writewrite

As many of you know, I have a sabbatical coming up. I’ll teach online this summer, and direct an independent study, and probably do some committee work here and there (sigh), but I won’t be stepping into a classroom to teach until January of 2011. Despite what all our teaching gurus tell us about the fantastic whatever of online teaching, for me *actual* face to face teaching takes the most energy. I find it exhilarating, yet exhausting.

And, when I teach, in the classroom, I don’t write as much as I would like.

Or ride.

And those are the two things I plan to do during my sabbatical: Write and Ride.

Or, to be more precise: Write the book, Horses and Divorces, and ride the horse, Oliver. Everything else comes in second. And many things will be simply dropped.

Like this blog. I’ve written things on this blog for a couple of years now. It’s been fun, and interesting, and sometimes I think I say things that are perhaps useful. But on balance, it’s a distraction. Writing here takes away writing that should go elsewhere. In the notebook, or in the book.

So this is it. The last blog post from writewrite. No more skewering the mangled writing of the local lousy newspaper. (Yes, dear editor, you can rest easy now.) No more cranky posts about local happy-face head-in-the-sand politics. (Yes, dear PR people where I work, you can heave a small sigh of relief that you don’t have to read-what-Jean-wrote and prepare to cringe.) No more completely gratuitous posts about my beloved Owen. Or about shoes. Or about random oddities in the place where I live. Or teaching. Or, well, anything.

I’m off to write. And to ride. See you in the real world!

PS and if I deleted your comments on this last post, it was completely by accident!

My brother has a post on his blog about the high cost of higher education, and the bind students find themselves in now: get a degree or don’t get a job. May I offer this: there is always the alternative of a reasonably priced state school with *ahem* fabulous instructors. I teach at one. Our students get a great education. Is it Harvard? Luckily for them and for me, no, it’s not. It’s a small campus with the resources of a top notch R-1 university.

To respond to other thoughts on the blog of my brother, who I love dearly: Are things worse now than they were, oh, 25 years ago? I think those of us firmly planted in middle age will always say so. But there is this: are we living in the Great Depression? No, we’re not. Might we have to give up some things? Yes, we might. Is the environment a mess? Yes, it is. Will it get better? I think it has a much better chance of improving now than it did, oh, 25 years ago. “Green” was only a color then.

Finally, this, something I talk about with my students all the time: Is finding a good job a matter of “luck”? Not really. It’s timing, persistence, location, persistence, preparation, persistence. And, probably this: redefine what it means to have a “good job.” I teach at a college many would never wish to because it doesn’t have the reputation of an Ivy League school, it doesn’t have the salary of one either, and oh my goodness sakes, it’s in the Midwest, how awful. I read the online forums of academics looking for work and you would think that if a city doesn’t have a decent latte and a good independent bookstore and a swanky organic food aisle that they’d been dumped in some circle of hell.

Are there things I miss here? Sure. I’d love to have a Unitarian congregation right here in town. But then again, I’d probably be at the barn when there was a service, so okay, take that off the table. I’d love to have seventeen bookstores I could browse in. But, then again, I’m broke and the library on campus and in town is great, so never mind the bookstores either. I’d love to have a downtown vibrant with nightlife and art galleries and readings by writers I admire. But then again, I’d spend time doing that instead of writing my own book, and 9 times out of 10 art disappoints and readings are exercises in displays of ego, so take that off the list too.

What do I have here, where jobs are scarce and salaries are low, Unitarians are few and far between, and a good latte is hard to find? I have a decent job teaching students who surprise me at times with their passion and hunger to learn. I have a core group of colleagues I admire and love to work with. I have time to write. I have rent that is reasonable, a place to board my horse I could never afford on the East Coast or West. I have long roads with wide horizons. I have the joy of finding beauty in corn and beans, combines shrouded in clouds of dust; of working to find common ground with Republicans and born-again Christians; of making amidst the factories and farms and small half-gone towns a life that works.

The sky in Indiana in November.

And I awoke this morning to find my car wrapped in a giant sheet of plastic.

I am making lots of these — it’s very cool: a single square, and then with some fancy stitching it becomes … TA DA … a bunny.

No. I have not lost my mind.

Yes. I do have a life.

Two friends, and I’m sure there will be more, sent me a link to this news piece. It seems, once again, Wayne County, Indiana, my hometown has made the top of a list.

Sigh.

Long ago I worked for an institution, which shall go unnamed here, which was struggling financially, losing money and clients in record numbers. The problems were large, and stemmed from several key factors: location, federal regulations, and the overall economy. The administrators in charge were worried. They had meetings. They had retreats. They had brainstorming sessions.

And they came up with an idea: Let’s institute a dress code! That’s it!

So they did. A three page, typed, single-spaced dress code. It specified everything: the length of your skirt, the type of pants you could and could not wear, the need for socks, pantyhose, and appropriate “undergarments.” There was even a little paragraph about “toe cleavage.” Yes, dear blog readers, toe cleavage. Apparently this is a terrible thing for the world to see. It induces mind-wandering, lustful thoughts, an inattention to detail. You know.

Following the announcement of the dress code there were, predictably, more meetings. As employees, we were schooled in what to wear. And what not. Should we dare to dress inappropriately? We would be sent straight home to change our clothes. And yes. We had to come back.

Fast forward. How is this institution doing today? Post dress code? Ah. Two years after the dress code, this little struggling institution was bought out by a bigger one. The administrators that invented the dress code have all dispersed to other jobs, in other places. And is the dress code still in place? I have no idea. I rather hope not.

So, a prediction: a few years from now, Richmond High School will still be here. High schools don’t get bought out. Not the way little businesses do. What we really want to know, however is this: will there still be a dress code?. There probably will be. Sorry kids.

Then the most important question, more important than plaids or stripes or logos or god forbid even toe cleavage: Will the graduation rate be better than, say, 68%? I doubt it. But let’s be positive and say that it will. And if it is, will someone — a superintendent, or a school board member, or maybe a teacher in the high school itself — heartily and happily claim a correlation between the existence of a dress code and this little uptick in the graduation rate?

They probably will.

Every day when I return from the barn, driving south back to Richmond, I pass a small house on a hill. No matter what time of day I pass the house, there is a thin, deeply tanned man standing outside in the yard, in exactly the same spot. He is usually, but not always, smoking. He monitors the road intently, and when I pass, he slowly turns his head to watch my car pass.

*****

At the grocery store the other day, a man appeared in the lot carrying an enormous cross. The man was stout, older, with a long gray beard. His clothes seemed to be fashioned from old grain sacks. He carried the cross as though he were Jesus. However, on the bottom of the cross, a small wheel with a rubber tire supported the weight of the whole contraption. The man slowly rolled his cross through the grocery store parking lot, gravely waving at passersby.

*****

I bought socks this week. A lot of socks. The salesclerk who sold me the socks was in a chatty mood and told me about a man who had come in earlier in the day to buy underwear. A bra, apparently. The salesclerk said to him, “What size does she wear?” The man paused, as though searching for the answer, then said: “It’s for me.” Without missing a beat, the sales clerk said: “Okay. What size do you wear?” I can’t remember the answer, but I do remember the sales clerk saying: “He had really good taste, bought the whole outfit: bra, garter, lace tap pants.” And then she shrugged and said: “He told me he’d been kicked out of a couple of other stores. I don’t care what he buys. He’s happy. I’m happy.”

As I write this (9:20 a.m.) Owen, in the back yard, has alerted me that there is more hoopla currently brewing at Richmond High. The Bark-a-Tron is in full alert! Yesterday, the BAT scooped the newspaper and the radio with the first reports of RHS protests. BAT subscribers knew first of the students and adults milling about in the rain, eager to make their statements about the dress code drama unfolding. Later reports would follow from the radio and newspaper outlets in town.

This, from the local newspaper, is a particularly telling comment:

Tenth-grader Karlee Cochran said she was suspended Wednesday, but instructed not to return to school until Friday. She said she wore a low-cut solid-colored white T-shirt, but wore a tank top over it that apparently didn’t pass the dress code.
She stood outside the school, beginning at 7 a.m., to participate in the protests.
“It was kind of exciting,” Cochran said about the attention the protest had received from local and regional media outlets. “Nothing ever happens in this town and this was big excitement.”

Indeed. Big excitement. And there will be more today. Owen, Ace BAT Reporter, will have a full report later.

*******

And, Baxter, Editor-in-chief of the Editorial Bureau, has made his statement by pooping in the living room.

Richmond Community Schools, in its inimitable wisdom, has decreed a dress code this year for all its students. Yesterday, on the first day of classes, 169 high school students were suspended for not adhering to the fairly strict dress code. Today, just before school began on day two, a noisy protest took place in front of the high school (which is also next door to the administration building). Lots of angry kids, parents, and more kids. The pictures tell the best story. As did the noise we could hear on my street, way across the Whitewater River gorge, and several blocks beyond that.

It all seems a rather ridiculous distraction from education, no? Yes. Yes, it does, all of it: the restrictive code itself which disallows stripes and flowers, pictures and words, logos and emblems of any kind; the innumerable violations caught by teachers, who are probably expressing anger at the administration that created the code as much, if not more than, a loyal sense of duty; the hepped up anger of the students and parents out protesting this morning in the rain, showing more enthusiasm today for the “right” to wear clothing of choice than any other issue in recent memory related to our sadsack public school system in Richmond, Indiana.

Yes. It’s much ado about not much at all. Plain clothes will not keep children from being distracted, enable teachers to teach better, lift our struggling city out of the muck that it wallows in. Nor will re-instating the ability to wear clothes that are not restricted by edict, apparently enable self-expression, and may or may not cause envy, horror, outrage, or sartorial disdain.

What will enable our children to learn, our teachers to teach, our families to prosper, our city to stand up that much taller?

Good question.