Another edition of Unsent Letters

To students of my seriously ill colleague: Trust me, your professor is in no condition to respond to emails demanding instant information about your grade, and acting as if he got sick on purpose just to inconvenience you isn't going to help him recover.

To a student confused about what "revision" means: I started reading the revised draft you sent me but it immediately became apparent that you hadn't revised any of the problem areas I marked on the earlier draft, including such simple issues as incorrect spelling of place names. Surely you're not asking me to mark all those errors a second time, right? So why don't you go ahead and revise in response to my previous feedback before asking for more?

To the most non-responsive class I've ever encountered: Honestly, I could stand in front of the room and offer a hundred-dollar bill to the first person who speaks, and I wouldn't be a penny poorer by the end of the class. If you're so terrified of wrong answers that you can't risk saying a single word all semester long, and if you perceive every friendly attempt to elicit responses as intimidation, then I hope you someday own a restaurant that gets reamed out by Gordon Ramsay so you can see what real intimidation looks like.

To the student who educated me: I confess that I initially perceived you as a big dumb lunk, but you've shown such an eagerness to learn, a willingness to take risks, and a persistence in the face of difficulties that I'll be reluctant in the future to dismiss anyone on the basis of a poor first impression. 

To my students preparing final papers and exams: Go ahead and panic if you have to, but do it quickly--set aside five minutes for a full-on panic attack so that you can get it over with and move on. Hit something soft that won't hit back, or run around campus waving your arms and yelling all the names you'd like to call your professors--whatever you have to do to get the negative energy out of your system. Then sit down and do all the things that stand between you and a successful completion of the semester, because winter break is on the way and we all want you to get there in one piece.

Post-Thanksgiving thanks

Yesterday some of us were coloring at the dining table while my oldest grandchild drew up a chart to record data about an interesting rock she'd found down at the creek, and she said, "I can't wait to take this home and put it on my spreadsheet!" Yes, we now live in a world in which eight-year-old girls create spreadsheets to record data about rocks. There's something to be thankful for!

When she got bored, I threw open the cedar chest and the basket full of scarves and she got busy putting together some very creative combinations from all the old fancy-schmantsy clothes I've inexplicably saved over the years. My old prom dress has never looked better, and we all enjoyed the fashion show.

We've all colored and played Legos and gone for walks together, but I'm most thankful for a family that knows how to work together to prepare a feast. I don't know where my daughter learned to make such fabulous pies--certainly not from me--but every hand played a part in putting a turkey and all the trimmings on the table (and cleaning them all up afterward).

Last night while all the men took my grandson to Columbus for his first hockey game, my daughter and I introduced the little girls to Singing in the Rain, which made them laugh their little heads off and express a desire to see it five million more times. Now their chirpy little voices are going around singing Moses supposes his toeses are roses, a pleasant sound to hear in a house that is normally way too quiet.

Now it's time to clean up the Legos, wipe up the syrup smears, pack up the muddy boots, and send everyone home. But we're not packing up the thankfulness. I need to make room for that in my house every day of the year. 

 

The right time for running out of steam

"You can spend the final 20 minutes of class working on the reading assignment for next Monday," I told my composition students, "But I don't care whether you do it here or elsewhere." So they all left the classroom, possibly to find a comfortable place to do the reading and possibly not. Who knows? They'd turned in their major research papers this morning so we spent some time in class doing some preliminary work to prepare for the final essay exam, but I won't see them again for a whole week and who's going to remember anything I tell them today?

I've reached the point in every class when I've just about run out of steam. Sure, I'll lead discussions of reading material and provide feedback on drafts, but two of my classes are spending the final week of class watching films and I don't feel the least bit guilty about that. They all have major projects due in the next two weeks, so they're working hard enough--and so am I. It just doesn't always look like work.

Frankly, I'm too tired to stand in front of class right now. I've been awake since 4 a.m. because my subconscious mind decided it was really important to find out whether we had any yeast in the kitchen, which we did not, so I had to add that to my shopping list for Thanksgiving food, although why I had to do that at 4 a.m. is beyond me. How am I supposed to stand in front of four classes and be coherent when my subconscious mind is waking me in the wee hours obsessing over yeast?

So for now I'll do my work sitting down. Today I'm providing feedback on a pile of drafts from the African American Lit class plus a pile of Works Cited drafts for the Honors students' research projects. And then I have all those composition essays to grade and a bunch of interpretive maps from the Postcolonial Lit class, where students did some really impressive work on the meanings of Maori tattoos and folk tales and where one student illustrated Peter Cowan's short story "The Tractor" by creating an image of a garden growing plants shaped like dollar signs. Amazing work, and I enjoyed watching them explain their findings to classmates while I sat and watched from the sidelines.

If I've done my work well, my students should be able to take the lead at this point in the semester while I observe and encourage. It may look like I'm loafing, but it's evidence that learning has happened and work has been done, and after all that effort we all need a bit of a break. And so we'll take it, with thanksgiving.   

A well-earned reward for a powerful poet

I had dinner with poet Martin Espada a few years ago before he gave a reading on our campus. A power outage knocked out our favorite local restaurants so we took him across the river to West Virginia, which caused some trepidation--he'd never been to West Virginia before, and he knew Appalachia only from the popular stereotypes. 

It was an odd dinner. He was a lovely man but low-energy, almost morose; I worried about how he would reach the audience at the reading. 

But then he stood up and started reading. What a remarkable transformation: he performed his verse, chanting and swaying and sometimes shouting. Poetry that was pretty impressive on the page swept through the room like a cleansing fire. And I thought: powerful poetry--from a powerful poet.

And so I was delighted to hear that Espada's latest collection, Floaters, has won this year's National Book Award for poetry. The title poem (read it here) responds to a photograph of a man and his small child who drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande. The poem reminds us that

... the dead have names, a feast day parade of names, names that
dress all in red, names that twirl skirts, names that blow whistles,
names that shake rattles, names that sing in praise of the saints...

Espada is an expert at making us look at the world around us and see beyond the surface. A few years ago he wrote an essay responding to Shelley's claim that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Espada writes,

Poets should have no trouble identifying with being 'unacknowledged.' They grouse about being ignored, about paltry attendance at readings and royalty statements that would cause most novelists to jump off a bridge. Yet poets also contribute to their marginalization by producing hermetic verse and living insular lives, confined to the academy or to circles of other poets, by mocking themselves as childish and unworldly, by refusing to embrace their role as unacknowledged legislators. The only antidote to irrelevancy is relevancy. The British poet Adrian Mitchell famously said: 'Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.'

Espada's poetry does not allow us to ignore people, even the nameless, faceless people whose tragedies are so easily overlooked. His poetry is an antidote to poetic irrelevancy, and for that he deserves all the applause he is now receiving.

A surprisingly easy week, despite everything

On Monday I excused myself from a class so I could go to the ladies' room and cough vigorously without alarming anyone, and today I had to figure out how to handle a nosebleed in front of a class while wearing a mask. I know what caused the nosebleed--the nasal spray that I generally use only during the height of spring allergy season but that I've reached for far too many times in the past week. No more! Today I feel nearly normal so I'm putting away all the over-the-counter remedies and sticking to hot tea to get me through the day.

And what a lovely day it is: warm and sunny, with a chance of gorgeousness this afternoon. It was a sudden shift to unseasonably warm weather that precipitated my allergy attack a week ago, so here's hoping that this week is different.

On the too-many-meetings front, things are going well. I've been reminded of how much fun search committees can be when they allow me to spend time with really interesting people who are passionate about their work, and the real advantage of Zoom interviews has become clear: I'm not stuck trying to eat a meal in a nice restaurant with a pedant who won't shut up about Foucault.

Most of my classes are having writing workdays this week, so I'm spending a lot of time wandering around classrooms checking on progress and answering questions. With little to prep, I'm working ahead on next semester's syllabi, which ought to be really easy since I'm teaching three repeat courses that require only minor adjustments. The fourth course is a new prep, but I had to produce a full syllabus to submit with the course proposal in August, so it just needs a little tweaking. 

On Friday I'll be inundated with drafts requiring swift feedback, and then over the next two weeks I'll be collecting piles of papers, exams, and other assignments to grade. Right now, though, I'm taking it easy, trying to be helpful, and celebrating every class period that passes without the need to cough.  

 

When students pursue the nuclear option

"We need to get together and share war stories so I won't feel like I'm the only one," said a junior colleague this morning. He's in the middle of a kerfuffle caused by a student who, upset with a particular classroom policy, sent a long angry e-mail to the President, Provost, the Associate Provost, and just about everyone in a position of authority at the College except the professor himself. Because why start small when you can jump right to the nuclear option?

I told my troubled colleague about the freshman comp students who told a former Provost that I should be required to teach in long sleeves because the big hairy mole on my arm was interfering with the students' ability to learn, and I also shared the then-Provost's helpful suggestion on how I should remedy the situation: "Why don't you just have surgery?" 

And I told him about the time I told a plagiarizing student that I didn't hear his own distinctive voice in his paper and he went and told everyone on the planet that I said his writing wasn't "Black enough."

These incidents and others like them happened when I was still wet behind the ears, not yet tenured and uncertain whether my career could survive. Incidents like these require time and resources from many people and tie everyone up in knots emotionally, with long-term impact. I mean, I still think twice before putting on short sleeves on a teaching day, and I've certainly become more careful about how I confront students about plagiarism. But here's the thing: I could have learned those lessons less traumatically if the students had approached me first instead of employing the nuclear option.

But outrage seems to be the order of the day, so complaints and concerns that ought to be worked out on the classroom level are instead making their way straight to the President and Provost, who, frankly, have one or two other things on their plate. Their response to the students is simple: "Have you talked to the professor?" But by that time the outrage genii is out of the bottle and it's often hard to shove him back in.

My colleague is doing okay. He'll come out of this just fine, and then someday he'll have a war story to share with a junior colleague who needs to hear that we're not alone, that we've all been through our battles, and that, if we pull together, we will survive.  

Can't hit the steps without a soundtrack

I'm in a panic after looking at next week's schedule. In addition to teaching four classes on MWF, I am also either encouraged or expected to attend meetings at the following times: Monday at noon, Monday at 4 (two different meetings!), Monday at 5, Tuesday at 12:15, Tuesday at 4, Wednesday at 4, Thursday at 4 (two different meetings!). Friday is my only meeting-free day, but by then I'll be too exhausted to celebrate. This week I backed out of two meetings because I was sick, but that excuse will only stretch so far--and besides, some of these meetings are kind of important. Not important enough to inspire me to be in two places at once, but important all the same. Good thing I'm not trying to, like, have a life or anything.

Someone needs to put this disastrous song-and-dance to music. Call it the Priorities Polka, the Too-Many-Meetings Blues, the Academic Hokey-Pokey, or whatever will put enable me to waltz from one conference room or Zoom call to another without tripping over my own fat feet. And a-one, and a-two--hit it, boys!

(You first.)

 

Is there anything we can't blame on the weather?

Is there anything we can't blame on the weather? There's lots of misery going around this week and we're badly in need of a scapegoat, so let's give it a try:

I'm behind on my grading because I got sick and stayed home feeling miserable for two and a half days, drugged up and surrounded by billows of used tissues because an unseasonably warm spell put some sort of allergen in the air that made my nose run like an open firehose, and yes, I blame the weather.

And I nearly had a face full of spider web this morning because the spiders that recently retreated to winter quarters have re-emerged in response to warmer weather but I don't expect spiderwebs across my front door in November so BOOM there it was, yuck, and yes, I blame the weather.

A committee meeting this morning was held in a room so hot and stuffy that people felt stifled and tempers simmered until they boiled over, and the room was hot because our HVAC system finally got switched over to heat last week in response to below-freezing temperatures and it's not feasible to switch it quickly back to air conditioning so yes, I blame the weather. 

Can I find the way to blame the weather for the fire that badly damaged a campus sorority house, displacing 15 students and destroying their possessions? No one knows what caused the fire yet and I guess I'm glad that the weather was warm so they didn't freeze to death when they fled the house, and nobody was hurt and the house can be renovated and the students have been re-housed (ugly word for a comforting concept) so no, I can't blame the weather for the fire, but I can't find anyone else to blame either so all that misery is just floating around loose, mingling with the heat and the allergens and all that leaf mold being blown into the air by the battalion of leaf-blowers all over campus, and the leaf-blowers wouldn't be blowing if the leaves hadn't fallen, so yes, I blame the weather.

The good news, though, is that my nose has stopped running and cooler temperatures are on the way this weekend so the spiders should beat a retreat from my front door and the committee meeting rooms will be just normally stuffy instead of unbearable. And for that, we can thank the weather.  

Buoyed up by future fun

It's amazing how little it takes sometimes to improve my mood. I was feeling stagnant, tired of teaching the same texts over and over, wondering whether it's time to pack up the office and call it a career, when suddenly, out of the blue, I was offered a chance to teach a special topics literature course, and now I'm all excited about choosing a theme and picking out texts and designing meaningful assignments--for a class I'll be teaching in Spring 2023. 

You know what this means, right? It means I can't retire for at least two more years and I also have an excellent response for all the people who keep asking me when I'm planning to retire: I'm too busy designing a new course to think about retirement.

It's a small thing, really, but thinking about this course has reminded me that I haven't used up all my good ideas and that I still have something to offer students. Sure, I teach a lot of the same texts over and over, but I'm not teaching the same students, and each new group brings something a little different to the table. And in 2023, I'll bring something new to the table too--and if I'm not quite certain right now what that something will be, at least it's giving me a reason to believe in a bright future.

 

 

Friday poetry challenge: Haiku, out on a limb

Creekside sentinels,
sycamores raise mottled limbs--
camo in the sky.

Everybody's good at something (I hope)

My student rushes into class flustered, says she's nervous about doing her presentation and It's not as good as the ones you do and I want to give her a big hug and say Oh sweetheart--I've been doing this since before you were born, but instead I help her get her file set up and I sit down and listen as she does her best not to collapse in sheer terror in front of the class.

And it's true--I've been doing presentations since overhead projectors were considered cutting-edge technology; I've juggled slippery transparencies and notes while trying not to knock the lens out of focus and I rejoiced when digital technology made the overhead projector obsolete. I've never claimed to be a master of PowerPoint but I've been honing my skills for a long time and I'm generally pleased with the results. I've seen talented students create slides that looked far more polished than anything I could hope to produce, but even the less flashy presentations are generally competent enough. I try to hold high expectations for student work, but I hope I'm not making students feel as if they'll never measure up.

Last week I watched a student presentation that made me marvel: the background looked clean and original, and the information was clustered to make the relationships between ideas especially clear. Two words were spelled wrong, but these students had designed something far beyond my skill-set. I expect to see more of this kind of excellence as my tech skills stagnate while students keep exploring new methods and programs. 

I give a loud hurrah to students whose presentation skills surpass mine, but that doesn't mean I expect every student to excel in that way. They're students! They're still learning! If they do their best to fulfill the requirements of the assignment, conveying helpful information clearly, then they'll be fine. And if oral presentations really aren't their strong suit, then they'll just have to grit their teeth and survive to move on to more comfortable territory.

Everybody is good at something, but if the something they're good at isn't on display in my classroom, then I may never know what skills my students possess that I could never hope to equal. So when my student said I know it's not as good as what you do, I was reminded that I get to get up in front of people and do what I'm good at every single day--and I can only hope that my students will reach a point when they will get to do the same.

A walk in the wet fall woods

I keep waiting for one of those crisp fall days when the brightly colored leaves stand out against a vivid blue sky, but alas, the good weather comes only on days when I'm tied up in meetings. I drive to work in the dark every morning and no matter how clear the skies may be while I'm inside teaching classes, the clouds start to gather the minute I leave the building. Soon the leaves will fall and we'll be black to bare brown woods, so if I'm going to enjoy the fall colors, I'd better do it now regardless of the weather. 

And so we went out for a hike at Lake Katharine this morning, walking through constant drizzle over paths covered by slick wet leaves. Occasionally the dim woods would open up onto vistas of yellow and red leaves alongside the lake shrouded in mist. I walked through shooting pains in my hip and hobbled back to the car both refreshed and exhausted. Conditions were lousy and I wondered if we'd ever see the sun again even as the lovely fall colors pulled me onward. Light at the end of the tunnel! I just wish the tunnel weren't so wet, dark, and cold.

   

Getting comfortable with discomfort

Another day, another news story about an attempt to remove from schools or libraries any book that might make a student "uncomfortable."

You know what makes me uncomfortable? Reading news stories about people trying to remove books that might make other hypothetical people uncomfortable.

Also peach skin--the fuzziness makes me uncomfortable. Big trucks barrelling down the highway right on my tail make me uncomfortable. Overuse of boldface in a document makes me uncomfortable, and a document that combines underlining and italics makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Learning the new software we're using for student advising makes me uncomfortable. Students who think anything that happened before the year 2000 is prehistoric make me uncomfortable, as do those who refer to prose written in 1921 as "Old English." 

This is just the tip of the iceberg of things that make me uncomfortable, but you know what? I'm still gonna eat that peach and drive on that highway and read that document and use that software and teach those students, because sometimes the rewards are worth a little discomfort.  

A little monkey business

I just found myself writing a comment I don't recall ever before applying to a student project: Effective use of monkeys. It's a relief, really, to see such adorable monkeys cavorting all over an assignment, and it's a relief to be able to write something more interesting than italicize titles of books or the period comes after the parentheses.

I've been reading drafts of annotated bibliographies, the most loathsome type of assignment to grade because so many elements require attention beyond the clarity of the annotations themselves: alphabetical order, title formats, hanging indent, punctuation, and a host of other niggling details. So then it was a pleasure to shift to the interpretive maps produced by my Postcolonial Lit students, whose use of monkeys was, as mentioned, highly effective. How can I encourage the use of colorful cavorting monkeys on other assignments?

 

 

 

A lot of brouhaha about vagueness

Autumn leaves lack subtlety, but while the colors screams for attention outside, I'm stuck in my office writing "vague" on recent literature exams. I appreciate subtlety in word use and argumentation, but these responses are not subtle or understated or oblique; they're just plain vague. There's no there there.

Many questions on my literature exams don't require a specific right answer, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as a wrong answer. Writing that the Odyssey portrays the Cyclops as an example of good hospitality demonstrates a lack of understanding of the text, as does the assertion that Inman is a war hero in Cold Mountain. But I'd rather see a student draw an inaccurate conclusion about a text than avoid drawing any conclusions at all.

My guiding rule is simple: Could the student's statement be applied indiscriminately to every work of literature ever written? If so, it's too vague. Literature means different things to different people: vague. Poets use different methods to get their point across: vague. These works are similar in some ways and different in others: vague. Music is used for many purposes in the text: vague.

These statements are salvageable; all the student has to do is provide specific examples from the texts to support broad generalizations. In fact, almost every question is accompanied by a request to support claims with specific examples from the text. What's so difficult about mentioning, for instance, the scene where Stobrod plays his violin for the dying girl and discovers that there's more to music than just hitting the right notes? 

Unless, of course, the student hasn't read the text. I would guess that 99 percent of vagueness in exam responses is a result of simple ignorance: the student hasn't read the text and so throws down a tangle of verbiage in hopes that I won't notice the absence of substance. But if I have one superpower, it's the ability to spot an absence of substance on an essay exam. I can see what's not even there, and its absence will result in a Very Bad Grade.

Fortunately, this semester I have very few students suffering from the vagueness disease. I try to nip the vagueness virus in the bud on low-stakes reading quizzes; once students see how much disaster the word vague can wreak on a 10-point quiz, they tend to work a little harder on specific examples. But a few are immune to the reading quiz vaccine--or maybe they're just immune to reading. Whatever the reason, I could definitely find use for a rubber stamp with the word vague in a big bold font.

I used to have a rubber stamp that said brouhaha (thanks to a friend who worked in a print shop), but I never found much use for it before it disappeared during one of my moves. I would get plenty of use out of a vague rubber stamp, but I would get depressed every time I saw it in my desk drawer. But imagine getting through a whole pile of exams without saying vague! That would be cause for some brouhaha. 

Just a brief midweek happy dance

I had the strangest feeling while driving home yesterday afternoon, an overwhelming lightness as of my whole being trying to smile. Could this be--happiness? For no good reason? In the middle of a ridiculously busy week?

Let me count the reasons I ought to be unhappy right now: student intransigence, campus shenanigans, financial stagnation, personal frustration over the zillion ways it's impossible to live in two counties at once. And yet I feel happier than I have in months, maybe years. 

It's true that yesterday a colleague shared with me something a student told her about my class that made me feel like Super Professor, but a solitary student comment shouldn't be enough to offset the gloom that has characterized the past year and a half of pandemic teaching. Last year at this time we were all dutifully putting one foot in front of the other to get through the day and the week and the semester, spending so much time wrangling technology for Zoom classes that we had no time to hope for happiness. This week I'll need to turn on Zoom to accommodate one student in quarantine, but the relative absence of Zoom from my daily life has lifted a curtain and let in some light.

And this semester I've also spent more time interacting with colleagues face-to-face, most meaningfully as chair of a task force charged with producing a bit of verbiage for the College's strategic plan. Sounds deadly, right? But here's the thing: this group worked really well together crafting a statement that bears none of the hallmarks of committee-produced prose. It's succinct, elegant, profound, and perhaps even inspiring. I was delighted to lead a mixed group of colleagues through the process and especially pleased to see the rookies step up to make significant contributions, suggesting hope for future campus leadership.

And I've also finally found an avenue for my own future research and writing. No one has been doing much professional development during the pandemic--I mean, who has time to write conference papers or journal articles? I've been shepherding the comedy volume through the editing process and I finally submitted the Natasha Trethewey essay to a journal, but for a long time I haven't been able to visualize any future research or writing beyond these projects. I've been wondering whether I might be reaching the end of the road as a productive scholar, but then this week I started sensing a pathway opening in a new direction, an area adjacent to my previous work but different enough to arouse my curiosity. I'm not ready to go public yet but it's exciting to see that what looks like a dead end might instead be a sharp turn into really interesting territory. 

It came to me in the middle of a long walk up the Big Horrible Hill, a hill I haven't been able to climb in months. I could blame the weather, my ridiculous schedule, or my aging joints, but the result is that I've fallen so far off my usual exercise routine that I couldn't make it all the way up the hill the first time I tried this fall. But I've been working at it--one foot in front of another, a little farther each time--and this morning I made it clear to the top and back home again without too much trouble. I'll be living on Aleve today, but there's no doubt that getting out for a challenging walk through woods suffused with autumn gold nourishes my body, mind, and soul. 

And so I feel happy--still!--despite joint pain and piles of grading and more committee work. I'm going to hold on to this feeling as long as I can because if nothing else, pandemic teaching has taught me how ephemeral happiness can be, how easy it can be to lose hope. I know it's not over and there are more challenges ahead, but just for today, let's raise a glass to happiness.

All the ways I'm being horrible today (or most of them, anyway)

First, I'm making my first-year composition students find books--actual books!--to use as sources for their problem papers, and I'm even requiring that they find at least one book published by a University Press, and when they asked why, I told them about previous students who used children's books written on a third-grade level as sources in a college research paper, and when my current students pointed out that they would never do such a thing and it's not fair to make them suffer because of bad acts by past students, I said I know it's not fair--but you'll have to do it anyway.

And if that's not bad enough, I'm making them find--and read!--articles from peer-reviewed academic journals, and I even devoted time in class to showing them how to use our library research databases to find articles, and then I gave them 20 minutes of class time  to find academic journal articles, during which time I walked around the room answering questions and offering guidance--even to the student who had kept her hood pulled up earlier in class to hide the fact that she had earbuds in and therefore didn't have the first clue what she was supposed to be doing--and before the end of the hour I made each student show me a peer-reviewed academic journal article relevant to their topic, so that when their annotation and citation are due on Friday, they can't claim that they couldn't find any articles. 

And then when I received an email from a student wanting to schedule time to make up a midterm from two weeks ago, I agreed to do so provided that the student could provide some documentation excusing the absence, because the class attendance policy clearly states that while I do not take roll in that class or penalize students for absences, I also do not permit make-ups without an acceptable excuse, and I forgot that there was a midterm is not an acceptable excuse even in the current environment when we are being encouraged to cut students some slack because life is so darned difficult right now, and every time I hear that I have to bite my tongue to prevent myself from growling You want to talk about difficult? I taught a full semester while undergoing chemotherapy and radiation! If I could do that, you can remember to check the syllabus once in a while.

And the day isn't even half over! Who knows how horrible I'll manage to be by the end of the afternoon? 

Advising the advisor

I asked my students this morning what they like about autumn and they mentioned the cooler weather, colorful leaves, and decorated pumpkins, but I notice that none of them brought up the joys of scheduling courses for next semester. Good thing this time of year offers us so many lovely rewards because pre-registration season is upon us and it's terrifying.

For years I taught the first-year seminar every fall, which brings with it the task of serving as advisor to a whole class of brand-new college students, and then I've generally picked up a few English major advisees along the way as well. But I haven't taught the first-year seminar for a few years now and all our English majors seem to be finding help elsewhere. Last year I had exactly one advisee, who how now moved on to an advisor in her major. This year I have thirteen.

Which is nothing, really, compared to the huge advising load some of my colleagues carry, but here's the complication: last year we moved to a brand-new online program for advising students, but I didn't go to any of the training sessions because I didn't have advisees. I was quite adept with the previous setup, even able to troubleshoot problems that arose while students tried to register. This new program is better in every way, offering a more user-friendly experience, more helpful options, more ways for students to take charge of their registration experience, but the problem is that I don't know how to make it work. I haven't used it enough to know where the potholes are hiding, and I'm still fumbling to figure it out well enough so that I can help my students.

Fortunately, all my advisees this semester are honors students, so some of them have already mastered all the intricacies of the new program. Maybe I'll ask them to show me how it works. As an advisor, I'm supposed to have all the answers (or know where to find them), but at this point I'm full of questions, and maybe the best place to find answers is among my students.   

Friday poetry challenge: Apostrophizing apostrophes

"The apostrophe is your friend," I told my freshpersons, but they seemed skeptical, preferring to eschew apostrophes altogether or use them incorrectly to form plural nouns. "That's called the grocer's apostrophe," I told them, just in case the question ever comes up on Jeopardy or something. They don't need to know how to identify a grocer's apostrophe, or even grocers' apostrophes; they need to know how to use apostrophes to form possessives, a topic that has no doubt been troubling students since the invention of the apostrophe--but not enough to motivate them to finally learn the rules of apostrophe placement. And so I gave them the whole song and dance, all the while wondering when the Apostrophe Dance will be featured on Dancing with the Stars. (Not Star's.)

Apostrophes dance across the page;
in plural nouns they're all the rage.
They do-si-do and stick their feet
in "it's" when "its" is needed. Beat

the big bass drum for proper nouns:
"Charle's" keeps on swinging round,
racing to keep up with "Jone's."
Prancing into forbidden zones,

these marks dance on with steps so errant
I fear I'll never cure their tarrant-
ism or constrain their gams
to Arthur Murray diagrams.

Step one: write the plural noun.
If at the end an s is found,
add an apostrophe. If not,
add 's. Apostrophes gavotte

in graceful, orderly progression
when used to indicate possession.

My next pet peeve?

What makes a word repellant? Novelty, sound quality, redundancy, or some other factor?

While grading midterm essays over the weekend, I saw some really good papers but also the usual pile of mediocre writing demonstrating the usual problems: comma splices, spelling errors, difficulty in forming possessives. One of the essays my first-year students analyzed was written by a fellow named Kohls, and when it came to making the name possessive, I saw every possible variation: Kohl's, Kohls', Kohls's, Kohlses', and just plain Kohls. None of this provoked any response other than the usual bland marginal comments.

Only one word in the whole pile of papers made me feel as if I'd been kicked in the gut. I've seen my share of awkward constructions over the years, but few cause the kind of visceral response I felt when I encountered Nextly.

What an ugly word! Next is such a neat little bundle of meaning, entirely inoffensive and useful in indicating progression, but add that little -ly and suddenly it grates on the ear. Was my reaction to the word based on its redundancy, its novelty, or something else? 

I recall when I first started seeing relatable oh so many years ago and found it vague, unnecessary, and lazy. I fought it at first, but it was a lost cause: relatable filled a need so neatly that its general adoption became irresistible. I still bristle when students use it to say something about themselves when they ought to be saying something about the text they're analyzing, but no amount of bristling is going to send relatable back where it came from.

But I can't help bristling at nextly. Is this one instance just a harbinger of change to come? Will nextly be the next relatable? What niche does nextly fill that can't be filled by next? And why does the simply addition of -ly make the word so stinking ugly? 

I hope this was just an isolated error and not the lone cockroach you see in the night kitchen--a visual manifestation of a much larger infestation. Stomping on the cockroach may solve the immediate problem, but it has no effect on the vermin still hiding under the cabinets.