Attending college is still valuable, but we're doing a good job of hiding it.

 

I was buoyed by the reception, and lively conversation across platforms, of my last post, Back to School in the Era of Self-Care. It made me excited for the next one! And now it's somehow been a month and I am forcing myself to sit down and write again despite a to-do list that never seems to shrink. 

One of the reasons it's difficult to make time to write is that I have been asked to do exciting musical things that require practice, and the students are lovely and enthusiastic and have had most of my attention as I craft individualized lesson plans, and these are good reasons to be too busy to write. But as I look back at my calendar for the past month, I see that I actually have been doing several hours per week of writing: filling out university forms! Concocting fancy-sounding word salads to answer questions like "in-reach impact" and "student deliverables"! I have counted no less than five hours per week spent merely filling out forms and proposals for last-minute cash grabs to benefit my students (I hope I win!). That's the same amount of work what Flute New Music Consortium pays a part-time employee to do. So my teaching job now has an additional side-hustle's worth of work for no additional pay. 

I have worked at my school, which I truly appreciate with most of my heart on most days of the week, for seventeen years, and in the past decade, I have watched the paperwork grow exponentially. Post-pandemic, things have become comically worse. I think the sentiment is that we are better accounting for each of our students' needs, but I somehow end up seeing them more as piles of mandatory forms now than as human beings. And I would be willing to bet that our students are experiencing a similar frustration; perhaps they have been experiencing this since high school, or middle school. It's no wonder when U.S. college students are asked what they expect to get out of their education, they list "the experience", networking, and having the right credentials to apply for a job above actually...learning. You really have to get out the magnifying glass to find the learning opportunities in this current sea of corporate speak and electronic forms. We are standing in classrooms (or sitting in studio offices) trying to impart information, but they see reams and reams of forms and mandatory events flooding their inboxes. We're all too distracted to really live the life of the mind, but that was supposed to be the point of college. 

I don't have a great solution to the problem, besides trying to corral my mandatory form-filling to  Thursday nights, with the box wine sitting on the corner of my coffee table, after I've focused on my students' musical and intellectual needs and tried to tend to my own. But I am painfully aware that my job not only involves cheering students through daunting challenges, correcting and re-correcting form, and giving them artistic goals to look forward to accomplishing; it now starts with my having to lead them through some kind of deprogramming when they appear at my door, or perhaps a mini-meditation retreat, so that they can eventually stop looking at their phones and Apple watches, forget about all the deadlines swimming in their heads, and actually pay attention to the phrase they are trying to play. All for one precious hour per week! Where their minds go when they're in charge of their own education in the practice room the other six days, I cannot say. But I know it is a herculean challenge for them to actually know what they are doing on the instrument while they are doing it, and I don't blame them. 

These are champagne problems, to be sure. But it is endemic in other areas of society as well--we have lost the point. I chose this field because I have always loved playing my flute and teaching. It turns out it was never fully about that, but in the past few years it has abruptly become...almost not that at all. What is my purpose? It used to be training my students to become the best musicians and teachers they could be. But if they're not coming to college to learn, then what am I doing here?  This year I am really trying to be subversive in my students' lives and compel them to join me in luxuriating in the distractions of music, thinking, and consuming others' inspiring art because I think that's what they need, and what I can best give them. Perhaps that makes me a dinosaur. I hope it doesn't get them in trouble with their advisers.