Surprised by students once again

Okay, so you're a brand-new student starting your first semester of college classes, enjoying the independence of living away from your parents' prying eyes, eagerly plunging into your sport or club or other interests, and on your way to your first class you encounter a whiteboard in the hallway of a classroom building with a sign that asks first-year students, "In one word, what excites you most about college?" What do you write?

For most of our new students, the answer is nothing. The whiteboard sits inside the main entrance of the busiest classroom building on campus, but four days into the semester, only five words or phrases have been written on it. The first was "Engagement," a word that rolls more readily off a professor's tongue than that of an 18-year-old fresh out of high school. The next two were "Learning" (yay!) and "Leaving" (boo!). We want students to be excited about learning, but it's distressing to think that some anonymous first-year student is already excited about leaving.

But that was yesterday. This morning there were two more entries on the whiteboard, neither of which follows the "one word" rule. What are today's first-year students most excited about? "Powerful women" and "Being demure."

Well I think we can deliver powerful women. Our current president, provost, VP for enrollment, CFO, and faculty chair are women, and we have plenty of powerful women on the faculty, amongst the coaches, and within the student body. 

But what first-year student writes that the thing that most excites her (I assume?) about college is "Being demure"? The words are surrounded by cute little puffy hearts, whatever that means. I'm trying to get inside the head of a young person who thinks, Yeah, I can't wait to move into the dorm and meet my roommate and hang out with all my classmates so that I can finally get a chance to be as demure as I've always wanted to be.

I went to a college with a very strict dress code and expectations for female appearance, so that getting ready for class might require ironing a blouse and skirt (that reached below the knee!), putting on a slip and panty hose, employing a hair dryer and hot rollers and lots of spray, donning full makeup and earrings and a fake pearl necklace, and tottering down the steps of the dorm in high heels, but all that performance of femininity didn't always translate into demureness. There were a lot of powerful women behind those fake pearls.

And what does it even mean for today's 18-year-old to practice being demure? Dressing like a tradwife? Avoiding eye contact? Limiting the size and number of holes in her jeans?

I confess that I am befuddled. If being demure is a new trend among the younger set, I want to see what that looks like--but the definition of demure seems to demand that the practitioner avoid drawing attention to herself (or, I guess, himself, or theirself), so a student practicing demureness may escape my notice entirely.

As a jaded, cynical old coot, I guess I'm glad that I'm still capable of being surprised by students. I just wish I knew which student surprised me so I can ask what it all means.

Filling up the education dispenser

Over the summer the women's rest rooms on campus were equipped with dispensers for free period products--a great step forward, you'd think, except the dispensers remain empty. No problem for the post-menopausal amongst us, but I'm sure there are young women on campus looking at those empty dispensers and wondering when they will be filled.

This strikes me as a fitting metaphor for this point in the semester: classes have just started and all the mechanisms and structures are in place to encourage learning, but now we just need to fill those structures with the stuff of learning--readings and discussions and writing assignments and class activities. I can set up the structures and set the mechanisms whirring, but filling up the classroom with learning depends upon the contributions of students. Will they come to class having done the reading and prepared to talk about it?

Maybe. Based on what I've seen so far from my students, it seems that some have fallen out of the habit of following directions. Or maybe they never developed that essential habit. At any rate we'll be discussing the first readings this afternoon and I hope to get everyone engaged.

In other news, Margaret Renkl proves once again that we think on similar wavelengths in her praise of overstuffed bookshelves (link here). "For me," she says, "a book made of paper will always be a beautiful object that warms a room even as it expands (or entertains, or challenges, or informs, or comforts) a mind, and a bookcase will always represent time itself." 

This topic arose in her household when her husband retired from a long teaching career and starting carting home boxes of books, a process my husband has also initiated. He currently has six big boxes full of books sitting in the living room and a paucity of empty bookshelves on which to put them--and plenty more to bring home from his church office. Further, I've been winnowing my own collection but I'll have more boxes of books to bring home from my office when I retire in a few years. One of these days the bookshelves will crowd us right out of our house.

It's not unusual for students to enter my office, eye the bookshelves, and say in wonder, "Have you read all these books?" Well yeah, but it took a little while. Compared to all the books in the universe--or even all the books in my office--I'm asking my students to read a relatively small number of pages this semester, but if they fail to do it, then the whole mechanism of learning will grind to a halt.

I've created the structure and installed the machine, but it's up to my students to fill the space with learning.

A refreshing absence

Prepping for the start of classes and suddenly I realize what's missing: no first-year students. Yes, for the first time since--well, forever, I have no first-year classes this fall. No composition, no Honors Literature, no first-year seminar. Just two upper-level literature classes and a host of administrative duties.

I haven't taught the first-year seminar in a couple of years but composition has been part of my fall teaching schedule since the dawn of time, and I've been teaching the fall Honors Lit class for at least a decade. I love that class and I would happily keep teaching it until I retire, but our Honors program has been revamped and the class is no longer part of the curriculum. Will I ever have another opportunity to teach Cold Mountain? Probably not. I will miss it.

What I won't miss: trying to learn the names of several classrooms full of unfamiliar first-year students. Trying to humor the deer-in-the-headlights look off their faces and encourage them to put down their phones and talk to each other. Introducing these shiny new freshpersons to our library databases, our course management system, and MLA citation format.  Deciphering their handwriting. Hearing myself repeat over and over the reminder that it's on the syllabus. 

And speaking of the syllabus, I'd better get cracking. I'm mostly ready, I think, but I won't know where I'm unready until I step back into the classroom. Two more days! Here we go again, a little older and possibly wiser and refreshingly unencumbered with freshpersons.

 

Take the money and trip

I was trying on dress pants yesterday when suddenly I was transported back to fifth grade when all I wanted was a pair of what my friends and I called elephant pants but what the women's clothing industry now calls wide-leg pants and I would like to call pants that make me look like I have tree stumps for legs. These pant-legs would be handy if I wanted to smuggle an actual elephant through airport security but since smuggling elephants forms no part of my daily routine, I'll give them a pass.

And why so many colorful plastic fabrics? Half of the blouses I looked at could have been constructed by a fourth-grader equipped with a box of Hefty trash bags, some permanent markers, a glue stick, and some sequins. Linen is out because I don't care to iron, but I'd really love to see some fabrics that don't look like they were extruded by machines oozing chemical goo.

The other day someone suggested that I pursue a certain administrative position but I demurred with I don't have the wardrobe for it, to which the person replied But you'd get paid enough to cover a new wardrobe, which is yet another reason to avoid higher office. Who wants to shop? Shopping is horrible. Yesterday I tried on eleventy-seven different items but ended up buying three, and the process took forever because the cashier asked for my name and email address but then could not spell either one correctly (no, the u comes after the g, and Marietta has one r and two t's) and I was so exhausted from trying on horrible wide-leg pants and Hefty-bag blouses that I lacked the energy to resist her queries. The person waiting in line behind me kept sighing deeply but I'm not going to apologize for having a name no one knows how to spell. I mean, if the cashier doesn't want to make the effort to spell my name correctly, why even ask? Just take my money and let me leave.

Can't run too far in those wide-leg pants, though. They trip me up every time.

 

Cutting and gutting

I've been watching with fear and trembeling the news about Wittenberg University's financial problems (links here and here). Many small liberal arts colleges are struggling right now, but Wittenberg looks a lot like Marietta: similar size, similar student population, similar financial difficulties. Their trustees will vote tomorrow on a proposed plan that may cut sixty percent of the faculty and require many students to rely on online courses to complete their degrees. A professor named Ruth Hoff is quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education article as saying the proposal "outsources the heart of what we're all about."

The numbers are terrifying and I would hate to be charged with figuring out how to make the college's budget work given reduced enrollments and burgeoning deficits, but Hoff's comment speaks to how this feels on the ground: Cutting faculty and gutting curriculum hurts our hearts. It feels like a violation of our mission, purpose, and identity, causing irreparable damage to certain intangible but essential qualities of the education we offer.

Today I learned that yet another of my valued colleagues has accepted a job elsewhere, and while he is over the moon about this new opportunity, I keep thinking about what we're losing--not just a prof who can teach a particular type of class, but the prof whose leadership of the jazz ensemble fills listeners with joy, the guy whose leadership of a faculty teaching workshop on jazz improvisation last spring gave us all moments of bliss and freedom from care, and a guy who's willing to put heart and soul into helping his students develop as performers and people. 

And this loss does not come in a vacuum but is piled on top of other recent losses, reducing our music department to mostly adjuncts. That could be my department a few years from now, and Wittenberg could be a model for what may happen here. 

But then again maybe we'll find a way to turn things around. Who knows? The uncertainty is part of the problem--it's hard to commit to a journey without any idea of the destination. I assume that the sun will come up tomorrow, but what it shines down on is anyone's guess. 

Walk, interrupted

I was enjoying my morning hike at Desonier State Nature Preserve right up to the point when the yellowjacket stung the back of my thigh.

At first I didn't know it was a yellowjacket. All I knew was that something had stabbed the back of my leg and that the best thing to do in the moment was to jump in the air and shriek--not that anyone could hear me out in the woods. Then I had to drop my pants to make sure that whatever had bitten me wasn't stuck inside my pants leg--not that anyone could see me out in the woods. Then something started buzzing around my head and trying to crawl into my ear canal until I swatted at it with my baseball cap, at which point I realized that the trail had taken me too close to a yellowjacket nest and they were out to get me.

This was just over halfway through a two-mile hike, and there was no way to get back to the car but to keep hiking. I had already slogged a mile up a steep, narrow path next to sheer dropoffs--and let me tell you, if the yellowjacket had stung me while I was walking on one of those cliffsides, I'd be toast. But I survived the frantic get-this-thing-off-me dance and went on to hike the rest of the trail, not without some renewed vigor and the constant urge to say something a little stronger than ouch.

It hurt. Hours later, it still hurts. It hurt all the way through the rest of the hike and then on the short drive to Strouds Run State Park, where it hurt as I sat in the shade watching wading birds  fishing in the marsh, goldfinches and hummingbirds buzzing among the tall wildflowers. The long walk in the quiet woods followed by a rest next to a quiet lake were supposed to fill my cup with calm before the next round of hectic campus mess begins, but the calmest moments played out against a backdrop of ouch.

Maybe that's good preparation for the coming academic year, which is bound to be well seasoned with painful moments. I am supposed to train my colleagues on how to discourage plagiarism in the era of AI while steeling myself once again to read reams of student handwriting (since I'm requiring more in-class writing to counteract the dominance of AI) while bowing to the demands of the Powers That Be that I "fix" faculty morale while trying to keep my courses fresh and relevant and prepare my students for success in a world I don't quite understand. And meanwhile, at every moment we'll all be waiting for the next phase of our ongoing budget crisis, although crisis seems utterly inadequate to the situation. 

It stings, I tell you. It really stings. But at least the woods were lovely.

 

It's not about the paper towels

I'm standing in a meeting room pressing the power button to start the projector but it isn't coming on so I press it again, and again, and again, until finally I realize that the reason the projector won't come on is that it isn't there. It's gone! Vanished! Elvis has left the building!

We managed the meeting without the projector, but it's not the only absence making itself known on campus. Earlier I'd stood in the ladies' room in the library staring at an empty paper-towel dispenser and running through options. I can't replace paper towels myself because mere faculty members aren't trusted with keys to the supply closets, nor are we trained on how to open those pesky dispensers. After recent purges of positions and shifts in responsibilities, I have no idea whom to notify about an absence of paper towels, or a leaky roof, or a pool of spilled coffee on the stairs. All over campus department chairs are scrambling to delegate tasks formerly completed by our hard-working administrative assistants, but now it's hard to know who will manage bulletin boards and budgets, collect departmental mail, or reserve rooms. 

That last item may seem small but faculty members can get very protective of our spaces. There are classrooms in which I refuse to teach because I prefer whiteboards to blackboards (chalk dust makes me sneeze), and I don't like rooms with tripping hazards (because I have fallen on my face in front of students before and I don't ever care to repeat the exercise), and rooms without windows make me nervous. (I'm claustrophobic. Deal with it.) Every time we hire a new admin assistant, I have to educate her about room preferences, and I'm sure other faculty members do the same, which is one reason being a departmental admin assistant is a horrible job. 

But in the absence of administrative assistants, I don't even know who is responsible for assigning classrooms. Last year the College bought a piece of furniture at my request so I could use it in a particular classroom, but this semester I'm scheduled to teach in a different room--an interior room without windows, a room too small for the number of students, and, worst of all, a room so suffused with mechanical noise that I can barely hear myself speak in there. I would love to shift to a different room, but instead of having a calm chat with an admin assistant, I'll be wandering around campus hoping to randomly run into whoever is responsible for easing my pain.

And along the way I'll run into other wanderers seeking the Paper Towel Czar or the Orderer of Dry-Erase Markers or the Printer Un-Jammer or whatever you call the one person who is permitted to open the electrical box and press "reset" after a space heater pops the circuit-breaker. We are hard-working people who are willing to do whatever we can, but who will do the things we can't?

  

As much as it pains me to admit this....

I'm going to write this quickly before I have time to second-guess an impulse that reeks of shameless self-promotion, but my excuse is that the academic climate these days leaves me feeling so beaten down that I have to celebrate the victories when they come. So here goes:

This summer I've been in charge of a grant-funded program in which a dozen very busy faculty and staff members meet for five hours each Tuesday for four weeks in a row to discuss readings and lay the groundwork for (re)building a sense of purpose and commitment on campus, and while it was a ton of work, I have enjoyed reading and talking and eating with my colleagues for the past four weeks. These people did not need to give 20 hours of their summer lives to meetings plus doing the readings on their own time, but they did the work in exchange for a few morning pastries and coffee, some free lunches, a modest stipend, and a couple of free books. 

Today I asked them what kinds of incentives would lure other colleagues to participate in future meetings, and they said that while they appreciated the coffee and lunch and books and stipend, there was one big reason they agreed to participate in these meetings: "Because you asked me to."

That would be me. I did that.

Not without help, of course, and I appreciate the support of every single person who assisted with logistics and planning, but several of the participants said they agreed to do this big lump of summer work because they knew I wouldn't have asked if it wasn't important. 

Nothing else that I have done this summer has made me feel so positive about my job. Good work has been done here--and I had a hand in making it happen.

Yay me. Yay us!

News from afield

After 20 years our woods and fields still have something to teach me. The white pine that got chopped down smashed our mullein patch, but here come some new plants springing back after the carnage. The area we've been leaving unmowed in the lower meadow is transforming itself into a pollinator habitat with very little encouragement from us; today I saw ironweed, coneflowers, and a few scraggly milkweed plants, but who knows what will be growing there tomorrow? Tiny pawpaws peek out from behind donkey-ear leaves along the edge of the woods, while morning glories weave among the tall grass. And what's that tiny lavender blossom with the purple center? I thought I knew my woods pretty well but once again they give me a puzzle.

Nuthatch

New mullein in the smashed space

Jewelweed

I don't know what this is.

Pawpaws!