Positive I'm negative, unless I'm not

Which is more stressful: a home Covid test or a home pregnancy test? The pregnancy test is much quicker and less complicated and a positive result can lead to new life, while the Covid test is slow and clunky and may portend disaster. 

I'm pleased to report that my home Covid test was negative this morning, which is really good news for the approximately 80 people with whom I spent time over the weekend. It felt fabulous to do so much face-to-face socializing after a long dry spell, but then it was sobering to learn that I'd been exposed to Covid just before all the socializing began.

It started on Thursday morning, when I had coffee and a long face-to-face chat with a friend, blissfully unaware that she would soon develop mild symptoms and test positive for Covid. 

On Friday I drove north to attend my grandson's birthday party, a raucous outdoor affair involving squirt-guns and water balloons, where the youngest attendee was the three-week-old sibling of one of the guests. I never even got close to the baby, but my grandkids were in my face and on my lap often enough.

On Saturday I drove south to attend a friend's 50th anniversary celebration, where I spent two hours indoors with about 50 people, mostly over 50 and a few in poor health. A joyful event with hugs all around. We ate cupcakes and sang songs and played a ridiculous version of The Newlywed Game in which long-married couples tried to answer questions about their spouses, to amusing effect. It didn't surprise me to learn that my husband does not know my ring size--but then, neither do I.

Then yesterday I went to a church service, but it was a small number of people who mostly kept their distance. Aside from that, during my road trip I had fleeting encounters with random strangers in various gas stations and rest areas, and let me just say that based on my experience, Circle K has the dirtiest rest rooms along major highways in Ohio. 

Now I'm at home enjoying memories of a joyful weekend alongside the dread associated with Covid exposure. The good news is if I was exposed on Thursday, I'm unlikely to have been contagious on Friday or Saturday. Today's negative Covid test is encouraging, but I ought to test again tomorrow just to be sure. Meanwhile, I'm staying home, just to stay on the safe side, and trying to cherish the joy despite the persistent dread.

 

 

  

Partly sunny with chance of train wreck

Yesterday I saw the signs that we were finally emerging from this cold, wintry spring when I got out the mower and mowed the front lawn. Granted, it was still chilly enough for long sleeves and layers, but the ground had dried enough so the mower wouldn't sink in, and the unruly grass was desperately calling out for a trim. The smell of wild onions, the cheery grape hyacinths nodding their heads in the breeze--our long extended winter might finally be coming to a close.

And this morning I saw the signs that we might eventually emerge from this long, taxing semester when I collected the last set of student drafts. I'll have plenty of grading yet ahead--papers and presentations and final exams--but this is the last time this spring that I'll have to read drafts and make suggestions for revisions.

Back in January I thought this semester would be pretty much like Fall semester except with fewer masks. In fact, for a while it seemed that the biggest problem we'd face this spring was whether--and when--to go to a "mask optional" policy. After a great deal of fuss, we pulled off the masks in late February and suffered no apparent repercussions, but by Spring Break no one was talking about masking anymore. We'd been blindsided by a different kind of problem and we're still not sure what repercussions we will face or for how long.

Sure, everyone knew that some budget-tightening would be needed in the next couple of years, but what we didn't expect--and by we, I mean everyone below the VP level, from students to staff to faculty--what we didn't expect was that the budget train was about to drive right off a cliff. The budget crisis hit hard and fast and repeatedly, causing an epidemic of insomnia and angry meetings. Kind of a bad time to be on Faculty Council! It's easy to say that we're not going to let campus controversies affect the students' learning experiences, but it's hard to accomplish that when cuts are affecting academic offerings and when the people charged with fixing the problems aren't getting any sleep. 

And then fall course scheduling season dealt another blow. Changes to our general education curriculum have been causing steady declines in enrollments in my department for a few years, but now the English train has driven off a cliff and I find myself dangling out a broken window, holding on for dear life. Suddenly I see a whole new vista opening up ahead of me: a few final years of teaching freshman comp and the sophomore seminar and other service courses before I fade away into insignificance. 

Sure, the changes that were made to my fall teaching schedule will affect only a small number of students, but I feel the difference every day. Today, for instance, as I was introducing my American Lit Survey students to Allen Ginsberg's poem "A Supermarket in California," with its "What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night!", I told them they could see how Don DeLillo made use of this image in White Noise, which I'll be teaching in my American Novel class this fall, except I had to stop myself before the sentence was over because of course the American Novel class got cancelled and, depending on how the next few years go and when I decide to retire, I may never get a chance to teach it again.

Those two unexpected blows would have been enough to make this semester difficult--and I'm working really hard to make sure my anger and disappointment don't affect my teaching but I'm not superhuman, especially when I can't sleep, so it's a struggle. But then we've seen a host of smaller disturbances, the most horrible of which can't be written about or discussed openly, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. 

Last week before the Faculty Council meeting we were delicately skirting the perimeter of one of these difficult issues when I was reminded of what happened at the end of my first semester at Marietta College. I was a newbie still feeling her way around campus, and suddenly the place was swarming with cops and the FBI was confiscating equipment and a colleague I'd never even met was being led away in cuffs, soon to be tried and convicted for setting up a secret email server to distribute child pornography. 

So last week when a few of us old folks on Council were reminiscing about that long-ago scandal, a fresh-faced junior faculty member asked, "After all that, why didn't you just walk away?"

"Some of us needed the job," I pointed out, but it was more than that. Even at the end of one semester, I knew that Marietta was a place where I could do good work that would be appreciated and occasionally rewarded, and I'd seen enough to suspect that the College could weather this storm and come out the other side stronger.

Is that still true? Possibly. Probably, even. But will I still be here to enjoy the recovery? And if my fingers lose their grip on that bloody broken window, will anyone even notice that I'm gone?

Arrangement in gray and black

No snow in the forecast this morning and yet there it was all over the road and getting thicker by the minute. 

The sky was black. The snow was white. The road was shades of gray.

Yesterday I attended an event for which the invitation specifically called for "professional attire," but jeans and boots and sweaters were the order of the day. Only a fool would wear a skirt and heels when the parking lots are dotted with icy spots and hard chunks of snow, and road salt walks into the building on all our shoes, dulling the shine on the parquet floors.

My jeans are black. My shoes are white. The floor is dull and gray.

Frank X. Walker is Black. His book Affrilachia collects poems about the African American experience in Appalachia, including one called "Fireproof" about church people who, like fire ants, swarm in response to distress, working together to rebuild their beloved sanctuary after an arsonist burns it down. Their souls, says Walker, are fireproof in the face of hate. I nearly choked up teaching that poem today to students who keep coming back eager to learn despite Covid cases and quarantines and tech difficulties and their entire lives being disrupted. 

My mood was black. They made my day. 

My day is cray-cray-crazy. Another finalist for the botany position will be here today, another opportunity for me to walk a botanist across campus to the next appointment and point to the big piles of snow and say, "In the spring that will be a pollinator garden." Sorry, botanist! Nothing growing here today! 

(The snow is white. The sky is gray.)

And in between the cray-cray-craziness I have to obtain a Covid test because I may have been exposed by a close contact, although probably not, but I was in the same room (unmasked) with the person but not for more than ten minutes, or maybe twenty, or maybe less, and we're not exactly huggy people so I don't know if we ever breathed the same air so who knows? I'm positive that I'm (probably) negative but only the test can tell for sure.

My fears are dark. That's all I'll say.

Between comfort and joy

On the same day we learned that my husband's cousin's wife had been hospitalized with Covid, we also learned that a colleague's horrible deadly diagnosis was not cancer after all. For more than a month he'd been living with a death sentence and then the tsar told the firing squad to put down their guns, and he couldn't have been more relieved.

Taken together, these two bits of news should have averaged out to make it a meh kind of day, but extreme news doesn't work that way any more than extreme weather does: if today is freezing and tomorrow is boiling, I'll feel it deeply both times. 

Yesterday I had coffee with the colleague who received the reprieve; he described the whiplash effect of the shifting diagnoses, and he's delighted to be out and about personally thanking all the people who helped him and his wife deal with the impact of his surgery and recovery. It was a joyful meeting, full of hope and cheer.

But also yesterday, the cousin with Covid died after three weeks in the ICU. She was always the fun one, full of life and energy and gossip and interesting ideas for outings, so it's hard to imagine her stilled and silenced. Her husband, of course, is devastated, as are other family members and friends. I'm sad and distracted and angry at this stupid virus, though it's hard to know what to do with that anger.

Covid has required us to get comfortable with case counts and death rates and big scary numbers, but when the numbers hit home, they still hurt. It's as if we've all been standing in front of the firing squad for the last two years, uncertain whether the guns are aiming our way. Some will receive a reprieve, but for others, the reprieve will come too late.

So what can we do? I'll reach out one hand to congratulate my colleague on his new cancer-free life and I'll reach out the other to comfort those mourning the loss of a beloved family member, and somehow I'll hover between the two extremes, feeling both deeply and doing my best to carry on.

   

Dispatches from the first day of class

Twenty minutes until class begins and I am SOOOOO looking forward to seeing a room full of freshpersons on a cold dark January morning!!!!!  Except the room won't actually be full because who wants to take an 8 a.m. class? And one student will be on Zoom because of Covid quarantine, so that means I have to remember to turn on the camera, turn on Zoom, check the microphone, share the screen, and include the quarantined student in class discussion....How about if I just give up and go back to bed instead?

And now here we are in the middle of class and the Zoom link doesn't work inside Moodle. It worked fine yesterday! I can open up the Zoom link outside Moodle, but all I get inside Moodle is an error message. Nice! I have to email the Zoom link separately to my quarantining students and try to figure out the problem later. 

Am I allowed to refer to our Zooming student as quarantining? Does it violate the student's privacy? I've announced that the class Zoom link isn't intended to accommodate students who  just don't feel like getting out of bed and walking to class, but it is available to those with valid medical excuses, like a need to quarantine because of Covid, so even if I don't mention that Zooming students are in quarantine, their classmates will surely figure it out.

Everyone writes on the first day of class, not for a grade but to give me an idea of their writing and thinking skills. My first-year students are writing about a personal goal and some obstacles they might face in reaching that goal, and they're pretty united in wanting to improve on their academic performance from last semester (I clearly have some repeat customers in this class) while about half of them say they want to be their best self, in those exact words. If I were Oprah I might be able to help them with that, but all I can promise is to try to help them become better writers, which might come in handy if that best self ever needs to communicate. (At 8 a.m., I'd be happy if my second-best self showed up.)

About a third of the students on my roster didn't show up for class at 8, which is a bit alarming, but the 9:00 class did better--perfect attendance, plus an extra who wandered in a bit late. We later determined that he's on the waitlist and I was happy to admit him to the class, since I suspect that the amount of reading and writing on the syllabus will scare away a few students.

And if the reading doesn't scare them away, the writing might. What a horrible person I am to make students in a literature class look at a work of art and write a paragraph or two about what they see! I don't let them see the name of the work but you can view it here. When we meet again next Wednesday, we'll look at the work again and discuss how to start analyzing an  unfamiliar cultural artifact, and I'll try to discourage the secret hidden meaning approach to literary analysis. "The meaning isn't hidden," I'll tell them; "It's right there in front of your face, but sometimes you have to look at it a little sideways before it clicks."

Back in my office--two classes down, two more to go, but I could use a nap already. I'd like to wander down the hall to visit with a colleague, but she's on sabbatical this semester and so keeps not being there, lucky her. Who's going to step in and take care of my emergency chocolate needs? If the Professional Development committee had known how much I rely on this colleague when I desperately need a bite of chocolate, they never would have approved her sabbatical. 

But it's time for my 11:00 class, which seems crowded. How did 20 students get into a course limited to 18? Good thing I made extra copies of the syllabus!

It's my first time teaching the new sophomore seminar course so I spend a little time explaining to students why we felt the need to add this course to the general education curriculum: It's all about scaffolding. The sophomore seminar will reinforce the skills students learned in their required first-year courses (information literacy, writing, public speaking) while building a bridge toward the junior core class, which I'm teaching this afternoon. 

The sophomore seminar is supposed to be an interdisciplinary approach to a big question, so in my class (My Happy Place) we'll examine what connects people to specific places by reading and responding to place-based literature alongside some history, psychology, and science. Fun? I hope so, but then an English professor's idea of fun may not be the most reliable gauge.

Lunchtime, and yet another reason to be glad my husband has moved back home from Jackson: the man can make a sandwich! Homemade ciabatta bread, sliced turkey, cheese, and mustard--if that sandwich can't power me through my final class, nothing can. (Though a little chocolate right about now wouldn't hurt.)

Last class of the day! Five bright young English majors wondering why they're required to take a class called The Ethical Author. This is my dessert class--my end-of-the-day reward for all those 8 a.m. composition classes. Right now my English majors are writing about the role poets would play in their ideal society, a question that will loom large in our readings for the next couple of weeks. What is literature for, anyway? I'm eager to see what they say.

But mostly I'm happy for the chance to sit down and shut up. By the time I've gone over four different syllabi, I'm tired of hearing the same sentences come out of my mouth over and over, so I've changed things up bit: "I live in the woods, where we communicate by whispering messages into the fuzzy ears of woodland creatures. If you can't reach me after hours, you're talking to the wrong raccoon."

And now they're done writing so my teaching day is over. I'll take care of a few things in my office before heading out, and the really good news is that I don't have to make that 90-minute drive to Jackson every Friday afternoon but instead I can head straight home, where the most pressing issue this evening is whether to call that new squash-and-sausage dish squasage or sausquash. 

I miss teaching when I'm not doing it and I never feel more alive than when I'm with students, but at the end of the day, I'm worn out. Next week I'll be back in the classroom trying to add some new twists to the same old song and dance, but until then, it's squasage time!

(Though I really could use a little chocolate. Help?)

Of hats, masks, and splendors

Last night at the community performance of Handel's Messiah I noticed a group of teens wearing unusual headgear--floppy knit hats with floofy things hanging from them--but I did not scoff because (a) the hats weren't any more ridiculous those I often wore in public during my own ridiculous-hat stage; (b) these adolescents' presence at a long baroque musical event more popular with the white-haired crowd is something to celebrate; and (c) in addition to ridiculous hats, they wore face masks, which is more than I can say for many others. 

Masks were required for the event, but many in the crowd interpreted "required" loosely. Way up front I saw a group of about a dozen Mennonite teens covering their heads with tiny white bonnets and delicate white scarves, but not one of them was wearing a mask. Maybe it's a religious thing? Mennonites are supposed to avoid personal adornment, but a plain drab mask doesn't seem like much of an adornment. (Neither does a ventilator, but let's not go there.)

It felt really good to be out amongst people enjoying the kind of performance that provides an emotional boost at the start of Advent. I kept thinking of the hymn we sang in church Sunday morning, "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear," which looks forward to a time "When peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling." That's just what we all need right now: a bunch of ancient splendors being flung about as we run around with arms stretched out to catch them. 

I caught some splendors the other day from my amazingly talented Jackson neighbor Judy, whose hobby is making beautiful quilts for family, friends, and strangers. Yes, she's the sort of person who entertains herself by crafting hand-made quilts to donate to needy children she'll never meet, but this time she'd made a quilt featuring 60 friendship stars in honor of my upcoming 60th birthday. I wrapped myself in that quilt and felt surrounded by love. I wish I could walk around wrapped in that quilt all week long, but it's a little unwieldy and I would hate to drag such a splendid gift in the dirt.

Instead, I propose that we all put on our most ridiculous hats, crank up the holiday music, and run around catching splendors wherever they are being flung, because what's the point of flinging splendors if no one's around to catch them?

I love the backing fabric just as much as the pieced top.

 

Remarks on unremarkability

Final day of classes for the semester but who has the energy to celebrate? Today my students are submitting papers, viewing the last bits of films, and preparing for final exams, but all I want to do is lie down and sleep for a week or two, which is not consistent with the need to grade all those papers and proctor all those finals.

This has not been the most exhausting semester ever: I haven't been trying to teach while competing for a tenure-track job in my own department or undergoing cancer treatment or serving as faculty chair, nor have I been shackled to Zoom while teaching during a lockdown. It has, on the whole, been a pretty unremarkable semester, with a few difficult spots but no more stress or heartache than might be expected of a normal year. Last year, surviving a full semester under pandemic conditions felt positively heroic; this year it's just business as usual.

But how do we celebrate business as usual? Congratulations on having a mostly unremarkable semester! Hope your next semester is even more unremarkable! I'm just not feeling it. What this semester needs is a theme song:

Call me unremarkable;
call me so forgettable;
and it's unregrettably true
that business as usual won't fit in this meter--boo-hoo!

Yeah, that's bad, but not bad enough to be memorable. Just unremarkable, like this semester, which appears to be winding gently down, going out not with a bang but a yawn.  

All the ways I'm being horrible today (or most of them, anyway)

First, I'm making my first-year composition students find books--actual books!--to use as sources for their problem papers, and I'm even requiring that they find at least one book published by a University Press, and when they asked why, I told them about previous students who used children's books written on a third-grade level as sources in a college research paper, and when my current students pointed out that they would never do such a thing and it's not fair to make them suffer because of bad acts by past students, I said I know it's not fair--but you'll have to do it anyway.

And if that's not bad enough, I'm making them find--and read!--articles from peer-reviewed academic journals, and I even devoted time in class to showing them how to use our library research databases to find articles, and then I gave them 20 minutes of class time  to find academic journal articles, during which time I walked around the room answering questions and offering guidance--even to the student who had kept her hood pulled up earlier in class to hide the fact that she had earbuds in and therefore didn't have the first clue what she was supposed to be doing--and before the end of the hour I made each student show me a peer-reviewed academic journal article relevant to their topic, so that when their annotation and citation are due on Friday, they can't claim that they couldn't find any articles. 

And then when I received an email from a student wanting to schedule time to make up a midterm from two weeks ago, I agreed to do so provided that the student could provide some documentation excusing the absence, because the class attendance policy clearly states that while I do not take roll in that class or penalize students for absences, I also do not permit make-ups without an acceptable excuse, and I forgot that there was a midterm is not an acceptable excuse even in the current environment when we are being encouraged to cut students some slack because life is so darned difficult right now, and every time I hear that I have to bite my tongue to prevent myself from growling You want to talk about difficult? I taught a full semester while undergoing chemotherapy and radiation! If I could do that, you can remember to check the syllabus once in a while.

And the day isn't even half over! Who knows how horrible I'll manage to be by the end of the afternoon? 

Let 'em eat pawpaws

I'm sitting in my office scarfing down chunks of fresh pawpaw, thanks to my finicky Honors students. Our pawpaw harvest was not great this year but I had just enough to peel and slice and divide into little cups for my Honors Lit students, so they could get a taste of the sort of thing Inman might have eaten in the wild during his long trek to Cold Mountain. 

They were underwhelmed, to put it mildly. The pawpaws were ripe, fresh off the tree, soft and delicious, but two students didn't have the guts to try it, and many others took one bite and then dumped the rest in the trash. Did they at least have the courtesy to say thank you? No they did not. So I took the two untouched portions back to my office and ate them myself--yum!

Earlier, a student in my composition class told me that I'm the nicest professor she has, which inspired the response, "Great--now I'll have to do something mean just to prove that I'm not a pushover." Maybe I'll make them eat pawpaws.

In another class, students stare silently at their desks when I ask a question, avoiding eye contact as if it were lethal. That's the class where I have the most trouble remembering names, primarily because I never see their faces and they all appear to be variations on the same person--skinny athletes with long straight hair. Funny: overall, we have pretty good gender balance this year, but I have one class that's 75 percent male and another that's 90 percent female, and the women speak up so rarely in class that in my mind they've all merged into the same person. 

It occurs to me that I've broken one of the primary rules of pandemic teaching: masks required at all times inside buildings, and no food or drink in the classrooms. My students would have been happier if I hadn't brought them fresh pawpaws this morning, but chalk it up to a learning experience. At least they know what pawpaws smell like--and by the end of the day, so will everyone else in the building. 

Hot under the collard

I was reading a student essay that referred to "blue collard workers" and I suddenly recalled the fabulous collard greens served alongside equally fabulous smoked brisket in North Carolina last week, but sadly, my student wasn't writing about greens but about collars. Spelling errors aren't as nutritious as collards and brisket, but they're my bread and butter.

Ah, academe! With your annoying notices about late-afternoon Zoom meetings, your advisees reluctant to heed good advice, your bottomless pit of bad excuses! Yesterday afternoon I overheard a tutor trying to explain the function of the semicolon to another student and I thought there's no place like home! Sure, it's fun to be whisked away on a colorful adventure that tastes like brisket, but there's nothing more comforting than the gentle drone of professors' voices emanating from rooms full of sleepy students.

As of this moment I am finally caught up on the grading that piled up while I was away, so now I can look toward the future--classes to prep, essays to edit, meetings to schedule, and on it goes. I've been back two days and already I'm wondering when I can get away again. Last year at this time I was contemplating a semester with no breaks, no opportunities for travel, no enticing prospect outside my home and office and piles of work; this year we get a brief break two weeks from now and a longer one at Thanksgiving. Covid transmission is dropping in the area and campus case numbers remain very low, so things are starting to feel more normal.

Last year all I wanted was a return to normal, but now that I've tasted the brisket and seen the sights, I'm bored by normality and I want to get away. Unfortunately, the only way to break away is to work really hard to earn that break, so off I go once again to stamp out ignorance, one blue collard at a time.   

Notes from the IOF corner

Halfway through the first week of classes and I'm already worn out:

1. Textbook problems! Way back last spring I ordered a new composition text with readings, but the bookstore instead stocked the same text without the readings, and when I called the bookstore manager to get it straightened out so my students would have the text they need, he said well we have the correct text in stock but it just isn't listed as required for your class, which makes no sense since I ordered the correct text and marked it as "required." Now all the students who bought the wrong book have to take it back and exchange it for the right one.

2. Tech difficulties, not horrible but distracting all the same. I'm not using Zoom in classes this semester (unless...you know the drill) so starting class requires far fewer clicks than last year, but that doesn't mean everything is smooth sailing. I'm using a different type of online discussion in one class and I didn't get the settings quite right so none of my students could access it for today's discussion. I woke up in the middle of the night suddenly understanding what I'd done wrong and how to fix it, but I don't generally take my computer to bed so I couldn't do anything with it until this morning.

3. New masks! One style makes my glasses fog up so I can't see what I'm doing in class; the other style feels much flimsier but doesn't make my glasses fog up. It wears me out to have to make these life-or-death decisions every stinking day.

4. Emails! I'm not the only one having a rough start to the semester. I'm responding as quickly as I can but I sense a lot of anxiety among students who are panicking about every little thing. One student wanted me to summarize the entire plot of Homer's Odyssey, to which I responded, "You could easily go and read a plot summary online, but then you would miss out on the most valuable part of the learning experience: immersing yourself in an unfamiliar world and feeling your way around until it starts to make sense. If you feel lost, you're probably in the right place. It will become more clear the more time you spend there." I hope this is true.

5. I've been realizing for the past couple of years that my opinions and experiences are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the current academic climate. I try to stay up-to-date on what's happening in my field, but nevertheless I feel a steady but subtle pressure pushing me gently toward the Irrelevant Old Fart corner, and there's nowhere to go from there but out the door. This is the way the career ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

A finger in the dike

Finally, a resolution to our very fluid mask policy! Shortly after I posted yesterday, the Powers That Be issued a mandate requiring that masks be worn inside buildings on campus, starting today. This will replace the official [INSERT POLICY HERE] policy, which is a tremendous relief. A uniform mask policy will be less confusing and easier to enforce than a patchwork of separate policies differing across departments.

Like many professors, I'm glad I'm not at the University of Iowa right now, where the administration tried to prohibit faculty from even talking about masks or vaccines with students (read it here). According to Inside Higher Ed, the original order "said instructors 'may only make statements regarding mask usage or vaccinations in the context of course material discussions of health-related issues.'" If staying alive during a pandemic is not a health-related issue, I don't know what is.

In other teaching-related news, I finally found some new teaching shoes. They're ugly as sin, well deserving the term clodhoppers, but I ought to be able to stand up in them through four classes without massive foot and ankle pain. Gone are the days of cute teaching shoes! I'd rather be sensible than suffering.  

But maybe I can make up for it with some cute masks. The new mask policy is a finger in the dike of a very fluid situation, but until this flood dries up for good, I'm going shopping. 

Clodhoppers. Not cute.

Maybe I should smuggle a bulldozer into my office

This morning I zipped blithely along a stretch of highway admiring the new wall intended to prevent the kind of landslip that closed the highway two years ago. For two years I've spent a great deal of time watching the heavy equipment move piles of debris out of the way and replace it with that massive wall a quarter mile long, an entertaining and educational process that helped me while away the time until the temporary red light turned green and let me proceed on my commute to campus. Early-morning commutes usually resulted in a short wait, but during peak hours I could wait through two or three lights, with no convenient way to get around the blockage (until amphibious vehicles become readily available). Now the heavy equipment is gone, the barriers are down, and the highway is open in both directions--smooth sailing!

Some other long-term projects have not proceeded quite so smoothly. Lots of Covid-related delays have kept contributors from submitting revisions in a timely manner, but finally it appears that I have everything I need to complete the manuscript for the collection on teaching comedy that I've been working on for two years now. I have some work to do on the organization and the introduction, but if I work diligently for a week or two, I should be able to submit the revised manuscript to the publisher before classes start. That will be another barrier cleared off my road.

But a pothole arose in the path of the pedagogy-inflected essay I've been working on all summer. A few weeks ago I celebrated finishing the draft, and now I've revised it in response to readers' comments--but the journal I'd been aiming for is not currently accepting submissions. I need a Plan B--a publication aimed at non-specialists interested in poetry, history, race, and culture, one that also accepts footnotes. (I can delete the two footnotes if I have to, but it would hurt me.) Finding a venue has always been my least favorite part of academic writing, and it's really disappointing to find that the venue I'd had in mind is unavailable. Where do I go next? I'm stuck.

The other big obstacle keeping me from relaxing for the few remaining weeks of summer is the lack of direction about fall classes. My syllabi are in good shape but I can't put the finishing touches on anything until I know what the College will require regarding Covid precautions. Do I still need to set up a Zoom link for each class? Will I be required to offer class online for students who have to quarantine? Will we have a college-wide mask policy or are we on our own? Until the Powers That Be issue their official pronouncements, my whole preparation process is broken down by the side of the road.

But progress is being made. Today I asked the building services people to let me use the vacuum so I can start getting my office ready for fall. Right now an avalanche of books blocks my work space, but let me get the heavy equipment moving and soon I'll have the whole place set to rights. All summer I've been making incremental changes so small that it rarely looks like I've been working at all, but in the end they'll add up to smooth sailing into whatever lies ahead. 

Proceeding forward, prepared to pivot

I was feeling pretty good about fall classes until I went to a lunch meeting yesterday and kept hearing the word pivot. "We have to be ready to pivot on a moment's notice," they said, and I'm sure it's true but all this talk of pivoting makes me dizzy.

It was a great meeting--faculty and staff talking about what we'd learned from pandemic teaching and what techniques we'll hold on to. Everyone loves Zoom office hours, and I agree: students seem much more comfortable bringing their writing problems to me if they don't have to actually enter my office. (Why? My office isn't scary! I have toys!) Some methods of online discussion seem really helpful and I'll probably continue to use them, although not to the extent I did in the past year. Several people talked about how much they love teaching online from the comfort of home, which of course is irrelevant to my situation since I lack sufficient bandwidth to Zoom from home.

Everyone wants to see the end of masks in the classroom, but there were some notes of caution. The current policy is that unvaccinated people are supposed to wear masks on campus, but there's no enforcement so we're on the honor system. Our campus is collecting data on vaccination rates so we know that not everyone is vaccinated--and yet I haven't seen anyone wearing a mask on campus all month. Clearly, some unvaccinated people are not wearing masks, and while the highly contagious Delta variant is not yet running rampant in our area, it's only a matter of time.

Which is why we need to be ready to pivot. We're still waiting for the definitive word on masking policies for the fall semester, but meanwhile, I've been assuming that things will be pretty much back to normal. But it's entirely possible that Fall 2021 could become a repeat of Spring 2020: starting off normal but shifting to online or hybrid teaching at some point following a massive outbreak of Covid-19.

Better keep my dancing shoes handy--and stock up on Dramamine for the vertigo.

A wet and wild birthday bash

Big plans this summer? he asked, and I just looked around and said Being here. That's enough. 

Here in this case meant out in my grandkids' front yard where a host of energetic imps were running around throwing water balloons at each other. Getting wet has been a big part of the past few days even when water balloons weren't part of the picture: we're either getting soaked with sweat from heat and humidity or getting drenched by sudden massive downpours. When the kids went puddle-jumping after a storm, they ended up with more water inside their boots than outside.

We have eaten birthday cake, watched a bunch of kids trying to destroy a very sturdy pinata, and picked up the remains of a zillion broken water balloons. Big plans? Just being here is enough for now.

 

 

I need remedial training for atrophied social skills

Forget the Beach Body exercise class--that ship has sailed. (Sunk, more likely.) What I need right now, as my community emerges from Covid restrictions, is a remedial class on social skills. Call it Speak, Buddy!

Let's face it: social distancing has squelched many opportunities to exercise social skills. Small talk is awkward through a mask or across a plexiglass barrier, and Zoom meetings inhibit spontaneity, especially when they're recorded. Sure, you could offer up some witty repartee in the chat, but do you really want every off-hand comment coming back someday to haunt you?

Given all these barriers to casual communication, it's no wonder that social skills have atrophied. I used to converse easily with strangers in line at the post office, trusting my gut instincts about what to say to whom, but now I spend so much time second-guessing my gut that it seems to have closed up shop. Either I can't think of a way to break the ice or else I get stuck in an awkward conversation and can't seem to make it stop. And it's even more difficult with friends and family--do they really mean it when they ask how I'm doing, or are they just being polite?

To aid in successful re-emergence from our Covid cocoons, the Speak, Buddy! program will offer a variety of hands-on exercises designed to restore ease in social settings:

Speed Small Talk: Can't manage small talk anymore? Fearful that every attempt at inconsequential chat will trap you in conversational quicksand? Speed Small Talk exposes you to a wide variety of strangers carrying egg-timers. You may not feel capable of maintaining an hour-long conversation, but how about sixty seconds? With practice, you'll start gradually increasing the time limit until you can comfortably chat with a complete stranger for up to ten minutes. Best of all, the timer allows you to exercise your personal chat function while also assuring a painless release from deadly bores, intractable boasters, and Amway salesmen and their ilk.

The Gambit Game: Players move markers around a board and land on spaces designated for particular conversation contexts--the department meeting, for instance, or bumping into an old friend at the airport--and must play cards indicating the appropriate opening line for the designated context. Say you land on the "Baby Shower for a Colleague" space, and you hold only the following conversation cards: 

A. "Weather hot enough for you?"
B. "Are those plastic cups? I heard they cause birth defects!"
C. "Could this line possibly move any more slowly?"
D. "Goodness, you've grown!"

Of course it's always easiest to play the A card ("Weather hot enough for you?"), but then you have to hope to land on the "Child's Birthday Party" context to play D ("Goodness, you've grown!"). You wouldn't want to land on the "Dream Job Interview" space with nothing left to play but "Goodness, you've grown!"

The Really Relay: There's a big difference between "How are you?" and "But how are you--really?" Many a conversation has floundered in the gray area created by the various inflections of "really," and after a year coping with public suffering on a global scale, many of us have become accustomed to downplaying our own disasters because they seem so inconsequential in comparison to people who have lost their lives, livelihoods, or loved ones. How will we know when it's okay to admit our struggles and problems again? In this exercise, partners take turns asking "But how are you--really?" with various inflections until they get tired of saying "Fine--and you?" and start spilling their guts on what's really bothering them. Some participants may experience a dangerous side effect: they'll get so disgusted by the pettiness of other people's problems that they'll banish the word "really" from their vocabulary and give up entirely on trying to converse, but this is a small price to pay for permission to finally share our problems without feeling guilty that my ingrown toenail is not as serious as your aneurysm.

 

And there's more! Speak, Buddy! subscribers will hone the lost art of eye contact, memorize a list of foolproof conversational exits ("Sorry, I've got to water my begonias"), and master the finer points of initiating conversation in various unusual contexts (Q: When is it appropriate to accost the CEO of your company if you're so far down on the company organizational chart that you are essentially invisible? A: If you know CPR and he's choking to death). Subscribe today by picking up the phone and making a call. 

 

With your actual voice. 

 

Using words. 

 

If you haven't entirely forgotten how to do that.

 

But what will you say to the person who answers? Buy Speak, Buddy! today to find out.   

Just what we need for summer writing

So far this morning I've already written a chunk of prose toward an essay I've been thinking about for ages, an essay I could have started writing at any point in the past six months if the creative part of my brain hadn't been crowded out by all the concerns of pandemic teaching. With students gone and fall semester far away, I feel the way I did after finally finishing the PhD: as if a glacier has finally receded, allowing the underlying land to begin to bounce back. It may take a while to bounce back entirely, but in the meantime it feels really good to be writing again.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so, because we've had a larger than normal number of faculty members attending our weekly Writing Wednesday sessions in the library. Last year Writing Wednesday was cancelled because of social distancing requirements, but this summer we're meeting again face-to-face, seven of us spread around a large classroom, working on our own projects, separate yet together. We write without distractions, phones silenced and email ignored, and afterward we share the exhilaration of making measurable progress toward our writing goals. Last week we even ate lunch together at a picnic table outside the library. We're not entirely back to normal yet, but our spirits rise as the glacier recedes.

Last week I focused on writing down a bunch of ideas about the poem I'm trying to analyze, and I so thoroughly lost track of time that the end of our session arrived as a shock. Writing these initial notes, though, revealed a sticky problem: the next steps of drafting will be largely determined by audience and purpose. Do I want to aim this essay toward an academic journal, or do I envision a more casual, non-academic audience? Do I want to focus on theoretical issues and analysis of the poem or emphasize the implications for pedagogy? I wasn't prepared to make this decision last week so I decided to park the idea and give it some time to develop.

And here's the wonderful thing: if I give the creative part of my brain time and space, it will keep working even when I'm not paying attention. The answer arrived as if unbidden: Much of my experience with the poem arises from my attempts to break through my students' resistance, so the essay will necessarily be informed by pedagogy; however, more than anything I want readers outside academe to comprehend the power of this poem, which provides valuable insight for our present moment. So I guess I'm writing a pedagogy-inflected essay for a non-academic audience, if that makes any sense. At some point I'll have to figure out where to submit such a hybrid beast, but first I need to write it.

Writing Wednesday give me time and space to do that, but the most important thing it gives is permission--to ignore texts and emails, the demands of home maintenance and the needs of family members, students, administrators, and everyone else outside this room. Writing Wednesday stands like a barrier holding back the glacier of responsibility that always threatens to overwhelm the writing life. Some small part of me knows the glacier will inevitably return, but while it's in abeyance, we sit in silence and write.

A one-way trail is better than no trail at all

We fell in love with Hocking Hills on our first visit in 1997, and since then we've managed to hike the trails in and around Old Man's Cave at least once each summer--until last year, when everything shut down. Now the trails are open, but the brand-new visitor center is shuttered and all the trails are marked for one-way traffic, which can make it difficult to pursue some of our favorite routes. So we settled for a simple hike down to Old Man's Cave followed by a visit to Conkle's Hollow, where we found some spring wildflowers still in bloom and wood thrushes filling the gorge with song. It's good to get back to such beloved places.

Just stop me from reading my course evaluations next time, okay?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any change a teacher makes in response to complaints on student course evaluations will inspire a whole new set of complaints. 

I envy my colleagues who tell me they never read their course evaluations. I keep telling myself to ignore them. After all, there is literally nothing at stake for me--no more promotions, not much chance of competing for teaching awards, no fear of being fired for bad teaching. I am confident in my abilities and I generally have a good sense of what's working and what isn't, so the course evaluations do little more than reinforce what I already suspected. ("Her tests are hard"--right, I knew that, but they're a lot easier for student who actually do the reading.)

But then why do I obsess over the negative comments? They're not exactly overwhelming; in fact, our response rates for course evaluations have fallen so low that it would be ridiculous to take them very seriously. Last semester I had a class in which only two students responded to course evaluations. They said nice things, but that's just two students--what about the other 16?

And this spring semester I had two classes in which not a single student submitted a course evaluation. Okay, we were all exhausted at the end of the pandemic-teaching year and there's no reward for submitting evaluations, but I've never before had zero response from half of my classes. One of those classes had only four students enrolled but the other had 16, so I would have expected at least a few responses.

So I ended up with course evaluations from my two sophomore-level literature classes, but even there the response rate was right around 40 percent. Numbers and comments were mostly positive, but as usual, one negative comment sticks in my craw: the student complained that I was "rude." Why? Because I called on random students in the middle of class, expecting them to comment on the reading assignments.

Let me just briefly quibble with the word random: I didn't just grab the next student who happened to be walking down the hallway and demand that she tell me what she noticed about the difference between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson's line lengths; I called on students who were enrolled in a class in which they were expected to engage in discussion on specific works of literature. Whatever their reasons for registering in my classes, they were there for the purpose of studying literature, which is what I tried to get them to do. There's nothing random about that.

It's true that I called on various students in the middle of class, but that was intentional: I was trying to deal with students' increasing unwillingness to engage in class discussion. As long as I've been teaching, I've regularly received complaints on course evaluations stating that I need to engage more students in class discussion, and with the problem worsening under pandemic conditions, I took the bull by the horns and set out to call on every single student in my literature classes at least once a week. Sometimes I would go down the course roster and call on students to comment on the reading; sometimes I went row by row. When the gunners in the front row tried to dominate the conversation, I would ask for a response from further back, and I was often pleased to hear the interesting insights provided by students who wouldn't normally volunteer to comment. 

So the system worked--except when I called on students who hadn't done the reading. I might say something mildly admonitory like "Try harder next time," which a particularly thin-skinned student might interpret as rude, but the course evaluation complaint made it clear that the very act of cold-calling students in the middle of class is rude. 

On the other hand, I didn't get a single complaint about the need to engage more students in the discussion. That's a first! And I'll accept that as evidence that cold-calling is a valid response to students' unwillingness to engage. If they don't want to talk about literature, they should take a different class; the rest of us are gathered together non-randomly to discuss literature, and we're going to do that regardless of whether my methods are considered rude.

Saying goodbye to bullying arrows

So much can change in a few short weeks! I was on campus briefly yesterday to pick up my laptop and it felt great to be able to walk from my car to my building without a mask, but I didn't notice the most welcome change until I was ready to leave: all the little arrows on the floors and doors have been removed. No more one-way staircases! No more exit doors that are hard to access from my office! No more bullying arrows pointing out my intransigence on those rare occasions when I cheat and go out the entrance door!

I noticed a similar change at the grocery store: all the signs and arrows marking one-way aisles have been removed. Everyone was still wearing masks inside, but I no longer had to strategize how to get to that lone item in the middle of an aisle when I was on the wrong end to go the right way, if that makes any sense. I know those one-way aisles helped maintain social distancing, but many customers ignored them entirely, while those screaming arrows gave the tiny Puritans living inside my head one more reason to make me feel guilty every time I shopped.

Of course I know we're not out of the woods yet. My county is experiencing a sudden surge in new cases, although the total number is so low that it would have looked like good news a few months ago. On campus we're allowed to remove masks indoors in small groups as long as everyone present is vaccinated, but if anyone objects, we will gladly keep them on. I'll keep masking in other settings until the local vaccination rate rises to a more reasonable level, but it's a treat to be able to keep the mask off outside, especially in the face of an approaching heat wave.

Most of all, though, I'm delighted to say goodbye to all those bullying arrows. To celebrate my newfound freedom, when I leave my office today I intend to walk straight out the most convenient doorway, even if someone is coming the other way.  Take that, tiny Puritans! I'm walking wherever I want!