7 am. What right do I have to take the time to write like this when there are four papers to finish grading - ridiculous that I've taken so long - but the exploratory writing and now drafts have poured in for the last paper because these essays are too bunched together at the end now, and I'm meeting with students again today - so what right do I have to write this way? Or what right do I have when I could be emailing more adjuncts about meeting me and signing a union card? I feel those claims on me, but I am doing this anyway. And so I can't truthfully claim that I use all my time working on my class in some way or union-organizing. I don't, and I can't. So I don't know... What is it to "try my best," anyway, in something this extended?
7:08 am. I was laughing with the last student group I met with yesterday afternoon from 4 to about 5:10 - Austin's writing his last paper on what Thoreau can tell us now about a "moral kind of economy" - and Austin drew our attention to the part in "Life Without Principle" when Thoreau asks what he would have to live for if he had to sell not only his forenoons but his afternoons, too, for income! So his position was that four hours a day is enough already to sell for income! If you sell the whole day, the time when the sun is brightest, that sweetest part of the day - what is your life, anyway, then? Austin's majoring in mechanical engineering; students from this university with that major have jobs lined up before they even graduate, he said. But be prepared to work 70 or 80 hours a week for a while, people tell him. The joke that isn't only a joke is that some people even sleep there during especially demanding work hours. Austin likes to write poetry, do woodwork - he comes across like my stereotype of (and people I knew back in the day in high school) a surfer dude. He already hates the idea of the long hours ahead, but this is his course: a job that pays well. Still, he dreads the loss of his freedom.
7:19 am. Another thunderstorm now; the first one blew in last night around midnight. Why, oh why, did I plan to go in to meet student groups today when I don't have to? But they zero in so much better when we do this. I suppose that makes their thesis a bit of talked through collective effort at times, but in my view, they're learning how to think in ways they never thought in before. I want them to experience how that comes about if they don't quite understand yet. I don't see how getting B's or C's on papers with vague, blah theses and then ending the semester will teach them that. So sometimes they come in with a thesis or even just a topic and we keep talking, throwing ideas around; I ask the other two students at various points what they think. It's a bit of a free-for-all. But it always stems from something they've already written in that first draft. I also tell them about passages they would have no way of knowing about otherwise. I told Austin for his last paper on Benjamin Franklin (a funny paper called "Benjamin Franklin - Virtuous?") about a passage by the great literary critic Kenneth Burke, where Burke says that people who read positive-thinking books are living in the aura of success while they're reading them - that is when the book does the most for them - they can imagine themselves as successful in those reading moments. I said it because that's what he was reaching for, and how could he know about Burke's quote? I just sent it and said to use it if he wants and feel free not to, but that his essay made me think about it. He made it his grand finale. And it's pouring rain now.
7:29 am. I am no martyr just because I'm driving in today. I love meeting with the students about their essays. And also, I love good and great papers. Reading boring or weirdly lost ones pains me, especially when I have to grade them and/or provide feedback. Ugh. At times I feel that I do all this in service to producing essays as excellent as possible. We're all devoted to the quest for sublime essays, I tell myself. And I want students to feel this, too. I want them to know that what they're writing matters, or at least it can.
7:33 am. I actually love what I do, at least most of the time. I hate grading, especially paper after paper, but so much of the other time, I love the rest. Austin said he will make one Thoreau point a focal point. a passage from "Life Without Principle":
The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.And this is why union-organizing in the quest to be paid more in the context of this economic system does much more than succumb to the logic of Capital (something I was working through in my last post, and didn't grapple with well enough). If they pay us well enough to live in this society that demands money, I can keep meeting with students, emailing them passages, remembering what they're writing about. If I have to teach four or five classes a semester, that cannot happen.
7:46 am. I've taken too long writing, but writing often centers me. I must grade these last papers before I head out into the storms!
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