Approaches to Librarianlessness

A couple of ways of handling these layoffs: 

Well first, the word is going around that Cheney anyhow is hiring. So maybe people just drive a little further, depending on where they live. 

The opinion of the Spokesman columnist is that an unconstitutional levy is bound to be floated as a solution, whereas that was precisely the problem the court ruling was supposed to have solved. 

Further ironies: in one building, where the teaching staff is relatively senior, no one is being let go, but a few will probably have to take their work across the way to a school that's losing 15 teachers--because they're all new, because of the rapid turnover there. And who knows, perhaps they'll bring some stability, but perhaps they'll just be resented and in turn resent having to adjust to a very different school culture there, much better than it used to be, but still a rough place. 

For instance, subbing there the other day, there was the kid who really thought he should try to mock me over the layoffs. I asked him if could do his book work on the computer he had open in front of him instead of a book. He insisted that what he was doing was much more important than reading the history book--and fair enough, it was going to get him a job, he said proudly, that paid $18-20/hr, and how was that history teaching job going for me with all the layoffs? I responded that I wasn't a history teacher, but a sub, and so the layoffs did not pertain to me, but that it was a good burn all the same, and I'd leave a note for his teacher to that effect so he could follow up and let him know his answer.

Meanwhile, a day or two earlier, over at the high school which hadn't had a single teacher laid off, I'd sat through another class in the room where I was subbing during a prep period. The teacher of that class spent the first half of the period discussing the layoffs with such an air of well-intentionedness and leveling with her class, asking them to be extra kind to their teachers who might be getting the news that they'd have to be picking up slack around the district next year. To the point that kids kept circling back to--why the pay structure was such that, given the enormous budget, positions were being let go, and new buildings constructed--she told a story about her colleagues who'd used thousands of dollars on a pointless training--they were retiring the next year, but traveled down to Texas anyhow because if they didn't use the money, it would be folded back into the administrative operating budget and would not be there for the school to use the next year anyway. Or, to the plan that certain classes, like the one she taught, be combined to save funds, she replied airily, saying that they [the district admin] don't know what we do here. Then, when fully half the class period was gone, with kids just as ignorant about the cuts as before, only now thinking they understood and so could discourse knowledgeably about them, and virtuously support their teachers in this trying time--she turned to the lesson, which consisted in  doodling on their folders for decoration. 

I would report this sort of thing if anyone asked. But I suspect that the admin already have a pretty accurate idea what goes on in that class.

For the most part, I include myself in all this, a superfluous observer of the trainwreck. But what about this: planting trees for the lost librarians. As a memorial slightly more permanent than doodled-on folders or stray reflections. 

Trimming the Fatuous

As expected since the rumors started up in the fall, and as reported on the front page of the local paper last week, Spokane Public Schools has given public notice that its schools will be shrinking by a few staff positions next year. The politic email sent out by the Superintendent, with a corresponding robo-call, runs as follows (my running commentary in italics):

Spokane Public Schools families,

No Dear, but no colon; this is not a friendly letter and not quite a business letter.

We have been talking for the past few months about new ways to meet student needs within the changing budget constraints of a new state funding model that reduced our local levy capacity by $43.6 million over two years. We have discussed priorities and expectations with you and engaged in ongoing advocacy with the state legislature about fully funding education in Spokane and statewide.

Why only in the past few months, if the McCleary decision was years in the making, has this issue become so salient? Because, ironically, the union won. Teachers reap the windfall, and the state the whirlwind, of attempting to act upon the WA constitutional mandate to fund education.

The conversation has been as thoughtful as it is complex. We have considered numerous ideas and debated the potential impacts of each to students. Although the budget is finalized by the school board in late August, we have to move forward now in our budget and staffing planning to fulfill contractual obligations with employees.

Right thing to do < Meeting the terms of a contract. Such is the machinery of the law which the two sides have seen fit to appeal to; in the relentless parlance of our time, we have to move forward. In that light, the thoughtful, complex conversation has been merely a matter of managing the fait accompli that sooner or later people would be losing their jobs, and the school board would have to bow before the exigencies of finance.

We have intentionally limited spending this school year while staying focused on our mission of educating students. Still, our financial commitments, most of them made long before the state funding change, are growing faster than our revenues. Despite efforts to find greater efficiencies, we are facing a 2019-20 budget gap of more than $31 million that requires tough choices. Unfortunately, as the Seattle Times recently reported, 253 of the state’s 295 districts also face deficits.

What falls under efficiencies here? Not millions of dollars all at once, but certainly hundreds of thousands could be saved just by setting a full hiatus on purchases of new technology, and taking the trouble to fully integrate the existing technology would no doubt reveal a great many points of overlap and redundancy within, say, payroll, maintenance, or transportation. Again, millions and tough choices, though, can only be accounted for with personnel.

Today, we began notifying 325 staff members districtwide, including 182 certificated staff, that they will go into layoff status at the end of the school year. I wanted you to hear this information from me and also to know that your student will continue to be cared for by our dedicated staff.

The technocratic circumlocution of layoff status is beautifully rounded off by the personal touch, the authoritative promise, that all will be well. Not that I have a student attending SPS, but that staff and parents are so neatly conflated here is well-intended, I'm sure.

Reductions started several months ago in the central office and other organizational support functions to minimize impact to classrooms. More than 41 percent of the cuts were made away from the classroom. The nearly $5 million in cuts in those areas are still not enough to sustain our ongoing needs. SPS central office functions account for 4.5 percent of the total budget, the second lowest percentage among peer districts statewide. Investments in student learning account for about three quarters, the third highest among our peers statewide.

To fend off the immediate critique that cuts should be borne by the central administration rather than the classroom, we get data spouting in all directions now. Percentages of cuts and of budgets, which nevertheless leave out other points of data we might have liked to know. If a mere $5 million accounts for some 40 or more percent of the cuts, how is the $31 million in shortfall figure cited earlier relevant? If I'm following, it now sounds like only around $12-15 million needs cut for the coming year, of which almost half is accounted for. But if the total shortfall can be effectively halved in the space of a couple of condescending paragraphs, then surely that $7 or so million remaining can be waved away by some clever bookkeeping?

In the coming days and weeks, you will hear more information about recommendations to reimagine the elementary school day and change the library model districtwide. A recommended change to the elementary school day would introduce a consistent weekly schedule for families, add time for students to eat lunch, build in additional social emotional time, and creatively reduce K-3 class sizes while doing all of those things more cost effectively.

But no, the elementary schools, and particularly, the hapless librarians, will be bearing the brunt of the lost jobs. After an absurd amount of cost in time and money and mindless coursework to earn a state certificate, these lovers of books will be the oblation pacifying the fates. And it will be fine, because now kids will have more lunch- and social time! 

Our obligation and promise is to provide the educational experience you expect. Thank you for choosing Spokane Public Schools.

Again, the conflation here is remarkably glib: an obligation to pay the piper can so easily be phrased as a promise to meet vague, but surely extremely low, expectations. With hardly any charter schools, and a handful of ludicrously costly private schools in the area, we are fobbed off with thanks, as if we had a choice!

Shelley

Again, no salutation, but no honorific either. After that bracing honesty, of course we're on first name basis. 

There's been more local coverage since: the basis for the layoffs, per union contract, presumably, was seniority. Profiles of laid-off teachers made the front page today (note the grim look, the armful of ineffectual books. Good grief!).

One Tribe Day, Year to Year

Weeks later this continues to bother me; for my own peace of mind I'll say what I think, even if I don't know yet to whom I should be saying it.

I've talked to another sub about it, and her advice was to tell anyone who might listen how much I liked it, whatever part of it was any good, and say nothing about the rest of it, tacitly condemning it by comparison. I think that's probably the way to go. So I'll pass over the absence of any discussion of suicide, even to name the kids who were gone, or of pathologies or treatment options, even a hotline number to call; the absence of a significant portion of the student body, along with the teacher I subbed for, who planned to be out that day at least a week in advance, since that's when I picked up the job; expecting to teach English, I showed up to be given a red t-shirt and coached on manifesting cheerfulness about the full-day activity I had stumbled into, a good day for subs to be in the building, I was assured vociferously by the secretary and two administrators who overheard me express some confusion as to why their teacher had seemingly chosen not to be there that day of all days (had she taught one of the suicides? battled with depression herself or known someone who had? simply felt it would be a good day to take off, since no work would be missed, and so many students would be staying home?) and how awkward this was for me--clearly, the wrong thing to say; or how the creepiness and cringe-worthiness just escalated from there, as even the students who were present complained to one another that they should have stayed home; how we gathered to admire the mural in the new cafeteria and have it described for us by a former teacher of Native descent (the school mascot is the Indians, hence, One Tribe Day), who then delivered a further motivational speech in the gym, followed by whoosh-passing and Icelandic foot-tag led by the school counselor, small group discussions made up of icebreaker games, a cross the line activity after lunch which was the closest thing to substantive discussion of at-risk behaviors, though root causes were nowhere questioned, and a Power 2 the Poetry concert back in the gym, followed by the Waka Waka dance to close things out. There are videos of me out there, I guess for use in next year's slide show or to present to district administrators, me standing on the edge of the circle in my red shirt, covering my ears from the noise, feeling awful for the waste of the school day and the barefaced lie that this was education, or any sort of meaningful response to the despair of those kids. I'm not sure how to give this feedback in a constructive way, so I'll keep it to myself.

What I liked about the day was hearing the student speakers: the one who sang a song she'd written, and the three who testified to their experiences of bullying, ostracism, depression, were incredibly moving. The student who led the small group discussion was wonderful, and elicited what seemed like honest responses, within the range of the questions on her list to ask, from the randomly mixed group. "What's your favorite candy? What's your least favorite class?" They all seemed like they could dig into a real discussion, given the chance.

Of course, that was what the day seemed calculated to prevent. The claim that the activities were put together with student input might have been true, but it seemed a little hollow given the absence rate. Maybe the Inlander will run a piece about it, following up this year or next to their coverage from last spring; maybe the Spokesman Review will have further insights into what ails the public school system. I'm no journalist, of course, just a sub, just happy to be here.

The Idea of the Holy, by Rudolf Otto, and Devotional Language, by Johannes Sloek

In the background of some of the more salient discussions of late to do with religion, and popularized by CS Lewis in particular, is the concept of the numinous. Here is the relevant passage, according to wikipedia:

C.S. Lewis described the numinous experience as follows in The Problem of Pain:

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told "There is a ghost in the next room," and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is "uncanny" rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply "There is a mighty spirit in the room," and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare's words "Under it my genius is rebuked." This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.^[8]

As the term owes its derivation ultimately to Rudolf Otto, you might as well look up the primary text, which is freely available: The Idea of the Holy. It's one of those books you need not read all the way through, or even very much of, in order to get the gist; but if you do, it's something you can then just as easily spend an hour or a week just thinking about a sentence or a paragraph from, as reading all the words of. One interesting thing to note is that Otto cautions us right up front against facile appropriation of his work of just the sort which it is so often put to, and which I am sure I am just as prone to as anyone:

... I feel that no one ought to concern himself with the Numen ineffablile who has not already devoted assiduous and serious study to the Ratio aeterna. (Foreword)

Time to brush off my Euclid and Aquinas, I guess. I came to Otto not via Lewis, most of whose apologetic work I'm still unfamiliar with, but from reading Karen Armstrong, on Pullman's recommendation. And even with that, it might not have made it to the top of my reading list if not for the curious prominence, not of the numinous as such, but of the word Holy, in the Final Fantasy series. But more on that another time.

Anyhow, Otto's Idea of the Holy proved to be such a powerful corrective to the rational studies dominant before his time, outside Nietzsche and Freud, and hanging on today in all sorts of reactionary positivism and New Atheism, that now we can speak perfectly comfortably of the spiritual or the numinous or the holy, until we stop to think for a moment about what it is we mean by them. Still, that's been true since Socrates, as Kierkegaard so exhaustively pointed out, or as Lewis, memorably, puts it in the mouth of one of his characters: "it's all in Plato!"

To highlight just a couple of more recondite connections worth attention, though: Auerbach, in his masterpiece Mimesis, has a discussion of creatureliness, a topic which may also have been popularized by Otto but which you don't hear much about anymore. Effectively, it's the opposite of the Holy, that in us by which, paradoxically, we recognize the Holy as wholly Other. Another expression of the core idea gets developed in terms of music, where Otto refers us to the well-documented holy genius of Bach (Credo, Mass in B Minor), as well as a couple of less conspicuous exemplars: Mendelssohn (Psalm 2) and Thomas Luiz / Tomas Luis de Victoria (Popule meus).

Armstrong's great survey also sent me searching for a copy of Devotional Language, by Johannes Sloek. Once again, Inter-library loan comes through! Now, Henrik Mossin's translation is generally fine to my ear, but the edition I read has weirdly many typos, as if the draft that got published hadn't been proofread.

Sloek, a Kierkegaard scholar and philosopher, leads us on a virtuosic, idiosyncratic dance through philosophy, psychology, and religion. The first step, as for Otto, is to come to grips with a linguistic (passably rational) account of phenomena, which Sloek sees as intrinsically existing in a dynamic between subject and object. This is of a piece with the next movement, providing a way to put to rest, or at least to side-step, the semantic rigmarole of analytic philosophy. In his view, rational language is always insufficient on its own, and whether it recognizes it or not, its users always depend on a mythic basis. Here's a good summary, in the course of the argument transitioning into its final phase, of what that means:

In rational language, logos, we are moving forwards from the problem toward its solution, from the question to the answer, and from the plan to the realization of it. Rational language expresses a progressive development, which, if successful, will find something new, gain new and hitherto unknown land, and conquer areas which were not under our control before. On the other hand, mythical language moves in the opposite direction, backwards, back to what is of old, to the foundation, or the origin. Mythical language makes no attempt to say something new; on the contrary, it takes refuge in the old stories; and, once more, it recapitulates what everybody already knows, for in the story that is told, truth is revealed--or, we may say that truth is not something to be discovered in an experimental investigation, or in an analysis, or thought of reflection. Truth is behind you as the proto-revelation in which everything started and not as something which has been discovered, at some time or other. According ot St. John - in 'arche' was the word - which is Christ. (84)

This is fascinating, and, as Sloek is well aware, it raises a number of questions--what of the Johannine Christian conflation of logos with the Genesis story? what of a revelation or incarnation in time, in history?--which perhaps can only be answered in terms of the myth.

Sloek discusses myths' link to ritual (Mystery cults, Demeter and Persephone), and to justice (taboos, Adam and Eve) in ways that are illuminating, or at least intriguing, but it is not always clear to me how far his use of structuralist and psychoanalytic approaches is meant to represent a workable bridge between religious and scientific realms of discourse, or how much they are sort of convenient stand-ins for the more adequate standpoint of faith, which he seems ultimately to occupy. Finally, he (or the translator) provides a bibliography, limited by scholarly standards, but one which in practice would take a lifetime to work through. Otto gets a mention, alongside some of the usual suspects: Frazier, Eliade, Wittgenstein; but also some I've never heard of: Grassi's  Kunst und Mythos sounds great, but it looks like it's never been translated...

Kierkegaard's Armed Neutrality, Open Letter, and Selections from the Journals

The Armed Neutrality book also carries the short "Open Letter"; taken together, they're a couple of the more straightforward things Kierkegaard ever published. In condensed form, they set forth his anguished effort to witness to the faith he could never fully externalize from a relationship with God to an identity in the world, but which he could never stop talking (or writing) about, either.

The task, then, is to portray the ideal Christian... (44)

In what sense he contrives to portray, ultimately, seems to be a matter between him and his reader, rather than between him and his neighbors, though in the "Open Letter" Kierkegaard comes near to engaging with a polemical reform effort. That is, he wants to set straight the attempt to connect his name with it, to correct the reformers:

There is nothing about which I have greater misgivings than all that even slightly tastes of this disastrous confusion of politics and Christianity, a confusion which can very easily bring about a new kind and mode of Church-reformation, a reverse reformation which in the name of reformation puts something new and worse in place of something older and better... 

Christianity is inwardness, inward deepening. (49)

Finally, in the selections of his Journals edited by Alexander Dru, a stream of Kierkegaard's inner thoughts, prefaced with a harrowing summary of his family drama, concludes my reading project of the past year. Here is his prophecy:

Certainly things will be reformed; and it will be a frightful reformation compared with which the Lutheran reformation will be almost a joke, a frightful reformation that will have as its battle-cry "Whether faith will be found upon earth?" and it will be recognisable by the fact that millions will fall away from Christianity, a frightful reformation; for the thing is that Christianity really no longer exists, and it is terrible when a generation which has been molly-coddled by a childish Christianity, fooled into thinking it is Christianity, when it has to receive the death blow of learning once again what it means to be a Christian.... (253)

I wish I could make up my mind whether than reformation has already taken place, or proved imaginary, or whether we find ourselves in the midst of it.

Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, For Self-Examination, and Judge for Yourself!

Around a month ago now I finally read the last of the Kierkegaard books which I've been able to add to my shelf so far. To say that I didn't understand them terribly well would be redundant and smack of excuse-making at this point, but I guess that must be why I never wrote anything in response to them at the time. So before it gets too long ago to recall even the flavor of that incomprehension, let me see what I can recover.

To catch up first with the Concept of Anxiety (or Dread, or Angst). This one seems to find its companion in the Sickness Unto Death, and of the two, I'd recommend reading the latter twice (or more) before tackling the former. And yet, for all its difficulty, it's actually one of the works which seems to get cited the most often, in my limited experience. Written by the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis ("Watchman of Copenhagen"), CA, in the words of its helpful subtitle, proposes A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. This is a throwback to Kierkegaard's concern with categories, prevalent in many of his earlier pseudonymous works, and one of the easier ways to try to sum him up: you'll hear about "the aesthetic," "the ethical," "the religious," when people make sense of Kierkegaard. Here what's at stake is the domain of psychology vis a vis dogmatics, something difficult for anyone not steeped in the theology or philosophy of his time to feel the urgency of, but popping up in all sorts of unexpected places--these days you might here people distinguishing "psychological" from "sociological" levels of analysis, or you might read in Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (surely one of the essential books in contemporary literature) the Reverend John Ames making his laborious, elegant distinctions according to faith: Now that is a remarkable thing... In Haufniensis' language:

The pivotal concept in Christianity, that which made all things new, is the fullness of time, but the fullness of time is the moment as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past. If attention is not paid to this, not a single concept can be saved from a heretical and treasonable admixture that annihilates the concept.... 

Let us now consider Adam and also remember that every subsequent individual begins in the very same way.... (90)

I shall endeavor to do so! I can only account for the popularity of this among K's works, such as it is, by considering how prescient his attention to anxiety was, how aptly he characterized it as a point of confusion, of liminality, between discrete realms of experience, with something very close to the poetic interest lavished on them by a Blake, or a Pullman, under the headings of Innocence and Experience (or Wisdom).

The next two books come bound as one volume in the Hongs' edition, as they comprise the first and second series of Kierkegaard's admonition to his reader For Self-Examination, Recommended to the Present Age. The form is direct, urgent, again, but much more transparently earnest than the pseudonyms get to be; in content, these are relatively short segments of meditative exhortations on Biblical texts. Kierkegaard's point of departure seems to be a profound disquiet with Christianity as practiced in his time, that is, with modern life "from a Christian point of view". He contends:

It is a disease. And if I were a physician and someone asked me "What do you think should be done?" I would answer, "The first thing, the unconditional condition for anything to be done, consequently the every first thing that must be done is: create silence, bring about silence; God's Word cannot be heard... (47) 

A quixotic endeavor, perhaps, but a noble one--and here I was, feeling bad about spending so much time and energy telling kids to be quiet! Not that I can talk to them about anything worth listening to in that short-lived silence, should it follow. On the one hand, Kierkegaard holds his task to be ratcheting up the stakes of calling oneself a Christian--again, quixotic, admirable, noble; on the other hand, for all his careful esteem of Luther, he fulminates against reformers. Could it be that he foresaw not only the pedantic fencing off doctrine from lived experience, inevitably tending to the misunderstanding of the one and the deracination of the other--the dwindling of significance religious life would undergo--but also the disintegration of institutional religion, which in trying to revitalize itself would leave Christianity as an either-or between a kind of decorous hypocrisy or else and unfettered, speaking-in-tongues passion?