I did my undergraduate years in a gloriously “traditional” manner. Eighteen, freshman year, assigned to a dorm with a roommate–luckily we fell into the lifelong friends category. We had another girl (although I would have said “woman” back then) who often stayed with us because she and her two roommates fell into the stone-cold adversaries category. I bought a meal plan and remained on campus for my part-time job, my room-and-board, my classes, my friends, my social life, my relaxation, exercise, love life, etc. etc. The college was the town.

I did my master’s program in a “mostly-traditional” manner. Twenty-six years old. Two years in a quirky, tiny apartment in the groovin’ downtown of a small city, just big enough to have two colleges and three “parts of town.” I met people who were not attending grad school and built a social network off-campus. I took road trips and threw together dinner parties and card nights with red wine. I devoted almost every moment to either my studies or my fun–I had no other real demands. I was a funded grad student in my twenties in my nation-of-origin doing research in a department with no Ph.D. students–so I got lots of support and guidance and attention. Academia magic.

I am doing my Ph.D. in a thoroughly “nontraditional” manner. Forty-three years old and a homeowner. I’ve been teaching at a community college and alternative schools–surrounded by the tumult and pressures of 21st-century democracy and education. I failed to anticipate the extreme nature of my nontraditional-ness and the extraordinary dissonance it would trigger when I entered a niche still entrenched in tradition.

I am older than a few professors in the department, which causes some weirdness since I feel collegial with them rather than subordinate. I drive several miles to campus from my house–I have other priorities in my daily life. Family, mortgage, bird nests in the attic, dog vomit in the living room, adult obligations like my friends’ birthday and graduation parties for their kids, multiple insurance premiums, and sales at the grocery store so I can stock up on a particular pantry item. Simple comforts have become more important than grand ambitions or riotous fun. I like playing in the garden, finding lady’s slippers on a hike in the woods, throwing together a crazy cheese and olive platter with my man, clean towels after a shower, sitting under an umbrella on a sunny day.

I’ve also been teaching for almost 20 years. So the usual TA anxieties about grading, undergrads, and authority flutter past me like gnats. I’m not a peer to those TAs… I could be a mentor. But I’m not a mentor because they’re third-year grad students. I’m also 15 years older and did not follow any established path, as many of them are in the midst of doing.

I also know the vicious truth about graduate research because I left academia and worked in the rest-of-the-world. Grad research does not mean anything to 98.2% of the U.S. population. Those students who travel from high school/private school to college to grad school to post-doc fellowship to university teaching have an absolutely different perspective on prioritizing research vs. teaching (vs. other duties… since many Ph.D. students will not become professors or even teachers). I value, celebrate, and advocate liberal arts & sciences education with all the enthusiasm I’ve always had. Such education explodes the mind, shifts lenses, and transforms individuals. Research–in conference papers, academic journals, monographs, and textbooks–serves a critical role in that formal education… but it mostly stops at the border between college and the rest-of-the-world (some policy and documentaries are the exception). If humanities academics want to be relevant beyond the niche of their peers and the liberal arts & sciences, they will have to conceive of research and its dissemination, teaching, outreach, and media in new ways. But grad research continues in a traditional manner…

So the grad school system remains aligned with a 19th-century model of a top-down master-apprentice relationship–based on an economic system (with its gender, race, learning, and product traditions) that has little relevance to the more fluid realities of the current economy or to the brutal conditions of the academic job market. Most Ph.D.s (especially in the humanities) will not become tenure-track professors… then they are not actually apprenticing. Right? I find my nontraditional-ness highlights such inadequacies, embedded in the stubborn notion that a 200-year-old apprenticeship model can provide (1) the teaching skills required for the 21st century and (2) an awareness of the full range of possibilities for the job search. The democratizing of education (the variety of students, backgrounds, technologies, ages) also pushes at a model developed for the elite of 19th-century European cities.

I have found ways to make peace with my nontraditional-ness. Younger students have also discovered ways to relate to me without assumptions. (Often the assumptions were paradoxical: I was old so I must be married with kids–but I was a grad student so I must want to complain about the undergrads’ lack of interest in the course material, which I actually see as typical of contemporary American adolescence.) Nothing about grad school itself has fostered these unique dynamics for the young students or for me. Instead, they wedged through the cracks, sought the openings. A way to grow and spin.

But I do recommend more middle-aged students in grad schools. Such demographic change often pushes reform.

The post Middle-Aged Grad Student first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

– Do ask everything that pops into your head. Writers have ideas, we let our imaginations crawl into corners and peep into dirty human motivations. The ideas and questions might seem bizarre, but ask. Sellers are not obligated to tell you as much as you think. Write down every little question and write every one in both past and present tense. Write them multiple times in multiples ways–you got this skill. Then send that long list of all the questions in all the tenses by email or hard copy to the seller before you pay for a home inspection. If you ask sellers directly, they have a legal obligation to answer. Demand details. Be as picky with these questions and answers as you would if an editor sent you back a short story to check before publication. Line by line, word by word, comma by comma. E.g. Is there asbestos in the house? Was there ever asbestos in the house? Is the sewer main line clear? Has the sewer main line ever been cleared?

– If the house is older or doesn’t contain any serious renovation–but then, hey, there’s one room or one ceiling or one part of the basement with totally new work, be suspicious. You know sloppy writing, when you or another writer slaps some lazy deus ex machina into a story to fix a major problem. Bad writing is bad writing, and only hard work in the structure of the whole piece can fix it. It’s the same with construction. If it’s out of place, ask when, where, why, and for what purpose. What’s it hiding? What really needs to be done?

– Visit the house at various times of the day and night. Where does the light fall, what are the noises. If you like to write at night with the starry sky, make sure neighbors don’t have a couple outdoor spotlights illuminating a two-acre diameter around their garage. If you like to write in the morning sun, make sure the knot of trees and mildewy arbor vitae drooping over the neighbor’s fence doesn’t block your office–no matter how wonderful it looks on the inside.

– Look up the word “efflorescence.” Know it, inspect for it, avoid it. Or you will spend too much time in your basement fiddling with a dehumidifier and online researching drainage ditches rather than writing.

– Junk is surprising. It always masks more junk. A house with a basement, garage, and shed full of old doorknobs, broken shutters, drippy paint cans, moldy boards, scraps of metal screen, rusty grills, styrofoam planks, and musty tins of nails and screws might be a bargain. But it is also an optical illusion. Under all that crap is more crap. And more crap. And more crap. And several writing weekends lost.

– Even if you hike, garden, camp, or compulsively clean, when you move into a new house–buy a respirator mask for scrubbing and moving. We live in an atmosphere of funk and ozone. Don’t inhale it, don’t act tough. Don’t be afraid of looking like a word dweeb in a mask, too frail for the hard hands-on labor of brooms, mops, rags, chemical cleaners, concrete, cobwebs, and sawdust. Or a good chunk of your writing time might slip away as you loll in bed recuperating from all those nasty bits in your lungs. On the other hand, if you want to enrich your next description of a character struggling for breath, feeling the truth of her tiny mortality and absolute alone-ness with each wheeze, don’t get a mask.

– Use the PennySaver, Craigslist, and the free local papers. Search out free or cheap help the same way you search out free or cheap submission opportunities. People will give you estimates on the strangest jobs–filling, sanding, and staining/polyurethaning all those empty cable and phone line holes left throughout the house. People will happily and with gratitude carry sawed-up old floorboards full of nails out of your house and into theirs. People will battle to pay $20 for a twenty-year-old chest freezer. People will give you stories as they help you with all this housework.

– The old saying “Good fences make good neighbors” depends on the ‘hood you live in. And the type of fence. Sometimes a six-foot solid stockade fence is the best plan, sometimes it gets you ostracized from the random street and sidewalk chatter. Explore your setting and the logic of that world before you make the fence call.

– If you want to be a writer, live life and ask for help with your craft. If you want to be a homeowner, live life and ask for help with the chores and repairs. If you want to be a writer who owns a home, those are your life.

The post To-Do List for a Writer (Thinking of Buying a House) first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

If you want to see a true and pure slice of America–America in all its glory of conglomeration, weirdness, exuberance, achievement, and commotion–visit a community college. The word “community” actually means what it says in this case: everyone in the area, from all different backgrounds, in some type of sync for some vaguely shared goal. In this case, formal education. Everyone and anyone.

In the fall of 2010, a reticent young woman who moved to western Massachusetts from Cambodia showed a knack for camera work and an interest in digital editing. I was impressed with her audacity–she used a digital still camera to secretly record all of us on our last day of class, made a video with creative cuts and music, and then told us by handing out DVDs.

So I made up my own production company, French Fry Productions. And asked if she wanted to make a video of this semester’s class. It took some negotiating. I think she wanted to believe I was joking. At one point, far into the process, her nephew downloaded a virus onto her laptop; she had to re-format and lose the file. Or at least that was her explanation for the delay…

She made this video with promotion in mind, the promotion of education for people who didn’t think they would go to college. Students who need not only academic preparation, but also cultural initiation. Because college is its own culture, with distinct jargon, conventional practices, accepted creative and intellectual products, and behavior patterns that are passed along. (I remember the pummeling of my own initiation, just a year after my father’s death, 17-years-old at a summer program in Boston. Surrounded by heirs to distinct privilege and bearers of international ambition, I flailed my way through the process of registering, getting syllabi, meeting professors, and walking across the yard to the cafeteria. I learned to cast away my parochial suburban habits–I was self-possessed yet pliable, dominant traits of the striving adolescent.)

I realized after a semester of teaching the “adult transition to college class” that psychological reinforcements help students flourish as well. Most have not had positive experiences with formal education. They harbor deep secret personal anxieties which can be triggered by stress from the unknown and the pressure of college deadlines. Fear of success with its expectations can sabotage as easily as the fear of failure with its despair or simple familiarity. I write prompts on the board like “What are external obstacles to college? What are internal obstacles?” and they brainstorm and we discuss.

The students who stay, those who believe formal education is worth everything or those who come to the decision they will transcend into anything they might become in this world–they develop trust in me and each other, and their willingness allows me to share my own terrors (granted from the safety of my instructor position and advanced degree).

This reciprocity, this soulful contact amidst the daily grind of paperwork, attendance sheets, and repetitive instruction, gives my life such moments of grace.

The post Moments of Grace in Learning from Teaching first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.