Friday poetry challenge: Haiku for you

This morning as I walked from my car to the office, I marveled over the songs of cardinals beginning to feel the first stirrings of spring; now, though, I'm sitting in a dim, cave-like basement classroom where the only sound is the tap-tap-tap of fingers on keyboards and the occasional susurrus of pages being turned. My first-year students are writing in-class midterm essays and by the looks of them, they are working pretty hard. I hope they're paying more attention than the student who wrote in a draft the other day that we all need to learn more about "the history of writhing," because the massive load of student writing I'm facing this week has already inspired writhing enough.

Overwhelmed by the unending pages of student prose I'm reading, I feel the need for concision, precision, and poise. Let's cut out the excess and write some haiku!

Above, birds call for
spring; below, fingers tap out
strings of student prose.

I write, you write, he,
she, or it writes; they write, I
read, nobody writhes.

Read the prompt! Follow
directions! My voice, ignored,
bleats its futile hope.

Outside, the birds still
sing on high, releasing spring
stories over air.

That's it for me. Why don't you give it a try?

Swerving to miss the next disaster

Yesterday as I drove to work I nearly hit a fox, which was exciting for several reasons: because it was a fox, because I missed it, and because I could see it. Daylight! What a remarkable thing to experience on the morning commute!

An earlier sunrise is not the only sign that things are changing. My driveway is now mostly free of ice and snow, relieving the daily angst about whether I'd be able to get anywhere. My new dryer will be delivered next week, relieving the weekly angst about who is going to do the laundry and how and where. And spring break is coming next week, suggesting that we've survived nearly half of a semester of in-person teaching without disaster.

Of course I'm joking about spring break. We do not have a spring break. We're all supposed to be limiting our travel, faculty and students alike, so instead of a spring break we get a spring break day. Yes: no classes next Wednesday! But at the same time, faculty have been notified that we have to require the appropriate number of contact hours despite the single day off, so we're supposed to assign work equivalent to that missed classed time: Go ahead, students, take the day off--but take this big pile of work with you when you go! Not sure that qualifies as a day off.

Meanwhile, we've seen a small spike in Covid-19 cases, including a handful of students in one of my classes. How nervous does it make me to know that a half-dozen of my students, including the one who sits closest to where I stand to lead class, are suffering from the virus? 

Let's not think about that. Instead, let's think about the fox. It was a lovely thing to see a fox, and even lovelier to keep seeing the fox running into the distance after I had swerved to miss it. Let's hope we can keep swerving to miss disasters because I think we've all survived enough for now.

Friday poetry challenge: Winter weather blues

As I walked six blocks through slush and cold to campus this morning, I started composing a Winter Weather Blues in my head, even though no mere song could adequately express the angst inspired by my most recent travails. 

After the massive effort required to get to campus yesterday, I wasn't about to do it all over again this morning, so I decided to stay in town last night. Now I have standing offers from a number of colleagues to let me camp out in their spare rooms, but I don't know how to maintain social distancing in those circumstances--and besides, all my friends have indoor dogs, which would be bound to stimulate an allergy attack.

So instead I decided to stimulate the local economy. I booked a room in the only hotel within walking distance of campus, a historic pile located on the banks of the Ohio River, a place habitually described as charming, quirky, and full of character. By the time I was done with class preps and meetings yesterday, I didn't care about charm or quirks or character; I just wanted a warm, dry room where I could finally take off my boots, put up my feet, and watch the steely-gray river roll by. Which I did, at great length. It is quite a river.

The hotel was quiet as a tomb, no surprise since I saw never saw more than three cars in the parking lot. I heard the occasional train across the river and some honking from the geese that hang out along its banks, but otherwise I mostly sat and watched the river and then, thankfully, slept. Last night I feasted on fabulous lamb vindaloo from the local Indian food-truck restaurant, but this morning I was up and out before all the coffee shops opened so I settled for a danish out of a vending machine. Who knows how old that danish might have been? 

And who cares? I'm back on campus now and I'll get my car back this afternoon. Better yet, the weather forecast suggests that I may actually be able to get it up the driveway. Next week we're looking at temps in the mid-40s and rain, which will be a nice break from all the ice. But meanwhile, it's time to put all that wintry angst into song:

I've got those can't-get-up-the-driveway-so-let's-stimulate-the-local-economy blues.
Oh I've got those can't-get-up-the-driveway-so-let's-stimulate-the-local-economy blues.
Just looking for a warm place where I can kick off my winter shoes.

Oh the river keeps on rolling through the wind and snow and rain and ice and slush.
Yes that river keeps on rolling through the wind and snow and rain and ice and slush.
Seems like Mother Nature don't mess with Old Man River much.

Oh the snow just keeps on falling and the slush piles up for miles and miles and miles.
Yes the snow just keeps on falling and the slush piles up for miles and miles and miles.
But one day when the sun comes out--just watch as it unfreezes all our smiles.

That's my winter blues. Now it's your turn.

 

This is what they mean by "quirky": power outlet in the middle of the bathroom mirror.

Once again I wonder: Where's the faculty helicopter when I need it?

Just in case anyone thought this week couldn't get any weirder, yesterday a tow-truck tried to drive up my driveway to haul away my son's car for repairs, but it couldn't manage the final curve and so tried to back down and slipped on some ice and got stuck sideways next to the bridge and had to call another tow-truck to pull it out. Meanwhile, my son's car still sits there waiting for a tow.

But I am on campus this morning! Getting here was quite an adventure: I packed up my laptop, books, and everything I'll need for a few days in town in a roller bag, bundled up in long-johns and layers, and walked a mile and a half in the snow this morning so a colleague could pick me up at the end of my road where it meets the highway. It was a lovely morning for a walk, with kingfishers calling above the frozen creek and trees still dappled with snow and ice, but walking a mile and a half in full winter gear while pulling a roller bag over a steep, snow-covered road is not exactly a walk in the park. Nevertheless I survived and here I am on campus once again, ready to get caught up on everything.

Some challenges of the icy life

Before he left for Jackson Monday night, my adorable husband left me a lovely bouquet of flowers, some fabulous chocolates, and delicious oranges, which are making these long, cold, can't-get-out-of-the-driveway days more delicious. However, he did not leave behind what I need the most right now: himself.

I went out this morning to fill the wood-burner (because my son managed to get to town and stay with friends last night so he can get to work and he won't be home until the ice allows). My husband left plenty of logs in just the right size for me to pick up, which are about half the size of the ones he generally tosses in the wood-burner because, as I keep reminding him, I'm not Paul Bunyan--or his blue ox either. So I found plenty of wood, but thanks to the ice storm, they were all frozen solid in a big forbidding lump. Where's Paul Bunyan when I really need him? 

Some elbow grease was required to dislodge the logs but I didn't expect the bird-feeders to provide a similar challenge. Ha! It's hard to get a good grip on an ice-covered bird-feeder, and it's even harder to unscrew a lid that's encased in ice. I filled the feeders finally but gave up on opening the suet feeder. I left a chunk of suet out on a post where the birds can get to it and called it a day.

And what a day! I can't Zoom from home so I've posted online activities for all my students. I really need to get to campus tomorrow, but lacking a working vehicle and a passable driveway, I don't see how that's going to happen. The roads are not bad but I couldn't even ask a cab to drive up my driveway, so it's possible I may have to walk out to the end of my road and arrange to get picked up there and then find a place to stay in town overnight so I can teach my Friday classes. But that only works if we don't get more snow, freezing rain, and ice, which are all in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow. 

Yesterday I took a walk around the lower meadow, lifting my legs high to crunch through the ice-covered snow, and I saw lots of small limbs down and some larger ones hanging low because of the burden of all that ice. More ice could bring down limbs and cause power outages like those that have happened elsewhere in the area, but maybe today's sunshine will thaw things out a bit. One can only hope. Because seriously, what are the other options?

Right now the sun is making the snow and ice sparkle like crystals. I can sit in my warm house watching my birds and eating my chocolates and grading my students' work and try not to think about how I'll ever get out of here again. 

Ice day, nice day

For the past few weeks I keep finding reasons to wonder why everything has to be so stinking difficult, so it's a bit of a relief when the situation moved from merely difficult to utterly impossible. While getting to campus has been a hassle recently thanks to snow and car problems, last night's ice storm has made it impossible to even try to get out of my driveway, so here I sit drinking tea and prepping classes instead of venturing out into the frozen tundra.

I realize that we've been relatively fortunate--others have had it much worse. Friends to the west are lacking power this morning, and Athens County roads are closed to all except emergency vehicles. I've seen a salt truck and some cars moving on my road this morning, but the only vehicle that would make meaningful progress on my driveway would be a luge.

Tiny icicles hang from the eaves and the trees and the back deck rails, creating a sparkling world that would merit a closer look if it weren't bitterly cold and windy outside. I stepped out just for a few minutes and found a slick, slippery world that crunches with every step. Excellent excuse to stay indoors! Things could get dicey if we lose power, but for the moment we're doing fine.

The temperature is supposed to drop into the single digits tonight so I don't see much hope for relief from the ice before tomorrow morning, when I will need to get to campus again. Today, though, I don't have classes and I don't expect any great demand for office hours so I'm happy to stay home and watch the ice from a distance, calmly accepting the impossibility of doing otherwise.  

 

Friday poetry challenge: Winning odds (and evens)

In a week full of craziness and unexpected obstacles, on a day when the dryer-repair dude was afraid to drive on my road because of the snow so I had to drive out on those slick roads myself to spend time at the laundromat (not the greatest place for reading Lacan) and then go to campus for all kinds of meetings and then drive home up the same snowy driveway until my car slid gently sideways and got stuck halfway up so that I abandoned it and walked the rest of the way, leaving it where it sat and where it still sits so that I had to hitch a ride with my son this morning and arrived on campus before 6 a.m. (!) and will ride back with him this afternoon to spend the evening digging my car out--on that really crazy day I came out feeling like a winner.

Why? Because I am a winner! At our online campus Founders Day event yesterday, I won a drawing for a $25 gift card to Applebee's, which I will be happy to use when it's safe to eat indoors again. And then I was a winner again when I got home and found a package full of See's chocolates and fabulous toffee from an old friend in California. But mostly I am a winner because when my car slid sideways into the snowbank, my helpful son was on hand to help me move it out of harm's way and to drive me to campus today.

I still don't have a functioning dryer, and I'm still behind on my classwork because of all the ways the snow has slowed me down this week, and I'm definitely not driving to Jackson this weekend with even worse weather in the forecast, but I'm not going to think about those things this evening as I sit in my nice warm house and nibble on See's chocolates and reflect on all the ways I'm winning.

Snow, sleet, rain, and Arctic freeze;
chocolates, toffees, Applebee's.
Dryer death and laundry trouble;
hands that help out on the double.
Odds are trouble keeps appearing,
even when I need some cheering.
When the odd lines leave wheels spinning,
read the evens--now I'm winning.

Yard birds

Just a few yard birds in the snow.

 

A day of delays, declogging, diagnosis

Today for lunch I'm eating yesterday's PB&J, the sandwich I made early in the morning on the assumption that I'd be able to get out of my driveway and drive to campus, which would have been a good assumption if we'd received the one-to-three-inches of snow in the forecast instead of the solid eight inches that actually fell, and perhaps if my road were not down so low on the county's priority list that we didn't see a snowplow until close to noon, when, instead of eating my PB&J at the office, I was sitting at home watching birds at the feeders.

Dozens of cardinals, three different kinds of woodpeckers, sparrows and juncos galore, and then two handsome starlings notified all their friends and we soon had dozens of starlings squabbling over the suet feeder. They put on a very entertaining show, but I really should have been grading freshman essays except that I had left my computer at the office so I was unable to do a lick of grading or prep work on my unexpected day off and consequently I am now behind on absolutely everything and scrambling to get caught up.

But I used my time wisely (ish). Sat and watched birds. Read a big chunk of a Louise Erdrich novel. Cleared snow off the front porch and a bit of the driveway (until the shovel broke). Cleaned the bathrooms (and used the plunger on the clogged toilet). Made brownies. Cleaned the kitchen (and unclogged the clogged kitchen sink, using the old-fashioned vinegar and baking soda method since I wasn't eager to brave the snowy roads just to buy drain cleaner). Examined the wood-burner in hopes of discerning why it hasn't been able to raise the temperature in the house above 63 all week (and called my husband with the results, which allowed him to diagnose the problem from a distance--a plugged-up chimney--but I'm not the one responsible for climbing ladders to clean out gunky chimneys, so he made a special trip home last night to fix it in the night, in the dark, in the cold).

I did not do laundry since our dryer is still on the fritz and the dryer dude who was scheduled to come and fix it last week couldn't get here because of snowy roads but is due to return tomorrow, after another night with snow in the forecast, so who knows when we'll have a functioning dryer again? Good thing we all so love the laundromat!

But at least I didn't have to make a new sandwich this morning--and hey, I brought one of those brownies to work too, a delicious treat. I've been working like a maniac just to keep my head above water today, and if I remember to take my laptop home with me tonight, I may be able to grade those papers while waiting for the dryer dude, assuming that he's actually coming.

Winter in the woods! You never know what might happen next, but you can only hope you'll have the right tools to cope with it.

Post-Covid fantasies both expand and contract

When this is all over, I told my colleague, I intend to burn Zoom, which would be difficult to accomplish even if Zoom were a physical object instead of a vast cloud-based conspiracy to numb my students into total mindlessness. Burn it, I say! Right down to the ground!

Last March in the first throes of lockdown and all-online teaching, I distracted myself by planning elaborate trips I would take After Covid: flights to California or road trips to Alaska or walks on a New Zealand beach. These days my escape fantasies are far simpler: I just want to take my grandkids to the zoo. I just want to linger at the library or walk the indoor track at the rec center or visit an art museum. 

I want to teach a class with all my students in the same room at the same time, and I want to ask them to form small groups to discuss the reading, and I want to take them all on a field trip and sit around a table at a crowded restaurant talking about literature. Is that really so much to ask? 

And yes, I'd like to see their faces instead of their masks and hear their voices unmuffled by masks and hold face-to-face conferences in my office instead of on Zoom. As much as we rely on Zoom and need Zoom and appreciate what Zoom makes possible, I cannot love the way Zoom inserts itself between me and my students, sometimes dropping a student entirely or mangling the audio so every third word gets lost and always making it way too easy for students to hide behind screens when they should be engaging with ideas.

I know I can't blame Zoom for everything awful about pandemic pedagogy, but with no clear outlet for my anger and frustration, I find relief in the fantasy of taking crowbar in hand and smashing Zoom into a million tiny pieces, or throwing Zoom out of a helicopter to the soundtrack of The Flight of the Valkyries, or tossing Zoom off the edge of a Big Sur cliff and watching it plunge helplessly into the rocky Pacific below. 

And then walking calmly toward a library, hand-in-hand with my grandchildren, with not a mask in sight.

Friday poetry challenge: Don't ask the mask!

A friend wonders whether this bizarre life we're leading is squelching my creativity and yes I said yes it is yes!

The mask makes it more difficult to be understood, to the point that sometimes I calculate whether it's even worth the effort to open my mouth, and I know my students are feeling the same way. But the mask is a visible sign of this invisible cloud we've all been living under. Sure, lots of people have responded to the pandemic by letting their creative juices flow in all kinds of interesting ways, but over time the cloud has turned dark and heavy and surrounded me like a damp wool cloak, suppressing my ability to think or speak or write creatively.

I know I'm not the only one feeling this way. I have to force myself to write anything more complicated than an email, and even then I struggle to put together words that reach beyond the perfunctory. My mind feels blank, my language leaden--even my dreams are colorless and blah. Where is the creativity of yesteryear? And will it return to full flourishing after life gets back to normal, whatever normal means these days?

Maybe what I need to do to keep the creative ideas flowing is to give them a regular outlet. That's why I'm trying to revive the Friday Poetry Challenge: if I force myself once a week to engage in a little creative word-play, maybe the exercise will open a conduit to keep the creativity moving through the pipes. It's worth a try. Setting a specific goal helps motivate me to act, and if there's one thing my sluggish, lazy, couch-potato brain needs right now, it's exercise.

So this is me, exercising my creativity within some narrow constraints. Feel free to join the fun!

Don't ask the mask!
It maims the game
of words. I've heard
the same from fam-
ous folk. Don't poke
the beast! It ceased
to care; it stares
or sleeps. Don't speak
of dreams--it seems
they're dull, a null,
a nought. I ought
to pull and mull
some words I've heard,
stretch sounds around
in play. I may
abound in sound
again. 'Til then,
don't ask! The mask
prevails. I fail
the task. (Don't ask.)

Oh snow!

Look out any window to see a scene of loveliness: at home, bright red cardinals standing out against a snowy background; at the office, a blue college flag flapping above the snow-covered campus. From safe within a warm house or office, the snow adds an enticing layer of white to the otherwise bleak midwinter, a soothing vision for my fatigued eyes.

But driving in this weather is another story altogether. For days I've been fighting my way through a mixture of snow, slush, fog, rain, sleet, and ice every time I leave the house; the snow isn't particularly deep but it keeps coming, so it's really hard for the roads to stay cleared. This morning I followed a snowplow most of the way to work, rarely moving at more than 30 mph even on the highway, but even behind the plow the road remained slick and treacherous.

Yesterday's drive was the worst; I arrived home feeling wet, cold, exhausted, and miserable, but then I opened the door and smelled bacon. My adorable husband had made breakfast for supper, eggs and bacon with homemade bread inside my warm cozy house where I could look out the window and enjoy the beauty of winter without the cold nipping my cheeks and toes. 

I ought to put my boots on and go out for a tromp with the camera--which, as far as I can remember, hasn't been out of the camera bag for the entire month of January--but I'm stuck on campus for meetings and course preps and teaching observations, because yes, the tenure and promotion committee still has a heavy workload this semester so I'll be visiting a bunch of classrooms over the next three weeks. But the days are getting longer so I may get home before dusk, and if I do, I'll try to make some footprints in the snow so I can say I enjoyed winter before all this loveliness melts clear away.

 

Friday poetry challenge: paean to lost pleasures

This week I'm really missing the highly civilized practice of taking a cup of hot tea with me to class. It's nice to wet my whistle when I teach back-to-back without a break, and the pause to pick up the cup and take a sip fills that awkward gap while I'm waiting for a student to respond to a question. But masks make so many things impossible, so I walk to class without my tea and miss the feeling of hot chai rolling over my tongue while my students try to look thoughtful.

Give me
my tea!
A mug
to lug
to class--
alas!
My chai--
goodbye!
Caffeine
from green
or black
(alack!)
tea leaves.
At fe-
ver pitch
I itch
to sip
from mug,
to chug
my brew.

You too?

Anyone want to try a little poetic paean to a practice squelched by the pandemic?

Bev, the magic draggin'

Yesterday I was crowing over how beautifully my students had sparkled in a difficult class discussion; today I'm puzzling over student prose describing a character as a "savor." The ups and downs come way too quickly in this profession: one minute I'm hitting all my marks and eliciting brilliant comments from students and the next I'm responding to an email that I will quote in full: "whats the name of the textbook." Two weeks into the semester!

I've adjusted to my new classroom spaces and figured out most (but not all) of my tech problems. On Zoom days I'm trying all kinds of tricks to transform students from names on a screen to actively engaged learners, but it's rough going and the methods I'm resorting to make me feel like we've regressed to third grade. In my composition class I'm so desperate to overcome one particular problem that--well, I'm a little ashamed of what I'm planning to do. Whips and chains are not involved but tomorrow I'm planning to offer a smidgen of extra credit to motivate them to do something that every writing student ought to do anyway.

The problem is that these students refuse to offer specific suggestions on each other's writing. We do this frequently throughout the semester--in fact, every time they turn in a low-stakes writing assignment, I make each student read another classmate's writing, point out something that classmate has done well, and offer a specific suggestion for improvement. 

This semester, though, almost all of their comments consist of vague statements like "This is fine the way it is." If we talk about qualities of an excellent title and then I ask them to read a classmate's writing and suggest improvements to the title, they will write, "The title is fine," even if the title is literally "Homework assignment"--or if there's no title at all. In fact, I see very little evidence that they are even reading their classmates' (short!) writing assignments.

But, as I keep reminding them, writing frequently and getting focused feedback on that writing is the best way to improve, so tomorrow I'm raising the stakes. They've all been having problems integrating, punctuating, and citing quotes, which is normal at this point in the semester, so we'll spend some time at the beginning of class talking about the Quotation Mantra (and yes, I do make them chant the phrase Integrate! Punctuate! Cite! in unison) and looking at a handout modeling these skills, and then I will ask them to look at a classmate's online writing assignment and point out one area where quote integration needs further work. Any student who posts a specific suggestion that provides the correct method will receive some piddly little amount of extra credit, hardly enough to make a dent in the grade but possibly enough to motivate some real attention to student writing. 

But maybe not. Maybe they'll all pull a Bartleby. That's who I think of when students hide behind a name on a Zoom screen or put their heads down so I won't call on them in class: Bartleby the scrivener turning his head to the wall and saying "I prefer not to." Well guess what? I prefer not to resort to third-grade methods to motivate students to engage in learning, but if that's what it takes to drag students away from the brick wall, then let's get draggin'.

Because how much weirder can this day get?

Yesterday we had no water at our house and this morning my car was totally encased in a thick layer of ice. My relationship with water seems to have hit a rough spot. Have I somehow offended Poseidon?

Who is the Greek god of doorknobs--or did the Greeks have no need for a doorknob deity? A little while ago when I opened the door to leave my office, the doorknob suddenly, without warning, fell off in my hand. (Although, come to think of it, what kind of warning was I expecting?) Now I'm sitting in my office waiting for whoever is responsible for campus doorknob repair. I'm afraid to close the door in case I can't get it open again, so I guess I'm not going anywhere for a while.

Hephaestus--Greek god of the forge, of weapons and metalwork and smithery. I suppose a doorknob could serve as a weapon in a pinch, so we'll adopt Hephaestus as our doorknob deity. The Romans adapted him as Vulcan, a name much more mellifluous than Hephaestus and also more redolent with pop-culture associations. 

Despite my marred morning, I'm not feeling particularly volcanic today. Sure, the ice made my morning commute a little intense, but I got here safely and taught my three morning classes without a hitch. I'll have to leave my office door hanging open when I go to teach my afternoon class, but even the sight of that uncooperative doorknob has failed to roil my emotions. What could go wrong? Against all odds, I feel calm, safe, positively pacific. 

Just don't tell Poseidon. He's bound to trouble the waters.

 

It ain't pretty, but it's what we've got

I'm sitting in my office early this morning getting ready to go to class when I reach for my mask and find nothing. No mask! How did I get to my office without a mask? Must have walked across campus without it, so early that no one was present to point out my intransigence. What a scofflaw! A scourge! A menace to society!

I was glad to have a box of spare masks in my office, even if they aren't pretty. At this point, I'm happy to have made it through the week, pretty or not. We have a few new cases of the virus on campus and I have students learning remotely in three of my classes, but we're still here, carrying on as best we can despite everything.

The best moment of the week, I think, was when my literary theory students were scheduled to talk about the role of the poet in society on the same day Amanda Gorman read her remarkable poem at the inauguration. None of the students had seen it before class, so I first asked them why we need a poet at an inauguration, an event focused on government and politics and patriotic spectacle. What can a poet possibly add? My students couldn't come up with any compelling responses until we watched the video. I don't know whether Amanda Gorman's poem would be as powerful on paper, but her performance gave my students something to say: "She made me want to go out and do something amazing," or "Poets remind us who we are." (Because we forget.)

I need that kind of motivation today because this week has worn me out. Two more classes and I'll be done with the first week of the semester! That's worth celebrating even if it ain't pretty.

Either that room goes or I do

Good news! Our resident problem-solvers have been hard at work solving various difficulties re: classroom space, and they've solved one major problem--and created a whole new one!

The 15-student class has been moved out of the 14-seat room and into a classroom more appropriate for its size, and it happens to be my favorite classroom in the building, so no worries. But meanwhile, while no one was paying attention a few more students added my freshman comp class, which made the class too big for social distancing in its assigned classroom, so today I've learned that my first class of the day will be held in the worst classroom in the building. 

Okay, I realize that there's a limited number of rooms available at any given hour and under pandemic conditions we all have to make sacrifices, but I've made plenty of sacrifices already and I think I may have reached my limit. I have endured faulty technology, moldy ceilings, and an improvised room in a busy social space, and I've put up with rooms that were so hot, cold, or cheerless that they seriously distracted from learning. But this room will be the death of me.

As much as I hate chalk, I can put up with a chalkboard if that's the price of teaching in the middle of a pandemic. And the computer setup in there is notoriously slow and cranky, but again, I can put up with that. What I can't manage is that stupid little stage.

That's right: in an otherwise flat-floored room, there's an elevated platform up front, and the only way to get to the chalkboard and the computer console is to step up on that platform and teach from there. It's not even a very big platform, a meager half-circle just adequate for a not-very-mobile prof, but if I'm pacing around waving my arms while pontificating about the glories of the semicolon, I'll be over the edge in a heartbeat. No matter how carefully I maintain my situational awareness, at some point in the semester I'm going to miss the step and fall, or I'm going to suffer a vertigo attack and fall, or I'm going to get distracted by a student and fall. It will not be pretty.

Moreover, the awareness that falling is inevitable will make me dread every moment I spend in that classroom. I'm already grinding my teeth to pieces because of the anxiety of teaching under pandemic conditions; by the end of this semester I'll be one giant toothless walking bruise. Is this the kind of future anyone really wants?

The paranoid part of me wonders whether this is some sort of evil conspiracy to nudge me toward early retirement so the College can replace me with two adjuncts and a trained seal, but I suspect it's just the result of our overworked records office staff trying to match enrollments with available spaces without any awareness of which rooms are workable and which are actively malevolent. If no other option arises, I will have to teach in that room two mornings a week for the next fourteen weeks--if the room doesn't kill me first. It will be a fight to the death between me and the room; if you don't hear from me, you'll know the room has won.

A few tough moments to start the semester

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: teaching is hard, and Covid teaching is harder. If you asked me to pick out the worst moment of my first day of teaching for the year, I'd have to narrow it down: 

• When the fifteenth student walked into a classroom that contained only fourteen seats so I had to roll the teacher's desk and chair over to the corner so the student could sit and then there was not a single place for me to sit down while my students did their first-day-of-class writing, and I had to worry what sort of pandemic protocols I was violating by allowing fifteen students in a room approved for only fourteen, but then I also had to wonder why the people in charge of assigning classrooms hadn't found one more appropriate for the size of the class.
• When the technology that worked fine when I tested it just last week refused to work properly so that the student joining my class from quarantine was unable to communicate with me or the rest of the class except via the chat function, which I couldn't see with my back to the screen and couldn't read when my attention was drawn to his comments because the print was too small for my decrepit eyes.
• When the technology that worked so well in a classroom I used all last semester refused to respond to my promptings so I had to dash down the hallway and fetch the administrative assistant charged with solving every problem in every single classroom in the whole stinking building, and I'm sure she's already getting tired of my face because I had to seek her assistance three different times before noon.

Those were difficult moments but not one of them was the worst. The worst moment occurred in my fourth class of the day, when I had finished going over the syllabus and my students were dutifully writing in response to a prompt and I was relaxing in the knowledge that all I had to do was sit there until they were done writing and I'd be done teaching for the day, but in the quiet of the classroom, something unexpected happened:

I had to cough.

And not just a little gentle throat-clearing snorf but a body-wracking cough that would shake me from toes to temple, the kind of cough that might attract concerned attention in the best of times but that could send people screaming for the exits during Covid-19.

Well what could I do? I felt the cough coming so I excused myself to the rest room across the hall, where I let it loose. I sincerely hope it was nothing worse than my usual reaction to returning to the classroom in a moldy building. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to be sick right now.

But that's just the bad news. The good news is my students all deserve gold stars for complying with mask and distancing protocols, and they wrote some really interesting stuff today, engaging with ideas in a way that fills me with hope. No one ever said teaching would be easy, but in this case I think it's worth doing anyway.

 

Working out the drudgery/magic ratio

How many hours of sheer drudgery are required to produce one moment of magic in the classroom? I asked that question on Facebook earlier this week and received answers ranging from 6 to 42 (because 42 is the answer to--well, everything). 

It would be a simple math problem if only I could figure out which acts of drudgery should be included in the equation. If we count all the years of education that led to the degree that put me in a position to create classroom magic, the number would be astronomical--even if we subtract the portion of that educational experience that does not qualify as drudgery. A correspondent informs me that drudgery comes to us from the Old English dreogan, "to work, suffer, endure," which perfectly describes what I've been doing all this week to prepare for the start of classes. The semester hasn't started but already my endurance is wearing thin. 

But let's put aside the drudgery required to get credentialed and find a teaching job, and since we're making arbitrary decisions, let's also bracket the time we spend in academic activities not related to teaching--but even that isn't easy. My service on the tenure and promotion committee may not enhance my own teaching, but it affects the College's ability to retain effective teachers and thus the quality of teaching overall. And what about research and writing? My students aren't likely to read my academic writing but my research informs my teaching, exposing me to new ideas and providing a foundation for the knowledge I share with students.

But we have to start somewhere so let's eliminate service, research, and writing from the equation, even though they involve a significant amount of drudgery. What about professional development activities aimed directly at improving teaching? Pedagogy workshops, technology training, discussions of diversity or assessment--such activities are not without their moments of drudgery, especially when they're held on Zoom. "Endure" is exactly the right verb to describe how I experience Zoom meetings.

So let's admit to the equation only the portion of pedagogical professional development that qualifies as drudgery, and then let's add to that the number of hours required to create classes, review and order texts, write syllabi, construct writing assignments and in-class activities, post all manner of matter on the course management system, make photocopies, set up gradebooks, prepare lectures and discussions--in short, every annoying little thing we do before we set foot in the classroom on the first day, plus all the annoying little things we do to make sure we're ready for the next day and the next. That's one side of the equation.

Now the next step: to determine our drudgery/magic ratio, all we have to do is figure out how to quantify a unit of classroom magic. 

And here, my friends, I throw up my hands. I have endured enough. Time to sit back and let the magic happen.

A new breed of anxiety dreams

In my nightmare I'm surrounded by a scrum of shoving students, all brandishing 45-rpm records and demanding my approval, and none of them are wearing masks.  

Teaching anxiety takes many forms and today it's a combination of unruly mobs, unworkable technology, and unawareness of proper pandemic protocol. Students aren't even back on campus yet but already I'm dreading what new horrors the spring semester will bring--and that was before I read the article on Inside Higher Ed about the vast increase in Covid-19 infection rates in counties where universities rely primarily on in-person instruction. Granted, the study looked at large public universities and not small private colleges, but it's hard to imagine that Ohio's post-holiday surge in cases won't affect even our little corner of Appalachia.  

How will this be different from past spring semesters? No breaks, for one thing--no long weekends, no Spring Break, just a single day off on a Wednesday in the middle of March. The goal is to keep students on campus, which didn't work all that well last semester but hope springs eternal. Social distancing requires different classroom setups so once again I'll be teaching in rooms I hate, although this time at least they're all in the same building. I can put up with horrible rooms just this once.

Of course that's what I told myself last semester about so many things--just this once I'll teach simultaneously to students who are present and others who are online; just this once I'll use put all my exams online and use online proctoring; just this once I'll forego unannounced reading quizzes because there's no equitable way to give the quiz when some students are face-to-face while others are on Zoom.

And just this once I'll prepare four spring semester syllabi crammed with Covid-19 guidelines about mask-wearing, Zoom participation, social distancing, and supporting one another. A clever colleague has come up with a "No-nose policy": if she can get through the whole semester without ever having to tell a student to pull a mask up over his or her nose, the whole class will get extra credit. Of course this won't work in my classes because I won't be able to see the students who sit in the back of my socially distanced classrooms. Oh, to have younger eyes--or smaller classes!