Operation [Yet to be named] Part Two: On Studentry, Part One

I deem it unwise to write about any battle at the time it is being fought, mainly because the proximity of the thing, the chaos of the combat, and the fatigue which sets itself like a plague on my body, mind and spirit, all serve to distort the sort of objectivity - the third person-ness - that I feel is important in recounting something with "the written word." However this bit of advice is matched in fervor only by my undying urge to break my own rules. It isn't without a certain sense of irony that I realize my desire to write has given birth to an intuition not to write, and in doing so rendered, or apprehended, the act of writing as both a disease and a treatment (I don't think that there is a cure). I digress long before I progress.

Lately I've been giving the question of the goal of education some thought. What is the purpose of getting an education to the student, what does a student look like after she is finished 'being' a student - how is she different, if she's been changed at all?

Earlier in the semester my conclusion was, shakily, that the goal of education was to make the student a better person. This is at once a broad and vague definition, but alludes to more than mere book learning, or vocational skill building: it has to do with someone's ability to function, to be healthier in mind and body, and to positively impact other people and society. "Good" things, right? I'm not convinced, however, and feel the urge to qualify what I mean by education, as it can be said that all of life can be an education, and it follows that everyone is a student of some sort. But I do not want to reduce my definition to simply mean the modern institution of education, namely, the university, because I fear that this reduction will lead to the inevitable conclusion that the only person who can adequately be called a student is that person who pays a disproportionate amount of money to learn a few things. This, the reader might note, is also how we define a dumb-ass.

So for the purposes of the treatment of this topic here, I'll let the formal definition of education remain nebulous, and hope that the reader infer my meanings from the context of my experiences as I relay them.

This morning, while walking up a set of stairs in the direction of the sun, the image of the word "student" was impressed upon my mind. I am a student, I thought, as I grunted up the stairs in the blinding light. What does that mean? It means the obvious: that I suffer for want of knowledge. That I dedicate resources towards the end of learning, or of at least being within an atmosphere where I can sit and think (which I like doing best of all). But WHY? WHY?!

Years ago, while on a church trip of some sort, I sat on the floor of a tour bus, towards the front, my legs dangling down the front steps (very obviously over that little yellow line you aren't suppose to cross while the bus was in motion), and watched the highway stretch out before us. I remember quite clearly a moment, while we were driving through eastern Colorado: the sun was shining brilliantly over the plains that reflected a warm golden hue, and a thick cloudy mist hung over the dark forms of the Rockies to our west. I was sitting there, elbow on knee, chin on hand, eyes on the road, and something dawned on me. From my vantage point it because very clear to me that I was supposed to spend time in my life learning. Learning what? Things? About what? My self? The world? What? Perhaps I've had a vocational vacuum chamber somewhere within my person from childhood but I remember feeling quite positive that I was suppose to do this, and I gleaned satisfaction from this experience.

Needless to say, I ignored this vocational aspiration - in the formal sense of the word - for quite awhile before reconciling myself to it. By that time I was a grown man (officially), husband (also officially) and father (results still pending just kidding).

So here I am, but why?

Operation Dumbo Drop*

In the fall of 2006, after having worked as a carpenter for a couple years, I became acutely aware that I was in need of a change - that we, my family and I, were in need of a change. At that point I had been married for over four years, my daughter had just turned two, and I was going to be 28 years old the following spring. I perceived my life as having a certain lazy, quasi-fatalist arc to it: I had done what had come my way, trusting - loosely - that everything would work out for me in terms of stability, success, etc. Having scrutinized the narrative of my life following my graduation from high school almost ten years prior to that point (and even before), I realized that it was pointedly lacking in the personal volition department. That is, I hardly ever asserted my will to live as deliberately as I, ironically enough, always knew I wanted to live. At the close of 2006 this began to change, and I still distinctly remember waking up to a brave new world on January 1st, 2007.

After a brief but victorious skirmish with the kind folks in Admissions I was admitted as a nontraditional undergraduate transfer student at the University of Kansas, and the transition began. At the time, as I mentioned, I was building houses with a local sub-contractor in Lawrence. He agreed to let me work 3/4 time in order to begin attending classes part-time. That summer I took a course at the Edwards campus, taking advantage of the K-10 connector, and by the following Fall I was taking classes part time, having shuffled off the mantle of blue collar hard labor (at least for the time being). This was the Fall semester of 2007.

The following semester my wife and I's second child was born, a boy, and the difficulty in sustaining a successful academic career was raised a couple of notches.

At the time of this writing he is just over a year old, while his older sister is almost 4 1/2. They are used to their Papa leaving early in the morning with a bag full of books, returning to eat and play for a bit before sitting down to shuffle papers, push pens, click the keyboard and jump through the various hair-graying hoops of academic life. What is next in this story involves them even to a greater extent, and is the purpose of this series of posts: the transition from undergraduate student to graduate student, and the subsequent and impending exodus.

The reality that in a little over a year from now my family and I will be packing up and moving to a new city in order for me to continue my studies is one we've anticipated. It has always been part of the plan to see this new track through to the end, but now it seems as though it has crossed the threshold of the horizon, and is creeping ever more perceptibly towards us.

Knowing that my time here will soon be up inculcates everything with a sense of significance. I basically grew up here in Lawrence. Growing up in a small town 15 minutes northwest of here, I spent the vast majority of my teenage years haunting Mass street. I was as far west as Manhattan, Kansas, for a couple of years before I ended up in Kansas City for a couple more. Seven years ago this summer my wife and I were married and moved to Lawrence, and the rest, as they say, is history (albeit recent). As reflective pieces like this often do, I'm tempted to descend into a number of tropes that illustrate perfectly the position I find myself in, but in the process of writing this sentence I've lost it. Something about a chapter in my life coming to an end, whatever.

So in the future this series of posts will address our impending move by reflecting both on the past - my experiences at KU, my family at Liberty Hall and St. Sophia Orthodox Church, my former educational experiences, etc. - as well as the future: my search for a graduate program, the logistics of moving a family of four to an as-of-yet unknown locale in the near future, our plans, etc.

My first order of business is to give this operation a name: I was thinking "Operation Exodus" but that seemed too obvious. Then I thought "Operation Get Those Children Out of The Muddy, Muddy" but that seemed a bit much. After that I thought "Operation Dumbo Drop," but realized that was something altogether different. So as a first order of business I'm soliciting a title that will work both for the physical act of moving as well as the title of this series of posts.

Operation __________________?