I finished my graduate school work three
weeks ago—closing the book, not with a bang but with a take-home stats exam—and
though it’s taken some time for the feeling of completion to sink in, it
finally has. I first began to appreciate
the month-long break I am on during those moments when, over a plate of dinner,
a brief flash of anxiety would rise in me and then just as quickly recede. No, I didn’t have to excuse myself to finish
just one more class reading; there was no meeting to schedule, no unoutlined
outline, no nothing.
In the mood of reflection post-grad
school, I’ve been most struck by two things: first, the ability to inure
oneself to a ton of work, and second, the strong desire to do something truly
imaginative.
First, I am struck by how accustomed one
can get to a “new normal.” In my case,
it was the new normal of working all the time.
In August, based on advice extracted from friends who had crossed the
grad-school bridge before me, I harbored fleeting and wildly optimistic plans
to “treat grad school like a job.” Get
to the library at 8, work all day, and leave it all behind to get home by 6:30
or 7. In my naïve imagining, it would a
job with long hours, to be sure, but with relative boundaries. The occasional evening and weekend would be
sacrificed of course, but disciplined work ethic could make those exceptions,
not the rule. By the end of September, I
was telling people, “I’m early to rise, and still working on the
early-to-bed.” I never did figure out
the latter part.
Much of the time, the schedule
represented a joyful immersion in pursuits of interest. I distinctly recall, several times last fall,
lifting my head up from a book and thinking, Wow, I’m being asked to spend all my time reading and thinking—what a
privilege! I felt the joys of the
work most strongly in the spring, where I did most of work not alone but in
groups, joining with classmates over bagels and coffee, our efforts laced with
banter, good-natured needling, and inside jokes kindled in the long, loopy
hours passed together at the ed school library.
At other times, I was reminded of the
darker sense of work that comes into English from the French travail, and the emotional something
that is chipped away at by too much labor.
I will always be grateful for the privilege of spending a year focused
entirely on school—and without having to balance it against a full-time job or
full-time parenting, as others have to. But
when the hours were longest, schoolwork sometimes felt more like travail than
joy. Although being a student promised
to be less emotionally demanding than previous work as a teacher, I abandoned
much of the personal caretaking I’d once steadfastly maintained as a
schoolteacher. A personal rule of 6.5
hours of sleep per night slipped to 6, or less.
Weekly pick-up basketball remained an imperative, but a Thursday run became
increasingly optional. In the fall I’d
stick to the calmer waters of tea, not coffee; by the spring I was intaking as
much espresso as I needed to fire the engine.
Because grad school seemed to require
less emotional strength than my prior work, I abandoned things to preserve me
emotionally—and found my emotional strength taking a toll. The costs were little but added up. Having to leave dinner earlier than I’d like
made me feel less present around other people, always the guy edging for the
door. Sending a personal email felt like
a luxury compared to processing the dozens of missives about class, meetings,
school events. There was less time to
linger over a conversation, or a beer.
Never before had I so appreciated how the long conversation, the
personal email, the curling up with a movie or novel acts as a salve, healing
and restoring us between bouts of work.
It makes the work easier to do.
It gives the work its sense of reward.
At orientation, our faculty keynote
speaker urged us students to surrender to grad school, and surrender I did—to
the joy and to sacrifice of it all. At
the time, I could hardly appreciate how much I would end up surrendering, or
how important it would feel to get back some of what I’d surrendered when it
was all over. Since being done I’ve
experienced what feels like a gift: I am so much more appreciative of the
little things than I was before.
Discovering an excellent pisco sour at the bar Eastern Standard; losing
hours in a Michael Chabon novel; taking photos off a bluff overlooking La
Crosse and the Mississippi River. I am
as happy to surrender to these things as I was to surrender to grad school. Here’s to small things that feel like luxuries.
The second striking reflection of the
last few weeks has been the primacy of reading
to my vacation plans. I got my fill
of nonfiction and PDFs the last 10 months, but for my down time I mean novels. It has become a sort of shorthand. To the question, How do you want to spend your time off? comes the answer, Catch up on reading. It’s always been that way; as a kid, I was
constantly losing a whole afternoon to a book.
But now, the urge to crack open a book seems like a nonnegotiable part
of the R-and-R.
And in, finally, reading again, the most
appealing part of literature has been how it allows one to escape into the
unknown. All of the things they say
about literature—putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, imagination filling
out characters—are so true, and I see
that now all the more because of its contrast with my schoolwork. It is like the contrast between the unknown
and the known. Literature brings us all
to the happy precipice of the unknown, from where we take leaps that land in
wonderful places. How the mind’s eye
will imagine a character is an open-ended endeavor. Where the author will take the story may have
been foreshadowed, but not telegraphed.
The unknowns of fiction seem so unlike
the decisiveness of the policy program. Sure,
as more than one ed-school commencement speaker mentioned, it’s important for
us educators to “hit the ground listening”
upon our graduation. But I often found,
in my policy and management program, that wondering about the unknown was far
less emphasized than being decisive, assertive, straightforward. You know it if you’ve seen; we students know
it well: The executive summary outlining the three main points. The imperative to define the problem—hammered
into me by my most recent professor’s exhortation to “Have a clear problem
definition,” or by my fall professor: “What’s the problem here?” The unctuous elbowing-in of politics, with
its necessary decisive steps and its cool disregard for second-guessing. The PDF with the three bullet-pointed problems
and accompanying three bullet-pointed solutions. And as students, the policy memos we wrote more
often than not hewed to the same dictum of the policy world: State the problem,
suggest solutions.
What was lost in that decisiveness,
especially given our location within what is (probably accurately) known as the
most opinionated ZIP code in America, was, at times, a respect for the unknown.
A policy—anything in education, indeed most things in the world—can only
be measured and assessed and understood so far.
There are things we don’t know, or can’t figure out, unless we wait a
long time, ask just the right questions.
Maybe there are some things we can never know.
It’s not just imagination that having a
respect for the unknown demands of us, but patience, humility, the willingness
to hold one’s guns, rather than fire them off in opinion. In an essay on American education, as it
happens, Christopher Hitchens wrote, “The measure of
an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.” In that sense, my graduate program was a
mixed blessing, opening up both countless avenues and on-ramps of curiosity
while also disciplining a decisiveness about matters that carries danger. We can debate the relative weight of either
of these. But no question, having time
off has been a clear step in the direction of the unknown.
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