Which way is Up? No, seriously, I need to know!

At a difficult moment a student asked me how I'm doing and I calmly replied, "Well, I'm falling to pieces but I'm trying to do it with dignity and grace."

I'm not sure what provoked that response--possibly the newly altered traffic pattern in my building, where I've struggled mightily to train myself to use the correct staircase and doorway for up or down or entry or exit but now, after two weeks of classes, suddenly they've switched the directions on the staircases so that down is up and up is down. I'll have to retrain my mind and body all over again. Small thing, but the small things keep piling up and bumping into big things.

Like the virus. We have a case. A student in one of my classes tested positive so that student and everyone who sat nearby has to quarantine, which means they have to join the class discussion via Zoom, which we can manage except when they're too sick to click, and then I'm supposed to make the class recordings available to the absent students.

So I thought I'd listen to the class recordings and all I can say is: Houston, we have a problem. In some classes the Zoom recordings are clear, although they're not great at picking up comments from students beyond the front row. In other classes the recordings are all but inaudible--and the written transcripts aren't any better. Transcripts simply aren't available for some of my classes, and the ones that are available are absolutely excruciating to read; not only do they transcribe every repetition and false start and "um" and "like," but they sometimes produce gibberish, transforming "major essay" into "made your essay" and somehow producing out of thin air the phrase "and grandson a spreadsheet." (Don't ask me. No idea.)

Today I get to test out a lapel mike, which ought to solve the Zoom recording problem while also equipping me with one more piece of technology to screw up. Provided that I can find my way to class first. My next task: trying to figure out which way is Up. 

There is no way for someone on my floor to exit by this door.

A little spider-centric self-care

 It's self-care day! No classes for me and no meetings until 4 p.m. so I decided to sleep in (until nearly 6 a.m.!), do a little housework, and then head up to the Luke Chute pollinator habitat for a morning hike, and my goodness was I glad I remembered to carry my walking stick to clear spider webs from the path. I mean, spider webs are beautiful but I prefer not to wear them on my face. Thistle, ironweed, and pokeweed were towering over the path and I saw a few butterflies and birds, but mostly I relished the placid river, green woods, and colors. 

And the spiders. Let's not forget the spiders. 

Next time I'll make my own sandwich

For all my griping about technology sometimes it works wonders, like this morning when a former student working on an article for a magazine asked if I knew an expert on a fairly esoteric topic and I knew just the person. The student texted me on my phone and I sent a message via Facebook to my contact, who gave me an email address to give the former student, completing a circuit that only worked because of the presence of a human being in the middle--me!

For a moment I felt like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character in Modern Times, when he's moving smoothly through the gears of the machine without being ground to pieces. Sometimes, though, the machinery doesn't work quite so smoothly and someone gets crushed, as in last weekend's tech fiasco or the big Zoom outage yesterday or, on a smaller scale, today's lunch.

I've been bringing my lunch to work, see, packing a sandwich and a few cherry tomatoes in a bag so I can sit outside by the butterfly garden in the middle of the day and enjoy a few moments of peace. Today, though, I didn't bring my lunch to campus, so I thought I'd do my part to stimulate the local economy. But blood-pressure-wise, a crowded food venue is the exact opposite of the butterfly garden; I'm just not comfortable lingering in a small space with a large number of people, so I thought I'd try the campus food service's new online ordering system.

Except it doesn't work. Online ordering will be available "soon," whatever that means. So okay, I can stimulate the local economy by going off campus, and guess what--my favorite farm market offers online ordering! So I went to their website, ordered my favorite sandwich, put in my credit card number, and headed for the car. Road construction delayed me a bit so I arrived long after my sandwich should have been ready, but it wasn't. They had no record of my order--lost in the ether. They kindly invited me to order in person, which would require standing in a long line of people crammed into a small space, but I could feel my blood pressure rising so I politely declined. 

No, I did not get my money back. That's how nervous I am about crowded public spaces: I'm willing to forfeit $5.99 to avoid standing in a crowd long enough to get a refund on a lost order.

So I left, but I was still hungry. By that point every fast-food place I passed had a massive line of cars waiting for the drive-through, and wouldn't it be interesting to know the environmental impact of all those cars idling in drive-through lines all over the world? But I saw a McDonald's with a short line and zipped on in there, only to discover that the menu offers very little that I found appetizing. But after my long detour to the farm market I needed to get back to campus so I ordered food that I didn't even like just to get out of there.

Clearly the technology is not entirely at fault here. I mean, I wouldn't have had such a lousy lunch if I'd made my own sandwich or overcome my fear of crowded public places, but I've spent so much time kicking myself for my frequent technological snafus lately that I really need another target lest I become little more than a walking bruise, so I'm going to blame the online ordering system, which ground me up like a fast-food burger and spat me out in an unappetizing heap.

Time to hide all the crowbars

On the first day of class, my film students watched two brief video clips--the copier-smashing scene from Office Space and the driving-the-car-into-the-lake scene from The Office--and then wrote about how the clips portray the relationship between people and machines. I was surprised by how many of my students had never seen Office Space and by how much sheer joy I can still get out of watching those guys whaling away at a copier with a crowbar.

I've returned to that scene in my mind many times in the past week: When I stayed in my office hours after my final class on Friday to try to repair a tech problem, and when I returned to my office Saturday morning and again Sunday morning to continue wrestling with the issue, and when I learned that I'll have to accommodate the needs of another distanced learner who will be attending every class via Zoom, and then this morning when I learned that Zoom is suddenly not working at all, so that my Comedy class's first foray into Zoom teaching will have to be postponed.

But the class itself is not postponed: Zoom is down but Moodle is available, so I emailed my Comedy students to tell them I'd post an online discussion activity on Moodle to take the place of today's class. And so I sit here in my office once again scrambling to rescue what remains of today's lesson plans and trying not to cry. (Again. Tears have appeared nearly every day since classes started, mostly tears of exhaustion after I finally get home, which I'm doing a little later every day with not an ounce of energy left for whatever needs to be done at home.)

I'm not a violent person but if I routinely kept a crowbar in my office, you know what I'd be doing right now, right? 

I keep hearing that old-fogey faculty members need to get with the program and adapt to the demands of technology, and I'm trying! But sometimes the technology doesn't work, and sometimes the labels on the remote-control for the classroom projector are too small for my old eyes to read, and sometimes my students submit documents in a form my computer can't read, so I have to be nimble, flexible, agile, and resilient.

But one of these days I'm getting my hands on a crowbar, and when that day comes--look out!

With a little help from our friends

It's hard enough to be expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast, but now we're supposed to do many things daily that seem impossible: to have frequent contact with students while avoiding viral spread, to adapt to unfamiliar technology in unfamiliar classrooms where that soft-spoken student who sits in the back is so far away that there's no hope of hearing her through her mask, to conduct effective class discussion among students who aren't in the same room, and on and on, every day a new challenge. Today's minor challenge was making sure my mask was rightside-up, and just go ahead and kick me for buying a mask that requires that much attention.

I've been baffled a few times this week but never more than when a neighbor knocked on my door the other day and told me that a deer had run across the road in front of his car and leapt down the embankment to the creek, breaking its legs in the process. It was lying there suffering on the creek bank on our property, so the neighbor suggested that I put it out of its misery.

With what--an eggbeater? I could recite poetry until the young buck died of boredom, but I don't believe that's what my neighbor had in mind. Impossible! So the neighbor offered to go get a gun and pretty soon we had a whole host of neighbors I never see out along the embankment offering suggestions, and then we had a carcass on our hands. The situation provided sad evidence of the brutality inherent in everyday life, but on the other hand it was a handy reminder that tasks that seem impossible sometimes just require a little help from our friends.

Today I was teaching in an unfamiliar classroom when I encountered a tech glitch that I feared would destroy my lesson plan, but fortunately I was able to nab a passing colleague who teaches down there all the time and together we worked it out. If we're asked to do the impossible, it's good to have helpers nearby who have the right tools to solve the problems, and if they can do it without leaving behind a smelly carcass, so much the better.

If I wear it upside-down, the books will fall off the shelf.

Small change, big impact

It's a cliche already to talk about how exhausting it is to teach classes via Zoom--to keep track of all those faces and try to lead a big group in a meaningful discussion--but yesterday when both of my first-year classes were meeting on Zoom I tried something new: instead of constantly looking down at my notes, I tucked them in my handy-dandy little gizmo that holds papers upright, so I could have my notes at eye level throughout the discussion. Not sure why it never occurred to me to do this when I was teaching for weeks and weeks on Zoom last spring, but I guess I'm just glad to find a small change that can make my work just a little bit easier.

New adventures in teaching, armed with masks and shields

At first my students couldn't hear me, which is not surprising given the way face masks muffle sound and prevent projection. So I switched to the plastic face shield so they could hear me but then I couldn't see them through my fogged-up glasses. So it was a rough start for both of my early classes today, but nevertheless it felt great to be back in the classroom.

Well, mostly great. Coronavirus-inspired anxiety about being in the presence of groups of people led to an upset stomach and a nasty taste in my mouth, and I left my travel mug of strong black tea in the car when I got to campus this morning so I approached my classes insufficiently caffeinated.  But somehow we carried on and did all the usual first-day-of-class things plus some unusual things, like reminding them of the all-college mask policy (100 percent compliance so far!) and the new traffic patterns inside the building and the procedure for attending office hours online.

And speaking of traffic patterns, I'm accustomed to teaching my two early classes back-to-back in the same room, but social distancing required moving the second, larger class to an improvised classroom space on the top floor of the library, so I'm dashing across campus between classes and hoping not to arrived covered in sweat. But I won't be doing that on Wednesday, when my two first-year writing classes will meet via Zoom. That will be the pattern this semester: two days each week face-to-face, one day on Zoom. Fortunately, all but one of my first-year students have used Zoom previously.

My two literature classes will be more complicated. I have some students with health issues that prevent them from being in class face-to-face, so they'll be participating remotely via Zoom all the time. I'm a little nervous about how well I'll manage class discussion in a class where some students are sitting right in front of me while others are on a screen, but I'm hoping that after a few weeks it will become second nature.

And then there are the clicky issues. The other day I practiced the steps I will need to share a bit of video in a class containing both face-to-face and online students, and it's just a ridiculous number of clicks: turn on the volume button on the main console, check the volume level on the computer desktop, cue up the video, click on "share screen" in Zoom, make sure to click on that tiny "share computer sound" button at the bottom of the screen, and start the video. Skip any one step or do them out of order and you're back to square one.

Every new complication means one more way things can go wrong, all stacked on top of my usual start-of-semester concerns, like learning students' names. I suggested this morning that they ought to wear masks with their names emblazoned across them, but my suggestion was met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. But just wait until Wednesday! I'll see their smiling faces all over my computer screen with names right underneath. Provided that I can make the tech work correctly.

On Wednesday my Honors students will dive right into Homer's Odyssey, accompanying Odysseus and Telemachus on their journeys into the unknown, where they will meet various monsters and overcome unexpected obstacles, but for all of us who are back in the classroom, this entire semester will be an odyssey. Odysseus would scoff at fighting the Cyclops armed only with cloth masks and plastic shields, but if that's what we've got to fight our monsters, I guess we'd better carry on and hope for the best.

It's the little things I miss the most

I miss the pastries.

Gather 'round, young 'uns, while Granny tells you what life was like in the old times, before the virus banished us all to isolation inside our phones. We used to have big gatherings of people--hundreds and hundreds of people--all inside the same room, mingling promiscuously, gabbing, hugging, laughing in each others' faces--without masks.

Every year about this time the College would gather all employees--faculty, staff, administration--for Fall Convocation, where we would welcome new employees and hear presentations about the state of the College and the challenges ahead, and since you can't expect several hundred people to sit quietly for three hours of PowerPoint without some sort of incentive, we would all be given goodies (like a new College t-shirt or, one year, a branded multi-use tool that I never found a reason to use) and plied with coffee and pastries.

Coffee I can live without--and in fact I've been living quite well without it since early March--but I do miss those pastries, especially the flaky little knots filled with apricot yumminess. We would gather up our goodies and sit at tables surrounded by friends and colleagues, chatting away and catching up on how we'd spent the summer, and those of us who sat in the back could lean in and make snarky comments during the PowerPoint presentations. Given the uneven distribution of PowerPoint skills, there was always something to snark about. 

One year (this is true) they didn't give us a rest-room break. You can't put several hundred people in a room, ply them with coffee, and then subject them to three hours of PowerPoint without a rest room break. That's got to be a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Well that won't happen this year. Fall Convocation is all online, and until someone invents an app allowing YouTube to serve coffee and pastries, we're on our own for refreshments. There will be no hugging, no chatting, no laughing in each others' faces, and while I'm free to make snarky comments to my heart's content while watching the event from my office, solitary snark is no fun.

But it's probably more fun than being hooked to a ventilator in an ICU, so we do what we have to do to carry on so that we'll survive long enough to tell the tale to our grandkids.

It's just not the same.

Unpixelating my eyeballs

Stare at computer screens long enough and everything starts looking pixelated, so I stepped outside my frigid office to eat lunch in the sunshine on the college mall. Once again the grounds crew has outdone itself by planting cutting gardens that attract pollinators--butterflies and bees buzzing from blossom to blossom. I didn't have my good camera and even if I did, I couldn't capture the majesty of the sunflowers stretching into the sky, but I enjoyed the buzzy quiet and the beauty of the blooms, with not a pixel in sight.

It's hard to see, but that center sunflower is at least ten feet tall.

Avoid the Day: Feeding the inner gargoyle

 Jay Kirk's new book Avoid the Day carries the subtitle A New Nonfiction in Two Movements, and if you're wondering A new nonfiction what?, join the club. Is it memoir, travel narrative, exploration of the collective unconscious through myth, or frenzied fever dream? Maybe all of the above?

If nothing else it's entertaining, except when it isn't, and here I'm referring to large chunks of the second movement when Kirk immerses us in an attempt to film a horror movie while on a ship exploring the Arctic. It's a deep dive into his personal neuroses involving visions of a muddy hole, a fire-hungry father, and a menacing dentist, and if you're giving away free tickets for that particular cruise, count me out.

The first movement is more fun, when Kirk seeks a lost manuscript of a Bartok quartet. Kirk retraces Bartok's travels through Transylvania, where the composer recorded folk music on wax cylinders and where Kirk's digital recorder breaks down when he needs it most. He draws a connection between Bartok's recordings and his own writing: "His whole method relied on this advantage: to go out into the world, collect bits of direct experience, make faithful transcriptions, then feed it to his inner gargoyle."

The problem, however, is that Kirk's inner gargoyle can be a pretty unpleasant creature, and he swiftly loses faith in his ability to gather "bits of direct experience" because everything he experiences becomes weighed down with meaning and morphed into something indirect and inauthentic and inaccessible, until he admits "an acute allergy to experience itself":

I had long suspected that my instruments for recording these experiences were little more reliable than a Xerox on the fritz. Mine maybe more than others. Memory being, of course, the defective machine spitting out its trickster distortions. The original memo--if there ever really had been one--was lost. The problem, no doubt, was that I had given myself over to thinking too much about the idea of experience.

Throughout his travels in Eastern Europe and the Arctic, he perceives experience through a scrim of myth and memory in a frantic search for meaning constantly derailed by rabbit trails splitting off and joining up again until everything seems connected in one massive labyrinth. During aforay into connections between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Virgil's Aeneid, and Egyptian myth, he finds "A bird-faced god sinking into the underworld in a boat. Everything entrapped by symbol, a sign to look elsewhere, to something not itself, the eternal spasmodic deferral of meaning." 

Kirk himself can't resist making such connections, multiplying clever similes as in this description of icebergs encountered on his Arctic expedition: "Slabs tilted like massive white piano lids, cracked and split, as if we'd crashed into a piano factory....Out the window the passing ice fields look like thousands of unhinged white doors. Like a torn-up suicide note shakily reglued. Like the ruins of the sun." The comparisons are playful and visual, but they also gain resonance in context, where Kirk has been obsessing over the impact of ever-present Arctic sunshine, the role of the sun in various myth systems, the presence of music in the the hum of existence, and the lure of suicide, which would allow him to escape from "the eternal horror show of connectivity. The never-ending hum of the pattern machine." 

Dead men tell no tales so I'm probably not spoiling the plot by revealing that in the end he does not kill himself, but after his bizarre and baroque explorations of myth, memory, and experience, he finds himself suspended between wheeling birds and the underworld, hovering over "The still blue hole. Like a pulsing orb at the center of this dark wheel of noise." And while parts of the book may be unpleasant, Kirk's willingness to drill beneath the surface and let us see the orb and hear the hum make Avoid the Day a trip worth taking. Just be sure to take along your seasick pills and a warm blanket.

Some updates and a brief celebration before panicking

My birding-and-botanizing buddy has provided identifications for some wildflowers I didn't recognize last week:

Partridge-pea, or Chamaechrista fasciculata

Heal-all, or Prunella Vulgaris

Hairy Ruellia, or Ruellia Caroliniensis

 

Also, my colleague the dragonfly expert has identified this as a Tiger Spiketail, rarely seen in Ohio (only two confirmed sightings this year):

 

Finally, and here I demonstrate my highly developed ability to bury the lede, this morning I finally submitted the full draft manuscript of the comedy text to the editors, which gets that massive project off my back just in time to allow me to panic over how unready I am to start teaching in a week! Right now I live in this odd environment of mingled panic and pride; I don't know whether to jump for joy or tear out my hair, which would certainly solve the haircut dilemma. But for five minutes I'll allow myself to celebrate: woo-hoo it's done! There will be plenty of time to panic after that. 

Shaggy, blurry, and profoundly unrelaxed

Lately people keep telling me to just relax, which is good advice except that it's generally given at a time when relaxation is impossible, like yesterday afternoon, when I went to my optometrist's office for my every-six-months check to see how my cataracts are progressing and whether my glaucoma numbers are getting any worse, and I had to sit with my chin perched uncomfortably on a hard plastic frame while they first shot puffs of air into my eyeballs over and over again (because I kept blinking and wrecking the test) and then made me focus on a bright yellow light and push a button whenever another light flashed but I wrecked the test again because I couldn't keep staring at that yellow light without occasionally looking away and everything was going blurry and dark, and frankly, relaxation is the last thing on my mind when someone is messing with my eyeballs.

Just relax, they said. This will be over soon, they said, but all I can say is: not soon enough.

I've been told to just relax while trying to learn new technology to use in my classes this fall, even though the thought of trying to manipulate all this tech in front of a room full of students (or a Zoom full of students) just over a week from now fills me with dread, and I've also been asked repeatedly whether I'm willing to be a guinea pig to test new procedures before they get released on the full campus, most recently when I had to get a new college I.D. because I wrecked the old one (long story) and the I.D. is now essential for basic needs like getting into my building and making photocopies, so I said Fine, try out your new I.D. photo process on me, and I tried to just relax even though I hate getting my photo taken under any circumstances, and the result is a photo that makes me look squashed and desperately in need of a haircut, which is accurate but not reassuring. 

I did get a haircut, finally, in June when the salons started opening up again, but then I was a captive audience for a stylist who couldn't stop spewing ignorant conspiracy theories that destroyed my ability to just relax, so I haven't been back for a trim since then even though my bangs are now longer than they've been in at least a decade. I don't want to be a guinea pig for anyone's loony theories, and I can't just relax when the person waving scissors within an inch of my face is clearly committed to the absolute destruction of the human race, so for the moment I'm letting my hair stay shaggy while wearing colorful masks to distract people from the mess.

I used to find haircuts relaxing, a guilt-free opportunity to sit quietly and do nothing, but now, like so many other ordinary events, haircuts are fraught with danger. I can't just relax in the stylist's chair or at the grocery store where shoppers demonstrate every possible misunderstanding of how masks work or on campus where I'm constantly banging my head against various new technologies or even in my bed when I'm sound asleep until some raging doubt about the syllabus alerts me at 4 a.m. and demands immediate attention. Squashed by anxieties and blinded by blurry eyes and shaggy bangs, I bumble my way through my days just hoping not to make too big a fool of myself. Under current conditions, that may be the best any of us can hope for.

 

Too many tweaks spoil the syllabus

Lately I keep repeating the same vicious cycle of syllabus-tweaking: make a change to an assignment to accommodate pandemic conditions, adjust surrounding assignments so they work well together, and then wake up suddenly in the middle of the night realizing that I need to change it all back again.

The issues are tiny individually but awkward in aggregate. Here's just one example: in a sophomore-level literature class full of (mostly) non-majors, my usual practice is to give unannounced reading quizzes about once a week to encourage students to keep up with the reading and to introduce them to the kinds of questions they'll encounter on exams. However, I also need to minimize paper-passing, so okay, let's put the quizzes online. But then I would need to either let students take the quizzes outside of class (in which case I have to get involved with online proctoring, which seems like a lot of fuss for a 10-point quiz) or else require them to bring laptop computers to take the quiz in class--while I try to monitor 18-20 computers for cheating in a classroom set up for maximum social distancing.

Just thinking about it makes me want to lie down.

So okay, we can skip the reading quizzes and come up with some other kind of reading response, which requires yet another series of tweaks to the syllabus until I figure out that my plan is once again flawed and I have to go and do the whole thing again. And that's just one class. I'm teaching four different preps starting two weeks from now. I foresee a lot of hand-wringing and sleepless nights in my immediate future, until I realize that I'm just not going to be able to produce the perfect class under current conditions. Maybe what we all need to do is stop tweaking and embrace the imperfections.

Yeah, right. You first.