English Ramblings

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.