Surprised by students once again

Okay, so you're a brand-new student starting your first semester of college classes, enjoying the independence of living away from your parents' prying eyes, eagerly plunging into your sport or club or other interests, and on your way to your first class you encounter a whiteboard in the hallway of a classroom building with a sign that asks first-year students, "In one word, what excites you most about college?" What do you write?

For most of our new students, the answer is nothing. The whiteboard sits inside the main entrance of the busiest classroom building on campus, but four days into the semester, only five words or phrases have been written on it. The first was "Engagement," a word that rolls more readily off a professor's tongue than that of an 18-year-old fresh out of high school. The next two were "Learning" (yay!) and "Leaving" (boo!). We want students to be excited about learning, but it's distressing to think that some anonymous first-year student is already excited about leaving.

But that was yesterday. This morning there were two more entries on the whiteboard, neither of which follows the "one word" rule. What are today's first-year students most excited about? "Powerful women" and "Being demure."

Well I think we can deliver powerful women. Our current president, provost, VP for enrollment, CFO, and faculty chair are women, and we have plenty of powerful women on the faculty, amongst the coaches, and within the student body. 

But what first-year student writes that the thing that most excites her (I assume?) about college is "Being demure"? The words are surrounded by cute little puffy hearts, whatever that means. I'm trying to get inside the head of a young person who thinks, Yeah, I can't wait to move into the dorm and meet my roommate and hang out with all my classmates so that I can finally get a chance to be as demure as I've always wanted to be.

I went to a college with a very strict dress code and expectations for female appearance, so that getting ready for class might require ironing a blouse and skirt (that reached below the knee!), putting on a slip and panty hose, employing a hair dryer and hot rollers and lots of spray, donning full makeup and earrings and a fake pearl necklace, and tottering down the steps of the dorm in high heels, but all that performance of femininity didn't always translate into demureness. There were a lot of powerful women behind those fake pearls.

And what does it even mean for today's 18-year-old to practice being demure? Dressing like a tradwife? Avoiding eye contact? Limiting the size and number of holes in her jeans?

I confess that I am befuddled. If being demure is a new trend among the younger set, I want to see what that looks like--but the definition of demure seems to demand that the practitioner avoid drawing attention to herself (or, I guess, himself, or theirself), so a student practicing demureness may escape my notice entirely.

As a jaded, cynical old coot, I guess I'm glad that I'm still capable of being surprised by students. I just wish I knew which student surprised me so I can ask what it all means.

Filling up the education dispenser

Over the summer the women's rest rooms on campus were equipped with dispensers for free period products--a great step forward, you'd think, except the dispensers remain empty. No problem for the post-menopausal amongst us, but I'm sure there are young women on campus looking at those empty dispensers and wondering when they will be filled.

This strikes me as a fitting metaphor for this point in the semester: classes have just started and all the mechanisms and structures are in place to encourage learning, but now we just need to fill those structures with the stuff of learning--readings and discussions and writing assignments and class activities. I can set up the structures and set the mechanisms whirring, but filling up the classroom with learning depends upon the contributions of students. Will they come to class having done the reading and prepared to talk about it?

Maybe. Based on what I've seen so far from my students, it seems that some have fallen out of the habit of following directions. Or maybe they never developed that essential habit. At any rate we'll be discussing the first readings this afternoon and I hope to get everyone engaged.

In other news, Margaret Renkl proves once again that we think on similar wavelengths in her praise of overstuffed bookshelves (link here). "For me," she says, "a book made of paper will always be a beautiful object that warms a room even as it expands (or entertains, or challenges, or informs, or comforts) a mind, and a bookcase will always represent time itself." 

This topic arose in her household when her husband retired from a long teaching career and starting carting home boxes of books, a process my husband has also initiated. He currently has six big boxes full of books sitting in the living room and a paucity of empty bookshelves on which to put them--and plenty more to bring home from his church office. Further, I've been winnowing my own collection but I'll have more boxes of books to bring home from my office when I retire in a few years. One of these days the bookshelves will crowd us right out of our house.

It's not unusual for students to enter my office, eye the bookshelves, and say in wonder, "Have you read all these books?" Well yeah, but it took a little while. Compared to all the books in the universe--or even all the books in my office--I'm asking my students to read a relatively small number of pages this semester, but if they fail to do it, then the whole mechanism of learning will grind to a halt.

I've created the structure and installed the machine, but it's up to my students to fill the space with learning.

A refreshing absence

Prepping for the start of classes and suddenly I realize what's missing: no first-year students. Yes, for the first time since--well, forever, I have no first-year classes this fall. No composition, no Honors Literature, no first-year seminar. Just two upper-level literature classes and a host of administrative duties.

I haven't taught the first-year seminar in a couple of years but composition has been part of my fall teaching schedule since the dawn of time, and I've been teaching the fall Honors Lit class for at least a decade. I love that class and I would happily keep teaching it until I retire, but our Honors program has been revamped and the class is no longer part of the curriculum. Will I ever have another opportunity to teach Cold Mountain? Probably not. I will miss it.

What I won't miss: trying to learn the names of several classrooms full of unfamiliar first-year students. Trying to humor the deer-in-the-headlights look off their faces and encourage them to put down their phones and talk to each other. Introducing these shiny new freshpersons to our library databases, our course management system, and MLA citation format.  Deciphering their handwriting. Hearing myself repeat over and over the reminder that it's on the syllabus. 

And speaking of the syllabus, I'd better get cracking. I'm mostly ready, I think, but I won't know where I'm unready until I step back into the classroom. Two more days! Here we go again, a little older and possibly wiser and refreshingly unencumbered with freshpersons.

 

Take the money and trip

I was trying on dress pants yesterday when suddenly I was transported back to fifth grade when all I wanted was a pair of what my friends and I called elephant pants but what the women's clothing industry now calls wide-leg pants and I would like to call pants that make me look like I have tree stumps for legs. These pant-legs would be handy if I wanted to smuggle an actual elephant through airport security but since smuggling elephants forms no part of my daily routine, I'll give them a pass.

And why so many colorful plastic fabrics? Half of the blouses I looked at could have been constructed by a fourth-grader equipped with a box of Hefty trash bags, some permanent markers, a glue stick, and some sequins. Linen is out because I don't care to iron, but I'd really love to see some fabrics that don't look like they were extruded by machines oozing chemical goo.

The other day someone suggested that I pursue a certain administrative position but I demurred with I don't have the wardrobe for it, to which the person replied But you'd get paid enough to cover a new wardrobe, which is yet another reason to avoid higher office. Who wants to shop? Shopping is horrible. Yesterday I tried on eleventy-seven different items but ended up buying three, and the process took forever because the cashier asked for my name and email address but then could not spell either one correctly (no, the u comes after the g, and Marietta has one r and two t's) and I was so exhausted from trying on horrible wide-leg pants and Hefty-bag blouses that I lacked the energy to resist her queries. The person waiting in line behind me kept sighing deeply but I'm not going to apologize for having a name no one knows how to spell. I mean, if the cashier doesn't want to make the effort to spell my name correctly, why even ask? Just take my money and let me leave.

Can't run too far in those wide-leg pants, though. They trip me up every time.

 

Cutting and gutting

I've been watching with fear and trembeling the news about Wittenberg University's financial problems (links here and here). Many small liberal arts colleges are struggling right now, but Wittenberg looks a lot like Marietta: similar size, similar student population, similar financial difficulties. Their trustees will vote tomorrow on a proposed plan that may cut sixty percent of the faculty and require many students to rely on online courses to complete their degrees. A professor named Ruth Hoff is quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education article as saying the proposal "outsources the heart of what we're all about."

The numbers are terrifying and I would hate to be charged with figuring out how to make the college's budget work given reduced enrollments and burgeoning deficits, but Hoff's comment speaks to how this feels on the ground: Cutting faculty and gutting curriculum hurts our hearts. It feels like a violation of our mission, purpose, and identity, causing irreparable damage to certain intangible but essential qualities of the education we offer.

Today I learned that yet another of my valued colleagues has accepted a job elsewhere, and while he is over the moon about this new opportunity, I keep thinking about what we're losing--not just a prof who can teach a particular type of class, but the prof whose leadership of the jazz ensemble fills listeners with joy, the guy whose leadership of a faculty teaching workshop on jazz improvisation last spring gave us all moments of bliss and freedom from care, and a guy who's willing to put heart and soul into helping his students develop as performers and people. 

And this loss does not come in a vacuum but is piled on top of other recent losses, reducing our music department to mostly adjuncts. That could be my department a few years from now, and Wittenberg could be a model for what may happen here. 

But then again maybe we'll find a way to turn things around. Who knows? The uncertainty is part of the problem--it's hard to commit to a journey without any idea of the destination. I assume that the sun will come up tomorrow, but what it shines down on is anyone's guess. 

Walk, interrupted

I was enjoying my morning hike at Desonier State Nature Preserve right up to the point when the yellowjacket stung the back of my thigh.

At first I didn't know it was a yellowjacket. All I knew was that something had stabbed the back of my leg and that the best thing to do in the moment was to jump in the air and shriek--not that anyone could hear me out in the woods. Then I had to drop my pants to make sure that whatever had bitten me wasn't stuck inside my pants leg--not that anyone could see me out in the woods. Then something started buzzing around my head and trying to crawl into my ear canal until I swatted at it with my baseball cap, at which point I realized that the trail had taken me too close to a yellowjacket nest and they were out to get me.

This was just over halfway through a two-mile hike, and there was no way to get back to the car but to keep hiking. I had already slogged a mile up a steep, narrow path next to sheer dropoffs--and let me tell you, if the yellowjacket had stung me while I was walking on one of those cliffsides, I'd be toast. But I survived the frantic get-this-thing-off-me dance and went on to hike the rest of the trail, not without some renewed vigor and the constant urge to say something a little stronger than ouch.

It hurt. Hours later, it still hurts. It hurt all the way through the rest of the hike and then on the short drive to Strouds Run State Park, where it hurt as I sat in the shade watching wading birds  fishing in the marsh, goldfinches and hummingbirds buzzing among the tall wildflowers. The long walk in the quiet woods followed by a rest next to a quiet lake were supposed to fill my cup with calm before the next round of hectic campus mess begins, but the calmest moments played out against a backdrop of ouch.

Maybe that's good preparation for the coming academic year, which is bound to be well seasoned with painful moments. I am supposed to train my colleagues on how to discourage plagiarism in the era of AI while steeling myself once again to read reams of student handwriting (since I'm requiring more in-class writing to counteract the dominance of AI) while bowing to the demands of the Powers That Be that I "fix" faculty morale while trying to keep my courses fresh and relevant and prepare my students for success in a world I don't quite understand. And meanwhile, at every moment we'll all be waiting for the next phase of our ongoing budget crisis, although crisis seems utterly inadequate to the situation. 

It stings, I tell you. It really stings. But at least the woods were lovely.

 

It's not about the paper towels

I'm standing in a meeting room pressing the power button to start the projector but it isn't coming on so I press it again, and again, and again, until finally I realize that the reason the projector won't come on is that it isn't there. It's gone! Vanished! Elvis has left the building!

We managed the meeting without the projector, but it's not the only absence making itself known on campus. Earlier I'd stood in the ladies' room in the library staring at an empty paper-towel dispenser and running through options. I can't replace paper towels myself because mere faculty members aren't trusted with keys to the supply closets, nor are we trained on how to open those pesky dispensers. After recent purges of positions and shifts in responsibilities, I have no idea whom to notify about an absence of paper towels, or a leaky roof, or a pool of spilled coffee on the stairs. All over campus department chairs are scrambling to delegate tasks formerly completed by our hard-working administrative assistants, but now it's hard to know who will manage bulletin boards and budgets, collect departmental mail, or reserve rooms. 

That last item may seem small but faculty members can get very protective of our spaces. There are classrooms in which I refuse to teach because I prefer whiteboards to blackboards (chalk dust makes me sneeze), and I don't like rooms with tripping hazards (because I have fallen on my face in front of students before and I don't ever care to repeat the exercise), and rooms without windows make me nervous. (I'm claustrophobic. Deal with it.) Every time we hire a new admin assistant, I have to educate her about room preferences, and I'm sure other faculty members do the same, which is one reason being a departmental admin assistant is a horrible job. 

But in the absence of administrative assistants, I don't even know who is responsible for assigning classrooms. Last year the College bought a piece of furniture at my request so I could use it in a particular classroom, but this semester I'm scheduled to teach in a different room--an interior room without windows, a room too small for the number of students, and, worst of all, a room so suffused with mechanical noise that I can barely hear myself speak in there. I would love to shift to a different room, but instead of having a calm chat with an admin assistant, I'll be wandering around campus hoping to randomly run into whoever is responsible for easing my pain.

And along the way I'll run into other wanderers seeking the Paper Towel Czar or the Orderer of Dry-Erase Markers or the Printer Un-Jammer or whatever you call the one person who is permitted to open the electrical box and press "reset" after a space heater pops the circuit-breaker. We are hard-working people who are willing to do whatever we can, but who will do the things we can't?

  

As much as it pains me to admit this....

I'm going to write this quickly before I have time to second-guess an impulse that reeks of shameless self-promotion, but my excuse is that the academic climate these days leaves me feeling so beaten down that I have to celebrate the victories when they come. So here goes:

This summer I've been in charge of a grant-funded program in which a dozen very busy faculty and staff members meet for five hours each Tuesday for four weeks in a row to discuss readings and lay the groundwork for (re)building a sense of purpose and commitment on campus, and while it was a ton of work, I have enjoyed reading and talking and eating with my colleagues for the past four weeks. These people did not need to give 20 hours of their summer lives to meetings plus doing the readings on their own time, but they did the work in exchange for a few morning pastries and coffee, some free lunches, a modest stipend, and a couple of free books. 

Today I asked them what kinds of incentives would lure other colleagues to participate in future meetings, and they said that while they appreciated the coffee and lunch and books and stipend, there was one big reason they agreed to participate in these meetings: "Because you asked me to."

That would be me. I did that.

Not without help, of course, and I appreciate the support of every single person who assisted with logistics and planning, but several of the participants said they agreed to do this big lump of summer work because they knew I wouldn't have asked if it wasn't important. 

Nothing else that I have done this summer has made me feel so positive about my job. Good work has been done here--and I had a hand in making it happen.

Yay me. Yay us!

News from afield

After 20 years our woods and fields still have something to teach me. The white pine that got chopped down smashed our mullein patch, but here come some new plants springing back after the carnage. The area we've been leaving unmowed in the lower meadow is transforming itself into a pollinator habitat with very little encouragement from us; today I saw ironweed, coneflowers, and a few scraggly milkweed plants, but who knows what will be growing there tomorrow? Tiny pawpaws peek out from behind donkey-ear leaves along the edge of the woods, while morning glories weave among the tall grass. And what's that tiny lavender blossom with the purple center? I thought I knew my woods pretty well but once again they give me a puzzle.

Nuthatch

New mullein in the smashed space

Jewelweed

I don't know what this is.

Pawpaws!

 

The thirty-percent solution

My computer screen told me "You're thirty percent there," and I thought: Now you're diagnosing my mental state? 

A colleague told a room full of academics, "We've been given an IKEA box with a cinnamon roll instead of an Allen wrench," and the scary thing is, we all knew what he meant.

A person whose clothes reeked of weed walked up to me and I immediately started sneezing. "You must be allergic to my essential oils," he said. That's one possibility.

An administrator urged a bunch of us to "take ownership of our spaces," but how will the seventy percent of me that isn't even here take ownership of anything? 

 Three weeks before classes start, thirty percent is about as good as it gets, especially when I'm sneezing all over this cinnamon roll.

Random bullets of where has the summer gone?

I need to mow this morning, which is actually great news after weeks of drought that painted lawns brown and prevented growth. I'm trying to remember the last time I mowed but it must have been before the Fourth of July weekend. Summer wildflowers are doing well along the roadside--chicory, Joe Pye Weed, ironweed, Queen Anne's lace, jewelweed--but grass has been enjoying a midsummer hiatus. A few days of rain and suddenly it's back in the business of growing.

And I'm back in the business of griping. Don't even get me started. I'm tired of hearing myself complain, but if I keep bottling up all the complaint-worthy issues, they wake me up at 3 a.m. to dance a tarantella in my brainpan. So I'll keep my complaints to myself except for this persistent pet peeve: I'm tired of asking for support on a project only to have new projects piled on my back. The only solution, I'm afraid, is to mess up so spectacularly and publicly that no one will ever again ask me to do anything.

Every time I see tarantella, I think of Verena Tarrant, the impressionable young thing whose life is manipulated by various domineering characters in Henry James's novel The Bostonians. Does it hold up, I wonder? It's been a while.

With August looming in the offing, I need to put some time into fall course preparations. I've been tasked with helping faculty write more effective syllabi, but at the moment my fall syllabi are Frankenstein's monsters of incompatible ideas poorly stitched together with lots of gaps showing. There are not enough weeks in the semester to accomplish everything I need to do in the capstone class, and I keep waffling about the assignment structure in the African American Lit class. More papers = more plagiarism and AI; fewer papers = more exams = more struggles to read students' handwriting. Focus on improving pedagogy or reducing pain? The eternal question.

The dark side of the fellowship of suffering

A bunch of us were discussing how hard it is to keep doing our jobs when it feels as if the ground is slipping beneath us and I brought up Stephen Crane's short story "The Open Boat." Here we have four men--a ship's captain, a cook, a journalist, and an oiler who works in the engine room--who would move in very different circles on dry land, but throw them together in a tiny dinghy tossed on rough seas and surrounded by sharks and they form a tight community working together toward a common goal--survival. 

We've done this before, I remind my colleagues. When Covid forced us to quickly pivot to online teaching in March of 2020, it felt like an impossible task but somehow we all pulled together and survived. It wasn't the most rewarding teaching experience of our lives, but we made it to shore.

But then I remember that in Crane's story, not everyone makes it to shore. Sure, the four men are all working together, but they endure 30 hours in a small dinghy, wet and miserable and unfed, only to swamp near shore and take a serious dunking that threatens all their lives and kills the strongest man among them.

So sure, we're enduring rough seas and working together toward the goal of survival, but we're also wet and cranky and hungry for hope and we fear that some of us won't make it to shore. If the strongest man in the open boat can be crushed by the waves, what can protect me?

Where are the life jackets? Who will call off the sharks?

Crowdstrike, the IT crowd, and key lime yogurt

If a colleague hadn't given me a small container of key lime yogurt yesterday, I probably would have dissolved in a sniveling lump on the floor of my campus office. Sometimes a small gesture can help us endure a big disaster.

At first I thought it was a small disaster. After a week of long and exhausting meetings, I hadn't intended to go to campus at all on Friday, preferring to stay home and do a smattering of work on my college-owned laptop computer. I needed to write a draft of an important document and circulate it among committee members, and I was working against a tight deadline--but when I turned on the laptop Friday morning, I saw the dreaded blue screen of death.

So I used my phone to alert our IT help desk and I headed for campus. By the time I arrived, I'd received a message Windows users all over the world would recognize: Crowdstrike had struck and all our campus computers were collateral damage.

The IT crowd promised to work its way around campus fixing one computer after the other and they very kindly thanked me for my patience, which was generous. I promise that I tried to be patient, but I had a deadline. IT arrived in my office around 9:30 a.m. "It's a simple fix," they said, but in my case that wasn't true. They had to take the laptop back to the IT office and left me another laptop to use while I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

I got some work done, true, but by noonish I was feeling peckish and cranky. I hadn't planned to be on campus so long so I hadn't packed a lunch, and I didn't want to leave my office lest the IT crowd returned with my laptop. I was scavenging in the English Department fridge and found a jug of lemonade left over from some departmental event. Lemonade for lunch! Better than nothing, I suppose. 

Then a colleague came in and offered to share her key lime yogurt. Score!

Key lime yogurt has gotten me through tough times before. Fifteen years ago when chemotherapy destroyed my tastebuds, key lime yogurt was one of the few food items that didn't taste like glue. And so I accepted my colleague's gift as a lifeline. 

Key lime yogurt couldn't solve the problems Crowdstrike caused to airlines, hospitals, or even my campus IT crowd, who returned my computer soon after lunch and moved on to repair many more, but it got me through a tough moment and helped me do my job.

"Your computer is a little screwy," the IT guys said, but this was no surprise to me--for months it's been groaning as if it's giving birth to baby computers. My computer caused a whole host of IT guys to try one thing after another and scratch their heads when nothing helped, until finally something did help and now my laptop is working without groaning. Score!

This would be a good time to finally buy myself a home computer, but I'd planned to do that after I get my car paid off, which should happen next week, barring catastrophes. My usual poor timing means that I was crippled by the Crowdstrike strike, but fortunately I could count on a hard-working IT crowd to come to my rescue.

And let's not forget the colleague carrying key lime yogurt. If we all pull together, we can get through just about anything.

Free ticket on the Crazy Train

Yesterday I came out of a very productive, encouraging, and even therapeutic five-hour meeting to find myself among people walking around stunned and bleeding.

Not literally bleeding, of course. No lives have shed in the making of these decisions, but our ongoing budget crisis has resulted in yet another round of cuts that will leave every department feeling battered, bruised, and hopeless.

It's a little disorienting to spend five hours with a select group of faculty and staff members imagining ways to improve campus conditions only to come out and find that we're once again being cut off at the knees, metaphorically speaking. In theory, we can do great things! In practice, people who are accustomed to doing great things will have to pick up new tasks to cover for the people whose jobs are being cut so they'll barely have time to do the things they didn't sign up for, much less the great things they could otherwise do. If that makes any sense.

Frankly, none of this makes much sense, but not making sense seems to be our modus operandi these days. Because of the grant I'm administering, I will continue to devote long hours to helping faculty and staff develop grandiose plans toward improving a sense of communal purpose, even while decisions are being made that will devastate our community and hamper our ability to achieve those purposes. My work right now feels like an immense waste of time, but I have to act as if it will make a difference. In other words, I've been issued a one-way ticket on the Crazy Train and I can only hope it doesn't end in a crash. 

So, um, let's enjoy the wild ride while we can? Nah, I've got nothing. 

Crawdads in your Crocs and other hazards

When a creek creature nibbled on my grandson's toe yesterday the boy found a crawdad in his Crocs, and I guess I'm glad it wasn't a crocodile. Crocodiles are not known to live in our creek, fortunately, and the crawdad's nibble didn't even leave a mark. 

In their weekend visit to Grandma and Grampa Camp, the grandkids have similarly failed to see any live bears, although they had lunch with some taxidermied grizzlies at the Bear's Den outside Cambridge, Ohio. The restaurant was a great place to meet my son-in-law for the official handoff of the young imps, and I enjoyed introducing them to great locally raised beef, crispy sweet potato fries, and what may well be the best mac&cheese I've ever eaten. Plus bears, of course. You can't ignore the bears.

The kids have been rebuilding the dam that got washed away by spring floods, at a spot in the creek that's mostly dry right now. We found some places to splash on our creek walk and also located crawdads and a cave and another dry creek bed. In the afternoon when the temperature rose toward triple digits, we stayed indoors and made candy sushi, a sticky mess that's fun to assemble but so sweet it makes my teeth hurt.

In the evening when the news came through about the shooting in Pennsylvania, we were all sitting on the sofa reading. The grandkids had discovered the stack of Calvin and Hobbes books downstairs and they were working their way through them one after another, their quiet reading only interrupted by occasional giggles and snorts of laughter. They were blissfully unaware of the violent events taking place in the outside world, which is fine for now. Someday they'll have to negotiate all the dangers and disasters the world can toss their way, but just for today, let them immerse themselves in a world of books and sushi and nearly-dry creek beds, where the worst danger they face might come from a crawdad in their Crocs.  

 

The black bear seems tiny compared to the grizzly.

Candy sushi. The only fish involved are Swedish.

Jump!

He's been getting stone-skipping lessons from the master.

Making room for Mr. Epiphany

You do all the work to apply for a grant to fund some faculty and staff development activities in the summer and then the grant gets approved (which is great because nothing's happening on campus right now without outside funding) and so you get to work setting up the details and everything is going smoothly until it isn't--a key contact is out of the office with Lyme Disease, the online system for catering campus events won't recognize your credentials, the books the group needs to discuss at the first meeting get hung up in a supply-chain snafu and won't arrive until after the meeting date--and you have to scramble to adapt to changing circumstances and you come perilously close to throwing in the towel entirely until an early-morning epiphany disrupts your sleep, and while epiphanies that arrive at 2 a.m. often aren't worth the paper they're scribbled on, this one actually smooths out the biggest barrier to successful completion of the project, because while wondering whether you ought to stand at the photocopier and scan the first 80 or so pages of the book and send it to participants so they can be prepared to discuss it next week, Mr. Early-Morning Epiphany asks a simple question: Have you checked Ohiolink?  

So first thing in the morning you check Ohiolink and see that the missing book is available as an ebook that can be downloaded for free by anyone with a college ID. So you send out the link to participants and give them their reading assignment and thank your lucky stars that Mr. Early-Morning Epiphany isn't suffering from Lyme Disease.

You may be sleepy, but at least you're happy. How happy? This happy:

(I'm using this photo in a PowerPoint presentation next week. Maybe at some point I'll write about why.)

Freedom to be unbusy

This week we celebrate freedom, including the freedom to eat strawberry shortcake for breakfast, have fun with grandkids, and cheer on our favorite baseball team. Watching the bees busily pollinating flowers in my daughter's front garden reminds me of just how un-busy I'm being, which is perfectly fine. Let someone else work for a while. I'm taking it easy.

Ready to catch home runs

"I'm a koala!"

If cats could read...

 

A midsummer night's scream

July is not the time to be obsessing about fall classes but I made the mistake of looking at the course schedule and now instead of relaxing I'm wrestling with numbers. 

The good news is that my fall classes have healthy enrollments, but this is also the bad news, entailing math problems such as this one: nine capstone students making presentations to the college community outside of class time, 15-20 minutes per presentation plus time for introductions, transitions, and questions, four English faculty members whose schedules must be consulted so they can attend the presentations, an unknown number of unknown factors (students who say too much or too little, students who don't complete the project and have nothing to present, power outages or technical difficulties or fires or floods), all these factors add up to--what?

Nine is not a massive number but it's more than we normally have in the senior capstone class. Last time I taught the capstone, I had six students and managed the presentations in one long session with a break in the middle, but no one is going to sit through nine full-length presentations one after the other. That means breaking the festivities up into two sessions that somehow fit the schedules of everyone who needs to attend. And what if all nine students attract large cheering sections to their presentations? We're gonna need a bigger boat.

So then I had to look at the enrollment in my African American Literature class, an upper-level class that normally attracts about a dozen students. Eighteen! Crammed into a noisy interior room with no windows and too many desks, a room that always makes me want to lie down on the floor in a fetal position and whimper. 

Individual presentations will be difficult with 18 students so I'll have to shift to some sort of group presentation--or steal my colleague's group discussion-leader assignment. And then I'll have to add more time for responding to students' drafts or else assign fewer papers in the class. Preparing that syllabus is going to require a lot more than just changing some readings and altering dates.

If everything goes according to plan, this will be the last time I'll be teaching either one of those classes before I retire, so I want to make them especially good. At the moment, though, I'm being assaulted by intransigent numbers and traumatic memories set in that horrible classroom. A midsummer night's scream! I need someone to provide the formula for success so I can get some rest.  

In the news but in the dark

I get a sinking feeling every time my campus ends up in the headlines of the local newspaper. People are going to ask me about that, I tell myself, but what can I tell them that won't make it worse?

Actually, it doesn't even have to be my campus in the news--if higher education hits the national media, I'm going to hear about it from people in my community, often at the most inappropriate of times. Case in point: last month I was at a funeral for someone I cared about when a person I don't even know came up to ask whether my students are getting involved in "all those crazy protests." I guess they assume that anything happening anywhere in academe must also be happening here in rural Ohio.

But sometimes what happens in Ohio doesn't stay in Ohio, so here we are making headlines in all the local media outlets as well as Inside Higher Ed, which helpfully proclaims,  "Incoming President Backs Out of Marietta College Job."

The article is short and lacking in details. Local articles have achieved more length simply by repeating the same statements in different words: No, we can't say why the newly hired president decided not to come here, aside from the aforementioned "unforeseen change in personal considerations"; yes, we have a plan moving forward; no, no further information will be forthcoming at this time.

And the astounding thing is that no further information is forthcoming. Lots of theories are floating around campus without any facts to back them up; even my usual sources of inside scoop are in the dark. So this week while I'm out in the community minding my own business--shopping or attending a play or going to church--and someone walks up to ask me what's going on with the presidential situation, I will honestly be able to say, Beats me. I don't know any more than you do.

Pining for peace of mind

Step out my front door and the whole world smells like a pine-scented candle. 

Last Friday a local tree service cut down a tree that has been threatening to fall on my house for years, a 90-foot-tall white pine conveniently located between two sets of power lines just uphill from the part of the house where the grandkids sleep when they visit. The power company had brutally trimmed off all the branches on the uphill side of the tree years ago, which probably led to the tree's eventual decline. The resident woodsman has taken down many massive trees over the years but the proximity of power lines made this one especially dangerous, and since the power company declined to take responsibility, we finally hired a tree service to take it out.

The bad news is that the patch of wild mullein that sat just downhill from the tree got flattened, but better to flatten some wildflowers than my house. No more pine-scented nightmares but plenty of pine-scented air. That's a pretty good trade. I'll pay the tree service a small fortune, but it's a small price for peace of mind.

The mullein patch before the tree was cut

Hard to see, but there's a power line in front of the rig and another behind the tree.

Mullein patch after the tree was cut

Plenty of firewood to heat the house all winter