Four Boys

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 every day 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!

March Madness

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.

Evolution of My Grading

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

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

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

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.

Good or Cool? What's More Important?

"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.

Back in the Day

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."

An Observation

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

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

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

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

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

In Defense of the 5-Paragraph Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atonement with the Father

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sierra's Side

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Only

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!

45 Minutes Down at the Lake

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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

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!