Poet, pie, penultimate

It's P-day, Pie-Day, Penultimate Friday--someone ought to write a song. 

I remind my students that today is the penultimate Friday of the semester and they look as me as if I'm speaking Swahili, until I define penultimate, which they promptly forget.

Doesn't matter when there's pie. On the Friday before Thanksgiving, all College employees are invited to eat pie together, one of our few social events where the President can mingle with the janitorial staff. Once upon a time when we had healthy budgets, people would try several different types of pie--blackberry, pumpkin, apple, you name it. Last year the ongoing budget crisis led to portion control, with enforcers watching to be sure no one took more than one piece or tried to smuggle a slice of pie out under their shirt. (It is a mistake to put blackberry pie in your pocket. Trust me on this.) This, of course, means that people stand around agonizing over which piece to take. Sure, that apple pie might be great, but choosing apple means no blackberry or pumpkin or coconut cream! Decisions, decisions.

No afternoon classes, so after pie I can spend the rest of the day responding to drafts, many of which won't take much time. The final project for the Nature Writing class calls for research, sources, and at least 2000 words, but the drafts aren't quite there yet, ranging from a 200 to 1500 words, with most hovering around 1000. I wouldn't worry much about the word count if the content were persuasive, but the content isn't entirely present yet, which is a problem since time is running out. Well, these are good students. They'll pull it together eventually.

Students, of course, complain about having major projects due in so many different classes at the same time, but if a project is supposed to be the culminating experience for a course, drawing on skills the students have been working to master all semester long, then it's hard to assign it much earlier in the semester. They're going to have a crazy couple of weeks, and their profs are going to have a differently crazy couple of weeks, with all those drafts needing feedback plus finals to construct plus all kinds of extra events to plan and attend.

Yesterday we had a different type of P-day when a visiting Poet spent time on campus. Jonathan Johnson met with an 8:00 a.m. creative writing class, had lunch with English department faculty members and students, and read from his work in the evening, all with great energy and enthusiasm. (Click here to see three poems I'm tempted to label "homely," but only in the original meaning of the word.) Judging from the way he connected with students, responded to their questions, and offered sage advice about writing and life, I'd guess he'd be a fantastic teacher. We had a casual talk about trees early in the morning when I introduced him to the gorgeous sweet gum tree outside our building, and after he'd spent some time enjoying our beautiful campus, he urged his audience to "keep telling these gorgeous trees 'hi' for me." 

Jonathan Johnson titled one of his poems "When something's good, keep it," as good advice as any this time of the semester. I suspect, though, that he wasn't talking about that extra slice of pie.