Who will design the official faculty tramp stamp?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Some) visiting writers rock!

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

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

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

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

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

Next month, because of an unusual conjunction of events, we have two authors visiting campus. One will visit a class and have lunch with English majors and departmental faculty; the other will arrive on campus 30 minutes before the reading and leave immediately after. Guess which one is being paid a whole lot more? In the literary world, success means never having to bother with students. 

Pig-headed about Pygmalion

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

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

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

My students' eyes glaze over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday fragments, with pulchritudinous yodeling

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attack of the AI bots, plus AI-induced paranoia

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

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

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

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

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

Red, yellow, and not too blue

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

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

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

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

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

  

Our creek looks like a sea of leaves.

 

Mind-reading their way toward educational goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday-morning meh

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

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

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

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

 

  

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

File under Where does the time go? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bridge bisects the scene: waterfall, old mill.

The roar of rushing water dominates Lanterman's Mill.

Julio Larraz, The Trojan Horse

Another kind of horse. Folk art, allegedly.

Grading grates on my brain

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

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

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

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

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

Resisting my inner Bartleby

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

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

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

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

That would be me.

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

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

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

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

Teaching in the golden years

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

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

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

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

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