What Now?

Ease on down, ease on down the road

Thanks to those of you who have been checking back and expressing interest in the outcome of the situation with Co-Author. And the news is ... there is no news. We're all waiting around for Co-Author to give us the new version of her chapter. The Librarian nudged her on Wednesday, I nudged her gently on Friday, and yet no new version has been forthcoming yet. Everyone has agreed that all must be resolved by the time classes end, on May 31, but I'm increasingly thinking that we're going to run up right against that deadline. 

I think what's going on is that, for all of her apparent deflecting of all criticism and her condescending to us as rank amateurs compared to her "professional writer" status, she actually realized that something serious had to happen. So my hunch is that her "playing around" with the chapter has actually become a serious revision. And in a way that means the whole system is working, of course, ... except that everything would be much more clear-cut if her chapter remains badly written. And at this point, what I'm now expecting is that her chapter will still not be well-researched or as well-written as mine, but that the difference won't be nearly as glaring as it was, and so it will appear as though the best and easiest thing to do is to keep us on as co-authors, with the quiet expectation that Librarian and I will whip the whole thing into shape in the end.

Or at least this is what I'm preparing myself for, so that I'll be able to smile with apparent (even if not actual) good will and say, "super!"

I had told Librarian last week that I might take myself off of the project if Co-Author stayed on. I'll have to decide if I really want to follow through on that threat, but there seems no point in going down that road until we get the new chapter. So for right now we're in a holding pattern.

*****

Onto happier news: D., who has been re-framing herself as an independent school teacher, has had all of the expected emotional ups and downs of applying for a lot of jobs and having those applications not go anywhere. But in the meantime, she has also this spring studied and then passed the state tests to teach middle and upper school history and English, so she is now a certified teacher in our state. She also worked with her recommenders to help them craft letters of rec for her that stress all of her great independent school teaching qualities; this was a major project with two of her recommenders, but in the end she finally got the appropriate letters that she needed. At the same time, I've pulled the only strings I have -- first, to get her the subbing gig at FGS, which has been great and has led to a glowing letter of rec from my Dept Chair; and then to get her an interview at the independent school summer program I've taught in for the last five years. That interview apparently got off to a difficult start, since the program director was skeptical given D's lack of formal teaching experience with kids and was clearly only interviewing her as a favor to me, but she clearly rocked it in the end, and as of three weeks ago she is employed for six weeks for this summer! And the program she's going to be in end will be enormously helpful in her job search, even though it's not at all the course she would have chosen to teach -- she'll be teaching English in two three-week sessions in a program designed for rising sixth-graders to help them develop the social and emotional as well as academic skills needed for middle school. She would really prefer to teach older students, but this course will be an amazing resume-builder, especially since what I think she has really needed to prove is that she can teach young students.

And lo and behold, this combination of new supportive evidence -- i.e., her upcoming summer gig and her now being certified (which isn't a requirement for independent schools but does make her academic qualifications clear) and her finally having three really strong letters of reference that she includes with her applications -- have resulted in two on-campus interviews and teaching demonstrations this coming week! One is at a Quaker girls' school and the other is at a new, experimental school; both would be amazing, but my hunch is that she'd like the latter school better, at least based on the sense of the schools I get from the website. But the great thing about having these two interviews is that it means neither interview has everything riding on it, which will help her relax.

We're also trying to be very clear that if she doesn't get hired anywhere by June, there is another hiring season in mid-August as schools scramble to cover last-minute openings; those schools tend to be more desperate and thus more amenable to folks with different backgrounds, plus she'll also by then have a letter of recommendation from the summer proram director. So I'm beginning to feel more optimistic that she will actually be employed next fall. Fingers crossed this week!

*****

My post title comes from The Wiz, the school musical that I went to last night. My brother and I grew up singing "Ease on Down the Road," and in fact we're known to sing it vigorously to this very day when we get together at holidays, much to the amusement of my nieces, but I wasn't familiar with the rest of the musical at all.

Turns out I don't like it. Ah well. I also don't like student theatricals in general, so it was not a great evening, but these things must be done.

At the intermission, a couple of colleagues and I escaped out into the cool night air, since it was really warm in the auditorium. And this is when we discovered a junior, one of my current students, languishing on the outside stoop, clearly in ill health. Her mother and her friends were with her, but as employees of the school we felt it incumbant upon us to go over and see if we could help, summon more official help, etc. I asked if she wanted us to call an ambulance or the school switchboard, but her mom said that she was simply dehydrated and that the heat in the auditorium had overcome her; we then offered to stay with the girl while her mom went off to get their car and that we would then walk her to the car so that she could go home. So her mom went off and I sat down with the kid, who was still surrounded by her friends, who were all relaxing now that adults were clearly in charge. And it was sitting there that I began to wonder whether there was more going on than simply dehydration, because would dehydration make one lose feeling in one's hands? That seems weird to me. Also, someone had given her a bottle of water, but she was having trouble coordinating the tipping her head back and drinking from the bottle, and then she'd giggle softly about it. But she didn't seem drunk, and I didn't smell any alcohol. Her mom showed up in due course, and one of her friends and I walked the student to her mom's car, and I assume that all was well when she got home and went to bed.

But afterward my colleagues and I were chatting, and one argued strenuously that this had been more than a simple case of dehydration and pointed out to me that there is more than one way to have an altered state than simply alcohol and that in fact prescription drugs were the drug du jour, especially for kids with money, such as this girl. The other colleague who was with us said that she thought that the mom had been covering for her daughter and anxious to get her away from school property as soon as possible. Now, who knows what was actually going on? And I think that we handled the situation in the only way we could have. I'm not second-guessing what we did last night, but I am now wondering if we should at least let the girl's advisor and the school know. And I'm trying not to allow into my consideration the fact that the girl's mother is on our board of trustees and that the girl's advisor is our head of school -- although I'm not sure which way that information would point my anyway.

*****

The other things I did yesterday, after school but before the play, were (1) to go to a short reception after school to meet the new baby of a colleague, and (2) to go to a fairly short rehearsal of our faculty band, since we're playing at the retirement part of one of our members in a couple of weeks, and (3) to have drinks with the two colleagues with whom I'd later have our student adventure during intermission; our get-together wound up being a testimonial from two of us to the third about the power of anti-depressants; and (4) to have dinner with another colleague who is at a real cross-roads in her career and thinking that the next step is going to involve leaving FGS (and I think she's right). Then I went to the play and had the adventures described above. And then I finally got home around 11:00 to find D. in the throes of anxiety about the reality of her new career path and the fact that this well and truly means that she is leaving behind the church, which has been her professional milieu for so long.

So I didn't wind up getting to bed until after 1:00 a.m., which is not my norm at all. It was an entirely too event-filled evening, and I'm planning to recuperate by having no other eventfulness at all this weekend! I have some grading to do and should do some picking up around the house, which has descended into its usual end-of-year pig-sty-ness. But I want no more emotional turmoil or any social activity at all!

I really am hoping to ease on down, ease on down the road into summer.

Things that I want that I'm not going to get

• I want my mom to be a more pleasant, positive person, or at least to quit using bitching about Facebook as a way of bitching about me. Seriously, she's become obsessed with how much she hates Facebook, but she won't just quit it because she wants to see family photos that people post. So instead she checks it every day and gets a little bit crazier with every single status update that she doesn't find fascinating. And the fact that I post regularly on Facebook has become something that she criticizes at least once a month; apparently I now represent much that is wrong with my generation and those to follow.

As this bullet point perhaps makes clear, my Mother's Day phone call home did not go well. She did like her gift -- a copy of Maya Angelou's Mom & Me & Mom -- but after that she got kind of mean. In fact, when I got off the phone, rather upset, D. said to me, "You know, your mom is really a bitch sometimes." Indeed. I know that our interactions would be better if I called her more regularly and often, but it's sometimes unpleasant enough that I'm then reluctant to pick up the phone.

Fortunately, we then called D's mom, who loves me. Yeah, she's a little crazy, and she was not at all a good mom to D. growing up, but it feels very good to have a maternal figure who always thinks I'm fabulous.

• I want to lose weight without having to diet or exercise. Yeah, yeah, I know.

• I want to stop grading for this academic year. I don't mind three weeks of classes left or exam period or the final faculty meetings ... but I really can't bring myself to do any more grading. This is unfortunate, since I happen to have a stack of papers at the moment (which I've been steadily avoiding and seem to be avoiding tonight as well) and have three remaining assignments that will come in over the next three weeks. And then there will be my sophomore exams to be graded at the end.

So, okay, this is a wish that will be granted if I just wait one month ... but I want it to happen now! whine, whine, whine.

• I want the Head of School to send me an email tonight telling me that I'm now the sole author of the FGS history and that I'm therefore getting additional money for this summer so that I can call the summer school program I teach for and ask to be let out of my summer courses. And then I want it to be summer so that I can stop setting my alarm and can work on the book.

Now, all of this may well happen ... but not tonight.

The Librarian met with the Head of School this morning and told her about the co-authoring problems. The Head was shocked and dismayed -- hardly surprising. She also said that she'd wanted only a single author from the beginning but that Co-Author and I had convinced her that this arrangement would work. Um, not my memory of how things went down. But whatever.

The good news is that the Head of School scoffed at Co-Author's assertion that my chapter was "too academic"; she said that she loved reading my chapter, and apparently she was very open to Librarian's argument that if there's only going to be one author, it ought to be me.

So here's the plan: Co-Author is going to send her revised (or "played around with") chapter to the full editorial group, including the Head of School and the communications director; Co-Author said that she'd send it this week, but if she hasn't sent it by Wednesday, the Librarian is going to nudge her. The Head will read it quickly and then wants to have a meeting with me, the Librarian, and the Archivist in which we spell out everything that we don't like about the chapter and what we want it to be like instead. And then, presuming the Head hasn't liked the chapter and that she's convinced by our discussion, she will meet with Co-Author and tell her that the project is moving to a single author and that it's a question of voice. And she'll offer Co-Author some lesser role in the project -- perhaps writing up the sidebars and photo captions -- although quite frankly at this point I'm hoping that Co-Author will simply take herself off of the project altogether.

But mostly what I want is a resolution to this whole messy situation. And I want it now!

 

The next chapter

Oh dear.

Yesterday the Librarian and I had our conversation with Co-Author about her chapter. It did not go well.

Of course, how well could it have gone, realistically? I mean, we were telling her that her chapter is really bad, so there was no pleasant outcome that we could anticipate.

Fortunately, the Librarian and I were on the same page. The two of us had met on Monday to discuss the chapter and our goals, and we were in total agreement that collegiality and respect demanded that Co-author get another chance to write this chapter. But we also agreed that, based on this first draft, we didn't actually think that she would be able to write something acceptable; it was so poorly researched and so poorly written that success seemed impossible, but that we couldn't make that call until she'd had another shot at it after we gave her our feedback. And then we came up with our back-up plan, which is that if/when the second version is also bad, or if Co-author refused to accept our feedback, the Librarian, as project manager, would have to go to the Head of School, who is the only one who has authority to remove Co-author from the project. I was so glad to hear the Librarian raise the possibility of removing Co-author from the project, since at this point it's the only feasible option I see to make the book a good product. But I didn't want to be the first one to say it!

I went into yesterday's conversation determined to say as little as possible and let Librarian do all the talking, in part because Co-author and I have this other relationship as departmental colleagues that I don't want to entirely jeapardize. But also, as the two co-authors, we're in sort of competition with each other, at least at this point, and Librarian and I both thought that it would be best for the criticisms to come primarily from her as project manager. But I did chime in a few times, as when Co-author said to Librarian, "You're the only person who hasn't liked the introduction"; I felt it incumbant upon me to say, "No, I didn't like it either." And after that, I did say a few other things, but left most of the heavy lifting to Librarian.

The whole thing stayed pleasant on the surface, but wow, there was real defensiveness underneath from Co-author, eventually turning into mild hostility ... and the hostility was toward me, not Librarian! The defensiveness is not at all surprising; being a writer is clearly vital to Co-author's sense of identity, as it is to mine, and Librarian and I were very aware of and sad about the fact that we were going to be wounding someone whom we both like as a colleague. At the same time, we had to be firm, because Co-author just kept deflecting criticism right and left. We'd sent her written feedback ahead of time, and she came in armed with reasons that we were wrong. I'd suggested, for example, that we hear more student voices in the chapter -- and that emphasis on students is something that we'd all agreed ahead of time would be central to the project! -- and Co-author turned to me and said, "No, there are plenty of student voices here already." We suggested that there could be a greater sense of narrative, and she at first said we were wrong, but finally said, "Well, if two of you think this, maybe there's a third person out there who would also think so. I'll play around with it a little this weekend, but I really think it's fine as is." And it went like that for an hour. She also did a lot of misrepresenting our statements, trying to make it seem that Librarian and I were disagreeing with each other and so that it was really all about our idiosyncratic individual opinions; that we put the kibosh on, dclaring, "No, we're saying the same thing" whenever she tried to pull that move.

The Archivist, who was out of town this week, had already met with Co-author last week to talk about the research (or lack thereof) in the chapter, and she had warned us that this was what to expect of the conversation. When it was pointed out to Co-author that almost all of her citations (typed out on a separate piece of paper, because she apparently doesn't know how to use the footnote function) were from a single secondary source, the reliability of which is somewhat suspect, and that she needed to go look at that secondary source author's sources herself, she looked affronted, as though this was hardly her job, and suggested that the Archivist could do this tedious work for her.

And when Librarian took one last stab and said to her, "Obviously you and WN are different people with different voices, but we do want to create as unified voice as we can between chapters," Co-author flared up with, "Well, why don't we change WN's chapter instead?! I mean, it's very academic and not particularly engaging." I think by "academic" she meant that I had done primary research and embedded quotations rather than simply quoting for full paragraphs at a time. She had already told the Archivist that she thought her chapter was engaging narrative whereas mine was "mere history." (Archivist and Librarian and I don't know what to make of such a complete lack of self-awareness on this point.) I didn't say anything during this part of the conversation, since there seemed nothing polite or politic to say now that it is clearly about competition between us and our respective chapters.

And you know what? I always suspected that this was what might happen, which is one reason I pushed myself so hard back in the fall and early winter to get my chapter in first; I wanted mine to become the model against which other chapters were judged. I have a specific vision of this book, and I want that vision to prevail, so I tried to promote that vision by writing the first chapter and having it be really damned good. And I sort of feel like I should feel guilty about being so deliberate in angling to have my way be THE way ... but on the other hand, what I wrote was along the lines of what we had all agreed we were going to do; it's Co-author who abandoned the precepts we had agreed on last summer.

Anyway, Co-author's conclusion in the meeting yesterday was to talk about how she and her writing group, all "professional" writers, all like this chapter and think it's a great piece of work; there was very much an implication that Librarian and I (both published authors, thank you very much) were mere amateurs who couldn't recognize her greatness. She's willing to "play around" with the chapter for a weekend but then is going to send it to the Head of School, "and then we'll see." I think that means that then Librarian and I will be put in our place and have to eat crow. Librarian (who was amazing during this whole ordeal) had clearly given up on Co-author by this point and said, "well, why don't we just give her this version?," but Co-author said, no, we'd wait until she'd done her "playing around" and then send it to her. But we all agreed that she would send it on next week so that all of this could get resolved by the end of the school year.

What Librarian and I are thinking, of course, is that we want Co-author off the project by the end of the school year so that I can re-plan my summer of work in light of being the sole author, and so that Librarian, as project manager, can renegotiate who is getting paid what for the writing of the project.

My only fear is that the Head of School might not necessarily have a lot of literary sensibility. I mean, I think if she put the chapters together she would say that mine is much better (which I realize sounds insufferably conceited, but it's just true!), but will she recognize that Co-author's chapter is so horrifically bad that it will ruin the book project? Or rather, will she be willing to step up to the plate and do the obviously unpleasant task of firing Co-author from the project, or will she want to just let things go along as they are, convincing herself that maybe the chapter isn't so terrible?

And things going along as they are is just not going to work.

My one big comfort in all of this mess is that Librarian is one of the most powerful and politically savvy people at FGS, and whatever she wants, she pretty much gets. So I'm putting my faith not in the Head of School herself, but in Librarian to make the Head act decisively.

Today Co-author went to see Librarian to do two things: First, to tell her that she never liked my first chapter at all and that she should have said something at the time (although I pretty much knew because of her tepid responses), and second, to bring her a revised version of the first couple of pages, asking, "Is this more what you had in mind?" Librarian showed it to me after school today, and we agreed that it was indeed better ... but still not nearly as good as the introduction to Ch. 2 that I wrote over the weekend and sent to Librarian; I wrote it just because I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't crazy, that this really was interesting material and that there was no reason for this chapter to be as flat and boring as it was. (Oh, and that reminds me of another thing: In yesterday's meeting, Co-author said, "Let's be honest. None of this is very interesting material anyway." Well, for heaven's sake, if you don't think the subject is interesting, why the heck are you insisting on writing about it? And no wonder it was a boring chapter!) Anyway, Co-author's introduction was better, but it still was not nearly as well written as my introduction, and Librarian told me that she just doesn't think that the co-authoring business is going to work.

So Librarian has made an appointment to talk with the Head on Monday, to explain what is going on and let her know that she is going to have to take decisive action.

Sigh. Stay tuned.

Made it!

The two weeks of how-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-all-this are over! There were a few grim moments along the way, including a couple of nights of deeply disturbed sleep that certainly didn't help the whole efficiency thing. One of those nights, I had a terrible dream in which I had run into someone from grad school whom I haven't kept in touch with; we filled each other in on what we'd been up to over the last decade-plus, and then she looked at me and said, "I'm trying really hard to find any redeeming detail in the story of your life thus far." Yeesh! It was terribly distressing and had me in a funk the next morning, but I finally decided it was just the stress talking. (And the person from grad school was always very nice; I'm sure she wouldn't say anything like that in real life!)

But enough about the grimness; the good news is that the grading all got done, and my AP Comp students actually did quite well as a whole on their practice AP exam; the arts/lit magazine is all laid out and the staff is proofreading it (and it looks awesome); the faculty band gave a rowsing performance to great applause, and I picked up a new instrument the night before -- the cow bell; I've now had my first two official department head events; the department unanimously supported the curriculum proposals for which I was the primary author; I got through Grandparents' Day in fine style; my advisees are handling their various crises better than two weeks ago (although a mom left a message for me on Thursday in which she was crying and screaming and basically hysterical; I'm really glad I didn't happen to be in the room to pick up the phone!); and I'm currently wrapping up various bits and bobs while I proctor SATs and am then going to take the rest of the weekend off!

The co-author crisis is pretty much in the same state as it was; we're all having a meeting on Wednesday. But I'm feeling remarkably calm about it, mostly because I'm not in charge of fixing it.

And in general my mood is dramatically up, having gotten through these two weeks. On Thursday night, I actually had a little difficulty falling asleep, tired as I was, because I was so very excited that the end was in sight!

It's always a little depressing to me to have my college-teaching friends be posting on FB and blogs about how they are grading exams and finishing up the year, all while I still have four weeks of classes left. But at least as of this morning I've gotten through the final hard push. There will certainly be ups and downs in the remaining six weeks before I'm free for the summer, but at this point I actually think I will manage to cruise pretty smoothly toward June.

Now here's a wrinkle!

Remember the whole FGS history project? The one for which I wrote Chapter 1 to many compliments and also a wee bit of tension from my fellow English teacher and Co-author, who only made some tepid, forced positive comments after the rest of the editorial group (the Librarian, who's the project manager, and the Archivist) sang the praises of the chapter.

Well, now it's Co-author's turn. Last Monday she gave the editorial group Chapter 2.

And oh my heavens, it's horrible! Choppy and hard to follow and badly researched with sloppy use of primary sources. It indulges in hagiography of the head of school during that period, which we had all sworn we weren't going to do, and largely ignores the students, which we had said would be our focus in this book. And, worst of all offenses, the writing is totally boring and flat.

Seriously, I was reading this in the bedroom, and D. was in the living room watching TV, but I kept storming into the room and interrupting her TV show to denounce various elements of the chapter and its general and specific badness.

And I had already told Co-author that I was going to read the chapter that night, so then I felt like I needed to send her and the rest of the editorial group a cheerful email right after reading it, since that's what Librarian and Archivist had done to me after reading Chapter 1. So I carefully crafted an email that talked about what a goldmine one letter collection obviously was and also how much I loved a particular quotation from the head of school ... and managed not to say anything at all about the chapter or writing itself.

I was actually quite upset all week to realize that I was yoked with a co-author whose vision of the book and whose writing style are so clearly different from my own. As I kept saying to D., "Could she possibly think that this is a good chapter? Does she actually think that this is interesting or well-written?" In fact, I said pretty much everything an author would worry that someone might say about his or her own writing.

It was so bad that I wondered if it was just me, if my whole sense of what is good and bad writing was just completely off-base. I had a week to stew about this myself, since Librarian was out of town at a conference and I didn't see Archivist.

But then I ran into Librarian yesterday at lunch. I asked if she'd gotten a chance to read the chapter yet, and then we had this slightly awkward moment where we looked at each other, clearly neither of us wanting to be the first to say what we'd thought of it. But then we broke through that awkwardness, and it turns out that she hated it as well.

And then this afternoon she told me that Archivist also hated the chapter.

Okay, so it's not just me; clearly this is a BAD chapter. The question is, what to do now?

Last Monday, mostly to manage my own anxiety, I typed up notes about the chapter, trying to come up with specific things that would make the chapter better. And, seriously, the suggestions were things like "a sense of narrative" and "inclusion of student voices," which all seemed pretty basic. But really what I kept coming back to was that the best way to turn this into a good chapter is to let me rewrite the whole damned thing.

And it's not at all that I think I'm a perfect writer, because I know perfectly well that I'm not, but it turns out that I'm a heck of a lot better than Co-author, at least based on these first two chapters (which I completely realize is a small sample size). And I do feel somewhat justified in this view by a statement that Archivist made in an email exchange with Librarian: "There are many options to make the story come to life. Maybe WN could articulate what made her chapter more exciting."

So, that is very complimentary, of course, and I'll admit that this whole episode has been good for my ego, which is most welcome after a hard spring. It also makes me wonder if Co-author kept making little digs about my chapter because she was actually feeling uncertain and threatened.

But, far more, I'm feeling stressed out, although no longer alone in that stress. We're having a meeting next week of our editorial group, and Librarian and Archivist and I are all fretting about it ... and probably Co-Author is fretting as well, because she surely must know that the chapter isn't good, right?

Here are the two goals I think we want to accomplish:

1. We don't want Co-Author to feel attacked. We all like one another, and we all work together, and we don't want things to be unpleasant.
2. But we also want the chapter, and the book as a whole, to be good. Is it possible to show/convince Co-Author what the chapter needs? Or do we need a change in author?

But can both of these goals be accomplished?

It's not actually clear to me what I want to happen in regards to goal #2. I mean, I really wanted to be the sole author of this project in the first place and wasn't at all keen on this co-authoring model when all of this was proposed last year; I think the head of school took the cowardly way out by interviewing both me and Co-author for the job last spring, not asking either of us for a writing sample (although she'd seen some of my published work), and deciding to have us co-author the book because (I assume) she didn't want the awkwardness of rejecting one of us. But now look at the awkwardness that we have! We've all been worried all along about creating a unified voice out of our two different writing styles, but now we've got much bigger problems.

Anyway, I'm not sure what I want to happen now. Part of me wants Co-author to somehow be taken off of the project, or at least out of the co-author position, so that I can just do the whole damned thing the way I think it should be done (and get all of the stipend or course release myself instead of splitting it with her). But if that's the way things work out, I'll feel very much behind schedule, since I think Chapter 2 has to be completely rewritten and then there are still five more chapters to go. We've been moving at a leisurely pace because we still had so much time to get this written ... but that was assuming that we have two authors producing good work! It would certainly be much better for departmental and professional relations if Co-author poured her heart into revising and wrote a much better chapter and then we all moved forward happily as a team, but I'm just not sure that this will or can happen.

So that's quite a wrinkle, isn't it?!

More drama than one would have wished

This morning I had my second class observation of the week -- both times when I was teaching Swift's "A Modest Proposal," which is great fodder for a class observation! -- but things got a little rocky this morning.

And by "rocky," I mean that a student started crying! Not over anything I said or anything we were doing in class, I hasten to add. No, at the very beginning of class I'd had the students pair up and given them a 5-minute project to warm up for the class discussion we were about to have. But then I noticed that one of my students -- who is also my advisee -- was quietly crying while still diligently going about her classwork. I went over to her, bent over with my hand on her back, and whispered, "Are you okay, honey? Do you want to step outside?" She nodded and slipped out while I asked her partner if she knew what was up. To buy myself another minute, I gave the groups a follow-up question and stepped out into the hall, only to discover that the student had disappeared. So then I had to hustle over to my computer and send a quick email to the front desk and dean of students to tell them that this distraught student was on the loose. (The student wound up sobbing on the next hall over and then meeting with our dean of international students, who sent me an email later to check in.)

And after all of that, I then sat down with the class and ran a pretty damned fabulous discussion, if I do say so myself. Looking back, I'm impressed at my own focus.

My advisee came back after the bell rang at the end of class and gathered up her belongings for her next class. I made sure she was okay to go to her next class; she seemed shaky but said she'd be okay.

And then I had a quick chat with my department chair, who was the one observing me ... and it turns out that the whole episode had been discreet enough, and she'd been busy eavesdropping on other student groups, that she hadn't really noticed what was going on with the student. And she said it had been a fabulous class ... and indeed, I share that assessment, other than the personal drama of the moment.

But dang, I was shaken afterward! I had a free period next and had thought I'd plow through a whole bunch of grading, but I got only one paper graded and otherwise mostly just frittered away my time and emailed D. and tried to calm myself down.

It turns out that the student drama this morning was a friendship crisis; a friend of hers had apparently sent her a mean text this morning, which caused her to meltdown in my first-period course. I saw my student/advisee later that day, and she was smiling again, because the text-messenger had sought out my advisee and asked if they could meet after school to talk about the morning incident. I told her that all friendships have rocky patches, but that the test of a solid friendship is that the people involved are willing to work through those patches. So let's hope that their discussion went well. I'll see her tomorrow morning and find out how things went.

So I guess all's well that ends well (assuming that their conversation actually goes well), but it was definitely NOT as smooth a class observation as I would have liked! On the other hand -- as a colleague pointed out at lunch -- I guess that I got observed handling a student crisis and doing it all pretty much according to the book, so I could have done worse.

Anyway, I'm really glad to have my sixth-year class observations finished with. I don't want to handle more mornings like today's.

Ooh, crikey

The goal now is simply to keep my head above water and hold on through next week. Here's what must be accomplished between now and then:

• Grade a set of papers from my sophomores (a creative assignment, so should be fun, at least)
• Grade my AP Comp students' practice AP exams -- yeah, that's three essays per student.
• Get the literary magazine to press. Miles to go before we sleep on that one, including an hours-long layout meeting on Sunday.
• Also need to read through applications for next year's leadership for the lit magazine and select the editorial staff -- terrible timing, but out of our hands.
• The faculty band -- in which I play the ukulele very badly -- is giving its annual performance next Thursday. So rehearsals tomorrow and Friday, a long rehearsal next Wednesday afternoon/evening, and then getting to school at 7:00 a.m. on performance day itself.
• I'm on duty this weekend, so I have student obligations Friday night and Saturday morning.
• I've got two advisees in crisis, one of them seriously -- I spent 40 minutes today talking with the school counselor, I've been emailing with the parents, and we have a meeting with parents, counselor, and me next week.
• Plus the usual business of actually carrying on with classes. As part of my 6th-year review, my class got observed this morning by the academic dean (in what I thought was not my best class by a long shot, but she apparently loved it) and on Thursday morning by my department chair.
• A lunch meeting on Friday to talk with co-conspirators about our AP Lit idea, and then making a presentation to the department next week.
• And I'm basically doing the work of department chair these days (in combination with the "real" chair) -- interviewing and observing a candidate yesterday, a lunch meeting today, a department heads' meeting next week.
• Oh, and did I mention that next Friday is Grandparents' Day, next Saturday is SATs, and next Sunday is D's birthday?

Why on earth I'm taking the time tomorrow afternoon to get my hair cut is beyond me. Except that I really need one, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be the only "me time" for a long while.

Playing around with AP Lit ideas

My department has been wrestling, mostly unproductively, with our senior English curriculum for the past couple of months, and we haven't really been getting anywhere at all, so tempers are beginning to fray. Indeed, I think there's a growing sense that we should just leave well enough alone ... except that the reason we started the discussion is that our senior offerings are not really "well enough."

A lot of the problem revolves around AP Lit; almost half of our seniors are taking the course, and even more than that would like to be taking it ... and, indeed, I think it's accurate to assume that almost all of our seniors are in fact working at the level of college freshmen. (As a department, we'd actually love to do away with AP altogether, but college admissions pressures are such that this radical move is off the table. There are certainly independent schools that have eliminated APs completely, but that is a decision that comes from the top and is really not on the table for FGS.) Those who aren't taking AP (either because they're not accepted into the program or are taking other APs and so don't want the AP English course) are supposed to get to choose electives ... except that there are so few of them really that they wind up with only a couple of choices, neither of which is at all exciting, quite frankly. Another problem -- one that is awkwardly in the mind of almost everyone in the department but must remain unspoken -- is that AP Lit is widely considered the easiest of all of the senior offerings, which is obviously not the way it should be. And the reason this must remain unspoken is that the department chair teaches it. I honestly don't know if this "easiest" claim is actually accurate or is simply the story that has grown up and now shapes the way students think about the course, but either way the big hurdle for AP Lit currently is getting into the course, and many students coast after that.

So this past week a colleague and I took matters into our own hands and started playing around with a wacky idea about completely redoing the entire way we handle AP Lit. We're thinking along the lines of college courses we had that students could do extra work for to gain College Honors credit (at D's undergrad school) or that had extra assignments to earn writing-intensive credit (at my undergrad school) or dual-enrollment undergrad/grad courses in which grad students had extra work and separate discussion sections. Here's what we've come up with so far (and many questions remain):

• Each year we would offer six sexy and interesting electives for the seniors (or maybe only four or so, with multiple sections of a couple). They would all be designated "Capstone English" to indicate that they are all challenging courses worthy of seniors.
• Students would then have the option of taking any one of the electives for AP credit. So on their transcript it would read either "AP English Literature: Sexy Elective Title" or "Capstone English: Sexy Elective Title."
• The AP option would be open enrollment, so any student who was willing to do the extra work could get the AP credit. And because the best and brightest students weren't being segregated into a separate course, all of the electives would run at a faster and higher level than they are doing now, when they are filled with only the bottom half of the senior class.
• To get the AP designation, students would have extra reading and assignments to do over the summer. If they didn't complete the summer work, they would not be eligible for AP credit, and if they did disastrously on that work, we could counsel them out of taking that option.
• Then each term, the AP students would have extra reading and writing assignments. These would probably be common assignments across all of the electives, but I think we have to wait and see just what the sexy electives turn out to be before we can make that decision. Probably a lot of the extra work would involve poetry, which tends to get short shrift in our curriculum.
• The idea we're playing around with now is that there would be one teacher -- perhaps one of the senior electives teachers, perhaps not -- who is the official AP Lit teacher. He or she would plan the extra assignments, meet with the students, grade the extra work, and coordinate with the electives teachers. Depending on the number of students and other factors, this would count as either a full or a half course for that teacher, which means that the administration would have to be willing to invest financially in this program ... but they are the ones pressuring us to let as many students into AP Lit as possible, so I hope (but am not at all certain) that they'd be willing to do this.
• The big question we're struggling with is whether and how to get the AP students together as a group. I think that ideally there would be discussion sections for the AP students to talk with the teacher about their extra reading and assignments, but that's going to be really difficult to pull off with our schedule. Maybe this happens virtually, with online discussion boards? D's suggestion was that students could be put into small study groups that meet on their own during the term, with guidance from the teacher; this would be a way of recalibrating for students the ratio of student-driven versus teacher-driven learning that they'll need to make as they enter college anyway.
• In the couple months before the exam, there would be some Saturday afternoon workshops for specific test-prep, working on the multiple choice section and practicing timed essays.
• Courses do have to get approved by the College Board to count as AP, so we could either submit each of the "sexy electives plus extra work" courses on their own, which wouldn't be that big a deal because we'd basically just write up one proposal for the "extra" stuff and then individualize it for each elective. Or we could write up just the "extra" stuff as one course and then have that teacher listed as the co-teacher for all of the AP students. A bit of a hassle either way, but since it's really teachers rather than courses who get approved by College Board, we'd only have to go through it the first year.

So that's our wacky idea. I think that the department will be in favor of the idea -- after all, it doubles or more the number of fun electives we're offering! -- but that no one will be interested in being the AP Lit teacher, since the ratio of class discussion (fun) to grading (unfun) will be dramatically shifted for the worse. And that's true, but I actually think that I might enjoy taking on the job and that there could be rewards, such as more time during the day because one was meeting with one fewer class. I'd have to think about that more before I would commit. Plus, I think that the curriculum committee and department heads committee and administration might not be in favor of this at all! It's really different from anything else we do at FGS, and the open enrollment feature of it particularly might feel threatening to the other departments, none of whom do this for their AP courses. On the other hand, the English department is in a really different situation from other departments. When parents are protesting their daughters' not getting into AP courses, it's the English course they protest most, on the theory that "anyone can do it -- heck, I'm speaking it right now!"; this is annoying, of course, because it signals a real disrespect of English as a discipline. But it's also the reality we face, and the administration has pressured us to throw open the gates and let as many students in as possible. Well, here we go -- gates wide open! But not in the way they anticipated, and we're a pretty conservative school when it comes to curriculum. So we'll see what happens.

In the meantime, I would welcome any and all suggestions or feedback about this wacky curricular idea! My colleague and I and our department chair are going to try hammering out details this week and next and decide if we ultimately think this is a good idea before we bring it back to the department.

Recovery

It's been a hell of a week, and I've spent the day recovering. To wit:

Spent the morning thinking about English curricular matters (a blog post in themselves).

Took a hell of a long nap with D. -- 2 1/2 hours of really hard sleeping.

Ate a delicious chicken burrito while watching the Shakespeare Uncovered episode about Richard II. Did you know that Sir Derek Jacobi thinks that Shakespeare didn't write the plays attributed to him?

Took a 45-minute walk through our local Catholic graveyard as the sun was setting -- lovely.

Now I'm settling in with a glass of wine to read Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, about the history of the SAT exam.

I know that this wouldn't be everyone choice for a day of recovery, but it's doing the trick well.

A mini-spring break

We have a three-day weekend (thanks to a school-specific holiday on Monday), and I am treating it like a mini-spring break!

I spent my actual two-week spring break grading my ass off and visiting my family (which was a good thing to do but not exactly restful). And then in the two weeks since spring break ended, I gave up my weekend to chaperone the Model UN fieldtrip, which again was a good thing to do (it was fun to share a room with the club advisor, who's a good friend of mine, and the students were sweetly grateful that I had come along) and gave me a chance to wander around a college campus I hadn't visited before, but was all rather tiring. Plus I had to finish doing our taxes and plan out the rest of the year to make sure we squeezed everything in. All important things, all good to do, but yeesh, I'm tired. Not to mention the starting Lexapro and going through those beginning-of-treatment symptoms (which actually weren't as bad as last time, other than the overwhelming sleepiness of the first week).

But now it's a three-day weekend in which I have no grading to do (thanks to hard work on Wednesday and Thursday finishing up a stack of short papers), and my classes for next week are already mostly planned, and on Friday I realized what a gift I had ahead of me and decided to declare this my own private spring break. Huzzah!

So it started with going to sleep at 8:30 last night and sleeping almost 11 hours. That's helping. I have a couple of murder mysteries from the library (Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series, set in 1920s Melbourne, which I discovered just last week), and there's an interesting documentary showing at the library that I'm going to go to this morning. We have dinner plans with someone who might become a new friend. The weather is supposed to get nicer tomorrow and Monday, and I might make my first spring foray into the yard and start doing some winter clean-up and enjoying the plants that are beginning to poke up out of the ground.

There are still seven weeks of classes left, and I need some energy and spring joy to carry me through. This mini-spring break might not entirely do the trick, but at least it's a start.