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.

The Lessons They Taught Me

The last weeks of 2020 have brought me two unexpected and grievous losses.

In mid-December, I learned that my high school Latin teacher died. I hadn’t seen James Bigger since my freshman year, but his imprint was indelible. A big man with capillaries tracing down his nose, a dapper dresser who wore three-piece suits to teach in a suburban public high school, Mr. Bigger dominated the classroom. He addressed us all formally and led us unrelentingly through the first-year Latin curriculum. I loved his class, which set the intellectual foundation for the next seven years of my life, carrying me from northern Virginia to Princeton, where I majored in classics. The way he unpacked the structure of the Latin language taught me more about my native language than twelve years of instruction in English did and made studying German and even ancient Greek a breeze. Brilliant teaching wasn’t enough to turn his three sections of Latin into a full-time job, however, so Mr. Bigger left us for greener pastures at the end of the year. Eventually he settled down into long-term employment at McLean High School in Fairfax County, a position he retired from a few years ago.

Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi could not have been more physically different from Mr. Bigger. A slight and unassuming man with an irrepressible mop of black hair, Ashkan was killed last week along with 11 companions, mountain climbing in Iran. Ashkan was one of the best doctoral students I ever worked with. He took two graduate seminars with me before inviting me to sit on his dissertation committee. It was a pleasure to read the work of this luminous young man, whose study of public space in his home city of Tehran fearlessly took on the intellectual giants of social science. Before graduating, he left Milwaukee to live with his adored wife, who was pursuing her own advanced studies in Denver. When the American Historical Association met there in 2017, the two of them graciously welcomed me and a classmate into their home, serving a feast that he had spent all day preparing. Although I knew that Ashkan was a mountain climber and accomplished harmonica player, the stunning landscapes on their walls introduced me to his eye for photography. Soon after, they returned to Iran to care for their aging parents and raise their baby. Ashkan landed a position at the University of Tehran and settled down for what we all assumed would be a lengthy tenure teaching and researching urban design.

While we might resign ourselves to the prospect that our beloved teachers may die before us, we are never ready to lose our students. I feel Mr. Bigger’s and Ashkan’s deaths as body blows, but our student-teacher relationships had long since transcended physical space. I never spoke to Mr. Bigger after he left my high school, but in 2010 I tracked him down for a long-overdue thank you message for his influence on my life. Although an ocean and a continent and failures of international diplomacy separated us, I never believed I had seen Ashkan for the last time. I sometimes daydreamed of visiting his growing family in Tehran, and I was delighted when just a few weeks ago he asked me for letters of reference for postdoctoral work in the US. In the shock of knowing that both are now forever beyond my reach, cut off from attending their memorial services, unable to find obituaries, I mourn by revisiting the lessons they taught me.

Once in Mr. Bigger’s Latin class, he stood right next to me and pushed his pointer finger down hard on my desk. “Never second guess yourself in language, Miss Seligman!,” he admonished in his typically florid tones. Patrolling the class, he had spotted eraser marks on my test paper, where I had replaced a correct answer with a wrong one. Did I end up getting that answer right? Thirty-seven years later, I have no idea. But with decades of teaching experience under my belt, I can see what he was doing pedagogically—building my confidence. He had taken my measure as a person and intuited that much more than language instruction, what I needed was to trust my first instincts. Learning a “dead” language suited me because I could deliberate over my answers, but for a “live” language—or to teach, or to parent—I would need to be able to think and speak on my feet. In the decades since then, I’ve often reminded myself, “Never second guess yourself in language, Amanda.” Eventually that confidence has seeped out beyond language—a little more slowly, perhaps, but I am still a work in progress.

In much less dramatic fashion, Ashkan also taught me. Since I was the professor and he was the student, it was ostensibly my job to do the teaching. But the best students also teach their teachers—about the stuff they are learning, and also about how to be in the world. In early 2013, I forwarded Ashkan an announcement about a public event relevant to his research. Born into an earlier generation, I would have been the kind of busybody who was forever mailing clippings to friends and family.  Not wanting to overwhelm Ashkan’s in-box, I cautioned him, “Tell me when these get annoying.” In gentlest fashion, he thanked me for the information and told me, “Acts of kindness never get annoying.” Although this might seem obvious to you, Askhan’s note pulled me up short—such a profound insight, delivered so straightforwardly. In retrospect, I can see that his message arrived the beginning of a journey to transform my teaching, learning how to make relationship and kindness the foundation of my pedagogy. In the moment, though, Ashkan’s words revealed the essential characteristic of a much younger person who already knew how to preach the gospel of kindness, even to his professors.

For years I’ve been telling my children that true love makes you a better person; if you are in a relationship with someone and your behavior becomes worse instead of better, if you feel yourself decaying instead of elevating, something is out of sync. You might love that person, but it’s not true love, not fully reciprocal, not one that you should commit your life to. Pedagogy is like that too. Minimal teaching fills a student with knowledge. Good teaching recognizes how relationship informs learning, motivates a student to dig deeper, creates aha! moments, earns hugs and tears at graduation. But great teaching transmutes you, you the teacher and you the learner. Great teaching—like great learning—builds you both into better people than you were when the classroom door opened. If you have passed through a crucible of great teaching, its lessons will spin out in unexpected moments, in forms tied to the original moment by a slender but unmistakable silver thread.

As 2020 draws to its awful close, Jim Bigger and Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi no longer walk the planet. But they are not absent from my life. For the remainder of my days, I will carry the lessons they taught me, mix them up in my being, and reweave them in new forms, for my future students, my future teachers.

Thinking about St. Anne at Christmas

 

December 24, 2020

From my childhood until I was married at 30, my Christmases had three noteworthy aspects: gathering with my mother’s family, the celebration centered on bringing a pine tree into the house and decorating it with ornaments above and presents below, and the story of Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem—at least as it was filtered through my decidedly non-Christian Unitarian Universalist churches. Santa wasn’t really part of my direct experience; we rarely if ever had Christmas stockings, and no one except popular culture tried to fill my head with stories about a jolly old man with a white beard. To young Amanda, opening our gifts on Christmas Day was surely the heart of the experience. There were SO MANY presents that my aunt always called it “Pig’s Christmas.” My grandmother, perhaps making up for family money and status lost with the picture cord factory in the Great Depression, made sure there was always a multitude of gifts to unwrap. A family rule was that everyone had to watch everyone open every single present—no presents could be opened when it was time to tend the feast in the kitchen—so the whole thing took hours. The present-opening ritual was always capped off by a visit from the Table Fairy, an idiosyncratic guest who left inexpensive practical presents such as office pens or a fresh box of paperclips on everyone’s dinner plate. The Table Fairy ensured that as the presents under the tree dwindled, no one would selfishly lose interest in the process of watching the unwrapping because everyone could look forward to have one more gift just before dinner, to be opened simultaneously.

If you had asked me as a teenager, I probably could have told you about Mary and Joseph, as could most American children who grow up in a superficially secular society that nonetheless shapes itself around the rhythms of the Christian holiday cycle. The UU churches I attended as a child taught me to love Christmas carols and to know the basic outlines of the story of Jesus’s birth. One year my brother had a part in the Christmas pageant, playing Joseph. He had a line reassuring the ass who carried Mary to
Bethlehem: “There, there, Small One.” We spent so much time finding the right tone for this line that it became a family byword for years afterwards. But the recitation of the classic Christmas story, which I encountered on Christmas Eve, really functioned as a prelude to the main event of unwrapping a seemingly endless supply of presents. No one did the work to connect the dots between Christmas presents and the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh that the kings brought for baby Jesus.

My primarily secular understanding of Christmas changed when I married a Roman Catholic husband. Neither of us was going to convert for our marriage—he is too dyed in the wool of theism to understand Unitarian Universalism as a religion at all, much less one he would practice; and becoming a Christian would require me to believe multiple things that I find impossible. But we respect the importance of each other’s faiths and from time to time attend worship at each other’s churches. Until we had actual children, I assumed that the challenges of raising an interfaith family would be central to our marriage. But our distinct theologies lead us to the same fundamental values, and our children’s major challenges have little to do with our religious orientations. The interfaith quality of our family is peaceful and enriching rather than a source of conflict.

Attending Catholic services even once in a while did transform my experience of the major Christian holidays. I was so surprised when I realized that there were Trinitarian versions of the familiar Christmas hymns, which even in UU form are already much more theistic than I am entirely comfortable with. I couldn’t belt out lyrics about “the offspring of the Virgin’s womb” with the same kind of gusto I sang about fields and flocks or the silent night. But over decades of marriage, my appreciation for Christmas has only increased, while I have backed off of Easter altogether. I began to understand Easter as the spiritual centerpiece of Christianity. It was not, apparently, a holiday about rabbits and jellybeans and finally the blessed return of springtime, as my various UU churches took care to emphasize for our members who are come-outers, so wounded by the churches that rejected their sexuality and feminism and generally questioning spirits that the traditional, resurrection-oriented Easter triggers their deepest hurts instead of offering them the promise of salvation. So I decided to let my husband shape Easter for our family, providing a festive ham-oriented meal on his request each year, but leaving the candy buying and church-going priorities to him (though I did continue to supervise egg-dyeing and hunting until the teenagers took over that one for themselves). Most years now I don’t even try to get the children to a UU Easter service as well as the essential Catholic mass. But Christmas—perhaps because it is a holiday with a baby at the core—has taken on many new valences to me over the years.

Christmas first began to grow new meaning for me when our first child was a toddler. We hadn’t tried to travel for her first Christmas, when she was five months old. That year, perhaps in a misguided effort to recreate my childhood Pig’s Christmases, we spent three days trying to keep her attention by opening all of her presents between nursing and a precious few naps. But we discovered it didn’t really feel like Christmas when it was just the three of us, so in following years we packed ourselves up and traveled 800 miles east to my family or 2,000 miles west to his. It turns out that there is nothing like traveling with a baby at Christmas to help parents feel both empathy with and sympathy for Joseph, and especially Mary, great with child, riding Small One in search of a hospitable inn. Sure, travel with fractious children and many bags and teeming, keyed up crowds in 21^st century America is hellish; but at least we knew that at the end of the ride our families would meet us at the airport and whisk us home for homemade spaghetti sauce and a futon made up with many warm blankets. Mary did not complain the way I did; but she was filled with the same love for her infant that I had.

My sense of connection to Christmas shifted again as my children grew old enough to participate in the pageant at my UU church, always held on the Sunday before Christmas (not Christmas Eve, which was reserved for a short homily; caroling culminating in the whole church singing Silent Night in a darkened sanctuary, the light from a single candle slowly spreading around the encircling congregation, one person at a time; and, of course, frosted cookies). The church I attend now, in the Universalist Midwest, tends not to use the opportunity of the Christmas pageant to relate the birth of Jesus. Our hard-working Director of Religious Education develops a new script every year, with evergreen woodlands, or elves, or once even a screaming latke at the center. I don’t much look forward to attending the pageant, which always feels like amateur acting rather than worship to me; but I definitely see the value of the children learning to take on these varied roles and the older members appreciating their efforts. My older child, inhabited by a level of stage lust I’d never previously witnessed in person, will take on any role asked of her, and is a very reliable narrator because she is naturally LOUD, even if she has to learn to slow down. My younger child, full of stage fright, will always try to participate but can’t always bring herself in front of all the loving eyes of the congregation. For her, the breakthrough year was the time she could manipulate a shadow puppet behind a screen.

Where is Christianity and the connection to Christmas in that reflection about non-nativity pageants, you ask? Well, it’s admittedly a bit more tenuous. Traveling with older children was easier than with infants, but we started staying home on Christmas to allow them to be in the pageant; and being home also makes it easier to go to both a UU service and a Catholic mass (a feat, by the way, that makes it very hard to feed a family on Christmas Eve; no time to cook, and the only restaurant open in Wisconsin is McDonald’s). But around the time of the pageant years, the UU Religious Educator Sophia Lyon Fahs’s words often got repeated at Christmas Eve services and on Facebook memes, words that make the birth of Jesus once again a universalizing experience: “Each night a child is born is a holy night.” My children might not have been sent to save the world, but their lives are sacred; I can treasure them; and I can try to raise them to bless the world despite our imperfections and brokenness.

And now this year. 2020. The year of the pandemic. This year my older child is 16, the same age Mary was when the state sent her off to Bethlehem, nine months pregnant, to be counted with her husband’s family (this version of a census never made sense to me, and still doesn’t; what kind of government counts people where they come from instead of where they actually are? One that doesn’t care about efficiency but does care about controlling people, I suppose). We aren’t staying home this pandemic year because the state insists we do; in fact, in Wisconsin the state’s power to order us home has been severely attenuated. But we are staying home voluntarily because we treasure other people’s children and the elders that they love and depend on. In the absence of church services, what does the Christmas story have to teach us this year?

My 16 year old hopes that she won’t be at home next Christmas; she has applied to spend it with a host family in another country. If she is away, I will miss her terribly. My thoughts turn to Mary’s mother, St. Anne, who is of course never pictured at the nativity in the manger, where Joseph was Mary’s only human companion. What was that first Christmas like for Anne? I wondered how she felt about sending her own pregnant child off with a much older man, even one to whom she was betrothed. Giving birth leads as easily to death as to new life. How much anguish did Anne experience, worried about how her beloved child would manage in childbirth, especially without her mother’s comfort to carry her through?

I do a little superficial research about St. Anne (and ask friends more knowledgeable about church history for a boost). I am shocked to learn that their mother-daughter story is one that is about familial separation well before the first Christmas. Anne and her husband Joachim do not appear in the Christian Bible. Instead, their story is related in the Gospel of James, which the Bible’s compilers decided to exclude from the canon.[1] Anne and Joachim are wealthy, and pious, but refused from certain desirable statuses because they are childless. Anne miraculously conceives—the Immaculate Conception—and gives birth to Mary. Anne cossets her child Mary throughout her infancy, but delivers her to the temple to be raised by priests when Mary turns three, as a way of offering thanks for the gift of her life. Did Anne ever see Mary after that? Was the first Christmas only one of many in which mother and daughter were apart? The tradition seems murky. For a while, teenage Mary, alarmed by a pregnancy she cannot hide or explain to the satisfaction of the priests, takes refuge with her cousin Elizabeth. Was Mary still connected with her family but fearful of the prospect of her mother’s wrath at the pregnancy? Depictions of Mary and Anne in the medieval period show mother teaching daughter to read, suggesting that then, at least, the church accepted the idea that they had an ongoing relationship, even if they were not together when Mary birthed Jesus.[2]

But 2020’s Christmas lesson is a poignant one for me. For 2000 years, Christians have celebrated the mother and son, Mary’s bond with Joseph solidified by the birth of the precious baby Jesus. But what of the mother Anne and daughter Mary, separated at the time of travail, by an unholy conspiracy of state and social dictates? Were they not also a family? Christmas is a time of family celebration but also of family put asunder.

Photo by my mother, Kerry Mueller, the artist.

---

[1] Why is the Gospel of James excluded, you ask? Read it for yourself here or here. It’s shockingly different from the more familiar gospels, and not only because a midwife attends Mary’s labor in a cave instead of a manger.

[2] Pamela Sheingorn, “‘The Wise Mother’: The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,” Gesta 32 1) (1993): 69-80, https://www.jstor.org/stable/767018

Pandemic Learning

Let’s talk about the suffering of American schoolchildren, shall we?

Until the 20^th century, children were entitled to a rudimentary education of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Most families could not spare their children’s labor—bodily labor on the farm, wage labor in the factory—so basic literacy was the maximum they got.

During the Great Depression, Americans started implementing universal high school education. Not because they really believed in the benefits of a superior education, but as a way of keeping youth off the job market. If they were in school, they would stop competing with grown men for family-supporting wages.

But that’s all taken care of right? That’s history.

Consider also these conditions that continue into the present.

Local municipalities and states denied African Americans the resources to run adequate schools. Buildings were ramshackle, teachers taught 100 children in a classroom. After the Brown I and II decisions, black children had better access to schools that had been built for white children. But African Americans and other families of color often have to make a trade-off: send children to schools built around white children so they can learn in well-resourced conditions, or keep them in a culturally-supportive, close-to-home environment where they are not subject to racist hazing and daily micro-aggressions.

Children with disabilities received either no education or entirely segregated education until the Americans with Disabilities Act meant they were entitled to education in the least restrictive environment. Even now, however, because schools cannot be bothered to implement Universal Design and the states have not quadrupled educational funding, they continue to learn on the margins of an educational system built for neurotypical students.

What of gifted/asynchronous learners? The schools have no obligation to meet their educational needs. The states have chosen to build schools around the learning needs of children of normal intelligence who meet a suspect set of developmental norms. They cannot have access to academic content appropriate to their intellectual gifts until their behavior meets the age-related criteria specified by developmental psychologists. Some gifted/asynchronous learners suffer their entire educational careers in schools that are built to prepare children for work and careers rather than for curiosity, wonder, and learning.

Some children are natural nightowls. Leave them alone and they will do their best and most creative work between about 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. But can they have a school experience that encourages them to learn? No, because school has to start at 7 a.m. so that student athletes are not denied the opportunity to practice and compete in the afterschool hours.

So, forgive me if I am not entirely sympathetic to the complaints of parents whose children would learn better in the school building than through temporary virtual learning. Your children are operating in a context that has simply not prioritized education for all students. Here in Wisconsin, the state and the public have decided that keeping tavern owners in business and going on with church services and weddings are all more important than keeping children in school buildings. They have taken this decision even though the entire planet is dealing with an emergency like World War II that requires everyone to sacrifice in order to keep our health care system functioning.

If you want an educational system that spares your child the indignity of learning from the comfort of home instead of with the direct supervision of teachers, then you have to work to build a system that prioritizes the education of all children. Because we haven’t had that yet in America. Maybe it’s time.

A letter to school board and administrative staff

Dear [school board and top administrators]:

Like you (I am sure), I have been giving a lot of thought to school reopening in the fall; I am literally losing sleep (hence the time stamp on this email). Thank you for surveying the staff and families about options. I suspect you have come to the conclusion that there are no good choices, only less bad ones. I personally have volunteered to teach my classes at [my university] face-to-face; but in light of the increasing prevalence of COVID in [our state], I am less and less sure that is a good idea, even for my classes that are smaller and less socially complex than classrooms full of children. I am particularly concerned about the [middle] school building, with few windows that would allow immediate fresh air to ventilate classrooms.

The more I think about it, the more I have circled back to the following principles that I would like to see govern the return to school in the fall:

• No staff member or students should be required to be in a school building unless they volunteer to be present
• Students with special educational needs and whose families cannot manage with them continuing to be at home should have top priority for being supervised at school.
• Regular in-building instruction should resume only when COVID is not still actively circulating in our community, according to public health authorities, and even then we probably need social distancing measures to begin.

These principles to me imply that the district should adopt a flipped-classroom model. Here's what I would suggest:

• All formal instruction takes place online, with Chromebooks issued to students and financial support for internet access for families who cannot afford it on their own. As occurred in spring, minimize the requirement to attend sychronous sessions (but make them available), to prevent bandwidth conflicts within households.
• The school buildings are opened up with staff and other supervising adults (volunteers?) who are willing to be physically present. The combination of the number of voluntarily-present adults plus social distancing factors should determine how many children can be present at the school together. The in-person adults can then a) supervise the work of students who need direction to get going and stay on task; b) provide additional tutoring and instruction to meet the needs of the particular students they have with them.
• Priority for access to the in-person building time should be explicitly allocated to families with the greatest needs (I don't have a system for determining priorities, but I assume school administrators including guidance counselors will have a good sense of this). The district should explicitly encourage families who can manage with their children at home and whose students will suffer the least from continued lockdown not to opt for the in-person option. Note that access to the physical school could rotate, or people could sign up on a drop-in model so that even mostly locked-down students could have some opportunity to connect with peers in person.
• Everyone in the building needs to wear a mask.
• Return to in-school instruction should not begin until the public health gating criteria indicate that it is safe to do so. I personally consult the [state recovery] plan every day; although [our state] was briefly at 5 out of 6 green lights, we are currently back down to 2 out of 6 gating criteria met. Even then, students and staff will need to practice social distancing until COVID is not actively circulating in the US or most of us are vaccinated.

I know that this will not be an easy decision to make. I am an educator myself and have placed a central value on education in my life. But I do not want our students and staff to face death or life-long health effects for the sake of keeping up with standards of achievement that were imposed in more normal times. We continue in a state of emergency, and our choices about how to proceed should reflect that state of emergency--the situation is substantially worse now in [our state] than it was four months ago when the schools (rightly) shut down. Humans have a long adolescence. For those who survive this pandemic, there will be plenty of time to make up for "lost" learning. Let's maximize the numbers of our children and staff who have that opportunity.

Sincerely

Amanda

An Open Letter to Wisconsin Republican Legislators

Dear Legislators

I am writing to appeal to you to get the Republican leadership in Wisconsin to cooperate with Governor Evers on finding a way to end COVID-19—even if that means ordering Wisconsin residents to wear masks in all public settings and temporarily shutting down businesses, churches, and other organizations again.

It is clear from the public health data that Wisconsin is on the cusp of tipping over into an outbreak of COVID that resembles the situations in Florida, Arizona, and Texas, which have become dire in the past week. Cases of COVID are steadily increasing, and they have been since Wisconsin reopened after the state supreme court decision setting aside the governor’s Safer at Home order. If this continues unchecked, we will soon arrive at the point where our hospitals are overwhelmed and cannot provide adequate treatment either to COVID patients or to people with other health emergencies.

My family and I have spent the past four months locked down at home, going out only for food and medicine, public service, and a tiny bit of outdoor recreation. We wear masks everywhere, even walking around our low-density neighborhood. Although my gym has reopened, I have not gone back to it. We are trying to model responsible behavior for our children as well as to protect our neighbors in case we are infected unawares. Even though the Safer at Home order was no longer in effect, it was evident that the key to beating the virus is to drastically reduce the number of potential transmissions.

But my family simply cannot do this alone. My children want to go back to school in the fall. They will not be able to do so unless the pandemic is under control. It was the right decision for schools to shut down in March with only a few cases circulating in Wisconsin, and it would be the height of recklessness to reopen them in September if the caseload is still growing—teachers and students will die and suffer lifelong effects of illness if schools are reopened too early. It is clear from worldwide evidence that the only situation that will allow safe reopening of schools is the virus is no longer in wide circulation in our communities. The only way to get that result six weeks from now is to get Wisconsin residents to stay home now and wear masks when they go out. And given the state of politics in Wisconsin, only the Republican leadership can make these things happen.

Please do the right thing for the people of Wisconsin, step up to promote sensible and mandatory public health measures, and turn the spread of COVID around.

Sincerely

Amanda Seligman

Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Stores

Two days before we were told by our medical professionals to quarantine for 14 days and that we should go to the drive-through site for COVID tests, my husband and I separately went to the same store, him to pick out and pay for a household appliance and me to collect it. The people in that store were not social distancing and were not masked. I had to handle the door to open it. The whole time I was there, I was regretting the entire transaction. For a couple days afterwards I regretted the transaction and worried what it might do to us. I was angry with my husband for going there in the first place and not turning around and walking out when he saw it wasn't safe. And when we turned up sick, I felt like we should never patronize that business again.

Are we sure that those interactions made us sick? No, of course we don't know for sure. But what I learned from this episode (again) is to listen to my gut. We were lucky to end up with colds and not COVID, and most of the cost we paid was in our anxiety in the week between the purchase and when the negative test results came in. I don't want to live again with the worry about what will happen to my children if my husband and I are hospitalized, with the possibility of infecting the people I love, with fear of the short-term and unknown long-term ravages of COVID on my body. Other than food, there is nothing I need so badly that I should put us at risk.

So, I drew up this list of rules for a personal gut check before entering a store or other public place:

1. Have your staff wear masks properly
2. Limit the number of people inside
3. Let me open the door without touching a handle
4. Invite all visitors to wear masks
5. Post your policy at the entrance and on the web

If the store doesn't meet these criteria, I'm not going in. If I'm in the store and I realize it's not safe, I'll leave without the stuff I came for. Wisconsin reopened prematurely. I am not.

Reflection on Our COVID Scare: Instruction

While we were waiting for our COVID test results, one of the things I did was to complete the university's online tutorial for teaching online. I'm very glad it was available, because I've never taught online, and I know I need to do more reading about how to teach online. Over the years, I've migrated some of my course materials to the CMS, including handouts, PDFs of readings, the syllabus, and the slideshows I make for every class meeting. But as a teacher, I know that the heart of my instructional style, and my best capabilities, lie in the face-to-face relationship, in reading the room to know whether the silence is complete comprehension or befuddlement. So I've never said yes to the option of moving my whole class online.

As I took the tutorial, believing as I did then that I would be under quarantine for a full 14-day period, it became evident to me that even if some classes are scheduled to be face-to-face in the fall, it is imperative to plan and make available remote learning alternatives for each class session. We absolutely MUST make it possible for instructors and students who are symptomatic or under quarantine because of contact with someone infected to stay away from the classroom. That means not only not penalizing absences but also making it possible for students to keep up with their coursework even if they aren't able to be in the classroom. Even before I needed testing on my own, I started making backup plans for my fall courses in case we need to shift to remote. But once I couldn't leave my house for any purpose, I saw that I needed to do more. I have to plan for students who can't come to class, and for me who can't leave my house.

Two points about this immediate circumstance. One, it's a ton of work to double-plan an entire course for two different modalities. Unless the whole class operates either online or FTF, something is going to be lost because we won't all be on the same page (literally speaking). Two, because this planning has to be done in the summer when we aren't on payroll, we aren't going to be compensated for this work. My husband is planning to record a couple hundred hours of lecture this summer so that he can operate a flipped remote classroom next year if necessary. And he's contingent labor. While his department would like to keep him on and has him in the schedule for next year, there is no guarantee in this climate that he's not going to be laid off. She he's going to do hundreds of hours of work that will never be compensated, on spec.

Additionally, and this makes for even more work, it also became clear to me that going forward I should always make backup remote learning opportunities for my students. I've always told students that if they miss class, there is just no way for them to make it up; I'm not delivering the lecture again; there is no way to duplicate class discussion (however feebly I think it went). I also tell students they are autonomous adults, and that it's up to them if they come to class. I don't expect or accept excuses if they miss class. But I am happy to make the course materials available for them to make what they will of them. At the same time, I know this about my students: they don't miss class capriciously. It's not that they slept until 2 in the afternoon (like my daughter is currently doing), or that they were hungover. It's that they had a sick parent to take to chemo; they couldn't change their shifts; they have a chronic illness; they can't get childcare when schools are closed; their military reserve duty demands them to go to extra training. If my students' learning is my highest goal--and I believe it is--then I should make course available to them the opportunity to learn a day's or a week's worth of material even if they can't come to class. And of course that means double-planning the whole semester.

Suddenly my teaching job got a lot more full. I'm not complaining, and I'm a tenured full professor with plans to really hone in on my teaching over the next decade. But, wow, it's a daunting lot more work. Right now I'm optimistic that re-planning everything will improve all my teaching, both face-to-face and my non-extant online skills. Ask me again in a year if I still think this.

Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Food Inventory

One of the most stressful aspects of the lockdown has been managing the food inventory. Very early on in the pandemic I was actually shocked by the account of a prominent Washington DC person who said that she had been going to Whole Foods every single day. By contrast, our family decided we would send me out once every ten days to our basic grocery store, with an occasional supplementary run to Trader Joe's. We shifted that strategy a little bit when it became clear that there were COVID outbreaks in meatpacking plants across the country and the meat supply was threatened. I stopped buying meat at the grocery store and started going to local butchers whose meat sources are out of the factory food chain.

This approach was meant to minimize the chances of our catching or sharing the virus, but it had some real downsides. Something you wanted but not at the store? Then you're out of luck until your next ten-day run (yeast, flour, I'm looking at you). We don't drink a lot of milk these days, but we do use it as an ingredient. A half gallon might run out in 24 hours if the kids decided to make a lot of pudding. But our last gallon went bad before we finished it. And the actual trips to the store have been enormous runs, taking multiple grocery carts and multiple hours.

The issue with being quarantined, instead of just conservatively cooperating with the lockdown, however, is that you don't have any warning that it's coming. You can't decide that on Saturday you're going to stay inside for 14 days and go to the grocery store now. If you have active reason to believe that you might be contagious, you can't just mask up and go out to prepare. You have a moral obligation to stay home starting immediately. The quarantine order just falls on you.

The news from our doctor that we should quarantine came about halfway through our 10-day grocery cycle. That meant we were still good for a while, but that we couldn't go out and replenish the stuff that was going to run out during our quarantine. Did I have enough meat (probably)? Milk? No, definitely not. Flour and yeast? This gave me the most anxiety, since my family has been devouring homemade bagels and loaves of oatmeal/flour bread at the rate of about one batch every 36 hours.

I got especially worried when I realized that in our case, it was both the adults who were potentially contagious. Of course we wanted to protect our kids. But could we really hand over responsibility to them for feeding themselves and us for a two-week period? If we were actively feverish in the bedroom, I don't think we would have had a choice. But my husband and I did continue to be in charge of cooking for them and ourselves on a regular basis, and I did keep kneading the dough (hoping that cooking would kill any virus). I just hoped that if we got truly sick, there was enough canned soup and rice in the house for the children to feed themselves. I worried particularly about my picky eater, who started off lockdown cooperatively eating whatever was offered but has backed off of that in the past month. I asked her sister what they would have done about eating if we got sick, and she told me today that "[she] probably would have yelled at [her] sister a lot."

This is hard to manage, and stressful. I see now that I absolutely have to have a fourteen-day supply of food on hand at all times, just in case. I'm grateful to be wealthy enough to keep a well-stocked pantry, to have older children who can manage the stove and oven, for the previous owners of this house who let us keep their backup basement fridge.

Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Infection

I learned just how easily infection passes.

Our household has been really careful since lockdown. The children have left the house pretty much only to walk in the neighborhood, with one or two in-car only outings (like to a friend's birthday parade). My husband has gone out only once or twice himself. I've done all the other necessary outings and practiced as much social distancing and covering up as I am able (masks, gloves for shopping, turning my face away from people who pass too close in the grocery store, etc.).

But last Tuesday, we needed a large piece of household equipment. My husband went out to select and pay for it, and I went back later to the same store to bring it home (because trunk space). The store we went to was not practicing any care measures. Within 48 hours, both of us were showing the symptoms that had us calling in to the doctor asking whether we should quarantine.

Normally, we think of getting colds as unavoidable, a natural consequence of being out in the world in regular contact with other people. I've never before had an experience where I felt like I could isolate having "picked up a cold" to one particular encounter. And I'm shocked at how easy it was to pick it up, since I didn't touch anything except the door handle at the store, and my husband; we don't know which of us was the vector for the other. We're lucky that what we got was minor and not COVID, a threat which raised a host of questions for us--including what would happen to our children if we both were hospitalized at the same time. This is why I'm developing a list of safe practices that a public place needs to put in place before I enter.

It's shockingly easy to pick up a virus.

Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Masks

As soon as the nurse scheduled us for COVID tests, I looked at CDC guidance. It seemed completely impossible for the two adults in the house to isolate from the teenagers who needed food and parenting (not to mention keeping up to the recommended sanitation procedures, which involves cleaning surfaces all the time). But thanks to a timely gift from a friend, we did have masks that we could wear to keep ourselves from coughing our viruses (or whatever) onto our kids. So, my husband and I have been wearing masks almost continuously in the house since Thursday.

Our masks are cute, and mostly I was entertained by wearing them instead of annoyed. I noticed that the mask hides my double-chin, which I appreciated. At one point over the weekend, though, I'd had enough, so I betook myself to an isolated spot in the house and did some reading or chores by myself, without a mask on. And every once in a while it seemed too warm under the mask. Overall not too onerous to wear.

But in the grand scheme of thing, given the choice between wearing a moderately annoying mask and possibly protecting my children, or having a comfortably naked face and possibly infecting my children, it seemed pretty obvious that I shouldn't complain. So I wore the mask. I'm sure you would do the same for your own children, as almost anyone would.

And I thought to myself over and over again, if someone would wear a mask to protect their children at home, why wouldn't they do so in public to protect strangers?

Sacrifice

I couldn’t, can’t sleep from the outrage and grief.

How many Americans are staying home right now?

The most patriotic thing most of us have ever done.

Sacrificing our livelihoods, our pleasures, our visits to our parents’ sickbeds, our children’s births

Working without PPE, without knowledge of the disease

To save the lives of the unknown, beloved stranger—our nurses and doctors, our teachers, our first responders, our neighbors.

Some powerful few suggest that for the sake of the economy, we should turn ourselves into unwitting bullets that will kill hundreds of thousands of other Americans,

To render pointless what we have already done and will keep doing.

I never want to hear again that “All Lives Matter,” that they are “pro-life.”

How can I persuade you that freedom should not murder?

Awaiting Pandemic: March 12, 2020

Awaiting Pandemic: March 12, 2020

Amanda I. Seligman

In June 1992, my classmate and I drove west. The Great Plains terrified me. Fresh out of our first year of graduate school, where I studied the changes that had shaped the North American landscape, my mind’s eye could recreate the vast herds of bison that used to thunder over the American grasslands. Under skies broader than I had ever imagined, horizon unbroken in all directions, you could see them coming for miles but never get out of their way. No matter how fast you tried to run, they would trample you. I knew that nineteenth-century American hunters had shot the bison herds to the brink of extinction, destroying the animals and imperiling the indigenous cultures wrapped around them. But the curse of the historian is to conjure up the past and the future into the present moment. I could almost hear the imminent hooves, and I could not dodge them. I trembled.

I feel that way again, sitting in my living room, letting the internet unreel COVID-19’s spread across the planet into my historical imagination. It’s easy to lose an hour flipping among multiple news outlets, Twitter, and Facebook. I have been preparing in a low key, non-freakout way over the past month. In February, I dipped into Max Brooks’s World War Z, checking whether he had placed the origin of the zombie apocalypse in Hubei province (he had, if I read Chinese geography correctly). On every trip to the grocery store, I bought a few extra essentials to set against the looming lockdown: toilet paper, two dozen cans of soup, ten pounds of flour, five pounds of rice, soap, toothpaste. At each restaurant and school event, I asked myself if this was the last one before we all go into our bunkers. But today I can hear the ground rumbling, and I know things have shifted. Instead of bison, it’s contagion. It might be a while before my next trip to the store.

I send an email to the school superintendent and repost it on the middle school parents’ Facebook page. My university is extending spring break to give instructors time to transform their in-person classes to remote learning. I ask the schools to do the same. My fellow parents’ responses run mostly along predictable lines. Some folks are 100% on board with my mildly phrased suggestion. Others quite rightly point out the hardships closing schools will cause for working parents and families that rely on free lunches. A few are dismayed at the prospect of a couple weeks of alone time with their children. I order myself not to write a rebuttal essay about how public health is undervalued because its effects are invisible. I refrain from explaining that because none of us has lived through a comparable emergency their complaints that not everyone learns well online are off-base. But I do remind myself about the basic stats of the 1918 influenza outbreak: 50 million dead from a planetary population of less than 2 billion people, or somewhere a bit above 2% of the global population. And I choke back the anger of my gut response to my more reluctant internet neighbors: so you want your children to be the bullets that kill your elderly parents and cause the health care system to break down?

Distracting myself from my work with quick hits of current information worsens my mood, exhausting me. I’m on sabbatical this semester, preparing new classes. My colleagues are swamped trying to move their classes online for the duration, but I lack their focus and keep dipping back into the river of news. It reminds me of what happened after 9/11. Psychologists warned us to turn off our TV sets so that our children would not think that new planes were hitting those towers over and over again. I suspect I am traumatizing myself in a similar way by watching the crisis continually unveil itself in my news feed. But I don’t know how to adjust my inner balance: how much information helps me understand the present moment vs. repeated input that will overwhelm me so thoroughly I crumble into an anxious heap? I try closing tabs, putting an extra step and a deliberate choice between me and the news. I set up rules about when I can look to the present and when I must focus on the past. They don’t last long.

I wonder about the other rules that we are supposed to be following now, the ones implied in the idea of “social distancing.” I understand that we should keep some physical space from other people. But what other rules apply, and how do we know when to implement them? How do we recognize the moment to reduce our outside activities? Is today it? Is it already too late? The Unitarian Universalist Association, offices closed for the duration, is recasting “social distancing” as “community care.” But in practical terms, how do I implement the important idea that it’s my responsibility not to become infected so that I don’t pass on the virus to people who are more vulnerable than my family? Should I bother trying to keep my own kids at home if the schools stay in session? I’m not worried about them getting sick, since children seem less affected than adults. I don’t want them to be vectors infecting others, but what’s the point if everyone else is still merrily out in public? Should I skip church, where last week we already substituted bowing “Namaste” for our usual handshakes and hugs? I probably shouldn’t go to yoga, but can I swim in the pool or walk on the track? Can I go to the grocery store at times when it’s likely to be uncrowded, or is now the time to forego fresh foods?

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted in part from the absence of bison doing their part for the ecosystem of the Great Plains. Pandemic mutates our economic and medical ecosystems. I know that I don’t need to buy clothes in person, but I have $40 in Kohl’s cash that will expire soon. Is OK to spend it online? Does doing so put the packer in the warehouse and the delivery driver in jeopardy or protect their jobs in a time of economic crash? I’m hanging out at home today because a pre-existing cold combined with an adverse reaction to a shingles vaccination to make me feel pretty crummy. Ought I postpone the second shingles injection until after the crisis is over, so that my clinic can focus on more urgent needs?

When someone asks me to identify the worst natural disaster in history, I point to the flu outbreak in 1918. Sitting in my PJs at home a century plus two years after, I can hear it on the horizon again. It’s not the thunder of bison hooves I can imagine, but the planetary echoes of the whoosh of a bat or the scritching of a pangolin somewhere in Hubei province. There are eight identified cases of COVID-19 in Wisconsin today, with one recovery, no deaths, and an unknown number of untested infections circulating or quietly self-quarantined in our community. The disaster isn’t here yet, but I am hunkering down as if for a long series of blizzards. I read a few weeks ago about the utter exhaustion of the nurses in Wuhan and today about the terrible choices of the doctors in Lombardy. I define medical triage for my increasingly less innocent child: quite literally dividing patients into those you can save, those you can only comfort, and those to treat later. I cannot calibrate my emotions or my actions. We will know only if we succeed or fail in tamping down the disease collectively, not individually. I am exhausted from knowing the past and reeling from the anguish of a future we are trying to prevent. The bison are coming up over the planet’s curve. I imagine if we lie very still, they might evaporate into a figment of the past, leaving only the dust they kicked up, making us wonder what all the upset was about, because the worst didn’t happen after all.

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

---

[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).

Russian Bots, a found poem

When we planned the Encyclopediaof Milwaukee (EMKE) in the late 2000s, we wanted to invite user comments. But also we wanted to be able to moderate the comments. The quality of user comments on news stories was notoriously low, and we were warned that we would spend a lot of time deleting Viagra ads and other spam. So our IT team set up our site so that users have to register before they can comment. A moderator has to release a comment before it is visible to the public. We’ve been open for comments since our first entries went live in March of 2016.

The project is having a long and slow soft launch while we get all 700 entries through our workflow. So it’s not surprising that we did not get a lot of registrations, much less comments, to start off. But beginning around September 2016, we had a noticeable uptick in newly registered accounts.

The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee is a locally-oriented digital history project. We expected that most of the people who wanted to register and leave comments would be from the Milwaukee area. But the handles and domain names of our new registrations did not look like we expected. Many were nonsense words; the extensions weren’t the familiar .com and .orgs; some were clearly spammers; and, fascinatingly, many ended with .ru. As in Russia. These new registrants didn’t leave comments. They just signed up and vanished again. Mysterious, eh?

For a while we just watched the registrations mount. Because digital history projects are collaborative, a whole team of people keeps tabs on site use. We want to make sure we don’t miss a legitimate comment, so I felt obliged to look at all the new user notifications and forward them to my colleagues with a note that I was ignoring this one or that one. Eventually process this got tiresome, especially given the ratio of legitimate users to spammers. So in 2018, we had our IT team install a Stop Spammers plug-in to filter out bots. Between June 20, 2018 and May 20, 2019, it stopped 35,231 registrations.

But I couldn’t get the Russian registrations out of my head. What did they mean? Why did they target the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee? We all know about “Russian interference in the 2016 US election.” But how did the apparently harmless effort to sign up with my digital history project fit in to this picture? Was it a side effect of a fundamentally political project, or was the interference in the election itself a piece of a larger effort? Whatever their political views, historians are intellectually conservative folk. We know that to see the big picture, we need to have all the pieces to look at—or at least enough pieces to be confident that we aren’t missing something huge. I would like to know what these registrations mean, but I’m not ready to pronounce a historical analysis of them.

Instead, I decided to write a poem, to share a sense of the experience and throw out to the world my piece of the picture. That’s why I wrote “Russian bots, a found poem.”

How did I compose this poem? While my students were taking their final exam last week, I found all the user notifications for the EMKE and manually pulled out every username and email address that looked to me like spam. I didn’t think to harvest the time stamps on the registrations so that I could make some inferences about whether they might have originated with people working in other time zones, and I don’t have the technical chops to scrape the data out of my email. I ended up with a list of 214 distinct registrations. I then separated each registration into three component parts: user registration name, the email handle, and the domain name of each email address. Just for fun, I visualized each set of components using WordClouds.com.

Here are the domains. I wanted to keep the @ signs with the domains, but again I am not technically proficient enough to stop the word cloud generator from deleting them.

 Here are the email handles:

Here are the usernames registered on the EMKE website:

To compose the poem, I compiled all three lists back into one dataset and alphabetized them using Excel. My plan was to make an acrostic poem using the first letter of the elements (excluding the @ signs). Based on my dataset, I had the entire English alphabet at my disposal—except Q and X—and many choices within some letter groups. Next I posed the question “Why were so many Encyclopedia of Milwaukee registrations Russian?” and arranged it vertically to create the acrostic. Then I inspected my list of usernames, handles, and domains and chose the ones that seemed most interesting and appealing, matching each to an appropriate letter in the acrostic. I was careful only to use a given option once in the poem even if it appeared multiple times on my list. I’m a humanist, so I felt perfectly comfortable making impressionistic rather than systematic selections. I retained the original capitalization and punctuation. Each of these “words” then became its own line in the poem, which ends with my inserted question mark. I visualized the poem as a picture using Branah.com’stext-to-image converter.

Admit Ivy League Students by Lottery

The time has come to say this aloud. Admission to the most selective colleges and universities in the United States simply is not an academic meritocracy. The current lawsuit against Harvard—accused of discriminating against Asian Americans—charges that admissions staff use not just grades and test scores, not just records of extracurricular activity, but also intangible factors of personality to decide who gets in and access to the treasury of Croesus. How those readings of applicants’ personalities shade over into culture and race seems to be the core of the case. The underlying logic is that applicants who are better students are being passed over because the portraits their portfolios paint are not sparkly enough.

            But for decades it has been the case that the nation’s most selective colleges make their admission decisions not solely on the basis of academic merit. When I was admitted to Princeton back in 1986, getting in was relatively easy—only 80% of applicants were rejected, compared to the 95% routinely rejected today. At some point in the distant past there was an academic cutoff—if your scores were good enough, you got in.* Now there are always fewer seats available than there are valedictorians, people with perfect test scores, and students with flawless GPAs bolstered by extra points for AP and honors classes in the applicant pool. In short, there are far more students who could clearly benefit from the rigorous academics of elite institutions than can be admitted. If you wanted an entering class that was nothing but wrestlers, you could surely build one from the qualified applicants.

            We also know that university admission is not an academic meritocracy because the faculty’s preferences are not the ones used to make most of the decisions. I am haunted by a scene in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel Admission, based on her experience on the decision-making staff at Princeton. Unable to make sense of an applicant’s essay about zombies, the protagonist sends it to a philosophy professor asking whether it is the real deal. The professor responds “Definitely. Absolutely. Yes, please.” A student like this is admitted as a rare “one for the faculty.” The balance of the applicant pool can certainly do the work required to earn an Ivy League degree, as testified by graduation rates, but it is their potential contributions to the rest of the university’s community life that tips the scales toward their admission: their prowess in fencing, their French horn, their entrepreneurial spirit, their proven leadership in student government.

There does exist an admissions meritocracy in American universities, one that culminates in the PhD. If you want to go to an academic (as opposed to professional) graduate school, you apply to a department and the faculty of that program decide whether to take you (assuming you meet the minimum criteria set by the university). Although faculty selection processes are surely far from perfect, they are skewed much more to the question of academic achievement than to a holistic view of an applicant’s potential community contributions. But imagine if you will what would happen if faculty got to select as the entering class at Harvard the students with the most potential for earning a PhD. They would pick the people most like themselves. You would get a yard full of nerdy gifted kids gleefully oriented to lab and library and a football team the size of the basketball squad. If Harvard wants to graduate a class that influences every corner of society, then it cannot leave admissions up to a faculty-based predilection for outstanding academic potential.

            So, what is an elite university to do? I suggest a more randomized approach to admissions. Use the admissions staff to identify everyone who is capable of thriving academically at Harvard and its peers. Then hold a lottery for admission among those applicants. Assuming the university doesn’t put its thumb on the scale—for the children of alumni, for “one for the faculty,” for tuba players, for underrepresented minorities, for first-generation college students—you would probably end up with a student body that looked pretty much like the applicant pool AND that would spread itself out into a broad range of post-graduation endeavors. The universities could even put their thumb on the scale for some percentage of the class that it needed politically or socially—or as an experiment to see how this idea works out—and leave the rest up to the lottery admissions. At a 5% admissions rate, it already feels like a lottery from the outside. Maybe it’s time to make it one on the inside as well.

*Unless, of course, you were a member of a group that was systematically excluded (women, African Americans) or capped (Jews). The history of the intersection of inclusive admission criteria and the cranking up of competition to get in is unclear to me. It is simple to say that with the widening of the applicant pools, standards went up and competition became more intense. But without inside information about actual admissions practices, it is hard to when the use of cutoffs shifted to evaluation of non-academic criteria.

Tara Westover’s EDUCATED: A MEMOIR

Tara Westover’s Educated is marketed as 2018’s Hillbilly Elegy. The surface level plot is about how your family—in Westover’s case, insular Mormon survivalists in Idaho—can mess you up, and how education can save you. Westover’s publisher won endorsements from J.D. Vance as well as Vance’s Yale Law School mentor Amy Chua. It is centrally about the redemptive power of education.

Educated’s effectiveness, though, lies in charting the path of education and its political significance. Hillbilly Elegy’s power is in J. D. Vance’s intimate descriptions of the chaos in his family, especially the ever-shifting cast of boyfriends in his mother’s life. Vance grew out of that experience into a moderate Republican, convinced of the power of the disciplined individual to move into a stable and gratifying personal life. Educated’s politics are more basic, not partisan, but about the polis. Westover’s political message lies in her unpacking of how education works. For her first sixteen years, Westover had no formal education. Although she was nominally homeschooled, her formal teaching was limited to reading and basic arithmetic. In its etymological Latin sense, to educate someone is to “lead them out.” Westover’s education leads her inexorably away from her natal family by teaching her how to see the world from multiple perspectives. While education permanently fractures her family, it also liberates her.

            Drawing on the tools from her doctoral studies in history, Westover’s primary sources for reconstructing her escape are her journals and emails and the memories of some of her siblings, as well as her own recollections. It takes some three quarters of the memoir for Westover to unfold the horror at the core of her family. Her father’s extremist stance against public education, the government, and the “Medical Establishment” animate the book from the start. But it is not his beliefs themselves that are the core problem for his daughter. What Westover ultimately cannot live with are the physical and emotional abuse from her brother, her father’s prioritization of his patriarchy and business over his children’s well-being, and her mother’s willful blindness.

Overlapping with her slow recognition of her willingness to rupture the family bond is Westover’s narrative how accessing a formal education allowed her to see the world entirely differently from the paternal indoctrination that shaped her childhood. In the second three quarters of Educated, we slowly watch the scales drift from Westover’s eyes. As she realizes that her new educated worldview will permanently sever her from her family, she falls into a temporary madness, wasting her a fellowship at Harvard binge-watching television instead of working on her scholarship. But by the end Westover has triumphantly earned a PhD with a dissertation that includes, inter alia, an analytical reading of the Mormon sacred texts that she grew up studying with religious eyes—a radical break.

            Westover never went to school until she was seventeen. After teaching herself enough mathematics to win a high-enough ACT score to be admitted to Brigham Young University, Westover begins to learn about events that her parents never bothered to let her know existed, starting with the Holocaust. More important than her ever-increasing knowledge, though, Westover shows herself moving through three essential epistemological problems. First, she has to learn how to distinguish what is true. The process starts in her dormitory, where she is astonished that the roommate with “Juicy” written on her backside goes to church. Initially, most of the other (similarly immodest) Mormon students at BYU seem to be what her family would have called “gentiles.” After several false starts, Westover learns that her roommates and new friends can teach her valuable things about how to get along in the world—including the importance of washing one’s hands after using the bathroom and that you have read the art history textbook, not just look at the images.

            Next, Westover reveals herself discovering the existence and value of perspectives other than the sole view cultivated by her family. That there is more than one way to see the world comes home to her most dramatically when her abusive older brother mocks her face blackened with dirt from summer work and spends months calling her the N-word. Westover narrates how she suddenly connected his taunts with the images of Civil Rights demonstrators she had learned about in a history class at BYU. Recognizing that her family “had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others,” Westover stops laughing along; “The word and the way Shawn said it hadn’t changed; only my ears were different.” (pp. 180-181).

            Finally, Westover explores whether one’s own memories can be trusted. In the book, she narrates several events whose exact sequence and details she remains unsure of, even when she was present as a witness to their aftermath—one brother’s burn, and another’s brain injury. Rather than just accept her own versions, historian that she became, Westover consults with the siblings who are still speaking to her to reconstruct what probably happened. She also flags those narratives as potentially unreliable and what the uncertainty over the exact details means for what kind of man her father actually is, softening his portrayal from a dictator to a fallible and flawed man. As further testimony to her intellectual honesty, Westover also marks passages where she has paraphrased emails instead of quoting them directly.

In short, Westover’s memor shows how far she has come from the certainties of the single worldview of her childhood. While there are things that are true, there is also more than one way to see the world, and a careful person acknowledges the limitations of her vision.

In these senses, Educated is a paean to the value of a liberal arts education. The education Westover received at conservative Brigham Young University, and then the venerable University of Cambridge and Harvard University, was not indoctrination in politically liberal values like tolerance, compassion, and the Democratic party—not the brainwashing of “liberal professors” (p. 134) that her father railed against. Instead, it was liberal in its fundamental (again etymological) sense: liberal as free. Westover’s education literally freed her from the bonds (=chains) of her family, whose patriarch systematically forced them to acknowledge only a single point of view—his. Westover shows us that education that is liberal—literally liberal—sets you free.

This praise for education is a vital political message for 2018, which perhaps explains why this book is resonating so deeply with American audiences.[1] If Hillbilly Elegy gives us insight into Trump voters, then Westover’s memoir reminds us how the skills embedded in liberal education—delivered with nuance, modesty, and skepticism—matter in securing American freedom and democracy.

Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2018).

---

[1] As of this writing, Educated is #44 on Amazon’s bestselling books list, with 906 customer reviews. There are a few negative reviews, including one that doubts Educated’s credibility and compares it to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.