End of Term

Photo by MITCHELL

This week was the last week of classes this term.  My college is year-round, and we have four 12-week terms, usually with a week off between.  I had four classes this past term, with a total of 15 students by the time I was done (I lost three students in one class who all dropped out of school for different reasons and at different times).

Weeks 10 and 11 of the term, I was having a really hard time sleeping.  I would wake up several times a night, and sometimes have difficulty getting back to sleep, which is really not like me.  T was getting worried about me, it was that unusual.  It seemed like I was suffering from stress, but I couldn't figure out what that stress was all about.  Acute stress is obvious -- oh my god, that thing is looming, gotta get it done now!  But chronic stress is much sneakier -- something is bothering you, but it is at the back of your mind.  And even though you are thinking calmly about what to make for dinner or what you are watching in TV, some part of your brain is focused on it.  It causes your endocrine system to work overtime, so that you can feel your heart pounding while you are laying in bed thinking about nothing in particular.  And since I couldn't identify what exactly was lingering in the back of my mind, I couldn't do anything about it.

And then I turned in my grades for my first class on Tuesday afternoon, and everyone passed, and suddenly I was sleeping just fine.  So I guess I now know what the problem was.

When I was a TA in grad school, classes usually had 100+ students in them.  I may have recognized the names and even writing styles of most students, but I couldn't put faces to those names.  When I was an adjunct at a community college for a semester, I ended up with about 20 students, but I still only knew a little bit about the personal lives of one or two of them. 

But where I'm teaching now, with only a few students in each class, I know a lot more about them.  Especially the students that have takens Strategies with me -- it's a class where you definitely spend a lot of time talking about fears, challenges, strengths and weaknesses, past experiences and feelings.  And then I have had those same students in my Computer Apps class, and now again in Composition.  We've had a lot more time to get to know one another.

Another difference is the attendance policy at my school.  Unlike in my other classes, where as long as students turned in the assignments and took the tests they could come to class or not as they pleased, here I need to personally calls students every time they miss class.  To get full marks for Professionalism, which is part of their grade for each class, they can call me in advance to let me know they will be late or out that day.  So I know why they are missing class: they are working 2 full-time jobs and are only getting a few hours of sleep a night; they have been kicked out of their apartment, along with their partner and toddler, and are living at a homeless shelter until they can qualify for HUD housing; their partner has been in the hospital getting a kidney transplant and they are the only one in the family with a car to drive other family members to visit; their car won't start, and there is no public transportation near their home; they have been suffering from migraines all week and can't get out of bed.  I know what they are struggling with, and I hope that they can do what they need to in order to catch up.  So I encourage, I offer tutoring, I do everything I can to help them get their grades up.  But by week 10, it looked like 6 of my 15 students were likely to fail.

And then there are the weekly reports, where I tell my boss who is doing poorly and why.  So every Monday, I go through my grades, and see all the students who are struggling and try to explain why.  Sometimes I can write it off as a student who simply isn't trying, but more often, I see someone who is struggling, for good reason, and I wish that there was something I could do to help them out.  But it's their life, not mine, and they are the ones making all the decisions.

In the end, only three of my student's didn't pass their classes.  I wish it were zero, but I know I did everything in my power to help them succeed.

Part of me wishes I could take a step back, be less involved, be less emotionally invested, to just say, "If you don't do the work, you suffer the consequences, and that's that."  It would certainly make me sleep easier.  But I think I wouldn't be as good of a teacher if I approached my classes that way.  And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have students who have just failed my class go and change their schedule so they can take it again from me next term.  And I wouldn't be happy for the opportunity to teach them again, in the hopes that all those personal problems stop getting in the way so that they can succeed next time.

Chemo Cap 2

As an update to a previous post, a while back my friend sent along a pic of her little one in the green tasseled hat I made for her.  I'm glad it looks as cute as I had hoped it would!

As for more recent projects, a friend, J, asked for hat donations for another friend of hers who is going through chemo treatments.  I have no idea who this woman is, but I decided that spending an hour or two knitting a hat for the friend of a friend is the least that I can do.  I had seen a really cute hat knit-up at the local yarn shop, one that used perled ridges around the sides of the hat.  I couldn't find exactly the same pattern, so I tried it on my own.  It didn't come out quite how I had hoped -- the one I saw had fat ridges where the knitted "valleys" in between disappeared, leaving the look of stacked rings on the outside of the hat.  I guess you get that with ribs where the perling is wider than the knitting.  I did 4 rows of perling followed by 4 rows of knitting, and the ridges just don't have the same effect.

Mildly ridge-y hat

A better shot for the overall shape and colors

I then accidentally threw it into the dryer for a few minutes, which helped define the ridges a bit more, before I put it in the mail.  (It was on a table waiting to be sent out -- some laundry ended up on the table on top of it -- I needed to get the wrinkes out of said laundry before work one morning, so everything got tossed into the dryer for 10 minutes -- don't judge me, okay?  *smile*)  I just hope that the woman I knit it for will like it, since I know absolutely nothing about her personality or tastes.  If she hates it, then maybe it can be her backup hat for when she doesn't want to actually leave the house, or something.

So that makes 2 hats I have knitted for people I don't know personally in just the past few months.  And now I have found out that a close friend of mine in CA has also just been diagnozed with breast cancer.  She's a knitter, and is surrounded by my old knitting friends from CA, so making a hat for her doesn't seem like the right thing to do to show support -- she will have plenty of hats if she wants them.  I wish that I could send along something else that will be unexpectedly useful, but having no personal experience with a friend or family member going through chemo treatments in the past, I don't know what else will be a good idea.  Whenever I make a baby gift, I like to send along some practical things, like baby lotion, wipes, washcloths, etc.  But I'm not sure what kinds of practical things can be of help to her.

Does anyone have suggestions about what else to send in a chemo care package?

My Report Card

I meant to write this weekend and let you all know how my lesson plans turned out, but I ran out of time.  So here it is.

I was moderately successful.  In my disengaged Composition II class, I asked lots of leading questions during my lecture, and got some feedback.  Mostly from just one student, but that's better than nothing.  This week, I'm going to try a trick other teachers here use with bigger classes: making them go over the reading and then give the lecture to the class.  Usually instructors will break the class into groups, but with only 4 students, they'll have to work individually.  I hope it works!

With my overly-talkative Composition I class, I managed to get through the lecture in a reasonable amount of time.  We were able to do some group editing, but because I was focused on providing my own edits to their rough drafts, the conversation wasn't as well-directed as I would have liked.  I got them back on track with some focused discussion questions, but by the time I took them to the library to work on their papers, we only had 6 minutes of class left.  So, again, mixed results.

My biggest problem right now is the number of students I have who are failing my classes.  I don't have a bell curve in my classes, which is what you usually expect to see -- most students have Bs or Cs, with a small number acing the class and a small number failing.  Instead, I have a bi-polar graph -- my students are either passing with flying colors, or they are failing.  Very little in-between.  Now, statistically speaking, it's hard to get a well-distributed curve with 4 classes of about 5 students each.  But even if I add them all together, across all my classes, the same pattern exists.

I don't think the problem is that my classes are too hard -- if that were the case, I'd have a bunch of C students and a bunch of F students, right?  Instead, the pattern I see is this: if you come to class and turn in your homework, you have an A in my class.  If you don't come to class and don't turn in homework, then you are failing.

So the question is, how do I get my students to all come to class and turn in their work?

I think I'm going to be visiting the academic dean soon to see if she has any ideas there.

Good Teacher, Bad Teacher

I am teaching two different composition classes this term, on Thursday and Friday mornings. They are Composition I and Composition II, so you would expect my experiences to be different simply based on writing level, but that's not what makes them so different from one another.  And the differences between the classes cause me to become a different teacher, so I feel the need to figure out what makes these two groups such polar opposites.

Both classes are small -- 4 students in one, 6 in the other, but in both classes I only reliably have 3 students a week.  Both classes are a mix of students I've had before who know my teaching style, and students who are new to me this term.  Despite the fact the Comp I is a prerequisite for Comp II, students in both classes have similar writing abilities -- one or two write quite well, a few have a lot of grammatical errors but their organization is good, and one or two struggle with their writing at all levels.

The lesson plans vary in only one really obvious way: I start the Comp I classes with a punctuation quiz each day, but I don't do that for the Comp II students.  But the rest of the lesson consists of covering PowerPoints on writing, having a class discussion and then having the students write a summary of the discussion, and then, if there is time, letting students work in the library on the writing assignment that is due the following week.

The last 2 weeks, my Comp I class has been so busy talking with me, they haven't even made it to the class discussion and summary, much less had time at the end of class to work on their assignments.  My Comp II class, on the other hand, usually has at least 2 hours to work independently.

My Comp I class is engaged.  We discuss each line of the PowerPoints, they ask questions, and they are able to provide examples for the concepts I am presenting.  They share their ideas, and often interrupt me to ask questions about the topics I am using simply for illustrative purposes.  During our 10-minute breaks, they often stay in the room with me and chat about their writing, musical tastes, personal lives, etc.  When I ask them to work in groups, they have easy discussions and help one another out.  One student in partcular tries to answer every question, and willingly shares his ideas, experiences, and writing with the rest of the class.

My Comp II class is disengaged.  They look blankly at me as I go through the PowerPoints, or put their heads down on their desks.  They don't volunteer information, and getting an answer if I ask a question is challenging.  I sit in the room alone during our 10-minute breaks.  When I ask them to work together as a group, they have nothing to say to one another, and usually revert to writing individually and in silence while sitting at the same table.  One student in particular gives me extremely terse and guarded responses, even when I try to draw her out with direct questions.

And I find myself responding to the difference in emotional tone in the two classes.  In Comp I, I am joking around, getting input on each point I make, drawing out the lecture into a more general discussion of writing.  No idea is too minor to explore in detail.  In Comp II, I feel as though I need to rush through the PowerPoint to make it less painful.  Every slide feels trite and obvious, as though there is nothing interesting I could add.

The only thing I can chalk the difference in classes up to is those two stand-out personalities among my students: the sharer, and the clam.  Right now, they are setting the tone for each class, and setting the tone for my teaching as well.  The differences, and my different teaching styles, finally came to a head last week, and I realized I need to do something about the situation.  I need to take control of my classes again.

So this week, in Comp I, I'll move through the lecture more quickly, do a few exercises, and then give them time to work on their papers.  And in Comp II, I'll ask more questions during the PowerPoints, do more hands-on exercises in class, and only then will we head to the library so that they can work on their papers.

This is my class, damnit.  I don't have to be the bad teacher if I don't want to.

Girl Scouts: The Second Round

My second Girl Scout presentation, which took place in Hooper, UT on Wednesday, was also a success.  Instead of the info fair setup, with tables for everyone to go around, I was in the "kiva" in the entryway, and there were a variety of crafts set up in the cafeteria next door.  There were 125 girls signed up to attend (!), so they were split into two groups -- one sat through my presentation while the other group made crafts, and then they switched.  I didn't get the opportunity to plop hats and tie headscarves on little heads, so I instead introduced my presentations by getting 5 volunteers to come up and be models for me.  It was a nice little ice-breaker, and it's interesting to see how age- and gender-role-conscious kids of this age are.  As soon as you tell them they're wearing a man's hat, or a married woman's scarf, or a shawl that is meant for grandmothers, they get a little uncomfortable.  So I let them out of their outfits pretty quickly.

The first presentation went well -- lots of girls, probably in the 3rd-5th grade range, with some high school aged -- I heard a few girls comparing driver's licence statuses.  They asked some questions during the presentation, and more after.  The second group was the littler ones -- 1st and 2nd graders, some with toddler siblings in tow, and being asked to sit still for 30 min. after a few hours of activities.  I streamlined my talk, trying to focus on the pictures, but half of them bailed 3/4 of the way through.  Which was just fine, I understood.

A neat activity the organizer came up with for this group involved the Cyrillic alphabet.  The leader had made a bunch of simple bookmarks from white paper and colored yarn.  She asked the girls to write their name and troop number on the front, and I would write their names in Cyrillic on the back.  Unfortunately, this activity didn't include a lecture on the two alphabets, because I kept getting little girls who came back to me and asked, "What does this say?"  One actually tried to correct me, and let me know I was using the wrong letters for her name!  So I would sound the letters out, and they could see how those letters made their name in a different alphabet.

Filling out the bookmarks was the point where I had the most interaction with the girls, which was, of course, my favorite part.  They came up and asked questions, and took a look at all the felt and velvet odds and ends I had spread out on the table.  And it gave me the opportunity to snap a picture of this little diva in a kalpak. (Which is a man's hat, by the way.  *smile*)

The sassy kalpak diva

Girl Scout World Thinking Day

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but my free time has been sparse.  This past weekend, I gave the first of two presentations to groups of local Girl Scouts as part of their World Thinking Day celebrations.  I guess it's a badge opportunity for Girl Scouts to learn about other cultures, and also to think about how resources are used around the world, so an ecology component is included.

Saturday's presentation was for troops near Draper, UT.  There were about 10 tables set up, and each troop hosted a table with information about a country, including local costumes, objects, food, and often some kind of craft.  I showed up with a few bags of textiles -- felt chair covers, quilted decorations, felt and quilted purses -- a book on Kyrgyz crafts, a leather kumyss bottle, hats, a head scarf, a shawl, a few pieces of posterboard with information about the country, and a handful of postcards.  I spread them across a table that had been set aside for me, and then waited for the girls to come.

The woman who had organized the event, S, gave me a handful of girls from her troop to help at my table.  They were curious about everything on it, and I told them what the leather bottle was for (fermented mare's milk), who wore which hat, and had them try them on, along with the head scarf and the shawl.  They stuck around for a little while and passed along what they knew to visitors who came to our table, while I swooped down on unsuspecting third graders and asked if they wanted to wear a head scarf.  After a little while my helpers wandered off, but I kept putting scarves, shawls, kalpaks and dopas on little girls, and for the most part they seemed to enjoy it.  I only wish I had gotten a few pictures of the girls wearing everything!  Every once in a while they'd stick around long enough for me to tell them about leather bottles and horse's milk.  I would have liked to go visit the other tables as well, but I was too busy, and that was just fine.

Asel

After an hour of girls milling around from table to table, everyone took a seat and I gave a PowerPoint presentation about my host sister, Asel, and what a typical day in a Kyrgyz village would be like for her.  My thesis research translator, Perizat, who I am still in regular touch with via email, helped me with the timeline for a village girl's day, and I filled in with pictures as well as I could.  As I was designing the presentation, at first I was upset that I needed to use pictures from different times and places to illustrate Asel's life, but I decided that some image was better than none.

My village

I started with Asel waking up, doing chores and helping make breakfast before school.  Then she walks to school, and I explain how she has been in a class with the same students every year since first grade.  Then she comes home from school, does some more chores, and then goes to the bazaar with her mother.  Then she helps with dinner, does her homework, plays cards and watches TV, and finally goes to bed.

The bazaar

To emphasize the resources angle of the story, I spent some time talking about what it is like to live without running water, and where the family gets water from, how they wash dishes, clothes, make tea, cook dinner, etc.  I also talked about some of the uses of empty soda bottles, including to measure gasoline and cooking oil.  I should have spent more time talking about how nothing is wasted or thrown away, but I'll have to get more of that in my next presentation.

Well, a room full of 2nd to 7th graders did a great job of listening through my whole story.  They raised their hands and asked lots of good questions as we went, and then while some of the littler ones got restless, we had a question-and-answer period where they asked more good questions at the end.

The last half hour was supposed to be an arts-and-crafts project, where the girls cut the tops off of water bottles, covered them with colored paper, and turned them into pencil holders.  In reality, it was 30 mintes of pure chaos, but in a good way. By the time we were done, there were paper-covered bottle bases of all shapes and sizes.

And I get to do something similar on Wednesday afternoon -- but this time, I'll definitely take pictures of the girls!

The Cox-Powell Tragedy

While I know that this case has made the national news recently, since Susan Cox Powell's disappearance happened here in Utah not too long after we moved, I have witnessed every step played out on our local news.  And while it appears that the story still has not come to an end, I finally feel the need to comment on it.
For those of you who don't know the whole story of Susan Cox Powell's disappearance and the following events, let me try and sum it up.  Susan went missing a little over two years ago.  Her husband, Josh, claimed that they had had a fight around 11 pm, she had left, and he had decided to take his two young sons, who were aged 2 and 4 at the time, camping.  In the middle of the night.  In a snowstorm.  Because they wanted to make s'mores.  Since day one, everyone, from the police to the local media to the average Utahn, has found this explanation awfully fishy.  But by the time the police were able to search the campsite Josh claimed to have visited with his boys, most evidence had been erased by the falling snow.

The local media harped on the fact that Josh was the only "person of interest" in the case.  Josh claimed Susan ran off on her own.  Susan's family, the Coxes, along with many of her friends, said that she was a loving and dedicated mother who would never have abandoned her children.  Searches went on for weeks.

After about a month, Josh took his young sons and moved to Oregon, to live with his father, Steve.  The Cox family kept up a campaign, looking for Susan and hoping she could be found.  Friends and family accused Josh of being controlling and potentially dangerous.  The Powell family, however, launched a website that accused Susan of being promiscuous and mentally unstable, with her teenaged diaries and one of the main pieces of evidence regarding her character.  However, one member of the Powell family, Josh's sister, sided with the Coxes, and publically stated that she believed her brother had killed Susan.

This stalemate continued for well over a year.  Every time a body was discovered somewhere, the local news wondered if it was Susan Powell.  Last summer, however, Utah police claimed they had new leads, and began searching an area of BLM land for evidence.  Cadaver dogs identified a spot that initial reports claimed was "a shallow grave."  The local news, without even pretending to maintain objectivity, did stories on whether the distance from the Powell home to this site was within the range of miles recorded on Josh's car after Susan's disappearance.  But after a few days and a full excavation, the human remains were not forthcoming -- there were just some small chips of charred wood that needed analysis, and the most the police could say was that the dogs had picked up on human decomposition, possibly of body fluids, if not a whole body.

In September, police got a warrant and were able to search the Powell's home in Oregon.  They took computers, diaries, and other evidence.  Child pornography was discovered in Steve Powell's posession, along with images he had secretly taken of women over decades, including images of Susan. Steve was arrested on charges of voyeurism and child pornography and put in jail. It came out that Josh's father often flirted with Susan sexually; her friends claimed it made her very uncomfortable, while he claimed that she was a very flirtatious, sexually aggressive woman.  At this point, my friends started to wonder whether Steve was the one who actually killed Susan.  The investigation of these images spilled over to Josh himself, and the children were taken out of his custody. The were put into temporary foster care, but the Coxes, Susan's parents, got custody of the boys very quickly.  Then, last week, a hearing to determine whether Josh could regain custody of the boys ended with the judge ruling not only that the boys stay with their grandparents, but that Josh needed to go through a psychosexual evaluation.

And then, as I was knitting in front of the Superbowl game last Sunday at a friend's house, one of the other guests received a call.  His exclamations of surprise caught everyone's attention, and he delivered the news that Josh had just blown up his own home with himself and his boys inside.  The social worker who was supposed to supervise the boys arrived with them, was locked out of the house, and then Josh blew everything up.

Okay, so that was a pretty long summary.  But it covers over two years of developments!  Anyway, now I'll finally get to my point.

Along with everyone else, my greatest reaction to this story has been, "Why would he kill his boys?"  My first reaction was, the antipathy between the Cox and Powell families was so strong, that he did it out of spite.  He would take his sons with him simply to keep them away from their grandparents.

But a day or two later, as the local news was reviewing the story from beginning to end, the images of Josh presented another possible explanation.

From day one, Josh has always had a face with a peculiarly hangdog expression.  He honestly looks like the human version of Droopy Dog.  And while he has that expression of sadness, in early interviews on the local news, he never seemed convinvingly upset about his wife's disappearance -- just very downcast in general.  And as they zipped through the story on the news, showing a series of images of Josh taken over the past two years, that expression became more unhappy over time.  The final image, of Josh at the unsuccessful custody hearing, showed a man who had large, dark bags under his eyes, and whose primary expression was one of desperation, a man at the end of his rope.

It made me wonder, was Josh trapped in circumstances he hadn't intended?  Was his killing of Susan an accident or a crime of passion, that he then tried to cover up?  Was his father perhaps the actual killer, and he then protected him?  Did he somehow begin a chain of events that spiraled further and further out of control, until he felt that the only way for him and his boys to escape was through death?  I certainly wouldn't excuse even an accidental death, because he chose to take steps to cover up that killing.  But it made me feel a twinge of sympathy for this man, who may have felt guilt and horror over his actions, and finally thought suicide was the only way out.

But now more details about the boys are coming to light.  They had recently talked about and drawn pictures of their mother in the trunk of a car.  Now, it is easy for memories to be planted, especially in young children, but the police are now claiming that Josh killed the boys to prevent them from saying more about their mother's disappearance.

And the most disturbing detail that has come out in the last few days are the results of the autopsy.  Josh tried to kill them before the explosion, hacking at their necks with a hatchet, but not killing them.  Perhaps this was once again the bungled act of a father who was trying to save his children from a worse death in a fire.  He only had a few minutes in the house with the boys before he caused the explosion, so he didn't have time to drug them, or use some other slow-acting method.  But I can't imagine intentionally making your children's last moments those of pain and fear.  And that spark of sympathy I felt is being erased.  Now I see a man whose selfishness destroyed not only his own life, but the lives of his wife and sons as well.