I was married on this date twelve years ago. In a few days I'll have been divorced for one year. It startled me to realize these things just a few minutes ago. My marriage is fading from my day to day consciousness.

Good.

This is far better than the agony when the divorce was still a shock and hard to believe.

Happy New Year to anyone who happens on this blog. I'm here to give witness: living can get better.

I've spent a fair amount of time on the ice in the last few days. It was a treat to see the wonder on my nephew's girlfriend's face as she walked/fished/kept warm on ice for the first time--it was also fun to see how good she was about the wet foot she got when she stepped in a hole. No fuss, just fun. She's a winner.

The four days of our festivities brought back to me what a socially odd person I am. It was interesting to feel again how I contribute to these family gatherings, when people come to visit my mother and me. The things I'm best at aren't things that add much to these settings. I teach and read and write. They can't share my teaching, they don't read much compared to me and certainly not the scholarly work I consume, none of them write and have only passing interest in the writing I do--with the exception of Mom. Not much for me to offer from my professional life or even my private life, which is mostly made up of reading.

They have spouses/significant others, children or plans for them, or they are children; I have no spouse/significant other, children or plans for them. That I don't have these things is painful to me and so I have come to the point that I rarely speak of such matters; they know that and so don't speak of them either. They are young and strong and socially engaged or they are little children; I am neither young nor old nor socially engaged in the ways that couples are or even very much at all. In this family setting, I am very much the odd man out.

Yet it is easy for me to pay attention to them and for them to like and pay attention to me. I like young people and am interested in them and what they do. I like their energy and the things they tell me about modern life--things I won't know of my own far more solitary experience. In this my encounters with my family are analogous to my teaching. I'm not teaching my family, but I live this experience-through-others in my teaching and on those few occasions that young people are in my home. I take pleasure in paying attention. I like to hear of the lives of others, of experiences I haven't had.

That characteristic, liking to hear what others think, may be one of my strengths as a writing teacher. It certainly is a big part of what I can offer to family members whose lives are much different from mine.

I awoke early this morning to the sounds of two excited and happy little boys playing with new trucks. When I got downstairs one of them assured me that he'd seen Santa but was then unable to provide any further details, as Mr. Tonka was calling for more attention.

Blogging will be irregular until spring term begins. I have no Internet access at home and will be in the office only occasionally.

I'm nearly done with the reading and grading. I just this morning received a whole set of papers from a student doing an independent course. They were stunning. I don't know whether I'm punchy from reading so many hundreds of papers in only a few days or I'm normally insensitive and woke up all of a sudden, but this woman's work left me awed and admiring.

What do I "teach" when I have such a student?

I don't; I get out of the way. She doesn't need me; she needs to do the work.

And then I get to appreciate it.

I read a set of papers by a woman who writes that she goes wondering down trails and I know that she means wandering, and then realize that I like wondering better. I wonder as I wander. I love to go a'wondering, which is what I do when I read sheaves of papers, flurries of papers, avalanches of papers. My back and neck and shoulders ache from the weight of so many papers, so many minds, so many wonderings. For all the body stress, the wondering is wonderful.

Where else, in what other work, could I live so many lives?

In a presentation of a Mass Communications thesis a student recounted his research into the characteristics of music videos that make them of greater or lesser quality in the eyes of his peers, who are also college students and watchers of such videos. His results struck me as utterly peculiar: the students he surveyed agreed almost unanimously that music videos weren 't very good, that none of the characteristics my student researcher had come up with to describe those videos made much difference in quality, and that they all watched those videos for hours every week. When I inquired of the class to which the student was presenting how this could be, they nodded their heads in agreement when one said "I know they're brainless, but watching them is addictive."

I was taken aback. "They're addictive when you think they're stupid? Why?"

"You watch, and then a new comes on. You watch that. A new one comes on."

At first I was struck dumb, shaking my head. Now I think I'm seeing something. There in front of me was the distinction between novelty and novel. Each video offered just enough sight and sound to be the little seduction of the senses that is novelty. None offered enough news, enough change, enough provocation, to be novel.

A pet rock is a novelty; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is novel. Huck offers such thought about inversions of right and wrong as evidenced in civilization and civilization's perversions that it requires the labor of engaged processing, testing against internal preconceptions, to comprehend what encountering it means. Encountering a pet rock is seeing a pet rock.

My superb creative writing teacher, Mark Vinz, told his classes what he'd heard from Tom McGrath, Mark's peer as writer and writing teacher, about encountering a poem. Ask the poem "What's the news?" What has the poem to offer that shifts the reader some way. The good poem brings news. The new, the novel, forces the engaged reader to see to think to feel familiar territory differently or to see unfamiliar territory as compared to past experience.

The pet rock or the dull poem lies there to be seen in its novelty of encounter, without the reward of the novel.

From music video to literary criticism. I hope that is novel.

Some unsorted thoughts on teaching:

Whenever I remember terrible teachers I get vaguely sick to my stomach and faintly angry and wish I hadn’t started remembering in the first place. This even though they knew their material. There are people who remember my teaching in my most specialized courses with vague nausea and faint anger (fools!) and so I sympathize with them. Oddly enough, some of the best-reviewed teaching I’ve done has been in classes for which I was unprepared by previous schooling. This leaves me thinking that sometimes it is best for the teacher not to know much, and to know that.

The best teachers combine elastic minds with generous hearts and relentless self discipline.

One good way to teach them is to convince them that you are off your rocker.

Teaching of any kind discloses the workings of our minds, including how we avoid disclosure or risk. In this, teaching is parallel to writing.

I want students to put aside their histories to the point that they can confront ideas. One way to be able to put aside our history is to confront it.

There is nothing more clearly antithetical to the teacher’s role as concerned offerer of paths toward learning than the cut-off end point judging of the student’s past signified in a grade.

Teaching English well requires even more judgment than writing well. The risk taking of the writer in draft can be withheld; the risk taking of the teacher causes drafts, even storms, that can’t be retrieved.

We are in our bodies and minds mediums for teaching, but not in the mindless conduit fashion of a piece of metal wire conducting this knowledge bit from here to there, but rather more like the spiritualist who opens to the radiance of eternity and allows entrance for the seeker.

People write about what they know and English majors read those things and then English majors get interested in things people write about and then English majors become English teachers and talk about all those things they’ve been reading and then…oh well

The near universal human struggle to understand spirituality is, as with nearly all great things, the source of both rapture and rupture. My own such experience is almost omnipresent, sometimes so intensely I have difficulty breathing as this invisible band originating in my diaphragm stretches out into the cosmos far beyond sight. That band is elastic, manifesting varying degrees of tension. Why I have to deal with this I don't know. I don't ask for these feelings. I suspect that they are intimately related to the streak of melancholy permeating my nature.

My dear now-dead friend was baptized a few days ago. A lifetime of agnostic doubt ended with baptism. There is something richly significant in that act. The rapture of religion is the hope for salvation.

This is also the source of my astonished bewilderment at the peculiarities of religion. As the teachings of any one religion become more exclusive, so does that religion rupture its believers from other believers. This is most notably true of two of the great world religions: Christianity and Islam. Each teaches that only through its god is salvation; all others are eternally doomed. Prayer brings some followers of one to their knees; it prostrates followers of the other. Five times a day. Power that great is evidence of the hope they offer. This also brings me to my utter confusion: I cannot understand the concept of a captive god, wholly owned by one religion or another. How so many people can think such things is beyond my comprehension.

I understand and feel the desire to comprehend and to manage the ravages of spirituality. I understand and feel the desire for community in these efforts. I cannot understand the hubris of exclusion in the process of satisfying those desires. Too much pain is added to the pain and joy and sorrow and boredom and ecstasy and monotony and engagement that is living.

Giving eulogies turns my thoughts to eternity.

My mother picked up the bowl of chili I’d put aside as finished at lunch. She looked at it and said “It isn’t finished,” and scooped out a part of a spoonful and held it in front of my mouth there as I sat at the table. I was 51 and being fed another spoonful by my mother. I found my face starting a smile as I opened my mouth. Then she tipped the bowl upside down and poured five or six drops into the spoon. “Good to the last drop.” Another presentation of spoon. This time I was chuckling as I opened my mouth. She had a mischievous look as she turned away with the bowl and spoon.

-----

My teaching in the Mass Communications department has come to an end. With an influx of new professors they have chosen to teach the courses I've been teaching as an adjunct. There is no insult intended here nor is there one taken. It strikes me as normal that Mass Comm profs would want to teach Mass Comm courses.

It's been an odd pleasure, for the past seven years, to teach courses in social science research and then to supervise social science theses. I do enjoy such research design and figuring out how best to collect and analyze data. I've also enjoyed working with Mass Comm majors. They are unlike English majors in that they are unusually extroverted. We English types tend to be introverts, intensely interested in our own thinking. Mass Comm majors are interested in everybody else. I have found that refreshing, and will miss it and them.

My friend, best man at my wedding, died night before last. I have a eulogy to do Saturday. Didn't feel like blogging yesterday.

In my job the workload doubles in the last two weeks of a term. Because I allow people to re-write and re-submit and turn in everything at the end, my office becomes a swamp of papers. Unlike the swamp described in M*A*S*H, I have no still putting out restoratives. Coffee becomes my survival substitute.

Papers to read; grades to do.

I just left the last regular class meeting of a methods class. It went twenty minutes longer than it is supposed to. They wouldn't leave. What a mix of moods. One man gave a thoughtful, well-prepared and researched PowerPoint presentation. We were all impressed. Later in the hour that same man was laughing so hard that the laugh sounded like a combination of a whine and a scream. Another laughed until he nearly strangled. One normally quiet woman laughed very loudly for a long time and then started again.

And we talked with great, solemn seriousness about the teaching situations at Cass Lake and Red Lake. And we marveled at those who are doing that work. And we applauded those who want to do that work.

Our work together is done.

I just read the course evaluations written by the students in my College Writing I class. They include a statement that could be, word for word, one I read in the evaluations of the first such class I taught, back in 1975. "I thought he was really funny because he had such a low voice for being such a small person." I've been hearing or reading that since I was thirteen. I like to joke that I have a Hulk Hogan sized voice in a Don Knotts sized body. The incongruity is funny.

And I'm not small. At 5'10" and 160 lbs I'm about as average as a man could be. My voice makes me smaller.

That's an odd thought: my voice makes me smaller. Somewhere in between finals and reading collections of student papers I'm going to have to think about that. There may be an essay waiting.

As always, when reading evaluations, I feel the small sadness that is the end of a school term. Students leave; teachers stay. It is right and necessary that this is so. Between the beginning of a term and the ending, we get to have some assertions about the quality of life. Then we're out of time. After that I hope for good memories and the beginning of a new term.

One of the many beauties of teaching is that there will be a new term.

Reading the work of a very good student has led me to think about Robert Bly's writing about men. Much of what he says strikes me as melodramatic, yet one of those statements, to the effect that the essence of male consciousness is the consciousness of grief, is true of me. I am not interested in male initiation rites or the beating of drums or Iron John, but his statement about grief is my reality. I also strongly doubt that is every man's reality. For them I am happy. Still, most of the men I know well face life as something to be taken on or even just endured. We rarely speak of such things. When we do, however obliquely, we recognize each other.

I suspect this drives my passion for teaching. Teaching, and writing, are affirmative, optimistic acts that warm a cold world.

I'm a student in the Bemidji Choir, which puts on Bemidji State's annual Madrigal Dinners. I am 51, the next oldest choir member is 31, the average age is perhaps 20. The men grow beards for this event (if they can). Mine is the only one going gray. The costumes for these dinners are meant to emulate medieval England. This means the men wear tunics and tights. Last night I was informed I have chicken legs. Shapely, though.

Tonight's is the last performance of the season. As this is my fourth and final year as a student in the choir, tonight will be the last time I appear in public in a dress.

The performance is sold out.

Friday after lunch as a professor is so much different from Friday after lunch as a high school teacher. I haven't had a Friday afternoon class in years. When I was teaching high school, Friday afternoon classes were usually things to endure rather than enjoy, but they were fully occupied. High school students get squirrelly. They won't do or say anything or they will do or say anything. They will drive teachers crazy either way. Sometimes I counted the last hour of the day in seconds rather than minutes.

Now Friday afternoons are quiet. I am sort of glad I don't have to work any more if I choose not to, but I'm also sort of sad that all the week's classes are behind me. I would rather be with students. I don't get to go to class again until Monday.

This has got to be the weirdest way to look at Fridays. I need to get out of the office.

The ending of a good class is much like finishing a good book. The satisfaction of completion is tinged with regret that it is done. A good class, like a good book, makes me wish it could go on a little longer. Student entries in the log I pass around during each class meeting have evolved from talking of nerves to crazy creative fun, with many statements of "I'm going to miss this class." The statements are sincere, even though it is/was an 8 o'clock class.

One comment I particularly enjoyed in today's entries: "This class is like waking up in clouds every morning without that heavenly vertigo." I don't know what that means, but I like the sound of it. And I prefer it to waking up in hell.

Teaching writing is such pleasure. The classroom is the best part, but right now I'm doing one to one conferences with student writers taking the first course in first year composition, going over their portfolios of work through the term. I'm relishing the experience. To take time to chat, purposefully, about their writing and what they have accomplished and what they might think about should they choose to be equally purposeful about living the writing life a little more intensely--this is stimulating. I like them so, and in this setting I can show them that I have really paid attention to their work individually. Of course, I often have paid more attention to it than they have.

I have loved teaching the first term of Freshman English since I first did so in the fall of 1975. The startled thrill I see so often in students who never had any idea that writing could be so unconventional, while satisfying conventions, is irresistible.

Dotted prefixes, WalkawayRenee says, are to be hidden in order to enjoy the reverse snobbery possible. I suspect she just nailed exactly why I never refer to myself as Dr. and tell students to call me Mark. I didn't get the doctorate to be a Ph.D. I got it to have the union card that allows me to do what I want to do. Then I can hide out and pretend I'm not one of them, though of course I am.

Twain said something about never wanting to join a club that would let someone like him in. I joined the club.

As a member of the club, I have in this week delivered an Honors Council Lecture, written three essays, responded at some length to seven written inquiries, and written and am about to deliver the thought-provocation at the Unitarian Universalist church tomorrow.

My fingers are becoming familiar with the keyboard.