A gracious greeting to those steered here by OGIC, and a mug of my eponymous liver oil to Mr. Teachout, whom we all are pleased to see up, around, and posting. As it happens, OGIC's meme crosshairs found me at a moment when fessing, my day job, takes precedence over my Gurgling Cod alter ego--hence light posting, posts about people I met in the elevator at work with titles boosted from Minutemen offshoots, and text-free posts about Cheeto-flavored lip balm. See, every year, people in my line of work have a magical carnival between Christmas and New Years, where we celebrate the rebirth of Gaia by wandering hotel lobbies furtively eyeing nametags while grippling folders containing information of extremely limited interest. I'll be there, sharing the magic, and telling a handfull of strangers why English people wrote such nasty things about turtle soup. (It's about as close as I'll ever get to a crossover.)
And besides that, there are a bunch of papers to grade. Figuring term grades is definitely one of my least favorite parts of the job, especially as where I teach, there is no plus or minus, just A,B,C, D, F. I'm not fond of this system, but it has got me thinking about how the scale shapes the evaluation, rather than the other way around. It has also reminded me that I have been meaning to say something about The Perfectionist, kindly sent my way by an ally. I got it too late to do a real review, but it is a biography of Bernard Loiseau, a prominent French chef who took his own life. The capsule version of the story, reported basically as such when it happened, was that the relentless pressure of getting and keeping three Michelin stars killed Bernard Loiseau. What emerges over the course of the book is simultaneously more and less complicated than that: people face pressure and failure and do not commit suicide. At the same time, the importance of Michelin ratings in the world L'Oiseau inhabited creates a kind of pressure that is distinctive to that industry. If the Michelin reviewers graded like Ivy League professors, would L'Oiseau still be alive, and what impact would that presumption of routine excellence have on French dining?
What interests me is the possibility that it is the system, as much as the people, that produce such agitas. These issues are on my mind as I wade through a sea of exams and papers--if I were expected to give the majority of my student no grade, a few Cs, fewer Bs and perhaps an A every other year or so, I'd be grading on the Michelin curve. I imagine it would change the atmosphere in the classroom. With the Michelin stars, the scale seems to drive the culture as much as the reverse--how different would the world of wine spectating if wines were assigned 0-3 stars with more or less the same distribution as French restaurants? Or if the grinches at Pitchfork started dropping 2.8 out of 10s on gymnasts? To make things easier on myself, I am considering adopting the Monheit scale for grading: 4 monocles = must see; 5 monocles = an indisputable classic. I bet the students would enjoy that.
Speaking of Spy, as we so often do here, if you find that snorting your daughter's adderol and reading Radar does not bring back that 80s Spy feeling, you might try, and I do mean try, reading Sirio, bio of noted Le Cirque impressario. It is like reading a vintage Spy that has been put on a heavy dose of thorazine, and become horribly bloated--432 pages and irony-free. It is a magical world where Kissinger is a humanitarian, Nancy Reagan eats, and Liz Smith is a journalist.
Comments