Criteria for a winter walk

It takes quite a lot to lure me out into the woods this time of year:

A few days with no rain or snow so the trails can dry up.

Temperatures above freezing so the trails won't be sheer ice.

A brief hiatus between gun season and muzzle-loader season so the woods won't be full of deer hunters.

Mild temperatures that merit wearing the bright blue fleece jacket instead of the deer-colored Carhartt jacket (because not all deer hunters obey the rules).

A trekking stick to keep me steady on the steep slick spots and the places where snow has been stomped down into ice.

A new canister of pepper spray to reassure my loved ones who can't deter me from hiking alone but want to be sure I can handle whatever creatures I encounter.

A stretch of time when nothing else is required of me--no painting, no cleaning, no prepping of classes, no laundry, no cooking, no pressing deadlines for anything.

That's a lot to demand but when it all comes together, there's no better time to enjoy a quiet walk in the woods, where icicles sparkle in the sunlight and woodpeckers chatter in the treetops and my mind is refreshed by the stillness and solitude.

New boardwalk through the wetlands!

Who leaves a mask out in the woods?

 

 

Making a list, chucking it out

I'm sitting in the kitchen watching birds flit back and forth to the feeder and I'm trying not to think about The Lists.

You know The Lists I'm talking about: The List of people to whom I need to send thank-you notes. The List of holiday stuff that needs to be stashed away for another year. The List of household chores to get my house shipshape before the semester stars. And of course, The Most Daunting List of All: everything I need to do to prepare my spring semester classes. Normally I'd be halfway through that List by now but our extended winter break gives me more time: classes start January 18 but meetings start before then, and where did I put The List of essential meetings?

I don't want to think about it. Looking at all those Lists feels like walking away from Christmas way too soon, while carols are still playing and tinsel is still sparkling. Instead, let's take a look back at some moments I'm not yet ready to relegate to my mind's attic:

For days our oldest granddaughter kept begging for a white Christmas--"I've never had a white Christmas in my whole entire life!!" (She's seven.) And she got her wish: snow began to fall heavily on Christmas Eve, just in time to make driving to the evening church service treacherous, but we all made it home and watched the snow fall from the safety of a warm house, where the kitchen was brimming with cookies and eggnog.

Next day we opened gifts, of course, with the other set of grandparents observing via video call. Gifts were thoughtful and unexpected, from a lighted magnifying glass so I can read recipes in the kitchen to a roof rack so we can carry the canoe on my husband's newish car. Not a bathrobe in sight. 

I'm glad I remembered to bring over my boots because all that snow was beckoning the grandkids, who found that eight inches of soft, fluffy snow did not make the idea surface for sledding but it was fun all the same. Afterward we warmed up with hot chocolate and before you know it the house was full of people napping--on the sofa, on the beds, even a few on the floor of the living room. The evening got raucous again when we played a round of Poetry for Neanderthals, with the grandkids expertly wielding the No Stick to beat up anyone who used words of more than one syllable. Just a bit of advice: if you're trying to get your team to say the word "syrup," saying "Comes from trees" is probably not the best place to start. 

And then the next day they all went away, taking their Legos and snow pants and baby dolls with them. The house is tidy and quiet now, which allows the demands of the next couple of weeks to loom large in my mind. Which comes first: writing thank-you notes, cleaning bathrooms, or setting up online gradebooks? 

I think I'll just sit here and look at the birds.

Lifting, leaning, learning, loving

This morning I learned that, despite my cranky joints and declining upper-body strength, I can carry a squirming two-and-a-half-year-old up a flight of steps. Score one for lifelong learning! However, I'm definitely hitting the Aleve bottle more than usual this week, thanks to the heavy lifting three grandkids require.

Lifting and leaning: helping kids dress and put on coats and wash their hands and wipe their bums requires leaning my back at a certain angle that, over time, causes severe pain. I don't recall having this problem when my kids were little, but then my joints and I were a whole lot younger too. 

So having the grandkids here is a pain in a whole lot of ways but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. They bring so much joy and energy and color into our quiet lives, and I'm not just talking about all the candy sparkles that ended up on the floor when we decorated cookies. We baked cookies! They took turns with the rolling pin and the cookie cutters without a single bit of fuss! They spent close to an hour standing outside watching Grampa chop wood! They had foot-races on the beach at a local lake! And I love to hear the oldest granddaughter giggle as she reads Shel Silverstein poems out loud!

After such a painful year it feels right to have some pain at Christmas, but it's also great to have a good supply of joy and laughter, the greatest analgesics of all. Merry Christmas to all! And to me, an Aleve.

A little Christmas crafting.

Putting some muscle into it.

More sprinkles!

Getting some sunshine before the storm.

Sometimes you just need to run around in circles.

 

 

 

The calm before the chaos

Why does insomnia strike when I am most in need of alertness and energy? Here I am with a house full of grandkids, one of them potty-training, and I'll be the only adult in charge until late this afternoon but I really want to go right back to bed. This has happened before: when the kids are in the house without their parents, my subconscious goes into constant vigilance mode and refuses to relax. It's just for a few days so I suppose I'll survive--but I predict a nap in the offing.

First, though, baking. Today is my husband's birthday and the grandkids want to bake him a cake, which I hadn't been planning to do (because we're already overwhelmed with sweets) but why not? I found an easy recipe and I have plenty of sprinkles so the grandkids can decorate the top, but one problem: the recipe calls for blackstrap molasses but all I have is a jar of sorghum molasses. Okay to substitute? I guess we'll find out. 

They also want to go for a walk in the woods today but the weather may not be congenial to hiking. Yesterday on the three-and-a-half-hour drive here, we drove through constant gray skies, fog, and rain, except for a three-minute period when the clouds opened to reveal a rainbow. It felt like a good omen after hours of bleakness, though what it might portend is beyond my ken.

Right now the biggest grandkid is coloring quietly beside me while the two younger ones sleep. When they get up it'll be time to rev up into full Grandma mode and get the mixer going, but until then I'll relish a few moments of quiet before the chaos. Day one of the grandkid adventure--and I'm eager to see what the day has in store for all of us.

 

Still chaos after all these years

I'm home alone on the morning of my 38th anniversary, but that's okay. The Bearded Wonder drove over to our house to do some chores and pick up the mail while I stayed in the house we're renting in Jackson to do the final preparations for the grandkids' visit next week, but we'll be back under the same roof by this evening, when we'll have plenty of time to celebrate our anniversary before starting up a whole new round of complicated events over the next week and a half.

This is the life we've built for ourselves: always going places, sometimes in the same vehicle and sometimes separately. We share time between two houses and follow two very different career paths that demand attention at odd and unpredictable times, and we devote ourselves to spending time with far-flung family, although that's been difficult during the pandemic. For the past couple of weeks we've shared the chaos of house-painting and next week we'll enjoy a more joyful type of chaos when we'll have the grandkids here without their parents for three days, but after 38 years, chaos is part of the DNA of our relationship. Maybe one day we'll have to slow down and resist the urge to engage in various forms of chaos, but for now, it's what we've got and we'll enjoy it.

But not at much as the starry-eyed couple in the photo is enjoying driving off to their honeymoon in a 1970 Dodge Dart, a car that stumbled and sputtered and looked like a dumpster on wheels but that took us to interesting places. That car is long gone but we're still going places 38 years later, and with luck we'll keep going a few years more, albeit a little more slowly.

 

 

Putting away the paintbrush, putting up the tree

After weeks of taping woodwork and painting walls and moving dropcloths from one room to another, today I have the delightful task of pulling up the last bits of masking tape and putting switchplates back on the walls in the kitchen as my husband stashes away all signs of the massive painting project we've completed.

Well, maybe completed isn't the right word. We haven't painted inside the front coat closet, and the vaulted ceilings in the kitchen and living room are painted only as high as we could reach with a stepstool and a long-handled roller. We'll have to borrow a ladder to paint the really high spots, but we're happy to postpone that chore until after Christmas. It's time to put away the paintbrushes and put up the tree.

Yesterday we were painting the kitchen and I needed to wipe up a drip, but the box of paper rags was in the other room and I didn't want to walk over there because I had wet paint on the bottom of my sock (because of course I did), so my adorable husband, who has a magical ability to avoid stepping in wet paint, went to the other room and brought me back a rag. Just one. Because after 38 years of close observation of my klutziness, he believes one rag will cover all my paint-wiping needs. Clearly the man is blinded by love, or something.

But together we finished the kitchen in record time, him on the stepstool tackling the high parts (because I have a hard enough time avoiding catastrophe while standing on a level floor) and me using the cutting-in brushes to do all the fiddly bits around the sink and appliances. The furniture was squooshed close together and piled high with plants to keep them away from the paint, so last night at supper we had to share the one accessible spot at the dinner table to enjoy some celebratory cheese and crackers after the second coat of paint had been applied.

And now we relax. Sure, there's plenty of work involved in getting ready for Christmas, especially with the grandkids coming for a visit next week, but holiday preparation won't require the paraphernalia of painting. It's not quite gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but if the first gift we receive this Christmas is the absence of paint, tape, and dropcloths, I'll accept it with pleasure.   

A small tree but festive enough.

Someone will have to scramble up a ladder to paint above the cabinets, but that someone will not be me.

A little disorder is part of the process.

 

There's a reason they're called "honorifics"

"So I hear you're not a real doctor," said my old friend (in jest!), and I wanted to say, "No, but I play one on TV." 

So many clever people have already said so many clever things in response to the ridiculous column in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Dr. Jill Biden ("kiddo!") has no right to use her academic title, so I'll just add that the editor who thought it was appropriate to devote so many column inches to such a poorly reasoned argument ought to be sent back to Journalism 101. Can all those clicks possibly offset the amount of derision the article earned?

This kerfuffle reminds me of a former high-level administrator who consistently referred to male Ph.D.s as "Doctor" and female Ph.D.s as "Professor," a distinction that apparently meant something in his warped mind but struck his listeners as bizarre. And way back when I was the a brand-new junior member of my department, a senior colleague (now long retired) used to treat female faculty members as if our gender had tainted our credentials, and I remember what a tremendous rush of joy I felt when I learned that this patronizing old fart had never finished his Ph.D. Of course I continued to show him the respect appropriate to his position, but never again would I allow him to intimidate me because I knew I'd achieved something worthy of respect.

For twenty years I've been fortunate to teach at a college where this kind of invidious distinction is rare, a place where respect is the rule. My colleagues who graduated from Ivy League schools don't look down their noses at my degree from Bowling Green State, and our students may come straight from high school accustomed to calling all their female teachers "Miss" but they soon adjust to the titles their faculty members prefer, whether Dr. or Prof. or whatever. The title is not a weapon, but it does serve to remind students that they're being taught by experts who have earned a level of respect.

And respect is exactly what's missing from Joseph Epstein's notorious Wall Street Journal article. What do you do with a person who demands a level of respect for himself that he is unwilling to extend to others? Ignore him and walk away would be my plan. But what do I know? I'm not a "real" doctor.

A bird in the hand, and another and another and another

If I had to pick my favorite moment of the day so far, I'd have a lot of moments to choose from: sitting on top of a hill on a bench having a private picnic lunch with my oldest grandchild; hearing my four-year-old grandson say "Let's do spoonerisms!" as we drove down the road; or seeing my youngest grandchild gently pat some pussy willows while saying "Fuzzy-wuzzy fuzzy-wuzzy fuzzy-wuzzy."

We went to F.A. Seiberling Nature Realm, where chickadees, nuthatches, and titmice will fly down and eat birdseed right out of your hand. The two-year-old enjoyed watching her brother feed the birds but she was a little leery: she clung to Mommy and drew back when a chickadee flew near, and the first one to land on her hand inspired a horrified expression. It didn't take long, though, before she was relishing the feeling of birds dropping into her hand, grabbing seeds, and flapping off into the woods. 

Which is what I'll be doing tomorrow--not flying but driving off into the woods to get back home. How have we packed so much joy into three short days? I'll take that joy with me, along with the hope of being together again as a whole family at Christmas. (Pandemic permitting!)

 

Unbeatable birthday

Most years I'm proctoring or grading final exams on my birthday, but a pandemic-compressed fall semester leaves me entirely free of academics this week and I have never felt more relaxed. My sweet hubby made me a delicious birthday breakfast near the kitchen window that looks out on my new birdfeeder, and then I drove north (through very little traffic--apparently people are staying home as requested) to spend some time with the grandkids. The last time I saw them face-to-face was in June, way too long ago. We've been reading books and playing with play-dough and going for walks and eating a chocolate yule log with peppermint filling (yum!) and tomorrow we're heading out for a hike. Yes, there have been presents, but the presence of beloved family members is all I need today to make me happy and to give a good start to the final year of my 50s. 

They made me a lovely card.

My creative daughter made a gingerbread birdhouse.

She says "Smoosh, smoosh, smoosh."

Chocolate yule log with mint filling. Yum!

My kind of birthday gift.

 

   

On Chuck Yeager, Tom Wolfe, and literary sorting hats

I was sad to read that Chuck Yeager had died, not just because he led an amazing life but because I can't think of Yeager without thinking of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, which presents Yeager as so vital, so much a force of nature, that he ought to be immune to death.

But I also think of the times I've introduced students to Wolfe's prose, assigning just the chapter of The Right Stuff that deals with Yeager, and how simultaneously exhilarating and disappointing that experience can be. The Right Stuff is the wrong stuff for so many students who wish Wolfe would quit with the pyrotechnics and just get to the point.

In fact, The Right Stuff is like a sorting hat for students, who either love it or hate it--no middle ground. The students who appreciate the energy and inventiveness of Wolfe's prose earn a warm place in my heart because they understand the joy of playing with language. Wolfe's prose reminds me of those magic eye images that look like a jumble of random shapes and colors until you glance at it just right and the chaos resolves into a clear picture. Some people never see the picture in the chaos, and those who do see it can't make the others understand the wonder of the experience.

I've taught a few works like that over the years, literary works that evoke strong responses between the few who get it and the many who don't. Frankly, I'm happy to evoke any strong response; too often my students' reactions to their reading can be summed us as: meh. It's okay. Not bad, but wouldn't it be easier to get the information across in a set of bullet points or a film?

So I pay attention when students have strong reactions to literature one way or the other. It would be too much to expect students to share all my enthusiasms, but when a piece of work divides students into those who get it and those who don't, I pay attention. That kid who got all emotional about the amazing way Amit Majmudar plays with language? I see that hand. The one whose love for Moby Dick led him to collect more than 40 different editions of the novel? We're crewmates on the same ship. The one who read The Right Stuff and felt like she was flying? There's no barrier she can't break.

I feel grateful to Tom Wolfe for breaking barriers in his writing to help readers feel the exhilaration of unfettered flight, but he wouldn't have had anything to write about if Chuck Yeager hadn't first broken so many barriers. So I hope he rests in peace, although it's hard to imagine such a restless and adventurous soul welcoming the final stillness.

Come watch paint dry with me

A week since I've posted! Either I've been doing nothing of any interest to anyone or else I don't have any need to procrastinate, or maybe a little of both.

I've been working, and I have the scars to prove it: paint splotches on my fingernails, blood blister where I smashed my thumb while changing a paint roller pad, sore wrist, elbow, and shoulder from addressing Christmas cards. Yes, I have a little course prep to do for next semester, but all my deadlines are so distant that they may as well be on Mars. Meanwhile, I paint and write and read and try to get ready for the holidays.

For months I've motivated myself to survive this impossible semester by promising myself two rewards at the end: a haircut and a visit to the grandkids. I got the haircut but the grandkid visit has been delayed because of various quarantine needs, but if all goes according to plan, I'm heading to their house two days from now--and if that happens to be my birthday, I can't imagine a better gift than some genuine face-to-face grandkid hugs.

And hey, maybe they'll give me something to write about too. Right now my life is about as exciting as watching paint dry, which I've been doing a lot, in between trips to the laundromat to watch laundry spin round and round. Tomorrow I think I'll address Christmas cards at the laundromat--two mindless, thankless acts of drudgery performed simultaneously! It just doesn't get any more exciting than that, folks.

Bootless

Sky full of snowflakes,
woods full of snow;
boots in the wrong place--
where can I go?

Yes, once again I have fallen afoul of the hazards of living in two houses: I own two pairs of boots and two winter coats but here in Jackson I have one coat and no boots, not even the leaky ones.  With wet snow coming up to my ankles, leaky boots would be better than no boots at all. I went out this morning in sneakers just to get a few pix before the rain starts and washes away the winter wonderland.

I've been keeping busy painting walls and addressing cards and doing a little advance prep work for next semester's classes, but yesterday I had to get out of the house and do some shopping. We weren't in danger of starving or anything, but after a few days I rebel against leftover turkey, no matter how moist and tender it might be. I found nice soft avocados so supper featured burritos and guacamole, about as far as it is possible to get from leftover turkey.

This morning I painted a closet, which means soon I'll be able to make the next move in our complex game of Musical Closets. There are four closets upstairs, each needing to be emptied out before being painted, so we keep moving stuff from one closet into another to keep it out of the way of the paint. I think the towels have lived in two different closets already, but as soon as today's paint is dry, I'll put the linen closet shelves back in and load 'em up. That leaves one more closet and the small bathroom and then the upstairs painting will be DONE.

Just now, though, I'm enjoying looking out the window at the snow-covered trees. The woods look like a picture postcard sent from a place where everyone knows better than to go outside without boots.

 

If only the subjunctive were more intuitive!

I click on the "comment" button and stare at that little space hovering above the word "were" in a pdf document, but I just can't start typing. I fear that my comment might open some sort of Pandora's box and drag me kicking and screaming into the dark underworld I've worked very hard to avoid. And so I wonder: do I really want to explain the proper use of the subjunctive to the committee currently engaged in revising our faculty manual?

The short answer is no, I certainly don't want to get involved in an advanced grammar lesson on the day after Thanksgiving. So much to be thankful for: I didn't burn the house down while figuring out how to make Thanksgiving dinner for two in a convection oven! In fact I didn't burn anything, and the food was both delicious and abundant enough so I won't have to cook again for days and days! We're making great progress on the painting project and just today the nastiest-looking stretch of wall in the hallway got covered in pristine new paint! And I got my hair cut for the first time since August! It's still gray, but it'll get more gray even faster if I get dragged into the faculty-manual revision process.

But there on my desktop sits the draft produced by the committee that has been working steadfastly to revise our faculty manual. It certainly needs revision; various sections are inconsistent with each other and with current practice, and everywhere there are artifacts of prior attempts at revision by disparate groups exercising widely divergent writing styles. It's a patchwork of policies showing a lot of fraying at the edges, and it's high time someone took it in hand and fixed it up. I'm just delighted that someone isn't me.

I was asked to serve on the revision committee and I don't recall now what marvelous excuse I found to avoid getting sucked into the process. I've served before on committees trying to revise official documents and in fact I was a party to the production of what may well be the ugliest dependent clause ever to appear in a faculty document. More than a decade later it is still seared into my memory: "Because a perceived and sometimes real conflict of interest may exist...." I don't recall the various concerns that led to that tortured bit of prose, but I don't ever again want to be a party to such a chunk of awfulness.

And yet here I sit reading the current draft. The entire faculty was invited to offer comments, and you can bet that at some point next semester we'll be asked to hash out disagreements in a series of meetings. I don't know if you've ever seen a room full of PhDs haggling over the placement of a comma, but it's enough to make me want to take up an alternative career as folding chair in a professional wrestling bout. Maybe we can head off some of that rancor by making suggestions privately before meeting face-to-face?

So with an idle afternoon, I opened the draft and started dropping in occasional comments, not dealing with important policy issues but instead focusing on small grammar matters: a missing comma, a subject/verb agreement problem, and then there's that "were" that ought to be "was," unless they intend to refer to a condition contrary to fact, which I don't think they're doing in this particular case but how am I supposed to explain this in a tiny comment box?

The problem with the subjunctive is that no matter how you use it, someone will insist that it's wrong. Same problem with "who" and "whom": how much energy do I really want to put into insisting on a correct usage that a vast majority of readers would rather scratch out their own eyeballs than employ?

I'd like our faculty manual to be elegantly written (would that it were so!), but maybe that's too much to hope for. If we're aiming for functionality, then maybe a little wobbliness in use of the subjunctive is no big deal if it doesn't interfere with clarity. Except in this case I think it does. So what to do?

In the end I decide to write the comment. If the revision committee wants to ignore it, that's their prerogative; I won't fight to the death over the correct use of the subjunctive in a single clause in the faculty manual, but at least this time the resulting clunkiness won't be my responsibility.  

Unmasked anxieties

I haven't seen my students in more than a week but I saw them last night--in my dreams. A nightmare, I guess it was, involving a student who refused to mask up in class and also refused to leave so I called Campus Police, but instead of a uniformed officer, the entire force crowded into my classroom wearing matching yellow T-shirts and proceeded to sing karaoke.

None of them were wearing masks. 

You'd think my pandemic teaching anxieties would be cured by the prospect of six student-free weeks, but no: belligerent virus-spreaders now crowd into my dreams singing bad 80s rock songs. What does this portend?

Ohio is in the middle of a massive Covid spike and we've been getting bulletins almost daily about new campus Covid cases, both students and employees being diagnosed with the virus or placed in quarantine due to close contact with those who test positive. Around 70 students will have something extra to be thankful for this week when they're cleared from quarantine just in time for Thanksgiving.

I'm thankful that we're healthy and safe and planning a quiet Thanksgiving at home, just the two of us. It seems wrong to cook a turkey and all the trimmings for two people, especially when I'm still struggling to figure out how this fancy convection oven works. The knobs have tons of tiny icons that all look like blurs to my old eyes, but even under a magnifying glass they're still incomprehensible. I swear one of the icons looks like a mushroom cloud, exactly the sort of thing that's not welcome at Thanksgiving dinner.

I made my beloved cranberry chutney yesterday, making the house smell like a holiday. I'm not baking pie--my husband made a couple of green tomato pies a few weeks ago and there's still one in the freezer, and it feels right to celebrate Thanksgiving with produce from our own garden so we'll enjoy green tomato pie and I'll also bake a couple of our butternut squashes instead of sweet potatoes. Today I'll thaw some of our frozen pumpkin puree from previous gardens and bake some pumpkin cookies to share with the neighbors. We've downsized the bird to a turkey breast, and I'll make some green beans with almonds and stuffing on the side.

So it won't be normal Thanksgiving but it'll be something. We'll be thankful for surviving the semester, finding a great place to live in Jackson, making progress on the painting, our son's new job, and the prospect of a Zoom call with the grandkids. 

No guests, no masks, no police officers singing karaoke, but we'll do the best with what we have and be thankful for it.   

Unsent letters, final exam edition

Dear student of comedy:
Thanks for providing a solid laugh in the middle of my exam-grading. Your description of Walter Mitty, Don Quijote, and King Arthur (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) bickering over what to pack for their heroic adventure demonstrated admirable awareness of the works as well as a sharp sense of comic juxtaposition. Just picturing Sancho Panza trying to fit in with King Arthur's entourage was enough to make me laugh, but then when you add Walter Mitty's wife to the mix--that's priceless.

Dear aspiring C- student:
I believe you when you say a D+ is not consistent with your self-image, but I'm not sure what to do when you request extra points because you had no intention of doing poorly on any of your assignments. Frankly, I've never figured out how to objectively assess a student's intentions or how to assign a grade to a self-image. If you had intended to do well on the final essay, why didn't you, for instance, revise in response to my comments on your draft or seek my assistance to improve your performance? Why did your final exam demonstrate little to no understanding of the texts or concepts under discussion? If you intended to earn nothing less than a C- in my class, why didn't you act on those intentions from the beginning of the semester by--oh, I don't know, reading the assigned texts? That would be a good way to demonstrate your good intentions. But since your intentions have not resulted in results I can assess, you'll have to live with the D+.

Dear recycler of prose:
That paper you wrote may have earned an A in the class for which you originally wrote it, but if doesn't fulfill the requirements of the assignment in my class, don't come looking for an A. Are you familiar with the phrase "original work"?

Dear obsessive inserter of superfluous apostrophes:
Wouldn't it just be easier to leave 'em out? Think of all the time you'd save if you stopped inserting apostrophes where they're not needed! Why, you might be able to figure out how to insert apostrophes where they are needed, which would be a big step toward writing like a person who cares about precision instead of a caricature of a third-grader.

Dear self:
Why aren't you grading papers? You should be grading papers, and then you should be grading final exams, and then you should be submitting final grades and assessment reports and D/F slips. You certainly shouldn't be blogging. So stop it already. Just stop.

At least the exams will be squeaky-clean

Today I discovered that there are some things I cannot do in the middle of a noisy laundromat, and grading papers is at the top of the list. Exams, however, are another story--I managed to grade an entire set of final exams while moving two loads of laundry from basket to washer to dryer to neatly folded piles. What makes the difference?

The local laundromat is not an ideal environment for doing anything requiring coherent thought--or, really, any kind of thought. I was distracted by the other patrons' masklessness, the noisy machines, and the television up in the corner blaring ad after ad after noisy ad begging listeners to invest in Medicare supplement policies. The ads must work or there wouldn't be so many of them, but I would have appreciated more variety and less fear-mongering.

Grading papers requires a particular type of focused attention that I could not have managed in that environment; after all, how can I follow the nuances of a student's argument when the dryer is beeping for attention and some washed-up two-bit celebrity is trying to sell me a bill of goods on a television with the volume set to Wake The Dead? But this final exam was more fragmentary and eminently interruptable: read a question, make a comment, assign some points; check the dryer, match some socks, fold some towels; read another question, assign some points, and so on until all the exams are folded and the towels have been assigned final grades.

Wait, reverse that.

One class down, three to go--but all the other final exams are timed essays requiring sustained focused attention, so not conducive to laundromat grading. What other household chores lend themselves to multitasking? Grading while cooking? Grading while vacuuming? Wait--we're supposed to start painting rooms this weekend, so maybe I'll try grading while watching paint dry. At least it'll be quieter than grading at the laundromat.   

A little multiple-choice quiz for final exam season

You're a student and you've finished writing your final essay with time to spare. Do you

a. Take time to carefully proofread before submitting it to the dropbox.
b. Close the file and turn it in.
c. Start proofreading but get distracted in your search for the perfect synonym for "said" and lose track of time so that the dropbox closes before you're done revising.
d. Wait, did we have something due today?

Which of the following factors might influence your decision:

a. Your current grade in the class and whether it's possible to improve it.
b. How much sleep you got last night.
c. How many other finals you have to prepare for.
d. How much you love/hate the class in question.
e. What was the question again?

You've got a few minutes before a paper is due in the dropbox and you know your professor sent detailed comments on your draft a week ago; do you

a. Find the professor's email, open the draft, and revise the essay in response to feedback.
b. Look for the professor's email but get distracted by messages from the Financial Aid office. 
c. How am I supposed to remember all those passwords? I mean, nobody uses email these days anyway!

You forget to submit a paper to the dropbox so your professor sends an email asking whether there's a problem and asking you to submit it posthaste. Do you

a. Submit it immediately along with an abject apology.
b. Submit it immediately but blame the error on faulty technology/Coronavirus/roommate's marauding emotional support wolverine.
c. Submit it eventually without any explanation.
d. Keep searching for that email password--it's got to be somewhere!

At last! The semester is over and you don't have to think about all those demanding professors--but then one of them gives you a final grade you don't particularly like.Do you

a. Chalk it up to lack of effort and resolve to do better next time.
b. Start drafting an official appeal to submit through proper channels.
c. Send an irate email to the professor blaming your poor performance on various problems outside your control (tech, Covid, wolverine, etc.).
d. Send an email to the professor claiming that your poor performance does not reflect your true merits and requesting an extra-credit assignment.
e. Grades? What grades?

Scenic route = procastination path

Final exams start tomorrow but mine are all online so all I need to do is post the essay questions and then monitor my email in case there are problems, which I can do just as well in Jackson--maybe even better, since my home internet connection is often horrible while the one in Jackson is generally reliable. So I packed up and headed out this morning, looking forward to spending the rest of the week in the same house as my husband.

But I had to take the long way around, and here's why: a colleague who serves as director of the group that oversees the Luke Chute Conservation Area asked me to write a little something for their newsletter and let them print some of my photos. I've done this before, but that was when I was visiting Luke Chute much more often; this year I've spent so much time in Jackson that I've visited Luke Chute only three or four times, and not at all since September. So I thought I'd stop by this morning and take a hike, even though the weather was cold and drizzly. (That's what you call commitment to craft.) Now I'm recovering at the Jackson house with a cup of hot tea, ready to write up a little something for my colleague's newsletter--a perfect excuse for avoiding that next round of student papers begging for attention. And look at the pretty things I found on my hike! Much more fun than grading.

 

Oh to own a private island!

What this college really needs is a private island, preferably in a tropical location where the surf and sun can compensate for the hassles of transporting all our teaching materials across the sea. If only our illustrious Founders had been more forward-thinking! Maybe someone should strong-arm the trustees into buying an island before January....

I feel like I'm on an island this morning, sitting in my office in a building so quiet and still that I could be the only living person in the Mid-Ohio Valley. I've probably spent more time alone in my office this semester than ever before, and I know I've eaten more peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches than I have since childhood, when a PB&J was my daily lunch except on those rare occasions when Mom slapped some cream cheese down in place of the peanut butter. The pandemic has put a serious damper on our going-out-to-lunch habits, and the advantage of PB&J is that it doesn't have to be refrigerated so I don't even need to leave my office to fetch my lunch from the fridge.

My office today is as cold and quiet as a crypt and I may as well be in a crypt considering the way we live these days. Our state is heading toward tightening restrictions so I probably ought to go to the grocery store and stock up on staples before the hammer falls, but I suspect that the entire population of the county will be shopping this week. It's hard to maintain a safe social distance in an aisle crowded with shoppers in the irrational grip of toilet-paper panic.

So I sit in my office grading papers and leading Zoom review sessions for whoever shows up. My 8 a.m. class has nine students, eight of them female; which one do you think showed up for this morning's review session? We ladies had a nice little chat about what to expect on the final exam and how to strategize in response to various sample essay questions--it was as if we were on our own little Zoom island, with the rest of the world banished to the waves.

By the end of the week they'll all be banished back to the home towns while I retreat to my own forest fastness--my crypt, my cave, my private island that lacks only sun and surf to make it the ideal place to ride out the next stage of the pandemic.

Deep breath before the onslaught

With piles of papers to grade and final exams coming in next week, the most productive use of my time this morning would be to pick up the metaphorical red pen and start grading, but instead I think I'll sip tea while looking out the window at birds visiting the feeders. The papers can wait; the birds can't, and neither can the tea.

It's ginger peach tea this morning, mainly because I ran out of my usual chai blend. Every morning I take the chai test--if I can smell my tea, then I don't have Covid--but it works just as well with ginger peach. I'd like to go outside with the camera and see what I can see, but the camera bag is locked in my car and my son has the key (because his car is in the shop and I'm not going anywhere this weekend anyway, so why not?), but he worked late so I doubt that I'll see him or my keys before noon. Meanwhile, I'll sit here and watch. Maybe that hairy woodpecker will come back! And there it is.

Frost on the windows and still some yellow and orange leaves hanging on, especially on the sweet gum. Our little sweet gum is showing signs of splendor but it does not approach the gorgeousness of the tall sweet gum tree in front of my building on campus. Positively awe-inspiring. One of these days mine will be that big and impressive and I only hope I'll still be around to see it. Stayin' alive: it's our new national pastime.

The surge in Covid cases has everyone spooked, so no one complained when I moved all my classes to Zoom yesterday. I'd been struggling half the night with a fall allergy attack that caused sudden bouts of sneezing and coughing, kind of a bad look in the middle of a pandemic. Students seemed relieved to be able to hide behind the mute button, and I don't blame them. This semester has taken a lot out of all of us, and we're all nervous about what campus conditions will be like come January. 

(No coughing at all today, which is a relief. Stayin' alive, stayin' alive...)

Meanwhile, my classes meet one more time on Monday (on Zoom--all on Zoom) and then it's just final exams, one after another for the rest of the week. Monday's classes are all review sessions, and I've already prepared study guides and sample questions; if there's one thing I can do blindfolded with both hands tied behind my back, it's help students review for an exam. So no class-prep stress this weekend.

And then all my finals are being administered online, so technically, I don't even have to set foot on campus next week. As long as I'm available to release the exams and monitor my email in case problems arise, I can spend the rest of the semester sipping tea and watching birds.

An grading papers. At some point I will need to begin the excruciating process of grading (let's count!) 8 presentations, 52 researched essays, and 52 final exams. I'll be walking around blurry-eyed all week, so if I want to see some birds, I'd better do it now. And that woodpecker is back again--stayin' alive, stayin' alive....

No "I" in team, but there is a Me

Pick a problem--any problem, from your roommate's dirty laundry to world hunger--and put together your dream team of experts to work on solving the problem.

This is the challenge I gave my composition students during this morning's class. They've been reading articles about groups of experts trying to tackle some of life's persistent problems--protecting endangered whales, balancing the need for development with the need for conservation, and preventing paper jams--and they'd also viewed the film The Martian, where a whole host of people with different types of expertise have to work together to get Matt Damon home from Mars. The final exam will ask them to write an essay related to problem-solving, so I thought we would spend a little time talking about how to put together a problem-solving team.

But I gave them very strict rules: Choose a problem and then put together a team consisting of one character from The Martian, two experts from our recent readings, and two Marietta College employees, and be prepared to defend your choices.

All my groups chose complex problems--hunger, littering, protecting endangered species--and they made some fairly predictable choices of experts from the film and their readings, but their choices of campus experts were especially interesting. The group tackling the problem of how to feed starving people thought they ought to have a cafeteria employee on the team because they know something about the logistics of feeding people, and another group mixed biologists with engineers to make sure to prioritize design thinking. 

And one group chose to put me on their team of experts. Why me? I'm not a scientist and I don't know anything about how to solve these big complex problems, but here's what they said: "We need someone to persuade people to care about the problem. That's your job." 

Well sure, let me just clear my committee schedule and I'll get right on it....

They made me proud, these students, because they finally realize that the big complex problems that face our society require the efforts of all kinds of people, from biologists to economists to cafeteria workers and even students, and an important part of the work is simply telling the story so that people will care. If they've learned nothing else this semester, I'm glad they learned that communication is an essential part of solving any complex problem.

Now I can't wait to see how they put this principle to work on their final projects. I'm still on their team, even when I'm wielding the gradebook.

Who was that masked memory?

Funny thing: this morning I was thinking about a class I took in college nearly 40 years ago--a Restoration drama seminar that met one hour a week, outdoors if the weather was nice--and as I pictured our small group sitting on green benches on a vast green lawn, I clearly saw a mask across my face.

Which is ridiculous, of course. I wouldn't have been wearing a mask in that class--no one would have been wearing a mask on my small college campus in 1983! But somehow the pandemic has invaded my memories and edited them to honor our mask mandate.

What about the future? Do I see myself wearing a mask to teach next semester? Yes--but a vaccine could change all that. As I look back on the dumpster fire this semester has become, I keep telling myself next semester will be different, and I hope it's true but I'm not confident.

One thing will definitely be different: I have to find new ways to encourage class participation. I've used various methods to engage students in class discussion, but putting a check-mark next to names of students who speak so I can reward them with participation points has never been part of my modus operandi. But now that's exactly what I'm considering. I have to do something different to make students open their mouths.

The worst aspect of this semester's classes has been my students' overwhelming unwillingness to speak in class, whether face-to-face or on Zoom. I'm a little hampered in the face-to-face classes because social distancing means students who sit in the back are so far away that what I can see of their faces is a blur, so for the first time in my teaching career I've utterly failed to learn many of my students' names. 

And if back-row students are blurry in person, they're practically invisible when we're on Zoom, where they can press mute and walk away. At some point in nearly every Zoom session I put my students into small groups to discuss a question and report back, but I've been told that some students simply disappear, leaving the more diligent students to do all the work.

But next semester will be different! Someone suggested making the students put name tags on their desks until learn their names, but if I can't see their faces clearly, there's no chance I'll be able to read their name tags. Since we'll still be required to assign seats next semester, I'll have to devote some serious time to memorizing the seating chart, or maybe keep a copy of it nearby so I can consult it and call out names when my questions are met with silence.

And suddenly I'm picturing myself as my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Davis, with her giant pouf of white hair, her jeweled cat-eye glasses, and her dainty hanky tucked into the sleeve of her dress. I fear that next semester I will become Mrs. Davis, a persnickety pedant armed with a seating chart and ruler to slap on the desk when my students won't respond.

But I'll be wearing a mask! A mask mandate powerful enough to edit my memories won't let me bare my face in class even in my dreams. 

Hope that light at the end of the tunnel isn't a train coming through

A friend emailed this morning to remind me of a horrible thing that happened back in January, and I responded, "Remember when you thought that was the worst problem you'd face this year?" There's a dose of perspective! We've survived one horrible thing after another, and although  the year isn't over yet, I see light at the end of the tunnel.

One more week of teaching before finals! Nearly all of my quarantining students have returned to class and our official campus Covid counter says we're down to only six active cases and 61 recovered cases. I'm tempted to say we've dodged a bullet--but again, the semester isn't over yet.

And yet it feels over. I'm counting down the few lessons left to prep and the final assignments still coming in, and every item I check off my list feels like a step toward triumph. My students sit there stunned in class as if this semester has beaten every ounce of energy out of them, but they'll pull themselves together to finish those final projects like the troupers they are.

For days I've been holding one-on-one Zoom conferences with various students to discuss their final projects and I find myself saying the same things over and over--points that I've covered in class but that many students seem to feel don't apply to their personal situations--and I am so tired of staring at the screen that I'd like to tear my eyeballs out with a fork. But that would be bad, not least because I've just had one set of stitches removed from my face and I really don't need another set. (Not skin cancer! Just a benign lesion caused by sun damage! Slather on that sunscreen, kiddos!)

In other good news, today I had the extreme pleasure of sending out letters from the tenure and promotion committee recommending deserving colleagues for tenure and promotion. The committee works really hard but the reward is the opportunity to make a difference in colleagues' careers, and sending out those affirming letters first thing this morning put a smile on a bunch of faces, mine included.

Good news for my colleagues, good news for my face, and a shortening list of things to do before this bizarre and exhausting semester becomes history--if I weren't so exhausted, I'd be tempted to do a little happy dance. It's dangerous to celebrate prematurely, because what if that light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be an express train heading our way?

Better do that happy dance now before it's too late!

Flipping the syllabus

In response to a student's complaint about so many final projects all due in the final weeks of the semester, I said, "Okay, from now on I'll make final projects due in the first week of the semester."

"But how--" she asked.

"Final paper due the first week, preliminary draft due the second week, prewriting and thesis development the third week--that way it won't all be due at the end."

"But wait a minute--"

"Think of how easy the end of the semester will be! By the time I get around to explaining how to use the library's research databases to find the resources you need for a successful research project, it'll already be graded and returned!"

"But how--"

 And that's when I had to tell her I was joking. 

Judging from the alertness level in my classes this morning, I believe I'm not the only one who didn't get much sleep. 

 

 

Conversations I wish I'd missed

In class this morning:

Student: Can you tell me when we're having our final exam?

Me: It's on the syllabus.

Student: But the final exam schedule is so hard to read! Can you just tell me the date and time?

Me: The date and time are on the syllabus.

Student: I don't have the syllabus.

Me: The syllabus is available on Moodle. Look, right here's the link! Also, the date and time of the final exam are listed very clearly on the final exam study guide and on the Moodle page for finals week--right here! 

Student: But another professor told me it's really hard to read the final exam schedule.

Me: Maybe so, but that's why I've listed the date and time of our final exam in three different places you can easily access.

Student: But can you just tell me when we're having our final exam?

On the phone this morning:

Me (politely, kindly, with a smile in my voice): Can you tell me your mask policy for employees?

Grocery-store manager: Employees are required to wear masks, but sometimes they slip up. Did you see an employee not wearing a mask?

Me: So I was in the store yesterday to pick up a few things, and I noticed that the employees around my age were all wearing masks but the teenaged cashier at the only available check-out line had her mask pulled down all the way under her chin.

Grocery-store manager: She's not supposed to do that.

Me: But wait! The bagger at the end of the conveyer kept his mask on until he needed to sneeze, and then he pulled the mask down and sneezed all over my groceries.

And I'm not going to repeat what the manager said except to note that he's going to have a word with the young people because they ought to know better than that.

And indeed they should. We all ought to know better than that. Can we please all just put our thinking-caps on and keep them fully engaged until the pandemic is over?