Tuesday. February snow day. One app said 8-10 inches of snow. Another said 1-3 inches followed by a coating of freezing rain. Artificials slackly forecast the weather, having never shivered much less set foot outside. Put on a scarf humans. School’s out. My fingers are cold but not freezing as I type this. Snow day not a great difference maker for me. Because I am teaching online this semester, the snow day is better news for everybody else. We haven’t had much good news lately. CNN and Fox sniffing each other’s indigestibly rotten reflux. Al Jazeera wide-eyed half a world away. Social media dead zone. Another twirl of enclaving and homophily, each whispering ta-ta-ta in best friend’s ear, the whole scene with less thunder from the device-glued herd. Thinning wisps as fuhrer DonJay’s hair, not that I can stand to look at it much less imagine for a microsecond its sadness. Gel, mousse, weariness. Context collapse. An ever distanter relative party pops on nimshit Zuckerberg’s tired platform about how DOGE is rooting out FEMA excesses. Are we even related? A part of the context that collapses would if it could tell of how weird it is to labor, to give away a third of your income to strangers, and then for those strangers to be wealthy oligarchs who have abandoned financial disclosure rules, who have carried menacingly a “corruption detector” to the beach and here we all are mere granules of sand at shores that keep washing wave-wash after wave-wash not even touching a coin Foucault. Beach appears smooth, pristine. Nothing to see here. And the penny is going away, soon gone. Ephemerality of the nanoscale.

Snow Day Chores

Tuesday. February snow day SW Virginia. Slippy Blue Ridge. Figured we would lose power. We’re only ever an unkempt tree branch away from all of it shutting down. So I was up earlier than usual for the juice meaning electricity, to make coffee and heat water. Predictable oatmeal bowl. Sucks bawk-bagawk feeding the chickens in the snow. The youngster pullets looked at me and it felt like they understood something like what the hell you acted like spring was coming. Hush now have your layer pellets, I didn’t make this weather. Neither am I free from participating in the day’s rituals just because this rarer, noise dulling precipitation has blanketed us over. Elkhound Feta in her Scandinavian element. I shoveled a little as she dashed about, gulping flavorless snow maws midstride. Bursty joy contagion, now come on let’s go back inside.

Have You Heard This Song?

Couple of weeks so not so long ago Is. first-yearing along up north texted me first thing, first class of the day but the teacher hadn’t arrived yet, so Gen Z-style whatevering at 8:30 a.m. and wondering had I heard Big Thief’s “Simulation Swarm.” I hadn’t. So I listened. Spotify is a contemptible pillage for artists, extracting at that razor’s edge between profitability and streaming use. Here we are. Flawed world accruing flaws the more you really think about it. But I’ll take the song rec from my daughter with an ounce of Spotify forgiveness. Good enough to add to Liked Songs playlist, hoggy trough that it is, such a careless curation with a declining chance of replay. There in the song, a burdock line about “the last human teachers.” It stuck. I wrote it down. Everyday collectanea.

Guest-Led Class Gets Bigger

The same week, a day or two on, collared shirt and good shoes, I guest-led an in-person class, same class I guest-led last fall though it has a different professor this semester. Last semester, they all gathered in a nondescript classroom, capped at 40 students. This semester, the cap doubled to 80, it meets in a lecture hall. Clip on a wireless mic for audibility. An activity on what you were eating for lunch in 2016. Lunch tray handout. Northern Virginia schools and memories about cow jokes printed on half pint milk cartons. Here, now, theater seating, and weren’t those corny puns the days. Here, now, discussion groups made into flat-lines by bolted down row seating and meanwhile from outside the ambience of heavy equipment building new and sparklier halls.

The same week, two days on, in my Shanks office on a Friday morning, small talk check-in with a colleague, and I learned that home department now has an online-asynchronous class capped at 500 students. Theme is true crime. People are ooh-ahhing about it, tongues out cash register pupils emoji, this new model for scaling up English Department’s offerings. Bigger being better, when bigger refers to the translation of credit hours pouring in, black gold, Texas tea. First thing you know, humanities are a millionaire, but the sing-along gets interrupted because, that’s peanuts considering there is another class, design appreciation, capped at 4000. I only know of design appreciation because from time to time someone in a much smaller technical writing section (capped at 22) will mention it as the only other online class they have taken before, hinting that it forges schema and functions almost as a model, an ur-experience, of an online learning sort, forget Dewey. So the road forks; teaching changes. The more costly and higher caliber thing dies out. The new thing is better because it cheddars more lunches, whopper profitable and there are so many other institutional priorities to underwrite. Sure, we could hold a yearning seance with the days of human teachers and human students gathering in a room and talking, interacting, making stuff, connecting, puzzling through. I’m not writing this as a proposal, only a thought-yarn, “last human teachers” setting in motion that flurry of questions, much as before, about what we’re doing now and why, about what the something-doing does.