There is a passage in Pirke Avot -- arguably, there is always a passage in Pirke Avot, but bear with me here -- attributed to Shammai, a bit of advice making him out as significantly less the Anti-Hillel than later tradition would have it: "Fix a period for your study of Torah; say little and do much; and receive each person with a cheerful face." I figure I'm mostly beyond hope on #2 and intermittently accomplished at #3, but lately I've been working on #1. When I moved to Boondoggle a little over a year ago, a small part of my brain apparently decided that since I was going to stay put, it was past time I found some fixed periods of study. Of course, given my schedule and the distance at which my family is located, "stay put" is a relative term -- and so I have a wandering-Jew plant hanging in my office window by way of metacommentary and a whole host of stories about how and where I study.

I flew to Major Professional Conference #1 on Saturday morning -- which I am never doing again for many reasons, but one of them is that I like to attend these wacky things we call services around that time. After staggering to one session and through several book exhibits in a state of serious exhaustion (I only bought five books!), I gave in and spent late Shabbat afternoon curled up in flannel pajamas on a king-sized bed with fat-free Fig Newtons, a cup of the weird herbal tea my hotel kept putting in my room, and Rachel Adler's Engendering Judaism*. I am not altogether certain that this is what Shammai had in mind. but I have been reading in bed since age four or so and have no intention of stopping. (I have, however, learned not to admit this in an academic setting -- some years ago, I convulsed an ordinarily staid seminar by gloomily admitting that I identified with Maimonides' complaint early in the Guide about intellectual dilettantes who only study when they have time and leap too easily to opinions. Of course, Maimonides actually said that his interlocutor only studied when he could "leave off drinking and copulating," and so I found myself explaining that I didn't ordinarily read the Guide while doing either of those things -- well, drinking tea -- but that the passage gave me the general sense that the Rambam didn't envision nice Jewish girls reading his masterwork in bed. "You read the Guide in bed?" my professor asked incredulously. "Uh-huh," I said, and distracted him by asking whether Maimonides was genuinely elitist or it just looked that way.)

The next weekend was Thanksgiving, and I spent that in My Home Town, which gave me an opportunity I'd been waiting for: I descended on the Torah and Talmud study classes Temple Hometown holds on Saturday mornings. The Torah study group is run by the rabbi and has, interestingly enough, gotten tired of the Pentateuch and moved into Joshua (I kind of wish Temple Boondoggle would try that); the Talmud study is fairly new, run by a longtime congregant, and seems to be soldiering through available volumes of the Steinsaltz edition at an impressive rate.** Anyway, I ran my mouth as little as possible (see #2 of Shammai), which still meant I talked a lot -- but it was a pleasantly conversational group and a good time was had by all. I also admitted to my identity in the Truly Godawful Confirmation Group Photo (note to self: never, ever wear bangs), which hopefully balanced out the fact that I occasionally use the word "hermeneutical" in casual conversation.

Then I came home and tried to talk to my mother about Jewish education, apparently because I was on some sort of educational high. I do this every couple of months, and nothing much ever comes of it except slight huffiness on Mom's part. What I would like to figure out is why so much of my mother's generation got so alienated from actual Jewish learning and only went back to synagogues to (a) get the kids Bar/Bat Mitzvahed and/or (b) engage in social activism with a healthy dose of self-congratulation. (Okay, yes, I sometimes get fed up with the predominantly Boomer crowd at Temple Boondoggle.) Unfortunately, I was talking to my mother rather than a case study, and there's really no polite way to ask, "so, how did your Judaism narrow down to being all about me plus occasional trips to shul when you visit your sister, and isn't that kind of depressing sometimes?" Frankly, I don't quite know how to relate to people who aren't at least interested in the topics I'm interested in -- this is my greatest weakness as a teacher -- and that's without throwing in the complicating factor of family. So I am no further along in comprehending my mother's Judaism, and she is probably not much further along in comprehending mine -- but she did ask me, spontaneously (I suspect Aunt Miriam's involvement), if Reuven Hammer's commentary on Siddur Sim Shalom might be the kind of thing I'd like for Hanukkah. So... yeah. Maybe. Someday.

It's easier to tackle the problem from an institutional vantage point. I've started attending meetings of Temple Boondoggle's education committee, a group which has succeeded in convincing me that we desperately need a separate adult education committee. It's not that the committee members don't care about adult education, it's just that they keep, um, forgetting it's included under "education." Also, trying to iron out various Hebrew-school-related issues is more than enough work for one group. We do have most of the components of an average congregation's adult education program: Torah and Haftarah study, interfaith/conversion outreach, trupp and tefillah classes, various levels of Hebrew. What we don't have is any kind of congregational supervision, overview, or serious attempt to weld these into a cohesive experience. (We also don't have Talmud study, but give me time.) There are larger congregational issues at work here, of course, and I need to put in another few months of meetings before I can be certain I know what I'm doing -- but I am collecting ideas as I go.

The thing to do, I understand, is to make other people think a separate adult-ed committee is their idea. And this is what my mother is very, very good at doing -- what, in fact, she does for a living. So I switched to talking about synagogue politics, and she told me what was going on in library-system politics, and my father came in somewhere along the line and we had lunch. And then I found a mattress (my parents are in the midst of converting my old bedroom into an office), and a couple of additional books I'd picked up at MPC #1, and curled up again with a Diet Coke. I am beginning to think that Saturday afternoons are my fixed time -- provided that Shammai was using the most expansive possible definition of "Torah" -- and that my version of saying little involves deciding what to say to whom. But, as I said, I have the cheerful face more or less down. Mostly.

* -- Which deserves its own post, but I'd dearly love to have a multi-blog discussion about it -- anyone? I mean, it's by no means a perfect book, but it's a lot more worthy of collective consideration than Nothing Sacred IMO. I have also been thinking (thanks to Zackary) that I should take another crack at The Star of Redemption. Would anyone like to join me in a completely disorganized Book Discussion Group For Jewishly Interested Bloggers? I'm sure I could come up with a catchier title given time....
** -- I think the Steinsaltz may, after all, be better than the Artscroll for teaching purposes. It breaks down Mishnah, Gemara, and later halakhah very clearly. Of course, I miss the traditional layout, but that's me, not a congregational priority. Steinsaltz is coming out with Berachot, and that'd be just right for easing the nice people at Temple Boondoggle into Talmud study, don't you think?

Advance warning: if you do not like whining, you will not enjoy this post. It is late, and I am more or less trapped in my office because it's raining medium-size mammals outside, and I am putting off grading papers. In other words, yes, I am feeling sorry for myself. That said, it's a fairly accurate whine, and the substance of it is that I am tired.

I am tired of Not Quite Fitting In, and I am even more tired of being the one who tries to adapt to whatever congregation I find myself in. And I've set things up so that I encounter people from across the Jewish religious spectrum on a weekly basis -- with the unfortunate side effect that I don't get to rest from worrying about any of it. Some days I'm chatting with a friend who had spent decades in evangelical Protestantism and is feeling her way back towards her native Judaism -- I keep reminding her that her baal teshuva friends aren't even being properly Orthodox when they keep expecting her to act as shabbos goy -- and some days I'm at Talmud study trying not to refer to a group of ten men and women as a "minyan" lest I offend someone and biting my tongue when our (extremely Orthodox) leader gives us a history of the compilation of the Mishnah by channeling Sherira Gaon.

Then there's Temple Boondoggle -- a wonderfully accepting place, but absolutely overrun with Bar/Bat Mitzvahs (if there's anything more tacky than a gift table in the synagogue lobby, I don't want to know about it), and that bizarre thing they do where everyone does the Shema at their own pace and it sounds absolutely fucking awful. Even the Marvelous Monthly Minyan is getting slightly on my nerves these days, largely because I'm trying not to offend people on either end of our spectrum and am getting cranky about ever-longer Torah portions which I am not reading up to my standards. (Yes, I could turn them down. I am a masochist have trouble admitting my own limitations. Moving on.) In the blogging world, I sometimes feel that I have the charming choice of deciding whether to bother contesting the received wisdom that Jews have always been Orthodox, Reform Judaism leads to intermarriage which leads to assimilation, and halakhah has never changed -- or to fulfill someone's worst expectations if I choose to post on Shabbat and/or demonstrate my relative lack of knowledge about halakhah.

To cap it all off, every other Thursday I attend meetings planning an interfaith worship service for which some committee members sincerely believe that Catholics and Baptists are from completely different religious traditions. (See above re: masochism.) So, in summation, I currently have some attachment to pretty much every remotely Jewish organization currently operating in the city of Boondoggle proper, and none of them quite fit me. Earlier today I was reading about halakhic changes mipnei darchei shalom ("for the sake of the ways of peace") versus changes mipnei tikkun olam ("for the sake of repairing the world") -- and I wondered, because there are things I am willing to compromise on if it would help repair genuine breaches, and others I am willing to temporarily hush up about for the sake of peace, but I occasionally feel like I'm losing track of which are which, and which things I can't compromise regardless. Or maybe I just wish more people would compromise in my general direction.

On the other hand -- because I am not temperamentally suited to whine for too long -- it does occur to me that I fit in on Saturday morning, when one of our minyan regulars came in late (two aliyahs ahead of where he was supposed to be reading) and told us to include the synagogues in Turkey in our healing prayers. And I got to deliver my d'var about the women in Vayera, and I got to quote Nachmanides. And I fit in not long ago when I finally filled out the membership paperwork for Temple Boondoggle (that being the only one of these organizations with actual membership dues), and people here in blogland often give me excellent advice. So -- yeah, I guess this has turned into an extremely roundabout answer to Chris's question. What I do "to get more involved in [my] congregation" is, apparently, to assemble some sort of religious affiliation out of bits and pieces and shards and buried sparks and books and blogs and a healthy dose of stubbornness -- and once in awhile I do think it helps lead to peace. Repairing the world... well, that's in the long-term plan.

I had planned to favor my readers with an extended meditation on the subject of hemlines, exposed kneecaps, and teaching uniforms -- a topic primarily of interest to females, unless some of my male colleagues have neglected to tell me about their agonized deliberation over late-summer Bermuda shorts. Fortunately, however, something more interesting has come up, courtesy of Avraham at Protocols.

Over at the Society for Biblical Literature website, a scholar named Thomas Phillips is predicting a gloomy future for his discipline -- and he's not worried about the coherence of the field of Biblical Studies, or its privileged place in an increasingly multireligious culture. No, he's worried about contingent faculty, and how their growing numbers have not only reduced the number of available tenure-track positions but also raised the tenure bar to ever more nail-biting heights for those of us who got lucky. See, there is a self-interested reason for tenure-track faculty to join with adjuncts. (Unfortunately, there's an equally self-interested reason for us to make nice until we get tenure, and the two have a nasty habit of canceling each other out.) Meanwhile, both tenured and tenure-track faculty assume ever-larger proportions of committee and advising work -- and much as we love our jobs, very few people think "oooh! committees!" Keep these trends going at their current pace for another fifty years, and you wind up with scorched earth -- or, less figuratively, a gutted profession and discipline.

None of this should come as a surprise to academics -- if they haven't been keeping up with Invisible Adjunct, they should at least read the Chronicle. We're just used to hearing it from jobless grad students rather than associate professors. But Phillips makes his doomsday predictions concrete, and his opening gambit is a particularly astute observation, one which is new to me. He observes that if you take the process of adjunctification to its logical conclusion -- tenured-but-overworked faculty in a few hundred wealthy institutions, contingent faculty in the rest -- you will only get a couple hundred people, as opposed to the current thousands, showing up for the national SBL meeting in Some City With A Convention Center in 2050. There won't be enough job searches to bother with conference interviews, contingent faculty will have neither the departmental funding nor the ongoing academic interests to attend, and tenured faculty will be too busy to make more than a token representation from their prestigious departments. It could be the end of major professional conferences as we know them.

Those of you who just hauled out the World's Smallest Violin -- no, really. Think about it. No matter how inconvenient your Major Professional Conference is, it does some very important things. It brings people together from across the country (sometimes continent or world) and from most of the tiers and levels of academia. (For all the talk about name-tag-scoping and social solecisms at conferences, it's still entirely possible for a Smart Young Thing with good questions to wind up deep in conversation with a Smart Old Thing after the panel.) Its formal offerings stimulate people to create better research and better classes -- at least, if they're paying the tiniest bit of attention (and if nothing at your Major Professional Conference interests you in the slightest, you are in the wrong profession). It lets us examine and buy books from major academic publishers at discounts. It gives us a sense of the breadth and depth of our fields or disciplines; it even allows us the occasional hearty chuckle ("they approved a session about what?") or comforting sense of adequacy ("okay, if that paper got accepted, I can certainly give it a shot"). And I don't think we should discount the pleasure (not to mention the networking opportunities) involved in meeting old acquaintances or friends and making new ones.

But what about the job-hunters? The "meat market" is easily my least favorite thing about major professional conferences -- I think desperation vibes are contagious, and while I realize that watching from the sidelines as my friends try to get jobs is harder on them than on me, it's still frustrating for me. And, yes, those flimsy interviewing booths are a violation of the Eighth Amendment. Still -- wouldn't you rather get your job interviews out of the way in a several-day block, away from other distractions, and in a situation where you can see my interviewers and take cues from their body language?* Afterwards, you can go out drinking with sympathetic friends, buy lots of books, take advantage of the conference location to do something touristy, work out at the hotel gym, or whatever coping mechanism you prefer.** My job-hunting MPC two years ago was marked by plenty of panicked phone calls, consumption of junk food from hotel vending machines, and aimless wandering through a Western metropolis -- but I also managed to buy books, chat with friends, and attend some really good sessions. If you're not job-hunting, of course, it only gets better.

So, yeah, I think Phillips has a convincing argument -- not just for SBL members, and not just for the academically disenfranchised -- in favor of working against the move towards contingent faculty. I sure wish someone would suggest a practical way of going about it, though. Meanwhile, if you'll excuse me, I need to go drop some suits off at the dry cleaner -- MPC #1 is coming up.

* -- Some people, I know, prefer phone interviews because they like to have all their notes spread out in front of them. De gustibus -- but I think they're weird.
** -- Most conference hotels also have hot tubs. I always pack a bathing suit when I attend a conference. :)

So, about Talmud study -- have you ever taken a nice long drink of water, then realized you'd been really, really thirsty for hours? Like that. Only better. I am trying not to get too enthusiastic about this until I am certain that we can make it fly as a regular event, but... whee!

The real problem with Talmud study is that I can't quite make Saturday-morning Torah study at Temple Boondoggle fit my suddenly elevated expectations for Jewish learning. Said expectations can sometimes collide rather nastily with experienced reality, especially on mornings when all the people who like to go off on tangents show up and none of the people who usually pull the conversation back on track do (except me, and I wasn't leading, which limits what I can in all politeness accomplish). And while I object to out-group snarking about Reform-going-on-Renewal Judaism, I am part of the in-group. So here is an abridged list of things I could have said yesterday but didn't:

- "Blessing is not the same thing as prayer."
- "Also, blessing is not the same thing as arguing for direct divine intervention, but if you go on for much longer I'm going to be praying for God to pull the fire alarm."
- "We were talking about Abraham, remember? And this book we call the Torah?"
- "Could we please not rehearse free will vs. predestination before doing some background reading? And by 'we,' I mean 'you.'"
- "I don't care what you believe in. Really. Truly. Honestly. With all my heart and soul and might."
- "There is nothing about miracles anywhere in the verses we are discussing. Just thought I'd point that out."
- "Blessing is also not the same thing as energy healing, and I can't believe I just had to say that."
- "When we get to Leviticus, you're going to shut up, right?"
- "Ah, yes. Just the time to mention Islam. Some of us try to actually make a connection to the text, but I see you're brave enough not to bother with that."
- "Midrash. That story is midrash. Not Torah. Mi. Drash."
- "What the heck do the Ten Commandments have to do with this?"
- "I'm sorry, this is 'Torah study.' The 'share your Personal Spiritual Journey Unasked-For' class is next door."
- "Energy healing is so not the point."
- "I think we should switch to hands-on Torah study. I'll be Abraham and you be the offering, okay? Now just pretend you're lying in two pieces, with your mouth on one side and your vocal cords on the other....."
- "I could've sworn there were some really interesting passages in this week's portion."
- "Ani ma'amin b'emunah shleima... what? I thought we were just kind of announcing things, and I prefer to announce things in head-voice. And the longer I sit in this class, the more convinced I am that we are in the generation of the heel."
- "You do not have a clue. You would not have a clue if an angel of the Lord appeared to you and told you that you were going to give birth to a clue after ninety years of barrenness."
- "No, I'm pretty sure that's not about energy healing, either."
- "Let me tell you the conditions under which it's possible to have a triple Purim...."

Details about the particular school of energy healing have been changed to protect the, er, innocent. *sigh* You know how Arthur Waskow described Jewish Renewal as feminist Hasidism? I have a horrible suspicion that I am, at heart, a feminist Mitnagid. Only -- with due respect to all the great Aharonim on both sides -- I think I have a rather better-developed sense of humor about it. For instance, I am looking forward to matching my handbag and shoes to my tefillin.

Speaking of tefillin, I have an uncle who has agreed to teach me the appropriate knots next time we are in the same place -- I've looked at diagrams online, and all I can think is that I was never very good at origami either. But his children just borrowed his old ones to learn (they don't wear them regularly), and what with the statistically improbable prevalence of girls on my mother's side of the family, I can't find anyone who remembers actually purchasing tefillin (as opposed to having them purchased for them). Do Baraita readers have an opinion on whether it's worth shelling out for all-leather batim (the little boxes), or whether plain or reinforced parchment boxes (peshutim or peshutim mehudarim) will suffice?

I am open to any other advice about purchasing tefillin, as long as it has absolutely nothing to do with energy healing.

There is nothing particularly serious about my choice of title; I am just thinking of new and exciting ways to express "miscellanies." In this case, I have the added benefit of evoking Clement of Alexandria's famous work of Christian philosophy, which exists online in a public-domain translation afflicted with the unfortunate habit of translating all the naughty bits from Greek into Latin. Book III, you will observe, is all in Latin -- a particularly quick-witted specialist in patristics once used it as the answer to the question "What is the Christian equivalent of the Kama Sutra?" I hope all my readers who are not Latin-literate are now experiencing pangs of regret. ;)

What I actually wanted to share with Baraita's readers is a series of good-news items. For example, one of our student organizations is sponsoring its annual no-more-than-$1 book sale downstairs -- yes, in my very office building -- and I have managed to hold myself to five (5) books. (It helps that I am out of cash. Still. I have some spare change left.) My acquisitions run as follows:

- Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. I don't know why I didn't already own a copy of this, but I didn't.
- Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book. Ditto. Only now I realize I should really own the lot -- I had them continually checked out from the library for several years.
- The Seventeenth Century, a document collection edited by Andrew Losky (part of a Sources in Western Civilization series from the Free Press). It looks as though Bossuet has been abridged enough for me to plough through it, and I don't think I have a translation of any of Galileo's letters in my office.
- On Being A Jewish Feminist, an article collection edited by Susannah Heschel. Very good articles, some on topics I know well and others I had never considered. (Good to know that "I like the burnt pieces!" attitude shared by my mother and her mother has a venerable pedigree. Better to know that, actually, I don't like the burnt pieces and will not be training my daughters to claim them either.)
- Jonathan Levi, A Guide For The Perplexed. Apparently, this is a novel published in 1992, and the back cover offers appealing blurbs ("combines the romantic erudition of Umberto Eco and A.S. Byatt with the ingenious storytelling of Scheherazade"), but I would have purchased it for the title alone.
- Furthermore, one of my colleagues purchased and gave me Sabbath: A Day of Delight by Abraham E. Millgram, a combo liturgical guide and document reader complete with tidbits from Philo, Yalkut Shimoni, and Heinrich Heine (who, as I have just learned from the Jewish Feminist book, was a descendant of Gluckel of Hamelin). There are also zemirot and cantillation charts complete with musical notation. I love my colleagues.

In further exciting academic news, I have been meeting with students for most of the afternoon. Not only is there a test coming up tomorrow in one class, I have my first ever group of student advisees, most of whom are double-majors and sensibly seek out other advisors, but a few of whom want me to tell them if they have fulfilled the requirements for our department's major. Since our major requirements are in flux due to course renumbering, this is... exciting. No, actually, it gives me a nebulous feeling of accomplishment -- and my advisees seem to have their acts very much together otherwise.

Tomorrow night, if all goes well, I will be attending the first meeting of a Boondoggle city shiur doing Tractate Megillah. Whee! (Feel free to imagine that I am bouncing with enthusiasm. I do that sometimes.) I had absolutely nothing to do with starting this up, but I am thrilled; the reason I know all the Talmud email lists is because I've never been able to find a group of people in the same metropolitan region who want to study Gemara with the likes of me. Maybe if I pray hard enough, someone will also start up a weekday egalitarian minyan so that I can go ahead and buy myself some tefillin. (I could buy them right now, but I'd basically have them for accessorizing purposes, and I do grasp that that's really not the point.) Anyway, I'm excited.

Oh, and on Monday the department came through with funding for me to attend Major Professional Conference #1, despite the part where my reasons for attending were articulated as "I will be dashing around, talking to lots and lots of people, and will provide free publicity for our programs." Well, I will. Just watch. Now I merely have to send out two dozen or so emails to all the people I absolutely can't fail to catch up with during the conference.

It's definitely shaping up to be a good week, despite my vaguely flulike symptoms earlier on and no matter what Angel springs on me tonight. Especially if I can finish writing this test and get out of the building without stopping by the book sale one more time....

I am not at all the sort of person who bans books, but if I were going to have Harry Potter banned, it would not be for the witchcraft. Or for the questionable ethics of the magical world in general. Or for killing off a character I liked in the last book. Or even for the excessive adverbs. No, I believe that the most offensive thing about the Harry Potter books, far and away, is the way History of Magic is taught at Hogwarts.

There's no chance of my being objective about this: not only am I a teacher, but given my professional training there's only one Hogwarts class outside of Muggle Studies that I'd have a prayer of teaching -- and I'd begin by pointing out that European witch burnings mostly took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not the fourteenth, no matter what it says in Chamber of Secrets. I may have a built-in blind spot as well: when you spend a good part of your childhood alternating between fairy tales (the grown-up sort) and European history textbooks by way of reading material, you have serious trouble believing that the history of magic -- or the history of anything else, but especially the history of magic -- could be anything but interesting. You also develop a certain talent for ignoring poorly taught history while retaining any interesting bits -- it probably helps that I had an amorphous class called "Social Studies" until high school* -- and for combining facts and legends.

It seems safe to assume that J.K. Rowling's primary-school instruction in history was less benign, judging from its appearance in the Harry Potter books. As we learn in the very first volume, "easily the most boring lesson was History of Magic, which was the only class taught by a ghost.... Binns droned on and on while they scribbled down names and dates and got Emeric the Evil and Uric the Oddball mixed up." Well, okay, Rowling decided to trot out the time-honored joke of the professor who died and didn't notice, and she attached it to history -- lucky history! -- but there's a bit more to it than that. History is not unimportant per se in Harry's adventure -- Harry's own background is recent history, the importance of the Philosopher's Stone** is buried in past centuries, and the kids learn crucial puzzle-solving details from Hermione's readings of Hogwarts: A History. But despite the presence of amusingly named people and an obviously still-relevant history, the History of Magic class is unquestionably -- and quite literally -- dead dull. Professor Binns doesn't even contribute to the set of teachers' puzzles which Harry, Ron, and Hermione must solve at the end of the book.

In Chamber of Secrets we finally learn the problem with Professor Binns's teaching technique. Hermione convinces him to drop the lesson plans for a few minutes and tell the story of the Chamber of Secrets, which fascinates the entire class but irritates Binns. "I deal with facts," he insists, "not myths and legends." Before long, he has run out of patience with the students' questions and announces: "'We will return, if you please, to history, to solid, believable, verifiable fact.' And within five minutes, the class had sunk back into its usual torpor." Well, no wonder -- even if Binns objected so strongly to talking about the Chamber of Secrets, any halfway decent teacher would've offered an impromptu lesson on the Hogwarts Founders, or brought in one of Dumbledore's past-Headmaster portraits to guest-lecture on the topic, or maybe offered some suggestions about the roots of anti-Muggle prejudice in the wizarding world (since it's clearly a good millennium old) and brought the students smack up against some of Grindelwald's less palatable writings on the subject.

This is possibly the only point in the books where I sympathize with Harry's attitude towards History of Magic -- because I have not always had the best possible experience with history instruction, and someone who sounded very much like Professor Binns is one reason I wound up deviating from my collegiate plans to go into graduate study in history proper. But it's all in the presentation. Knowing that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215 is spectacularly useless trivia; knowing that this implies 800 years of certain kinds of individual rights claims, or that King John signed the document after being weakened by not only fighting with his barons (who were ticked off at his brother's bankrupting the country to get back from Crusade and his own steady loss of French lands, leading to several more centuries of warfare, important cross-cultural influences, proto-nationalist sentiment, etc.) but also feuding with Pope Innocent III at the absolute zenith of the medieval papacy's power (leading to several more centuries of centralization, bureaucratization, political and theological hijinks, the aftereffects of the Fourth Lateran Council, the English Reformation, etc.) -- well, see, that's useful, not to mention a good starting point for some really amazing stories.***

Unfortunately, neither Professor Binns nor Harry sees history this way, and if J.K. Rowling disagrees, she's playing her cards very close to her chest. There are some glimmerings of thematic relevance here and there -- for instance, Harry begins Prisoner of Azkaban writing a History of Magic essay about the pointlessness of Muggles trying to burn witches shortly before his annual escape from his Muggle relatives (who would certainly burn witches if they could) and considerably longer before discovering that the wizarding world features equally massive and far less negligible miscarriages of justices -- but this connection, not to mention the probable fates of falsely accused witches, does not seem to trouble Harry. In Order of the Phoenix, Harry's History of Magic studies include details on the wizarding world's largely antagonistic relations to giants and goblins, but Harry never makes the conceptual leap to the Order's ongoing work of trying to persuade those creatures not to side with Lord Voldemort. Of course, canonically speaking, Harry's not really the sharpest twig in the broom-cupboard, especially in the most recent volume of the series. His narratorial perspective is severely limited.

All the same, we don't have any serious authorial opposition to Harry's judgment on History of Magic -- sure, Hermione takes careful notes, but Hermione takes careful notes for everything. More damning is the fact that advanced History of Magic is not a required subject for those interested in becoming Aurors, the folks responsible for taking out Dark Wizards. Between that and his miserable showing on the History of Magic OWL exam, I have trouble imagining that Harry will continue to take the subject in his final two years at Hogwarts. Trying to guess authorial intent is every bit as reliable as the Hogwarts Divination classes, but I can't help wondering why on earth Rowling put History of Magic classes into her book in the first place. Except for that one scene in Chamber of Secrets, the HoM classes have only advanced the series plot in that they allowed Harry to fall asleep during his fifth-year exams and have a crucial dream. I also don't think they're there there solely to fulfill some distribution requirement of class conflict (so to speak) in a Schoolboy Yarn: Harry already has a class with an unfair teacher (Snape), and in short order he gets additional classes with instructors who are marginally incompetent (Hagrid), largely fraudulent (Trelawney), and sadistic as well as boring (Umbridge).

From the perspective of story structure, History of Magic is a bit like Arithmancy and Ancient Runes, the mysterious subjects we only hear about through Hermione: so far, it seems, they exist only because they are wizarding analogues for regular school subjects. These wizarding analogues don't necessarily reflect Rowling's own attitudes towards their Muggle equivalents -- I don't read many interviews, but I seem to recall that Rowling shared Hermione's feelings about the pointlessness of school sports, whereas Quidditch has been presented as exciting and plot-critical within the HPverse. Still, when it comes to the History of Magic at Hogwarts, one can't help but suspect that we are reading either Rowling's memories of history classes or Rowling's view of how most children experience history classes. I'm not sure which option is more depressing, especially when I start thinking about the numbers of children and adults who have read and enjoyed the Harry Potter books. This is, after all, a real-world problem.

Of course, there are other reasons why history is not often taught with vim and vigor, and most of those are political. If I had to come up with an explanation for the neglect of History of Magic within the universe of the Harry Potter books themselves, that's what I'd plump for. In the HPverse fanfiction novel Dissipation and Despair, after telling the local vicar a spine-tingling fictional narrative about English witch-hunts and a secondary character's ancestress, Neville Longbottom explains: "History was very badly taught at my school. We were all so bored no-one could remember a word of it. It's only after I started to read it for myself that I wondered if that, perhaps, might have been deliberate." Well, yeah. God bless fanfiction. But I don't know that Rowling herself is going to write that kind of payoff scene, which brings us back to Real-World Problem #1.

You see, I don't think the humanities are in danger because their academic practitioners are getting lost in theory; I think the humanities are in danger because they're somehow getting taught so poorly that humans consider them irrelevant. Which scares me a lot more than the latest Dark Lord to come down the pike. But that's another post.

* -- My worst memory of Social Studies was seventh grade, when the teacher required us to write out notecards in order to write a paper. Even in seventh grade, this struck me as fairly techno-silly, but it wouldn't've been so bad if I hadn't misplaced the notecards, written the paper from the articles I'd photocopied, then had to go back and redo the notecards to hand in along with the paper. I got an A and an abiding distaste for notecards. Still, I was capable of distinguishing between the relatively interesting topic of the paper (the rhetoric linking the Six Days' and Yom Kippur Wars) and the godawfully pointless pedagogy involved.
** -- Which was a perfectly fun and legitimate borrowing from the real-world History of Magic, and I could spit thinking about the assumptions involved in changing it to "Sorcerer's Stone" for the American edition and then the movie. Yeah, wouldn't want the kiddies to inadvertently trip and learn something. *rolls eyes*
*** -- And that isn't even getting started on the really good stories about King John. ;) In the unlikely event that I find myself teaching ten- and eleven-year-olds about Magna Carta, I shall simply assign them Puck of Pook's Hill and a couple of Robin Hood movies along with the occasional primary-source snippet (in translation). In the even more unlikely event that I find myself teaching ten- and eleven-year-olds at Hogwarts, I shall ditch the Board-mandated curriculum and craft a year-long interdisciplinary "How To Defeat A Dark Lord" seminar in conjunction with whatever poor sap they put in Defense Against The Dark Arts. (I haven't given a lot of thought to Hogwarts lesson plans, honest. They just seem to write themselves.)

The 2003 Halloween season here in Boondoggle is now formally over -- by "the Halloween season," I of course mean "as long as it takes me to polish off any leftover candy," although an argument could be made for "as long as it takes for me to polish off any leftover candy and use up all the pumpkin puree in recipes," in which case it'll take a few days longer because I am out of crumb-crust ingredients.

That said, I am sad to report that my country's moral standards are slipping. In our President's well-publicized haste to protect children against the evils of pornography and marriage (or something like that), we have failed to properly instruct these impressionable young minds in the proper etiquette and rituals for Halloween -- that is, the secular U.S. observance thereof. Since I am neither a parent nor a primary-school teacher, and since I have a full evening's experience in the handing out of candy plus close to a decade of trick-or-treating, I am obviously well suited to dictate these sorts of protective rules (although not as well-qualified as our nation's politicians). So let me suggest a few simple trick-or-treating guidelines which Baraita readers can share with the children in their lives.

(1) If there is a doorbell in evidence, ring it. If there is no doorbell, knock firmly. The homeowner is not required to wait in her living room with the TV off so that she can hear you shuffling up her steps. If the porch light is off (with no compensating lighted Halloween decorations), skip the house.

(2) Wear a costume, and be prepared to explain what you are dressed as. (Note that some face paint and/or fabric can be made into a costume by anyone with even marginal creativity and a bunch of safety pins.) If you cannot manage a costume, be prepared to offer a smart-aleck claim that you are dressed as "a kid named [whatever]," a [somethingth]-grader," or something similar. Do not under any circumstances admit that you are not wearing a costume.

(2a) Parents: don't let your kids go out without a costume. They have to learn important life lessons about wearing the right clothes and making themselves look dorky before they can be rewarded. This will come in handy later in most of their careers.

(3) Proper greetings by which to address the homeowner include "trick or treat" and "happy Halloween!" "Are you giving out candy?" is not a proper greeting. Responsible homeowners do not carve pumpkins without buying candy.

(4) The next part of the trick-or-treating ritual is an exchange of pleasantries. The homeowner may ask what you are dressed as, feign fear, demand some sort of performance, or otherwise annoy you. You may evade but must nevertheless respond politely. If at all possible, compliment the homeowner's Halloween decorations (e.g., jack-o-lanterns, ghosts, funny socks). Beware of assuming that cobwebs you glimpse in the interior of the home are Halloween decorations.

(5) It is your responsbility to utter the magic words "trick or treat?" unless they have already been said at the outset, or unless you are under five, in which case your hovering parent is entitled to prompt you.

(5a) Parents: accompany children under five while they trick-or-treat, or ensure that an older sibling takes responsibility for the little one. Homeowners who do not also moonlight as bouncers generally prefer not to break up candy-stealing fights on their doorstep.

(5b) Older siblings: take good care of the little ones. Haven't you noticed that people give them more candy?

(6) For goodness' sake hold the storm door open while the homeowner turns around to get your candy. Also, if you are trick-or-treating in a group, try not to crowd the doorstep until the frontmost of your number falls over. If the homeowner was going to run out of candy halfway through your group, she wouldn't've opened the door in the first place.

(7) When the homeowner gives/offers you candy, the correct response is "thank you." It is usually considered impolite to request specific candy options from the homeowner unless s/he offers you a choice. (Getting rid of the candy you don't like is a job for later trading -- or you could shove it off on your parents.)

(8) Eggs and toilet paper are only appropriate for homeowners who give out "treats" consisting of dental hygiene products.

(8a) Homeowners: if you fail to give out good candy, the terrorists have won.

(9) Proper trick-or-treating hours run from 6 to 8, or in a pinch 5:30 to 8:30, on October 31st. If you start running around the neighborhood at 5:10, you will panic homeowners who are setting out on a final dash to the drugstore for more candy. If you start running around the neighborhood on some other day, you will simply confuse the heck out of everyone.

(9a) Parents: if your children are too little to go out unattended after 5 pm during Standard Time, go with them. Remember that you can demand a cut of their candy.

(9b) Advertisers: for the love of all that's good and holy, do not run Christmas-themed commercials until after Halloween (preferably after Thanksgiving, but that's a lost cause if there ever was one).

(10) For future reference, and especially for those of you dressed as witches, there is no One True Way to pronounce "Samhain." There is, however, a proper way to pronounce "Hermione."

No, seriously, it was a good Halloween, and I am easily entertained by kids. I do enjoy getting dressed up myself, and I'm sorry that I seem to have missed all the costume parties this year, but I've been waiting for years to live someplace other than an interior-entrance apartment so that I could pretend I was a grown-up and hand out candy. As it turned out, I got about twenty-five trick-or-treaters, and the candy came out more or less right. Also, I found snack-size Almond Joys. Next week I am eating lots and lots of healthy green salad. And possibly some on-sale candy corn....