Thanksgiving smiles

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

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

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

 

Because everyone needs a little good news

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The return of Friday Pie Day

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

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

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

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

Sometimes pie makes everything better.   

 

Assailed by tiny enemies while giants wait in the wings

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

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

But I digress. 

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

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

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

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

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

And here we are agonizing over AI again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trotting out the trivia

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

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

It depends upon how you define trivial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Lit4Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the simulated garden

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

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

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

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

Here comes another Bartleby!

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Spooky season, sort of

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

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

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

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

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

When the obstacles are part of the journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ephemeral autumn

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

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

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

 

Chasing leaves, chasing rhymes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dangling from a cliff, the modifier required rescuing

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

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

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

I comment: Who is fumbling? The keys?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fumbling for an answer, the solution remained elusive.

Mitty and me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Vowell among the crazies

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

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

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

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

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

Getting flip about slips and trips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for the annual cold-building complaint

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

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

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

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

On not getting lost in a good book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

A little too much of just about everything

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

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

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

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

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

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