Don't Know Much 'bout Science Books

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.   – John Dewey

This week, I took a crash course in Blackboard 9.1. For those of you unfamiliar with this product, Blackboard is an online course development and communication tool rumored to have been created by Satan himself. Most of its competitors have perished in the wake of its steady advance towards world domination. Blackboard’s unique format now determines the pedagogical landscape for instructors and students, much the same way Power Point shapes (and cripples) the presentation universe.

Whether evil or handy, this tool is necessary for my job. Every year, our incoming doctoral students take a statistics assessment to determine their quantitative starting points. Design and delivery of the test (though, thankfully, not content), fall to me.

The program coordinator in my department joined me for the training. In the computer lab, we found a small collection of faculty members from our campus. Everyone, it seems, uses Blackboard now, even the professors who have had tenure since the signing of the Magna Carta.

The objectives of the training seemed simple enough. We were expected to learn the basics of getting started with the latest version of Blackboard. The poor instructor from the Department of Instructional Technology had no idea how complicated “simple” becomes when training graduate faculty.  

“Now, we are going to upload a document.”

“All I want to do is post a syllabus!” The professor across from me had a bit of a volume control problem. “Can’t you just show me how to post a syllabus?”

“Yes, sir, that’s what we are doing. Now, go to ‘course content’. . . “

“To what?” He was just a decibel shy of shouting. “To course what?”

  

She walked around to his side of the room. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what happened here. You’ll need to close your browser and open a new one.”

“Close my what?”

“Click the red X. That will close. . .”

“The what? Click the what?”

“Just click the red X, sir, on the top right corner of your screen, sir, please. . . “

On and on this went, with almost every participant in the room. Ten faculty members needed constant guidance and reassurance. My co-worker and I bit our tongues through each agonizing stretch between tasks. Finally, I realized a course in the basics was not going to get me anywhere close to the level of skill necessary to design on online stats assessment. Instead of seething in poorly disguised frustration, I began exploring.

After discovering the FAQs and a few hidden drop-down menus in the control panel, I was on my way. I created two different tests along with several versions of syllabi and course descriptions. For a few head-scratching moments, I was stumped about making the quizzes live for my cohort of dummy students. I meandered through unfamiliar pages until I unlocked the right door. Meanwhile, my co-worker zipped through her own learning process, pausing every now and then to show me a trick she had picked up.

Twenty minutes before the scheduled end of the session, our dynamic duo was logging out and heading for the door. All around us, faculty members kvetched and interrupted and ran the instructor ragged.

“Why can’t I see it! I can’t see it!”

“You’ll have to turn the editing mode back on.”

“The what? The editing what?”

Learning anything new is a challenge, of course, but that room was filled with some of the brightest minds in their fields. One professor has published ten books. Another is an economist who advises the World Bank and USAID. Since landing this position at George Mason University, I have been in awe of the faculty and their high caliber research. Curiosity and investigative skill should lead the academic mind to explore any unknown subject with aplomb, shouldn’t it? On the contrary, these brilliant thinkers were out of their depth in an online training, needing someone to hold their hands and keep them afloat through what I considered a simple process.

Do we all become pigeonholed? Does our area of expertise so thoroughly define us that we forget our brains are always capable of adapting? Perhaps this is a generational dynamic, but that explanation is too limited. Many professors from across the age spectrum overcome much trickier changes in the academic terrain than a Blackboard upgrade. Outside the ivory tower, age does not correlate consistently with rigidity. My great-uncle decided in his 80s to communicate by email. He wanted to be in touch with far-off friends and family members. With limited mobility, electronic tools were his vehicle. If necessity is the mother of invention, perhaps hunger sires expansion.

It simply never occurred to me that I would not master Blackboard 9.1. I need to learn it to do my work well, and so I will learn it. Maybe the trick is to begin with full faith in the plasticity of the brain. This faith does not preclude toil and even a bit of pulse-popping anxiety about new endeavors. It does, however, set the mind on an inevitable course of expansion. When stagnation is the alternative, learning is the only real option.

Sacrament

At the top of the hill, a chorus of frogs hollows out the dark meat of night. It had been dense and pressing until their song cut a bowl deep from its middle. No one belongs here but those quick beasts, no one except the deer, of course, creeping through the iris and hydrangeas, sampling from early summer’s smorgasbord.

They love it here, the frogs. They love this place for the reasons humans hate it. The swamped earth and diverted rivers return, forever return, to their native channels. Difficult Run has to fight her way through metal culverts and concrete spillways. Incorrigible, she splits carefully crafted barriers and seeps into the low gardens of the neighbors who thought they had her beat. Water striders and minnows frisk along her shallow trickle, happy for anything, happy just for the moving wet.

It isn’t long before the mosquitoes move in. They come with company: tiny biting gnats in clouds, a frantic halo of deer flies, drunken moths. Right behind comes the steady advance of deer ticks clinging to the underside of leaves, waiting for a hungry host to press past so they can slake their own thirst. Cast across the towering firs is a constellation of lightning bugs animating limbs from root to sky.

Oh, the feast! The frogs and toads have every reason to sing. This soft crescent of earth, this horn of plenty, provides for every finicky taste. Even at dusk when bats emerge to carry off more than their share from the streetlamps and porch lights, still, such abundance! It is maddening. It is a bacchanal. Out from greased throats belch voices of gluttony. Satisfied grunts echo off scoured maples still dizzy from the rapid retreat of winter.

The amphibian symphony rains down on the blank brick of gargantuan houses. Blue haze flickers from second-floor bedrooms. At the windows, moths beat their desperate wings and hurl their bodies against screens. As busy and dim as it is, they lust and lust for the light.

                                                                                                       

What did the luna moths and biting flies desire before our arrival? They must have hungered for the moon. That single cool beacon, forever in a state of partial undress, lingered just beyond reach. Did they all throb for her? They take what they can get now that the moon is the smallest light in the sky.

Bellies bursting, the frogs sing on in the low damp of the borderlands. Night skims her ladle across the font and spills gospel through the deaf streets.                                                                                        

Year Twenty

The artists have become investment fund managers. The jocks are consultants and physicians, the princesses are professors and engineers. The geeks are still geeks, having acquired picture-frame families and the easy smiles of the comfortably wealthy.

We all know a reunion is a self-selecting collection of success stories. The folks whose narrative arc veers toward the tragic choose not to tip a glass with their former classmates. Even so, it is surprising how gilded the edges of this group. This was a fine shaving off the top of an already elite population – graduates of a Montgomery County public high school. Perhaps these are not Sidwell or Georgetown Prep elite, and we are not quite captains of industry or cabinet members in training. But these are the federal lawyers, the policy-writers, the decision-makers, the architects (both literally and figuratively) of the public landscape.

I can hear my classmates poo-pooing now at these declarations. Inside each individual life is a series of struggles and unanswered questions. Talk to E, and she will tell you she only manages to work 12 hours a week as a CPA around raising her children. This story was told time and again by the women who were once the girls I knew. Some have pushed on through since becoming mothers, leaving their children in the care of others and their families with little time for togetherness. They pay the price for tenure or executive leadership positions.  But to a (married) woman, their husbands are as successful as they come. With a doctor or a CEO providing the ballast, the ship manages to surge on.

The single women of the group are kickboxers, musicians, art aficionados and world travelers in addition to whatever enviable title they hold. The decision to work, stay home or even to have a family at all occurs at the summit of a very high mountain, where only the select few breathe the rarified air. While uncertainties texture the individual stories, the group, taken as a whole, is a kaleidoscopic spectacle of accomplishment.

Strange to know I am of that culture. Probably strange, too, for the other three or four in the group whose recent stories have included divorce or single parenting or job loss.  Being adrift is a state in which many 30-somethings find themselves, to be sure. But being adrift in this milieu means something different. Our shared school system provided an early dose of overdrive. It kicks in higher than most, ratchets the bar up to the upmost notch, and demands forward motion. The few in the group (yours truly included) whose paths seem more circuitous than certain are still engaged in the pursuit. We find our way back to education, volunteerism, craft, challenge. It is in the water. It is in our blood.

I, for one, believed myself to have danced into a different land. Leaving for Vermont at 16 and meandering through the next decade in the company of farmers, musicians, and activists led me to believe I was fluent in the language of my adopted home. The long chapter set in forests on mountainsides as a camp wife was a heroic attempt to become a naturalized citizen.

In coming back, however, I find I never lost my mother tongue.

At one point, I was chatting with a still-single friend who has found himself on a new, untested career path. “What I notice,” I said, marveling at the assemblage, “is that everyone here seems to be both ambitious and thoughtful about their choices.”

He nodded. “We have to be, don’t we? We have to do something with all the privilege, growing up where we did. It’s important to give back.”

So it is.

Each and every decision is one to seek purpose and make a contribution. It takes great effort to rein in the breathless tendency measure how much good one has made with the opportunity provided.

At the thirty year reunion, the landscape will undoubtedly have shifted yet again. Sadly, a handful of divorces are in the cards, as more than one “happily” married man suggested over a shared a drink. Several careers will bomb and a few more will rise from the ashes. We smile, we hug, we make promises to get together for lunch, we tell each other how outstanding we all look.

Then each of us returns to home to take the private accounting. What will my contribution be? I hold this golden ticket. How will I pay it forward?

What Happens If?

Bug’s latest fascination is “experiments.” These generally take the form of combining corn starch, milk, leaves from the hedges, curry powder, dish soap, and split peas into an unrecognizable glop. He seems to be practicing cooking more than testing a hypothesis, although the line between the culinary and the scientific arts is a fine one.

All this chemistry indicates Bug is primed for the rite of passage required of any young scientist: The Kitchen Volcano. Yesterday, we hopped out back with a collection of household items. “Let’s see what happens,” I said. He was curious, asking me question after question as I urged him to measure, pour, and watch. At one point, he was so uncertain and excited that he stood as far back from the table as he could manage while stirring up the baking soda.

As parents, we sometimes forget our kids don’t know what we know. The meeting between a base and an acid may be dramatic the first few times, but it loses its allure when it turns into a method for refreshing a garbage disposal.

 

For Bug, this was his first time. My job was to keep my mouth shut and let him explore, refusing to answer his insistent questions. “What will it do, Mommy? Will it explode?”

"What do you think will happen?" I asked. He ignored the question. At a certain point, doing the experiment is far more appealing than thinking about it.

For a twist, Bug had free access to the food coloring. He decided to mix hues, telling me blue with yellow would make red. He was as surprised by the resulting color as he was by the swift rise of his ingredients.  

 

This was not, Bug made clear to me, a volcano. "We made foamy soap!" Much more exciting, perhaps because it is more real. The boy is just beginning to piece together the origins of the common items in his world. Meat, for example, is a subject of great curiosity. "Which part of the animal are we eating? Is this its skin? How do they get the meat out?" Fun dinnertime conversation. So, it was with great delight and pride that Bug managed to concoct something similar to the stuff he uses to wash his hands.

The fact that it is bright green and a giant mess doesn't hurt.

Prone

The loneliest nights call for letting the delicate cotton gown

Whisper over skin smoothed with almond oil.
Pause for a drink of cool water from a thick, hand-blown glass

Whose blue lip lays its weight against the thirst
Before crawling, at last, between fresh linen

Folded back in welcome.

Solitude is a chosen state

They say. Blessed, even.

They also say it was supposed to storm today

But no rain came. Not one drop.

Soon, it will no longer be today

Or even tonight.

It is time to stop watching the sky.

Rainmakers and Wise Men have the right idea.

Linen, oil, vessels, prayer.

A woman stretched across a bed.

Make an offering, go home empty handed

For the long surrender to a moment

No one dares call

Waiting.

Offering

Four perfect snow peas
Unfurl from the climbing vines
Despite our neglect

How Sweet

I close my eyes at night
Wondering where I would be without you in my life.

The last time June 11th fell on a Saturday, I woke up single and went to bed with a new last name. That's a lot of change in the span of a day.

Last year's anniversary was not so happy an occasion. June 11 was the day I landed in Virginia with the remains of all my worldly possessions crammed into my little Saturn. My kid and my dog were heaped on top of the luggage in the back. We pulled into the driveway of my parents' house where my husband was waiting for me. We had no jobs, no home, no idea what would become of us. The word "divorce" had not yet joined the family, but it was banging on the door.

Now, we are both well employed and our son has two loving homes.

That's a lot of change in the span of  a year.

Today, I am waking up to a wide-open morning at the beginning of a four-day weekend with my kid. I could not imagine on that sweltering Saturday in 2005 the activities comprising this life now. I had not yet met some of the people I cherish most today. One of them will be crawling into my bed with a giant grin and a pile of books a little after sunrise this morning.

In six years, a person can become only a faint reflection of a former self. So can a date. Anniversaries reside in memory, after all. The day itself is just a square on a calendar, coming around year after year, full of new possibility.

One thing I recall about our wedding was the music. The entire assembled mass rose to its feet to sing along while my friend, Robyn, filled the field with the chords of James Taylor's "How Sweet It Is." My uncle had suffered a stroke a few years earlier and had lost all but five words. When the melody began, he opened his mouth and sang right along. The lyrics had planted themselves so deeply in his memory, they bypassed language and moved directly to voice.

The mind has a way of re-configuring itself to take on the world as it is. This adaptive capacity is the key to survival. (A song now and then don't hurt).

The next time June 11th falls on a Saturday, who knows what my name will be? My address, my line of work? I make my plans but keep nimble. It is hard to be angry or even very sad when it is so clear this is just one chapter in a grand adventure. It helps to have a chatty, dancing, 4-foot reminder of the real reason to celebrate this anniversary. No matter how broken I feel, I always manage to find a song.

We are all imperfect creatures, and we are all doing our best. The man I married was as generous in his love as he knew how to be. Whether it's because of Tee or my own dumb luck or that fickle bastard, Fate, all happens to well on this summer day. For that, a little gratitude is in order.

I just want to stop
and thank you baby