I drove back to Boston on Wednesday, leaving home at 6 am so that I could get most of a workday in before packing and leaving for Kansas City early in the morning on Thursday. But as I was getting to work at about 11, the phone rang. It was the conference organizer for the KC meeting; she'd heard from New York colleagues that the winter storm was keeping them grounded, and she wanted to make sure that I'd be there to give the opening keynote address on Thursday night. She'd already had one horse shot out from under her, which is why I got the invitation to do the keynote less than a month in advance; now she was worried that her second steed would also come up lame, and that she'd have to just make the assembled 600 people watch TED videos on YouTube or something.
I called the airline and was told that anything after 4pm Wednesday was in danger of not leaving Boston; my Thursday 9am was looking pretty unlikely, certainly nothing like on time. So we re-booked my flight for 2:45 that very day (by that point, it was already past noon), I called the organizer and said "get me a room for tonight," and drove straight to the airport.
No luggage. No clothes. No computer. No phone charger. Just me and my script and a flash drive and some business cards and two hours to get to the gate.
Got there. Flew to Charlotte NC and then on to Kansas City, getting to room 1614 of the Downtown Marriott at about 11pm Central.
The next morning, I went over to the conference registration desk, and found my host, who was effusive with thanks over my arrival. I checked in, saw nothing in particular that I wanted to attend that afternoon, and went back over to the hotel. I asked the concierge, Robin, if there was anywhere in the neighborhood where I could buy a sport coat and a couple of shirts. He immediately went to his little black book and looked for a business card. "Please let my man be in today, please!" he said while dialing.
His man was in, and Robin handed the phone to me. We talked, I walked four blocks, and I met Bruce Jerwick, the owner of Slabotsky & Son Tailor, Ltd., Since 1914. (Bruce had bought the business from Son a decade ago.) Within minutes, he'd marked up a suit for alterations, picked out a couple of ties, got shirts for Friday and Saturday. It was his tailor's day off, but he said he'd get it done in time for that night's presentation, no problem. And after his heroic efforts, I met him back at the store just before 6pm as he was walking back in from his car with my suit over his arm. I tried it on (perfect fit), and strode more or less straight to the lectern at 7pm, my new red tie gleaming in the stage lights.
Slabotsky & Son Tailor, Ltd; 1102 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64106; 816-842-3445. Highly recommended. And a great storyteller.
Anyway, I spent most of the next two days walking around the Garment District and the Power and Light District of Kansas City. The neighborhoods are filled with buildings from 1890 to 1930 or so. Buildings that have mass, buildings that are more wall than window, buildings that tell you plainly how they stand up and make a living. It's a foursquare and forthright neighborhood, a neighborhood that can meet you at 10 and have your alterations done by 6.
I took my walks in lieu of going to very many of the sessions. Those that I did go to were uninspired. One of my favorite teachers at Berkeley, the architectural historian Spiro Kostof, had been a theater major as an undergraduate at Yale, and it showed. We used to bring friends visiting from out of town to his lectures, where he and his two slide projectors held a room of 400 completely rapt. If you go to Spiro's Wikipedia page, you'll find at the bottom a link to a video archive of all 26 lectures of Architectural History B. And even now, on a small screen, twenty years after his death, those lectures are wholesale delight.
Another Berkeley teacher, David Littlejohn, won the Berkeley distinguished teaching award in 1985; in his essay of acceptance, he wrote:
I believe that a teacher's own energy, dedication, and conviction can be the most effective means of engaging, persuading, and exciting students. I believe that every class, whether a 12-person seminar or a lecture to 500, should be a kind of theater, an intellectual scene more charged, more shapely, and more rewarding than most hours we spend in "real life."When we ask for 30 minutes or 60 minutes of someone's attention, we owe it to them to craft an experience for them, not merely deliver content.
Having grown up in the 1960s, I spent many hours listening to comedy records. Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Woody Allen, Tom Lehrer, Bob Newhart, Andy Griffith (a brilliant comedic storyteller before he started acting). Later, watching Robin Williams and Richard Pryor and Whoopi Goldberg and Margaret Cho and Bill Hicks, and Spalding Gray in his own tragic fashion. They'd stand on stage, alone, and do an hour with no strain, and that hour hung together... but if you looked at the record, you'd see that hour was made up of a number of discrete bits, each several minutes long. Storytellers understood that you have to have some pacing, you have to build and release and build and release. You can come back to an idea after not touching it for half an hour, and if it was memorable the first time, it would become even more memorable for seeing it in a new context.
I'm impatient with bad conference sessions and bad teaching. It's not an attractive characteristic, but I'll admit to it. And one of the great problems in higher education is that we lock doctoral students into a laboratory for 24 hours a day for five years, attaching antibodies to exposed proteins, and then suddenly give them a PhD and say, "here's your lecture hall, here's your students, good luck." Talk about the Peter Principle... two wholly dissimilar skill sets, and being good at one is absolutely no predictor of being good at the other.
I'm weary with higher education in general. I feel like we expend enormous energy on questions of tiny importance; we serve the organization more than the students. (This is true of far more than education, of course; think of your bank or your insurance company, in which extraordinary layers of bureaucracy inhibit customer service people from serving the unique needs of customers.) The poet Andrei Codrescu once wrote that poetry is the loveliest of all arts because all you need is your wrist, a razor blade, and a wall. Teaching is like that, too; it's really just you and a student and an idea. But the infrastructure that it takes to bring that teacher and that student and that idea together in space and time takes up the great majority of our efforts, like the 80% of a corn plant needed to grow the 20% of edible corn.
The drummer Bill Bruford has written wonderfully about his working life; after reading his autobiography and thinking it over, it seems like about 30% of his career was music, and the other 70% the music business. So maybe the education proportion isn't as far out of line as it feels, but I can't help wondering what teaching and learning could be like if we thought less like middle managers and more like Garrison Keillor and Lily Tomlin, just inviting people to come walk with us through some interesting stories.
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