Fanconi Syndrome, Part 6

A couple of weeks ago, Yo-Yo and I returned to the specialist for follow-up blood work, as per Dr. Gonto's Fanconi syndrome protocol. Based on the results, Dr. Skeptical has increased Yo-Yo's sodium bicarbonate dosage from 8 to 10 pills per day. Apparently her carbon dioxide level [pCO₂] had dropped to 33.3 mmHg, but her pH reading was more alkaline at 7.323, up from 7.252. I was hoping to hear that we wouldn't have to return for six months to a year, but Dr. Skeptical wants to run Yo-Yo's blood again in 3 months. She also confirmed my suspicion that Yo-Yo will need an ever increasing amount of sodium bicarbonate until she is taking 32 pills a day, the maximum dosage on the protocol.

This visit was much more pleasant than the first. The clinic was on schedule, so we were seen immediately. I knew what to expect and felt less anxious [Yo-Yo, however, expressed her dissatisfaction by peeing under the exam room bench]. Dr. Skeptical was in a much happier mood and didn't dis the protocol as she had at our last visit. We even had a laugh inventing the circumstances necessary to perform a double-blind study to test the protocol's effectiveness. On a secret island, researchers would establish a colony of 1,000 basenjis, fed by assistants who were paid to do just that, provide sustenance, not get attached as regular owners would. Then, after the 10 percent developed the disease, the other 900 could go up for adoption [Wouldn't the national rescue group love that!]. The remaining 100 would participate in the research. The only problem, as I pointed out, was that basenjis could win over even hardened scientists who, as a result, would start sneaking sodium bicarbonate to the "sugar pill" group anyway!

I decided to spring for the very expensive ultrasound [$270], just so we would know early in this "adventure" the state of Yo-Yo's kidneys. Dr. Skeptical sent Elizabeth and me away for an hour, and Yo-Yo went to radiology, where she received a Brazilian wax before the procedure. Elizabeth and I drove up the road to Quiznos, and since the restaurant was in a Publix shopping center, we got Yo-Yo a quarter pound of roast beef to make up for the stress of the afternoon and the sandwich stink on our breath. When we returned, Dr. Skeptical had a laptop loaded with pictures of Yo-Yo's insides. Her kidneys are normal size, but the ultrasound showed that her bladder wall was thickened, indicating an infection. There was no blood in her urine, though, and at the last visit, her culture had been "clean." Her walk behavior didn't indicate an infection, either. We stopped to pee just once; if she found a really interesting street corner, she might squeeze out a few extra drops for any other dogs that happened by. Dr. Skeptical decided that we would culture her urine again at the next visit and see what happened.

Elizabeth unwrapped the roast beef, and Yo-Yo gobbled a slice. Elizabeth gave the second slice to Dr. Skeptical, who tore it into little pieces. In typical basenji fashion, Yo-Yo accepted the offerings—it was roast beef after all—but remained aloof to her "torturer." She acted as if Dr. Skeptical's hand was the floor, and she just happened to find bites of beef there.

Yo-Yo still looks good, has high energy, and is her usual spunky self. An extra meatball with breakfast and dinner to accommodate two more sodium bicarbonate pills suits her fine.

Yo-Yo considers whether or not she will forgive the trip to the specialist.

Yo-Yo knows how cute she is.

Not another picture, Ma!

Finding Nemo and the Hero Cycle

Once again, my students and I satisfied the literature portion of the research course using Joseph Campbell's story rubric as our focus. To evaluate everyone's understanding of the hero cycle, this semester I showed Finding Nemo instead of The Matrix, the tried-and-true film I have used previously. Finding Nemo has several advantages: it is approximately 100 minutes, so even though we broke for discussion at four places in the movie, we still saw the whole thing during two 75-minute class meetings. Second, I didn't have to ride the volume command as there are fewer scenes that will inspire an instructor next door to ask me to reduce the noise—no gun battles, no explosions, no screaming subway trains. Plus, all of those overprotected, closed-minded religious kids can't complain as it is a G-rated movie. The nice thing about a Pixar choice is that there are enough references to adult concerns that the students don't think the movie is totally unhip; Bruce and his shark boys, for example, are in a 12-step program for "substance" abuse.

We managed to get Marlin through 16 of the 17 stages. The only one we missed was "refusal of the return." Since the movie so abbreviated the return portion of the cycle, we concluded that Marlin probably satisfied this stage as well, but the scene didn't make the final edit. When I have time to watch the movie again carefully, I'll follow Nemo more closely and see if he too goes through all seventeen stages.

We broke Departure down like this:

Call to adventure: Nemo disobeys his father and swims past the drop off to inspect the boat. This scene should inspire Marlin to leave the reef and venture into the open water.

Refusal of the call: Marlin attempts to order Nemo back but refuses to follow his son past the drop off.

Supernatural aid: The scuba diver nets Nemo, the goggles with the Sydney address the "amulet" Marlin needs to start his adventure. [Many students wanted to use Dory as supernatural aid, as she guides and advises—such advice as it is—our hero throughout the adventure.]

Crossing of the first threshold: Marlin makes his ineffective dash after the boat carrying his captured son.

Belly of the whale: Marlin finds himself out in the ocean proper, far from the comforts and familiarity of the reef.

After our discussion of Departure, I turned the movie back on and let them watch through the encounter with the sea turtles. After this portion of the film, we decided that Marlin had three major challenges during his "road of trials," the first stage of Initiation. He learns how to deal with the new denizens of the open ocean when he and Dory encounter Bruce, the great white, and the other shark boys. The anglerfish and then the school of jellyfish teach Marlin about the dangers past the drop off. I challenged the students to find another series of three, but most of them could only pick out one or two more. Since I used the scuba diver as supernatural aid, I believe Marlin's first "trial" is learning to make sense of the illogical Dory. Another one that the students tended to overlook was escaping the tottering ship that almost crushes Marlin and Dory right after they escape the sharks—perhaps because they lumped this scene into the trial of the sharks. The smart-ass school of fish, another communication challenge, made a total of six for me.

"Well, what if you ask us about road of trials on the exam?" asked one student who couldn't come up with six.

"Then you say something like, 'Road of trials is a stage that typically comes in series of three. Marlin faces many trials during his adventure, but the three most important ones are A, B, and C.'" Most of them just don't know how to manipulate the evidence to make it look as if they know more than they actually do, and sometimes I feel like a used car salesman explaining how to spin the material to their advantage.

We decided that Crush qualified as "meeting with the goddess," the next stage of Initiation, even though he was male. His emphasis on parenting made him, in our minds, feminine, and his advice about giving children independence seemed the key lesson Marlin needed to learn to complete the adventure successfully. I had primed them earlier in the unit for considering a male character as feminine. During the hero cycle lecture, we viewed a clip from Return of the Jedi when Darth Vader and the Emperor try to tempt Luke to the dark side of the Force. I explained that "dark" was symbolically feminine [for example, the black half of the yin-yang [ sign], so Vader and the Emperor, both men, could qualify as "woman as temptress" since they represented the dark [i. e. feminine] side of the Force.

Next, I let them watch through the fishing boat capture. We equated the whale, gender undetermined, that swallows Dory and Marlin as "woman as temptress" because in Marlin's mind at least this experience takes him off the path of his adventure. The whale poses the danger of getting eaten on the one hand, but it is also a womb-like bubble of protection from the other uncertainties of the ocean. One very literal, not-so-bright student interjected that the whale scene was "belly of the whale," even though we had concluded that a different, much earlier part of the movie had already met that stage, even though I had carefully explained the stage as being swallowed into the great unknown. Alas, there's one in every class ...

For Marlin, "atonement with the father" is the most important stage. We concluded that Marlin's "father" was all of the permissive dads who allowed—in Marlin's mind at least—their children to have too much independence. At the start of the movie, Bob [the seahorse], Ted [the octopus], and Bill [the fish] come to mind; they easily relinquish their children to Mr. Ray, the schoolmaster. Marlin initially believes that these fathers are wrong to give their children so much freedom, but as a result of his adventures, he realizes that Crush and Dory are both right about trusting and letting go.

Marlin gets to demonstrate his "atonement with the father" during the next two stages, "apotheosis" and "the ultimate boon." When Dory is scooped up by the fishing boat, Nemo rushes to help her. Marlin, however, doesn't want to lose his son again and tries to interfere. Nemo insists that he can save Dory and explains that Marlin can help as well by getting all of the netted fish to swim down. Marlin relinquishes Nemo's fin, allowing his son to have independence, and then works to inspire the trapped and bewildered catch to swim together toward the ocean floor. Marlin demonstrates god-like ability as the catch overpower the humans who trapped them. Their eventual escape of the net qualifies as "the ultimate boon," the difficult task easily accomplished. I told my students to compare this Marlin to the pathetic version at the beginning of the movie. Pre-adventure, Marlin couldn't save Nemo from a tiny net; now, however, he nearly capsizes an entire fishing boat to free his son.

My students and I never observed Marlin refuse the trip home, but we could get him through the rest of the Return portion of the cycle. We decided that a couple of things could satisfy "magical flight." First, since ocean gossip about Marlin's search for Nemo helped our hero get to his son, then all the creatures who knew the story would help [or at least not hinder] his return to the reef. Since some students believed Dory was supernatural aid, equating her as a loopy Athena to Marlin's dysfunctional Odysseus, Dory could also be the divine aid maneuvering Marlin home. Even the pipe Marlin begins to follow, erected by otherworldly humans, could qualify.

"Rescue from without," that call from the old life to return, has existed the entire movie for Marlin. The reef, its comfort and familiarity, beckons him back. We knew Marlin crossed "the return threshold" because we saw him happily home at the end of the film.

We realized that the journey had certainly changed Marlin. Not only does he allow Nemo the independence to attend school, but that tight hold he had both on his son and himself [hence his inability to tell a successful joke] has loosened. Now he can deliver a flawless punchline and graciously welcomes Bruce, the fish-eating great white, who arrives to deliver Dory. The other reef dwellers, none of whom have taken as great an adventure, panic in the shark's presence, but Marlin, who is now "master of two worlds"—the reef and the open ocean—has no fear. He has "freedom to live," his worst personality flaw corrected during the arduous journey. Marlin has the knowledge and skill to swim past the drop off if a need ever arises. Should a paralyzed parent be unable to dash after a lost child, we know if Marlin is there, he will swoop up the fishlet and return the kid to the reef in Superman fashion.

I read the Joseph Campbell biography at Wikipedia and learned that several folks criticize his hero cycle. For example, Kurt Vonnegut says that it is better named the "in the hole" theory and can be summarized like this: "The hero gets into trouble. The hero gets out of trouble." A careful reading of The Hero with a Thousand Faces reveals that the cycle is more than "into trouble ... out of trouble." Several key stages in Initiation—"meeting with the goddess," "woman as temptress," and "atonement with the father"—and then demonstrating "master of two worlds" in Return are key to refining the hero's personality, fixing flaws that existed before the adventure began. We tend to believe that we "know it all," but hearing and accepting the advice of the goddess shows us that we don't have the full picture, opening us up to the wisdom of others. Navigating successfully past the temptress, who represents the pleasures and diversions of the flesh, allows us to experience the full strength of our own discipline and will. In "atonement with the father," when we see that we too are capable of what we despised or disagreed with, we realize that any two opposing sides have validity. We see that another's opinion is not a cause to argue, just a different "side" of the one universe, someone's wet to our dry, someone's cold to our hot, someone's salty to our sweet.

The cycle isn't a spring break road trip where the hero parties too much and then returns home unchanged. The cycle is instead an opportunity to evolve, the chance to develop an inner strength that makes the hero more adaptable to an ever-changing world. Neo in The Matrix is better able to maximize his potential as the result of his adventure, just as Marlin demonstrates at the end of Finding Nemo.

Worrisome Grade Inflation or Good Teaching?

My friend Elizabeth chairs the academic grievance committee at school, so I usually hear a blow-by-blow description of the events that occur at the contentious meetings where students protest their grades. The question that the committee members always ask the instructor is this: Did you warn the student at midterm that he was failing? College policy states that faculty members must alert students in writing that they are not performing at a passing level. An email digitally stored on the college server—not a verbal warning or a message written on an assignment that the student has since conveniently "lost"—is the agreed upon best method. [I am old enough to remember the days when we had to fill out a paper form, look up where the student lived, and then address the envelope to send the warning. The student received the top white copy, the department got the yellow, and the faculty member kept the pink.]

To cover my ass To abide by college policy, this week I emailed all of my students in five classes, letting them know where they stood at midterm. I noticed an odd pattern in the averages. In the three sections of freshman composition [approximately 70 students], I gave three As total: 2 in one class, 1 in a second class, and 0 in the third. In the two research classes, however, I gave mostly As and Bs. The occasional C, D, or F was usually the result of missing work averaging as zeros, not poor performance on the assignments I had received. In short, my grade distribution makes me look like a real hard-ass in freshman composition but an easily pleased grade inflater in the research class. Neither label is accurate.

Part of the grade distribution disparity is the different types of students in the two courses. In the research classes, which have freshman composition as a prerequisite, the students are proven performers; they have all passed the department-graded, do-or-die final exam. The freshman composition classes, however, are mixed bags: preparatory and ESL students who barely squeaked through those programs before attempting college-level work, drop-outs from four-year schools who spent their first freshman year partying too much and studying too little, resentful repeaters who couldn't pass the department exam the previous semester, and decent writers with college-level placement scores. In the freshman composition classes, my department means business. Since my colleagues will flunk any bad writers at the final exam grading—resulting in those folks earning Fs as final grades—I must let students know all along the way if they aren't writing at a passing level. Harsh but fair evaluation from me tempers the students' disappointment and anger when their blue books don't get passing scores. They can't complain about failing the course when I have said over and over in the comments on their essays that they have serious writing problems they must fix by the semester's end.

The reality of the upcoming freshman composition final exam explains the lack of good grades in those sections, but how do I explain the typically high grades in the research classes? As an aside, the research classes often have a low completion rate; ending a semester with 12 of the original 25 students is typical for many professors because the long research essay so intimidates students that they withdraw. I, however, can usually get 23 or 24 of the students to hang on and finish. Is it because I inflate grades, allowing students to perform badly but still receive As and Bs? There's no department-graded exam to squash the poor performers and insure quality control as we have in freshman composition.

The answer of course is no. My research students succeed and finish because I have set up the course so that if they follow directions—i. e., do exactly as I say—they will not only write a real research essay, a document they would be proud to show anyone, but also have a good average at the end of the semester. Students typically produce crappy research essays because they have never really written one. Oh, sure, they have been assigned long research papers over and over again, but they procrastinate getting started, try to write the whole thing over a weekend or in a single night, bang out some total piece of crap [probably half plagiarized], and turn it in to satisfy the assignment. What occurs on those pages is so not a research essay. When I was in college, a professor would say, "A paper on X is due such-and-such a day," and then never mention the assignment again. I could handle that; I was a good enough writer. Many of my colleagues today take their cue from a similar college experience and do exactly the same thing here at the community college. They might take their classes over to the library for a tour; they might warn the students not to plagiarize or show them how to set up documentation. But my colleagues assume that students have a plan for their papers, even though the final products they receive demonstrate over and over the faultiness of that assumption. One member of my department, so frustrated by the quality of work her students produce and so unwilling to change the way she does things, has decided that this semester's research class will be the last one she ever teaches, by god.

For many years I refused to teach the research class. I had seen too many disastrous efforts students had written for other instructors and decided hell would freeze before I was going to read a whole set of that crap from my own people. Then I decided that there must be a strategy to get them to write good research essays. They could write perfectly decent short papers in freshman composition, so where did their fuses blow in the transition from short to long? I realized that it must be right at the beginning, when the professor said, "I need an X-page [or Y-word] research paper on _____." The greater length and necessity of research paralyzed them because they didn't have a plan. They waited until the last minute because they didn't know where or how to start. They didn't start until complete desperation descended on them the night before the thing was due.

I realized that if I wanted students to write successful, long research essays, ones that I wouldn't mind reading, I had to provide the plan. This doesn't mean that I give them a specific topic. Rather, I demonstrate the stages—everything from choosing the topic, to deciding the logical flow of the project, to ensuring that in-text citations in the final draft flawlessly match the entries on the works cited page. We write the essay in a non-negotiable series of steps, everyone producing a similar new piece for the paper, no matter how divergent the topics are. Because the students are writing little pieces that we knit together, it doesn't matter if they produce the pieces at the last minute; the assignments are so small that even the last minute gives them enough time to write a decent effort [and thus earn a decent grade]. We all do the research together. For example, on one day, two database article summaries are due. One student's summaries might chronicle the advancements in prosthetic devices while another student's summaries document the efforts to preserve the Great Barrier Reef in Australia or the advantages of maggot therapy for diabetes patients with necrotic tissue.

Providing the plan—the formula or recipe for the essay—means more work for me, and more grading as well. Instead of one paper worth 25, 30, or even 50 percent of the course grade, I read 12 different assignments, the last one the final draft. But because I have seen the 11 pieces produced before the final product, because I have actively guided students so that the final draft has a logical flow and all the components of a real, correct research essay, the papers are pretty good. As a result, I can give those papers good grades, contributing to my students' successful averages. If the students remember for future papers that the key is little pieces stitched together to make the longer effort, they then have the skill to produce real research essays for professors who just announce the assignment and due date and never mention the paper again.

Am I mollycoddling my students? Maybe. But I have good papers to read at the end, and I'm not complaining to my colleagues that students can't write. If a student completely mishandles a short piece, I read 300-400 bad words, show that person what to correct, and can usually expect the next piece she produces to meet my expectations. We have more fun, everyone preparing the same short piece on wildly different topics. Student morale is high because they see both themselves and the rest of the class getting through the arduous course requirement rather than watching their classmates disappear one by one as they realize they can't complete a long paper without a plan. Do I worry that I give too many As, too many Bs? Not really. This is one class where I can clearly communicate what each piece must contain, and since the students are proven writers, they have the capability to do the work. Will the majority of my colleagues follow suit? No way. They are too convinced that they are single-handedly enforcing the only real standards on campus to try something that might allow everyone to succeed [not just the handful of really bright students]. In addition, they're too busy complaining about the horribly prepared students in their classes to have time to rethink their pedagogy and try something new.