Sorting paper....

To prepare for our move to New Mexico, I've been going through our old files to see what can be safely shredded and thrown away. (Answer: almost all of it.)

It is an exhausting process, but also humbling. Your triumphs you keep in full view. Your failures you quietly entomb in dead storage. Thus, while sorting through the check registers and credit card carbons (remember them?) from the middle 80s, I also find myself re-examining thirty years of rejected book proposals, unfinished business plans, notebooks filled with ideas that—in retrospect—seem at best laughable…

The good news is that I will rid my life of all this detritus. It is a kind of purge. I will haul box upon box of things that-just-didn't-work-out to the dump. They'll be pulped and recycled and made into new paper. Literally carte blanche.

And I will find myself somehow lighter. Somehow unburdened.

professors and hell

8:00 am -- Getting ready for work. A little worried. I have to confront two students on the quality of their work. It is a difficult problem because on one level there is work is just fine. On the other, it is impossible.

Let me explain. Most of my students this term are Chinese. They came to the US for a special three term program which, if they pass it, gets them into a certain American University as a freshman, no questions asked.

These two young women are good students, in their way. But, they come into class and zone out. They do homework for other classes, flirt with the boys, talk to each other…

When they turn in their work, it is usually pretty good. They do halfway decent essays on American history. But, there's the rub. The essays are based entirely on what they learned in high school in China. Everything they write is from a strictly Chinese perspective. In fact, even their exams sound as though they were carefully copied, word for word, from a very Marxist Chinese textbook. Thus, the U.S. Civil War was a clash between progressive elements from the American bourgeoisie and reactionary Southern feudalists. The Cold War was a conflict between Russia and America, in which China was simply a bystander, except when forced to protect itself from U.S. imperialism in the Korean War.

And there's nothing particularly wrong with writing in this way. But, there is nothing of me in it, either. There is no sign that they have heard my lectures, read my notes, or even looked at the assigned readings. It is as though they have somehow been wholly absent from my class.

So, I face the interesting problem of explaining to them that their work is good…but it is also good evidence that they have spent four months ignoring me.

1:00 pm—now back. The students were humble, even contrite, when I talked to them about the problem. I encouraged them to, in future, actually include material from their classes in their homework.

I wonder if they will follow my advice. Alas, they seem to me the sort of person more likely to smile and say yes, while continuing to do exactly what they had done before.

For their sake, I hope I'm wrong. They are about to begin their freshmen year, and, once in "real" college, they will encounter many professors who are far less tolerant than I am.

Simply put, academics are a lot like lovers. They can forgive an honest error. But, ignore them…?

Hell hath no fury.