It's the End of Summer As I Know It (and I Feel Fine)

By Josh Corman

Clever Alice Cooper Reference

Arne Duncan and President Obama plotting the destruction of summer.
Hilarious.

When I was a kid, I heard the old expression, credited to Ben Franklin, that you can count on just two things in this world: death and taxes. With all due respect to our most quotable founding father, I  disagreed from the moment I heard the quip. For most school-age children in this country, the concepts of both death and taxes are mere abstractions, their inevitability a distant, vague proposition. So if eight-year-old me had been allowed to amend Franklin's aphorism, I would have added to it something that I really did feel would happen every year like clockwork, something I felt was my God-given right as an American, something I would fight for, if it came to that. Death? Sure. Taxes? Fine. But the thing I could always count on? Summer vacation.

From early June through mid-August for every year of my public education, I was free. I played in the yard, watched or played baseball six hours a day (and organized, reorganized, and shelved baseball cards for another two—great practice for bookshelves or record collections), ate lunch whenever I wanted, went swimming, jumped on the trampoline, skipped stones (seriously), learned the game of golf, and read every book I could get my hands on, among about a hundred other things. It was wonderful, even when it was boring. Summer vacation was how I learned to be by myself, to find entertainment off the beaten path, to terrorize my little sister in inventive new ways. Without it, I'm sure I wouldn't be the person I am today (nor would my sister, for that matter, but her nightmares are down to two nights a week, tops).

Increasingly, though, the rumblings from those highest of higher-ups in education spell doom for the traditional summer vacation. Death and Taxes indeed.

Time on Our Hands


The first question to ask about the end of summer vacation is why? Why put an end to this most beloved of childhood rituals?

The answers from those dark, nefarious forces aiming to squelch everyone's good time are surprisingly persuasive. On the one hand, the discussion over America's global competition in the academic realm has taken center stage. Both President Obama and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, have taken pains to point out the need for more globally competitive students as they outline proposals and policies. Chief among the president's suggestions has been lengthening the amount of time students spend in school, either by extending the school day or the school year. My knee-jerk reaction as a teacher (it would have been the same when I was a student) is to boo loudly and frequently, but if I'm honest, I know that my vitriol is primarily the result of selfishness. I like being done with work before 4:00 PM, and I love having summers off.

But if I look at the issue more objectively, that is, if I try to see the issue simply in terms of problems and solutions, it seems, initially at least, difficult to argue with a longer school day and a longer school year. Consider, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his fantastic book Outliers, that students in many Asian and European countries spend about 250 days a year in school, compared to the average American student's 180-190. Kids in the U.S., especially those with long summer breaks, are shown routinely to retain fewer of the skills and less knowledge than those who have a shortened summer vacation. This is even more true for kids in lower socio-economic strata, because it's likely that they're not being read to or taken to museums or enrolled in summer camp programs that might help bridge some of the wide gap between school years.

Isn't it obvious that kids who spend 25% more time learning to master skills will be better at those skills (and potentially given more time in which to master them, meaning fewer rushed lessons and fewer kids being turned off math because they took longer to understand its underlying principles)? Isn't it clear that taking immense amounts of time without any sort of targeted instruction throws an enormous wrench into kids' ability to learn?

Of course it is. But you and I both know that it isn't the whole story, either.

What We Do With the Time That Is Given to Us


I graduated high school with somebody who went to MIT. One of my best friends is at NYU law school. Another friend has studied at Oxford. All of these people had lengthy summer vacations. They all engaged their minds in a variety of ways, looked for education in a broader sense, everywhere they could. The latter two goofed around a lot and spent a lot of time doing things that no sane person would consider intellectually beneficial. And yet, there they are, smart, decent human beings with a lot to offer the world.

I'm less concerned with asking the question, "But what would they have been able to accomplish with all that extra learning time?" than asking, "What would they have missed out on if they'd been cooped up in a classroom sixty-five extra days a year?" The reason the second question interests me more is that I think I know the answer to the first one, but I'm much less certain about the second. I would hope that they would have still developed some of the same extra-curricular interests and met the same friends and been able to use their time free from school to experience some of the incredibly formative moments of their youths, but I don't know if that's accurate.

Thinking about this makes me realize how delicate a balance the relationship is between structured learning time and those moments which are, at least on their surface, totally removed from intellectual or academic concerns. I would distrust anyone who said we didn't need both, but I have no idea what the exact balance between the two should look like.

Perhaps we can take a clue from Sir Ken Robinson, whose TED talks are among the most viewed in the website's history (his first one, titled "Schools Kill Creativity," is actually #1). Robinson points out that schools very often do a piss-poor job of adapting to the needs of students whose strengths lie outside of the traditional spectrum of academic subjects (math, science, languages, etc.). He claims that an alien looking down on Western education could only conclude that its purpose is to produce university professors. Think about the kids you went to school with. Who finished at the top of the class? What was most valued in those students by their teachers? Maybe you're like Emily, who in her post on creativity last week admitted that she had submerged her more creative instincts in the interest of more measurable academic skills. (She was class salutatorian, by the way.) How many kids are like her? How many aren't capable of succeeding in school like she did because their intelligence isn't as varied or adaptable as hers? How many feel like they aren't good at anything only because what they were good at wasn't valued by their schools? Robinson says it's this last thought that bothers him most.

And it should. Because when it comes to education reform, we assume that students should essentially be treated the same, that there's one way to define intelligence and that, therefore, the most practical answer to the question, "How do we make our schools better and our students stronger?" is to make the school day longer and shorten summer vacation, rather than question the value of what we're teaching them to be.

Maybe we will have to spend more time in school. But first, we should ask ourselves what the value of time outside of school is and see if we can't learn a little something from summer vacation that would apply nicely inside a classroom. What if we used those extra sixty-five days to let kids explore their passions and interests outside of the core content subjects? What if we acknowledged that just because kids are out of school, that doesn't mean that they aren't learning constantly, turning themselves into the types of people we want to succeed in our culture—not just because they're smart or they did well in school, but because they're assured of who they are, confident in what they do, and capable of a more rounded view of the world.

If we fill our schools with students like that, they will leave school and build a richer society once they're out in the world. I'd take that outcome, even if we still finish behind France in the TIMMS test, 'cause I bet we'd beat their asses in Calvinball.

Hard Work, Great Art: The Radiohead Effect

by Corman

Sometime during my freshman year of college, when my musical curiosity was only just blooming, I illegally downloaded a bunch of Radiohead songs. The band had just released Hail to the Thief, and every music publication and grumpy record store clerk (is there any other kind?) that I consulted was preoccupied with the album and the band that released it, so naturally I became preoccupied with them too. If I liked their stuff, I would support them by purchasing their records. If not, I could erase the files and pretend the whole thing never happened.

At this point, I couldn’t have named a single Radiohead song, so when I started downloading their music, I stuck to the albums that most frequently showed up on the “Best-of” lists in those aforementioned publications: The Bends, OK Computer, and Kid A. I don’t remember the exact point when I actually became afraid of what I heard, but I’ll wager it was somewhere during “Idioteque,” a stuttering electronic spasm of a song that sounded nothing like the blues-based rock I ingested by the gallon in those days.

This? I thought. This is the greatest band of their generation? Who did these guys bribe?

But then, I started to worry. What if it’s me? What if they really are great, but I just don’t “get it?” What am I missing? This sort of self-criticism is, I think, pretty natural any time a work of art is praised and awarded high status but doesn’t resonate personally. At the time, though, I was haunted just trying to figure out which of my reactions was closer to the mark. Were the critics and fans just fooling themselves into crying “classic” because they wanted so badly for it to be true, or were my critical faculties not sophisticated enough to understand what I was listening to?

To be safe, I did what any intellectually astute young man faced with such a quandary would do: I ignored it. I shelved the whole Radiohead experiment, intent on proceeding with my Beatles and my Hendrix and my Pink Floyd.

But, oh, how it gnawed at me. I was pulled time and again back to Radiohead’s music no matter how I resisted, even going so far as to buy copies of a couple of their early, much more listener-friendly albums. They repelled me, then drew me back in, pushed me away and beckoned me again until one day, almost five years after I had first listened to their music, everything fell into its right place. I saw Radiohead in concert during the summer of 2008 and was blown away. It was like I had spent those five years wrestling with a complicated equation, and on that night, I finally solved for X. They played the hell out of every song, even the ones I was less familiar with, the ones that had scared me off years earlier. Suddenly, they just made sense. Part of it was the energy behind the performance (it’s easy to forget with all the electronics that the band actually plays all of those songs), but I think mostly it can’t be qualified.

That performance sparked Radiohead’s ascent to their current status as my favorite active musical artists. I eagerly anticipate the release of every new album and single. I salivate over the rumors of a 2012 U.S. tour. I adore this band and their music.

But all of this came very close to never happening. My initial urge to dismiss the band’s status as a byproduct of the hipster hype machine very nearly won out, and if it hadn’t been for that little niggling urge that drew me back to something I hadn’t originally grasped, it would have. And then where would I be? Who would I be? Does the question seem ridiculous? It shouldn’t, not if you believe that, at least in part, our identities are in some way shaped by the art we love. Or, at least, the types of art we love.

Let me explain. My Radiohead example is just one of many from my life. Often I have encountered albums, novels, films, and even television shows that have taxed and perplexed me. My initial reaction is always, no matter how “sophisticated” I think I’ve become, to push the art away, write it off as pretentious. But the good stuff, just like Radiohead, responds in kind. It calls to me, invites me back, slowly reveals a beauty or poignancy or sharpness that was hidden during our first encounter. Eventually, I had to concede that my first impressions could not be trusted, and while some great art does not require this level of, for lack of a better word, work, all great art rewards our persistent efforts at relating to and interacting with it.

I understand that some don’t see it this way. Many believe that art should meet you where you are, and if it doesn’t speak to you immediately, then that probably means it never will. These people look, like I once did, at what they don’t enjoy or understand (though they are often loath to admit the latter) with disdain, unable to grant even the possibility of value. This view is easier, but it is not best practice.

I don’t mean that we might, if simply enough effort were expended, come to enjoy everything. Our tastes will still direct us to that music and writing and film which resonates with us, but we must rely on more than simple taste. We must be willing to wrestle with and even struggle through difficult, challenging works to mine from them the value within.

The reward, though hard won, is inestimable. The reward is Vertigo and There Will Be Blood, The Brothers Karamazov and Infinite Jest, In Utero and The Age of Adz, The Wire and Twin Peaks. The reward is engaging with some of mankind’s greatest achievements and coming out the other side enriched, fulfilled, and maybe even changed.

I don’t know what’s out there waiting for you, but the only way to find out is to get to work.

Normally, I would end there, but I’d like to invite my fellow Verbal Infusers to take a crack at my central question: How hard should we have to work to appreciate great art?