Frogs and Ravens

Twitter Made Me Do It

A post in which I rant about lazy jeremiads against technology.

Campus Trail

I walk the narrow, muddy pathway, wending my way among the trees.  The foreground is an abundance of leaves and flowers, the middle a pattern of thin straight trunks against the new green of spring.  There is no distance. 

My forehead strikes a series of spiderwebs as the air condenses, a humid presence smelling of mud and honeysuckle.  I startle three white-tailed deer, brown shapes crashing through the green.

Beneath the mayapples are white flowers shaped like satellite dishes; above me are vines.

The world is green and brown, punctuated with snippets of white.

Late Spring

The semester is almost over and I am chafing at the bit, wanting to get out there with my camera and explore again.  (Stupid grading.)

The trees continue to green up as the wave of flowers ebbs, and the grass grows thick and long under the afternoon rains.  Birds have been making their nests, and the sides and medians of the roads are dotted with the swelling bodies of unlucky young squirrels and raccoons seeking new territories. 

Wanderlust is upon me, and I am stuck here with the blue books and the essays.  I am feeling irritable and ingrown, pushing against the walls of my responsibilities.  I want to shed the semester like a skin rubbed off against rough rocks and damp bark, gliding new and fresh over the muddy ground of spring.  If I look hard, I can see potential through the haze of my outgrown self.

One More Year of Teaching

This last semester has been a slog.  Interesting topic, interesting, engaged students - and a ton of work.  Work that at no point did I ever feel all that much enthusiasm for. 

So I've decided that I will cast a critical eye on my teaching next fall (I am already slated for a class then) and spring (if the class I proposed is accepted).  If things don't improve, I will declare myself officially Done With Teaching.

I have long suspected that I was burning out on teaching, back when my dream of full-time academic employment was still alive, but it really came to a head this term.  Some days I literally had cramps in my gut during the drive to campus, cramps that somehow never manifested on non-teaching days.  About the only part of it that I liked was talking with my students outside of class, or reading the books I'd assigned.  The rest, though, ranged from painful to boring. 

These are not good attitudes for a teacher to have.

So next year is a test.  Either this spring was a fluke, and it was just a bad combination of things, or it wasn't, and I am in fact no longer interested in teaching. 

I will not be surprised if the latter is the case; it feels lately like I'm groping my way back to the person I was before grad school, rediscovering the things that excited me and brought me pleasure.  Teaching was never something to which I aspired; indeed, part of the reason I went for the doctorate was to ensure that I'd never have to teach high-schoolers, figuring that college students were at least there voluntarily.  (Shows how much I knew!)

Research, writing, reading - and photography, art, the outdoors, and tinkering with things - those are (and have long been) the sources of my lasting satisfaction.  They are wells that never run dry.

This is a useful thing to realize now, in my sixth year of blogging, a process that started when I fell out of the academic tree onto my head.  The forest is large, and I know how to climb more than one kind of tree.

The Clade

A new community environmental blog, The Clade, launches today.  Go check it out - there are a lot of good writers already signed up. 

(Good job, Chris!)