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.

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.