep that cranky old laptop creaking along until I retire in December, but the laptop had other ideas. 

Now I have power and running water and a new (well, less old) laptop willing to do whatever I need, and in a few days I'll have access to my classroom building again, after the masters of mold remediation perform their whole-building magic. There isn't a laundromat on the planet big enough to complete that cleaning job, and if there were, it would be full of bugs, just like my errant computer.

Well I'm raving. Everything is swirling together in my head, including the all-day New Faculty Orientation I led today. Being "on" all day taxed the people skills that have been lying dormant all summer, but I ushered a string of competent colleagues through the room until the newbies had been oriented to within an inch of their lives. 

Later I arrived home exhausted to find the resident lumberjack cooking a wonderful supper, even though he'd been busy chopping up chunks of fallen trees, meeting with the insurance claims adjuster and the Spectrum cable dude, conferring with the helpful neighbor who offered to help him haul out the whole tree lodged under our bridge, and, yesterday, driving our son to Columbus, where he was adjudged too sick to undergo his scheduled treatment.

Nothing made me happier all week than to finally see my son eating solid food tonight, even if he was still in some pain. Small improvements matter, like clean clothes and a hot shower, helpful neighbors and competent IT guys. Shove all of this week's ups and downs into a washing machine and you never know what might come out when the agitator stops:

Bugs in the laundromat,
bugs in the tech,
mold in the office building--
who can say what's next?

Smiles in the meeting room,
water in the pipes, 
solid food that tastes so good--
little things, but nice.

And that's where I end this impossible week: nestled within the niceness. I'll take that over a filthy laundromat any day of the week.

Now your turn: show us little things that make a difference, for good or ill.

Note to disasters: take a number

And then a tree fell on my house is what I've been telling people, but that's not strictly accurate. It wasn't one tree but four, or five if you include the one that fell halfway across our road. A good neighbor would have whipped out a chain saw and removed the road hazard, but I just drove around it. I don't do chain saws.

And the trees didn't fall on the house but all around it, missing just about everything of value. A tree down the hill fell on a brush pile. The lovely tulip poplar out back missed the house, the deck, and the wood-burner but fell, appropriately, on the wood pile. The two pine trees just uphill missed the house, the shed, and most of my son's car (one small dent) but slammed down onto the power lines feeding the house, with predictable results.

I wasn't home when this happened but the men were listening to the carnage and marveling at their close escape. By the time I arrived home, the AEP crew had already removed the trees from the power line and then promptly failed to depart because one truck had sunk into a saturated bit of our front lawn. The other truck pulled the first one out and they promised that AEP would send someone to repair the muddy ruts they'd left behind, but I'm more concerned about whether they damaged the water line running under that bit of lawn--the water line that feeds the apartment above our garage, which, remarkably, never lost power. But we won't know whether that water line is leaking until we get power to the well pump. Maybe today?  

This all happened on Monday. Our son had an appointment at The James early Tuesday and it's not a great idea for a person with a compromised immune system to stay in a house that lacks running water, so I drove him to Columbus Monday afternoon and we stayed in a hotel. We left the resident woodsman behind to cope with the aftermath: calling the insurance guy, finding an electrician, hauling in bottled water, chopping trees. So my son and I were safely ensconced at the hospital Tuesday morning when the tornado hit Columbus.

Well, the weather people are calling it a possible tornado, but if you watch this bit of video of strong winds flipping a car over during a deluge that reduced highway visibility to near zero, you'll agree that only a fool would try to drive in those conditions. Nevertheless that's what I was doing about an hour after the car-flipping incident--driving my son home through conditions so deplorable that I didn't hit the speed limit for the first hour, and I tensed up so much that my entire body still hurts a day later. We didn't take our usual route because I was dropping my son off at a friend's house (with fully functioning electricity and running water!), so we missed a whole host of areas where the roads were submerged.

But I made it home, finally, to find our creek high and a tree lodged under the bridge but everything else intact, ish. I am very sad about the tulip poplar out back--such a lovely tree--but maybe one of the nearby saplings will grow up to take its place. And I was not thrilled about the lack of running water in the apartment where we slept last night, which is why I left for campus very early this morning, stumbling in the dark through spider webs and muddy ruts to get to my car and drive out to find a working bathroom. Today I'm on campus unwashed and in yesterday's jeans (because I can't do laundry), with spider webs in my hair and mud on my shoes but happy to be back at work in a building with electricity and running water. I feel horrible for the people who suffered more severe damage but I'm glad the storm spared my house.

But seriously: if I put this summer's disasters into a work of fiction, readers wouldn't believe it. Cancer, chemotherapy, mold, floods, falling trees, tornado (possibly!)--it's too much! It is too much, but if you hear me so much as whisper that surely we've fulfilled our quota of disasters for the year, just give me a good sharp kick, okay?  

One truck stuck, the other pulling.

Damage where the cables enter the house.

Power line on the ground.

The remains of the tulip poplar. Sad!

Where the tops of the pine trees snapped off. 

Once again, my whole yard smells like pine.

What I wish I could tell the newbies

As I've been organizing New Faculty Orientation for the half dozen incoming faculty members we'll welcome this Friday, I'm reminded of a post from a few years ago called "Old Faculty Re-Orientation," a list of things I wish someone had told me when I first started teaching here:

1. Where to park. (Seriously--I was an adjunct, so I was not included in New Faculty Orientation, and the sum total of my instruction in parking was "You can park along any of the streets around campus," which led to my first-ever parking ticket, which I could not well afford on an adjunct's paycheck--which, by the way, has not increased in the entire 15 years since I've been teaching here. I'm grateful I no longer earn an adjunct's paycheck, but why are we still paying today's adjuncts the same amount per course that I earned 15 years ago?)

2. Who was sleeping with whom. (Information that would have made some department-meeting discussions much more transparent.)

3. That colleagues may become friends but they're always colleagues first, and some so-called friends will eagerly sacrifice friendship on the altar of professional advancement. (Social Relations 101 in the School of Hard Knocks.)

4. The Law of Conservation of Curmudgeonliness on Campus: the minute one career curmudgeon retires, another rises up to take his or her place. (And someday I might become that person!)

5. That some day I would be mourning the loss of a long-lived curmudgeon whose notorious name is totally unknown to my younger colleagues. (Aging 101 in the School of Hard Knocks.)

6. That the wonderfulness that sometimes happens inside the classroom can make all the outside-the-classroom awfulness worthwhile. Or, to quote a former colleague of mine: "The students! The students!" (He was a little drunk at the time so maybe you had to be there.) 

 

That was my list in 2015. What would I add today?

First, I'd love to give new faculty members the secret cell-phone number they can use to text a particular administrator, which is the key to getting that person to read and respond to email messages, but if too many people get hold of that number then the person on the other end will be buried in new text messages and thus unlikely to pay attention to mine. Besides, I object to this roundabout method of getting a response and I don't want to feed the beast. Except when I really need a response.

Second, I'd like to provide new faculty with a list of the people who can be trusted to have their backs and those who can't, but the Master Backstabber File seems to have been corrupted. Better, maybe, for newbies to find out for themselves. How can they earn a degree from the School of Hard Knocks if they never get any hard knocks?

Finally, the reason we're here--The students! The students!--is as rewarding as ever, but when we're not feeling the rewards, it's always helpful to know where to find some cake. (In the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence. We've misplaced all the magic wands that instantly solve pedagogy problems, but we can usually provide a nice piece of cake.)

What do you wish someone had told you when you were a newbie? 

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.