6.28.2005
dropping the ball
Keble Ball was on Saturday / Sunday: an 8 - 5 (yeah, you read that right) affair in which partygoers were treated to several large acts on a few different stages while being pumped full of alcohol and food. Also available were two carnival amusements: bumper cars and a big bouncy-castle. Lots of attendees, though not enough to justify opening up a third quadrangle of the college. Drinks were darn strong, and the food was excellent. So why is the overwhelming consensus that it sucked? Well, still relatively fresh in our institutional memory is the 1999 ball when Keble managed to book Fun Lovin' Criminals just after they got big. A blowout affair, the '99 ball sold something like 2500 tickets. I think we sold all of 1000. Combine this with the fact that many other balls have larger and more lavish affairs for essentially the same price. At Trinity College on the night before, £100 bought you a massive food buffet, rides, bands, and a truly elegant affair. At Lincoln College, earlier this year, something like £60 still left plenty of options on the table and the entertainment was excellent. Keble just doesn't have the spaces to put something like this on: sure we've got the quad space and the physical plant, but we don't have larger rooms in which to put up a massage parlor or a proper photo room. And we don't have a giant lawn in which to pitch tents in lieu of those rooms. I mean, hey, I had fun. I enjoyed talking with my friends, mauling them on the bumper cars, and the food was excellent. But at £70, yeah it was expensive. And somewhat unjustifiably so. Next year, I think I'd like to budget myself into some smaller but more impressive balls. Or at least, some cheaper and less absurd ones.
Speaking of budgeting, there's a nice editorial in yesterday's New York Times which details why people don't want to go into teaching. A popular story that I tell a lot of people. So I'm at Princeton reunions and I run across an old friend who's working on Wall Street. He tells me he's just spent the weekend in London with his girlfriend, and in a month he's spending two weeks traipsing around the South of France on vacation. He's just moved into a larger apartment where he now has a concierge and they just found this fantastic cleaning and laundry service. I reply that we both came from work today: how was his job? "Oh, it's terrible," he responds, "I work with complete idiots who couldn't analyze their way out of freshman economics... My boss is a jerk who doesn't respect my contributions, the commute is hell, never enough time on lunch breaks to do what he wants, and the hours are absurd." I think to myself that, while I don't really have the money to pay someone to clean my apartment or do my laundry, and I certainly can't just pick up to London for a weekend or to the South of France for two weeks, I love my job and I don't have to take refuge in a large Manhattan apartment or in London or in France in order to escape from a job that I hate. I compensate for my expensive tastes in food by making my own sushi. I learn to cook better food so that I don't have to go to restaurants. If I splurge, it's on good coffee or a great CD. I actually make more money than I'm spending for all three years of teaching. It's not easy, and I certainly wouldn't be able to afford a family. At that point, I'd have been hard-pressed to afford a girlfriend, frankly. Of course teaching salaries should go up. Of course we should value our teachers with our wallets as much as we do with our verbal praise. One Maryland housing complex is providing free rent to five teachers as long as they keep their jobs in the local school. Kudos to them. But instead of five for free, how about halving the rent for ten? Full student debt relief if the student teaches for five years? Schools should be palatial, kids should have up-to-date textbooks and top flight equipment. How about something simple: if you want me to use the internet more for my students, if you want me to email my kids and put my worksheets online, could you pay my cable modem bill? My former employers, when they implemented a fantastic plan from the trustees, picked one single step on which to start: raising faculty compensation. But when I suggested that they pick up the tab for my internet access, the older teachers just looked at me and giggled.
But two years later, I was the one with a website, I was the one with worksheets online. Students could IM me at home and expect to get a response. And when I travelled to visit other schools, I would grade their homework online and hand it back. One parent was shocked that I would email a quiz to her son and then just *trust* that he'd get it back to me the next day without cheating. Not only did I trust this one student: because we had an honor code in place, I knew I could trust all of them. My internet access cost about $45/mo. It's not cheap. Last idea: if you paid my internet bill, but required that I maintain a website and post every other day? That would certainly make sure that I was using 'net connection wisely. In fact, that's how the people in Gawker media get paid - bloggers who are charged with posting at least, I think, six times per day. No post, no pay. There are certainly faculty who would complain: those would be the less tech-savvy and generally older teachers who are already making a lot more than the fresh college grads for whom this is important money out the window anyway. And again, I didn't get paid for it, I still had the website, I still posted worksheets, and I still fielded IMs from students. So in one sense, I guess I am the sap more than anything. But why should good teaching rely on a teacher's gullibility or altruism in order to succeed?
Speaking of budgeting, there's a nice editorial in yesterday's New York Times which details why people don't want to go into teaching. A popular story that I tell a lot of people. So I'm at Princeton reunions and I run across an old friend who's working on Wall Street. He tells me he's just spent the weekend in London with his girlfriend, and in a month he's spending two weeks traipsing around the South of France on vacation. He's just moved into a larger apartment where he now has a concierge and they just found this fantastic cleaning and laundry service. I reply that we both came from work today: how was his job? "Oh, it's terrible," he responds, "I work with complete idiots who couldn't analyze their way out of freshman economics... My boss is a jerk who doesn't respect my contributions, the commute is hell, never enough time on lunch breaks to do what he wants, and the hours are absurd." I think to myself that, while I don't really have the money to pay someone to clean my apartment or do my laundry, and I certainly can't just pick up to London for a weekend or to the South of France for two weeks, I love my job and I don't have to take refuge in a large Manhattan apartment or in London or in France in order to escape from a job that I hate. I compensate for my expensive tastes in food by making my own sushi. I learn to cook better food so that I don't have to go to restaurants. If I splurge, it's on good coffee or a great CD. I actually make more money than I'm spending for all three years of teaching. It's not easy, and I certainly wouldn't be able to afford a family. At that point, I'd have been hard-pressed to afford a girlfriend, frankly. Of course teaching salaries should go up. Of course we should value our teachers with our wallets as much as we do with our verbal praise. One Maryland housing complex is providing free rent to five teachers as long as they keep their jobs in the local school. Kudos to them. But instead of five for free, how about halving the rent for ten? Full student debt relief if the student teaches for five years? Schools should be palatial, kids should have up-to-date textbooks and top flight equipment. How about something simple: if you want me to use the internet more for my students, if you want me to email my kids and put my worksheets online, could you pay my cable modem bill? My former employers, when they implemented a fantastic plan from the trustees, picked one single step on which to start: raising faculty compensation. But when I suggested that they pick up the tab for my internet access, the older teachers just looked at me and giggled.
But two years later, I was the one with a website, I was the one with worksheets online. Students could IM me at home and expect to get a response. And when I travelled to visit other schools, I would grade their homework online and hand it back. One parent was shocked that I would email a quiz to her son and then just *trust* that he'd get it back to me the next day without cheating. Not only did I trust this one student: because we had an honor code in place, I knew I could trust all of them. My internet access cost about $45/mo. It's not cheap. Last idea: if you paid my internet bill, but required that I maintain a website and post every other day? That would certainly make sure that I was using 'net connection wisely. In fact, that's how the people in Gawker media get paid - bloggers who are charged with posting at least, I think, six times per day. No post, no pay. There are certainly faculty who would complain: those would be the less tech-savvy and generally older teachers who are already making a lot more than the fresh college grads for whom this is important money out the window anyway. And again, I didn't get paid for it, I still had the website, I still posted worksheets, and I still fielded IMs from students. So in one sense, I guess I am the sap more than anything. But why should good teaching rely on a teacher's gullibility or altruism in order to succeed?
