Kittens

The shift key on my laptop is working erratically. If something is not capitalized it is because I do not have the time or inclination to write the same words over and over again.
Sometimes spellcheck is merciful and corrects the error, as seems to be the case right now.

Our kitten is trapped up high in a 40 foot, lanky tree behind the garage. The kids, in their fourth day of testing for the standardized CT exams designed to accommodate the NCLB act of the Bush administration, are so stressed they left the back door open behind them as they sped out to meet the bus. When I emerged to ready myself for class, the two big cats ran in the door. I could not find the kitten, finally heard her meowing and felt relief, assuming that she was trapped inside the garage, an easy situation to remedy.

But, no. She is up in the tree, so high up that the branches wave in the bitter wind, and when I climb on top of the garage to coax her down, she is so scared that she climbs farther away, up and up. I drag old ladders I cannot lift by myself, and sit on the roof, helplessly holding an open can, redolent with the aroma of tuna, up towards Junie, who meows piteously, afraid to move. I dare not leave my house for fear she will fall and get hurt with no one to attend to her needs.

For the second time in the four years I’ve been teaching at CCSU, I call in to cancel my classes. The only other time this happened was in the fall of 2005, when I was vomiting. Even then I felt guilty. Now I feel like an idiot, but know how delighted my students will be when the English Department secretary tells them they can leave. I know this, not only because no teenager wants to sit in a class so early in the morning, but also because one of the semester’s four major papers is due today.

As I suspected, Min tells me that very few students were actually in the room when she arrived to announce that class was cancelled. I am secretly relieved I will not have to deal with my classes. I was up until 5am, doing schoolwork; I haven’t taken a shower; my house is warm and in need of cleaning. But really, I am truly scared about the cat, can feel her fear and pain and hunger

I check every few minutes to insure that the she is still up in the tree.while I post gigs on Craig’s List, Freedomcycle. I call equipment rental places, looking for extension ladders. The fire department no longer rescues treed animals; the Humane Society blithely tells me the cat will come down when she is hungry, tired, and cold. No, they cannot guarantee that she will land unharmed.

It strikes me that I am reacting as would a student in a similar situation. A student who would get a disappointed look from me upon her return to class next Tues. When I was a student, I thought professors had a cakewalk job. When I was merely professor, I realized how easy students have it. Now that I am both professor and student with a full load of classes and a thesis to write, I recognize that it is not easy on either side of the desk, and so I am much less harsh than I was as a new teacher, caught up in seemingly fair repercussions for slackers.

It is interesting that student cite a teacher who never gives them homework and lets them leave early as being ‘nice”. As a teacher myself, I know that she is making her own life easier by being that particular brand of nice. I’d like to be nice ALL the time, but unfortunately, I feel obliged to help my students improve their writing skills. In order to do so, I have implemented a few new strategies this semester. I make obligatory one on one meetings. I demand students do the brainstorms and fastwrite steps of their essay process in class, knowing that they will be less inclined to procrastinate, knowing that at least the seeds of their papers have been planted, and will hopefully propel them towards feeling less hopeless and floundering than they would by postponing every step of the essay until 2am on the day the paper is due. I hope to make them aware that they need not put off starting their papers because of having only a spare half hour, that a fast write can be done, and should be done, in ten minutes. They can set the alarms on their phones anywhere and write for ten minutes.

The most important pieces of information that I have thus far imparted to students revolve around voice and being able to write a reade-based paper. These two concepts seem to be new ideas for the students with whom I conference. I tell them to write the way the character would speak. Since the character is essentially their ownselves, I tell them to decide whether they are telling that particular story to a peer or a grandmother. When I say that, they get it. They had been confused by rules they learned in high school, the ones that demanded they write intros and conclusions that say exactly what is in the body of the essay, the one that told them they could not use “I’ in an essay-- one of the causes of an illogical shift in person and number that run rife as a virus through the essays.

I hate five paragraph essays, I tell them, I want to hear your story, the way you can best tell it. Just remember that by the final draft of the paper, any information I need, should be on the page. I point out areas in their essays where they have omitted necessary information, forgetting the reader is clueless about certain details that have come seemingly out of thin air

We have covered all the forms of illogical shifts, faulty parallelism and misplaced or dangling modifiers. They have done the exercises fairly easily, even edited pretty well the chapter review paragraph, identifying errors explored in that chapter. When it comes to handing in their own essays, however, many of the issues remain, staring me baldly in the face.

In our conferences, I ask about this phenomenon. Mostly they shrug helplessly that they can see the errors when working with me, but it’s harder on their own. One student informs me that he hadn’t realized they were supposed to incorporate the grammar lessons into their own essays.


The kitten is still stranded in the tree, and I cannot get her down.