Fatherhood at Fifty-One

One year ago last night, as my spouse and I were getting ready for bed, she complained that her waistbands were feeling tight although she hadn't gained any visible weight.

"Could you be pregnant?" I asked, and she told me that was ridiculous. She was probably right. We were too old. We had missed the window for having children and reconciled ourselves to growing old together as a childless couple. So I went to sleep.

One year ago today I woke at 5:30 in the morning and found my wife had already been awake for hours. My question had nagged at her until she dug an old home-pregnancy test out of the bathroom closet. Positive. A baby was coming.

But was that right? The test was so old it had expired. So off to the drugstore for another (inconclusive) and another (positive) and then a hurried call to her ob/gyn and a trip to the nearest emergency room for an ultrasound. And there was our daughter on the screen, wriggling happily away.

"I can't take a picture for you," the ultrasound technician said. "I'm only trained for the first trimester, and we're obviously past that."

As Gomer Pyle used to put it: surprise, surprise.

My spouse and I met late and married late, when I was already past forty, and spent our first years of marriage commuting between jobs hundreds of miles apart. There was no responsible way to start a family when I spent the work week two states away. By the time we'd landed jobs in the same city I was very distinctly middle-aged. Could we start a family so late? Should we? We decided to let nature take its course and then accept its verdict: no IVF or other medical interventions, no adoption. We'd just see what happened, and nothing did. We thought that was that. And then it wasn't.

So in this worst of years, filled with calamities, we were also given an enormous, unexpected gift of joy. Our daughter was born in the Pandemic Summer of 2020 and we've been home with her ever since. I mean, where else would we go?

Being older parents means getting warned about every possible complication or grisly birth defect. The testing was constant. But the baby is healthy. Being pregnant during the pandemic meant worrying that there won't be a hospital room at all when the time comes, but the line held. Being an expectant father during the pandemic meant I had to live in the hospital room with my wife and newborn; if I left the hospital, I wouldn't be allowed back in. But I wouldn't have had it any other way. I began fatherhood as I meant to go forward, and living together is the point. Having a newborn in a pandemic means you never go out or see anybody; in some ways the two parts cancel each other out. 

Working from home with a newborn when both parents teach at the same university, means that the fact of the newborn cannot be hidden. She has sat on my lap through Zoom meetings and through online teaching videos. I wouldn't recommend it as standard practice, but I also wouldn't have it any other way. And why should the work of raising a child be hidden, except to keep employers from recognizing that work?

And Christmas came to our small family at home, the first time I've celebrated Christmas without traveling since before I left home for college and I think the same for my spouse. But all I wanted for Christmas I had, here under my own roof. 

I'm old to be a first-time father: as old as my own grandfather was when I was born. I don't have the physical energy I had in my twenties or my thirties, but I have a little more cunning and much more patience. I will worry about my daughter every day for the rest of our lives, but that's the job description. 

Being half a century older than your child brings home mortality like nothing else, not even a global pandemic. If I'd forgotten how fragile everything is, I'm never going to have that luxury again.

And I know what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life. Happy New Year. I hope yours is joyful and safe.

cross-posted from Dagblog

My First Short Story in a While

As previously mentioned, I have a new short story out this month: my first in 21 years. I am very happy about this. And, as promised, here's a taste and a link to the full piece. I hope you enjoy it.

The thing that broke your heart was, he could still fly. Nothing else to call it. There he was in those silly clothes, going wherever he pleased and not falling, as if gravity were just some tired social pretense and he’d grown too old to bother. But it wasn’t the same.

Writing Short Stories, Then and Now

I used to write short stories. Then, for many reasons, I stopped writing fiction. Today I had my first story published in more than twenty years. (It will be posted on the web in two weeks, and I will link to it then. If you can't wait, the issue's for sale here.) More stories may be along; we'll see. If it takes another twenty-one years, I'll have something to look forward to in 2039.

It's a little strange returning to an art form after two decades away. One of the things it means is that in my old stories, no one has e-mail. Most people didn't. Or cell phones. Any temptation to dredge up old pieces is held at bay by the fact that they've become historical fiction.

So what else has changed?

Electronic submissions have made the business of sending out stories easier, and vastly sped up response times for science fiction markets. I loved the ritual of going to the post office, and I enjoy an occasional return to that, but in the old days after stories went in the mail you had to put them out of your mind for at least a couple of months. Now you sometimes get a response in less than a week. Sometimes it's still months, of course, but things are more efficient.

(Literary magazines are still as slow to respond as always, or slower. Budget six months for a reply and be happily surprised if you hear back within three.)

The small cool science fiction magazines I used to love, with their tiny press runs, have largely been replaced by cool online science fiction magazines. That's a useful change, especially in terms of how many people potentially read a story. I didn't have many links to share in the old days. I'm back to being a fiction rookie again, trying to break in just as I did when I was younger, except that rookies today get to play for bigger crowds.

I am now older than my characters. In my twenties, my typical science-fiction narrator was about 45 years old. I had real storytelling reasons for that: one way to write about the future is to use a character who's old enough to have lived through the key social or technological change, and who remembers how things were before. On the other hand, I used a middle-aged protagonist at least once in a straight-realist story, so I don't know what I was thinking. My go-to protagonists are still middle-aged, but now I don't have to imagine what that's like. A 45-year-old narrator might just be me with marginally better knees. And maybe some of the emotional tone I was reaching for as a younger writer, the rueful complexity I associated with my elders, is nearer to my midlife grasp. At least I'd like to think so.

Fiction writing is no longer my vocation. I've learned there's something else I'm better at. I will never know how well I write either scholarship or fiction, because that's something you can never know about yourself. But I know which one I write better. The best thing I have ever written is a scholarly article about Shakespeare, and so is the second-best thing. Ten years from now, that will still be true. If I had been asked twenty-five years ago whether I'd prefer to be a better fiction writer or a better Shakespeare scholar, I wouldn't necessarily have chosen the way it's turned out. But no one gets asked. It's great luck to feel any vocation as a writer, and I'm grateful. It feels like ludicrous good fortune to discover I can still publish in a second field, years after leaving it behind.

Knowing that fiction won't get me anywhere means I don't have to worry about getting anywhere with my fiction. I can write short stories because I don't have to make a living from them. It's no longer possible to make a living writing short stories. Even commercial markets (and I should say Apex Magazine has been both fair and generous) won't pay a month's rent or mortgage in America, and no one can sell a story every month. But my stories don't have to pay my rent. Neither do I need to use stories to get attention for my novel, or worse yet my unfinished novel, or get myself an agent. If I write a novel, I'll try to get it attention, and probably an agent too. But right now the point of my stories is to be the best stories I can make them. If I end up writing a novel, the point will be to create the best novel I can. There don't need to be other reasons.

I suppose this is all to say that my ambition is to write fiction with "a professional's skills but an amateur's goals." But I lifted that phrase from the scholarly article I have coming out next month. I'm better at some things than others.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Why Art?

Why study the arts? Some politicians ask the question as a joke, mocking this or that discipline as impractical. Those who defend the arts and humanities answer in economic terms, arguing for the rich and versatile skills one learns in the humanities classroom. I have made that economic case myself. As far as it goes, it is true. But it is not the only argument, and it does not go far enough.

We need the humanities because we are human. We need the arts because we are mortal. We need art and poetry because everyone we love will some day die.

We are human, and so we have problems that we cannot solve. That is not pessimism. Life is also full of beauty, wonder, and fulfillment. But even the best life includes the certainty of pain and loss. They are sure to come, and there is no "practical" solution for them.

Medicine can cure disease, it can ease suffering, it can extend life. It cannot banish death. Medicine does remarkable things, and I am grateful for it. But the larger problem remains.

Human ingenuity and practicality and industry can do wonders, and I am lucky for everything technology has done for me. But technology does not end the problems of the human spirit: loss and loneliness, wounded hearts and broken souls. We will never have a technological fix for these problems. There is not an app for that.

Right now, somewhere in California, some of the richest men alive are trying to find a technological solution to the problem of death. They have come to believe, or at least to hope, that money and technology will buy them immortality. What does this teach us? That people like Larry Ellison, Sergei Brin, and Peter Thiel, for all their fabulous wealth and admirable math skills, can be complete idiots. This problem is not to be solved in the way they hope. (The idea that immortality would come out of Silicon Valley, whose products are not built to last even a single decade, is hilarious.) The problem that they want to overcome is called "thermodynamics." It is part of the nature of all things. Silicon Valley's riches do not change that. They only fuel the hubris that lets billionaires mislead themselves.

None of us, personally or as a society, are ready to look straight ahead at problems like death, or to think about them too long. We have built marvelous toys to distract ourselves, like children putting off bedtime. The old folk saying about only using ten percent of our brainpower is not quite true; the truth is we use ninety percent of our brain power to trick ourselves out of dealing with the truths we can't face.

But we will all find ourselves, sooner or later, dealing with problems that money and technology cannot solve:

                   Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
                   mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
                   che la diritta via era smarrita.

                  (In the middle of our road of life,
                  I found myself in a darkened wood
                  Where the right path was lost.)

When that happens, and it will happen to all of us, we will be stuck with it. We will not be able to write a check. We will not be able to take a pill. We will not be able to ask Siri for the answers. The new car won't save us, because we'll already be off the road.

For these moments, humankind has invented the many arts and disciplines called "the humanities." Philosophy, art, literature, history, religion, theater. These disciplines do not solve the fundamental problems in the sense that those problems go away. No poem will keep you from dying. But all of these arts search for ways to deal with those problems, to come to grips with them honestly. Technology solves the problems that can be solved. Art faces the problems that cannot be solved.

Those problems do not go away. But the accumulated human wisdom of a few millennia does often help. Sometimes, what you need most is perspective, and sometimes, alas, there is nothing to give you but perspective. Philosophy, literature, and art are tools for broadening and deepening your perspective. You are a thinking soul in a difficult and transient material world. When there is nothing for you to do except to think, nothing you can change but your own thoughts, Tolstoy and Milton and Yeats are there to help.

And when all else fails, as eventually it must fail, the arts provide consolation. When the matter fails you, you will be forced to seek the comfort of self-deception or to reach for the hard-won consolation of difficult truths. For some, that consolation is philosophy, for others faith, for still others art. But I would humbly suggest that you rely on everything you can.

If nothing else, the arts and humanities give us something durable to think about in our fleeting, temporary world: things that, if not eternal exactly, are at least durable. When the world changes under your feet, the thought of something that came long before you and will remain long after you are gone is a kind of comfort. At least, it has been for me. And then I am like the poet Keats, who could no longer deceive himself about his death), looking at the ancient Greek pottery which would outlive him:

     When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man ...

What else to say? We are flawed and human and fragile, and we need all the friends that we can get.

 

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

JFK's Birthday

Today would have been John F. Kennedy's 99th birthday. I doubt he would have seen it, even if he had lived out his natural days. He was never in good health. But I grew up with a huge JFK poster in my childhood bedroom, and a little bronze bust of him, the kind banks used to give away, on my shelf. I was born Catholic in Massachusetts in the 60s; Kennedy loomed large in my childhood.

Today is also the end of my 25th college reunion at Harvard. I have been having a great time with my classmates, and it's ending before I'm ready. I feel like I've only spoken to half as many people as I'd like, and only for half as long as I'd like. But at least I got to come; JFK did not live to his 25th. I've been joking that I will soon have achieved two things John Kennedy never managed: going to my 25th Harvard reunion and turning 47. But it's not funny. It's just true.

Fifteen of my classmates are already gone, all too soon. Some I knew and some I didn't. And two of the seven people I roomed with over those years have already passed away. I wasn't in touch with them as much as I would have liked. I wish I had taken the chance while I had it.

Mortality has been on my mind, because of my mother's passing a few months ago. Some of my college classmates knew about her death before this weekend, because of social media. Some old friends didn't know, and I told them over the last few days when there seemed like a reasonable moment to tell them. Others I didn't tell, because the time was never right or because we have never been more than casual friends.

I've grown obsessed over the last few years with the Grant Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal study of human aging that tracked 268 Harvard boys over the rest of their long, complicated lives, trying to assess their mental and physical health and growth. They are the worst social science sample possible, so over privileged that they can't be representative. I mean, the guys in that study had a 1 in 268 chance of actually being JFK. But I think about them a lot, because the study illustrates so much about growth in the second half of life, and I am coming to the second half of life. And the Grant Study promises that there is a continuing process of maturation and growth after, for example, a 25th reunion. It is at once comforting and challenging to think that I still have a chance to grow, and to become a better man.

Whether I like it or not, my life is in transition. This week, before I left for Boston, we had a visit from my father and brother at our new house. And I was sitting at my dining room sharing a meal with my family, and Mom wasn't there. It's a new place, and the same old family, but not the same old family. My family changes, and my place in my family changes. There is so much left to do between the middle of life and the end.

The Grant Study also emphasizes the crucial importance of relationships and emotional connections. And perhaps that's why my reunion seems like such a gift. But it is bittersweet to see all these faces for such swift moments, when I want to sit them all down for long, open-ended conversations. And so I guess that's my lesson this Memorial Day weekend: how it all goes by so very, very soon.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

A Personal Note

As many people who read this blog know, my mother has been very ill for some time. I don't have much to say about that, but having mentioned how sick she was it seems strange to let the topic drift off inconclusively.

My mother has passed away. We had her funeral a week ago. I may have more to say about that later, but right now I do not.

If you are a praying type, spare a few thoughts for my dad, who was married to her for more than 47 years, and who has suffered the heaviest loss of all. Thank you.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

A New Hampshire Primary Memory

It's the New Hampshire primary today. I grew up in New Hampshire, and I remember those elections fondly.
One of my my favorite memories, which I've blogged about a few years back, involves my Mom getting into it with Al Haig on the campaign trail back in the 80s. Haig was, of course, a retired general, former Supreme NATO commander, Nixon's last Chief of Staff and Reagan's first Secretary of State. Mom was a police lieutenant.
So, Mom, who was interested in the question, asked Haig a question about women playing combat roles in the military.

Haig responds with a story about a female war correspondent who was covering Vietnam (an irrelevant story, to Mom's mind, because it involves an unarmed woman with no military training). And Haig wound up his story with his big clincher: "As soon as the shooting started, my instinct was to throw that girl over my shoulder and run for the nearest helicopter."

Mom said, "I carry a weapon every day. Don't you call me girl."

And that's how they were quoted in the newspaper.

Sorry to repeat that story. I do love it.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at,  Dagblog

David Bowie Lived to 69 (Alan Rickman, Too)

My social media feed, like yours, is full of mourning this week: not simply for the great and beloved David Bowie, but also for the brilliant Shakespearean actor Alan Rickman (likewise beloved from many films), the poet C. D. Wright, and two more heroes of the Shakespeare world: the eminent actor Brian Bedford, a legend of the Stratford festival in Ontario, and the scholar and editor Sylvan Barnet. (You know those Signet paperback editions of Shakespeare? Those were Sylvan's.) And I see my friends asking in baffled grief, Why so many? Why so fast? Why now?

Because they refused to die in December. So let's celebrate that. They wanted to make it through the winter holidays, into the new year -- in Bowie's case, until his 69th birthday. So they hung on: for their family's sake, and for their own. Maybe not all of them. But likely most of them.

Can someone do that? Absolutely. You're going to have to trust me on this one.

You can't keep yourself alive through sheer willpower, not forever. You can't choose your day. But terminally ill patients can rally for a while, especially when they something to look forward to. I've seen it happen.

I feel sad that these famous strangers have gone out of the world. I liked living in the same world with them, and I will be sad they are gone. Some of them were heroes of mine. But celebrate that they got their New Year's Eve, their London Christmas. Be happy that their spouses did not have to spend Christmas in raw, newly-wounded mourning. Be glad that Bowie, who had already willed himself not just to stardom but to thoughtful, searching artistry, willed himself to his 69th birthday. (And no, I couldn't resist the off-color pun in my title. Bowie was full of appetites and life, as people who knew him in his touring days have amply testified. The bacchanal Bowie of the 1970s and the Bowie who willed himself past one last milestone were very much the same man.)

And if you think your Facebook feed is sad now, think of what it would have been like if Ziggy Stardust and Professor Snape had died on December 23. Think of how that would have made you feel, and be grateful for the deep generosity, by people with almost nothing left, that held off that sadness from you.

Celebrate their lives, and celebrate their final, persevering strength.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

The Christmas Star

It's Christmas, the second-most-important Christian holiday and the most important holiday for many Americans. Tonight is Christmas Eve. But for some families, every year, Christmas comes at a moment that seems dark and difficult. Many of my friends are in my thoughts tonight, and my own family is grieving.

This will be our last Christmas with Mom. My mother is in hospice. She spoke during the fall about wanting to make it to Christmas, and she has. I am immensely thankful. I am very sad. We have her; we will lose her. The two truths are not separate.

The winter holidays are about celebration and gratitude. Celebrating is easy. Gratitude is harder. In the good years, in our well-fed and endlessly-indulged country, being grateful for our easy bounty often poses an enormous challenge.We take so much for granted, and understand too little of it as a gift. But when Christmas comes to you in the bleak midwinter, gratitude is even more important. You must dig deeper to bring up your thanks. But this is the most important time to be thankful.

I am grateful, tonight, for all the years of my life that I have enjoyed my mother's love. I am grateful that this Christmas I will see her face and hear her voice. And I am grateful, more than I can ever say, to the family that has supported and surrounded her during her illness. Everything I want for Christmas I have; I have already been given it, year by year and day by day, all the days of my life.

There is a reason that this holiday comes at the dark ebb tide of winter. It is the holiday of consolation in the darkness. The Christian story tells of a miraculous birth in the dead of winter, far from any riches or comfort, in the most unlikely of places. And it offers, in the long night of the spirit, a promise of far-off hope.

That promise is not about tomorrow. There is a reason that Easter is the most important day of the Christian's year, and Christmas the second. Easter is the fulfillment of hope. Christmas is hope that has yet to be fulfilled. Santa aside, Christmas has never been about immediate gratification. The child is born, and nothing outward or immediate changes. He is a baby; his great deeds, his historic role, are decades away. Everything will change, but not yet.

Christmas is not about hope fulfilled, but about hope itself: the faith that the better day will come, no matter how long tonight may last. The promise is fulfilled by being renewed, and we are asked to wait again, to hold hope quietly in our hearts through the long, gray winters. It offers us only the reassurance of a distant star, just above the horizon, clear and steady but beyond our reach. All it promises is that the star is there. And that will be enough.

cross-posted from (and all comments welcome at) Dagblog

Brett Foster Goes Out Singing

I was blogging today about art, especially about poetry and about grief, but that post was interrupted by the news of an old friend's death. My own thoughts about grief can wait. I will still be thinking them tomorrow. Today I give way to the beautiful, kind-hearted poet and scholar Brett Foster, who has passed out of this world. He was a better man than I have ever been, and I will miss him.

I will leave the best words to Brett himself, and to his poem "Tongue Is the Pen," written during his illness, which is more eloquent than I could ever manage. His poem begins with a citation to Isiah 43, and opens:

I am making all things new! Or am trying to,
being so surprised to be one of those guys
who may be dying early. This is yet one more
earthen declaration, uttered through a better
prophet’s more durable mouth ...

I cannot tell you how beautiful a friend Brett was, or how much I treasured him. I can only leave you to read his own words. But I will close with the end of Brett's poem:

And speaking of things overheard, you heard right:
if I have to go out, I am going to go out singing.

Update from Old Friend of the Blog (or, Kevin Hogan Is Back!)

Four years ago, I blogged about my old friend and colleague Kevin Hogan, a Massachusetts teacher who was ambushed in a parking lot by a Fox News reporter peddling a sex scandal.

Kevin has been suspended from his job. He is in real danger of being fired. And he will likely never find another job as a teacher. That is a sad thing, and not just for Kevin.  Teaching may be the single best thing he does for the world, and the world will be much the poorer if he leaves the classroom.

I was afraid that Kevin's educational gifts - and Kevin is a genuinely gifted educator - would go to waste, unused. But last week I got a surprise e-mail from out of the blue: Kevin Hogan, who has now become an LGBT activist. I cannot tell you how pleased and relieved I am to hear that news. If Kevin is being kept out of classrooms, his talents as a teacher and communicator can still benefit us all in the public square.

And Kevin does have important things to teach us, not least the hard truths of surviving the 21st century's vicious public shaming. He's currently finishing a book, Healing Stigma: A Survivor's Guide to Repairing Identity in the Internet Age, and I am looking forward to reading it. This is news that stays news. We don't yet have our minds around what we, in the internet age, are doing to private individuals, but Kevin's experiences and his thoughtful reflection can help us understand. Here is Kevin on the recent Ashley Madison hack, something widely taken as an opportunity for gleeful internet heckling:

On the morning of August 19th, I woke up early and went online to check the news. A headline in the business section caught my eye: "Ashley Madison infidelity site's customer data 'leaked.'"
A chill crept over me. I ran to the bedroom, where my wife was just waking up. She must have recognized a familiar look on my face, because she immediately reached for my hand and asked what was wrong.
"People are going to die," I whispered to her, dreading the words as I said them. 

You can read the rest of Kevin's post here. It's very much worth the read.

Welcome back to the fight, Kevin. This time, I know our side will win.

cross-posted from, and comments welcome at, Dagblog

Goodbye, My Second City

Although "Doctor Cleveland" is my nom du blog, I've been splitting time between two cities for years. Like many academics in my generation, I've struggled with the "two-body problem" as part of a couple with teaching jobs at universities in different places. We've had homes in both places, but I've been the primary commuter and my spouse has held down the home front. I've really been "Doctor Eastern Great Lakes" or "Professor I-90." Now, at long last, we have solved that problem. My trusty Buick has made the last of its round trips.

The bittersweet part is that being together means saying goodbye to one of our cities: the city where we were married and bought our first house, the city where we made our primary home. Today, the sale of our house in Rochester closed. I have come to love Rochester, and I will miss it.

The Kodak Building from the cheap seats

Rochester and Cleveland are not so different: they are resilient Rust Belt cities on the shores of Great Lakes. And both have been home. But Rochester taught me the charms of the small city. Hundreds of thousands of people, rather than millions, live in and around Rochester. It lacks the major amenities of a big city: no big-league sports, no Big Five orchestra, no Art 101 masterpieces in the local museums. But the scaled-down versions of those amenities make for a pretty good life. Rochester taught me the pleasures of Triple-A baseball and the local Philharmonic, the quirkiness of small museums, the pleasures of a pocket-sized amusement park tucked alongside the small beach. Aristotle writes that The Good is that which needs no addition, and there were many days and evenings when I had no desire for any finer place.

Guarding my study on a summer night

I will miss the Japanese maple in our backyard, and grilling dinner on a crisp September night. I will miss the mated pair of cardinals that nested nearby, and our evening strolls along leafy side streets. I will miss the annual Oscar party in fancy dress at the George Eastman house, and the Rochester Philharmonic's annual Messiah. I will miss our church, where we were married, and the pastor who married us. I will miss Sunday brunch at the Highland Diner, where we eventually became such regulars that we weren't always given menus. I will miss driving past the Kodak building late on winter nights, knowing that when I saw it I was nearly home.

Time to be going

 I will miss our first house. I will miss our dining room and the old two-way swinging door to the kitchen, I will miss the old butler's pantry with its 1920 woodwork, and the fireplace that my wife loved building fires in. I will miss coffee on our front porch, and the garden which managed (thanks to the foresight of the previous owners) to have something in bloom or berry almost all year round. I will miss our lilac trees and our holly bush. Most of all, I will miss the little window in the room I used as an office, which looked out into the enclosed porch that was my spouse's office. And most of all I will miss looking up from the sidewalk in the evening and seeing her in her well-lit aerie, looking down at something on her desk.

Near the end of summer

I will miss the dinner parties we had for friends. I will miss hosting our parents, both sets, for Thanksgiving in that dining room. I will think fondly of the friends who visited us in that house, for a weekend or an afternoon.

As we were doing our last weeks of yard work, packing away our garden tools until next year, I realized that one of the bushes in our back yard, which we had never identified and which had only just begun bearing its first green, immature fruit, was actually a peach tree. The little mystery fruits yellowed and reddened into small, half-grown peaches, too small still to eat.

As ripe as this summer allowed

The full ripening, and the taste of backyard peaches at the kitchen table, will not come until another year. But I was happy that I got to see that color on the tree, promising better things to come.

cross-posted from Dagblog.

The Two-Body Problem: What I Learned

A few weekends ago I came home from commencement, hung up my silly robe for another year, cleaned my fridge, packed my car, and left town for the city where I live with my spouse. I won't be back until later in the summer. I've been making that five-hundred-mile round trip nearly every weekend for three of the last four years, with breaks for summers or sabbaticals. But this was the last time. Next time I drive to Cleveland it will be with a moving van and my spouse.  We have been lucky enough to solve the infamous two-body problem, the long-term, long-distance relationships that bedevil so many academic couples.

There was no fanfare. There was no parade. And there are plenty of logistical hassles left, such selling a house and moving our main household. But that phase of my life came to a quiet end. I will simply not do that commute anymore, and gradually I will lose the habit of doing it and the habits that came with it. But, before the perspective of the last few years fades from memory, I'd like to jot down what the experience taught me.

Some things should be obvious. A long-distance domestic partnership or marriage makes demands on your time, your energy, your organizational skills, your finances, and your relationship itself. Some of those things can be traded for one another to a limited degree; spending more money might mean shorter commutes, or ease organizational challenges by allowing you to duplicate, rather than endlessly pack and unpack, more possessions. Or your superior organizing may streamline things enough to buy you a couple extra hours of weekly rest. But the trade-offs only go so far.

The rise of internet and cell phones have made some aspects easier to cope with; there are no more massive long-distance phone bills. And some things are idiosyncratic to each situation. I had an enormously difficult time trying to manage two separate kitchens and keep both properly stocked. Not everyone will have that problem, just as not everyone has the same travel patterns or domestic pressures. And yes, there are first-world problems. But they're widely shared problems in my profession.

1. You will be tired and can't afford to be.

The first part of this is obvious. Travel takes time. Travel takes energy. But just because it's obvious doesn't mean that it won't affect you nearly every day. And it doesn't mean that you will expect how tired you will be. A commuter marriage taxes the time and energy of both partners, even if one doesn't usually do the traveling. My 4+ hour drive was manageable; I always had the energy to do it. But doing it twice a week for weeks on end wore me down more than I was willing to admit to myself. And at a certain point, not admitting to yourself that you're tired is the biggest problem.

But you can't afford to relax and save your energy, which would be my usual advice. Your careers run on that time and energy, and you can only get two jobs in one place by making yourself as employable, and thus working as hard, as you possibly can. The two-body problem takes away exactly the time and energy you need to invest in solving the two-body problem. And you also need to leave some time and energy for, you know, the relationship itself.

My weekly travel was much easier than many people's. I could drive, rather than fly. And it only demanded between eight and nine travel hours on a typical week. But eight or nine hours is most of a workday taken out of your week somewhere. And those are hours when you're awake and alert; below a certain limit of fatigue, you're not safe to drive. If you're trying to set aside one workday a week for your writing, as many people do, that day can get gobbled up by travel time and by tasks that travel pushes into other days.

(If you're flying or taking the train, you might be able to sleep or work as you travel. But you're still not going to use that time efficiently; it's going to be broken up and full of distractions.)

I found that I could drive to Job City from Marriage City at the beginning of the week and jump right into the week's tasks, although I wasn't going to get much done Sunday night after the drive. But one way or another, the drive back to Marriage City extracted a productivity toll. If I drove on Friday, most of that day got burned. If I kept Friday clear of courses and meetings and drove home after my night class on Thursdays, I would typically arrive home sometime between 1 and 3 AM. Then, mysteriously, I would have trouble getting much done the next day. Either way, my Friday-as-writing-day was cooked.

What I began to learn, but never fully mastered, was the art of using partially-fatigued time for tasks that required less concentration. If I tried to write part of an article on Friday, most of that time was going to get wasted. But I could use that time to prepare the next week's classes, rereading the assigned texts and writing classroom handouts. I couldn't write elaborate feedback on student papers just after I got home from teaching my night class, but I could proofread those papers and mark mechanical errors. And then those tasks would not end up taking up hours when my mind was sharper and I could do more complicated things.

You can't always devote your best working hours to the most demanding tasks. Sometimes a pile of meetings eat up some of your most productive time, and compressing the time you spend in the office - which you have to do to commute - means that lots of those meetings get stacked up in the middle of the week. But you can try to husband the less-productive time carefully to get through less-demanding tasks, and salvage as much of your high-productivity time as you can. Even more importantly, you have to learn when even low-level work is counterproductive, and make yourself rest when you can't work. If it's midnight, or even 10:30, and you've just driven two or three hundred miles, you should go right to bed.

2. You cannot divide the challenges evenly, but you can be fair.

Any couple with the two-body problem is concerned with equity; that's why one partner doesn't just sacrifice his or her career for the other. But there is almost no practical way for most couples to divide all of the different kinds of work that two-location marriage or domestic partnership requires equally. It doesn't even make sense to do it that way.

Even if you each do half the traveling during the semester, which is almost never efficient or practical, you aren't going to split summer break or winter holidays evenly between both locations. You probably can't afford to buy permanent homes in both places, but you might have good financial reasons to buy a home in one place. If you have children, they have to go to school somewhere. Inevitably, one location will become home base, and the partner who works in the other location will do more of the traveling.

What this means is that, one way or another, the practical challenges of the two-body relationship get distributed asymmetrically. This doesn't have to be unfair. But you can't split every task down the middle. You can share the hardships, but you're each going to cope with a different set of hardships.

Even when you think that you're taking on the tougher job, you are inevitably leaving other difficulties to your partner. I chose to be the primary commuter (although my spouse gave me a break once or twice a semester by coming to Job City for a weekend), thinking that I was taking a major burden from my spouse's shoulders. And to some degree, I was. But I was also, without realizing it, sticking my spouse with the responsibility for upkeep and repair of our 90-year-old house. After all, she was there, and I couldn't be around on most weekdays. Trying to relieve her of one burden, I saddled her with another. But that's how long-distance partnerships work; each partner ends up taking on different roles.

(The one part of the main household I did oversee was the kitchen, because I'm the primary family cook and therefore the primary grocery shopper. Before I left for the week, I would stock up the home-front kitchen with low-maintenance meals that I knew my spouse enjoyed. That particular division of labor was idiosyncratic, driven by our particular skill sets. Every long-distance partnership will have odd details like that.)

The thing you need to remember, for your relationship's sake, is that both of you have taken on the harder half of the job. Each one of you wrestles with problems the other doesn't have to deal with, and both can legitimately say they have it tougher than the other. Always remember in moments of stress that your spouse or partner is dealing with many challenges that s/he has taken on alone.

3. You must really live in both places.

One of your two locations will inevitably end up being primary, but you can't psychologically disconnect from the second place. It may be secondary in practical terms, because you can only handle one mortgage and because you leave during summer break. But you can't treat it as simply a place where you show up, do your job, and leave. You can't treat your home in the secondary location as a motel. One of you is going to spend the lion's share of every work week in that place; if it doesn't feel like home at all, you're going to be miserable.

The dumbest smart thing I ever did in the commuter phase of my marriage was to downsize my apartment in Work City to a smaller, fairly anonymous bachelor pad close to my office. On paper, it was a perfectly sensible idea; it was cheaper and more efficient. But over time it wore on me terribly, and I eventually came to hate being there, not because the place itself was so bad but because I had never managed to make it feel like home. Worse, I thought of it as Not-Home, as an extension of my workplace. And that meant that psychologically I never came home from the office at all unless I got in a car and crossed two state lines.

The only time that apartment felt like home was when my spouse visited for the weekend. Those weekends often became extended date nights, as we got to enjoy Job City's amenities. (If you spend your time in two places, you will discover unique pleasures in each place. Try to enjoy both when you can.) And when she visited, even my grimly convenient apartment became a place where I found comfort. Later, when my spouse moved to Job City for a sabbatical year, we found a more home-like apartment in my old residential neighborhood, and I began to reconnect more fully with the city around me.

You can't afford to be alienated from a place where you spend at least twenty days a month. And you can't let your social life wither in either place, no matter how easy that is to do. You need to bond with both places. You need friends in both places. And you need to keep working on those things.

4. Mood. 

A commuter marriage is, by its nature, something you're not happy doing, and it fills your daily life with things that aren't especially happy-making. Most of us don't get married so we can wake up alone. You have to spend a lot of your time putting on your happy face and powering through. Everyone learns to do that getting through grad school, just like you learn to power through a lot of work when you're tired. But, just as pushing on with work after you're tired eventually becomes counter-productive, ignoring your mood will eventually burn you. You need to monitor your frame of mind just as you monitor your energy level, and plan around your own low points.

Most of my problems with mood were cumulative: things that weren't so difficult in themselves but, through repetition, slowly eroded my inner resources. I don't fall apart if I spend a day or two without my spouse. Waking up alone for a day or two is not a problem. But as the number of days spent apart from her stacked up, week after week, I eventually had to admit that I was finding it increasingly hard to stay positive, becoming frustrated more quickly, having a harder time shaking off minor problems. In my case this was complicated, and temporarily masked, by the fact that while I was adjusting to the weekly commute I was also taking on a number of new quasi-administrative responsibilities at work, so there were genuinely new workplace headaches. But it's harder to roll with the punches on the sixtieth or eightieth work day you wake up without your spouse. I eventually accepted that my mood declined over the course of each week, and that every week's low point got a little lower.

Driving at night was another cumulative problem. I find driving at night relaxing. But when you're driving 250 miles twice a week, almost always after dark,  you are basically spending eight or nine hours a week sitting alone in the darkness. That turns out to affect your mood. Driving through the night for four hours won't meaningfully affect you. Sitting in your darkened car, mile by mile, for more than 100 hours a semester will gradually start to darken your outlook. I eventually had to take active steps to ensure that I did at least some of each week's driving in the sunlight, and noticed an immediate improvement.

Mood is obviously related to energy level and fatigue, and the same problems with academic culture apply. We're all trained to suck it up and grind it out. That's how you get through orals, that's how you finish your diss, that's how you do all the end-of-term grading in four days, that's how you got through the gauntlet of the job market. It's the right thing to do, up to a point. But after that point, or when the thing your pushing past stretches beyond weeks and months and becomes indefinite, it becomes very much the wrong thing to do. It's like distance running: you need to run through some discomfort and fatigue. That's the normal state of things. But if you push it beyond a certain point, you will hurt yourself. Sometimes the pain is warning you that you will injure yourself if you keep running; the fatigue is telling you that you are dehydrated, and getting worse with every step. If you keep pushing after that point, you will put yourself far, far behind.

I learned, or began to learn, two basic strategies for coping with my declining mood. One, as with the drive-in-the-sunshine trick, was to look for small things to build into my schedule that improved the day: lunch at a favorite place instead of at my desk, coffee with a friend. The big things, like not seeing your spouse every day, are part of the problem, and big attempts at compensation are often dysfunctional, but you can get some decent mileage out of small things.

The second trick is to be aware of your moods and step back a little from what you're feeling in the moment. For the first year of weekly commuting, it seemed that every Thursday afternoon between 4 and 6 something outrageous and messed-up would happen at work, usually involving some quasi-administrative stuff. Then I would teach my night class, which put whatever it was out of my mind for two hours but left it waiting for me when I got out of class, and then I'd pack my car and drive four and a half  hours through the night, chewing over whatever that week's Thursday Afternoon Outrage was. That was a pretty ugly experience. Eventually I learned to adjust to that, partly because I learned which kinds of nonsense I should expect in my inbox, but mostly because I learned that I was at the absolute lowest trough of the week at 5:30 on Thursday afternoon, and that I should learn to hold all my Thursday-afternoon reactions at arm's length. I learned that things tended to look especially bleak or dysfunctional by that time (and of course, almost every Friday afternoon meeting seemed to be about something utterly insane) and that I should presume that any problems that came to my notice late on Thursday would seem less awful the next day. I couldn't make myself a resilient optimist by the last days of the week, but I could plan around my weekly lack of optimism or resilience and keep my temporarily lowered mood from affecting my actions.

Anyway, that's what is was like for me. Your mileage may vary.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Solving the Two-Body Problem

For years now, my spouse and I have had what academics call the "two-body problem": two careers at two universities in two places. It's a common problem for our professional generation, and we have an easier version of it than most. My spouse (the more accomplished blogger Flavia) works at a school about 250 miles away from mine. We maintain two homes and commute between them. We have been lucky that we are not farther apart, and that we can travel by car rather than plane. But like most of our generation, we have had no visible or easy solution for our problem. Professorships are very hard to come by, and job mobility after one's early career is almost nonexistent except for a handful of stars. We have always promised each other that we would  live together full-time some day, but we have never been able to promise when or how that day would come.

Now we know. As Flavia has announced recently, we have completed a busy and complicated season of job searches. The result is that she will be moving to my university in the fall of 2015 with a position befitting her accomplishments. This, as she points out, is mostly the result of outrageous luck: both of our schools unexpectedly listed a job in just the right sub-field this year. That not only meant that we could apply to each other's departments, but that each department understood that it might lose us to the other. We never planned for this, because we could not have planned for this.

The particular version of a happy ending we got is the one I least expected. It's not just that I viewed it as the most unlikely result; I have operated for years under the assumption that it was not possible. I thought my employer would never offer my spouse a job, and was absolutely certain that they would never offer one she could afford to take. I was wrong. But that wrongness was the basis of my career strategies for years; that is how little I planned this.

So how to solve the two-body problem? My advice is worthless, in normal academic-job-advice terms. I could not have made this happen, nor could Flavia. Most of the key events were entirely beyond our control. But that is true of every academic job search. You cannot make someone offer you a job. You always have to be lucky. All you can do is be ready when the lucky break comes.

One of Flavia's old friends once asked us, "So what is the strategy for you two?" and we had to say there was no strategy, because there was no obvious endgame. The only strategy was to keep doing our jobs as well as we could and to build our professional value as best we were able. But that is a strategy, too: the only strategy you can really follow. The last few months and weeks have been exceptionally busy and superficially eventful, but most of what Flavia and I did to make this happen, the things that were about our efforts instead of about luck, happened over the four or five years before those jobs were ever posted.

The real success here is Flavia's. The ultimate resolution of our problem was a job offer to her, and I will  enjoy the privilege of living and working with my spouse mostly because I am lucky enough to have a talented and ambitious spouse. 

The conventional wisdom is that it is easier to find a second job for a less accomplished partner. If one of us were clearly junior to the other in career terms, or did not have a serious research agenda, the usual thinking goes, it would be much easier for a department to find a starter gig or to create a non-tenure-track job. It's harder and more expensive to find a job for a professional peer. So, on paper, marrying an intellectual heavyweight like Flavia should have been a big mistake; she is nobody's trailing spouse. And nobody moves back down to an entry-level job the same week her book comes out.

But that "wrong move" turned out to be the right move for me. My colleagues and my institution saw a chance to hire someone who, because of the nature of the profession, would not otherwise be applying for this job at this stage of her career. (Every academic job search gets an abundance of applications from talented new PhDs, but since the market is poorly structured for mid-career job-seekers only a few places get many talented mid-career applicants.) This was not about credentials that Flavia scraped together after this job opening turned up. She didn't write that book over Thanksgiving weekend. This was about qualifications she has been steadily building for years, before she had any notion that this job opening would exist.

My ultimate role was to strengthen Flavia's negotiating hand. The decision to offer her a job was about her qualifications. The decision to make her an offer reflecting those qualifications was almost certainly about both the opportunity to hire her and the possibility of losing me. Hiring Flavia is a bargain at virtually any price, but passing up a bargain is easier than giving up something you already have. My school could have saved money by hiring one of those promising-but-inexperienced applicants for less money, but only at the risk of losing one of their established faculty members.

I am sure that my colleagues believed that I might leave; I have spent the last five years working under the assumption that I would eventually have to. And I have tried to be aboveboard about external job searches, telling my department chairs when I was applying and keeping them up to date about the progress of outside searches (including telling my chair promptly when I was eliminated). That included being transparent about my application to my spouse's school. 

I have also worked hard on publishing my research over the last five years, because it's a publishing record that is most likely to help you change jobs. My annual reports have made it clear that my supervisors consider me productive. So the idea that I might leave my job in order to be closer to my wife wasn't a new concept introduced in the midst of negotiations. I didn't actually say anything to my bosses during negotiations. My institution had already spent a few years thinking about the chances that I might leave, and the chances that I could.

But I also spent the last five years trying to be a good citizen of my department and university. This should also have been the wrong move, because I didn't expect to be able to stay, but it almost certainly turned out to be the right one. The conventional wisdom when you want to change jobs is that you should focus as much of your energy on research and publication as you can, and as little on service or committee work as you can get away with. I've written before about research as hard currency and service as local scrip. Publication is valuable to outside employers, while service is mostly valuable to the place you're serving. One keeps its value wherever you go, and the other can only be spent on-site. Amassing local scrip has no purpose if you're planning to leave. More importantly, I didn't believe that my institutional scrip could ever be put toward what I really wanted, because I didn't think "Mid-career Job for Spouse" was something they carried in the company store.

But I've spent the last few years doing a lot of administrative work. I have told my department that I needed to look for other jobs, but I have also told them that I was committed to doing my job properly for as long as I was here. That means working for the school's long-term future whether I intended to share it or not, doing some serious administrative chores inside my department and also becoming one of the department's public faces to the rest of the university. I did those things for the same basic reasons that baseball players run out ground balls: not because I thought it would get me anywhere, but because I would feel bad about myself if I didn't and because I was afraid if I stopped doing things the right way I would develop bad habits and lose the ability to do my job properly. But today I see the last few years differently. If I had used my weekly commute as an excuse to slack off, I'm not sure my colleagues would have worked so hard to end that commute. And I don't think they would have focused on keeping me if I had focused on trying to leave, at the rest of the department's expense. This could not have possibly happened if Flavia were not so very qualified. It likely would not have happened if my department did not think I could, and would, eventually leave. But they also had to believe that I was worth keeping.

The other reason they teach ballplayers to run out hopeless ground balls is because occasionally it does actually get you somewhere. Sometimes you hit the ball and don't seem to have any chance at reaching base. But then some piece of unexpected luck, some fluke, gives you an unforeseen opportunity. Players are taught to run hard for first base, no matter what, so that they have a chance to be lucky. You need to put in the work before there is any apparent hope; if you don't turn on your full speed until something surprising happens, you're probably too late. If you ever get a sudden bit of good luck, you need to be running as hard as you can.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Seeing the Headlights

Six years ago today, in the early morning hours of April 5, I hit a patch of highway ice while driving to the airport in an unexpected snowstorm and spun out sideways. My car was totaled, with all of the damage to the driver's side door. I survived unscathed. I did not get whiplash. I did not miss my plane.

My car turned around 180 degrees so that I was looking back at an 18-wheel truck coming toward me out of the snow while I was sliding sideways into its lane. There was nothing I could do in that long moment but watch the headlights coming toward me. Either I would slide in front of those headlights, and that would be the end, or I would slide just slowly enough to miss the truck.

In the end, I was almost slow enough. The metal step on the truck's cab gouged into my driver's-side door, buckling it inward and sending me caroming in another direction until I finally spun to a stop in the middle of the highway. Snow was falling through the foot-wide gap that the crumpling door had left between my window and the car roof. The difference between life and death had been two or three feet. I was alive.

After the wreck had been towed away and the cops had taken their report, they dropped me off at the airport with my bags, and then some time later I was standing in the California sunshine at an academic conference. Later that afternoon, California time, I took part in my scheduled seminar. Our death always follows close behind us, just over our shoulders. For a brief moment I was forcibly turned around so I could see its headlights, and see them pass, and then it was back behind me again, hidden from direct view.

Because hindsight creates the illusion of order, it looks to me as if the seeds of the last six years were already around me on that day. The seminar I took part in, and the response to the paper I had written for it, formed a turning point that began the last six years of my career. That paper became my most-cited article, and part of my book. When I went off to the same conference this year, the book was freshly out in paperback and the colleague who was covering my graduate class decided to assign my students that article. I had allowed myself to stall professionally; the jump-start came on the day I lived through the accident.

And that weekend in California I also happened to see, for the second time in my life, a person whom I later married but who was then only an interesting but skeptical stranger. That weekend was nowhere close to a beginning for us, but was a chance for me to make the all-important second impression, persuading her that I was at least not a full-time jackass. (The second impression is pretty important if you're me.) I suspect that it was on the last day of that conference that she decided I was socially tolerable. I suspect this because she has repeatedly informed me that it is so. And the last remnant of that early-morning trauma, a lurking anxiety about driving in the snow, began to dissolve later as our commuter marriage gave me strong reason to travel winter highways again.

The six years since I saw those headlights have been full: a book, a career, a house, a marriage. Six years of things I would have left undone. Six better and fuller years than the six that came before it, surely. I don't think my accident was providential, or that the last six years have been specifically part of any plan. Two or three feet further to my left and there would have been no planning left to do. But seeing the headlights puts some things in sharp focus. What you want, and what matters to you, become very clear. A couple hours after I had almost been killed, what I wanted most in the world was to go to my Shakespeare conference. (On the other hand, I absolutely did not want to go home to my apartment and spend the weekend there without structure. That idea would have been terrifying.) That may be a sorry truth about me, but it is the truth, and apparently pointless to deny.  For better or worse, that is who I am.

I don't believe that things happen to me, personally, for a reason. God's plan is not focused on my career. But seeing the headlights can put you in touch with what you want from your life. And if you glimpse the Angel and it passes you by, you should take that as a reminder. It's worth it to live.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Opening Day Farewell

Today is Opening Day for most of Major League Baseball, including my beloved Red Sox. For most baseball fans, the experience of falling in love with the game is inextricably bound up with their relationship to the men in their family, to the father or uncle who took them to games and played catch with them in the yard. But my love of baseball grows out of my love for a woman: my aunt Ann, who was laid to rest this week. Today is the first time I have been in Boston for Opening Day since I left New England fifteen years ago. And today is my first Opening Day without Ann. I had expected her to have another, and another. I was not prepared for this day to come without her.

Ann had no children. She was a sister in a Catholic order, what most people would call a nun. (Technically nuns are something different, and since they live cloistered away from the secular world you've probably never met one. The "nuns" you meet in the everyday world, running schools and hospitals and charities, are technically known as sisters. They do God's work in the most practical and literal way, as genuine work. Ann was one of them.)

As her oldest nephews, my brother and I were the closest things she had to sons. When we were still small, she began taking us to Red Sox games for our birthdays, which meant weekend stays with her in Boston, once fairly early in the season and once near the end. (I would like to officially thank my brother for having a birthday that tends to fall in the middle of pennant races.) We saw some great and dramatic baseball together. We were in the bleachers when the 1986 team clinched the American League East and their ride to the playoffs; I have a framed photo in my office that Ann took that day from the stands, with Oil Can Boyd on the mound in full windup, a few pitches before he ended the game and jumped up and down for joy, like a child. We also saw some profoundly undramatic baseball together over the years. A lot of September games have nothing at stake but the player's professionalism and self-respect; over time, I came to view those games as the most revealing, in certain ways: the games played for the highest stakes of all. And, truth be told, you can see a game any time over the summer when not much goes on, and the actual suspense is over by the fourth inning. We saw those games with Ann, too, and watched every pitch. Leaving early was never even mentioned. When you start a thing, you finish it, and when you love a team (or a person), the love is  not conditional.

It would be easy to say that Ann taught me about baseball as a metaphor for life, and so on, but she didn't, and it's a cliche, and Roger Angell has already said all that better than I ever will. And anyway baseball isn't much more of a metaphor for life than any other part of life is, and in some ways it's a less of one. (Life, for example, involves women. And men over forty. And doing your job when it rains.) What I learned about life on those trips I learned getting to and from the games. Ann was an adult, and lived in the city, and being with her I saw what adulthood and city life were like. She could not only find her way around Boston, but find a place to park. She could keep two kids under ten interested and occupied for two and a half days. She was the most streetwise person to ever set a good moral example for anyone, and she set a good moral example to most. Being around her taught me how to be an adult, and made me want to be kinder. When I graduated from college, it seemed natural to start my first adult job in the Boston Church: Ann's version of Boston, and Ann's version of the Church. The Catholicism that the sisters lived was, and is, the face of the Church that I found most comfortable and appealing. Reporting to a sister as my first boss made all the sense in the world.

And for all of the Hall-of-Famers we watched play, all of the dramatic hits and big games, my best memories are of sitting in the stands with Ann and my brother when nothing much was going on, sitting in Fenway and being together. I'd give a lot to sit with Ann through nine dull innings today.

Is baseball a metaphor for life? Is opening day a metaphor for spring and rebirth and new beginnings? Maybe. Sure. But when you come right down to it, baseball is an excuse to sit outdoors with someone you love. If it were nothing else but that, it would be enough.

Rest in peace, Ann.

Teaching by the Numbers

cross-posted from Dagblog

Last week, New York City released Teacher Data Reports for every teacher in its system. This week, I got my own teaching numbers: last semester's teaching evaluation scores. Getting my numbers was a good thing for me personally; they were very high, and my bosses tend to reward that. Releasing the New York City numbers was a bad thing generally, which can only set education in the city back. But both sets of numbers are largely bullshit.

Teaching quality is very difficult to quantify, and no method that currently exists comes anywhere close to doing it accurately. It's not impossible. But it is impossible with the current tools. It's like going to Mars: a good thing to do that is impossible this week but can be possible someday if we keep working.  In fact, getting quantifiable teacher assessment right is probably a bigger technical challenge, in terms of how far the existing technology is from the ultimate goal, than a Mars mission. Measuring teacher quality accurately is something that we should do, and which will have important benefits for K-12 and university teaching alike. But it's important to be realistic about what we can actually achieve right now. And relying too quickly on the flawed early technology, like launching a mission to Mars in a rocket that can't make it, will only set back progress and cause real people pointless harm.

These aren't sour grapes. The current method of quantifying university teaching treats me very favorably, and if more weight were given to those numbers it could only be to my benefit. My evaluation scores are reliably high, and last semester's were close to perfect. But that's no reason for me to believe them. Student evaluations, which are the only widespread quantitative measure of university teaching and by which some numbers-minded administrators set great store, measure student satisfaction, not student learning. These are obviously not the same thing. My numbers don't prove I'm effective. They prove that I'm well-liked. And the students have no way to know how much, or how little, they would have learned with a different teacher, because mine is the only version of that class they've taken. If, for example, I did not cover material that students at other universities would routinely learn in that course, my students would have no idea. And if my students learned significantly more than students in a similar course somewhere else, if they covered more material, understood it better, and developed stronger intellectual skills than students elsewhere, they couldn't know that either. They do have an intuitive sense of whether they're learning or not, and that intuitive sense is part of their satisfaction with the course and the teacher, but it's only part. These numbers are correlated with effective teaching, but the correlation isn't strong and (even worse) the correlation itself varies widely from class to class. Some popular teachers are very effective. Some are simply easy. Still others are merely likeable. Which am I? The numbers don't tell me.

There are other ways to evaluate university teaching: peer observations, teaching portfolios, testimonial letters from former students, and so on. All of these methods are also imperfect. They work best when several methods are combined, which gives you a fuzzy but reasonably adequate picture of how someone is doing in the classroom. The fuzziness of those measures has fundamental consequences for the entire profession of college teaching. They're good enough to weed out flagrant incompetence, or at least to reassure the school that the flagrantly incompetent have been weeded out. But they're not focused enough to make fine distinctions between good teachers and very good ones, let alone distinctions between the very good and the truly excellent. This is why professors ultimately advance their careers either as researchers or as administrators; research talent and administrative skill are easier to measure, and make it easier to distinguish the excellent from the merely good and the very best from the merely excellent. There isn't a career path that rewards superb teachers for their teaching, because the available measurements can't reliably tell those people from the teachers who are only above-average.

If college administrators tried to use the existing measurements to reward the best teachers by, say, promoting people whose teaching scores were 10% better than their colleagues', they'd be prospecting for fool's gold. Was I really 5% or 10% better last semester than I was the semester before? Hell, no. In fact, I was badly distracted last semester: I had an especially laborious and high-stakes administrative role to perform, I was making an inter-state commute almost every weekend, I got terrible medical news about people dear to me, and halfway through the semester I got married. I never slacked on my course prep, but I guarantee you that there was no extra time to put into it. The numbers, taken at face value, suggest that I should strive for that level of stress and distraction every semester, but the numbers should shut their damn mouths. And when this semester's numbers "show" that my effectiveness has "declined" 10% or 15% (because last semester's scores can only decline), that won't mean that I've actually become less effective. It will mean that the scores fluctuate widely from semester to semester because they are extremely imprecise.

But my bullshit evaluation numbers are a masterpiece of statistical rigor compared to the numbers that New York City just published. That data is related to students' performance on a standardized test, which is already imperfectly correlated with how much students have learned. So from the start you've got a shaky correlation with a shaky correlation. Then the numbers are adjusted in various ways to make them more "meaningful," but considering how small the sample sizes are  all the extra variables and sub-tabs, and the addition of new correlation problems with each new variable, actually make the numbers murkier and more volatile. Even if you ignore all those problems, and you shouldn't, there's the problem of sample size itself. In some instances the number crunchers themselves admit that the margin of error for particular teachers hits 53%. This means that a teacher ranked in the 50th percentile might actually belong in the 103rd percentile and be a miracle worker, or belong in the -3rd percentile and have been dead since the 1990s.

When I call these numbers bullshit, I don't mean that they serve no purpose at all. We will only get meaningful techniques of measurement by experimenting with different approaches. The numbers we have are not useful as actual measurements. They are useful as steps in the project of devising better measurements. Bullshit, put to the right use in your garden and combined with the right mix of water, seeds, and sunlight, will eventually yield a nutritious salad. But that doesn't mean you put the bullshit on a plate and call it lettuce. The New York City numbers are pretty obviously not ready for public consumption. Serving them up represents a health hazard.

Bill Gates, a champion of number-driven education reform, published an op-ed in the Times opposing the release of the teacher numbers. By and large, Gates gets it: the numbers aren't ready for prime-time and using them to publicly shame teachers will only cause harm. And Gates is right that using numbers punitively, especially when the numbers themselves aren't even half-baked, will only make teachers resist the whole project of numerical assessment. Of course it will.

Finding ways to measure teaching quality would eventually benefit teachers enormously. Teachers don't oppose measurement and numerical assessment because they fear change, or don't want to be held accountable, or because they're union thugs. Teachers oppose these "reform" initiatives because the "reformers," sometimes with the best of intentions, often use badly flawed measurements as if they were self-evident facts. No one in their right mind would want to be evaluated that way, especially when "education reform" in its current form has no suggestions for helping "underperforming" teachers except firing them. Gates understands that education reform should ultimately aim to help teachers improve, rather than simply replacing them, but many "reformers" take a much cruder approach. Claiming that the teachers are just looking out for their self-interest doesn't cut it; you can ask teachers to put their own interests aside for the sake of the kids' education, but you can't ask them to put their interests aside for the sake of number-driven policies that don't help the kids' education and likely hurt it. Turning over K-12 education to a set of statistics that don't actually measure learning is not a worthwhile goal, period, let alone a goal worth getting fired for.

People with the best intentions can do enormous damage to our education system by naively relying on numbers that are a long way from becoming reliable. These people are perfectly sincere. They really think that the bullshit is lettuce, and they will tell you at length how important leafy greens are to a good diet. If someone tells you that identifying the best teachers is perfectly simple, you're likely talking to one of these naive and disastrously well-meaning souls. They not only do damage to the current education system, but they set back reform, because peddling bullshit and calling it lettuce has the long-term effect of making teachers oppose lettuce on principle, and moves us further from the day that we can actually produce a healthy salad.

And what Bill Gates does not get is that not everyone who advocates these number-driven policies is naive or well-intentioned. There are a number of people supporting numerical assessment who are not interested in improving education at all, but who are simply anti-teacher or even anti-education. Some are union-busters, some have ideological problems with public schools, some have other motives. But they are not interested in producing lettuce. They just want to see some teachers eating shit. This can be difficult for well-meaning "reformers" to see; when you understand yourself as crusading for the public good, you tend to see anyone who joins you as one of the good guys. But it is transparently and intuitively obvious to teachers. When the same politicians and interest groups who were down on teachers last year are suddenly talking about "assessment" and "reform" this year, it's obvious that those politicians and activists are just adopting a new name for the same old ends. And that leads many teachers to see all advocates of reform, no matter how well-intentioned, as part of an older anti-education agenda. When reformers talk about reform leading to higher pay for the best teachers while the "underperformers" are fired, it is very obvious to people who actually teach that no one is going to get much of a raise, but that the firings are at the top of the agenda. (Even when school systems follow through with merit pay, the increases are small, and in many systems the "best" teachers don't do any better financially under the "reformed" system.) The sincere reformers, such as Arne Duncan or Barack Obama, generally don't grasp this. Their opportunistic allies do.

The genuine reformers damage their cause through their careless choice of allies, and by working with people who are operating in bad faith. They not only create resistance from the very people who should be their most important allies, the teachers themselves, but they ensure that any "reforms" enacted will be implemented abusively rather than productively: that flawed numbers will be treated as hard data, that results will be used to punish teachers and not to help them, that the promised raises never come but the threatened firings do. "School reform" will be a thin disguise for teacher-bashing as long as the "reformers" include education-bashers in their political coalition. That alliance will always provide enough political backing for new punishments, but not enough for the promised rewards. Bill Gates should be applauded for reminding the well-meaning readers of the New York Times what education reform is supposed to be. But his plans will never bear fruit until he comes to grips with what "education reform" actually is.

Birth Control Makes Catholicism Work

cross-posted from Dagblog

My brilliant co-bloggers Ramona and Destor have been especially brilliant this week on the Catholic bishops' outrage at having to pay for full employee health insurance. Destor is so smart about the church and state principles involved, and Ramona so good on the women's-health issues, that I have nothing left to add but my own personal experience. I am a former employee of the Catholic Church. I used to have a health-insurance card with the Archdiocese of Boston's seal printed on it. That wasn't an experience of religious liberty. That was an employer exercising its muscle to impose on employees' religious consciences. And it involved the hypocritical pretense that the Archdiocese and its good works did not fundamentally depend on careful family planning by its employees, as every American diocese did and does.

I was in no personal need of the contraceptive pills that my health card wouldn't get me, because I was a dude and because I had a romantic life which rendered family planning moot. But one of my co-workers explained what our health-insurance card meant for her. Prescriptions for contraceptives weren't covered, and had to be paid for out-of-pocket at the exorbitant rate reserved for the uninsured. And any doctor's appointment where contraceptives were discussed or prescribed was also not covered, even if the appointment was primarily to treat something else. (And obviously, it didn't matter why contraceptives were being prescribed. If, like many women, my co-worker needed the pill for medical reasons unrelated to family planning, then she would simply have an uninsured medical problem.) That isn't just refusing to be "forced to buy contraceptives." That is an employer using its muscle to put obstacles in its employees' way, to press its own agenda upon employees no matter their own religious beliefs. In this case, my Jewish co-worker had her employer's religious convictions forced upon her. That is not freedom of conscience.

This is what "freedom of religion" has come to mean to today's religious right: the privilege to push your religion on others, and to play the victim when your bullying is interrupted. The official leadership of the Catholic Church has utterly failed to convince even its own followers of its position on contraception: 

in recent polls, about 95 percent of Catholics have said they use contraceptives, and 89 percent say the decision to use them should be theirs, not the church’s,

and another recent poll shows Catholics favoring the Obama administration's ruling by a 58-37 margin. So the "religious principle" being discussed here is a recent teaching embraced mainly by the Church's hierarchy, but not actually part of most believers' practice of the faith. But having failed to persuade rank-and-file Catholics of the Church's novel and ill-thought-out position, the leader of my Archdiocese, Bernard Cardinal Law, resorted to bullying employees with his economic power, interfering with their medical decisions because he was The Boss.

The claim that Cardinal Law's conscience would have been violated if the organization he led had been "forced to buy contraceptives" is nonsense. The Church does not buy contraceptives, penicillin, X-rays, or any other medical good. It buys a premium for a health plan for its employees, and that plan pays for medical goods and services. But isn't that just buying contraceptives with the Cardinal's money? No. Because the premium on my health plan was not the Cardinal's money, even if his little stamp was on the card. It was my money. It was part of my pay. I had earned it, through the work specified in my contract, and what I did with the benefits I was owed was no more the Cardinal's business than what I did with my paycheck. Employees' medical decisions and religious beliefs are their own. (If I bought a hamburger on Good Friday, I wasn't forcing the Cardinal to "buy meat" against his religious beliefs. Once someone pays you, the money is yours.)  Even if the employer pays the insurer directly, that doesn't entitle it to dictate the way medical insurance was used. If it did, the Christian Science Monitor couldn't be required to provide health insurance at all.

And let me be very blunt here. Almost all of the employees covered by the new ruling are working in the non-profit sector at non-profit salaries. They are teachers, doctors, nurses, and social workers in the Catholic Church's schools, hospitals, charities, and colleges. They are not paid unfairly, but the Church does not pay them, and could not afford to pay them, well enough that they don't need to worry about when and how they start their families. The first year I worked for the Boston Church, I was paid the princely sum of fifteen thousand dollars plus health insurance. My co-workers who had more experience and credentials than I did were paid better than that, at least, but they were still paid much less than people in similar jobs outside the Church. I didn't think my salary was unfair, considering the original skill level I brought with me, and I was happy to have the opportunity to do the work I was doing and to get better at it. But that decision was only possible for me because I was not going to be starting a family. I could not have taken that job if I were responsible for a child. If I'd had a child on the way, I would have had to look for other work. And the idea that I would "let God decide" when children would come, and in what numbers, while I was working for a salary that wouldn't cover day care, is the height of irresponsibility. Catholic schools and Catholic charities and Catholic hospitals are only economically possible because of contraception. Without family planning, they would have to close.

The sisters and brothers who once staffed those institutions no longer exist in anything close to the numbers needed to keep them open. You cannot run a school or hospital with American nuns any more, because there aren't any. They have been replaced by lay employees who have not taken vows of poverty, and so need to be paid. The schools and hospitals stay open because those lay workers are willing to work for below-market wages. But since those educated below-market-wage professionals have also not taken vows of chastity, they have to make decisions about starting families, and about the size of their families. They cannot afford to let children come on their own schedule, in whatever numbers. They have to make the same decisions that most middle-class families make about when they can afford to have a baby, except they have to make them even more carefully. If everyone who worked for the Catholic Church in this country had the large, unplanned families the Church recommends, then the schools and hospitals and charities would not be able to pay the parents well enough to support their children. Those schools and hospitals would either go broke or lose most of their workers to more profitable jobs. This is the reality underlying the Church's good works.

It isn't wrong; those schools and charities and hospitals need to be low-cost to serve the Church's mission. I've never been sorry I worked for them, or served the people I served while I was on the Church's payroll. But to pay people a wage which will not allow them to start a family and then make them go into their underpaid pockets for the birth-control pills that allow them to keep working for you is wrong. It is unworthy of any of the values the Church stands for. And making a grand pious show of it only makes the bishops' behavior more sinful.