In today’s work email I found not one, but two, requests for overrides into my upper-division class next spring. These were the eleventh and twelfth such requests I’ve received in the past two weeks. That class doesn’t begin for—what?—two months. But I teach at a public university, and even after what the local papers have declared the most significant tuition hike “in history,” we’re a bargain compared to the private and even the other public colleges and unis in the area, so if our classrooms were packed like sardines before, then, well, I can’t think of a good canned-goods simile for our enrollments.

I’m not even a popular teacher. For one thing, most of my colleagues have mad teaching skillz. (Not only are our average customer satisfaction survey course evaluation scores stratospheric, but the program assessments we send to the state have been improving every year.) It’s like teaching at Lake Wobegon. For another thing, I have a terrifying reputation. I’ve heard the young folk claim I make them read until their eyes pop out, and that I make them really think about their writing. And actually, I’d like to keep it that way.

Yet, as I said, I’ve got pleas galore for overrides, which I don’t handle. I refer the students to the appropriate authorities. Then I check my roster. I am mildly shocked to learn that the cap had been raised from 36 to 45, thanks to a room change to one of Soviet buildings across campus, which boasts not more capacious rooms, but smaller desks.

My eye darts down the list of forty-five names. At first I’m pleased. Hey! She’s really sharp! And he can be depended upon to say something insightful every class. I’m so looking forward to teaching her again! And him, too! I’ve heard great things about that student (our hallway gossip tends to violate FERPA poison the well in a good way)! And her, too!

(from kamranweb.com)

But one name in the middle of the list stops me cold. It is the name of a student I last taught in the most miserable class I’ve ever taught here. Nothing went the way it should have. The class even met on the Soviet end of campus, the most direct route to which consists of an odiferous and not-at-all scenic footpath behind one of our student commons, near where the biggest dumpster I’ve ever seen is parked. As winter thaws into spring, this route becomes increasingly unpleasant. English majors, who are ostensibly interested in aesthetics, often mutter about attending classes in such environs.

This student was one of the complainers. The last time I taught her, she was as wonderful a discussant as I could have wished. Her essays were diamonds in the rough (and that’s accounting for the artificially inflated value of diamonds), flashing with insight but falling short of coherence because of lackluster signposting. I first antagonized her by pointing out this shortcoming, assuring her that once she foregrounded the “so what?” of her arguments, her essays would really sparkle. She sulked, countering that she had always received A’s on her papers, and that she had worked harder on mine than on those. She rolled her eyes. I soon learned that eye rolling was part of her natural expression, but still it was discomfiting.

I knew someone in grad school who once threatened a student who re-enrolled in her comp class after failing it the first time. He was an athlete who wrote at best semiliterate papers and, in the classroom, was like a black hole, sucking all the enthusiasm out of the discussion. On the first day of classes, the second time around, my grad-school colleague told this student she had changed her syllabus, that he couldn’t depend on turning in his half-assed assignments again. She assured him he would fail. Since he was not stupid—just a slacker—he dropped her class, and all was right with the world. He never even made it into the pros.

Even if I wanted to do something similar to my student, I wouldn’t. She smiles sweetly and says hello whenever I run into her in the halls. But she makes me uncomfortable. This is my problem, and I must overcome it.

It must be the weather, or maybe the threat of swine flu, but, between screaming at slow-moving strangers and what happened yesterday, I fear I am losing my Pollyanna touch. Gentle reader, I am cheesed off.

Yesterday, partly to burnish my “student engagement” cred, I was coordinating a project with some former and future students, and a non-teaching colleague in a faculty support role (not IT, but along those lines) agreed to help out. This colleague has worked with my students before, even wheedling a letter of recommendation out of me (alas, my letters get around), but yesterday he seemed to sabotage my students, who had gathered on a cold, rainy afternoon to work on their project. After an hour of condescending gibberish, I intervened, prompting him to show them what we had agreed he would show them.

That I had to intervene cheesed me off, but something much more trivial has me simmering like Velveeta in “queso” dip. See, throughout the afternoon, I had wanted to model respect to non-teaching professional faculty, so I consistently addressed and referred to my colleague as “Mr. McGillicuddy.” He neither addressed nor referred to me until the last ten minutes or so, and then he was directing my former and future students to “Listen to Jane” and “Look at what Jane is showing you.” That was strange: if he used to address me by my first name in front of students in the past, I didn’t notice.

I had planned to correct him after the students had left, as well as to inquire into the bizarre decision not to show students how to do what he had explicitly agreed to show them how to do. The latter he had already acknowledged, but does he need to be told that women—especially younger, petite women—have enough problems maintaining authority without their colleagues undermining them? I kept mum, however, because students had lingered after: some of us hadn’t seen each other since April.

Or did Mr. McGillicuddy, however unconsciously, set out to undermine me? I call him my colleague, but not all colleagues are equal. I outrank, have more degrees than, and am a well-regarded member of a more powerful department than that of Mr. Melchizedek McGillicuddy—to such an extent that he depends upon me to speak well of him to his superiors. But no, men would never behave passive aggressively! Never.

In fact, yesterday evening he sent a gushing email thanking me for trusting my student group with him. And would I put in a good word with the Big Cheese?

Well, that cheesed me off. I didn’t delete it then and there, but I don’t want to reply. Am I overreacting? Would making some “queso” and chilling out with some beer at 9 in the morning mellow me out, make me less of an insecure, screamy-meamy beeyotch? Or is my collegial irreparably harshed?

I’ve been feeling so crappy lately that, at this very moment, I’m missing my department’s Big Event of the season. Wouldn’t want to sneeze on the dignitaries’ cheese cubes and chardonnay, which are nothing to sneeze at in this economy. As much as part of me must acknowledge how being magnificently sick has been a reprieve from weekend collegiality, it is also a pain in the ass that brought out my inner curmudgeon, which never needed much coaxing, anyhow.

Yesterday I ran out of my tried-and-true Thera-Flu, and I exhausted my last drop of NyQuil this afternoon. So that I could continue to feel better through chemistry, I had to replenish my supplies. I know some of my neighbors drive to the store, though we can walk to it within ten minutes. I’ve been feeling lousy enough that I seriously considered driving, but even I have principles, so I layered on my t-shirts and sweatshirts and fleeces (bear in mind that I take forever to dress when there’s no elegant teaching uniform to throw on) and finished off the ensemble with me warm lickle woolly mittens and scarf. I shivered as a stepped off my steps and was passed by a pair of joggers in tank tops and shorts. Whatever. I was cold.

Then as I was ringing up my three boxes of Kleenex and bottle of NyQuil at the self-checkout, I was stopped for the latter, whose label declares that it not only “Tastes Better Than Ever!” but also contains 10% alcohol. I’m small but I don’t look underage, so the attendant didn’t even have to look at my driver’s license to punch in “December 03, 1960.” Good Lord, do I look that bad? Whatever. I looked old.

But the pièce de résistance still awaited me. One of the things I like about my town is that it moves at a more leisurely pace than the cities in which I was brought up and in which I conduct research. People actually saunter in my gracious little neighborhood, often accompanied by children and dogs.

So did they today. As I crossed the street from the store, I couldn’t help noticing that I was following a young couple alternately accompanied, led, and followed by what appeared to be a collie-German shepherd mix on a very long leash. The dog stopped to sniff every other tree and flower pot, and whenever it passed another dog—which was frequently, as people here are dog-mad—the very long leash would become taut as it stood barking. Meanwhile, the couple was talking about how hard “FAFSA” is to pronounce. (Well, Junior, wait till you have to pay off the consequences of filling it out inattentively; pronunciation will be the least of your worries.) They weren’t paying attention to the dog. After three blocks of this purgatorial combination of insipid conversation and unruly dog, I had gotten quite close to them. Meanwhile, I couldn’t wait to suck down my NyQuil and go to sleep. I could almost taste them, and I was mad with anticipation that one them Tastes Better Than Ever!

One block before turning onto my street, the couple paused. Would they turn and be out of my life forever? Please?

No. They continued straight. I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Nooooo!” I wailed. “Nonononono!” The couple and the dog stopped, turned, and stared. I couldn’t believe I did that. But you know? I’m relieved I did. And the NyQuil? Tastes the same as it ever did. I’m about to fall asleep into my keyboard, but to tell the truth, I had already started feeling better when I let my inner curmudgeon give way to my inner brat. I highly recommend that everyone do so every once in a while.

This is not a political post. But if you live where an election is going on, then go get your vote on. Well? What are you waiting for?

That’s better.

Anyway, spring classes have opened for registration. After a year of dodging graduate classes, I have been assigned a grad seminar that meets during the graveyard shift. For weeks now I have already been bracing myself for the experience. I dislike how long the sessions are, and if we have an off class, then too bad: that’s it for the week. I also dislike how, at JPU, most grad classes meet after dark for these high-stakes marathon sessions, by the end of which I’d be stupid to walk the six blocks home unarmed. But mostly I’m frustrated and underwhelmed by graduate teaching.

Whenever I meet up with longstanding conference buddies or former grad-school colleagues who teach at SLACs, small universities without grad programs, or even regional master’s comprehensive schools, though, they speak wistfully of my job, specifically the part about being able to teach grad students. Make no mistake about it: I have a great job. I get to teach any topic that takes my fancy. I never teach comp (though I loved it and was good at it when I did). Apart from gen ed surveys, I don’t teach non-majors, and when I do teach gen ed, I never have to read a word a non-major has written.

However, let’s just say JPU’s grad programs are not stellar, uneven, even (see what I did there?). In fact, most of our grad students are candidates for terminal MAs—as they should be, since humanities PhDs are, in the immortal words of Thomas Hardy’s fratricidal, suicidal, and just plain creepy Little Father Time, “too menny.” Just this morning I received a query about my spring seminar from one of our MA grads. The message betrayed a stunning ignorance of historical fact, as well as confusion about when to use an apostrophe. Sure, it was only an e-mail, but all the same I replied by making the class sound as unpleasant as possible, just so that I wouldn’t be saddled with week after week of historical ignorance and grammatical ineptitude. My reply means that I am lazy and elitist, the antithesis of a teacher: yes, I know. I know also that untenured faculty—especially untenured female faculty—really should be more accommodating.

Yet if it’s possible, I’m even less accommodating of grad requests for independent studies. Unlike thesis or dissertation advising, directing independent studies counts for nothing, though they can be almost as time-consuming as an additional class, and that’s taking into account that there’s only one essay to oversee and evaluate. I teach 3/2, and I have no desire to make my load 4/4 or higher. Because I specialize in a hot subfield, I get a lot of requests. Because my hot subfield is theoretical, students tend to appropriate its premises to examine texts I don’t know well or—as is more often the case—texts I despise, but on which the student needs a lot of guidance, given the complexity of the theoretical interpretive framework.

And the independent study never ends there, since I require that my grad students, regardless of the context in which they are “my” students, produce a presentable or publishable paper. This requirement may be another reason to request an independent study of me, since I’ve been the midwife of several articles in my short, slow time directing independent studies. Then also, of course, working so closely with me entitles a grad student to recommendation letters.

All of these things I have been happy to do, precisely because I’ve been so picky about accepting independent studies. Not only must the “lucky” few have taken a class with me, but they must also have earned one of the top grades in the class (in grad school, anything lower than a B is failing, so a “mere” A won’t cut it). It doesn’t matter if a student I have taught recommended me. If I’ve never clapped eyes on someone’s analytical writing, I won’t direct an independent study. I won’t even read a writing sample. Besides, I know that they’re really asking mostly because they don’t like our course offerings, which are not my problem, actually.

Yet those whom I turn away always seem stunned. They request explanations, try to change my mind. Indeed, they seem to think I should have been flattered that they asked. Well, I’m not. So there.

Tonight, the longest Saturday night of the year (don’t forget to “fall back,” y’all), I shall arise from my nest of printouts from JSTOR and manuscript scraps. On my patio table I’ll place a glass containing Halloween-themed pencils and a big bowl containing granola bars I got for free with coupons last week. At some point this afternoon I’ll make a festive, glittery sign directing trick-or-treaters to “take one.” I don’t care if one of them empties the bowl; I don’t care if they shun my treats. The only thing I’m concerned about is that I don’t actually encounter any trick-or-treaters. I won’t even be home.

Instead, thanks to complimentary passes from my landlord, I’m going to my town’s “historic” discount theater to watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I didn’t see when it was released this summer and still haven’t seen—until tonight. I never buy popcorn at the movies, since I eat it every day, and thus am too accustomed to making my own and flavoring it more adventurously. Instead, since the proprietors of this theater don’t care if patrons bring their own food and non-alcoholic drink, I’m bringing a box of rosemary Triscuits, which I love, for indeed they put the “crack” in “cracker.” Plus a wedge of drunken goat cheese.

There. A wild night of such wildness that even Emily D could not have imagined it. I love it.

Three years and two months ago I arrived in Funky City for my first tenure-track job. At last, my job had come along! My temping days were over, but alas, life was no song. My landing was not gentle, and I’ve written about some of the disasters that greeted me here. I often felt I was in my own personal Amityville Horror, in which a door hissed at one of the house’s new residents, “Gehhhtttttt ooowwwwwtttt.” Or maybe that was Prince. Whatever. As a kid, I laughed my ass off at that cheesy gambit, but I could have sworn my new apartment, my new office, and my new town were hissing at me. If I were superstitious, I would have breached my contract and run screaming, in any direction, away from here.

Even my computer was hazing me. Or do I mean “haunting”? Two weeks before classes started, I had a conference in London. I also had to correct proofs for an article. But the moment I turned on my computer, the screen started streaking, and then it faded to white. I soon learned that my iBook, which had served me faithfully for almost four years, was a notoriously buggy model, and that Apple was replacing parts for it, provided one send it in within a certain time frame. Of course, mine was not only out of warranty, but also beyond the help of AppleCare.

So in my iBook went into the shop, which sent it to California. Since my own office wasn’t ready, I wound up correcting my proofs and finishing as much of my conference paper as I could in the faculty office of one of my deans, all the while paranoid about ruining the good impression I had made during my interview, before departing for Blighty.

Before my conference I had four days in the British Library—without a computer. While I was able to finish my conference paper on the PC of a friend in London, I had no access to a laptop for note-taking. Sure, my bags were a lot lighter without a computer, but the pencil-and-paper method really got tiresome. Actually, I switched to pencil and paper after I filled the two knockoff Hello Kitty notebooks I’d bought at a Pound-Stretcher shop. When I ran out, I wrote on the versos (versi?) of the BL’s maps and fee descriptions. I’m sure the reading room attendants loved flipping through my pink notebooks full of notes in various languages and scripts, and that they loved even better that I was appropriating their employer’s free info once those pink notebooks were exhausted. Or, more likely, they didn’t care. For those four days, I was my own Bartleby.

This morning I was going through old conference materials in my file cabinet, when what flopped out but twenty A4 pages of close, tiny writing?

I spent today transcribing those notes into electronic files, like all my previous notes. This way, I can find relevant material in spotlight searches (hello, new OS) if I can’t figure out the content from my files’ names. The material is fascinating. In the three years since I took those notes, I have published two articles relating to them and completed a book manuscript based on similar material. I can still shoehorn the newly rediscovered material into the book, but while writing one of the articles a year ago I turned my computer and my files inside out looking for a weird detail I transcribed today. It was something I could have sworn I had read somewhere, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. But, with the deadline looming, maybe I had imagined it. It would have made such a difference in the way I framed my argument.

But no, that article is out there, skewed by ignorance of an obscure, extremely weird bit of ephemera that has probably not been consulted by anyone else at the BL since I entrusted it to Hello Kitty’s safekeeping in 2006. I would be embarrassed, were I not cynically comforted by the possibility that no one has read this article since its publication in February. Yes. Just move it along. Nothing to see here.

Between job searches and graduate school admissions of all flavors, many faculty members’ offices are like little recommendation-letter factories these days. Letter-writing is part of my job, and I owe it to the universe not to upset this pyramid scheme that works as a pyramid scheme ought to work: since high school, over a dozen people have written letters on my behalf; since before grad school even ended, I have written letters for almost ten times as many students. Because I’ve taught more than two thousand students by now, and I once held a job where students needed faculty recommendations for the most absurdly trivial honor, I wouldn’t be surprised if more than a hundred people have received my Seal of Approval.

The most recent of these may not have been so deserving.

His request came via email, along with a flurry of others. On short notice, he had decided to apply to a professional MA program. He had learned a lot from me, he said, and thought that, of all his professors, I knew him best. To his request he attached some supporting materials. Among the thousand-plus students I have taught at JPU, I remembered him favorably. He seemed to have his shit together, to the extent of even being able to make a living with his newly minted English degree. I agreed to write the letter.

Over the next few days, I began to regret doing so almost immediately. I evaluated the attachments to the initial request. The statement of purpose was trite in the predictable ways, and he had requested feedback, which I gave with quite brutal honesty, along with links to some pointers on such statements that he could have found himself with the help of a little-known computer tool called “Google.” No problem: he thanked me profusely and revised prolifically, in the process revealing he had no idea what he was applying for and hadn’t done even the most basic research on what a statement of purpose is supposed to look like. Meanwhile, I had refreshed my memory of this student, who had barely earned a C from me. How on earth did I forget that? I had never written a grad-school recommendation for a student who had earned any less than an A. In fact, whenever I receive requests from people who had earned anything other than an A, I decline, telling them that they should request their letters from those from whom they had earned As. This approach not only gives me a graceful out, but (more importantly) it also prompts the applicant to reevaluate her or his goals.

But I couldn’t retract my “yes.” The deadline loomed (the request was on short notice, remember), the alum sent no re-revised statement (for which I was grateful), and the form waiving the right to view my letter never arrived (for this I was not grateful). I wrote the letter, vague and brief—though peppered with modifiers such as “quite” and “rather,” to make my assertions less pepperily commendatory, my hesitation more evident—with the bottom portion of the unwaived waiver form completed as truthfully as I could manage. It was all I could do not to check the “recommend with reservations” box, keeping my reservations hidden.

A year from now, no one, including me, will remember that I wrote this letter. But I have compromised my integrity. I have also learned not to rely on my memory. In my extremely mid thirties, that memory is noticeably already on decline. (As for my parlor trick of being able to go around the room naming all my students at the end of the session on the first day of class, that is, well, a parlor trick.) And boy howdy have I learned to go easy on the trigger with “Yes.” The Nancy Reagan of my childhood was onto something, and I should have just said no.

Thing is, I do think this alum would benefit from this graduate program, to which I do believe he would be a credit. Then again, maybe, given his self-induced short timeline and my harrowing critique of his statement of purpose, he wound up not applying. Yet my hemming-and-hawing recommendation will arrive, if it hasn’t done so already. And I feel like an idiot, because I was.

. . . chagrined and absolutely mortified that Kanye West was brought up by an English professor? He is a grown man, of course, whose actions are no one’s fault but his own. Perhaps childhood exposure to incessant grammar-correcting, piles of books and the oppressive culture they represent, not to mention the small-stakes politicking that comes with chairing a department, did a number on young Kanye? Perhaps. I mean, whiskey tango foxtrot. Get well, fella.

Like some middle-aged dude with fading tattoos on my sagging, dough-like nether regions, I’ve been trying to get the band back together. Well, not quite. What I’ve actually done is send out an email to a group of my former undergrads, now strewn about the nation’s grad programs, great and, uh, not so great (and I’m not talking about elitist gossip reputation rankings). I’m personally on a hiatus from the conference circuit, but the sorta-recently resurrected Calls for Papers (CFP) list is busting out all over with tantalizing conferences and special issues devoted to books and authors I’ve taught to some really astonishing young people—young scholars.

In graduate classes, I have students blog their responses to the reading and subscribe to their classmates’ blogs using a RSS reader. Since each student’s work culminates in a seminar paper that responds to a CFP that I strongly encourage them to send in for real, I also require them to subscribe to the CFP list’s RSS feeds for the specializations my class involves. And no, I don’t go all geezer-like on them about the good old days when CFP was a listserv, and announcements would drop in my e-mailbox. My grad students are also pretty good about getting off my lawn without my yelling at them to do so.

(source: icanhascheezburger.com)

Most of my former undergrads are, however, not my grad students. Despite my hellfire-and-brimstone diatribes about grad school and the job market—complete with a followup email that contains a link to the Chronicle’s forums for the distraught and disgruntled—and my disabusing them of their notions about how “nice” their professors’ lives seem to be, they persisted, I happily wrote references, and they enrolled in grad school. They don’t complain about how hard the work is, how poor they are, how unlike undergrad grad school is. They had been copiously warned, and they know better. Besides, professors do have nice lives. It’s just that, like anyone else’s life, our lives also involve a lot of things that are not nice. And those tend to be not nice in the extreme.

Anyway, by pelting former students with announcements for conferences, anthologies, fellowships, and so on, I’m trying to give them an advantage. It is very likely that I’m guilty of the pre-pre-professionalization Flavia provocatively described last month. As much as this worries me, the students I’m referring to have already come to the Dark Side, where I can’t be sure their current departments are looking out for them. One of my former students, for instance, sent his applications in late when his father died after a long illness; despite my and my colleagues’ protests, this student enrolled in a program that is not funding him in the first year. I wish such young people had taken less precarious paths.

A person can live a life of the mind outside of the academy. In fact, the professionals I know outside the academy seem to have more time and leisure to do so. They’ll go to a play or a gallery exhibit, then read about and debate with people like me what informed these these clever, cultured things. Plus they earn more. My non-academic friends, acquaintances, and siblings are not the rule, I know. My former undergrads also know this, and they think they are seeking something more meaningful, such as the ability someday to spam their future former undergrads, tempting them with opportunities for not-fame and not-fortune. Thus says the pot to the kettle, Pleased to meet you. . .

According to this quiz, if I were on Mad Men, I would be

(source: Elle.com)

. . . Peggy Olson!

Quietly confident, innocent but ambitious, you are most like Sterling Cooper’s eager, hardworking secretary turned copywriter from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (played by Elisabeth Moss). You exude girlish charm with your preppy-chic ensembles and perky ponytails.

Gag. I’ve never seen more than five minutes at a time of Mad Men, but I totally hope Peggy’d cut someone for crossing her, pigtails or no. Seeing both sides of the “OMG It’s so sub-subversively feminist!/Are you kidding? It’s like product placement for patriarchy” debate, I think I understand the show’s appeal. The clothes look magnificently uncomfortable. The decor is an irresistible parlor game of interior-design pedantry for hipsters brought up on Where’s Waldo? to spot the anachronism.

If this quiz is any indication of the show, then I am taken aback that the female principals are not so much individuals as they are types, and such distinct ones at that. On a perhaps-frivolous, perhaps-not (if you believe the authors of Freakonomics) note, what is it with the women’s names? Are our deeds supposed to be as ephemeral as our names are? In ten years of teaching, only a couple thousand or so students have crossed my path, but this meager sample of anecdata suggests that, while  younger boomers and older Gen-Xers east of the Mississippi have been reluctant to indulge their whimsy when naming boys, there’s something hallucinogenic about a pair of X chromosomes that, among other things, suppresses new parents’ ability to spell. It’s like Bob Ross’s compulsion to put some happy trees on that birth certificate.

Regarding the women on Mad Men, I’m hard-pressed to find anyone my age, let alone babies, named Betty, Joan, or Peggy. I do know a “Bette,” but one letter makes a huge difference. If you count middle names—and you shouldn’t, because that’s where parents pay all their debts of gratitude—then I know an astonishing handful of women middle-named after their wicked matron saint, Joan of Arc. If anyone is ever foolish enough to let me name a child, I’m opening up the Old Testament for  some bibliomancy. It wouldn’t be that bad. Really, does anyone have a problem with Eve, Rachel, or Sarah?

Then again, I’m hopeless with the teevee. In fact, the last time I looked up my local listings, I got all excited that we had a channel apparently devoted to “lolcat religious programming.” Visions of epic agons between Ceiling Cat and Basement Cat danced in my head. Then I realized I misread “local.” And they say it is TV that will rot your brain.