No Glory Days, but Plenty of Pop Songs: an Academic Celebrates Community

Going to conferences can be the perfect antidote for the day-to-day work of an academic.  I usually have mixed feelings of “Yay!  I get to go learn stuff and hang out with like-minded people” simultaneously with “I am soooo not ready for my presentation.  Do I have to do this?”  My friend Susan captured this perfectly.  The night before I left, I discovered that the luncheon I was to attend was 90 minutes earlier than I thought, which wrecked my plans for a leisurely, post-rush hour trip up 95.  Then, I looked at the convention program for the first time (I know, I know) and found out that my presentation was supposed to be on the article for which I won an award, not the new research I had just spent two weeks preparing for.  Oops.  When I told Susan these stories, she said, “When these things happen, don’t you wish you didn’t have to go, even if it’s something you looked forward to?” 

I understood what she meant, because I had had those exact same feelings at other times.  Nels and I almost didn’t take a trip to Puerto Rico, even though it was planned and paid for, because we had just been traveling to see family.  We did end up going, which was great.  For this trip to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) annual conference, even with the last-minute problems, I still was excited to go.  Not to get the award, or talk about my research, but because I would be spending time with friends, old and new. 

The Buddhists call the assembly of ordained monks and nuns a “sangha.”  Yogis use the term more loosely, in that groups of students who practice together, say, at the same studio, might be called a sangha.  I like to think of it even more broadly, in that I feel like I’m a member of multiple sanghas—runners, yogis, writers, academics, Hoosiers.  Each of these sanghas have their own discourses and ways of being—their own social worlds. 

At NCTE, I was able to spend time with two different sanghas who differed in space and time.  One of my current sanghas is the Agentive Teachers’ Group, or ATG.  We are a coalition of teachers interested in social justice pedagogy and all that goes with it.  Our presentation was in the late afternoon on Friday, and we had a full house.  By staying away from the “talking heads” kind of presentation, we were able to engage in dialogue with the participants and learned as much from them as they did from us.  Although this group has existed for four to five years (none of us can remember, which I take as a good sign), I was gratified and humbled by how they talked about their work.  Afterward, at dinner, we didn’t talk about the presentation at all, beyond the initial “Wow, did you know Tom Romano was in our session?”  Instead, we talked about music, books, movies, and television shows, including arguments about what should be on the Top 10 Pop Song list of all time (a sampling of songs under discussion:  “Billie Jean,” “The Final Countdown,” “Heard It through the Grapevine”, along with newer stuff I didn’t recognize.  Hoosiers, rest assured I put in a vote for Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” and these East Coast folks agreed).    Sure, there was also beef regarding whether Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” was crap or not.  What else can you expect from a bunch of English teachers? 

Then, instead of staying at the conference hotel, I stayed with two dear friends in Newton.  They are both educators, so of course we talked shop, but the topics ranged from politics to football to the benefits of vitamin D to contentment.  This is a different, more intimate sangha, and is just as important in sustaining my sense of connection and well-being.

Going to conferences is not just about current and local sanghas, though. It’s mostly about sanghas of the past.  If you have gotten your doctorate or been partnered with someone who has, (to this latter group, we owe you) then you know that graduate school sanghas, like professional sanghas, help you keep and retain your sanity.  Unless you’re in grad school, nobody really gets what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.  Even the language is different.  Meeting up with Beth, John, and Tasha was about reconnecting to a place and time that shaped who I am as a person and an educator.  I would not have made it through statistics without John’s patient tutelage and Tasha’s fierce commitment (I have called her Tenacious T ever since).  Beth and John were key members of the English Teachers Collaborative (ETC), the ancestor group of the current ATG.  Tasha, who is exactly five days older than me, and I share an Aquarian vibe that is both airy and fiery.  We haven’t seen each other in years, but it didn’t seem like it, as conversation flowed just as naturally about our current concerns and lives as it did ten years ago. 

Interestingly, conversations with my past sangha members were not about what we experienced together in grad school.  There was no, as Bruce Springsteen puts it, Sitting back/trying to recapture/a little of/glory days.  Instead, we talked about where we are now, who we are now, and what is going on in our field.  The mileage between the physical and social spaces of Michigan, South Carolina, Virginia, and Rhode Island may be far, but the connections we forged through a doc program that managed to be both demanding and supportive are still intellectually and socially stimulating. 

It is a shame that academic institutions are committing less funding for conference travel.   The benefits of attending these yearly conventions are not limited to going to sessions or even presenting.  Instead, I would argue that the main value comes from creating and sustaining relationships.  Relationships drive and sustain all professions, and I’m not talking about networking, which is purely strategic.  I’m talking about authentic dialogue that comes from genuine interest in and support for others, not what benefits the individual only.   So this Thanksgiving week, raise a toast or turkey leg to your own sanghas, whether they are family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, or members of a specialized group.  

What Billy Squier Taught Me about Integrity

Integrity.  The first time I remember thinking about this word was due to Billy Squier. 

For those of you who had the misfortune to be born post-80’s or outside the U.S., you may not know about the magic of somebody like Squier.  If I was a musical snob, I would completely disown that I ever liked this guy, but hey, I’m married to a guy who is unashamed of loving Dan Fogelberg, whom, to me, is the nadir of rock.  (“Leader of the Band”?  Seriously?  HATE that song). 

As I listen to videos via not-very-good YouTube videos, Squier’s songs still sound as tempting and revealing as they did back in the mid-80’s, when Don’t Say No was one of the biggest records around.  “The Stroke” was most popular, but to my ears, “Lonely is the Night” and “My Kinda Lover” sound as sincere as rock and roll possibly could in the 80’s.

I liked Billy Squier enough to want to go see him at the Fort Wayne Memorial Coliseum during my junior year of high school.  The only problem was the concert was on a school night, and thus my parents said no.  Not to be thwarted, I made up a story about how my friend Kim and I were going to a tech rehearsal for the school play, that I would stay overnight with her, and go to school from her house the next day.  Somehow, my parents bought it.

Interestingly, I remember nothing about that concert.  What I do remember is being caught a week later when my mom talked to Kim’s mom about an unrelated issue.  My mother, having been raised a Southern Gentlewoman, is not a screamer, but she has a firm and dangerous tone when she is mad.  And boy, was she mad.  The one statement that came through clearly was, “It’s a matter of integrity.”   

In my adolescence, it seemed far more convenient to lie, especially to my parents, to get what I wanted.  So I did.  I even said things like, “Lying to your parents is okay, even necessary,” and honestly believed it.

But when my mom said, “It’s a matter of integrity,” a seed was planted.  I lied to her and my dad plenty of times after that (after all, that was just my junior year), but I was conscious and remorseful of what I was doing.  Funnily enough, I was also lying to myself.

Ironically, this came home to roost when I was teaching high school.  I loved the punks and goths because they were honest about what they did (drinking, getting high), what they didn’t do (my assignments), and who they were.  I took the truthful, greasy-haired, leather-jacketed kid reeking of last night’s alcohol over the sweet (ha!) blond blue-eyed girl who told me earnestly that 4:20 was not a drug reference, and that’s why she wanted it on her yearbook page.

Lying is a form of protection borne of the need to preserve others’ projections of us.  I was trying to protect my parents from knowing that I was not the person they projected me to be, however unconsciously.  I wasn’t as good or smart as I thought they thought I was, and I desperately didn’t want them to know that.  My students, even my college students (even graduate students!) have done the same thing with me.  I recently realized, in one of those lessons that needs to be experienced over and over again, is that I can’t take this personally.  As I wrote in my journal back in 2008:

What this tells me is that it’s [lying] not about me, the authority figure, but the person him or herself.  It may be a case of having high self-expectations and knowing you are falling short, but you don’t want to admit that to anyone, so you make up excuses or lie or get defensive when people see those cracks in your armor that you thought were invisible or that you had covered up, or even worse, that you didn’t even know were there. 

Now, when Sharon Salzberg, meditation teacher extraordinaire, talks about integrity, she means something more conceptual, as in living your values. I wrote about that later in the same journal entry:

Maybe it’s as basic as thinking and acting with integrity, not only toward others, but toward myself.  Sometimes I get so caught up in doing things so that others will like and respect me, that I don’t even do the things that I like and respect about myself.  In other words, I’m performing for others for the sake of my ego, as opposed to thinking about what I really want in life.  My ego…protects those small brittle places to make it so that I’m not vulnerable.  I figure if I try really hard to appease my ego, than those vulnerabilities will go away.  What I’m seeing is that they don’t; and that the ego stretches me too thin so I cycle through those dark moments time and again—that deep-seated anger at trying to play nice and to play strong as opposed to really getting down to business. 

I need to define for myself what acting with integrity really means.  It doesn’t mean doing what I want to do and not doing what I don’t want to do:  it means being truthful, even so far down and deep as learning to recognize those hard truths about myself.  It also means being generous toward others and myself. 

At the very least, then, I hope I can lie less to myself about what I can and cannot do.  My ego still wants people to like me, because maybe then I will like me; thus it thinks I can and should do all kinds of things.  I see the same thing with my colleagues.  At a meeting this week, every single person claimed to be overwhelmed.  You know what?  I am not overwhelmed—not yet this year anyway.  After years of burnout, my sabbatical taught me that taking time to do yoga, meditate, read, play in the garden, and even watch television, keeps me rejuvenated. 

Busyness is now the way we tell ourselves we are wanted.  The endless emails.  The taking on of more complex tasks.  I still sometimes get sucked into that, but can often come back to the place of “No more work this afternoon.  It’s time to read some young adult fiction.” 

If you are feeling overwhelmed, can you step away from your inbox, your promises to others, and keep the promise to yourself?  Can you offer yourself the generosity you would offer others?