Back to the simulated garden

Standing nearly six feet tall and arranged in neat rows between ziggurat-like office buildings, 109 molded concrete ears of corn guard a busy intersection in the Columbus suburb of Dublin, Ohio.  The art installation, Field of Corn with Osage Orange Trees by sculptor Malcolm Cochran, can baffle unprepared passersby.  Are these stark white erections tiny missile silos?  Tombstones?  Teeth?  Klansmen playing freeze-tag?

Thus begins a cheeky article called "From Mulberries to Machines: Planting the Simulated Garden," published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 15 years ago. It wasn't my first article in an academic journal, but it drew on a section of my dissertation so I'd been working on the topic for what felt like a very long time. From that field of fake corn grew my entire academic career.

I don't spend much time in Columbus these days but this morning I paid a repeat visit to Field of Corn with Osage Orange Trees. The property once belonged to an agriculturalist studying corn hybridization, but I'm sure he never envisioned an ear of corn six feet tall. Early settlers planted osage orange trees close together to serve as hedges along property lines, but it's unusual to see osage oranges standing in the middle of the city, occasionally dropping a hedge apple to the ground with a thunk.

Even early on a Saturday morning, a steady swish of traffic whizzed past as I wandered among the artificial ears. I could wax poetic about how Field of Corn makes visible the various meanings inscribed on this particular plot of land over the centuries, but mostly the whole experience just makes me smile. A simulated garden in the middle of a city! Someone should write about that.

Here comes another Bartleby!

After several rounds of email messaging yesterday, I finally had to admit to a student that the powers invested in me as Chair of the Art Department do not include the ability to increase the size of a classroom. No matter how desperately the student wants to take that class, all the seats are already full and I can't wave a magic wand to make the room extend into another dimension, however cool that might be.

Most of my duties as (temporary!) Chair of the Art Department have been both mild and interesting: I love observing creative people in the classroom, and so far the department hasn't been threatened with the curricular cuts happening elsewhere. Right now, though, students are scheduling their spring-semester classes and I suddenly face an inbox full of requests for waivers of prerequisites, course substitutions, and admission into courses that are already full.

The requests to be added to full courses are the easiest to deal with: classrooms are only so big, and a room that's already crowded with 18 students isn't going to welcome a 19th. In the English department it's not so difficult to shove an extra desk into a classroom, but art classes tend to require different types of works space--super-spiffy computers in Graphic Design courses, easels and paints or pencils in others. I've been in all those rooms and I've seen how cramped they can be, so I have no problem holding the line on course caps.

The requests for waivers and substitutions are more difficult, though, because I'm required to provide a written rationale for each one I approve, and I'm hard pressed, for instance, to explain why a painting course is an appropriate substitute for one focused on print-making. When I ask students why they want a waiver or substitution, their reasons not the type that will impress the Registrar's office: I don't like morning classes, I think I'll do better in this type of class, I don't want to take that other one. It's a whole lot of Bartlebys facing a brick wall and saying "I prefer not to," and I can't send that to the Registrar.

So this morning I came up with a solution: When a student asks for a waiver or substitution, I will ask the student to write a couple of sentences explaining why they're equipped to take the course without the prerequisite or why the course in question is an appropriate substitute for the required course--and the reasons have to refer to course content and skills acquired, not personal preferences. This may save me a little work but, more importantly, it will make the students think about the purpose of their education beyond personal preference.

The Bartlebys will always be with us, but maybe this will make a few of them think beyond the brick wall.

 

Spooky season, sort of

As I walked out the door into an elaborate spider web this morning, I reminded myself to be grateful to the spiders. Other people have to buy artificial spiderwebs to decorate their front porches this time of year, but our front porch gets the full Spooky Season treatment at no cost to me, except for the occasional discomfort of a face full of web. 

It's always seemed ironic to me that our road is considered too scary for trick-or-treating. I mean, if you want to experience some genuine fear that doesn't come out of a package, why not walk along a country road with no sidewalks or streetlights and hike a quarter-mile up a dark driveway to a porch swathed in spider webs? The night sounds emanating from the woods aren't chintzy recordings but actual Things that Come Out at Night, and they're watching you. In fact, don't look now but they could be creeping up behind you right now!

Nope, no trick-or-treating on my road, and no one coming inside the house to see the genuinely scary gigantic spider the crawled our across the dining-room floor the other day. No one else was home and I couldn't stomp it without shoes on, so I grabbed a nearby glass and trapped the spider under it and then watched its futile attempts to escape. I enjoyed Spider Under Glass for a good part of the evening until the resident spider-killer came home and made quick work of the menacing beast.

Speaking of menacing beasts, I was walking toward my classroom building the other day when one of my students stopped me: "Don't go in that way! There's a snake on the path!"

"Cool," I said, and hurried up to take a look. Wish I'd had a camera on hand because it was a lovely lithe ribbon with an iridescent belly, no thicker than my little finger and posing no danger to anyone, but the next group of students who came up the path scared it away with their shrieking. These same students will probably pay good money to buy costumes and go to Halloween parties just to celebrate the scariest things in life, but here they had an opportunity for genuine fear at no charge and they did not appreciate it one bit.

When the obstacles are part of the journey

For months we tour guides in the higher ed odyssey have been told that we need to remove "obstacles to completion," which sounded reasonable enough until it became apparent that one of those obstacles is--well, me.

Not me exactly, but the kind of course I design and champion, the kind of curriculum I support, has become Public Enemy Number One for the Obstacle Removal Brigade. 

Removing obstacles sounds like a worthy task, and in some cases it's necessary. For instance, the English department needs to confer with the Education department to make sure required courses in the two departments don't conflict; otherwise, an English major pursuing teaching certification won't be able to complete her degree. And if transfer students regularly have trouble getting credit for classes they've taken elsewhere, then we probably need to take a look at transfer equivalencies and smooth out the pathway to completion.

But what the Obstacle Removal Brigade really wants is to make the journey shorter and simpler for everyone. Let's eliminate a bunch of General Education requirements, shrink requirements for most majors, and de-emphasize challenging courses so students can move down the road toward degree completion more quickly and smoothly. So sure, maybe we'll go ahead and offer that upper-level theory-laden course, but we'll no longer require it for the major because it poses to great an obstacle.

Funny, but when I designed and taught that course, I envisioned not an obstacle but a pathway. Sure, it's challenging and some students will struggle with the material, but as long as learning happens in the struggle, it's worth the effort. Further, figuring out how to deal with obstacles with equip students to tackle even bigger challenges in later classes or in their careers. Dealing with obstacles is an essential part of the journey! Or so I have always believed.

But higher education has moved on. The goal, you'll notice, is not education but completion: let's make it easier for students to take home a diploma, even if that means narrowing their opportunities to pursue depth and breadth of education.

So removing obstacles to completion is really the same old story dressed up in new buzzwords. We can scoot students briskly down the pathway toward that precious diploma, but most of them won't even know what adventures they've missed by avoiding every little obstacle.  

Ephemeral autumn

Friday afternoon I arrived home just after a rainshower and found myself surrounded by fall leaves glistening and sparkling in the sudden sunshine. I reached for the camera bag but it wasn't in the car but before I'd unzipped it the sun had ducked behind the clouds and the rain was falling again.

Every year at this time I keep catching moments like these--sun hitting red and yellow leaves until they appear to be lit from within, my road passing between walls of shimmering color, the sky above dotted with brilliant red maple leaves. And every year I try to capture those moments on camera, with little success. Sure, I get some colorful leaves, but the picture lacks the sound of leaves rustling and woodpeckers chattering and squirrels skittering through the woods, and somehow the colors in the photo lack liveliness and brilliance.

Autumn color is so ephemeral. Right now my house is surrounded by colorful trees, but every gust of wind sends a cascade of yellow and red flying past my windows, and the hillsides along my route are already showing big patches of brown where the tree limbs are bare and foreboding. I love this season while it lasts, but once the leaves start turning there's no stopping them. Which means, I suppose, that we'd better go outside and enjoy them while we can, with or without the camera.

 

Chasing leaves, chasing rhymes

Last night I heard a Serious Poet assert that he doesn't allow his poetry students to use rhyme because when they ought to be attending to assonance and alliteration and diction and rhythm, they focus instead on chasing the rhyme. 

He has a point, but I've never been happier to not be a Serious Poet. We mere doggerelists are free to chase those elusive rhymes wherever they take us, whether they're wafting toward a spider web, skittering across wet pavement, floating through a sludgy sewer, or dancing in the breeze.

Which reminds me: this morning I had the rare pleasure (?) of walking up a campus sidewalk in the rain to the accompaniment of leaf-blowers. Who uses leaf-blowers in the rain? Wet leaves don't waft, skitter, float, or dance, and using a leaf-blower as an overgrown blow-dryer seems an immense waste of energy.

On the other hand, this sounds like just the kind of futile exercise that could promote contemplation. Pop in some earplugs, crank up the noise, and stand there staring into space while absolutely nothing happens--it's the perfect time to chase some rhymes.

Oh the leaf-blowing fellow
sees fall leaves, red and yellow,
as mere  blots, hazards, flaws, and impediments:
"Sure, they look nice, but soon
they'll get mooshed and festoon
all our sidewalks with squishy wet sediment."

Oh the leaf-blowing dude
scatters leaves 'til a cloud
spits great raindrops to drip down his nose.
Leaves won't dance, waft, or skitter
when they're wet. Now he's bitter,
telling all who can hear, "This job blows."

(But alas, no one can hear him over the roar of the leaf-blower.)

Dangling from a cliff, the modifier required rescuing

This morning an e-mail message from our college bookstore transported and transformed me: , "As the official online bookstore of Marietta College, you can be prepared for class with complete confidence."

Somehow, this message does not fill me with confidence about the communication skills of our online bookstore, even if the sentence implies that I am our official online bookstore. But it does offer a real-world example of a type of sentence problem my students seem blind to: the dangling modifier. If a student submitted a draft containing the sentence above, I would attempt to explain the problem in marginal comment that the student might not read at all, or might read but not understand and not ask for help, or might read and try to repair but introduce new problems in the process.

Let's see how that works with a common example: Fumbling in her purse, the keys could not be found.

I comment: Who is fumbling? The keys?

The student who doesn't read or understand my question will leave the sentence alone and then wonder why I'm deducting points from the grade on the final version. The student who reads my comment, on the other hand, may revise the sentence in any number of ways: 

Fumbling in her purse, the keys could not be found by Jane. (Dreadful.)

By Jane's fumbling in her purse, the keys could not be found. (Clunky.)

Jane fumbled in her purse. The keys could not be found. (Choppy.)

Fumbling for her keys, the purse remained empty. (Oh come on.)

Fumbling in her purse, Jane found the keys. (Perfect.) 

I've tried a number of ways of explaining this problem to students, but either my explanations are inadequate or the students are unable to see the error. Like a roommate suffering from dirt-blindness, students look right past the messy bits or they tune me out when I start using words like modifier and noun phrase and subject. 

If we're having a face-to-face conference, I'll ask students to read the sentence out loud or else I'll read it out loud with exaggerated emphasis on the faulty phrasing, but they look baffled. Sounds fine to me, they say. Everyone knows what I mean. You just don't like my style! 

And at that point I just want to give up. I mean, the world is full of dangling modifiers; will it really hurt anything to let this one slide?

Fumbling for an answer, the solution remained elusive.

Mitty and me

With my hands buried deep in the bowels of the printer, scrabbling desperately after the wrinkled scrap of paper jamming up the works, I glance at the clock and see that I need to dash upstairs to teach a class in 30 seconds, which doesn't leave any time to wash my ink-stained fingers.

Today I've been struggling to make things work--clearing a stubborn paper jam from the printer, fumbling with a so-called fillable form that resisted my efforts to fill in the blanks, transcribing a url incorrectly and leading students to the dreaded "404 Error." Somehow, though, all this mechanical incompetence seems appropriate on a day when I'm teaching James Thurber's story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

For Mitty, too, is bedeviled by machinery, so incapable of putting chains on his tires in the winter that he resolves to put his arm in a sling so the garage mechanic won't view him with contempt when he asks for help. The milquetoast Mitty bows to his wife's warnings--he's driving too fast, he ought to be wearing galoshes, he can't be trusted to buy the right brand of puppy biscuit. Even a revolving door whistles at him derisively.

Which is why Mitty takes refuge in a fantasy world in which he exudes authority, knowledge, and competence. The real Mitty can't park his car without assistance, but in his fantasies, he can pilot a "hurtling eight-engine Navy hydroplane" or use a fountain pen to replace a faulty piston in a complicated medical machine, and if the fantasy Mitty, accused of murder, had his right arm in a sling--well, he testifies, "I could killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand."

What would Walter Mitty do with a paper jam or a faulty url? If he struggled to remember to buy overshoes or the right brand of puppy biscuit, how would he handle the many passwords needed to survive modern life? Today as the printer tried to consume my whole hand, I kept waiting for it to say "ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa" and I wondered what kind of fantasy scenario could make my technological struggles appear heroic. 

In the end I determined to face my students with the kind of stoic nonchalance Mitty displays at the end of the story, "Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last," tearing off the blindfold to look squarely at the firing squad.

Oh, shoot--there's still ink on my hands. 

Sarah Vowell among the crazies

During her campus visit yesterday, Sarah Vowell explained that she had once intended to be an Art History professor but her experience as a teaching assistant killed that dream: "Have you spent much time with young people lately? What kind of crazy person does that?"

Color me crazy, but I really enjoyed introducing some of my young people to Sarah Vowell's work earlier this week and to the author herself yesterday. What surprised me was how few of my students were interested in taking advantage of the opportunity, despite the lure of extra-credit points. Only about one-quarter of my comedy students showed up for either the small-group session with the author or the public reading. I have English majors who want to pursue writing careers but somehow can't take the time to seek insight from an actual writer. What kind of crazy person does that?

One of the things Ms. Vowell emphasized during the small-group session with students was the importance of revision, both in writing and in life. "I hate writing, but I love re-writing," she said. Describing her practice of writing multiple drafts, constantly whittling down sentences and tossing out sections that distract from the purpose, she said, "Most of what I do is wasted work." And yet the finished writing is stronger for her willingness to toss worthy passages into the recycle bin.

And she made it clear also that her life is stronger and richer for her willingness to abandon dreams and adapt to unexpected opportunities. By the time she understood that she would not be pursuing a career as an Art History professor, she'd held a variety of other jobs for newspapers and radio stations and knew that she could make a living as a writer. Goals are fine, she told our students, but knowing when to toss out the plan and try something different can lead to surprising rewards.

I hope my students were listening--those who bothered to attend. Because if we crazy profs decide to devote our lives to educating young people, we have to hold on to the hope that it's not mostly wasted work.

Getting flip about slips and trips

A grizzled colleague on the verge of retirement asked me yesterday what I'd learned from our mandatory online Slip, Trip, and Fall training.

"Well," I told him, "I learned that if you must carry a large box on steep, slippery steps in the rain, you should definitely not wear high heels."

He promised to toss out all his Louboutins, but he may have been pulling my leg.

I took the Slip, Trip, and Fall training last weekend because Fall Break seemed like the appropriate time to learn how to break a fall, but that's not what I learned. I'm a longtime expert on slipping, tripping, and falling, but the only helpful advice the online training offered on how to break a fall can be paraphrased thus: If you must carry a large box on slippery steps in the rain while wearing high heels, make sure there's a certified safety officer nearby to help you get up.

Which is not to suggest that the online training was worthless. It informed me, for instance--not once but twice!--that walking around is inherently dangerous, which makes me want to curl up on a comfy sofa with a good book, except our Wellness Program keeps telling us that sitting around is inherently dangerous, leading to obesity and heart disease and joint problems and all kinds of other issues. 

Slip, Trip, and Fall Training also informed me that ice can be slippery, that power cords can be tripping hazards, and that if I need to reach something on a high shelf, I shouldn't stand on a rolling chair. Frankly, ice and power cords can't intimidate me as long as I carry with me everywhere the only tripping hazards I'll ever need--my own two feet. And I've long ago learned that if I need to reach something on a high shelf, the best thing to do is call for a tall person, preferably one who isn't a klutz.

Which reminds me of the mandatory Sexual Harassment Training some years ago that featured a scenario of a middle-aged female professor sitting in her office chair while looking admiringly upward at a hunky male student retrieving something from a high shelf. "I'm just admiring the view," she said, and the lesson here is: if you must rely on a tall non-klutzy person to retrieve something from a high shelf, try to avoid sexually harassing him in the process.

The funny thing about that particular version of Sexual Harassment Training was that in every scenario, the sexual harasser was--how shall I put this tactfully?--fat. A Person of Size, shall we say. Our Wellness Program may be trying to prevent sexual harassment when it hectors us to get up off your fat butt and get moving, but our Slip, Trip, and Fall training says Not so fast! Walking around is inherently dangerous!

And so I sit here, surrounded by tripping hazards and torn between the need to keep moving and the desire to stay safe, so confused that if I happen to fall flat on my back, I'll probably just lie there and enjoy the view.

Time for the annual cold-building complaint

I wasn't prepared for the cold and wind during my weekend visit with the grandkids, so I did a lot of layering every time we went outside and then, on the way home, I bought a new jacket. 

I wore the new jacket to campus this morning but found it insufficient to protect against the arctic indoor chill. Goodness it's cold in here. I'm wearing fingerless gloves right now because otherwise my hands would be too cold to feel the keys. Who knew that a PhD in literature would qualify me for a job in which I have to dress like Bob Cratchit?

Do I dare turn on my space heater? It's a tough call because we're not supposed to have space heaters in our offices (but everyone does) and if too many people turn on their space heaters, we blow the circuits and lose power entirely. But my neighbor across the hall has left for the day so maybe I'll be safe.   

I'm tempted to just cancel office hours until we get some heat in the building. I mean, I can huddle under a blanket to work in my office, but I don't have enough blankets for everyone else in the building.

On not getting lost in a good book

Bright and early Thursday morning I was all set to hop in the car and drive north for my fall-break visit with the grandkids, but I couldn't leave the house until I learned whether Salman Rushdie had won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. (Spoiler: he didn't.) I was afraid, see, that if Rushdie's win was announced while I was driving, I'd get overcome with emotion and have to pull over.

I don't know anything about Jon Fosse (or I didn't until Thursday) but he seems admirable enough. And I admit that Rushdie has his flaws, but if he had never written anything but Shame, Midnight's Children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, he would still stand among the literary immortals. I've been trying to think of any other living author who grabs hold of me the way Rushdie does but the list is short. Colson Whitehead. Natasha Trethewey. Ruth Ozeki, sometimes. I'm drawing a blank here.

I had lunch with an old grad-school friend yesterday and had trouble talking about books because nothing I've read recently has been particularly memorable. I read a bunch of Sarah Vowell's books in search of an excerpt to assign to my comedy students in preparation for her campus visit next week (!!!), and while I enjoyed Assassination Vacation and The Wordy Shipmates, they didn't sink their claws deeply into my soul the way Rushdie's writing does. And I'm once again teaching Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain in my Honors Lit class and loving every minute of it, but Frazier's other books have been mostly meh. 

My leisure reading lately has consisted of Harrison Kinney's monumental 1995 biography of James Thurber, which I've read and enjoyed before but I can't recommend it casually because it's 1200 pages long and so heavy it hurts my wrists. Only a die-hard Thurber fan would be willing to endure that kind of pain for a deep dive into the humorist's psyche, but how many die-hard Thurber fans do I encounter on a daily basis? When my comedy class reads "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" next week, I'll be the only person in the room familiar with Thurber's name. In Ohio! That's a travesty.

Maybe I'm the problem. I read a lot of contemporary fiction but I find it increasingly difficult to immerse myself in the plots or care about the characters. No novel published in the past five years has moved me as deeply as All That She Carried by Tiya Miles, a deeply researched work of narrative history. I'm still praising Whitehead's The Nickel Boys to anyone who will listen, but he's published two more books since then that haven't touched the same chord. 

These days when I want to lose myself in a good book, it's almost always an old book, well loved and reliable. I've been feeling a hankering lately to revisit Middlemarch, for instance. Why don't more recent novels have the ability to hold my attention the way George Eliot does, or Jane Austen or Zora Neale Hurston or Salman Rushdie?

I used to be happy to read anything, but not so much anymore. What's changed: the books or me?

 

 

A little too much of just about everything

We've arrived at the season of Too Muchness: too many papers to grade, brussels sprouts to pick, pawpaws to process. I mean, we love pawpaws and appreciate an abundant harvest, but the flesh is so slick and slippery that I kept dropping the knife while peeling them last week to make pawpaw butter.

Too many stinkbugs coming into the house! They're trying to find a warm place to spend the winter, and they keep bopping against the big picture window and getting tangled in my hair. If a cockroach got caught in my hair I'd scream, but I just brush the stinkbugs away and wait for the resident Stinkbug Remover to scoop them up and dump them on a big spider web out on the porch.

Too many meetings! A meeting to discuss a problem directly related to one of my classes has been scheduled at the precise time when I'm teaching that class, which won't work unless someone quickly develops a method for cloning myself. Or wait--maybe I can create an AI version of myself, but would I send the AI to attend the meeting or to teach the class?

Too many special events! On just one day next week, I'll have a visiting scholar speaking to my morning class and Sarah Vowell meeting with my comedy class, followed by a dinner with faculty members and a public reading. For a confirmed introvert, that's a lot of schmoozing in a short span of time.

Too many excuses! Yes, we've had a bunch of viruses swirling around campus, including the stomach bug that knocked me out last Thursday and a particularly nasty strain of strep throat. I've also had students (and colleagues!) dealing with parental illness and the demands of extracurricular activities. The result is a mass of make-up quizzes, all scheduled to accommodate the students' schedules more than mine.

Too many drafts to read and papers to grade, but the good news is that if I use my time wisely today and tomorrow, I can head off to fall break without too much work. Grandkid time! I can never get too much of them.

Same song, different key

Several times during my first year at Marietta, I wondered whether I'd accidentally wandered into a madhouse. I loved teaching classes and appreciated having a real office, but the College was in a transitional state that sometimes erupted into craziness.

I entered at the same time as a brand-new President and Provost and a new General Education Curriculum, which caused some friction across campus. Further, my department at that time was dysfunctional, with various cliques constantly at war and department meetings devolving into shouting and tears.

And don't even get me started about the kiddie-porn fiasco. At the end of my first semester here, when the head of IT was arrested for operating a secret server that distributed tens of thousands of images of child pornography, I took comfort in the fact that this was the sort of catastrophe we were unlikely to encounter ever again.

The other big controversy during my first year here, though, keeps swinging around for a return visit. The College's Strategic Planning Committee proposed cutting costs by eliminating a list of majors and programs. Music was on the chopping block alongside Philosophy, Geology, Physics, and some others I've forgotten. Arguments about the value of these programs tore through campus and across the alumni network, and eventually a few programs were rescued by being merged with other programs or downgraded from a major to a minor. 

Physics, though, was a special case: an alumnus donated enough millions to endow professorships, provide scholarships, and build a new science facility equipped with spiffy labs, classrooms, and a pendulum, because who doesn't love a pendulum. This donation proved that even a small major can survive if someone pours enough money into the mix.

I don't remember how the Music major was saved, but I know it didn't involve any twenty-million-dollar donations. And now here we are again, for the fourth time since I've worked here, looking at a list of proposed program cuts and wondering who will rescue the programs we love.

Some of the cuts are reasonable enough while others confound me. Shelving the English as a Second Language program seems particularly short-sighted. Enrollment of international students is pretty low right now, but are we giving up on enrolling more in the future? 

The cut that hits me hardest on an emotional level, though, is Music. The current proposal calls for eliminating majors in Music Therapy, Music Education, and Vocal Performance, leaving only a basic B.A. in Music. I know the numbers people have looked closely at costs and outcomes, but I think about all the creative music students I've taught over the years and the fabulous performances they've provided and I wonder how the shrinkage of the Music department will affect their ability to serve the community through performance. We need music! Music feeds our souls! But if it doesn't also feed our pocketbooks, it's in danger of  eventually disappearing.

What we need is another alumnus with a boatload of money to rescue the threatened programs, but the problem is that alumni in the fine arts tend to not earn the kind of money that will allow multi-million-dollar donations. Some interpret this fact as further evidence that the arts don't equip people for the World of Work, but our Music Education and Music Therapy graduates have been very successful in finding meaningful jobs in their fields. Music educators enrich all our lives, but unfortunately they don't earn the kinds of rewards available to tech entrepreneurs.

So much has improved in my 23 years here--I no longer worry about kiddie-porn catastrophes or departmental dysfunction, and I even have a more comfortable office. But after all these years it feels sad but somehow familiar to be back in the same old quandary, singing the same old song, trying to save the budget by cutting programs that enrich us in ways that can't be quantified. 

On the other hand, ouch!

Okay, here's the situation: You're inside a stall in a public rest room and the door is stuck shut. According to my students, here are your options:

1. Kick down the door.

2. Stand on the toilet and climb over the stall door.

3. Crawl under the door.

My students were pretty evenly divided between the kickers and the crawlers, although many said they'd choke themselves to death with toilet paper before crawling on the floor of a public rest room.

No one suggested using a cell phone to call for help, which seems like the obvious solution once you get past the embarrassment of admitting being stuck in the rest room.

And no one suggested option 4: Pound on the door with your hand until you break the door...and your hand. But that's exactly what the student who found herself in that situation did, much to the detriment of her broken hand.

On the bright side, she exercised agency and physical strength to free herself from an impossible situation, and she now has a great story to tell whenever the conversation turns to Embarrassing Injuries I Have Known. (Did I ever tell you about the time I broke a toe while helping to carry a friend to a lake to throw her in? No? Well, it's still crooked...)

On the other hand, the other hand is unaccustomed to single-handedly taking notes, typing, tying shoes, or doing any of the millions of other things we usually do with our dominant hand.

So I guess the lesson here is simple: If you must use a public rest room, take a sledge-hammer. 

A few midweek surprises

I definitely wasn't expecting to find a fallen tree blocking my driveway this morning. I mean, we haven't had a storm in ages, so why did that tree decide to fall last night? Good thing the meadow was dry so I was able to drive around the blockage.

I'm ashamed to admit that I wasn't expecting the student drafts I collected yesterday to be as good as they are. Even though these are honors students with above-average writing skills, I generally expect the draft of the first major paper to be a train wreck. Not these drafts! They all need some polish and a few are thin on content, but they're mostly clear and readable--so now I'm worried about whether they're AI-generated. I think not. I hope not. But who knows?

Unsurprisingly, my department is rallying 'round to help a colleague who's having surgery, but I've been reminded that not every department is so accommodating. A new faculty member asked me where she can find help if she gets sick and has to miss class, and I was tempted to tell her, "Just hope your department is as helpful as mine."

After 23 years I shouldn't be surprised by how much the temperature in my building bothers me, but once again I find myself occasionally cutting office hours short and posting a note on the door: "Too cold to work in here. Email if you need me." The other day I was sitting in a slightly-less-frigid section of the big room where we hold faculty meetings and our new president walked in the door, stopped in her tracks, and asked, "Why is it so cold in here?" Good question! Maybe she'll be more successful at getting an answer than the rest of us, but meanwhile, I'm making good use of sweaters, blankets, and fingerless gloves.

If only these pants came equipped with a magic wand

It's hard to complain about my sorry lot in life when I got to show my Comedy students a clip from the "Chuckles the Clown's Funeral" episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show in class yesterday--and my book got a shout-out at the faculty meeting last night--and I finally got up the courage to put on my new blue-and-white plaid pants, which vary so markedly from my usual blah monochromatic wardrobe that they make me smile every time I see them. I haven't owned a pair of plaid pants since probably 1972, but these are so cheery and comfortable that I couldn't resist buying them.  Nevertheless, I've delayed donning the plaid until I got to the point in the semester when I really needed a mood booster.

And boy do I need it. I've caught up on all the things that fell through the cracks while I struggled with Covid and I've got a pretty good handle on the many drafts and exams I'll be collecting starting tomorrow, so the immediate future is looking manageable. However, every time I get a glimpse of the more distant future, I want to put my head down on the desk and cry. 

Can it possibly be true that the expertise I've poured so much time and energy into developing will be swept into the dustbin of history by people who no longer believe literature matters? Where do I fit into a culture that seems increasingly convinced that a liberal arts education is an obstacle to success instead of a threshold to possibility? How can I go out in a blaze of glory when my field, my knowledge, and my passion are dismissed as irrelevant?

When this mood strikes I want to start channeling the narrator of Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat": 

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.

And I deeply feel the dilemma faced by the suffering father in Sherman Alexie's short story "Do Not Go Gentle":

When you're hurting, it feels good to hurt somebody else. But you have to be careful. If you get addicted to  the pain-causing, then you start hurting people who don't need hurting. If you turn into a pain-delivering robot, then you start thinking everybody looks like Mr. Grief and everybody deserves a beating.

So I am trying very hard not to throw bricks or deliver pain, especially to others who are stuck in this same leaky boat. Instead I'm holding on to the promise offered later in Alexie's story, when the father of a very sick child tries to buy his suffering baby a toy but wanders into the wrong kind of toy store and emerges with a vibrator, which he and his wife wave around the hospital ward as if it's a magic wand bringing healing. "We humans are too simpleminded," he says:

We all like to think each person, place, or thing is only itself. A vibrator is a vibrator is a vibrator, right? But that's not true at all. Everything is stuffed to the brim with ideas and love and hope and magic and dreams.

I want to believe that this is true, that even the curricular and cultural changes that make me feel marginalized and worthless might bring some unforeseeable hope or magic or dream, but it's going to take more than a pair of plaid pants to help me hang on to that hope.

Not so much overwhelmed as just plain whelmed

Overheard in the hallway: "I just found out I'm failing the first-year seminar. I didn't know the class had assignments."

I feel for the dude, I really do. Three weeks into the semester and somehow he's been so overwhelmed that he read right past the due dates on the syllabus, never noticed that other students seemed to have stuff to turn in when he'd come empty-handed. Good thing it's early enough in the semester to allow him to catch up.

I've been a little overwhelmed myself, though now I wonder whether I'm really just whelmed, from an Old English root meaning overturned or upside-down. Covid knocked me for a loop, but on Wednesday I was able to return to teaching unhampered by the need to Zoom, the first time since the first day of class that I haven't had at least one student per class in quarantine. Today, though, I've just received a notice about a quarantining student, and I know of at least six students in my 2:00 class who will be missing because of sports-related travel. That's one-third of the class. The rest of us will just have to carry on without them.

I keep telling people that I've fully recovered from Covid, but ragweed pollen is still harassing my sinuses and I have to fight sleep every evening starting around 7 p.m. Tonight I'm supposed to go see Much Ado about Nothing down by the river starting at 8 p.m., right in the middle of peak head-drooping time. I fear falling asleep in the middle of the show and tumbling to the ground tangled in my folding lawn chair.

That kind of spectacle might be entertaining for the rest of the audience, but for me, the experience would be truly whelming.

Looking the other way

Twenty-two years ago I walked into the department office to find the administrative assistant staring in horror at her computer screen. "We're under attack!" she said. Pretty soon we were all wandering around dazed, trying to keep ourselves and our students from bursting into tears in the middle of--well, everything. For a while I couldn't even listen to the radio on the way to work because I can't drive while sobbing.

This morning I didn't even think about the significance of the date. I woke up bubbling with happy plans and then took a Covid test that immediately plunged me back into misery. Still positive. I'm allowed to return to campus tomorrow as long as I wear a mask and don't have a fever, but I had hoped to put this virus behind me more definitively. 

To distract from the persistence of Covid, I've been responding to students' writing assignments, prepping Wednesday's classes, processing a massive pile of kale, and baking a caramel apple cake, which was only a partial failure. It's a new recipe and I had some doubts from the start about the amount of butter it called for, and then my doubts increased when I had trouble incorporating the butter into the batter. And then I baked it and ended up with butter all over the bottom of the oven, butter oozing from the cake pan, butter now solidifying alongside the rich apple caramel cake. I like the apple/cinnamon/clove/caramel flavor combination, but the end product looks more like a pile of slop than a cake.

There's now a pile of dirty dishes in the sink but I think it's time to step away from all messes and walk out into the sunshine. It was a sunny day 22 years ago when the planes struck the towers, releasing clouds of smoke, fear, and terror that did not easily dissipate. Faint wisps linger even now, for those who know where to look. But sometimes what I really need to do is to look away.

 

The haze lifts, revealing the wreckage

The first sign that I was emerging from my Covid-induced haze was an urge to get into the kitchen and process a whole mess o' garden vegetables. I haven't cooked a thing in days and have barely eaten anything, surviving mostly on zucchini bread and chunks of cantaloupe. Even making toast seemed like too much work. 

Yesterday I spent most of the day postponing folding a basket of clean laundry, and then when I finally got up and did it, I felt that the effort I'd expended deserved, at the very least, the Presidential Medal of Honor. This morning, on the other hand, I roasted eggplants to make babaganoush and made a stuffed cabbage pie--both at the same time. Multitasking again! I feel almost normal.

Almost. Looking over some emails I sent yesterday, I see some prose that's, um, unpolished. Sloppy. Not entirely clear. I had set up some online activities for my Friday classes and I thought my instructions were perfectly clear, but some emails from students suggest confusion. Now I'm kind of afraid to go and look at what I asked them to do. It's impossible to assess one's ability to think clearly when one is not thinking clearly, so it could have seemed perfectly reasonable to instruct my students to hop on one foot while reciting the Preamble to the Constitution. Not that I did that. I hope.

Now that I can think clearly (I think!), I need to go and look at those online responses and make the final preparations for Monday's classes. I can't go back to campus until Tuesday, no matter how normal I may feel, but I can at least enjoy the opportunity to feel the brain cells sparking once again.

Teaching through fever dreams

Good thing I had the foresight to bring home my college laptop and textbooks yesterday afternoon, because I won't be able to return to campus until Tuesday. Yes: I've just tested positive for Covid. First time, but I suppose it was inevitable. I'm not coughing much, but last night was a misery of chills and fever that had me first piling on the blankets and then tossing them off. This morning I've done little but nap, but now I need to gather whatever brain cells survived last night's misery and think about what to do with my classes tomorrow and Monday.

Since I have a new wi-fi setup at home, I thought I'd test to see whether I have the bandwidth to Zoom. Our instructional technologist sent me a Zoom link and we tried it out, and the result is: I can Zoom from home if everyone keeps their cameras off, but even so, I'll still freeze up occasionally. So time for Plan B.

Tomorrow's classes are easy: I'll post an online discussion in one class, give students a research workshop challenge in another, and move the third class's readings to Monday. But at some point I'll need to come up with a more robust plan for Monday's classes so we don't fall behind. What did we do before Zoom? A helpful administrator suggested asking a colleague to cover one or more of my classes, but a bunch of my colleagues have Covid too. 

The Theatre department was planning to open their Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado about Nothing tonight--a musical version set in the 1980s--but they have so many cast members out with Covid that they're instead offering "Scenes and Songs." Maybe they'll be able to perform the full play next weekend. 

But I need to perform my teacherly duties before then. Do I trust my fever-addled brain to write an online discussion prompt? Better get to it before I fall asleep again. 

Zooming toward more Covid cases

These days my attitude toward Zoom is similar to my attitude toward air bags: Thanks for saving my life, but I hope I never have to see you again. I hadn't planned on using Zoom at all this semester, but suddenly I find myself setting up Zoom links for every class to accommodate quarantining students.

Fifteen students in the classroom and one up on the big screen--my least favorite way to conduct a class. So far I've had only one student at a time needing to use Zoom, but the current wave of Covid cases could change that. And what happens if I have to quarantine?

It could happen. Right now we're in the midst of fall allergy season, with ragweed spewing pollen all over creation and no rain coming along to wash it out of the air. Right now I'm struggling with the usual fall congestion and night-time coughing, but what if I pick up a case of Covid from one of my students or colleagues? 

My new wi-fi setup at home is more reliable than my old one but still not steady enough to teach via Zoom. So what are the options? Sit in my car in the McDonald's parking lot to piggyback on their wi-fi. Stay in a motel. Hide in my office with the door shut and hope no one notices. 

It's hopeless. What I really need to do is avoid getting Covid, or continue to avoid it. I've never tested positive for Covid, so either I'm an asymptomatic carrier or else my immune system gets such a great work-out fighting every passing pollen flake that it can swat down Covid without breaking a sweat. Either way, I want it to keep doing what it's been doing so the whole teaching-from-home thing remains a purely hypothetical problem. 

Hello, hawk!

Yesterday I glanced out the front window just at the right moment to see a raptor standing on the driveway right next to my car--and even better, the camera bag was nearby. I took a few photos through the picture window and then went outside to get closer, which scared the bird away. While resting it looked too small to be a red-tailed hawk, but it had a wide wingspan and a call like a red-tailed hawk, so maybe a juvenile? 

On Saturday I spent some time wandering the property with the camera, trying to capture the end-of-summer glory before it fades. Jewel weed, ironweed, and joe pye weed are still spectacular and the sunflowers in the garden are standing tall. I mean, really tall. How tall are they? The resident gardener is six feet tall, so you do the math.

Well whatever their height, the sunflowers are producing plenty of seeds that will continue to attract birds to our little house in the not-so-big woods.

jewel weed

ironweed

joe pye weed

How do you put handcuffs on a Watusi bull?

I had no idea how badly I needed to see the news story about this guy in Nebraska who adapted his car to allow his pet Watusi bull to ride shotgun. 

The Watusi bull is described as "a breed of cattle famous in Africa with gigantic horns," and the photograph confirms that it is the bull and not Africa that has gigantic horns. The car itself is equipped with horns less gigantic than the bull's but still impressive, but if you consider the Horn of Africa, then we're in a whole different realm of size re: horns.

The bull's name is Howdy Doody, despite the lack of rosy cheeks and buckteeth. The Watusi bull looks pretty sedate, but I wouldn't want to be the puppet-master trying to stick my arm up inside his innards to make him talk.

A police officer alerted to the presence of a Watusi bull riding shotgun in Nebraska found that while "there were some citable issues with that situation," the best thing to do was to issue a warning and ask Lee Meyer, the bull's chauffeur, to take the bull home, which he promptly did. I'm a little disappointed that this decision robbed viewers of the opportunity to see troopers wrestling the bull to the ground and snapping on the cuffs while the bull loudly claimed Sovereign Citizen status. Is a little mayhem too much to ask?

Howdy Doody had no comment on the situation.

Ahem:

There once was a Watusi bull
who made Meyer's car mighty full.
On the passenger side
Howdy Doody would ride,
but his presence was deemed citable.

Learning from my mistakes

Word to the wise: If you're sitting in the drawing studio chatting with the drawing professor and you hear a faint caterwauling, do not ask, "Is someone in the next room shaving a cat?" Especially do not do this if you aren't entirely familiar with the layout of the art department, where the drawing studio butts right up next to a row of practice rooms for music students. 

Not a cat screaming but a soprano practicing. I won't make that mistake again!

So far my tenure as Chair of the Art Department has been fairly uneventful. One faculty member left without being replaced, one is on sabbatical, one teaches evening classes, and one teaches online, so this morning the whole top floor of the Arts building was quiet--until the soprano started reaching for the high notes. I've enjoyed getting to know some very talented faculty members, and soon I'll be visiting classrooms to watch them work.

Meanwhile, I've been fielding emails asking questions to which my first response is I don't know but I'll find out for you. Why didn't the prof let this student add the course? Because she can't fit 17 butts into 16 seats. Who is administering this scholarship contest now that the person in charge no longer works here? Let's shift that task to someone else. How do I find out what courses a certain professor plans to offer next year? Well, for starters, you could ask the professor. And so on.

Seeking answers is a great way to learn how the department functions, and of course I'm also learning from my mistakes. I'll continue tracking down answers to the most baffling questions as long as no one asks me to make any art, because anything I draw is the visual equivalent of screaming cats.    

Up the down staircase

The staircase runs both ways, I said to the student looming in my path. He had his eyes glued to his phone so he may not have been aware that he was getting ready to steamroll me right off the steps. I had to go back up those stairs a few minutes later when I realized that I'd left my office keys in the classroom, but if that's the worst thing that happens in the first week of classes, I'll survive.

After all, I survived the semester when the staircase didn't run both ways. In Fall of 2020, we came back from Covid lockdown to find one-way staircases and directional arrows all over the building, necessitating roundabout routes to wherever I needed to be. I survived teaching in masks, teaching hybrid classes with some students face-to-face and some on Zoom, teaching without any fall break or even a long weekend, teaching in a building where everyone seemed to be teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown every single day.

And even longer ago I survived a semester of teaching while undergoing cancer treatment, guiding online discussions while chemo drugs dripped into my veins, teaching sitting down when I couldn't stand up, teaching entirely from home when my immune system went on hiatus, and relying on my students to figure things out when I wasn't available to respond.

And even earlier in my career, I survived teaching during a departmental search in which I was the only inside candidate, hiding in my office on days when outside candidates were being wined and dined and squired around campus, trying not to read anything menacing into my colleagues' casual comments, trying to focus on my teaching after I was told that they were expanding the search to invite yet another candidate to a campus interview. 

I could go on, but I'd rather not. I prefer to forget my most challenging teaching experiences unless I can use them as inspiration on a day like today: If I can survive all those other things, then today's challenges should be a piece of cake.

Great ideas illuminating the path ahead

When the academic Powers that Be proclaim that we need to work on negotiating the compliance landscape, my first question runs toward wardrobe: does this kind of excursion call for pith helmets, snowshoes, or parasols? I guess I'm going to find out because the compliance landscape plays an important part in our institutional goals for the year. I'll keep my eyes on the new president so I know when to reach for appropriate accessories.

Whatever landscape we're entering this year, I'll be well equipped with good ideas. I brought a container full of them today, tiny yellow tomatoes that look like lightbulbs, so sweet and juicy that every time I eat one I'm reminded that planting them was a really great idea. I'll take my tiny lightbulbs to the workshop I'm leading this afternoon and tell my colleagues I'll share my great ideas with you if you share yours with the rest of us.

I hope they'll comply--otherwise, the landscape will feel really lonely.

Edible lightbulbs--great idea!

 

Photo finish

So I went out of town for a few days but left my computer charging cord at home and ran down the battery trying to edit some butterfly photos I took in my daughter's wonderful front garden, but my camera is failing in a variety of ways and my editing software is so old that it couldn't get installed on my new laptop so I had to use clunky software I'm not familiar with and it made the whole joyful process of taking and editing photos miserable. Which is why I've posted nothing here for a week. So sue me. Some battles are worth fighting and some simply are not.

The next challenge, of course, is to pick out a new camera. I can take photos on mine but that's about it: I can't view or edit or even delete them without going through a massive annoying rigamarole. My Nikon has provided loyal service for eight years, but I've carried it into wet, messy environments and dropped it more than once, so it doesn't surprise me that it's malfunctioning. No one is repairing SLR cameras these days and buying a new camera will require getting up to speed on the mirrorless options, many of which look big and bulky and (gulp!) expensive. I mean, really expensive. I suppose the price ranges are proportional to what I paid for my Nikon eight years ago, but the number of digits in the price makes me nervous about making an expensive mistake.

I could stick with my cell-phone camera, but frankly, cell-phone photography does not provide the pleasure I've always received from the feel of an SLR camera in my hands. Years ago when I was a struggling journalist and a painfully shy person, I found that I could walk into any environment and speak to anyone as long as I had my camera around my neck.  It was a sort of badge of belonging, an antidote for the imposter syndrome that crippled me in so many situations. 

These days, photography requires me to get off my butt and away from my computer, to look closely at the world around me and seek out different perspectives. Facebook memories crop up to remind me that I've taken photos of the same scenes and situations over and over, but while the photos may be similar, the experience remains fresh each time. I've taken hundreds of butterfly photos over the years, but the one I take today will provide just as much pleasure as all the preceding photos.

So I'm looking for a new camera, reading online reviews and talking to photography friends, seeking advice in hopes of avoiding an expensive mistake, and I'm trying to silence the tiny Puritans in my brain who think it's frivolous to spend so much money on myself. "It's cheaper than therapy," I'll tell them, and if they won't shut up, maybe I can distract them with some butterfly pix. 

 

Calling Dr. Syllabus-Saver!

Right now academics everywhere are typing and clicking, copying and pasting, updating due dates and reading assignments to make sure their syllabi are flawless before classes begin, but deep in our hearts we long for the appearance of Dr. Syllabus-Saver, a caped crusader who swoops in to swat our hands when we're on the verge of accidentally assigning all our classes to submit drafts on the same date. Faster than a speeding cursor, he's able to make leaps of logic across courses and sections to see hidden conflicts, to synthesize details across space and time and stand boldly in the path of disastrous gaps that creep into policies.

I'm dreaming, of course. I've had decades of experience in enshrining foolish decisions on course syllabi, and no one is hovering overhead to prevent me from doing it again. I've finished two of my fall syllabi, but I've learned the hard way that I'd better not print them out until next week. One year a flood closed campus, delaying the start of classes for a week and washing out every date on every syllabus. If I print out these syllabi today, I'll just be tempting fate to strike us with a wildfire or tsunami or even a global pandemic.

So instead I'll keep pointing and clicking, copying and pasting, updating and revising until all three syllabi are done. Of course I did the two easier ones first. I've taught both of these classes many times before, but I've still needed to switch out a few readings and tweak some assignments and, of course, change all the due dates. I keep recalling the former colleague who used to hand her past syllabi to the department secretary and demand that she change all the dates manually with a typewriter, but nobody's getting away with that kind of noblesse oblige these days. We're all doing obeisance to our keyboards and course management systems, which means that the blame for any mistakes falls firmly on our own shoulders.

The next syllabus will take some work. I've taught the class twice before but I'm still not happy with the rhythm of the course or the assignment structure. Two of the papers are too similar, and I'd like to change the final project to eliminate some of the lazy shortcuts that students can't seem to resist. They do a ton of reading about what connects people to specific places, and they write some short papers about their own connections to specific places, but the final project asks them to argue that a certain group should take a specific action in regard to a specific place. Despite seeing plenty of examples of place-based advocacy, too many students want to argue that "Everyone should visit x place because it's really cool." Not a particularly interesting argument, especially after the umpteenth repetition. 

So today's task is to revise the assignment structure to shut off access to that particular shortcut without opening doors to other shortcuts I can't yet imagine. If only I could call on some academic superhero with the power to foresee every possible point of weakness in a prompt and obliterate it before it's enshrined in print! Where's Dr. Syllabus-Saver when I need him? 

Surviving the veggie-pocalypse

As summer problems go, too many vegetables is not a bad one to have. Right now my kitchen looks like the aftermath of an explosion at a farmer's market, but an excess of eggplant is far more manageable than an excess of, say, wildfire. 

So I'm not complaining! But I'm grateful to my friends who accept my offerings of zucchini and tomatoes, and I'm especially grateful to my vegetarian friend who came out for lunch and helped me gobble up zucchini quiche, babaganoush, and cucumber salad. 

But I refuse to be grateful to the raccoons, even if their depredations did reduce the volume of veggies needing my attention.

I remember the time years ago when our corn crop was reaching its peak and we designated a certain day for the harvest--but when I went down to the garden early that morning, I found corn stalks knocked over and ears of corn stripped and eaten. Raccoons! After all the time we'd spent planting and weeding, the raccoons left us about three ears of sweet corn.

That disaster inspired the resident green thumb to start installing a solar-powered electric fence around the corn patch. For a few years we were able to frequently relish the crunch of freshly picked sweet corn and even preserve many ears in the freezer, but then the flood that washed away our garden shed took all the electric fencing supplies down the river, and then for a few years we were dividing our time between home and Jackson so we didn't bother with a big garden.

But this was the summer to bring back sweet corn. My sweet hubby installed the new solar electric fence, taking care to put the strands of wire close enough together to deter small animals and high enough to prevent deer from jumping over the top. All summer he's carefully tended the corn patch until, finally, he brought in the first batch of fresh sweet corn to share with our son on his birthday.

That was August 3rd. For a week we've eaten sweet corn nearly every day, and if you've never eaten sweet corn on the day it's been picked, you don't know what you're missing. What a great week! But it's all over now: on August 9, my husband went to the garden early in the morning and found corn stalks knocked over and nearly every ripe ear stripped and eaten.

How did the raccoons get in there? Did the electric fence fail in the middle of the night? Or did they climb on each other's backs to reach high enough to flip the switch and turn off the power? We'll never know.

This evening we'll eat the few scrawny, immature ears the raccoons rejected, the last gasp of this year's corn patch. We'll have plenty more veggies--the peppers are just now starting to ripen and we still have kale and cabbage and cucumbers and all kinds of squash. Brussels sprouts! Watermelon! Cantaloupe! And a row of sunflowers towering over everything!

But I look at the piles of produce in my kitchen and wonder where we'll put the next batch that gets harvested. We'll eat some and put some in the freezer and keep pushing veggies on everyone we see and maybe at some point we'll be able to see the countertops again and open the fridge without releasing a cascade of eggplant. Until that time, we're learning to live in the veggie-pocalypse.

   

Sunflowers are just starting to bloom.

Corn stalks torn down and stripped.

More zuccinin--always more zucchini.

Corn tassels reach higher than the top fence wire, but not by much

Taking a gamble on student writing

Decision time! Two weeks until classes start and I still haven't figured out how to adapt my writing assignments to the presence of artificial intelligence. I've done some reading and writing and thinking about the topic and I've jerked awake from some annoying nightmares, but now that it's time to actually write the assignments, I'm stumped. How do I get students to do their own writing?

Require more in-class writing, by hand. Until someone invents an AI-equipped pencil, I can be sure that students are doing their own work. 

But then I'll have to read their handwriting. Time to stock up on magnifying glasses and eyedrops.

And in-class writing is bound to be less polished and coherent than out-of-class writing. Allow them to revise for additional points after it's graded? More work for me, but probably better papers.

I want them to draw evidence from texts in their writing, but many students use electronic texts, which means I'll have to allow them to refer to their phones or computers while writing in class, which means I'll have to monitor all those screens to make sure they're being used only for accessing texts. 

Ack! This is too difficult.

Stick with out-of-class writing but run everything through an AI detection program. Essays will presumably be more readable and polished and students will practice the kind of drafting-and-revision process that we all know and love.

But AI detection programs aren't foolproof and disputes are bound to arise. Last semester when a student's paper was flagged as 100 percent AI-generated, I had a hard time moving the discussion past the yes-you-did-no-I-didn't stage. Disputes and appeals suck up time and energy, souring my days and intruding on my nightmares.

Incorporate AI into the writing process. I've heard all kinds of ideas: Use AI as an idea-generator or outline-creator. Have students write a compelling thesis statement in class and then use AI to generate paragraphs. Get students to critique AI-generated text and fill in gaps from their reading or their own experience. 

But I'm just old-school enough to find these ideas distasteful. I want to see human minds at work, not algorithms spinning words--but I fear that I won't be able to tell the difference.

Trust my students to do what's right. This would be my preferred option, but in the current climate, it's just not realistic to expect all students to resist the lure of a tool that promises quick, easy results and good grades. Besides, their idea of what's right may differ dramatically from mine. 

Right now, though, the right thing to do is to make a decision about my fall writing assignments. The options keep spinning around in my head like a roulette wheel that promises either lasting success or instant disaster. The only way to make the wheel stop is to write those assignments, but I wish each decision didn't feel like such a huge gamble. 

The free-book frenzy

Free books! For an academic, is there anything better?

Anyone looking at my shelves would assume that I already have more than enough books, and my giveaway pile keeps growing--and yet I still get excited when someone offers me a free book.

Back when textbook publishers used to send packages of sample texts, opening the boxes felt like Christmas. Usually most of the books went into the giveaway pile, but there might be one jewel that I would be happy to read even if I didn't want to spend my own money on it. A collection of critical essays on Charles Chesnutt? Yes, please!  

Some free books aren't really free, of course, but serve as compensation for service. Today I've been promised a book in exchange for reviewing a prospectus for a publisher, and while I enjoyed reading and commenting on the prospectus, my favorite part of the transaction occurred when I went online and chose one from a selection of books. I hope I enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed selecting it.

Funny story: at a recent academic conference, the book table included display copies of various books written by conference attendees, and at the business meeting the organizers drew names to give away those books. The twelve people whose names were picked from the hat had to cross campus to another building to choose their free books--first come, first served. The minute the meeting concluded, the winners made a frenzied dash across campus as if heading for the last helicopter out of Saigon. I'm slow so I knew I wouldn't get my first choice, but I got a free book on an interesting topic and took pleasure from the knowledge that I could send it to a friend who would find it compelling. 

But that wasn't my favorite part of that transaction. My book Teaching Comedy was one of the giveaways, and as I hobbled out the door I heard a swift young grad student calling out, "I've got to get there first so I can get Bev's book!"

He got it. I appreciated his enthusiasm for the book, but most of all I delighted to see that free books can still inspire such joy.

When AI answers the wrong questions

Writing instruction is irrelevant, they said, or something very close to that. Artificial Intelligence is able to excel at so many writing tasks that in the long term, they said, we won't need to waste time teaching students how to write effectively because they won't need those skills in the so-called Real World. 

Imagine a world, they said, in which you never again have to explain to a student how to use an apostrophe--because the AI can take care of that. Students who rely on AI will turn in papers without annoying spelling errors, without misplaced or missing commas, and without subject/verb agreement flaws.

And without humanity, I wanted to interject, but there's no point in yelling at the radio. Without creativity, without playfulness, without depth of ideas, without so many things that make writing worth reading.

To my mind, the AI cheerleaders seem intent on providing answers to the wrong questions. If the question is "What's the most efficient way to get students to produce error-free essays," then AI is a pretty good answer. But what about other kinds of questions?

Go ahead and ask ChatGPT about the purpose of suffering. It is capable of instantly producing an error-free, well organized essay outlining various philosophies of suffering, with a caveat at the end:  

It's important to note that these explanations are not exhaustive, and different individuals and cultures may hold unique beliefs about the origin and purpose of suffering. While understanding the reasons behind suffering can offer insight, addressing and alleviating suffering remain important goals for individuals and societies.

All true! And if I ever need a brief summary of different approaches to understanding suffering, I'll know where to look. But what I don't see in this passage is any evidence of original thought: given all these approaches, which do you find most relevant to your life or to a particular text we're discussing? If, as Richard E. Miller insists, writing is "a technology for thinking," then I want writers to do some thinking in their writing, not just parrot back what others have thought.

But apparently I'm missing the point. According to the experts on the radio, I need to think about writing tasks from the perspective of students, who may suffer extreme anxiety at the thought of putting words to paper. AI will help them overcome that anxiety by enabling them to produce error-free prose fulfilling the requirements of the assignment.

Again, all true! If the main purpose of education is to ease students' anxieties about writing, then AI is a pretty good tool. I don't want to minimize the impact of writing anxiety--heck, I still get tense and jittery when I have a deadline and I've been writing professionally for over 50 years. But in my experience, we don't overcome writing anxiety by avoiding writing but by writing. Just as a performer can learn to transform stage fright into energy that connects with the audience, the anxious writer can learn to transform anxiety into energy on the page.

But this transformation takes time, and it takes effort, and it takes writing--a lot of it. The AI cheerleaders seem delighted that these new tech tools will allow students (and others) to write less when what they really need is to write--and think!--more. 

But I can't tell the radio experts all that, and even if I could, why would they listen to me? After all, I"m a dinosaur facing certain extinction in a world in which writing and thinking will no longer matter.