Smiley Friday

Late on Friday afternoon at the end of a complicated week, I walked into a room in the science building feeling tired, grumpy, and entirely out of energy, but within minutes I was laughing and by the end of the hour I felt refreshed. The room was full of exhausted professors eating finger foods, drinking wine, and sharing stories, gathered to listen as two of our colleagues presented the results of their sabbatical research projects. I don't know much about scanning tunneling microscopes or microbial films on reefs, but my colleagues took such joy in explaining their work that the joy seeped into every corner of the room and put a spring in our steps as we left the building. 

But that's not the only reason I'm smiling this Friday. In no particular order:

At the student creative writing event yesterday, three of my Nature Writing students read short essays they'd written for my class. Beautiful writing read beautifully--they made me very proud. 

Earlier in the day--at 6:30 a.m., when it was still dark out and I hadn't yet ingested my morning quota of caffeine--I arrived at our first-year student registration breakfast to find a host of students eager to press the big blue "Register Now" button promptly at 7, plus faculty from various disciplines helping them troubleshoot scheduling problems. At least half of the students present were first-year football players, whose coach had insisted that they walk over to the registration breakfast right after early-morning weightlifting. Best of all, the coach came along with them. It's refreshing to see a brand-new coach impressing on students the importance of academics. 

One of my first-year seminar students got the rest of the class laughing so hard this morning that we all felt like one big happy family. Sometimes one student can be a catalyst in a classroom, making good things happen just by being there. I'm going to miss this dude next semester.

I had to run an errand to a bleak strip mall in the middle of the day but I stopped along the way to look at the Ohio River, where the light was gorgeous during the calm before an ugly storm. Calm water, lovely light, refreshing breeze--just before the sky fell.

And a colleague reminded me this evening that the sky is always going to be falling, but it's good sometimes to focus instead on the lovely light. 

An elevating topic

This morning I rode in an elevator with a student who had recently broken his ankle in two places. "This is nothing," he said. "Last year I broke my neck."

I think I would have quit playing football after the first injury, but whatever. I certainly wasn't planning to gripe about my bum knee in the presence of that kind of pain. He can't put any weight on his ankle for at least a month so his knee was propped up on one of those little scooters, which has to be a horrible way to get around campus. Historic buildings full of charm and character aren't necessarily easy to retrofit for the differently-abled. (I keep casually referring to myself as a cripple but people flinch. Too Dickensian?)

Yesterday I was halfway down a flight of stairs when I realized that I had forgotten to take the elevator and then I had to make a decision: continue down to the next floor or walk back up and use the elevator? In the past couple of weeks I've spent more time in campus elevators than I had for the previous 25 years combined. Elevators in campus buildings are, variously, slow, smelly, noisy, unreliable, or absent, but my orthopedist says my knee will be happier if I avoid steps for a while, so I hear and obey.

For about four days after the cortisone shot my knee felt great. I was able to walk without a discernible limp and sleep without being awakened by shooting pains. 

Then I twisted it again--not as badly as the first time, but enough to make me despair of ever living without pain. Back to taking piles of painkillers every day, back to limping slowly around campus, back to being awakened by pain every stinking night.

But then it started feeling better. I can sleep! I've cut back on the painkillers! I can walk for a time without a limp! I can put on my socks without being overcome by a strong desire to cut off my right leg above the knee! Stairs still hurt, especially going down, and by the end of the day my leg feels fatigued, but the knee is making steady progress, filling me with hope that I may someday get around campus without having to plan every step of my route in advance. 

For a while I was going to Faculty Council meetings to offer feedback on topics related to one of my positions, but the last time I attended a Council meeting, my knee hurt so badly that I resolved to stay away until such time as Hell freezes over. Council meets on the top floor of the administration building, a lovely historic pile where the steps seem as steep and endless as the Eiffel Tower.  

How would a person dependent on a wheelchair access any of the services available in that building? Well, there's no room inside the building for an elevator, so some years ago the College installed an outdoor chair lift just next to the steps. To operate the chair lift, you have to press a buzzer and hope someone inside the building hears the summons and knows how to operate the lift. Once years ago the chair lift got stuck halfway up with a wheelchair-bound person in it. 

And even if it works, the chair lift only gets you so far: access to the main floor of the building, where all the services most essential to students are located. There is no elevator to the upper floor, where Faculty Council meets and where the Human Resources office is located. How am I supposed to file paperwork requesting accommodations for my bum knee when I can't get up the steps to HR? 

But let's look on the bright side: I can walk! I can sleep! And I'm not trying to play football with a broken neck! I've reached the age when joint pain is a fairly constant part of everyday life, but there's hope that someday I'll be able to walk down the stairs without giving it a second thought. Anything to avoid the elevator! 

When the door swings back

On cop shows it's become a cliche: the officers encounter a woman with bruises on her face and ask who's been hitting her and the woman says I walked into a door. Lame! Such a lame excuse that it has become code for Let's all pretend that no one is hitting me. 

So I probably ought to come up with something else to say when people ask about the bruise on my forehead, like The plunger the aliens used to suck me into their flying saucer left a nasty red mark. That's about as believable as I walked into a door, but nevertheless I assure you that I' telling the truth: I walked into a door, and I have a door-shaped bruise to prove it.

Trust me: my husband is the last person on earth who would intentionally hurt anyone, and also he doesn't know his own strength, so if he decided one day to punch me in the face, I'd still be lying on the floor in the room where it happened. The laundry room. Which has swinging saloon doors, one of which failed to swing back out and so was located where I didn't expect it when I turn to walk vigorously out of the room.

My husband heard me holler and yelled up from the basement, Are you okay?  

No, I said, but there's not a thing you can do about it. 

I could blame it on my lifelong klutziness or an aging body or the malignant door, but the fact is that I've been doing a lot of stupid things lately because I'm distracted by fears that my teaching career is going pfft right in front of my face. Whatever I do to try not to think about it, I'm frequently assaulted by intrusive thoughts of despair over my moribund teaching career. 

No literature classes this semester because students wouldn't sign up for them. No upper-level literature class since fall of 2024, and it's possible that one or both of my literature classes scheduled for next semester will be canceled due to low enrollment, which would leave me with...nothing to teach. 

Of course the Powers That Be will make sure I devote my non-teaching time to administrative projects to make up for not teaching, but while I'm pretty good at administrative claptrap, it doesn't feed my soul the way teaching does. And it's a little embarrassing for the senior member of the English department to be haunting the halls with nothing to do because my courses have been so roundly rejected by students that I've become utterly irrelevant. (And they're left with no options for American Literature classes, which leads to a pretty unbalanced English major, but that's not my fault.)

I'm trying not to whine too much about this lest I become the curmudgeonly old crone who's always bringing down the mood, which will make me even less welcome on campus. But when a colleague from another department asked how I was doing this morning and I said not great and spilled my guts, I found out that it's not just me--other departments are seeing declining enrollments, and other colleagues are wondering what they'll do to fulfill contractual requirements when there's nothing left to teach. There's not enough administrative claptrap to fill all the gaps in teaching loads, so what are the options?

It's a painful time to be a prof, but at least the painful bruise on my forehead gives me a chance to change the subject. Twenty-five years ago I walked through a door into a wonderful career, and now that door has swung back to hit me in the face, and it hurts.

No, I'm not okay--but there's not a thing you can do about it. 

Who will design the official faculty tramp stamp?

This is either a brilliant idea or--well, you decide:

Yesterday the committee I chair was talking about what sorts of door prizes might inspire faculty members to attend a training workshop, and today one of my students mentioned that the best way to lure students to attend events is to have a drawing in which the prize is a gift certificate to a tattoo parlor.

You can see where I'm going with this, right?

Why not offer tattoo parlor gift certificates as door prizes at faculty events? Or, better yet, bring in a tattoo artist to ink 'em up right here on campus?

Think of the possibilities: the college mascot inscribed on our biceps, departmental logos on our ankles, important concepts from our disciplines on our foreheads. Soon departments will be competing to sport the most impressive tattoos, with math profs adding ever more digits of pi while chemists show off diagrams of carbon compounds.

What sort of tattoo would the English department select? Years ago we had a major who wanted the word liminal tattooed on her arm, which is amusing on a visceral level (but only to people who know what liminal means). Should we deck ourselves out in diagrammed sentences, allow our arms to pay homage to authors, or adorn ourselves with quotes from classic works of literature? I'd love to carry with me every day the last two lines from "To the Stone-Cutters" by Robinson Jeffers: "Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found / The honey of peace in old poems." Or maybe just the last line of Denise Levertov's "The Jacob's Ladder": "The poem ascends."

That line might look nice ascending up my neck, except it would probably just make my neck look unwashed--and besides, who would ever get close enough to read a poem off my neck? 

So okay, the idea needs some work, but I'll bet I could find some faculty eager to put in the time to refine it. Far more fun than tackling the pile of student projects and papers coming due in the next couple of weeks.

Maybe I'll get the entire text of Pride and Prejudice micro-printed on the back of my hand. It might look like a blob of ink to others, but wherever I go I'll have on hand something well worth reading.

(Some) visiting writers rock!

In 2009, Anthony Doerr was a cheap date: he came to campus, met with a creative writing class, had lunch with English majors, and read from his work in a public reading, all for the pathetic honorarium our department was able to scrape together. We invited him on the strength of his short stories and Four Seasons In Rome and we paid him just enough to tempt him to fly cross-country. This was before the novels and the Pulitzer and the movie deal, so there's no way our meager budget could lure him here today--but if we did, I have no doubt he would spend quality time with students. He was great with students. Alumni still rave about the writing advice he so generously shared.

We've been lucky over the years with many of our visiting writers, pleased with their willingness to share their expertise with students. Sarah Vowell was fabulous. Dan Chaon was great. Joni Tevis was a gem. And the first visiting writer whose visit I arranged--the poet David Citino--read students' work with care and offered focused encouragement. A year later when I learned he'd died, I was so moved by the memory of his patient attention that I cried in front of my class.

But some visiting writers have not been so accommodating. I guess I understand, a little bit: if some big-name writer takes time out of a busy writing schedule to travel out to darkest Appalachia, flying in and out of annoying little airports and staying in a chain motel next to the interstate, they might want to get out of here as quickly as possible, arriving on campus in time to read but avoiding the classes or lunches or opportunities to meet with students. They're tired. They're busy. They're big stars in the literary firmament, and we are nobody.

But do they have to rub it in? I remember one pretty well known writer--whose name I won't mention--whose imperious attitude left a bad taste in my mouth. She openly expressed contempt for our students' work, and while I'm not surprised that a student's writing might not meet the high standard expected by a successful writer of literary fiction, I don't see the need for contempt. But this same author also treated the chair of the English department like the hired help, so maybe contempt was just her usual way of being in the world.

A visiting writer who hates students probably ought to stay away from students entirely--read the work, be inspiring, go away. Fine. But I keep thinking back to that visit by Anthony Doerr, when no one knew that he would someday become THE Anthony Doerr: he convinced our students that their writing mattered, and the students responded by writing more and mattering more.

Pig-headed about Pygmalion

It didn't surprise me at all that my first-year students have never heard of Pygmalion. I mean, why should they? Is anyone seriously teaching Ovid or George Bernard Shaw in high school these days? I was a little surprised that none of them admitted familiarity with My Fair Lady, but why should twenty-first century college students watch a musical released in 1964? Old news. Nothing to see here.

What surprised me most, though, was that when they encountered a reference to Pygmalion in Tara Westover's Educated, none of them looked it up. It appears at a pivotal moment: a scholarship has enabled the unschooled Tara to study in Cambridge, where she suffers deeply from impostor syndrome and feels her unusual childhood ill suits her for academic life. She doesn't know what to wear, what to read, or what to think, and her mentor, Professor Steinberg, is titillated by her ignorance, seeing her as a blank slate ready to be molded into his idea of a scholar. "It's as if I've stepped into Shaw's Pygmalion," he says, and my students just read on without stopping to wonder what that might mean.

Pygmalion was a dude who fell in love with a statue, I tell them, and I show them some images showing a sculptor crafting a beautiful woman in marble. They are unimpressed--like, why do they need to know this? So I explain: Pygmalion was disgusted by the women available to him, finding some flaw in every single woman he saw, so he set out to make one of his own, crafting the perfect woman from marble and then falling in love with the work of his hands. What can you say about a dude who falls in love with his statue? The word desperate comes to mind--like a twenty-first century guy who can't deal with real women and so creates his own AI-generated sweetheart. But today's Pygmalion has no Aphrodite so moved by the depth of his love that she transforms the statue into a real live girl ready to meet his every need. No word on what Galatea thinks of the deal, but whatever.

My students' eyes glaze over.

Look at the image, I tell them. Who has power here? They look: Pygmalion dominates the scene, making and crafting and designing. Galatea is passive, submissive, silent. Who wants to be that girl? 

Here I should probably note that I have only four female students in the class (out of 17), and all but two of the men are athletes, mostly football or basketball players. But that shouldn't make a difference: anyone with a few functioning brain cells ought to be able to look at the representation of Pygmalion and Galatea and understand that the myth envisions the ideal woman as silent, submissive, passive, and designed primarily to serve the needs of men. 

But my students don't want to talk about that.

So I turn back to the text: Tara is trying to reinvent herself in an academic environment that will free her from the restrictions of her home back in Idaho, where she was repeatedly (and violently) shoved into certain models of feminine behavior promoted by her church, her community, and her father (who referred to six-year-old girls in tutus as whores because they were showing too much leg). Young Tara hopes academe will free her to become her own person, but the first mentor she encounters at Cambridge takes glee in viewing her as Galatea to his Pygmalion.

Why would Tara Westover compare her mentor to Pygmalion? How free is she in this scene? No one wants to touch the question. No one wants to consider the irony involved in creating an AI-generated image of Pygmalion sculpting Galatea. No one wants to explore who has the power to craft our identities or what sorts of constraints might deter today's students from becoming their best selves. 

It's possible that I see myself as playing the part of Pygmalion in my students' lives, trying to craft them into the scholars I hope they are capable of becoming. But even if I admitted this out loud to my students, how many of them would be willing to look up the words?

Friday fragments, with pulchritudinous yodeling

I've been meeting with a million first-year advisees this week so my brain is a little fried, which may explain why I'm struggling to comprehend reality.

A student is currently earning an F in a math class but assures me he'll bring it up to an A by the end of the semester and I think no wonder he's failing math, but then maybe it would be possible to bring an F up to an A if the prof hands out a whole lot of extra credit. I remind the student of a common advisor mantra--D's get degrees--but he sees an elusive A gleaming on the horizon and thinks it's easily within his reach.

A student in the Nature Writing class wants readers to care about the harm we're doing to our pulchritudinous planet but I tell her I hear pulchritude in the voice of W.C. Fields so maybe she ought to choose another word. She doesn't ask me who W.C. Fields might be so maybe she knows, but she doesn't know for pulchritude.

All the commuter students in my 9 a.m. class were a little late this morning because the Oil and Gas Expo taking place in the rec center has resulted in big trucks taking up the parking spaces commuter students need. Maybe I should have warned my commuters to attend class via Zoom while circling the lot. 

I'm getting a cortisone shot in my sore knee this afternoon from an orthopedist who can't understand why I'm not begging for surgery on both knees, because the X-rays reveal that the arthritis is worse in the left knee, which doesn't even hurt. He says the cortisone shot might provide some relief to the sore knee but it won't last so I'd better get used to the idea of a knee replacement tomorrow if not sooner, but instead I'm getting used to the idea of seeking a second opinion.

My partner in faculty training tells me about a dream in which a vendor is supposed to be training faculty in a new technology but instead he's standing at the front of the classroom dressed in German folk garb and yodeling while his young daughter dances nearby, and while my partner is trying to signal to the presenter that he's lost the plot, I'm rushing around the room passing trays of food, presumably because it's impossible to yodel with a mouth full of cake. This scenario may be a dream, but it doesn't feel too different from what's going on in my world right now.

Attack of the AI bots, plus AI-induced paranoia

So yesterday a colleague in another department asked her students to explain specific ways they use AI in their classes. Do they ask an AI to help them come up with ideas for papers, summarize readings, or find sources for research projects? The first kid to raise his hand said, "I cheat." Then he explained, in detail, how he cheats. Brazen but not surprising. At least he was honest, I guess, if that's what counts as honesty these days.

Now I'm dealing with AI-generated blog comments. It's nice to find in my inbox a comment full of fulsome praise for my prose, except when it includes an embedded link to a sketchy website shilling certain goods and services. And why does the comment sound like it was written by a particularly sycophantic robot? I like praise as much as the next blogger, but I'm not interested in robotic sycophancy!

Of course this makes me question other comments as well. I have moderation turned on for posts more than a week old, but couldn't AI comments sneak into more recent posts without my awareness? I've long suspected that many of the thousands of purported visitors to my blog are bots, but how often do they fool me into believing they're real people? Maybe I'm paranoid, but in the current environment it's a well-deserved paranoid.

My paranoia went a little too far yesterday when I convinced myself that the weather was targeting me personally. I had to walk down the hill to pick up a tray of sandwiches and then walk back up the hill again to deliver them to a meeting, but the sky got dark just before I stepped out the door and the rain poured down throughout the process of fetching sandwiches. Then within minutes after I'd stepped back inside, the sky cleared and the sun came out. Good thing I had a (borrowed) umbrella! And good thing my bum knee didn't fail me on the slippery steps! But if we must endure a 20-minute downpour, why does it have to happen just when I can't avoid being outside?

The weather may hate me, but the AI bots love me. Honestly, it's nice to be appreciated by someone, although I'm not sure what really counts as honesty these days.

Red, yellow, and not too blue

I drive home along the river and marvel over the autumn leaves turning brilliant red and yellow, but at the same time I'm reminded of one Sunday years ago when the pastor asked the congregation what they were thankful for and some nice church lady mentioned the beautiful fall leaves, only to have another nice church lady intone darkly, "The leaves look nice now, but soon they'll all fall down and the colors will go away and everything will turn dark and bleak and make me think of death." 

Well sure, that's one way to look at it, but if I had to think about death every time I saw a colorful leaf, I'd stop looking. But I can't drive home with my eyes shut so instead I glory in the beauty of nature, even when I'm in pain--or especially when I'm in pain.

Having a diagnosis for my bum knee is a bit of a relief--torn meniscus, severe arthritis--but I'm definitely looking forward to getting some treatment, which will probably start with steroid injections. The knee is not quite so painful at night these days but it's excruciating when I have to stand for long periods of time. At church I can generally get through one hymn without too much discomfort, but last Friday at the inauguration of our college president I had to march in the academic procession and then remain standing through the national anthem, the invocation, and the college hymn, by which point I was grasping tightly to the chair in front of me to avoid falling over from the pain. The colleague next to me whispered You can sit down if you need to, but people were taking photos all over the place and I didn't want to go viral as the evil professor who refused to stand for the national anthem--or the prayer, or the hymn. In these troubled times, I didn't want a personal, practical decision to be interpreted as a symbolic act.

Despite the pain I went for a walk up my road Saturday morning just to see how far I could go. I took my husband along to distract me with conversation, which helped. Our creek is mostly dry right now and looks like a river of leaves, but we heard kingfishers chattering and saw the friendly smiles of neighbors, which also helped. One of our close neighbors killed himself last week--Who knows why? It all got to be too much for him--which made me sad for his family, who will see the lovely colors of autumn through grief-tinged eyes.

Or maybe the lovely colors will provide some comfort. I know they cheer me up, even if I'm well aware that winter is coming. I may be a little blue, but I refuse to encounter the beauty of autumn except with eyes wide open. 

  

Our creek looks like a sea of leaves.

 

Mind-reading their way toward educational goals

Extra credit to anyone who can read my mind right now, I said, and a student said, Seriously?

I didn't hand out any extra credit this morning but I did give a student an imaginary gold star for guessing what I was asking for when I wrote WWTD on the whiteboard. 

My first-year seminar class has reached the point in Tara Westover's Educated where young Tara has to seek help her reach her educational goals. She goes to office hours to ask a professor how to improve her performance in class, asks a friend for tutoring, gets her pastor to help her apply for a government grant, and even submits to her roommate's instruction on the importance of washing her hands after she uses the bathroom. (Because yes, she was that clueless.) 

On Friday my students will start learning about the complicated process of creating an educational plan and selecting classes for next semester, so today I wanted to draw connections between what they were reading in Westover's book and what they'll be doing in planning their own educational goals. So I asked them to write down specific educational goals for the short term (passing that next chemistry exam, for instance), medium term (getting into a major class next semester), and long term (studying abroad, getting an internship). Then I asked them to get into groups, talk about their most challenging goals, and then answer the question I wrote on the board: WWTD? 

Does anyone know what this means? I asked, adding, I doubt it since I just made it up.  

That's when I offered extra credit for mind-reading, and they fumbled toward an answer: Who Wants To Dive, What Would They Do, What Would Timmy Do--and then I said, Close, but not Timmy. 

What would Tara do said a voice from the front row. (Gunners in the front row, as usual.) 

Gold star! (Except I didn't actually have any gold stars.) What Would Tara Westover do if faced with the challenges you've been discussing? And where can you find that kind of help here? 

They came up with great answers, so at least for today I know they know how to use campus resources. Will this result in a sudden influx of students coming to office hours? If so, I need to top up my supply of gold stars.

Monday-morning meh

This morning at my annual wellness checkup my doctor asked whether I ever get depressed and I burst out laughing. Frankly, depression would be a totally rational response to the world we're all living in as well as the specific conditions of my job, where ChatGPT is turning everyone's brains to mush and the English major is being marginalized and others keep taking credit for my work.

But no, I'm not depressed, I said. A little glum sometimes, a little angry, a little prone to wondering what all this pain and suffering is for, but I wouldn't call that depressed. That's just life.

The good news is that my blood pressure is excellent, which is surprising since I've gained a little weight, which is not surprising since it's really hard to exercise when my knee screams every time I move, which is also not surprising since I've apparently been suffering from a torn meniscus since (checks calendar) mid-August, during which time the elevator in my building was out of order for five weeks. (All of my classes are upstairs.)

Tomorrow I'll get X-rays on both knees and start the long process of figuring out what can be done to ease the pain of a torn meniscus, which (checks Dr. Google) should have included staying off my feet and elevating the knee rather than walking up and down steps on it for the past two months. Depending on the extent of the damage, remedies run from physical therapy all the way up to knee replacement. But at least my blood pressure is excellent! It's good to have something to celebrate.

 

  

Art, nature, essays, chickens--what more could anyone ask for?

File under Where does the time go? 

Fall break will end in a few hours and I've just this minute finished my midterm grading. I'd promised myself that I would really relax during this four-day break and I guess I must have because I can't possibly account for all those hours. The grading itself didn't take too long, but finding novel ways to postpone grading seems to have eaten up my entire break.

Okay, I had a little fun. I kept telling people that I was planning to go to Youngstown over break and they kept asking me why, to which I had no good response. Colleagues mentioned Italian food and organized crime, neither of which interested me all that much. I wanted to go to a museum, the Butler Institute of American Art on the campus of Youngstown State University, and since it didn't open until 11 a.m. on Thursday, I spent the early morning hours at the lovely Mill Creek Metropark in the company of waterfalls, ducks, fall colors, friendly dog-walkers, an old mill, and lots of steps and sloping trails.

Now I won't be seeing the doctor about my wonky knee until tomorrow so I was still in quite a lot of pain during my one-day visit to Youngstown, but the knee was much happier hiking up and down hills in the park than it was walking around on very hard floors at the museum. Good thing there were plenty of places where I could sit and look at interesting art, although one of those places turned out to be more hazardous than expected: a cushy chair I sunk into so deeply that I had trouble getting out of it again. This hefty workman in flannel shirt and heavy boots kept clomping past carrying lengths of wood and I briefly considered asking him to stop and pull me out of the chair, but eventually I managed to extricate myself without assistance, though I knocked over the chair in the process. I'm just glad it wasn't a priceless artwork encrusted with crystals. No lasting damage was done except to my dignity.

And what about the museum itself? Lovely building, really stupid rest-room location, some nice paintings by the likes of Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt--the sorts of works I often show in literature courses dealing with portrayals of nature. I liked the folk-art section though I wish there'd been more of it; in a room devoted to carousel art, I encountered a carved horse that looked deformed if not downright demonic. What child would willingly sit atop such a frightful beast?

My favorite part, though, was an entire gallery devoted to Julio Larraz, a Cuban artist who fled to the U.S. in 1961. Huge canvases, vibrant colors, surreal images intended, I think, to critique oppressive power structures. An image of an antique telephone on wooden wheels standing before the high walls of some sort of fortress reminded me of the Trojan Bunny scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I couldn't decide whether the paintings were more tragic or comic but either way I found them haunting.

After all that excitement, I managed a 24-hour visit to the grandkids before I had to come home to attend to the chickens while my husband was in prison. Every time I'd mentioned that my husband was going to prison, people who knew him would assume, correctly, that it was some sort of ministry thing, while those who didn't know him would look puzzled and tactfully change the subject, which I enjoyed immensely. But he couldn't tend the chickens from prison so he had modified the security fence around the chicken run so I could get inside (while the raccoons could not), and on a dark, drizzly evening he had given me chicken-tending lessons including the essential steps of wearing a hat (to shoo the reluctant chickens into the coop at nightfall) and pausing on the way down the hill to gently call out to the chickens to let them know I was coming. 

I executed all the steps properly in his absence although I did have some difficulty getting the two guineas to go into the coop last night. I think they hate me, those guineas, or else they enjoyed seeing me chase them around the coop while waving my hat. I'm sure I heard them laughing at me. If they'd made me fall on my face in the mud, I'd still be down there waiting for some flannel-clad fellow to come along and help me up again.

So during my four-day break I have limped through pain to see art and nature and workmen and essays and chickens and grandkids and now, finally, I am done with it all and ready to relax. Too bad I have to get back to work in a little over twelve hours. Where does the time go?

Bridge bisects the scene: waterfall, old mill.

The roar of rushing water dominates Lanterman's Mill.

Julio Larraz, The Trojan Horse

Another kind of horse. Folk art, allegedly.

Grading grates on my brain

Just now I wrote in the margin of a student paper, "This omission is everywhere."

Not helpful! Even if the student recognizes omission, he's unlikely to be enlightened by the image of an omnipresent absence. 

In my defense, midterm grades are due next week so I've been grading a lot of stuff, some of it written in handwriting so tiny and faint that reading it requires the assistance of a scanning electron microscope. One student (this is true) could not figure out how to save his document so instead uploaded a photograph of the computer screen on which his document appears. 

Yesterday I had technical difficulty showing a clip of a speech in class and a student instantly solved the problem for me, hurrah. Today I've had to email students in that same class to tell them that if they're summarizing the content of a speech by President John F. Kennedy, it's not appropriate to keep referring to him as "John" as if he's their bestie. Show some respect!

And now I need to finish grading today's wave of student work before tomorrow's tsunami of work comes roaring in. All this grading makes me wish I could find myself an omnipresent absence and slowly sink into it. 

Resisting my inner Bartleby

Last Friday I started my work day by spilling a cup of tea all over the floor in my office and today I did the same with coffee, except some of it missed the floor and soaked my pants and sweater. I'm going everywhere smelling like coffee today, to which my colleague across the hall responded, "Well, there are worse things you could smell like."

True. I would blame all this spillage on multitasking, but the simple fact is I'm too much of a klutz to be trusted with food or drink at my desk. Lesson learned! 

Today's theme is lifelong learning, a quality I promote and embrace except when I prefer not to. This week I'd really like to pull a Bartleby in reference to a particular lifelong learning opportunity, but when the arc of the universe tends toward chickens, who am I to resist?

I haven't spent much time with the chickens (and two guineas) for a while. When the resident chicken-fancier started conducting all-out war against marauding raccoons, he fortified the chicken run in a way that made it impossible for my short legs to climb over the fortifications. Not a problem so far, but my husband is going to prison starting Thursday (as a visitor—part of a group conducting a three-day retreat for select prisoners). Our son's legs are long enough to scale the anti-raccoon fence, but he's out of town all week. Meanwhile, someone needs to attend to the chickens. 

That would be me.

First, though, I need chicken-tending lessons. My husband's task today is to modify the raccoon-resistant fence so that I can get inside the chicken run, and then I'll engage in some lifelong learning. I think I can figure out how to feed and water the poultry, but the task I don't relish is toddling down the hill on my bum knee to round up all the chickens (and two guineas!) and shut them safely inside the coop for the night, and then toddling down there the next morning to let 'em out again. 

Good thing my fall break starts Thursday so I won't have to rush off to campus first thing every morning. And good thing the plans I'd made for fall break can be adapted to the needs of the chickens. And good thing my husband is a kind, gentle, supportive person who does all kinds of wonderful things for me, like making me tea every morning that I can then proceed to spill all over my office.

I'm inspired today by another lifelong learner, a colleague in the Biology department who retired in May but still does some volunteer work on campus. We're not short on empty offices (thanks to years of faculty cuts) so my retired colleague has been given an office to use as his home base, and somehow he managed to put up some official-looking signage proclaiming him "Infra-Dean of Biodiversity, Entomology, Invertebrates, & other stuff."

You've got to admire someone who's earned the right to lean back on the sofa and eat bon-bons but who instead takes the time to create a new title and signage that looks so authentic no one is likely to notice that it's entirely bogus. My husband suggested that I follow suit and change the sign outside my office every week until someone notices. I would have to learn how to get the fonts and spacing right and make it look authentic, but that's a bit of lifelong learning I would heartily embrace.

Teaching in the golden years

Okay, so I'm having a bad knee day and I may have groaned just a bit when I got up from the computer desk at the end of class this morning, but there was only one student left in the room and it wasn't a loud groan. Nevertheless the student very helpfully responded to my pain thus: "I remember what my grampa always says about getting old," and I wanted to tell the student to stop right there because a sentence that starts that way cannot possibly end well, but he insisted on completing the thought: "Grampa said the only thing golden about the golden years is his pee."

Nothing I've ever read or heard or experienced as a teacher has equipped me to respond in the moment to that kind of statement, so maybe the best thing to do under the circumstances would be to pretend I've gone deaf. Which would only serve to reinforce the student's belief that I'm a creaky old codger contemporary with his grampa.

Earlier in the same class students had been showing me their progress on annotated bibliography entries, most of which were in fonts so small they could have been etched on the edge of a sewing needle. I kept needing to blow up the page and squint, which made me feel about a million years old.

And then I pulled some real old-fogey moves like insisting that the deadline is real and therefore the right time for students to mention a dead laptop is at the beginning of class, not at the moment after the dropbox closes, and if some technical difficulty made submitting the assignment on time impossible, then their best approach would be to ask me what they can do to remedy the situation rather than to tell me "I'll just be turning this in later" with a smirk that brings to mind the phrase "arrogant prick."

But of course I wouldn't say that out loud to a student--and even if I did, he wouldn't be able to hear it over the creaking of my bad knee.    

Pumpkins, peppers, pawpaws, pizzazz

After a weekend with the grandkids, I arrived home yesterday to find my kitchen and dining room overflowing with produce from the fall harvest. I don't even like spaghetti squash but they're stacked on the dining table alongside a pile of fragrant pawpaws that seems undiminished by the dozens I took north with me. The kitchen counters are covered with tomatoes of many sizes and colors while the fridge is full of okra, habaneros, and red bell peppers. The resident gardener wonders whether I can throw together a batch of stuffed peppers sometime this week, but stuffed peppers are not so much thrown together as painstakingly assembled over a series of hours. So maybe--but not today.

On Friday before I left my husband put a great pumpkin into the back of my car, a pumpkin so big he had to use the tractor to carry it up from the garden, and then he wedged it in with pillows to make sure it didn't roll around. All well and good, but I wasn't able to take the tractor with me to the grandkids' house and I certainly wasn't planning to try to pick up that pumpkin myself. It took a group effort and a garden cart to move the orange behemoth. 

It's been a bizarre garden year: many early crops did nothing--we had very few zucchinis or broccoli and a handful of beans--but later crops are going bananas. I hope we can find someone interested in spaghetti squash because I certainly don't intend to cook all eight million of them. I've been bringing containers of tiny tomatoes to campus to share with colleagues, but I'm not hauling in a giant pumpkin. And all those habanero peppers? If my husband eats them all, we'll never be able to kiss again. 

But I'm not complaining. As long as we have sweet corn in the freezer and fresh tomatoes boiling down into paste in the kitchen, I'm ready for a tasty winter. 

 

Going where I have to go

"This is how the career ends. Not with a retirement party and a gold watch but with a second career in the gig economy." --Reuven Perlman, "How Other Things End" in the Sept. 22 New Yorker.

What I'm telling myself this morning: I may have had a bizarre day that revealed once again the appalling level of incompetence running rampant in the universe, and I may have left my umbrella in the library so that I had to run through this morning's badly-needed rain without protection, and I may be required to give up my lunch hour to meet with someone I've never heard of to deal with an issue that does not concern me, and I may be facing students who think it's cute to ask out loud in class things like "I'm a computer science major--why do I have to learn to write?", BUT at least my job does not require me to be hit in the face with a 99-mile-per-hour fastball on live  television. Neither does it require me to instruct the editor of the AP story about David Fry's unfortunate injury that it is not correct to write that Fry "laid in the dirt for several minutes." He lay! Lay lay lay! This is not that difficult, people!

On the plus side, this morning my Nature Writing students discussed Annie Dillard's marvelous essay "Total Eclipse," which includes a quote from Theodore Roethke's poem "The Waking," which none of my students had read before so we took a look at it in class and examined how he uses end stops to reinforce the feeling of a person stumbling blindly down a poorly marked path, and I am taking the final verse as my marching orders for the brief amount of time left in my teaching career:

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

 

 

 

 

 

Twiddling the time away

According to our old pal the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of twiddling appeared circa 1547 in J. Redford's Moral Play of Wit & Science: "As for her syngyng, pypyng, and fydlyng, what unthryftynes therin is twydlyng?" Twiddling emerges from the marriage of twisting and fiddling, and an alternate spelling (tweedling) suggests that the patron saints of twiddling ought to be Tweedledum and Tweedledee. 

No relation to tiddlywinks, a game requiring facility with winks and squidgers and the ability to squop. Tiddlywinks derives from British slang and may be related to both kiddlywink and pillywink, a word that ought to apply to tiddlywinks played with fluffy pink pillows but most definitely does not. Pillywinks are instruments of torture also known as thumbscrews.

While twiddling appears in the sixteenth century, thumb-twiddling is first recorded much later, in the 1930s. So when I twiddle away my morning by exploring the more esoteric uses of twiddling, I am following a long tradition.

I probably shouldn't say this out loud where any of my overworked colleagues can hear me, but my skills are being underutilized this semester. Few classes, low enrollments, few papers to grade, few colleagues interested in attending workshops or training events--whatever the reasons, I keep finding myself with time on my hands. I haven't quite been reduced to thumb-twiddling, but yesterday I finally submitted an essay to a journal and today I'm thinking about writing a letter of recommendation that isn't due until November.

And it looks like things won't be much better next semester. If current enrollment trends continue, I'll finish my career teaching negative 27 students and grading no papers at all.

But I'll think about that tomorrow. Today I sit and twiddle my thumbs and wonder where I can locate some winks and squidgers and find someone to teach me to squop.  

A step-by-step guide to writing a step-by-step guide

Draw a circle on the whiteboard.

Easy enough to accomplish as long as you know what the word circle means. But what if you're a visitor from an alternate universe consisting entirely of straight lines and right angles? What if you've never seen a circle, never heard of a circle, never held a marker in your hand to draw a circle on the whiteboard?

Tell our visitor how to draw a circle, I told another acting as instructor, But use only words--and turn your back so you can't see what he's doing.

We tried this exercise in my Nature Writing class with two different pairs of students, each pair made up of a cosmic visitor unfamiliar with the circle concept and an instructor explaining how to draw a circle. The instructors used various methods, from defining a circle in the abstract to comparing a circle to other non-circular things to providing step-by step instructions for hand movements designed to result in a circle on the whiteboard. The visiting aliens followed the instructions to the letter but produced a dotted line in the shape of a mountain range or a squiggle resembling an upper-case N. 

Then we tried something similar with a more common task: Your classmate has never learned to tie her shoes--lead her through the steps, using only words. The classmate followed instructions carefully but ended up with a twisted mess of laces.

What's going on here?

My Nature Writing students had turned in their first major essay yesterday so I wanted to give them a lightweight but thought-provoking class activity aiming toward the next major project: an essay explaining a natural process. I wanted them to think about what's required to help a reader understand a process, so we started with some very simple exercises in giving instructions--Draw a circle. Tie your shoes. It's not as easy to explain as you might think, especially if you're limited only to words. (Try it!) 

We talked about methods for making a process comprehensible--establish common vocabulary, compare the process to something more familiar--but then we talked about the why question. A biology exam might ask students to explain the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, but outside of a testing situation, why would anyone need to know?

Then I showed them Margaret Renkl's recent essay from the New York Times on "How to Count Butterflies." She helps us understand various processes in the butterfly life cycle for a very clear purpose: so we can help protect them from extinction. Explain a natural process to a specific audience, making sure they know why it matters and what's at stake. That's the next assignment in a nutshell, and if our practice exercises over the next couple of weeks are successful, then my students ought to produce something more convincing than a squiggle on a whiteboard or a tangle of shoelaces.    

Next time I'll leave the red pencil at home

I appreciate the student who raised his hand in class and said, "Planetarium--I can never remember whether that's about plants or planets." Sure, we all got a good laugh out of it, but I wish more people were willing to speak up and admit when they're confused instead of nodding knowingly about things they know nothing about. 

I also appreciate the student who, when asked why a character in Tara Westover's Educated had said some particularly outrageous thing, raised his hand and said, "Because he's crazy." Yes! As I wanted to tell the rest of the class--especially the ones avoiding eye contact--"If you don't realize the dude is nuts, you're not paying attention."

Yesterday at a big meeting I was tempted to get out my red pencil--the imaginary one I always carry, long enough to reach up to a theater marquee to remove unnecessary apostrophes--and correct some errors on slides presented by people I probably shouldn't be correcting in public. First I wanted to correct the spelling of a colleague's name, because why bother congratulating a person if you can't be bothered to spell the person's name correctly? But that's the former journalist in me speaking, the person who breaks out in hives at the recollection of a particularly egregious spelling error.

But then if I'd had my imaginary red pencil with me, I would have wanted to correct some other things, like enrollment numbers and rambling responses and administrative decisions I find ridiculous. These things may not have been errors, but I simply can't accept a world in which such statements can stand unchallenged.

Finally, I was delighted to share with my upper-level writing students this passage from a book I've been slogging my way through:

Nowadays, of course, given all man has learned of their senses, it is easy to see why they should have felt so liberated, so connected to their wild selves, when it appeared: like any crepuscular creatures that possess night vision (whether naturally or through a device), the augmented but still ethereal light of that Moon makes all the usual night sights--whether rustling trees and bushes or prey and predators--show up brilliantly. 

My students were apologizing for their first drafts, worried because they weren't quite perfect. I pointed out that the definition of a draft is a piece of writing with something wrong with it, and then I pointed out that the sentence above was written by a professional author and published by a reputable press that presumably employs competent editors, and yet not one of us could make sense of it. (Does it help if you know they refers to cats and when it appeared refers to the full moon? Not much.) If a sentence can pass through so many brilliant minds without becoming comprehensible, then why should we expect all our sentences to hit their marks on the first try?

So here's my tepid cheer for the presence of error in the world. Let's speak up and admit that we don't know everything! We're all still learning (I hope), so let's admit our confusion out loud and help each other toward understanding.

Updating, infinitely

My classroom computer greets me with the Spinning Circle of Doom and a message saying Updating--please wait, so I wait, because what else can I do? But while I'm waiting I zone out and let my mind wander and I wonder why I can't have an Updating message pop up on my forehead when I'm trying to process new information--in fact, why can't we all take time for Updating, especially in the middle of trying times when we could use a little hiatus to bite our tongue and think before spouting off something we'll later regret.

The enforced stillness while Updating is a good time to ruminate, to slow down the flow of repartee until our brain cells can catch up to our emotions. I know some people who ought to deploy the Updating tactic instead of heading straight for the nuclear option, and if everyone would occasionally take a few moments for Updating, maybe some of the quiet voices in the back would have a chance to be heard.

Of course problems might arise if people get stuck in an Updating loop, shutting down all communications while a glitchy system doubles back on itself infinitely. But that's a risk I'd be willing to take if it would encourage everyone to listen more carefully, ruminate deeply, and measure words carefully before spouting off. 

Now someone just needs to invent the app.  

Mailing it in?

I'm not, I think--or at least I hope I'm not. Mailing it in, that is. Last week I submitted the official notification that I intend to retire at the end of Fall 2026 semester, just over a year from now. I wanted to give the Powers That Be sufficient time to find an appropriate person to replace me in each of my three campus roles in hopes that I can assist with a smooth transition, but I suspect that we'll see the usual series of delays followed by a frantic attempt to fill in with adjuncts. 

I'm aware that I have no control over how the institution decides to fill the gaps created by my retirement, but I can control how hard I work for my final couple of semesters. Does being a lame duck give me permission to slack off?

Well, yes and no.

I'm teaching two new classes this fall and my students are keeping me on my toes, so I'm certainly not slacking off there. And I'm trying to plan campus events to enrich teaching and highlight faculty research, though it's a little difficult when we're suffering a campus-wide epidemic of not responding to emails. I'd like to encourage more participation in these events, but I'm not interested in holding guns to my colleagues' heads, even if I can afford to burn a few bridges. 

So I'm still working hard and doing my part, but there are certain discussions on campus from which I have chosen to abstain. Do I care about the finer points of the campus calendar for the three years after I retire? Not a whit, so don't ask me to respond to any online surveys or attend another meeting. Am I eager to get worked up about the suggestion that it's time to consider revising our General Education curriculum? I've fought that fight too many times before--go recruit someone else. Do I worry about whether I'm producing enough scholarship, publishing enough articles, or providing enough service to the campus community? Well, I don't intend to fill out an annual review form ever again, so who will even know how much I contribute?

I've also slacked off in regard to complaining about conditions we're forced to endure. My campus-owned laptop has so many crotchets that I've had to develop all kinds of annoying workarounds, but nobody's going to spend money on a new laptop for my final semesters so I'm biting my tongue and doing my best with what I have. Likewise the unbearable cold in my office, the nonfunctioning clocks in the classrooms, and the stained ceiling tiles all over my building. If I were planning to stick around longer I might put some energy into lobbying to spiff up the learning environment, but at this point I'm just done with all that. If the College has been willing to put up with my repeated complaints for the past 25 years, I can probably just grin and bear it for a few semesters.

But there are a few areas where I'll put in some extra effort over the next twelve months. For one thing, I want my final semester of teaching to include something memorable, a class that allows me to dig into great literature while challenging students to think more deeply. I don't know who or what I'll be teaching next fall, but I sincerely hope it's not all first-year classes.

And I want Emeritus status--not that it counts for anything, but because I've earned it. We're in the process of changing the process for Emeritus status so it's not at all clear how to make that happen, but I'm hopeful that at some point someone will intervene in my favor. 

And I want a party. There's no money for parties so for the past couple of years retirees have been allowed to slink off into the sunset without a peep, but I intend to go out with a bang even if I have to pay for it myself. I want cake and music and poetry and speeches and all my favorite people gathered round, and if I can't get that, I might just threaten to stay until I can.

Just joking. Definitely retiring at the end of next year because my eyes are too fatigued to see to the end of the day, much less the end of the decade. The end is in sight, but I can't spend too much time looking toward it while I have all these student papers to read and events to plan and nonresponsive colleagues to track down. It's a tough job but someone's got to do it--at least a little while longer. 

Illuminating "Illuminati"

Yesterday I showed my first-year seminar students the following definition of the word Illuminati: "Comprised of several of the world's most powerful heroes, the Illuminati is a secret organization that shapes the superhuman world and protects Earth from catastrophic threats."

"Is this what Tara Westhover is talking about when she refers to the Illuminati in Educated?" I asked. No, they said, and when I asked why, one said, "Because superheroes aren't real."

I suppose that's as good an answer as any. I pointed out that the definition I'd shown them came from a web page produced by Marvel, so it's relevant within the Marvel universe but not necessarily elsewhere.  

Then I showed another definition of Illuminati that went into great detail about an eighteenth-century Bavarian named Adam Weishaupt who had a penchant for secret societies. My students were pretty sure Tara Westhover didn't have Adam Weishaupt in mind in Educated, but they struggled to pin down a reason until I pointed out the source of the information: The Catholic Encyclopedia.

Westover's memoir, of course, concerns neither superheroes nor Catholic history but instead a father who's obsessed by conspiracy theories and convinced that going to college means being brainwashed by the Illuminati. Many of my students had read the assigned chapters with only a vague idea of what Illuminati might mean, but at least they're reading! And the word provided a good object lesson to introduce the primary purpose of the first-year seminar: developing information literacy and critical thinking skills.

They had more difficulty last week when I gave them a photocopy of the first few chapters of Educated and then required them to discuss them in class, for points. The discussion went really well, but I'd given them no information about the author or context so some students struggled to use the correct pronouns or place the scenes in the correct time frame. 

Afterward I asked a few students why they'd assumed the narrator was male and they said the character was doing "guy things," like working in a junkyard and messing around with guns. But I was more interested in my students' struggles to determine the historical context of the passage, with some insisting it must take place more than 100 years ago because the characters were relying on midwives and herbal tinctures instead of doctors and hospitals. A student who had spent time in the military said the reference to MRE's means it had to date from after the Vietnam conflict, which was progress, but it was only after I made them look up Randy Weaver and Ruby Ridge that they got the date right--1992. One student wanted to know why, then, the characters act as if they're living in "pioneer times." Really great question! Let's talk about that some more.

We've got quite a lot of Educated ahead of us so we'll have plenty of time to ask questions and learn to evaluate the reliability of answers, an activity that would surely lead Westover's father to insist that I'm a member of the Illuminati intent on brainwashing students. But I can live with that. If I can motivate a few students to stretch their minds beyond what they're so certain they already know, then my work here is done.  

Oak, kay?

The massive oak hit the driveway with a thud, sending up a cloud of dust and debris that coated the resident woodsman's fuzzy arms until he looked like a sawdust-encrusted beast. He is a beast with the chainsaw, cutting a huge wedge out of the oak tree's trunk before making the fatal cut to send it sprawling. 

The last time we needed to remove a tree that big, it was surrounded by power lines and so we relied on professionals, who charged thousands of dollars but left us with wood to heat our house all winter. This time the tree was far from power lines but fairly close to the edge of the garage, so my husband rigged up ropes and chains to the tractor to pull the tree in a safe direction, straight across the driveway. Then he went to work with the chainsaw to cut away bits and branches until only the thickest part of the tree was blocking the drive.

And that's when the chainsaw stopped working.

So the tree will continue to block our driveway until the chainsaw gets fixed. We can get around it by driving down into the lower meadow, as long as the weather stays dry so the meadow doesn't get mushy. But anyone coming up from the road won't be able to see the tree until they're right on top of it, and then there's nothing to be done but back up down the hill and venture through the meadow, if they dare.

Ah, the joys of country life. Always another adventure.

 

Coming down near the garage--but not on it.

Still standing tall

  

Laboring on Labor Day, perhaps for the penultimate time

I'm required to labor on Labor Day--but not too hard. While my blog takes a holiday, here are my annual listing of Rules for Laboring on Labor Day that I published some years back:

1. Dress down. They can make me teach on Labor Day, but they can't make me dress up.

2. Pack your own picnic. No way I'm eating at my desk when the rest of the world is outside grilling burgers!

3. Don't begrudge the revelers their revels. The people who clean our bathrooms, make our photocopies, and answer our phones work hard for very little money and deserve every minute of their day off. I do not wish they were here working, but I do wish I could join them on their day off.

4. Office hours? Are you kidding me? No one comes to my office hours on a normal day, so what are the chances that anyone will show up on Labor Day?

5. Enjoy the commute. No public school = no school buses holding up traffic, no 20-mile-per-hour zones, and no teens racing around curves on country roads.

6. Be there. Nobody's fooled by the Labor Day flu; if my students are required to be in class on Labor Day, then I'm going to be there with them.

7. Don't try to explain it. I know we have reasons for teaching on Labor Day, and some of them may even be valid ("We can't shortchange Monday labs!"), but the real reason we teach on Labor Day is that we've never been sufficiently motivated to change it.