Volunteer Explorer

Lascivious. Vulgar. Admonish. These are some of the words my Advanced Conversation students wanted help understanding yesterday. And they happen to be some of my favorite words. They are favorites not because of their definitions, but because of the way they feel in my mouth when I say them, and because of the reactions they can elicit from listeners. Few people react mildly to hearing about lascivious speech or vulgar acts. And no one likes to be admonished. Besides, when I hear or read these words, I automatically picture Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights," with all its wanton nudity and twisted depictions of tortured sinners. Unsurprisingly, the newspaper article my student gleaned these words from concerned a college football player who had behaved very poorly in public and whose punishment was being benched for several important games. ( Benched was another word my students were unfamiliar with.) Just before our class started, I was ove...

The transition from student to faculty has been odd for me in its ease. I thought I would have more difficulty thinking of myself as an instructor, especially because I don't technically instruct. I spend my days in the Writing Lab explaining, informing, and guiding, but I never instruct. Still, I have a natural kind of authority when I'm around the students in Polsky. I'm sure it's in large part due to being twice their age. But authority is perception, so I'll take it however it comes. The chain of command at Polsky, real or imagined, was thrown into fairly stark light last Wednesday, when a tornado passed through the Akron area. Chelsea, the most seasoned of our peer tutors, interrupted my session with a student to tell me—show me, actually, on her phone—that the University was issuing a tornado warning and that all faculty and students were advised to take shelter on the lowest level possible of the building. I had just received a similar warning on my ...

I received the 2013 Annual Report from the International Institute in the mail this week. Seeing it sandwiched between ads for gutter guards and lower car insurance rates evoked an odd mix of emotions. Sadness and regret bumped up against equal measures of relief and…something else, something I couldn't name right away. It was something like the feeling a traveler might have who changes her plans at the last minute, then realizes the plane she would have been on went down over the Atlantic with no survivors. Or maybe it was like the feeling of seeing the guy you almost married in college at a reunion, now married to someone else and fat and balding, and realizing he is nothing at all as you remember him. Disaster narrowly averted or escaped. This is the project that made me change my mind about volunteering with the Institute. This is the project that made me change my mind about writing for other people, about writing for a living, about how much of my time and energy I a...