extremes

Today was too long by about three hours. Part of the problem was an academic senate meeting. I've been the senator for my college for going on three years now and the nasty bits of the sausage-making that is getting people to discuss issues and make decisions has become tiresome.

Today's meeting there were presentations from two of the academic vice presidents. These women aren't directly connected to the faculty-teaching side of things, but they were giving information about the dire state of the campus and what we should be thinking of doing about it. I may have mentioned that the place is falling apart?

Their presentations were the sort of bracing talks we needed, but of course someone managed to turn it around to their political perspective in less than 30 seconds. So what that we're the worst school in our system for students transferring out? It's not our fault. The problem is that the tuition is too high! Yeah, that's it.

Uh huh, sure it is.

So I drag myself out of the meeting and off to class. This is my rambunctious section and we're slogging through a book that I know less than half of them are reading with anything like attention. One of my better students starts off with this wild-assed theory about why African-Americans are better athletes than whites. Something about different rates of evolution in humans.

Oh dear.

Well, I was tired and I was cranky and I called his theory wacky in front of the entire class. After about ten minutes he left and I have never felt so bad in a classroom all the time that I've been teaching. I got through the rest of the class and went straight to my office to write him an apology. At the end of my next class, he walks in, waits for the students who have been hanging around to leave and then we have a good talk.

He's having a hard time these days. His parents are splitting up. He's been helping his dad move to Salinas. (His mother doesn't know.) He just broke up with his girlfriend. And he's pretty sure that he doesn't want to be a business major. He really just loves music, but doesn't see how he's going to make a living at it.

We talked for quite a while. Although I'm the last person on earth to tell someone to stay in college, I think that college is the perfect place for a guy like him. He's curious. He likes struggling with new ideas. He's not particularly shy about putting his opinions out there. He's thoughtful. He works hard. Not to mention that he's thinking about dropping out to join the Navy and this is a bad time to be in the Armed Forces. He should be having a good time in school now and not worrying about what he's going to major in to pay off the debt he's accruing as he goes to school.

Our system sucks.

This is one of the things I like about teaching. Just as sitting through the meeting before class is one of the things I hate. The latter makes me tired. The former makes me feel useful and it's nearly as good as doing the classroom work.