Monthly Archives: November 2009

Last Week of Classes

By IRIS Posted on by

It’s the last week of Fall Term here at Carleton. In fact, tomorrow is the last day of classes. Then we get two days of reading days followed by our infamous Saturday, Sunday, Monday exam schedule.

Some year it’ll cease to surprise me when I get blindsided by extra work this week. Students panic over their final assignments (like, literally hyperventilate at the reference desk or navigate the computer with shaky hands in my office). Interlibrary Loan isn’t really an option any more, so we have to work a lot harder to find workable evidence for some arguments. Freshmen, faced with their first “long” papers are having trouble negotiating topic size. Everyone’s just a little more stressed and impatient (including me). And it’s quite possible to work with one student for 45 minutes on three citations. (I know this because I just did.)

Meanwhile we’re also gearing up for Winter “Break” activities. Planning has ramped up for the December faculty development workshops here on campus, the copyright committee has a work-in scheduled, and all the other committees and working groups and task forces I’m on are looking forward to the amount of work they can accomplish during “break.”

At the same time, various holidays and special family days are coming up, all of which require preparation and planning.

Some year I’ll see this coming and prepare… somehow. Tonight, though, I’m going to forget all about everything and let my brain turn off for a few hours.

Exciting Reference Shift

By IRIS Posted on by

Made for an interesting shiftWe having lab machines packed full of wonderful software and a curriculum packed full of assignments that require the use of specialized software. This is a wonderful thing.

Today, though, it made for an exciting reference shift when the network folders (where you basically have to save stuff if you’re working on these wonderful lab machines) went off-line for an hour or so… during the last full week of classes.

Luckily, ITS is awesome, as the sign says.

Of Bravery

By IRIS Posted on by

Veterans Day changes for me every year. It used to be one of those days whose frequency and timing I could never quite predict, but which signaled that my friends would have the day off from school, no mail would arrive, and the public library would be closed so that if you happened to time it right and your books would have been due that day, the date stamped in them would miraculously be one day later — a bonus day.

Then one year, we took my grandpa to a nearby mansion-turned-war- museum and he pointed out the tank he had driven in the second World War, telling us for the first time about maneuvering that tank over uneven ground, it’s deafening sounds which robbed him of much of his hearing, and how cold they would get inside of it. I could barely understand him as he talked, his booming pastor’s voice and clear articulation long gone by this point in his struggle with MSA, but that day changed Veterans Day for me. One of the gentlest men I’ve ever known had been forced to face hardship and fear and to find the strength to endure.

Over the years I’ve met veterans young and old, and I’ve been struck by the diversity of their experiences and motivations. But one thing that’s been consistent is that their experiences changed them, fundamentally and irrevocably. And while it’s trite to say that our experiences change us, I’ve always been struck by the depth of that change in these people I’ve known. Some joined to serve their country, experience intense camaraderie, and be all they could be. Others joined because they didn’t see any other choice in life. Many fell somewhere in the middle. And none could have predicted the effects.

I am grateful, today, for the service of these brave people. I grieve for those who never got the chance to point out their tanks to their grandchildren. I grieve, too,  for those who live broken lives that could have been whole. And I marvel at the bravery that I can’t begin to imagine – bravery to face hardship and fear, and bravery to face the possibility that even among the good experiences, this service may strip you of yourself. This is not something I could face. I’m not even sure I could handle watching someone close to me face it.  So I am deeply grateful that there are those who can and do.

I Interrupt This Blog…

By IRIS Posted on by

… to bring you pieces from my past.

This past summer I traveled to Chicago to hang out with librarians who were attending ALA Annual, but I took one day to ride the train out to the suburb I’d lived and danced in while living my previous life as teacher at the Academy of Movement and Music and a dancer and occasional choreographer for Momenta.

I’ve spent years trying desperately not to think about what life would have been like if I’d decided to pursue dance as a career, missing it so much that I didn’t even attend live dance performances for years. But I was finally ready to go back and immerse myself in the familiar sounds and smells of the old building, dig through the archived performance videos for hours and hours, and trace my favorite barre with my fingers (it was wobbly, and therefore forced me not to rely on it for balance).

Digging through archived performance videos is kind of a hit-or-miss affair. They’re labeled, helpfully, “summer dance festival 1999″ and “Evening 7/21/2001″ and the like, with no cataloging. (The librarian in me wanted to apply for a leave of absence to spend a few months making finding aids for them!) But in the end I was able to find three pieces that I’d choreographed. Over the last couple of days I’ve spent some time making them sharable online. And here’s one of them, choreographed in 2000 for some of the group of teachers and alumni who gather every summer to put on their own show. Some were and are professional dancers. Others (like me at the time) hadn’t danced in a long while, but still made yearly pilgrimages back to the Momenta studios to participate in this show.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled program. Thank you for indulging me.

The World Between the Lines

By IRIS Posted on by
All's Well That Ends Well - National Theatre

All's Well That Ends Well - National Theatre

A few friends and I have started a Shakespeare Project. We want to read Shakespeare’s plays, starting with the ones we’re least familiar with and moving up to the biggies we all remember from college, taking about two weeks to read each one. (This is kind of a repeat of a project my family undertook when I was in high school. We’d all read a play a week and then sit down on Sundays to watch the BBC versions of the plays. It was a project I mostly resented at the time, but now really want to do.) So every morning I get up, make hot chocolate while feeding the cat, and then spend half an hour or 45 minutes reading a few scenes of Shakespeare. When the cat finishes his breakfast, he jumps up to sit quietly with his front paws planted as near to the left-hand edge of my Complete Works of Shakespeare as possible so that I can run my fingers along his head and shoulders while I read and sip hot chocolate. Pretty idyllic.

Anyway, I was reading All’s Well That Ends Well, which I had just seen beautifully performed by the National Theatre about 10 days ago, and I suddenly realized that there had been whole little scenes of action in the production that simply don’t show up in the dialog on the page. The actors and directors had taken the time to wonder why some of those off-hand lines were there, and to build that world into their production. Left to my own devices, novice that I am, I’m incapable of seeing the world that exists between the lines of dialog on the page, but that world is so much richer and more fascinating than the pure dialog admits.

As I taught a couple classes of freshmen this week and tried to build a picture of college-level research for them, I wondered yet again how to bridge the gap between expert and novice. I see conversations where they see bits of data. I see interconnections between vocabulary and lines of arguement where they see result list after result list that doesn’t contain “sources on my topic” (by which they mean “sources that say what I’m about to argue”). How do I first describe the world between the lines for them, and then help them develop the capacity to imagine it for themselves?