Rock and Roll

Obviously it's not the time that has changed - the minute, the hour, and the day are the same now as they were a dozen years ago - it's the perception. In elementary school, a day was an eternity, in high school, a single high school calculus class would last as long as ten ages of the earth. Now the years feel like months; the months, weeks, and days go by as hours. The last time I mentioned it, the DBT concert was 6 weeks away ... and now it's a mere six days.

I mention this as preamble to my real point: in August it will have been five years since I first stepped into the Class of 1950 lecture hall on Purdue's campus, one of five TA's for Dr. Morrison's History 371: Society, Culture, and Rock and Roll. I was a Master's student, having had my bachelors placed in my hand just 3 months earlier. I thought I was eager to jump into the life of a professional academic. Looking back, I may have been eager, but I surely don't know what for --- booze perhaps?

I'd visited the program back in early April, taking my leave from the strain of Theory of Coaching Football (watching film was SO STRESSFUL), the chaos of my Senior Seminar paper (Barbary Pirates Ho!) and the even greater chaos of Marc Becker's Latin American Revolutions - a class that made the reign of Savonarola appear as the height of order and peace. On a Thursday afternoon I headed six hours east, arriving just in time to go with my host to Chumley's. At the time Chumley's served as the History department haunt on the Lafayette square. Regretfully, the connection between the two started to disintegrate not long after and by the time I left in 2007, Chumley's was an undergraduate haunt that rarely entered my mind. But on this Thursday night it was fantastic. The company was splendid and the beer, well, there was a lot of it. I had been warned to prepare for the Schooner, a colossally large piece of glass, a colossally large piece of glass able to hold a prodigious amount of beer, beer that could be had at a comically affordable price. I think I drank three of them that night and when woke up sorrowfully early to attend the next day's events ... hungover. I remember only snippets of the day: a pep talk by Dr. Larson, in which we were assured we could compete for jobs with the finest schools out there (cough), lunch, where I first discussed baseball with Mr. Childress, dinner at Dr. Larson's, where I first saw how prone faculty were to drinking, and then drinks at the HGSA presidential compound, where I first met the Margaret and bonded with many others. It was a good day - and all but assured that I'd be heading to West Lafayette in the spring.

I moved in mid-August and I'll admit that first week was rough. New places always bring their own challenges: getting the bills set up, finding your way around, outfitting a new apartment etc. I hadn't left home for college like most young'uns, so in a way I put off life's first great home-sickness for four years. But delaying the inevitable did not mean that I managed to escaped it. I was a wreck. I didn't eat, I couldn't sleep, and I didn't socialize. At the end of this week I was (artificially) the lightest I have been in my adult life. I didn't have a parking pass so I couldn't park on campus and I didn't have a Purdue ID so I couldn't ride the bus for free. Presented with this situation, I walked to campus to get my ID. You know, so I could ride the bus. The "short" walk to campus turned out to be over 2 miles, 2 miles in the August heat of the midwest. Not only that, but I started off on what I believed to be the way to campus only to come to find that I'd actually walked in a circle of a mile's radius, ending up back where I started. I'll never forget my Purdue ID picture - a person who didn't know better could believe that I'd come directly from killing a neighbor's housecat. I was not happy.

That first semester I was lucky enough to be TAing for Dr. Michael Morrison's Rock and Roll Course. Micah and I had been assigned as MAM's advisees, and I think they threw us a bone by giving us a pretty sweet TA gig. Whatever else he is, MAM is a dynamic lecturer. What's more, who wouldn't love a history class about the progression of 20th century popular music? Not the undergrads - they flocked to it. I think we started out with about 350 kids divided between five TA's. And what TA's they were.

1. Me: yes, I'm first, this is my post. And I'm awesome. Next question.
2. Mr. Childress: Bearded. Iconoclastic. Indefatigable. A chick magnet. A scholar. Did I mention bearded?
3. Sara: Uptight, schoolmarmish, humorless, responsible, the one MAM trusted.
4. Renee: short (very short), laid back, encyclopedic music knowledge, the "anti-Sara" if you will. Cinco De Mayo 2006 she got Tequila in my eye. This is probably unrelated.
5. Tom.

Yes, Tom. Tom gets a paragraph. Mostly because he hadn't crossed my mind in ages ... not until yesterday when Mr. Childress and I were reminiscing about that first semester. Tom is one of those people that - even though I'd hated him for a not-insignificant period of time - I'd managed to forget about entirely. In a bizarro world, "please-god-no" kind of way, I saw myself in Tom Lutes. If I weighed more. And had a goatee. And wore sandals and shorts every day. And lived 30 miles away and had several children.* And never showed up to class. And really, was just about totally worthless in every sense. Then - yes, then - I'd have seen myself in Tom. He was a pain in our ass. Tom couldn't be depended upon for anything. Unless that "anything" was that you could depend on him not to be depended upon. TA's were asked to do 3 things: 1) come to class. 2) Grade 3) hold office hours. None of these were very difficult. Not difficult at all. Yet Tom managed to fuck up at all 3. It may be revisionist history, but I don't believe that Tom was a bad guy. However, there was one quality that Tom had that made it very difficult to like him: he made everyone's life harder.

Like I said, we did three things: went to class, graded, and held office hours.

Going to class was easy, for Morrison was an adventure. A wiry little man who seemed to have more hair in his bushy mustache than he did on his male-patterned bald head, it's difficult to separate the man from the myth. I'd heard that he never slept, couldn't sleep really, and would wake up ridiculously early and run ridiculous distances. He claimed to eat only one meal a day, a breakfast suited for Louis XIV's table. He seemed to have a natural electricity flowing through him. I'm not the type and thus it's hard for me to explain - but some demonic force kept him from sitting still. He'd get so fired up that he changed color. The day he went off about Kurt Cobain - and the crushing expectations placed up on him - I thought that the little vein in his forehead was going to blow ... and spray blood over the first three rows in the process. Wearing a tweed jacket and knit tie, he'd thrash about like a fish desperate for oxygen, whether it was in emulation of dancing or simply another manifestation of his constant need to move. He'd climb up the desks in Class of '50 while the socially-maladjusted engineering students, all caring not a lick for history and many possessing a mastery of English equivalent to my own mastery of the Shakuhachi flute, looked on. They ate out of his hand.

I have to admit, I wasn't ready to grade undergraduate essays and tests. Just a few months earlier I'd been sucking on the teat of undergraduate-dom. I still felt like one of them, but now it was now my job to pass judgment - and not only their content mastery but also their writing ability. And, as you can guess from my earlier statements, there was some pretty sketchy writing. PRETTY SKETCHY. I had no idea that a student could graduate from an American high school and still not have a grasp of the basic essay format. Let me assure you (and I know that most readers here know this better than I), it is very much possible. Pretty common, actually. Grading undergraduate papers at a large, public institution had me weeping for the American education system.

Not being one to let Tom have all the fun, I birthed a pretty fine grading shit-storm that semester. In the review session for our first exam, I encouraged the students to tell us as much as they possibly knew about every ID term - that sheer mass of information was the key to success. Hey, what did I know? I was spitballing here, and it sounded good to me. Turns out that the students (foolishly) took something I said to heart, and many of them ended up running out of time on the test before they'd even tackled the essay. Needless, to say, many of them contacted MAM with the problem. He then fell on the sword in front of the class, took the blame for the misunderstanding, and gave some extra credit. There are several reasons the man is popular, and his willingness to fall on the sword was one of them. Oh. And extra credit.

We weren't grading hardasses. Oh no, far from it. It might not have been ethical, appropriate, fair, or beneficial to the students, but it was pretty well known that there was a "desired" grade distribution. For better or worse, I had little problem in going with the flow. In hindsight, this probably should have bothered me, but at the time I took Tennyson's lesson to heart: "ours not to question why..." Students who were given high grades were happy, non-troublesome students. Grading tough caused problems for the higher ups, and nobody wanted that. Shit ----- it runs downhill.

The final duty of the TA was the holding office hours. These were not a foreign concept to me - every professor at my alma mater had to hold them weekly. What was new to me was that it was I, the TA, and not the professor, who was in charge of holding them. I forget how many hours (not very many) but for so many hours a week I'd hop on the bus** and head to campus so that the young minds of tomorrow could flock to me with questions. I'd settle into the office, fire up the laptop, and download music using Purdue's broadband, all while doing my best impersonation of the American Insurance Industry: hoping like hell that I didn't actually have to do the job I was being paid for. And it worked pretty well - only occasionally would a student come to office hours, and usually it was to 1) make up a test they had no business missing in the first place or, 2) copy the notes from a day of class that they had no business missing in the first place.

Once in a great while, they'd come in an attempt to convince me of the err of my grading ways, to lobby that their inability to construct a sentence was not their fault but instead an intrinsic flaw in graders everywhere, those close-minded who were unable to look beyond the "traditional" system of writing into the bold new avant-garde where the subject and verb were no longer prerequisites, content knowledge was irrelevant as long as it sounded "good", and coherent paragraphs were considered inferior to rambling "thought bubbles" - my term, not theirs. Apparently, I expected too much of them. This paper would have earned them a 100% in high school. No, it was not relevant to them that they were no longer in high school. Was I swayed? Hardly. I'm not the type of person who listens to arguments based upon reason, let alone those based upon some completely non-reason-like substance. As they say... power corrupts.

I have thus far written several million words about my first semester as a TA but have neglected to mention the best part: having an office. Nothing makes a man so drunk upon power as having an "office," however meager. Recitation Hall 403 is imprinted in my memory as the land of milk and honey, the shelter from the storm.. 3 people resided in that office and all 3 of them are authors on this blog. Fourth floor recitation was a forgotten corner of campus. uncared for, if even remembered, by the university - in that sense a true microcosm of the history department as a whole. But here, in this dingy attic, the history graduate students made their lairs. Admittedly, 403 was Scott's world. Micah and I only lived in it. But it was a good office, a valiant office, an incomparable office. And here we are, in that little slice of heaven between University Hall and the end of the world...


Those were the days. Feels almost like a dream.

*please correct this if I'm misremembering.
** The 3A, Northwestern. It was a foul, foul smelling bus. I don't blame the smell on the large number of Asian students who rode it. Well, I kind of do.