Fall Semester 2012: Rolling Right Along

Posted on October 14, 2012 | 5 comments

Earlier I reported that Fall 2012 was not excellent, but of course, that was PARTLY tongue-in-cheek. I am happy to report that Fall Semester 2012, while still not technically averaging out to excellent in every category, is rolling right along.

1. Bag Saga
Last January I got the brilliant idea that if I bought a different bag for each class, it would help me stay organized. The official “resting spot” for the stuff for each class would be a bag, rather than a stack on my desk. (I love stacks, but they aren’t particularly useful in staying organized, at least not for me.) I figured if a bag got too heavy, that’s how I would know it was time to file.

(I have a play in which a character loses an entire set of essays in what he calls his PIO bag–Put It Off. When the bag gets too heavy, he knows it’s time to deal with what’s inside. That’s when he finds the missing set of papers, which he had lied about to his students. It’s just now occurred to me to make the connection between what I decided to do in January and Freddy. Hm.)

This bag plan worked beautifully UNTIL I hurt my shoulder while swimming. My physical therapist said at one point, “You don’t carry really heavy bags, do you?” “Um, well….” So I went back to the Bargain Nook III, where I’d bought two of the class-bags, and promptly purchased three rolling backpacks. They were heavily discounted already, and I lucked out and bought them on a day when their tags were the right color for that day’s discount–I think I paid $10 each, and these are solid Lands End bags.

The compartmentalizing continues apace. It’s working well. O.k., so, I look even more like an absolute dork as I walk across campus, but really–it’s a matter of degree. My rolling backpacks did not turn me into a dork, or even tip the scales significantly toward dorkiness. They’re just highly visible badges I’d earned long ago.

Plus, my shoulder feels great, and I’m working my way back up to the number of laps I was doing last spring when I got hurt.

2. Current Numbers
I like to report periodically how promptly I’m returning student work. Doing all right on that score, not great, but all right. I reconfigured the numbers to include D2L/online quizzes. I’ve done a lot of work to put quizzes on D2L, largely to ensure fast feedback to students. As soon as they submit their quiz, they can see what they got right and what they got wrong. Then I make sure to evaluate the scores within a day of when the quiz closed, and I report to them on whether or not I needed to adjust the scores at all. Last year, I didn’t include this in the overall numbers, but I am this year. Just because it’s not the traditional mode–collect a paper quiz, ask my student worker to score the multiple choice part, return them to students–it does still count. Then I’m keeping a separate number–how long is it taking me to return ENG 102 papers? How long to return longer writing assignments in general?

So…not where I’d like to be with the longer writing assignments. Part of that came from having a paper assignment rather than having it on D2L. I finished grading a set of Early American Lit in-class-essays on a Friday, but I wasn’t scheduled to see them until Monday, and then I took a sick day. If it had been a D2L/Drop Box assignment, the # of days would have been 9. But since I didn’t return all of them (they did have the opportunity to pick them up from me on that Friday) until Wednesday, 14 days seemed more accurate. Also note–because of budget cuts, faculty at UW-Richland don’t have a “faculty secretary” any more, so I couldn’t ask anyone to go in my office, snag the essays, and have them at the office for students to pick up. I suppose this is one way technology makes budget cuts less onerous–D2L, when I use it, is kind of my faculty secretary….

But what makes me happy is that the numbers are better than they were last spring–both in overall numbers, and in terms of where I was in Week 6 last spring. Rolling right along!

3. Dramatic Re-enactment
I mentioned that I called in sick–there are approximately sixteen hundred viruses flying around campus already, some of them stomach-related. I’ve had multiple reports of students being sick–they use colorful language to describe this less often than you would think, being college students–and then I even had an eyewitness encounter. One of my poor students got sick on his way out the door with the trash can. I told him I’d brought my camera this past Friday in case he wanted to do a dramatic re-enactment, but he said no, that he never wanted to do that again in any way. But it looked something like this:

But this student is better now, and will be caught up on Monday when he participates in peer editing. He is the kind of student who is absolutely cool enough to weather that kind of incident and end up having a good semester.

4. Impressive Student #2

Next time you find yourself wondering about, or complaining about “kids these days,” first of all, that makes you sound old, and second of all, consider this young woman. She is about to head home for ankle surgery, and her doctor is MAKING her stay at home for a few days, because everyone knows she won’t stay off her foot if she’s back in the dorms. She is my advisee, and has been meeting with me regularly to make sure the surgery doesn’t derail her semester. In my head, surgery means “good excuse to turn things in late.” For her, it means “can I do all my assignments and take all my exams EARLY?” And that’s just what she’s done. I’m looking forward to hearing from her (“or it might be my mother emailing you right at first,” she said) next week about how the surgery went, and then I’m sure we’ll have a meeting to go over her midterm grades, which will be terrific.

5. Random shots of impressive students

6. If my student working is no longer scoring multiple choice quizzes, then what….

In addition to the regular Xeroxing, shredding, and data entry, my wonderful student worker Rhiannon is now organizing my books according to the Library of Congress protocol. It looks messy, sure, but that’s not really unusual for my office, and the long-term payoff will mean that I can actually find a book in my bookcase without scanning all the books, two or three times, before I decide I must have taken it home, only to find, no, it’s in the bookcase at work after all.

7. Wouldn’t it be great if it had occurred to me to finish this post with a picture of a Rolling Rock beer?

Oh! If only I’d thought of it. But this particular shot is a Friday early-evening moment–some of us went out after work. I was sampling the new Leinenkugel Big Eddy. Not bad.

8. In the end, if you work with good people, it’s all worthwhile.

If you know anything at all about UW-Richland, you know who this is, and you know how hard he works, and how much UW-Richland’s success has depended on him over the years. You also know he’s retiring relatively soonish (so he says–we’ll see if it actually ever happens), so I thought I’d grab a shot of him at his desk.

I asked him to do something rude for the camera, but he wouldn’t. I guess I’ll have to try again another time.

9.Rolling Right Along
Keeping track of my work hours this semester, I’m averaging 40+, even having taken 1.5 sick days. I’m a little concerned about the number of hours I’ve logged working on Sundays–I actually think it’s important to TAKE A FREAKING DAY OFF ALREADY. So it’s a little ironic I’m posting a work-related blog on a Sunday. I promise I’ll stop thinking about work right quick, once this is up.

We’re in midterms now, and once I’ve posted midterm grades (taking this opportunity to remind myself they’re due 10/26 by noon), I’ll ask students to let me know (via anonymous internet surveys) how the semester is going. I’ll do a post after that, with updated numbers as well. And hopefully I’ll still be saying that things are rolling right along.

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Posted in Burnout, Creativity, Procrastination, Teaching, Work Life

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Genius Loci: the Sh*tty Barn

Posted on September 26, 2012 | 1 comment

Some time-traveling incarnation of Ma Rainey possessed by Brian Eno,
serving the cooked and the raw, together, straight up—
that’s the guiding spirit of the Sh*tty Barn.

Here’s what we got going in Spring Green, Wisconsin right now: the nights are colder, the leaves are changing, a lot of the architects are heading to Arizona next week, but there are 10 days left of up-the-hill shows at APT, three and half more weeks at the Touchstone, and a full month of Sh*tty Barn sessions left to go. I can still pretend it’s summer, at least for a while.

Bessie Smith sang, “I hate to see that evening sun go down” in “St. Louis Blues.” I would sing, “I hate to see the Autumn Equinox.” Dark and getting darker, that’s where we are, so I rely on these local portkeys to take me somewhere else–somewhere midterms and winter aren’t on the way.

I can’t tell you how special the Sh*tty Barn is to me. Nowhere else did it make sense to perform something that I didn’t even know what to call. Not a poetry reading. Not a verse play. So what was it, in the end?

A special night, or, as one of my students told me today, “It was dope.” One terrific director, David Daniel, took a big schmear of narrative poems and shaped them into a narrative that worked on stage.

David working with Nate.

Three terrific actors–how lucky am I? Terrific venue, grants from the Spring Green Area Arts Coalition and the Sauk County Good Idea Grants program, all benefits of this wonderful place. The poet Honor Moore said Spring Green seemed to have some kind of special vortex going on–or maybe I said that and she agreed–in any case, this is a special place, with special people here for a good long while, or just a brief passing through. (You can see David, Sarah, and Nate a few more times yet this season at APT.)

Here’s Sarah Day, as Elizabeth, a character I wrote with her in mind–she’s reading from a book of poems called Speakeasy Love Hard:

Sarah reacting to Nate singing.

Here’s Ashleigh LaThrop as May, who is certainly the guiding spirit of Speakeasy Love Hard, but I think May’s also secretly the poet of it all:

Ashleigh’s sweet smile.

Here’s Nate Burger, just absolutely nailing a poem after the intermission. It’s called “Mobius Strip of a Man.” Did I mention he nailed it? He just nailed it.

Nate reading “Mobius Strip of a Man.”

Also on the list of my luckiness–being married to a man who can take such fantastic pictures.

After they’d finished Speakeasy Love Hard, Sarah asked if it was all right. “You’re scowling,” she said. I hope I conveyed sufficiently how wonderful it was (IT WAS WONDERFUL), that the look on my face is how I look when my mind is blown. Do playwrights ever get used to hearing their words come out of the mouths of amazing actors?

I feel as though a nuclear reaction has gone off in Gashouse Love, the play that needed Speakeasy Love Hard. No wonder the look on my face was intense, and not just blissed out (though I was feeling the bliss just as much). I have a lot of processing to do.

Will I be lucky enough to work more with these people in this place?

So grateful to the universe that it happened this one time. It was dope.

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Speakeasy Love Hard: The Interview

Posted on September 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

I recently sat down with myself to ask myself some questions about the September 24th performance of Speakeasy Love Hard @ the Shitty Barn in Spring Green. We enjoyed some mocha latte in the busy dining room of our Spring Green home, as little Lego men tried to corral Jurassic Park dinosaurs and our crazy cat chased pipe cleaners.

Tell us about Speakeasy Love Hard .

Sexy. Funny. Poetry.

That’s what I’ve been saying, and that just about covers it, but in more specific terms, I’ve worked with David Daniel to come up with a lightly-, slightly-staged version of some of my narrative poetry.

The main feature is based around a set of poems called Speakeasy Love Hard, which take place in the 1920s. A young woman leaves home, makes a friend, meets a veteran of WWI, falls in love—experiences all the wildness of Prohibition St. Louis. There’s a little baseball, too—I have a poem called “Urban Shocker.”

Sarah Day and Nate Burger and possibly another mystery woman will be the performers for Speakeasy Love Hard.

After half-time, Nate Burger will be reading some other poems, also sexy, also shocking. David Daniel might even get in on the fun.

Shocking? Could you give us an example?

Well, sure—some general warnings—there’s profanity here and there, and what the ratings board would call sexual situations. No actual nudity though. That I know of. But definitely for mature audiences only.

This one’s called “Ballad of the Bad Man.” It’s sort of mildly shocking.

You take me down to the wrong side of town
At night you do, you know it.
For you, baby, I’d swallow the moon.
All that dark, and us glowing.

My whole life I’ve hated morning.
A sunny day can slay you.
The only thing between me and you
Is hours. I’m pretty good at waiting.

Report for duty at midnight, sir.
We get one shift of happiness.
Every joke and drink is work
To get us started. Make it last.

We both wake up from bad dreams at 3:00.
You hit me once without seeing
Who it was you hit.
I was crying before I felt it.

You take me down to the bad side of town.
At night you do, you know it.
I go down without a fight.
Wherever you want me, I’m going.

So, other than the appeal of a life of illicit lust, what would you say the message of the piece is?

Well, as I told Mr. Daniel, I don’t actually think too much about the message. I figure if I’m doing my job focusing on the music of the language and the flesh-and-bloodness of the characters, the message will just come out on its own.

But once he asked me that, I started thinking about it, and I think my work centers on these four things:

You have to laugh.
You could always have sex.
You rail at God.
You make it through.
(Repeat as needed.)

The poster is pretty hot. Could you talk a little about that?

I’m so lucky to be married to a multi-talented man! Nath Dresser is a singer songwriter—he performed recently at the Shitty Barn at a celebration of Townes Van Zandt. But he’s also a talented photographer, and he designed the poster. When he showed me the image, I just about swooned.

Have you worked with David Daniel or Sarah Day or Nate Burger before?

David was the director last year for my 10-minute play for 24-7 here in Spring Green. On the first read-through he said, “You’re insane,” but I assumed he meant that in the nicest possible way. I’d written a verse play overnight, with three sonnets and two sea-chanteys that had to be cut back for the performance. He did an admirable job shepherding my terrific actors through my insanity, so I thought he’d be good to work with again.

Sarah Day inspires me, generally and consistently and greatly, but she’s also done me the honor of reading my play drafts, and she’s done several dinner-table readings of them, and she participated in a reading/workshop at UW-Richland, of a play which is now called Second Blessing.

I think Sarah and David are phenomenal—I can’t really say enough about how thrilled I am to work with them again.

I haven’t worked with Nate before, but I’ve seen his work at APT, and I know he loves poetry, so I’m excited to get to work with him.

What’s your Bacon Number?

I think four, if writers count (and they might not). Because Randall Duk Kim’s number is two, so Sarah Day’s number is three (or hers might be higher—I’ll have to ask), so if writers count (and, again, they probably don’t), mine is four.

Everybody’s too busy and everybody’s broke. Why should anyone fork out $7 and three hours for Speakeasy Love Hard?

Great question. First of all, the actors are terrific. You know how people say they’d pay to hear certain actors read from the phone book? Well, these poems are at least as good as a phone book. Second, the Shitty Barn. I’ve never not had a good time at the Shitty Barn.

And finally, how many golf balls can you fit in a 747?

I have no idea. But 7:47 was when I was supposed to leave for school when I was grade school. I was a latch-key kid, so I was in charge of getting myself to school on time. Knowing me, 7:47 is not when I left. It’s probably just when I thought, “I’m supposed to leave now.”

All righty then. Anything else you want people to know?

Nope—just hope to see everyone on Monday, September 24, at 7:30 at the Shitty Barn! Buy your tickets in advance if you don’t want to wait in line!

Updates and information are available at
https://marniere.wordpress.com/speakeasy-love-hard-the-shitty-barn/

Tickets can be purchased at the door or in advance at
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/275278

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The Heart of the Farm

Posted on September 14, 2012 | Leave a comment

for Joy

The woman, the wife, of course, could be the heart,

The husband could, or the children, doing their part

To keep machinery humming—the chore machine,

The pet machine, the house-barn-garden machine.

They grow up fast on farms, those children do.

Maybe the heart of the farm is the land. It’s true

Each generation adds their hard-earned sweat

To the soil, but it’s the land sustaining it.

I think the heart of the farm is made of wood,

Or maybe metal and enamel, handed down

When someone in the family could buy new

Or someone died. The kitchen table holds

Conversations, accounts payable, and food–

It’s so alive it almost makes a sound.

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Posted in Opdyke, Poetry, Uncategorized, Work Life

Fall Semester 2012: Already Not Excellent

Posted on September 4, 2012 | 7 comments

I say this somewhat ironically–really, it’s too early to tell, especially since none of my classes meet until tomorrow.

But I decided to make up a “First Day of the Semester Rubric” as a way to introduce the concept of rubrics to students, and to begin talking about expectations (mine for me, theirs for me, mine for them, theirs for themselves, ours for the universe in general).

first-day rubric

And this is how the semester is already not excellent–I don’t have the full semester schedule for all my classes ready yet, and it won’t be ready for all of them by tomorrow.

But I do have a lot done, and, as per the rubric, I anticipate showing up early and being enthusiastic and focused for each of my four classes tomorrow.  I’ll report back and let you know how it went!

In the meantime, I’m relatively fired up and kinda sorta ready to go.

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Professor is “Person of Interest” in Crime Against Civility

Posted on August 25, 2012 | 4 comments

My contract starts up again on Monday, and one of the things I’ll be working on before classes start is Xeroxing my yellow and red warning cards–if anyone’s late to class one time, it’s an automatic yellow card, no matter the reason. Late a second time? Red card.

Once you get a red card, you have two options: go talk to our Student Services Director, so he can either kick some serious ass, or do some problem solving. Option #2 means you go to our Roadrunner Café Lunch Ladies and you do

WHATEVER THEY TELL YOU TO.

You don’t get to come back to class until you have the signature from one of those folks.

The policy applies to me as much as my students, and it’s kept me on time, as much as it has my students. (Before motherhood, I swear I was NEVER late to class. But the last 7.5 years, I’ve felt so scrambled for time that I’m always thinking I can get just one more thing done before I walk over to class….)

Sure, it’s a little juvenile, which one of my consistently-tardy students complained, immediately, loudly, last fall when I introduced the cards. But, as another student said to him, “So get to class on time.”

What I like about this policy is that #1, it worked. #2, it was silly enough to bring some lightness to the subject. #3, it was so clear-cut that there wasn’t much fussing about it when someone was late. I think the idea began germinating when one of my colleagues said he has a cardboard box at the front of the room and anyone who was late had to bring a donation for the food pantry the next class period. I liked that, but then there’s a box to deal with, and worrying about students stealing ramen when I wasn’t looking. Warning cards seemed easier, and sillier. (And as we always used to say at Lake Benton Baptist Camp, soccer players have the best legs.)

All the best advice about handling classroom incivility involves making expectations clear and enforcing rules consistently.

The red card/yellow card (in addition to now implying that I perhaps watched more than three minutes of the Summer Olympics) allows me to be clear and consistent.

Do I wish, as a college professor, that I didn’t have to do anything like this, ever?

Sure. But if wishes were horses, I’d find them alarming and probably be allergic to them.

Part of what helps me love my job is that I try to teach the students I have, not the students I wish I had. And honestly? If I had the students I wish I had, I’d probably miss the ones I have now.

If I get out of teaching anytime soon, it won’t be because of my students.

We’ve seemed to have waves of tardiness at UW-Richland in the 20 years I’ve been there. Some semesters it’s an issue, most semesters not.

But I try not to blame students for this, not after I’ve made my expectations clear. I teach at a two-year campus, so I’m getting a lot of 18- and 19-year-old hooligan-wannabes, and my thinking is that they are JUST NOW absolutely responsible for themselves.

I’ve explored the issue of civility in the classroom a number of times in workshops that I facilitated, and that workshop is now available online, at the UW Colleges Virtual Teaching and Learning Center. It’s a narrated power point, and you can watch/listen any time you want, should you want to.

I try to emphasize the notion that if things are going badly in the classroom, it is, first and foremost, the professor’s job to figure out why. It behooves us, frankly, to look at ourselves as a “person of interest” in the case of crimes against civility.

These workshops have worked best in groups where faculty, staff, and students were present—otherwise, it’s too easy for one group to complain about the others. In groups with a cross-section, too, it becomes clear that there isn’t one right way to handle any of this. I would never say, for example, that everyone, or even anyone other than me, should use red warning cards as a way to curb tardiness. It works for me; it’s up to us to find what works for us.

I’m genuinely fond of students, and that comes across pretty consistently, but I’m still guilty of what they’d list as “bad professor behavior” sometimes–being too disorganized. It’s a relative thing, of course. I’m way more organized than some of my peers, and I’m not joking at all when I say I think there’s a lot of undiagnosed ADHD in academia.

But I’m more organized all the time, and one of the BIG crimes against civility I’ve been guilty of over the years–taking too long to return student work–is REMARKABLY improved (which is why I keep remarking on it–a fair number of the posts in my blog on procrastination have to do with this issue).

In fact, the fact that you can access a perfectly lovely version of the narrated power point on the VTLC site is proof I’m more organized. I offered to narrate it last spring so Jennifer Heinert, the current director of the VTLC, could make it part of an online workshop. I didn’t know at the time, but if you use a Mac to narrate a power point, the narration is likely to just cut out. Randomly. I didn’t have time to fix it last spring, but since Jennifer was getting good feedback on “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Civility and Responsibility in the Classroom,” I wanted to make it right, and I told her I’d fix it over the summer.

It took several tries of narrating test power points on the Mac before I finally Googled the issue and found out it was mostly the Mac. Then I had to line up a mic for my office PC. Then I had to copy/paste each slide into a new document, because the mix of ppt/pptx in the old one was making the whole thing freeze up in places.

So it wasn’t perfect last spring, in terms of content, and it’s still not. I wish it were even more of a scholarly project—hope someone else can move it in a more rigorous SoTL/Scholarship of Teaching and Learning direction. It was absolutely FLAWED last spring in terms of execution. Still, it did some good, and now it’s fired up and ready to go for the fall semester.

Thus, even though I do not technically, typically score high in conscientiousness self-assessments, I am capable of doggedly finishing a project.

In this case, it’s because I have immense respect for Jennifer Heinert, and the original UWC VTLC Director, Nancy Chick, and I’m thrilled to be a part of what is a really valuable resource for us in the UW Colleges (and elsewhere—it’s online! It’s free! It’s pretty-much open access! It might be a MOOC!)

But I was also determined to make it work better because civility in the classroom is so important, and if I can do anything to spark conversations that make civility more common, I’m on it.

[The original title of this blog was “Kids These Days,” but I changed it. Even ironically, I didn’t like adding to that chorus. It’s not that I think my students always behave in lovely ways. They don’t, and I call them on it. But “kids these days” not only makes me sound old and crabby even when I insist I’m trying to make a joke about it, it’s not “these days.” I was very squirrelly as a first-year college student, and that was nearly 35 years ago. I was so squirrelly that my son would probably rate it as “Volume A.”]

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On Conscientiousness

Posted on August 20, 2012 | 5 comments

It smells like cider, my ongoing, lifelong lack
Of industry. We’ve lived here twelve years now,
this summer becoming for us a massive wreck
of good intentions rotting on the ground.

I was so happy when we bought this house,
With its fulsome, near-truck-garden and fruit trees.
But year by year I’ve scaled back. It turns out
I can’t work full-time and be a mom and weed.

Or maybe I just can’t keep up with everything
I wish I could. Unnecessary further proof
I am not Robert Frost: apple-picking
Exhausts me before I ever start. The ruin

of this apple harvest shames me, and yet—
a mess like this taught ancient humans to ferment.

I am now caught up with apple-mucking (cleaning up the rotten apples on the ground under our apple tree), and we did harvest enough to make some apple sauce. But there’s still a faint smell of cider in our backyard, and I’m sure the yellow jackets are still on the prowl. Now they can focus more on the rotten apples hanging high up in the tree, which I can no longer reach, because the apple-picking tool for high branches broke last year. It was modeled on one my Granma Roane used for her cherry tree–a broom handle with an empty tin can attached to the end.

I’m campaigning for a massive pruning of this tree this fall. It’s tall enough it could conceivably be a problem for the phone lines that run through it. Also, it’s too big for an orchard tree, and although we don’t have an orchard, we do have a plum tree and an asparagus bed, and some years I have an actual vegetable garden, so I need this tree to be manageable. Here’s what I’d like—a much smaller tree that I feel good about taking good, organic-gardener care of. I’d like to learn more about apple maggots and whatnot, so that our next harvest will yield fewer BUT MUCH NICER apples. The ones we get now are not the kind you can just pluck off the tree, polish up, and take a big bite out of. Almost every one has a worm in it, so you have to wash them & cut them & use only the parts not bruised by worm travel.

Pruning back the apple tree feels metaphorical to me right now.

This time last year, I came across an article in the New York Times on Grit. I loved the article a lot, and shared it with my students in my composition classes. Many of them seemed to benefit from it. Angela Duckworth is featured in the article; her research coined the term “grit,” and she has questionnaires available where you can see how “gritty” you are, and also how ambitious you are.

I would be VERY gritty if it weren’t for needing to admit that statements like “new ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones” are indeed “very much like me.” (If there were an option on the Likert scale that said, “Are you kidding? This is me, 1,000,000%,” I would have to choose that one.)

I am VERY ambitious. No qualifiers.

This article and Duckworth’s grit research helped me realize last fall that chief among the many things keeping me from realizing my ambitions, is my tendency to start new projects (without every actually letting go of previous projects). I decided to list, off the top of my head, the projects I had in mind to work on and complete in the next three years or so. Without even straining my memory at all, I came up with 17 projects. 17. Each of which I estimated would take six months to a year to complete, assuming that I still have to teach to pay the bills. Crazy. So I set up a survey asking people to help me decide where to focus my efforts. Not surprisingly, the votes were pretty evenly spread out, because I tried to choose people who knew me from a variety of contexts.

One thing that got proportionally more votes, which surprised me, was having actors perform some of my narrative poetry at The Sh*tty Barn (an amazing venue in Spring Green). So I churned out some grant applications, and am now in the process of working on that performance with David Daniel as my director. (More on that project soon, as we get the cast set and rehearsals in full gear—but mark your calendars: it’s happening on Monday, September 24, 2012!)

One thing that got fewer votes, proportionally, was raising funds for a sabbatical project—developing creativity workshops. I’m plowing ahead with that. It occurred to me as I was reading the survey results that I had not talked to many people about the project—so why would they vote for it?

(Blogging got a lot of votes. So here I am.)

My friend Kim’s response to the survey was recommending that I read an article on Atul Gawande (which I wrote about a little in a previous post, “On the Lighting of Farts and the Reduction of Bile”).

I identified with Gawande’s push for excellence, but I suspect I do not work as many hours as he does. I also suspect he is someone who needs less sleep than I do. (I often suspect this of successful people, which may not be logical.)

Regardless, I was already learning that I can only realistically work on one or two professional projects at a time even before I came across this quote:

“Highly productive academics focus on one thing at a time….Switching back and forth between ideas breaks up concentration and eats up valuable time. By contrast, people who meditate and focus on breathing are better able to concentrate and focus on their immediate tasks,” which comes from an article that brought Angela Duckworth back to the forefront of my brain recently.

(She’s also on my mind because I’m working on my syllabi for the fall semester, even though I’m not on contract again until 8/27.)

The article is called “Traits of the ‘Get It Done’ Personality: Laser Focus, Resilience, and True Grit” recently appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Ed.

NOW, in addition to Duckworth’s Grit and Ambition scales, I could also take Brent Roberts’ Conscientiousness quiz!

It turns out I score above average in virtue and responsibility (I will always be at least partially the GOOD BAPTIST GIRL I strove to be whilst growing up), and then ALMOST up to average on industriousness, and then far below average on self-control, order, and traditionalism. (Of those, I’d like to improve in self-control most. I’m not sure how much order I actually want or need, though more than I currently have, probably. Don’t care at all about traditionalism.)

The Chronicle article does a nice job of pointing out that it takes a balance of traits to publish successfully in academia—that you also need to be creative, and if you score high in traditionalism, for example, you’re not going to score high in creativity.

The article quotes Roberts: “If you look at the profile for someone who’s realized creative success, they can’t be conventional….Whether you’re an engineer or an artist or an English professor, your job is to create new knowledge.”

Which brings us back to those apples.

Yes, I wish I’d kept up with them as the summer wore on. Yes, I wish I’d pruned the tree years ago. Yes, I wish I’d hung up all manner of pie tins and jingle bells to scare away the birds and squirrels who started enjoying the apples long before they were ripe. Not having done any of those things, I am currently satisfied with having mucked up most of the cider makings.

I anticipate pruning the tree back because the huge harvest of minimally useful apples is not something I’m capable of (willing to be? interested in?) staying on top of. A significantly smaller harvest of more usable apples—I’ll Robert Frost myself all over that.

Metaphorically, then, I’m also learning how to prune back my short-term, how-much-can-I-actually-get-done-in-a-year ambitions. If I keep coming up with new ideas all the time, without following very many projects through to completion, I’ll end up with a multitude of rotten projects at my feet. (And that attracts yellow jackets, which, in my case, since I’ve already been promoted to full professor, can’t be a dossier committee—could be, instead, a hiring or grants committee that turns me down, OR, more likely, my own self-loathing thoughts.)

Let me emphasize–over the years, I have followed a number of projects through to completion, to respectable levels of success. Just not as many projects, and not the level of success I’d prefer. Other years I put up more apple sauce, in other words.

Two final thoughts on those apples–I suspect there’s a yellow jacket symbol for “kind-hearted woman” etched on every building and etchable plant in our yard, which, unfortunately, won’t keep them from stinging me.

And then this–if everyone on the planet had always been diligent about harvesting everything right when it was ripe and not letting anything rot, we would never, as a people, have discovered beer.

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Posted in Creativity, Family, Poetry, Procrastination, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

The End of the Drought

Posted on August 9, 2012 | 3 comments 
 
 
 
“nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands”
                        e.e. cummings

 

 

That’s where you’re wrong, e.e. (can I call you e.?)

Because when you’ve been in a drought and it finally rains,

Rains hard, sky green, trees whip-dancing like Salome,

Each drop reaches in like the tiniest hand, a clean

Well-meaning touch of good intent and love,

And suddenly I approach believing in a God

Who has a plan that we’ll eventually be fond of,

Once we learn the particulars she had in mind.

And even when we find ourselves still caught

In hell, in misery, injustice not

Yet made right, the pouring rain is pushing pause,

Is washing fresh, is resurrection, is applause.

I can’t remember ever being more

In love with the rain, or anyone, not ever.

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Posted in God Stuff, Poetry, Uncategorized

A Knottier Wretch Post: Mary and Martha and Rest Vs. Work

Posted on July 26, 2012 | 2 comments

Did you know that when you do an anagram of “Protestant Work Ethic,” you come up with “Procrastinate, Ewok!”

O.k., not really—it leaves a couple of letters unused and you have to throw in an extra “a.”

You do get “a thickset rotten prow” or “a sphincter totter wok” or “a thrice strew topknot,” however (all courtesy of a fun anagramming site, but you should also Google anagram). Overall, my general lack of anagramming skills is one of three or four things that would keep me from competing in an actual Scrabble tourney. But I really, really want to mess with that Protestant work ethos.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Mary and Martha this summer.

The basic story is in Luke 10: people are gathered at Mary and Martha and Lazarus’s house (L. will later be raised from the dead by Jesus), and Martha complains to Jesus that Mary isn’t helping, “Don’t you care that she’s left me to do all the work by myself?” There may well have been a lot of work—Jesus was traveling with a crowd of up to 70 disciples (not that they were all in that one house together), and this is a time and a place where hospitality was taken very seriously. And the house is identified as Martha’s in the story. She has a prominent role in the gospels. In this story she’s an antagonist, but then she’s the first, even before Peter, to identify Jesus as the Messiah.

In this particular story, instead of helping, Mary was sitting at Jesus’s feet & listening to him. Jesus apparently enjoys that, because he tells Martha she’s worried and distracted, and that (in the King James Version), “only one thing is needful.” That Mary’s listening is more important than Martha’s bustling.

A blog post I like, “Mary and Martha: A Story About God’s Radical Hospitality,” on the “Grace Rules” blog (not sure who the author is but it was written in response to a request from Julie Goss Clawson, a writer I enjoy a lot) deals with the M&M story and says, after quoting Jesus’s response to Martha, “At this point, someone usually teaches a lesson about how important it is not to get so busy that we forget to spend quiet, contemplative time with Jesus. And while I think that is a good lesson I have a feeling we may be missing the point of what Jesus is talking about.” “Grace Rules” outlines how subversive Jesus was being here, and I think that’s exactly right. He’s upending expectations about gender roles and hospitality and busy-ness and lots of other things in the mix.

I was wondering a while back who would spend more time on Facebook—Mary, Martha, or Lazarus? I said I was pretty sure Jesus would have friended all three of them. Here are some of the responses:
⋅ “I think it would have to be Lazarus, since he would get a second chance at it.”
⋅ “How much would Jesus love FB and Twitter?!”
⋅ “Mary wins out. . .her sensitive, caring, compassionate side means that she would answer even the wildest commentary the social network has to offer …. In other words, she would be a terrific online friend. Lazarus, I fear, will probably just sit at the gate of the city, dreaming of his ordeal, not wishing to share with anyone. He would not be a good friend.”

I thought Lazarus would have one of the all-time great status updates, post-resurrection, though, if he chose to post it, “I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!” or “Know how we all thought I was dead?”

We agreed that Martha would have short posts, things like “Just mopped again!” or slams, “Wish I had more time to spend on Facebook, but I have things to do, unlike some people I know.”

The thing is, of course, that sometimes, things just need to get done.

I also asked a more serious question this summer on Facebook—who’s your nominee for someone who does more than just “get a lot done,” someone who seems to get the right things done. I didn’t word it as clearly as I might have because there was a lot of confusion about whether I meant “do the right thing” as in a moral choice—but I mostly meant someone who isn’t just busy or efficient, but has real impact in important ways. I got several nominees, and I emailed those nominees to see if they could talk about HOW they do that (in my ongoing quest to figure out how to GET SHIT DONE). Three of them were nice enough to respond—

Michael Broh, a member of Spring Green’s Village Board and Production Manager at American Players Theatre, said, “I’m honored by the nomination, but I must decline. As far back as I can remember, I’ve believed myself to live in a subjective universe, one in which there is as little place for right as there is for wrong.

In terms of what drives me to make the decisions I do make, and when, I suppose it is a combination of self interest, and a feeble attempt to look beyond the immediate, and treat long term implications with equal importance.”

(I guess I’m not technically letting him decline since I’m mentioning him here—the nomination didn’t actually lead to anything other than a public compliment and a mention in an obscure blog, but it’s a sincere compliment, and he did say I could quote him.)

Melinda Van Slyke is the owner/operator of Heart of the Sky Fair Trade and a local Progressive activist. Here’s what she had to say:

“True story: One day at swimming lessons (I was probably 4 or 5 at the time) we were all lined up at the side of the pool with the instructions being to jump one by one into the arms of our awaiting swim teacher. The little boy in front of me would not jump in. He just stood there, refusing to jump in, knowing that he should, (in my little girl mind) holding up the show. I very calmly pushed him in and immediately jumped in right behind him.

So that’s the secret to my so-called success. Don’t over think it. Just jump in and do it. Don’t wait for other people to be ready and sure as hell don’t wait for permission. But I like to think that now instead of pushing people *out* of my way I push (encourage) them to get involved and do things that they haven’t done before and hopefully they realize that hey, that wasn’t so bad after all.”

This is a terrific description of her mode, except I see her more as “offering to push.” And as I was diving into collecting signatures for Walker’s recall, for example—I was grateful for the push.

The other person who answered the email was Jan Swenson, who’s so good at getting things done she made the news. Her response to the question of how she gets things done was this: “I do the right things politically when the need arises (i.e. when ‘my’ candidate needs support or when a governor needs to be recalled). Musically, I do concerts when there is a need to raise money for something I want to support or when I can help publicize community events. My last choral concert was to raise money for our local food pantries and for ‘4 Pete’s Sake.’ The concert before that was in memory of Mitch Feiner (one of our finest musicians!) and was a fundraiser for his 3 children’s college educations. As for volunteering in the community, I do that because I love APT and want to support them any way I can, and my volunteer work at the school in Arena is to help those kids continue their amazing reading program. They read so many books that the librarian can’t keep up with filing the books!”

Not one of them mentioned the sort of stillness and listening and contemplation we associate with Mary in the M&M story (because, of course, that’s not what I asked them about, and not what they were nominated for–each nominated by more than one of my Facebook friends). They all sound productive, they truly are productive in important ways, I’m pleased to be a part of the community they’re active in, pleased to benefit from the fact that they are, in KJV lingo, “cumbered with many things.” They’re inspiring, and if I can generalize, I would say that they’re describing the need for vision, courage, and responsiveness, all three of which I know I am capable of only if there’s rest and contemplation on my to do list somewhere.

The thing that I find most difficult in balancing my Mary side with my Martha side is knowing WHEN to focus on resting versus acting. In recent blogs, I’ve described my struggles with figuring out how to honor the Sabbath (“Day of Rest, My Ass”) and figuring out how to procrastinate at just the right time (but not all the time) and stay busy (but not be consumed with busy-ness) and how burning trash is one of my all-time favorite activities, apparently (“Summer Theologica”).

It’s a hard balance—knowing when to get busy, and knowing when to rest and listen.

Even Jesus struggled with it. In the later story about Mary and Martha, Jesus shows up at their house because their brother Lazarus has died. Both sisters tell him that if he’d come sooner, they know he could have healed Lazarus. This is when we get the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” You could say he’s weeping in disappointment because his good friends Mary and Martha don’t understand he’s capable of raising the dead (though to be fair to them, he had done that only one other time that we know of, and that was in a different gospel than the one they appear in, so they might not have heard about it). I’m sure I heard sermons like that—that his tears were tears of judgment. I don’t think so. You could also say, and these are the sermons I’ve heard most often, that he’s showing his human side and his love for his friends. That comes closer to feeling like the truth for me, but what if—what IF he’s crying not just out of sadness, but out of frustration with himself?

I have to think he was a good friend, and a good friend might well think here, “Oh my God, they’re right. So what if I can raise him from the dead? If I’d gotten here sooner, I wouldn’t have to, and they wouldn’t be so torn up….”

(It is possible that Jesus would NOT say “oh my God,” but would instead say, “Oh I’m God” or perhaps not take the Lord’s name in vain at all, since that is one of the Top Ten.)

Fortunately for me, since I’m a writer, writing about work qualifies as work, or I’d have to admit that all my time blogging is neither restful (especially not these last three posts–I kept thinking I was writing about Mary and Martha but finding I had too much to say about the points I thought were going to lead quickly to M&M) nor productive.

Even when writing feels like hard work, it doesn’t feel like work–partly because I do it pro bono most of the time.

It’s all the other things on my to do list (28 things on today’s list, 15 of which I’d hoped to have done before I hit the sack tonight, which doesn’t seem likely, although writing this blog is on the list so I can check that off at least) that feel like work that make me wonder:

If I’m allowing myself to indulge in a Mary moment, am I really resting and listening? Or am I just procrastinating the next needful Martha moment? Am I giving due diligence to the “incubation” stage of creativity? Or am I resisting every other everything that has to be achieved for successful creativity?

Let me just meditate on each moment of my answer to the above questions:

I

don’t

know.

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Posted in Burnout, Creativity, God Stuff, Procrastination, Spring Green, Work Life

Tagged

Day of Rest, My Ass

Posted on July 22, 2012 | 2 comments

When I say Sunday dinner I mean lunch (although on other days, “dinner” means supper—I don’t know why) and I also mean hot meat of some sort. Today it was baked chicken, real mashed potatoes (skins-on), and three-bean salad (cheated on that—it came from a can).

In an alternate universe, this meal would have been served by me, wearing an apron, after a morning spent in church.

In this particular universe, there was no apron and no morning in church.

I never remember to put on an apron, and organized religion and I are spending some time apart. I am participating in what Wendell Berry’s character Jayber Crow called “disorganized religion,” which I typically call being a Zen Baptist.

What about you? Are you resting on this day of rest?

Some of the people who take the Bible most literally, who insist that Genesis is a literal description of creation (despite the fact that there are two creation stories in Genesis and a third in Proverbs 8), are adept at ignoring Genesis 2:2-3, when God rested and created the Sabbath—something Yahweh cared enough about, apparently, to put it on his Top Ten list, (this from Exodus 20)“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work….”

Of course, there are those who take this commandment very seriously, who won’t drive on the Sabbath, who work hard the day before to make food that can be eaten without work to prepare it. But that’s not what I grew up with, not my adult experience, although one of the reasons I love living in Spring Green is that I can function really well without driving anywhere. (Walking home from the bars is only a small part of that pleasure.)

It’s one of the more striking ironies of my life–any time I’ve belonged to a faith community, been an active participant in one, Sunday was anything BUT a day of rest.

Stretches when I’m in a wilderness time (which can be nasty and involve dehydration, or wonderful, like now), Sunday stands a much better chance of actually being a day of rest.

What do I mean by wilderness time? It’s a reference to Jesus’s time in the wilderness, first of all. Three of the four gospels tell the story of Jesus going into the desert, immediately after being baptized, to fast for 40 days and 40 nights. He’s tempted by Satan there (the best depiction of which I’ve ever seen occurs in the movie Jesus of Montreal, when the actor portraying Jesus in a suddenly-popular passion play has a lawyer telling him all the ways he could parlay this into fame and fortune).

If you focus on the gospels (as opposed to the epistles of the apostle Paul), one of the things that stands out is how often Jesus heads out on his own. My friend Tammy is the first person I recall hearing preach on this–she’s also the first person I remember pointing out to me that God pronounces he is “well pleased” with Jesus before Jesus has done anything we consider part of his work on Earth. Even after he begins that work, Jesus sneaks off a number of times, which should comfort both my slacker and my introvert friends.

I’m not saying that he was resting, exactly, as he was fasting and being tempted, but it was sort of a pause, an episode of time off the clock. His ministry won’t start until he leaves the desert, but it can’t start until he’s spent enough time in the desert.

Once his ministry starts, he somehow gets a reputation as a “wine-bibber and glutton,” which I grew up understanding was slander, that people were falsely accusing him of that. Really? I don’t know. I think Jesus had a prescription for chill pills, and knew when to take one.

Matthew 11 is a really interesting chapter. John the Baptist is in prison and sends his disciples to ask Jesus if he’s the Messiah (when John baptized Jesus, he didn’t seem to have any doubts about the matter). Jesus sends them back to John with a list of what he’s accomplished, a sort of short-form resume, “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Then he adds, bizarrely coming at the end of this list, “And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.”

He spends some time praising John the Baptist, and then does a little comparison/contrast:

“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another,
‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

(I personally prefer “winebibber” to “drunkard,” because it sounds like so much more fun.)

It’s not literal, of course, John did eat and drink (honey and locusts, at the very least), and we don’t have Biblical evidence of Jesus eating too much or getting tipsy, but we do have evidence he appreciated good wine. Otherwise why would his first miracle be turning water into, not just wine, but wine pronounced as good wine?

The chapter ends with verses I’m pleased to take literally (and poetically, which is why I quote the King James version here): “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Never, not once, has my participation in a faith community felt easy or light. It has felt terrific, and right, and sustaining, and wonderful at times (not so great at other times). But easy? Or light? Not that I’m remembering.

So was Jesus just being ironic there?

I don’t think so, although he says things other times that contradict this (“Take up your cross daily” comes to mind—I often feel that just getting out of bed is my cross).

As someone who is nearly always teetering on the edge of burnout, I want to cling to those verses, make them real.

The title of this blog, “Day of Rest, My Ass,” is a poem written by a character in an old novel draft of mine, written during my first sabbatical, in 2004. She’s a burned-out preacher trying to find her way by working at a church camp one summer.

I understand why Jesus blesses anyone who doesn’t take offense. He did and said so many things to upset the apple quo, and advocating rest, for me a lot of days, tops the list.

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Posted in Burnout, Family, God Stuff, Spring Green, Work Life

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