Just Breathe

There's a song refrain, a woman's voice singing "and breathe, just breathe." I tried to find out who it is, the name of the song, whatever, and couldn't, but that's what I keep telling myself. Breathe. Just breathe.

I got all the papers done, conferences accomplished--and as the day went on, was able to grab a few pages of Dickens in between students. Heavenly. Breathe.

Interesting, though: of course students were struggling with the thesis (always hard--even for accomplished writers), and many of them had taken an approach that was leading them into blather (I call it "unsupported commentary": when they go on about people in general, with nothing to ground their arguments) or into territory that the readings barely touch, as if it were the main point. So I kept reframing the assignment as three questions (plus the "how can I prove it" question that is always part of any academic writing). Finally, sometime either late yesterday or today, it dawned on me that perhaps my need to reframe in every conference means I need to rewrite the prompts for the assignment itself. Duh.

The thing is, I work so hard to keep them away from the "My sacred space is Disney World" or "No one needs nature because the city gives us everything we need" arguments (which they may believe but which are certainly not expressed in the essays they are meant to analyze), that I've neglected to clearly tell them where they should go instead. Part of the prompt is something about identifying what natural/wild places give us that cities can't--consequently many of them go on and on about what's wrong with cities (which they know from experience) instead of identifying what we get when we are immersed in the nonhuman world (which is the point of the readings).

Oh, and before I forget: blooper of the week: "Nature has been on Earth longer than humans have." (Yes: nature arrived on an alien vessel to spread over, well, whatever the planet is without "nature...." I grant you, "nature" is a pretty fuzzy term--a problem we wrestle with in Nature in Literature--but I think this is the first time I've seen a student separate nature and the planet.)

Getting back to the wording of the assignment, after my experience earlier with student confusion over the study questions in 229, I realize that the process of clarifying and simplifying my instructions will have to continue ad infinitum, as my natural tendency is to complicate and over-explain (it's hereditary: Mom is an information junkie; I got it from her). But everything about the readings, how to write, the whole content of the course, is so new for them--and so radically different from anything they've encountered before--that I have to break things down and use short, simple sentence, and not a lot of them.

You understand why this is difficult for me.

This is also why I will NEVER voluntarily teach remedial English of any variety.

But the other problem is that students always, always, find new and unique ways to interpret what I say as meaning something I would never have dreamed it could. I keep trying to find a balance between keeping them at least in the ballpark and overwhelming them into immobility.

Side note: got our schedules for spring. Despite all the juggling that the chair and assistant chair had to do to fix the problems we on the scheduling committee created, I think I got essentially what I originally gave myself: three 102 sections (comp 2, which essentially functions as an introduction to literary genres and how to write about them) and, hallelujah, the aforementioned Nature in Lit. There are other faculty who want to teach it, but I'm senior to most of them (hah! take that!) or--since P&B has decided to get strict about making sure people actually are qualified to teach the classes they're assigned--I can make a case that I have the better credentials. (It is my field, after all. Some others in the department are making forays into ecocrit, but I still think I'm the one specialist.) Now I just have to hope it runs--and that it gets the necessary critical mass of bright and interested students to make it work. Last semester's section was a dream--one of those miraculous confluences of personalities that produces brilliant class chemistry--and I know I can't expect that again, but something close would be nice. One prays to whatever gods (or dogs) there may be.

Tomorrow, into the office to attend to P&B business (writing up observations, reviewing sabbatical applications, finally attending to my mentee's promo file). But tonight? Breathe. Just breathe.