Time for “Back-to-School.” Really?
Engulfed in August heat, it’s hard to summon up even a smidgen of Norman Rockwellian imagery about the crisp days of fall that once heralded the start of school. Yet, clearly we’re headed back.
Stores are piled high with mazes of crayons, markers, and notebooks through which frenzied parents wander, brandishing official supply lists. Who writes in all of these notebooks, I wonder, since so many schools require digital pads?
Some of you prepare for school differently, drawing up individual curricular plans for each homeschooler, attending a practicum with colleagues from Classical Conversations or a Charlotte Mason group. Others have settled into in-service days at Classical academies. Whatever your situation, the “back-to-school” wave has hit.
If you are railing against the advancing academic year, let me invite you to consider this. One day, when the academic calendar no longer dictates your life, you may enter a gulf of sorrow at its passing.
My first mourning of the academic cycle came in 2006. It was devastating. Despite the excitement of retiring, moving to a small ranch, starting a herd of Boer goats and getting Brangus cows, I was disoriented.
Those days of unstructured time I had dreamt about? They hung on my shoulders like a prickly cape. Don’t get me wrong: I was busy. My new schooling involved researching hay and feed, figuring out the attachments on our tractor so I could set out round bales, and learning how to dehorn and castrate baby goats. My “grades” were better in some subjects than in others.
But as August drew to a close, I longed for school. Wasn’t I supposed to be inside an air-conditioned building, making out reading lists and formulating class rolls? The cycle of academia had shaped my identity. When August issued her call, I longed to respond.
Three years passed before I could push that “call to the classroom” into the recesses of my mind. Then, Hank and I started the venture we call “Professor Carol,” and we jumped right back into a new type of academic calendar—one that wove seasons of kidding goats and cutting hay with speaking at conferences and publishing curricula.
Fast-forward to autumn 2018. I’ve entered a new season of the academic cycle. I call it the “throwing out season.” I am finally throwing out mountainous boxes of academic files. I’ve put it off for decades. But it’s time to let go.
Why? Well, despite loving purple, I’m never again going to use those mimeographic masters. Also, I don’t need 30 black notebooks organizing the handouts that I used in Opera History, Bibliographic Research, 19th-Century Romanticism, or World Music. These files, if still useful, are on my Cloud.
Hardest to toss are the boxes of materials from my dissertation research in the Soviet Union. Spoils of war, they are. Finding anything was a slug-fest. Once you obtained it, there were few ways to work with it. Microfilms could be ordered, but who knew if they’d get made.
And photocopies? Now that was a system! The Lenin Library back then allowed ten pages of copying in the morning hours, and ten in the afternoon. Dozens of us lined up along a long corridor in advance of each session to submit our materials through a little window.
That was tedious enough. But no set of ten pages could be contiguous with any pages recently copied out of the same source. So I drew up elaborate charts (where was Excel then?) documenting the pages already copied. Then I would hop 30, 40, maybe 70 pages ahead so that nothing was contiguous with a recent request. Then after a week or two, I’d flop back to pick up 10 more of the pages that were missing. It’s funny now. It wasn’t then.
And, of course, we hand-copied far more than we photo-copied. I close my eyes and envision the formal reading rooms of these venerable libraries. The mahogany desks were filled with scholars dressed in somber, neat clothing, dedicatedly copying articles, manuscripts, even whole books. You could hear a pin drop, and yet, within each person’s mind, a noisy drama was spilling off the page, through the fingers, and onto the paper.
Boxes of my materials left Russia through the Diplomatic Post. It was a different era, and the consulate was able to offer all kinds of congenial services unthinkable today. After fierce wrestling and the inexhaustible patience of my advisor, these boxes yielded a dissertation and a string of scholarship beyond. But for the last 12 years they have been sitting in closets and storage sheds. So it’s time.
At first it’s like dipping a toe into frigid water: I couldn’t do it. But once I’d thrown out 40 hand-copied pages of verses by Derzhavin, I might as well throw out the 300 photocopies of Odoevsky’s prose (gathered ten non-contiguous pages at a time).
Of course I felt sad. What did it mean that years of effort could slide so easily into a trash can? These were the paper testaments to my life!
Or were they? These were paper testaments to a past life. If I ever returned to write about these topics, I’d have to start over. The reality of Soviet censorship had affected nearly all of these materials. Scholars after the Bolshevik Revolution had to tip-toe around the historical culture, particularly if it involved the Orthodox Church and the aristocracy who had sponsored Russia’s artistic culture. In addition, many an archive I’d like to have seen was housed in stacks behind closed doors during Communism. Today, these doors are open.
But the fact is, I’m not going to return to these topic. My interests and scholarly responsibilities have gone into other directions. That was then; this is now, as they say. Beyond keeping samples of the low-grade green and grey photo-copy paper for mementos, these boxes needed to go.
Subsequently I realized another fact. This “throwing out” celebrates the ultimate season of my academic life. This season marks the culmination of a cycle that began with my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Summers, and ran through graduate school. That season led to dissertation research in the Soviet Union which led a life as a professor. And that season allowed me decades spent with inspiring, magical, students, many of whom I still am blessed to know.
And, yes, that cycle led me out to the country where I earned another degree in Texas Hobby Ranching (majoring in “How to keep a goat alive when she’s having difficulty kidding triplets.”) And all of that led me to launch Professor Carol, which brought me to my work today, creating courses, speaking in communities across the US, and leading Smithsonian tours around the world.
And there’s one more cycle, the most important back-to-school season of all: reading to my pre-school grandchildren and participating in their learning.
All told, it has been a life blessed with seasons of learning, far beyond anything I could have imagined. No box contains it. And I have nothing to fear from tossing the paper trail out.
