Remembrance of libraries past

A student came to me with a great idea. He was showing me the scholarly article he'd received in his e-mail inbox via interlibrary loan, and he said, "Why don't they have a place where all these articles were printed out and we could go read them right away instead of waiting for them to come to our e-mail?"

What a concept--a whole building dedicated to collecting texts and making them available to students! We could call it--a library! And it could have a big room dedicated to print copies of academic journals! Sort of like what we have in our own beloved library, except we don't have nearly enough space for all the specialized journals students might need, so we could go back to the days when dedicated students would drive two or three hours across the state to a whopping big academic library and then spend hours and hours in the dusty stacks photocopying articles from academic journals, only to drive back home to read them!

And if starting up an institution like that would be too much trouble, we could build a time machine and send my student back a few decades to research his paper. He'll be begging to return home within minutes, but how will he ever reach us? He'll never find a cell-phone signal!

Sick of exams already

What's with all the coughing? Sounds like someone's trying to hack up a lung, and those two guys seem to be coughing a call-and-response. Some sort of code? 

Oh look, the first cougher wants to go out for a drink of water. Sure sounds like he needs one, but is this just a ploy to allow him to look at his notes? 

How would I distinguish between a real cough and a fake cough? I don't generally bring a stethoscope to class, and I did not get a PhD in literature so I could become the Cough Police.

And now the other coughing guy is nonchalantly leaving the room without a word. Maybe he wants to look up that important bit of video on the course management system. Too bad I closed those links five minutes ago.

Only 20 minutes in and one student is already turning in his paper. Does he realize that there are questions on both sides of the page?

Now the coughing guys want to rummage in their backpacks for tissues. What if a clever student prepared a box of tissues with notes written in tiny print on each one? And then what if the professor felt a sneeze coming on and reached for the student's tissues?  (No, I don't want to be the tissue police either.)

40 minutes in and only a few students are left. None of them are coughing, sneezing, blowing their noses, or asking to leave the room. They're just writing. That's what I like to see.

Now I have a big stack of exams sitting on the desk, all of them thoroughly coughed on. How many germs can fit on the head of a pen? Now I'm suddenly hoping that all those coughs were fake. (If I find a chunk of lung on any of those papers, I quit.)

A+ in Mask-Juggling

In my office this week I have met with students sincerely attempting to improve their writing and others desperate to offer excuses about why their writing stinks, when sometimes it really doesn't. I have felt the need to inform students that due dates matter, that they are still responsible for the material even if they neglected to complete the reading assignments, and that "that" is not a verb--and I've had the pleasure of telling a very nervous student that he's a good writer regardless of what anyone may have told him in high school.

This week I have laid hands on students more than usual: a heartfelt hug to a student who is withdrawing for medical reasons, and a tug on a set of headphones that were preventing a student from being fully present in class. That incident could have gone very badly in a variety of ways, but in the moment I couldn't think of another way to get the student to take the quiz I was trying to hand him.

With one student I've expressed sympathy for a death in the family, and then with the next I've had to put on my Mean English Professor gaze and deliver a stern sermon on the importance of taking responsibility for one's actions. It's hard to shift from one persona to another in a short span of time--maybe I need a set of masks to make the switch more seamless. The problem is that I don't always know which Me the students need when they come into my office, and switching masks in the middle of a session might be awkward.

The hardest part of my week was meeting with a student facing a really serious and life-changing problem just a few minutes before class, an encounter that left me feeling bereft, but then I had to go and face a whole room full of students who needed a whole different Me of the non-bereft variety. Where can I find a Competent Teacher mask? 

But now office hours are over. Time to take off the mask, put my feet on the desk, and turn my attention to the next urgent task. (Close the door on the way out, would you?)
 

Birth of a conversationalist

I was talking on the phone with my three-year-old granddaughter, who wanted to know what happened while we were canoeing (flipped the boat) and whether we got wet (yes) and then "How many wet?"

Very many wet. Every wet that it was possible to get. We got all the wet.

What charmed me about this conversation was not just her creative use of grammar but the fact that it was a real conversation, with two people asking questions and listening to answers and following up. For a long time our phone conversations were fairly one-sided and monosyllabic, but suddenly she's become an adept little conversationalist. How did this happen?

Of course she gets lots of practice. She's at the stage when she likes to give voice to her toys, making stuffed animals or toy trucks or Lego bricks talk to each other at great length. It's delightful to watch a small person learn to use language to form connections with a community, a skill I suppose most human people possess.

But then why do so many lose that skill as they age? I have students who don't know how to converse with me, which is perhaps understandable since I'm this big scary red-pen-wielding professor (even when my pens use green ink), but many of them don't seem to care about conversing with each other, except through their smart phones. I've been told that today's digital natives possess all kinds of finely honed communication skills, but if that's so, why is it so difficult sometimes to get them to respond to a simple Hello?

I realize that this complaint marks me as an old grump grumbling about kids these days!  But I'll tell you: one small child asking how many wet tells me more about the human family and our relationship with language than dozens of blank stares from texting students.

When greatness offsets mediocrity

One of the rare blessings of teaching college students is that every once in a while I get to be present at the birth of greatness, and sometimes I even get to assist. That happened recently when a student gave a presentation and then led the class in a discussion that left me beaming silently in the back of the room. "What you have is a rare gift," I told the student, "but that means you have a responsibility to develop that gift and use it to make the world a better place." (I'm allowed to say such sappy things because who else is in a position to do so?)

I'm basking in the afterglow of that class as I try to deal with some less rewarding student-centered experiences: the complaining student who tracked in a carpet of dried leaves all over my office floor; the promising student who turned in an uncharacteristically inadequate paper and then dropped off the face of the earth; the consistently tardy student who laughed and said, "I'm only five or ten minutes late most days!" Somehow, that doesn't make it better.

For anyone with a tendency to crash and burn, this is the time to do it--but this is also the time when I'm seeing some hard work pay off in improved writing, interesting research, and compelling presentations. While the crash-and-burners generally require more one-on-one attention, more grief and anguish and patience and work, the other students provide an energy boost just by walking in the room.

And then when I get that rare student who can move the class to a whole different level--it just doesn't get any better than that.