Poet, pie, penultimate

It's P-day, Pie-Day, Penultimate Friday--someone ought to write a song. 

I remind my students that today is the penultimate Friday of the semester and they look as me as if I'm speaking Swahili, until I define penultimate, which they promptly forget.

Doesn't matter when there's pie. On the Friday before Thanksgiving, all College employees are invited to eat pie together, one of our few social events where the President can mingle with the janitorial staff. Once upon a time when we had healthy budgets, people would try several different types of pie--blackberry, pumpkin, apple, you name it. Last year the ongoing budget crisis led to portion control, with enforcers watching to be sure no one took more than one piece or tried to smuggle a slice of pie out under their shirt. (It is a mistake to put blackberry pie in your pocket. Trust me on this.) This, of course, means that people stand around agonizing over which piece to take. Sure, that apple pie might be great, but choosing apple means no blackberry or pumpkin or coconut cream! Decisions, decisions.

No afternoon classes, so after pie I can spend the rest of the day responding to drafts, many of which won't take much time. The final project for the Nature Writing class calls for research, sources, and at least 2000 words, but the drafts aren't quite there yet, ranging from a 200 to 1500 words, with most hovering around 1000. I wouldn't worry much about the word count if the content were persuasive, but the content isn't entirely present yet, which is a problem since time is running out. Well, these are good students. They'll pull it together eventually.

Students, of course, complain about having major projects due in so many different classes at the same time, but if a project is supposed to be the culminating experience for a course, drawing on skills the students have been working to master all semester long, then it's hard to assign it much earlier in the semester. They're going to have a crazy couple of weeks, and their profs are going to have a differently crazy couple of weeks, with all those drafts needing feedback plus finals to construct plus all kinds of extra events to plan and attend.

Yesterday we had a different type of P-day when a visiting Poet spent time on campus. Jonathan Johnson met with an 8:00 a.m. creative writing class, had lunch with English department faculty members and students, and read from his work in the evening, all with great energy and enthusiasm. (Click here to see three poems I'm tempted to label "homely," but only in the original meaning of the word.) Judging from the way he connected with students, responded to their questions, and offered sage advice about writing and life, I'd guess he'd be a fantastic teacher. We had a casual talk about trees early in the morning when I introduced him to the gorgeous sweet gum tree outside our building, and after he'd spent some time enjoying our beautiful campus, he urged his audience to "keep telling these gorgeous trees 'hi' for me." 

Jonathan Johnson titled one of his poems "When something's good, keep it," as good advice as any this time of the semester. I suspect, though, that he wasn't talking about that extra slice of pie. 

On needing a new challenge

Thirtysomething years ago when I was contemplating switching careers from journalism to teaching, my wise and wonderful husband told me something like this: "It won't be much of a change since you're always teaching anyway--you'll just be teaching a different type of student."

He was right: Even while working as a small-town journalist covering all manner of mundane news, from school board meetings to Eagle Scout ceremonies to wheat futures (and this is true--I once won an award for my coverage of innovations in farming), I was always looking for ways to educate readers about the issues that mattered to the community. For instance, when a company wanted to open a new local plant to process petroleum-contaminated soils, I didn't just report on what the two sides said but I read deeply about the process and consulted experts. I had to educate myself before educating my readers, and while I didn't think of them as students, many readers demonstrated a dedication to learning that made my job worthwhile.

Now I'm wondering whether it's time to once again seek out a different type of student. Let me explain:

For some time I've been indulging in what turns out to be a ridiculous fantasy about my final couple of semesters as a college professor: teaching my favorite classes, imparting well-earned wisdom to a horde of eager English majors, going out in a blaze of glory, the whole shebang. 

But no. My favorite classes keep getting cancelled due to low enrollment (or, in the case of the Colson Whitehead class I'd planned to teach next semester, no enrollment) while our supply of English majors steadily declines. The way things look right now, next semester I'll teach one class, American Lit Survey, in which only ten students are currently enrolled. That's right: my entire teaching load will consist of ten students taking a class I've taught so many times I could do it with with my eyes closed and both hands tied behind my back. Where's the challenge in that? I mean, I love the class, but I hope I'll have something a little more rewarding in my final semester next fall. 

Unfortunately, demographic trends suggest otherwise. It's possible that my final semester teaching will be much like this one, in which I'm teaching no literature classes at all.

So I'll admit that I have not been a lot of fun to be with as I'm trying to adjust to my continued irrelevance. Sulking is what I've been doing. Trying to find someone to blame, as if the bad academic weather is aimed directly at me and no one else. 

But then yesterday I had an epiphany: Maybe it's time once again to find a different type of student.

I don't know what that means right now but figuring it out might provide the kind of challenge I need. I'm not interested in seeking another teaching job elsewhere since I know other colleges are struggling the same way we are, and there are good reasons that I need to retire at the end of next year. But if teaching still makes me happy but I can't seem to attract students where I am, maybe it's time to find a different kind of teaching--and a different type of student. 

What could this mean? Starting a Substack, teaching Learning in Retirement classes, serving as a writing consultant or mentor for struggling writers? Writing more pedagogy essays or pulling together all my previous pedagogy essays into a book proposal? Volunteering in local schools? Writing PR pieces for local nonprofit organizations? Or maybe something I haven't even thought of yet--I'm accepting suggestions.

Mostly I just need something positive to work toward so I don't focus so intently on the current situation. Decades ago one of my college English profs told me, "You seem like someone who always needs a challenge to keep you going." He was right, but what do I do when all the challenges dissipate? 

Find another challenge--and another way to keep teaching--and another type of student. 

Why couldn't I bring back a bison?

Of course it would be ridiculous to buy a pair of pants just because they happen to match some particularly wacky socks, but I'm the one who once sewed an entire wool skirt suit and silk blouse to match a set of antique buttons I'd found at a yard sale.

And I didn't buy my lovely new moss-green corduroys just to match the Meerkats in Love socks my son brought home from South Africa, but when I saw these green cords on the half-price rack at Macy's I immediately thought, Meerkats. And then I saw a lovely soft v-necked sweater in the same color and now here I am ensconced in warm moss green from head to toe, except for the orange stripes on my Meerkats in Love socks. No one ever sees the orange stripes, but I know they're there and that's all that matters.

I was at Macy's as part of a two-day junket to Columbus, Ohio, the ostensible purpose of which was to buy a new winter coat. I didn't buy a coat (because I prefer not to look like the Michelin Man if at all possible) but I bought some other things and also visited two friends who always make me smile, plus a herd of bison. The bison were standing around placidly at Battelle Darby Creek Metropark, where the peace and quiet were balm for my soul. Why are bison more soothing to watch than cows? I barely notice the cows in the pastures along my commute but the sight of a few bison standing in a restored prairie fills me with peace.

The friends I visited were more talkative than the bison, reminding me that the issues that irk me aren't confined to my campus. I'm not the only one whose life's work is being rendered irrelevant by AI, nor am I the only one struggling to find a reliable foothold in our current cultural moment. Friends who can help me laugh in the midst of all the horror are a priceless gift.

And getting away from campus for a couple of days was a gift as well. No one gave me the time off; I just took advantage of a Thursday with no meetings and a Friday when I didn't need to be in class because my students were otherwise occupied. Call it a mental health break. I've been working like a maniac to complete important campus projects (with no thanks from those whose bacon I'm saving) and I had to get away, to fill my eyes and mind and heart with something other than trouble.

Today I'm back at work on campus, rejoining the mad race toward the end of the semester, but I feel more equipped to keep moving toward the finish line in my new green cords and meerkat socks and a mind refreshed by my time away--and a new career plan. If the whole academic thing doesn't work out, I'll remake myself as a professional appreciator of bison. Do you reckon there's any money in it?

 

Gotta love Meerkats in Love

 

Mary Roach: A little more than diddly

Just before we walked onstage in front of a packed house last night, the director of our campus speaker series asked me, "Do you usually get nervous before doing things like this?"

Things like this? What, like sitting on stage for an hour tossing questions at the author of eight best-selling books? Not something I do every day!

The answer is: yes, I did get a little nervous before I had that very public fireside chat with author Mary Roach last night, but it was the most fun I've had in ages. Aside from being a terrific writer, she is a warm and funny person who can talk intelligently about just about anything. Here's part of what I said about her in my introduction:

Early in her new book Replaceable You, in a chapter describing treatment options for people suffering third-degree burns, Mary Roach tosses out the phrase exuberant granulations as if it's precious treasure. In Fuzz, we learn about pronking and stotting and frass and kerf, and we encounter people who work as Danger Tree Assessors or Falling Safety Advisors. This is what I love about Mary's writing: she takes such great joy in language, glorying in the weird and wonderful nomenclature of science and nature while she's looking at interesting topics in granular detail--exuberantly. Near the end of Fuzz she writes about scientists' attempts to genetically alter mice, admitting that she "knows diddly about how it works but wants to become someone who knows a little more than diddly." Well we all know diddly about a lot of things--but by the time we're done tonight, I hope we'll know a little more than diddly.

And we did! We all now know much more about how Mary Roach writes her books and what she's learned along the way. The first question I asked was How far will you go to get the story? I've read only two of her books, but I've seen her get mugged by monkeys, get trained in wildlife attack response, climb inside an iron lung machine, get a hair transplant on her calf, and travel all over the world to track down scientists and other experts so she could observe their work while peppering them with questions.

I wish I could have written down her responses, but I had my hands full with a microphone and lists of questions, some of them written by my Nature Writing students, who had read a chapter of Fuzz. They wanted to know why she writes about serious topics humorously and why she tucks so many little gems into very funny footnotes. Her answers made us all a little smarter while keeping us laughing. 

But then she'd been doing that all day. Because of an unusual convergence of events, I was in charge of getting the author where she needed to go all afternoon, so we spent a lot of time talking while tootling around town and having dinner before the show. She is just as warm and interesting offstage, so by the time we got on the stage, I felt very comfortable asking questions.

And then after the show, she sat and signed books for a long line of people who wanted to keep the conversation going. It was pretty late when I dropped her off at her hotel, where she had arranged for a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call so a car service could drive her to the airport in Columbus. Maybe that's why I woke up at 3:30 this morning--in sympathy with the author who'd kept me so well entertained all day. The whole event wore me out but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Maybe next time--if there is a next time--I won't be quite so nervous.  

Snow trouble

So I'm sitting in the audience at a big campus event while five distinguished men (and three women!) in expensive suits give speeches one after another after another, and I'm trying to listen very closely to what they're saying but I'm distracted by what I can see through the great big rec center windows just behind them.

Snow. Lots of it. Coming down so thickly that it's hard to see the trees right outside the window.   

The problem with working in a historic city full of picturesque brick streets is that it's very hard to remove snow from bricks, and the problem with white-out conditions is that there's a limited number of snowplows and salt trucks and they can't hit every road at once, and the problem with working in a city squeezed between two rivers and a steep hill is that there's really only one route that will take me home.  

Which is why I was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic feeling its way along the highway at speeds up to six miles per hour yesterday afternoon. The line would inch up to a traffic light, stopping carefully to avoid skidding, and then more traffic would spill in from a side road, clogging the intersection so that no one could move even after the light turned green.

It was a long drive home and a stressful one. I was about halfway home when the snow stopped falling and the sun burst through the clouds, so that when I turned right on my country road, the snow-covered trees were in the spotlight. After taking close to an hour to drive my 17-mile route, the light and beauty made me want to stop and applaud. 

Snow creates all kinds of problems in the world where I live, but every once in a while it offers a lovely reward.

 

 

Guineas in the mist

I totally understand why no one goes trick-or-treating on my road: it's narrow and twisty, with lots of blind curves and no streetlights or sidewalks, and you never know when a critter might skitter across the road in front of you. Houses are far apart, and a child in a mask that limits peripheral vision would be taking his life in his hands walking up my driveway. And of course the guineas' alarm call makes it sound like someone is getting murdered in my meadow. Scary place! But beautiful too, especially in the early-morning autumn fog.

 

Guineas in the mist, and chickens too

The resident woodsman has been working hard.

Smiley Friday

Late on Friday afternoon at the end of a complicated week, I walked into a room in the science building feeling tired, grumpy, and entirely out of energy, but within minutes I was laughing and by the end of the hour I felt refreshed. The room was full of exhausted professors eating finger foods, drinking wine, and sharing stories, gathered to listen as two of our colleagues presented the results of their sabbatical research projects. I don't know much about scanning tunneling microscopes or microbial films on reefs, but my colleagues took such joy in explaining their work that the joy seeped into every corner of the room and put a spring in our steps as we left the building. 

But that's not the only reason I'm smiling this Friday. In no particular order:

At the student creative writing event yesterday, three of my Nature Writing students read short essays they'd written for my class. Beautiful writing read beautifully--they made me very proud. 

Earlier in the day--at 6:30 a.m., when it was still dark out and I hadn't yet ingested my morning quota of caffeine--I arrived at our first-year student registration breakfast to find a host of students eager to press the big blue "Register Now" button promptly at 7, plus faculty from various disciplines helping them troubleshoot scheduling problems. At least half of the students present were first-year football players, whose coach had insisted that they walk over to the registration breakfast right after early-morning weightlifting. Best of all, the coach came along with them. It's refreshing to see a brand-new coach impressing on students the importance of academics. 

One of my first-year seminar students got the rest of the class laughing so hard this morning that we all felt like one big happy family. Sometimes one student can be a catalyst in a classroom, making good things happen just by being there. I'm going to miss this dude next semester.

I had to run an errand to a bleak strip mall in the middle of the day but I stopped along the way to look at the Ohio River, where the light was gorgeous during the calm before an ugly storm. Calm water, lovely light, refreshing breeze--just before the sky fell.

And a colleague reminded me this evening that the sky is always going to be falling, but it's good sometimes to focus instead on the lovely light. 

An elevating topic

This morning I rode in an elevator with a student who had recently broken his ankle in two places. "This is nothing," he said. "Last year I broke my neck."

I think I would have quit playing football after the first injury, but whatever. I certainly wasn't planning to gripe about my bum knee in the presence of that kind of pain. He can't put any weight on his ankle for at least a month so his knee was propped up on one of those little scooters, which has to be a horrible way to get around campus. Historic buildings full of charm and character aren't necessarily easy to retrofit for the differently-abled. (I keep casually referring to myself as a cripple but people flinch. Too Dickensian?)

Yesterday I was halfway down a flight of stairs when I realized that I had forgotten to take the elevator and then I had to make a decision: continue down to the next floor or walk back up and use the elevator? In the past couple of weeks I've spent more time in campus elevators than I had for the previous 25 years combined. Elevators in campus buildings are, variously, slow, smelly, noisy, unreliable, or absent, but my orthopedist says my knee will be happier if I avoid steps for a while, so I hear and obey.

For about four days after the cortisone shot my knee felt great. I was able to walk without a discernible limp and sleep without being awakened by shooting pains. 

Then I twisted it again--not as badly as the first time, but enough to make me despair of ever living without pain. Back to taking piles of painkillers every day, back to limping slowly around campus, back to being awakened by pain every stinking night.

But then it started feeling better. I can sleep! I've cut back on the painkillers! I can walk for a time without a limp! I can put on my socks without being overcome by a strong desire to cut off my right leg above the knee! Stairs still hurt, especially going down, and by the end of the day my leg feels fatigued, but the knee is making steady progress, filling me with hope that I may someday get around campus without having to plan every step of my route in advance. 

For a while I was going to Faculty Council meetings to offer feedback on topics related to one of my positions, but the last time I attended a Council meeting, my knee hurt so badly that I resolved to stay away until such time as Hell freezes over. Council meets on the top floor of the administration building, a lovely historic pile where the steps seem as steep and endless as the Eiffel Tower.  

How would a person dependent on a wheelchair access any of the services available in that building? Well, there's no room inside the building for an elevator, so some years ago the College installed an outdoor chair lift just next to the steps. To operate the chair lift, you have to press a buzzer and hope someone inside the building hears the summons and knows how to operate the lift. Once years ago the chair lift got stuck halfway up with a wheelchair-bound person in it. 

And even if it works, the chair lift only gets you so far: access to the main floor of the building, where all the services most essential to students are located. There is no elevator to the upper floor, where Faculty Council meets and where the Human Resources office is located. How am I supposed to file paperwork requesting accommodations for my bum knee when I can't get up the steps to HR? 

But let's look on the bright side: I can walk! I can sleep! And I'm not trying to play football with a broken neck! I've reached the age when joint pain is a fairly constant part of everyday life, but there's hope that someday I'll be able to walk down the stairs without giving it a second thought. Anything to avoid the elevator! 

When the door swings back

On cop shows it's become a cliche: the officers encounter a woman with bruises on her face and ask who's been hitting her and the woman says I walked into a door. Lame! Such a lame excuse that it has become code for Let's all pretend that no one is hitting me. 

So I probably ought to come up with something else to say when people ask about the bruise on my forehead, like The plunger the aliens used to suck me into their flying saucer left a nasty red mark. That's about as believable as I walked into a door, but nevertheless I assure you that I' telling the truth: I walked into a door, and I have a door-shaped bruise to prove it.

Trust me: my husband is the last person on earth who would intentionally hurt anyone, and also he doesn't know his own strength, so if he decided one day to punch me in the face, I'd still be lying on the floor in the room where it happened. The laundry room. Which has swinging saloon doors, one of which failed to swing back out and so was located where I didn't expect it when I turn to walk vigorously out of the room.

My husband heard me holler and yelled up from the basement, Are you okay?  

No, I said, but there's not a thing you can do about it. 

I could blame it on my lifelong klutziness or an aging body or the malignant door, but the fact is that I've been doing a lot of stupid things lately because I'm distracted by fears that my teaching career is going pfft right in front of my face. Whatever I do to try not to think about it, I'm frequently assaulted by intrusive thoughts of despair over my moribund teaching career. 

No literature classes this semester because students wouldn't sign up for them. No upper-level literature class since fall of 2024, and it's possible that one or both of my literature classes scheduled for next semester will be canceled due to low enrollment, which would leave me with...nothing to teach. 

Of course the Powers That Be will make sure I devote my non-teaching time to administrative projects to make up for not teaching, but while I'm pretty good at administrative claptrap, it doesn't feed my soul the way teaching does. And it's a little embarrassing for the senior member of the English department to be haunting the halls with nothing to do because my courses have been so roundly rejected by students that I've become utterly irrelevant. (And they're left with no options for American Literature classes, which leads to a pretty unbalanced English major, but that's not my fault.)

I'm trying not to whine too much about this lest I become the curmudgeonly old crone who's always bringing down the mood, which will make me even less welcome on campus. But when a colleague from another department asked how I was doing this morning and I said not great and spilled my guts, I found out that it's not just me--other departments are seeing declining enrollments, and other colleagues are wondering what they'll do to fulfill contractual requirements when there's nothing left to teach. There's not enough administrative claptrap to fill all the gaps in teaching loads, so what are the options?

It's a painful time to be a prof, but at least the painful bruise on my forehead gives me a chance to change the subject. Twenty-five years ago I walked through a door into a wonderful career, and now that door has swung back to hit me in the face, and it hurts.

No, I'm not okay--but there's not a thing you can do about it. 

Who will design the official faculty tramp stamp?

This is either a brilliant idea or--well, you decide:

Yesterday the committee I chair was talking about what sorts of door prizes might inspire faculty members to attend a training workshop, and today one of my students mentioned that the best way to lure students to attend events is to have a drawing in which the prize is a gift certificate to a tattoo parlor.

You can see where I'm going with this, right?

Why not offer tattoo parlor gift certificates as door prizes at faculty events? Or, better yet, bring in a tattoo artist to ink 'em up right here on campus?

Think of the possibilities: the college mascot inscribed on our biceps, departmental logos on our ankles, important concepts from our disciplines on our foreheads. Soon departments will be competing to sport the most impressive tattoos, with math profs adding ever more digits of pi while chemists show off diagrams of carbon compounds.

What sort of tattoo would the English department select? Years ago we had a major who wanted the word liminal tattooed on her arm, which is amusing on a visceral level (but only to people who know what liminal means). Should we deck ourselves out in diagrammed sentences, allow our arms to pay homage to authors, or adorn ourselves with quotes from classic works of literature? I'd love to carry with me every day the last two lines from "To the Stone-Cutters" by Robinson Jeffers: "Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found / The honey of peace in old poems." Or maybe just the last line of Denise Levertov's "The Jacob's Ladder": "The poem ascends."

That line might look nice ascending up my neck, except it would probably just make my neck look unwashed--and besides, who would ever get close enough to read a poem off my neck? 

So okay, the idea needs some work, but I'll bet I could find some faculty eager to put in the time to refine it. Far more fun than tackling the pile of student projects and papers coming due in the next couple of weeks.

Maybe I'll get the entire text of Pride and Prejudice micro-printed on the back of my hand. It might look like a blob of ink to others, but wherever I go I'll have on hand something well worth reading.

(Some) visiting writers rock!

In 2009, Anthony Doerr was a cheap date: he came to campus, met with a creative writing class, had lunch with English majors, and read from his work in a public reading, all for the pathetic honorarium our department was able to scrape together. We invited him on the strength of his short stories and Four Seasons In Rome and we paid him just enough to tempt him to fly cross-country. This was before the novels and the Pulitzer and the movie deal, so there's no way our meager budget could lure him here today--but if we did, I have no doubt he would spend quality time with students. He was great with students. Alumni still rave about the writing advice he so generously shared.

We've been lucky over the years with many of our visiting writers, pleased with their willingness to share their expertise with students. Sarah Vowell was fabulous. Dan Chaon was great. Joni Tevis was a gem. And the first visiting writer whose visit I arranged--the poet David Citino--read students' work with care and offered focused encouragement. A year later when I learned he'd died, I was so moved by the memory of his patient attention that I cried in front of my class.

But some visiting writers have not been so accommodating. I guess I understand, a little bit: if some big-name writer takes time out of a busy writing schedule to travel out to darkest Appalachia, flying in and out of annoying little airports and staying in a chain motel next to the interstate, they might want to get out of here as quickly as possible, arriving on campus in time to read but avoiding the classes or lunches or opportunities to meet with students. They're tired. They're busy. They're big stars in the literary firmament, and we are nobody.

But do they have to rub it in? I remember one pretty well known writer--whose name I won't mention--whose imperious attitude left a bad taste in my mouth. She openly expressed contempt for our students' work, and while I'm not surprised that a student's writing might not meet the high standard expected by a successful writer of literary fiction, I don't see the need for contempt. But this same author also treated the chair of the English department like the hired help, so maybe contempt was just her usual way of being in the world.

A visiting writer who hates students probably ought to stay away from students entirely--read the work, be inspiring, go away. Fine. But I keep thinking back to that visit by Anthony Doerr, when no one knew that he would someday become THE Anthony Doerr: he convinced our students that their writing mattered, and the students responded by writing more and mattering more.

Pig-headed about Pygmalion

It didn't surprise me at all that my first-year students have never heard of Pygmalion. I mean, why should they? Is anyone seriously teaching Ovid or George Bernard Shaw in high school these days? I was a little surprised that none of them admitted familiarity with My Fair Lady, but why should twenty-first century college students watch a musical released in 1964? Old news. Nothing to see here.

What surprised me most, though, was that when they encountered a reference to Pygmalion in Tara Westover's Educated, none of them looked it up. It appears at a pivotal moment: a scholarship has enabled the unschooled Tara to study in Cambridge, where she suffers deeply from impostor syndrome and feels her unusual childhood ill suits her for academic life. She doesn't know what to wear, what to read, or what to think, and her mentor, Professor Steinberg, is titillated by her ignorance, seeing her as a blank slate ready to be molded into his idea of a scholar. "It's as if I've stepped into Shaw's Pygmalion," he says, and my students just read on without stopping to wonder what that might mean.

Pygmalion was a dude who fell in love with a statue, I tell them, and I show them some images showing a sculptor crafting a beautiful woman in marble. They are unimpressed--like, why do they need to know this? So I explain: Pygmalion was disgusted by the women available to him, finding some flaw in every single woman he saw, so he set out to make one of his own, crafting the perfect woman from marble and then falling in love with the work of his hands. What can you say about a dude who falls in love with his statue? The word desperate comes to mind--like a twenty-first century guy who can't deal with real women and so creates his own AI-generated sweetheart. But today's Pygmalion has no Aphrodite so moved by the depth of his love that she transforms the statue into a real live girl ready to meet his every need. No word on what Galatea thinks of the deal, but whatever.

My students' eyes glaze over.

Look at the image, I tell them. Who has power here? They look: Pygmalion dominates the scene, making and crafting and designing. Galatea is passive, submissive, silent. Who wants to be that girl? 

Here I should probably note that I have only four female students in the class (out of 17), and all but two of the men are athletes, mostly football or basketball players. But that shouldn't make a difference: anyone with a few functioning brain cells ought to be able to look at the representation of Pygmalion and Galatea and understand that the myth envisions the ideal woman as silent, submissive, passive, and designed primarily to serve the needs of men. 

But my students don't want to talk about that.

So I turn back to the text: Tara is trying to reinvent herself in an academic environment that will free her from the restrictions of her home back in Idaho, where she was repeatedly (and violently) shoved into certain models of feminine behavior promoted by her church, her community, and her father (who referred to six-year-old girls in tutus as whores because they were showing too much leg). Young Tara hopes academe will free her to become her own person, but the first mentor she encounters at Cambridge takes glee in viewing her as Galatea to his Pygmalion.

Why would Tara Westover compare her mentor to Pygmalion? How free is she in this scene? No one wants to touch the question. No one wants to consider the irony involved in creating an AI-generated image of Pygmalion sculpting Galatea. No one wants to explore who has the power to craft our identities or what sorts of constraints might deter today's students from becoming their best selves. 

It's possible that I see myself as playing the part of Pygmalion in my students' lives, trying to craft them into the scholars I hope they are capable of becoming. But even if I admitted this out loud to my students, how many of them would be willing to look up the words?

Friday fragments, with pulchritudinous yodeling

I've been meeting with a million first-year advisees this week so my brain is a little fried, which may explain why I'm struggling to comprehend reality.

A student is currently earning an F in a math class but assures me he'll bring it up to an A by the end of the semester and I think no wonder he's failing math, but then maybe it would be possible to bring an F up to an A if the prof hands out a whole lot of extra credit. I remind the student of a common advisor mantra--D's get degrees--but he sees an elusive A gleaming on the horizon and thinks it's easily within his reach.

A student in the Nature Writing class wants readers to care about the harm we're doing to our pulchritudinous planet but I tell her I hear pulchritude in the voice of W.C. Fields so maybe she ought to choose another word. She doesn't ask me who W.C. Fields might be so maybe she knows, but she doesn't know for pulchritude.

All the commuter students in my 9 a.m. class were a little late this morning because the Oil and Gas Expo taking place in the rec center has resulted in big trucks taking up the parking spaces commuter students need. Maybe I should have warned my commuters to attend class via Zoom while circling the lot. 

I'm getting a cortisone shot in my sore knee this afternoon from an orthopedist who can't understand why I'm not begging for surgery on both knees, because the X-rays reveal that the arthritis is worse in the left knee, which doesn't even hurt. He says the cortisone shot might provide some relief to the sore knee but it won't last so I'd better get used to the idea of a knee replacement tomorrow if not sooner, but instead I'm getting used to the idea of seeking a second opinion.

My partner in faculty training tells me about a dream in which a vendor is supposed to be training faculty in a new technology but instead he's standing at the front of the classroom dressed in German folk garb and yodeling while his young daughter dances nearby, and while my partner is trying to signal to the presenter that he's lost the plot, I'm rushing around the room passing trays of food, presumably because it's impossible to yodel with a mouth full of cake. This scenario may be a dream, but it doesn't feel too different from what's going on in my world right now.

Attack of the AI bots, plus AI-induced paranoia

So yesterday a colleague in another department asked her students to explain specific ways they use AI in their classes. Do they ask an AI to help them come up with ideas for papers, summarize readings, or find sources for research projects? The first kid to raise his hand said, "I cheat." Then he explained, in detail, how he cheats. Brazen but not surprising. At least he was honest, I guess, if that's what counts as honesty these days.

Now I'm dealing with AI-generated blog comments. It's nice to find in my inbox a comment full of fulsome praise for my prose, except when it includes an embedded link to a sketchy website shilling certain goods and services. And why does the comment sound like it was written by a particularly sycophantic robot? I like praise as much as the next blogger, but I'm not interested in robotic sycophancy!

Of course this makes me question other comments as well. I have moderation turned on for posts more than a week old, but couldn't AI comments sneak into more recent posts without my awareness? I've long suspected that many of the thousands of purported visitors to my blog are bots, but how often do they fool me into believing they're real people? Maybe I'm paranoid, but in the current environment it's a well-deserved paranoid.

My paranoia went a little too far yesterday when I convinced myself that the weather was targeting me personally. I had to walk down the hill to pick up a tray of sandwiches and then walk back up the hill again to deliver them to a meeting, but the sky got dark just before I stepped out the door and the rain poured down throughout the process of fetching sandwiches. Then within minutes after I'd stepped back inside, the sky cleared and the sun came out. Good thing I had a (borrowed) umbrella! And good thing my bum knee didn't fail me on the slippery steps! But if we must endure a 20-minute downpour, why does it have to happen just when I can't avoid being outside?

The weather may hate me, but the AI bots love me. Honestly, it's nice to be appreciated by someone, although I'm not sure what really counts as honesty these days.

Red, yellow, and not too blue

I drive home along the river and marvel over the autumn leaves turning brilliant red and yellow, but at the same time I'm reminded of one Sunday years ago when the pastor asked the congregation what they were thankful for and some nice church lady mentioned the beautiful fall leaves, only to have another nice church lady intone darkly, "The leaves look nice now, but soon they'll all fall down and the colors will go away and everything will turn dark and bleak and make me think of death." 

Well sure, that's one way to look at it, but if I had to think about death every time I saw a colorful leaf, I'd stop looking. But I can't drive home with my eyes shut so instead I glory in the beauty of nature, even when I'm in pain--or especially when I'm in pain.

Having a diagnosis for my bum knee is a bit of a relief--torn meniscus, severe arthritis--but I'm definitely looking forward to getting some treatment, which will probably start with steroid injections. The knee is not quite so painful at night these days but it's excruciating when I have to stand for long periods of time. At church I can generally get through one hymn without too much discomfort, but last Friday at the inauguration of our college president I had to march in the academic procession and then remain standing through the national anthem, the invocation, and the college hymn, by which point I was grasping tightly to the chair in front of me to avoid falling over from the pain. The colleague next to me whispered You can sit down if you need to, but people were taking photos all over the place and I didn't want to go viral as the evil professor who refused to stand for the national anthem--or the prayer, or the hymn. In these troubled times, I didn't want a personal, practical decision to be interpreted as a symbolic act.

Despite the pain I went for a walk up my road Saturday morning just to see how far I could go. I took my husband along to distract me with conversation, which helped. Our creek is mostly dry right now and looks like a river of leaves, but we heard kingfishers chattering and saw the friendly smiles of neighbors, which also helped. One of our close neighbors killed himself last week--Who knows why? It all got to be too much for him--which made me sad for his family, who will see the lovely colors of autumn through grief-tinged eyes.

Or maybe the lovely colors will provide some comfort. I know they cheer me up, even if I'm well aware that winter is coming. I may be a little blue, but I refuse to encounter the beauty of autumn except with eyes wide open. 

  

Our creek looks like a sea of leaves.

 

Mind-reading their way toward educational goals

Extra credit to anyone who can read my mind right now, I said, and a student said, Seriously?

I didn't hand out any extra credit this morning but I did give a student an imaginary gold star for guessing what I was asking for when I wrote WWTD on the whiteboard. 

My first-year seminar class has reached the point in Tara Westover's Educated where young Tara has to seek help her reach her educational goals. She goes to office hours to ask a professor how to improve her performance in class, asks a friend for tutoring, gets her pastor to help her apply for a government grant, and even submits to her roommate's instruction on the importance of washing her hands after she uses the bathroom. (Because yes, she was that clueless.) 

On Friday my students will start learning about the complicated process of creating an educational plan and selecting classes for next semester, so today I wanted to draw connections between what they were reading in Westover's book and what they'll be doing in planning their own educational goals. So I asked them to write down specific educational goals for the short term (passing that next chemistry exam, for instance), medium term (getting into a major class next semester), and long term (studying abroad, getting an internship). Then I asked them to get into groups, talk about their most challenging goals, and then answer the question I wrote on the board: WWTD? 

Does anyone know what this means? I asked, adding, I doubt it since I just made it up.  

That's when I offered extra credit for mind-reading, and they fumbled toward an answer: Who Wants To Dive, What Would They Do, What Would Timmy Do--and then I said, Close, but not Timmy. 

What would Tara do said a voice from the front row. (Gunners in the front row, as usual.) 

Gold star! (Except I didn't actually have any gold stars.) What Would Tara Westover do if faced with the challenges you've been discussing? And where can you find that kind of help here? 

They came up with great answers, so at least for today I know they know how to use campus resources. Will this result in a sudden influx of students coming to office hours? If so, I need to top up my supply of gold stars.

Monday-morning meh

This morning at my annual wellness checkup my doctor asked whether I ever get depressed and I burst out laughing. Frankly, depression would be a totally rational response to the world we're all living in as well as the specific conditions of my job, where ChatGPT is turning everyone's brains to mush and the English major is being marginalized and others keep taking credit for my work.

But no, I'm not depressed, I said. A little glum sometimes, a little angry, a little prone to wondering what all this pain and suffering is for, but I wouldn't call that depressed. That's just life.

The good news is that my blood pressure is excellent, which is surprising since I've gained a little weight, which is not surprising since it's really hard to exercise when my knee screams every time I move, which is also not surprising since I've apparently been suffering from a torn meniscus since (checks calendar) mid-August, during which time the elevator in my building was out of order for five weeks. (All of my classes are upstairs.)

Tomorrow I'll get X-rays on both knees and start the long process of figuring out what can be done to ease the pain of a torn meniscus, which (checks Dr. Google) should have included staying off my feet and elevating the knee rather than walking up and down steps on it for the past two months. Depending on the extent of the damage, remedies run from physical therapy all the way up to knee replacement. But at least my blood pressure is excellent! It's good to have something to celebrate.

 

  

Art, nature, essays, chickens--what more could anyone ask for?

File under Where does the time go? 

Fall break will end in a few hours and I've just this minute finished my midterm grading. I'd promised myself that I would really relax during this four-day break and I guess I must have because I can't possibly account for all those hours. The grading itself didn't take too long, but finding novel ways to postpone grading seems to have eaten up my entire break.

Okay, I had a little fun. I kept telling people that I was planning to go to Youngstown over break and they kept asking me why, to which I had no good response. Colleagues mentioned Italian food and organized crime, neither of which interested me all that much. I wanted to go to a museum, the Butler Institute of American Art on the campus of Youngstown State University, and since it didn't open until 11 a.m. on Thursday, I spent the early morning hours at the lovely Mill Creek Metropark in the company of waterfalls, ducks, fall colors, friendly dog-walkers, an old mill, and lots of steps and sloping trails.

Now I won't be seeing the doctor about my wonky knee until tomorrow so I was still in quite a lot of pain during my one-day visit to Youngstown, but the knee was much happier hiking up and down hills in the park than it was walking around on very hard floors at the museum. Good thing there were plenty of places where I could sit and look at interesting art, although one of those places turned out to be more hazardous than expected: a cushy chair I sunk into so deeply that I had trouble getting out of it again. This hefty workman in flannel shirt and heavy boots kept clomping past carrying lengths of wood and I briefly considered asking him to stop and pull me out of the chair, but eventually I managed to extricate myself without assistance, though I knocked over the chair in the process. I'm just glad it wasn't a priceless artwork encrusted with crystals. No lasting damage was done except to my dignity.

And what about the museum itself? Lovely building, really stupid rest-room location, some nice paintings by the likes of Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt--the sorts of works I often show in literature courses dealing with portrayals of nature. I liked the folk-art section though I wish there'd been more of it; in a room devoted to carousel art, I encountered a carved horse that looked deformed if not downright demonic. What child would willingly sit atop such a frightful beast?

My favorite part, though, was an entire gallery devoted to Julio Larraz, a Cuban artist who fled to the U.S. in 1961. Huge canvases, vibrant colors, surreal images intended, I think, to critique oppressive power structures. An image of an antique telephone on wooden wheels standing before the high walls of some sort of fortress reminded me of the Trojan Bunny scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I couldn't decide whether the paintings were more tragic or comic but either way I found them haunting.

After all that excitement, I managed a 24-hour visit to the grandkids before I had to come home to attend to the chickens while my husband was in prison. Every time I'd mentioned that my husband was going to prison, people who knew him would assume, correctly, that it was some sort of ministry thing, while those who didn't know him would look puzzled and tactfully change the subject, which I enjoyed immensely. But he couldn't tend the chickens from prison so he had modified the security fence around the chicken run so I could get inside (while the raccoons could not), and on a dark, drizzly evening he had given me chicken-tending lessons including the essential steps of wearing a hat (to shoo the reluctant chickens into the coop at nightfall) and pausing on the way down the hill to gently call out to the chickens to let them know I was coming. 

I executed all the steps properly in his absence although I did have some difficulty getting the two guineas to go into the coop last night. I think they hate me, those guineas, or else they enjoyed seeing me chase them around the coop while waving my hat. I'm sure I heard them laughing at me. If they'd made me fall on my face in the mud, I'd still be down there waiting for some flannel-clad fellow to come along and help me up again.

So during my four-day break I have limped through pain to see art and nature and workmen and essays and chickens and grandkids and now, finally, I am done with it all and ready to relax. Too bad I have to get back to work in a little over twelve hours. Where does the time go?

Bridge bisects the scene: waterfall, old mill.

The roar of rushing water dominates Lanterman's Mill.

Julio Larraz, The Trojan Horse

Another kind of horse. Folk art, allegedly.

Grading grates on my brain

Just now I wrote in the margin of a student paper, "This omission is everywhere."

Not helpful! Even if the student recognizes omission, he's unlikely to be enlightened by the image of an omnipresent absence. 

In my defense, midterm grades are due next week so I've been grading a lot of stuff, some of it written in handwriting so tiny and faint that reading it requires the assistance of a scanning electron microscope. One student (this is true) could not figure out how to save his document so instead uploaded a photograph of the computer screen on which his document appears. 

Yesterday I had technical difficulty showing a clip of a speech in class and a student instantly solved the problem for me, hurrah. Today I've had to email students in that same class to tell them that if they're summarizing the content of a speech by President John F. Kennedy, it's not appropriate to keep referring to him as "John" as if he's their bestie. Show some respect!

And now I need to finish grading today's wave of student work before tomorrow's tsunami of work comes roaring in. All this grading makes me wish I could find myself an omnipresent absence and slowly sink into it. 

Resisting my inner Bartleby

Last Friday I started my work day by spilling a cup of tea all over the floor in my office and today I did the same with coffee, except some of it missed the floor and soaked my pants and sweater. I'm going everywhere smelling like coffee today, to which my colleague across the hall responded, "Well, there are worse things you could smell like."

True. I would blame all this spillage on multitasking, but the simple fact is I'm too much of a klutz to be trusted with food or drink at my desk. Lesson learned! 

Today's theme is lifelong learning, a quality I promote and embrace except when I prefer not to. This week I'd really like to pull a Bartleby in reference to a particular lifelong learning opportunity, but when the arc of the universe tends toward chickens, who am I to resist?

I haven't spent much time with the chickens (and two guineas) for a while. When the resident chicken-fancier started conducting all-out war against marauding raccoons, he fortified the chicken run in a way that made it impossible for my short legs to climb over the fortifications. Not a problem so far, but my husband is going to prison starting Thursday (as a visitor—part of a group conducting a three-day retreat for select prisoners). Our son's legs are long enough to scale the anti-raccoon fence, but he's out of town all week. Meanwhile, someone needs to attend to the chickens. 

That would be me.

First, though, I need chicken-tending lessons. My husband's task today is to modify the raccoon-resistant fence so that I can get inside the chicken run, and then I'll engage in some lifelong learning. I think I can figure out how to feed and water the poultry, but the task I don't relish is toddling down the hill on my bum knee to round up all the chickens (and two guineas!) and shut them safely inside the coop for the night, and then toddling down there the next morning to let 'em out again. 

Good thing my fall break starts Thursday so I won't have to rush off to campus first thing every morning. And good thing the plans I'd made for fall break can be adapted to the needs of the chickens. And good thing my husband is a kind, gentle, supportive person who does all kinds of wonderful things for me, like making me tea every morning that I can then proceed to spill all over my office.

I'm inspired today by another lifelong learner, a colleague in the Biology department who retired in May but still does some volunteer work on campus. We're not short on empty offices (thanks to years of faculty cuts) so my retired colleague has been given an office to use as his home base, and somehow he managed to put up some official-looking signage proclaiming him "Infra-Dean of Biodiversity, Entomology, Invertebrates, & other stuff."

You've got to admire someone who's earned the right to lean back on the sofa and eat bon-bons but who instead takes the time to create a new title and signage that looks so authentic no one is likely to notice that it's entirely bogus. My husband suggested that I follow suit and change the sign outside my office every week until someone notices. I would have to learn how to get the fonts and spacing right and make it look authentic, but that's a bit of lifelong learning I would heartily embrace.

Teaching in the golden years

Okay, so I'm having a bad knee day and I may have groaned just a bit when I got up from the computer desk at the end of class this morning, but there was only one student left in the room and it wasn't a loud groan. Nevertheless the student very helpfully responded to my pain thus: "I remember what my grampa always says about getting old," and I wanted to tell the student to stop right there because a sentence that starts that way cannot possibly end well, but he insisted on completing the thought: "Grampa said the only thing golden about the golden years is his pee."

Nothing I've ever read or heard or experienced as a teacher has equipped me to respond in the moment to that kind of statement, so maybe the best thing to do under the circumstances would be to pretend I've gone deaf. Which would only serve to reinforce the student's belief that I'm a creaky old codger contemporary with his grampa.

Earlier in the same class students had been showing me their progress on annotated bibliography entries, most of which were in fonts so small they could have been etched on the edge of a sewing needle. I kept needing to blow up the page and squint, which made me feel about a million years old.

And then I pulled some real old-fogey moves like insisting that the deadline is real and therefore the right time for students to mention a dead laptop is at the beginning of class, not at the moment after the dropbox closes, and if some technical difficulty made submitting the assignment on time impossible, then their best approach would be to ask me what they can do to remedy the situation rather than to tell me "I'll just be turning this in later" with a smirk that brings to mind the phrase "arrogant prick."

But of course I wouldn't say that out loud to a student--and even if I did, he wouldn't be able to hear it over the creaking of my bad knee.    

Pumpkins, peppers, pawpaws, pizzazz

After a weekend with the grandkids, I arrived home yesterday to find my kitchen and dining room overflowing with produce from the fall harvest. I don't even like spaghetti squash but they're stacked on the dining table alongside a pile of fragrant pawpaws that seems undiminished by the dozens I took north with me. The kitchen counters are covered with tomatoes of many sizes and colors while the fridge is full of okra, habaneros, and red bell peppers. The resident gardener wonders whether I can throw together a batch of stuffed peppers sometime this week, but stuffed peppers are not so much thrown together as painstakingly assembled over a series of hours. So maybe--but not today.

On Friday before I left my husband put a great pumpkin into the back of my car, a pumpkin so big he had to use the tractor to carry it up from the garden, and then he wedged it in with pillows to make sure it didn't roll around. All well and good, but I wasn't able to take the tractor with me to the grandkids' house and I certainly wasn't planning to try to pick up that pumpkin myself. It took a group effort and a garden cart to move the orange behemoth. 

It's been a bizarre garden year: many early crops did nothing--we had very few zucchinis or broccoli and a handful of beans--but later crops are going bananas. I hope we can find someone interested in spaghetti squash because I certainly don't intend to cook all eight million of them. I've been bringing containers of tiny tomatoes to campus to share with colleagues, but I'm not hauling in a giant pumpkin. And all those habanero peppers? If my husband eats them all, we'll never be able to kiss again. 

But I'm not complaining. As long as we have sweet corn in the freezer and fresh tomatoes boiling down into paste in the kitchen, I'm ready for a tasty winter.