Friday poetry challenge: paean to lost pleasures

This week I'm really missing the highly civilized practice of taking a cup of hot tea with me to class. It's nice to wet my whistle when I teach back-to-back without a break, and the pause to pick up the cup and take a sip fills that awkward gap while I'm waiting for a student to respond to a question. But masks make so many things impossible, so I walk to class without my tea and miss the feeling of hot chai rolling over my tongue while my students try to look thoughtful.

Give me
my tea!
A mug
to lug
to class--
alas!
My chai--
goodbye!
Caffeine
from green
or black
(alack!)
tea leaves.
At fe-
ver pitch
I itch
to sip
from mug,
to chug
my brew.

You too?

Anyone want to try a little poetic paean to a practice squelched by the pandemic?

Bev, the magic draggin'

Yesterday I was crowing over how beautifully my students had sparkled in a difficult class discussion; today I'm puzzling over student prose describing a character as a "savor." The ups and downs come way too quickly in this profession: one minute I'm hitting all my marks and eliciting brilliant comments from students and the next I'm responding to an email that I will quote in full: "whats the name of the textbook." Two weeks into the semester!

I've adjusted to my new classroom spaces and figured out most (but not all) of my tech problems. On Zoom days I'm trying all kinds of tricks to transform students from names on a screen to actively engaged learners, but it's rough going and the methods I'm resorting to make me feel like we've regressed to third grade. In my composition class I'm so desperate to overcome one particular problem that--well, I'm a little ashamed of what I'm planning to do. Whips and chains are not involved but tomorrow I'm planning to offer a smidgen of extra credit to motivate them to do something that every writing student ought to do anyway.

The problem is that these students refuse to offer specific suggestions on each other's writing. We do this frequently throughout the semester--in fact, every time they turn in a low-stakes writing assignment, I make each student read another classmate's writing, point out something that classmate has done well, and offer a specific suggestion for improvement. 

This semester, though, almost all of their comments consist of vague statements like "This is fine the way it is." If we talk about qualities of an excellent title and then I ask them to read a classmate's writing and suggest improvements to the title, they will write, "The title is fine," even if the title is literally "Homework assignment"--or if there's no title at all. In fact, I see very little evidence that they are even reading their classmates' (short!) writing assignments.

But, as I keep reminding them, writing frequently and getting focused feedback on that writing is the best way to improve, so tomorrow I'm raising the stakes. They've all been having problems integrating, punctuating, and citing quotes, which is normal at this point in the semester, so we'll spend some time at the beginning of class talking about the Quotation Mantra (and yes, I do make them chant the phrase Integrate! Punctuate! Cite! in unison) and looking at a handout modeling these skills, and then I will ask them to look at a classmate's online writing assignment and point out one area where quote integration needs further work. Any student who posts a specific suggestion that provides the correct method will receive some piddly little amount of extra credit, hardly enough to make a dent in the grade but possibly enough to motivate some real attention to student writing. 

But maybe not. Maybe they'll all pull a Bartleby. That's who I think of when students hide behind a name on a Zoom screen or put their heads down so I won't call on them in class: Bartleby the scrivener turning his head to the wall and saying "I prefer not to." Well guess what? I prefer not to resort to third-grade methods to motivate students to engage in learning, but if that's what it takes to drag students away from the brick wall, then let's get draggin'.

Because how much weirder can this day get?

Yesterday we had no water at our house and this morning my car was totally encased in a thick layer of ice. My relationship with water seems to have hit a rough spot. Have I somehow offended Poseidon?

Who is the Greek god of doorknobs--or did the Greeks have no need for a doorknob deity? A little while ago when I opened the door to leave my office, the doorknob suddenly, without warning, fell off in my hand. (Although, come to think of it, what kind of warning was I expecting?) Now I'm sitting in my office waiting for whoever is responsible for campus doorknob repair. I'm afraid to close the door in case I can't get it open again, so I guess I'm not going anywhere for a while.

Hephaestus--Greek god of the forge, of weapons and metalwork and smithery. I suppose a doorknob could serve as a weapon in a pinch, so we'll adopt Hephaestus as our doorknob deity. The Romans adapted him as Vulcan, a name much more mellifluous than Hephaestus and also more redolent with pop-culture associations. 

Despite my marred morning, I'm not feeling particularly volcanic today. Sure, the ice made my morning commute a little intense, but I got here safely and taught my three morning classes without a hitch. I'll have to leave my office door hanging open when I go to teach my afternoon class, but even the sight of that uncooperative doorknob has failed to roil my emotions. What could go wrong? Against all odds, I feel calm, safe, positively pacific. 

Just don't tell Poseidon. He's bound to trouble the waters.

 

It ain't pretty, but it's what we've got

I'm sitting in my office early this morning getting ready to go to class when I reach for my mask and find nothing. No mask! How did I get to my office without a mask? Must have walked across campus without it, so early that no one was present to point out my intransigence. What a scofflaw! A scourge! A menace to society!

I was glad to have a box of spare masks in my office, even if they aren't pretty. At this point, I'm happy to have made it through the week, pretty or not. We have a few new cases of the virus on campus and I have students learning remotely in three of my classes, but we're still here, carrying on as best we can despite everything.

The best moment of the week, I think, was when my literary theory students were scheduled to talk about the role of the poet in society on the same day Amanda Gorman read her remarkable poem at the inauguration. None of the students had seen it before class, so I first asked them why we need a poet at an inauguration, an event focused on government and politics and patriotic spectacle. What can a poet possibly add? My students couldn't come up with any compelling responses until we watched the video. I don't know whether Amanda Gorman's poem would be as powerful on paper, but her performance gave my students something to say: "She made me want to go out and do something amazing," or "Poets remind us who we are." (Because we forget.)

I need that kind of motivation today because this week has worn me out. Two more classes and I'll be done with the first week of the semester! That's worth celebrating even if it ain't pretty.

Either that room goes or I do

Good news! Our resident problem-solvers have been hard at work solving various difficulties re: classroom space, and they've solved one major problem--and created a whole new one!

The 15-student class has been moved out of the 14-seat room and into a classroom more appropriate for its size, and it happens to be my favorite classroom in the building, so no worries. But meanwhile, while no one was paying attention a few more students added my freshman comp class, which made the class too big for social distancing in its assigned classroom, so today I've learned that my first class of the day will be held in the worst classroom in the building. 

Okay, I realize that there's a limited number of rooms available at any given hour and under pandemic conditions we all have to make sacrifices, but I've made plenty of sacrifices already and I think I may have reached my limit. I have endured faulty technology, moldy ceilings, and an improvised room in a busy social space, and I've put up with rooms that were so hot, cold, or cheerless that they seriously distracted from learning. But this room will be the death of me.

As much as I hate chalk, I can put up with a chalkboard if that's the price of teaching in the middle of a pandemic. And the computer setup in there is notoriously slow and cranky, but again, I can put up with that. What I can't manage is that stupid little stage.

That's right: in an otherwise flat-floored room, there's an elevated platform up front, and the only way to get to the chalkboard and the computer console is to step up on that platform and teach from there. It's not even a very big platform, a meager half-circle just adequate for a not-very-mobile prof, but if I'm pacing around waving my arms while pontificating about the glories of the semicolon, I'll be over the edge in a heartbeat. No matter how carefully I maintain my situational awareness, at some point in the semester I'm going to miss the step and fall, or I'm going to suffer a vertigo attack and fall, or I'm going to get distracted by a student and fall. It will not be pretty.

Moreover, the awareness that falling is inevitable will make me dread every moment I spend in that classroom. I'm already grinding my teeth to pieces because of the anxiety of teaching under pandemic conditions; by the end of this semester I'll be one giant toothless walking bruise. Is this the kind of future anyone really wants?

The paranoid part of me wonders whether this is some sort of evil conspiracy to nudge me toward early retirement so the College can replace me with two adjuncts and a trained seal, but I suspect it's just the result of our overworked records office staff trying to match enrollments with available spaces without any awareness of which rooms are workable and which are actively malevolent. If no other option arises, I will have to teach in that room two mornings a week for the next fourteen weeks--if the room doesn't kill me first. It will be a fight to the death between me and the room; if you don't hear from me, you'll know the room has won.

A few tough moments to start the semester

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: teaching is hard, and Covid teaching is harder. If you asked me to pick out the worst moment of my first day of teaching for the year, I'd have to narrow it down: 

• When the fifteenth student walked into a classroom that contained only fourteen seats so I had to roll the teacher's desk and chair over to the corner so the student could sit and then there was not a single place for me to sit down while my students did their first-day-of-class writing, and I had to worry what sort of pandemic protocols I was violating by allowing fifteen students in a room approved for only fourteen, but then I also had to wonder why the people in charge of assigning classrooms hadn't found one more appropriate for the size of the class.
• When the technology that worked fine when I tested it just last week refused to work properly so that the student joining my class from quarantine was unable to communicate with me or the rest of the class except via the chat function, which I couldn't see with my back to the screen and couldn't read when my attention was drawn to his comments because the print was too small for my decrepit eyes.
• When the technology that worked so well in a classroom I used all last semester refused to respond to my promptings so I had to dash down the hallway and fetch the administrative assistant charged with solving every problem in every single classroom in the whole stinking building, and I'm sure she's already getting tired of my face because I had to seek her assistance three different times before noon.

Those were difficult moments but not one of them was the worst. The worst moment occurred in my fourth class of the day, when I had finished going over the syllabus and my students were dutifully writing in response to a prompt and I was relaxing in the knowledge that all I had to do was sit there until they were done writing and I'd be done teaching for the day, but in the quiet of the classroom, something unexpected happened:

I had to cough.

And not just a little gentle throat-clearing snorf but a body-wracking cough that would shake me from toes to temple, the kind of cough that might attract concerned attention in the best of times but that could send people screaming for the exits during Covid-19.

Well what could I do? I felt the cough coming so I excused myself to the rest room across the hall, where I let it loose. I sincerely hope it was nothing worse than my usual reaction to returning to the classroom in a moldy building. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to be sick right now.

But that's just the bad news. The good news is my students all deserve gold stars for complying with mask and distancing protocols, and they wrote some really interesting stuff today, engaging with ideas in a way that fills me with hope. No one ever said teaching would be easy, but in this case I think it's worth doing anyway.

 

Working out the drudgery/magic ratio

How many hours of sheer drudgery are required to produce one moment of magic in the classroom? I asked that question on Facebook earlier this week and received answers ranging from 6 to 42 (because 42 is the answer to--well, everything). 

It would be a simple math problem if only I could figure out which acts of drudgery should be included in the equation. If we count all the years of education that led to the degree that put me in a position to create classroom magic, the number would be astronomical--even if we subtract the portion of that educational experience that does not qualify as drudgery. A correspondent informs me that drudgery comes to us from the Old English dreogan, "to work, suffer, endure," which perfectly describes what I've been doing all this week to prepare for the start of classes. The semester hasn't started but already my endurance is wearing thin. 

But let's put aside the drudgery required to get credentialed and find a teaching job, and since we're making arbitrary decisions, let's also bracket the time we spend in academic activities not related to teaching--but even that isn't easy. My service on the tenure and promotion committee may not enhance my own teaching, but it affects the College's ability to retain effective teachers and thus the quality of teaching overall. And what about research and writing? My students aren't likely to read my academic writing but my research informs my teaching, exposing me to new ideas and providing a foundation for the knowledge I share with students.

But we have to start somewhere so let's eliminate service, research, and writing from the equation, even though they involve a significant amount of drudgery. What about professional development activities aimed directly at improving teaching? Pedagogy workshops, technology training, discussions of diversity or assessment--such activities are not without their moments of drudgery, especially when they're held on Zoom. "Endure" is exactly the right verb to describe how I experience Zoom meetings.

So let's admit to the equation only the portion of pedagogical professional development that qualifies as drudgery, and then let's add to that the number of hours required to create classes, review and order texts, write syllabi, construct writing assignments and in-class activities, post all manner of matter on the course management system, make photocopies, set up gradebooks, prepare lectures and discussions--in short, every annoying little thing we do before we set foot in the classroom on the first day, plus all the annoying little things we do to make sure we're ready for the next day and the next. That's one side of the equation.

Now the next step: to determine our drudgery/magic ratio, all we have to do is figure out how to quantify a unit of classroom magic. 

And here, my friends, I throw up my hands. I have endured enough. Time to sit back and let the magic happen.

A new breed of anxiety dreams

In my nightmare I'm surrounded by a scrum of shoving students, all brandishing 45-rpm records and demanding my approval, and none of them are wearing masks.  

Teaching anxiety takes many forms and today it's a combination of unruly mobs, unworkable technology, and unawareness of proper pandemic protocol. Students aren't even back on campus yet but already I'm dreading what new horrors the spring semester will bring--and that was before I read the article on Inside Higher Ed about the vast increase in Covid-19 infection rates in counties where universities rely primarily on in-person instruction. Granted, the study looked at large public universities and not small private colleges, but it's hard to imagine that Ohio's post-holiday surge in cases won't affect even our little corner of Appalachia.  

How will this be different from past spring semesters? No breaks, for one thing--no long weekends, no Spring Break, just a single day off on a Wednesday in the middle of March. The goal is to keep students on campus, which didn't work all that well last semester but hope springs eternal. Social distancing requires different classroom setups so once again I'll be teaching in rooms I hate, although this time at least they're all in the same building. I can put up with horrible rooms just this once.

Of course that's what I told myself last semester about so many things--just this once I'll teach simultaneously to students who are present and others who are online; just this once I'll use put all my exams online and use online proctoring; just this once I'll forego unannounced reading quizzes because there's no equitable way to give the quiz when some students are face-to-face while others are on Zoom.

And just this once I'll prepare four spring semester syllabi crammed with Covid-19 guidelines about mask-wearing, Zoom participation, social distancing, and supporting one another. A clever colleague has come up with a "No-nose policy": if she can get through the whole semester without ever having to tell a student to pull a mask up over his or her nose, the whole class will get extra credit. Of course this won't work in my classes because I won't be able to see the students who sit in the back of my socially distanced classrooms. Oh, to have younger eyes--or smaller classes!

Once again I reach for poetry, for calm in the midst of chaos

That crash you heard yesterday was the sound of angry people trying to smash Democracy to pieces, and that persistent chatter you hear today is the sound of people trying to pick up the pieces.

Did anyone sleep last night? Can anyone think straight today? Is anyone anywhere getting any work done? I feel at once a sense of urgency, a need to read more and hear more and do more, accompanied by a sense of helplessness and confusion. I watch from a distance when what I'd really like to do is roll up my sleeves and start sweeping up the broken shards.

Which is why I was drawn this morning to Natasha Trethewey's poem "Housekeeping," in which a young girl and her mother "mourn the broken things" and get to work with glue and nails to save what they can from a catastrophe undefined but imaginable. Trethewey has written often of the violence and abuse that characterized her childhood home, the racial prejudice that constrained her family's life, and the way Hurricane Katrina ravaged her community, but she also writes frequently of the unheralded people who quietly pick up the pieces and try to restore order after chaos. Another Trethewey poem, "Watcher," describers her brother's post-Katrina job watching for detritus washing up on a beach where waves can't wash away the deep pain of community trauma.

"Housekeeping" begins with brokenness and ends with expectation of better things to come, eliding the fact that the mother so lovingly evoked in the poem would eventually be murdered by her abuser. The poem situates readers in a peaceful moment between whatever act brought brokenness into the home and the violence that would later remove the mother from the scene, suggesting that the gentle act of housekeeping--of picking up the broken pieces--exists as a temporary respite from the surrounding chaos.

And yet what peace that moment brings, the mother singing as she irons, the daughter paging through a book of wishes for better days. Housekeeping is what we do when things get broken, even if the fix we can hope for is at best tenuous and temporary. But still we get to work with glue and nails and elbow grease, even as "All day we watch / for the mail, some news from a distant place."

I don't want to be in the Zoom where it happens

After a blissful month away from campus, it took only a few hours in the office to remind me of so many things I'd forgotten--and I'm not just talking about the need to regularly water potted plants. My dragon tree survived a month of neglect but it's not particularly happy about it.

I had forgotten how much I appreciate my colleagues, how delightful it can be to bounce ideas off interesting folks in the hallway or on Zoom, but I had also forgotten how much I hate Zoom meetings. Yesterday's meeting was great--a lively discussion among articulate colleagues--but being on Zoom strains my eyes and brain and makes me want to go hide in a dark closet. Others in the meeting shared their frustrations with pandemic pedagogy and started counting up the years until they can retire, at which point it became clear that I was the oldest person in the meeting by a good ten years. It's nice that I can still be on the Zoom where it happens but I had forgotten how much I miss being in a room with people, face-to-face, and I also miss not being the oldest person in the room. I'm not ready to be an eminence grise! (Although my hair is certainly equipped for the task.)

I had forgotten also how lonely it is to eat lunch in my office and how much I miss going to the gym, especially with persistent horrible weather making outdoor exercise very difficult. I had forgotten that I needed to vacuum my office, and it's a good thing our administrative assistant was in the building because who else would have unlocked the door to the supply closet so I could get the vacuum? I can't work when I'm mired in squalor. I had forgotten how much I rely on our administrative assistant, but I'd better appreciate her quickly because she's soon moving to a better job elsewhere. 

And then the emails started up. I had forgotten how annoying it can be as a committee chair to try to get the right people to do the right things at the right time, and I had forgotten how challenging it can be to write diplomatic responses to those who simply can't follow directions. Everyone needs to just put down the eggnog and get the brain back in gear.

I had forgotten some of the small but satisfying tasks that signify a shift to a new semester--emptying out old folders, stashing away last semester's textbooks, clearing space on the credenza for this semester's books, which look so sparkly-new and promising. And then I had forgotten the thousand clicks required to update syllabi, add new required language, post assignments on the course management system and set up the gradebook. After just two days in the office, I feel as if I've fulfilled an entire month's quota of clicking but I'm nowhere near ready for classes to start.

I had forgotten how the academic calendar plays tricks with time, making two days in the office feel weightier than the entire month I spent painting, baking, and celebrating with family. But the good news is that winter break isn't quite over. I don't have to be on campus again until next Monday, so I intend to go back to Jackson and enjoy a few more days of unstructured time before I get swallowed whole by the long, slow slog through the spring semester.

Special delivery--late, wet, and totally misplaced

Mystery solved! This morning I found my husband's birthday gift, which had allegedly been delivered on December 16. When I filed a claim with UPS a week ago, the tracking data claimed that the package had been "placed on an external porch," which is kind of odd because I found the package tossed on top of a yucca plant near the end of the driveway two tenths of a mile away from our porch. I suspect that the package got covered by snow soon after delivery and did not become visible again until last week when the snow melted--and then no one was home to see it.

One mystery solved, another uncovered: I know my driveway is difficult, and I would certainly understand if the driver didn't want to risk it on a particularly ugly day, but if the UPS delivery person was unable to drive up the hill to leave the package on the porch, why then did he or she specify in writing that the package had been left on the porch? If the tracking information had stated "left beneath the yucca plant near the end of the driveway," I would have looked there. But no: "placed on an external porch" is what the driver reported.

The large box was in a plastic bag but still the box was so wet it fell to pieces when I picked it up. Nevertheless I am pleased to report that interior packaging protected the actual gift (a cast iron grill pan--and trust me, it would have made a perfect birthday gift). I have been on the phone with UPS representatives this morning and I have received a number of apologies, but I would really like to talk to the driver and ask how in the world "placed on an external porch" can accurately describe a package tossed on a yucca nearly a quarter mile away. I fear, though, that that mystery will never be solved.

 

Making my own beach

Last week when the grandkids were here they used blankets and seashells to construct a private beach on the living-room floor, and then they sat and watched the imaginary surf roll in.

That's what's missing from this winter: a stroll on a beach, with sand and shells and water birds. For years--decades, even--we've taken a southern vacation during the weeks after Christmas, recharging our batteries between the hectic holiday season and the demands of the new semester. Twenty years ago we watched the new century roll in from Cocoa Beach, and a few years after that we helped our daughter celebrate her 16th birthday at Key West.

That was the quintessential winter beach trip: we had all been sick with a nasty bug involving vomiting and diarrhea--just at the moment when a water main burst in our little neighborhood and we had no way to flush the toilets or do laundry. Somehow we held our ailing bodies together long enough to do laundry at a friend's house and pile into our van and start driving south, where we recuperated in the sunshine.

This winter the whole world is sick so we're not traveling anywhere. Facebook keeps presenting me with photos from those past trips--vivid sunrises, brilliant birds, long stretches of sand and surf--but for days all I've seen outside my window is gray sky, fog, and rain. Somehow I need to follow the grandkids' example and make my own beach, a place of warmth and rest away from the demands of work.

So 2021, here's my beach. It's not much but it's the best I can do under the circumstances. If you close your eyes and stay still, you might even hear the ocean.