Pushed to the brink by tech

It was a student, finally, who talked me down off the ledge.

It's been a rough week for everyone suddenly struggling to master the technology needed for moving all course material online. I don't envy my colleagues teaching hands-on courses like art or science labs, but those of us who traffic only in words and ideas are finding the situation difficult enough. Yesterday I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to do necessary stuff in Zoom, and by the end of the day all I wanted to do was to quit teaching entirely and take up something less stressful, like pounding my head against a brick wall all day long.

A tech specialist tried to encourage me. "You're pretty good with technology," she said; "you'll figure it out. Just be glad you're not--" and then she named a colleague known for antipathy to all sorts of technology. 

Well I saw Dr. Antipathy yesterday, and he's not struggling at all. He looked calm and well rested, in stark contrast to my frazzled and freaked-out appearance. "I'll just give my students some extra assignments," he said; "I'm not going to bother with any of that online stuff" (although he may have used a more vivid word than "stuff").

But I need that online stuff! I need to lead class discussions, present information visually and verbally, and encourage student engagement, and to do that I need to move beyond Moodle and master all the elements of Zoom, all while wondering why all these educational access programs sound like they were named by four-year-olds. And despite some experience with online learning, I'm not finding any of this easy.

I keep being reminded of my mother, who was a registered nurse for many decades, adapting to vast changes in medical care without much fuss or complaint. She never made the switch to wearing scrubs but instead held on to her white nursing uniform and little starched hat, but she had to adjust to all the technological changes involved in caring for oncology patients. She loved her job so I was surprised when she retired, but she'd reached a point where she would need to learn a whole new set of procedures for administering chemotherapy and she decided it was just a bridge too far. 

Yesterday I wondered whether Zoom is my bridge too far, the point where all my teaching skills break down and leave me helpless and blubbering in front of my class. I felt my confidence diminishing with each click of the mouse, and at my lowest point I started composing a resignation letter in my head.

But it's amazing how much more hopeful things look after a good night's sleep. Today I tackled the worst of the technology and got all my classes prepared for Monday, but I still lacked confidence that the setup would work. Then along came an email from student who is scheduled to give a presentation in the Colson Whitehead class on Monday, and before you know it I'd set up a test meeting space in Zoom to let her run through her presentation, and then we tried out some of the other functions so she could tell me how things looked from her end. We had a few rough spots but I'm pleased to report that everything worked without too much fuss.
 
I think I'm ready to roll out online classes on Monday, but here's the scary part: it took me the better part of the week just to prepare for one day's teaching. I certainly hope I've moved past the worst part of the learning curve because there aren't enough hours in the day to put this amount of effort into every class for the rest of the semester, provided that we have a rest of the semester.

And one last thing: if working with this technology made me feel so thoroughly hopeless and confused, how will my students feel? At least I can tell them truthfully that I feel their pain. 

In a fowl humor

I was out in the back yard burning trash when I noticed in the neighbor's hay-meadow a parliament of fowls worrying over some unfortunate carcass. Black vultures they were, with their white underwing tips and chain-mail-gray heads, an unusual bird at our house but quite common just an hour or so west. 

I feared at first that this encounter was a metaphor for my current situation: scrambling to keep the chaos under control while scavengers wait in the wings to carry off the scraps--and I'm not referring only to the Internal Revenue Service, although they certainly come to mind when the vultures start to circle. The vultures have come to nibble away at what little time, energy, and sanity remain after I figure out how to deliver my classes online despite unreliable technology, inadequate sleep, and no transportation whatsoever (because my son's car broke down last night--all the oil came spurting out when he tried to start the engine, which surely can't be anything serious, right?--so he's using mine until, well, whenever). 

But thinking about all the ways in which my life feels like a human sacrifice to ravenous scavengers just gets me down, so instead I'm wondering how Chaucer would have responded to the local influx of vultures. His Parlement of Fowles focused on far classier birds, of course, eagles mouthing cliches of courtly love on Valentine's Day; what would Chaucer do with vultures hovering over a nation in panic over an impending pandemic? That's an epic for a different kind of poet--maybe Shakespeare in full Lear mode or Cormac McCarthy channeling William Blake.

As for me, I've got nothing--not a rhyme, not a joke, not the slightest gesture that might transform the current chaos into some sort of sense. Trash is burning and vultures are circling and all I can do is stand over the fire wondering what's going to happen next.

   

Spring break = spring broken, or the perils of pandemic panic

Just over ten years ago I spent a week teaching all my classes online to protect my chemotherapy-ravaged immune system from whatever toxic crud was making its way around campus at the time--but that was just one week, and my students were still able to assemble as needed or visit the library and other campus services.

Now comes word that we're required to teach all of our classes online starting Monday, with no end date in sight and no expectation that students will be on campus at all. Good thing I have the rest of Spring Break to figure out how to make this work.

The challenges are daunting: my textbooks and course materials are on campus and so, I suspect, are my students'. My home internet service is stronger than ever but still not strong enough to allow streaming video or synchronous chat; I could drive five miles up the highway and piggyback on the wi-fi at the McDonald's while giving lectures  and leading discussions from the parking lot, but I think I'd rather take the risk of sequestering myself in my campus office.

Not that the risk is high. There are no known COVID-19 cases in the area, although it's the unknown cases that have everyone frightened. I was supposed to travel to North Carolina this week to visit my Dad but got waylaid by an earache accompanied by a nasty case of vertigo; before the visit was cancelled I was repeatedly offered this helpful bit of advice: "Don't get near anyone who might have the virus." Okay! Given the flexibility of the word might, I think my best bet is just to lock myself in the basement and not come out until the last person standing sounds the All Clear.  

Bird in the hand

A chickadee lands on my hand as insubstantial as a puff of dandelion fluff, but then it takes off with spring-loaded legs that propel it so powerfully into the woods that it's hard to believe it was ever there at all. At F.A. Sieberling Nature Realm in Akron, Ohio, we slid on snow-covered paths through woods alive with early-morning birdsong, and soon a few handfuls of birdseed lured chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, and cardinals toward our hands. Each bird's arrival was a revelation, a weightless bundle of feathers appearing from nowhere to grab a seed and quickly fly off, but each new visit brought fresh delight. Light as a feather but full of power: birds in the hand.

Not the evil supervillain you'd imagined

All morning I've been telling myself Don't be evil, a situation that rarely arises in my current milieu. You'll notice, for instance, that one rarely finds a comic-book-style supervillain brewing up a secret plan to destroy the world while working in the bowels of the English department. In my boring workaday world, opportunities to intentionally make someone's life miserable arise only rarely and aren't particularly tempting. 

But after a week crammed full with meetings and paperwork and massive amounts of grading, it might feel positively cathartic to stand in front of a class and say something like this: "Before you take your exam, I want you to know that I've identified passages in some papers that were copied directly from online sources without attribution, which constitutes plagiarism. Those of you who did that need to see me as soon as you're done taking your midterm exam. You know who you are."

Yes, that would be truly evil, but on the whole I think I'd prefer to abstain, not least because I don't want a guilty conscience to burden my weekend with the grandkids. 

But the question remains: if you were a student, when would you want to be told that your attempt at plagiarism had been uncovered? Before the midterm exam, which would be distracting, or after the exam, when everyone leaves campus for Spring Break and therefore won't be able to do anything about the situation for a week? Which would be less evil: to ruin a student's concentration on an exam or force the student to stew about the incident all through Spring Break?

Probably I'm overthinking this. Probably this situation, which to me seems so fraught with danger, will constitute a mere blip on the student's consciousness, a minor incident that will be quickly forgotten. Probably I should just calmly follow our campus procedures without any hint of vindictiveness or anger. This is me, sitting calmly in my office abstaining from evil. Somebody give me a gold star.

Pandemic planning 101

The threat of a global coronavirus pandemic inspired the person who supplies faculty snacks to announce a new policy: no more communal potato-chip bags; single-serve packages only! Pandemic Packaging she called it, or, if you prefer a peppy portmanteau, pandackaging.

This proposal caused the pandemic skeptics (pandeptics) to decry the needless expense, while the pandemic fatalists (pandatalists) objected for a different reason: we're all doomed anyway, so why not share our misery as we share our snacks? 

"Just tell everyone to wash their hands and we'll all be fine," insisted the resident pandoptimist, at which point a pandessimist proposed stationing strong men bearing baseball bats in every public rest room to encourage compliance.

"I'm telling my students to take all their textbooks home over spring break so they can keep up with the reading if they get quarantined," said an old-school tweed-jacket-with-elbow-patches prof (pantweedademic), provoking a trauma-informed pedagogue (pantraumagogue) to shriek about spinal damage and PTSD caused by bearing heavy backpacks.

The last word, of course, came from our fearless leader, Dr. Pangloss, who assured us that all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, which is where the coronavirus lives. Resistance is futile. We are all Panglossademics now.  

Tossing out the catnip question

I don't often hear the word joy applied to grading exams, but I'm sitting at my desk smiling from ear to ear after reading an essay scribbled in response to a question on the midterm exam I gave yesterday. I don't even care how hard I had to work to decipher the student's nearly illegible handwriting: he grabbed that question and nailed it--which made me immensely happy because I'd written that question with this particular student in mind.

I know, I know--exams are supposed to be objective measures of students' understanding, not invitations for a certain student to showboat, but this is an odd kind of exam: students are given seven topics but must write about only four of them, and for each topic they choose, they have to write about three literary works listed beneath the topic. The question in question (ha!) presents a topic and three works I suspected few students would care to tackle (and sure enough, very few did), but I've had this student in class before, and I knew that if he were a cat, this question would be catnip. 

And of course he jumped on it with both feet and batted it into submission. Given the time constraints, his response was rich, insightful, and buzzing with energy. If every response were like that, midterm grading would be sheer delight instead of drudgery occasionally punctuated by small pleasures. To read an exam that evokes the word joy is highly unusual, but that's why I wrote the question the way I did: to entice a student to make grading great again, of only for a moment.

Jackie on my shoulder

Had lunch today with a group of senior faculty who know what I mean when I say I've got Jackie on my shoulder. Jackie's been dead for a decade but she still gives us good advice, sitting on our shoulders and telling us to Just say no when we need to protect our time, or telling us to Finish things when we're torn between a ton of different projects, or telling us to Turn off the television when we need to focus on things that matter, and if she'd lived to the current day she'd be telling us to Put away the phone and get back to work.

I realize this makes Jackie sound like a particularly annoying killjoy, but trust me: she knew how to get things done without sacrificing joy. She'd been through all the kinds of grief academe can throw in a scholar's way and emerged victorious and full of insight, which she was always willing to share with younger colleagues. She had a huge impact on the cohort of faculty members who arrived when I did, but the number of people who remember her grows smaller every year.

Now those of us who were sitting around the table today talking about Jackie on our shoulder are stepping into her shoes, finding ways to encourage junior faculty to protect their time and focus their efforts and step up into leadership positions. If someday a colleague blames a good decision on that nagging voice of Bev on her shoulder, my work here will not be in vain.

Because I really need a break from reading drafts

"It's time to make your verbs do the heavy lifting," I wrote in the margin of a students' draft, and I showed him some options for achieving that goal. I wouldn't offer the same suggestion to every student because those who are still floundering about for a coherent argument have bigger fish to fry, but it's very satisfying to read a draft in which the biggest challenge is encouraging a student to experiment with verbs.

Students sometimes think I'm picky about things like over-reliance on weak linking verbs, but I remind them of my now-retired colleague whose rule was "no more than three weak linking verbs per page." Try it! Cutting down on weak verbs requires paying close attention to sentence structure, a helpful exercise for any serious writer--or even the non-serious kind. 

Reading student drafts requires a sort of triage, first determining the level of trauma and then determining the appropriate treatment. I have a bad habit of first reaching for papers that I suspect will be really good, which sets the bar high for the remaining papers but also assures me that the writing task was actually doable. The primary drawback of this approach is that I always end up with a group of papers requiring the most exhausting sort of intensive care.

But, as I was reminded in my Colson Whitehead class today, reading student papers is not as difficult or dangerous as pounding tunnels through solid rock or trying to harpoon a whale on the open seas, and the pay is probably better too. I'm not going to complain (much) about a task that offers me the opportunity to introduce a student to interesting verbs, even at the cost of fatigued eyes and occasional boredom.

Not that anyone asked...

I drove to work this morning behind an attractive Acura sporting a license plate that said GOLFGLV, which I interpreted as "golf glove" because what else could it be? And then I had to wonder why someone would feel so enamored of a golf glove that he would feel the need to advertise that fact so publicly (and of COURSE I assumed it was a guy--wouldn't you?). Maybe he made a killing manufacturing golf gloves or somehow owes all his success in life to a certain golf glove, or maybe he considers his car a metaphorical golf glove, which makes no sense to me--but then, I'm not the one driving around with a vanity plate that says GOLFGLV. These things ought to come with interpretations, or maybe someone could create a web site where people could post the explanation for their vanity plates to satisfy the curiosity of fellow drivers. Until that happens, I'll be scratching my head over GOLFGLV.

 

Winged palette

I'd like to call these bird photos Arrangement in Gray and Black but apparently the title is already in use. (Should I apologize to James McNeil Whistler or to his mother?) And besides, arrangement suggest that I did some arranging, which is patently not the case: my job in these circumstances it to sit as still as possible so as to become invisible to the birds and wait for them to land where the lens can reach them. Also, while it's true that gray and black appear in each photo, they don't at all cover the range of colors appearing around my birdfeeders yesterday. Goldfinches still sport their muted winter colors, but when the feeders are full, I never fail to see brilliant flashes of red and blue. And now the red-winged blackbirds have returned! Soon they'll be perching on fenceposts all over the county, but for now I see just a few early harbingers of spring. 

 

Prof, interrupted

So many interruptions this week and sometimes interruptions inside interruptions, so that a look back at what I've accomplished reveals only scattered fragments that fail to cohere, which is appropriate since a fragmented sense of reality is an important characteristic of modernism that we've been discussing for two weeks in my American  Lit Survey class, and despite the fact that I've written the word fragmentation on the whiteboard numerous times (alongside alienation, perspectivism, collage, and others), the word appeared on only a handful of reading quizzes on modernism the other day, leaving a whole lot of students flailing about to produce empty and inane statements about how modernism refers to literature that is really, really modern, and so I have relented and created a handout listing some essential characteristics of modernist literature for the benefit of those who have not written them down all the times we've discussed them in class.

Will the handout help? I tried to help some students in my Concepts of Nature class this week but, as is usually the case when I offer any kind of extra credit opportunities, very few students took advantage of the offer, and not the ones who needed it most. Nearly half of the students in that class earned a D or F on the first exam, which I found alarming because it covered concepts that they will need to use throughout the semester, like the pastoral mode and dualism, so I created a way for students to earn up to 10 additional points on their exam grade by coming to my office--with textbooks and notes in hand--and answering some questions orally about the concepts they'd bobbled on the exam. Yesterday was the last day for students to do this, which explains some of my frequent interruptions, and on the whole I enjoyed having face-to-face discussions with students about interesting literature--but only six (of 19) students came in, and only half of those had earned a D or F on the exam; the rest wanted to move their B up to an A, and I get that, I really do, but why did the students who most need the extra points not even bother to try? This I will never understand.

But now the deadline has passed and I'll return the exams today and hand out the modernism terms and start a new book in the Colson Whitehead class and lead a lunchtime workshop for colleagues eager to learn the secret to responding to student writing without pain or struggle (spoiler: there isn't one) and in between all that I'll try to form the fragments of my week into something I'm not ashamed to leave lying on my desk, and anything that doesn't fit will have to come along for the weekend, when I intend to take refuge, as much as possible, in an interruption-free zone.

Kaleidoscopic

Screens! Too many of 'em everywhere I look, demanding that I pay attention (to emails, essays, way too many ads) and rewarding my attention with squinty, fuzzy vision and lingering headaches. Today I've been struggling to book rooms for a trip I'm planning for students who want to learn about careers in editing and publishing so I'm taking them to New York next month to meet with editors, but if you think it's easy to find affordable hotel rooms in midtown Manhattan for seven people on a busy weekend, think again. I see a rate that looks good but then have to scroll and squint to read the small print that complicates everything--massive resort fees! Impossible parking! Only king suites available! And here's an Airbnb claiming to accommodate 8 people with only two beds. Who's sleeping in the closet? Not me!

Time to turn away from the screens and scan the world outside my office window, or unwrap the kaleidoscope and watch the shiny colors tumble and turn. Too much squinting at tiny details--I need to take the long view. Perhaps a walk down to the river would help. Sign me up! I'm on my way (and no resort fees apply).

Of sledding and sleepwalking

Sleepy Monday, 8 a.m., and what do we have on the syllabus? A discussion of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which seems appropriate: a sleepy poem, a character who struggles to find the strength to wake himself from a life befogged and befuddled by indecision, inaction, and despair. Do I dare to teach Prufrock on a day when all anyone wants to do is take a nap?

I have measured out my life in attempts to explain obscure allusions to students too young or inexperienced to recognize them, but today I'm not sure I dare disturb the universe of those who sleep-walk into class under the influence of mid-semester malaise. Too many projects and deadlines and social activities in their lives and now I want them to attend to a dude who thinks a "love song" begins in hell and ends with drowning? It's a tough sell.

I feel for Prufrock today because I had too much fun and too little sleep this past weekend, when I measured out my life in photos of the grandkids sliding their sleds down a snowy hill. What do children know of existential despair? They slide, they spin, they fall, they laugh, and then they climb up the hill to do it all over again. I suspect that even gloomy Prufrock would have been happier if he'd spent more time in the company of small children. If nothing else, he would have been too busy to fuss about the fog or worry about his bald spot.

I grow old, I grow old, I shall snap a photo of the kid whose sled has rolled....

Some days I feel like Prufrock, like a sleep-walker struggling to feel his way across a foggy room, and some days I feel like a hill that's had too many sleds roll down its slopes and ground it down to a mere nubbin, but at times like that the memory of my grandkids' laughter arrives like a lifeline to rescue me from the descending gloom and draw me back into the world of light and love and laughter.

 
   

Highs and lows of living near water

One of the advantages of living in the middle of nowhere is that nobody bats an eye if I wander down the hill in my pajamas to check on whether the creek has washed away my driveway in the night. This morning I startled a bunny as I made my careful way down the wet muddy gravel, flashlight in hand, to confirm that I would indeed be able to leave the house without swimming. Fortunately, our bridge was still standing and the driveway was intact, but who knows what might happen if the rain keeps up?

I knew the creek was getting high last night, and opening the door confirmed the danger: if I can hear our normally quiet creek from the house, it has to be pretty high. But it's impossible to tell whether water has covered the driveway without walking all the way down to the bridge, and it always makes me nervous to stand on the bridge with all that roiling water roaring underneath. Our bridge is pretty sturdy but that doesn't mean I want to be standing on it when it finally gives way.

It seems like just yesterday that the creek washed away our driveway (and garden shed and bench and tools and all kinds of other stuff), but it turns out that was way back in May of 2018. We've had a few high-water days since then but nothing quite so catastrophic, which is good because I have too much to do today to worry about finding a gravel guy and clearing debris off the bridge.

But this morning the bridge was fine and the driveway was fine and, aside from a few mud splatters on my bathrobe, I was none the worse for my early-morning walk. Now I'm on campus and I won't be home until this evening so the water has all day to recede to normal levels--or rise up higher, if that's what it wants to do. Either way, we'll find a way to cope, because that's what we do, and lately we've had plenty of practice.

 

Sliding into PowerPoint

I'm showing a PowerPoint presentation in class today and I know already what will happen: the lights go down, the slides go up, and immediately all my students--even the ones who rarely take notes--pull out pen and paper and start copying down every word on every slide. It's as if the PowerPoint logo acts as a subliminal trigger compelling them to slavishly copy down every word, even though often the only thing they'll see on the slide is an image and a question--but instead of looking at the image or responding to the question, they're busy copying it into their notes.

I know I'm not the only one who struggles with this. A colleague routinely gets complaints from students who insist that he needs to put more words on his slides, but my colleague points out that if he puts more words on his slides, then his students just copy down those words instead of engaging in discussion of what they see or paying attention to what anyone else is saying, as if transcribing the words from the screen into the notebook completes some essential cycle requiring no further thought.

I've tried a number of ways to fight this tendency. I don't use PowerPoint often but I do like to use images of various types to illustrate concepts or spark discussion, and in those cases I generally minimize words on the slides or eliminate them entirely. Sometimes, though, I use PowerPoint to convey a mass of information efficiently and I want students to return to that information to study it later, so I make the slides available on our course management system. That's what I'm doing today, and I'll tell them up front that the slides will be available online, but nevertheless I know what's going to happen. When I pause to ask a question, to encourage them to apply what we're learning to something we've read, I'll see a sea of faces staring at notebooks and a flurry of hands desperately scribbling down every word. Who can think or discuss or respond when engaged in slavish copying?

I want my students to take notes and I complain when they don't, but sometimes I need them to look up and examine some wonderful bit of art or other visual aide, and they can't do that with their noses in their notebooks. Eyes up, oh slavish copyists! The words will be there later! Rise up and see the point of the power of sight!

Same route, different journey

Lately it seems everything I do I'm doing again: I'm filling the wood-burner again and fighting off invasive mice again and trying to get students to understand concepts like dualism and pastoralism and utilitarianism again and again and again, and did I really tell that Twinkie story to an entire congregation this morning again? That story's older than my adult children and it's morphed to fill so many contexts that it barely resembles its original kernel of truth, but I think it's a truth worth telling again and again and again or I wouldn't keep telling the story. (Again.)

Today I drove home from Jackson again and watched for red-tailed hawks on the trees along the highway and again I told myself that one of these days I'll stop and take a picture of the hawks sitting in a stately manner, unperturbed by passing traffic, but I never seem to find the right spot for pulling off the road at a place where a hawk is posing and a time when I have my camera nearby, so again I kick myself for being unprepared when hawks present themselves again.

It's helpful to have a routine, I suppose, to have a good idea what I'll be doing and teaching and even wearing from one day and week and month to the next, but sometimes I need to think and drive and do something different, although I'll probably do it wearing my same old boring clothes again. Yesterday, for instance, I bundled up in my favorite flannel shirt and livened up the drive to Jackson by stopping to take photos of the snowy landscape in the gently morning light, and even though most of the photos aren't very good, I enjoyed the attempt to see my surroundings from a slightly different angle, as not just places to drive through but as lovely little nooks offering unique perspectives. 

This fear of stagnation also explains why I'm tackling a whole new topic in my film class this fall instead of going back (again) to the old faithful topic that has served me so well, and it's the reason why I'm teaching the Colson Whitehead class this semester (and watching students surprise me every day with new insights) and why I've been formulating a list of texts I want to teach before I retire--or teach again, this time with new eyes (but probably the same old clothes). I can't keep driving down the same old roads again and expect to arrive at a new destination, but I can take a few detours to enliven the journey.

An unexpected view of winter beauty.

First (real) snow

There's no denying that it's pretty outside, all that fresh white snow frosting trees and buildings, and there's no denying that I've been begging for snow all winter long, but driving to work this morning was a bit of an adventure, with more fresh snow falling even as plows were failing to keep up with the snow that had already fallen. But fortunately it was wet snow with no ice underneath, and everyone was driving very slowly and carefully on the highway hidden underneath the snow, except for that one guy who kept creeping up as if to push my car from behind, even though it would have done him no good to get ahead of me since cars in front were keeping to the same slow pace. But I got to campus and had class and now I can sit back, look out the window, and simply enjoy the beauty, hoping all the while that the roads will be cleaned up by the time I drive home.

 

Just when I thought I'd heard everything....

So my students were doing peer responses to drafts the other day and later one of my English majors astutely observed, "I can always tell right away which of my classmates wrote their papers on their phones," and my mind cycled through a range of horrified responses:

On their phones?!!! When we provide labs and libraries full of laptops for their use? I mean, how can they possibly fit any big ideas onto those tiny screens? I know I couldn't do it! My rapidly aging eyes have enough trouble trying to read the small print on my phone, and it's a struggle making my big klutzy fingers formulate coherent prose. But then again, that might explain why so much of the prose I'm reading is not as coherent as I'd like it to be, and it certainly explains the reluctance to capitalize or format titles correctly or bother with quotation marks or, really, any punctuation marks more complicated than the pedestrian period. Next thing you know they'll be begging to respond to my paper prompts via text message. How does a writer develop a sense of the overall structure of the paper or of the relative importance of concepts when all he or she can see is what fits into that tiny glowing box? And if they're trying to read my marginal comments on their phones--well, it's really just hopeless. How can they possibly write whole papers on their phones?!

But of course I am a dinosaur. Students are free to employ whatever technology they need to write the paper, and I am free to evaluate it according to the standards set out on the grading rubric without regard for how the paper was produced. When they start expecting me to read their papers on my phone--well, that's when these old eyes will have to call it quits.

 

Closing the book on an open text

"Tell us your theory," my students demanded, but I wouldn't do it--not until they told me their own. We've been reading Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days and they, like many readers, were frustrated by the ambiguity of the ending: Does J. Sutter live or die, stay at the festival and get shot or go back to New York with Pamela and start writing a different type of story? Is he supposed to be a twenty-first century John Henry or is all that historical stuff a big red herring? And why doesn't Whitehead offer any easy answers?

My students had to come up with answers for an essay due today, drawing their own conclusions about J. Sutter's fate based upon evidence from within the text. Last Friday they asked me to tell them my own interpretation but I refused, promising instead that I would reveal my conclusions after they'd written their papers and shared their ideas with the class. 

So that's what we did today: each student explained the conclusions they had drawn about J. Sutter's fate, and, unsurprisingly, no two students agreed entirely. The remarkable thing was that each of these competing interpretations was entirely defensible based on the evidence provided within the novel. We chewed on that for a while before they asked me to give them my theory.

I read them a piece of the article I published about the novel eight years ago, an extremely obscure publication that I knew they wouldn't be able to locate locally without breaking into my office, and we talked a little bit about how Whitehead invites readers to fill the gaps in the narrative by adding their own verses to the John Henry legend. But then I suggested an alternative explanation: maybe J. Sutter is just a human version of Schrodinger's cat. As long as he's trapped inside the box--the book--he exists simultaneously in all possible states, both alive and dead and every other possibility. When we open the box and try to take him out of his context, we either doom him to instant death or breathe new life into his body. Why not leave him in the box and let him experience pure possibility?

Here's what impresses me about this class: They can read a book that offers no obvious resolution, write an essay that requires them to draw their own conclusions, and then engage in discussion that challenges all their expectations about literature, life, and the possibility of interpretation, and then they can come back and do it all over again on Wednesday and Friday and again next Monday. And if that doesn't make my job worth doing, nothing else will.

 

Sunshine and shadows

Finally, a perfect day for a walk along the creek, where you might catch a glimpse of a chattering kingfisher while shadows play on the limbs of sycamores and the water sparkles in the sunshine.

Snowless but skunkful

Where are the snows of yesteryear? Here we are at the end of January with nothing to show for our winter except a series of dark, wet, rainy, gray days with only the barest occasional dusting of snow that doesn't last. We've had more sleet than snow this month, and we face more danger of slipping on mud than ice. 

We took a walk around Hogue Wild today and found a few birds and buds, lots of mud to slip on, and plenty of signs of wildlife. Deer trails and scat dot the hillside, and our back yard is pockmarked with little muddy holes dug by skunks searching for grubs, which makes me miss my old Hopeful hound even more. 

The resident lumberjack took some time to examine the next big chopping job: a tree dangling precariously in the woods alongside the driveway. It's an awkward spot to reach with a chain saw but at least there's nothing nearby that it will destroy when it finally falls. This mild winter means we haven't used as much firewood as we have in previous years, but it's good to be prepared. After all, winter isn't over yet, and that big snow may be coming just around the bend. 

Feasts of words

It's probably a mistake to tell students that Stephen Crane didn't care much for college and so spent more time playing baseball than going to classes and never got a diploma but still managed to write two remarkable novels and a bunch of short stories considered among the greatest of all time and experienced adventures on Skid Row and in Cuba and Greece and in shipwreck and storm, and just think of what he would have accomplished if he hadn't died so young! It might give my students the idea that college is a waste of time when such adventures await, so I have to remind them that they're not Stephen Crane and unless they can write like Stephen Crane they'd better stay in their seats and keep learning.

And I probably shouldn't explain to my students how Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days echoes James Joyce's Ulysses in certain chapters, and I definitely shouldn't describe Joyce's prose so deliciously that the students are tempted to go find Ulysses in the library, and I shouldn't tempt them further by saying "nobody reads Ulysses these days because it's so long and complicated and demanding," because these students adore a challenge and my warnings may push them deeper into desire to open Ulysses and say yes I said yes I will yes.

And reciting lines from W.S. Merwin in front of students susceptible to the lures of alliteration is probably the wrong thing to do, because they might be tempted to follow that little warden of where the river went to its foxy lair when they ought to be focusing on the writing for tomorrow's class, and how can a student construct a competent thesis statement when that little vixen  is running on the breathless night on the bridge with one end and scampering down the road that leads to places in the silence after the animals.

Frankly, I don't know how anyone gets any work down around here when we're so surrounded by prose that promises adventure and a feast for the senses--but while it's all laid before us, we may as well indulge.

 

So apparently it's not the end of the world as we know it

The best thing I've heard all week was a student--and not even an English major but a future petroleum engineer--telling his classmate, "I've already started accumulating my library."

Accumulating my library! The dream of my youth, but a dream shared by too few students these days. I'm still accumulating my library, but I'm also doing some weeding out because I'm running out of space to store my accumulations and the Kindle leaves me cold.

This week I've also heard the ping that tells me my home internet connection has been restored better than ever. No internet service at home for a whole week, no idea why despite running several tests, and then last night just as I was getting ready to do one final test, I hooked the wi-fi hotspot up again and suddenly had the strongest, fastest internet connection I've ever had at home. Who can explain it? Well, maybe Verizon could explain it if I got through to the right person, but I'm not terribly interested in dealing with their customer service again, especially when things are suddenly going so well.

I'm even seeing a little more clearly today after struggling with an eye irritation that kept causing my left eye to suddenly start weeping copiously for no apparent reason at the most inopportune times, like when I was observing a colleague's teaching. I had to go up afterward and explain that it wasn't his teaching that drove me to tears, but today I'm hardly teary-eyed at all and the world is far less blurry than it has been recently.

It's been a busy week and far less productive than I would have wished, but I can march into the weekend with eyes less prone to weeping, home wi-fi more responsive, and students inspiring me with their accumulation of libraries. As crazy and distressing as the world is today, I have to take my comforts where I find them and hope to avoid excessive weeping.



 

When it's time to waive invisibility

My helpful colleague suggested that I wear a hoodie and dark glasses and slump down in a seat at the back of the room, so I said "Sure, and I'll wear a big name tag saying 'Not the Unabomber,'" but my colleague said, "Don't bother--they don't know who the Unabomber is anyway."

He has a point.

The larger point, though, is how I'm supposed to be inconspicuous when I observe teaching in a class with only two students enrolled. The question comes up periodically on the tenure and promotion committee, which sends multiple members to observe different classes on different levels and sometimes has no choice but to include low-enrollment classes.

In large classes, I generally sit in the back trying to be invisible so that the students forget I'm there, and I know it works because sometimes students in front of me do things they probably would not do if they remembered I was watching, like visit web sites one would not normally share with a professor. Once (this is true) I watched a videotape of a classroom that knew it was being videotaped and saw, right there on the videotape, a student watching porn on his laptop in the middle of class.

But those instances are rare. I've seen students check email and shop for shoes online, but mostly they just take notes, inspiring me to take note of the fact that they're taking notes. All we need is for someone to observe my observations and we'd have note-taking on my note-taking concerning students' note-taking, which seems a bit superfluous.

But I digress.

The point is that soon I'm scheduled to observe a class with only two students in it and I don't know how to hide in that kind of crowd. How does one escape notice in a room containing only four people, one of whom clearly does not belong? I suppose I could sit next to a ficus and try to look leafy, but alas, so few classrooms come equipped with potted plants.

Should I slip into the back of the room when students aren't looking--and scare the bejeebers out of them the first time I sneeze? Hide above the ceiling tiles--and evoke the climactic ceiling-collapse scene of Richard Russo's superb academic novel Straight Man? Or follow my colleague's suggestion and go full Unabomber?

It looks like I have little choice in this situation but to waive my right to invisibility and park myself boldly in the classroom without attempt at obfuscation. (But I'll slip those fake glasses with the big nose and moustache in my pocket just in case.) 

Blinded to the obvious answer

It's the easiest kind of reading quiz: print an excerpt from the reading on the quiz and ask students to analyze what that excerpt suggests about some relevant topic--in this case, what  Longfellow's poem "The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz" suggests about the relationship between people and nature. Other quizzes will be more challenging, but this one early in the semester is intended to set a baseline, to show what conclusions students can draw about a poem that presents a metaphor as obvious as the nose on your face: nature as an "old nurse" tenderly teaching children what is written in the "the manuscript of God."

I tell them that there are many possible right answers, but I also point out that there are even more answers that are wrong, misguided, or incomplete. "Just be sure to support your response with evidence from the text," I tell them, and they do it, most of them.

Most students pick out the "nurse" imagery immediately and assume that it's referring to a medical professional rather than a nanny, but as long as they make the point that nature is trying to nurture and guide, I can accept that. A few argue that the poem portrays people as eternal infants dependent on nature's guidance, an interesting point we'll expand upon in class. With a few exceptions, the class performs well.

Those exceptions, though--I worry about those students. Generally they scribble superficial cliches with no apparent relationship to the reading; they repeat in several different ways the fact that the relationship between people and nature is complicated and deep without attending to the most obvious images in the poem, or else they offer arguments they think I want to hear (about how people take nature for granted by polluting too much) without offering a shred of evidence from the text. These are the students who will come up in a huff after class and tell me my grading is too subjective and the poem can mean anything to anyone, an argument that is true as far as it goes but willfully ignores the "nurse" metaphor that screams from every other line.

How can anyone ignore that screaming? Fear of poetry, I suspect, is the chief culprit, causing some readers to freeze when they see lines arranged in stanzas. Searching for secret meanings, they ignore the blatantly obvious. I need to know who these students are at the beginning of the semester, before we get to the less obvious stuff. (I'm look at you, Ralph Waldo Emerson, with your blighted "Blight.") 

Every semester I waffle about whether to start with a really difficult reading quiz (to signal high standards) or an easier one (to establish a baseline). This time I went with the easy choice and learned something important about my students, but I warned them: the quizzes will get more challenging as time goes on as I lead them, like Longfellow's nurse, toward more distant and difficult adventures.

Adventures in editing, plus a love song to the semicolon

How many tabs can I simultaneously keep open at the top of my browser screen? As I begin the long process of editing essays submitted for the anthology I'm assembling, I find myself needing to refer repeatedly to Merriam-Webster (which is the preferred spelling, wacky or whacky?), the MLA Style Center (when do I need a suspended hyphen in late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century?), and the style guide for this specific book series (subheads: boldface or not?). I think I know MLA style pretty well, but the questions that come up in editing a collection of scholarly essays are more complicated than those I generally encounter in student work.

Fortunately, I'm the kind of person who gets a kick out of reading style guides, so all this attention to picky little details suits me just fine. I'm more concerned, frankly, about how to communicate with contributors, especially when substantive changes are needed. Educated people can disagree about placement of commas, but some scholars can take stylistic suggestions very personally. I'm trying to be diplomatic. I do not intend to get into any screaming matches over the suspended hyphen.

If only I could resort to poetry! In "His Love of Semicolons," Amit Majmudar elegantly defends a punctuation mark facing increasing neglect:

The comma is comely, the period, peerless,
        but stack them one atop
the other, and I am in love;...

I am in love, too, with the final line of the poem, which appears in two different versions. The online version ends with a full stop, but in his poetry collection Dothead, the line ends as it ought, with a semicolon. 

If I had to write elegant verse about every stylistic issue I encounter in editing these essays, I'd never get through them all, so I'm sticking to straightforward sentences in the indicative mood. No one is going to fall in love with my editorial suggestions as Majmudar fell in love with the semicolon, but as long as contributors don't scream at me, I'll be content. 

Like square clouds in a round sky

It's the first day of class and instructions are simple: look at the work of art on the screen, describe what you see in some detail, and then speculate about what it suggests about the relationship between people and nature. "There's no right answer," I tell my students; "I just want you to give me an idea of your writing and analytical skills," but when I read their responses, I am dismayed. Is there a farmer in the class? How about an artist? Not even one?

The class is Concepts of Nature and the painting is Grant Wood's Spring Turning, painted in 1936 (see it here). I've used this painting before so I'm accustomed to seeing students struggle to figure out what's going on: What are those brown squares on the hills? Baseball diamonds? An arena for horse-racing? Or just an attempt to impose symmetry on the face of nature?

They notice the grass, the intense green of the rolling hills, and I encourage them to walk up close and look at details, but maybe they're shy or maybe they're in a hurry to finish so they keep their seats and fail to notice so many small things: the tiny farmer and his team of horses tilling the ground, the road and farmhouse and fence-line tucked between the hills, and the phalanx of clouds rolling along the top of the painting.

Most of all I want them to notice the clouds. So much depends upon a white cloud rolling over a square field, and a few students pay lip service to the clouds, mostly to note that the clouds are white and fluffy. Not a single student notices that the clouds are also square.

Clouds are not supposed to be square! Why would Grant Wood have painted something so unnatural in a painting immersing the viewer in the natural world?

I'll ask that question on Monday when we look at the painting again, and I'll nudge students to notice the contrasting shapes: the hills are rounded and rolling, while the only straight lines and right angles are imposed by human beings, inviting us to associate roundness with nature and squares with culture. But then why the square clouds?

In fact the clouds perfectly mimic the shapes of the farmer's fields, providing a visual metaphor for the nineteenth-century belief that Rain Follows the Plow. Wood, painting in 1936, could look back at the Dust Bowl, the disastrous result of plowing without regard to the contours of the land, but he was clearly also looking back even further to the time in the late nineteenth century when farmers were enticed to settle in too-dry areas by the promise that cultivating parched land would change the weather--that plowing dry land would cause rain to fall on it.

Wood's painting mocks that concept by taking it literally, which ought to cause viewers to step back and question other assumptions. Yes, the peaceful setting evokes nostalgia for a pastoral lifestyle, and yes, the massiveness of nature dwarfs the tiny farmer with his tiny team, but step back and look at the painting as a whole and suddenly the whole landscape looks like a human body covered with a quilt of verdant green, perhaps a sexy pun on planting seeds or fertilization or perhaps a reminder that we see nature always through human eyes and shape it in our own image. 

None of my students saw that today, or if they did they lacked the confidence to write about it. If I accomplish nothing else in this class, I hope that by the end of the semester every one of my students will notice the little details that stand out like square clouds in a round sky, and I hope they will start asking questions and keep asking until they find some answers.

 

Rez says

So a friend of mine started an online group for creative people, challenging us to post projects in response to a theme each month. The January theme is "Resolution," which sent me in several different directions. Here is the result:

 

Cozy copy corner

The zoop-zoop of paper running through the photocopier puts me in a meditative mood, or maybe it's the heat of the stuffy copy closet or the complete and utter boredom involved in waiting and watching while the big white machine spits out piles of syllabi, assignment sheets, and handouts.

This beginning-of-the-semester photocopying takes a ton of time, but technically I don't have to sit there waiting for my copies. I could walk away from the tiny stuffy copy closet and do something more useful, like watering my neglected plants or putting together a PowerPoint presentation, but I prefer not to. For one thing, the copier is bound to break down or run out of paper the minute I walk out the door, or else someone else will come in to run some copies while I'm gone and will shove my unfinished copy job out of the way and I'll never find it. 

Besides, sitting beside the thrumming copier provides a moment of peace before the chaos of classes resumes. I think of my fraught relationship with copying technology over the years--the blots of black ink leaking through stencils in my junior high newspaper print shop, the copier cover I slammed too hard and broke at a newspaper where I worked,  the sweet and tangy scent of mimeograph stencils at my first grad-school institution, where grad students were forbidden from running the equipment themselves but instead had to hand the typed stencils over to authorized staff well in advance of need.

Things had changed by the time I started my second round of grad school. Photocopying had replaced mimeograph machines, and asking the administrative assistants to make copies was strictly forbidden. Everyone was expected to make their own copies, which was fine when the copier was functioning properly but not so great when it jammed or otherwise malfunctioned, which always happened at the very moment when everyone in the building needed to copy syllabi for every class. Under those circumstances, we were well motivated to make as few copies as possible.

I remember when one of my grad-school profs handed each member of the class a thick accordion file full of photocopied journal articles, and we marveled over the amount of time he must have spent standing over the photocopier. "Oh, I don't do photocopies," he said, and we asked how in the world he managed to persuade the office staff to make all those copies for him. His eyes twinkled as he explained, "I always remember them generously at Christmas," which taught me more about the academic life than several of my classes.

A few years ago I tried to take the next step and go paperless, posting syllabi and handouts on the course management system and trusting students to print what they needed themselves, but the problem is that they don't, which would be fine if they could be counted on to make a habit of actually looking at the course management system regularly, but again, they don't. Well, some do, but not enough, and the rest miss out on too many important requirements and deadlines. 

And so I sit in the copy closet listening to the zoop-zoop of paper zipping through the drums and the sharp click of staples biting into the top left corners, and no matter how much I miss the smell of fresh mimeographs, I'm content to let the copier do its job.

Life's a blur and then you cry

I'm driving along the Ohio River when I see what I swear is a man fly-fishing, which is highly unlikely both because it's the wrong time of year and the wrong type of body of water for fly-fishing and because anyone standing that far out of the water at that point in the river either has legs 20 feet long or is performing a miracle, and that's when I know I need to give my eyes a break.

I've been spending way too much time in front of my computer pointing and clicking and typing and deleting so now I'm seeing double, but I'm also not seeing things that ought to be there. For instance, I know I have an eye exam scheduled soon, but I've looked all over my calendar and I can't find it listed anywhere; also, when I went looking for the W.S. Merwin documentary Even Though the Whole World is Burning, I found the DVD case exactly where I expected it to be but no DVD inside. I last used that DVD for a class three years ago, so now all I need to do is retrace my steps for the past three years and I'm sure to stumble upon my DVD somewhere. (As if.) 

To make the eye fatigue worse, I haven't been sleeping well because my subconscious mind refuses to believe that the semester can start on a Thursday and therefore keeps waking me up in a panic to remind me that I'm not ready to start teaching on Monday, AKA today. I don't have any Thursday classes anyway so I don't need to be in the classroom ready to roll until this Friday, but deep inside me this schedule feels so wrong that it disturbs my sleep, or what passes for sleep these days.

There's one place where I wish my vision were less acute: every time I look at my computer monitor, I see behind it stacks of books waiting to be restored to their proper places. These are books I pulled from the shelves for various reasons last semester, and now I need to put them back where they belong so that they'll be easily findable next time I need them, but how can I get my books into alphabetical order when my vision is so blurry that I can't read the authors' names on the spines? Time to give my eyes a break, maybe go out and look at the river for a while...but then there we are back where we started and I still don't know what that guy's doing out there fly-fishing in January. 

Please, somebody, help!

 



 

The party's over--almost

I came home from our holiday road trip to find my snail-mail box stuffed with bills and my e-mail inbox stuffed with--well, stuff, most of it interesting and all requiring responses. January 1 was the deadline for submissions to the anthology I'm editing, but people interpret "by January 1" fairly loosely so I'm still getting submissions alongside requests for extensions, which I'm able to grant since I built some leeway into the schedule. 

I'm excited about getting to work on editing all those submissions, but I'm also excited about getting back into the swing of teaching and reading and keeping house. A regular routine will feel comfortable after all the holiday hoo-hah.

Our holiday road trip was short in both distance and duration. My winter break is briefer than usual and Dad now lives in North Carolina near my brother's house, so we made a quick drive to NC instead of going all the way to Florida. This means I'll have no sunburn to contend with when I step into the classroom next week (EEK), but it also leaves me hungering for sunshine, currently in short supply.

We saw no sunshine at all on our drive down to NC; in fact, the fog was so thick that the mountains effectively disappeared. Driving in stop-and-go traffic through horrible weather on the Interstate is no one's idea of a good time, but the trip home yesterday provided adequate compensation: clear skies, no traffic, back to Ohio in record time. 

Dad is doing well in assisted living, making many friends and spending time with family. The Florida house in which he lived for 40 years has sold, so my brothers cleared it out. I brought back boxes of things to sort through, which will make an interesting project for those long winter evenings: My wedding gown can go in the cedar chest but what do I do with that spelling-bee trophy? Maybe my granddaughter would like Mom's old music box, but what do I do with her porcelain figurines? They don't really suit my aesthetic.

The boxes and bills are calling and the essays need editing, and have I mentioned that classes start next week? All the festivities and travel and rich foods and gifts were tons of fun, but it's high time to stop holidaying and get back to work.