A couple of years back, I waxed loquacious and hopeful about my birthday. Today, as I hit forty years of age–yes, cue the black balloons–I have to note that the hopes…did not pan out quite as expected. And I still don’t know what ingredient in the salad I am, although I expect it’s a vinaigrette dressing, being somewhat astringent.
I need…a few more candles. Photo by lil artsy on Pexels.com
As I sit now, though, I have a decent job again. I still have my family and my home. The past year wasn’t necessarily a good one for me, but it’s done, and I am where I can move ahead with some confidence. Hopefully, I know enough now not to get too cocky about it…
It has been seven years since the first post on this website, seven years I’ve been working on Elliott RWI. As I write this, I have published 1,213 posts to the blogroll (this will be post 1,214), and I have revised individual pages, collecting 65,277 views from 22,675 visitors as of this writing. In the last year, therefore, I have made 156 posts and collected 24,525 views from 6,803 visitors (based on “Reflective Comments about the Sixth Year”). Performance is up from last year and overall; I’ve made more posts than at any point since leaving Oklahoma (even with making no class reports), and I had more visitors offering more views than in any previous year.
Of the three figures below, the first displays posts by year of blogging. The second shows views by year of blogging, and the third shows visitors by year of blogging.
Figure 1, as labeled.Figure 2, as labeled.Figure 3, as labeled.
I remain pleased to be able to continue doing this kind of work, and I look forward not only to another year of it, but many other years of it. I’ve enjoyed doing the writing I’ve done here, and I’m gratified to have learned that at least some of it appears to have been useful and/or enjoyable to others.
This last week, my wife, my daughter, and I took a bit of a vacation. I was nervous about doing so, to be certain. For one, the last time we thought to take one–spring break for my daughter’s Kindergarten year–happened right as the shutdowns and lockdowns from the novel coronavirus started hitting in earnest in our part of the world. For another, I have…challenges…having fun, as I’venoted. But I am happy to report that things went well, overall; there are always issues, of course, but they were minor, and the family had a good time.
Clearly, a happy time! Photo is mine.
Heading out from where we live, we went first to Houston, where we spend a couple of days. We traveled by way of Shiner, allowing us to see not only a couple of interesting historical markers, but also to tour the Spoetzl Brewery and sample some of the products of which my wife and I are fond as we sat for a picnic lunch under cloudy skies. And we drove the rest of the way to Houston along surface roads rather than the interstate, which made for a far more pleasant drive, even if it was a longer one. I think I’ll do so much again.
In Houston, we spent a fair bit of time touring around. My wife had grown up in the area and had lived not far from where we stayed, so we had a chance to check out her old stomping grounds, and I was gratified to learn a little bit more about her. We’ve been together for years, and I’m happy about it, and any chance I get to know her better is a welcome thing. Too, our daughter, Ms. 8, getting a sense of her parents’ background is a good thing; we live in the town where I grew up (for a little longer, anyway), so my history is clear enough, and getting the chance to expand on my wife’s for our daughter was good. So was going to Galveston, where we visited a confectioner and went to the beach; both were good for us!
Deuce-38!
One brick, neither in the wall nor of a house
Photos are Sonya Elliott’s
From Houston, we headed to Lafayette, where my wife and I had attended graduate school. We stayed at a bed-and-breakfast there, the Duchess Downtown, where we received excellent treatment; we felt welcomed and appreciated and at home there, and I recommend it highly. And we revisited a number of the places we’d been together, including the office where we got to know one another while in graduate school and working on translating Beowulf. It was good to go back and find our bricks–UL Lafayette paves its walkways with the names of those who have graduated, so that we symbolically speed current students along their way as we remain part of the institution–as well as to go into the Edith Garland Dupré Library and find both my master’s thesis and my dissertation. Even better, both showed that they’d been checked out, and more than once!
We did some of the touristy stuff, too, of course. Chief among them was heading down to New Iberia, where we called at the Konriko Rice Mill and Museum before heading to Avery Island. At the former, we got some tasty treats that will soon grace our table; at the latter, we toured the Jungle Gardens and the Tabasco factory–as well as making a few purchases for ourselves and our loved ones.
Buddha rockin’ e’rywhere
Take it to the bridge!
Hot stuff!
Photos are mine and Sonya Elliott’s
Nom!
Par for the course
Images are mine.
We also took a little excursion to Breaux Bridge and Henderson, where we got to check out some attractions. Ms. 8 enjoyed walking amid dinosaur models and reconstructions (while her parents needed the exercise!), and the lot of us enjoyed mini golf, go-karting, laser-tag, and the like next door to it. Ms. 8 was especially fond of the karting; I drove her, and she got to learn that, while I drive with restraint on the roads, I don’t have to do so. Little speed junkie that she is, she thrilled in it..
Again, in all, it was a good vacation. We saw and did neat stuff. We ate good food (perhaps more than we should have.) We bonded. And we look forward to doing as much again in the future.
Thirty-eight years ago today, I was pulled screaming into the world. I am told–and I have to rely on what I have been told, since memory does not serve me quite so well at that remove–that I was a forceps delivery, and the image of sterile salad tongs cupping my head and yanking me out into light and cold seems apt enough. I wonder if I am the tomato or the carrot in such a salad, or if I am the olive or the cucumber or what.
Something like one of these, perhaps? Image from Wikimedia Commons; I am told it’s public domain.
Whatever salad-fixin’ I might have been or might still be, though, marking another circuit of Sol is something that often prompts reflection and consideration. There’s been enough to consider, certainly, and not all of it has been a comfort. Occupying the position of privilege that I do, I know I am insulated from the direct effects of much of the unpleasantness and outright evil that has been at work in the world, and I am neither unappreciative of that ease nor unmindful of those who do not have it. I work with no few of the latter, and I do sometimes pay attention at work.
I am more or less comfortable at this point, as I sit and type out this post (well ahead of time, I have to admit; I mean to be at work on the NaNoWriMo project when this goes live). And that is a dangerous thing. It breeds complacency, laziness. I already do not do enough. But I also grow more and more accustomed to comfort, easing into it and succumbing to the inertia of my own indolence. I’d imagine I can get more than a few more years out of myself in such circumstances, but whether or not that’s advisable…
As it is, I have more writing to do and different. I also have a new year of me starting, and I had probably ought to see if I can’t enjoy some of it.
It’s not exactly a secret that I do a fair bit of writing. I’ve been pretty good about keeping pace in this webspace, posting thrice weekly, and even if a fair bit of my writing is working through a re-read of novels, novellas, and stories I love, it’s still writing–and not all of the writing I do here is on that project. Nor yet is this the only place where I present my writing, as this and this attest, as well as the conference presentations I still occasionally do. And my mostly-online roleplaying games involve no small amount of writing, too, both in the actual play and in the chatter that surrounds it.
Yep, this is the sign. Image taken fromNaNoWriMo.org, used for commentary
I have tended to struggle, however, with writing narratives of one sort or another. I may be able to put together the occasional vignette taken from my daily life–like this, this, this, this, or this–but longer works have tended to elude me. Too, I do tend more toward a poetic voice than a narrative one, working with sound rather than story, even though I know prose fares better with more people than verse. “Poetry’s hard,” after all, and more people are lazy than aren’t. (For the record, I include myself among that group.)
For the record, I don’t intend on giving up the work I’m already doing. I’ll keep moving forward with the Robin Hobb Reread, which I am flattered to note is getting a fair bit of attention from folks. I’ll also doubtlessly keep going with the other blogging I do, here and elsewhere. I have responsibilities with one of the other blogs, at least, and I try not to let people down. (It still happens, and far more than I like, but I try, dammit.) But I think I will try to address the deficiency in composing an extended narrative–I think I’m going to try to do NaNoWriMo. Kind of.
I know it shows up in my biographical information that I’ve put in a fair bit of time on medieval studies. A lot of it has been more “medievalism studies,” to be fair, looking at how the medieval gets mis/used, but there’s no way to do that work without having a solid grounding in the traditional medieval; one has to understand the references to get the jokes. As such, I’m fairly steeped in the idea of narrative poetry–and, as noted above, I do better with poetry than with narrative prose. So I mean to spend my NaNoWriMo trying to put together a narrative poem.
By the usual standards, I’d have to write something like 1,667 words each day across the thirty days of November to make the 50,000-word expectation. There will be a few days, at least, that I cannot guarantee being able to sit down and write the equivalent of a five-page paper, although I remember being able to knock out five to ten pages with ease when I was appropriately motivated. I’ve got a decent chance at getting the work done, and I think it’s worth a try to do so.
Were this year a normal year, I would be posting now about my experience at the International Congress on Medieval Studies on the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I’ve done so once or twice before, I know, and I’ve commented about papers I’ve delivered there, such as this one. The Congress has its problems, as I think I’ve noted and as I know many others have written about far more eloquently and at greater length than I have it in me do do, but it also remains one of the few places where I can be part of a broader scholarly discourse, having sharply limited access to journals and the other paraphernalia of contemporary scholarly work.
And there are these glorious accommodations, too! Picture mine.
This year, due to COVID-19, the Congress did not meet. I am fortunate in that I was able to get most of the money I’d laid out to attend back; the rest is bound up in other things, and I do not expect to see it again. I am fortunate that the business meeting I was to chair was able to move online and do what needed doing. I suppose that I am fortunate in that I ended up not needing to write the papers I was going to have to write for the event and that I had not started when I needed to get them going; my sloth will not out in quite the same way as would have been the case had I tried to talk once again. (Obviously, I am admitting to it here, but telling doesn’t have nearly the same impact as showing, right?) Too, I was home for my mother’s birthday and for Mothers’ Day for the first time in many years, which is the kind of thing that should be celebrated.
But–and it should have been clear that a “but” was coming–I do miss the opportunity to hear new ideas pushed forward by people who have not yet been so ground down by the drudgery of academe that they cannot see farther than a single step in front of them. I miss getting to see friends I’ve known for ten years and more, now, and to enjoying their company again. I do miss getting to get up and advance my own ideas and see them taken up for consideration by others, to hear them discussed and debated; I miss feeling like I still matter in some small way inside the ivory tower I so long sought to enter and from which I had to make an escape because I knew I would never be let out of its basement. And I miss the power I felt in pulling together ideas, in making new knowledge–even about so small a thing as a series of fantasy novels or a particular kind of bullshit in something Spenser wrote–and, in so doing, pushing back against the boundaries of human ignorance, clearing out just a little bit more room for what we know against what we still have to learn.
I still have the chance, of course. I can use this blog to that end, and it is expected that the Congress will happen in 2021–and that I might well be able to attend it. But that good things are still to come does not mean it is wrong to sorrow for such good as was lost.
To conclude a practice I most recently iterated at the end of the July 2019 session at DeVry University, and following closely the patterns established in previous practice, comments below offer impressions of class performance among students enrolled in my section of ENGL 135: Advanced Composition during the November 2019 session at that institution. After a brief outline of the course and selected statistics about it, impressions are discussed.
Homework and presentations were assessed by adaptations of University-provided rubrics. Discussions were assessed through an instructor-developed rubric.
The section met wholly online, so no attendance was assessed. Online office hours were generally held Mondays at 6pm, US Central Time. Its overall data includes:
End-of-term enrollment: 25
Average class score: 687.88/1000 (D)
Standard deviation: 289.871
Students earning a grade of A (900/1000 points or more): 6
Students earning a grade of F (below 600/1000 points): 8
Numbers of students receiving each of the traditional letter grades are indicated below:
As I have intimated, I do not intend to return to teaching, whether at DeVry or at another institution. I had been having doubts even prior to the session about whether I was doing any good continuing to teach and continuing to teach in the specific circumstances at the institution, though I continued to accept pay for doing so, so I did not voice those doubts quite as openly as I might otherwise have done. I understand my complicity in structures and their continuation well enough to know that I would invite more justified critique by offering my own. Some events early in the session, both in and outside the class, affirmed those doubts, and, as I compose this final report about my teaching, I know I have made the correct decision in withdrawing from the profession.
I have a number of regrets about my career in the classroom. I have had what is perhaps an unfortunate amount of time to consider those regrets, to mull over what I ought to have done better. Some things did improve in time. For others, the opposite was true; certainly, I have lost much of the joy in the work that I once felt. I have also lost the grinding necessity of continuing; I am in a much more stable place, emotionally and financially, than I have been in previous sessions. Having that stability, being able to stand firmly for a bit and take a look at my circumstances and situation, has let me see what others have likely realized for some time. Having stable footing is letting me step away–and it is time, indeed, for me to do so.
Continuing a practice I most recently iterated at the end of the May 2019 session at DeVry University, and following closely the patterns established in previous practice, comments below offer impressions of class performance among students enrolled in my section of ENGL 112: Composition during the July 2019 session at that institution. After a brief outline of the course and selected statistics about it, impressions and implications for further teaching are discussed.
Students enrolled in ENGL 112 during the July 2019 session were asked to complete a number of assignments in quick succession. While there was some overlap with previous iterations of the course in terms of the assignments requested, there was not congruity; the later assignments differed from previous practice. Three papers (a profile, a rhetorical analysis, and a “persuasive” paper) and a presentation deriving from the final paper accounted for the majority of the grade; discussion activities accounted for more than a third, and a quiz over APA guidelines occupied the remainder, as presented in the figure below:
Point values sum to 1,000.
Homework and presentations were assessed by adaptations of University-provided rubrics. Discussions were assessed through an instructor-developed rubric.
The section met in a hybrid on-live session on Wednesdays at 6pm, US Central Time, with online office hours generally being held Mondays at 6pm, US Central Time. Its overall data includes:
End-of-term enrollment: 18
Average class score: 762.222/1000 (C)
Standard deviation: 158.91
Students earning a grade of A (900/1000 points or more): 5
Students earning a grade of F (below 600/1000 points): 1
Numbers of students receiving each of the traditional letter grades are indicated below:
Since the class met at a prescribed time, it was possible to assess attendance. Most students in the section missed at least one class meeting; some missed quite a few more, as indicated below (with the figure being classes missed, students missing that many classes, and percentage of students falling into that category):
This session has been one of the better ones I’ve had in the past few years. Although live attendance could have been better, the students who did attend were more engaged than many I have had in my classrooms since leaving New York City, and student engagement in discussion threads was quite robust. I think it directly ties to the quality of the work I received from students in the class; many of the papers and presentations I got were good ones, if perhaps not the most adventurous. (I note that many students took a “safe” route in their final two major assignments, but with as many as were in their first session at DeVry, if not in college, generally, I cannot be justly annoyed at it.) It is the kind of thing I continue to hope to see when I take on a new set of students, and I am particularly happy to have gotten it this time around.
The thing is, the fact of having good students does not do much to help me further develop my skills as a teacher. Working with good students is easy; they do most of the work, needing only limited guidance. In the kind of lock-step curriculum in place at DeVry, there is not the flexibility to challenge further those students who show themselves able to do more, and while I have worked to reward those who have done that more, there is only so much I can do within the constraints within which I must operate to keep working. The same offers have been and will continue to be open to any students who seek to avail themselves thereof, but I am still not sure how to get more students to take me up on them. It is something I clearly need to continue to work on.
As ever, I am glad to have had another opportunity to put to work those skills I spent years developing. I am less happy that the September 2019 session does not have me teaching–but I look forward to future sessions that will.
For the final meeting of the session, discussion opened by noting the availability of evaluations and the looming end of the session (31 August 2019). It moved thence to treat questions from the previous class meeting and earlier before looking at others’ presentations to offer critique and addressing final assignment concerns.
Class met as scheduled, at 1800 CDT in Room 114 of the San Antonio campus; the class was broadcast online, and a recording will be made available soon. The class roster listed 18 students enrolled, a decline of one since the last class meeting; seven attended live online or onsite. Student participation was good. No students attended the week’s office hour.
Students are reminded that the the rhetorical strategies presentation, of which a sample is available here, is due before the end of day Saturday, 31 August 2019.
Grading will be finalized shortly after the session ends, with reflective comments to follow after.
After addressing questions from the previous class meeting and before, discussion remarked upon student surveys being available. It then turned to concerns of presentation, in anticipation of the final assignment for the course.
Class met as scheduled, at 1800 CDT in Room 114 of the San Antonio campus; the class was broadcast online, and a recording will be made available soon. The class roster listed 19 students enrolled, a decline of two since the last class meeting; seven attended live online or onsite. Student participation was reasonable. No students attended the week’s office hour.
Students are reminded that the following are due before the end of day Sunday, 25 August 2019:
Discussion: Presentation Experiences (five posts or equivalent)
Discussion: Presentation Peer Review (five posts or equivalent)
Students are urged to be at work on the rhetorical strategies presentation, due at the end of the session. (A sample is available here.) Working on it longer will allow for better results.
Elliott RWI 