Frogs and Ravens

A Question for My Colleagues in the Teaching Professions

I was having a discussion with some of my colleagues the other day about something we've all noticed in our current crop of students (yeah, I climbed back into the adjunct tree - helps with the bills, you know?).

It is this - as a group, they seem remarkably blind when it comes to seeing arguments in the stuff they read/view/discuss, and when it comes to thinking about their own arguments. 

They write reviews that enumerate everything that an author "discusses" - but they never seem to see what the author has to say about a given subject or source, or even why the author might be discussing that topic or source in the first place. 

I point out the ways that an author is taking a stance on an issue, and ask them to look at what he or she is trying to claim and defend, and I get blank stares.

They will happily talk at length about the implications of the subjects that form the basis of an author's examination, but not of the author's own position on the issue.

They do not like being asked to write papers that require them to state an opinion and defend it.  They want to write narrative "and then this happened" descriptions of events, not to analyze them or interpret them.  They do not seem to understand why vague generalities are not effective claims, nor effective evidence.

They are also more confused about the differences between primary and secondary sources than any other cohort I've taught.

Time Rushing Past

Spring is upon us.  The trees are budding and blossoming and swelling with the promise of summer.  Grackels and robins swirl around the neighborhood in great clouds, their voices clanging from the branches, their beaks bobbing up and down in the grass.  Squirrels are attempting to remember where they hid all those acorns.  Sparrows are squabbling over prime nesting spots inside clothesline pipes and atop porch lanterns.  Inside the house, flies spontaneously generate out of air and dust and drifting cat hair; I have become a leaping samurai warrior, armed with a blue-tipped flyswatter, declaring death to these buzzing black concentrations of matter.

I pass among this bustling whirl of growth and energy, and I look at it, and remark upon it - and yet I fail to set it down in words and images, in pixels and megabytes and photons glowing through the screen.  Teaching is sprawling through my life like a massive underground fungus; the classes and lectures are only the fruiting bodies peeking up between the leaves.  Below the surface the tendrils reach out and infiltrate all parts of my life, waking and sleeping.  I find myself dreaming in PowerPoint slides.  I struggle to find clear ground, bare rock upon which I can stand and contemplate the changes around me.

In other words, I've been too busy to write.  Forgive me.

Teaching Has Eaten My Head

I apologize for the even more sporadic than usual posting.  This semester I'm teaching two new preps, one of which has two sections (for a total of almost 80 students) and lots of lectures.  Plus, for some bizarre reason, I thought having them write lots of little papers would be a good idea.  I haven't really had any free time during the day except for maybe a couple of hours a week for pottery; at night I'm brain dead and watch too much tv (I am now addicted to Cash Cab). 

I saw a hawk in a tree on campus a few days ago, the robins are out, and I heard a woodpecker this morning.  So that's something...

Fall Has Come?

Autumn seems to have arrived: the air is cooler, even cold, especially early in the morning. Now when I let the cat out onto the porch in the morning I close the door behind her, and I find it difficult shedding my warm pajamas for crisper clothing.

My mood is subdued, my energy waning. Is it a seasonal shift? I wonder, or is it an accumulation of sleep deprivation resulting from allergies and early-rising, loud-meowing cat? Either way, I find myself feeling out of sorts more frequently than I'd like - a sort of mental bloat.

The department chair has approached me about carrying a full load in the spring. It is a generous offer, as it means a substantial increase in income. I feel a certain reluctance, partly because of the work it represents, partly because it feels like a step backwards to be teaching again, and partly because I am already regretting my inability to make the full use of the free time I do have now. There are so many things I would like to do, and there is not time enough for all of them as it is.

I do not do intensely busy well anymore. I struggled with it during graduate school, and eventually found ways to cope, but I think I was designed for a slower pace. In life I'm a long-distance through-hiker, not a sprinter. I can manage short bursts of speed, but like a cat, my endurance is low, and I tire and become distracted easily.

Or maybe it's just fall, and I haven't been sleeping well.

Rusty Schtick

I've lost my schtick. Or it's grown rusty with disuse. Something like that.

By which I mean that the snappy bitesize description of what I do / who I am has become less snappy, more wordy, harder to spit out and to digest.

At parties, people ask me what I do, and I sort of go "uhhhh" or babble away or dodge the question. At a recent gathering of academics, the queries were more focused, and the inarticulacy was correspondingly worse.

Plus there's the past tense / present tense issue. My old soundbites were descriptions of then-current activities, but now they'd be describing stuff I'm no longer involved in, or not really interested in anymore. The current soundbite is, on the other hand, raw and unfinished and productive of hesitant possibilities; it is not a crisp declaration of what is, as a good short summation of self should be.

Perhaps I should practice making a "do tell" face in the mirror; that way, I can get other people going about their interests and work, while my schtick rusts in peace.

Party Pooper

I am both feeling frustrated and lacking the energy to deal with it.

The textbook that was ordered turned out to be the wrong one. The new and correct one comes bundled with two supplements that I have never seen, and the publisher's website is being very coy as to what their contents are.

This makes it difficult to plan out the syllabus.

Also, class starts Monday.

Further, it does not help that I'm feeling cross and cynical and burnt out already about the whole enterprise, not just the textbook. I'm not interested in the teaching for its own sake, but rather I am doing this because I need the money and D's department chair was in a bind and needed an adjunct at the last minute.

It is tiring being on a campus filling with excited energy and not feeling engaged by or part of it.

D., though encouraging, has never fully grasped the emotional and functional distinctions between adjunct and visiting; when he was an adjunct, it was at an institution where the majority of teachers were adjuncts, rather than the other way around. So he doesn't get on a gut level how disaffected I'm feeling, and how the institutional structure does more to reinforce this than alleviate it.

This is just a JOB, and yet everyone seems to think that I should be thrilled by the chance to teach again.

I'm not. Honestly, truly, I'm not.

Broken

Hi all. I apologize for being a Lame Blogger and not posting much these days.

I could, I suppose, lay the blame at the feet of our move, and a house full of things needing to be unpacked, sorted, and given new places here to live.

I could blame the settling-in chores and errands, things like going to the DMV or City Hall, or the Post Office, and so on.

The real reason is that I'm feeling both depressed and freaked out by not having any plans beyond getting settled. I don't have a job, I don't have an agenda for the year, I don't have a purpose.

Moreover, I'm feeling a crisis of confidence about jobs in general. With a resumé like mine - long on skills and credentials, short on in-field experience - you have to be very confident and able to sell yourself to a sceptical interviewer. You have to be able to do this right from the first sentence in the cover letter.

I lack that confidence. I've lacked it since I fell out of the academic tree four years ago, and the situation has not improved since. It's hard for me to persuade people to give me a chance, when I'm not convinced myself that I'll do well. As well, being inexperienced, I second-guess the fit of a possible job so much that I often don't even bother making the attempt. This week, for example, the local paper was looking for someone to do a writing-based job that didn't require even half of my credentials. I knew I could do the job, skills-wise. But I couldn't convince myself that anyone else would look at my resumé and want to hire me for that job. And so the deadline passed for applying, and I won't be getting it, for certain.

I do this with my writing too.

I need to write for a purpose; simply spilling stuff onto the page isn't really writing to me: it's journaling, which is valuable, but isn't anything worth sharing (or even meant to be shared). It's putting events down so that my memories have a back-up, nothing more.

Lately, I have extreme difficulty figuring out what the point of my writing is. I thought I knew, then I shared my latest project with an editor I respect and like, and he thought I ought to be doing something else. It used to be that such scepticism provoked my stubborn side, and I'd continue just to prove people wrong. I don't seem to be able to marshall that confident, stubborn energy anymore; instead, it was as if someone had pulled a rug out from under feet that had already begun to falter.

So I don't know what the hell I'm doing any more, or why anyone would care. It's hard to blog with that attitude.

Out of the Trees, Into the Forest

The past two weeks have been exhausting, but in a good way. I'm finally feeling back on my feet again, figuratively speaking, though it's again more of a pause before the onrush. (Heck, it's not even much of a pause - I'm uploading gingnormous amounts of photos at this very moment, a hugely tedious process.)

While I was at the conference last week (as opposed to the workshop the week before), I finally came up with a way of quickly describing my academic history that satisfied me. Before I'd been using the metaphor of the merry-go-round, as in "I've fallen off the academic". Now, I say that I've "fallen from the tree."

I like this new metaphor because it's much richer, and it seems to do a better job of describing the experience. As I can now think of it, when I was a squirrel in the academic tree of History, I was in the habit of clambering out on various branches into other trees - literature, geography, anthropology, various sciences - but my home tree, the one in which I nested, was History.

Now, having fallen out of that tree, I'm free to explore the forest.

Last week's conference was an exercise in briefly climbing up into a smaller subspecies of the Literature tree, and while there I confirmed both that I was a History squirrel by training, and no longer comfortable in the branches of academic trees more generally. (Perhaps I need a different animal to be my personal metaphor: something that inhabits some trees preferentially, but which matures into a largely ground-dwelling animal in adulthood.)

While the tree was green and leafy and some of its fruit was sweet, and there were other congenial animals to hang out with in the branches, it didn't feel comfortable. Some of the branches were too far from the ground, some of the animals too serious about defending their territory, and the tree as a whole felt a bit stunted, as if it were afraid to grow wild and unruly.

The workshop's tree, on the other hand, was a comfortable habitat. Its name, Wildbranch, is taken from one of the streams in the area, but it works in a tree-sense too. (There is, in fact, a local farm that takes Wildbranch as part of its name, and its design features an otherwise ordinary tree with one graceful, curving branch that spirals up around the moon.) I like the wildness of the branches, the way that the tree feels like it could grow and bend in any direction. At the same time I like the number of cozy nooks, the satisfying nature of the nuts it produces. It's a good place to nest for a bit, to survey the forest from a higher perspective, to hobnob with similar creatures as myself.

I have become a creature of the forest, uneasy in many trees, but able to roam among and explore them as a community, as competition, as possible habitats, some comfortable, others less so. After a long struggle, I have learned to love the view from the ground.

From the Far Side

Almost every weekday I don't walk to work I park my car in the same lot.  I park at the far end; usually the spaces fill up from the other.  Yet, I have found, the "far" end is only far if you think in terms of established paths.  On the end where most people park, a series of steps and walks curve between bushes, up hill and around the buildings.  On the end where I park is instead a low grassy hill, shaded by maples and oaks.  If one is willing to walk on grass rather than pavement, to climb up a slope rather than up stairs, the "far" end is, in fact, closer to my destination.  So I prefer to park there, in the shade of a sheltering red oak, wheels crunching over last fall's acorns.

Later this year I will be attending a conference at which I will be part of a discussion panel.  In preparation for it, I am looking over a sampling of related literature.  Notably, I am looking at this book by Lawrence Buell.  What is interesting is that much of what he's examining I have encountered elsewhere - the familiar names, the familiar titles, the faces on the book jackets - but it's viewed through a much different perspective.  It can be easy to assume that disciplinary boundaries are more virtual than real, even when you're someone like me who made almost a fetish of crossing them in my mad search for knowledge.  Still, I have always had my home ground, my own disciplinary training to act as a firm base among the shifting patterns.  Now, I am preparing to step off that stable ground and move into other territory.  The terrain looks different when viewed from Buell's home ground, and I hope that I will find a welcome there.  I am hoping that my path there, from the far side of the lot, will come out in the same place, that I am not lost among the maples and oaks.

Three Sentences

Pilgrim/Heretic recently attended a recognition ceremony at her campus, and was struck by how little the dedications ended up saying about the people who'd been working there for twenty or thirty years.  So she posed the question:  In three sentences or fewer, how would you like your work and yourself to be described in a similar situation?

I'm very intrigued by the question, but more than a little daunted when it comes to thinking up an answer.  For one thing, I don't really have a career at this point.  So I have to think about might-bes in more than one way.  But here's one attempt:

During the last 30 years, R has written numerous articles and books, many of them exploring the themes of home and our connections to the non-human world. Despite her success as a writer, what we wish to celebrate most today is her success as a human being and as a friend.

I guess that's only two.  But there's only so much head-swelling I can manage in one day.  (I can't tell whether this is a crisis of confidence, or a lack of imagination.)  I'd like to think that 30 years from now I will be a warm and humane person, with a good sense of humor, lots of stories to tell, and a number of intriguing adventures and quiet satisfactions to look back on and forward to.  But that's more about me and less about my "career."  I want to be published, and I want people to read my work, and I want approval.  (I've given up on the idea that I could change the world.)  But that's pretty vague - which is why I'm sceptical about my ability to turn those speculative sentences into reality. 

Still, it'd be something, if I managed it, wouldn't it?