A Great Way to End the Year

Mom called after Christmas to say that she and Step-Dad would be "camping" at Moss Park for ten days. I have to use quotation marks around camping because the park is only ten miles from their home, which they return to every day to shower, pick up mail and the newspaper, get food, etc. Plus, Mom is still working her part-time, pocket-money job. So they are not camping but "camping." As I have yet to see their new RV, they invited me to visit. Mom gave me a detailed schedule of when they would/would not be there during the ten days. She assured me they were spending all of New Year's Eve day at the campsite.

So this morning Elizabeth and I agreed that we were up for an adventure, got in the car, and drove to the park. I wasn't going to photograph anything; my plan was to find Mom and Step-Dad, compliment the new RV, drink a Coke, wish them a happy new year, and come home. Elizabeth advised that I pack the camera just in case.

When we arrived at the park, I spotted a pair of sandhill cranes and, happy to have the Canon with me, went in pursuit of pictures. A very tame flock lives there year-round; I saw one pair right next to a picnic table begging a family for cook-out goodies.



We walked down to the shores of Lake Mary Jane so that I could evaluate dragonfly potential in the spring. A couple of turkey vultures wheeled on the thermal currents overhead. Elizabeth had me take their pictures as she is writing a novel with vultures as supporting characters:



Elizabeth noticed a white sulphur nectaring at some weeds and said, "There's one of your peeps, Sparky." I explained that I was not photographing bugs today, but then I spotted a dragonfly perched near the shore. I couldn't believe it! A dragonfly on the last day of 2006, willing to pose for its portrait!


I called Mom on my cellphone so that she could direct us to the campsite only to learn that she and Step-Dad were at their real home and not in the park. "Camping," you see.

So Elizabeth and I continued our tour. I found a barred yellow sulphur. This species is not a spectacular butterfly, but it's also not one that I've ever photographed before:


We also spotted an enormous black and white beetle that sounded as if it collided with a pine tree. I'm not sure what type it is. There are too many beetle pictures at Bugguide.net to search for a match.


Even though I missed seeing Mom and Step-Dad, I really enjoyed the trip. It's a long drive, but this park has many photo opportunities for the future.

Head Shots

Madeline and Joseph, Elizabeth's sister and nephew, were in town for a visit, and I accompanied them to the Central Florida Zoological Park and the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey. Both of these places prove the adage "you get what you pay for." Disney charges $71 dollars for a one-day ticket and delivers ten times the entertainment [and considerably cleaner bathrooms] than did the zoo at $10 or the Audubon Center at $5. But none of us wanted to spend a full day anywhere, so the zoo and Audubon Center were nice alternatives.

I went to the zoo hoping to photograph lions, tigers, and bears—so carefully composing the shots that a viewer couldn't tell I wasn't on safari in Africa—but the zoo disappointed in species and photo opportunities. The few big-ticket animals were behind such heavy wire grate that good pictures were impossible. Many animals—and I couldn't blame them—kept their backs turned to the noisy crowds. The most willing subjects were the flocks of blackbirds willing to do anything for a piece of pretzel [except not shit all over the picnic tables]. Although I didn't capture any exciting wild animals, I got a few pictures where I am happy with the personality that comes through:




The Audubon Center offered even fewer photo opportunities. The eagles and owls were still tethered in their "garden." I tried shooting the vultures in the aviaries, but again the wire grate was problematic; I couldn't both focus past it and keep the subject clear. I did manage to get one shot of a hawk that I like:


I also took some human portraits that my companions enjoyed. I guess that I should be happy expanding my photographic repertoire to include more than bugs, but I must say that I am impatiently awaiting late February/early March and the return of the dragonflies.

No Wrapping Required

Even though this is the end of December, we have been averaging temperatures in the high 70s for several days. Sometimes I get anxious that global warming will make my inland home beachfront property in a couple of years. But then I consult Weather Underground, where I see that the record for December 21—set in 1954, long before Al Gore and his Inconvenient Truth—is 85 degrees, even higher.

So I have been out with the camera, hoping to get a big enough "cushion" of photographs to last through the usually bleak January and first part of February. Butterflies galore are nectaring at year-round flowers like pentas; the hibiscuses aren't melting in the heat as they do during the summer; and bees are plentiful. So I have found many willing subjects for the photostream. I didn't have any hopes for dragonflies, though, as their season, I thought, had come to an end.

Then a gift landed from the sky and perched on a pruned stick:


Maybe the beautiful weather inspired this roseate skimmer to leave his aquatic life at the lake and take to the air. Maybe dragonflies are year-round in Florida, just harder to find in the cooler months. Whatever the explanation for his presence, I enjoyed the addictive hunt for the perfect portrait.



I hope he gets a week or two of good temperatures so that he can darken to the pinks and purples of a mature male, eat many tasty insects, and find himself a good woman.

An Observation

The bottom drawer of my filing cabinet contains all the student work I must keep for one semester: the final exam blue books and scantrons, attendance sheets, Excel printouts, testing center receipts, and the like. Today, to make room for this semester's must-keeps, I tossed all of the paper I had saved from the summer. Before I filled the trashcan, I went through the piles looking for items that should be shredded instead of trashed.

Over the summer I taught one group of prep students, folks whose placement scores indicated that they weren't ready for college-level work. Their blue books were mixed with final exams from the college-level students I had. As I sorted work into "shred" and "toss" piles, one thing I looked for was a social security number on the front of the blue book.

I tell students, as do their other professors, the student handbook, the nightly news—not to enter their social security numbers on anything, to substitute their student ID numbers on college materials. [Although the college went to a student number system of identification 4 or so years ago, paperwork all over campus is just now catching up.] During the last week of class, I must have warned them at least 5 times that they needed to protect their identities.

But as I was flipping through the blue books, I noticed that all but one of my prep students had written their social security number where the blue book cover asked for it! [Identity thieves would dance with joy after noticing the name, signature, address, and telephone number dutifully added.] In comparison, the three sections of college-level students had followed my directions and substituted their college ID number.

Most prep students believe that they do not need remedial classes, that the college is wasting their time and stealing their money. If I had the opportunity to meet that class one more time, I would explain to them that yes, they did need their prep classes. That semester of remediation was their last opportunity to fix bad habits that would ruin their future success in both the academic and professional world—namely acting before thinking about the consequences and not following directions.

In Defense of the 5-Paragraph Essay

Intellectually, we humans know that we share the world with other people. But our physical experience, locked as we are in our own heads and bodies, is that we each are the center of the universe, around which all other people revolve. Perhaps Zen masters transcend this restriction, but most of us can't. Our special people are close, as Mercury is to the sun; other folks, like an asshole swerving into our lane without a turn signal, are as distant as Pluto. Frustrations arrive when our satellites don't circle us in the predictable manner we expect, whether it is a lover who forgets an anniversary or the asshole who neglects to check his blind spot.

I regularly visit Rate Your Students. At this site, posts often vent frustration because someone's satellites have jumped orbit instead of dutifully revolving as the writer/center of the universe believes they should. The irritation is natural, as is the venting. God knows, I've done enough of the same here at my own blog.

But I want to share this observation: The people who survive as teachers, the people who become really good in the classroom, know that not all students share the same interests as the teacher. Most students, in fact, do not want to acquire expertise in the area the teacher loves; they are merely fulfilling a graduation requirement. The sooner a young professor learns that everyone in class will not adore the material or skill as she does, that the lack of enthusiasm isn't personal, the easier life will be. Mr. Miyagi, of Karate Kid fame, is a great teacher because Daniel wants to learn martial arts. We wouldn't be very impressed with Mr. Miyagi's teaching skills, though, if Elle Woods of Legally Blonde were under his tutelage.

Students aren't engaged in a lot of their academic work because their gifts lie elsewhere, either in disciplines different from the ones we teach or in other areas of life. Someone whose gift is, for example, nurturing children or animals might enjoy her psychology class but not mathematics. Her developmental psychology professor might be really impressed; her statistics professor, not so much. As a composition teacher, I know that most of my students don't want to write in an academic fashion. They're more interested in updating their MySpace pages than producing essays. That's not a fault; I would rather write a blog post here than solve calculus problems or dissect fetal pigs, activities that some of my poorer writers would prefer to producing their next essay for me.

Armed with this knowledge, I have to inspire my students to write essays that I can tolerate reading—because that is the nature of our relationship, they write and I evaluate. So I teach as a starting point—and for some of them, the only pattern they will master—the 5-paragraph essay. In a college composition class. And without apologies.

No predictable form is without the potential for art. No one would slam Bashō because his haiku provided only 17 anticipated syllables; I wouldn't tell Shakespeare that his sonnets were worthless because they were the expected 14 lines and had a predictable rhyme scheme. And I wouldn't say to a student, "five-paragraph essays have no place outside of a seventh-grade English class," because the rules for that pattern can produce a great essay. As every creative writing teacher can confirm, lots of student-composed, 17-syllable haiku are garbage; lots of 14-line sonnets are trash; and, of course, many composition teachers will lament that lots of 5-paragraph essays suck too, but the reason is a lack of skill on the part of the writer, not a problem with the form itself.

To be perfectly honest, I have never understood why the 5-paragraph essay gets such a bum rap. Every coherent piece of writing has a beginning, middle, and end, as does the 5-paragraph essay. In school, students write to show what they know, so giving three examples, consequences, or reasons to prove X will make any professor in biology, history, or humanities happy. If an essay question asks for five examples or two consequences, modifying the basic format of the 5-paragraph essay to seven or four paragraphs is a no-brainer. Using multiple paragraphs for each of the three restrictions in the thesis statement to turn a 2 - 3 page paper into a longer 10 - 20 page effort is also easy to demonstrate in class. The three-paragraph essay is the basis for all composition; a five-paragraph paper a more developed artifact of the thought process.

Did I write this blog post as a 5-paragraph essay? Of course not. Do I ever consciously plan a piece of writing using the 5-paragraph pattern of organization? Never! I have skills and desire to write that the novices in my classes do not. Some of my students are like budding Michelangelos or Monets; most, however, are paint-by-number and color-in-the-lines types of folk. This is the reality, and the sooner a faculty member learns this truth, the more years she'll get before burnout.

Every institution of higher learning has its star alumni. Most graduates, though, leave to become society's drones. Giving them a malleable writing formula like the 5-paragraph essay allows these folks to produce everything from letters to credit card companies, business reports for the boss, or holiday letters tucked into Christmas cards:

Seasons greetings, everyone! We had a great 2006, but these three events really stood out! First, Sparky won ...

Atonement with the Father

I invoked the spirits of two dead colleagues yesterday while consulting with a student in freshman composition. The first sitting for the big do-or-die, department-graded final exam starts tomorrow, and I have been meeting with everyone to discuss the last in-class practice essay. I had given the topic "something that everyone should get for free" and read a number of papers on health care and textbooks. Julia, however, had written her essay on underwear, explaining why bras and panties shouldn't cost a penny.

The essay was fresh and interesting, but Julia made a common mistake: she used second-person pronouns, you and the like, throughout the paper, addressing me, the reader. I explained to her that Professors Fielding and Hammond, both male, might be the two evaluators of her final exam and would not want to be addressed as if they were women with bra and panty concerns. I advised her to replace the yous with first-person Is.

I know why I invoked Dave and Glen in my explanation to Julia. They were already senior colleagues when I began working here at 21, and the inexperienced, younger I thought them ruthless, careless evaluators who failed my students after just glancing at their papers, inconsiderate of the whole semester I had spent training those writers. [Today, I would substitute objective and experienced for ruthless and careless; that's what 22 years of classroom experience have done for me!] Speaking their names conjured their presence in my office, even though both men died shortly after retirement, bodies destroyed by too much abuse.

When I was younger, Dave and Glen were the antithesis of what I wanted for my professional life. Both were burnouts, but in different ways. Dave took campus politicking seriously—but not anything that happened in the classroom. Despite his ennui, his classes filled faster than anyone's when registration began; students considered him fun and easy. He sexed up every paper topic, every piece of literature he taught, and passed anyone who made an effort. He didn't bother to learn his students' names, but the easy As made everyone feel good, made everyone love him. Glen, too, had long since lost his enthusiasm for the job, but he blamed his students. He believed that the students had changed, not he himself. In his mind, the inadequate, unprepared folks who sat in his classes deserved nothing but his contempt and anger; his students dropped like flies. These two men were best of friends; at department gradings they competed to see who could read the most essays.

Years ago, the young-snot me couldn't understand why Dave and Glen appreciated their positions, tenure, and influence so little. I desired what they had, and I vowed that I wouldn't turn into them. Not all old-fart faculty were burnouts like these two; I had role models who were courteous and professional, who still enjoyed students and the classroom—or at least did a damn good job pretending.

But after 22 years at the college, 18 of them as a full-time instructor, I have reached the stage that Joseph Campbell, in his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, calls "atonement with the father." During the life-altering adventure detailed in this book, Campbell claims the hero must experience "at one ment" with his biological father—or a father figure or a strong masculine force. During the "at one ment," the hero realizes that an undesirable quality of the father resides in himself as well. Sometimes, after this recognition, the hero can keep the quality at bay. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker realizes that the undesirable dark side of the Force can tempt him, too, but he does not cross over as Darth Vader, his father, did. Sometimes, the hero embraces the once-undesirable quality, as does Neo in The Matrix, who realizes that he has the same level of commitment that Morpheus, his father figure, has shown.

I am at the point where I now understand Dave and Glen, where I have reached "at one ment" with my "fathers." Too many semesters of the same—the same student errors and excuses, the same accomplish-nothing committee work, the same predictable comments made by the same colleagues at department meetings, the same drive on the same road to work—are the cause of my own ennui. I don't think that a Zen master could sit through 22 three-hour graduation ceremonies, sweating in the hot robe, squirming on the uncomfortable folding chair, and not be over that experience. I cannot begin acting like a young snot again; that would mean that I would have to give up the maturity that makes me good.

So I am at a three-pronged fork in the road. Do I follow in the footsteps of the faculty who were pleasant and professional until retirement—even though I believe that they were secretly going through the motions, nothing more? Do I go where Glen beckons, down a path of anger and bitterness? Do I choose Dave's route, where fun process matters more than competent product? Or do I just get off the damn road, preferring to tramp through a field without the conventional guidance of concrete beneath my feet? These are the questions I am considering after atoning with my fathers.

Sierra's Side

I have a real office at school, not a cubicle, but the walls that separate me from the bio-chem professor to my left and the social science dude to my right are just drywall partitions. Even when we all have our doors closed, I can still hear my neighbors' phone conversations, student meetings, chair squeaks, paper rustling, and farts. I assume that all of my noise is audible to them as well.

As final exams are looming, I spent the day with my door open so that students who needed to speak with me would realize I was available. My colleagues had their own doors open too, so we were swapping all kinds of sounds along the hallway. At one point, my phone rang, and when I answered it, I discovered Sierra at the other end. The tragedy! Her grandmother had just had a stroke, so she would be unable to bring her portfolio and other late work to the appointment we had in twenty minutes.

"Sierra," I said loudly enough for everyone on the hallway to hear, "If you are not in my office at 1 p.m., as we agreed, your notebook gets a zero, and I will not take any of the other late work you owe me. You will then have no chance of passing this class."

I know I sounded stern and inflexible. Since I didn't have speaker phone on, my colleagues didn't know why the student I addressed wasn't able to be come to the meeting, but even if they did hear Sierra's half of the conversation, I doubt that they would have had any sympathy for her. We are all hearing lame-o excuses as students who have been fooling themselves, their friends, their parents are quickly coming to the realization that they are failing one or all of their classes.

In Sierra's case, I don't believe that her grandmother really had a stroke. Sierra missed too many classes, too many quizzes, too many deadlines. Each time she explained the lapse of responsibility with a variation of "Grandma died": either she had to drive her father to the emergency room, or sit with her brother during his asthma attack, or stay close to a toilet after a bad bout of food poisoning. And then there was the trip to Atlantic City for a wedding not her own. I don't like to get in the way of a student's success, but I can reach a point where I conclude that failing the class is the best lesson that student can receive.

What will happen, though, if Sierra goes to my dean to complain? I can hear Sierra whine, "My grandma had a stroke, and mean ol' Professor Lightbulb wouldn't let me turn in my work even though I explained to her that I had to be at the hospital!" My dean is experienced enough to know that not all student complaints are legitimate, but she doesn't know Sierra's long history of bogus excuses. And don't I sound like a real hard-ass if you only know Sierra's side of the story!