The End of the Semester

I am grading my students' final papers and projects.

(Thank goodness nobody wrote anything "disturbing.")

This is the first upper-level, discipline-specific class I've been able to teach. The first class for which I designed my own syllabus, readings, and assignments. The first class for which I was, in essence, entirely responsible.

Previously, I had taught an Intro to Theatre course where the texts and the assignments were all set out for me and the students were, for the most part, only interested in getting a gen-ed credit out of the way. I taught it three times, and each time we enjoyed ourselves, had some good discussions, and (I hope) learned a thing or two about the work it takes to put on a play, but... the atmosphere of the course, both in its design and in its practice, was rather like learning "about French" rather than learning French.

In the class I'm teaching now, we're actually learning the language.

And so, reading the final papers and looking through the semester-long "director's notebooks" I've asked my students to create, I feel... as if I didn't do enough, as if I could have taught them more, as if I should have had them write these "final papers" two weeks ago because now I see what of my teaching they understood and what they missed or did not understand.

Looking at the final papers gives me a better sense of what we accomplished as a class than any blah-blah student evaluation ever could. ("On a scale of 1-5, please rate your instructor's level of interest, knowledge of subject matter, availability outside of the classroom.")

Some students, of course, got it. A few blew the whole thing off, and that's their problem to deal with. But it's the ones in the middle, who got "most-but-not-all," who wrote things in their final paper which make me think "oh, but if I had only asked this question or prepared this exercise, maybe they would have made this connection" that are breaking my heart as I read and grade this stack of papers.

To the more veteran educators out there: How do you all deal with this? Obviously one improves and makes changes in subsequent semesters. But do you also share this feeling of "if we could only meet one more time as a class, I could make everything clear???" and the guilt of thinking "now they'll never know..."

Of course, since I am meeting with all my students one-on-one this week to discuss their papers and notebooks, I will have a chance to talk with them and maybe make that last bit of connection. But it's also Finals Week, and the students are an inch away from putting school down entirely, and classes and a previous semester's work suddenly become unimportant.

And the students who got "most-but-not-all" will get the rest in next semester's class, or on their own; or they'll never get it, and then I couldn't have helped them anyway.

Still, it brings to mind "If He Walked Into My Life" from Mame (yes, I know, theatre dork), which I cannot find anywhere on YouTube or I would post the link.

But we all know the lyrics:

Did [they] need a stronger hand?
Did [they] need a lighter touch?
Was I soft or was I tough?
Did I give enough?
Did I give too much?

Though I'll ask myself my whole life long
What went wrong along the way
Would I make the same mistakes
If [they] walked into my life today?

Back from Travels

As you may have guessed by the post below, I'm back from my NYC trip.

Seem to have got a lot of traffic in the past few days. A lot... of traffic.

But no hate.

This is good.

Tomorrow: posts on Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and my discovery that all of Broadway is being kept afloat by memory and nostalgia.

I mean, come on... would anyone go see Legally Blonde (the musical) if it hadn't been a popular movie that, more than five years ago, they once liked? And would anyone buy tickets to the captivating but oh-so-dated Company if they hadn't once been awkward teenagers singing to the original cast album, dreaming of the magic of theatre while trying to fit all the words of "Another Hundred People" into a single breath?

I could keep going... but will have to save it for tomorrow.

Indian Breakfast

Two tables, next to each other.

At one, I sat with S.

At the other, another young (desi) man sat with his girlfriend.

Both tables played out, a beat apart, the same scene.

The table number is called. The young man goes to the counter and returns with idli and sambar and chutney. The pair begins eating. All is well.

The table number is called again. The young man goes to the counter and returns with a dosa. The young woman demurs, and says something teasingly about how it will be perfect for sharing.

The table number is called again. The young man goes to the counter and returns with a second dosa, as there are, after all, two people at the table. The young woman is starting to look a little nervous. He pushes one of the dosas -- which is, of course, the size of... oh, I don't know, a small cat -- towards her.

"Eat up," he says. "This is what everyone eats for breakfast in India."

The young woman at the second table rebels a bit more than I do (I am rapidly becoming seduced by the spices), as both men say "but you are too thin already, you need to eat this." Then the table number is called yet again, and the young man returns with cups of thick coffee and chai. The only question is where I can find room to put them.

"What can one possibly do after eating Indian breakfast?" I ask, staring at the empty plates.

"Sleep, of course," he replies.

But instead he takes me out into the street, around a corner to a shop which sells paan. Dosas are overwhelming because of their square-footage; the paan was overwhelming for a different reason.

"All of it in the mouth at once?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

The wrapped mixture was slightly larger than my palm, but I was nothing if not game. And yet -- after conquering the idli and the sambar and the chutney and the dosa and the coffee and the chai -- the paan, stuffed into the only part of me that was still empty, was my undoing.

My head began to spin as I tried to chew, and I ended up spitting the mixture out into the street, which I think disappointed S., because I had held up so well thus far.

Yet he was kind enough to take me back to the apartment a half-hour later, when the rest of the Indian breakfast caught up with me and caused me to lean, somewhat dizzily, into the wall of a grocery featuring an advertisement for Amitabh Bachchan in Cheeni Kum. ("Now with less sugar," indeed!)

And, as he had predicted, Indian breakfast led me straight to Indian sleep.

I wonder if the young woman at the other table slept as well.

Blue, Continental Traveler

I have too traveled! I said. After graduation I went to a school in Ohio, and after that I lived in Minneapolis!

You have certainly toured the parochial midwest, he said, laughing.

Well, I countered, look at how many places I've been in the last month. Washington, D.C., Chicago, Toronto, and now here, in New York City.

And the man who once lived on the other side of the world smiled.

(Note from the editor: Blue's in NYC for the weekend, seeing art and theatre and S., for whom she tried to write a villanelle. Clearly not much time left for posting. But when she gets back... she'll tell you the story of her first experience eating paan. The DARE program never warned her about this one. ^__^)

Blue's Back to the Political, For Just A Moment

Each day in our graduate directing seminar we are asked to bring in a piece of news, on the grounds that an artist should be continually aware of what's going on in the world.

A lot of the current events I've posted about on this blog have made it into class (particularly this one and, of course, this one).

Today, as the culmination of our current events project, our professor told us that the interesting thing about today's news (as opposed to 1930s German news or 1960s Russian news) is that no matter how awful the story, it no longer affects us. That is to say, it might "affect" us mentally (in that we think "oh, how terrible!") but it doesn't affect our day-to-day lives.

The two women in the class immediately piped up and said oh no, the recent Supreme Court ban on late-term abortion certainly affects us.

No, said the professor, that's all theoretical. You just think it affects you. It hasn't really changed the way you live your lives.

We were not able to convince the professor that any of the news we brought to class actually affected us in any way. Yet I would argue (and am going to argue, on this blog) that it does.

Sure, knowing that the Supreme Court just banned late-term abortion doesn't change my evening plans. It doesn't change the fact that I came home and said hello to my kitty and heated up yesterday's "bell peppers in a curry sauce." But, when I begin to start a family, it may become a very urgent issue.

And knowing that Allen Lee was arrested for writing an essay doesn't change the fact that I sat down to watch The Simpsons on Sunday evening. It did cause me to censor what I posted to this blog, though (as anyone with eyes clever enough to catch the differences between the first and second versions of this post noticed); and as someone who plans to continue teaching, it has made me stop and think "what would I have done in this situation?"

No, I won't be faced with an Allen Lee essay tomorrow (although technically I don't know kind of end-of-semester papers my students will hand in). But I might find myself reading one in two years.

Of course by then, the professor might argue, everything will have changed anyway.

So is the crux of the matter, then, that students (even graduate ones) are just too "removed from responsibility" to have these issues affect them in any day-to-day way? Perhaps. But I still disagree.

Let's take this current event: Micheal Winerip's recent essay on what it actually takes for a student to get into Harvard these days. It's a human interest story, to be sure, but note the details he gives us:

What kind of kid doesn’t get into Harvard? Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake.

At his age, when I got hungry, I made myself peanut butter and jam on white bread and got into Harvard.

It's the Red Queen Effect: It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place. And you can bet that it affects my day-to-day life. Which is, btw, perhaps the reason why my particular generation is less inclined to, say, chain ourselves to a pillar of the Supreme Court Building to protest the recent abortion ruling, although we are vaguely (or presciently) aware that it does affect our lives and that in previous generations people might have done something about it.

That is to say, we know that if we drop out of the race for even a moment, not only will we not get into Harvard, we might not get back into the race at all.

But this is not a new thought by any means, which leads me to believe that there might be another reason why we aren't taking the political action my professor reminds us was taken (by ordinary citizens!) in the halcyon days of the '30s and '40s.

Could it perhaps be, instead of the Red Queen Effect, the "Cindy Sheehan Effect:" the knowledge that protests, even well-organized, persistent ones by large groups of people and headed by a charismatic individual, no longer have the possibility to enact any significant change?

Meeting Tappan Wilder

Our Town opened last weekend, to moderate success. As the musical director, the most interesting part of the opening was that the choir (perhaps due to nerves, and to the fact that there is a bit of an interval between when they hear their pitch and when they sing) naturally pitched themselves up a step and began singing "Blessed Be The Tie That Binds" in G rather than F major. And, as I heard this, suddenly remembering a choir director from years ago telling me that F major was the hardest key in which to sing (because it fell naturally into the female voice break), and being impressed by the choir's unconscious fortitude (and blending skill), and wishing I had remembered that bit of music theory earlier so I could have worked with them in G major from the beginning.

Today, Tappan Wilder, who is Thornton Wilder's nephew and the acting spokesperson (and heir) of the Wilder estate, came and gave a lecture on Thornton Wilder's life.

The man was brilliant. Both men (Thornton and Tappan) were brilliant. Thornton, as a child, learned to speak French, German, and Italian (in addition to his native English); and his father, noting his son's aptitude for the academic, sent him every summer to work on farms so that he would not become "disconnected from what is real, i.e. the earth and the natural life cycle."

Thornton Wilder began writing the works that would make him famous while he was working as a high school English teacher, and even after he became wildly famous never stopped teaching. He also traveled extensively, and (as Tappan told us) made a variety of friendships, and might spend one weekend eating at the home of a local family and the next weekend eating dinner at the Rockefellers'.

Anyway. Long story short. To whom does Tappan attribute his own liberal education, and to whom does he attribute Thornton's education and capacity for thought and understanding?

Not to any teachers. Not to any schools.

To the parents.

Tappan acknowledges his own debt to his father, Thornton's brother Amos; as well as Thornton and Amos' debt to their father, Amos Parker Wilder.

How fascinating. I suppose the moral is "teach your children well, so they might grow up to win three Pulitzer Prizes." Or, perhaps, "if you want smart kids, you're going to have to raise them your own damn self." ^__^

Things You Should Never, Ever Eat

For reasons too complicated to explain right now, I haven't yet had the kitchen-restocking spree I so desperately need. (Though help is on the way. On the "slowed down by fracking Fed-Ex way," but on the way nonetheless.)

Anyway. In my ongoing search for the cheapest forms of ____ available (today it was food) I found myself eating a Taco Bell "Seven-Layer Crunchwrap."

I chose it because it contained no meat.

Imagine, if you will, a pile of vegetarian nachos. Maybe they contain some sour cream, some guacamole, some salsa, some refried beans, and at least three other unidentifiable "layers."

Then imagine someone deep-frying that pile of nachos into a soft tortilla shell.

Then imagine eating it.

It is possibly the most disgusting thing I have ever encountered. Even more disgusting than Grindhouse.

On the plus side, there must be enough calories involved in the process to... um... aid in keeping my pants from hanging off of my pretty, pretty (shrinking) kundi. ^__^ (When I had the privilege of meeting Tappan Wilder this afternoon, I had to keep reaching behind me to pull up my ever-sinking waistband.)