I have never thought of myself as an unusual person, particularly. My age puts me right in the middle of the Boomers. My annual income, before I retired in July, was just about exactly the median household income for Americans. I did have a full-teaching, college-level teaching job, something that has become increasingly scarce, and I have some modest accomplishments on my curriculum vitae, but it hasn’t been an outstanding career. In retirement, I should have a sufficient income, if I really watch my pennies.
All my life, I’ve found myself trudging along with the broad middle. It was something of a joke between my former husband and myself: if we bought a washer-dryer pair one month, for example, the Commerce Department would announce, next month, that sales of major household appliances had risen. If we bought a car, car sales rose. I said they should fire their statisticians and just follow us around to see what we did. In the 1980s, in the Volcker Recession, when interest rates soared, I put my savings into a money market account. In the 2000s and the 2010s, I had a retirement investment account. In the ‘70s, I had a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress. I dabble a little in genealogy (of course), and what I have learned is that my ancestors have been middle class people trying to get into the upper-middle class for at least the past four hundred years. I am made from the same mold as them.
Now I am finding that I had been at the top of the food chain, all along.
British Literature I had to be an independent study, because at my small community college, just one student wanted to take the course. In exchange, and to do a favor for my department chair, I agreed to take over a developmental writing course in the second half of Spring semester. It would be the first time I’d ever taught developmental writing, but the syllabus and exercises were all laid out; all that I had to do was follow them. I had a light teaching load that term, the last full term I would ever teach, and I looked forward to coasting into retirement. I would train my replacement as Honors Director, get the house in shape for sale, and prepare for an extended period of travel in Germany. If all went well, I hoped to apply for permanent residency.
My first hint that things would not go as planned came in March, when the European Union shut its borders to American citizens. (They are still not open, as of this time of writing.) My next hint came when I lost one-third of my retirement savings in two days, as the country locked down and the stock market crashed. Then my college shut its doors. No one was allowed on campus. We were all to shelter in place and teach our classes using Zoom.
I read Defoe in long stretches during those first two weeks of lockdown, when I had, perhaps, one good day, followed by two or three days when I stared at the walls and couldn’t account for the passage of time. My mind was like sodden wool. I fed the cats and took the garbage out. That felt like an achievement, each night. My sleep was disturbed, and often I lay awake until three or four in the morning.
When I met my student again, we threw away the norms of literary analysis, because, we agreed, it was all in Defoe, everything we were going through.
There was the wishful thinking: It’s in Holborn and St. Giles, said Defoe’s Londoners, but it won’t come here to the City. It’s in China/Washington State, said the people around us, but it won’t come here to Florida.
Then the magical thinking: Maybe it will just disappear. The cold weather / warm weather will make it go away.
Then the upwellings of hatred: It was brought to us by foreigners, let’s keep those foreigners out, by force, if we must.
And then the lockdowns came, and the numbness and terror. People tried to isolate themselves, but the poor had no choice, and had to keep on working. The court, on the other hand, had left London at the first sign of the plague, leaving the local authorities to figure things out for themselves as best they could. People tried to evade health regulations, lied about their symptoms, and broke their quarantines. Other towns barred Londoners from entering.
The Londoners elaborated conspiracy theories about the plague, followed half-mad “prophets,” and swallowed the poisons of quack doctors; they ran from each other, screamed from upper-story windows, and danced naked in agony in the streets. Then suddenly the curve began to flatten, and people rejoiced. They threw away their caution with their fear; though there were still as many new cases as before, the daily new case numbers had stopped rising. That caused a kind of second spike, but then it was all over. The plague was gone. “And I alive!” cried Defoe’s narrator, “H.F.” “And I alive!”
I said to my independent study student at that first meeting, because we had to talk about the coronavirus before we could talk about anything else: all of a sudden, everything has stopped being modern. Do you know what I mean? Yes, she said. Good, I said, I’m glad, because I don’t think I know what I mean by that, and as I write this six months later, I still don’t think I know what I mean by it. But I stand by the truth of the statement.
For one thing, humanities classes seem much less useless; there seems to be a point to reading earlier literature, after all. Ten or twelve years ago, despite the Great Recession, the emphasis was, still, always, on the future, which was widening out, becoming ever brighter, ever more abundant. Of course it would; we were Americans. There would be continuous improvement and worldwide connectivity. The world would become ever flatter, one big libertarian social network powered by freedom of choice. Already our bodies no longer weighed us down. The acne-pitted faces that had been common among students in my high school were long gone, airbrushed away by doxycycline and face peels, to be followed, in the life cycle, by cosmetic surgery, Botox, vein removal, hip replacements, and of course mood stabilizers, performance-enhancers, pills to improve focus and endurance, all to make us bright, productive, optimistic achievers. Our generation, said my students then, will achieve human immortality. The body will never again be a locus of suffering and limitation; what good could it do, then, to read Dostoevsky?
But we’ve learned that the burden of the body is still with us.
Four weeks into the lockdown, I’m attending a Zoom meeting of the Southwest Florida regional group for co-curricular and service-learning opportunities. The meeting facilitator asks us to start by thinking of one good thing that’s happened to each of us since the lockdown began. We each gamely offer something, but this attempt at mobilizing professional optimism falls apart pretty quickly. All of us report a sense of sudden disconnection from our colleges, our administrators, and, of course, our students. No one has any real idea how an internship is going to function when everyone involved is confined to their homes. No one at our colleges besides us seems particularly concerned about developing new community partnerships or scheduling visits to the local field research station, which is in any case also shut down.
I’d spent a fair amount of time on co-curricular activities as part of my work as college Honors director, without ever quite realizing how fragile all these programs were. My takeaway from the meeting: (which fortunately they did not ask me to give) was a picture of my professional life as a small, delicate structure perched on top of a huge system of supports, invisible to me because I had never thought to notice they were there. They made their existence known to me only when, in a matter of days, they crumbled. What I had spent my life on was ceasing to be. There would be no in-person conferences, no travel for business, few in-person classes, too risky in any case for a person my age. Student research opportunities would vanish with campus labs. Of course I wasn’t alone; I was like an actor or musician realizing that there weren’t going to be any live shows to try out for, no cruises offering a paycheck in exchange for playing boring old standards with a smile on your face, no showcases, no church orchestras or children’s theater, not even the chance to play a department-store elf, the role that launched David Sedaris’s career. The department stores are gone now too, aren’t they?
I don’t, in all honesty, know how or when we’ll recover from this. It seems we’re likely, as a society, to bumble along as a stripped-down version of ourselves, dealing with a Covid-19 that has become endemic, something like malaria, dragging down young people’s chances along with the economy. But I don’t know. No one knows. We all know that we can’t see the future and don’t know what it holds for us – except that, whatever it is, it probably isn’t good.
So is that what it means to say that everything has stopped being modern? That the future has become opaque and unreadable; that its eyes are blank?
My plan for retirement now is to move back to the city in which I was born, where some of my ancestors have lived for nearly a hundred and fifty years, and most of my relatives still live. Those who left are slowly filtering back. My niece is abandoning any further thought of a career with the airlines, something she had given twenty years of her life to, and settling into a home and a modest job a few miles from where she was born. I’ll try to travel in Germany, if the borders ever reopen, that is. I suppose they will eventually. But I don’t think there will be many grand travels or adventures in my life, or in most other peoples’ lives, anymore. We’ll be born, and live, and die, most of us, in the same place, because it will keep us safe, and we’ll scratch out whatever living those places can offer, because there won’t be much chance to grow.
For my students in the developmental writing class, getting used to Zoom teaching was painful. I wasn’t, of course, alone in having students who were under severe, multiple stresses, often struggling with poverty and inadequate computer equipment. There were many students like them in every community college. On the other hand, these were my students, and I felt their struggles every day we met.
There was a young woman, for example, who did all the shopping and cooking for her multigenerational household and held down a job as well. Four weeks into the lockdown, she was already panic-stricken and confused, twisting her strands of hair, chewing her lip, picking at her bangs obsessively during class. I gave her the number of a counseling service the college refers students to, “in case she wanted it.” There were others who needed help of various kinds. I was meeting with these students for several hours after each class and dealing with constant e-mails from some of them. They were frightened and miserable. I was not much better, but I had to do my best to reassure them. I might have helped them, sometimes.
And there was, finally, the young man pretty far along on the autism spectrum, who had “aged out” of the system and was, I think, taking my class so that he could continue to qualify for “services” as a college student. His family was supportive, and wanted the best for him, and he tried hard, but his language difficulties were simply not going to be helped by learning the textbook rules for writing topic sentences. It was a sad mismatch, but Florida has very little to offer people who are poor and disabled except workarounds like this, so I did what I could.
Before lockdown, when the class was still in person, I had noticed that he had great difficulty concentrating in class. Another student seemingly had volunteered to sit next to him and show him, one on one and step by step, what to do with each assignment. Without that help, he seemed to have no idea what to do or how to do it. He couldn’t pick it up from a lecture-demonstration or a video. With a great deal of in-person coaching and help, he might have been able to produce enough work to make it through the class.
But then came the lockdown, and Zoom class, and this was brutally hard for him. During class, he sat in a room where his younger brother and at times other family members also gathered. It was noisy and there were constant distractions. Sometimes he had a laptop to use, but sometimes he had to use his phone, and neither worked very well with the class learning management system. He constantly moved the phone and/or laptop up and down, back and forth, so the camera image on Zoom bounced around too. He complained he couldn’t get what was going on. I met with him after every class; I talked about him with the college disabilities specialist. It got worse.
Then, in the middle of Zoom class one day, he began to have a meltdown. He talked, at length, about how frustrated he was. He wasn’t understanding anything, and he wanted – he demanded – to be able to get in-person tutoring. He couldn’t learn, he said, except when someone was there with him to show him what to do. It was his learning style. He needed in-person help. He wanted to come to the college campus for tutoring. It was in his IEP.*
I tried to explain to him that there was a worldwide pandemic now, and that the college, like every place in the country, was in lockdown. And he kept saying, but I’m supposed to be able to get in-person tutoring. I have an IEP! I have an IEP!
And I finally said to him, the campus is locked down, there is no one there, security will stop you if you try to come onto campus. There is no one there to give you in-person tutoring. This is a worldwide pandemic. Everyone has to quarantine now. And there isn’t an IEP in the world that can do a thing about that.
*An IEP, or Individualized Educational Program, is a document developed for each student who has a disability and requires special education. It outlines what accommodations and services the student is to receive and is reviewed each year. However, an IEP does not follow the student to college, and colleges do not develop IEPs. Students in need of accommodations see the disabilities specialist, who notifies instructors if certain accommodations need to be made, but the process is very different.
Charlotte Pressler is originally from Cleveland. A graduate of Cleveland State University, she earned her PhD in English literature from the University at Buffalo. She retired as Honors Director at South Florida State College, where she taught English and philosophy, at the end of July, 2020.
Now I am finding that I had been at the top of the food chain, all along.
British Literature I had to be an independent study, because at my small community college, just one student wanted to take the course. In exchange, and to do a favor for my department chair, I agreed to take over a developmental writing course in the second half of Spring semester. It would be the first time I’d ever taught developmental writing, but the syllabus and exercises were all laid out; all that I had to do was follow them. I had a light teaching load that term, the last full term I would ever teach, and I looked forward to coasting into retirement. I would train my replacement as Honors Director, get the house in shape for sale, and prepare for an extended period of travel in Germany. If all went well, I hoped to apply for permanent residency.
My first hint that things would not go as planned came in March, when the European Union shut its borders to American citizens. (They are still not open, as of this time of writing.) My next hint came when I lost one-third of my retirement savings in two days, as the country locked down and the stock market crashed. Then my college shut its doors. No one was allowed on campus. We were all to shelter in place and teach our classes using Zoom.
I read Defoe in long stretches during those first two weeks of lockdown, when I had, perhaps, one good day, followed by two or three days when I stared at the walls and couldn’t account for the passage of time. My mind was like sodden wool. I fed the cats and took the garbage out. That felt like an achievement, each night. My sleep was disturbed, and often I lay awake until three or four in the morning.
When I met my student again, we threw away the norms of literary analysis, because, we agreed, it was all in Defoe, everything we were going through.
There was the wishful thinking: It’s in Holborn and St. Giles, said Defoe’s Londoners, but it won’t come here to the City. It’s in China/Washington State, said the people around us, but it won’t come here to Florida.
Then the magical thinking: Maybe it will just disappear. The cold weather / warm weather will make it go away.
Then the upwellings of hatred: It was brought to us by foreigners, let’s keep those foreigners out, by force, if we must.
And then the lockdowns came, and the numbness and terror. People tried to isolate themselves, but the poor had no choice, and had to keep on working. The court, on the other hand, had left London at the first sign of the plague, leaving the local authorities to figure things out for themselves as best they could. People tried to evade health regulations, lied about their symptoms, and broke their quarantines. Other towns barred Londoners from entering.
The Londoners elaborated conspiracy theories about the plague, followed half-mad “prophets,” and swallowed the poisons of quack doctors; they ran from each other, screamed from upper-story windows, and danced naked in agony in the streets. Then suddenly the curve began to flatten, and people rejoiced. They threw away their caution with their fear; though there were still as many new cases as before, the daily new case numbers had stopped rising. That caused a kind of second spike, but then it was all over. The plague was gone. “And I alive!” cried Defoe’s narrator, “H.F.” “And I alive!”
I said to my independent study student at that first meeting, because we had to talk about the coronavirus before we could talk about anything else: all of a sudden, everything has stopped being modern. Do you know what I mean? Yes, she said. Good, I said, I’m glad, because I don’t think I know what I mean by that, and as I write this six months later, I still don’t think I know what I mean by it. But I stand by the truth of the statement.
For one thing, humanities classes seem much less useless; there seems to be a point to reading earlier literature, after all. Ten or twelve years ago, despite the Great Recession, the emphasis was, still, always, on the future, which was widening out, becoming ever brighter, ever more abundant. Of course it would; we were Americans. There would be continuous improvement and worldwide connectivity. The world would become ever flatter, one big libertarian social network powered by freedom of choice. Already our bodies no longer weighed us down. The acne-pitted faces that had been common among students in my high school were long gone, airbrushed away by doxycycline and face peels, to be followed, in the life cycle, by cosmetic surgery, Botox, vein removal, hip replacements, and of course mood stabilizers, performance-enhancers, pills to improve focus and endurance, all to make us bright, productive, optimistic achievers. Our generation, said my students then, will achieve human immortality. The body will never again be a locus of suffering and limitation; what good could it do, then, to read Dostoevsky?
But we’ve learned that the burden of the body is still with us.
Four weeks into the lockdown, I’m attending a Zoom meeting of the Southwest Florida regional group for co-curricular and service-learning opportunities. The meeting facilitator asks us to start by thinking of one good thing that’s happened to each of us since the lockdown began. We each gamely offer something, but this attempt at mobilizing professional optimism falls apart pretty quickly. All of us report a sense of sudden disconnection from our colleges, our administrators, and, of course, our students. No one has any real idea how an internship is going to function when everyone involved is confined to their homes. No one at our colleges besides us seems particularly concerned about developing new community partnerships or scheduling visits to the local field research station, which is in any case also shut down.
I’d spent a fair amount of time on co-curricular activities as part of my work as college Honors director, without ever quite realizing how fragile all these programs were. My takeaway from the meeting: (which fortunately they did not ask me to give) was a picture of my professional life as a small, delicate structure perched on top of a huge system of supports, invisible to me because I had never thought to notice they were there. They made their existence known to me only when, in a matter of days, they crumbled. What I had spent my life on was ceasing to be. There would be no in-person conferences, no travel for business, few in-person classes, too risky in any case for a person my age. Student research opportunities would vanish with campus labs. Of course I wasn’t alone; I was like an actor or musician realizing that there weren’t going to be any live shows to try out for, no cruises offering a paycheck in exchange for playing boring old standards with a smile on your face, no showcases, no church orchestras or children’s theater, not even the chance to play a department-store elf, the role that launched David Sedaris’s career. The department stores are gone now too, aren’t they?
I don’t, in all honesty, know how or when we’ll recover from this. It seems we’re likely, as a society, to bumble along as a stripped-down version of ourselves, dealing with a Covid-19 that has become endemic, something like malaria, dragging down young people’s chances along with the economy. But I don’t know. No one knows. We all know that we can’t see the future and don’t know what it holds for us – except that, whatever it is, it probably isn’t good.
So is that what it means to say that everything has stopped being modern? That the future has become opaque and unreadable; that its eyes are blank?
My plan for retirement now is to move back to the city in which I was born, where some of my ancestors have lived for nearly a hundred and fifty years, and most of my relatives still live. Those who left are slowly filtering back. My niece is abandoning any further thought of a career with the airlines, something she had given twenty years of her life to, and settling into a home and a modest job a few miles from where she was born. I’ll try to travel in Germany, if the borders ever reopen, that is. I suppose they will eventually. But I don’t think there will be many grand travels or adventures in my life, or in most other peoples’ lives, anymore. We’ll be born, and live, and die, most of us, in the same place, because it will keep us safe, and we’ll scratch out whatever living those places can offer, because there won’t be much chance to grow.
For my students in the developmental writing class, getting used to Zoom teaching was painful. I wasn’t, of course, alone in having students who were under severe, multiple stresses, often struggling with poverty and inadequate computer equipment. There were many students like them in every community college. On the other hand, these were my students, and I felt their struggles every day we met.
There was a young woman, for example, who did all the shopping and cooking for her multigenerational household and held down a job as well. Four weeks into the lockdown, she was already panic-stricken and confused, twisting her strands of hair, chewing her lip, picking at her bangs obsessively during class. I gave her the number of a counseling service the college refers students to, “in case she wanted it.” There were others who needed help of various kinds. I was meeting with these students for several hours after each class and dealing with constant e-mails from some of them. They were frightened and miserable. I was not much better, but I had to do my best to reassure them. I might have helped them, sometimes.
And there was, finally, the young man pretty far along on the autism spectrum, who had “aged out” of the system and was, I think, taking my class so that he could continue to qualify for “services” as a college student. His family was supportive, and wanted the best for him, and he tried hard, but his language difficulties were simply not going to be helped by learning the textbook rules for writing topic sentences. It was a sad mismatch, but Florida has very little to offer people who are poor and disabled except workarounds like this, so I did what I could.
Before lockdown, when the class was still in person, I had noticed that he had great difficulty concentrating in class. Another student seemingly had volunteered to sit next to him and show him, one on one and step by step, what to do with each assignment. Without that help, he seemed to have no idea what to do or how to do it. He couldn’t pick it up from a lecture-demonstration or a video. With a great deal of in-person coaching and help, he might have been able to produce enough work to make it through the class.
But then came the lockdown, and Zoom class, and this was brutally hard for him. During class, he sat in a room where his younger brother and at times other family members also gathered. It was noisy and there were constant distractions. Sometimes he had a laptop to use, but sometimes he had to use his phone, and neither worked very well with the class learning management system. He constantly moved the phone and/or laptop up and down, back and forth, so the camera image on Zoom bounced around too. He complained he couldn’t get what was going on. I met with him after every class; I talked about him with the college disabilities specialist. It got worse.
Then, in the middle of Zoom class one day, he began to have a meltdown. He talked, at length, about how frustrated he was. He wasn’t understanding anything, and he wanted – he demanded – to be able to get in-person tutoring. He couldn’t learn, he said, except when someone was there with him to show him what to do. It was his learning style. He needed in-person help. He wanted to come to the college campus for tutoring. It was in his IEP.*
I tried to explain to him that there was a worldwide pandemic now, and that the college, like every place in the country, was in lockdown. And he kept saying, but I’m supposed to be able to get in-person tutoring. I have an IEP! I have an IEP!
And I finally said to him, the campus is locked down, there is no one there, security will stop you if you try to come onto campus. There is no one there to give you in-person tutoring. This is a worldwide pandemic. Everyone has to quarantine now. And there isn’t an IEP in the world that can do a thing about that.
*An IEP, or Individualized Educational Program, is a document developed for each student who has a disability and requires special education. It outlines what accommodations and services the student is to receive and is reviewed each year. However, an IEP does not follow the student to college, and colleges do not develop IEPs. Students in need of accommodations see the disabilities specialist, who notifies instructors if certain accommodations need to be made, but the process is very different.
Charlotte Pressler is originally from Cleveland. A graduate of Cleveland State University, she earned her PhD in English literature from the University at Buffalo. She retired as Honors Director at South Florida State College, where she taught English and philosophy, at the end of July, 2020.
Char,
ReplyDeletelove your writing. lemme know if you swing by...