Back on the Chain Gang

It is a fallacy well-tended by those outside of academia that teachers and professors get summers off. Well, OK, I did get last summer off, but that only occurred through careful planning (and a good deal of Ramen noodling during the school year). You know a humanities professor is gunning for a summer off when they start to get excited about staff and faculty meetings, volunteering for them and the like. We aren't actually having a curriculum planning renaissance; instead, we just know that there's free food.

Anyway, while summers off are a myth or the result of sleight-of-hand, professoring does bring one absolute joy -- big long, Christmas breaks. If my friends and family dug a little deeper, they might realize that my passion for Christmas is not a reindeer obsession or for the little lump that forms in my throat when Linus reads from the Book of Luke. Instead, it's the thrill of having four full weeks with, literally, nothing to do. It's downright European, and they have the right of it.

The problem with four whole weeks off is that is seems so long at the outset (and you convince yourself that finals were so damn harrowing that you deserve a little time to yourself) that we inevitably come to the second week in January when we realize what we conveniently forgot, between Fa-la-las and realizing we have 12 hours before the last four quarts of Egg Nog go really bad (what's a girl to do? Salut!) -- that we have 3 business days in which to plan the next four months of our life. When the next four months of your life involve being surrounded by late-stage adolescents, you begin to wish you had gone into Economics like your parents wanted you to.

My peeps who work in public education on the K-12 level are rolling their eyes now. The Manda is searching every corner of her brain to try and remember if she ever saw a single official lesson plan in the decade we shared the space under a rock in Brighton. The answer sounds as full of shit as the excuses I'll begin to accrue the day my first set of assignments come due -- I'm not really a planner. I usually teach by the seat of my pants, and I've spent almost two decades doing that really successfully. But, things change. As my butt is no longer the right size for the kinds of clothes I like to wear (iwillnotwearmomjeans....iwillnotwearmomjeans.....iwillnotwearmomjeans), my teaching style, I have discovered, no longer fits the training my students have come to expect.

I always enjoyed being the weird one in many of my classes at Wake. Lest I give false impressions, I was a Democrat even then, so I was destined for the role. Shaving my head wasn't exactly necessary for being different at a school where few people wore Polos outside of the approved color spectrum. This isn't a diss on my peers; they all make a lot more money than I, so maybe I should have shut up and stuck to pastels. That's all I'm saying.

My "being weird" in classes just meant trying new things. I tried to break out of the mold of traditional literature discourse. When you are taught Shakespeare by a guy who could have been one of the Bard's friends, you sort of give up the delusion you are gonna wow him along the traditional paths of enquiry and try new things.

Like many of my students today, I tried really really hard to get my professors to give up what they really thought about the issues, books, and authors we studied in class. My students take this information and use it to write me technically strong papers agreeing with my thoughts. I never think of my students as dumb, but I have to ask, "How dumb is that?" I always took the position polar opposite to my professor. With the exception of that Southern Lit dipshit (Bill? Ben? Who the hell was he?), this worked very well.

See, most people like it when people suck up to them. They like people around them to be deferential and accommodating. Not so much the typical 21st century American academic. We like discussing things in the abstract, and when everyone agrees, it's not a discussion; it's a rally (which we also like, but only when we are apart from it, on the sidelines, being superior and snarky. Don't judge -- many of us gave up health care benefits to do this job; let us have something here). So, when students mirror my thoughts back to me, they are essentially telling me what I already know, and they are saying it in a way I find inferior to how I would say it (because, you know, it isn't me saying it).

When they disagree with me, on the other hand, it makes me think. It clicks on something in my head that starts the engines turning and the pulse racing. It reminds me why I got into this gig in the first place (other than the four whole weeks off at Christmas, of course). It's the Academy's version of street fighting, and it's why professors gave up the idea of world domination and ever getting an office larger than a half bath or with any sort of view at all in the first place.

But, I'm beginning to believe that all the fighters are already on this side of the desk. Students believe the fight is about the grade, not the topic. They want to challenge the result, not the process. I'm not willing to give up hope that the tide will turn back towards the life of the mind, but I'm preparing to hunker down until that happens.

So, until that day, I'm doing what I never wanted to do. I'm cheating on my idealism.

I'm making checklist rubrics.

Reading Journal (as promised):

I checked two items off my list. The first is the YA novel Hacking Harvard. While fairly easy in terms of vocabulary and style, this does clock in at 321 pages, so it wasn't exactly a one shot, before-bed feat. I'm fascinated by the culture of college admissions, by the look of superiority on the faces of my incoming freshmen every fall. They seem to feel as if the hard work is over. They have proven their mettle by gaining admission. Wasserman details this process quite admirably. Although it's not in the book, he seems to imply just what I discover -- my students have spent, literally, 12 or more years preparing to be admitted to the university of their choosing, but they have absolutely not been given any sort of road map concerning what to do once they get there. I picture them, acceptance letter in hand, standing at the top of Everest. What they haven't been told is that, goal achieved, the descent can be as fraught with pitfalls as the ascent was. To make matters worse, their "permanent record" is just now becoming truly permanent.

I often ask my students to avoid summarizing books as a whole and pick out one particular passage to reflect on (this is easier if you write WHILE reading rather than just summarizing, but hey, it's a YA novel and I do read 125 pages a week rather than 25, so it's a challenge). Here's the passage I picked:

Back when we were kids, Harvard Square had all these little stores and restaurants that were famous just for being in Harvard Square -- greasy diners and skanky bars and funky thrift shops. Then the rent rose too high, they went bankrupt, and got replaced by B&N, Starbucks, Baskin-Robbins, and Abercrombie. I guess some people have this idea of Harvard Square as a quaint little college town, because that's the way to make it look at movies -- but these days, in real life, it's more like Disney World.
You know how Disney World has that fake main street? On the outside, the buildings look all old-fashioned, like Ye Olde Chocolate Shoppe and Smitty's Apothecary -- but then you go inside and they're all selling the same crappy Donald Duck dolls and Mickey Mouse ice-cream bars? Well, just substitute tacky crimson sweatshirts and Starbucks lattes, and you'll have a pretty good grasp on Harvard Square.

Having spent the better part of my first year in Boston "trying to soak up the charm" of all the major neighborhoods, and having a big brother who lived in Cambridge, I spent a fair amount of time around Harvard Square, and this section made me laugh out loud. Harvard has sold out to all the major brands. I hit this part, ironically enough, at about the same time I was watching House Hunters on HGTV when a guy moving to Boston almost wet himself to find out he qualified for Boston's "affordable Housing project" and was going to get a "steal" on a shitty one bedroom condo four or five non-elevatored flights up near Harvard Square -- all for the bargain price of about $350,000. Thanks, Mayor Menino and Governor Patrick. Glad to know you guys remember the little people and still have our backs.

I also finished Scrabble. Well, I as finished it as I'm going to. I give my students the authority to reject books when they have outgrown their welcome, so I finally resorted to giving myself permission to skip out on the last 60 pages or so. Nothing Fatsis could conclude was anything I really cared about hearing at this point. That doesn't mean I'm not copying chapter two as an example of profile when we get to that point in AWD. The book DOES start off strong. It just becomes epic, and it is, in the end, about Scrabble. The battle, I will concede, may BE epic, but the writing about them need not be.