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"If I were a rich man..."

8/21/2015

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"Yabba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum..."  (That sounds like it to me, anyway--if you look up the lyrics, you'll find several versions of that line.) Fiddler on the Roof remains one of my all-time favorite movies and stage plays, with Tevye one of my favorite fictional characters, and this, one of my favorite songs. 

The opening lines are well known, the bridge section less so.  After enumerating all the things he would do if he were rich--he "wouldn't have to work hard," he'd build a big tall house with "rooms by the dozen" and one stairway "leading nowhere, just for show," he'd fill his yard with ostentatiously noisy live poultry, et cetera--the tempo shifts from lively to stately as Tevye observes:

"The most important men in town would come to fawn on me.  They would ask me to advise them, like a Solomon the Wise.  If you please, Reb Tevye... pardon me, Reb Tevye... posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes..." Tevye chants briefly, pauses, then turns to the audience.  As the light-hearted tempo and more familiar tune resumes, he sings, with a wink:  "And it won't make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong--when you're rich, they think you really know!" 

Long fermata here, as if giving the audience time to contemplate what Tevye has just said: "When you're rich, they think you really know."

I thought of that song the other day when I was reading this AAUP Academe blog on boards of trustees and the role they play in university governance.   As blogger and educational specialist Brian Mitchell points out:  "By far, the weakest link in the governance chain is the trustees.  Often successful in business, law, medicine and other fields, they take their considerable talent to a non-profit setting.  Unfortunately, the issue may require an approach using an entirely different skill set than applied in a for-profit business."  

To understand the differences between higher education and the trustees' own fields of specialty, Mitchell continues, calls for "ongoing trustee education":  "Colleges today are complex and operate more like small cities than for-profit businesses.  They are in the business of relationship-building.  It is critical that Boards of Trustees understand the policies and protocols that matter differently than those they see in business and professional settings."  Responsibility for such trustee  education, Mitchell places at least partially at the feet of college administrators. 

This is all well and good; I wholeheartedly agree.  If a person is going to serve as a "trustee" for a nonprofit organization--that is to say, "one to whom something is entrusted"--such a person ought to understand exactly what it is that he or she is holding in trust for someone else.  This seems too glaringly obvious to need mentioning.  (Why some boards are composed of "regents" rather than "trustees" becomes an interesting lexical question, given that "regents" historically governed a kingdom when the sovereign was unable to do so, due to youth, disability, or absence--causing me to ponder why a university with a president would need to have "regents."  But I digress.) 

Surely it's reasonable to expect some of the impetus for such education to come from administrators themselves.  And in an ideal world, administrators would receive much of their own guidance from faculty members, and even from staff and students--in other words, the people who are involved in the institution on a daily basis and know, from the ground, what's going right, what's going wrong, and what's needed.  (Yes, I know -- here I should shift from Fiddler on the Roof to Aerosmith: Dream on.)

Mitchell's essay prompted me to think about another question that his blog entry doesn't specifically address:  In higher education today, who are most of these trustees?  How are they selected, and what makes a person qualified to serve as a trustee (or regent)?  All too often, board members are mysterious entities; board members and faculty often would not recognize on the street, even when they often cross paths.  All too often, it is also the case that board members come from professions outside education, and usually at incomes that are higher income levels than that of the average liberal arts professor--not to mention the countless lesser-paid staff members who keep the university running on a daily basis, or the legions of minimally paid adjunct faculty members who lack benefits, job stability, and even a living wage.

What makes people qualified to be trustees?  Could it be that the selection process relies on the logic expounded by Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof: When you're rich, it's assumed that you "know," even if you're venturing into a field about which you actually know very little?  And what is it about education that makes us assume that powerful, influential, and wealthy people--often, with no background in education--believe they have both the know-how and the right to determine how education is governed? 

This seems to happen at all levels of education, not just at the university level. You  have the Gates Foundation, with Bill G. able to shape and even determine the course of public K-12 education in this country based on ... what, exactly? I read recently about a newly appointed member of a state school board who comes from a background far afield from education, who gushed about this wonderful opportunity to "come full circle" because at an earlier age, the person had "thought about becoming a teacher."  

Interesting.  At an earlier age, I thought about becoming a doctor, a psychologist, and an avionics engineer.  I wonder how many hospitals, mental health organizations, or transportation safety boards would like to invite me, with my PhD in English, to offer my expertise to them, based on my childhood dreams and the enormous social influence afforded me by my currently frozen five-figure salary.  I'm sure if I offered, the response would be, "Sorry.  Go play in a different sandbox."

And it appears that that's how many (I would assume not all) trustees/regents view their task: more as a sandbox to play in than as a sacred trust held on behalf of an institution whose long-term welfare, as well as the welfare of those whose lives are significantly influenced by it, depends on their wise and well-informed decisions.  This may stem from two assumptions that appear to drive trustee selection: (1) the assumption that professional experience within education isn't necessary to wield power and influence in that field; (2) that when you're rich, "you really know."

I wouldn't argue that every single trustee should have an educational background.  To the contrary, on any governing board a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives is a positive thing.  Fiscal responsibility is a positive, not a negative, and boards can only benefit from having a few members with solid backgrounds in fields like business and law.  I am also not suggesting that wealth is inherently a bad thing.

But when it comes to governance, the term "diversity" needs to be taken seriously.  Boards will be even more effective if they are comprised of people from a true range of backgrounds, including but not limited to professional expertise and experience, socioeconomic level, race, gender, and more. 

Imagine the difference if at least some board members had significant firsthand knowledge and experience in education.  Imagine the difference if at least some board members were of average financial means and could share the perspective of families and students who struggle to pay tuition. Imagine the difference if some board members understood what happens in educational institutions, at the ground level, on a daily basis.  Meanwhile, diversity of race, ethnicity and gender should be a no-brainer (though if you look at actual board representation, it appears that in most cases it isn't). 

Imagine the world we would have, both in higher education and elsewhere, if Tevye turned out to be wrong.  Imagine what could happen if we didn't begin with the assumption that wealth is really the best measure of whether a person "knows" what's best when entrusted with an entity's overall well-being.
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And then there were none? 

7/30/2015

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I know a sad tale.  It's about a small private university that once had a dozen full-time faculty members teaching foreign languages.  Now there are three.

That same university once had four full-time faculty members teaching performing arts.  Now there is one.  


That's just the tip of the iceberg.  In the past year and a half, the total number of faculty members in the university's liberal arts college has been sliced almost directly in half.  Why?  Lots of reasons.  For one thing, this institution offers no tenure.  Instead, faculty members receive extended contracts, subject to periodic renewal.  For many years--decades, even--nobody thought it mattered much, since faculty dismissal without cause basically did not happen. 

Then it happened.  Now, people who work there are bemoaning the lack of tenure, and the lack of a union to protect the university's workers.  Too late. 

And so the ranks of the departing/departed began to increase.  Those who were able to find other jobs, left.  When administration offered a phase-down retirement plan, first to anyone over sixty with at least ten years' experience and then to anyone over fifty, many people took it.  It's sort of like being a character in the Agatha Christie play, And Then There Were None, in which a character disappears in every scene.

Almost none of the faculty who departed--whether by dismissal, voluntary separation, or retirement--have been replaced.  (Lately, "served on search committee X" has not been a line on anyone's C.V.)  In many cases, classes--and even programs--were simply axed.  Where that couldn't happen, salaried faculty members were replaced with part-time adjunct instructors who are paid by the course, accruing no benefits.  If these part-time workers were allowed to teach full loads two semesters per year, their total wages would equal an annual income at the poverty level for 2 people in the state where that university is located.

But these part-time instructors can't even do that, because if they taught a full load, the law requires the university to provide them with benefits like medical insurance.  In years past the university limited part-time teachers to 3 courses per semester, since state guidelines required them to provide insurance to anyone teaching 4 or more courses per term.  When a court case changed that threshold to 3 courses per term (recognizing, wisely, that the hours a teacher spends in the classroom are only a small portion of total hours worked), the university responded not by offering insurance to its part-time teachers, but by limiting each instructor to 2 classes per term.  This means part-time instructors must also work elsewhere as well; otherwise, the maximum they can make in one academic year is a couple thousand dollars less than the poverty level for one person, in the least expensive state in the union.

(With such significant salary savings being realized, you'd think tuition would be a bargain.  After all, when major retail chains operate this way, at least their prices go down--I will grant them that--but when universities follow suit, for some reason their prices tend to go up, and astronomically!)

Right now there are so many directions I could go with this post.  Much ink has already been spilled elsewhere on so many interconnecting issues: over-use, under-payment and exploitation of adjuncts, university failure to replace full-time faculty, the slashing of liberal and performing arts, the "crisis in the humanities," the financial crunch experienced by small private universities, the follies of late capitalism, administrative bloat, the problematic "student-as-customer" paradigm, the takeover of higher education by a business-minded mentality.  Much has been, and is being, said.  What can I say here that hasn't been said already? 

What occurs to me, as I ponder the sorry direction in which our educational system seems to be heading, is the emphasis on utility--the veneration of things that are considered useful, practical, profitable, productive, efficient, cost-effective, over things that are considered superfluous, frivolous, costly, unproductive, labor- or capital-intensive.  In this mentality:

              business students = good, poetry majors = bad
              science = good; music = bad
              finance = good; foreign language = bad
              (by extension, teachers of business, science and finance = good; teachers of poetry, music or foreign language = bad)
              squeezing every last ounce out of your employees = good; treating people humanely (or at least paying them a living wage and benefits) = bad
              squeezing every last penny out of your students (while pretending to indulge their whims) = good; providing a challenging intellectual experience that is ultimately meaningful though not always pleasant = bad 

And so it goes.  The scary thing is that once we start down the road toward pure utility, cost savings and productivity, where does it lead?  

How, for instance, does a society over-emphasizing utility treat its members who may be unable to contribute as much to the economy as others--namely, how does it treat the elderly, the young, those with various disabilities or illnesses? What kind of society do we end up with, if few people know how to speak a language other than their native tongue?  Or when few people know how to make music with others?  Or when few people have studied something other than how to squeeze the last dime out of a business transaction?

I thought about the interconnections of all this as I was finishing one of the novels on my summer reading list--Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, which has generated considerable and well-deserved positive buzz.  Like all the best novels I've read, I felt totally immersed in the worlds Doerr created, and when the book ended, I felt abruptly yanked back to present reality.  Of all the interconnecting threads that make up this novel, most haunting to me was the story of young, little Werner Pfennig--the genius German orphan and radio-whiz for whom joining the army was the only viable alternative to a brutal life in the coal mines that killed his father.  

Werner isn't your stereotypical sadistic Nazi--just a young, bright yet naive teenage boy who wants something more out of his life and who, at least initially, doesn't totally understand what he's getting into.  The well-written passages narrated through Werner's consciousness are disturbing because they make it possible for the reader to identify with the experience of being slowly indoctrinated into fascism; falling into denial; hearing, and for years ignoring, whispers of conscience, until a crucial climactic moment when Werner understands and makes a moral choice--after which he can no longer continue to live with himself.  It's analogous to the proverb regarding the frog in slowly boiling water, which appears in the novel too.

The other thing that strikes me about Werner's experience is the fascists' emphasis on utility, productivity, and purpose.  In some of the novel's most harrowing scenes, young soldiers are trained for ultimate toughness--no weakness, no flaw, no trace of humanity allowed, and anyone who displays any of those traits will be destroyed (including Werner's kindhearted young friend Frederick).  We all know that Nazi ideology was fueled largely by racism grounded in false biological theories of hierarchy and superiority. And we can easily see how dehumanization leads down a slippery slope toward fascism and genocide.  Yet sometimes it's easy to overlook other, more apparently mundane aspects of the mentality underlying such viciousness--such as a focus on what's useful, practical and profitable, to the exclusion of all else.

Yet isn't that where dehumanization starts--with the assumption that what's utilitarian, profitable, cost-effective and practical is more important and valuable than human feelings and relationships?

I'm not saying that any manager who's made cost-saving budget cuts is on his or her way to becoming the next dictator, or that people who major in (or teach) accounting instead of humanities are fascists, or that downsizing leads automatically to outrageous human rights abuses such as genocide.  I'm also aware that many of those "at the top" of numerous repressive regimes have been denizens of the arts, so I don't take a simplistic position that arts and creativity are automatically going to save us from our own worst capabilities.  It isn't that simple.  I'm quite a practical-minded, hard-nosed "accountant" myself when I have to be--and I'm well aware that if the numbers don't work, neither does anything else.  I firmly believe we need all professions in our world--accountants and bankers and scientists, those who perform crucial tasks of manual labor, masters of all that is practical, working alongside musicians and writers and humanities teachers and cartoonists and whoever else.  We need all of it.  

But that's my point--we need all of it.  To keep our balance as a society, we need to understand that while there are times and places for the balance sheet and other practical considerations, there must also be times and places for creativity, enjoyment, relaxation, even frivolity--and for pursuits such as the study of foreign languages, music, and other subjects that are both capital and labor-intensive.  The situation described above isn't unique to any particular institution. Right now it's a story repeating itself in many other locations, with variations--offers screaming evidence that our society as a whole is wildly out of balance, that we've lost our way; that for some reason, far too many of the people in charge seem hell-bent on heading down a path that emphasizes utility and productivity at the cost of everything else.

It's time for us to find a different path.
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Young adults adrift: why?

6/19/2015

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Looks like good old Arum & Roksa are at it again, following up their 2011 Academically Adrift with a new book, Aspiring Adults Adrift.  And, just as in their first book, it appears this doomsday duo wants to lay all the blame for today's "adrift" young adults at the feet of university professors. 

In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks buys glibly into Arum & Roksa's assumption: "The average student at a four-year college studies alone just over one hour per day. That is roughly half of how much students were compelled to study just a generation ago," says Brooks in his paraphrase (emphasis mine). Meanwhile, Brooks continues, "Colleges have become socially rich, stocked with student centers, student organizations, expensive gyms, concerts and activities."

(Clearing throat)  Ahem. Yes, I've noticed that many colleges are emphasizing extra-curricular amenities over academics, expanding their facilities rather than their faculties, and agonizing over whether they have rock-climbing walls and gourmet cafeterias rather than investing in pointless little things like ... teaching.  (Please read sarcasm here.)  

But where is this distorted sense of priorities coming from? I don't know any single faculty member who supports the continual leaching of funding from academics and toward flashy facilities, or the increasing reliance on and exploitation of adjunct faculty while investing more and more money in stuff like swimming pools.  For the sake of argument I'll concede that some such people might exist somewhere. But from my vantage point it appears that, as much as academics are notorious about disagreeing, most of us share similar dismay about the shift from scholarly pursuits  toward things that should be peripheral to our central mission.

This distorted sense of priorities, I would argue, reflects the priorities of certain (not all) administrators, rather than faculty--though faculty are always the ones blamed when students don't appear to be learning enough.  A generation ago, says Brooks, students were "compelled" to study much more; nowadays, according to Brooks, today's students have attended colleges where they were "not taught to work hard."

But if a student fails to work hard, who is responsible for that?  And how much is the onus on the college to "compel" students to study?

I find much more compelling the argument made by Hunter Rawlings in a June 9th article for the Washington Post: "College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one." Rawlings criticizes our society's penchant for analyzing the "value" of a college education in "purely economic terms"--a subject in itself, of course. After discussing the non-monetary value of education, he then points out what most of us who teach already know: "The value of a  degree depends more on the students' input than on the college's curriculum." Here he states something that most of us who teach have witnessed: "I have seen excellent students get great educations at average colleges, and unmotivated students get poor educations at excellent colleges." 

What matters most, says Rawlings--and this certainly resonates with me--is student effort: "You need a professor who provokes and a student who stops slumbering." Universities do, of course, have responsibilities to meet, and it's a two-way street: "It is the responsibility of colleges and universities to place students in environments that provide these opportunities.  It is the responsibility of students to seize them."

I don't argue completely with some of Arun & Roksa's findings; as someone whose job it is to teach and mentor college-age students, I do see that many of them have a difficult time, at least initially, with navigating post-college life. The challenges that Arum & Roksa refer to--difficulty in finding good jobs or establishing stable and long-term romantic relationships--are real situations for many.

But what might be the underlying reasons? Are today's "adrift young adults" products of a university system that failed to "compel" more studying, as Brooks suggests? Is the difficulty that many young adults encounter with finding good jobs--or, closely related, the fact that many move back with their parents for a while after college--the result of lax demands by lazy university professors?  (As for the problem of establishing stable romantic relationships--I could expound for hours on that subject, but is this even remotely related to the purpose of a college education?)

Or, could it be that we have an American culture that is too often anti-intellectual and lazy? Could it be that we are obsessed with instant gratification, meaningless entertainment, and mindless consumption? Could it be that our consumeristic society promotes the commodification of everything, including education, and including human beings? 

Could it be that well-paying jobs for young adults are scarce because corporate greed has made it systematically more difficult for young adults to find decent jobs? 

Could it be that college graduates often move back home not because they're psychologically perpetual teenagers made lazy by "slacker" colleges, but because in a world where most wealth is controlled by a tiny minority, their economic situation necessitates a shared housing situation?  

Could it be that too many university administrators, eager to grab student tuition dollars, are all too willing to offer students the same pablum that permeates the rest of our culture, rather than modeling a different set of possibilities through their own spending and planning priorities?

In his discussion of Arum & Roksa's latest, Brooks takes an interesting turn when he suggests that life itself often teaches young adults what they need to learn. He optimistically claims (though without providing evidence) that "by age 30, the vast majority of them are through it"--"it" being the general aimlessness of the 20-something years.  "After a youth dazzled by possibilities and the fear of missing out," says Brooks, "they discover that committing to the few things you love is a sort of liberation."  

On that point I agree with Brooks--commitment is the key to a successful adulthood.  To make a choice almost always means choosing against something else.  That's why it can be hard to decide to marry someone, or what field to major in, or where to go on this summer's vacation, or what to order for tonight's dinner. Growing up, to a large extent, is about accepting and ultimately embracing the choices we make, recognizing what the late folk singer Harry Chapin sang in his under-appreciated ballad "Story of a Life": "For every dream that took me high, there's been a dream that's passed me by." 

And if we want a few dreams to "take us high"--a few goals realized, a few life visions achieved--we have to commit: This primary relationship and not that one. This home and not another. This career; this hobby; these children. This life. 

We also have to do the hard work demanded by all those things; any dream worth the trouble requires considerable time, energy, and effort.  In our current consumeristic, convenience-minded, capitalistic, commodified society (how's that for alliteration?), fulfilling our goals often means going against the grain, tuning out countless cultural messages, joining forces with the like-minded, and persisting in the face of extremely long odds.

The irony is that for all the hand-wringing by people like Brooks, Arum & Roksa about the supposed inefficacy of the 20-something generation, they actually play into that very possibility when they suggest that young adult laziness lies in the failure of the university to "compel" sufficient study time.  If we really want more of our young adults to step up to the plate sooner, to take charge of their own lives more readily, to make the sometimes-tough choices and commitments that adulthood requires, then we have to ask them to do exactly that.  Rather than putting all the onus on colleges, we need to heed the words of Rawlings: "Good teachers 'supply oxygen' to their classrooms . . . students need to make a similar commitment to breathe it in and be enlivened by it." Placing the onus entirely on the teacher actually perpetuates the kind of "learned helplessness" that Arun & Roksa find so troublesome.

Finally, if we want today's young adults to be successful, we'd also do well to work toward creating a world more rich in opportunity for all--a world in which higher education is economically accessible for all who are willing to make the effort, a world in which decent-paying jobs are easier to come by than they are now.  Not least of all, we need to work toward a world in which those held most accountable are not the young and powerless and indebted, but those who actually have the power and the means to provide opportunities to today's young adults.

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To be here, or not to be here? (an end-of-year teacher self-reflection)

6/7/2015

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The 2014-15 academic year is finally in the books.  And, like so many educators I know--particularly in arts and humanities fields--lately I often find myself pondering whether it makes sense to keep on doing this or not.  

If I were easily persuaded by vitriolic public discourse, I'd probably decide no. It's all so dispiriting--the public perception that humanities degrees are useless, or that professors are out-of-touch, lazy slobs who work ten hours per week; the erosion of tenure protections (along with public misconceptions about what tenure is and is for); attacks on academic freedom; the exploitation of part-time adjunct faculty; non-replacement of full-time faculty members who retire or leave; calls for "accountability" and "assessment" that strip-mine our curricula and straitjacket our teaching; the unwelcome meddling of for-profit entities; reduced access to higher education by those lacking economic privilege, not to mention reduced access to the professoreate as a career path ... the list is so endless that I'm sure I'm leaving out something crucial.

So many low points this year.  Yet still so many highs. (Insert cliched expression about roller-coasters here.)

This particular roller-coaster was the sadistic type--one that saves its final nauseating loop-de-loop for the final seconds.  Fall semester was crazy, spring semester crazier. As for the final weeks of spring semester--I don't even know what word there is for that, and an English professor deprived of lexicon is a rare thing indeed. (Note under Archives, the lack of entry for May 2015. There are reasons for this gap.)

The world keeps spinning.  As does my head. 

all-day workshops on core competencies and accreditation ... how to operationalize measurements of creativity without standardizing them ... students aren't learning enough and it isn't their fault for not showing up or doing the homework, it's our fault ... spreadsheets, budgets ... behind-the-scenes wrangling ... revision of major degree requirements ... new joint degree plans, negotiations ... new general education plan, how to assess it ... scheduling challenges ... enrollment projections ... exhaustion ... honor society induction ceremony, with pizza (there's always pizza) ... student learning outcomes, or are they objectives, and what's the difference ... assessing senior portfolios ... capstone symposium  ... leave capstone symposium early when son's school calls to say he's broken his foot in P.E. ... senior seminar papers ... final class day, potlucks, senior tears ... grading ... grade complaints ... student evaluations ... spousal kidney stones while teenager recovers from pneumonia ... party for graduating seniors ... photos ... 

A week before graduation, two of our English majors get married in the backyard of a house shared by four of our alumni.  Most of the wedding party and guests are students, alumni and faculty in our small program. Four weeks earlier, many of the same people had gathered for a colleague's memorial service. 

Five days later, many of the same people gather in our town's arena for our graduation ceremony.  When students  walk across stage, I am the one to read many of their names.  (Workshop presenter has suggested  we follow up with these "data points" in the future, as they may--or may not--provide us with "indirect evidence of institutional effectiveness," depending on whether they go on to demonstrate "success." Today, the data points are wearing caps and gowns and honor cords and an array of interesting shoes.)

speeches ... meeting students' families ... photos ... farewells ... my husband, who teaches in a different field at a different institution, wins an Excellence in Teaching Award ... celebrations ... family visit ... birthday celebration for colleague's baby ... 

A graduating senior presents several of us with customized coffee mugs featuring end-of-semester group photos from classes we taught.

grant requests and travel forms, committee meetings and task forces, draft conference paper and update CV ... asthma attack and bout with sinusitis ... web site updates ... draft 2016 schedule ... fall adjunct staffing ... ad placement ... HR rules constantly changing ... prominent administrator at competitor institution says faculty are not being "fully utilized," though most--like me--are clocking sixty hours per week or more ... 

Our graduating senior class presents the entire faculty with a yearbook they have created themselves on Shutterfly, compiled of scenes from this crazy, wild roller-coaster ride of an academic year. They've been photographing themselves, and us, all along--documenting their last year together in this small program at a little-known institution. On the last few pages they each write a handwritten message to our faculty as a whole. 

They say things like, "You all will never know just how big a role you played in my life and success. Thank you for all of the opportunities and support you've given me in my time here." "You will never truly know the full extent of your positive impact on my life, both personally and academically." "I am forever thankful and blessed to have been taught by you all. I wish you could all follow me to my next location!" "Thank you for teaching me to be a better thinker and better person.  You all made a huge difference in my life."

Self-reporting is suspect in the data world, but I'm told we can indeed use this  yearbook as "indirect evidence" of "student success"--provided it's "triangulated" with other "meaningful data," including objective corollaries that "prove" we actually have taught our students to become "better thinkers." 

Better people? Positive impacts on personal lives? Who tracks that? 

Three weeks after our university's graduation ceremony, my teenage son "graduates" from middle school.  For this sort-of-ceremony, there are no caps or gowns or honor cords, they all wear practical shoes, and no band plays "Pomp and Circumstance"--it's just a short assembly in the school cafeteria.  Still, each kid is called by name and walks across the stage to a round of applause.  

I don't applaud for my son alone. I've known many of these kids since they were small--either I tutored them in reading as a parent volunteer during kindergarten, first and second grades, or my husband coached them in basketball and/or soccer, or all of the above.  Many of them, I've watched sprout from near toddlers to teenagers. 

It's only going to be four more years until many of them show up in a college freshman composition course like the one I teach.  I imagine they will be much like my own college freshmen at first--nervous, skittish, a bit uncertain as they begin to negotiate the huge gap between high school and college. 

Four years after that, most of them will--I hope--walk confidently across the stage as young adults ready to make their way in our crazy and confusing world. Like our graduating seniors did three weeks ago. I remember when most of them were freshmen too.

The middle-school principal speaks to the audience of young teens and proud parents.  He tells us, "We're pressed a lot from all sides right now--pressed to make our students high-school ready, so they can be made college-ready and career-ready. I have every confidence you will all be college and career-ready. What matters to me even more is that you become better people. I know many people who make less money than I do and have less influence, yet many of those people are role models for me. I also know many people who make more than I do and have more influence, yet many of those people are not role models for me. Yes, I want you all to be successful, however you define success. But even more, I want  you to be compassionate, decent human beings, even if nobody is putting the pressure on us to produce that."

more celebrations ... more goodbyes ... students move away, some very far away, including the newlyweds ... some who left long ago come back to visit ... son registers for high school  ... elementary school puts on elaborate end-of-year show ... my children bring home yearbooks signed by their friends ... prepare fall syllabi ... consult enrollment data ... more bad press ... teachers are lazy ... humanities fields are a waste of time ... we need to prove we're doing our jobs ... Prove it!

I re-read the handwritten signatures in the yearbook produced voluntarily by our graduating seniors, now alumni (also known as "data points"). 

"Words can't express my gratitude for all you've done to change my life for the better."

Not everything that matters can be expressed by words. Or even data. 

I'm in for another year.  Another year of one day at a time. Another year, I hope, of ups.  A year, I hope, with fewer--or at least less extreme--downs.

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"THE POWERFUL PLAY GOES ON..."

4/18/2015

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First, my apologies for the lag in posting.  First my twice-weekly blog became a weekly blog. Then it became bi-weekly.  Right now, it seems to be monthly.  I hope to change that soon, since I do enjoy expounding on various education-related topics.  Obviously it's difficult to keep up a blogging schedule when one is chairing a department, teaching, and raising a family. Life is always crazy.

But this semester's craziness goes even beyond the usual.  Shortly after classes began last January, our  newest faculty member--who also happened to be one of our youngest--was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor.  He died in mid-March, a little over a week after my last post below. 

Our late colleague was outstanding in every way--as a teacher and scholar, and most importantly as a person.  This isn't just the rosy, nostalgic tendency often found in eulogy; he really was that remarkable.  The loss is tragic in more ways than can be counted--most of all for his wife, family and closest friends.  Yes those of us who worked with him and studied with him are feeling it deeply too.  Still. 

The weeks prior to his passing were bittersweet.  Many of us enjoyed wonderful, meaningful visits with our colleague and his wife, before he left to receive hospice care in his hometown.  We are grateful for that time with him, and we'll cherish those memories.  

His family held the primary memorial service in their hometown.  Last weekend we held our own, here at the institution where he expected to work for many years to come.  

This was the second such service our department has conducted this academic year; as I mentioned in a post from last October, right before the fall 2014 semester we lost a student who died at age 22 of a hereditary illness. Two losses in one academic year, both of them untimely.  It's been tough on our small department.  

This blog is (ostensibly) about the value of the humanities and liberal arts, the need for those of us within the academy to engage in dialogue beyond our walls, and the true purpose of higher education beyond job training.  I've been pondering how to tie those themes together with the tragic loss that's colored virtually everything about my professional life for the past eleven weeks.  It's hard to do so without sounding like I'm spouting standard cliches, or tactlessly exploiting recent circumstances just to score a cheaply earned point.

Right now, in fact, it feels challenging to make any kind of point.  Poet Paul Celan once said that in the face of tragedy, language has to "pass through its own answerlessness, pass through a frightful falling mute."  Figuring out what these losses mean--what, and how, we might be able to make these lives that have been lost to us mean something--takes time, takes more than words, and goes beyond words.  "The frightful falling mute."

And still, I keep writing.  I keep trying.

We keep looking for silver linings. 

There have been a few.  Besides being small, our department is cohesive, relatively free of the kinds of rifts I've seen develop in some places.  That's not limited to faculty: We are also fortunate to know our students as people, not just as numbers, and most of them know us, their professors, as people too. Not everyone is best friends with everyone else; we have our moments, our differences of opinion, and our expected human shortcomings.  But we've pulled together in spite of all that.  Right now it feels like that counts for something.  

And both this colleague and this student were gifts in our midst.  Rarely do any of us get to choose the people we work with, or study with; the universe pretty much throws us together with a bunch of random people and says, "Here they are, as they are.  Deal with them."  Often that doesn't turn out so well.  But sometimes, people come into our lives by accident yet end up meaning a lot to us--often more than we thought they would, and sometimes more than we realized, until it was too late to tell them so.  

It's almost May now--both my most and least favorite month on the academic calendar.  It's the month of achievements and awards, celebrations and ceremonies, finals and finish lines.  Ay, there's the rub: it's also the month of farewells.  Even in a good year, May means elation, followed by dispersal. After the ceremonies of May, nothing is ever the same.  With seventeen years of teaching, I'm sort of used to that rhythm, at least in principle.  I love the high points.  Yet I still struggle against the inevitability of annual change. 

May is always a month of goodbyes.  This year, it feels even harder than usual.  There have been too many already.

More loss is inevitable as we grow older, of course.  Invest as much you like in hair dye or anti-wrinkle cream, but gray hair and wrinkles are only the symptom of what's happening here, not the problem, and there's nothing we can do to stop time.  I'm always amused by the prefix anti-aging, since being "against" aging feels about as intelligent as taking a stand against gravity or the laws of thermodynamics.  Aging, how do I hate thee?  Let me count the ways.  But you're here to stay.  For all that, those of us who get to experience aging are the luckier ones.  No matter how expensive the face cream, the one thing we all want can't be purchased at the beauty counter, or indeed anywhere:  time.  

Unlike the marketing folks with their ridiculously impossible prefixes, I do grasp the futility of raging against aging.  I know that endings are inevitable. But why must it so often happen to younger people?  People who are the same age as my nephews?  People young enough to be my own children?  

I realize that none of us are alone in having experienced or witnessed more than a few unjust, untimely deaths.  As my favorite song from Sondheim's Into the Woods reminds us: "No one is alone."  So many people have harsh tales to tell, many of them even harsher than these.  So many people have been forced to survive losses that did not feel survive-able.  These two stories are just two among trillions, or whatever number is larger than multiple trillions.  They are all part of the grand narrative of human life--what some writerly and philosophical types have termed "the human condition."

At the risk of engaging in tactless exploitation, my mind keeps circling back to the fact that "the human condition" is what the arts and humanities are about, what they are for, and why their innate importance to our lives seems so self-evident to me that I'm often puzzled about why we so often find ourselves having to "defend" them.  

I'm still trying to come to terms with a year in which I feel like I've been body slammed to the pavement and then dragged around for a while.  I'm still figuring out how to do that.  But I'm pretty sure the journey--like the memorial services themselves--will be far more likely to  delve into poetry, literature, philosophy, theatre, music, and art, rather than spreadsheets, marketing plans, or SWOT analyses.

Rest in peace, departed friends.  Your time here with us mattered.  "The powerful play goes on," and the verses you both contributed were beautifully and powerfully written.

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"UNINTERESTING" STUDENTS AND THE ART OF TEACHING WRITING

3/7/2015

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Recently there's been a lot of buzz in the literary world about Ryan Boudinot's piece, "Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach In One."  Some people loved it.  Some people hated it.  Some people demanded that Boudinot apologize to his former students, for saying things like "Writers are born with talent," "If you didn't take writing seriously by the time you were a teenager, you're probably not going to make it," "No one cares about your problems if you're a shitty writer," and so forth.   

I'm one of those whose general reaction was--shall we say--less than enthusiastic.  He lost me in the first paragraph with "The vast majority of my students were hardworking, thoughtful people devoted to improving their craft despite having nothing interesting to express and no interesting way to express it."  (I've never met anyone who had "nothing interesting to express"; I think people are inherently interesting.  They may be weird, they may be annoying, they may be a lot of things, but people--boring?  No.)

Of course I can't discount all of Boudinot's observations out of hand.  I may not teach in an MFA program, but I do teach undergraduate-level creative nonfiction every year, and until I recently moved into mid-level admin, I've typically taught two freshman comp courses per semester in addition to coordinating first-year writing.  (Contrary to what many believe, I don't see a huge distinction between "composition" and "creative writing"; all writing requires creativity and linguistic fluency.)  

I sort of know what he's talking about.  Whether we slog in the lower-level trenches as I do, or soar with the literary giants as he does, we've all been there.  We've all had students who say silly things like "I prefer to read books that 'don't make me work so hard to understand the words'" (cringe, especially when the person saying that claims to want to become a writer).  We've all had students who "blow deadlines and whine about how complicated their lives are."  (Caveat: While we all encounter whiners who are just whiny, some of our students do have extremely complicated lives, and it would be arrogant of me to assume I know more about their lives than they do.)

We've all had poorly performing students, and we've all have bad days (or weeks, or months, or semesters, or years).  We've all seen our share of student laziness, narcissism, delusion, and entitlement.  Those of us who teach memoir have all read pieces that beg people "to feel sorry for them" while being "riddled with errors."  (I even tell my students that few genres are more dull to read than "Once upon a time, somebody was mean to me.")  So I can't disagree with Boudinot entirely.  Teaching is not an easy endeavor in general, and I'd posit that few things are harder to teach than writing.  

Well, maybe that's the issue here: Boudinot isn't simply acknowledging that teaching writing is difficult.  It is.  There are thousands of us doing so across the country who, arguably, are dealing with far more challenging student populations than he faced. (Griping about student incompetence in a well-known MFA program?  Come and teach developmental writing at an institution few people have ever heard of!)  

But Boudinot suggests that teaching creative writing isn't even possible.  Most people, he says, have "nothing interesting to express."  (With sentiment like that floating around the academy, no wonder so much public opinion isn't on our side).  Writers, he says, are born that way, and usually manifest this innate gift by the teenage years.  (Never mind mountains of evidence-based cognitive research to demonstrate that writing, like any other complex neurological task, improves through thousands of hours of deliberate practice.  I've published on this myself, by the way, in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.)  Most people, the piece implies, are dull enough that they really ought not even to try.

This raises an ethical issue: Is it right for MFA programs (or indeed, even an undergraduate English program) to accept tuition money from students in exchange for the promise that they will be taught something, if some of the teachers themselves believe what they teach cannot be taught?  Are there too many such programs across the country, accepting too many students, charging too much money, making too many empty promises?  Such questions require further exploration.  I wouldn't feel right about an auto mechanic who had no qualms about pocketing my money with the promise of a fix, who then blasted the news on the internet that my car isn't fixable and I'm silly for thinking so.  Yet with teaching writing, something akin to this often seems to happen.

Perhaps the issue is whether the people hired to teach in such programs are actually teachers--or simply writers.  Now, there is nothing wrong with "simply" being a writer.  Writing is a noble occupation, and a difficult one.  It's enough by itself.  And teaching--while it's oxygen for many of us--is not for everybody.  Teaching calls for us to believe, for starters, that our students are teachable.  It calls for us to consider obstacles like student laziness and narcissism not as impossible dead-ends but as challenges to be overcome (and frankly, we don't win them all, so teaching also requires a high degree of tolerance for frustration).  It calls for us to realize and accept that student growth isn't always instant or visible, and doesn't always occur in ways that we would have prescribed.  Basically, teaching calls for us to have deep long-term patience as well as faith in humanity (which can be challenging at this historical/cultural moment, when all the loonies seem to be coming out of the woodwork). 

Writing, meanwhile, makes its own demands.  Not everyone is necessarily inclined toward both. And--at the risk of sounding like Stuart Smalley--that's okay.  Some of the world's greatest writers would not have been fantastic teachers.  They didn't need to be.  And if they weren't--or aren't--they shouldn't teach.  

Teaching and writing are different arts.  Some people--though not all--are good at both.  

Perhaps one of the issues with MFA programs is that too often their status stems from their ability to attract big-name writers, rather than teachers.  If institutions with MFA programs are going to accept money from fledgling writers, perhaps an ethical stance demands that they connect students with people who believe that learning to write more effectively is possible; that narcissistic early drafts can be transformed, through revision, into powerful memoirs that connect individual suffering to a larger context; that minor annoyances like verb tense shifts can be corrected.  

Would-be students should also do their homework and, when looking for a program, seek quality of teaching rather than simply big-name status.  For when students pay money and walk through the classroom door, they deserve--for starters--teachers who believe their students have something potentially interesting to express, and that their job as writing teachers is to help each student find and express that "something," whatever it may be.  

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SYMBOLISM: JUST FOR ENGLISH PROFESSORS?

2/16/2015

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"How come I have to take this stupid class if I want to be a" ... (fill in the blank -- nurse/accountant/ entrepreneur/reality TV star...)

"Am I ever going to use this for anything?"

"Why do you English professors have to analyze everything all the time--can't you just sit back and enjoy the movie/book/whatever?" 

"How come you English professors always find hidden meanings everywhere?"

"What does all this stupid symbolism have to do with real life?"

Those of us who teach English or closely related subjects have probably heard all of those—the questions that drive us crazy.  (Speaking for myself anyway, they all drive me crazy--though I admit that's sometimes a short drive.)  

Hidden meanings, symbolism--what's that got to do with real life?  What are we ever going to use it for?  (In this context, "use" usually means "make money from it"--as though nothing else is of "use." But I digress.)  Because, you know, nobody cares about symbolism except a bunch of aging hippie English teachers and their dwindling handful of nerdy students, right? I mean, it's not like people actually use symbolism in “real life.”

It's not like people assign meaning to things like crosses, or Stars of David, or moons-and-crescents, or other religious symbols.  

It’s not like anyone flies flags on public holidays and in front of public buildings.  And it’s certainly not like anyone gets offended when a flag or religious symbol is desecrated.

It’s not like military ceremonies feature particular music, symbols, protocols—nope, no symbolism there at all.

It's not like anyone wears jewelry shaped like peace signs or yin/yang symbols, or butterflies or dragonflies or the piece your grandmother handed down to you. 

It's not like anyone places yellow ribbons or Greek fishes or pictures of the globe on their car bumpers.

It’s not like we send floral arrangements to honor weddings or funerals, or decorate tombstones (for that matter, it’s not like we put up tombstones).  It’s not like anyone spends hours choosing just the right song and agonizing over the right color scheme for special occasions.

It’s not like we wear special clothing, play special music, and change our cap tassels from one side to the next after graduating.

It's not like couples in love have "their songs."  

It’s not as if sports fans wear their team colors on game day.  And certainly no one ever does anything ridiculous like dye their hair or paint their nails or paint their faces in a favorite team’s color scheme.

It's not like people today use emoticons in their communication, or display their favorite sports team’s logo as a profile picture, or, God forbid, have symbolic tattoos engraved on their very bodies.

Clearly, symbolism has nothing to do with “real life.”  Clearly, the meaning of things is always “hidden” (and therefore, not worth looking for).

It’s not like anyone ever drew a metaphorical conclusion from a sports event: a blown lead, an improbable comeback, or a near-comeback that ends with unfortunate failure by inches due to a bad decision to run on second and goal, which everyone knows you don’t do.  I mean, it’s not like anyone ever saw potential life lessons in the outcome of a sporting event.  It’s not like anyone would think a U.S. hockey victory in the 1980 Olympics makes a grand statement about the Cold War, or  that a post-Katrina New Orleans football victory symbolizes resilience, or that criminal justice would be grounded in the rules of a sport like baseball (“three strikes and you’re out”). 

It’s not as if identifying with a hometown sports team takes on a life of its own, so much so that there can be a fine line between good-natured banter and hurt feelings—or worse, eruptions of violence when those who identify themselves with two different tribes find themselves holding opposite viewpoints while sharing the same space.  (For catastrophic results, add alcohol to symbolic identification and stir.)

So it’s not as if symbolism has anything to do with our daily lives. And it’s not as if English teachers, with their obsession on supposedly “hidden” meanings, are teaching anything that anybody can use.  
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WHY I ENJOY FOOTBALL (EVEN THOUGH I'M PROBABLY NOT SUPPOSED TO)

1/26/2015

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Football.  It's a ridiculous spectacle, a violent game, a dangerous game, a drain on our resources, the new opiate of the masses.  Our society has elevated football to a status completely out of proportion.  Athletes and coaches make zillions of dollars, while ticket prices skyrocket to the point where the majority of their fan base can't even hope to attend a game.  A National Institutes of Health Study demonstrates a 10% increase in rates of domestic violence when a home team loses a tight game (check it out HERE).  It's not unusual for riots and looting to occur after major wins or losses; alcohol consumption at games leads to all kinds of social ills; people who can't be bothered to get their butts into a polling both or their noses into a book will spend all kinds of time, money, and energy getting over-excited about a game played by bunch of guys they don't know, who supposedly "represent" their city but aren't even from their city--they're all essentially paid mercenaries who could be traded away at any time, in a brutal, money-centered business.

Why, some of us ask, can't people use some of that sports-fueled energy to get equally excited about and committed to things that actually matter?  And why must I and my fellow public school parents help raise money for our kids' middle-school music program by selling pizzas at our local college football games, when the football players' parents don't have to engage in quite so vigorous fundraising?  (I sometimes joke that in my ideal world, parents of student athletes would have to raise money for their kids' sports events by selling pizzas at sold-out symphony concerts.)  

And all that's before we even get to the college level.  As an English professor, I'm well aware of the disparity between the incomes of football coaches and professors (especially in humanities fields).  Although the small university where I teach has no football program, it's common knowledge that big-bucks programs like football suck major resources away from the central mission of education, and away from public perception of what universities are supposed to be for.  This reflects a twisted sense of priorities. Furthermore, all too often athletes and coaches at all levels are given "free passes" for despicable behavior--a state of affairs made doubly disturbing by the fact that so many young people revere them as role models and heroes. 

And those athletes also pay a price: this is a violent game that poses the constant threat of injury, possibly quite serious.  My husband's brief teenage stint as a high school linebacker ended abruptly when he was clipped (by a fellow teammate in practice, no less) and landed in the E.R. with internal bruising in the kidneys.  Since he knew he wasn't going to be NFL or even college-team bound, he (and, of course, his mother) decided it just wasn't worth it.  These athletes' bodies pay a steep price.  Often, so do their minds and emotions. 

All this and we haven't even gotten to the problematic gender politics of it all.  Female athletes may have made inroads in soccer, baseball, basketball, track & field, swimming, skiing, even hockey--but American football remains the province of males, with females serving as eye candy and cheerleaders.  As reported by the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, women's sports receive only 4% of media coverage even though 40% of all athletes are women (HERE).  Undoubtedly much of this disparity is due to football, which re-enacts its own imperialistic impulses by stampeding, "Beast Mode" style, over every other sport when it comes to media coverage.  Many even mistake this game for some kind of religious experience (HuffPost reports that 25% of Americans believe "God will decide who wins the Super Bowl"), a phenomenon that curiously attaches itself to American football more so than to any other game.

I really should hate American football. 

But here I sit, writing this post with a couple of other Internet windows open--Pinterest, where I've been surfing for blue and green party food to make for next Sunday, and Facebook, where I'm exchanging good-natured (I hope) banter with a friend who happens to be from Boston.  I've got a Seahawks pennant hanging on my office wall.  I just had my fingernails and toenails painted green and blue.  I'm pathetic.  I just may be the world's worst hypocrite.

Actually, I feel this kind of cognitive dissonance fairly frequently: when I like a movie whose messages are somewhat in conflict with my values, or I enjoy the prose of a writer whose personality totally puts me off, or I feel drawn to a song written later than 1982 (rare, but it happens).  For that matter, I feel it whenever I order dessert.  Rather than castigating myself for what I believe to be pretty normal human behavior, I like to analyze the "why" of it all:  Why do we so often enjoy things that we simultaneously recognize as problematic?  In this case, why--despite all the valid reasons I should be ideologically opposed to football's existence--am I still drawn not only to watching the game but to participating in some of its fandom's sillier, irrational manifestations? 

For starters, because for human beings, "irrational" is actually normal.  Too often we forget that, while we are all (hypothetically) capable of rational thought and behavior, at the core we are not purely rational beings.  Deny this as vehemently as we like: we operate from a mix of logic and emotion, but emotion has the upper hand,  (Countless cognitive studies confirm this; if you want scholarly references, just ask).  But this isn't necessarily a bad thing: Just watch Star Trek (or read any dystopian novel) if you want to see how flattened out a world would be in which everything were rational.  Too much irrationality, of course, might be even worse.  We need balance.  But we're never going to live in a completely rational world, nor should we want to.

And our collective life, I'd argue, has presently become a bit too rational.  Don't want to share the great outdoors with your neighbors?  Ditch public parks and create a gated-in, grassy lawn that's all your own.  Don't want to share your books?  Ditch libraries and just buy what you want (if indeed you read at all).  Don't like mixing with the riffraff? Embrace the private automobile over public transportation.  All very rational.  If you're a manager or company owner, do you have employees who want to receive money for days they aren't even working, because they are sick or want a vacation?  Irrational.  Cut 'em back to bare bones, to the point of desperation, and they'll keep working for you not because they want to, but because they have to.  Exploitation and isolation: it's all quite rational. 

Yet all of us--and yes, I do believe it is all of us--are attracted to something, or somebody, or someplace, or some activity that is, by traditional numerical metrics, not totally rational.  Human beings don't always want everything to make logical sense.  Why should we?  What is life for, if we never emerge from the confining box of rationality? Why do I occasionally order dessert when I know it's more nutritionally sound to forgo the sweet stuff in favor of more vegetables? Frankly, because dessert tastes better.  But do I do that every day?  No.  Once again: Balance.  

Football fandom makes no rational sense.  But it's fun.  We took our son to his first college game when he was seven, and although he understood almost nothing he was seeing, he told us later, "I liked it because I got to use my outdoor voice for three hours without getting in trouble."  I joked with a friend that this must be heaven for a seven-year-old.  Then I realized that hey, it was heaven for me--when do I ever get to use my "outside voice"?  (At football games and Elton John concerts, that's where.)  Like most of us, I have to suck up a lot of things and play the "rational" game all day, every day.  Who doesn't want to let loose every once in a while and just scream, even if you are screaming for a bunch of overpaid, oversized men who really don't have a personal connection to you?  Logically, you know this.  But do you care?

Fun isn’t rational.  Screaming isn’t rational.  Aligning yourself psychologically with the fates of large strangers isn’t rational.  But then, neither are we.

Sports fandom also revives a sense of community and connection that nowadays we experience far too rarely.  Note how all the “rational” decisions outlined above also lead us to close ourselves off from those around us.  Much ink has been spilled regarding the loss of extended family, community, and social connection in the technological age.  (See the work of Robert Putnam, for instance--Bowling Alone and Better Together).  I believe such observations are true—nowadays most of us are too cut off.  I can understand the desire for occasional solitude.  People aren’t perfect—far from it (often way far from it). They drive us crazy, and sometimes we just want to pull away.  But in the end, we are social animals and we weren’t built for total isolation.  When I read about the "Twelves" Seahawks fandom phenomenon, I always notice countless references along the lines of "It brings the city together," "We feel like we're part of something," "You're able to talk to strangers."  We need that.  That's another part of the appeal.

Now I'd be first in line to call for us to build a stronger sense of community in additional ways besides sports.  Yet:  (a) I'm glad to hear that a spirit of community is emerging at all, and (b) the fact that it does actually demonstrates our deep human need for it.  In the endless individualistic quests foisted upon us by the powers-that-be, we keep doing things that reassert our deep need for belonging and connection, even as it seems we've forgotten that it is a need.  The sight of The Twelves speaks to the need for community more loudly than any textbook theory ever could.  I hope we can learn how to do make this happen through other means as well. 

Hometown and regional pride--even when displaced onto a bunch of overpaid strangers--also points out the strong human need for a sense of place.  I was born and raised in Seattle and lived there well into my adulthood; it's "my" city.  (I often tell people that I was "Seattle" before Seattle was cool.)  But life did what it sometimes does, and I haven't lived there now in over a couple of decades.  As much as I love so many things about my present hometown, there is much I miss about the Pacific Northwest.   In our increasingly depersonalized world of endlessly replicating big-box stores and corporate shopping malls with the same chain stores and restaurants that you can visit anywhere you go, what we finally love about a place--whether we're at home or visiting--are the characteristics that make it "here" and not someplace else.  

For me, seeing all the "Twelves" hype evokes not so much football memories as sensory impressions of a place I love and miss: the smell of evergreen forest and fishy/salty air, the taste of fresh salmon and Dungeness crab and Washington State apples, the sight of Seattle's many bridges and waterways ringed by snow-capped mountains, the sounds of trains whistling late at night as they traverse the tracks along the edge of Puget Sound.  It isn't just about a game played by strangers.  It's about a place I still call home.

Last but not least: I may be one of the few people on earth who is quite this geeky, but I enjoy football for its literary dimensions.  Basketball might be faster-paced and baseball more civilized, but what sport is more epic in its scope, more dramatic in its unfolding, more operatic in its range of emotions than football?  All the elements for a compelling mythological narrative are in place: heroes and villains (though my Boston friend and I may disagree about which is which), quests both defensive and offensive, obstacles and helpers, the right mix of predictability and surprise, dramatic successes and fatal mistakes, the ever-looming possibility of a sudden reversal of fortune.  

Add in the ultimate narrative twist: when these epic stories unfold on the field each week, we don't know in advance how they will end.  In that way the game is much like our own lives--and at least, unlike our own lives, in football we do get to see the end, which may or may not be what we thought we saw coming.  (Take the ending of that Green Bay-Seattle NFC championship game last Sunday: I don't think anybody saw that one coming!)  

There's also an aesthetic dimension to the game.  Sometimes things get really ugly--the hard hits, the injuries, the running plays that result in little more than a giant pile of large men tangled up with each other.  But then there are moments that are almost poetic: the improbable length-of-the-field run, the well-thrown long bomb.  There's a weird kind of elegance in a perfectly thrown pass or a tackle-defying run.  Beauty among the  beasts.  Hope juxtaposed against despair.  Elegance amidst brute force.  The contrast is compelling.

And of course once it's all over, those pivotal moments morph  into object lessons for those of us who will only ever experience what it's like to be "third and 19" in the metaphorical sense.  We want to know that sometimes we can get that first down even when the odds are against us. Sports metaphors may be corny and cliche, but sometimes things become cliche precisely because they're true.  Lately I've been trying to pull through a situation that sometimes feels as bleak as the Seahawks' prospects during the first 57 minutes of the NFC championship, and if I or others in such situations gain some inspiration to persevere from watching "our" team turn it around--well, maybe it's corny, but so what?  Is it preferable to fall into a state of utter despair?

That's not to say the problems I outlined at the start of this post aren't real.  Even though I enjoy watching football, I'd like to see our society have better balance.  I'd love to see civic life, political engagement, and the arts generate as much excitement and sense of community as sports does. I'd love to see money more equitably distributed (and some of those billions of dollars spent on Super Bowl commercials funneled into more meaningful pursuits).  I'd love to see gender equity and the abolition of female objectification, in sports as well as elsewhere.  I wish people would stop thinking football has something to do with church.  I wish we could prioritize the educational mission of our universities.  I wish more of our athletes would serve as worthy role models, and that those who don't will not be given a free pass for bad behavior.  I also hope additional safety measures can be taken to reduce the likelihood of severe injuries.  

Things are definitely out of whack, in so many ways.  But even with all its problems--and no matter how weird my colleagues may find my blue and green fingernails--I enjoy the dimensions that are added to my life by watching sports, particularly football.  

Though I want a lot of things to change, next weekend I'm going to have fun.  I'm going to escape, for just a few hours, from the excessively rational demands of daily life,  I'm going to enjoy feeling momentarily reconnected to a spectacular place that I miss, and to a geographically scattered community of family and friends who are having fun in the same way, who feel loyal to the same place.  I'm going to revel in the unfolding drama, and I'm going to make some blue and green food.  The spectacle may be ridiculous, but I'm it's a spectacle I plan to enjoy.  
  
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SCROOGE WINS?

12/24/2014

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" 'And yet,” said Scrooge, 'you don’t think me ill-used, when I pay a day’s wages for no work.'

"The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

“ 'A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!' said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin." 
(From A Christmas Carol, ch. 1)

* * *
1843--the year A Christmas Carol was first published--a time when life in England after the Industrial Revolution was marked by growing social inequality, exploitation and dehumanization. We're lucky that so much has changed since then. Right?

Tomorrow, our Christmas dinner will be missing one family member because he has to work, and not because he's "essential personnel."  We're not talking about fighting fires or staffing emergency rooms or providing police service or offering transportation: My family member works in a retail establishment.  For a pittance.  If he puts in forty hours for 52 weeks, he'll barely rise above the threshold that qualifies a person for food stamps--and then only because he's single.  If he had any dependents, he'd qualify for every assistance program in the book, despite the fact that he works full-time. 

Anyone notice a slight disjunction here?  Our retail workers are apparently not valuable enough to deserve a living wage. Yet on the other hand they're so valuable that they can't be spared, not even for a few hours, on Christmas Day--because what they do is so important.  (Not so important that they deserve overtime pay for working on a holiday, of course...)

(And no, it's not that one retail establishment that everyone talks about.  Bad as that place is, sometimes I worry that we single out particular big-box chains as though they are the sole problem, when the real issue lies in the system itself.  Focusing on one or two "big names," I fear, can have the effect of demonizing particular businesses in a way that leads us to neglect to address the systemic greed that pervades everywhere, not just in the expected places.)

How bad have things gotten?  I mean, even pre-ghostly-visitation Scrooge consented, however begrudgingly, to having Cratchit "pick his pocket every twenty-fifth of December."  Yet today's clerks (pronounced "clarks," if you're British or an Anglophile) don't even get that much.  The pre-conversion Scrooge may have bitched and moaned about holiday pay, but he still acquiesced to the social norm.  Today, though, we apparently can't cease from buying and selling, not even for one day.

Recently when I complained about my family member's holiday work schedule to a friend who's always been a staunch advocate of working people, I was a bit surprised at the reaction:  "Too bad about the holiday, but that's small stuff in the face of larger injustices like low pay, lack of benefits," etc.  I generally agree; if retail workers at this establishment were adequately paid and cared for in other ways, perhaps missing Christmas dinner to run a cash register (or at least getting paid double-time if you did) wouldn't be an especially big deal.  And if only some of the problems with our current service-based economy can be addressed, yes, we should go after the bigger ones. 

But to my way of thinking, the holiday issue is symbolic, a metonym for the larger issue of believing that the lives of lower-paid working people don't matter, a more-than-century-old echo of Scrooge's attempt to "edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance." 

I also came up against unexpected resistance to workers' holiday rights when I discussed it around Thanksgiving time with some other acquaintances, whose family members--"essential personnel"--have always had to work holidays.  "People adjust," one person told me, "so the retail workers should stop whining." 

Yes, people adjust.  Our family did--for years.  My younger brother and I were the "late babies" in a large extended family, and when we were small, our much older adult cousins had already entered the working world, as firefighters and police officers.  While our smaller nuclear family celebrated fairly consistently (on Christmas Eve, thanks to our Scandinavian roots), it wasn't unusual for our extended family gathering to take place on the 23rd, or the 26th, or even later or earlier when necessary.  

And 
this was a good thing: from an early age I learned how to adapt, and how to distinguish custom from rigidity.  Knowing how to build flexibility into traditions has proven to be an essential life skill, especially as the years have taken their toll and forced us to adapt to bigger, unavoidable changes, like the loss of loved ones.  (For instance, this marks my twentieth Christmas without my parents--and no, I'm not that old.)   When I see the ill effects of unwanted changes on families that were more absolutist and unyielding than mine, I'm grateful that part of what I learned from our family celebrations was flexibility.  But retail work on Christmas Day--unlike, for example, firefighting--is not essential, and we shouldn't be pretending it is.

I am grateful for the many people who do perform essential functions and must work on holidays--like my cousins did for so many years.  I understand that for many, working on holidays isn't optional.  I also understand that there are far bigger issues for all of us to be concerned about right now, and it may sound to some like I'm harping on minutiae. 

But when I re-read A Christmas Carol, I'm reminded of how much that story still resonates culturally, even with people who have never read the actual book.  Look at how much of its vocabulary has become our own: "Scrooge" is in the dictionary, "Bah, humbug!" is what we all say when we're just not feeling that holiday spirit, "God bless us, every one!" is still being used in contemporary song lyrics, the "ghost of Christmas past/present/future" is a recurrent trope (even leading to silly Facebook memes that make fun of grammar geeks, such as "the ghost of future perfect subjunctive").  This reminds me of why symbolism matters, and as I said above, I see this issue as symbolic of a far deeper problem: that the making of money is venerated above all else, and that human relationships, experiences, celebrations, rituals and connections have taken a back seat to the false gods of commerce.

Critics of Dickens have argued for years about whether Dickens was socially radical (because he called for more humane treatment of working people), or socially conservative (because the solutions to injustice envisioned in his novels are fanciful fictions, framed in terms of individual conversion rather than more broadly systemic socioeconomic changes).  I'd argue that we make a mistake if we fall into that "either/or" trap.  (Right now, the false dichotomy seems to be one of our most pervasive cultural logical fallacies...but I digress.)  

Yes, we need the whole system to change, as I mentioned above.  Many might hope for their own Scrooge-like boss to be freaked out in the middle of the night by a ghost wearing the chain "forged in life," made "link by link" through turning a blind eye to human needs.  And yet as long as the system itself venerates profit above humanity, not enough will have changed.

Yet social critics who get mired in the structural side of that argument would do well to remember that systems only change when people do.  We can't create a world in which human needs are prioritized unless there are enough of us who believe that doing so is desirable.  If we want a society that takes care of its needy (beyond the "prisons and workhouses" that Scrooge and his ilk call for), an economic system that truly gives people from all walks of life meaningful opportunities to improve their lives, that pays workers fairly and treats them with dignity (including appropriate time off), a culture that values some things beyond the financial bottom line--we need a society made up of people who are committed to this vision.  

A lot of people need to change their minds.  A lot of people need to "receive the visitation" from ghosts of past, present and future, to understand the harm done to all of us when the quest for profits is deemed more important than the compassionate addressing of human needs.  For society to change, individuals must change.  And before change can become reality, we need to be able to imagine it--which is one reason why I've never believed that literary fiction is a purely fanciful thing.

Wishing a Merry Christmas to all the readers who celebrate it. And a special thanks to those who must spend their holiday working--either because they truly are providing essential functions that help all of us, or because they are presently subject to the whims of an economic system that does not yet realize what Dickens wrote in 1843, in the voice of Marley's Ghost to Scrooge: 

"[Hu]mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”


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"I JUST WANT THIS TO BE OVER!"

12/13/2014

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I knew I'd been slacking on this blog, but nearly a month without a post? That's even longer than I thought it was. Two factors: First, I was really sick for a couple of weeks (I'm still not totally recovered). Second, look at what time of year it is: the last four weeks of the semester, when students and faculty alike are stressed beyond belief. Recently I've noticed multiple student Facebook posts about being stressed out, and multiple faculty posts about being stressed out.  I also realized that this is the time of year when I almost always get sick. Coincidence? I think not.

I enjoy the company of my students (well, most of the time), and during the last week of classes I often feel nostalgic about the imminent dispersal of this group of people who came together, through random chance, for just a few weeks out of our lifetimes. On the last day of class, I'd like for us to enjoy being together for one last time. I'd rather remember my students as relaxed and happy than freaked out and under pressure, and I'm sure they'd rather remember me that way too.  Yet during those final class meetings, it's rare for any of us to be at our best.

Hearing my students talk leads me to remember my own college years, when my husband (also a college student) and I used to get through final exam week by ordering pizzas, keeping them in the fridge, and grabbing slices whenever we were hungry so that we didn't have to stop for meals. As if that weren't naughty enough, we'd drink too much caffeine and eat too much sugar--even though we were sitting more and exercising less. And then would come semester's end and you know what that means--celebration! (Read: indulgent food and alcohol--and a little too much of both.)

If we were studying for exams, we'd try to stuff our heads full--not just with facts we needed to pass the test, but with tips about the particular form of trickery in which each professor liked to engage. Much testing is a battle of wits: Which wrong answer has been deliberately planted as a red herring? Finish the test and we'd finally exhale: "Whew. Good thing I passed--now I can finally forget about all that stuff." (Never mind that "forgetting the stuff" isn't exactly the goal here...)  If we were writing papers, we'd care for a little while, until we hit the wall: "At this point I don't care if it's any good or not--I just want this to be done!" 

Mind you, we were the good students--the kind who aspired to grad school and attempted to impress our professors, the annoying super-achievers who caused the goof-offs and the party crowd to roll their eyes whenever we spoke in class (and we spoke a lot).  Yet at some point, even we became too stressed out to continue caring. I just want this to be done!

I remember thinking then something that I still often think: Is this really the best way to bring about meaningful learning?

I'm not saying it isn't. Perhaps it is. Many studies on stress indicate that total stress-less-ness is not something to which we should aspire: a sense of meaning and accomplishment only happens when we surmount challenges, which means some stress is necessary for learning and growth. (I wish I had money for every student who tried to justify their procrastination habit by telling me, "I work better under pressure.")  

Yet we're all even more familiar with the ill effects of too much stress (not to mention "coping" mechanisms like sugar, caffeine, booze, and too much pizza--things that work for now but that in the long run tend to backfire). The research for the last two articles I published took me into the realm of cognitive psych, where I discovered numerous studies that examine how learning, cognition, and abstract thinking are shut down in the presence of negative emotions.  (That's why when somebody insults you, you don't usually think of the perfect comeback until two hours later.) This being the case, it would seem that many things about the structure of education--the high-stakes nature of testing, the tendency to pile all major assessments in multiple subject areas into the final week of the semester--actually work against the goal of meaningful learning and long-term retention. At the same time, too much slackness is clearly not the answer.

So what to do? If you're hoping I'm now going to turn to "the answer," sorry to disappoint you because I don't yet have one. (In fact, lately I've been excessively pondering (a) why I become less certain about almost everything as I grow older, and (b) how many of the world's problems seem to stem from people claiming certainty about things that no human being can actually be certain about.)  

So, maybe the super-stressful model of education is fine and we shouldn't fix what isn't broken. That's a possibility. Maybe part of what we're doing is "weeding out" those who can perform under pressure from those who can't. Certainly our world needs a few people who can. Many professions demand the ability to work under pressure. So I'll allow for that possibility.

But I'll also allow for the possibility that there's a better way to do this. Maybe, if our goal is for our students not only to remember what we're trying to teach them but to care about it (not because we tell them it's important, but because they really believe it is), we could develop strategies and ways to pace our semesters that don't lead a lot of people to throw up their hands and say, "I don't care anymore--I just want this to be done!" Or, "Thank goodness I'll never, ever have to remember any of 'this stuff' again!" I haven't hit on the perfect answer, but I welcome discussion and suggestions. 

One of my favorite composition pedagogy theorists, Mary Rose O'Reilley, said once that "we can count it as a good semester if we don't make students want to stop doing whatever it is we teach." Perhaps if we keep this in mind as an over-arching goal, it will help us to design assessments and pace our classes in a way that makes more of our students want to keep on keeping on. I'd be happy if, down the road a few years, at least a few students tell me, "I still remember what I learned from your class," or, "I got really excited about that paper I wrote for your class and I kept working on it afterwards." What I really want--and maybe it's too much to want--is not just that my students have learned the content, but that they have learned to care about learning.  

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    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    The Underground Professor teaches English at a small private university. This blog explores how we might revitalize the humanities in the twenty-first century--and why it's important that we do so, in light of the our culture's current over-emphasis on profitability, quantitative measurement, and corporate control.


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