Feeling the ground shift once again

I'm so sorry about what you're going through. If you want to list me as a reference, I'd be happy to tell anyone what a great teacher you are.

This was my repeated refrain yesterday as word trickled out about the latest round of faculty cuts. My words felt lame and useless, but what else could I say? 

For the past three years we've gone through a repeating painful cycle: rumors of impending cuts, anguish among non-tenured faculty members in vulnerable positions, relief for those whose lines survive combined with distress over those who don't, and scrambling within departments to cover classes without sufficient staffing. Those who have gone through multiple cycles probably deserve combat pay to compensate for the emotional anguish they've endured.

But then this brutal cycle is piled on top of a whole host of lesser insults, from draconian budget cuts to Kafkaesque procedures for purchasing essential supplies to the loss of funding for faculty awards and prizes. I'd like to express my profound gratitude to the people who so generously provided letters supporting my nomination for the research prize this year, but I regret to inform you that no prizes will be distributed.

But it's petty to complain about a measly prize when I still have a job. My job will inevitably change going forward as cuts to faculty lines require us to shift the burden for certain classes, but I'm still gainfully employed doing something I usually love. Meanwhile, today a bunch of my colleagues are stumbling around looking stunned, suddenly feeling the ground slip from under their feet and wondering where they'll land. I want more than anything to lend some support, but frankly, I'm feeling a little wobbly myself. 

Just can't see it

I'm picking through a stack of exams from my American Lit Survey class, trying to find some handwriting I can read without straining. Large print, dark ink, neat handwriting--it's like a treasure more valued for its rarity. It's a mistake to read the more legible exams ones first because then I'll end up struggling through a sea of scrawls, but maybe I can tackle the difficult ones in the morning after I give my eyes a rest. 

In my morning class I struggled to decipher students' handwriting; in my afternoon class today I struggled to see my students. Waves of cooties are sweeping through campus, causing multiple cases of Covid and flu and bad colds and something a student called "fuzzy throat." When five out of nine students in a literature class stay home sick, it's time to make an executive decision to meet on Zoom. The problem, though, is that sick people don't want to be seen on video, and I guess healthy people don't either because I ended up trying to converse with a whole bunch of blank, silent squares. One student had bandwidth issues and kept having to reconnect. Another student had audio issues and had to share his insights in the chat. I don't know how to make eye contact with blank silent squares--it's like talking to a wall.

I keep thinking about the department chair who first hired me here, who decided to retire when his eye problems made it virtually impossible to read students' handwriting. If my vision gets any worse I can switch to online exams so students can type in their responses, which will require use of anti-cheating software but at least I'll be able to read the answer. But if we ever get to the point that I can't see my students' faces, I'm outta here. I don't mind meeting on Zoom occasionally while the place is overrun with germs, but I don't intend to conclude my career by talking to a wall.

Puzzling over meal madness

We really know how to live it up on a Friday night, I thought as I looked at our dining table, one end covered with jigsaw puzzle pieces and the other with crackers, cheese, and spreadables. Neither of us wanted to cook so we treated ourselves to Snack Supper: a bunch of little things to nibble on while working on a puzzle.

It's a relaxing way to spend a Friday evening but I realized, even as I sat there chomping on crab dip and crackers, that if my father had come home at the end of the work week to find anything other than a meat, a starch, a vegetable, and a salad on the table, there would have been yelling. Mom worked nights as an RN but she was expected to make a full hot meal every day of the week. I remember once when she was too exhausted to cook and so decided, without conferring with Dad first, that just this once we could go out to eat at a local low-cost family restaurant; we were all dressed up and ready to go when Dad walked in the door and declared the plan unacceptable, and then he yelled and stormed until Mom produced a home-cooked meal that met his expectations.

And those expectations were firm and specific: it wasn't a meal unless Dad was sitting at a table and being served a plate heaped with meat and several side dishes. Self-serve buffets were completely unacceptable. One time Dad ordered from the menu at a restaurant with a buffet and then complained about how long he had to wait for his order to arrive. "Don't they know I'm starving to death?" he asked, even though we were sitting so close to the buffet that he could have reached out and grabbed a yeast roll at any time.

Once we were on a short road trip together, me and my husband and our small children and my parents for four hours in our van, and we practiced normal road-trip behavior--passing around yogurt and granola bars at lunchtime so we wouldn't have to make an extra stop. But this was not a table at a restaurant with someone serving hot food, so Dad never stopped complaining about being starved, even though he took full advantage of the available food. It clearly wasn't about the calories; he had some deep need to experience the performative aspects of a meal and if the experience lacked a table, a server, and a plate of hot food, then he didn't feel fed.

We felt fully fed last night even though the puzzle took up more space than the food. Our meal wasn't particularly elegant or well balanced or even hot, but the experience was more than satisfying. I've spent a lot of time over the years trying to piece together the details of my father's peculiar upbringing, to understand what led him to develop such specific and limiting rules about food and so many other aspects of human behavior, and I'll never put together the full picture now that he's gone.

And I honestly don't know how my mother put up with Dad's demands for so long. Of course it was a different time with different expectations about gender roles and division of labor in the household. Today my husband and I share the cooking duties and if we don't feel like cooking, we raid the pantry and make do with what we find there, even if it doesn't look like Dad's idea of a meal. If he were here he would look at our table with its unfinished puzzle and scattered snacks and let us know very clearly what's wrong with this picture, but to us, it looks just right.

Hula-Hooping to save the world

My five-year-old granddaughter approaches the Hula-Hoop systematically: first she measures her space and clears out obstacles, and then she takes up the hoop and makes it spin and spin and spin and then spin and spin some more, all the time clenching her fists and maintaining the firm, focused expression of a professional completing a difficult but necessary task that gives her intense satisfaction. She can keep that thing going for three or four minutes at a time and often doesn't stop until someone stumbles into her path, which annoys her.

I watch her spin and wonder: when was the last time I focused so intently on a task that no one was paying me to do? I admire the way the small folk single-mindedly pursue each new obsession, whether it's Legos or rock-collecting or fart jokes. When a tree-stump in the yard needed to be dismantled, my seven-year-old grandson put on a hard hat and work gloves and took his hatchet out there to hack away at the stump as if he thought he was saving the world. 

And maybe he was. Maybe the ability to focus on a thankless task until it's done is a trait essential for human survival. It's one thing to tackle a tough job with an eye on the prize, the paycheck or the blue ribbon or the promise of advancement, but it's another thing entirely to devote long hours to a difficult task for the sheer joy of doing it.

I need more of that kind of passion in my life, but instead I spend a lot of time doing things I don't want to do because no one else will do them. I love a clean house, but I'll never get any sense of satisfaction out of dusting or cleaning toilets or scrubbing the algae off the siding. The things I do that bring me joy (outside of teaching, I mean) have been hampered lately by lack of time, lousy weather, and failing equipment. One of these days I'll get a new camera, but meanwhile, photography has become more frustrating than fulfilling.

So at the moment I'll settle for getting my joy out of watching my grandkids pursue their passions. It's almost hypnotic the way that Hula-Hoop spins, its colors glinting and sparkling in the changing light, and my granddaughter's dogged determination to keep it spinning inspires wonder and awe. I want some of that passion! If I can't find it in a Hula-Hoop, then where?

Shipwrecked in a shrinking sea of time

I'm in the middle of a lively class discussion digging deeply into how Stephen Crane draws attention to the way his characters' perceptions distort their understanding of events as they bob on the sea in that tiny dinghy, but then I glance at the clock--only five minutes left and so many miles to row!--and I have to scramble to keep my head above water as we try to bring "The Open Boat" safely to shore. 

I like to structure class discussions so ideas build toward new understanding--not just floundering in a sea of ideas but fixing a course toward firm ground. Lately, though, I've been getting swamped. Why do I keep running out of time? 

I start class promptly and I rarely keep a class one minute over our allotted time, but this semester I'm always racing to pack everything in before everyone packs up and leaves. Part of the reason, I think, is that my classes are a little bigger than usual this semester: more talkers = more talk. But I also feel retirement breathing down my neck and I know I have a limited opportunity to teach students everything I know and then I panic when I realize that I can't, and even if I could, how would I test them on all that?

Two years until retirement (ideally) but I'm already feeling the onset of endings. I doubt that I'll teach the sophomore seminar again, which is no great loss, but was last semester my final chance to teach Honors Literature? Will I ever teach the theory course again? I doubt that Creative Nonfiction will roll around in the rotation again before I'm ready to retire, but at least I'll get one more stab at the senior capstone course. 

I feel this sense of urgency both inside and outside of class, this impulse to impart insight that will make a lasting impression on someone--anyone--so I won't just fade into irrelevance. But eventually irrelevance comes for us all, as Stephen Crane points out in one of his bleak little poems:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
"A sense of obligation."

The universe is not obliged to provide me opportunities to leave my mark, but it does occasionally deposit me on shore, where, like the shipwrecked men in Crane's "The Open Boat," I can look back upon the sea with new understanding:

When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt they could then be interpreters. 

"What does the sea tell them?" I ask my students as the clock ticks away in the final seconds of class. My time is up and I can't find words and so I hold up the book and show them Crane's remarkable story and I say, "It tells them this."

Our time is up. We've reached the shore in a sorry state, but at least I've given them something solid to take away.

Park your ideas here

How far would you go for a reserved parking space?

The question arose during a discussion of low- or no-cost incentives for faculty members. If there's no money for awards or meals or conference travel or even branded T-shirts or water bottles, how do we encourage faculty members to do things that need to be done?

The snarky response is why do we need incentives to do the right thing? If attending pedagogy workshops or engaging in research or professional development is going to make us better at our jobs and, over time, improve the level of excellence on campus (as if excellence were a measurable substance doled out as a reward for our best efforts), then we ought to do these things without regard for rewards.

But! Everyone is already doing so much that one more thing feels like an unjust imposition, and sometimes it takes just a slight nudge to move people toward doing the one small thing that might make a difference. We all know that the way to get students to attend an outside-of-class event that will enrich their learning is to order a bunch of pizzas. The promise of coffee and donuts can lure faculty to a morning meeting, and a free lunch can make a three-hour workshop look more attractive.

But when there's no such thing as a free lunch, what can we offer?

This is where the reserved parking space idea comes in: put the names of all the attendees in a hat and draw one; the winner gets to pick out a campus parking space and park there for a month. Our staff recognition program provides a similar incentive, and winning staff members enjoy finding a parking space marked with their name, available whenever they arrive on campus for a whole month. The only cost is the portable sign to mark the space.

Would faculty go the extra mile in hopes of earning their own parking space, even temporarily? Or are there other low-cost ways to incentivize participation in enrichment activities? Somebody needs to find out, and I think that someone is going to be me. (But what is my incentive for pursuing this project?)

Mothball mania; or, why I'd rather stay inside the classroom

Who knows what mothballs smell like, I asked my class, and only one student came up with an answer: They smell like old ladies.

It's hard to imagine that the smell of mothballs would be relevant to a class discussion but even harder to comprehend that 90 percent of my students do not recognize the concept of mothballs. A character in John Henry Days discovers a mothball in the pocket of his suit at a social event and then fears that he's walking around as a marked man, carrying a foul scent into every strained interaction. It's a lovely image, but effective only insofar as readers are familiar with mothballs.

I came out of my classroom yesterday feeling energized and excited: my students had done the reading and had interesting things to say, and I was able to answer their mothball-related questions along with many others. This is why I love my job, I told myself as I walked back to my office, but then I opened up my email inbox and felt the love draining away.

I'm trying to master the new purchasing procedures--honestly, I'm doing my best, but dealing with spreadsheets and online forms is outside my skillset. If you need someone to guide students toward understanding why the ability to create narrative out of chaos, trauma, and debris is compelling evidence of the continuity of human culture, I'm your person--but that doesn't necessarily mean I'll excel at Excel. I'm a word person, not a numbers person. All those little spreadsheet cells feel like prisons for my creativity.

And this week I've also been required to be the bearer of bad news about topics I can't share here. Receiving bad news is difficult enough; I've never enjoyed being told that my hard work will not be rewarded nor my projects supported. But serving as the conduit of bad news is like carrying a mothball in the pocket of your best suit--everything you do starts to stink.

I'm trying not to carry that stink of despair into the classroom. My students deserve better; they're putting in the time and effort to understand difficult readings, and they're doing their best to contribute to a lively learning environment. When I'm with them, I love what I'm doing; I just wish I didn't have to leave the room. 

Pick your poison

You're head of a department with a meager budget. Would you rather

• Attend a 90-minute mandatory training session on new purchasing processes that are convoluted, inefficient, and demoralizing, or
• Ignore the new processes and run the risk of facing harsh sanctions outlined in bold red print on multiple PowerPoint slides (because this time they really, really mean it), or
  
• Buy everything out of your own pocket?

You've run out of your blood-pressure medication but the prescription can't be filled until you fix a glitch in your online medical record. Would you rather

• Sit in your car in very cold weather listening to bouncy hold music while waiting to talk to someone at your doctor's office who can fix the glitch, or
• Turn on the car and let it idle so that you can have some heat during your 20 minutes on hold while the tiny Puritans who live inside your head brew up cauldrons of guilt about your carbon footprint, or
• Decide that, on the whole, you can probably survive a while without your blood pressure pills?

For reasons the rest of the world struggles to understand, you insist on living in a rural area lacking cell-phone reception and therefore rely on a landline at home--a landline prone to outages when the weather gets too wet, too hot, or too cold. When a winter storm hits and your landline provides a sharp shriek instead of a dial tone, would you rather

• Explain the problem to an online bot that responds onto to certain key words and insists that the technician who will be sent out to check on the problem will need to communicate with you via cell phone to confirm the service time, or
• Tag-team with your spouse to make sure someone is at home all day just in case the technician shows up when the bot says he might show up, or
• Drive five miles down the road and sit in your car on a very cold evening using your cell phone to try to reach an actual human being who can understand the situation and schedule a technician without demanding that he be able to reach you by cell phone in an area where there is no cell-phone coverage, which is the whole reason why you must have a functioning landline, or
• Decide that, on the whole, connectivity is overrated and cancel your landline service?
  

Storming onward

Those fat fluffy snowflakes looked so pretty in my car's headlights this morning that I almost forgot how treacherous they can be when they pile up on the road.

Almost.

I sat in my car at the end of my road--still untouched by plows--until I could pull out onto the highway and take my place in a long line of slow-moving cars stretched behind a snowplow. I've always dreaded driving in snow, but four-wheel drive made me much more confident. Still, no one was driving more than 35 on the highway this morning, and traffic slowed to a crawl once we got into town. Those historic brick streets might look nice, but there's no good way to keep them clear in bad weather. 

A different kind of storm awaited in my email inbox, where a bunch of my advisees were eager to drop difficult classes and replace them with something less demanding before the add deadline. I don't know what to say to a student who want to know where the easy classes are listed, so I encourage them to choose classes based on their educational goals. But what do I say to an advisee whose primary educational goal is to remain eligible to play basketball? 

And yet another storm swooped into our Center for Teaching Excellence, where I found a line of people eagerly waiting as soon as I opened the door, all wanting to buy the used iPads we're selling. I've never owned an iPad and I was not privy to the procedures for selling them, but the colleague in charge of the sale suffered weather-related travel delays. Until she arrived, all I could do was stand there looking stupid and trying to keep everyone calm. 

I'd been looking forward to this, my first full day back in the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence, but by midmorning I'd accomplished nothing but fight my way through various storms. Now the snow has stopped falling, the email inbox has stopped pinging, and the iPad seekers have left the building, so I think I'll just sit here and enjoy the quiet. At some point I'll need to buckle down and get to work, but will anyone begrudge me a few minutes to catch my breath?

From stunned to fun

Second day of the new semester and I've already had somebody crying in my office. In fact, I've had two people crying in my office, and one of them was me. It wasn't full-blown weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth--just a profound sadness over the loss of colleagues and the difficulty of the budget situation we're facing here.

But there were no tears in my American Lit Survey class this morning. When I call roll on the first day I usually ask students to share the most interesting thing they read over winter break, but I did not want to face rows of students telling me I didn't read anything. Instead, I asked them to bring some color into this gray day--Share something colorful, glittery, or cheerful you encountered over break. They talked about taking small children to see Christmas lights, visiting Manhattan or Florida or Puerto Rico, wearing glittery party hats on New Year's Eve, and even eating grapes under the dining table during a family party.

In the absence of grapes and glittery hats, this morning I offered my crying colleague a book I've been recommending to lots of people trying to maintain hope in the midst of various types of losses: The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl, a series of pithy seasonal meditations sparked by the author's backyard. The first chapter instructs readers, "Wherever You Are, Stop What You're Doing." "Stop and look," she says, and then "Stop and ponder....Stop and listen....Stop and consider," and at each stop she shows us something ordinary in her backyard, a spot of color or life in disorderly surroundings. "The world lies before you, a lavish garden," she says; "However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away." That's what The Comfort of Crows did for me, over and over and over again.

After class I talked to another colleague who is angry and distressed by local conditions as well as the larger cultural disdain for education, but after we blew off some steam, she said her plan for this semester is to have fun--inside and outside her classes. I agree. There's plenty of reason to weep and plenty of opportunity for hard work, but despite it all, we're doing what we love while we can and we fully intend to enjoy it, glittery hats or not.

Big problems, small pleasures

Boy, it sure takes very little to make you happy, said my colleague. All I did was tell her how excited I was to see that our Interim President's photo had been added to the Wall of Presidents in the library, which delighted me for two reasons: (1) It's good to see more than one female face among the rows of dour men; and (2) The new photo fills a gap that had destroyed the symmetry of the display. Of course that symmetry will be thrown out of whack as soon as we hire our next President, but we have to take our pleasures where we can find them, especially in the midst of an ever-deepening campus budget crisis.

I've been told that I'm being too negative, that I need to keep my chin up and look on the bright side and seek out the silver linings and a whole mess of other cliches, so here are a few more things that are making me happy right now:

A colleague asked to borrow an assignment from me and then put a footnote on the assignment to give me credit. I've shared assignments with many colleagues over 23 years of teaching but I think this is the first time I've been given written credit. (The class is called The Ethical Author.)

Speaking of giving credit where credit is due, I sat down with a cup of tea yesterday afternoon and cracked open R.F. Kuang's novel Yellowface, intending to read a few chapters before dinner, but as of this morning I've finished it. Couldn't put it down. Can't stop thinking about it. It's very funny in a horrifying way and deals with the problem of credit for creative work; the narrator is a white woman who appropriates (um, steals) a manuscript written by a dead Asian friend and then profits by putting on her friend's skin, as it were. The novel involves some biting satire on identity politics and literary tokenism, but I was most impressed by Kuang's ability to make me care about a character who is, at heart, reprehensible--and make me laugh about it.

Despite the persistent rain, wind, and winter bleakness, I had no trouble getting out of my driveway this morning. High waters threatened our driveway yesterday but the creek fell before doing any damage; low temperatures threatened to sequester us behind a wall of snow and ice last night but didn't fall quite low enough to turn the rain to snow. The wind, though, is something else. When I got to campus this morning, the flags outside my office were snapping so sharply that they sounded like gunshots, which was a little disconcerting.

Still, I'm here, and no one is shooting at me, and I'm getting good work done, and I'm looking forward to the start of classes tomorrow. And if I start getting blue again, I can hike on over to the library and take a look at that Wall of Presidents and remind myself that every once in a while, we can make a little bit of progress. 

But just a little. No point in getting all giddy about it.

 

 

 

Attack of the anxiety dreams

Classes start in three days so right on time the anxiety dreams are arriving. Last night I was responsible for protecting a group of vulnerable people from a zombie attack, but I couldn't get anyone to follow instructions. "You have to rub this stinky herb all over you to repel the zombies," I kept telling them, but they just said, "No thanks, I'm good" and wandered off to become zombie fodder.

I don't know if this reflects anxiety about my upcoming classes or my previous ones. Getting students to follow instructions is difficult in any semester, but their noncompliance doesn't generally result in zombie attacks. Instead, it results in snarky comments on course evaluations from students who don't understand requirements of certain assignments or who are unhappy that I'm not at their beck and call 24/7. What they really need is an AI prof who will respond to calls for help at 2 a.m., but if I created such an avatar, it would soon get tired of saying "The answers are on the syllabus."

The zombies may have arisen from the reading list for my upper-level literature class this spring, which includes Zone One, Colson Whitehead's zombie novel. I've taught that novel before, but the last time I taught the Colson Whitehead class was in spring 2020, when we suddenly had to move our classes online during spring break and reinvent everything in response to Covid-19. Talk about apocalyptic! I've been looking forward to the opportunity to focus an entire class on Whitehead again without the pandemic disruptions, and I'm so thoroughly prepared that there's really nothing to get anxious about. 

And my other class should be a piece of cake: American Lit Survey, which I've taught nearly every spring since 2001. It's a full class (19 students!) and I'll have to be on the lookout for AI-produced essays, but otherwise it's a course I love to teach even though the students keep me on my toes.

I keep reminding myself that angst and dread arrive faithfully about a week before each semester starts but they dissipate as soon as I step into the classroom. Deep inside, though, I don't quite believe it. Every semester troubling emotions come lumbering out of my nightmares with bloody fingers outstretched to grab and eat my brains, but I can't seem to locate the stinky herb that will protect me from their depredations. The only cure, it seems, is to get back into the classroom.

Coming and going, standing and falling

I'm back on campus today for a farewell event for a longtime colleague and people keep asking me about my recent road trip but I'm having trouble responding. Half of my brain cells are still scattered along the Interstate highway system while the other half are obsessing over how to put down sturdier roots. Part of me wants to talk about the sun shining off the water of the Gulf of Mexico while the other wants to ask for recommendations for tree removal services, so I guess I'm kind of coming and going.

That tree has to go, no question about it, but who will remove it? A high-tension power line runs through our property just uphill from the house, and the tree stands between the power company's right-of-way and our house. In fact there's a line of pine trees in a row, all severely trimmed on the uphill side so the limbs won't endanger the power line, but that makes the trees heavier on the downhill side, toward the house. We've mentioned the trees to the power company before without inspiring any interest, but now the largest tree--the one closest to the house--is starting to look unhealthy. It needs to go! Who will take it away? It's too close to the power lines for the resident lumberjack to handle, so I've just sent an SOS to the power company. 

It always pains me to see an ancient tree cut down, just as it pains me to see a longtime colleague leaving, even if he's not quite as ancient as the tree. We were hired to tenure-track positions here in the same year, celebrated triumphs and suffered through crises together, took students on field trips and listened to capstone presentations and interviewed job candidates at MLA conventions and made the long drive to Louisville for those marathon AP-essay grading sessions. Now he's moving to a new position in administration, an ideal situation for him but a sad day for those of us who will miss his laugh and his insight and his deep passion for literature. 

He'll be putting down new roots elsewhere while we struggle to keep thriving here despite budget difficulties. Sometimes I feel like a tree trying to survive with half of its branches lopped off, standing close to the source of power but fearful of one day falling splat on the ground. I send my roots down deep and reach for the sun and provide shade to those who gather, but how long can this feeble trunk keep standing?   

To live like a cormorant

A snippet of seaside conversation:

When I retire, I'd like to live like a cormorant--dive into the water to grab a fish, then perch on a pole, spread my wings to dry, and stare at the water for hours on end.

But why not a pelican? They sit on poles too.

Pelicans are beggars. Cormorants don't beg.

But...they're ugly.

Ugly? Nah. Cormorants are dignified. Besides, who cares what you look like if you can sit on a pole and watch the water all day?

Breakfast with ibises

After twelve hours on the road, we arrived at a rented condo on Cedar Key in the Gulf Coast of Florida and saw very little. At twilight under a gray sky, we could see the Gulf of Mexico just beyond our balcony, a fishing pier just off to the left, and an expanse of island fading into the gloom. We took a walk out on the pier, and by the time we'd turned back around, the whole area was socked in with thick fog. But at one point we looked up and saw, gliding across the gray sky, a flock of ibises. That's when I knew we weren't in Kansas anymore, or Ohio either. Where a whole flock of ibises can fly overhead, anything is possible.

This morning's sun revealed more wonders. At high tide the water laps on rocks just a few yards from our balcony, but this morning's low tide revealed a broad stretch of mud flats, which attracted birds that dabbled in the mud for breakfast. Just a few feet away a pair of white ibises fought over a morsel of something dug up from the mud, while nearby a host of other birds searched for sustenance--great egrets and little egrets, a tricolored heron and a little blue heron, cormorants and gulls and terns and pelicans, so many pelicans swooping just inches above the still water and then diving for a tasty treat.

We've spent a lot of time today sitting on the balcony looking at the water, or, alternately, sitting on the beach looking at the water, much more relaxing than the interstate traffic we spent so much time looking at yesterday. This morning we hiked through Florida scrubland looking for missing trail markers but finally found our way back, and this evening we'll walk a few blocks to a restaurant in search of local clams--and we won't even have to dabble in the mud to find them.

On our short drive to the scrubland hike, we passed a spot where roseate spoonbills were dabbling in the water alongside the road, but there was no good place to pull off and watch them. But I've researched places where roseate spoonbills gather and I'm determined to see some up close in the next couple of days. If weather permits, we'll rent a kayak and paddle out to Atsena Otie Island, where wildlife abounds in the midst of the ruins of a ghost town and pencil factory. (Cedar Key was named for the cedars that grew here abundantly before they were transformed into pencils.)

At some point I'll be able to edit the many photos I've been taking with my cranky camera, but meanwhile I'll include just a few views from our balcony before the fog rolls in again to draw a curtain over the beauties of Cedar Key.

The view from our balcony at low tide.

A gift of energy, wonder, and joy

I didn't take any photos at the Trans-Siberian Orchestra performance in Cleveland yesterday afternoon, for several reasons. First, we were sitting up in the nosebleed section, so if I'd fumbled and dropped my phone, it would have gone plunging so far down that I surely wouldn't have seen it again--and I'm enough of a klutz to do that. Second, plenty of more sure-fingered people in our family party were taking photos and videos, and they all have nicer phones than mine. But mostly I was so caught up in the elaborate spectacle that I couldn't have looked away long enough to press the shutter button.

Wow what a show. I don't believe I stopped smiling once for two and a half hours, except when I felt moved to let out a joyful whoop. Joy, in fact, was the overwhelming feeling of the event, accompanied by wonder and awe evoked by both the music and the effects. Up in the cheap seats we had a great view of the stage from above, and my son the percussionist was especially impressed by the drummer's ability to play complicated beats while his platform was being lifted into the air or surrounded by lasers or fireworks or, occasionally, actual fire. Lasers! Flashing lights! A giant snow globe with a woman inside, singing her heart out! It was like nothing I've ever seen before.

Or heard, for that matter. We've listened to Trans-Siberian Orchestra's holiday music for years, but even familiar tunes have a fuller, fresher sound in person. And when the performers are playing while dashing around the stage or being raised aloft on a column or surrounded by fireworks, you just can't stop the energy. In fact, all the performers threw so much energy into the afternoon show that I wondered if they'd have anything left for the evening crowd.

And they infused us with energy too. All evening the grandkids were humming and singing, and at bedtime I had trouble calming my brain down enough to sleep. I kept closing my eyes and seeing the colors, hearing the music, feeling the joy. A gift of energy--what a great start to this busy holiday weekend.

(My son took these photos.)

Here we all are after the show--so many smiles!

 

A fine whine

I had no intention of coming to campus at all this week but here I am, two days in a row, clattering away at the computer in my office instead of baking festive holiday cookies at home. And why? Well, I can't say, exactly, because yesterday at our semi-annual the sky is falling meeting outlining new procedures for spending departmental funds (in a nutshell: don't!), those in attendance were reminded of the need to be mindful of the narrative we craft, but my mind is still so befuddled by the convoluted procedures I will now have to follow as a department chair that I'm in no fit state to be mindful of crafty narratives. Instead, I will keep silent on the substance of yesterday's meeting except to wonder when we can move away from the word crisis to describe a situation that has been going on so long that it feels like the way things have always worked. I mean, the first time you get hit over the head with a sledgehammer might feel like an unprecedented outrage, but by the 50th time, it's just another Tuesday.

But I am happy to comment on the other reason I have to be on campus today, which springs from the existence in the world of academics who somehow fail to understand the academic calendar. Raise your hand if you want to be handed an essential task on Dec. 19 and told that you must complete it by January 4! I didn't raise my hand for that but nevertheless here I am wondering why editors at academic journals can sometimes be so clueless about how academics plan their schedules and the existence, for instance, of the winter holidays. 

Yesterday, when I first received the final version of an article due for publication over the winter, I thought I would just run through it and correct any little infelicities that might have crept in over time, but then I noticed that a quote had been mangled and realized that I was going to have to check every quote in the essay for accuracy, which I couldn't do at home because the necessary books are in my office, except for the one that, fortunately, I was able to locate in our library. And then on closer inspection I found that somewhere along the line other errors have been introduced--and I know they're not my errors because they don't exist in the version I submitted to the journal, such as a misspelling of an author's name and the presence of the word oftentimes, which I never use, in writing or speaking, except to ask students to change it to often.

So here I am clicketing away at the keyboard, being mindful of the need to craft narratives while sledgehammers periodically pound on my back. Not too often--but never oftentimes.  

Revving up for the holidays

So much to celebrate today! No more grading, no need to go to campus, cookie dough in the fridge ready to be rolled out, piles of gifts all wrapped up to take to the grandkids later in the week, a functioning television at our house for the first time in several years plus a new tech setup that allows us to stream video here for the first time ever. (Ah, the joys of country life!) 

And let's not forget that today is our anniversary. Forty-one years! Once upon a time we were shiny young things in a cranky old car, but now we're the ones having trouble getting moving in the morning. But we can still get our engines going when we need to! That's something to celebrate.

Flunking my own exam

Everything's in place for an early-morning final exam: Students in their seats, muffins in a box accessible to all (because it's a long exam and I don't want anyone to faint from skipping breakfast), first half of the exam in students' hands, essay question and blue books on the desk up front. Students have to complete the first half of the exam and turn it in before receiving the essay question, because they're allowed to use books and notes on the essay question but not on the short-answer questions. I've used this system many times before and in fact I'm using it in two classes this week, which is where the problem arises.

The first student to finish the short-answer questions turns in her work and picks up the essay question and blue book, but then she sits at her desk looking puzzled and scribbling a few tentative notes. The second student who picks up the essay question, though, doesn't even make it back to her seat. "I think you gave us the wrong question," she says. 

She's right: I gave my Honors Lit students the question intended for my Comedy class. I had to run down to my office and retrieve the correct question.

What amazes me most about this incident is that the first student was actually trying to answer the question--about literary works that the class had not read. These are pretty good students, but I wouldn't expect any of them to make much headway in analyzing stories they've never read or responding to theoretical concepts we've never discussed. I'm impressed that one student tried, but I'm sorry that she felt she had to.

Today as I've been making my way through that massive pile of papers to grade, I keep being tempted to insert snarky comments like If you must include a dictionary definition, make sure you spell the name of the dictionary correctly, but then I remember that I'm the one who gave my students the wrong exam. We all make mistakes! Sometimes the best response to a little oops is to forgive ourselves and move on. 

Why every professor needs a chainsaw

On a pitch-dark morning I drove around a hairpin turn and found my route blocked by a fallen tree—one of the drawbacks of living in the woods. I don't carry a chainsaw in my car but fortunately I was able to squeeze around the far edge where the trunk had shattered, although I wouldn't have made it if my car had been two inches wider. No way a school bus is getting past that tree. As soon as I got into an area with cell-phone coverage, I called my husband to warn him. His car is a little bigger than mine—but he's a genius with a chainsaw.

I wish I had a chainsaw to cut through some of the obstacles blocking my path this week. Next week looks like freedom: No more grading! Time for shopping! Fun with the grandkids! Baking cookies! Taking the whole family to hear the Trans-Siberian Orchestra in concert! Followed, of course, by a quick trip to a sunny place! Just thinking about it exhausts my store of exclamation points.

But standing between me and all that freedom is a pile of research papers begging to be graded, plus three exams I need to proctor and then grade (and if anyone thinks proctoring a two-and-a-half-hour exam is easy, let them come and give it a try—I'd welcome the break).

Meanwhile, an administrative roadblock is thwarting my ability to complete an important project. I wake up in the wee hours in a panic about what will happen if it doesn't get done before winter break, but all my attempts to remove the obstacle or drive around it have proven futile. If I didn't have to spend five hours proctoring exams today, I'd go camp out on a certain administrator's doorstep until the roadblock got removed.

Maybe it's time to equip all our administrators with chainsaws. Professors too. How else can I cut through that big  ol' pile o' papers?

Sigh. Better do some grading.

 

A step ahead of Clint the Caribou

I had dinner last night under the watchful eyes of a caribou whom I decided to call Clint, a polite dinner companion though he didn't contribute much to the conversation. Some people might be put off by dining in the presence of taxidermied animals--all those beady little eyes glaring out from the heads of deer, elk, bison, and caribou, plus the bears' menacing teeth and claws--but animal heads hanging on the wall don't disturb my dinner. After all, I have eaten fried alligator nuggets in the presence of live alligators. Tastes like chicken.

The steaks we ate at the Bear's Den last night did not taste at all like chicken, fortunately. It's a farm-to-table restaurant located 40 minutes away in the middle of nowhere, which makes sense because getting great grass-fed beef from farm to table is easier if the table remains close to the farm. Delicious local beef, interesting vegetables, spectacular desserts--plus close proximity to the Guernsey County Courthouse in Cambridge, Ohio, where the holiday light-and-music show makes me smile right down to my toes.

In between the teaching and student conferences and grading, this has been a week full of smiles. At the local performance of Handel's Messiah Sunday night, I sat with the family of a retired colleague who sang the bass solos with gusto despite having undergone a major organ transplant not so long ago, and on Wednesday evening I watched some very talented students perform a festive and fun holiday concert.

Now, though, it's back to work: piles of papers to grade, followed by piles of final exams to decipher. This afternoon I'll hold my last class meeting of the semester, a study session to prepare for the final exam, and then it's back to grading grading grading. But at least I've had some great music, delicious food, and colorful lights this week to prepare me for the long slog ahead. I may be worn out, but at least I haven't been taxidermied and hung on the wall--and as long as I stay one step ahead of Clint the Caribou, I'm doing okay. 

Too bad you can't hear the music.

Crunch Time comes for us all

Welcome to Crunch Time, when students frantically try to complete end-of-semester assignments while their professors try to respond calmly to requests for extensions and exemptions and just one more round of feedback on drafts, except that some students don't seem to have written drafts for a papers due two days from now, which is alarming in itself, but then the types of feedback I'm asked to provide are alarming in a different way. 

Just this week I have been called upon to remind students that Facebook did not exist in 1870, that an event can not be influenced by events occurring decades later, that summary is not the same as analysis (again! and again!), that reading a book review is not the same as reading the book, and that some random dude's online literary ramblings don't necessarily count as an academic source just because he has a college degree.

Once again I have had to repeatedly explain that online citation engines are only as good as the information we feed them, and if we can't figure out the difference between and author and a translator or between the title of the article and the name of the journal, we're going to get a mess, and then it won't do any good to say But that's what the citation engine said because once it appears in a student's paper, I treat it as the student's work.

With all these competing demands swirling around my inbox, it's no wonder I'm having trouble sleeping. I wake up in the wee hours with pain in my shoulder or hip and feel myself falling gently back toward snooze-land until annoying questions start popping up: Did I spend enough time on information literacy with my first-year writers? Do I need to revise that prompt to state even more explicitly what kinds of sources are appropriate, or am I being too directive already? Too much hand-holding or not enough? Eventually I give up trying to get back to sleep and then hours later I'm sitting in my office wondering why I can't put together a coherent sentence.

But at least the incoherent sentences I'm producing are my own. No AI or plagiarism at work in this space and no paraphrasing of online summaries, cited or otherwise. All errors and infelicities are entirely original--an ill-favored thing but mine own, and perhaps just enough to carry me through the Crunch.

Good start to a time of cheer

It all happened on the first of December:

I collected the last set of student drafts for the fall semester, many of which were pretty good so I shouldn't complain, but after responding to all of them I'm retiring the sentence suggesting that they please go back and read the prompt again. Until next semester, anyway. I've run out of ways to re-explain the assignment and now it's up to them to see what they can do with it.

I browbeat my classes into completing their end-of-semester course feedback surveys, driving the response rate above 50 percent for the first time in ages. I don't know how useful their feedback will be since I may not be teaching any of these classes again before I retire, but we are under orders from the Provost's office to increase response rates and so I comply. Will students who feel forced to respond be more cranky in their comments? I guess I'll find out when I get a chance to read them in January. (Not that it matters. I mean, literally nothing is at stake.)

I finished off a very long day by attending a musical play written by a talented student and produced entirely by students. It was great to see so much energy up on stage, and the music was engaging. My favorite bit involved a clueless character saying he was "speaking semaphorically," and when another character asked whether he meant "metaphorically," he paused and said, "No?" 

But sandwiched between the play and all the drafts and classes was a celebration of four faculty members who have published books this semester. The books have been in process for varying amounts of time and it's just a coincidence that they all came out so recently, but at a small college like ours, having one faculty member publish a book would be a pretty big deal. Four at once is unheard of. So the Provost's office feted us in the library with cake and coffee (and hot cocoa!), and we mingled and chatted and celebrated success among a congenial group of colleagues and family members. We haven't had much occasion for public celebration in the past few years, so any opportunity to cheer each other on feels terrific. 

If so much cheer can happen on the first day of December, what other joys might the season provide?

  

 

Maybe we all need to hibernate

Everyone was dragging yesterday despite having just returned from an extended break. I provided a rude awakening to one student who forgot that he's scheduled to give a class presentation on Wednesday, but mostly I spent class time trying to gently prod my students into alertness and engagement. They're tired, they say. Well I'm tired too. We're all tired. Who wouldn't be tired in the final weeks of the fall semester?

This morning I've been reading student drafts and right now I'm tired of asking students to spell my name correctly. It's not that difficult! Only five letters! One set of papers features four different spellings of my name, which is nearly as annoying as the paper that keeps referring to Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir as The Women Warrior. I'm tired of seeing references to a women and I'm tired of seeing then where than should be.

But I'm also tired of the paper that looks absolutely perfect, with no spelling or punctuation errors, but that our AI detector flags as being mostly machine-generated. I'd rather see a student spell woman wrong a dozen times than to go through the whole process of figuring out who or what wrote a perfect paper and what I'm supposed to do about it. 

I'm tired of the cold already even though it's barely begun. I'm interested in seeing how my new car handles snowy roads, but not interested enough to wish for a blizzard. This morning I drove through scattered flakes that melted when they hit the ground, which barely counts as a flurry. If I'd blinked, I would have missed it.

I'm tired of class preps and grading and meetings meetings meetings, but the good news is it's nearly over (for now). On Wednesday my students will discuss their final reading assignments of the semester; after that, it's a week and a half of drafts, revisions, presentations, and final exams. So much to do before winter break! Just thinking about it makes me tired.

 

 

  

Thanksgiving smiles

The youngest grandkids were pretending to be superheroes and when it came time to select their powers, the youngest said, "I breathe out sunshine." Indeed she does, but so do her siblings. It's a family trait passed down from both parents: the ability to light up a room with a smile.

We've been enjoying some Thanksgiving sunshine with the grandkids, with food and fun and silliness. The meal was a group effort, as usual; I was especially thankful for my oldest granddaughter's help on rolling out the pumpkin yeast rolls because some muscle pain in my arm made it hard to apply sufficient oomph. We ate and talked and took a walk and by late afternoon we were all in the living room, struggling to stay awake.

Today's it's time to head back home, where I'll face a fridge that isn't crammed with leftovers (except some excess cranberry chutney, yum). But that's okay. As much as we enjoy the Thanksgiving meal, it's really not about the food. What we're most thankful for are the smiles full of sunshine.

 

Because everyone needs a little good news

Fourteen years ago today I sat in a comfy chair at our local cancer center dangling between the bad news dominating my recent past and the good news beckoning me forward. After major surgery and months of cancer treatment, I was enduring my final round of chemotherapy while looking forward to finally stepping into a new role as Director of our campus's Center for Teaching Excellence.

Today I'm enjoying a similar sense of anticipation. With cancer treatment long in the past and with administrative changes making the College's budget problems more bearable, I'm looking forward to January, when I'll resume the role of Director of the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence.

This change seemed unimaginable not so long ago. In summer of 2022, I met with the then-Provost to discuss taking on a different role. The ongoing marginalization of the liberal arts made me fear that my final years before retirement would be one long slog through multiple sections of first-year composition and general education courses, with little challenge or variety. I wasn't expecting to ride into the sunset in a cloud of glory, but I was looking for an opportunity to use my skills in a more challenging and rewarding way.

So the Provost and I tossed around ideas and agreed to take a few weeks to think about the options before making any decisions--and then, a week later, she announced her sudden retirement.

So that's the end of that, I thought. The new interim Provost was hired to do a specific job--evaluating positions and programs to target for elimination--and he did it as graciously as he could, but developing challenging opportunities for discontented faculty members was not part of his bailiwick. I assumed that I would just keep doing what I'd been doing and hope for an occasional upper-level class to make things interesting.

But halfway through the fall 2022 semester, I became aware of a gap and jumped in to fill it: department chairs needed some training, so I sent a two-sentence email to the Associate Provost in charge of the problem and offered to design the training in exchange for a course release in Spring 2023. The training was a success and the course release was renewed for Spring 2024--for a "project assigned by the Office of Academic Affairs." I didn't mind the ambiguity. We were, after all, welcoming a new Provost this fall, and she might have different ideas about how I could serve the College.

And now that different idea has become public: starting in January, I'll go back to doing a job I loved and never wanted to leave. I was the first Director of the Worthington Center, so I had a hand in establishing how the Center could serve the needs of the College by offering faculty workshops, one-on-one mentoring, teaching observations, and other services designed to improve pedagogy and professional development. I served a three-year term and applied for renewal, but by then the Provost who had hired me for the position had been replaced by another with a different vision for the position. (Somehow this is turning into a Tale of Too Many Provosts.)

Several other Directors served admirably for the next few years but then the administration moved away from three-year terms and instead tried a new leadership model, which resulted, eventually, in a stark decline in the kind of faculty support the Center had excelled in offering. At various meetings over the past two years I've heard many voices saying "We need the Worthington Center back at full function," but nobody knew how to make that happen in the midst of a budget crisis.

But the new Provost had a plan, which was approved by the Trustees in October and presented to me last week. Before accepting the offer, I asked the Provost to describe her vision for the Center. Once before I got stuck in the awkward space between my understanding of my job and a Provost's shifting priorities, and I don't ever want to visit that place again. But our discussion convinced me that the job will allow me to do many things I love to support faculty development while also teaching two courses per semester--and, if all goes according to plan, I can continue doing this rewarding work until I'm ready to retire.

Am I happy? Of course I'm happy. And judging by the wide smiles and the round of applause greeting the announcement at the faculty meeting last night, others are happy as well. If anyone isn't happy, I'm not hearing about it. I'm already thinking about ideas for workshops and looking forward to working one-on-one with faculty members in search of insight and perspective on their teaching, activities that fill me with excitement. We've had a rough couple of years here and we're not in the clear yet, but looking into the near future, all I can see is good news. 

The return of Friday Pie Day

A year ago I wrote about the cancellation of our campus's annual Friday Pie Day, when employees mingled over slices of pie on the last Friday before Thanksgiving, a lovely tradition that fell victim to our ongoing budget crisis. Things might be looking up, I wrote, but "I won't believe the College has recovered from its budget crisis until I see a room full of campus employees happily eating pie."

Well we still haven't recovered entirely, but I'm pleased to report that Friday Pie Day is back--and I had just a little bit to do with its resurrection. Last week I was meeting with the brand-new Provost about an entirely unrelated matter when I wistfully wondered aloud when the annual Friday Pie Day might return.

She'd never heard of it, so I had to explain: it's one of the few occasions when faculty, staff, and administrators can sit around a table casually, drawn together by the offer of many types of pie. (And whipped cream, of course. For some folks pie is just a vehicle for whipped cream.) The new provost seemed vaguely interested in the idea and even brought it up at the Department Chairs' meeting on Monday. 

And now it's back! For lunch today I enjoyed a delicious piece of blackberry pie accompanied by a chat with some colleagues I don't normally see too often. It's been an exhausting semester and a week crammed full with meetings and madness, but this morning the anticipation of pie kept me going--and now the afterglow will carry me through my one remaining class.

Sometimes pie makes everything better.   

 

Assailed by tiny enemies while giants wait in the wings

I woke up at 2 a.m. in a panic because I realized I'd forgotten to remind an advisee to add a particular class to his schedule. Not an emergency! Just an errant item from my to-do list haunting the midnight hours.

If I have to wake up alarmed in the middle of the night, why can't I panic over something actually worthy of panic, like extinction of species or melting of glaciers or a 12 percent increase in our health-care premiums? (Which our HR people prefer to call "contributions," as if we're donating our hard-earned funds to a worthy cause out of the goodness of our hearts instead of having them wrenched out of our paychecks kicking and screaming.)

But I digress. 

The problem, I think, is that my subconscious knows that there's no point jerking me out of a sound sleep to obsess over melting glaciers in Greenland because what could I possibly do about the problem? I've relegated too many big issues to the category I'd describe as I'm doing my best but this really requires larger societal change so what's the point of thinking about it at 2 a.m.?

Instead, my subconscious likes to alert me to smaller matters that I actually have some control over. Forgot to give proper advice to an advisee? Better get to it! Granted, emailing the student at 2 a.m. is unlikely to result in any immediate action, but at least it will get the problem off my back.

This reminds me of the problem we discussed in my Honors Literature class this morning, when we tackled the chapter of The Woman Warrior in which Maxine Hong Kingston examines the disconnect between fairy-tale heroics and real-life action. Fa Mu Lan sets out with her village's grievances inscribed in her flesh and she uses her skills and weapons to locate and destroy the oppressor. But her enemy is easily identified--he has a name and an address, and once he's dead, the village is free.

What happens when we can't identify the enemy? How do we locate an enemy who seems to suffuse the very air we breathe? If the enemy is an evil baron living in a castle, then break down the doors and chop off his head; but what if the enemy is racism or gender stereotyping or unjust economic systems? Where would you start chopping off heads and how would you know when you're done?

And so we sheath our swords and go to sleep, where we hope to build strength to fight the big battles but instead find ourselves assailed by little things that go bump in the night. Who can be a hero under these circumstances?  

And here we are agonizing over AI again

I want to see your mind grappling with issues on the page, I told a student this morning, but in the back of my mind I heard echoing a statement I heard at last week's training on Artificial Intelligence in the classroom: We need to teach students how to use AI responsibly. The gap between those statements is a place of anguish.

If it were up to me, my students would never resort to AI--and they wouldn't plagiarize either, or read online summaries instead of actual books or sit through an entire semester without taking a single note in class. They would love to read and write and would use their writing assignments as a place to take risks and play with words and engage with ideas, drawing on their reading to support claims originating in their own heads, not manufactured by a machine.

I'm dreaming, of course. If the AI detectors can be believed, I've had very few students resorting to AI in my classes this semester, but I frequently see papers parroting back inane ideas gleaned from online summaries, with a few quotes tossed in as proof-texts.

At last week's training I was reminded that it's unrealistic to expect my students to express truly original thoughts. They are, after all, college students with little experience in literary analysis, so anything that strikes them as original has probably already been said better by someone else. The most we can expect, then, is for students to make creative use of whatever unoriginal thoughts they come up with.

And I'm okay with that. They may not have read enough to know whether their ideas are entirely original, but at the very least I want them to make an analytical claim, to stake out a space for their own interpretation based on support from the text. A mind at work on the page--is that so much to ask?

But the recent AI training session wants something different. To teach students to use AI responsibly, I should outline parameters of acceptable use: allow them to use AI to develop an outline, for instance, and then allow the student to fill in the blanks. I agree that such an approach might be useful in some contexts, but it defies the most basic advice I give students who are learning to analyze literature: Always start with the text itself. Don't approach it with preconceived notions but instead choose a passage that interests you and dig into it until you understand why. Take it apart and examine the pieces, then put them back together and see how they work. Let the text inspire the points of the analysis.

Starting with an AI-generated outline will only encourage proof-texting--approaching the text to locate quotes to support a preconceived idea. This method tends to produce superficial readings that pay little attention to metaphor, structure, imagery, or how form and content work together to create meaning. This may be the best I can hope for from some students, but how can I get students to dig deeply into a text when they're looking only for what matters to a machine?

I want to see a mind at work, but too often I see the results of machine thinking, which, to my mind, isn't very interesting.

Trotting out the trivia

So what's the most trivial thing you know, she asked, but I had to think about it.

We were in the English Department office spouting off about the kinds of things English professors spout off about--tracing the etymology of palimpsest, quoting lines from The Importance of Being Earnest, ranking our favorite Nicola Walker roles--when the youngest among us marveled over our wealth of useless knowledge and asked What's the most trivial thing you know?

It depends upon how you define trivial.

Oscar Wilde gave The Importance of Being Earnest the subtitle A Trivial Play for Serious People, but its effect on Wilde's career and the careers of many actors and on the history of theatrical comedy itself was hardly trivial.

Likewise, the date of the Battle of Hastings might show up on a Jeopardy answer or a Trivial Pursuit card, but the battle had a non-trivial impact on the soldiers whose heads were smashed in and, ultimately, on the development of the English language. I wouldn't consider the date useless, either, because I use it every day as part of an important online password. (Don't tell anyone! It's a secret.)

Anyone who has earned a PhD possesses a wealth of knowledge essential to some narrow area of study but trivial to anyone outside that area. For instance, Theodore Dreiser might pop up in a trivia quiz as the author of An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie, but without breaking a sweat I can tell you the date of his momentous road trip from Manhattan to Indiana (1913) and relay his response to two northwestern Ohio towns: Dreiser relished the vibrant bar scene in Hicksville, but he dismissed Bowling Green as a hick town redolent of pig farming. I have lived in Hicksville and earned my Ph.D. in Bowling Green so I can state confidently that Dreiser would be amazed at how the two towns have switched roles.  

But is that the most trivial thing I know? I know Donnie Osmond's birthday, many of the lyrics to the Gilligan's Island musical version of Hamlet, when Hunter S. Thompson was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base, and how to say duck in Russian (ootka)--knowledge useful to a Russian duck-breeder, perhaps, but not so relevant to my daily life.

I studied Russian for three years in high school so I've probably forgotten more Russian words than most Americans will ever know, but that doesn't mean I would be able to find my way around Moscow. Looking lost while saying ootka isn't going to get me anywhere except, maybe, the loony bin.

Anyone in possession of a large reservoir of trivial knowledge has to be careful about trotting it out in public. This is one reason I love academe: if I mention the Battle of Hastings or Oscar Wilde--or, for that matter, Gilligan's Island--among my colleagues, someone is bound to know what I'm talking about, while the general public tends to look askance at eggheads who make obscure allusions.

And this is one of the things I'll miss when I finally retire: sitting around the department office spouting off about the kinds of things English professors spout off about. Will my wealth of useless knowledge atrophy, or will I annoy everyone who comes near me by spewing a fountain of obscure trivia?

For that matter, how much trivia have I already forgotten? Maybe the most trivial thing I ever knew has already drifted away into some forgotten limbo. 

So even after thinking about it for a few days, I still don't know how to answer the question--but I'm happy to work in a place where it's not unusual for such a question to be asked.

 

Lit4Life

About halfway through George Saunders' short story "Ask the Optimist," a parody of advice columns, the Optimist receives a letter from Satan, who's having trouble finding the silver lining in his situation: 

Although I know I should be grateful--I love working for myself, and I'm one of the two most powerful beings in the universe--I sometimes feel a certain absence, as if there's some essential quality I'm lacking. I've heard people, as I make my rounds, speak of something called "goodness." Usually when I hear someone use this word, I get frustrated and immediately tempt them into doing something horrific--but lately, somehow, this isn't enough. Thoughts? 

Of course The Optimist has thoughts--he always has thoughts about his correspondents' problems, most of them inane (Look on the bright side!) or self-serving (as when he invites a turkey over for Thanksgiving dinner). Faced with pure evil, he suggests that Satan cure his loneliness by visiting another hopeless correspondent, unless he'd rather not, which would also be fine, because, as the Optimist concludes, "Whatever! It's all good!"

When we discussed this story in my Comedy class, my question for students was If it's all good, how do we decide what's bad? And if we define evil out of existence, what are the consequences? (In the story, the consequences are violent, bloody, grim, and hilarious.)

And this is what I love about teaching literature classes: dig beneath the surface and any text and we're bound to unearth an invitation to talk about ethics, epistemology, ontology, and a whole host of questions about living a meaningful life. (I've been thinking about introducing a course called "Literature for a Meaningful Life," but it would be abbreviated "Lit4Life," which might give students a mistaken impression.)

Sure, we can talk about metaphors, similes, imagery, diction, and all the literary devices Miss Groby liked to hunt down and count up in James Thurber's "Here Lies Miss Groby." Or we can follow the example of the readers in Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry" and "tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it." But at some point we need to stop identifying literary devices and ask what they all add up to, what they suggest about the human condition or how we should live or what I call meaning-of-life issues.

I suspect that some of my Comedy students did not expect to address philosophical questions in a class that includes Monty Python on the syllabus, but here we are talking about how we distinguish between good and evil. If they get tired of my probing questions, they can vent their anger in a letter to the Optimist, but he'll just tell them to look on the bright side--Whatever. It's all good. (Until it isn't.)