Writing Maternity

looking for an antidote

A colleague of mine at another institution said that this semester she really wants to buy one of those "Whack the Mole" games for her Writing Center -- because she feels as though that's precisely what she's been doing this semester: whacking the mole back down one hole only to have him reappear out of another.

I'm feeling much the same: utterly battered by the overload, both the foreseeable and the unforeseeable.  We all talk periodically about how the urgent overtakes the important, and this is part of the problem.  Another part of the problem is that -- particularly this week -- I'm surrounded by a particular set of problems that I utterly failed to foresee, and feel a bit more like personal betrayals.  I'm trying to get things in perspective -- it's all so very little about me, after all -- but I'm also trying not to let the generally pervasive whinyness produce further whining on my part.

For that reason, and because for the first time in quite a while I just don't want to deal with 80% of what the week is bringing, I'm copying my weekend journal from my family blog here.  Because that isn't whining, and I'm quite afraid that otherwise that's all I have to offer.

Happy Fall!

There's essentially nothing to report about yesterday because it was such a blissfully empty day.  We barely even ran errands -- although in some ways that's a bad thing, since it meant we didn't eat much of last week's market produce.  Tricksy was healthy again (after running a fever for the second half of the week -- see below), and all was generally right with the world.  In the evening, G took Squiss to a friend's barbeque while I stayed home with Trix and caught up on the paper-grading that had gone by the wayside, but even that felt relatively calm: while I'll never choose to spend a Saturday night commenting on student work, I don't get much time alone in the house.

Today, we woke up to one unexpected burp: Tricksy's broken out in a rash.  Given both the timing (two days after the otherwise symptomless fever) and the look of the rash itself, we confidently diagnosed roseola and started talking to her earnestly about how many kids get rid of the rash in 24 hours.  (Squiss had rosela at 10 months, and her rash lasted several days.  Roseola isn't actually contagious even once the fever's broken out, but I'm betting daycare won't want to take her back tomorrow with her trunk all covered in spots.)

But the rash itself didn't seem to phase either Squiss in 2004 or Tricksy today, so we continued with our plans.  The big project was also a long-awaited one.  We took a day trip down to Gold Mine, USA, which we'd heard about both as a cute and pie-filled place to go, and as an excellent destination for apple-picking.  Our New England blood (particularly mine) hankers intensely for apples come fall, and so this seemed like a great excuse to start our plan of Getting Out and About the Area more. We're far too locked into the local area, with the decent but paltry excuse of being busy.

Gold Mine is really too far for a day trip with two kids, at just over 2 hours away.  But much of the drive is beautiful and the girls were certainly both troopers.  We walked around the cute and kitschy town for a bit, had a completely respectable lunch at one of the many cafes, and sampled both the traditional apple pie and an apple-boysenberry crumb.  (Both were good.  G. asserts that the crust had nothing on mine, but I actually think that the traditional apple's crust was a good bit like mine when it's crumbly -- as he likes it -- rather than flaky.  But this month's Cook's offers a revision of their piecrust recipe, which has been my stand-by for ages, that includes vodka.  This I have to try.)

Squiss liked the pie a good bit.  Tricksy seemed to prefer the ice cream that came without being ordered on top.

After that we went to the gold mine that has given Gold Mine its name, in part because they give tours.  We ended up going through with a troop of Boy Scouts, which was a little odd.  Squiss really enjoyed panning for gold, but got a bit freaked out once we were underground, and temporarily lost it when she had to climb a ladder by herself.[1]  Once back out in the sunshine, she was hot for the apples that were the original goal, so we picked ourselves many pounds of Jonathans and Golden Delicious (the Pippins were either underripe or rotten and the Empires and Fujis didn't interest us as much).

And then we came home.  Given the dinner-time naps in the car, bedtime was an unsurprising battle in both cases.

The day overall was lovely and warm, which meant that it felt a good bit like Indian Summer, and hence just right for apple-picking.  We had cider with lunch, and our one regret from the day is that we didn't pick up a gallon to bring home.  Best of all, G and I felt as though we'd gotten really, really far away; travelling with kids is never precisely relaxing, but the day itself felt like a genuine break from routine.

[1] We had a really interesting conversation about fear and bravery at bedtime, actually.  We'd just read a story -- her choice, and she knows it well -- about a boy who is afraid of a teacher-disguised-as-a-monster one year, but realizes the following year that it's just pretend, and so isn't afraid anymore.  I asked her, after we'd finished, if she thought that she might not be afraid in the gold mine if we went back next year.  She said she'd still be afraid of it.  Then I asked if, sometime soon, she wanted to think about watching one of the movies that she rejected a few months ago because there were scary characters in them.  "No," was again the quick and definite response.  "Hmm," I said.  "You don't really like being scared, do you?"  "No," replied Squiss.  "Because I'm a girl."  I couldn't let that one go, so we talked about it for a couple of moments.  Then we got onto bravery, and how she'd actually been brave to go up the ladder in the mine by herself, even though she was frightened.  "But I didn't have a smile on my face," she said.  "That's okay," I replied.  "It's brave to do something that scares you even if you're crying while you do it."

another teaching question

How do you handle difficult students in class?  I'm thinking, specifically, of students who are jerks to one another rather than jerks to the professor.

ways of reading

At the end of class this morning, I found myself mulling over this question:

why do students read so literally? and, how do we train them out of it?

I'm teaching a literary-studies-based first-year seminar on fairy tales alongside the English thesis seminar this semester, so I'm seeing the two ends of the education at this school and in this department.  By no means all or most of the first-year students will major in English (perhaps paradoxically, I'd feel like a bit of a failure if they did), but they're acting like English students in this class because it's very much an introductory level course in literary analysis, in addition to being (primarily) a course about learning how to craft college-level arguments.

We were talking about the Grimms' "Hansel and Gretel" (the 1857 version) and "The Juniper Tree."  (Both are stories about children and cannibalism, which may be why Maria Tatar groups them in the same section of Classic Fairy Tales despite the fact that they have different Aarne-Thompson classifications -- 326A and 720, respectively.)  "H&G" in the Grimms' version ends with one of the best non sequiturs ever: "My fairy tale is done.  See the mouse run.  Whoever catches it can make a great big fur hat out of it." [1]

We talked idly for a moment about the simple oddity of this conclusion.  Then, a student connected this reference to a mouse to the witch's first lines: "Nibble, nibble, is it a mouse? / Who's that nibbling at my house?"  Well, if the children are mice to the witch, I mused, there's a strange way that this epilogual nursery rhyme aligns us with the witch -- since we're now thinking about catching and skinning the mouse.

What struck me in the ensuing conversation was how literally they tried to work out this possibility, with a kind of one-to-one correspondence.  They were clearly humoring me, in part, and it's always a bit disconcerting to watch students do that.  But it was curious that, when they put on their "I"m in an English class" hats, that kind of symbolic analysis was what came out.  I called them on it, gently, and we moved through that point to other things.

I'd already been thinking about posing this question here -- how do we teach students to move beyond that kind of analysis? -- when I came across something in my reading for tomorrow's thesis seminar that felt like a soothing antidote, from Jonathan Z. Smith's essay "The Devil in Mr. Jones."  I'm quoting a series of excerpts, because they offer a model for unpacking complexity that repeatedly offers and then steers us away from simple, and somewhat literal, parallels:

"In this essay I would like to suggest two models, one quite old, one relatively new, which may illuminate aspects of the White Night of Jonestown.  They are necessarily partial.  They are far from being final proposals.  But they are a beginning at an enterprise of looking at Jonestown rather than staring or looking away.  [Miller's writing in 1982.]  We will have to continue this enterprise.  . . . "

"I suggest no simply parallels.  There are profound differences between Dionysiac cults and Peoples Temple Christian Church.  Yet the spatial considerations that I have advanced from the one, supply some instances of familiarity when we seek to understand the other. . . . By reading Jonestown in light of the Bacchae and Euripides in light of Jonestown, we can begin to understand its utopian logic.  We can begin to find Jonestown familiar. ..."

Smith repeats this logic in his analysis of the parallels between cargo cults and Jonestown, as well, marking similar assumptions or logics in the two and then deliberately and explicitly backing away from drawing direct correspondences.  He insists, carefully and responsibly yet with absolute clarity, that his analysis is only and can only be partial: he can illuminate what has been otherwise left unintelligible (and an important component of his argument is the urgency and importance of doing so).

I'll be talking about this with the thesis students tomorrow, and writing here has served, in part, to get my thoughts in order about what to draw their attention to.  But my question about the first-year students persists: how do we teach them to be comfortable with partial but thorough explanations, with resonances rather than literal correspondences, perhaps even with metaphor rather than analogy?

In other words, how do we help them grow up?


[1] Bettelheim touches on this passage in his essay on "H&G" in The Uses of Enchantment, but suggests (rather oddly, to my mind) that it provides evidence that "[n]othing has changed by the end of 'Hansel and Gretel' but inner attitudes."

[Note, Friday morning: For some reason I misremembered Smith's last name as Miller when I first posted this.  I've corrected that error now.]

speaking of cultural shifts

In my reply to Kabbalina below, I mention needing a drastic cultural shift in how teachers (and teaching as a profession) are/is perceived if we truly want our educational system to be meritocratic.  While I'm thinking about cultural shifts (and how to make them happen), I'm going to take a moment to crow about one that I've helped to make happen:

My institution now has a Writing Center.  Not only that, but in the space of two years we've gone from really-just-about-no-culture-of-peer-tutoring-in-writing to what looks like the beginnings of a substantial one.

My evidence?  Numbers.  Since the Writing Center opened on Sept. 11, counting through this Thursday (the 27th), we will have run at a 90% efficiency rate.  In other words, out of 78 possible consultations with the tutors, all but 8 have been booked.  Last year, out of the first 80 possible consultations of the semester, only 22 were booked.  (That's a 28% efficiency rate.)

This is creating new nightmare scenarios in my mind, in which students give up on the Writing Center because you can't get an appointment unless you book a week in advance -- which would mean that we wouldn't be serving some of the last-minute writers who need this kind of service this most.  But overall this is huge.  It's happening far sooner than I'd anticipated or even hoped.

I'll take some of the credit.  But most really goes to the tutors themselves who are -- as I've already bragged endlessly -- really just outstanding.

fairness by chance

Jerome Karabel takes on the fiction of the meritocracy in higher education in today's NYT.

I'm not sure that his idea is a bad one.

new pacing, new projects (of a sort)

The immediate crisis that I referred to last week has past, but there are radiating effects of that crisis that will change the tenor of my semester pretty drastically.  As a result of someone quitting (let's call a spade a spade), I'm having to resume responsibilities that I'd thought safely delegated.  Because I was going to be able to delegate certain things, however, I made a commitment to my own department that I can't back out of.  As a result, a number of things are being reshuffled, and I'm having to simply say "no" to a number of others.  It's been interesting to say "no" loudly and clearly and unashamedly.  I'm much more used --when thrown an unexpected wrinkle -- to simply juggling with more difficulty than usual but trying to continue to keep the seams from showing.  But there are strategic and political reasons to make it clear that I can't do the work of more than one person right now, and so this has both been a week of more work than I can wrap my mind around in retrospect and a week of reneging on the small numbers of things that I can renege on.

The new pacing is that my work week now seems to include no slow moments.  It never included many during the semester, and this week was (admittedly) particularly bad, because I was also reading drafts and meeting with the students in the first-year seminar.  While this week felt like a time when the difficulty of that adjustment could show, I feel as though my new task is to figure out/remember how to move at that pace without the strain showing.  We'll see.

Most of the projects on my desk aren't new, but something came up at the end of the week that is usefully and helpfully going to force me to keep working on my book during the semester.  I hadn't anticipated that even before the world came crashing down around me, and it feels both exhausting and useful that I'm going to have to keep this ball in the air.  I'm not sure how I'm going to do that, yet.  I've been trying to see silver linings, this week, and there are several.  (Not least of which is how clearly this crisis makes it that my job is no longer -- if it ever was -- a one-woman job.)  But the urgency of keeping this project going is a big boon, even if it's going to mean (even) less sleep for the next couple of weeks.

ahem

Students, who are not currently in a class you are teaching (or otherwise in a group that has a direct and evident claim on your time), should not fail to show up for an appointment that they requested out of the blue and without explanation.

I probably don't even need that modifying clause, but it does make it particularly egregious.

generalizing

There's an interesting conversation going on about academic discourse, and specifically the voice with which academics write.  Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted writes about it here; he's responding in part to what Henry Farrell has written at Crooked Timber. The point at which those two intersect is really about cliche and generalizations, especially the latter.  I'm reading some Bruno Bettelheim for class tomorrow, and he -- like many psychoanalytic critics, to toss in an over-generalization of my own -- is quite prone to making assertions as though he has evidence to back them up.

It's one of my biggest challenges as a teacher, more generally: to get students to understand the difference in their own writing between generalizations and nuanced claims from the evidence.  They can often identify them in the writing of others, but have difficulty pruning them out of their own.   

One of my closest friends in graduate school had the reverse problem: rigorously trained as a close reader during her undergrad years at Yale, she had a terrible time writing her dissertation because it always seemed to require claims that were larger and grander than she was comfortable making on the basis of the texts she'd read.  Her advisor finally chastized her with what is possibly my favorite piece of criticism ever: "You have far too much integrity."

well, wouldn't you know

I've just learned that a difficult and hectic semester is about to get more difficult and hectic than I'd anticipated in highly specific and quanitifiable ways, ways that directly pertain to someone else not following through on a commitment.  I've already spent at least a day, and am about to spend at least a day more, figuring out how to deal with this and putting contingency plans into effect.

Given that, it seemed like the right moment to do the career matchmaker thingy that's floating around.  Good thing I wasn't taking things as a sign I should leave the profession . . .

1. Professor
2. Foreign Service Officer
3. Foreign Language Instructor
4. Sport Psychology Consultant
5. ESL teacher
6. Humanitarian Aid Worker
7. Lobbyist
8. Rehabilitation Counselor
9. Computer Trainer
10. Criminologist

Interestingly enough, G's former career -- corporate lawyer -- turned up as my 40th possibility (out of 40).

If you're curious, the link is above.  Username: nycareers; password: landmark.  And hat tip to Mrs. Coulter.

taking stock

It's been a week of minor and major crises, many of which are unbloggable, most of which are not yet resolved.  The good news is that all of these crises are work-related: G and the girls are great, and home is feeling respectably haven-like, except for the fact that email follows me there, not to mention the chaos in my head that keeps me from slamming the mental door shut when I walk out of the office or shut the computer.

And I'm in the office, albeit with the door shut, on Rosh Hashanah, thanks in no small part to these crises.  So I'm going to take stock of the work-related things that are making me happy this week:

• Teaching.  My students are great.  Zombie is working out well, and I'm (still) deeply happy to be in the classroom, thinking about teaching, preparing for class, and the rest  of it.  Even when (as yesterday morning) I'm panicked for the two hours that I spend preparing because I'm pretty much unprepared.  Even then.
• The Writing Center tutors.  Several, in particular, are rising to various occasions with ease, energy, and aplomb.  This is particularly good, because one of the current crises in particular means that I'm going to have to ask even more of them.
• I was asked to serve on an outside review team for another institution.  This is a huge honor.  When they asked, I wanted to write them back and ask if they were sure, and if they realized that I'm essentially still wet behind the ears.  I didn't.  I wrote back and accepted, with pleasure.
• With the help of a colleague, I've figured out how to address one of the earlier-in-the-week conundrums.  It's going to be no small amount of work, but it's work so absolutely worth it, and so essential to what I hope to do here in the long and short term, that it's good to know what the first step is.  I came out of a meeting earlier in the week feeling fairly hopeless and alone in this endeavor.  Not only did her advice make me feel less so, it will help me quite directly be less so.
• Students, more generally.  This is akin to my post on Wednesday about my thesis student.  There have been a number of other students -- Writing Center tutors, thesis students, advisees -- in and out of my office this week asking advice, having me help them think some knotty issues through.  Because I teach fewer students than most, this kind of traffic has been relatively slow in building for me.  It's a nice energy to have in my life (even if it's also crazy-making, at times, because it takes time).
• Finally, I'm doing the writing center orientation on Sunday.  That's also crazy-making (I'm working all of Sunday), but it's the biggest, energy- and confidence-building event that I do with the tutors, and I love it in many ways.  It launches us into the semester, and it's a great feeling to be the slingshot that gives them that energy.