An appointment with autumn

Last week when one of the Powers That Be tried to schedule a meeting with me for this morning, I begged off by saying "I have an appointment that will keep me off campus all morning." I did not feel the need to mention that my appointment was with a great blue heron.

Of course at the time I had no idea that I'd be meeting with a heron this morning. I did have an appointment--in Athens at a car dealership to get a new rear window on my car so I can start using my rear-window defogger. I've owned that car for just over a year, but early last fall I started seeing news reports about people whose rear windows shattered as soon as they turned on the rear-window defogger, so I decided to avoid using the defogger and wait for a recall notice, which arrived in due course over the summer. First I had trouble scheduling an appointment and then I had to reschedule because of a conflict and I was determined to get that window replaced before the mornings get any frostier, regardless of the needs of the PTBs.

So I've had the car appointment on my schedule for weeks but just this week the gorgeous fall foliage inspired me to add a stop to my Athens itinerary. I left in the dark and arrived at the shallow upper end of Strouds Run Lake in the soft early-morning light, which made the world look like a watercolor painting, and right in front of the parking area stood a great blue heron.

I saw ducks, too, and a few geese and sandpipers and even a lone red-winged blackbird that should have left for a warm winter home already, and I saw the rising sun paint the sky pink and the leaves yellow, orange, and red. For a while there were no sounds beyond the ducks' quiet squawks and the wind rustling through the leaves, so I stood there and drank in the beauty without a thought for what I might be missing on campus.

I'll pay for it, of course--I'll have to scramble to get through all those annotated bibliographies and deal with whatever complications arise from my dereliction of duty, but I came home with a new rear window with functioning defogger, a host of photos, and a sense of calm that can only come from looking away, if only temporarily, from the daily grind. 

I don't know how long I watched that heron before it finally flew off into the distance. My spirit took flight with the bird, but my body sighed and drove away toward duty.

  

The impending Bibliopocalypse

A dozen times this morning I wanted to stop and take a photo--of colorful leaves reflected in the river, pink stripes in the sky highlighting red and orange trees, light filtering through leaves so golden they seem to glow from within. I keep telling myself I have enough photos of fall leaves but I'd better enjoy them while I can because soon I'll be immersed in a task that will keep me tied to my computer screen for hours on end.

I refer, of course, to the Bibliopocalypse. I have gone on record confessing that I hate annotated bibliographies. They're a pain to teach and a pain to grade and they inspire a host of complaints among students. So much can go wrong: not enough sources, the wrong kinds of sources, inadequate summaries, absent evaluations, every type of format error known to the MLA handbook, and I have to keep an eye open for every possible problem. First I count the listings and determine whether they're in alphabetical order, and then I go through them with a fine-toothed comb, marking problems and offering suggestions. Then there's the rubric, the grade, the comments--a total slog, but if I assign such an onerous task, my feedback had better reflect some serious effort.

If everyone hates annotated bibliographies, why not just ditch the assignment? Because gathering, summarizing, evaluating, and citing an array of sources is a valuable stage in a large research project. In first-year composition courses I might require students to turn in individual source evaluations over the course of a week or two, but for the English majors in my capstone class, they've already submitted a research proposal so now they have to show that they've put in the legwork to locate appropriate sources. If they do a thorough job summarizing and evaluating those sources, they'll be way ahead of the game when they write their drafts next week. And then we'll be off to the races with presentations, revisions, and final papers. There's no turning back now--the rest of the semester is just one big assignment after another.

So I have only 24 hours before the Bibliopocalypse, and I intend to enjoy them. Look at those leaves! But the time I have a minute to spare to look outside again, they'll all be on the ground. 

 

 

The mail must go--somewhere

What I learned this morning when I called our local post office to complain about a missing package:

Thanks to staffing problems, the USPS no longer employs a regular delivery driver for our rural route. Instead, they rely on temporary drivers borrowed from other post offices.

Temporary drivers can't be expected to be familiar with our route, so when they see our mailbox sitting across the street right next to our neighbor's mailbox, they may not be certain which house the mailbox serves.

Our house isn't even visible from the mailbox, so if they deliver our mail to the house nearest our mailbox, they'll get it wrong every time.

Therefore, if the Amazon package-tracking software says our package was delivered "On or near the front porch," it doesn't necessarily mean our front porch.

The temporary delivery driver promises to retrieve the misplaced package and deliver it properly today.

What does our local post office do when they can't find anyone to serve our rural route? Well, the postmaster kindly informed me that often he has to deliver mail along our route after the post office has closed for the day--and if he has to serve other rural routes as well, he may be out past midnight getting the mail delivered. This explains why our mail, which used to arrive reliably by 1 p.m., now often gets delivered long after we've gone to bed.

After this short conversation, I have developed a new appreciation for our local postmaster...but I wish the USPS would find a way to compensate rural delivery people so we could go back to having a postal carrier we know and trust instead of some temp who can't find our house. Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night can stop the mail, but staffing problems can certainly slow it down.

The future awaits, but not very patiently

The future is calling! It's so demanding--just today it wants me to produce a schedule for a January teaching workshop, a list of classes I'd like to teach next year, a plan to help an advisee complete his graduation requirements before May, a final book order for a new class I'm teaching in the spring (and maybe some thoughts toward a syllabus?), and an essay question for Wednesday's exam.

The exam question is easiest: I don't like the essay question I used for this material last time I taught the class, so last Friday I put my students into small groups and asked them to discuss concepts appearing in the readings and write sample essay questions. All the sample questions circled around a tight little cluster of interesting concepts, so I'll knead and twist all the questions together until they form a coherent and compelling prompt.

Other demands from the future won't be solved so simply. Some require me to look to the past: When was the last time we offered a teaching workshop on this particular topic and how many participants did it attract? What classes have I offered for the past few years and how many students enrolled? How has the College previously responded to the particular type of glitch messing up my advisee's schedule? What book did I intend to order when I initially proposed this new class seven years ago, and is it still relevant today? (The future doesn't really care why I am only now able to teach a class that was approved seven years ago, but that's a tale for another time.)

The most complicated demand from the future deals with my teaching schedule for the next academic year, because I have to look forward and backward and even sideways to balance what I want, what my English majors need, what we've offered recently, and what our limited department can reasonably be expected to do without being permitted to replace lost positions. 

I need to fill out my schedule for Fall 2025, Spring 2026, and Fall 2026 (so I can retire in December 2026, hurrah!). I have a list of classes I'd like to teach, but I wonder whether our English majors would benefit by my branching out a bit. Our expert on pre-Civil-War American Literature has not been replaced and probably will not be replaced for quite some time, so this year our English majors are getting no exposure to American literature before the Civil War except the little bit of it we covered in my African American Lit class early in the semester. How long are we expected to continue with no early American literature classes? How will that affect our majors' future prospects? Should I offer to teach the early American Lit survey even though I've never done it before? Should I develop an upper-level course on an early American author (Melville!)? If I teach a class or two outside my area of expertise, which of my regular classes should I sacrifice? 

That's too much to think about right now, but the future is standing outside my office door tapping its foot and demanding some answers. I'm tempted to close the door in its face so I can focus on today's issues--like lunch. Surely the future can wait until after I've eaten? 

Random bullets of bright spots in a bleak week

• Sure, the temperature was hovering just above freezing this morning, but we still have big fluffy yellow sunflowers standing tall outside my building, bright spots in fall days that vary between bright and bleak.

• In my usual parking lot the other day I noticed that every car was either gray or black except my red car and my department chair's blue one. My department does its part to bring a little color to campus, but we can't be expected to carry the ball for everyone.
  

• Our volleyball and football teams are still undefeated, a feat they've never before accomplished in my 24 years here. At some point they'll meet Mount Union, but I prefer not to think about that right now. Besides, maybe this is the year someone will prove that Mount Union is just as fallible as the rest of us.

• And so, apparently, are the Yankees. It is a joy to have my Cleveland Guardians playing October baseball, but they've been struggling against the Yankees, which makes last night's walk-off win so much more exhilarating. I keep playing this video of David Fry's game-winning home run. Makes me happy every time.

• Speaking of struggling, a prof from another college told me about an attempt to cut costs and improve efficiency on her campus: they eliminated all the photocopiers on campus except for one and put one person in charge of doing all the photocopying so that faculty have to send their copy orders to the Copier Czar to be printed out. But what happens when the Copier Czar wants to go on vacation? Faculty received an email telling them no photocopying for two weeks, so plan ahead!

I guess I'm happy that no one has tried to do that here--but I'd better keep the idea under wraps lest someone get inspired. So don't tell anyone, okay? I like my photocopier right where it is.

Combustible

 As I stare at my sandwich, I keep thinking about Jack London's story "To Build a Fire." This poor guy trudging through the Alaskan wilderness in fifty-below weather is going to die if he can't start a fire, but he's dropped his last matches and he can't pick them up with his gloves on-- but if he takes off his gloves, his fingers will freeze and then how will he build a fire? 

I wish I could build a fire in my office, but instead I'm wondering whether I should try to eat my peanut-butter sandwich with my gloves on--and risk getting glove fuzz on my sandwich or peanut butter on my gloves--or take off my gloves to eat so that my fingers get so cold I can't type?

Turn on the space heater and risk blowing the circuit breaker? Leave the space heater off to ensure sufficient electricity to do my work? Every option has its down side.

The bigger question is why I keep having this kind of dilemma. I mean, anyone who knows how to read a weather forecast could have foretold that we would need heat in the building this morning, but no heat is to be found. I've been trying to work with my gloves and coat on and a big shawl wrapped around my shoulders, but hunching under the shawl gives me a sore neck and back while shivering against the cold upsets my stomach and gives me a headache.

Worst of all is the anger. Trying to work in this kind of cold produces a constant simmering anger that threatens to burst out at any moment, so that I'm afraid to interact with students or write emails lest I lash out. If only the anger could produce enough heat to allow me to take off my gloves! But no--the anger just makes me want to cancel classes and go home, or else take early retirement and leave my freezing office behind for good.

Right now, though, I need to figure out how to eat my lunch. I guess I'm thankful that I'm not trudging through the Alaskan wilderness in fifty-below temperatures, but if I don't get this anger under control, I may just spontaneously combust.

Dance party in the sky

My day started very early with a doctor's appointment and blood draw before breakfast plus a flu shot that may have contributed to the overwhelming desire to sleep that hit me by midafternoon, but by that time I'd spent three hours driving north to meet my old grad school friend for lunch and a refreshing chat and then driven another 40 minutes to the home of my daughter and son-in-law and, of course, the grandkids, who read to me and played their piano pieces and demonstrated their progress in eating with chopsticks, so by the time the sky got dark enough to make the Aurora Borealis visible in northern Ohio I was so tired I was tempted to give it a pass, but the young folks convinced me to join them on a late-night jaunt to a local field where we were able to view the light show without obstructions, and when the middle grandkid said "There's a whole dance party going on in the sky," I had to take it on faith because, sadly, I couldn't see anything except a whole lot of dark sky with a pinkish tinge in certain areas, but fortunately the camera saw more than my aging eyes could see--and even if I couldn't see the dance party up there, I could see the grandkids dancing around in a field in their pajamas and warm coats and hear them marveling over the wonders playing out far overhead, and after the long and winding road I'd traveled to make it to that point, that moment was worth every ounce of effort.

 

Now that's some powerful teaching

I was reading The Last Devil to Die, a Thursday Murder Club mystery by Richard Osman, when I happened upon a passage that made me laugh out loud. It's a little long but worth the effort. Nina, an archeology professor, is meeting with an apathetic student whose name she can't remember when they are interrupted by a hefty Canadian thug named Garth: 

There's one with her now, an identikit boy of around twenty, a first year, certainly. He's called Tom or Sam, or maybe Josh. The boy is wearing a Nirvana T-shirt, despite being born many years after Kurt Cobain died. 

They are discussing an essay he hasn't written. "Roman Art and the Manipulation of Historical Memory."

"Did you enjoy the reading at least?" Nina asks.

"No," says the boy.

"I see," says Nina. "Anything else to add? Reasons you didn't enjoy it?"

"Just boring," says the boy. "Not my area."

"And yet your course is titled 'Classics, Archeology and Ancient Civilizations'? What would you say your area is?"

"I'm just saying I don't pay nine thousand pounds a year to read a bunch of left-wing academics rewriting Roman history."

"I imagine it's your mum and dad paying the nine thousand pounds, isn't it?"

"Don't privilege-shame me," says Tom or Sam or Josh. "I can report you."

"Mmm," says Nina. "Am I to take it that you're not planning on finishing the essay anytime soon?"

"Read my file," says the boy. "I don't have to do essays."

"OK," says Nina. "What do you imagine you are doing here? What and how do you hope to learn?"

"You learn through experience," says the boy, with the world-weary air of a wise man tired of having to explain things to fools. "You learn from interacting with the real world. Books are for lose--" 

There is a knock at Nina's door, despite the SUPERVISION IN PROGRESS note stuck on it. Nina is about to send the unseen caller away when the door opens, and who should walk in but Garth, the colossal Canadian she had met at Sunday lunch.

"Sorry, this is a private session," says Nina. "Garth, isn't it?"

"I need something," says Garth. "And I need it right now. You're lucky I even knocked."

"I'm teaching," says Nina, then looks at the boy. "Up to a point."

Garth shrugs.

"So you'll have to wait. We're trying to discuss Roman art."

"I don't wait," says Garth. "I get impatient."

"Probably ADHD," says the boy, clearly glad there is now a man in the room.

Garth looks at the boy, as if noticing him for the first time. "You're wearing a Nirvana T-shirt?"

The boy nods, sagely. "Yeah, that's my vibe."

"What's your favorite song?"

"Smells Like--"

"And if you say 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' I will throw you out of that window."

The boy now looks decidedly less happy that there is a man in the room.

"Garth, I'm teaching," says Nina.

"Me too," says Garth.

"Uh....," says the boy.

"Easy question," says Garth. "Nirvana is the fourth-greatest band of all time. Name their best song."

" 'The Man Who...,' uh."

"If you're about to say 'The Man Who Sold the World,' think again," says Garth. "That's a Bowie cover. We can have a different discussion about Bowie when we're through with this."

"Leave him alone, Garth," says Nina. "He's a child. And a child in my care." 

"I'm not a child," says the boy.

"You want me to help or not?" says Nina. "Why don't we call it a day anyway? If you haven't done the essay, there's no point."

"My pleasure," says the boy, getting up as fast as he can.

"Wait, you didn't do your essay?" Garth asks.

"Leave him alone, Garth," says Nina.

"What was it about? The essay?"

"Roman art or something," says the boy.

"And you didn't do it? Couldn't be bothered?"

"I just...didn't...just wasn't...interested."

Garth roars and beats his chest. The boy instinctively ducks toward Nina, and she puts a protective arm around him.

"You weren't interested? In Roman art? You are out of your mind. You're in this beautiful room with this intelligent woman, and you get to talk about Roman art, and you're not interested. You're not interested? You've got three years till you actually have to go and get a job! You know what jobs are like? Terrible. You think you get to discuss Roman art when you've got a job? You think you get to read? What are you interested in?"

"I have a TikTok channel," says the boy.

"Go on," says Garth. "I'm interested in TikTok. I was thinking of dabbling. What do you do?"

"We do....fast-food reviews," says the boy.

"Oh, I like that," says Garth. "Fast-food review. Best burger in Canterbury?"

"The Yak House," says the boy.

"Noted," says Garth. "I'll check you out. Now I need a word with Ms. Mishra here, so I'm going to ask you to skedaddle."

The boy doesn't need asking twice, and shoots for the door. Garth puts out a massive arm to stop him. "Three things before you go though. One: if that essay isn't done next week, I'll kill you. I mean that. Not like 'Your mom will kill you if you don't tidy your room.' Actually kill you. You believe me?"

The boy nods.

"Good, stop wasting this opportunity, brother, I swear. Two, if you tell anyone I threatened you, I will also kill you. OK? Not a word."

"OK," says the boy.

"It better be OK. God cries every time someone lies to a Canadian. And three, the best Nirvana song is 'Sliver' or 'Heart-Shaped Box.' Understand?"

"Understand," agrees the boy.

"I played bass for a band called Mudhoney for two tour shows once. You heard of them?" says Garth.

"I think so," pretends the boy.

"Great, you check them out, and I'll check out your TikToks. Off you go, champ."

Garth ruffles the boy's hair and watches him run out. He turns back to Nina.

"Nice kid."

Since reading this, all I can think about is how different my life would be if I had a Garth in all my classrooms or standing in the corner for every student conference. It wouldn't do much harm to throw anyone out of my office window, but I suspect that Garth rarely has to follow through on his threats.

An awkward interregnum

Here we sit in an odd interregnum: things are going swimmingly in class and out; I'm checking things off my to-do list, planning campus workshops, developing plans to celebrate faculty research and scholarship, enjoying opportunities to make good things happen on campus, but at the same time in the back of my mind sits the constant awareness of the looming Board of Trustees meeting where Important Decisions will be made about how we're going to continue digging ourselves out of our ongoing budgetary mess. 

Earlier in my career I was never really aware of when the Trustees were meeting or what they might be doing; if they made a decision that affected me, I assumed that someone would let me know. But ever since we dug ourselves into this budget apocalypse, every Trustees meeting feels like an existential crisis. Will they cut programs? Cancel positions? Impose further restrictions? Or will they announce some big new donation to fund an initiative that will save all our necks? 

I tell my students that liminal space is a place of possibility--we stand in the threshold of opportunity where anything can happen--but it's also a space of limitation because we can't fully engage with activities on either side when we're stuck in the doorway. But here I sit, uncomfortably aware that something is going to happen in the next couple of weeks, or maybe nothing will happen and we'll scrape along as best we can with the resources available. 

So things are good! Until they're not--and who knows when the door of opportunity might slam shut in our faces?

  

Would you get a root canal from a Muppet?

I was trying to tell my students what it felt like to get a root canal from an endodontist who looks just like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew but they said Who's Bunsen Honeydew, which made me want to throw in the towel right there and then because I'm clearly getting too old to communicate with these infants, but then one of them said Is he the Muppet in the lab with Beaker? and I breathed a sigh of relief, but by then I'd ventured pretty far from the point of the story, which is that I spent two hours this morning having my jaw and face stretched and immobilized so a bunch of sharp, whiny dental instruments could do horrible violent things to one of my teeth--a tooth that required attention from a specialist because the roots are curvy, much like the rest of me--and to multiply the usual horrors and indignities of dental care, the face of the man wielding those instruments looked just like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, which made me want to either laugh or scream (because of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew's calamitous klutziness with tools in clips like this one) except I couldn't do either because I couldn't move my mouth, so that I had to grunt faintly when Dr. Not-Bunsen-Honeydew asked me repeatedly whether I was doing okay, and when I really needed a rest room break so as to avoid an embarrassing incident in his nice sanitary endodontal office, my attempt to say rest room caused the endodontist to respond, So you say you're Russian?, which I'm not, and even if I were Russian I doubt that I would feel the need to convey that information whilst having my rotten curvy tooth drilled by a guy who looks like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew.

But I made it to the rest room without incident and I survived my root canal and I taught my classes, despite feeling about 102 years old, and the novocaine had worn off by the time classes were over so now my primary goal in life is to hunt down some pain-killers and call it a day. A bizarre day, but at least the hard part is over.

Irony, sardony, Irene-y, unread

The visiting writer talks with her hands, squeezing an invisible ball as she describes her attempts to put pressure on language. I watch her, mesmerized, glad for an opportunity to sit at a desk like a student and listen for a bit.

But not too long, because those desks are uncomfortable. Even more uncomfortable was the temperature in the auditorium where the writer later gave a public reading. I had the foresight to take a blanket, but it didn't help much. Every day I experience the irony of constantly being urged to cut costs while working in buildings so excessively air-conditioned that we have to huddle under blankets so our lips don't turn blue.

Speaking of irony, why don't we follow Nella Larsen's example and adopt sardony? It shows up in Passing with a footnote claiming that Larsen was the first to use the word in print, but apparently it never caught on. I could dish out sardony every day of the week if there were any market for it.

My students discussed the first half of Passing on Wednesday, and at the end of class I asked them to predict what might happen next. Without fail, their predicted humiliation and doom for Clare Kendry. No one even mentioned Irene. I mean, how could anything significant happen to sweet little Irene? Surely she's just an objective observer of Clare's downfall! I'm eager to see how my students feel about Irene after reading the rest of the text.

I just hope they're actually reading it. Inside Higher Ed featured an article the other day asking "How Much Do Students Really Read?" It turns out, unsurprisingly, that many students prefer not to read their texts but instead watch videos or scan AI-generated summaries. One exception: English majors are more likely to read texts, some completing as much as 75 percent of assigned readings. I pity the English major who reads only 75 percent of Passing--or of Percival Everett's James, which we're finishing in my capstone class today, or Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys from last semester. The revelation at the end shifts the meaning of everything that comes before. 

What came before that shivery reading by the visiting writer? A discussion of tattoos--namely, the dearth of same amongst English Department faculty. I shocked our students by telling them I have two tattoos but then I had to explain that they're just dots tattooed on my hips to guide the great big clunky medical machine that delivered precision rays of radiation to my innards 15 years ago. Another colleague admitted to having a small fraternity-related tattoo, but the rest of us are woefully unadorned. I proposed that we hold a student competition to design an appropriate tattoo for the entire English department, maybe some memorable words from a text, provided that anyone still knows how to read words (she said sardonically). Then instead of putting pressure on language, we could allow language to put pressure on us.

Read but not said

My capstone class will start discussing Percival Everett's James this afternoon, having finished with Huckleberry Finn last Friday. A few students are listening to the texts on audiobooks, so I asked them how the audiobooks handle the frequent use of the n-word. Apparently the narrator just says it, out loud, over and over again.

In class we're talking about the n-word and using the phrase the n-word but not saying the word out loud. In interviews about James, Percival Everett states that he chose to use the word in the novel because he didn't want to whitewash history or misrepresent the nineteenth-century vernacular, but while he uses the full word in the novel, he says the n-word in interviews. 

One student in my class tells about the time when her high-school English teacher introduced study of Huck Finn by going around the room and requiring each student to say the n-word out loud so they could get comfortable saying and hearing the word they could not avoid seeing on the page, but enough students (and parents) were uncomfortable with the exercise that the teacher backed off. 

Another student is student-teaching in a local high school and feels that trying to teach Huck Finn in today's high school environment would be more trouble than it's worth. I see her point, but nevertheless I jumped at the opportunity to teach Huck Finn alongside James. If nothing else, the portrayal of Jim in Huck Finn provides a valuable lesson on why it's important to empower diverse voices. Huck's voice is so charming and full of energy that it may distract readers from the stories he's eliding or ignoring altogether. James fills that void, providing a compelling counternarrative that sends us back to Twain with new insight, new questions.

But still we struggle with how to handle the n-word. In my class the word remains read but not said, which is an imperfect solution but at this point it may be the best way to introduce students to the incredible story of James.

Obvious or oblivious?

There I was in the middle of yet another meeting designed to inform me of all the ways I'm failing to follow proper campus purchasing procedures--frequently-changing procedures for which I was never trained and that until recently were not even part of my job description--when I had a sudden epiphany: the procedures in question were so completely obvious to the expert that she couldn't imagine that they wouldn't be similarly obvious to me. 

I mean, aren't we all born with an inherent ability to distinguish between a requisition and a payment request? Don't we just innately know which online form must be submitted before the event and which one comes after? Don't we come out of the womb aware that one of these procedures requires a detailed quote while the other requires an invoice? And if we bobble the procedures and submit an invoice with the wrong online form, aren't we just about the stupidest people ever to have walked the earth?

I don't even want to go back and count all the times I've griped about the constant struggle to figure out campus budgeting and purchasing procedures; just thinking about it wears me out. But today I'm interested in the deeper issue: why would someone who has developed a specific area of expertise assume that whatever is obvious to her must also be obvious to others? 

What would this attitude look like in my discipline?  

Okay, class, you must all have come to college well aware of how to construct an effective thesis statement, so let's not look at any examples or discuss their strengths and weaknesses. Just write me a good thesis--and if you don't know what that means, what's wrong with you? 

Dear colleagues, I had intended to organize a workshop to help you design writing assignments to discourage plagiarism, but the methods are so incredibly obvious to me that I can't see the point, so never mind. 

So you say you're struggling to understand Charles Chesnutt's dialect tales? Just look at the words on the page! The meaning is obvious!

These examples are, of course, ridiculous. If I assume that whatever is obvious to me must also be obvious to others, then why am I here? And if we all adopt this attitude, then why does any institution of higher education need to exist?

Fortunately, ignorance is a renewable resource--that's what keeps us all in business. I am willing to admit my ignorance and gather the knowledge required to fulfill my duties--but I'll never learn if the experts assume that what I need to know must already be completely obvious.

A nightmare too far

I dreamed I was getting ready to start a new graduate program to seek a Ph.D. in Psychology. At age 62. In Kentucky. While maintaining my day job teaching in Ohio. And in my dream the thing that worried me the most was not the stupidity of starting a new Ph.D. on the verge of retirement or the fact that Psychology would require me to do scary things with stats and spreadsheets--no, the burning question that turned this bizarre dream into a nightmare was What will I listen to on all those long drives?

Fortunately, I woke up from that nightmare, and the real-life nightmares I've been facing in my daily life are much less stressful. For instance:

I keep being required to feed people. Now I love feeding people if I'm doing the cooking; putting together a tried-and-true recipe in my own kitchen is one of my love languages. But I don't like being in charge of selecting food for a group of campus colleagues. I worry about making the wrong choices to suit every palate, and then I worry about submitting the invoice incorrectly so it doesn't get paid, and then I worry about forgetting to put the leftovers in the fridge. This happened once over the summer when a plate of chicken-salad sandwiches got overlooked and sat out overnight, and then I couldn't just throw them away in the nearest trash can because staff cuts have led to changes in the trash-emptying schedule so I had to go wandering around looking for a trash can that was likely to be emptied within the week or risk living with the smell of three-day-old chicken-salad sandwiches in my workspace. Nightmare.

For a morning person, a slate of back-to-back classes and meetings running from 1 to 6 p.m. on a Monday is another kind of nightmare, but at least I won't be expected to think too much at this afternoon's meetings. In one meeting: I'm assisting a colleague who is working remotely, so I have to get to the room early, pull up the Zoom link, connect with my colleague, and then stand by throughout the meeting to step in as needed: Bev, can you check and see if everyone is on the same page? Bev, can you troubleshoot that problem? Bev, can you let me know when everyone has finished that task? I can't lead the workshop myself because it deals with the kind of software that makes me break out in hives, but I am happy to help my colleague, who has helped me often in the past. But frankly, it would really be easier if she could insert a computer chip in my brain and then run me around the room like a remote-control robot.

Over the weekend I tackled the first major pile of grading for the semester, which included some student handwriting that nearly drove me demented--but the content of the essays was so delightful that it offset the nightmarish scrawls. Today I'll grade a pile of essays submitted online, which I couldn't do over the weekend because a nasty stye in my eye made staring at the small computer screen painful. The papers will be more readable on the big monitor in my office, but the eye still hurts. Not so much a nightmare as an annoyance, especially since nobody will mind if I put them off for a day or two.

Similarly my crowded schedule of meetings and tasks this week: It will be a challenge to get it all done, but it's doable as long as I keep up a steady pace, and if I have to let something slide, there will be no screaming involved. So I guess my daytime nightmares are pretty tame these days. I may experience some discomfort--but nobody's forcing me to drive a six-hour round trip twice a week with nothing good on the radio. That's a nightmare too far.

In times like these, WWJD?

I went outside because my hands were so cold it hurt to type and I felt ridiculous wearing gloves and huddling under a blanket in my office when it's 80 degrees outside, but as I searched for a place in the sun where my black sweater could serve as a solar cell, I happened upon the bench near the library with the plaque that honors a colleague who died 15 years ago, so I decided to sit there and warm myself inside and out by pondering the question What Would Jackie Do?

Jackie taught Political Science, and in an election year she would get her students involved in political campaigns so they could see up close how the sausage gets made. She would encourage them to apply their critical thinking skills to everything, to ask questions about motivations and rhetorical devices and unintended consequences. She was a no-nonsense straight-talker but she never steamrolled anyone, instead empowering students to learn for themselves.

In times of campus controversy she would challenge assumptions, demand clarification, and expose sloppy thinking. She carried enough institutional memory to help the rest of us understand the historical issues underlying current problems. It was fun to sit next to her at faculty meetings, where her whispered comments provided an eye-opening education to the newbies amongst us.

She taught here through some difficult times, but I don't know how she would react to the petty wrangling we're enduring on a regular basis today. If the administration took away her support staff and demanded that she master procedures that changed every other week and then chastised her when she made a mistake, what would Jackie do? 

She probably wouldn't curl up in a fetal position and whimper, which is what I wanted to do this morning when I saw the email indicating that I'd once again messed up one of our ever-changing procedures and I was going to have to go through a tangle of multiplying emails just to get the vendor paid for an expense that is fully funded by my grant and that has already been approved at the highest level. And Jackie definitely wouldn't threaten to retire immediately after being encouraged to seek further assistance from a person whose e-mail autoreply says "Off campus--unavailable for appointments."

Jackie was just getting ready to retire in the spring of 2009 when she was suddenly felled by complications of cancer treatment. If she were here today, she wouldn't take any rash steps but would probably step outside, find a warm place to sit, and think deeply about the situation. Then she might just share some choice words with the person responsible for the current problem, and I would be happy to follow her example if I could only figure out who that person is.

Not ready for prime time

When is a woman in the prime of life? I suspect that any woman who has time to ponder the question has already passed her prime.

I keep hearing on the news that Kamala Harris is proof that a woman in her 60s can be in her prime, and last week my comedy students heard Hannah Gadsby insisting that "A 17-year-old girl is never, ever, ever in her prime."

"I am in my prime," she adds. "Would you test your strength out on me?"

Hannah Gadsby was 40 when she said that in her comedy special Nanette, and no, given the fierceness on display in that performance, I would not test my strength out on her. But then I am hardly in my prime. Am I?

In hindsight I agree that I was not in my prime at 17. I was smart enough and full of ambition, but I had bad skin and too much flab and a self-image that inspired suicidal feelings on a regular basis, which didn't make me much different from most of my friends. What I had a lot of at 17 was potential. 

When I was in college and grad school I was too busy to wonder whether I might be in my prime, and as a young mother I was pouring my energy and creativity into every little thing my children did, so if I was in my prime, I couldn't have paused long enough to enjoy it.

I might have been in my prime in my mid-to-late 40s, when I was making strides in my career, writing and teaching and delivering papers, getting my kids through college and devoting myself to creative projects; physically I was in better shape than ever, except I was not aware at the time that my physical strength was masking the growth of an insidious cancer. Trust me, I didn't sit in the cancer center's chemotherapy suite with an IV in my arm pondering whether this might be the prime of life. 

These days my mind might be in its prime but my body is falling apart. In the classroom I feel alive and alert, able to think on my feet and come up with useful insights; at the computer my fingers fly across the keyboard, barely able to keep up with the creative flow. But a long day of running from classes to meetings to frustrating tasks leaves me wanting to curl up on the floor in a fetal position and cry. I go for a walk in the woods and feel great, but then after a 24-minute drive to campus, my legs are so stiff I have trouble getting out of the car and walking half a block to my office.

I've used up much of that potential that seemed so endless when I was 17, but I haven't quite reached the pinnacle of success I'd dreamed of back then. But I haven't given up trying either. If I can't identify the prime of life, maybe that's because it's still on the horizon, beckoning me onward. If I ever reach my prime, I hope I still have the energy to realize that I've arrived.

 

Celebrating the Yes while respecting the No

My administrative position periodically requires me to ask people to do things--voluntarily--for the good of the institution, and lately I keep getting two contrasting responses. The problem is that I sympathize strongly with both.

These are tough times in academe, with professors facing increasing expectations and diminishing rewards. We've lost so much in the past few years--respect, raises, benefits, awards, funding for academic programs and professional development, colleagues whose positions have been cut, access to office supplies (who will order those green gel pens I love so much?), all the perks that made our professional lives more pleasant. Rampant staff cuts mean fewer people are available to do essential work, so everyone who remains has to work harder than ever, often without adequate training or compensation. 

So when I ask someone to assist with a project, I'm not surprised to be told, "No, I'm not doing anything extra for the College this year. I'm just teaching my classes and going home." I can respect that. We all have our own ways of coping with trauma, and I can easily recall times when I've needed to sentence myself to the Timeout Box just to survive the stresses of the job.

But I'm also getting plenty of Yeses. In fact, I'm amazed at the number of colleagues who are still willing to share their expertise at a workshop or participate in a program that requires a lot of effort without additional compensation. While some colleagues need to disengage from the College and limit their efforts to fulfilling their minimal requirements and no more, others are stepping up in big ways and small.

Here's an example: staff cuts mean that I have to pay more attention to budgets than ever before, tasks I have always preferred to delegate to people who don't break out in hives at the sight of a spreadsheet. This has been a struggle. I am okay handling numbers but I couldn't get the budget technology to work, something I was reluctant to admit to anyone in a position to help me, because how pathetic is it to have a PhD and decades of teaching experience but still be unable to access the spreadsheet showing my grant budget? But last week I overcame my shame and asked for help, and a very busy person in an essential administrative position came to my office to guide me through the process step by step.

I so appreciate colleagues who say Yes that I've been trying to say it to others, although sometimes all I can offer is I don't know. My office door is sometimes the only one open early in the morning, so I get a lot of questions that previously would have been the purview of the administrative assistant whose position was eliminated. Where are the spare batteries for the classroom clickers? (Not in my office--but I'll gladly walk down the hall to show you the secret stash.) Where do we keep the staples for the photocopier? (No idea, and don't ask me how to replace the toner either.) Who will bake cookies for this English major event since our catering budget is nonexistent? (I guess that would be me, but I'm not above volunteering a colleague to help.)

In times of trouble, I try not to be judgmental. Those who need to limit their engagement and tell me No get no grief from me. But in an atmosphere of No, each individual Yes makes me want to stand up and cheer. Hurrah for the Yeses! I'm collecting as many as I can right now before everyone gets so burned out that there's nothing left but a big fat No.

Laboring on Labor Day again (again)

I'm required to labor on Labor Day--but not too hard. While my blog takes a holiday, here are the Rules for Laboring on Labor Day that I published some years back:

1. Dress down. They can make me teach on Labor Day, but they can't make me dress up.

2. Pack your own picnic. No way I'm eating at my desk when the rest of the world is outside grilling burgers!

3. Don't begrudge the revelers their revels. The people who clean our bathrooms, make our photocopies, and answer our phones work hard for very little money and deserve every minute of their day off. I do not wish they were here working, but I do wish I could join them on their day off.

4. Office hours? Are you kidding me? No one comes to my office hours on a normal day, so what are the chances that anyone will show up on Labor Day?

5. Enjoy the commute. No public school = no school buses holding up traffic, no 20-mile-per-hour zones, and no teens racing around curves on country roads.

6. Be there. Nobody's fooled by the Labor Day flu; if my students are required to be in class on Labor Day, then I'm going to be there with them.

7. Don't try to explain it. I know we have reasons for teaching on Labor Day, and some of them may even be valid ("We can't shortchange Monday labs!"), but the real reason we teach on Labor Day is that we've never been sufficiently motivated to change it.  

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.