Midweek whimsy; or, everybody do the Diphthong Swing!

The flood fizzled out. Everything is going swimmingly. What's left to write about?

• I walked past a sign on campus pointing the way to a Phonics Dance. What is a Phonics Dance? Will earnest teachers attired in letter sweaters join hands to do the Diphthong Swing? And most importantly, why wasn't I invited?
• Speaking of reading, I am taking the extremely rare step today of cancelling a reading assignment. I knew the reading list for my Literary Theory class was ambitious, and we've reached the point in the semester when a little trimming would open up some space for working on writing. So I'm cutting Friday's reading assignment in half. I would expect the class to rise in spontaneous applause if they weren't too exhausted to stand up. 
• And speaking of applause, I had a great time applauding my deserving colleagues who received honors at our annual Founders' Day event two weeks ago, but I also appreciate finally getting a chance to reveal exciting news I've known about for a while now: starting this fall, I'll be sitting in the William R. and Marie Adamson Flesher Chair in the Humanities. It's an entirely honorary position carrying a little pot of faculty development funds, but it feels fantastic to have earned the respect of my colleagues.
• Finally, I have in my hands a card entitling the bearer to a free coffee beverage at the library cafe. Today I'll hand it to the student whose morning quota of caffeine ended up all over the floor of my classroom the other day, and at the same time I'll remind myself once again not to shimmy too close to students' desks lest I dislodge their essential beverages. If anyone ever makes a rule barring klutzes from classrooms, I'll be out of a job.

(Hey, do you think that's why I didn't get invited to the Phonics Dance?)

Another entry in the Academic Olympics

Today's top Olympic event is Synchronized Coffee-Cleaning, in which two students toss a roll of paper towels back and forth as they attempt to clean up a massive coffee spill all over the classroom floor. Watch those paper towels fly! Uh-oh, looks like the spillage is creeping toward a classmate's backpack! Will they soak up the whole spill before running out of paper towels?

Wait--one student has broken free! She's running to the bathroom for more paper towels! They're wiping, they're swiping, they're tossing soaking paper towels into the trash can--and they're through! The floor is clear! And not a spot of coffee on their shoes--they'll get extra points for style!

I, on the other hand, am walking around the rest of the day in shoes that smell like coffee. I was not involved in the cleanup, thankfully, but I was standing right there collecting reading quizzes when the coffee spilled, and in fact it's entirely possible that my hip accidentally nudged the desk enough to send the coffee flying before the student ever had a chance to take a sip. I'm going to have to treat my student to another massive coffee drink to make up for it.

Best moment of the morning: the student actually managed to contribute meaningfully to class discussion--of Faulkner (!)--while wiping up the spilled coffee. And the crowd goes wild!

Watching the water rise (again)

I've just read Frank Bruni's excellent article describing how he's coping with sudden blindness in one eye, in which he quotes filmmaker Joseph Lovett: "you cannot spend your life preparing for future losses." But that's what we're doing this weekend as the rain falls and the rivers rise and we watch the forecast and wait to see how much damage lies ahead.

Didn't we just have a flood last week? Yes, we did, especially in the cities along the Ohio River, but the waters receded quickly and it and were not nearly as damaging as previous floods. (I'm looking at you, 2004!) Our creek stayed within bounds while the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers rose; some streets in Marietta were flooded and my friend who owns a gift shop in the historic district had volunteers helping her move all her merchandise upstairs.

Now just a week later she's doing it again, and the forecasts are calling for a much more widespread flood--or not, depending on a variety of factors. We woke this morning to the sound of a downpour and thought here it comes--but then the rain stopped and our creek stayed within its banks.

Our creek's name is Big Run, a bit of a misnomer for a meandering brook that's usually shallow enough to wade across; in the heat of the summer, it's often reduced to disconnected puddles. When Big Run swells to flood stage, though, it's frightening.

On Thursday I was afraid the creek would wash out the end of our driveway, which has happened before--twice the first year we moved in (2004!) and once more since then. Our normally quiet creek roared up into the neighbor's hay-meadow, moved toward our pepper patch, sent waves licking at the edge of our driveway, and looked like it was going to cover the road in several spots. 

And then the rain stopped and the water fell and here we are again, two days later, waiting for the flood.

I don't know why I keep looking at forecasts, which change by the minute: by noon Monday the Ohio River will reach 41 or 42 or 44 feet, which was the height of the devastating 2004 flood, or no it won't, it will stay below 40 feet or barely hit the mid-30s. Each shift of a few inches suggests a different future: campus will be closed or classes will proceed as usual, only with fewer parking spaces; downtown businesses will return to normal on Tuesday as if nothing had happened, or the entire downtown district will be afloat and we'll all spend next week pitching in to clean up the mess.

Either way, there's nothing we can do about it now but wait and watch and listen for the roaring that tells us our creek has reached its limit and is about to burst out of its banks. I'm hopeful: so far the rain has not been nearly as abundant as forecasts predicted, so I'm preparing to teach Monday's classes on the assumption that our road won't be under water. But who knows? We'll find a way to cope with whatever losses lie ahead; meanwhile, it's time to live.

Thursday morning--the view from my bridge.

The neighbor's bridge under water, and the creek becoming a lake.

water in woods

the creek creeping u into our meadow on the right

Tara Westover gets Educated

As a young girl growing up in a family living off the grid on an Idaho mountain, Tara Westover was convinced that all kinds of external forces were intent upon her destruction--the FBI, the Illuminati, public school teachers, doctors, people who shop on Sundays--but only after she left that world did she realize that the greatest threats to her sanity and survival arose from inside her family circle.

In Educated: A Memoir, Westover presents the gripping story of her harrowing childhood,  her eventual escape from her family's home, and her pursuit of education and an independent identity. The youngest of seven children, Westover realized at the tender age of 7 that her family was different from those of other children, who rode the big yellow bus to school while she stayed home to absorb whatever education she could pick up from parents too distracted to provide any consistent instruction. And that's not the only isolating factor:

Dad worries that the Government will force us to go [to school] but it can't, because it doesn't know about us. Four of my parents' seven children don't have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we've never set foot in a classroom. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist.

Of course, I did exist. I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spend my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.

This tension between the need to remain invisible and the growing child's desire to assert her own identity lies at the heart of this compelling book. She absorbs conflicting lessons from her father, who develops his own personal version of Mormonism based on individual revelation, and from her mother, who sometimes helps her sneak around her father's strictures, although she and her mother generally pay a high price for such intransigence. 

From a young age, Westover is taught that she exists only to marry, have children, and  submit to the men in her life, starting with her father, whose word is law and whose will is rock; however, she also starts seeing signs that he might not be as infallible as he claims. For instance, her father pushes her mother into becoming an unlicensed midwife, even though he believes women should not work. "I suppose he thought it was all right for Mother to be paid for midwifing, because it undermined the Government," she writes. "Also, we needed the money."

While other children are going to school and learning to read and write, young Tara is put to work sorting scrap metals in her father's junkyard--a dangerous place that maims and injures nearly everyone in the family at various times. Her father believes that wearing gloves or other protective gear will slow down the work,  and he also tends to fling heavy iron cylinders or sharp chunks of corrugated aluminum around without any awareness that Tara is directly in their path. At one point she says to him, "Don't throw them here! I'm here!"

But Westover's father seems particularly unaware of the presence of those closest to them, constantly putting them into danger. When he brings home a massive steel-cutting device called the Shear, he sends one of his children after another to work with it even after they keep getting injured, and since the family does not believe in seeking medical care, the inevitable injuries get treated at home, where Westover's mother treats deep cuts and third-degree burns with homemade herbal salves and tinctures--and no pain-killers.

There are moments of transcendence--when she sings the lead in a community musical or spends hours exploring the beauties of the mountain--but too often these bright spots are followed by pain, poverty, harsh labor, and, eventually, physical and emotional abuse. Tara falls victim to an older brother's sadism, but when he shoves her to the floor and begins to strangle her, she can't even call out to her mother in the next room--and isn't quite sure that her mother would help. 

When the grown-up Tara eventually confronts the family about her brother's bullying, they refuse to believe her and instead circle the wagons to protect the reputation of the bully. Westover presents a vivid and emotionally wrenching picture of a dysfunctional family warped and twisted by the irrational will of a brutal control freak, which makes her eventual escape even more remarkable.

Education provides the only escape route, but it's not an easy road, and she finds herself woefully ill-equipped for college, both academically and socially. She doesn't recognize the word "Holocaust" and so looks it up online, which reveals to her the huge gaps in her hit-or-miss self-education. She doesn't know how to apply for a government grant or how to go to the dentist or how to get along with roommates who don't dress as modestly as she does, and she has been so brainwashed to distrust anyone from outside her immediate family that she cannot bring herself to ask for or accept help. And when she compares her childhood to that of others, she is consumed by shame and cannot begin to share her pain.

Later, while working on her PhD at Cambridge, Westover overcomes her shame enough to start telling stories about her bizarre childhood, and only then does she understand the source of her shame:

It wasn't that I hadn't studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn't a diplomat. It wasn't that Dad was half out of his mind, or that Mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.

And so she finds herself alone, isolated from a family that nearly destroyed her and then refused to accept the part they played in her pain. In this passage you can hear the small girl calling to her careless father: "Don't throw that here! I'm here!"

She's here in living color in Educated, which opens up a world that feels simultaneously exotic and familiar. Her voice is so engaging that I didn't want the book to end, but I suspect we'll be hearing more from Tara Westover. It would take more than the FBI and the Illuminati and all her father's fears to silence a voice this strong.

A taste of spring in the middle of winter

So nice to walk across campus and see students, faculty, and staff members sauntering around eating ice-cream cones, listening to music, chatting, sitting on benches and studying in a most sociable fashion--in shorts and T-shirts!

I'm trying to remember the last time we saw any sunshine and I'm coming up blank. Last week was cold, wet, and gray all day every day. Three days ago I drove to campus for a basketball game and had to walk through ice-melt and slush to get to my car, and then I drove home with thoroughly wet feet on a highway surrounded by water where water does not normally appear. Trust me: you don't want to know what it's like to drive uphill on snow-covered mud.

Yesterday parking lots on the low end of campus were still flooded and my lot on the upper end filled up before 8 a.m., so I parked all day in a two-hour spot. Thankfully, the parking police announced that they wouldn't be ticketing anyone for on-street parking since some downtown streets were still flooded and there simply wasn't enough parking available anywhere.
 
After all that cold dark mess, today we suddenly have sunshine, blue sky, and a delightful soft breeze. The flood waters have receded and clean-up efforts are going well, but now we look at the forecast and see another huge mass of wetness heading our way. Maybe the storm will pass us by and the rivers will have a chance to fall to a less threatening level, or maybe we're on the cusp of another disaster.

I refuse to think about it. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it--as long as it's not under water.  

From Prufrock to whooping cranes to a silent, gentle snooze

This morning I taught "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to a group of students intent upon illustrating the line "like a patient etherized upon a table": lots of blank looks, not much alertness. Of course it's not a young person's poem, and the oppressive gray weather and overly warm classroom didn't help. I would have appreciated a nap myself.

Conditions weren't much better in Florida Lit, where we joined Jody and Penny at the fishing hole where they encounter the dance of the whooping cranes:

The dancers raised their wings and lifted their feet, first one and then the other. They sank their heads deep in their snowy breasts, lifted them and then sank them again. They moved soundlessly, part awkwardness, part grace. ...The birds were reflected in the clear marsh water. Sixteen white shadows reflected the motions. The evening breeze moved across the saw-grass. It bowed and fluttered. The water rippled. The setting sun lay rosy on the white bodies. Magic birds were dancing in a mystic marsh....

I read this passage aloud and then pointed out that it's different from other encounters with wild animals so far in the book. Other animals are predator or prey, portrayed as either a threat to the family's survival or as meat. "So if Jody and Penny are so desperate for food," I asked my class, "Why don't they kill some cranes and take 'em home for supper?"

No response.

"Come on, they've just been discussing the law of the jungle, the need to eat or be eaten. Shouldn't they skip the awe-filled observation and bag a bird?"

Crickets.

"And what's with all the 'magic birds' and 'mystic marsh' stuff? What makes these birds so special?"

Finally, a brave student works up the courage to respond: "You're the one who likes birds."

Well alrighty then! We'll assume that Rawlings wrote this passage to appeal to those few peculiar people among us who like birds, and that way everyone else can go back to sleep. I'll just stand up here mouthing meaningless blather about nothing in particular while everyone else succumbs to gentle slumber...until human voices wake us, and we drown.

What would Marjory do?

Marjory Stoneman Douglas lived to be 108 years old, and she never stopped fighting for justice--for minorities, for women, for children, for the land itself. In her 90s she appeared in a hearing where she was the lone voice opposing a plan to drain a portion of the Everglades in Dade County, and when she was booed, she reportedly responded, "Can't you boo any louder than that?"

"Look, I'm an old lady," she said. "I've been here since eight o'clock. It's now eleven. I've got all night, and I'm used to the heat." She persisted--and the county commissioners cancelled their plan to drain the wetland.

In her youth she fought for women's right to vote and later she worked to provide safe drinking water to residents of Miami's segregated slums. She fought to improve conditions for Florida's migrant workers and to provide them legal services, and she fought to earn her voice as a writer in the predominantly male world of journalism.

But her most sustained and intense fight was her decades-long campaign to protect south Florida's waterways, especially the Everglades, from overdevelopment, drainage, and pollution. In her 1947 book The Everglades: River of Grass, she elegantly portrays the wonders of the massive wetlands that had long been viewed as a barrier to development. Where others saw a virulent swamp, Douglas saw beauty:

The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slowly moving, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades. It is a river of grass.

Her research for River of Grass led her to look beneath the surface, to consider the peculiar geology of south Florida, the interdependence of fragile species in the wetland's unique ecosystems, and the natural cycles of rain and drought that could transform lush green growth into kindling:

The saw-grass stands drying to old gold and rustling faintly, ready, if there is a spark anywhere, to burst into those boiling red flames which crackle even at a great distance like a vast frying pan, giving off rolling clouds of heavy cream-colored smoke, shadowed with mauve by day and by night mile-high pillars of roily tangerine and orange light. The fires move crackling outward as the winds blow them, black widening rings where slow embers burn and smolder down into the fibrous masses of the thousand-year-old peat.

Then the spring rains put out the fires with their light moving tread, like the tread of the running deer, and the year of rainy season and of dry season has made its round again.

In River of Grass, the Everglades emerges as a character in itself, a misunderstood but fascinating entity with a complex history and an uncertain future. Douglas was among the first to proclaim that the destruction of the Everglades by drainage or pollution would be a disaster for the state as a whole, to see the health of wetlands as a harbinger for the health of the nation. "The Everglades is a test," she once said. "If we pass it, we may get to keep the planet."

Marjory Stoneman Douglas lived 108 years but, thankfully, not long enough to see a school carrying her name polluted by senseless violence and bloodshed. She saw environmentalism as a practical way to care for the weakest among us, claiming that providing clean water and clean air demonstrates our love and concern for children and those marginalized by poverty or other problems. When we love the land, we love our children, and if we fail to pass that test, our children bear the wounds of our neglect.

Today we face another kind of test: can we develop a sensible, workable plan to keep the most lethal weapons out of the hands of murderers? If we can't pass this test, we don't deserve to keep the planet.

As I hear more painful details about the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I mourn for the families and I mourn for the victims and I mourn for a culture that can't find a way to make these shootings stop, but I also mourn for Marjory. She doesn't deserve this, I tell myself, and neither do we.
 

No curtain calls in academe

Now here's the downside of spending a whole weekend putting together new teaching materials, as I did recently: When I was done giving this massive brilliant presentation in my Florida Lit class yesterday, I looked at my students and saw the same blank looks I see most days and I wondered Why aren't they applauding?

I didn't waste much time wondering, though, because of course they're not applauding: I've just given them a whole bunch of new stuff to learn, and even if the material was accompanied by photographs and engaging stories, it's still work. I wouldn't expect a child to applaud a new list of household chores even if it was beautifully formatted in rhyming couplets and accompanied by fireworks, so why would I expect my students to applaud my little academic song-and-dance?

But I performed so well!

Right, and there's the problem: this lecture was pretty much a one-person performance, without much participation by students except for note-taking (and, in one case, sleeping). I don't often teach that way, but we were starting a new unit and I needed to provide some necessary context and introduce essential concepts that will inform our discussion, and while I can congratulate myself on presenting it in an interesting way, it was still 40 minutes of me standing in front of the class yammering away.

I didn't stand still, of course. I'm not capable of talking for more than a minute without waving my arms around and moving around the room, which may be why I was so exhausted at the end. At one point I used the word "peripatetic" and, suspecting that my students would find it unfamiliar, I said, "I shall now become peripatetic right before your very eyes," and I did. And then of course I defined the word.

After the lecture I put my students to work applying some of the concepts to their reading assignment, which worked well enough, and then they were out the door and I moved on to the next class, but all afternoon I felt a lack, a sense of longing for something I'd lost without even know what was missing. After all that work and an exhausting performance, I'd really like a round of applause, a pat on the back, or even a small nod indicating a modicum of understanding. 

Instead, I sit in my office facing a pile of papers to grade and I take a moment to tell myself Well done, you. Now get back to work. Accompanied by the sound of one  hand clapping.

 

On (not) coutenancing error

A student wrote about an author who provides "a perfect Segway" into a new topic, and suddenly I found myself imagining Henry James zipping around Rye on a two-wheeled personal transport device, if James could be said to do anything zippily. Would he hop curbs and go airborne? I'd pay money to see that. Someday when someone finally has the foresight to open up a Henry James theme park, we'll all zip around on Segways along paths as complex as James's labyrinthine sentences, paths that keep promising to lead to a satisfactory destination--Gilbert Osmond's Passive-Aggressive Gift Shop, say, or Fanny Assingham's Mad Teacups--but somehow fail to finally arrive.

How long before Segway overtakes segue as an alternate spelling? Maybe the student never saw the word segue in print or saw it without knowing its pronunciation. Another student wrote that he had never seen the word countenance before, which made me sad. How can anyone be expected to understand Theodore Roethke's great poem "My Papa's Waltz" without understanding the meaning of countenance in the line "My mother's countenance / could not unfrown itself"?  (And where is the not-unfrowny-face emoji?)

My countenance fell when I saw that another student had formatted the date incorrectly in the heading of his paper, using one of those little nd, rd, or st dealies that make MLA tsk. Surely I marked that on his draft, I told myself, but then I checked the draft to be sure, and no, I did not mark the error on the draft because it wasn't there. That's right: he formatted the date correctly on the draft but then changed it to make it wrong on the final paper. Why?

And before you ask why I get all picky about formatting the date correctly in the heading, here's my thinking: if it's wrong in the draft, I mark it and insert a comment; if it's still wrong in the revised essay, that immediately lets me know that the student either hasn't  read my comments on the draft or doesn't care. Either way, helpful to know.

But then here's a student who didn't need to change the format of the date but did it anyway and thus introduced error into his paper. Who told him to change the format? I didn't do it, and he didn't see it on the sample papers I provided. Is someone giving bad advice during peer review? If so, how shall I address the problem? 

That's too much for my tired brain right now. I need to grade the rest of these papers, but first I need to find a way to smoothly shift from one topic to another. Where's that Segway when I need it?

 

On proof-texting, periodization, and any old poem

I thought I'd fallen into an e.e. cummings poem this morning when a student tried to attribute a certain idea to "Any poem by Campbell McGrath." I'm reading drafts in the Florida Lit class and the prompt required them to choose "Any poem by Campbell McGrath," but most students correctly interpreted this as requiring them to write about a specific poem. Any poem lived in a pretty how anthology--no, it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

I'm fighting a tendency toward proof-texting in these papers: students are picking quotes out of context without taking into account the larger purpose of the piece, which leads to incomplete or misleading readings. Uncritically quote a portion of a line that appears to laud Minnie Mouse in a poem brutally critiquing commodification and your argument will stand on extremely flimsy evidence.

I saw something similar in last week's American Lit survey drafts, suggesting that we need to do more class work on depth of analysis. But on those drafts I also had to keep reminding students that Henry James, Kate Chopin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and their contemporaries do not fall into the category "Early American Literature" and did not write in "Old English."

Maybe I should make them read some actual Old English. Any poem lived in a pretty hwaet anthology--nope, not feeling it.

Not slacking off (except when I am)

Sometimes the syllabi align in amazing ways: over the weekend I prepared to teach three Harlem Renaissance authors in Literary Theory, prepared an extensive presentation on the friendship between Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings for Florida Lit, and prepared a short presentation and handout on the Harlem Renaissance for American Lit Survey.

Aside from the coincidence in subject matter, I'm a little impressed that I spent that much time preparing new teaching materials even for a class that I've taught many times before. I've taught Hurston so many times that I ought to be able to phone it in, but apparently I'm allergic to slacking off.

Except when I'm not. Today my department met to work on next year's course schedules, which will include a significant change in the way we teach first-year composition, thanks to the recent approval of a new General Education curriculum. I'm mostly in favor of the changes but when it became clear that we'll still need one section of the "old" version of the class this fall, I jumped all over it with both feet. 

It's not that I don't want to change how I teach composition--I just don't want to do it right now. I'm teaching only one semester next year thanks to my spring 2019 sabbatical, which means I'll be teaching only one section of composition all year, and I just don't feel like reinventing my tried-and-true methods for the sake of only one section.

After the meeting I ran into a retired colleague at the grocery store, and he asked how long until I'll be able to retire. For years I said I'd never be able to pay off enough of our horrible debts to ever be able to retire, but careful husbandry and a little help from unexpected sources have eliminated enough debt to make retirement appear possible within the next eight or ten years.

And now I feel myself slowing down, still trying new things in class and putting tons of energy into updating my pedagogy, but I an increasingly unwilling to hop up and volunteer to  pilot the next new thing or revamp a tried-and-true course. Let someone else be the pioneer for a change. I'm happy to watch from the sidelines. I can catch up with the changes later on, but for now I need to hang back until I've caught my breath.

Author of my own onslaught

Who brought on this onslaught
of papers and tests?
Who sent out abundant
e-mails and requests? 

Who piled up the powerpoint
slides and the quizzes?
Who multiplied meetings?
Who offered the whiz-kids

enriching experiences
outside of class?

Who wrote this danged syllabus?
Who let this thing pass?

Who scheduled assignments
to arrive all at once?
Who authored this onslaught?
(That was me. What a dunce.)