Can't teach to an empty room

A colleague once told me I could teach that poem to an empty room and I know what she meant--I have those poems too, or those stories or other works that resonate so deeply that I could stand in front of a room and talk about them passionately even with no one listening--but that was before Covid, before rooms full of masked, silent students, before Zoom screens covered with names showing no indication of life behind them, and I am now willing to say that I could stand in front of an empty room and talk passionately about that poem--but I don't believe I would call it "teaching."

Teaching is transactional, and one thing pandemic teaching mutes is the kind of teacher/student transaction that leads to deep learning. Sure, I can still stand in front of a room and try to engage students in discussion of interesting literature, but masks block my ability to read responses in their faces and Zoom removes students from the scene entirely, so I'm doing a lot of talking but I don't know how much teaching is really being accomplished.

And now I'm giving my last final exam of the semester, so soon students will scatter and I'll be surrounded by nothing but empty rooms. You won't see me standing in empty classrooms talking about literature this summer, which is one reason the end of the semester is a bittersweet moment. Sure, I'll be glad to leave behind the stress of class preps and grading and committee work and dealing with the plagiarizing student who insists he did nothing wrong, but it'll be a long time before I will once again enjoy the extreme privilege of being paid to stand in front of a room full of students and lead them toward understanding of great literature, and I will miss it.

All year I've missed teaching the way we used to teach, and I know this pandemic pedagogy we've been forced to employ will make some permanent changes in how we teach. If nothing else, I've learned that I can't teach anything to an empty room. I just hope that next fall these classrooms will fill up with students who are ready to learn--and that I can recover enough from this year's difficulties to be confident that I have something to teach them.

 

My welcoming committee

First day of finals week and I arrive home to find a welcoming committee: a big black rat snake stretched out across my front porch. It stayed there a while, first dawdling among the miscellaneous junk and then moving just below the threshold to block my way--but I didn't mind. Rat snakes earn my respect by their willingness to eat mice, thus reducing the numbers of mice that might end up inside my house. I can happily cohabit with a rat snake as long as it knows its place--outside the house. 

Friday poetry challenge: The end is near

I'm tempted to write a screed caviling about all the different words my students didn't know in the poem we discussed this morning, including cavil and coven and covenant (from Amit Majmudar's wonderful poem "Covid-19"), and I would mention that I'd told my students on Wednesday to go home and read the poem out loud and listen for the sound repetitions and make sure they understood all the words and so this morning when no one could identify the meaning of the second word in the poem I stood there silently in front of class while they looked it up on their handy little electronic devices, which made me feel useless because why, at the end of the 14th week of the semester, do I still have to tell intelligent adults that they can't hope to understand the poem if they don't know the words? But then I reminded myself: it's the last day of classes. We've all had a long, exhausting semester in a long, exhausting pandemic. Give 'em a break.

I still made them look up the words, but I'm not going to complain about it. Life is too short, and this semester has been too long.

The end is near--
it's here! We can
begin again--
amen! We're done!
A ton of tests
(the best!) to grade,
we'll wade through piles
(for miles!) until
(Be still my soul!)
we toll the bell
that tells us all
to call it off.
Don't scoff! The end,
my friend, is near.
Three cheers!

Now on to finals week! Who's with me?

 

Resisting the all-consuming machine

All I want today is to not be an avatar. Is that so much to ask?

My building is quiet and empty this morning, even moreso than usual, and I've got a little time on my hands so I decide to pop in on All Scholars Week.

Now I love All Scholars Day--the day each spring semester devoted to celebrating students' research and creative work, when classes are cancelled so we can attend poster sessions or oral presentations or art shows and see all the neat stuff our students have been doing. Normally, All Scholars Day is my favorite day of the spring semester, and I generally offer extra credit to my own students if they attend sessions and write about them.

But this year is different, because of course it is--Covid-19 couldn't keep its nasty dirty claws off of All Scholars Day, which can't be held in person because of the need for social distancing and so has been spread out over an entire week and moved entirely online.

Fine, whatever, we've been doing things online all year so I ought to be able to handle an online poster session, so I go to the link, which is not Zoom but an entirely different site that requires me to create an account, just one more in a long line of online accounts with so many different passwords that I've lost hope of ever remembering any of them, and then I think all I have to do is click on the name of the poster session and I'll be able to view whatever wonderful things my students have been doing.

But no. I have to allow the program access to my computer's camera and microphone and I have to create an avatar. After a year in which all the joy of teaching has been eaten alive by horrible Zoom meetings, this just feels like too much.

I don't want to create another password and start another account, and I really don't want to give another program access to my microphone and camera, and I can't even begin to express the loathing I feel for the concept of becoming an avatar.

I heard a respected colleague talking about how neat this system is--You get to make a little avatar and everything--and I realized that I come from a whole different planet from people who think it's cool to exist online in avatar form. I don't even want to exist online in picture form--I hate being photographed, I hate seeing my own face on Zoom, I get sick to my stomach when I sense the presence of video cameras, and I nearly puked while reading an article in a recent New Yorker that casually mentioned the presence of surveillance cameras in certain public rest rooms in China that allow the Powers That Be to make sure people don't use too much toilet paper. Video surveillance of toilet-paper use is the kind of nightmare that makes me want to assume the fetal position in a dark closet and not come out until--well, ever.

I don't want to be on camera today. In fact, I don't want to spend one more millisecond swallowed up by the technology that has poisoned this entire year of teaching. I don't want to give any more programs permission to access my microphone and camera. And I don't want to transform myself into some cutesy, smiley, Disneyfied cartoon.

(But what if they offer avatars that look like cranky  middle-aged curmudgeons? Don't tempt me...)  

So just for today I'm opting out of All Scholars Week. Maybe some yard work and a good night's sleep will make me more willing to step inside the all-consuming machine, but right now I can't even rationally explain why I find the concept so repellent. Let the avatars go play online all they want; I prefer to mow the lawn.

Showing up, regardless

The exhaustion I'm feeling may spring from the miles I hiked over the weekend or the mowing I did last evening or the Covid nightmares that keep interrupting my sleep (Put your masks on, people!), but at least I showed up in class with a lesson plan and some great discussion questions and even a little bit of group work. 

My students this morning barely showed up. Some offered excuses for needing to attend via Zoom (okay, I don't want you throwing up in the classroom, whatever) but the ones who were present in the room--well, there's not enough caffeine in the universe to supply the alertness missing from my classes this morning.

What have my students been doing to wear themselves out all weekend? Probably homework and projects and papers. That's what I choose to believe. We have made it to the final week of classes so we ought to be jumping up and down on our desks and cheering, but their eyes are barely open and their heads hang low.

A colleague posted last week on Facebook about how exhausted everyone is, and a helpful respondent suggested that she should give the students a pep-talk every day. As if we're not doing that anyway. As if a pep talk could restore everything we've lost in this pandemic-teaching year. As if any of us have a single scintilla of energy left for another stinking pep-talk delivered to students who didn't listen to the last one.

But here we are! Lesson plans in hand, discussion questions at the ready, group work all queued up. One more week! We can do this! And if we can't, we're going to do it anyway! 

In search of small beauties

Pawpaw blossoms are so tiny and inconspicuous that the only way to see them is to get up close to a pawpaw tree--but then, that's not a bad place to be. The color blends in with the surrounding brownness of the spring woods, so you won't find them unless you know where to look, and meanwhile you're bound to see other splendid things like buckeyes beginning to bloom and solomon's seal leaves curling above tiny buds. Not a bad way to spend a spring afternoon.

Coasting the chaos

Is it selfish to make things easier on myself in the final weeks of the semester? I do it every year in American Lit Survey: the final two or three weeks are devoted entirely to poetry written since the 1950s, focusing on poems I could teach with my eyes shut and both hands tied behind my back. There's not much prep required--I mean, if I can't get up in front of a class and lead a discussion on Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," I'm in the wrong business. Similarly, next week my literary theory students are giving presentations in class. They'll be working pretty hard to prepare and present, but my role is just to show up and take notes, maybe ask some questions at the end. Easy-peasy. No prep required. Time to coast!

Well, sort of. The time I'm not spending doing heavy-duty class prep is now devoted to writing final exams and grading papers and dealing with panicky emails from students who have suddenly realized that the end is near and they're not ready. I'm already looking ahead to a new class I'm teaching next year, but my struggling students are still mired in the murk of this semester and hoping they'll find a way out. I feel for them. This bizarre year has not been easy on any of us.

And yesterday I discovered yet another small pleasure the pandemic has diminished: browsing at the library. Sure, we can still walk over there and search for books in the stacks, but we're not supposed to touch any books except the ones we intend to check out. My problem is that I can't read the call numbers on the spines unless the books are at eye level, so I end up pulling out a lot of nearby books and bringing them up to my face so I can read the numbers, touching book after book after book. I suppose I could send a student worker over to find the books I need, but then I would lose the pleasure of browsing nearby shelves, the serendipity of discovering something I didn't know I needed to read.

It will all come back, I tell myself. One day the masks will come off and the signs warning about touching books will come down and we'll be able to gather face-to-face without fear. Meanwhile, we carry on for just a few more grueling weeks full of anxiety, stress, and struggle. Can you blame me for trying to make one small part of those weeks just a little easier?

Side effects? What side effects?

In retrospect, I should have taken it a little easier after getting my second Moderna vaccine yesterday afternoon. I taught my morning classes, drove to Jackson, got the jab, and then taught my afternoon class over Zoom, and the whole time I felt fine. A little headache last night, a little arm soreness this morning, but nothing that would lead me to believe that a two-and-a-half-mile hike in the woods would not be a good idea. 

It was a pretty good idea at first. We walked a little more slowly than usual, but that's no problem when there's so much beautiful stuff blooming all around. I had thought that if we felt worn out, we could cut our usual hike short and take the shortcut from the wetland up to the parking lot, but when we got there, we felt okay. And besides, I really wanted to see whether those white trout lilies were blooming this week, but the only way to see them is to take the long loop through the wetland and up the bluebell trail alongside the creek.

So that's what we did. Hiked the wetland, heard Louisiana waterthrushes in two different places, saw trilliums and bluebells and festoons of dutchman's breeches and foamflowers and violets and I don't know what else, and we found not one but four white trout lilies blooming, very small and nondescript next to the trail, easy to overlook if you don't keep your eyes peeled. 

But by that time I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. Is it possible to nap while hiking? My arm hurt and started swelling. My legs felt like wet spaghetti. We sat on a log to take a break and when I closed my eyes for a few minutes, I came very close to falling asleep right in the middle of the woods. And when we got back to the top, I did not feel alert enough to drive us home.

Good thing I had the hubby with me. He had his second vaccine jab on Thursday and tried not to let it slow him down, but he wasn't moving at his usual pace this morning, and pretty soon we'll be napping the afternoon away.  I'll remember this lesson next time we have to get vaccinated against a nasty global pandemic--but let's hope there's no next time! I've had about as much as I can take of this one.

 

 

Taking a trip on the T Train

I tried to sell my students tickets for the T train this morning--the train toward Transcendence--but I found few takers. Boarding now on the American Lit Survey platform, step inside A.R. Ammons's "Garbage" for a contemplative journey past a towering garbage dump and on to a different type of landfill:       

                                        there is a mound, 

too, in the poet's mind dead language is hauled
off to and burned down on, the energy held and

shaped into new turns and clusters...

I'm reading this out loud with great enthusiasm and I look up expecting to see some light dawning on students' faces but I see nothing, nothing but incomprehension and boredom. I want the students to feel the way a poem can transforms dead language into new life and move us

        far beyond these our wet cells,

right on up past our stories, the planets, moons,
and other bodies locally to the other end of the

the pole where matter's forms diffuse and
energy loses all means to express itself except

as spirit,

But they're not having it. Maybe it's a bit much to ask students to think about language as a landfill at 9:00 on a Friday morning, and I can't drag them kicking and screaming into the ineffable. Last call for the train to Transcendence--the doors are closing now! I'm manning the controls as the engine rumbles away so I can't see whether the T train is carrying any passengers.

That's not Santa on the roof, but it still feels like Christmas

Day has barely broken but already I hear the clump of feet and the whine of power tools overhead as young bearded men in work-boots tromp all over my roof, tearing off twisted bits of decrepit flashing and flinging them to the ground. My usual view out the picture window is interrupted by ladders, piles of building materials, and pickup trucks. Yes: we're getting a new roof! It feels like Christmas in April.

From the sound of it, work is happening at a furious pace. My roofer dudes moved their original installation date (tomorrow) in hopes of avoiding the rain that's expected to arrive late this afternoon. Does this means they expect to have my new roof fully installed before suppertime? That seems to be the plan.

Just now something big made a massive thump above my head--it sounded catastrophic, like a chimney collapse, but it's apparently just part of the roof-construction process. Compared to the noise and activity of the roofers, my keyboard-clicking seems wimpy and inconsequential, hardly worthy of the word work. Every time one of the roofer dudes walks past the window, I try to look busy. It feels wrong to just sit here while so much heavy lifting is going on overhead.

They've been here twenty minutes and already one pile of wooden laths has disappeared overhead. The truck carrying the new metal roofing materials has not yet arrived, and I'm eager to see how it gets across the creek and up the hill. They don't want to take the big truck across the bridge because it can't handle the sharp turn on this side, so they're hoping to drive it through the creek, across the meadow, and up the secondary drive. Fortunately, the big utility trucks that took that route last week left big ruts to show the way, but that doesn't mean it'll be easy.  

And it's not easy for me to concentrate on my own work with so much hullaballoo happening, but I've finished responding to student writing for the moment so I can focus on some less demanding projects, like writing final exams, doing laundry, and whacking some weeds. The important thing is to look busy, even though it wears me out just to see how hard the roofers are working.

And...it's done! Before 9:30 a.m.!

 

Preparing for the approaching tsunami

This morning my composition students were so focused on working on their research projects that I had a hard time getting them to stop writing at the end of class. They've seen the writing on the wall, the amount of work they'll have to complete in the next three weeks, and they're taking good advantage of every opportunity I give them for in-class work.

And I'm doing the same. I teach four writing-intensive classes and so far this semester I've successfully avoided having multiple classes submit written work on the same day, but this Wednesday my perfect record falls to pieces. I'll collect a set of exams from the American Lit class, a set of annotated bibliographies from the literary theory class, and paper drafts from my two larger classes--composition and Literature Into Film. 

I'll have to respond to the drafts first because the turnaround time for revision is pretty brief, but I also need to respond promptly to the annotated bibliographies, which provide the foundation for my theory students' final projects. The pile I'm most interested in reading will have to wait for last--the exams on which my brilliant students will bring some of my favorite short-fiction writers into conversation with each other. (Louise Erdrich! Flannery O'Connor! George Saunders! Raymond Carver! Don't you want to listen in?)

So my week is a little upside-down: Today and tomorrow I'll do all my reading and prep work for Friday's classes so I can spend Wednesday and Thursday reading and responding to draft after draft after draft. By the end of the week my eyeballs will be falling out of my head and I'll be kicking myself for not planning this end of the semester a little more carefully. 

Maybe I'll get so caught up in my work that I won't even notice when this crazy week is finally over. When Friday rolls around, I'll need someone to give me a nudge and say "Class dismissed!" And then listen for the rewarding sound of a laptop computer slamming shut.

Resurrection season

Facebook tells me that one year ago today I went for a walk in the woods, which sounds about right. I mean, what could be more appropriate for Easter weekend than seeking out new growth springing to life in the woods? 

On Friday afternoon I went out to Lake Katharine to see what I could see: towhees singing "Drink your tea!", the first mayapples popping up out of the ground, a few trout lily buds getting ready to burst into bloom, purply stalks of blue cohosh sprouting like alien life forms, and dutchman's breeches providing pops of bright white in the dull brown undergrowth. Then this afternoon I took some time to wander into my own woods, past the daffodils and grape hyacinths that have gone native and the forsythia that's blooming more profusely than it has in years, and I found coltsfoot and a few trillium stems (but no blossoms yet) and tons of hepatica and a stand of bloodroot blooming so high up a steep, muddy slope that I'd be taking my life in my hands trying to get close. 

Best of all, I walked along the stretch of road where I've been picking up beer cans--over 150 in two weeks' time--and I did not see a single can. In fact it's been a week since I last found any trash along that stretch of road. Coincidentally, the utility crews that have been working so intently all up and down our road for months have now moved on to a different area. I don't want to think that our dedicated utility workers have been responsible for all those beer cans, but it does seem odd that the cans appeared and disappeared at about the same time as the utility workers--and in fact, the last three cans I picked up were left in the exact spot where the utility workers' truck had been parked. Probably just a coincidence, right? If the cans don't return, I will assume that the problem has been solved. (For now.)

If the beer-can-tossers, whoever they are, had looked up along the hillside right next to where they tossed the beer cans, they might have seen that steep slope blanketed with deep green ferns and thick patches of blooming hepatica. I remember the first time I saw that hillside in bloom, during our first spring in this house when we still had our ailing dog: I'd walked Princess on a leash down to the creek, and as she lapped at the water, I glanced upward and was stunned to see a hillside festooned from top to bottom with white blossoms. Anyone driving past would be oblivious to the show, but stand in the right place and be still for a moment and you just might see something amazing. And what better time to do that than Easter weekend?

     

Time just keeps slip-sliding away

Five students showed up for American Lit this morning--five! Out of a possible thirteen! But they seem to have done the reading so we had a pretty lively discussion of Louise Erdrich's "Fleur," during which the students came to appreciate how effectively Pauline uses Fleur to deflect attention from her own culpability for three deaths. And I got to refer to one of the men as "Dances with Pigs," which is always fun. I only wish a few more students had been present to enjoy the discussion.

But I don't really blame them. No spring break + Easter weekend + pandemic fatigue = a whole lot of students taking a long weekend. And faculty too, to judge by the unusual number of available spaces in the faculty lot closest to my building this morning. I hear them thinking spring has finally arrived, so let's make a break for it! Except the temperature got down into the 20s last night so it doesn't feel so much like spring out there.

Two of my classes have "research days" today, and they are free to conduct their research from the comfort of their own rooms (or, more likely, beds), so I have just one more face-to-face class session before I'll be heading out of here too. I've been spending way too much time this week holed up inside for Zoom meetings, but today the sun is shining so I may stop on my way to Jackson and go for a walk in the woods, even though the temperature is lingering in the 30s. I have a coat, I have hiking shoes in my car, and I have to see the spring ephemerals blooming before ephemeral spring slips away. So why not live a little? 

It's funny how time works: I keep wishing away the rest of the semester while trying to slow down spring so I don't miss all its beauty. Can't have it both ways: the spring wildflowers that make me want time to linger exist on the same timeline as three weeks of classes remaining in the semester, so until time travel is perfected, I need to take time as it comes, appreciating every moment no matter how empty or ugly or dull. 

But on the other hand, the moments spent with spring wildflowers help to make all those Zoom calls and quiet classrooms more bearable. So off to class I go, willing to keep educating the few students likely to show up even if they're the only thing standing between me and a walk in the woods. We can do this! (And if I keep telling myself that, eventually I'll believe it.)