November 14, 2007.  I suppose many things annoy me that shouldn't.  I should be better at accepting "the way things are," but it isn't easy.  One of the hardest annoyances to accept is irresponsibility and its consequences, and there's certainly a lot of that going around.

As I've noted in these pages, students can be incredibly irresponsible about everything from doing the work to showing up for class.  A friend says that this is because I teach at a community college.  "If you taught at Princeton," he says, "this wouldn't happen."  I wonder.  A cavalier attititude toward responsibility – even a reluctance to make any commitments at all – seems to pervade our society at all levels.  It's not just kids and young people; it's adults as well.  It's not just the "hired help"; it's professionals, too.  Indeed, professionals may be the worst offenders because they think that their "important" status gives them the right to ignore "trivialities" such as punctuality.

It's not just what we're not teaching our children.  It's the example we set for each other.  When enough people start showing up at meetings late, nobody expects meetings to start on time, and soon everyone is showing up late.  Not long ago, customers accepted the premise that delivery people or service people could do no better than give us a four-hour window when they would show up.  Now, we are surprised when they hit even that broad target.  There's no penalty for their showing up late; it's expected.

The worst part of this phenomenon is that people can be very hypocritical about it.  They wring their hands about the irresponsibility of other people, but they engage in same behavior themselves.  We have an excuse for being late, for not showing up, for failing to return a call; they do not.

We are adept at making excuses.  I think we train ourselves to do it.  Our first thought when we fail to meet a commitment is not how much we inconvenienced or let down other people but what "reason" we're going to give for our irresponsibility – something good enough to save face and get us off the hook.

Yeah, I know – we're all so busy and stressed that we don't have enough time to be responsible.  Well, in the first place, we all seem to have enough time to watch TV, exchange trivial e-mail and instant messages, jabber about inconsequential matters on our cell phones, and so on.  In the second place, maybe one reason we are busy and stressed is that other people are wasting our time by not keeping their commitments.

November 21, 2007.  Some people send Christmas cards, but I have a different tradition – one that forces me to get an early start on the holiday season.  (Well, it's not early by the criteria of the retail industry, which starts to hype Christmas before Halloween, but it is early by reasonable standards.)  Although my wife and I also have a tradition of sending handmade Christmas cards, my custom is to hand out homemade collections of holiday music to a select group (currently about 70 to 80 people) of friends, relatives, and acquaintances.

No, I don't record myself performing music.  My talent in that respect is virtually nil.  I cannot sing, I can barely whistle, and I think the band director in high school was tempted on several occasions to declare me "the world's worst trumpet player."  Rather, I dub tracks from my favorite Christmas albums (which now number about 200, of varying quality) to create collections that people can listen to during the holiday season.  That requires handing out the completed anthologies as soon after Thanksgiving as I can have them ready.

Like most such undertakings, it began rather simply in 1986, when I put together an audiotape of Christmas music for the family.  We had quite a few LP records (remember them?) that had only one or two selections that we really liked, so I decided to put some of our favorites on one audiotape.  In a few years, I was taping  from both LPs and CDs and handing out copies of the tapes to friends and coworkers.  It was a laborious process.  After I made the master tape, each copy had to be individually made, so (even with high-speed dubbing) it could take 45 minutes to produce each copy of a 90-minute program.  Needless to say, I was selective about who received them.

By 2001, though, the digital revolution was in full swing, and I had acquired a standalone CD burner.  To my dismay, though, the CD master that I made on the burner could not be copied on the same machine.  In what I still consider one of the most absurd moves by the music industry, they installed a chip that made a copy of a copy sound positively awful.  Thanks to the IT staff at my office, however, I learned that I could make a copy of the master on a computer and then make as many copies of that as I wanted on the burner, without distortion.  Of course, all the professional counterfeiters had been using computers for this purpose since the advent of digital discs, so the industry's protective chip was – and still is – only an albatross around the neck of individuals such as me, who bought hundreds of CDs and wanted only to make collections for their friends.

Be that as it may, by 2002, I had settled into my current routine.  I spend two or three days creating a master collection on the burner, using a rewritable disc.  When it's done, I use software on my computer to make a copy that I can test on a standard CD player (the master won't play back on another machine unless it's finalized, which I don't want to do until I'm sure it meets my satisfaction).  If that disc passes muster, I use the same software to crank out multiple copies on the computer.  It will make about ten in an hour, and since all I have to do is feed it blank discs, I can putter about with something else at the same time.  Since then, I have been much more generous about handing out discs.

Unfortunately, that is not all there is to it.  The remaining chores are labor-intensive.  I still must design and print the covers for the jewel cases (I use the standard ones, not the slimlines), a back cover that lists the disc's contents, and the labels.  Putting the packages together has become my wife's chore – and she spends literally days doing it while I make copies of discs and operate the printer.  Last year, we did a three-disc set, each with a different label, cover, and back, and she made me promise never to go overboard like that again.

This year, I'm settling for a two-disc set, roughly an hour and a half of music.  I just finished the first master this weekend, have ensured that it passes muster, and am in the process of making copies and printing the packaging materials.  Tomorrow, I shall return to the burner to start making the master of the second disc.  By December 1, I should be giving or mailing discs to people and, I hope, helping them to get in a holiday mood.

Naturally, I wonder each year whether it's worth the effort.  I'm not around when people play the discs, and it's tough to know what kind of reaction they have since that many people are bound to represent a vast spectrum of musical preferences.  Naturally, I shun the bland elevator music and the stuff that one hears in the stores every December anyway.  I know I've had some success.  I awed them with Mannheim Steamroller before their recordings became a fixture in the stores, and I have introduced them to many arrangements of holiday music and to many artists whom they might not have heard otherwise.

The chief testimony that these collections are a success, however, is that I can't stop producing them.  A few years after I started giving them out, people were asking, "Are you going to do a Christmas collection again this year?"  Nowadays, they ask, "When are we going to get your Christmas collection?"  And some say, "You know, the first thing that comes out when we start getting ready for the holidays is your Christmas music."  I've got to admit it – it's nice to be a tradition.

There is a downside, however.  After auditioning hundreds of holiday songs and selecting the ones for my collections, I am saturated with Christmas music long before Christmas Day.  What I've been listening to mostly is far better than the stuff played in the stores all month (which most of us don't really listen to anyway), but I'm ready for something else.  The sound of the wind and the whisper of snow would be nice.

November 30, 2007.  Although I enjoy teaching part-time (I wouldn't do it if I didn't), I am always glad to know that the end of the semester is near.  The last few weeks are easier for the instructors than the rest of the semester is, at least in the kind of introductory college course that I teach.

For one thing, I have fewer papers to grade.  The deadbeats have dropped out.  It's amazing how many students will pay tuition, try to get credit for a course by just being there (some of the time), and then decide that they don't want to take the course after all if it means working and learning something.  Indeed, one student who is completing the course complains that there are "too many essays."  How absolutely unfair of me it is to require essays in a course in English Composition!  (I require six short essays in a 15-week course, and that's a decrease from the eight essays that I required ten years ago.)  Anyway, most of the "survivors" are writing at least a little better than they were at the beginning, and this, coupled with the disappearance of the slouches, makes the most burdensome part of teaching composition (reading and critiquing papers) somewhat lighter.

Classes are more lively toward the end, too.  The dullards who had nothing to say or who shot off their mouths with idiotic remarks (which caused the more serious students to roll their eyes) are now wasting time somewhere else.  Although not everyone who remains is certain of passing, nearly all of the remaining students have a sense of accomplishment at having done close to their best to meet a difficult challenge.  If I made the course easier, fewer would drop out, but nobody would have this sense of having accomplished something.  Indeed, it would then be doubtful whether anybody had learned much of anything.

There's a lesson in this for all of us.  What comes easily and effortlessly is usually of little, if any, worth.  The few "A" students in the class could probably have coasted to B's with very little effort, but they learned something and gained much more than they would have otherwise by putting in the effort to write "A" papers.  For the majority of the survivors, though, the rewards may be greater even though the final grades are lower.  About fifteen weeks ago when they got back their first compositions, they may have doubted their ability to write anything halfway decent.  Now, they have proven to themselves that they can.

As I have said many times, very, very few students fail because they cannot do the work.  Most of those who fail do so because it's easier to give up.  So it is, I think, with almost everything in life.  We cannot all excel or ascend to the top of the heap, but we can not fail if we take the more difficult road of not giving up.