Maybe we all need to hibernate

Everyone was dragging yesterday despite having just returned from an extended break. I provided a rude awakening to one student who forgot that he's scheduled to give a class presentation on Wednesday, but mostly I spent class time trying to gently prod my students into alertness and engagement. They're tired, they say. Well I'm tired too. We're all tired. Who wouldn't be tired in the final weeks of the fall semester?

This morning I've been reading student drafts and right now I'm tired of asking students to spell my name correctly. It's not that difficult! Only five letters! One set of papers features four different spellings of my name, which is nearly as annoying as the paper that keeps referring to Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir as The Women Warrior. I'm tired of seeing references to a women and I'm tired of seeing then where than should be.

But I'm also tired of the paper that looks absolutely perfect, with no spelling or punctuation errors, but that our AI detector flags as being mostly machine-generated. I'd rather see a student spell woman wrong a dozen times than to go through the whole process of figuring out who or what wrote a perfect paper and what I'm supposed to do about it. 

I'm tired of the cold already even though it's barely begun. I'm interested in seeing how my new car handles snowy roads, but not interested enough to wish for a blizzard. This morning I drove through scattered flakes that melted when they hit the ground, which barely counts as a flurry. If I'd blinked, I would have missed it.

I'm tired of class preps and grading and meetings meetings meetings, but the good news is it's nearly over (for now). On Wednesday my students will discuss their final reading assignments of the semester; after that, it's a week and a half of drafts, revisions, presentations, and final exams. So much to do before winter break! Just thinking about it makes me tired.

 

 

  

Thanksgiving smiles

The youngest grandkids were pretending to be superheroes and when it came time to select their powers, the youngest said, "I breathe out sunshine." Indeed she does, but so do her siblings. It's a family trait passed down from both parents: the ability to light up a room with a smile.

We've been enjoying some Thanksgiving sunshine with the grandkids, with food and fun and silliness. The meal was a group effort, as usual; I was especially thankful for my oldest granddaughter's help on rolling out the pumpkin yeast rolls because some muscle pain in my arm made it hard to apply sufficient oomph. We ate and talked and took a walk and by late afternoon we were all in the living room, struggling to stay awake.

Today's it's time to head back home, where I'll face a fridge that isn't crammed with leftovers (except some excess cranberry chutney, yum). But that's okay. As much as we enjoy the Thanksgiving meal, it's really not about the food. What we're most thankful for are the smiles full of sunshine.

 

Because everyone needs a little good news

Fourteen years ago today I sat in a comfy chair at our local cancer center dangling between the bad news dominating my recent past and the good news beckoning me forward. After major surgery and months of cancer treatment, I was enduring my final round of chemotherapy while looking forward to finally stepping into a new role as Director of our campus's Center for Teaching Excellence.

Today I'm enjoying a similar sense of anticipation. With cancer treatment long in the past and with administrative changes making the College's budget problems more bearable, I'm looking forward to January, when I'll resume the role of Director of the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence.

This change seemed unimaginable not so long ago. In summer of 2022, I met with the then-Provost to discuss taking on a different role. The ongoing marginalization of the liberal arts made me fear that my final years before retirement would be one long slog through multiple sections of first-year composition and general education courses, with little challenge or variety. I wasn't expecting to ride into the sunset in a cloud of glory, but I was looking for an opportunity to use my skills in a more challenging and rewarding way.

So the Provost and I tossed around ideas and agreed to take a few weeks to think about the options before making any decisions--and then, a week later, she announced her sudden retirement.

So that's the end of that, I thought. The new interim Provost was hired to do a specific job--evaluating positions and programs to target for elimination--and he did it as graciously as he could, but developing challenging opportunities for discontented faculty members was not part of his bailiwick. I assumed that I would just keep doing what I'd been doing and hope for an occasional upper-level class to make things interesting.

But halfway through the fall 2022 semester, I became aware of a gap and jumped in to fill it: department chairs needed some training, so I sent a two-sentence email to the Associate Provost in charge of the problem and offered to design the training in exchange for a course release in Spring 2023. The training was a success and the course release was renewed for Spring 2024--for a "project assigned by the Office of Academic Affairs." I didn't mind the ambiguity. We were, after all, welcoming a new Provost this fall, and she might have different ideas about how I could serve the College.

And now that different idea has become public: starting in January, I'll go back to doing a job I loved and never wanted to leave. I was the first Director of the Worthington Center, so I had a hand in establishing how the Center could serve the needs of the College by offering faculty workshops, one-on-one mentoring, teaching observations, and other services designed to improve pedagogy and professional development. I served a three-year term and applied for renewal, but by then the Provost who had hired me for the position had been replaced by another with a different vision for the position. (Somehow this is turning into a Tale of Too Many Provosts.)

Several other Directors served admirably for the next few years but then the administration moved away from three-year terms and instead tried a new leadership model, which resulted, eventually, in a stark decline in the kind of faculty support the Center had excelled in offering. At various meetings over the past two years I've heard many voices saying "We need the Worthington Center back at full function," but nobody knew how to make that happen in the midst of a budget crisis.

But the new Provost had a plan, which was approved by the Trustees in October and presented to me last week. Before accepting the offer, I asked the Provost to describe her vision for the Center. Once before I got stuck in the awkward space between my understanding of my job and a Provost's shifting priorities, and I don't ever want to visit that place again. But our discussion convinced me that the job will allow me to do many things I love to support faculty development while also teaching two courses per semester--and, if all goes according to plan, I can continue doing this rewarding work until I'm ready to retire.

Am I happy? Of course I'm happy. And judging by the wide smiles and the round of applause greeting the announcement at the faculty meeting last night, others are happy as well. If anyone isn't happy, I'm not hearing about it. I'm already thinking about ideas for workshops and looking forward to working one-on-one with faculty members in search of insight and perspective on their teaching, activities that fill me with excitement. We've had a rough couple of years here and we're not in the clear yet, but looking into the near future, all I can see is good news. 

The return of Friday Pie Day

A year ago I wrote about the cancellation of our campus's annual Friday Pie Day, when employees mingled over slices of pie on the last Friday before Thanksgiving, a lovely tradition that fell victim to our ongoing budget crisis. Things might be looking up, I wrote, but "I won't believe the College has recovered from its budget crisis until I see a room full of campus employees happily eating pie."

Well we still haven't recovered entirely, but I'm pleased to report that Friday Pie Day is back--and I had just a little bit to do with its resurrection. Last week I was meeting with the brand-new Provost about an entirely unrelated matter when I wistfully wondered aloud when the annual Friday Pie Day might return.

She'd never heard of it, so I had to explain: it's one of the few occasions when faculty, staff, and administrators can sit around a table casually, drawn together by the offer of many types of pie. (And whipped cream, of course. For some folks pie is just a vehicle for whipped cream.) The new provost seemed vaguely interested in the idea and even brought it up at the Department Chairs' meeting on Monday. 

And now it's back! For lunch today I enjoyed a delicious piece of blackberry pie accompanied by a chat with some colleagues I don't normally see too often. It's been an exhausting semester and a week crammed full with meetings and madness, but this morning the anticipation of pie kept me going--and now the afterglow will carry me through my one remaining class.

Sometimes pie makes everything better.   

 

Assailed by tiny enemies while giants wait in the wings

I woke up at 2 a.m. in a panic because I realized I'd forgotten to remind an advisee to add a particular class to his schedule. Not an emergency! Just an errant item from my to-do list haunting the midnight hours.

If I have to wake up alarmed in the middle of the night, why can't I panic over something actually worthy of panic, like extinction of species or melting of glaciers or a 12 percent increase in our health-care premiums? (Which our HR people prefer to call "contributions," as if we're donating our hard-earned funds to a worthy cause out of the goodness of our hearts instead of having them wrenched out of our paychecks kicking and screaming.)

But I digress. 

The problem, I think, is that my subconscious knows that there's no point jerking me out of a sound sleep to obsess over melting glaciers in Greenland because what could I possibly do about the problem? I've relegated too many big issues to the category I'd describe as I'm doing my best but this really requires larger societal change so what's the point of thinking about it at 2 a.m.?

Instead, my subconscious likes to alert me to smaller matters that I actually have some control over. Forgot to give proper advice to an advisee? Better get to it! Granted, emailing the student at 2 a.m. is unlikely to result in any immediate action, but at least it will get the problem off my back.

This reminds me of the problem we discussed in my Honors Literature class this morning, when we tackled the chapter of The Woman Warrior in which Maxine Hong Kingston examines the disconnect between fairy-tale heroics and real-life action. Fa Mu Lan sets out with her village's grievances inscribed in her flesh and she uses her skills and weapons to locate and destroy the oppressor. But her enemy is easily identified--he has a name and an address, and once he's dead, the village is free.

What happens when we can't identify the enemy? How do we locate an enemy who seems to suffuse the very air we breathe? If the enemy is an evil baron living in a castle, then break down the doors and chop off his head; but what if the enemy is racism or gender stereotyping or unjust economic systems? Where would you start chopping off heads and how would you know when you're done?

And so we sheath our swords and go to sleep, where we hope to build strength to fight the big battles but instead find ourselves assailed by little things that go bump in the night. Who can be a hero under these circumstances?  

And here we are agonizing over AI again

I want to see your mind grappling with issues on the page, I told a student this morning, but in the back of my mind I heard echoing a statement I heard at last week's training on Artificial Intelligence in the classroom: We need to teach students how to use AI responsibly. The gap between those statements is a place of anguish.

If it were up to me, my students would never resort to AI--and they wouldn't plagiarize either, or read online summaries instead of actual books or sit through an entire semester without taking a single note in class. They would love to read and write and would use their writing assignments as a place to take risks and play with words and engage with ideas, drawing on their reading to support claims originating in their own heads, not manufactured by a machine.

I'm dreaming, of course. If the AI detectors can be believed, I've had very few students resorting to AI in my classes this semester, but I frequently see papers parroting back inane ideas gleaned from online summaries, with a few quotes tossed in as proof-texts.

At last week's training I was reminded that it's unrealistic to expect my students to express truly original thoughts. They are, after all, college students with little experience in literary analysis, so anything that strikes them as original has probably already been said better by someone else. The most we can expect, then, is for students to make creative use of whatever unoriginal thoughts they come up with.

And I'm okay with that. They may not have read enough to know whether their ideas are entirely original, but at the very least I want them to make an analytical claim, to stake out a space for their own interpretation based on support from the text. A mind at work on the page--is that so much to ask?

But the recent AI training session wants something different. To teach students to use AI responsibly, I should outline parameters of acceptable use: allow them to use AI to develop an outline, for instance, and then allow the student to fill in the blanks. I agree that such an approach might be useful in some contexts, but it defies the most basic advice I give students who are learning to analyze literature: Always start with the text itself. Don't approach it with preconceived notions but instead choose a passage that interests you and dig into it until you understand why. Take it apart and examine the pieces, then put them back together and see how they work. Let the text inspire the points of the analysis.

Starting with an AI-generated outline will only encourage proof-texting--approaching the text to locate quotes to support a preconceived idea. This method tends to produce superficial readings that pay little attention to metaphor, structure, imagery, or how form and content work together to create meaning. This may be the best I can hope for from some students, but how can I get students to dig deeply into a text when they're looking only for what matters to a machine?

I want to see a mind at work, but too often I see the results of machine thinking, which, to my mind, isn't very interesting.

Trotting out the trivia

So what's the most trivial thing you know, she asked, but I had to think about it.

We were in the English Department office spouting off about the kinds of things English professors spout off about--tracing the etymology of palimpsest, quoting lines from The Importance of Being Earnest, ranking our favorite Nicola Walker roles--when the youngest among us marveled over our wealth of useless knowledge and asked What's the most trivial thing you know?

It depends upon how you define trivial.

Oscar Wilde gave The Importance of Being Earnest the subtitle A Trivial Play for Serious People, but its effect on Wilde's career and the careers of many actors and on the history of theatrical comedy itself was hardly trivial.

Likewise, the date of the Battle of Hastings might show up on a Jeopardy answer or a Trivial Pursuit card, but the battle had a non-trivial impact on the soldiers whose heads were smashed in and, ultimately, on the development of the English language. I wouldn't consider the date useless, either, because I use it every day as part of an important online password. (Don't tell anyone! It's a secret.)

Anyone who has earned a PhD possesses a wealth of knowledge essential to some narrow area of study but trivial to anyone outside that area. For instance, Theodore Dreiser might pop up in a trivia quiz as the author of An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie, but without breaking a sweat I can tell you the date of his momentous road trip from Manhattan to Indiana (1913) and relay his response to two northwestern Ohio towns: Dreiser relished the vibrant bar scene in Hicksville, but he dismissed Bowling Green as a hick town redolent of pig farming. I have lived in Hicksville and earned my Ph.D. in Bowling Green so I can state confidently that Dreiser would be amazed at how the two towns have switched roles.  

But is that the most trivial thing I know? I know Donnie Osmond's birthday, many of the lyrics to the Gilligan's Island musical version of Hamlet, when Hunter S. Thompson was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base, and how to say duck in Russian (ootka)--knowledge useful to a Russian duck-breeder, perhaps, but not so relevant to my daily life.

I studied Russian for three years in high school so I've probably forgotten more Russian words than most Americans will ever know, but that doesn't mean I would be able to find my way around Moscow. Looking lost while saying ootka isn't going to get me anywhere except, maybe, the loony bin.

Anyone in possession of a large reservoir of trivial knowledge has to be careful about trotting it out in public. This is one reason I love academe: if I mention the Battle of Hastings or Oscar Wilde--or, for that matter, Gilligan's Island--among my colleagues, someone is bound to know what I'm talking about, while the general public tends to look askance at eggheads who make obscure allusions.

And this is one of the things I'll miss when I finally retire: sitting around the department office spouting off about the kinds of things English professors spout off about. Will my wealth of useless knowledge atrophy, or will I annoy everyone who comes near me by spewing a fountain of obscure trivia?

For that matter, how much trivia have I already forgotten? Maybe the most trivial thing I ever knew has already drifted away into some forgotten limbo. 

So even after thinking about it for a few days, I still don't know how to answer the question--but I'm happy to work in a place where it's not unusual for such a question to be asked.

 

Lit4Life

About halfway through George Saunders' short story "Ask the Optimist," a parody of advice columns, the Optimist receives a letter from Satan, who's having trouble finding the silver lining in his situation: 

Although I know I should be grateful--I love working for myself, and I'm one of the two most powerful beings in the universe--I sometimes feel a certain absence, as if there's some essential quality I'm lacking. I've heard people, as I make my rounds, speak of something called "goodness." Usually when I hear someone use this word, I get frustrated and immediately tempt them into doing something horrific--but lately, somehow, this isn't enough. Thoughts? 

Of course The Optimist has thoughts--he always has thoughts about his correspondents' problems, most of them inane (Look on the bright side!) or self-serving (as when he invites a turkey over for Thanksgiving dinner). Faced with pure evil, he suggests that Satan cure his loneliness by visiting another hopeless correspondent, unless he'd rather not, which would also be fine, because, as the Optimist concludes, "Whatever! It's all good!"

When we discussed this story in my Comedy class, my question for students was If it's all good, how do we decide what's bad? And if we define evil out of existence, what are the consequences? (In the story, the consequences are violent, bloody, grim, and hilarious.)

And this is what I love about teaching literature classes: dig beneath the surface and any text and we're bound to unearth an invitation to talk about ethics, epistemology, ontology, and a whole host of questions about living a meaningful life. (I've been thinking about introducing a course called "Literature for a Meaningful Life," but it would be abbreviated "Lit4Life," which might give students a mistaken impression.)

Sure, we can talk about metaphors, similes, imagery, diction, and all the literary devices Miss Groby liked to hunt down and count up in James Thurber's "Here Lies Miss Groby." Or we can follow the example of the readers in Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry" and "tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it." But at some point we need to stop identifying literary devices and ask what they all add up to, what they suggest about the human condition or how we should live or what I call meaning-of-life issues.

I suspect that some of my Comedy students did not expect to address philosophical questions in a class that includes Monty Python on the syllabus, but here we are talking about how we distinguish between good and evil. If they get tired of my probing questions, they can vent their anger in a letter to the Optimist, but he'll just tell them to look on the bright side--Whatever. It's all good. (Until it isn't.)

Back to the simulated garden

Standing nearly six feet tall and arranged in neat rows between ziggurat-like office buildings, 109 molded concrete ears of corn guard a busy intersection in the Columbus suburb of Dublin, Ohio.  The art installation, Field of Corn with Osage Orange Trees by sculptor Malcolm Cochran, can baffle unprepared passersby.  Are these stark white erections tiny missile silos?  Tombstones?  Teeth?  Klansmen playing freeze-tag?

Thus begins a cheeky article called "From Mulberries to Machines: Planting the Simulated Garden," published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 15 years ago. It wasn't my first article in an academic journal, but it drew on a section of my dissertation so I'd been working on the topic for what felt like a very long time. From that field of fake corn grew my entire academic career.

I don't spend much time in Columbus these days but this morning I paid a repeat visit to Field of Corn with Osage Orange Trees. The property once belonged to an agriculturalist studying corn hybridization, but I'm sure he never envisioned an ear of corn six feet tall. Early settlers planted osage orange trees close together to serve as hedges along property lines, but it's unusual to see osage oranges standing in the middle of the city, occasionally dropping a hedge apple to the ground with a thunk.

Even early on a Saturday morning, a steady swish of traffic whizzed past as I wandered among the artificial ears. I could wax poetic about how Field of Corn makes visible the various meanings inscribed on this particular plot of land over the centuries, but mostly the whole experience just makes me smile. A simulated garden in the middle of a city! Someone should write about that.

Here comes another Bartleby!

After several rounds of email messaging yesterday, I finally had to admit to a student that the powers invested in me as Chair of the Art Department do not include the ability to increase the size of a classroom. No matter how desperately the student wants to take that class, all the seats are already full and I can't wave a magic wand to make the room extend into another dimension, however cool that might be.

Most of my duties as (temporary!) Chair of the Art Department have been both mild and interesting: I love observing creative people in the classroom, and so far the department hasn't been threatened with the curricular cuts happening elsewhere. Right now, though, students are scheduling their spring-semester classes and I suddenly face an inbox full of requests for waivers of prerequisites, course substitutions, and admission into courses that are already full.

The requests to be added to full courses are the easiest to deal with: classrooms are only so big, and a room that's already crowded with 18 students isn't going to welcome a 19th. In the English department it's not so difficult to shove an extra desk into a classroom, but art classes tend to require different types of works space--super-spiffy computers in Graphic Design courses, easels and paints or pencils in others. I've been in all those rooms and I've seen how cramped they can be, so I have no problem holding the line on course caps.

The requests for waivers and substitutions are more difficult, though, because I'm required to provide a written rationale for each one I approve, and I'm hard pressed, for instance, to explain why a painting course is an appropriate substitute for one focused on print-making. When I ask students why they want a waiver or substitution, their reasons not the type that will impress the Registrar's office: I don't like morning classes, I think I'll do better in this type of class, I don't want to take that other one. It's a whole lot of Bartlebys facing a brick wall and saying "I prefer not to," and I can't send that to the Registrar.

So this morning I came up with a solution: When a student asks for a waiver or substitution, I will ask the student to write a couple of sentences explaining why they're equipped to take the course without the prerequisite or why the course in question is an appropriate substitute for the required course--and the reasons have to refer to course content and skills acquired, not personal preferences. This may save me a little work but, more importantly, it will make the students think about the purpose of their education beyond personal preference.

The Bartlebys will always be with us, but maybe this will make a few of them think beyond the brick wall.