April is the cruelest month, breeding student papers that must be read and graded, computer bugs that shut down our ability to function, wide-spread panic attacks and existential despair even among students who've never read The Waste Land--and now the weather forecast tells me April is bringing snow? Like, tomorrow? While tulips and daffodils and forsythia are blooming all over the place? That's just gratuitous suffering.
A student explained that he had to miss class today in observation of Good Friday--which is next week.
The flag in the center of campus is flying at half-staff again today, as it has every day this week, and no one can tell me why.
Five e-mails in a row came from students looking for extensions on a project, and I went ahead and granted the extensions because it's really hard to expect students to do research in our online databases when the campus internet connection has been taking frequent unplanned mini-vacations for hours at a time.
Cruel, I tell you. April is pouring on the cruelty relentlessly, luring us outdoors with sudden bursts of sunshine and then dumping dark rainclouds on our heads, and now snow? It may not be Good Friday yet, but this so-called spring sure feels apocalyptic.
And yet we carry on. Each time a new disaster drops--and I can't even talk about the most interesting ones--we just grit our teeth and carry on, because what else can we do?
This afternoon I'm filling in to teach a colleague's religion class, leading a discussion of the book of Job. Students have been talking about the problem of pain, but I'm going to direct the to the problem of genre: how do we know how to approach a text like Job if we don't know if it's supposed to be read as tragedy, comedy, courtroom drama, or something else entirely? And yes, I'm going to make them learn some characteristics of certain genres and think about how the frame influences how we view the picture.
Right now April is framed in alternating gloom and glee, with massive black clouds hanging over a campus where daffodils bloom, robins sing, pandemic masks get flung to the ground, and the flag remains at half-staff. How do we react when gratuitous grace mingles with gratuitous suffering? Right now, all we can do is carry on.
2 comments:
Half staff flag explanation? https://flagsexpress.com/flags-half-staff/ohio/march-31-2022/Dominic-Frances/
Interesting. Our flag seems to fly at half-staff nearly every day; I can remember coming out of a meeting with some colleagues a week or two ago and we all noticed that the flag was at full-staff, commenting on how unusual this was.
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