Snapshots from the First Day of School

I begin my first day of fiftieth grade working at home, prepping tomorrow night’s seminar. New this year is historian Catherine J. Denial’s A Pedagogy of Kindness, which I have slipped into the syllabus sight unseen. When we talk about teaching, my graduate students will consider Denial’s suggestion that teaching begin with kindness, toward ourselves and our students.

When I am on campus, printing out the class list, news of the killings at Apalachee High School comes across my newsfeed. I gird myself, pray about the body count, turn my mind sideways, do the mental calisthenics I learned somewhere between Sandy Hook and Parkland. I carry my books and papers and welcome the undergraduates to class.

I begin with my values. I tell my students I know they are people first. They have complicated lives that will sometimes get in the way of their ability to do the work we are meant to do together. I value their physical and mental health. Last fall a student told me no professor had ever offered that message before. I tell them teaching is a sacred trust.

I assure the students that the deadlines are soft. We will have ungrading instead of rubrics and graded assessments. When they do the work in good faith, I will give them the same engaged feedback I give my colleagues. They will not lose points for lateness or misplaced apostrophes or less than fully-formed ideas. Learning to please their own standards outweighs the anxiety of trying to meet mine, still unknown to them. I also ask them for their grace. I am a caregiver for a relative in hospice. Soon I may need them to forgive my distraction and absence. I too am a person with a complicated life.

The class meeting is full of laughter, with more instantaneous connection, engagement, and pleasure than I have ever experienced on the first day of school. The students are genuinely enjoying themselves. They are also giddy with relief. They may have come to class knowing about the news from Georgia, done their own psychological gymnastics. They are mostly no older than Columbine. They have grown up in the shadow of school shootings and the heat of a warming planet. They have chosen higher education despite it all. My classroom will provide a little respite from the grief.

After dinner I deal with my high school senior’s back-to-school paperwork. I read and sign a syllabus. It is fierce and adversarial. It admonishes and threatens. It tells students they must do the reading, come to class fully prepared, not hide in the nurse’s office during a test, write an extra test if they miss the AP exam next spring. It looks like the kind of syllabus that many of us wrote before the pandemic. But at least my child came home today.

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel defeated in this vocation. Educators feel ourselves so thoroughly devalued. Policies set us at odds with our students: following the curriculum is more important than learning, judging our students is more important than loving them. Our schools have been stripped of funding. We show up for the first day of school knowing that somewhere in the country, dozens of our colleagues and students will be murdered at work this year. Perhaps in ours. In school, the Second Amendment outweighs our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I no longer hope that we will renounce the madness of the guns. The worst has already happened, over and over again, and nothing has changed. Kindness is not the kind of structural transformation that can counteract the consequences of bullying, abuse, illness, and rage. It is a pedagogical strategy, or perhaps a tactic. It is not enough. But it is something that I can bring to my teaching, to how I work with students and how I set up my classes.

After I walk the dog in the dark, I have a free hour to write. I contemplate the metaphors of conflict built into my vocabulary: snapshots, gird, deadlines, defeated, strategy, tactic. I consider whether to free my language of their taint or to keep them, markers of how hard it is even to speak peacefully.

Earlier this week, another teacher reminded me that in the long run students will forget the content of my class, but they will remember how I made them feel. I am not so naïve as to think a million teachers infusing our courses with kindness will be enough to stop school shootings. But as I peer over the rim of my own despair, I wonder whether being kind might be enough to give pause to the shooter who walks through my hallway. He might point his gun downward as he passes our classroom door, away from my beloved, laughing students, full of the joy of learning.

A Letter to My Future Self: How to Get Ready for a New Career Or, How Teaching Career Diversity for Historians Opened the Door Leading out of the Academy

Dear Future Amanda,

If you’re reading this missive, it means that you’ve started to give serious consideration to leaving the professoriate. I might say, “Congratulations,” but I don’t know the circumstances. Maybe you’ve stopped looking forward to being in the classroom. Maybe you’ve run out of research ideas (I know, this sounds unlikely). Maybe you can’t stand your colleagues any longer but know the odds against lateral move. Or maybe the state government has succeeded in destroying the public university system. I don’t know what’s brought you to this point, but I do have confidence that you can make this transition to a new career.

Do you remember when we decided to pursue a doctorate? Super-Past Amanda decided to go to graduate school when she was a young pup of 20. Super-Past Amanda really enjoyed her first US history classes and thought she’d like to learn more. Although she gave herself permission to drop out if so inclined, once she got to graduate school she just kept going. When she finished the PhD in 1999, landing an academic job was a crapshoot with even odds. The “jobs crisis” dating to the 1970s hadn’t yet turned into the structural divide of the twenty-first century academic job market. When she lucked into an academic position that the first choice candidate turned down, she settled into the job and built a life around it. A good life, until now, when you’re considering whether to leave the faculty.

You don’t have to be trapped by Super-Past Amanda’s myopic decision-making. You aren’t less competent than she was. You know from parenting your daughters that you can’t map out your whole life. You should make the next right choice. Perhaps that means it’s time to leave the academy.

It might have been a while since you taught a course on Career Diversity, so I want to remind you some of what Past Amanda learned this spring semester teaching graduate students about planning their own professional paths.

There are plenty of resources for PhDs seeking careers outside the academy. I know that you know about Imagine PhD, Basalla and Debelius’s “So What Are You Going to Do with That ?,”[1] the AHA’s first-person essays from a broad range of historians, VersatilePhD, and Beyond the Professoriate. I won’t try to summarize their insights. Instead, here are some personal suggestions to lay the groundwork for your next steps. Hopefully you are still cultivating these practices, but in case you forgot about them, here’s a reminder from your past self about why they are worthwhile.

First, you should use your energies for your community, outside your formal job. Volunteering for the public good helps you recognize your existing skills that non-academics see as valuable. Is the mayor of your small city (himself a former humanities professor turned politician) still giving you opportunities to participate in local government? Past Amanda has already worked her way up from chairing a short-term task force on the city’s housing code to membership on the relatively relaxed Architectural Review Board and now the city’s Plan Commission. Keep it up and build your local network. When your neighbors know what you can do, they might open professional doors for you.

Second, you should deliberately undertake professional development, even though professors generally don’t use that term. The PhD is a terminal degree, but it shouldn’t be the end of your education. Obviously your teaching and research have taught you more about history. But you should also keeping learning new skills. Remember that writing project that introduced you to WordPress? The time you put in then paid off when your digital history project ended up on a WordPress platform. You started playing with coding after a visit to your daughter’s middle school Tech Ed class; how far did you get on Code.org? I’m not saying you ever have to penetrate the mysteries of the photocopier—there are limits after all—but do welcome the possibilities that intrigue you.

Finally, keep up those connections with your students. Your decades in the classroom mean that you have already built relationships with students who are now embedded in work environments that welcome historians. Other professors probably won’t be helpful building your new career, but the students who remember you fondly might be excited to have the chance to return your service with an informational interview or an entrée to a position. Your students already know you respect them as whole people whom you want to help for their own sake. They might welcome the chance to see you as a whole person as well.

Know that your PhD is not an anvil weighing down your job search. Rather, like other forms of education, a PhD is a battery: it powers you, and it fits a wide variety of machines. Whether you want to leave your career or are feeling forced to, you can adapt your PhD to many different applications. To be sure, your PhD is a C battery—suited for flashlights, radios, toys, and tools. To fulfill your childhood dream of a seat on the Supreme Court, you will need to earn that (J)D battery instead. But your PhD is never wasted, even if it is time to try it out somewhere new.

Love,

Present Amanda

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[1] Susan Basalla and Maggie DeBelius, “So What Are You Going to Do with That?’: Finding Careers Outside Academia, 3^rd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015; originally published 2001 by Farrar Straus and Giroux).

Living the Dream

Every summer, my husband and I go to see the financial planner. I hate it. For me, it's like going to the dentist. Except for in my life as a busy mother, going to the dentist is a nice little vacation--I get to sit still with my eyes closed and no expectations that I say or produce anything for half an hour.

One thing I particularly loathe at the financial planner's office is the "Dream Wall," a cloud painted wall decorated with clients' dreams for themselves and their futures. It's the kind of thing that you would expect...early retirement, open a bed and breakfast, sail around the world. I've always reacted viscerally against the Dream Wall, and every year the financial planner asks me again if I'd like to share my dream on the wall.

As I anticipate with dread our next visit to the planner this summer, I am starting to discern why I hate the Dream Wall so much. I'm not opposed to dreams. But, there are two problems.

1. I am already living my dream life. I really can't ask for more than I already have: meaningful work, a solid, fascinating, and basically happy family, a good church community, and, most days, the chance to swim.

2. Money, which is what the financial planner is positioned to work on, can't buy me what I dream of. I want more rest, more time each day to read novels, more time to do the work of my soul, more time to get exercise, more time to enjoy my children.

My problem is that I can't always remember that I am already living out my dreams. I get so wound up in the daily problems that I forget--as a friend was kind enough to remind me this morning--that my joy resides in my daily activities, the intriguing and confused comment of my child, her excitement about a new idea, the chance to go to sleep in a house that has so much space I can't possibly keep up with the labor of tidying, much less cleaning it.


The financial planner would probably say that the purpose of the Dream Wall is to help me realize how much of my dream I already have, and how to put aside money for the other things I might want in the future, like retirement, or a college education for my kids. But those things aren't dreams for me. They are icing. My dream is the day, not the night.

In which I agree (somewhat) with Jonah Goldberg

It’s not every day that I even bother to read Jonah Goldberg’s column, much less agree with the basic sentiments in it. But today is a different day.

Goldberg recounts the story of Lena Reppert, a wheelchair-bound, dying nonagenarian being escorted by her daughter to a nursing home out of state. The staff of the Transportation Security Administration searched Ms. Reppert in a way that made her daughter conclude that she had to remove her mother’s adult diaper, humiliating enough in itself, and then rush to catch her plane, lacking a second diaper with which to protect her mother’s dignity. Goldberg calls for a rebellion against this suspicion of passengers by TSA.

I don’t follow Goldberg’s railing all the way back to ethnic profiling, which he would clearly prefer to the current approach taken by the TSA—that everyone is a suspect. A mother who brings water or juice boxes for her children through security (yes, this happened to me). A baby, inspected out of the sightline of his mother. Lena Reppert. But I do agree with Goldberg’s basic sense that TSA staff often act like machines, at the expense of their discretionary, human judgment.

Although I have traveled by plane only infrequently in the years since 9/11, when I have flown, I have often wondered about what working for TSA must do to a person’s soul. What does it mean to a person to be trained by his employer—the federal government, no less—that all other human beings must be regarded as possible terrorists and treated accordingly, with no milk of human kindness to ameliorate what most rational Americans recognize is a sadly necessary level of screening? If you work for TSA, do you carry your work attitude home with you? Do you fear the children in the playground and treat them with the same distance and disdain you do at work? How many people quit their jobs at TSA because of what it does to them, inside?

I am fortunate enough to have work that I love to do. I realize that this is a privilege that I should not take lightly, a product of my class, educational, and generational contexts. Most humans in the present, as well as in the past, have had to labor under bad conditions for goals that they may not value personally. I wish that everyone had the opportunity to do the kind of work that I have. Not that everyone should be a professor, but that everyone should enjoy the chance to do work that they believe makes a substantive contribution to bettering the human condition and receive adequate compensation for their labors. This is the dignity of work, to my mind. I wish for everyone the chance to do work that elevates them personally, rather than degrades them.

How’s Your Water?

I’ve never been much of a fan of the balance metaphor as a way of describing our lives and our work as being in competition with each other. When I picture “work-life balance,” I imagine a woman holding up heavy burdens, maybe bowling balls, up in the air while she walks around trying not to fall over. The only time I felt that the metaphor really worked was in the introduction to Mama, PhD, where the editors remind us that when a dancer’s body is in balance, every muscle is working. That, at least, felt validating and true.

Perusing Samantha Parent Walravens’ Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood, I was struck by the observation of my college classmate Alexander Bradner. Bradner writes, “Children need their mothers—not nannies or daycare workers—to narrate the mundane, introduce so many joys, and assist with so many pains…But women need a public voice, external affirmation, internal feelings of triumph, money of their own, and a mental life beyond worry and logistics. Only those free to fulfill their early promise have a chance of living through their fifties and sixties without debilitating regret. So we should be able to work as well.” (“Muthering Heights,” p. 110).

For me, Bradner’s observation triggered something. We need our families, or, writ more broadly, our lives. We need our work—something satisfying that makes a contribution somewhere beyond our selfish inner pleasures. We need life, and we need work. They are not burdens; they nourish us. Granted, they nourish us in different ways, and it usually is hard to cultivate them simultaneously.

I have not fully worked this out, but it also seems to me that work and life usually interpenetrate. Show me a mother who does not think about her children when she is working. Show me a worker who never does any “work” while off the job. I acknowledge that you can’t drive your bus while you’re at home. But I have loaded the dishwasher mentally while trying to go to sleep often enough to suspect that downtime nourishes our ability to do our jobs in important ways.

So now I am in search of a different metaphor, a metaphor that acknowledges that work and life are not just burdens, but needs. And that projects the notion that work and life are mutually reinforcing, not undermining.

Today I am trying out the metaphor of water instead of work-life balance. Water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. We need them both individually, and we need them together. We need them to be connected correctly, in the right proportions, at the correct angles. Let’s try it out. Instead of asking your friend, “How is your work-life balance?” ask them “How is your water today?” and see what you learn.