The Classroom Conservative

Eat In, Take Out

Going through the books I brought back from Europe, I found a scrap of paper I put in one while sitting in Starbucks in Brighton, England. "Eat In, Take Out," it says.

That phrase takes me back. The take-out restaurant, the equivalent of the British take-away, is a mainstay in Atlantic Canada. It was in my childhood, at least. Little communities like the one in which I lived had one every mile or two: fish 'n chips, chips-dressing-and-gravy, wings 'n chips. It is like the comedian Mark Critch once quipped, "There are only three ways to die in Newfoundland: heart attack, stroke, chip-fat fire."

These little towns were too small for large restaurant franchises. Before there was an Arby's or a Burger King in St. John's, there was the Dew Drop Inn in Topsail. My parents got paid every second Friday, and, in those years before McDonald's came to the province, we would all have dinner at the Dew Drop Inn.

You do not find these little grease pits in Western Canada. Perhaps they had them in the 1970s, as well. But A&W and Subway are very aggressive out here, bringing fast food to every little whistle stop. I do not imagine that even today the chains have spread to what remains of Newfoundland outports.

While the phrase is the one that came to mind, I was not thinking about chippies when I scribbled "Eat In, Take Out." Rather, I was reflecting on the distinctly European custom of charging two prices: one for people who leave with their food and another, higher price, for people who want to stick around. I may be wrong, but I cannot remember seeing this elsewhere, and I really cannot understand it. You certainly see lots of little dining rooms so crowded that a policy intended to discourage lengthy visits might have some use, but I never see this where they have differential pricing. In fact, the first time I ever saw it was in a little bistro in Paris, back in the mid-1990s. The place was empty.

My companion asked me, "Should we stay or should we take our food?"

"Oh, it doesn't make any difference to me," I replied.

It was then that the proprietor's eyes flashed red. "It certainly does, monsieur! It costs more for you to stay here to eat!"

At the Starbucks in Brighton, I had to wonder what they did with the extra money from patrons who ate in. The bathrooms were overflowing; the floors were filthy. Dust and dirt blew in from the patio. The extra fifty pence I was charged to sit with my scone was certainly not used to keep the dining area clean.

Academic Freedom In The Classroom

A couple of months ago, I got a call from the Associate Dean in our Faculty of Management. They were putting on a professional development conference, and she wondered if I would give a ninety-minute session.

I jumped at the chance.

The event helped me provide some professional development to our Arts and Science instructors in Calgary and Edmonton, and so it was only fair that I helped provide the content. She gave me a generic title -- "Empowering Classroom Instructors" -- but I decided to give the talk on academic freedom. I was reading both Matthew FInkin and Robert Post's For The Common Good and Stanley Fish's Save The World On Your Own Time, and I was thinking quite a bit about what latitude we are granted in the classroom. The talk was a lot of work. I dragged the books halfway around the world and chewed on them a little bit. In the end, I think our little group of twenty university teachers raised and discussed at least a dozen related issues. I still have not processed all we covered, but I do come back again and again to the reaction to one of Fish's assertions. Basically, he suggests that many university professors do too much -- what he describes as doing someone else's job -- and that gets us away from our true tasks. "College and university teachers can (legitimately) do two things," he claims, "(1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills -- of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure -- that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over."

There is a part of me to which this appeals a great deal. I am but one station on the assembly line of someone's life. I can describe my job, and I can learn to do it well. But I think it is fair to say that my colleagues at the conference were appalled. Almost everyone believed us to be participating in some much more comprehensive, holistic education of citizens. But while my analogy of the line worker may be unfair -- imagine the teacher as Lucille Ball trying to sort candy -- I am not sure that we should assign "quality control" to professors, either. I introduce them to the concepts, sharpen the tools, and send them out to think for themselves. Don't I?

So Long, Then, Frog Hollow

News has crawled west that Frog Hollow Books of Halifax is shutting its doors after 25 years of independent book sales. When I lived in Nova Scotia, I spent far more time at Bookmark, on Spring Garden Road, located next to the Daily Grind. Bookmark had a deeper catalog, and its proximity to magazines and baked goods next door was entirely agreeable. But I did attend Frog Hollow readings and book launches, and there can be no doubt that these kinds of events will always be missed.

Message boards discussing the demise of Frog Hollow discuss service concerns, and they talk inevitably about the convenience of shopping online. We have heard all this before, and as someone who buys a ton of books on the internet, I can sympathize. Having grown up in Newfoundland, we bought what Jim Baird carried at WordPlay or, worse, what washed ashore at Coles in the Avalon Mall. But, as I have written before in this space, what is lacking in the online experience is the ability to browse effectively. Is there any better experience than finding, in a genre-oriented section or amongst the new releases and recommended books, something you did not even know existed? In our comfort, this is the only discernible echo of a way of life that rewarded skill and attentiveness with the ability to support ourselves. Perhaps the kind of curiosity we express in bookstores is the way we have been supporting our curiosity and our intellect. Do we lose this online?

The struggling independent bookstore cannot hold the depth of stock necessary to nurture always the curiosity about which I talk, and it relies on a keen buyer and keen staff, but perhaps that is not even enough.

A recent trip to Market Mall in Calgary revealed the sad reality that Play had closed its doors. An independent music chain with three locations in British Columbia and Alberta, it suffered the kind of fall-off you see in little bookstores. Where is used to have, say, deep holdings in folk and blues, it started carrying little more than new releases with a token catalog presence.

My question, moving forward, is who will inhabit all this evacuated commercial retail space? There is no need for the proliferation of cheap clothing stores, where you can find shoppers sifting through, looking for a bargain. While the thrill of the hunt persists there, there is little evidence of intellectual curiosity amongst those who moil for cheap socks and shoes.

Julie & Julia

Is the belief that movie-going was ever a simpler experience just the product of middle-aged nostalgia? The complication with screening Julie & Julia last night was presented by its apparent target audience, older fans of Julia Child who perhaps bought her Mastering The Art Of French Cooking in its first edition. At the very moment the film began, the cinema was besieged by people who, I assume, had not been to the movies in years. While scaling the stadium-style bleachers was a problem in the dark, there is solace to be taken in the general behavior of these older patrons who, once settling in, did not behave as if they were watching Julie & Juliaat home. We have a copy of Julie Powell's book in our house, and so I have to assume that people somewhere are seeing this film as an adaptation of a blogger's tale of cooking her way through Child's cookbook in a year. The hybridity of the story -- dividing itself between Powell and Child -- is both its greatest strength and inherent weakness, though not, as reviews have suggested, by contrasting the performance of Amy Adams with that of Meryl Streep.

Like so many films these days, we know far too much before entering the theater. (There was, for example, a preview for The Stepfather last night that revealed what appears to be the whole plot.) The advance media suggested that the Powell segments would be brief, an interruption exacerbated by Adams' pedestrian performance. The film, in fact, is rooted in Powell's experience as an unfulfilled, low-level bureaucrat, and Adams is far more than skilled. (Okay, it is no Junebug, or even Sunshine Cleaning, but the material does not grant her this latitude.) The alternating segments are structured to show the similarities in human experience, and while you are left in awe of Streep's acting, I needed to see no more of these flashbacks. The truth is that the Child segments are lacking almost any conflict. When she faces intolerance at Le Cordon Bleu, for example, we know she will prevail; when her husband Paul, played brilliantly by Stanley Tucci, is suspected of unamerican activities, we know that Joseph McCarthy will be discredited; when no one will publish her behemoth of a cookbook, we know that Knopf will see her brilliance. We are left, in the end, with the wry wit of Streep's representation of Child, and that is well worth anyone's time.

But a classic film it does not make, and the problem has everything to do with Powell's story. Perhaps, in the internet age, we simply know too much about the chronic problems in Powell's marriage to buy a happily-ever-after tale of misunderstanding and reconciliation between the author and her husband, Eric. The arc of her learning is just too modest. Eric is supportive and not at all judgmental as the couple comes to terms with Powell's underachievement. He helps her set up the blog that will, over the course of a year, preoccupy her beyond distraction and give her creative life new direction. And, when she neglects anything and everything but Julia Child, poor Eric does nothing more than sleep one night in his office. Director Nora Ephron is not subtle: in the hilarious scene in which Powell has to boil lobsters, she has Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" on in both the car and the apartment, and, if you missed it the first two times, Eric sings over the song as "Lobster killer, q'est-ce que c'est?" But the larger question of what it might mean to call oneself a wife in the twenty-first century when compared with that role in the 1950s and 1960s becomes more of an incidental matter, and one suspects that this shortcoming is what prevents this film from ever being much more than a pleasant diversion.

On Health Care Public, Private, And Something In Between

Shona Holmes, a 45-year-old Canadian who paid for her own cancer treatment at the Mayo Clinic, presents for opponents of health care reform the kind of prohibitive tale necessary to blunt any drive necessary to cover those 44 million uninsured Americans. Suffering headaches and vision loss, Ms Holmes was put on a six-month waiting list to see specialists in Canada; she chose, instead, to go to Arizona, where she was diagnosed with a growth on her pituitary gland and returned home with a recommendation for immediate surgical intervention ignored by our public health care system. In the end, Ms Holmes spent nearly six figures back in the U.S. to have what proved to be a benign cyst removed.

In the face of heavy government spending, there seems little traction in arguing the cost of Mr. Obama's health care plans. Billions and trillions scare no one anymore: we might as well, like Dr. Evil, put our pinkies in the corner of our mouths when we discuss these numbers. But the idea that Americans might have to wait for their health care gets some attention. Now, I have no time for the scaremongering used to bring Ms Holmes' case to the American public, but I am concerned -- as are some Canadian doctors -- to hear that, in the face of undiagnosed vision loss, she could not get a referral within a week. Something here does not add up, and that something should worry all Canadians.

The New York Review of Books held a recent forum on health care, and John Dean from Kent, England wrote in praise of the British medical system. "The U.K. National Health Service deals with the majority of U.K. citizens," he affirmed, "but everyone has the right to opt out of the system and seek private medical advice and treatment for which, of course, they will pay." When I lived in England, I had two relatively minor experiences with the NHS. (We should remember that I was a foreign student, and I was using gratis the system for which British citizens paid through tax.) I once spent fourteen hours vomiting on a cot in a hospital corridor, suffering from a kidney stone, begging nurse after nurse to believe that I was not a fraudulent drug seeker. After a doctor finally relieved my pain, I was released and pointed towards the bus stop. I missed it, in my prescription-addled confusion, and I staggered home on foot only by the most circuitous route. On another occasion, I had a medical test far more advanced than that offered in Canada, and my general practitioner assured me that she would be in touch if the results warranted treatment. When I next sought advice for a severe shaving rash, a year later, I was asked why I had not returned for my other treatment. My test had come back positive. (On the rash, I was advised to grow a beard.)

So, the long and the short is that I got pretty much what I paid for in England: that is to say, nothing. I have always had the uneasy feeling that the same kind of thing happens in Canada, and so I have been more proactive in seeking my own treatment. I try to stay healthy, and I visit my doctor regularly (though not obsessively), hoping that any problem I encounter will thus be properly contextualized. ("Honestly, I am not a crank. Look, I have had eight previous uneventful checkups!") But as my classmates at Oxford were either well-bred enough to "go private" already, or looked forward to a day when they could afford to do so, they did not worry about getting put at the back of a hopelessly long queue when push came to shove. The objection of some Americans to Mr. Obama's plan is that they fear being forced into a public system where they will lose the right to fight with their ghoulish and heartless Health Maintenance Organizations for timely care. As Michael Moore's excellent Sicko (2007) demonstrates, however, such advocacy is likely fruitless while HMOs are private and profit-driven. But what is also clear is that advocating your case to a government bureaucracy is no less promising.

Whatever happens in the United States, there will always be a system there for those willing and able to pay. Of that, Americans can be sure. For Canadians, this option exists for the most part only with our neighbors to the south, where we are free only to line the coffers of American hospitals, improving facilities for their regular customers. Should Mr. Obama's initiative not open debate here in Canada for more innovation for Canadians?

I was once supportive of a parallel, private system in Canada, but I have been convinced that this system would, initially at least, draw resources from our public system, and that is too heavy a risk. But that is not to say that some system by which people who wish to spend their discretionary income on health care could not somehow be devised. I am not rich, and unlike those old Oxford colleagues I do not come from a privileged background. But I also do not have a large recreational vehicle or fly extensively all over the world. If, instead of spending what money I have saved on these pursuits, I would like quick access to discretionary treatment, why would the government not at least help me to do so? It is not as if the roads on which my neighbors drive those RVs or the subsidized aircraft on which they vacation do not have taxpayer sanction. I am not certain that government health dollars could not match private dollars for parallel treatment. At least that additional private money would be staying in the country, and any public contribution could be accurately tracked and measured against the level of support of the public system. How about a private insurance scheme? With the cooperation of my employer, I am currently insured for dental work I will never need, exercise equipment I could never house, and enough pharmaceuticals for the rest of my life. Is there not a way to use insurance companies to buy a little peace-of-mind time? Could we not insure ourselves against catastrophe, and expect to pay higher premiums or get struck off (as with our automobiles) if we have to use it. Unlike Americans, currently, we would at least have the public system on which to rely as a baseline.

Make no mistake, I have every confidence in Mr. Obama to reach out and provide something adequate to all Americans, just as there is something adequate now for all Canadians. But we should let his great leap forward allow us here the opportunity to talk about improving what we have. It is not about having one system for the rich and one system for the poor. Rather, it is about acknowledging that health care should be more important to all of us than the silly commercial goods with which we fill our lives.