Old dog, new (old) trick

My normally orderly home-office space
in pre-semester chaos mode

A colleague of mine is on maternity leave this coming semester, and I was asked to take one of her classes: a 300-level course titled "Methods of Teaching Composition," a requirement for our English-education majors.

It's a daunting prospect, since A) I'm by no means a rhet/comp scholar; B) any formal study I have done in that area is about twenty years old; and C) if I screw it up, I not only shortchange this class of students, but their future students as well.

No pressure.

While I've been reading up on the subject and thinking about the class all summer, I just this week actually started putting the syllabus together.  It's one of the hardest I've ever had to write.

I should say that my colleague very generously put not only her syllabus, but all her assignments and the course readings on Dropbox for me to steal, which has been a great help.  But what I've discovered is what every substitute teacher certainly already knows: having someone else's lesson plans doesn't mean you "get" what they're trying to do.  Ultimately, you're approaching from the outside a class that someone else has inhabited from the inside.

Well-designed classes have a deep context, I'm discovering--and you can't just borrow that context.  It has to be ingrained in your very way of thinking.  Disciplinarity matters, and it shapes everything we do as scholars and teachers.  Sure, I could give someone my folklore syllabus and the textbook and they could do the readings and teach the class, but that wouldn't make them a folklorist--any more than my upcoming stumble through the comp methods course will make me a compositionist.

I'll certainly know a lot more about it in three months--probably as much by virtue of the many mistakes I'll make as anything else.  But I still won't have that depth of knowledge that makes specialists able to answer complex questions, draw connections between ideas, and situate current approaches in a larger historical context.

Part of the purpose of my saying this is simply confessional: I'm very anxious about this class, and am trying to prepare myself--if not for outright failure, then, at least for serious imperfection.

But another intriguing discovery has been that because of my lack of context, I physically have not been able to put the course syllabus together the way I normally would.  Typically, I tend to write my syllabi in a linear fashion:  I have a sense of how much time we need to spend on each book/topic/time period, depending on the course, and also have a sense of how the course content should build as the weeks go by, and where we need to end up.  So, I just plug that sequence in, week by week, until I get to week 15.

I can't tell you how many times I sat down at the computer with my blank syllabus (Week 1, Day 1...Week 1, Day 2) and looked at it just as blankly.  So I resorted to the grids that I created long ago for mapping out classes.  I haven't used them in years, because my brain just doesn't need them to plot out a class anymore.

Until this one.

Not only did I use the grids, I eventually taped them all to the wall, side-by-side, so I could see the whole semester in one shot.  Then I started working backwards from the end of the semester, blocking out weeks for various topics, and then gradually filling in the readings and assignments for specific dates.  All in pencil, so that I could erase and revise as needed.  Which was often.

I was somewhat amazed at how much easier it was to get down to the nitty-gritty with this method.  And I'm glad I thought of it, because otherwise I might still be sitting in front of a screen with a bunch of empty spaces next to dates, and feeling increasingly panicked.

So, maybe the first lesson I've learned about Methods of Teaching Composition is that even old dogs like me need to try new invention techniques sometimes.  When your usual writing process fails you, it may be better to do something radically different than to keep trying to force your usual process to work.

* * * * * * 

This post is dedicated to my friend Jane, one of the most thoughtful, hard-working writing teachers I know, whose many blog posts about the difficulties of teaching writing (even to students at MIT!) have been a big influence on my thinking about how to put together this course.  Take this entry, for example.  

Endings and beginnings

Spring is the season that reminds us that each new beginning is the ending of something else.

When I'm walking to campus across the High Street bridge, seeing the trees on the banks of Decker's Creek leafing out and catching a glimpse of a moutainside painted in shades ranging from the palest green to russet, Robert Frost's lines "Nature's first green is gold/ Her hardest hue to hold" often run through my mind.  In April, every day brings the emergence of some new wonder even as yesterday's fades.

Can you tell I'm feeling sentimental lately?

I spent this afternoon at the annual conference the College of Education holds where the graduating class from the 5-year teacher education program presents on their classroom research projects.

I facilitated a couple of sessions for the English education soon-to-be grads, and realized while I was sitting there that this is really the first class of students that I've seen through their entire program, since I'm finishing my fifth year.

The students in the photo, Brent and Carrie, were both students in one of the best sections of the young-adult lit class I've taught thus far.  It was one of those classes full of amazing students who collectively create something even greater than the sum of their individual parts.

We initially bonded over our mutual disdain for Sharon Draper's Tears of a Tiger, a book I didn't really care for but had included because it's required reading at both of the high schools in town.  It was one of the first novels we read, and after about half an hour of discussing it, someone finally asked, in a tentative voice, "Why did you choose this book?"  Suddenly we all heaved a mutual sigh of relief, realizing that we all felt the same way about it.  From then on, there was no holding back.

That was in fall 2009, the semester my father died.  In fact, the only things I remember about that fall are Dad's illness, and specific moments from the young-adult lit class.  I missed a week of school right after Thanksgiving for the memorial service, and I was anxious about going back to work afterward.  But every one of the students in that class sent me an e-mail while I was gone to offer their condolences and to express their sympathy, and when I went back, I almost cried, I felt so much like I was back home.

(And then Emma played guitar and sang a very funny song she'd written about Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak [believe it or not], and I laughed until I almost cried again.)

A couple of the folks in that class have graduated already, but most of them will be graduating in May.  Brent, on the left, has been in at least three of my classes, starting in the fall of 2008.  Writing a letter of recommendation for him recently, I thought about how lucky I am to be able to be a part of some students' lives for these particular years.  A music-teacher friend of mine once remarked that middle-school students were her favorite to work with, because they were just starting to figure out who they are.  I love working with college students for the same reason--and because they're so full of potentials and possibilities for the future.

I never thought I'd be the kind of person to say this, but what the hell: it's true.  Not having any children of my own, some of these students truly come to feel like my kids.  The love and pride I feel for them is overwhelming at times.  And many of the WVU students I've grown to feel that way about were in that fall 2009 class:  Brent and Carrie, but also Emma and Jake and Paige and Rachel...you get the idea.

It's been a long, hard semester, and I'm not going to be remotely sorry to see it in my rearview mirror.  And I won't be sorry to see these students graduate and take their gifts into the world.  But I will be sorry not to see them around.


(As long you're reading such schmaltz, you might as well listen to some, too, right?)

Good Girl 2.0

Years ago, when I was still a grad student at Ohio State, I baked some cookies for my Introduction to Folklore class.  It was the last day of the quarter, and we were watching a movie.  Plus, the class started at 7:30 a.m., and those folks deserved a reward for having dragged themselves to campus at the crack of dawn for the previous ten weeks.

When I got out the cookies, one of the students said, "I knew you'd bring cookies.  You've just got a cookie personality."

I wasn't really sure how to respond, because the comment was delivered in a positive way, so I decided not to ask too many questions about what it means to have a "cookie personality."  And I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the answer anyway.

This line turned into a running joke, and several years later, after I told that story to a class at the University of Northern Colorado, a bunch of them got on RateYourProfessor.com and left comments about my "cookie personality." 

A colleague at UNC was always kind of snarky about the "cookie personality" thing, referring to it sarcastically on a number of occasions.  It clearly irritated her, and she remarked more than once that she envied the label, even as she coached me to "grow a set," in her words.

More recently, I've run into a similar situation here: a former student told me that when my name came up in a conversation she was having with another professor, the other prof said, "Oh, Rosemary.  She ought to have little birds fluttering around her head." 

I can't tell you how much that irritated me.  Being a "good girl" is a double-edged sword.  Yeah, I'll be the first to say that there are a lot of benefits to it.  My longtime friend Christina and I are sometimes astonished at the stuff we got away with in high school because we were considered to be "good girls" and "good students."  (Don't worry, Mom: it was nothing dire!)

But when you get tagged that way, and--admittedly--when it's important to you personally to be thought of that way, it's a very restrictive and even a dangerous label.  

Recent events at work have left me feeling like being anything but a good girl.  I've been, by turns, enraged, depressed, astonished by people's short-sightedness, and just plain cranky.  I haven't wanted to be nice, or be a team player.  To do so would be to deny my very real, very powerful feelings.  And yet, I worry that if I show my true feelings, speak my mind, people will think that the "good girl" thing has all been an act--that I was just waiting to get tenure so that I could revert to my true, bitchy self.

I posted this image to my Facebook profile,
and a former colleague commented,
"Rosemary! This doesn't sound like you at all."
But it's what I'd like to say sometimes.

Those of you who know me are probably saying "Not bloody likely."  I know.  If only I could say what I feel, be bitchy, pitch a fit, sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of Morgantown.  Instead, the arguments, the sassy comebacks, the bitchy asides just play on a continuous loop in my head.  I'm not a nice person; I just hide my inner mean girl a little too well.

In the wake of all of this, I've been contemplating what "Good Girl 2.0" might look like, since "Good Girl 1.0" is so obviously an obsolete and buggy piece of software.

Good Girl 2.0 would maintain its signature features: trying to be kind, compassionate, reliable, helpful, and thoughtful. 

However, while these are integral parts of the Good Girl programming, they need to not be automatic functions in Good Girl 2.0.  Perhaps the new interface should have a series of pop-up dialog boxes: "Are you sure you want to say yes to that request?"  "Does what you're about to say reflect what you actually feel?" "Can you tolerate disappointing or angering this person?  Because it's OK if you do." 

That last one's tough, since Good Girl 1.0 has a tendency to crash if she thinks someone is mad at her.  And she's also worried that her niceness is an effective whitewash to hide her incompetence, so that without it she'll be revealed for the fraud she is.  Or perhaps the better analogy would be to liken niceness to a bunker:  "If I'm nice [or cooperative, or silent, or invisible], people won't hurt me."

How do you beta-test a new attitude? 

Well, one way is graphically.  Here's how I'm reframing the "fluttering birds" comment:

Any good student of fairy tales knows that in many older variants, the heroine isn't always sweet and docile.  Often, she's wily and intelligent--a trickster.  She often plays into the villain's idea that she's naive and powerless specifically to put herself in a more powerful position.  Folklore reminds us that there's always been a subversive element to good-girl behavior; in Good Girl 2.0, I think that feature needs to be more robust. 

But here's the thing: it's not about the program's interface.  It's about being more user-friendly--the user being me.  In short, I don't necessarily have to change how I respond to things, but where I respond to them from.  If the response comes from that automatic, Good Girl 1.0 place, then it's likely based in fear, or shame.  The 2.0 response might might look the same to another person, but feels entirely different to me because it comes more directly from my feeling in the moment.

Cinderella may still be smiling, but she's not doing it because she feels like she has to.

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Helicopter attack, part 2

Regular readers might recall a post from about a year and a half ago about an encounter that I had with a  helicopter dad who came in to the advising office with his daughter, and the family drama that ensued.

Flash forward to today.  First day of spring semester, and I'm in my usual two-hour Monday afternoon shift doing advising.  It's very quiet--too quiet--for the first day, which probably should have been my first clue that some fresh hell was about to break loose.  I only had one scheduled appointment, at 3:30.

Around 3:15, a middle-aged guy sticks his head in the door, and asks if I can meet with him.  He looks familiar--I've met him before, I know he's been in the office before, but I can't place him until he says he's here to talk about his daughter's schedule.  But she's nowhere to be seen, and he has to call her several times before she finally answers and shows up in the office.  Oh yes: it's that family again.  And Mom's along this time, too. 

The student herself?  As soon as she plops into the chair, she whips out her phone and starts texting.  As the dad starts asking me questions about what classes she needs, I turn to her to get her input, and she's totally tuned out, texting away and clearly expecting mom and dad to do the heavy lifting.

The long and short of it is that the student is expecting to graduate this semester, but she's forgotten to enroll in the last class she needs, and got a D in another required course last semester, which means she'll have to repeat it and get a C or better. 

I could go on and on about the drama, part 2.  I'll spare you the details, and just say that it was very clear that the dad knew the requirements for the English major inside out, and the daughter not at all.  When the student bothered to put the phone down, it was to make snarky, petulant comments about how she didn't care what was required; she just wanted to finish and graduate. 

As before, I was mad at myself for not being more assertive--since, of course, this all took far longer than 15 minutes, leaving the poor guy who had actually scheduled an appointment sitting in the hallway. 

In my dream world, I would have channeled my maternal grandmother and said something snappy like "Young lady, this is your future we're discussing here, and you need to pay attention."  And maybe say something similar to the parents, like, "Tiffany Sue [not her real name] is the person who needs to make these decisions; why don't you wait outside?"

But of course, none of that happened. 

What really strikes me this time around is that this student is a graduating senior.  Presumably, she's on the brink of adulthood and independence.  But there's no evidence that that's even within the realm of possibility for her. 

Even more than feeling angry, the encounter left me feeling sad, and bewildered.  It seems like this child has been permanently damaged by her parents' concern.  And it strikes me as pathetic that any college senior could be OK with having her parents schedule her classes and generally organizing her life for her, much less seemingly expecting them to do it, and behaving as if she couldn't be bothered to worry about such trivial concerns.  Had it even crossed my mind to ask my parents for that kind of assistance, I would have been utterly humiliated to do so.

I just don't get it.

Is being a grown-up that unattractive to this young woman?  Or is it that it's just so, so much easier to keep doing the same old thing?  It just seems to me that by the time you were 21, you'd be tired of behaving like you're 16.  And that you'd want to feel like you were capable of managing your own life (whether you were or not). 

Damn, she didn't even show as much initiative as Veruca Salt.  At least Veruca always knew what she wanted, and asked for it by name.

Sigh.  And so begins another semester...

What a long, strange trip it's been

In tenure-file hell (thanks to Cath Gouge for the photo!)

A few days ago, Romantoes marked its four-year anniversary.  Our inaugural post focused on the end of our first semester here at West Virginia University, after Tom and I both ditched tenured jobs in Colorado to move back east.

Yesterday, I turned in my tenure crate.  Yes, crate.

Don't let appearances fool you--that's not just any plastic milk crate, but the College of Arts & Sciences "official container," as the e-mail from our Department admin described it.  And, indeed, it has stickers all over it identifying where it came from, and who it's to be returned to. 

Because I'd gotten tenure at my previous university, I figured it'd be no sweat to be untenured again.  To some degree, that was true: it was certainly less of a scramble to figure out how to juggle the teaching, research, and service parts of the job.  And I was largely unfazed by a lot of bureaucratic snafus that might otherwise have derailed me.

But in other ways, the experience of being untenured was much the same.  I've worried about making some huge mistake that would cost me my job.  I've been paranoid about whether people think that hiring me was a bad idea.  I've compared my own productivity unfavorably with pretty much everyone else on campus.

The tenure file itself, as you can see, is a monster.  We're required to include all of the materials that were in our past annual evaluation files, but they need to be disassembled, reorganized chronologically, and re-numbered and re-inventoried.  That part of the process nearly drove me mad, and I'm actually the kind of person who loves organizing stuff; I mean, one of the perks of this scheme was that it gave me an excuse to wander the aisles of Office Depot, debating the relative merits of reinforced hanging folders versus expandable ones.

At the end of last week, this is what my desk looked like.

Yes, I'd arranged everything into piles for each section that conveniently spelled out the word "PARTS":  "Preliminary" materials, "Administrative" materials, "Research," "Teaching," and "Service."  Clearly, I'd gone round the twist, as the Brits say.  I can't tell you how many people stopped in my doorway to laugh at me.  (This is one of the downsides of having an office located directly across from the first-floor women's restroom.)

But at any rate, I finally got everything printed out, numbered, inventoried, put in its correctly labeled folder, and transferred into the crate.  And then I hefted that bad boy down to the office and officially let it go. 

And you know what?  I knew I'd feel relieved, but I figured I'd just feel relieved in the same way you feel relieved when any big project is over.  After all, I'd gone through this before, right?  So it's not like it's a novel experience. 

But the thing is, turning that file in felt very different this time.  It felt not like an ending, but like a beginning.  In many ways, it felt like I was emerging from a four-year purgatory.  Seriously.  I don't think I comprehended just how tentative my position has felt for the past four years until I reviewed it, articulated it, packed it into that crate, and sent it off to someone else to evaluate.  All day today I've had a sense of placid liberation. 

I'm sure the anxiety will rear its ugly head again eventually, as I await the decision of the Chair and the faculty evaluation committee.  But anxiety is absolutely what I don't feel at the moment.  The word that springs to mind, oddly, is "sanctified," though for the life of me I don't think I could explain why. 

At Northern Colorado, after a couple of folks in our department got tenure, a colleague bought them a congratulatory cake that said "Greeley Forever."  Everyone laughed, and grimaced, and knew that inscription was half joke, half grim reality.  It was one of the many moments that led me to question the sacred cow that is tenure: why work so hard to get it if you assume it means you're stuck in a place and a job that you don't like?

Looking back on this blog's first entry from the vantage point of having just applied for tenure again, I'm happy to report that the sense of trepidation that comes through in that first post is gone, while the sense of wonder and pleasure about being here has only grown.  Here's to taking the leap.

Teaching 9/11

Today I was down at the local high school for which I'm the faculty liaison to observe three of our student teachers.

About five minutes into the first class, around 9:35 or so, the PA came on and a student's voice said, "At 9:37 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, D. C.  At the same time, hijackers had taken over Flight 93 and turned around to head for Washington."  Similar announcements kept up throughout the period, recounting what was happening at that particular time on September 11th, and then asking for a moment of silence to remember the victims.

It was surreal to be sitting in a ninth-grade algebra class learning about the order of operations and then to periodically get these harrowing interruptions.

In the third class I observed, a ninth-grade below-level English class, the student teacher addressed the topic directly.  She grew up in New Jersey, and her school was directly across from the city, with a full view of the skyline and the Towers.  When the first plane hit, her teacher took all the kids outside to see it, telling them, "You're witnessing history right now."  And then the first Tower fell.  The student, who was twelve at the time, remembered that she was wearing a yellow shirt and jean shorts, and that she was standing next to a kid named Robert, and that she grabbed his arm when the Tower came down.

Immediately, the teacher whisked all the kids back into the school, where they spent the rest of the day scared and confused as the teachers debated whether to tell them what had happened or not, since so many of the kids had parents who worked in the city.

It was an incredibly moving story, and the students in the class--most of whom have some kind of intellectual or developmental disability--were totally tuned in.  What did she feel when she saw the Towers fall?  Did she cry?  Did she know anyone who died?

The student teacher followed up her presentation with a writing assignment, asking students to write ten sentences in response to several prompts she offered.  The last two were "Name something you're proud of about our country" and "Describe what you can do to show your patriotism."

I cringed.

I understand that she was close to the events.

I understand that she saw the Tower fall with her own, 12-year-old eyes.

I understand that this is an important anniversary, and probably even more so for her for reasons I can't fathom.


Is it, therefore, petty and selfish and insensitive of me to critique her lesson, or at the very least, the focus of the writing assignment that followed it?

We need to talk about, and teach 9/11.  But must we do so, even ten years on, in a way that romanticizes the events of that day, ignores all that has followed, and paints a portrait of national unity that frankly wasn't true even at the time?  She said, in her presentation, that 9/11 brought Americans closer together and created unity.  Not for everyone, everywhere.

I couldn't help but feel like I had just witnessed the way history gets flattened for K-12 consumption.

In my observation report, I focused on her interaction with students and said I was glad to hear her story.  And I suggested that if she were to teach the lesson again, she might want to consider other points of view--especially if she has students in the class who are Muslim, or of middle-eastern heritage.

It was all I could say without going crazy.  Unfortunately, she had a class the very next period, so all I could do was hand her the paperwork and tell her to e-mail me if she had questions or wanted to meet to discuss things more fully.

"Was it OK?" she asked, looking a little anxious.  She was only concerned with how the lesson had gone, whether she was going to be a good teacher.  I learned from the lead teacher later that this particular student has had some problems with asertiveness and self confidence.  I worried that the fact that I'd critiqued her lesson and then dumped the paperwork on her and ran from the room would do more harm than good.

I came home and wrote her an e-mail, which I'll probably never send.  She doesn't need to know all of this, but I need to say it, so you--my dear, long-suffering blog readers--get to be the audience for it.  So I'll apologize to you, too:

Hi [Student]--

I wanted to send a follow-up e-mail about the observation sheet...I wish we'd had time to discuss it in person, and I felt bad about just leaving it there with you without putting things in context.

The story about your own 9/11 experience was, as I wrote, riveting, and meant a lot to me and to those students to hear. I was living in Colorado at the time, so the events were still horrifying, but seemed distant in a way, too.  One of the things that's been interesting (and scary) about being back east is learning how much more directly people here were affected by the events. 

So--I don't want you to think that I had a problem with the topic or how you handled it.  I guess my concern had more to do with the issue of balance.  To be sure, we need to remember the victims (who were from 100+ different countries, as one of the FSHS announcements said!), and we need to honor the heroes.  But I think it's also important not to forget the ugliness and divisiveness that followed.  Muslims, and people who looked "Arabic" generally, were attacked in the streets.  People sent hate- and vengeance-filled e-mails.  Some people were rallying for war, others for peace.  Rather than using this experience to empathize with others in the world who live and have lived with terrorism on a much more regular basis, some people became insular and reactionary.

As I wrote, I know this is an important anniversary and that you may never have the opportunity (or desire!) to teach it again, which is why I hesitated to say anything about it.  But in a larger sense, I do feel like--as educators--we're especially obligated to present all sides of an issue, especially one that's so potentially controversial and divisive.

Did you see the audio stories that WVU posted for the anniversary?  The one at the very bottom, by a student from Pakistan who was in Morgantown on 9/11, is especially moving, and gives a different side of the story.

Anyway, I apologize for harping on this.  I guess, on some level, I'm trying to make sense of what the anniversary means, too.  I had to teach on the afternoon of 9/11, and I remember struggling to know how to handle the situation. In the end, I went into class and just asked the students what they wanted to do:  talk about it, or just press on with the lesson for that day?  Overwhelmingly, they said to press on--so I did.  I guess I've spent the last decade trying to figure out whether I did the right thing, and where my own reaction to such an event ends and my responsibilities as a teacher begin. 

Again, I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to talk about this in person.  And I apologize if this seems like I'm unloading on you--I don't mean to; I just wanted to to explain why my comments may have seemed weird or cryptic!  The lesson itself was fine, and you did a great job of drawing the students in and then helping them individually with their work.

Don't you wish you'd been teaching Algebra today, too???  :)

Sigh.  I guess this proves one of the maxims of WVU's teacher-education program, which is that "the teacher is a self-reflective practitioner."   What it doesn't say is how uncomfortable and complicated being self-reflective is.

One of the ways I myself have taught 9/11 over the years is with the "e-lore" that I collected at the time and archived.  I often have students in my folklore classes look at the archive so we can talk about how folklore has adapted for electronic transmission.  But it also provides a disturbing insight into the informal ways that people were channeling the fear and uncertainty they felt at the time.

Today, I thought:  thank god I kept that stuff, because otherwise, maybe no one would believe that's part of the history, too.

Teacher Appreciation Day 2011

Colson Hall, home of the WVU English Department

True confession:  when I first started working with English-education majors years ago,  I openly scoffed at those who said they wanted to be teachers because they just loved kids so much! 

(Although not as much as I scoffed at those who said they wanted to be teachers so they could be home when their kids got back from school, or because they wanted to have their summers off.  Dream on, folks!)

This semester I've heard a lot of buzz about "teacher dispositions" in meetings at the college of education.  That's a fancy, euphemistic way of describing whether a student in the teacher-ed program has the personality, perseverance, sensitivity, tolerance, and sheer nerve that it takes to survive and thrive in the classroom. 

A few days after my first-grade teacher died in March, I ran into a friend from the college of ed, and we talked about how some people are just born to teach.  Even if they didn't have the official title "teacher," that's what they'd be doing in whatever setting they found themselves in.  Malayna and I agreed that in many ways, the idea of "training" teachers seems absurd.

Sure, anyone wanting to teach needs as much content knowledge in their discipline as they can get, and also needs to love learning generally in order to convey that enthusiasm to others and to keep up-to-date in their field.  In terms of practice, though, while there may be specific tools and skills to be learned and refined, the idea of "training" teachers renders what is at its best an art into something numbingly mechanical.

And my own reaction to the passing of Molly Davis made me reconsider whether "love" really is all you need to be a good teacher.

While I recall some of the knowledge I acquired in her classroom, what I remember most is how she made me and all her other students feel:  Noticed.  Cherished. Nurtured.  And yes, loved.  As I told several folks, after hearing of her death, I felt like I'd lost another of those very few adults who loved you unconditionally as a child.  Without that deep feeling of acceptance, would I have learned as much?  Of course not.  And for sure, having an adult who was passionate and excited about what she was teaching, and who never doubted that we'd be just as excited about it, was the best incentive for learning imaginable.

Now, I'm still enough of a realist (or a snob, depending on your perspective) to know that love ain't all that teachers need to succeed.  Teachers still need "training," but there is, undoubtedly, an intangible, essential quality that the best ones bring to the job.

So maybe what we need is a different, more specific term than "love."

Jane calls it "school love."

For lack of a better term, I might call it faith.  I really think that to be a successful teacher, you have to have a core belief that what you do matters, that all students can learn, and that education is the key to enlightenment and opportunity.  Which is not to say that teachers won't have crises of that faith.  And certainly, there will be many experiences, and students, and administrators (especially administrators!) that will regularly challenge that faith. 

In the weeks after Molly's death, I heard a couple of songs that seemed apt, not just for her, but for all the other hardworking teachers out there. This one by Earth, Wind and Fire especially caught my ear with its opening lyrics:

Through devotion, blessed are the children
Praise the teachers that bring true love to many.
Your devotion opens all life's treasures
and deliverance from the fruits of evil.

So on this Teacher Appreciation Day, let's praise our devoted teachers, and help them keep the faith.

(Oh, and if you're in Ohio, you might consider signing the petition against Senate Bill 5 being circulated by the group We Are Ohio.)

Her price is far above rubies

Lavish salaries and benefit packages, work days that end at 2:30, summers off...man, those teachers sure are living the good life, at least according to some conservative pundits.

But this is not a blog about them.

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, in September of 1971, a beautiful fairy princess walked into a first-grade classroom in Bexley, Ohio.  She spent a full year working her magic on the twenty-nine children in the class.

Years later they would be astonished at how much they remembered about that magical year:  Amos pounding out the opening chords of Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World" on the classroom piano and belting the opening line, "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog!". Singing "Sweet Gingerbread Man" for a holiday program and receiving personalized styrofoam gingerbread men as gifts. Mounting a presidential campaign for classmate Michael Meckler. 

Here's the non-fairytale part of the story:  our princess was killed in a car accident last week, just a couple months shy of retiring after forty years of teaching.

Even the collective wish-making of those former first-graders and of the hundreds of other students who'd been touched by her magic couldn't bring the fairy princess back to life.

On the other hand, the tributes to Molly Palsgrove Davis that have poured forth since are a testimony to the paradox that even in death, she lives on.  Here are just a few examples gleaned from comments on Facebook and entries in the Columbus Dispatch's online guest book:

She was as inspirational a teacher as I have ever encountered, from "Dick and Jane" to the 5th grade Soul Train parade around the room with Michael Kaplan on the pencil microphone. How lucky some of us were to have her twice! I still hang my gingerbread man on the tree every Christmas. 

I had her for a couple of classes in fifth grade, and would've sworn I was one of her favorite students.  Reading other people's comments, though, it's clear she made every child feel that way.

One of my favorite memories of her class was when she brought in a basketball with these huge hand prints outlined in black marker. Those hand prints were from none other than Dr. J. She was a terrific teacher and person, and I am saddened, as are many of my classmates, to learn of her passing.

Miss Palsgrove was my 5th grade teacher in 1983. She will be deeply missed by all of us and especially for her great laugh, loving smile and her huge hugs of encouragement. I still have the Palsgrove Cookbook that we made and smile every time I read it to my children!

Miss Palsgrove was the finest teacher I met. She was also one of the finest persons I've ever met. She came into my life when I was a fourth grader (1974) and deeply encouraged me to higher heights. She was one of those persons who are simply indispensible. God doesn't create enough Mollys. Thank God for her. All my love and sympathy to the family--she is being missed by whoever knew her. 

Miss Palsgrove was the teacher one never forgets. Her enthusiasm for education and life was infectious. Fond memories of her striped knee socks, and learning “the Hustle” in her classroom will always be cherished. She inspired me when I was 11 and has continued to do so for another 34 years.

Miss Palsgrove was one of my favorite teachers ever. I remember her argyle kneesocks, sunny disposition, and genuine interest in her students.

I entered her classroom a painfully shy child who was struggling with a learning disability, and she took me under her wing. She encouraged me to speak up in class, even if I didn't know the answers. And she created a special "secret" signal for me: I'd tickle my nose when I needed something repeated, and she would happily oblige.

Molly Davis was a gift to all of us. My daughter, Haley, is in her 2010-2011 5th Grade class. Haley has truly blossomed in Molly's classroom and under Molly's care. Molly was a wonderfully bright light that touched all of us. Her smile, her warmth and her one-of-a-kind hugs will always be remembered. 

I, too, remember the wild socks (toe socks, with each toe a different color), the dancing (to the Osmonds' "Down By the Lazy River"), and the music (I can't hear that Three Dog Night song without thinking of her...and Amos).

Like all well-crafted stories, this one has a couple of ironic and bittersweet twists.  On March 15, the day she died, Molly hosted her annual luncheon for her former 5th grade students who are currently high-school seniors.  And on that same day, the Superintendent of the Bexley City Schools received her official resignation letter, which he was to read at a special school board meeting on March 17th.  Instead, it ended up being read the following evening at a candlelight vigil in Molly's honor.

I wasn't there, but a friend forwarded the text of the letter to me.  It is so quintessentially "Miss Palsgrove," and I am so happy that she was able to leave us these words:

March 17, 2011

Dear Bexley Board of Education, Dr. Johnson, and Barb Heisel,

It is with a fulfilling sense of accomplishment and completion that I write this letter.

1971:  Having completed all my college course work, I was "waiting around" to graduate from Capital University.  Bexley City Schools hired me as a "teacher aide" for Cassingham School and Bexley Junior High.  I was hired with the understanding that in "the fall" I would begin my career as a teacher.  That's right.  Bexley hired me before I graduated from college. I graduated that spring with my Bachelor of Science Degree in Education, Summa Cum Laude.

I taught twenty-nine first graders my first year of teaching.  I loved my boys and girls.  It was such a special, magical year, even though I had student taught in fourth grade and had wanted an intermediate teaching position.  At the end of that school year, my sister, who was also a Cassingham teacher, and I did the unthinkable.  We left the Bexley City Schools. I treasure my three years at Edwards Elementary in the Groveport-Madison School District. I taught fourth grade and had thirteen students my first year there. It had a Little House on the Prairie feel to it.

At the end of my third year at Edwards, I received a call from Mrs. Beebe, Cassingham's Assistant Principal.  She wanted me back.  My sister had been rehired, and now it was my turn.  Did I want a fourth grade or a fifth grade?  I chose fifth because it would be a new experience for me.  I loved American history and could now teach it, and I would get to teach my first graders again in fifth grade after having been gone for three years!  That was 1975, and grade five was the perfect fit.  I had found my niche.  For thirty-six years I would be teaching fifth graders at Cassingham Elementary School.

After working hard at The Ohio State University, I received my Masters Degree in Early and Middle Childhood. (After that I continued my education, earning forty-nine more semester hours.) In 1983 my first/fifth graders graduated from Bexley High School. That started my "reunions." In 1983, with braces on my teeth, I got married and was honored by being named Bexley's "Outstanding Young Educator of the Year" and the 1984 "Ohio Teacher of the Year."

In reflecting upon my years of teaching fifth grade at Cassingham, I feel blessed. Because of teaching in departmentalized and team-teaching situations as well as the self-contained classroom, I have taught over fifteen hundred students. For the students in my homerooms, I will forever call them my own.

Now it is time to close this chapter of my life. There will be tears of sadness and tears of joy.   One of my favorite celebrations is sure to be on June 12th of this year when my first/fifth graders are throwing a reunion party for me.  How perfect.  How heart-warming. They were there from the beginning--and now the end.

Again I say it is with a fulfilling sense of accomplishment and completion that I write this letter.  (And did I mention the smile on my face?), I, Molly Lou (Palsgrove) Davis, do hereby give notification of my resignation as a Bexley school teacher to take effect at the end of this school year, 2010-2011. My first official day of retirement will be July 1, 2011. Thank you so much, and may God bless you.

Truly yours,

Molly Davis

I was moved to tears to read Molly's words about the specialness of our first-grade class, and her observation about how our June gathering would provide the perfect matching "bookend" to her long and distinguished career.

And it made me realize how she, too, had "bookended" my entire elementary school experience.  I had her as my teacher in first grade, then again in fifth grade, and in sixth grade one of my teachers was Molly's equally gifted and loving sister, Mary McMullen.   How blessed I was, and am, to have had that warm, enveloping web of connection and compassion throughout my primary years.   

To those who say that public-school teachers are underworked and overpaid:  I pity you, because you clearly never felt the deep caring of a teacher as beloved and inspirational as Molly Palsgrove Davis or Mary McMullen.  You never knew the unconditional love of a teacher who nurtured you not just as a learner, but as a human being. 

There are many other gifted teachers out there who are up before dawn, working well beyond 2:30, earning a fraction of the salary of CEOs and bankers.  Those teachers earn every penny of their "lavish salaries."  Their real price is far above rubies.

See an earlier post about Miss Palsgrove, and other memorable teachers, here.  And yes, the photo at the top was taken earlier this school year, when she was 60.  Clearly, teaching was good to her, too.

TMI

I'm used to virtual strangers telling me their sad tales.  I just have "one of those faces," for good or ill, that makes people (especially crazy, lonely, or troubled people) feel safe.  Most of the time I try to think of this as a good thing, particularly in the classroom.  But for some reason this semester I've been hearing way too much, and in way more detail than I need, from some of my students.

It's the end of week 4, and so far I've heard about

• One student's diagnosis with stage 2 cervical cancer and the surgery to remove her cervix;
• Another student's aunt's brain tumor, and the surgery to remove it;
• Another's HIV test scare;
• Another's cramps, and how they kept her from participating in class discussion.

There was at least one other person with a family member having surgery, and another who told me she'd be missing class because of some sort of medical emergency.  Frankly, I appreciated the vagary of those two excuses.

And it's not just in person.  Here's an excerpt from a recent student e-mail:

I was the girl that had the busted eardrum. Anyways, I just got back from the emergency room because my ear started bleeding out again. I'm concerning you with this because I have to go to the ENT's (Ear, Nose, and Throat Doctors) tomorrow at 9:30am, so they can figure out what the next step is to do with this because this isn't supposed to happen. I was there last Friday for it and they gave me the antibiotics and ear drops to heal the infection in my eardrum and behind it, because when my eardrum actually busted they didn't catch it at Student Health. So, by the time I made it to the ENT's after that the first time my eardrum had already healed, BUT with the infection still in my eardrum and behind it. Therefore, I _might_ miss your class tomorrow.

Why, oh why, can't students use that specificity of detail in their papers?

And just this morning, a student came to drop off her paper and to let me know that she wouldn't be in class because she's got bronchitis.  Suddenly she started taking off her jacket and rolling up her sleeve, saying, "Look where they put the IV!  Why would they use that vein?" 

Now, I'm used to hearing such things occasionally throughout a semester.  And I know that some students worry that if they don't tell you the gory details of their illness, you may not believe they were actually sick.  But this semester, I've heard something like this literally Every.  Single.  Day.

Here's my theory about what's going on:  gray hair.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I've been coloring my hair for years.  Last summer I decided to try to grow the color out, partly because it was starting to feel dishonest, partly because it was damaging my hair, and partly because I was just curious as to how much gray there was.  It seemed like a good time to do it, since I wasn't teaching in the fall, and wouldn't have an audience for the really awkward two-tone phase.

So, this is the first time I've ever been in the classroom as a gray-haired, middle-aged woman, who's visibly the age of my students' mothers.  I honestly think that this sudden surge of confessional stuff, especially around health issues, is due to the fact that I look like I care.  Or like I have to care, because I'm the right age, the right sex, the right hair shade.

I'm half tempted to dye it again just to stem the tide of TMI. 


But then I might miss the occasional gem, like the student who told me that she'd missed class because she'd been taking Nyquil for a cold and didn't know that it would make her sleepy.   She just couldn't figure out why she was so tired all the time until someone explained to her that, well, you're only supposed to take Nyquil at night. 

It gets better

Me and Jay in a window of our high school, 1982.

In the wake of the recent spate of suicides by gay teens and young adults who'd been bullied, harassed, and tormented because of their sexual identities, advice-columnist Dan Savage has started a YouTube project called "It Gets Better."

The project's goal is to help LGBT teens know that however bad things are at the moment, that isn't going to be a permanent state...they can and should live to see a time in their lives when they can be themselves, and be accepted for who they are.

James Black has written very cogently about the irony of Dan Savage taking up this cause, since Savage apparently has some bullying tendencies himself.

The point that James touches on, and that I hope isn't lost in the movement, is that it's not always kids doing the bullying. 

One of my best friends all through school growing up came out after we started college.  That wasn't much of a surprise to anybody, but of course that doesn't make it any easier for someone to come out.  And for years he had been bullied, harassed, and tormented about being gay...but importantly, not ever, to my knowledge, by his peers.

In many ways I think he'd escaped that kind of treatment by other kids because he was just so damned charming and funny.  I mean, he was truly the funniest person I have ever known.  He was witty, punny, and could stage some of the best practical jokes imaginable with the straightest of faces.  He was also incredibly smart, musically gifted, and genuinely gregarious.  I really credit him for making my own time in high school as easy as it was--somehow, he single-handedly made it cool to be a nerd.

So who was doing the bullying?  Teachers.

I remember sitting in chemistry class my junior year when suddenly the door flew open and Coach Click came in, rolling Jay in front of him in a ball cage from the gym.  He'd apparently stuffed Jay in the empty cage, locked it, put it on the service elevator to the third floor, and proceeded to wheel Jay around from room to room.  (I should mention that Jay was a pretty small guy--probably only about 5' 3" in shoes, and very slight.  Hence, his ability to fit into a 3 x 3 ball cage.)  Jay characteristically laughed it off, I'm sure because he knew that not to would open the floodgates for others to pounce.

The year before that, Jay and I were in the same gym class.  The teacher, whom I've written about here before, was a nasty, sexist piece of work.  During the winter, he often closed the partition wall between the two halves of the gym and put the girls on one side and the boys on the other to play half-court basketball.  Needless to say, he generally stayed on the boys' side and ignored the girls altogether (which was fine with most of us, who weren't that enthused about basketball to begin with).

On one of those days, several minutes after pulling the dividing wall into place, the little door in the partition opened, and Mr. Speciale thrust Jay through, telling him to "Go play with the girls."

Even writing about that now, I find myself breathing faster, my muscles tensing up for a fight.

We need to remember that it's not always kids who are the bullies.  Adults--teachers--can be bullies, too.  And when they're doing the bullying, kids are even more powerless.  After all, aren't your teachers, your coaches, supposed to be the ones looking out for you?  When those alleged allies become the enemy, is it any wonder that kids despair?

Jay didn't kill himself.  At least, not directly.  But he did die of complications of AIDS three years after we graduated.  He died the summer before he was supposed to start his senior year at Cornell, a couple months after he'd returned from a semester abroad in Florence, where he was studying art history.

It's hard for me, even now--some twenty-four years after his death--not to blame it, on some level, on adult bullies like the "coach" and the "teacher."

Realistically, I know that Jay struggled with his sexual identity throughout high school, and couldn't be open about it for a whole lot of reasons that went far beyond the fear of proving those two right, or of inviting more harassment.  And I've resigned myself to the sad fact that it was just pure dumb-ass luck that Jay was becoming sexually active right at the moment when HIV was spreading like wildfire and there was no known treatment for it.

But still, part of me has always, always wondered:  if we'd lived in a world where it was OK for LGBT teens to be honest with themselves and others, would he have died?  Did he get infected because he had to seek out the answers to his questions surreptitiously, with strangers?

The hell of it is that Jay knew it got better.  It was better.  He loved his life, and had loved it all along.  But that life was still cut tragically short because of the stigma attached to his sexual identity.

The last picture of us together, taken about six months before Jay died.

I still miss him like crazy.  And I'd still like to kick Coach Click and Mr. Speciale in the teeth for what they did to him, and moreover for the message they sent to their colleagues and to students that it's all right for adults to behave in those ways.  Cool, funny even.

When the pre-service teachers in my classes start complaining about how kids don't respect teachers these days, and how much better it used to be in the "good old days" when teachers' authority was unquestioned, I remind them that a lot of teachers abused that authority in heinous ways, and were very seldom called on their abuse.  It astonishes me now to think about it, but at the time neither Jay nor any of us thought to report those incidents to another teacher, or to the principal, or to our parents.  That shit just happened.

So, that's my addendum to the anti-bullying campaign:  Bear in mind that bullies come in many forms, and some of them are full-grown monsters.  They're the ones who most deserve to be called on the carpet.  Don't be afraid to tell someone if it's an adult who's bullying you.  And if the first person you tell doesn't do anything to help, go to someone else and keep talking until someone does help.  Someone eventually will. And it does get better. 

Jay as I will always remember him best:  laughing his @$$ off.

The telephone is ringing--is that my mother on the phone?*

This morning I had another one of those moments that makes me feel middle aged...and glad of it.

I took the PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) over to the Evansdale campus for a meeting.  For those unfamiliar with the PRT, it's a sort of monorail system with unmanned cars that shuttle to and from five different stations around Morgantown.  They hold about 12 people total, and are usually populated by undergrads going back and forth from classes on the downtown campus and the dorms on the Evansdale campus.

It's always interesting to ride the PRT early in fall semester, since the vast majority of dorm-dwellers at WVU are freshmen, and thus most of the PRT riders are freshmen as well.

One of the many things WVU freshmen have to get acculturated to is the etiquette of the PRT:  sit or stand?  Are you allowed to interject into someone else's conversation, since you're standing six inches away from them, or are you supposed to pretend you're not listening?  And can you talk on your cell phone or not?  Even students who might have had some kind of big-city subway experience aren't sure whether the standard subway-rider etiquette applies, since your fellow riders aren't necessarily complete strangers, even if they are at the moment.

This morning, as the lone non-student in the car**, I noted that most of my very young-looking fellow riders still seemed a little uncomfortable.  It was a quiet ride, though in a few weeks I'll undoubtedly be overhearing the usual conversations about annoying roommates and neighbors, amusing drunken exploits, and football football football.

What I really noticed, though, was that to a person, every student had a cell phone clutched in one hand, except for the lone guy who was eating a snow cone.  At 9:30 in the morning.  I love that guy.

It being week two, no one was using their cell phone during the trip.  But despite the fact that they all had backpacks or pockets where they could stow said phones, they held on to them as if letting go would somehow disconnect them from the life force itself.  It reminded me of the way my nephew clings to the TV remote:  try to wrest it from him when he's asleep and he'll wake up instantly and look at you as if he'd caught you preparing to murder him.

As I looked on this scene, I wondered where my own cell phone was.  In the outside pocket of my bookbag, where it sometimes lives?  No, I thought:  it's at home, in my purse, turned off.  And my iPod Touch is on the nightstand, recharging.

I was unplugged, and not only was I OK with that, I prefer being unreachable much of the time.

Of course, I'm not accustomed to being plugged in 24/7 like this generation of students is.  I've often thought that my own freshman year might have been a lot less traumatic if e-mail, the web, and cell phones were available then.

After my experience with the helicopter dad last week, a number of friends on Facebook shared their experiences detaching from their parents when they left for college, most of which fell along the lines of Lynn and Heather's experiences:

"My parents said goodbye, hugged me, and then I got on the plane."

"I left for college on a train with a suitcase, a small trunk, and an airline carry-on containing a small terrarium with a lizard.  I did not suffer unduly."

For me, the scariest thing when my parents left me at college was knowing that I had no way of getting ahold of them for days:  they were driving back to Ohio, and of course they didn't have a cell phone, or phone numbers for places they'd be staying. And aside from the pay phone in the dorm, I didn't have a phone, either.   I suppose if I did, I'd probably have been clutching it like my life depended on it, too.

The irony is that the potential to be in immediate, constant contact doesn't seem to have diminished either students' or parents' anxieties.  In fact, the New York Times recently featured a story about colleges that have instituted formal "parting ceremonies" to ease the transition.

I don't have kids.  I won't presume to understand what it must be like when they leave the nest.  But I will say that I do wonder whether that acculturation process would be quicker, and healthier, if students were a little more unplugged from their past, and a little more plugged into the present. 

But then again, one of the great personal challenges of college is figuring out how to link your past with your present, and eventually with your future.  It takes a long time to discover, as my friend Becky wrote in a song lyric once, that "who you are now will depend on the people you've been."

In the end, though, I guess I'm glad I went to college during the technological stone age.  Yeah, all those tools might have made things easier at the time, but then I would never have all the letters from that time, all the evidence of the person I was then.  After all, I still depend on her now.   No cell-phone call record could capture her essence so well.


* If you know the song whose lyrics inspired the title of this post, then you went to college during the stone age, too.

** Which is pretty typical:  faculty and staff seem to be even less willing to rely on public transportation than the students.

Teacher Appreciation Week

The national PTA has designated May 2-8 as Teacher Appreciation Week, and with each passing year I come to appreciate teachers more and more. My classes are largely composed of preservice teachers, and part of my job is to serve as the university's liaison to a local high school. So I see how much teachers these days are expected to juggle, and I am regularly humbled by how much work they do, under so many constraints and demands, with such inspiration and determination. Frankly, I wouldn't last a week.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend that turned toward stories about former teachers, and I said that I felt increasingly lucky and grateful that I can only think of one truly awful teacher I had in elementary school. My friend looked astonished, and after a pause, said, "You don't know how lucky that is." There were several real clunkers in high school, but by that point you're not spending all day every day with a single teacher, and you generally have like-minded friends to compare notes with and provide some perspective.

So, I thought I'd take a moment to publicly thank some of the teachers I've had who inspired me, nurtured me, challenged me, and generally did their jobs well (and, I imagine, with very little thanks).

First up is my first-grade teacher, Molly Palsgrove (later Molly Davis). She was fresh out of college and we were her first class, though you'd never have known that by the grace, intelligence, and gentle authority she showed in the classroom.

I still remember learning the "McDonald's is your kind of place/They serve you rattlesnakes" song from her, and recall the mock presidential election we held (to parallel the McGovern/Nixon race), with classmate Michael Meckler as our candidate. (For the record, I still think Meckler '72 was probably the strongest ticket.)

When our class entered fifth grade, Miss Palsgrove switched to teaching that grade, so many of us had the pleasure of having her again. That year, she taught us a dance to The Osmonds' "Down By the Lazy River" that's still built into my muscle memory.

The year our class graduated from high school, Miss Palsgrove (by then Mrs. Davis) was named the Ohio Teacher of the Year. I went to visit her at Cassingham Elementary several years ago, and remarkably, she looked exactly the same, even in her 30-something-eth year of teaching. And she still interacted with students in the same loving, firm, but playful manner that she always had. I feel blessed that my public-school experience had such an auspicious beginning.

I was equally lucky in my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Arlene Robinson. More seasoned than Miss Palsgrove, she too had mastered that fine balance between rigor and compassion. She was a lover of language, and from her (and for her) I learned to write for pleasure. As I continued through elementary school, I would still put poems and stories in her mailbox, and she would return them to me with comments and encouragement.

There are many others: in high school, Mike Logsdon, the biology teacher I've written about here before stands out, as does Isobel Inglis, my French teacher. Not until college did I realize that pretty much everything I knew about European history, I learned from Miss Inglis--not in an actual history class. And I will always be grateful to Miss Bowling, my geometry teacher, for being the lone math teacher who didn't make me feel stupid.

Unfortunately, it's only in hindsight that we realize just how profoundly teachers influenced us. So, to all of these folks and the many others not named here, I say a very belated thank you. Then and now, you do what you do with little compensation and even less gratitude, and with far too much pressure and criticism.

Wherein Rosemary tears up her PhD and hires on at McDonald's

Part of my job at WVU is to work with our English-education majors, both in the classes I teach--especially the young-adult literature class--and out in the local schools where they're doing their observations and student teaching.

I love this aspect of my work, and in fact applied for the job here three years ago specifically to do more of this sort of thing, which I'd started doing at UNC when we were short an English-ed faculty member or two.  There are few things more rewarding than working with future teachers, and seeing (sometimes in scary ways) exactly how the content students learn in their English major gets filtered down to the high-school classroom.

And then, I come across something like this.  Perusing our SiteMeter stats for this week to see how people arrived at Romantoes, I learned that someone in Port Saint Lucie, Florida, found us by Googling "the advenchers of tom scourer who is the author."

You know, Tom Scourer, by Samyul Clemmunts, better known as Margt Wayne.  Sigh.

Juris(im)prudence

I was working at the dining-room table this morning when the doorbell rang; it was the mail carrier, who needed me to sign for a package. He handed me the rest of the mail and I flipped casually through it--the usual bills, junk mail, magazine-subscription renewal forms, and then...one thin white envelope, addressed by hand.

I had a fleeting moment of sheer pleasure--a real hand-written letter!--until I saw the return address: the Colorado Department of Corrections.

It was from a former student of mine--one of my favorite students from the university I used to teach at, actually--with whom I'd kept in touch for over a decade. I'll call him M.

M. had been in the very first folklore class I taught at my previous job, and was one of those people who develops an instant passion for the subject. At that point, he was a naive enough undergrad to ask me quite seriously as we were about to start on the folklore collection project whether one needed a license to do fieldwork. He was so earnest I couldn't even laugh. But it endeared him to me forever.

Over the years and long after he graduated, we kept up a steady e-mail correspondence. M. is one of those people who seems to get every joke, urban legend, and chain letter sent to him, and he faithfully forwarded them on to me, since--ironically--I'm not one of those people. We'd often write back and forth about the context in which he'd heard a joke, or the differences between one variant of a legend and another.

About four years ago, M. decided to go back to school to get his master's degree in education and get certificated to teach high-school English. I wrote him a gushing recommendation letter, and our correspondence widened to include discussions about English education. Always tech-savvy, M. was interested in the remarkable facility students had for code-switching back and forth between text language and standard English, and we had lots of interesting discussions about ways that might be incorporated into the classroom.

We lost touch for a year or two around the end of my time in Colorado and my move to West Virginia. Then a year or so ago a student here e-mailed me a legend that reminded me of one M. had sent me years ago, but with an interesting twist. I dug out M.'s e-mail address and forwarded it to him. I figured by this time, he'd have settled into a full-time teaching job somewhere, so I asked him how things were going and said that I had no doubt he was doing well, since he had so much promise as a teacher.

The message I got back left me stunned. The previous spring, a student on the cross-country team he coached accused him of sexual assault. He'd been summarily fired and brought up on criminal charges. It didn't look good, he told me.

I had no doubt then, and no doubt now, that M. did not commit the crime he was accused of. I know him well, and it is just out of the question. I wrote a letter to the judge in his case to vouch for M.'s charaacter, and to plead for leniency.

Over the last few months, I've heard from M. occasionally, and he steadfastly skirted the issue of how things were going. I know he was trying to protect others from his misery, but I felt anxious for him.

So. The letter today was from him. In it, he explained that his lawyer told him he'd be better off making a plea agreement than going to trial. Instead of granting leniency, the judge handed down the maximum sentence: 12 years in prison. Though he's eligible to be in a minimum-security facility, overcrowding in those places got him sent to a medium-security institution over three hours from Denver, so he has very few visitors. He's hoping his case will be reconsidered. He told me he plans to study prison lore as a way to stay focused.

I wanted to throw up when I finished reading. But I had to go in to work in the advising office, where a mopey-looking student told me he was sad because his favorite NFL team lost yesterday. I wanted to slap him upside the head. At least he could walk out the door into the blue brightness of a beautiful October afternoon. At least he'd been rejected from WVU's teacher-education program, so he'll never have to worry about his life being derailed, and his freedoms taken away, for something he didn't do.

Since the letter was addressed to Tom, too, I left it on the table. When I got home, Tom greeted me with the same look of shock and horror I'm sure was on my face after I read M.'s letter. We talked about how scary it is that everything can be taken away from you so suddenly, how quickly life can devolve into a total nightmare, and a lot of other things that will all sound too banal if I try to put them into words.

But I'll tell you: I feel sobered and cynical in a way I never thought possible--and I'm here on the outside.