Light and Momentary

In-person teaching in a pandemic

I am so much happier teaching in person.

We are all masked and the students are pretty good about it. It's a little weird to encounter a student outdoors without a mask, because I'm not very good at predicting what the lower half of someone's face will look like. Learning names is going really slowly, but I'll keep at it.

I have a little microphone. The speaker hooks into a pocket or a waistband, or hangs around my neck if I have neither pocket nor waistband, and the microphone curls around my head like a 1950s phone operator's headset. It is making my life a lot easier. In years past my most consistent request from students in the classroom has always been to speak up and slow down-- I have a small voice and I speed up when I get excited. The microphone doesn't give me a ton of amplification, but it seems to be enough to counteract the effects of the mask. My students always have an open invitation to throw up a hand and ask me to back up, rephrase, slow down -- but nobody is taking me up on the offer this semester.

I saw a professor complaining on social media about the difficulties of masked teaching, saying it had been terribly hard on her lungs and her voice. Little microphones FTW, man. My voice is holding up better than usual. When the microphone does the work, my lungs don't have to.

It seems like a lot of what we do in the classroom should transfer into online teaching, but that has not been my experience. When I lecture enthusiastically, I can feel the students' reciprocal enthusiasm. I mean, sure, some of them are always going to be yawning in the corner, but I love that sense of taking a class to a new and interesting place where they've never been before. Over the months that I was teaching remotely, it was so disheartening to pour my most enthusiastic efforts into the computer. In the classroom I toss a metaphorical ball to the students and they catch it and throw it back. Online I toss a ball to the students and it thuds to the ground.

Teaching in person makes me tired. When I go to class in person I am ON ON ON, and then afterwards I have a bit of a slump-slump-slump. I've always felt like I should be able to walk right out of class and into the next work task, and it has always bugged me that I need a little time to unwind instead. But this semester I am viewing it differently: on good days, something magical happens in the classroom. And magic is hard work.

Almost

Remember how I was going to give an unassisted pull-up a whirl today? This morning I warmed up in the basement, where we have a pull-up bar in front of the furnace. (This is a terrible place for it, because it's way too easy for swinging knees or feet to kick the furnace, but it's also the only place for it. Every other door frame in our house has a lintel that's pentagonal rather than rectangular -- the top, instead of being flat, slopes upward to form a gentle point in the center. You probably wouldn't notice it unless you were trying to hang a pull-up bar.) Then I did a platform-assisted set at the gym: 8 reps, 40 pounds offset. And then I chalked up and faced off with the pull-up bar. 

First I hopped off the step and tried to pull up from the bottom of a dead hang. I couldn't do it, so I tried again. I have to stand on tiptoe on the step to reach the bar, so I gave myself a gentle upward nudge with one foot. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't generate a lot of upward oomph while standing on tiptoe. But that little nudge was all I needed: I swooped right on up to the top from there. So I did a few of those and then went back to the platform-assisted machine to get a bit more volume in.

It makes sense to me that I got nowhere from a dead hang: I haven't been practicing that specific maneuver at all. With platform-assisted pull-ups you always get some help at the bottom; that's just how the machine works. With band-assisted pull-ups, the bottom of the rep is where you get the most help, since that's where the resistance band is stretched the farthest. 

Joe says I should check out "scapula shrugs" on YouTube to tackle that last tiny bit of distance between me and a real true honest-to-goodness pull-up. I guess, actually, I've been imprecise in my nomenclature here-- I almost always use a chin-up grip (knuckles facing me) because it allows me to use my biceps more than a pull-up grip does (knuckles facing away). I mix it up a little bit, but I figure I'll start with a chin-up and progress from there.

I think I'll also try some reverse reps in the basement to see if that helps. I made up that name, I think, but what I mean is this: start at the top, let myself down, and then pull myself back up. It seems like it might be easier to change the direction of the movement than to overcome inertia at the bottom of a dead hang. Maybe? Maybe that just sounds like wishful thinking, now that I've written it out.

Anyway: I'm close! Really close! Maybe I'll post a video when I get there.

That does not seem quite fair

If you've been around for a while, you might remember the Night of the Bat. I was lying next to Stella right before she went to sleep, and a bat wriggled in between the storm and the window. We heard it skittering in distress there. It still gives me the shivers to remember its winged silhouette, scrabbling frantically at the interior glass.

This felt like a worrying development, in the moment. I was pretty sure that a bat able to squeeze in through the tiny space between the upper and lower parts of the storm window could find a way to squeeze through the similarly tiny space between between the upper and lower parts of the interior window, and the prospect caused me some alarm.

Recently Stella was telling the story, and I discovered that our memories diverged. In my version of the story, I told Stella in a calm but firm voice to go right away and lie down in Joe's room with the door closed while I figured out how to relocate the bat safely. But in Stella's version, I said, "AAAAAHHHHHH, IT'S A BAT GET OUT OF HERE GO GO GO GO GO!!!!!!!!!!" Only with more exclamation points.

I suppose in a way we are both right. What actually came out of my mouth would have passed for calm and firm with anyone, literally anyone, outside my immediate family. I promise you, it would have sounded calm and firm to you. But my kids know me well enough to know when I am faking the calm part, and Stella was filling in my (completely accurate) thought bubble.

I've grumbled about this before, the way that my kids knew I was faking calm when our car developed a power train fault while we were hundreds of miles from home. The part I didn't know was that their brains -- or at least Stella's brain -- will apparently just go ahead and fill in the flail-y inner monologue even though I am doing an EXTREMELY PERSUASIVE impersonation of a calm person responding sensibly to a fixable problem.

Maybe it's good that kids know me so well? Maybe it's good that it's rare for me to try to hide something from them, even if the something is panic? I'm casting about for a positive spin here, because it does not seem quite fair to me.

More lifting musings

I wish I had some middle-aged-lady friends who wanted to lift weights with me. It's nice to have a lifting buddy. You can cheer each other on; you can spot each other when you're doing hard things. I suspect it wouldn't feel quite as lonely in the Bro Zone if I had a workout pal.

"Everybody's nice in the gym," Joe tells me. "Even if they look scary, everybody's always friendly and helpful."

I am finding this to be a leetle less true for me, though. I was not always especially welcoming to that one lonely guy in Pilates class, so maybe I understand why the weight room guys might seem a little standoffish. 

Lately I've been making slower headway. I've been more cautious about bumping up the weight I'm moving, opting instead to bump up the reps with weights I know I can handle. I don't want to be like "OF COURSE I can bench 90 pounds!" and then get pinned under the barbell, gasping for air while all the beefy bros around me carry on with their workouts, their AirPods blocking out the sound of the sad middle-aged lady wheezing "HELP!" (Why yes, I do seem to catastrophize about any workout regimen I undertake. Catastrophizing is practically my superpower. I'm pretty confident there are no kraken in the weight room, but plenty of other catastrophes loom.)

Still, I'm definitely making headway. I did use the 35-pound dumbbells for shoulder press today. My squat is just barely into triple digits, but I'm pleased that it's there. I look forward to lifting workouts in a way that I have very seldom looked forward to endurance workouts. Today I watched a Jeff Nippard video because it looked interesting to me, not because Joe wanted to know what I thought about it.

It's weird to be the only person in my demographic in the space, though. There are other faculty who use the pool and the cardio machines and the track. The weight room is almost entirely students, the large majority of whom are male.

I'm about 98% certain that I have the strength to do an unassisted pull-up now, but I'm not quiiiite sure how to make the transition away from the pull-up machine. The prospect of going for it on the pull-up bar and failing in public is a discouraging one. I need to figure out how to balance my unhelpful tendency toward self-doubt against the reality that it's not a super-friendly environment. But you know, when I picked up a pair of 35-pound dumbbells for shoulder press this morning, I thought to myself, "This is a bad idea; I can't do it." And I was wrong. I might be telling myself the same false thing about pull-ups. I think on Saturday I'll do a warmup set on the platform pull-up machine and then give it a go on a pull-up bar. What's the worst that could happen? Whatever the outcome, it is unlikely to involve a kraken attack.

I have been reading a bunch of interesting books

Are you looking for some good books to read? I have been reading a bunch of good books. I am going to tell you about the best ones in reverse chronological order until this post gets too long.

The day before yesterday I finished Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake, which is fluffy but hilarious. It made me laugh out loud over and over again. It's the story of a single mom (mum, I should say, since she's English) who lands a spot on a thinly disguised Great British Bakeoff. WILL Rosaline find love and contentment? WILL she shake off the pressure of her parents' unreasonable expectations? WILL her cake rise? The suspense is not intense, but the dialogue is snappy and the laughs are abundant.

Two days before that I finished Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing. I tore through it compulsively, eager to see where the characters found themselves next. It's a book worth going back to. It tells the story of two Ghanaian half-sisters: one marries a slaver, and one becomes a slave. The author traces their descendants' lives across 200 years. It's a hard read. As soon as I finished it I wanted to find whatever other books the author had written. But I also wanted to take a little time before I started the next one, because she is writing about some tough truths.

After more than a year of being stuck in chapter 1, I finished Intuitive Eating. And I think? it might? change my entire attitude toward food, weight, and occupying a woman's body at midlife? I hesitate to make bold pronouncements only a week after reading a book, but it made me think a lot of Serious Thoughts. They're all tied up with the Thoughts I've been thinking about fitness: how did I absorb the message -- from elementary school onward -- that I would be better, somehow, if there were less of me? In the same way that there's a weird taboo about getting bulky at the gym, there's a weird taboo about enjoying food and responding to our appetite cues and accepting our current shapes. 

In most domains we accept that our bodies' cues exist for an important purpose, you know? If we're tired, we should try getting more sleep. If that doesn't fix the problem, maybe we should see the doctor and get some bloodwork drawn. Part of being a Catholic adult is learning about rightly ordered appetites: tending our bodies in a way that allows us to live life to the full. We can believe this is true with respect to our desires for sleep, work, sex, etc. But there are an awful lot of Catholic women out there -- an AWFUL LOT -- thinking it is somehow virtuous to disregard their bodies' hunger cues on a regular basis.

Huh, I suspect I will have more things to say about Intuitive Eating, but I am going to get up at 5:30 so I can go to the gym at 6. I may have been talking a big game here this summer about TAKING UP SPACE etc., but it still feels pretty weird to be the only middle-aged woman in the weight room at the student fitness center. Not quite weird enough for me to stop going, but weird enough for me to aim to be there when the concentration of 19-year-old males is lowest. Will Jamie bump it up to 35-pound dumbbells for shoulder press tomorrow? Stay tuned for more exciting weightlifting updates!

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Updates from Gladlyville

Hi, friends, how is it going? I am back in the classroom and it is mostly really good to be there. I have expended a lot of energy over the past 18 months attempting to make enthusiastic video recordings for my students, and now I can just settle into the real-time real enthusiasm mode. I'm a fan. I think the students are too.

Gladlyville U is handling COVID well, I think-- about 2/3 of students are fully vaccinated and still more have received at least one dose. About 5/6 of employees are fully vaccinated. Masks are required in indoor spaces on campus, and people on campus are much more cooperative about mask-wearing than people off campus. Our local COVID numbers are rising, but not in a way that suggests to me that returning students are causing a spike. 

My ferocious COVID anxiety has largely abated. This afternoon a student emailed to ask if she could attend class today via Zoom because her roommate had just been identified as a close contact for another COVID-positive student, and I called the dean of students to see if I could encourage her to come to class after all (answer: yes). This is a pretty marked shift from my attitude earlier in the pandemic, but it feels good to be less worried and I was genuinely glad to see her at her desk. This has been a bad stretch for people with OCD-ish tendencies, and I'm relieved that my hypervigilant brain seems to be standing down at last.

We are down to two kids at home again. It's quiet. Grocery bills are down. The youngest kids are adjusting to being in school 5 days a week. The college-aged kids are adjusting to living on their own again. So far so good on the adjustment front, I think. Three of us saw Alex in Chicago over the weekend. I miss that boy.

Not all the news is rosy here in our half-red/half-blue/half-vaccinated county. I have a friend from church who has been adamant about the evils of vaccine mandates; her sister is a committed anti-masker. Both of their parents have been in the hospital for a week now, felled by COVID pneumonia. Yesterday her mom coded: her kidneys stopped working and the resulting electrolyte imbalance stopped her heart. She did respond to the resuscitation efforts; now she's on dialysis and a ventilator. All over the country there are so many preventable tragedies unfurling. I do not understand.

An improvisational apple upside-down cake

Tonight at the CSA pickup I decided to buy the last half-bushel of organic apples. As I was leaving I ran into the friend who was planning to come over a little later and play games. "Maybe I'll make you an apple cake," I told him, and I went home and did just that. It turned out really well, so I am writing down what I did.

I preheated the oven to 350 and melted a stick of butter in my 9-inch (I think it's 9 inches) cast-iron skillet. We were out of brown sugar, so I poured in a quarter-cup of the dark corn syrup lurking in our pantry. We have an apple peeler-corer-slicer that gives us thin-sliced apples in a trice. I ran two apples through it and cut the resulting rounds into quarters, which I tossed into the butter. I sprinkled salt over them, along with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and a wee pinch of cloves. I tossed the apple slices in the liquid for a few minutes and turned off the heat. 

Next I melted another stick of butter in a mixing bowl and added a cup of sugar. When it was cool enough not to scramble my eggs, I added two eggs and a quarter-teaspoon of salt. I was riffing on a recipe that called for 175 grams of flour, but my quick search for upside-down cake recipes had turned up complaints about soggy cake. In hopes of avoiding soggy cake, I used 50 grams of almond meal and 125 grams of flour, to which I added a teaspoon of baking powder along with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, cloves, and allspice.

Once I had stirred this together, I poured it over the apples and popped it into the oven. It tested done after 35 minutes. I pulled it out and let it cool for five minutes, whereupon I turned it out onto a pretty plate. I served it forth to enthusiastic eaters, almost all of whom asked for seconds. If you are looking for a quick and easy dessert as we head into apple season, here you go.

On the road again

Tomorrow, if all goes well, I will see my parents for the first time in two years. At some point in the next few days I will also see my brother and my sister. It's been a long time.

#208

Last year on my birthday I resolved to post 4 times a week. Until December I was ahead of the game. But in December and January and February the world seemed so bleak and my job felt so hard that I hardly posted at all. I realized in May that I could still average 4 posts per week if I squeezed in the remainder. This is the very last one, on the very last day of my fifty-first year. Thanks for reading, friends!

Farewell to Fifty

It was the best day.

In the spring of 2019 I emailed my high school best friend to say I'd had a dream about her. It was just a short email -- thinking of you; hope all is well. She replied to ask if I wanted to set up a Zoom call. (I had only the vaguest knowledge of Zoom in March of 2019.) That call led to daily texts and semi-regular voice calls and occasional Zoom chats. Two years later it doesn't quite feel like the day has started properly if I don't have a quick conversation with Becky first.

Even though we exchange dozens of texts a day, we hadn't seen each other in twelve years. When she suggested that we could get together this weekend, I wasn't sure it would work. (Road trips came to seem a little weird to me over the course of the pandemic. You put yourself in a metal box and hurtle down the highway at 70+ mph for multiple hours? This is weird, right?) But! it did work!

We met at the beach with two of my kids and one of hers in tow, and we picnicked and played in the water and admired Stella's sand castle and climbed a massive sand dune. Afterward we ate delicious ice cream in an empty small-town bandshell. Joe and Stella and I were able to have dinner with Marie on the way back to Gladlyville, which was a nice bonus.

Tomorrow I will turn 51 years old. I am feeling grateful for many things: perfect weather and smooth travels and tasty food and kids who got along. But I am especially grateful -- deeply, joyfully grateful -- for this friend who has been dear to me since I was 16.