The Leaves on our Trees

Every once in awhile, if you’re lucky, you get a teacher who changes your life.

I’ve been fortunate to have had a few over the years, notably my cello and orchestra teachers, without whose influence I would be a very different person. But I also had one very special English teacher in high school: a wonderful lady by the name of Penny. All of her senior students got to call her by her first name, and I was looking forward to earning that privilege upon completing her class at the end of my junior year. It was the spring of 2004, and I had loved her English class. It was hard work – Penny didn’t take crap from anyone, and she also didn’t accept any late work. She demanded and received responsibility, attention, and excellence from her students. Through literature, poetry, and essay writing, she got us to think critically, to examine the deepest parts of ourselves, and to develop empathy and compassion for others. Imagine my dismay, then, when she told my class that we were to be her final students – she was retiring.

Not to be deterred, I struck up a friendship with Penny after she left teaching. I had connected with her on a deeper level than most kids find with their high school teachers, and I didn’t want to lose that bond. She seemed to value me too. When Penny, who had long been a single mom, got married in 2004, I was the first student at school that she told. It hadn’t been a big to-do of a wedding, and it hadn’t even occurred to her to announce it to her students. But she felt like she should tell someone, so she confided in me one day after class. Being a self-absorbed 16-year-old, this didn’t make much of an impact on me at the time and I had almost forgotten about it. But years later she reminded me of this fact and shared what it had meant to her to have a student she could trust with the details of her personal life.

Autumn foliage in Oregon

So what was Penny’s influence on me? She didn’t teach me to write. I was already pretty competent by the time I got to her class. Although she did, however, help me refine and examine my writing, and taught me the value of using writing as a means of self-reflection. She didn’t teach me to appreciate literature, either. I was already a bookworm. I read some great stories and poetry in her class, but I could have done that on my own. What Penny did was she told me I could be a writer. 

She didn’t just say it once, either. She would write it in her comments on my school essays. She would write it in her emails about my blog posts. Over the course of nineteen years, during which we kept in touch and would get together when I came back to town, she never neglected to encourage me to become an author. She said that whenever I got up the courage to write a book, she would gladly volunteer as an editor. During that whole time, outwardly, I was enjoying my career as a music teacher. But deep down, I really wanted to write.

Admittedly, until recently, I never seriously considered ditching my music career to become a writer. I had invested too much time and energy into teaching music to even fathom giving it up. And besides, a healthy dose of realism and pessimism prevented me from thinking I could ever succeed as an author. But Penny planted that seed in the fertile soil of my mind twenty years ago, and finally the first tender sprouts are springing forth. The specter of failure still sits with me every time I sit down at my writing desk, but I’ve found the courage and the confidence that Penny always knew were there.

I last saw Penny in person around Thanksgiving 2019. I brought my then three-year-old daughter with me to Penny’s house and Penny was absolutely delighted to chat with me about books, films, and travels and to play hide and seek with my daughter behind the cushions of her overstuffed couch. We had a lovely time together, but I could tell that something wasn’t quite right. When we had knocked on the door, Penny opened it still wearing her bathrobe. She had forgotten about our meet-up. No problem though; she quickly changed and we sat down to a cup of tea surrounded by the many wonderful paintings on her walls. We had a lively conversation, but I noticed her occasionally repeating statements and questions that she had said only a few minutes earlier. This forgetfulness was new to me – I hadn’t seen any evidence of it before, and it was pervasive enough that I started to feel a tiny crack in my heart when we left. This was more than just her getting older. Her memory was slipping away from her. 

A few months after our last visit, the world began its quick collapse under the weight of Covid-19. Consecutive lockdowns, coupled with our move from Hawaii to England made it highly unlikely that I would see Penny again any time soon. As the months turned into years, it became more and more difficult to get in touch with her. Not because of her memory, but because of my fear. Penny had such an incredible mind - sharp, inquisitive, insightful - that I couldn’t stand the idea of her losing those powers of thought. I decided it would be too hard to see her diminished in such a cruel way. So when we finally came back to Oregon, nearly three years later, I made the rather cowardly decision to not get in touch with Penny. How I regret that now.

I’m back in Oregon for my first Thanksgiving since 2019. I decided to become a full-time writer in September, thanks in no small part to Penny’s persistent encouragement for more than half of my life. So at this time of gratitude and reflection, it felt only right to contact Penny and thank her for never giving up on me. I didn’t know how she was doing, I wasn’t sure if she would respond, but I needed to try. I emailed her and waited. A week went by. With each passing day, I felt more certain that things had gotten much worse for her. Finally, I saw an email from her in my inbox. My heart leapt for a moment, only to be crushed in the next when I saw that the response was from Penny’s husband, offering to call me with an update.

Penny is now in a memory care facility. She was moved there about nine months ago and her husband visits her several times a week, taking her out to lunch, and bringing her back home for a few hours. But every time he takes her back to the facility, she gets upset again, which must be absolutely heartbreaking for him. Nonetheless, Penny’s husband kindly offered to take me to see her. He was hopeful that she might want to go out for coffee, or at least chat with me in the cafeteria. I, on the other hand, had no idea what to expect. Would she remember me? Would she want to talk to me? Would any of the teacher that I loved and respected remain?

The answer: I’m not sure.

Perhaps due to some side-effects from her medicine, Penny has recently been sleeping for most of the day. When we visited her, she was tucked up in bed, unable to stay awake for more than a minute. She hadn’t had breakfast, hadn’t gotten out of bed at all that we could see. She was so drowsy it seemed like she was struggling to come out of general anesthesia. When she briefly sat up, I could see that her gray hair was longer than she used to keep it, and was unusually untidy. She looked old and depleted, not the petite firecracker of wit and wisdom that I was accustomed to.

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But when she saw me, for a brief moment her eyes lit up, her wan face transformed with a radiant smile, and it was just like old times. Her husband asked if she remembered me and her response was a quiet but enthusiastic “Yes!” I felt replete with hope, my heart so happy to see her smile.

Then, just as suddenly, she flopped back down on her pillow and closed her eyes as if we weren’t even there. After a few more attempts to wake and engage her, Penny’s husband went to the cafeteria to procure a bit of food for her breakfast. When he returned, she and I shared a small chuckle when, with a sassy shake of her head she replied “ppfft” in response to an offer of strawberry yogurt. It was a very Penny-esque gesture, and I felt a moment of relief that some element of her was still there. 

But that was as much as we got from her. Not long after, she wanted us to leave so that she could sleep again. With tears in my eyes, I walked away from my dear friend and mentor, leaving her to waste away in a place that projects a false cheerfulness to hide the profound sadness of the inmates who are experiencing memory loss.

A good teacher leaves indelible marks on her students, helping them to grow and to overcome the obstacles in their path. Penny achieved all of this and much more in her decades of teaching. I only had one year in her class, but was lucky enough to get nineteen years of her friendship. I am beyond grateful for her love, encouragement, and support, and would give anything to take away her present afflictions. But even now, I’m still learning from her - learning how to have courage and strength in the face of difficulty. And of course, she’s still inspiring me to write too. 

Here’s to you, Penny. Thank you for everything.

What is a postdoc?

Today's post is for everyone wondering "what is Rory actually doing in Paris? What is a 'postdoctoral researcher' really?" Since you asked the question, you get to learn about the wonderful world of academia and higher education.

The answer is, on one level, quite simple, but also quite complex as there are many caveats and exceptions. The simple answer is that a postdoc is a form of temporary employment for people with PhDs, which allows them to gain extra training and experience before (presumably) moving on to a permanent position as a professor.

For the longer answer, we have to consider the traditional career trajectory of someone with a PhD. This trajectory is roughly (a) get a PhD, (b) be hired into a professorship. (By "professorship" I mean being hired as an "assistant professor" in North America, or as a "lecturer" in the UK. The positions are broadly equivalent. (Confusingly, "lecturer" in the North American context has a different meaning.)) However, there are two problems with this traditional trajectory:
1) There are very few professorships, and quite a lot of people with PhDs
2) Some fields of knowledge are so very specialized that even after getting a PhD, your knowledge is not complete or effective enough to do groundbreaking original research.

So, as a partial solution, a "postdoctoral" period of additional training is common. Postdoc positions are very diverse, but traditionally they involve working with a mentor (usually an established, famous researcher) on some new project that is related to but not the same as your previous research. Along the way, you will learn new skills, theories, and frameworks, and acquire valuable experience in writing up research articles and supervising students. Some postdoc positions involve working on a specific, pre-determined project, some are open-ended. Some positions involve a little (or a lot) of teaching, to postgraduates or undergraduates, while some have no teaching. Some involve a lot of committee work, organizing, and managing, while others do not. Some postdocs don't even have an explicit mentor.

In some fields, such as the natural sciences, doing a postdoc is all but mandatory if you want to stay in the academic game. (In natural sciences, there are also a lot of job opportunities for PhDs in private industry, so that's where many people go instead of professorships.) In the humanities, postdocs are somewhat rarer. In the social sciences (like linguistics and cognitive science), they're fairly common. Postdocs also appear to be more common in Europe than in North America, although I think that's more to do with the volatile nature of higher education funding in Europe than an actual cultural preference. Indeed, it's not uncommon for academics in Europe to be sustained purely through research funds acquired from grants, rather than through a direct contract from a university. They're still affiliated with a university, but their salary comes from a research foundation (usually funnelled through the university, who skim money off the top so they can pay their electricity bills). This kind of precarious academic situation is becoming more common, and all it takes for them to face unemployment is a few failed grant applications or research budget cuts. It's scary.

So, postdocs are really diverse. What's mine like? Well, I have a supervisor (or a mentor), and together we are working on a project that is largely of my own devising. I do not have any teaching responsibilities, although I've been informally mentoring some master's and PhD students, and I'm otherwise free to pursue my research in whatever way I like. All in all, it's a great position, and very conducive to learning new skills, getting papers published, and making me more attractive for landing that coveted professorship job.

What do postdoctoral researchers actually do, though? For me, there is a lot of variability in my day-to-day activities. Here's a rough outline of the sorts of things that I do:

• Attending discussion groups. Someone may seek expert feedback on a research proposal or a draft presentation for a conference.
• Meetings. Yes, you can't escape meetings, even in higher education. Meetings with collaborators to discuss our projects (and assign tasks and keep people on schedule); meetings with students to review their progress; meetings with the whole lab to discuss administration; meetings with visiting scholars to talk about their latest project; and more.
• Reading articles. Staying up-to-date on the current state of the field is very important - new findings are always being published, and new methodologies and techniques developed. I spend a lot of time simply prioritizing what I need to read closely, what I can simply skim, and what I can ignore. There's a lot of good science out there!
• Designing and planning experiments. This can be a long process and is often one of the most varied aspects of my job. It can involve making recordings, combing through dictionaries for words with just the right combinations of sounds, creating huge spreadsheets to make sure your designs are "balanced", tweaking hardware to ensure that stimulus presentation is correct and that responses are accurately recorded, learning new programming techniques for presenting stimuli, and more.
• Analyzing data from experiments. This part can also take a while, depending on how much (or little!) work I did in the planning stage. This usually involves a lot of statistics and a little programming. For many experiments, acoustic analysis is also necessary (and invariably tedious).
• Preparing presentations to give at professional conferences. Sending work-in-progress for consideration for presentation at conferences is all part of the job. The feedback you get at conferences can really improve the work that you do, and the personal connections you make with people can be really important too. Before the conference, of course, many hours are spent perfecting the presentation - you only have your audience for a brief time, so you have to be sure that you convey your message well.
• Writing (and re-writing) articles for publication in scientific journals. This is a big part of the job. Academics are judged to a large extent on the quality (and quantity) of their publications. Finished articles are sent to a journal, who sends them out to reviewers (other academics) who write critical reviews of the article, saying whether it's good enough to be published. Usually, it isn't, and they demand particular changes - incorporate a particular theory into the discussion, run another experiment, change the statistical analysis. Sometimes they simply reject the article as inferior. It can be a slow, gruelling, and soul-crushing process. Still, getting published and contributing to humanity's understanding of the world is pretty great.

I won't do all of those things in a single day, but they're all things I do. There's usually a fair degree of overlap - while I am planning my next experiment, I'll also be analyzing the data from the previous experiment, and writing up the results from the experiment before that. My job is self-directed and generally very flexible, which is great in some regards. It also means it's easy to procrastinate or skive, so I usually try to impose a fairly rigid structure to my days with clear goals so that I actually get things done.

I definitely enjoy my job, but there are times when I wish the system were simpler, or that the process of proving your worth as a researcher didn't involve so many hoops to jump through. Still, that discussion is probably better saved for another post. Sorry for the lack of pictures today. Next week, we'll be talking about Rouen (in Normandy), so you have that to look forward to!

New Zealand-inspired writing

The calm and peaceful atmosphere I found in New Zealand made it easy for me to write, something that I've always enjoyed doing but have put off for many years because my life felt too harried and busy. So it was wonderful to be surrounded by nature with my notebook in hand, being able to examine my thoughts and reflect on the world and my experiences therein. Below are two short products of my time spent in parks in Christchurch. 

Not your average university park

I'm sitting on a tree-shaded bench, staring at a barely moving, bog-like stream. The warm sun is streaking through the leaves, but its heat is tempered by a mild spring breeze. Bird song swirls around me like surround sound, and in the not-too-far-off distance, I can hear cars and construction equipment. In front of me are huge globe-like ground plants that look like Albert Einstein's hair with static electricity running through it. On the other side of the stream, bright green dinosaur-sized kale-shaped leaves hang on thick stalks over the water. Fern trees and pale pink rhododendrons round out the menagerie of unfamiliar plants. Apart from the blackbird hopping about inquisitively near the water, I am entirely, gloriously alone.

If I could block out the sounds of the construction crews, it would be easy to forget that I am on a university campus. In fact, I would surely be unaware that I am in the most populous city on New Zealand's south island. Rather, I would be quickly convinced that I had stumbled upon my own peculiar, quasi-tropical island, and I would feel as though the rest of the world never existed. New Zealand does that. It has a way of kindly but dramatically introducing you to the glories of God's earth and persuading you that none of your petty concerns really matter. Even with all the madness in the world today, I find an unflappable sense of calm and contentment here. The world keeps turning.

Roses were out in full bloom. I made a point to stop and smell them frequently. They were divine.

This side of the earth
I'm sitting on a park bench in Christchurch
feeling the sun and the warm spring breeze.
I'm surrounded by birdsong and roses
and the leaves that are dancing on trees.

How incredibly lucky I must be
to experience two springs in one year,
when back in my hometown of Paris
a cold gray winter is near.

But it's not just the seasons that changed
when I came to this side of the earth.
A calm and serenity found me,
helped my soul to a joyous rebirth.

Not so for the people of Paris right now
whose grief and anger are clear
at the act of hatred and violence
that sowed seeds of terror and fear.

I admit I'm relieved to be sitting here,
to feel safe and protected and free,
but I ache for my friends in the city
who don't have such a luxury.

Yet the news shows us flowers and candles,
Parisians lending each other a hand.
Fighting violence with love and compassion
and showing kindness to their fellow man.

Quelle surprise! I quietly think to myself
as Paris is known for being rigid and cold.
When people don't smile or even look at you,
treating strangers with love is quite bold.

But that's the norm in New Zealand it seems.
Here they're generous and friendly and kind.
Being surrounded by nature will do that to you,
clear your spirit, your heart, and your mind,

So with a clean slate I'll go back to Paris,
which has changed in both bad ways and good.
And I'll try to hold onto this calm I've found
when passing soldiers in my neighborhood.

I hope we will help and support one another
to rebuild and find peace once more,
since it's unity that will heal the world's ills:
At last a cause worth fighting for.