A particular attitude toward the work. (Cover of 500 Cabinets (Lark Press, 2010), a book by Ray Hemachandra and John Grew Sheridan. This featured cabinet is “Yin, Yang, and Young,” by Steven M. White, 2006.)
Okay, I know I left off my last post with “more again tomorrow,” but things have intervened. I’ll have more to say about that further below. For now, let’s get back to the work of failing to measure up.
Part of what it means to produce “work of quality” is to locate the work accurately within the conversation it wants to be part of. An IKEA cabinet is a work of quality in important ways: it’s accessible in cost and construction to millions of users, and it uses stable, veneered plywood rather than expensive and ever-moving birch hardwood. It’s true to its Scandinavian Modern origins. And it holds things out of the way of dust and dog slobber. All good.
Steven White’s cabinet in the image above is also a work of quality. The joinery is exquisite, each joint cut to its specific location along its curve. (Try to make a curved drawer. I dare you.) The design idea carries through in smart ways: the button knobs curving up the (sometimes implied) centerline of the curved case, the two paired side cabinets providing the front legs while the taller back cabinet provides the back legs. The light wood of the side doors and the dark buttons balancing the uniformity of the cherry body. And the whole thing looks like Fantasia, bewitched furniture becoming animated. This is a person who’s studied not merely cabinetry but also art history, and understands what contrapposto is.
It’s almost certainly wildly expensive, because of its innumerable hand-cut joints. And although it protects its belongings from dust and dog slobber, you can’t just throw your wallet on the top when you go to bed, because it’ll slide off.
Which is the “better cabinet?” That depends entirely on what conversation it wants to enter.
I ran face first into this question, which I’d never considered before, when I went to architecture school and entered studio. These were artists who had no interest in whether you could toss your wallet on top of the dresser. Whether someone could care for a sick child or have a dozen friends over for cocktails. Had no interest in the relationship between bathroom and bedroom. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were trying to break us, like wild horses made tame. To unlearn everything we’d ever known about houses and stores, about streets and neighborhoods; to erase all of that vernacular wisdom and enter the world of studio art.
The work we were to emulate was wildly expensive, just as unique in execution as that cabinet. It mostly didn’t have to respond to any programmatic requirements, being instead an exhibition pavilion or a vacation house or simply a drawn idea. We were asked to enter a new conversation, one for which I at least had no vocabulary nor native interest.
Lots of fields have this division. Publishing clearly differentiates between “literary fiction,” in which questions of language and form are central, and “commercial fiction” that emphasizes pageturnability and adherence to genre norms. Literary fiction is scarce and resource-intensive, which is why so many of its practitioners are employed by universities whose patronage applauds the publication of one moderately-selling book every few years. Commercial fiction and its authors rely on reliably sufficient book sales in order to survive, and thus engage in a different conversation.
Popular music, folk music and “serious” music. Dirt-track racing, NASCAR and Formula 1. Different conversations within the same general category, and thus judged by different criteria. I remember going around the table at our first Bread Loaf meeting, where we were all asked to name a few favorite writers. Mostly I hadn’t heard of any of them, even as the others all muttered after each name with that hushed “mmm” of connoisseurship. I named Walter Tevis (a highly successful commercial writer) and Rex Stout, the author of a forty-year mystery series. And I could feel the pity of the serious writers, wondering how a person of such diminished judgment could ever have been allowed through the literary gates.
So that brings me to the work that’s kept me away for a week. My new play “Old Dogs on the Porch” is having its world premier this Friday, and will run for the next two weeks on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. If you’re in New England, I think it’s worth the trip. Tickets are available here.
This week has been the work of installing the set, getting the sound and lights right, and having the cast become accustomed to doing their work in a designed space rather than around folding chairs and through implied doorways. There are about twenty people who’ve been involved in bringing this production to life, and I’m grateful to each one. I hope to see you if you’re able. And we can have a conversation.
The best there is… if that’s what you want. (Image by Samuel Ramos, via Unsplash)
So yesterday, I used my lapsed bowling career as an example of the distance between people who are merely reallyreallyreally good and people who are at the peak of whatever endeavor they’ve chosen. I think, in principle, that the same general logarithmic distance is true in whatever field of practice we might consider. Every step is a mile, and there are a lot of steps to take.
But bowling is limited in its utility as a model, because it’s objective. Scores are scores, tournaments are won and recorded, and there’s no argument about intentions or values. There are lots of endeavors in which we might excel in ways that aren’t as easy to know, or to agree upon.
I’m enough of an elitist to resent being labeled a “local author.” But certainly the objective record of my fiction writing is exactly that. I’ve not had fiction published, by a major house or a minor indie. I do it because it’s a meditative act, because the craft matters. Using language to render complicated lives in complicated circumstances… there’s nothing that absorbs me more fully.
But if that’s my motivation, why would I inflict the outcomes upon others? Why not just leave it on the hard drive? That’s the point at which the questions of relative quality emerge. Is it good enough to share? Am I proud of it? Will the person I’m sharing it with enjoy it? Will they TELL ME they enjoyed it? It’s just an ugly smoothie blended from mixed ingredients: vanity and generosity, validation and hope.
One of the thoughts I’ve shared with my writing group a few times is that for me, giving someone one of my books is like making them a meal. I just want them to have a nice evening, and I have enough confidence that my cooking matches their tastes to make the offer. And ohhhh, does one of my colleagues hate that idea! It demeans the craft, it doesn’t take the work seriously. He’s also said that he’s terrified of dying, though, and I think he wants something to live on when he’s gone.
I don’t, oddly enough. When I’m dead, everything I ever could have done, generous or otherwise, will be done. The rest will be compost. So because I’m not in the game of “legacy,” I have a little less interest in comparing quality. It’s as good as I know how to make it.
What I need is to be acknowledged, by an audience larger than my friends and neighbors. And that’s a sad fact to sit with.
The Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play here as well. When I was a Level Three bowler, I thought I was going to be a professional. Once I got to Level Five, I recognized that I wouldn’t. Not because I’d stopped trying or gotten lazy, but because I knew so much more that I could appreciate how much broader the chasm was that lie ahead. The more you know about something, the more you know you don’t know. The less you know about something, the easier it seems. I mean, everybody can write, right? Everybody can sing, everybody can drive a car and ride a bike. Being a professional at those things must just mean doing more of it.
You have to go a long, long way down the road to realize how vast and complicated the road is. And by that time, you’ve dedicated most of your young life to the journey. The craft matters to you, you’ve given yourself to it and received so much beauty in return. But there will come a moment when you realize that you will never be Simone Biles, or LeBron James, or Yo-Yo Ma, or Lewis Hamilton, or Emma Stone. There will come a moment when you realize that your ticket won’t take you to the final station, that you’ll disembark in some one-dog town along the way.
They’re all remarkably high. One of them is higher. (image by Rohit Tandon, via Unsplash)
I hate to bring us back to eleventh grade, which at least for me was miserable, but I want to talk about logarithms. (Sister Claudette would be pleased that I remember what they are.) Specifically, I’d like to talk about logarithmic scales of measurement, of which the Richter scale for the measurement of ground movement is the best known. For every digit increase in the scale, the actual amplitude of ground movement is amplified by ten times. Thus:
Magnitude 1 = 10^1 = 10
Magnitude 2 = 10^2 =100
Magnitude 3 = 10^3 = 1,000
Magnitude 4 = 10^4 = 10,000
And so on. As the amplitude increases, the likelihood of occurrence decreases. Magnitude 1 earth movement is almost constant, completely imperceptible without advanced instruments. A Magnitude 9, like the Alaskan Good Friday Earthquake of 1964, happens three or four times a century.
I think talent works that way, too.
Half of every profession is below average. And that’s the proportion of the people who’ve actually trained and been accepted into that profession! The rest of us know very little, and probably ought to admit it.
Out of a thousand art students, maybe five will make a living off their art, and perhaps one will be known outside her city. That’s not a condemnation. It’s the nature of fame, real quality, and genuine influence to be rare.
This fact of logarithmic levels of art has been on my mind for a long, long time. It first occurred to me on a weeks-long bike camping trip. We stopped in at some nondescript grocery in a nondescript Missouri town; some kind of bland retail music was playing. But I’d been on a music-starvation diet for three weeks by that point, so it caught my attention. In particular, there was one syrupy, abysmal arrangement of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” every bit as awful as you might think it could be. But it struck me that all of those players were remarkably skilled, even though doing undemanding work. They’d been given their sheet music twenty minutes earlier, probably; had run through it once; and then recorded an errorless take and moved on to the next. Each of those musicians, in a lay environment, would be by far the best musician we’d ever met. And no one would ever know their names.
I once thought I was going to be a professional bowler. I was wrong, though I didn’t know it at the time. So let me put forth a Richter scale for bowlers:
Level 1 — has bowled once or twice at a birthday party or a drunken Saturday college night
Level 2 — likes bowling enough to have joined a league and bowl every week.
Level 3 — has made a conscious decision about which bowling ball might suit their game, and practices once in a while outside of league.
Level 4 — bowls in more than one bowling center, and thus learns different conditions.
Level 5 — has enough variability in strategy and equipment to be able to reliably score 200 or more on most conditions.
Level 6 — is reliably top ten in their city. Has joined the Professional Bowlers Association.
Level 7 — is reliably top ten in their region. Participates occasionally in professional tournaments that come through their area.
Level 8 — reliably cashes in professional tournaments.
Level 9 — has won a professional tournament, and no one would be surprised if they won again.
Level 10 — has won five or more professional tournaments, might be mentioned in Bowler of the Year conversations.
Level 11 — has won twenty or more professional tournaments, might be mentioned in barstool arguments about “the best bowler of all time.” (There’ve been about 1,900 professional tournaments in the past 60 years. These fourteen people have won about a quarter of them.)
I was at about five and a half on that scale. Which means I would probably have been the best bowler you’d have ever met. And I was infinitely far away from Level 9, which is kind of what I thought when I said “professional bowler.”
I know so, so many people on the middle ranges of their various scales. People with remarkable talent and dedication, years of experience, accumulated wisdom. The logarithmic scale shows just how many of us there are, and explains why we’ll go unnoticed beyond our neighborhood.
Two new PhDs being sent away by their advisor, who now has more important things to attend to. (Image: “Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise,” by Benjamin West, 1791)
See the glory Of the royal scam
Steely Dan (Donald Fagen/Walter Becker), “The Royal Scam,” 1976
We had no reason to imagine that our doctoral hoods were merely emotional courtesy prior to execution. The blindfold before the guillotine.
Most of us in academia, eighty percent or more of all new research doctorates, will be exiled from our adopted home. Will be shot directly from the most vertical rise into a vast, airless nothingness, jettisoned into the silence just as we imagined that we were about to be cleared for a new stage of flight.
Those of us who’ve been associated with graduate education have a very specific, lived, daily experience of the holy land. We know its pleasures, and we know the ways in which we could imagine making it even more sublime. Every one of us comes to the work with our own specificity in detail—in names, institutions, disciplines, graduation dates—but with a remarkable uniformity in the wonders of intellectual life. We have all lived within, and helped to manufacture, heaven.
None of us were prepared for hell.
Aside from the various mythologies—of burning pits, sulphureous lakes, being herded by demons with forks—the most basic concept of hell is that it is a full removal from the presence of God. Academic hells are like that. The particular experiences might be unique to each of us, but what they have in common is the absence of specific emotional qualities that we have come to love.
It is this sense of absence from the divine that binds us so closely, even after our condemnation, to the enterprise that has banished us. Online trolls plague every discussion of adjunct life with some variant of, “well, if they’re treating you so badly, why don’t you just leave?” And the easy psychological response will have something to do with identity—that we have framed a particular kind of self (and self-narrative), and are bonded to that identity in ways that we shouldn’t be expected to easily abandon. But I think that there’s a second force at work, which is that we hope to be paradise-adjacent. To hold at least a gauzy, pastel version of the vivid pleasures we once knew so well. To imagine that there is, after all, one last final exam we might pass in order to be welcomed home.
Let’s examine nine specific blessings from which we will be held apart.
The First Circle of Hell: “Your Call Is Very Important to Us…”The abandoned scholar will no longer have software, either general nor discipline specific, at her disposal. She will not receive updated computers, will not have automated backups, will not have a local-area network, will not have an IT team on call. She will not even have a photocopier, or a cabinet of pens and legal pads. She will not have a single W-2 at the end of a year, but instead a scatter of 1099s. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of what it means to be part of a community, a specialist contributing to and supported by a team. She will know instead what it means to surrender time to tasks that she would have expected to outsource. What it means to be a sole practitioner rather than a member of a professional culture.
The Second Circle of Hell: Banished from the Garden.The abandoned scholar will no longer have a free on-site health club, nearby food service, or a beautiful campus landscape within which to walk, with its own grounds crew, its own public safety service, its own transit system. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the aesthetic nature of the academy, the ways in which beauty and generosity have been core facets of the academic enterprise, from the Groves of Academia to the monasteries and private libraries and collections that gave rise to the modern university. The abandoned scholar will do without the unnecessary but ennobling powers of beauty which are so often foregone in workplaces more dedicated to purely economic principles; will no longer have places, and lives, that are outside the simple demands of maximized production.
The Third Circle of Hell: Each Day the Same as the Next. The abandoned scholar will have no recourse to the liturgy of the seasons: the year that breathes between the opening and closing of semesters, the programmed temporal movements between immersion and recovery, between service and discovery. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the rituals that make a calendar into a sacrament. We will instead live within a flattening of time, in which the pressures of “time is money” have made all hours and seasons into fungible commodities.
The Fourth Circle of Hell: Non-Member Rates. The abandoned scholar will have no access to the common heritage of intellectual life. The library—its books and journals, its databases and collections, its invitation to browse freely rather than be solely strategic—will be supplanted by Google searches for the random, pirated PDF copy of an important article. The abandoned scholar will have no support for memberships in scholarly societies nor to register for and travel to their meetings; their professional community will be replaced by email and LinkedIn. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of serendipity, of bringing intelligent people together to talk freely, and thus to discover fruitful intersections that power new ideas. The abandoned scholar has not merely been abandoned, but undergoes the active process of cashiering, of dishonorable discharge—the ritual disgrace of the fallen officer, stripped of sword and stripe; the service record stricken from history.
The Fifth Circle of Hell: Free Agency. The abandoned scholar will no longer have a daily community of the like-minded, a cohort that has set aside worldly concerns for the unreasonable pursuit of wisdom. The daily exchange of the secret languages and iconography of one’s field, the collective effort to continually redefine one’s discipline, all will be set aside for the blunt intersections of the co-worker: the project update, the check-in, the annual review. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the commonality of wisdom, the awareness that intellectual life is communal more than individual, that the debate and argument and peer review of scholarly life are all mechanisms through which a community both rises and binds together.
The Sixth Circle of Hell: Billable Hours. The abandoned scholar will no longer have the freedom to take her work wherever her interests might lead, to spend months or years chasing an idea to its natural conclusions. Research will be reduced to fact-finding, strategic planning, product R&D, client service, market forecasts. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the power of curiosity and exploration, the importance of having an entire profession of people who specialize in the things they don’t yet know, the benefits of whose work might arrive in years, or decades, or generations.
The Seventh Circle of Hell: No Thru Traffic.The abandoned scholar, having finished her dissertation, will now find her intellectual path truncated, her enormous work leading to none further, the ladder reduced to a stepstool with no higher levels. That imagined family tree, bearing forty or fifty further years of discovery, has instead been uprooted and burned. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the increasing sophistication of thinking that becomes possible with sustained engagement, of insights that can only fostered by accumulation and repetition. It will lead us toward thinking about the meaning of life, of setting a trajectory of values rather than merely accomplishing goals.
The Eighth Circle of Hell: Barren.The abandoned scholar will have no leverage with which to influence a new generation of young thinkers, will never have a second or third course with a particularly lively undergraduate, will never have graduate students, teaching and research assistants, dissertation advisees. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the lineage of ideas, of the personal evangelism and encouragement that brings new initiates into the faith.
The Ninth Circle of Hell: Ghosted.The abandoned scholar will be excluded from a machine expressly designed to offer all of its participants regular feedback, with extensive individual commentary and recommendation. Whether course grades, student evaluations, peer-review judgments, or tenure and promotion structures, the academic structures of individual appreciation and growth will now forever be closed. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the powers of admiration and recognition, of the emotional value of being meaningfully appreciated.
I can’t count the number of times when some tenured faculty member, hearing about the indignities of adjunct life, said something about how hard life is for us on the inside, too, you know… To which I can only say, “Trade you.”
Cultures are lived from the inside, but understood from the outside. So it’s no surprise that faculty members might become blind to their blessings, and instead attend to small nuisances. They can take for granted the continuation of things the rest of us can only remember.
I’ve often been criticized for not holding out hope for collective bargaining for adjuncts. And it’s not true. There’s absolutely no justification for paying someone three grand per class with no expectation of renewal, no justification for eliminating someone’s course the day before the semester begins and thus removing even that meager income. I’m all in favor of banding together to change the compensation and work security of the majority of college teachers, and I think that it can actually work a little bit. But for me, the economics have only been a small part of the ache of banishment. Far more important is being told for decades that we belonged, only to discover that paradise was provisional at best. Far more important is being exiled from a community and its language, its patterns and its tools. It’s important to see heaven clearly, to burn its pleasures into mind, so that at least we can comfort ourselves with the paradise we once had.
Huh. What people won’t think of. (Image by Muyenda Burnett, via Unsplash)
Lots of discussion in certain circles last week (probably didn’t enter conversation on the porch of the general store, for instance) about the egregious behavior of star chef René Redzepi, of the restaurant sequence Noma. Verbal and physical abuse of his employees for decades, unpaid servitude billed as “internships.” Angry men excused again and again for their behavior because, somehow, they are brilliant. Same thing throughout history in art, in science, in fashion, in architecture, in MFA programs… abuse too often overlooked, or even expected, even celebrated, in the pursuit of the sublime.
Nothing new to see here. What prompted me to write today was Helen Rosner’s very smart article about it all in today’s New Yorker Food Scene newsletter. She raises important questions about what a restaurant is for, but I think she answers them in a way that itself contributes to this culture of abuse.
I think the goals that the restaurant pursues, and that its vast and largely anonymous corps of workers achieve—novelty, technique, narrative, surprise—are, in many ways, the only things that matter in restaurants, once the bare physical fact of hunger has been satiated.
In this formulation, restaurants appear only at the base and the pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid. We either eat and survive, or we eat for intellectual stimulation. And I say that misses so many things that a good restaurant can do.
A good restaurant can comfort the exhausted, give us a warm place and a night off.
A good restaurant can be the place where we know we’ll see our friends every Wednesday.
A good restaurant can become the anchor that defines a neighborhood.
A good restaurant can make us feel like friends, welcomed back, celebrated again.
A good restaurant can make its magic visible, without docents, and leave us feeling like we might try something like that ourselves.
A good restaurant can make its workers visible, so that we might appreciate everyone who created our evening.
If you really want to spend $1500 per person to “accept the potential artistic merits of this type of formal play,” that’s fine. You could stack some red-enameled metal in the middle of a city block, too. But you could instead aspire to kindness and welcome, much less expensive and much more accessible.
There was a person there once… (Image by Rob Griffin, via Unsplash)
You may have heard about the red protest hats, drawn from similar hats worn in Norway during the Nazi occupation as a wordless sign of resistance to authoritarianism. The Minnesota fiber store Needle & Skein is selling patterns for knitting and for crocheting at $5 per, and have raised nearly three quarters of a million dollars for immigrant support services by doing so. It’s hard to get red yarn right now because of the power of this moment. Nora has hosted knit-ins for the past three weekends, and everyone in the room has been working on their red hats. We have friends in Canada and in Sweden who’ve knit their own in support.
However, we recently got word of this Instagram post about Crochet.com asking their “influencers” not to mention the name of the company in any posts having to do with the creation of these hats. Apparently, they’re trying to not piss off the petty tyrants in the administration, and would like to just be left alone to make money, please.
Let’s take a step back. Crochet.com is owned by another company, called Local Crafts. Isn’t that a sweet name… Local Crafts has assembled an extensive roster of fiber-arts companies: Knit Picks, We Crochet, Madeline Tosh, Jimmy Beans Wool, Berroco Yarn, Connecting Threads, HandiQuilter, and Della Q. Probably others. Each of those was started by a person who cared about yarn, about knitting, about fiber arts. And each of them was eventually sold to a company that doesn’t.
From the Local Crafts website, we see that their CEO, Veronica Collins, is “a seasoned ecommerce leader. Veronica has also focused on scaling tech enabled consumer companies across industries both organically and through targeted M&A.” Sounds like every knitter you know, right? And guess where she trained before this MBA word salad? At Amazon and at Bain, Mitt Romney’s old vulture shop.
Local Crafts itself is owned yet further upstream, by Premier Needle Arts, which is a nice shell name for one of the twenty companies or conglomerates owned by Blue Point Capital in Cleveland. Blue Point Capital doesn’t specialize in any particular industry—their companies range from post-fracking industrial washout services to rubber and plastic gasket makers to blank t-shirts and merch for the promotional-printing industry. What they specialize in is operational efficiency for “lower mid-market” companies of $5M to $50M in annual sales. Doesn’t matter what you make, it only matters how much. As the former president of US Steel once said, “We don’t make steel. We make money.”
I don’t begrudge anyone who comes up with a good idea, builds it, and then later decides to sell the company and buy a house or send their kids to school or whatever. I get that. But what happens far too often is that the company lives on as a zombie, a corpse with no heart left to it, roaming the streets in the lurching pursuit of cash. Madeline Tosh Yarn started out as an Etsy shop twenty years ago. Jimmy Beans was a neighborhood yarn-and-coffee shop in Truckee, California. Knit Picks was launched by a husband and wife who used his engineering and her knitting experience to start manufacturing knitting needles and crochet hooks. In each case, the founders wanted to bring pleasure and human connection. Now those hollow names just shamble through the world consuming dollars. If industrial washout services make more money, yarn will be abandoned without a second thought.
Four decades ago, I spent a miserable year working in the kitchen at one of the outlets of Bennigan’s Tavern. Bennigan’s Tavern was a subsidiary of Steak and Ale, itself owned by Burger King, itself owned by Pillsbury. In the regular human world, all of these shell companies and holding companies and subsidiary agreements would be called “aliases,” and would mark you as wholly untrustworthy. In the corporate world (and as Mitt says, “corporations are people, my friend“), they’re everyday practice. It’s enormously difficult to untangle who owns what, and it shouldn’t be.
The fiction of the corporate entity allows enormous malfeasance, because everyone is protected from the implications of their decisions. I mean, you can’t blame a zombie for eating brains, right? It’s what they do. But don’t hide behind the name of the corpse. Just call yourselves YarnCo and be honest. Shareholders don’t care what the company makes, as long as it makes money. To quote Napoleon (ruthlessness recognizes ruthlessness), “Money has no motherland. Financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”
I’m doing some assessment research, and one of the steady findings is that students in the program feel less welcomed by the professionals around them at mid-project than they did when they started. This shouldn’t be a surprise. For a lot of people, the day they were hired was the last day anybody told them that they were smart, or that they were valued. After that glorious honeymoon, they’re just furniture. Increasingly familiar, shopworn furniture.
Think about that transition from college or from grad school to workplace. A person goes from having identifiable humans giving them specific feedback on a regular basis to… well, to what? To the mechanical arms of the HR mother, giving annual review notes and a COLA?
That transitional band ought to be a structured adjustment from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, from external rewards to internal satisfactions. But often, it’s just silence. And when the performance monitor suddenly flatlines, we don’t know if the monitor’s unplugged or we’re about to die.
Let’s talk about intrinsic motivation. It’s easy to get all shouty-grandpa about kids needing constant validation and participation medals, but let’s slow down and think about another aspect of that transition from school to workplace, which is the bait-and-switch. I think about this a lot with architecture students, going from a high-design, high-autonomy environment to being the third desk on the left doing endless flashing details for a branch bank drive-thru. Job titles and job descriptions are largely lies. I once had a job called Director of Research that should actually have been called Director of Justification, because the work was to tell our funders that their programmatic investment had paid off and they should give us another infusion. (And friends, sometimes you have to search through a big old pile of horseshit before you find a pony.)
Before that, I’d finished my dissertation to high acclaim and near-immediate publication, only to find myself a spreadsheet jockey telling my boss how many kids the Butte County Probation Department were likely to have in juvenile custody in thirty years. There wasn’t any intrinsic motivation to be had in that job, which is why they ran through a rotating cast of analyst associates for years. It kept the rent paid and the car fueled, but that’s not enough to make you eager to go to work in the morning.
Far too often, we ask young people to go from a high-autonomy, high-feedback, high-growth environment to a low-autonomy, feedback-starved, static environment, in which the rules of business outweigh the rules of intellectual honesty. And we don’t understand “kids these days…”
Learn to say thank you, and to remember to do it. Learn to spot the flashes of enthusiasm in the pan, and find ways for that enthusiasm to be challenged and fulfilled. Just because your own job title doesn’t say “mentor” doesn’t mean that you aren’t one, either through action or inaction.
Having gotten the above dog last summer, I’m now going through dog training for the first time. Small treats are a central element of the training. You reward good behavior with a click and a treat, you lure the dog away from bad behavior with a treat, you get the dog’s attention with a treat. And one of the terms of art, when a dog is highly distracted by all the other dogs and handlers and scents in a class setting, is that you might need a “higher-value reward.” [String cheese, as it turns out, is maybe the highest-value treat there is. The gas station convenience store near the training center recently started stocking string cheese just because so many dog owners were stopping in on their way to class. Makes me wonder what proportion of string cheese is going into grade-schoolers’ lunchboxes, and how much is for dog class.]
For me, the highest-value treat in my life was a grade. An A, or a 100, were the core markers that I’d been a good dog, that people loved me. I still remember learning the “times tables” in third grade; every time you felt ready for the next step, you told the teacher that you were ready to do your threes or your fours. Then the teacher’s aide would take you into the next room, and you’d say four times one is four and four times two is eight, and so on through twelve. (Why twelve? I don’t know. Why do grown-ups do anything?) If you got it right, your little marker on the chart at the front of the room got moved forward a step. (Why was it important for us to treat this as a competition and introduce shame yet again into some kids’ experience? I don’t know. Why do grown-ups do anything?) Anyway, I finished my twelves while everyone else was on fours and fives, and I remember being really disappointed that I couldn’t go on and do thirteens. (Why couldn’t someone be interested enough in something to do more than the curriculum mandated? I don’t know. Why do grown-ups do anything?)
13-26-39-52-65-78-91-104-117-130-143-156-169, and yes, I did that in my head just now, faster than I could type it. Where’s my cheese, bud?
From reading in kindergarten through winning an architectural history award as an undergrad, from multiplication through dissertation, I lived in a world of high-value rewards. I’d done what was asked, done it in an exemplary way, and people loved me.
So what happens when people don’t love you any more? When the rewards don’t match the behavior? When the treat bag goes empty?
Stand where we tell you to stand, look at what we tell you to look at, and you’ll have the product you came for. (photo from the Orange County Register)
“When someone is searching,” said Siddhartha, “then it can easily happen that the only thing his eyes see is that for which he is searching. He is then unable to find anything or let any thought enter his mind because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search. He is obsessed by a goal; searching means having a goal. But finding means: being free, open, and having no goal. You, O venerable one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, because, in striving for your goal, there are many things that you don’t see, even though they are right in front of your eyes.” — Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
I’m a huge fan of serendipity. I used to try to help my students look around in the library. “When you find the book you want on the shelf, make an imaginary circle three feet around it and look at all the titles in that circle. They’re clustered by topic, so there’s probably something there that’s related to what you came for but even better.”
When we’re laser focused on the thing we think we want, we miss all the interesting side roads. And friends, I can tell you now at my advanced age that my life has been nothing but side roads.
I talked yesterday about how high school is just a structure to force kids to attend to six or eight wildly divergent topics every day for four years, and thus build the learned helplessness that allows them to fit the commercial world without too many complaints. College could be something other than that, but increasingly isn’t.
As more and more working-class kids go to college, college is bending itself to become more high-school-like. It’s certainly the case that lots of kids come to college without the skills or experience of navigating a complicated intellectual path. But rather than build extensive structures to teach navigation, too many colleges have just simplified the path. “Guided pathways” used to be the term of art, walking each student directly down the rails to their chosen terminal. And like a rail ticket from Albany to Denver, you’re not going to see Minnesota.
Let me give you a few examples of the lucky experiences that a loose curriculum can offer.
When I was an undergrad, I wanted to be an architect. And as soon as I hit studio, I realized that I didn’t. I wanted to talk about people, the topic that the bullshit sculptors (excuse me… formgivers) avoided at all costs. But I fell into architectural history with Dell Upton and Spiro Kostof and Paul Groth, a field that was nothing but people. What the patrons wanted, what values drove their decisions, what empires were expressing their power. That was my first off-ramp into a meaningful and personally selected destination.
Near the end of my undergrad, I needed to fulfill one last humanities elective, and browsed the catalog until I found “The Critical Review,” a Journalism course taught by the miraculous David Littlejohn. It was there that I learned that writing wasn’t just being clever with words; it was thinking carefully about something in the larger world, and helping others to think differently about it as well.
When I was getting ready for grad school, the doctoral director (BA Stanford, MA/PhD Harvard) of the school I REALLY wanted to go to—and which had already accepted me—told me that my research agenda was stupid, that my chosen faculty were too busy to work with me, and that I had the wrong approach to architectural history anyway. So I went to my second-choice doctoral program, and had an utterly brilliant and self-created experience, weaving together scholars from architecture and art history and geography and fiction to add their colors to my project.
Our lives are most fully formed by the things we do on purpose, because purpose is desire made tangible.
I made a couple of visits to the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Academy, a high school in Providence RI that everyone called The Met. There’s a lot to say about it, but I’ll shorthand. It was a small school, about a hundred (mostly working-class) kids. And for four years, each of those kids did the same things every semester:
ADVISORY. Every day started out with a group of twelve students and their advisor, who were unified across the whole four years. That was the trusted family base from which kids could individually explore, and their advisor was there to help them take chances, and to be rigorous about those chances.
INTERNSHIP. Every semester, kids had an internship of at least 15-20 hours a week with a local business, learning some things about how to navigate not just the specific work at hand, but also the general world of serious adult interactions.
PROJECT: Every semester, each kid would have one self-chosen project that they had to conceive, execute and complete within that four-month window.
And at the end of each semester, each student had an individual summit meeting with their advisor, their internship supervisor, and their parent(s) or guardian(s) to talk about what had been successful, what had been less so, and what opportunities seemed to make sense for them to take on next.
Friends, it was fucking brilliant.
Anyway, on one of my visits, it was the college fair day. (One of the deals that The Met leadership had made with the RI board of education was that, in exchange for curricular freedom, they’d guarantee that their graduation rate was far higher than the abysmal Providence public high schools, and that 100% of their graduates would be accepted to a four-year college.) And as was fitting for The Met, college day was nothing like anywhere else, either.
For the first hour, the schools were setting up their promo materials in a big room, while the principal and advisors had all the kids together in the central atrium, coaching them into their work for the day, And that work was fascinating. Groups of three or four kids were assigned a college; their job was to explain The Met to that admissions representative, and then to ask why that college would be a good fit for a student who’d had that kind of autonomy and exploration. Why does your school deserve us?
Friends, that was fucking brilliant, too.
When I was a high school senior, the local community college was generally said to be “high school with ashtrays.” We don’t smoke indoors any more, but colleges in general are moving in that intellectual direction.
College could be simple. A tribe of geniuses who compete for the attention of their students (Why do you deserve us?), and lead the ones who choose into a unique garden of ideas. Put smart people in a room and good things happen, unless you actively interfere in it.
And way too many college actively interfere in it. The “guided pathway” is the exact opposite of exploration and discovery. It’s just high school without truancy laws, and we can’t be surprised when half the kids who start it don’t finish it.
When someone is searching, then it can easily happen that the only thing his eyes see is that for which he is searching. He is then unable to find anything or let any thought enter his mind because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search. He is obsessed by a goal; searching means having a goal. But finding means: being free, open, and having no goal.
Keep your eyes on the task, please. (Image by Allan Wadsworth, via Unsplash)
Many years ago, I had an older friend who’d been a government bookkeeper during WWII. One senior accountant on a raised platform faced the room, with thirty or forty workers down on the floor in row and column desks. Every so often, one of Tom’s co-workers would light a cigarette and lean back in his chair, seemingly pondering some difficult calculation but really just taking a five-minute eye-and-brain break from the endless stream of numbers flowing across the desk. When Tom did the same thing without the cigarette, the bossman would holler “Hawley! Get back to work!” So he did what any reasonable worker would do, and took up smoking.
Etymonline.com shows the phrase “rat race” scarcely in existence at all prior to the war, and rising to its peak of usage in 1969. That growth paralleled the rise of bureaucratic culture, in which Taylorism, standardization, and the division of labor emerged from the factory floor and entered the office. (The male office, anyway. Taylorism and close observation had already been the main structure of women’s corporate working lives, from the Lowell mills to telephone operators to steno and typing pools.)
When each workday feels like the last, when someone’s job is to provide standardized outputs at a steady pace, that person has no attentional autonomy. That doesn’t mean they’re not skilled; Barbara Ehrenreich spent a year doing housecleaning and diner waitressing and hotel housekeeping, and said at the end, “There is no such thing as unskilled labor.” The skills and judgments one develops, though, are only focused on the immediate task provided. The miner may exercise a lot of judgment about the most productive and safest way to attack a wall, but the wall and extraction of coal therefrom is the only thing to pay attention to.
Years ago, when I was doing my dissertation in a rural high school, I started to see significant differences between students, but not only across the dimensions one would expect: intelligence, athletic ability, popularity and such. What I saw was four clusters of students that I framed my own X-Y quadrant diagram around.
High school is an attentional-deficit environment. Every fifty minutes, a new person insists on students’ full attention to yet another irrelevancy. They get yanked through six or seven attentional demands every day. The teacher John Taylor Gatto, in his 1991 acceptance speech for New York State Teacher of the Year (a speech he used to resign from the profession, saying “I can’t hurt children any more”), said that one of the hidden lessons of high school is that nothing really matters. We start and stop our engagement with any particular idea on someone else’s whim, rather than on our own progress or satisfaction with the work we’re doing. English-History-Religion-Algebra-Lunch-PE-Spanish, the screwing-on of knowledge-nuggets as we roll down the line. And in the end, we’re screwed.
It turns out that different groups of kids responded differently to the factory. Kids from middle-class families who were aimed at college and white-collar life did pretty well in school, but for different reasons. The ones who made themselves attentionally compliant, who did what they were told, were the “good kids.” I called them Believers—they endured the difficulties of the world in order to obtain the rewards sure to come. Others, though… they struggled against their bonds every day. They believed so strongly in the value of thinking that they hated being told what to think about, or when they should stop thinking about one thing and go on to another. They were the Theologians, who relied not on received wisdom but on self-determination. That girl in the back of Spanish II who’s secretly reading Cervantes… that’s a theologian.
Working-class kids who were moving toward blue-collar life right after high school also fell into the same two camps, but they looked different. The ones who were willing to comply—”whatever, dude“—were Agnostic to what was being presented, all of which was merely something to endure before lunch, before soccer, before graduation day. But the ones who pushed back had no aims to move toward, they just didn’t want to be herded. These were the “fuck you!” kids, the Infidels in detention or shifted off campus into the “continuation school” of post-expulsion and pre-emancipation.
High school, in principle, names its function as moving kids upward on that graph; giving them the tools they need to have a better shot in adult life. But what I saw, every day, was that the hidden function of high school is moving kids leftward, toward compliance. Compliance makes the machine run, whether you believe in the machine or not.
Herb Childress 