English Ramblings

Nearly an Engineer

When I tell people I was a Mechanical Engineering major for my first semester, they are inevitably shocked.  I'm not sure why--I guess I just don't look like an engineer or something.  But I was planning to be an engineer, and applied to college and got accepted into one of the toughest programs in the country.  Unfortunately, by the time classes had started, I had already decided months earlier that I no longer wanted to do engineering.  I was stuck, though, for the first semester.

Why did I want to be an engineer?  I think about that decision and wonder what I was think back in the early 1980s.  It really is not all that mysterious, however.  Everybody wanted to be an engineer at the time.  That dramatic final speech by Anthony Edwards in Revenge of the Nerds, when he extols the virtues of the engineers--the guys who design the planes you're flying in, for example--captures the engineering zeitgeist pretty well.

I was not so much influenced by the movie, though, as I was by the constant pressure.  All through school I had been very good at math, so all of my teachers, my guidance counselors, and my family encouraged me to "do something with math."  Doing something with math meant engineering school.  It didn't matter that the entire time I was getting straight As in math I was also acing my English classes.  No one said, "You should do something with English."  It just wasn't done.

I would like to think there is a big, important lesson--or, better yet, a Big, Important Lesson--here.  Something about finding your own direction in your own time, and I guess you could take that away from my experience.  The truth is that your freshman year is a messy time, and it's fine not to know what you want to be when you grow up.  You need to figure things out, and soon, but there is still a little time left.  Maybe that is the lesson, then: Find yourself!  Choose your destiny! 

Actually, the lesson is probably just that I don't look like an engineer.  So do this:  Find out what you look like and choose your major accordingly. 

Let's Try this Again

Last semester was not a good semester for writing, at least from a physical point of view.  I'm talking ehre about the actual, physical act of writing, not the trouble of getting ideas or putting those ideas into words.

It started with the bike crash I described in a previous post.  With a badly sprained wrist, I found it very hard to write, especially in the somewhat cramped hand position a laptop forces you to take.  Once I started to get papers that needed to be graded, things just got worse (I grade all of my papers on the computer). 

My wrist recovered a little past the midpoint of the semester, but something still was not right.  My body ached, and I felt like I had been hit by a truck.  I had been hit by a truck in August, but this was different.  Chills, fever, general bad feelings persisted until I finally went to the doctor.

If you go to the doctor in Connecticut and complain of a fever, joint aches, and extreme fatigue, they immediately assume you've been fraternizing with ticks and diagnose Lyme disease.  That's what I had, and now I know why my dog, who has had Lyme twice this year, acted so miserable when he was sick.  It is no fun at all.  Put Lyme very near the bottom of your list of things to experience.

At any rate, now I back and relatively healthy (let me find some wood to knock) and I'll try to get into a more regular schedule of writing.  We'll see how that goes.

In Which I Complain About Substandard Halloween Merchandise

A couple of weeks ago I started teaching Hamlet in my Literary Expressions of the Human Journey class.  As I do every time I teach this play, I think it would be great to have a skull as a prop when discussing Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick” speech.  This speech, for those of you who haven’t read the play recently, deals with the themes of mortality that permeate nearly every line, and points to Hamlet’s morbid obsessions.  He struggles to come to terms with the tension between looking at himself and all other humans as divine creatures (“What a piece of work is a man…”) who are yet animals (“A beast, no more”).  “The paragon of animals,” perhaps, but animals nonetheless.

I think we have all had this Hamlet moment, when we are forcefully reminded of not just our mortality but our physicality, our materiality, and that can be shocking, especially if you are one to focus more often on the intellectual or spiritual side of your nature.  In my last post I talked about my various cycling mishaps, and nothing reminds you so much of your own mortality as seeing your own blood oozing out on the pavement after an unplanned bicycle dismount (that’s the official bureaucratic way of saying bike crash—unplanned bicycle dismount).

I wanted to make this point dramatically in class with a skull that I could wave around as I talked about the Yorick speech.  To this end, I went to the Halloween store in the Danbury Fair mall, thinking that Halloween is nothing without our innate fear of mortality, so I should be able to find a great skull.

I was wrong.  There were a lot of costumes that were meant to be funny (Rasta man, anyone?) and some that were supposed to be mildly scary (a very weak-looking Mummy).  In the front, the store stocked some haunted house props that probably looked a lot better in the dark of night than they did under bright fluorescents.  There, in a basket, they had stacks of small plastic skulls about the size of a grapefruit.  These substandard skulls had a little light inside so it could glow.  I thought this would maybe work since I could make the point that the glowing light is sort of like the spark of spirit that some say animates the human frame, or the light of intellect, or even the “ghost in the machine,” as Gilbert Ryle puts it.  I quickly saw that I was grasping at nothing as I tried to justify my three dollar purchase.

Despite my misgivings, I brought the skull to class on our first day of Hamlet discussion.  My students were even less enthusiastic about the skull than I was.  “That’s not very scary,” said one.  “Pretty weak,” said another.  I had to agree, and I thought about ditching the whole skull idea before we got to Act V.

The Pathetic Skull, Looking Pathetic on My Desk

The Scary Skull, Scaring a Student

However, Lena, one of my students, came to the rescue.  She had gone to Walmart, where she found a pretty decent skull made out of some sort of foam that nevertheless looked fairly realistic, and the focus of the class finally left my pathetic glowing skull.  As an added benefit, Lena confessed that the skull creeped her out, so I got to keep it, and it now resides on my office desk.  I am keeping my old skull, though.

A Tale of Two Crashes

I thought about calling this post “What I Did on My Summer Vacation,” but then the much more dramatic and evocative title came to me.  It also screams “English major geek!” and, since I am definitely an English major geek, I decided to go with it.

My summer vacation was uneventful for the first couple of months.  I did the usual things someone in my position does during the summer.  I wrote an article for publication in an anthology, and then I started in on my tenure portfolio.  I rode my bike a lot and I grumbled about mowing my lawn even though my yard is tiny.  I like to grumble about mowing my lawn.  I planted a tree in my back yard.  In other words, it was very quiet and boring, which is exactly what I needed.

In August, we took our vacation, first up to Rochester to visit the in-laws and then to Vermont.  It just so happens that Rochester was hosting a huge bike race the weekend we were there, the Rochester Omnium.  This was a three day race, with many of the pros who weren’t off in Beijing racing in the Olympics, and the organizers set aside Saturday for the amateur racers.  I decided to do the race in my category despite the fact that the course, a twisty loop through downtown Rochester, looked a little dangerous, or, as we say in the racing world, sketchy.

I lined up with about sixty other racers on the warm Rochester streets, a little in awe of the huge crowds lining the course.  I heard later that there were 45,000 there for the pro race, and almost that many for mine, the last amateur race before the main event.  Once the gun went off, we all took off at what seemed to be top speed.  The first corner was not so bad, and the tricky hairpin turn was not as terrible as I thought it would be.  I settled in and watched my heart rate, making sure that I was not going to explode and go flying down into the Genesee River.  After ten laps or so, I actually felt good.  Not like I was going to win the race, but good, like I could snag a top ten if I raced very smart in the last couple of laps.

But then it started to rain.  Hard.  Pelting, pouring, time-to-build-an-Ark hard.  There were a lot of bright flashes, and a couple of us debated whether the flashes were people taking pictures or lightning.  We couldn’t really hear anything with the water gushing down our faces, so we couldn’t tell if there was any thunder.  We didn’t have much time to discuss this, though, since every last atom of concentration was required to keep from skidding out on the slippery streets.

The inevitable then struck.  One crash right in front of me and then another a few hundred meters later.  I slowed down to avoid the sprawling bodies and bike parts and lost contact with the front of the racing pack.  I quickly got together with some other guys trapped behind the crashes, and we worked to try to get back into the race.  Although the rain was still gushing down, we hammered the pace at almost 30 mph. 

We were looking good.  The race announcer called out our names as we passed through the start/finish line, talking up our hard effort, and it did help to hear “Rick Magee, racing for Bethel Cycle…”  It did not help enough, though, when the five of us snaked through Irving Street, which is really more of an alley.  For some reason, Irving Street has at least six steel manhole covers in its short, hundred meter length.  Manhole covers are very slippery when they are wet, and the guy in front of me learned that the hard way as he skidded out and went down.  I tried to avoid him, but my bike slipped sideways and I flew off and landed on the handlebars of the downed bike in front of me.  The guy behind me slammed into my bike.

The spectators (and, despite the rain, there were still a lot of spectators) jumped out to help us up, and that’s when I noticed that my bike was out of commission.  The big chainring was bent horribly by the guy slamming into it, and there was a small crack on the carbon fiber frame.  Suddenly my fun race had turned into a very expensive ordeal.  I took a deep breath and realized that it was also a very painful ordeal—one of my ribs was cracked.

My wife and in-laws gathered around me sympathetically.  We surveyed the damage and decided that any crash you can walk away from is a good crash.  The casualties were not as high as they could have been: one broken (and expensive) carbon fiber frame, one cracked rib, a little road rash.  I’ve been in worse.

A week later, back at home in Connecticut, I built up my new bike, a bright orange Cannondale.  Unlike my old carbon black stealth bomber, this new bike screamed.  It almost hurt your eyes to look at it.  At first I wasn’t thrilled with the color, but had decided to get it because I needed a bike in my size, and this one fit.  Once I built it up, though, I like it a lot.  It assaulted the senses in just the right way.  This was the visual equivalent of a Harley with a loud muffler.

I rode it six times.  On the sixth ride, I meandered through Bridgewater, Roxbury, and Newtown, hitting some hills and generally just having some fun.  I was on Church Hill Road, riding on the shoulder when I saw a car sitting at the stop sign on a side road.  He looked my way, then looked the other way, then pulled out.  Unfortunately, I was right there in front of him when he did that, and I went flying over the handlebars and landed on my right side. 

Before I knew what was happening I was surrounded by people.  Apparently every business in the area emptied as all of the employees and customers flocked out to see the carnage.  I tried to sit up, but a physical therapist, whose office was on the corner, demanded that I stay still.  I decided to become passive and lie back and let the officials take care of things.  Four hours later, I finally got out of the Danbury Hospital emergency room with a badly sprained wrist and a lot of bruising.

This is the tally for the summer:  1 broken rib.  2 broken bikes.  1 broken helmet.  1 sprained wrist.

How was your summer?

Summer Countdown

I was contemplating writing a post about finals week, but that’s something no one wants to hear more about. Either you’re studying hard and feeling swamped, or you’re grading hard and feeling swamped. So let’s skip that. 

I then thought about my summer plans. Summer plans always sound like fun, right? My usual summer plan involves a lot of bike racing, but the way my racing has gone lately, it’s probably a good idea to skip that topic as being far too painful. My other summer plan involves putting together my tenure packet. Since any discussion of a tenure packet is intensely anxiety-inducing for the packet assembler and intensely boring for everyone else, it is yet another topic to skip.

How about summer movies? I don’t spend a lot of time watching summer movies, but I have to confess, shamefully, that the new Speed Racer movie has energized my inner seven-year-old. It looks like an incredibly stupid movie, and the early reviews seem to confirm that, but it is just such a bright and shiny mess—sort of like what you would get if you threw up after eating 25 pounds of brightly colored Halloween candy—that I just can’t look away.

When I was a little kid, I was a big fan of the old cartoon series, though, of course, it was not all that old back then. Every afternoon at 3:30 my friend, my sister, and I would drop whatever trouble we were contemplating and run inside to turn on channel 13 to watch reruns of Speed Racer. We usually had our Matchbox cars with us, which we would drive around the living room and crash into each other, or we would sit down with pads of paper in our laps and draw race cars, making engine noises and tire screeches while scribbling furiously with crayons.

One day my sister proudly showed us her drawing of a race car. It was a huge triangular thing with tiny spoked wheels in front and huge spoked wheels in the back. The driver perched up on the top above the monstrous rear wheel and grasped a steering wheel that looked more like a ship’s wheel than a race car steering wheel. The front of the car sprouted several exhaust pipes sticking out at weird angles. Thick curlicues of black smoke spewed from these pipes.

This bothered me the most. Clearly, the black exhaust would blow back into the driver’s face and choke him, and that offended my sense of proper engineering. “That’s stupid,” I told my sister, and explained exactly why her drawing was so terrible. 

“I can draw any way I want to!” she yelled back at me. “I don’t have to listen to you!”

Because I was seven, and she was only five, I thought that she was completely wrong. She did indeed have to listen to me. I insisted that her drawing was dumb and that the exhaust pipes should be behind the driver.

She, sadly, decided to resort to name-calling. “You’re a big fat meanie!” she screamed and threw a crayon at me.

“Well, you’re a stupidhead!” I shouted and threw her crayon back at her.

Crying, she ran off to tell my mom that I was being mean.

Good times. Maybe I’ll wait until Speed Racer comes out on DVD.

Teaching, Teaching Awards

On Wednesday night, I was honored at the Campus Life Leadership Awards, where I received the Dr. Marian Calabrese Outstanding Faculty Award. Dr. Bunny Calabrese herself presented the award, which made it even better. When I first started teaching here at SHU back in 2003, she was her usual warm and welcoming self, and we bonded over stories of our dogs and their antics.

But back to the award. As the cliché goes, I was honored just to be nominated, and I did not really expect to win. So, when Bunny began her presentation, being intentionally vague about the winner, I was sort of zoning out. Then I heard her say “gothic literature” and “teaching poetry,” and I knew that I was the only one in the Final Four who could answer to those descriptive terms. I was, and am, thrilled to have won the award. Although I sometimes find teaching to be a depressingly difficult thing to do, I still enjoy it immensely, and I often feel that it is the one thing I do well.

As I was driving home after the awards ceremony, I started thinking about my teaching and my inspiration. When I was a freshman, I took an American lit survey class from Walter Benn Michaels, an insanely brilliant scholar who seemed to cultivate an oddball persona to show in front of the classroom. He would pace back and forth, gesticulating madly, drawing intricate parallels between very different works, and tracing detailed themes from the Puritan writers up to the contemporary novelists. I still use his giant crab monster example when I’m teaching Whitman, and when I described his rather crazy teaching style to one of my classes, everyone in the room started laughing. I guess I have unconsciously picked up his mannerisms, if not his actual brilliance.

Then there was Alain Renoir (yes—that Renoir family), who taught medieval literature. He was a short, somewhat goofy-looking Frenchman, and he would tell the strangest stories in class. “Lecture by anecdote,” one of my classmates called it, and he was right, but I prefer to think of it as analogical teaching. Renoir would start off with some long-winded and bizarre story about being on a film set when he was a boy, watching his father direct, and somehow he would meander around to some important point about the language in “The Peterborough Chronicles.” I find myself often saying, “Now follow me here—this story really does have a point,” before I try the same sort of thing.

Later, in grad school, Linda Halisky, who taught both Renaissance lit and early American lit, showed me that great teaching is a matter of inspiring students to look more deeply at the literature, to find meaning and make it their own. Once, when I was her TA, she taught Anne Bradstreet’s “Upon the Burning of Our House” to an undergrad class. She was discussing the sense of loss that the poem conveys, and was leading the students to understand how the poem’s simple imagery could still demand both an intellectual and emotional response. By the time she finished, half the class had tears in their eyes and the other half were staring wild-eyed at the page, realizing for the first time how poetry works.

One huge influence was Lenny Cassuto, my dissertation director at Fordham. He had a reputation for being tough and demanding, but I soon learned that he was also his students’ greatest advocate. He taught me how to see through a dense rhetorical problem and find a way to untangle the mess I could make in my mind as I sought to understand a difficult point. Today, one of my favorite parts of teaching is when a student comes to me with a problematic paper and I can point to the exact thing that will solve the problem or ask the right question to send the student in the direction the paper needs to take. Lenny’s gift for finding the right question to ask saved my dissertation countless times, and I’m happy to continue the tradition.

So I guess this is my long-winded way of saying that any success I have teaching comes from all of the crazy and inspiring people who have stood in front of classrooms from California to New York. All of these professors, and many I haven’t mentioned, deserve some credit for my award. But they can’t have the plaque. The plaque is mine.

Spring Fever

“Can we have class outside?” the students ask. “Can we have class outside?” At this time of year, especially when the soft April warmth feels so lovely and alien on our winter-pale skins, everyone starts to suffer from spring fever. Even though the students might be surprised at this, their professors are often feeling that same little twinge of solar-powered longing. This year, I forestalled the outside requests by beating my students to the punch. “Today,” I announce in grave tones, “we will have class outside.”

Of course, being the professor, I have sound pedagogical reasons for taking the class outside. In my core classes, we are dealing with the fundamental question, “What does it mean to understand and appreciate the natural world?” Where better to ponder this question than out in that natural world?

The problem with this, of course, is that our natural world, the natural world of the Sacred Heart campus, is not the bucolic forest surrounding Walden Pond, but then again, that bucolic forest surrounding Walden Pond was never quite as bucolic as Thoreau led us to believe. From his perch on the edge of the pond in front of his cabin, he could see the train tracks cut a neat tangent line. As we sat on the hillside we had to contend with cement trucks rumbling up with deliveries to the chapel building site, motorcycles roaring past in spring-fever-induced exuberance, and tour groups of high school students and their parents. The tour groups looked longingly at my class sprawled on the grass and talking about the natural world.

Despite, or maybe in because of, the distractions, we were able to talk of the topic at hand. As we discussed the meaning of nature and the place of humans in nature, we followed the truck rolling past and then the wind ruffling our hair. The machine and the garden both found their way into our talk. 

Sometimes we need a break from the walls of the classroom, and sometimes we need a break from all walls. 

Trip of a Lifetime

Back in December, Amy Van Buren, my friend from the Psychology department called me and said she was going with the El Salvador delegation over spring break. A faculty spot had opened up, and she wondered if I happened to be interested. I said yes right away, without really thinking things over. It just seemed like such an important opportunity that I could not turn it down, even when the doubts and fears began to creep in when I started to think about what I had just volunteered to do. 

I started to feel better when we started to have some informational meetings about the trip and I met some of the students who were participating. Everyone involved was so dedicated and earnest about their desire to go and make some sort of difference that I was inspired to think more about my own reasons for going on the trip. Like most of the others, I found my motives coming from two different directions. On the one hand, I felt the urge to give some of myself to others, to help out people who enjoy fewer advantages than I do. On the other, I felt the need to push myself, to test my limits by moving outside of the cozy little zone of comfort that I had built up over the years.

The first shocks of the trip were relatively easy to deal with. When we landed at the airport outside of San Salvador, the tropical sun shone fiercely on our pale New England skins, but we were ready to soak up some of that warmth after the deep freeze of Connecticut February. Slathering on sunscreen, we piled into the back of the cattle truck that would drive us to Tierra Blanca where we would be staying and working. Coming from the land of seatbelt laws and injunctions against riding in the backs of open trucks, we were thrilled by the prospect of roaring down the highway buffeted by the wind, and the novelty of this mode of transportation never wore off during our week there.

The first thing we did after settling in to our new home at the Romero Cultural Center was drive around the area and see the sites where we would be working. Loaded once again in the back of the truck, we bounced over rutted, rocky dirt roads to a small chapel nestled in some trees. The chapel was old and tiny, with roots from one of the huge trees pushing up through the dirt floor. The area of ground next to it was set aside for a newer chapel, and we would be digging the foundation hole. After watching a group of men chop down a huge tree that was in the way of construction, we drove a few miles away where another clearing met us and where we would dig another chapel’s foundation. 

The work was hard, physically demanding, and done under the glaring sun. Nevertheless, we all pitched in, swinging our picks and hauling away wheelbarrows full of dirt and rocks. The Salvadorans working beside us laughed good-naturedly at our clumsiness with the tools and showed us how to use them better. Although many of us didn’t speak any Spanish much beyond “gracias,” we managed to communicate with a lot of signs and smiles and help from those on the trip who did speak the language.

Our work was not all physical. Most of our time, in fact, was spent traveling to different communities to visit the people and listen to their stories about the horrors and difficulties of the civil war years and the continuing economic and social hardships they face. 

One afternoon we drove up a winding rural road along a river, up into the foothills to visit La Quesera, the site of a massacre of civilians in 1980. We sat in the shade of several large trees, hearing the river burble quietly below us, while survivors of the civil war told us their stories. One woman told of stumbling down the hillside behind us with her child in her arms as bullets flew overhead. An old man, his face set rigidly, recounted seeing warplanes strafe his village, and told us that he never saw his wife and six children again.

In a more somber mood, we went to the memorial built at the location of the massacre. The memorial is an arching wall, the roof formed by the protecting wings of a dove. It stands on a small, flat area on a bluff jutting out of the surrounding hills. As we wandered around the area, dark clouds blew through, casting dramatic shadows and making the scene even more touching than it already was.

The trip, though, was not all melancholy. On our last full day, we took a trip to the beach and invited several families from the surrounding communities to go with us. We ate, we lounged in hammocks, we played soccer on the sand. Because the ocean waves were as warm as a bath, we had to splash around in the water. As I stood in ankle-deep water, one of the little girls from La Gracia, a community near Tierra Blanca, grabbed my hand and pulled me into the waves. I hefted her onto my shoulders and waded into even deeper water, laughing and shrieking with her as the waves hit us.

Here is where you can get more information on the El Salvador trips, and even donate money if you are so inclined: http://www.sacredheart.edu/pages/2627_el_salvador.cfm

 

Who Am I?

When I was a graduate student and teaching freshmen at Fordham, I was surprised that I did not run into my students very often in the neighborhoods of the Bronx. I did bump into a student (literally) at a bar once, but that’s a completely different story. One time, though, I remember shopping at Modern Food on Arthur Avenue and seeing one of my students. As he walked up to talk, I nervously scanned my basket to make sure I wasn’t buying anything embarrassing—hmmm, bacon, cheese, not any vegetables at all…not good. My student didn’t seem to pay my purchases any attention, but he did say something that has stuck with me: “Wow, teachers go grocery shopping, too!”

Well, of course we do, I thought. We are human (most of us, at any rate). His surprise is one of the reasons I am writing this blog. I plan to talk about teaching here at Sacred Heart University’s English department, and, along the way, show a small glimpse of the human side of the professor.

Some background is probably in order here. As my students here all know by now, I am a transplanted Californian, although now that I have lived on the east coast for almost 13 years, I don’t feel like much of a Californian any more. Apparently, though, I still speak like a Californian, as one of my classes has found it hilarious to make fun of my west coast accent. Everyone in that class, by the way, is going to fail.

Just kidding.

I grew up in various places around the Golden State, and graduated from Morro Bay high school, which is famous, or wants to be famous, for being the only high school in the country where you can walk directly from campus to the beach without crossing any roads at all. From there I went to the University of California at Berkeley, where I intended to major in engineering. I changed my plans, though, and switched to the English major, which I did mainly for the huge income all English majors can expect to earn.

Keep this in mind, all of you at SHU who are still undecided: English major = big bucks.

After that, I moved back to my home town and enrolled at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where I started teaching while I worked on my Master’s degree. When I finished my degree there I made the big move of my life and flew across the country to get my Ph.D. at Fordham University in the Bronx. While I was writing my dissertation I started teaching full time at SUNY Maritime College, which is famous for having direct access to Long Island Sound. I completed my dissertation in 2002 (wild rejoicing) and three months later found an advertisement for a teaching position at a Catholic university in Connecticut, and in the fall of 2003, I started teaching here at Sacred Heart.

I realize that all of this information reads more like a curriculum vitae than anything resembling a glimpse at the human behind the professor’s desk, but more will follow.