Petty

So, the other day I got an evaluation form from the local medical clinic I go to.

I seek to be as medically boring as possible, really, and have largely succeeded in this through most of my life. But, since I'm going overseas to teach (and to play tourist on either side of the semester), I thought I should make sure my vaccines are up to date and such.

Anyway, this evaluation form from the clinic.

See, I had an irritating visit to the clinic, irritating in the most petty ways, and the petty part of me wants to fill out the form to reflect that. The lazy part of me wants to put it aside until it finds its way into the trash. And the not petty part of me wants to find a useful way to fill out the form.

The paranoid part of me wonders if my petty irritations, expressed on a form with the name of the travel clinic doctor and the date of my appointment, might make for a less than pleasant encounter with the needle when I go to get the second Hep B vaccination. And the third.

The cynical part of me thinks that responding is a time-consuming (for me) exercise in pretending that someone there cares. Circular file.

The teacher part of me that gets evaluation forms myself doesn't want to be mean, but also recognizes that filling out the form and saying things were GRRRRREAT! would give someone an excuse to do petty irritating stuff in the future. And not filling out the form doesn't help someone who wants to do better but doesn't realize they're not doing a good job communicating on a basic level.

Or maybe people were having a bad day? (or several people, several bad days, over several weeks, actually.) Maybe the travel clinic doctor's a petty jerk and not a sexist jerk? It's so hard to tell the two apart sometimes, when I only have myself as a sample size.

All the parts of me agree that chocolate malt balls would be more pleasureable than filling out the form. They also all agree that chocolate covered raisins would be an acceptable second choice, and also far more enjoyable than filling out the form.

Advising Joys and Frustrations

It's advising season here at NWU.

I had a fantastic meeting with a student last week; we put together a schedule so that each of her classes speaks in some way to another class. Environmental lit with human geography and so forth. I felt a strange sort of jealousy, because I think she's going to have one of those really amazing semesters. In an ideal world, part of advising is helping students look for connections between and among their classes. It's especially important to make meaningful connections between work in general education type classes and their majors/minors. The fact that this student was actually going to have a semester where those connections were explicitly emphasized makes me happy, and seemed to please her as well.

I've also had some less satisfying meetings. I have a couple advisees who are changing majors. I don't regret in any way the change, or even losing them as advisees. But I worry when someone tells me she wants to change majors but she hasn't even read through the catalog to learn what the requirements for her new major are. The frustration increases when the new major is in a field for which licensing plays a large part, such as nursing, accounting, or teaching. I do my best to set things up, and then tell the student to hie him or herself to the new department to talk to someone who really knows the show.

And I worry when a student who talked to me during our meeting last semester about changing majors has another appointment with me this semester because it means they haven't followed up on the change for some reason. If they haven't followed up because they changed their mind, fine. If they haven't followed up because they just didn't bother, then that's not so fine. I see some of each.

I don't worry at all about first or second year students who aren't leaning towards a major/minor combination so long as they're in exploration mode, trying out different things, and familiar with the catalog possibilities. I worry a lot more when a junior or senior seems undecided and unfocused. Most students, though, work through their decisions, sometimes without my help, sometimes with more specific help. I have a tendency to send students to career counseling, especially if they're talking about doing a teaching degree so that they'll have job security. Job security means little if you hate your job, I figure. So I try to get them to do some tutoring or classroom observation at least.

We have to give certain advisees a registration code, and we're supposed to advise them before we give the code. The idea is that they actually have to talk to someone about their academics before enrolling in their next semester of classes. That makes good sense to me.

But it's so very different from my own advising experience. I would have benefitted a LOT from actually talking to someone once a semester about what I was doing, but I'm a stubborn so and so, and would have fought such a system. I have students who fight this system, too, and while I understand their irritation, their sense that they should be able to make totally independent decisions, I also don't give out the code without seeing them and trying to advise them. But I can tell when I get their frustrated email about how they need to register and don't have time to come by to talk.

One of the more frustrating meetings this semester involved a student who didn't want to come see me last semester, but who came. We talked, and I wrote down the classes he planned to take. And this semester, he's not taking any of the classes I wrote down. Sometimes students can't get into classes, but sometimes, I think they change their minds.

I remind myself, it's their education. I can talk to them, listen, advise, and try to help them go in the directions they seem to want to go, but when push comes to shove, they have to register for classes, go to classes, do the hard work involved. And they'll get the degree. Or not.

So, Why DO I Blog?

Midwife with a Knife tagged me with a meme asking for five reasons why I blog. I've read some other folks' responses to the meme, and they're all more interesting than mine, so feel free to skip.

But, if you're HeoCwaeth, Chaser, Ancrene Wiseass, Styley Geek, or New Kid, I'd love to read your response! (A lot of folks have already been tagged, but if you haven't and I missed you, please consider yourself tagged and let me know so I can come read!)

So, my reasons:

1) I have an ego the size of a large city or a small state. I'd be willing to pontificate at length in person, but no one wants to listen.

2) I like to read what other people write, and once I started reading blogs, I thought I might be able to contribute something. I thought I'd have something useful to say. I'm less and less convinced of that. Nonetheless, I love what I do, and I blog in part because I want to talk about what I do, what I read, what I care about. And sometimes I want to complain about things, because even the best academic department, colleague, administrator, or student can make me crazy sometimes.

3) I think we academics do a lousy job explaining what we do and why it's important to everyone else, including our students. I guess I hope blogging will help communicate what happens with education and why college and university education is so important and actually worth paying for with taxes. I also enjoy reading about what other people do, and what their work means to them. It's like a fascinating conversation that I can have at my leisure with multiple people. Cool.

4) A few years ago, I was part of a vibrant on-line community, including forums. I enjoyed the interactions with people across the world, enjoyed the connections, and enjoyed exploring the ways on-line personae work. When I pretty much left that community, I missed the on-line interactions. When I ran across blogs, I found a new sort of on-line community, which I enjoy.

5) I live far from where I grew up, and I'm sometimes uncomfortable here. Being part of the blogging community is a way of having contact with people who aren't from here, or who, if they're from here, are engaged with the on-line world in more open or different ways. Sometimes I like to blog about things that are new and special to me here, birds, gardening, riding or kayaking. And sometimes I just want to scream about how things here frustrate me.

There you are.

Vultures

The press at its best is one of the greatest institutions in the US, no question. A good reporter following a story to tell us what we need to know should be cherished, especially when we need to know about political machinations.

But. And this is big. We don't always need to know everything a reporter can find out. At some point, reporting shifts from a useful activity to something harmful.

The problem is that all news media runs on money, on selling ads, and they'll sell anything they can, pretty much, so long as people will watch, and the advertisers have hope of profit and so are willing to buy time or space.

I don't know how to judge the moment when the press turns from responsible reporting to vultures circling for profit. And, were I a good capitalist, I would enthusiastically support circling for profit. (But I'm not. Write me down as "not a good capitalist" when it comes time to bring charges against me.) Once it happens, though, once the line is crossed, I recognize it, and so does everyone else.

The public doesn't need to see some grieving family member have a camera and a microphone stuck in his/her face along with a "how do you feel?" I'll tell you what, we can all answer, "terrible." Seriously, that's not reporting, that's savagery.

Some time ago, I lived in a big city. And disaster struck. Okay, actually, I've been in a couple big cities for a couple of disasters.

Weirdness is watching a big building in the next block burn, and looking up to see news helicopters circling around, and then going inside to see footage from the same helicopters, and recognizing your apartment building.

Anger is seeing some intrepid reporter, say Dan Rather, dressed in safari clothes to report on an urban event days after it's happened, getting in the way of people trying to repair things and working for the community. (For some reason, the safari clothes seemed to add insult to injury.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Reporters,

Go follow up on the political issues making recovery difficult in New Orleans. Go follow up on the decision making processes in DC.

Get the [expletive deleted] out of people's faces in Virginia. Get out of the way of investigators, get off campus, don't hassle families. You're not doing good or informing the public of news we need at this point, but rather you're causing more pain. Stop. Think.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Public,

Quit watching lousy "news" on television. When the lurid photos come across, turn off the television. Let advertisers know that you're not interested in seeing microphones jammed into people's faces when they're facing difficulties and need help, not hindrance. Make this sort of reporting unprofitable, and they'll stop, because unlike me, they ARE good capitalists!

Ruminating

Last week, news reports talked about Julia Campbell, a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Phillippines who was missing; and then her body was found, evidently revealing that she'd been murdered. Campbell's death didn't make the headlines in the week that was.

I'm sad for Campbell's family. In the release, she sounds like a good PCV, someone who was working hard to make a positive difference.

There are no Peace Corps cheers, no bands, no shared color symbolism. Peace Corps Volunteers' deaths are remembered by family, by other volunteers, and by the local people with whom the volunteer worked. But the memories tend to be separated; PCVs don't tend to gather in large crowds to hold candlelight vigils because they're usually separated by travel distances from other volunteers, working with local people rather than other volunteers. PCVs don't tend to know the family of other PCVs, and the family members don't know the community (though some visit, and so know a little).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Last night, I went for a bit to the campus "Relay for Life" event (to raise money for cancer research) because there was a memorial part for my colleague's partner. At one point, student readers read names, in memory of, or in honor of, people who've died of cancer or who are being treated for cancer.

I couldn't help but remember one of the PCVs I knew in country, a guy who was pretty much admired for his work. He'd had cancer as a child, and then, in his 20s, he suddenly had bone cancer and died within a very short time. At least, that's how it seemed to me; we heard rumor that he'd been med-evaced to the US and then a week or two later, the office sent out telegrams or something to inform us PCVs that he'd died there of bone cancer.

Fade to black.

Yard Birds

Over the past several days, I've seen some new yard birds.

My first ever pretty much for sure for sure Tree Swallow. (It courteously and kindly perched on the birdhouse that wrens used last summer, and posed so I could be pretty sure with binoculars and the book, and sang to tell the world how absolutely wonderful s/he is. I was convinced, anyways!)

Brown-headed Cowbirds, following a Robin around. Sneaky! And yet another one of those amazing evolutionary adaptations!

Two Downy Woodpeckers feeding on suet, not quite together. I love watching the way these guys keep watch on the world around while they get some suet in, so very alert and ready.

A Red Winged Blackbird (male) came by to feed a little on the deck (where I spread out some sunflower chips), not at all unusual in these parts, but I'd never actually seen one in the yard.

Not in the yard, but out on the bike trail, I saw a Pileated Woodpecker fly by, calling. That's one remarkably spectacular bird, with the white against the black as it flew, big, too. (Oh, a rhyme!)

The Juncos seem mostly to have moved on further north, but lots of Goldfinches, and a pair of House Finches seem to be hanging around.

Spring makes me happy!

Hah!

Every year, we have a campus celebration of English studies, mostly student organized and run, with lots of presentations, talks, readings. And every year, the students running the thing come up with a theme, often centered on word-play, and always, since they're English majors and stuff, verging on or alluding to sexuality.

This year is no different. Very witty.

Today, for the first time, I saw the t-shirts they've made up, and just started laughing.

Books in different named positions. I'm just cracking up, totally. I love how creative and playful our students are, how willing to step up and laugh while they're also working hard and putting things together.

The Week that Is

As I was going to class, my first after I learned about the tragedy at Virginia Tech, prepped to teach Hughes' "Theme for English B" and Thomas's "Do not go Gentle into That Good Night," I got that tight feeling, the inception of doubts and worries. I wished I'd had time to talk to some of my colleagues who'd had classes since the tragedy.

I wondered if I should address the issue, give students a chance to talk? Does opening up the issue give students a way to reduce anxieties, or does it contribute to their stress?

I'm in no way a trained counselor. Do they train high school teachers to deal with this sort of thing? I don't know about other college instructors, but I've never had any sort of training about dealing with any sort of disaster, except through experience.

While I was in a training program for teaching college writing, there was a disaster in the area. The master instructor for the class had the students write about it, using their own experiences and what they were seeing in papers. At first, students were eager to talk, but by the time papers were due, they wanted to move on as much as they could.

Like Dr. Virago, I opened each of my classes with an offer to talk about the Virginia Tech tragedy if folks wanted to, and I shared a little about my experience after that tragedy. Each of my classes seemed to want to talk a little, but not much.

The most common concern was about what kinds of plans our campus has for dealing with an act of violence like the one in Virginia. I'm sure my campus has all sorts of plans, but I have no idea what they are. We wouldn't be able to get out windows, for sure, though.

We talked about academic freedom; I mentioned that I teach Shakespeare's plays, some of which are disturbingly violent, and yet I've never worried about Shakespeare as a person who would have committed acts of violence, per se.

And I told them that they should take care of themselves; if they're feeling stressed, they should talk to friends, RAs, the campus counselors, and so forth. And they should be caring for their friends who might also be stressed. Dr. Virago's post about the issue is well worth reading on this.

I'm conflicted about Thomas's "Do not go Gentle into That Good Night" in general, but yesterday, specifically, it was particularly difficult. I tend to want people to go gently if possible. We focused on the stanza

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

for a while, talking about the imagery, the tone of "frail deeds," "danced," "crying," and the "last wave by" until we'd gotten a good sense of the difficulty of doing well enough, even for good men. And we talked about masculinities in the poem. All in all, it was a better discussion than I'd feared heading in.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm upset about the Supreme Court decision to uphold the ban on a specific late term abortion procedure. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is my hero of the moment. You can read her dissenting opinion starting at about page 49 in the decision document above. Justices Stevens, Souter, and Breyer joined Ginsberg in dissent, and each has my profound thanks and respect.

Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, on the other hand, have earned yet again my deepest scorn and contempt.

The Blog that Ate Manhattan (TBTAM) and The Well-Timed Period have blogged about the issue from the medical perspective.

I think Planned Parenthood needs my money right now more than the bike company or bike shop.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I seem to have acquired ants in my kitchen. I feel sort of bad for them, but I have to admit, I value the relative peace of an ant free kitchen more than I value ant lives. I am, indeed, a humano-centric being, one who is willing to kill other creatures rather than be even inconvenienced (much less actually hungry).

I got some liquid bait and put it out last night, and I find myself macabrely fascinated by watching them find the bait and such. For a while, I thought one had gotten stuck in the bait, but it wandered off. I'm guessing they don't go directly from nest to food quickly or easily until they've really got a path going? And I'm not sure quite where they've been coming in or nesting.

If there's a god and she's an ant, I am going to be tortured in the worst ways. (Hey, just because I'm humano-centric doesn't mean I think a god would actually have to be humanlike in any way, right?)

Heartbreaking

My thoughts are with those at Virginia Tech. Chaser is safe, for which news I'm grateful.

After hearing the news this afternoon (because I'd been teaching, of course), I stared out my window for a while. This is my first spring in this office, and it faces out to some trees (my old office faced a brick wall). In the trees today, I noticed some Cedar Waxwings for the first time. And once I'd noticed one, I could see a lot of them. They were perching a few feet in from the edges of branches, and then taking off, flying rapidly up at an angle, and then dropping again, and flying even faster to another branch. They looked sort of like swallows. I'd thought that Cedar Waxwings were primarily fruit and seed eaters, but I looked it up and they also eat insects in just the way I was seeing out my window.

I've never seen so many Cedar Waxwings at a time, though I know they hang out in the neighborhood of the school in numbers. I just hadn't seen them or watched. Or hadn't noticed to think about it.

There they were, trying to eat. Killing off insects, I suppose. I wonder if there's substantial food now, or if they're basically always hungry. They seemed to be feeding for a good while without leaving the area, so I'm guessing they haven't got hatchlings yet.

I wondered, watching them, if they gathered in like numbers before people changed the environment around here so much. I wondered much the same the other day, watching American Robins gathered on my neighbor's lawn at intervals of only a few feet. Where would they have fed in such numbers before humans took down the great northern pinery and put in lawns? Did they?

We humans muck things up like no other species, don't we? We make a mess of the earth for other species, and we treat our own as badly as we can.

If we humans all died off tomorrow, in some way that didn't take out every other species, how long would it take the earth to recover?

Farmland, well, 20 years, perhaps more?

Suburban areas, a couple hundred years or so?

Cities would take even longer, all that concrete in such large blocks.

But eventually, in geologic time spans, the fertility would blot out much of the damage we've done to the earth.

It's much easier as a human to have a really deleterious on the earth and our community than it is to have a really positive effect. Much more difficult to do things that make a positive difference, and downright difficult to know what makes a positive difference, even. Do our activities contribute to problematic overproduction of some species at the expense of others, even when we try to do well?

And when we try not to do well? Heartbreak and worse.

Question of Numbers

I went to a play the other night with a couple of friends. There, I saw a couple of students I know, including one who's a theater type, in the audience.

The play was so-so. Another play by a famous living white guy, supposed to be terribly existentially meaningful. But the play felt so slow that I kept imagining if Shakespeare had written it. First, there'd have been a fair bit of murder or mayhem. And, I realized, there'd be more than the very small cast.

How irritating was the play, you ask? The people behind and next to me needed to consult their programs and explain to each other what the heck was happening, not because things were confusing, but because so little was happening that they couldn't quite believe that nothing was happening. (Now I'm just being mean.)

The theater was lit and small enough, and semi-in-the-round, so that I could see the audience, and I couldn't help looking over at the theater student I know.

The play has one female role, and a couple of male roles. That's it.

For the modern playwright who probably thinks about getting his play produced professionally in expensive venues, a small cast must seem like a very good idea, fewer people to pay and all that.

But even so, I want to kick the playwright where it counts and ask, why ONE female role? I don't know the playwright's work well enough to make broad assertions, but my vague sense is that he usually writes plays with one or two female roles and several more male roles, or no women's roles at all.

And I can understand that imbalance when I think about how Shakespeare's theater companies were organized, but nowadays, we have, you know, women and they act and all professionally. So why the continued imbalance?

Thinking in terms of the modern collegiate theater department, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to produce this play. The theater department has more female than male majors. The theater department has an abundance of students who want to be involved and audition for productions.

Why the heck would one choose to produce a play with so few parts, and only one female part?

I can hear a certain backlash from the folks who think that kids who try out for little league shouldn't get on a team if they're not "good enough." Disappointment does build character. But what's the point here?

If little league is intended to develop future professional ball players, then I don't want my taxes paying for the local fields, because it's a waste of money. (Professional sports could disappear tomorrow and the world would not be adversely affected; heck, if half the couch quarterbacks got out and threw the ball around themselves, at least they'd be making less of a mess.) If, on the other hand, it's intended to get kids out in the sunshine playing, learning to work cooperatively, having fun, etc, then I'm happy for my taxes to contribute.

At the collegiate level, what's the point of theater? Is it to develop actors who will become professionals? Maybe at Julliard it is, but out here in the Northwoods, not so much, I hope.

I think we do theater productions so that our students can learn teamwork, learn drama and theater, learn skills at presentation and performance, learn management and balancing skills, learn about culture and the arts, and yes, have fun. Some students learn a lot by going to plays. I'm one of those learners. Some will have a life enriched by years of community theater.

The opportunity to be in plays is special, and we should be extending that opportunity more rather than less widely, encouraging more students from across the campus community to be involved.

I'm sure the theater folks choose the plays they do carefully and thoughtfully. Their choices just don't often make much sense to me (well, except when they choose Shakespeare, as one did this year). I don't think it's that I don't like modern plays, either; I enjoy modern plays a fair bit, and teach them when I teach our intro to drama class. I can think of a dozen modern plays that would really be great to see here, that would challenge and entertain the student actors and the audience members.

There's an easy solution to the gender imbalance in this play, of course. They could have just gone with gender blind casting.

A decade or so ago now, I saw a fabulous performance of Richard the Third by the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express. A female actor played Richard, and she was stunningly good in the part. It wasn't about her gender, it was about her acting.

I've never seen our theater department use gender blind casting for any but the spear-carrier type roles, and then the extra women always do the parts. (My colleague in the department DID use a female actor to play a male role in the high school summer production last year, though; so it's not impossible.)

I would be thrilled beyond belief to see them try gender blind casting where it counts.

But, I've heard it said that the two most conservative institutions are the academy and the theater. I have medieval robes in my office, so I know the one is true. The other seems pretty true from where I sit.

Yay StyleyGeek!!

I got my promised post card today from StyleyGeek. Is it wrong that I got all excited even though it has a picture of a frog and not a parrot?

StyleyGeek, thank you!!!!

StyleyGeek also cruelly mocked the sorts of postcards available here in the NorthWoods. Heck, I mock the postcards available here in the NorthWoods, about one third of which feature a sports team or logo, one third of which feature a mythical character. The remaining one third feature an agricultural thing or related product.

To be fair, more than one state claims the mythical character, and more than one state features the same agricultural thing or related product, though that state enjoys making fun of ours. No one wants to share our sports team, I guess.

So It Goes

Kurt Vonnegut has died, I read.

Like many who write in the blogosphere, I went through a period when I read a lot of Vonnegut. About the same time I was reading Tom Robbins and such, late college and through my Peace Corps years. (We passed a lot of books around.)

I remember especially reading Welcome to the Monkey House, a collection of short stories, and especially the short story "Welcome to the Monkey House." Basically, the story takes place in a period when overpopulation is widely recognized as deeply problematic, and the problem is approached from two angles: first, people are encouraged to commit suicide in special places, where their suicides are managed by a sort of super woman type (highly sexualized clothing, etc, but also supposed to be virginal, if I recall; a certain version of straight male fantasy land, for sure). Second, everyone takes pills to basically prevent sexual feeling by making them physically numb. (The title has to do with a guy who saw a monkey masturbating at a zoo, and decided that this sight was inappropriate for children, so figured out how to make monkeys numb. And then the numbness drug gets used on humans to reduce human sexual behavior.)

There are, of course, rebels, and one of the lead rebels disguises himself as an old man who wants to commit suicide, and kidnaps one of the women who assists suicides. The rebels hold her until the numbness medication wears off, start her on birth control, and then rape her. The idea is that they'll teach her to enjoy sex and prevent pregnancy with the pill. And, this being literature, it works. She joins the rebels, stays on the pill, looks forward to lots of sex, and the story ends.

I remember being disturbed by the story, even in my relative innocence, and without any feminist critical apparatus for talking about texts. I was torn: overpopulation is a serious problem, and so is denial of sexuality. But the thought that one might "solve" denial of sexuality through rape, well, no.

The conservative movement to "teach abstinence" isn't at all about overpopulation; these are the same folks who encourage married white women to breed like rabbits and who try to make choice in matters of abortion and birth control illegal. There's an interest in controlling sexuality, but the conservatives (especially, but not solely males) really don't want anyone controlling or limiting their sexual practices.

The sexualization of the suicide assisting women was disturbing, but also rings true to the ways our society has continued to develop; where men have power and want to be served, they get what they want. We have restaurant chains dedicated to the idea, a sort of slow suicide by bad food.

But the rape, as I recollect it, seems to feed male fantasy about controlling female sexuality, about hurting women to "help" us, and I'm still disturbed by that.

I guess what I'd like to say on Vonnegut's passing is a thank you for being thought provoking, for making me begin to think about the ways rape and women are represented.

Thank you for caring about overpopulation enough to work out ways to address the problem and test them out in literature. Thank you for testing out lots of ideas in literature, and getting people to think about things.

Thank you for this: *

I'm hesitant to go back and read some of the books I found challenging and exciting in my late teens and early 20s because I know I'll be far more irritated at the sexism. Sexism from people who've been alive within my lifetime irks me far more than sexism from Shakespeare. I think I'd be all the more irritated because those books seemed to herald change in some ways, but not in terms of gender hierarchies.

So, goodbye Kurt Vonnegut. Listen.

Disappointments

Some weeks are full of disappointments.

I overheard a couple male colleagues talking about their wives the other day in the hallway. I felt like I'd been transported in time to overhear a conversation between male faculty members in the 50s. Disappointing. When I was young, I had hopes that my generation would do things better. On average, I'm disappointed.

I tried to teach "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" today. Emphasis on tried. I thought I had a brilliant way to introduce the concept of writing in utramque partem (arguing both sides of an issue), but, alas, the class proved otherwise. I still find Altman's Tudor Play of Mind useful! So there! These are great poems, but I just didn't do them justice today. I get another shot on Friday.

I worry too much about some things, way too much. I expend endless energy stupidly worrying or being angry about things I can't change. I should know better, but I disappoint myself.

Snow in April. I surprised myself by being unsurprised, but I'm still disappointed. I'm so tired of being cold! I got more seed today for the local birds, and threw some on top of the snow so they'd be able to get at it easily. Several juncos were eating already when I left this morning, fluffed out and a bit wind-blown, but I got home too late for any birds to be out, alas.

Reading Gardens

I started reading a really fascinating book the other day, Kenneth L. Helphand's Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime. I saw someone talk about it somewhere, and decided to get it, and then the other night it was read or grade, and reading won at least temporarily.

Basically, Helphand covers mostly 20th century conflicts, starting with WWI, and trench gardens, and comes up to current war gardens in Iraq, though I haven't gotten there yet.

In some ways, the book's fabulous. I find the pictures fascinating, and it inspires me to want to plant more shrubs and such in my yard (because seriously, bad as the soil is, it's got to be better than the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto).

In other ways, it's frustrating. I want to know a lot more about what soldiers were thinking when they made gardens behind the lines in WWI, and who they were. Were they making gardens in a sort of cyclical way, one soldier starting it, passing the care along to another when he went back to the front and such? Or were they made by a soldier who was pretty sure of staying in one place for a while, say someone whose main job was in supply or support work? But I suppose it's an incredibly narrow topic and there just aren't good resources to make researching easy. I'm guessing there are lots of WWI era letter collections, but mostly probably still in family hands or being passed to local archives/historical associations. At any rate, it would take years of reading just WWI letters to answer those basic questions, but I'd still like them answered!

Of the chapters I've read so far (the WWI and Jewish Ghettos in Nazi Europe chapters), the Ghetto chapter was painfully interesting. I'm not someone who's read tons about the Holocaust, but I find the struggle to survive, well, terrifying and more.

When I was a small child, and my Aunt En had married fairly recently, Aunt En's parents-in-law came to one of the massive family dinners (think 30+ people, grown up tables, kids tables, people all over). I didn't really know them except from the wedding, and I remember seeing numbers on Julia's arm, and I asked my Mom about the numbers. My mom explained that Aunt En's in-laws were Holocaust survivors, and the numbers were tatoos that the Nazis had put on them when they were prisoners. At the time, all I knew about Nazis came from Hogan's Heroes, so I really didn't have an idea about what it meant to be a Holocaust survivor. But as I grew up, I came to understand a bit more about what it meant. The first sight of those tatoos remains with me.

Aunt En's in-laws had two sons and no other family surviving, so they joined the big family gatherings often, and rightly felt like family to me as I was growing up. Part of my growing understanding came through understanding why our family was important to Aunt En's in-laws, why they came to our Christmas and Easter dinners, and why we included Channukah and Passover greetings and practices to include them. So when I think of the Holocaust, it's George and Julia I think of, not pictures in history books.

Reading Defiant Gardens made me think about how hard people strove to take care of themselves and their community, how much effort just living took, and how just inhuman people can be to one another. There's always that in the background.

When I think about the Jewish Ghettos, concentration or PoW camps, the Holocaust, I have complete doubts about what sort of community member I'd be. I fear that I'd be one of those peoples in the community who turns out to be greedy, or who turns traitor, or who just collapses. I've never been in anything like that sort of situation, and I hope I never am, but I wonder about myself. Reading the book brings back the wonder, the terror, and the feelings of unknowingness I had when I first saw Julia's tatoo.

I think a book that can make me think, remind me of terror and my unknowingness, well, that's a book worth reading, even if it doesn't answer all the questions I want to ask.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I taught Ben Jonson's poems on his dead daughter and son today, and I had tears in my eyes. And the students knew. And it was okay. Sometimes it's not okay, but today, it was okay.

Cycles

Not bicycles for once. Student cycles.

We get a new influx of students every year; they start as first years, and if all goes well, graduate in four or five years with a good education, changed in important ways through our work.

Each semester has cycles, too. There's the introductory phase, when I'm trying to learn names, get classes going, introduce students to my expectations and class style, get a sense of them as people and students. Then there's the hard work phase, work in class, writing work, grading work. And finally, towards the end, for most students, there's a short time when they're really having fun in class, when they know what's expected and know enough of the material to do a higher level of intellectual work. Then there's the final work, papers, exams, whatever. And it's all over, and we start again with new classes.

Mostly, cycles are great. When good students graduate, I know there will be more good ones in the incoming class, and I look forward to getting to know them and doing my small part in their education. The rounding of the academic year has its pleasures, though grading is not one of them.

But cycles are also frustrating because students make the same basic mistakes endlessly, just different students. Okay, so we aren't supposed to talk about mistakes, but let me get away with it for a short moment.

At some point, most students hear certain things often enough and/or care enough that they know the basic academic writing conventions. But each semester, new students aren't there yet.

I feel like I've endlessly written

"Periods and commas go inside quotation marks." (at least in the US; if you're elsewhere, your conventions differ. But it's no more difficult to learn than which side of the street to drive on!)

"Italicize or Underline play titles."

"Use quotation marks for titles of short poems."

The fact that I'm grading stacks of 30+ papers at a time means that I'm writing the same thing over again, though not to the same student. So for the student, it's maybe new information. But for me it's hellish repetition.

And I know, there's a point at which marking conventional stuff just doesn't work, but I can't get myself past it with lit papers somehow.

I "know" my colleagues teach things like topic sentences in paragraph writing in our first year class. Okay, I hope they do. But I still feel like I have to endlessly talk about paragraph writing. I know it's a matter of practice and such, and that it's not something most people learn instantly when they hear it once, but I'm still frustrated.

In academic blogs, I think there's also a cycle. And now, with finals and such coming up for those of us on the semester system in the US, we're coming into the heights of grading whining. Ugh.

Linkalicious Goodies

Tiny Art. I just love this sort of creativity.

Road ID. Solving the problem of carrying light ID when I'm out riding. I got a shoe one and a wrist one to try out, and am using the shoe one on my riding shoes now. Very light and cool.

Birds of Spring

Birding report: In the past 24 hours,

At the suet feeder: Black Capped Chickadees, White-Breasted Nuthatch, Downy Woodpecker (female)

At the thistle feeder: Goldfinches!

Eating thistle off the deck: Juncos, lots of Juncos! House Finches (male and female)

And sitting on the post of the new bluebird house? Yep, a very fluffed out Eastern Bluebird (male, I'm pretty sure).

And around: American Robins, Crows.

I think it's spring! (But dang, it's cold!)

Edited to add: a Song Sparrow on the suet feeder, and weirdly, one of the Juncoes has decided it likes the suet, too, and managed to stay there long enough for a snack.

ps. Blogger's slow like anything lately. Are other folks having issues, too? (Loading to post, loading blogs, slow all around.)

Deciding

I'm thinking about getting a new bike. It's a tough decision because I don't NEED a new bike. My old bike works well and feels pretty darned comfortable riding.

But...

I was out and about yesterday, and rather than grade, I went to the three basic bike shops in town and sat on all sorts of bikes. Then I went home, changed into long johns and biking tights, and went and tried out a bunch of bikes at one of the shops. All in all, it was an educational day.

I was looking mostly at Trek bikes there, though I also tried out a couple others (a LeMonde or two). I tried out the women's specific bikes and the standard bikes (the women's specific bikes, I learned, have a little shorter top bar, and slightly narrower handlebars); I tried out the Pilot (comfort model, with the handlebars a little higher) and the regular street set up. I tried them in different sizes.

It was almost scary getting on them because they felt so fast, just starting off, very fast. Happily, the shops are all right near the bike path through town, so I could take a fair test ride without too much hassle. And wow, all of them felt so smooth, I can't even describe it.

(I've only driven sporty cars a couple times, once an '83 Mustang on the freeway. Anyway, that's the closest I can compare: my bike's like driving a Valiant and these bikes are like driving a Mustang. The Valiant worked perfectly well and was a pleasure to drive, but the Mustang was a world apart in terms of fun.)

I have to think hard about this, because, again, I don't NEED a new bike. But a new bike would add to my fun.

And then which kind? I tried 54 and 56 cm bikes, and want to try a 52 cm bike (though they didn't have any on the floor that day).

There's a lot to think about. Sizes, styles, components and such.

I learned a LOT. I couldn't figure out what was weird about a couple of the bikes, so I got on my old bike and within a few seconds, I realized that the handlebars were narrower. The bike shop guy measured different ones, and indeed, they were. It's amazing how much difference a couple centimeters can make in handlebar width. I never even realized drop handlebars came in different widths.

It took me a while to get the hang of shifting with the gears on the brake pedal things, but I ruled out one kind of shift because you have to have your hands up rather than on the drops, and I tend to ride on the drops.

On one of the standard bikes, my fingers could barely reach to pull the brakes. Turns out the distance you need to reach to the brake levers is bigger on standard bikes than on women's designed bikes. Who knew? I also liked having a second set of brake levers up on the upper part of the handlebars; my old bike has those, except on older bikes they're very different.

Over the past year or so, I've had a bike shop change a couple things on my old bike. Specifically, they put on a strategically designed seat (for women) and added an adjustable higher stem for the handlebars. And when I took my bike in, it turns out the way I have it set up is pretty much the geometry that the comfort bikes have. That was interesting to see, and made me feel a little less self-conscious about the changes I had made for my whussiness.

I'm impatient with the weather. It would have been a lot more fun to try out these bikes in weather over 30F. I suspect that part of my wanting to try out bikes comes from my frustration with the coldness around here. I just want to get outside and go! But it's so danged cold!

I went to look at bikes on the way home from my travel vaccination appointment. It was sort of irritating, so I went to look at bikes as a sort of reward. Maybe I was just nuts from the vaccines? Maybe there should be a warning on them: may inspire stupid shopping?

So I'm stuck trying to decide. Bike? I'd enjoy it, for sure. I enjoy riding now, and I certainly wouldn't enjoy it less with an even cooler bike.

On the other hand, if I already average 15 mph, does going a little faster make it more dangerous? Does it add to my fitness level? Add to or reduce my birding fun? (Because no ride's complete without some birds, right?)

At my age, it's unlikely I'll get another bike. That's weird to say, but in 20 years, I doubt I'll be biking. Maybe I have 10-15 years of biking on a bike like this? (This is weird, and makes me feel old.)

Am I just being a stupid consumer? If I sent the same money to the local food bank, I could feed a family of four for a month, probably. I could pay down my mortgage and shorten it by 6 months to a year.

I take forever to make these sorts of decisions; I ponder and mull and ponder and mull.

Rental vs Purchased Textbooks

Inside the Philosophy Factory kindly asked me in a comment on my last entry about our rental text system from my point of view. And since I aim to please, here goes:

Basics: Our bookstore offers both purchase and rental texts; each instructor chooses texts for his/her classes (though I understand that in some departments, faculty all use the same text for a given class) and says whether they should be purchased or rentals.

Our students play a flat fee of about $50. each semester for the rental texbooks, no matter how many they use or not.

Ordering: In order to get something NEW ordered as a rental, we have to make a commitment to re-use the book for 2-3 terms (I think 3, but I can't remember for sure) when we teach the same class. The bookstore loves it when we re-use the same textbook for years on end; they probably love the old Riverside Shakespeare anthology.

For rental texts, the bookstore really likes when people re-use the same books from semester to semester, and when people teaching different sections use the same books. So when colleagues who used the same first year writing text wanted to change to a new, briefer edition, the bookstore strongly encouraged me to change. It worked fine for me, so I changed. SOMETIMES, if you're using an older edition, you can't get new desk copies (because the publisher has put out a new edition); but the bookstore will let you use a rental.

The bookstore sends my department a list of all rental texts that we've got on hand (that is, that we've used within the past 3-5 years); once a text is part of the rental collection, you don't have to commit to using it more than once.

Advantages: Cheaper for students. I think this is HUGE, especially for science and language studies texts.

As an instructor, I like that I can order an anthology by rental and have students only read 3-4 essays out of it, and students won't have spent $60.+ for the text. I regularly use McDonald's Bedford Companion to Shakespeare for contextual readings for my Shakespeare classes, for example. I like to have students read from it, but wouldn't expect them to really want to keep it long term.

Disadvantages: Students don't plan to keep these books, and tend not to take good care of them over the years. Students write all over the texts, but not in ways that will necessarily help the next person. Within a few years, the books are falling apart, literally, even hardcovers.

On the other hand, because they don't plan to keep the books, they don't write notes in them the way I want them to.

There's at least slight pressure not to get a new edition; now, not every new edition is an improvement over the last, but sometimes that's an issue. Also, once a book gets to a certain age, the wear and tear means there are fewer available, and they can't really be replaced (or not in a cost/effective way), so that can be its own problem. Our bookstore tends to under-order purchase books, though, so order problems happen both ways.

Gen Ed vs Majors Classes: I'm more likely to order a rental text for a general education class (lower level, introduction to lit, poetry, drama sorts of classes are what I teach) rather than a majors class (though I have used Richter's theory anthology in my theory class for a few readings in addition to purchase texts). I hope that majors want to write meaningful notes in their texts and keep their texts to reread. Yes, I live a rich and full fantasy life.

To Sum Up: I basically like that we have the option, though I use it less than I might.

I think rentals are probably really helpful for science type books since they go out of date fairly quickly (so students wouldn't be likely to keep them and read them in coming years) and are incredibly expensive.

For lit anthologies, I use rentals, generally (for poetry and drama classes, lower level, often general education students). But, what if I didn't? Would students resell the books (at a big financial loss) or keep them to read and reread? I think for most classes, students would resell anthologies.

Novels and plays and such don't really work with the rental system because most of us don't teach the same novels or plays from one term to the next. And we want students to write in their books and hope that they'll keep them.

Philosophy? As I was writing this, I started thinking about books I still have and use from undergrad classes. Not too long ago, one of my grad students was talking about his interest in existentialism, so I read up a bit before we met to talk about his work. I started with two books from my intro lit class at a community college (An old edition of Hakim's Historical Intro to Philosophy and Lavine's From Socrates to Sartre) and was able to remember enough to be at least minimally useful to my student. I was never a philosophy major, just someone who wanted to learn and found the reading challenging and enjoyable, but I'd kept the texts and they've come in useful at least once.

On the other hand, I was a science major, and have only saved one or two books from that part of my life, because I just don't imagine rereading biochem and such for fun.

ItPF, I hope this helps at least somewhat. If you have questions about specifics, feel free to ask, or drop me an email and I'll try to respond.

A Little Spark

Sometimes students just make me happy. The other day, one of my poetry students dropped by to chat, and in passing said that she was reading poems from our anthology that weren't on the syllabus, just because she was enjoying poetry so much. She was, she said, thinking about not turning in the rental copy she had, and paying for it so that she could continue to read poetry out of it.

I happened to have an extra copy, so now she has her own, new and clean copy, and can turn back the rental one.

Some days, I really need that little spark of joy from a student. And I got it.

Methodologies

At the panel presentation recently, we were discussing one of the forms for getting on-campus grants, and giving the person in charge some feedback. One of the areas that has to be filled out is the usual research method/methodology.

We humanists have difficulty talking about methodology in the ways that science folks do. They say, well, I'm going to do X to one group, and not to another, and measure the differences in reaction in this and that way. And there's method, and measurement, and you can use statistics and all.

But we humanists, our typical response runs more along the line of, well, I've got this questions, so I'm going to read some books and think, and then I'm going to read some more books and think some more, and then maybe I'll look at some pictures and think some more, and then I'll try to explain what I've been thinking about in writing. There's no measurement, and the statistics suck.

So we asked the person in charge to use more inclusive language, something along the lines of research methods and/or theoretical approach.

The responses on my last post (thank you, folks, very helpful) made me think about teaching research stuff to grad students next term, and how difficult that's going to be, yet again. And you folks are totally right, I think, that most folks could do a research course, but don't want to put in the necessary time. Unfortunately, I put in the time already, so now it's slightly less onerous.

But, yet again, since I'm supposed to teach it, I'm thinking of changing up the class somewhat.

In the past, I've given the students a project that requires some set work that tends to prompt lots of questions because I think having real questions to answer makes research interesting. I tend to think that the hardest parts of research are coming up with good questions and then thinking of possible answers. Figuring out how to test out the answers is easier, and involves finding and reading what other people have had to say, understanding the cultural contexts, thinking about theoretical issues, and so forth.

The thing is, in the past, I've set up this project (which works well, shockingly well), but not given much guidance. And I'm thinking now of spending more time working specifically guiding the process, doing pre-writing sorts of exercises to brainstorm ideas and possible answers, and then trying to be more transparent about the ways of testing out the answers.

But still, the whole methodology thing brings me to a halt. I don't know how to tease out my methodology or describe it, and that makes teaching it all the more difficult. How do the humanist types out there describe their research methods?

Qualifications

I had a conversation the other day with a senior colleague about a grad program class. It seems no one wants to teach our introductory class in Research Strategies and Such. I've taught the RSS class before, and thought I did it reasonably well. The students who took the class with me, in exit interviews, seem to have thought the class was very helpful in their work here.

It's distressing that no one wants to teach this class because our students seriously need help learning to do research. But, my colleague told me, s/he doesn't feel qualified to teach the class, and most other faculty members don't feel qualified, either.

My brain is still reeling. Almost everyone who teaches for the program has a phud; a few have terminal MFAs. In English, a phud is considered a research degree; in order to get one, you basically have to convince several phuds that you have fulfilled a bunch of requirements, one of which is making a new contribution to your field. That contribution generally comes through research.

And yet, a phud in English sat in my office and said s/he isn't qualified to teach research in our field.

Every graduate seminar should involve some degree of teaching of research in the field. Every single seminar.

If people with phuds in English don't feel qualified to teach students how to do research in the field, what the dickens DO they feel qualified to teach?

Why do we have a graduate program? Heck, why do we have an undergraduate program, even?

We have a grad program for several reasons: the grad program gets some funding. We serve local people who want to get MAs, and giving people further education in our field serves our community broadly. It's a long drive to the next opportunity for MA study, and many people are geographically limited.

Those are reasonably good reasons to have a program. Of course, having an MA program also is a bit of a tiny ego booster for faculty folks, and means we get to teach the occasional graduate seminar in our field. Most people are eager to teach those.

But, seriously, if faculty members don't feel qualified to teach basic research, we aren't qualified to have a graduate program.

My brain is reeling. A senior person in my field sat in my office and told me s/he was unqualified to teach research in our field and it didn't seem to occur to him/her that what s/he said was even slightly problematic.

Chalk One Up for a Colleague

If you've read more than a couple academic blogs, you've read about how we find certain student actions really frustrating. The student who misses class and then asks if anything important happened? Yes, frustrating. The student who asks one of us to repeat what was said in class discussion or lecture? Yes, frustrating?

Yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion lasting over an hour and a half.

And when I got back to my office, I had an email from a colleague:

Bardiac,

I was too busy [detail about busyness] to go to the panel today. Could you give a summary of the discussion at the next department meeting?

Colleague


I would love to point out to the colleague how much his email sounds like the sort of student request we all find irritating, but I won't, of course.

We all make choices about what we'll spend our time on, all of us, all the time (not just profs, all of us). I spent time last summer working on this project, I spent time at meetings this year working on this project. I spent time prepping for the panel. And then I spent time at the panel, listening to what others had to say and contributing to the discussion. (I didn't take notes of the panel discussion; it was interesting, but I didn't find the information new in ways that prompt me to take notes.)

I do not plan to spend time trying to reconstruct in some meaningful way the discussion so that I can present it to the department. Nope, the people who chose to go and participate, did so.

(But, as you'll have realized, I did spend a few minutes whining on my blog.)

Rethinking Some Basics

I'm doing a panel thing this afternoon, so I've been thinking about what to say and how to contribute well to the panel. What I've been rethinking is the work I've done with the summer Shakespeare productions, and the work I've been doing lately with the NWU Shakespeare production, and, alas, I've come to the conclusion that I've done things all bass-ackwards.

I've been reading up on using theater approaches to teaching Shakespeare. Basically, the articles I've been reading start with a "standard" English lit classroom teaching of Shakespeare and then integrate some aspect of theatrical practice into the teaching, so that students may read aloud, perform short scenes, or perform whole plays in costume. And when I read these, I tend to be stuck on the "standard" thing, because they seem to think that lit classes generally involve an authoritative, professorial figure lecturing to a group of cowed students taking word-for-word notes. On the most basic level, then, the imagined classroom is one I've never experienced except as a TA a few semesters at the R1 where I did my phud, where a professor lectured three hours a week to about 200 students, and then TAs met with students for discussion in smaller groups for an hour a week. Before today, I've tended to get stuck on a basic level of irritation: that's not the way I teach. Nor was it the way my teachers taught 20 years ago, really.

It's felt sort of like the articles have set up a straw professor to knock down. On the other hand, I've seen perhaps five faculty members teach Shakespeare other than myself, so it's hard to say what goes on in classrooms across the world. And, indeed, many of the articles are aimed at high school teachers, and I know even less about what high school teachers do.

But today, I really came to a full stop. I've been looking in all the wrong places because what I'm doing is quite traditional dramaturgy. The starting context to what I've been doing is theatrical; the students have mostly been in other staged plays and are interested in theater as theater. And I walk in and introduce the more literary study of Shakespeare to the situation, get them thinking about verse as verse, and about Shakespeare's language. I ask them to look at stage directions carefully, and to think about early modern material culture. I ask them to break down metaphors and think about how they work, rather than just what they mean (though that's useful, too, of course).

The immediate beneficiaries aren't literature students or English majors, but theater students and majors. And it's valid and useful work, but it's more useful if I reframe how I think about what I'm doing that way, I think. (And, of course, I've been learning lots, but not things that are going to come into my classes in new ways, so much.)

Boy, do I feel stupid. Time to begin again, Finnegan.

Highlight of the Day

I won a contest!!!! Over at Styley Geek!!!! It was a caption the picture contest.

I'm weirdly excited about this. The news certainly overshadowed the day's meetings and grading. I should celebrate. /nod

Developing Characters

Last night's theater group work for the play was to work on character development. As I've mentioned, I tend to think of dramatic characters in terms of when they're on stage, or being talked about; when they're offstage, they don't really exist except as waiting in the wings to come back on for what's important.

But actors, or maybe students actors, or probably actors in our time and place, are taught to think about character development in ways that are at least partly about offstage lives. That's really alien to me. But, I'm in this project to learn as much as to teach, so I'm going with what the director wants.

The director had given each student a sheet asking him/her to fill in questions about his/her character, so they brought in the sheets. Then, since s/he was going to be gone last night, the director had the assistant start off the students with an exercise, asking each student to write a one word description for each character.

I then took over leading the discussion we had of characters. We worked backwards (in part because the end of the line is usually rushed, and the students playing characters at the end of the list tend not to get as much attention because they're playing spear-carriers, basically, so by turning that around, I could make sure to give those students help with their characters. Assuming those students are more likely to be less experienced actors, they're also more likely to need help. And the script gives them less help.)

Well, let me say, it was fascinating and stimulating. One of the friends of a main character roles we talked about in terms of development and friendship. In Shakespeare's comedies, he often has characters who are moving from homosocial friendships into heterosexual marital relationships; while lots and lots of people make this transition in real life, so it's easily recognizable, it's also a difficult transition. We move from having our kid friends to seeing those kid friends choose a more "partner" type relationship (or many, or whatever), and since we move at different speeds, sometimes one or another is ahead or feels left behind. So we explored where the friend character might be in the relationship, and how to represent that in acting the part. Challenging and exciting for me to think about how to enact relationships that way, but also important to staging the play.

I was repeatedly impressed by different students' insights, especially into other roles. They've clearly been thinking about the play, what happens and how, and they're learning a lot of cool Shakespeare in the process ("cool Shakespeare" is like the "department of redundancy department" from me, I suppose). I especially enjoy when a student who's been sort of on the sidelines for whatever reason comes up with good ideas that show s/he's been thinking and paying closer attention than I'd realized.

All in all, this has been a great experience for me so far; I'll be participating less directly for the next several weeks; I'll try to make it to a rehearsal or two, but mostly, my work here is done. Time-wise, I really need my 8-10 extra hours a week back, but I'll also miss the fun of working with these students in a new way (for me, anyway).

Lingering Joys

One of the great pleasures of working in my new (since summer) office in the afternoon comes from casual chats with my colleague in the next office.

I have "Prufrock" on my plate tomorrow; I always get a little anxious about teaching "Prufrock" because it's unwieldy in some ways, and complex, and either captures, or pretends to capture, a moment. There's a bit of an illusion to the captivity, the moment, the whole "speaking for the age" sort of thing, but the poem works. And, once we're actually working with the poem in class, I relax and enjoy the experience, and I think I do a pretty good job teaching it.

My colleague's much better with modernist and 20th century poetry than I even dream of being, so I find pleasure in leaning on his door jamb and sharing ideas about teaching the poem, setting up the contexts, talking about imagery.

On and off, this afternoon, we've been chatting about it in that relaxed, almost pointless way that gives me time to think about the poem between points, walking to and from a meeting or whatever. When I come back, my colleague may remind me of the way a line works, or I may have another question or response to an earlier point.

And then my colleague shares an idea about a poem he's teaching, and we float texts and ideas in the air around our offices, sometimes one leaning into the other's office, and sometimes the other doing the leaning.

Sometimes, research or teaching is exciting, heart-racingly thrilling. But I also find a deep, satisfying pleasure in this more casual, almost playful work. It reminds me of the best of hanging out in graduate cubicles, figuring out how to teach something, or pondering some textual question, except that there's a maturity (not an oldness) to my colleague's responses, a depth that probably takes years of thinking closely about things, a lack of anxiety about impressing anyone or being harshly judged for a question, that makes the conversation more like a walk in a redwood forest with the smells of dampness, ferns, redwood bark, other stuff compared to the sharper, more distinct smell of a rose or barbeque?

Lame similes. The lameness of my simile goes far in explaining why I'm not a poet, doesn't it?

Learning Theater Stuffs

The word of the day is "Gobo." (Pictures! And more pictures!)

Today, the stage, lighting, and costume design folks came in to talk about what they're doing for the production, how things will look, and so forth.

To be honest, when I teach Shakespeare, I talk a fair bit about the material practices of early modern staging and how, for example, a thrust stage works dramatically. But lighting? Let's see, there's sunshine, cloudiness, rain, none of which the playing company could control. And in indoor theaters, there's either sunlight through windows or candlelight of varying sorts. (No limelight until later.)

Anyway, it's fascinating to watch as theater folks talk about their ideas and present them to the cast. They bring in lots of pictures or drawings, so it's easy to imagine how the stage and such will look. And fabric swatches, which gives a sense of a sort of color scheme to the costuming, which gets picked up in the lighting and stage design. This is going to be pretty spectacular in the old sense of the word.

I must confess, though, that I am as happy to have Shakespeare played in jeans and t-shirts as in fancy dress. But I really enjoy conceptual productions, and I like to think about the ways concepts work to make a play new for me, to make me rethink what I "know" about it. So this is exciting!

Tomorrow, we're doing character work, so again, I'm in a rather new world. Exciting!

What I did on my spring break - Friday and Saturday

Random bullets of vacation goodness!

*I thumbnailed a flea. I either got it from playing with my handyman's dog, or picked it up while wandering the "back 40" area of the yard, talking with the handyman about where the new Bluebird box should go, and where he'd move the Wren box, and where the batbox will go. At least it wasn't a tick. I detest ticks. I'll thumbnail a dozen fleas happily, but I hate killing ticks. Now, of course, every hint of anything on my skin has me looking for fleas and ticks.

*I got and painted a batbox matte (brown). The guy in the hardware store helped me find the right primer/sealer. I love bats and hardware stores, not necessarily in that order.

*I moved one of my wren boxes from the back to the front yard, in hopes that a second pair will use it. We'll see. I also got a Bluebird box.

*I cleaned up the planting boxes on the deck, but resisted the futile effort of actually putting in seeds. 50' F weather is deceptive at this time of the year; it may look and feel great today, but it could snow tomorrow. I confess that I did look longingly at sunflower and vine seeds for more than a few moments before fully appreciating the futility. This may mean that I've adapted somewhat to midwestern seasons.

*I rode 20 miles today, at just over 15 mph on average, which seems to put me pretty close to where I was in early January, fitness-wise. My new shoes felt comfy (still and again), and my feet didn't go numb the way they have with the old softer tennies (which, biking folks say, has to do with the way pressure on your feet works). I've now tried out my padded shorts in every way you can imagine and come to the conclusion that the experts know what they're talking about.

*I cleaned up a bit in the "back 40" and beyond. I don't know how so much litter gets there, especially plastic bags and pieces of tarp, but dang! I think I'm going to put in some more trees, maybe a Crabapple or something, and some more White Pines.

*Grading? Not nearly as much as I should have!

In the 'Hood

One of our newish administrators bought a house recently, and didn't buy it in the 'Hood. The 'Hood in Northwoods is the neighborhood right near the University, a neighborhood of mostly charming homes built from the turn of the century through the 40s. It's one of the more expensive areas in town, setting aside the nearby lumber baron mansions that have been mostly turned into student apartments.

I've heard several people remark upon the administrator's choice, commenting that it means he doesn't care about the University community, that he doesn't want to be part of the University community. Notably, everyone I've heard remark on his choice lives in the 'Hood.

When I first came to Northwoods, I'd paid off my students loans and saved several years for a downpayment. (It was relatively easy saving in the rural midwest; I have to say that for living there.) I'd done my financial homework, and figured out what sort of downpayment and mortgage I could conservatively afford (because, despite my deeply leftist leanings, I was raised by depression babies, and I learned well from them).

"Everyone" recommended the 'Hood; it has the best schools in town, they told me, and it's close to everything. So, I asked my realtor who was showing me houses in town and she dutifully showed me a couple houses in the 'Hood, along with others on the "hill" and on the "heights." In the 'Hood, my realistic choices were a couple of tiny fixer-uppers, with more fixing needed than not. On the hill and the heights, my choices were basically GI Bill starter houses, built in the late 40s and early 50s, mostly in good shape, small and cozy.

I bought my house up in the heights.

Only after I'd been in town a while, and another colleague was buying a house, did I think more about where people from the University live in town.

Everyone I know in the 'Hood is straight, and all but two are married and have two incomes in their household. One of the unmarried folks is divorced, and had owned a house previously with a spouse. The other has been on the faculty for 30 plus years.

Single folks don't live in the 'Hood. Neither do gay folks, even those with long term partners. People of color pretty much don't. Married couples with one income don't tend to live there, either.

The housing choices people make are related to economics, of course. But how we think about where we live shouldn't be limited by our economics. I think about how the faculty residents of the 'Hood expect administrators to live close, to be their neighbors, to be in their social groups, to talk over the fence. I think about how the residents of the 'Hood think about the University community as centered in their neighborhood. I think about how they hang out with Headmasters, Provosts, Deans and Deanlings, with people who can casually make things happen, because it's human nature to make things happen for your neighbors and friends.

It seems to me that the negative comments about this administrator's choice have a lot to do with the 'Hood's residents' expectations that they'll have neighborly access to people in charge. But, of course, they can't say that exactly; instead, they talk about how this administrator doesn't want to be part of the community.

And me? It's hard to know how to say it to them, to get them to rethink their comments about the new administrator's choice.

Fragile

The news this week has been sad and worse. News came to us of a terrible traffic accident in which one of our students died. Another student has died a few days later from injuries in the same accident.

I didn't know either of these students, but I'm stunned and saddened. I can't imagine how the world has changed for their parents.

I don't think much about how fragile humans are usually. I think parents think about their kids being fragile; certainly, most parents are protective. Sometimes I get frustrated by how protective people seem about their kids, how they hover and try to intervene in every aspect of their kids lives. I wonder at kids not being allowed to ride bikes by themselves or go to the park or whatever at an age when I was exploring my world with a fair sense of freedom.

But today I've been thinking about how those students' parents must have tried to protect them, and worried when they couldn't protect them, from the time they were born until the day they died.

I forget sometimes how hard it must be for parents to try so hard to keep their kids safe for so long, and then step back and watch them go off to college, make decisions that seem iffy and dangerous.

Reading about these students, and the others who survived in the same car crash, they sound like people who made good decisions, were doing well, would have been a source of great pride to family and friends.

But, purely by chance, a tire came off a truck going the opposite direction at precisely the moment it could hit the students' van, and all the protectiveness of their parents, all their good decisions and hard work are stopped short.

Birds of the Day

Yesterday, I traveled a bit, by car, stopping at a couple places because I had some time.

I saw a bunch of turkeys, as in a veritable thanksgiving parade of turkeys. I've never seen a flock this size.

Sandhill Cranes. I stopped to watch two for a bit off a rural road. I guess they were probably a mated pair. One of them had an odd step. Every time s/he lifted his/her left leg, it swung back and out a bit, in a way that the right leg didn't, and neither of the other crane's legs did. If you look at them through binoculars for a bit, crane legs look pretty silly, with a big knobby joint (what, I think, would be the ankle for people). But I couldn't tell anything different about this one's left leg. Usually, when I'm just driving, I can't see the red top to their heads, but stopped and taking my time, I could clearly see the red. And they were magnificent in an awkward sort of way.

A male Red-Bellied Woodpecker. I stopped at a nature area and went for a very short walk before I got too cold. But right near was this great bird, looking for food, and cooperating with my slow binocular skills. Wow! I'll never figure out why they're called Red-Bellied, though.

Black-Capped Chickadees. Yes, I see these all the time, and so do lots of folks. Still, they rock.

White-Bellied Nuthatch. I love Nuthatches, the way they go up and down, doing their thing despite gravity.

An uncooperative yellow bird, fluffy and small, I'm guessing a female Yellow Warbler. They're common, yellow, and found in this area.

Loads of Red-Wing Blackbirds, Crows, Canada Geese, and Mallards.

I had to slow down and swerve to avoid hitting a female Ring-Necked Pheasant. Perhaps not the brightest bird on the blacktop today.

And the other day on a short bike ride (yes, in the new shorts--and long johns and tights), I'm pretty sure I saw a male Blue-Winged Teal. Way cool, hanging out near some much larger Mallards.

I have hope of spring.

Enabler

I spent the first couple of days of our break visiting my sibling, the Most Wonderful In Law, and their kids.

MWIL is an enabler extraordinaire. It's a good thing I'm not really into some illicit chemicals or wildly expensive high tech stuff, because MWIL would really help me get myself into trouble. But, with MWIL's encouragement and help, I bought myself biking shoes and two jerseys. They look GREAT.

As MWIL noted with gentle laughter, at least I look like I know what I'm doing, even if I don't. (I look goofy in them, to be honest. Alas, that's actually a slight improvement over my look in street clothes.)

While I was there, we also went out and looked at some nature stuff that MWIL knows about from a class. What fun!

If MWIL and my sibling ever split up, I hope MWIL gets custody of me.

Character Development

We're on break now, but when we come back, my collaborative project with my theater colleague will get even more interesting for me.

First, the design folks will be coming in to show the set and costume design plans. I've seen just a little bit of design stuff, so I'm really looking forward to seeing more fully how the project moves from design concepts to built sets and costumes.

And we'll be working with the student actors on developing their characters. That, too, is totally new to me. I have to admit, I think of dramatic characters as being created in the moment of the staging. But my sense is that the theater people ask our acting students to think about their characters as having a sort of pre-existence, as having more than just the text.

I'm conflicted about that, and my conflict has to do with the ways I conceive of characterization in drama, and of ways of acting. I resist students asking about characters' lives off stage. I'm of an academic generation that doesn't think much of the romantic and Victorian interest in Ophelia's childhood. But that seems to be how many actors learn to work, and I'm interested in learning their angle, their take.

Back Up?

I got emails recently from an organization called "backupyourbirthcontrol dot org" telling me that March 20th is "back up your birth control day." The email referred to the blog for choice effort, but didn't tie itself directly to that. For all I know, the organization's totally legitimate. But for all I know, it's not.

I'm all for people using whatever birth control they find helpful and effective, and for backing it up. I'm happy that emergency contraception is available over the counter. I'd like to see better birth control and sexuality education in schools, and even wider availability. Yes, I even asked my local pharmacy if they have Plan B, and they do, and offered to sell me some. But I was just making sure they had it.

What seemed weird about this effort, though, is that it's focused on only Plan B as the back up, and even say basically to ask for it by name, to paraphrase the old ads.

So that makes me wonder if this organization isn't some sort of sub rosa advertising strategy. If it is, maybe it's brilliant. Or not. I haven't seen people blogging wildly about backing up stuffs, but I haven't read a bunch today because I was on the road.

I should start a super secret blog virus ad campaign... read a Shakespeare sonnet, fight for social justice! End sexism and racism! Except, yeah, not like anyone's going to be convinced.

Drag

I went out to dinner the other night with a friend. You have to sort of picture this. I have this wagon. In this area, pretty much every woman who can afford one has the same wagon. A lot of men have them, too, just not the more macho types. This is the sort of wagon one expects friendly dogs, groceries, and gardening stuff to ride around in, perhaps with a small child in a car seat or something.

We're both middle aged women. Really. Middle-aged. Except that it's night, and I had on my nice warm stupid hat that I got to bike with, which happens to basically be a black, tight, skull cap, semi-worthy of someone half my age and at least twice as tough. I can imagine, in the dark, with my cap, that an outsider might be a little uncertain. My friend, though, had no stupid skull cap thing on, and has generous, wavy hair, even in the dark.

We rolled up to a stop light, chatting. Then we heard the loud revving. Vroom, VRRRROOOM. We looked over to see a hot rod, with a young male driver, and several other young folks (it was dark, I didn't bother to count). The male driver looked over at me. VRROOM! He eyed me, he eyed my car, and mostly, he eyed my friend in the passenger's seat. He nodded at me, silently clinching a deal.

My friend and I started helplessly laughing. The people in the other car started laughing too.

Then the light changed, and they zoomed off. My wagon eased sedately forward, humming quietly.

So what I'd like to know: in the world of young male car driving, exactly how many coolness points do you lose for trying to rev up against two middle aged women in a wagon?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I left town for a couple of days, and have been semi-internet-less, and hanging out with people whose ages work in the single digits. I have no clue what they're talking about at least half the time.

But, I have begun testing my new biking shorts, but not yet the way you're supposed to use them because it's too danged cold and I need all the strategic layerage I can get.

Slice Up Your Shakespeare

One of the fascinating things I'm learning working with a colleague in theater is how we think about staging and texts. Happily, the person I'm working with likes plays that move along. I, too, like plays that move along.

But we differ about how to move plays along. After a variety of experiences, I really want to hear plays, and see acting, and I really don't care much about scenery stuff. I'd be pretty much happy with a bare stage. I HATE having the play stop while the curtain comes down and we wait for a scenery change. I hate this especially with Shakespeare stuff, because he gives us so much in the dialog that we can use our imaginations. My theater colleague, though, takes pleasure in the scenery, and that means it gets changed.

My colleague focuses on making things faster with judicious cuts to the script. Now, I'm a realist enough to know that pretty much any time you see Shakespeare on stage, it's been cut, and I can deal with that. Seriously, someone could cut half of Hamlet and I'd survive. But it's a real education for me learning how a theater person thinks about and chooses cuts, and it says a lot about our differing focuses.

My colleague tends to want to cut the most difficult language; s/he argues convincingly that there are times when the modern audience just isn't going to get some metaphor or joke, but that people might focus on not getting it, and then miss important stuff coming up. In a class, on the other hand, we (or at least, I) take a lot of pleasure in teasing out the really difficult language. Thinking that sort of thing through helps us tease out how the play's working.

My colleague usually cuts weird racist metaphors and images because they don't make sense to modern audiences. In contrast, I tend to teach about how those images reflect and contribute to early modern understandings of human differences, and how early modern practices and attitudes feed into our own. I can live with these cuts, except I sometimes wonder if we're not making Shakespeare seem less racist than he is. And it bugs me that we never seem to have to cut his sexism, because we still recognize and accept that language. Some people even do it without flinching.

It's been fun to work through the play (which s/he calls a "script" and I call a "text") and talk about what should or shouldn't be cut and why. I was oddly happy last night to be able to suggest a specific cut, since I'm usually the one saying we should keep stuff. But this cut makes sense, I think, and flows better in my modern ear. (And it cracks me up to think I'm "fixing" Shakespeare. I mean, really, the arrogance!)

When we work with students, I tend to bring in broader themes, recurrent imagery or ideas, and my colleague says s/he's finding that useful, and actually using what we've talked about in his/her other class for this text. So that's neat, too. My colleague's better at communicating with students/actors about how to work specific scenes, and especially at how to think about the play as a whole staging, rather than in pieces. But I can contribute to helping students understand how to read the text for stage directions (which tend to be less full in early modern plays than in plays written in the past, say, 50 years), which facilitates his/her staging work.

I'm very much enjoying this process, but the theater life, well, I'm too old for that. They work in the late evenings, because that's when their students have learned to keep blocks of time free. It's also when I'm in the habit of being long abed, usually. And then after we work with students, my colleague and I have been spending an hour or so working through cuts and such for the next section. I don't know quite when I got so old; I used to be able to stay up until dawn without any trouble, though in those days I wasn't also getting up within a short time of dawn to go teach. So maybe that has something to do with it?

Wake Up!

Last night, at some point, I decided that I'd sleep through the morning, through all my classes, just sleep. This is not my habit, but that's what I was thinking.

When I looked at the clock, it was 12:50. I cursed myself for sleeping through my classes, all morning. I cursed loudly and repeatedly. I lurched out of bed, angry at myself that I hadn't even had the courtesy to call my department and arrange to have someone put signs up so students wouldn't sit in classes endlessly waiting. Then I cursed myself some more.

Oddly, it was dark outside. Either there's a really bad storm, or the end of the sun has come.

Or, as it turned out, it's 12:50 AM, and I haven't actually slept through anything, not even the night. I had to walk around the house to make sure that it was actually dark out all the windows before I was finally convinced that indeed, it was very early morning and not actually some strange afternoon.

I must have been dreaming about sleeping through my classes, maybe trying to sleep through something, the neighbor's dogs barking, light from someone's headlights as they drove up the hill, something.

I do that waking up in the middle of the night and thinking it's day thing every once in a while. I've gotten as far as showering before realizing that it's dark out, on one occasion. Usually I figure things out before I'm that far along.

And when the alarm finally went off at a way more reasonable time, and I woke up, I was unusually happy that I hadn't missed my classes, that I would be on time and prepared for the day. Funny how thinking I've really messed up makes me extra happy when I realize I haven't.

Out of the Frying Pan

For the past several weeks, I filled in for a colleague teaching an extra five-hour a week class. Five hours taken by itself sounds like nothing, but when you add in an hour or two of prep for every hour teaching, it adds up. That colleague came back in yesterday and life got simpler for me again.

Late last summer, one of my colleagues in the theater department asked me to participate in the student production of a Shakespeare play this spring; technically, I'm a dramaturge, I guess. Yesterday, that started up, so I went over to the theater building to start doing my bit. It looks like I'll be there a couple hours a night this week, and then maybe a couple hours a couple nights more. So that's a substantial addition to the day. Happily, it's also a great learning opportunity. But dang, Skippy, I'm tired!

I'm a lit person. And they're the theater people. Lit and theater people tend to approach plays really differently. I don't want to stereotype; certainly some lit people have substantial theater experience, and some theater people have loads of lit experience. But we come at things from different directions.

Speaking to my experience, for example, I think of plays first as cultural texts; I think in terms of cultural and literary contexts, material contexts. Then I think in terms of theoretical questions. In there, especially in the material contexts, I think of play texts in theatrical contexts. Play texts, for me, are sort of potential stagings, multiple in meaning; I tend to hold multiple ways of enacting a given scene in mind without necessarily settling on one.

My colleague in the theater department tends to think in terms of staging this specific play in a specific production. She knows about early modern theatrical practices, and about theatrical practices through history, but she's far more prepared to deal with the specifics of a given space here and now, and not that interested in early modern spaces or stagings.

I've now participated in two summer Shakespeare programs with this colleague, so I'm learning to think more theatrically, but I still love coming at things through lit.

Some of the students in the play are in my Shakespeare class, where we'll also be reading the play (and where I'll require everyone to go to the play and write about it). But they're a little different in their theatrical department space.

Different departments live in their spaces differently. English students don't much hang around the department except for when their major society is meeting and such. But art types hang out in studios doing there work, and some science majors tend to hang around labs or whatever. In my grad program, students, majors and grad students, hung out in our specialized library; I usually felt a good balance there; I could work, and then there was usually someone around to take a break with, and then back to work.

My sense from last night is that the theater majors hang out in this one room, a crowdedly comfortable place circled by couches, and mostly seem to know each other pretty well from doing shows and classes together. They seem to feel comfortable sitting far more closely than English students do when they hang out, seem more comfortable with touching, leaning.

In my experience, students in different fields tend to idealize and take on traits they associate with those in the field. Here, the students act like they've been watching A Chorus Line a lot, or maybe Tootsie. They have ideas about what and how actors are, and they're trying out those roles.

I know two professional actors. Not people you're likely to have heard of, but people who make their day to day living acting, mostly stage acting. These two are intense and focused, and I can't really imagine them lounging in quite the way these students do. But then again, I don't know them primarily as actors, nor do I see them hanging out around acting jobs. One of my friends is New York based, the other West Coast based. When I was in grad school, one of them came to one of my Shakespeare discussion classes and gave an incredible little workshop. I still use what I learned from him. I wish I could get one of them to come do a workshop with my students here, but we're so out of the way in so many ways.

The theater department hasn't put on a full Shakespeare play for almost a decade; mostly, I get a sense that they don't especially value Shakespeare compared to the more modern plays available. (Obviously, I value Shakespeare lots more.) Their students have, as you'd expect, largely adopted the general attitude. So unlike where I went to grad school, where acting students crowded into Shakespeare classes, relatively few theater students take Shakespeare. (Except this semester, because they knew this play was on the docket and were encouraged by this director to take Shakespeare.)

When we talk about interdisciplinary work around here, this is the work I imagine most available to me, so here goes. Lots to learn, and hopefully lots to contribute to the production.

Right now, I'm doing this as an add on. If they decide to do Shakespeare more regularly, and I'm involved, then I'll have to negotiate something. But if this is just a one off, then I'm going full out for the opportunity.

Job Talk Talk

I went to the third job talk so far for a job we're trying to fill.

Happily, the candidate did not show us a bulleted powerpoint presentation. It's nice to see someone who can give a coherent, smart talk without bullet points, manage to keep focused and not run over. The candidate also rounded off the talk with an image reminiscent of the opening; it was clearly well-thought through and yet felt relaxed and responsive to the audience.

At every job talk, there's one. At every conference, there's one. You know the one, the person who has to ask some canned question that really doesn't go anywhere. We have ours. S/he reads the set up and question every time, although, seriously, I could do it by now, and at least I'd try to have more than a monotone.

There's basically one acceptable answer in the US to his/her canned question, and pretty much anyone past 9th grade should be able to nail it without any trouble. Certainly all these candidates do a fine job with it. For me, there's a way of answering really bad questions sometimes that makes them into good questions; today's candidate managed to sort of do that with this one, which I admit impressed me.

For those who care, the right answer is not, for once, hanging by the neck until half dead and then drawing and quartering. While this seems to have been a solid stock answer for many questions back in the day, it's not so popular in the here and now.

There you are, free advice: skip the powerpoint and don't offer to draw and quarter anyone in the central quad.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For some stupid reason I won't share, I woke up at 3:30 am this morning, and didn't get back to sleep, though by the time I needed to get up, I was finally ready to go back to sleep. I really want to sleep now, but instead, I'm prepping to go work with theater students on a play they'll be performing at the end of the semester. Let's just say, the playwright's pretty good, and I have an affinity for his/her works that makes this more a pleasure than a chore, except for the sleepiness part.

A little bit o' sunshine

It's supposed to get into the 40s (F, that's 4.44 something in C, which frankly seems way colder) again today. Yesterday, I was hunkered down, avoiding grading. Today I'm just going to give in; the bike is coming off the trainer (where, to be honest, it hasn't been used nearly as much as it should have been).

UPDATE (because I know you've been waiting with bated breath)

Joy. Happiness. A little sweat, a lot of mud up my back (through all three layers, thanks). I rode out to where the city trail meets the state trail, which isn't cleared of snow at all, then turned back and rode up through the city park, which has enough trees to scent the air to remind me that once this area was a great pinery.

A fair number of folks were out walking and such, and all of us smiling.

There's something very weird about riding through the park, up the hill, and seeing in the distance people out ice-fishing on the lake, and then riding around and down next to the lake, and watching kids play at sliding near the ice fishers.

Note to self: trying to ride uphill on ice isn't as fun as it sounds.

I desperately await the arrival of spring. I sent away for biking shorts today, even though I've read how you're supposed to wear them.