Jennette McCurdy on mothers and middle school

Jennette McCurdy was a child star on a Nickelodeon show I've never watched, but nevertheless I found her memoir, I'm Glad My Mom Died, insightful and terrifying and funny all at the same time for its compelling portrayal of her controlling stage mom, her battle with eating disorders, and her life as a child star. She puts the cost of stardom into perspective here:

It doesn't help that I'm famous for a thing I started when I was a kid. I think of what it would be like if everyone was famous for a thing they did when they were thirteen: their middle school band, their seventh-grade science project, their eighth-grade play. The middle school years are the years to stumble, fall, and tuck under the rug as you're done with them because you've already outgrown them by the time you're fifteen.

But not for me. I'm cemented in people's minds as the person I was when I was a kid.

As I said: horrifying. I quit playing the flute following the fiasco of my seventh-grade marching band season and I shudder to imagine being stuck in that wretched scratchy wool uniform forever, desperately struggling to march intricate formations while playing the right notes on my flute but knowing that I could accomplish only one of those two goals at any given moment. Don't even get me started about the fire ants on the practice field. I've successfully swept those memories under the rug and I would not care to carry them around with me everywhere.

So I have some sympathy for the child star "cemented in people's minds" as a 13-year-old, and her book is a brisk and often comical variation on the tear-off-the-bandaid memoir, full of grotesque details but never maudlin. I've never seen her act, but I believe her when she says she's rather write than act; her long-thwarted passion throbs through the book and made me want to keep reading long after she'd finally left behind her eighth-grade self.

I guess I'll never be a ditch-digger

As I struggled to remain standing in wet, slippery mud while trying to dislodge a stubborn wad  of heavy wet clay off the end of a shovel, I thought, Well there's another career path closed to me in case the whole teaching thing doesn't work out.

Two days later my entire upper body is still aching from the short time I spent with a group of volunteers digging shallow trenches to improve drainage on a newish trail near the Luke Chute pollinator habitat. Volunteers were urged to bring their own tools, so my husband brought along a shovel and mattock while I brought along my husband, who could dig a trench through the Hoover dam without breaking a sweat. 

He swung that mattock to dislodge rocks and break up clumps of roots while I struggled to lift the heavy shovelfuls of clay soil and struggled even more to stay standing in the slippery mud on the edge of the trench. I'd never make it as a ditch-digger, but at least I was there, trying to make an impact on a place that matters to me. 

I hadn't ventured up that particular trail before and wouldn't have found the way without a guide, but now I'm looking forward to walking up there in the spring when the trilliums starts blooming. There's a spot upstream where wild ginger grows, a treat I've not yet seen in the wild, and the whole trail holds the promise of unexplored territory.

In fact we encountered a set of hikers walking the trail from the opposite direction as we made our way up the steep hill to the part of the path that needed trenching. That spot was muddy on Saturday but is reportedly nearly impassable in the spring. The two trenches we dug should make a difference, and even though my ditch-digging skills are subpar, I can still give myself a pat on the back for being part of the process--and for bringing my husband, the hardest-working tool in the box.  

How do you count what can't be squeezed into a spreadsheet?

The problem with clarifying our value proposition, as the current euphemism puts it, is that a lot depends on whose values are included in the proposition.

Let me try that again.

Suppose you are a bean-counter at a campus suffering from budget problems, and one way to fix the problem is to cut some faculty lines, transform others into part-time contingent positions (because "any adjunct can teach that class for a lot less money"), and discontinue some programs entirely. How do you decide which programs to chop and which to enhance? (In this context, "enhance" might mean simply "allow to continue functioning as usual," but that's a quibble for another day.)

You've got to develop some metrics, concrete numbers to show which programs are contributing to the success of the institution and which ones aren't. The problem with this system, though, is that numbers can measure only those qualities that are measurable by numbers, which seems so self-evident that it's hardly worth mentioning but at the same time needs to be reiterated: numbers can measure only those qualities that are measurable by numbers. Which raises the question: what about the ones that aren't? How do you measure the immeasurable, untangle the intangible, eff the ineffable?

First let's think about the metrics that might be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a program, starting with FTEs, AKA "butts in seats." How many students does a program attract? How many of them graduate, and how quickly? How effective is the education they receive in those classes? This can be hard to measure--course evaluations are notoriously unreliable, but that doesn't mean their numbers won't be consulted. Assessment data will help. What about post-graduate outcomes--how many students go to grad school or find a job in their field within six months or a year? And of course you have to consider costs: How much does the department cost the institution in salaries, benefits, equipment, and facilities? How much grant money does it bring in? All these numbers are easily obtained and will therefore play a big part in evaluating a department's value to the institution.

So you run all these numbers through the algorithms and you come up with a list of programs or majors that attract a lot of students who demonstrate positive outcomes at a reasonable cost, and you conclude that those departments are contributing quite a lot to the success of the institution and should therefore be enhanced. Kudos to you, Top-Notch Department! According to the metrics, you're doing a great job educating your majors!

But of course Top-Notch Department isn't functioning in a vacuum. Its majors must take courses outside the department--writing and speech and general education courses, maybe even a second major or minor or certificate. How much do these other departments contribute to Top-Notch Department's students' success? That's a little harder to quantify. How much does a good Business Writing class contribute to a Finance major's ability to communicate clearly? How much more employable is a Petroleum Engineering major who can speak a foreign language proficiently? How can you equitably distribute the credit to all the departments that might contribute more or less to a student's success? And what about outside-of-class activities? How much does participation in student government or baseball or a fraternity or Model U.N. contribute to student success? 

Maybe that task is too difficult. It's a lot easier to ignore extracurriculars and courses outside the major; in fact, maybe it would be a lot easier--and cheaper!--if more of those general education and service courses were taught by part-time and contingent faculty members, which would improve the value proposition of the institution as a whole.

But, again, a lot depends on what you value.

Do you see general education courses as check-marks on a transcript or as opportunities for students to have enriching and sometimes life-changing encounters with a wide range of ideas? Is there room in your algorithm to measure the degree of enrichment experienced in those classes? Where does "that course changed my life!" fit into your metrics?

Do you see faculty members as interchangeable cogs in a machine or as experts and leaders who contribute to the quality of the institution even when they're not in the classroom? Is there room in your algorithm to value the time faculty members spend advising students, leading campus committees, or organizing cultural events that serve the entire community?

How, in other words, can your numbers quantify the things that make a Liberal Arts education a Liberal Arts education? How are you going to quantify the value of students' self-understanding and breadth of knowledge and in-depth study with faculty members who enjoy the academic freedom protected by tenure?

Maybe that's too much to expect. In fact, this whole program evaluation process has a fairly tight deadline, so you'd better just gather the numbers that are easily gathered and crunch the numbers that are easily crunched and ignore those qualities that resist quantification, even if those are the qualities most closely associated with the institution's mission, history, and identity. After all, you devalue the intangible or immeasurable or ineffable characteristics long enough, eventually they are bound to disappear. And since the costs of ignoring unquantifiable qualities are themselves difficult to quantify, you don't even have to worry about what may be lost along the way. Problem solved!

Meanwhile, those of us who value the intangible qualities that can't be squeezed into a spreadsheet find ourselves, at best, sidelined, dismissed as obstructionists or devotees of an outmoded ideal--or, at worst, deleted entirely from the system, just as our values are deleted from the institution's value proposition.

So go ahead, bean-counters, count what can be counted--but be watchful lest you count out the very qualities that make the institution matter most.

Mount Chicago: comedy, memory, anomaly

When people ask me what Adam Levin's new novel, Mount Chicago, is about, I'm tempted to respond, "It's about 600 pages long."

The length is an important detail I neglected to notice when I ordered the book. I'd read a review that made me think this novel could be a good reading assignment for my Concepts of Comedy class, but a 600-page novel in that class would wipe out half of the syllabus. I might assign a 600-page novel in an upper-level class full of English majors, but certainly not in a lower-level class full of General Education students. Unless I want to spend a month talking to myself about a novel no one else in the room has read, I'm not going to assign Mount Chicago in my Comedy class.

Which is not to say that it has nothing to say about comedy. In fact, the novel tackles a couple of my favorite questions: How do cultures memorialize tragic events, and what role can comedy play? The sections that deal with these topics are insightful and often quite funny, but they're funny in a way unlikely to resonate with my students. I mean, when the malaprop-prone Mayor says he wants a memorial more popular than Auschwitz but "less depressing," the laughter is not unmixed with pain.

But, on the other hand, there are plenty of poop jokes, plus a personable parrot named Gogol, a duck named Momo whose attempt to free his people--er, ducks--from their oppressors is thwarted by an untimely erection and who therefore becomes a comedian, and a comedian named Shlomo--er, Solomon Gladman--doomed by hemorrhoids to a miserable life that may or may not be redeemed by comedy.

It's complicated, in other words. The style evokes Vonnegut, Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace, with massive digressions that tumble forward and backward and circle in upon themselves before reaching punchlines that are frequently worth the effort.

The longest digressions concern Apter Schutz, who seems at first like a minor character but, like the parrot named Gogol, steps up, demonstrating a powerful ability to make money through honest but not always honorable means and eventually becoming advisor to the malaprop-spouting Mayor of Chicago, who struggles to create the appropriate response to a disaster that swallows up a huge chunk of the city. 

 

This disaster is, more or less, the driver of the plot, such as it is. First, what to call the disaster? "Sinkhole" is accurate, but "Sinkholes were for Florida. They made you think of swamps and they made you think of armpits. Swampy armpits." The Mayor similarly dismisses "the seismic event" (too earthquaky), but finally Apter offers "the anomaly," which earns him a job as the Mayor's chief advisor, in which position he is placed in charge of developing the park that will serve as a memorial to the anomaly and become a more popular but less depressing Auschwitz, and off we go on a million digressions, some of which are rewarding and others not so much.

 

But I kept reading through almost 600 pages because that's what I do, and in that I resemble no one so much as the hardy Chicagoans described by their Mayor in response to the aforementioned anomaly:

We are, every one of us, all-star NFL linemen in our souls, and yes it is true that I wish, like I'm sure all of you wish, that there had never been any chapter that required our talent for this overcoming of it to be demonstrated, but we have demonstrated that talent, in spades, we have put our big shoulders to the task of tackling this chapter that needs to be tackled, we have tackled it in fact, and we will keep on demonstrating even more of our talent in even further spades, we will keep on tackling it till the game is over or it can't get up, whichever comes first, and if you want to know why, I will tell you why, even though I think you already know why: because this is Chicago and we are Chicagoans, and that's what we do.

So yes: I have tackled all the chapters, and I found something funny in all of them and sometimes something admirable and often something surreal or bizarre, but now I am done tackling chapters and I am closing the book.

Recharging my batteries

This used to be easier, I tell myself as I slog my way up the Big Horrible Hill, but I'm not sure that's true. Walking up that hill has always been challenging, which makes it a great workout. What's changed is pain.

My hips hurt walking up the hill and my knees hurt coming down. On the stretch of road along our creek--a lovely place to walk in any season--the road's steep bank makes my right foot and ankle bend in a way that causes constant pain and makes me limp through the home stretch. Then I sit down for a few minutes and rise to find I've stiffened up everywhere. If the walk is difficult, the aftermath is even worse.

Good thing the walk offers plenty of distractions from the pain. This morning I followed a red-tailed hawk up the hill; it would perch on a tree and shriek, and then as soon as I got a little closer, it would fly to a tree just a little bit further up the hill until it finally got tired of the chase and flew off into the woods. Elsewhere I heard kingfishers and a pileated woodpecker, but not much else was stirring in the cool morning woods.

Wildflowers are also getting more scarce--just a few tall thistles plus jewelweed, ironweed, wingleaf, some scraggly chicory and something that looked like lobelia. I should have taken along my trash-picker-upper for the fresh crop of beer cans alongside the road, but I can't handle that and the camera at the same time, and apparently I can't handle the camera either because I neglected to check whether the battery had any charge left. It did, but not enough.

But the walk recharged my batteries, calming my anxious thoughts and preparing me for the pile of reading and grading approaching just down the road. I can live with a little joint pain if it means a chance to absorb energy from a walk in the woods. 

 

Friday poetry challenge: seasonal haiku

It's not just the calendar pointing toward autumn: on these cool mornings I drive through dense fog along the river, wearing a jacket or sweater that I'm bound to leave behind somewhere when the sun comes out. The pollinator garden has reached Peak Sunflower while the grass around my house seems to have finally slowed down its frantic summer growth. And the cool nights are already inspiring mice to seek a warm indoor space to spend the winter--time to bait the mouse-traps!

At school the changing season means my students suddenly find themselves facing demands in every class, from history exams to chem lab reports to oral presentations. And in my classes they'll all be submitting drafts--all my students--over the next week and a half. "Do you read them all?" asked a student this morning, but of course I do: read and re-read and respond and reach out. So the honeymoon's over for me as well as my students; a week from now I'll be struggling to keep up with the flood of drafts alongside class preps and committee meetings. ("I feel like you go to a lot of meetings," said our new administrative assistant, but we all have a lot of meetings! Maybe I just complain about them more.)

Between the morning fog and the flood of drafts, I keep wishing someone would toss me a lifeline. I wish I could follow the advice in Wendell Berry's poem "Stay Home," except then I'd have to deal with the mouse problem. Let's write some haiku!

Fog blankets the road,
blanks out my thoughts, bringing
the promise of autumn:

Sunflowers hover
above us who hunger for
transient colors;

their heads droop with seeds,
ours under workloads that mag-
nify gravity.

Light in the fog, or
lines on the page: a lifeline!
Let autumn roll on.

Little worries, big worries

I arrived home after a late-afternoon meeting yesterday to find that my husband had left two boxes of Domino's pizza on the dining table accompanied by a flurry of sticky notes, one of which told me not to worry about the kitchen, which, of course, propelled me into the kitchen to see what I wasn't supposed to worry about, where I saw that the cabinets under the sink were standing open and it looked like the cabinet had vomited its contents all across the floor.

Plumbing problem. Nothing a handy husband armed with PVC pipe can't handle. Last night, I just walked away from the mess and told myself not to worry about it, which is about as effective as trying not to think about pink elephants.

Still, I welcome these minor kerfuffles because they give me something to talk about when I can't talk about larger and more consequential problems that don't quite portend The End of the World As We Know It but certainly feel that way. I mean, we are in the middle of a budget crisis that will eventually lead to the brutal amputation of faculty positions and programs. There isn't enough PVC pipe in the world to fix that problem.

I keep going to meetings where I am asked to envision the future of various programs and departments, but it's hard to get motivated to plan for a program that may get axed at any moment. It's like spending a lot of time picking out new cabinets for the kitchen only to come home one day and find that the whole house has been swallowed by a sinkhole.

Too many metaphors? Since I can't talk about details of the current crisis, metaphors are all I've got. Somehow, they're not helping.

So it's comforting to know that my helpful husband is at home fixing the plumbing problem while I focus on trying not to worry about the kitchen. That's a level of not-worrying I can live with.

Mayo-news

Today a student researching a medical topic said he thought a great source would be the Mayonnaise Clinic (what if the door is ajar?), and in another class a student wondered what kind of Yelp review Odysseus would write about, say, the Cyclops' cave or Circe's house. They make me laugh, these students of mine, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.

In my Nature class, students debated whether a certain poem is about eating apples or having sex (or both!), making good arguments on each side. In the Place class, on the other hand, only two people in the room really wanted to talk about poetry while the rest inspired me to say, "You know, I didn't assign these poems to torture to." I doubt that they believed me.

And then there was cake where no cake was supposed to be. How can I explain the bizarre series of events that resulted in the appearance of a birthday cake proclaiming Happy Birthday Bev in a large committee meeting on a day that is three months away from my birthday? Why do I have the remains of that cake in a large box in my office right now? Well, it's complicated. A few weeks ago, we were looking over the schedule for future meetings and I noticed that the final meeting on the schedule was slated for the final day of the fall semester, which is also, coincidentally, my birthday, and I said, jokingly, something like If we have to meet on my birthday, someone had better bring cake! And someone did...just not on my birthday.

So yeah, it's been an up-and-down kind of day, ranging from silliness to sweetness to torture, but I guess the bright side is that the work week is over and all I have to do before I go home is attend our departmental picnic (with cake!) and then go see the theatre department's production of Into the Woods, presented in a woodsy park next to the river in the dark, with mosquitos (but not cake).

Which goes to show, I guess, that academics is sometimes like a box of chocolates but more often like a jar of mayonnaise where no mayonnaise is expected to be.

  

S'mores and stomping, with aplomb

While we were walking the track at the rec center, my retired colleague asked about my Labor Day weekend and I told her about the grandkids' camping trip in our back yard--sleeping in the tent, stomping in the creek, cooking out, making S'mores.

"Next time you have S'mores," she said, "You'd better invite me."

I struggled to picture my perfectly-pulled-together colleague messing around with marshmallows on a stick. "You know you can make them in the microwave," I pointed out.

"Right," she said, "But that's not how I like them."

This was an unexpected aspect of my former colleague's character. She is the ultimate in elegance, always perfectly manicured and with every hair in place. She never even broke a sweat despite walking briskly around the track for an hour only two months after her knee replacement. But she had very specific expectations for the perfect S'mores experience:

"I'll need two marshmallows, not one, and I'll hold them over the coals until they're just about to catch fire--not charred, but nice and crisp on the outside and gooey on the inside. Then I want to set them and the chocolate carefully between graham crackers and smash them together, and when I bite into it, I want the goo to drip down my face."

I agree that this is the ideal recipe for S'mores, but the thought of melted marshmallows and chocolate dripping down my elegant colleague's face was causing a little cognitive dissonance. Somehow she's always managed to sail through distressing circumstances without a hint of muss or fuss, so I wouldn't be surprised if she could handle the whole S'mores-making experience without a hint of melty goo on her chin or a drop of chocolate on a perfectly manicured fingernail. But it would be worth the experiment just to see how she does it.

And then when we're done, I'll see how she feels about creek-stomping. I'm sure she could stomp with perfect aplomb, a lesson in elegance for all of us. 

Friday poetry challenge: relishing the niceness, for now

The other day I asked my first-year composition students what has surprised them the most about being in college, and several said they were surprised by how stinking nice all the professors are. Give it time is what I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue. 

I've been doing that a lot lately. My tongue-biting skills are legendary, developed over long years of being a pastor's wife, but right now I'm privy to way too much information that I'm not allowed to share with the general public, so I find myself keeping silent when every muscle in my mouth is screaming to speak out. The stress of keeping silent makes niceness much more challenging.  

Students, though, deserve the extra effort required for niceness. I try to be as pleasant as possible to all my students, but there are times when harsh truths have to be conveyed, like You're in danger of failing or This looks like plagiarism or even You need to work harder on getting the details right. Often that kind of message doesn't feel particularly nice to the listener, while an Honors student may consider a B+ positively brutal.

This early in the semester, though, I've had little opportunity to be anything but nice. I've written some pointed marginal comments on homework assignments, but at this point I'm overlooking small issues while balancing out positive and negative feedback. There's no particularly nice way to say Add quotation marks, but at least I'm not prefacing my comments with Hey, stupid.

As the semester goes on, everyone's workload ramps up and sleep becomes more fleeting, niceness starts to fray around the edges. If I wait until after midterm grades come out to ask my students whether they still think all their professors are so nice, I suspect that I'll hear some different answers--if I can hear anything over all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Today, though, I'll relish the niceness and hope that it hangs around as long as possible. 

Nice work! Nice font! Nice title too!
Good vivid verb in sentence 2!
Your punctuation's rather strange;
your spelling is downright deranged.
Your paper lacks a thesis, and
its logic stands on sinking sand.
There's no citation--not a one!
The final paragraph's not done.
This thing's a mess! But one thing's nice:
you've spelled my name correctly--twice!

 

Busy bench

Sit on this bench in the middle of campus and everyone I know will pass by: 

The Instructional Technologist who answers a question about Canvas and tells me about her cats.

The Associate Provost for Tackling Annoying Tasks (or whatever his title is), who asks me which of several options for classroom chairs I prefer.

A retired colleague who has unexpectedly come out of retirement to teach a few classes in place of another colleague who suddenly left us for reasons that cannot be discussed in public so I keep my mouth shut even though I really want to know what happened.

Dozens of butterflies, bees, and birds attracted to the nearby pollinator gardens.

Our resident narcissist, who appears as if by magic the minute I tell a colleague that it's impossible to reason with a narcissist.

A former student who assures me that he's graduating next May even though it seems like I just had him in first-year writing five minutes ago.

A groundskeeper responsible for keeping the pollinator garden growing, who zips past too quickly to do more than accept my thanks.

Another student and another, and then a whole stream of students heading for lunch.

But now my lunch break is over and it's time to head back inside and get to work, knowing that my bench will still be there the next time I want to watch the passing parade--and learn a thing or two in the process.