Unofficial Dress Code

I made a deal last year, but it was a bad one. I am usually good at making deals, but I caved to the persistent pressure laid upon me by both my mother and my wife. The deal was a that I would get a hair cut (bye-bye pony tail), which I did on January 11th, and start dressing "more professionally" for work.

I want my long hair back. I liked the weight. I liked the feel of it on my neck. It's a tactile thing, though there is still the convenience to consider. Now I must get my hair cut more than once a year—six times, at least, truth be told—and that's a costly hassle. Now I may have to start putting things in it to keep it under control, but I am tempted to grab a razor first. A shaved head must be lower maintenance than this!

Clothing is another matter. While I could use some new jeans, slacks and a belt hardly seem right. This is not the 1950s or 1960s, so I wonder if perhaps my mother's perspectives on how a college instructor (this is a community college, remember, not a university) might not be a little dated. I wear good shirts, but my wallet has done damage to my right back pocket. My wife says I look like a hobo. What? I listened to one woman whose only on-campus experience with a community college was a series of nursing refresher courses in the 1980s and another whose experience on community college campuses measures lower than Bush's experience making good environmental policy decisions.

Half of my male colleagues dress down, on a regular basis, as much as I like to, but neither my mother nor my wife will believe such a claim. I walked in one day in a pair of Dockers, a button-down shirt, and shoes from Coscto and was more formally dressed than the department chair (he had jeans, a button-down shirt, dark socks, and Birkenstock sandals). I felt out of place.

And is it wrong for dressing in a way that makes me feel comfortable? in a way that invites my students to talk to me? in a way that, quite frankly, expresses my relaxed classroom mood. My "sneaky bastard tricks" are key in keeping my students showing up every week, in getting them to do things they start off swearing they will never do, in keeping them awake. Sneaky bastards don't wear Dockers. We wear jeans. We talk to the students as people with more potential than they ever would have ascribed to themselves. We make them believe us when we tell them that they will succeed because we don't come across as if we are inherently superior. We aren't.

I went to community college. It took many instructors to convince me that I could achieve something, and without fail they weren't distant and formal. Those who succeeded in reaching me were razor-challenged and satorially inept. They were in the trenches standing beside me. That's what I want my students to feel. I don't want a wall of formality between them and me. Am I wrong with this?