Dear Special Snowflake

To my faithful readers: This semester, I haven't been as direct and authoritative in the classroom as I should have been. The reaping time has arrived, and so I give you yet another "dear student" post. I imagine it will feel cathartic. 

Dear Student,

You are a special snowflake. But you do have to write a new draft, just like everyone else. You heard my instructions in class, and you may also have read them in my follow-up email or on our class website or in the special snowflake email I sent you. I don't know how to say it any more clearly: Write a new draft. Your first attempt was crap. 

Although you are a unique individual with outstanding potential, I'm not going to answer your email during the weekend. Even though you need my immediate response because you have a super important thing that you have to do instead of the work for my class. Sure. I'll give you an extension. You should get the opportunity to be the best you that you can be.

However, I did not cause your scholastic emergency. Let's face it: I'm going to hold this whole sorry episode against you. That's one of my special qualities.

Dear Student*

Dear Student: I'm pretty sure that the word you want is "undertow," not "under-toe." Also, when referring to a woman, one should not use the word "female" as a noun. An animal can be "a female," but a woman is not. In short, use the word "woman." Finally, when you send an email to me explaining that you're "not feeling well," don't ask me if you're going to miss "any information."

*Please note that I do not intend for the "Dear Student" posts to be read by my actual students. As such, I limit identifying details and never use a student's name or description. Furthermore, 

nearly every error or problem identified in the "Dear Student" posts comes up in my response to the student(s)'s work—albeit in a much different form. So it's not like I'm just making fun of my dumb students and not actually trying to teach them.

***I am instituting a new class policy, I've decided. Each student earns 25% of his or her grade on the basis of class participation, as described in the syllabus. Clearly, I need to describe more fully what this means. It means that I'm paying attention to who's talking and who's prepared (as measured by our new, required 10-minute in-class writing assignment). Now, you can get a possible 5 points each class period, 2 of which are predicated on the substance of your in-class writing. This more specific method of measuring student performance will, I believe, benefit me and (possibly) the students. Not to make a fine point, but I've had enough. Whee!

upside

The upside of the JJ's terribleness was that I used a very edited version of it to drive home the importance of diction. (And I lied a little. I told them that when the angry weird old man swore at me, I told him to go fuck himself.) One should choose one's diction according to the situation and the audience. 

It almost always makes students laugh when I say the word "fuck" in the classroom. They don't expect it. Which further illustrates that classroom diction doesn't include words like "shit," "fuck," "asshole," "goddamn it," "pussy," or "doodoo." Unless the student is quoting a source text.

update

See post below for initial details of weird asshole old guy.

After one of my students left, the guy said, "So are your office hours over yet?"

And I mumbled something like, "We'll see, I guess." Then, I said, louder, "Since you bring up my office hours, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't interrupt me while I'm with a student." A request that I think is reasonable and appropriate.

Asshole says, "What, Vanderbilt doesn't give you people an office to do your shit in?"

Then, there was a stupid little "you were rude to me"; "no, you started talking to me first. you were rude to me." So, yeah, I could have handled it better.

To prevent a yelling match, I left to talk to the proprietor, Sam, about the escalating situation. This little asshole old guy followed me right up there, talking over me, and Sam said to him, "Just a minute."

Then, Sam talked to me about how I was a long-time, valued customer, and he'd take care of it. I went outside, Sam talked to the asshole, and the three of us sat together while Sam basically told us to play nice. Apparently, to the old guy, asking me to plug his computer in was less interruptive than just barging through. What would have been better would be for him to go around my chair and move the power strip so he could plug it in himself without bothering me.

While I appreciate the proprietor's need for diplomacy, the compromise he tried to create wasn't enough. I probably won't be coming here anymore. 

But at least the asshole old guy left. 

working at the coffee shop

I really like working at JJ's and meeting students here. Overall, it's a good experience. HOWEVER (didn't you know that was coming?) there's this older guy who often shows up, and he always sits next to me, which in itself is creepy. It's not like no other seats available near the powerstrip. 

Because of where he sits, he generally has to climb past me to plug his computer in, which also makes me uncomfortable because I don't like to be that close to strangers. He always apologizes for getting in my way, which isn't really an apology because it happens each fucking time.

There's a coffee table on which people rest their beverages. It's pretty big, which is great. So creepiness #3 is that he puts his stuff so close to mine that he has to lean toward me to pick up his coffee cup. Ew. And he tries to make conversation.

Now, if this series of events only happened once, that would be fine. It's easy to be generous and polite if the other person is as well. It's becomes less and less easy the more frequently it happens. I intended to ignore all of this as though this desperate old man just wants a little attention and perhaps camaraderie. The smile of an obviously married woman? The scent of clothes worn a third time, not really dirty but not totally clean either? Ick. Just ick. 

Today represents my last little nerve. I don't know what to do.

I was meeting with a student this morning when he sat down. Then, during an obvious conference (more obvious to someone sitting too close), he interrupts to ask me could I please plug his computer in so that he doesn't have to climb over me. Three things: 

1) don't interrupt my meeting/conference/conversation/whatever to make me do a favor for you. 

2) the favor itself is unreasonable because it is he who sat down after my student and I did. (He left for a moment, and my student leaned over and asked, "do you know that guy?" I explained that I didn't, and she said, "I thought maybe you did, but when you didn't say Hi, I wasn't sure. Yeah, he's weird.") Also unreasonable because the powerstrip is on a long cord, and he could move it so that he doesn't have to bother anyone ever.

3) Now I'm spitting mad, and I would say something, but I didn't at the moment, and now it's been about 10 minutes, and I don't really know what to do. The presence of my student made him sit a little farther than usual, so it's not like I can ask JJ's gunther to help me. When I look up, straight ahead in front of me (as I often do when I'm thinking and writing), he always looks at me. (It's pretty obvious.) I'm mad and creeped out, but I won't move because I don't want to cede my territory. This is where I sit. I shouldn't have to move, and this creepy guy is taking advantage of JJ's overall sense of decorum, so I feel I can't yell at him. Part of me is angry at myself that I didn't tell him immediately that he was interrupting a student conference (with the subtext that he could figure something else out about his stupid computer that didn't involve me plugging it in for him or him crawling over me to do it himself). 

What should I do? What would you do? If you know what to do, would you do it for me?

Imaginary writing

I do quite a bit of imaginary composition. Manifestos when I'm in traffic (or fantastic, involved, 12-minute intricacies about why I might be late). The beginnings of a story as I walk to meeting on campus. Partial sestinas when I'm in the shower. (I like to take long showers, but it's hard to remember the pattern for that form.) Movie scenarios while my students are peer reviewing each other's papers.

That kind of composition is fleeting, and I think blogging sometimes resembles it. 

Recently, I've been composing my first class of this semester. Monday is the first official day of classes, and my TTh class starts Tuesday at 8am. Freshman Composition. Maybe I'll ask them about their mental essays, poems, and songs. 

I've actually written lots of posts between now and the last one I posted. A lot is going on right now for me mentally, physically, socially, politically. I'm not sure how much of it I want to disclose, so I've discarded pages of stuff. Instead I've been doing quite a bit of imaginary writing. It's written in lemon juice, invisible. Hold it over a flame to see the muddle.

Preparing for the semester

I taught 100 last spring, and I'm teaching 102 in the fall, which means I have a returning student who's willing to show up at 8 for my class. This makes me happy.

My goal as a teacher this semester is to have a better attitude about grading. 

I like teaching, however much I complain, and I look forward to every semester: learning names, eliciting the first tentative comments, getting the students to engage each other. I'm especially looking forward to teaching The Good Soldier. One day is reserved for an exercise in which I split them into groups of 3 and assign each group a major character to defend. The four major characters all have questionable motives and values, so the conversation can be pretty raucous as each group tries to get its say. The exercise requires them to read closely and helps them see the novel's intensity and brutality. 

And it's fun. No, really. It is as Leonora describes the girl: "not no good."

First, do no harm.

Released in 2001, A Beautiful Mind still makes me angry. I bring it up because Netflix keeps suggesting that I take another look at it. In terms of craft, the film is lovely to look at, and the actors do their jobs. And I don't really care if it remains true to the events of Nash's life. What angers me is its fantasy about schizophrenia and the old saw about mad genius. Critics and viewers alike laud this movie for offering a glimpse into the experience of having serious mental illness. Isn't it pretty to think so.

(For bonus points, name the allusion.)

---

In other news, last night M asked me about how a person determines whether a poem is good. I talked a little too long about "One Art," then said that it's easier to show with a selection of poems, rather than a list of qualities. Our conversation makes me think about how I approach teaching poetry in 102. I don't care for the approach lampooned Dead Poets' Society---I'm not going to make a bunch of graphs. But I do believe that one can tell whether a poem has merit. As a pedagogue, I try to make the concepts we talk about as concrete as possible (e.g., handouts for 6 steps to a good thesis statement, 12 steps to a close reading, 6 right ways to use commas). Students like lists and handouts. So, it's not enough for me just to say that these 10 poems we've read are excellent because I say so and anything with 14 lines is a sonnet, no matter what anyone else says.

Poetry is a long and vibrant mode, such that its forms, variations, and ambiguities are much more difficult to quantify than any more recent form (e.g., novels). A traditional Shakespearian sonnet contains 14 lines of iambic pentameter, organized into three 4-line stanzas and a couplet, with a standard rhyme scheme, and a turn of some kind at the end, usually somewhere in the last 4 lines.

Using this description of the form, a person can still write a poem that will make your eyes and ears bleed. In fact, that's the most likely outcome. (Ooh!) It's like giving a person who has never cooked a bare-bones recipe for hollandaise sauce or pastry creme. Something's going break.

So I don't think I can write a list of elements to look for in a great poem. I can only repeat what has been said to me: Great poems are revelatory. They don't conform. Here's a list of terms you can use to talk about poems. Now let's look at one. 

Wilfred Owen (written between two tours in WWI. He himself became one of these youth just before the war ended.)

Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen. 

(He died in WWI a week before Armistice Day.)

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,

Nor any voice of mourning, save the choirs,----

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

The final Dear Student until the fall (I hope)

Dear D Student:

I have looked at the course evaluations, and I'm pretty sure which one you wrote. I've been reading your crappy writing all semester, so I should know. Evidently, my office hours were hard to get to, and the class was slow and "desorganiaed." (Did you mean "disorganized"? I may have mentioned this: Misspelling decreases one's credibility.) 

Please note: The difference between my evaluation of your work and your response to my class is that your response doesn't really matter. It doesn't affect me scholastically. I don't have a GPA to keep up.

Unfortunately for you, dear Student, you do. 

Incidentally, your classmates did not agree with your assessment. Four other students also took the time to write comments, and they were all positive. One said simply, "Love McColl!" Now, I can't tell if that's an incomplete sentence or a command, but either way, it works for me. 

Grades Are Done

Dear students: I've calculated your grades based on how much I like you. Not really. I based them on how much I dislike you. 

Confidential to the student who got a D: I let you write another draft of Paper 2, and I gave you a lot of feedback about it. It was still awful. You wasted my time, and if I ever see you on campus, I'm going to give you a really dirty look. But the D you earned. 

----

Today, I drafted some material on "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" (1916). I actually do think it's funny. Detective Coke Ennyday shows the crook a photograph and asks, "Is this you?" (It obviously is, right down to the glue-on mustache.)  The man replies, "Yep, that's me!" and escapes on an inflatable fish. I won't even mention the opium part. That and the "Jap"/Chinese conflation won't fit into the diss, but it would make a good article. Hurrah, Scientific Detective Ennyday!

I'm the smartest person you know. Ha!

I'm grading today. Wish me luck. (One early paper begins, "A birthday is the annual anniversary of the day on which a person was born." No lie.)

It counts as work, even though I don't have an object to show for it. As I've mentioned in more specific terms in an earlier post, I often get the impression that many of my acquaintances don't respect what I do, and my being at Vanderbilt likely doesn't help. 

I think for a living. Everybody thinks--why should certain people get paid for it? That answer is simple. I read complex books, they inspire complex thoughts, and I communicate those thoughts to students and colleagues clearly and economically. It's difficult, it's necessary, and not everyone can do it.

Apparently, believing the last two sentences means I fit one of America's most pejorative categories: the elitist intellectual. 

Now, let's see if I can say this without whining. Far more people heap scorn on elitist intellectual types than vice versa. This is true in public and private discourse. I could cite dozens of examples. (Someone once told me that being my friend made her feel stupid, so she couldn't be my friend anymore. And we were both adults at the time.) Of course, academics are sometimes snottish assholes. You can find assholes who think they're better than others in every profession. 

The category of elitist intellectual reminds me of namecalling on the playground. I hope that at some point, public and private discourse will move on to more pressing issues than whether someone is a stuck-up dork.

Entry #4 in the ongoing "Dear Student" series

Dear Student #1: Alright already. Just, please, don't send me another goddamn draft.

Dear Student #2: I appreciate your hope, but no, this is not an A paper. You cannot use what I said as a major plank of your argument. Also, "quote" is a verb, not a noun. 

[entry for Dear Student #3 redacted for its incivility.]

Dear Student #4: Thank you for reminding me that I'm not a horrible teacher.

---

A useful phrase: l'esprit d'escalier. In German, Treppenwitz. It's one of life's most frustrating experiences. On Saturday, to a friend of a friend, I said, "What?" when really what I meant was "Being fat and drinking water does not mean I'm pregnant, you ass." Or any of the other clever, biting things I thought to say fifteen minutes after the conversation. She's lucky I'm taking mood stabilizers, a benzo, and some buproprion. By law, I may not be responsible for my actions, otherwise.

Dear student #3

Dear student,

You are upset with the grade for your last paper. I would be, too, if I were you. You're lucky you didn't fail that assignment. Despite your semester-long blasé attitude, I'll let you write another draft, an opportunity for more instruction and a test that determines whether you really are "totally willing to do any extra work or writing" to better your grade.

For this additional draft, consider your audience and your source material. Don't use the Graham Greene essay to justify hating to read. It doesn't help your case.

Dear Student #2 (in what might become a series)

Joseph Conrad may not have ever mastered British ways, but he did master the English language. Trust me on this one.

Conrad hated Russia, true, but not because of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. At that point, he was 60 and had hated Russia for a long time, probably because his Polish father was exiled for revolutionary activities. And Conrad was a Pole, not a Polack or a Pollock. 

Finally, the sentence "My teachers love my mother because . . ." cannot end well.

Dear student

Your essay is awful. It presents the exact opposite of the author's expressed ideas. You also don't seem to know that the essay was published in [fill in the date], which means your assumptions don't make any sense. Your mechanics are a mess, and I suspect your wordy sentences result from your attempt to reach the required draft length. If it weren't so terrible, the essay would be banal. Worse, you often use words you clearly don't understand the meaning of. For example, a child cannot be venerable. Unless he is the Last Emperor, I suppose. You don't know what I'm talking about, do you.

Oh, student. This essay is all wrong. Historically, analytically, and stylistically. Please don't cry again when I tell you this.

No class today

Last night, I found myself with a turned ankle. I'm not exactly sure how it happened: one moment I was at the top of the stairs by the door, the next I was far closer to the ground than I expected to be. (It's like discovering that you're wearing two pairs of underwear. You ask with astonishment, "Who could have done this?" but the answer is that you've done it to yourself, when you weren't looking.)

A quick roll-call of parts determined that everything seemed properly attached and contained. My ankle hurt but not enough to cancel our rendezvous with friends. (Incidentally, Sam searched out an extremely close parking spot, one of the many, subtle ways he takes care of me.) Three glasses of wine later, I felt great.

Not so much this morning. It takes about ten minutes to get from my car to my classroom, which typically seems a short distance. The stiff ankle, and the egg it had grown in the night, said no, and I called in. This interlude reveals two unhappy faults: 1) I tend to whine about physical pain, and 2) I readily to notice minor pains, which I then whine about. 

I'm also a bit of a liar. A couple of weeks ago I was moving fairly slowly one morning, and consequently, I was late to class. On my way there, I created an elaborate story to tell to my students. See, I was driving with the windows open because it's such a nice day. At a stoplight, a small bird flew into the car through one of the open windows and then tried to fly back out through the windshield. We both panicked. I swatted at the thing with a book, and it eventually figured out how to get out the car. 

The students laughed, but I don't think they bought it. But what are they going to do? Call me on it? I'm the one grading them. At least I had an entertaining excuse, if not a good one.

So what new lie can I tell them on Monday about how I turned my ankle? Perhaps it will have to do with encountering my doppelgänger. Or maybe another bird story. It could be a theme.

Blogging from JJ's

Many of my students are writing analyses for the first time. It's been difficult to convince them that I'm giving them the tools for analysis but that they don't have to use all of the tools. One student's writing on a Bertrand Russell essay about Conrad and feels she needs to bring in the historical relationships among Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and Britain. In 1250 words. I told her that I'll accept papers up to 10 pages, but no more.

To shift somewhat:

The following poem reminds me a lot of the previous post's Berryman poem, in that Bishop uses form to constrain deep, aching emotion. You've probably read it, but it's such a lovely villanelle. 

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master, 

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last of three houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

--

Please note that this poem is copyrighted, and I've stolen it. I have mixed feelings on whether a company (like Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, LLC) should get to own a poem.

A typically constrained poet, Bishop breaks her own conventions with this poem: using two exclamation marks, the parenthetical outburst, the stuttering last line. Yet, she still manages to contain an otherwise destroying grief, the death of her lover, Macedo Soares. Although she affects a light tone until the last stanza, the poem as a whole always drives me close to tears. The chosen details ("the joking voice, a gesture/I love") are countered by the oddly formal "shan't." In the final line, she must command herself to complete the poem. She pushes the disaster of Soares's suicide away with the conditional "may" and the couching of grief as simile ("like"), but it doesn't work. She feels, and makes the reader feel, the intensity. The discipline it shows—she wrote 17 drafts—amazes me, but I think I understand the impulse of containment. To do otherwise risks spinning out of control: out of art, mastery, and eventually language. What in another poem might be a command to another (e.g., "Accept the fluster") emerges as commands to herself, as the parenthetical, italicized statement reveals. She is essentially talking to herself and to her dead Macedo, as one addresses a headstone, speaking for her own benefit into the void. She's trying to comfort herself, even through the disowned lie in the final stanza. 

"One Art" is perhaps the most affecting elegy I've encountered.

A few fires extinguished

After some time the corner, the computer seems to be working better. My space bar is a little wonky, but if that's the deal, I'm fine with it.

Money-wise, it looks as though the financial aid people are going to come through after all. If I had known before the summer award letter came, however, it would have been nice.

At any rate, class yesterday was less than exciting, and I finally dinged a student for resting her head, perhaps sleeping, by asking her a direct question about the reading. When she said she didn't know, I told her that when one is awake, one tends to have more ideas about what's going on in class. So I probably won't teach that Flannery O'Connor essay again. 

Third, my exam has been pushed back by at least a week (provisionally April 17), which takes some of the pressure off. 

Which leads me to my question of the day: do any of you (you few, you happy few) have a system for keeping track of books? I would have sworn that I have Kittler's discourse book, but it would seem that I don't and have never checked it out from the bookstore. Is that possible?

How do you keep track of what you have? Or do my diamond shoes hurt too much?