Friday, September 24, 2004

Duplicator 

If scientific progress goes "boink," does institutional progress go "thud?"


Coworker and Video teacher Kackie is off at an Indiana wedding today and Monday; due to the unique substitute policies and limited potentialities of the prep school, as if my job wasn't so double-booking difficult in the first place, I'm both of us until she returns.

This morning this meant an hour of Apocalypse Now and a subsequent discussion of sound design with the eight students taking Video as Art, all but two of whom seem to be deadwood, taking the class to suck up the art credits, none of whom could access the email-attached overnight reading, without which the discussion goes nowhere. Or maybe they were just tired. Or stupid, I suppose.

Now I'm in the media center, missing lunch and chating with the veryoccasional stopper-by about anything under the sun; though my usual media spot is light and airy, here on the "lesser campus" of two media services is a basement coridor dead-end, and NMH stands for Not Much Here. Hard to believe the bare fact of access, regardless of community use and desirability, is more valuable to the comunity than my usual work in the busier spaces -- library info commons, and the much more accessible media center adjunct to the library and snack bar on the other, about-to-be-deserted campus. But such is the life of the institutional drone, I guess, when coverage priorities are made by those who have never seen me work, not done a single observation of class or instruction, and therefore make policy by theory, regardless of praxis and sociocultural need.

And the subjective? Would I rather be in the library between blocks, of the deserted media center, blogging on worktime? An unsolvable paradox, that -- I prefer to be in the bustle, but I'd rather be all things, infinite in time, vocational to the core, always at work and with time for the family constant and coincident. Tempting here to wish for the ability to clone, but I know better; the Calvin-and-Hobbesean dilemma (all betas believe themselves to be the alpha) merely leads to self-jealousy ("It worked! It worked! I'm a genius!" "No you're not, you liar! I invented this!"). It's so much safer/saner to be jealous of others.

posted by boyhowdy | 11:32 AM |

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