No blank pages

It looks empty, but don’t panic.

I’m spending June at home in Texas, and it’s everything you might imagine and more in this early apocolypt-ish summer. Humidity like a microwaved blanket stuffed directly into the bronchial tubes, multiple inches of rain in a single day repeated multiple times in a week, huge hail and interrupted electricity and the after-odor of wet shoes hanging everywhere in the background. I get up before dawn to walk a few miles and boil water for my oatmeal before everything goes all Satan’s living room on us. And then I drive to the big pretty library on campus and settle in for another day at a summer institute for profs. I’m staying home for five weeks this summer to learn more about teaching.

At your age! you might exclaim, and I mean who can fight you there? Thing is, several fancy pals had done the institute and recommended it. I was impressed that the university would offer such a robustly supported resource for new-ish faculty. And among other things, I was attracted by the chance to get paid to stay home. So last Tuesday, fresh off the plane from Tokyo and still wildly jet lagged, I sat down with nineteen colleagues from all across the university to see what we might do together as spring erupted into summer.

Okay, real talk.

Academia’s been, how you say, a whole situation, no cap. I’ve had the privilege of mobility, but I’m longing for what smoothness I can find even as every road buckles in the twenty-first century heat. I signed up for this summer with a student’s mind - I mean a student of the institution, looking to learn about navigation and alliance. Learning about teaching would certainly come, thought I, as a byproduct of being in a roomful of teachers. It wasn’t top of mind for me.

Silly rabbit. You know what’s more interesting than policy or procedure? People.

Every day I watch teaching demonstrations from professors in all sorts of disciplines. So far we’ve learned a bit about math, religion, linguistics, gerontology, nursing, Swahili, music, and public relations, with a dozen more topics to come. The information on offer is impressive. But the surprise, the delight, the gift? Each and every person who stands up to click through a PowerPoint and speak from the center of their expertise, experience, and passion.

It doesn’t even matter how they do it. Quiet, loud, methodical, speedy, demanding, circumspect, funny, serious, warm, cool - every speaking style, every vibe you can imagine is in that room. And one isn’t better than another, at least not in a roomful of committed nerds wanting to tell you all about The Thing. Sometimes we talk about knowledge and experience like they are the items on our CVs, existing somehow outside of the people with brains and hearts who did the reading, took the tests, learned the job, made the mistakes, figured it out. But the knowledge and experience are inside the people; the people are made up of knowledge and experience and so much more.

Every single day, I’m brought back to the sheer truth of it: the biggest asset any of these educators has is their own human self.

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Of course, it can all go so wrong, and it has. Which is also because of human selves.

I’m having the inspiring feels described above during weeks in which more classical music educational misconduct is coming to light. This is a continuing, necessary process of justice and grief which breaks hearts and gives hope. It can also sometimes flatten people, even the warriors.

Humans, warriors or not, are part of other big systems as well, ideological and economic ones for example, and those seem to be pushing us ever harder to produce while offering ever less in return. Choosing your own adventure is cool, but these days it can feel like somebody grabbed the last parachute right before it was your turn to jump.

One day last week, my glasses fogged in transition from the ninety degree Texas morning into the library’s frigid air. I pulled on a jacket and used the hem to wipe my lenses, and sat down in our seminar circle for a morning of talks about AI.

A bullet point on the screen said “No Blank Pages.”

The speaker was giving us tips on how to use chatbots to speed through some writing tasks in order to make more time for others. No more blank pages, they said, no more sitting there spending your precious time figuring out what to write. Let a bot write that recommendation, that CV, that syllabus, whatever your rote document might be. A few edits, and you’re done and on to your creative work, your research.

Now that all the search engines suck (because bots), I can’t begin to find who originally said the first thing that came to my mind, but here’s a version of the quote I can’t properly attribute:

Why should someone read something I didn’t bother to write?

The second thing that came to my mind was this: can we call ourselves “student-centered” (a top ten buzz-phrase in academia) if we are willing to let bots write our recommendation letters and syllabi? In the neoliberal university, where faculty’s job is to tirelessly produce, has teaching lost so much value? (Spoiler alert - yes). But surely one thing we can do for the students that keep the wheels turning is the honest labor of finding the words they deserve, words they have earned.

The third thing that came to my mind was something a professor said a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away where I wrote my exams in pencil after listening to LPs in the music library and didn’t tear the shoulder pads out of my blouses. He suggested to a roomful of us that we put our egos and ideas at the door and sit at our desks with “minds like blank pages, waiting for the stories of the masters to be written.”

At the time, I thought that phrase was beautiful. And my young mind did need calming, my fragile ego did need schooling. It was helpful to me in checking my mental chatter to envision a blank white page. It was much harder to see the harms that such a construct could - and did - bring, requiring us to perform an intellectual simplicity that waited for a master’s permission to move ahead.

So, no, yeah, as the kids these days might say, no blank pages. It’s not that blank pages are undesirable. It’s that no page is blank. Just because you can’t see anything yet doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.

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Ultimately, the writing is only meaningful because of the writer, the teaching because of the teacher.

That shoulder-pad era prof? He was a patriarchal dude for sure. He taught in ways that I wouldn’t, and he taught in a way to which I still aspire. His way of teaching was effective and meaningful, and it had nothing to do with our minds being blank, nor the stories of the masters being transformative. He was the gift - his hard work, his knowledge, his expertise, his experience, and his energy, these things of which he was constructed, which he offered to us ethically and kindly through his singular, human self.

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I have a much clearer idea of what I’m writing for, and I owe that to this seminar and these colleagues. Remember when I said I was putting aside all things piano? It’s time to take them back up.

More to come.

For now, I’m a little stuck on the blank page in front of me, and it’s the most delicious feeling in the world.