Out with Scout

Clear blue sky up above, calm brown water beneath, and between it all just me and my hubby in our little red canoe.

In the weeks since I brought the canoe home, I've frequently looked out the window and wondered when we would ever get out on the water. On the few really nice days we had other commitments--baby shower, funeral, classes, meeting madness. But mostly we've had horrible days: cold, gray, windy, snowy, slushy, icy, and did I mention cold? 

Today we had the time but not, at first, the temperature: 20 degrees first thing this morning. But the sky was cloudless and the mercury kept climbing--30, 40, 50, 55--and when it hit 60, we strapped Scout to the van and headed for the lake.

For our inaugural outing, we selected a local lake frequented only by a few fishermen. Today we saw one small fishing boat puttering around on the brown water surrounded by woods that haven't yet started to green up. No wind, wakes, or currents, so we worked on our paddling skills, practiced keeping the boat steady. Find the center. Lean in. No sudden movements. Communicate! Find the balance.


Sometimes we stopped paddling and drifted, watching and listening. A towhee's call. A Cooper's Hawk circling overhead. Geese coming in for a landing. A stray bit of down drifts toward the water in a silence so serene I expect to hear a splash. 

No moments of high drama, but we get enough drama in our daily lives. One of these days, after we strengthen our paddling skills, we'll venture out into some more adventuresome waters, but for now it's enough to glide along the stillness, listen to the silence, and keep our craft from tipping.

Owls and ends

Fragments from a freaky weak:

We're in the middle of a class discussion of Cold Mountain, not quite at the end so trying to avoid spoilers, and suddenly a student's face lights up and she says, "Now I understand the ending!" Moments like that are what I live for.

Also, owls. We've heard owls at night and seen owl pellets around our property, but last night, for the first time since moving to the woods 10 years ago, I saw an owl in the wild. I was driving along our country road in the dark when suddenly a flash of feathers and wings swooped past in front of my car so quickly I could barely register its presence. The immense wingspan, mostly white underneath, suggests either a barn owl or a great horned owl, but I didn't see the head or hear the call so I can't say for sure. But it felt like a blessing.

An owl confers a blessing in the section of Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima discussed in my American Lit class today. Who, seeking a blessing, runs to owls? Antonio, apparently.  I haven't taught this text for years but its beauty nearly takes my breath away.

As does Toni Morrison's "Recitatif," also discussed this morning. How did we manage to work the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle into a discussion of Morrison's stunning story?

And speaking of stunning, we've lived so long with wretched weather that the return of sunshine and spring seem to have left us all stunned and speechless, wandering around with our arms out in appreciation as if to say, "It came back! The sunshine came back!"

So maybe the sun really will come out tomorrow--and if it does, so will the canoe! 

Collecting an old debt

Savannah, Georgia, owes me a good time (or at least some good weather) and next week I aim to collect.

The last time I visited Savannah was in 2005, when I presented a paper at a conference during a cold, dreary, wet February. I remember driving to the Columbus airport through a snowstorm in my husband's car, a tiny Honda with manual transmission, which was usually pretty good for highway driving but not so great with snow all over the road. It was a tense two-hour drive with a lot of stop-and-go, which means a lot of stomping on the clutch, shifting, and stomping again. I don't know if it was the cold, the clutch, or the stress, but by the time I got to the airport, my left hip felt as if it had been attacked by thugs with truncheons.

Then I squeezed my sore body into a seat on the plane and sat without moving for what seemed like days but was probably a couple of hours. When the plane stopped and I tried to get up, I couldn't.

It was raining in Savannah and cold, and I didn't have any money so I had to walk everywhere, which sent daggers of pain up and down my leg. I took aspirin and did stretching exercises, switched shoes, and sat at every opportunity, but the pain only got worse. I remember finally finding someone who took pity on my pain and gave me some serious painkillers so I could sleep, but then I didn't want to get groggy for my presentation so I postponed taking the pills until my part was over--and then I surrendered.

I don't have much memory of that trip aside from misery, but I'm giving Savannah a second chance. Next week I'll be giving a paper at the College English Association conference, and although my paper is scheduled for Thursday afternoon, I'm arriving Wednesday and staying until nearly noon Sunday.

I don't intend to be in pain because that hip problem is now under control. (Just a little arthritis, and the right kind of exercise keeps it from flaring up.) And I don't intend to drive through a snowstorm on the way to the airport, but this is Ohio so you never know. And I certainly don't intend to drive that old manual Honda because we got rid of it years ago.
 
Savannah in April has got to be better than Savannah in February--and best of all, I'll have a rental car and plenty of time, so I hope to visit some wildlife refuges to look at birds. Of course I'll give my paper and attend some other sessions, but after a long, cold, wet winter, I'm really looking forward to soaking up some spring.

The reading crunch

Suddenly I come face-to-face with the consequences of teaching three brand-new courses in the same semester: teaching two novels I've never taught before in the same week. 

That's a lot of pages to read, and not just to read but to organize into notes and discussion questions and possibly some group work. Of course I've read them before, but reading a book for pleasure is very different from reading a book in preparation for teaching it. I have no notes from prior years to fall back on, no ready-made handouts or group discussion prompts. I love these books but how can I possibly read and prepare to teach 150 pages by tomorrow? 

What crazy prof made this syllabus? If I had a time machine, I'd go back to January and slap myself silly.

Words, wonderful words!

The other day I was reading some vapid prose and, overcome with the desire to share the experience, I phoned a friend to say, "I just feel like talking to someone who understands the word vapid."

I tried vapid and hedonism in one class this morning and palimpsest and wraith in the other, and of course I had to stop and explain my meaning in smaller words, even though the book we were reading followed the word hedonism with "You dedicate your life to the pursuit of pleasure."

I enjoy telling my students about palimpsests and even drawing diagrams to illustrate, but sometimes I need to speak to people familiar with palimpsests, people for whom the pursuit of pleasure includes the pleasure of unusual words. Here, for instance, is the context for wraith: "Lodged there in the tree, he began to feel himself to be a sodden wraith askulk in the night, some gnome or underbridge troll." That's from Cold Mountain, a book full of delicious sentences. I roll sentences like that around in my mouth like dark chocolate, delighted that I don't have to query any of its ingredients.

I hope to infect my students with this love of words until it spreads like a glorious contagion across the land, but they seem to have been vaccinated against my efforts. Whoever is distributing this insidious vaccine needs to just stop. Otherwise, we'll all be immersed in a sea of vapidity with no one to throw us a lifeline and then we'll all end up sodden wraiths askulk, if it's possible to skulk on the sea. (Yes, I know I'm mixing metaphors. No, I don't care.)
   

Send in the clowns

So I'm working on a presentation about clowns, fools, and grotesques (for the Concepts of Comedy class, of course) and I run across this photo of Emmett Kelly Jr. at the 1964 World's Fair in New York.

I've seen him before--often. In my father's collection of slides is a photograph of me at age 3 encountering Emmett Kelly Jr. at the World's Fair. I'm wearing a cute little summer dress and holding the skirt out to the sides as I curtsy to the clown.

I have no memory of this, of course, but I have internalized my parents' memories of the event until they are nearly my own. I was there! (Although not, apparently, while he was making that charming hand gesture.) 

"I was there!" I told my American Lit Survey students this morning as we encountered the World's Fair in an entirely different context: Kurt Vonnegut's introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five. He describes taking two sweet little girls in party dresses to the 1964 World's Fair, where he "saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

Time and memory slip away and even pictures resist comprehension. Today I look beyond the famous clown and wonder about the little hand reaching into the frame from the right, eager to touch the hem of his garment. Is that moment preserved forever in some family's photo album? Does the hand remember or is it dependent, like me, on prosthetic memory?

That past, so distant in my students' minds, was once my present--but how much of that present was mine to keep?

Suddenly, crocuses!

Hold the mayo

This week I have enjoyed wonderful class discussions on remarkable literature, with students contributing valuable insights right and left, and I have read online discussions and papers demonstrating that they get it--they really get it! So why do I keep obsessing over one student who really doesn't?

Maybe because I'm dealing with cluelessness on a level I've rarely encountered. Imagine that a student wheedles well enough to persuade you to overlook your no-late-papers policy just this once, and then imagine that the student finally turns in a piece of writing mentioning mayonnaise where the story under discussion features manure, and then you Google it and discover the same error spread all over a prominent online summary of the work in question.


At this point that student is up to his knees is something, but it sure ain't mayonnaise.

 

 

 

Showers of pinkness

That's just ducky!

Having heard from a small horde (a smorde? a hordlet?) of readers interested in hearing about the baby shower I wrote about last week (here), I offer a few observations--but if you're allergic to pink, stop reading right now! I don't want anyone breaking out in hives.

We didn't play the poop game or the pin-the-sperm-on-the-egg game or the name-that-babyfood game, but we played a name game. People wrote answers to questions on a card (What was your grandmother's first name? What is your favorite bird? What is the name of the person on your left? What is your favorite color?) and from their responses created potential baby names: Frances Mango Williams, Almuth Eagle Williams, Strawberry Belle Williams, and so on. The expectant couple selected the winner: Gertrude Hydrangea Williams.  They are, of course, under no legal obligation to apply that name to their baby, but at least they have some options!


Showers ought to be an opportunity for the tribe to share its collective wisdom with the expectant couple, so I challenged attendees to share their wisdom--in five or fewer words. "Don't drop baby in shark-tank" is pretty good advice but perhaps not as practical as "Roughen breast with a towel." My favorite snippet of wisdom? "Keep grandma close." Words to live by, people!

I haven't been to a baby shower in years so two things really surprised me. First, attendance. I plan social events the way airlines sell seats: assume a bunch of people won't show up. In the end, my double-booking led to a dearth of chairs, a problem my son-in-law solved by wiping off a lawn chair and bringing it inside. Fortunately, we had enough cake. Running out of cake would be catastrophic. (Cake-tastrophic?)

My second surprise came during the gift-giving time: nobody brought just one gift. (Except for me. I had no idea the rules had changed!) Every gift bag contained multiple gifts: little pink onesies and sleepers and bibs and washcloths plus diapers and pacifiers, hair ribbons and socks--and let me just say that the only way the baby will ever get to wear all those tiny pink socks will be if she's born with 17 feet, which is highly unlikely.

Of course tiny pink socks can get lost and babies quickly grow out of their onesies, which will get stashed away or passed on to other infants. Baby showers lead to streams of pinkness circulating through the babysphere until people stop having babies or stop feeling the need to draw together as a tribe and support the novice parents. 

I just hope some of that essential wisdom gets passed on as well. After all, you never know when you might stumble upon a shark-tank. 

Things I shouldn't have to tell my students

1. "I was distracted" is not an adequate excuse for missing class--unless the distraction is provided by, say, a mile-wide meteor streaking directly toward southern Ohio.


2. "This doesn't reflect my true character" suggests that you've been keeping your true character tied up in the attic while your false character lurches around wreaking havoc in your name. 

3. Of course you missed something. In fact, you missed a lot, as you would realize if you hadn't been so distracted.  

4. No, you can't make up eight weeks' work in two days, but go ahead and try. Maybe that dude you've got tied up in the attic will help. Otherwise, you'd better hope for a meteor strike.     

When a talky class goes quiet

Faced with a class full of students trying to discuss a text without actually having that text in front of them, my first assumption is that they're not reading. Yesterday, though, a student reminded me that there are other ways to read texts. "I'm reading it on my phone," she said.

Who reads a 450-page novel on a tiny cell-phone screen? I read Les Miserables on my Kindle over Christmas break and the vast number of screen-taps required to move through a 900-page book made my arms hurt all the way up to the elbow. Reading on the Kindle screen was comfortable enough after I learned how to adjust the size of the font and the brightness of the screen, but I wouldn't want to try reading that much text on a smaller screen. 

But of course I am a dinosaur. I get that. If students want to read Cold Mountain on their phones, I should simply rejoice that they are reading.

Except they aren't. Based entirely on their (un)willingness to participate in class discussion, I would bet that three students in that class are keeping up with the reading while the others are trying to coast. This is generally a talky class, so I'm not accustomed to silence.

I suggested that they read the book over Spring Break and perhaps they did, but they're not talking about it. I saw one copy of the text that looked so pristine it clearly had not been opened--and we are supposed to have covered close to 200 pages by now.

Tomorrow in class we'll do some group work requiring them to come up with examples of certain concepts from within the text. Meanwhile, I'm just griping about their unwillingness to read and discuss a really wonderful novel. This morning I asked my department chair, "Why wouldn't they want to read Cold Mountain?"

"You've got the question wrong," he said. "It should be 'Why wouldn't they want to read,' period."

If that's the question, I'm afraid I don't know the answer. 

Where are the hippos of yesteryear?

That's me on the left with the hibiscus blossom in my hair.

No matter how deeply a memory is submerged, someday it will surface on Facebook.

I had forgotten the hippos. And the hippo party. And the immense amount of time I must have devoted to cutting and piecing together intricate little bits of fabric to make stuffed hippos for myself and my two close friends.

This must have been around 1977 or 78, when we were 16 and could think of nothing better to do than to write silly songs about our stuffed hippos. They had names, of course: the purple one, Harriet, was mine, while the yellow plaid was Harmony and the pink fleece hippo was Hilary. It's possible that the tattered remains of Harriet live in a box stashed away in a closet at my parents' house, but I doubt it.

Last night Hilary's keeper posted hippo photos and tagged me so all my Facebook friends can be reminded of a time when 16-year-old girls threw parties for stuffed animals. In the current media climate, it's hard to imagine that adolescence need not be a seething mire of angst, shame, and ennui. Sometimes youthful energy can be steered toward silliness--and then everyone smiles.

Even the hippos.

On brobdingnagian vocabulary

This is a small word. That is also a small word. In fact, all the words in this post so far are small, which makes them easy to read. But ease of reading isn't everything.

Is everything a big word? Ten letters! Three or four syllables, depending on how carefully you enunciate! But readers allergic to multisyllabic words can't enunciate, can they? They can only speak.

The day is coming when I won't be able to speak to my students at all, thanks to the Big Word Problem. Just about every semester on course evaluations some anonymous student complains that I use too many big words. "She uses big words alot," they write, or "She uses alot of big words." I generally read these comments while sitting on my hands so I can't spontaneously insert a big red virgule between a and lot. And if I mentioned this in class, I would have to explain not only what a virgule is but why people who want to give advice about vocabulary would be taken more seriously if they wrote a lot as a two-word phrase. 

So the Big Word Problem crops up every semester, but this week it suddenly got bigger when a student complained that when I grade papers, I seem to care more about big words than about content.

How does this complaint rankle? Let me count the ways:

1. Nothing on my grading rubric refers to big words. The rubric asks whether the paper employs diction appropriate to the audience and purpose, which seems like a reasonable expectation. The size of the words matters less than how well they suit the particular writing task.


2. This is college, where little words go to grow up. Anyone who prefers to write paragraphs composed entirely of familiar single-syllable words ought to go back to second grade. 

3. This complaint arose in a literature class in which I am trying to equip students to use specific analytical terms so that I don't have to keep encountering relatable. Some of those analytical terms aren't even all that big--prose or rhythm, for instance--but you wouldn't believe the grief I endured when I expected students to learn the word stasis.

4. When grading an essay, I don't know how to separate the content from the words. The words are the content. We're not finger-painting, drawing graphs, or sending messages via semaphore; all we have to work with are the words, so we ought to use the best words possible for the task. Sometimes the best words are big.

In our family we reserve the big word brobdingnagian to describe the cutlery at a certain chain steakhouse. When the server plops down in front of you a steak the size of a hubcap, you don't want to attack it with a nail file and oyster fork--a pitchfork, maybe, but not an oyster fork. Fortunately, the restaurant provides a knife and fork sturdy enough to carve a haunch of venison. It's positively brobdingnagian.

There I go using big words again. If I want to communicate this lesson to my students, I'll have to simplify: Use the right word for the task. If you don't know the right word, learn some new words. They won't bite--they're just words. And no matter how big they are, remember: you're bigger.

Party-poopers not allowed

I was talking to a colleague about an upcoming baby shower and she said she would attend on one condition: "Promise me that you won't be playing that poop game."

What poop game? 

I haven't been to a baby shower in so many years that I had never heard of this game, which is apparently all the rage: smoosh a candy bar inside a disposable diaper; pass it around and ask your dearest friends and loved ones to examine the diaper and identify the type of candy bar. Is that a Mars Bar or Three Musketeers? Maybe a little Grey Poupon?

Um, no thanks.

We won't be playing the poop game at my house tomorrow, and neither will we be playing the guess-mommy's-tummy-size game or Pin the Sperm on the Egg. No one will have to decide how to slice open a bulging-womb cake because we're eating the kind of cake I do best: angel-food cake with fresh fruit and whipped cream.  

I have no pink balloons, party favors, or streamers. I have prepared two games, one of which isn't even a real game. The bulk of the party will be a time to socialize with people we don't often see and share the joys and delights of impending birth.

And if anyone wants to get bent out of shape because I'm not embracing the latest baby-shower trends, then they can just throw their own poopy party.  

Even workaholics have their limits

So I'm parallel parking my station wagon across from campus (because the campus parking lots have been invaded by pickup trucks), and as I pull up and back and up and back I notice an international student standing in the tree lawn just across the road from me and grinning like an idiot. I pull up, she grins; pull back, she nods; pull up, she grins again. Could anyone possibly have a life so empty that watching me parallel park counts as entertainment?

But no. I gather up my things and cross the street but before my feet hit the curb she's holding out a paper and asking me to go through it with her to correct her grammar. 

Seriously.

1. She is definitely NOT my student. I don't even know her name. 

2. I don't even WORK in the Writing Center any more and I haven't worked there since this student left kindergarten.

3. In case you haven't noticed, it's SPRING BREAK.

So no, I won't be going through this student's paper with her. She'll have to stand there beside the road desperately awaiting the next parallel-parking professor, or perhaps accosting any random person who happens to wander by. 

  

Where the work never ends

When I arrive on campus at the crack of dawn in the middle of spring break, I expect to find a parking space. But not today! By 8 a.m. the parking lots were full--of pickup trucks. Not redneck-style heaps of rust but big shiny duallies of the sort that contractors drive. That's not something you see every day in an academic context. Clearly our campus has been taken over by aliens.

Why am I here so early? Because I haven't been in a library since last Friday and I'm suffering withdrawal--and besides, I need a fast internet connection so I can find some good video clips to use in my comedy class next week when I introduce Depression-era comedy. Reading Miss Lonelyhearts seems to be plunging my students into depression anyway, so let's see if Charlie Chaplin can cheer them up.

And then there's this big pile of annoying piddly little tasks I need to tackle, blech. I've promised myself that if I can clear all this junk off my to-do list, I'll take a drive down to the Ohio River backwater where eagles have been nesting. It's oddly quiet in my building and dark too, since the lights in the basement are triggered by motion sensors and there's no one moving around out in the hallways. I've got Michael Buble turned up high to keep me company so I'll just keep working until the work runs out.

Alternately, I could just go dump it all in the back of a big shiny pickup truck.  That's what they get for taking my parking space. 

 

Spring broken

Do I look relaxed enough?

Spring break!!!!!! And I've spent the entire morning preparing a presentation for my Learning in Retirement class. That's right: working. 

But it's fun work, much more fun than figuring out what's wrong with my Comedy class and how I can fix it for the second half of the semester. (Nobody likes Nathanael West. Maybe they're too young...reading West requires a certain jadedness, a wee smidgen of cynicism, a dollop of dolor. Can perky students appreciate Miss Lonelyhearts?)

It's noon now, though, so soon my adorable daughter will be done with work and we'll go out for lunch and shopping. We had hoped for a hike this afternoon but the weather is too cold, wet, and ugly, so we'll walk around the mall instead. (Wimps.) Which reminds me: I need new walking shoes, and a vacuum cleaner, and lentils and almond extract, and of course we need to look at baby stuff. We're clearly not doing any one-stop shopping today.

My son-in-law analyzed the canoe-slippage situation and figured out a better way to secure the Scout. Tomorrow morning I'll be on my way south again, heading for home (and a whole pile of housework, class preps, and baby shower tasks). At some point this week I need to write the paper I'm delivering in Savannah next month...but first, lentils and vacuums and babies, oh my!    

Adventure-A-Day

Lesson one in the Great Canoe Adventure: buying the canoe is the easy part. 

Driving with a canoe on top of my car? Not so easy--especially since I had trouble getting it tied down securely. The woman who sold me the canoe helped, but she was a little fuzzy on the details of canoe-securing since her husband had been in charge of that and, sadly, he died in December, which was why she was selling the canoe (and paddles, life jackets, supplemental sling seat, and car-top straps and pads).

I found the canoe on Craigslist, spoke to the widow woman on the phone, drove two hours early this morning to check it out, and handed over the money. Easy part done. My husband was tied up marrying people, so it was just the widow woman and me attaching the pads and lifting the canoe on top of my car and then fumbling with the straps, trying them first one way and then another until it seemed secure.

My first mistake, I think, was in trying to take the quickest route toward my daughter and son-in-law's house, which meant getting onto the interstate before I was really ready to deal with the difference a canoe on top of the car can make. I got off a the first exit that presented itself and sat there breathing deeply while rethinking the situation.

Then began my real education: putt-putting at 35 or 40 miles per hour on state roads through three-horse towns that probably boast impressive historic architecture that I never saw because I was constantly monitoring the state of the tie-downs. At first I had to stop and tighten them about every 10 miles, but eventually I found a way to keep the canoe from sliding around for as much as 20 miles at a stretch, with long lines of cars following me because every time I nudged the car above 50, the canoe would shift and start to scream.

How can I describe the noise of that vibration? The aural equivalent of a dental drill, maybe. I learned soon enough that the canoe made more noise when the tie-downs started loosening up, but I would wait until the screaming was really unbearable before stopping to tighten and readjust once again.

But the canoe and I made it. It's still sitting on top of my car. My son-in-law the engineer has promised to figure out a better way to secure the tie-downs so I can drive it home on Tuesday, at which point we will learn how to secure it to my husband's car, which has a roof rack. 

The easy part is over, but next comes the fun part: getting my canoe into the water. Another day, another adventure.  

A question of trust

Why do I trust one student to take an exam unsupervised while I require another to sit in my office and write while I watch? 

It's a matter of trust. There's nothing like exam season to inspire a careful parsing of the parameters of trust.

One student needs to take the exam early so she can leave town for a college-sponsored activity; another dashes into my office and begs to be allowed to take the exam even though he overslept and missed the exam period.

One student has taken several of my classes and always demonstrates responsibility, character, and perseverance; the other frequently skips class, sits in the back, rarely participates, and provides no clear evidence of virtue.

One student is taking an exam for which notes, textbooks, and other students would not be helpful, so it would be difficult to gain points by consulting sources; the other is taking an exam requiring identification of authors and titles of works and specific examples of concepts from certain works, so having access to sources would give the student an unfair advantage.

Which one would you trust?

And after you've figure that one out, please let me know what to do about the student who left the classroom in the middle of the exam to use the rest room and didn't come back for more than 10 minutes...and then wrote about a section of a work that we did not read for class. Who will proctor my exam if I have to start following students into the bathroom?

NameQuest

I know I ought to be grading midterm exams right now, so just shut up about it, okay? I've graded a bunch. I have a bunch more to grade. They'll wait. Meanwhile, I'm thinking up names.

In Cold Mountain (which I'm getting ready to teach tomorrow for the very first time), the names of familiar places and plants act as incantations reminding the wanderer of home, but I'm aiming at more practical names: what shall we name our granddaughter?

Of course I realize that we are not, technically, the ones who will do the naming in May when our granddaughter is due to arrive, but a grandma can dream, can't she? I've been sending my daughter names drawn from her favorite fields: music, flowers, and fungi. So far my contributions include Melody Harmony Hilary Williams, Trillium Lilian Williams, Lily Zinnia Williams, and Chanterelle Morel Williams.

Oddly enough, these charming names have been met not with open arms but with laughter. I can't imagine why. Come on, get creative! How many more Chelseas does the world need?

I keep stumbling upon names in the oddest places. Used car ads? Lumina Volvo Williams. Mapquest? Xenia Marietta Williams. Yesterday a student paper referred to a literary character as the "affable oddball Oreo," which isn't a name you hear every day. Hey, let's combine more of our favorite things: Oreo Oriole Williams! 

Stop me before I name again!

Paddling upstream

For a few brief moments yesterday, I was caught up on everything--course preps, grading, miscellaneous annoying tasks. 

Today begins the deluge: essay exams in one class, paper drafts in another. Exams Thursday and Friday in other classes plus an online discussion to evaluate. Starting at 9:30 today, I'll be grading grading grading for the rest of the week.

It's easier to keep my nose to the grindstone when I can see a light at the end of the tunnel (although you have to wonder what kind of idiot puts a grindstone inside a dark tunnel, especially if it's a railroad tunnel, in which case you have to wonder how much damage a grindstone would do to a moving train or whether the train would smash it to smithereens and emerge relatively unscathed)--now where was I?

Oh yes: nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, eyes firmly fixed on the light at the end of the tunnel (a position bound to result eventually in neck cramps): early Saturday I'm looking at a used canoe! In Columbus! That sounds exactly like what we've been looking for! And comes equipped with paddles, life preservers, and car-top carrier! So I won't be up the creek without a paddle while keeping my nose to the grindstone and shoulder to the wheel and eyes on the light at the end of the tunnel!

Speaking of deluges, stop me before I drown in cliches!

Desperately seeking a deus ex machina

Microsoft Word keeps autocorrecting deus ex machina until I'm tired of fighting it (and also tired of wondering when some deus ex machina will materialize in a cloud of smoke and zap Autocorrect into the stone age) so I'll take a break to seek a grammar guru who will emerge from the internet machine to help me with a sticky problem.

It's simple: my students think although is the same as however.

It isn't. However, this is what I see in student papers all the time:

Although, the deus ex machina failed to materialize.

Just like that: although with a comma attached to a sentence  or a fragment. The sentence would be just fine if they replaced although with however or nevertheless or therefore, but they don't. Maybe they're not familiar with however. Or maybe they think although is essentially the same thing.

It isn't, but so far I haven't found a way to explain the difference without relying on terms like concessive adjunct. What are the odds that someone unfamiliar with however would understand concessive adjunct? Pretty close to nil would be my guess.

Here's where I'd like to adjust Autocorrect so that it administers an electric shock every time a student puts an unnecessary comma after although, but that's just the kind of deus ex machina that never shows up.

Wind and woodpeckers

A walk through the snowy woods today revealed woodpecker holes on many of the trees damaged by last summer's high winds. Which came first, the winds or the woodpeckers? Do the woodpeckers attack trees damaged by winds, or were trees weakened by woodpeckers more likely to be damaged by wind? Either way, we have some brand-new open spaces in the woods and we're wondering what weeds and wildflowers will fill those spots this summer.

Links, both whelming and otherwise

In honor of my alter ego, Agnes, today I will be whelming. 

Yesterday I read this wonderful article by Rachel Aviv about the local journalists who covered the Newtown massacre for the Newtown Bee and I want to recommend it to everyone who has ever worked as a small-town journalist or loved a local newspaper, but the site offers only a taste of the story so non-subscribers will have to buy the March 4 New Yorker.

Brad Leithauser's essay "In Praise of Concision," on the other hand, is fully available here. His explication of a moving Seamus Heaney haiku is almost as interesting as the haiku itself.

And now for something completely different: for a lecture on Monstrous Beasts, I showed the Learning in Retirement class a bunch of images and clips from various monster films. We watched Godzilla stomp Tokyo, Mighty Joe Young smash a nightclub, and Betty White feed a giant crocodile, but nothing we saw or discussed was as powerful as Robert Shaw's monologue from Jaws (here). It's helpful to be reminded that blood, gore, and spectacle may create overwhelming emotional responses, but sometimes all you really need is one guy quietly telling a story.

Failure to communicate 101

As I prepare to meet my Comedy class today, I keep finding myself rehearsing lines that would be more appropriate in Kindergarten: I'm doing this for your own good. This is hurting me more than it's hurting you. If I've told you once, I've told you 1000 times...

The thing is, I have told them 1000 times, or at least 20 times, and I've told them in various forms (orally, in person, on the assignment sheet, via e-mail) and they're still not getting it.

Well, some of them. At least half of the class needs a kick in the pants while the rest are doing just fine on this particular assignment, which offers students a significant grade-boost for a minimal amount of work. All they have to do is read the directions and follow them: submit at least 250 words commenting on a literary work before we discuss that work in class; they can earn only 5 points per submission, but over the course of the semester those 5 points add up to a full 100, which can make a significant difference in the final grade, for good or ill.

I use this system in general education literature classes every semester and I generally have to spend some time at the beginning reminding students of the requirements: Nice work, but your comment falls far below the 250-word requirement, so no credit this time. Or: Excellent analysis, but as the assignment sheet points out, you must submit comments before we discuss the work in class or you get no credit.

Usually all the kinks get worked out within the first two weeks, but here we are a week before the midterm exam and I still have students who have not submitted any comments (of the 10 due before next week) or who continued to submit comments that are too short or too late to get any credit.

And here's the thing: they're apparently not even reading my responses to their comments, because they keep making those same mistakes and they seem oblivious to the fact that they're not getting any credit.

I honestly don't know what to do with these students. I don't want to berate the entire class when only a few students are having trouble, but sending them more e-mails explaining the problem is unlikely to work when they haven't paid any attention to the messages I've already sent. How do I get through to students who have ignored everything I've ever said about the assignment, either in person or in writing?

I suppose I could tell them for the thousand-and-first time...

Addled (in ALL CAPS)

I knew the day would come when my four preps/four writing proficiency courses would addle my brain, and now it's here. Ample evidence: 

1. I almost missed my 1:00 class because I thought today was TUESDAY.

2. I distributed a handout with instructions that made NO SENSE WHATSOEVER because somehow I substituted the word SYLLABUS where THESIS was supposed to be.

3. I was surprised when a student reminded me that our class is meeting in the library Friday (according to the SYLLABUS) and I had to stand in front of the class looking STUPID while trying to remember WHY I had scheduled a LIBRARY VISIT.

4. I forgot to pack my LUNCH this morning and then, when I went out to buy something, forgot to take my PURSE to pay for it.

5. I found on my desk a yellow sticky note with a phone number and the letters UHC and even though it's clearly my handwriting, I have NO IDEA WHAT IT MEANS.  

Now here I am in my office surrounded by the wreckage of my morning. It's 2:12 p.m. Can I possibly restore order in a mere two hours or shall I just pack it in and call it a day?

Welcome to my window well!

So I walk into my office after class and find: a body.

Not a dead body. What do you think this is, CSI? If this were CSI, I would be surrounded by tall, slender, stylishly dressed people who keep whipping off their sunglasses and making dramatic statements; instead, I'm surrounded by ordinary-looking people who don't even wear sunglasses to work because we work in a basement, not a crime lab or a morgue. Although, come to think of it, the basement is not without its morgue-esque qualities (morgue-iness?): it's dank, dark, and musty enough for any morgue, and some of my students do a pretty good impersonation of a corpse in class.

But I digress. 

The body I found in my office was not dead and neither was it, technically in my office. It was sitting in the window well where it would be blocking the sun if we had any sunshine today instead of this horrid dank dark musty cold wintery rainy mess. 

When I first looked up up up, far above my head to my tiny dungeon window, I thought that someone had left a pile of discarded clothes right in my window well, but then it moved. It's alive! But who is it? Nondescript beige jacket, vague gray hat, basic working-man apparel. Homeless person? My window well can't be a particularly comfy place to hang out, so maybe it's one of the tree-removal dudes busily deleting a row of ash trees right next to my building. But why would anyone take a break in my window well others are available closer to the road?

Then I notice: he's smoking. I know a smoker who wears that coat and that hat! It's one of my colleagues seeking shelter from the rain while he takes a smoke break. I call out his name but he can't hear (who knew the glass was that thick?), and he's facing away from the window so he can't see me. I could throw something up there to get his attention, but what would I say? "You're blocking my sun?" There isn't any.

I don't begrudge him a little shelter from the storm--in fact, basic human decency demands that I provide a more hospitable welcome. I ought to equip my window well with a little rug or a soft cushion--or, better yet, heat and light, cheery yellow walls painted with birds, a sturdy desk and comfy chair. If the window well were more like my office, I'd be tempted to hang out there myself!
 

Loving those lightbulb moments

A student comes to me for help with paper and somewhere in the course of our discussion I see a lightbulb burst into full glow just above her head. Suddenly she gets it. What did I say--or not say?

Another student comes in to talk about what's so great about the English major, and she asks me whether I went to college knowing what I wanted to do. I tell her I entered college undecided but chose English after a professor wrote on my final paper, "If you don't go into English, I shall go into mourning." She leaves still undecided, but we're making progress. If she doesn't go into English...some other department will be very well blessed by her presence.

I'm reading the essay exams from my film class and they're all batting around the same general idea in a reasonably competent manner, but then I read one that points out an important element of the film that I had never even considered--and it changes the way I look at this scene. There's this ridiculous line in the film textbook warning that professors are unlikely to learn anything new from students, but I'm happy to report that it's wrong wrong wrong.  


Prufrock day in American Lit! Before class, a little bumper music: Simon and Garfunkel singing "The Dangling Conversation" (link here). I get to squeeze the universe into a ball and roll it toward a room full of students. Will they answer the overwhelming question or deflect it? Either way, at least the question gets asked.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job?  

Cold gold

 The buzzards have begun to return from their southern sojourn--two weeks earlier than usual!--but year-round residents are still bundled up in their winter plumage. Dozens of goldfinches gather around the thistle feeders, their buff-and-black colors a muted echo of their flashy summer feathers. We saw an indigo bunting yesterday and a northern flicker today, wild turkeys last week and at least a half dozen downy woodpeckers this morning. Everything, it seems, is on the move. Can spring be far behind? 

(Tell that to my hands. They got so cold when I went out to get these shots that they're still complaining hours later.)  

To be or not to be (promoted)

The admin asked me to be in my office between 3 and 5 on Friday. I would rather be up and doing, but when the admin says be, I say, "How high?" Especially when I'm supposed to be waiting for an important piece of information re: promotion. So here I sit between 3 and 5--being.

It's not easy being me. I could be doing my taxes or my class preps or my grading, but doing wasn't part of the agreement: I am under orders to simply be for two hours on a Friday afternoon while awaiting important news from a person not known for punctuality. Is being something I can accomplish while listening to music? Live music would be better, but where would I get a mariachi band this late on a Friday when there's ice all over the roads? Do mariachi bands even exist in locales subject to ice?

Do-doodly-do-do, be-beedly-be-be, just let it be. I sit and wait for a while, and then, just to change things up, I wait and sit. Sit. Wait. Wait. Sit. Boring. Let's face it: being is boring. Maybe I'm not doing it right--instead of simply being, maybe I should try being in the moment, but what moment and how do I go about being in it? Someone send me an instruction book, preferably one translated into four languages so I can sit here and be entertained. And a mariachi band. How about a mariachi band equipped with an instruction book?

But wait: being entertained was not part of the admin's insistence that I be in my office from 3 to 5. On Friday afternoon. To await important information. From a person not known for punctuality.

If I'm still here being patient at 7, please send in the Saint Bernards. Equipped with a multi-lingual instruction booklet and a mariachi band. And, if possible, a promotion.  

My mobile boneyard

Whoever parks beside my car today or even glances inside will be greeted by the fleshless skull of a deer stacked atop a pile of miscellaneous bones. I hope they don't call Campus Police to report that I'm operating a mobile boneyard on campus. Is that even legal?

It's not every day that I come to campus equipped with a big ol' box o' deer parts, but one of my colleagues has dogs that hanker after bones and we have an excess, thanks to Hopeful, who helpfully hauls home all kinds of animals, both intact and in pieces. This time of year, it is not at all unusual to look outside and say, with a sinking feeling, "She's brought home another head." 

Deer head, of course. No human beings were harmed in the making of this movie. I hope.

Eventually we end up with dessicated deer parts and bones scattered all over the yard, which then looks more like a boneyard than a front yard. So when my colleague last week mentioned that he spends more than $40 a week buying bones for his hounds, I offered to ease his burden. Hence the box of bones in the back seat of my car, which I left unlocked for my colleague's convenience. Who's going to steal a box of bones--or a 19-year-old car with 252,000 miles on it? Good luck trying to start it in this cold weather!

And the Oscar for tongue-biting goes to...

This morning when a clueless driver incapable of interpreting a big white arrow and a "One Way" sign pulled into the parking lot in the wrong direction and clogged traffic, I wanted to yell--but I didn't. Probably a visitor, I thought; maybe even a potential student. So I sat in my car biting my tongue while waiting for the traffic to untangle so I could park.

Biting my tongue may well be my greatest skill, developed over decades as a pastor's wife. Back when we lived in church-owned parsonages I would often be the target of complaints about, for instance, the parsonage electric bill. I would show up for church Sunday morning laden with children and Sunday-School teaching materials and be greeted at the door by some sweet old church lady waving the electric bill in my face and demanding to be told why it was so high. "Because the house has no insulation so every ounce of heat leaks out while we shiver indoors under layers and layers of wool" is what I could not say, so I bit my tongue, smiled, and bottled up my anger until we got home, where anger sometimes leaked out all over my poor innocent children.

Not a good situation, but this kind of experience, repeated over decades, fully equipped me to avoid saying things I would really like to say. Recently in a class, for instance, I wanted to snap out, "Instead of parroting back what your high school teacher told you, can't you look at the actual words on the page?" Or this morning: "What part of 'One Way' do you not understand? If you can't read the words, maybe you could look at that big white arrow painted right in your path."

But I didn't. Would letting the anger out help the situation? I don't know.

Here's one thing I do know: all that bottled-up anger doesn't just go away. At some point it'll spill out, perhaps over innocent bystanders. So that's why I like to let it out here. Turning anger to humor dissipates its power--and if someone finds it entertaining, I have done my part. Even if that someone is only me.

A love/hate kind of day

A funny thing happened on the way to my Concepts of Comedy class: each student who submitted reading comments thoroughly hated one poem--but no two students hated the same poem, and any poem hated by one student was loved by another.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when students respond passionately to poems dealing with passionate topics: love, hate, death, suicide, and religion. We looked at incongruity of style and substance in Stevie Smith's "Sunt Leones" (link) and Dorothy Parker's "Resume" (link), and we examined love poems you'll never find inside a Hallmark card: Parker's "Love Poem" (link) and Julie Sheehan's "Hate Poem" (link). A love poem full of hate and a hate poem full of love: the perfect recipe for either comedy or tragedy.

Speaking of love/hate relationships, I tried to enrich our discussion of Ambrose Bierce's "The New Decalogue" (link) by reading aloud some entries from The Devil's Dictionary, including his long definition of Regalia, which includes the incomparable phrase "The Blatherhood of Insufferable Stuff." Half of my students bore up under the onslaught as if being pelted by bloody entrails while the other half wore smiles that threatened to break their faces wide open. I ignored the hateful half and kept reading. Bierce may be a polarizing figure, but on a day when we're discussing dark comedy, he's worth pursuing.

"You know he's still out there," I told my students. "Bierce's body was never found, so he's still out there wandering the Mexican wilderness--or else he's sitting at a bar with Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa while Elvis warms up to sing a few tunes."

Did anyone laugh? Maybe a little. Most looked puzzled, a look I see frequently in that class. All in all, it was a love/hate kind of day in a love/hate kind of class that is turning out to be a perfect recipe for either comedy or tragedy.

Pardon the interrup--

A student came into my office and apologized for interrupting my work. "My work itself is an interruption," I said. "In fact, this entire day has been a series of interruptions inside interruptions until I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be doing anymore."

What I was supposed to be doing at that particular moment was helping a student understand transitional devices, not a thrilling topic for discussion but we managed. That talk interrupted an attempt to write an exam, which, in turn, was interrupted by a class and a workout at the rec center and then another class, which was interrupted before it even began because the classroom door was shut and locked and I don't have any keys to that building.

But somehow we survived all that and now here I am disentangling myself from all those embedded layers of interruptions so that I can think about maybe perhaps at some point (gasp!) going home while the sun is still shining. Shocking, I know. I'll be on campus for Very Important Events just about every evening this week, including the mysterious "be in your office from 3 to 5 Friday" event, unless it gets interrupted by, say, a meteor strike.

It could happen. Even locked doors can't prevent that kind of interruption.

 

What's opera, doc?

Spending an afternoon at the opera today made me realize that I'm really not doing too badly for a savage raised by wolves.

My people are not opera people. Well, my daughter is an opera person and she's working really hard to help me appreciate good music, but I grew up in a household that tended more toward Johnny Cash than Placido Domingo. I still recall the time a high-school classmate corrected my pronunciation of "Placido Domingo." How was I supposed to know it's not supposed to rhyme with "placebo"?

I've seen some Gilbert and Sullivan but never a real opera all the way through, so when some colleagues formed a carpool to travel an hour north and watch a performance of the Metropolitan Opera's Rigoletto simulcast live in tiny, provincial Zanesville, Ohio, I decided to give it a try. My daughter met me at the theater where we settled into our comfy seats for a high-def, high-class, high-culture experience.

It was pretty good, I think. I'm not really qualified to judge, but if good opera involves colorful costumes, dramatic sets, remarkable voices, and compelling music, then this was good. I would have been lost without the subtitles and I'm annoyed that the Duke got away scot-free at the end, but the time whizzed by quickly and I kept wanting to clap. (But what's the point? The performers are in New York. They can't tell whether we're clapping, stomping, or throwing popcorn at the screen.)

At the end I appreciated one unheralded advantage of having been raised by wolves far from the realm of opera: no one will ever ask me to sing a demanding song in Italian in front of a live audience while lying on my back in the trunk of a car. So there's that. If there's an opera award for Best Performance by a Soon-to-be-Corpse Stuffed in the Trunk of a Classic Car, Diana Damrau ought to get it. 

Just don't ask me to pronounce her name.

There's a reason they call it "lifelong learning"

One of my students apologized for falling asleep in class and another thanked me for using large print on my Prezi slides. "I'm legally blind," he said, "but I can read the print if it's big enough."

Why is a woman who can't sleep all night sitting in a late-afternoon class? And what is a legally blind man doing in a film class? I'm just happy they're in class, even though they're not taking exams or writing papers or getting academic credit for the experience. I'm teaching a Learning in Retirement class for the first time ever, and I'm enjoying every minute of it. 

I confess I was initially motivated by the money--not a huge amount but enough to make it worth my while to teach one two-hour session each week for eight weeks, especially since I'm drawing on material I'm using in my film class so there's no new preparation required.

After four weeks, though, it's not about the money any more. It's just fun. 

The 20 or so students in my class are retired professors, schoolteachers, librarians, counselors, journalists, housewives, and who knows what else, but here's what they have in common: they know stuff. A lot of stuff.  And they'll eagerly share that stuff during class discussions--no one stares at the desk in hopes that I won't call on them. I learn something from them every week, even though I'm supposed to be the expert.

They speak up in class and ask terrific questions and they are incredibly appreciative. Late afternoon is not my most energetic time of day and today I was particularly tired, fumbling with technology and tripping over words, but as we were leaving, just about every student thanked me. I can't remember the last time a college student thanked me for a class (no matter how brilliant), but my Learning in Retirement folks thank me even when I fumble and stumble.

They wouldn't be there unless they really wanted to learn, so they show up, week after week, even if they haven't slept or can't see. I like them, these old folks. They're the kind of people I want to be when I retire. In fact, the sooner, the better! How about tomorrow?

Stop boring me. Please. Just stop.

Rule #1 for writing papers in my classes: Don't bore me. 

If the material is boring, use interesting words--starting in the title and introduction. "Poetry Essay" is not an interesting title. Neither is "Literature Essay." And don't even get me started on "Essay 1." Imagine that the future of the planet depends upon your ability to hook every random eyeball that happens to glance upon your title. Notice how the concept of hooking eyeballs makes you squirm? Kind of icky, isn't it? But it got your attention. Made you look!

But hooking isn't enough: you've got to set the hook with an interesting opening line. Today I've been shuffling through a pile of papers trying to find an opening line that makes me want to keep reading, and so far the pickings are pretty slim. "Since ancient times, authors have written poetry" is true but so obvious that I can't imagine a reader who would find it interesting. 

Well, okay, I can try: an alien planet where poetry does not exist accidentally intercepts a broadcast of Billy Collins reading "The Lanyard" (link) and cannot comprehend the function of such a peculiar arrangement of words. Overwhelmed by curiosity, the alien planet sends anthropologists to earth to research the history and purpose of poetry, but they possess only the most rudimentary understanding of the English language and human history. That alien anthropologist would be the ideal audience for a sentence like "Since ancient times, authors have written poetry."

But I am not that alien. So say something interesting and stop boring me.

A little moral calculus

First, let b = the number of weeks of winter bleakness we've endured. Subtract w (the wonderfulness of today's weather) and multiply by m (the number of late meetings I've attended in the past 7 days). Add p (the number of papers I need to grade by tomorrow) and stir gently until it reaches temperature t (my current blood pressure multiplied by the number of times I encountered ludacris used as an adjective in student papers today). Pour into heart-shaped molds and cool until pliable, then toss to the dog.

Which is what I'm doing with the rest of the day. Yes: I'm skipping out on office hours and taking my pile of papers home, where they will sit patiently in my bag while I take the dog out for a long walk in the beautiful gorgeous irresistible sunny weather. I know it's wrong, but my moral calculus tells me that sometimes you've gotta be bad to be good. So sayonara, sweetheart. I'm going to the dogs. Dog. Whatever.

A literary boxing match

Take the characters from readings and films assigned in my classes today and tomorrow and put them in the ring together. Who wins?

Round One
In this corner, Mary Tyrone, the morphine addict from Long Day's Journey Into Night; in the other corner, the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Hold on, folks--that rabbit may have sharp pointy teeth, but Mary's constant whining makes the rabbit's head explode! 

Round Two
The Misfit (from "A Good Man is Hard to Find") meets Sonny Steele (a good man who is hard to find in The Electric Horseman):  The Misfit wields a gun, but Sonny's sparkling electric-blue cowboy get-up blinds him so he can't aim straight. Sonny wins by a lumen!  


Round Three

Eugene O'Neill meets Eudora Welty in the battle of the euphonious names. Welty wins it by a syllable!

Round Four
Rising Star, the aging racehorse in The Electric Horseman, meets the coconut-shell horsey sounds from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but Rising Star is so doped up that all he can do is settle down for a nice nap. The coconut shells gallop off with the win!

Round Five 
James Tyrone, armed with a hedge-trimmer, meets the Knights who say Ni--and Tyrone trims their shrubbery!

Round Six
The sad-sack traveling salesman from Eudora Welty's "Death of a Traveling Salesman" meets Hallie Martin, the sassy journalist played by Jane Fonda in The Electric Horseman: it's a draw. The salesman disables Hallie by opening his sample cases full of ladies' shoes, but then he keels over from a heart attack and nobody even notices. 


Round Seven 
The backseat-driving talkative grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" meets the French Taunter from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Which one will shut up first? It's impossible to say--once they get started, they never stop. This match may go on forever!

On poetic polysyndeton

Lists are useful: to encourage my advanced writing students to attend to the rhythms and sounds of language, I get them to make lists and arrange them in sentences in particularly euphonious ways. An excellent example of this practice appears in an article called "Street Life" in the Feb. 11&18 New Yorker, in which Joseph Mitchell describes his fascination with the ornamentation of buildings:

I never get tired of gazing from the back seats of buses at the stone eagles and the stone owls and the stone dolphins and the stone lions' heads and the stone bulls' heads and the stone rams' heads and the stone urns and the stone tassels and the stone laurel wreaths and the stone scallop shells  and the cast-iron stars and the cast-iron rosettes and the cast-iron medallions and the clusters of cast-iron acanthus leaves bolted to the capitals of cast-iron Corinthian columns and the festoons of cast-iron flowers and the swags of cast-iron fruit and the zinc brackets in the shape of oak leaves propping up the zinc cornices of brownstone houses and the scroll-sawed bargeboards framing the dormers of decaying old mansard-roofed mansions and the terra-cotta cherubs and nymphs and satyrs and sibyls and sphinxes and Atlases and Dianas and Medusas serving as keystones in arches over the doorways and windows of tenement houses.

The polysyndeton and repetition would be right at home in those Old Testament passages describing the ornamentation of the Temple, and if you read it out loud the incantatory rhythm casts a poetic spell. Phrasing controls pace, with the short phrases at the beginning expanding into longer phrases before moving toward that final swift outpouring of "nymphs and satyrs and sibyls and sphinxes" and so on. 

The repetitions and lists continue in the next paragraph, culminating in a short, simple sentence that punctuates the whole:

There are some remarkably silly-looking things among these ornaments, but they are silly-looking things that have lasted for a hundred years or more in the dirtiest and most corrosive air in the world, the equivalent of a thousand years in an olive grove in Greece, and there is something triumphant about them--they have triumphed over time and ice and frost and heat and humidity and wind and rain and brutally abrupt temperature fluctuations and rust and pigeon droppings and smoke and soot and sulfuric acid, not to speak of the perpetual nail-loosening and timber-weakening and stone-cracking and mortar-crumbling vibration from the traffic down below. Furthermore, they have triumphed over profound changes in architectural styles. I revere them. 

That's the way to make a list. That's the way to make a statement. That's the way to make me want to go to New York.   

Teacher's helper

Last night I dreamed a PowerPoint presentation--and a pretty useful one at that. (Far more useful than the information Edgar Allan Poe one imparted to me in a dream. "Ulalume," he said, "means soccer coach.")

This morning I spent an hour or so putting together the presentation, strictly following the detailed instructions imparted within my dream.  Tomorrow I'll present the material in my Romancing the Beast class to introduce the history and significance of the Western film (in preparation for viewing The Electric Horseman). It's a pretty darned interesting presentation, including photos, film clips, and quotations from the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, but I'm not sure I can take full credit for a presentation created while I was sleeping.

Clearly my subconscious knew that I needed to present this information, but I don't know how to give my subconscious a pat on the back. Maybe I should nominate my subconscious for the Innovative Teaching Award--but what would my subconscious do with the money, and where would it hang the plaque?

Is that a light at the end of the tunnel or a train coming through?

In just twelve short months I've moved from assuming that I'll never retire to wishing I could retire right now--today if possible. Tomorrow at the latest. 

How did this happen?

For years I used to tell people, "I can't retire until I pay off my awful horrible oppressive very bad debts and I'll never pay off my awful horrible oppressive very bad debts, so I guess I'll never retire." Then I received an unexpected windfall--and then another--and now it looks like I may actually pay off my awful horrible oppressive very bad debts well before reaching retirement age.

Then my oncologist handed me a bunch of scary numbers and I thought, "That's it, then. I'll be dead long before I'm old enough to retire." But then I recovered and the numbers went into hiding, and now it's entirely possible that I'll still be alive and kicking when it's time to retire.
 
Of course I'm such a workaholic that I've always feared idleness, assuming that the absence of regular teaching in my life would drive me quickly crazy. But then last spring my sabbatical convinced me that I can enjoy a meaningful, rewarding existence even without standing in the classroom every day. 

So now I'm willing to admit that I will someday retire--but I'm beginning to wonder whether I can keep doing this for another 12 or 15 years.

Yesterday our department worked on scheduling next year's courses, and I took a good hard look down the coming decade: teaching the same handful of courses in a regular rotation, with the occasional special topics course thrown in for the sake of variety, to students who express open contempt for the material, on a campus that rewards hard work with more hard work and places annoying bureaucratic obstacles in the path of interesting ideas. 

I don't know if I can keep doing this. I don't know how anyone can keep doing this. 

Is this a mid-life crisis or just the usual fourth-week malaise? Years ago I left a job I loved in journalism because I found myself doing the same things over and over with no new challenges, and now I'm looking at the same prospect. Here I am once again doing a job I love but wondering how long I'll be able to stand it without some new challenges, but this time I can't quit because I've advanced so far I'm unemployable. 

So I guess it's time to find some new challenges. But where do I begin? 

 

Snow problem

When the ambulance came screaming up the center of the state highway last night, I knew I needed to move off the side of the road--but I couldn't find it. 

The side of the road, that is. 

I was poking along at 25 mph on a broad expanse of snow, with no visible edge lines and no clear indication of where the road ended and the shoulder began. Where was the ditch? Where was the river? Impossible to say. Slamming on the brakes was not an option--I wasn't really in the mood for doing donuts in the middle of the highway. But here was this ambulance, lights flashing and sirens blaring, bearing right down toward me in the middle of the highway, so I nudged over toward where I imagined the edge of the road might be and watched the ambulance scream past with inches to spare.


Not so long ago such an encounter would have made me hyperventilate, but last night I managed to drive home over snow-covered roads without breaking a sweat. I credit the Volvo. For years I drove cars that lacked stability in snow, little wimpy cars just begging for an opportunity to wobble and spin, so driving in snow made me a little bit crazy. My Volvo, on the other hand, is built like a tank and handles like one too: I may have to take it slow, but I'll get there, snow or no snow.

Well, mostly. I made it about halfway up the driveway last night before sliding sideways and deciding to call it a day. My husband's car suffered a similar fate, and our neighbors's car spun out on the road, dashed across the end of our driveway, and sunk into a snow-covered farm field. This morning our driveway was studded with cars parked at jaunty angles in the snow, but mine was the first to move on out.

And driving to work this morning was a breeze: a little slush on the highway, a few slippery spots on the brick streets in town, but no reason to panic. Just another small adventure along the highway of life.

Something's missing here

First exam of the semester! I'm excited, but I suspect that "excited" isn't quite the right word to describe my students' feelings. It feels as if the semester just started, but we've read and discussed two batches of poems and nine short stories published between 1865 and 1900, and we've also thoroughly examined the development of realism, naturalism, and literary impressionism, so an exam right now works just perfectly.

Something's missing, though. Nineteen students on the roster, 14 in the classroom taking the exam...that's not right. One student is taking the exam in the Academic Resource Center and another had surgery and has not been in class in two weeks, but where are the rest? No e-mails, no calls, no excuses. It's a mystery. I don't know how the missing students intend to get caught up, but on the other hand, it's really easy to grade a blank exam.