Would you get a root canal from a Muppet?

I was trying to tell my students what it felt like to get a root canal from an endodontist who looks just like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew but they said Who's Bunsen Honeydew, which made me want to throw in the towel right there and then because I'm clearly getting too old to communicate with these infants, but then one of them said Is he the Muppet in the lab with Beaker? and I breathed a sigh of relief, but by then I'd ventured pretty far from the point of the story, which is that I spent two hours this morning having my jaw and face stretched and immobilized so a bunch of sharp, whiny dental instruments could do horrible violent things to one of my teeth--a tooth that required attention from a specialist because the roots are curvy, much like the rest of me--and to multiply the usual horrors and indignities of dental care, the face of the man wielding those instruments looked just like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, which made me want to either laugh or scream (because of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew's calamitous klutziness with tools in clips like this one) except I couldn't do either because I couldn't move my mouth, so that I had to grunt faintly when Dr. Not-Bunsen-Honeydew asked me repeatedly whether I was doing okay, and when I really needed a rest room break so as to avoid an embarrassing incident in his nice sanitary endodontal office, my attempt to say rest room caused the endodontist to respond, So you say you're Russian?, which I'm not, and even if I were Russian I doubt that I would feel the need to convey that information whilst having my rotten curvy tooth drilled by a guy who looks like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew.

But I made it to the rest room without incident and I survived my root canal and I taught my classes, despite feeling about 102 years old, and the novocaine had worn off by the time classes were over so now my primary goal in life is to hunt down some pain-killers and call it a day. A bizarre day, but at least the hard part is over.

Irony, sardony, Irene-y, unread

The visiting writer talks with her hands, squeezing an invisible ball as she describes her attempts to put pressure on language. I watch her, mesmerized, glad for an opportunity to sit at a desk like a student and listen for a bit.

But not too long, because those desks are uncomfortable. Even more uncomfortable was the temperature in the auditorium where the writer later gave a public reading. I had the foresight to take a blanket, but it didn't help much. Every day I experience the irony of constantly being urged to cut costs while working in buildings so excessively air-conditioned that we have to huddle under blankets so our lips don't turn blue.

Speaking of irony, why don't we follow Nella Larsen's example and adopt sardony? It shows up in Passing with a footnote claiming that Larsen was the first to use the word in print, but apparently it never caught on. I could dish out sardony every day of the week if there were any market for it.

My students discussed the first half of Passing on Wednesday, and at the end of class I asked them to predict what might happen next. Without fail, their predicted humiliation and doom for Clare Kendry. No one even mentioned Irene. I mean, how could anything significant happen to sweet little Irene? Surely she's just an objective observer of Clare's downfall! I'm eager to see how my students feel about Irene after reading the rest of the text.

I just hope they're actually reading it. Inside Higher Ed featured an article the other day asking "How Much Do Students Really Read?" It turns out, unsurprisingly, that many students prefer not to read their texts but instead watch videos or scan AI-generated summaries. One exception: English majors are more likely to read texts, some completing as much as 75 percent of assigned readings. I pity the English major who reads only 75 percent of Passing--or of Percival Everett's James, which we're finishing in my capstone class today, or Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys from last semester. The revelation at the end shifts the meaning of everything that comes before. 

What came before that shivery reading by the visiting writer? A discussion of tattoos--namely, the dearth of same amongst English Department faculty. I shocked our students by telling them I have two tattoos but then I had to explain that they're just dots tattooed on my hips to guide the great big clunky medical machine that delivered precision rays of radiation to my innards 15 years ago. Another colleague admitted to having a small fraternity-related tattoo, but the rest of us are woefully unadorned. I proposed that we hold a student competition to design an appropriate tattoo for the entire English department, maybe some memorable words from a text, provided that anyone still knows how to read words (she said sardonically). Then instead of putting pressure on language, we could allow language to put pressure on us.

Read but not said

My capstone class will start discussing Percival Everett's James this afternoon, having finished with Huckleberry Finn last Friday. A few students are listening to the texts on audiobooks, so I asked them how the audiobooks handle the frequent use of the n-word. Apparently the narrator just says it, out loud, over and over again.

In class we're talking about the n-word and using the phrase the n-word but not saying the word out loud. In interviews about James, Percival Everett states that he chose to use the word in the novel because he didn't want to whitewash history or misrepresent the nineteenth-century vernacular, but while he uses the full word in the novel, he says the n-word in interviews. 

One student in my class tells about the time when her high-school English teacher introduced study of Huck Finn by going around the room and requiring each student to say the n-word out loud so they could get comfortable saying and hearing the word they could not avoid seeing on the page, but enough students (and parents) were uncomfortable with the exercise that the teacher backed off. 

Another student is student-teaching in a local high school and feels that trying to teach Huck Finn in today's high school environment would be more trouble than it's worth. I see her point, but nevertheless I jumped at the opportunity to teach Huck Finn alongside James. If nothing else, the portrayal of Jim in Huck Finn provides a valuable lesson on why it's important to empower diverse voices. Huck's voice is so charming and full of energy that it may distract readers from the stories he's eliding or ignoring altogether. James fills that void, providing a compelling counternarrative that sends us back to Twain with new insight, new questions.

But still we struggle with how to handle the n-word. In my class the word remains read but not said, which is an imperfect solution but at this point it may be the best way to introduce students to the incredible story of James.

Obvious or oblivious?

There I was in the middle of yet another meeting designed to inform me of all the ways I'm failing to follow proper campus purchasing procedures--frequently-changing procedures for which I was never trained and that until recently were not even part of my job description--when I had a sudden epiphany: the procedures in question were so completely obvious to the expert that she couldn't imagine that they wouldn't be similarly obvious to me. 

I mean, aren't we all born with an inherent ability to distinguish between a requisition and a payment request? Don't we just innately know which online form must be submitted before the event and which one comes after? Don't we come out of the womb aware that one of these procedures requires a detailed quote while the other requires an invoice? And if we bobble the procedures and submit an invoice with the wrong online form, aren't we just about the stupidest people ever to have walked the earth?

I don't even want to go back and count all the times I've griped about the constant struggle to figure out campus budgeting and purchasing procedures; just thinking about it wears me out. But today I'm interested in the deeper issue: why would someone who has developed a specific area of expertise assume that whatever is obvious to her must also be obvious to others? 

What would this attitude look like in my discipline?  

Okay, class, you must all have come to college well aware of how to construct an effective thesis statement, so let's not look at any examples or discuss their strengths and weaknesses. Just write me a good thesis--and if you don't know what that means, what's wrong with you? 

Dear colleagues, I had intended to organize a workshop to help you design writing assignments to discourage plagiarism, but the methods are so incredibly obvious to me that I can't see the point, so never mind. 

So you say you're struggling to understand Charles Chesnutt's dialect tales? Just look at the words on the page! The meaning is obvious!

These examples are, of course, ridiculous. If I assume that whatever is obvious to me must also be obvious to others, then why am I here? And if we all adopt this attitude, then why does any institution of higher education need to exist?

Fortunately, ignorance is a renewable resource--that's what keeps us all in business. I am willing to admit my ignorance and gather the knowledge required to fulfill my duties--but I'll never learn if the experts assume that what I need to know must already be completely obvious.

A nightmare too far

I dreamed I was getting ready to start a new graduate program to seek a Ph.D. in Psychology. At age 62. In Kentucky. While maintaining my day job teaching in Ohio. And in my dream the thing that worried me the most was not the stupidity of starting a new Ph.D. on the verge of retirement or the fact that Psychology would require me to do scary things with stats and spreadsheets--no, the burning question that turned this bizarre dream into a nightmare was What will I listen to on all those long drives?

Fortunately, I woke up from that nightmare, and the real-life nightmares I've been facing in my daily life are much less stressful. For instance:

I keep being required to feed people. Now I love feeding people if I'm doing the cooking; putting together a tried-and-true recipe in my own kitchen is one of my love languages. But I don't like being in charge of selecting food for a group of campus colleagues. I worry about making the wrong choices to suit every palate, and then I worry about submitting the invoice incorrectly so it doesn't get paid, and then I worry about forgetting to put the leftovers in the fridge. This happened once over the summer when a plate of chicken-salad sandwiches got overlooked and sat out overnight, and then I couldn't just throw them away in the nearest trash can because staff cuts have led to changes in the trash-emptying schedule so I had to go wandering around looking for a trash can that was likely to be emptied within the week or risk living with the smell of three-day-old chicken-salad sandwiches in my workspace. Nightmare.

For a morning person, a slate of back-to-back classes and meetings running from 1 to 6 p.m. on a Monday is another kind of nightmare, but at least I won't be expected to think too much at this afternoon's meetings. In one meeting: I'm assisting a colleague who is working remotely, so I have to get to the room early, pull up the Zoom link, connect with my colleague, and then stand by throughout the meeting to step in as needed: Bev, can you check and see if everyone is on the same page? Bev, can you troubleshoot that problem? Bev, can you let me know when everyone has finished that task? I can't lead the workshop myself because it deals with the kind of software that makes me break out in hives, but I am happy to help my colleague, who has helped me often in the past. But frankly, it would really be easier if she could insert a computer chip in my brain and then run me around the room like a remote-control robot.

Over the weekend I tackled the first major pile of grading for the semester, which included some student handwriting that nearly drove me demented--but the content of the essays was so delightful that it offset the nightmarish scrawls. Today I'll grade a pile of essays submitted online, which I couldn't do over the weekend because a nasty stye in my eye made staring at the small computer screen painful. The papers will be more readable on the big monitor in my office, but the eye still hurts. Not so much a nightmare as an annoyance, especially since nobody will mind if I put them off for a day or two.

Similarly my crowded schedule of meetings and tasks this week: It will be a challenge to get it all done, but it's doable as long as I keep up a steady pace, and if I have to let something slide, there will be no screaming involved. So I guess my daytime nightmares are pretty tame these days. I may experience some discomfort--but nobody's forcing me to drive a six-hour round trip twice a week with nothing good on the radio. That's a nightmare too far.

In times like these, WWJD?

I went outside because my hands were so cold it hurt to type and I felt ridiculous wearing gloves and huddling under a blanket in my office when it's 80 degrees outside, but as I searched for a place in the sun where my black sweater could serve as a solar cell, I happened upon the bench near the library with the plaque that honors a colleague who died 15 years ago, so I decided to sit there and warm myself inside and out by pondering the question What Would Jackie Do?

Jackie taught Political Science, and in an election year she would get her students involved in political campaigns so they could see up close how the sausage gets made. She would encourage them to apply their critical thinking skills to everything, to ask questions about motivations and rhetorical devices and unintended consequences. She was a no-nonsense straight-talker but she never steamrolled anyone, instead empowering students to learn for themselves.

In times of campus controversy she would challenge assumptions, demand clarification, and expose sloppy thinking. She carried enough institutional memory to help the rest of us understand the historical issues underlying current problems. It was fun to sit next to her at faculty meetings, where her whispered comments provided an eye-opening education to the newbies amongst us.

She taught here through some difficult times, but I don't know how she would react to the petty wrangling we're enduring on a regular basis today. If the administration took away her support staff and demanded that she master procedures that changed every other week and then chastised her when she made a mistake, what would Jackie do? 

She probably wouldn't curl up in a fetal position and whimper, which is what I wanted to do this morning when I saw the email indicating that I'd once again messed up one of our ever-changing procedures and I was going to have to go through a tangle of multiplying emails just to get the vendor paid for an expense that is fully funded by my grant and that has already been approved at the highest level. And Jackie definitely wouldn't threaten to retire immediately after being encouraged to seek further assistance from a person whose e-mail autoreply says "Off campus--unavailable for appointments."

Jackie was just getting ready to retire in the spring of 2009 when she was suddenly felled by complications of cancer treatment. If she were here today, she wouldn't take any rash steps but would probably step outside, find a warm place to sit, and think deeply about the situation. Then she might just share some choice words with the person responsible for the current problem, and I would be happy to follow her example if I could only figure out who that person is.

Not ready for prime time

When is a woman in the prime of life? I suspect that any woman who has time to ponder the question has already passed her prime.

I keep hearing on the news that Kamala Harris is proof that a woman in her 60s can be in her prime, and last week my comedy students heard Hannah Gadsby insisting that "A 17-year-old girl is never, ever, ever in her prime."

"I am in my prime," she adds. "Would you test your strength out on me?"

Hannah Gadsby was 40 when she said that in her comedy special Nanette, and no, given the fierceness on display in that performance, I would not test my strength out on her. But then I am hardly in my prime. Am I?

In hindsight I agree that I was not in my prime at 17. I was smart enough and full of ambition, but I had bad skin and too much flab and a self-image that inspired suicidal feelings on a regular basis, which didn't make me much different from most of my friends. What I had a lot of at 17 was potential. 

When I was in college and grad school I was too busy to wonder whether I might be in my prime, and as a young mother I was pouring my energy and creativity into every little thing my children did, so if I was in my prime, I couldn't have paused long enough to enjoy it.

I might have been in my prime in my mid-to-late 40s, when I was making strides in my career, writing and teaching and delivering papers, getting my kids through college and devoting myself to creative projects; physically I was in better shape than ever, except I was not aware at the time that my physical strength was masking the growth of an insidious cancer. Trust me, I didn't sit in the cancer center's chemotherapy suite with an IV in my arm pondering whether this might be the prime of life. 

These days my mind might be in its prime but my body is falling apart. In the classroom I feel alive and alert, able to think on my feet and come up with useful insights; at the computer my fingers fly across the keyboard, barely able to keep up with the creative flow. But a long day of running from classes to meetings to frustrating tasks leaves me wanting to curl up on the floor in a fetal position and cry. I go for a walk in the woods and feel great, but then after a 24-minute drive to campus, my legs are so stiff I have trouble getting out of the car and walking half a block to my office.

I've used up much of that potential that seemed so endless when I was 17, but I haven't quite reached the pinnacle of success I'd dreamed of back then. But I haven't given up trying either. If I can't identify the prime of life, maybe that's because it's still on the horizon, beckoning me onward. If I ever reach my prime, I hope I still have the energy to realize that I've arrived.

 

Celebrating the Yes while respecting the No

My administrative position periodically requires me to ask people to do things--voluntarily--for the good of the institution, and lately I keep getting two contrasting responses. The problem is that I sympathize strongly with both.

These are tough times in academe, with professors facing increasing expectations and diminishing rewards. We've lost so much in the past few years--respect, raises, benefits, awards, funding for academic programs and professional development, colleagues whose positions have been cut, access to office supplies (who will order those green gel pens I love so much?), all the perks that made our professional lives more pleasant. Rampant staff cuts mean fewer people are available to do essential work, so everyone who remains has to work harder than ever, often without adequate training or compensation. 

So when I ask someone to assist with a project, I'm not surprised to be told, "No, I'm not doing anything extra for the College this year. I'm just teaching my classes and going home." I can respect that. We all have our own ways of coping with trauma, and I can easily recall times when I've needed to sentence myself to the Timeout Box just to survive the stresses of the job.

But I'm also getting plenty of Yeses. In fact, I'm amazed at the number of colleagues who are still willing to share their expertise at a workshop or participate in a program that requires a lot of effort without additional compensation. While some colleagues need to disengage from the College and limit their efforts to fulfilling their minimal requirements and no more, others are stepping up in big ways and small.

Here's an example: staff cuts mean that I have to pay more attention to budgets than ever before, tasks I have always preferred to delegate to people who don't break out in hives at the sight of a spreadsheet. This has been a struggle. I am okay handling numbers but I couldn't get the budget technology to work, something I was reluctant to admit to anyone in a position to help me, because how pathetic is it to have a PhD and decades of teaching experience but still be unable to access the spreadsheet showing my grant budget? But last week I overcame my shame and asked for help, and a very busy person in an essential administrative position came to my office to guide me through the process step by step.

I so appreciate colleagues who say Yes that I've been trying to say it to others, although sometimes all I can offer is I don't know. My office door is sometimes the only one open early in the morning, so I get a lot of questions that previously would have been the purview of the administrative assistant whose position was eliminated. Where are the spare batteries for the classroom clickers? (Not in my office--but I'll gladly walk down the hall to show you the secret stash.) Where do we keep the staples for the photocopier? (No idea, and don't ask me how to replace the toner either.) Who will bake cookies for this English major event since our catering budget is nonexistent? (I guess that would be me, but I'm not above volunteering a colleague to help.)

In times of trouble, I try not to be judgmental. Those who need to limit their engagement and tell me No get no grief from me. But in an atmosphere of No, each individual Yes makes me want to stand up and cheer. Hurrah for the Yeses! I'm collecting as many as I can right now before everyone gets so burned out that there's nothing left but a big fat No.

Laboring on Labor Day again (again)

I'm required to labor on Labor Day--but not too hard. While my blog takes a holiday, here are the Rules for Laboring on Labor Day that I published some years back:

1. Dress down. They can make me teach on Labor Day, but they can't make me dress up.

2. Pack your own picnic. No way I'm eating at my desk when the rest of the world is outside grilling burgers!

3. Don't begrudge the revelers their revels. The people who clean our bathrooms, make our photocopies, and answer our phones work hard for very little money and deserve every minute of their day off. I do not wish they were here working, but I do wish I could join them on their day off.

4. Office hours? Are you kidding me? No one comes to my office hours on a normal day, so what are the chances that anyone will show up on Labor Day?

5. Enjoy the commute. No public school = no school buses holding up traffic, no 20-mile-per-hour zones, and no teens racing around curves on country roads.

6. Be there. Nobody's fooled by the Labor Day flu; if my students are required to be in class on Labor Day, then I'm going to be there with them.

7. Don't try to explain it. I know we have reasons for teaching on Labor Day, and some of them may even be valid ("We can't shortchange Monday labs!"), but the real reason we teach on Labor Day is that we've never been sufficiently motivated to change it.