Hula-Hooping to save the world

My five-year-old granddaughter approaches the Hula-Hoop systematically: first she measures her space and clears out obstacles, and then she takes up the hoop and makes it spin and spin and spin and then spin and spin some more, all the time clenching her fists and maintaining the firm, focused expression of a professional completing a difficult but necessary task that gives her intense satisfaction. She can keep that thing going for three or four minutes at a time and often doesn't stop until someone stumbles into her path, which annoys her.

I watch her spin and wonder: when was the last time I focused so intently on a task that no one was paying me to do? I admire the way the small folk single-mindedly pursue each new obsession, whether it's Legos or rock-collecting or fart jokes. When a tree-stump in the yard needed to be dismantled, my seven-year-old grandson put on a hard hat and work gloves and took his hatchet out there to hack away at the stump as if he thought he was saving the world. 

And maybe he was. Maybe the ability to focus on a thankless task until it's done is a trait essential for human survival. It's one thing to tackle a tough job with an eye on the prize, the paycheck or the blue ribbon or the promise of advancement, but it's another thing entirely to devote long hours to a difficult task for the sheer joy of doing it.

I need more of that kind of passion in my life, but instead I spend a lot of time doing things I don't want to do because no one else will do them. I love a clean house, but I'll never get any sense of satisfaction out of dusting or cleaning toilets or scrubbing the algae off the siding. The things I do that bring me joy (outside of teaching, I mean) have been hampered lately by lack of time, lousy weather, and failing equipment. One of these days I'll get a new camera, but meanwhile, photography has become more frustrating than fulfilling.

So at the moment I'll settle for getting my joy out of watching my grandkids pursue their passions. It's almost hypnotic the way that Hula-Hoop spins, its colors glinting and sparkling in the changing light, and my granddaughter's dogged determination to keep it spinning inspires wonder and awe. I want some of that passion! If I can't find it in a Hula-Hoop, then where?

Shipwrecked in a shrinking sea of time

I'm in the middle of a lively class discussion digging deeply into how Stephen Crane draws attention to the way his characters' perceptions distort their understanding of events as they bob on the sea in that tiny dinghy, but then I glance at the clock--only five minutes left and so many miles to row!--and I have to scramble to keep my head above water as we try to bring "The Open Boat" safely to shore. 

I like to structure class discussions so ideas build toward new understanding--not just floundering in a sea of ideas but fixing a course toward firm ground. Lately, though, I've been getting swamped. Why do I keep running out of time? 

I start class promptly and I rarely keep a class one minute over our allotted time, but this semester I'm always racing to pack everything in before everyone packs up and leaves. Part of the reason, I think, is that my classes are a little bigger than usual this semester: more talkers = more talk. But I also feel retirement breathing down my neck and I know I have a limited opportunity to teach students everything I know and then I panic when I realize that I can't, and even if I could, how would I test them on all that?

Two years until retirement (ideally) but I'm already feeling the onset of endings. I doubt that I'll teach the sophomore seminar again, which is no great loss, but was last semester my final chance to teach Honors Literature? Will I ever teach the theory course again? I doubt that Creative Nonfiction will roll around in the rotation again before I'm ready to retire, but at least I'll get one more stab at the senior capstone course. 

I feel this sense of urgency both inside and outside of class, this impulse to impart insight that will make a lasting impression on someone--anyone--so I won't just fade into irrelevance. But eventually irrelevance comes for us all, as Stephen Crane points out in one of his bleak little poems:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
"A sense of obligation."

The universe is not obliged to provide me opportunities to leave my mark, but it does occasionally deposit me on shore, where, like the shipwrecked men in Crane's "The Open Boat," I can look back upon the sea with new understanding:

When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt they could then be interpreters. 

"What does the sea tell them?" I ask my students as the clock ticks away in the final seconds of class. My time is up and I can't find words and so I hold up the book and show them Crane's remarkable story and I say, "It tells them this."

Our time is up. We've reached the shore in a sorry state, but at least I've given them something solid to take away.

Park your ideas here

How far would you go for a reserved parking space?

The question arose during a discussion of low- or no-cost incentives for faculty members. If there's no money for awards or meals or conference travel or even branded T-shirts or water bottles, how do we encourage faculty members to do things that need to be done?

The snarky response is why do we need incentives to do the right thing? If attending pedagogy workshops or engaging in research or professional development is going to make us better at our jobs and, over time, improve the level of excellence on campus (as if excellence were a measurable substance doled out as a reward for our best efforts), then we ought to do these things without regard for rewards.

But! Everyone is already doing so much that one more thing feels like an unjust imposition, and sometimes it takes just a slight nudge to move people toward doing the one small thing that might make a difference. We all know that the way to get students to attend an outside-of-class event that will enrich their learning is to order a bunch of pizzas. The promise of coffee and donuts can lure faculty to a morning meeting, and a free lunch can make a three-hour workshop look more attractive.

But when there's no such thing as a free lunch, what can we offer?

This is where the reserved parking space idea comes in: put the names of all the attendees in a hat and draw one; the winner gets to pick out a campus parking space and park there for a month. Our staff recognition program provides a similar incentive, and winning staff members enjoy finding a parking space marked with their name, available whenever they arrive on campus for a whole month. The only cost is the portable sign to mark the space.

Would faculty go the extra mile in hopes of earning their own parking space, even temporarily? Or are there other low-cost ways to incentivize participation in enrichment activities? Somebody needs to find out, and I think that someone is going to be me. (But what is my incentive for pursuing this project?)

Mothball mania; or, why I'd rather stay inside the classroom

Who knows what mothballs smell like, I asked my class, and only one student came up with an answer: They smell like old ladies.

It's hard to imagine that the smell of mothballs would be relevant to a class discussion but even harder to comprehend that 90 percent of my students do not recognize the concept of mothballs. A character in John Henry Days discovers a mothball in the pocket of his suit at a social event and then fears that he's walking around as a marked man, carrying a foul scent into every strained interaction. It's a lovely image, but effective only insofar as readers are familiar with mothballs.

I came out of my classroom yesterday feeling energized and excited: my students had done the reading and had interesting things to say, and I was able to answer their mothball-related questions along with many others. This is why I love my job, I told myself as I walked back to my office, but then I opened up my email inbox and felt the love draining away.

I'm trying to master the new purchasing procedures--honestly, I'm doing my best, but dealing with spreadsheets and online forms is outside my skillset. If you need someone to guide students toward understanding why the ability to create narrative out of chaos, trauma, and debris is compelling evidence of the continuity of human culture, I'm your person--but that doesn't necessarily mean I'll excel at Excel. I'm a word person, not a numbers person. All those little spreadsheet cells feel like prisons for my creativity.

And this week I've also been required to be the bearer of bad news about topics I can't share here. Receiving bad news is difficult enough; I've never enjoyed being told that my hard work will not be rewarded nor my projects supported. But serving as the conduit of bad news is like carrying a mothball in the pocket of your best suit--everything you do starts to stink.

I'm trying not to carry that stink of despair into the classroom. My students deserve better; they're putting in the time and effort to understand difficult readings, and they're doing their best to contribute to a lively learning environment. When I'm with them, I love what I'm doing; I just wish I didn't have to leave the room. 

Pick your poison

You're head of a department with a meager budget. Would you rather

• Attend a 90-minute mandatory training session on new purchasing processes that are convoluted, inefficient, and demoralizing, or
• Ignore the new processes and run the risk of facing harsh sanctions outlined in bold red print on multiple PowerPoint slides (because this time they really, really mean it), or
  
• Buy everything out of your own pocket?

You've run out of your blood-pressure medication but the prescription can't be filled until you fix a glitch in your online medical record. Would you rather

• Sit in your car in very cold weather listening to bouncy hold music while waiting to talk to someone at your doctor's office who can fix the glitch, or
• Turn on the car and let it idle so that you can have some heat during your 20 minutes on hold while the tiny Puritans who live inside your head brew up cauldrons of guilt about your carbon footprint, or
• Decide that, on the whole, you can probably survive a while without your blood pressure pills?

For reasons the rest of the world struggles to understand, you insist on living in a rural area lacking cell-phone reception and therefore rely on a landline at home--a landline prone to outages when the weather gets too wet, too hot, or too cold. When a winter storm hits and your landline provides a sharp shriek instead of a dial tone, would you rather

• Explain the problem to an online bot that responds onto to certain key words and insists that the technician who will be sent out to check on the problem will need to communicate with you via cell phone to confirm the service time, or
• Tag-team with your spouse to make sure someone is at home all day just in case the technician shows up when the bot says he might show up, or
• Drive five miles down the road and sit in your car on a very cold evening using your cell phone to try to reach an actual human being who can understand the situation and schedule a technician without demanding that he be able to reach you by cell phone in an area where there is no cell-phone coverage, which is the whole reason why you must have a functioning landline, or
• Decide that, on the whole, connectivity is overrated and cancel your landline service?
  

Storming onward

Those fat fluffy snowflakes looked so pretty in my car's headlights this morning that I almost forgot how treacherous they can be when they pile up on the road.

Almost.

I sat in my car at the end of my road--still untouched by plows--until I could pull out onto the highway and take my place in a long line of slow-moving cars stretched behind a snowplow. I've always dreaded driving in snow, but four-wheel drive made me much more confident. Still, no one was driving more than 35 on the highway this morning, and traffic slowed to a crawl once we got into town. Those historic brick streets might look nice, but there's no good way to keep them clear in bad weather. 

A different kind of storm awaited in my email inbox, where a bunch of my advisees were eager to drop difficult classes and replace them with something less demanding before the add deadline. I don't know what to say to a student who want to know where the easy classes are listed, so I encourage them to choose classes based on their educational goals. But what do I say to an advisee whose primary educational goal is to remain eligible to play basketball? 

And yet another storm swooped into our Center for Teaching Excellence, where I found a line of people eagerly waiting as soon as I opened the door, all wanting to buy the used iPads we're selling. I've never owned an iPad and I was not privy to the procedures for selling them, but the colleague in charge of the sale suffered weather-related travel delays. Until she arrived, all I could do was stand there looking stupid and trying to keep everyone calm. 

I'd been looking forward to this, my first full day back in the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence, but by midmorning I'd accomplished nothing but fight my way through various storms. Now the snow has stopped falling, the email inbox has stopped pinging, and the iPad seekers have left the building, so I think I'll just sit here and enjoy the quiet. At some point I'll need to buckle down and get to work, but will anyone begrudge me a few minutes to catch my breath?

From stunned to fun

Second day of the new semester and I've already had somebody crying in my office. In fact, I've had two people crying in my office, and one of them was me. It wasn't full-blown weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth--just a profound sadness over the loss of colleagues and the difficulty of the budget situation we're facing here.

But there were no tears in my American Lit Survey class this morning. When I call roll on the first day I usually ask students to share the most interesting thing they read over winter break, but I did not want to face rows of students telling me I didn't read anything. Instead, I asked them to bring some color into this gray day--Share something colorful, glittery, or cheerful you encountered over break. They talked about taking small children to see Christmas lights, visiting Manhattan or Florida or Puerto Rico, wearing glittery party hats on New Year's Eve, and even eating grapes under the dining table during a family party.

In the absence of grapes and glittery hats, this morning I offered my crying colleague a book I've been recommending to lots of people trying to maintain hope in the midst of various types of losses: The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl, a series of pithy seasonal meditations sparked by the author's backyard. The first chapter instructs readers, "Wherever You Are, Stop What You're Doing." "Stop and look," she says, and then "Stop and ponder....Stop and listen....Stop and consider," and at each stop she shows us something ordinary in her backyard, a spot of color or life in disorderly surroundings. "The world lies before you, a lavish garden," she says; "However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away." That's what The Comfort of Crows did for me, over and over and over again.

After class I talked to another colleague who is angry and distressed by local conditions as well as the larger cultural disdain for education, but after we blew off some steam, she said her plan for this semester is to have fun--inside and outside her classes. I agree. There's plenty of reason to weep and plenty of opportunity for hard work, but despite it all, we're doing what we love while we can and we fully intend to enjoy it, glittery hats or not.

Big problems, small pleasures

Boy, it sure takes very little to make you happy, said my colleague. All I did was tell her how excited I was to see that our Interim President's photo had been added to the Wall of Presidents in the library, which delighted me for two reasons: (1) It's good to see more than one female face among the rows of dour men; and (2) The new photo fills a gap that had destroyed the symmetry of the display. Of course that symmetry will be thrown out of whack as soon as we hire our next President, but we have to take our pleasures where we can find them, especially in the midst of an ever-deepening campus budget crisis.

I've been told that I'm being too negative, that I need to keep my chin up and look on the bright side and seek out the silver linings and a whole mess of other cliches, so here are a few more things that are making me happy right now:

A colleague asked to borrow an assignment from me and then put a footnote on the assignment to give me credit. I've shared assignments with many colleagues over 23 years of teaching but I think this is the first time I've been given written credit. (The class is called The Ethical Author.)

Speaking of giving credit where credit is due, I sat down with a cup of tea yesterday afternoon and cracked open R.F. Kuang's novel Yellowface, intending to read a few chapters before dinner, but as of this morning I've finished it. Couldn't put it down. Can't stop thinking about it. It's very funny in a horrifying way and deals with the problem of credit for creative work; the narrator is a white woman who appropriates (um, steals) a manuscript written by a dead Asian friend and then profits by putting on her friend's skin, as it were. The novel involves some biting satire on identity politics and literary tokenism, but I was most impressed by Kuang's ability to make me care about a character who is, at heart, reprehensible--and make me laugh about it.

Despite the persistent rain, wind, and winter bleakness, I had no trouble getting out of my driveway this morning. High waters threatened our driveway yesterday but the creek fell before doing any damage; low temperatures threatened to sequester us behind a wall of snow and ice last night but didn't fall quite low enough to turn the rain to snow. The wind, though, is something else. When I got to campus this morning, the flags outside my office were snapping so sharply that they sounded like gunshots, which was a little disconcerting.

Still, I'm here, and no one is shooting at me, and I'm getting good work done, and I'm looking forward to the start of classes tomorrow. And if I start getting blue again, I can hike on over to the library and take a look at that Wall of Presidents and remind myself that every once in a while, we can make a little bit of progress. 

But just a little. No point in getting all giddy about it.

 

 

 

Attack of the anxiety dreams

Classes start in three days so right on time the anxiety dreams are arriving. Last night I was responsible for protecting a group of vulnerable people from a zombie attack, but I couldn't get anyone to follow instructions. "You have to rub this stinky herb all over you to repel the zombies," I kept telling them, but they just said, "No thanks, I'm good" and wandered off to become zombie fodder.

I don't know if this reflects anxiety about my upcoming classes or my previous ones. Getting students to follow instructions is difficult in any semester, but their noncompliance doesn't generally result in zombie attacks. Instead, it results in snarky comments on course evaluations from students who don't understand requirements of certain assignments or who are unhappy that I'm not at their beck and call 24/7. What they really need is an AI prof who will respond to calls for help at 2 a.m., but if I created such an avatar, it would soon get tired of saying "The answers are on the syllabus."

The zombies may have arisen from the reading list for my upper-level literature class this spring, which includes Zone One, Colson Whitehead's zombie novel. I've taught that novel before, but the last time I taught the Colson Whitehead class was in spring 2020, when we suddenly had to move our classes online during spring break and reinvent everything in response to Covid-19. Talk about apocalyptic! I've been looking forward to the opportunity to focus an entire class on Whitehead again without the pandemic disruptions, and I'm so thoroughly prepared that there's really nothing to get anxious about. 

And my other class should be a piece of cake: American Lit Survey, which I've taught nearly every spring since 2001. It's a full class (19 students!) and I'll have to be on the lookout for AI-produced essays, but otherwise it's a course I love to teach even though the students keep me on my toes.

I keep reminding myself that angst and dread arrive faithfully about a week before each semester starts but they dissipate as soon as I step into the classroom. Deep inside, though, I don't quite believe it. Every semester troubling emotions come lumbering out of my nightmares with bloody fingers outstretched to grab and eat my brains, but I can't seem to locate the stinky herb that will protect me from their depredations. The only cure, it seems, is to get back into the classroom.

Coming and going, standing and falling

I'm back on campus today for a farewell event for a longtime colleague and people keep asking me about my recent road trip but I'm having trouble responding. Half of my brain cells are still scattered along the Interstate highway system while the other half are obsessing over how to put down sturdier roots. Part of me wants to talk about the sun shining off the water of the Gulf of Mexico while the other wants to ask for recommendations for tree removal services, so I guess I'm kind of coming and going.

That tree has to go, no question about it, but who will remove it? A high-tension power line runs through our property just uphill from the house, and the tree stands between the power company's right-of-way and our house. In fact there's a line of pine trees in a row, all severely trimmed on the uphill side so the limbs won't endanger the power line, but that makes the trees heavier on the downhill side, toward the house. We've mentioned the trees to the power company before without inspiring any interest, but now the largest tree--the one closest to the house--is starting to look unhealthy. It needs to go! Who will take it away? It's too close to the power lines for the resident lumberjack to handle, so I've just sent an SOS to the power company. 

It always pains me to see an ancient tree cut down, just as it pains me to see a longtime colleague leaving, even if he's not quite as ancient as the tree. We were hired to tenure-track positions here in the same year, celebrated triumphs and suffered through crises together, took students on field trips and listened to capstone presentations and interviewed job candidates at MLA conventions and made the long drive to Louisville for those marathon AP-essay grading sessions. Now he's moving to a new position in administration, an ideal situation for him but a sad day for those of us who will miss his laugh and his insight and his deep passion for literature. 

He'll be putting down new roots elsewhere while we struggle to keep thriving here despite budget difficulties. Sometimes I feel like a tree trying to survive with half of its branches lopped off, standing close to the source of power but fearful of one day falling splat on the ground. I send my roots down deep and reach for the sun and provide shade to those who gather, but how long can this feeble trunk keep standing?