Peonies in the Kitchen During Finals Week

Three weeks ago, as I was entering finals week at Parkland College, where I teach English and Humanities, I turned to flowers to ground me. Marilyn, my spouse, had planted a new peony bush in front of our two older ones. The new bush had two deep crimson blooms, and they were already opening when the old plants’ pink buds were still tightly closed. I cut those two flowers and placed them in a vase on the kitchen counter, where I saw them every time I looked up from grading papers. 

That week, in addition to the usual grading marathon, I was also saying goodbye to students to whom I had grown attached. My classes had become genuine communities; students chatted with each other instead of staring at their devices before, during, and after class, and we often laughed together. I had grown to love them and often been inspired by them, these students who came from so many different places: a night-shift at the hospital, thirteen years in the army, successful treatment for depression, a mental-health break from the U of I, a job lifting boxes for UPS. The semester was ending, and they were moving on: one transferring to Columbia College in Chicago, another to the University of Missouri, most returning in the fall for more classes—but not to our class. Our communities were temporary by definition. 

I was exhausted, ready for summer, and I was also sad to be saying goodbye. 

That week, I found myself checking in with the peonies each day, burying my nose in the petals, inhaling their fragrance, and taking photos. As the week went on, the peonies opened fully, then started to lose their petals. Eventually, the fallen petals dried up in a small pile around the base of the vase. But I wasn’t ready to let the flowers go. Finally, a couple of days after I had submitted grades and the semester was officially over, when Marilyn asked me yet again whether I was done with those peonies, I said yes. I photographed the dried petals; even at that stage, the peonies were beautiful, and then I said goodbye. 

 

Two of my South Asian Cultures (HUM 109) students working on a rangoli together in class. Rain kept us indoors, but a sense of discovery and play filled the room. These two students had not worked together before. Their creative collaboration was typical of that class.

[I read this reflection during the annual Flower Communion service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign on Sunday, June 2, 2019.]

Finishing up a Semester at 35,000 Feet

It's 9:09 AM on Friday, December 18 as I write this, on a plane 35,000 feet above Yerevan, Armenia. My body might think it's 11:09 PM on Thursday night, but I've been served lunch once since we took off at noon in Chicago, and another lunch will be served soon. The night/day was short. 

I spent most of the past ten hours grading final projects and exams by students in my Introduction to Poetry and freshman composition classes. Students reflected on what they had learned over the course of the semester; I was moved to read their thoughts about the role of poetry, glad to know that revising their writing made them feel confident. 

A poetry student, responding to one of Mary Oliver's poems about poetry in a question on the final exam, wrote that analyzing poetry teaches that "your way of thinking is not the only way someone might approach the text. You are open to new ways of thinking." Another student, who told me she wants to be an engineer, wrote, "I believe that there is poetry in everything, even if it is not visible on the surface."

One composition student wrote, "I learned how to get my voice to come through my writings and not just be another sentence on the page." He also observed, "I even began to enjoy myself while writing a few of these papers. This is something I wouldn't have guessed before." I wanted to cheer. 

---

It is now 3:35 PM on December 31, 2015, in Bombay (Mumbai), India.

I am ending the year in the city of my birth and childhood, among family members in whose faces I can see myself--the color of their skin, the shapes of their smiles, their inability to speak through helpless laughter mirroring mine.  Though this city has been transformed--down the street, a three-story mall houses a multiplex theatre in what used to be a sleepy edge of the city--I am taken back to the seventies as I hear the incessant beeping and honking of traffic and also the cawing and cooing of crows and pigeons. 

Last night, thirty-seven years after I left India for the first time, I reconnected by phone with a favorite teacher: Mrs. Mehta, who taught me history and geography in the fifth and sixth standards (grades). Her voice was familiar even after all these decades. "I learned the most when I was teaching," she said. I told her I have the same experience; I am always learning from my students. And, I thought to myself a little later, I learned about teaching from my many enthusiastic, gifted teachers--and that is why, while flying halfway across the world, the cabin lights dim as other passengers slept or watched movies, I was able to find pleasure in discovering what my students had learned. Every now and then, I would turn to Marilyn and say, quoting from an exam or a paper, "This is why I teach."

The Peace of Knitting

Knitting my first cardigan with this blue-violet-turquoise Malabrigo is making me very happy.

The repetition of knitting brings me peace. Looping yarn around needles, feeing its softness and its weight in my hand, watching a skein turn into a hat, a blanket, a scarf--I have found pleasure and comfort in this process for a dozen years now. When I spot a knitter waiting at the airport or in a clinic, I feel a kinship with this stranger and find comfort in watching her hands move.

Recently, I began knitting my first cardigan. I am taking a class at my local yarn store, Klose Knit; the teacher is a new friend I made at a knitting retreat last January, when I spent an entire day among knitters and learned how to cable for the first time.

This is the final stage of the hat I knitted after I learned how to cable.

Here are some photos from the early stages of the "Sheer Beauty" cardigan I am knitting. I began with 665 stitches; I have begun the decreases, but, still, it's a very good thing I love the process of knitting. Completing each row is a triumph, and it will be months before I'm done.

Knitting on the deck in the September sunshine while not knowing what time it is--one definition of paradise.

When I Looked Out the Window

It was after six in the evening, and I had been working almost since the crack of dawn. 

After preparing for classes all morning, I had tried to inspire three groups of English 101 students to approach revision with enthusiasm--or at least without trepidation.  In between classes, during office hours, I had discussed drafts with at least half a dozen students.  One young woman, dressed all in black, underestimated her writing skills and was in tears at first, but she left the office with a plan for revision, and she even smiled.  Another, who is facing pressure from her parents to get excellent grades, seemed optimistic after we discussed how she could add to her draft and relieved when I offered to extend the deadline.  Fueled by those small successes and by the coffee I sipped during office hours, I had worked with another half a dozen students over the next two hours in the college's Writing Lab.  I had explained comma splices and discussed the First Amendment.

By six o'clock, I was beat.

But before I could go home, I needed to revise a literature test for the next day.  So I climbed the stairs back to my office.  Just as I reached the top, I glanced out the window. 

Below me, in the sun shining from the west, bushes of red roses whipped in the wind around golden prairie grass.  The petals were almost translucent in the light. 

As I walked down the hall to my office, I smiled.

The End of an Era

One of the books my students and I discussed together; I took this picture because I liked the bookseller's reason for recommending Mrs. Dalloway: "Woolf elegantly demonstrates that sometimes life is bigger on the inside."

“It is the end of an era,” my student said a week ago.  We were at my neighborhood coffee shop with other students from my women’s literature class, sitting around one of the coveted, large tables usually occupied by people with laptops.  My students had wanted the class to gather somewhere off campus, and one suggested that coffee shop.  That Wednesday, after their final exam, was when most of them were available. So we sat there, eating biscotti or a sandwich, sipping on tea or a latte, talking about books and movies and super heroes (one of them was explaining The Avengers to the rest of us).  This group of women had been chatting like this before, during, and after class twice a week, and over the course of the semester, they had become a community.  A temporary community, by definition. 

I have thought about that a lot the past couple of weeks, as I said goodbye to my classes and transitioned into the summer.  Every semester, I endeavor to create a community in each classroom, one where students feel that they belong.  Each community develops its own quirks, its own inside jokes.  And even as I create it, I know it will be dissolved and then never exist again.

This semester, I especially enjoyed my students, thinking of them between class meetings and looking forward to our next conversation.  So I was sad as the semester drew to a close, even though it meant the start of summer. 

Yes, summer is nice: I slow down, I read widely, I reacquaint myself with my art supplies and with the fiction I write in the break from teaching, and I get my hands dirty in the garden, planting tomatoes and annuals and tending to the perennials.  But summer also involves letting go, saying goodbye to students with whom I have spent a lot of time and for whom I feel affection. 

The endings feel more final at community colleges.  Students don’t meet again in dorms, and many of them transfer to other colleges.  So the connections they make in the classroom are not easy to continue afterwards.  Despite that, connections are indeed made.  Perhaps the connections were especially strong this spring.  Certainly the end-of-semester rituals seemed more important, both to me and to the students.  In a composition class, some students suggested we ought to have food on the last day and joked about a turkey roast.  We settled for Oreos, and chips, and Hawaiian punch—which they drank out of Styrofoam bowls because no one had thought of cups.  Some students from my Humanities class, where we study South Asia, decided to meet me at a nearby South Indian restaurant.  Over a leisurely two-hour lunch, we sampled four different kinds of dosas and tried mutton biryani, too.  Then they ordered kulfi; they were full, but they couldn’t pass up a chance to try an Indian dessert. 

At the coffee shop last week, getting ready to leave, my student sighed as she said, “It’s the end of an era.”  I chuckled inwardly at her grand description of the disbanding of our small group.   But I also recognized the aptness of her words.  It was indeed the end of our era, an era I enjoyed and will think of fondly, as I did while planting tomatoes yesterday evening.

Fog and Clarity

           On Monday morning, I woke to a “freezing fog”; that’s what the weather report on the radio called it.  It was a perfect description for the air that was suddenly visible and for the delicate ice crystals that had settled on every branch and twig, and even on the prairie grass around the lamppost in our front yard.  The cold I have had all week had just begun its stay in my body, and I felt a kinship to the haze outside: my mind felt foggy, and my insides were freezing. 

            The next morning, I was rereading Adrienne Rich’s poem “To the Days” (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2001/02/09), one of my favorite poems of all time.  I was preparing for my Women in Literature class that afternoon.  The first line of the second stanza, “Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity” is lovely, as is the image in the next, “coffee and bread with sour plum jam.”   I felt fortunate that this was my work, is my work, to help students appreciate and analyze such sensory, evocative language.  That morning, I was also grateful for my copious notes on the poem; my mind was still foggy, and the day ahead was going to be long and full.

            At one o’clock that afternoon, I met my students in our classroom, where the sun streams in from the south, a luxury on a campus where some classrooms have no windows at all, and those that do are not always a source of light.  We spent over an hour on that one poem, discussing each line and all it evoked.  As always, I gained new insights, too.  When the class ended, the last student to leave chatted with me as she packed up her books.  She had been telling her advisor about this class, she said, and her advisor had remarked, “But I thought you didn’t like poetry.”  “I didn’t,” she had replied, “but I understand it now, and I love it.” 

At the end of class the previous week, after we had discussed poetry by Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Sexton, another student said to me, almost as an aside, “I didn’t like these poems before we discussed them.  I didn’t know what they were about.  Now I really like them.  I understand them.”  She had contributed to the discussion that day, and I hadn’t noticed that she was confused, so her comment came as a surprise to me.  A surprise and a gift. 

            This Tuesday morning, discussing the line about “Fog in the mornings,” the students talked about the weather the day before and all the metaphorical meanings of fog.  Apparently they felt a “hunger for clarity,” too, and it was satisfied.