"And other duties as required...."

How many academics does it take to free a trapped sparrow from an elevator shaft?

Well, it depends on how you define academics. At least five people were involved in the sparrow rescue, some digging in hands-on while others served a more supervisory function. My primary role was to say "Hey, is that a bird stuck in the elevator shaft?"and find someone who could help, but since we don't have a designated bird-rescuer on staff, I grabbed the nearest administrator.

I'm going to avoid naming names here not because my bird-rescuing colleagues aren't heroes but because I'm certain that we violated a not insignificant number of OSHA policies while trying to rescue the bird and I don't want to get any of the rescuers in trouble.  In the end the rescue group included representatives from English, IT, Academic Affairs, and the Physical Plant.

Now the first thing you need to know is that this isn't your normal ordinary indoor elevator but a glassed-in outdoor elevator sitting alongside the steep steps at the front of the administration building.  You can't get into the elevator without the appropriate key, and if you're a wheelchair-bound campus visitor who lacks a key, you use a little call box to alert someone inside the building that you need to get in.

I don't know how the bird got into the space below the elevator--after all, birds don't need elevators, can't operate call boxes, and don't have any pockets where they can carry keys--but he was clearly struggling to get out. Why not just open the door? I didn't have a key, but the administrator did; however, it's not possible to open that door while the elevator is, um, elevated. (This is getting confusing, but trust me, it was a lot more confusing in real time.) Use the manual override to lower the elevator...and the door won't open. The bird is now fluttering in a narrow space between the elevator and the external glass, but it can't stretch its wings out enough to take flight.

Suggestions start flying, with random passersby tossing in their two cents' worth. Reach a branch down there so the bird can climb up it! The administrator finds a long gnarly branch to reach down in to the gap but the bird wouldn't climb. Reach a hat down there to scoop up the bird! But no one present has long enough arms. Finally the Physical Plant guy says, "Anybody got a broom?" And before you know it the bird gets scooped up into the elevator and the door gets opened and the bird scoots off into the bushes.

And we all give each other high fives and celebrate our bird-rescuing efforts, but really, what did I do? I noticed the bird in distress and sounded the alarm, and then I mostly sat back and watched my colleagues work. My eye was on the sparrow! (If OSHA calls, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

No tricks, all treat

I took muffins to a class this morning, which I wouldn't even consider doing if there were 200 or 100 or 40 or 20 students enrolled in the class, but with only 10 students, why not give them a treat? 

And they deserved it. They've been doing great work all semester, and I have come to admire the way they support each other in times of need: studying together, sharing a granola bar with the classmate who's skipped breakfast, waking up the classmate who accidentally set her alarm for p.m. instead of a.m., and so much more. When one of them gives a class presentation, the others don't just sit there looking bored but they take notes and ask good questions, and last week they were doing peer review on a set of drafts and one of the students called out, "Hey everyone, listen to this great sentence!" And that's when I thought I ought to take them a treat.

Today turned out to be a great day to start off with muffins because they were all going to the same exam after my class so they'd been studying instead of eating breakfast. We spent our time reviewing concepts for the exam they'll take in my class on Friday, and when a student asked me to explain a particular concept again, I said, "Who would like to try to draw that on the board?" And one of them jumped right up and did it. Did a fine job, too. 

I can't remember the last time a class worked together so cohesively, taking responsibility for their own learning but willing to support one another in the process. They've even gone so far as to call out a classmate who wasn't performing up to the class's high standards, exercising the type of peer pressure that pushes everyone to improve.

That's the kind of class that makes me happy, so why not return the favor? If we can all sit in a classroom happily eating muffins while discussing great literature, good has been done here.

To sleep, perchance to breathe....

At 3 a.m. I woke with an urgent need to figure out when my passport expires. This is actually a good sign: for the past couple of days my brain has been unable to tackle any question more challenging than where are the tissues?, so my ability to get up in the middle of the night, locate my passport, and confirm that it doesn't expire for another 18 months suggests that I'm emerging from the current Attack of the Killer Phlegm. The really good news, though, is that I don't teach on Tuesday mornings so I was able to go right back to sleep for a few more hours.

I blame trees. Don't get me wrong: I love trees, but trees don't love me. In the spring my sinus passages react strongly to tree pollen, and in the fall it's leaf mold, resulting in massive attempts to expel the invading allergens: watery eyes, runny nose, sneezing, coughing, and the feeling that I'm walking around under water, at a distance from the waking world. It's not an ideal condition for teaching but ya gotta do what ya gotta do. And so I make my way through campus, my glowing red nose lighting my path.

So many things I'd like to write about--my students' ability to surprise me with their support for one another, my ongoing quest to adopt a new dog, my crippled dragon tree's continuing progress toward recovery--but, frankly, it's hard to put words together when I'm constantly interrupted by sneezes and the need to blow my nose. I have one student appointment this morning and a doctor's appointment at 1, after which I intend to go right home to rest and drink lots of herbal tea. One of these days I'll be able to breathe easily again, but meanwhile, I'm just grateful to be breathing at all.

The unkillable dragon tree, growing stronger every day.

 

Wandering through the gaudy woods

First it was too warm and then too rainy, but finally the day arrived: clear skies, clear schedule, clear path through woods turning gaudy with fall color. 

I hiked at Mountwood Park yesterday because I wanted to get away from the house and clear my head, and peak color season is the best time to climb that big hill. Once I left the parking lot, I didn't see another person on a two-hour hike, but I did see a red-tailed hawk and a pair of pileated woodpeckers and some Canada geese and two deer and about a million squirrels and chipmunks. 

I don't like to switch lenses while walking so I used the wide-angle lens on the way up and the telephoto on the way down, which means I had exactly the wrong lens on the camera when a big doe stepped in front of me. It's kind of amazing how quickly a deer can disappear in the woods; first she's standing broadside to the trail, not moving a muscle, and then with a twitch she's invisible, moving swiftly but silently through the thick woods.

One squirrel makes more noise moving across the forest floor than a whole herd of deer, and my presence seemed to throw them into a panic.  One chipmunk ran frantically to a tree and then stood stock-still on the trunk--If I don't move, she can't see me--while others rioted through the undergrowth seeking hiding places. 

At the top of the hill I rested near the ruins of an oil baron's mansion, looking up through leaves so yellow they seemed to glow. I paused by the remains of old rock walls that defined the edge of a meadow now thickly covered in second-growth forest where brilliant flashes of red, yellow, and orange leaves contrast sharply with trunks dark black or bare, blasted white. On the way down I turned aside to look closely at witch hazel blossoms just starting to emerge; in a few weeks, those tiny yellow flags will provide one of the few spots of color in woods bare of leaves. Today, though, a riot of color erupts in the woods, beckoning all those who need to fill their eyes with beauty.

Witch hazel blossoms

Extremely quiet and incredibly empty: a visit to the Flight 93 memorial

A baby kept crying in the Flight 93 memorial visitor center the other day until the mom finally decided to take her, but one of my students wanted to object: "Don't take the baby away! Someone in here ought to be crying."

I'm not naming names, but I know some tears were shed during my students' field trip to the Flight 93 memorial last weekend. They've been reading and writing about 9/11 literature all semester, examining the various ways in which national trauma is represented in fiction, poetry, art, and memorials, so Saturday's visit was an opportunity to apply all that learning face-to-face with a symbol of public mourning--or healing, or heroism, or a number of other possible narratives.

We chose the Flight 93 memorial because it's relatively accessible, about three and a half hours by college van, and it's also smaller and more manageable than the Manhattan memorial and museum. We drove over Friday after classes and spent Friday evening in one of the motel rooms watching the film adaptation of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which the students had read a few weeks ago, and then on Saturday we drove through the extremely quiet Pennsylvania countryside to get incredibly close to the trauma of Flight 93.

I'd been there before, of course, so I knew what to expect--the constant videos of burning buildings, falling towers, and somber politicians trying to make sense of it all, the eclectic collection of items mourners have left at the site, the recordings of passengers' final phone calls to their loved ones. I paused here and hung back, knowing how heart-wrenching those recordings can be and not wanting to push my students beyond their comfort level, but finally one student stepped forward and said, "I don't want to listen to this but I need to so I'd better just do it." 

And they did.

Afterward we walked down the twisting path through fields of dried-out thistle and goldenrod to visit the memorial wall and look at the massive rugged boulder that marks the plane's crash site.  From below, the visitor center looks like the prow of ship run aground on the hilltop, its blindingly white walls and sharp lines forming a stark contrast to the dark, formless boulder, which was chosen by victims' families to mark the spot because they didn't want anything man-made down there.

We talked about that for a while and the students asked great questions: Why make visitors walk a winding trail instead of installing a staircase directly to the memorial wall? Why leave native wildflowers and grasses growing in the fields instead of planting a neat, tidy, cultivated garden? Why does the space feel so empty? Why the giant portal, the giant wind chimes, the black sidewalk following the flight path of the plane?

I asked them to think about Stonehenge or the Indian mounds that dot our area: the people who built them knew exactly what purpose the sites would serve and what meaning they wanted the design to convey, but we don't speak their language so all we can do is speculate. If space aliens who can't decipher human language visit the Flight 93 memorial, what conclusions will they draw about its purpose and significance?

Wind rustled through dried thistle as we stood silent and contemplated the memorial. Is it a site of mourning, a celebration of heroism, an expression of power, or a massive bleeding wound? In the end we agreed that whatever interpretation of the memorial moves us, sometimes tears are the only appropriate response.

Unwelcome wake-up calls

I came within inches of hitting a deer this morning and I'm still not sure how I managed to miss it. It's a narrow stretch of road so I wasn't moving very fast and I guess my brakes must be pretty good, plus the scream unfurling behind me like a parachute must have slowed me down even more. At any rate, I found myself suddenly sitting in my car in the predawn fog with every cell in my body suddenly wide awake and a doe standing in front of me with a look on her face that clearly said, "Are you looking at me?"

Oddly enough, that was not my first rude awakening of the morning. I don't know how you react when the landline phone rings right next to your bed at 3:30 a.m., but my first thought is always Who died? followed quickly by If that's a phone solicitor, someone is going to suffer and it won't be me. 

But it wasn't a phone solicitor. It was my dad, who woke up in the wee hours and couldn't figure out where he was. He was okay, no problems, nothing particular on his mind, but he just wanted reassurance that he hadn't been abandoned. I reminded him that he's in a very nice assisted living facility in North Carolina, and then he wanted to know where I was, at which point I was tempted to say, You called me on my landline at 3:30 a.m. Where do you think I am? 

My brother says it's a stressful time for Dad, which is true, but it's a stressful time for all of us. Both brothers are in Florida clearing out Dad's house to get it ready to sell, and they keep texting me photos of things I'd forgotten about and asking whether I want them. That old trophy from my time on the junior high newspaper staff? Sure, why not--no one else will want it. I can use it as a paperweight. My favorite fruit bowl? Absolutely. A 20-year-old Nikon that shoots film? No thanks, I already have one. 

The brothers and sister-in-law are doing all the heavy lifting, so I'm not going to complain about getting an unwelcome wake-up call. It's the least I can do. Now, though, after close encounters with both Dad and a deer while I was still feeling my way around this morning, I'm ready to curl up and go right back to sleep. Too bad I have to go teach my composition class! If my 8 a.m. students sit there with that deer-in-the-headlights look, I'll try very hard not to scream.

Thinking, feeling, and bad adaptation: another trip up Cold Mountain

Last night after my honors students watched the film Cold Mountain, a confused student asked a simple question: "What's the point of the preacher, then?" It's a particularly insightful question because it helps to unravel what's wrong with the film.

It's not a terrible film, particularly if you're hankering for a glance at Jude Law's naked butt, but it is a terrible adaptation of Charles Frazier's luminous novel. The film plays up the love story and leaves out some important events, including the crucial bear attack and the frequent hospitality-and-storytelling scenes that link the novel so nicely with Homer's Odyssey. But what happens to the preacher in the film is symptomatic of larger issues.

To review: in the novel, preacher Veasey is first a hapless villain and then the kind of fool whose foolishness rains pain down on others. Encounters with Veasey draw sharp outlines around Inman's value system, showing when and why he will or will not resort to violence, but more importantly, Veasey's foibles allow Frazier to introduce a question that haunts the novel: Can a person be too far ruined to be reclaimed? Fool though he may be, Veasey in the end steps forward to deliver a one-sentence sermon and inadvertently saves Inman's life, suggesting that redemption is possible even for dangerous fools.

In the film, on the other hand, Veasey is all fool, all the time. He provides some comic relief, but in the end he's just another carcass for Inman to lug around, joining all the other blasted bodies haunting Inman's consciousness. All of Inman's concerns about whether he's too broken to rejoin the human race are reduced to one line near the end, and the preacher plays no part in saving Inman's life. So, as my student asked, what's the point of the preacher? If he's not challenging Inman's value system, offering Inman evidence for the possibility of redemption, or saving Inman's life, he's just another dead man for whom viewers can feel sorry.

And this highlights the most significant difference between the book and the film: the novel asks readers to think, while the film wants viewers to feel. It's true that Frazier's novel is very moving and excels at making readers care about distant and disparate characters, but it also demands that we face deep philosophical questions about the human condition, the nature of evil, and the problem of pain. 

The film, on the other hand, is all about the feels. Even the evil Teague is given a tragic backstory to make viewers sympathize with his actions. In the novel, Teague and his cronies illustrate the way war can open up spaces for unscrupulous people to wreak havoc unhindered, challenging readers to think beyond the rightness or wrongness of the cause and consider war as an experience that wounds everyone it touches. In the film, Teague is just a vengeful old guy motivated by anger over the loss of his granddaddy's land. He's creepy and violent and mostly heartless, but his actions spring from a private pain rather than illustrating the larger wounds caused by war.

Let's face it: Charles Frazier wrote a war story entangled with a love story, but the film Cold Mountain presents a love story complicated by war. Frazier wants readers to think their way through the kinds of meaning-of-life issues that don't transfer well to the screen, while the film wants us to revel in emotional spectacle and the delights of the flesh. If you want to follow the complex progress of Ada and Inman's thoughts, read the book; but if what you really want is Jude Law's naked butt, this is the film for you.    

Sleep-walking weather

I was just sitting down to write a sternly worded e-mail to a student when the Internet decided to take a nap. (And why not? If you look up “nap weather” in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of today, complete with gray skies and wind blowing wet trees sideways.) I don’t know whether this was a local technical glitch or something more widespread, but suddenly I found myself unable to say exactly what was on my mind at the moment.

This has been a dominant theme of my week: biting my tongue. 

• A colleague offers “helpful” “feedback” on a project I’ve been working on forever and I smile brightly and agree to make changes while an angry little voice inside my head screams If you don’t like the way I’m doing it, why don’t you do it yourself?   
• A student asks me to explain an important concept for the umpteenth time and I comply when I’d really like to say You didn’t take notes the first three times I explained it so why should I explain it again?   
• An acquaintance expresses ignorance of an important change in my life and I want to yell What have you been doing for the past year—sleep-walking?

Maybe we're all sleep-walking. This is, after all, sleep-walking weather. Maybe this Internet outage is a reminder that this might be a good time to sit back and take a chill pill. Maybe we should all put our heads down on our desks and close our eyes until sanity is restored to the universe—or until Internet service is restored, whichever comes first.

(Shhhh!!! You'll wake it up!)

After the fall

Two months ago I lamented the death of the dragon tree that has lived in my office for ages: I'd accidentally knocked the top off the tree, leaving nothing but a stunted stem. I was ready to give up on the tree but my husband, who knows better, persuaded me to keep it watered and just wait, and now look: two new shoots are poking out of the stem! Every day they look a little bigger. How long will it take before they look like actual leaves?

Last year at this time I went home early because of a power outage and found my faithful dog Hopeful nearing her end, but I couldn't get her any help because of the power outage so I eased her through the night and buried her the next morning in the rain. I miss my dog and I still talk to her when I'm up on her part of the hill, but lately I've been wondering whether it's about time to look for a new dog. Do I have the time and commitment level to train a new dog in the weird ways of our household, or am I absent too much to make a new relationship work? I'm open to exploring the possibilities, to see whether something new can grow out of an old trauma.

 

Getting to the meat of the in-class essay

"You've provided the meat of the essay but not the serving platter" is the comment I wrote in the margin of a student paper just now, but I wonder whether he'll understand the problem: diving right into some excellent paragraphs without leading up to them with an effective introduction or tying them up neatly with a conclusion. So I went back and explained it another way, knowing that metaphors can be misunderstood.

So, apparently, can prompts. After reading two consecutive papers that veered widely off course in similar ways, I had to go back and read the prompt again to make sure it said what I thought it said. But no, I was right: the students misunderstood what the question was asking for and so produced competent in-class essays that did not actually answer the question. I had warned about this, of course; we had spent several class periods looking at sample essay questions, circling key words, and writing thesis statements that responded to the questions, but when it came time to write the actual essay in class, several students responded not to the question written on the prompt but to a question we had discussed previously. Either they didn't read very carefully or they didn't think I'd notice.

And, as expected with in-class timed essays, several papers start off really well but then thin out toward the end with underdeveloped paragraphs showing evidence of haste. Writing half of a great essay will earn half of a great grade, which may be distressing, but students will be relieved to find out that I'm offering them an opportunity to revise these in-class essays to earn up to ten additional points. Some will be content and won't bother revising; some will hope to earn a few points by correcting the spelling and punctuation errors while ignoring large glaring holes in structure or content; but a few will diligently revise and submit a nicely polished essay.

I just hope they don't forget the serving platter this time because it gets messy when the meat falls on the floor.

 

Adrift with the milkweed but finding a home

Yesterday I took advantage of the gorgeous fall weather to walk up the hill and set loose some milkweed seeds collected by my old friend in North Carolina. We have two kinds of milkweed in the butterfly meadow already but none like these, producing red and yellow blossoms, but I wonder: Will North Carolina milkweed grow in Ohio? The only way to find out is to pinch a handful of milkweed fluff and fling it across the meadow, trusting that it will alight and take root somewhere hospitable.

We've been talking a lot about hospitality in my Honors Literature class, first examining how the code of hospitality works in Homer's Odyssey and then finding variations on the theme in Cold Mountain. We've seen how wayfarers depend upon the kindness of those who are more rooted in place, how diverse people can find common ground around a meal accompanied by music and storytelling, and how those who violate the code of hospitality create all kinds of havoc. The wanderer finds rest for his journey by making himself at home in various places, hoping he can trust his hosts to send him safely on his way; when this doesn't happen--when the Cyclops eats Odysseus's men or when Teague shares a meal and music with holy men before shooting them--we see that the difference between civilization and savagery hinges on the willingness to create a home, however temporary, in the wilderness and to treat all who enter it as brothers.

I want my friend's milkweed blossoms to find a home in my meadow but it's hard to direct the seeds to any certain spot as the least puff of wind blows them out of reach and out of sight. This is how I got here too, adrift among too many homes: my little house in the woods, the parsonage in Jackson where I spend my weekends, the house up north where I visit my grandkids, the house where I grew up in Florida. I lived in six or seven houses as a child but the only one that still feels like home is the Florida house, which will soon be on the market, so we need to retrieve some valuables before the house falls out of our hands forever. Last weekend my brother and I tried to remember the things we've loved in that house--the watercolor my daughter painted, a cross-stitch piece I made for Mom, those books, that vase, those flowered chairs--but when the people we love have left the building, we can hardly call it home.

Today a colleague asked me to name my favorite place on campus, and I cast about for an answer. I love the library, of course, and my office where I'm surrounded by books and photos of birds and grandkids, and I loved the pollinator garden before it was removed to make room for fall plantings, but the place on campus where I feel most at home is in a classroom full of students wrestling with a text. It doesn't even need to be a nice classroom; the people and the stories make it home. And this, I think, is true of all my homes: the empty house in Florida, still full of stories in my memory; my house in the woods, where family gathers around a table to talk, eat, and sing; the parsonage where we make new friends by sharing stories; the grandkids' house where the future is being built by tiny hands and big voices.

Sometimes I get tired of uprooting myself every weekend to live in a whole different town, but today when I drove into that town, it felt like home. I may drift for a time like the milkweed seeds, but it's good to know that wherever I land, I can find a place to call home.

Just a closer walk

Ten or twelve white-haired ladies and a few bald gents in wheelchairs sing "Just a closer walk with thee," their wrinkled faces beaming with joy even though it's been a while since most of them have walked at all. They gather in a meeting room at their nursing home to sing and pray and hear a little preaching, sometimes interrupted by a congregant's urgent need to ask a question or use the rest room. One woman falls asleep in the middle of the service, her head slumped over so far that from the back she looks like a propped-up torso, but as soon as the first notes of some old hymn start up, the sleepy head pops up and lends a whispery voice to the singing.

This is my father's world now, and my brother's too. My brother preaches every Sunday at a nursing home near where my father is now in assisted living, so over the long weekend I helped out by picking up Dad and taking him to hear his youngest son preach.

Dad doesn't like to miss church these days, which is kind of interesting given the hundreds of times in my youth when he dropped me off at church and then drove home to read the paper or watch Sunday-morning television. Today the church that nurtured me through my difficult adolescence is being torn down to make room for a senior living community; meanwhile, Dad lives in assisted living and delights to go to church at a nursing home.

He misses his church back in Florida, of course--the Sunday School class he adopted as family, all the hands he shook as a greeter every Sunday morning, his men's prayer group and the waitress who knew his regular order when they all went out to breakfast afterward. But he introduced me to the new friends he's making in North Carolina, including a man more than 100 years old and another whom he's invited to join him for church.

The old folks fall silent when the guitar-strumming worship leader switches to a more recent praise chorus, but they join in with gusto on their old favorites. They sing "Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home" as if they can hear the chariot wheels rumbling right up the road, and they sing about a closer walk with God as if He's waiting just outside the door. 

I want to be like that when I get old, I think, but then why not now? Why not live every day as if the chariot wheels are rumbling my way and the final door could open at any moment?

The previous evening I'd had dinner with an old friend--one of my oldest friends, in fact; a woman I've known since sixth grade--who told me about the massive heart attack that had almost killed her last spring. If she'd been alone at home she'd be a goner, but fortunately she was at her gym just finishing a CrossFit class when she collapsed and got immediate help. Now if you had looked at the two of us and tried to guess which one was more likely to have a heart attack in her 50s, you would not pick my friend. But there it is: given the right conditions, a heart attack can fell the fittest person while the fatter one stays safe. (For now.) 


But all this morbid musing could only last so long before I had to head back to Ohio to resume my place in the land of the young and the giddy and the temporarily able-bodied. I commended my brother for doing God's work and hugged Dad goodbye and headed up the road with Just a closer walk with thee ringing in my ears. Sometimes I droop and forget what real faith looks like, but those wrinkly old faces singing with joy filled my heart with a little bit of heaven.    

 

Don't sass the sassafras

With daytime temperatures in the 90s and nights not much cooler, autumn is hard to imagine but the signs are all around: blasted thistle drooping in the meadow, dry leaves crackling underfoot, smashed walnut husks all over the driveway. 

I went to the woods this morning to find sassafras leaves for a student, a task I've never before been asked to undertake. The student is preparing a presentation on Appalachian folk remedies and intends to bring in props but couldn't find any sassafras trees on campus. No problem! I headed for the woods and found all three leaf shapes growing from the same branch--the oval, the mitten, and the three-fingered glove.

On my walk I found some vestiges of summer--scarlet pokeweed stems among the crackling foliage, creek rocks coated with slick green liverwort, one last lingering dayflower at the edge of the meadow. The dry rocks lining the creek bed remind me that our very wet spring wrecked farmers' crops all over the state. Now we're hoping for rain to break the drought--but not too much rain. Just enough. If I were in charge of the weather, I would have spread out last spring's rains throughout the year.

But I'm not a weathermaker or any other kind of deity, despite my students' recent insistence that I'm a teaching goddess. I'm not letting that designation go to my head because I have a long memory for all my errors, supported by a file full of student comments on course evaluations. (The word despicable comes to mind.) If appreciation is falling like rain from the heavens, I'll stand here and soak it in while I can, knowing that eventually the rain will end and drought will come.

Meanwhile, though, how about some sassafras tea? I may not have the power to change the weather, but I can make sassafras leaves appear in the classroom so my students can do their own kind of magic.

Pokeweed

Fungus the size of a dinner plate growing on the stump of the tulip poplar my husband cut down last month.

It's a magical place even when my creek is nearly dry.

Dayflower!

 

Let us now praise famous students

I was handing back graded writing assignments yesterday when one student turned toward another and said, "Look! She wrote 'good point' on my paper!" And I wondered: if a student can get so excited about such a meh comment, maybe I should be less stinting in my praise.

Let us now praise famous students--or students who may not be famous to the rest of the world but score high points from me.


I praise the student who, by the luck of the draw, got the first spot on the schedule of oral presentations and then, despite nervousness, knocked it out of the park. Her classmates who follow may not appreciate how high she set the bar, but I do.

I praise the former student who came to campus to teach our students about careers in publishing and to mentor them through individual projects, and I praise the current students who batted ideas back and forth for what seemed like hours before coming up with a group project that could have an impact on the campus for years to come, and then they set right to work putting together a budget and organizing operations.

I praise the first-year students who charmed me with their letters to space aliens explaining why humanity should or should not be destroyed; even the students who filled their papers with examples of human stupidity showed through their work that there's something here worth saving.

I praise the student who counted every single reference to birds in the first chapter of Cold Mountain and the one who loves to read Charles Frazier's sentences out loud and the one who asked if she can dress up in character for her presentation. Rarely has a class responded so warmly to a book that many students see as a long, hard slog through bloody terrain.

I praise the student demonstrating grit and resilience through a difficult time and still finding a way to carry on, and I even praise the student who dropped my class to deal with a health problem. It takes maturity to realize that sometimes the only way to move forward is to drop back and punt.

And that's just the start!  Who wants to join me in praising famous students?