Overwhelmed? Just a bit

Today I had to explain to my upper-level literature students the meaning of bits in the Zora Neale Hurston story "The Gilded Six-Bits." 

I am definitely getting too old for this.

And too tired. I went home exhausted last Friday, worked all day Saturday and part of Sunday, and have been scrambling today just to avoid falling hopelessly behind on this week's work. To actually get ahead, I'd need a whole extra day in the week--and then I'd probably just sleep the day away. 

Part of this frenzy of activity involves preparation for the three days of class I'll miss after my surgery. I've copied texts, written group work prompts and reading quizzes, provided contexts, goals, and discussion questions for the wonderful colleagues who will be covering for me, and tried to anticipate any problem that might arise. All this advanced preparation will pay off when I spend a few days not thinking about classes, but at the moment it's a lot.

Another task bogging me down right now is the need to pack up my office in the moldy building. Every time I'm in there I fill another box or two, but I keep finding new deposits of ick. Today, a full two months after I discovered mold growing on my carpet and a month after the College conducted in-depth cleaning and installed heavy-duty dehumidifiers throughout the building, I found a row of books on the bottom shelf that were wet to the touch, some of them moldy and some warped from moisture. Working in there more than a few minutes makes me cough and sneeze and stuffs up my sinuses, but I'm only about half done with the packing job. I keep thinking of Thoreau's image of his townsfolk who inherited property and spent their lives "well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing a large barn." That office weighs on me but I can't just set down the load and walk away. Someone has to deal with all those books.

So I truly have no time for blogging or walking or photography or fun, but nevertheless I have shamelessly indulged in all these activities in the past week. It's required. Literally: last week's leader at a campus workshop challenged each participant to write down one leisure activity unrelated to our work that we would promise to do before the next meeting, and then he collected the notecards. Will there be a quiz at the end? At any rate I felt obliged to do some leisure activities, which makes it no so much leisure as work, but whatever. The photography walk I'd promised myself was difficult to squeeze in between thunderstorms, but somehow I managed to get it done, though there wasn't a whole lot to photograph aside from pawpaws and standing waves in my creek where no standing waves ought to exist at this time of year.

But I got out of the house and away from my work and looked at pretty things, and now my whole house smells like pawpaws. They're not particularly abundant this year but the ones we've harvested are fat and juicy, a benefit of our unbearably wet, muddy summer. Maybe the only benefit. 

I mentioned the pawpaws to my students and few of them knew what I was talking about, but if I brought in pawpaws and sold them for two bits each, they'd all go hungry. 

Doing my breast--er, best--to be transparent, but not too transparent

The next question, of course, is what to tell my students--and when.

Seventeen years ago when I was fighting an entirely different type of cancer with a treatment plan requiring radiation every weekday for a month and chemotherapy every three weeks until Thanksgiving, I knew from the start that I would have to tell my students something. My hair started falling out during the first week of the semester so I couldn't pretend everything was fine. Besides, I had to arrange online activities for chemo days, so from the start I enlisted my students' help in making all the logistics work right.

This time is different. No chemo, no hair loss, and not much chance that I'll look visibly ill before the surgery. Afterward I'll have to take a little time off, but how much do my students need to know about why?

The good news is that the lumpectomy itself will be on October 5--in the middle of our four-day fall break. I plan to stay off campus that whole week and I've already found colleagues to cover my Wednesday and Friday classes. The Thursday capstone students were already scheduled to have a research day in preparation for their annotated bibliography assignment, and I trust them to use the time wisely even if no one is in class taking attendance. 

But I have to tell my classes something about why I won't be on campus and why I won't necessarily be responsive to emails, and I need an explanation more compelling than because I'll be taking really great drugs.

I don't remember how much I told my students last time--did they know what kind of cancer or where? Would they even know the meaning of endometrial? I think I kept it vague, but I don't remember. 

This time I'm telling them that I need to have a medical procedure that will keep me off campus and mostly inaccessible for a week but it's nothing to worry about. Is that too vague? I mean, I don't want students thinking about my breasts, and I certainly don't want them thinking about the fact that one of the pre-op procedures involves inserting a tiny radioactive seed into my breast ACK OOF YIPES. I'd rather not think about that myself so I'm certainly not telling anyone else about it. (Except you. You I can trust.)

Most of all I don't want my students thinking about me at all. I want them to think about poetry and fiction and nature and culture and history, but it's impossible to do that when someone is poking a radioactive breast in your face. So I'll shut up about the breast.  

So we've agreed on a plan: be as vague as possible; focus on the course material; reassure them about the positive prognosis. Don't even breathe the word breast. (Breast breast breast breast breast.) 

The end is near(ish)

Well that is absolutely the LAST time I'm teaching on Labor Day, harrumph, and you'd better believe I reminded my colleagues of that fact repeatedly yesterday. Laboring on Labor Day is such a tradition here that it's not worth noting its oddness, but I'm definitely eager to abandon the tradition when I retire.

Also: that moment when I'm standing in front of a room full of students attempting to draw a connection between today's reading and something we discussed last week, but it suddenly occurs to me that the previous reading I'm referring to was discussed in an entirely different class. Oops. Never mind. It's nice to make connections across classes, such as when one of my capstone students brings up an example of witty repartee from the Jane Austen class, but when I'm the only one in the room who has been present in both discussions, the connection is broken.

I will not miss that feeling of never getting caught up, the knowledge that the to-do list never ends because the minute I cross off one task, two more will crop up to take its place. And I won't miss the regret that arises from the sudden realization that I've required students in two different classes to turn in a major assignment on the same day. What moron wrote this syllabus?! Oops, that would be me.

I won't miss the necessity of mastering new classroom technology. We now have access to Respondus, a lockdown browser helpful to faculty who want to allow students to use laptops in class but don't want to hand over their writing process to AI. We will all need training on Respondus--except for those of us who will be sashaying out the door at the end of the semester. I long ago exceeded my quota of new technologies to master. Time for someone else to pick up the baton.

But first I have to get through this semester, and we've barely begun the third week. How many days left they ask me, but who's counting? I'm a word person, not a number person, so the answer has to be something like not enough days to complete everything I need to do. 

Ask me again after I've crossed a few more tasks off my list. The end isn't quite near, but I can feel it getting closer by the minute.  

Bonfire of the inanities

We've heard the legend of the professor so disgusted with his lot that he burned his bridges when he left academe--by burning a pile of books in the middle of campus. This happened before my time so I can't attest to the truth of the story, but I've heard from people who claim to have witnessed the feat and I believe the prof in question was capable of making such a dramatic gesture. 

I thought of that prof this morning while I was clearing out the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and found years of student course evaluations and annual reviews, from back when we did it all on paper. Do I want to know what my students thought of my teaching in 2003, or what my department chair wrote on my annual review in 2007? Not really. Off to the shredder!

Except for that one set of student evaluations containing comments so toxic that I persuaded the provost to remove them from my tenure file. Yes: in the semester before I came up for tenure, a first-year composition class sat in the classroom together writing course evaluations and somehow several students wrote very similar complaints stating that I shouldn't be allowed to wear short sleeves in class because the big hairy mole on the back of my arm was so disgusting that it prevented students from learning. Coincidence or conspiracy? Either way, I'd like to do something more satisfying than sending those evaluations to the shredder. Bonfire?

I couldn't bring myself to burn books, but I feel like lighting a match every time I run across a book with mold growing on the pages. What else would I toss into the bonfire? My old tenure file? A pile of instruction manuals for various software programs I've been required to master over the years? The carpet where the mold festered? Probably I ought to burn all my angers, resentments, and grudges so that I can proceed into retirement free of the burdens of past pain.

And what shall I do with the things I don't want to take home but don't want to burn? I'm resolved to hold a Giveaway Day, when I pile up the books, toys, and random coffee mugs I don't need at home and invite all and sundry to saunter in and grab what they want. I'll keep my stained-glass kaleidoscope, of course, and my Jane Austen action figure, but do I really need a Barbie rubber stamp or miniature Etch-A-Sketch? Surely someone would gladly take these things off my hands.

But first I need to sort through all the things and pack up what has to go home. Every once in a while I stumble upon buried treasure, but when instead I find toxic waste, I'm grateful I don't keep matches in my office.  

 

Who chooses shoes--and how?

Am I walking into the classroom today wearing my blue, pink, and white Brooks trainers? Yes I am--because they coordinate with my outfit, because they're comfy, and because they look cheery, as if my feet are smiling.

You will note two criteria missing from my footwear selection process: I don't wear shoes to please administrators, and I don't care what students think. I'm not convinced that students even notice my teaching clothes, though I do recall the time when I served on the tenure and promotion committee and read a comment on a course evaluation in which a student expressed indignation because the prof's shoes didn't match his belt. 

 

Listen: if we had to deny tenure to every prof who'd ever made a fashion faux pas, we'd have nothing but empty classrooms. 

I look around and don't see anyone here whose clothes would compel a student to stomp out of class and demand a refund, but nevertheless last week an administrator way above my pay grade castigated us all for dressing too casually. Why? Because casual dress will repel prospective students.

Wait--aren't profs supposed to look a little--um, eccentric?  

I know the demographic cliff is real and competition is stiff for the shrinking pool of high school seniors. I don't want to be responsible for alienating a potential student when increasing enrollment is so vital.

But do we really want students who make massive life-changing decisions based on how profs dress?

The answer, I'm afraid, is yes. We need to help students develop the critical thinking skills that will empower them to make decisions based on more reasonable criteria, but we'll never get those students if they object to my shoes.

I'm wearing them anyway. Because some things are more important than a hypothetical visiting student's fashion hangups. Like shoes that make my feet smile.

Friday poetry challenge (late): Back to the dorm, almost

What would it be like to live on campus again? Unlike the incoming class of 1980, today's students move into the dorm with plentiful bags and boxes--and wide-screen TVs, and gaming systems, and emotional support pets. In my freshman dorm, all it took to blow a circuit was for too many students to run their blow-dryers at the same time. We traveled light because we had to.

And I'll have to travel light when I move back on campus tomorrow. Our driveway could serve as a film location for a post-apocalyptic nightmare, but it certainly isn't suitable for driving. My husband's and son's cars are stuck on this side of the creek and the only way to get out to my car is to walk downhill through mud and clamber down a five-foot drop onto loose rocks and more mud--and then do everything in reverse on the return trip. This is dangerous enough when I'm dressed casually, but I certainly don't intend to practice my mountain-goat act while dressed for teaching Monday morning. 

So I'm moving to campus. (Temporarily!) I'll pack up my teaching clothes and make the perilous climb down the hill on Sunday afternoon, and then my husband will drop me off on campus, where I'll stay in the guest apartment in one of the classroom buildings. It's bigger and more private than my freshman dorm room and I won't have to walk up the hall to shower, but in two ways it closely resembles my freshman experience: I'll take with me only what I can pack in one overstuffed bag, and I won't have access to a car. I may even end up eating in the cafeteria!

I guess I'm grateful to have somewhere to lay my head down and cry while the contractors figure out what to do about the ramp leading up to our bridge, but I really hadn't planned to live on campus during my final semester before retirement. Instead of preparing to teach, I ought to be attending freshman orientation, playing ice-breaker games, and learning the words to the alma mater. 

As it happens, I already know the words to the alma mater, which begins, "Time-honored Marietta, thy walls to us are dear." Not dear enough to make me want to live within them, but beggars can't be choosers.  

What I really need is a cheer squad. Think how much more motivated I would be if energetic young people waved pom-poms to cheer on my every step!

Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar,
If you know what "bits" are, stand up and holler!
If you're a professor, what're you doing here?
Go back home while we stand up and cheer!

Give me an O! 

         Give me a U! 

Give me a C!

Give me an H! 

What's that spell?
OUCH!
What's it mean?
Ancient knees can't play this game!
What do we care?
Not a whit!
What are we gonna do?
Play it anyway!
O-U-C-H OUCH OUCH OUCH

Well I guess I won't be pursuing a second career as a writer of school cheers. But anyone who wants to give it a shot should do so in the comments.

What I wish I could tell the newbies

As I've been organizing New Faculty Orientation for the half dozen incoming faculty members we'll welcome this Friday, I'm reminded of a post from a few years ago called "Old Faculty Re-Orientation," a list of things I wish someone had told me when I first started teaching here:

1. Where to park. (Seriously--I was an adjunct, so I was not included in New Faculty Orientation, and the sum total of my instruction in parking was "You can park along any of the streets around campus," which led to my first-ever parking ticket, which I could not well afford on an adjunct's paycheck--which, by the way, has not increased in the entire 15 years since I've been teaching here. I'm grateful I no longer earn an adjunct's paycheck, but why are we still paying today's adjuncts the same amount per course that I earned 15 years ago?)

2. Who was sleeping with whom. (Information that would have made some department-meeting discussions much more transparent.)

3. That colleagues may become friends but they're always colleagues first, and some so-called friends will eagerly sacrifice friendship on the altar of professional advancement. (Social Relations 101 in the School of Hard Knocks.)

4. The Law of Conservation of Curmudgeonliness on Campus: the minute one career curmudgeon retires, another rises up to take his or her place. (And someday I might become that person!)

5. That some day I would be mourning the loss of a long-lived curmudgeon whose notorious name is totally unknown to my younger colleagues. (Aging 101 in the School of Hard Knocks.)

6. That the wonderfulness that sometimes happens inside the classroom can make all the outside-the-classroom awfulness worthwhile. Or, to quote a former colleague of mine: "The students! The students!" (He was a little drunk at the time so maybe you had to be there.) 

 

That was my list in 2015. What would I add today?

First, I'd love to give new faculty members the secret cell-phone number they can use to text a particular administrator, which is the key to getting that person to read and respond to email messages, but if too many people get hold of that number then the person on the other end will be buried in new text messages and thus unlikely to pay attention to mine. Besides, I object to this roundabout method of getting a response and I don't want to feed the beast. Except when I really need a response.

Second, I'd like to provide new faculty with a list of the people who can be trusted to have their backs and those who can't, but the Master Backstabber File seems to have been corrupted. Better, maybe, for newbies to find out for themselves. How can they earn a degree from the School of Hard Knocks if they never get any hard knocks?

Finally, the reason we're here--The students! The students!--is as rewarding as ever, but when we're not feeling the rewards, it's always helpful to know where to find some cake. (In the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence. We've misplaced all the magic wands that instantly solve pedagogy problems, but we can usually provide a nice piece of cake.)

What do you wish someone had told you when you were a newbie? 

Friday poetry challenge: Excavating buried treasure

I found buried treasure in my campus office yesterday, and it would be selfish not to share. 

I've been clearing out a filing cabinet and sending piles of documents to the shredder, mostly dating from the time before electronic everything. A two-foot-tall pile of student advising folders: gone. Hard copies of old syllabi, quizzes, and handouts--gone. A bulging folder labeled bad papers and a thinner one labeled good papers--gone. Hard copies of evidence from ancient plagiarism cases--gone. What's the statute of limitations for a plagiarism case from 2006? 

I quickly leaf through the files to remove paper clips and I see lots of names I don't recognize. I remember the students in the messier plagiarism cases and even more from the good papers file, but most of the names evoke not an iota of recognition. In the bad papers file I glance at a few opening lines, but they all sound like this one: "The surroundings that go on in the world today hurt many Americans; various people have their own way of living and their own thoughts of behavior." Gold star to anyone who can identify the topic of that paper. 

But hidden among the unmemorable and outdated files are a few items I can't discard. Years ago a student illustrated a handout introducing Baudrillard to literature classes, back when discussing Baudrillard was a thing, and while I haven't used the handout in years and I'll certainly never use it again, I'm keeping the student's drawing. 

And I'm keeping a paper that served as an excellent example of the Bumper-Sticker Essay--a feast of vague generalizations supported only by slogans from the NRA. I love the fact that it repeatedly refers to guns as "utensils," which makes me wonder whether I ought to stash a Luger in the kitchen amongst the spatulas.

I've set aside for further consideration a folder full of old transparencies for overhead projectors, including the ones I used in the teaching demonstration that won me this job. Mingling within the same crowded folder are a photograph of three space aliens from some cheesy B-movie, a detailed portrayal of the Great Chain of Being, a drawing of Abe Lincoln's top hat, and a photo of Charles Whittlesey, a noted geologist who surveyed the Indian Mounds in Marietta in 1837 (and also a distant relative of my mother). I don't know what to make of these oddities but I can't let them go without a thought.

The treasure I can finally share is an email from a student defending his decision to cheat in my class more than 20 years ago. I think this was in Postcolonial Literature Survey, back when I was still giving multiple-choice reading quizzes--five simple questions that anyone who had done the reading could easily answer. On the first quiz I thought a particular student had looked at a classmate's answers, so for the next quiz I made three versions. Sure enough, this student's responses were incorrect for his version of the quiz but correct for his classmate's version. I sent him a very brief email suggesting a meeting, and in response he sent me a screed two and a half pages long, a classic of defensive rhetoric. Here are a few excerpts, with distinctive syntax and spelling retained:

Here's the deal. I did not do my reading for this week. When we took the quiz, I was trying to answer to the questions until the girl sitting in front of me raised her quiz to check on her answers....This is when I decided to write down the answers she had on her paper thinking I might have a better chance to not get a zero....

Just like most students (I presume), I from time to time might have used the homework of somebody else before class to turn in one of mine. But I don't think this is dishonesty because most students do the same....

Now as for possibility that this behavior might be a usual habit for me, I would just like to let you know that I always sit in the front row when I'm in class (this semester, your class being the expection because I came late the first day).....

I'm an honest person and I don't believe in getting out of college with a degree without being able to show some degree in professiency in the subjects I studied as a major, minor or else. I'm ready to take any test you would like me to do in any subject I took so far to attest this.

If you see I did this regretable act for this quiz, it's for the following reasons: first of all in my opinion, this is just a quiz. Second, as I told you, I don't care too much about this subject I'm taking because hopefully, it will never help me to an important degree for any of my possible future careers....

I have high respect for the  subject you are teaching but I don't see a direct connection for me in it when it comes to giving me a job in the future....

[Deleted long paragraph about how hard the student had to work to get to college.] 

I regret this incident happening because now at least you will not see that and it's just as if all my efforts where waisted. And for what???? A quiz! 5 questions not even important in the sence that they don't even require any critical thinking, any analysis or anything related to the use of our brains to solve, create or investigate. The only think I needed to do was to read the book!!!!!!!!! I did not have time to do this and I sincerely regret not doing so. I thought about guessing the answers (actually you can see that on the first question) but I was like "Hell! this is not a big deal...it's just a quiz and this is not very important stuff!"....

I hope this will not have any direct consequences on my scholarships because I can not afford the tuition fees. (I'm almost laughing about it because that would be really odd and funny to loose all that work for something this insignificant for me)....

And on it goes.

The student was right about a few things. It's true that the quiz required no critical thinking, and that's one reason I moved away from multiple-choice reading quizzes and started instead giving questions requiring some analysis. It's also true that all he had to do was read the book, but that would have taken more time than writing a lengthy email defending his right to cheat.

What ever happened to this student? No idea. The name means nothing to me now, but he was perfectly suited to any career requiring the construction of irate screeds--a skill AI may have made obsolete. 

Just like me! 

So many obsolete files sent to the shredder! What will be left of me when my office is empty?

"I've piles
of files
to shred,"
I said,
a mound
I'm bound
to toss--
no loss!
I'll take
a break
to read
a screed--
a mess
express-
ing heat.
(The deets
long gone.
Doggone!)
I'll trash
this stash
of stuff,
enough
to force
a horse
to choke--
no joke!
And then
I'll pen
a note.
I quote:
"Retired."
Inspired?
Agree
with me:
attempt
to empt-
y drawers.
No more
to say.
Away
I'll wend.
(The end.)

That sudden abrupt stop seems appropriate for a career heading inexorably toward the exit, but I'd love to see some more poetry on my way out the door. Who will sling some rhymes?    

 

Just a tiny sampling of the treasures I've amassed.

 

Take Your Maggot to Work Day?

When I first arrived at Marietta College, the English department offered courses focusing on the concepts of tragedy and progress but nothing on comedy or nature, and while some African American texts were included in survey courses, we offered no course fully dedicated to the subject. The first thing the department asked me to do was to design a course on African American Lit, which became a favorite. No one ever asked me to design courses focusing on comedy or nature, but I did it anyway. And now I will conclude my 26-year tenure here by teaching, in my final semester, African American Lit, Concepts of Nature, and a senior capstone focusing on comedy. It feels right to end with my three favorite teaching topics.

Other courses I've designed over the years have been more ephemeral: a Sports Literature class designed for remedial writing students; a Postcolonial Survey that I taught many times before it died for lack of enrollment; a condensed course on humor writing that died with our short-lived attempt at offering a January term; and a course focusing on literature of place that enabled my all-time favorite teaching experience--taking the California Literature class on a Spring Break tour of California, where students gave oral presentations on authors in places they wrote about. 

I hope my contributions to diversifying our offerings have made a difference, but I won't mourn if they die in my absence. Students' interests change and new instructors bring different areas of expertise, so the curriculum will evolve with or without me, which is fine. Change is good! Even small changes in existing courses can open doors to new insight.

Yesterday, for instance, while working on the Concepts of Nature syllabus, I came up with a new grouping of poems that made me laugh out loud. I've given up on the anthology I used for years; many pieces are outdated and students often refused to buy the book anyway. I'm still assigning a novel and novella, but in place of the anthology, I'm assembling pieces available online or via pdfs. Freed from the limits of the anthology, I've come up with way too many readings, so now I have the delightful task of winnowing the list and putting readings together in ways that will inspire interesting discussion.

Early in the semester we talk about the relationship between people and animals, and in one class period I'll ask students to discuss four poems: Walt Whitman's "I Think I Could Turn and Live with the Animals"; James Wright's "A Blessing"; Robinson Jeffers' "Vulture"; and Yusef Komunyakaa's "Ode to the Maggot." What a progression: from "I love animals!" to "Animals love me!" to "Animals will eat my carcass when I'm dead, and that's okay!" Maybe the class should sponsor a "Take your maggot to work" day. A colleague from the biology department is auditing the class--maybe she can dig some up for us. Wouldn't students relish an opportunity to cuddle with maggots?

I'm joking, I think. I mean, if I want to bring in examples of every animal we read about, I'll have to find a reliable source for weasels, wolves, bucks, herons, and whales, among others. And, sadly, we won't be able to visit all the natural landforms we'll read about; I'm afraid the classroom can't quite accommodate Mt. Katahdin, Kilauea, the Pacific Ocean, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

But what fun we'll have on those imagined journeys. All journeys must eventually end, but I intend to make this last leg of my teaching career a wild, wonderful ride through courses I love to teach--just one last time. I won't even complain if some maggots want to come along for the ride.

Getting the machine moving again

Mouse clicks, computer blips, quick checks with a colleague on items that need her input--these are the sounds of summer break moving swiftly toward its close, the sounds of deadlines looming and colleagues making decisions that dump work on my back, the sounds of the great education machine being prodded back into action.

Persistent piercing beeps from a bit of equipment in the moldy office building--why won't someone put that thing out of its misery? My office door sticks, swollen with moisture, and I've brought along a student worker (tall) to lift down books from the top shelf where the moisture is thickest. The books are slightly damp but don't appear to be moldy, and the tall person says the top of the shelf looks dusty, with some black smudges in the farthest corner. I'd like to take a look at my framed diploma and awards to see if they're moldy on the back, but they're hanging too high for my tall helper. The cleaning crew will have to take them down when they're working to de-moldify my office.

I fetched some undamaged books and took home my regalia plus the lovely teal-and-midnight shawl a retired colleague knitted for me years ago, a shawl that, unfortunately, I had left draped on a chair where mold patches grew. The shawl can be cleaned and the regalia shows no signs of damage, but I left it hanging outside in the sun all afternoon Saturday just in case. A hot, dry day with a light wind and plenty of sunshine can work wonders, or that's what I hope.

Mold makes no sound at all, creeping into dark, damp spaces and establishing invisible outposts before we're aware that we've been invaded. It would be much easier to manage if it came charging in accompanied by bagpipes, but apparently the universe thrives on the element of surprise.

The rest of campus remains mostly quiet, but here and there I encounter pockets of activity. The clock is ticking and the to-do list is calling, which would be fine if new items didn't keep getting added. (Surprise!)

I'm done preparing for New Faculty Orientation but suddenly I have to add a very recent hire to the list and replace a presenter who can't attend--and oops, I'd better go ahead and order lunch. You can't require people to meet for seven hours straight without feeding them.

Syllabi for my two fall courses are coming along, but classes start four weeks from today (!!!) and suddenly I have to add the senior capstone to my schedule, thanks to a long-delayed shift in staffing. I taught the capstone two years ago so I can recycle my previous syllabus, with updates to account for changing conditions. How do I teach a senior research class in the age of AI? I guess I'm about to find out.

And while my to-do list grows, some habitual tasks fall away. Normally in July I'd be working on my annual review, but what's the point of filling out a pile of forms to prove my worth as an employee when I'm retiring in December? And I've completed what I hope will be the last department assessment task of my career. I also set up an assessment plan for the grant I'm administering, but all the assessment activities will take place after I pass on leadership of the grant to another colleague. Yes: assessment is slinking out of my life the same way mold slinks in--unheralded, sans bagpipes.

In the quiet of the library I click and the computer blips and the colleague confers and we slowly, steadily, quietly get the gears of the great machine moving again. My final semester of teaching, already full of quiet surprises and promising more. I hope they are the happy kind and not more mold.  

Breathing, not quite easily

I was all set to teach my Nature Writing class right on time Saturday but nature got in the way--thunder and lightning and rain so heavy that I had to sit in my car in the parking lot waiting for a break in the deluge. I used an umbrella, but nevertheless I spent the next three hours walking around on wet feet. The class was great, though, and the rain stopped just in time for us to go outside for an observation activity, stepping out the door into what felt like a sauna turned to Broil. But the good news is the wildfire smoke had dissipated.

Friday morning I had walked out the door of my hotel room in Columbus and immediately abandoned my plans for a nice walk in a lovely garden. The sun was a dim hazy disc, like a fuzzy felt circle glued on gray; the heavy air tasted acrid and made my eyes gritty and my head dull. From the window of my son's room on the sixteenth floor of The James, I saw buildings a block away fading into invisibility. My son was released from the hospital under strict orders to stay indoors. What do we do when the very air feels hostile?

But I got him home and we stayed indoors and awaited the rain, which arrived on Saturday as expected, with winds whipping trees around and pushing my car across a road rippling with rain falling too fast to drain away. And then I stopped by my office on campus to pick up some things and found another indication of nature's resilience: blotches of mold growing on the carpet. I've been working in the library all summer because my office in the classroom building gets damp in the summer, but never before has that dampness transformed my carpet into a living ecosystem. 

Maybe it's appropriate to be reminded of the power of nature when I'm teaching people about nature writing. It's not all butterflies and rainbows, people! The group was lively and attentive, a dozen people, mostly women of a certain age, all eager to amp up their nature writing skills. I kept reminding them I'm not grading any of this, and by the end of the three hours they had stopped apologizing for their attempts. They sat around big tables covered with notepads, pens, drawing paper, markers, colored pencils, handbags, abandoned attempts at prose, and crumbled snack wrappers, but all I could see were the hands scribbling and drawing and writing accompanied by a low, gentle chatter that sounded like joy. 

Today the sun is shining and the smoke is gone and I'm still reveling in the pleasures of yesterday's class. Tomorrow I'll have to motivate someone on campus to remediate the mold infestation in my office, but today I think I'll sit here and enjoy the privilege of breathing freely. 

Oh, and I'd probably go back to the nature center and retrieve the umbrella I left behind. This time of year, we never know what nature might throw at us next.

Waiting for a break in the storm

The view from the 16th floor

Just a small section of my carpet ecosystem

A different type of classroom

Teaching in the middle of July--outdoors, in whatever weather, for an unknown number of students of various ages and abilities? Sure, sign me up. 

It sounded like a fabulous idea a few months ago when the director of the local Master Naturalist Program asked me to teach a three-hour elective on Nature Writing for people seeking to become certified Master Naturalists. I can teach nature writing with my eyes shut and both hands tied behind my back, I told myself, but it'll be better if I prepare. So here I sit in my office on a hot July day putting together activities and discussion questions for--well I don't know who these people are. Who signs up to take this kind of class? The classroom could be full of curious retirees, young professionals trying to broaden their skills, or bored teens whose parents are forcing them to attend something educational. How do I engage a wildly mixed group?

And when I say classroom, I mean outdoor space with gazebo and lawn chairs. Unless it's raining, in which case we go inside and I figure out how to adapt my exercises to the indoor environment. How do I get them to closely observe nature if we're sheltering from a thunderstorm? Oh, maybe we can observe the thunderstorm....

I'm planning to focus on observation skills, starting with a description of the Claude glass, that handy-dandy accessory so beloved of 18th- and 19th-century nature lovers. Nature observed directly can be unruly, poorly composed, overwhelming to our refined senses, so the trendy traveler carried a Claude glass, a small, darkened hand-held mirror. Viewers would stand with their backs to the sublime scenery and observe its reflection in the mirror, flattened and framed and filtered until it resembled a refined piece of art. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear, but we'd prefer to keep them at a safe distance.

Today our cell phones take the place of Claude glasses, offering an instant image of the natural world, framed and filtered and flattened so we can carry it around easily in our pockets. But are we really seeing what's out there? How can we get an unmediated image of nature?

When we first moved to the woods, I thought it would take forever to identify all the types of birds that visited our feeders. I keep a bird book next to the big front window, and I still spend time trying to distinguish between, say, varieties of sparrows, or similar types of woodpeckers. The downy and hairy woodpecker look nearly identical, but the hairy is bigger and has a longer beak--longer both in absolute terms and in relation to its head size. To get to the point that I can tell the difference instantly requires time and attention to details and the willingness to make mistakes 

These days people can just snap a photo of a bird, post it on social media, and ask for an identification. It's a quick and easy way to learn the name of the bird, but knowing the name is not knowing the bird. To know the bird, you have to watch it, not just for a moment but over time, repeatedly, directly, persistently, seeing it in all its behaviors and shades.

This is the kind of observation I'm planning to promote at my nature writing class. I have these people, whoever they are, for three hours on a Saturday afternoon when maybe they'd rather be kayaking. How much can we really accomplish in that length of time? I guess I'm getting ready to find out. 

 

Moving past panic mode

For academics, compliance is a dirty word, evoking visions of Vogons stomping through our lovely courses yelling Resistance is useless! We're happy to insist that students comply with disciplinary conventions regarding format, syntax, citation styles, and so on, and we absolutely insist that students comply with requirements for completing their programs, but we balk at complying with procedures mandated by our own institutions, much less federal mandates.

Which is why I had to try to talk some colleagues down off the ledge this morning. Panic may be an appropriate response to some situations, but it's not my favorite way to start a faculty workshop.

The topic was accessibility--big scary word that means a million different things, but at the moment it means that federal law requires us to make course materials accessible to all kinds of students, including those who are visually impaired. The deadline, thankfully, has been extended until next April, but that doesn't mean we should sit on our hands until the Vogons come stomping through and hold a gun to our heads--or, more likely, a lawsuit. So the Instructional Technologist and I invited faculty to join us for two workdays in a computer-equipped classroom, and we even fed them muffins and lunch. 

The plan was to provide guidelines and techniques for making course materials accessible and then set faculty loose to work on their own materials (documents, presentations, Canvas pages) while we offered one-on-one assistance. But first we had to defuse the panic.

I can understand the source of the panic: if someone told me to insert alternative text descriptions for every image I've ever used in a PowerPoint presentation, I'd panic too. But no one is asking anyone to do that. This workshop was called "Small Change, Big Impact," and the goal was to persuade a few faculty members to, at the bare minimum, make their syllabi fully accessible and to think about accessibility when creating new course materials. We're not interested in the past; we want to make small changes moving forward so that eventually we'll all be in full compliance with the law, though maybe the best we can hope for is that most of us will be closer to partial compliance.

Well this morning you'd have thought we were asking people to sacrifice their firstborns on the altar of Moloch. No one was holding a gun to anyone's head! We were just trying to help! Baby steps, people! Move the needle a few degrees! A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step! And now I'm running out of cliches to describe the minimal changes we're requesting.

At one point I looked at the sea (well, puddle) of angry faces and realized that I don't even need to be there. I'm retiring in December! I could just ignore these new guidelines and fade off into the sunset before the deadline, but instead I was sitting there trying to figure out how to format class readings so they're be comprehensible to a student relying on a text reader. It has to do with formatting headings, and establishing reading order in PowerPoints, and inserting alternative text for images. Not rocket science, in other words, except for the STEM people in the room who have to figure out how to translate complex scientific images into readable text. But we have a year to figure this out! Let's take advantage of the time available and get it done.

(What about a student too visually impaired to be able to see through a microscope? He could become James Thurber is what I want to say, but probably someone else is better equipped to come up with a helpful response.)

By the end of the day we'd all learned a thing or two and made at least a few improvements, and many of us will go back and continue the process tomorrow, keeping the panic at bay as much as possible. Here's what really scares me, though: Less than one-fifth of our faculty showed up for today's workshop. What about the rest? Who will motivate them to make the changes needed to comply with this federal mandate?

Maybe it's time to send in the Vogons.

Working through the glitches

In the quiet darkness of the planetarium I may have heard some snoring, but I swear it wasn't me. I was breathing deeply and at times my eyes were shut, but I was just resting. Honest.

Well you can't blame a bunch of faculty members for falling asleep in the dark right after lunch on our big workshop day. Final grades were due at 9 a.m. and I know some profs were scrambling right up until the last minute, but enough of them showed up to make our morning workshop sessions worthwhile. We learned things, shared stories, and laughed together, which was good enough for me.

Which is why I was a little annoyed this morning when a colleague expressed sympathy over how badly the workshop turned out. How could we have been at the same event? Granted, we endured a few technical glitches--an intransigent computer, a clock stuck in a time warp, and a presenter delayed at a rail crossing. But while we waited for these problems to resolve, we filled the time by talking about great things our students had accomplished this semester.

If there was one unexpected throughline in the day's presentations, it was the need to accept and learn from imperfection. A presenter talked about what he'd learned from a new assignment that was "somewhat okay some of the time," and a small group discussion led to a great piece of advice for profs facing disruptions to teaching plans: "Accept imperfection." Another presenter reminded us that we need to acknowledge our students' right to fail: if they resist all our attempts to help them succeed, then "we may feel like we have failed them when they've failed us."

Our campus caterers didn't fail us: the lunch was perfect and the conversations even better. And then a bunch of us went over to the planetarium to see what the whizzy new equipment can do, except those comfy chairs in a darkened room were an invitation to relax perhaps a bit too deeply. 

We've all worked hard this semester and we needed some relaxation, and some laughter, and some commiseration, conversation, and compassion. I offer no apologies for presiding over a glitchy workshop. We're imperfect people working in imperfect circumstances and sometimes being somewhat okay can feel like triumph.

Time to hang up the regalia

Clues that it's time to hang up my regalia for good: 

Early in my career here I taught a terrific student...who returned for this year's Commencement as our distinguished speaker. How did she accomplish so much so quickly?

My second year here I served on the search committee that hired a wonderful young colleague...who will retire as soon as he gets his grades turned in this week. How could someone I hired beat me to retirement?

I survived all the standing and processing and sitting in uncomfortable chairs at Commencement ...but afterward my legs were so sore I could hardly walk. When did I get so old?

We suddenly need to fill in some blanks in the teaching schedule because of a colleague's unexpected departure...but I don't want to step up and teach any of the unmanned classes, even for overload pay. What happened to my sense of duty?

After Commencement I should have carefully hung up my regalia so it'll be ready the next time I need it...but it felt like too much work, so I left it draped over a chair. When will I need academic regalia again?

 

Pencils down, forks up

What a semester! I'd like to put a fork in it and call it done but the thick bits are still stewing. 

I've graded all the final exams except for one that a student had to take online, and of course it's a pain for me to write an online version of a face-to-face exam and post it to Canvas and arrange for online proctoring but it's more of a pain for the student who broke his leg very messily and is still at home recovering from surgery. So I did all the things and checked yesterday to make sure his exam was complete in Canvas but I didn't grade it, but now that I've graded all the hand-written exams (and my goodness my students wrote some great essays!), I can't get into Canvas at all because it is "currently undergoing scheduled maintenance." Did I receive an email about this scheduled maintenance? Maybe I did. I don't remember. At any rate I can't finish that last bit of grading or post the grades until the scheduled maintenance is complete so here I sit, stewing.

I've been stewing a lot lately over any number of silly little things, which is probably one reason my hair is falling out. It's probably not noticeable to anyone else, but my hair has been thinning on top since around March, due, no doubt, to stress caused by trying to live a semi-normal life while helping my son endure the throes of cancer treatment. But at least I still have hair. The chemo was making my son's hair fall out in clumps, so he finally got a buzz cut to even it out, and my husband got the same cut in sympathy, so now they have matching hair. So okay, one is more gray than the other, but you can certainly see the family forehead.

So while I'm stewing over any number of annoying little things, I have to remind myself: I still have hair, and my students wrote some wonderful essays, and the grading is nearly done. At some point scheduled maintenance will be complete. Meanwhile, I'll sit here with my fork at the ready.

Friday poetry challenge: reining in the nightmares

I show up at my office to find it changed, my books all gone and my art replaced by garish posters and one whole wall knocked down to expand the space and the carpet replaced by dull beige shag, and there's this woman there, young and pert with short dark hair and a bright smile, who says it's her office now. But I haven't retired yet, I insist, and I want to know where all my books and pictures have gone, not to mention the Jane Austen action figure and the Potato Head family and my stained-glass kaleidoscope, but she says she won the job in an online competition and if I have a problem with it I should take it up with HR, which I do, except when the HR director arrives she's a woman I've never seen before who can't understand why I'm upset. Yelling ensues. The argument ends when the HR director states that they had to hire this new person because she won the contest fair and square--and besides, she's so darned cute.

And that's when I wake up.

Is this my first retirement anxiety dream? Not very realistic. I mean, I'm sure some colleagues are already salivating over my lovely office, but even if the Powers That Be agreed to tear down a wall or put the carpet out of its misery, it wouldn't happen overnight--not without drastic revision to current purchasing policies. Once years ago a former colleague persuaded the PTBs that she couldn't move into a particular office unless (this is true) the doorway was moved to a different part of the wall because she didn't want to look at every dude who went in or out of the men's rest room across the hall, but I don't have the kind of clout required to move doors or walls or carpets. I doubt that anyone does.

We don't hire faculty via online contests (yet) or install them in prime offices because they're so darned cute, but any kind of faculty search would be preferable to no search at all. The PTBs have already selected replacements for my administrative roles, but my department was not permitted to replace the last couple of tenured professors who left us s0 they may be forced to replace me with an adjunct or two. Or a bot. Why not? They're hot! Suddenly I feel some doggerel coming on:

We've got
a bot.
Why not?
They're hot!
And cute
to boot.
Astute
offshoots
of bytes,
they might
delight
all night
and day
to stay--
no pay!
No play!
All work!
(A jerk.)

Now you try: rein in your nightmares by tying them up in rhyme.

What we've got here is failure to imaginate

Not a standard word, of course, and there's really no reason for imaginate to exist when imagine works perfectly well, but this morning in class I was thinking what we've got here is failure to communicate. I didn't dare quote the line because I feared that none of my students would be familiar with Cool Hand Luke--and why should they know anything about a film that came out decades before they were born?

I don't know who I represent in this scenario--the prisoner or the brutal captain--but I know I struggled to get students to imagine themselves in the starkly unfamiliar scenario presented in Natasha Trethewey's poem "Native Guard." I had to stand there and endure the awkward silence when they refused to look up unfamiliar words or read footnotes about unfamiliar historical events, but the most awkward silence occurred when I asked them to find the first mention of the word history in the poem. I had told them that Trethewey loves to examine gaps and erasures, stories left out of received histories, and I wanted them to think about how the poem employs history itself. It's a long poem, but history first appears in the tenth line:

Yes, I was born a slave, at harvest time, 
in the Parish of Ascension; I've reached
thirty-three with the history of one younger
inscribed upon my back. 

I endured the long silence as my students stared at the text hoping someone else would find the line, and then the silence grew even more awkward when I asked what sort of history a former slave might have inscribed on his back and how we might go about studying that sort of history.

I get it: it's the wrong time of the semester to ask students to think too much. They're tired. We're all tired. But we started the semester with Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser," which took us on a guided tour of a hospital ward full of soldiers wounded in the Civil War, and I like to end the semester by taking another look at the Civil War to see if there's still anything left to learn. 

There is, but it requires some imagination. Trethewey suggests that poetry can help us understand gaps in the historical record by drawing us deeply into imagined lives, but do I really have to drag students kicking and screaming into engagement with imagination?

Some students you just can't reach--and I don't like it any more than they do.

Friday poetry challenge: a shove out the door

Second-to-last Friday of the semester and my students stand ready to dash off into summer, to jobs and internships and adult responsibility, or perhaps to sleeping late, doomscrolling, and soaking in the summer sun. They stand at the threshold of something new, in a liminal space much like that described in the Anne Sexton poem we discussed on Wednesday, "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman," in which a mother addresses a daughter who stands in the passage between childhood and adolescence. 

Earlier in the semester we'd read the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, in which a mother uses the occasion of her daughter's first period to tell her a terrifying story about a village that rises up violently against a woman who bears a child out of wedlock. It's a "story to grow up on," warning the daughter that if she steps outside of bounds, the village will watch and take revenge.

Anne Sexton's poem provides a more gentle message from mother to daughter. The mother recalls her own transition to puberty, when she heard "as in a dream / the conversation of the old wives / speaking of womanhood," but she adds, "I remember that I heard nothing myself. / I was alone. / I waited like a target." She wants her daughter, on the other hand, to be wrapped in love and surrounded by supporting words. "Your bones are lovely," she says, adding, "there is nothing in your body that lies. / All that is new is telling the truth." The final stanza urges the daughter to seize the burning power of newness with a confidence set in stone.

Just before that final rousing word, though, the poet describes herself, as if in afterthought, as "an old tree in the background." When newness springs forth like a vine in a bean patch, it's easy to ignore the old tree in the background, but that's where I stand right now. My students are working hard to finish well and in a few weeks they'll scamper off to experience newness, and at that point my only job is to stand in the background stolid as an old tree and trust that we've equipped them for whatever lies ahead. 

With just a few more class sessions to prepare them for the journey, what words of wisdom might a tired old tree impart? Let's keep it brief with a little haiku:

Roots burrow deep while
limbs seek the sun: a bare tree
bursts with fresh spring leaves.

Now it's your turn: share some words of wisdom with the young folk who stand in the doorway, and give them a little push as they pass through.

A sharp wind blowing through academe; or, when chickens fly the coop

I drove through a lot of wind yesterday but saw no signs of damage at home--only because the resident chicken fancier had already done his work.

When I arrived home he was down in the meadow fiddling with the chicken run, and it wasn't until later that he told me what I'd missed: the wind had lifted the chicken run and lofted it across the meadow, leaving the chickens free to take a walk on the wild side.

I don't know which was more difficult--restoring the chicken run or retrieving all the chickens--but he got it done. Not without drama: There's this chicken the grandkids call Pineapple because they say it looks like it's wearing a Hawaiian shirt (because of course they do), and sweet little innocent Pineapple had escaped detection by hiding in the tall grass. It might have remained there all night if the guineas hadn't squawked at the hiding place, bringing it to the attention of the chicken fancier. Yes: poor Pineapple got ratted out by a pair of officious guineas.

That's the way we live these days, both at home and at work. This morning I stumbled into the never-ending discussion about the difficulty of counteracting students' reliance on AI for everything. It's clear that a sharp wind is blowing through academe upsetting all our tried-and-true methods, and many of us are running around trying to corral the chickens and restore the structures while a few wily chickens hide in the tall grass. Do we strengthen our containment structures, give the chickens a good talking-to, or import some guineas to squawk at the miscreants? 

Or is it time to declare victory and depart from the field? Retirement is just seven months away. Why can't someone else take charge of these chickens?

They look innocent, but don't be fooled.