Another day, another opportunity to brutalize students

It has been suggested (never mind by whom) that the comments I insert in students' papers can sound a little, um, unfriendly. Maybe even downright harsh. I have explained that my comments are intended to be helpful but I have to keep them concise or they'll fill the entire margin and spill out over the next page, but for students in the Emoticon Age, conciseness can feel like brutality.

I don't want to brutalize my students--well, most of them, anyway--but I don't know how to make brief and pithy suggestions about syntax sound celebratory:

A comma alone is not strong enough to connect two complete sentences; try a semicolon or a comma plus a conjunction--LOL!

Check spelling--I mean, if that kind of thing is important to you. :-)

This is a really interesting point! It's so interesting, in fact, that it was made by another author in an online summary of the text! So while I applaud your ability to pull together really interesting ideas, I'm going to have to give you a teensy-weensy little grade deduction (enjoy that F!) and report your academic dishonesty to the provost. Have a nice day!

This clearly isn't working. I always find something good to applaud in each paper, and I enjoy inserting celebratory remarks for a student who shows progress, but I can't avoid pointing out areas that need work and I can't figure out how to make those comments sound friendly, or at least less brutal.

Maybe we can all just put our emotions aside and read the comments as comments. Suspend emotions while reading papers! Is there an emoticon for that?  

 

 

Not sure how those squeegees snuck in there

My first inkling of the problem arose on the opening day of class, when my brand-spanking-new first-year students condemned the credibility of a text because its author is a journalist and everyone knows journalists are biased.

I thought their evaluations of texts would become a bit more nuanced after we'd spent three weeks building their rhetorical analysis skills, so when we discussed a study conducted by credentialed professors and published in an academic journal (with supporting evidence, footnotes, and a lengthy Works Cited), I fully expected students to give the article an A+ for credibility.

But no. Several students (enough to make a noticeable dent in the discussion) averred that the article in question is not credible because the study addresses an issue related to gender but its authors are both women, who are obviously incapable of writing about gender without disqualifying bias.

So if women can't be trusted to write about gender without bias, who can? Men have gender too! Must we hand over all our gender-related research to genderless beings, maybe let the plankton take over the research labs? But wait, do plankton have gender? What about algae? Fungi? Squeegees? Would you trust a research article written by a squeegee? It would have to be a pretty incredible squeegee.

Some of my students seem to think that no sources are credible, that it's foolhardy to trust any source written by a human being capable of bias, that throwing the word "bias" out there trumps every other consideration. A bias against bias--how can I wipe that away? (Somebody hand me a squeegee!) 

Monday morning mail

Dear student with the wandering eyes taking my Monday-morning exam:
I'm sitting right here in front of you, and my eyes work just fine. Exactly whom do you think you're fooling?

Dear student who e-mailed me late Sunday night to complain that you can't possibly do what the assignment asks you to do:
Go back and read the assignment sheet again, because it doesn't actually ask you to do the thing you say you can't possibly do.

Dear student who dropped my class right before the first exam:
I'm sorry to see you go. You've been a faithful participant in class discussion, offering interesting insights on assigned readings. I understand that you have a busy schedule and something has to go, but I wish it didn't have to be my class.  Can't you stay in the class and persuade Mr. Roaming-Eyes to drop instead?

Dear students whose drafts I read over the weekend:
The assignment asks you to do two related things in the same essay, but most of you chose to do just one and then vaguely gestured toward the other. I know it's not easy, but I really do expect you to do what the assignment sheet asks you to do. So go back and try again. 

Dear administrator who sent out a survey first thing Monday morning:
Yes, the topic of your survey is important. Yes, I would be interested in seeing what my colleagues think about the topic. Yes, I agree that full participation will make the results more meaningful. But seriously: early Monday morning? At the beginning of the fourth week of the semester, when I'm giving an exam in one class and commenting on drafts or grading papers in all the others? When I'm still a few cups short of my Daily Caffeine Quota? Ask me again another time. I've got other things to do, like stare meaningfully at Mr. Roaming-Eyes as he takes my exam. (Yoo-hoo! I'm right here! I can see you!)  
 

Book-burners in my backyard

I've never assigned Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye in my classes, primarily because an author's early work is not always her best. Paradise and Song of Solomon serve my students well, and when my survey students need a small taste of Morrison's magic, I assign the short story "Recitatif." Besides, The Bluest Eye is frequently assigned in high school.

Except when it's banned. I am embarrassed to report that the president of my state school board believes The Bluest Eye ought to be banned from high school reading lists. 

In Ohio. Toni Morrison's home state. 

The Bluest Eye is set in Lorain, Ohio, but if Debe Terhar has her way, students residing in Lorain will not be allowed to read the book in school. Never mind that Toni Morrison, a native of Lorain, is our nation's only living Nobel-Prize-winning novelist and a writer whose impact on American literature has been incalculable. Terhar doesn't want 11th-graders exposed to anything "inappropriate," and she's perfectly happy to become the final arbiter of literary appropriateness.  

I didn't believe it either, but read it for yourself here. And if you figure out what another state school board member means when he says The Bluest Eye promotes a "socialist-communist agenda," please explain.
 

Feelin' linky

Because it's the final day of my 63-hour week and there's really nothing left in the old brainpan:

Will you survive the alien invasion? (Don't skip the comments! You wouldn't want to make the Alien Commander angry!)

If the aliens don't get you, will you survive the fog invasion? Watch this incredibly beautiful and soothing time-lapse photography of fog rolling in. And if that sounds about as exciting as watching paint dry, you haven't had the kind of week I've had. Fog rolling in is just what the doctor ordered.

Shameless self-promotion: it took too much work and endless revision, but writing this article gave me a great deal of joy which I am happy to share with others. (You have to scroll down the page to "Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Essay: Nature Writing through Multiple Lenses" for a link to the pdf.)

If I lived in or near New York or had access to a private jet, you'd better believe I'd hie me on over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to take a look at this exhibit of embroidered textiles from around the world.

And finally, I'll never get tired of John Hodgman's elegant response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Storytelling matters...but sometimes other things matter more.

Read the fine, friendly, fantastic directions!

My colleague gave our shared class a quiz on following directions, starting with "Read all the directions before you do anything" and then offering a numbered list of ridiculous actions (fold the paper in half, poke a hole in the middle, draw a smiley-face, and so on) concluding with "Do not complete any item on this list." Students who read all the directions all the way through can sit in class laughing their heads off as their classmates fold papers, poke holes, and draw smiley-faces.

Our students took this quiz in her class yesterday; today they're submitting drafts in my class. How many of them won't be able to follow simple written directions for submitting drafts online?

I was going to say we're facing an epidemic of failure to follow directions, but 20 percent doesn't quite reach epidemic status. It is, however, a very revealing exercise: if 80 percent of the class manages to understand the written directions and upload the draft, then the problem probably does not lie with the directions or the technology. If nothing else, this assignment reveals which students are going to need extra attention.

Do you think I should make them fold their drafts into origami cranes?

  

Halfway through a wild week

By Tuesday evening I'd logged 24 hours on campus in only two days--but the week isn't over. Afternoon meeting today, afternoon meeting tomorrow, evening event tomorrow, afternoon meeting Friday, afternoon event Saturday--I may as well roll out a sleeping bag in my office and skip going home.

Am I doing more this year than last? Evidence from my recent annual review would suggest that the answer is yes: last year I served on a committee that met three times all year, while this year I'm on a very active committee that plays an important role in my colleagues' lives and therefore requires a huge time commitment. Also, I've already done more for my department in the past two weeks than I did all last year, and I'm doing some extracurricular things with students as well. Last year I took a step back and spent some time licking my wounds from the previous year's painful battles, but I'm through with all that now and ready to move on.

But that doesn't mean I'm excited about spending 63 hours on campus in one week. This week's schedule won't be repeated any time soon, so I guess I'll survive. But next week? Don't look for me after 3 because I'll be rolling up my sleeping bag and heading for home.

 

Meet the new crisis, same as the old crisis

You know you've been around too long when brand-new ideas designed to Save Our Campus sound just like old ideas recycled and rebranded with spiffy new names. While I admire the energy and enthusiasm some of my colleagues bring to discussions of innovative programs, I'm inclined to sit back and keep my thoughts to myself. Does this make me an old-fogey obstructionist fuddy-duddy? Maybe, but I'm okay with that. I've run headlong into enough brick walls in my time so I think I'll move out of the way and give others a chance. But if someone starts handing out sledge-hammers to knock down that wall, count me in!

On the contrary, it's actually just enough reading

Third week of the semester and I'm thoroughly sick of hearing complaints about "too much reading." According to (some of) my students, anything more than a page and a half is just too LONG, and anything written more than five minutes ago is just too HARD, and anything requiring complex reasoning is just too BORING.

I'm already tired of fighting their complaints and defending my reading list, so I've decided to give up: You're right, it's too long, too hard, and too boring, but you still have to read it, so quit griping and get to work.

Yes: I'm just too MEAN!  

Bookless buncomb

Dear textbook-free student:

Textbooks are expensive--I get that. My ability to obtain desk copies insulates me from textbook prices, but I do pay attention to prices and try to order only the books you'll actually need for my class.

And I understand that sometimes you can save money by ordering textbooks online instead of buying them from the bookstore, and that sometimes the mail can be slow. I totally understand that you're just doing your best to save money and that's why you still don't have the textbook for my class.

I suppose it's possible that you could pass my class without buying the textbooks. I've had a few students try it, but they've had to work really hard: ordering books well in advance through interlibrary loan, hunting down obscure online sources for out-of-print texts, or even photocopying pieces from classmates' texts. (Copyright violation + expensive, but I'm not here to manage either your morals or your checkbook.)

What I truly don't understand is where you got the idea that lacking the textbook gives you an excuse to avoid work altogether. You've submitted so little work and skipped so many classes that I thought you'd dropped the course, but no: you assumed that you could just make it all up after you got the textbook.

That's not how it works. If you lack the textbook, you'll have to work twice as hard: haunt the library, search out the original sources for these anthologized works, hope that the poems we study are available online, make friends with classmates willing to let you borrow the book.

What you can't do is simply goof off for a few weeks and then blame the post office. If the post office is responsible for your academic performance, you're in pretty sorry shape. So do yourself a favor and stop mailing it in! Buy the book, read the assignments, and come to class--unless you want that absence of textbooks to translate into a zero in the gradebook.
  

Friday poetry challenge: single-sentence prose poem

This morning on the way to work I saw cotton-candy pink fog hanging languidly over the river and wondered what combination of natural forces could produce such a phenomenon, so different from the other types of fog I've observed this semester--the students feeling their way (already!) through a fog of bewilderment, the one whose peculiar interpretation of a poem relied on misreading of the word "sow" as a verb (the farmer sows the seed) instead of as a noun (the blood of a broody sow), the fog of woe that fills my mind when minority students recount their encounters with local rednecks--and my morning-fogged mind tried to write a poem about fog without going all Carl Sandburg with his little cat feet, but in the end the only thing that emerged from that pink fog was this sentence.

But maybe you can write another one.

My ever-evolving technology policy

A colleague is upset because a student took a photo during class and posted it on social media. 

An international student wants to use a translator during exams.

A student just ordered an iPad and wants to use it to take notes in class.

Another student wants to put on earphones and listen to music while working on in-class writing assignments.

A struggling student wants to use his smartphone to take a photo--of another student's paper.

Technology used to be so easy: pencil, pen, overhead projector. As students' command of technology expands, I have to keep rethinking my in-class technology policies to deal with situations never before imagined. 

The easy way out would be to outlaw all technology in class, but I'm not ready to go that far. I outlaw texting, shopping, or using social media in class, but if an unfamiliar word comes up and I don't want to serve as Dr. Dictionary, I'll ask students to look it up on their smartphones just to give them some practice in using technology for academic purposes.

And I'll confess to some inconsistency in enforcement. I'm far more strict, for instance, in freshman writing classes because I know they're easily distracted; however, in an upper-level writing class, it's often helpful for students to have laptops in class so we can try out various writing techniques and see immediate results.

Other cases are quickly resolved: no translators during exams--ever. (They can do a lot more than translate!) I prefer that students not take photos in class and post them online without permission, but on the other hand, I don't have time to be the Social Media Police. If a student takes a video of something I say during class and posts it online without any context in order to make me look like a fool, I'm sure I'll hear about it; otherwise, ignorance is bliss. (And if a student ever outs me online as a raving lunatic, I'll take refuge in one word: tenure!) 

Taking notes in class on an iPad? I'm okay with this in a literature class (as long as it's not distracting to other students), but I'm leery of allowing iPads or laptops in freshman classes. One of my goals in freshman classes is to help the students develop effective study skills, which means eliminating distractions. Therefore, no earbuds, headphones, or music during class. 

Then there's the student who wants to photograph another student's paper. She had trouble completing the assignment and wants to see "the right way to do it." (Never mind that I had already offered an example.) If a student wants to get up at the end of class and photograph the stuff I scribble all over the whiteboard, I'm not going to stand in the way, even though I believe the student would be better served by taking notes during class. However, taking a photo of another student's paper (without that student's permission) seems different. Why not just ask the other student for a copy of the paper? Why sneak around doing the spy thing with a smartphone?

A few weeks from now my freshman writing students will be reading an article from Slate about the dangers of divided attention while studying (read it here), and I'm sure I'll get some pushback from students who believe they can't learn without a dozen different devices demanding simultaneous attention. I can't regulate how they use technology outside the classroom, but inside the classroom I can be a real pain: Turn it off--all of it--and put it away or I'll put it away for you. Allow me to introduce you to an essential piece of technology: the pencil or pen. It's portable, versatile, welcome in just about any setting, and never needs to be plugged in. And best of all, it won't distract you from the task at hand--learning.

  

 

Fiction, falling (with a splat)

My Concepts of Nature class was discussing "A White Heron," Sarah Orne Jewett's lyrical story about a young girl whose love for a bird causes her to sever ties with the human community, when my students started riffing on alternative endings.

She could have fallen out of the tree--or jumped! 

And landed on a white heron!

Or the white heron could have magically saved her. 

Or the hunter could have shot her--intentionally (to punish her for not revealing the location of the heron) or accidentally (not realizing that the innocent girl had been transmogrified into a heron).

I had to stop them before they started inserting vampires and zombies into Jewett's bucolic setting. Sarah Orne Jewett couldn't have written "The Writhing Bloodstained Zombie-Bird of Doom," but the task would give my students no trouble at all.

Public places, private faces

The student leaned back in his chair, drummed his fingers on the table, let his eyes wander around the room, and occasionally let out out a big sigh, his body language screaming "Get me out of here!!"

I get it--really, I do. He has more important things to think about than my silly class, which doesn't seem at all related to his major or career plans. If the class weren't required, no WAY he'd be sitting there working on writing skills on such a beautiful day. Some days I don't want to be there either.

But I wonder whether he realizes how loudly his body language is shouting. I wonder also about the students who sit there slack-jawed, slumping in their seats and staring blankly as if no one can see them. Are they aware that they're in the presence of actual people and not just computer monitors? Do they even know that their facial expressions are public? If they were aware of how absent and addled they look or what negative messages their faces convey, would they sit up and look lively?

Maybe I need to take a big mirror to class and challenge my students: If you can't be interested, can you at least pretend?

 

Rules for those who labor on Labor Day

1. Dress down. They can make me teach on Labor Day, but they can't make me dress up.

2. Pack your own picnic. No way I'm eating at my desk when the rest of the world is outside grilling burgers!

3. Don't begrudge the revelers their revels. The people who clean our bathrooms, make our photocopies, and answer our phones work hard for very little money and deserve every minute of their day off. I do not wish they were here working, but I do wish I could join them on their day off.

4. Office hours? Are you kidding me? No one comes to my office hours on a normal day, so what are the chances that anyone will show up on Labor Day?

5. Enjoy the commute. No public school = no school buses holding up traffic, no 20-mile-per-hour zones, and no teens racing around curves on country roads.

6. Be there. Nobody's fooled by the Labor Day flu; if my students are required to be in class on Labor Day, then I'm going to be there with them.

7. Don't try to explain it. I know we have reasons for teaching on Labor Day, and some of them may even be valid ("We can't shortchange Monday labs!"), but the real reason we teach on Labor Day is that we've never been sufficiently motivated to change it.

Friday poetry challenge: time's slippage

The first week of classes has passed in a blur, but time seems to stop every afternoon as I wait out my office hours alone in the cavelike basement with no one stopping by. Five minutes of empty office-hour time seems to take an eternity to pass, while time in class goes by so quickly that I can't squeeze in everything we need to cover. How did time get so unreliable?

The weeks are racing quickly by
but afternoons stretch on
in twiddling thumbs and tedium,
slow-motion--then they're gone.

A thousand years are like a day,
a season like a slumber.
An hour in class just whizzes past,
but minutes like to lumber.

Its ticking sounds consistent, but
my clock is worthless--see, 
it cannot show what we all know:
Time's relativity.

That's my week in a nutshell--how about yours? I'd love to see some time-related musings in the comments!
 
 
 

Heeding my inner personal trainer

It's time to get up off your butt and go to the Rec Center. You know the weather's going to be lousy tonight so there's no chance you'll go for a walk. Besides, you promised to meet your colleague over there. Just go!

Ignore all those students milling about. They don't care how flabby you look in your gym clothes--in fact, they don't even see you. As far as students are concerned, you've entered into the invisible age.

Pay no attention to the scale in the corner. Well, okay, just once--step on the scale to see how you're doing, but then immediately put the results out of your mind.

Don't be afraid of the elliptical machine! It won't bite! It doesn't even care how long you've been neglecting the Rec Center. Just get up there and start stepping. 

You can stop after 20 minutes--but not before. Not five minutes early. Not even one minute early.

And you can't stop in the middle of a song, even if your 20 minutes are up and the current song is "The Boxer."

And you obviously can't stop until your heart rate drops into more normal range. So just keep stepping--but slowly.

There now. Don't you feel much better? Don't get too relaxed, though--time to walk the track! 

Doing my literary analysis happy-dance!

The very best moment of this morning's class occurred when a student asked a simple question: "Are we allowed to look up words?"

Yes! Please! Look up every single word if it will help you understand the poem!

This was in my Sports Literature class, which introduces firts-year students to the fine art of literary analysis. I wanted to hit them right off the bat with the important distinction between emotional and analytical responses to literature, but this group needs to take things in small steps, so over the summer I created a Prezi that dramatizes the process. And if this thing is working right, you can see it here:


My goal today was to kick them right off that very comfortable bottom step ("I feel, I can relate, It reminds me of the time...") and help them step up toward Understanding, so I showed them a short poem, put them in groups of three, asked them to work together to understand the poem, and then left the room for a few minutes. (Small-group discussion can be thwarted if the students feel as if I'm looming over them, so I often step out for a drink of water or a brief chat with a colleague.)

The minute I walked back into the classroom, a student threw his hand in the air and asked, "Are we allowed to look up words?"

I wanted to do my happy dance right there in the classroom. I even gave the class a one-time release from the no-cell-phone policy and encouraged them to look up any unfamiliar term, and within seconds I heard groups talking out which definition of eccentricity might apply to a poem about baseball and what the differences might be between errant, arrant, and aberrant.

It took a few minutes but they soon convinced me that they understood the poem, and they even started making some leaps toward analysis (which wasn't part of the lesson plan). Some of them even liked the poem--but not until they'd made the effort to understand it.

See, it doesn't take much for students to make me really happy. Sometimes all it takes is a simple question.  

Do I dare?

The peach has been sitting on the dining table for three or four days, looking uglier by the minute, mottled and split and entirely unappealing. First it was hard as a rock and then, as it softened, it attracted a swirl of fruit flies. Who would pick such an unlikely peach? Who would dare to eat it?

That was our entire peach harvest sitting on the table, this one peach. A peach tree we planted up the hill a few years ago finally started producing peaches this season, but they stayed small and hard and were eaten by deer and raccoons; the peach on the table, on the other hand, came from a tree we planted just a few months ago, a tiny sapling that had no business producing fruit.

And yet it did: it made one big, plump, ugly peach that we picked last week while it was still hard, and then it sat and waited for someone brave enough to take a bite.

This morning my husband cut up that peach, eviscerated the icky spots, removed the ugly peel, and sliced half of it into my breakfast cereal.

It was good. Really good--the sweetest, juiciest, most luscious peach I've ever eaten. A tree from which we expected nothing produced one perfect piece of fruit, and it was very good. 

If that peach suggests anything about the nature of my fall classes (which start today!), I'll be on the lookout for the unpromising student who hands in a peach of a paper--but I'll also keep a sharp eye out for the pit!

Unbeatable but unbloggable

Because communication breakdowns on campus have resulted in a series of ludicrous but unbloggable situations,

and because our campus continues to discriminate between men and women in petty but unbloggable ways,

and because a certain local official persists in embarrassing the community in an ignorant but unbloggable manner,

and because our two-month-long attempt to refinance our mortgage fell to pieces for unbloggable reasons involving violations of the laws of physics,

Here is a totally gratuitous photograph of a sunflower.

You're welcome.
 

My kind of personal assistant

This morning College Misery features a post on the growth of private consultants who do all the grunt-work for students trying to register for classes (read it here), while over at Slate Farhad Manjoo reveals that outsourcing his "most mundane personal tasks" to an online personal assistant (in India!) did not work out as well as he'd hoped (read it here).

Neither of these stories features the specialized kind of personal assistant I need today: someone to sit through six hours of meetings in my place. Call her a Personal Ass-sitter--someone who can sit patiently through any number of inane meetings, listen to the same three people make the same three points at every meeting, and nod brightly even when the information presented at this year's meeting is identical to the information presented at last year's meeting.

The ideal Personal Ass-sitter would occasionally offer clever comments that would reflect positively on my wit and wisdom, but I fear I might have to pay extra for this service. How many comments at how much per comment? We would have to negotiate a reasonable fee, but I stink at negotiation.

But hey, I can hire another personal assistant just to negotiate with my Personal Ass-sitter...and then a third personal assistant to negotiate with my negotiator, and eventually I would have to take on a second job just to pay all my personal assistants.

Maybe I could get a job as a Personal Ass-sitter! Oh wait, I already have that job.

Another many-meeting marathon

Meeting today from 3 to 4.

Three different meetings tomorrow from 10 to 1, 1:30 to 4, and 4 to 5.

Lunch with friends Thursday, hurrah!

Meeting Friday from 3 until the end of time.

Meetings Saturday (with new students!) from 9 to 1 (ish).

What, no meeting on Sunday? Somebody must have slipped up!

And then classes start for real on Monday....if I have any energy left after all those meetings.

Hunting (and sometimes gathering)

With few free days left before I have to step back into the classroom I've donned my hunter-gatherer boots, but I seem to be doing a lot of hunting and precious little gathering. 

I had invited my birding-and-botanizing friend out Sunday to go creek-stomping in search of kingfishers. "They've been really active lately," I told her. "I see them every day." So naturally the kingfishers were nowhere to be seen Sunday, even though we waded far upstream into their secluded areas. They were probably taking shelter from the persistent drizzle, which anyone with a working brain would have done at the time, but we just stomped on through the muddy water, sludge, and drizzle.

Yesterday I was more successful when I went hunting for classroom-worthy clothes, bagging a wonderful skirt, a blouse, and two sweaters, but I spent most of the day helping my husband with two other important searches: a computer to replace his ailing 12-year-old (!!) laptop and a used van to replace the one that exploded three weeks ago. We brought home no computer and no van, although we test-drove the perfect van at the perfect price. We just need to get a few financial things figured out before we actually buy anything, which means the perfect van might no longer be available. On the other hand, Autotrader.com offers a wide field for hunting and gathering used cars, so one of these days we'll bag a beauty and bring it home.
 
Back home our gathering has been much more fruitful. Our corn is as high as an elephant's eye and absolutely delicious, so we've been eating it every day--sometimes two meals a day. Sweet-corn season doesn't last long but while it does, it's good to be a gatherer.  

Unnerving numbers

Three--count 'em, three. That's how many of my freshman students this fall are female. I have two freshman classes for a total of 29 students, only three of them female. Meanwhile, my two non-freshman classes have a total of 27 students, 19 of them female. Right: in my freshman classes, 10 percent of the students are female, while in the non-freshman classes, 70 percent are female. What's up with that?

Twelve months: that's how long I've been doing my best to love my basement office, and it's not working. I have plenty of space and everything I need to make my work space comfortable, but the more time I spend in here, the more glum I get. The problem, I think, is the dearth of natural light. Fluorescent lights plus a tiny dungeon window set near the ceiling = cavelike ambiance. What can I do about this? I suppose I can learn to love my office, but if a full year of trying won't do the trick, I'm not sure what will. Maybe I need to start holding office hours outdoors.

Three seconds: that's how long it took me to turn down an unexpected offer yesterday. Would I like to take a course release this fall in exchange for doing a bit of work for a particular program? No, I would not, partly because I've already completed my preparations for that class and partly for reasons I'd rather not reveal. The fact is that I've had my knees kicked out from under me too many times and I don't intend to take on any administrative work unless it's something I really want to do. (And yes, I do have in mind the "something" I'd really like to do, but the position does not actually exist at this time.)

Nine days until classes start! Three long required meetings/events next week plus several shorter auxiliary meetings. One more chance for Monday canoeing, and then 15 weeks until Christmas break. And the countdown begins....

 

To boldly go where no paper has gone before (without boldface!)

Dear not-yet-my-student,

You've offered me so many avenues for criticism that I don't quite know where to begin: you've sent me a paper and asked for my feedback even though classes haven't started yet and the paper is intended for a class I'm not teaching; you've addressed me by an inappropriate name; and you've put a red flag on your e-mail message as if it's the most important thing coming into my inbox, certainly far more important than those mortgage refinance documents or photos of my grandbaby.

But I'm not going to complain about all that. You were, after all, just following the suggestion of the minor administrator who told you to contact me and that I would be utterly delighted to read your paper and offer suggestions. I will certainly have a word or two with that administrator, but that's not your problem.

Your problem is boldface. And italics. And, sometimes, if you're really really excited about something, boldface and italics combined with quotation marks so I can't "POSSIBLY" ignore the very important thing you have to say.

Trust me: you don't want to start like this. First of all, if you boldface important words in every sentence, what will you do when a truly phenomenal idea comes around? It's only a small step from bold/italics/quotation marks to pulsing red flaming fonts accompanied by trumpet fanfare.

Second, promiscuous mingling of boldface, italics, and quotation marks indicates a lack of awareness of proper MLA formatting. Okay, I realize that you're just an incoming freshman and I can't expect you to know squat about MLA formatting, but here's a quick and dirty secret: MLA is boring. (Perhaps intentionally.) Anything that personalizes the format of your paper, that adds color and zest and individualized Ka-POW, is probably not allowed. Get used to dullness now and save yourself a world of grief. Heed the words of David Foster Wallace, who tells us in The Pale King that the ability to endure dullness is a form of power: "If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."

Finally, using tricksy font treatments to emphasize words is the sluggard's way out. Careful writers emphasize important ideas by stating them in compelling ways, using precise words and arranging them cleverly in order to confer power. See how I put the word "power" at the end of the sentence? That position packs the kind of punch that can't be conferred by boldface, italics, quotation marks, or pulsing red flaming fonts accompanied by trumpet fanfare.

You are not yet my student but you will be soon, and the first lesson you'll need to learn is to resist the urge to boldface everything. Put some duct-tape over the B key if you need to, or if you're overwhelmed by the urge to boldface, sit on your hands and hum for a while. Let your words be bold and your syntax powerful, but let your fonts be boring.

Abnormal August

If I'd been carrying my camera this morning, I could have photographed two male kingfishers sitting on the same branch and then swooping off in a mad chattering chase, perhaps a territorial dispute. Normally, kingfishers flee before I can get close enough for a good shot, but this time they let me get really close before taking off--and of course, I didn't have the camera. 

Maybe they were confused by the weather. I know I was. No one told me we were going to have October this morning, so I had to walk really quickly in the shady spots, trying to get to the sun. August in Ohio is generally fairly predictable: oppressive heat, humidity, mosquitoes, thunderstorms, rinse and repeat. Today, though, the cool, crisp air felt like apple-picking-and-hayride weather and made me wonder where I've stashed my fall jacket.

Not that I'm complaining! However, it does seem a little ironic that the minute the air conditioning in my office building gets fixed, we no longer need it. And the cooler weather also reminds me that I'll soon be swamped with classes to prep and papers to grade. I look longingly after those fleeing kingfishers and wish I could join them, flying up the creek and chattering my fool head off.
 

At home on the river

Lesson #1 of river paddling: downstream is easier. 

Of course every idiot knows this, but we're dealing with a river that resists easy access, so sometimes you have to paddle upstream to get where you want to go. The mighty Muskingum is known for its many low-head dams and its historic hand-operated locks, which draw tourists, fisherpeople, and campers but are less friendly to boaters. The dams are treacherous, especially for unpowered craft; last month when the river was at flood stage, a 17-foot fishing boat lost power and got swept over one of the dams. Two of the fishermen swam to safety but the third drowned. The river held on to his body for three days, and it's still holding on to his boat.

So we're not taking our canoe anywhere near the dams, and the hand-operated locks may be quaint but operators are on hand only a few weekends each year.
But the Muskingum is beautiful and very close to home and full of fish, so all summer we've been working our paddling skills up to river level and then waiting for the river to come down from flood stage. 

Finally conditions were right, so for the past two Mondays we've taken the canoe on the same stretch of the Muskingum: putting in at the boat launch across from the power plant just above Beverly, paddling upstream toward Luke Chute, and then paddling back downstream to where we started.

Last week we took a side-trip up a very quiet creek but this morning we just kept moving on upriver. It felt as if we were paddling miles and miles but distances are deceiving on water, and the length that took us two hours to paddle upstream took only 40 minutes going down. We worked really hard maneuvering the currents and the occasional wakes from powerboats, and when we were worn out, we pulled in to a secluded cove for a picnic.

And then we turned around and went back downstream, marveling over how quickly we moved past landmarks that had signified major accomplishments while paddling upstream--a landscape that had been moving past at ultra-slow speed suddenly slipped into fast-forward.

Which felt GREAT. All that hard paddling against the current gave way to a swift, easy slide downstream in a breeze that cooled our sweaty bodies. 

Downstream is like dessert--except the only way to get a second helping is to paddle upstream first.

Is it too late to consider an alternate career?

But I don't WANNA write syllabi! Don't wanna post essay prompts on Moodle, create handouts, or decorate my bulletin board!

Don't wanna type, write, think, or facilitate--especially facilitate.

Don't want no meetings. Don't wanna meet deadlines or submit documents to appropriate offices.

Why? Give me a corner to stand in and I'll echo Bartleby: I prefer not to. 


Today. Ask me again tomorrow.



 

To futility and beyond!

Thanks to sophisticated software, frequent backups, and redundant failsafes, it's really not all that easy to accidentally obliterate an entire day's work in one keystroke. Nevertheless, that's what I managed to do yesterday afternoon.

Don't ask me how I did it--it's too embarrassing. I was trying to work too quickly on too little sleep right in the middle of my stupidest part of the day when I realized almost instantly that I had accidentally deleted an entire course from our course management system after spending the better part of the day building that course from the ground up.

It was a beautiful course while it lasted and it's even more beautiful now that I've rebuilt it from scratch, but for a few hours there it was a vast desolate wasteland. But I was okay with that. In fact, I surveyed that wasteland with an utterly incongruous sense of peace.

For one thing, right now is the right time to do irrevocable damage to courses because no students are here to suffer the consequences and I have plenty of time to sweep the dust under the rug before they return. No need to panic or run around alarming our tech people--just breathe deeply and take some time to figure this out. 

Which I did.

Also, for the past few years I've been developing a profound appreciation for futility. Consider: on Monday we packed up all our canoeing gear and hauled the canoe a few miles up the Muskingum, and then we paddled up the river a short distance to the mouth of a pleasant little creek, paddled up the creek until it got too shallow and rocky, and then turned around and paddled right on back to where we'd started. We didn't catch any fish, take any decent photos, or even arrive anywhere significant; by any objective measure of accomplishment, it was an exercise in futility.

But I like futility. Futility is soothing, especially when accompanied by kingfishers. And so when I accidentally and irretrievably deleted my beautifully constructed course, I took a little mental trip up the river and cherished the moment. This is the magic of August: even if I end up in the middle of a vast desolate wasteland, it doesn't have to be the end of the world. 

Doing the Find-a-New-Classroom Shuffle

There once was a time when I accepted my classroom assignments without a peep, making do with whatever inadequate arrangement I'd been given, but too many classroom disasters have made me more demanding. These days I look over all my classrooms weeks before the semester starts and then I lobby various offices to get my classes into appropriate rooms.

Way back before classrooms were equipped with DVD players, I taught a film class in a room that required me to get down on my hands and knees in front of the entire class and crawl under the desk every time I needed to insert a video. Last semester, though, when my film class was scheduled to meet in a room with great big windows and no effective way to block the sunshine and darken the room, I did the Find-a-New-Classroom Shuffle until I'd located a workable environment.


And another time I was scheduled to teach back-to-back classes in rooms on opposite ends of campus, and even though it's a small campus, I would have breezed into the second class winded and worried about getting the computer going and all my stuff set up for classroom activities. So I did the Shuffle again, this time begging the head of another program to allow me to use their empty rooms. 

Another time I taught a class of 18 students in an auditorium that seats over 100, which was awkward and annoying. This fall I'm scheduled to teach an upper-level seminar with only six students in a room that seats 40. It's not a horrible room, but I would really prefer one more intimate, so off I go to the Records office to find out what other rooms are available (none in my building!) and then off I Shuffle to several other buildings, trudging up and down flights of stairs and examining the few available rooms to see which one will work best.

I haven't found the right room for my small seminar class but I still have a week and a half to work it out. I know the people in charge of assigning classrooms do their best with limited resources and I suppose I ought to be grateful. If nothing else, I'm getting some extra exercise.

Hey, I wonder how many wellness points I can earn by doing the Find-a-New-Classroom Shuffle? Someone ought to start a Shufflecise class!

Desperately seeking clever retorts

I've been driving my sleek indigo beauty for a month now and I've grown accustomed to hearing statements like this from my so-called friends: "I didn't recognize you in such a nice car!" Or, as a colleague told me yesterday: "I saw you getting out of your beautiful new car and it just looked SOOOOOO wrong."

I still haven't figured out what to say to that. It reminds me of the odd things people used to say when I lost all my hair to chemotherapy, like "Baldness suits you--it makes you look intelligent!"

What am I supposed to say? "Sorry, I prefer looking stupid"?

When I was bald I still thought of myself as a person with hair, and when I drove a series of rustbuckets I still thought of myself as the driver of a sleek indigo beauty; any appearances to the contrary were simply temporary setbacks. (And in the rustbucket realm, "temporary" stretched across two decades.) I can't blame my friends for their ignorance of the internal me, but I hope they get accustomed to my new wheels quickly--or else I'll have to come up with some clever retort.

Like what?

What students can learn from babies

I hear the complaint often, even from my own mouth: "I wish my students wouldn't act like such babies!" What we mean by this is "I wish they wouldn't whine and cry and gripe and act as if the universe revolves around their every little need!"

But in some ways, I wish my students would act more like babies. I realized this the other day as I watched my adorable granddaughter lunge toward her mother's shoe.

Baby push-ups strengthen those arms so they can reach!

It's nothing at all special--just an ordinary walking shoe--but baby E was fascinated by the criss-cross patterns of blue lines. She's not particularly mobile but she just kept lunging toward that shoe, reaching with her whole body as if that shoe held the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. (And it's not even a 42.) I admired her persistence: the shoe was just out of her reach and her arm control is still in Beta testing, but nothing was going to stop her from reaching out to satisfy her curiosity.

I wish more of my students would practice that kind of curiosity about how the world works, and I wish more of them would demonstrate that kind of persistence. Focus on the object of curiosity and lunge toward it with everything you've got! And if it's still out of reach, keep reaching! Go on--be a baby!

Just don't come crying to me with your dirty diapers! 

Wander, wonder

Fog socked in our little holler this morning as I set out for my morning walk and a startled a kingfisher flew chattering off into invisibility. The chill in the air felt more like autumn than August, but then I rounded the curve and walked up the hill and found bright sunshine on my shoulders again.

I love these walks in the early-morning stillness but a month from now everything will change. A school bus will rumble up the hill throwing up clouds of dust while pickup trucks full of sleepy teens zoom off toward the high school, but I won't be here to see it because I'll be teaching. I love teaching morning classes except that it makes morning walks difficult, and then the days will get shorter and colder and I'll do most of my walking in the gym.

Nothing wrong with the gym--it's quite nice and I always see pleasant people there--but there are no kingfishers in the gym, no spider webs glistening in the fog, and no faithful Hopeful hound at my side. Walking in the gym feels like an unpleasant obligation, while walking up the hill at home always brings some wonder into my life.

Why don't designers of gyms include wonder in the plans? I mean, aside from wondering how many times I've walked around this wretched track and how many more times I have to walk around it before I can earn a wellness point. Give me a track as big as all outdoors and I'll wander with wonder every day of the week.

 

My student shopping list

Our Facebook page for incoming students features a few valiant attempts at serious discussion of the common reading, but right now the students are filling the page with panicky queries about shopping: What kind of computer should I buy and how long should the Ethernet cord be? How big a television can I have in my room? What kinds of bed linens, bookshelves, bed risers, textbooks? Do I really need to buy the textbooks or can I do without?

This chorus of questions evokes a vision of the entire incoming class frantically dashing from store to store stocking up on enough supplies to provision an expedition through the Sahara, except I don't know how you'd carry a flat-screen television on a camel. I understand that starting college is a big step involving occasional brushes with chaos and that shopping is one way to impose order and quell the rising panic, but these shopping lists have some serious gaps. Here are some things I hope every new student will pack for the expedition:

Laundry detergent and the ability to use it. Febreze may do the trick for a day or two, but eventually you'll have to actually wash some clothes or no one will want to sit next to you in the cafeteria. Any student who can't sort clothes into hot, warm, and cold needs a crash course before the semester starts.

Writing implements--and the willingness to use them. Some students think it's really cute to show up for a writing class without a pen or pencil every single day, but trust me: it's not cute. It's annoying and disruptive and it suggests that you suffer from a deep and abiding lack of comprehension of how college works.

An alarm clock obnoxious enough to get you out of bed. Mom doesn't make house calls to the dorm, so find another reliable method to get to class on time without dribbling Cheerios all along the way.

An off button--for everything. Turn off the noise, the phone, the Youtube videos, untether yourself from the earbuds and the chargers and electronic hand-holders, and walk away into the silence and solitude for a few minutes a day until you can work up to an hour. Learn to possess your soul with patience (assuming that you have a soul, and if you've already sold your soul for a mess of pottage, now would be a good time to get it back).

An open mind. If you already know everything about everything, go out and apply your knowledge in the so-called Real World and see how that works. Students who know they don't know it all and who are eager to encounter new ideas are welcome in my classroom.

Perseverance. Finding the right size Ethernet cord is easy and mistakes are readily remedied, but finding reliable information and an effective way to express it can be difficult--so difficult that some students take the lazy way out and let others do their thinking for them, or they give up at the first bump in the road. A student who knows how to keep working through the obstacles will get an education, which is way more important than the right size Ethernet cord.

A smile. Seriously: we've all seen enough of that cynical, world-weary scowl, and we're tired of it. Give those facial muscles a workout and watch how smiles light up the world.

And after all that, go ahead and worry about bed risers and televisions--and textbooks. This expedition runs on textbooks, so stock up and stop complaining. If the camel balks at the weight, you can always jettison the television.

Runaway month on the loose!

Here comes August careering around the corner with its load of deadlines, academic and otherwise. Time to move things out of the way!

But that's not as easy as you might think. Just try getting rid of a nonworking vehicle that's stranded halfway between Nowhere and Nowhere Else. When the cost of towing exceeds the value of the car, who ya gonna call?

It's much easier to get rid of piles of random stuff that's been stashed away in closets so long no one remembers why we kept it. Look, a suitcase so old it doesn't even have wheels! A dust ruffle that matches a bedspread we wore out years ago! A flattened pillow that looks as if some creature has been gnawing on it! That empire-green lamp with the broken shade and no chance of ever finding a shade that fits! Who would want all this stuff?

The Goodwill store wants it, as it turns out. I hauled six armloads in there while the clerks thanked me so profusely you would have thought I was distributing gold bars. If a battered powder-blue suitcase without wheels makes you jump up and down for joy, you've got a pretty low joy threshold.

One more closet to clean out and then I'm declaring my deck-clearing done. Bring it on, August! I'm ready for you!

It's all in the framing

It's possible to look at the past two months as a series of disasters: One car died, and then another! Big expense to replace! Four inches of rain in a two-hour span turned our little corner of the county into a disaster area! We got poured on at a Cleveland Indians game that our team lost! Our grandbaby was born all blue with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck!

But we have a beautiful healthy grandbaby, and I have a beautiful new(ish) car, and my daughter and son-in-law have a spare car my husband can borrow for a while, and the flood did surprisingly little damage to our property, and the gravel guy is coming today to fix the driveway, and the Indians were fun to watch even if they didn't win.

See, it's all in the framing, and right now I'm in a thankful frame of mind. I'm living inside a disaster-free zone and that's where I intend to stay. 

 

Van go! Van no go?

If you had been driving north on I-77 just south of New Philadelphia, Ohio, about midafternoon Sunday, you might have wondered, "Who's that crazy lady standing on the shoulder doing a Sudoku puzzle?" 

That would be me.


I was doing the puzzle because we happened to have the Sunday paper with us and what else was there to do while waiting for the tow truck?

Yes, I managed to drive yet another car right straight into the ground. For a while there it looked like I was going to drive it into a ditch or off the road--that van acts like a sail in high winds, and the canoe on top wasn't helping any. We were on our way to our annual family reunion and making really good time despite the unfortunate incident with the construction barrel in the middle of the road (yipes!) and the frequent corrections when a gust of wind would push us toward oblivion (hold on!).

But it wasn't the wind that blew us off the road. It was the head gasket, which blew out and let coolant into the engine and released billows of smoke carrying the sweet stench of engine death.

Here's the irony: my husband had just thoroughly cleaned that van out to make it more amenable to canoe trips. It'll be the cleanest car in the junkyard, assuming that we can find a junkyard that wants it.

Yes, it would be possible to replace the engine, but that van has almost 300,000 miles on it (all ours!) and lots of rust, and the transmission shows signs of age as well. We're happy it kept going as long as it did and grateful for all the wonderful places it took us, but it's time to give it a rest.

We'll have some logistical issues to resolve: how to get the van from Dover to its final rusting place, how to get the canoe back home on the car we're borrowing from our daughter and son-in-law, how to manage replacing the van when we just replaced our decrepit Volvo. It's a puzzle much more complex than the Sunday sudoku, but I think we're up to the challenge. As long as I don't have to spend any more hours stranded on the side of the interstate.

 

The pull of the potato

We saw more of our neighbors yesterday than we've seen all year long: everyone was out clearing debris and searching for items washed away by the July 23 flash flood. Our horse-raising neighbor sought a feed trough while our dock-building neighbor chased after the fifty-gallon drums he uses as floats; however, our neighbor whose potato field was ripped apart by the flood never came around to collect the potato the flood deposited at the end of our driveway. Finders keepers?

Local media seem unaware that our part of the county was under water Tuesday night, and when I mention the flood to my friends in town, they say, "What flood?" When hurricane Ivan hit nine years ago, the flood disrupted traffic all over the county, inundated downtown areas, and even crept up onto campus; this week's floods, on the other hand, have been highly localized, briefly submerging country roads, washing out driveways, and sweeping away feed troughs and dock floats. My friends in town can shrug off a flood that destroys a potato field, but to those of us in the middle of it, the flood certainly felt catastrophic.

And that's why it was good to be out mingling with fellow sufferers yesterday and sharing our tales of woe. Last night my husband drove a mile upstream to return the well-traveled potato to our potato-farming neighbors. They didn't really want it back, but when a humble potato works to pull people together, it would be a shame to overlook the opportunity.

Sunken gardens, suddenly

Corn and sunflowers--everything else is submerged.

Last night we could have launched our canoe at the edge of our lower meadow, paddled above the submerged cabbages in the garden, and then been swept downstream to certain doom in a roaring, raging river.

The sudden deluge that caused the flash flood didn't last long and at first it didn't seem to do much damage. A tree fell across the road, so my husband went out with a chainsaw to help the neighbors remove it, walking down the driveway, across the bridge, and up the road around the curve. Within 40 minutes after he returned, that entire route was under water.

Our house is well up the hill and out of danger,  but the garden shed got pushed off its moorings and sat there aslant in the current. We stood in the midnight darkness where the driveway disappeared under the water and heard occasional bumping sounds as floating debris hit our bridge, which was kind of reassuring--the bridge was still there! We certainly couldn't see the bridge, or the road, or the far shore of our new river, and only the corn and sunflowers stood tall enough to mark the location of the gardens.

 

Listing...a little more water and it's afloat.

The gardens! I looked into the murky waves and wondered whether all our hard work was getting washed downstream. What could possibly survive all that rushing water? 


But this morning things look much brighter. The garden is muddy but few plants washed away, and the garden shed wasn't damaged although everything inside got thoroughly soaked. A chunk of driveway disappeared, leaving a long parabola of gravel in our neighbor's hayfield, so I won't be driving anywhere until our gravel guy delivers.  Our son spent the night in town since our road was underwater, but by the time he comes home today things could be pretty much back to normal.

Blackberry patch on the right; pepper patch submerged.

Over the next few days we'll need to remove debris from the bridge, reshape the driveway, clean out and reposition the shed, and see what we can salvage from the garden, but we survived! Showers of blessings, rivers of thanks!

Damaged driveway.

Debris on the bridge and washed-out bank alongside the driveway.

The view from the road: the creek is still about eight feet above normal today, but last night it reached all the way across the meadow to the red shed.

Muddy cabbage, anyone?

 

Carpet sludge and the value of denial

The worst part of cleaning my carpets came at the end, when I emptied the dirty water out of the reservoir and saw the thick, black, gooey sludge stuck to the bottom. That stuff was in my RUGS. That I WALK on. In BARE FEET. 

Yuck.

I've had my carpets steam-cleaned before but this time I thought I'd save a ton of money by renting a cleaner and doing it myself, and frankly,  I'm not sure the money I saved can compensate for my hard work, frustration, and pain. For one thing, I had to move a lot of heavy furniture out of the way, first by myself and then with the help of the resident strongmen, who were worth every penny I didn't pay them--but if I'd hired a steam-cleaning company, none of us would have had to lift a finger and I wouldn't have half-dropped a futon on my foot and then hopped around the house in intense pain trying not to bleed all over the very carpet I was cleaning. 

(Side note: who thinks it's a great idea to install wall-to-wall WHITE carpet in the bathroom? If I ever get my hands on the previous owner responsible for that choice, I'll force him to drink the sludge left in the bucket from cleaning that carpet.)

And then of course I had to haul that carpet cleaner full of water all over my house, up and down stairs and through the obstacle course that is my hallway. I worked up quite a sweat pulling that little puppy around--and, like a puppy, it piddled all over the floor and stuck its nose into all kinds of inappropriate places. Bad puppy!

None of that, though, was as awful as cleaning the sludge out of the bottom of the bucket. If I'd hired a steam-cleaning company, all that sludge would have been sucked up into a big truck and hauled away, and I would never have had to face that disgusting residue of my daily life. How much would I be willing to pay for the privilege of denial? 

My feet are happy this morning feeling the fresh fluffiness of clean carpets, but how long can they stay that way? Even now the raw ingredients of carpet sludge are beginning to accumulate unseen right under my feet, yuck. There must be a better way! When will someone finally invent a personal hovercraft?   

On Orwellian wellness rewards

I've griped openly about our new wellness program but I can rejoice that it has not gone the way of Penn State's wellness program, which will begin fining noncompliant faculty members $100 per month starting in January (read it here).

Where do I even begin?

The article discusses the carrot-or-stick problem: encourage wellness by rewarding faculty who participate in the program or penalizing those who don't? I suppose it's possible to frame "not being fined $100 per month" as a reward, especially if you're a character in a George Orwell novel, but I cannot imagine any actual employee of Penn State viewing the proposed fine as anything other than a punishment.

For what? For refusing to participate in a highly invasive series of medical tests at the university's command.

I liked our old wellness program because of its simplicity: get a basic, noninvasive health screening once a year and then keep track of exercise time, which translates into wellness points; at the end of the year, anyone who reports enough points gets a reward ($100). I always work more efficiently with a clear goal in mind, so even that fairly paltry amount was enough to motivate me to keep exercising and track my points.

Our new wellness program offers less obvious rewards: if a high enough percentage of faculty complies with all aspects of the program, then our insurance rate increase will be less that it would have been. Let me see if I can phrase that less incomprehensibly: The rates will rise regardless of what we do, but if enough of us do what the insurance gods want us to do, then our rates might go up less than they would have otherwise.

I don't know about you, but that kind of reward doesn't do much to motivate me. It's like telling someone, "I'm going to beat you up regardless of what you do, but if you run this marathon, your beating will be slightly less painful."

Still, at least no one is threatening to fine us if we don't comply.

Yet.

Wordwhacking in Terra Incognita

"We both agreed to eschew the jellied viscera," explains a character in Eric Overmyer's 1986 play On the Verge--and  that line is just one reason I'm excited about teaching the play in Concepts of Nature this fall. True, my students will have to keep a dictionary nearby in order to enjoy the delicious wordplay, but the play rewards the effort. "Eschew the jellied viscera"--roll that around on your tongue a few times and you'll see what I mean.

But will my students get it? I laughed out loud at a scene dealing with the hazards of cannibalism ("There are two types of people in the world. There are cannibals--and there are lunch."), but I doubt that my students will spot the allusion in the title of the scene: "High Tea--Or, Many Parts Are Edible." (Did you ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible!)

They'll have to look up palaver, pasha, and perhaps even poobah, and they'll have to discover what punji sticks are to understand why a petticoat might be protective. They'll have to bushwhack through Terra Incognita and consider, with the three main characters, whether a rusted eggbeater might function as talisman, totem, amulet, or marsupial's unicycle.

They will encounter a Yeti not abominable but adorable, a troll who collects tolls and is not quite Robert Lowell, and a gerbil in a dirigible. My students will have to slash their way through a jungle of succulent verbiage and a Himalaya of historical allusions, and they'll need a trusty sherpa to guide the way. 

That would be me. I'd better grab my machete and a tub of Cool Whip because, as the play reminds us, "You're not gonna find a lot of Saint Bernards with Cool Whip in their kegs."

The cranes, the cranes!

I had been planning to issue a blistering screed condemning the inhumane working conditions in my office building, where the air conditioning has been on the fritz all summer, when a single press release transformed an annoyance into an adventure.

They're bringing in cranes--big ones! They'll have to block off roads and establish a perimeter to keep the gawking public away, but trust me, people will find a way to watch. Who wouldn't want to watch a 50-ton crane heft an immense chunk of HVAC equipment onto the roof of a building?

When the new library was just a great big hole in the middle of campus with a parade of cement mixers lining up to lay the foundation, people of all ages stood there all night long watching the Big Pour. It was part social event, part celebration of progress, and part outpouring of awe and wonder over the power of modern technology. All that heavy equipment! All those men! All that mud!

We'll have similar feelings next week when we watch those immense chillers lifted into the sky on what looks like a thin thread, plus we'll get to applaud the promise of cool air in a building that has served as a sauna all summer long. There's a really good reason you don't generally see photocopiers inside saunas--the pages stick together, and all that moisture can't be good for the inner workings of the machine. And what about mold? Don't get me started!

But soon all that discomfort will be a dim and distant memory. Make way for the heavy equipment! They may look like cranes to you, but to me they look like hope.