More Meta-Writing (I Do Actually Get Real Work Done In Other Places)

This week, when I was trying to write something creative, I found that, to move the narrative forward, I needed to know the space in which this movement would take place. I had to draw a blueprint of the house and the surrounding landscape, and have at least the general outlines of the landscape accurate. I had to take this foreign landscape and, to make anything happen in it, understand its contours and its obstacles. The alien world had to become real.

I actually began to feel a little like Coraline when she reached the limits of Other Mother's world. Other Mother had only created a tactile world, one with smells and tastes and colors, up to a point. Then, the details became fuzzy, and objects became more of an idea of a house or a tree rather than the thing itself. Finally, the world turned into a big haze of fog.

As you try to create another world, and you move from one part that you have imagined in great detail or that you have assembled with extensive research, you find yourself in that haze. When I write non-fiction, I find that this is a useful place to find yourself. You discover the holes in your own research, or new questions to ask that require more research, or even the lack of surviving evidence that forces you to reshape what you are trying to write or describe. Fiction, I'm finding, isn't too terribly different, except that you can make up more of the material, and you don't have to document that material. You have flexibility to some degree more or less.

Back when I was 11 or 12 and into competitive novel-writing with my friend Ann (again, not Historiann, another Ann!), she and I would spend a lot of time drawing the outfits that our characters wore, and the spaceships that they flew, and floor plans of their home, and maps of their homelands. We spent as much time on this as we did on our writing. The two of us were using this novel writing as our project in our "gifted" class. (She was genuinely brilliant, I got in because of a long story that amounts to me essentially cheating on the IQ test). This was at the beginning of the whole identification of the "gifted and talented" students, and they didn't quite know what to do with us except to give us a special "independent study" class and turn us loose in the library. Our novels were our independent study.

The teachers never quite understood what we were doing when we were not writing. "Why are you drawing all of this?" they asked. "What is all of this for?" I don't think they were criticizing us. They were pretty good teachers, actually. They weren't saying, "you should not be wasting time on this other junk! You are supposed to be writing!" I think they were genuinely curious about all of these images and visual ideas that we generated. They wanted to know more about our imaginary worlds. I think they may also have been challenging us to think more about the reasons and logic behind our creations. "Why do they dress the way they do?" one teacher asked. "Why do you have this city covering half of the state?" another wanted to know. I don't think either of us had much logic to our creations. We just sort of grabbed images and altered or adapted them to suit our own aesthetic senses.

In our writing class Saturday, our instructor told us that, as writers, we all must make a world that engages the readers' senses, to give them a seamless transition from the world where they live into the world where our characters live. We even did a "free writing" exercise from the prompt "The air smelled like..."

"Free writing" is sort of a warm up exercise in which you sit down for a set period of time -- 10 minutes, 20 minutes --and just write without your internal editor. Some people use prompts like the one above. Last week I wrote about my first kiss (and I might just share it with you all sometime soon). This week, after "the air smelled like.." exercise, we wrote on a room in our childhood homes. The prompts just help you get started, and the whole point is to warm up what ever synapses or muscles or part or your brain where your words live. You don't edit yourself. You keep your hands or fingers moving for the entire time. You don't erase or scratch out (I cheat on that one). It's great fun.

Of course, this "free writing" is also what I call "blogging." It's part of my problem. As fun as it is, I still need to focus. My blog isn't focused, unless "bitching" is counted as a focus.* My journal, sporadic as it is, is not focused. When I focus, I always feel like the product has to be perfect. The instructor said that these free writing exercises can be put to that purpose of focusing. She uses them to get into her characters by writing the exercise with a particular character or scene in mind. I decided to try her method.

I took "the air smelled like..." and instead of using it to describe a memory, I jumped into something else. Imperfection can be liberating, let me tell you! No agonizing over the right phrase. Just going forward with the knowledge that you can clean up later if you see something good, or chuck it all without the agony of a lost investment. If you go forward, you usually get somewhere. Maybe not far, but somewhere else.

I have sort of done something like this before. Not quite as productively or focused, but it did get some of the work done. So, I'm trying it again, but with more of that elusive focus. I call it the "draft before the draft," or the "pre-writing writing," in which I write about what I'm going to write about. That way, I don't have the pressure of actually writing the thing itself; and therefore I do not have the pressure of unattainable perfection. It's the shit before Anne Lamott's "shitty first draft." ("So maybe the shitty first draft won't be so shitty!" said one of my classmates.) I'm sidling up to the actual producet, seeing what I know about what I'm going to write about, and where I need to know more. Somewhere in the process, a few real lines, a few real ideas, a few bits that might just approximate perfect, make their way out. Then, when the real writing time comes, when the need for perfections becomes stronger, I'm starting with something; and the something generates more somethings.

Everyone in our class is writing fiction, including the teacher. I still don't know what I'll produce in that direction, or if I even will produce in that direction; but I already know that I've learned a few new tricks and validated or refined a few old ones. These will help with writing history if for no other reason than that I can free myself from the perfectionist rut by giving myself a defined activity in which I'm allowed to be a bad writer or to get my ideas out without having to annotate them.

One of those old tricks that I'm refining is that of creating that imaginary or alien world. The one where the action happens, but where you do not live (although it might resemble the one in which you do live). You have latitude to invent when you write fiction, although the invention must be internally consistent. When you write about history, that world not only has to be internally consistent, but also consistent with the evidence. That historical world is one that once existed, but it was a foreign world with different internal points of reference that you must excavate and interpret. As a document editor once told me, "you get inside of the person's head when you start reading what they wrote and then going to read what they read to write the annotation for what they wrote." That was actually the most satisfying part of being a document editor.

In getting into my subject's head, I also always felt a desperate need to go to the places where they lived and visited -- and not just as an excuse to travel! This, in fact, was the way I realized that I had finally found the right advisor for me. My first, evil advisor saw no reason for me to travel to archives or see the places that I wrote about.** The second advisor would only let me write about a subject for which I had a document in her hand for every year she was alive.

The third advisor brushed aside the other two. He told me, first, "if you used that [second advisor's] standard, then you couldn't write about whole groups of people." Then, he told me, "you should always walk the same ground as your subject." He didn't just mean it intellectually. He meant it literally.

He was right, too. All of these tricks of understand a character by understanding what they think, where they lived, what they liked and disliked, work for actors, novelists, and historians. Even if you don't use every single note that you take, every idea that you have, every phrase that you write, you come to a fuller understanding of your subject and you write a richer, more literary, more alive story. You make your reader move from their own world into the one on the page, the one that you have written. You make the alien understandable.

*For a good list of reasons that blogging is both good and bad, see "The Blogging Habit" at Confident Writing. Yes, yes, and yes. Thank you to Professor Zero for the link.

**Yes! No archival research! But just for me, not for his male students. You see, if I went away to archives in Virginia or Ohio or England, then I wouldn't be around for him to pursue his goal of getting into my pants. When I figured all of this all out, he became the ex-advisor. That is why he is evil.

I Want to Bang My Head: A Rant

Several months ago I mentioned a book discussion that had I facilitated in which the author of the book showed up (it's item #18). The problem with this was that the author had written a history book about the Constitution and presented really old research that had been common knowledge for ages. At least, it was common knowlege among historians, not Constitutional attorneys.

Well, he wrote another book. Now, my college wants to bring him back to speak because someone saw him at some local event and thought that he had some "interesting new information on the subject." Somehow, I doubt it.

When I first wrote about this writer -- who, sadly, gets reviewed in the NYTimes instead of actual historians on the same subjects who write better and more original books -- I also complained of another "historian" who wrote a book about women's history that would have been out of date 20 years ago. Yet, everyone at our college went on and on about what fresh, new work she had done.

I bang my head at this not out of jealousy. I have no pretentions to the NYTimes or of being considered original and fresh. I bang my head at this because these are not trained historians. They are hailed as "fresh" because they have "archival research," as if "archival research" were some revolutionary activity. They don't acknowledge that many of their ideas are build upon a foundation of other people's work; or, if they do, those parts are cut out of the book.

I don't despise them personally, nor do I begrudge them the joy of writing or consider them the root of all evil. I do see that they serve a sort of function; but I still have a huge problem with a system that keeps the work of actual historians marginalized as "too academic" (not to mention the way that actual historians are supposed to be out of touch with the "real world" in the "ivory tower") while anyone with the time and independent wealth (which often buys time) ends up with best sellers and speaking engagements from books that churn out the same ole same ole as if it were original to that writer and new to the study of history.

At my school, I bang my head because, in a city with a gazillion universities and agencies that employ a gazillion more historians, educators who should know better are turning to non-historians to speak on historical subjects.

Then, I read the last line of the e-mail. This particular writer is a married to a county council woman. As in, this writer is married to one of the people who approves funding for the college.

It all makes sense, now!

The Monster Wants to Eat Me

I got to season 3 of Lost. I'll try not to spoil it for anyone, but damn! Yeah, Mr. Eko and the Monster are totally my relationship to my writing. Many a time I feel as if...well, now I will spoil it if you are as hopelessly (or blissfully) behind the curve as I am, so I'll stop.

I'm taking a creative writing class on Saturdays. The company where I was taking the comedy class was not offering the acting class that I wanted this summer, and I still needed some sort of outlet. Meanwhile, various forces in the universe seemed to whisper the suggestion that I take a creative writing class, if for no other reason than to give myself a weekly writing goal of producing something so that I wouldn't embarrass myself in front of the other students.

That's one of the problems with me and writing. Give me a deadline and I panic. All of the words dry up in the face of my absolute need to be perfect, and my absolute knowledge that I will never be perfect. Then, all of the voices start to shout and yell and pound me about the head and shoulders. I don't have an "Angel in the House," I have a symphony of demons. Our instructor has us reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. In one of her early chapters, she tells of a friend of hers who suggests taking all of those voices, turning them into tiny mice, and putting those mice into a jar.

I can't do that. I start to have sympathy for the mice. I start to worry about whether they have enough air, and I empathize with their clawings and scratching and squeekings as they try to get out of the jar.

Instead, I hear that cacophonous, demonic symphony. I imagine myself sitting down with that staff paper that composers use to score music. I imagine myself writing down what all of these voices say, the high pitched piccolo of "Lazy, Lazy, Lazy" and the booming bass "worthless, worthless, worthless" and the violins squiggling in with "you don't have an analytical mind" and the violas saying "you are only good as an editor, you can only write narrative" and the tubas bellowing down the scale with "and you aren't even very much good at that." "That" goes "splat!" at the end. Mine ends up being a gigantic symphony of Mahler proportions, with a chorus as emphatic as Beethoven's Ninth.

That all comes when I have a deadline. It comes when I don't have a deadline, too, which leads to the other writing problem. Without a deadline, I don't have to listen to that symphony. It doesn't go away, of course. Every time I start to think that maybe I'm just a little bit decent, maybe a little good at something, the symphony blares, "Loser! Loser! Loser!" and the chorus chants, "Nothing! No One! Nothing!" Without that deadline, however, I can turn down the volume. I give it one less opportunity to ring in my ears.

Then, I don't write. Not writing doesn't make that symphony go away because not writing doesn't prevent the ideas from appearing. Not writing doesn't make the need to write, to tell a story, to simply be creative, go away. Not writing becomes the next movement in the symphony.

Blogging has provided the nice middle ground between writing and not writing. I write, and get the words, along with whatever complaints that they contain. Yet, blogging doesn't really have a purpose. When the instructor started to talk about "free writing," I thought, "I already do that, and I call it 'blogging.'" Blogging, however, isn't really free writing. Blogging has more focus in that I am writing a sort of essay with a sort of point. Blogging is also not particularly focused in that it doesn't have the purpose of digging into some subconscious mound of creative goo in order to get the raw material for something bigger and better. Blogging is it's own thing, and a good think, but ultimately not enough of the thing that I need. I need to write with more purpose.

The symphony metaphor works best for the academic writing. I've done more of that publicly what with two books (on on the c.v. and one off). I have also had other academic writing subject to criticism and -- what do you call it when one minute your work is considered publishable and the next considered crap all by the same person? Suffice to say that my foundation in graduate school was scarring. Whatever the case, if you've ever had your writing criticized, even in a good way, all of those symphonic demons get discernible faces and voices all of their own.

In fact, the incident that prompted this very post was a dream that I had last night. I'll spare the details, but I ended up finding myself back in graduate school, having to take the comprehensive exam all over again. I couldn't remember any of the literature, and knew that what I had studied and could remember was all a decade out of date. My advisor had moved on to a much better school (as he eventually did -- but all of that is another story), and I was face-to-face with my first evil advisor (he was truly evil -- but all of that is another story, too), who was going to grade part of my exam and bully the other graders into following his lead in assessing my work. Except, I knew that they weren't just going to follow his lead because I knew that I was going to give them enough ammunition to kill me on my own. I knew that I was going to fail and I heard and read (yes, I saw words on a paper) all of the comments about how I had no business being a historian and that their duty was to drum me out of the profession. I more than half believed them. I three-quarters believed them.

You see, the academic writing has been given voices and instruments, which doesn't make the silencing any easier. The creative writing has no voice as yet, that is why I imagined it like Eko's smoky monster. It wants to eat me. One way or another, it will. Sometimes, you only have the choice of how you will be eaten, not if. Sometimes, you only have the choice of regrets.

The creative writing class is my choice of how to be eaten, of facing the monster (and the music). The particular one that I chose is called "The Creative Writing Process," focused more on getting yourself into a routine and canning the mice, turning down the symphony, facing the monster, and just fucking writing. We are all beginners with something in us that not only says "write" but also says "you cannot NOT write." We are all beginners who want to see if we can at least try. We are all beginners. That's why I chose it, rather than something more advanced. I may have two books behind me, but those were written with a deadline. You improve as a writer between the deadlines. You come up with better stuff between the deadlines, be it academic stuff or creative stuff.

This class sort of gives me a deadline with each meeting, but it is the kind of practice deadline that I think I need to be less afraid. The deadline is more the "friendly competition" sort. The kind that I used to have with my friend, Ann (not Historiann -- another Ann!), back in middle school when we nearly turned novel-writing into a competitive sport, each trying to out do the other in numbers of pages and plot-twists. The competition, this time, is with the other students in the class, all from fascinating backgrounds and with so many different stories to tell in fiction and non-fiction.

Now, it is time to go face the monster.

Facing the Monster

"What keeps you from writing?" our teacher asked us.

"Me," I said, without hesitation. "My lack of discipline and my fear. Complete, overwhelming, all-consuming fear. The fear kills the discipline and the lack of discipline feeds the fear."

"What does that fear look like?" my analyst asked.

"It has no shape," I said. "Not yet anyway." The fear is like the monster in the jungle on Lost, I told her. The characters know when it is near, they hear the booming stomps, they feel the ground shake, they see the crushed trees, they sometimes see the bloodied bodies. Still, they don't know what this creature looks like. That is what this fear of writing looks like.

Then Netflix delivered the second season of Lost. In that season, the monster comes out of the jungle to slay Mr. Eko. "Run!" Charlie yells; but Mr. Eko stays. He stands at the edge of the treeline waiting for the monster. The monster emerges, looking just like my own (minus the red eyes and teeth), a snake of electric smoke. Eko stands powerfully, legs apart, fist clutching club. He dares the monster to come closer. The monster stops and hovers. Then, it pulls back into the jungle and evaporates.

I have to be like Eko. I have to stare down my monster and write.



By the way, I'm not even through season 2. If you know, don't tell me if something terrible happens to Mr. Eko! For once I don't want spoilers!

Reading the Barometer

When I teach African American history, even to white students, they always ask, "how could people be like that?" They don't so much mean "how could individuals be so bigoted and racist?" The get that. They've met that. They mean "how could such bigotry and racism be written into law?" They wonder how the grandfather clause, or the laws against miscegenation, or the literacy clauses, or the 3/5th clause could actually come into being? They assume that such blatant acts of racism would have been hidden and denied, embedded in cultural practice, not the legal system.

One day, maybe they will wonder how people could be so bigoted and homophobic that the legal system would be used violate the rights of GLBTQ people.

We also need to work on that cultural practice thing, too.

Here are some more articulate reactions to California's decision to uphold Proposition 8:

"Our Big Gay Agenda" and "Shame on You California Supreme Court" at Hahn At Home
"CA Supremes Say Yes to H8" at Roxie's World
"Link Farm: Reactions to the California Prop 8 Ruling" at Pam's House Blend
"Prop 8. What It's Really About" at Shakesville
"Pondering Commitment" at Angry Black Bitch
"California Supreme Court Ruling 6-1" at Womanist Musings

As Bayard Rustin said, "Twenty-five, thirty years ago [from 1987], the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian. We are all one. And if we don't know it, we will learn it the hard way."

UPDATE: Efforts to challenge Prop 8 in Federal Court.

One Rain Out, Please

Have you ever woken up and thought, "I can't. Whatever it is, I just can't"? That's been me for about a week, or at least the past couple of days. I wake up, look out the window and think, "no."

I think of that scene in Bull Durham in which the Durham Bulls players all desperately need a break. They are so tired and worn out, and their exhaustion is affecting their morale and their game. So, Crash (Kevin Costner) arranges for a rain out. He and the team break into the field the night before a game and set off the sprinkler system to flood the field. Good lord, do I need a rain out!

Suitably, we have rain today. NOAA's National Weather Service says that we will have rain for the rest of the week. Sadly, this still does not give me a rain out. Short of a full-on server meltdown, there will be no rain out. Even then, I fear that would end up as a case of "be careful what you wish for."

Our spring semester officially ended last Wednesday, the day of the fiesta of meetings. Our summer semester begins today. Yes, not even a week later. This is typical of our academic calendar, which has to be one of the quirkiest I have ever encountered. Our spring semester, for instance, did not begin until after the inauguration, at the end of January, this year. Our fall semesters officially end either 2 days before or 2 days after Christmas. I'm waiting for the day that the semesters overlap. Also, you can look at the official online academic calendars and find the days that classes start, but you can never find the day that classes end. The final exams schedule is often listed as "ask your instructor," except the instructors aren't given a finals schedule until after the semester starts, at the same time that the students receive it. I often wonder who makes all of these schedules, and if they consult an actual calendar. Sometimes you feel like you are one of the western powers dealing with Russia before the revolution: you have one calendar and they have another that's like yours, but several weeks off.

Anyway, I have to teach this summer. We don't have any contractual obligations for summer teaching, but most instructors want to teach. In fact, when the administration tried to implement a policy limiting summer teaching for full-timers last year, everyone was up in arms. That's because everyone has a mortgage and kids or child support and credit cards and so forth. I'm fortunate in that I have none of the above. I've also been pretty good about saving this year. This is the first time in probably forever that I've been able to look at the summer and think, "hey, I could use all three months to write, or research, or sit on the sofa and watch my toenails grow!" Nice work if you can get it, let me tell you!

This summer, one of the NEH Summer Institutes accepted me for one of their month-long programs. This one takes place in Baltimore and has to do with slave rebellions in the Atlantic World, which should be incredible. I can see more of Baltimore and roam to some Frederick Douglass sites (because all things lead to Frederick Douglass), official or unofficial. I had hoped to spend the first part of the summer getting ahead on the very extensive reading list, and moving forward on my Douglass's women research. I also have another little thing I'm working on, too -- or want to be working on -- but that's another story.

Anyway, it looked to be a fabulous summer of Douglass and resistance and rebellion and the Atlantic World and being a scholar and just simply recharging. The recharging is the most important part of that equation since I taught the second summer session last summer, then taught 18 credits in the fall, then about the same in the spring. All of these credits included that hideous fellowship and a compressed semester class in which the whole semester's worth of work takes place in the second half of the semester. I also developed 4 online classes, 2 in the fall and two in the spring. Throw in a medication change and a triple wisdom tooth extraction and you now understand the reasons that I broke down, went crazy and built a Peeps diorama.

I need the equivalent of a Peeps diorama, now!

You see, the summer semester starts today and I have 3 online classes to teach. I'm not required to teach these according to my contract, but I am the only history instructor at my campus who has been trained to teach online. My chair -- the other history instructor -- and one of the adjuncts are supposed to be training over the summer. The adjunct actually has more incentive since the training will make him more marketable and he gets paid for it.

This adjunct now knows that he gets paid for it because I made sure that he did. I made sure that he knows because I had found out that the distance learning department had not paid me for the training. They had failed to tell me that I would get paid for the training, and when I accidentally discovered that they were supposed to pay me, they told me that I had not submitted the proper paperwork before the training and that they couldn't pay me retroactively. I didn't submit the proper paperwork before the training because neither I nor my chair nor even my dean knew that there was paperwork to submit. The dean went to bat for this one, as well as the extra pay that I was supposed to receive for the four courses that I developed, and they agreed to pay part of it over the next year.

Getting back to the point of my whining: since I am the only instructor at our campus who has been trained to teach online, I am the only instructor who can teach online. Therefore, I must take all of the online classes for the summer. Originally, there were four online classes, but enrollments were so low for one that they folded it into the other section of the same class (thank goodness!). I'm also hoping that, once the students see the amount of work required of them, half of them will drop.

That's the problem with online classes: they require far more work of both the students and the teachers than the regular classes. Lots of people sign up to take an online classes because they think, as our administrative assistant so succinctly put it, online classes will "allow them to sit at their desk at work and earn credit for a class without actually doing anything." As one student put it an evaluation, "we had to write an essay every week, which was too much work! We are busy people and take online classes for a reason!" That reason would be, presumably, to get "life credit" and therefore not have to do as much work as in a regular class, much less the more work required of a class in a medium that naturally requires written communication. Some people think that online classes are all multiple choice tests taken at their leisure.

Sadly, many people who have not taught online classes seem to think the same thing. "Oh, but it's online," they tell me, "so it isn't as much work," or "you can work from home" or "you can go out of town on vacation and take your computer with you."

As a math instructor and I were discussing after one of those meetings last week, online teaching is much more work for the instructor because the stuff that you can do in class -- the stuff that lets you know the students are understanding the material -- must be done online and rigorously graded. Furthermore, whereas discussion in class takes place organically (once you get them talking), you actually have to force the students to interact online. In a regular classroom, you can ask probing questions in real time, which takes much less effort and time. Online, this is a constant process over a several days, taking up much more time and much more effort. This is a more rigorous educational process, and definitely requires much more work on writing; but the process requires extra attention to that rigor on the part of both the teacher and the student. In the summer, the three or four months of the regular semester must be compressed into five weeks. "Intense" does not begin to describe the workload of a single class, let alone three.

"Plus," the math instructor says, "while working at home is great, it also means that the work is always there." The work at home side is probably much more of a benefit for me than for him, since I am the sort of teacher who dresses "professionally" and the sort of female who considers pantyhose and make-up and done hair part of the uniform. He is more of a t-shirt with jeans and no makeup and wet ponytail sort of a teacher. Still, as he said, the work is always there, always lurking, like a ghost haunting your home, whispering "grade more! Grade now!" It's the opposite of the Amityville Horror's "get out! Get out!" In fact, you often find yourself wishing the Amityville ghost would take down the Online Teaching ghost.

As for the vacation suggestion, he and I just fell over laughing like two hysterical cartoon characters. Really! Isn't taking your work with you on vacation an oxymoron? Vacation, by it's very definition, is the OPPOSITE of work. That means that taking your computer with you so that you can grade your online classes while on vacation isn't actually a vacation. To which we both said, "Duh!"

When I ended up with the four -- then three -- online classes, I protested. My chair, who doesn't really understand the amount of work yet, but takes my word for it, went to our dean to ask if he could get someone from another campus to take some of the load off of me. The dean, however, refused. I'm not sure exactly why, but the refusal has something to do with either the possibility of the other campus getting the classes permanently because this will seem like we don't have the staff to accommodate those classes, or simply that the other campus would get the money for the class right now. In any case, the dean said that she would not authorize the use of an instructor from another campus, so I had to take one for the team and teach all three.

With no break between the spring and summer, with the sheer number of these already work-intensive classes, with no break between the end of these classes and the beginning of the NEH seminars, with no break between the seminars and "professional week" at the beginning of the fall semester, I don't get any sort of relief until Christmas.

All of this is to say, I'm a bit stressed out, unable to recharge, annoyed beyond reason by everything, pissy, grouchy as a green monster in a garbage can, and drained of all creativity.

I bitch here as a means to release some of the pressure and some of that creativity because, believe it or not, I know that these are good problems to have. Like I wrote at the beginning of this post, half of the faculty around me would love to have three summer classes. Heck, people in the unemployment lines would give anything to be bitching about too much work. I wish I could subcontract to them (off the record, of course, so they could still collect the unemployment payments)! Who knows? The way things sometimes work out, I could end up needing this extra pay to survive unemployment myself at some point in the future. Mine is a one year contract, after all.

This bitching is a very privileged sort of bitching, and I know from whence I speak. Three years ago exactly, I was making $15 an hour, was investigating bankruptcy, and plotting the rhythm and intersection of bill and paycheck cycles. Four years ago, I was making less and wasn't even sure if I was going to be employed for the summer, much less beyond. Five, six, seven and eight years ago, I was working on soft money with a boss who would allow summer funding disasters to happen in order to "rescue" me from them in an effort to earn my undying loyalty and affection (that backfired on him, and I still spit curses at the mention of his name).

I know that enforced, paid overtime in a union shop is not the worst of problems to have in a shrinking profession in an economy that may still be circling the toilet bowl. It is the best of problems to have short of "damn, I have to pay taxes on my lottery winnings!" I just wish I could have some breathing room to appreciate it! I need that rain out because, as Crash said earlier in Bull Durham, "this game is fun. Fun goddammit!"

The Semester Has Left the Building

Ah, yes! The semester has ended as of yesterday, just in time for the summer semester to begin on Tuesday (Monday if you teach online, but that gripe is coming).

The big blowout that concludes the semester involves a whole day of meetings. First, we have the big all-college meeting in a room that in no way accommodates the whole of the faculty, staff and various administrators. This meeting tends to go like this: "What a great semester this has been! We are so wonderful! Our students are wonderful! Our staff is wonderful! Our administrators are especially wonderful! Don't we have such wonderful administrators? And so many of them! Oh, and yes, the faculty are also good. This is such a wonderful place! We are all so wonderful! Here is our first wonderful speaker! Isn't he wonderful?" This goes on for about an hour and a half.

Yes, it's nice to hear we are wonderful. What else are they going to say? Still, after about an hour and a half of "wonderful," the word starts to lose its meaning. "Wonderful" means even less when the administration cut cost-of-living increases and travel money and froze all hiring while at the same time bringing in a 6-figure-charging consultant to talk to us in what one faculty member described as "glittering generalities" about "having discussions" and "catalytic conversations." This consultant went on at length about "having discussions" and "catalytic conversations" without actually allowing anyone at the college (other than the high-level administrators) to participate in said "discussions" and "catalytic conversations."

I wanted to know if anyone tried playing Bingo with these terms. Someone suggested a drinking game, but the Bingo game seems to be in the works for the consultant's next appearance.

This all went to explain the reason for high faculty turn-out at the next meeting. After a long, impassioned debate about switching to a +/- grading system (people were really up in arms about this!), and a dismissal of faculty appreciation awards ("oh, we are out of time, you know who they are!"), the first meeting ended and the union meeting convened. Yes, we are a union shop, and thank goodness for that! Being a union shop means that we have an advocated making sure that cost-of-living increases weren't all that we lost. After all, the administration had threatened pay cuts. Those 6-figure consultants don't pay for themselves, you know!

People were pissed at this meeting. I kept waiting for pounding chairs and chants for freedom or something dramatic. I forgot that this was an academic union, so what we got were calls for unspecified action accompanied by long-winded Zaprudering of what these unspecified actions should look like. Eventually, these unspecified actions came down to "vote of no confidence" on the one end and "write individual letters of protest to the Board of Trustees" on the other. The consensus was that a "no confidence vote" was an overreaction at this point and that individual letters of protest, all of which had to be signed, might be the better first step in airing greivances to those on high. Of course, everyone realized that the letter writing campaign would be limited to people who had been with the college long enough to have earned tenure (they phased out tenure over a decade ago), or who were on six-year contracts. Anyone on a 1 year contract (such as myself), could easily be "non-renewed" and replaced with an adjunct. Still, those who can are plowing ahead.

I bide my time, being as I am on that 1 year contract, am new, and am in an as yet indeterminate amount of trouble for the fellowship thing. At least I've found a female companion in strong language, who knows other females of strong language, most of whom have longer contracts than myself. We have to stick together, you know!

The union meeting ran over by 30 minutes, which seems to be part of the culture of that particular campus as much as a result of the passion expressed yesterday. Fortunately, I sat near the door, and my rather large consumption of water by that time of day meant that I could not wait a second longer before I stepped out to the ladies' room. That business taken care of, I noticed that the lunch (at least they feed us!) had been set up in the next room. I figured that I would pick up lunch and return to the meeting, since I would then have to run to the next meeting three buildings over; and, then, I would have to leave that meeting for yet another meeting.

See? I told you that yesterday was a fiesta of meetings.

Fortunately, the union meeting ended about that time, and most of the people at the following meeting were in the union. Of course, that meant that the following meeting started an hour late, by which time I had to leave for my 4th meeting of the day.

The fourth meeting had to do with the honors curriculum, in which we were approving proposals for honors sections. It's one of the two committees on which I have just agreed to sit. The other involves two of the women with strong language; but I agreed to sit on it before I knew that. Actually, I had to run for the seat, which I did after nominating myself (we all did). I nominated myself because the strong-language woman who sent out the call for nominees advertised the committee as "not scary" and as meeting on my campus on one afternoon each month. Afternoons? On our campus? Not the one an hour commute away? Sign me up!

At the first meeting of that committee, which took place in the wake of that fellowship ordeal, I quickly learned that our campus is known as the trouble-maker campus. Given that we are located in an area that has designated itself a "nuclear free zone," was often known as a "People's Republic," has a history that, during the Vietnam War, included a break-in at the draft office and an SDS house down the street, and a pooch as mayor of one of its better know trails -- well, you can see that we have a legacy to uphold!

Also during that first meeting, the other committee members were drafting a letter to the college president protesting certain events. The letter that they had written had been revised by the union president. As I read the revised letter, remembering that I had just been lectured about my "destructive" language, I thought, "man, this is harsh! They are going to have to tone it down." Oh, no. They thought the letter was grovelling and weak. My chair had also read it and had the same reaction. As they ripped apart the revised letter, and reworded it to be more precise and stronger, I shed a little tear. "I'm not alone!" I thought.

This other committee meeting yesterday went on forever, also running 30 minutes over, and it already had run for 2 hours at that point. Seriously, this is a feature of that campus! No only does the commute there and back take up to 2 extra hours out of the day, but then you can never know when the actual meeting will end.

In any case, the fascinating thing about this meeting was that it involved reading other people's syllabi. Instructors have to submit a syllabi for their proposed honors sections. Since the college loves multi-volume syllabi this was a lot of reading. Yet, in reading the syllabi, we get this unique insight into the problems other instructors have faced in their classrooms, particularly in regard to the classroom policies. The college has certain expected policies that we all must include in the syllabi, but every teacher adds to them, and this is where they create this record of past problems in their classes.

For instance, I have added an extensive list of items that are considered unacceptable speech in my classes. These all include racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual orientation slurs. I also include a rule against getting up in the middle of class to throw away trash that can wait until the end of class. I have rules about which door to enter and where to sit if students are late. I have extensive rules about e-mail, including subject lines (have one!), preferred e-mail accounts (the school's, so it doesn't go to the spam folder), signatures (have one, your name), indication of the course in which you are enrolled ("your history class" doesn't really help me) and so forth. I limit where student can sit because a class of 30 in a room with 100 seats means that everyone gravitates toward the back and sides. Yes, these all seem ridiculous and anal and controlling. Yet, they all indicate problems that I have had to the point of exasperation; and the attitude of the school is that, if it isn't specifically stated in the syllabus, then you cannot require it of the students.

In this committee meeting, we began to see the same frustrations and neurosis in other faculty. Many of these were things that we have all included. There were the admonishments on attendance and tardiness. "If you are more than 20 minutes late to the class, you will be counted absent," or the various combinations of the number of tardies that equal an absence, and the number of absences that lead to an F or a W. One instructor wrote, "the school allows two absences before you are dropped. That should be enough!" What incident, one wonders, prompted that language? Yet another forbid students from frequently exiting and re-entering the class. "More than three times in one class meeting equals an absence," wrote that instructor.

The syllabi also revealed a general distaste and often deep rage about cell phones, texting, and other electronic communication. One instructor would take away the device if used during class. Another would count the student absent. Yet another, whose class met in a computer lab, required students to turn off the computer screen when not in use. We were all taking notes on these points.

The writing instructors seemed to have the most interesting policies. One instructor required 3 inch discs for storage of all in-class writing. "Why 3 inch when computers these days don't come with 3 inch drives?" I asked. "Oh, I do that," said another committee member. "The classes meet in computer labs where they have 3 inch drives. That way, I know that they aren't copying something at home and trying to pass it off as theirs in class." Wow! Who knew? Although, I'm sure that the intrepid student would find a way around that because they aren't stupid.

Another writing instructor included a requirement that in class writing (presumably by hand) must be done in blue or black ink. "NO FANCY COLORED INK OR PAPER!" he admonished. This was followed by one that would endear him to Dr. No, "NO EXOTIC FONTS." You can imagine the scenario, after receiving one too many silver inked essays on light blue paper embossed with fuzzy kitty cats, after having yet another project masking its poor research with the Broadway font, he snapped. "Enough!" he shouted, and revised his syllabus.

Yet another instructor included the very odd stipulation, "only use small staples. I will not accept papers held together with large staples." Small versus large staples? Isn't there only one size? What was she talking about? Then I realized that perhaps she had received one too many papers fastened together by one of those industrial sized staples meant to hold together 50 or 100 pages, not the two or three of a freshman's essay. At least, that was the scenario that I imagined.
A creative writing instructor forbid pornographic stories. "I have to do that too," said the art instructor on our committee. "In photography, I have to ban explicitly sexual or graphically violent photos. Especially when we are working in the dark room and the whole class is there. These images suddenly appear and it upsets many of the students."

Being the historian, I began to wonder what future historians might make of these syllabi as documents of both the prescribed behavior in classrooms and the past behavior of students. Will they see the instructors as control freaks, dictating all behavior and limiting the creative expression of the students? Will they see the students as disengaged, irresponsible and lacking attention spans? Of course, there are many people out there right now of all political stripes who think both of these things, some sitting in the classrooms, some teaching the classrooms, some administering the schools, and some funding the schools. Yet, these people are, for the most part I am assuming, working from a weak body of evidence based primarily upon their experience and anecdotes from people that they know. In the future, historians look at the evidence that we now generate, having the benefit of a larger pool of documents over a larger geographical and temporal space. What will they see; and will they find any difference from their own time?

In any case, the meeting day finally ended at 5 pm, just in time for rush hour traffic. I killed a few more hours at the nearby Target and Barnes & Noble (yes, I'm going to hell), and finally got home at 7 pm, grateful that today, I don't actually have to go anywhere or do anything.

Then, I remembered that the summer session starts next week, and I have 3 online classes to teach, not by choice or contractual obligation, but because I am the only one trained to do so. So, I turned to yet another mantra, which I had been chanting to myself all day: "At least I have a job. At least I have a job. At least I have a job and its a pretty damn good job to have."

You Are Aware that I'm Not a Grown-up, Right?

I take the most recent communication with the coordinator from my previous posts to finish up this semester's saga of the Internal Fellowship Gone Awry, aka the Scapegoating of Clio, Her Poison Pen, and Her Big Destructive Mouth. (That feels like it should be punctuated with a growl. Arrr!)

The last meeting of the semester took place last week. Unlike earlier meetings, this one did not take place at a museum but at one of the other campuses of our college. I went in resolved to take Ani diFranco's advice to "smile pretty and watch your back," and to work on something more creative to distract myself from any desire to participate. As you may remember, I've been restricted from saying anything that hasn't been cleared through this coordinator.

As the meeting progressed, I didn't so much smile as smirk cynically as the meeting -- for me anyway -- moved from infuriating to downright comic, leaving me feeling as if I was sitting at the Mad Hatter's tea party.

The other fellows voiced the exact same concerns about the program as I had, and made the exact same suggestions -- some almost word-for-word. The main concerns had to do with the fact that we all came into the fellowship with the expectation that we would learn some new pedagogical tools, that we would hear curators talk about social justice issues in their exhibits or museums, and that we would get tours of the exhibits or museums. As I've mentioned before, this was not the overall experience of the fellowship, and people pointed this out. They also gave suggestions for changes that might meet these expectations.

In response, we received the same lines, as if the coordinator were reading a script. The curators can't always take the time for the tours, so if we want to see more of the museum we have to come back on our own time. The curators aren't experts in social justice, so we can't expect them to speak to social justice issues in the exhibit. The curators aren't educators, so they can't give us any pedagogical assistance.

Well, then, what was the whole point of the fellowship?

Worse, the coordinator said it was our responsibility to address the social justice and pedagogical issues. Well, we did, and the curators were completely unprepared and unable to answer our questions. One fellow actually called a curator to interview him about social justice in relations his museum (and it was a museum dedicated to native people), and he not only needed to get back to her to answer her questions, but when he did, he still couldn't speak to them. What was going on there? Maybe they are all dealing with the culture wars, but couldn't they even talk about that?

All of our suggestions were dismissed in such a way that they essentially said we were at fault for having our expectations, and in a way that led me to believe that the museum side really does not see this fellowship as the advertised "partnership." You see, all of our suggestions meant that the museums would have to do some adjusting to meet our program's need. The museums have no intention of adjusting. So, the tactic is to turn on the fellows and tell them that they are at fault for the unmet expectations.

For the future, the coordinators decided to add an addendum at the beginning of the fellowship that refutes all expectations for the fellowship. I interpret this statement as saying, "Yeah, we know you all signed up for this because of the theme and because you want to learn more about the theme and how to use the museums in your lessons, but we aren't going to deliver that. So, if you want any of those expectations met, then it's up to you to meet them on your own time."

Again, what's the point of the whole program, then?

We next moved on to the whole electronic communication and blog issue in order to "come up with" ground rules for the future. At this point, all but two of the fellows had come to me and told me they didn't understand what the problem had been. Moreover, as the discussion progressed, once again, everyone else said the exact same things that I had, and sometimes in more confrontational "tones."

In the discussion, the man who had publicly come to my defense, took a look at the rules that were presented to use (not created by us, as implied, but to which we were allowed to veto or expand). "All of these focus on the writer or speaker," he said. "We should also have something addressing the listener. Especially in written language, things can be taken different ways. I could write something one way, but someone takes it another."

I mouthed "thank you" to him. The coordinator, on the other hand, said that the entire responsibility for language rested upon the writer and that the writer should ensure that any reader will take the written word in the intended way.

My jaw dropped. Would she feel the same way if I went up to her and told her that I found her to be patronizing toward me? Heck, she even told me that I was wrong in my reaction to some of the curators' presentations. That I needed to understand their intention. That isn't exactly following her view that the speaker has the entire responsibility for meaning. What world is she living in? On top of that, she did not see that discussions emerge from misunderstandings, and that those discussions help both sides clarify the ideas being expressed or examined.

Of course, I've encountered this attitude before -- the one that places the entire burden of communication upon the speaker. Haven't we all? It's a technique of control, and this woman seems to have some real control issues.

Well, she was in the complete minority. Everyone in the room agreed with the man who pointed this out. A statement went into these ground rules that the audience should assume the best intentions of the speaker or writer.

Still, as I looked over the rules, every one had the same phrases that she used in her confrontation of me. Yet, no one thought that I had violated any. Furthermore, if any had been violated, we can presume that it was the listener rule -- and that wasn't me doing the violating.

So, I just sat back, shook my head, and thought, "Fall is going to be a long semester." I also thought, "At least I don't have to deal with any of this between the minute I walk out the door today and the minute I walk into it in September."

You know that's not the end.

I just received an e-mail from the coordinator reminding me to adjust my fall schedule to accommodate our meetings. This was not a general reminder for all of the fellows. It was a pointed message to me that would have just been friendly except that she added that she had already contacted my chair to make sure that he was aware of the situation.

Like I'm not able to do that myself. Like I wouldn't do that myself. Like I'm five, and she has to check up on me to make sure that I'm behaving. She seems to need to control everything. Can she not control herself?

Meanwhile, suffice to say, this program and specifically this woman have worked my last nerve down to a frayed little thread. I'm doing my best to hang on to that last little bit because if I snap, the only person who is going to suffer is me. I focus on the image of water rolling off of a duck's back to keep myself focused.

In fact, that should be my mantra: Water off a duck's back. That, along with "smile pretty and watch your back" and "Moscow Rules." My unholy trinity: "the smile, the rules, and the water off a duck's back."

(Video has the F-word, so you be the judge of where to play it)

Hi, My Name Is Clio and I am an Enabler

I think I got it from my dad, but that's a matter for analysis.

In this case, I enable cheating. In this particular case, there were two approved courses of action, but I don't think that I took the better of two.

This has to do with the two sets of cheaters in a previous post. I contacted all four and got four responses that all fit together. That is, the two who wrote original papers all said that they had loaned their papers to other students to use as examples; and the two who copied papers admitted that they had "borrowed" from the first two. There are a few more details, but they are not particularly important here.

This should be clear cut, right? Two people copied, word for word, from two other people. You don't find a better example of the definition of cheating than that. Flunk them and turn them in to higher powers.

Instead, I give them a second chance, explaining that what they did was wrong and that I could turn them into higher powers. Maybe they don't turn in the second chance paper, thereby earning a 0, maybe they do. In either case, I'm not really dealing with the cheating in a way that demonstrated true consequences.

Now, I can guess what you are thinking -- some of you have expressed it quite succinctly! My initial reation was the same: What a pair of entitled brats! Do they think I am that stupid? I must confess that, had these two students been the sort who rarely show up, turn in half-assed assignments when they bother to turn them in at all, and general let you know that they really don't respect you or what you do, I would have taken great schadenfreude in sending them to the (interim) Dean of Students.

These two, however, don't act like disrespectful, entitled brats. They show up to every class, they take notes, they do moderately well on quizzes (yes, I give quizzes -- they are the enticement to read the book and engender good study habits), and for all appearances are making an effort to do well in the class.

Additionally, the type of cheating that these two did -- well, who does that type of cheating after 5th grade? Sure, you have students who copy from student is other or previous classes, students who copy from the internet, and students who copy from books. In other words, most students who cheat at least make some effort to cover their tracks. They don't copy, word-for-word, from a classmate's paper.

So, what is the deal here?

The students who wrote the original papers are native English speakers. They are as comfortable with the language as your average college freshman. The students who copied are not native-English speakers. As evidenced in their in-class assignments and previous assignments, their writing skills in English are quite weak. This alone would have tipped me off if they had attempted to cover their copying through other methods (except I wouldn't have been able to prove anything there, which is a situation that I have encountered in other instances).

Given their poor English writing skills, given their general desire to do well, given that I had marked up their previous writing assignments in an effort to help them with their writing skills -- given all of this, I think what the did was panic. In their panic, they just copied, hoping that I wouldn't notice, or hoping that I would assume that they worked with the other student as a group, or just trying to buy some time before they were caught. I think they thought that they might get away with it because I encourage them all to study in groups. I think they did not comprehend the part in which I said, "but you must turn in your own work."

Then I became both suspicious and curious. At our school, you have to pass a test on basic written English before you can take even the most basic of composition classes. If you don't pass, you have to take classes until you can. Then, you have to have taken a semester of freshman composition before you can take my class. I've seen the instructors of those classes at work. They are tough. They take no crap, and ride their students hard. Heck, I might not do so well in their classes!

The quality of the in-class writing and earlier writing, however, made me wonder how these students got through those classes. "Every now and then one slips through," said my chair, who himself is also an American English Language instructor.

"Yeah," I thought. "I understand that; but how do they slip through?"

Forgive me for thinking this. Based on this case and a few others that raised my antennae but which I couldn't prove, I started to wonder if some students who understand the material, but know their limitations at this point in their acquisition of English, compensate by copying or plagiarizing or otherwise cheating. They have the ability to do well in school; the language is the main barrier to the good grades that lead to graduation or transfer that ultimately lead to better job prospects, upward mobility and all of the things that people go to college to attain.

Still, copying doesn't solve the basic problem that these students seem to face. First of all, it doesn't improve their command of English which comes from the practice of writing. Second, in copying, they don't really engage in the process of the assignment, and therefore genuinely demonstrate their ability to understand the material.

To punish them by initiating academic dishonesty proceedings is fair, but somehow not quite right a response. My response wasn't particularly effective either. On the one hand, they get the consequence of a 0 if they don't redo the assignment and they get the practice of writing if they do. On the other, they could easily see this as a narrow escape and continue to do the same thing in the future.

I talked to my chair about this. Again, he is an ESL instructor, so has some sensitivity to the language problems facing immigrants. He hasn't had so blatant an example of cheating as this, but he did understand the ways that non-native English speakers work their way through both the language and this end-of-the-semester panic. He approved of my solution, as I wrote. He also told me that he has his students turn in any big writing assignments at mid-term, and refers any problems to the writing center at that point. They can turn in the revised assignment at the final. That's a good idea; but I've done some of that, and still this.

I think what I want is to send them back to those basic English classes so that they can get a better command of the language and then do better in the rest of their courses; but you can't make them re-take classes that they've already passed, no matter how much they seem to need it.

As I work my way through this by writing it, I'm seeing that they were still in the wrong. I did refer the students to the writing center. They did go. They know the rules. I can be as understanding about the language issue and the desire to perform well as possible, but they still copied from someone else.

In giving them that second chance -- which will be the last that I give -- I'm not sure that I did anyone any favors except maybe the administrators that would have to deal with the issue as it moved up the hierarchy. If those administrators want to give the students second chances, I don't have a problem with that. Right now, I'm feeling a little culpable in something vaguely fraudulent, all because I really just wanted to be understanding and nice. Understanding isn't really a problem, but "nice" is.

The evils of "nice" are a subject for another post.

(By the way, I feel like a complete Ugly American shouting "learn English if you are going to live here" in writing this, but that's not what I mean. In this case, the problem lies between the acquisition of English and the attempt to perform well in school, with my job being to ensure that they do both.)

Losing Wisdom

As my last post and Twitter stream might indicate, I'm in a nasty mood. Normally, I'm happy at this time of year, anticipating warmer weather and a slight break. Not so much this year.

One of the things aggravating my mood is this freaky pain in my face. I feel as if I've taking a mean right hook to my jaw. I wake up in the morning oddly aware of the bones in my face, which is a sensation much like the one of hearing nails on a chalkboard. You don't really think of your skeleton on a regular basis, so when it hurts, especially in a place so central to your identity and so close to your brain, you become slightly alarmed.

This is not anything abnormal. It's just the side effect of the wisdom teeth extraction. When I last mentioned this procedure in my comments, everything had gone fine. Since I don't teach on Fridays and Mondays (nice work if you can get it!), I scheduled the procedure for a Friday morning. That way, I would have the whole weekend to recover.

Actually, I planned to recover by Saturday and spend the rest of the time blithely floating in a Vicodin haze as I watched the first season of Lost on DVD. What do they say about "the best laid plans"?

You are probably wondering what made me think that I would be recovered within 24 hours. Well, when I made the appointment, I asked the receptionist how long recovery usually takes. "Oh, a couple of days," she said. Now, my guts responded, "she's kidding, right?" But instead of heeding that skeptical voice, I decided that I liked the receptionist's voice better.

That's probably a fourth rule for girls: listen to your gut, not what you want to hear. Your gut is more likely to be in tune with reality.

On that Friday morning, I went in, entirely unsure of what to expect. They gave me oxygen first, which I inhaled with deep deep breaths. I did this because I once dated a respiratory therapist who told me how oxygen will clear out your sinuses and help with congestion. He was right; and, I felt better in some subtle, inexplicable way, like my cells had all been clean. Maybe it was just psychosomatic?

Then they turned on the happy gas. "Tell me when you feel anything different," the dentist said. "Are you feeling anything now?"

"Nah," I responded; but inhaled deeply, deeply, deeply.

I felt my cheeks twitch. "Heh," I thought. "It really is laughing gas."

I snorted. "Hee!" I thought, "I'm laughing on laughing gas."

I giggled. "Hey, look at me!" I thought, "I'm laughing at myself laughing on laughing gas!"

You can see how the loop progressed. This was exactly how I thought smoking pot would be, but wasn't. Pot just made me stupid, and aware of the stupidity. This was fantastic!

"Tell me if I'm hurting you," the dentist said.

"Ah heh," I said.

Actually, "said" isn't quite the precise term since is suggests actual power of speech, which I did not have both because my mouth was propped open with a gigantic syringe sticking in my gums, and because I'm not certain if I could form actual words in my state of bliss.

Normally, I scream like a little baby at the mere mention of needles. I only want them around me if they are going to leave something pretty behind, like a tattoo or an earring, and even that is becoming less appealing as I age. This dentist stuck me four time and I was so blissed out that, while I registered the pain, I couldn't have cared less about it.

Then, he began pushing on my tooth in the upper right side of my mouth. I waited for something dramatic, like a huge crack. Instead, he pushed and pushed, then a little tug.

"That's one," he said.

"Nnng ahh?" I hummed. "Nnnnahh!"


He had already begun pushing on the opposite, upper side.

"That's two," he said.

Somewhere in the still sober recesses of my mind, I realized that this was all going rather quickly. "Shit!" I thought. "This is going to be over in a few minutes and he's going to cut off the gas. Quick! Breathe deeper! Save some in your lungs!"

By now, he had started on the lower, left tooth. This one was larger than the others. It came in on my 30th birthday. I'm not sure that has any significance, but I thought it bore mentioning. The one on the other side had come in when I took the comprehensive exams for my PhD. I can't remember when the third came in, but it was sometime after my 30th birthday one.

Anyway, he was pushing on the lower one and it didn't want to come out. "More gas!" my happy brain thought, not because the dentist was hurting me, but because that part of my brain was quickly becoming a gashound. The sober part of my brain, however, was worried. The jawbone felt so fragile against the dentist's pressure. "What if the bone breaks?" my sober brain thought, presenting a slide show of skulls missing jaws, jaws hanging like second mouth joints, jaws crumbling like china inside the flesh. "Do I want to be present for this? How do I get out of this body?"

Then, the dentist tugged and the tooth came out.

"Ah, relief," thought my sober brain.

"Damn, there goes the gas," thought my happy brain.

Sure enough, the nurse shoved gauze into my mouth and shut off the gas.

They didn't let me take the teeth with me. These days, extracted teeth fall into the category of "medical waste." I really wanted to turn them into jewelry. Seriously! I thought a pair of earrings and a pendant made of my wisdom teeth would be really cool.

Instead, I took a picture:
TMI?

The blood is a nice, nasty touch, as are the rotting spots on the big one. That's the one from the lower jaw and the one that led me into this whole procedure. One day I'll freak out my nephews with this picture and thereby become the Coolest Aunt. That, or considering some of their other relatives, the Most Boring.*

All went well for the rest of the day. The most bizarre part was the residual Novocaine, which didn't so much numb half of my mouth as make it disappear. I envisioned a black hole drilled into the lower half of my face. It just wasn't there. When all of the drugs began to wear off, I began popping Vicodin like House.

I exaggerate. I only took two Vicodin, which gave me a nice, dreamless sleep.

The next day, I woke up feeling no pain but about a fuzzy as a teddy bear. I wandered around my apartment for the rest of the day with no ability to concentrate. I remembered that, back in middle school, the stoners were all called "gells" (I have no idea why). That's what I felt like, gell.

Big gaps opened up in my thinking, too. Normally I have what other people call "brain farts," but I envision as a synapse that doesn't quite make the leap from one cell to the next. I have them quite often, actually, and sometimes another thought will helpfully jump in, totally forgetting that it is the wrong thought for the occasion. That is me on a regular day, so you can imagine on the vestiges of prescription painkillers. I would just stop in the middle of a sentence and phase out.

The haze stuck around in bits until Wednesday. In the meantime, I began to feel the need to pop pills like House, without exaggeration. Soreness I would understand. Sharp pointed pain I would have understood, too. This was like a loud bass line caught in the tiny space of my cheek and jawbone, except that it wasn't sound, it was pain. A glowing, low, deep pain. I ran through the remainder of my prescription ibuprofen, and half a bottle of over the counter ibuprofen. The Vicodin was mighty appealing, but I had to have my wits somewhat about me to get through my classes. The best solution that I could find was to suck on a Q-tip soaked in Anbesol.

The Anbesol also served to cover the rank cloud that had become my breath. Apparently gaping wounds don't smell so nice.

My follow-up visit was the next Friday. "Am I supposed to still be in this much pain," I gasped.

He took a look. "Ah, dry sockets," he said, and which you all had probably guessed by now. I considered that possibility, but thought that a dry socket would feel more like that needle of electricity that comes with hitting a nerve. I was sure that this was some infection eating away at the bones, and envisioned a future in a burka to hide my hideous, malformed face that would of course lack half of a skull. The dry socket diagnosis came as a big relief.

The dentist packed one of the sockets with some sort of putty, which promptly popped out and would not go back by the end of the day. Turing to that research tool of great medical scholars, Google, I learned about the miracles of clove oil. Small children were in danger of being run over as I blindly dashed to the CVS for the Toothache Kit.

The Toothache Kit comes with a tiny bottle of clove oil, some curved tweezers, and a little box of tiny cotton balls. You dip the cotton balls in the oil and cram them into the gaping holes in your gums. The excess oil will burn the hell out of the rest of your mouth, but that excruciating pain of exposed bone goes away for several hours. Ahhhhhh!

Yesterday, I went back for the final follow up. He says I'm healing and told me not to pack the socket any longer because that will keep them from closing up. As soon as they close up, the pain will go away. I confess that I've packed them overnight because, damn! bone deep pain in your face doesn't help with sleep. Nor do the bizarre fantasies of the hole going up to your brain, or infected and deteriorating bone, or bugs crawling into the sockets, or whatever freaky shit my subconscious digs up from the fragments of horror movies, X-Files episodes, and surgical film that I've seen over the years. I also pack them for an hour or so when the pain flares up. Bone deep pain doesn't help with grading either.

Meanwhile, anyone who lives with chronic pain has my complete sympathy. I don't know how they do it. Many people might say that you learn to live with it, but I doubt it. Pain is pain, and it is distracting to the point of obsession and depressing in the clinical sense.

Now, I have to go get my clove oil fix because I can feel my cheekbone from the inside.

*It will take a lot to compete with the aunt who had a cute butterfly tattoo on her pelvis until she became pregnant. Now half of it is still cute,but the other half is striped with stretch marks and resembles a comic stretched out on Silly Putty.

How Stupid Do They Think I Am?

I try not to be suspicious. I try to think the best of my student. I generally like all of them.

Then, there are the exceptions.

Two sets of students turned in the same exact assignments as each other. That is, I have two different papers, each handed in two times, with four different authors. The real punchline here is that a significant chunk of the paper had to do with opinion and personal experience.

Another student, from a team taught class last semester, wants a retroactive W because he received an F. He gave no reason and told me that the other professor said it was o.k.

Do the first four (or at least two of the first four) think that I won't notice the exact same paper being turned in? Does the last student not think I will consult the other professor?

We won't get into the five or ten who come to me begging for deadline extensions because, as they reveal in their excuses, their other classes and their jobs and their family and their whatever else are all more important than my class. Or the one who came to me a month after the mid-term to ask "when is the mid-term?"

I just want to shriek in frustration! These are the times when I feel profoundly disrespected.

Actually, I want to create some kind of film or program that goes something to the effect of this:

Student says: "I have work, and paper in other classes, and I have to take care of x,y, and z."

Student probably means: "I'm really busy, I've done all I can to manage my time and still must come to you to ask for some consideration."

Teacher hears: "Your class is unimportant to me, you should accept that, and give me what I'm asking for."

Teacher knows: "You and every other student at this school, and not a few of the faculty and staff."

Meanwhile, I have to deal with 2-4 cheaters. I will do what I usually do, which is to allow them to be contrite and give them the opportunity to re-do the paper. Which means that I will have to grade up to the very last minute before grades are due. As for the other guy, I'll know what to do when the other instructor gets back to me. She has even more stress than I, being chair of the English and AELP sections.

This is the worst time of the semester -- so close, and yet so far from relief, wishing I could find the backbone to be a coldhearted bitch, yet not having the energy to be one, and wondering if I'm just spinning my wheels for nine months out of the year. It's a hazard of the profession.

The World in the Classroom

Do you remember that scene in A Fish Called Wanda in which John Cleese's character explains how difficult being British can be, always afraid that he might ask someone about their parents only to find out that they had died that morning, or inquire about the children only to learn they had burned in a fire the week before? That's me.

I don't tend to ask people about their lives, not because I'm not interested -- I usually am fascinated by other people's experiences (I gravitate toward biography in my own professional interests, for goodness sake!) -- but because I'm paranoid that I will ask the precise question that will trigger PTSD in someone. Silly, I know, but there it is.

Many of my colleagues want their students to draw upon their personal experiences and share those with the class. I tend to shy away from this both because of my neurosis, but also because this likelihood of PTSD is quite high.

I feel this especially in my world history class. This class usually has the highest number of international students of all of my courses, and many of these students come from places that you have seen on the news. Darfur, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, Guatemala, and so forth. Many are refugees. One of my collegues told me about a student who exhibited disabilities of such a nature that, put together her country of origin and her age, made him wonder what hell she had been through. Another of my collegues herself fled civil war.

Finding out that one of your students had been a sex slave or a child soldier or witnessed a massacre of their family is not too far outside of the realm of possibility. I'm afraid to scratch the surface because I am afraid of drawing blood unintentionally. Whatever their lives have been, for good or bad, those stories are theirs to tell when they want to tell them. They aren't my business unless they want to make them my business.

Last week, a student told me his. He came to me asking about our textbook. "Who is this guy?" he asked of the author. "Does he know anything?"

"What makes you ask?" I wanted to know.

"Well, I don't like the things he said about Africa," the student told me. "He gets a lot of it wrong, like my country."

This student is from Rwanda. If you are American or western, and don't know much about Africa, you probably know one thing about Rwanda, and it isn't pretty. He lived through that as a child. He told me more, too, but I don't want to tell his story for him here except to say that he told me that he could not celebrate his birthday, which fell during the period of those events, or talk about his life until he was older. Then, he said, he told his story and attained acceptance. I asked him to write a critique of that part of the text, for extra credit and for my own education. He willingly complied. He has a desire to tell the truth of what he witnessed, even if this offends other people.

This student is part of a group of friends in my class. They are so delightful in that they are just so young and goofy and full of life. They come from different parts of Africa, either recently or as children. They tease one another mercilessly, as boys do; and, while I know they are doing so in jest and affection, I do have to call them off of one another sometimes because they go too far for my comfort and, potentially, others in the class. I have forbid teasing the Nigerian about internet scams, for instance.

At the risk of writing about Africa like a typical, ignorant westerner -- no, to completely write like a typical, ignorant westerner, because that is what I am -- I am amazed by these young people. Amazed and humbled. "Who am I to stand up here and teach them about Africa and the world," I think, "when they have lived it?" (Teaching outside of anything resembling your area of expertise is one of the hazards of community college work.)

I don't know their lives. I don't want to pry; but they do bring me this information, and I overhear it in their conversations with one another. I hear their pride in their background, and I occasionally glimpse what that background has included. I also see their resilience. I want to know more, but, again, who am I? I let them tell me their stories when they feel comfortable, if at all. I won't demand that they share. This isn't therapy.

At the same time, I think their experiences and points of view are of vital importance in studying history. Sure, we can talk with certainty about the Holocaust, and rationally debunk the deniers; but what about recent events? These students' lives are part of the process of understanding history, and that process is raw and personal.

There is so much for me to read and to learn about the rest of the world, especially about Africa and the Caribbean (in fact, I feel a deep responsibility as a teacher and as a human to visit both places -- and not for the resorts). I'm of the old school of teaching, in which the teacher does, in fact, know more about the subject than the students. So standing before a class with patchy knowlege makes me feel like a fraud. Knowing that my students have lived some of the subject, makes me feel like giving up. It seems an awesome arrogance to teach them about their own lives.

Yet, my ignorance begins to guide me toward a way to approach this. As basic as this sounds, I am learning to begin with an issue. Human rights, civil war, western views of their homeland. I must create the skeleton of a subject, and let them flesh it out with the questions and animate it with the answers. This is tricky because I need a destination, and haven't quite learned where that destination should lie (the "outcomes" are so vague as to be useless in this regard -- which is actually good, but not useful).

This is a weird journey into new territory, and terrifying for me. Yet, at every step, I stumble upon the things that make the students curious. They are cynical as all hell, but they are also idealistic. They want to know more about the terror out there in the world, the evils of humanity, but not because they are ghouls. They are trying to understand "why....?" and "how...?" This is what perks them up when we get to the Holocaust. This is what make them actually wake up and lean forward during a film about the International Criminal Court.

Here's What Happened Next

I backslid.

Yes, I stayed in the fellowship. I stayed because I began to realize that me staying meant more to the coordinator than me going meant to me.

The coordinator and I were scheduled to meet on Wednesday because, as she put it, "it's really important that we meet about this." That meant the first half of the week was spent obsessing and ranting and obsessing and weighing the pros and cons and obsessing just a little bit more for good measure -- which you all witnessed. After much consultation with the comments in my earlier posts, much commenting in the comments, reading and re-reading supportive e-mails from my fellow fellows, and a visit with my analyst (I'm so Woody Allen in the '70s), I came to the conclusion that the more politic decision would be to stay and the more healthy decision would be to go.

Don't you hate when those two are at odds?

Right up until about two minutes before our meeting on Wednesday, I knew that I really really wanted to quit. I could survive staying; but every fiber of my being wanted to quit. I mean every fiber down to my bones. Then, I got her message.

She couldn't make our meeting because of a sick child, so she left a message on my voice mail at work. "It's really really important that we meet about this," she repeated, including the repeated "really." "We need to discuss the obligations and responsibilities of committing to the fellowship, and the consequences of leaving it."

Reasonable enough; but five days after I quit, and now she wants to discuss obligations, responsibilities, and consequences?

She didn't outline the consequences. I have no idea what they might be. I have no idea if she has any power to make these consequences happen. "Consequences" has an unknown value. Another unknown value is the extent of provincialism at this college. This could be one of those places where someone could win a Nobel Peace Prize but still be shot at home because they were part of the wrong faction in local politics. This provincialism could also be different from campus to campus, administrator to administrator, and person to person. Experience made me choose to err on the side of caution.

I may not have known the extent of "consequences" or levels of provincialism, but I did know that she was willing to pursue them in order to keep me in this fellowship. You see, she had a problem, and that problem was willing to go away quietly while also taking the blame upon itself; but she still seemed willing to pursue consequences for that quietly retreating, self-blaming problem.

In other words, this meant so much more to her than it did to me.

I was going to lose whether I stayed or left. Heck, I had already lost. I just had to gauge the level of damage, to decide which was less of a loss. Staying was less of a loss.

Then, things got weird.

I told her that I would stay, and she went back to her "opportunity for growth" and "learning to use the appropriate language in the appropriate setting" talking points. Seriously, she used the same phrases and same tactics as she had in our other conversations.

"Look," I said to her, "I cannot promise to change as much as you need me to, in the amount of time that you need me to. I cannot promise results."

This distressed her. "Can you at least promise to try really really hard?" she asked, almost begging.

"This is how I am and this is how I've always been," I said. "I can promise to try, but I still can't promise results."

At that point, she said that I should go to her with any problems that I have before I mention them to anyone else. She would then determine if those problems could be discussed openly, and she would determine the language that I could use in discussing them. She would also helpfully send me links to professional development courses on expression in professional and online environments. I am not making this up, and I'm not exaggerating (I don't think!).

You would think that I would become incensed. That I would perhaps want to demonstrate just how "unprofessional" and "inappropriate" and "strong" my language could become if I put my mind to it. That I would want to show her that she hadn't seen anything yet. That I would become tempted to exhibit my considerable skills in profanity since I was being condemned for my language anyway. That I would hang up on her, or inform her that some "other people" might consider her plan an infringement on free speech or classify it as censorship. You would think.

Instead, I laughed. Not out loud, but to myself.

Then, I felt myself split, and half of myself rise up, turn around and look at the other half. That floating half said, "promise her anything, it doesn't matter."

"Promise to bring her all of your problems," I told myself. "Promise to turn to her for guidance in expression. Promise to change. Promise the desired results. Promise her whatever she wants. Then, do what you are going to do."

"What you are going to do is not invest yourself," I told myself. "You are going to show up for the seminars. You are going to do your project and make your presentation. You are going to grin and nod and fly under the radar. You are going to have the appearance of having no problems because you won't have any. You won't invest yourself any more than necessary."

"Let her believe that you have no problems," I told myself. "Let her believe that you are reformed. Let her think that she was the cause of the reform. Let her be proud of you because you are a testament to her managerial skills.

"This all matters to her, so let her think she has it," I told myself. "None of it matters to you, so save your energy and put it elsewhere."

That's what I told myself, and I laughed.

I kept laughing, too, when later that evening one of the other fellows caught up on his e-mail, read my apology, and issued his own statement. He defended my right to an opinion and pointed out the hypocrisy of a seminar about social justice refusing to hear criticism from one of its participants. He had nothing to gain from this, and could easily have been lumped with me as a "trouble maker." I was humbled at his support.

The coordinator went into high panic. No sooner had I read his message than hers dropped into my inbox. She had to reassure everyone that I was not leaving, the fellowship program was not threatened (quite a different tale than she told me), and that we should all remember who might be listening when we aired our opinions in an online forum or hit "rely all" to an e-mail. She noted that she had excluded administrators from her own message.

I about fell out of my chair laughing at that point.

Still, I approached the next meeting of the fellowship with some trepidation. Five people had shown me support, one of those publicly. That left nine more (I think I mistakenly numbered the fellows at 25 before) who could potentially be the ones whom I had insulted, disrespected, and intimidated.

I don't think I have been so popular in my life. Before the seminar began, the others came up to me, asking, "what happened? What did you say? Who complained?" I began to wonder if they thought I had called someone a stupid motherfucker to their face because they all clearly expected a juicy story. "That's all?" they asked, a bit disappointed, when I told them that they had read it all.

At my last count, over half of the fellows had approached me either in person on in e-mail to say that they had no problem with what I said, that they had agreed with me in some, if not all points, and that they thought my comments had contributed to the conversation, not destroyed it. One is a good friend of my chair, and she talked with him about the situation. He came to me today and told me that he was supportive.

So, wow! Who knew?

We have another meeting on Thursday, at which we are supposed to create the "ground rules" for the wiki that will replace the blog/discussion board that I had allegedly abused and defiled. I'm not sure what will happen or what I will discover.

Meanwhile, I have had to re-learn for the fifty-billionth time that a woman can be liked or she can speak with authority, she usually can't do both. I want to devote another blog post to this subject. For the moment, I will say that I was raised to be liked. That is, I was raised to ensure that everyone liked me at all times, which meant that most of my own desires, opinions, sense of self and self-preservation all had to be set aside in order to make people like me. That hollows a person out. Yet, I must sometimes speak with authority. I sometimes can't help but speak with authority, but I don't trust that in myself. In fact, I fear it. When those two impulses conflict -- to speak with authority and to try to be liked -- I become disturbed.

I have also had reinforced my theory that high school is actually a very good training ground for life because so many people continue to behave as if they are in high school for decades after graduation.

Finally -- for now -- I am amazed at how many people have been through similar or worse and more blatant experiences and how this has engendered sympathy in so many. I feel sympathy in return. I hate that so many people have had to go through this type of crap to recognize it, but I'm glad that they recognize it and rebel rather than accept it and willingly comply.

There is probably more to wring out of this, but not right now. This is enough for the moment.