Faculty WebPage For John Goldfine

Jan. 20.  One last anonymous page of written questions about the syllabus popped up in the papers I collected Friday, and once again someone wants to know if I like teaching.  People kept asking this question last week--do I look like I'm in pain?  Or having too much fun?

I do like to teach (but I don't like committee meetings and dealing with administration stuff, which are also part of the job).  At the very least, teaching's a cheap adrenaline high.  At the best, the teacher feels pretty good about lightbulbs going off in student heads.  But what I emphasize to all my classes when I answer this question is that it's work: teaching is work. 

Maybe some students have had saintly teachers who love teaching so much they'd volunteer and do it for no money.  Not me.  Sorry if that sounds awful, but psychic satisfaction won't put bread on the table or even get me out of bed in the morning.  The positive side of my lack of volunteerism is that since I'm being paid--and not too badly (don't tell the administrators I said that!)--my professionalism is strong.

That means that meeting my classes is not optional.  I meet my classes.  Assigning and reading essays and getting them back the following class is not optional.  I read and get them back.  Talking to students about their writing is not optional.  I talk.  You're paying me for all this, and I will earn my pay.

Jan. 20.  Forbidden words, animal-style.  Winston Churchill's parrot, Charlie, is still going strong and still four- lettering Hitler and the Nazis in a voice unmistakably that of Britain's wartime leader.  Her suggestion to the German dictator and his cohorts is simple and clear and the operative verb she uses can still be heard wherever two or more gather together, even in America.  Apparently Charlie's cage stood in Churchill's office and visitors plotting wartime strategy were often appalled at Charlie's coarse remarks, but...Churchill always smiled.  Check out Charlie's story! 

(Thanks to www.AndrewSullivan.com for the link.)

Jan. 19.  Friday I was booming along in my lecturette--they seldom go on more than 20 minutes, and I was about 15 minutes in.  Yep, I was doing great, delivering really slick stuff--or so I thought--until I saw a student flash a desperate look at the clock.  Former Academic Dean Nat Crowley once told his faculty that 15 minutes of straight lecture is about all anyone can handle.  He was right!

Today's mandatory three-hour faculty session at Rangeley Hall wasn't straight lecture.  Lots of questions were asked.  But...after three hours I was totally limp, passive, and word-pummeled.

I used to write email critiques of these sessions, figuring people would want feedback so they could continuously improve their performance.  Those critiques were never welcome, whether because of my writing style--which ranged from edgy disillusionment to hostile assault--or because of people's natural resistance to actually examining a performance they already figure is pretty okay.  So, the critiques are no longer written and the people no longer getting them perhaps think a session like today's flew into the faculty ears and up to its brain without even a wince.

Jan. 17.  Spelling counts!  Sort of.

This morning the missus asked me how to spell 'collage'--the last time I saw 'collage,' I was telling a student that his resume darn well better read 'Eastern Maine Community College' because 'collage' is that arty thing you do with cut-up magazines.... And a day or two ago, I asked her whether 'harass' had one or two r's.  She didn't know for sure and in the end I settled (Incorrectly!  I just checked the dictionary) for two.

All of us spellers live on the bell curve, either spelling nearly every single word wrong or nearly every single word right or falling somewhere in-between those extremes.  All of us, that is,  except Official English Teachers.  We Official English Teachers can't and don't make spelling mistakes--ever.  You might see a word misspelled, but that's actually a typo.  A mistake of the fingers, not of the mind.

Jan. 16. Punctuality Plus.   I'm probably a lifetime low-teens achiever if you add the Seven Deadly Sins to the Ten Commandments.  For all my wicked ways, however, I am very punctual, which is not too high on anyone's list of major virtues, but still, it's what I have going for me.  There I was at 10:58--punctually--in Room 223, waiting for class to start (the clock in 223 is 3 minutes slow, so in the real world it was actually 11:01, not my problem.  I just go by the room clock.) I I look around and think, 'It's early in the semester, but I'm not getting even a faint buzz of recognition from this group.  Who are these people--did they all somehow wander into my classroom by mistake?'   Then suddenly the penny dropped!  Duh! Someone had made a mistake all right, but it wasn't the twenty students, it was the instructor who forgot that he doesn't always teach everything in 223! 

I arrived in 263 at about 11:05, out of breath but full of explanations and excuses my students believed not a word of.  Uh-huh, give the prof his first tardy--and the rule is: three tardies and the students get a day off!

Jan. 16.  Dreams.  I had a school anxiety dream last night--not the classic which usually features a first-day-of-semester classroom full of rowdy students throwing paper airplanes and a teacher who unaccountably forgot to do ANY class prep at all and who also forgot to put on certain clothing items no well-dressed man should ever arrive without.

This was different.  It was the first day of school all right--a new fancy school with all-glass construction so every classroom was visible from every point in the building--ideal for those administrators who like to know what's going on but who hate to leave their desks.  What happened first day was that teachers had a musical chairs kind of race to see which classroom they would get for the semester. The best classrooms were the farthest away, so the race went to the swift, the young, and those who remembered to wear their sneakers.  Students were cheering their profs on, while administrators lined us up and shot off a blank to begin the race.  Then I woke up...and it was all a dream!  Thank heavens!

In truth, there won't ever again be any scrambling and scrabbling since the school has come up with a new proactive scheduling plan.  Instead of figuring out next semester's schedule at the last second or just after, we're now going to plan a whole school-year ahead.   An economist of the Marxist school might call this a One-Year Plan, and it has all the strengths of any long-term plan.  It looks good on paper; resources can be allocated; rational plans can be made; everyone knows exactly what will happen and there are no surprises.

Of course, if surprises do occur, as they have a nasty way of doing, living up to the Plan may make it harder to improvise (improvisation is seen as a bad thing among long-term planners).  Plans tend to take on a life of their own--the plan becomes more important than the reality--or, at least it inevitably did in economies that were centrally planned.  Long-term plans (of all sorts) have been known to impose a sense of why-bother-to-get-up-everything-is-already-known on the population serving under the plans.

So, we choose between constant flux, akin to (but not the same as) anarchy, and a permanent monolith crowding the horizon, akin to (but not the same as) a glacier approaching.  Between Jack on the one hand and the giant on the other.  Between the ragtag colonists using stonewalls for cover and the well-trained redcoats marching along in smooth perfect order.... 

Jan 15.  More forbidden words.  The school's computer network uses a censor which refuses messages containing this or that nasty word--probably George Carlin's famous seven (I could link here but why don't you google it for the thrill of discovery?) and then some.  Anyway, a student wrote me about yesterday's 'forbidden words' post, and I wasn't able to see see that email, presumably because of the network censor.  I can also be reached at johngoldfine@acadia.net where the censor is much less stringent.

Jan. 15.  Religious prophets call for a total conversion of the wicked human heart; their disciples settle for some new commandments.  Which is why on Monday we EMCC faculty will celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s preaching by listening to the heirs of his legacy, folks who have no notion of redeeming our souls, but who do press us to live by rules which ought to chop the sharper edges off our unregenerate selves.  In other words, we will get training in how to avoid harrassing each other racially, sexually, and all the other ways.  Our hearts may be cold, but our actions will be above reproach and beyond litigation.

Sometimes we are even trained in triplicate--with a speaker who hands out a handout of material which is then talked about and also duplicated on overhead transparencies.  Not really Dr. King's style, but we've moved up and on.

Jan. 15.  For the record.  New course proposal is over on the left, but it seems pretty hopeless to propose and design courses which in the end can't run for lack of interested students, so I guess the AAPD won't get a chance to consider this one. 

Jan. 15.  Smoking.  Back when I was seventeen and starting college--1963, as I recall--there were empty tunafish cans on all the tables in the classrooms.  Ash trays!  Yes, children, in those far-off distant days, it was well-known and without question that no one could get through a prof's lecture without lighting up.  We were so cool back in the day!   Although my last ciggie was Dec. 14, 1967, yesterday, for some reason, I had a huge jones for a cigarette.  Darn it, I only wanted a couple of puffs while I was talking to the class!

And, just five days ago in  Heathrow, I only wanted to strangle the jerk who at 9am was having a pint or two and blowing his miserable cigarette smoke my way.  Go figure.

Jan 15.  I learned a lesson yesterday.  I gave an in-class assignment I thought was fairly straightforward: write a story about someone you love or someone you hate.  A lot of students had trouble getting past the explanation of why they loved/hated the person and on to the story.  After a while I saw that the story--the example, the anecdote, the evidence, the goodies, the nitty gritty--was a commitment to the material many didn't want to make.  Stories are hard, they demand a beginning, a middle, an end, and everyone knows there  can be lame stories or sharp stories--so the risk of writing one is great because the risk of failure lurks. 

I'd never quite seen this difficulty so clearly, although it's no late-breaking news that students often dislike providing specifics in their writing.

I introduced most of the classes right then and there to the NRA--that's the National 'Ritin' Association--and explained that unless they pulled the trigger and shot their stories out of the pistol and onto the page, they wouldn't be allowed to join the NRA and wouldn't get their personally autographed Shakespeare poster.

Maybe Shakespeare is a bad example to students--he cribbed all his plots, Mr. Master Plagiarist.  Not that there are all that many basic plots out in the universe.  An unsurprising number of my student stories were classics, along the lines of:

* then we met and the stars shone in the sky

* then he/she screwed me over and everything turned dark

* then I did something bad/good and still feel awful/great about it

* then bad stuff happened but I overcame all obstacles

Jan. 14.  Got into a discussion with a colleague about forbidden words, forbidden in class anyway.  He said the four-letter words were all forbidden in his class, because they make some people uncomfortable and are disrespectful to him.  I don't really understand the disrespectful part, and since people have been unsuccessfully trying to get me to understand it for nearly fifty years now, I doubt I ever will.

How is it disrespectful to the instructor for a student to use a word in class that the instructor uses naturally and easily outside of class?  More to the point, what does it do to the class when the instructor is in the position of monitoring people's words?  Aren't we all eager to be out of junior high school where one's deportment is an issue?  Do we want to introduce that way of thinking into adult college life? 

On the one hand, forbidding words may save some people the discomfort of hearing words they dislike.  On the other, it may cause some people the discomfort of not being able to use words they do like, words they use without guilt or self-consciousness in their daily lives.

No teacher wants to lose the first group--to alienate people for no good reason.  ( I wrote about that very thing in the Jan. 13 post)  I don't want to lose the second group either.  Especially in a writing class, how can I tell people that part of the language that might be used effectively in their writing is arbitrarily closed to them?  How should the rival and irreconcilable claims of the two groups be reconciled?  Beats me.

My colleague even thinks the use of the word 'god' is offensive, unless the course is one in religion.  Omigod, good god, god in heaven, god only knows, god almighty, and all such other expressions are off-limits, lest some student feel that someone else is blaspheming or disrespecting God.  Personally, I think that's serious overkill.  I can and do school myself to avoid in class the nasty-mouth language I use everywhere else, but I don't know if I can follow my colleague this far into concern for student sensitivity.

And here's a wrinkle: in the gym during my workout, a hip-hop  song came on.  The song gloried in the two big four-letter words, hit the twelve-letter word many times, might have slipped the ten-letter one in there, and was all over the six-letter word.  If a student said the six-letter word in class, as a joke or angrily or maybe even in defense of 'Huckleberry Finn,' there might be heck to pay.  But here we all were, pumping iron and listening to it for entertainment*.  It's confusing--some people can say it, others can't.  Some get paid for saying it, others will pay dearly if they say it!  We can rap along with it in the gym, mustn't breathe it elsewhere.  It's art and music, yet it's also a quick trip to the Hate Crimes Police interrogation room. 

I know that somewhere out there someone thinks it's insensitive,  disrespectful, inappropriate, blasphemous, and wrong for a teacher of writing to even write about this word--to even THINK about this word (and there are also people out there who think it's unforgivably mealy-mouthed of me to write about it without ever using it.)  Here's a link to further discussion.

*Well, I wasn't listening for entertainment.  I hated it, but not because I object to the language--but because I'm an old guy who just doesn't get rap or hip-hop or even know what the difference between them is, if any.

Jan. 14.  Every night at supper, I work on dog training.  Seems like a silly time, but in the books they always advise having a regular class time every day, and a trainer's resolution to set one up carries no more weight than the same trainer's resolution New Year's Eve to cut back on whoopie pies or to change the oil in the car more often.  Fortunately, I don't have to do any resolving at all if the work sessions are at supper time.  The dogs come over anyway to check out the latest chow off the grill (They say, "Not begging, daddy, just...curious!") so why not work then?  And we do.  And if I forget for even a second, Chloe does her famous Cuff Trick, which consists of her stuffing her squashy Shih-tzu nose up the cuff of my pants and sticking her cold nose against my calf.  When I look down, all I can see of her face is her eyes, staring up at me, beaming her message: "Can we please, for the luvva pete, get going?  We have work to do!  Sheesh!"

Talk about your motivated students.

We have a trick that we've been working on every night for a couple of years, and it goes against all the dogs' instincts and all their doggy lifestyle.  Last night, they were so clockwork, I wish I'd had them on videotape.  The trick is simply that both dogs sit and I call first one, then the other over to me.  Their instincts tell them to run in a pack. Their lifestyle tells them that Scooter should go first, even if I call Chloe first.  It's taken a lot of practice to get them to listen for their names and not break.

Like most good physical things--good horseback riding, good skiing, good dancing, good skating, good shooting, good play of any kind--it looks easy from the ground.  Doesn't look that hard or like much is happening.  But that's the outsider view, the view of the person who hasn't tried it yet.  Teaching it was hard and learning it was too.  Now a visitor would say 'Big deal!'

This post actually has a moral: I had students Monday who basically told me that the trick was too hard and they didn't think they ever could do it.  They may be right.  But most of them will look back some day when they're styling right along and say, "Oh yeah, sure, you betcha.  English?  Nothing to it!"

Jan. 13.  First day yesterday.  I'm always torn.  Part of me wants to be very calm and reassuring with new students.  Another part of me wants to shake them out of their preconceptions and get them agitated.  Usually I can't summon the energy I need to teach unless I get a little bit manic--and that translates into agitating students instead of calming them.  Teaching is performance art (see the second graf of the Dec. 20 post), and I only quell my own demons and  perform satisfactorily when I'm juiced on adrenaline--but I have a lot of doubt whether that style is useful for the majority of my students.  It's a bind.  I wind up later in the semester having to overcome my unfortunate presentation but, for some students, it's too late.   On the other hand, in end-of-semester surveys, a lot of people say they were very anxious after the first few classes but found things turning out not-so-bad.

Jan. 12.  Right now, I should be over at the gym, pumping iron and adding hard muscle to the ripped physique, which is already the envy of all the other faculty guys.... Unfortunately, boiler problems in the Johnston Gym have me killing time at a keyboard instead.  Can my 2:30 class really be all it ought to be if I haven't worked my lats and biceps?  Are you going to argue that there is absolutely NO connection between mind and body?

Jan 11.  Raise your hand!  Actually, don't, please.  Dec. 8's post on hand-raising says most of it.  But here's the rest:

One thing I dread about first day of class is students feeling out the teacher--y'know, just how big a jerk is he going to be?  If I have to go to the bathroom, is this like first-grade where the teacher will laugh at me in front of the whole class for having a mini-bladder?  So, at first they treat the teacher like he's a bottle of nitroglycerine.  Shake him up, and he might explode.  And that translates into hand-raising.

I think hand-raising is degrading on both sides.  I don't want to call on people.  Giving me that power puts me on a pedestal that's a dite too high for this English teacher.  Nothing I have to say is so important it isn't interruptable.  It embarrasses me for students to act as if it is.

(The missus will not agree.  One of our oldest arguments is over interrupting: I'm generally for it; she's deeply against it.)

As for students, it puts them back in first grade to have to raise hands--at least, that's how I feel at the school meetings where faculty have to raise hands.  Like we can't be trusted not to get rowdy.  I want people to figure out for themselves when the time is right to interrupt with a question.  If people have to raise their hands and call attention to themselves that way--as well as calling attention by asking the eventual question--a lot of people say to heck with it and never do either.

Anyway, questions aren't really part of my teaching style.  I rarely ask the class a question (because I hate to see either blank faces or people's raised hands waving for me to notice.)  And I rarely ask individuals questions except ones like 'So, what do you think about this hook you've got?'  Or '"Why'd you repeat this in graf 4?'

Most student questions fall into the 'Do we really have to do this/how many words is this supposed to be/why do we take English anyway' category.  Not real questions so much as anxiety or hostility let off the leash for a minute.

Real questions, questions about writing, questions which always have gray area answers, answers which are a matter of writerly opinion as opposed to teacherly authority, those questions I love, but they never are asked from under a raised hand.

Jan 10. I'm back!  Back from my vacation travels and almost back to school.  Spring semester, eh?  It's twelve below out there, not much like spring, but pitchers and catchers do report in a month, so spring will come.  Speaking of pitchers and catchers, every bozo in England is wearing a baseball cap with a New York Yankee insignia and, bad as that is, a lot of those hats are in ridiculous pastel pinks and lime greens, which is about right for the Yankees--but still!  Is there something wrong with good old navy blue?

Big story in England about this monster who raped, killed, and chopped up prostitutes before he dumped their body parts in wheelybins.  And you know what?  When the police got onto him and he ran, to disguise himself he shaved off his beard and WORE A NEW YORK YANKEES CAP!  Typical Yankee fan....