by Lucy S.
I am trying to line up work to teach as
an adjunct next fall, now that I have a master’s degree (which still feels surreal and wondrous to me).
And I am struggling to not be submerged by waves
of defeatism and pain as I realize that I still may not have what it takes to teach. The
community college closest to me, only a couple miles away, requires a minimum
of one year of teaching experience. I am not sure yet what the requirements are
of the other state community colleges in this area, but I worry that they may
have similar policies. I have talked with a faculty member in the program I
graduated from and he will meet with me next week to talk more about this.
A friend who teaches at another
community college allowed me to visit her composition class last week. I LOVED
it. I took notes the whole time, paying
close attention to how she moved the class along – a long class that runs from
11:15 am to 2 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s accelerated because
it’s summer. This friend was once a
professor of mine at my undergraduate university. She used to get deeply depressed struggling
to line up work that paid anywhere near a living wage. When I met her, she was making $12,000 a year
and paying $400 a month for health insurance because of a pre-existing eye
condition. Her partner thus paid a large
percentage of their living expenses out of her much higher wages. My friend had
a PhD in English. At one point, she considered pursuing work as a barista at
one of the corporate coffee chains. These kinds of experiences hurt so badly.
They can scrape out a person’s sense of self-worth and leave them struggling to
sustain the capacity to continue pursuing work. Others who don’t understand can
wonder or even ask what is wrong with you. They assume – and you may begin to
agree – that there must be some profound lack in you that has resulted in your
inability to find work in your field. But at last, she lined up work as an
adjunct, and now she is tenured. I am so glad for her. I know how much this meant.
And when I visited her class recently, I was so impressed with her teaching and
the ways that she treats the students.
I drove home that day feeling elated.
This was what I had wanted for so many years – to teach college English
classes. I know I will probably never get tenure, and I know they pay $3,000 per
semester per class, and they take up a huge amount of time for that $3,000 (and
this varies widely – some pay far less). But I want to teach
composition and literature. I kept thinking: after all of this time, I am finally almost there.
Gratitude and excitement surged through
me that afternoon.
My friend did mention, as we talked
briefly after class, that she was surprised that I had no teaching experience
in my program. And I felt something scared and pained catch in me, but
happiness overwhelmed that bit of panic.
I do have some teaching experience. I taught an
ESL class during the spring of 2012 (though not for pay). And I’ve tutored ESL
a few semesters (and a lot more times informally over the years) – again, not
for pay. And I worked in a high school one semester, doing individual or small
group tutoring – a high school with immigrant students ages 18-22 trying to get that diploma. That was a
work-study job, so I was paid for that one. But I can’t think of any other
relevant experience. Well, I worked in the college writing center years ago
when I went to California community college in the late 1980s. But it’s impossible
for anyone to even document that anymore. And it’s so long ago that it means
nothing.
Well, and there is this other experience
that I have teaching. I homeschooled my five kids. I am still homeschooling the
youngest two. One is in the age range of that high school’s
demographics. He has some learning difficulties, so I have had to work with
him at his pace. He continues to learn! And to be quite honest, I think what we do is far more substantial than much of
what I saw going on in that high school when I worked there. I felt so angry at
times to see the days and weeks and months wasted of students, tutors, and
teachers doing busy work that failed to teach much except cynicism. But that
experience counts, and my experience teaching my kids does not.
We continue studying during the summer.
Lately, Sean and Ryan and I are reading Robert Frost poems. We had a poignant
discussion last week about Frost’s brilliant, achingly sad poem, “Home Burial.”
It is a poem about a husband and wife whose baby has died, and their inability
to reach one another across their private walls of devastation, loss, and
judgments about how the other one should respond to their child’s death. We are
also reading Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. We recently made a list of the books we’ve
read together, and we feel a bit impressed with ourselves -- impressed with the weight of what we
all have to draw on, individually and in our collective conversations and
engagements. I will post that list separately.
The way I have always taught my kids is
most of all to read with them and to talk with them. There is the magic formula. Well, and we watch movies and talk about
those, also. And we talk about songs, and we talk quite a lot about the events
going on in our own lives, the lives of people we know and love, and the larger
societal or world events. We try to figure out better answers, but in doing so,
we have to turn the problem over, examining it from a multitude of angles. I don’t
mean that we bring any particular expertise to it. It is only that we keep
reading, talking, questioning, and trying to act in the ways we manage to find
available to us. Of course, my formal
education in these recent years has profoundly helped my ability to delve into
these texts with them.
I would like to know why what I have
done with my kids all these years (and sometimes with other kids) doesn’t count
at all as ‘real’ work experience. I am not sure how the hirers imagine what we have
done, but I wonder why they can’t even discuss it with me. Maybe they wonder
how they could ever verify what I did, but quite honestly, having seen what I have seen in institutions, I know that the verifications offered
there of one’s experience are not necessarily rock-solid, either. And in my
pain, rightly or wrongly, I see their utter dismissal of my experience as one
so thoroughly bound to the dismissal of so much of the labor traditionally done
by women.
The day before yesterday, as the
realization sunk in more fully that I may still be unqualified because of my
lack of teaching experience, I crashed. I was trying to write a cover letter to
send with my CV (academia’s version of a résumé) to the person hiring adjuncts
at the program I just graduated from. He mentioned that the way graduates from
our program typically demonstrate that they have the experience to take on teaching
a college freshman composition course is by having worked as a teaching
assistant one semester for a professor there. I didn’t do this. I was on a fast-moving fellowship that took up all of my waking hours my first semester
and most of them my second and third semesters. (And here, my mind always interjects: but I was LUCKY to have this!) I should have done it for
that fourth and final semester, when I was working on my master’s essay. I didn’t
realize I needed this. And now I keep thinking, how could I have not figured
this out for myself? I almost applied,
but the graduate coordinator mentioned I would need permission from my final
project advisor. And I was unofficially part of a difficult theory course. And
I was still homeschooling. I wasn’t sure if it might be too much. I keep
thinking now: how could I have been so stupid? And then I think: why didn’t
they tell me that this was necessary? And then, like a blinking neon sign, the
first question returns: but how could I have been so stupid? I looked at the samples
for the cover letters, describing how the academic job seeker graduated with a
PhD from a prominent university, has already taught a multitude of courses as a
grad student, has published in academic journals… and I couldn’t get past a few
sentences. What content could I interject into this letter of interest? Why should they ever hire me over someone
else?
I looked at a state college’s classes
in teaching composition and wondered if maybe I should take some of those now,
starting in the fall. It is a 1 ½ hour drive to that college. But I wrote to a
friend of mine that I just didn’t think I could do it. I wrote that I can’t
deal with this anymore.
I remember a time a few years ago when
we were visiting my sister and some there were playing a board game at
her kitchen table. Her son hadn’t won a round yet, after a long while. But at
last – at last, he did. Then his twin
sister was confused and said, “No, Paul didn’t win that one.” And overcome with
his sliced-open elation, he stood up on the bench, opened his mouth, and screamed
a gut-wrenching cry, shaking with tears streaming down his face. That image has
come back to me quite a few times in the past few days. I keep thinking, “Man,
I’m with you, Paul. I know what you mean.”
On that bitter Thursday (the day before
yesterday), I wrote this about what we study and discuss in the academy. It was
my own scream:
Let us talk about feminism, or more specifically, let us
talk about the ways that women’s reproductive labor is appropriated in this
society for no material compensation, and the ways in which that work is
devalued (Federici).
And let us talk about the bitter, abundant evidence that the
children of the working-classes and poverty classes do not by and large fare well
in these capitalist government schools, because those schools mostly reproduce
the same class structure in existence; many laborers are needed, after all, to
serve those who live on their backs (Kozol, Freire, Bourdieu, hooks…).
Now tell me why it is that my twenty years teaching my
kids outside of the schools, as we lived through the battering of this economic
system, moving over and over – as the older ones had their lousy experiences in
the schools, even though we tried – I tried – to make it work – tell me how it
is that when I apply for an academic job teaching at a low wage that I would
nonetheless be jumping with joy to receive right now – I can’t count that work.
I don’t dare list that on a CV. Only
those who haven’t lived these lives can theorize about them in the academy. Those
who have lived too much of this aren’t fit enough to enter.
Well, if I can manage to get some OTHER experience as a TA
under a REAL teacher – that could count. But when I tried to apply for one of
those jobs as an undergrad T.A., I was not even interviewed for it. I didn’t even make it up to that
level of consideration. And I DID, back then, dare to list experience teaching
my kids and teaching homeschool classes. I think it was worse than if I’d
listed nothing, because I think they interpret the inclusion as evidence that I
– poor deluded person living outside of ‘real’ society all these years as a ‘housewife’ (a 'housewife' watching other people's kids and delivering papers and doing other 'flexible' work) – do not quite understand the ‘real world.’
(This makes me remember when I took a geology class with my
oldest son – then 15 – my first venture back into a college class after more
than ten years – a science with a lab class I had always needed for my general
education requirements – still hoping so badly that I was still on my way back
to getting a B.A. – and I asked the professor one day if instead of turning in
the lab questions, I might take it with me to work on for a few hours before we
met for the evening class (the lecture portion). The professor wrote all the
answers on the board every week about an hour into lab, but I was tired of just
copying them. I wanted to try to work them out and see if I could actually
learn something. He said, in a rising voice that seemed to combine smugness and
extreme irritation: “NO – you’ll turn it in now or you’ll take an F.” Justin sat next to me with his own answers
already copied out, watching. Stung and stunned, I asked, “Why?” He responded: “Because
this is a college science laboratory course, and that’s the way things WORK –
in the REAL world.” I handed it to him
and walked out with Justin beside me. A few steps past the door, I was already ranting
about what an asshole that teacher was, how his whole life was so worthless,
since he clearly didn’t even care about his work – how he was satisfied just having
students copy down answers in his pointless class rather than actually try to
learn. I was trying not to let that man make me cry. And trying to teach my son that people like that are NOT real teachers.)
Yes, I have quite a love / hate relationship with academia
and its professors and administrators. I will always be working-class. There my
loyalties lie. But sorting out what that means eludes me at times. What it does
NOT mean is uneducated.
If I dare to list homeschooling as part of my teaching
experience, I imagine the decision-makers thinking, “Poor thing – she might as
well list playing with her dolls as a child and pretending to teach them as
experience!!” Is it everything domestic that must be disdained? And what is ‘domestic’
anyway? Are they not domestic in some sense, too?
I don’t know how much of what I wrote is
true. And I don’t know if I think of every disdainful way that they might sum me
and my labor up as a way to bitterly beat them to the punch.
That day was awful. I cried so hard,
harder than I’ve cried in a long time. I kept thinking, “So I still can’t even
begin to support myself. After all this, I still can’t.” I kept feeling that
everything was ruined.
But I woke up the next day realizing
that there is nothing to do but keep trying. A good friend of mine tells me
to always try for everything and to make others tell me no. He does the same. I know that I do
have to keep trying. And I have to find a way to interrogate those who devalue
the labor of people like me. I have to
do this in a way that doesn’t set us apart from other laborers, but instead identifies
our commonalities with others who labor and are in a multitude of ways devalued
and badly exploited.
Today is my lifelong friend Gloria’s
birthday. I called her this morning and we talked for a couple of hours. I hadn’t
talked with her since she managed to get her job back after fighting for
months. She, like me, is a mother, and she knows the devaluation of that labor
in capitalist society. The equation is: that labor = no experience. But she talked about how in her current job,
she is held under the thumb of supervisors
and higher level management, people who warn workers like her that they’d “better
watch it or you’ll be labeled a complainer…” Gloria has always been one of the
hardest workers I know, and she used to give her all to the job she’s in, but
she has finally learned, she said, that workers have to stick together. She said she will never run herself ragged as
she used to. This is part of class-knowledge.
(Happy Birthday, Gloria, my brave
friend. You will always be a hero to me.)
But academia cannot be so neatly
categorized as bosses versus workers, because the best professors are on OUR side.
They are with us. Or they ARE us. So many are themselves exploited, not knowing
if they will have jobs year to year. For so many, their own deep care for those
whom they teach and their love for their work is used against them, just as parents
who love their children can have that love used against them in this economic system.
Yesterday morning, the professor from my graduate institution who I’d emailed
about my efforts wrote back to suggest that we meet to talk about the possibilities.
I know that this person cares and is trying to help me. And there is my friend
who tells me to try for everything… and who has helped me through every step of
this journey since I returned to school in 2009. There are others, too, in and
out of academia.
When I visited the community college
class, the students were discussing a chapter from Michelle Alexander’s
powerful, crucial book, The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). Alexander writes of
the many ways in which people with felonies are stripped of their rights by the
U.S. legal system, and how racism is bound up in these practices. Some of the
people in the class have felonies themselves. They are struggling so hard to ‘make
it’ this time. In the chapter the class read, Alexander includes this by
Frederick Douglass: "Men are so constituted that they derive their
conviction of their own possibilities largely from the estimate formed of them
by others" (143).
What is our estimate of one another?
Are we all co-teachers and co-learners, as Paulo Freire insisted? Am I a
teacher? Do I have experience? Are the people in that class human beings or are
they “felons”? What are our
possibilities?
I believe in academia’s possibilities
because of what I saw in that community college class last week. I believe in
it because I know that there can be something so utterly affirming in it –
tools to ‘speak truth’ to those that have us under their huge thumb, but even
more, to one another. I believe in it because I know what it can be to come together
in a class and talk about a poem like “Home Burial,” and I know that I talked
about it with my kids in ways I would not have talked about it before I was in
the American literature course in which we discussed it, or the other
literature courses I have had that have helped teach me to sink into the moment
and to truly see and listen. It is not an either / or; the ‘real world’ is not
either out in academia or some other institution OR in our homes taking care of
our loved ones. It is everywhere. We are always in it.
I am going to ask the professor when I
meet with him next week if my years of homeschooling can count as teaching
experience. It’s been almost twenty years now since I first homeschooled. How
about one year of credit for ten years of homeschooling? If it cannot count as any experience at all, then
I don’t think academics have much place to talk about feminism and the
appropriation of women’s reproductive labor. But maybe it can count. As my
friend says: try for everything, make others tell you no.
Works Cited
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarcerations in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012 (original 2010).
Douglass citation in Alexander's book:
Douglass, Frederick. "What Negroes Want." The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Vol. 4. ed. Phillip S. Foner. New York: International, 1955. p 159-160
***
After Thoughts
Hours after posting this and then making dinner and then reading with Sean and Ryan (and pressuring them to help me make our list of shared texts more complete), I am thinking about what I wrote. To be fair, teaching a college class is not the same as homeschooling. I don't grade my kids. More importantly, I don't have to put in the enormous amount of preparation before we read that college professors have to put in before teaching a class. I don't have stacks of essays to read, and extensive feedback to write, and I don't have to answer to anyone about what we do.
I also know that we don't work within the same constraints that the high school did, where I worked one semester. And I know that at least some of the teachers cared tremendously about the students. One teacher who I talked with from time to time told me and my oldest son (who volunteered there three hours a week) that she often went home on the bus crying. Students who were refugees would write short essays that began like sunny, benign children's tales and ended with the author as a child going home to discover that the militia had murdered the rest of the whole family. She would begin to cry even in front of the students, and they would say, "It's okay, teacher. It has happened to a lot of people." And I cannot really say that this teacher was ever cynical about her work, though she could be bitingly sarcastic about some of the doings of those in administrative positions. And I used to tutor a student there who loved history and wanted to be a lawyer. But she was struggling against such a multitude of obstacles. I had her write me essays, because I could tell she was falling through some kind of cracks in their system. But after a while, she stopped coming. I would email her to ask if she'd be coming, and she stopped answering.
It is vital that in standing up for ourselves, we don't get sucked into the trap of seeing other laborers antagonistically. If we want our own labor honored, we have to honor the labor of others as well. And yet if we do this too uncritically, pretty soon we all we can express is a useless, untrue claim that "It's all good."
There are many ways to teach. I can't say that homeschooling my kids for years means that I could just walk into a classroom and teach well. And teaching well is what is needed; students deserve that. I am only saying that even if I have a lot to learn that can only be learned through particular experience, I know that teaching and learning with my kids (and sometimes other people's kids) has given me at least some feel for other kinds of teaching. And I know that if something goes wrong and I can't teach for an income, I'm still amazingly fortunate that I've been able to teach my kids for all these years and teach ESL and sometimes other things for short periods of time. Like all teachers, I will teach in the ways that I can.
