Locking through

Between Writing Wednesday and a heavy rainstorm yesterday I squeezed in a quick visit to the Muskingum River lock in Devola, where I enjoyed a casual lunch while watching the Valley Gem sternwheeler make its way through the historic lock. 

The lock-and-dam system on the Muskingum River dates back to 1836, though the structures have been renovated several times over the years. The locks are among the oldest hand-operated locks in the nation still in use and measure 35 feet wide by 160 feet long, which is barely big enough to contain the Valley Gem. 

I watched the lockmasters strain to push the large iron levers to open the upstream gates and let in water, which slowly raised the sternwheeler to the upstream water level. Crew members released the ropes and kicked the boat away from the side of the lock so it could make its way out the upstream gates and on up the river--straight into a sudden shower.

When I'm surrounded by technology so complex it seems magical, it's encouraging to see a geriatric feat of engineering prove its worth. Actual human beings turn the levers that move the gears that open the gates, and it's all visible right before our very eyes--not a hidden algorithm anywhere. The locks that originally opened the Muskingum watershed for commerce and transport now support tourism, but seeing the sternwheeler chug through the locks and up the river reminded me that human ingenuity has mastered a lot of knotty problems--and that's just the kind of insight that floats my boat.

Write write write--but why?

This is it--the first Writing Wednesday of summer break. I'm sitting in a library classroom tapping on my laptop alongside two faculty colleagues, three of us in all--a small start perhaps attributable to some problems in communication. I faithfully followed new campus procedures for getting the word out but somewhere there's a glitch in the system. Three people! Better than none, I suppose.

I have spent two hours writing, although perhaps "writing" isn't entirely the right word. I have revised my Agnes essay to include info about that historic hurricane and sharpen up some phrasing; now I need to decide whether I want to call my brother and ask what he remembers about our family's encounter with the worst natural disaster in Pennsylvania's history. And then I need to figure out where to submit the essay. Literary magazines are closing and possibilities are shrinking, so I'll need to do some serious research.

And then I opened the folder containing the larger project I started during last summer's Writing Wednesdays. I'm happy with the first chapter and I'd love to submit it somewhere as a stand-alone essay, but again, where? It's too personal and not theoretical enough for an academic journal but too steeped in literature for a casual outlet. Where are the hybrid publications where an intelligent person can combine close reading with practical classroom experiences? (Asking for a friend....)

I haven't looked at the rest of the project since last August and so I was surprised, both by how ambitious it is and by how fragmented. I see some lovely sentences and paragraphs but an awful lot of gaps and brackets. I'm reminded of the seven-page single-space notes-for-a-memoir document we discovered among my father's papers after his death: whenever he seemed to be getting close to a really interesting part of his life, he would write ETC. Now it's too late to ask what all those etceteras were eliding.  

And that's the conundrum about this writing project: as I near the end of my teaching career, I feel the need to pass on a whole bunch of etcetera lest it perish with my passing, but it's hard to write when I don't know have the first clue who might serve as audience. Writing these essays is either an opportunity to pass on some important insights or a massive, thankless waste of time.

For right now, though, it's therapy. Putting down words, imposing some order on the chaos, feels like an accomplishment. And that's why I look forward every week to Writing Wednesdays, even if, in some sad dark corridor of my mind, I fear that every word I write takes me closer to The End.

Settling into summer break

I know I've settled into summer break when I'm halfway through the morning but still can't be sure what day it is, or when you ask me how I've spent my day and my response is, "Um...give me a minute."

Sunburn on my forearms from weed-whacking and mowing this morning, crick in my neck from sitting on the back deck staring up toward the top of the tulip poplar tree, camera at the ready, in case that oriole comes back, except it has a remarkable ability to appear only when the camera is inaccessible. True story: I was sitting in the living room reading when I felt I was being watched, and when I turned and looked out the big picture window, I saw an oriole perched on a potted plant looking right at me not two feet from my face. Where was the camera? In the car, just behind the oriole. 

I've seen an oriole (possibly the same one) flitting about the top of the maple tree out front and then flying away the minute I picked up the camera, and there it was again this morning at the top of the tulip poplar out back--twice!--but I sat out there with the camera for 40 minutes hearing it sing from a tree halfway down the cliff but never seeing it within shooting distance.

Big bowl of quinoa salad in the fridge--something I always make at the beginning of summer break for reasons I don't even recall except that it's cool and lemony and makes a great lunch out on the deck on a lovely spring day, especially when orioles are singing (but not posing for photos) nearby.

I saw swallows, turkey vultures, and a red-tailed hawk, but no oriole. Didn't see any goldfinches and wondered where they'd gone--we used to have them all over the place year-round but lately it's a nice surprise to see even one. Saw two male hummingbirds fighting over a feeder, but no oriole. Saw mourning doves, red-winged blackbirds, a phoebe, but no oriole--but every time I started to pack up the camera to go inside, the oriole would sing tantalizingly close but still out of sight.

It's out there still, I'm certain, and I'm sure at some point I'll be unable to stop myself from going out to stalk it some more, camera in hand. Because that's what summer break is for. Sure, I'll have to get my act together to plan some meetings and write some reports in the next couple of weeks, but while I'm still bouncing back from the busy semester, I'll enjoy some long lazy days that don't require me to remember their names.

Don't diss the diss

Yesterday I was all smiles after a total stranger came up to me at a meeting and said, "I've read your dissertation." Today I'm trying to figure out whether it might have been a mistake or a little white lie or an elaborate prank. 

I mean, has anyone outside of my dissertation committee ever read my dissertation? Decades ago I presented some bits of it at conferences and I published a piece of one chapter in a journal, but my dissertation exists primarily as a printed document in my house and in a regional university library--only the abstract is available online. It would take a significant effort to read my dissertation.

But the person I bumped into at this meeting had been talking about a stretch of old-growth forest she visits with her classes, and I recalled that I'd visited those woods close to 30 years ago so I could take some photos, one of which ended up in my dissertation. The stranger said she'd cataloged everything that had been written about that stretch of woods and that my dissertation was part of the collection, which at the time sounded plausible, but now I'm not so sure.

So I dug out my copy of my dissertation and took a look, and sure enough there's the photo of the woods in question accompanied by exactly one sentence labeling the photo and naming the woods. That's all. There's maybe one more obscure mention of the woods within the document, but it's not mentioned in the abstract or the title, nor does it play any significant part in the argument. So maybe someone (who?) might have been reading my dissertation (why?) and stumbled upon that brief mention of those woods, and maybe that person passed the reference on to the scholar I met yesterday, but the odds for that scenario seem vanishingly small.

We were in a room full of happy people at the time and it didn't occur to me to give the stranger a quiz to verify that she had done the reading, so I just beamed at the possibility that some total stranger had actually read my dissertation. Except maybe she didn't. Maybe she's confused. Maybe it doesn't even matter. But I appreciate the brief glow her words inspired as well as the excuse to hunt down my dissertation, which I'm sure I haven't looked at in twenty years. (The argument remains sound, but goodness gracious I used a lot of semicolons.)  

Applause all around

I came out of Commencement Saturday with sore hands from applauding so much, and then I wanted to walk right over to the peony patch and applaud some more. How could those tight little buds burst into such massive gorgeous blossoms so quickly?

I'd like to ask the same thing about the students I clapped for as they received their diplomas. (Well, their diploma cases--the real thing comes later, after grades are submitted. Which reminds me of a great line from the Commencement speech: when he graduated from Marietta College in 1970, our speaker's diploma case contained only a bill for $2.48 for library fines--"And I don't remember ever checking out a book." It was a great speech and when I get the link I'll post it.) 

It seems like only yesterday that these bright-eyed students came toddling into my first-year classes wondering what the word syllabus might mean, and now here they are tottering across the stage on platform shoes and out the door toward jobs and adventures and real life. Go, you! Here's a round of applause!

And how did I celebrate my sudden burst of freedom? With birds and wildflowers, of course, and by diving into a good book. I have some projects around the house that need attention and my summer campus meetings start tomorrow, but right now I'm spending every spare moment doing as close to nothing as possible. Go, me! Here's a round of applause!

Grading accomplished! How shall I celebrate?

Today I waved goodbye to my office, a purely symbolic act since I'll need to be on campus many times this summer to attend meetings and manage events, but sometimes a symbolic gesture is just what I need. I finished grading student projects today and turned in final grades and then I walked out the door and shut it tight. 

Yesterday's grading pile was made up of hand-written exams and in-class essays dense with tiny, crabbed handwriting; today's grading pile was all online documents, presentations, and portfolios. Both types of grading left my eyes begging for mercy, my vision so blurred that I struggled to read my list at the grocery store and couldn't read signs on the drive home. Good thing I knew where I was going!

But where shall I go tomorrow? I need to attend Commencement on Saturday and two big events on campus next week, but tomorrow's schedule is entirely blank. My husband suggested that I visit a friend, but I've fulfilled my quota of peopling for the week and I think I'd prefer to be alone--but where? Someplace quiet and peaceful and far from the madding crowd. Long walk in the woods? Deep dive into a good book? Or something else entirely?

The sense of possibility is what I like best about summer break. No need to punch the clock or put on teaching clothes or prep for classes--just long hours that somehow manage to pass without a lot of fuss and bother.

Goodbye, office! (Until next week.)

No need to get all shouty about it

It seems the semester just started last week, but what's left to do now? A final exam, some student presentations, a few meetings, and a whole mess of grading. I'm tempted to say It's all over but the shouting, but at this point I hope people keep their shouting to themselves--unless it's happy shouting, which I will accept any time.

We had some happy shouting today at the final meeting of the First-Year Faculty Support Group, which I've been leading since last August when I met all these colleagues at New Faculty Orientation. Orientation is a pain to organize even when the incoming group is small, but this group has been such a blast! I've had the opportunity to help them understand important topics--how our faculty governance system works, how to interpret student evaluations, how to troubleshoot teaching problems--and I've enjoyed observing teaching and encouraging them to do great work. Today's meeting was all about sharing our fabulous experiences, which led to much laughter and a little happy shouting. This group has been so helpful, they said, which I found encouraging because planning meetings is not my favorite thing to do and I'm glad when it works well.

That will be one of my summer projects--planning orientation and arranging mentors for new faculty members and adjuncts--but first we have to hire some people. I suspect that this fall's group will be small because who can afford new faculty members? Still, we have some holes to fill in a few key departments, so I'll make sure they get the training they need.

Also on this summer's project list: write the final report for the grant I administered, provide a professional development activity for staff members, help plan a summer creative writing day camp for high school students, update the official Syllabus Template to include specific language concerning use of Artificial Intelligence, plan fall pedagogy workshops, oversee Writing Wednesdays, and work on my own writing projects.

And plan my fall classes! Neither course is entirely new but I haven't taught Nature Writing in ages and I'm pursuing an entirely new topic for the freshman seminar. Yes, it's a little disappointing that our senior faculty member in the English department has no literature class to teach this fall, but I'll manage. I intend to have lots of fun with these two fall courses and then enjoy my last couple of semesters before retirement--and then it will really be all over but the shouting.

Stop me before I get "brilliant" tattooed on my forehead

I had to do a little shameless self-promotion in my American Lit Survey on Wednesday just to show what sorts of rewards may follow when research and teaching go hand-in-hand. I taught Natasha Trethewey's poem "Native Guard" a few years ago and then I read more of her work and did research and wrote an academic essay about why and how I teach the poem--an essay that was published in Pedagogy journal last year at this time--and so this week when I taught the poem again I showed my students the journal and told them how prior students' experiences had informed my writing and current students may inform my future writing, putting a neat little bow on the last week of the semester.

What I couldn't show them (because it wasn't available yet) was the most recent edition of Pedagogy, in which Elizabeth Brockman, who recently retired as editor of the "From the Classroom" section of the journal, devoted her farewell column to praise for the last essay she had ever edited for the journal, one she holds up as an example of what the journal can and should do. "I chose this essay because the author is brilliant, the essay is skillfully written, and the topic is profoundly important," she wrote.

Reader: I am that author. The essay she's praising is mine. 

Academic writing can be such a thankless task: you read, research, write, revise, submit, get rejected, revise some more, submit again, and if all goes well the article gets accepted—and then you go through the long process of responding to suggestions for revision and reading proofs and waiting for the thing to finally get published, by which time you've been fiddling  with the essay for so long that you're utterly sick of the topic, and then you wait in hope that some kind scholar will read the essay and maybe, someday, cite it in a footnote buried at the bottom of an article in an obscure journal no one will ever read--or you go mad waiting for the round of  applause that never arrives.

Which is why Elizabeth Brockman's column in Pedagogy praising my essay makes me feel as if I've won a gold medal in the Academic Olympics. (Stop me before I get brilliant tattooed on my forehead.)

Another brick in the (educational) wall

You encounter a course called The Naked Person--What section of the course catalog are you reading and what topic does the course cover? 

I've always felt The Naked Person would be a great title for the biology department's cadaver lab, but no: the title was proposed for an introductory course in the Gender Studies program. Someone in a position of power objected: What would outsiders think of they saw The Naked Person listed on the course schedule? (For outsiders read parents or potential donors or prudes.) So the title was changed to something more generic, like Introduction to Gender Studies.

This was years ago. These days all you have to do to offend an outsider is to call a class Introduction to Gender Studies.

Which is why I'm a little nervous about the title I've proposed for my first-year seminar class this fall. You're perusing the course schedule and notice a class called We Don't Need No Education. Appalled?

I hadn't expected to teach the first-year seminar this fall—or, really, ever again—but my Later American Novel class got cancelled (again) due to low enrollment (again), possibly because it didn't have a sexy title. So I needed a class to fill out my schedule and the brand-new director of the first-year seminar was looking  for another section so here I am scrambling about looking  for a topic, description, textbook, and title.

Over the years I've taught nearly every version of the first-year seminar, from the highly regimented lockstep to the teach-whatever-you-like version. I've taught the seminar on critical thinking, comedy theory, and nature writing, but I wasn't feeling inspired about any of those despite the fact that I'm required to submit a title and description in the next two weeks.

This fall's version of the first-year seminar focuses on transitions to college, critical thinking, and information literacy, and I'm required to assign at least 300 pages of reading--but nothing too challenging because, you know, kids these days. I briefly thought about assigning Hope Jahren's Lab Girl, which should be required reading for women going into STEM fields, but I can't choose my clientele so I went looking for something relevant to a wider variety of students.

Then it hit me: Tara Westover's memoir, Educated.

 

It has everything: train-wreck parents, familial abuse and indoctrination, grievous bodily harm, and the inspirational story of a student who arrives in college without ever having heard of the Holocaust but nevertheless manages to earn a PhD from Cambridge. (Read more about the book here.) I couldn't put the book down and I hope my students will find it equally compelling, or at least readable. 

 

The point of the first-year seminar is to help students—many of them the first in their families to attend college—make the leap to college-level learning, so they ought to be inspired by the story of a student whose childhood leaves her woefully ill-equipped to succeed in college but who nevertheless prevails.

Westover's memoir asks us to think about what it means to be educated, both formally and informally. What is education for, anyway? What walls do students have to climb to achieve their educational goals, both inside and outside the classroom? And how do we master the hidden curriculum needed for success in college if we're the first in our family to attend?

These, I think, are valid questions to tackle in a first-year seminar, and Westover's memoir will help us tackle them. But what do I call the class?

This is when I heard the thump thump of the bass line from "Another Brick in the Wall." Am I allowed to call my class We Don't Need No Education? Will any incoming 18-year-olds recognize the allusion? How appalling will it be to see such, um, colloquial language attached to a class taught by the most senior member of the English department?

At this point I don't care. I'm going to submit the title and description to the new director of the first-year seminar and let him decide whether it's too risque. I mean, it's not The Naked Person, but the title may be too revealing to make outsiders comfortable. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm okay with that.

Budget cuts hit home

A colleague is distraught because her spouse may be one of several hundred local employees expected to lose their jobs at the Federal Bureau of Fiscal Service, which manages our country's public debt. A college administrator is befuddled because we can't determine whether a grant we'd applied for still exists. And now a former colleague has lost her job with AmeriCorps--a job that empowered her to work hands-on with low-income students and families to help them manage diabetes.

You can read the whole story on Substack here, but the salient point is simple: "What the cuts to AmeriCorps communicate is this: people and communities are not worth investing in. They are 'waste.'"

I am allergic to writing about politics and I have no doubt that intelligent people can disagree about what kind of spending qualifies as "wasteful," but these cuts hit home in painful ways. Agencies that serve the neediest in our communities are being wiped out as people who do good and essential work get shoved out the door. You want to know what's a waste? Taking someone whose gifts, talents, and passions help low-income people live healthier lives and saying, "No thanks." 

My heart breaks for those who are suffering right now and even more for the many more who will suffer in the future, but mostly I'm embarrassed. If we can't provide essential care for the neediest among us, who have we become?  

In the way-back on the way back

One of the grandkids asked me this weekend how old I am and another immediately objected that it's rude to ask old people how old they are, which didn't help, but finally I told the questioner the year I was born so he could do the math, something I have to do every time I'm asked about my age or my kids' ages or how many years I've been married because who keeps those numbers constantly at top of mind? I could see the wheels spinning in the grandkid's head but even a math whiz gets something wrong once in a while, which is why we all laughed at the first guess--43--which is just a few years older than my oldest kid and that kind of math doesn't work unless you're a Tribble, born pregnant. Then the grandkid got confused and said, "Wait, did you say 1861?"

Well I feel about 164 this morning after driving two hours to get to campus in time for my morning class. As much as I love a road trip, driving that far takes a little something out of me, which is why when I got to campus I decided to park in a two-hour spot and risk the $20 ticket, because who wants to drive around in circles looking for a parking space after being on the road all morning? Parking enforcement is notoriously inconsistent locally, so maybe I'll go outside at the end of a very long meeting-filled day and find a windshield covered in pollen but no sign of a ticket at all.

I'm tempted to go outside right now just to get warm before my next class. For reasons no one can explain, my little corner of the building feels like a meat locker today, while my classroom on the other end of the building remains in tropical rain-forest mode. If I step out into the bright sunshine in my dark sweater, I'll be toasty in an instant, plus I'd get a chance to check on the progress of the peonies just down the mall. 

As I walk toward the peonies I'll think of a line from my daughter's choir concert last night, where they sang a setting of some Wendell Berry poems, including this, from "Sabbaths":

There is a day
when the road neither
comes nor goes, and the way
is not a way but a place.

"The way is not a way but a place."

I'll have to keep thinking about that one for a while. The music was so beautiful, the setting so serene, the poetry so profound, that I felt transported beyond the present, moving far along a path that brought me back to myself refreshed, something Artificial Intelligence will never accomplish. I hope.

My journey home was much less poetic but my trusty red car safely delivered me into the place where I pursue my way--toward what, I don't know. Happy to be here nevertheless.

Birds, bugs, and beauty

I don't know which is better: hearing my youngest grandkid tell me she's "allergic to bad grammar," watching the middle grandkid holding giant creepy-looking insects in his bare hands, seeing the oldest grandkid win a prize for an Earth Day coloring contest, or hearing all of them correctly identify wildflowers--and ask about the ones they don't recognize yet.

Spring ephemerals are already fading at our house, but two hours north I saw a whole new collection of wildflowers, including squirrel corn, jack-in-the-pulpit, and four species of trillium. After a many-meeting-marathon kind of week, it feels really good to go outside and touch grass--or bugs or birds or trilliums, as the case may be.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

Monday evening at the faculty meeting I looked around the room and wondered who will step up to fulfill the Law of Conservation of Curmudgeonliness on Campus, which states that the minute one career curmudgeon retires, another rises up to fill the spot. Who will be our next Chief Curmudgeon? Not me! I've been too irrationally euphoric this spring to let my curmudgeon flag fly.

I was pleased to see that the Silverback Gorilla Rule no longer holds. When I started here, I was informed that the faculty always elect as Chair the oldest male tenured Faculty Council member, but then I was the second woman elected Chair and over the years the Chair was occupied by a few other women--not male, certainly, but all tenured and old enough to be considered senior faculty. But on Monday we elected next year's chair, who may be male and tenured but he's hardly a Silverback. I think he's the youngest Faculty Chair we've elected in my 25 years here. 

I won't be getting my 25-year appreciation bonus this spring, though, because I worked part-time  my first year here so that year doesn't "count" toward my years of service. I'll have to wait a whole year to get my 25-year bonus alongside the remaining members of the North Bend 17. Yes: 24 years ago, the College brought in its largest class of new faculty hires in many years and held  New Faculty Orientation at North Bend State Park, so we became known as the North Bend 17.

How many of those 17 are still here? Five. We are a pretty impressive group, having filled just about every major committee chair on campus as well as leading departments and serving on task forces and organizing major campus events. If we all retired at once it would be a pretty big blow to the College, but I'm the only one of the remaining five old enough to be close to retirement. The rest will have to wait their turn.

How many faculty members will be ahead of me in the academic procession at Commencement next month? It depends on who shows up, but I ought to be among the first five faculty in line. Once you're in single digits there's nowhere to go but out the door or on the shelf. The rules have been in flux, but I sincerely hope Emeritus status still exists next year when I retire. Otherwise, I might be forced to unleash my inner curmudgeon.

Villanelle, Taco Bell, gee this week is going well

You know it's a good day when you ask a class if anyone knows what a villanelle is and a student promptly raises her hand and explains the complex poetic form in detail, and then you ask whether anyone in the class has ever written a villanelle and three people say yes. I told them that they are required to show me their villanelles because it's something I've never been able to manage and I admire anyone who can make it work. One student admitted to having written a villanelle about Taco Bell, which makes my heart sing even though I'm not convinced that what Taco Bell serves is actually food.

In other news, we are down to 15 baby chicks--the smallest, most delicate ones failed to thrive, as they say. One big bossy yellow chick demonstrates such distinctive personality that I'm tempted to name her after one of my colleagues. The rest are still just cute little fluffballs. 

The chicks remain in the garden shed with a heat lamp, safe from the big bad pine tree that fell just behind the shed during a freak storm on Saturday night. It was a very quick storm--from clear sky to wind rain lightning hail and back to clear skies in about 20 minutes--and in the middle of all that, the top half of a pine tree got twisted off, knocked down a no-longer-in-use phone line, and wedged itself neatly between two rows of pine trees just uphill from the house. 

Do you think Frontier Communications is interested in dealing with their long stretch of phone line that's sitting on the ground in my back yard? No they are not. In fact, since we are no longer Frontier customers, they made it nearly impossible for me to file a complaint, and then when I did, they wanted to transfer me to some sales representative eager to sell me on all the services they claim to be able to provide. I pointed out that they'd provided our landline service, such as it was, for 20 years without demonstrating any evidence of their ability to serve our needs, so no thanks.

But I started the week at a lovely sunrise service overlooking the Ohio River and then zipped upstream a few miles to a backwater where I saw a green heron (which I always want to refer to as "The elusive green heron" in the voice of David Attenborough) as well as a couple of yellow warblers (which thrilled me because I recognized the song before I tracked down the birds, something I could not have done not so long ago), and the sightings made me so euphoric that nothing could possibly get me down--not dead chicks, not falling trees, and not mini-administrators who pat themselves on the back for coming up with a brilliant idea that I've been pushing for at least a decade. The only thing that can make this week better is if those three students actually show me their villanelles.

 

The chickens have landed

So it seems we have chickens. Eighteen of them, to be precise, in a big box in the living room. They're supposed to out in the garden shed, but there's a wasp problem out there at the moment. The resident chicken-fancier is out there right now trying to put things in order so my living room won't smell like a chicken coop.

My husband will gladly tell you that he hung out with a lot of cute chicks in his youth. His family owned a hatchery and then a feed-and-garden-supply store that sold chicks in the spring, so my husband spent a lot of time in the chick room and raised a flock of his own in his teens.

These chicks are a retirement project, even though he is still marginally employed. He has diligently built a rolling chicken coop and a chicken run, but the chicks can't be put out there until they're a good bit bigger. For now they'll live in the shed, with food and water and a warming lamp. At some point the flock may be expanded to include guineas, which are beautiful and noisy and eat bugs like nobody's business. 

I've been asked what we're going to name the chickens but I can't give them names until I can tell them apart. Right now they're just lumps of fuzz scuttling about and cheeping in a big smelly box in my living room, but at some point they may be named for friends and colleagues or some of my favorite baseball players or fictional characters. I'm accepting suggestions. Meanwhile, all they have to say for themselves is "cheep!"

Clambering through the claptrap

I learned the word claptrap from my high school Russian teacher, who insisted that we call him Ivan Vasilyevich even though his name was John Sheehan. As the bell rang he'd come bustling into the classroom carrying an ash tray and stubbing out his cigarette, if you can imagine high school teachers openly smoking in front of their students--or a public high school that offered three years of instruction in the Russian language during the Cold War era. 

We Russian students were a tight-knit bunch, always planning and executing cultural events: Ushering at symphony performances featuring Russian composers, sewing Russian costumes to wear whilst ushering, designing and selling T-shirts proclaiming our commitment to the Russian language, ordering daffodils to present to all the female teachers on May Day, competing in the state Russian language competition, meeting with local Russian emigres to enjoy Russian food and conversation, and much more. 

These activities spawned a constant barrage of hand-written notes stuffed into Ivan Vasilyevich's roll book detailing every possible logistical challenge standing in the way of the successful event: Who was purchasing fabric, where were the receipts, who was in charge of sewing, cooking, making calls, collecting money, and so on. At the start of every class period Ivan Vasilyevich would riffle through the scraps of paper dramatically and call out, "Time for claptrap!"

Sometimes the claptrap was so complicated that we barely had time for what we ostensibly there for--learning Russian--but we certainly absorbed a lesson in logistics. Careful attention to details resulted in events far more memorable than rote learning.

Today I see claptrap similarly cutting into my opportunity to do what I'm ostensibly here for, and it all gets worse this time of year because we have only a few weeks left to do all the things that need to be done. If you can imagine it, I'm in the middle of arranging logistics for five events over the next three weeks, each one spawning virtual sticky notes reminding me to reserve rooms, juggle schedules, distribute documents, submit requisitions, send announcements, and write reports. One of these events was unceremoniously dumped on my back late yesterday afternoon, leaving me scrambling to make arrangements during my stupidest time of day--and all because the person who should have been in charge of it is too busy to handle the details.

Fine, whatever--someone needs to get it done. The thing is, I'm good at claptrap. I get the things done and I usually do it pretty well, but I don't enjoy it. Juggling virtual sticky notes while (im)patiently awaiting responses to emails is not at all intellectually stimulating, and all those logistical details make me feel like a drudge.

Which is why I can't be a full-time administrator. Somewhere between the requisitions and the room reservations I need some moments of transcendence and meaning and poetry, which is why I'm getting ready to walk away from the current claptrap kerfuffle and spend fifty minutes with my American Lit Survey students exploring the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa:

Our bodies spun
On swivels of bone & faith,
Through a lyric slipknot
Of joy, & we knew we were
Beautiful & dangerous.

That's what I'm talking about! Much more enlightening than claptrap.

Turning up the sound on the symphony of learning

I was observing some excellent teaching in another department yesterday and finally figured out what the prof's distinctive hand gestures brought to mind: He was directing a symphony, holding the students' attention with his outstretched hands as he explained dense technical concepts.

I looked around to see how the students were responding. Many--most, even--were diligently taking notes, but one guy had his eyes shut and another was staring blankly into space without so much as a pencil in evidence and a third, in a remarkable feat of multitasking, was scrolling down his laptop screen with one hand and texting into his phone with the other while his ears were ensconced in big clunky headphones. Here was a symphony of learning happening right in front of their faces but some students simply muted the sound.

I saw something similar in my American Lit Survey class yesterday as I performed my annual song-and-dance in honor of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." We got to the end of Part I, where Ginsberg describes his poetic task: "confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought....with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years." I stand in front of the class with my right hand outstretched and say, "Here's a chunk of bloody flesh butchered out of my own body--take a bite! It'll do you good."

And they just stare at me as if I've lost my mind. A few take up a pen and write something down--"confessional poetry," perhaps, as if that explains everything. I want them to taste and feel the power of the poem but they want to note the words and phrases that might show up on a test. I feel I have failed them, but maybe it's an age thing. I'm sure I found "Howl" incomprehensible the first time I read it, but now it feels like the world I inhabit.

How often is wisdom wasted on the young? I've been thinking lately about Walt Whitman's poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider," in which the spider casts out "filament, filament, filament" into the unknown in firm belief that it will latch on somewhere, and then the poet's soul tosses "gossamer threads" across "measureless oceans of space" in hope that the thread will connect across the gaping void.

And I wonder how anyone can fully comprehend this poem without having faced that void. If your life is full of inputs from laptops and smartphones and big clunky headphones, you might wander blindly past the void without feeling the chill of its presence. Whitman had seen enough of suffering and pain to know the void was always waiting just beyond the leaves of grass he traversed, but a person distracted by shiny sparkly images might never notice the gaping void just underfoot--until someone came along and pushed them in. 

Is it my task as a teacher to introduce students to the void, to feed them the bloody chunk of flesh, to turn up the sound on the symphony of learning? Or shall I feed them flavorless words and phrases they can regurgitate on an exam? Just for today, I think I'll grasp the bloody flesh from Ginsberg, cross the void with Whitman, and listen for the subtle notes of the symphony--and hope my students someday return to these poems for another taste.

 

Celebrating second chances

I love to see a second-chance student--the one who majored in partying the first time around but came back ten years later to try again and aced every class; the one who had epic meltdowns at tense moments every semester but took time off and then came back to struggle tooth and nail to earn a degree; and the one everyone thought was a waste of space until someone decided to give her another chance.

I have one of those students this semester. Every time she turns in a writing assignment, I am grateful that we didn't give up on her. She's killing it in every class session, not only producing brilliant work herself but also inspiring her classmates to do the same. Sure, she's a little behind her peers on progress toward commencement, but she'll get there--and she'll be well prepared to face whatever challenges lie ahead. 

There's nothing like a dose of harsh reality to motivate students to get serious about college. I've often argued that everyone should be required to spend time working in food service just to get some perspective on how petty, cruel, and unfair the world can be, but most of my traditional students have never even held part-time jobs. They're serious athletes who spend all their free hours practicing and all their summers playing on traveling teams, so they've never experienced the injustice of being forced to clock out for a rest-room break or the indignity of serving up French fires while a manager brushes his hand across their butt--accidentally, of course.

My second-chance students know what it's like to struggle and suffer and somehow turn their lives around. They tell me stories sometimes that would curl your hair, but they come back and they carry on and they find a way to survive. One of my second-chance students is a poster child for how to find success as an English major and the one I have in class right now is well on her way to similar status, but we'd never know how talented she could be unless someone had decided that she deserved a second chance.

 

Spring keeps springing

If my memory files can be believed, every year at this time I go to the same places and photograph the same things--trilliums, trout lilies, dutchman's breeches, buckeyes bursting wildly into leaf in the woods. After 21 years you'd think I'd have enough photos of pawpaw blossoms, which aren't even all that interesting, but no: I hear the call of the pawpaw and out into the woods I go, except that this time I forgot to take my walking stick and slipped on a muddy slope and had trouble getting back up again and had to scootch down the hill on my bum. But I don't care. It was worth it. In times like these we need to grab hold of every ounce of beauty that comes our way, even when it hurts. I hope I never get tired of photographing spring.

Buckeye

Twinleaf (above) and trillium (below)

I love how the bloodroot leaf embraces the stem

Trout lily

Dutchman's breeches

Tiny spider inside the trillium blossom

Pawpaw blossoms

Twinleaf