Semester finals, and a first foray into podcasting

Why am I here?

The original import of that question, asking it not in a cosmic but a straightforwardly literal sense, hit me a long time ago in the school cafeteria at GHS. It was finals week the end of second semester, and I was there to wait for a period when I had an exam to take. That was when it first occurred to me to question, in anything more than a bellyaching way, what I had been doing in school all those years. In some ways it is that questioning which I am still spinning out whenever I sit down to write on the sorts of topics that I gather here.

And it is in that literal sense of being located at school, too, that I was asking it again after I had given my last exam last week and finished whatever grading and planning I could find to do. The office didn't have any work for me to do. They suggested I check in the library, seemingly wishing we could all just leave and go outside, but stopping short of saying so.

In the event, there was a sub in the library, too, so there wasn't anything else we could make the executive decision to have me do. I'd already made some good headway on Exploring the Hobbit for my class which is still months away, so when I saw they had a copy of The Righteous Mind, I started reading that. Fascinating...

A few classes came in. A student came over and asked if I minded if he sat at the computer next to me. I looked around and saw plenty of open seats, said it was fine, and asked him in turn if I should make room for people who actually needed computers, since I was only reading. No, he explained, it was just that teachers usually weren't in that area. I mentioned that I was a sub, and he asked how I liked that, and so we got to talking. It seemed like he was not just being polite, that he really wanted to talk. I told him about my classes and the pros and cons of subbing, and I eventually got a question in about what he was working on--his computer was taking forever to log in after an update--so he told me all about his research essay on the death penalty. As his teacher had explained, it was as if he and his classmates had just arrived to a dinner party where the guests had been talking for awhile, so before giving his opinion, it would be best to listen first to what was being said--a version of Kenneth Bruffee's Conversation of Mankind, I would guess, though maybe the teacher had come up with the metaphor independently. But it seemed to have worked in this student's case: he had a carefully balanced exposition of the topic ready, with some pros and cons of his own to highlight, if the computer ever booted up.

Without going into too much of the rest of what we discussed, though, I just share this anecdote as an illustration of a point whose simplicity might cause us to overlook its powerful significance: that when possible, we should go ahead and do the thing we know to be right, even if it seems easier and totally harmless not to. I could have gone home, left by a side door, or probably even walked straight out the main entrance without anyone making a fuss, but then I would have missed out on starting that book and meeting that student.

It's a small example of the same thing Peterson loves to point about about Solzhenitsyn in the gulag, you see, but I'm afraid that if I say that up front, people will have trouble hearing it.

Another version of this story is embedded in the Alexander Schmid podcast, episode 016. His other episodes are mainly about the Iliad, but he plans to go on and discuss all the major epics he's been teaching for the past several years. Godspeed! Hopefully I'll get to talk on there regularly, and hopefully, too, there will be some people listening.