Foot feats

Red feet, wet feet, tired feet, sore feet--I'm clearly having way too much fun on my holiday weekend. The red stripes on my feet were a result of wearing sandals to a baseball game without applying sunscreen, and goodness do they hurt. Mowing on the steep slopes always causes foot pain, so by the end of the day, my feet demanded a rest. And then this morning I hiked at Luke Chute Conservation Area while the burgeoning greenery was still dew-bedecked, soaking my shoes and socks, but I had neglected to bring another pair so I had to drive another 40 miles up the highway dripping wet. Now I intend to spend the rest of the holiday weekend reading a book with my feet up, still striped red but finally dry.

 

 

 

 

There aren't enough support groups on the planet for this

Judging by comments from my colleagues assembled for our first Writing Wednesday session, we need to establish some support groups to help us all get through the summer. Writing Wednesday works like a writing support group, but what some of us really need is an I-don't-know-what-to-write support group so we can encourage each other to keep going when we're out of ideas and our brains are crowded with other concerns, like campus budget problems, continuing Covid cases, and random mass shootings that make us cry every time we turn on the radio. 

But that's not all! We need more:

A Growing Out Our Bangs support group so we can share strategies on staying sane when yard work sends long strands of sweaty hair into our eyes. Headbands or barrettes? Discuss!

A Dealing with the Loss of Colleagues support group to help us walk that fine line between publicly celebrating the successes of colleagues who have found better jobs elsewhere while privately grieving their loss and wishing we could go away with them. Maybe we can craft spiffy little carrying-cases to hold those unwieldy wads of envy.

A Making Small-Talk with Wretched People support group where we can practice the skills required for random public encounters with the higher-ups who are determined to make our lives miserable. What do we say when we bump up against an intransigent administrator at the Farmers Market when it takes every ounce of self-control to hold back a sharp kick in the shins? What martial art system will help us hold back our kicks?

A Coping with Anxious Offspring support group where we can hold each others' hands when children respond to the horrors of modern life by falling into silence, depression, or eating disorders. Where do we find hope when children lose their joy? Too painful to discuss, so keep the Kleenex handy.

A Support for the Supporters support group where those of us who are trying to support so many others can lay down all responsibility for others' issues and just sit in a pool of our own feelings until someone notices and reaches out a hand. Let's have a pity party! (Be sure to bring along your tiny violin.)

Not-so-swift slog through etc.

I saw a bald eagle flying overhead early on my road trip back to Ohio, and as soon as I got home I saw an oriole. The rest of the time I saw a lot of Swifts--not birds but trucks with the word Swift on the back. So many trucks! So many construction zones! So much traffic! I wasn't exactly flying down the interstate--more like crawling.

But it is good to be back home. I spent a few days helping my brother and sister-in-law clean out Dad's things and make arrangements for the funeral (in July, in Florida), which exhausted both mind and body. He had only enough stuff to fill a generous room in his assisted living facility, but it was still a lot to go through: Dozens of DVD's, mostly British mysteries or war movies. Hundreds of greeting cards. Socks, shoes, shirts, pajamas, so many belts. Piles of photographs, many of unidentified people. Crumpled documents covered with enigmatic notes. 

One of those documents contains seven pages of single-spaced notes for a memoir. He wrote a few pages and left the rest in outline form, leaving behind lists of topics that raise more questions than they answer. Next to "Basic Training" he wrote "sick, cry, gas," which makes me wonder what kind of gas he's talking about. Were they eating a lot of beans or what? Next to one relative's name he wrote "temperance society, Calif., usher, leave for AF, suicide try, sickness, State Theater, spanking," while next to another he wrote "money lending, cod liver oil, strict but fair, favored me even though many spats, Charlie McC, school, caddying, last letter, etc." I detect a story there but with all the main characters among the dead, we'll never know.

"Etc." comes up over and over again in these notes:

money, jealous, car crash, etc.
religion, etc.
New Orleans (girls, etc.)
stockroom, not Jewish, etc.

And in fact, under the heading "Grandchildren and Retirement," the first item listed is a large ETC. Whatever that means.

Among this mass of incomplete notes, I find two statements most evocative. First, "How my life was changed by the G/D episode," a reference to an incident that occurred when he was working for General Dynamics in Rochester, New York. I was three or four years old but I can distinctly recall a huge change in our family dynamics, and after that we started moving around every couple of years as Dad struggled to hold down a job. What caused the disruption? Mom and Dad never told us and quickly changed the subject when we tried to gently probe. Now we'll never know.

Earlier in the outline, amidst a list of fragmentary references to his education, he wrote one complete sentence: "I never swam in the deep end." This is literally true since Dad was not a swimmer, but it's also metaphorically true: Dad was a specialist in safety and reliability and was always interested in playing it safe. Maybe he would have been less risk-averse if he'd learned to swim.

Now I don't know what to do with all this stuff. We divvied up the things that were worth saving and I came home with a two-foot-long cobalt-blue shoe-horn (because why not) and a lovely pair of occasional chairs that remind me of Mom, but I also have possession of this fragmentary outline for a memoir that will never be written. What am I supposed to do with all that etc.?

I thought about that during my not-flying-but-crawling drive home, hemmed in by slow-moving Swift trucks, an event that will barely merit an etc. in the story of my life. My father may have failed to leave behind a memoir, but he left a mark on many people, including the assisted-living staff members and residents who appreciated his intelligence and encouragement. He left a mark on all of us, helping to produce children who can work hard together to deal with his effects and arrange a funeral without discord. He made us all aware of risks, but he also made sure we all knew how to swim so we're not afraid to go into the deep end. And he encouraged us to develop analytical skills so that we'd know where to start when life tossed us a lot of etc. 

Whatever that means.

End of the road, beginning of a new journey

My father died while I was driving 70 mph on I-40 in traffic conditions that left no room for feelings, so I comforted myself with the thought that at least I was trying to reach him in time. In a grueling and occasionally joyful journey full of misunderstandings and missed connections, we never stopped trying to reach each other.

That attempt has been complicated by distance, Dad's health problems, and technical difficulties. Our recent phone calls have mostly consisted of me yelling inane pleasantries down the phone line and him responding, "What was that? I can't hear you." Nevertheless communication did occasionally occur; for instance a few weeks ago I realized that things had gotten serious when Dad admitted that he'd been watching college softball coverage because he could no longer find the golf channel. You might as well take away his oxygen!

Low oxygen levels caused other problems in bridging the gap, making it difficult for Dad to come up with common words, including, sometimes, oxygen. We were talking on the phone a few weeks ago when Dad tried to tell me something about "that thing I take," and I offered several possible words for thing: Medication? Physical therapy? Vitamins? "No," he said in some distress, "The thing I breathe." Oxygen. So necessary, in so many ways.

But congestive heart failure creates supply-chain issues re: oxygen, especially when lung cancer is busy tearing up all the roads and bridges. We all saw the decline coming, and I'd planned to drive down to North Carolina today for what would surely be our final visit. Then last week pneumonia sent Dad to the hospital, erecting further barriers to communication. 

On Sunday afternoon, my brother put his cell phone on speaker so Dad and I could talk. I know he heard me when I told him about our granddaughter's upcoming birthday party, because he responded, very clearly, "I'll be sure to be there." Those were the last coherent words I heard from him, and what a nice thought! Even as lack of oxygen was taking him farther and farther from us, he kept promising further connection.

I spoke to him again yesterday but heard no clear reply, but by then I'd already packed up and hit the road a day early. The doctors said multiple organ failure and palliative care and just a matter of time, but I heard an urgent call to get there before it was too late. Perfect weather, minimal traffic, very little road construction--ideal conditions for a road trip, which I made in record time. Nevertheless I was over an hour from Raleigh when my brother called to say it was too late. 

What could I do? I kept on driving. I'll be sure to be there, he'd told me, always hopeful that we could find a way to meet and hug and communicate, even when the words wouldn't come. And now there's nothing left to say.

Francis Zelesky, 1933-2022

You are now entering the Timeless Zone

Only Wednesday? How can this be?!

The end of classes means the end of time, or the end of my constant awareness of time. I spent an hour in the cool of the morning wrasslin' with the weed-whacker and came inside feeling like I'd done a day's work, but here I have the whole rest of a Wednesday to fill up however I like. Think of the possibilities! I could buy paint for the living room, clean the hall closets, read a good book--or, more likely, catch up on email and read a bunch of files to prepare for tomorrow's assessment meeting.

The weed-whacking was a pain, literally--I had to work around flood debris and lingering muddy spots and ended up with a massive blister that burst as I was carrying the weed-whacker back up the hill. Another sign of the end of time: a yard-work-related injury. It'll heal. So will the lawn, eventually. A little flood damage is not the end of the world.

Yesterday I applauded another kind of ending: celebrating some retirements. One long-time colleague spoke of her delight in seeking new adventures, and she's just the type to keep adventuring until there are no more adventures left. This, I think, is the reason I have trouble seeing beyond retirement: I can't envision what new adventures might be out there beyond the classroom. I realize that this is a failure of imagination, so I'd better get the imagination cranked up before it gets too decrepit to do the work.

But first, I'll start by imagining my summer break. Surely I'll do something more significant than weed-whacking and wildflower walks and forgetting that it's Wednesday, but at the moment, that's about all I can manage.

Here are some pictures from yesterday's walk.

 

Eight or ten turkey vultures were hovering overhead along the creek.

Brand-new oak leaves emerging.

Buckeye blossoms!

Our creek looks so harmless when it's not in flood stage.

Blue-eyed Mary.

Green valerian, maybe?

Stonecrop.

Perfoliate bellwort.

My first rhododendron blossom!

   

Doused with a dose of perspective

There's nothing like a little minor disaster to distract attention from major disasters, and it's helpful to occasionally be doused with a dose of perspective. Which is why I'm not complaining (much) about the flash flood that washed away part of my driveway Friday night. Sure, I've been mightily inconvenienced, but nobody died, right? I had to use some creativity to get around obstacles that washed across my path, but I thrive on creativity, so it's all good. Or it's all mud. Or something like that.

Friday felt like a disaster long before the flood hit. I spent the morning hours first having all kinds of uncomfortable eye tests at the cataract surgeon's office, then balked at the cost estimate and wondered whether my eyesight was really valuable enough to merit wiping out my entire health savings account, then spent some time squinting blurrily at final exam and papers, and then attended a campus meeting that left me feeling reamed out and hopeless, and then I finally got to go home--but I didn't take my laptop with me because I was sure I'd be back on campus Saturday morning to finish the final set of student papers before attending Commencement.

And sure, rain was in the forecast, but we've had plenty of rain this spring without problems, so when the sky started falling in earnest, I was totally unprepared. Frankly, I'm not sure how anyone could have prepared for that kind of deluge--when the normally placid creek suddenly starts thundering like Niagara Falls, it doesn't do any good to stand on the bridge declaring "Thus far and no further!" A chunk of wet sky fell into our area and transformed our tiny creek into a solid wall of water that overtopped its banks, inundated our lower meadow, tossed entire trees against our bridge, and wiped out part of the ramp that connects the bridge to the lowest part of the driveway.

What to do? No way to drive across all that water and no possibility of a gravel delivery over the weekend, so we mostly stayed put. No Commencement for me! (Good thing I wasn't slated to serve as Marshal this year.) But I needed to finish grading that last pile of papers, so I used my husband's laptop to sign into our course management system so I could access the papers and issue a grade. I didn't have access to my usual grading rubrics and I couldn't insert comments into the papers, but who reads comments on a final paper anyway? I decided to just wing it, and if the students want to quibble over the grade, I can deal with that later. 

But now the grading is done and the driveway is fixed and I'm getting caught up on all the things I couldn't do over the weekend without access to my laptop, which turns out to be quite a lot. But again, nobody died, and the inability to get to campus reminded me how very much I love my job and want to be able to see well enough to keep doing it, so I'll soon be scheduling that cataract surgery regardless of the cost. See? Perspective: sometimes it comes in little doses, and sometimes it falls like Niagara from the sky, but either way it can wash away the pervading gloom and make me feel a little less hopeless.

You really wouldn't want to drive on that mess.

Free delivery of firewood.

 

Debris shows that the bridge was under water overnight.

That's gravel from our driveway washed into the neighbor's field.

That tree usually stretches far above the water level.

 

Fueling final exams

My American Lit classroom was bubbling with energy at noon when students gathered to take their final exam. Where was all that energy last week when we were discussing poetry? No matter: a few of these students are graduating on Saturday and they're delighted to finally be done; the rest are just full of beans. Cocoa beans, to be exact. Yes, I brought chocolate to the final exam. Final exams are long and grueling--I don't want anyone to faint dead away. I want their brain cells to be alert and well lubricated, and chocolate can help. I suspect that some of these students will find other ways to lubricate their brains later on.

My Learning in Retirement class was also bubbling yesterday but for different reasons. No final exams in the Comedy in Theory and Practice class; just a final wrap-up of concepts and an opportunity for my retirees to put what they've learned into practice: each class member could take the microphone for up to five minutes to share a joke or funny story or whatever. If someone could find a way to transform Dad Jokes into fuel, that class could keep the world turning on its axis for a few millennia. 

I was strong-armed into teaching that class but I came to look forward to it every Tuesday afternoon. I mean, who doesn't appreciate a weekly excuse to laugh with a bunch of interesting people? We read some great stuff and watched some silly videos but mostly it was all about the laughter. Now I'm looking at the vast expanse of summer break stretching before me and wondering where I'll find my Tuesday afternoon laughs. Shall I go out back and tell jokes to the birds?

That's the drawback of summer break: no good reason to spend time regularly yammering with a room full of people. Of course I'll have Writing Wednesdays, and Faculty Council will continue to meet occasionally over the summer to hash out details of the College's survival plan--oops, Strategic Plan, sorry!--but laughter is rarely at the top of the agenda for those meetings. Still, it's better than spending the entire summer talking to the birds.

They've been pretty bubbly lately, the birds. For a week I've been hearing wood thrushes in the woods below the woodpile, and this morning there were orioles at the end of my road. Mornings are raucous with birdsong, suggesting that the local avian population is getting plenty of the bird equivalent of chocolates. 

Have my students had enough? I've run out of things to teach them this semester so it's time for them to show me what they've learned, and then it's time for me to read it all and assign a grade. So many things to grade! I need some fuel. Good thing they didn't eat up all the chocolates.

 

Wishing upon a shooting star

I thought I saw shooting stars, those delicate white or purple blossoms that appear to be ready for blast-off, and I was so surprised I even said the words shooting stars out loud although no one was around to hear. 

Soon, though, I was assailed by doubt. I'd never seen shooting stars in that stretch of woods before and couldn't be sure they would bloom so early there; I couldn't get close enough to examine them carefully and the photos I took showed an ambiguous mass of blurred blossoms. So I lost confidence in my shooting stars, didn't tell anyone that I'd seen such a thing and couldn't be certain that I had.

And then I saw a newspaper photo showing shooting stars blooming in the same area of the state where I'd been hiking, and I knew that I was both right and wrong--right in believing I was seeing shooting stars, wrong to doubt my perceptions. 

I try to approach the natural world with humility, knowing that what I don't know far exceeds what I do, and yet when I encountered another hiker in those same woods who was all excited about what he thought was "some weird kind of pitcher-plant back there," I looked at the photo on his phone and confidently identified it as Jack-in-the-pulpit. I even pointed out a few more places where he could be sure to find more. Most of the time I know what I know and I'm willing to learn about what I don't know, but I'm reluctant to take a risk on an identification if I'm not entirely certain--because what if I'm wrong?

Well, what if I am? Will the world end if I misidentify a wildflower? Will the botanists of the world line up to heap contempt on my head? I've known some botanists and I don't see them carrying around buckets of contempt to throw at rank amateurs.

The word amateur, let's recall, derives from the French for lover, and love is a risky pursuit. I love wildflowers enough to venture into unknown territory and try out paths that might prove to be dead ends, and sometimes I have to stop in my tracks and confront an unexpected wonder. Shooting stars, I say out loud, and next time I'll believe it. 

Mid-week recharge among the wildflowers

This morning a student hopped up in the middle of class to carry his laptop closer to a power outlet. "I'm about out of power--I need to plug in," he said, and I thought, aren't we all. All out of power--need to plug in.

So that's what I did yesterday when I discovered I had a rare afternoon with no responsibilities. I came to campus for an 8 a.m. meeting and then high-tailed it out of town for a quick trip to Jackson.

Now I know I've told a million people what a relief it is not to have to make that drive to Jackson every weekend. It's only 90 minutes, but for a few years it was 90 minutes in the car every Friday afternoon and then 90 minutes in the car every Sunday afternoon and then all kinds of stuff to catch up on in Jackson over the weekend, which felt exhausting.

So it's been a real treat to not make that drive every weekend, but yesterday I didn't mind the drive so much because it allowed me to have lunch with a friend and then take my favorite hike at Lake Katharine, which hosts the widest variety of spring wildflowers I've ever seen in a two-mile span. I was pleased to see some improvements in the steep trail, but mostly I was delighted to see so many spring flowers blooming in profusion. 

Halfway through the hike I sat on a bench while the creek burbled nearby and a hairy woodpecker hopped along a tree limb and I felt plugged in, as if that bench contained a power outlet that plugged right into my soul. I'm a little out of practice so I walked more slowly than I used to, but I still took the long loop on the off chance that I might find the rare showy orchis still blooming. Sure enough there they were, the blossoms fading and ready to fall but still making a stand for beauty and growth.

Today I'm that showy orchis, battered by the elements and exhausted by the demands of this train-wreck semester but still standing in front of my classes and pointing toward beauty and growth. Final exams are next week, followed by grading and assessment activities and one long meeting after another, but after that maybe we can all move a little closer to the outlet and recharge our batteries, whatever it takes.

Violets popping out from the cliff face

Bloodroot, past blooming

Foamflower

Wild geraniums

Ferns

Trilliums

Bluebells in many colors

One of four types of violets I saw

Jack in the pulpit

Solomon's seal

Magnolias just leafing out

Path through the bluebell woods

Pawpaw blossoms

More trilliums

Showy orchis

Spurred violets

 

Today's hot teaching topic

I just printed out eleven copies of a handout for my composition class, something I've been doing all semester--even though I haven't had more than seven students in the room on any day since Spring Break. Most days just five or six show up. Why do I keep printing eleven copies when I haven't seen eleven students in the room since early March? That's the triumph of hope over experience.

This morning we met outside, where we could discuss the reading assignment without melting into a massive puddle of sweat. Cold temperatures last week followed by a very hot weekend moved the entire building into Meltdown Mode. I opened every window but we were too hot to think straight so we moved the class outdoors. I could not do that with my American Lit class because I needed to use the projector, which only made the room feel hotter. 

An hour from now that same room will be crammed full of sweaty students, five of whom will be extra-sweaty because they're giving presentations.  I wouldn't want to be in their shoes in a building this hot. Frankly, I don't really want to be in my shoes either. I already feel like a sweat-bomb after teaching one class in that room, and I've got two more classes to come, both of which feature student presentations that can't be done outside. 

And so we will suffer together, sharing a vivid reminder that the life of the mind cannot be conducted without the cooperation of the body. (Just don't sit too close because we're all gonna stink.)  

Wildflower walk, blurred but beautiful

The camera and the eye see the world differently, I keep telling myself, but it's never been more apparent than it is right now. Cataracts are clouding my vision to the point that I've lost my confidence in what I'm seeing. I sit down to edit photos and I can't tell whether the fuzziness I'm seeing is in the photo or in my eyes, and the colors look washed out but I can't trust myself to enhance them because I fear I'll go overboard. The good news, though, is that I have an appointment with the cataract doctors in two weeks, when I'll undergo extensive testing to find out whether my cataracts have reached the level where our insurance will pay to remove them. If not, I'll keep seeing a washed-out world, keep second-guessing all my photos. But that doesn't mean I'll stop venturing out into the woods to see what I can see--and wonder what I can't.

 

Partly sunny with chance of train wreck

Yesterday I saw the signs that we were finally emerging from this cold, wintry spring when I got out the mower and mowed the front lawn. Granted, it was still chilly enough for long sleeves and layers, but the ground had dried enough so the mower wouldn't sink in, and the unruly grass was desperately calling out for a trim. The smell of wild onions, the cheery grape hyacinths nodding their heads in the breeze--our long extended winter might finally be coming to a close.

And this morning I saw the signs that we might eventually emerge from this long, taxing semester when I collected the last set of student drafts. I'll have plenty of grading yet ahead--papers and presentations and final exams--but this is the last time this spring that I'll have to read drafts and make suggestions for revisions.

Back in January I thought this semester would be pretty much like Fall semester except with fewer masks. In fact, for a while it seemed that the biggest problem we'd face this spring was whether--and when--to go to a "mask optional" policy. After a great deal of fuss, we pulled off the masks in late February and suffered no apparent repercussions, but by Spring Break no one was talking about masking anymore. We'd been blindsided by a different kind of problem and we're still not sure what repercussions we will face or for how long.

Sure, everyone knew that some budget-tightening would be needed in the next couple of years, but what we didn't expect--and by we, I mean everyone below the VP level, from students to staff to faculty--what we didn't expect was that the budget train was about to drive right off a cliff. The budget crisis hit hard and fast and repeatedly, causing an epidemic of insomnia and angry meetings. Kind of a bad time to be on Faculty Council! It's easy to say that we're not going to let campus controversies affect the students' learning experiences, but it's hard to accomplish that when cuts are affecting academic offerings and when the people charged with fixing the problems aren't getting any sleep. 

And then fall course scheduling season dealt another blow. Changes to our general education curriculum have been causing steady declines in enrollments in my department for a few years, but now the English train has driven off a cliff and I find myself dangling out a broken window, holding on for dear life. Suddenly I see a whole new vista opening up ahead of me: a few final years of teaching freshman comp and the sophomore seminar and other service courses before I fade away into insignificance. 

Sure, the changes that were made to my fall teaching schedule will affect only a small number of students, but I feel the difference every day. Today, for instance, as I was introducing my American Lit Survey students to Allen Ginsberg's poem "A Supermarket in California," with its "What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night!", I told them they could see how Don DeLillo made use of this image in White Noise, which I'll be teaching in my American Novel class this fall, except I had to stop myself before the sentence was over because of course the American Novel class got cancelled and, depending on how the next few years go and when I decide to retire, I may never get a chance to teach it again.

Those two unexpected blows would have been enough to make this semester difficult--and I'm working really hard to make sure my anger and disappointment don't affect my teaching but I'm not superhuman, especially when I can't sleep, so it's a struggle. But then we've seen a host of smaller disturbances, the most horrible of which can't be written about or discussed openly, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. 

Last week before the Faculty Council meeting we were delicately skirting the perimeter of one of these difficult issues when I was reminded of what happened at the end of my first semester at Marietta College. I was a newbie still feeling her way around campus, and suddenly the place was swarming with cops and the FBI was confiscating equipment and a colleague I'd never even met was being led away in cuffs, soon to be tried and convicted for setting up a secret email server to distribute child pornography. 

So last week when a few of us old folks on Council were reminiscing about that long-ago scandal, a fresh-faced junior faculty member asked, "After all that, why didn't you just walk away?"

"Some of us needed the job," I pointed out, but it was more than that. Even at the end of one semester, I knew that Marietta was a place where I could do good work that would be appreciated and occasionally rewarded, and I'd seen enough to suspect that the College could weather this storm and come out the other side stronger.

Is that still true? Possibly. Probably, even. But will I still be here to enjoy the recovery? And if my fingers lose their grip on that bloody broken window, will anyone even notice that I'm gone?

Explaining the obvious, one draft at a time

I can't read it if I can't see it.
I can't see it if you didn't submit it.
A full draft is better than a partial draft, but a partial draft is better than no draft at all.

Reading the abstract is not the same as reading the article.
Reading the article is not the same as understanding the article.
Quoting the article is not the same as synthesizing the information into your argument, but it's a good start, especially if you cite it properly.

The words "Works Cited" indicate that the works on the list have actually been cited within the accompanying document.
"Cited" means the document refers to the source specifically, by author's name or title and, when available, page number.
Vaguely gesturing toward "some experts" is not the same as citing a source.

It may be accurate, in a metaphorical sense, to refer to an institution of higher education as a Collage, but students who want to be taken seriously spell it College.

Using only commas is better than using no punctuation at all, but just barely.
Consider the colon: a pause that promises more to come.
Or the dash--that dashing shift to something different.
Or if you can't manage those, how about the occasional question mark at the end of a question?
Really, at this point, any punctuation at all would be a nice thing. And would it kill you to capitalize proper nouns?

Kidding! We are all improper now. We should be happy simply to receive a pile of words, in whatever form they arrive--provided that they actually arrive. Because let's face it: the easiest paper to grade is the one that does not, in the strictest sense of the word, exist.

Where are the academic cheerleaders when we need them?

We're getting ready to celebrate All Scholars Day, when students present the results of their research and creativity, so this morning a first-year student asked me what ASD is all about. "It's kind of like a pep rally for academics," I lied, "with bands playing and cheerleaders leading a massive crowd in chants celebrating all our hard-working students: Give me an A! Give me another A! Give us all A's!"

If only. All Scholars Day is back to being a face-to-face event this year, so I'll spend time Thursday walking around the poster session and asking students to explain their work. There will be no bands or cheerleaders, but students will hear encouragement and occasional gentle applause, and maybe someone will give them the A's they're after.

First, though, I need to tackle the big ol' pile o' papers in my inbox, some needing feedback and revision and others begging for a grade. Would the work go any more smoothly if I had an academic cheer squad urging me on? They wouldn't have room to turn around if I tried to cram them into my office so they'd have to do their jumps and tumbling runs out in the hallway, which might disturb my colleagues trying to teach in the nearby classrooms. Then again, they could adapt their cheer routines to encourage all kinds of learning experiences: 

Two bits! Four bits! Six bits! A dollar!
If you did your homework, stand up and holler!

We've got spirit, yes we do!
We submitted our files into the Moodle dropbox--how 'bout you?

Give me an A! Give me another A! Give me another A! What's that spell?
Wait, what are you doing in college if you don't know what AAA spells?!

And then they'd form a pyramid in the hallway while the pep band marches past playing "We Will Rock You," and everyone in the building would stop what they're doing and stomp their feet to indicate their eagerness to teach teach teach and learn learn learn!

I don't know if that kind of motivation would inspire me to get my students' papers graded more quickly, but I'll tell you one thing I'm sure of: I won't get them graded at all if I keep indulging in ridiculous fantasies. Time to send the academic cheerleaders home and get back to work.

Wait--who left this pom-pom in my office?  

 

 

Even the cruelest month has its bright moments

April is the cruelest month, breeding student papers that must be read and graded, computer bugs that shut down our ability to function, wide-spread panic attacks and existential despair even among students who've never read The Waste Land--and now the weather forecast tells me April is bringing snow? Like, tomorrow? While tulips and daffodils and forsythia are blooming all over the place? That's just gratuitous suffering.

A student explained that he had to miss class today in observation of Good Friday--which is next week.

The flag in the center of campus is flying at half-staff again today, as it has every day this week, and no one can tell me why.

Five e-mails in a row came from students looking for extensions on a project, and I went ahead and granted the extensions because it's really hard to expect students to do research in our online databases when the campus internet connection has been taking frequent unplanned mini-vacations for hours at a time.

Cruel, I tell you. April is pouring on the cruelty relentlessly, luring us outdoors with sudden bursts of sunshine and then dumping dark rainclouds on our heads, and now snow? It may not be Good Friday yet, but this so-called spring sure feels apocalyptic.

And yet we carry on. Each time a new disaster drops--and I can't even talk about the most interesting ones--we just grit our teeth and carry on, because what else can we do? 

This afternoon I'm filling in to teach a colleague's religion class, leading a discussion of the book of Job. Students have been talking about the problem of pain, but I'm going to direct the to the problem of genre: how do we know how to approach a text like Job if we don't know if it's supposed to be read as tragedy, comedy, courtroom drama, or something else entirely? And yes, I'm going to make them learn some characteristics of certain genres and think about how the frame influences how we view the picture.

Right now April is framed in alternating gloom and glee, with massive black clouds hanging over a campus where daffodils bloom, robins sing, pandemic masks get flung to the ground, and the flag remains at half-staff. How do we react when gratuitous grace mingles with gratuitous suffering? Right now, all we can do is carry on.

With Prufrock in the art gallery

 

One panel of the Prufrock project

At an art exhibit on campus last Friday I encountered an old friend: the ghostly presence (or absence?) of J. Alfred Prufrock in a collage of torn paper and string. Leaning closer, I saw lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" adhering to each panel. Here were the words "I have measure out my life with coffee spoons" near an image of a steaming cup of coffee, and alongside a swirling black hole was the eternal question, "Do I dare disturb the universe?"

It's no surprise that this work of art was created by a student with dual majors in Art and English. She encountered the poem some time ago in my American Lit Survey class, where Prufrock pops up every spring like clockwork just before midterm. I was touched to see that a hundred-year-old poem could inspire such creativity and insight, especially since Prufrock often evokes very different responses from students--confusion, boredom, anger. "Why can't he just say what he means," they ask me, and I say, "That, in a nutshell, is the problem." They are not amused.

But amusing students is not my primary purpose here. Lately I've been thinking more deeply about that purpose, not because I'm at a loss for things to think about but because I'm fighting off the perception that I'm an old stick-in-the-mud resistant to change--or, as a colleague told me succinctly last week, "Maybe your courses would attract more students if they had more interesting titles." Would more students be attracted to American Lit Survey if it were called Love Songs with T.S. Eliot? I don't think so!

And this persistent accusation that I am resistant to change does not hold up under scrutiny. When I was hired here 22 years ago, the department had no African American Lit class, so I created one. There was no Postcolonial Lit class, so I created one. It's interesting to look through the course listings and see the number of courses that are now a permanent part of our curriculum that I've designed, proposed, and taught: Concepts of Nature, Concepts of Comedy, Concepts of Place (taught as Cal Lit and Florida Lit), Creative Nonfiction, Life Writing--and in addition I've designed special topics courses on Flannery O'Connor, Stephen Crane and Kate Chopin, Colson Whitehead, animals in film, machines in film, Nature Writing, Comedy Writing, plus capstone classes on postmodernism, Garbage Theory, and 9/11 Literature. To fill a need in the curriculum, I developed and taught an experimental Sports Lit class that was linked with a developmental writing class. And I'm not done doing new things: next spring I'm slated to teach a special topics class on the ambiguous zone between fact and fiction, if anyone registers for it. That's a pretty wide variety of classes to develop and teach over a 22-year span.

But one class remains constant: every year, usually in the spring, I teach a sophomore-level Survey of American Lit since 1865. Sure, I tweak the syllabus to introduce more recent authors (because the Norton Anthology only goes so far) and I've changed the assignment structure significantly over the years, but if you look at the syllabus for any one semester, you'll get a pretty good idea of what the course covers and what it's trying to do. Somewhere near midterm during the unit on modernism we'll spend a whole class period discussing Prufrock, and that's not going to change, no matter how many students complain.

Why? Because Prufrock still has something to offer today's student--and so do I.

The full project. It's more impressive in person.