Uphill Both Ways

I was meeting with a former student, now one of our teachers, this afternoon, and I was recommending a particular article for her work.  (Murray Silverstein and Max Jacobsen, "Restructuring the Hidden Program: Toward an Architecture of Social Change."  Highly recommended...) Anyway, I was finding the citation, and I said, "It's pretty old, it was written in 1985.  That feels recent to me, but I know you were only like two when it was published."  And it's true.  I'm working with a new teacher, just having finished her master's degree, who was born in 1984.  That's just not right.

One of the most difficult things about getting a little older is that I never know whether things were really different back in the day or whether I'm just getting crotchety, recalling bitterly the way in which I was sent walking six rocky uphill miles to school barefoot in the snow after a breakfast of Melba Toast, yesterday's newspaper stuffed inside my t-shirt for warmth and a stick in my gloveless hand to fight off the jackals and vultures.  But tell you what, I am SICK TO DEATH of graduate students telling either Nora or I that we give them too much work.  I used to spend $15 or $20 a week on photocopying my readings for Jerry Weisman's course, at a dime a page, so that works out to 150-200 pages a week.  For one course of three.  Sherry Ahrentzen's research methods reader was about 500 pages, along with the additional article we had to critique for bad methodology every week.  And Mark Fenster's statistics course had huge amounts of math homework, a final project, and three exams.  Plus I was auditing a course because I was going to be teaching it the following year.

It was grueling, but it was also invigorating.  I was literally bombarded with new ideas every single day.  Nowadays, it's wah wah wah you're so mean every time some students have to read an article with a single word they don't recognize.  What part of "graduate school" is hard to understand?

This little rant is spurred in the longer range by Nora having had a couple of students blaming her for their inability to keep up with the "unreasonable" workload last semester (which, trust me, is nothing like what she or I had to keep pace with).  But in the shorter range, I got a phone call today from one of my students who had an independent study with me and another colleague in Spring 2011.  She's plenty smart, but she finished the semester having read two articles (TWO!!!) and written a response to one of them, and asking for an incomplete.  That incomplete dragged on and on, and she built out a workplan for reading and responding to ten pieces by this Wednesday 1/11, plus writing a two- or three-page summative essay.  Anyway, this phone call today was a request to finish the course with five responses rather than ten, so that she could register for classes next week.

It's a pass-fail course.  What the hell do I care?  She's going to get a job as an architect and never have to read anything again for the rest of her life.  But as I sit and think about it, I think what bites me is feeling disrespected.  This student had the services of TWO really terrific scholars who were interested in her topic and volunteered to coach her into critical thinking about something she claimed to be passionate about.  And she took advantage of almost none of it.  When I asked for an independent study with Judith Kenny in 1992, I KNEW what a resource she was, and I read and wrote responses to three or four articles or books a week—some of which she chose, some of which I chose.  When was I ever going to get the chance to study cultural geography one-on-one with Judith Kenny again?  Never, that's when, so I'd damn well better wring that one opportunity dry.

If I had a sponsor, I'd go back and do another Ph.D. tomorrow.  There's so much to know, so much to read and to write... but the economy's got everybody scared, and if a student has two classes plus a full-time job and wants to get a handful of marketable nuggets instead of an education, who can blame them?

UPHILL BOTH WAYS, I tell ya!  Gaddam kids don't know how good they got it, with their Pods and their Pads and their pants hangin' down around their asses.  My old man woulda had a switch on me if I wore crap like that.  An we didn't have no Interweb thing, neither, we hadda go to this place you call a library (like these kids would walk four feet out of their way to get a book). 

I don't think I'm just being a curmudgeon, but this experience combined with my screed last week about money being properly sequenced and oriented makes me think I'm being just a little bit brittle these days.  Blame the full moon...