Different tools for different messes

This morning I squeezed a week's quota of tact into one email message, but it got the job done. If a boulder is already teetering on the edge of a cliff, sometimes all it takes is a gentle nudge to send it over the edge. I nudged, the boulder toppled, and now I can get on with the massive cleanup effort. And that's all I'm planning to say about that delicate situation.

It's amazing, though, how much of adult life amounts to cleaning up various types of messes. I started the day trying to fix a mess of my own creation--I forgot to click on a certain box in our course management system, which then refused to allow my students to upload their drafts--but a zillion students helpfully emailed about the problem so I could repair the dropbox in my pajamas. Meaning I was in pajamas. Why would a dropbox need pajamas?

Next I need to respond to all those drafts, offering students specific suggestions on cleaning up their prose and reasoning. Since I'm all out of tact, I'm being blunt. "You need a comma here" is easy enough to fix, but at this point in the semester I'm stymied on what to do with students who don't understand the difference between stories and poems or between summary and analysis. A few marginal comments aren't going to fix that kind of mess.

Now I have to fix the scheduling problem arising from the fact that no one wants to take an exam on April 8, Eclipse Day. We're about an hour's drive from the Zone of Totality, but my students will miss it if they're stuck in my classroom taking an exam. I had already planned to be out of town (because my grandkids live in the Zone of Totality, and how many more times will I be able to experience a total eclipse with my grandkids?), but by making one small adjustment to the course schedule, I can eliminate the need for an exam proctor and allow my students to gape at the eclipse as well. 

With proper eye protection, of course. I do not want to be responsible for blinding the entire population of my American Lit Survey class. That's not the kind of mess I'm equipped to clean up.

Winds of change, both literal and metaphorical

I wasn't driving when this happened, which is a good thing because big trucks make me nervous, and when we're approaching an eight-mile-long steep uphill grade featuring blinking signs warning "High wind alert--Truck blow-over danger," I'm much more comfortable with a colleague at the wheel--especially if it's the colleague whose legendary calm would make her the ideal driver for a trip to the ends of the earth through an apocalyptic nightmare. 

So I'm sitting pretty in the passenger seat while my colleague struggles to keep us in our lane through wind gusts roaring down the mountain and pushing us toward the guardrail. Suddenly we see flashing lights. We join a line of cars and trucks crawling carefully past the wreck of a semi that has blown over on its side next to a cliff edge. Emergency vehicles have attached heavy cables to the truck, but with every new gust of wind the cables quiver and the truck scoots a little closer to the edge. In the battle between cables and wind, who wins? We're not staying around to find out.

Is this a metaphor for the current state of higher education? If so, are we the truck being blown off the cliff, the cables trying to hold the truck steady, or the drivers gawking as they try to move on and survive the storm? Who or what is producing the wind? Is it the FAFSA breakdown, the bleak enrollment forecast, the budget crisis, or the larger cultural disdain for higher education?

Judging by my conversations with colleagues from other campuses last week, we'd prefer to be among the line of cars crawling past the disaster than in the truck going over the cliff--but even then, I'm really glad I'm not the one driving the car.     

Sound and silence at an academic conference

From my room on the 21st floor of a conference hotel in Atlanta, I can hear a distant hum of passing traffic, the occasional whine of a siren, a buzzing light and a rush of air from a vent--but no people. Not a human voice to be heard.

Nothing against people, but I've exceeded my quota for today. I'm with a small team from my campus attending the CIC NetVUE conference, where sessions ask us to listen and think and talk and talk and talk some more, which I have been dutifully doing all day long, both in and out of sessions--talking about the challenges of inculcating in students a sense of vocation, about renewing faculty members' commitment to the mission of the college, about deep listening and close reading and community-engaged learning, but mostly about the traumas small colleges everywhere are enduring.

At many moments throughout the day I've felt the presence of a supportive community. Unlike many academic conferences, this one is characterized not by arrogant posturing but by collaborative exploration of our common struggles and goals. At lunch I sat with faculty members from various disciplines and types of institutions who started spontaneously sharing the most ridiculous comments students have written on course evaluations, and every single one of them felt familiar. 

So many ideas! One session encouraged struggling campuses to develop methods of lamentation--to allow people to grieve the loss of colleagues and majors and programs. Someone told about how in 2020 her campus invited faculty distressed by the demands of pandemic teaching to gather beside a river and release all their fear and anger in a primal scream.

Interesting ideas but by the end of the day all that talk turned into a screaming headache. My colleagues went out to dinner together but I suspect that every restaurant in walking distance is crammed full of conference attendees still talking talking talking, and I've had enough.

So I've retreated to my quiet room. The fan clicks on and I hear a hum; far below on the highway a horn blasts and a siren blares, but here in my room I'm happy to sit still and listen to the silence.   

Not quite the morning news

If I had to write a news story covering the events of the past seven days in my life, I'd be hard pressed to know what to put in the headline--the shrieks in the night, the sweets in my mouth, the boys in the sun, the boy with the gun...it felt like a lot but it really adds up to not much. But I'll start with the gun because it was by far the most bizarre thing to happen all week, even if I was an uninvolved bystander.

We were enjoying a potluck lunch in the church fellowship hall (coconut cake--yum!) when a sweet church lady heard a knocking on the door. She opened the door to find a local urchin, maybe 12 years old, whose first words were enigmatic: "Tell God I said hello." The church lady asked him if he wanted to come in and get some lunch but he said no, his mom didn't know where he was. As the kid turned to leave, the church lady saw the gun in a holster hanging at his waist.

What was a 12-year-old kid doing carrying a gun? Was it a real gun? What did he mean by "Tell God I said hello"? A good journalist would have sought answers to these questions and more, but the kid was gone before I even knew he'd been there and no answers were forthcoming.

The presence of a gun tends to overshadow other events, so probably no one is interested in hearing about the community production of Death of a Salesman, which made me cry, or the student production of Medea, which made me wonder how the main character could do all that shrieking without seriously damaging her vocal cords. Both productions were very well done but I got annoyed every time someone blamed Willy Loman's failures on his old age. I kept wanting to jump up and yell "63 isn't that old!"

In between all that gallivanting, I graded exams, prepped classes, interviewed three candidates for adjunct positions, served as a judge at a cookie-baking contest, chatted with artsy folks at a reception for a visiting artist, and attended a baseball game in the bright spring sunshine.

That warmth seems to have gone on hiatus, however, as tonight's forecast calls for snow. This morning as I drove to campus near 7 a.m., I was surprised to see a crew shell skimming along the surface of the river. Twenty-eight degrees outside with the sun barely glancing above the horizon and there were my students putting their muscles to work on the cold, dark river.

It's dark and cold and we're barely awake but still young people are pulling their weight to move the boat forward--that's the story I prefer to tell, but it's hard to put that in a headline when there's a mysterious gun drawing attention just outside the door.

Wobbling on a shifty surface while trying to serve my students

Lately I keep thinking about the time close to 20 years ago when I attended a college event on a docked sternwheeler. I don't recall the topic of discussion, but the boat bobbed on the water and attendees enjoyed an open bar, so when an administrator got up to spread his arms wide and admonish us all to consider the needs of The students! The students!, he wobbled a bit. Looked like he might fall over at any moment, in fact. People sitting near the front braced themselves to catch him if he fell or at least avoid the carnage.

Today I feel like that dude--wobbly, trying to remain upright on a shifty and uncertain surface, but still devoted to serving the needs of my students even though I could fall flat on my face at any moment.

Yesterday there were many such moments. First day after Spring Break and the time change and I arrived in my office to find no heat in the building. Outside temps in the mid-twenties; inside, colleagues sitting in their offices in full winter coats, hats, and gloves. I put up with it as long as I could and finally turned on my space heater--just for five minutes, just to take the chill off--and promptly blew a fuse, shutting off power to all the offices in my corner of the building.

We lowly academics are not permitted to reset a circuit breaker, so I reported the outage to the building coordinator, who reported it to the Physical Plant, who sent someone over to restore electricity--four hours later. I guess they were busy. And so was I--trying to find a way to do my job without heat or electricity.

But I survived that. And I survived teaching in unheated rooms and sitting through a long, unnecessary meeting on a profoundly uncomfortable chair that made my bad hip so stiff that I could barely walk when it was finally over. And I survived three-quarters of the department chairs' meeting without any more than the usual amount of anguish. 

But then the Powers That Be unleashed the new departmental budgeting process (surprise!), which exposed my areas of greatest anxiety and incompetence: working with spreadsheets. At first I thought okay, give me some time to figure this process out and I can get it done, but then they announced the deadline. 

The ground shifted. My heart started racing, my brain spinning, my head wobbling. No way I can complete this complex task in that amount of time, I told myself, but then the tiny Puritans who live in my brain starting huffing and puffing about the necessity of meeting the deadline, but then my deep-seated anxieties about money started screaming that the deadline is impossible, and then those prim little Puritans reminded me that it would be unseemly and untidy to allow my head to explode in front of all those people whom I respect, and then I started silently drafting a letter of resignation.

An over-reaction? Maybe, but it was nothing compared to the way I reacted when I finally arrived home to discover that one of the ravening beasts who shares my household had eaten up all but a tiny sliver of the pineapple-upside-down cake I'd been saving for myself. After the day I'd experienced, the absence of cake felt unforgivable.

After a good night's sleep I'm still feeling wobbly and I'm waiting for the next shift in the uncertain surface I'm standing on while I try to appease the tiny Puritans and the anxiety monsters and the ravening beasts, but I haven't written that letter of resignation just yet, mostly because I'm devoted to meeting the needs of my students. 

The students! The students! I cry, hoping that someone catches me when I finally fall on my face.

Swanning about

After being away four days and ignoring a million emails and piles of work, I really didn't want to come home. As a delaying tactic, I took a scenic route that added nearly an hour to my journey but rewarded me with views of swans--and not just once but in several places. The stretch of Killbuck Creek below Millersburg widens out into wetlands where I saw herons, geese, ducks, and swans, which from a distance looked like white lights hovering above the dark water.

I need to get out on that water, I told myself, but it was too cold and I lacked essential equipment. Still, visiting Killbuck Creek gave me ideas, made me long for my canoe and some sunshine and a picnic lunch. Along the drive I saw forsythia blooming and then when I pulled into my driveway I was greeted by a host of golden daffodils bobbing in the breeze.

Spring is coming--I can feel it--and today, just for a while, I saw it all around me. It was an extra-long journey home, but I don't regret a single minute.

 

 

Great weather if you're a duck

After two days of t-shirt weather, we bundled up yesterday to stand in persistent drizzle and cold wind at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, where my adorable daughter and I observed great blue herons building nests and courting, and then we took a quick jaunt alongside an old canal to see a beaver pond where ducks and geese dabbled contentedly. Poor lighting means bad pictures, but it was worth seeing the birds at work, unbothered by the weather.

How does he carry a stick that big?

Every black blob is a nest at the heron rookery.

I love the elegant pattern on the female mallard's back

Wood duck!

Evidence of beaver activity

 

Sometimes it's hard to break away

My primary purpose this Spring Break is to distract myself from the ongoing situation at my beloved place of employment, and I use situation because I'm trying to avoid more descriptive phrases that require unwieldy words like apocalyptic and abandonment and thumbscrew-inspired decisions-making. 

But it's hard to avoid thinking about the situation when my inbox contains yet another email from a valued colleague announcing a move to a job in the private sector after 25 years of teaching, plus an outstanding student's request for a letter of recommendation so he can transfer his skills, intelligence, and passion to a different institution. Even at church I couldn't escape the situation. A congregant asked me questions about opportunities for a young relative to study in a particular program, and I had to work very hard to tactfully avoid speculation about whether that program will be fully staffed in the near future.

So I had to get away. My all-over-Ohio excursion was nearly thwarted 90 minutes into the trip when my tax person texted to let me know she needed a particular form signed by me and my husband right away. I sat in a Wal-Mart parking lot in nowheresville, Ohio, texting with a tax person who at first could not understand why I wasn't willing to drive back home to print the forms, find my husband, get his signature, scan the form, and send it back, and then after she agreed to send a version that could be signed online, she couldn't understand why I couldn't get my husband to sign it electronically immediately. (Because Monday is his day off and the weather was gorgeous and there's no wi-fi connection out on the tractor.)

But we worked that out without disrupting my trip too long, and then I spent a lovely day visiting an old friend, looking at overpriced hardwood desks at Amish furniture stores, visiting my  former favorite mall only to discover that many of the stores were empty, and spending a relaxing night far from home and campus and tax persons. 

Along the way I took a wrong turn and stumbled upon a boardwalk out into a wetland, and I made a note of its location so that I could head out there to see the sun rise over the wetland this morning. Except the parking area was blocked off and the boardwalk entrance was boarded up--"closed for repairs." Thwarted once again! But the weather was gorgeous (40s and sunny early, 70s and sunny later), so I found another park and took a hike through woods that will no doubt be stunning in a few weeks when the spring ephemerals start popping up. This morning it was just me and trees and woodland birds and some turkeys gobbling in the distance.

But I can't think about the situation while attending to turkeys or watching woodpeckers disassemble a tree, so the excursion was successful so far. The next leg of the journey will take me to the grandkids, and if their youthful hijinks can't distract me from the grim facts back home, nothing will.