Late one night, I took Gus the Dog out for his pre-bedtime bathroom break. I lingered outside the Q long enough to savor one of the last genuinely warm Vermont nights and was approached by a student who I’d only met in passing on move-in day.
He said, “So do you care if I ask you something that’s kind of personal? I mean, what’s it really like living here with your family around all of us?”
I thought for a moment. I suppose I could have told me about the guys next door and their rave’s worth of DJ equipment, the girl I found sleeping in the hallway using her purse as a pillow and the time someone on the fourth floor launched a water balloon at my wife and painted a cringe-worthy picture of what it’s like to be a college professor living in what’s more or less a dorm.
But that would not have been accurate. And it would have been a total cliché. If I were to complain to Owen about loud music and run of the mill harmless debauchery, it would be like someone going to the grocery store at the busiest time of the day and being upset there’s a line. We knew what we signed up for.
The thing that’s harder to see and sometimes hard to articulate is the quality of life value that’s added when given the chance to be around a group of people seeing the world with fresh eyes. Everything’s new to a college freshman- being away from home for the first time, being exposed to new ideas, learning to think for themselves, etc. To a large extent, the Kelly’s really aren’t all that different. Everything is new to us as well. We’re new to Vermont, facing new roles domestically and just trying to figure things out the best we can.
Living around people who are in a similar transitional stage makes for a more engaging set of neighbors than living around people who think they have everything figured out. Speaking of clichés, one of the most visible ones in teaching is “I learn just as much from my students as they learn from me.” Occasionally, I’ve found this to be true, but more often than not it’s a pretty statement that’s evidence of a false sense of humility.
My sense is that, like most clichés, however lame they are on the surface, they can possess some great truths. This year might be one of those times.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Monday, September 6, 2010
When Life Resembles a Reality TV Show
When I told my friends that my wife, three kids and 90-pound dog would all be living in a two-bedroom apartment with 110 college freshmen as neighbors, the most common responses were: “That just makes sense financially” to “You are absolutely effing crazy” to “Dude, you should start a blog.” Following the advice of the latter contingent, I am introducing the Kelly Family Q Blog.
Here’s our story: Early in August we left our native Omaha, Nebraska for the bonny shores of Lake Champlain knowing 11 people total in the Eastern Time Zone. The “we” in this story is me, my wife, Jamie, our three boys (Nicky age 4, Jack age 2, and Baby Sam age 6 months) and our golden retriever Gus. I had accepted a faculty position at Champlain last March, but relentless scouring of Craigslist for housing proved fruitless until my Dean called with an opportunity.
In exchange for housing, the college offered us the chance to be the “Faculty in Residence” at Champlain’s new Quarry Hill Residential Program for the 2010-11 academic year. Officially, I am supposed to do things like “provide an academic presence in the residence by serving as an intellectual mentor” and “facilitate connections for students with the broader Champlain community.” All of this sounded doable to us so we signed on.
In our minds though, we wondered what kind of academic presence we would really have. After all, my boys are prone to donning plastic football helmets and knocking the snot out of each other in the yard for all the neighbors to see. We watch the lusty vampires on True Blood on Sunday nights. I’m guessing these kinds of things never happened at Oxford when the faculty lived amongst the students.
To some degree, the questions I’m commonly asked are not the ones I’m concerned about.
“Are you worried about the parties?”
“Are you worried about your kids being exposed to things they shouldn’t be?”
“Don’t you guys need your privacy?”
To be sure, I don’t want to hear a rave going on next door at 3am on a Tuesday and don’t want my kids exposed to pot before they’re exposed to kindergarten, but the questions I am thinking about seem bigger than that.
I’m planning on using this blog to think about what living around students says about teaching and learning. I’m thinking about what happens to “authority” when students see how the same presence I project in the classroom fails miserably when I’m disciplining my two-year old. I’m thinking about how if someone would have told my wife she’d be living with me and three kids in more or less a college dorm at 30 years old would she have even entertained the thought of marrying me. Those are the things I’m thinking about and will process through this blog.
Here’s our story: Early in August we left our native Omaha, Nebraska for the bonny shores of Lake Champlain knowing 11 people total in the Eastern Time Zone. The “we” in this story is me, my wife, Jamie, our three boys (Nicky age 4, Jack age 2, and Baby Sam age 6 months) and our golden retriever Gus. I had accepted a faculty position at Champlain last March, but relentless scouring of Craigslist for housing proved fruitless until my Dean called with an opportunity.
In exchange for housing, the college offered us the chance to be the “Faculty in Residence” at Champlain’s new Quarry Hill Residential Program for the 2010-11 academic year. Officially, I am supposed to do things like “provide an academic presence in the residence by serving as an intellectual mentor” and “facilitate connections for students with the broader Champlain community.” All of this sounded doable to us so we signed on.
In our minds though, we wondered what kind of academic presence we would really have. After all, my boys are prone to donning plastic football helmets and knocking the snot out of each other in the yard for all the neighbors to see. We watch the lusty vampires on True Blood on Sunday nights. I’m guessing these kinds of things never happened at Oxford when the faculty lived amongst the students.
To some degree, the questions I’m commonly asked are not the ones I’m concerned about.
“Are you worried about the parties?”
“Are you worried about your kids being exposed to things they shouldn’t be?”
“Don’t you guys need your privacy?”
To be sure, I don’t want to hear a rave going on next door at 3am on a Tuesday and don’t want my kids exposed to pot before they’re exposed to kindergarten, but the questions I am thinking about seem bigger than that.
I’m planning on using this blog to think about what living around students says about teaching and learning. I’m thinking about what happens to “authority” when students see how the same presence I project in the classroom fails miserably when I’m disciplining my two-year old. I’m thinking about how if someone would have told my wife she’d be living with me and three kids in more or less a college dorm at 30 years old would she have even entertained the thought of marrying me. Those are the things I’m thinking about and will process through this blog.
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