"Why are we doing this?" Education as explanation.

"Why are we doing this?"

I was in the midst of asking my Literature & Creative Writing (English 273) students what sounds vowels make and then having them, Christian Bok style, write sentences in which they used as much of one vowel as they possibly could. We were reading these sentences out loud when the student next to me asked this simple question.

I was annoyed. I put him off. And then, for the next day, I contemplated the question, which was, after all, a good one. Why were we doing that? My intention, which I had not yet stated, was to have the students think about sound. When they enter the class (these are introductory level students), they read poetry out loud as if their voices were filtered through a tone-reduction device. Their renderings are flat, affectless, unmusical. We spend a lot of time in class reading out loud, precisely to mitigate this atonality, this lack of engagement with sound. The students are bathed in music by their ipods, but have not been immersed in the musicality of language.

So I asked the students during the next class to say simple sentences like "how are you today?" as if they were in very different contexts. As if they were speaking to a lover, or to a lover they thought had cheated on them, or to a dog (not to be confused with that middle term). We talked about what it's like to find oneself surrounded by speakers of a language we don't know, and what we can tell about the speakers simply through the sounds of their speech. We talked about listening through a wall. And I'm hoping it began to make sense to them, why we were indulging in the non-sense of a week of sound poetry.

But that question also resonates in a larger echo chamber. Why we do what we do is not something teachers and scholars do well. That lack of communication shows, when you read the comments section of the local newspapers, or talk to people who wonder why you're not at work at 10 a.m. on a given day, or who ask how many hours a week you teach or how many books you sell. (This reminds me that I was once confronted at a Halloween party by a man dressed as a gypsy who loved the football coach, but wanted to know how many hours a week I was in the classroom; I responded that I was pretty sure the coach only coached three hours a week.) What we seem precisely to lack is what we're constantly asked about: product, and quantity of product. Who knows if explanation will work; during my recent trip to SFSU I was told that the cutbacks are so severe that they're allowing students to enter classes five weeks into the term. Needless to say, the classes are larger than they had been, and faculty are teaching more of them. But we owe it to ourselves to explain the value of what we do to those who do not consider it important enough to maintain during this recession.

What is our product? We like to think that we teach critical thinking, observation, even enjoyment. But what is that? I like to think that in encouraging my students' creativity, I am freeing them from the very questions we are always asked--about practical realities. These are interior qualities, not something one can see, or purchase. They are not consumables. That one of my students came to me at the end of his college career and said he had discovered a love for theater and opera touched me deeply, but just won't cut it in the public sphere. There, intangible goods are not good; they are excess, luxury, inessential.

My husband, who is a high school science teacher, says that our "product" is those students who graduate and make the state work, the lawyers, the politicians (well . . .), the teachers, the architects, and so on. He says we need to claim that we're creating something tangible in this way. Much as my idealism still pushes hard against my gorge, I think we must say these things. We also need to assert, as my colleague Joan Peters did to me yesterday, that the public sector cannot be compared to the private, as it so often is in the comment streams. It exists for other reasons, and in another economy. But no one who succeeds in the private sphere who went to a public university has done it "alone," without the support of a community larger than self, than family.

While we cannot lay claim to our students' successes, we can fairly lay claim to having provided the materials and the methods (critical thinking, creativity) for their success. Let's start making lists of UHM grads who are prominent in our community, and elsewhere, and send them to the newspapers and the television stations. Recently, my blog post on the UH crisis went viral, my colleague S. Shankar wrote an op-ed in the Star-Bulletin, and several of my colleagues wrote and signed a letter in the Advertiser. Our union's website archives letters by faculty to the administration. Ku`ualoha Ho`omanawanui wrote an open letter to her school friend, Lee Cataluna, whose opinion piece in the Advertiser presented the university's faculty in a very poor light. This is all to the good.

Today a facebook friend sent me a link to the UK Guardian about the four-day weeks Hawai`i schoolchildren are facing as of tomorrow, the first "Furlough Friday." (The school week in public schools will actually be three and a half days, due to early dismissal on Wednesdays.) And what will the end result of that be? I tell you, that's a rhetorical question.