Bullied!

So the father of my St. Thomas cheater just called me at my office: he is ANGRY. Of course, he's angry that his son is, as he said, "getting an F in the class," [see "Mash-Up" below] which of course is my fault. But what he should be angry at is the fact that his son's a liar and a cheater.

The son evidently told his dad that I refused to talk to him about his grade, that I dismissed him from class, and that I told him to "check the website" instead of talking with me. Of course almost the opposite is true: here's what happened this morning in class:

After class, Cheater interrupted my conversation with another student (who, appropriate for her gender role, graciously allowed him to do so) to ask how he could make his reading journal "better: I didn't get the points I was hoping for," he said. Yeah, right.

When I explained that a reading journal should be about what you think of the reading -- a journal is about your thoughts -- he sort of shook his head. And then I made a fatal mistake: I'd seen online that he'd accessed our course website to "read" the feedback I'd left for his exam. But evidently the "read" online doesn't mean "read" in real life.

When I confirmed that he'd failed the class because he'd cheated on his midterm, his eyes bugged out. His whole body language changed, from conciliatory boy to bristling, angry man. It was a fascinating transformation: he's a tightly-wound, emotional human being. Unfortunately, that emotion is probably fear.

He protested, of course, and started raising his voice (in front of at least half-a-dozen students, including the poor African woman who'd he interrupted). I suggested he come talk to me privately once he'd read my comments on the exam, "where I've explained everything," I said. He stormed out. And evidently immediately talked to his parents.

His father, whose name is the same as the son's, called to talk to me -- but bully me is more accurate. I cannot talk to parents about my students -- in fact, I'm not even supposed to confirm that the student is in my class (I learned this a few minutes ago when I called my dean to give her a "head's up"). When the father characterized my interaction with his son (I'd refused to talk with the son, I'd dismissed him), I couldn't even defend myself and say that that's not what happened at all.

All I could say was, "As a faculty member, I'm obligated to talk to my students, not to their parents." The father insisted that he waived any right to privacy, that he'd sign any forms, that he'd talk to my supervisor, but I needed to clarify that his son was out of the class, was not allowed back in. I couldn't even confirm that. (The student had stormed out of the class before I could even tell him that he could stay with us to learn if he wanted, even though his grade was already determined.)

My dean's a champ, though: she's had a few conversations with these priviledged, private-school parents: "They're paying a lot of tuition for their kids," she said, "and they think they can get cheap credits here." Yep, this student joined the class on day 2, and I don't think he's read much of our literature all summer.

The dean will do a much better job of handling the bully than I can: I feel slimed and wimbly after the conversation. He was clearly angry, keeping his voice to an even level, but almost ready to erupt.

Mash-Up

My literature students are supposed to keep reading journals for each class meeting's reading. They can then use their journal in their exams. I tell they that they can record anything related to what they're reading:  take notes, write summaries, brainstorm reactions, ask questions -- anything that's related to what they had read for the class meeting.


Here's one student's entry for Harriet Jacobs, who wrote the autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: 

"In 1874, Virginia Jacobs wrote a book entitled Miami. Which told a story of a writer, representing English literary history, who was born male during the Renaissance and started life as an Elizabethan, but turned into a women in the second half of the seventeenth century. Her protagonist's sex change dramatizes a major event in the history of English letters, namely the entrance of women into the literary marketplace. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the printing press, invested in the fifteenth century, led to an expansion of literacy as well as a reconceptualization of the role of the author."

I'm not sure where he copied this information from, but some of it is about Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando. And some of it seems to be copied from a history of the book. And I have NO idea what the "book entitled Miami" might be!


This student has already failed the class because he copied from the internet for his midterm take-home exam. And he's going to St. Thomas in the fall. Sad.

Tired/Tried

Reversing letters -- I'm not doing the reversal (although I am the tired one), but some of my students are. I'm back with Tech Writing (first week under our belts), and so far I only have one student I dread. She's taken up a LOT of class space in the last few days: very tiring.

But the first assignment went pretty well: over half the class earned an A or B. Only two flunked completely, and I only had to ask three to re-submit (how do you turn in 300 words when you've been asked to write a 50-word summary?).

Tomorrow morning's literature course is not yet ready: but there are still hours in the evening, right? I mean, getting up at 5:30 this morning won't catch up with me for a while, right? (Can you tell I'm trying to talk myself into non-sleepiness?)

Good first day

Summer session started for me today with class at 7:45 a.m. Most who know me get a bit shocked when I teach such early-morning classes, which I only do in the summer (the sunshine helps me get up and out the door -- oh yeah, I only have to do it for 17 mornings, which now is 16).

My students are lively and interesting: we'll be reading American women writers together, smashing together 16-weeks worth of reading into 6. Yikes.

[Since I titled this "Good first day," I'm going to leave *out* the bad part about my computer taking so long to boot up that I was late for class because I had to print the syllabus. I even got to school 20 minutes early to prep, but that wasn't enough time.]

Kelsie arrived this evening before her 6:10 a.m. flight to Salt Lake City for some vacation. We took a good walk down to Hidden Falls with Maisy, who'd already spent an hour at the dog park, but you wouldn't know given her frenzy to get to the river. She's such a water dog.

Then Kels and I had some snacks at the Chatterbox Pub. Now we're both bushed and ready for bed because we'll be out the door at 5:00 a.m. to get her checked in.

Hate

Last night, I went to bed in Minnesota. This morning, I woke up in some other state. Minnesota's legislature voted last night to put on the fall 2012 ballot a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

What is wrong with people? Why do heterosexuals think that the institution of "marriage" is something only they should have?

I just don't get it, especially because the latest Gallup Poll found that the majority of Americans support legalizing same-sex marriage.

Oh wait, I *do* get it: politics. Republicans make a power-play to beat-up-on the Democratic governor.

Republicans seem to be the party that's protecting the patriarchy: Suzanne Pharr's "Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism" explains so many of the Republicans' moves for social control. They want to limit anything to do with the feminine, continue to keep women in subordinate positions, preserve the privilege of the patriarchy.

Fight back against their power to show that might does *not* make right.

Egads

Minnesota Senate voted to put this constitutional amendment in front of voters in 2012: what disrespect in so many ways!

"Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to provide that only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota?"

It worked?

I'm reading "Introduction to Writing" final portfolios, and in one reflection essay, a student talked about blogging.

Students post to a blog, just like this one, to talk about our college's common book, The Good Soldiers. It's a tough book, both in terms of content and form, so the Engl 90 students struggle. But the casual writing space seems to be a good way to practice that struggle for a real audience.

One student realized this goal. She reflected on her choice of assignment (I ask them to read through the blog and then write an "analysis" about what they notice). Here's how she expressed her realization:

"Similar Views" is the essay I chose to polish [for my portfolio] because it made me feel more comfortable with the blog. I didn't like the idea of blog writing at all, it was a scary thought other people reading my writing. I felt people would judge me. Once this assignment came up and I had to read through the blog it was nice to realize that other people felt the same way I did. I wasn't worried about their typos or the punctuations errors, I was just reading their thoughts. It made me feel a lot more comfortable knowing me and other classmates feel the same on certain subjects.

I'm pretty pleased -- she made the connections I was hoping for -- especially around the struggle to write about something disturbing. Many students did not like reading the book because, as one student wrote, "We should not have to know about war."

Yep, these students want NOT to know things that they find disturbing. But it's my job to help them know -- and to help them articulate their thinking about what they learn. Educational job security, right? :-)

Why-Oh-Why

End-of-semester and final-exam pressure brings out the worst in some of us, the best in others. This semester, I've had quite a bunch of each reaction: the most recent headache is a bitchy student who copied from an online source in her final exam.


What's really amazing [and by "amazing" I mean ballsy and personally insulting] is that the student tweaked the original language in a way that indicated she'd thought through how she was going to fake her way through the exam.


Exam question [actually devised in consultation with students in the review session] was "What's the effect on the reader of the unnamed narrator(s) in Toni Morrison's Jazz?" We'd talked in class about who/what the narrator might be, especially in light of the novel's ending, and about the title as a framework/trope for understanding the novel's structure. So I expected an exam answer related to these topics.


Instead, the student wrote this answer:

The effect of having unnamed narrators creates a larger focus on the other characters. As an individual reads through the novel, they ignore who the narrator is and focuses on the story being told. Having this role, the narrator creates a jazz-like feel to the story. Morrison doesn’t reveal who this narrator is, so the reader doesn’t know whether they are male or female, white or black. All we are given is their view on the story being told.  

Up to this point, the answer is not good for a whole host of reasons, but it's consistent with the student's thin understanding of the novel and of how to think about / articulate ideas about craft. So while I didn't quite understand what she was talking about in the answer above, I really didn't think she was plagiarizing, until I started reading this next information (she'd smashed it all into the same paragraph, by the way -- I'm just separating things out here for clarity):

The interesting concept of Jazz is the reality of there being two narrators instead of one. There is the first narrator, an overt know-it-all who tends to be gossipy, who does not reveal that their knowledge is based strictly on observations until the end when it states, “So I missed it all together… I was so sure it would happen… I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, … while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view was the only one that was or that mattered” (221). The second narrator who makes no claims to any of her knowledge and structures the character’s conversations and emotions without having any bias against them.  The reason I explain this as Jazz-like is because the novel seems to create a fluent form of improvisation through these narrators which is what jazz music is based on.

These ideas are completely, completely new -- no relation whatsoever to topics we discussed in class. And I'm sure you can see a distinct difference in style, syntax, and diction. So I quickly googled "overt gossipy Morrison" and found the following passage in an online article called "Narration and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison's Jazz":

instead of giving the reader one omniscient narrator, Toni Morrison chooses to use two narrators: One gossipy, overtly hostile voice which presents itself as omniscient; admitting only towards the end of the text to have based all of its’ conclusions on what it can observe (Jazz 220-1); And another narrative voice which often follows closely on the heels of the first, makes no claims to complete knowledge, involves no insults to the characters, yet is involved in framing most of their conversations, thoughts and feelings. . . .To create an omniscient narrator who is both first-person and third-person omniscient is jazz-like because this combination “symbolize an incredible kind of improvisation” (Micucci 275). We can say that Morrison draws upon jazz music as “the structuring principle” for Jazz.

You've probably figured out that the underlining exists to point out the obvious: the "plagiaphrasing" as Brenda Spatt calls it. Startlingly, the copied part is from the very first paragraph of the source article, and the student obviously had to spend some time tweaking the original language to sound like herself, changing "omniscient" to "know-it-all" and "incredible kind of improvisation" to "fluent form of improvisation" (she is a writing major, so she probably likes that slight alliteration).

I guess I will be using this example with future students, as something NOT to do.

Talking Points

The following letter, written to Gov. Dayton by a Metro State colleague, has been circulated to all of us at Metro.

I thought I'd post it here, in case anyone is reading this blog, so that Minnesotans can see a straight-forward expression of what's wrong with Republican budget proposals.

I just don't understand why greed is starting to sound normal and not like the vice it is. Anyone remember the Seven Deadly Sins? Seven Cardinal Sins? Seven Capital Vices? Greed is on all the lists, as are a bunch of other things that have started to seem normal or even good, like Pride, for instance, probably due to the PR campaigns of Bernays et al., as introduced in the previous blog post.

Anyway, here's Don's letter:

From: Doug Rossinow
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2011 11:20 AM
To: mark.dayton@state.mn.us
Cc: ifo.org
Subject: the disastrous health-care pay-cuts in SF 1047

Dear Governor Dayton,

I want to thank you for the leadership you’ve shown—even when others are going wobbly—and for your plans to visit the Metropolitan State University campus tomorrow. I am chair of the history department at the university. I am leaving the country tomorrow morning to participate in an international conference, so I will be unable to attend the forum we are hosting. I am disappointed not to personally thank you for your leadership, but I thought I would send you an e-mail message as second best.

Everyone knows you’ve taken a courageous yet sensible stand in favor of tax progressivity as a necessary part of a reasonable solution to the terrible State budget situation. Taxes only make sense if they are levied based on the ability to pay. The top 1% of income earners in this country now take about 25% of national income. Yet the highest earners in the State actually pay a lower effective State tax rate than middle-income earners. And, of course, high income earners have gotten one tax cut after another in recent years and decades. Bringing back sensible tax rates on those who can most afford to pay them and have reaped the benefits of recent changes in our economy and tax code is the path to a robust, balanced, and sustainable economic future for the State.

Unfortunately, the State legislature is taking a different path: just gut public services, including education. This is what SF 1047 is about. It contains numerous really terrible provisions. But perhaps the cruelest and most unfair is the enormous shift in health-care premiums it would push onto public employees and their families. For those who have family health-care coverage through State employment (like my family), this would amount to a legislatively imposed pay cut of perhaps $10,000. This is simply outrageous.

It’s outrageous on the merits. Who with a college degree or postgraduate education would even consider taking a job with the employer paying 0% of health-care premiums, with a $5,000 family deductible?

It’s outrageous in terms of the process. Terms of health-care coverage are supposed to be negotiated through the collective bargaining process. This effort to impose a punitive health-care system on public employees through legislation is an attack on collective bargaining. It’s no different than what was done in Wisconsin in that respect. At least the Wisconsin governor and his supporters had the courage to openly say they wanted to do away with collective bargaining.

What’s really at stake here?

It’s whether we will continue to have high-quality public services in Minnesota.

It’s whether public service in Minnesota will continue to be a viable career option for committed professionals.

The State can’t get good public services for nothing. We’re not asking for the moon. Sure, there will have to be shared pain and sacrifice to get out of this mess, and we’re prepared for that—just as we ourselves proposed a salary freeze two years ago.

But we are asking not to be scapegoated and viewed like a pool of dedicated money (as with the State’s tobacco settlement money) that can be drained to fill a budget hole. We’re people and it costs money for us to live decently.

When I moved to Minnesota from California in 1997 to take a job teaching in the MnSCU system, I did so only because I believed Minnesota would be a good place to teach in a public university system. That will no longer be the case if this incredibly extreme, punitive, and unnecessary set of measures becomes law.

I fear that some in the legislature really want to make our public universities places where proud and accomplished professionals will not want to work. Some are ideologically opposed to all public services, period—they deride public schools as “government schools” and hope to turn all public services over to for-profit enterprises. By making the terms of employment in MnSCU ones that strong job candidates will find alarming and unsustainable, provisions like those in SF1047 can help these ideologues in their quest to make public services shrivel. But, of course, if public services are greatly weakened, this will leave the middle class and working Minnesotans out in the cold, without the low-cost option of high-quality university education they now get in MnSCU.

We know you understand the facts. What we’re asking is that you not treat totally unreasonable and punitive legislative proposals as a reasonable starting point in negotiating an eventual higher education law. “Compromise” between sanity and insanity is no real compromise at all.

If you stand up for sanity and fairness, millions of Minnesotans will stand up with you and for you.

Thanks for your attention.

Doug Rossinow

Professor and Chair

Department of History

Metropolitan State University

Bernays

Tonight, I'm going to be talking about a bit of Edward Bernays's Propaganda. I found this clip from a BBC documentary The Century of Self. It's scary.

Cyber Bullying

At the MnCUEW keynote on Friday, John O'Brien presented a bunch of slides he'd complied to to illustrate his point that technology is changing how we communicate.

One video was about cyber bullying, and I re-post it here because it's direct - and uncomfortable:

Activities in Minnesota

According to the brainstorm list one of my students wrote on the midterm, these are activities you can do in Minnesota weather:

• swimming
• ice fishing / fishing
• ski / snowboarding
• hiking
• camping
• canoning / boating
• drag car racing

He added this wonderful sentence in his actual essay: "You can go snowboarding, show shoeing or ice fishing because where in Untied States you can go ice fishing." Where, indeed!

"Academically Adrift"

A couple of days ago in The New York Times, op-ed columnist Bob Herbert published "College the Easy Way." In it, he reflects on a new book called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska. 

It was published in January, and it got a bunch of press then. In fact, I've heard these authors on the radio, and I'm sympathetic to their findings -- I, too, find that the institution I work for has struggled to preserve its integrity (often, in my view, sacrificing that integrity in order to satisfy legislative overseers who have none). 


I am not sympathetic, however, to the blaming of faculty: teachers are such easy targets, aren't they? Public conversation about teachers is almost always negative, a fact pointed out by Nicholas Kristof in this column, where he argues that teachers should be paid more, not less). It's tougher to look at systems -- and to see the forces behind the breakdown of systems.

Related to that point about the forces behind the breakdown, I read a comment at the end of Herbert's column, which ends with almost 200 comments from readers around the world. The following comment sums up what I have been thinking about the political consequences of the bully-Republican politics we are living under. I've printed it below [adding paragraph breaks] to share a straightforward articulation of the problem:

Dr. Sam

California

March 5th, 2011

1:40 am

It would seem from what we know now that rightwing Republicans want to set our kids "academically adrift." They know that an educated electorate would not buy into their conspiracy theories, their parochial view of the world and their narrow, inhumane vision of human relationship. 

Therefore, they have gone about rewriting school and college texts in such places as Texas and Mississippi to accommodate their bogus religious and political propaganda such as creationism, civil war heroes and a fictional interpretation of the pre-civil rights era. 

In their deficit-cutting frenzy, they have set their eyes on dismantling public education as we know[it], shifting money from public schools to private schools through a voucher program that benefits even the children of the rich. 

At the federal and state levels, they are proposing deep cuts in education even though America is clearly lagging behind in this important area compared to others nations like China and many parts of Asia, and even though we are now faced with global competition in a knowledge-based economy. 

Think of how ignorant our kids and the broad electorates in America are becoming as they listen to the misinformation and untruths that poor our in deluge in rightwing media daily. 

Finally, while they claim they are for small government, they interfere boldly with many aspects of our private lives, including the bed rooms of the nation. We are truly in trouble! God save us from Republican fundamentalism. 

Downtown

I'm writing this post from the MnSCU system office - where they've become so lean that there's no longer a receptionist to let you in the offices! Weird because the glass doors are locked at all times, and so you have to wait outside until you happen to come into the vision field of a person walking around inside.

I've been reading portfolios for the Outstanding Educator Award - quite a wonderfully tiring experience. Some really, really good people work in the MnSCU system. I'm learning some great new ideas, and I've discovered a program that I think would be perfect for my nephew: a Heavy Equipment program at Staples!

Okay, back to work.

Coriolanus Corollary

So I'm reading a bit of Shakespeare's later plays: The Winter's Tale was for class, and now I've dipped into Coriolanus. It starts with a mob of angry Roman citizens who are starving because of the rich folks' greed. 


Here are some lines that should sound familiar (I've broken up Shakespeare's line breaks so that we can see the sentences):

FIRST CITIZEN:
We are accounted poor citizens. . . .
What authority surfeits on would relieve us. [Sounds familiar!]
If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely;
but they think we are too dear.
The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance;
our sufferance is a gain to them.
Let us revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes;
for the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge. (I, i, ll.13-22).

Later, the crowd is calmed by a smooth-talking friend of the dastardly Coriolanus:

MENENIUS:
I tell you, friends, most charitable care have the patricians of you. [yeah, right!]
For your wants, your suffering in this famine, you may as well strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them against the Roman state . . . .
For the famine, the gods, not the patricians, make it, and your knees to them, not arms, must help.
Alack, you . . . slander the helms of the state, who care for you like fathers, when you curse them as enemies.

FIRST CITIZEN:
Care for us? True, indeed! [Yeah! Right!]
They never cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain;
make edicts for usury, to support usurers;
repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statues daily to chain up and restrain the poor. [sounds like Gov. Walker!]
If the war eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love they bear us. (I, i, ll. 61-82)

The Bard knew about politics - but this play is a tragedy, and Coriolanus is killed. I hope we have no tragedy on our hands in this era, but I'm not so sure . . . .

Upton Sinclair would be proud

I want to preserve this video for the next time I teach The Jungle: people don't seem to realize that we could fall back to those brutal days (they certainly exist in other parts of the world).

That's George Eliot?

When I was in grad school, I had a seminar on Victorian literature with Professor Robert Lougy. It included George Eliot, and I didn't like her novels much: too long and mannered for my taste. I don't really remember much from that seminar: we read Middlemarch, I know, and The Mill on the Floss. Did we read Silas Marner? Probably. What else? I can't remember.

But these days I assign my students an Eliot short story in our British Women Writers class: in our anthology is "The Lifted Veil," an atypical Eliot story that includes gothic elements. The supernatural isn't the only thing that's atypical, as far as I can remember from that long-ago seminar; it's the darkness of the narrator's vision.

Here's what the narrator, Latimer, says in the beginning of the story -- it's been bothering me because it seems so timely:

While the heart beats, bruise it,--it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brother recognition,--make haste,--oppress it with your ill-considered judgments, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.

Brilliant

More than two decades ago, I read Mark Johnson and George Lakoff's book Metaphors We Live By. It knocked my socks off with its brilliance. "Yes," I thought. "Our language reveals the metaphors that shape/control our thinking. I'd never thought about it like that, but he's so right!"

I thought that same thing this morning when I read this article Lakoff wrote: "What Conservatives Really Want." In it, Lakoff lays out all the moves that conservatives make in the public sphere - including shaping/controlling the language ("80% of the talking heads on TV are conservative," Lakoff reminds us - he could make the same claim about "talk radio").

By listing all the moves conservatives make, he reveals that the controlling metaphor of conservatives' worldview is the autocratic "strict father": they want the world to be structured like a head-of-household family where the strict father makes all the decisions, is not questioned, metes out the [necessarily physical] discipline.

With this kind of family, the social contract that Democracy promises (that we-the-people have a social responsibility to our fellow citizens) becomes a threat: helping others in the wider culture undermines the authority of the strict father.

Lakoff articulates SO clearly the views I've had for at least two decades but haven't been able to formulate, other than to say we're living through the last desperate gasps of the Patriarchy. To me, no one talks about the masculine violence that's behind all the criminal activity, economic greed, and gun-toting fear we see around us.

Conservatives campaign on the slogan "Take our country/state back!" (Minnesota's recent Republican candidate for governor used this phrase, even though our state had been suffering under a Republican governor for eight years. No logic there, but "strict fathers" don't work with logic; they work with fear). Back to where, is of course the question. Turning out country back in time seems to be the conservatives' goal - when men were men, women knew their place, and Dad yelling "Get off my lawn!" and following that up with a few firings of a 410 shotgun are appropriate ways to act.

Change is automatically a threat to the "strict father." And our speeded-up, technologically enhanced pace of change scares these fathers (who can also be "Mama Grizzlies"), but "strict fathers" cannot show that they're scared. So they scare everyone else instead. And then use the threat of physical violence against everyone else.

Back to Lakoff: he sees the Wisconsin protests as a hopeful sign of real citizens who want to make the world a better place (real public servants such as teachers, pipe fitters, fire fighters, rather than the fake "public servants" that politicians claim to be, in another theft of a good metaphor). I applaud his article and want to share it far and wide.

Read it and pass on his clear thinking.

Learning something new

A former student (I'll call Tracy) who still keeps in touch with me via Facebook has taught me a lot about a slice of American culture I know very little about: lower-middle class rural lesbians.

Tracy and her partner "Hannah" live in the country north of the Twin Cities, in a 70s split-level house with land enough for a half-dozen horses, four dogs, many barn cats, and two children: Hannah's son Christian from one of her marriages (she's had two) and daughter "Sage" that she had via donor insemination while in the relationship with Tracy. (Sage was a bargaining chip when Hannah broke up with Tracy last year - Hannah told Tracy to move into the basement but couldn't move out of the house because she had to "babysit" Sage. Eventually, the two got "back together," and now Tracy is trying to get inseminated.

These women come from extremely damaged backgrounds: lots of sexual abuse/incest, family members in prison for drugs and sexual crimes, suicide of family members, lots of drinking/meth/drug use. Hannah turned to religion (fundamentalist Christian) as a way to make sense of her life; she'd gotten a degree from Bethel, so Christian propaganda had been taught to her. For a while, she dumped Tracy "for Jesus" and because it was a sin to be gay. She dated a series of guys she'd pick up on Craig's List; Tracy (as well as Hannah's 12-year-old son) was still living in the basement while Hannah would bring the guys home.

Neither of them can hold down jobs, and they are both enrolled as students at Capella: Hannah for a master's in counseling (!) and Tracy for a bachelor's in law enforcement. I don't know how they make their mortgage payments, feed their horses, or pay for the sperm. Tracy's getting the second insemination tomorrow (the first didn't result in conception). She shared that news, among other things, with me on FB tonight:

tommrow is the day. HOpefully it works this time!

Me: Good luck! What time should I be sending my good karma?

thanks. Its at noon. Everythign has been going much smoother this time around, and because I bough more sperm hopefully that means it will take so I can be out the money

Me: So you buy sperm in different quantities? How much is it??

I was on the wait list for a guy that was half black/half white, and he is no longer donateing so I took them when I had the chance. The one I am useing tommorow is the same donor as Sage and the only one left of him. They are $395 each

unless I want one with more options

Me: more options? What would those be? (And it makes sense to get the same as Sage, don't you think??)

if you want it so they can meet the donor when they turn 18, or if they have a Doctorate degree,

Me: it costs extra if the child wants to meet the donor??!! That sounds really weird to me: why would it cost extra?

yea. I only have one left of him, he is no longer donating either. That is why I want tommorow to work. Hannah is worried about me having 4 eggs tho

cause not all donors agree to it
Me: hmm, but I still don't get why it would cost more for you if donors don't agree: are you saying that the donors who *do* agree are the more costly sperm?

right if you want that option then its $560 a vial, and if you want doc its around $700

This morning's Writer's Almanac

In Praise of a Teacher

by Nikki Giovanni

The reason Miss Delaney was my favorite teacher, not just my
favorite English teacher, is that she would let me read any book I 
wanted and would allow me to report on it. I had the pleasure of 
reading The Scapegoat as well as We the Living as well as Silver
Spoon (which was about a whole bunch of rich folk who were 
unhappy), and Defender of the Damned, which was about 
Clarence Darrow, which led me into Native Son because the real
case was defended by Darrow though in Native Son he got the
chair despite the fact that Darrow never lost a client to the chair
including Leopold and Loeb who killed Bobby Frank. Native Son
led me to Eight Men and all the rest of Richard Wright but I 
preferred Langston Hughes at that time and Gwendolyn Brooks
and I did reports on both of them. I always loved English because
whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories
that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a 
history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we 
think we are; English is much more a story of who we really are.
It was, after all, Miss Delaney who introduced the class to My
candle burns at both ends; /It will not last the night; /But, ah, my
foes, and, oh, my friends— /It gives a lovely light. And I thought
YES. Poetry is the main line. English is the train.

"In Praise of a Teacher" by Nikki Giovanni, from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. © Harper Perennial, 2002.