Easy to serve, difficult to please

This week I learned that a former department head at a college where I’ve taught adjunct classes off and on for a decade had died.

I first worked for her the semester my eldest was born. A colleague facing some unexpected surgery offered me a Western Civ II course at this other school and put me in touch with the department head there. She gave me the course on the spot, with just a few weeks to go before the spring semester. I had a hard time keeping up—I began that spring with five adjunct classes at two colleges, an ESL tutoring job for a German elementary student at Sarah’s school, and part-time work at a sporting goods store—but I was most grateful because we needed the money and the work was good. As so often, it was exactly what we needed when we needed it.

My department head didn’t have another class for me after that spring but said she would be in touch as the need arose. Lo and behold, as Sarah and I expected our second child two years later, she reached out with another spring class. I gratefully accepted. Again—just enough, when needed.

That summer I found out about a full-time position at Piedmont Tech and that’s where I’ve been ever since. When I let my department head at this other school know, she thanked me and wished me luck, and said to let her know if I ever needed anything. A generous offer, and she meant it. Over the next few years she’d check in regularly on LinkedIn—yes, LinkedIn can actually be helpful!—always encouraging me and letting me know that if I needed work all I had to do was ask.

I asked when Sarah and I found out we were expecting twins, children four and five. And my department head happily set me up with an online class, semester after semester until her retirement.

She will be missed. She not only played a willing role in God’s providential care for our family—something, as a fellow believer, she would have happily acknowledged—but was simply a good boss.

I’m old enough now to have lost several former bosses: my first boss, a family friend who managed the seafood restaurant where I kept the buffet line supplied with clean plates in middle school, and then her husband, an auctioneer and antiques appraiser who employed me for the year between college and grad school and where I learned a lot about old stuff—as well as how to properly load a moving truck. My department head joins them.

As I’ve reflected on this over the last couple days, their authority reminded me of Confucius’s concept of the junzi, the “superior” or “noble man,” a subject I once taught in an adjunct World History course for this department head: the superior man is “easy to serve but difficult to please.” A rare combination. They were gentle but demanding, graciously insisting on high standards of work, encouraging me to live up to my potential. It was never difficult to work for any of them but I always knew I could do better, and improved as I worked for them. I’m glad to say these are not the only such bosses I’ve had.

The internet is full of vindictive, cynical, hostile takes on the relationship between employer and employee, and it’s not hard to understand why so many people assume it must be adversarial. But I’ve been blessed to see a number of genuinely good bosses, including my current and former deans and department heads at my full-time work, and to cherish the memories of these who have passed away. Precisely by being a good boss they proved to be more. RIP.

Leisure, wonder, and Josef Pieper

I turned in final grades last Thursday evening after graduation and, this morning, myself graduated from the college's New Faculty Course, officially ending my first year as a full-time History instructor. Today is also the first day of in-service for the summer session. So work is on my mind, as is leisure. Appropriately, then, I read this nice short piece from ISI on Josef Pieper and his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture. I recommend it—both the article and the book itself.

I first read Leisure in the spring of 2015, as I concluded a semester teaching as an adjunct at two different colleges, tutoring two students—one in German—at my wife's school, and working part time at a sporting goods store. That was also the semester my daughter was born. By the time I picked up Pieper's book, I was exhausted.

Pieper, a good Thomist, understood. Leisure is in part a critique of modern work, which is really a tyranny of economic activity over the whole person. "The world of work," he wrote, "is becoming our entire world; it threatens to engulf us completely." We all know a workaholic; probably several. Pieper argues that, while work is necessary and good, leisure is crucial to the creation of culture and our flourishing as human beings, both individually and in community. 

The ISI piece does a good job of explaining this. By "leisure," Pieper does not mean mere free time, spent aimlessly or on what he calls elsewhere "the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli" that dope us against boredom and sedate us between shifts at work. Rather, leisure is itself active, something pursued and embraced, something open and reflective and, therefore, basically philosophical. "To perceive all that is unusual and exceptional, all that is wonderful, in the midst of the ordinary things of everyday life, is the beginning of philosophy." And culture grows from this through sharing—stories, poems, art. After all, the great Western epics from the Iliad to Beowulf were composed for leisure time among friends and companions.

Something to think about. As summer approaches, we may have more or less downtime depending on our jobs, but let's use the time we have not simply to laze around or "rest" in a utilitarian way, but for leisure. In that way, both our work and our lives will become more meaningful.