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

Things that go "Um...." in the night

After all the fuss and bother, the alarmed phone call to the sheriff and the trailcam and the rush to make sure all the doors were locked, I took comfort in the unlikely fact that it could have been a bear. 

It could have been a person, too—an intruder in the night skulking about in the woods near our house. That's what my son thought he saw, and that's the reason we were all alarmed.

Why, we wondered, would anyone be lurking in the woods near our house at night? When we lived in town youngsters would cut through our lawn to get to the high school, but our little house in the not-so-big  woods isn't exactly on the way to anywhere. You have to walk two-tenths of a mile up a hill to get to the house, and then the only thing to do is turn around and go back down to the road again or go further uphill into the trackless woods. Why would anyone do that on a cold dark night outside deer season?

So my son called the sheriff's office and they sent out some deputies just to take a look around, and my husband fetched the data card from the trailcam at the edge of the woods. We saw deer, raccoons, possums, squirrels, foxes, and turkeys, but the only people recorded on the card were immediate family. 

But then the person, if it was a person, could have gone another way--for what reason I could not imagine. We sometimes hear about thefts of tools and equipment from garden sheds and garages in our area, but what would an intruder hope to find in ours? If you want to walk off with my vintage collection of broken weed-whackers, be my guest. In fact I wish someone would.

The deputies, of course, found nothing, but what did we expect them to find? Nothing was disturbed and nothing was taken, so we're not expecting CSI to come out and collect DNA samples. "Better safe than sorry," said the deputy, and we all went back to bed.

But not to sleep. Well, I can attest that one of us slept—I heard the snoring. I kept drifting off and then jerking awake again—What was that noise? Raccoons disassembling the birdfeeders again, or maybe a deer ambling past or a possum or a groundhog or a fox, or maybe an intruder!

At the back of my mind was the murder case that came before me some years ago when I served on our county's grand jury. A twelve-year-old kid took the hinges off the family's gun cabinet, grabbed a shotgun, and shot his grandmother and aunt at point-blank range. As grand jury foreperson, I had to look at the crime-scene photos, and I had to look at the aerial photos of the route the kid took when he fled from deputies and hid in woods that looked very much like our woods. Who but a fugitive criminal would be running up into our woods by night?

Well, a drunk person might, or some wanderer who thought he'd found a shortcut. Or perhaps nobody at all. 

In the cool light of day, it all felt like an overreaction. My son saw or heard or experienced something running through the woods, something human-sized that sounded like  a person, but it makes no sense for a person  to be in our woods at night.

But it could have been a bear. Granted, we've seen no bear tracks, so it could have been  an incorporeal bear, a great big wad of imaginary animal lumbering through the woods and into our nightmares. I'd rather be haunted by an imaginary bear than by a thief or a fugitive or a lost hunter so drunk he doesn't realize deer season is over, but unless the CSI guys take an interest, I guess we'll never know.

Pay attention--there's a quiz at the end

The problem, they tell me, is that my course needs a sexier title. My Later American Novel class has been cancelled due to low enrollment the last two times it was on the schedule, and now it's on the verge of being cancelled again. If you ask some of my colleagues, students' rejection of the course has nothing to do with the fact that they'd be required to read six novels--it's all about the title.

Now I'll be the first to admit that Later American Novel is not the most compelling title, but it has been in the catalog under that name for decades and serves as a nice parallel to Early American Novel. What else would you call a class focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first century American novels? 

Someone suggested calling the course Sex and Death, and there's plenty of both on the syllabus. We start with a book in which sex creates much of the conflict--or a dearth of sex combined with inaccurate rumors about who is having sex with whom, followed by a death that may be suicide or accident. So maybe Not Enough Sex and Ambiguous Death.

But the course covers so much more! Sex and death play a large part in the war novel in which bloodshed is overshadowed by red tape, violence veers toward comedy, and mindless bureaucracy creates absurd consequences. So maybe we can call the course Sex and Death Go Kafkaesque. 

But that wouldn't do for the short novel in which swimming substitutes for sex and death. A lovely narration of communal consciousness gets fractured by a crack in the bottom of the pool and a crack in a woman's mind--truly a lovely novel, but any accurate course title would reek of chlorine.  

A title that covered the important concepts in all six novels would have to include a hurricane, mad dog, and blossoming pear tree; Dylar and Hitler Studies and an Airborne Toxic Event; a peacock and children's songs and a misidentified bag of bones; women named Pilate and Babette or nothing at all, guys named Teacake and Milkman and Major Major Major Major.

A course title covering all that would have to be encyclopedic: 

Sing a song of sex and death
doused with chlorine--Kafkaesque,
guns and peacocks, courtship rites,
billowing clouds and bombing flights;
swimming pools, mad dogs, and mules,
flying Africans, useless tools,
deaths in wartime, deaths at home,
death and sex in every tome.
(But whichever name you chance, they'll
never take a class that's cancelled.)

(Gold star to anyone who can name all six novels.)

Ephemeral beauty--blink and you'll miss it

Hiking conditions are treacherous today thanks to the massive rainstorms transforming our hillsides into mud. One year ago today the entire area was under flood waters, but this week's rains have been spaced out enough to keep creeks and rivers mostly within their banks. Campgrounds along the Muskingum are under water, but the roads are passable and our driveway hasn't been washed away, thankfully.

Spring ephemeral season is upon us and I can't miss the opportunity to see what's blooming, so this morning we took advantage of a brief break in the rain to trek up the wet and muddy hill behind our house and visit the spot where the earliest bloodroot blooms. I took my walking stick and my husband lent his arm on the slippery spots but still we couldn't get very close to some of the blooms on the steep, muddy slope, and then the moisture in the air kept fogging up my glasses and the camera's lens. 

But we still saw some beauties worth seeing: grape hyacinths livening up our lawn; trout lily leaves spreading over the forest floor but producing, so far, only one blossom; rue anemone brightening up the dark, rotted leaf cover; a blossoming pear tree my husband planted 20 years ago standing alongside the dying crabapple that probably dates to the earliest inhabitants of our property.

And bloodroot, of course. I don't know why I'm so enamored of this tiny white blossom poking up next to a solitary lobed leaf--a blossom so delicate it's easy to overlook, a leaf so unassuming that I can't quite believe it will grow nearly as big as my hand long after the blossoms are gone.

Yesterday my American Lit students encountered the word ephemeral and I found myself compelled to urge them to go out in the woods and look for lovely little spring flowers that bloom for a brief moment and then disappear. There's all over the place in April, I told them, but you'll miss them if you don't make an effort to look.

My students may be too young to be awed by the world's ephemeral beauties, but maybe one day one of them will step out into the woods with eyes wide open and gasp at the loveliness hiding in plain sight. At that point, my work here will be done. 

Grape hyacinths

Blossoming pear and crabapple

Buckeye leaves bursting forth

Trout lily

Rue anemone

Bloodroot

A patch of club moss I'd never noticed before

Some practice in probing for the story

How to give advanced writing students practice at conducting interviews? In my Life Writing class, we've worked on asking good questions and following up to clarify details, and we've spent some time practicing interview skills on each other and then writing up mini-profiles that integrate quotations in interesting ways. But my students know each other too well already--they need to practice interviewing strangers.

So I invited a retired colleague to visit my class. (Let's call her Dr. M.) I told my students very little in advance aside from her name and the fact that she's led an interesting life, and we devoted part of Monday's class to writing questions designed to probe for information that the interview subject might not volunteer all at once.

When Dr. M visited class on Wednesday, each student was required to ask at least two questions; for the first round I drew students' names randomly, and we got started off on the right foot when the first student asked our guest how to spell her name--which she did, slowly and clearly. Dr. M walked around the room engaging students individually and told some great stories about her 42 years as a professor, but she followed my instructions to the letter: if a student asked a vague question, she gave a vague answer. If Dr. M mentioned or even hinted at an interesting story, it was up to the students to follow up and tease out the details. Sometimes they did, but they let some great opportunities slip right by.

And then they had 20 minutes to write a mini-profile, one or two paragraphs based on what they'd learned. Considering the time constraints, some of these profiles were quite good--setting the scene, describing the subject's bright smile and abundant energy, selecting and incorporating quotes that revealed her voice and personality. One student started her mini-profile by stating that Dr. M "may carry the name of her mother and her mother before her, but she has made a legacy of her own." Nice work on such a short deadline!

But about half of my Life Writing students chose to use no quotations at all. Dr. M spoke slowly and clearly (as one would expect from a longtime professor of Communication) and my students were scribbling notes or typing on their keyboards throughout the interview, but somehow many of them had trouble turning their notes into quotes or accurate information. I saw Dr. M's name spelled five different ways and her hometown spelled incorrectly or connected to the wrong state. And then there was the gaffe about her favorite childhood book. I doubt that today's students are at all familiar with The Bobbsey Twins, but how could a student have misinterpreted that as The Bootie Twins?

Today we'll take a look at some of the great examples and I'll try to get some insight on their reluctance to use quotations. I've seen something similar in my American Lit Survey class--in-class essays for which students had full access to their textbooks, but about half of them didn't use any quotations at all. How do you analyze literature without attending to words? And how do you interview a bubbly, dynamic person for thirty minutes without capturing a single phrase worth quoting?

They can learn from this, I'm certain--and so is Dr. M. "You give me hope," she told my students, and those students able to recognize a great quote made certain to write that down.  

The tragedy of TL;DR

I swear I'm going to SCREAM the next time a student tells me she didn't like a reading assignment because it's too long. If the server put an extra scoop of ice cream on your sundae, would you complain about getting too much of a good thing? If a visit to a national park overloaded your senses, would you gripe about being intoxicated by too much beauty? Why, then, complain if a really lively, informative, thought-provoking article provides more good stuff than you can squeeze into a life crowded with so much doomscrolling and video gaming?

It's not even a difficult text--"Stone Skipping is a Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants the World to Find It," an excellent piece from Outside magazine by Sean Williams (click here for a fun read, and don't neglect the jaw-dropping videos of stones flying across vast lengths of water in apparent defiance of the laws of physics). Several students in my Life Writing class told me this article was their favorite assigned reading so far this semester, but those who didn't like it said it was just too long to read.

I pointed out that the author and editors could have chosen to cut any number of passages, such as the bit about the history of stone-skipping and its various monikers in other parts of the world. ("Czechs throw froggies, while Swedes say they're tossing sandwiches.") They could have cut details about Kurt Steiner's hermetic cabin, mental health struggles, and failed marriage, or they could have deleted the lovely passage about the search for the Platonic ideal of skipping stones. In fact, why didn't the editors demand that the author transform the whole amazing article into a simple series of bullet points? So much easier to read!

 

But so much emptier. Like many other aspects of life, stone-skipping is inherently futile--I mean, in the end all you've achieved is tossing a bunch of stones into a lake. How, then, can the subject of the article, Kurt Steiner, claim that stone-skipping is "a means for the redemption of mankind"?

 

Well you'll have to read the article to find out, and when you do, you'll note that the first five paragraphs provide a master class in introducing readers to a complex subject. The author starts from the outside and draws us deeper into the topic until we're well and truly hooked. 

 

First paragraph: Description of physical surroundings and Kurt Steiner's appearance, including the word "Rasputinesque," which we had to look up in class.

 

Second paragraph: Description of the man at work, relying on such vivid comparisons that it's worth quoting in full: 

Steiner stared across the creek and raised his right arm into an L, clasping a coaster-size sliver of shale the way a guitarist might hold a plectrum during a showstopping solo. But rather than fold his torso horizontally, as you might expect somebody skipping a rock to do, he stretched his five-foot-nine-inch body vertically, and then squeezed down like an accordion and planted his left leg to crack his throwing arm, placing the rock under so much gyroscopic force that it sputtered loudly as it left his hand, like a playing card in a bicycle wheel.

Third paragraph: The stone acting as the subject of one sparkly verb after another.

 

Fourth paragraph: Steiner's reaction to the toss, a passage that begins unveiling the subject's personality.

 

Fifth paragraph: Statement of purpose. "Kurt Steiner is the world's greatest stone skipper" plus a clear indication of why stone-skipping matters. I don't know about you, but if the Rasputinesque dude with the accordion body insists that stone-skipping will save the world, I want to know how.

True, it takes a while to get to the answer, and it's not so much an answer as a series of questions about how damaged people find meaning despite--or perhaps because of--the inherent futility of their actions. The article ends at a moment of indecision and uncertainty, but also a point of possibility, when just about anything could happen but there's only one certainty: any time is the right time to throw.

 

And any time is the right time to read a sparkling article about stone-skipping, as long as we don't reject it as TL;DR.