Some you could just hug

To say that my enthusiasm for my job right now is high would be a serious misinterpretation of the concept. Between the rapid growth of our department in the past few years and the concurrent downturn in the economy—accompanied by a downturn in university funding—I have seen my classes range to incredibly large for writing programs as my grading assistance has dwindled to one.

Add to that my frustration with the low evaluations I got last semester and my lack of confidence that my spring course is accomplishing anything worthwhile, much less what either the department or I would like to see happening, and the picture becomes pretty gloomy.

Yesterday was the first day back to class after the winter break. I was out all last week on a consulting job, so I had to play catch-up yesterday, which was complicated by the fact that the computer jocks had changed out the operating system on my computer and confused my email system, my web browser, and my printer connections. The handful of students who dropped by with questions provided sort of comic relief.

One of them was very apologetic about needing me to reconsider his grade from a previous semester, which was good because it kept me from pinching his head off. Another had a similar case but probably a better excuse; since he arrived late in the afternoon, he lingered a while after hours and just chatted, which I mostly appreciated because he said some nice things about my fall course—words I probably needed to hear.

The third came to ask a favor of a different flavor. Part of my chagrin with this semester is that the department has seemed to be stacking ideas like Jenga blocks and then flinging Tonka trucks into them, which has led this semester to my classes mixing sophomores and juniors into a course designed for juniors but now redesigned for sophomores. I can see some potential benefit to the mix, sort of in the way one-room schoolhouses benefited from having sixth-graders in the same room with primary grades: advantages of the older helping the younger, but frustrations for the older who feel held back by the younger—the differences in vocabulary and comprehension of the industry are easily that great.


Southpark's concern in this was that the juniors have to participate in a paper contest in a couple of weeks where they have been advised to present the simple proposals they wrote in my class last spring. For those who actually took the class last spring, that's no problem; for the ones who are just now taking it, it is: they haven't yet written the proposals. Southpark is a TA in one of their labs this semester, and some of them had approached him for help in preparing for the presentation.

His visit to my office was to ask me to stay late this evening and try to help them negotiate a solution to the problem of presenting a paper when they only began the course today. This is a kid who had had some conflicts with my class in the fall, but I had been amused by some of his strategies to manage them. The one that stands out best in my memory is the evening he sat in on several presentations "to get some ideas," when in fact he simply hadn't been able to attach himself to a presentation group. Others complained to me that they couldn't get a group together; he found a way to attach himself to a group and meet his obligations.

He clearly was not one of the surly evaluators who have had me off my feed but in fact was creative enough to meet my challenges in a subtle but sufficient way. He had come into my office being gracious about my course and sympathetic toward our mutual students, so I certainly couldn't turn him away, although I really didn't have much idea of what I might say that would help this crowd.

When I got to the classroom for the help session, Southpark was there with his backpack to greet me. "Do you think it would help for me to show them my presentation?" he asked. I had really expected the students to want more information about what to present than how to design the presentation, but certainly a brief run through his couldn't hurt them, so I happily agreed.

From the very beginning of his talk, I must have been beaming: starting on the title slide, he pointed out details that I had covered time and again last semester, never knowing whether I was really getting through to students in the presentations sessions but pretty sure from their surly evaluations that they had resented my suggestions. I can't know how much of what Southpark said cam from my class and how much came from other experiences, but he even stopped from time to time to say things like, "This isn't as good as it could be, but here's what I plan to do to improve it." I was floored that he touched on so many concepts I had coverend—even more so when he showed me my comments on his slides from the fall and how he had worked through cleaning them up.

For my part, which wound up being only a few minutes in the hour-long session, I fielded questions from the juniors mostly about the content and organization of their presentations, as I had anticipated from the beginning. After they had left, I complimented Southpark on the fine job he had done of showing the students a good model, giving them some good ideas for ensuring that their presentations went well, and assuring them that the point of the contest was to help them become better professonals. He was concerned about his tendency to stammer through rough spots in presentations, and I pointed out to him that he hadn't stammered at all tonight—probably, I think, because he was so intimately sure of his subject matter after having worked with it so much in the fall.

He cocked his head for a minute, thought it over, and acknowledged that the hard work of developing his paper last semester really had led to an easier task of developing the presentation, and he knew the presentation so well that showing it to the younger students had been no challenge. He seemed to have learned more from the class than he thought he had.

And maybe I taught more than I realized in that class, too. This semester might turn out all right after all.

(Mis)adventures in cooking

I used to think I was a pretty good cook. I had lots of fun as a teenager developing recipes for homemade pizza, and I got pretty good at homemade bread, although I never had much responsibility for preparing the family's meals.

In college, I appreciated the fact that the dining halls provided and prepared the food and cleaned up afterward, so I never complained about the quality of the food.

When I had a family of my own, I got meals on the table and kept my kids healthy, so I thought I was doing okay. 

As divorce and high school graduations changed the dynamics of my family, I thought back over all the years I had admired my grandmother, who had lived alone until she was in her late 90s but, as far as I could tell, had eaten three square meals every day of her life. I don't remember whether she ever had a microwave in her kitchen; about the most advanced "conveniences" I remember were her toaster and toaster oven. But she always took the time to prepare and eat good meals.

Not so much me. I figured out a long time ago that I don't need to eat "three square meals" every day, partly because I have a tendency toward hypoglycemia that doesn't necessarily like me to wait too long between meals. And I don't need to stuff myself to feel satisfied. So left to my own resources, I'm likely to snack a bit here, nibble there, and usually wonder whether I get any real nutrition in the course of a day. (With modern agriculture and grocery shopping being what they are, I'm not sure anything we eat anymore has much nutrition in it by the time it gets to the table.)

Part of my agreement with Number One Son to let him room with me has been that he is in charge of KP, which he interprets to meaning cooking but not so much cleaning. He's really a pretty good cook and he works hard to try to balance meals so we both get appropriate amounts of protein and veggies. But he's been on vacation for the past week, so I've been on my own.

I know I can still cook some, at least: while NOS and I were in Los Angeles for Christmas, I puttered around in the kitchen a bit to help Darling Daughter with meals. (She had planned mostly eating in, which thrilled NOS who got to work with her on their favorite shrimp stew.) Mostly, that turned out all right, despite my lack of expertise with a gas range.

One of the meals there had been a dish my mom used to call "oven-fried chicken," which is merely a cut-up chicken dusted with flour and seasonings and drizzled with butter, then baked for a bit. DD had boneless breasts on hand for making them, and while they turned out all right, they didn't have the usually crispy coating because the flour didn't stick too well to the naked meat. I figured I could experiment with a version of that dish for myself; maybe coating the bird with the butter before the flour would have a better outcome. (Not so much.)

I also had a squash and some spinach on hand, so I decided a those could round out my meal. Unfortunately, I started sauteing the onions for those about a year too early, so I had onions that were something beyond "caramelized" by the time I got ready to add the veggies. I split the soggy onions into a nonstick pot for the greens and a ceramic-coated cast-iron pan for the squash; turns out the nonstick is still the better deal for cleanup, even though my little bargain-buy cast-iron was kind of fun to use.

I had cooked earlier than I usually eat so I could watch the old John Wayne version of "True Grit" on tv, and I left the cookpots on the stove for cleanup later. During the movie, I heard some rattling around in the kitchen, and sure enough the bigger dog, Tank, had helped himself to licking out the residue in the cast-iron pot.

I gave in and moved the pots to the floor for the dogs to finish licking out before I stuck them in the dishwasher, then loaded in the rest of the dishes before closing down the kitchen for the night.

Regardless my ineptitude, Tank must have really appreciated the leftovers; he left his grubby ball on the stove in trade.

The best medicine

I'm so familiar with the adage that laughter is the best medicine that I sometimes forget how well it works.

I opened my teaching evaluations for the fall semester a couple of days ago, and to say I was disappointed would be a really serious understatement. I'm used to getting what I consider "mediocre" evaluations—I'm the language teacher in an engineering department, which puts me right up there with pond scum and lepers in the students' opinion, so if my evaluations aren't stellar, I usually shake it off.
But these were doubly disappointing because such a large percentage of the students rated me at the C level on most of the questions and several wrote some fairly searing comments. (Okay, one wrote a really nice one and a couple of them were such nonsense as to be laughable, clearly the effluence of students who didn't want to take responsibility for their own sloth, but still....) So I haven't been a happy camper for a couple of days.

The department has a hole in staffing right now that I've been asked before if I would consider filling, but I've hesitated for a couple of reasons. The current opening has turned attention back to me, and the somewhat younger administrator who would be my direct supervisor dropped by my office this afternoon to test the water with me about it.

"Might as well, think about that job," I said, trying to sound casual. "I'm obviously not very good at this one!"

The response was explosive laughter. The YA has worked with me for years in a number of capacities, and while he's been in a position a couple of times to suggest ways to get along better with the students, in the long run he has shown a lot of appreciation for my work. He clearly wasn't willing to buy the criticism of the current crop of students about my abilities.

Turns out all I really needed was a good, redheaded belly laugh.