Stressing out my students

This class is like stress therapy said one of my Nature Writing students, but I fear that my next class might disagree. The Nature Writing students have been talking about how we frame nature, so I gave each of them a rubber band and asked them to go outside and frame some part of nature within the rubber band and then observe that small space for a minimum of ten minutes. The time limit was the hardest part--if nothing much was happening in the patch of moss a student observed, it was easy to get distracted. But they kept at it and brought back some good insights about observation, including that it's helpful to employ all the senses. Progress!

My next class will be more stressful. The first-year seminar is designed to equip students with the skills they need to succeed in college, and today the emphasis is on discussion skills. In Monday's class I gave them a photocopy of the first two chapters of Tara Westover's Educated and I showed them methods of annotation to help them retain what they've read--and then I gave them some time in class to work on it. (No AI involved, but there's nothing stopping them from getting an AI summary of other parts of the text that we didn't touch in class Monday.) 

In today's class, the students will be expected to discuss their reading--for points. Each student will be expected to ask a question or make a comment about a particular passage in the text, and I'll be up front putting a check mark next to the name of each student who contributes to the discussion. Two check marks equal ten points, the maximum available for this assignment.

I've never tried to quantify student engagement in discussion so literally, but this is where we've arrived in higher education. My biggest problem will be that I haven't yet learned all their names, so I've printed out a seating chart and I'll put all their names on it this morning. Sure, I could ask them to wear name tags, but I'd never be able to see them from up front. So seating chart it is. 

The thing about teaching two brand-new (to me) classes is that everything is an experiment. Some experiments result in enlightenment and joy and stress therapy while others may prove more frustrating. Either way, it's a learning experience, and learning, after all, is why we're here.  

The theme photo for the Nature Writing class. How do we frame nature?

 

Down the garden path

Rather than moping over my ruined zoom lens, I'm forcing myself to learn how to take better photos on my phone. It's not as satisfying as my beloved Nikon but I'm enjoying messing around with it and trying to like the results. 

This morning, for instance, I hobbled down the hill on my bum knee to visit the chickens (and two guineas) and see what's still growing in the garden. Last weekend we processed dozens of ears of sweet corn for the freezer, but this week the sweet corn patch is pretty much done. The okra suddenly shot up to six feet tall and started making pods, so today we'll fry up a mess of okra for lunch. It looks like we'll have tons more tomatoes and tomatillos and hot peppers, plus three big watermelons and massive pumpkins. Sunflowers, spaghetti squash, a few lingering cucumbers, lovely red beet greens mingling with swiss chard...all very promising, and very pretty.

It's been an odd year for gardening, with the cool, wet spring hampering many early crops--even the zucchini has been disappointing. But this late-summer burst of growth will keep us busy and happy for weeks to come. Though I'm not sure what we'll do with those giant pumpkins. How many pumpkin pies can the two of us eat?

Countdown to class time

Well I remembered to wear earrings and makeup this morning, so this must be my first day of fall classes. Last week I bought four new shirts suitable for the classroom, but I didn't wear any of them this morning because I'm leery of new clothes on the first day of class. The last thing I want when I first meet my new students is a wardrobe malfunction, so I'm sticking with something tried and tested.

Neither of my syllabi have been tested before, which makes this first day a little nerve-wracking. Where have I messed up? What have I left out? The last thing I want is to have students point out a gaping hole in my assignment schedule while I'm standing in front of class on the first day.

If I can stand up at all, that is. Yesterday I twisted my knee while walking across a parking lot at the mall, so if anyone asks why I'm limping more than usual, I'll say I suffered a shopping-related injury. Hurt myself while searching for a new shower curtain for my recently renovated bathroom. (Whom shall I sue?) Rumor has it that the elevator in my building has been fixed, but nevertheless I'm going to try walking up the stairs. The last thing I want on the first day of class is to be trapped in an elevator with doors that won't open.

I have 24 minutes to overcome those first-day jitters that never seem to go away, and then I'll be upstairs opening doors to learning for a bunch of students, new and old. We can do this! First, though, I have to get up the steps. 

Got some color in there!

 

Ready, ish

The big question on everyone's lips today, of course, is Are you ready for classes to start tomorrow? And my answer is yes, ish. 

How can I start teaching without making a million photocopies and posting writing prompts to my Canvas pages and printing out my rosters? My first class is Friday so I ought to be able to do all that tomorrow, but instead I'll be spending some quality time in the dentist's chair in the morning and getting a mammogram in the afternoon. What possessed me to schedule so much, um, discomfort on the day before I return to the classroom? I suspect temporary insanity. At least I hope it's temporary, but how would I know?

So I'll be doing all those first-day preps today, but how can I concentrate on syllabi and prompts and rosters when my office is still in Summer Mess Mode? I vacuumed last week (because of course we have to vacuum our own offices) but my eye keeps catching the untidy stacks of books that surround me. How am I supposed to work on my computer when all those books need to go back on the shelves in proper order? I need to start the semester with a clean office (because yes, I am that neurotic) but it's not going to clean itself.

More than anything, though, I need to clean up my attitude. I've been doing some loud complaining lately, and some of it has produced results that will benefit my colleagues--small things like being permitted to use a particular technology that works reliably in place of one that doesn't. In fact I'm beginning to wonder whether, in my final full year of teaching, the greatest gift I can give the institution is the willingness to complain about certain situations in order to improve conditions not just for me but also for those who can't risk alienating the Powers that Be.

So yes, I'm ready to complain, and I'm ready to make photocopies and post prompts and print rosters. First, though, someone needs to put those books away. Volunteers?  

 

Who stacked all those books there?

 

Peoples is peoples, says Pete

A few observations from a busy week on campus:

If I carry a pair of freshly-picked cantaloupes into the library and a human being's nose catches  a whiff of the scent, I will not be carrying any cantaloupes when I leave the library, which is a good thing since my resident garden guru has just picked a dozen ripe cantaloupes. They don't keep well, you know? I'm happy to try making some cantaloupe-and-ginger sorbet this weekend, but my experience has been that frozen cantaloupe loses massive amounts of flavor.

If I walk into a meeting expecting a meaningful contribution from someone who has previously demonstrated an unwillingness to contribute anything meaningful or even, often, to show up, then I'm expecting too much. Can't expect a tiger to change its stripes just because I said Pretty-please.

If one person emails to ask politely for the kind of help and training I'm accustomed to providing while another person sends an obnoxious email berating me for not having already provided such help to certain people who never asked, I'm answering the polite email first, every time. Why do some people go straight to the nuclear option? I'm here to help, but don't scream at me for failing to help someone who never asked for my help! After all, I'm only human.

If I'm already having trouble getting to sleep, staying asleep, and keeping alert in the afternoons when we haven't even gotten to the stressful part of the semester yet--you know, the whole teaching two new classes thing--then it's going to be a very long and exhausting semester. I need to develop some better relaxation skills--but I'd better do it quickly before everything gets any crazier than it already is. Hurry up and relax! Nope, that didn't work.

It's always nice to be reminded that human nature continues to be entirely what it has always been: human. Or, as Kermit the Frog learns in Pete's Luncheonette, Peoples is peoples.

Couldn't have said it better myself.  

Flush with success

The bathroom remodeling project is finally done but it didn't occur to me until today that I don't have to put the same old gray shower curtain and towels in the guest bathroom. I can fall in love with whatever shower curtain I like and buy towels in coordinating colors! Couldn't have done that with the old purple bathroom.

And no sooner did the project get done than I received the invoice for the second half of the cost via email. We've waved goodbye to the old purple bathroom, the competent and efficient Bathroom Dude, and a big pile of money, and it didn't hurt one single bit. Felt great, in fact. And now I'll have an ideal answer when my colleagues return to campus next week and ask me where I went for my summer break: To the bathroom. Three cheers for a smooth and satisfying home improvement project!

Before (above) and after (below)

Good work if you can get it

I'd like to issue an invitation to everyone who has ever congratulated me on getting the whole summer off from work: Please come and watch what I'm doing today and then tell me I'm not working.

Granted, I'm not required to work outdoors in wretched heat or do any heavy lifting or crawl around on the floor of a horrible old bathroom or even punch a time clock, though if I were I'd be tempted to follow the example of Mooch in the 1979 film Breaking Away when he punches the timeclock--literally. I may have my moments of metaphorically throwing punches at certain people responsible for the mindless pettifogging procedures I am required to follow, but my job has never compelled me to throw an actual punch. 

But I have punched a lot of keys and crunched a lot of numbers and I have the eye fatigue to prove it. This fall I'm teaching two almost-brand-new classes, classes I've taught before in other incarnations; however, the contents and expectations for both courses have changed so much that I may as well be starting from scratch.

I last taught an upper-level class on Nature Writing more than a decade ago--as a summer online course. I like to use recent examples in upper-level writing classes, so most of the readings I assigned previously are no longer relevant (except Annie Dillard's 1982 essay "Total Eclipse," which everyone interested in writing about nature ought to read). The eight-week assignment structure for the online course doesn't translate well to a 14-week face-to-face semester, and I no longer have access to the previous course management system so I can't just copy and paste assignments and content into the new shell. So I have spent a lot of time tracking down appropriate readings, scanning them into the system, and organizing them into a reasonable class structure.

And then the first-year seminar I'm teaching is very different from the version I last taught several years ago, so this summer I've had to shift topics, choose a new text, and create an assignment structure that includes certain types of required assignments plus a whole range of activities requiring students to show mastery of the skills they need to succeed in college. These skills will be taught by the Peer Mentor, an upper-level student assigned to my class, but I'll be the one collecting and grading the required college skills assignments. 

First, though, I need to develop an assignment structure that makes some sort of sense, motivating students to do all the things even though many of the things simply aren't comparable. I mean, sure, I have no problem creating a meaningful prompt and rubric for the required annotated bibliography and research paper, but how do I balance those demands against, for instance, an assignment requiring students to print out an email on a campus printer or come up with a list of potential classes to take in the spring? Those can be low-stakes assignments, but if the stakes are too low, the students won't do them.

So I've spent a lot of time writing prompts and shuffling due dates and moving readings and activities around on my draft syllabi, and now I'm uploading assignments and files and rubrics to the course management system. Three solid hours this morning just trying to get one class's assignments mostly loaded to Canvas, and I haven't even started uploading files or developing detailed lesson plans.

Now my eyes are blurry from staring at the screen and my wrist hurts from all the pointing and clicking. (Ah, the humanity!) But on the other hand, I get to do my work sitting down in a comfy chair, with a cold drink at my elbow and no snarky supervisor looking over my shoulder. Granted, Bathroom Dude is just a few feet away putting the finishing touches on our guest bathroom while listening to a very loud podcast dealing with supernatural phenomena and conspiracy theories (somehow combining interest in the Shroud of Turin, sea monsters, and Florida bog people), but anyone willing to spend the morning on his hands and knees installing new flooring and fixtures in my horrible old bathroom is allowed to listen to whatever he wants to.

Bathroom Dude is a bit of an inspiration: if he hasn't punched the face right off the time clock after all those hours in that cramped room, then I think I can keep on pointing and clicking for as long as it takes to get the work done, all summer long.

Spam(a lot) and eggs(tra anxiety)

Early this morning I walked down the hill and through the woods in my nightgown and robe so I could take a shower in my son's apartment. At our house the tub has been installed in the guest bathroom but the water hasn't been turned on, and the lovely new shower has been installed in our master bathroom but we can't use it for 24 hours while the silicon cures, whatever that means. Yesterday I made several visits to my son's apartment just to use his bathroom, because our guest bathroom doesn't have a toilet yet while the master bathroom was occupied by a working man armed with power tools and caulking guns. 

So far it's been an up-and-down kind of week. The bathroom project is on target to be finished by Friday and the master bathroom will be fully functional this afternoon, so progress is being made! But obstacles keep arising, at home and elsewhere.

That important report I need to submit by the end of the month? I finally received the information I need to finish the report. Where has that info been hiding all this time? Well I'm not naming names here, but the essential information has been sitting in a certain administrator's spam folder since the middle of June. Our campus email system deletes spam items after 90 days, so it's a good thing I nagged someone into looking for the data!

Am I the only one who regularly practices spam folder hygiene? My Inbox Zero obsession requires me to scroll through spam at least twice a week to rescue anything that doesn't belong there and delete the rest, but maybe that's just a symptom of my personal neurosis. Apparently plenty of people are able to stroll calmly through their lives without ever wondering what valuable messages might have been inappropriately relegated to spam. Call it Spam Blindness--the ability to ignore a bulging spam folder without any qualms whatsoever.

At home I sometimes see signs of Dirt Blindness or Clutter Blindness--the ability to walk blithely past a mess without the slightest urge to clean it up. Again, I'm not naming names, but I long ago gave up on saying "If you see something amiss, just clean it up" to people for whom "amiss" is a foreign concept. I'm not a clean freak and I can live comfortably with a modicum of clutter, but certain types of disorder ring alarm bells in my brain and make my whole body vibrate with anxiety. Another symptom of my personal neurosis, no doubt, but if that little pile of dirt at the edge of the hallway insists on interfering with my sleep, you'd better believe I'll nag the person who left it there--or clean it up myself.

Maybe the presence in my house of men with power tools has made me a little more anxious than usual this week. I'm delighted at the work they're doing (on time and under budget, so far) and I'll be even more delighted when it's done, but it's hard to concentrate on important tasks with strangers in the bathroom and tools shrieking at all hours of the day. And then when I need the bathroom, I have to find the keys, find my shoes, and trek down through the woods to a bathroom that's suffering from its own special form of neglect. Right now it feels as if everything is a little bit amiss, but I lack the ability to put it back to rights and no amount of nagging will make this project get done any faster, so I'm just biting my tongue, biding my time, and trying to live through the current disorder.

In praise of a project that's going well (knock wood)

I recall a time years ago when we tried to do a little home improvement project in the parsonage where we lived for a few years: removing wallpaper and repainting the walls in the room where I wrote my dissertation, although "room" is perhaps not the right word to describe a space barely wider than a hallway, its walls interrupted with five doors and two windows. It was impossible to furnish a room so wonky, so I put my computer desk in there and wrote diligently, promising myself that my reward for completing the dissertation would be tearing down that horrible wallpaper. 

I think about that wallpaper every time I teach Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wall-paper," where the offending decor is described as

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions....The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sun light. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

I recognize that wallpaper! The wallpaper that surrounded me while I wrote my dissertation surely merited charges of aesthetic harassment, but I never figured out whom to sue. I gritted my teeth and lived with that wallpaper for more than a year, and instead of going mad like the woman in Gilman's story, I got even. As soon as the dissertation was done, I started tearing down that malignant wallpaper. 

Big mistake. 

The wallpaper didn't come down easily, and we soon learned that it had been hiding a multitude of sins: insect infestations, wall cracks, a round hole in the wall large enough for a wood stove's chimney, and a piece of plywood loosely covering an opening for yet another door. All those surprises required work that we weren't equipped or inclined to do--especially in a house that wasn't even ours.

Lately I've been thinking about that little home improvement project that got too big to handle, as we are currently in the midst of a major home improvement project that seems to be going quite well (knock wood). True, we've reached an awkward stage: the guest bathroom has no toilet (yet) while the master bathroom is occupied by a worker diligently removing the tub. Kind of awkward to elbow a worker out of the way every time one needs to use the bathroom, and also he's bound to have turned off the water in there, which is why I'm staying away from the house and working on campus all day. 

We knew this kind of thing might happen, but the good news is that the master bathroom is a small job--remove tub and tub surround, install accessible shower stall and hardware--and it should be done today or tomorrow, as long as the worker doesn't discover anything surprising while removing the old tub.

The guest bathroom doesn't even look like the same space. So far they've taken it down to the studs, removed all traces of dark gray and purple (mauve?), and installed the new tub and drywall; today they start mudding the drywall before they can install the toilet, sink, hardware, and flooring. That formerly dim, cramped room already looks so bright and cheery that I get happy every time I walk by.

I hesitate to say this out loud lest I jinx the process, but so far everything has gone entirely according to plan. No surprises, no problems, no extra charges, and the contractor and his crew have been a real pleasure to work with. I feel a calm confidence in their ability to get it done on time and within budget.

But I can't let myself get too excited. Who knows what might pop up before it's all done? Maybe they'll pull out the tub and find Jimmy Hoffa buried underneath. Whatever happens, I've got to be grateful for two things: against all odds, we have sufficient resources to meet the challenge--and we don't have to do any of the work ourselves. 

 

New bath in the guest bathroom!