Boy, what a laborious--and dangerous--walk this morning after Labor
Day. The remnant of Earl still lay shrewn about many streets and
sidewalks. Fallen pine cones litter the scene like boulders in a flow
field, and feel just as large if you happen to step on one. Broken limbs
and branches with sharpened and broken tips lie hidden in the dark ready
to snag, snare, trip, sprain, and cut. I dodged, darted, veered, and
leaped throughout much of the six mile course. All of that broken field
walking reminded me of more than a few of my e-mail colleagues who, last
week, tried to dodge, dart, and veer during a vigorous and at time
acrimonious exchange on tenure. I guess some were uneasy or unnerved by
the very raising of the issue. Many, on-list and off-list, turned the
topic from the impact on the pursuit of tenure to the defense of tenure's
value. But, that's okay. What wasn't all that okay was the aloofness,
distance, and maybe even a touch of arrogance far too many expressed.
"They wouldn't understand," was an overwhelmingly common theme. "I don't
have to explain," was another. "I'm too specialized to do anything else,"
was sadly a third that was sent to me privately. "After all the years of
studying and preparation, I deserve the perk of job security," was a
fourth theme. "They're turning our campuses over to businessmen and
politicians," was a fifth that seemed to be preachimg imminent armageddon.
Intermingled with these thoughts were flashes of the stalls at the
Flatlanders Art & Crafts festival that is held each Labor Day in a town
about 15 miles up the road. As we endured the muggy and buggy air, walked
up and down the rows of stalls, I looked at ladies joyously sewing a
quilt, a blacksmith putting marvelous twists and turns in his iron, a
tanner fashioning belts, a carver finding faces and images in fallen
limbs, a women who had fashion dolls from field straw. A lot of stuff
came together this morning. I'd like to some of it with you.
When I was a kid, like most kids, I spent a lot of time dreaming
about what I wanted to be, fantasizing about different jobs, picturing
myself as different people. I wanted to be a soldier bravely charging the
enemy pill boxes just like in the comic books; I dreamed of being a
fireman driving the back of a hook-and-ladder or climbing those tall
ladders to heroically save a dog from a flaming building; I wanted to be a
policeman who would nab Wille Sutton; I wanted to be a T- Man; I wanted to
be a spaceman, especially Tom Corbitt, space cadet, or Captain Video, and
meet weird beings from other planets. I dreamed of being a baseball player
who would hit that game winning homer in the bottom of the ninth; I
thought about going out west and becoming a cowboy or, even better, a gun
slinger. I thought about becoming an airline pilot who would fly people
all over the world; I wanted to be a doctor and find a cure for a rare
disease. Almost everyone I saw working, I wanted to be: a sailor who
traveled the seven seas, a high-walking steel worker, a scientist who
invented something new, a lawyer like my father though he never practiced,
a dentist, a postman who delivered news, a bus driver, a cabdriver, a
barber, a jeweler, a butcher, a baker, a chef. But, never an academic,
never a teacher. I had nothing but resentful memories about Mrs. Satchel,
my second grade teacher at P.S. 160, and after a half century still think
unkindly after of her in politically incorrect ways. But, that is another
story.
I wasn't what you might call a good student. I never went out
of my way to study; I didn't have the discipline or commitment. I
graduated 52nd in my high school class of 282 graduates with an average of
86. I didn't particularly have an enthusiasm to go to college. I went
more because it was expected of me by my teachers, friends, family then
for any other reason. My family wanted me to be a doctor!! Yet, those
college years between 1958 and 1963 proved to be some of the most
influential years of my life, not because of the book learning I received
in classes, but because of the education in life I received outside those
classes. As I look back, passing the test, getting the grade, screwing up
major after major, acquiring the undergraduate degree, and then going on
for the additional graduate degrees, was no where near as important to my
life as the experiences and people I encounter outside academia on the
formative way to getting those degrees. At the time, however, I really
didn't appreciate those experiences or those people. They gave me a
flexibility of outlook, a broadened horizon, an appreciation of the world
beyond the campus, and a later humility about both myself and my
profession that more than a few e- mail colleagues have a hard time
understanding as we recently "discussed" the issue of the quest for
tenure and tenure itself.
My family was upper middle class. My parents were first generation
American-born. When I was 8, in 1948, as a sign of "having made it," we
were trail blazers in what historians would later call "White Flight" out
to the sunny, clean, open fields of Rockville Center on Long Island from
the steep, dark, dirty canyons of New York City's Orchard and Delancy
Streets. My father failed in business when I was 14. My sizeable
education fund went down the tubes with it. I found that if I was to live
up to the expectations of those around me, I had no choice but to work my
way through college. At one time during the four years of undergraduate
school and my first year in graduate school, I held three jobs: delivered
newspapers before the sun rose; I was a short order cook as the sun rose;
I was a waiter after the sun set. At other times, playing "musical jobs,"
getting them and quitting in order to work around my ever-changing class
schedule, I was a bartender, a dishwasher, a stock boy in a department
store, a delivery boy for a small grocery store; a gift wrapper in an
exclusive department store. I was a salesmen in an appliance store; I
was a manual laborer, a truck driver, a part-time mailman. I hauled,
scraped, dug, built, wrapped, piled, moved, unloaded, loaded, packed,
unpacked, concocted; I handled shovels, bottles, steering wheels, dishes,
pans, boxes, brick, wood, wire, pipe, concrete, appliances, manure,
letters, food, information. I wore aprons, hard hats, hobnail boots,
uniforms, and dungarees that at times got so dirty and smelly my mother
would fend me off with a broom stick until I stripped naked in the
backyard before she'd hose me down and allow me in the house. I cursed my
situation: it cut into my study time--that was the least of
it--trespassed on my social life, prohibited me from continuing to play
sports, hurt my grades, forced me to change majors from pre-med to
philosophy to english and finally as a last resort to my childhood hobby
of history for what of something else to major in, and lowered my final
GPA to a 2.2--not that I was a great student to begin with or really knew
what I wanted my future to look like. I "backed" into academics by
default and got an M.A. and Ph.D. for want of something to do since I did
not want to enter the military or the business world--and the ivory tower
proved to be safe. But, that is still another story.
Yet, now that I look back, that was the best schooling I could have
gotten. I see that each job was a portal to another aspect of life, each
job added a dimension to my life; each job was a lesson in what life was
about; each job deepened by understanding that even the so-called lowly
job had a high calling; each job showed me the interdependency we have on
each other like individual stands in the spider web; each job left an
impression of the wondrousness and complexity of people in the world about
and with me. As I slowly realized I wasn't going to be a policeman or
fireman or sailor or spaceman or athlete, as I jettisoned possibilities of
a medical career by making choices or having choices made for
me--sometimes reluctant and painful and scary--to become an academic,
those scenes in my youth and experiences of my adolescence never allowed
academia to shut me up in the ivory tower and to drape a curtailing and
separating set of experiences over my psyche like some dark, heavy,
victorian curtain. I could not forget that if any academic ever became
infected with the virus of superiority, he or she should try putting a saw
to the wood, hammer to the nail, screwdriver to the screw; plaster to the
wall, shovel to the dirt; he or she should try building the building which
houses the classroom from which he or she pontificates on high. When
academics proclaim title to some lofty position by virtue of years put
into study, they better stop and learn. The demands of becoming an
electrician or plumber or welder or mason are often no less arduous than
becoming a lawyer, CPA, doctor, Ph.D. These supposed "drones," as one
e-mail colleague struggled to denigrated them and futilely tried to
inflate herself as we vigorously discussed the issue of tenure, put in
many years as apprentices, attend school, and take demanding board state
exams than can be as tough as any professional boards.
In my family our collars were very white and I went to college to
further bleach that collar, but in getting there my collar was blue. I
have never lost the tint on my collar. I
learned to respect the expertise, the craftsmanship of these often
demeaned workers without whom the designs of modern society would remain
as little more than doodles and dreams. I saw how a carpenter wields his
tools with
the skill of a surgeon, how a cook handles his food with talent of the
master artist, how an electrician can read blueprints with the skill of an
engineer and architect, and solves problems worthy of any intellectual;
how a welder handles the flame as finely as a sculptor. I saw that they
knew their physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. They could
talk with the best of them about psi, resistance, ohms, amps, volts. I
learned how to work with my hands and learned that they were connected to
my mind. I learned how to butter brick, mud a wall, plumb a line. I
learned to pull wire, and draw pipe. Most important I learned to
appreciate the those who work with rock and dirt and mind as much as those
who work with words and ideas. They each have a confidence in their own
expertise; they each don't understand the value of the other; they each
are tentative and intimidated on the other's turf; they each haughtily
throw demeaning labels at each other: egghead, laborer, daydreamer,
commoner, etc.
Yet, there are times, I think I learned a lot more from those who
proudly shared food for the tummy than from those who so often arrogantly
threw down food for thought. There are times, I feel those supposed
uneducated people were wiser people, more understanding people, more
approachable, more supportive and encouraging people, more real people,
more effective teachers than were my most of my professors with their less
than exciting orations, long lines of degrees and resumes. There are
times I think, especially after engaging in many a recent conversation
about tenure, that in this vibrant, rapidly changing, competitive economy
that provides less security, where cost cutting, deregulation,
globalization, downsizing, merging, layoffs, retraining, new patterns of
competition, new technologies, competitive pressure force companies to
shed workers like a snake sheds its skin, these people have less a fear of
life, more of a flexibility and adaptability to change, more of a survivor
mentality, than many professors I know.
During those college days, struggling through school, one or two of
jobs let me live out some of my fantasies. These days, the wildness of
those dreams seem silly. No, not really. I still dream about the day I
will fly in an F-16. I want to learn how to fly an airplane. I envy John
Glenn and his upcoming flight into space. And, I will Harley
cross-country some day. I still want to see new places, meet new people,
experience new things, relish new foods. And the wondrous thing about it
is, that by accident I am blessed to do those very things, each day, if
I never leave Valdosta.
As for my labor, teaching, it is not a chore or burden or distraction
at all. It's not about a job; it's not apart from life. It's about my
life, my essence, as much as is my family. I don't see academia as a safe
haven from life as I once did; nor do I let it impose an inflexibility or
unadaptability as I once did. As the oldie song goes, don't fence me in.
Give room, lots of room to roam under the starry skies above. I won't
allow myself to be confined physically or emotionally or intellectually by
and to an stuffy office filled with books. My world is also inhabited by
hammers, saws, paint, hoes, trowels, shovels, pliers, and tools of various
trades.
The world of my office is a good reflection of me. There are
shelves filled with books, magazines and other paraphanalia of academia.
It is also a poor version of FAO Schwartz, filled with toys on the floor
and desk and shelves. My sacred objects of teaching, a cow's skull,
posters, flashing signs decorate the walls. Inflatables dangle and dance
from the ceiling. As I gaze at this one or that one, as I dip my wire
ring into a Mr. Bubbles bottle, as I unwrap a Tootsie Pop, each is like
Tinkerbell that takes me off to Never- never-land. I won't chain myself in
a library filled with manuscripts as I once did; I wouldn't enslave myself
in a lab filled with smells as I once hoped for. My world embraces
people. I walk the campus each day to talk with people, mostly students
and people who keep the campus operating.
I also prefer the wide open spaces of the classroom. The classroom
has walls only if I have walls on my spirit. Walls are for buildings, not
for my soul. For me, the classroom is not a circumscribed world. It's
not narrow, not diminishing, not confining, not compromising as too many
academics see it. It's a place where I cross geographical and social
borders; it's a place where I wander, forge connections with people, have
new experiences, where my sphere is ever expanding and changing shape like
some floating globule in one of those table ornaments. I equate teaching
with journeying, with venturing outward in the world, with mixing among
other people, with engaging in the world, with extending myself toward the
unfamiliar. I am challenged, tested, stretched, dazzled, exposed.
Teaching is not by its nature a tethering, restricting, insular existence.
I deal with people, gloriously and wondrously different each day. Each
gathering of these people is a melange, each day is a bold and glorious
mishmash. Each person is like a piece of those patchwork quilts I saw
yesterday--bold and glorious hodgepodge of fabrics, colors, patterns and
shapes: calicos, velvets, corduroys, cotton, synthetics, reds, yellows,
browns, blues, stripes, diamonds, squares, triangles, rectangles, circles,
flowers, cats, horses, birds, fish, dogs. Each day is like sewing on a new
and unique piece that gives me meaning to living; each piece shouts at me
to be different, to do something different, to be someone else, to do
something else, to make sure, as a friend told me, that today is more
interesting and more exciting and more important than yesterday. Each day
someone leads me down a path I've never walked before; each day someone
connects me with something I've never experienced before; each day someone
asks me to taste a morsel that has never touched my palate before; each
day I am introduced to sights I have never seen before each day opens my
world a bit more, each day I now find begins and ends with an expectant
"what next?" I love learning with people because I can't help but
journey, explore, venture, witness, experience, connect with places,
things, and above all, people.. Teaching--any profession and life--should
not be otherwise.
Make it a good day.
--Louis--
Louis Schmier [log in to unmask]
Department of History http://www.halcyon.com/arborhts/louis.html
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, GA 31698 /~\ /\ /\
912-333-5947 /^\ / \ / /~\ \ /~\__/\
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-_~ / "If you want to climb mountains, \ /^\
_ _ / don't practice on mole hills" - \____
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