Saturday Fragments: Weather, Walking, and Apples

It has been a good week overall, yet I still arrive at this Saturday feeling a bit fragmented.  Let me capture a few fragments:

--I am still trying to decide if my apple comparing review exercise in my Nonfiction Writing class was effective.  In some ways, it was:  we had a great conversation about the apples, but we're still in the process of translating that experience to the writing of reviews.

--I haven't done as much walking this week--we've had several very rainy mornings, and while I don't mind walking in the rain, I worry more about walking in rain in the dark, as I must do with my MWF schedule.

--While I haven't done much poetry revising, I've been revising a short story I found in my files.  It didn't need much revising, so I don't know how much I should be patting myself on the back.

--We've had the arrival of our first cool weather--finally!  I want to bake, but I'm also aware of how many calories my fall favorites contain and how much time some of them take to create.

--I decided to do some tasks out of order this morning.  I went on a full moon walk--lovely!

--Yesterday was a day that many folks were celebrating Dolly Parton.  My spouse found 2 possible movies for us to watch.  I wasn't really up for 9 to 5.  Instead, we watched Straight Talk (1992), where Dolly plays a woman who leaves a bad boyfriend and heads off to interesting adventures in Chicago, some of which involve James Woods, who plays a newspaper guy.  Lots of unbelievable plot twists, but I didn't really care.

--My spouse and I both agreed that this movie is Dolly at her most physically lovely.  Her personality, lovely as always, blazes through this movie, which made it particularly perfect.

--We are almost at the 2 year anniversary of Hurricane Helene.  Two years ago today, I went down the market to Spartanburg Methodist College, hoping to finish up student conferences.  On my way home, driving through rain that seemed normal, I got a weather alert on my phone, telling me about a flash flood warning, urging me to seek higher ground.  I had just driven across a mountain and assumed the alert was for someone else, since I was in a car on the Interstate (I 26).  A day later, that part of the Interstate would be under water.

--And now there are new houses and apartment buildings being built on that land that flooded.  Maybe it was a hundred year flood, and those structures will be safe.  I am doubtful.

Love Poem in Strips

Some of my more interesting teaching ideas come when I get towards the end of what I have planned, and there's still a lot of class time left.  Some days, I just finish.  Some days I come up with something else because I've already let the class go early in the last week or two, and I don't want students to start to expect it.

Yesterday I went to my Creative Writing class with worksheets, along with two sonnets:  a traditional love sonnet by Constable and "My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun" by Shakespeare.  In a 102 class several semesters ago, I created a Love Imagery Generator Worksheet:

Love Poem Imagery Generator


My love is like _____________________________________________________.

My beloved’s eyes are like ____________________________________________.

My beloved’s skin is like ______________________________________________.

My beloved’s personality is like ____________________________________________.

My beloved’s hair is like _________________________________________________.

I love my beloved the same way I love _____________________________________.

My beloved’s cooking is like ___________________________________________.

My beloved’s hands are like __________________________________________.

My beloved’s voice is like ______________________________________________.


We filled in the sheets; I encouraged them to feel free to make up a fictional beloved.  In fact, I advised it might work better as a fictional experiment.

I had taken out parts to make a new worksheet, and we tried making a love poem to a non-human, like a car or a phone or a pet:  My beloved's _________ is like ________.

By design, I had extra worksheets which I cut into strips.  I gave everyone 6 strips and had them fill in the blanks.  They could use the worksheets they'd already filled in or create something new.

I had planned to have them paste strips to pink paper on tables around the edge of the room, but I realized we'd end class 30-40 minutes early if I went with my original plan--not good.  So I pasted three strips per paper, strips I took from each student, with space in between.  I divided them into 2 groups of 4, with 2 pink sheets per table.  They worked in groups, or pairs, to put additional strips on the paper, which took 15-20 minutes longer than each student pasting strips would have taken.  On the 5th sheet of paper, I put more strips in a random way--students were working more than I anticipated to have the poems make sense and/or flow.

Before I read them, I asked what they expected.  Then I read them.  They were a mix of things:  intriguing imagery, cliches, weirdness that did and did not work.  It might have been interesting to have them take each poem and try to go deeper.  I thought that the completely random poem was no better or worse than the poems they took more care creating, but I didn't tell them that.

I had them take pictures of the poems, just in case they wanted them later.  They will be taking one of the poetry projects we've done and revise, plus a short process piece:  a love poem, a photo with haiku, and either a villanelle or a triolet are the options.

I'm so pleased with how this class session went--my students were engaged, even though I could tell that some of them were mildly frustrated at times or perhaps baffled is more accurate--or both.  They worked together, even though they weren't sure what they were doing.  We all seemed to leave in a good mood, astonished at what we had created--or maybe it was just me who was astonished.

Inkspire and Other Events of the Week

I am tired this morning--it's a good tired because of a more intense week of good stuff, but a good tired is still tired.  Let me collect some fragments before they float away:

--One of my colleagues at Spartanburg Methodist College has been bringing in watermelon from her garden, which seems miraculous to me.  I've never been able to grow the larger, slower produce:  winter gourds/squash or melons.  I've been feasting on melons that someone else has cut up for me--a real treat.

--I was asked to be part of the search committee to find a new, full-time Speech hire.  I said yes, and I have no regrets:  as our provost said, it's one of the more important tasks that a college does.  But it will take a lot of time, and just thinking about it makes me tired (in a good way, but still tired).

--I am part of a student's Capstone project, and yesterday was her first event with me as a guest speaker.

It went really well.  It was a small group, but they were attentive.  I decided to talk about blocks and distractions that might keep us from writing and some techniques for dealing with those.  It was nothing earthshattering:  write in smaller increments--10 minutes a day can lead to having 150 to 300 pages in the course of a year.

--I love this broader view picture, the Inkspire event among many other events:

I love being part of a college that has so many events happening.

--Yesterday was a pizza party for Humanities majors, and we got good turnout.  Delightful!  But also tiring.

--In the midst of all of these events yesterday, I was sad to hear about the death of Annie Dillard.  She was not one of my writing/reading touchstones.  I remember a college summer of commuting when I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I had heard so much about--but I was underwhelmed.  I felt the same way about all of her work, and I feel weird about that, with so many people whom I respect having a different experience.

--It's the time of the school year when I feel like it's getting harder to stay ahead, especially with copying.  In part, it's because I have a lot of competing ideas for my creative writing classes, and all of them seem worthwhile.

When I want to remember why I tend to do the same thing semester after semester in English 101, it's so that I can devote creative energy to other classes.

--The work on the fixer-upper house has felt more intense.  Last Thursday we rented a floor sander, and now the big spaces are done.  Now we need to get the insides of the closets and the edges near the baseboards.  We're renting a different kind of sander today--here's hoping it makes it easier.

A Different Approach to Peer Editing

As a teacher, I have had students do peer editing a variety of ways:  in pairs, in groups of 4-5, as a big group passing papers to the left every ___ minutes, online as a discussion thread, and so on.  My new approach with peer editing in my two different creative writing classes has gone better than any other experience, and it's been so good that I'll try it with my English 101 class next week.

My Creative Writing class is a sophomore level class which attracts all sorts of students, but most do have an interest in Creative Writing.  They're not taking the class just because it's the only one where they could get a seat or the only one offered at a time that works with the rest of the schedule.  My Nonfiction Writing class is an upper level class; students who take that class are English majors for the most part.   

Both classes are much smaller than my 101 class.  The Creative Writing class is 10 students, Nonfiction 8.  My 101 class has 24 students when they all come to class.  

Back to my new approach.  I gave 2 days to peer editing not just one.  On the first day, we sat in a circle, each student with their rough draft.  We did timed readings, roughly 4 minutes per reading, no writing/feedback, pass the draft to the right, repeat.

My theory was that if they had done a quick reading, they could spend less time reading when it came time to give written feedback.

On the second day, I moved the tables so that each table would operate as a station with 2 chairs.  Each station had several copies of the rough draft and peer editing feedback sheets to fill in.  I also gave each writer a sheet where they could ask for specific feedback, which I won't do with my 101 class.

Students could move from station to station, reading at their own pace.  Some students read more slowly, while the ones who read and responded more quickly, could move to other stations.  Each writer got several response sheets, and most writers got responses from every student in the class.  No student sat idle--everyone was engaged on some level during the whole class period.

It was such a success that I'll try it next week with my 101 students.  Will it work?  Stay tuned!

Visions and Revisions

It's been a good week, but I feel behind, in the way that I often do once the semester gets underway.  I was shocked yesterday when I wrote in my bullet journal:  "Teaching Plans, Week 5."  Let me capture a few notes from the week:

Writing:

--This week's short story writing made me think of earlier writing I've done.  Very few of my short stories are in my folder of short stories to be sent out in hopes of publication.  So I went back hunting.

I have a few short stories that are set in a specified time:  2027 (the story was written in 2010 or so, but it didn't really need to be set in 2027, from what I could see) and 2076 (did I just have a yen to write a science fiction story?).

And then, I remembered:  I was creating a book of linked short stories.  It's a family saga, and these stories were written with the collection in mind, so I had to be aware of when the characters would have lived.

Now I think I'll take at least one of them and tinker with a new draft.  It will be more effective if the older woman in the hospital is the mother, not the mother-in-law.  I no longer need to explain what a smart phone is.  The revision won't take a lot of work, and I'll keep the original, in case a publisher ever asks me for a collection of linked short stories.

--I also did some poetry rough draft revisions when my two Creative Writing students needed to spend the class time writing.  I had printed the rough drafts in week 1, but never had time to look at them.

Commuting and the Fixer-Upper House

Today we will rent a drum sander to do the floor work.  Here's hoping it goes well.  Yesterday's commute reminded me of why this house was a good idea:  an accident hours before had shut down the interstate, in a place where there's really no other way around.  Our trip home took at least an extra hour, and I was so exhausted that I was dozing in the chair by 7:30 in the evening.

Department Life

We had a department meeting yesterday, and we went over course descriptions, some of which need some gentle revisions.  It was a collaborative vibe, so different from some schools.  I was startled to realize that I have some expertise (teaching experience and publishing) in all the types of classes we teach:  professional writing, creative writing, and literature. 

Teaching Life

My onground classes continue to be a delight.  Usually by week 5, there's at least one student, and sometimes a whole class, who I'm seeing as an aggravation, or one class that's so much more unengaged than the others.  But the chemistry of this term makes me think it may be one of my all-time best.

Post-Labor Day Shift

It has been an intense few weeks, book-ended by Quilt Camp on one end and Crafts for Christmas on the other end.  I made a quick trip to Columbia, SC for an overnight last Wednesday; I am trying to go once a month to see my grad school friend who had the catastrophic stroke 2 years ago.

I've had tech woes with the authenticator app which allows me to access my online classes, so I feel a bit behind.  That school has just switched its process for attendance verification, which has also left me feeling discombobulated.

It's been a good teaching time, particularly for my 2 Creative Writing classes.  Last week I had the class peer edit a short piece of mine; it's one of the few things I've written that works as both a short story and a piece of creative nonfiction.  Then we wrote together.  I brought my laptop, and I wrote too.  As a result, I have a new short story, one that came to me during Quilt Camp.  I still need an ending, but I expect to have that after I go on my walk. 

This morning, I also have that sad wistfulness that comes from knowing it will be some time before I see these friends again:  neighborhood friends, retreat friends, and grad school friends.  There's also a bit of overwhelm from a fixer-upper house that needs us to take the next step of refinishing the floors.  And there's the ordination overwhelm--I am doing an onground intensive in October, and I have some work to do beforehand, including a Zoom session tonight.

Let me go and walk and remember that all will be well.

Tech Woes, Famous Death Woes

Yesterday was a frustrating day.  On Thursday, I had trouble with the authenticator app that I have to use to get access to my online classes.  On Friday, I had the same trouble, so I thought I'd call the help desk early in the morning before everyone else tried to call.  So, at 4 a.m., I called, and at 5:20, I was able to explain my issue, and a ticket was created.  It left me frazzled all day, and feeling annoyed that I was letting tech troubles get to me.

I thought the problem was solved, but no, this morning, the app is not working again.  Later I will go up the hill to use Lutheridge's wi-fi, to see if the problem is my home wi-fi.  But other than that, I am not going to waste another day on this.

Yesterday afternoon the Crafts for Christmas retreat started.  I haven't had time to make a sample, so I made a small string of bunting.  We ate dinner, and then we did more crafting.  I was feeling tired and still a bit frazzled from the day, so I headed home at 8.  I am sure there were retreat friends that crafted all night.

Yesterday I put together a draft of a sermon.  I was sure it was terrible.  This morning, I read it and thought it wasn't nearly as awful as I worried it was.

Yesterday I had planned to write an appreciation of Gloria Steinhem, who died on Wednesday.  Like others who have died recently, she had a long life; she was 92 when she died.  For many years, I was a subscriber to Ms., the magazine she founded.  In pre-internet years, it was an amazing resource, with more global news than I was getting otherwise, with a wide diversity of alternate visions of what life could be.

This morning, I found out that Cassandra Wilson also died this week. There were several years in the mid to late 90's when I was in love with her voice and her music.  Her version of "Last Train to Clarksville" was revelatory--or so it seemed at the time.

I'm listening to it again as I finish this blog post, and while it may not seem groundbreaking now, it's because so many people have done similar work (taking an old pop standard and making it anew) in the decades since she did it.

I am ready to stop writing tributes--I am hoping for a few weeks with no notable deaths.

Now, let me get ready for another day--creating with friends, one of the best kinds of days!

Swiss Army Knife of the English Department

We've had a major internet outage in my service area overnight, so let me make a quick blog post in case it flickers out again.

On Monday, I made this Facebook post, which has gotten more likes than almost any other Facebook post I've ever made:

My department chair just said I am the Swiss Army knife of the department, in terms of being able to teach such a wide variety of classes, and I have decided this one may be my favorite job descriptor ever: Swiss Army Knife of the English Department!

My department chair is the one who just took over from the old department chair at Spartanburg Methodist College; that department chair took over when the chair who hired me got promoted to Dean of Humanities.

The all-time favorite blog post I've ever made, the one that got the most likes and loves, is the one where I announced I had just applied to Wesley Theological Seminary.  That was back in February of 2021, and it is rather staggering to think about all that has happened since then, both in my personal life, in the life of the nation, and the life of the planet.

Happily, I do not have time for a full catalogue of wins and losses.  But there is always time for gratitude that I found my way here to this small, liberal arts college,  where I am so lucky to have a tenure track job, with a Candidacy Committee who is supportive of my goal to be bi-vocational.

Whirlwinds: Teaching Days and Apprentices

Yesterday was one of those teaching days where I had plans going into the day, with back up plans because I wasn't sure the original plans would work, and then I went with the original.  Let me explain, in case it's useful:

--I had planned to do peer editing with my English 101 class.  I got rough drafts by e-mail, and then I couldn't open most of them, even when students tried to give me editing/access permissions.  Grr.  Some of the students sent in their rough drafts other ways, but I wasn't sure that everyone got the message.

So I went into Monday thinking I'd do Wednesday's lesson (intros, conclusions, and transitions) yesterday if I didn't have the rough drafts.  I was almost sure I was going to do that.  But I printed the rough drafts that arrived over the week-end, and lo and behold, I had them all.  So I shifted back to the original plan, and we did peer editing.

--I hadn't done the speed writing with objects week 1 writing with my nonfiction writing class, and I thought I would do that yesterday.  I knew that one student would be absent, and I wondered if the whole class might be there on Wednesday, if I should wait.  But I also feel we're now in the point of the semester where on any given day, someone will be absent.

We've been in a reading intensive time in that class, so I thought it was good to mix it up a bit.  So I went with the plan:  writing about objects on Monday, one more essay on Wednesday, along with planning for rough draft writing.  But I didn't make that decision until literal moments before the class started.

It went really well, much like the experience I blogged about last week. But unlike last week, I put random collections of objects on the tables.  I did that primarily because there was no time to set up the room before students got there because I have my assigned writing center hour from 11-noon, and the class starts at noon.

My teaching day felt hectic--no down time at all.  I am thinking I need to rethink my office hours, but in some ways, I'm not sure there's a great alternative that works with our current housing, with my spouse commuting down with me to work on our fixer-upper house.

We were both exhausted yesterday, so we settled in to watch The Apprentice.  When the movie first came out, I had no interest in seeing it, but as is often the case with biopics, I slowly changed my mind as I heard other people talk about the movie (interviews and reviews and passing remarks).  It was an amazing piece of work, intriguing to see how the characters made us believe that they were the actual characters that have come to loom so large.  But it was also a good choice for last night because it didn't require much intellectual work--it's not a complicated movie.

I remembered hearing interviews when the movie came out, and so now I'm listening to them again.  I first thought about seeing the movie when I heard the lead actor interviewed on NPR--astonishing to see that I heard that interview back in February of 2025.  Time just zooms along.

Random Objects in the Creative Writing Classroom

I've written before about using objects as writing prompts (see this blog post for explanation and pictures).  Usually I spread objects out on a table and have students pick one.  We do a variety of types of writing:  description, writing in the voice of the object, free associating to access memories based on the object.  It works well across writing classes.

In my Creative Writing class, half the students have had me in other classes, so I wanted to do a different approach, but still use objects.  We meet in one of the larger classrooms, so I had an idea.  I got to the classroom early and was happy to see that the room was set up with tables in the middle and a ring of tables around the edge of the room.  I decided to use 12 of them as stations.

At first I thought I would put one object per table, and then I thought it would be more interesting to have several objects.  Some tables had connected objects:  for example, on one table I put Christmas ornaments, a Christmas card, a packet of replacement bulbs for a strand of holiday lights.  On another, I kept the objects from the natural world:  3 feathers, a pine cone, and some shells.  Other tables were more random collections.

I was also pleased with how many tactile experiences they could have.  I had two felted pieces, along with chunks of wood and chunks of asphalt.  The cross made out of palm stalks and the waxy, half-burnt candle gave different sensations.  I put out broken strings of beads and broken pottery.

I told students that they would need paper and something to write with, or they could take laptops to write on.  They all chose paper, and I told them to make sure they had enough paper.

Students sat at a table and had 30 seconds to look at the objects.  Then they wrote for 3 minutes.  They could write about the object or write in the voice of the characters we created in past class sessions or explore their own memories.  I wasn't looking at their writing, so they had plenty of latitude, as long as they kept writing.

After three minutes, they moved to the next table, a process which went smoothly.  At the end, I had them read all the writing they had done, marking any that had potential.  I reminded them that they could go deeper, but I wasn't requiring it.  For me, it's too much policing, having students write for 20-30 minutes.

My students seemed to really like the process.  They talked about how many ideas it generated and how much fun it was to write about random objects.  They also talked about their wonder at what all was waiting to be written about--and I reminded them that we live in a world of random objects, so whenever they feel blocked, they should remember this technique.

It's been a really good teaching week, and this experience was one of the highlights.

A Good Stretch of Poetry Days

The past few days have been a good poetry days, in a more well-rounded sense--by which I mean, I've been doing more than just writing down a line or two.  Let me capture what a good stretch of poetry days looks like:

--A few months ago, I had an idea for a poem, Jesus buying a fixer-upper of a house.  I didn't do anything with this idea since I first had it (in late April, as evidenced by this blog post).  But this week, I returned to it, and I'm really delighted with the surprises that the poem offers.

--Yesterday, I read a volume of poems.  My students were working through a time management module and had to enter due dates into calendars and planners.  I thought they would blaze through the assignment, but only a few of them did.  I went back to my office to get something to read.

--That book was Donna Vorreyer's Unrivered.  What an amazing book!  Vorreyer explores themes of aging and the natural world and relationships, and many of her poems have theological imagery and ideas that I didn't expect.  She's also skilled at a variety of forms.  It's a book that demands a re-read, which I hope to do soon.

--I read most of the book in one sitting, and I returned to read the rest of it later in the afternoon.  It's always a very different experience to read an entire collection in one day, and I'm glad I did it yesterday.

--I had a late afternoon phone call after the Endorsement Panel yesterday.  I was invited to be the official poet, a poet laureate of sorts, of the Southeastern Synod's Synod Assembly.  What a cool possibility!

--My mom heard me say that I was invited to be poet laureate of the Synod, which would also be an interesting possibility.

--This morning I returned to my poem about Jesus working on the fixer-upper.  Here's what I wrote, a stanza which surprised me--I didn't know I was going to write it until the lines flowed out:

Jesus wipes down every surface,
scrubbing when necessary.
He paints the walls in a soothing
version of the color that first flooded
the world when God said,
“Let there be light.”

Signs and Signifiers and Keeping a Record

It's been a strange beginning to the work week.  Let me record, so I don't forget.

--I've been in that liminal space where it's time to settle into the semester, yet I could still delay doing that for another few days.  My office hour time has been consumed by meetings and Convocation, so I have yet to get my Brightspace course shells set up.  At this point, it doesn't matter, because the classes meet in person.  Soon, though, it will be time for students to submit work, and I need to get those structures set up.

--I've been trying to decide how to record what I do in class--I'm going to keep a weekly list in my bullet journal, because it will be easier to find it again.  I've also discovered that I need to do a better job of adding handouts to the course shell.  I did none of that in last year's Creative Writing class.  Happily, I recorded a lot of what I did in this blog.

--Last night, I saw a Facebook post that Wesley Seminary created with a “We’re welcoming students back to campus!” motif: tables of breakfast, welcome baskets, happy faces. I am happy for those students, don’t get me wrong. But it does remind me of how my time at seminary was not what I expected, with no one on hand for move in day, no welcome of any kind. We were still social distancing in 2022, so that was part of it. For the 1st part of the semester back in 2022, we wore masks to our in-person classes.

For the most part, I’m still very happy I got to go to seminary, to attend physically in person, for a year. But occasionally, I feel a stunning sadness at all the ways it was so different from what I expected.

--Let me end with a happier memory of this 2nd week's beginning.  I went to the library to pick up my book on hold:  Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad about My Neck.  The librarian touched her neck and said, "This 72 year old librarian feels seen."  

I told her about my idea for my Nonfiction Writing class, which is focusing on the wide variety of personal essays we could write as a way to begin the class.  I'm bringing in Molly Jong-Fast's NYT essay with its realistic assessment of plastic surgery which references the Ephron essay.  I said, "Of course, these students are 19 and 20 years old, and they have gorgeous skin, so I don't know if they can relate to any of this."

The librarian beamed at me and said, "You're going to have a wonderful class.  Those students are so lucky."

We did have a really good class yesterday.  My English 101 and ALP classes were good too.

--In an evening of whiplash, with up and down feelings, I did ask God for a sign, even though I don't really believe God works that way.  I looked at the screen door and saw a perfect, tiny butterfly, so perfect that I wondered if someone had put a butterfly sticker on the screen.  Nope--my spouse took the screen door off the sliding track, and it flew away.

I'm going to see it as a sign of blessing, even if I'm a woman who tells herself that she doesn't believe in signs.

First Week of School: The More Things Change

It's an interesting moment in time to be teaching first year students.  I mean that in a broad sense, but I also mean it in a "teaching the first week of classes during this particular week in August of 2026."  Let me unpack that statement a bit:

--Tuesday March 11 was our first day of classes.  It was also my first day as an Associate Professor on the tenure track at Spartanburg Methodist College, which I wrote about in this blog post.  Just before I went to my first class of the Fall 2026 semester, I read this article in The Atlantic about a professor leaving his tenure track job.  His college, Bates College in Maine, is in many ways completely unlike mine.  The beginning of the article made me think I was reading the complaints of an incredibly privileged man who got a teaching job right out of grad school, but it's more nuanced than that.

Here's the 5th paragraph (the nuanced part comes much later):  "When I defended my dissertation on Zoom that spring, one of my advisers joked that seeing me with a tenure-track job in hand was like 'watching the last dinosaur being born.' It was at once a compliment and a grim acknowledgment of reality. I had won the lottery in an apocalypse. I was going off to the kind of secure, prestigious, fairly remunerated academic job that was rapidly going extinct in a world where most people teaching college courses were stuck in the permanent underclass of contingent labor."

Most teachers I know are somewhere in between:  certainly not prestigious institutions, but not adjunct work either.

--As I drove home on Wednesday, I listened to this episode of On Point, which talked about reading, both in light of the state of Texas requirements announced very recently, and in terms of whether or not children are reading whole books at all.  It made me nostalgic for my own days of reading in elementary school and made me think about what we read in high school, where we did read whole books and plays.

I don't assign many whole books these days, and I feel mostly good about it--but the show made me wonder if I'm right.

--My students will be doing more writing, the old-fashioned kind with pens and paper.  Most of my department colleagues are also shifting back to paper.

I came across this Substack post that talked about what writers should be doing to prove that they did their own creative writing, should a publisher feel the need to have a writer justify their work.  As a poet, I'm not too concerned.  The post did point out how much formal writing, the old-fashioned kind that academics learn to write, will be flagged as AI generated.  Here's what the author did:  

"I ran my PhD thesis. Atmospheric physics, submitted in 2010, at a point when the technology being accused of writing it was more than a decade from public release. Running it through a detector in 2026 returns around 70%.

A physics thesis is exactly the careful, formal, low-perplexity register that the Stanford study found classifiers flag.

A detector tells you one thing: that a piece of text resembles a statistical distribution. The question in the room is who wrote it, and no detector has ever answered that one."

--This week is also a week with more articles about AI run amok, a week when at least one more experimental AI agent got out of the boundaries/cage/safeguards.  My apocalyptic brain immediately thought of a future when we look back and laugh/rage/cry at the obsession with student/writer cheating and ignoring the much larger threat.

--It's strange being at a school where most of us haven't seen each other since early May, and I haven't seen students since late April.  It's not strange to me when students return looking different.  They are in late adolescence after all.  But some of my colleagues are notably thinner.  Maybe it's having time off in summer, but one colleague did tell me that she'd been taking a GLP-1 drug (another new technology reshaping our lives), and it was transformative.

I had hoped to be somewhat thinner when I returned to school, but I'm happy with feeling healthier.

Conclusion;  In some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same:  I always want to return as a transformed version of myself--transformed in a good way--if I haven't seen people in awhile.  And yet, I'm seeing changes underway that may completely reshape the world, in the way that the atomic bomb did, and the way the end of the Soviet Union did.

Second Day of Fall Semester

Yesterday was a good first day of class at Spartanburg Methodist College, and not just for me.  Everyone I talked to yesterday mentioned the good energy on campus.

Of course, the first day of a semester is usually wonderful--and fall semester is best.  Yesterday was no exception.

My heavy duty teaching days are Mondays and Wednesdays, so today will be a bit more structured.  Yesterday I went to my Creative Writing class and then did some work for today's classes during my office hours.

I was hanging out in my office even beyond office hours while my spouse finished his day working on the fixer-upper house.  We traveled down together, he dropped me off, and then at the end of our separate days, we traveled back to our mountain house.

We are in that time of summer where I don't feel hungry for anything in particular, but I do feel hungry.  We stopped at Publix, the grocery store which makes our favorite fried chicken, and I grabbed the last box of 8 pieces.  We spent the evening watching TV and eating chicken.

Yesterday I didn't have class until 12:15, but today's teaching starts at 9, so I'll need to be on the road by 7:15 or 7:30--so let me get ready for my morning walk.

It's darker than I would like it to be, but I have lights for my shoes, and we'll see how it goes.  MWF will be the days when I stop by the Lutheridge weight room to do some work on the weight machines--at least that's my plan until we've moved into the fixer-upper house.

Let me begin.

First Day as Associate Professor

On my first day of class every year, I'm  always tempted to post a picture, the way that parents post pictures of their kids as they head off to school.  This year, the temptation is especially strong, as today begins a slightly different direction in my teaching life.  Today is the first day that I am teaching as an Associate Professor on a tenure track.

In some ways, not much will change.  I'm at the same school where I've been teaching full-time for 2 years in a year-to-year capacity.  I'm teaching the same classes, and I have the same schedule.  But this year, I have the assurance of being able to do this teaching work for at least the next 5 years.  Being on the tenure track means the school has more of a commitment to me than before.

This year I will have committee work, and we got our assignments yesterday.  I am on the Interdisciplinary Studies Committee.  As I looked at the other possible committees, I felt very seen with my assignment.  I'm not exactly sure what the committee does, but fellow members include the chaplain and the person in charge of co-curricular arts experiences.

Now that I'm on the tenure track, I'll be more meticulous about keeping records and keeping them accessible across years.  I always keep teaching evaluations, for example, but I rarely download them into a separate file.  Now I will, and upon the advice of two colleagues who have just gone up for tenure, I know how to create the master file for the tenure portfolio (class by class, not year by year).

Those of you who have been following my seminary/candidacy journey might be feeling confused and wondering what happened to that.  I continue a Synod Authorized Minister at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  When our fixer-upper is ready for us to move some furniture into, I'll be in Spartanburg for part of the week and Arden at our Lutheridge house for part of the week, driving up and back to Bristol each Sunday.  I hope to spend summers in Arden, which is a much better place to spend summers on a climate change ravaged planet than most other places I could choose.

This morning, I'm thinking about that day in 2023 when I went down for the first day of teaching; I blogged about it here.  It's strange to think about how much has changed since that day.  Back then, I wasn't sure where my office would be or if I would even have a key.  Back then, I taught two classes, both on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I'm going to use the 2023 end to that blog post to end today's post--it still works:

I am thinking back to my first day of teaching, long ago in 1988. I didn't bring water with me everywhere I went. I showed up with syllabi, which I handed out. And then I stationed myself behind a podium, where I kept a death grip for the whole class.

I am lucky--that first class was bright and engaged and wonderful. My life might have taken a very different trajectory had I been assigned a different class. I'm glad that I had the group of students that I did.

Let me go take a walk; I likely won't have a chance later today.

Balancing Work

We had a really good day at church yesterday at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  I say this with some sense of wonder because I arrived in a grumpy mood:  we left ten minutes later than I had requested, which meant I felt frazzled.

I prayed for my grumpy frazzled mood to lift as I waited for my spouse to come downstairs and open the door, and happily it did with the first hymn.  My sermon went well.  I was more pleased with my adult sermon, but I also think what I did with the youth was important, talking about storms as what they might encounter in school (it's their second Monday back today).  Grown ups hear about Peter sinking in stormy waters and immediately think about the chaos in their lives, but most youth are not trained in this kind of interpretation.

We even welcomed a new member, the nephew of one of our current members and his two small (delightful!) children.  I got donuts in Arden, at my newish favorite donut store that's open at 5 a.m., even on Sundays.

You can find the recording of my sermon here.  If you'd like to read along, the manuscript is in this blog post.

I feel such gratitude that I get to do all the work I do:  being the Synod Authorized Minister at Faith Lutheran, being a college English teacher on the tenure track at Spartanburg Methodist College, and all the other work I get to do:  volunteering, coordinating, being a friend, being a partner, being a family member in any number of family constellations.

This morning, on the Florida-Bahamas Synod Facebook Page, I came across this stunning picture of the amazing altar and stained glass of St. Stephen Lutheran in Pompano Beach.  It reminded me of a time that I met there to do some work for the bishop and had to take a vacation day to be able to be absent from my day job in higher ed.  I am glad to be in a time of my work life where I have more flexibility and a schedule that is not as unrelenting.

Friday Fragments: Positive Student Evaluations and Poem Creating

Yesterday was much easier than Thursday--but that's not a surprise.  Yesterday we only had one meeting, so my committed time was only one hour.  Thursday was very scheduled, from 8 a.m. until 3.  Let me capture yesterday:

--Here's the one cool thing that stands out.  We had our Humanities division meeting, and we entered the classroom door that had colored pieces of 8 x 11 paper posted around the door frame.  On each piece of paper was a different student evaluation with a positive statement about teaching.  Our dean told us that she chose a positive evaluation for each one of us and put the comment on the paper.  She wanted us to remember that the work we do is important.  What a great way to start a meeting!

--The meeting was a good one, full of good brainstorming about ways to keep students from leaving us.  We'd like to grow our bachelor degree programs, and we'd like to keep 1st year students from dropping out.  Unlike some administrator meetings I've attended in pre-pandemic days, there was no administrator blame in the discussion of retention.  Refreshing!

--Yesterday morning I was going back through old blog posts trying to remember the pre-first day of class schedules of past years.  I came across this blog post that reminded me of eating ice cream with my parents a year ago and this post about aging bodies and this post about watching the news with my dad a year ago, and a first line for a poem came to me, and I followed it.

--It's not the first time, and it won't be the last time that I've been grateful for my blogging practice.

--This morning, before Saturday sermon writing, I'm trying to finish the rough draft of the poem.  It revolves around three T.V. shows:  Back to the Frontier, a nightly news show, and Little House on the Prairie.  It involves ice cream and habits and the way we may never escape our younger selves in our family constellation.  This bit may be my favorite:

We return to earlier incarnations
of our relationship. My mom
counts the calories in the bowl
and comments on how much thinner
we would be if we dumped
the ice cream down the drain.
Because I am now a grown up,
I resist the temptation
to eat the whole carton.

--I have been making lots of progress on quilting projects.  I've been sewing in the evenings, as we've watched TV--it's a delightful way to end the day.

Workshop Day and My New Bullet Journal

Yesterday was a good day overall, but also a bit overwhelming in understanding ways.  I went from summer days when I'm around one or two people a day to a day full of humans.  I went from the unstructuredness of summer days to a day of a rigid schedule.

Happily, I was surrounded by other humans, my colleagues, who are delightful.  I went from the free floating thinking of summer to focusing on teaching.  I gave a workshop on using haiku to assess student learning--yes, it's a workshop I've given at other places, but it continues to be well received.

As I always do when I use the word "haiku," I did remind us that true practitioners of haiku would tell us that a creation is not a haiku just because it's 3 lines and follows syllable requirements.  But it's a fun way to try to determine if students have a grasp of the material, and it gives them small bits to put on the board, which can give interesting opportunities for small group and/or large group discussion.

My favorite workshop that I attended was one on bullet journaling.  We each got a bullet journal, and I'm planning to keep it through the school year.  I'm now on the tenure track, so I need to be much more intentional about remembering all that I've done as a faculty member over the next 5 years.  Plus, I just love keeping track, and I've been wanting a system that is more portable and encourages me to capture daily observations closer to real time.

You may say, "Couldn't you do that on your phone?"  No, I can't.  I haven't found a phone system that works, and I will be the first to confess that I haven't tried very hard.

Our workshops ended by 3, and I drove home.  It was good to remember how tiring this commute can be, even when it's a straight shot down the mountain and back.  My leisurely summer days occasionally made me wonder if we made a mistake to buy a second house.  Yesterday reminded me that it will be  good to have a second home base.

Today will be an easier day with just one meeting.  Will my spouse and I meet at the Spartanburg house to get work done or will that wait for next week?  Stay tuned.

Back to School, Back to Hiroshima

Yesterday was a delightful day.  Today will be delightful too, although it's a full day on campus, so it will be a different kind of delightful.  And I've been awake since 2, so I do worry about how tired I'll be by late afternoon.

My brain started churning at 2, churning with all sorts of worries and plans.  I need to sit down with a calendar and old syllabi and make some loose plans--or maybe weekly plans--at least that's what my brain was telling me when I couldn't go back to sleep.  My brain also jumped ahead to spring, and how I might teach the Intro to Lit class, and it's much too early to be plotting those classes.

Have I done the syllabus planning for this semester, since I was awake?  No, of course not.  I did some reading and ate some cranberry orange bread.  I did some fretting about muscle loss:  not my own, but my friend who had the catastrophic stroke a few years ago, and has lost so much muscle mass that she can't sit in the wheelchair very long.  I've wondered about other people in my life who aren't getting much exercise--but certainly more than my mostly bed-bound friend.

I am remembering 2 years ago, heading down to campus for a day that would have been even fuller, with a dinner for new faculty at the end.  I remember going to orientation sessions for new faculty and wondering how much would apply to me as a person with a one year position.  And I remember feeling so jealous of people who had the luxury of more permanence.

And now I am one of those people.

Of course, today is one of those days in history that reminds me that permanence is an illusion. Today is the day when the first atomic bomb used in warfare was detonated at Hiroshima, thus launching us into this brave new world where we find ourselves.  I think of those people headed to work when the bomb detonated, those burned into the concrete, and those further away, who would spend the rest of their lives being a walking specimen of what overexposure to radiation does to a human body before they died early.

The bombs used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small by today's standards--but what damage they did! The effects of that bomb obliterated much of Hiroshima--and vaporized some of it. There were reports of people fused into pavement and glass--or just vanished, with a trace remaining at the pavement. The reports of the survivors who walked miles in search of help or water are grim. And many of those survivors would die of the effects of radiation in the coming years.

Through the years, I've seen many a documentary about the rush to build nuclear weapons, about the uncertainty of what would happen with those first tests and explosions--would the very atmosphere around the planet dissolve? I have yet to see any footage of scientists who wondered what might happen to civilians on the ground when these bombs exploded.

I've lived long enough to see history being made to know that the choices can be fairly ghastly. In this case, far better to develop the weapons before the Germans. I know many people who believe that the use of these bombs helped avoid more years of grueling battles in the Pacific that would have left us with even more dead--one could argue that the sacrifice of the populations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were worth the avoidance of more years of war and that loss of life.

I've also done enough reading and thinking about pacifist approaches to wonder if there might not have been another way if we had acted much earlier.

I remember during our grad school years we went to a beautiful anti-nuclear vigil on August 6 in a city park.  I remember paper cranes and seeing some of our grad school professors there.  That would have been in 1988 or 1989.  I wonder if any groups mount anti-nuclear vigils in August anymore?

It's not that the world is any more of a peaceful place these days.  In fact, in recent years, it feels like we're sliding back to a world that's much more dangerous.  Sadly, the world still needs the blessings of the origami cranes.  They're not as easy to fold as they look--that, too, makes them an appropriate metaphor.  But they are worth the effort--and peace is worth the effort too.

Delights Planned for the Last Day of Summer and an A for Paul Class

In many ways, today is my last day of summer 2026.  A year ago, I'd have been going to CPE early and then driving to Williamsburg to help my parents recover from my mom's near death pneumonia hospitalization--I am so grateful that this summer's end is more mundane.

Our transition to the school year is a gentle one.  Tomorrow we have a very full day of teacher training and meetings.  On Friday and Monday, we have one meeting per day.  I'd prefer to have both on one day and the other day free for syllabus prep, but I'm fine with the schedule.  Having more time off is a game changer--in my younger days at community colleges, I'd have been irritable at being expected to do any of this at all.  

Of course, in my younger days, I spent much more time being irked.  Now I am older and wiser and more laid back and a better shepherd of my energy, meaning I ask more questions about situations and whether or not my irritability/anger is worth the energy and time.

On this last day of summer, I'll fill my day with delights:  a morning visit with a neighborhood friend doing creative work together in her studio and an afternoon with the LWR quilting group at the local Lutheran church.  I'll do some reading and some writing.  For one day, today I won't do any teaching work:  I turned in final grades for my online classes last night, and I still have time to create syllabi before classes start on Tuesday.

But I'm just remembering that I need to put an announcement in my onground class course shells that gives a welcome and says that more information is coming soon.  Since the shells open tomorrow, I'll do that cut and paste work today.

I'm happy that my work-for-pay still leaves me with time to see friends and do creative work of all types, along with writing and reading.  I'm grateful that my teaching life doesn't consume all my free time.  I know I say this a lot, but it's worth remembering and retreating.

It seems fitting that on one of the last evenings of summer, last night I got my grades for my summer TEEM class on Paul:  an A on each of the two papers, and an A for the class.  My teacher gave thoughtful commentary that made me feel seen and heard and understood.

I mention my reaction because last night I also got my supervisor feedback for the summer online class that I taught for SMC.  Overall, it was positive, although there is room for improvement:  more personalized feedback and more depth of feedback.  My first thought was that using names of students in grading feedback (a suggestion) would take too much time.  But it really won't take that much more time and maybe it would help students stay engaged.

I'm grateful for my return to school in late middle life for many reasons, but it's been revelatory to remember what it's like to be a student.  I used to think that A level papers don't really need much instructor feedback, but as an A student, I would feel cheated if my papers got the kinds of A level feedback that I give as a teacher.  Maybe that's too strong; I'm remembering all the times I got minimal feedback on A level papers and didn't feel cheated.  But every time I get more involved feedback, I'm grateful.  And A level students are more likely to have the time and mental space to care in a way that isn't possible for students who can't care as much because their lives are falling apart.