Class Room Struggles

I am a professor. I know my material and chosen subjects. I have a near photographic and encyclopedic knowledge of the things I have chosen to learn about, history and architecture. I'm not saying that I know everything or even very much about either of them (considering how vast both are), but what I have learned I retain to an interesting degree which is why you want me on your Trivial Pursuit team. You really do.

Math and technical and coding and garble garble garble.....I really struggle to retail the details and to remember them in context. Photography is only a small part composition and artistic eye (which I can do) and the rest is math and equipment settings. Sure I can click over to auto and then just be really frustrated later when the camera did not do what I wanted......or I can actually learn how to use my camera.

It is hard. Harder than learning business calculus, which I spent hours with a tutor and more hours in the college math lab pushing myself to learn it and maybe pass the class. I did. With a B+.

Strange thing is that I feel more energetic with this challenge and I very much feel I am on the right track. Half the issue is learning the lingo, which I can store in the language and history part of my brain (the part that works!). The rest is practise and patience. I make a point to read the assigned chapters twice, once the day after class they are assigned and once in the hour before the class where the topic is discussed. Squished in the middle is a combination of researching the assignment, doing the assignment, and finding related youtube videos (because I am a visual learner too).

Then, I make a list of questions to ask. I "reverse" highlight, something I learned in college: I only highlight the parts of the text that I do NOT understand, write my questions in the margin and then ASK about these in class. That's what the professor is there for too, not just a crowd control manager, not just an assignment grader, no....an expert in the subject you are teaching yourself. The instructor helps you find resources and frames the subject matter with a textbook and lesson plan, but it is really up to the student to figure out the rest and ask questions.

One of the real problems I see in American education is the student's expectation to be hand fed all the information and then gifted the grade for paying the tuition. I will not ever be that kind of student. I do not waste my time or others sitting in a classroom for a subject I do not care to learn. I am paying for it? I will make it worth my time and get the full value product. I will ask questions.

This is the shift that has to happen on the student side and I am not sure how else to encourage it, other than teaching the students who walk into my classrooms that I am a resource and they can ask questions and that they are the ones in control of their education.

Being a student is hard. Discouraging. Humiliating at times. Goodness. I turned in an assignment I thought I had done right only to find out that the flash was actually engaged in 3 of the 6 photos. I was completely freaked out when I discovered the mistake, too late.

It is one class, one assignment, and I learned from it. I may bomb this week's grade, but it is not the entire term. It still feels horrible. I forgot what it was like to be on this side of it. The struggle is real.

Snowy, snowy storm land

Winter has finally graced us with her pleasures and her wrath. It is really cold, there is so much snow, and did I mention cold? It is cold. So cold.

I am now really looking forward to travel. Cold makes my hands and feet hurt, makes sleeping near impossible, and everything is just miserable. I have so much nervous energy about travelling that I am cleaning like a mad woman. My tub has never been so very clean.

My closet is organised, I have sorted and culled my costume jewelry twice, and the list goes on. I hate being cold. I suspect that my cold=cleaning has caused Chad to turn the thermostat down even more. Grrrrr. Brrrrr.

I have also been thinking a lot. Thinking about posts to write. Poems to pen. Essays to compose. I have been dreaming of food and sweet tea and laughter.

I have been laughing with my children.

That's the part that is causing the most anxiety. I am going to be apart from them for almost a month. It is a long time. I'll stop home in the middle for 4 days, but that's not nearly enough. The kids are all encouraging me though, pushing me out of the nest to fledged and fly, and asking to skype.

Love. I love my kids. I love this life. Five years ago I could never have imagined a life so blessed with good friends and adventure. It gets better. 

It gets better.

It isn't just teenagers that need to hear that. It's young moms too. Women coming of age (that's what this feels like). It gets better. Discover yourself, your passion, and when you catch on fire you can better be the mom, wife, friend, lover, poet, (fill in what you are) that you have potential to be.

Ok, that took a motivational life coach turn that I was not intending. My thoughts on this are this though, it does get better. Just wait and while you are waiting.....dream it.

Midwestern Wanderer

"Agriculture, Alcohol, Loneliness, and Other Motifs of the Midwest," is the title of an essay reviewing a favourite literary journal of mine.

Without reading the article at all, the title stayed with me.

I mean, this is what people think of the Midwest. Not a question. This is what I think of the land I live in. This is my landscape. Living here for the last twenty years has not changed my opinion of the landscape. I wrote a poem that sums up these feelings- lust, dust, and rust. Things dissolve into each other. 

I am having a really hard time finding subjects for my photography assignments. Right now, real life is dreary and blah. Browns and muted yellows against a grey sky. The house is messy, the kids are restless, I spend my afternoons writing in a grocery store cafeteria or next to a pile of laundry in my bedroom. Sometimes I imagine that pile suddenly animating like the Trash Heap in Fraggle Rock to give me advice and foretell my future, "There is more laundry to be washed! Always!" Then collapsing back into a heap of unfolded clothes for me to fret and worry over instead of writing. Like right now.

The loneliness and the dreary dead landscape view out my window is enough to nudge me toward the Scotch bottle for sure. Fulfilling the Midwestern legacy put forth by the article title. I resist and instead fill my cup with little cinnamon candies and plough on, word after word.

When I was sixteen and living in a small town in Illinois where everyone pretended to actually be from Chicago when they moved on to college out of state, my father told me we were moving to Iowa. My friends joked that my days would be filled with cow tipping and riding escalators for fun and that I would grow fat eating corn. Which is funny, considering that the town I moved from is more rural than the city I moved to in Iowa (Des Moines), though the year I moved here there were some unfortunate news headlines about teenagers riding escalators at the mall and getting clothing caught in the teeth of the moving stairs. Funny.

The Midwest sure is a strange place to live.  A landlocked, wet prairie, desolate, beautiful place to be exiled in. I have said this before, that I feel like mermaid stuck on land, homesick for something unattainable ever again, or maybe for something I have never known. Still, I am coming to this thought, unravelling at the seems, and wondering if maybe this homesickness and heartbreak I feel isn't for a physical place, but rather a yearning to be accepted by a place. I have spent the last year travelling all over and not once did I land my feet on the ground in a place that felt more like home, than my own farm. I had moments of bliss and beauty, vistas and magical places to roam, but never did I feel more loved and safe and beautiful than in my husband's embrace.

This was driven home to like a steak knife to my heart, in a bar in Prague, left alone at the table with another academic who was completely ugly drunk. He was pushing at me, asking why my husband would let me travel alone, why would I travel half way around the world if my bonds were secure and sacred? This is certainly an interesting question, even out of the context of this drunk stranger trying to get me to go home with him for the night. Why would my husband let me travel on my own? He could not stop me, not with pleas nor violence. I am my own wandering soul. He knows that and encourages and nurtures my dreams. Why would I go? Because I need to see. I need to climb to the top of a thousand year old church and breathe in the history and pray and be. I need to walk twenty miles until my shoes fall apart. I need to place my feet where revolutions have shaken the foundation of centuries of tradition, baptised in blood. Touch the bones that are said to cure blindness. I need to wander physically. My heart does not. My heart is with my family, sacred and secure, and I bring my stories and photos home to them. I am tethered by my heartstrings and my devotion and without that, would be completely lost.

And the evening ended with me threatening to gut the drunk bastard with my car keys if he dared try the grabby hand thing under the table again. You don't mess with a Midwestern farmer, even if she is on her own in a foreign country. I may have also made the threat in a Scottish drawl, strange as that may be. Goodness. I do thank the drunkard for the story though, without his terrible behaviour my last night in Prague would have been less story worthy, perhaps.  Less broken glass, at the very least.

And so, even though this place I am right now is dreary and cold, the food is fantastic and the present company close to my heart, always.

Balance of Ego and Vunrability

When I signed up for the photography class, I was kind of full of myself. I mean, I have published art photography and sold framed prints. I love my own work, I find it pleasing.

But I have never taken a class, barely understood the how to books I bought, and just rely on my instinct and auto setting. Finding and framing the moments.

I walked into class, the very basic beginning class at our local community college. First, there are students in the class that I am pretty sure have taken classes from me online. I'm on the other side of the fence now and it is really hard to readjust to being a student instead of in charge of the classroom dynamic. Second, there are professional photographers in the class. Actual professionals with successful businesses, mostly portrait and weddings. There are also students who have never used a camera other than their phone to take selfies and/or are semi literate (can't read or understand the syllabus, the class notes, or the assignments). I am too used to being the smartest person in the room and it is unsettling.

And necessary.

There are other times that I feel like an impostor. I've written about that before. That my lack of experience or credentials will reveal me to be a big faker. The thing is, over and over, I have faked it until it was real. At least, that's what it feels like. I was a city girl, in Target muck boots, pretending to farm- now I teach others farming ethics and techniques. I was a stumbling 1st year professor/grad student using a template syllabus and borrowed textbooks and assignments and ten years later I am a seasoned professor, creating my own lesson plans and creating new syllabus that others use.

I am taking the class because I love photography and need help learning the technologies involved. The math is really getting me. The vocabulary is confusing me. The technology is complicated. It feels very much like when I attempted fiber arts, but instead of my fingers fumbling, my mind is tangling up around the textbook concepts and camera settings.

Still, I am hanging in there. Dedicated and determined.

Here's a link to the work I am posting for the class (and some of my older work):
Danelle Stamps Flickr