Once again being asked to explain that I'm not a machine

It's hard to imagine a college without any faculty but that doesn't stop a whole lot of people from trying. 

One of my students asked me yesterday when we're going to put all our "course content" online so that they can stop coming to classes and start saving money, because online education must of course be so much less costly than face-to-face classes. He'd heard a rumor about a wholesale movement toward online learning, and all I wanted to say was, "You don't absorb ninety percent of what I tell you in class but you're willing to stake your future on some random rumor?" But that's not the point. The point is that this student thinks education would be so much cheaper and more efficient if we took contact with faculty out of the equation.

It's a tempting thought. If our job is to introduce students to a certain body of knowledge, why not just put that body of knowledge online and allow them to access it at their own pace? The problem is that this vision of education fails to distinguish between faculty members and machines or between teachers and scholars.

Certainly online teaching can be effective; I've seen it and I am in awe of those who can do it well. However, effective online teaching requires more than simply dumping a pile of content into a course management system and allowing students to access at their leisure. Online pedagogy is different from face-to-face pedagogy, but it still requires teachers to carefully design activities to help students master skills and content. What if some of our tried-and-true methods don't translate well to the online environment? Well, then we would need training to help us master online pedagogy, and we would need IT support to deal with the inevitable glitches. Those things cost money. Switching to online teaching might be a cost-saving venture in the long term, but in the short term it would require significant investment in training and technical support, which is neither free nor easy.

And then who says putting classes online will take faculty out of the picture? Someone still needs to read and grade and assess and trouble-shoot and provide the kind of hand-holding our students have come to expect, and that's more than anyone can ask of a course management system. The vending-machine model of education, in which students insert money into the slot and press the right buttons so it can spit out a diploma, fails to consider the importance of human interaction. The machine isn't going to spend office hours doing one-on-one tutoring with a student struggling with a difficult concept. That's what teachers do.

And that's not all that teachers do. Those who think that our only responsibility is to pass a big body of knowledge to the students fail to consider our role as scholars. We don't just draw on the existing body of knowledge--we add to it. We write and do research and create art and performances that add to human understanding. A vending machine knows how to dispense a can of soda but cannot engage in the process of creating new types of soda or imagining a world beyond the realm of soda. That's what scholars do, and that kind of activity can't be confined to a box.

Every time this topic comes up I feel as if I'm once again being called on to defend my right to exist, which is exhausting, but if I object, I'm accused of being stuck in the past and resistant to change. But you know what? I'm okay with that. I've tried online teaching and I did a pretty good job of it, but I know how much I had to rely on our instructional technologist and how many more of her we'd have to hire if a whole bunch of us switched to online teaching, and I also remember how much time and effort I had to devote to trying to prevent and punish online cheating. When the institution makes the kind of commitment to online teaching that would solve those problems, I'll be happy to make whatever changes are required. Meanwhile, I'll keep being the kind of teacher and scholar who can't be automated or confined to a box.

Now hand me a can of soda, because my students aren't going to teach themselves.

Welcome to my landfill

Yesterday when I was trying to think of an appropriately festive way to celebrate an unexpected windfall, this is where I landed: 

That's a 32-inch adjustable trash picker-upper, which would make it easier to pick up the many beer cans that rude people keep tossing alongside my road. That's right: when considering how to commemorate a significant influx of dollars, I settled on a twelve-dollar tool that would make it easier for me to pick up other people's trash. And that's all you need to know about my world right now.

The windfall came from an unexpected source: myself. I learned from my taxman yesterday that we'd seriously overpaid the quarterly estimated taxes on my husband's 2021 income, thanks to a tried-and-true method we're calling ELTEFMMCA (Earning Less Than Expected and Failing to Make Mid-Course Adjustments), so not only do I not have to write a big fat check to the IRS next week, but the refund will cover the quarterly estimated taxes on his income for the entire rest of 2022, so I will not have to write a big fat check to the IRS in June, September, or next January either. Hallelujah!

But of course I had been setting aside money to cover those big fat checks that I will now not have to write (unless someone suddenly starts earning more money), and now that feels like money in the bank. Which, of course, it literally is, but it's money that I've been pretending isn't in the bank so that it will still be there when I need it to make those quarterly tax payments, which I now don't need to do, so the invisible money suddenly became visible and now I want to do something fun with it.

But buying a trash picker-upper? That hardly seems celebratory. I grumble and gripe every time I go out with a five-gallon bucket to gather the latest crop of cans full of ditch-water, and I put every ounce of frustration into stomping those nasty cans flat so I can fit more in the bucket. Today I made it less than half a mile before the bucket was full, and while bending and stooping over muddy roadside ditches to pick up trash provides an excellent whole-body workout, it does not fill me with warm feelings about the human race. 

Buying a tool that would make it easier to pick up the trash feels like accepting a situation that I find repugnant. And yet, it surely would make it easier to reach those beer cans nestling in eight inches of muddy water just beyond my reach.

So far, I have not purchased a 32-inch adjustable trash-picker-upper, but I'm leaning in that direction. Because as much as I resent living in a world in which people treat my bucolic country road like a landfill, that's the only world I've got right now, and it wouldn't hurt to spend twelve dollars to make that world just a tiny bit better.

Friday poetry challenge: aiming for mediocrity

Comparing notes with colleagues at yesterday's Faculty Council meeting, I learned that if someone had called a special meeting at 4 a.m., we would have had a quorum. Everyone is overwhelmed, no one is sleeping, and yet we carry on--just barely.

Which is why today my primary goal is simply to be an adequate teacher. I aim for mediocrity! Excellence will have to wait for another day.

Just for today
I'll be okay.

Mediocrity
is the thing for me.

My teachy stuff
is just enough.

No home-run hit--
just adequate.

But that's okay.
(Just for today.)

Not exactly hair-raising

People keep commenting on my hair. Why? I haven't done anything special with it--in fact, I long ago decided to pretty much give up and let it do what it wants, which is mostly to hang in my eyes or stick out in random directions. And yet in the past couple of weeks random people have been making random comments about my random hair(s), all complimentary. Whatever it's doing, I guess it ought to go ahead and keep doing it.

Thinking about hair is more pleasant than thinking about other things, like war or refugees or gas prices or the campus budget crisis, but it makes me feel frivolous. I mean, don't I have something more important to write about than hair? Sure, but I'd rather not.

Yesterday someone complimented my hair (out of the blue!) while I was sitting on a bench out on the campus mall soaking in some sunshine after a very busy morning of teaching and preps. After the between-classes rush of students cleared up, it was just me and the birds overhead and the bulbs sending up greenery from bare brown patches--oh, and the groundskeeper across the way driving around a big loud messy piece of equipment poking holes in the turf. What was he doing to that scraggly-looking lawn? Aerating? I have no idea, but it was loud and annoying until he drove loudly away.

I was reminded of a class activity last week, when lovely weather inspired me to send my Place students outside in the middle of class. We'd been reading about urban nature, so I sent them out in pairs to examine specific spots where nature impinges on campus and report on how people interact with those places and what it takes to keep those natural spots healthy. They looked at trees and ornamental garden plots and a field and an unexpected patch of early spring flowers, and they concluded that all it takes to keep natural places healthy is a little work by the groundskeepers. Well yes, but those groundskeepers have to be hired and trained and paid, and someone has to order the right equipment and keep it running, and someone has to establish budget priorities so all those things can be paid for, which suggests a whole network of people and institutions have a hand in keeping that little patch of flowers blooming or that field mowed or that tree standing.

Last week at another awful meeting someone asked whether the budget crisis will prevent the kinds of plantings we're accustomed to seeing on campus in spring and summer, when our campus blooms from end to end. A person in the know said the planting budget can't be cut because campus beautification is a tool for attracting new students, which is a valid point. I would not want to minimize the importance of keeping campus beautiful, but I wish some people understood that excellent teaching is also a tool for attracting and retaining students and should therefore be protected.

I mean, if the students aren't coming here for the teaching, what are they here for? It's certainly not my hair.

 

 

Words fail. Daffodils don't.

I keep starting to write about this week's craziness but my sentences tend to end in helpless sputtering. The student who wrote---!! The administrator who said---!!! The colleague who claimed---!!!!!

I mean, I can't even with these people. And when we have people in positions of authority feeling empowered to say out loud in public that anyone who criticizes the current administration ought to be immediately fired, I just don't have the words.

But I have the daffodils. They're blooming beautifully. Yesterday I took a chair down to the thickest part of the daffodil patch and sat there trying not to think for a while. Consider the daffodils of the field! They toil not, neither do they spout senseless garbage in meetings!

I wandered lonely as a cloud that doesn't have to attend three hours of meetings on its sole non-teaching day. There was no wind so the daffodils weren't dancing, but at least they were quiet and nondemanding and unlikely to point a finger of blame at me--or at anyone, really. We've got way too much random blame floating around campus right now. Some of us need to take a lesson from the daffodils and spend some time in the sun simply being there.

So I have no words. I have no wisdom. I have no poetry. But I have daffodils, and that's not a small thing.

 

  

Some funny business

Some requests are easy to resist. A student wants to meet with me via Zoom at 10 p.m. on a weeknight during Spring Break? Um, no, and I'm not even going to offer an excuse.

But I did feel the need to offer excuses the past ten times I refused the annual request to teach a course in our local Learning in Retirement program. I taught for the program once before and found it rewarding, exhausting, and exhilarating, but I've resisted their requests ever since for various good reasons: Too busy or tired to teach a two-hour class once a week for eight weeks; too distracted by other projects (writing and editing essays on teaching comedy); unwilling to put in that much work for a stipend that's significant but not life-changing. 

But the leaders of the program persisted and finally I agreed to teach a course on comedy in spring of 2020. Then came Covid. Then the whole program moved online and they asked me to teach the class via Zoom, and I said that I couldn't spend one additional millisecond on Zoom than was absolutely necessary or my head would explode. 

Then this spring they went back to in-person classes and I ran out of excuses, so here I am getting ready to lead a weekly discussion of comedy with a bunch of retired people, and I couldn't be more pleased. For one thing, I need that stipend to pay for my new cell phone so I can continue to enjoy funny pictures of my grandkids, and for another, I need to immerse myself in comic material to distract myself from the current misery on campus, including the fear that I'll never get another raise. 

So today's the big day: an introduction to the history of comedy, illustrated with film clips and some short readings. I can count on these students to read the homework assignments, so I know they'll be prepared to discuss theories of comedy next week. Among other topics, we'll have sessions about comedy and the human condition, comedy as uniter or divider, and what makes British comedy so very British (with an expert guest speaker). I have one class session set aside to view a film, but I'm going to ask them for suggestions before deciding which one. And during the final class session, I've set aside time for anyone who wants to perform up to five minutes of comedy in front of the group. I hope some of them will want to put comedy theories into practice, and by that time we'll be so comfortable with each other that we'll laugh even if it isn't funny.

So I guess it's a good thing that I finally ran out of excuses. Eight weeks from now I may be exhausted from the extra work, but at least I will have had a few laughs along the way.

 

Frosting my mood on a snowy morning

Yesterday I stood out in the sunshine admiring daffodils that were just about to bloom, and today they are buried under a blanket of wet snow. About six inches, I would guess, and still falling. 

All week I've been hearing towhees calling and I thought the juncos had left us, but snow brings back the snow-birds so this morning they're all over the place, along with a herd of cowbirds desperate for some seeds from our feeder. When everything they rely on for food is suddenly covered with snow, the birds have to find sustenance where they can.

No sign of a plow on our road so it's a good thing I don't need to go anywhere. Tomorrow I need to drive to Columbus to pick up our son from the airport, so I sincerely hope the roads are clear by then. Shoveling snow during spring break? That's just not right!

I've been thinking of the Robert Frost poem--not "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," lovely as that might be, but the more bleak and hopeless "Desert Places," with its "blanker whiteness of benighted snow / with no expression, nothing to express." If I sit and think too much I'll soon join Frost in "scare[ing] myself with my own desert places," so I think I'd better get up and get moving, for I have many rooms to clean and miles to go before I've seen a host of golden daffodils, or something like that.

 

Floods of laughter, joy, and beauty

The plan was to visit a couple of wetlands this morning looking at birds before meeting friends for lunch in Jackson, but heavy rains all day yesterday left standing water everywhere water can stand, so as I headed west of Circleville this morning to find the Calamus Swamp, I was dubious. I have spare shoes and socks in the car but I'm not a fan of stomping through six inches of muddy water, which I found covering part of the boardwalk that circles the swamp. Fortunately, I also found an older gentleman who has worked for years as a volunteer at the swamp, and he not only showed me a more passable trail around the muddy spots but also walked alongside and told me about the history of the place. Score one for talking to strangers!

Visiting wetlands was an important part of my Spring Break Restore-My-Equilibrium tour. Last week when I heard some of my students talking about how much they were looking forward to going to Florida for Spring Break, I realized how much I'd missed our usual Florida trip over Christmas, with its requisite visit to the beach. There's nothing quite like looking at rolling water to wash the cobwebs out of my head, but I couldn't manage a trip to Florida for break so I resolved to spend some time near a different kind of water.

So Friday when I left campus early, I drove due north on I-77 and reached Zoar Wetland just in time to enjoy a fast-food lunch, minus the iced tea that spilled all over the picnic shelter when I tripped and fell and smashed my knee. But I tried not to focus on the pain: I sat and ate my lunch in the presence of still water and birds (geese! mergansers! red-winged blackbirds!). Mergansers don't care what new outrage is blowing up on campus email and neither did I, or at least that's what I kept telling myself.

All weekend with the grandkids I tried to ignore my work, except for grading a few freshman essays and posting midterm grades, and then I tried to ignore the emails from the student panicking over plagiarism (two cases in one week!) and all the e-mail chains multiplying over campus problems. We went to Sieberling Nature Realm near Akron, where birds will eat seed right out of the grandkids' hands, and on Sunday my daughter and I enjoyed a choir concert in Cleveland in which I could not understand a word of the lyrics (mostly in German) but felt a flood of beauty washing over me. 

On Sunday we had lunch out on the deck in gorgeous sunshine, and when a sudden wind gust launched a pile of paper napkins into a whirlwind, we laughed our fool heads off. The wind soon blew in a storm, though, and I drove through downpours on and off Monday.

More laughter at lunch with a friend in Columbus, followed by a visit to the Ohio Craft Museum, where a collection of quilts created by African American women artists flooded my senses with color and joy. Then a little shopping, a little visit to a chocolatier, and a little more driving south of Columbus to Circleville, where I spent a quiet night.

Tomorrow I need to be back in the office to work on preps for next week's classes--and for the Learning in Retirement class I'll be teaching starting next week, an eight-week course, two hours every Tuesday afternoon, in which a bunch of local retirees expect me to introduce them to the history and theory of comedy. I agreed to teach this course back in 2020 but was thwarted by Covid, and now here it is ready to start and I haven't done a blessed thing to prepare. 

So if today is my final day to have some fun, I'd better get to it. I visited the Calamus Swamp this morning and I hope to get to Lake Katharine after lunch, although flooding may limit access to some favorite parts. It's not quite a week at the beach, but simply getting away from campus problems and exposing my senses to floods of beauty have worked wonders. And look--no sunburn! (I've got to look on the bright side because the dark side is so unbearably dark.)  

80 miles from campus, ignoring the pain

Beautiful quilts a the Ohio Craft Museum

Feeding the birds

Snowdrops!

Yeah, I'm not walking through that

Osage orange trees planted along a fence-line in the 1800s

 

Grinding toward spring break

On Monday I taught four classes that filled me with energy and hope for the future, and then I attended a two-hour meeting that made me want to curl up under the table in a fetal position and whimper.

That's the way it goes when we're wrapped up in a campus controversy while continuing to do some of the world's more rewarding work. Learning is happening! Students are exploring interesting texts! Both our men's and women's basketball teams are playing in the NCAA tournament! Even on the budget crisis front there's good news: immediate cuts were less draconian than expected and action is being taken to get us through the rest of this year with a little less agony. 

This week I've seen evidence of stakeholders on every level--students, staff, faculty, administrators, trustees, alumni--pulling together to maintain the College's mission well into the future, and as a member of Faculty Council, I've been directly involved in an effort that produced immediate and gratifying results. I can't go into detail but I'll say this: sometimes words work, and when they do, it makes me very happy.

But still I spend far too much time in meetings or casual encounters with people who are fearful and distraught or just plain old angry. Members of the torch-and-pitchfork brigade, fueled by unsupported rumors, are looking for someone to burn in effigy. Local media outlets have fanned the flames, but I can't really blame them. They're doing their best with limited information and so far they've been mostly accurate about some things. But we're still in the middle of an evolving situation, which makes people very nervous. In the absence of solid information, while all the plans that have been put into place this week move toward fruition, we all need to step back and take a deep breath.

Which is why it's a very good thing spring break starts tomorrow. For me, actually, it starts at 10 a.m. today. I'm giving a midterm exam at 8 a.m. (as if students needed another reason to hate that class) and teaching some Harlem Renaissance authors at 9, but I have a guest speaker in my afternoon class and I changed my 11:00 class to an online discussion. I thought about coming up with some legitimate pedagogical reason to move that class online, but the truth is that if I don't get out of town soon, my head is going to explode--and who would clean up the mess?

I see that someone is already preparing for a mess this weekend, when campus will be invaded by hordes of high school students competing in Science Olympiad. As long as the students keep coming, we'll keep teaching 'em. The gears of the educational machine grind on, and those of us in the heart of the machine can only hope that, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, we'll slide through the gears without being ground to pieces.