Signs and Signifiers in the Indianapolis Airport

I spent the week-end in Indiana, where we went for my husband's family reunion. I didn't mention it before we left, because I didn't want to announce to the Internet world that my house would be vacant. It doesn't take too many mouse clicks before you've got my address, after all. Would thieves go to that much trouble? I have no idea, but I try to minimize risks where I can.

I had an experience in the Indianapolis airport that I've never had before. I actually had to study the signs for the bathroom to determine which one was mine. I'm used to those old-fashioned designs, where the female wears what looks like a big triangle. From far away, you know which bathroom is yours.

On Friday, I had to actually doublecheck the written sign, just to be sure. Part of it was that the symbol sign was confusing--the same sign told us in symbols that there was both an entrance for the women's room (to the right) and the family bathroom (to the left).

I noticed that the woman's dress has been updated. She's no longer wearing a triangle. She's got on a much slimmer skirt with an asymmetrical hem. I started wondering about the person who designed the sign. Did the person do it just for the Indianapolis Airport? Or will we soon be seeing this more fashionable woman on signs throughout the world?

I thought back to graduate school, where we spent lots of time arguing about signs and signifiers, and other concepts that the outside world probably never spent much time pondering. And then I thought about my current life, where my fine graduate school education has gone to analyzing airport signs.

Well, my education has been useful in any number of ways, and not always in the ways I anticipated. I use this sentence whenever students complain about having to take English classes (and other classes they consider useless). I think that one of the advantages of a Liberal Arts education is that it gives our brains fine things to ponder so that we don't have to focus on whatever indignities we're enduring at the given time.

How interesting--as I write this, Madeleine Albright is talking on NPR about the pins that she wore and what they signified as she went about her duties as Secretary of State. You can read or listen here. And if you really want to know more, she's written a whole book.

Yes, signs and signifiers are all around us. That's why I became an English major, after all. I tend to see the world as a storehouse of symbols. My brain left me predisposed become either an English major or a theology major--I liked the English department professors better, and so I set off down this road, with nary a care for practical issues, like how I'd make a living. I assumed the world would end in a nuclear blast very shortly (it was the early to mid 80's, after all), and I wouldn't have to worry about mundane things, like a career.

Again, the beauty of a Liberal Arts education--whether we're dealing with mundane things, like our careers, or earth-shattering things, like the idea of catastrophic loss, our Liberal Arts education has given us the tools we need to deal with whatever we may face.

Does "Community" Look Like Your Community College?

After watching promos for Community for what felt like the whole summer, by the time I sat down to watch the show last night, I felt like I had already seen the show. I've taught English at lots of community colleges, both in South Florida and in South Carolina (in Columbia and Charleston), so I was interested to see how the community college would be depicted.

I found the Spanish teacher least believable. To be having that kind of meltdown so early in the term? And over student expectations of what an Asian person should be doing? What, is he a new teacher? Is he not used to this by now? Does he not see it as a teaching opportunity? And to get in people's faces--literally!--the way he did? To be abusive to students? At most community colleges, I suspect that such a hair-trigger teacher wouldn't last very long. If that kind of scene happened in a classroom, half those students would be in the offices of various administrators complaining.

I found the set of the show to be more like a research university or a small college. Everything looks clean and bright and new. Most community colleges were built in the 1960's, and with the exception of a new building here and there, those buildings haven't been updated much since (I'm leaving the gleaming buildings that the Health/Medical students have out of the equation). Where were the broken desks? The shabby, stained carpeting or ugly linoleum? Why did the outside scenes look like the vegetation had been manicured? Where were all the huddles of smoking students?

But what I found most unbelievable was that all these students seemed to have so much free time. They met in the library to study. They worked on a Spanish assignment half the night. They put together a protest about Guatemala--a protest which had students show up.

Most community colleges serve a very transient population. Students come for class and then dash away to their job--often several jobs. They might wish they had time for study groups and protests, but they don't. They have children that need care. They often have older relatives who need care. My community college students faced more obstacles than any other students I've ever seen--and they often managed to hold it all together.

I'm happy that people in government are finally seeing the importance of community colleges. I worry that this T.V. show won't, that it will all be fodder for a series of smirking jokes.

What Price Votes? (or book adoption?)

When I started my first full-time teaching job at a community college in South Carolina in 1992, we weren't allowed to accept any gifts or anything of any value at all. When book reps wanted to buy the department lunch or a box of donuts, we had to say no. If a student wanted to give us a gift, we were supposed to say, "I so appreciate the thought, but I can't accept this" (full disclosure: an older student crocheted an angel for the top of a Christmas tree for me, and I didn't have the heart to reject it).

Why this strict line? Because a few months earlier, several state legislators had been arrested for selling their votes. Many of them had sold their votes for under $1000. As a struggling grad student who shivered through the winter and sweated through the summer because I could only afford an electric bill that went so high, I'm not sure what shocked me most: the fact that legislators sold their votes or that they sold them so cheap.

In response to this scandal, the state legislature passed strict rules about what state employees could and could not accept. As a naive younger person, I assumed these rules would take care of the ethics problem.

Now, of course, I know that there are many different ways to cheat the system. Now I'm surprised when something so brazen as accepting money in cash makes headlines. Don't these people know how to hide their interests in blind trusts?

I have this on the brain because yesterday, some of our key local politicians were busted in an FBI sting. They, too, sold their votes or influence. They, too, accepted pitiful sums of money. Have these idiots not been paying attention? Don't they know that they'll be caught? I've been watching politicians arrested for this kind of thing since I was a little girl. If Richard Nixon couldn't get away with his crimes, what makes these people think that they will?

Hubris, I suppose. Or, more scary, the fact that so many people probably do get away with these ethics violations. Perhaps it should be more surprising that anyone is ever arrested at all.

And then, of course, there's the larger question. I'm always shocked at how little money is involved. So, let's play a game. If you were going to abandon your moral self and throw your ethics away, what would the price be?

It probably starts small. A free lunch here, a pair of tickets there. Before you know it, you're accepting cash in a bag that contains leftovers from lunch, as one of our school board members is accused of doing.

Perhaps those ethics rules that governed state employees way back in 1992 weren't so crazy after all.

Can This Business Model Survive?

A few weeks ago, I read a favorable review of the book Push Comes to Shove, by Wesley Brown. It sounded like an interesting book, but more than that, the publishing company had an interesting business model. They give their books away.

Yes, they give their books away. Even the shipping and handling is free. In return, they ask that recipients make a donation to a charity or a person in need and that they pass the book along when they're done. Concord Free Press calls it a generosity-based publishing model.

How can they afford to publish books? They don't pay their writers or designers. They keep their expenses low. They accept donations. They do a limited print run. They sell T-shirts.

I like the idea of community that they're trying to build. I like the idea of requesting that people donate to charity instead of to the press; they say their first book has generated over $40,000 in donations. I like the idea of keeping books moving through society. The website notes that most books are read, shelved, and spend the rest of their lives gathering dust.

They only publish novels, but I started wondering if this model could work for poetry. Most poets aren't going to make gobs of money off of their books--if in fact, we make any. Would we rather have that money given to a charity? Is it important to be able to choose the charity? We could argue that the contest model of poetry publishing is supporting a charity, but the charity is that book publisher or a journal. I'd be happier if the money went to Oxfam or Lutheran World Relief, or some other organization that's devoted to helping the poorest of the poor.

It would be easier for me to do self-promotion and book sales if I knew that my efforts were helping the poorest of the poor. But maybe that's just me. Actually, I don't have trouble with self-promotion. I'll go out and rustle up poetry readings. But I hate being the one who sells my books. I hate that question that someone inevitably asks, "Do you think your book is really worth this price?" I always say, "The publisher set that price." But the question leaves me feeling queasy.

It's similar to how I feel about my students, who are now paying about $1500 a course. It's hard for me to imagine that I know anything that would be worth that price. And they assume that all that money goes to me. They look at our school's full-time teaching load of 5 classes a quarter, 4 quarters a year, and at all the students sitting around them. Even the ones who are math deficient can figure out that we'd be making gobs of money if that $1500 a course came directly into our pockets.

Except, of course, that money doesn't go into our pockets. Likewise, with poets and other authors. People assume that all that money that a book costs goes directly to us. But it doesn't. That's why this book publishing experiment of Concord Free Press intrigues me so much.

Education Bubbles

If you're still interested in the future of higher education, here are some resources. This morning, on NPR's Marketplace Morning Report, Chris Farrell talked about the high student loan default rate, the dropping earnings rate that college graduates are experiencing, and the future of education. He says that a college degree used to be the equivalent of a hot growth stock, but now it's more similar to insurance--you don't want to be without it, but you want to be careful what you buy. Go here to listen. It's a short piece, but it seemed well-reasoned and thoughtful.

A bit more on the apocalyptic side is this story from Washington Monthly, which asks what happens when students can get all the classes they can complete for the low, low price of $99. The author, Kevin Carey, says, "In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries—automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the dozen. It’s tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows."

It's important to mention that most people can still get a good undergraduate education for the price of a moderately priced new car--and there's still reason to hope that the education will outlast the car. And in many fields, we can't do the training online, at least not all of it: think of the medical field, for example. I think that we'll always have some form of higher education, but I think it's going through radical changes and won't resemble the college educations that many of us received. Good or bad? Still too early to say.

Julie and Julia and Kristin

I admit, I'm late to the movie Julie and Julia. I'm surprised that I managed to see it at all. I usually miss movies altogether, and I can't even remember which movies I wanted to see long enough to catch them on DVD when they're released months later.

But I did go see it on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and I loved it. Yes, I loved it. It made me want to go home and cook. It made me want to write down my recipes and perfect them into a cookbook that would change the world. It made me happy that I, too, have a gem of a spouse, like the two title characters did. It made me resolve to start greeting all my friends by saying, "My Darling Friend!," as Julia Child did in one scene.

O.K., I probably won't do that, but I might make Boeuf Bourguignon once the weather cools off enough to have the oven on for several hours. I won't cook my way through the book (no calf feet in my kitchen!), but I might return to it with renewed interest.

I was interested in the movie's depiction of women as creative people who have to remake themselves periodically--in fact, that seemed to be the movie's message about the world of work--we'll all have to reinvent ourselves periodically.

I was interested in the idea that each woman was adrift and found herself through cooking--and through writing about her cooking. I spent a lot of time thinking about how small changes in trajectory changed each woman's life so completely.

I had no idea that it took Julia Child so long to write Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The movie shows the multiple times that she had to make major revisions and how she coped with each twist. I loved the scene where she's thoroughly dejected--nice to see a bit of realism.

I have always thought of Julia Child as a cook and a television personality, but never really as a fellow writer. How nice to discover that side of her.

Was the movie a chick flick? I don't even know what that term means anymore. Many critics have pointed out that it's one of the few movies centered on women that doesn't focus on their romantic lives--very refreshing. Yet at the same time, these women are allowed to have healthy relationships as well as creative ambition--and they're not punished by horrible torture, dismemberment, or death. I loved the fact that Julia Child's body looks like a normal woman's body on the screen--a tall woman's body, but a body with a bosom, with hips, with a large behind--the kind of body one would have as one cooks with all that animal fat. I love the fact that her husband clearly desires her, well into their middle ages. I love that he sees her as a treasure, even as the society in which they live sees her as a bit of a freak.

Perhaps I won't wait for cooler weather to cook up something delicious that needs to stew for hours in the oven. Maybe I'll turn down the AC and heat up the kitchen. Maybe I can heat up my creativity by cooking too. I'm feeling anxious because I've spent the month of September writing an academic essay, instead of writing poems. Maybe cooking can gently correct my life's trajectory.

How to Use Your Liberal Arts Education

Last night, I went to see Rafe Esquith. What a treat. For those of you who don't know, Rafe Esquith is probably the most famous teacher of 5th grade in the world. He's been teaching some of the nation's poorest students for the past 25 years. How do I know they're poor? Every single student in the school is eligible for free breakfast and lunch. The students start out with many strikes against them: most of them don't speak English as their first language, and many of them have challenging home lives--and they experience a variety of challenging home lives, which makes it tough for the school.

Rafe Esquith travels with some of the children, and they performed for us. They did a program which combined speeches from a variety of Shakespeare's plays and rock and pop music--which they sang and played on the guitar and harmonica.

It's the kind of night that makes me feel like I've wasted my whole life, although I teach too, and when I taught English at a community college in South Carolina, I taught students coming out of some of the worst public schools in America (some years it was South Carolina, some years Mississippi).

It's the kind of night that made me think, Hey, I could teach 5th grade! In fact, watching those 5th graders last night, it seems like just the right job for someone with a Liberal Arts background: music, drama, Shakespeare--we can do it all!

Of course, watching Rafe Esquith, I firmly reminded myself that he makes it look easy, but he glosses over difficult stuff. Well, he doesn't gloss it over, but he doesn't dwell on it. He talks about the stupidity of standardized tests, but he cheerfully talks about ignoring them until test day arrives.

Sure, he can do that. He's Rafe Esquith. He can do whatever he likes. As a new elementary school teacher, if I could get a job (and that's a big IF in our county), I'd be subject to all kinds of lunacy.

I also felt uneasy watching him and realizing that I'm less a teacher these days, more of an administrator. I tell myself that my job is important--protecting my faculty and their students from as much lunacy as I can. But on nights like last night, it's tough to convince my idealistic side of that.

It was an inspiring night, even for those of us in the group who don't teach. Sitting in one of the best book stores in the U.S., hearing some of the greatest of Shakespeare's monologues, delivered by impassioned children, all for free: it's hard to beat that kind of night out!