Spinning Yarns

An amusing thing happened outside my house last night.

I was lying on the sofa, reading news, when I heard a loud, wild whoop from outside. “Whoo!” someone shouted. Then: “Whoo hoo! Whoooo-hoo-hoo-hoo!” And then, “AAAAAAAH! AAAAAH! WhoooooooooHOO!”

Naturally, my curiosity was piqued. While the road I live on is pretty well travelled, it’s a fairly rural area. I mean, when I lived in Hanover, people did stupid stuff like that all the time — mostly, though not exclusively, Dartmouth students. It wasn’t even particularly noteworthy. You’d be amazed what someone will shout out when they’ve had enough to drink on a Wednesday night after House Meetings. So, right enough, but it’s a little bit more surprising when it happens in the middle of a big old cow pasture eight miles from the College.

I got up off of the couch, put on my Hobnailed Hiking Boots from Hell, and popped out the door onto the porch. Now, it quickly became clear that the voice was out in the field somewhere, across the road from me, although I could not see the owner, it being rather too dark, and there are no streetlights. It was a male voice, though, and as he shouted, you could hear him punctuating his exclamations by slapping and beating on his chest.

“AAAAAAH! AAAAAH! WHOOOOOO-hoo-hoohoohoo! WOOLA-WOOLA-WOOLA-WOOLA-WOO!” he shouted, and slapped his chest.

And then, “FUUUCK!” Thump-a-thump-a-thump. “FUUUUUCK!”

And then, even louder, “FUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOU-HOO HOO!” Followed by, “AAAH! AAH! WOOLAWOOLAWOOLAglahgrughargh!”

And then, “FUUUCK YOOOOU!”

At first, I was a little concerned that there might be a bunch of young people out causing mischief, and I considered the possibility of calling the police. Because it’s hunting season, I had some additional concern they might be armed. So, I took my Sixteen Year Staff out with me, not because it could stop any bullets, but because I don’t currently own any firearms, and the weight of a piece of steel-shod maple in your hand makes you feel a little safer when you’re outside in the dark on a chilly late-autumn night, where some guy who might or might not have a gun is screaming WOOLA-WOOLA-WOOLA-WOOLA-WOO! in the cow pasture across the way.

He went on like this for quite some time — probably at least fifteen or twenty minutes — but eventually you could tell he was starting to get hoarse, and he subsided a bit. There were still a few loud and occasional cries of “WHOO!” and “AAAAH!” but the more interesting stuff was mostly done, and I stopped worrying that my house might get invaded by a bunch of drunken louts out for a mid-November cow-tipping party. I imagined it was some guy, drunk off his ass, beating his chest and wailing and going WOOLA-WOOLA-WOOLA because his girlfriend had kicked him out of the house, and blowing off some steam. Of course, I have no idea whether this is even vaguely accurate, but it’s a satisfying enough explanation, that I don’t really feel much need to look for more truth.

Needless to say, I was (in retrospect) quite deeply amused.

Filed by Michael at 21:46 under Personal, Story
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Across the street from Sudikoff Hall in Hanover, there is a parking lot. Not a nasty, dirty, wet parking lot, filled with the ends of battery cables and an oozy smell; nor yet a dry, bare, sandy parking lot, with no space to turn around in or to park. It is a faculty parking lot, and that means comfort. The origins of our particular parking lot…but what is a parking lot? I suppose some explanation is needed, now that they have become rare, and shy of people. This parking lot wasn’t always there — once upon a time, not too long ago, there was an enormous building covering most of that area. But, once the new Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center went online in October of 1991, the old Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, which covered most of that space, was no longer needed, and it was demolished in September, 1995. Once the rubble was cleared away, they levelled the ground, and paved it with asphalt, and made it into a parking lot for the faculty and staff of Dartmouth College, who seem to think they have some kind of divine right to park their cars right next to the building where they work.*

* And when I say “they,” I should also properly include myself, since I too belong to the category of Dartmouth faculty and staff. But I don’t think I have a divine right to park my car right next to the building where I work, even though I certainly have found it convenient to do so, on occasion.

Within a couple of years, everybody forgot about the old hospital, and got used to the parking lot. Of course, it’s not as if anyone forgot about the existence of the hospital, except for the incoming students, who had never seen it before. It’s more that nobody really thought about it consciously, once we all got accustomed to the fact that there was no longer an enormous rectilinear box looming over Maynard St. and frightening the children. Besides the looming, it had been a really ugly building anyway, so it was no great loss, if you ask me. The original hospital was a nice bit of 19th Century craftsmanship with nifty arches and windows, but by the time they knocked the whole thing down, the nice bits had been buried behind an enormous red brick sarcophagus, yet another nail in the coffin of architectural good taste. The old mental health annex, located diagonally across the street, was not demolished. Instead, in a burst of irony bordering on inspiration it was renovated for use as an academic building, using funds donated by the Sudikoff clan, and turned over to the Computer Science department, and that’s where I began my tale.

Now, it seems the Ghost of Buildings Yet to Come has visited the Facilities Planning Office, and they’re getting ready to rip up the aforementioned parking lot, and build a couple of new dormitories there. Speaking as a battle-scarred veteran of the undergraduate housing system at Dartmouth, I applaud this use of space. Wearing the hat of a crusty alumnus, however, I’m concerned about the implications of this additional housing. For one thing, I think the College has been admitting too many students for the past ten years or so. The housing crunch wasn’t caused by the students all getting fat, it was caused by the Administration admitting too many people into each new freshman class. Most of the alumni seem to be opposed, on principle, to increasing the overall size of the student body at Dartmouth, but it’s hard to argue with the profit motive. And anyway, the Administration doesn’t go to the alumni and solicit donations “for the purpose of increasing the student body.” Instead, they admit overly-large classes, and then go beg the alumni for help in “solving the housing problem caused by the great popularity of your wonderful alma mater.” Six of one, a half-dozen of the other — there’s more than one way to de-fur a feline.

When charged with admitting overstuffed classes, Admissions officers argue that they can’t reliably predict how many of the students they accept will actually agree to come. Fair enough — it’s a complex question. Furthermore, they argue that if you reduce the number of students you send offers to, a greater percentage will accept, because it’s more exclusive. Again, this is a reasonable argument. But the think other bright Ivy League admissions officers seem to do in these circumstances is to admit fewer students outright, and put a few more on the wait-list. That way, if they find their return rate is too low, they can admit a few more off the wait-list. Dartmouth College may not be the No. 1 rated school in the country, but it’s certainly a damned fine institution, and they can afford to put people off. Maybe they’ll miss a few of the creme de la creme that way, but the fact that they admitted me already proves they’re willing to compromise on quality in exchange for amusement. And, if they get a couple of smaller classes while they work out the kinks in the system, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. For one thing, they could stop housing rising sophomores in dorm lounges for the first couple of weeks of the fall term, and tear down the so-called “temporary” dorms they threw up a few years ago (and how they bullyragged the Town of Hanover into accepting those, I will never understand).

So, anyway, we’re going to get some new buildings, and that’s that. I can only hope that the architect they hired to design them has a modicum more design sense than the clowns they hired to design the new Baker-Berry Library complex, which has all the visual appeal of a Kindergarten child’s crayon drawing, but without any of the dynamic emotional character or kindly associations. I try not to even think about what the place costs to heat and cool throughout the year. Just as a note, in case you were ever thinking of building a large building of some kind — do not hire the firm of Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates to design it for you. Posterity, your wallet, and the environment will all thank you most kindly.

Filed by Michael at 02:32 under Personal, Story
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It’s almost come to that point of the term when everybody takes a deep breath, and looks down into the still blue water of term’s end. It’s a moment of stillness and contemplation, before we leap into the air and plunge swiftly through the open space of the last two weeks before finals. The final exam period at Dartmouth is intense, but it is (thankfully) comparatively brief — a quick shock of cold, a blur of frenetic activity, and then we will all be swimming slowly away into the calmer waters of December break, when a College town like Hanover empties out in a self-conscious and disorderly hurry, as if nobody wants to be the last one left on stage after the closing curtain. I can’t blame anybody for that, although I don’t share the sentiment. I like December in Hanover — it’s peaceful and relaxing, and the fact that everybody’s gone means I can get some research done.

We’re not quite there yet, but everybody can feel it in the air. Attendance at lectures has declined, and a number of those who do attend have taken up seats nearer to the back of the classroom, and they nod their heads only when their chins bounce off their chests. I don’t take this personally; I’ve been tired too. I have to admit that if it weren’t for my good friend 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, there have been a few occasions when I would have been hard-pressed to focus on lecture at all. You can give a lecture when you’re tired, but unless your principal goal is to lull your students to sleep, you need to be awake enough to be clever and engaging. should the opportunity arise. Even then, nifty concepts that would have set their heads nodding with appreciation a few weeks ago, and even evoked an appreciative murmur, now get a much cooler response from the students. They’ve worked hard, and it’s made them jaded. I keep expecting somebody’s hand to go up, and to hear a voice say, “Michael? Our brains are full. Can we go home now?” What can you do? Sometimes class is a long row to hoe.

But at least midterm exams are done now. I’m at least as relieved about that as my students are — in fact, possibly more so. I like to give two midterm exams in this course, so I don’t have to load the entire front half of the course onto a single test. I tried that once, and it resulted in The Midterm that Ate Toledo. So, now I give two smaller ones, and although each individually might nosh on a suburb, they could not eat a major metropolis unless they started a gang, and got the final exam to join up and form a posse. But writing two exams is four times the work of writing one, especially when they have an appetite, so I did a lot of late-night feedings. Much to the chagrin of my class, the second one turned out appreciably harder than the first one was. Mostly, I did this on purpose, because the mean on the first exam was too high to be useful as a diagnostic, and a harder exam is a better test of what the students really understand. But I say “mostly” because coming up with good test questions is really difficult, and I’d used up a lot of the obvious questions I could have asked on previous year’s exams, and I don’t like to re-use test questions. So, I had to rack my brain for interesting problems, which resulted in questions that were less obvious, and consequently, more difficult. I’d like to claim it’s not my fault, but I did write them.

Anyway, modulo a certain inevitable amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth that results when the mean drops almost twenty points, things seem to have settled down again, and I can breathe a little. Not too much, though; I still have a lot of writing to do for my own research, which I let fall by the wayside in the midterm scramble. Time to pick that back up, and get ready to dive.

Filed by Michael at 00:37 under Personal
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