Make Something

Excavate the clay from the beds of your eyes

to shape its crude skeleton.

Press its feet into sand so it stands rooted

wherever you find forgiving earth.

Use force

wherever you don’t.

Plunder grand tapestries crafted by greater men

for patches and scraps

to stitch the skin to its bones.

Command your creation

to rise.

If that fails (which it is bound to do)

use flattery and bribery and even deceit.

When you have nothing left in you,

kneel.

Press your lips to husk and stone

and pound its chest

until it creaks to life.

I don’t blame you

for limping back to your lover

who waits with a silver bowl brimming

in outstretched hands.

You ache for intoxication

and you imagine

once she is done pouring herself down your throat

she will oil your stiff shoulders

and bathe your eyes, so weary

from trying to fix your gaze on that hairline crack

in the horizon

where your promise gestates.

The mighty figure you see reflected

in that pool of her grasp

is hard to resist,

especially as she refills it again and again

and whispers that you belong there

that she will restore you

to the one thing she has known all along.

You are a marvel, limitless,

an everyday rarity.

You are a man.

She will give you sanctuary

For as long as it takes

But not a moment longer.

Don’t mistake the sustenance for the source.

No well is bottomless

And no woman’s hands can fight gravity

or the urge to scratch

her own itch.

Sip

long and deep.

Then turn your back and walk out the door.

Your love is not resting at the bottom of a bowl.

The golem you braved doubt to construct

awaits your transfusion.

Your place is there,

Animating

your next incarnation.

Good With Names

Nothing could follow the adrenaline rush of leading a kick-ass workshop on teaching for doctoral students last week. So, why am I so surprised to find myself bored at work today? This is supposed to be the way of university administration. Intensity ebbs and flows, as does pleasure in the tasks.

But seriously? Address checking? Our database gobbled up eight solid hours of the precious and shrinking cache granted to me for walking this earth. The Commonwealth of Virginia paid a creative, educated woman a day's salary to cross-check the address every single student in our doctoral program against the university's records. What a numbing use of the gift of gray matter.

It has to be done, though, and I am the one who suffers if I leave this little house untidy. Doing this work is really not so different from folding the laundry, except that it's less stimulating and harder on the eyes. Every working person faces unsatisfying aspects of a job. Artists complain about having to deal with gallery owners. Camp directors have to swim through tedious HR protocols during multiple hiring cycles in a year. Name your dream job, and I can find you some piece of it someone wants to hire out to a peon.

Sometimes, though, you can't get around being your own peon.

Our PhD program houses 160 doctoral students. Staying on top of their progress and providing them with accurate and timely guidance helps them (I hope) keep that final dissertation defense in their sites. Being a resource for the students is the fun part of the position. As I get to know them, I can tailor my approach to their personalities. What could be better for a dyed-in-the-wool extrovert? This may not my avocation, but parts of it sure fit my groove.

Monitoring the construction of 160 people's careers (while also attending to the 60-odd faculty members and two dozen bureaucrats working the scaffolding) is about as complicated as you'd think. I have days when I am right on top of things. I can field a call from a student in Nigeria about a small payment detail that needs to be resolved within the hour, and the student's situation pops to the front of my brain. That one happens to be a permanent U.S. resident in the 1-credit-per-semester dissertation phase of his research, an international student living abroad but not on a visa. I know exactly how to give him the right answer in the blink of an eye. On such days, I feel like I have the best job in the world.

Then I have moments like the one last week. The workshop brought in a manageable 10 participants, and I knew every one of them. They introduced themselves at the beginning. I had an RSVP list on my desk. You can imagine my mortification when I drew a complete blank on one student's name halfway through the session. This would only be a big deal if I were calling on people and trying to engage the discussion.. . . There I was, trying to model active teaching skills, and I not only forgot the student's name, I called him the wrong name.

I have only flipped the calendar thirteen times since the university first saw fit to hand me this title. Anyone can be forgiven for slipping on the details from time to time. Heck, this position doesn't require me to perform surgery or land airplanes or anything. The slip is actually a good reminder that I serve the students best when I learn who they are. In that moment, I could not have answered any question _blankname_ had posed to me about his next step in the program, because in forgetting his name, I also forgot everything about his research interests and his progress. I may love schmoozing and teaching and advising, but I also simply need to know who the students are. Their names are the keys that unlock those heaps of information stored in the file cabinets and, increasingly, in my own memory.

Today, it is true I am not doing anything more compelling than cutting and pasting data from one two-dimensional page to another. As the afternoon drags to a close and I slog to the bottom of the spreadsheet, something dawns on me. I know their names. I can look at any list of names anywhere, any list of thousands upon thousands of names of humans pulled from the phone book or even just the random sky, and I can tell you which among them belongs to a student in my program.

As I cut, paste, search, and check these records, I am looking again and again at the names of these 160 students who comprise my professional universe. I am learning them, the way a person memorizes passages of poetry or elements from the periodic table. Repeated exposure cuts pathways into the mind. Mnemonics form between names and the larger human composition. Simply by gazing for a day at this list of students, I place them in the larger geography of the planet as well as in the storehouse of my own memory.

Might it be the case that sitting still and attending to nothing more than a tiny collection of details, I become a better advisor? In addition to the critical task of creating order when chaos threatens, housekeeping may actually build capacity for both service and leadership.

It is a surprise and a delight to learn, once again, that the parts of my work I consider most mind-numbing might be anything but.

In Decision

He has just started the program. One week of classes are not even yet under his belt. Is now the right time to be asking? It is the only time, I suppose, but the uncertainty seems both late and premature. He wonders if this is the right decision, if the financial outlay will reap future benefit, if the career trajectory he imagines is just a fantasy. What of the girlfriend who wants to start a family, what of the student loan debt he already carries?

I walk him through a reasoned assessment of the costs and benefits. He has come to me for information not exhortation, and I provide it with care. Eventually, I lean back in my chair. This is hard for me. The lion in me wants to lean in and bare my fangs. Courage, man! Take the leap! Instead, I draw breath and offer up the deeper questions of his motivations. My restrained interrogation asks him to consider the increased credibility an advanced degree brings. For the kind of contribution he wants to make, does it help him to have that level of expertise in his field? How might the doctorate itself – aside from the depth of knowledge it requires – provide currency for establishing the future he envisions?

He is a builder of things, a doer, yes. But also, he contemplates. He explores. He questions. These latter gifts may be his downfall if he does not consume them in moderation. He can contingency-plan himself out of any plan at all. The allure of the right approach is one of the devil’s craftiest tricks. Security is an illusion, after all. Foxholes are safe. They are no place I would want to live.

In the end, I do lean in. I adjust my posture and my gaze by mere inches and tell him that this is his moment.  The door is wide open. None of us, not even he, has an endless supply of these. He has what it takes not just to do but to lead, to create, and to engage in the great conversation. He is at the threshold of a journey that few are offered and even fewer will complete. Scholarship and time and funds (meager though they may be) are on offer just for him. Starting now – and maybe never again – he can dive deep into the heart of what moves his world while also gaining capacity to provide for his not-yet family.

All of this is here, now, right before him. The investment may pay off and it may not. The question, of course, is not how to find the perfect way forward. It is how to choose a path suited to one’s feet, and to walk it wherever it leads.

Same Salsa, Different Day

My one-year anniversary at my job coincided with an earthquake. After the building flung us out onto the sun-baked streets, a dozen of us gathered at a local watering hole to catch our collective breath and wait out the traffic. There I was, one of a dozen university administrators bobbing and gossiping around the table, knocking back margaritas. It seemed the most normal and enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. Even though the building had decided to stand firm and we would all be going back in the morning, smiles flitted with ease around the room.

It is a wonder to me that still, a year in, I look forward to going to work every day. What began as the first job I could land after five years as a mountain mama has turned into a job I love.

What is the secret recipe? What ingredients make work work? I know I am not alone in my sense of dumb luck. This graduate school happens to have a great knack for keeping low-paid employees around without dulling their sparkle. A quick sniff around this week has offered up some possibilities:

·         Service: Believing your work, however mundane, contributes to a larger (and worthwhile) objective.

·         Celebration: Pausing to cheer on colleagues for achievements and life events, even if (or perhaps especially if) the celebration puts the brakes on work for a moment. People who feel valuable tend to produce valuable work.

·         Tapping expertise: Leadership calls upon the insights of people from various levels of the organization, and allows that expertise to inform significant decisions.

·         High standards: Leaders pay attention to anything produced. No one gets to be sloppy.

·         Learning: The organization provides opportunities on the company dime and on company time for employees to enrich themselves professionally and personally.

·         Variety: Expansion and contraction of pace, scope, and nature of work. We all need a few surprises to stay nimble. No one should be so pigeonholed that the dance becomes a grind.

·         Adaptation: Tradition tussles with progress in a well-refereed, ongoing game to identify the best processes.

·         Flow: Helping folks zero in on that sweet spot right between where the work is easy enough to be dull and just tough enough to be frustrating. Allowing room to shape a position around this moving target.

Mix the component parts, cook it all in an atmosphere of respect and challenge for the people who do the work, and voila!

It isn't magic, of course. Perhaps the real mystery is not how to master the recipe, by why organizations keep cooking up pablum and poison. Why are so many of my contemporaries slogging away at unsatisfying jobs in dysfunctional outfits? How much responsibility rests with the workers, how much with the leaders, or and how much with the institutional context? I may not have more than a dim sense of things, but it does seem important to identify the unique texture and flavor of a company's strengths. The people in an organization need to commit to a certain kind of culture, then follow through on engendering it through hiring decisions and the day-to-day operations.

As for me, one year in? I plan on sticking around, keeping that smile on my face and the bounce in  my step. An organization is its people, after all. When I embody the resilient spirit, I make my small contribution to creating the kind of workplace to which people want to return, even if they know the menu by heart.

Take the Stairs

Up to the fifth floor
One step at a time, climbing
A mountain a day.

Pi r Square One

“Let’s go back to the unit circle.” Boy, did I dread those words when I was a kid. No matter what my stumbling block on the math homework, my father’s response was the same. His approach was to scrap the question itself and return to Chapter One. This was not the quick and easy help I wanted. Asking a man with a doctorate in statistics for trigonometry help is like asking an architect for help installing shelf paper. “Ah, I see, but this whole closet is really in the wrong place. . .”

I wanted a trick to get to the solution. My father wanted me to re-build my basic foundation. Neither of us ended up with what we wanted. Instead of enduring the agony of returning to Chapter One, the Unit Circle and the basis of all trigonometric functions, I stopped asking him for help. I ended up with near-failing grades in high school math, remedial summer courses, and a just-good-enough pass on the SATs to get into the University of Vermont.

Where I studied education.

At the time, the only mathematics requirement for an education major was Teaching Math to Elementary School Students. Creative approaches to fractions? No problem! I aced it. I was all of 19 years old. I knew my math skills were thin and growing thinner, but I figured I would just work around this weakness.

Multiply the number of math courses I have taken since that freshman year of college by the number of intervening years, and you still get a big, fat zero.

My teaching work did not require quantitative methods, so I never bothered to learn them. The graduate program I completed did not require GREs, and the faculty was perfectly happy to accept my meticulous survey and interview skills as sufficient research tools. Who needs advanced math? I have a handle on the basics, right? I can balance a family budget, calculate the angle of the brace for a cabinet frame, and measure flour for the cookies.

I’ve mastered the work-around, and I have turned out just fine.

Two unrelated events in the past month have given me pause. The first was small. My boss asked me to generate statistics about our doctoral students.

Seems the work-around only gets you so far.

While pulling numbers from the student database, I was irritated with the paltry tools available to me for analyzing the information. I had before me a data set, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to go about comparing completion rates of various groups of students. I could barely recall how to calculate an average from a list of numbers! Ridiculous. I work at a major research institution with unlimited resources available for analyzing data, and I was using tick marks and sloppy arithmetic. For the first time in decades, my lack of quantitative skill was standing in the way of something I was both curious about and required to know. It was maddening.

This led me directly to the second event: selecting a class for the fall.  Granted, it is just one class, and only the first of many. I have not yet applied for a doctoral program and I still have this huge divorce looming on the horizon. However, the direction of my studies is important. Is the ease of the application process my main motivation for aiming for the PhD in the department where I completed my master’s degree? Does conflict resolution jazz me enough to consume my attention for the next six or seven years? Doesn’t something else here at this university pique my interest and spark my curiosity far more?

The other two other programs I secretly want to pursue have not been allowed to enter my awareness. I finally had to have a chat with myself. “Lady? What the hell are you avoiding here?”

 A meek and embarrassed little voice came back: “The GREs.”

That’s it. That’s the only thing. Not the all-consuming nature of dissertation research, balancing doctoral studies with single parenting, or getting cross-eyed analyzing data. None of those things seems insurmountable. It’s just the silly ol’ GREs. Studying for the quantitative portion of the test, possibly needing to take a year of mathematics courses to re-build my termite-ridden foundation, scares the hell out of me.

The program I am currently, loudly considering? It still doesn’t require that test for admission.

 I have been doing the work-around for far too long. I could work right around into a field of study of only marginal interest to me. My modus operandi is to find the easiest way to the solution.

The problem is this:  the easy way doesn’t lead to a solution at all. Experience has taught me this. The easy way only muddies the data, convolutes the question, and bogs me down in unworkable formulas.

Alas, it is time to go back to the unit circle.

I spoke with a faculty member in my department about the statistics course she teaches this fall. It is an introductory class for the master’s students in the School of Public Policy. It is quite possible that this will be too advanced for me, but she provided me with her pre-course study guide, last year’s first problem set, and bushels of encouragement.

I am now enrolled in Statistical Methods and Policy Analysis for the fall.

No more work around. Time to buckle down and work through, starting with Chapter One.

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.