A Million Stories

The young man who moved to America from Pakistan when he was 12, now desperately trying to put some breathing room between himself and his strict, traditional family.

The older woman, half of a husband-wife pair of clergy, back in architecture school to get away from the endless ache of social services work.

The colleague who has a massive project dumped on her desk, without resources or recognition.

The colleague who had done strong work on a different project and had it taken away from her after four years.

The couple selling their house, neither of whom are convinced they want to.

The couple buying their house, waiting on edge for the call that the contract has been signed.

The friend who ran a job search only to have the job itself placed upon him.

The non-profit organization with the hundred-year history that looks prestigious from outside but is a hollow and hemorrhaging shell when seen in detail.

The college president who hires a new dean and then rescinds the offer just before the start date, having stumbled across the new hire's skeletons.

The supervisor and supervisee who were uncomfortably forced to switch roles.

The faculty member who carpet-bombs the e-mail boxes of president, provost, board members, and every professional organization, demanding that his agenda take precedence.

The provost who wants that faculty member banished for harassment.

The college administrator finishing a flimsy degree from a shady college in order to try to gain some job security.

The board member who sees accreditation rules as mere suggestions, because he's also such a committed (and good) teacher.

The colleague who takes every opportunity to grasp change and render it toothless, because he's proud of the work he's done in the old system.

The friend who worked heroically to design and launch an innovative new program, who now wants nothing more than to leave it behind and get back to teaching.

The person who finished second for a job and admits that the person chosen first is a better fit for the organization as it stands, though not for what it could be.

The person who could have had a job, and instead writes a letter to the search committee to explain why she won't be continuing her candidacy.

The young new postmistress, trained to follow procedures, who finds herself running a tiny rural center that is the social hub of its community, with no knowledge of the residents or their norms.

The graduate student who says she's in grad school because "she wants to get it right this time."

The graduate student who resents broad liberal thinking, because he feels like he's being forced to become a "little Renaissance man" instead of the effective and focused professional he aspires to be.

The heavy man who eats his emotions.

The gaunt woman who burns up her brittleness.

We see people going about their lives and believe, somehow, that they are self-evident.  They are students, teachers, administrators, colleagues, friends.  And we are wrong.  After all, every label we wear ourselves — student, teacher, administrator, colleague, friend — we wear uncomfortably, knowing the ways in which it doesn't quite fit, doesn't meet the real contours of the self. The same is true all around us, of everyone we encounter. 

Nora and I have a saying — "there's a million stories" — that we bring out whenever we get below the surface of someone we thought we knew, when we start to see "a student" as a person, when we start to see "a colleague" as a friend.  It's our lullaby for the endless re-discovery of subtlety and context and invisible lives that exist just below the roles we play.

So distractable I forgot the title!

There are yellow roses behind the computer. I am sitting at the kitchen table beside the wood stove and working where I stopped last night...too late to pack everything up and move it to its appointed place(s). There are post-its at my elbow, and a hair comb, and some shallots in a colander. There is an old Casio watch that I have been meaning to put on in lieu of my good watch which takes a beating from all the travel. But somehow I never get around to it. There is my ipad - so yes, I am a two computer person. When did we become so addicted that we needed two computers per person? Sort of like needing more than one car (only I think that's worse). There is a pen (for writing on the post-its) and some caffeine candies and my camera and a short wave radio that Mom gave Herb for Christmas one year. You would think I would have enough media access with two computers that have access to wireless communications that bring in BBC radio or the great Albany public radio station WAMC, or Jango music on demand, but no... there's a radio as well. I am beginning to sound like Andy Rooney..."Wouldn't you think kids would have enough to do with a stick and a ball, but no.o.o.o.o!...")

Anyway, it is a marker of my distractability these days. Too many pieces. Not enough concentration.  I picked up the Atlantic article on Google making us stupid the other day. It was in the bathroom - another place where I can't allow myself to do only one thing. And I thought about assigning it to my students to read as a warning against the life style and against their well worn dependence on Google and Wikipedia as a source of truth and wisdom. Then I realized that the very distractability that the author worries about is what they (most of them anyway) thrive on.  See? I can't even write a simple sentence without parenthetical comments!

So anyway, somewhere in the process of the last hour or day or week or month, I decided to refocus on the writing. It will theoretically allow me to restore the part of my brain that can do one thing. Yes. I aspire to doing one thing. Sad isn't it?

{Pause}

So I thought about ending this essay there, so I could add wood to the wood stove, plug in the ipad to the wall socket which would have necessitated finding the charger (I am pretty sure I know where I left the wall socket.)  I have a call or two to make this morning, but no, I am going to make every effort to keep doing this one thing. (Did you get up to make a cup of coffee? Answer a ringing phone? Change channels?  Are you there? Are you? Or did you turn to another person's blog?  Huh? Huh?)

I took a class with the famous writing teacher Natalie Goldberg many years ago. The workshop was called "Fast Writing, Slow Walking." I am a master of slow writing and slower walking. But the core concept was to keep your hand moving on the page to foil "monkey mind" which is the built-in editor that tells you that everything you write is worthless even as it is emerging from your pen. The momentum blocks the distractability. "Write for 15 minutes without stopping the hand," she said. Then she asked us to take 10 minute meditation walks in which we moved so slowly that we could feel each bone of the foot hit the floor, each movement of the arm, each breath. It was actually both meditative and aerobic in the need to hold the body back. It seems that when we walk, much of the energy comes from sheer momentum, and in blocking the momentum, the muscles have to take over and work harder. Hmmm... I never thought of that before - The momentum of writing, when we allow it to, can take over the "work" of writing. The meditative practice of attention, can help build the muscles needed. 

It is a theme I see often. Work on the writing with no distractions for a block of time. Then stop and do something different. An article in Poets and Writers Magazine recently advocated a 45 minute work block and then 15 minutes of walking the dog or preparing dinner in a crock pot. Simple advice. The trick is to do it... And then to return to the writing...Not so simple advice.

I think I'll add some wood to the stove and take the cats outside.

A new "normal"

It is another snow-free morning in Vermont. Nearly the end of February and there isn't a patch of white even in the shadiest portions of the back yard. I went outside without a coat to walk the cats this morning and "our" chipmunk was out and about. Ed (the cat) nearly came nose to nose with her. Simon, the great hunter, never knew there was anything worth pursuing.

I don't know whether chipmunks hibernate, but this has not been a hibernating year. It is easy to see this as yet another symbol of global climate change.   I wonder whether the ground has frozen or whether I could actually get in to dig up some of the weed roots I didn't get to in the Fall. I avoided walking in the woods yesterday, fearful that the tick population would still be active. There are rumors that the deer and the moose are dying of tick infestations. One local hunter found hundreds if not thousands of them on a moose he killed this past season, and others are rumored to be finding the animals dead, with no signs of trauma other than thousands of ticks.

I got a solicitation from an activist group this morning, asking me to write to the FDA to ban the use of a pesticide that has been used on corn crops. They say there has not been adequate testing other than a study by the company that is marketing the stuff. And it is blamed for Colony Collapse Disorder among bees. A poorly worded petition to stop the pesticide use, says that it isn't "only" about the death of a species, but about the impact on our agriculture that depends on bees for pollination of our crops.

I wonder how it became all about us. I look at the reports of climate change and it is always couched in terms of what humans need to survive. We appear to be a selfish species. We also want to see ourselves as benefactors--"making the world a better place"-- with our intelligence and industry, but somehow that is at the sacrifice of everything non-human around us. There is nothing new or particularly wise about this observation, but as I sit at my drafting table in the tiny room upstairs in a small house on the main road of a tiny town, I wonder how we became so selfish. I wonder whether there isn't another way to appeal to people. We stress the future of our children and grandchildren. That too is about our own legacy. We stress the geo-politics and economic hazards of a world in which people are forced to move from their homelands by sea level rise or driven to famine by drought cycles. And we feel "compassion fatigue" at yet another "cause" when there are so many others that compete for our attention. (Note that I didn't write: "action.") We focus on legislative changes needed to force compliance on those who still believe that climate change is a hoax, or on those who are so invested in their bottom line that they won't consider mitigation. But these are still selfish acts.

I wonder whether there isn't some other way. There are people I know and respect who simply won't act to change their own behavior patterns. I admit that I am a long way from perfect myself.  But what I do not see in any of the rhetoric about global climate change, is an analysis of the personal motivators that make us act for short-term self interest instead of the long-term self interest, or yes, in the interest of other species and other people and the planet.

There is a research study that I read once, about people on welfare in Ireland. With a fixed income, they knew that they had enough money to pay the heating bills that would keep the thermostat at a certain steady state temperature. But that temperature was not cozy. Instead of doling out the heat, they turned the heat up to a level that would allow them to feel cozy for a few days each month, until they ran out of money. They were cold then, when there was no more money to pay for heat until the next month's check. Asked why they cranked up the heat, they said something like - "we wanted to be 'normal'."  They didn't always want to feel poor. So for a few days, they pushed poverty aside and felt "normal."

It is a powerful metaphor for our need to structure a new "normal."

Once we turned to religion for a moral guide to actions in the interest of others. Once we turned to the sense of community norms, and believed that we were responsible for each other. And that spilled over to a sense of responsibility for those who could not act in their own self-interest. Once we understood the chain of being, that linked our acts with the well-being of others, and yes, our well-being with the acts of others. No more.

There are days when I wake up feeling both isolated and crowded by the buzz of media images that fill me with the things I need to do. Compassion fatigue is strong these days for me as well. And there are days when I wake up wanting to feel "normal".

But when I sit at my little desk and look out at a brown landscape, see a chipmunk depending on the seed he so liberally stored away last summer and Fall, I wonder whether there isn't some other way to make change.

Dreams come true.....

Herb and I have had an emotional weekend. The stress has broken through in a number of ways, and we have sniped at each other more than usual. I suppose it was bound to happen. What is clear is that we come back together with the clear knowledge that we are making a conscious choice about where we want to be.

It is true that I envy other couples, younger couples, those with less complicated lives.They don't have to make a decision on where they will be on any given night. They go to work and return home, take their assigned place at the dinner table, take turns brushing their teeth and climbing into bed on the familiar side.  With H and I living between Boston and Vermont, and my addition of New York into the mix, there is little that we take for granted.  But just as that is true about the places we sleep, it is true about our marriage. Herb doesn't much like that characterization of a "marriage" external to the two of us, and when I talk about making sure the marriage is strong, he steams from the ears. "There is no marriage separate from us," he has said (approximately).  He has said that people talk about saving "the marriage", just before one of them walks out. And I know what he means. But there is something in the manner in which we make decisions every day, to have dinner out, or sit at the kitchen table and talk rather than working on the computer, or choosing to shop for dinner together when one of us could easily do the task alone...For me, it is about keeping our marriage healthy and strong. It is about taking pleasure in sharing the things that others take for granted. I used to imagine reading the paper on Sunday mornings in bed with a h.h.h.h.h.husband. I used to dream of taking long drives together. 

H may be fuming as he reads this, but I am too aware of the threats that lurk outside the door... health threats and too much work, and the lack of laughter.I am a lucky woman in that we rarely go to sleep without laughter. H has a gift at imitating the "boys," channeling Ed's voice. I have been known to laugh so hard that I wheeze. Attractive, yes?

Maybe it is better to be older. Better to be conscious of the decisions we make. I wouldn't perpetuate the distances between us in this tri-state existence for one moment longer than necessary, but we seem to know how to keep the wind in the sails and travel forward.

There will be other weekends when we snipe at each other. There will be nights spent apart. But we are coming closer now to that future we imagined...closer to being in the place our home is. And I wonder what will fill the spaces taken up by those dreams, when we no longer need to wonder what comes next.

New Experiences

Douglas Adams, the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, offered the following definition of progress.

1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Nora and I are in the midst of new experiences, and each finding several parts of it to be against the natural order of things.  I like to think of myself as a storyteller and an intuitive thinker, but Nora says I'm analytical, and she's always right, so I'm analytical.  I do like spreadsheets and sudoku puzzles and pool.  And so I'm comfortable with things like calculating interest and payments and making little Excel algorithms in which you change one variable and that changes the calculations in thirty other cells so that you can do rapid comparisons. 

Spreadsheets came into my life in a meaningful way when I was 30 years old. I had a 1988 summer internship with the Berkeley Solar Group in which I spent three months developing a massive spreadsheet program that would convert data entered from field visits to houses into a file type called a CSV that you could feed into an energy simulation program.  [I hear you snoring out there, but it wrecked my eyesight, so pay attention.]  I spent the entire summer hunched over a "portable" Compaq computer that never left my desk because it weighed 34 pounds.  It had a tiny black CRT monitor with green text, and I was trying to build a spreadsheet that was over 200 columns wide and about 500 rows tall.  And, because Steve Jobs hadn't finished stealing the computer mouse from Xerox yet, I navigated the whole thing using arrow keys

The monitor was about the size of the screen on an iPhone, which people seem to like, but just for movies and Angry Birds and stuff.  Try doing a 100,000-cell spreadsheet on your iPhone.  If you're old enough, you'll know what I mean when I tell you it ran on a 286 Turbo processor.  If you're not old enough, then...

Anyway, spreadsheets — and the things you do on them, like budgets and finances and schedules and higher-ed assessment projects — are old hat for me, because I encountered them in the "Adams Zone" between 15 and 35.  But Nora finds them mystical, which is kind of cool because I get to do what seem like magic tricks.

On the other hand, I had a very simple childhood and young adulthood.  I never had more than a few dollars at a time, so whenever I wanted to buy something, I went to the store, looked at the price, paid that price, took it home and used it.  The whole notion of "customer service" was a misnomer, because the customer transaction was so straightforward:  see it – buy it – take it home.  If it was broken, you took it back and they gave you one that wasn't.

Nora, on the other hand, came from New York, where there are so many businesses that they have to differentiate themselves somehow.  So negotiating prices and dealing with customer service people was part of her Adams Zone in a way that wasn't true for me.  She certainly doesn't enjoy spending hours on the phone with the computer technicians, but she's extraordinarily good at it.  For me, I dislike it so much that I'm more than willing to give up a couple of hundred dollars and just start over rather than deal with the headaches and awkwardness.  I didn't have any of that in my life until I was well past the Adams threshold, and I find it unnatural.

Between the two of us, we get most things done remarkably well.  But half of what each one of us does mystifies the other.

Fortune

We went to dinner tonight at Blue Fuji, a Japanese restaurant that serves Chinese food as a sideline.  So once we'd finished our tempura, we received fortune cookies.

Nora's:  Get your mind set... confidence will lead you on.

Herb's:  If your desires are not extravagant, they will be granted.

Given the rest of the day, these seem appropriate.  More to come.

The Vital Connection, Part 3 — A question of scale

I had an unexpected and lovely hour-long chat with a friend last night.  She, in Colorado, happened to be on GMail at the same time that I, in Massachusetts, was on, and she saw my little green dot.

We talked about many things; I hadn't seen her since Nora and I went to our friends Neoma's and Ben's wedding in August 2010.  [Neoma is now two weeks away from having their first baby, who will almost certainly be born with a passport in hand.]  One thing she told me was that she and her husband have just decided that they're going to homeschool their son, who's 8 years old.  There are a lot of reasons, as there always are, but one of the things that it drove home for me (again) was the problem of scale.

When your work is with a handful of people, or with a piece of material right in front of you, you can be attentive to its details.  You can see the way that each person receives and works with ideas, you can watch the grain of the wood take shape, you can see patterns emerge before your eyes.  But hardly any of the ways we make our living any more have that kind of attentiveness, because they almost all happen at a massive scale.  A restaurant that serves fifty diners an evening is a different kind of restaurant than one that serves fifty diners every ten minutes.  A clothier who makes a thousand shirts an hour is a different kind of business than a clothier who makes a shirt a day.  And a school that serves a thousand students is a different kind of school than one that serves eighty.

Our friend Dave is a wood turner, and I think his bowls are completely gorgeous.  Not merely because of the wood he uses — lots of people use good northern hardwoods.  And not just because he has a good sense of line and proportion — lots of people have design sense.  Dave's bowls are remarkable because I look at each one of them and see him paying attention.  Each bowl is different in thickness, different in curvature, different in its base and decoration.  He's letting the wood itself help him make decisions.  He could hire a team of workers and make a hundred bowls a day, but they wouldn't be nearly as interesting.

In 1973, the British economist E. F. Schumacher published a remarkable little book called Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered.  Schumacher was what you might call a reverse colonialist; he worked for huge national economics boards and helped with German reconstruction after the war, but his primary gift was to look at village-scale economies (mainly in his travels to Burma, Zambia and India) and to say not that they needed to be "modernized," but rather that modern economies needed to understand more fully the successes of the small.  Work, according to Schumacher, is not a mindless tool to facilitate consumption.  Rather, work is an expression of one's own abilities and a gift to those who receive it, and can only be done well in that spirit of meaning and relationship.

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his facilities; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining him with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence... To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.

Can anything worth doing be done at a massive scale?  Is it possible to serve 125 billion hamburgers or 14 million college students or 2.3 million prison inmates and do it with any degree of craft?  Is it possible to design a curriculum through which all students pass together in pace, trajectory, sequence and outcome, and have any sense of what it means uniquely to any of them?

Instead of division of labor, we need integration of labor.  Instead of economies of scale, we need economies of attention.  Instead of a rush to growth, we need an understanding of enough.

The Vital Connections, Part 2

Never try to teach a pig to sing.  It wastes your time, and annoys the pig.

Back in the dark ages, I spent a miserable year working in the kitchen at Bennigan's Tavern in Amarillo, Texas.  The $4.50 an hour I made as a fry/salad/app line cook was substantially higher than the $3.35 Federal minimum wage in 1983, but the work was crushing.  Bennigan's Tavern (we all just called it Bennigan's, which frustrated our managers who were attempting to carry out the full branded experience) was a "theme restaurant," with the theme of the Irish pub conveyed through a tone-deaf corporate palette of shamrocks and green polo shirts and brass bar rails and walls covered with jaunty faux-memorabilia more reminiscent of 1920s Princeton than 1890s Derry.  It's as though the Irish, when they arrived in America, had been welcomed as long-lost brothers by their English predecessors and greeted with gift baskets from Ralph Lauren and L.L.Bean.

Our work at Bennigan's was largely in defrosting five-pound sleeves of chili mix, dividing huge boxes of frozen mozzarella sticks into bags of ten for quick tosses into a Fryolator basket, and placing plates of nachos under infrared broilers.  And if you're wondering what role chili, mozzarella and nachos had in the traditional Irish diet, then you're several steps ahead of the corporate office.  Bennigan's Tavern was a subsidiary of Steak and Ale, which was a subsidiary of Burger King, which was a subsidiary of Pillsbury, and that's all the logic you need to follow.  (Pillsbury is now owned by General Mills, so there you go.  Pretty soon, everything you want to eat or watch or wear will be owned by either Microsoft, ExxonMobil, or Philip Morris.  It's already true of congressmen...)

I say with no little embarrassment that I was suffused with schadenfreude at hearing the news that Bennigan's Tavern had gone bankrupt several years back.  But, like kudzu or tuberculosis, they're back, now just called Bennigan's, with outlets in half a dozen US states along with one in Bahrain and another in Qatar.  They promise "the welcoming, friendly and festive spirit of Irish Hospitality," but really, it's just a new awning on the same old Applebee's.  (And any bar that brags about "a bountiful selection of ice cold beers" has clearly tipped its hand.  If the best thing you have to say about your beer is that the refrigerator works, you've made a pretty light claim upon quality.)

I'm taken on this afternoon's reverie because Nora and I had another of our ongoing conversations about "what's next," and I was suddenly taken with the idea that "a job" might be the misleading concept in our search.  Anybody who teaches like Nora teaches, anybody who teaches like I teach, is going to be misfit in a world of accredited, course-numbered disciplinary sequences, the theme restaurants of the intellectual world.  We do too much that violates the paint-by-numbers goals of the  accrediting agencies and disciplinary societies.  The same is true for the positions we have held as administrators. We can't just thaw out another ingredient in the corporate menu.  Our work may have served the institutions well, but hasn't used very many of our talents.

Innovative chefs like Thomas Keller and Cindy Pawlcyn and Charlie Trotter didn't apply for jobs in theme restaurant kitchens; it would waste their time and annoy the pig.  They found backers who understood the quality of their unique training and vision, and founded small independent experiences that are sought out by people who have outgrown Bennigan's.

Time to reimagine the business plan.

The "vital connections between education and the public good"

"This brew--oversimplification of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical mastery, neutrality as a condition of academic integrity-is toxic when it comes to pursuing the vital connections between education and the public good, between intellectual integrity and human freedom..." - Liz Coleman

It has been a long and rather hectic week already and it is only Wednesday - but for me, this is a kind of weekend, back in VT after a week on the road.  And what is on my mind tonight, is an assortment of debris. It is hard to know if there is a "theme."  But here goes...

H and I are back in our respective classrooms. He loves to perform as he has said... loves to teach..loves to talk to large groups. I never feel at ease entering the classroom, whether with ten or two hundred students, but by the time I leave, I usually feel that there has been a good conversation with some learning goals met. It's too bad that I can't reduce the stage fright with that acknowledgement. Certainly, there have been some classes that were abysmal, but the percentages remain on my side.

So this semester's classes began as most do - with the introductions and the syllabus review - mostly a getting-to-know-you session in which everyone gauges everyone else. Will this group be animated or taciturn, smart or stultifying?  They gauge whether I am likely to be easy or hard, interesting or deadly boring. The second session is where the work really begins. This semester however, one group of students is beginning their second semester in "my" classroom. It is an odd experience to not have the introductions again--one that full time faculty in mainstream institutions take for granted. 

As I start out though, there have been more than a few glitches...some have been unsettling. Some have made me wonder how education became a business product rather than an exercise of the mind, an opportunity to make change--in the student and in the society.

I am a great believer in the power of liberal education though I am not sure that I would have used those words three or more years ago. I believe that liberal education can go a long way toward making social change and social justice. But I also believe that it is crucial as a training ground for what is called "critical thinking." I ask students to compare and contrast authors who are writing on related topics. I ask them to find the common themes in articles and essays that seem dissimilar. I ask them what is wrong with the author's premise and what they will take away as lessons for their lives --both personal and professional. I ask them to think about what they know and what they believe and what they value. It can help them figure out when someone in power is lying to them or merely coloring the truth. It can help them understand that others think differently than they do, and that difference, as Martha Stewart would say, "is a good thing." In fact, it can help them understand that they actually have independent thoughts, something for which many of them have not been rewarded in the educational system as it has evolved.

But the dirty little secret is that increasingly the students I meet, neither know how to do that, nor want to. Increasingly many (though not all), are looking for a certification that will allow them to make more money on the job. And that is based in pragmatic skills of memorization and replication. Perhaps that is because the schools where I have been teaching for the past decade, see "training young people" for the work force as their mandate. They see students as professionals or apprentices who are getting the training that will make them more effective employees. I see them as students who happen to be professionals, getting an education that will help them make a more sustainable planet, a more humane work or living space, or a space that will help people learn or heal. It makes for some very uncomfortable mismatches in learning goals.

I am a member of an organization I respect -- Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. They are committed to equity and social responsibility in the workplace and in the community. They are planning a conference and as members, we were asked to consider the role of education. One emailed response after another suggested that we need to prepare students for the work force. And that makes me cranky. 

I had a student who complained that we were trying to make "little Renaissance men" rather than giving him the skills he needs to improve his job status. He reminded me in the first week that he was "a consumer" and this was not meeting his needs for what he bought with his tuition money. He ended the semester disappointed with all three of his teachers.

So I have come up against the deeply unsatisfying nature of the education system that I have been part of for decades. 

I tell students that they have the chance to learn and think.  And I am aware of how many have no opportunity to do this--in this country or elsewhere.

They want an education that teaches them to "do".  They want the old fashioned American dream of upward mobility in a time of broken careers, broken dreams and broken lives.

But why would it be different when a class is framed around what is posted in the catalog whether or not that is accurate--or appropriate - or effective for the content. A faculty member is told not to spend time answering students' emails or phone calls if that exceeds the amount of time allotted to the course by Union contract.

Nor does this apply only to the students we teach.

A close friend sent me several emails over the past few days, encouraging us to apply for full time teaching positions at a local college. She thought they might find H and I a valuable resource based on our training and our knowledge. She knows something of our work histories. 

I reminded her of the old story about the neurologist who is talking to the novelist. The neurologist says to the writer, “You know when I retire, I am going to write the great American novel.” And the writer pauses and says,  “And I think I will take up neurosurgery.”  

We are grateful for the support of our friends and colleagues, but these days, University and College education is not a place for critical thinking for either students or faculty (in most places). Academia promotes those who show a nearly monomaniacal career-focus. The rhetoric about interdisciplinary curricula is not supported in the hiring that I have seen. Despite the rhetoric about an economic downturn driving students toward colleges as the job market dried up, there are fewer students filling the seats. Faculty members have to take on the fundamental courses in their disciplines as well as the advanced classes in their areas of interest. And many need to teach the "General Education" classes that provide students with the basic critical thinking skills that they didn't get in high school. Or worse, they have to embed lessons on showing up for class, and turning off their PDAs during class, with lessons on plagiarism. New prospective faculty need to guarantee when they apply for a teaching position, that they can raise the money for their own salary as well as cover the research assistantships of their graduate students, by bringing in grants.

Without an act of god, it is more than a little unlikely that either of us, trained in the most interdisciplinary of fields, would be hired for full time faculty positions where we would have to do what is called "skills training," teaching Clinical Psych and GIS and statistics and physics. Forget about the nature of Environmental Theory or John Stilgoe's class at Harvard which rejects the use of a syllabus or pre-determined readings (mandated now by Federal edict so students can assess how much their textbooks will cost before they register). Stilgoe urges his students to go outside and observe; to see what catches their eye. He writes in his book Outside Lies Magic of the manner in which the color of smoke from a chimney against the sky identifies what is being burned - oil or wood. He looks at the way newly mown grass shows patterns of human use. These are small details but they teach students to get outside of their textbooks and engage the world they live in. That is something that matters to critical thinking - and sutainability and social justice. As long as we are concentrated on the costs of our textbooks, we have little concern about who can afford to be educated.

It is more than a little unlikely that two people who never fit the mold, moving from graduate school to assistant professor to associate professor, to tenure, would pass muster. As people who have been in academia long enough to have qualified for senior professorships and well-funded retirements, both of us find ourselves battling with our own work histories, squeezing them like lemons to make from them something akin to lemonade.


And sometimes that feels anything but sweet.