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.    

Pumpkins, peppers, pawpaws, pizzazz

After a weekend with the grandkids, I arrived home yesterday to find my kitchen and dining room overflowing with produce from the fall harvest. I don't even like spaghetti squash but they're stacked on the dining table alongside a pile of fragrant pawpaws that seems undiminished by the dozens I took north with me. The kitchen counters are covered with tomatoes of many sizes and colors while the fridge is full of okra, habaneros, and red bell peppers. The resident gardener wonders whether I can throw together a batch of stuffed peppers sometime this week, but stuffed peppers are not so much thrown together as painstakingly assembled over a series of hours. So maybe--but not today.

On Friday before I left my husband put a great pumpkin into the back of my car, a pumpkin so big he had to use the tractor to carry it up from the garden, and then he wedged it in with pillows to make sure it didn't roll around. All well and good, but I wasn't able to take the tractor with me to the grandkids' house and I certainly wasn't planning to try to pick up that pumpkin myself. It took a group effort and a garden cart to move the orange behemoth. 

It's been a bizarre garden year: many early crops did nothing--we had very few zucchinis or broccoli and a handful of beans--but later crops are going bananas. I hope we can find someone interested in spaghetti squash because I certainly don't intend to cook all eight million of them. I've been bringing containers of tiny tomatoes to campus to share with colleagues, but I'm not hauling in a giant pumpkin. And all those habanero peppers? If my husband eats them all, we'll never be able to kiss again. 

But I'm not complaining. As long as we have sweet corn in the freezer and fresh tomatoes boiling down into paste in the kitchen, I'm ready for a tasty winter. 

 

Going where I have to go

"This is how the career ends. Not with a retirement party and a gold watch but with a second career in the gig economy." --Reuven Perlman, "How Other Things End" in the Sept. 22 New Yorker.

What I'm telling myself this morning: I may have had a bizarre day that revealed once again the appalling level of incompetence running rampant in the universe, and I may have left my umbrella in the library so that I had to run through this morning's badly-needed rain without protection, and I may be required to give up my lunch hour to meet with someone I've never heard of to deal with an issue that does not concern me, and I may be facing students who think it's cute to ask out loud in class things like "I'm a computer science major--why do I have to learn to write?", BUT at least my job does not require me to be hit in the face with a 99-mile-per-hour fastball on live  television. Neither does it require me to instruct the editor of the AP story about David Fry's unfortunate injury that it is not correct to write that Fry "laid in the dirt for several minutes." He lay! Lay lay lay! This is not that difficult, people!

On the plus side, this morning my Nature Writing students discussed Annie Dillard's marvelous essay "Total Eclipse," which includes a quote from Theodore Roethke's poem "The Waking," which none of my students had read before so we took a look at it in class and examined how he uses end stops to reinforce the feeling of a person stumbling blindly down a poorly marked path, and I am taking the final verse as my marching orders for the brief amount of time left in my teaching career:

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

 

 

 

 

 

Twiddling the time away

According to our old pal the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of twiddling appeared circa 1547 in J. Redford's Moral Play of Wit & Science: "As for her syngyng, pypyng, and fydlyng, what unthryftynes therin is twydlyng?" Twiddling emerges from the marriage of twisting and fiddling, and an alternate spelling (tweedling) suggests that the patron saints of twiddling ought to be Tweedledum and Tweedledee. 

No relation to tiddlywinks, a game requiring facility with winks and squidgers and the ability to squop. Tiddlywinks derives from British slang and may be related to both kiddlywink and pillywink, a word that ought to apply to tiddlywinks played with fluffy pink pillows but most definitely does not. Pillywinks are instruments of torture also known as thumbscrews.

While twiddling appears in the sixteenth century, thumb-twiddling is first recorded much later, in the 1930s. So when I twiddle away my morning by exploring the more esoteric uses of twiddling, I am following a long tradition.

I probably shouldn't say this out loud where any of my overworked colleagues can hear me, but my skills are being underutilized this semester. Few classes, low enrollments, few papers to grade, few colleagues interested in attending workshops or training events--whatever the reasons, I keep finding myself with time on my hands. I haven't quite been reduced to thumb-twiddling, but yesterday I finally submitted an essay to a journal and today I'm thinking about writing a letter of recommendation that isn't due until November.

And it looks like things won't be much better next semester. If current enrollment trends continue, I'll finish my career teaching negative 27 students and grading no papers at all.

But I'll think about that tomorrow. Today I sit and twiddle my thumbs and wonder where I can locate some winks and squidgers and find someone to teach me to squop.  

A step-by-step guide to writing a step-by-step guide

Draw a circle on the whiteboard.

Easy enough to accomplish as long as you know what the word circle means. But what if you're a visitor from an alternate universe consisting entirely of straight lines and right angles? What if you've never seen a circle, never heard of a circle, never held a marker in your hand to draw a circle on the whiteboard?

Tell our visitor how to draw a circle, I told another acting as instructor, But use only words--and turn your back so you can't see what he's doing.

We tried this exercise in my Nature Writing class with two different pairs of students, each pair made up of a cosmic visitor unfamiliar with the circle concept and an instructor explaining how to draw a circle. The instructors used various methods, from defining a circle in the abstract to comparing a circle to other non-circular things to providing step-by step instructions for hand movements designed to result in a circle on the whiteboard. The visiting aliens followed the instructions to the letter but produced a dotted line in the shape of a mountain range or a squiggle resembling an upper-case N. 

Then we tried something similar with a more common task: Your classmate has never learned to tie her shoes--lead her through the steps, using only words. The classmate followed instructions carefully but ended up with a twisted mess of laces.

What's going on here?

My Nature Writing students had turned in their first major essay yesterday so I wanted to give them a lightweight but thought-provoking class activity aiming toward the next major project: an essay explaining a natural process. I wanted them to think about what's required to help a reader understand a process, so we started with some very simple exercises in giving instructions--Draw a circle. Tie your shoes. It's not as easy to explain as you might think, especially if you're limited only to words. (Try it!) 

We talked about methods for making a process comprehensible--establish common vocabulary, compare the process to something more familiar--but then we talked about the why question. A biology exam might ask students to explain the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, but outside of a testing situation, why would anyone need to know?

Then I showed them Margaret Renkl's recent essay from the New York Times on "How to Count Butterflies." She helps us understand various processes in the butterfly life cycle for a very clear purpose: so we can help protect them from extinction. Explain a natural process to a specific audience, making sure they know why it matters and what's at stake. That's the next assignment in a nutshell, and if our practice exercises over the next couple of weeks are successful, then my students ought to produce something more convincing than a squiggle on a whiteboard or a tangle of shoelaces.    

Next time I'll leave the red pencil at home

I appreciate the student who raised his hand in class and said, "Planetarium--I can never remember whether that's about plants or planets." Sure, we all got a good laugh out of it, but I wish more people were willing to speak up and admit when they're confused instead of nodding knowingly about things they know nothing about. 

I also appreciate the student who, when asked why a character in Tara Westover's Educated had said some particularly outrageous thing, raised his hand and said, "Because he's crazy." Yes! As I wanted to tell the rest of the class--especially the ones avoiding eye contact--"If you don't realize the dude is nuts, you're not paying attention."

Yesterday at a big meeting I was tempted to get out my red pencil--the imaginary one I always carry, long enough to reach up to a theater marquee to remove unnecessary apostrophes--and correct some errors on slides presented by people I probably shouldn't be correcting in public. First I wanted to correct the spelling of a colleague's name, because why bother congratulating a person if you can't be bothered to spell the person's name correctly? But that's the former journalist in me speaking, the person who breaks out in hives at the recollection of a particularly egregious spelling error.

But then if I'd had my imaginary red pencil with me, I would have wanted to correct some other things, like enrollment numbers and rambling responses and administrative decisions I find ridiculous. These things may not have been errors, but I simply can't accept a world in which such statements can stand unchallenged.

Finally, I was delighted to share with my upper-level writing students this passage from a book I've been slogging my way through:

Nowadays, of course, given all man has learned of their senses, it is easy to see why they should have felt so liberated, so connected to their wild selves, when it appeared: like any crepuscular creatures that possess night vision (whether naturally or through a device), the augmented but still ethereal light of that Moon makes all the usual night sights--whether rustling trees and bushes or prey and predators--show up brilliantly. 

My students were apologizing for their first drafts, worried because they weren't quite perfect. I pointed out that the definition of a draft is a piece of writing with something wrong with it, and then I pointed out that the sentence above was written by a professional author and published by a reputable press that presumably employs competent editors, and yet not one of us could make sense of it. (Does it help if you know they refers to cats and when it appeared refers to the full moon? Not much.) If a sentence can pass through so many brilliant minds without becoming comprehensible, then why should we expect all our sentences to hit their marks on the first try?

So here's my tepid cheer for the presence of error in the world. Let's speak up and admit that we don't know everything! We're all still learning (I hope), so let's admit our confusion out loud and help each other toward understanding.