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.  

"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.  

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.  
  

" '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!”

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.