A roller-coaster ride that just won't quit

On the roller-coaster ride of life, it's sometimes hard to tell whether we're experiencing a thrilling upswing or getting ready to crash to the ground in a flaming heap. This week the ups and downs are coming way too swiftly, for both me and my students; it's hard to go from a hush-hush behind-closed-doors meeting concerning a serious campus controversy straight to a Zoom call celebrating my youngest grandchild's third birthday. 

On Monday a Zoom call with a colleague filled me with hope and encouragement about a looming project--until she told me about yet another controversy that threatens to drive some valuable people out of academe entirely, and then a student met with me with an exciting plan for success in my course, followed almost immediately by a total meltdown. The ups and downs flash past in a colorful blur so that at any given moment I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or scream for help. But here we are, as everyone keeps saying, and here we will remain until whatever happens next happens.

Being circumspect here. Just call me Ms. Circumspection. Biting my tongue on tasty tidbits not ready for prime time. So let's focus on the fun stuff:

I had lunch with a colleague yesterday--at a restaurant! Well, a casual deli, but still, we sat at tables indoors and conversed like civilized people. I honestly don't remember the last time I ate inside a restaurant, and the weather was nice enough to allow us to walk over there, which was a plus.

We talked about how hard it's been to maintain an active research agenda with all the demands of pandemic teaching sapping our energies and our favorite conferences being cancelled or moved online. "It's like we're on hiatus," my colleague said, and I have to agree. It's hard to plan when the future keeps hiding behind the next blind curve. 

Remember the year I turned 50? I set a goal of doing 50 things I'd never done before, from painting my fingernails blue to snorkeling at a coral reef, and I did them. The goal gave the year shape and encouraged spontaneity as I was always looking for another item to add to my list. This year I'm approaching 60 and I have no plans whatsoever. No goals, no hopes and dreams (except seeing my dad and grandkids again), no aspirations except simply to carry on doing what needs to be done. Not a particularly exciting goal, but somehow just getting through this time is starting to feel heroic.

So hurrah for everyday heroes--the ones who keep the lights on and the internet working and the campus humming; the ones who encourage each other even while up to their necks in crises of their own. Hurrah for the colleague who told me she loves my photos and asked me to keep posting them because she appreciates anything that brings beauty into our colorless lives, and hurrah for the students who keep producing brilliant work in spite of their distractions and disappointments. We're all on this roller-coaster ride together, so we may as well laugh, cry, or scream in unison as we hold on until the time when the ride smooths out.

Aging into a cliche

In the middle of a class this week I heard myself saying I've been teaching composition since before you were born, and my heart sank--both because I'd resorted to such a lame cliche and because how can I be that old?

But apparently I am. This morning my cranky hip started acting up in the middle of a walk through the woods, and the only way to get back to the car was to keep going forward, up and down steep, slippery trails and steps. I stopped to stretch the hip out, which helped a little, but when I change my gait to favor the sore left hip, then the right knee starts to hurt. Am I really going to be that annoying older person who's constantly griping about sore joints?

And then I got stymied this week by what seemed to be a challenging math problem. Several students met with me over Zoom because they wanted to know whether they can pass my class if they get A's on the last couple of assignments. They wanted me to do the math and give them a number but I was overwhelmed by so many questions that I couldn't have counted my own toes, questions like If you're capable of doing A-level work in my class, why have you so far failed to earn anything higher than a D+? That's not a math problem. That's a lack-of-contact-with-reality problem, and I don't know the proper equation.

But life goes on. This morning I saw exactly one bloodroot blossom, but the dutchman's breeches are starting to bloom and the bluebells are budding. We saw lots of trout lily leaves but no blooms yet. Towhees are back and pheobes are calling and my mornings are filling with birdsong. Best of all, this semester will be OVER in four weeks. Granted, I'll also be four weeks older, but that's probably better than the alternative.

 

 

Green(ing) world

I had to get out in the woods today before the weather turns awful again, and I'm glad I did. From a distance the forest floor looks brown and lifeless, but step closer and you'll see buckeye buds bursting into new leaf, feathery foliage of dutchman's breeches peeping out from among the dead leaves, and tiny ephemeral blossoms of hepatica and anemone lifting their faces to the sun. 

Sunshine was what I needed--I've been spending so much time in my office staring at student prose on my computer monitor that when I leave the office, the whole world seems to be made of twitching pixels. But a morning in the woods calms my mind and rests my eyes, which revel in the spreading patches of green. Combine this new growth with the songs of birds and the sounds of rushing water and the woods become an ideal refuge. (When can I go back?)

I love the showy buckeye buds bursting forth.

I think this is marsh marigold. Couldn't get very close.

This I do not know.

 

Bleak past, bright future

 

A year ago I posted this depressing photo on Facebook, revealing the view from the temporary home office where I taught my classes during the second half of last spring semester. Campus was closed down after spring break and I don't have the bandwidth to teach from my house in the woods, so I relocated to my husband's parsonage in Jackson and taught from the dining room, where the only interesting part of the view was a robin's nest where I watched chicks being fed and fledged throughout the spring.

I should have shared this bleak photo with my students Monday morning--maybe it would have shaken them out of their lethargy. Everyone is tired of the pandemic and overwhelmed with work and unwilling to participate in class, but look how far we've come! A year ago we couldn't be in the same room together, and students were either quarantined in their dorm rooms or trying to learn while sequestered at home, where they were surrounded by distractions, bedeviled by tech issues, or even located in time zones that made class attendance difficult.

Today we speak to each other with voices muffled by masks, but at least we're in the same room. Our case and quarantine numbers are minuscule, and vaccines will be available to all students right here on campus in the next couple of weeks. Sure, we're bummed about missing spring break, but sports events are happening again with a limited number of spectators, and in five weeks the semester will be OVER.

Next year will be different--we know this, though we don't know all the details. The 2021-22 academic calendar allows for breaks, and if there's one thing we've learned this year, it's that we all need breaks. Right now would be ideal, but I suppose I can wait a little longer. And we all need each other. When personal interactions were confined to a bunch of empty Zoom squares, hope was a dim glow in the distance that often seemed to be snuffed out. Today the light at the end of the tunnel is strong and bright, beckoning us onward.

The past is a bleak view out a small window, but from where I'm standing, the future's so bright we're gonna need shades.

Just call it a bold fashion statement

So I'm standing at a gas pump filling up my car's tank when I look down and notice I'm wearing mismatched shoes. I'm halfway between home and campus. Do I go back home and change shoes or carry on toward campus?

Some considerations: I don't teach on Thursdays and I don't really need to be on campus until late afternoon, when I have a Zoom meeting. (On Zoom, no one knows your shoes are dogs.) The shoes are similar enough that few people would notice the difference anyway--both black Skechers, the older one from a pair I use for messy, muddy tasks, like picking up beer cans in the muddy drainage ditch along our road, which I did just yesterday before the rain started.

On the other hand, going back home would require backtracking, which violates the strictures of the tiny Puritans who inhabit my brain. They thrive on efficiency and reject concerns for appearance, so they'll have hysterics if I turn around. Moreover, back home I'd have to encounter the sick person currently inhabiting my house, and while I love my son, I'm not a fan of vomit. (No fever, so no worries.) Finally, yesterday the electric utility dudes started work on replacing electric poles and lines that run across our property, and their trucks are currently colonizing my driveway. I don't feel like maneuvering through that muddy labyrinth right now.

So now I'm sitting in my office huddled up to the space heater until my socks dry out (because it's the kind of rain that makes puddles hard to avoid). I'll have to put on my mismatched shoes whenever I leave the office, and when I do, I'll pretend that I'm making a bold fashion statement, sparking a new trend, setting forth on an unconventional path.

It'll be easy enough to join me--just follow the muddy footprints.

 

   

Are the Difficulty Police coming for me?

This morning I made an offhand comment about low attendance in recent classes and a student said, "Maybe the problem is just in your classes," which got my attention, and then she added, "because your classes are so hard," which really didn't help.

Twice this week I've had to give different classes the "learning happens in the struggle" speech, reminding them that the students who persist in struggling with a challenging assignment learn far more than those who give up at the first sign of difficulty. "This assignment is supposed to be difficult," I tell them, "so if you find it easy, you may not understand the directions."

It's a hard sell, persuading students to value difficult tasks, but I've always assumed that my colleagues would understand. Alas, maybe not. The other day at a faculty meeting we were discussing a proposal (never mind the details) that evoked some discussion of the reasons students might want to transfer in an online course from another institution--money, scheduling difficulties, the desire to take an unofficial, unapproved overload--but the discussion kept coming back to the fact that some students take easier online equivalents of courses that they find too darned difficult, which inspired a colleague to quip, "Well, if students find some of our courses too difficult, maybe those courses need to be investigated."

It was a Zoom meeting with cameras muted so I don't know how many jaws dropped at that moment, but mine certainly did. First of all, who would be charged with "investigating" whether certain courses are "too difficult"? Too difficult for whom? I mean, if we want to "investigate" every course that any student ever finds challenging, wouldn't we eventually end up investigating everything?

I don't set out to make my courses difficult just to annoy students and I bend over backward to work with students who really want to succeed, but I notice that the group of students who recently dropped one of my classes had never once attended office hours or sought my help in any other way. The class is not that difficult--but it does require an effort, and that effort can't be entirely on my part.

Sometimes simply showing up requires effort, and I notice that in my general education literature classes, more "difficult" readings result in lower attendance. Wouldn't it make more sense to skip class when the material is easy to understand? Surely we can all make progress toward understanding if we struggle through the weeds together, right?

Well maybe not. Maybe my classes are too hard. Maybe someone ought to investigate whether I'm overworking the little darlings. But who is prepared to do that? Does anyone in academe have so much free time on their hands that they can police the difficulty levels of every class students find challenging?

The very prospect makes me want to pull the covers over my head and stay home. I could call in sick, cough into the phone to make it sound more authentic. Sometimes this job is just too hard.

And yet here I am, doing my best to struggle through the difficulties and eager to welcome anyone who wants to join me.    

Random bullets of why is it so dark?

I was just getting accustomed to driving to campus in the daylight and suddenly I'm feeling my way down the highway again because it's pitch-black outside. I contend that Daylight Saving Time discriminates against morning people--and trust me, the world is a safer place when I'm not driving in the dark. I'm scheduled to teach a couple of 8 a.m. classes next year but that's the last time. Let someone else take over the early-morning hours--I'm moving to the daylight!

Did I change all the clocks at my house? No, I did not. I changed the ones I could reach. Let the tall people change the others. Of course this means that I can't casually glance at a clock without first stopping to remember whether I've changed it.

Last Friday half of my 8 a.m. class was missing, so I arbitrarily assigned a minuscule number of extra-credit points for those who completed the in-class writing activity. Word must have gotten around because suddenly I received a pile of e-mails offering various not-very-convincing explanations for students' absences. Apparently we had an epidemic of malfunctioning alarm clocks early Friday. I imagine these students showing up just a few minutes after the pearly gates slam shut and mumbling about faulty alarms. Too bad. You snooze, you lose.

Would you rather grade three short essays or two slightly longer ones? Not asking for a friend--I changed the assignment structure in a literature class to require two longer and more complicated essays instead of the previous three short essays, mostly to minimize my own frustration with students' abysmal performance in online peer review. I also made meaningful participation in peer review a portion of the grade, and I very carefully defined the meaning of each word in that phrase. The result is fewer drafts and papers to read, but each one takes a little more effort. Will I hold on to this system? Let's wait until the second set of papers comes in before we decide. 

Meanwhile, we need to decide on the color of our new roof! For several reasons we're leaning toward charcoal, which will surround us entirely in various shades of gray, allowing our house to fade indistinctly into the twilight as if it were a mirage. Maybe I'll paint the front door red. Of course, as dark as it is out there this morning, you'd never know we had a house at all. 

Friday poetry challenge: Let's do the vaccine polka!

It's true that I barely felt the jab when the Moderna vaccine went into my arm, but it's also true that I felt that shot with every cell in my body. Relief--so relieved that I couldn't decide whether to sit down an cry or jump up and dance, neither of which felt appropriate in an extremely busy pharmacy. 

Despite what looked like chaos, the vaccines were administered like a carefully choreographed dance: stand on this dot, move up to that dot, sit in this chair, jab ouch bandaid, sit in that other chair for fifteen minutes and then jump up and sashay on outta here. In front of me in the vaccine line was an 84-year-old woman who wants to hug her family members again; behind me was a young mother who wants to take her kids to Disney World. I want to go see my dad and travel again and spend time with my grandkids without worrying about who's breathing on whom, and I want us all to move past masks and Zoom and social distancing in the classroom. Getting the shot felt like a big step in that direction--as long as enough other people get it too.

Side effects? I fell asleep pretty early last night and had some vivid dreams, and if you nudge my upper arm I'm likely to shriek, but this morning I felt lively enough to take a two-mile muddy hike at Lake Katharine, so I guess I'm okay. I have a few weeks to wait for my second dose but meanwhile I'm walking with a spring in my step and hoping all my colleagues get a chance to step out and dance the coronavirus vaccine polka:

Stand in line, wait your turn,
wonder if the shot will burn--
let's do the vaccine polka!
take a seat, bare your arm,
don't forget to sign the form--
let's do the vaccine polka!

It doesn't matter if you're lean or tubby,
this shot will make you want to hug your bubbe,

So take the jab, sit and stay,
then smile as you sashay away--
you've done the vaccine polka!

I eagerly await the day when many others can add verses to this ridiculous song.

A new season of possibilities

Ten years ago today I was sitting on a beach near Carmel, California, eating a picnic lunch with my students while watching the waves for signs of an echo of the Fukushima tsunami. My colleague who was co-chaperoning the trip waited for word about the safety of his family members living in Japan. My California Literature class had enjoyed a week of travel and learning over Spring Break, but it was disconcerting to think that a natural disaster on the other side of the Pacific could have a direct impact on our lives.

One year ago my classes were affected by a different kind of disaster as I scrambled all through Spring Break to move my classes online. The virus that had seemed like a distant threat had suddenly become an ever-present concern affecting every choice in our private and public lives: how to meet with classes, where to get groceries, what to do about travel plans. 

Now here we are a year later and I can't imagine what it would be like to travel with students or share a meal with a large group or crowd together into a tight space to see where a prominent author did his best work. I'd love to think that everything will go back to normal one day (and I definitely look forward to a celebratory mask-burning bonfire!) but a year under constant constraint has narrowed my focus so severely that it's hard to even think about what happens when everything opens up.

And what an interesting metaphor that is: we've been closed down, cut off from each other behind closed doors, closed to new possibilities, but at some point someone will just flip a switch and we will all open up again like crocuses in spring. When will we know that this is all behind us? 

I look at pictures of the area devastated by the Fukushima tsunami and see debris still awaiting collection, radioactive waste still making its presence known, a whole landscape that will never fully recover from the devastation it endured, and I wonder at what point we can call a disaster truly over if its affects will continue to be felt, perhaps invisibly, for centuries to come. 

But we're definitely entering a new season of possibilities. My brother got to visit face-to-face with my dad for the first time since last March, and the College's Covid dashboard currently lists only three active cases. Best of all, Ohio changed its criteria so I'm now eligible for the vaccine, and I even found an appointment for tomorrow afternoon. I'll have to cancel a class to get the shot, but I doubt my students will complain. We're all in this together, and anything that can move us one step closer to the time when we can all take a field trip and eat a meal together has got to be a good thing. 

Crocuses are blooming in my front garden! What changes will this new season bring?

Stymied by Edith Wharton

We've just started reading Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence in my Literature Into Film class so of course I get to hear all kinds of student complaints about how hard it is to read all that Old English and how boring the plot is because nothing ever happens and how annoyed they are with the petty concerns of the character and so on, but I really don't care--I love Wharton and rarely get a chance to teach her work and the book is so full of sharply pointed zingers critiquing the upper crust that I get a thrill every time I turn a page. 

But one student's complaint stopped me in my tracks: "It's harder to read than Shakespeare." 

Um, what? 

The Age of Innocence is certainly longer than the average Shakespeare play, but harder? 

Sure, students are bound to encounter some unfamiliar vocabulary in Wharton's prose, but context clues abound and they won't need massive numbers of footnotes just to understand the dialogue. They're not going to miss out on important plot points just because they don't recognize words like canvasback (in reference to dinner) or cobs (in reference to horses).

But they've just finished reading Cheryl Strayed's Wild and, before that, Yann Martel's life-or-death adventure Life of Pi, and they're finding the slow pace of The Age of Innocence rough going. So much of the plot involves characters observing other characters and drawing (sometimes false) conclusions about them, an activity far less exciting than, for instance, sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger or trying to fend off a rattlesnake on the Pacific Crest Trail.

In my introductory lecture about Wharton, I made a big deal out of the author's conviction that too much innocence is a dangerous thing, and I informed the students that Martin Scorsese once called The Age of Innocence his most violent film, even though it includes no actual bloodshed. I told them about Sam Jordison's statement that The Age of Innocence is "about gangs, their unspoken rules, their codes of honour, and the structures of power." This may have led them to expect a novel less sedate than the one they're reading (or not reading as the case may be).

So I can see why they're finding it a challenge, but harder than Shakespeare? This I don't see. 

Maybe what they need is a little comic relief, a grave-digger scene between some of those stilted formal conversations amongst characters clad in evening dress. If only those uppity New Yorkers would invite Falstaff to dinner--I'm sure he'd enjoy the canvasbacks, and what a stir he would cause!

But instead we'll muddle through the book we have instead of the one some students wish for. They'll be writing papers about how the book and film portray guilt or innocence, comparing a character in The Age of Innocence with one from the next novel, Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress. If Walter Mosley and Edith Wharton could sit down for a dinner date, I'd love to overhear that conversation!

But wouldn't it be better if Falstaff were invited?

Why do they think my road is a landfill?

It's a gorgeous Sunday afternoon--sun shining, birds singing, daffodil buds popping up out of the ground--but instead of enjoying all the beauty, I'm bending over a muddy ditch picking up a Bud Light can and trying not to slip and fall on my butt in the mud. It took me about ten minutes to pick up 57 pieces of trash along a short stretch of road that follows our creek, but the horrible thing is that I could have picked up twice as much if I'd had extra arms or a bigger bucket. Some very thirsty Bud Light drinker seems to think my rural road is a landfill, and I don't know how to make him stop. (Is it sexist to assume that a person who regularly tosses beer cans out of car windows is male? Convince me otherwise.) 

Friday poetry challenge: Break, broken

My grown-up son had a nice surprise last night. Months ago he'd booked a ski weekend in West Virginia, and then what with his car problems and other recent chaos, he totally forgot about it until last night when his phone reminded him to pack for his ski trip. 

You'd be amazed how much a surprise ski weekend can cheer a person up. I confess that I got a little envious. Even though I don't ski (because I'm perfectly capable of breaking a leg without all that expensive equipment), I started wondering, Where's my surprise vacation? 

And then on top of that, I received a bunch of emails from students offering various excuses for missing today's classes, few of them credible. I suspect that a bunch of students stretched their one-day spring break into a full week away from responsibilities. I can't say that I blame them--I'd do the same if I didn't have a host of tiny Puritans inhabiting my brainpan--but again, Where's my spring break?

Maybe writing about it will make me stop obsessing. No? Well, it can't hurt:

Don't take
my break
away!

Today
I work,
you play.

Someday
I'll run
away

and sun.
Today
I'm done.

Reviewing a year-long learning curve

Today my husband is eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, but I'm still ten months too young, even though the phrase too young should not apply to someone with such cranky hip joints. He's also eligible to receive the next stimulus check while I apparently make just a tad too much money (if that's not TMI). Never thought I'd complain about being too rich and too young. I don't mind not receiving the stimulus check, but I would really like to get the vaccine sooner rather than later.

A year ago at this time I was getting ready to drive north to start my spring break with a visit to the grandkids and then drive south to see Dad, but then I got sick and delayed my trip south by one day and then Dad's assisted-living facility went on lockdown, and now here we are a year later still waiting to reschedule that postponed visit. Dad is fully vaccinated and his facility is opening up next week for limited visits, but I have to wait until I'm vaccinated.

A year later, I can still recall that deep inner panic that hit when the Powers That Be announced that we would have less than a week to switch all our classes to online learning. I don't know whether I slept at all that week but I remember frustration and blurry eyes and even some tears and yelling. Online learning was a slog but we somehow survived, and then summer was a different kind of slog, trying to adapt each class to several different possible teaching scenarios, a high-stress situation that put me (briefly) into the hospital. And now, again, here we are a year later wondering what the fall semester will look like and dreaming of the day when we can burn all our masks.

What have we learned in the past year? I can attest that resilience is both essential and exhausting and that technology can create as many problems as it solves. It's true that we've been more fortunate than some, but I'm no longer surprised when students and colleagues wear that shell-shocked look of someone who has walked through a post-apocalyptic hellscape. I'm tired of hearing myself say When this is all over, but when this is all over we need to devote some serious time to self-care, preferably on a beach far from the reach of Zoom.

Meanwhile we keep rolling with the punches, being resilient, flexible, nimble, agile, engaging, rigorous, and a whole lot of other adjectives that have been pounded into our heads over the past year. The red-winged blackbirds have returned to the wetlands so spring is on the way, and one of these days we'll join them in calling out our joy over a fresh new season of hope. Today, though, I'm just counting the days until I become eligible for a shot in the arm. 

  

From hectic to hopeful

Where are the Spring Breaks of yesteryear? I could really use a week clear of classes to catch up on grading and projects and preps and perhaps even to relax and have some fun, but this year we've been given a single day off to mark the middle of the semester.  I intend to make the most of it, even if that means just loafing around the house and taking a nice walk in the afternoon sunshine. But I can take this time off only because I've spent the past week working like a dynamo, constantly flitting from one activity to another until everything urgent is more or less done. 

In the past week I have written detailed feedback on 35 student drafts, graded nearly 50 midterm exams and essays, prepped and taught all my classes and met one-on-one with some struggling students, chaired a committee meeting and met with the provost regarding the committee's recommendations, and, finally, submitted midterm grades.

At home I've cleaned bathrooms and vacuumed and dusted and prepared the spare rooms for a visit from the kids and grandkids, spent time at the laundromat and the car wash, submitted my tax documents to my tax guy, tossed logs into the wood-burner (and jammed the finger responsible for every "s" I type, ouch), cooked for a crowd and cleaned up afterward (with plenty of help), watched my grandkids toss frisbees and play with Legos and throw a million rocks into the creek, helped them use the binoculars to watch birds at the feeders and enjoyed all their drawings and jokes and hugs.

The biggest and most rewarding task, though, was clearing everything out of the laundry room so my son-in-law could install a new dryer vent and fix the dryer (so that I had to go back to Lowe's yesterday and cancel the order for the new dryer, a task that filled me with glee) and then clean up the mess and reorganize the whole laundry room to make it more user-friendly. Meanwhile, my adorable daughter replaced a light fixture in the hallway (Where did she learn to do these things? Not from me!) so that now all the broken things are fixed and the dryer is no longer vented into the crawl-space.

Oh, and in the middle of all that I drove to Jackson to spend less than 24 hours with my husband and then drove back again through a massive rainstorm that brought flooding to the area, although our property was spared this time. Today I'll take a walk down to the lower meadow and start strategizing how to transform a chunk of former horse pasture into a pollinator habitat, plotting out its boundaries and walkways and plantings. After the hectic week I've had and the storm-tossed anxieties that preceded it, I can't imagine a better way to spend my Spring Break Day than to stand in a meadow envisioning a blooming future full of butterflies and bees.  Tomorrow I'll get back to all the demands of campus life, but just for today I'm cherishing some brief moments of stillness.

The oldest grandchild drew these birds for me.