Same song, different key

Several times during my first year at Marietta, I wondered whether I'd accidentally wandered into a madhouse. I loved teaching classes and appreciated having a real office, but the College was in a transitional state that sometimes erupted into craziness.

I entered at the same time as a brand-new President and Provost and a new General Education Curriculum, which caused some friction across campus. Further, my department at that time was dysfunctional, with various cliques constantly at war and department meetings devolving into shouting and tears.

And don't even get me started about the kiddie-porn fiasco. At the end of my first semester here, when the head of IT was arrested for operating a secret server that distributed tens of thousands of images of child pornography, I took comfort in the fact that this was the sort of catastrophe we were unlikely to encounter ever again.

The other big controversy during my first year here, though, keeps swinging around for a return visit. The College's Strategic Planning Committee proposed cutting costs by eliminating a list of majors and programs. Music was on the chopping block alongside Philosophy, Geology, Physics, and some others I've forgotten. Arguments about the value of these programs tore through campus and across the alumni network, and eventually a few programs were rescued by being merged with other programs or downgraded from a major to a minor. 

Physics, though, was a special case: an alumnus donated enough millions to endow professorships, provide scholarships, and build a new science facility equipped with spiffy labs, classrooms, and a pendulum, because who doesn't love a pendulum. This donation proved that even a small major can survive if someone pours enough money into the mix.

I don't remember how the Music major was saved, but I know it didn't involve any twenty-million-dollar donations. And now here we are again, for the fourth time since I've worked here, looking at a list of proposed program cuts and wondering who will rescue the programs we love.

Some of the cuts are reasonable enough while others confound me. Shelving the English as a Second Language program seems particularly short-sighted. Enrollment of international students is pretty low right now, but are we giving up on enrolling more in the future? 

The cut that hits me hardest on an emotional level, though, is Music. The current proposal calls for eliminating majors in Music Therapy, Music Education, and Vocal Performance, leaving only a basic B.A. in Music. I know the numbers people have looked closely at costs and outcomes, but I think about all the creative music students I've taught over the years and the fabulous performances they've provided and I wonder how the shrinkage of the Music department will affect their ability to serve the community through performance. We need music! Music feeds our souls! But if it doesn't also feed our pocketbooks, it's in danger of  eventually disappearing.

What we need is another alumnus with a boatload of money to rescue the threatened programs, but the problem is that alumni in the fine arts tend to not earn the kind of money that will allow multi-million-dollar donations. Some interpret this fact as further evidence that the arts don't equip people for the World of Work, but our Music Education and Music Therapy graduates have been very successful in finding meaningful jobs in their fields. Music educators enrich all our lives, but unfortunately they don't earn the kinds of rewards available to tech entrepreneurs.

So much has improved in my 23 years here--I no longer worry about kiddie-porn catastrophes or departmental dysfunction, and I even have a more comfortable office. But after all these years it feels sad but somehow familiar to be back in the same old quandary, singing the same old song, trying to save the budget by cutting programs that enrich us in ways that can't be quantified. 

On the other hand, ouch!

Okay, here's the situation: You're inside a stall in a public rest room and the door is stuck shut. According to my students, here are your options:

1. Kick down the door.

2. Stand on the toilet and climb over the stall door.

3. Crawl under the door.

My students were pretty evenly divided between the kickers and the crawlers, although many said they'd choke themselves to death with toilet paper before crawling on the floor of a public rest room.

No one suggested using a cell phone to call for help, which seems like the obvious solution once you get past the embarrassment of admitting being stuck in the rest room.

And no one suggested option 4: Pound on the door with your hand until you break the door...and your hand. But that's exactly what the student who found herself in that situation did, much to the detriment of her broken hand.

On the bright side, she exercised agency and physical strength to free herself from an impossible situation, and she now has a great story to tell whenever the conversation turns to Embarrassing Injuries I Have Known. (Did I ever tell you about the time I broke a toe while helping to carry a friend to a lake to throw her in? No? Well, it's still crooked...)

On the other hand, the other hand is unaccustomed to single-handedly taking notes, typing, tying shoes, or doing any of the millions of other things we usually do with our dominant hand.

So I guess the lesson here is simple: If you must use a public rest room, take a sledge-hammer. 

A few midweek surprises

I definitely wasn't expecting to find a fallen tree blocking my driveway this morning. I mean, we haven't had a storm in ages, so why did that tree decide to fall last night? Good thing the meadow was dry so I was able to drive around the blockage.

I'm ashamed to admit that I wasn't expecting the student drafts I collected yesterday to be as good as they are. Even though these are honors students with above-average writing skills, I generally expect the draft of the first major paper to be a train wreck. Not these drafts! They all need some polish and a few are thin on content, but they're mostly clear and readable--so now I'm worried about whether they're AI-generated. I think not. I hope not. But who knows?

Unsurprisingly, my department is rallying 'round to help a colleague who's having surgery, but I've been reminded that not every department is so accommodating. A new faculty member asked me where she can find help if she gets sick and has to miss class, and I was tempted to tell her, "Just hope your department is as helpful as mine."

After 23 years I shouldn't be surprised by how much the temperature in my building bothers me, but once again I find myself occasionally cutting office hours short and posting a note on the door: "Too cold to work in here. Email if you need me." The other day I was sitting in a slightly-less-frigid section of the big room where we hold faculty meetings and our new president walked in the door, stopped in her tracks, and asked, "Why is it so cold in here?" Good question! Maybe she'll be more successful at getting an answer than the rest of us, but meanwhile, I'm making good use of sweaters, blankets, and fingerless gloves.

If only these pants came equipped with a magic wand

It's hard to complain about my sorry lot in life when I got to show my Comedy students a clip from the "Chuckles the Clown's Funeral" episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show in class yesterday--and my book got a shout-out at the faculty meeting last night--and I finally got up the courage to put on my new blue-and-white plaid pants, which vary so markedly from my usual blah monochromatic wardrobe that they make me smile every time I see them. I haven't owned a pair of plaid pants since probably 1972, but these are so cheery and comfortable that I couldn't resist buying them.  Nevertheless, I've delayed donning the plaid until I got to the point in the semester when I really needed a mood booster.

And boy do I need it. I've caught up on all the things that fell through the cracks while I struggled with Covid and I've got a pretty good handle on the many drafts and exams I'll be collecting starting tomorrow, so the immediate future is looking manageable. However, every time I get a glimpse of the more distant future, I want to put my head down on the desk and cry. 

Can it possibly be true that the expertise I've poured so much time and energy into developing will be swept into the dustbin of history by people who no longer believe literature matters? Where do I fit into a culture that seems increasingly convinced that a liberal arts education is an obstacle to success instead of a threshold to possibility? How can I go out in a blaze of glory when my field, my knowledge, and my passion are dismissed as irrelevant?

When this mood strikes I want to start channeling the narrator of Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat": 

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.

And I deeply feel the dilemma faced by the suffering father in Sherman Alexie's short story "Do Not Go Gentle":

When you're hurting, it feels good to hurt somebody else. But you have to be careful. If you get addicted to  the pain-causing, then you start hurting people who don't need hurting. If you turn into a pain-delivering robot, then you start thinking everybody looks like Mr. Grief and everybody deserves a beating.

So I am trying very hard not to throw bricks or deliver pain, especially to others who are stuck in this same leaky boat. Instead I'm holding on to the promise offered later in Alexie's story, when the father of a very sick child tries to buy his suffering baby a toy but wanders into the wrong kind of toy store and emerges with a vibrator, which he and his wife wave around the hospital ward as if it's a magic wand bringing healing. "We humans are too simpleminded," he says:

We all like to think each person, place, or thing is only itself. A vibrator is a vibrator is a vibrator, right? But that's not true at all. Everything is stuffed to the brim with ideas and love and hope and magic and dreams.

I want to believe that this is true, that even the curricular and cultural changes that make me feel marginalized and worthless might bring some unforeseeable hope or magic or dream, but it's going to take more than a pair of plaid pants to help me hang on to that hope.

Not so much overwhelmed as just plain whelmed

Overheard in the hallway: "I just found out I'm failing the first-year seminar. I didn't know the class had assignments."

I feel for the dude, I really do. Three weeks into the semester and somehow he's been so overwhelmed that he read right past the due dates on the syllabus, never noticed that other students seemed to have stuff to turn in when he'd come empty-handed. Good thing it's early enough in the semester to allow him to catch up.

I've been a little overwhelmed myself, though now I wonder whether I'm really just whelmed, from an Old English root meaning overturned or upside-down. Covid knocked me for a loop, but on Wednesday I was able to return to teaching unhampered by the need to Zoom, the first time since the first day of class that I haven't had at least one student per class in quarantine. Today, though, I've just received a notice about a quarantining student, and I know of at least six students in my 2:00 class who will be missing because of sports-related travel. That's one-third of the class. The rest of us will just have to carry on without them.

I keep telling people that I've fully recovered from Covid, but ragweed pollen is still harassing my sinuses and I have to fight sleep every evening starting around 7 p.m. Tonight I'm supposed to go see Much Ado about Nothing down by the river starting at 8 p.m., right in the middle of peak head-drooping time. I fear falling asleep in the middle of the show and tumbling to the ground tangled in my folding lawn chair.

That kind of spectacle might be entertaining for the rest of the audience, but for me, the experience would be truly whelming.

Looking the other way

Twenty-two years ago I walked into the department office to find the administrative assistant staring in horror at her computer screen. "We're under attack!" she said. Pretty soon we were all wandering around dazed, trying to keep ourselves and our students from bursting into tears in the middle of--well, everything. For a while I couldn't even listen to the radio on the way to work because I can't drive while sobbing.

This morning I didn't even think about the significance of the date. I woke up bubbling with happy plans and then took a Covid test that immediately plunged me back into misery. Still positive. I'm allowed to return to campus tomorrow as long as I wear a mask and don't have a fever, but I had hoped to put this virus behind me more definitively. 

To distract from the persistence of Covid, I've been responding to students' writing assignments, prepping Wednesday's classes, processing a massive pile of kale, and baking a caramel apple cake, which was only a partial failure. It's a new recipe and I had some doubts from the start about the amount of butter it called for, and then my doubts increased when I had trouble incorporating the butter into the batter. And then I baked it and ended up with butter all over the bottom of the oven, butter oozing from the cake pan, butter now solidifying alongside the rich apple caramel cake. I like the apple/cinnamon/clove/caramel flavor combination, but the end product looks more like a pile of slop than a cake.

There's now a pile of dirty dishes in the sink but I think it's time to step away from all messes and walk out into the sunshine. It was a sunny day 22 years ago when the planes struck the towers, releasing clouds of smoke, fear, and terror that did not easily dissipate. Faint wisps linger even now, for those who know where to look. But sometimes what I really need to do is to look away.

 

The haze lifts, revealing the wreckage

The first sign that I was emerging from my Covid-induced haze was an urge to get into the kitchen and process a whole mess o' garden vegetables. I haven't cooked a thing in days and have barely eaten anything, surviving mostly on zucchini bread and chunks of cantaloupe. Even making toast seemed like too much work. 

Yesterday I spent most of the day postponing folding a basket of clean laundry, and then when I finally got up and did it, I felt that the effort I'd expended deserved, at the very least, the Presidential Medal of Honor. This morning, on the other hand, I roasted eggplants to make babaganoush and made a stuffed cabbage pie--both at the same time. Multitasking again! I feel almost normal.

Almost. Looking over some emails I sent yesterday, I see some prose that's, um, unpolished. Sloppy. Not entirely clear. I had set up some online activities for my Friday classes and I thought my instructions were perfectly clear, but some emails from students suggest confusion. Now I'm kind of afraid to go and look at what I asked them to do. It's impossible to assess one's ability to think clearly when one is not thinking clearly, so it could have seemed perfectly reasonable to instruct my students to hop on one foot while reciting the Preamble to the Constitution. Not that I did that. I hope.

Now that I can think clearly (I think!), I need to go and look at those online responses and make the final preparations for Monday's classes. I can't go back to campus until Tuesday, no matter how normal I may feel, but I can at least enjoy the opportunity to feel the brain cells sparking once again.

Teaching through fever dreams

Good thing I had the foresight to bring home my college laptop and textbooks yesterday afternoon, because I won't be able to return to campus until Tuesday. Yes: I've just tested positive for Covid. First time, but I suppose it was inevitable. I'm not coughing much, but last night was a misery of chills and fever that had me first piling on the blankets and then tossing them off. This morning I've done little but nap, but now I need to gather whatever brain cells survived last night's misery and think about what to do with my classes tomorrow and Monday.

Since I have a new wi-fi setup at home, I thought I'd test to see whether I have the bandwidth to Zoom. Our instructional technologist sent me a Zoom link and we tried it out, and the result is: I can Zoom from home if everyone keeps their cameras off, but even so, I'll still freeze up occasionally. So time for Plan B.

Tomorrow's classes are easy: I'll post an online discussion in one class, give students a research workshop challenge in another, and move the third class's readings to Monday. But at some point I'll need to come up with a more robust plan for Monday's classes so we don't fall behind. What did we do before Zoom? A helpful administrator suggested asking a colleague to cover one or more of my classes, but a bunch of my colleagues have Covid too. 

The Theatre department was planning to open their Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado about Nothing tonight--a musical version set in the 1980s--but they have so many cast members out with Covid that they're instead offering "Scenes and Songs." Maybe they'll be able to perform the full play next weekend. 

But I need to perform my teacherly duties before then. Do I trust my fever-addled brain to write an online discussion prompt? Better get to it before I fall asleep again. 

Zooming toward more Covid cases

These days my attitude toward Zoom is similar to my attitude toward air bags: Thanks for saving my life, but I hope I never have to see you again. I hadn't planned on using Zoom at all this semester, but suddenly I find myself setting up Zoom links for every class to accommodate quarantining students.

Fifteen students in the classroom and one up on the big screen--my least favorite way to conduct a class. So far I've had only one student at a time needing to use Zoom, but the current wave of Covid cases could change that. And what happens if I have to quarantine?

It could happen. Right now we're in the midst of fall allergy season, with ragweed spewing pollen all over creation and no rain coming along to wash it out of the air. Right now I'm struggling with the usual fall congestion and night-time coughing, but what if I pick up a case of Covid from one of my students or colleagues? 

My new wi-fi setup at home is more reliable than my old one but still not steady enough to teach via Zoom. So what are the options? Sit in my car in the McDonald's parking lot to piggyback on their wi-fi. Stay in a motel. Hide in my office with the door shut and hope no one notices. 

It's hopeless. What I really need to do is avoid getting Covid, or continue to avoid it. I've never tested positive for Covid, so either I'm an asymptomatic carrier or else my immune system gets such a great work-out fighting every passing pollen flake that it can swat down Covid without breaking a sweat. Either way, I want it to keep doing what it's been doing so the whole teaching-from-home thing remains a purely hypothetical problem. 

Hello, hawk!

Yesterday I glanced out the front window just at the right moment to see a raptor standing on the driveway right next to my car--and even better, the camera bag was nearby. I took a few photos through the picture window and then went outside to get closer, which scared the bird away. While resting it looked too small to be a red-tailed hawk, but it had a wide wingspan and a call like a red-tailed hawk, so maybe a juvenile? 

On Saturday I spent some time wandering the property with the camera, trying to capture the end-of-summer glory before it fades. Jewel weed, ironweed, and joe pye weed are still spectacular and the sunflowers in the garden are standing tall. I mean, really tall. How tall are they? The resident gardener is six feet tall, so you do the math.

Well whatever their height, the sunflowers are producing plenty of seeds that will continue to attract birds to our little house in the not-so-big woods.

jewel weed

ironweed

joe pye weed

How do you put handcuffs on a Watusi bull?

I had no idea how badly I needed to see the news story about this guy in Nebraska who adapted his car to allow his pet Watusi bull to ride shotgun. 

The Watusi bull is described as "a breed of cattle famous in Africa with gigantic horns," and the photograph confirms that it is the bull and not Africa that has gigantic horns. The car itself is equipped with horns less gigantic than the bull's but still impressive, but if you consider the Horn of Africa, then we're in a whole different realm of size re: horns.

The bull's name is Howdy Doody, despite the lack of rosy cheeks and buckteeth. The Watusi bull looks pretty sedate, but I wouldn't want to be the puppet-master trying to stick my arm up inside his innards to make him talk.

A police officer alerted to the presence of a Watusi bull riding shotgun in Nebraska found that while "there were some citable issues with that situation," the best thing to do was to issue a warning and ask Lee Meyer, the bull's chauffeur, to take the bull home, which he promptly did. I'm a little disappointed that this decision robbed viewers of the opportunity to see troopers wrestling the bull to the ground and snapping on the cuffs while the bull loudly claimed Sovereign Citizen status. Is a little mayhem too much to ask?

Howdy Doody had no comment on the situation.

Ahem:

There once was a Watusi bull
who made Meyer's car mighty full.
On the passenger side
Howdy Doody would ride,
but his presence was deemed citable.