UPDATED AT THE BOTTOM (Picture: pedestrian street in downtown Denver.) Now that 2022 is officially over, here are some highlights of the year for me. The biggest event was, of course, that my mother died suddenly back in May. I was extremely shocked and one day I may write about the details but not now. She died too early. Then two months later, her dog, whom she adored and who adored her back, also died suddenly after he realized she wasn't coming back. Mom and her dog were my favorite two-legged and four-legged people in the whole world, and navigating this grief has been hard. #GriefTwitter has been very helpful, though.
I wanted to do something I wouldn't have done if mom hadn't died, to honor her memory, so I decided to apply to a couple of low-residency MFA programs in fiction writing. (Low-residency means it won't interfere with my job, because the short residencies are all outside the regular semesters at the university where I teach.) I was admitted to my dream program and I am so excited. It is good to reconnect with that side of me because being Faculty Senate President during the pandemic was incredibly disheartening and I am not sure I can ever recover the old me but at least I can move forward. And it is good to develop a community of fellow creatives all over the country.
I also finished the next round of revisions to my novel (the one about the opera singers) and my literary agent sent it out recently. It was very exciting because writing this novel has stretched over way more years than I had anticipated and getting the book to this stage was an important milestone. That novel is also a key reason I applied to MFA programs -- I don't want my current novel to take nearly as long to be finished. I am really lucky to have the literary agent I have and I have plenty of ideas for more books, but I need to finish them.
(Pictures: LA cityscape, theater program in LA, theater programs in NYC). I started traveling more again. I always double-mask on planes and in the airports, and it has always been really important for me to travel, so I am glad I get to do it again. This year I've been to Denver, CO, Portland, OR, Los Angeles, CA and New York City, which deserves its own post (to come soon). I also traveled to Bayreuth, Germany with my father during the summer because my parents had tickets to Tristan und Isolde at the Bayreuth Festival (they would go every few years before the pandemic). T&I plays a key role in my novel and I wanted to cheer my father up so I took my mother's place. I had seen a previous production of T&I at Bayreuth with my parents but it was underwhelming, so I am really glad I got to see this production, which was excellent. Also, I was thrilled to realize that Catherine Foster, whom I had seen in the Ring as Brunnhilde both at Bayreuth and at the Washington Opera (different productions, both excellent, although the one at the Washington Opera was more my style), was singing Isolde. The hardest part was to see so many women looking older than my mom when she died, strolling around the festival grounds during the intermissions. Why couldn't my mom survive?
What else? I was named an alternate for a Fulbright award to Austria (Vienna) but being an alternate means you only go if the people ahead of you in line for the same Fulbright award don't go, and they went. I didn't apply this year because I was too stunned by my mom's death, but I plan to re-apply next year. I did manage to graduate two doctoral students (one PhD, one DEEM), before my mother passed. The work accomplishment I am proudest of, though, was coming to the (academic, not literal) aid of a sick student. My mom had taught for decades at a technical community college outside Paris and she loved helping her students.
Another thing I did was to sign up for 200-hour yoga teacher training, also to get out of my post-Faculty Senate state, although that was before my mother died, so the worst was still to come (thankfully that part happened during the summer when I don't teach). The best part of the training was to have to take 30 hours of practice, and to understand what some yoga teachers are doing wrong in their sequencing, including yoga teachers who sell many DVDs. The issue with doing the sequencing wrong is of course that students may get injured. My life is always better when I have a regular yoga practice, and now I am doing two other online trainings to keep the momentum going. Doing yoga helps with my focus and energy.
I started learning Ukrainian on Duolingo after the Russian invasion in February. I am about to reach the 300-day mark: I have practiced Ukrainian almost 300 days in row now. Frankly the only reason I have been able to learn Ukrainian on Duolingo was that I already knew Russian. I don't know how anyone could learn it from scratch using that app only. A lot of the exercises are very repetitive and you can be asked the same question in multiple lessons, but sometimes it is downright funny, for instance when the app asks you to translate "What is my name?" (girl, if you don't know your own name, you have bigger problems on your hands than learning Ukrainian), and I love how it counts your answer as wrong if you spell Kyiv as Kiev (that is the spelling I learned when I was in school decades ago so sometimes it comes back, although now I am careful not to use what is in fact the Russian spelling.)
I am slowly getting back into dance and this year I picked up an interest in musical theater because of my going to New York City. Last year and the year before that, I had already been taking online playwriting courses with a mostly Denver-based group and since I used to dance ballet many, many years ago and also have an interest in opera, I suppose it was always meant to be that I would look into music theater at some point, although I spent my college years in Paris watching straight plays and ballet and never musicals (they are not produced much in France).
In June I was a keynote speaker at a workshop in the U.K. It was really good and I reconnected to my passion for research. Faculty members outside the U.S. have in general a much healthier attitude toward academia too, at least in my experience.
This year I taught engineering management both semesters (in addition to other courses) and I really liked it. The first time I taught the course, in Fall 2021, I used a previous case studies package that I hadn't developed in addition to a book that I selected but that a large minority of the students disliked. Their main reason was that the book basically only portrayed white males as managers, which was understandable given the historical period covered by the book (decades ago at NASA) but disappointed a large segment of those among my students who weren't white males, so I picked new case studies and new books and now the students like the new books a lot more.
Then in the fall, using recent academic literature about novel grading methods, I tried a different grading technique where I had the students write assignments about which letter grade they were going to go for, how they planned to achieve it and what may stand in their way, and the best part of it is that they got to share with me any potential problem they may face, such as a very heavy course load or an anxiety of public speaking (the course uses in-class discussions a lot). I had never felt so close to understanding my students before. Sometimes, when students are on their laptops in class, it is easy to assume they are doing something fun like online shopping while I try to give the lecture but in fact a lot of them have to deal with very intense course loads and they also tend to be perfectionists. Without that assignment, I would never have realized so many of them wanted to do well in the course but were anxious of public speaking, which was very important in the course. One of the two sections I taught had 55 students in it (the other had 36). That made difficult for all students to participate, especially students who have anxiety speaking in class. I am making some changes to address this in the spring.
The assignment helped me get a better sense of the rigorous education engineering students receive at the university where I teach (every engineering undergraduate student must take the engineering management course before graduating, but before teaching it I only knew the workload of students majoring in my department). I have been so impressed by my undergraduate students this year -- the great things they do in their major, the many rigorous courses they juggle, the fantastic capstone projects they accomplish, the high standards they hold themselves to, the discipline they bring to their studies and the internships and full-time jobs they secure. (I know about the internships and jobs because they also have to write an introductory post on the Canvas discussion board to the whole class.) I joined this university because I love undergraduate teaching and it took me some time to figure out the fit because at my previous employer my strongest teaching contribution was in a quantitative senior elective course in operations research but it turns out that here my strongest contribution is in teaching that engineering management course. My mom would be so happy to hear I have great undergraduate students and they are set to do great things after graduation.
When I re-read this post before publishing it, I realize I've had several milestones in 2022 but my mom's death will always mean that 2022 was an awful year for me. I miss her.
UPDATE: I forgot to write that I completed the CASA (court appointed special advocate) training and got sworn in!
(Picture below: high-level view of Portland from a lookout point with a large tree on the right.)
