Consider the trilliums

The gloom started lifting the minute my car swung around the curve and I saw the gate to Lake Katharine opened wide as if in welcome. If ever there was a time when I needed to immerse myself in nature, this is it.

Each day I feel more blue, even though things are going well enough under the circumstances: we're still fully employed and healthy, classes are carrying on as well as can be expected, and, thanks to the wonders of Zoom, we even got to sing Happy Birthday to our youngest grandchild when she turned two yesterday. But so much is still missing from our lives right now: hugs from the grandkids, visits with friends, trips to the store, impromptu discussions with students in the hallways. 

Like everyone else, I'm living a compartmentalized life, dividing the home into work and leisure zones, seeing friends and family in little Brady Bunch blocks on a computer screen and finding it difficult to make connections across the void or bring the different pieces of life into harmony. Even my attention span seems fragmented, my mind constantly jumping from one online task to the next, constantly worrying over broken bits of everyday life and wondering when they'll ever be normal again. But when I went to Lake Katharine this morning and walked through the woods and down into the gorge, the pieces started coming together.

There's no Zoom in the woods and few distractions; in a nearly two-hour walk, the only other person I saw was a jogger running nimbly up a muddy slope I was struggling not to slide down. I stepped aside to let him pass and then went on my way through woods that felt familiar: this is the place where I saw the bluebells last year, and here I should look for trout lilies. I heard a hawk and a pileated woodpecker and unknown numbers of phoebes, and down at the marsh I heard the call of a Louisiana waterthrush, exactly where I'd heard one at this time last year.

Names of wildflowers came back to me unbidden as I greeted them as old friends: Dutchman's breeches and Jacob's ladder and blue cohosh looking, as usual, like something beamed in from outer space. Consider the trilliums: our spring so far has been cold, wet, and windy, and the coronavirus has turned human communities upside down, but down in the woods the trilliums are coming up all the same, thriving on damp hillsides and turning their pure white blossoms toward the light.

That's why I go to the woods: to turn away from the flickering lights of the computer monitor and the transient fragments that fill our lives now and find a place that feels whole and unperturbed and full of peace. Just last week I reminded my students, apropos of something we'd been reading, that the words whole and health and holy all derive from the same Old English root, and while the entire world obsesses over how to stay healthy, we do well to work on wholeness and holiness as well. 

That's why I go to the woods: to find a place that feels whole, where I can turn my face to the light and find peace.

Down into the gorge.

Salt Creek.

Solomon's Seal, just starting out.

Bloodroot.

Blue cohosh. Freaky!

Fiddleheads!

Dutchman's breeches.

Mayapples, just popping up.

Bluebells are on the way!

I don't know what these flowers are and I couldn't get any closer.

Two Canada geese were sounding a loud alarm about something.

Trillium!

I think this is Jacob's Ladder.

Trout lilies! Saw lots of leaves but few blossoms.

The way my mind works now

Is there a word to describe an irrational fear of grocery shopping? Better ask Google: officinaphobia, from the Latin officina, a shop.

Under current conditions, is officinaphobia really all that irrational? Asking for a friend.

In a time a social distancing, how do pickpockets earn a living? Can they apply for unemployment benefits? Or have they all moved indoors to become Zoom-bombers? 

Zoom-bombers sounds like people so disgusted with how they look on the screen that they firebomb their own home offices, which would have the added benefit of injecting a little variety into the working-from-home situation, but no: Zoom-bombers exploit features of Zoom to force participants to view offensive content, like porn or racist rants. (Read it here.) The existence of Zoom-bombing provides further evidence, in case we needed it, that despicable people will find a way to act despicably in any situation.

Funny how everything on the syllabus right now seems to have some relevance to current conditions, from George Saunders's portrayal of characters trying to profit from the suffering of others (in "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline") to W.S. Merwin's poem "Rain Light," which shows how comfort can continue "even thought the whole world is burning." Next week my Colson Whitehead students will start reading Zone One, a zombie novel examining the various ways humanity responds after a global pandemic. Some suffer severe officinaphobia while others act despicably by seeking to profit from the disaster, but my favorite character rearranges debris to create art that will last long enough to convey meaning into the future. 

I want to be that person, but instead I'm sitting at home obsessing over how I can avoid looking like an idiot on Zoom and wondering how long I can put off grocery shopping.

I've taught online before--why is this time different?

Everyone I know who has made the sudden shift to online teaching keeps talking about how exhausting it is, and I agree, but then I ask myself: I have taught online before without trouble; why is this time so different?

Let me count the ways:

Two or three times I taught an online course in Writing about Nature--a bit ironic, I know, relying on technology to write about nature, but we do what we have to do. Teaching that course was a total breeze for several reasons:

1.  Summertime! I didn't have to teach other classes, attend committee meetings, or do any of the million other tasks associated with my job during the semester.

2. Preparation! I worked long and hard to set that class up, recording narrated PowerPoints and creating assignments and activities that did not require my constant attention. I had ample one-on-one support from our Instructional Technologist and an opportunity to test every part of the system before opening it up to students.

3. Asynchrony! Students completed assignments on their own time, meeting three deadlines each week; I could dip into the course to check on progress any time and respond to their online discussions and writing assignments at my leisure--no Zooming required. 

4. Small class size! It's always easier to manage the needs of eight students rather than eighteen, whether online or face-to-face.

My current online classes, by contrast, had to be thrown together in a few days with assistance from our Instructional Technologist who is doing valiant work to provide services to literally the entire faculty, all at once. There was little time for testing or putting together elaborate resources, and of course I still have to deal with my usual committee work and my usual load of students. 

I've made some changes in syllabi and assignments to allow some asynchronous work, but because my courses are largely discussion-based, we still meet virtually via Zoom at least two days a week. I have mastered breakout rooms, and I think the students enjoy meeting in small groups where they can chat comfortable with each other, although the one guy who was Zooming without a shirt on was maybe a little too comfortable. (This is college, dude. We wear clothes.) 

I don't think I've "dumbed down" my classes but I've certainly inserted some flexibility, and I'm also offering a few unusual extra-credit opportunities designed to help students boost their grades while encouraging each other. My American Lit students, for instance, can earn a few extra points by choosing a character from their reading and writing about why they would or would not want to be quarantined with that person, with evidence from the text to support their claims. Me, I'm choosing a character with a working time machine so I can jump right past all this mess and see what comes next.

I admire my students' ability to adapt to circumstances: one rural student without home internet access drives down the road to a church parking lot where he can call in on his cell phone, and a couple of students in my 8 a.m. class are not complaining about having class at 6 because they live in a different time zone.

But I am exhausted. I feel like I'm on duty all the time, even while I'm sleeping. When I hear or read the so-called "experts" saying this experience proves that colleges can easily shift to online learning permanently, I utter a hollow laugh and start counting the days until I can afford to retire. With time, preparation, support, small class sizes, and more universal access to appropriate technology, online teaching could be a breeze, but not today, and probably not tomorrow either.

Home office blues

Shelter in place means stay home, but what is home? I feel most at home in my little house in the not-so-big woods, a house with lots of windows so every room offers views of trees and birds and other wild things. However, that house lack cell-phone access and reliable internet access, which I need for teaching my classes and surviving during the shelter-in-place order, so last Friday I packed up what I thought I would need for teaching my classes and took it all to the parsonage in Jackson, where the internet and cell-phone coverage are great but there's not much to see out of the windows.

On the plus side, I'll get to go through this struggle at my husband's side, and I can still go for walks out at the cemetery or at Lake Katharine after the weather clears up. On the minus side, I miss my woods, my birds, and my creek. Also, just a few days of relying entirely on my laptop have proved gruelling, causing elbow and neck pain, blurred vision, and headaches. I need the big computer monitor from my office and the docking station and external keyboard and mouse--and a desk to put it all on. I taught this morning from my dining-room table, which is not sustainable because it's small and we need to eat there, and somehow spilled salt ended up on all over my notes.

But we are safe and intending to stay that way. I'm reminded of the six months I spent doing chemotherapy and radiation, when I struggled through sleepless nights by visualizing a happier future or planning a long road trips down the Pacific Coast Highway. In 2011, I had the privilege of taking my California Literature students there during Spring Break, and when I stood on the shore of the Pacific at Big Sur with my health restored and a full head of hair, it felt like triumph. 

So today as I try to cope with neck pain and blurred vision and an uninspiring view, I keep trying to believe in a happier future when we can move freely about the country in the company of people we love. "Next year in California," I keep telling myself, and I might even come to believe it one day.

The view from my "office"

Where I really want to be right now

Updated to add: Just after I posted this, I noticed a robin building a nest under the eaves just outside my "office" window. I realize that having a choice of two places to live is a first-world problem that many people would welcome, but when this style of life starts feeling oppressive, it's good to be reminded that nature is still doing its thing out there, even if I can't always see it.

Just ducky

I didn't walk far this morning because of threatening weather, but I found plenty to distract me from the current crisis: flotsam washed up by last night's heavy rain, cardinals chasing each other through the forsythia, waterleaf and coltsfoot popping up in the woods alongside the usual spring crop of beer cans tossed out of passing cars (why?), spring rivulets washing down the hillsides, standing waves in the creek where a few days ago our grandkids were wading--and, best of all, a pair of wood ducks in the trees above the creek. I've caught a few glimpses of ducks for a week or so but never saw enough to provide a clear identification. I hope this pair decides to nest nearby. 

I can see how high the creek rose based on what it left behind.

Why do people do this? All up and down my country road!

wood ducks!

This tree caught...something.

This is where we were wading last week.

And the bridge caught a tree.

titmouse!

Such a handsome couple.

Seeking cheer in the midst of fear

Every day this week I've reached a point when I just wanted to lie down and cry, usually toward the end of the afternoon when I'm exhausted from learning so many new skills and tired of my own company, but tears can be also triggered by minor matters, like the absence of cars in the campus parking lot, or major issues, like the lockdown at my Dad's assisted living facility, where he is no longer allowed to leave his room even to take walks up the hall and so spends all his time alone with nothing but the television to entertain him, and at the moment nothing he sees is particularly entertaining.

Spending too much time listening to news or looking at social media makes me jittery, and my attention span has gone all to pieces as I scramble for reasons to hope. So many groups and individuals are making resources available online--we should all be virtually touring art museums or learning new languages or watching opera or going outside to see nature doing its Spring thing. 

Carefully. Keeping our distance. Washing our hands.

Yesterday my daughter sent me a video of a chickadee feeding from my granddaughter's hand. The bird lands and Miss E looks surprised, and then the bird takes off just as a huge grin flashes across her face. I've played that video over and over again, and I'm also monitoring the Marietta College hawk nest live stream (click here). Outside my window the phoebes are calling and towhees have returned, and down by the creek the kingfishers are chattering up a storm. After a bit I'll walk out and see what else is happening in the non-virtual world.

I won't be gone long. You come too.

Questions I'm obsessing over right now

Will recording Zoom class sessions inhibit student participation?

How inhibited do I feel when I know I'm being recorded?
Is this why I refuse to use video in Zoom and why I rely entirely on audio instead?
Will I ever get over my horror of being recorded?
Does this stress me out more than any other aspect of online teaching?

What about privacy issues? Does random noise from the student's household need to be recorded in perpetuity?

At this chaotic point in time, do I really need to learn to use a video editing program to delete the unnecessary sections from the class meeting recording?

It's helpful to have a recording to share with students who have tech issues and miss the class meeting, but if I make the recording widely available, will this encourage students to skip the class meeting and rely entirely on the recording?

What kind of class discussion can we have if no one shows up?

Instead of cancelling our student poetry reading, why not move it online? 
Wouldn't lots of people enjoy watching students read their creative works in front of cool virtual backgrounds?
If an online poetry reading is such a great idea, why didn't I step up and volunteer to organize it?


If I had to take an exam online, would it totally creep me out to know that an electronic proctoring program was monitoring my every move and even taking control of my computer to limit access to other programs? 

If such a system would creep me out, why would I expect my students to welcome it?

Is it possible to adapt my exams to make such invasive monitoring unnecessary?

Am I a fool to have spent time submitting my fall book orders? 
Is it safe to assume that we will have some sort of fall classes regardless of circumstances, or is that assumption unreasonably optimistic?
Does that little frisson of pleasure provided by crossing fall book orders off my to-do list offset the possibility that it's a total waste of time? 

Will my wrist and elbow ever stop aching? 
Will my eyes ever un-blur?

Will I ever stop obsessing over everything that could possibly go wrong in my online classes?
 
 

I taught online and it didn't kill me (yet)

After teaching my first class online this morning, I have to wonder: How can it be so exhausting to sit at my desk and talk to a screen?

Difficulty sleeping last night certainly has something to do with it; maybe by Wednesday this whole setup will be so routine that I'll be sleeping like a baby instead of repeatedly waking up in a panic over how to share a whiteboard on Zoom.

I did fine sharing the whiteboard, by the way, but then I neglected to save it, so I will have to see whether I can retrieve it from the recording or else reproduce the material on the whiteboard from memory. And I managed to show a brief video clip, although I skipped a step and had to start it over after one brave soul said he couldn't see it. 

All but one of my 8 a.m. students showed up (virtually) for class, and the missing student had told me in advance that she would be on the road during class time and would check in with me later. At the beginning of the class session, I wanted to check on our ability to communicate as a group so I went down the roster and asked each student to say something interesting about where they were. A few remain on campus but most of my students are working from home, which is probably for the best. 

I was pleased with my students' willingness to jump in and respond to questions, but it feels very odd to talk to a group of people I can't see, unable to gauge their engagement with the material or their eagerness to respond. On Wednesday we'll try an online quiz and by Friday I have to figure out how to do peer review of drafts online. Maybe by next week I'll be ready to try small-group discussions on Zoom, and at some point I need to decide how I plan to give exams.

First, though, I need to chill for a bit. The first class went well enough but they're my talky class; the 11:00 group is much more reticent and also bigger, so I worry about participation. One down, an unknown number to go....I hope I don't have to spend the rest of my career teaching this way, but at least for the moment, I think I can manage.

Pushed to the brink by tech

It was a student, finally, who talked me down off the ledge.

It's been a rough week for everyone suddenly struggling to master the technology needed for moving all course material online. I don't envy my colleagues teaching hands-on courses like art or science labs, but those of us who traffic only in words and ideas are finding the situation difficult enough. Yesterday I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to do necessary stuff in Zoom, and by the end of the day all I wanted to do was to quit teaching entirely and take up something less stressful, like pounding my head against a brick wall all day long.

A tech specialist tried to encourage me. "You're pretty good with technology," she said; "you'll figure it out. Just be glad you're not--" and then she named a colleague known for antipathy to all sorts of technology. 

Well I saw Dr. Antipathy yesterday, and he's not struggling at all. He looked calm and well rested, in stark contrast to my frazzled and freaked-out appearance. "I'll just give my students some extra assignments," he said; "I'm not going to bother with any of that online stuff" (although he may have used a more vivid word than "stuff").

But I need that online stuff! I need to lead class discussions, present information visually and verbally, and encourage student engagement, and to do that I need to move beyond Moodle and master all the elements of Zoom, all while wondering why all these educational access programs sound like they were named by four-year-olds. And despite some experience with online learning, I'm not finding any of this easy.

I keep being reminded of my mother, who was a registered nurse for many decades, adapting to vast changes in medical care without much fuss or complaint. She never made the switch to wearing scrubs but instead held on to her white nursing uniform and little starched hat, but she had to adjust to all the technological changes involved in caring for oncology patients. She loved her job so I was surprised when she retired, but she'd reached a point where she would need to learn a whole new set of procedures for administering chemotherapy and she decided it was just a bridge too far. 

Yesterday I wondered whether Zoom is my bridge too far, the point where all my teaching skills break down and leave me helpless and blubbering in front of my class. I felt my confidence diminishing with each click of the mouse, and at my lowest point I started composing a resignation letter in my head.

But it's amazing how much more hopeful things look after a good night's sleep. Today I tackled the worst of the technology and got all my classes prepared for Monday, but I still lacked confidence that the setup would work. Then along came an email from student who is scheduled to give a presentation in the Colson Whitehead class on Monday, and before you know it I'd set up a test meeting space in Zoom to let her run through her presentation, and then we tried out some of the other functions so she could tell me how things looked from her end. We had a few rough spots but I'm pleased to report that everything worked without too much fuss.
 
I think I'm ready to roll out online classes on Monday, but here's the scary part: it took me the better part of the week just to prepare for one day's teaching. I certainly hope I've moved past the worst part of the learning curve because there aren't enough hours in the day to put this amount of effort into every class for the rest of the semester, provided that we have a rest of the semester.

And one last thing: if working with this technology made me feel so thoroughly hopeless and confused, how will my students feel? At least I can tell them truthfully that I feel their pain. 

In a fowl humor

I was out in the back yard burning trash when I noticed in the neighbor's hay-meadow a parliament of fowls worrying over some unfortunate carcass. Black vultures they were, with their white underwing tips and chain-mail-gray heads, an unusual bird at our house but quite common just an hour or so west. 

I feared at first that this encounter was a metaphor for my current situation: scrambling to keep the chaos under control while scavengers wait in the wings to carry off the scraps--and I'm not referring only to the Internal Revenue Service, although they certainly come to mind when the vultures start to circle. The vultures have come to nibble away at what little time, energy, and sanity remain after I figure out how to deliver my classes online despite unreliable technology, inadequate sleep, and no transportation whatsoever (because my son's car broke down last night--all the oil came spurting out when he tried to start the engine, which surely can't be anything serious, right?--so he's using mine until, well, whenever). 

But thinking about all the ways in which my life feels like a human sacrifice to ravenous scavengers just gets me down, so instead I'm wondering how Chaucer would have responded to the local influx of vultures. His Parlement of Fowles focused on far classier birds, of course, eagles mouthing cliches of courtly love on Valentine's Day; what would Chaucer do with vultures hovering over a nation in panic over an impending pandemic? That's an epic for a different kind of poet--maybe Shakespeare in full Lear mode or Cormac McCarthy channeling William Blake.

As for me, I've got nothing--not a rhyme, not a joke, not the slightest gesture that might transform the current chaos into some sort of sense. Trash is burning and vultures are circling and all I can do is stand over the fire wondering what's going to happen next.

   

Spring break = spring broken, or the perils of pandemic panic

Just over ten years ago I spent a week teaching all my classes online to protect my chemotherapy-ravaged immune system from whatever toxic crud was making its way around campus at the time--but that was just one week, and my students were still able to assemble as needed or visit the library and other campus services.

Now comes word that we're required to teach all of our classes online starting Monday, with no end date in sight and no expectation that students will be on campus at all. Good thing I have the rest of Spring Break to figure out how to make this work.

The challenges are daunting: my textbooks and course materials are on campus and so, I suspect, are my students'. My home internet service is stronger than ever but still not strong enough to allow streaming video or synchronous chat; I could drive five miles up the highway and piggyback on the wi-fi at the McDonald's while giving lectures  and leading discussions from the parking lot, but I think I'd rather take the risk of sequestering myself in my campus office.

Not that the risk is high. There are no known COVID-19 cases in the area, although it's the unknown cases that have everyone frightened. I was supposed to travel to North Carolina this week to visit my Dad but got waylaid by an earache accompanied by a nasty case of vertigo; before the visit was cancelled I was repeatedly offered this helpful bit of advice: "Don't get near anyone who might have the virus." Okay! Given the flexibility of the word might, I think my best bet is just to lock myself in the basement and not come out until the last person standing sounds the All Clear.  

Bird in the hand

A chickadee lands on my hand as insubstantial as a puff of dandelion fluff, but then it takes off with spring-loaded legs that propel it so powerfully into the woods that it's hard to believe it was ever there at all. At F.A. Sieberling Nature Realm in Akron, Ohio, we slid on snow-covered paths through woods alive with early-morning birdsong, and soon a few handfuls of birdseed lured chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, and cardinals toward our hands. Each bird's arrival was a revelation, a weightless bundle of feathers appearing from nowhere to grab a seed and quickly fly off, but each new visit brought fresh delight. Light as a feather but full of power: birds in the hand.

Not the evil supervillain you'd imagined

All morning I've been telling myself Don't be evil, a situation that rarely arises in my current milieu. You'll notice, for instance, that one rarely finds a comic-book-style supervillain brewing up a secret plan to destroy the world while working in the bowels of the English department. In my boring workaday world, opportunities to intentionally make someone's life miserable arise only rarely and aren't particularly tempting. 

But after a week crammed full with meetings and paperwork and massive amounts of grading, it might feel positively cathartic to stand in front of a class and say something like this: "Before you take your exam, I want you to know that I've identified passages in some papers that were copied directly from online sources without attribution, which constitutes plagiarism. Those of you who did that need to see me as soon as you're done taking your midterm exam. You know who you are."

Yes, that would be truly evil, but on the whole I think I'd prefer to abstain, not least because I don't want a guilty conscience to burden my weekend with the grandkids. 

But the question remains: if you were a student, when would you want to be told that your attempt at plagiarism had been uncovered? Before the midterm exam, which would be distracting, or after the exam, when everyone leaves campus for Spring Break and therefore won't be able to do anything about the situation for a week? Which would be less evil: to ruin a student's concentration on an exam or force the student to stew about the incident all through Spring Break?

Probably I'm overthinking this. Probably this situation, which to me seems so fraught with danger, will constitute a mere blip on the student's consciousness, a minor incident that will be quickly forgotten. Probably I should just calmly follow our campus procedures without any hint of vindictiveness or anger. This is me, sitting calmly in my office abstaining from evil. Somebody give me a gold star.

Pandemic planning 101

The threat of a global coronavirus pandemic inspired the person who supplies faculty snacks to announce a new policy: no more communal potato-chip bags; single-serve packages only! Pandemic Packaging she called it, or, if you prefer a peppy portmanteau, pandackaging.

This proposal caused the pandemic skeptics (pandeptics) to decry the needless expense, while the pandemic fatalists (pandatalists) objected for a different reason: we're all doomed anyway, so why not share our misery as we share our snacks? 

"Just tell everyone to wash their hands and we'll all be fine," insisted the resident pandoptimist, at which point a pandessimist proposed stationing strong men bearing baseball bats in every public rest room to encourage compliance.

"I'm telling my students to take all their textbooks home over spring break so they can keep up with the reading if they get quarantined," said an old-school tweed-jacket-with-elbow-patches prof (pantweedademic), provoking a trauma-informed pedagogue (pantraumagogue) to shriek about spinal damage and PTSD caused by bearing heavy backpacks.

The last word, of course, came from our fearless leader, Dr. Pangloss, who assured us that all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, which is where the coronavirus lives. Resistance is futile. We are all Panglossademics now.  

Tossing out the catnip question

I don't often hear the word joy applied to grading exams, but I'm sitting at my desk smiling from ear to ear after reading an essay scribbled in response to a question on the midterm exam I gave yesterday. I don't even care how hard I had to work to decipher the student's nearly illegible handwriting: he grabbed that question and nailed it--which made me immensely happy because I'd written that question with this particular student in mind.

I know, I know--exams are supposed to be objective measures of students' understanding, not invitations for a certain student to showboat, but this is an odd kind of exam: students are given seven topics but must write about only four of them, and for each topic they choose, they have to write about three literary works listed beneath the topic. The question in question (ha!) presents a topic and three works I suspected few students would care to tackle (and sure enough, very few did), but I've had this student in class before, and I knew that if he were a cat, this question would be catnip. 

And of course he jumped on it with both feet and batted it into submission. Given the time constraints, his response was rich, insightful, and buzzing with energy. If every response were like that, midterm grading would be sheer delight instead of drudgery occasionally punctuated by small pleasures. To read an exam that evokes the word joy is highly unusual, but that's why I wrote the question the way I did: to entice a student to make grading great again, of only for a moment.