A "gimme" question that gives back

It's not often that a question on a final exam inspires a student to write "I love this question," especially when it's the final question on the final exam of the sequestered semester when the whole world seems to be falling apart. But it was that kind of question.

I wrote the question as a reward for students who have worked so hard to make this semester work and also as a reward for me for plowing through the pile of exams. Other questions asked students to explain concepts, analyze specific works, or draw connections between characters, but the final question asked them to connect their reading to their lives:

Choose any work we’ve read this semester and explain in some detail how it illustrates your own concept of what it means to be at home in nature. What work best represents the place what nature means to you or what you hope to experience in your relationship with nature? Be specific, providing examples from the text to support your claims.

It's a gimme question, really: who could fail to find something interesting to say in response? The only way to lose points would be to fail to provide examples from a text, but given that students could choose any text from the entire semester, they found some interesting examples. Many chose our most recent reading, Peter Heller's The River, but others stretched back as far as Thoreau's "Ktaadn" and Sara Orne Jewett's "A White Heron." Some saw themselves "Thinking Like a Mountain" with Aldo Leopold, while several students wrote passionately about W.S. Merwin's "The Vixen," a poem many of their classmates found puzzling. 

I made my students work on this exam and I know I made them think, but in the end I really wanted to give them a chance to show me why our reading matters. Now that we're done, I  hope they all have a chance to take their love for nature outdoors--at a safe distance, of course. With masks and hand-washing.
 

The kind of assessment that does my heart good

I wish I'd had an assessment-themed Buzzword Bingo card today during the final Zoom session for my Colson Whitehead class because I kept hearing terms like critical thinking and synthesis and transfer of skills to other classes--from my students.

I didn't prompt them to use those terms--they came up with them on their own. Usually in upper-level literature classes, I require students to write a low-stakes essay at the end of the semester reflecting on what they've learned and how the course has affected them as students, but the one concession I made to the new demands of online learning was to cancel that essay and replace it with a final Zoom discussion covering the same ground. 

We had fun talking about Whitehead's significance as a novelist--how each new novel felt like the most original and important one until we got to the next one, how his early playfulness morphed into powerful prose that made students want to go out and change the world. Students talked about the demands Whitehead made on their attention, challenging them to fill in gaps and examine their own assumptions and expectations, and how their explorations of historical and cultural contexts enriched their understanding.

Several students said they were initially nervous about being in such a small class, scared to step out and speculate during class discussions, but they said the books opened up so many different avenues for discussion that they grew comfortable taking opportunities to direct the class to new insights. And best of all, they showed how the skills they'd honed in my class helped them excel in other classes as well, giving them confidence to speak up in discussions and examine texts with a more discerning eye.

Of course today's class discussion isn't going to produce any official data or written documents that could enrich an assessment portfolio, but it did my heart good to hear my students talking so passionately about their learning experiences. Sometimes we don't need data to prove that good work has been done here.  

On loss, limbo, and longing

This week my my husband's uncle died--the uncle who served as a father after my husband's parents died, so closer than the typical uncle, a man who carried a screwdriver everywhere on the off chance that he might find something to fix--and our neighbor up the road lost his wife this week too, a neighbor we've been particularly close to, the man who sharpened our chainsaw and played his trumpet at the party the day after our daughter's wedding, whose wife has been suffering from dementia for quite some time and whom we haven't seen since the quarantine began, and we've been doing all the things--phone calls and cards and sending flowers--but it's not the same, no big family funeral with hugs from distant relatives or friends we never get to see, no road trips to other parts of the state, no funeral dinners with loads of leftovers to take home afterward, no long, lingering conversations full of stories about the loved ones we've lost. Instead we stay home, look at the photos, watch it all happen from a distance.

My classes ended too, all except for final exams and grading, but the final Zoom sessions felt flat and unsatisfying. We congratulated each other for surviving this pandemic like the Pioneers we are (or claim to be), and I told them all I hope to see them in the fall, but who knows what will happen in the fall? "Watch your College e-mail for further details," I said, and I'll be doing the same, watching and wondering and waiting to adjust to whatever new conditions might arise while we're in limbo.

Meanwhile, back on the nest, our robin chicks are looking more like robins every day, rising higher in the nest to show off speckled bellies with rusty smudges. This morning I watched on our campus hawk's nest live stream (here) as an adult red-shouldered hawk disassembled a squirrel to feed the three fluffy chicks--a fine example of nature red in tooth and claw but also oddly soothing. And the woods keep calling me, despite wet weather, to look closely and see what new growth is bursting forth every day. On the forest floor, fallen trees rot and decay, providing nutrients for the rampant green cascading over everything, and even the most sterile stone teems with lichen and provides a footing for tiny forests of moss. 

Our time in limbo seems to bring only loss and decay, but I wonder what new thing is getting ready to burst into fresh life. Will the changes be bright and flashy or will they slither in unnoticed and stick around until it seems like something that's always been there? Either way, there's nothing to do for it but to keep waiting and watching and keeping our eyes open.

These tiny ferns were about the size of my smallest fingernail.

Tiny mossy forest on a rock.

Jack in the pulpit.

Colorful tree buds. Beech, I thnk.

Umbrella magnolias are beginning to leaf out.

Pawpaws!

 

A moment for poets to make connections

Today's American Lit class discussed poems of connection: Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons" and "This Room and Everything In It," in which the poet reveals a rage for making connections between distant people and events, preserving important moments of meaning by transforming them into distinct images--an effort that faltering memory renders futile--and Amit Majmudar, whose poem "To the Hyphenated Poets" characterizes poets themselves as the hyphen that connect disparate people and cultures, the "tongue a hyphen joining / nation to nation."

"Splendor is spliced," asserts Majmudar, and that splicing is what's missing from our lives right now. How can we make fertile connections when we have to stand six feet apart or sit ensconced in our houses encountering the world through our screens?  Perhaps we'll see a new poetry of separation arising from this experience, a new emphasis on drawing on inner resources to stand alone and indivisible, but what I really miss right now is the feeling of being part of something beyond the confines of my own screen, something that can't be muted or switched off at will. 

Give me some spliced splendor, some accidental encounters with others who don't gaze suspiciously from a distance! I'm reminded of another Majmudar poem, "The Beard," in which the suspicious gaze of strangers locks the poet into a space of sterile stereotypes, a move that "foreclosed / the flux" of personal identity and left him with no way to bare his "true face veiled beneath his beard." The global pandemic has sequestered us all behind masks and machines and inspired us to look at others as sources of disease rather than splendor, and I only hope our poets are finding the words that will help us make new connections after the plague is vanquished.  

Teaching as the worm turns

The baby robins outside my window have reached the point where they respond to any cheep or chirp or bird-like sound by raising wobbly heads as far as they can above the nest and waiting for Mama to drop in a juicy morsel of worm or grub, and if Mama's not there, they keep those beaks wide open anyway just in case. Little eating machines is what they are, tiny bundles of fluff driven entirely by appetite, their mouths open so wide they couldn't scream Feed me! for love or money, but their body language is pretty clear: Feed me is all they know.
 
Meanwhile, on my side of the window, I'm dangling juicy morsels of poetry over the heads of my students and hoping they'll jump up and bite. They mostly keep their video feeds muted (because who wants to be on camera at 8 a.m.?) but I like to imagine that they're hungrily grabbing for every bit of literary meaning that wafts past, raising wobbly heads above their nests to reach for the next delicious line. 

But probably I'm delusional. After a month of socially distant teaching and learning, I detect a certain lassitude, a pronounced lack of eagerness to engage with literature. I think we're all just worn out. It's true that the early bird gets the worm, but do you know what the early bird does after getting that worm? It goes right back out and gets another one, and then another, all day long, one worm after another dangled over the mouths of demanding chicks who never even say thanks. 

One of these days, though, they'll grow strong enough to leave the nest and face the cruel world on their own strength. That's why the adult robin keeps bringing more grubs and worms and it's why I keep dangling juicy morsels of meaning in front of my students: feed them today so they can feed themselves tomorrow. 

 

Forget multiple versions of classes--I need multiple versions of me

When asked about teaching options for the fall semester, our administration says we have to remain flexible because we don't know whether we'll be able to meet face-to-face or have to continue teaching online. Flexible and nimble, they say, or flexible, nimble, and agile, plus also engaging. Flexible, nimble, agile, engaging, and rigorous. Sounds less like teaching than like physical therapy.

Our best bet, says one colleague, is to plan two versions of each class, one designed for face-to-face delivery and one designed to be delivered online. Then again, maybe we'll need a third option, a hybrid version of the course that can move on and offline as conditions require. How can one person deliver three versions of a course, assuming that deliver is the right verb to describe what we do? Trust me, if I could press a button to deliver an education to my students, I'd coast through life without a care. Nimble. Agile. Flexible.

Instead, four weeks of unexpected online teaching have left me feeling stiff and sullen. I am proud of the work my students are doing, impressed by their ability to remain engaged in learning despite distractions and difficulties, but I hate talking to a machine, watching a Zoom screen, missing the clues to comprehension I can catch when I'm surrounded by students in a classroom. I miss the friction created by eager minds brushing up against each other in the classroom, the energy produced by proximity, serendipity, and chance. Distancing dampens the energy, reducing opportunities for spontaneous discovery. In front of a classroom, I can be flexible, nimble, agile, engaging, and rigorous without any strain at all; by comparison, online learning feels stiff, stale, sterile, and stilted.

Maybe I just need to improve my online teaching skills, to prepare more competently for what may come in the fall, in which case our administration is on the ball, planning all sorts of training over the summer for those of us who may need help. Maybe I can become more flexible, nimble, and agile without sacrificing engagement and rigor, but it's going to take a ton of preparation, and as one of my colleagues pointed out, "We can make all the plans in the world, but the virus may have other plans."

If nothing else, this plague promises to give us all a whole-body workout.

Lunch guests

To get a photo of our resident robins feeding their brood, I first open the upper window in the dining room and then stand on a step-stool located a few feet away from the window, far enough from the nest so the bird won't feel threatened. Still, the robin always stops and looks in my direction for a moment before feeding the latest grub or bit of worm to the young. At first I could see only one tiny beak reaching up for take-out food, but today I clearly saw two or possibly three. Inside the window, I eat some leftover roast lamb for lunch; outside, the robin feeds newly hatched chicks. It's good to have a little company sometimes.

A portal to a different world

After days of wind and rain keeping us mostly indoors, I decided that I was going to go out for a walk at Lake Katharine today despite the cold, damp weather, and my husband asked me to pick him up at the church office so he could go along--which is how he ended up hiking through the wet, muddy woods in dress shirt, tie, and sport coat. High waters covered the trail and forced us to take detours through the muddy woods at a few spots, but the woods were bursting with colorful spring  blossoms and the air was alive with birds singing and spring peepers peeping, a refreshing respite from our usual confinement.
 

Great spurred violets.

Trilliums!

 

Muddy trail, but lovely walking among the bluebells.

 

Dutchman's breeches are still holding on.

I don't know what these are.

Foamflower!

We saw one or two jack-in-the-pulpits blooming, but more coming up.

Fun fungus!

Yellow violets were everywhere.

More foamflower.

Best-dressed hiker in the woods. (We were the only hikers in the woods.)

Like a portal to a different world.

Quiet Storm leads the way

It's not easy for students in the midst of a deadly global pandemic to immerse themselves in a novel about a deadly global pandemic, but I wrote the syllabus without being aware that the Coronavirus was coming and so here we are discussing Colson Whitehead's Zone One while sheltering in place, and even though we live in fear of an ordinary virus rather than the zombie apocalypse, my students have no problem finding parallels between their own situations and those of Whitehead's characters. 

Ten years ago Whitehead made some pretty accurate predictions about disparate responses to the pandemic both rational and irrational, raising questions about whether a global health threat would do more to unite or divide frightened people and suggesting that nothing--not chaos, not zombies, not desperate bandits wielding automatic weapons--can prevent the spread of PR, for he who controls the narrative controls the world.

It's a bleak world in Whitehead's novel but it's not without its moments of light. Today we reached my favorite part: the passage describing how the character who calls herself Quiet Storm creates art, order, and meaning out of scattered debris. Charged with using heavy equipment to clear wrecked vehicles from a stretch of I-95, she arranges cars and trucks in an order visible only from the air, where the wrecked cars form an "alphabet" arranged in a "grammar" that creates both beauty and ambiguous meaning:

Ten sport-utility vehicles arranged one-eighth of a mile apart east-west were the fins of an eel slipping through silty depths, or the fletching of an arrow aimed at--what? Tomorrow? What readers?

Asked to interpret the Quiet Storm's message, our intrepid protagonist responds, "We don't know how to read it yet. All we can do right now is pay witness."

And this, I think, is where we are right now. We don't know how the story ends or when we'll back to normal or even what new normal will arise from the detritus, but while we wait, we can make a mark in the chaos, rearrange the wreck of our lives, and aim an arrow toward a future reader who will stand befuddled and wonder what it all meant.  
  

A lost chapter from the Book of Hesitations

And lo, it shall come to pass
that a time shall come
when the plague shall be forgotten, 
and your children and your children's children,
even unto the third generation,
shall come to you and ask in wonder
why we celebrate the time of the canopy-carrying
by tootling a holy honk, 
and thus you shall tell them
how lo, it came to pass
that in the time of the Coronavirus,
when the people were forbidden to assemble
in the Great Congregation
for fear of contagion,
the people determined to gather
on the Day of Resurrection
(while maintaining social distance);
and so they drove their cars to the place of parking,
between their own lines parked they their cars,
and within each car sat the people,
some wearing homemade masks of calico or camouflage
and one with a stars-and-stripes bandanna wrapped around his face
in the style of a bandit
(though no bandit was he),

and the pastor stood before the assembled cars
and led the people in singing the songs of resurrection
and praying the prayers of comfort and hope,
when suddenly, in the midst of the service,
the skies grew dark
and the wind whipped up
and lo, a raindrop fell on the head of the pastor,
and soon was joined thereunto other raindrops,
each dampening the pastor or his scriptures
or the sound equipment surrounding him
and threatening to inundate the service.

But lo, there arose at the upper edge of the parking lot
a group of ushers, four in number,
who sprang into action in an instant,
for from the back of a truck they drew forth
a folding canopy,
and after drawing its legs to full length
and snapping down its fabric cover,
the ushers lifted the canopy--
each one leg of the canopy carried they them--
and walked it across the parking lot
to where stood before them their pastor,
and lo, they positioned the canopy
to keep the rain off the man of God
and his scriptures
and his sound equipment
(which, truth be told, was not his sound equipment at all
but was borrowed from a local motorcycle group),
but alas! The canopy did not extend far enough
to cover both speakers,
so the ushers retrieved plastic garbage bags
and with Hefty bags covered they them.

And lo, a great noise of praise arose,
as all the congregation, ensconced in their cars, 
saw through their rain-splattered windshields
the valiant work of the canopy-carrying ushers,
and behold, they expressed their appreciation
by tootling a holy honk
with their klaxons of praise
for they rejoiced
that the Coronavirus could not crush their congregation
nor the rain drench their pastor or wash away their worship
for the Day of Resurrection had arrived
and they were exceedingly glad.

A front-row seat at our Easter service.

 
 

Not that anyone asked...

My students know that anything I draw on the whiteboard is not going to come close to resembling whatever it's supposed to illustrate, but now, thanks to the wonders of Zoom whiteboards, my sad, sorry attempts at drawing out concepts for students can now be preserved for posterity. Thus, this:

Feel free to provide your own interpretation in the comments. Extra credit if you can guess the poem being illustrated.

 

Dispatches from the Pandemic Police

The other night I kept dreaming that I was under video surveillance and waking up frantic to find the hidden camera--in the clock? the light fixture? the phone?--until my groggy mind would remind me that only someone in truly desperate circumstances would consider footage of me sleeping particularly scintillating. 

The culture of surveillance invades my nightmares, but perhaps the nightmare is becoming reality. Who needs government surveillance when we're so good at policing each other? A man in a local town faces charges after he repeatedly called 911 to report that people were walking down the sidewalk past his house. Another family endured online shaming after neighbors reported that they had been walking through a park together without maintaining social distance--even though they all live together in the same house and brush up against each other multiple times every day. Forget to wear a mask when you step out to the grocery store and other shoppers tut-tut and shoot nasty looks your way, and it's only a matter of time before they start conducting citizens' arrests. (From a distance.)

Which is why I'm not going anywhere right now. I don't have any masks here and all my sewing equipment is at the other house, along with all my scarves and fabric, but my adorable daughter sewed and sent us some masks so I'm staying indoors until they arrive. Except for that long walk in the cemetery yesterday, with my husband, with whom I do not maintain social distance because what's the point? As long as our toothbrushes are mingling promiscuously in the bathroom, I don't see why I need to walk six feet away from him at the cemetery.

Which was empty--of the living, at least. Usually I see a few other walkers at a distance, but the windy weather must have inspired them to stay indoors. With so many people stuck inside for so long, it's no wonder that some are finding novel ways to pass the time: peeking out through the curtains to catch neighbors committing coronavirus infractions, swiftly dialing 911 or posting the details on social media. When our local self-appointed Pandemic Police can safely go back to yelling Stay off my lawn!, we'll know we have returned to normalcy.