Post-Traumatic Glitch Syndrome

Deep cleansing breath, and let it out slowly. Breathe, and breathe again. Think happy thoughts--last day of classes! Summer break just around the corner! Freedom awaits! So don't even think about that annoying little tech issue that's poisoning your morning. Just put it out of your mind!

You know the thing I'm talking about--the link that won't work, the software that won't respond, the marginal comment that won't stick to the essay you're grading. It's just a minor glitch, one tiny little tech issue that shouldn't be permitted to spoil your day--which, as you may recall, is the Last Day of Classes, so forget all about tech glitches and just breathe. And breathe again.

Don't waste your time fantasizing about that Tech Utopia where everything works simply and intuitively, where you emerge from training well equipped to troubleshoot every minor issue that may arise. Don't even think about how much you'd pay for a Technology Solution that solved more problems than it caused, and for sure don't let your computer hear you complaining about technology lest it lash out and find more passive-aggressive ways to thwart your wishes, like the time the Delete key got stuck and wouldn't stop deleting until the screen was entirely empty.

Don't think about that. Breathe deeply, calm your thoughts, and humbly beseech your computer to fulfill its essential purpose: to meet your needs, to tackle your tasks, to smooth your path through the last day of classes and toward that glowing dot on the horizon called Summer Break. It's on the way! You can't stop it from arriving!

Just breathe deeply and keep your hand off the crowbar.

Add 'torture skills' to my resume

My new department chair hasn't even taken office yet but I'm already starting to torture her. You'll be my department chair until I retire, I tell her, so you'd better start planning the party now.

Here we are immersed in retirement season and some of my colleagues adamantly refuse any sort of celebration. They don't want parties, cards, cakes, speeches, or even a farewell video featuring fond memories from long-time colleagues.

Not me. I want it all! And I keep coming up with suggestions to share with my new department chair. Today I demand hot-air balloon rides, tomorrow a campus-wide Scrabble tournament, and who knows what I'll come up with next week? Poetry slam, sushi bar, 76 trombones and a big parade--I could go on. 

And I will. Consider it my public service, peppering the department chair with ridiculous demands so that she'll be prepared to handle more serious issues when they arise. So someone has to torture the new department chair, and it may as well be me. After all, I've got the most experience.

Chairs in the hot seat

I'm not sure I'm the right person to be writing a manual for department chairs and planning workshops in support of their work. After all, it's been nearly 15 years since I left the chair's seat and a lot has changed since then--policies, procedures, computer programs used for assessment and curricular changes and reviewing job applicants' materials. But the essence of the job hasn't changed: it's all about managing people and resources, building consensus, and responding to problems. I can provide support for most of these tasks and I know where to find experts to help with the others. 

I took on this project because I needed a little variety in my life--and a course release. My contract confirms that I was a lousy negotiator when I first started working here 23 years ago, but since then I've learned a thing or two, so when I perceived that the Provost's office needed someone to organize some training for chairs, I offered to take on the task in exchange for a course release. I could come up with some moving rhetoric about my desire to make a lasting difference and ease the load for my colleagues, but really, I'll do just about anything to get a semester away from first-year composition.

Now I'm deep into drafting the chairs' manual and planning two training workshops and I'm impressed, frankly, that we're able to get anything done on this campus. Like many colleges, we expect chairs to perform a daunting list of tasks without adequate resources or support. Procedures are convoluted and sometimes contradictory, and administrative turnover has resulted in a loss of institutional memory and a lack of clarity about where to go for help.

Not that I'm complaining. If department chairs didn't need help, I wouldn't have my course release. My goal is to provide enough training over the next couple of years so that by the time I'm ready to retire, they won't need my help anymore. In other words, I'm trying to work my way right out of a job.

Morning light on spring ephemerals

The morning light in our woods has been calling me but who has time for a quiet walk? The few times I've been out in the woods, I haven't had time to process my photos. Some of these are from two weeks ago while others are from this morning. Two weeks ago we had trilliums, bloodroot, rue anemone, hepatica, and trout lilies blooming; the dutchman's breeches were just getting started, and the pawpaw blossoms were still rolled up in tight little buds. This morning the bloodroot has all gone by but I saw a few tiny twinleaf blossoms (too far up the slope for good photography), plus surprising stands of squirrel corn and perfoliate bellwort. The pawpaw blossoms have opened up on the edge of the woods and the mayapples are rising from the forest floor. So much change in just two weeks! What will be waiting for me next time?

Trout lily tucked amongst the ramps.

Rue anemone

bloodroot

dutchman's breeches

The redbud is abundant and amazing this year

Buckeye foliage continues to unfurl

mayapples!

buckeye

Tiny twinleaf blossom

dutchman's breeches

perfoliate bellwort

Solomon's seal just beginning to unfurl

squirrel corn

the trilliums are still holding their own

Lots of white-throated sparrows this spring

pawpaw blossoms

 

Pulling deep-fried thoughts out of potato brains

Pen to paper! Fingers to keyboard! Feet together! Sit up straight! You aren’t in Kansas anymore, you’re in the roughest toughest writing professor's class. Get your finger out of your nose and prepare to type out your deep-fried thoughts out of your potato brain.

That's good advice for any writer suffering from potato brain, but in this case it's directed toward a very specific audience. Since my Creative Nonfiction students are swamped by final projects, I asked them to put their list-making skills to work today and write helpful hints for future writing students.

Some of their tips could apply to a wide variety of activities: Just show up! Do the work! Stretch outside your comfort zone! Words to live by.

Other tips were more relevant to writing classes, revealing how much my students learned from their own struggles: 

Know how long 400 words are. Objectively this shouldn’t come as a surprise but there will be writing exercises that you will do the night before class and you will stare at the little number at the bottom of the screen wondering how even after you’ve exhausted all your thoughts is it only 200 words long. My advice? Don’t look at that number--it’s a threat to your train of thought. 

You should get some steam coming out of your ears while writing, and you should transfer your thoughts in a way that expresses you. Don’t just write what you think people want to hear. Give your words your voice.

Drafting doesn't have to be linear. Many of my drafts for large assignments in this class were pieced together like a puzzle. I wrote parts out of sequence and found ways to fit them together as I went along.

I want to cheer when I see these tips because they show that my students have developed valuable skills that will serve them well in other contexts. They're not just learning to produce better writing assignments; they're learning to be better writers.

One student warned that weak verbs come here to perish a swift and merciless death, which is true but makes me think that we need to pump some more drama into our destruction of weak verbs, maybe round 'em up and disembowel 'em all as we dance in glee to their sound of their shrieking. Because that's how I roll, unless you believe the student who called me a mythical creature: 

She has stories about meeting many authors in elevators or at conventions. She lives out in the woods and knows the names of plants and flowers that you may stumble upon in national parks. You won’t be able to collect enough tidbits even if you take at least one class with her a semester. She will elude you.

I'm not sure how useful that last bit advice might be or how accurate since it suggests that I'm some sort of unicorn, but if it gives students a reason to get their fingers out of their noses and pull the deep-fried thoughts out of their potato brains, I'll be happy.

Moved by poetry moving through me

A poem, said A.R. Ammons, embodies a motion that may be "lumbering, clipped, wavering, tripping, mechanical, dance-like, awkward, staggering, slow," or something else entirely, but my students won't feel that motion unless they hear the poem out loud, and even then the motion might elude a clumsy reader.

So I read to them. In American Lit Survey at this time of the semester it's all poetry all the time, so we're lumbering and wavering, dancing and staggering through lines by Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Amit Majmudar, Gwendolyn Brooks, and more. Today we discussed Yusef Komunyakaa's great basketball poem "Slam, Dunk, & Hook," and I wanted them to hear the "hot / Swish of strings like silk" and the blackjack pounding the palm of personified Trouble, wanted them to see the bodies rising as they "spun / On swivels of bone & faith / Through a lyric slipknot / Of joy," so of course I had to read it out loud.

But I can't read every poem out loud, so when we do group work I often ask groups to choose a few lines or a stanza to read to their classmates. A few students don't mind but many resist, perhaps fearing stumbles or unfamiliar words. Feel the motion, I tell them. Hear the words. Savor the sounds. But they're too busy packing up their books and notes so they can dash off to the next class. Poetry may be lumbering or staggering or slow, but students are always in a hurry to close the books and move on.

I'd like to live inside the poetry one day, spend my days reading beautiful lines to an appreciative audience, but where will I find one? Shall I go to the woods and read poems to the birds, embodying the motion appropriate to each poem? They're unlikely to be appreciative, and my bursts of enthusiasm might scare them away.

So I savor the days when I can read poetry out loud to students, even if they're not always listening. I feel the words move through me and I spin through that "lyric slipknot / Of joy" and for a moment gravity releases me and I am free. 

Out of the chaos

One student frenetically wipes desk-tops with a paper towel while another wanders around asking about a lost dog and a third urgently tries to usher everyone out of the classroom. Why is this student sitting in the corner ignoring everyone? Why is that student miming the need to be fed? And why is the professor jumping in front of students and insisting on rescuing them?

Welcome to chaos. Want to make something of it?

My Creative Nonfiction students are working toward an essay composed in the form of a list or a collage of fragments. Lists and collages, I tell them, allow us to make some sense out of a confusing world, to imply connections where they may not be apparent and to impose some order on the chaos. But before we can practice doing that, we need some chaos. 

And so we made some: Students randomly drew slips of paper, each describing a specific role: You are a flight attendant trying to persuade passengers to sit down before the plane takes off. You are an old lady who can't find her way home. You are trying to get people to respond to a survey. You are a superhero, so fight some crime.

That last one was mine, by the way. If my students are willing to get up and simultaneously perform unfamiliar roles in the classroom, then I'd better join the chaos. 

I probably wouldn't do this exercise early in the semester, but by this time we're all pretty comfortable with each other--and besides, it's April. Everyone is so overwhelmed preparing projects and papers and end-of-semester events that they'll happily take the opportunity to step outside their own lives and have some fun.

We all acted out our roles in the classroom for about five minutes, and then I told them to sit down and quickly write everything they could remember, quickly scribbling the details before they fade from memory. After that we talked about structuring their observations and controlling tone and details to achieve a particular purpose--and wow, what a difference. One student wrote a children's nonsense story, while another used the same details to plunge us into a dark, brooding city of madness. We may all inhabit the same physical space, but our headspaces are in whole different galaxies.

Sometimes chaos is all we've got to work with, I tell my students, but that's not the time to put down the pencil. That's when we sharpen the lead and start writing.

Brave new world that has such AI in it

The AI detection software said the student's essay was 100 percent generated by Artificial Intelligence, which confirmed my suspicions but also threw me into a quandary--What am I supposed to do now?

I know how to handle plagiarism. The details differ a little each time, but once I've confirmed that a chunk of text was copied from an online source (and it's always an online source--gone are the days of hunting down stolen passages in the library stacks), I follow a very clear series of steps laid out in our faculty guidelines: confer with the department chair, meet with the student, apply the penalty, send a report to the Provost's office. The student may complain that it's purely coincidental that a whole paragraph from a paper perfectly matches some online source, but if the evidence is clear, I have confidence in the process.

Now here we are in a brave new world where I don't know where to start. I've already made changes to assure that future syllabi will include language dealing with AI-generated text, but this semester's syllabi don't even mention AI, unless AI is covered under the prohibition on having someone else write or significantly revise a paper. 

Further, I don't know exactly what that "100 percent AI" score means or what will happen when I confront the student with the problem. If the student denies getting an AI to write his paper, how do I contest that? The algorithm says you're guilty? I just don't feel confident that this is going to go well.

So I asked for help. I'm working with our instructional technologist to make sure I understand the issues and possess the evidence before I meet with the student. Brave new world indeed! Why can't I just retire right now?

Mostly yellow

A world of yellow greets my eyes as I process photos I've taken in the past week at my youngest grandkid's birthday party and in a short walk in the woods, and it's not a sickly yellow suggesting jaundice but a cheery yellow suggesting fun and laughter. So let's look at some yellow things before getting back to the daily grind:

Trout lilies are blooming!

It was a balloon-themed party

My distinguished hubby shows the young folk how it's done

Taking turns cranking the ice-cream maker

Bananas for banana cake

 

A little Kum-ba-yah couldn't hurt

I woke up grumpy this morning after interrupted sleep, and all morning my interior monologue has been grumbling through a long list of annoyances: The UPS guy who's scared of our driveway and delivers packages to inappropriate places! The lack of bowls for yogurt and fruit at this morning's breakfast meeting! The person who thinks it's cool to announce an important meeting a mere three hours in advance! Ah, the humanity!

 I could go on, but just thinking about all those annoyances makes my blood pressure rise and I don't want such a beautiful day to be tainted by rage, so instead I'll think about things that make me happy, like the aforementioned gorgeous weather, the swath of brightly colored tulips blooming just across the street, the Creative Nonfiction students dutifully commenting on their classmates' drafts, and the finalist for an administrative position who, in the midst of a talk suffused with data and outcomes and appeals to reason, said she wants to help us restore the joy of working together.

Which made me wonder: where did it go, all that joy? I know we had a healthy amount at some point, because I remember years ago accompanying a group of my colleagues to a curriculum workshop where we interacted with teams of profs from other colleges who kept telling us that we made Marietta College sound like a fun place to work. And it was! We've always had our issues and obstacles, but—not to get all Kum-Ba-Yah on you—we used to be able to join hands across disciplines and make meaningful stuff happen.

When did we lose that ability? It would be easy to blame Covid and the stresses of pandemic pedagogy, but cracks were starting to show well before 2020, and since then we've had budget crises and cuts to positions and administrative challenges, and at some point a massive gulf opened up between the faculty and other constituencies on campus so that it's hard to feel like part of a team working together toward any purpose beyond sheer survival, like shipwreck survivors in a crowded lifeboat wondering who's going to get pushed off next or who will be first in line for dinner when we're forced to turn to cannibalism. Not fun!

I'm not sure a new administrator can solve that problem, but I can get behind a candidate who acknowledges that an emphasis on data and outcomes should not preclude the possibility of joy. You can feed an Artificial Intelligence Prof on reams of data, but we mere human beings function more effectively on a diet of purpose and passion and appreciation.

So that's what I'm holding on to today: the possibility of joy. Let it come soon, because the lifeboat is taking on water and the sharks are circling and I don't want to be anyone's lunch.