Friday poetry challenge: In celebration of students

I'd like to give myself some credit for brilliant pedagogy, but really it was a last-minute attempt to fix holes in a couple of syllabi that led me to assign student presentations in all my classes this semester. At the time I had no idea how much I would need those presentations and how beautifully my students would perform.

The English capstone class, of course, always culminates in a major paper and presentation attended by the entire department, and my senior English majors are well on their way toward submitting their drafts next week so they can present their papers next month. Nothing new here.

But I don't always assign presentations in other literature classes and I've never before assigned them in the Concepts of Nature class. Nevertheless I'll be spending the next week sitting in a student desk while my students try to persuade us all to care about specific problems related to nature. 

Several factors led me to assign presentations in that class: its small size made presentations feasible; I'd dropped a major reading assignment that left a week's gap in the syllabus; and only three of the students are English majors while the rest are mostly STEM students who thought studying nature in literature would be a fun way to fulfill a General Education requirement. I wanted to challenge those students to make connections between literature and current events.

The assignment is simple: inform classmates about a specific problem related to nature and explain how two of our class readings help us understand or respond to the problem. We spent a class session researching reliable sources on their topics and another drafting thesis statements and outlines, and from what I've seen, it looks like we're going to learn an awful lot about endangered species and deforestation and microplastics in drinking water. How will they bring together serious scientific research and, perhaps, poetry? I'm looking forward to finding out. 

The African American Literature class posed a different kind of problem: a large class and too many reading assignments, with no room on the syllabus for individual presentations. So instead I put the students in pairs and assigned them to lead discussion on specific authors. They provide a little context about the author and the work, and then they have to engage their classmates in discussion of the assigned readings for at least 20 minutes. Most of them take the whole hour--and do a fabulous job. They put us in groups, assign discussion questions, or make us get up and walk around and write things on newsprint. 

Just this week a pair of students engaged the entire class in a discussion of the meaning of art. We'd read Alice Walker's essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," which examines the difficulty of finding time and space to create art under oppressive conditions. It's a serious and joyful essay and the students engaged in serious and joyful discussion. A few weeks ago when we were discussing Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun, the student discussion leaders gave each group a major character in the play and then set the groups debating about which of the characters most deserved the inheritance at the center of the plot. It was a lively debate demonstrating great depth of insight and nuance.

Best of all, though, all I had to do was sit there and let it happen.

Given everything that's been happening outside of class this semester--the flooding, the surgery, the repeated trips to Columbus to tend to my cancer-ridden son--I am exhausted all the time. I reserve my best energy for teaching, but some days it's all I can do to stand there and toss out coherent questions or engaging activities. Never have I been more grateful for regular opportunities to sit and listen and observe while my students take the helm. 

And they have done well. Seeing my students grab hold of ideas and make them sing makes me even more certain that it's time to retire. I've had my chance to lead the dance; time to get out of the way and let others take over.

In the Alice Walker discussion, we came to the conclusion that the process of exercising creativity is important even if the product is overlooked or forgotten, so I'm going to engage in that process and hope that others will follow my lead:

I've had my chance to lead the dance
so now I'll step aside
to let my students join their hands
to swing and swirl and glide
through poems and stories, essays too,
debates, deliberations.
They lead so well. This dance is swell!
Come join the celebration!

Come on, now--toss down some lines in celebration of students.

Not quite up to scratch

No power in my building when I arrived this morning, no light no heat no tech, but everything in the building capable of beeping was raising a racket. I sat in my dark office resting my eyes and trying not to think about how my students were supposed to give presentations in the absence of electricity. 

But the power came back on, thankfully. Still no heat, though--that'll take some more repairs. And the classroom computer took a full eight minutes to boot up and then Canvas demanded dual authentication but I had left my phone in my office so I had to run and fetch it to make the tech work. Good thing I'd arrived at the classroom early!

No rooster crowing when I left for work this morning, which alarmed me. I'd spent much of yesterday driving to Columbus and back and so had to feel my way down to the chicken coop well after dark, but the flashlight revealed no eggs at all. Normally they lay eight to twelve eggs each day, but their first full day in the new coop resulted in six. Yesterday was the second day, and no matter how carefully I search all the nooks and crannies, I found not a single egg. And so when there was no crowing this morning, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong.

No eggs today either, and I checked in the daylight just to be sure I wasn't missing anything. The resident chicken fancier says the hens are probably just stressed out from the big move, but I don't know what I can do to calm them down since I'm not exactly a paragon of calm myself at the moment. I took some leftover pancakes down to the coop and tossed out chunks while speaking calmly to the chickens about eggs and scratch grains and nest boxes. Maybe tomorrow I'll find eggs. Or maybe they're withholding eggs until their regular minder returns from Columbus.

Where I went yesterday to meet with the medical oncologist, who confirmed that chemotherapy is not called for in my situation (hurrah!) but that I'll need to take estrogen blockers for the foreseeable future since the tumor they removed is the type that thrives on estrogen. Fine, whatever. Anything to avoid chemo. 

But the reason I was so late returning from Columbus was that every medical professional in a thirty-block radius felt the need to take a look at my rash. 

I have a rash. A very itchy, very red rash, which was of concern to the oncologists because it's located right next to my surgical incisions. Everyone wanted to see it, especially when it became clear that the rash was visible on every speck of skin that my bra had touched. Contact dermatitis, they said. Apparently I am allergic to my underwear. 

So many questions! Is it a new bra? (No.) Has it ever caused me to break out in a rash before? (No.) Have we changed laundry detergent recently? (No.) Have I changed anything about my normal household routine? (Well, I've been taking care of chickens, but how that's relevant to a bra-shaped rash is beyond me.) What a mystery!

After all the rash-related delays, I was so late getting home that I didn't even bother stopping at the pharmacy to pick up the ointment they'd prescribed, which was just as well because the pharmacy texted me this morning to say the medication is out of stock. By the time it arrives, the rash will be gone.

No light, no heat, no tech, no eggs, no crowing, no chemo, no answers, no ointment--I've got plenty of nothing, but what I have is a rash that itches so constantly that it requires every ounce of willpower I possess to prevent myself from tearing off what's left of my breasts. 

But I am calm. Breathing deeply, thinking soothing thoughts, trying not to scratch. Don't let me get hold of a garden claw.

Because I don't know enough to know what I don't know

If you can handle teaching first-year students for all those years, you can handle a few chickens, said my colleague, and I said, Sure, I'll just stand in the middle of the flock and explain the function of the semicolon. 

After successfully completing my first weekend in Columbus as official caregiver to my son, I'd been obsessing about making the shift to caregiving for chickens. I'd heard a rooster crowing as I left the house this morning and I was relieved to have aural evidence that at least one of the chickens had survived the flock's first night in the new coop. Hobbling down the hill to the coop on my bum knee isn't easy, but my primary concern about being in charge of the chickens is that something horrible will happen to them while my husband's in Columbus and it will be All My Fault.

Nothing about this situation is my fault, really. It's not my fault than my son and I both got cancer in the same year or that he needs constant caregiving as he recovers from his bone marrow transplant or that I had already submitted my retirement date before his diagnosis so that I'm committed to teaching until the beginning of December or that repeated flooding made the meadow too mushy to allow delivery of the new coop or that there was a glitch in getting the electricity hooked up so that the chickens couldn't be moved to their new digs until Sunday afternoon.

And it wasn't my fault that I was in Columbus waiting for my husband to arrive to take his caregiving shift while he was trying to encourage a few stubborn fowl beasts to make the move. Several of them resisted vociferously, including one especially obstreperous guinea. (The Especially Obstreperous Guinea: garage band or twee tavern?) And it wasn't my fault that he arrived in Columbus much later than expected so that I arrived home hours later in the pitch darkness too exhausted to check on the birds.

I took it on faith that the chickens were doing fine, but how would I know? Thanks to automatic feed-and-water systems, they don't need me to check in constantly, but I can't stop thinking about all the things that could go wrong while I'm not paying attention. Raccoons, for instance. The resident chicken fancier insists that the doorknob in the coop is set too high for raccoons to reach, but I've seen raccoons climb a birdfeeder pole and disassemble an elaborate feeder into its constituent parts, so I never underestimate the abilities of a raccoon. 

And even if the doorknob is too high for raccoons, what about bears? Bears have been sighted not 10 miles from our property, and what's to stop them from reaching the doorknob or crashing through the window? Do bears even care about chickens? Again, how would I know?

Aside from predators, I wonder what stupid thing I'll do just because I didn't grow up raising chickens as my husband did. What ignorant act could result in mass destruction of chickens and a few obstreperous guineas? I don't know enough about chickens to know how much I don't know.

Taking care of my son requires following directions: make sure he takes his umpteen bazillion pills; take his temperature, watch for alarming symptoms, and flush the central line every day; change his dressing once a week; make sure he eats properly and drinks plenty of fluids and gets a little regular exercise. And if I mess up, the nurse line at the hospital is staffed 24 hours a day with highly competent people eager to answer questions, even ignorant ones. 

Where is my 24-hour chicken help line? If such a thing exists, I wouldn't even know what to ask aside from Do these chickens look okay to you? When I finally got down to the coop after work today, I found no eggs in the nesting boxes and six eggs laid in a neat depression they'd made in the straw in one corner of the coop. How do I make them lay in the nesting boxes? Six isn't many--where are the others? Were they too stressed out to lay eggs?

I asked them nicely but they're not saying. All I hear from them is clucking and crowing and I have no way to interpret what it all means.

I love to see sunshine through the fall leaves

Running on empty

Wrote a pop quiz and forgot to take it to class and then wondered why our discussion ended with ten minutes to spare.

Showed up at a meeting an hour early and couldn't figure out why no one else was there.

Approved a bunch of minigrants but neglected to notify the recipients that their proposals had been approved.

So yeah, I realize that my brain isn't operating on all cylinders. I know I've gotten forgetful. I can clearly see the impact of dividing my attention between everything going on at work and everything else going on at home. 

And I appreciate every single person who has offered to help.

But I'm not sure anyone can do anything about my slo-mo thinking skills. 

What I really need is a good night's sleep, an absence of worry, and a week that doesn't require massive amounts of city driving. 

I'll add those things to my Christmas list. If there's another solution, I've already forgotten it.

Friday poetry challenge: Unexpected adventures--or, when the chickens come home to roost

A new chicken coop arrived on Wednesday, pulled across the meadow and placed on the waiting slab. The chickens gathered at the edge of the fence to peer at their luxurious new digs, the fowl equivalent of a Hyatt. It's sturdy and functional, custom-built from a design inspired by the chicken coop where my husband kept a flock of hundreds in his youth. We don't have a flock of hundreds but goodness our chicken population will be happy when they move to their new coop. Just a few more tweaks and they'll be coming home to roost.

Meanwhile, I'm at home in an actual Hyatt, just blocks from the hospital where our son has been languishing for three weeks. He was released today, a week earlier than expected, an excellent indication of how well he's been responding to the bone marrow transplant. He has to remain close to the hospital for at least a couple of months, but the Air B&B he rented won't be available until next week, so we're hunkering down at the Hyatt in the interim. It's a decent room with a well-equipped kitchenette, though I was too exhausted to cook anything but canned chicken soup for supper tonight.

Yes, I'm here too. He needs a trained caregiver available at all times, so my husband and I went through required training and are now considered equipped to keep him healthy between regular visits to the hospital. But we can't both be here all the time, so we'll being doing the tag-team parenting thing again: Through the week my husband will be in Columbus while I'm at home to finish up the semester, and on weekends we'll switch places. I think the next time we'll all be together in the same house will be over Thanksgiving break.

But who will take care of the chickens through the week while the resident chicken fancier is in Columbus?

That would be me.

I don't mind gathering the eggs or tossing down some scratch grains, but I mind the old chicken run, which always makes me feel as if I'm about to fall on my face or impale my eyeball on the sharp edge of a pole. What I really mind, though, is getting down the steep hill to the coop. Walking uphill doesn't hurt (much), but downhill can be a nightmare.

Someone suggested installing a zipline. Why not? Zip on down the hill to tend to the chickens, trudge back up with eggs in hand.

Frankly, given the amount of driving I've been doing this week to complete caregiver training and then retrieve my son from the hospital, I'm looking for the day when every household comes equipped with a transporter. I would even install one in the chicken coop. Beam me up, Scotty--but make it over easy. 

O give me a home says the song, but I roam
over highways, through city-snarled traffic,
to live in the Hyatt--no more country quiet--
as a dutiful health apparatchik.

Then when Sunday night comes I'll go driving back home
to a house empty of all companions--
except for the chickens, for whose needs I will quicken
my steps down the hill to their mansion.

In one home I'll be tending the chickens: unending
the need to retrieve fresh eggs daily.
In a home in Columbus I'll tend to my son, but
the stakes are quite high if I fail. We

would never have planned for a life so expand-
ed, with chickens, coops, houses, and Hyatts.
but necessity called so we promptly enrolled
in the caregiving life. (You should try it.)

Maybe not--but feel free to tell me about your unexpected adventures in living.

The old chicken run in the background, downhill from the new coop

The house in the background, uphill from the new coop

 

Piled higher and deeper

When a new magazine arrives I want to read it right now, but sometimes I have to let them pile up for later. In grad school I would ruefully watch a tower of New Yorker magazines growing ever taller while I dutifully focused on comprehensive exams and dissertation revision and oral defense, and then when it was all over, what a reward! Months of my favorite magazines awaiting my perusal. Where to start?

Now I find myself with different kinds of piles of stuff awaiting me, things I've had to postpone attending to while dealing with surgery and recovery and my son's health and my big lecture. But now that's all over and the delights I've been postponing can no longer be deferred.

Magazines aplenty, plus some books I'd like to read (for fun, not work) and some interesting puzzles. But I also have 15 boxes of my campus books downstairs, all needing to be sorted and stashed in the waiting bookshelves. 

I'm unlikely to tackle that project until I finish clearing out my campus office, a job I've whittled down to the tough stuff. On Friday I found yet another mold infestation--an old computer cord pouch that was growing its own ecosystem. I tossed the pouch in the trash and saved the cord, even though I don't know which computer it belongs to. Last week I persuaded the IT guys to come over and take away a monitor, keyboard, mouse, portal, and a nest of miscellaneous cords, but this pouch was stashed deep within the cabinet in my office, a space where I didn't expect to find mold. 

So I cleaned out that whole cabinet and found one other water-damaged item: a signed framed photograph of Don Knotts as Barney Fife, so damp it's become swollen and wavy. Only two more items remain in that cabinet: a cloth tote bag full of clean gym clothes that I'm afraid to touch in case it's covered in mold, and a row of old DVDs and videotapes about four feet long.

I don't know what to do with the DVDs and videos. I could box 'em up in five minutes flat, but then what? Many of them were for classroom use, but our classrooms are no longer equipped with VCRs and now many of them don't even have DVD players either. Because of the changing technological landscape, I own versions of A River Runs Through It on videotape, DVD, and streaming--all paid for, of course, by my own hard-earned cash.

I want to take a few of the DVDs home but most will be added to the giveaway pile, just in case someone wants to transform them into festive holiday decorations or something. I'm planning to hold Open Office days when anyone can take whatever they want: books I don't need at home, a whole shelf of old Norton anthologies, excess coffee mugs, toys, and tchotchkes, and now DVDs and videos. I'm even leaving behind some of the bird photos that have hung on the walls of my various offices for 26 years. I have duplicates at home, so maybe my birds can brighten up someone else's office.

One last big office task: the moldy chair holds a pile of moldy books that I will need to photograph and catalog so I can submit a request for replacements. Maybe a dozen books, which doesn't include the moldy paperbacks I've already thrown in the trash. These are hardbacks, some of them quite expensive, a couple of them out of print. I don't even like to look at that moldy tower of tomes, but I'll have to get my hands dirty if I want replacements. 

I'm much rather tackle the tower of magazines piled up next to the sofa at home. Here's last month's Atlantic! Time to get caught up on everything I've been missing.

 

I mean, who has room for all this stuff?

The giveaway pile. All of it.

 

Basking in the moment before getting back to the trenches

I'll admit it: I enjoyed the standing ovation. It doesn't happen often in the life of an academic, and the huge respect I bear for the people out there doing the applauding made it even more special. But it was just one high point in a day full of joyful moments.

Like when my department chair said such nice things about me during his introduction that he nearly made me cry, which was a problem because for a half hour before my talk I'd been up in my office practicing the last section over and over again, trying to find a way to get through some lines from Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons" without crying. If I'd dissolved into a sloppy puddle of tears from the very start, I would never have made it to the end.  

Or when I asked the audience questions about the opening paragraph from Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," which I'd projected on the screen, and they played along, coming up with charming and intelligent responses even though most of them had never read the story.  

Or afterward, when a former student told me I think of you literally every time I teach--and meant it.

Or when some dude who graduated 45 years ago came up after my talk and told me You've got it, and I knew what it meant.

Or much later, after I arrived home exhausted and started rooting through gift bags and discovered two of Percival Everett's books signed by the author. Yes: a wonderful colleague had taken a bunch of our students to Ohio University last week to hear a talk by Percival Everett--a talk I couldn't attend because I was recovering from surgery--and had made sure to get the author to sign two books for me. By that point I didn't bother trying not to cry. It was inevitable.

Or much much later, when a colleague from upstairs sent me a sketch he'd made of me speaking with the words from a Robinson Jeffers poem in the background: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained hearts found / The honey of peace in old poems. No livestream, no video, no official photos, but I welcome my colleague's sketch, especially since I'd been talking about our shared passion for leaving a mark on the world.

I think I did. If the crowd that showed up to hear my Best Lecture yesterday can be believed, I may have spent the past 26 years doing something worth celebrating. And now I'm getting ready to do something completely different--but first I have to get through the rest of the semester, powered by that round of applause.