Filling up the education dispenser

Over the summer the women's rest rooms on campus were equipped with dispensers for free period products--a great step forward, you'd think, except the dispensers remain empty. No problem for the post-menopausal amongst us, but I'm sure there are young women on campus looking at those empty dispensers and wondering when they will be filled.

This strikes me as a fitting metaphor for this point in the semester: classes have just started and all the mechanisms and structures are in place to encourage learning, but now we just need to fill those structures with the stuff of learning--readings and discussions and writing assignments and class activities. I can set up the structures and set the mechanisms whirring, but filling up the classroom with learning depends upon the contributions of students. Will they come to class having done the reading and prepared to talk about it?

Maybe. Based on what I've seen so far from my students, it seems that some have fallen out of the habit of following directions. Or maybe they never developed that essential habit. At any rate we'll be discussing the first readings this afternoon and I hope to get everyone engaged.

In other news, Margaret Renkl proves once again that we think on similar wavelengths in her praise of overstuffed bookshelves (link here). "For me," she says, "a book made of paper will always be a beautiful object that warms a room even as it expands (or entertains, or challenges, or informs, or comforts) a mind, and a bookcase will always represent time itself." 

This topic arose in her household when her husband retired from a long teaching career and starting carting home boxes of books, a process my husband has also initiated. He currently has six big boxes full of books sitting in the living room and a paucity of empty bookshelves on which to put them--and plenty more to bring home from his church office. Further, I've been winnowing my own collection but I'll have more boxes of books to bring home from my office when I retire in a few years. One of these days the bookshelves will crowd us right out of our house.

It's not unusual for students to enter my office, eye the bookshelves, and say in wonder, "Have you read all these books?" Well yeah, but it took a little while. Compared to all the books in the universe--or even all the books in my office--I'm asking my students to read a relatively small number of pages this semester, but if they fail to do it, then the whole mechanism of learning will grind to a halt.

I've created the structure and installed the machine, but it's up to my students to fill the space with learning.