Floods of laughter, joy, and beauty

The plan was to visit a couple of wetlands this morning looking at birds before meeting friends for lunch in Jackson, but heavy rains all day yesterday left standing water everywhere water can stand, so as I headed west of Circleville this morning to find the Calamus Swamp, I was dubious. I have spare shoes and socks in the car but I'm not a fan of stomping through six inches of muddy water, which I found covering part of the boardwalk that circles the swamp. Fortunately, I also found an older gentleman who has worked for years as a volunteer at the swamp, and he not only showed me a more passable trail around the muddy spots but also walked alongside and told me about the history of the place. Score one for talking to strangers!

Visiting wetlands was an important part of my Spring Break Restore-My-Equilibrium tour. Last week when I heard some of my students talking about how much they were looking forward to going to Florida for Spring Break, I realized how much I'd missed our usual Florida trip over Christmas, with its requisite visit to the beach. There's nothing quite like looking at rolling water to wash the cobwebs out of my head, but I couldn't manage a trip to Florida for break so I resolved to spend some time near a different kind of water.

So Friday when I left campus early, I drove due north on I-77 and reached Zoar Wetland just in time to enjoy a fast-food lunch, minus the iced tea that spilled all over the picnic shelter when I tripped and fell and smashed my knee. But I tried not to focus on the pain: I sat and ate my lunch in the presence of still water and birds (geese! mergansers! red-winged blackbirds!). Mergansers don't care what new outrage is blowing up on campus email and neither did I, or at least that's what I kept telling myself.

All weekend with the grandkids I tried to ignore my work, except for grading a few freshman essays and posting midterm grades, and then I tried to ignore the emails from the student panicking over plagiarism (two cases in one week!) and all the e-mail chains multiplying over campus problems. We went to Sieberling Nature Realm near Akron, where birds will eat seed right out of the grandkids' hands, and on Sunday my daughter and I enjoyed a choir concert in Cleveland in which I could not understand a word of the lyrics (mostly in German) but felt a flood of beauty washing over me. 

On Sunday we had lunch out on the deck in gorgeous sunshine, and when a sudden wind gust launched a pile of paper napkins into a whirlwind, we laughed our fool heads off. The wind soon blew in a storm, though, and I drove through downpours on and off Monday.

More laughter at lunch with a friend in Columbus, followed by a visit to the Ohio Craft Museum, where a collection of quilts created by African American women artists flooded my senses with color and joy. Then a little shopping, a little visit to a chocolatier, and a little more driving south of Columbus to Circleville, where I spent a quiet night.

Tomorrow I need to be back in the office to work on preps for next week's classes--and for the Learning in Retirement class I'll be teaching starting next week, an eight-week course, two hours every Tuesday afternoon, in which a bunch of local retirees expect me to introduce them to the history and theory of comedy. I agreed to teach this course back in 2020 but was thwarted by Covid, and now here it is ready to start and I haven't done a blessed thing to prepare. 

So if today is my final day to have some fun, I'd better get to it. I visited the Calamus Swamp this morning and I hope to get to Lake Katharine after lunch, although flooding may limit access to some favorite parts. It's not quite a week at the beach, but simply getting away from campus problems and exposing my senses to floods of beauty have worked wonders. And look--no sunburn! (I've got to look on the bright side because the dark side is so unbearably dark.)  

80 miles from campus, ignoring the pain

Beautiful quilts a the Ohio Craft Museum

Feeding the birds

Snowdrops!

Yeah, I'm not walking through that

Osage orange trees planted along a fence-line in the 1800s

 

Grinding toward spring break

On Monday I taught four classes that filled me with energy and hope for the future, and then I attended a two-hour meeting that made me want to curl up under the table in a fetal position and whimper.

That's the way it goes when we're wrapped up in a campus controversy while continuing to do some of the world's more rewarding work. Learning is happening! Students are exploring interesting texts! Both our men's and women's basketball teams are playing in the NCAA tournament! Even on the budget crisis front there's good news: immediate cuts were less draconian than expected and action is being taken to get us through the rest of this year with a little less agony. 

This week I've seen evidence of stakeholders on every level--students, staff, faculty, administrators, trustees, alumni--pulling together to maintain the College's mission well into the future, and as a member of Faculty Council, I've been directly involved in an effort that produced immediate and gratifying results. I can't go into detail but I'll say this: sometimes words work, and when they do, it makes me very happy.

But still I spend far too much time in meetings or casual encounters with people who are fearful and distraught or just plain old angry. Members of the torch-and-pitchfork brigade, fueled by unsupported rumors, are looking for someone to burn in effigy. Local media outlets have fanned the flames, but I can't really blame them. They're doing their best with limited information and so far they've been mostly accurate about some things. But we're still in the middle of an evolving situation, which makes people very nervous. In the absence of solid information, while all the plans that have been put into place this week move toward fruition, we all need to step back and take a deep breath.

Which is why it's a very good thing spring break starts tomorrow. For me, actually, it starts at 10 a.m. today. I'm giving a midterm exam at 8 a.m. (as if students needed another reason to hate that class) and teaching some Harlem Renaissance authors at 9, but I have a guest speaker in my afternoon class and I changed my 11:00 class to an online discussion. I thought about coming up with some legitimate pedagogical reason to move that class online, but the truth is that if I don't get out of town soon, my head is going to explode--and who would clean up the mess?

I see that someone is already preparing for a mess this weekend, when campus will be invaded by hordes of high school students competing in Science Olympiad. As long as the students keep coming, we'll keep teaching 'em. The gears of the educational machine grind on, and those of us in the heart of the machine can only hope that, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, we'll slide through the gears without being ground to pieces. 

As good as it gets?

Lately when my brain stops wallowing in the murky financial swamp long enough to take a frightened glance toward the future, I keep hearing the voice of Jack Nicholson, who, in the 1997 film As Good as it Gets, stuns a room full of psychiatric patients by confronting them with the question What if this is as good as it gets?

Well, what if it is?

Given the College's current budget crunch, the looming decline in high school graduates, and the few years I have remaining before I hang up my dry-erase markers for good, it's possible that I'll never get another pay raise, and if things get dire enough, I may eventually be looking at a pay cut. It's too late to go out on the job market (and there are no jobs anyway), so it looks like I'll be slogging away at a struggling institution until I run out of steam and grind to a halt.

Thanks to years of experience in making ends meet, I am confident that I will survive despite the dire forecast. I didn't become an English professor to get rich (because that would be stupid) and I have enough socked away to keep us from living in a cardboard box under a bridge. I'm more concerned about the emotional toll of finishing my career not with a bang but a whimper. I guess I thought I still had mountains to climb and rewards to seek, but it looks like I may have quietly passed the pinnacle of my career some time ago and I'm now looking at a slow downhill slide--which beats being pushed off a cliff, but it's kind of sad that those seem to be the only available options.

It's a mistake, of course, to equate income with success, and I've certainly earned enough accolades over the years to feel good about the work I do. I can point to the number of students I've helped to achieve their goals, including several who have gone on to grad school, found wonderful careers, and even earned tenure (although that makes me feel old).

What if this is as good as it gets? Well, it's pretty good. Good enough, anyway. But it's really hard to give up the hope that at some point in the future things could get a whole lot better. 

Desperately seeking solutions for surreptitious surveillance situations

This week I uncovered an unusual situation in one of my classes and I can't decide whether my students are out of line or whether I'm an old fogey who needs to get with the program. Maybe there's a middle ground? Help me decide:

I was reading a draft when I saw some familiar words: instead of analyzing a particular work of literature, the student was summarizing what I'd said about the work in class. Now it's not unusual for students to parrot back some version of my words, but since that kind of paper usually doesn't engage in any real analysis, it generally earns a Very Bad Grade. But this was different: this time I saw entire sentences that I distinctly recall coming out of my mouth in class. I can imagine that this might happen if the student took very good notes, but in fact I've never actually seen this student write anything down in class--he just sits there staring at his laptop screen. So how did he reproduce a whole paragraph of my words?

Because he's recording class sessions to listen to later. And, as it turns out, he's not the only one: a whole mess of students are choosing to record my classes instead of taking notes or engaging in discussion. Someone suggested that maybe they got in the habit of recording classes on Zoom and they can't break free of the habit now that we're face-to-face, which seems plausible, but I want it to stop and I want it to stop right now. 

One voice in my head says we live in a digital age so students are accustomed to learning experiences mediated by machines so I should just get over myself and let them do whatever works, but a louder voice reminds me that what they're doing isn't working: they're not taking notes or engaging in the class as it happens, and then they're echoing my words instead of thinking independently. Studies show (I think? Citation needed!) that we remember more of what we write down than what we merely hear, but maybe this generation doesn't learn that way? Or maybe they're listening to recordings of my class over and over until they've memorized the material? Or maybe they're editing snippets together to make me sound like a raving lunatic? (It wouldn't be that difficult.)

I'm fumbling around for reasons to make them stop because the primary reason is that being recorded creeps me out. I don't like having my photo taken or being videotaped or recorded in any way, which is one reason teaching on Zoom was such a soul-destroying experience, and being recorded without my permission feels like a massive violation. If I outlaw laptops in the classroom, they'll use their phones, and I'm not going to go around asking students to empty their pockets to prove that they're not surreptitiously recording the class. I just want them to be fully present and engage in the moment instead of putting off their learning until they can listen to the recording. 

So I talked to the Associate Provost for Talking Faculty Off the Ledge, who promised that an email would go out reminding all students that recording people without their permission is not okay. That reminder is unlikely to deter anyone, so what then? Do I carry on as usual and hope for the best, or do I become the Classroom Recording Police looking for opportunities to confiscate their electronic devices? Or is there some better way? 

I can't make a reasonable decision when I'm this upset, so I'm accepting suggestions. Are my students out of line--or am I?

 

Probably shouldn't be writing about this but "transparency" is the word of the day

One advantage of being raised by wolves is a highly-developed ability to adapt to adverse circumstances, an ability that allowed me to sit calmly through a faculty meeting in which we learned that the budget crisis that we knew was coming has arrived and it's worse than expected. This is tough but I can survive this is what I kept telling myself, and I hope it's true but it doesn't help those whose jobs are now in danger.

We're all taking a hit, even top administrators--and when the admins taking a pay cut, you know there's a problem. Some programs will struggle to survive because they won't be able to fill open positions, and some non-tenure-track instructors will not have their contracts renewed--and those unfortunate people, many of whom were sitting in the room at the time, will be informed of their non-renewal by March 1, a fact that precipitated a massive collective gasp. Another collective gasp happened when we were told that the College will stop matching our pension contributions, effective as soon as they can make the computers switch to check-chomping mode.

I was impressed by my rock-star colleagues who were able to calmly ask reasonable questions and press for further information. If I'd tried to speak up in that fraught moment I would have either whimpered in fear or bared my teeth to attack, further results of being raised by wolves. Today the mood on campus is somber, as well it should be. Those of us who have been here long enough recall the previous budget crisis and the one before that, and some of us are remembering the valued colleagues whose lives were turned upside down just a few short years ago. We survived that, I tell myself, but then comes the kicker--Some of us didn't.

The Rime of the Ancient English Professor

So I'm sitting in my office trying to finish grading the last couple of composition essays when suddenly, without warning, the power goes out.

What to do? I need to get the papers graded before the weekend so I can get out of town and see the grandkids, but my laptop no longer runs on battery power and I have to stay close to my office in case the fix-it dudes show up so I sit in a chair out in the hallway and plug the laptop into the wall and try to continue grading despite the fact that people keep stopping to chat, and then a student comes by to ask me to fill out a reference so she can volunteer at the local hospital, which I am happy to do except the form is due the next day so I promise to fax it in right away, but when I try to do that I discover that the ancient fax machine in our department office has been possessed by demons and sits like an albatross around our necks serving no purpose but to remind us of the futility of all human endeavor. (Coleridge could make a poem about that but I'm not Coleridge so don't get your hopes up.)

So I'm scrambling around trying to find the email address of the volunteer coordinator so I can send over a scan of the reference form before the end of the day when the fix-it dudes show up to restore power to my office, but by this time I need to hie me across campus while gripping a rapidly disintegrating umbrella so I can cheer on my colleagues who are receiving awards at our annual Founders Day Celebration. My applause may be a bit damp, but it's definitely heartfelt.

And all this on a day when problems seem to pour down like rain all around me. At one meeting, I'm held up as an example of what's wrong with our college (really? harmless little me?), and at another I watch as a colleague dashes out of the meeting in tears because of a scary (but probably unfounded) rumor. My daughter calls to report that one of the grandkids has a fever but the Covid test was negative so I may want to reconsider my plan to visit this weekend, except I really don't want to reconsider because next weekend is impossible and I haven't seen the grandkids since Christmas and I really need to get out of town, but what if the Covid test was a false negative? 

And the rain keeps falling and the wind keeps blowing long into the night, and this morning we awake to a wet debris-strewn world. Our new roof escaped damage and the driveway isn't under water, but many low-lying areas along the Muskingum River are suddenly part of the river. It's a bit disconcerting to see my car's headlights reflecting on water where no water is expected to be. 

But I am now safely back in my office, equipped with full power and a functioning umbrella, and all I have to do before I can leave town is grade those last few composition essays and teach four classes and prep Monday's classes and get an update on the sick grandkid (just in case!) and hope that by midafternoon I'll be heading out of town. If not, I'll have to drape that albatross around my neck and wander around obsessively telling my tale of woe to anyone who will listen--starting with you. 

 

My good deed for the day, Superbowl edition

Is it inhumane to give a 9 a.m. literature class an unannounced reading quiz on the day after the Superbowl? And does it make a difference if the hometown team lost?

Let me qualify those questions a bit: The quiz was not entirely unannounced. Last Friday I told my American Lit Survey students that they should keep in mind the characteristics of modernism we've been talking about as they read Susan Glaspell's Trifles, because if they had a reading quiz that information would be useful. The hint was there for the taking, but apparently some students didn't take it or got distracted. (Probably by the Superbowl.)

And it's not entirely true that the Bengals are the hometown team. Cincinnati is more than three hours' drive from here, and locals tend to be loyal to the Cleveland Browns. However, Joe Burrow grew up in a small town about 40 minutes away and has been hailed as a local hero because of his vocal support for Appalachian Ohio's food banks, so Bengals Fever has been strong locally. (One symptom: our governor temporarily changed the name of Burr Oak State Park to Burrow Oak. Ha!)

A former student of mine who teaches at a Cincinnati high school has the day off today. Classes were cancelled because who would show up? But we are serious scholars relentlessly pursuing enlightenment without regard for outside distractions, so all but one of my 8 a.m. composition students showed up for class. None of them looked particularly perky, but they were present! Rather than introducing new material, I gave them 40 minutes of class time to work on revising their papers that are due on Wednesday while I circulated around the room answering questions and offering guidance.

But at 9 I gave a reading quiz, because apparently I am a mean, heartless English prof who gets her jollies out of torturing students. Based on their responses, I would guess that half of the students read the play, which is not untypical, but even those who didn't read the play were able to say something about modernism, even if they weren't able to offer specific examples from the play. 

The way I see it, my students should thank me. Those who took the hint and prepared for the quiz enjoyed an opportunity to earn a good grade, while those who weren't prepared and bombed the quiz will have something to complain about for the rest of the day, and maybe for a few moments they'll be able to forget that Joe Burrow and the Bengals lost the Superbowl. That's my public service for the day. (You're welcome.)

Random bullets of buttermilk

I was having coffee with a colleague yesterday afternoon when my phone buzzed and presented this reminder: Valentina butyermilk. This enigmatic message was prompting me to stop at the grocery store on the way home to pick up some Valentine cards and buttermilk, but people who type with big clumsy thumbs on tiny smartphones ought to take the time to proofread. (My bad!) My colleague agreed that Valentina Buttermilk would be a great name for a character in a children's book, some large ungainly yak-like beast that wants to be a ballerina. Someone could make a pile of money on that idea but that someone will not be me.

I used the buttermilk to make a chocolate cake, part of my pantry-clearing effort. When my husband moved back here from Jackson and we combined households, suddenly the pantry was overflowing with duplicate items. I don't know how we ended up with five containers of paprika, four jars of peanut butter, or three containers of cocoa powder, all of them already opened, but what can't be combined is being dined on. Here's a box of graham-cracker crumbs, a can of cherries, and a can of sweetened condensed milk; add lemon juice and cream cheese and we've got that no-bake cherry-cream-cheese-pie that my mom used to make for special occasions. I loved it as a child, but last week's version was cloyingly sweet.

Yesterday's buttermilk chocolate cake made a dent in the cocoa powder supply--and it was scrumptiously rich, creamy, and satisfying--in fact, I have a piece in my office right now that will serve as a reward after I finish meeting with all my first-year composition students. Yesterday two-thirds of students showed up for their required conferences, and, as usual, the ones most in need of help on their drafts missed their meetings. But this morning I'm batting a thousand, so maybe this will be a better day.

It will definitely be a warmer day. The forecast calls for highs in the low 60s this afternoon, which will continue to melt the remaining snow while turning my ice-rink driveway into a mudslide. But I'll accept the warmth! Warmth is just what we need right about now, along with a little chocolate, a little comfort, a little Valentina Buttermilk.

A cold front in the classroom

It's February out there, folks, so the forecast is calling for waves of bad academic weather. At 8 a.m. we'll see a slow-moving mass of students unable to follow directions, followed at 9 by a brief flurry of obvious attempts at cheating, but everything will calm down by 11, when we'll see an influx of somnolent students barely able to open their mouths to discuss the reading.

And that is what we call a Wintry Mix: a little bit of awfulness in every class, all adding up to bone-chilling conditions not conducive to learning. It's the fourth week of the semester so the honeymoon is definitely over and we've settled in for that long winter slog through papers and reading assignments and exams that seem to stretch on for week after week after week, regardless of whether the groundhog sees his shadow. 

I came out of every class this morning wishing I could just keep walking out the door and never come back, but it's cold outside and I can't afford to retire, so soon enough there I was back in the classroom again attempting to move yet another group of students through the morning's material.

Classes were warm enough but progress was glacial. Students didn't read, didn't write, didn't bother to show up, or showed up in body but left their warm spirits elsewhere. I'd need something sharper than an ice-scraper to break through the indifference of certain students, but all I had were words and images. Some days that's enough. Today it clearly was not. 

But you know what they say about the weather in Ohio: If you don't like it, wait five minutes. The sun'll come out tomorrow! If we survive this mid-semester chill, at some point the outlook will be cloudy with a chance of comprehension, and I want to be here to see that.

Snow, blowing

Suppose you've been out using a snowblower and you later want to report on your activity; which verb would you choose?

I snowblew.
I snowblowed.
I have snowblown.

Inquiring minds want to know!

I, personally, do not own a snowblower so I have not snowblown, but I have been driven through blowing snow and did not like it one bit. A colleague told me he couldn't believe I'd driven to campus today and I said, "I didn't drive--I sat in the passenger's seat and bit my fingernails." 

My husband can drive through anything--Need someone to drive up the side of Mount Everest in the heart of winter? He's you're guy--but even he had to creep along at around 12 mph on the state highway this morning. My building is practically empty because many classes have been moved online, and it's clear that the cleaning crew did not make it to campus this morning. (Not that I blame them!) I'm teaching my classes face-to-face for those who can get here but opening the Zoom link for those who can't. This morning this resulted in one-third of my students showing up for class while the rest signed on to Zoom and either did or didn't pay attention.

These hybrid divided classes are the absolute worst. I have a few colleagues who are really good at dividing their attention between in-person and online students, but I stink at it, which makes me tense and prone to doing stupid stuff, like tripping over the camera tripod or accidentally muting myself. The fact that I'm willing to open Zoom to my students at all today shows just how awful the weather is. I only wish I could do this from home, which would save me a drive through blowing snow, sleet, freezing rain, ice, and rising floodwaters in area creeks and rivers, but since I'm here, I carry on as best I can. It's all I can do.

And now the snow is coming down again. Maybe I'll just curl up into the fetal position and let it blow on by.

 

Of ice and eagles

I should have known there was a reason no one had parallel-parked in that last remaining space near my building, but I pulled in anyway and then I tried to straighten my car out and discovered the problem: ice! I spun my brand-new Christmas tires briefly before deciding that my car was straight enough, and then I left it there in hopes that the ice will melt before I leave for home. With a full day's work ahead of me and temperatures rising into the 50s this afternoon, I'm hopeful.

Stopped by the Devola Dam yesterday afternoon and this morning to see bald eagles, which are present in abundance. A member of the local birding group reported seeing more than 40 eagles along a stretch of the Muskingum River over the weekend, including many juveniles congregating below the dam. And indeed there they were, a scrum of scraggly adolescents hanging out on the ice and occasionally taking wing, but the position of the sun made photos difficult so I just enjoyed the spectacle. The Muskingum is still icy in many places and my own little creek is totally iced over, but that will change soon.

February already! I'm collecting the first set of major papers in one class tomorrow and giving the first exam of the semester in another next Monday. So far classes are moving along pretty well, although my Place class let me know yesterday that they found Wendell Berry impenetrable (just one poem!), and about half of my American Lit Survey students failed to show up to discuss "Daisy Miller." If Daisy were an Instagram influencer trying to establish a personal identity amidst an unforgiving and judgmental society, my students would have plenty to say, but all we have to work with are words filtered through the perceptions of clueless observers, and where's the fun in that? 

This week I've been recommending to everyone Kate DiCamillo's YA novel The Magician's Elephant, which I devoured in about an hour of luminous delight. The impossible plot is conveyed with striking realism, and in the end a snowfall becomes a sign of hope and a promise of comfort. I accept every single impossible thing that happens in the novel, including the snow, but when I look out my window later on, I hope to see some melting ice so I can get my car moving. If the thaw doesn't come soon, someone's going to have to get out and push.  

Arrangement in gray and black

No snow in the forecast this morning and yet there it was all over the road and getting thicker by the minute. 

The sky was black. The snow was white. The road was shades of gray.

Yesterday I attended an event for which the invitation specifically called for "professional attire," but jeans and boots and sweaters were the order of the day. Only a fool would wear a skirt and heels when the parking lots are dotted with icy spots and hard chunks of snow, and road salt walks into the building on all our shoes, dulling the shine on the parquet floors.

My jeans are black. My shoes are white. The floor is dull and gray.

Frank X. Walker is Black. His book Affrilachia collects poems about the African American experience in Appalachia, including one called "Fireproof" about church people who, like fire ants, swarm in response to distress, working together to rebuild their beloved sanctuary after an arsonist burns it down. Their souls, says Walker, are fireproof in the face of hate. I nearly choked up teaching that poem today to students who keep coming back eager to learn despite Covid cases and quarantines and tech difficulties and their entire lives being disrupted. 

My mood was black. They made my day. 

My day is cray-cray-crazy. Another finalist for the botany position will be here today, another opportunity for me to walk a botanist across campus to the next appointment and point to the big piles of snow and say, "In the spring that will be a pollinator garden." Sorry, botanist! Nothing growing here today! 

(The snow is white. The sky is gray.)

And in between the cray-cray-craziness I have to obtain a Covid test because I may have been exposed by a close contact, although probably not, but I was in the same room (unmasked) with the person but not for more than ten minutes, or maybe twenty, or maybe less, and we're not exactly huggy people so I don't know if we ever breathed the same air so who knows? I'm positive that I'm (probably) negative but only the test can tell for sure.

My fears are dark. That's all I'll say.

Making tracks

In the winter woods, sunshine hits the snow-frosted tree limbs, causing a steady dripping on the snow below and leaving behind a filigree of ice on the tree. All sounds are muffled: brittle oak lives shifting in the breeze with a sandpapery sound; water from a drainage pipe dripping onto creek ice with a metallic clink; boots brushing through soft snow saying shh--shh, shh-shh. 

I didn't go to campus today, obviously. Didn't even try. Yesterday's snow was more abundant than expected so coming home last night was an adventure that I didn't really feel like repeating today, and I don't have classes today anyway so why bother? True, I'm missing my office hours, but in the grand scheme of things, office hours are not worth risking one's life for. So I'm working from home and spending some time enjoying the snow, which is much prettier when you don't have to drive in it.

 

 

 

Can't live the life of the mind without lunch

I found ice in my hair when I got in the car this morning, which suggests that if I must scrape the ice off my car when the temperature is in the single digits, I ought to dry my hair first. But I survived that little adventure, just as I've survived the epidemic of yawning in my classes today. Judging from my impact on students, I could make a bundle marketing today's lectures as a sleep aid.

But instead let's celebrate surviving the first week of classes despite heavy weather, increasing Covid cases, and extra activities associated with my service on a search committee. By the time I'm done this evening, I will have been on campus for twelve solid hours, and here's a dilemma: if I teach at 8, 9, 11, and 1, meet with a job candidate at 10:30, and attend the candidate's presentation at noon, when am I supposed to eat lunch?

When I finally got to it--after 2 p.m.!--my lunch was pretty special: leftover lasagna, which I made from scratch yesterday afternoon. Anyone who goes home after a hard day's work and then puts together a big pan of lasagna ought to be showered with gold stars, applause, and fireworks, but my reward for yesterday's hard work was the opportunity to finally sit down this afternoon at my desk and enjoy a steaming hot lunch of leftover lasagna.

 

 

 

 

Between comfort and joy

On the same day we learned that my husband's cousin's wife had been hospitalized with Covid, we also learned that a colleague's horrible deadly diagnosis was not cancer after all. For more than a month he'd been living with a death sentence and then the tsar told the firing squad to put down their guns, and he couldn't have been more relieved.

Taken together, these two bits of news should have averaged out to make it a meh kind of day, but extreme news doesn't work that way any more than extreme weather does: if today is freezing and tomorrow is boiling, I'll feel it deeply both times. 

Yesterday I had coffee with the colleague who received the reprieve; he described the whiplash effect of the shifting diagnoses, and he's delighted to be out and about personally thanking all the people who helped him and his wife deal with the impact of his surgery and recovery. It was a joyful meeting, full of hope and cheer.

But also yesterday, the cousin with Covid died after three weeks in the ICU. She was always the fun one, full of life and energy and gossip and interesting ideas for outings, so it's hard to imagine her stilled and silenced. Her husband, of course, is devastated, as are other family members and friends. I'm sad and distracted and angry at this stupid virus, though it's hard to know what to do with that anger.

Covid has required us to get comfortable with case counts and death rates and big scary numbers, but when the numbers hit home, they still hurt. It's as if we've all been standing in front of the firing squad for the last two years, uncertain whether the guns are aiming our way. Some will receive a reprieve, but for others, the reprieve will come too late.

So what can we do? I'll reach out one hand to congratulate my colleague on his new cancer-free life and I'll reach out the other to comfort those mourning the loss of a beloved family member, and somehow I'll hover between the two extremes, feeling both deeply and doing my best to carry on.

   

When travel is for the birds

As I look at the snow piled high on the driveway, I thanked my lucky stars for a Monday holiday, a husband who loves to get out on the tractor and push snow around, and a house well stocked with food. Snow day! I'll have to get my car out of the driveway tomorrow, but today it can sit there looking like a snowdrift until the cows come home--or the cowbirds, as the case may be.

As soon as we had light enough to see outside, I opened the bedroom window and hunkered down with the camera to see what kinds of birds would visit the feeders. That window serves as a natural bird blind, partially concealed by vegetation and far enough from the feeders so that I don't spook the birds. At first I saw the usual mixture of winter birds--juncos, woodpeckers, chickadees, a lone titmouse--but then suddenly a black wave swooped down from above and colonized the feeders.

Darn those starlings I thought, until I looked closer and saw that they were not starlings but cowbirds. The dim light made their brown heads hard to see, but the size and shape and coloration all said cowbird. I've never seen so many together, at least 50 attacking the feeders or perching in nearby trees. A few gathered on the front porch and looked in the big picture window, lured, presumably, by the mass of green plants just inside. They scattered when I closed the window, but they've come back for a few more visits. I'm not a fan of cowbirds but I'm not sure what I can do to keep them away--I can't go slamming windows all day long.

I could have gone to campus today for some Martin Luther King Jr. day events, if I could see my driveway. The sheriff's office tells us to stay off the roads unless travel is absolutely necessary, and I'm happy to comply. On a day like today, travel is strictly for the birds.

 

 

  

Dispatches from the first day of class

Twenty minutes until class begins and I am SOOOOO looking forward to seeing a room full of freshpersons on a cold dark January morning!!!!!  Except the room won't actually be full because who wants to take an 8 a.m. class? And one student will be on Zoom because of Covid quarantine, so that means I have to remember to turn on the camera, turn on Zoom, check the microphone, share the screen, and include the quarantined student in class discussion....How about if I just give up and go back to bed instead?

And now here we are in the middle of class and the Zoom link doesn't work inside Moodle. It worked fine yesterday! I can open up the Zoom link outside Moodle, but all I get inside Moodle is an error message. Nice! I have to email the Zoom link separately to my quarantining students and try to figure out the problem later. 

Am I allowed to refer to our Zooming student as quarantining? Does it violate the student's privacy? I've announced that the class Zoom link isn't intended to accommodate students who  just don't feel like getting out of bed and walking to class, but it is available to those with valid medical excuses, like a need to quarantine because of Covid, so even if I don't mention that Zooming students are in quarantine, their classmates will surely figure it out.

Everyone writes on the first day of class, not for a grade but to give me an idea of their writing and thinking skills. My first-year students are writing about a personal goal and some obstacles they might face in reaching that goal, and they're pretty united in wanting to improve on their academic performance from last semester (I clearly have some repeat customers in this class) while about half of them say they want to be their best self, in those exact words. If I were Oprah I might be able to help them with that, but all I can promise is to try to help them become better writers, which might come in handy if that best self ever needs to communicate. (At 8 a.m., I'd be happy if my second-best self showed up.)

About a third of the students on my roster didn't show up for class at 8, which is a bit alarming, but the 9:00 class did better--perfect attendance, plus an extra who wandered in a bit late. We later determined that he's on the waitlist and I was happy to admit him to the class, since I suspect that the amount of reading and writing on the syllabus will scare away a few students.

And if the reading doesn't scare them away, the writing might. What a horrible person I am to make students in a literature class look at a work of art and write a paragraph or two about what they see! I don't let them see the name of the work but you can view it here. When we meet again next Wednesday, we'll look at the work again and discuss how to start analyzing an  unfamiliar cultural artifact, and I'll try to discourage the secret hidden meaning approach to literary analysis. "The meaning isn't hidden," I'll tell them; "It's right there in front of your face, but sometimes you have to look at it a little sideways before it clicks."

Back in my office--two classes down, two more to go, but I could use a nap already. I'd like to wander down the hall to visit with a colleague, but she's on sabbatical this semester and so keeps not being there, lucky her. Who's going to step in and take care of my emergency chocolate needs? If the Professional Development committee had known how much I rely on this colleague when I desperately need a bite of chocolate, they never would have approved her sabbatical. 

But it's time for my 11:00 class, which seems crowded. How did 20 students get into a course limited to 18? Good thing I made extra copies of the syllabus!

It's my first time teaching the new sophomore seminar course so I spend a little time explaining to students why we felt the need to add this course to the general education curriculum: It's all about scaffolding. The sophomore seminar will reinforce the skills students learned in their required first-year courses (information literacy, writing, public speaking) while building a bridge toward the junior core class, which I'm teaching this afternoon. 

The sophomore seminar is supposed to be an interdisciplinary approach to a big question, so in my class (My Happy Place) we'll examine what connects people to specific places by reading and responding to place-based literature alongside some history, psychology, and science. Fun? I hope so, but then an English professor's idea of fun may not be the most reliable gauge.

Lunchtime, and yet another reason to be glad my husband has moved back home from Jackson: the man can make a sandwich! Homemade ciabatta bread, sliced turkey, cheese, and mustard--if that sandwich can't power me through my final class, nothing can. (Though a little chocolate right about now wouldn't hurt.)

Last class of the day! Five bright young English majors wondering why they're required to take a class called The Ethical Author. This is my dessert class--my end-of-the-day reward for all those 8 a.m. composition classes. Right now my English majors are writing about the role poets would play in their ideal society, a question that will loom large in our readings for the next couple of weeks. What is literature for, anyway? I'm eager to see what they say.

But mostly I'm happy for the chance to sit down and shut up. By the time I've gone over four different syllabi, I'm tired of hearing the same sentences come out of my mouth over and over, so I've changed things up bit: "I live in the woods, where we communicate by whispering messages into the fuzzy ears of woodland creatures. If you can't reach me after hours, you're talking to the wrong raccoon."

And now they're done writing so my teaching day is over. I'll take care of a few things in my office before heading out, and the really good news is that I don't have to make that 90-minute drive to Jackson every Friday afternoon but instead I can head straight home, where the most pressing issue this evening is whether to call that new squash-and-sausage dish squasage or sausquash. 

I miss teaching when I'm not doing it and I never feel more alive than when I'm with students, but at the end of the day, I'm worn out. Next week I'll be back in the classroom trying to add some new twists to the same old song and dance, but until then, it's squasage time!

(Though I really could use a little chocolate. Help?)

Flights of fancy in the midst of the mundane

A friend texted to encourage me to "have a glorious day on campus," but I spent the morning sitting in meetings full of administrative PowerPoint followed by a long, lonely session with the photocopier. Glorious is not the word.

On the other hand, I finally picked up a package that's been waiting in campus mail--a new mug and a bunch of tea sent by an old friend. The mug is kind of special; it's called Fowl Language and it features pictures of birds with names that sound a little off-color: the dickcissel, the rough-faced shag, the blue-footed booby. Very cute, and it was comforting to camp out next to the nice warm photocopier with hot tea in my new mug while zillions of syllabi rolled through the wheels. 

This mug is the fourth bird-related gift I've received this Christmas season; also under my tree were three books with pictures of birds on the cover. I have not yet begun reading A World on the Wing by Scott Weidensaul with its flock of migrating birds on the front, but I'm about halfway through On Animals by Susan Orlean, with a spare front cover adorned by a single adorable chicken. Chickens play a large part in the essay collection, although guineas, turkeys, and pigeons also make an appearance, plus donkeys and mules and lions and a killer whale and I don't remember what else. Despite some distressing details on animal extinctions and cruelty, it's a joyful reading experience.

And I read right through Ann Patchett's new essay collection, These Precious Days, with a painting of her dog on the front and a pileated woodpecker on the back. Those paintings play a role in the title essay dealing with an unexpected pandemic friendship with an artist; another essay called "Covers" explores the vagaries of book-cover design, with interesting examples from Patchett's experience. I had read many of these essays before but they play well together as a collection, and the book as a whole made my mind take flight.

Another Christmas gift finally arrived this morning--a new set of tires for my car--so I'm a little less nervous about taking flight on the wintry roads. I have a few more boxes to unpack at home and a few more details to prepare for my classes, but when I'm surrounded by so many charming birds, how can my day be anything but glorious?

 

 

Click and breathe, slowly

As much as I complain about my slow internet connection at home, I appreciate its advantages. Here I sit on my comfy sofa constructing a new course page on our course management system, the last bit of Moodling I need to do before classes start next week, but I have a ton of documents to upload and each one takes a while. At the office I sometimes click-and-scroll so quickly that I make myself dizzy, but at home I click on "upload" and then wait a minute or two or even three while it loads. Meanwhile, I look out the window at the bluejays visiting the feeders, juncos jumping around in the snow, sunlight glimmering on frosty trees, and I relax until it's time to upload the next document.

Back in the dial-up days, uploading a document in 60 seconds would have felt like a miracle, so I'm not complaining. And I appreciate the way my son-in-law reconfigured our antenna setup so my slow connection is significantly less slow--not so long ago I wouldn't have been able to upload documents at all. But mostly I appreciate an excuse to slow down and take a breath between clicks. Some days I have a need for speed, but it's nice to spend a lazy Saturday sitting at home and looking out the window while my documents slowly upload.

A time to hunker

My inbox is full.

My gas tank is empty.

My house is crowded with boxes but less crowded than it was a week ago, and it will be even less crowded today after I make the first of several trips to the Goodwill store.

My eyes are tired from a quick road trip to North Carolina to see Dad, who is doing great despite everything, but now I need to unpack and get back to work. 

Classes start a week from today and if I'm not quite ready, I'm well on the way to being ready. 

A winter storm is coming this afternoon and my Christmas gift of new tires has still not arrived so I don't trust my car in the snow. I arrived on campus at 7 a.m. and I intend to get a pile of work done before noon today and then grab some groceries, deliver a pile of boxes to the Goodwill, and get home before the snow starts falling. 

For the next couple of days I'll be hunkering down, unpacking more boxes, and putting the finishing touches on syllabi. At some point I need to get my brain back in active mode, but for now I'll mindlessly scroll through my inbox hitting delete delete delete. I want an inbox as pure as the driven snow, as long as I don't have to drive on that snow in my car.