By Eleanor Baker

Over the past few weeks I have been thinking back on my years of teaching at Penn State.  I taught my first class in the fall of 1982, so those long years ago were different, but I think we managed quite well without computers, email, cell phones, ANGEL or Canvas.  Everyone carried around stacks of papers and used overhead projectors quite regularly.  I still see a few hanging out in a corner of a room often buried behind the screen.  The copy machine ran regularly, much more than it does now. The 202s were in the process of being invented; the original thinking was that lots of students would take English 202B; never materialized, of course, as we see the many sections of Business and Tech Writing offered each semester.  English 10 and 20 merged into English 15, and so Jack Selzer and his pals reinvented Penn State composition from the very old school days of when I had been an undergraduate.

Everyone’s filing cabinets were full of old papers and a ton of file folders that students apparently purchased at McLanahan’s or the bookstore about 3 minutes before the project was handed in; how long were we supposed to save that stuff? I used to wish students would forget about the folders. Few people were neat enough to clean out their office at the end of every semester. One time I cleared out about 10 years of old papers packed into some filing cabinet.  I personally believe that Nancy Lowe was the only person who faithfully cleaned out her office every semester; I used to like to go into her office just to admire her clean desk with her nice little pitcher of water all ready for her to pour into a glass.

In the days before all the recycling bins in the hall, the end of the semester usually brought very full trash cans.  I might also add that building staff actually came into the offices and removed trash and took it someplace and emptied these receptacles.  Where are all of these zillions of trash cans that used to decorate everyone’s office? I suspect piled around the Paterno statue somewhere in an unnamed university warehouse.

I used take in my grades; yes, I had to hand carry them to Burrowes after having put the grades on the scan sheet using #2 pencil and personally hand them to Kathy Leitzell. I would say that I was sorry to be slow, and she usually said that she hadn’t even begun to call the losers, and no I wasn’t anywhere near one of the last to show up with grades.  I liked it, too, because I always heard the best and most interesting English department news, oh yeah, I really mean gossip.  It is not the same to just upload a set of grades to LionPath, which does so many things I tell my students not to do in terms of document design.  I can happily say that I don’t expect to deal with that mess too much longer.

The mail room was fairly large and was pretty much in the location of where Greg Rogers’ office is today, although a bigger room than that, but in that vicinity. Greg’s office, with its baseball memorabilia, is much neater and more interesting.  Many groups regularly had meetings in the mail room; there were couches and chairs (old) as well as the mailboxes. One always found people of all types in the mailroom:  faculty, grad students, and staff.  It was kind of the department crossroads, which doesn’t really exist on the fourth floor, and I think we have missed that particularly after having been in exile for two years while Burrowes was being renovated. The people were interesting; perhaps several conversations were going on at once, yet the room itself was pretty tacky.

Overall I can say with complete certainty that I have enjoyed my years with the English department—the students I had in class and the faculty and staff that I have talked with for so many years. I greatly appreciated the support I received during my bout with breast cancer 20 years ago—hard to believe it was that long ago.  I have also said good-bye to a good many folks; Penn State is nothing if not transient for those who have received degrees and nice job offers elsewhere, those who have already retired before me, and those memorable individuals that death has separated us from their wit and fine writing.  Technology has wrought many changes in the way we teach and will continue to make teaching both more interesting and more challenging at the same time. I’m looking forward to a new challenge in my life, but it’s a bittersweet feeling as I come to the end of this semester.

Note:  Eleanor Baker retires at the end of this semester after 35 years. A celebration in honor of her many years of service will be help at 4 p.m., Wednesday, April 26 in the Grucci Room.

By Judith McKelvey

Vintage Perspectives

Long, long ago, in another century and with different haircolor, I lived in France and sat through many dinner parties: some at tables groaning with six courses of food; most on the floor with a menu of coffee and a baguette, no butter. After about one year abroad I figured out that the amount of time spent talking politics during the meal correlated to the degree of the hosts’ wealth. If the menu was glazed duck confit with six stinky cheeses and mixed fruit tartine? Then the guests were card-carrying communists with two vacation homes arguing loudly with centrist socialists who were in turn rebutted forcefully by a monarchist holdout. The wine flowed. Everyone laughed and kissed each other goodbye when the meal was done.

Meanwhile, in a dilapidated house furnished with sleeping bags, I lived for a month with the mostly unemployed anarchists who had plucked me off the street. A few times we went for days without food, and all I could think about were flowers—stomach grumbling, all I wanted in the world was a fresh bouquet of bright flowers. Isn’t that weird? But strange circumstances perhaps make us focus on strange things.

Also weird was how much my revolutionary hosts did not talk about politics, not really. There were flyers about anarchist meetings and rallies skittering around the floors and collecting in corners and stairwells; but the talk was only about things in their blinkered now: music (free jazz) and sex (also free) and strategies for the next trip to Turkey for hashish (I never inhaled). The smoke furled. Everyone laughed, and we kissed each other goodnight at the end of the loaf of bread.

With dinners as my informal education, I learned to conflate politics with lifestyle and leave it at that. But then, in the 1980’s shortly after Mitterand was elected as the first socialist president and about a year after I’d moved with my Parisian boyfriend to a crappy apartment in a slum neighborhood in Lyon, I spiked a high fever that would not break. On the edge of hallucination for days, I was not surprised to open my eyes at one point to see a stranger with a black doctor’s bag sitting on the floor next to our mattress. A doctor, literally bedside! I happily wondered if time had reversed and this was my childhood bed and the man and his bag were here to tend to all four of us kids with the mumps.

What snapped me back to reality was the conversation between the doctor and my worried boyfriend. Eric asked how much we owed for the visit. The doctor said, “She is your concubine, yes? I mean, you have lived together for at least a year, yes?”

And that’s how we learned that under socialist healthcare, you are 100% covered a long as you are having sex in the same house as your lover.

As soon as the fever broke, I read everything about Mitterand’s socialist party that I could get my hands on. It didn’t seem all that radical, even to an American born in the 60’s and raised to associate the far left with the threat of nuclear war and having our homes stolen by the peasantry. Mitterand’s 100 step plan was grounded in common sense, aiming at gradual shifts toward basic safety nets and equal opportunities rather than espousing a revolutionary change. The anarchists were not invited to ransack the fancy six course dinner homes. Wine still flowed, smoke furled. But also, doctors visited the sick, and young people just starting out did not go bankrupt paying for it.

I wrote about this time in my life twenty years ago for the CDT shortly after starting a family here in State College. Back then, my point was that I missed all the political engagement and party differences woven into the French culture. I wished that my beloved country could get more informed and daring and directly engage with life in a republic. Why, I lamented, did we vote so little? Why did we take a stance so rarely? Why didn’t we talk about it for real? And wouldn’t universal healthcare be healthy for all of us? What were we so afraid of?

Here’s what I know now in the aftermath of the 2016 elections: the anarchists I lived with were strangely mute on politics because they stood for nothing–they were just against everything. The way to look at it, they explained just once when I asked, is that they tolerate chaos as a way of getting back at the all-inclusive evil “establishment,” which is why anarchists have no real platform or incremental plan. Their politics were about hating the “they” out there who were magically responsible for all the vague things that each anarchist resented.

Apparently it’s a winning formula in 21^st century America. My anarchist friends were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who knew?

Back in the late 1970’s, I thought these anarchists were puzzling but sweet—after all, they took me in without knowing a thing about me except that I looked like them and had the added value of the acceptable exotic: Look, a skinny white un-rich American who wants to live in France–let’s show her off to our friends! Eventually I figured out that there was a dark side to a negatively energized community whose entire platform was to scapegoat “the establishment”—and I got out of there fast. Started cobbling together 12 hours of work a day tutoring and substitute teaching in bilingual charter schools. I grew up, and put childish things behind me.

Or so I thought. It may be a new century, folks, but this new day looks an awful lot like the old dilapidated house full of self-satisfied angry rebels dulled by the smoke of their hazy rhetoric and hyped up on the caffeinated confidence that everything is someone else’s fault, and that a magical not-like-all-the-other-guys member of the household will make it all great again. Pouf!

Weirdest of all is seeing that the dinner party in that tired old house is being thrown by the six-course-meal crowd that the anarchists despised. On the menu? Yuge amounts of talk. Gold-flaked chocolate mousse. Servers stiffed on the tip.

And told with a derisive snort to keep the change.

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Looking for Columnists.

Every month we host a different writer for the columns “Fresh Perspectives” and “Vintage Perspectives.” We can also create a new column space for contributors with something to share that is connected in some way to teaching. Pitch something! Write and send!

Our editorial policy is not very policy-y, but a few basic guidelines are posted below:

CPT Editorial Policy:

We are looking to publish columns by different contributors at the beginning of every
month.

Send a pitch to Judy (jlm24@psu.edu) and have a draft by the third week of the month so Leslie (lrm155@psu.edu) has time to work out the tech side of things by the first of each month.

As a general rule the word limit for e-newsletters is 1000, but we are an informal organization; our first priority is to offer a forum for what teachers have to say, and if you need more than 1000 words to say it, that’s fine with us.

For the “Fresh Perspectives” column we are interested in what people new to teaching or new to PSU teaching have to show us about the profession, about our particular teaching culture, about students, best practices, surprise pratfalls, inspiring learning curves.

“Vintage Perspectives” is about old, old points of view. You know who you are.

 

Vintage Perspectives:

Scott Building Memories
Paul Kellermann

“I look like Scott, so you do not be a little bit jumpy.”

—Jeff Bridges (John Carpenter’s Starman, 1984)—

If you walk down the 100-block of West College Avenue—past Indigo, the dance club that used to be called Players (and before that, Gatsby’s,and who knows what before then); past Jack Harper’s Young Mens Shop, with its missing apostrophe; past the CVS, which once was McLanahan’s; just before you get to the shady walkway alley leading to the sunny environs of Calder Way—you may notice an inconspicuous door on your left. Today, that door says PHEAA and it leads to an office housing the agency charged with inventing inexorable hassles for students seeking financial aid. But once upon a time, that door led to a place called the Scott Building, where the English Department warehoused its lecturers and graduate students who had outlived their Burrowes welcome. The Scott Building was also a place where lecturers (non-tenure-line, fixed-termers, indentured savants) bonded into a close-knit community.

That inconspicuous door opened into a stairway that led to a cathedral full of cubicles, decades-old uncirculated air, and an oddly comforting assortment of stenches that told the story of the building’s history (if only the scents could be deciphered). At the fore of the cubicle village sat Judy, the den mother to the Scott denizens. A longtime English employee, Judy had been deployed (banished?) to Scott to look after the department’s flotsam in her final years before retiring. And look after us, she did: fetching our mail from Burrowes, ruling over the office supplies, unjamming the copy machine, and maintaining the antique transparency burner (perhaps the only thing in Scott that was older than Judy).

But mostly, Judy’s job entailed dispensing good vibes, pleasant thoughts, and much-appreciated smiles. Her mere presence made it nearly impossible to sustain a bad mood—even for those of us preternaturally inclined to grumpiness. And so, Judy’s desk evolved into a town square of sorts—a confluence where we all gathered to chit-chat, to kibitz, and to discourse on pedagogy, epistemology, and recipes.

Across from Judy, you’d find the mail slots and the bathrooms—two of Scott’s more necessary features. Just beyond the men’s room along the western wall, Jay and Mary lived. I say lived rather than worked, because I don’t recall ever being in Scott—day or night—when Jay and Mary weren’t there. In fact, the only time I remember seeing them leave was when one of them had to teach or they had a play to rehearse or when they slipped out the back door to conduct business at Webster’s rather than Scott.

To me, Jay and Mary were the King and Queen of Scott, as they embodied the spirit of the building. Mary sat at the desk, looking not at the computer, which was rarely on, but at the jumble of papers strewn across her work space. Jay sat behind her, his chair spilling out of the cubicle into the aisle. From their cubicle, Jay and Mary ran their theater group. It took me a while to determine whether Jay and Mary actually taught classes or if they directed their theater group fulltime. But one thing I knew for sure: you never mentioned one without mentioning the other—not so much Jay and Mary as it was JayandMary (but rarely MaryandJay, which didn’t slip off the tongue as easily).

Before moving to Scott, most of what I’d heard about it involved gossip—who was sleeping with whom, who wasn’t speaking to whom, who had freaked out on whom, who didn’t know the difference between who and whom—the sort of informationless drivel I typically go out of my way to avoid. Moreover, the layout of the room, a remnant of a corporate ethos determined to construct solid organizational citizens, left me cold. And so, I kept my distance. For the first year I was there, I never met the person with whom I shared a cubicle. But I appreciated his sense of style, as the cube was decorated with flyers and posters from theatrical productions he had clearly been involved with. Still, I felt like an interloper in my own workstation—especially when students complimented the decorations and I had to explain that they belonged to some guy named Jason whom I had never met.

The following summer, I met Jason at a party. The fact that I was at a party with colleagues speaks volumes about how the Scott environment had grown on me. But it wasn’t necessarily the environment that had grown on me; it was people—a group of likeminded outcasts with a penchant for the offbeat and a passion for teaching. Back then, lecturers had more opportunity to teach creative writing, literature, and cultural studies. Back then, the department offered more classes in creative writing, literature, and cultural studies. Back then, more students majored in English. And I shared many students in common with my Scott compadres. English majors visiting Scott would jaunt from cubicle to cubicle to talk to instructors—not because they were required to, but because they wanted to. And when students weren’t visiting, colleagues were.

Eventually, I earned a cubicle in the balcony. The balcony wasn’t really a balcony; it was more a pulpit two steps above the rest of the room. From there, I could look down at the maze of cubicles and imagine hiding pieces of cheese to watch the test subjects scurry about. Judy claimed that she reserved the balcony cubicles for people she liked—not that she didn’t like everyone, but she wasn’t above playing favorites. Places in the balcony only came available when someone left to take a better job. I gained mine when Lorena moved to Burrowes to work in the comp office.

When Lorena returned to Scott a couple of years later, I stayed in the balcony and she was assigned a place in cubicle valley. Since my space was just above the copy machine, I felt as if I were a sort of ombudsman. Everyone took a minute to stop by and kvetch as they made their copies. But I never really minded, nor did I feel burdened. Usually, the complaints weren’t complaints at all—more like minor annoyances of the sort that bring people together rather than driving them apart. And I certainly wasn’t immune to griping myself. And that’s the thing that made Scott special. We shared. We listened. We engaged each other every day. We interacted in ways that involved more than clicking a button that says LIKE.

And sometimes, we sat back in our chairs and stared at the ceiling. As much as I miss the Scott Building’s camaraderie and sense of community, I may miss the ceiling most. Oddly, I can’t recall details about the ceiling; all I remember is a rococo mural on a dome several stories above the cubicles. That’s enough. When the stresses of the job and the load of papers to grade weighed me down, I sat back, stared at the ceiling, and lost myself in thought.

Returning to Burrowes this semester, I feel some of the esprit de Scott returning to the corridors. As nice as it was to spend the last two years doing office hours in coffee shops, it’s even nicer to see my colleagues regularly. I may not have an Art Deco ceiling to attract my gaze, but I’ve got a door and a window—and little pillowed nook where I can hide and read. I also have a cadre of comrades within calling distance.And that’s enough for me.

Paul Kellermann introduces himself to his online students this way:  “I’m Paul. To quote a well-known Frank Sinatra song: ‘I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet—a pawn and a king.’ Now, I am a teacher and a writer. ” See Paul’s English Department profile.