Bread
“And maybe the bread, as I’ve always understood it, really is over. The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in.”
Last Spring, just as we were getting our pandemic legs under us, the Paris Review published an essay with a title for which I have perma-envy: Fuck the Bread. The Bread is over. It’s something the author’s mother said to her. I wish my mother would say things like that to me. I wish I were the kind of mother who said that to her daughter.
The occasion for those two wonderful sentences is, I think, longing for the stability of clear definition while realizing the futility of that longing. Work is over, school is over, baking is over. Everything’s over except that nothing has started and we are still doing...something. The world is rearranging itself. Still.
I teach English at a community college and have, for the last year, been teaching remotely from home. My college has for years offered online, remote, hybrid, and now we have online-live (Zoom). Students, faculty, and administration are using the terms almost interchangeably. And, for the last year, I have been saying and writing (in meetings, emails, and blogs) things like, “We need to define the terms we use for online learning moving forward otherwise students, faculty, and administration will continue to use the terms interchangeably and no one will be clear on what any of them means, how they are distinct from one another, or how each should be implemented or defined.”
In other words, we need a new language for the kind of educational experience we are delivering in the corona—and will be delivering after the corona.
Online, remote, hybrid, flexed, face-to-face: these are terms we’ve always used to describe the classroom—redefining a term doesn’t allow us to re-conceptualize what it denotes. Repurposing old language but pretending it has new meaning carries the ennui into the nouveau, n’est pas?
My near-constant espousing, discussing, mentioning, intoning, opining, and perhaps beating the issue of how we talk about our post-Corona teaching modalities and andragogy/pedagogy has not gained much traction among my peers. But, last Friday, in yet another “what-shall-we-do-with-a-problem- like-teaching-and-learning-online” meeting, a different professor, a man, said something like, “We need to define the terms we use for online learning moving forward otherwise students, faculty, and administration will continue to use the terms interchangeably and no one will be clear on what any of them means, how they are distinct from one another, or how each should be implemented or defined.”
Good idea. Now there’s a subcommittee. Fuck that bread.
“What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go?”
Sabrina Orah Mark, with a running essay series in The Paris Review, at least two published books, and probably a better degree than I have (ok, maybe not a better degree) cannot find a tenure-track job. She probably teaches adjunct, and she gets interviews but hasn’t been hired.
What does that mean?
My college recently posted a position for a full-time janitor. I considered applying until I noticed that the position stated that “preference will be given to current part-time janitorial employees.” Darn. I wish they gave similar consideration for current part-time faculty. About three years ago, the English department hired two new tenure-track faculty, and both came from outside the adjunct pool.
What does that mean?
A neighboring community college just advertised an open dean of student services position. Under “Skills & Education” they require: “a Master’s degree, Ph.D. preferred, administrative experience, and ballet.”
What the fuck does that mean?
Perhaps it’s auto-correct or a typo, but I’m a poet, so I’m saying no—they put it there so it means something. While including “ballet” in the skills list might be in error, it’s not a mistake. They’ve accidently tipped their hand, spilled the beans, & ‘fessed up.
They revealed part of the secret code for getting hired.
Steven Spielberg’s 2001 “AI: Artificial Intelligence”/Pinocchio reboot is about a robot who becomes a boy not through a wish but with an activation code to which he must listen carefully: Cirrus. Socrates. Particle. Decibel. Hurricane. Dolphin. Tulip. (He becomes a real boy later in the film, but that’s another story, and I can’t tell you anything about that part, or I will start crying.)
2014’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”, Steve’s best friend from the 1940s goes from Bucky to crazed assassin after hearing the words longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak, furnace, nine, benign, homecoming, one, freight car spoken with deliberate clarity.
Based on these models, I must surmise that getting the attention of a hiring committee for a full-time position at a Chicago community college requires scattering seven to 10 secret code words throughout your dossier, and one of those words is ballet.
“...it’s day fifty-eight of homeschooling, and I’m all out of ideas. I give [my sons] a [scavenger hunt]: a rock, soil, a berry, something soft, a red leaf, a brown leaf, something alive, something dead, an example of erosion, something that looks happy, a dead branch on a living tree. ”
If I am going to survive any of this—corona, committees, job searches—I need to run out of ideas and scatter random words that might bring something to life and, eventually, make something real. All the words and ideas and people I’ve relied on to define who I am and get me somewhere no longer matter. Fuck the bread.
I’ll Zoom into that online learning subcommittee meeting this Thursday and the interview I haven’t yet landed (but will have in a couple of weeks) and say whatever comes to mind ver-y clear-ly. And. With. Absolute. Authority.
ballet. six. fiesta. heraldry. scout. bolster. fearless. butterfly. dice.
What I think it means to teach online or remotely or hybrid; to have a job or go to school or visit the hospital; to bake or parent or write won’t matter in our new arrangement. The bread is over. And the more I think it’s not, the more I think I can anticipate the future because of my understanding of the past, the less I will be able to see, outside of the light of the corona.
