Resuming a semblance of normalcy

We celebrated commencement on Saturday for this year's graduates and on Sunday for last year's graduates--as many of them who wanted to return for the face-to-face ceremony they missed last spring. As I suited up to serve as a faculty marshal, I tried to remember the last time I had to get into my regalia. Maybe fall of 2019, for the matriculation ceremony? It felt good to put on the layers of fabric, great to stand outside with students bubbling with excitement, and absolutely fabulous to hear a cell phone ring loudly from underneath layers of voluminous robes and to know that the ringing phone was not mine. 

Commencement was different this year--distanced, masked--and the ceremony was shortened. Everyone appreciated the commencement speaker's remarks, which were brief, pithy, and punctuated with a gift: a tote bag containing a laptop computer for every graduate. That's over 200 laptop computers donated by our commencement speaker. True, we gave him an honorary degree, but that's a lot of laptops.

Today there were many things to celebrate at my five-hour committee meeting: We met face-to-face! Masked and distanced, yes, but with not a Zoom screen in sight! And despite all the complications inherent in our task—doling out faculty committee appointments—we got through it all without rancor or discord. And we had a great lunch—together! (Distanced and masked.)

But over lunch, the costs of this peculiar pandemic year became apparent: after a year of eating lunch alone in our offices, we’ve forgotten how to chat while eating. As we sat at a distance from each other tearing into our boxed lunches, a long stretch of silence settled into the room and no one made eye contact. These are normally really talky people, but today, for the longest time we had nothing to say.

I broke the awkward silence with a confession: “I’ve forgotten how to eat with other people.” My colleagues laughed, but the spell was broken and soon we’d slipped back into our usual bantering roles. If nothing else, the experienced proves that we can get our groove back, as long as someone is willing to break the awkward silences. I've done my part. Who's next?

Can't teach to an empty room

A colleague once told me I could teach that poem to an empty room and I know what she meant--I have those poems too, or those stories or other works that resonate so deeply that I could stand in front of a room and talk about them passionately even with no one listening--but that was before Covid, before rooms full of masked, silent students, before Zoom screens covered with names showing no indication of life behind them, and I am now willing to say that I could stand in front of an empty room and talk passionately about that poem--but I don't believe I would call it "teaching."

Teaching is transactional, and one thing pandemic teaching mutes is the kind of teacher/student transaction that leads to deep learning. Sure, I can still stand in front of a room and try to engage students in discussion of interesting literature, but masks block my ability to read responses in their faces and Zoom removes students from the scene entirely, so I'm doing a lot of talking but I don't know how much teaching is really being accomplished.

And now I'm giving my last final exam of the semester, so soon students will scatter and I'll be surrounded by nothing but empty rooms. You won't see me standing in empty classrooms talking about literature this summer, which is one reason the end of the semester is a bittersweet moment. Sure, I'll be glad to leave behind the stress of class preps and grading and committee work and dealing with the plagiarizing student who insists he did nothing wrong, but it'll be a long time before I will once again enjoy the extreme privilege of being paid to stand in front of a room full of students and lead them toward understanding of great literature, and I will miss it.

All year I've missed teaching the way we used to teach, and I know this pandemic pedagogy we've been forced to employ will make some permanent changes in how we teach. If nothing else, I've learned that I can't teach anything to an empty room. I just hope that next fall these classrooms will fill up with students who are ready to learn--and that I can recover enough from this year's difficulties to be confident that I have something to teach them.

 

My welcoming committee

First day of finals week and I arrive home to find a welcoming committee: a big black rat snake stretched out across my front porch. It stayed there a while, first dawdling among the miscellaneous junk and then moving just below the threshold to block my way--but I didn't mind. Rat snakes earn my respect by their willingness to eat mice, thus reducing the numbers of mice that might end up inside my house. I can happily cohabit with a rat snake as long as it knows its place--outside the house. 

Friday poetry challenge: The end is near

I'm tempted to write a screed caviling about all the different words my students didn't know in the poem we discussed this morning, including cavil and coven and covenant (from Amit Majmudar's wonderful poem "Covid-19"), and I would mention that I'd told my students on Wednesday to go home and read the poem out loud and listen for the sound repetitions and make sure they understood all the words and so this morning when no one could identify the meaning of the second word in the poem I stood there silently in front of class while they looked it up on their handy little electronic devices, which made me feel useless because why, at the end of the 14th week of the semester, do I still have to tell intelligent adults that they can't hope to understand the poem if they don't know the words? But then I reminded myself: it's the last day of classes. We've all had a long, exhausting semester in a long, exhausting pandemic. Give 'em a break.

I still made them look up the words, but I'm not going to complain about it. Life is too short, and this semester has been too long.

The end is near--
it's here! We can
begin again--
amen! We're done!
A ton of tests
(the best!) to grade,
we'll wade through piles
(for miles!) until
(Be still my soul!)
we toll the bell
that tells us all
to call it off.
Don't scoff! The end,
my friend, is near.
Three cheers!

Now on to finals week! Who's with me?

 

Resisting the all-consuming machine

All I want today is to not be an avatar. Is that so much to ask?

My building is quiet and empty this morning, even moreso than usual, and I've got a little time on my hands so I decide to pop in on All Scholars Week.

Now I love All Scholars Day--the day each spring semester devoted to celebrating students' research and creative work, when classes are cancelled so we can attend poster sessions or oral presentations or art shows and see all the neat stuff our students have been doing. Normally, All Scholars Day is my favorite day of the spring semester, and I generally offer extra credit to my own students if they attend sessions and write about them.

But this year is different, because of course it is--Covid-19 couldn't keep its nasty dirty claws off of All Scholars Day, which can't be held in person because of the need for social distancing and so has been spread out over an entire week and moved entirely online.

Fine, whatever, we've been doing things online all year so I ought to be able to handle an online poster session, so I go to the link, which is not Zoom but an entirely different site that requires me to create an account, just one more in a long line of online accounts with so many different passwords that I've lost hope of ever remembering any of them, and then I think all I have to do is click on the name of the poster session and I'll be able to view whatever wonderful things my students have been doing.

But no. I have to allow the program access to my computer's camera and microphone and I have to create an avatar. After a year in which all the joy of teaching has been eaten alive by horrible Zoom meetings, this just feels like too much.

I don't want to create another password and start another account, and I really don't want to give another program access to my microphone and camera, and I can't even begin to express the loathing I feel for the concept of becoming an avatar.

I heard a respected colleague talking about how neat this system is--You get to make a little avatar and everything--and I realized that I come from a whole different planet from people who think it's cool to exist online in avatar form. I don't even want to exist online in picture form--I hate being photographed, I hate seeing my own face on Zoom, I get sick to my stomach when I sense the presence of video cameras, and I nearly puked while reading an article in a recent New Yorker that casually mentioned the presence of surveillance cameras in certain public rest rooms in China that allow the Powers That Be to make sure people don't use too much toilet paper. Video surveillance of toilet-paper use is the kind of nightmare that makes me want to assume the fetal position in a dark closet and not come out until--well, ever.

I don't want to be on camera today. In fact, I don't want to spend one more millisecond swallowed up by the technology that has poisoned this entire year of teaching. I don't want to give any more programs permission to access my microphone and camera. And I don't want to transform myself into some cutesy, smiley, Disneyfied cartoon.

(But what if they offer avatars that look like cranky  middle-aged curmudgeons? Don't tempt me...)  

So just for today I'm opting out of All Scholars Week. Maybe some yard work and a good night's sleep will make me more willing to step inside the all-consuming machine, but right now I can't even rationally explain why I find the concept so repellent. Let the avatars go play online all they want; I prefer to mow the lawn.

Showing up, regardless

The exhaustion I'm feeling may spring from the miles I hiked over the weekend or the mowing I did last evening or the Covid nightmares that keep interrupting my sleep (Put your masks on, people!), but at least I showed up in class with a lesson plan and some great discussion questions and even a little bit of group work. 

My students this morning barely showed up. Some offered excuses for needing to attend via Zoom (okay, I don't want you throwing up in the classroom, whatever) but the ones who were present in the room--well, there's not enough caffeine in the universe to supply the alertness missing from my classes this morning.

What have my students been doing to wear themselves out all weekend? Probably homework and projects and papers. That's what I choose to believe. We have made it to the final week of classes so we ought to be jumping up and down on our desks and cheering, but their eyes are barely open and their heads hang low.

A colleague posted last week on Facebook about how exhausted everyone is, and a helpful respondent suggested that she should give the students a pep-talk every day. As if we're not doing that anyway. As if a pep talk could restore everything we've lost in this pandemic-teaching year. As if any of us have a single scintilla of energy left for another stinking pep-talk delivered to students who didn't listen to the last one.

But here we are! Lesson plans in hand, discussion questions at the ready, group work all queued up. One more week! We can do this! And if we can't, we're going to do it anyway! 

In search of small beauties

Pawpaw blossoms are so tiny and inconspicuous that the only way to see them is to get up close to a pawpaw tree--but then, that's not a bad place to be. The color blends in with the surrounding brownness of the spring woods, so you won't find them unless you know where to look, and meanwhile you're bound to see other splendid things like buckeyes beginning to bloom and solomon's seal leaves curling above tiny buds. Not a bad way to spend a spring afternoon.

Coasting the chaos

Is it selfish to make things easier on myself in the final weeks of the semester? I do it every year in American Lit Survey: the final two or three weeks are devoted entirely to poetry written since the 1950s, focusing on poems I could teach with my eyes shut and both hands tied behind my back. There's not much prep required--I mean, if I can't get up in front of a class and lead a discussion on Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," I'm in the wrong business. Similarly, next week my literary theory students are giving presentations in class. They'll be working pretty hard to prepare and present, but my role is just to show up and take notes, maybe ask some questions at the end. Easy-peasy. No prep required. Time to coast!

Well, sort of. The time I'm not spending doing heavy-duty class prep is now devoted to writing final exams and grading papers and dealing with panicky emails from students who have suddenly realized that the end is near and they're not ready. I'm already looking ahead to a new class I'm teaching next year, but my struggling students are still mired in the murk of this semester and hoping they'll find a way out. I feel for them. This bizarre year has not been easy on any of us.

And yesterday I discovered yet another small pleasure the pandemic has diminished: browsing at the library. Sure, we can still walk over there and search for books in the stacks, but we're not supposed to touch any books except the ones we intend to check out. My problem is that I can't read the call numbers on the spines unless the books are at eye level, so I end up pulling out a lot of nearby books and bringing them up to my face so I can read the numbers, touching book after book after book. I suppose I could send a student worker over to find the books I need, but then I would lose the pleasure of browsing nearby shelves, the serendipity of discovering something I didn't know I needed to read.

It will all come back, I tell myself. One day the masks will come off and the signs warning about touching books will come down and we'll be able to gather face-to-face without fear. Meanwhile, we carry on for just a few more grueling weeks full of anxiety, stress, and struggle. Can you blame me for trying to make one small part of those weeks just a little easier?

Side effects? What side effects?

In retrospect, I should have taken it a little easier after getting my second Moderna vaccine yesterday afternoon. I taught my morning classes, drove to Jackson, got the jab, and then taught my afternoon class over Zoom, and the whole time I felt fine. A little headache last night, a little arm soreness this morning, but nothing that would lead me to believe that a two-and-a-half-mile hike in the woods would not be a good idea. 

It was a pretty good idea at first. We walked a little more slowly than usual, but that's no problem when there's so much beautiful stuff blooming all around. I had thought that if we felt worn out, we could cut our usual hike short and take the shortcut from the wetland up to the parking lot, but when we got there, we felt okay. And besides, I really wanted to see whether those white trout lilies were blooming this week, but the only way to see them is to take the long loop through the wetland and up the bluebell trail alongside the creek.

So that's what we did. Hiked the wetland, heard Louisiana waterthrushes in two different places, saw trilliums and bluebells and festoons of dutchman's breeches and foamflowers and violets and I don't know what else, and we found not one but four white trout lilies blooming, very small and nondescript next to the trail, easy to overlook if you don't keep your eyes peeled. 

But by that time I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. Is it possible to nap while hiking? My arm hurt and started swelling. My legs felt like wet spaghetti. We sat on a log to take a break and when I closed my eyes for a few minutes, I came very close to falling asleep right in the middle of the woods. And when we got back to the top, I did not feel alert enough to drive us home.

Good thing I had the hubby with me. He had his second vaccine jab on Thursday and tried not to let it slow him down, but he wasn't moving at his usual pace this morning, and pretty soon we'll be napping the afternoon away.  I'll remember this lesson next time we have to get vaccinated against a nasty global pandemic--but let's hope there's no next time! I've had about as much as I can take of this one.

 

 

Taking a trip on the T Train

I tried to sell my students tickets for the T train this morning--the train toward Transcendence--but I found few takers. Boarding now on the American Lit Survey platform, step inside A.R. Ammons's "Garbage" for a contemplative journey past a towering garbage dump and on to a different type of landfill:       

                                        there is a mound, 

too, in the poet's mind dead language is hauled
off to and burned down on, the energy held and

shaped into new turns and clusters...

I'm reading this out loud with great enthusiasm and I look up expecting to see some light dawning on students' faces but I see nothing, nothing but incomprehension and boredom. I want the students to feel the way a poem can transforms dead language into new life and move us

        far beyond these our wet cells,

right on up past our stories, the planets, moons,
and other bodies locally to the other end of the

the pole where matter's forms diffuse and
energy loses all means to express itself except

as spirit,

But they're not having it. Maybe it's a bit much to ask students to think about language as a landfill at 9:00 on a Friday morning, and I can't drag them kicking and screaming into the ineffable. Last call for the train to Transcendence--the doors are closing now! I'm manning the controls as the engine rumbles away so I can't see whether the T train is carrying any passengers.

That's not Santa on the roof, but it still feels like Christmas

Day has barely broken but already I hear the clump of feet and the whine of power tools overhead as young bearded men in work-boots tromp all over my roof, tearing off twisted bits of decrepit flashing and flinging them to the ground. My usual view out the picture window is interrupted by ladders, piles of building materials, and pickup trucks. Yes: we're getting a new roof! It feels like Christmas in April.

From the sound of it, work is happening at a furious pace. My roofer dudes moved their original installation date (tomorrow) in hopes of avoiding the rain that's expected to arrive late this afternoon. Does this means they expect to have my new roof fully installed before suppertime? That seems to be the plan.

Just now something big made a massive thump above my head--it sounded catastrophic, like a chimney collapse, but it's apparently just part of the roof-construction process. Compared to the noise and activity of the roofers, my keyboard-clicking seems wimpy and inconsequential, hardly worthy of the word work. Every time one of the roofer dudes walks past the window, I try to look busy. It feels wrong to just sit here while so much heavy lifting is going on overhead.

They've been here twenty minutes and already one pile of wooden laths has disappeared overhead. The truck carrying the new metal roofing materials has not yet arrived, and I'm eager to see how it gets across the creek and up the hill. They don't want to take the big truck across the bridge because it can't handle the sharp turn on this side, so they're hoping to drive it through the creek, across the meadow, and up the secondary drive. Fortunately, the big utility trucks that took that route last week left big ruts to show the way, but that doesn't mean it'll be easy.  

And it's not easy for me to concentrate on my own work with so much hullaballoo happening, but I've finished responding to student writing for the moment so I can focus on some less demanding projects, like writing final exams, doing laundry, and whacking some weeds. The important thing is to look busy, even though it wears me out just to see how hard the roofers are working.

And...it's done! Before 9:30 a.m.!

 

Preparing for the approaching tsunami

This morning my composition students were so focused on working on their research projects that I had a hard time getting them to stop writing at the end of class. They've seen the writing on the wall, the amount of work they'll have to complete in the next three weeks, and they're taking good advantage of every opportunity I give them for in-class work.

And I'm doing the same. I teach four writing-intensive classes and so far this semester I've successfully avoided having multiple classes submit written work on the same day, but this Wednesday my perfect record falls to pieces. I'll collect a set of exams from the American Lit class, a set of annotated bibliographies from the literary theory class, and paper drafts from my two larger classes--composition and Literature Into Film. 

I'll have to respond to the drafts first because the turnaround time for revision is pretty brief, but I also need to respond promptly to the annotated bibliographies, which provide the foundation for my theory students' final projects. The pile I'm most interested in reading will have to wait for last--the exams on which my brilliant students will bring some of my favorite short-fiction writers into conversation with each other. (Louise Erdrich! Flannery O'Connor! George Saunders! Raymond Carver! Don't you want to listen in?)

So my week is a little upside-down: Today and tomorrow I'll do all my reading and prep work for Friday's classes so I can spend Wednesday and Thursday reading and responding to draft after draft after draft. By the end of the week my eyeballs will be falling out of my head and I'll be kicking myself for not planning this end of the semester a little more carefully. 

Maybe I'll get so caught up in my work that I won't even notice when this crazy week is finally over. When Friday rolls around, I'll need someone to give me a nudge and say "Class dismissed!" And then listen for the rewarding sound of a laptop computer slamming shut.

Resurrection season

Facebook tells me that one year ago today I went for a walk in the woods, which sounds about right. I mean, what could be more appropriate for Easter weekend than seeking out new growth springing to life in the woods? 

On Friday afternoon I went out to Lake Katharine to see what I could see: towhees singing "Drink your tea!", the first mayapples popping up out of the ground, a few trout lily buds getting ready to burst into bloom, purply stalks of blue cohosh sprouting like alien life forms, and dutchman's breeches providing pops of bright white in the dull brown undergrowth. Then this afternoon I took some time to wander into my own woods, past the daffodils and grape hyacinths that have gone native and the forsythia that's blooming more profusely than it has in years, and I found coltsfoot and a few trillium stems (but no blossoms yet) and tons of hepatica and a stand of bloodroot blooming so high up a steep, muddy slope that I'd be taking my life in my hands trying to get close. 

Best of all, I walked along the stretch of road where I've been picking up beer cans--over 150 in two weeks' time--and I did not see a single can. In fact it's been a week since I last found any trash along that stretch of road. Coincidentally, the utility crews that have been working so intently all up and down our road for months have now moved on to a different area. I don't want to think that our dedicated utility workers have been responsible for all those beer cans, but it does seem odd that the cans appeared and disappeared at about the same time as the utility workers--and in fact, the last three cans I picked up were left in the exact spot where the utility workers' truck had been parked. Probably just a coincidence, right? If the cans don't return, I will assume that the problem has been solved. (For now.)

If the beer-can-tossers, whoever they are, had looked up along the hillside right next to where they tossed the beer cans, they might have seen that steep slope blanketed with deep green ferns and thick patches of blooming hepatica. I remember the first time I saw that hillside in bloom, during our first spring in this house when we still had our ailing dog: I'd walked Princess on a leash down to the creek, and as she lapped at the water, I glanced upward and was stunned to see a hillside festooned from top to bottom with white blossoms. Anyone driving past would be oblivious to the show, but stand in the right place and be still for a moment and you just might see something amazing. And what better time to do that than Easter weekend?

     

Time just keeps slip-sliding away

Five students showed up for American Lit this morning--five! Out of a possible thirteen! But they seem to have done the reading so we had a pretty lively discussion of Louise Erdrich's "Fleur," during which the students came to appreciate how effectively Pauline uses Fleur to deflect attention from her own culpability for three deaths. And I got to refer to one of the men as "Dances with Pigs," which is always fun. I only wish a few more students had been present to enjoy the discussion.

But I don't really blame them. No spring break + Easter weekend + pandemic fatigue = a whole lot of students taking a long weekend. And faculty too, to judge by the unusual number of available spaces in the faculty lot closest to my building this morning. I hear them thinking spring has finally arrived, so let's make a break for it! Except the temperature got down into the 20s last night so it doesn't feel so much like spring out there.

Two of my classes have "research days" today, and they are free to conduct their research from the comfort of their own rooms (or, more likely, beds), so I have just one more face-to-face class session before I'll be heading out of here too. I've been spending way too much time this week holed up inside for Zoom meetings, but today the sun is shining so I may stop on my way to Jackson and go for a walk in the woods, even though the temperature is lingering in the 30s. I have a coat, I have hiking shoes in my car, and I have to see the spring ephemerals blooming before ephemeral spring slips away. So why not live a little? 

It's funny how time works: I keep wishing away the rest of the semester while trying to slow down spring so I don't miss all its beauty. Can't have it both ways: the spring wildflowers that make me want time to linger exist on the same timeline as three weeks of classes remaining in the semester, so until time travel is perfected, I need to take time as it comes, appreciating every moment no matter how empty or ugly or dull. 

But on the other hand, the moments spent with spring wildflowers help to make all those Zoom calls and quiet classrooms more bearable. So off to class I go, willing to keep educating the few students likely to show up even if they're the only thing standing between me and a walk in the woods. We can do this! (And if I keep telling myself that, eventually I'll believe it.)

A roller-coaster ride that just won't quit

On the roller-coaster ride of life, it's sometimes hard to tell whether we're experiencing a thrilling upswing or getting ready to crash to the ground in a flaming heap. This week the ups and downs are coming way too swiftly, for both me and my students; it's hard to go from a hush-hush behind-closed-doors meeting concerning a serious campus controversy straight to a Zoom call celebrating my youngest grandchild's third birthday. 

On Monday a Zoom call with a colleague filled me with hope and encouragement about a looming project--until she told me about yet another controversy that threatens to drive some valuable people out of academe entirely, and then a student met with me with an exciting plan for success in my course, followed almost immediately by a total meltdown. The ups and downs flash past in a colorful blur so that at any given moment I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or scream for help. But here we are, as everyone keeps saying, and here we will remain until whatever happens next happens.

Being circumspect here. Just call me Ms. Circumspection. Biting my tongue on tasty tidbits not ready for prime time. So let's focus on the fun stuff:

I had lunch with a colleague yesterday--at a restaurant! Well, a casual deli, but still, we sat at tables indoors and conversed like civilized people. I honestly don't remember the last time I ate inside a restaurant, and the weather was nice enough to allow us to walk over there, which was a plus.

We talked about how hard it's been to maintain an active research agenda with all the demands of pandemic teaching sapping our energies and our favorite conferences being cancelled or moved online. "It's like we're on hiatus," my colleague said, and I have to agree. It's hard to plan when the future keeps hiding behind the next blind curve. 

Remember the year I turned 50? I set a goal of doing 50 things I'd never done before, from painting my fingernails blue to snorkeling at a coral reef, and I did them. The goal gave the year shape and encouraged spontaneity as I was always looking for another item to add to my list. This year I'm approaching 60 and I have no plans whatsoever. No goals, no hopes and dreams (except seeing my dad and grandkids again), no aspirations except simply to carry on doing what needs to be done. Not a particularly exciting goal, but somehow just getting through this time is starting to feel heroic.

So hurrah for everyday heroes--the ones who keep the lights on and the internet working and the campus humming; the ones who encourage each other even while up to their necks in crises of their own. Hurrah for the colleague who told me she loves my photos and asked me to keep posting them because she appreciates anything that brings beauty into our colorless lives, and hurrah for the students who keep producing brilliant work in spite of their distractions and disappointments. We're all on this roller-coaster ride together, so we may as well laugh, cry, or scream in unison as we hold on until the time when the ride smooths out.

Aging into a cliche

In the middle of a class this week I heard myself saying I've been teaching composition since before you were born, and my heart sank--both because I'd resorted to such a lame cliche and because how can I be that old?

But apparently I am. This morning my cranky hip started acting up in the middle of a walk through the woods, and the only way to get back to the car was to keep going forward, up and down steep, slippery trails and steps. I stopped to stretch the hip out, which helped a little, but when I change my gait to favor the sore left hip, then the right knee starts to hurt. Am I really going to be that annoying older person who's constantly griping about sore joints?

And then I got stymied this week by what seemed to be a challenging math problem. Several students met with me over Zoom because they wanted to know whether they can pass my class if they get A's on the last couple of assignments. They wanted me to do the math and give them a number but I was overwhelmed by so many questions that I couldn't have counted my own toes, questions like If you're capable of doing A-level work in my class, why have you so far failed to earn anything higher than a D+? That's not a math problem. That's a lack-of-contact-with-reality problem, and I don't know the proper equation.

But life goes on. This morning I saw exactly one bloodroot blossom, but the dutchman's breeches are starting to bloom and the bluebells are budding. We saw lots of trout lily leaves but no blooms yet. Towhees are back and pheobes are calling and my mornings are filling with birdsong. Best of all, this semester will be OVER in four weeks. Granted, I'll also be four weeks older, but that's probably better than the alternative.

 

 

Green(ing) world

I had to get out in the woods today before the weather turns awful again, and I'm glad I did. From a distance the forest floor looks brown and lifeless, but step closer and you'll see buckeye buds bursting into new leaf, feathery foliage of dutchman's breeches peeping out from among the dead leaves, and tiny ephemeral blossoms of hepatica and anemone lifting their faces to the sun. 

Sunshine was what I needed--I've been spending so much time in my office staring at student prose on my computer monitor that when I leave the office, the whole world seems to be made of twitching pixels. But a morning in the woods calms my mind and rests my eyes, which revel in the spreading patches of green. Combine this new growth with the songs of birds and the sounds of rushing water and the woods become an ideal refuge. (When can I go back?)

I love the showy buckeye buds bursting forth.

I think this is marsh marigold. Couldn't get very close.

This I do not know.

 

Bleak past, bright future

 

A year ago I posted this depressing photo on Facebook, revealing the view from the temporary home office where I taught my classes during the second half of last spring semester. Campus was closed down after spring break and I don't have the bandwidth to teach from my house in the woods, so I relocated to my husband's parsonage in Jackson and taught from the dining room, where the only interesting part of the view was a robin's nest where I watched chicks being fed and fledged throughout the spring.

I should have shared this bleak photo with my students Monday morning--maybe it would have shaken them out of their lethargy. Everyone is tired of the pandemic and overwhelmed with work and unwilling to participate in class, but look how far we've come! A year ago we couldn't be in the same room together, and students were either quarantined in their dorm rooms or trying to learn while sequestered at home, where they were surrounded by distractions, bedeviled by tech issues, or even located in time zones that made class attendance difficult.

Today we speak to each other with voices muffled by masks, but at least we're in the same room. Our case and quarantine numbers are minuscule, and vaccines will be available to all students right here on campus in the next couple of weeks. Sure, we're bummed about missing spring break, but sports events are happening again with a limited number of spectators, and in five weeks the semester will be OVER.

Next year will be different--we know this, though we don't know all the details. The 2021-22 academic calendar allows for breaks, and if there's one thing we've learned this year, it's that we all need breaks. Right now would be ideal, but I suppose I can wait a little longer. And we all need each other. When personal interactions were confined to a bunch of empty Zoom squares, hope was a dim glow in the distance that often seemed to be snuffed out. Today the light at the end of the tunnel is strong and bright, beckoning us onward.

The past is a bleak view out a small window, but from where I'm standing, the future's so bright we're gonna need shades.

Just call it a bold fashion statement

So I'm standing at a gas pump filling up my car's tank when I look down and notice I'm wearing mismatched shoes. I'm halfway between home and campus. Do I go back home and change shoes or carry on toward campus?

Some considerations: I don't teach on Thursdays and I don't really need to be on campus until late afternoon, when I have a Zoom meeting. (On Zoom, no one knows your shoes are dogs.) The shoes are similar enough that few people would notice the difference anyway--both black Skechers, the older one from a pair I use for messy, muddy tasks, like picking up beer cans in the muddy drainage ditch along our road, which I did just yesterday before the rain started.

On the other hand, going back home would require backtracking, which violates the strictures of the tiny Puritans who inhabit my brain. They thrive on efficiency and reject concerns for appearance, so they'll have hysterics if I turn around. Moreover, back home I'd have to encounter the sick person currently inhabiting my house, and while I love my son, I'm not a fan of vomit. (No fever, so no worries.) Finally, yesterday the electric utility dudes started work on replacing electric poles and lines that run across our property, and their trucks are currently colonizing my driveway. I don't feel like maneuvering through that muddy labyrinth right now.

So now I'm sitting in my office huddled up to the space heater until my socks dry out (because it's the kind of rain that makes puddles hard to avoid). I'll have to put on my mismatched shoes whenever I leave the office, and when I do, I'll pretend that I'm making a bold fashion statement, sparking a new trend, setting forth on an unconventional path.

It'll be easy enough to join me--just follow the muddy footprints.

 

   

Are the Difficulty Police coming for me?

This morning I made an offhand comment about low attendance in recent classes and a student said, "Maybe the problem is just in your classes," which got my attention, and then she added, "because your classes are so hard," which really didn't help.

Twice this week I've had to give different classes the "learning happens in the struggle" speech, reminding them that the students who persist in struggling with a challenging assignment learn far more than those who give up at the first sign of difficulty. "This assignment is supposed to be difficult," I tell them, "so if you find it easy, you may not understand the directions."

It's a hard sell, persuading students to value difficult tasks, but I've always assumed that my colleagues would understand. Alas, maybe not. The other day at a faculty meeting we were discussing a proposal (never mind the details) that evoked some discussion of the reasons students might want to transfer in an online course from another institution--money, scheduling difficulties, the desire to take an unofficial, unapproved overload--but the discussion kept coming back to the fact that some students take easier online equivalents of courses that they find too darned difficult, which inspired a colleague to quip, "Well, if students find some of our courses too difficult, maybe those courses need to be investigated."

It was a Zoom meeting with cameras muted so I don't know how many jaws dropped at that moment, but mine certainly did. First of all, who would be charged with "investigating" whether certain courses are "too difficult"? Too difficult for whom? I mean, if we want to "investigate" every course that any student ever finds challenging, wouldn't we eventually end up investigating everything?

I don't set out to make my courses difficult just to annoy students and I bend over backward to work with students who really want to succeed, but I notice that the group of students who recently dropped one of my classes had never once attended office hours or sought my help in any other way. The class is not that difficult--but it does require an effort, and that effort can't be entirely on my part.

Sometimes simply showing up requires effort, and I notice that in my general education literature classes, more "difficult" readings result in lower attendance. Wouldn't it make more sense to skip class when the material is easy to understand? Surely we can all make progress toward understanding if we struggle through the weeds together, right?

Well maybe not. Maybe my classes are too hard. Maybe someone ought to investigate whether I'm overworking the little darlings. But who is prepared to do that? Does anyone in academe have so much free time on their hands that they can police the difficulty levels of every class students find challenging?

The very prospect makes me want to pull the covers over my head and stay home. I could call in sick, cough into the phone to make it sound more authentic. Sometimes this job is just too hard.

And yet here I am, doing my best to struggle through the difficulties and eager to welcome anyone who wants to join me.    

Random bullets of why is it so dark?

I was just getting accustomed to driving to campus in the daylight and suddenly I'm feeling my way down the highway again because it's pitch-black outside. I contend that Daylight Saving Time discriminates against morning people--and trust me, the world is a safer place when I'm not driving in the dark. I'm scheduled to teach a couple of 8 a.m. classes next year but that's the last time. Let someone else take over the early-morning hours--I'm moving to the daylight!

Did I change all the clocks at my house? No, I did not. I changed the ones I could reach. Let the tall people change the others. Of course this means that I can't casually glance at a clock without first stopping to remember whether I've changed it.

Last Friday half of my 8 a.m. class was missing, so I arbitrarily assigned a minuscule number of extra-credit points for those who completed the in-class writing activity. Word must have gotten around because suddenly I received a pile of e-mails offering various not-very-convincing explanations for students' absences. Apparently we had an epidemic of malfunctioning alarm clocks early Friday. I imagine these students showing up just a few minutes after the pearly gates slam shut and mumbling about faulty alarms. Too bad. You snooze, you lose.

Would you rather grade three short essays or two slightly longer ones? Not asking for a friend--I changed the assignment structure in a literature class to require two longer and more complicated essays instead of the previous three short essays, mostly to minimize my own frustration with students' abysmal performance in online peer review. I also made meaningful participation in peer review a portion of the grade, and I very carefully defined the meaning of each word in that phrase. The result is fewer drafts and papers to read, but each one takes a little more effort. Will I hold on to this system? Let's wait until the second set of papers comes in before we decide. 

Meanwhile, we need to decide on the color of our new roof! For several reasons we're leaning toward charcoal, which will surround us entirely in various shades of gray, allowing our house to fade indistinctly into the twilight as if it were a mirage. Maybe I'll paint the front door red. Of course, as dark as it is out there this morning, you'd never know we had a house at all. 

Friday poetry challenge: Let's do the vaccine polka!

It's true that I barely felt the jab when the Moderna vaccine went into my arm, but it's also true that I felt that shot with every cell in my body. Relief--so relieved that I couldn't decide whether to sit down an cry or jump up and dance, neither of which felt appropriate in an extremely busy pharmacy. 

Despite what looked like chaos, the vaccines were administered like a carefully choreographed dance: stand on this dot, move up to that dot, sit in this chair, jab ouch bandaid, sit in that other chair for fifteen minutes and then jump up and sashay on outta here. In front of me in the vaccine line was an 84-year-old woman who wants to hug her family members again; behind me was a young mother who wants to take her kids to Disney World. I want to go see my dad and travel again and spend time with my grandkids without worrying about who's breathing on whom, and I want us all to move past masks and Zoom and social distancing in the classroom. Getting the shot felt like a big step in that direction--as long as enough other people get it too.

Side effects? I fell asleep pretty early last night and had some vivid dreams, and if you nudge my upper arm I'm likely to shriek, but this morning I felt lively enough to take a two-mile muddy hike at Lake Katharine, so I guess I'm okay. I have a few weeks to wait for my second dose but meanwhile I'm walking with a spring in my step and hoping all my colleagues get a chance to step out and dance the coronavirus vaccine polka:

Stand in line, wait your turn,
wonder if the shot will burn--
let's do the vaccine polka!
take a seat, bare your arm,
don't forget to sign the form--
let's do the vaccine polka!

It doesn't matter if you're lean or tubby,
this shot will make you want to hug your bubbe,

So take the jab, sit and stay,
then smile as you sashay away--
you've done the vaccine polka!

I eagerly await the day when many others can add verses to this ridiculous song.

A new season of possibilities

Ten years ago today I was sitting on a beach near Carmel, California, eating a picnic lunch with my students while watching the waves for signs of an echo of the Fukushima tsunami. My colleague who was co-chaperoning the trip waited for word about the safety of his family members living in Japan. My California Literature class had enjoyed a week of travel and learning over Spring Break, but it was disconcerting to think that a natural disaster on the other side of the Pacific could have a direct impact on our lives.

One year ago my classes were affected by a different kind of disaster as I scrambled all through Spring Break to move my classes online. The virus that had seemed like a distant threat had suddenly become an ever-present concern affecting every choice in our private and public lives: how to meet with classes, where to get groceries, what to do about travel plans. 

Now here we are a year later and I can't imagine what it would be like to travel with students or share a meal with a large group or crowd together into a tight space to see where a prominent author did his best work. I'd love to think that everything will go back to normal one day (and I definitely look forward to a celebratory mask-burning bonfire!) but a year under constant constraint has narrowed my focus so severely that it's hard to even think about what happens when everything opens up.

And what an interesting metaphor that is: we've been closed down, cut off from each other behind closed doors, closed to new possibilities, but at some point someone will just flip a switch and we will all open up again like crocuses in spring. When will we know that this is all behind us? 

I look at pictures of the area devastated by the Fukushima tsunami and see debris still awaiting collection, radioactive waste still making its presence known, a whole landscape that will never fully recover from the devastation it endured, and I wonder at what point we can call a disaster truly over if its affects will continue to be felt, perhaps invisibly, for centuries to come. 

But we're definitely entering a new season of possibilities. My brother got to visit face-to-face with my dad for the first time since last March, and the College's Covid dashboard currently lists only three active cases. Best of all, Ohio changed its criteria so I'm now eligible for the vaccine, and I even found an appointment for tomorrow afternoon. I'll have to cancel a class to get the shot, but I doubt my students will complain. We're all in this together, and anything that can move us one step closer to the time when we can all take a field trip and eat a meal together has got to be a good thing. 

Crocuses are blooming in my front garden! What changes will this new season bring?

Stymied by Edith Wharton

We've just started reading Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence in my Literature Into Film class so of course I get to hear all kinds of student complaints about how hard it is to read all that Old English and how boring the plot is because nothing ever happens and how annoyed they are with the petty concerns of the character and so on, but I really don't care--I love Wharton and rarely get a chance to teach her work and the book is so full of sharply pointed zingers critiquing the upper crust that I get a thrill every time I turn a page. 

But one student's complaint stopped me in my tracks: "It's harder to read than Shakespeare." 

Um, what? 

The Age of Innocence is certainly longer than the average Shakespeare play, but harder? 

Sure, students are bound to encounter some unfamiliar vocabulary in Wharton's prose, but context clues abound and they won't need massive numbers of footnotes just to understand the dialogue. They're not going to miss out on important plot points just because they don't recognize words like canvasback (in reference to dinner) or cobs (in reference to horses).

But they've just finished reading Cheryl Strayed's Wild and, before that, Yann Martel's life-or-death adventure Life of Pi, and they're finding the slow pace of The Age of Innocence rough going. So much of the plot involves characters observing other characters and drawing (sometimes false) conclusions about them, an activity far less exciting than, for instance, sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger or trying to fend off a rattlesnake on the Pacific Crest Trail.

In my introductory lecture about Wharton, I made a big deal out of the author's conviction that too much innocence is a dangerous thing, and I informed the students that Martin Scorsese once called The Age of Innocence his most violent film, even though it includes no actual bloodshed. I told them about Sam Jordison's statement that The Age of Innocence is "about gangs, their unspoken rules, their codes of honour, and the structures of power." This may have led them to expect a novel less sedate than the one they're reading (or not reading as the case may be).

So I can see why they're finding it a challenge, but harder than Shakespeare? This I don't see. 

Maybe what they need is a little comic relief, a grave-digger scene between some of those stilted formal conversations amongst characters clad in evening dress. If only those uppity New Yorkers would invite Falstaff to dinner--I'm sure he'd enjoy the canvasbacks, and what a stir he would cause!

But instead we'll muddle through the book we have instead of the one some students wish for. They'll be writing papers about how the book and film portray guilt or innocence, comparing a character in The Age of Innocence with one from the next novel, Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress. If Walter Mosley and Edith Wharton could sit down for a dinner date, I'd love to overhear that conversation!

But wouldn't it be better if Falstaff were invited?

Why do they think my road is a landfill?

It's a gorgeous Sunday afternoon--sun shining, birds singing, daffodil buds popping up out of the ground--but instead of enjoying all the beauty, I'm bending over a muddy ditch picking up a Bud Light can and trying not to slip and fall on my butt in the mud. It took me about ten minutes to pick up 57 pieces of trash along a short stretch of road that follows our creek, but the horrible thing is that I could have picked up twice as much if I'd had extra arms or a bigger bucket. Some very thirsty Bud Light drinker seems to think my rural road is a landfill, and I don't know how to make him stop. (Is it sexist to assume that a person who regularly tosses beer cans out of car windows is male? Convince me otherwise.) 

Friday poetry challenge: Break, broken

My grown-up son had a nice surprise last night. Months ago he'd booked a ski weekend in West Virginia, and then what with his car problems and other recent chaos, he totally forgot about it until last night when his phone reminded him to pack for his ski trip. 

You'd be amazed how much a surprise ski weekend can cheer a person up. I confess that I got a little envious. Even though I don't ski (because I'm perfectly capable of breaking a leg without all that expensive equipment), I started wondering, Where's my surprise vacation? 

And then on top of that, I received a bunch of emails from students offering various excuses for missing today's classes, few of them credible. I suspect that a bunch of students stretched their one-day spring break into a full week away from responsibilities. I can't say that I blame them--I'd do the same if I didn't have a host of tiny Puritans inhabiting my brainpan--but again, Where's my spring break?

Maybe writing about it will make me stop obsessing. No? Well, it can't hurt:

Don't take
my break
away!

Today
I work,
you play.

Someday
I'll run
away

and sun.
Today
I'm done.

Reviewing a year-long learning curve

Today my husband is eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, but I'm still ten months too young, even though the phrase too young should not apply to someone with such cranky hip joints. He's also eligible to receive the next stimulus check while I apparently make just a tad too much money (if that's not TMI). Never thought I'd complain about being too rich and too young. I don't mind not receiving the stimulus check, but I would really like to get the vaccine sooner rather than later.

A year ago at this time I was getting ready to drive north to start my spring break with a visit to the grandkids and then drive south to see Dad, but then I got sick and delayed my trip south by one day and then Dad's assisted-living facility went on lockdown, and now here we are a year later still waiting to reschedule that postponed visit. Dad is fully vaccinated and his facility is opening up next week for limited visits, but I have to wait until I'm vaccinated.

A year later, I can still recall that deep inner panic that hit when the Powers That Be announced that we would have less than a week to switch all our classes to online learning. I don't know whether I slept at all that week but I remember frustration and blurry eyes and even some tears and yelling. Online learning was a slog but we somehow survived, and then summer was a different kind of slog, trying to adapt each class to several different possible teaching scenarios, a high-stress situation that put me (briefly) into the hospital. And now, again, here we are a year later wondering what the fall semester will look like and dreaming of the day when we can burn all our masks.

What have we learned in the past year? I can attest that resilience is both essential and exhausting and that technology can create as many problems as it solves. It's true that we've been more fortunate than some, but I'm no longer surprised when students and colleagues wear that shell-shocked look of someone who has walked through a post-apocalyptic hellscape. I'm tired of hearing myself say When this is all over, but when this is all over we need to devote some serious time to self-care, preferably on a beach far from the reach of Zoom.

Meanwhile we keep rolling with the punches, being resilient, flexible, nimble, agile, engaging, rigorous, and a whole lot of other adjectives that have been pounded into our heads over the past year. The red-winged blackbirds have returned to the wetlands so spring is on the way, and one of these days we'll join them in calling out our joy over a fresh new season of hope. Today, though, I'm just counting the days until I become eligible for a shot in the arm. 

  

From hectic to hopeful

Where are the Spring Breaks of yesteryear? I could really use a week clear of classes to catch up on grading and projects and preps and perhaps even to relax and have some fun, but this year we've been given a single day off to mark the middle of the semester.  I intend to make the most of it, even if that means just loafing around the house and taking a nice walk in the afternoon sunshine. But I can take this time off only because I've spent the past week working like a dynamo, constantly flitting from one activity to another until everything urgent is more or less done. 

In the past week I have written detailed feedback on 35 student drafts, graded nearly 50 midterm exams and essays, prepped and taught all my classes and met one-on-one with some struggling students, chaired a committee meeting and met with the provost regarding the committee's recommendations, and, finally, submitted midterm grades.

At home I've cleaned bathrooms and vacuumed and dusted and prepared the spare rooms for a visit from the kids and grandkids, spent time at the laundromat and the car wash, submitted my tax documents to my tax guy, tossed logs into the wood-burner (and jammed the finger responsible for every "s" I type, ouch), cooked for a crowd and cleaned up afterward (with plenty of help), watched my grandkids toss frisbees and play with Legos and throw a million rocks into the creek, helped them use the binoculars to watch birds at the feeders and enjoyed all their drawings and jokes and hugs.

The biggest and most rewarding task, though, was clearing everything out of the laundry room so my son-in-law could install a new dryer vent and fix the dryer (so that I had to go back to Lowe's yesterday and cancel the order for the new dryer, a task that filled me with glee) and then clean up the mess and reorganize the whole laundry room to make it more user-friendly. Meanwhile, my adorable daughter replaced a light fixture in the hallway (Where did she learn to do these things? Not from me!) so that now all the broken things are fixed and the dryer is no longer vented into the crawl-space.

Oh, and in the middle of all that I drove to Jackson to spend less than 24 hours with my husband and then drove back again through a massive rainstorm that brought flooding to the area, although our property was spared this time. Today I'll take a walk down to the lower meadow and start strategizing how to transform a chunk of former horse pasture into a pollinator habitat, plotting out its boundaries and walkways and plantings. After the hectic week I've had and the storm-tossed anxieties that preceded it, I can't imagine a better way to spend my Spring Break Day than to stand in a meadow envisioning a blooming future full of butterflies and bees.  Tomorrow I'll get back to all the demands of campus life, but just for today I'm cherishing some brief moments of stillness.

The oldest grandchild drew these birds for me.