It is so useful, dammit

It’s not that I haven’t had a thought or found anything provocative since June 26. It’s that for late June and all of July, I was making up new eClass websites and notes for my Fall Term classes, so I could go on holiday at the end of July but be ready to go back into the classroom when I got home. 

Then it was that I was spending a lot of time in the sun on the beach at Nice, thinking about going into the water. And a lot of up to my chin in the Med., thinking about getting out to enjoy more of the sun. And a lot of time thinking about which restaurant we would go to for supper, to enjoy more piles of fresh seafood.

Then I was thinking about how relaxed I felt after coming home.

Then I was thinking about plans for a Sept. 19 poetry workshop I was co-hosting with Anna Marie Sewell, for the Edmonton Poetry Festival.

Then I was back into Fall classes, thinking through the dullness of a cold that was draining my energy for much but teaching.

I was, with many of my colleagues, also thinking about provincial government policies and practices, backed by University blogs and state-of-the campus missives, that seem to indicate there is some concern that showing up to do our job is maybe wasting our students’ time, as we in the Faculty of Arts are not “training” them for jobs.

Pronouncements from the Ministry of Enterprise and Advanced Education the past few months mention the plan to develop more jobs through a more entrepreneurial spirit. Then they cut the budgets and shrink the programs of the universities and colleges where entrepreneurial (as opposed to MBA managerial) skills and vision can get a start.

Then the tech schools brag they are being spared because they are training people for jobs. But without imagination developed through non-job-training types of education (i.e. not just apprenticeships and other training to be employees), without imagination to see opportunity and to have the confidence and thought processes to see it through, what jobs are they training people for. Not the new ones that have not been created.  Just the existing ones—the ones that disappear with the end of every resource boom and the end of every construction project.