Raise a glass to sheer survival

I could count up all the things that made this an awful week, from the snow that slicked up my road again to the deer that ran in front of my car and caused me to slam on the brakes in a way that wrenched my back, not to mention the all-day rain and gray skies and the impossibility of sleeping through my husband's night-time coughing fits, plus an annoying allergic reaction that made my ankles feel like they were on fire all day long for two days straight, but it's Friday so let's think about happier things. 

Snow-covered trees along the icy river made for a beautiful drive the other morning. Despite my three (!) separate encounters with deer this week and my close encounter with a cliffside during a dangerous skid, I am still alive and kicking--which is easier now that my ankles are done burning and itching and swelling up until they feel as if they'll burst.

The skies may have been gray for a few days but in our house the Christmas cacti are blooming beautifully--again!--and my husband brought home a lovely bunch of tulips to brighten things up. The tulips echo some hues on our current jigsaw puzzle, a collection of colorful succulents challenging our puzzle-solving ability--and what a great feeling to insert a piece that transforms a chaotic blob into something beautiful.

This has been a cupcake-and-cake intensive week, with campus gatherings for a teaching workshop, the installation of our interim president, and the College's 190th birthday party, where I cheered on colleagues earning prizes for good work and took home a little bling myself. Most of these prizes were cancelled last year but the nominations were resubmitted this year, which is how I ended up walking home with a Research Prize for the Teaching Comedy book. Plus a cupcake!

And now all I have to do is get through two classes today and this complicated week will finally be over, so let's raise a glass to anti-lock brakes, anti-itch cream, tulips, cacti, and cupcakes. 

 

 

A novel suggestion from a creative (yawn!) class

Instead of taking the exam, why don't we all just take a nap?

A tempting request to be sure, but I had one objection: I don't know how to grade a nap.

That's okay, my student said. We can come up with a rubric.

Which is why we spent the last few minutes before the start of class discussing what items might appear on a nap-grading rubric. Everyone agreed that pajamas should earn style points, but students were divided about whether points should be added or deducted for snoring. Maybe consider the style of the snore?

The most novel suggestion was that dreams should be evaluated based on how well they illustrate realism, naturalism, or literary impressionism--an excellent segue into the exam on that very topic. So my students got down to work, and if any of them took a nap during the exam, I certainly didn't notice.

Here I am again, banging my head against the wall

Just came back from a quick trip to the mailroom in an attempt to stop the stream of emails reminding me to pick up a package, and I decided to pick up the rest of the English Department mail while I was at it; it's not a long walk and the weather is lovely, crisp and cool, but I resent being required to walk across campus just to retrieve three pieces of junk mail addressed to people who no longer work here plus a package containing a desk copy of a textbook for a class I'll likely never teach again.

It's the futility, stupid--the constant nagging need to perform actions that don't seem to make an iota of difference in the world, as if I'm being paid the big (ha!) bucks just to continue banging my head against various walls day after day. 

Sure, I appreciate the opportunity to guide students through Salman Rushdie's Knife, the remarkable memoir of the incident in 2022 when he was stabbed nearly to death in front of a thousand people in Chautauqua, New York, and it's even more compelling to teach this material while testimony begins in the trial of his attacker, but first I had to spend half of a class period providing information about Rushdie's past works and the fatwa and the whole long history that led up to this moment because none of my students had ever heard of him before. These are all juniors and seniors in an upper-level class, but the existence of Salman Rushdie and the attack that destroyed his eye two years ago had somehow escaped their notice.

Don't they read the news? (Probably not, and even if they did, the American media are doing a dreadful job covering the trial and I doubt my students are familiar with The Guardian.) Aren't they being required to read Rushdie's work? (Where? The Postcolonial Lit class isn't being offered anymore and while students may be required to read one Rushdie story if they take our Brit Lit survey, many English majors transfer in that course from community college so who knows what they're reading?) 

And when I required them to read the first 50 pages of Knife, why didn't their curiosity lead them to look things up? They could have read about Rushdie online, learned the history of the fatwa, or even looked up unfamiliar words they encountered, but no. When I asked the class why Rushdie compared his wounds to stigmata, I got blank stares. I found myself wanting to use the line Eudora Welty allegedly uttered with a sign whenever she taught a Flannery O'Connor short story: Is there a Catholic in the class? (There was.)

I know my students know a lot of things about which I'm utterly clueless--like who Kendrick Lamar is and why he matters, and why the dice are so weird in Dungeons and Dragons, and how TikTok works. (Sorry/not sorry.) In their eyes I'm probably some historic relic of a bygone age, when educated people read the news and cared about books and understood that on any given day the mail might bring something wonderful. Expecting them to value those experiences is probably just as futile as expecting them to have strong opinions about the Teapot Dome scandal.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly toward the day when no one anywhere will recognize the final line of The Great Gatsby--or care what knowledge has been lost. 

 

 

 

How far would you go to keep students comfortable?

Twenty(ish) years ago a group of students decided they were uncomfortable in my class and they needed to do something about it: they banded together to write comments on my course evaluations complaining that the big hairy mole on the back of my arm distracted them from learning and therefore I should be required to wear long sleeves in the classroom.

This was back in the day when students were allegedly more resilient, but clearly that resilience didn't extend to tolerating the existence of a professor whose body did not meet their exacting standards.

But surely the adults in the room would realize that my students were being unreasonable, right? Surely the administration would have my back!

But no: the provost suggested that I should get the mole removed. Right: she thought the best response was for me to get an expensive and unnecessary surgery that would not be covered by our insurance just to keep the customers comfortable.

I've been thinking of that incident this week as our campus has been discussing how the current anti-DEI hysteria might affect us. The official response is simple: We're a private institution; we will continue to hold firm to our core values. Colleagues assure me that we may change the names of some initiatives and offices but that nothing in the current climate will affect our academic freedom in the classroom.

But I'm currently teaching a class that has occasionally inspired students to complain on course evaluations that there's too much diversity--even though half of the authors on the syllabus are white males. I feel confident in my ability to expose students to a variety of different types of authors and texts, but I worry about those few students who can't distinguish between exposure and indoctrination. Suppose a student feels uncomfortable studying Kate Chopin or Toni Morrison or Yusef Komunyakaa, and suppose that student posts a complaint or a bit of video on social media to kick up a fuss. Surely the administration would have my back!

But I'm not so sure. Granted, the provost who thought I should have a chunk of my flesh removed to please the customers is no longer with us, but the precarity of our financial situation means we might bend over backward to keep students happy. I held my ground against surgery twenty years ago--but I also stopped wearing short sleeves in the classroom, a small change just to keep the peace.

For the moment I forge ahead, boldly introducing students to the wide variety of voices that characterize American Literature, but in the back of my mind there's a niggling fear that some random comment in the classroom might show up out of context online and I'll be urged to cut a chunk of content from the course just to keep the customers happy. 

A promise of produce

Signs of hope: the ice in the creek is breaking up and the mailbox brims with seed catalogs. The other day I asked my oldest grandkid what she was looking at so intently on her computer and she said, "I'm looking for ways to keep cabbage worms off of my cauliflower plants in the garden this summer." 

Well that was unexpected.

Springtime is coming, the time when young girls' thoughts turn to cauliflower--and cabbage and carrots and corn. Later she used graph paper to sketch out all the things she wants to plant in her garden plot, and looking at that sketch made me grateful for the people who have, over the years, planted in my grandkids a love for gardening. 

I think of my husband's grandma stooping over her tomato patch well into her 90s, and I think of my husband's patience in teaching our daughter how far apart to place the seeds and how to distinguish the weeds from the beans. Now, just like her dad, she can make just about anything grow, and all my grandkids look forward to getting their hands dirty in the community garden where they tend their family plot.

The thaw is coming. Soon spring will be here, and the young people will play an essential part in making new things grow.