On the (ragged) fringe

I nearly missed the nondescript stalk of white blossoms among the tall greenery beside the forest trail, but I didn't recognize the blooms so I stopped to take a photo. Later it took a little while online but I identified the blossom as ragged fringed orchid. You know, I lived in Ohio for decades without ever knowing that twelve species of orchid grow wild in Ohio's woods, but in the past year I've managed to locate three of them simply by paying attention and remaining curious.

This week my curiosity took me to Boord State Nature Preserve, which I'd never visited even though it's located not far off a route I drive nearly every week. I've read that it's a great place to see early-spring wildflowers, but when I tried to visit in early spring, the access road was under water. This morning, though, I had a relaxing walk through pine woods and along a creek where little was blooming and the waterfall had been reduced to a trickle, but it was a great way to start my week's staycation.

Yes: I've reached important milestones in both my course preparations and my big writing project, so I decided to give myself a week off and see what kind of vacation I can enjoy without sleeping away from home. We'll get the canoe out at some point and find some interesting places to hike, and this weekend we'll get to spend some time with the grandkids, hurrah. The goal is to have as much fun as possible while socially distancing and avoiding crowds, which was not a problem this morning because I had the woods entirely to myself and the only real hazard I faced was the occasional bit of poison ivy encroaching on the trail. Wouldn't life be so much easier if the Coronavirus were as easily avoidable as poison ivy?

Proof that there are idiots everywhere.

Not much of a waterfall this time of year.

Ragged fringed orchid.

Majumdar, Dalton, Rushdie: not exactly light summer reading

What happens when good and evil commingle within a single person? If a character more or less accidentally gets sucked into an evil activity, can the character still be considered good? Three books I've recently read consider this question, with varying degrees of success. 

The best and brightest is a first novel by Megha Majumdar titled A Burning, which explores how an evil act can create shock waves that eventually wash over characters quite distant from the center. A terrorist bombing at a train station in Kolkata, India, sends shrapnel into the lives of three characters: Jivan, a young woman struggling to escape from poverty; her friend Lovely, a hijra and aspiring actress to whom Jivan has been teaching English; and PT Sir, Jivan's former phys ed teacher. While Jivan strives to become "an ordinary person in the world," Lovely longs to become extraordinary but fears she is "only a smashed insect under your shoes." Meanwhile, PT Sir seeks advancement "in the government office's special elevator" and finds his voice by denying others their own. Despite the horrific and disturbing events at the heart of the novel, the narrative voices paint a world where hope and joy remain possible, even when most improbable.

Improbability is the chief problem with Boy Swallows Universe by the Australian author Trent Dalton. Like Jivan, Eli and his mostly silent brother August are initially mired in an impossible situation involving drugs, poverty, and abysmal parenting, but there's a Dickensian touch to the method by which Eli escapes poverty by befriending a hardened criminal. In a world where charity serves as a mask for evil, Eli wonders whether anyone is truly good--including himself. It's a lively and enjoyable novel requiring some suspension of disbelief, and perhaps most annoying is young Eli's tendency to demonstrate wisdom far beyond his years; in one particularly dangerous moment, for instance, he pauses to reflect:

One face keeps me frozen. The flashlight finds it at the end of the shelf above me. And I know immediately that I am standing inside a moment of trauma. The trauma is in me and the trauma that will happen has already happened. But the face still makes me move. This face I love.

Yes: just at the point when the adolescent character needs to stop thinking and start moving, he feels compelled to indulge in profound self-reflection. Good thing Trent Dalton has a deus ex machina at his disposal because poor Eli is going to need it.

Finally, Salman Rushdie's 2017 novel The Golden House needed a different kind of deus ex machina--an editor with the power to tell Rushdie to go back and try again. Like the Rushdie novels I love most, this one tries to tell a mythic tale sprawling over two continents and many characters, but in this case too many of the characters are cardboard cutouts and the structure simply doesn't work--although it might work as a film treatment, which it often mimics. The novel's greatest success is in reproducing a believable picture of life in Manhattan during the Obama era, and its occasional moments of wit enliven a plot that alternately plods and sprints toward a predictable point. The narrator is an aspiring film-maker obsessed with a neighboring family led Nero Golden, the patriarch who has jettisoned his past in Mumbai to reinvent himself in America but finds that evil has long arms and a vast memory. At one point the narrator's girlfriend tells him that "everyone in my story was an aspect of my own nature," which may explain why so many of the characters resemble cartoons. 

In the end Rushdie's novel asks whether an observer can pursue an obsession with evil without getting his own hands dirty, a question Trent Dalton and Megha Majumdar explore in their own ways. It's not exactly light summer reading, but at a time when we're all considering our complicity with social evils while obsessively keeping our distance from anything that might pollute, these novels raise a question worth consideration.  
 
 

Like dropping a rose petal in the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo

Academic publishing is such a protracted and arduous process that by the time the article appears in print, I've forgotten what I was trying to say and why it mattered.

It starts with the merest inkling of an idea that grows and possesses my mind until I'm compelled to do some preliminary research just to see whether anyone else has already covered the topic, and then there's more research and thinking and note-taking and drafting followed by feedback from friends and colleagues and revision and more feedback and more revision, and then, finally, polishing up the essay for submission to an academic journal, in this case the premier journal in my field, and then, months later, one very positive reader's report overwhelmed by two encouraging yet negative reports, and then more revision in response to the readers' reports and more feedback from colleagues and more revision and then, finally, submission of a significantly different essay to a smaller and less prestigious journal, followed months later by an acceptance (hurrah!) and then the whole copy-editing and production process, during which time the essay loses its playful title ("Schrodinger's Trash"! What's not to love?) and some of its more clever lines to become a bit more staid and conventional, and then, finally, more than five years after this whole process began, the essay appears in print in an obscure journal where it will be read by the handful of scholars who care about the topic, all looking for flaws.

But: It's a publication! A line on my vita! Proof that I've accomplished something that may outlast my mortal flesh! And it arrives just in time to contribute to the ongoing conversation about the arbitrary ways by which we determine whose lives matter and whose stories deserve to be told, so that's something.

A friend recently asked me whether there's any money in academic publishing and I said no, we do it ostensibly for the noble goal of contributing to the scholarly conversation on important topics and, more practically, to prove that we're worthy of hiring, tenure, or promotion, so I'm not sure why I'm still doing this but I'll admit that I enjoy the frisson of pleasure that occurs when a new publication appears in the mail--even if very few people will ever read it. Good has been done here! Brief pause to pat myself on the back before I move on to the next project.

Musical chairs, pandemic style

The problem with planning classes for a pandemic is that every time I think I’ve figured out how to run my classes like a well-oiled machine, someone tosses a monkey-wrench in the works. Yesterday, for instance, I was walking to my office when I noticed new signs outside all the classrooms listing occupancy limits—to allow for social distancing, a classroom that could comfortably seat two dozen students is now limited to 10.

I got a sinking feeling and immediately checked the enrollments for my fall classes, and sure enough, half of my classes are too big to allow social distancing in their assigned classrooms. To complicate matters further, we have a very limited number of large teaching spaces on campus and competition for those spaces will be stiff, especially at the more popular teaching times.

At 8 a.m., my building is like a mausoleum so I could probably move my 8 a.m. class to a bigger room—but I see that only 8 students have enrolled in that class, so unless we experience a sudden rush of students desperate to take first-year composition at 8 a.m., that class can stay where it is. Similarly, my upper-level film class is unlikely to grow large enough to cause problems. (I realize that I'm fortunate to teach at a college where small class sizes are the norm and an 8-person class isn't in danger of being cancelled. I don't know what people who teach really big classes are going to do.)

A problem arises, though, with my two bigger classes, which are taught at some of our most popular teaching times—9 and 11 a.m.  How do I teach 18 students in a room that’s now limited to 10, at a time when every classroom on campus is already in use?

I spent some time brainstorming with valued colleagues and found a solution that’s complicated and inelegant but just might work: Split the class into two groups; each day, half of the class will meet in the classroom while the other half joins via Zoom. I’ve been told that all of our classrooms will be equipped with cameras before the semester begins, so we have the technology to make this happen—but of course the solution raises a whole host of other questions:

How do I divide the class--randomly or based on some specific criteria related to pedagogy or student demographics or arbitrary preferences for Wednesdays?

How do I communicate the plan so that students won’t be confused about when they’re supposed to be in class?

How do I divide my attention between the students in the room and those on the screen?

How do I engage the Zoomy students in class discussion and other activities?

How do I give exams? Final exams are not the problem—there’s enough time available to allow students to take the exam in shifts if need be—but how do I give a 50-minute midterm when only half of my students can be in the classroom? Maybe it’s time to shift to online exams—but then why not move the entire class online?

In fact I’d already been planning to hold one class session per week online for all my classes, doing things like presentations, group projects, and writing and research workshops during our online time. If I break the class in two groups and have only half of my students in the room for each class session, that means each student will be in the classroom only one day each week (for a three-days-per-week class). Under these circumstances it seems a bit disingenuous to call this a return to face-to-face teaching, but this is what I have to work with and so somehow I’ll make it work.

Like a well-oiled machine? Maybe—until  someone throws another monkey wrench into the works.

Always something

A nothing day! Summer ought to be full of them: days with absolutely nothing on the schedule, no pressing tasks requiring immediate attention. But it's hard to do nothing when the yard needs mowing or the flower beds need weeding or the birdfeeders need filling or the windows need washing, and I can't relax any better at the office surrounded by reminders of classes that need to be prepared and books that need to be sorted and returned to shelves.

The only way, then, to have a real nothing day is to leave my immediate surroundings and go somewhere where I'm not responsible for anything--like, say, a vacation. But who can go on vacation in the middle of a pendemic? I'd have to first overcome my fear of public rest rooms and then find a way to relax in the midst of people whose commitment to social distancing may not pass muster.

So I stay home and try to dull my conscience, try to read a book near the big picture window without being distracted by the birds wondering why the feeder isn't full or the lawn calling out it's time to mow! or, worst of all, the window itself asking me how I can stand to look through such grubby glass. It seems that right now doing nothing is simply not possible because there's always something. Why can't the pandemic go on vacation and leave us all alone?   

Spidey-senses tingling!

Here's a sure sign of changing seasons: these days when I hike in the woods, I'm using my walking stick less for keeping balance on muddy paths and more for knocking spider webs out of the way. Despite my best efforts, I got a face full of spider web at several points this morning, but I'm just glad it was so early that the mosquitoes weren't buzzing me.

Wednesday's violent storms knocked down many trees and limbs all over Lake Katharine, but the maintenance crew did fabulous work clearing debris off the trails. There's not much blooming out there right now but I found one patch of rattlesnake plantain sending up shoots. I'll have to keep an eye on that--which will require more hikes in the woods, and more opportunities to watch out for spider webs. So exciting! I am all aquiver with anticipation.

 

 

After the storm, a gentle paddle

Yesterday's violent storms washed silt downstream and roiled the waters so that Forked Run Lake looked like chocolate milk this morning, but it was a lovely morning for a paddle. The storm tossed some debris in the water but it also broke up the overwhelming heat and humidity we've been suffering, so we were cool and comfortable even when a little wind whipped up. In some places the scent of honeysuckle hung heavily over the lake, and occasionally a fish would jump just in front of the canoe. We saw few birds and only one other boat on the lake, but it felt good to linger in quiet coves where the only sound was the dip of paddles in smooth brown water.

  

Puzzling over the pandemic syllabus

Even under normal conditions, writing a syllabus is like solving a complicated logic puzzle requiring fitting the material into a certain number of weeks while avoiding certain obstacles--I need some space between the exam and the submission of the essay and I can't assign these two readings back-to-back, so let's put a library tour in the middle. And then I have to look at all my syllabi together to make sure that I don't set myself up to respond to drafts from all my students on the same day. It's a challenge, but I enjoy puzzles so it's one I don't mind tackling.

This time, though, the obstacles are different. Our fall academic calendar has changed to streamline the semester: we’ll start early, run straight through without breaks, and finish by Thanksgiving, and we’ve been advised to make our classes flexible enough so that we can go online at a moment’s notice if the pandemic warrants. The new calendar is not a problem, but I’m encountering some unexpected obstacles.

For instance: I always enjoy taking my honors students on a tour of the library. It's fun to watch them discover the joys of making huge shelves move or finding treasures in Special Collections, and I always make them check out a book just so I know they know how to do it. But under social distancing guidelines, how do I take my students on a library tour? I can't squeeze a dozen students into a confined space to show them the kinds of resources they'll find in the reference section, and Special Collections doesn't have space to allow social distancing for all my students at the same time. If they spread six feet apart during our tour, I'll have to talk so loudly that we'll disturb other patrons. Do I break the class into smaller groups and take them on separate tours? Construct a self-guided scavenger hunt? Cancel the library tour altogether on the assumption that students will do most of their research online this fall? Which priorities take precedence: pedagogy or pandemic prevention?

And that's just one of the many unexpected questions I'm struggling with as I think about fall syllabi. Here are a few others:

If my film class can't watch face-to-face on the big screen, I can make them available online through our course management system--but how do I discourage students from watching films on their tiny smartphone screens? 

I can commit to doing online writing workshops to minimize time spent passing papers back and forth in the classroom, but how do I monitor the quality of the feedback they offer each other without vastly multiplying my workload? I don't want to read every comment a student writes on another student's draft! 

I understand that plexiglass dividers are being installed in classrooms to allow faculty to teach without wearing a mask, but what if I have trouble staying behind the divider? How do I curtail my tendency to wander around waving my arms while teaching? Will small-group work be possible in socially distanced classes and, if so, how do I visit those small groups without violating social distance?

What about class presentations? Do I assume that students will be able to present material face-to-face or schedule all presentations for online class meetings? Or just ask them to be prepared to do either? If some students present online while others present in person, how will my expectations differ? Is it better to require them all to present in the same way?

This is just the beginning--I've got two months to mull over these issues before classes start, and who knows what may happen in that time? It's like trying to solve a puzzle while the parameters keep changing--suddenly the borders change or all responses must be written in Swahili, and then oops! Back to English. At some point I'll get this all figured out, but meanwhile, you know what's keeping me awake nights.

The green badge of discomfort

“We want you to be uncomfortable,” the woman said, and I was. Eight minutes and 46 seconds is a long time for my stiff old joints to be kneeling on the wet ground and I worried about getting grass stains on my best summer capris, but I soon turned off the worry to focus on the silence of more than 1000 people kneeling in a city park to reflect and pray and offer support for social justice and racial equality.

Protests are not my thing and neither are crowds, especially since the coronavirus, but I wanted to attend the local Black Lives Matter protest that attracted a large and disparate crowd in our little river town yesterday, a purely peaceful event characterized by periods of quiet reflection, impassioned speeches, and occasional song. When it was over I felt as if I’d been schooled and churched and blessed.

I was proud to hear one of my former students talk about what it was like to grow up mixed-race in a mostly white community and to see so many colleagues come out to support our commitment to diversity and equality. Many wore masks and tried to maintain social distance while others milled about barefaced in a way that made me determined to keep near the back of the crowd. 

I haven’t been in a crowd that big since—well, February. The only place I go where I’m likely to encounter more than a few people is the grocery store, where I dash in, find what I need, and dash out, always keeping my distance from others. So I felt a little uncomfortable just being at the edge of this milling crowd, unsure when someone might mill a little too close.

But that’s not the kind of discomfort the event's organizer was aiming for. She asked us to kneel for eight minutes and 46 seconds not just to remember George Floyd and others like him but to think about what part we might play in our nation's long struggle to achieve racial equality. That's the kind of discomfort that can do some good, so I knelt and felt the complaints in my knees and worried about grass stains and felt the discomfort, but here's the thing: I got on the ground voluntarily, and I didn't have anyone's knee on my neck, and when the nearly nine minute were over, I got back up again, still stiff and a bit grass-stained but ready to do something useful with my discomfort.