October 2006 Archives

The pre-major (that it even came into existence) seemed an indication of the institutiton’s lack of commitment to General Education, even a stake in its very heart.  General Education, as I had understood it, was there in part to give the student a look around at the landscape of learning and to locate, perhaps, in it something he or she had not seen or heard of before and might find attractive, even inspirational. 

I understood the need for the pre-major as the means by which to create an artifical bottleneck that might slow the flow of students into “impacted” majors.  I understood too that were I a student and wanted to get into a particular major the very first thing I would do would be to take the courses required for the pre-major.  Waiting around to take your pre-major classes was bound only to prolong the anxiety about whether one was going to get in the major or not.

But so much for General Education (GE); those courses had to be pushed aside, while the pre-major was taken care of, with the result that GE’s no longer served for many as an opening vista onto the possibilities of higher education but as an impediment to getting into the major and finally an impediment to graduation.  The last thing one wished to know about on the way out the door was all the things one had missed, all the things one might have learned but had shoved aside in the intererts of timely progress towards graduation.

As a result GE classes begin to fill, not with freshmen and sophomores just embarking on their educational adventures, but with jaded juniors and seniors who did not want to have any sort of educational adventure at all.

I taught a number of years ago a writing course linked to a general education course, Philosophy 5, Introduction to Ethics.  Because of an ongoing beef with the registrar and inadquatee upfront advertising, my section was low.  I thought maybe they would drop it, but instead I was allowed to keep it running with only 15 students. 

 I was terrified for these students.  Each and every one was in his or her very first quarter at the university.  Of the 15, three males were causcasian, and all the rest were either asian or latino, latina.  They had never read ethics before; they didn’t read well in any case.  They knew nothing about ethics and they were competing for a grade in a course that was 25% seniors.  I didn’t think my guys stood a chance.  When I saw early samples of their writing I was sure they were all going to fail.

I had to do what I hate doing.  I had to cut to the chase.  I told them: at the university there is no room for your thinking.  You are all in any case idiots.  You don’t know a thing and you shouldn’t ever get the idea that you do.  Accordingly your task, in exams and papers, is:

 TO REPEAT WHAT THE TEACHER SAYS.  THIS IS YOUR WORK.  TO DO THIS WORK PROPERLY, YOU MUST GO TO LECTURE AND TAKE NOTES. THEN YOU MUST MEMORIZE THOSE NOTES.  WHETHER OR NOT YOU UNDERSTAND THE NOTES IS NOT IMPORTANT; IF NOTES ARE SOLD THROUGH THE NOTE TAKING SERVICE, BUY AND MEMORIZE THOSE NOTES AS WELL  AND WHEN THE TIME COMES REPEAT WHAT YOU HAVE MEMORIZED.  DO NOT FIGHT THIS. DO NOT RESIST THIS. JUST DO IT AND YOU WILL BE ABLE TO COMPETE WITH THE JUNIORS AND SENIORS IN THE CLASS WHO ALREADY KNOW WHAT I AM TELLING YOU NOW!

These numbers aren’t exact.  But there are in the ballpark.  Something like 14% of all institutions of higher education in this country are large land grant public research universities and this 14% hands out about 50% of all four year college degrees in the country.  The large land grant for which I work is fairly typical I do believe of all the others, and if this is the case then the right wing of this country that would prefer people live in ignorance has won big time.

For in all these land grants I expect general education is in disarray, ill-coordinated, poorly taught and generally resented.  These courses scattered here and there represent the broken shards of what was once called a liberal arts education.  Now we have the reactionary arts—I suppose they are best called—or no education at all. 

For diverse reasons—economic and political—the university or more properly the multiversity when it came to general education just caved.  Part of it had to do, I guess, with the death of the canon and the fact that most of that dead canon was written by dead white men and not progressive and hip living people of both sexes.  By attempting to appear the flagship of political correctness the humanities reamed themselves, having then to throw out, not without bitching, moaning, and bitter in-fighting the very materials, subjects and author that had been their bread and butter.

And to my dismay all throughout the 70s and well into the 80s deconstructionism spread its obscurationist haze over the whole mess.  The result was, well, appalling.  And to put the matter clearly, I am not opposed to obscure writing.  I think Hegel terribly obscure but still worth the attempt, but not Derrida or his midget minions who began to turn the teaching of literature into a way of  talking, a discourse—I suppose the terminally hip would say—available to and understood only by the initiated.

People were coming in droves out of the universities, especially the East Coast ones, not educated but schooled.  I didn’t know what schooled meant until I attended a summer seminar—six weeks, I think it was—on the topic of the Sublime, taught by a young woman of impeccable credentials, Yale by way of parents who had been on the Freedom Buses down south.  And after each of our two hour sessions, we ordinary teachers from small liberal arts colleges across the country would come out furrowing our brows and wondering just how stupid we might be since we couldn’t understand a word of what she said, though she was apparently speaking English.

But I digress.  Though not exactly.  This was part of it, but as I said many factors contributed to the demise of the general education and the liberal arts education.  The university, in financial crisis due to things like Proposition 13 in California, found itself hustling for students and the bucks they brought.  And the students were not going where they used to go.  They were going especially to places that had business degrees and to places with degrees in communications (whatever the hell that was).

One result of this was “impacted” majors—way too many students to handle, and this led in turn to the creation of the pre-major, actual courses students had to take, usually with a C average or better, in order to qualify for the major, during those first two years especially when students had traditionally taken their General Education courses.

My little classroom is a place of contestation, conflict and confusion though no effort of my own.  First—and I do have to keep reminding myself—my writing course—the one I most teach—is required.  Period.  The students exercise little or no choice.  Instructors’ names are not listed for this particular course, so students can’t pick among instructors even if they knew who any of them were (which they don’).  Mostly a particular class is selected on the basis of the days of the week and the time of day it is offered.  Since no reasoning seems to go into it, I have had lately classes with 26 people not a one of whom knows another.

While my class is probably the most resented, because required, class on campus; students resent other required classes also.  I haven’t heard much complaint about it lately—perhaps because these students don’t complain openly much—but a while back a good third of the students in any class resented the General Education requirements.  They just didn’t see the point.

The general education classes are there for the purposes of general education.  Students are required to take a history course here and a philosophy course there and some science class and a class in literature or the social sciences.  Most of these classes have little or nothing to do with students’ majors and are intended, I suppose, to produce more of a well rounded individual, a person who knows in a generally educated way a little something about the world around him or her.

 I have sat through a number of these General Education courses.  As part of my work as a Writing Instructor I have taught and continue to teach an occasional writing class linked to a General Education class.  This means all the students in my writing class are also enrolled in the same general education; and to make the classes work together in some way I usually attend the lectures for these courses and try, as well, to do the readings assigned the students. 

I understand why students have some troubles with these courses.  First, since many students have to take said courses, they are usually overloaded lecture classes, with a minimum of about 240 students with a Teaching Assistant teacher and a few other TAs to service their educational needs.  The classes taught more as general education courses and less as an extention of the professor’s research are the most “popular.”

I attended for example an art history lecture in an 800 seat lecture hall.  About every seat was full the first day though by the fourth week perhaps a third were occupied on a regular basis.  This course had a professor, not a TA; he had some vision I think of art history as arising from and registering particular historical situations.  But the deeper ideas just seemed to go by the boards as the professor showed one slide after another and made a few remarks on each.

The tests were of the identify the slide variety.  Students liked this class because they didn’t have to understand anything; all they had to do was memorize slides.  They used mnemonic devices that had little or nothing to do with what the professor said about the painting, as in “isn’t he the guy with the pink clouds” or “isn’t he the guy with the really fat women.”

One student insisted, “We are lazy and I can prove it.”  OK, I said, I don’t know what the proof could be but what do you mean.  “My boyfriend is always losing his remote somewhere, so he went up to Home Depot and bought a long stick, ten feet long maybe, so that when he loses his remote, he doesn’t have to get up to look for it but changes the channels by poking the TV with his stick.”  Everybody laughed.  Who hasn’t felt too lazy to look for the remote.  I don’t know I said, he may be lazy but that’s pretty ingenious too.  “He should sell it,” a student said.

Perhaps they are lazy.  In 2004 the UC did a big survay and report on the UC undergraduate experience (except for Berkeley; it did it’s own study since it doesn’t consider itself part of the UC System).  But the other eight campuses contributed, and they found that the mean number of hours spent by students in class was 14 and the mean number of hours per week spent studying was 12.  So the students spend a total of 26 hours a week on “academics.”  The report noted some variation in academic involvement between the areas of study.  Students in science/math studied the most; students in the social sciences the least.

Twelve hours of study a week doesn’t seem like much to me.  That’s less than two hours a day on average.  One reason for this relatively low number could well be that it is all that is needed to received a satisfactory grade.  Everybody has heard of grade inflation including students.  So that if one attends class and studies those 12 hours, one could pretty easily come out with a B average especially if one is a student in the social sciences or the humanities.

Once I graded a lot harder than I do now.  About 15 years ago some sort of shift took place; my particular institutution began to attract more and more students with very good high school grades.  I gave Cs then, not a lot but some.  But I gave it up because I saw  that for these students getting a “C” was a failure.  I remember one student going off about how his parents had spent 12000 dollars a year to send him to private school and here he was in college getting Cs.  He didn’t know how he was going to explain that to his parents since he couldn’t explain it to himself.

For a while I tried to hold the “C” line but the Cs seemed to panic the students so much—especially one in the only course required of all students—that they were rendered pretty much unteachable.  They wanted to know EXACTLY what to do to get an A.  Unfortunately, I don’t know a way to tell people EXACTLY how to write well; the more I tried the more I ended up writing the paper for the students.  That was counter-productive and exhausting.

I speculate that grade inflation went along with either the lack of will or means by which to distinguish levels and degrees of quality.  Increasingly students who did the work, no matter what the quality of the work, did well, while those who didn’t do the work, whatever the quality of what they did do, didn’t.  I don’t know when this started but since,  as Hegel says, the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, I would suggest  some time before the publication of Pirsig’s abstruse musings on quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1973).

A fair number of the students I teach may then not know why they are in college (having given really no thought to it).  They are just there, as that student put it, in a kind of robotoid state on automatic pilot not wanting or seeking any larger or greater purpose to their situation than to get through it with as little strain and as quickly as possible so they can get onto whatever the next step is supposed to be.  

Once upon a time I used to give the students a you-really-don’t-know-what-you-have-got-speech.  College, I would say, that’s nothing.  College is a snap.  For all the talk of being stressed out, you are walking on the sunny side of the street.  College—you will look back upon its horrors and terrors—once you get out there into your 20s—quite fondly.  You have not been to hell—I pour it on—until you are in your 20s.

Have you even thought about it?  About getting a job?  And finding out it sucks?  Or getting a job and then losing it and having to move back in with your parents?  26 years old and living with your parents?  Can you imagine that?  It’s enough to make you get married to the wrong person, no less?

So as you round the curve towards 30, you will have probably gone through a couple of jobs, a couple of relationships, and maybe a marriage.  Possibly along the way you will have become addicted to something and had to go through detox.  You will have contracted herpes or venereal warts.  If you are a woman your butt will have started to sag and if you are a man your gut will. If you are lucky, you will have a job you can at least stand, no children, and not buried up to your necks in debt.  Because this is America.  It’s dog eat dog and devil take the hindmost.

You haven’t seen shit yet.  I pray for your sake that your parents have the money to help you buy a house because you won’t get one otherwise, and oh, you should call your parents tonight and make sure they have taken care of their old age because the last thing you want is to feel that you have to take care of them at about the point you are trying to send your two irresponsible ungrateful brats off to college.

I stopped giving that speech though because all it seemed to do was bleak them out.  They would sort of sit there with their mouths agape.  Sometimes I wonder if anybody has ever bothered to talk to them straight.  Tell me I am wrong, I said, tell me I am wrong.  But they couldn’t.  And from stuff I started to read I realized I wasn’t making it up.  I was too close to the truth. 

Articles were appearing, informed by the ruminations of concerned sociologists, about how many young people had to go home after college.  Getting that first and last months rent together, plus a cleaning deposit, plus trying to keep the car going and having suitable clothes for work or the job search—well, students had to reply on my ma and pa for continued support.  And the idiot sociologists were concerned that this move back to ma and pa would interrupt or somehow distort the life process of young people.

I call the sociologists idiots because it was clear to me in 1985 that adolescence had been prolonged into the late 20s and early 30s.  We have come a long way from Rousseau who pegged adolescence as lasting six weeks.

After I have practically pinched, poked and prodded myself into a stupor, finally one still small voice off in the corner of the room (in response to my question what does being lazy feel like) says, “It’s like you just don’t want to.” That’s all it takes.  An honest voice can cut through a ton of bullshit.  I not only know what that means, I can feel it.  I just don’t want to because it bores me and makes me feel stupid and I can see no purpose for doing it in the first place and it’s not that I have better things to do or places to go or people to meet.  I just don’t want to do it.  And when I do it I feel like I am walking knee deep in molasses straight into a swamp which potentially has no end.

I just don’t want to do it.

That’s what concerns me.  That many students just don’t want to do it.  Don’t want, I mean, to be in college or to go to stupid lectures or write dumb papers on stuff they know little or nothing about and would prefer to go on nothing little or nothing about.

I tumbled to this some time in the late 80s.  I volunteered to spend an hour with groups of incoming freshmen as they cycle through campus during orientation.  I would meet with 20 of them in some overheated dorm area, and they would be completely worn out from having spent the day trying to figure out how to enroll in classes.  

I tried to be entertaining and made up one of my surveys asking them such things as why they had decided to come to college a) to get a job b) to get a career c) to meet your mate and so on and so forth with a list of about everything I could think of.  Then we would walk through the list and make jokes about things like trying to find a mate or maybe get a little discussion going about the difference between a career and a job and what that might be.

But one time no sooner had I handed out the survey, than one guy in the back raised his hand and said he didn’t understand these questions at all.  I wondered if he could be more specific.  Well, he said, these questions seemed to imply—all of them--that they had made decisions about going to college for this or that specific reason.  And he continued, that wasn’t the case.  They were there because they were supposed to be there; not because they had decided to be there.  They had been raised to be there and were there because everybody they knew was there.

So I said, you think most of the people in this room have been set up to go to college from such an early age that they have never even thought about why they are going or about not going.  Something like that, he said.  Well, if that’s true, I blame the Cosby Show.  Do you remember that show?  Every time the head idiot would wear a new sweat shirt with the name of another college on it.  He was like a public service announcements for colleges everywhere.  So I blamed Cosby.  Everything and everybody on that show was so damned cute that Cosby ought to be ashamed of himself; putting that freaking ass delusion forward as something to aspire to.  Talk about your crappy role model.

I bumped into the kid outside and asked him what he planned to do.  He didn’t know.  His father was a lawyer and his mother was a teacher, and they both hated their work.  That’s a bitch, I said.  You bet, he said.

I have not taken any particular pride in having missed maybe 15 classes in 26 years of teaching.  And that may be high.  I missed half of those from illness; the other half from professional obligations or job seeking.  Working class people show up for work is all; if you don’t you don’t get paid because you get paid by the hour.  I don’t get paid by the hour but I continue to function as if I did.  Bricklayers don’t get personal days off.

One of my working class friends wrote about showing up for a graduate seminar sick with a runny nose and how one of her colleagues snapped at her for showing up and taking the chance that she might infect the rest of the lot.  My working class friend explained to her colleague what was what and to go screw herself.  I am not sure my working class friend was right, but if you are wc you do go to work.

I have woken up all moaning, and down at the mouth, and looking bleary eyed and feeling down emotionally or physically, and my wife will say, why don’t you stay home, and I will say, “Are you crazy.  What the fuck are you thinking?  How long have we been together?  Don’t you understand me yet?  Christ! Is our marriage a sham? You know I show up for work unless I have a fever.”  There’s a phrase for this reaction, “Denial by Exaggeration.”

Unconsciously of course, I want to stay home.  I am whipped and exhausted.  But denial by exaggeration allows me to completely shift the nature of the discussion from whether or not I am feeling lousy and should stay home to whether or not our marriage is a phony sham.  That’s logic for you.  I use denial by exaggeration all the time.

So being a sort of educational iron man is not something I take any particular pride in.  The psyche is just too complicated for some straight one to one equation.  Go to work.  Go to heaven.  That’s not how it works.  Because in addition to the wc background, I am a workaholic.  You can have workaholic at all levels of society.  I am one however because I identified with my father and as far as I could see he served no longer purpose than to go to work.  If he had not worked, he might as well have been dead.  Because other than working and making some money to feed his family, he had no other redeeming social value.  So not only am I a workoholic with low self-esteem.

So coming down with pneumonia, as I have just done, and having already missed two classes in a row and knowing I will miss one more, for three in a row is a real blow to my iron man image.  I don’t know how I got this sick.  

Anyhow when I woke up with a temperature of a 104 I knew I wasn’t going to class that day.  And when my wife suggest I stay home and see a doctor, I didn’t make any argument.

I continue to pinch, poke, and prod, trying to get them to say what they mean more precisely by laziness.  Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son in law, I tell them wrote an essay called the right to be lazy.  He was pro-laziness and saw much potential good arising from it.  I think now of those days back when I was hanging out standing in line at the Seven Eleven and reading a sticker on the back of the Slurpee machine that read: “Don’t just do something.  Stand there.”  Or I say, “regard the lilies of the field neither do they reap nor do they sew…”  Even the Bible praises laziness.

But I can’t seem to get a rise out of them.  I ask well what does it feel like to be lazy.  Procrastination, somebody says.  When I wrote, list three reasons students give for plagiarism, one student wrote:  Procrastination, Procrastination, Procrastination.  I have been hearing students say that for over 25 years.  I procrastinate.  What do you mean by that, I ask.  Well, I am supposed to do something, and I put off doing it, and I do something else instead.

Give students a fancy sounding word and that’s the end of it.  It’s as if the description of the activity (or inactivity) is the cause of it.  I procrastinate because I procrastinate.  At one time, I don’t remember when, this came up so much on one little survey I did that I devised a tiny bit of lecture along the lines of the-how-to-make-procrastination-your friend-model.

Look, I say, procrastination as I see it is not a bad thing unless of course following Aristotle’s golden mean one does it too excess.  But while you are procrastinating you may well be thinking about the thing you are supposed to do and are putting off.  Indeed, you must be thinking about it or you wouldn’t feel you are procrastinating.  In fact, while you are procrastinating you are thinking down in the unconscious; unless of course you are unconscious from having drunk too much.   In this case, you are just unconscious and probably aren’t thinking about anything.

Procrastination may be essential to the unconscious processes involved in the writing of a paper, especially one that might require some self involvement.  You may for example be struck suddenly just as you are going to your computer with the irresistible urge to clean out your refrigerator.  So instead of writing the paper, you straighten out the refrigerator and find all kinds of strange molds and other exciting stuff.  Well, I do exactly that when I am sitting down to write something longer, when I know I am going to be in front of the computer for three or four hours.

I will straighten the refrigerator, or flea comb the cat, or straighten my desk, or delete stuff from my email.  Little household things that I have been putting off for weeks, suddenly occupy my attention.  But you know I do the same thing when I go on any trip.  Even if I am just going off for a week, I try to clean up the place so that when I come back I will have a clean place to walk into.

So you call it procrastination, and I call it getting ready for a trip.  Because writing something can be like going on a little trip.  Your immediate surroundings aren’t there; they go away.  The clock can even go away and when you come back to the clock and your immediate surroundings it’s nice to have things nice.

At some point in every quarter, I touch on the plagiarism issue.  I try to make this less a warning and more a discussion.  I don’t receive much plagiarized material.  But I do want them to know that the plagiarism police are more active than ever.  If my memory serves, faculty were ordered to report any instance of academic dishonesty.  But, hey, try ordering a faculty to do anything.  Still I wanted them to know more pressure was being applied from the top and that out there on the web are guys making money tracking down plagerized work.  I expect most of them know this stuff but maybe a few lost souls don’t.

On one survay—intended to open the plagiarism discussion, I asked, what reasons do people give for plagiarizing.  Students reported all sorts of reasons: want to get a better grade; don’t understand a damn thing so have to get something from somebody who does; procrastination; but the reason that popped up by far the most was “laziness.”  I have heard this laziness explanation for diverse student behaviors increasingly over the last 15 years.  In fact, there seems to be a laziness epidemic.

Honestly, I don’t understand what they are talking about.  How could laziness lead to an activity that might bring down academic—not to mention parental--wrath upon their heads?  Laziness does not want to be not lazy.  In the long run, given all the possible troubles that might arise from cheating, I argue that it would be lazier just to toss off a piece of crap and turn that in and get a C or something.

But no matter how I dig—this way and that—I can’t put my finger on what they mean by laziness.  Somebody will mention; it’s all those labor saving devices.  They have made us lazy.  And I will go, what the hell is wrong with a labor saving device.  And beside I argue laziness is a great american virtue.  Look at Rip Van Winkle; didn’t he sleep for 20 years or something.  Or Huck and Jim going down the river, idling away their time.  And while I may be wrong, but I believe we still have the longest summer vacations for school in the industrialized world.  Or take our so-called national past time:  baseball.  Practically a training ground for laziness.  Except for the pitcher who always seems excessively busy, the rest just stand around and spit.  Mostly nothing happens in a baseball game for a long time followed by sporatic outbursts of activity.  That don’t last very long.

But my students aren’t buying.  They are lazy.  And no doubt poor people engage in criminal activity because they are lazy.  But I don’t push that point.  I have pushed it before, and it so infuriates me to hear that people are poor because they are lazy that I am put off my feed for days and don’t want to talk to the students.  

Instead I take another angle: you guys all must have really negative self-esteem or something if you are going around thinking you are lazy all the time.  Clearly you don’t feel good about being lazy (and what’s the point of being lazy if you don’t enjoy it) and in fact you seem to think it’s a kind of moral defect.  And I don’t get it partly because you students are among the apparently busiest students I have ever taaught.  If you were lazy, I would think you would look rested up, but instead, hell, many of you seem stressed out.

 All I want to do is get a conversation going.  But they don’t want to talk.

And along with the fatigue factor I have the problem with those back to back classes of repeating myself.  I can’t remember what I said to one class so that I don’t repeat myself in the second. But for some unknown reason I am saying quite different things to these backs to backs.  Perhaps the first is sort of warm up for the second, where I get low down and dirty.  I don’t know.

But I do know I have asked students, no, I have told them, if I am repeating something I said before please let me know that’s what I am doing.  And not once, over 26 years, has one damn student said, hey, Tingle, you are repeating yourself; when I know for a fact that I have repeated myself because half way through whatever it is I am saying I will remember that I am repeating myself.  Lord knows, since they won’t say anything, how many times I have repeated myself without knowing it.

Not recently, but I would at one time give students a lecture in the first week about how it was their duty to tell a teacher when his fly was down.    Remedial politeness required it.  One day I was walking away from my class and looked down and my fly was open, and I was pretty sure I hadn’t stopped at the bathroom, so clearly my fly had to have been down during the class.

I got back to the office and zapped off a email to the entire class. Boy, did I let them have it about their failure to do their duty and about their apparent willingness to see me humiliated for an entire class without my knowing it.  What kind of people were they?  By the time of the next class, I had pretty much forgotten the fly thing though I ask if they had received my fly email, and one of them seemed sort of upset and said that she had not seen my fly down and as far as she was concerned it had not been down at all.  And a couple of others chimed in and said my fly hadn’t been down.

I said, you’re lying.  You guys are fucking with my mind.  Don’t fuck with my mind I said.  And then I laughed and said, you know, one quarter I had these two guys in my class.  They didn’t look alike really except maybe they both looked like skateboarders; and the first day of week of class, I screwed up somehow and I called, one guy Bob, when in fact the other guy was called Bob, and I called the other guy Dan when in fact the other guy was called Dan. 

And the next class when I called out Bob’s name Dan said present and when I called out Dan’s name Bob said present.  And the next class they switched back to their real names and since neither of them said anything but their names the whole quarter that might make me remember one or the other, I just couldn’t figure out which was which.  I would call roll and say, you are really Dan, right, and not Bob.  But they wouldnot  say and down to the end of the quarter I didn’t know which was which.

And of course about half way through this story I realized that I was repeating myself.  I stopped and said, for God’s sake you were going to let me repeat that whole thing.  Didn’t I tell you to tell me when I repeat myself?  They said, no. 

If the team at CSI had a department of forensic metaphysics or metaphors, they might be able to detect, though the sprinkling of some special metaphysical dust, a long yellow and continuous streak running along the ground behind me wherever I go. This is a complicated and excessively clever way of trying to say that most days, wherever I go and whatever I am doing, I feel as if I am dragging my ass.  The causes for this condition I may or may not further detail, but for now I can say the conditioned has worsened as I have grown older.

Perhaps because of this general condition, these two back to back classes that I am teaching on Tuesday and Thursday this quarter loom on my psychic horizon like a twisted time warp from which I may or may not escape completely in tact.  Maybe I could it at one time, but damn it’s four hours straight of continuous teaching. 

I don’t know how the hell or what known criteria was employed that a writing class should be an hour and fifty minutes long.  I remember indeed, at one time, a long ways back, the Tuesday, Thursday classes were an hour and 20 minutes.  And then for some reason, we stopped teaching writing classes on Friday and for whatever reason that increased the class time to an hour and 40 minutes; and then out of nowhere at the command of the people who book the rooms we were ordered to go an hour and 50.

None of this as far as I am able to ascertain has any relation to or was the product of “educational” or “pedagogical” thinking.  No.  It’s all bureaucracy from top to bottom.  For a university class to be a university class, students and teachers are required to have a certain amount of face time or we don’t get paid for the teaching.

Or to take another example, we require students to write approximately 20 pages per quarter in our classes.  Why?  Why not 2 well polished pages or 100 pages?  Make them write like mad fools for a quarter.  The answer to this really unimportant question is that one of the schools in the system is on semester and would not accept our classes for purposes of transfer unless we guaranteed our students write 20 pages a quarter.

How is that for sound pedagogical or education reason?  Not that I know or have any idea how long a writing class should be for ideal educational purposes.  I am inclined to think that most of the learning of a skill like writing occurs outside of the classroom.  Giving some sort of lecture on the comma splice and then having students do exercises on the comma splice for an hour and 50 does nothing at all. 

But maybe, at two in the morning, some students looks at what they have written and sees that they have constructed a paragraph that is a page long and that I the teacher have suggested that such paragraphs usually can be broken into smaller parts.  And they look and, what do you know, it can be broken into smaller parts, except for this part which is two small and thus has either to be dropped completely or elaborated upon.

In any case, I have reached the conclusion that a writing class that’s an hour and fifty minutes long is very far from ideal. 

(RECAP:  I have made it to the classroom, hooked up every thing and am reminded of the heft of my new laptop that I bought exclusively for educational purposes.  I don’t like carrying it in my over the shoulder bag because it hurts my weakened left rotator cuff.)

At present my left rotator cuff is worse than my right rotator cuff.  That doesn’t make sense because I am right handed and my right rotator cuff has had much more wear and tear.  But it hurts too though not as bad as the left.  The left was waking me up at night.  I would have to roll over onto the left shoulder to make the pain go away.  That doesn’t make sense either.  But I didn’t care.  If it disturbs my sleep, I tend to it.  That’s all there is to it.  I fancy my sleep and will brook no loss of it. 

The doctor, after I got the x-ray, said I had a calcium deposit and probably something more, but of course x-rays don’t show soft tissue.  He recommended PT and ice.  That was cool with me.  So far I have never spent a day in a hospital and I have never had any part of my body “under the knife” (excepting that cancer in my lip that had to come out).  It’s not that I don’t trust doctors; I just don’t believe they know what they are doing. 

I prefer to treat the problem; at least I know what I am doing to myself.  For example, I decided to skip PT and went on line and found the exercises I should do, and I iced and the pain has subsided significantly.  Such injuries—the general result of wear and tear and skeletal instability that comes with old age and creaking joints—I have found can be very easily re-aggravated. 

In light of the tonnage of my new laptop, I decided therefore that I had to abandon my trusty over the shoulder book bag.  I use a book bag for about 6 or 7 years and then I have to throw it away because I have spilled too much coffee into it or some candy melted and everything got all sticky or the cap came off the sunscreen.  This bag has at least a year more in it, but I go to Staples and I buy one of those bags on little wheels that people pull around behind them usually at airports.  But where I work many of my female colleagues use these to lug stuff to and from classes, especially laptops and the like.  So I got a pretty sturdy one for 99 dollars with a space in it for a laptop and all sorts of pockets for this and that.

The only problem with the bag is that, up to the present moment, while I have seen many women pulling these things behind them, I have yet to see a single male with one.  I knew this when I bought the damn thing.  But thought I was secure enough in my masculinity to non-conform in that particular way.  I should have known I would have a problem when I told the clerk or assistant (or whatever they call the person who takes your money these days) that I was buying it for my wife.

I feel like a wimp pulling that little cart behind me.  I should be a proper man and lug my stuff up off the ground.  So when I see somebody I know, I grab my shoulder and groan as they walk by so they will know I am physically injured and am using this cart device only as a temporary measure while I regain my appropriate masculine strength.  And sometimes for good measure, I throw a limp into it so they will think I am nearly physically incapacitated.  That’s easy to do since my left knee always has a slight ache going.

How long I can keep up this pretext, I don’t know.  In my heart of hearts I fear this little cart thing is permanent and I will never regain my proper masculine strength.

(RECAP:  I have managed to get everything hooked up but realize that the data projector may not have any sound.  I have decided to pretend, when no sound comes out, that the people over in AV are all screwed up.  I am able to see my “desktop” projected onto the screen behind me by the data projector, but it has disappeared from my laptop.  It is, thus, very difficult to get the little arrow to go where I want it to go so that I might open the media player to play the CDrom and produce no sound.)

 As I attempt to manipulate the little arrow by looking at the screen behind me because I can’t see it on the blank screen of my laptop, the students titter at my discomfiture.  I complain that this is a new laptop and I am not yet used to it.  Also I am old.

Both are true.  I am feeling quite old at that moment and the laptop is new.  Indeed, I bought it with my own money for the express purpose of having it for classroom use.  I had grown sick and tired of the one I had been checking out from the writing program.  It was at least five years old, and I don’t know what it is but something goes haywire with a computer that’s five years old.

It’s like it has lint in its system or something.  Stuff would start popping up on the screen from out of nowhere.  Little signals saying it wanted to download something or I was supposed to do something, or in the middle of things it would start checking its disk.  Also I was not trusted by the program’s computer person, so I had been blocked from any ability to add something to the computer if I wanted to or to try to repair something if I wanted to do that.

 The students used the laptop for oral reports and they would want to show something but couldn’t because the laptop didn’t have something on it, and the screen would say download this but they couldn’t and I couldn’t either.  Also I had grown sick and tired of going to the computer person and asking her to help me.   That was her job, I thought, but everything I walked in, she would give me this look and say, “Oh, Nick, what have you done now.”

After about 8 years of this treatment, the computer person began to get under my skin, and I was rude to her on a couple of occasions.  Well, rude for me, anyway.  Which isn’t all that rude.  But I apologized anyway.  And we made up, I guess you would call it, and did the hugging thing.  I guess people just don’t see how terribly sensitive I really am.  And then, just when we had gotten comfortable enough with each other to be rude and then make up (sort of like family), she up and went and got a better job.

Anyhow I didn’t want to do that anymore or not be able to download stuff to the computer if I wanted to, so I went out and bought a laptop so I could be in charge of it.

I went to a PC Club not far away and said all I was interested in was the ratio of money to power or, in other words, what was their most powerful laptop for the least money.  I was not interested in features, add-ons, extras, or any of that crap.  I wanted raw power.  So that’s what I got from a computer manufacturer that I had never heard of and a type that they were going no longer going to carry.  In short, the last one of its kind on their shelf.

I got lots of power for about a thousand of my own dollars to be used in the education of my ungrateful and unappreciative students.  Unfortunately—I had not paid much attention to it at the time—but the thing weighs a ton.  It’s portable, but in a limited sense of that word.  I have bad rotator cuffs on both shoulders and walking with it to class in my over the shoulder bag just killed me.

But at that moment, I am not so much concerned with tonnage as I am with the fact that I cannot open the “media player” to play the Cdrom for which I have no sound.

(RECAP:  I am finally in my classroom and have just attached the data projector to the wall outlet when I realize that the data projector which I have gotten to play the CDrom of a documentary (that will not work in the room’s DVD player) does not appear to have any sound.  I decide when I turn on the CDrom and no sound comes on that I will pretend I am outraged by the failure of the AV people to do their job.  I will curse them roundly.)

 While understanding the ultimate futility of my efforts (i.e. no sound will be produced) for my plan to work, I must complete hooking up all the apparatus.  Also I have the faint hope that when I play the CDrom magically sound will come out of the data projector.  I remove my laptop from my bag and screw the data projector cable into the back of the laptop. 

I take out the telephone cable that runs from the laptop to the phone jack in the wall by which I can access the internet and my online syllabus.  I see that the cable will not reach the outlet in the wall, so I push the whole table with a screeching sound towards the outlet.  I squint looking at the four outlets.  Why, I don’t know, but only one of them is “active.”  Unfortunately, unless I get down on my knees, I cannot see which one is designated as active.  I ask the student nearest the outlet if she can see which is active and plug the cord in.  This she does with apparently reluctance.  Or perhaps she is just depressed.

I return to my bag to locate the power cord for the laptop.  I cannot find it.  I rummage for a bit.  And give up.  After all I won’t really need it since the sound won’t come on anyway.  I then plug the internet cord into the laptop and turn the laptop on.  The laptop goes on and my “desktop” appears but no light is coming out of the data projector.  I stare directly into its green eye but see nothing coming out.  I ask a student to locate the power button because apparently I have failed to turn it on.  The student does so and I am immediately blind by light from the projector.

Improvising, I pretend to be blinded and stagger about the front of the room for a bit.  But nothing, not even a titter.  Apparently they have no interest in my labors or my antics.  Or maybe they are a really tough crowd.  I will perhaps have to fall flat on my ass or maybe have a heart attack before I get a laugh out of them.  That would be great.  I have a heart attack, they laugh hysterically at my apparent discomfiture.  I die and some of them at least feel guilty.

I return to the desk with the laptop almost tripping twice on the various cords running this way and that.  Clearly now the data projector is working, so is my laptop.  But the image on my laptop is not appearing on the screen.  Instead there is just this big blue square up there with nothing on it.  I remember this having happened before and that to fix it involves the function and the F8 key on the laptop.  I give it a try.  And to my delight my desktop appears on the screen.  But my delight is dampened when I see now that my laptop screen is completely black. 

 My ability to control what appears on the screen is now reduced to zero since I am sitting with my back to the screen and staring at a blank laptop.

(RECAB: After having gone to the bathroom and picked up the data projector and having forgotten the number of my room and having numerous flashbacks that I have to write about, I have finally manged to write myself into the room that is full of annoying sophomores.  I am after all my anxiety approximately 3 minutes late.)

I enter the room pushing the  damn data projection cart ahead of me.  It is not a grand entrance.  I say I am sorry I am late, but nobody says anything back.  Not:  Oh, that’s ok; or glad you are here; or go fuck yourself. Zip.

I manage to turn the cart and angle it towards the seats.  I say that I will have to push it back more towards the middle of the room.  I aim towards a gap between the row of seats and push in that direction.  But nobody moves.  Scoot over, I say, Come on. They move slowly and with apparent resentment at having to expend the energy to do so.  I unravel the power cord for the data projector and hand it towards a student seated by the projector, but he looks at it like he doesn’t know what a power cord is for.  I am saved by the student behind him who takes it and plug it into the wall socket.  My heart goes out to this helpful student. 

I then take out the cord that runs from the data projector to the laptop.  I screw it into the data projector…and it comes to me in a sudden and horrifying flash that, while I am that day going to show part of a documentary on the consumer society, I am not sure that I have any sound. 

I bought the documentary for 35 dollars off Amazon.  But when I got it I saw it wasn’t a regular DVD as I had thought ibut a CD rom.  Always anticipating technological difficulties, I had gone to my rooms  two weeks before class started and put one of the rom disks into the DVD player that is built into the wall and attached to a TV monitor hanging up there in the air. But the DVD player would not play the CD rom.  

Up to that point I had decided I would just bite the bullet and do without the data projector.  But since the CD rom would not play in the DVD player, I decided I had to use the data projector because I knew that the CD rom would play in my laptop, and if I could connect my laptop to a data projector, I could use that to project the CD rom onto the screen upfront.  The rooms that come with built in data projectors also have speakers in the ceiling.  Until that moment I had not stopped to consider that a data projector that was not built into the room might not have sound attached to it.

So far I have managed to enter the room, plug in the data projector power cord, attach the data cord to the data projector, and now I am paralyzed at the thought that, while I have a documentary to show the class, I may not have sound for them to hear the documentary.  I begin to sweat.  All around me is silence.  Frantically, I examine the data projector but can find nothing among all its little buttons indicating the presence of sound.  I feel like just giving up and going home.

But I decide to plunge on.  I will hook everything up, I will take roll, I will tell them that we are going to watch a documentary on the consumer society as part of the material for their first paper, and when no sound comes out of the data projector, I will act as if I am completely shocked and start cursing the people over in the AV department for not giving me the right projector.

I have a plan.  But no sound.

(RECAP:  I have finally made it to my classroom.  I enter and immediately have an angry flashback about the first time I entered those rooms, found them crammed to the gills with seats, and myself completely immobilized by all the seats up against the blackboard,  Suddenly I think, EARTHQUAKE.)

I have this vision of an earthquake.  I see the students coming at me, a frantic horde, climbing over their seats (since there is no room to walk between them) and the doorway of that tiny, jam-packed room completely blocked with a confluence of student bodies all atop each other arms and legs akimbo as that wretched building comes down around our ears.  Since my vision has some basis in reality, so as soon as that class is over, I go to the office and say that the brand new room I just held class in is an earthquake hazard.  Oh, Nick, they go.  Since we writing teachers are not real Professors, but Lecturers, some members of the staff adopt towards us a condescending attitude.  Well, you go over, I say, You look at that room and tell me it is not an earthquake hazard.

When I return to that room a day later, I find that 10 seats have been removed.  I learn that the campus fire marshal has visited these rooms and declared them a fire hazard.  Where the fire marshal was when they put all those seats in there I don’t know.  I feel vindicated.  The room is still too small with no data projector and no cross ventilation.  But I feel vindicated.  Indeed, when I look back, I rank my part in the removal of those chairs one of the high points of my career as a writing instructor.

This is pathetic, admittedly.  But the teaching of writing is a very frustrating business because I never know if I have, after ten weeks with a class, accomplished anything.  Sure, maybe their writing has improved somewhat.  I say maybe because sometimes it’s really hard to tell.  How the hell in any case is one to find a standard by which to judge what improvement might or might not occur over a mere ten week period.

 And unlike a tenured Professor, say, of literature, I see a group of students once and then they disappear.  They do not take a class from me two or three times as they might from their favorite professor.  So I don’t have students coming back to me, bringing me candy, or offering me sexual favors because I was such an earthshakingly wonderful professor and profound guy.  In ten weeks, it’s just not possible to build up that narcissistically informed rapport.  And besides I am teaching writing, not Shakespeare, or James Joyce, or one of those authors that allows me to play the explication guru and act as if I know what I am talking about so that students who don’t have the faintest idea what these authors might be saying come away thinking they have been informed.

I don’t get to talk about tragedy or comedy and love or the nuances of all three.  I don’t get to emote or to display the depths of my compassion or my complex understanding of the nature of human experience or indoctrinate them into the most hip and cutting edge current theoretical fad.  It’s hard to emote over the use of the comma.  I have tried and failed.  Rather than display the depth of my understanding of human nature, I come off sounding like a raving pedant. 

But with those seats and their removal I could see and feel that I had played a role in causing something to happen.

I do not think a writing instructor should be late for class.  On top of that, I am never late.  Usually, I am early.  I am incredibly punctual.  Once I began to wonder if my punctuality was obsessive and so forced myself to be late a couple of times going to class.  That was years ago.  But lately I find myself being late.  Not by much, mind you.  Also I forget things more than ever.  So being late to class has worked me up into complete fiddle-faddle.  Not only am I late, but being late is a sign of my weakening mental condition and insipient senility. For god’s sake, I don’t know how I live with myself.

So rather than roll the data projector along a route that is all sidewalk, I decide to take a short cut.  I take some sidewalk, cut across a parking lot, and reach an embankment.  I was going to go around the embankment but miscalculated.  Going around will go a long way in the wrong direction.

The data projector is strapped down to the top the cart with one of those elastic cords I used to use when I strapped things to the back rack of my bicycle when I rode my bicycle before my neck gave out.  My bag full of stuff is sitting there too on top perched precariously next to the data projector because it is so full of stuff I could not jam it into one of the shelves on the cart.

I would call it a semi-sharp, slightly sloping embankment.  I have walked up it and down it before as part of my short cut, but I have not tried to roll a cart with a data projector down it.  Those damn eucalyptus trees grow along the embankment, and they have dropped their berries or nuts—or whatever the damn useless things are called—all along the embankment.  So going down the embankment will be somewhat like walking over ball bearings.  I am buffaloed.  I have an image of myself lying flat on my back at the base of the embankment with the data project cart lying on top of me and the contents of my bag scattered from here to eternity.

I hate those damn eucalyptus tress; they are a non indigenous import from Australia.  They do not belong in California, but they arrived in the 19^th century.  They have stayed and they have proliferated.  They are always dropping shit—their little berries and they shed their skin too.  They make a mess and nothing can live below them because of the toxins they emit.  I consider them a large noxious overgrown weed.

In any case, I decide I must go around the embankment because I don’t want to do myself bodily harm.  I mean, I tell myself, what the hell is the big deal?  Why should you rush and do yourself bodily injury just to avoid being a few minutes late.  What could possibly be the big deal, you idiot, I harangue myself. 

Having managed to subdue, if not calm, myself, I walk around the embankment pulling that loathsome cart and finally get to the side of the building where my class is.  These classes have doors that open out into the air.  There’s a whole row of these classrooms, they all look alike, and I realize I don’t remember the number of my classroom.  To find out what the number is will require that I dig into my bag, plow though its contents—aspirin, batteries, antacids, paper of all kind, pencils, pens, bits of chalk, my coffee container, my laptop, the cords to my laptop and locate the damn piece of paper with the number on it.

I am overcome by thought.  If I was not a stoic and I were in touch with my true feelings, I would go off somewhere and just cry my eyes out.

I know that I am in the general area of my classrooms.  They are right there in front of me.  I say “they” because I have one for my 1-250 class and another for my 3-450 class.  As you can see these classes are back to back with a ten minute break between them.  One might think that it would make sense to assign me the same room for the whole period and not give me two different rooms.  But the university does not know how to make sense of anything.

Instead of one room, I have 2 rooms and they are RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO EACH OTHER.  For God’s sake.  And neither of these rooms has a data projector.  So in the ten minutes between the classes, I must urinate, smoke a cigarette, unplug all the stuff I have had to plug in for my data projector to work.  Put all the stuff on the damn cart, and PUSH IT RIGHT NEXT DOOR (for god’s sake) where I have then to plug all that crap back in again to various sockets and outlets.

Just standing there looking at the two rooms—and I am pretty sure I am looking at the two rooms; I just don’t know which one I has my first class—I get pissed off all over again.  A person, clearly a student, comes and stands next to me.  I assume he is in my class since he seems to be standing there aimlessly.  I say, “I don’t know which room it is.”  “Oh,” he says.  Then he spies a woman going in one of the doors and says he thinks she is in the class.  So we go in that door.

Sure enough it appears to be my class.  A room full of annoying sophomores.  Moreover, not a seat is empty.  They are all mashed in there like sardines.  About 10 years ago I walked into one of the classrooms in this building on the very first day it was opened for use.  I almost exploded.  This is supposed to be a university and part of the purpose although apparently a very insignificant part is to educate.

I walk into a place where such education is supposed to occur and find myself in a tiny box.  I have 25 students but there are 35 seats in the room.  The teacher’s table at the front of the room actually touches the desks in the front row.  Between the desk and the blackboard, I find about 2 feet of space into which I squeeze myself.  If I speak too vigorously, I am likely to spit on students who sit in the front row.  

I have to restrain my fury.  Brand spanking new classrooms with no data projectors built into them and so crammed with seats that I can scarcely move.  The students can’t move either.  And this is very troubling since I frequently break them into groups to discuss readings with each other.  Such groups will be impossible in this room because THERE IS NO ROOM TO MOVE.

I am about to have a hernia.  Millions of dollars have been spent building this building mostly for offices for professors and nobody bothered to speak to a teacher about how the classrooms should be set up.  I am freaking dumbfounded.  Not just by the stupidity of it, but by the clear and present indifference of the powers that be—whoever they might be—to the so-called educational mission of the university.

Then I think.  What the FUCK if we have an EARTHQUAKE?

Having managed a successful visit to that hellhole of a restroom and having gathered up my stuff, I head out to the classroom at a comfortable amble, only to remember when I am half way there that I have forgotten to pick up my digital data projector.  Now I have to go back nearly to where I started, and I must hurry.

I am very unhappy about that.  I have for perhaps 8 years now been attempting to integrate into
the classroom the use of digital equipment, a laptop in particular and a data projector.With these two devices I am able to access my on line syllabus, my blog where students make entries about what they have read, special readings I may have assigned, and the web which I use both as a source of information and a subject of analysis. Consequently, I have repeatedly asked the front office to insure that I have a room with a data projector built into it.

In spite of my best efforts however every other quarter it seems I must return to the office and tell them the rooms assigned me do not have a data projector.  I don’t like doing this since doing it might imply that the staff is incompetent or that perhaps I am senile and forgot somehow to tell them once again that I wanted a data projector for my rooms.  This problem is exacerbated by the ungodly turnover in the front office.  So that just when I have managed fully to indoctrinate the responsible party into my peculiar needs they leave for a better job.

 This time, I must say, perhaps I did not get on the problem early enough.  But I didn’t think there would be a problem soon enough.  In any case, the responsible party tried repeatedly but could not get me a room with a data projector.  No sooner had she told me that, than she moved on to a better job.  Now I have to train a new person about my particular needs.  But perhaps since I was one of the persons who interviewed her for her job, she will think I am important and pay attention to my requests.

So I rush back to the AV place to get the data projector I have reserved for my class.  When I get there, the door is closed because it’s the lunch hour, and for a second I think, oh god Jesus no, but then remember if I knock they will let me in.  So I knock and then knock again and finally somebody opens up and I tell them I am there for the data projector I have reserved for my class.  I expect they will lead me to the data projectors and say, here take this one.

But, no.  Everything is written down and you can only take the one assigned to you as if there was some huge difference between the damn things.  I find myself standing there as a rather oafish looking student worker begins to thumb through some pages to find my particular data projector.  I can’t believe it.  You would think the thing would be in alphabetical order and the guy would just go to the page with the first letter of my name on it.  But, no.  Maybe it’s not in alphabetical order or maybe the guy doesn’t know the alphabet.  Because he starts with the first page, looks at it, turns to the next for ten damn pages before he glumly says, “D-15.”  The code apparently for the projector they have assigned to me.

It’s pretty clear I am going to be late to my second day of class.

RECAP:  I am in my office preparing to go to class.  So far I have read my student-evaluations and was bummed by them.  I felt resentful feelings towards those who get high student evaluations and called them ass kissers. I have concluded that I am not cute because I am old. I have decided I have time to urinate before I head out to class. But rather than go to the urinal, I describe my new environmentally responsible trash can. Having completed the description I return to the idea of going to the bathroom.

With 15 minutes till the hour, I have time for a pre-class precautionary leak and so head for the previously mentioned male restroom.  I open the door and plunge into pitch black darkness for in addition to the new state of the art environmentally responsible urinal the restroom no longer has a light switch.  It has a motion detector.  One plunges into the darkness hoping to be detected.  To make sure that I am I make wild gestures in the general direction of the motion detector.

Maybe I am wrong; perhaps it’s not a motion detector because I fail to see how it could detect any motion in that pitch black.  For the restroom is like a closet with no windows.  Perhaps it is a noise detector.  If so waving my arms around in the air is not doing one whit of good.

In any case, the light comes on and I angle around the stall up to the new environmentally responsible urinal.  Unlike any other urinal I have ever known, it does not make use of water.  This does not seem like a particularly stunning environmental break through to me.  The urinal seems to be coated with a super slick surface designed not to retard the flow of urine as drawn downward by the power of gravity towards the outlet hole.  

Unfortunately, the surface does not work. Especially on warmer days and what with no way to get air in the place, the urine adheres to the surface and stinks.  Some of us must have particularly adhesive or thick urine.  In addition, to the frequently fetid odor emanating from the urinal, it appears to have a significant design flaw.  A stream of any significance produces, when striking the super slick surface of the urinal, a ricochet spray effect.

If one leans back a bit, one’s clothes are not in danger of being sprayed.  Unfortunately, the floor is with the consequence that the area immediately adjacent to the urinal is somewhat slick and I worry about slipping and wrenching my wretched right knee. 

I don’t know why I have not contacted the authorities yet about this problem.  I expect I will since I am usually the person who notifies the main office if something is amiss in the mechanics of our environmentally responsible building. For example the big door at the end of the corridor sometimes gets out of alignment and emits a horrible sound like the final squawk of a strangling sea gull. Three of us had to call before somebody came to fix that problem a couple of days later.

I also call when someone has jammed up the toilet.  Usually, they come to fix this more quickly since a jammed up toilet in that little hellhole of a restroom can produce a rather stifling atmosphere.  We are lucky, though, as I said, in that few students use our restroom.  Once, when I was officed in another building, I frequented a restroom that was regularly used by students to throw up before going to class.  Or perhaps upon leaving it.

To be continued

RECAP:  I am in my office preparing to go to class.  So far I have read my student-evaluations and was bummed by them.  I felt resentful feelings towards those who get high student evalauations and called them ass kissers. I have concluded that I am not cute. I have decided I have time to urinate before I head out to class.

I have 15 minutes till class starts and I still haven’t managed to get myself out of the office.  Thankfully, the male restroom is just a couple of steps away; if it weren’t I would have to take all my stuff with me because I wouldn’t have time to get back to my office to get my stuff and then get to class.  Additionally, if I had to carry all my stuff, I know from experience that I might have a hard time getting to my penis to urinate.  

 And at my age you don’t want to be fumbling around with stuff whilst taking a leak.  First you have to find the damn thing.  Then you have to be careful not to pee on yourself.  It’s not too bad yet, but I am beginning to have a bit of a cut off issue.  I think I am done peeing but my penis, or more exactly, I believe, my bladder doesn’t seem to know it.  I have a slight aftermath leakage problem.  I need both hands to make sure I shake sufficiently and don’t leave unseemly spotting.

This particular restroom is pretty much reserved for the male members of the writing program.  We rarely have student urinators or defecators because our restroom is off the beaten path.  We are grateful for that.  The restroom has a sink and a mirror and a stall and next to that a brand new environmentally responsible urinal.

For some unknown reason, somebody decided to make our building an environmentally responsible building.  We even got some sort of plague for that; and little signs with some sort of green symbol were posted around when the building was converted to being environmentally responsible.  I have not idea what this means—being in an environmentally responsible building.  But it seems to mean that a special trash container was put in my office.  This container is like a regular trashcan but made of blue plastic with a smaller version of a trash container attached to its lip. 

Apparently, we are supposed to put paper into the big blue plastic bucket.  And garbage, like banana peals or apple cores or other possible rotting material, into the little bucket hanging onto the big bucket.  Unfortunately if you put something heavy, like some old batteries or a dead pencil sharpener, into the little bucket that hangs on the lip of the big bucket, and you have nothing in the big bucket, the big bucket falls over.  I find this annoying, so if the bucket happens to fall over I just leave the bucket lying on its side until I have something to put in the big bucket.

The big bucket doesn’t have a completely open top like a regular trash basket.  Instead it has a blue plastic lid with a long narrow hole in the middle about the length of a width of a piece of 8 by 11 paper.  Apparently, one is supposed to slip the paper into the long narrow hole, and I suppose the hole is long and narrow so that one does not try to put a whole book or magazine into the bucket.  I don’t know why you should not do that.  But clearly the long narrow hole is intended for some particular purpose.  So when I have something that won’t go through the long narrow hole, I just take the whole top off and drop the magazine in it.  That’s what I did with the phone book.

I guess I am not environmentally responsible because usually my environmentally responsible trash can scattered in three parts on the floor.  The lid is wherever I decided to fling the annoying think.  And the little bucket is sitting on the floor next to the big bucket until I can find something heavy enough to hold the big bucket down when I put something heavy in the little bucket.

I must come to grips with the reality of not being cute.  Actually, it’s worse than that.  My students don’t care if I am cute or not because I am clearly old.  As an old person, I fall entirely outside of the cuteness spectrum.  A cute old person is just an embarrassment. 

So here I am trying to get out of my office to go teach a class, and I am bummed.  Because I am not cute and my student evaluations were not absolutely sterling.  They weren’t awful either.  I am not going to be fired because of these evaluations; they are not going to raise some huge question mark and cause my colleagues to discuss them ad nauseum behind my back (while I am recluse) to determine whether I have completely lost it or gone over the edge. 

No, that’s not the problem.  It’s more the being old problem.  I hit my peak. I crested student evaluation wise maybe ten years ago.  The drop from that personal best has not been a precipitate plunge, but a slow stagger.  A drop here, a little rise above that, a drop back below the previous drop.  Gradual and slow but potentially a slippery slope.  I used to be an ace, an all-star with a high SES (strident evaluation scores); now I don’t make the all-stars.  I am more just reliable.  He will give it his all; you can count on that.  But that’s it.

For the last ten years, I have been trying not so much to go up, as to hang onto the side of the cliff by my fingernails.  I am fighting to keep back the flood.  I am maneuvering an excellent retreat but it’s still a retreat.  Whoever said après moi, le deluge had to have been standing on pretty high ground.  Because nobody knows when le deluge might hit and if you have not maintained the high ground you could easily be up that proverbial creek.  I maintain the high ground, but I am like Sisyphus trying to keep the rock from rolling back down the hill while trying to get traction on the slippery slope.

I get to the plant, I go to my mailbox, I get my evaluations, I make the mistake of looking at them, and all these nasty memories and self doubts come flooding back, and I have 15 minutes till class.  I am not all pumped up and ready to go.  I am deflated, tired, and slightly flatulent from having eaten my lunch too quickly.  Three minutes away from my office are classrooms that I like to teach in.  They are old rooms and have big windows.  But instead, for whatever unknown reason, my rooms are located in a new building a good 5-8 minutes away depending on how my right knee is doing.

I have arthritis and a torn meniscus in my right knee.  I made it better by resting it.  But that required that I did not exercise with the result that I have gained ten ugly pounds thereby putting even greater pressure on my weakened knee.  That’s how it goes these days.  One step forward and one back.  I have to reconcile myself to the condition.  When I ask one older guy I know—in his seventies—how he is doing, he says, “status quo.”  At a certain age, if you can say status quo, that means things are going pretty damn well because any change in the status quo is going to be backwards.

Right now my knee is status quo.  So 15 minutes gives me plenty of time to urinate before I hit the road over to class.

That’s not fair really.  Getting good student evaluations on your teaching is not all a matter of kissing butt.  Students also like good looking teachers.  The guys especially like good looking women teachers, and the girls like good looking male teachers. I have always considered myself good looking enough.  I mean I don’t have two noses or big warts growing out of my forehead or something.  On the website, rateyourprofessor.com, I am not considered “hot.”  They put a little picture of a chili pepper by your name (indicating if you are hot).  But I don’t have a chili pepper so I am not.

Even if I ever had the potential to be hot, I am not sure I ever was even when younger.  I didn’t start teaching till I was in my 30s, so that might have put me out of the hotness range.  Also I used to sport this big old beard;  so unless a person was attracted to shaggy somewhat ill-kempt types, I doubt if I fell into the hot category except maybe with a few alienated, intellectual types with strong nurturing instincts.  

Somewhat recently, as I remember, I asked my students what “hot” exactly meant.  What actors I wondered were hot.  Mostly the women spoke up and they mentioned names of guys I didn’t know.   A lot of students watched that show called OC, about Orange County, and I think they thought some of the guys on that show were hot.  I don’t know.  I asked if De Caprio was hot; yea maybe they said, but he was sort of old hat.

So I asked when you say somebody is hot do you mean they are, if they are a man, handsome.  They looked a little befuddled.  Then somebody said, hot meant cute, and yeah, yeah, others said in chorus, that was it.  OK. Cute.  One of my least favorite things.  I am not a fan of cute.  I get tired of it really quickly. For me cute is sort of the high fructose corn syrup of appearance.  It’s a really quick, very, very sweet high and then it goes away fast and isn’t all that good for you.

So what was a handsome man, I asked, or a beautiful woman, or were there such things any more.  Or only cute, high fructose corn syrup people?  Well, maybe, they said, handsome was still there.  But it applied, if at all, mostly to old people.  So old people could be handsome but not cute?  More or less, they indicated.  So who would be a handsome actor, I asked, but they didn’t know any, so I let it drop.

But I wondered what this love of cuteness might say about my students.  Were I to attempt a phenomenology of cuteness, it might run something like this.  Part of the appeal of cuteness is its very lack of substance, its transience, one might say.  De Caprio, formerly cute, is now old hat.  Cute is new, and being hot too it cools rather quickly.  Part of the appeal of cuteness is its very faddishness, its come and then gone quality.  Biologically it’s true too.  Cuteness is brief; the face and the body can sustain it for only a very limited amount of time.  Over 25 I would argue cuteness is biologically impossible.  So at the heart, cute is cute because one doesn’t have to work hard to get it and one doesn’t expect to get much out of it either.  It’s a buzz.

I went to my mailbox and found those loathsome teacher evaluations from summer school classes.  I didn’t want to look at them; I had already read the students’ written comments so I knew my evaluations wouldn’t be so hot.  These were the raw numbers from a computerized form that asked students to respond to two questions.  Rank the teacher for the course; rank the course—on a scale of excellent, very good, good, fair, poor.  So you get a number that can be used to compare your teaching to the teaching of others in the same course.

I hate these scores.  The damage they have done to my teaching and to my development as a teacher is immense and unfathomable.  Unfathomable because fear produces unconscious affects.  You censor yourself.  Things you might have done, insights you might have had, things you might have said get crushed by the fear that doing them, saying them, seeing them might have a negative affect on your scores.  Most tenured faculty members don’t pay any attention to these student evaluations at all.  They don’t have to because they have tenure.

But I have been for 26 years a lecturer.  First I was on one year contracts and then on three year contracts and the central, most significant bit of information used to determine whether I would be rehired or not is those damn student evaluation scores.  These are the most significant thing because ultimately the decision about whether you are rehired or not is made, not by your fellow teachers, but by the administration.  And what speaks most clearly to them is numbers.  A few years back at one branch of the university, the teaching scores of the lecturers were lined up and those who fell below a certain line were fired.  Hired and fired on the basis of numbers generated by the students you taught.

The numbers for the student evaluations for writing teachers are significantly and routinely higher than the numbers for any other classes on the whole campus.  One reason for that is that we teach small classes; the students get to know the teacher a bit and the teacher gets to know the students a bit.  The students appreciate that because in most of their large lectures they are anonymous and the professor might as well be the man on the moon.  The other reason is that sometimes quite consciously and sometimes very unconsciously, we writing teachers want to please the students so they won’t say nasty things about us in their evaluations or give us low scores.

This is a very bad, indeed pernicious situation.  I was surprised to learn over the years that even those instructors who routinely got the highest evaluations of all, sometimes 100% excellent, hated to look at their “scores.”  Maybe they were worried they had not received their usual 100% excellent; or maybe they were worried that they had because they 100% excellent indicated that once again, unconsciously of course, they had managed successfully to kiss the butt of each and every student.

When a person teaches writing, as I have, for 26 years to students who don’t want to take a writing class and resent being in the same room with people who teach it, I feel you have a right to be crabby.  Or at least to pretend to be.  Actually, I don’t mind the word ubiquitous.  I like the sound of it though I have small occasion to use it.  I just throw that in as an example of a big word.  I really don’t like the word “plethora.”    A person who uses “plethora” is a social climber, the kind of person who might be drawn to word power books as a way of cultivating an enormously inflated vocabulary as a means to intimidate others.  

I don’t believe in using big words to intimidate others.  People who do that are vulgar and lacking class. If you want to use language to intimidate others, small words will do.

Of course, though, most students who try to use big works are not using them to intimidate but to imitate the big word users known as professors or teaching assistants.  They are humbly trying to conform but screw up a great deal while trying to do so.

But the deeper problem with my sophomores is not that they are probably average to poor writers rather that average to good.  No.  The problem is the sophomore attitude.  In less than a quarter, many conclude that college is a “game.”  Frequently this is a defensive strategy.  They came into the university thinking they would get A's with little effort.  I do believe that about a quarter of the students I teach have a straight A average upon entering the university.  But then they don’t get A's; they get B's.  And sometimes if they are in the sciences they get Cs.  

These students, rather than decide they are perhaps stupid or that their education was perhaps inadequate or that they did not study enough but partyed way too much, decide that school is a game, and if they screwed up, that’s because they have not learned the game.  Learning the game is not the same thing as learning at all.  Instead learning the game is best called working the system.  You simply have failed to make the right connections so you can find out who the easy teachers are or you have failed fully to grasp the technique of saying exactly what the professor wants you to say and no more or no less.  And because you have not figured that out, you study the wrong thing or too much and end up feeling like a social outcast among all those people who don’t seem to study at all but still get As.

Because the idea that college is a game serves as a defense for these people, as a cover up for some vulnerability, they can be quite obnoxiously assertive in their claim that college is nothing but a game with nothing of justice to it.  Such students will sometimes say, “I did not get my money’s worth from your class.”  Or: “Your class was a waste of my valuable time.”

I call these sophomores “pre-mature cynics.”    

But over the weekend, the sophomore problem started bugging me again in multiple ways.  I had all those sophomores partly because the Writing Program didn’t have enough money to teach all the Freshpersons who were supposed to take the course.  Or to put it another way, even if every class had been completely filled with nothing but Freshpersons we did not offer enough classes to take all of the Freshpersons who were supposed to take the course in the year—the Freshperson year—that they were supposed to take it.  Some of the sophomores in my class might have actually tried to get in the course but couldn’t find an empty spot.  So here they were slopped over into my class.

Also quite logically and correctly, no doubt, I assume that most of these sophomores had not tried very hard.  The people who wanted really to get into Writing 2 were people who requested the course on what is called the first pass through the computer system.  But most of these people had probably requested the course on their third pass and of course—what do you know?—but no spots were available. They didn’t want a spot most likely because they had failed the writing placement exam.

That meant as entering Freshpersons, the year before they got into my class, they had not been eligible to take Writing 2 but had to take Writing 1 that is the course a person has to take if they fail the writing placement exam.  Most students do not like failing a writing test and then have to take and also to pay for (and at one time get no graduation credit for) a course to make up for failing the test.  The test is a really stupid test, but the people who flunk it, at least half of them, do not write as well as the people who pass it.  They probably did not pass it because they lacked confidence as writers or were hung over.  So they fail the test and their confidence is further reduced, and then they take Writing 1 which makes them feel stupid or like they have the small pox and their confidence is further reduced.

Consequently by the time they get to my class the very idea of a writing class—and the potentials for humiliation and embarrassment implicit in it (not to mention the horror of a bad grade)—has put them in a pretty rancid mood.  Also the sophomores know as well as I do that the course is for Freshpersons.  Right there in the catalogue it says, “Writing 2 Introduction to Academic Writing.”  And during that Freshperson year when they should have been taking Writing 2 they were “introduced” or perhaps “smacked over the head” with Academic Writing in one of those General Education Courses they didn’t want to take either, but had to because they are required.  Some feel resentment at having to receive a brush up course on an introduction they have already experienced in the concrete form of a low grade.

Already, I suspect they are seeking compensatory structures, as I call them, to hide or muffle their inadequacies as writers. So off I go, “And don’t ever use that thing…What’s it call the thsaraous (I pretend I can’t pronounce Thesaurus).  Yea…that thing.  I know, even though I am old, that they have that thing on computers now.  But never use it. Never, ever use a big word when a simple one will do.  Why use ubiquitous when you can use every where.  Tell me, why the hell would you do that except to impress somebody with your knowledge of big words? What are you trying to do?  Make somebody else feel stupid?  Are you an elitist or something? Well, I am not stupid, I am not an elitist, and I am not impressed.  Also, I want you to know I just hate the word, ‘plethora.’”

Almost all incoming students are required to take Writing 2.  I don’t mind teaching it because it’s part of the Freshman sequence, and the fall quarter is particularly nice because the class is usually full of students who may have never seen a college teacher up close and personal before.  Perhaps they are not overcome with joy at the prospect of learning, but they are at least excited to be in college.  Also they don’t quite know how college works yet, so I have the opportunity to act in my person as an introduction to the university, most especially to its intellectual standards and challenges.

But when I walked into my first Writing 2 course of the new school year (I am teaching two this quarter), I felt something was off.  The room was dead silent.  In the first quarter at college some students don’t know appropriate student teacher decorum and one of them might do something odd like ask you how you are doing or are you the professor. And usually too they are at least whispering to each other trying to make sure they are in the right class and the right room and at the right time.

But not with this class.  As soon as I sat down to take roll, I saw why.  The class had only a sprinkling of Freshpersons.  The rest were sophomores.  In the Vietnam War, people wrote about soldiers with the thousand mile stare.  These people had been through hell and back and seen it all.  Sophomores have the two inch stare.  They have seen just enough not to want to see anymore.  They slouch, they fidget, they yawn, they stretch, they put their heads on their desks for a few winks, and they don’t want to meet your eye. Sometimes, they lapse unconsciously into grooming behavior and sit there breaking off their split ends.

 Sometimes, I think I could drop dead on the floor, and they would just ignore me.  And then somebody would ask, “How long do we have to wait for the Professor till we can leave.”  Then they would wait the requisite 15 minutes and step over my dead body as they went out.

You might think it takes a year for a Freshperson to become a sophomore.  Actually it takes just two quarter or about one semester.  Teaching Assistants who start teaching Writing 2 in the fall come up to me in the spring quarter and say that they don’t know what they are doing wrong.  Things went well the first two quarters, but now...  I say, hell, you are doing fine.  It’s those sophomores.

So felt a bit disappointed sitting there in front of all those sophomores.  “Damn, I said, you are nearly all sophomores.  I am sorry Freshpersons but you are at a disadvantage.  What happened?  This class is supposed to be for Freshpersons.  Did you put it off?  Couldn’t you get in?”

I might as well have been talking into thin air.  But I got into taking roll and trying to pronounce these amazing names that I can’t pronounce at all and pretty quickly forgot, for the moment, the sophomore problem.

Fate?

Destiny?

I really don’t have the faintest idea what I am talking about.  But maybe I am thinking that had I taken that job or the one in Kansas that was offered me at one time, I wouldn’t be the intensely miserable person I am today, eaten alive daily by anxiety and wiped out by depression.  If good things happen to a person, doesn’t a person feel good?  Not that bad things have happened to me, but not good enough to make me go around feeling good or happy or light hearted.  I don’t feel good, I am not happy, and boy I am not light hearted.

So the idea of fate is just a way to reconcile yourself with wherever you are with the desperate idea that wherever you went or whatever you did you would be stuck with yourself and given that the self you are stuck with, in my case, is a miserable self I would have been miserable pretty much anywhere. Maybe this is a stoic sort of rationalization for my current state of being.  But honestly I don’t think it is.

Had I become a Professor of Literature—who knows—I might have been happier getting to tell students great stories and emote about them and had I been able to do this in a small private school where I got to know the students and they got to know me I might have been much beloved as they say and when I died, lots of people attended my funeral and said all sorts of nice things about me. 

And even with all that—who knows—I probably still would have been miserable eaten alive every day with anxiety and flattened out with depression.  Some people say people don’t have selves anymore.  We are like onions; keep peeling away the levels and finally you hit zero.  I don’t buy it.  We do have selves.  It’s there wherever you go, and is buried way down there in the unconscious mind and is the foundation of who you are at the present moment.  It’s the thing you are given to build upon or live with or not.

I don’t hear people talking about this stuff on TV.  Maybe I should write a book or something.

People should talk about this stuff.  It’s important.

What are we here for?  To be like the lilies of the field and neither reap or sew.  Or are we to be industrious and work for our fellow persons?  Is the goal to achieve happiness and to maximize that happiness for others too?  Or is happiness the goal of weak kneed.  Perhaps the goal of life is suffering and to suffer.  At one time, life was called the veil of soul making because—contrary to the idea of natural rights—one is not born with a soul.  One has to work for it.

Certainly my goal is not to buy a Lexus.   

Yes.  Horrible.  Back when they censored books, they would say that the book had no redeeming social value.  This seemed to mean that if you wrote something with a bunch of sex scenes in it and all sorts of “dirty” words, and it had some redeeming social value, it might be published.  I don’t think my time on the job market had any redeeming social value.

I got to see a few places I might not otherwise have seen, I suppose.  For example, I saw River Falls, Wisconsin.  They flew me in for an interview, so what the heck.  I was desperate.  The school was 40 minutes from Minneapolis-Saint Paul.  I think that was its redeeming social value.  Along the way, the chair who came to pick me up talked about how this last winter it had just snowed, and snowed, and snowed, and driving to work, he had gone off the road and neck deep into a snow pit just.  And when he didn’t show up for work when he usually showed up (this was before cell phones), they came out looking for him and retrieved him from the gully by the road. 

That’s the kind of people they were there.  They looked out for each other because, if they didn’t, they could freeze to death.  The college-an ag school-consisted of a fair number of brick and concrete bunker like buildings with tiny windows designed to withstand the rigors of winter. 

As we were walking towards the building that housed the English department, a young woman walked down the steps of the adjoining building, and she was so damn pale I thought she was sick and almost said so before I realized that’s what a person looks like—a naturally fair person—when they hadn’t been in the sun for six months.  A person who has not seen the sun for six months looks like they are coming out of a long stay in the hospital.

They parked my ass in a tiny mail room so I could meet faculty as they came and went.  And one after another, the faculty persons proved to be guys with great Paul Bunyonesque guts, huge beards, and clothes that made them appear to have just returned from shooting elk or fishing for beaver or something like that.  One guy walked in with no beard, wearing slacks, and not fat and I asked who he was, and they said, oh he was leaving.

Later in the day, the Department crazy who wore a suit jacket, had a huge gut, and smoked like a fiend drove me around a bit in River Falls proper.  The Boy Scout troops had their own damn buildings.  And note I said troop(s) because there was more than one Boy Scout troop building.  I didn’t know Boy Scout troops could have their own buildings; my troop had met in the cafeteria of the local elementary school.  And then, church, after church, after church, all some sort of Protestant.

I got a pretty good idea of what people were up to in River Falls.  They stayed indoors six months of the year and ate and ate and ate, and went to church and Boy Scout meetings, and made sure nobody froze to death in the snow.  Altogether a real family values place.

I’d have to say the Saint Louis experience pretty much ripped it for me job hunting wise.  I’d been on the market at least eight years by then.  Every fall during that time, I read the job list and wrote the letters of application.  I went to a bunch of different cities to be interviewed by people I didn’t know at the time and don’t remember now. 

My specialization, Romantics, had nearly disappeared from the job listings.  Now theory was being emphasized, and minority literature, and somewhere I had failed to hear that the Renaissance, as I had known it, was called now “pre-modern.”  Women were being hired, rightfully so, and I was getting old, well over forty by then.  That didn’t help me at all.  The society is obsessed with youth and youthfulness.  I wasn’t anymore, and because of the teaching experience I had acquired I would have to be paid more than people just fresh out of graduate school and less, sometimes well less, than thirty years old.

I was astonished to hear the English Department where I worked hired a person in my area, Romanticism and another area too, straight out of graduate school. And she had published utterly zip, nada, nothing.  But she had been graduated from a top ranked school. I guess her dissertation looked good and she was a she, and not a hairy old white man like me.

So the whole field as a specialization had transformed right before my eyes.  And I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how the market worked, what reasoning, if any, went into hiring somebody and not somebody else.  All I knew as that it didn’t work for me.

I think I can sum up this experience pretty readily by saying it was horrible.  Yea, well, that’s the right word.  Horrible!  I was perpetually anxious and completely at the mercy of the mail person.  Also being repeatedly rejected, over and over again, is not good for one’s self concept.  It felt like one of those cartoons where a cartoon person is being driven straight into the ground by repeated blows to the head with a giant mallet.  Huge chunks of my energy were sucked from me as if I had ingested a giant tape worm and couldn’t throw it up.

I had never liked the Holidays and Christmas any way and then, what with waiting to hear if I had an interview or not, they had become a nightmare.  One year I had bought my plane tickets because you had to buy them early to afford them, and I remember how miserable I felt when suddenly, it was mid December, and I had not received a letter for any interviews and I had to go right then to return my tickets if I wanted to get my money back.  I was utterly torn up. 

What if a letter came the next day?  But who the hell was I kidding?  I wasn’t going to get any letter.  But, wait!, one year I had received an invitation via phone right before Christmas, so it was possible.  But who the hell was I kidding.  I wasn’t going to get an interview.  But what if a really good school called with a terrific position?  Could I afford to say no?  But could I afford the tickets to say yes.  Or what if some nowhere school called, that required 12 classes of composition a year, and paid zip.  But was tenure track and in a place where my wife and I could afford a house.

After I turned in those tickets to get my money back, I cried, and I do that once every five years or so (except during the period when I decided I should try to cry more often).

After years of waiting for rejection letters to get an interview, and rejection letters after getting an interview, and rejection letters after having had the on campus interview, as well as rejection letters for articles and proposals, I had come, in those days before email, to have mixed feelings about the postal person.  And these mixed feelings reverberated in a very unpleasant ways with those three years of waiting for the post man to come and tell me I had been drafted or not. 

I began to dislike the mail person even though I didn’t know him or her.  Or maybe I didn’t like feeling chained to my awareness of the postal person, when he or she was supposed to come, or my suddenly very acute hearing that alerted me to the distinctive squeak of the postal person’s postal vehicle.  It was kind of like having somebody come up behind you and go boo.  I would be cruising along in the late afternoon usually and bang I would be aware of the damn postal person.  They say you don’t want to be a bearer of bad tidings.  I think I understand why, because if I had been king and the postal person had brought me another rejection letter I would have made him pay for it.

The on campus interview had been in early February, and I found myself listening for the postal person through the rest of February, through all of March, and into April.  I knew by then, no dice.  When and if the rejection letter ever came, I did not plan to open it.  Then the phone rang and, to my surprise, the Chairman of the English Department at St Louis was on the other end of the line.

He was a nice guy, awful busy it seemed, more my age but a little younger, and he had called he said because they had taken an unconscionably length of time he felt to notify me of their decision.  He apologized because part of the problem had been him.  He had cancer he said and was under going chemo and some paperwork for the Dean had been late because of his treatments.  So here was a guy undergoing chemo calling me to apologize for being late with a rejection letter because I had no doubt where this was going. I could tell the Chair was tired and pissed off.  Probably he had wanted me for the job.  Finally, he said, he probably shouldn’t say it but he wanted me to know the vote had been real close.  In fact, I had lost out on the deal by one vote.

Later on, I sort of wished he hadn’t told me that.  But here was a guy with cancer, on chemo, calling to apologize to me for not having sent out their rejection letter more promptly.  He really hadn’t had to do that.  So in the end, I thanked him and expressed my appreciation and hoped that all went well with his treatments.