If only the subjunctive were more intuitive!

I click on the "comment" button and stare at that little space hovering above the word "were" in a pdf document, but I just can't start typing. I fear that my comment might open some sort of Pandora's box and drag me kicking and screaming into the dark underworld I've worked very hard to avoid. And so I wonder: do I really want to explain the proper use of the subjunctive to the committee currently engaged in revising our faculty manual?

The short answer is no, I certainly don't want to get involved in an advanced grammar lesson on the day after Thanksgiving. So much to be thankful for: I didn't burn the house down while figuring out how to make Thanksgiving dinner for two in a convection oven! In fact I didn't burn anything, and the food was both delicious and abundant enough so I won't have to cook again for days and days! We're making great progress on the painting project and just today the nastiest-looking stretch of wall in the hallway got covered in pristine new paint! And I got my hair cut for the first time since August! It's still gray, but it'll get more gray even faster if I get dragged into the faculty-manual revision process.

But there on my desktop sits the draft produced by the committee that has been working steadfastly to revise our faculty manual. It certainly needs revision; various sections are inconsistent with each other and with current practice, and everywhere there are artifacts of prior attempts at revision by disparate groups exercising widely divergent writing styles. It's a patchwork of policies showing a lot of fraying at the edges, and it's high time someone took it in hand and fixed it up. I'm just delighted that someone isn't me.

I was asked to serve on the revision committee and I don't recall now what marvelous excuse I found to avoid getting sucked into the process. I've served before on committees trying to revise official documents and in fact I was a party to the production of what may well be the ugliest dependent clause ever to appear in a faculty document. More than a decade later it is still seared into my memory: "Because a perceived and sometimes real conflict of interest may exist...." I don't recall the various concerns that led to that tortured bit of prose, but I don't ever again want to be a party to such a chunk of awfulness.

And yet here I sit reading the current draft. The entire faculty was invited to offer comments, and you can bet that at some point next semester we'll be asked to hash out disagreements in a series of meetings. I don't know if you've ever seen a room full of PhDs haggling over the placement of a comma, but it's enough to make me want to take up an alternative career as folding chair in a professional wrestling bout. Maybe we can head off some of that rancor by making suggestions privately before meeting face-to-face?

So with an idle afternoon, I opened the draft and started dropping in occasional comments, not dealing with important policy issues but instead focusing on small grammar matters: a missing comma, a subject/verb agreement problem, and then there's that "were" that ought to be "was," unless they intend to refer to a condition contrary to fact, which I don't think they're doing in this particular case but how am I supposed to explain this in a tiny comment box?

The problem with the subjunctive is that no matter how you use it, someone will insist that it's wrong. Same problem with "who" and "whom": how much energy do I really want to put into insisting on a correct usage that a vast majority of readers would rather scratch out their own eyeballs than employ?

I'd like our faculty manual to be elegantly written (would that it were so!), but maybe that's too much to hope for. If we're aiming for functionality, then maybe a little wobbliness in use of the subjunctive is no big deal if it doesn't interfere with clarity. Except in this case I think it does. So what to do?

In the end I decide to write the comment. If the revision committee wants to ignore it, that's their prerogative; I won't fight to the death over the correct use of the subjunctive in a single clause in the faculty manual, but at least this time the resulting clunkiness won't be my responsibility.  

Unmasked anxieties

I haven't seen my students in more than a week but I saw them last night--in my dreams. A nightmare, I guess it was, involving a student who refused to mask up in class and also refused to leave so I called Campus Police, but instead of a uniformed officer, the entire force crowded into my classroom wearing matching yellow T-shirts and proceeded to sing karaoke.

None of them were wearing masks. 

You'd think my pandemic teaching anxieties would be cured by the prospect of six student-free weeks, but no: belligerent virus-spreaders now crowd into my dreams singing bad 80s rock songs. What does this portend?

Ohio is in the middle of a massive Covid spike and we've been getting bulletins almost daily about new campus Covid cases, both students and employees being diagnosed with the virus or placed in quarantine due to close contact with those who test positive. Around 70 students will have something extra to be thankful for this week when they're cleared from quarantine just in time for Thanksgiving.

I'm thankful that we're healthy and safe and planning a quiet Thanksgiving at home, just the two of us. It seems wrong to cook a turkey and all the trimmings for two people, especially when I'm still struggling to figure out how this fancy convection oven works. The knobs have tons of tiny icons that all look like blurs to my old eyes, but even under a magnifying glass they're still incomprehensible. I swear one of the icons looks like a mushroom cloud, exactly the sort of thing that's not welcome at Thanksgiving dinner.

I made my beloved cranberry chutney yesterday, making the house smell like a holiday. I'm not baking pie--my husband made a couple of green tomato pies a few weeks ago and there's still one in the freezer, and it feels right to celebrate Thanksgiving with produce from our own garden so we'll enjoy green tomato pie and I'll also bake a couple of our butternut squashes instead of sweet potatoes. Today I'll thaw some of our frozen pumpkin puree from previous gardens and bake some pumpkin cookies to share with the neighbors. We've downsized the bird to a turkey breast, and I'll make some green beans with almonds and stuffing on the side.

So it won't be normal Thanksgiving but it'll be something. We'll be thankful for surviving the semester, finding a great place to live in Jackson, making progress on the painting, our son's new job, and the prospect of a Zoom call with the grandkids. 

No guests, no masks, no police officers singing karaoke, but we'll do the best with what we have and be thankful for it.   

Unsent letters, final exam edition

Dear student of comedy:
Thanks for providing a solid laugh in the middle of my exam-grading. Your description of Walter Mitty, Don Quijote, and King Arthur (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) bickering over what to pack for their heroic adventure demonstrated admirable awareness of the works as well as a sharp sense of comic juxtaposition. Just picturing Sancho Panza trying to fit in with King Arthur's entourage was enough to make me laugh, but then when you add Walter Mitty's wife to the mix--that's priceless.

Dear aspiring C- student:
I believe you when you say a D+ is not consistent with your self-image, but I'm not sure what to do when you request extra points because you had no intention of doing poorly on any of your assignments. Frankly, I've never figured out how to objectively assess a student's intentions or how to assign a grade to a self-image. If you had intended to do well on the final essay, why didn't you, for instance, revise in response to my comments on your draft or seek my assistance to improve your performance? Why did your final exam demonstrate little to no understanding of the texts or concepts under discussion? If you intended to earn nothing less than a C- in my class, why didn't you act on those intentions from the beginning of the semester by--oh, I don't know, reading the assigned texts? That would be a good way to demonstrate your good intentions. But since your intentions have not resulted in results I can assess, you'll have to live with the D+.

Dear recycler of prose:
That paper you wrote may have earned an A in the class for which you originally wrote it, but if doesn't fulfill the requirements of the assignment in my class, don't come looking for an A. Are you familiar with the phrase "original work"?

Dear obsessive inserter of superfluous apostrophes:
Wouldn't it just be easier to leave 'em out? Think of all the time you'd save if you stopped inserting apostrophes where they're not needed! Why, you might be able to figure out how to insert apostrophes where they are needed, which would be a big step toward writing like a person who cares about precision instead of a caricature of a third-grader.

Dear self:
Why aren't you grading papers? You should be grading papers, and then you should be grading final exams, and then you should be submitting final grades and assessment reports and D/F slips. You certainly shouldn't be blogging. So stop it already. Just stop.

At least the exams will be squeaky-clean

Today I discovered that there are some things I cannot do in the middle of a noisy laundromat, and grading papers is at the top of the list. Exams, however, are another story--I managed to grade an entire set of final exams while moving two loads of laundry from basket to washer to dryer to neatly folded piles. What makes the difference?

The local laundromat is not an ideal environment for doing anything requiring coherent thought--or, really, any kind of thought. I was distracted by the other patrons' masklessness, the noisy machines, and the television up in the corner blaring ad after ad after noisy ad begging listeners to invest in Medicare supplement policies. The ads must work or there wouldn't be so many of them, but I would have appreciated more variety and less fear-mongering.

Grading papers requires a particular type of focused attention that I could not have managed in that environment; after all, how can I follow the nuances of a student's argument when the dryer is beeping for attention and some washed-up two-bit celebrity is trying to sell me a bill of goods on a television with the volume set to Wake The Dead? But this final exam was more fragmentary and eminently interruptable: read a question, make a comment, assign some points; check the dryer, match some socks, fold some towels; read another question, assign some points, and so on until all the exams are folded and the towels have been assigned final grades.

Wait, reverse that.

One class down, three to go--but all the other final exams are timed essays requiring sustained focused attention, so not conducive to laundromat grading. What other household chores lend themselves to multitasking? Grading while cooking? Grading while vacuuming? Wait--we're supposed to start painting rooms this weekend, so maybe I'll try grading while watching paint dry. At least it'll be quieter than grading at the laundromat.   

A little multiple-choice quiz for final exam season

You're a student and you've finished writing your final essay with time to spare. Do you

a. Take time to carefully proofread before submitting it to the dropbox.
b. Close the file and turn it in.
c. Start proofreading but get distracted in your search for the perfect synonym for "said" and lose track of time so that the dropbox closes before you're done revising.
d. Wait, did we have something due today?

Which of the following factors might influence your decision:

a. Your current grade in the class and whether it's possible to improve it.
b. How much sleep you got last night.
c. How many other finals you have to prepare for.
d. How much you love/hate the class in question.
e. What was the question again?

You've got a few minutes before a paper is due in the dropbox and you know your professor sent detailed comments on your draft a week ago; do you

a. Find the professor's email, open the draft, and revise the essay in response to feedback.
b. Look for the professor's email but get distracted by messages from the Financial Aid office. 
c. How am I supposed to remember all those passwords? I mean, nobody uses email these days anyway!

You forget to submit a paper to the dropbox so your professor sends an email asking whether there's a problem and asking you to submit it posthaste. Do you

a. Submit it immediately along with an abject apology.
b. Submit it immediately but blame the error on faulty technology/Coronavirus/roommate's marauding emotional support wolverine.
c. Submit it eventually without any explanation.
d. Keep searching for that email password--it's got to be somewhere!

At last! The semester is over and you don't have to think about all those demanding professors--but then one of them gives you a final grade you don't particularly like.Do you

a. Chalk it up to lack of effort and resolve to do better next time.
b. Start drafting an official appeal to submit through proper channels.
c. Send an irate email to the professor blaming your poor performance on various problems outside your control (tech, Covid, wolverine, etc.).
d. Send an email to the professor claiming that your poor performance does not reflect your true merits and requesting an extra-credit assignment.
e. Grades? What grades?

Scenic route = procastination path

Final exams start tomorrow but mine are all online so all I need to do is post the essay questions and then monitor my email in case there are problems, which I can do just as well in Jackson--maybe even better, since my home internet connection is often horrible while the one in Jackson is generally reliable. So I packed up and headed out this morning, looking forward to spending the rest of the week in the same house as my husband.

But I had to take the long way around, and here's why: a colleague who serves as director of the group that oversees the Luke Chute Conservation Area asked me to write a little something for their newsletter and let them print some of my photos. I've done this before, but that was when I was visiting Luke Chute much more often; this year I've spent so much time in Jackson that I've visited Luke Chute only three or four times, and not at all since September. So I thought I'd stop by this morning and take a hike, even though the weather was cold and drizzly. (That's what you call commitment to craft.) Now I'm recovering at the Jackson house with a cup of hot tea, ready to write up a little something for my colleague's newsletter--a perfect excuse for avoiding that next round of student papers begging for attention. And look at the pretty things I found on my hike! Much more fun than grading.

 

Oh to own a private island!

What this college really needs is a private island, preferably in a tropical location where the surf and sun can compensate for the hassles of transporting all our teaching materials across the sea. If only our illustrious Founders had been more forward-thinking! Maybe someone should strong-arm the trustees into buying an island before January....

I feel like I'm on an island this morning, sitting in my office in a building so quiet and still that I could be the only living person in the Mid-Ohio Valley. I've probably spent more time alone in my office this semester than ever before, and I know I've eaten more peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches than I have since childhood, when a PB&J was my daily lunch except on those rare occasions when Mom slapped some cream cheese down in place of the peanut butter. The pandemic has put a serious damper on our going-out-to-lunch habits, and the advantage of PB&J is that it doesn't have to be refrigerated so I don't even need to leave my office to fetch my lunch from the fridge.

My office today is as cold and quiet as a crypt and I may as well be in a crypt considering the way we live these days. Our state is heading toward tightening restrictions so I probably ought to go to the grocery store and stock up on staples before the hammer falls, but I suspect that the entire population of the county will be shopping this week. It's hard to maintain a safe social distance in an aisle crowded with shoppers in the irrational grip of toilet-paper panic.

So I sit in my office grading papers and leading Zoom review sessions for whoever shows up. My 8 a.m. class has nine students, eight of them female; which one do you think showed up for this morning's review session? We ladies had a nice little chat about what to expect on the final exam and how to strategize in response to various sample essay questions--it was as if we were on our own little Zoom island, with the rest of the world banished to the waves.

By the end of the week they'll all be banished back to the home towns while I retreat to my own forest fastness--my crypt, my cave, my private island that lacks only sun and surf to make it the ideal place to ride out the next stage of the pandemic.

Deep breath before the onslaught

With piles of papers to grade and final exams coming in next week, the most productive use of my time this morning would be to pick up the metaphorical red pen and start grading, but instead I think I'll sip tea while looking out the window at birds visiting the feeders. The papers can wait; the birds can't, and neither can the tea.

It's ginger peach tea this morning, mainly because I ran out of my usual chai blend. Every morning I take the chai test--if I can smell my tea, then I don't have Covid--but it works just as well with ginger peach. I'd like to go outside with the camera and see what I can see, but the camera bag is locked in my car and my son has the key (because his car is in the shop and I'm not going anywhere this weekend anyway, so why not?), but he worked late so I doubt that I'll see him or my keys before noon. Meanwhile, I'll sit here and watch. Maybe that hairy woodpecker will come back! And there it is.

Frost on the windows and still some yellow and orange leaves hanging on, especially on the sweet gum. Our little sweet gum is showing signs of splendor but it does not approach the gorgeousness of the tall sweet gum tree in front of my building on campus. Positively awe-inspiring. One of these days mine will be that big and impressive and I only hope I'll still be around to see it. Stayin' alive: it's our new national pastime.

The surge in Covid cases has everyone spooked, so no one complained when I moved all my classes to Zoom yesterday. I'd been struggling half the night with a fall allergy attack that caused sudden bouts of sneezing and coughing, kind of a bad look in the middle of a pandemic. Students seemed relieved to be able to hide behind the mute button, and I don't blame them. This semester has taken a lot out of all of us, and we're all nervous about what campus conditions will be like come January. 

(No coughing at all today, which is a relief. Stayin' alive, stayin' alive...)

Meanwhile, my classes meet one more time on Monday (on Zoom--all on Zoom) and then it's just final exams, one after another for the rest of the week. Monday's classes are all review sessions, and I've already prepared study guides and sample questions; if there's one thing I can do blindfolded with both hands tied behind my back, it's help students review for an exam. So no class-prep stress this weekend.

And then all my finals are being administered online, so technically, I don't even have to set foot on campus next week. As long as I'm available to release the exams and monitor my email in case problems arise, I can spend the rest of the semester sipping tea and watching birds.

An grading papers. At some point I will need to begin the excruciating process of grading (let's count!) 8 presentations, 52 researched essays, and 52 final exams. I'll be walking around blurry-eyed all week, so if I want to see some birds, I'd better do it now. And that woodpecker is back again--stayin' alive, stayin' alive....

No "I" in team, but there is a Me

Pick a problem--any problem, from your roommate's dirty laundry to world hunger--and put together your dream team of experts to work on solving the problem.

This is the challenge I gave my composition students during this morning's class. They've been reading articles about groups of experts trying to tackle some of life's persistent problems--protecting endangered whales, balancing the need for development with the need for conservation, and preventing paper jams--and they'd also viewed the film The Martian, where a whole host of people with different types of expertise have to work together to get Matt Damon home from Mars. The final exam will ask them to write an essay related to problem-solving, so I thought we would spend a little time talking about how to put together a problem-solving team.

But I gave them very strict rules: Choose a problem and then put together a team consisting of one character from The Martian, two experts from our recent readings, and two Marietta College employees, and be prepared to defend your choices.

All my groups chose complex problems--hunger, littering, protecting endangered species--and they made some fairly predictable choices of experts from the film and their readings, but their choices of campus experts were especially interesting. The group tackling the problem of how to feed starving people thought they ought to have a cafeteria employee on the team because they know something about the logistics of feeding people, and another group mixed biologists with engineers to make sure to prioritize design thinking. 

And one group chose to put me on their team of experts. Why me? I'm not a scientist and I don't know anything about how to solve these big complex problems, but here's what they said: "We need someone to persuade people to care about the problem. That's your job." 

Well sure, let me just clear my committee schedule and I'll get right on it....

They made me proud, these students, because they finally realize that the big complex problems that face our society require the efforts of all kinds of people, from biologists to economists to cafeteria workers and even students, and an important part of the work is simply telling the story so that people will care. If they've learned nothing else this semester, I'm glad they learned that communication is an essential part of solving any complex problem.

Now I can't wait to see how they put this principle to work on their final projects. I'm still on their team, even when I'm wielding the gradebook.

Who was that masked memory?

Funny thing: this morning I was thinking about a class I took in college nearly 40 years ago--a Restoration drama seminar that met one hour a week, outdoors if the weather was nice--and as I pictured our small group sitting on green benches on a vast green lawn, I clearly saw a mask across my face.

Which is ridiculous, of course. I wouldn't have been wearing a mask in that class--no one would have been wearing a mask on my small college campus in 1983! But somehow the pandemic has invaded my memories and edited them to honor our mask mandate.

What about the future? Do I see myself wearing a mask to teach next semester? Yes--but a vaccine could change all that. As I look back on the dumpster fire this semester has become, I keep telling myself next semester will be different, and I hope it's true but I'm not confident.

One thing will definitely be different: I have to find new ways to encourage class participation. I've used various methods to engage students in class discussion, but putting a check-mark next to names of students who speak so I can reward them with participation points has never been part of my modus operandi. But now that's exactly what I'm considering. I have to do something different to make students open their mouths.

The worst aspect of this semester's classes has been my students' overwhelming unwillingness to speak in class, whether face-to-face or on Zoom. I'm a little hampered in the face-to-face classes because social distancing means students who sit in the back are so far away that what I can see of their faces is a blur, so for the first time in my teaching career I've utterly failed to learn many of my students' names. 

And if back-row students are blurry in person, they're practically invisible when we're on Zoom, where they can press mute and walk away. At some point in nearly every Zoom session I put my students into small groups to discuss a question and report back, but I've been told that some students simply disappear, leaving the more diligent students to do all the work.

But next semester will be different! Someone suggested making the students put name tags on their desks until learn their names, but if I can't see their faces clearly, there's no chance I'll be able to read their name tags. Since we'll still be required to assign seats next semester, I'll have to devote some serious time to memorizing the seating chart, or maybe keep a copy of it nearby so I can consult it and call out names when my questions are met with silence.

And suddenly I'm picturing myself as my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Davis, with her giant pouf of white hair, her jeweled cat-eye glasses, and her dainty hanky tucked into the sleeve of her dress. I fear that next semester I will become Mrs. Davis, a persnickety pedant armed with a seating chart and ruler to slap on the desk when my students won't respond.

But I'll be wearing a mask! A mask mandate powerful enough to edit my memories won't let me bare my face in class even in my dreams. 

Hope that light at the end of the tunnel isn't a train coming through

A friend emailed this morning to remind me of a horrible thing that happened back in January, and I responded, "Remember when you thought that was the worst problem you'd face this year?" There's a dose of perspective! We've survived one horrible thing after another, and although  the year isn't over yet, I see light at the end of the tunnel.

One more week of teaching before finals! Nearly all of my quarantining students have returned to class and our official campus Covid counter says we're down to only six active cases and 61 recovered cases. I'm tempted to say we've dodged a bullet--but again, the semester isn't over yet.

And yet it feels over. I'm counting down the few lessons left to prep and the final assignments still coming in, and every item I check off my list feels like a step toward triumph. My students sit there stunned in class as if this semester has beaten every ounce of energy out of them, but they'll pull themselves together to finish those final projects like the troupers they are.

For days I've been holding one-on-one Zoom conferences with various students to discuss their final projects and I find myself saying the same things over and over--points that I've covered in class but that many students seem to feel don't apply to their personal situations--and I am so tired of staring at the screen that I'd like to tear my eyeballs out with a fork. But that would be bad, not least because I've just had one set of stitches removed from my face and I really don't need another set. (Not skin cancer! Just a benign lesion caused by sun damage! Slather on that sunscreen, kiddos!)

In other good news, today I had the extreme pleasure of sending out letters from the tenure and promotion committee recommending deserving colleagues for tenure and promotion. The committee works really hard but the reward is the opportunity to make a difference in colleagues' careers, and sending out those affirming letters first thing this morning put a smile on a bunch of faces, mine included.

Good news for my colleagues, good news for my face, and a shortening list of things to do before this bizarre and exhausting semester becomes history--if I weren't so exhausted, I'd be tempted to do a little happy dance. It's dangerous to celebrate prematurely, because what if that light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be an express train heading our way?

Better do that happy dance now before it's too late!

Flipping the syllabus

In response to a student's complaint about so many final projects all due in the final weeks of the semester, I said, "Okay, from now on I'll make final projects due in the first week of the semester."

"But how--" she asked.

"Final paper due the first week, preliminary draft due the second week, prewriting and thesis development the third week--that way it won't all be due at the end."

"But wait a minute--"

"Think of how easy the end of the semester will be! By the time I get around to explaining how to use the library's research databases to find the resources you need for a successful research project, it'll already be graded and returned!"

"But how--"

 And that's when I had to tell her I was joking. 

Judging from the alertness level in my classes this morning, I believe I'm not the only one who didn't get much sleep. 

 

 

Conversations I wish I'd missed

In class this morning:

Student: Can you tell me when we're having our final exam?

Me: It's on the syllabus.

Student: But the final exam schedule is so hard to read! Can you just tell me the date and time?

Me: The date and time are on the syllabus.

Student: I don't have the syllabus.

Me: The syllabus is available on Moodle. Look, right here's the link! Also, the date and time of the final exam are listed very clearly on the final exam study guide and on the Moodle page for finals week--right here! 

Student: But another professor told me it's really hard to read the final exam schedule.

Me: Maybe so, but that's why I've listed the date and time of our final exam in three different places you can easily access.

Student: But can you just tell me when we're having our final exam?

On the phone this morning:

Me (politely, kindly, with a smile in my voice): Can you tell me your mask policy for employees?

Grocery-store manager: Employees are required to wear masks, but sometimes they slip up. Did you see an employee not wearing a mask?

Me: So I was in the store yesterday to pick up a few things, and I noticed that the employees around my age were all wearing masks but the teenaged cashier at the only available check-out line had her mask pulled down all the way under her chin.

Grocery-store manager: She's not supposed to do that.

Me: But wait! The bagger at the end of the conveyer kept his mask on until he needed to sneeze, and then he pulled the mask down and sneezed all over my groceries.

And I'm not going to repeat what the manager said except to note that he's going to have a word with the young people because they ought to know better than that.

And indeed they should. We all ought to know better than that. Can we please all just put our thinking-caps on and keep them fully engaged until the pandemic is over?