God Has Videotape

Four Boys

2010-07-23T23:02:00.006-04:00

I am teaching in the second 6-week summer session. Since this session begins right after the high schools turn loose their wards, it attracts recent graduates and dual enrollment students looking to earn some college credit before the next academic year. The students are generally good—in attitude or in skills, sometimes both. But they are so young, and their youth and inexperience always surprise me. I wouldn't want their thoughts buzzing around in my own head, I know that for sure.

Boy 1

"Can you tell me how to calculate my average?" asked Rudy, a potential 2011 valedictorian from a nearby high school. Rudy is in competition for the top honor with a number of other rivals who also have perfect GPAs. Rudy hopes A's in a couple of college courses will help distinguish him from this crowd, so here he is, slaving away at the local community college. And Rudy is making an A in my class. He is careful and competent; mechanically, his writing is flawless, though long-winded and too safe to be interesting.

My question is why would he need to calculate an average when everything I have marked is an A? Is he so competitive that he must know that he has a 99.8 in case he has heard someone else might have a 99.7? I can imagine how hard it must be to live in his head, where he constantly measures himself against everyone else. Only the numbers matter, not repartee with peers before class, not the joy of running with an idea even if it takes him over a cliff. I hope his parents would say, "We wish he'd relax." I hope they are not applauding this super-competitiveness.

Boy 2

At the opposite extreme is Paul, who refuses to accept that he's not passing the course. Despite the frequent absences [and ensuing zeros from missing work] and a steady stream of Ds and Fs on assignments, Paul keeps asking, "But I'm doing okay, right?" No, sweetheart, you're not. "What if I make A's on everything else? Then I'll be okay, right?" Perhaps, I say. But then Paul misses yet another class, and I just shrug my shoulders. I would hate that heavy blanket of denial trapping my brain.

Boy 3

In an essay, Timothy wrote, "I'm a Christian and still a vurgeon, but it's hard with all these girls and their tits bursting out of their shirts ... " A vurgeon? I wouldn't be able to spell either if I lived in a young male body unable to get any release because my religion had such unrealistic expectations of me. Timothy's Christianity requires no fornicating, but it's summer in Florida—highs everyday in the mid 90s—so exposed skin abounds. This poor young man doesn't have enough of an independent spirit to disregard the rules of his religion, so when temptation finally wins, he'll have all that unnecessary guilt and self-recrimination for a biological imperative millions of years in the making.

Boy 4

Before submitting his first essay, confident Bradley told his classmates, "To make a paper good, all you have to do is add enough literary devices. They're impressive!" Bradley learned this trick in AP English, though he did not score high enough on the exam for college credit. Now he's taking freshman composition to earn those three hours. Despite his failure at the AP exam, he blindly believes what Dr. High School English Teacher has said. I'm hoping that this PhD actually taught that certain devices used with skill and care are impressive, not to hang similes at the ends of sentences like ornaments on a Christmas tree. I'm hoping that this PhD explained the value of clear communication, not faking a reader out with "devices." During one short paragraph describing his love of soccer, I learned that athleticism smiles on Bradley "like a mother on her newborn baby," that his skills get the attention of coaches "like a child grabbing a cookie from a cookie jar," and that scoring goals is "as easy as a Sunday morning breeze."

I have gotten Bradley to stop his nonsense—but only because continuing the practice negatively affects his grade, not because he believes that I have any real writing wisdom. On the first day of class, he asked, "Should we call you Dr. Lightbulb?" When I said no, he concluded that I was thus inferior to Dr. High School English Teacher.

Oh, well. Eventually Bradley will figure out that clear communication, not decorated writing, is what impresses readers. And college is, after all, the opportunity to try out new ideas and learn what works best, just like a teenage girl shopping for a new pair of jeans at the mall—ha!

Not Necessarily Laziness

2010-07-23T23:01:00.006-04:00

I know, I have ignored this space for months. Chalk up my absence to responsibilities at my real job and that I seem capable of only one creative project at a time. I have not been out with the camera, for example, for over a year.

But I have been writing for Trade It in for Twinkies, where I have composed three new movie reviews:

And I have done four labor-intensive TV series:

But I miss writing here. Summer break is around the corner, and I hope to divide my energies between this blog and the other.

Swimming with Sharks

2010-01-22T23:01:00.012-05:00

I just posted my review of Swimming with Sharks. Because this project is training to write reviews, I did what the professionals do and did not give away the ending.

This post, however, is not the review, so I want to talk about Guy's decision here.

>> Spoiler Alert << I believe that Buddy offers power while Dawn champions art [Michelle Forbes makes a kick-ass muse]. Guy snaps at the end of the movie because Buddy is about to fire him [= loss of power], not because he learns that Dawn has agreed to a midnight rendezvous with Buddy. Guy has already picked power over art. He breaks up with Dawn because he wants to please Buddy more than her. And we have seen him imitating Buddy's style: once on the phone in Buddy's office chair and then in the restaurant regaling the wannabes with insider stories.

For me, Guy's murder of Dawn is logical and consistent. During the evening of torture, Guy learns that Buddy lost his wife in a senseless, horrifying gang rape/murder. When Guy shoots Dawn, he is trying to prove to Buddy that he can suffer that same loss. Buddy must like the homage because he is complicit in the story he and Guy concoct to explain Dawn's death.

You can read the review here.

The Road Killers

2010-01-01T23:01:00.003-05:00

Of the three Michelle Forbes movies I've watched and reviewed, The Road Killers is my least favorite. I wouldn't have finished the DVD if I wasn't committed to this project. I felt bad trashing a movie with my favorite celebrity in it. Everything I know about movie making I learned while watching Entourage, so I could have gotten wrong all the reasons why this movie failed.

You can read the review here.

Crumbageddon

2009-12-28T23:01:00.018-05:00

I don't have children, so I do not have first-hand knowledge of how difficult they are to raise. I was a child years ago, and although my upbringing was painful and imperfect, my rearing was, in my opinion, better than the cushy, entitled lives I see so many children experiencing today.

The evening was too chilly to sit outside, so Elizabeth and I chose a tiny table in our favorite (crowded) Starbucks. A young couple with two children sat beside us. Unfortunately, a second glance their way revealed they were neighbors, so stupid small talk ensued. Elizabeth knows these neighbors better than I, for the mother has had to "rescue" my friend from 4-year-old Reagan, the little girl, who likes to run after Elizabeth, grab her clothes, and insist that she go into "time-out" whenever Elizabeth walks past their house. So I let Elizabeth do the talking while I sat quietly and observed the girl.

The parents had stopped at Starbucks at Reagan's request. The little girl wanted a slice of lemon pound cake, and her demand for dessert delayed four people in their evening plans. Their only purchase was the pound cake, which they handed over to Alpha Girl, who grabbed the whole slice and began eating down the center. Two towers of pound cake collapsed on either side of her mouth like the World Trade Center on 9/11. Crumbs and bigger chunks fell on the table, the chair, and the floor. When Alpha Girl had enough, her mother poked through the debris—telling Alpha Girl that she was so good to share—and gave pieces to the 2-year-old boy who crushed them in his little fist and, like Jackson Pollock flinging paint on canvas, further decorated the area. "He's much less verbal than Reagan was at his age," the father remarked, "but he's well above average!" Whatever you have to tell yourself, I thought.

A third adult joined the family, a bad-boy hipster with elaborate sideburns. Wolverine sneered at the mess and noted that they would be late if they didn't hurry up. Jackets were donned, bags and children grabbed, and then the five of them headed for the door. When the father discovered that the boy was still clutching a piece of pound cake, he slapped the kid's hand, sending a final spray of crumbs in our direction. Dad looked back and said, "I'll be right back to clean that up!" Of course, he never returned.

I know that wiping tables and mopping floors are responsibilities of the Starbucks crew, but I was appalled that three adults felt entitled to leave a table that messy. New arrivals couldn't sit there unless they took on the job of cleaning up the disaster these assholes thoughtlessly made. Elizabeth and I were stuck looking at it, and, because we had been talking to them, were getting looks from other patrons as if the eyesore was our responsibility.

As a child, I would have loved parents who always let me have my way and who held me accountable for nothing. I can only imagine how much my confidence would have grown if my desires and happiness made a difference to Mom and Dad. I couldn't get my parents to stop to let me pee—"Hold it until we get home," my father would have growled—let alone divert them for food I alone desired. My parents would never have allowed me to make such a mess in public; I remember orders to brush the salt grains off Burger King tables so that the minimum-wage staff wouldn't think my family and I were pigs. As a result of my raising, I know that I am not the center of the universe, and I am glad that I learned that fact early. I feel sorry for Reagan, who might have alpha status right now but will learn soon enough that the rest of the world won't cater to her whims as Mom and Dad do.

Kalifornia

2009-12-16T23:01:00.004-05:00

I just posted the review for Kalifornia. I remember seeing this movie in the theater when it first came out. I went for David Duchovny as I was a big X-Files fan. I remember that I found it very disturbing, but I don't recall if what bothered me was the violence or Brian Kessler not being Fox Mulder enough.

I was not looking forward to seeing the film again, but 16 years later—this time studying a different character as the action unfolded—I really enjoyed it. I like movies that show we are not affixed to one place on a continuum like violence. Sure, Early is at one extreme end, but he moves more to the center when he pistol whips Brian instead of shooting him and then handcuffs Carrie to the bed instead of killing her after she embeds that shard of glass in his side. Brian and Carrie—both at the opposite end of the continuum since they have never held guns, let alone used them—have to slide over to violence if they hope to survive. The movie is an interesting study in adaptability—Early who tries to adapt to friendship, Brian and Carrie who have to accept their animal instincts.

You can read the review here.

Love Bites: The Reluctant Vampire

2009-11-29T23:01:00.010-05:00

I have begun a new project which, at this early stage, seems intimidating and impossible: I am going to review all of the work of the actress Michelle Forbes. [I will berate myself less for the silliness of a celebrity crush if I can point to the hard work of analysis and writing that these reviews will require.]

After much difficulty, I finally tracked down a copy of Love Bites: The Reluctant Vampire and composed my first movie review. I think this one is too heavy on summary; I'll try to be more careful of that problem with the next film.

You can read the review here.

March Madness

2009-03-24T23:01:00.000-04:00

As the tales below will illustrate, I have hit the point this semester where I just don't care any longer if I lose a teaching moment.

Right before the withdrawal deadline, I make my students do an admittedly corny in-class assignment which I call The Midterm Reality Check. They fill out a form to determine their current average and write a paragraph explaining what they will do to maintain or improve that average by semester's end. When a student says, "Professor Lightbulb, I can't find Reading Quiz 3," I get to say, "That's because you weren't here the day we took it, so put a zero in the box," demonstrating to the entire class the correlation between attendance and success. I like making students do the math themselves rather than bugging me with a "How am I doing in this class?" I like having the bad students reflect on what behaviors got them into their pickle; I like letting the good students with high marks in all their boxes watch the bad students scramble to make the math work in their favor.

Bryan, always the first to finish—but also the most likely to lose significant points for failing to follow directions—brought me his form, ready to escape the prison which is my class. His average thus far was a 63. I said, "Thanks" and let him go. I should have pointed out that his desire to rush out every day contributed to his low number, but I didn't.

Back in my office, I found an email inbox full of messages, two of them from my most frustrating student, Roderick. This young man is empty handed when work is due, but excuses tumble out of his mouth like presents from Santa's sack. The first email asked for a letter of recommendation for a scholarship. Roderick is not empty headed; he is bright and creative, just undisciplined. I could frame him as full of potential in the letter I was considering writing. A few more messages down the list, I got Roderick's second email, this one explaining that he would be missing yet another class for another unbelievable reason. I returned to the first email to say that I don't write letters of recommendation for students with F averages. I should have explained that the deciding factor was the second email with yet another lame excuse for his missing warm body and/or homework, but I then asked myself, Why bother?

Later that day, I sent midterm averages to my online students. Katherine wrote back to protest a zero. She claimed that she did in fact post a response to our first cyber discussion. I checked the board but found no post. I looked for the automatically generated email copy that the service sends when a student hits "Submit" but found no email. I searched her virtual folder for the .doc copy she was supposed to send "just in case" but found no copy. I wrote back that I had no evidence of the missing work, so the zero would stay in my gradebook.

Oh, claimed Katherine, it was saved on her home computer. She couldn't understand why I didn't have it. Of course, she neglected to send this "saved" copy with her protestation, for she won't actually write it unless I ask to see it. I explained that I do not take discussion responses late, and the zero would stay.

You're being so unfair, Katherine replied. Why, she even sent a draft of her discussion response to her aunt to proofread, and the timestamp on that email showed that she had written it before the deadline. She did not, however, forward this sent email to me and missed a third opportunity to send me her "saved" copy.

I held firm. Zero, Katherine. Part of me wanted to explain the strategies that she could have used to make her story more believable. For example, she could have inquired about this January assignment in early February: "Professor Lightbulb, when am I getting a grade for the first cyber discussion?" I would have scrambled to find it, assuming that I was at fault and taken anything she sent. Or she could have written it and attached it to the first email, hoping that if she immediately produced the work I would believe it was written long ago. But waiting for a cue that I would accept it before she even bothered to write it was misplayed. I hate when students lie to me and refuse any grace in such situations. I wanted to write, "Katherine, sweetheart, I have taught college longer than you have lived. Such amateur tricks don't work on me," but I was too over it all to bother.

Beautiful Boring

2009-03-06T23:01:00.006-05:00

As soon as my online office hours were over at 11 a.m., spring break began! Elizabeth and I made our second trip to Lukas Nursery, where she bought more plants, and I spent time with the flying beauties in the Butterfly Encounter. I don't want to become a boring one-trick pony, but here are the latest takes with the camera:

Click photo for large version.

Evolution of My Grading

2009-03-04T23:01:00.002-05:00

As an undergraduate, I worked in my college's writing center where I learned to mark student essays in a manner that inspired thoughtful revision. For example, my tutor training taught me to ask questions instead of bark orders—"Can you tell a specific story to illustrate this?" rather than "Give an example." Because I worked one on one with just a handful of students per day, I had time to evaluate their writing in a meaningful manner.

When I got my first real class to teach—one section of prep writing as an adjunct—I still had time to comment in ways that I hoped inspired improvement. But as my dean concluded that I had "the gift" and began giving me more and more classes, and then a temporary full-time contract, and then the coveted tenure-track position, I could no longer comment as carefully on the work of 150 students, each of whom had to write 6,000 words per semester, a state mandate.

My grading changed from thoughtful remarks about content to covering my ass by marking sentence errors. I believed this strategy was necessary because of the precariousness of my employment. In those early days, I quickly learned that students shared their papers with everyone. As a result, I began to mark essays so that if a senior colleague or my dean got his hands on the paper, he would know that A) I read the entire essay, and B) I knew my grammar. Another factor influencing the number of sentence errors I marked was the do-or-die, department-graded final exam. At the time, the college required that freshman composition students pass this final exam essay or fail the entire class. The most common cause of failure was too many grammar mistakes, especially when a paper indicated a lack of fluency with English. So I marked every sentence error—top to bottom—in the essay; if a Korean left out articles, I added _^^a, _^^an, or _^^the wherever necessary. No student could complain, after receiving a semester's worth of papers dripping with green ink, that she didn't realize that she was in jeopardy of failing the class heading into the final exam.

Once I was awarded tenure, new responsibilities and observations affected my grading. Freedom from paranoia didn't turn me into a lazy grader who didn't really read, nor did I become a hardass no longer concerned if students complained about my unreasonable demands. Instead, I began loosening my standards, mostly as a result of the hypocrisy my colleagues demonstrated.

I first learned that my classroom expectations weren't in line with the reality of academia when I began editing a professional journal showcasing the interests/research of the college's faculty and staff. Before this experience, I was really nitpicky about works cited page entries/parenthetical references in student essays. Because my students and I had a lengthy discussion/practice of how to compose works cited page entries and the corresponding parenthetical references, I took 2 points for every error I found in the final document, no matter how small. A miscapitalized word, a missing mark of punctuation, forgetting the brackets that enclose the web address—minus 2 points, minus 2 points, minus 2 points! I could get an essay down to a 70 on the works cited page alone. But after reading submissions from PhDs who made up their own personal citation style as they wrote—which then required extensive changes from me and the other editors—I decided I wasn't going to bust first-year students so harshly for something that their professors couldn't do correctly themselves. If the list of sources looks works cited page-ish, I'm okay with it now.

I am crystal clear about what plagiarism is and my penalties for it. Those penalities, however, have lessened over the years. In the past, if a student lifted a single sentence verbatim from a source and neglected to include quotation marks around it—whether or not a parenthetical reference followed—she earned a zero. A second instance meant I WFed the student from the class. Not so any longer. When I heard a colleague bitch that the papers she wrote for her daughter's college history class were earning only B's, I quit losing my temper over plagiarism. How could I bust students for doing something my fellow faculty—as well as more prestigious teachers at better schools—did without real penalty? A lifted sentence without quotation marks is just a punctuation error for me now.

I used to agree with my colleagues that too many errors—no matter how intelligent or insightful the content—equalled a failing paper. Then I began to serve on faculty hiring committees where candidates had to write impromptu essays right before the interview. Some of these pieces were grammatical disasters, but I would listen to faculty who argued that we should overlook the mistakes, especially if they really liked a candidate. "He was nervous," "Twenty minutes is too little time to write and proofread," or "She is very good with students" were some of the excuses I heard when committee members wanted to move a candidate to the second interview with the provost. Then when our Chief Learning Officer sent an email introducing a new hire as a former principle of a local high school—for even she didn't remember that your principal is your pal—I gave up. I'm not failing students for making mistakes at the beginning of their higher education that folks with advanced degrees can't handle themselves.

If you get a group of faculty together in a room, they will insist that they are, by god, upholding standards. They will bemoan the fact that students today can't do things they themselves did stupendously back in the day. Anyone listening should have plenty of skepticism, though. Most of those faculty have skills only slightly better than the average first and second-year students in their classes.

I still give plenty of Ds and Fs as final grades, but those students don't pass because they either A) can't follow simple directions, usually because they didn't attend class to get them, or B) can't get the work done at all. Skills like documenting sources, avoiding plagiarism, and editing for sentence errors are not what get the students in my classes in trouble.

When Things Work and When They Don't

2009-03-02T23:01:00.002-05:00

Our favorite barista invited Elizabeth and me to meet Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks. He is, we learned, visiting individual stores all over the country, talking to patrons, trying to determine what can be done differently/better since the current recession is the first time in Starbucks history when profits/growth have declined. Any caffeine fiend without a special invitation had to peer at us through the plate glass as the staff served custom drinks in ceramic mugs and slices of cake decorated with whipped cream and cut flowers. When Mr. Schultz asked for feedback—either positive or negative—the invited guests offered praise and complaints. I enjoyed watching a billionaire honestly engage his customers. He admitted when he thought the company made mistakes; he talked with great passion about health coverage for his employees and ethical farming. He was nothing like the banking and automobile execs dodging questions before Congress.

One story he told got me thinking. During a recent visit to New York City, he walked into a filthy Starbucks. He explained that the mess wasn't the result of a busy lunch hour when the employees were too overwhelmed to keep up with cleaning. No, this filth was established. He then bemoaned the difficulty of finding store managers with the leadership skills to run each individual location in an ideal manner. We could all relate. Throughout my city are Chick-fil-As and Burger Kings that I refuse to enter, and yet I know individual stores where the employees keep the tables shiny and the fries hot.

Unlike Mr. Schultz, I think a well-run store is not entirely up to the manager, that location and the corresponding clientele make a difference. When a number of guests bitched about the Starbucks near the university, several people noted that rude workers staffed every food and beverage location in that area, that students serving—for the most part—other students were bound to be surly. Elizabeth and I once ordered coffee from the Starbucks at the Florida Mall. The store was a pigsty; we watched unoccupied employees ignore the mess. We surmised that the store atmosphere which we so prized at our regular Starbucks could not develop in a location where tourists visited a single time, and the lack of intimacy affected the attitude of the employees.

In the classroom, student mix can handicap an otherwise effective professor in the same way. I have gotten enough feedback—on classroom visits by the dean, on student evaluations, in comments at RateMyProfessors—to know that I am a good teacher. But my classroom leadership skills do not mean every section of a class goes equally well. I can adjust my methods so that if I have a really extroverted class, I tone down my own enthusiasm to keep the top from blowing off, and if I have a reticent class, I have a few tricks to get the reluctant participating. Even so, some classes, despite what I try, fail to respond, and four, five, six weeks into the semester, I give up on ever enjoying them; I count down the days until final exams.

This semester, I have thrown up my hands in one section of freshman composition. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I have a group I love, whose papers I enjoy reading. After grading a set of essays, I pick out the four best titles, the four best thesis statements, the two best introductions, and read them aloud; then I let students vote on which ones they like the best, rewarding the winners with candy bars purchased from the book store. The class has gotten very competitive composing those introductory parts of an essay where the writer grabs or loses the reader's attention. Does the other class get candy? No way. The students are cowardly automatons, afraid to have an original thought that might distance them from the safety of their boring peers. For them, I bring grammar worksheets. And if I were Howard Schultz and they were one of my Starbucks stores, I'd immediately close the doors and lay off the workers. Unfortunately, I'll still be serving up composition instruction every Tuesday and Thursday until late April.

Letter to a Student

2009-02-19T23:01:00.000-05:00

Dear Mr. Too-Cool-for-School:

This admission might surprise you, but when I was an undergrad, my classes frequently frustrated and bored me. Like you, I often sat in class without taking notes. Like you, I seldom had my work done on time.

Our similarities end there, however.

Unlike you, I didn't sit angry as a storm cloud, glowering, arms crossed, radiating negativity that filled my corner of the classroom. My demeanor indicated interest—even on the days it was feigned—so professors found me attentive and polite and were willing to give me a little grace when I missed an exam or deadline.

Unlike you, I have an excellent memory. Not only could I remember everything the professor said during a lecture, but I also remembered all of my own musings—the connections, consequences, and applications of the material covered in class. So when I had to write an essay or take an exam, I didn't regurgitate my fuzzy, superficial understanding of the lectures. I had instead substantive, insightful things to say, further winning me points with my teachers.

Unlike you, I was such a good writer—a reputation that often preceded me—that professors would say, "Give me the paper next week, Sparky. Your essays are always worth waiting for." Unlike you, I almost always earned As. And when an iron-willed instructor got tired of my attempts to bend the rules and refused any more grace, I recognized that I was at fault and accepted the punishment. Unlike you, I didn't have tantrums appropriate for two year olds during which I blamed the professor, the computer lab, my frozen water pipes, etc. for my own shortcomings.

I've read your essays and observed your attitude. You're perfectly capable of college-level work, but you're no great talent. I assume that your parents did let you in the house, but you act as if they kept you out in the barn, behavior that doesn't inspire any grace from me. This means that you have to do things on time, based on the lectures given in class. So you might want to pick up that pencil and start writing things down, for you will never hear me say, "It's okay, Mr. Cool, I'll take that assignment late. I'll use the extra week to let my anticipation build for what will inevitably be a great essay!"

Yours truly,
Professor Lightbulb

Swagger Jacking

2009-02-16T23:01:00.003-05:00

My freshman composition students are drafting their definition essays. As they were choosing their topics—they have to define a type of person—I encouraged them to bring something new to the table. When I asked for possibilities, one of my students offered "swagger jacker," a term I had never heard. The student explained that a swagger jacker hijacked someone else's swagger, or style. I was delighted with the name.

When I saw Elizabeth later in the day, I asked her if she knew what a swagger jacker was. She did not, so, puffed with superiority, I defined it.

"So you swagger jacked CJ?" Elizabeth asked.

Yes, it's true. For years my style had been boring but my own: neat but casual, too much 100% cotton, everything fit for a washing machine. But then last summer, I began watching all seven seasons of The West Wing on DVD, a show I missed during its original run. CJ became my role model for dressing. I liked the masculine suits softened with colorful collared shirts, camisoles, and jewelry. I decided that at 45 years old, I should own suits of my own, and have since bought four with shoes to match. When classes started this spring, I wore a new suit each day the first week. CJ's style is classic, so I can keep it for the rest of my professional life. The West Wing premiered in 1999, but I heard that the office staff reported to my dean, "Damn, Professor Lightbulb looked good" when I wore the taupe suit on Monday.

Now that I've 'jacked a TV character's style, I guess I'll have to be less critical of the colleague who roams the hallways dressed as Brittany Spears circa "Hit Me Baby One More Time" or the one who exits his ordinary little Toyota dressed as a Hell's Angel—black motorcycle boots, black leather jacket, wallet secured with a chain to his faded jeans, unshaven face and pony tail. We're all being someone else.

New Beginning

2009-02-13T23:01:00.003-05:00

A student approached me after class the other day to ask, "Do you post as Sparky Lightbulb?" I said no, and at the moment that I responded, I meant it. Then I remembered that I used to blog—as Sparky! Oh, no! Students had learned my secret identity! Oh, no! What information that I didn't want to share had they discovered?

I signed into my Blogger account ready to "draft" any embarrassing posts—if not delete the entire body of work—but I discovered that this blog is a charming snapshot of my life two years ago. So what if a person who knew me as Clark Kent got a little insight into my Superman?

Rereading some of the posts here reminded me how much I enjoyed blogging—as well as photographing, something else I've essentially abandoned as my work life and other projects swallowed up my time. I dusted off the camera, and, in search of a sure thing, drove to the Lukas Nursery Butterfly Encounter, where I shot those proverbial fish in a barrel:

Click photo for large version.

I had so much fun that I might just have to dust off the Spandex and cape, ready to soar through cyberspace once again!

Bzzzzzzzzzz

2007-05-31T23:01:00.000-04:00

I cannot let May 2007 end without a single post here. I haven't lost enthusiasm for blogging; I just don't seem to have any time! I did go out with the camera last weekend and noticed [in a completely unscientific way] that the insect population—butterflies, dragonflies, and bees—was less abundant than this time last year.

The weather, though, is different, much drier than last May. The Old Farmer's Almanac says that Florida will have a wetter than usual June, so I am hoping that thriving wildflowers and higher humidity will fill the air with my little friends.

Spending Time with the Small Things

2007-04-29T23:01:00.005-04:00

I spent two hours at Mead Garden today, sweating in the already hot sun and pursuing little things with the camera. A woman walking her Great Dane warned me to take care near the water as she had just seen a large water moccasin, but I had my doubts, what with all the elementary kids who visit the park by the busloads.

The male anoles were flashing the females everywhere I turned:

The dragonflies were back in force, especially blue dashers:

Even though I have photographed hundreds of blue dashers, I still enjoy them. The photo below I might use as a Christmas card for 2007, a weird little angel perched atop an equally weird little tree:

I also shot a gray-green clubtail, Arigomphus pallidus, another new species for me. Clubtails are not handsome dragonflies, but I always enjoy spotting something new.

And the male pondhawks were dueling with the blue dashers at the water's edge. I never got a good picture of one last year; this shot isn't stupendous, but it's an improvement over my sorry efforts from 2006:

I had a lot of fun, but a big project is taking up my time, and I don't know when I'll get the chance to go out again.

Photo Lesson

2007-04-08T23:01:00.001-04:00

Today I learned that the hostess, anxiously preparing the Easter feast, is never happy to discover that a guest is dissecting the tulip centerpiece and snapping pictures:

Shooting Fish in a Barrel

2007-03-18T23:01:00.001-04:00

Lukas Nursery has a "butterfly encounter," a large enclosure stocked with nectar and larval plants and hundreds of free-flying butterflies. The captives are so tame [or depressed] that they tolerate very close human proximity. Species like the zebra longwing, which I have chased without success at Leu Gardens, will perch on the end of a human finger. So I thought that taking great photos would be as easy as shooting those proverbial fish in a barrel. After dumping the day's haul onto my computer and viewing the 150 shots, I learned otherwise.

I blame my macro lens, which I used exclusively, although I realize that my amateur status as a photographer was more likely the real culprit. I always aim for the eyes, and since the macro lens has such a small area of clear focus, I got lots of super-sharp butterfly eyes while the rest of the insect was reduced to blur. Below are some of my nicer efforts.

A Great Southern White:

Julia Heliconians:

And Zebra Heliconians:

I'll bet that shooting real fish in a barrel isn't as easy as one might at first think!

Spring Break Adventure

2007-03-13T23:01:00.004-04:00

Elizabeth and I spent the day at Moss Park. I had hoped for lots of dragonfly photo opportunities but was disappointed by the small numbers of insects in inconvenient places. Moss Park has big areas of water, and alligator breeding season is right around the corner, so I was sticking to the shores heavily trafficked by people and boats! I did manage one shot of a cypress clubtail, a new species for me:

And another shot of a sandhill crane pair:

I am definitely feeling out of practice with the camera!

Good or Cool? What's More Important?

2007-02-15T23:01:00.000-05:00

"This is from the heart," Raj insisted, tapping his chest. He was explaining why I was the finest instructor at the college. I listened patiently, uncomfortable with the gush of praise delivered in the hallway. I didn't want to hear that I was "so unlike" the other, presumably bad professors that Raj had taken after his semester of freshman composition with me.

I am not so modest that I can't listen to compliments. The problem was that Raj was the student delivering them.

Raj is Indian or Pakistani, older than I, probably in his late 40s or early 50s. He already has a university degree from his home country, one that isn't honored here in the States, so he has returned to school to pursue the credentials that will allow him to work again as a pharmacist. When Raj was in my class, he was a model student. He was smart, punctual, and prepared. He understood social hierarchies and respected them, beginning each question he asked with a British-inflected "Ma'am." But Raj was far from cool, and his comments bothered me that day in the hallway because he had caught me right after a class with the Show Dog.

The Show Dog is tan, tall, and surferesque but not a surfer. I can tell that his dedication is to the stylist who can streak his hair so beautifully, not to the next wave. He exudes wealth—and not from parents strapped with huge credit card debt who buy him whatever he wants as bribes. No, his parents have real money, and lots of it. I just know that he drives a much more expensive car than I do, and he knows it too.

I assume that he is taking freshman composition in the spring because he flunked out of an expensive 4-year school last semester, probably after four months of heavy drug and alcohol abuse. He has that world weariness that comes from too much high drama early in life. I'll bet that his parents want him close to home so that they can easily return him to rehab, if necessary. Respectable grades during a semester at the local community college might be all the university needs to readmit him next fall, what with the endowment Dad has promised.

The Show Dog is a decent writer but has no interest in improving his skills. He never says a word in class, yet everyone is aware of his presence and behavior. He won't take notes. He sits the entire hour and fifteen minutes with his arms crossed, awake but bored. He is not sullen, just passively tolerating the restrictions on his freedom. Usually when a student doesn't participate—doesn't talk, doesn't take notes, doesn't do the optional bonus-point assignments—the others in the room dismiss him. Their suspicions that the nonperformer is a loser are confirmed when I return heavily marked essays or low quiz scores.

But the Show Dog is so charismatic in his wealth and ennui that I notice my good students mimicking his behavior by putting down their own pens and attempting to replicate his inscrutable face. The Show Dog isn't instigating this minor rebellion—I can tell that he finds all of us so beneath him in money and experience that we hardly register—but my students act as though they are in the presence of a celebrity, and the only way to get his attention is to imitate him.

Now if the Show Dog had stopped me in the hallway to praise my teaching, I would have enjoyed the compliments—although such behavior certainly isn't the Show Dog's style. If I just caught the corners of his mouth upturned in the start of a smile during one of my witty moments in class, that would do. But my humor must be so unsophisticated or safe by the Show Dog's standards that I can't break the stoic blankness of his features.

And here's the self-revelation I'm not much liking: It doesn't matter to me that hardworking, good Raj, whose life has been nothing but challenges and obstacles, appreciates my style and skill as a teacher. I would rather have confirmation that the pampered Show Dog thought I was cool.

Maybe I know that the Rajs of the school are easy to impress; they require only that I have a professional demeanor and an organized class. The Show Dogs, meanwhile, need a level of hipness that I no longer have [and maybe never did]. I don't believe that I will ever get this Show Dog to connect with what I'm doing in class. His refusal to meet me halfway—something the Rajs are all too happy to do—is part of the problem. But that I wasn't able to spark an exception from him means that I am getting too old or too tired to be good and cool.

Out with the Camera Again—Finally!

2007-02-07T23:01:00.009-05:00

I haven't budgeted much camera time lately. The weather, for Florida, has been cold, which I don't tolerate well, and winter isn't the season for insects, my favorite subjects. Plus, I had a nice stash of hoarded photos to post at the photostream in January and February, since I knew opportunities for new work would be slim to none.

Yesterday, however, I decided to go out. I wasn't expecting any good pictures this early in the year; I just wanted to see if the dragonflies had begun to make their return.

I started at Mead Garden. Perhaps the day was too cloudy and windy, but when I sat quietly at the lake shore, at first no camera in hand, just observing, I didn't see a single dragonfly skim over the water. I did, however, get a reasonably good shot of a snowy egret:

Next, I drove over to Leu Gardens. There were bees and an occasional butterfly, but I found myself drawn more to flowers. I remember shooting soprano daisies last year but always being disappointed with the results. These, though, I do like:

I also managed one good shot of a sweat bee who was busy in a flower I don't recognize. I love when my big human existence dissolves, and I get to see the world that the little bug inhabits from his perspective.

Do You Need That Emotion Today?

2007-02-07T23:01:00.001-05:00

Elizabeth and I met a friend for lunch. Eventually, Lynda regaled us with tales from her hiking adventure over Christmas break. But first we sat through a long series of complaints: her mother's unrealistic expectations, her boyfriend's refusal to get married, her colleagues' incompetence, her limited income as a single woman in a couple's world. She seemed tired and unhappy, and spring break is still weeks away.

But eventually, Lynda began to recount her trip to Mexico, which included burro riding, all kinds of limit-testing challenges, and beautiful scenery. She stayed at a nice resort in the mountains, and each day her group followed a no-nonsense guide on hikes of various difficulty. Each evening during dinner, the guide would explain the next day's outing, detailing the distance, altitude, level of challenge, and exposure. For Lynda, exposure was the concern; she explained that her fear of heights was something she could control if the trail was wide enough or had natural railings on both sides. But she feared losing her footing and tumbling down the mountain if the trail was narrow and exposed.

One evening, as the guide discussed the next day's challenges, he mentioned that there would be frequent exposure. If any of his hikers thought that they would have a problem, the guide wanted to know immediately.

Lynda went right up to say that she was using this trip to work on her fear of heights, but after his description of the upcoming hike, she thought that she would just relax at the resort.

"He looked right at me and asked, 'Do you need that fear tomorrow?' Like it was my choice. And you know, when he asked me that way, I believed that it was my choice. I thought a second and told him, 'No, I won't need that fear tomorrow.'"

Lynda seemed to get the lesson about fear but didn't see its carryover to other emotions. I wanted to imitate the guide and ask, "Do you need the unhappiness about your mother today? Do you need the disappointment with your boyfriend and colleagues today? Do you need the worry about your finances today?"

Even though I understand the guide's lesson, I'm sure that I don't apply it either. Do I need this impatience with the computer ignorant today? Do I need this boredom with my life today? And on and on.

Why is it that we see that other people have clear choices, but we don't see our own?

Closer to Fine, Closer to Old

2007-01-26T23:01:00.010-05:00

Elizabeth and I went to see the Indigo Girls last night. They performed at the Bob Carr, an intimate venue that seats maybe 500 - 600 people. We enjoyed the opening band, Three5Human, who were so good in a Lenny Kravitz/funk-rock way that I bought their album at iTunes. Three young women got up to dance more often than was polite, waving their wide asses in our faces a little too frequently. But since the three knew all of the words to the songs [and thus qualified as real fans], it was hard to stay annoyed for long.

I had seen the Indigo Girls in concert years ago, after the release of their third or fourth album. That show had been wild, so I tried to prepare Elizabeth for more of the same. They had performed at the Peabody Hotel, in a basement banquet room. Although the stage was slightly raised, the floor was level and the seats were rows and rows of dining room chairs. For a better view, everyone started to stand on the chairs, dancing and clapping. As it was the only way to see, I remember getting up on a chair as well, an act of balance I would never attempt today. Back then, the Indigo Girls were younger and leaner, as was their audience. And what now seems dangerous, uncomfortable, and inconvenient seating was, at the time, just an opportunity for a bunch of young people to have fun.

The audience last night was, as Elizabeth put it, Chablis-sipping yuppies, what those foolish young people from 15 - 20 years ago have become. The chatter around us was middle-age talk about professional jobs, mortgages, and the like. The clothing, the drink choices, the behavior all smacked of maturity, not abandon and folly. Most of us would have happily stood for "Closer to Fine" but preferred sitting in the comfortable chairs, tapping out the beat with a palm to the knee or a heel to the floor, not dancing in the aisles. For god's sake, Elizabeth and I paid $25 for valet parking at the downtown Marriott, a luxury and expense that I could not have afforded on top of the ticket cost 20 years ago.

I did enjoy going to the concert, even though the performance fell on a school night. Listening to an album is enjoyable, but seeing artists create the music live is inspiring. I really need to schedule more things out in the future. But, boy, have I aged, a fact that the concert communicated in clear ways.

The First Dragonflies of 2007

2007-01-15T23:01:00.004-05:00

The temperature was in the low 80s today, so Elizabeth and I decided to spend the MLK holiday at Moss Park. We stopped at Publix, got an "ultimate" sub and organic Cheetos, and picknicked by Lake Mary Jane.

After a hike on the nature trails, Elizabeth sat by the lake to write; I went off to confirm that we have dragonflies in Florida in January. I didn't expect to find any, but once near the edge of the canal that connects Lake Mary Jane to Lake Hart, I caught the familiar sparkle of wings.

Not only did I find dragonflies, I found a new species for me, blue corporals, or Libellula deplanata. At first I thought they were little blue dragonlets, but after reading Dunkle's description of behavior [perching close to the ground] and female coloring [I saw reddish-brown versions], I think that I have photographed blue corporals instead. Dunkle says that blue corporals make their first appearance in Florida in January, so these guys are right on schedule:

It's nice to start the new year with a new species!

Tested by the Gods

2007-01-12T23:01:00.005-05:00

Tonight, around 8 p.m., I started to take the dogs for their last walk of the evening. Yo-Yo and I always go first. We don't really walk; we just go down the street so that she can smell the four corners at the end of the block. Like a wine connoisseur, she evaluates with real concentration single blades of grass, the sign posts, the bases of the big oak trees at the edges of lawns. If the weather is really rainy or cold, she just pees in the front yard and wants to come right back inside to her warm spot on the sofa.

We noticed an old black guy pushing a shopping cart. This sight was odd as I live in a residential neighborhood, not downtown. It is an old neighborhood, so it is more readily accessible than all of the new subdivisions farther from the city center, the ones with a single entrance where all the streets end in cul-de-sacs. But my neighborhood is suburban residential, so we don't see homeless guys. As the night was chilly, Yo-Yo wasn't interested in more than a quick pee, after which I took her inside to get Bug. When Bug and I got outside, I noticed that the homeless guy had made his way up my street and was in Elizabeth's next-door yard picking grapefruit off her tree.

Bug was inspecting the spot where Yo-Yo had peed, so I just stood there watching the homeless guy. Elizabeth wouldn't have minded the man raiding her tree; a couple of well-off yuppies who live in the neighborhood routinely trespass in her yard for fruit. This tree produces so many grapefruit that even with robbing neighbors and bags picked for friends and family, the tree leaves plenty to rot on the ground. When Bug was done inspecting Yo-Yo's pee, he headed for the street, and his jingling tags alerted the homeless guy that we were out.

"Ma'am?" he called. "Ma'am?"

When I realized he wanted something from me, I pulled Bug back into the house and locked the door.

Having been kidnapped from a 7-11 parking lot several years ago, I just don't deal with strange men at night. But as soon as I heard the deadbolt slide into place [noting, as any college composition teacher would recognize, that my life had become a Brent Staple's cliché ], I felt bad. I am well schooled in Greek mythology and know the code of hospitality. I have read of one poor mortal after another ignoring someone in need only to discover that the person was actually a god testing the human's good will.

I guess last night I failed.

Back in the Day

2007-01-05T23:01:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, on the first day back to campus, still adhering to my New Year's resolutions about healthy eating—I brought whole-grain pretzels and vegan chicken noodle soup [Just add water and microwave!]—a mommy colleague accosted me to order Girl Scout cookies. I said no, in part because my colleague's daughter wasn't in tow. It's just wrong to push high-fat cookies on January 4, but it's so much more wrong to have moms selling cookies for their daughters.

I am reaching an age when I remember back in the day.

I was never a Girl Scout—I have been avoiding professional organizations since grade school—but my sister was. I remember helping Melody load up the rusted, red-metal wagon with boxes of cookies, after which we went door-to-door hawking thin mints. We were unsupervised, responsible for the money and cookies ourselves. The troop leader always had a sales contest to motivate the girls; whoever sold the most boxes won a bicycle or some other cool prize, which inspired our forays far from home. Melody always came in second, and when I think back, I now assume the contest was rigged. Our neighborhood—blue-collar working class—bumped up against a more affluent section of the city, all of the kids attending the same elementary school. I'm sure that the troop leader deferred to the wealthier parents, alerting them how many boxes they personally had to purchase to keep their daughters ahead of Melody, who was quite the saleswoman.

Back in the day, Girl Scouts developed independence, learned money management and the value of competition, and honed sales skills. Today, if my mommy colleague is any indication, the girls learn instead to rely on adults to do all of their work. I'm not opposed to Girl Scouts and their mothers sitting outside supermarkets selling boxes of cookies; I assume that the grocery stores require the adult presence for liability issues. I realize that in a world where children routinely get kidnapped or molested, that going door-to-door isn't an option any longer either. But to buy cookies from an adult without the actual Girl Scout present, realizing that the scout will later receive an unearned award, is just wrong.

As I said, I'm reaching that age when I remember back in the day when selling Girl Scout cookies meant dragging a heavy, squeaky, difficult to maneuver wagon all over the city—risking blisters, exhaustion, even robbery—for a colorful embroidered badge and, with any luck, a brand-new bicycle.

Even at work I catch myself responding with "Well, back in the day ..." For example, at the end of last semester, two of my colleagues were responsible for a group of 150 students. The "in charge" professor was tenured; he was paired with a much younger, temporary-contract colleague. Mr. In-Charge, despite the importance of the event, failed to show up on time, leaving Ms. Temporary Contract waiting in the auditorium lobby with 150 irate students. The gossip is that she just waited. She didn't call security to come unlock the door; she didn't contact the department office for directions. Her name didn't have "in charge" beside it on the assignment sheet, so she chose to stand there and broadcast her ineffectiveness. If last semester had been her first, I would understand, but she has worked at the college for a number of years and should know how to make things happen. But like Mommy Colleague's daughter, she has learned to let the "real" adults do everything and, when they're not around, just let nothing get done.

My second semester at the college, my primary duty was staffing the lab component of college-prep courses. I supervised/helped students who were working individually on problem areas in reading and writing. One evening during the first week of classes, a group of 25 students arrived in the lab. They had been sitting in an upstairs classroom for half an hour waiting for the instructor to show up. Now this happened back in the day, the late 80s, when I didn't have instant access via the Internet to faculty schedules. The students had an evening class, so the department office was closed. I had no one in authority for them to contact.

I could have shrugged my shoulders and told them that I didn't know what they should do. I could have advised them to go home when they got tired of waiting. But instead, I made an executive decision. Even though I was beginning only my second semester, I knew that the first meeting of prep classes included a "diagnostic" that determined what students worked on when they came to lab. I had copies of the diagnostic, so I had everyone sign an attendance sheet and take the test. I gave them the department phone number so that they could contact the office the next day to learn what had gone wrong. I told them not to worry, that there had to be a logical explanation for their professor's absence. I collected everyone's work as they finished.

It turned out that the dean, who, back in the day, handwrote faculty schedules on a tabled form, had told the instructor that she taught on Thursday night instead of Tuesday, the evening when the students showed up. No one was upset because I had not wasted anyone's time. The students performed a meaningful task and got credit for their presence, and the professor didn't lose an entire three-hour block of teaching time. "The only other thing I would have done," she explained as she thanked me, "was go over the syllabus, and we can do that next Tuesday." My dean was especially pleased because his error did not result in angry students, an angry faculty member, and a class beginning badly, as it would have if I had just waited.

And I didn't just wait because my childhood experiences had taught me to take responsibility and act—advantages of growing up "back in the day."

In Retrospect, Tonight's Dinner Wasn't That Bad

2007-01-01T23:01:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth and I went to Brio's Tuscan Grille for dinner tonight. Elizabeth had prepared an elaborate early New Year's meal while Madeline and Joseph were here, featuring a $70 prime rib, and I wanted to return the favor and take her out someplace nice to eat.

Unfortunately, the restaurant was chaotic and incompetent. Our bad experience began when the hostess seated us for our 4:30 reservation at a table that wasn't staffed with a waiter until 5 p.m. Elizabeth eventually went to complain, but we waited another five or so minutes before anyone came to greet us. The poor waiter apologized and promised to make it up to us, but that was not to happen, as he immediately got a huge table of Brazilians who neither spoke nor read English. I watched our waiter spend 30 minutes just trying to take their orders.

When our tournedos arrived, we discovered that the chef had mistaken medium rare for medium well. One of Elizabeth's little filets had the consistency of a piece of charcoal. She insisted on speaking to the manager, who took her entire meal off the ticket. We were so unhappy that we left without crème brûlée or cappuccino, two extravagences we enjoy when we eat there.

In retrospect, though, tonight's meal wasn't that bad, just disappointing. My worst restaurant experience happened many, many years ago. My father had come to town and wanted to assemble and feed the family in the excessive and expensive manner that is his style. We had reservations at a steak house; I made the mistake of walking over to my grandmother's house, where my father picked us both up. I'm sure that a step-mother accompanied Dad on this trip to Florida, but which one I don't recall. We met my sister and her dick-brain first husband at the restaurant. Dick-Brain was an assistant manager at a Firestone; he met my sister Melody while selling her tires after a boyfriend's ex-girlfriend had slashed hers.

Melody and Dick-Brain had driven in from Lakeland. They arrived first and waited in the bar drinking. After greeting them, we followed the hostess to a table where the horror began.

The waitress arrived, which immediately soured my father, for he believes that men are the only capable servers. The waitress detailed the specials and began to take drink orders. My sister and Dick-Brain ordered a second round of whatever they had gotten from the bar. Dad was paying, so they planned to get smashed on free booze. This was years ago when we were all a lot younger—so young, in fact, that the waitress asked to see ID to confirm that Melody and Dick-Brain were both 21.

Despite having driven an hour from Lakeland, despite the very real possiblity that they would be drunk on the way home, die in a car crash, and need identification so that cops could call their next-of-kin, neither of them had a driver's license. Dick-Brain mentioned that the bartender had had no problem serving them.

The waitress explained that she would lose her job if she didn't check ID; Dick-Brain countered that he would just walk back to the bar when he and Melody needed their next drink. Dick-Brain was displeased because he, rather than my father, would have to pay for any future alcohol. My father growled, "Just get them their drinks," but the waitress stood her ground.

Now Dick-Brain should have apologized and ordered Cokes; it was his and my sister's fault that they didn't have their licenses, not the waitress's fault that her job had rules. Meanwhile, my father stewed; he couldn't ask to see the manager about this problem since the waitress was clearly in the right, but on his face, I could see him planning the many ways he would make the waitress miserable as the meal progressed.

We ordered our food, and while we waited for it to arrive, Dad and Dick-Brain bitched about the waitress. We were a party of six at a large round table in an intimate little room with four or five other tables of guests. Dad and Dick-Brain were loud and mean, and I could tell that their conversation was making everyone within earshot uncomfortable. I'm sure that other wait staff delivered the gist of their comments to our poor waitress.

When the meals arrived, my father found something wrong with his and sent it back. When the waitress grabbed his plate only, he insisted that she take everyone's with her because we were there to eat together, that he refused to watch everyone being polite and letting their food get cold while he waited for the return of his steak.

The waitress took away all of our dinners, fixed whatever Dad had found complaint with, and returned. My father then scrutinized everyone's dish. He found something wrong with someone's plate—maybe the bernaise sauce had thickened on the meat, maybe the vegetables looked wilted, I don't remember. He made a big production of how he wasn't going to let his family eat inferior food because a stupid waitress had messed up his initial order. He demanded to speak to the manager.

Our frazzled waitress left to get her boss. I was nauseated with Dad's behavior long before this latest outburst; dinner was irrevocably ruined. I should have excused myself and left the restaurant, but I didn't have a car, and the pair of dress shoes I was wearing would have tortured my feet during the five-mile walk home. Plus, Dad was such a tyrant. Even though I was already an adult, gainfully employed at the college, I felt like a child in his presence and couldn't stand up for myself or for the waitress.

The manager took away all of our dinners a second time. Then he served our table through the rest of meal; we never saw the waitress again. Even though we now had a male attending to our needs, my father criticized every part of the experience. Dick-Brain, who was enjoying watching Dad control the staff, egged him on.

I refused ever to eat with that group again, fabricating responsibilities that I couldn't escape when asked to join them. Melody soon after divorced Dick-Brain and moved to Husband #2, so the possibility of that particular combination of personalities disappeared. I have never since allowed my father to pick me up, insisting that I meet him at the restaurant in my own car. As I recall this meal with my father, I realize that I would rather suffer through a bad experience happening to us, as occured tonight, than watch people at my table bullying the staff.

A Great Way to End the Year

2006-12-31T23:01:00.007-05:00

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

2006-12-30T23:01:00.005-05:00

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

2006-12-21T23:01:00.004-05:00

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

2006-12-13T23:01:00.001-05:00

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

2006-12-09T23:01:00.002-05:00

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

2006-12-07T23:01:00.001-05:00

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

2006-12-06T23:01:00.001-05:00

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!

Getting Wintery

2006-11-26T23:01:00.004-05:00

After a week of record lows, the weather finally warmed yesterday, so I drove to Mead Garden, a protected wetland/park that has a small, dragonfly-friendly lake at its center. Unlike the over-groomed lake near the house, this little body of water has a variety of aquatic plants along the shore where dragonflies can perch. I figured that it might be my best last-chance spot to photograph my favorite quarry.

Despite the sun and temperature near 80, dragonflies were scarce. One lone darner patrolled over the water, and a couple of male roseate skimmers, always difficult to photograph, zipped among the plants, resting occasionally:

I could also find perching blue dashers. I like that the light and colors indicate that winter is near:

I spotted damselflies too but had a hard time getting close enough for good shots:

I guess that dragonfly season really is coming to a close, that I'll have to wait for the new year before I get the color and variety I took for granted just a month or so ago!

If Only

2006-11-20T23:01:00.000-05:00

Sometimes students handle situations so stupidly/badly that I must be a hard-ass when, in fact, I would have ignored or not punished the behavior if only the students had demonstrated more sense. For example, this past weekend, a student emailed me to explain that she had just agreed to adopt a puppy from an idiot neighbor. The irresponsible owner had allowed her female to get pregnant, didn't want to be bothered with the puppies, and announced to the neighborhood that she was driving them to the pound. Eliana and her friends decided to each adopt one. Because the idiot neighbor didn't want the puppies interfering with Thanksgiving dinner, she insisted that Eliana and her friends take them now at 4 weeks old. The puppies will need bottle feeding, so Eliana asked if she could bring hers to class so that she could take care of this responsibility on campus. She promised the puppy would remain in her purse.

Now what was the mistake? Emailing me, of course! I'm a dog lover; I believe that Eliana is trying to do a humane thing in a world often cruel to animals. But because I know about the dog's presence, I cannot allow it. I doubt that anyone in the room has such severe allergies to pet dander that the puppy will cause an asthma attack, but because it might, I can't say, "Sure, Eliana, bring your little doggie to class," in an email saved to the college server. If only she had just brought the damn dog hidden in her purse, then I wouldn't have to start quoting college policy. If the puppy began barking or wimpering, Eliana could have apologized then.

I had another student try to have a temper tantrum in class as I was returning graded work. I had marked "zero points" on the score sheet for a part of the assignment that was missing. All the rest of the work I had stapled together. Kristopher cried, "But I did do that part!" as he waved a separate sheet of paper in the air rather than pointing to anything in the stapled packet I had overlooked.

"If you had given that to me last week when it was due, it would be stapled with everything else," I explained.

"This isn't fair! I deserve those points. My work is right here. You're the second professor who has lost one of my papers this week!"

Maybe Kristopher did finish that portion on time but forgot to include it with all of the other pieces that he submitted—I have had him run out to his car half a dozen times this semester to fetch something that was due, and he returned in 5 minutes with the assignment. Maybe he didn't finish that portion until after I collected the work, hoping that feigned indignation would buy an extension today. Maybe he had indeed given me the piece. My office isn't in a wind tunnel, and I am very organized. But I am also human and might have stapled it with another student's work.

"You are not being fair," he said again as he stomped out after I dismissed class.

I didn't budge because Kristopher wasn't behaving like someone legitimately aggrieved. He was instead acting like a 4-year-old who wanted his bowl of ice cream immediately, even though a pile of carrots still lay on his dinner plate. If the error really had been mine—and I admit the possibility—he should have stopped by my office to discuss the matter instead of ranting in a classroom full of fellow students. If only he had met with me privately to say, "Really, Professor Lightbulb, I gave you that piece last week. I understand that you might not believe me, but I just want to say that I did turn it in," I would have taken the work and credited his score sheet.

The third student made a big enough blunder that I withdrew him. I had already warned Julio—per college policy—that he had too many absences and too much missing work. Then he missed another Tuesday and the following Thursday sent an email explaining that St. Cloud was under a tornado watch [as was all of Central Florida], it was raining really hard [so hard, in fact, that my shoes and pants didn't dry out until noon], so he wouldn't be in class again but did want to know if I had graded all of his late work. I curtly replied that I hadn't received any late work and that if he didn't hand deliver hard copies by 2 p.m. that day, I was withdrawing him.

Of course he never came. I waited until today before I withdrew him—long after the tornado watch had expired—but I did have to do it. Experience has taught me that when a student in the research class doesn't do all of the little assignments leading up to the big paper, they are either recycling a paper from another class or procuring the work in some other academically dishonest way. Perhaps Julio was just way behind. If only he had admitted that fact, promised to spend all of Thanksgiving break catching up, and brought me the work next week, I would have accepted it. But believing that I should be satisfied if he just claimed he did the work was unforgivably bad behavior.

If only students had the sense to manipulate their instructors more intelligently, both their lives and mine would be less frustrating!

Near the End?

2006-11-17T23:01:00.001-05:00

I trekked around Leu Gardens today. It was too bright and sunny for any good pictures, and the dragonflies were in a depressing state. I found one Carolina saddlebags covered with mites:

And then I found another female looking thin, tired, and raggedy, as if she can barely hold on:

I guess like the grass which has finally stopped growing, the dragonflies need to die off to let the shorelines rest for the winter.

45 Minutes Down at the Lake

2006-11-14T23:01:00.000-05:00

If there weren't so many responsibilities! But I always have papers to evaluate, classes to plan, and email to answer, and the hours that I spend at work slip away. Despite promises to myself, despite packing the heavy camera, I haven't gotten down to Lake Pamela. Yesterday, I finally made a real effort, but because of schedule constraints, I had only 45 minutes.

At 2 p.m. the sun was already past its zenith and beginning its descent. Since I had chosen to walk counter clockwise, I had to squint the entire trip around, which made spying small things more difficult. Our lowest temperatures have been in the 50s, so I thought that the dragonfly population would still be strong, but I was wrong. There were still specimens, but fewer in number and species. I didn't see a single four-spotted pennant, my favorite bug of 2006. The blue dashers were battling at the water's edge and saddlebag pairs flying in tandem were abundant.

I did manage to capture a pair of Rambur's forktails, insuring future children for me to photograph!

And luckily I noticed this black saddlebags perched:

The picture isn't good for identification purposes because the markings on the hind wings aren't visible, but I love those giant eyes looking right at the lens. Black saddlebags are not handsome dragonflies, but at least this guy has a little personality, and I have one more species to add to my capture list!

And the Award for Best Performance in Front of a Skeptical Faculty Member Goes to ...

2006-11-10T23:01:00.000-05:00

The theatrics started 48 hours before the official withdrawal deadline. Tiffany, the first actress, hadn't bothered to read the policy in the syllabus, which states that students have a one-week grace period before I start penalizing late work. Her assignment was only two days late, not a matter of concern to me. Tiffany, however, was sure that she would earn a zero, so she began the performance by telling me that her best friend, after hanging on in the hospital for two days, had died that morning, the victim of a horrible automobile accident.

Now the local news here in Central Florida loves deadly car crashes, especially when a twenty something is fighting for life, giving the reporters time to analyze the accident and assign blame. If the young woman was at fault because of booze, pills, or the inability to pilot the huge SUV her parents bought for her birthday, we would have seen cops declaring the senselessness of the death. If she was the victim of someone else's drunkenness or inattention, the reporters would have broadcast family members crying for justice or weeping friends dropping off teddy bears at the roadside memorial. As a local news junkie, I had heard nothing of such an accident. The late piece that Tiffany delivered was polished, not the type of incoherent writing I would expect from someone who had just observed her best friend's death. The laser jet printing hadn't run from dripped tears.

Julio, the second actor, dashed to my office three minutes after I sent him an email warning of unsatisfactory progress. He must have been sitting at a computer on campus, updating his MySpace account or playing internet poker, not producing work he owed me, as he arrived empty handed. Although he had been an impressive student as we satisfied the literature component of the class, he was falling apart during the big research project. He was missing many assignments on top of being absent in class for the last week. Julio's performance in my office included a long monologue about Grandma. She hadn't died, but his family had learned that she was in a hospital in Columbia, about to expire from a heart attack. So the entire family had driven to Miami to catch the first flight to their home country. Before boarding the airplane, they learned that Grandma just had a bad bout of gas, nothing a Bean-O couldn't solve. Miami is three hours away by car, so how all of this drama had consumed an entire week he didn't explain. I was unable to sustain my disbelief during the performance.

Shortly after, Gerald, another nominee for best lie told to explain late work, appeared in my doorway, his open laptop in hand. "Professor Lightbulb," he panted, having run from somewhere, "how much do you know about computers?" Well, young man, quite a bit. Haven't you seen me demonstrate a range of multimedia presentations, all of which you know I created and then post to the course blog for your out-of-class download pleasure? Haven't you watched me fix problems after the AV guys throw up their hands in defeat? So I guess that you can surmise that I know quite a bit about computers.

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"I have the work I owe you—I mean, I wrote it—and I saved it, but it's not anywhere on my computer!"

He offered me the laptop as if the computer alone could fill the zeros in my grade book. When I opened Word, there were no recent documents opened or saved. The computer was either brand new or not used for writing papers. Gerald continued to pant while I ran a quick search. The heavy breathing added to my annoyance, not my sympathy. "There's nothing here," I said.

"But I saved it!" he emphasized. Despite the histrionics, I found the performance unconvincing.

My best actress—utilizing all of her high school drama club training—gave her elaborate performance in class with an audience of peers. She too owed me a number of assignments; her excuse was that a recent illness had put her way behind in all of her classes. She sat in class and fake sniffled and coughed. All the while, she crumpled tissues which formed a ring around her computer keyboard. Everyone in the room knew that she wasn't really sick because she couldn't get enough juiciness going to be truly convincing. But she would win an award for set decoration, for I found the ring of crumpled tissues an effective visual for her snow job.

This semester had been going so well that I wasn't counting down the days to Thanksgiving as I usually do at this time of year. I was enjoying my students and happy with their progress. I wasn't expecting scintillating research from them, but I did believe that they would continue to crank out the competent efforts that I had grown accustomed to.

But when students start putting their energy into lame performances instead of completing their work, they start to disappoint me. I wish that they would try honesty for a change: "Professor Lightbulb, I am a lazy slacker [or desperately trying to catch up in calculus, or working on a big group project in US Government, or whatever] and I have fallen behind. I promise that I'll have the work I owe you by _____." I would love some refreshing truth. I might even use the line my undergrad professors often used on me: "Oh, that's okay. Your writing is worth waiting for!"

Playing Hooky

2006-10-31T23:01:00.006-05:00

Today was the annual all-campus "Celebration of Learning." Classes were cancelled so that faculty and staff could come together, listen to overpaid, trendy, motivational speakers blabbing about educational assessment, and work on common course outlines, i. e., meaningless documents that everyone except the accreditation team ignores. Some of my colleagues just had to attend to confirm that the common course outlines were revised correctly. I, on the other hand, took a personal day.

The Celebration of Learning started four years ago, the brain child of our newest president. I went to the first one with an open mind. After sitting through a mind-numbing speech stating the obvious—students come to college to learn—and two excruciatingly boring break-out sessions, I went to the buffet lunch to find that the caterers hadn't cooked enough food. Like my experience with the McGriddle at McDonald's, I was foolish enough to try the Celebration of Learning only that one time.

So Elizabeth, who played hooky with me, and I decided to visit some places in the city that everyone knows about but which we had never seen. We started at the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey. The center is clean, spacious, and well-staffed; the birds are magnificent. I took a number of pictures that I wouldn't be able to get unless the raptors were tethered to a perch:

And since the center had a small butterfly garden, I was shooting the bugs as well, like this tiny cassius blue:

The center is on a lake, where an immature, very tame white ibis posed:

I enjoyed the photo ops but not the idea of the center. One of the volunteers explained that in the wild, most raptors die in their first year, but in captivity, they live considerably longer. The smaller birds in the aviaries didn't seem to have a bad life. But I felt awful about the bald eagles and large owls roped to posts with six-foot tethers. Trees shaded their area, but if a beam of sunlight found a large enough hole in the canopy, there was no where to escape. They reminded me of old folks in nursing homes. Were they content just to be alive, enjoying the taste of raw meat for scheduled dinners and the travels of the sun across the sky? Or would they have preferred death to this confinement? Their stoic, noble faces didn't reveal the answers.

The goal is to release as many of the birds back into the wild as possible. Those with severe injuries—amputated wings after collisions with power lines, for example—help educate the visitors. But the birds' existence at the center is such a reduction from their lives in the wild. I can't imagine losing a range measured in miles for one where a six-foot tether determines the farthest one can travel.

On the way home, we stopped at the Orlando Science Center because billboards in the city indicated that the Our Body: The Universe Within exhibit had begun. We should have confirmed that before paying the $15 admission. The staff was still arranging the dead bodies, so we were left touring exhibits appropriate to 10-year-olds. All of the dinosaur bones were fakes; all of the hands-on learning opportunities were stretched, chipped, and inaccurate from too much use. I did get one cool picture, though, shooting from the dinosaur room into kiddie science area:

All in all, Elizabeth and I celebrated learning in a much more meaningful way than did our colleagues stuck on campus.

Painting the Fence

2006-10-22T23:01:00.003-04:00

Shortly after I became a tenured faculty member, my colleagues had to choose a representative for faculty senate. At a department meeting, I heard my name being murmured when we reached that agenda item. Naive, I was thrilled to think that the long-tenured ranks wanted me to represent them. Finally, one old fart said, "I nominate Sparky," someone else seconded, and before I knew what had happened, I was appointed to what I believed was an august body that did important, good work.

In reality, the Tom Sawyers of my department had gotten me to paint the fence. They secured their own free time while I did the hard work of attending those dreadful meetings, suckered by flattery and false glamour. Faculty senate could never get anyone to run for secretary, as writing the minutes was a real chore. The secretary had to make sure that she recorded every single administrative slam without giving away any top secret, off-the-record discussion. Since I taught "composition" and was too green to know better, the senate president asked me to act as an interim secretary. I then got to listen to the senate members grumble because I had reduced [on purpose] a three-hour bitchfest and paranoia eruption to a single, single-spaced page, neglecting to record and properly credit the "clever" trumpeting of the most vociferous peacocks in the room.

I gave up my afternoon freedom and own personal writing time to sit in those frustrating meetings [or worse, in front of a computer trying to capture them] in the same way that boys in the Mark Twain novel give up an apple core, a piece of blue bottle-glass, a key that won't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, all for the "glamour" of whitewashing a fence while Tom supervises their work, smirking all the while.

My old fart colleagues weren't the only Tom Sawyers on campus; the administration knew how to hand off a paint brush as well. One day at a brainstorming session for a college-wide initiative, I made a well-received presentation on a solution for a problem. The next day, one of the VPs asked me to chair a large group responsible for producing documents that thousands of future students would use. The glamour of a phone conversation with a big-wig and the flattery that only I could pull off this project got me to give up more personal time for the equivalent of fence-painting labor. The glamour quickly evaporated as I drove all over the city, coordinating work with folks whose real interest was the stipend, not the product, and having to rewrite—or just plain write—their sorry contributions.

I'd been Tom Sawyered a second time.

There's that saying, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." I explain the second fooling this way: I was hoping for an encounter with Mr. Miyagi, of Karate Kid fame, not Tom Sawyer. I was hoping that if I was fence painting once again, that this time it was training to make me a better employee. After the arduous work, I wanted my Mr. Miyagi to boom, "Show me paint-the-fence!" and then, as I demonstrated the skill, he would make the connection between the chore and some greater good. But in academia [perhaps everywhere], few managers are really mentors. Higher ups—either the long-tenured or the administration—are just looking for 1) to get out of work that they don't want to do or 2) to have work done that makes them look good.

I produced excellent documents for the administrators. They are still used ten years after I supervised and edited their writing. But that work is just a pretty fence, not an opportunity for me to grow as a person or an employee. That project wasn't meant to teach me anything, although it did: I learned not to be stupid enough to give up my time—as precious to me as an apple core is to a young boy in a Mark Twain novel—to agree to another paint job.

During lunch on work days, I read a number of blogs from academics, most of whom are younger than I. Sometimes a newly-tenured faculty member, puffed up with an appointment to an "important" committee or assigned an "important" task, brags about becoming a true member of the college community. Maybe these folks have gotten lucky, and Mr. Miyagi is handing them the brush. Maybe it's Tom Sawyer whitewashing them, which they'll discover soon enough. I don't bother posting a comment to warn them. Teaching is the really hard job, and maybe fence painting—more aggravation but less difficult—gets someone out of the classroom for a bit, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Once More to the Lake

2006-10-06T23:01:00.007-04:00

Because it has been too hot to tramp around Lake Pamela in school clothes, I haven't brought my camera to school in weeks. That all changed yesterday, a workday without students that allowed me to wear jeans and a T-shirt. I had plenty of time, but the weather didn't want to cooperate: gloomy skies and lots of wind.

I did get to observe that the rainy months of July, August, and September had set the wildflowers into overdrive. If our provost doesn't pay the guys in haz-mat suits to spray Agent Orange-quality herbicide on all the growth, I might get 4 to 6 weeks of really great photo opportunities. I know that she is just trying to reduce the number of snakes and a potential alligator close to campus, but I hate the wasteland that results after the chemical defoliation.

It was too windy for normal dragonfly activity, but I did spy some four-spotted pennants, a species long gone from the lake near home. I saw some males and immatures, like this one, color-morphing into a mature male:

Where most dragonflies hide on a windy day, I don't know. But the Carolina saddlebags were tightly clutching dried twigs that swayed from side to side. I don't know how many I passed before I realized that they were there, weird blooms on dead stems. Almost every gray, weathered twig had a saddlebags on top, its wings pinwheeling in the breeze:

My favorite shot is this close up. The green-blue in the background is the surface of the lake:

I have seen Carolina saddlebags all summer, but always in flight. The last pictures that I took of one were in the spring. Note to self: To photograph saddlebags, look for subjects on windy days.

The Hero Cycle and Cast Away, Part 3

2006-10-05T23:01:00.006-04:00

A brief recap of departure and initiation, the first two major portions of the hero cycle [if you don't want to read Part 1, the first post, or Part 2, the second post]:

Stage 1, Call to Adventure = Turbulence wakes Chuck Noland, who is sleeping on a FedEx plane
Stage 2, Refusal of the Call = Noland, denying that the plane is in trouble, goes to the bathroom to wash his face
Stage 3, Supernatural Aid and Amulet = Albert Miller, a pilot, shoves a life raft into Noland's arms
Stage 4, Crossing of the First Threshold = With the help of the life raft, Noland makes it to the surface of the water, his old life sinking with the plane
Stage 5, Belly of the Whale = Noland reaches the deserted island, where he initially has no skills
Stage 6, Road of Trials = Despite the primitive conditions, Noland acquires basic necessities of life: food, shelter, water, companionship
Stage 7, Meeting with the Goddess = The Woman of the Golden Wings makes her appearance as a Port-O-Let, giving Noland the idea to leave the island
Stage 8, Woman as Temptress = Wife-like Wilson brings up his concerns about the dangers of leaving, tempting Noland to stay
Stage 9, Atonement with the Father = Noland sends himself off as a package, not knowing when, where, or if he will ever arrive, submitting to the mysteries of Father Time
Stage 10, Apotheosis, and Stage 11, The Ultimate Boon = Noland, powerful with his aluminum wings, flies over the breakers fencing the island and easily escapes

One advantage of using Cast Away to teach the hero cycle is that the third portion of the adventure gets a detailed treatment. My students and I decided that Chuck Noland met all the required stages of return.

Refusal of the Return: For this stage, my students and I disagreed. I will admit that they made a very strong argument for their case. I have always thought that Noland's refusal was the ease with which he adapts to life on the raft, illustrating his need for "no land" beneath his feet. We see him collect water during a storm and spear fish as he swims nearby. He is able to meet all of his basic needs, just as he did on the island, and I believe that his contentment and ease, his lack of impatience for an immediate rescue, fulfill this stage.

My students, on the other hand, thought that Noland refuses the return when Wilson falls off the raft and floats away. At this later point in life on the ocean, Noland is exhausted; he has lost his sail and the raft is disintegrating. When he discovers that Wilson is bobbing in the water far from the raft, he starts swimming to retrieve him but realizes that he doesn't have the strength. My students argued that if he had continued, he would have drowned, refusing the return in a definitive way. By choosing the relative safety of the raft over Wilson, he allowed the cycle to continue.

Since the stages of return must follow a certain order, the decision to lose Wilson to stay with the raft comes too late for me—other later stages have been met before this scene. But my students, clever people that they are, were still able to work out the rest of the cycle, as you will see.

Magical Flight: Powerful forces, according to Joseph Campbell, either help or hinder the hero's return home. Since I have equated the Woman of the Golden Wings with Athena to Noland's Odysseus, I believe that Noland is hindered when his Athena, represented by the Port-O-Let sail, flaps off into the night during a storm. She helps him off the island but thwarts him on the road back to his old life. Since this scene occurs before the loss of Wilson, the volleyball floating off on strong currents couldn't be, for me, the refusal of return.

My students argued that Noland's magical flight was instead the whale. Whereas I saw the whale only once in the movie, that one star-lit night early in the voyage home, my students believed that the whale had been following the raft ever since. They claimed that water spray was the proof. When Noland first encountered the behemoth, they explained, he was woken by spray. Since he was alerted by similar spray when Wilson fell off the raft, and then again as the ship that rescued him passed behind his back, my students argued that the whale had been watching over him in a protective manner ever since that first night.

Rescue from Without: No one disagreed that Kelly is Noland's call from his old life, the next stage in the cycle. We did have a laugh because a number of students couldn't understand why, when Noland finally sees the freighter, he is hoarsely calling out "Kill me. Kill me." Why, they asked, would he want to die this close to home? Those of us who had ears unruined by constant iPod music clarified that he was saying, "Kelly. Kelly."

Crossing of the Return Threshold: Again, this stage caused some minor disagreement. The appearance of the freighter, Noland's first sight of civilization in four years, full of packages as was his old life, is the crossing for me. My students wanted to wait until he was back on the plane with his buddy Stan, flying to the FedEx festivities. Either way, he transitions back to his modern life.

Master of Two Worlds: As a result of the adventure, the hero acquires skills that allow him to live more fully in his old life and have confidence to venture into the Unknown in the future. The best depiction of Noland's mastery occurs in his hotel room after his friends leave. He picks up a crab leg; he plays with a lighter; he sleeps on the floor. We know that he will be able to eat in a civilized manner at Red Lobster, that he will use the thermostat in his home and the buttons on his stove to control heat, that eventually he will sleep in a bed. Unlike a character in a Jack London story, he hasn't gone crazy during his years of deprivation. But we also know that if he has to spear fish with a sharpened stick, make fire with his bare hands, or get comfortable in a stone cave, that he retains those skills as well. And more importantly, we know that the confidence he has in his abilities to survive dramatically different environments will give him an edge whenever problems arise in his modern life.

Freedom to Live: By modern standards, the pre-crash Chuck Noland was a successful man. He commanded workers below him, jetting around the world insuring the interests of a huge corporation. But he was a slave to time and predictability. At the end of the movie, when he stands in the crossroads without a plan, willing to go not where a schedule dictates but where the moment carries him, then we know that he has true freedom to live.

My students were not unhappy that he loses Kelly. One young man, when Kelly's husband explains that she is unwilling to meet Noland, said, "I'd have beaten the shit out of him." But by the end of the movie, they agreed that his old life was a trap. They thought the artist was beautiful and cheered his decision to pursue her. I believe that they got the hero cycle.

The Hero Cycle and Cast Away, Part 2

2006-10-04T23:01:00.005-04:00

A brief recap of departure, the first major portion of the hero cycle [if you don't want to read Part 1, the first post]:

Stage 1, Call to Adventure = Turbulence wakes Chuck Noland, who is sleeping on a FedEx plane
Stage 2, Refusal of the Call = Noland, denying that the plane is in trouble, goes to the bathroom to wash his face
Stage 3, Supernatural Aid and Amulet = Albert Miller, a pilot, shoves a life raft into Noland's arms
Stage 4, Crossing of the First Threshold = With the help of the life raft, Noland makes it to the surface of the water, his old life sinking with the plane
Stage 5, Belly of the Whale = Noland reaches the deserted island, where he initially has no skills

The real meat of the adventure happens in the second major portion, initiation. At this point, the hero faces many challenges which, if he successfully meets them, provide opportunity for growth in knowledge and competence. My students and I concluded that Noland does finish all of initiation.

Road of Trials: Once the hero is swallowed into the unknown, lost to his old life, he discovers that he must acquire new skills to survive. Food pulled easily from a refrigerator or pantry and nuked in the microwave is no longer possible for Noland; neither is closing the snug door of his home to keep out the elements, or calling a friend by phone for companionship and conversation. So the next thing we observed was his slow development of basic survival skills: opening coconuts, finding shelter and water, building fire to cook crab, acquiring a companion in Wilson, the volleyball, and doctoring himself when he removes his own abscessed tooth. The degree of competence he develops living in primitive conditions is beautifully illustrated when the movie flashes forward four years, and the viewer finds a tan, lithe Noland easily spearing his dinner with the same ease he would have unwrapped a Filet-O-Fish in his old life.

Meeting with the Goddess: Noland has his own Athena, the Woman of the Golden Wings, who is a constant presence during his island adventure, just as Athena aided Odysseus in his long journey home from the Trojan War. Noland first encounters his goddess drawn on the one FedEx package that, after it washes ashore, he does not open. The mysterious contents—a waterproof satellite phone, perhaps?—give the package a palpable power. The goddess makes a big appearance in his life when she manifests as the Port-O-Let banging against the rocks on the beach. Noland retrieves the mangled aluminum and stands it in the sand where it resembles an abstract angel. He and Wilson then sit in a circle with her until Noland finally understands her message, that he needs wings himself to get past the breakers that fence the island. Her gift of wings in the guise of the Port-O-Let is the one thing Noland must have to continue his journey.

Woman as Temptress: In this stage of the cycle, physical pleasures, usually offered by a woman, tempt the hero to leave the uncomfortable adventure. When Noland realizes that his gift of "wings" can get him past the breakers, Wilson brings up the dangers and uncertainties of leaving. The island certainly isn't modern life, but it does offer the comfort of a full belly, the protection of a stone cave. Wilson, the nagging wife-like fragment split from Noland's personality, unsuccessfully tempts our hero with the island herself, Gaia, Mother Earth.

Atonement with the Father: I think that Noland experiences Campbell's "at one ment" with Father Time. In this stage, the hero must come to realize that he shares a belief or ability with a strong male—his biological father, a father figure, a masculine force. Until atonement, the hero previously thought himself incapable of having this belief or ability. This semester, we discussed both Luke Skywalker, who at first thinks he is incapable of going over to the dark side of the Force as Darth Vader did but then realizes that he too can entertain the temptation; and Neo, who at first believes he is incapable of the same level of commitment that Morpheus models but then demonstrates it himself as he rescues Morpheus from the Agents. Sometimes the "father" is evil, like Darth Vader, or good, like Morpheus. Either way, the father represents a force initially in opposition to the hero but one which the hero eventually embraces.

At the beginning of the movie, Noland believes that time is consistent and controllable. A package sent from the United States to Russia should arrive in x hours, every time, even if one has to steal a bicycle from a crippled child to finish the delivery. Noland realizes, however, as he is about to launch his raft, that time is inconsistent and mysterious, a fact he must accept as he sends himself as a package back home, not knowing when, or where, or even if, he will arrive.

Apotheosis and the Ultimate Boon: The last two stages of initiation quickly follow one another. The hero recognizes his superior ability and completes a difficult task with ease. Noland had demonstrated that he was a frail, puny human after he first arrived on the island. One night he spied a light on the horizon and got back in his life raft to paddle out to it. The island, at this point, would not let him leave. The waves easily repelled his efforts, gashing his leg on the sharp coral, as the water threw him back to the beach.

With his gift of Port-O-Let wings and a new raft he has built himself, Noland challenges the breakers again. Whereas the waves easily beat him back as an island neophyte four years ago, now Noland has the skill to fly right over them. Even to himself, he must feel he has god-like abilities in comparison to the man who washed ashore after the plane crash. Leaving the island so easily is his ultimate boon.

Tomorrow ... Noland is now ready to return, the third major portion of the cycle!

The Hero Cycle and Cast Away, Part 1

2006-10-03T23:01:00.002-04:00

The research class I teach requires that students also receive an introduction to literature. They buy a reader that includes poems, short stories, and plays. Individual faculty then determine how much time they will devote to the literature portion of the class. My colleagues who have degrees in literature [and who resent the heavy load of composition classes required by a community college] will often spend the entire semester in the reader, making students explore a specific author and his/her works to satisfy the research portion of the class. Those of us who see the course as a composition class spend the biggest chunk of time on a non-literary research essay and just dip our toes into reader.

As usual, I used the Joseph Campbell hero cycle to frame our study of a handful of poems, short stories, and songs, hoping that my students would find the literature more engaging if we weren't analyzing poetic meter or picking out critic-contrived symbols. Poems, short stories, and songs contain parts of the hero cycle but never the whole adventure, so I always end the unit with a movie so that they can see the seventeen-stage cycle play out.

For years I used The Matrix, but then I wrote about that experience in this blog and didn't want one of my students to type "hero cycle matrix" into Google to discover all of my thinking ready to plagiarize. So the following semester we watched Finding Nemo, another successful movie to discuss, but I wrote about that one here too, ruining it for future classes.

This semester I chose Cast Away, and our discussion was so lively that I think this film choice was my best yet [which, of course, I'm ruining again by writing about it]. In Cast Away, the three main portions of the hero cycle—departure, initiation, return—have crystal clear lines of demarcation: Charles Noland, Tom Hanks' character, begins the movie as a typical, technology-dependent, modern man. He survives a plane crash and washes ashore on a deserted island where he must live a primitive existence to survive. After he successfully navigates a series of life-changing challenges, he eventually returns to his old life.

This movie was a three-day affair. On the first day, we watched through the scene when Noland discovers that the troubling thumps he hears in the undergrowth are just coconuts falling from the palm trees. Learning to open those coconuts begins his "road of trials," the first stage of initiation, the second major portion of the hero cycle.

My students and I divided up departure, the first major portion, like this:

Call to Adventure: Some students wanted the beeper that interrupts Christmas dinner to be Noland's call to adventure, but most of us thought that he accepted that invitation too easily. A real hero must at first refuse the call. The students who liked the beeper argued that he makes the plane wait once he gets to the FedEx hub, signifying a type of refusal, or at least a delay.

Maybe. But most of us thought that the call happens after the plane is in flight. We decided the plane itself communicates the call to adventure with its bad behavior, waking him from sleep with turbulence.

Refusal of the Call: Once Noland awakens, he tries to joke about the turbulence with the pilots. The pilots brush him off; everything in their actions and words indicate that the jet is in serious trouble.

Noland is not ready to give up his predictable, modern life, so he refuses the call to adventure by denying that he heard one in the first place. He grabs his shaving kit from his luggage and, despite a warning to sit down and buckle up, goes to the bathroom to wash his face. He's hoping, I'm sure, that when he exits the tiny, safe bathroom space, all will be well. Escaping to the bathroom to groom is his refusal of the call.

Supernatural Aid: Instead of finding that the flight has returned to normal, Noland is nearly ripped out of the bathroom from cabin depressurization. According to Joseph Campbell, a wise figure bearing amulets for the difficult journey ahead must next appear. For Noland, that supernatural aid is Albert Miller, one of the pilots. It is Miller who gives up his own oxygen mask so that Noland can breathe; it is Miller again who shoves the life raft into Noland's arms. The life raft is the amulet that Noland must have to continue his journey.

We watched as the plane hit the Pacific Ocean. Unless a person has survived such a crash, I doubt it's possible to appreciate what happens next. Robert Zemeckis, the movie director, has conveniently lit the crash scene so that the viewer can see water rushing into the fuselage and the plane sinking, but in real life I'd bet that the dark and shock would be so disorienting that determining the right direction to escape would be impossible. Noland, however, has the raft, and the air that fills it knows how to find the surface. Without that gift from Miller, Noland would have failed to finish the stages of departure, drowning with the crew.

Crossing of the First Threshold: I believe that when Noland throws himself into the raft and finds himself floating on the dark, rough sea, soaking wet and devoid of a schedule, he crosses the first threshold. He has left the dry, usually dependable, everyday airplane, finding himself instead in a wet raft ready to shirk its responsibility and flip him back into the water. There is no turning back; the adventure has begun.

One of my very bright students had a more symbolic crossing. She believed that when Noland is taking stock after washing ashore on the island and discovers that both his watch from Kelly, his fiancée, and his beeper are now inoperable, he crosses the threshold at that moment, leaving his time-organized life for a "time-less" existence on the island.

Belly of the Whale: We all agreed that the island is the belly of the whale, the place where the hero is lost, to be reborn—if he survives the next major portion of the cycle—a new, better man.

Tomorrow ... Part 2!

Now Where's My Real Present?

2006-10-02T23:01:00.000-04:00

Every Christmas I purchase gift cards for my family. Occasionally I will try a present that requires a box, but my family usually has only complaints or looks of disappointment after they unwrap whatever I thoughtfully chose—a biography of Ronald Reagan for my Republican-loving grandmother, for example—so I usually make the trek to Wal-Mart for Grandma, Target for my nephews, and a nice restaurant for the parents, where I buy gift cards that allow family members to make their own purchasing decisions.

This year I thought I would give everyone a one-of-a-kind present in which I had invested hours of creative work. I created an account at Kodak EasyShare Gallery, uploaded some of my best dragonfly pictures, and created a prototype 2007 calendar that I could share with the family. The calendars cost only $20 apiece, less than I would usually put on a gift card, so I would spend less money than usual. But how could they put a price on an original work of art?

My prototype arrived last week. I was impressed with the turnaround time: less than one week from the day I paid online until I found the package in my mailbox. I would grade the print quality a B, not as sharp and as evenly colored as my ideal vision but a very nice job nonetheless, well worth the 20 bucks.

For the cover I chose a photo that I personally like, but I thought might be too "busy" for someone to have to stare at for an entire month. It is an Eastern amberwing female perched on a spent black-eyed susan deep in a bed of the flowers:

For the first month of the new year, I chose a happy blue dasher male "smiling" at the camera:

For February, I picked this female four-spotted pennant. Her orange abdomen thrown up in the air like a warming thermometer seems a good symbol for humans ready for winter to end:

In honor of spring and St. Patrick's Day, I chose one of the greenest pictures I had for March:

And since the primary colors in this next picture—the greens, yellows, and pinks—are reminiscent of Easter eggs, I'm using this scarlet skimmer female for April:

Heat, humidity, and rampant plant growth characterize summer in Florida, so I picked this Halloween pennant female for May. Her warm markings against the green background colors represent the start of our hot season.

And for June, I decided I liked this female blue dasher, the rain drops on the flower buds typical of the afternoon thunderstorms we can expect:

Since we celebrate the 4th in July, I chose this Carolina saddlebags male because of his red tones against the blue sky, the colors of the holiday:

By August, the heat has exhausted a lot of Florida plants, so I used this roseate skimmer female for her appropriate colors:

In September, if I lived in the North, the leaves would change colors, and this photo of an Eastern amberwing male captures the brilliance of the deciduous trees losing their foliage:

For October, I picked this mature male four-spotted pennant, his black color typical of Halloween demons. In the prototype, this photo reproduced the most poorly, so I will probably switch it out for something else, maybe a male Halloween pennant who has the right shade of orange for this month's holiday.

For November, a "dead" month, cold and gray, I chose this male Halloween pennant. This photo also didn't reproduce that well, so I will probably change it out too:

And for December, I chose this immature four-spotted pennant, one of my favorite photos from Lake Pamela:

I think my family will think, Oh, nice, a calendar. Now where's my real present? My hours of creative work won't matter as much as their moments of pleasure spending the money on the gift cards they anticipate. Perhaps I will just buy them those gift cards and share the calendars with my more appreciative friends.

The Importance of Showing Up

2006-10-01T23:01:00.004-04:00

I didn't really want to go out with the camera this afternoon because I've been taking crappy pictures lately. But I decided that even if I didn't shoot anything interesting, I would at least have a good sweat in the hot sun. So I drove over to my favorite haunt, Leu Gardens, and went in pursuit of my usual quarry, bugs.

While I was in the "home demonstration" garden, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned to discover a hummingbird dipping among the blossoms. I aimed the camera and began shooting; luckily, I heard the Canon singing, "Beep! Beep! Beep!" which means I'm in good light and the lens is correctly focused. I am very happy with the photos:

I wouldn't have gotten these pictures, though, if I hadn't shown up. All creative work requires that the artist get her ass to the easel, computer, studio—wherever—to try at least, since the art isn't going to create itself.

I haven't been showing up at this blog very often of late. Lots of good ideas for posts have slipped right out of my brain because I have allowed too much time to elapse between getting the idea and sitting down to write.

I am planning to amend my ways, however. My goal for the entire month of October is to write here ~~every day~~ more. I recently purchased and read No One Cares What You Had for Lunch, a collection of ideas for blog posts. I won't be writing long, thoughtful daily essays, but I hope to produce 31 many quality posts over the next month. I have to show up if the art is going to happen!

What I Remember, 5 Years After

2006-09-11T23:01:00.004-04:00

On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46. Oblivious, I was on my way to a class that began at 8:55. I had a student in that class—let's call him Mohammed—that I know I wouldn't remember if al-Qaeda hadn't struck the US in such a dramatic fashion. Mohammed was a spunky, fully assimilated, young Muslim whose smart-ass contributions often livened up class. Whatever variety of Islam he practiced required that he wore a turban. Before September 11, the headdress stood out, but not that much since Central Florida is such a culturally mixed area of the country.

When class ended at 10:10 that fateful morning, I walked back to my office, unaware that three other planes had crashed. Faculty on my hallway love to hang in each other's doorways and gossip, but that morning—still oblivious—I was struck by the number of people crowded in doorways and the grim looks on their faces. From one office, I could hear the voice of a newscaster on a staticky radio. When I reached my own office, the chemistry professor next door announced, "Well, I guess we're at war." I remember the discombobulation as I transitioned from the class that had just ended to the idea that my country was fighting an enemy that one hour and fifteen minutes earlier I didn't know existed. The chemistry professor caught me up—sketchy and inaccurate details that she had—of the events that had transpired while I was teaching pronoun agreement to a bunch of "college prep" kids.

On the first floor of every building on campus is a TV bolted to the wall. It plays CNN 24/7 unless a tall student pulls a chair over and changes the channel to Jerry Springer or General Hospital. So I went downstairs for visual confirmation of what was happening. A big group of students and faculty craned to see the small screen as emotional reporters documented people leaping to their deaths to escape the flames. One big, dumb white boy declared, "That wasn't a very smart move, man," after we watched one man jump on-camera. I guess a lifetime of playing video games made him unable to grasp the reality of what was happening. The South Tower had already collapsed; soon after, we witnessed the North Tower go down. Some faculty were already canceling classes so that students could watch TV; others continued with class in an attempt, I guess, to establish a small bit of normalcy.

Our college president refused at first to send folks home. At the time, administration chanted continuously that we were a "learning-centered" institution, and I couldn't understand how anything that happened in a classroom that day was more important than watching this tragedy develop minute by minute. I assumed that getting blasted by the math-holes motivated his decision, in part. Math-holes calculate the entire semester's activities down to the last minute and do not deal that well when a hurricane is charging up the peninsula or terrorists attack the country, ruining their all-important schedules.

Around 3 p.m., we finally heard that the college was closing and were instructed to go home to be with our families.

So I went home and watched uninterrupted news until midnight. I remember that I wanted to see President Bush promising that we would annihilate this enemy who had so brazenly attacked us. I remember thinking at the time that our stock piles of nuclear weapons now had a real purpose. But, as usual, George disappointed me, coming off as soft and confused, not at all capable of making mushroom clouds appear over the homes of al-Qaeda.

The next day I returned to campus, emotionally and physically exhausted. My freshman composition students told me that math-holes gave tests scheduled for that Wednesday, expecting that the students had studied the night before instead of watching one of the most important days in American history unfold. Some of my students had family in New York that they could not reach during the communication chaos that ensued. Many people had faces blank with overstimulation.

I didn't expect Mohammed to return to class. Many people, myself included, felt irrationally anti-Muslim right after the attacks. For a short time, I supported revoking visas and sending international students back to their own countries. But at 8:55 on Thursday, 48 short hours after the initial strikes, the nation's collective psyche still raw, Mohammed came to class, his turban perched on top of his head, reminding us all that he shared the same religion—if not the same interpretation of it—as the 9/11 hijackers.

I really admired that spunk, his walking into a room filled mostly with native-born Americans still reeling from the horrific event of two days earlier, his turban like a satelite dish broadcasting what he shared with the people who attacked us. He stopped making smart-ass comments, prefering to remain quiet and not attract any attention. But he came to class everyday and finished the semester with the required C, worrying all the while, I imagine, that I or my colleagues might penalize him for that headdress or that some not-so-bright Ocoee redneck might take offence in the men's restroom and beat the shit out of him.

I remember that shortly after the events of 9/11, I affixed an American flag sticker to the back windshield of my car, something that I would never do now. My patriotism and connection to my fellow Americans began to disappear when everyone, it seemed, became a right-wing, Christian Republican who blindly supported the Bush-Cheney machine in stupid maneuvers like the war in Iraq and the Federal Marriage Amendment to the US Constitution. But I do remember Mohammed and still admire him.

The terrorists were, after all, more terrorizing to him, a minority in this mostly Christian nation where that turban was an Islamic beacon on which people could project their own fear and desire for revenge. Even if he held his breath getting the mail out of the box in the anthrax scare that followed soon after 9/11, even if he too foolishly bought duct tape and plastic as a way to protect his family during a chemical or biological attack, he demonstrated way more courage continuing to wear that headdress than did any of us who merely watched 9/11, reduced as it was on tiny TV screens.

If I Had Only Thought to Say It

2006-08-31T23:01:00.000-04:00

"I'm a liberal, pro-choice, lesbian atheist, and I'm sure that both of your children will benefit from a semester with me."

Now, that's what I should have said.

As this new academic year began, the only bit of drama was a father who came to my second class on Monday. He wanted to know if I would allow his daughter, a twin in a different professor's class, to join her brother, who had me.

"Yes, I would mind," I replied.

"So you don't mind?" he asked again. I guess this guy was not used to a woman thwarting his goal. He had that ultra-conservative, religious, home-schooling vibe.

"I said that yes, I do mind. She'll be fine in the other professor's class." In my head, I added, This is college, not kindergarten.

"But they'll be separated by two buildings!" he emphasized.

When I wouldn't budge, he tapped a young man on the shoulder and said, "Let's go, Justin. Maybe the other professor will take you." Embarrassed, the kid followed his father out of the room.

I guess the other professor—the kind, flexible one—did take Justin, as the young man did not return. I feel sorry for that colleague, whoever she/he is, because that one moment of kindness and flexibility will mean a semester's worth of a helicopter daddy interfering in the twins' education—and probably the professor's teaching, too. I feel sorry for Justin and his sister, who both have so little autonomy that they cannot navigate the first day of college, a passage into adulthood, without the presence of their father.

I'm really quite proud of myself, though. Not that many years ago, I would have let myself be bullied by a parent making such a request and would not have realized the consequences until it was way too late.

Walking in the "Angriest" Town

2006-08-20T23:01:00.000-04:00

The other day, Elizabeth and I were walking the dogs home from the lake. While we waited to cross the moderately busy street from the park to our residential neighborhood, a rare thing occurred: A driver who saw us stopped his car and waved us across. When we reached the other side of the street, we turned to each other and simultaneously noted, "He must have gone to school in Gainesville."

Elizabeth is a Florida Gator; I have spent some time in Gainesville, home of the University of Florida, working as an item writer/validator for the Florida Department of Education. The one thing that a visitor to Gainesville immediately notices is that drivers willingly share the road with pedestrians. While there, if I so much as looked over my shoulder to gauge street-crossing potential, motorists would stop their cars. I'm not sure if the police ticket heavily at the beginning of a new academic year or if the city culture values pedestrians and models that behavior to newcomers. I have never felt on guard in Gainesville as I do here in Orlando, where the morning news has another hit-and-run pedestrian fatality to report at least once a week. In my city, motorists will run down cops and leave the scene. Here, we walk at our own risk, and I would require a gun to my head to ride a bicycle anywhere in the city.

The danger I have felt on the roads—both in a car and on foot—is not imagined, I recently learned. According to Men's Health magazine, Orlando is the angriest city in the entire country. This top spot was determined in part by traffic-congestion data, speeding citations, and road-rage reports; the ranking does not surprise the residents. Most people do not signal their intentions or yield the right of way. Many of them are blabbing away on a cell phone, oblivious that other drivers share the road. Stopping at a new red light means running the risk of being rear ended, as the general road philosophy is that 3 to 5 cars can continue through the intersection after the light has changed. Cops choose to pull over 60-year-old women driving 4 miles over the speed limit to meet their ticket quota because the more aggressive drivers might roll down the window and start firing a gun.

Since Elizabeth and I carpool to work, we get to observe and analyze a lot of bad driving behavior. We have concluded that an asshole pilots 1 in 4 vehicles; some days we raise the percentage to 1 in 2.

Just the other evening, I got to witness a bout of driver rage that inspired anger in me as well. Bug and I had gone for the long walk, which includes a quarter-mile stretch of road that parallels the back of the downtown graveyard. Motorists used to exceed the speed limit, racing down this long stretch which was unbroken by a single stop sign. The city eventually erected a series of speed bumps to discourage the bad behavior.

As Bug and I were strolling down this road, a truck squealed out from a feeder street and came barreling in our direction. Right before the first speed bump, the driver slammed on his brakes, but not in enough time to keep the front bumper from scraping on the asphalt after he hurtled over the hump. I could see him cursing inside the cab, his face an angry storm. "Well, that will show him not to drive like an asshole in my neighborhood," I thought, assuming that he was just cutting through. He rammed the accelerator again, sending the car lurching forward a few yards before he came squealing into the driveway that Bug and I were about to cross. Two or three feet further along and Bug and I would have been struck. Incredulous, I stood there on the sidewalk. The driver wouldn't exit the truck—I assume that the near-miss had shamed him—so I mouthed "Asshole" in the direction of the rearview mirror and kept walking. His roommate/girlfriend/wife, having heard all of the engine reving and tire sqealing, ran out of the house, asking, "Are you mad about something?" I pity the woman if she has made a life-long commitment to that loser.

This situation was closer to wrong place, wrong time than usual, but every moment as a pedestrian in this city gives me ample evidence that yes, we are angry here in Orlando.

Nibbled by Ducks

2006-08-09T23:01:00.002-04:00

When I first began teaching, I felt nothing but disdain for the old burnouts in the department. I resented how their bad attitudes and behaviors tarnished the sparkling reputations of us young snots who had real enthusiasm for the job and believed that we made important, measurable differences in the lives of students. I got angry when administration enacted a new policy not because of something I did but because Gerry, the Civil War buff, was passed out drunk in the rotunda instead of teaching his 9 a.m. American Lit class.

Now, after 21 years in the classroom, 21 years observing academic politics, I am beginning to understand how the burnouts "crisped" over the years. The process is slow—maybe inevitable. One faculty member who has since retired described it as "being nibbled by ducks." I don't believe that certain unpleasant realities of academia are a good enough excuse to become a burnout, but every now and them, I lose a little more of my trust, my empathy, to the nibbling of those very ducks, and I understand why the burnouts turn off as they do.

I turned in grades a week ago. For the last seven days I have been enjoying the first week of vacation, playing with my new macro lens, cleaning closets, taking the basenjis for longer than usual walks. I have checked school email once per day, mostly because I don't want to return later this month with 150 messages that require answers. Until today, I had been pleased that no one had emailed to complain about a grade. I meet with all of my classroom students individually before the do-or-die, department-graded final exam to give them their averages, so they all knew what to expect. I had provided the online students with a grade worksheet so that they could easily calculate their averages before exams. The best surprise is no surprise, my motto.

This morning when I opened my school email account, I found a message from Latoya. The subject line was "Urgent Change of Grade" and the content read something like this:

From: latoya.tiller@_____cc.edu
To: sparky.lightbulb@_____cc.edu
Date: August 9, 2006 9:34 AM
Subject: Urgent Change of Grade

I was in your online research class and i should have a "B" as my final grade but after downloading my transcripts I have a "C" i need you to change this asap because it is messing up my financial aid please email me as soon as you can because the computer won't let me register for fall classes until you resolve this mistake.

Latoya

A little Latoya history is needed here. This student began the course by missing the first exam, giving her a big, fat zero. The first two or three writing assignments read like her email above—no punctuation, no capitalization, just verbal diarrhea—so I had to fail them as well. Then she pulled her shit together and began to produce average work—or her roommate, her mother, or her boyfriend wrote it for her. Latoya had emailed me late in the semester asking for her average, so I reminded her of the grade worksheet available at the course website and told her to do the math herself. In hindsight, that advice was a mistake; anyone who writes as poorly as Latoya probably can't do simple addition and division either.

Latoya's average was a 69.6 after the final exam. I use Excel as a gradebook, and the grade boxes are set to 30 pixels wide, so Excel rounds up all grades to a two-numeral number, in this case a 70. Latoya was way closer to a D than a B. I curtly replied that she had barely gotten a C in the class and that I had no intention of changing her grade. Later in the afternoon, I got a new message that she had "mistaken" me for a different professor and apologized.

At this point, I got curious which of my colleagues might be "ruining" Latoya's chance of financial aid, so I pulled up her transcript. I learned that she had earned 3 Cs and 1 B during the summer, giving her a 2.25 GPA for the semester. The only problem was that her overall GPA—reduced by a string of Ds, Fs, and WFs from previous terms—was a 1.95, not yet high enough to qualify for financial aid. I concluded that Latoya was probably emailing all of her professors to say that we each had made a grievous mistake and were frustrating her academic future, hoping that one of us would forget an entire semester of her dreary performance and boost a grade.

That she believed we were dumb enough to believe her is the "nibbling" for me. Next semester, convinced as I will be that another Latoya has registered for one of my classes, I will make a policy change that requires I become meaner or make more work for myself, which I will then resent. If Latoya was the only student who inspired such a change, that wouldn't be so bad. But there was Brian who convinced me that I would allow no more make-up quizzes, and Bethany who made me severely penalize work more than one week late, and a long list of other students who have changed me from easy-going to an instructor who sees things now only in black and white and who doesn't much care that someone's mother just got diagnosed with cancer.

I am looking forward to the fall semester. If it started this Monday, I would don a new shirt and slip on a new pair of shoes—all spiffy for a new academic year—and go off to teach, still convinced that I make important, measurable differences in the lives of my students. But I no longer see most of them as willing partners in the process—more like ducks I am herding to a pond.

Out with the Girls

2006-07-29T23:01:00.004-04:00

End of the semester responsibilities are keeping me so busy that I do not see a photo outing in my future this weekend, but last Sunday I took a trip to the Greenwood Urban Wetland. I was hoping for the explosion of white peacock butterflies that I observed last summer, but I was still too early. I saw lots of dragonflies, though, and two willing females sat for portraits.

One was an Eastern amberwing perching in the grass beside the sidewalk. I know that she's a she from the smudges on the wings; males have mostly unmarked wings. This photo isn't my best female amberwing, but she was a cooperative subject, and I appreciated her tolerating my phallic 300 mm lens pointed at her face. I think that if I Photoshop the eyes so that they aren't so dark, the picture will be decent. I am planning to learn layers during my break between semesters so that I can fine-tune specific areas of a picture.

On the path through the wetland, I caught a yellow sparkle out of the corner of my eye. I discovered a beautiful female scarlet skimmer near the water's edge. The dark line down her abdomen indicates her species, the yellow her gender. I love that the tiny grass seed flowers complement the pink in her eyes. And I am always pleased to find something new.

I think that this photo is one of my best dragonfly captures. I like the depth of field and the rarity of the picture—I don't see many yellow dragonflies at any of the Flickr groups.

I anticipated lots of comments after I published this picture to my Flickr stream. That, however, has not been the case. Since last Sunday when I posted it, I have received only 13 views and 2 comments, many fewer than a dragonfly picture of mine usually gets. I don't know—maybe it's too green and yellow; there are no strong contrasts in color. Maybe the thumbnail that shows up on a person's "Contacts" page or in a "Group" collection isn't interesting enough to click on for the larger option.

I know that the number of comments by Flickr members does not mean that a picture is any good. Folks cultivate attention by making lots of comments on other people's work; those recipients feel obligated to return the favor. Flickr is often MySpace for adults, an online hangout where fragile egos get boosted with positive [though often undeserved] feedback. I have seen some ugly photos get tons of comments while real art [if the person doesn't have a huge Flickr audience] gets hardly any attention.

As proof, I give you the photo below, which, in my opinion, has uninteresting subject matter [a dragonfly ass!], bad composition, and distracting color. It, however, has earned its photographer 85 comments and 617 views as of this writing.

Compare it to this photo, by geckonia, one of my contacts. This is a brilliant capture; I'm thinking about contacting the artist to ask if I can buy a print. Despite its beauty, it has only 3 comments [one of them mine!] and 31 views.

Even though neither of my two "girls" from the Greenwood Urban Wetland garnered much Flickr attention, I still like them. I have that stubborn allegiance to my art that lack of Flickr attention cannot sway!

Of No Concern to Anyone But Me

2006-07-20T23:01:00.005-04:00

Let's say that I maintain this blog for fifty more years. When I'm rereading my July 2006 posts as a 92-year-old in 2056, I probably won't remember that today Lebanon and Israel were lobbing missiles at each other, civilians be damned. I won't recollect that just yesterday President Bush vetoed a bill on stem cell research, claiming that "each of these human embryos [destroyed while discovering cures for debilitating diseases] is a unique human life with inherent dignity and matchless value." I will have forgotten how he tried to explain the importance of potential life while US servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan or the uninsured here at home were regularly annihilated without any consideration of their realized dignity or value.

Long in the future, I'm also certain that I won't remember the appearance of a white peacock butterfly nectaring in the flowering ground cover that Elizabeth and I planted under the crape myrtles. But there the white peacock was this week, another thing to ponder beside the illogic and depravity of world leaders:

How It All Started, As Well As I Can Recollect

2006-07-19T23:01:00.000-04:00

I bought my good digital camera last June. I had been reading/experimenting with blogs for a year or so [quickly abandoned efforts litter Blogger as I tried to find the right writing voice/purpose for my own little homestead in cyberspace], and I wanted to include photos since all my favorite blog writers had a word/picture combination. Two or three years earlier, I had bought a cheap $300 digital camera, one that proved the "you get what you pay for" adage with its poor clarity and color capture. When I plunked down the $1,000 for the Digital Rebel, I was planning to take pictures of the dogs, signs advertising gas prices, and other minutiae of my life, all of which would decorate the mini-essays at my blog.

One year ago today, as I playing with my $1,000 toy, I took my first pictures of hibiscuses. These flowers are, for me, incredibly difficult to photograph artistically; I have only shot three that I believe are good enough for the photoblog:

Hibiscuses are important because they began my shooting affair with insects. As well as I can remember, stalking butterflies and their six-legged kin began like this: One sunny afternoon in July, probably after snapping some more overexposed portraits of my dogs, I took a few shots of the hibiscuses in Elizabeth's front yard. I remember thinking to myself, What hackneyed subjects, as I pressed the shutter button. But when I dumped the images into the computer, I was amazed at the detail in the petal texture and stamens. I realized that I had never really seen hibiscuses before; they had been just blobs of color hanging off shrubs I passed.

Elizabeth's hibiscuses were doing poorly last summer—everything required a year to recover after the three hurricane whippings of 2004—so I had few flowers to photograph. We decided to visit Leu Gardens, where we expected to find plenty of hibiscuses for me to shoot.

Leu Gardens was overrun with flowers, but not hibiscuses that first trip. The blooms of the other plant species were, however, full of insect activity. I reasoned that a flower picture would be nice, but a flower-insect combo shot would help the photo rise slightly above roll-your-eyes totally overdone to mere conventional, and the bug chase was on.

In those days, with the original 15 - 85 mm lens that came with the camera, I shot autofocus in "portrait" mode. As I was always taking pictures of my basenjis, portrait mode worked well, reducing the poorly landscaped backyard to a swirl of gauzy colors. Because I knew nothing about aperture settings, ISOs, and the like, I didn't realize that portrait mode was too slow for busy insects. When I first viewed the images that I took that day at Leu Gardens, recollecting the beautiful bees and butterflies I had aimed at, I was totally disappointed with the crappy fuzzy images on the computer screen, and the challenge was on. So I have worked on getting from bee blur ...

to in-focus bee butt ...

to a bee photo I kind of like:

I have always liked bugs, so taking portraits of them has been very enjoyable. I am a firm believer in nuturing new interests, and I enjoy learning to identify and understand the behavior of the creatures I am observing. Last summer, I couldn't identify lantana from pentas or butterflies from moths [I mistook skippers for moths]. I didn't know dragonflies were carnivores and ate butterflies. I couldn't distinguish a carpenter bee from a bumble bee, choosing just to get out of their way to avoid being stung.

I still prefer "feeling" the camera rather than understanding all of the many numbers and setting associated with photography. My excuse is that insects are so fast that I must let the camera do some of the work. But I do know that I need the 300 mm for the best pictures of dragonflies, the very fast focusing 28 - 105 mm for bees in flight. I know that a clear picture, though, is nothing special if it is bug butt poking at the lens. So I have also learned from observation when to anticipate the head shot I prefer. I know that I should have the sun at my back, but I'll get the best pictures if the day is overcast. And I try not to drop my hand as I mash the shutter button. I am also learning to use the more sophisticated features of graphics programs. I still prefer my old Corel Photo-Paint 12 but have purchased and begun experimenting with Photoshop.

I think after a year's experimentation, I have made some progress. I know clearly what I want when I find a subject; I just have to be better about insisting the camera give it to me.

Good Taste in Books, no. 2

2006-07-12T23:01:00.001-04:00

Basenjis are devilish creatures. Owners of this breed of dog will say that the dogs train them more than the owners are able to train the dogs. Yo-Yo might know "sit," but I know to keep the closet door closed if I don't want holes chewed in my underwear, and I leave the TV remote, cell phone, and stapler out of the dogs' reach if I don't want to find a pile of mangled plastic components on the living room floor. Elizabeth, proud owner of basenji Pequod, knows to push the bananas and tomatoes to the back of the kitchen counter—or better yet, put them on top of the refrigerator—if she expects to have fruit for breakfast or salad for dinner. I think that most basenji owners reach happy compromises with their pets: In my house, I keep the toy chest full of smelly hooves, and the dogs don't eat the sofa.

Both Yo-Yo and Bug are way past puppyhood, but they can still get into trouble. Usually I conclude from their bad behavior that I am being punished. "You were gone too long, so we decided to chew the zipper out of this pillow," their faces say when I get home.

The last book that Bug ate was an expensive collection of plays by Euripides, my favorite ancient author. I was really looking forward to reading fresh, clean pages of the Alcestis, for instance, without getting distracted by marginal comments I had made in graduate school or while preparing for classes. I thought I understood that destruction, as I had gone out longer and later than usual one Friday night.

Sometimes, though, the destruction is inexplicable.

The most recent bit of destruction, for example, has no reason as far as I can figure. I had spent the whole evening at home. I was brushing my teeth, getting ready for bed. I heard a thump in Command Central, the spare bedroom I use for all things technological, and mistakenly guessed that Bug had jumped off the chair.

When I finished my bathroom routine, I walked past the open doorway of Command Central to witness Bug mauling my $125 dragonfly book, which he had pulled off the desk. Of all the things he could have chosen! I have poorly written/edited textbooks from school that I would have encouraged him to chew, dried out Sharpie markers, printouts I could have found again on the internet. But, no, he has to eat my most expensive book:

Eventually, I will forgive him. But I am left wondering why? Does the binding use really sweet glue? Did the guy who packaged it have greasy fingers from lunch at McDonald's? Can Bug smell cost and then intentionally chooses my most expensive purchase? Is Bug an incarnation of the Buddha, here to teach me nonattachment to material things? The little devil always eats books that are too expensive for me to justify replacing.

At least the book is still readable, unlike the collection of Euripides, half of which Bug vomited up during the 24 hours following its destruction. Ah, basenjis!

How can you stay mad at such a cute puppy, Ma?

Little World, no. 3

2006-07-09T23:01:00.012-04:00

My neighborhood was once full of huge, ancient oak trees. When I pulled onto my street, the temperature dropped 10-15 degrees even on the hottest summer afternoon. Quite a few still line the roads, but the summer of 2004, when we took three direct hits from hurricanes, thinned the ranks considerably. Luckily at the time, I had only one oak on my property—actually half of one, as the tree straddled the property line—and my neighbor Elizabeth and I had already scheduled its removal after discovering a giant crack at its base. When we heard that Charlie was on his way, we called the tree company and begged to have it removed early. The dispatcher confirmed the poor condition of the tree with the inspector who had given us the estimate and sent out a crew the day before the storm hit, saving Elizabeth's roof and my driveway from annihilation.

The tree company was supposed to grind the stump right away, but Charlie—and then Frances, and then Jeanne—took out so many old oaks in Central Florida that the crews were busy removing trees from roofs and off crushed cars. Elizabeth and I didn't complain, knowing the damage we had been spared. Then one day, six months later, we came home to find a giant pile of wood shavings where the stump had been. We decided that we would cart the mulch into our backyards, but that was heavy, hard work, all the more depressing after the three huge yard cleanups—complete with chain saws—after each hurricane. So the mountain of mulch lay between our two houses for another six months.

One day a neighbor asked for it, and we gladly gave him permission, after which a big hole adorned the swath of grass. We considered our options, eventually giving the lawn guy we share the go-ahead to plant a row of six crape myrtles—a species of tree that does not flatten cars or crash through the living room window during 110-mph winds. Todd got a great deal on 9-foot sticks, all that they were in November. We took turns watering them everyday, even though I often doubted that they did in fact live. When spring arrived, the branches budded, and I got excited about the landscaping possibilities.

Having spent numerous hours chasing insects with a camera at Leu Gardens, I knew which plants had the greatest number of nectar groupies. Elizabeth and I made several trips to Lowe's to buy lantana and pentas, two butterfly favorites, which we planted underneath the crape myrtles, where they took off in a growing spurt I never imagined.

With the ring of flowering plants around each tree and the leafy tops above, a community of brown anoles took up residence, hanging upside down from the trunks, the males flashing their girlfriends with bright orange dewlaps. They all eat well on the numerous bugs that come to nectar at the plants.

Apparently, the lizards find the landscaping pleasing as I have observed plenty of romance:

I have seen—and managed to photograph—cassius blue, monarch, gulf fritillary, and skipper butterflies drinking either at the crape myrtle blooms or from the flowering ground cover underneath.

The occasional swallowtail always times its visit when I am out with Yo-Yo, who won't hurry her sniff-fest of the street no matter how urgently I tug the leash, trying to get back into the house to retrieve the camera.

Road sniffing has top priority, Ma.

It is constant joy to walk out to my car and scare off the tiny creatures who enjoy the oasis we planted.

Aye, Aye, Captain

2006-07-08T23:01:00.004-04:00

The ship that is my department floats now without the steady hand of a captain on the rudder. Connie, our dean, has moved downtown to her VP position; our campus provost is on vacation; and the one member of my department with the stomach to move into administration doesn't have an appointment to discuss her future with the provost until the end of the month. Power-hungry admin wannabes from other campuses are circling like sharks.

I have no doubt that we will conclude the summer semester successfully. We won't rip open our hull on some behemoth problem in Titanic-like fashion, nor will a black hole of indecision catapult us into trouble that only Captain Kirk-style leadership will help us escape. Because in reality, all we have lost is our Captain Stubing of Love Boat fame. Connie valued smooth cruises from Point A [the start of a new semester] to Point B [common course outcomes], and then back to port so that our passengers ... um, students ... could disembark, having had such a good experience that they would book a new cruise ... uh, register for the next semester ... to start the fun all over.

Connie had a high threshold for boredom [as most administrators must, their days filled with long meetings and the same student and faculty complaints]. I don't remember one single time during her tenure as our leader that we "rocked the boat" in an attempt to innovate student learning or faculty development. Her attitude reflected the current culture at my institution. No one here is interested in carving out a new post-secondary niche for the college [as the place was when it opened 30-odd years ago] or building its reputation [as we already have a pretty good one]. No, we value safe waters, a steady, measured pace, a pleasant ride for those "passengers" on board.

Before Connie, we had Captain Ahab at the helm. This dean chased technology as her white whale. She believed that computers could solve all of the problems associated with our department—they would make students write better, teach second-language students to master English faster, and relieve the paper grading burdens of faculty. Just as Melville's Ahab didn't understand Moby Dick, mistaken in his belief that the whale had eaten his leg as a personal insult [not while making an instinctual, self-protecting bite], our Ahab didn't really understand technology and its limitations.

When other departments were putting single computer-projector combinations into classrooms so that faculty could liven up instruction with PowerPoint presentations and full-screen movie clips or web pages, our Ahab was chasing bigger, flashier prey, entire rooms filled with machines to run software pushed by slick sales reps. The only problem was that no one—not the professors who taught the classes or the students along for the ride—could use those programs effectively. Even I threw up my hands in disgust, declaring the software techno-glitz with no real substance, after Ahab flattered me into a semester of freshman composition in one of those rooms. In three short years, the computers were obsolete—low-end models that came "free" with the ridiculously expensive licensing fees for the user-unfriendly software—leaving us piles of crap we couldn't upgrade to do anything new. When Ahab finally drowned in a sea of department disapproval, we had the fewest "smart" or "wired" classrooms of any department on campus, this despite Ahab's promise to make us rich with the technology she could harpoon for the department.

When I first began working here in 1985 [exactly one half my life ago, egad], the college had not yet hit its 20 year anniversary. My first year, the department was full of activity as CLAST, a state-wide exit exam, had begun, and the legislature had freed the universities from teaching "preparatory" classes, dumping them on the community colleges instead. These realities inspired significant changes in the way the college handled curriculum. The do-or-die exit exam [you didn't pass, and you didn't get your degree] and the influx of lower level students meant the college had new challenges, and my first dean behaved just like the unflappable, thoughtful Captain Picard of the Enterprise, steering us through the adventure.

Back then, the college valued innovation and versatility; administrators recognized the ability to make an impact, not necessarily credentials on paper in HR. All I had to say was "If you'll let me do X, I can solve the problem of Y for you," and I would get the go-ahead. As a reward, I got to teach freshman composition with just a bachelor's degree because I had demonstrated that I could affect the writing skills of students in positive, measurable ways. Our Captain Picard eventually retired, and no one since—at any level of administration—has engaged challenges with as much spontaneity and disregard for educational buzzwords and trends.

Today, I'm not sure I would be hired at all, definitely not with just a BA and a call from the dean of my alma mater claiming that I "had the gift." I think Connie would be insulted if she knew I called her a Captain Stubing or a contributor to the Captain Stubing mentality of the college, although I mean no disrespect. The inescapable fact is that the institution wants happy purchasers of its education product, so we don't "explore strange new worlds" or "boldly go" anywhere that marketing research hasn't determined is our mission.

Too Beautiful to Dissect

2006-06-28T23:01:00.010-04:00

I have spent $234 on dragonfly books the last couple of months. My first round of purchases included Wild Guide: Dragonflies, The Beginner's Guide to Dragonflies, and A Dazzle of Dragonflies. The Wild Guide book [$20] includes drawings, not photographs; it is a simple thing—a kid in middle school could understand it—but well written and interesting. At the beginning of spring, I didn't know much about dragonfly life cycles or behavior, and this book has helped me understand what I am observing down at the water.

The tiny A Beginner's Guide [$9] is full of color photos and descriptions. Maps make it hard to misidentify a species because I can say, "Whoa, Florida isn't colored green on the map. This specimen must be something else." It is another simple book, but as I am trying to get a handle on what I'm seeing, it too has been helpful.

A Dazzle of Dragonflies [$40] includes not only photos but also scans. The authors took laptop computers and flatbed scanners into the swamps, netted dragonflies, cooled them on ice, posed them on the glass, and scanned them. This book is helpful with identification, although the accompanying website, Digital Dragonflies, has a better selection of species. What I like best about Dazzle is the chapter on dragonfly mythology. The dragonfly, for example, is a servant of the devil for Europeans but an advanced spiritual being for Native Americans. The writing in this work isn't the best, but I am happy to add it to my collection.

None of the first three books I purchased included any information about four-spotted pennants, however. This species of dragonfly frustrates me because I see so many color variations when I am at Lake Pamela. Unlike blue dashers or Eastern pondhawks, which both have distinctive gender colors, the four-spotted pennants do not; moreover, they seem to color morph as they mature more dramatically than any other dragonfly I have seen in the area. So I bought Dragonflies through Binoculars and Dragonflies of North America, hoping for some help with this particular species.

Dragonflies through Binoculars [$30] is an expanded A Beginner's Guide—more species, longer descriptions. Concerning four-spotted pennants, it says that this species is the only North American dragonfly "with entirely white stigmas [small marking at the front of the front wings]" and that "females darken more slowly than males, retain white facial spots." The note about white stigmas helps me confirm that I am observing four-spotted pennants—not misidentifying some other species—but the "slow darkening" contradicts the scan of a female at Digital Dragonflies, which shows coloring different from that of males. So I can't tell if this specimen below, for example, is a female [does have the white facial spots] or a male [typical male coloring]:

Dragonflies of North America [$125] is advanced scholarship, years in the making. This thick, heavy hardback is a biologist's book, not targeted for the lay person. It is as dense as it is beautiful. The authors call the four-spotted pennant "a very handsome species," an opinion about looks not typical of most of the descriptions of other dragonflies, an opinion that indicates the authors' own appreciation for the species. This work claims that the face of a four-spotted pennant is "black and white," apparently for both males and females, contradicting the information in Dragonflies through Binoculars.

I have learned a little about dragonfly genitalia, so I know to look for a male's "package." Often, though, I don't get the "package" in the shot, so I can't confirm gender that way.

I could probably find a bio professor who would go out and net some specimens with me and then tutor me on dragonfly gender, but I would feel that I was mixing too much science with the art. Plus, gender identification might include dissection, and although I have no strong complaints about the process, I personally don't want to cut up one of the little guys myself. So I'm just going to share some new pictures, gender be damned:

I can't explain my fondness for this species. Maybe it's that I alone know that Lake Pamela is overrun with them, so they are my personal little world that no one else on the planet appreciates. The mature males perch on plants in the water, battling each other over the lake. The others—females or immatures, I give up—hang from the dead branches at the shore, as though they are Coliseum spectators watching gladiator battles below. They are not the easiest dragonfly species to shoot—blue dashers, for example, will let me get so close that I can't focus the 300 mm lens and have to back up--but these pennants do tolerate my presence well enough. They're not flashy colored but wonderful nonetheless in their Darth Vader beauty.

Department Chaos

2006-06-26T23:01:00.001-04:00

Last Wednesday morning, our dean announced by email an unscheduled department meeting at 3 p.m. "Unscheduled" is not Connie's typical style; the red envelope icon attached to the message inspired most people to stick around despite the late hour. No fishing expedition to the department office could discover what prompted the need for us to gather.

At the meeting, Connie explained that she had accepted a vice-president position at the downtown center—it used to be a "campus" but they no longer pollute the building with faculty or students. Her news stunned everyone in the room, as she would be gone by July 1. Most of us knew that she was upwardly mobile as an administrator, but to leave in the middle of the semester with various projects halfway completed came as a big surprise.

I am saddened to see her leave, but we did expect her eventual move up. Although I have enjoyed her as my boss, I can work without her presence, as I am low maintenance and have the security of tenure. Unfortunately, not all of my colleagues could function effectively after the news.

On the way to my car, I bumped into Libby. Tears were dripping past the frames of her gigantic sunglasses. Connie had hired her, so Libby was losing her mentor. I could empathize. When my first dean retired, I bawled my eyes out after the big party, convinced that my life at the college couldn't continue without his presence. I have always been a real asset around here, though, something soon obvious to the new dean who replaced him. And life did in fact continue, as I tried to convince Libby it would.

I wondered if Libby's tears were an expression of loss or evidence of her anxiety about an uncertain future. She is full-time temporary, her contract renewed each semester. With Connie, the renewal wasn't in question; with an unknown interim, who knows? I'm sure that concerns about paying the mortgage also influenced the flood of emotion. The impression she makes on the interim dean—and on the permanent leader the college will eventually hire—will have way more importance than the impression any of us tenured folk make.

I remember the anxieties of pre-tenured life all too well, so Libby's behavior was understandable. Other people did not have such good excuses for their poor reactions. One tenured colleague was hysterical with grief, threatening to quit if some moron replaced Connie. Quit? A tenured position in this grim academic market? Good grief, girl, get a grip! What are you going to do, waitress as you did during graduate school? The reality is that the deans on our campus are quite good, that the deans for our department in particular—in the 21 years of my experience—have been above average at least, and usually brilliant. Our provost isn't going to saddle us with a moron when ours is the one department with agreed-upon assessment protocols already in place, the one department that teaches classes every degree-seeking student must take.

Another tenured colleague approached me the day after the meeting. She had convinced herself that she alone was the reason Connie accepted the new position. "If I hadn't ..." launched her detailed explanation. Incredulous, I asked, "Do you really think Connie thinks about you enough to base career decisions on your actions alone?" Apparently, this narcissist did think so.

Unlike regime changes in the past, Connie has not lined up a temporary successor. Instead, she asked us what we thought she should do. Oh, the temptation of power and how to get it! At the meeting, one relative newbie nominated an inappropriate choice, whom no one seconded [whether the nominee was relieved or disappointed or both, I don't know]. Almost everyone believes that it's time to be chief, not a little Indian any longer, with qualifications: "I'd make a great dean but don't have the high boredom threshold to attend all of those meetings," "I could do the job but don't want to put in the long hours on campus," or "I have the experience but don't want to listen to all of those student complaints."

A senior colleague's flunky wrote a petition announcing our unanimous support of the senior colleague, but no one would sign it. Some of us emailed a potential candidate on another campus, tempting the poor guy with flattery to give up his great, relatively easy life as a teacher to enter the tedium of management [because none of us were willing to do it], but he intelligently declined.

Everyone is reacting as if a parent has died and left us to starve as orphans, not as if we are rational adult human beings. I keep saying to people, "It doesn't matter who sits in that office because you already have tenure. We need someone who will protect the 4-monthers like Libby," but my advice falls on deaf ears. I have imagined my worst nightmare getting the job. I don't think he'd give up one year early his cushy, quasi-administrative, token faculty post downtown where he can star-worship the college president, but even if he did, I realized that I—and everyone else in the department—would survive. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Something Old, Something New

2006-06-19T23:01:00.001-04:00

A week ago Sunday, I chose Leu Gardens for my photo outing. Alberto, the first tropical storm of 2006, was pinwheeling out in the Gulf, so I knew I could count on cloudy skies, which always give me the best lighting for insect pictures. In one part of the garden, the curators have built an artificial stream bed filled with rocks, ornamental grasses lining the banks. Despite the absence of water, I can always find dragonflies there, usually very common ones, like blue dashers. This weekend a female Eastern pondhawk, another species pretty easy to spot here in Central Florida, was perching in the grass:

She kept hassling this guy [girl?]:

I had seen one of these—I now know to call it a "pin-tailed pondhawk" [Erythemis plebeja]—at Lake Como, but only once. When the Eastern pondhawk wasn't buzzing him aggressively, I managed to get a few nice shots:

From a distance, he looked like a big black bug, but up close I could see the beautiful bronze tones on the frons, the front part of the head. I was so happy with these pictures that I finally took advantage of my Bugguide.net account and braved an upload. According to the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, pin-tailed pondhawks are not a "confirmed" species for Orange County, so I also decided to contact that group as well and make a small contribution to their collection of knowledge. The email reads something like this:

From: sparky.lightbulb@_____cc.edu>
To: boris.kondratieff@colostate.edu
Date: June 19, 2006 4:04 PM
Subject: Pin-tailed pondhawk sighting in Orange County, Florida

Dear Dr. Kondratieff:

I recently shot [with a camera, not a rifle] a dragonfly I didn't recognize. Scanning what I believe are reasonably reputable websites [Odonata Central, Digital Dragonflies, Bugguide.net], I discovered that it is a pin-tailed pondhawk [pictures attached]. A little more online research brought me to Dragonflies and Damselflies of the United States, where I learned that there are no confirmed sightings of this species in Orange County, Florida. I just wanted to let you know that I have seen this species of dragonfly at Lake Como Park and Harry P. Leu Gardens, both in Orange County.

I am not a nutcase who just wants her county to be blue or turquoise on the pin-tailed pondhawk Florida map. I am a professor [of English, alas], and know the importance of careful research. You can trust me even though I have never pithed a frog! I just want to help out dragonfly science in whatever small way I can.

Sincerely,
Sparky Lightbulb
Professor of English

A Simple Formula

2006-06-15T23:01:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I received a student email that read something like this:

From: vita.villanova@_____cc.edu>
To: sparky.lightbulb@_____cc.edu
Date: May 16, 2006 2:54 PM
Subject: Late assignment

I need you to just approve "heart disease" as the topic for my research paper. I don't have time to pitch nine different topics and explain my interest in them because my grandmother just died. Not completing that long form won't hurt my grade, will it?

Vita

An email like this makes my usually easy-going nature as inflexible as a brick wall. The likelihood that Grandma has died is slim, the possibility that the student is hoping to recycle a research essay from a previous health class high. The self-importance evident in the student's belief that she gets to determine how to complete and count an assignment lights my anger. I responded diplomatically, though: "I'm sorry for your loss, but I cannot treat you any differently than the other 24 people in class. You must complete the form before I will approve a topic for your research essay." In a case like this, I might give the student a break on the late penalty in case Grandma really has passed, but I will make it clear that it is for that one assignment—and only if I get it within a day or two.

This student chose to employ a formula that meant my inflexibility was the only possible outcome:

Take stance as the Center of the Universe
+ Fabricate a ridiculous excuse
+ Indicate that course policies should be the student's prerogative
= An angry professor without sympathy

I too faced many brick walls as a student, but instead of lying about a dead grandmother, I plugged into a surprisingly effective formula that got me one exception after another:

Acknowledge the power of the person granting the favor
+ Admit one's own inferiority
+ Make a reasonable request
= An exception to a usually hard-and-fast rule

This people-smart formula worked in all kinds of situations. For a professor who prided himself on never giving an extension:

Dr. Conner, I hate to trouble you when you have so many important things to do, but I am a butt-head who has mismanaged her time and needs the weekend to finish the paper due today. I promise it will be under your door before you arrive on Monday, and I will accept whatever late penalty you give it for my lack of punctuality.

Received = 3 scowls, 1 threat that I shouldn't expect better than a C, 1 grade of A when he returned the paper

For the cashiers in the bursar's office:

You have been so helpful and kind about accepting my tuition in little chunks all summer, but I am sick with worry that I won't have it all paid before Labor Day. Is there any way possible I can start fall classes even if I still owe about $200?

Received = Paperwork shuffle that kept the bursar from discovering the "gentlewomen's agreement" we had arranged

I guess my advice would be that if someone can't be a good student [and good students, by the way, get their work done even when Grandma has really died], then that person should at least learn the method for manipulating people more effectively!

Do You Get What You Pay For?

2006-06-14T23:01:00.003-04:00

In the early 80s, after the bursar's office credited my generous financial aid and scholarship package to the bill, I still owed roughly $2,000 for fall/winter terms and another $1,500 for spring. Since my parents didn't help with college tuition, I worked all summer at a theme park, eating a bag of corn chips and drinking a Coke during my shift because that was all my lunch budget allowed. On a day off, I would cash my paycheck and drive to campus to turn over the majority of my minimum-wage earnings. The women in the bursar's office, who saw me deliver my paltry contribution week after week, always fixed it so I could begin classes even if I owed a couple hundred dollars in early September. Then, during the school year, I worked every weekend as well as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and spring break, hoping to reduce my spring term bill to zero dollars by the time the academic year ended.

I have always been a big believer in "you get what you pay for." But is this true concerning higher education? I went to an expensive, private liberal arts college. But did I get a better education there than I would have if I had attended the local community college, which today charges $67 per credit hour, or about $1,600 for a fall and spring semester combined? My undergraduate education was way more expensive than what the community college or state university was charging at the time, but did I get way more learning?

Immediately after graduation, I had the opportunity to look closely at the schooling option I hadn't chosen. I went to work at the local community college, which employs me still. When I first arrived here, I was amazed at the brilliance of the teachers. I could have taken much cheaper classes with caring, creative, smart people my first two years if I hadn't dismissed the place as Grade 13!

Sure, some of the faculty here are worthless burnouts, but they are a very small minority, and we had them at the expensive school too. For example, my senior year as an undergrad I took a course on Renaissance art. I knew Dr. Lemon's reputation: everyone thought he was a snooze-o-rama. But this was Renaissance art: Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Raphael. Course material would still be great to study, or so I believed. Oh, was I wrong! Dr. Lemon read dusty, yellowed lecture notes—"jokes" penciled in the margins—and put me to sleep in the dark room lit only by the slide projector. If he's still teaching, I bet students skewer him on RateMyProfessor.

If the classroom education is the same—there are both brilliant teachers and worthless burnouts at both places—then why do community colleges have such a bad reputation? I will never forget the depiction of Bunker Hill Community College in Good Will Hunting. Despite Robin Williams' lively antics as Dr. Maguire, professor of psychology at BHCC, the students in his dumpy classroom slump in their seats, twirl their hair, and contribute zombie-like grunts to discussion. Compare that picture to the MIT students, willing to attempt difficult mathematical challenges their professor leaves on a hallway chalkboard for fun. They sit at the edge of their seats, their classroom as brightly lit as their minds, competing for their professor's attention, applauding his performance at the end of class.

I am also reminded of the constant ribbing Eric, "E," of Entourage gets whenever he mentions that he at least attempted a 4-year degree. On one episode, the boys are at a showing of Gary Busey's art. After Eric corrects Johnny Drama's bad "interpretation" of a piece of sculpture, Drama gets defensive. Eric explains his limited expertise by saying, "I took art history in college." Drama retorts, "Community college, loser."

So is the rotten reputation that community colleges have deserved? Do they offer the McDonald's Quarter Pounder equivalent of education while pricey 4-year schools serve up filet mignon instruction?

I've been teaching long enough to know that the additional money my alma mater charged wasn't going toward better classrooms or teacher salaries. In one building, for example, I always checked the seat before sitting down. The roof leaked, and I could expect a puddle. When I applied for graduate school at the same institution, I had to interview with one of the faculty who taught in the program. I remember her shock when she learned that I made as much money as she did. That I taught 5 classes to her 3 and had 25 students per section to her 7 - 15 didn't temper her disapproval.

The differences in price allow the four-year college students more frequent and higher profile guest speakers, opportunities to watch and participate in sports, free movies on weekend evenings, museums and performing arts centers, and health services. As an undergrad, I attended lectures by James Dickey and Maya Angelou; here, we get no-name poets with print runs of 3,000 copies. If someone needs a Tylenol or bandaid at my community college, she can't walk to the Health Center for an evaluation by a real nurse or doctor. Instead, she'll have to pay the overpriced charge for a two-pill package at the bookstore or wrap toilet paper around the wound.

So differences in price contribute to differences in extracurricular opportunities or fringe benefits, not necessarily differences in the quality of instruction. So is the community college a savory—whoops, savvy—financial move, or is it where where we feed those with less discerning intellectual palates?

I don't think that community college students are stupider, that's for sure. We do get people, as a result of the "open door" policy [anyone with a high school diploma or GED has the ticket to enter], who do not have the IQ to handle the work, and no amount of remediation will help. But that's also true of universities who admit intellectually unqualified football players and drugged out children of rich alumni. Many students in my classes are just as capable of handling the work as, say, I was, and if our research folks aren't finagling the numbers, we have proof: our graduates do better their junior year [as evidenced by their GPAs] at the university than the "native" students who started there as freshmen. I have met many talented students here, some of whom are more brilliant writers, better artists, and deeper thinkers than I. They could have handled classes at an ivy league school—if they had gone to one.

I see one difference between community college and university students. Many community college students are not intellectually inferior; they are instead time management dumb. They are the people who couldn't get it together to register for their SATs, or study for them, or take them on the scheduled Saturday, or take them a second time to raise their score. They neglected to request applications to schools that made admissions decisions months in advance of the start of a new academic year. They never bothered to fill out the necessary financial aid forms. And even if they did get accepted somewhere prestigious and were awarded a scholarship, they self-sabotaged themselves, mismanaging time with a boy/girlfriend resulting in a pregnancy that caused them to decline the university offer to raise a child.

Maybe their life experiences contributed to such low self-esteem that they didn't think they deserved a chance at a more prestigious institution than the local cc. Maybe they didn't have family models who "knew the ropes" and could help them through the labyrinth of paperwork and deadlines. Whatever the obstacle, they wasted those precious months of their senior year at high school when they needed to get envelopes in the mail. Their time management stupidity has forced them to attend an institution that will accept them, arrange a short-term loan, and register them all on the same day, if, of course, they have the stamina to wait in lines. If they have postponed a return to school, the community college allows them to continue their education close to the job that they now must work to pay the bills.

Community college students do get their money's worth. They get the same great instruction at a place willing to work with their time-management problems. They get their "beef" [a McDonald's Quarter Pounder is a damn fine thing to eat], missing out on the filet mignon because they neglected to make a reservation at the "restaurant" that serves it.

And what about me? Was I a damn fool to spend all of that money on tuition to a private school? No, I don't believe so. The smaller classes meant that faculty looked out for me and my intellectual development. They were asking me my sophomore year where I planned to attend graduate school and offering to write letters of recommendation. They had a real interest in me and my friends, one that I wish I could have in my own students. But there are just too many of them, as well as too many state guidelines I have to meet, too many state or department competency tests I have to prepare the students for, that I can't offer quality time for them as individuals. They get only my and my colleague's quality instruction in the classroom, not the "fine dining" experience a 4-year school can offer.

So, yes, you do get what you pay for.

Communicating with Online Students

2006-06-12T23:01:00.001-04:00

For the last seven years, I have taught online classes as part of my load. In my department, I pioneered education in cyberspace, being the first person to offer freshman composition and the research class via the internet. When I agreed to design an online course, my big fear was that I would have no students left at the end of the semester; the reality has been that I keep 16 - 19 of the 25 people who initially register—this high number even though they must take and pass the same department-graded, do-or-die final exam or write the same long research essay required of classroom students. Although I am considered the department expert for online instruction, I am still solving problems inherent in "distance ed." Thousands of emails later, I feel that I have finally mastered communicating with online students.

One big problem to communication via email is that neither the sender nor the recipient can see the facial expression of the other. From an email message alone, I cannot accurately gauge whether or not a student has fabricated Grandma's death. I don't have the person's eyes to study, posture or body language to translate. And online students sometimes have a hard time reading me as well. Sometimes they cannot determine, say, my level of enthusiasm [or lack thereof] for an assignment they have submitted. In a physical classroom, I might say, "This is not too bad." My friendly face communicates the math: "not," a negative, plus "bad," a second negative, equals a positive, or my general happiness with the work.

If, however, I write "This is not too bad" as part of an end comment on an assignment I am returning via email, insecure students will read the sentence this way: "This is not TOO bad"—or, "It's bad but I have seen worse"—when I did not intend to communicate that message. So in email, I now avoid phrases that I still use in the classroom where my physical presence helps students interpret my meaning. In email, I am straightforward and cold: "I liked the way you handled X, but you must revise Y before you submit the final draft" or "The content is just what I was looking for, but you will need to work on Z if you want to pass the department-graded exam at the end of the semester."

Straightforwardness, though, can get me in trouble in an email as well. When I meet classes in person, I can easily determine who has done the work and who hasn't. Physical evidence abounds: Does Student X have a textbook? Is it marked in a way that indicates that he read it? Did Student Y attend class the day we discussed the PowerPoint presentation? Did I see her ask her seatmate for notes to copy because she wasn't here? Did Student Z take notes the day we discussed the very important directions for the final draft, or was he surreptitiously trying to complete homework for another class?

Online students are equally transparent—the quality of their assignments indicates how much of the preparatory work they did before attempting the piece I will evaluate—but I do not call them on it as I would a classroom student. To Student Z above, I can say, "You could have earned a higher grade on this if you had put aside the math homework the day I went over the directions." But I cannot say to an online student, "You obviously did not view the PowerPoint I posted before attempting this essay," because the student will retort, "I did too!" While she feigns indignation and hurt that I would accuse her of such a thing, I can offer no physical evidence that she is lying.

So I have learned to phrase my suspicions like this: "I wish that you had paid better attention to the reading assignment [or PowerPoint presentation, or student samples, etc.] and tried harder to meet the expectations communicated there, for then you would have earned a higher grade." I know the student didn't do the reading assignment, but I don't accuse her of that lapse because I can't prove it. The student will often reply, "Gosh, I guess I didn't read X very carefully. Next time I will pay better attention." The student and I both know the translation: "Gosh, I didn't do the reading. Next time I will actually view the student samples you so thoughtfully provided." But we avoid unsubstantiated accusations and retorts zinging through cyberspace.

The I-know-you-didn't-do-the-required-preparation-but-I-will-only-accuse-you-of-not-doing-it-carefully rebuke works well with A and B students who are testing how little they can get away with in an online course. Next time, they will likely get their act together and do acceptable work. C, D, and F students, however, want to make appointments to see me. "I don't understand X," their email will begin, "so I was hoping you could better explain it to me in person." They had X explained at the minimum in assigned pages in the textbook, a PowerPoint presentation spelling out what I wanted, samples of A+ student work or a practice quiz with answers.

At the appointment, these students will have no interest in learning anything about X; they will instead whine that a work, health, family, financial, or relationship responsibility keeps them from doing a good job in my class—as though they alone in the world have to juggle so many challenges. They will hope that I will be sympathetic and reduce my expectations of them. C, D, and F students aren't that bright to begin with; they don't realize that their physical presence in my office—their eyes, their facial expressions, their posture—will give me way more information than the static words in an email, and that I will have less sympathy, be less inclined to give them a break, than I would if they had just admitted their laziness and promised to do the work for the next assignment.

I have finally figured out how to handle these folks as well. I always begin the return email with my office hours and location. Then I add something like this: "To better help you understand X, I will need to see how you prepared for the evaluative assignment. When you come to the meeting, bring both of your textbooks, all of the posted handouts I advised you to print and read with a highlighter, and all of the exercises I assigned. Put stars or question marks by anything that you don't understand."

Since employing this strategy, I have found that not one of them comes to the meeting. I, of course, know why. If they bought the textbooks [and that's a BIG if], they don't want to bother marking them up as though they did in fact prepare beforehand for the assignment or quiz they bombed. And if they were to read them in preparation for our in-person meeting, they would realize that the information wasn't difficult to understand. I don't teach rocket science! Once they start printing the handouts, just a glance would indicate that all of the problems I marked in their essays were addressed in readily available materials. And if they start the assigned exercises, they realize that only a moron could still mess up a quiz on the material after doing so much preparatory work.

To establish good communication in an online course, I now follow these simple rules:

Avoid expressions that can be interpreted differently depending on what word is stressed
Accuse the students of not preparing carefully enough, even when their work indicates that they didn't prepare at all
Insist that the students bring all materials and preparatory assignments, marked in a way that shows what/where they didn't understand, to any in-person meeting

Now I'm sure that since I feel confident in my ability to communicate with online students, one of them will throw me a curve to demonstrate how little I really know. But I'm here with the bat, though, my eye on the ball.

Little World, no. 2

2006-06-05T23:01:00.011-04:00

When I took Bug down to the lake this afternoon, I noticed that city workers had mowed. Cut grass is a good thing; I can more easily see—and thus avoid—a pile of dog poop that one of my inconsiderate neighbors has neglected to pick up, and in the early mornings my shoes won't get so wet with dew. This mowing, however, will probably wipe out the last of the fleabane, a wildflower/weed that was at its height early in the spring. Yesterday, small patches were still popping out blooms, and I managed to photograph a cassius blue butterfly enjoying nectar from the flowers:

I'm sure that like the clover, fleabane has appeared every spring. This is the first year that I've noticed it, though. That's one important benefit of having a camera: I am always looking for photo opportunities, so I notice my environment a lot more. Finding a new location is also an opportunity to learn things, since I want to know what to call the flora and fauna I spy there.

When the fleabane was in full bloom, it made a thick circle around the lake. All I had to do was sit with the sun at my back to capture a wide variety of visitors who came, like this skipper butterfly:

Also snacking on the nectar were drone and hoverflies:

And bees of various breeds came to work in the "fields":

I will miss the fleabane, but the recent rains have inspired the Spanish needle to flourish, and that ugly wildflower/weed is always good for attracting all kinds of bugs.

A special note: Today marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. Whoo-hoo! I managed to commit to project that no one but me cares about for a whole year. I had hoped to write at least 100 posts, but I only made it to 79, 3 of which are still saved as unfinished "drafts."

Is There an Entomologist in the House?

2006-05-31T23:01:00.006-04:00

Lately, this blog seems like online field notes, but the truth is I am spending a lot of time reading and thinking about bugs, especially dragonflies. The lake behind campus is replete with four-spotted pennants, or Brachymesia gravida, a type of skimmer. Identifying this species has been quite a challenge.

I took my first pictures of four-spotted pennants a couple of weeks ago. At the time, I didn't know their name. I found three color variations, and at first I mistakenly believed that I had found two new dragonfly species [new to me, at least]. One version I called [in entirely unscientific lingo] chocolate-blueberry:

The eyes do look like pools of Hershey's milk chocolate while the wings seem to have four chocolate fingerprints on them, as though God were snacking on Kisses while assembling these little guys, holding them up to study his handiwork. From a distance, the thorax and abdomen appear black, but once I got close enough, I noticed a blue tone, as if they were a fruit and chocolate blend.

None of the three dragonfly guide books I have recently purchased identify this particular species, so I was at a loss for a common/scientific name until I happened across a similar photo at Odonata Central. I now know that the above individuals are male four-spotted pennants, their coloring the giveaway. Once I had a name, I went to Bugguide.net to confirm the identity, and it was at this website where I realized that the second new dragonfly I had found at Lake Pamela was an immature male of the same species.

The second color variation looks like this:

The colors might be strikingly different, but I wasn't surprised to discover that they were the same species because the "chassis" of the two versions are identical. When I compare "chocolate-blueberry" above to these specimens, I notice the similar position and shape of the "headlights," the styling of the "passenger compartments," the identical amounts of "trunk" space. The immature male has the flashy colors of youth while the mature male has a "paint job" that indicates his elder statesman status.

Dragonflies, I've learned, go through dramatic color changes as they mature. I believe that for a four-spotted pennant, the "tweenie" version looks like this:

At first, I thought this duller-colored one might be a female, but after I looked more carefully, I noticed the "chocolate fingerprints" beginning to appear on the wings, the bright colors fading into shades that could darken to the blue-black of the mature male. That's my reasoned guess, anyway.

So where are the women? I haven't observed a single mating pair during my "field work." Female dragonflies don't hang out near the water; they only make an appearance to breed. Shorelines are male territory. I did spy this dragonfly in the woods beside the lake:

Her[?] coloring might indicate a female. Female scarlet and roseate skimmers, for example, are yellowish. I have observed no scarlet and roseate skimmers at the lake, though. I was hoping she[?] was a female four-spotted pennant, but Digital Dragonflies shows the chocolate fingerprints on the female as well as reddish eyes.

I wish I knew an entomologist, especially someone who knew odonata, as I get frustrated and confused!

Did I Learn Anything?

2006-05-23T23:01:00.003-04:00

One blog I visit every weekday during lunch is Confessions of a Community College Dean. The author provides entertaining, work-related posts and has quite a large following, which makes the "comments" section a worthwhile diversion. Last week he spent one day complaining about the foreign language requirement at his school and the very next day arguing that typical college-level math classes were just as worthless for many AA-degree seekers. Those two posts—plus discovering a copy of my undergraduate transcript here in my office—made me think about my freshman year in college. I have concluded that although I must have learned a lot [I do remember reading, writing, taking exams, feeling great anxiety, etc.], I don't remember much of the content of the classes I took.

What I Remember Best, Fall Term, 1981

Elementary French: I can still picture the lovely silver-haired madame puffing on a cigarette as she stood in the door frame, blowing smoke into the empty hallway, while she proctored our exams or waited for us to scribble answers in our workbooks. I thought she was the epitome of cool and worried that I personally disappointed her whenever I failed to score a 100 on an assignment. The class was too easy for me—I should have taken Intermediate French—but the one section that was offered conflicted with Conversational Russian. The professor of that class, Colonel Ed, an authoritative ex-Marine, was also my academic advisor. He pressured me to take Russian every semester until he retired two years later.

Current knowledge of French = miniscule
Crush on teacher = immense

Precalculus Mathematics: Whenever my classmates and I were especially annoying in our mathematical ignorance, our nerdy professor turned to the blackboard and her scribbled formulae, lamenting that numbers were her only real friends. I remember that the first half of Precalculus was a repeat of high school math, so I quit attending regularly, as I was easily making As on exams. When the class began new material, I was not there to notice and never able to catch up. Thankfully, half a semester of As and half a semester of Fs averaged to a C+ for the course and the end of my math torture.

I would not know where to begin if someone put a first-day problem from Precalculus in front of me today. I do know that if I had a copy of the textbook, I could figure the problem out. As a student, I never read math textbooks. [Some of my undergrad professors would say I overwrote that last sentence, that math made it wordy.] But having taught myself over the years a number of new things without formal classroom training, I have learned that looking over printed explanations can usually provide the answer. I am a big fan of the For Dummies series.

Current knowledge of precalculus = zero
Likelihood I could figure it out, if motivated = high
Likelihood I would be motivated to figure it out = low

Conversational Russian: I still have a handful of ever-handy phrases—"Hello, how are you?" "Good." "Goodbye." "Do you speak Russian?" "Yes, I speak Russian." "Give me some black bread, please." "Thank you." If I were to listen all the way through "Katyusha," a Russian wartime song, I could probably sing it accurately at a karaoke bar. I remember having to sing "Katyusha" at least once every other class for five semesters.

Current knowledge of Russian = laughable
Likelihood I would embarrass myself at a karaoke bar = high

Essentials World Civilizations: I remember that I made the mistake of writing "The ancient Egyptians had a fetish about death" on an essay exam, and my professor circling fetish and snidely commenting that I needed to consult a dictionary to use the word correctly. I immediately understood that college professors, unlike high school teachers, wanted papers that had more than correctly spelled words. The professor for this class was a brilliant lecturer—even though PowerPoint wasn't invented, even though all he had was a collection of brightly colored flip maps at the front of the room—so I made the mistake of taking him again for Winter Term, one month of intensive study in a single class.

Current knowledge of ancient cultures = high [reinforced, though, by graduate work and self-study]
Opportunities to use fetish correctly in daily speech = few, alas

What I Remember Best, Winter Term, 1982

The Russian Revolution: Mesmerized by the melodic voice and scope of knowledge of Dr. Eaton, I took a senior-level history seminar winter term of my freshman year. I remember that I had to get his written permission to register. Dr. Eaton may have tried to dissuade me but signed the form in the end, despite the evidence that I didn't know how to use fetish correctly. Instead of a superficial textbook that covered all of human history as we had used in Essentials World Civilizations, I was assigned primary sources, like the writings of Trotsky and Lenin, or detailed historical analyses by highbrow scholars. I was in way over my head, afraid to say anything in a class full of anarchist history majors, afraid to ask for help after class and risk appearing stupid. We had a major research paper as our only grade. Of course, I had never written a research paper before, further proof of the poor public education in the South. I bought a handbook and puzzled out footnotes and the bibliography. Dr. Eaton gave me a generous B-, perhaps out of guilt from having signed the permission form in the first place. I don't even remember the subject of that 20-page paper.

Current knowledge of the Russian Revolution = too painful to determine
Inspiration after this class to become a history major = low

What I Remember Best, Spring Term, 1982

Freshman Rhetoric & Composition: I remember staring at the classroom door, waiting for the department secretary to poke her head in. She came often to say that our professor was blowing us off again but to begin the new essay even though we had no guidelines. "He says to tell you to read the handbook if you have any questions!" she would advise. Dr. Phillips was the resident Southern literature expert, so he found the one composition class he taught—us—a real drag, not really worth his time. To be perfectly honest, though, we didn't find the course worth our time either. The college mandated that the bad freshman writers take composition in the fall. We knew that our spring term placement meant that the college considered us the good freshman writers. We thought we already knew everything and wondered why no one had offered us a book contract yet.

Current knowledge of essay writing = high, no thanks to Dr. Phillips
Frequency of employing the techniques of Dr. Phillips in my own composition classes = never

World Religions: Far Eastern: Any chance that I would return to regular worship at the Methodist church ended after a semester of lively discussions with the professor of this class, the Dean of the Chapel. Finally, I thought, religions that made sense! Religions that offered logical explanations for the existence of suffering and imperfection! I loved the idea that we have many lives to fix mistakes and get things right, instead of being tossed into hell after sixty or so short years. As a poor college student struggling to pay for things, I loved the idea that all suffering is the result of wanting what we cannot have, and that we should try to stop the desire, not exhaust ourselves trying to satisfy it.

Current knowledge of far Eastern religions = high
Mom's worry that I would join a cult while taking the class = high

Elementary Russian:A typical class* went like this:

Colonel Ed: Hello, How are you?
A student: Good, thank you.
Colonel Ed: Do you speak Russian?
A different student: Yes, I speak Russian.
Colonel Ed: Would you like some black bread?
A third student: Yes, give me some black bread, please. Thank you.
Colonel Ed: [hitting play button on tape recorder] Okay, let's sing "Katyusha."
Students: [in unison] Расцветали яблони и груши,
Поплыли туманы над рекой ...
Colonel Ed: Goodbye!
Students: [in unison] Goodbye!

*translated from Russian

Current knowledge of Russian = greater than current knowledge of precalculus
Opportunities to ask a Russian speaker for black bread = zero

Elementary Spanish: To explain my third language in a single year, let me say that I fancied myself a writer/world traveler after college graduation and began the requirements [soon abandoned] of a foreign language major. I remember best that the professor for this class insisted that we clock in and out of the language lab, amassing a specific number of hours per week there. During one trip to a carrel with headphones, I discovered a tape with a recording of "Guantanamara," a famous Cuban song. Every future hour in the lab I spent listening exclusively to this song: finding the place on the tape, listening, rewinding, listening again, rewinding—you get the picture. If the lab staff heard the song escaping from my headphones every day I was there, no one confronted me to get on task.

Current knowledge of Spanish = un pocotito
Ability to pretend that I am paying attention in department meetings while I am in fact singing "Guantanamara" in my head = off the charts

Humanities: Classic to Romantic: I remember many things about the art, literature, and philosophy of the Classic and Romantic movements. I made many good friends in this class and spent all of my free time on campus discussing/debating the ideas and works we explored. This class ruled my spring semester. My strongest memory, however, is the frustration trying to please the two professors who taught the course. The first month, we listened to the philosophy professor [who paced on the conference table around which we sat]; then we took an essay exam which he graded. Everyone found it impossible to answer all of the questions in the time we were given. When Professor No. 1 returned the essays, he chastised us for not completing all of the exam. We cried that there was no way to write good essays for all of the questions. He countered that he didn't want essays, just answers. We sucked up our Cs and spent the next month listening to the literature professor who made up the second half of the team. At the end of his turn, we took our second exam. This time we didn't worry about titles, engaging introductions, carefully crafted thesis statements and the like; we just wrote answers—to all of the questions. When Professor No. 2 returned this set of exams, he chastised us for forgetting everything our composition classes had taught us about good writing. But Professor No. 1 said the answer, not the writing, was important, we cried. We could not convince the literature professor that we felt betrayed by the team-teaching experience and sucked up more Cs. For the final exam, we demanded that they make their expectations clear before we wrote that last time. I ended up with a B in the class, but I doubt that they even opened the blue books, basing their grades on some holistic evaluation of our overall performance, so they could watch TV.

Current knowledge of Classic/Romantic movements = high
Grade I should have received = A+

Looking back on that first year as an undergrad, I realize that it didn't really matter what I took. Having to weigh skipping a class against all the money tuition cost, having to be more responsible than any high school class ever required, having to please people who expected more of me than anyone else ever had, operating within and testing new boundaries, learning to please different personalities—those were the real lessons.

What I've Learned Doing Urban Nature Photography

2006-05-17T23:01:00.000-04:00

When my focus is a picture of an insect or other very small creature, I can usually frame the shot so that no human artifact appears. This way, the viewer can't tell if I am in the middle of the Everglades National Park or sitting in the driveway of my front yard. When the subject is larger than a finger, the illusion of being deep in the wilderness is harder to create because evidence of urban life is everywhere. On Monday during my tramp around the lake behind campus, I happened upon a great egret, a stately though common-as-dirt bird found at most bodies of water. The egret still had its frilly mating plumage and perched upon a submerged branch. Here was the opportunity to take a swamp picture while I was three miles from Theme Park Mecca! But I was directly across from campus and couldn't help getting the loading dock in the shot:

Water birds will wing off at the first sign of danger, so I crept to a new spot to make undeveloped shoreline the background. I can reposition myself more easily with the 300 mm lens because my greater distance from the bird threatens it less. The only problem is that greater magnification means less depth of field. As the egret considered whether it should fly off, glancing over its shoulder for a safe place to land, I lost the necessary clarity for a good shot:

I stopped, waiting for the bird to feel safe and settle back on his perch. Finally, I was rewarded with a shot that I could say I took in the Everglades, even if I really didn't:

As I've said here before, I prefer fauna photographs with the creature showing a little attitude. Eventually, my patience won me this:

For me, what was just a typical bird picture becomes a shot worth viewing with that red tongue and shed feathers showing off some egret sass.

Ghosts and Goblins Six Months Early

2006-05-16T23:01:00.008-04:00

Summer classes started on May 8 and will run through the beginning of August. For the past four or five years—as well as this summer—I have agreed to a rather bizarre schedule that has both great perks and drawbacks. During summer semester, students and faculty have a variety of scheduling options: a 6-week semester that begins in May and ends in the middle of June, a second 6-week semester that begins in June and ends in August, or a 12-week "full" semester. A full-time load is four classes—not the usual five—and most faculty opt for either four long-semester classes or four short-semester classes, two at the beginning of the summer and two more at the end. I, however, have both the best and worst of both worlds. I have two full-semester classes and then two short-semester classes that begin in June. This means that I have lots of free time currently but will really feel the crunch once the second short semester begins. The first half of the summer is always "project" time; if I am overhauling a course, updating assignments, creating something new, May and early June is when that work gets done.

I also have leisure to do some fun things. My goal last week was to bring the camera to campus every day. I planned to stroll around the lake once per day, looking for subjects to photograph. I anticipated another Lake Pamela series like the one this past November. I was going to discuss one new picture here every day: what I had learned in identifying the plant or animal, what I had observed about its behavior, what challenge I had faced getting the shot. I planned to be disciplined. I always over-schedule free time, though, and despite lugging the heavy camera to campus, I never got out to the lake. Yesterday, however, I finally managed the short hike at lunch time. It was a good trip; I have enough photos to write a whole week's worth of blog posts [something else I finally have the time to do!].

I hadn't been down to the lake to observe and photograph since a Saturday in early April when I accompanied Elizabeth back to campus for a presentation she got coerced into giving. On that trip, the lake was overrun with male blue dasher dragonflies:

Although I did spot a few yesterday, I was amazed at the high number of other species. According to Dragonflies [an excellent read], dragonfly species appear "in a predictable sequence." If this blog is acting in part as field notes, blue dashers are at their ascendancy here in Central Florida in late spring. Now at mid-May, a very common sight is Halloween pennants, Celithemis eponina, so named for their Halloween colors of black and orange—I spotted several at Mead Gardens on Sunday, many more at Lake Pamela yesterday. As a side note, Lake Como is still a battleground for blue dashers, Halloween pennants making only rare appearances.

The first Halloween pennant I photographed was exciting. I had admired pictures of this species at other photoblogs but had never seen—let alone digitally captured—a specimen myself. I look at that photo now and dismiss it as not very good. Lake Como, where I took the picture, is a well-groomed lake; the city keeps the grass neatly cut, and workers use weed wackers to tame the unruly plants at the shore, right down to the water's edge. I think the blue dashers are so combative because there are so few perching spots left once the maintenance crew finishes. The aggressive manicuring also means that artistic photographs are difficult to compose. Typically I have to shoot with water behind the subject or mud to the side, getting a hazy, unappealing blue, gray, or brown background [depending on water/sky/ground conditions].

Unlike the neighborhood lake near home, Lake Pamela is unkept and wild near the water. I keep my eyes out for snakes whenever I make the trip around; I always confirm that I'm not standing in a fire ant nest when I stop to shoot. Late last fall, the college hired a firm that came out in haz-mat suits and sprayed the lake shore with chemicals similar to Agent Orange, killing all of the plant life along the edge. But the shore has had several months to repair, and now three or four yards of vegetation on all sides of my subjects provides a much more artistic background. These are four males I captured yesterday, all at Lake Pamela:

I tweaked the amount of contrast on the one above, but the colors are accurate. I almost desaturated to tone down the colors but decided I really liked the vibrancy. This photo will definitely get posted at the photostream, titled something like "A Moment to Pray" or "Little Angel." Dragonflies are both hideous and beautiful; the angle of this shot hides the hairy legs and has the bug positioned like an angel in a Renaissance painting, hovering above some human action below.

This second one is just fun. The dragonfly looks as if he is on a carousel ride, twirling in circles. I imagine that I can see a smile on his face. The reality is that he was balancing and maintaining his perch as gusts of wind came off the lake.

No, this third Halloween pennant is not participating in a karaoke contest. When a dragonfly touches a surface with his feet, he instinctively pulls what he is grasping toward his mouth, usually to feed on the prey he has caught. But even a perch gets a similar embrace. Bad dragonfly table manners, I guess.

I could have cropped this last male much closer to the actual insect, but I like the dreamy grass background and the insight into perspective. If you click one of these images for the full-sized version, then the dragonflies on the computer screen are the size of birds; in reality, they are tiny creatures, this one balancing on a single blade of grass.

This last one is a Halloween pennant female, taken at Mead Gardens, not Lake Pamela. Notice that the wings are less colorful, although I like the lime green thorax more than the chocolate brown on the males.

The walk around the lake yesterday was very pleasant, the only problem an overzealous [new] security guard who came chasing after me in a golf cart, demanding identification. I should have told him to fuck off, as it is public property, not a military base. I had every right to take pictures as the college isn't [to my knowledge] burying nuclear waste behind the cafeteria as a favor to the President or receiving supplies at the loading dock to build weapons of mass destruction in the chemistry labs. But I was good and gave him my name so that he could radio the command center [a.k.a. the place where one gets parking stickers renewed] and confirm that I was an employee. "We spotted you near the water, ma'am, and needed to know what was going on," he explained. I guess suicides routinely throw themselves off the two-inch "cliff," drowning themselves in three feet of water with expensive cameras in hand.

Clash of the Titans

2006-05-07T23:01:00.016-04:00

I walked down to the neighborhood lake yesterday, camera in hand. The shoreline was abuzz with dragonfly activity. I sat six or seven feet away from the dried stalk of a water plant, watching the action. I observed that even though the human housing bubble might be about to burst, dragonflies still prized certain perches and fought like yuppies competing in a bidding war over a choice piece of trendy real estate.

Initially, the perch in question was "home" for a male blue dasher. He, however, was constantly challenged by other individuals of his species for ownership of the stick. Notice the tips of the abdomens curving up, signs of male dragonfly aggression:

I know these are males because of their coloring; female blue dashers aren't blue. A perch like this one allows the male to position himself in defense of his water territory. Here he waits ... and fights off intruders ...

And waits a while longer ... and fights off more intruders ... and waits until a female ready to mate finally arrives. She will lay her eggs directly in the water—or in plants in the water [depends on the species]—so the male must have a choice spot picked out for her.

Eventually, an aerial battle distracted the blue dasher long enough for a new squatter to arrive, a lovely scarlet skimmer. When I first showed these photos to Elizabeth, she asked, "Is there really a dragonfly that color?" thinking, I guess, that I had tweaked the color with a graphics program.

Slightly larger than the blue dasher, the scarlet skimmer fiercely defended that stick for the 30 or so minutes I sat there. Notice his abdomen fully tilted up as he signals his unwillingness to give up the territory. His posture looks like the dragonfly equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's "crane" karate pose, open but deadly:

Elizabeth pointed out the similarity between this dragonfly battle and the epic clash of Obi Wan Kenobi [who weilds a blue light sabre] and Darth Vader [with his red light sabre] in Star Wars.

Bear with me here!

"I've been waiting for you, Obi Wan. We meet again at last."

"The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master."

"Only a master of evil, Darth."

"Your powers are weak, old man."

"You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!"

Photographing Dragonflies

2006-05-05T23:01:00.002-04:00

When I first bought my camera, I had little luck photographing dragonflies. They like to land on water plants offshore, and the zoom feature of my first two lenses couldn't get me close enough for a good shot. Here in Florida, television news anchors love to report that another brain-sucking amoeba has traveled up a careless swimmer's nose, landing the poor soul in an irreversible coma, so walking into lake water to bridge the distance between me and the subject was so not an option.

Any dragonfly photo I took in 2005 was just plain lucky. I always assumed my subjects were either newly emerged or dying, their pristine or tattered wings the proof. Their vulnerability gave them no choice but to tolerate my proximity. But my newest lens, a 300 mm, allows me to sit at the water's edge and bring the water plants and their perchers right to me, dry and comfortable on the shore. With the magic of magnification, getting close enough to a dragonfly is no longer the challenge:

The ability to bridge the physical distance does not, however, automatically make a good picture. Dragonflies have sparkling wings, big shiny eyes, and other smooth, light-reflecting body parts. As we have had a record-setting stretch of cloudless, rain-free days, the blinding sun and polished subjects often make nothing but ugly glare.

I am willing to shoot 50 pictures of the same insect, though, and with a little luck, one of every three or four bugs will reward me with a good picture. Down at Lake Como, the closest body of water to the house, the majority of dragonflies are male blue dashers. The females, I've learned, remain inland until they are ready to mate, so it's a real frat house down at the water as the males aerial battle for perches. They wait for a willing female to enter their "house" where they have a "bed," a water territory, they are defending.

Patrolling the land between the shore and the busy road that the lake interrupts are the aptly-named Carolina saddlebags. Notice the "saddlebag" spots on the hind wings:

I have spotted an occasional Halloween pennant close to water:

If I hunt carefully near the water's edge, I can find the damselflies, the second type of Odonata, veritable needles in the grass.

I try to keep the sun at my back; I try to use the shade of a cypress tree as a natural hood for the lens to reduce glare. I try to frame the shot so that a bright orange road construction sign isn't the background for the dragonfly. But a willing subject perched for his portrait can so inspire my finger to mash the shutter button that the little I know about good photography is quickly forgotten, and I arrive home with a bunch of useless crap.

The Eyes Have It

2006-04-10T23:01:00.011-04:00

Why am I taking pictures of bugs? Sometimes a photo outing is a scavenger hunt. I know a certain species exists in my area—the field guide says so—and I want to find a member and prove that I did with a picture. Often, though, I will chase after another white peacock [my favorite butterfly, even though they are quite common in Florida] or a monarch [my least favorite], hoping for a better shot of the eyes. Insects might be ambulatory vegetables, allowing purely instinctual impulses to influence their behavior, wind-up toys running until their springs loosen. But when I capture their eyes in just the right light, I can give them impish or serious personalities that make them look like great [or at least cunning] thinkers.

And more than we realize might be happening in their little heads. I'm currently reading Life in the Undergrowth; its author, the naturalist Sir David Attenborough, points out that scientists have long considered insects "automata, mindless robots reacting automatically to the simplest stimuli," that crediting them with any of our human motives was thought "unjustified and scientifically disreputable anthropomorphism." Recently, however, scientists have begun to revise that attitude. In an experiment recounted in An Obsession with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect, swallowtail butterflies learned to revise instinctual behavior to survive. Lantana, a common nectar source, "signals" butterflies, one of its pollinators, with color: a yellow bloom likely holds nectar while an older, red bloom does not. When scientists drained the fresh yellow blooms and filled by hand the red blooms, the swallowtails didn't starve to death as they would if they were simple "machines" obeying pre-programmed commands. Instead, they overrode their instinct, tried the red blooms, and were rewarded with food. They had learned that their instinctual preference for yellow wasn't feeding them and found a solution for their hungry bellies in the red.

When I look at field guides, the pictures often capture butterflies, for example, from behind, like this:

I can study the wing patterns and figure out a species identification, but I get no insight into the insect's attitude. To me, this kind of photo is equivalent to knowing a stranger as he drives by in a limousine with tinted windows. Oh sure, he might be a big-deal movie or rock star, but even though I saw the limo pass, I have no personal knowledge of the man inside, as I would get at a superficial, shake-hands-and-gush backstage meeting.

That's why I prefer a head-on shot, one that lets the little bug stare right back at the lens, giving me a little attitude.

Sparkle in the eyes is also important. My newest lens, a 300 mm, allows me to sit six or seven feet away from the subject. This distance provides enough cushion between us that the creature won't try to scurry away or hide. I can relax and take several pictures as my subject goes about its life. With luck, I'll catch the wet or shiny part of the eye at just the right moment, humanizing the little guy.

A butterfly or lizard on the computer screen is huge; in real life, many of my subjects are the size of a quarter or the first two digits of a finger, their little eyes difficult to catch. A slight shift of the lens or the subject [I breathe; the wind blows; the subject spies food or a predator] and the point of clear focus will become a shoulder or front leg, not the all-important face. For me, a successful picture is the capture of an intelligent eye staring right back at me.

In real life, the subject cannot hold its gaze with the same unwavering intensity of a photo, but engaging my eyes with its own gives the subject an upfront honesty that intimates an intelligence that I enjoy experiencing.

Little World, no. 1

2006-04-05T23:01:00.007-04:00

When I was an invincible teenager, I used to walk barefoot around the neighborhood lake. One time I stepped on a rusty fishhook someone had carelessly discarded. Sometimes a foot landed in dog poop or on a mound of fire ants. And on one occasion, while strolling through a patch of clover, I got stung by a bee.

My neighbors consider clover a weed, although it is possible to buy seeds online and plant them as ground cover. I understand why people pull this plant from their lawns. The leaves are nondescript, and the flowers, viewed from eyes five or six feet off the ground, are nothing special: yellowish white puffballs that brown with age, colors reminiscent of used cigarette butts.

The first time I tried my newest camera lens, a 300 mm, I was shooting anything that caught my eye, not at all attempting to make "art." I took several shots of the puffball flowers in a clover patch. After dumping these images into the computer and viewing them, I was mightily impressed with the intricate petals that fell away from the centers, row by row.

I noticed also that a patch of clover, so inconsequential to me, was a tiny world full of activity. Bees, for example, visited flower after flower collecting nectar and pollen, like migrant workers harvesting fruit in strange groves.

I can't count the times I have stomped through clover—now with feet safe in shoes—while walking the dogs. I don't know how many tiny creatures I have crushed underfoot after Yo-Yo or Bug has dragged me off the sidewalk to one more interesting spot to sniff.

I do know that if I sit quietly by a patch, I will soon notice movement as this little nectar oasis teems with tiny life. I can take a vacation from my giant world to visit a different country, one without UN representation. I get to experience a culture that I don't understand, its citizens speaking and behaving in ways I can't translate with accuracy.

I have friends who are constantly traveling: Germany for spring break, Miami for a conference, New York City for technical training. Part of me feels that I miss something by not leaving home more. And yet when I am visiting a little world underfoot, I do vacation from my everyday life and sample a new culture. Plus I have the travel pictures to prove it!

Fanconi Syndrome, Part 6

2006-03-23T23:01:00.005-05:00

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

2006-03-11T23:01:00.008-05:00

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?

2006-03-09T23:01:00.000-05:00

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.

Inevitable

2006-02-23T23:01:00.001-05:00

Each semester I have one class that is my "unfavorite." This time, the dislike I feel is far greater than usual. For a really stupid reason, I agreed to teach a section of freshman composition at 7 a.m. My dean passed out spring term schedules at a department meeting I neglected to attend, and when I found mine in my mailbox the next day, I felt that I couldn't complain as I had intentionally missed the meeting. I didn't want to compound the bad karma, so I decided to suck it up and teach at that early hour.

The class wasn't a punishment. I happily teach at 8 a.m., but this semester the college abolished that start time, which means classes now begin either at 7 or 8:30. Connie moved what would have been my 8 a.m. class to 7 a.m., probably because I have never complained about the 7 a.m. class I always teach during one of the summer's short semesters. Getting up at 4:30 is fine for five short weeks, 20 class meetings total. But during a 15-week semester, it's hell. I have to reset the alarm every evening because my Monday/Wednesday schedule doesn't require leaving the house as early. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and can't remember if the next morning is a Tuesday or Thursday, which means I must get out of bed to confirm the day and correct alarm time. I leave the house in the pitch dark, hoping I don't miss a stair and crack my head open on the front sidewalk, and then get to play "Near Miss" with the drunks who are still on the road.

But I am a professional, so my attitude is the same for the 7 o'clock group as it is for my later classes. I don't bitch about the time, just get down to business. Although I am awake and fully functioning, many of the students are not. Two distinct personalities comprise the class: the mature, responsible folks who registered for a 7 a.m. class because that time fits their schedule, and then everyone else who was "forced" to take it because no other section remained open. In this last group, I have the lifelong procrastinators, the slackers, the oversleepers. I passed back a quiz today: 9 students earned As; two not-so-bright hardworkers got Cs; the other half of the class made Ds and Fs. The line of demarcation is clear.

Now I am not about to start complaining that malcontents are walking in late. I don't allow students to disrupt the rest of us with their tardiness, so they are in class on time but resentful. And I'm not going to whine that they are sleeping either. They get one polite warning after the class they slept through [I'm not a fan of public humiliation]; then I just mark them absent and eventually withdraw them for "nonattendance." I guess my dislike for this group is the high number of students with crappy attitudes. Every class has a handful of poor performers. But I am a really good teacher, usually maintain everyone's attention with interesting and meaningful material [no small-group bullshit or in-class busy work], and the handful of slackers who do register for a class with me either get peer pressured into becoming at least decent students or withdraw.

Fifty percent of this 7 a.m. class, however, doesn't want to learn. I am trying to ignore their presence, their palpable dislike for everything we do, their sad attempts to look awake while they zone out, for the other half of the room includes people who have their notebooks open before I arrive and are attempting to become better writers. But I am finding it hard to keep my focus on the good students. I am used to enthusiastic people concerned about the course content [or at least their good grades], so half a class of malcontents who shrug indifferently at yet another D or F is really getting on my nerves. There is an unspoken tension in the room between those who are "too cool for school," who look on disdainfully at anyone who bothers to take notes, for example, and everyone else.

I'm really at a loss as to what I should do. I imagine that as the weather warms, they will drop like flies, preferring a trip to the beach or an extra hour in bed to their complete boredom in my class. I am used to finishing with most of the students who start the semester, but this group of losers can't withdraw soon enough, no matter what lousy retention numbers I have at the end of April.

Today officially marks the halfway point, the end of week 7 in 14 weeks of instruction. I have 14 more energy-sucking mornings before I never have to see this particular sea of faces again. When I spot these students as individuals in the hallway, I will regret that the good ones didn't have the typical Professor Lightbulb experience that is my reputation. I will ignore the glares from the slackers who have had to re-register for the same course because they failed their first attempt with me.

Damn, I wish I hadn't missed that department meeting so that I could have wailed to Connie that there was just no way I could teach at 7 a.m. during a long semester!

The Return of the Bugs

2006-02-18T23:01:00.004-05:00

I drove to Leu Gardens today, not expecting to find much to shoot for the photoblog. Taking the camera out and not finding any insects, my subject of choice, has become very depressing. Plus, I feel some pressure to perform as the photoblog has several loyal viewers [unlike this word blog which no one but Elizabeth reads]. We had record lows in the 30s earlier in the week, so I assumed the cold had wiped out the few slow and tattered insects that had lived through the winter. I started down at the lake, hoping to find an interesting bird willing to pose, but the reeds and beach were empty.

As I was heading back to the gardens proper, I caught a flash of silver. A lacewing, perhaps? I walked over to investigate and realized that it was a dragonfly, from the look of her [the coloring indicates a female Eastern pondhawk], a newly emerged one. She had pristine wings—not a single tattered edge—and acted as if this body were a foreign language she didn't yet understand. She stayed close to the ground, making frequent stops in the cut grass. A mockingbird had his eye on her, but I shooed him away, and with the new lens [a 300 mm] got a few very nice close ups. The lake edges have been dragonfly free for quite some time, so her presence must mean that spring is indeed near.

I spied a skipper butterfly in the "home demonstration" garden and then went in pursuit of a fat bumble bee. That's when I learned that my camera battery had died [this new lens, with image stabilization, sucks down a battery much more quickly than I'm used to], so I headed home. But at least the bugs are returning!

It's Not All Bad

2006-02-17T23:02:00.000-05:00

The last five posts, all dealing with Yo-Yo's diagnosis with Fanconi syndrome, have been pretty depressing, but it's not all bad. Both basenjis are still full of energy and beauty, as evidenced by two photos out in the yard this week:

Yo-Yo in her hot red-leather collar, a Christmas present

Handsome Bug in his spiffy new collar