This is the first Thanksgiving I've ever spent away from my family, excepting Thanksgiving 2006, when I was in London. When we finally got the students packed and out and the campus shut down on Monday afternoon, I felt oddly melancholy. I had been waiting all month, really, for the beginning of Thanksgiving break, and as the week progressed it began to feel unattainable - how could we possibly pack up 400-something children, how many more exasperated sighs and whines and "don'tworryI'lldoittomorrows" and "whatdoyoumeanmybathroomisn'tcleans" could I possibly hear? But then they were FINALLY gone, it was FINALLY break, and instead of feeling happy about it I felt kind of depressed. I eventually figured out it was because I wasn't going to be with my family.

Thanksgiving, not Christmas, was our big holiday. When my parents were still married, we used to alternate hosting it with my aunt and uncle, and since the divorce my aunt and uncle have been hosting it every year. It's a big enough deal that when I came back from London, my aunt made Thanksgiving dinner all over again so that I could eat it with my family. Some of my favorite childhood memories of my family are from the various Thanksgiving celebrations in either Boston or Gatlinburg.

Nevertheless, I perked up the moment the train rolled into Chicago. What a city! Skyscrapers shrouded in fog and endless lanes of glittering lights. I am spending the holiday with one of my dearest friends, I'm in love with her neighborhood, and I'm still getting to help cook Thanksgiving dinner.

As I sit and reflect on what a year I have had, and what lies ahead for me, words only do so much to express how thankful I am for the opportunities that have come my way and the people in my life. I am grateful that I live in a place that is incredibly beautiful; I am grateful that I have a job I love; I am grateful that every day I get to laugh with some of the brightest and most talented students I've ever seen; I'm grateful that I have charming, entertaining, and supportive colleagues; I'm grateful for my health, my parents' health, my friends' health, and I pray that the coming year will continue to bless me and those I hold dear.

I raise a glass to everyone today: Happy Thanksgiving!

On The Liberal Arts Education

Today at my school we had a faculty meeting. A large portion of the faculty meeting was spent watching a video of a speech given by Liz Coleman, president of Bennington College, about the nature of the liberal arts education in the 21st century. I believe the talk dates from February 2009.

I agreed with many of the points she made - that liberal arts education has become too specialized, too focused on "expertise" and narrowing lines of inquiry when really we should be broadening our scope in a world where everything is connected. But that angle was really only about half of her message. The other half was about the line between politics and education, or whether there even is a line; her argument, as I understood it, was that part of the duty of educators now is to mandate that students to get involved in public policy and governance, and to use their liberal arts education to "change the world." To that extent, Bennington is building a shiny new building on its campus, the "Center for the Advancement of Public Action." It will be home to a new "citizenship curriculum," which will supposedly encourage students to grapple with real-world issues.

Of course, it all sounds very noble, and to an extent it is; like nature abhors a vacuum, education abhors apathy, and it's natural that anybody who is passionate about their education probably also cares a great deal about politics. But do you really need a curriculum for it? The way I see it, the purpose of a liberal arts education, at least on the B.A. level, is not to prepare you for a particular career; it is not to indoctrinate you with a particular ideology; it is not even to prepare you for graduate study. A liberal arts education should show you how to think for yourself. History shows you the consequences of decisions; psychology and anthropology and sociology and religious studies give you insight into human behavior; political science teaches you about the ways we choose to govern ourselves; languages and rhetoric show you how we communicate effectively; philosophy shows you all the different ways people have thought about the world; science and math show you its concretes; and music, art, and literature are the various lenses through which we can view all of this, and the mirrors that reflect it all. There has been much harping in some circles that a liberal arts education is useless because it prepares one for nothing, because it is not vocational, and while I can't deny that, it is certainly not useless. My liberal arts education has taught me how to engage with the world on my own terms and no one else's. I come to my own conclusions about things; I question; and if and when I want to get involved with anything political, it's my decision.

That is precisely why I was bothered by Liz Coleman's speech. While she said all these lovely things about getting students involved in politics, the obvious and unspoken assumption was that everyone in that room was in agreement about certain things. She made references to the "shredding of our Constitution" and to "zealots" and "theocracies," and the "decline" of the last eight years. She references the excitement of the Obama administration's recent takeover and reminds the audience that "they cannot do it alone." She made a crack about those who don't believe or understand evolution and credited it to the failure of our public education. In a speech that lauded the very same kind of education that taught me never to assume anything, it seemed like quite a lot was taken under assumption.

I am under no illusions about academia and I realize that I stand largely apart from most people my age and with my interests in that I am not a self-professed liberal. But I still worry about what is happening to higher education these days. I worry because Liz Coleman speaks about abolishing neutrality in the liberal arts (neutrality - is that the same thing as objectivity?) and because the purpose of higher education should not be to help one particular presidential administration over another. Under the roof of that lovely new Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College, I wonder just how much questioning is really going to be done.

I have really been struggling with my writing lately. Both in terms of what I want to write about, and in terms of actually summoning the focus to sit down and do it. Not a good thing for someone in a master's program.

I also haven't really been reading lately. This, for me, is quite literally unprecedented. I can't remember the last time I wasn't in the middle of a book. Usually I'm in the middle of several at once. In a normal month I plow through six or seven. Since I've gotten here in late August, I haven't read any new books. A few short stories; I wandered through the early part of an Anne Sexton biography (quite good, actually; it wasn't the book's fault I stopped reading); I jumped around a T.S. Eliot anthology; but other than that, nothing. And I have no real desire to read. It's the absolute weirdest thing I've ever experienced. I was starting to feel afraid that it will never come back to me, although of course it will, but still - it's a little bit like losing my sex drive. Perplexing to say the least. And how can I write when I have no desire to read?

What's funny is I have a friend here now with whom I discuss books and literature and writing almost nonstop. I have talked more about books in the last two weeks than I've spent reading them in the last two months. We talk about all these wonderful things related to wordsmithing and I feel a bit like a fraud. He just loaned me David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and tonight while killing time at desk I read a few pages.

That was all I needed to know that no matter what I'm feeling now, it's still there. It's never going to leave. Not just my love of reading, but my love of words, my love of language, of beautiful prose, and of that moment - a perfectly rendered detail - when you think, yes, oh yes, this is how it is. I don't feel like much of one at the moment, but I'm still a writer.

I'm still a musician, too. All the neuroses I had related to horn has just been transferred to the pen and paper now. Horn does not stress me out anymore. I love playing it more than I ever have before. Practicing used to be the bane of my existence, and now I look forward to it every day. Perhaps it's because I know what I'm doing now - I know how to solve problems, I know how to fix things, and I have the wisdom to know that nothing is going to get better rightthisinstant.

Of course, it helps if what you're practicing is Harry Potter. And Star Wars. And E.T. Hard horn parts, make no mistake, but the biggest challenge is going to be keeping myself from smiling while I'm playing it.

Conversational Highlight

"So, my roommate and I have a problem."
"Okay."
"Like, today, I came in to my room to take a nap...my roommate was gone, and my suitemates were gone, too. Well, when I woke up, someone had like, gone to the bathroom. Like, you know. And then they didn't flush."
"Okaaay."
"So it wasn't me. And it wasn't my suitemates or my roommate because they weren't there. So someone must have like...come into my room."
"Was your door locked?"
"No." (Blank look). "Like, can you do something about this?"

Institutional Parenting

I love my job.

How many people can say that?

But it's not really a job. I think that's why I love it. All of the things that feel like a job - filling out forms, answering the phone, sending lots of emails - are not things I love. What I love is watching kids jam on ukeleles in the lobby. The conversations I have. Helping them solve problems. Feeling USEFUL is the best thing in the world, and so rarely have I ever felt truly useful in any other job I've had so far in my life. I mean, ushering is a utilitarian position - it's "useful" to take people to their seats - but you're not imparting any lasting life skills further than teaching someone the layout of a concert hall. Being a librarian is useful in the institutional sense, but again, you're not doing anything more than finding music for people. Working for my dad last year, I had a sense of how useful he was - but I didn't feel particularly useful as his secretary. One of the things that attracted me to a potential career in law was the knowledge that attorneys - at least some of them - can really solve problems for people. This is why I have enjoyed working with kids in the past, and why I'm loving it now. These kids are fantastic. They are smart, talented, motivated, quirky, and exceptional in every sense of the word.

Of course, they also make me want to tear my hair out a little. They challenge everything (which is healthy); they ask "why does it have to be this way?" and the onus is on me to come up with a worthwhile answer. I feel like I have to come up to their level; I also have to hold them to my expectations. So every day is a different challenge. Sometimes I'm a judge, a mediator, a tutor, a shrewd bargainer, a big sister; sometimes I'm a mom.

Ever since the kids arrived, I've been having trouble falling asleep at night. The end of every day I take stock of my girls and can't stop worrying about the choices they've made, the problems they're having, the ways I can (or can't) help them. Last night, it dawned on me that this must be part of what parenting is: you lay awake at night worrying about them.

Today at our school's meeting, a professor played us a video of a performance by Laurie Anderson. The piece is called "O Superman." It was, at one point, #2 on the British pop charts, but that's not the point. It was written in 1981.

It was also performed in the week following September 11, 2001. You would think, listening to the lyrics, that that is what it was written about.

I'm not much for interactive blogging, but I suggest you do something today, or perhaps tomorrow. Play this video, but don't watch it; just listen to it. In another window, at the same time, watch this video with the sound off.

After eight years, it is hard sometimes to remember what it felt like on that day. What we lost. How everything changed, even for those of us who had never been to New York or didn't know a single person who lost his life. Today, for about ten minutes, listening to Laurie Anderson's piece, I remembered. And I realized how important it is to remember, painful though it is.

Another New Beginning...Again

That about sums it up. I've moved around so much in the past five or six years that I always feel like I'm starting something new every few months or so. 

This really is a new beginning, of course. My first "real" job. Thankfully it's not in an entirely unfamiliar place, but one of the things that has been brought home to me during my training this past week is that I am going to change the way I think about things. I'm fairly professional in my day-to-day life, but I have to be careful what I write about on here with regards to my employer and the kids that I'm working with. I am a writer, of course, and when I think stuff is interesting I want to write about it, so I may just not be writing as much. I may have to change the tone of my blog. I don't know yet; I'm still thinking about it. I guess it's all part of that growing up thing.

I am really excited for the students to get here, starting tomorrow evening - though I'm also a little bit terrified. I keep worrying what if they don't like me, what if I do something stupid, what if I catch somebody snorting cocaine on the first night (not that that's likely to happen, but...discipline is scary for a pushover like me), etc. Then I remember the absolute insanity of trying to shepherd seventeen twelve-year olds through the inauguration disaster and I feel better because nothing that happens here could possibly be as challenging as that experience. 

The one thing that has been a downside to all the excitement of the move and the new job is that it's really easy to forget that I'm supposed to also be doing quite a bit of writing. This is the challenge of a low-res MFA: you have to make the time for it. Right now I'm not managing that time so well. At all. I've been suffering from writer's block, or perhaps just plain laziness; I'm not sure. I'm just finding it very hard to sit down and concentrate on any writing at all. My mind wanders off and I feel restless. Perhaps things will settle down once I get into a routine here, but I have a big submission due next Monday and I'm only about a third of the way done. And I have no time off this week because it's opening week. Starting to get a little nervous...