Peddling influence

I've been haunted by a disturbing article in the New York Times about parents who post their children's photos online and then attract sexual predators, which is appalling enough, but the detail I can't get out of my head is the claim that one-third of preteen girls want to pursue careers as online influencers.

I have questions! Most of them, though, place me firmly in the Old Fuddy-Duddy category, like "How do preteen girls even know what an online influencer is? Aren't their parents monitoring their internet usage?" But no, the article points out that at least some parents encourage their children's online presence, seeking to open doors to careers in modeling or acting or influencing.

But how can so many kids think online influencer is a viable career goal? It's like a pyramid scheme: the more influencers, the fewer people available to be influenced. And why don't the children aspire to be astronauts or doctors or writers or scientists or teachers?

All those careers can lead to immense influence. I mean, how many of us can point to a particular book that changed the way we think about the world, or a particular teacher who encouraged us to pursue a field of study? How many people my age watched the moon landing and were inspired to pursue careers in math or science? Maybe they didn't all become astronauts, but they may have learned a thing or two along the way and developed the skills to contribute something meaningful to society.

What will a child learn by pursuing a dream of being an online influencer? Maybe some marketing skills or effective camera angles? Help me out here! Is there really a crying need in our culture for even more young people excelling at the fine art of self-promotion?

I confess that I would like to have more influence than I do. If I could encourage more students to care deeply about the power of storytelling or the cultural value of poetry or even the effective use of the semicolon, I would feel that I've contributed something that might bear fruit long after I'm gone. But if online influencers keep influencing young girls to pursue careers as online influencers, we'll soon be so up to our eyeballs in influencers that we'll have no one left to be astronauts or doctors or writers or scientists or teachers.

But then I am an Old Fuddy-Duddy. Maybe someone can explain to me how to solve this problem, because I don't think I'm the right person to influence the influencers.

Leaving my ducks in the dust

So I'm sitting on the sofa in my pajamas, drinking a leisurely cup of tea and reading the morning news, when my husband says, "It's almost 7. Don't you need to be on the road?"

"No problem," I say. "I can go in a little later this morning because I'm staying late this afternoon and my first meeting isn't until 10."

Then, just to be sure, I check the calendar on my phone. Friends, my first meeting of the day was at 8. 

This morning I proved that if I put my mind to it, I can get from pajamas-on-the-sofa to fully-clothed-in-the-classroom in under an hour, as long as no one looks at me too closely. No makeup, no earrings, no frost to scrape off my windshield, no slow-moving school buses stopping to pick up students every 30 feet--made it in the nick of time, but one tiny delay would have been a disaster.

As it is, I feel as if I've been running to catch up with myself all morning long, cramming in my caffeine quota while rushing into meetings clutching handouts still warm from the printer. This is not the way I prefer to operate. I'm a planner, the first one to show up for a meeting with all my ducks in a row. This morning all my ducks are scattered in my wake in a chaotic cluster of panic.

Now my morning meetings are over so I can relax a bit. I have some papers to grade, emails to send, classes to prep, and two more meetings this afternoon, but for the first time since 7 a.m., I can sit and breathe for a few minutes and wait for the ducks to catch up.

On driving and surviving

Nearly two weeks after getting pulled over and ridiculed by a police officer who didn't like my car's headlights, I still tense up every time I drive through that little river town, which is right smack in the middle of my shortest route to campus. I have adjusted my schedule so I can leave the house after the sun comes up, which means I encounter more traffic and more school buses loading and unloading, but I still get nervous every time I get close to the tiny town where the police officer promised that he'd be watching me. 

This morning I saw a police car taking radar at the edge of town, where the speed limit switches from 55 to 35. Just seeing the police car made me tense up--even though I've always been careful about slowing down there. I'll bet the impatient pickup-truck drivers who ride my bumper itching for a passing zone don't get tense when they drive through that dinky little town. Will I ever again drive through there without fear?

If the aftereffects of a minor chewing-out can linger so stubbornly, you can just imagine the lingering impacts of our recent campus bloodletting. Here we are in Inside Higher Ed, where our campus cuts are placed in the context of a bunch of other colleges facing similar problems. We're in pretty good company, but that doesn't do much to diminish the local impacts. Departments are scrambling to construct fall course schedules, proposing changes to majors to reduce dependence on classes we can no longer offer, and searching for adjuncts to teach courses formerly taught by full-time faculty members whose positions were cut.

This kind of struggle makes me even more tense than my encounter with a condescending traffic cop. It feels unjust to cut a position and then try to replace the instructor with a contingent faculty member who will be paid poorly, won't have access to benefits, and is unlikely to be invested in the future of the College or the education of students beyond the classroom.

In addition, it's not easy to find adjunct instructors qualified to teach in certain fields in the Appalachian part of the state. A few hours away in Columbus or Cleveland we could find a deeper talent pool, but who's going to drive two or three hours to teach here for the piddly amount we pay for adjunct labor? All we can offer is a decent office--because so many positions have been cut that we'll have empty offices on every floor of my building.

Emotions are raw and anger bubbles up everywhere. Worst of all, though, is the fear: If that position can be cut, why can't mine? Faculty members have confided that they are afraid their actions are being monitored, that some malign force is watching their every move in search of some excuse to pounce.

I've adjusted my daily commute in response to paranoia about one solitary traffic cop who promises he's watching me, but what happens when that kind of paranoia infests an entire campus? Trust is a fragile vessel and easily broken; how can those of us who remain put the pieces back together when so many have been lost?

Caught on the trailcam

How many photos of my coffee table do I really need? The answer is none, but this morning I had to delete a bunch of them while downloading photos from the trailcam we got for Christmas. No, my coffee table has not been hitting the trail; it just happened to be in the frame while we were trying out different settings on the trailcam and getting it ready to go out to the woods. Apparently we hadn't yet figured out how to delete.

After a month in the woods, the trailcam this morning offered up many many photos of the same plot of ground from which a woodland creature had just departed, or maybe the motion sensor was set off by a gust of wind. It got plenty of photos of squirrels, which is not surprising given the abundant nut trees in that part of the woods. It also caught raccoons, a possum, several deer, and a mystery critter that looks like the back end of a beaver, except it's in a spot where beavers generally aren't.

Also lots of photos of the resident woodsman carrying a ladder or chainsaw up the hill to prune fruit trees or pulling fallen trees down the hill with the tractor. Probably we ought to move the trail-cam to a less tractor-friendly location. I'd like to put it down by the creek to see what critters visit, but it would probably take a shot of every passing car as well.

Photo quality is uneven, which is not surprising since the trailcam has no sense of composition. Night photos look like something out of a horror movie, with glowing eyes atop blurry shapes that could be mistaken for space aliens or hoofed fiends though they're probably just raccoons.

We've been hearing a lot of coyotes in the night but apparently they're not visiting the vicinity of the trailcam. No sign of foxes or turkeys either. I keep hearing that bobcats are getting more common in Ohio and I'd really love to see one, but dream on. In 20 years living in these woods, we've seen a bobcat exactly once, and it had disappeared before we could get the word "bobcat!" out of our mouths.

But still we hope. Whatever passes by, the trailcam will be ready.

Morale-boosting on a budget

I've been tasked with coming up with some activities to boost faculty morale, but I do not intend to pursue the suggestion that we offer a hatchet-tossing event. In times of stress and change, it's probably not a great  idea for faculty members to be armed--one errant toss could shift our campus bloodletting out of the metaphorical realm.

But what can we do? A case of Xanax might make a dent in our current stress levels, but nobody's going to approve the expense. The HR office brought in massage chairs, but appointments are limited and the massages don't last long enough to loosen up the deep-seated sources of our pain. Yesterday at an all-campus event we were urged to stand and sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" (because the academic year has reached the seventh-inning stretch). Participation was spotty and enthusiasm was low, and it seems that some of my colleagues didn't know the words. We need to get out more!

Okay, baseball season is coming up soon so let's get out there! Last year I attended a bunch of home games but never saw more than two other faculty members in attendance. Apparently we're not big baseball fans?

How about a guided wildflower hike? A long walk along the river trail? What will it take to help people relax: a fleet of kayaks, a pen of puppies, a coloring sheet and a big ol' box o' crayons?

Everything I come up with feels lame when juxtaposed with the losses we've been suffering, but on the other hand, maybe some small but meaningful activity could help distract us from those losses and think about the future more effectively. 

When I moped around the house as a kid, my mom would open the door, point toward the yard, and command, "Go out and play!" Sometimes a change of venue provokes a change of perspective. The problem, though, is that wherever we go out to play, we can't seem to escape the problems that had us moping around the house to begin with.

So I don't know what to do. What are some effective methods for improving morale on a budget when everywhere we go we see signs of the very problems that depress morale? 

I'm happy to open the door and point the way--but I don't intend to hand out any hatchets.

Bending to the breaking point

Old buzzwords never die; they just get repurposed to meet new challenges. I give you nimble, agile, flexible, and resilient, the buzzwords trotted out in 2020 to inspire the heroic efforts required to shift quickly from face-to-face teaching to pandemic mode. We nimbly flexed and demonstrated resilient agility, and if the effort wore us out, at least we knew that when push comes to shove, we can be as nimble as the next guy.

Now the same old buzzwords are pushing and shoving their way into meetings called to respond to staffing issues caused by cuts in positions. Departments, I've been told, will need to be nimble, agile, flexible, and resilient to find creative ways to staff essential courses, and that might require some of us to teach outside our areas of expertise.

Which, sure, is a nice idea. My primary area of expertise is post-Civil-War American Literature, but when I first started teaching here, I spent a significant amount of time developing new expertise in postcolonial literature because we felt our students needed exposure--but this was feasible only because I was building on a foundation of study and research from grad school. And I suppose that if it were necessary I could teach an introductory-level survey of early American literature, but I haven't taught or thought about most of those texts for 30 years! And forget about upper-level courses outside my area. I always include a Shakespeare play in my Comedy class, but only a fool would expect me to teach an upper-level Shakespeare seminar. May as well ask me to teach organic chemistry.

No one would be foolish enough to ask me to flex that far outside my field, but recently I heard a suggestion that we could offer a little training to equip faculty members from other departments to teach first-year composition. No one would suggest that a little training would equip an English professor to teach chemistry, but apparently teaching first-year composition is so simple that a little training could equip anyone to do it. I'll bet my colleagues with degrees in Rhetoric and Composition are just kicking themselves for wasting all that time and money on grad school.

Like many of my colleagues, I am willing to flex--but flex too far and something's bound to break. Then we'll need nimble people agile enough to pick up the pieces. 

Blinded by the blights

Yesterday's events included an encounter with an annoying police officer and a severe case of carrot cake deprivation, both of which felt at the time like immense injustices except when considered alongside the long line of faculty members getting pulled into the Provost's office to learn that their services were not longer required. I thought that carrot cake would be the highlight of a very long, horrific day, but when I arrived at the department office, I found  nothing but a smear of buttercream. On the other hand, I still have a job! So no complaints.

And I will have to keep driving to that job right past the annoying police officer who told me, "I'll be watching you." What horrific crime did I commit to merit getting pulled over in the tiny river town along my route?

My headlights were too bright.

The first thing the officer said when he walked up to my window was, "Don't you know where the dimmer switch is?" Yes, officer, I know where the dimmer switch is, and my only complaint about my wonderful car is that when I drive at night, people are constantly flashing their brights at me to indicate I have my brights on when I don't. He scoffed and went to the front of my car and told me to flip the brights on and off, which I did. "Something's wrong with these lights," he said. 

I explained that I'd already mentioned the problem to my mechanic, who told me my lights were just fine. "Well they're too bright," said the officer, and I said okay, yes, maybe they are, but what am I supposed to do about it? "When someone flashes their brights at you," he said, "Be sure to flash them back." And then he told me he'd been watching me go by with my lights too bright every morning but never had a chance to pull me over until now--"But I'll be watching you," he said, which felt like a threat. 

So this morning my early meeting was cancelled (because people who are losing their jobs aren't in the mood for an 8 a.m. meeting) so I thought I'd solve the problem by leaving home a little later, when headlights were still required but barely necessary. But when I got to that tiny river town, there he was, that surly police officer, waiting for me. When he flashed his brights at me, I flashed back, a move I will have to make every morning as I drive to work because there is really no better route. 

Don't you know where your dimmer switch is? What I really want right now is a dimmer switch to turn down the intensity of all the negative feelings swirling around campus. Whoever invents that will make a killing.

Feeling the ground shift once again

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

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

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

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

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

Just can't see it

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

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

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

Puzzling over meal madness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hula-Hooping to save the world

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

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

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

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

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

Shipwrecked in a shrinking sea of time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Park your ideas here

How far would you go for a reserved parking space?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pick your poison

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

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

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

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

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

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

Storming onward

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

Almost.

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

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

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

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

From stunned to fun

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

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

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

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

Big problems, small pleasures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Attack of the anxiety dreams

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

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

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

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

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

Coming and going, standing and falling

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

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

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

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