My grandparents had a country house where we spent summers when I was a kid. I remember my grandfather, and sometimes my stepfather, standing in the kitchen doorway, aiming a rifle to kill the woodchucks that lived in the far corner of the field. I think this is what’s left of it.
After 14 student deaths, North Carolina State confronts a national crisis
While I am unaware of student suicides or deaths from any other causes on my campus, the point this article makes about a student mental health crisis hits home hard for me, especially now that the semester is ending. Almost 30 students, more than one full section’s worth of a composition class, have dropped my classes this semester, overwhelmingly because of some situation in their lives that prevented them from being able, emotionally and/or psychologically, to focus on the work they need to do. The most difficult part from my point of view is how many did not come talk to me because they didn’t want to be “that student” who was constantly making excuses. I know the difference between “that student” and the students I am talking about very well, and they do not deserve to have that image of themselves. There is a big difference, I tell them, between an excuse and an explanation, and that, if the explanation means they have to prioritize their lives over school, that is not a failure. It is, at minimum the responsible decision to make and it might also be an important component of their future academic success, since taking care of themselves and their lives is what will make that future possible. That is a message too few of them have ever heard.
From Fletcher’s Field, by Derek Webster in @columba_poetry:
All these years, I have lived as if a thought
could sink me like a paper boat
and have tried to trace back the creek
that carried me out to sea.
Too many people fail to understand that responding to student writing—not just grading it, responding to it—is an emotional process, not a mechanical one and that, like any other emotional labor, it is often mistaken for something other than “real” work.
The online journal EuropeNow has published five poems by the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu that Sonia Alland and I have translated. They join two others that were published by Plume in 2021.
That feeling when a student you’ve bent over backwards for resorts to cheating on an assignment because—this is what you know he’ll say—he didn’t have time.
I had very strange dreams last night, but the only thing I remember is that the word “stochastic” figured prominently in each of them. It’s the first time I remember the dreams of a single night having a sort of through-line.
Going through drawers I haven’t been in in a very long time, I found this, drawn by my friend Frank Simone, who died some years ago. It’s dated July 2006 on the back. I knew Frank from the open mic scene in Manhattan in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
If I believed in a god, I would ask that diety to save me from grading. Just for today. Or maybe this whole week.
Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, piece by piece, the jigsaw puzzle of this essay is finally nearing completion.
Teaching the sexual politics of Deaf Republic to students in Introduction to Literature–mostly second semester freshman–is a huge challenge!
Asymmetry: Wrote two paragraphs of what will be the concluding section of my essay. Now I need to prep for next week’s classes. Hopefully, time away from the piece will give my subconscious time and space to unravel into clarity the knot that’s got me stuck. How’s that for a mixed metaphor?
Symmetry: now that I’ve finished the novel I was reading, today’s task is to finish a first draft of the essay I’ve been working on.
Finished reading: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 📚
Just got my royalty statement from CavanKerry Press for 2022 for $3.84, which represents five copies sold of The Silence of Men. On the one hand, a paltry sum; on the other, when I consider that the book was published in 2006, a sign of longevity, and of the press' commitment, that moves me.
