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.