My Heart Goes Mmm

 Usually, I don't enjoy conferences, meetings, townhalls, or much of what goes in the name of professional development. I participate and attend because I must, to prove that I seek self-improvement and therefore continue being worthy of being employed. Most of these events are pointless, unspeakably boring, and smack of self-congratulation and self-celebration. 

However, last Friday was an exception. Actually a couple of events were a pleasant surprise. I apologize to my patient reader for the length of this entry since I plan to include a couple of poems that emerged from a writing workshop. These poems resulted from two workshops, both part of a writing conference hosted by my college, for my college. It was a great way to get to know the very active writing community this place harbors. The members of this community sometimes publish, sometimes not and they are extremely diverse, their writing as varied as it is evocative. 

The first session I attended was on the multilingual nature of writing when one writes for oneself, not an imagined audience or publisher. A University professor who teaches creative writing facilitated this session. She used Ciserno's "You Bring Out the Mexican in Me" as a starter and suggested we each write a You Bring Out the _____ in Me poem. We had around ten minutes. We were to use at least some native language or phrases and present at least one verse to the group. I share mine below. I will hopefully re-visit it to revise and tinker with it, but here is the first draft:

You Bring Out the __ In Me

You bring out the bureaucrat in me.

My verse replaced by Excel columns,

Multicolored, swirling scarves tamed into pantyhose

My stories translated

Into skillsets,

 Appropriated to fit

The glass walls of my assigned office

 

You bring out the vanquished in me

Smothering batting onto my worn cotton sheet

“It will be much improved if you

Stitch on these words over what you just said. Use

Embroidery floss, not your cotton threads,”

You say.  I always listen

 

You bring out the wanderer in me

I wash up alone on craggy shores, hazy landscapes

Scowling, dark with bruise-purples and greens and yellows

Sunrises spill across indifferent skies

I squint myopically to recognize

Alien accents, slippery consonants, nasal vowels

But I get it. Sort of

 

You bring out the Gujjuben in me

Dal-Bhaat-Rotli-Shaak for lunch

Mung for dinner. Elaichi cha and thepla

For noon-headaches when the day heaves and slows.

Please-please, Lounge

On my swing, I bring you some, quick-quick

 

You bring out the Gujjuben in me

When the festivals loom

I scream the harder. I dance the louder

You do not listen.

Another session in the writing conference was about mining one's childhood memories for generating ideas. We were given various ideas about which we listed memories (the more sensory the better, of course!). This session was facilitated by one of our local creative writing faculty who regularly publishes children's books. Again, we were encouraged to use the phrases & languages we experienced the memories in. The next stage was to create a character, what this character sought to achieve through the plot, and what lay at stake. Of course, my character was a kite, who sought to fly with a lantern. This exercise ultimately led us to nailing the framework for a Where I Am From poem. I may flesh out the fiction piece (told from the kite's perspective) one day. However, here is my first draft of the poem:

Where I’m From

I am from Chhipwad, from its

rough roads and cows lowing and the smell

of daal dhokli in the afternoon.

 

I am from the shout of game-invites at 6 pm

Homework done, dinner too far

The clink of a thrown can

Begins the game

Of Chor-Police continued from

Summer vacations and last night

 

I am from the stink of burnt ghee

Left too long

A desperate rush to the kitchen

As the radio swirls remembered lyrics

In the sandalwood air

Cut by the hiss and slash of flour in the pan

 

I am from clanging temple bells and the Mullah’s Call

I am from Jack-and-Jill and the Saraswati Mantra

I am from sandalwood and marigolds and cow dung

 

I know this.

But I can’t find my glasses to see where I am

(Would you text or tweet if you find them?)

To say that I enjoyed this day a great deal would be an understatement. I even stayed back for the "happy hour," during which we got a beverage of our choice and read what we had come up with on that day to each other. Because the event was on Zoom, I did not have to leave my comfort zones or worry about the thousand ills that flesh is heir to. 

The wonderful day was preceded by the wRites of Spring festival the English department at my campus (North Campus) puts on every year. This year, the theme was Fantasy Tales and Why We wRite Them. Fascinating! The author featured was Kij Johnson, whom it was a pleasure to discover and Zoom-meet. One of our faculty encouraged his classes (and the attendees) to come up with 2 to 4 syllable words and phrases we were never going to be mature enough for. Pantyhose and self-improvement were some of my contributions, of course. Then our instructor converted them into poems and songs. Immense fun! However, one of my favorite sessions was the nature of fantasy tales on TV and in movies. This, too, was facilitated by one of our local professors. She examined shots from shows like True Blood and movies like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to point out mythemes, settings, themes, and other stock elements that constitute fantasy tales and that one must look for. 

Kij Johnson also discussed the differences between fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc. Her stories can be found on her website. It was quite the experience to see these genres from a craft person's perspective.

It is such a treat to be afforded these shining days and evenings! They provide an oasis in my daily drudgery of juggling schedules, finding and hiring staff, supporting the existing staff, and conducting workshops. I do not go on retreats and have a very generous amount of vacation time accrued, having gone almost nowhere since I started in this position. These events promised professional development credit to me. However, I cannot see how I can use any of what I learned and realized to enhance my professional performance. In fact, the vagaries of my imagination are now confined to managing my staff, colleagues, and students, garnering traffic to my writing center, and balancing schedules. 

I shall not examine these "credits" too closely. As it is, I seem to have wandered too far, not just from my janma bhoomi, but also from all that makes my heart go mmm (to paraphrase the song). 

It serves me best if I just take these events as a sort of an apology offered to me by my fortune (or misfortune) for all the compromises I make daily by genuinely trying to do my job well. I remain grateful for such apologies. 

I wonder if I can mine ideas that would frequent and multiply these apologies. Mmm . . .

Lumos: of MOOCs and LMS

I must confess to a largely cursory interest in the future of Higher Education until this week. I know, I know, patient reader; this is the business that keeps me in cat food and samosas: how could I not be more aware, involved, curious? However, there you have it: I have been apologetically, blatantly incurious. I've had plenty of excuses for this, of course, and all of them quite, quite valid, all tinged with only an obligatory tinge of apology.

All that changed this week, when I attended a conference (Cengage & SXSWedu) that shook me awake and forced me to turn my head and look out of the window. The landscape has completely changed, and what is more, is rushing fast, faster than my eye can keep up. It is a veritable stampede!

Before I address the changes, I want to first validate what remains reassuringly unchanged. All reliance on a keyboard is not always the best thing, yet. Everywhere I looked, attendees were plugged in (for lack of a better epithet): they all (with probably less than 1% exceptions) had ipads or tablets which were busily buzzing along, talking to them and their phones, and a variety of other devices. I cannot express the strangeness I felt as I whipped out a pen and notebook to take notes during sessions. But then I realized that no matter how much I type, and how fast I've learned to type, I still write much, much faster, with greater coherence, since my hand doesn't require me to press the shift button, or do anything extra when I want to change languages or use symbols instead of words. A part of me feels reassured to know that I am still the most efficient and fastest note taker for me.

At the same time, however, the material I was taking notes on has widened my eyes, popped my inner ears, and lighted up unexplored corridors in my brain! Ah brave new world! I learned of the very real impact of MOOCs, of Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Multi dimensional interface, and Analytical feedback (like the recommendations one sees when shopping on Amazon, for instance).  It was really like an instructor's dream: we were treated to lunch as publishers and authors of textbooks asked what our perfect texts would look like! I know I am not alone in feeling the isolation behind the desk, and I have often wondered about the value of what I do. I have often dreamed of "if only" and "by now, we should be able to" scenarios; well, those scenarios are already here, it would seem.

One of the sessions used the trope of Peter Pan's shadow to point out the impact that Web 2.0 has on our sense of self. This has resonated to me and at last, at last, I have a clearer understanding of why we all prefer Facebook to PDF's of texts (a pointless thing, if you ask me; if students don't read the hard copy, why would they read the PDF of the same?). However, now, I understand why students (and, I confess, the instructor in me) are so attracted to our LMS (which is neither the best, nor the worst) and I plan to exploit it to its fullest capacity.

I do not, of course, mean to indicate that I shall be completely reliant on my LMS: if it goes away, I will not be lost, since I have found  many compasses. I learned how to use completely free resources if one has no LMS. In fact, one of the fascinating lounges I visited was the Google lounge, which offered a wonderful respite from the crowded sessions, provided time and space to explore how to use free resources to teach and learn, even try out the new technology to be released later on this year.

I have heard a great deal of doom saying when conversations meander towards the future of Higher Education, especially during the last year, with its stampede of MOOCs. The sessions I attended, however, have reassured me: learning is not becoming obsolete and the value of the educator in this maelstrom of changing technologies, is unshakable and central. I have a clearer idea of what I'd like my absolute dream job to be (though this job, of course doesn't exist yet, I don't think).

I have spent the greater part of this weekend trying to catch up on the grading that has loomed large in my absence. But today, I don't resent it like I used to. My attitude towards the endless grading (the lot of every writing instructor) has been similar to the unnamed Maiden's attitude to her endless spinning in Grimms' "Mother Holle." However, like the Maiden, I have glimpsed at the alternate world beneath the well, a world that coexists with mine, where meaningless, repetitive chores have cosmic impact and all work is meaningful, relevant, and rewarded.