Root beer reward

For the past month or so, A (not her real initial) and I have been looking forward to the end of our respective fall semesters and the chance to reward ourselves with root beer, ice cream, and French fries. It’s not that we haven’t had root beer, ice cream, and French fries this past semester…we just haven’t had the time to sit down for a long, leisurely, and high-caloric weekday lunch since we walked at Mount Auburn Cemetery and ate pancakes (and I drank the unbelievably sweet, neon-bright raspberry lime rickey pictured below) at the Deluxe Town Diner back in August. If you’re in tune with an academic calendar, you’ll recognize the pattern: August was our last hurrah before fall semester classes began, and this past Friday, when A and I made good on our mutual root beer promise, marked the last push before semester’s end.

At some point over the past month or so, “root beer” became a kind of code for “the celebratory lunch A and I will have after we’ve both submitted grades.” When you teach for a living, you get used to the fact that no one except another instructor will remember the precise chronology of your “busy” and “down” times. Yes, everyone assumes my summer schedule is lighter than my winter one, and everyone knows that school resumes sometime around September. But only someone like A knows that if we have Getting-Ready-for-a-New-Semester Pancakes in late August, it will be roughly 15 weeks before we can have a refreshing glass of Thank-God-It’s-Nearly-Over Root Beer in late December.

In about a month, A and I will have a serving of Spring-Semester’s-Almost-Here Potato Pancakes, then another three months or so after that, we’ll indulge in some version of I-Have-Piles-of-Final-Papers-to-Grade Cheesecake. If you know what it’s like to measure out your life with coffee spoons, you’ll recognize this pattern. For every milestone, there’s an accompanying meal anticipated in advance and enjoyed over conversation, the savor of a leisurely, high-caloric treat being the perfect reward for a busy semester with little time to socialize.

The site for this past Friday’s root beer reward was Joey’s Diner in Amherst, NH, which I’ve featured here previously. Both A and I enjoyed our anticipated root beer and fries: A’s with a crock of turkey soup, and mine with a bacon cheeseburger. We saved, however, the ice cream for another day: next semester’s reward, perhaps?

 

Piled higher & deeper

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and in this case, that’s a conservative estimate. This is what three writing classes’ worth of end-term grading looks like, minus a few latecomers, lollygaggers, and incompletes.

The left and middle piles are from my first-year Thinking & Writing classes. Those folders contain the final version of each student’s 15- to 20-page research project, all the rough drafts that went into said project, and a final reflective essay. The small pile on the right is from my intermediate-level Expository Writing class. That stack is smaller because students submitted only final drafts of a 10-page research project, a handful of short essays, and a final reflective essay.

Grading portfolios isn’t as bad as all my complaining would suggest: it just takes a lot of time. As Jo(e) has said about watching student presentations, you learn a lot when you read research projects on topics that students are genuinely interested in, and grading papers is infinitely easier than comment on drafts. When you comment on drafts, you’re still steering the car, trying to communicate to students how they can/should improve a particular piece of writing. When you grade a portfolio, you’re riding in the car. The student is presenting their best shot at the Perfect Project, and you as teacher get to watch like a director in the audience of a one night performance. Yes, you see the mistakes; yes, you make note of them. But any improvements will wait until the next play or project: as in baseball, there’s always next year. For now, you sit back, watch the show, clap when the performance is good, and wring your hands when any given actor plays a scene differently from how you had directed it.

Ultimately, you see, it’s their show, not mine. Those portfolios on my desk? I’m just borrowing them.

Click here for last spring’s markedly different visual depiction of “Piled Higher & Deeper.” And if you want to learn even more about what I do with my first-year Thinking & Writing students, click here to read an alumni magazine article about Keene State’s new Integrated Studies program, illustrated with a picture of Yours Truly conferencing with one of last year’s first-year students. Enjoy!

 

Primitive

It’s very primitive when you think about it. Someone takes a stick-shaped piece of rock and scratches it against a big, flat rock. Okay, chalkboards are no longer made of slate, but chalk is still made of chalk. In a day and age when many students–including many of my own–study online, the brick-and-mortar technology of a classroom with chalkboards seems downright archaic.

You might recognize these chalkboards as belonging in the Keene State College classroom where there ain’t no chalk. This past semester, I’ve taught a section of my first-year “Thinking & Writing: The Art of Natural History” course in this particular classroom, where the class before ours is studying architecture. For an entire semester, I’ve entered this classroom on Tuesdays and Thursdays and found the most inscrutable scribbles on “my” chalkboards: diagrams, drawings, and technical-sounding words I’ve encountered only in print, if ever. My Thinking & Writing students have made drawings of their own in nature journals they’ve kept over the course of the semester–my attempt to get them to use the practice of natural history to make a memory all their own–but most of our hurried scribbles of leaves, trees, and the occasional squirrel look like scrawled cave paintings compared to even a lazy architect’s sketches.

I snapped these pictures last Thursday, in between small-group essay conferences with those same Thinking & Writing students. In pairs they came at appointed times to discuss my last set of draft comments on their semester-long research projects: one last bit of feedback before final portfolios are due next week. When you get down to it, it’s funny how primitive teaching really is. My students and I spent some 15 weeks staring at one another in this very classroom, and much of the time I worried they just weren’t getting it. How can something as seemingly primitive as simply communicating, one human to another, be so difficult?

And yet semester after semester, the “A-has!” don’t start happening until the 13th, 14th, or even 15th week, when some sort of connection seems to happen. Students who had merely stared start listening. My comments about thesis statements and arguments start making sense. “You actually want me to say something in my paper?” one student asked in a pre-Thanksgiving conference, incredulous. I nodded, emphatic. “Oh my gosh,” another student exclaimed after this past week’s conference, after reading another set of draft comments from me. “I totally know how to write my paper now, but only after I’ve already written it!” Yes. That’s how it works. Sometimes you have to write a whole 15- to 20-page paper before you actually “get” what you’re trying to say…and yes, it’s all about having something to say.

I shouldn’t be surprised that it takes my students almost 15 weeks to “get it” since I too seem to forget every semester the most basic tenet of the writing (and teaching) process. Most of the time, you slog on without having a clue what you’re trying to say; even if you think you know what you’re trying to communicate, you’ll struggle for a way to get your message across. Having made your point one, two, or even more times, often you’ll realize only after the saying’s done what you should have said from page one. What applies to the process of first-year students writing a 15- to 20-page paper applies as well to the professor who cheers, coaches, and sometimes coddles them through the process…and every semester, I somehow forget that fact. For a professor, it’s surprising how very primitive I am.

This is my contribution to this week’s Photo Friday theme, Primitive. I’m still laboring under the grading glut of two semesters ending while another lingers on, so blogging will continue to be light this week. So many papers, so little time.

 

Wedged

All this week I’ve felt wedged, smashed, or sandwiched between Then and Now, the Done and the Yet-To-Do.

Last week, I was teaching one writing class for SNHU Online; this week, that one class has ended, and I’m teaching in its stead two online lit classes. This is, of course, on top of the four writing and lit classes I’m teaching at Keene State and the one lit class I’m teaching online for Granite State College: not simply an overload, but a double-load. This is, I remind myself, how I as an adjunct instructor pay the bills, save money for summer, and harbor some hope of someday retiring from a handful of jobs that don’t provide health insurance much less retirement benefits. When you’re in the midst of a Semester Smashup, it’s important to remember the “why” behind all the multitasking.

One result of piggybacking classes at several institutions is the calendrical chaos that ensues. On Monday, I was simultaneously grading midterms and commenting on research paper drafts for my students at Keene State and grading final exams and calculating final grades for my SNHU Online students. Left untouched in the midterm/end-term madness were weekly response papers from Granite State students; on hold were my new online lit students who were facing the usual back-to-(online)-school jitters and thus had more questions than normal about course requirements, schedule details, and workload overwhelm.

In other words, Thank God It’s Saturday and I survived the week.

An over-loaded semester is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I like the extra money that’s coming in: fall is when I buy the things I wanted over the summer but couldn’t afford…or when I pay off the credit cards I used for the things that couldn’t wait. And given a choice between Too Busy and Not Busy Enough, I’ll always choose the former over the latter. Growing up in a working-class family, I was bred to believe that hard work is good for you: it keeps you out of trouble, and it makes you honest. When I come home from a marathon on-campus teaching day or click “Submit” on another batch of online papers, I feel an unmistakable sense of accomplishment. I’m pulling my weight and paying my way. No free lunches for me.

It’s true, though, that when I’m busy with teaching tasks, I’m much less likely to write…and when I do write during an overloaded semester, what I manage to produce feels dull and formulaic, like I’m churning out Literary Product just as mechanically as I churn out grades and student feedback. Whether I’m feeding ungraded papers into the Mental Machine or the matter of my days, it feels like what I do with that stuff is entirely automatic. In the case of student papers, I read it, mark it, and move on; in the case of life-matter, I snap it, write it, then post it. There’s nothing magical in any of this: heaven knows the last time I saw anything remotely resembling a Muse. Who has time for a Muse when you’re teaching an overload, have both a dog and a blog to feed, and want to get an occasional full night’s sleep?

On Thursday morning, only six students came to my 8 am Expository Writing class: only six! Cleaning crews had used a solvent to clean our computer classroom’s dry-erase board, so the place reeked of chemicals; it didn’t take many quickly dying brain cells to decide to scrap the day’s lesson plans and relocate to the student center, where we spent our scheduled class time doing an essay read-around.

My students get to workshop one another’s papers on a weekly basis, and I read them as often en masse…but I couldn’t remember the last time I had the luxury of sitting with only a handful of students–not the usual 20–to hear them read and talk about one another’s work. Maybe I was strung-out from too much Halloween candy or simply exhausted from the usual Marathon Thursday drill, but it felt downright heavenly to just sit still with a handful of students who themselves were just barely healthy and awake enough to drag themselves to class.  What a difference it made to experience each of their essays as the work of a living, breathing person rather than another piece on the Paper Pile.

At this time of the semester, it’s easy to forget why you’re burning the candle at every conceivable end…and that applies to students as well as overloaded instructors. When my students, face-to-face and online alike, approach me with the usual excuses–I’m sick, my car broke down, my baby was up all night screaming–I can nod my head, “Yes, yes, I feel your pain” even if I can’t related to the particulars. At this time of the semester, we’re all feeling wedged, smashed, or sandwiched by the various conflicting demands on our days; there isn’t enough time for any of us. And perhaps only an overloaded adjunct instructor can understand a student’s workload overwhelm to the marrow of her bones.

If you enjoyed today’s tree pictures, you should click over to this month’s double-stuffed Festival of the Trees, which features Trees of Halloween and Trees and Fruit of Autumn. Enjoy!

 

Instead of apple picking

It’s been three years since I went apple picking in Hollis, NH with my friend A (not her real initial), and I haven’t picked any apples since then. The academic year is a busy time, and fall semester is my busy season, time for me to teach extra classes to replenish the savings I spent over an under-employed summer. Just as the agricultural year follows its own ebb and flow, so does the academic one: fall is harvest time for farmers and paper-grading time for professors. If you’re a farmer, professor, or friend of a farmer or professor, you quickly learn to beware the busy season.

While I was at the Providence Zen Center on Saturday, I took a quick stroll through their apple orchard. It’s been years since anyone’s tended the trees there, and nobody picks them come October. Instead, the apples are worm-eaten and grow increasingly wizened and frost-bitten as they hang and then drop in benign neglect.

A conscientious farmer would be saddened to see fruitful food going to waste, as Zen Master Soeng Hyang (aka Bobbie Rhodes) was when I ran into her after picking pictures, not apples, from these trees. Bobbie has been a nurse since 1969, the year I was born; she has more than a lifetime’s worth of lessons gleaned from her years as a hospice nurse tending souls facing their own bittersweet harvest. If you’ve spent a lifetime helping people at the end of theirs, you grow accustomed, I assume, to the sight of wasted promise. It’s never easy, I think, to see death, decay, and denied dreams. How many of the patients Bobbie has cared for over the years have felt too late the regret of their own neglected orchards?

In my three-years-ago post, I wrote of the weary, guilt-tinged sorrow voiced in “After Apple Picking,” one of my favorite Robert Frost poems. “Frost’s speaker describes apple picking as work, not leisure,” I noted, “and there’s more than a hint of guilt tinging his words as he describes the apples he’s failed to pick and bushels he’s failed to fill.” When Zen Master Soeng Hyang lamented the apples that are going to waste in the Providence Zen Center’s long-neglected orchard, she was echoing the sentiment of Frost’s speaker, as I was when I wrote about the poem three years ago. It’s a shame, I thought then, to leave things undone: surely if I or others were more in control of our lives, our schedules, or our days, we wouldn’t let a single apple, a single opportunity, or a single second go to waste. Given the abundance of nature and the seeming fecundity of time, we’d squeeze every drop of succulence from sweet-soaked days.

And yet… Can anything go to waste in a world where worms live, too? I’ve never seen deer nibbling apples from these human-neglected trees–perhaps the apples themselves are bitter, not sweet–but then again there aren’t years’ worth of apples piled beneath them. Some sentient creatures–not humans, for sure, but an invisible band of someones–are eating these apples, or perhaps they’re only contributing to the health of their parent trees through their own demise and decay. These apples aren’t, in a word, being wasted even if human hands aren’t picking, eating, or preserving them, savoring their sweetness in the form of pies, applesauce, or cider.

These days I’m considering the merit of letting an occasional apple drop. Worms are hungry, too, as are deer and other foragers; even microbes, mites, and other agents of decay deserve an occasional taste of tart. When you’re an overworked farmer or paper-plagued professor, you ultimately realize you can’t do everything. There are too many apples to pick, too many bushels to fill, too many papers to grade, and too many patients looking for patience. The secret to surviving an overloaded semester, I’m learning, is to give up on catching up. Once you realize there are more apples in the Universe than you have the hands and energy to pick, you concentrate all your attention on the apple in your hand.

Tonight, I have a half-dozen paper piles, all of them demanding attention, but the realist in me knows losing sleep over paper is the most wasteful choice of all. Instead of apple picking, these days I’m doing all I can to tend to classes, students, and my own fragile soul. What benefit are brimming bushels if you reach harvest’s end with a life that’s been wasted?

 

The weight of words

It’s the fifth week of the semester at Keene State, the fourth week of the semester for SNHU Online, and the third week of the semester at Granite State. In other words, this week I’m feeling the full brunt of being a multi-institutional adjunct instructor, burning the proverbial candle at both ends to keep all my juggled balls aloft and moving.

I’m tempted to say that like Mother Hubbard, my blog-cupboard is bare, but that’s not true. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, pictures to share, or ideas for blog-posts: there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all.

At times like these, I feel more like a bricklayer than I do a writer. While my poet friends concern themselves with the crafting of fine delicate trinkets–the work of literary watchmakers or jewelers–I’m daunted by the sheer weight of words as I try to keep on top of a perpetually renewing paper-pile. There’s no time to help my students craft fine delicate sentences; instead, we’re in the business, my students and I, of building weighty walls of prose, and that means schlepping a lot of words.

It’s tiring work, this building with words, brick by brick. At the end of one of my marathon teaching days, my feet ache with the weight of language, and I come home wanting nothing more than to sit on my couch and say nothing. On grading days when I’m home with dog, laptop, and the ever-present paper-pile, my head and neck feel the weight of words like a yoke as I plow, ox-like, through the furrows of other people’s prose, pen in hand.

At this point in the semester–the simultaneous fifth week, fourth week, and third–I ask myself why I require my students to write so damn much, a question I’m sure they’re each individually asking. The answer, unfortunately, is always the same. If you want to become a bricklayer yourself, you have to lay your own wall, brick by brick; if you want the benefit of learning from an older, more experience bricklayer, she needs to watch and oversee your progress. It’s long, grueling work, and there are no shortcuts. By week seven, six, and five, we all will be stronger and more callused, my students and I. Between now and then, though, all we feel is the slow grind of a heavy haul.

 

Open meadow mind

This morning, for the first time in about a month, I went to morning practice at the Open Meadow Zen Group in Lexington, MA. Today, I’m under a deadline as I finish grading exams for the summer school class I’ve been teaching in Keene: the very class that kept me from practicing on Monday mornings. Somehow, facing today’s paper pile seems less daunting given how I started the day, with a spot of silence within sight of a lone tree standing like an island in a sea of tall grass while sunrise gleamed off distant clouds.

Enlightenment is just like this: a spot of sun and silence that happens suddenly, will not last, and promises to stay with you, cherished. In my Zen school, we sometimes describe enlightenment as being both clear like space and as sharp as the end of a needle. Enlightenment is clear like space in the same way that looking at an open meadow clears your mind: ahhhh! In the absence of borders or boundaries, your consciousness is open and unfettered, unstressed and at peace.

At the same time, enlightenment mind is as sharp as the end of a needle. Right now, work awaits and a deadline looms: I’d best get busy! One-pointed “needle mind” doesn’t spend the day lounging in an open meadow if there’s work to do or sentient beings to save. Meditation isn’t about zoning out or “unplugging” from the mundane world with its challenges and traumas. Meditation is about cultivating a needle-sharp awareness so when challenges and traumas arise, you can act with a mind that is uncluttered, compassionate, and effective.

The world of business reminds us to “work smarter, not harder.” Perhaps on this manic Monday, I need to be both clear and sharp, tackling my paper-pile with a mind that is as fair as an open meadow and as sharp as the tip of a teacher’s red pen.

 

Sustained attention

It is the nature of academic conferences that you have lots of “Gee-whiz, let me write that down” insights…but those “a-ha moments” that sit you bolt-upright in your seat are rarer and more precious.

This morning, at the very end of the Q&A portion of Orion Magazine’s plenary panel on “The New, New Environmental Writing” featuring David Gessner, Ginger Strand, and Jordan Fisher Smith, Ginger Strand make a remark that brought into crystal-clear focus what I’ve been trying to do for the past three-plus years on Hoarded Ordinaries. In noting what’s good about the “old” nature writing of a writer like Henry David Thoreau, Strand said it was his “sustained attention” to lived experience: his life, the world around him, his ever-active mind.

It was that phrase “sustained attention” that zinged me like a lightening bolt…and that phrase also resonated with a Keene State colleague who sat next to me during this morning’s plenary panel. If my sometimes-personal blogging about place isn’t about sustained attention, I don’t know what it’s about.

On Saturday morning, I’m participating in a session titled “Grass Roots, Web Logs, and Virtual Moss? An Ecocritical Look at Blogging.” The presentation title I’d proposed is “The Personal Is Ecological: Locating the Self in Place-based Weblogs,” and I’ve been struggling all week with what to say on Saturday. What I want to talk about is the way that many so-called place-bloggers actually focus as much on so-called “personal” matters as they do on so-called “environmental” ones: in my mind, the line between “nature writing” and “personal writing” is hopelessly blurred on blogs such as mine, and I consider that a good thing.

What I’ve been struggling with, though, is with finding language to explain why I think it’s a good thing to blend “the personal” with “the environmental.” In my vague grappling toward articulation, I’ve reasoned that habitats consist of particular places combined with communities of interconnected creatures, so blogs that ground a specific person in a particular place are “ecological” in depicting these interconnections. But until Ginger Strand uttered the worlds “sustained attention,” I didn’t have a narrative “hook” to hang my intellectual “hat” upon.

Like several of the participants in today’s Orion Magazine panel (most memorably David Gessner, who addresses this very issue in his book Sick of Nature), I resist the “nature writer” mantle. Yes, I mention birds, trees, and other natural things here…but I show just as many pictures of pick-up trucks, graffiti-covered walls, and other human-made objects. In selecting a masthead image for this newly formated version of Hoarded Ordinaries, in fact, I intentionally chose one with bricks. Yes, there’s some leafy green foliage at the top of my new blog-home, but the leafy-green left is juxtaposed against a brick red right. Here’s the place, ladies and gentlemen, where “nature” meets “culture” and “place” is something “personal.”

As David Gessner listed the kinds of things he wishes he could see more of in so-called “nature writing”–references to booze, shit, and machines, written by people who have real-world jobs and aren’t “white guys from Harvard”–I kept thinking of the place-bloggers I read and know: folks with whom I’ve actually drank and shot the shit. The “New, New Environmental Writing”–prose that breaks free of the “gentle strait-jacket of genre” that Gessner decries–is being written and read…it just isn’t necessarily found in the “quiet magazines” that Gessner claims to be so sick of. “We’re here,” I wanted to shout from the back of Wofford College’s Leonard Auditorium, “but we aren’t writing and publishing in the places you’re looking!” Panelist Jordan Fisher Smith pinpointed the precise reason why conventionally published nature writing–the stuff you read in books and quiet magazines–is so homogenous: as a product sold primarily to urban audiences, nature writing is marketed as “epiphanies from pretty places,” and much of what place-bloggers such as Dave and Beth and Fred are offering isn’t always pretty or neatly epiphanic.

I find it hugely ironic that the name of the journal Gessner founded, Ecotone, is the same as the now-defunct place-bloggers wiki were I first found my feet as an online writer. There already is a community of “new, new voices” who are writing and publishing genre-defying nature writing…we just tend to fly under the conventional market radar. Because we deliver our writing straight to our audiences without the middle-men of journals, agents, book publishers, and the like, we can push the usual generic boundaries, offering “nature writing” that is sometimes pretty, sometimes dirty, and always personal. What remains constant, regardless of what we call the writing on our blogs, is the process of how we produce it. Whether I’m blogging a conference in South Carolina or the graffiti-covered factories in my neighborhood back in New Hampshire, what I do when I sit down to write is try to pay Sustained Attention to where I am.

UPDATE: A two-part podcast of this morning’s plenary panel is posted here and here. Enjoy!

 

The final push

The last of my spring semester grades are due by noon today, and as usual I’m working down to the wire. No matter how organized and pro-active I am, each semester it seems to take forever to complete the last bit of grading, as if the final push is more demanding than any that came before it.

The photo above illustrates another kind of final push. Lacking a car, how would you cart a couple boxes of wine from a liquor store in Somerville, Massachusetts? Perhaps a wheeled office chair (the latest in my fascination with feral furniture) would serve nicely as a makeshift shopping cart…or not. The fact that this chair was abandoned right around the corner of that Somerville liquor store, plus the fact that the boxes, minus their contents, had been left behind, suggests that the final push is indeed the hardest.

Of course, you could simply steal, er, borrow a shopping cart to get your goods home, as I suspect happened with this errant CVS cart, which I spotted in Newton, Massachusetts last month. You don’t suppose it rolled itself here, do you?

 

Smoke

This was the photo I planned to post for today: a loose interpretation of today’s Photo Friday theme Smoke. It’s been a while since my favorite abandoned factory here in Keene produced much of anything…but in my mind’s eye, I can imagine a time when this now-crumbling smokestack was pumping pollution as duly as its employees pushed out product.

But then I heard about this. A Keene State College student–a 20-year-old who could have been one of my students–shot his roommate early this morning and then turned the gun on himself. All this happened in an off-campus apartment within a few blocks of where I live, on a street where I occasionally walk the dog and snap photos. Had I been awake and listening around 1 this morning, I might have heard from my bedroom the sound of gunshots–or at least sirens as police and then ambulances arrived. Instead, I was asleep, deaf as usual to the “Thirsty Thursday” hubbub of the students who live around me.

In the aftermath of the killings at Virginia Tech, I said nothing here, mainly because it was a particularly busy time of the semester for me, and I felt I didn’t have the time nor the insight to say anything particularly helpful. But as a college instructor, my ears perk whenever I hear news involving college students: just as a parent might think, “That could have been my kid,” as an instructor I automatically think, “That could have been my student.”

Neither of the students involved in this particular shooting–neither the one who got shot and called police, nor the shooter who then killed himself–is one of “my” students. But in a sense, any Keene State College student is one of “my” students. In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, there were two separate incidents at Keene State involving suspicious, potentially threatening graffiti that shook the nerves of students, staff, and parents alike. It was a loss of innocence where a hitherto safe world suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable, the questions of “Where next?” and “Could it happen here?” serving as a worrisome distraction from the usual end-of-term frustrations, and as an instructor you couldn’t not feel the tremors of uncertainty quietly reverberating across campus.

Your college classroom (or your off-campus apartment) shouldn’t be a place where you feel you ought to wear a Kevlar vest along with your school colors. As a college instructor, I take seriously my responsibility to act in loco parentis, looking after someone else’s youngsters as if they were my own. In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech killings, I was particularly moved by the story of one particular professor–himself a Holocaust survivor–who stood guard and ultimately gave his life while several of his students escaped. As an instructor, the question of “Could I–would I–give my life to save one of my students?” is one that continues to trouble me. As a teacher, you’re accustomed to thinking of your students’ needs before your own: what’s best for them? But what kind of world do we live in that a teacher would ever have to face the question of whose body to protect from bullets: their students’ or their own?

As someone who lives within walking distance of campus, I’m accustomed to living among students: if I weren’t living in my apartment, surely some students would live here in my stead. When neighbors complain about loud student parties or drunken off-campus capers, I usually have nothing to add: I’m a sound sleeper, and my bedroom is on the side of my house opposite the loudest of my partying neighbors. Although I don’t condone obnoxious behavior, I figure college life necessarily involves the occasional release of academic stress, and loud parties and drunken hijinks can sometimes serve as a psychological safety valve. But today’s news goes to show that some students are more troubled than we instructors will ever know, and when they leave our classrooms and the safe, educationally-conducive spaces we try to create for them, we don’t know what dark places they go home to.

As an instructor, I wish I had an answer to the question “Why do some students turn violent,” and as a writer, I wish I had a neat truism with which to tie up today’s post. Instead, I’m left with no clear conclusions, only worrisome questions. They say that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and if some of our young people today find violence to be the best way to speak their troubled minds, we have a problem on our hands that’s bigger than any of us probably know.