Learning to Re-member

by Lucy S.

I’ve just come back from a trip home to Southern California, where I spent time with close friends who are family to us and family who are close friends to us, including my cousin Johnny, who got out of prison last February after 17 years, and Gloria, my lifelong friend.  Justin, my oldest son, went with me. This trip taught us so much. 

We learned that my cousin Johnny's first felony, in his early 20s, when he and his wife had a baby under a year old, was a set-up by a friend of my uncle's. That man, friends with so many judges, lawyers, and affluent business people, always on the hunt for new ways to make a lot of money, asked Johnny if he could put a business in his name. It's a little shady, the man said, but perfectly legal. He offered Johnny $200 to do it. Johnny agreed, and it turned out to be a credit scam of some kind, for which Johnny went to prison for five years.  The man urged him not to tell my uncle or anyone else, and promised to take care of his wife and baby. He did nothing for them. When Johnny got out, the man asked my uncle to see if Johnny wanted to make some extra money moving some of his wife's things from one home to another. Johnny agreed, and stole some expensive items. The man complained to my uncle, who asked Johnny, who freely admitted taking the items and said he wouldn't give them back. "I'm not asking you; I'm telling you," my uncle said. "Ask him why I did it," Johnny countered. Then he told my uncle the whole story, and my uncle furiously confronted the friend. That friend answered vaguely that it was "years ago..."  

And I learned that Johnny and I are still close, as we once were.  

We learned that we're still part of our family and friends, and that maybe it's time to go home.  Not because it's objectively 'better' than where we are, but because it is home, and we are members of those people and that place.

Now I'm trying to shift my focus back onto being ready for the class I start teaching on Monday. I feel like school (as a student or now as a new teacher) takes such an intensity of concentration for me that I've become afraid to take time off. Because of that, when I do take time off, I feel sort of swept up and engulfed in the waves of everything else – who I was before, all of my relationships...  And I get burned out at times with how much school takes out of me. In despairing moments, I question whether what I'm doing makes sense.

But in California, I felt good telling people I hadn’t seen in a long time that I finished my master's degree and am now in my first year of teaching college classes.

I feel good telling them this because I say it as one of them. I want to take what I've learned and use it to affirm the people I come from. I want to say that in some ways WE are teaching these literature classes. I try to use what I've learned to say that our perspectives and stories had power and truth all along, and to show that learning can be used to fight back instead of to become part of those who look down on, marginalize, and in various ways help oppress those most colonized, enslaved, exploited, excluded, and imprisoned (and their ancestors): the working classes; the poor; people of color; immigrants; unpaid or poorly paid caregivers; and others the dominant have tried to keep out and keep down. What we learn needs to undo the ways we have learned to be ashamed of who we are or who we come from or who we were as kids.  

Otherwise, education can enslave us and make us further participate in the enslavement of others. In Debt: the First 5000 Years, David Graeber says:

[T]o make a human being an object of exchange, one woman equivalent to another for example, requires first of all ripping her from her context; that is, tearing her away from that web of relations that makes her the unique conflux of relations that she is, and thus, into a means to measure debt (159).

Reading this again, I think of a friend raised in Dallas and punished in school as a little girl whenever she spoke Spanish. By first grade, she refused to speak it at all. Her bilingual parents would speak to her in Spanish and she would answer in English. Even now, as the mother of four grown sons, she will not even pronounce a Spanish word as it would be pronounced in Spanish, let alone speak the language she still understands. School taught her to see her first language and culture as inferior to the dominant one, and as something she must lose or be punished for keeping.

In the case of another friend, when I hear her say various racist comments about African-Americans, I think of how in 8th and 9th grade, a lot of her friends were black. When I hear her say so many negative comments about people on welfare, I remember that she was on welfare when her son was a baby and her first husband went to prison for a year and a half. When she says mean things about the way other women or girls look, I think of her telling me years ago that when she and her sister were little, people would say her sister was so pretty, and would say nothing about her, standing there alongside her sister. She has internalized oppressive ideas and turned them against who she was, the friends she used to have, and so much that she came from.  She has done all she could to become middle-class, which she frames in entirely positive terms. If we just met now, we probably would not become friends. But we've been friends most of our lives. We’ve called each other sisters for most of those years. She helped care for my three oldest kids as babies when I worked and took community college classes. So I am trying to work through my aversion to these things she says in a way that does not in turn throw away our relationship and part of my history.  

At times, I rail against the “American white middle to upper classes” and against all that makes me sick about class-climbing. I may put some of these things in racial / ethnic terms at times, but it's beyond being or not being of European descent. In The Possessive Investment In Whiteness, George Lipsitz describes this 'whiteness' as “the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, … [which] never has to speak its name...” He includes Richard Dyer's identification of a primary source of “white power” and its “dominance”– the way it seems “not to be anything in particular.” (1)  This 'whiteness as a norm' marks the way people become part of the "respectable" group in this country. The Irish were not considered white at one time. Poverty-class whites are also way outside of that "respectable" kind of "whiteness."  And working-class or poverty-class people of many ethnicities too often look down on themselves, or their kids look down on their parents. At the same time, class and race are so entangled in this country. In a society in which the dominant preach equality while perpetuating deep inequality, it is no surprise that many of its members argue for their superiority over this or that other group or person on the basis of how closely they can resemble the constructed identity and lifestyle which "never has to speak its name." 

Then there is mass culture to complicate it all and in various ways, to estrange one generation from another, or make people feel ashamed of themselves.  I think of how the woman who calls me her ‘fifth daughter” – who I call my “other mother," who immigrated as a young mother from Colombia, has never been to college, and worked in sewing factories for years (and sews so splendidly) – how she loves to read, and has read the classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by the great Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Her kids don't read Latin American authors in Spanish or English. They often think of so much from Latin America as ignorant, out of it, old, superstitious. They in turn might love a movie like "Crash," which their mom might not like so much.  In turn, my master’s adviser once mentioned in class how awful he thought that movie was. He'd consider Marquez's work far better than "Crash” or most other mass-culture movies. And then the people with a lot more money than (even tenured) college professors might value mass culture movies far more than Marquez – and the ultra-rich may make or direct the manufacture of the most popular items and works of mass culture. Academics have cultural capital; those with lots of money have economic capital; and the majority of people in our society have neither. 

As someone who also has loved movies like "Crash," and Marquez's great novel, I struggle to understand how to make my education not make me ashamed of part of who I've been for much of my life. When I gradually began to figure out which pieces of culture were 'good' and which were 'bad' in academia, I'd feel so embarrassed about telling a teacher I'd liked one of the 'bad' ones. I'm still trying to figure out an answer to this. My dad gave me a book one time about a Civil Rights activist, and then said it might not be that good compared to the things I was reading in college. He too had picked up on the academic version of 'cool' and 'uncool,' not enough to sort out the differences, but enough to worry about his possible taste for the 'inferior.' Not everything is equally well-done... and yet this can't be right. 

Maybe these paradoxes are themselves part of a big story that we have to keep telling and analyzing. Maybe education to re-member can teach us to value stories whose sometimes painful truths aren’t easily digested, complex stories that we have to chew on a long time, stories to connect us to our earlier selves and each other in all our messiness.

It seems that so many efforts to 'move up' in this society decimate people's relationships with their family and friends, who and where they came from, and the knowledge gained through lived experience and passed down histories – their own or that of their parents and others they used to respect or might have respected. Too often. this all gets devalued, disdained, and discarded. I have felt this and warred with it in myself, too, at various times.  On “Columbus Day” 2011, after an Ojibwe dance and presentation outside at Government Plaza in Minneapolis (with Occupy going on there), a young Ojibwe man said: “We’ve all been colonized.” I think this is part of what he meant.

All of these contradictions sometimes feel like too much to handle – these things that pull me in so many different ways, and the massive amount of time academia takes, so that I get more disconnected from the people I come from and even my own kids.

Add in the massive attention I give my students, because that is inside a form that constitutes a real "college class" that pays me and gives me a title – and add in that those students are in an expensive private college that my kids, family, and lifelong friends could not attend – and add in my guilt for not giving more attention to my loved ones – and it all can make me feel more despair. Conversely, I can get too used to all this, so it feels 'nice and normal.' I deeply appreciate the faculty I know in my English department. I like and care about my students. But I must use my education to re-member myself and help others do the same – to remain a member of all the people I come from.

I teach literature and writing. I’m trying to know how to teach it to empower. And our truest stories do have power. The English writer, painter, and poet, John Berger says:

The secret of storytelling amongst the poor is the conviction that stories are told so that they may be listened to elsewhere, where somebody, or perhaps a legion of people, knows better than the storyteller or the story’s protagonists what life means. The powerful can’t tell stories: boasts are the opposite of stories, and any story, however mild, has to be fearless; the powerful today live nervously.

A story refers life to an alternative and more final judge who is far away. Maybe the judge is located in the future, or in the past that is still attentive, or maybe somewhere over the hill, where the day’s luck has changed (the poor have to refer often to good or bad luck) so that the last have become first (101-102).

Maybe Berger overstates this; there have been affluent, powerful people who told good stories. But I believe what he says is true in the most important ways.  I know that the man who set up my cousin and let him spend five years in prison cannot tell real stories. He can boast about how many people he deceived in his determination to make as much money as he could.. But Johnny can tell stories that matter.  

About Palestinians who stay bound to one another (and surely this applies to others who do so as well), Berger writes:

When somebody has the opportunity to leave a camp and cross the rubble to slightly better accommodation, it can happen that they turn it down and choose to stay. In the camp, they are a member, like a finger, of an endless body. Moving out would be amputation.  The stance of undefeated despair works like this (18)

Am I already too amputated?  How can I be part of the body of those I come from and be also part of the body of those I've learned from and those I teach?  Can we be an even bigger "endless body"?  How do I teach and learn in ways that, instead of amputating, work to re-member?

Works Cited:

Berger, John. Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. New York: Vintage, 2007. 

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2011.

 Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment In Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.  

Our American Discomfort with Unsolved Pain

by Lucy S.

I don't have much time, so this won't be written as well as I'd like, but I'll do what I can in 60 minutes or so. I started to write back to a friend of mine who told me we shouldn't stay in the initial slump of depression as we more fully realize how the system functions, but should push onward with renewed strength. The system "wants" us to be depressed, said my friend. What I've written here isn't positioned in any kind of opposition to my friend's stance.  I am not saying that he is for some kind of uncritical, perpetual cheerfulness. Rather, these are things that came to me as I began writing my own thoughts in response. I will share what I wrote (and did not send, deciding instead to make it this post), interwoven with what I am adding now as I go back through it. Bur first, some context:

I recently was fortunate enough to be part of a one week intensive seminar focused on better ways to teach writing to students. My university offered this.  I applied last fall and was among twenty selected from different disciplines.  I love many aspects of this approach to teaching writing - making course and assignment goals align with what is taught along the way and with how students are finally evaluated and assessed. Students are well supported all the way through the process and so they fare better. This caring, constructive approach lines up with my own philosophy of teaching, writing, trying to enact more democracy in our classes, and building relationships with students.

At the same time, there were aspects of my experience in the seminar that hit me hard. A number of faculty from the business department were in our group, along with people from other disciplines who by and large continued to emphasize the need to prepare students to have the skills their corporate employers want. As I noted in my last post, if all goes "well" for these students (and for our university's reputation), these folks will graduate and become the professional-managerial class. If they're lucky, some will become the capitalist class - the elite. Or in various ways, they may become both (owners of businesses, investors, high level executives). At any rate, with all the emphasis on preparing students to meet the demands of their business employers, it sunk in particularly deeply that education, especially at institutions where students pay so much in tuition, is so forced to twist and turn itself to what big business wants.

 And so I had written to my friend something along the lines of what I said in the above two paragraphs, but I additionally expressed that I felt depressed by what I've explained in the second paragraph. My point here isn't to attempt to adequately represent his own undoubtedly more nuanced view or to "debate" whatever that view may be, but instead to share some of the thoughts that came to me as I started to write back.

I already have known for many years that education under capitalism is for getting jobs. That is even what people who aren't at all critical of capitalism already believe. But the big question is always whether we are educating against that grain or whether even our efforts to do so are co-opted back into serving the system. And that is a question that I think everyone not only has to answer for themselves, but will inevitably go on answering in changing ways. Education as it has been delivered for most of the last 60 years in public institutions (free or low cost) is quite different than education as it is increasingly being delivered even in our "public" institutions with their soaring tuition (high tuition with huge student loans for most people or wealthier parents who save up and pay these exorbitant fees).  Disciplines like literature, history, and philosophy start falling apart when they're forced to answer to market logic that way, just as libraries would if it started costing $1000 a year or whatever to belong to your "public" library.

And so more than ever, the pressure is on to turn English into a discipline that churns out good corporate writers. Furthermore, the only ones who can afford to study literature, philosophy, history, etc. "for its own sake" become those in more affluent classes. And that is a massive change from what has been the case in previous post World War II decades.  It works very well for corporate interests for higher ed to change into this kind of structure.

At my university, where students paying full rate for tuition and board (and almost all live there in the dorms) spend $180,000 for their B.A. (in whatever combination that happens - parents paying part; student loans...), it's easy to see why most students major in the things that they think will lead them to making a lot of money when they're done. The degree must "pay." It's not just that they "have to work" under capitalism. It's that they will become the upper-middle to upper class. And we know from Gramsci, Marx, etc. that people by and large behave according to their class interests. My goal isn't to syphon off a tiny amount of class traitors (though that's always nice to have happen), but to be part of educating the working classes to more fully grasp their own position in capitalism. It is in their class interest to actively oppose capitalism because they're the ones most screwed over by it.

The poverty- and working-classes are also the ones far less likely to find that college degrees change their class from working-class to the middle or upper classes.  Jack Conroy wrote about that way back in the early 1930s in The Disinherited - the way that very few working-class people "rose" out of their class by means of higher education - and we're seeing that more and more again now. (I see it in the experience of my two kids with B.A.'s, in my income post-M.A., and in the experiences of so many people working low paying retail and food service jobs after college graduation.)

I know all this on an intellectual level and political theory level, but knowing it in that way and living it are different. This is why the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire emphasized the importance of "class knowledge." The lived realities that shove you up against the wall, exhausting you, scaring you when you don't know how you'll have enough money, limiting your options, angering you, breaking your heart over and over... these teach you what theory alone cannot.

But I don't think that the system in its American instantiation "wants" us to be depressed. It functions best when most people find ways to be "positive" within it and keep viewing their own and other individual lives in terms of "choice."  Those kind of "positive" and "hopeful" people make the best workers. They "know their place" and at the same time, believe that if they try hard and play by the rules, they and everyone else can make good lives for themselves. People who are upset, sad, angry, etc. are the ones who may organize against capital - we can see it in recent times as well as historically. But in the U.S. this is often cast as some kind of individual problem or even illness. Or it gets romanticized and individualized and directed into expressions of depoliticized personal angst. I am sympathetic to that individual angst, but I think it's crucial to show how it's not just an amorphous despair, as it seems - how its source should be identified in the structure of the system, and how we can then respond to it effectively. But cutting off our mourning, our grief, our chronic pain cannot be the answer, and at any rate, people can't just turn them on and off at will.

In terms of what this means for those of us working in education, it's not that I see it as wrong or foolish to do this work. If I did, I wouldn't root so strongly for friends of mine to get into academic programs or get the positions they're trying for. And I wouldn't do the work myself.  Also, I know the constraints we're all under. But there's no need for people to try to not feel whatever it is they feel, whether that is depression at various times, grief, joy, etc. Some of the strongest people I've known were what gets called "depressed" in American terms. It's just that we're so infused with the contemporary American ideology - the push to be relentlessly "positive" - that we tend to connect that mental state with "strength," and many of us tend to become uncomfortable with people who express their raw pain without any neat and easy solutions to it.

I have found that people who are more invested in the system and are faring pretty well under it, even if they are in theory on the Left, struggle enormously with the cognitive dissonance they feel when presented with other people's testimony that the system is working horribly for them or that their own efforts may be co-opted into perpetuating the same inequalities. (In basic terms, cognitive dissonance is the extreme discomfort people feel when they find out that their beliefs don't match reality.) The work of social psychologist Melvin Lerner is extremely useful here. I will lift something about it from a graduate paper I wrote in fall 2012:

Social psychologist Melvin Lerner’s research, known as the “just world” theory (first published in 1966 and repeatedly followed up and expanded on by a multitude of researchers in a variety of countries), demonstrated that when people encountered others who were suffering, they tended to blame the sufferers if they could do nothing to alleviate their suffering.

[His research] arose, initially, out of the efforts to explain why scientifically trained university students insisted on condemning poverty-stricken victims as “lazy and no good” while denying the evidence of their victimization by overwhelming economic changes. The explanation offered … was that people, for the sake of their security and ability to plan for the future, need to believe they live in an essentially “just” world whereby they can get what they deserve, at least in the long run. This may involve acting to eliminate injustice. But failing that, by blaming, rejecting, or avoiding the victim, or having faith that the victim will eventually be appropriately compensated, people are able to maintain their confidence in the justness of the world in which they must live and work for their future security (Lerner 1).

Most awfully: “The greater the injustice the greater the tendency to denigrate [the victim]” (2). Yet these researchers found that if observers found the victims to be similar to themselves, the blaming did not tend to occur. Thus, they report, homosexuals did not blame homosexuals with AIDS; unemployed people did not blame others for being unemployed; and so on (4). Moreover, the psychologists found that “giving observers instructions to empathize with the victims (imagine it is happening to you) seemed to prevent their victim derogation, as did reminding the observers that they were not supposed to condemn innocent victims” (2).


That paper was about the importance of connecting working-class literature to Critical University Studies, but I could broaden the argument to emphasizing the importance of connecting real working-class lives to critical analyses of the institutions.  And I am using it here to most of all emphasize why it is that many are so uncomfortable with, as I said earlier in here, raw pain that lacks neat and easy solutions.

This isn't to say I'm advocating some kind of "learned helplessness" - quite the opposite - but I'm arguing that those who resist the system best are those who can't find individual solutions or those who have close relationships with people for whom individual solutions fail. As Lerner's research shows, people don't blame others in similar straits.

Demanding that people put on cheerful, ever upbeat facades is not a genuinely progressive demand, nor does it help people who are suffering. When I talk with my cousin Johnny who got out of prison last year, he often expresses anger, bitterness, and profound grief.  It would be disrespectful and damaging for me to start lecturing him about what he can do to "better" himself.  (Not to say I haven't ended up delivering my fair share of disrespectful, moralizing lectures to people that I later regretted - including in some of my comments to people's responses in this blog last year.) The truth is that the system horrifically screwed Johnny - stole so much of his life - left him in a terrible mental and physical state when it finally let him leave its prison.

In 2011, I was volunteering for a project locally and mentioned to the director - a man who'd left his corporate marketing job of 24 years to "give back' to the community - that my cousin was in prison on a 27 years to life sentence for nonviolent crimes relating to his heroin addiction - and this perpetually exuberant person exclaimed with a big smile, "It probably saved his life!!"  It is people from his class that need to put a perpetual happy face on every rotten experience of those who are supposed to thankfully accept the crumbs the system's benefactors hand out to alleviate guilt and cognitive dissonance.  Otherwise,  people like that man would have to interrogate the system they support.

But those of us who want systemic transformation know better. And this is why I say, we need to critically analyze the urge toward cheery positivity within ourselves - the American white middle to upper class norm that makes people so uncomfortable with unsolved pain and so unable to fully accept it without berating or avoiding the person expressing it for being "a downer."

Thinking about my discomfort with not only the last post of mine but so much of what I've written on this blog for the past year, I know that I too am infused with these ideas about being "positive."  This is I think why I feel so guilty when I express pain and anger about the way the system plays out in my life and the lives of many close to me.  And I've chosen to use a lot of my life energy and time in these educational systems, so I too find it hurtful if too much of the meaning in what I do is unraveled.  And it HAS been transformative. I am still trying to sort all of this out,

One last thought: another reason I find myself feeling that something I've strongly expressed is not true enough is because so many of these things are dialectical. Out of the seeming contradictions, we work out a complicated, paradoxical truth that encompasses what seem to be at opposite ends.  And that's true with this topic as well.  We do need (as Frederic Jameson says) the utopian impulse. We need to imagine and try to create better. Mixes of joy, anger, and despair at the possibilities within the system can push us in that utopian direction. And that is probably what my friend was getting at.




Works Cited:

Lerner, Melvin J. and Leo Montada. Responses to Victimization and Belief in a Just World (Critical Issues in Social Justice) New York: Springer, 2010. Print.

My Standing in the Academy -- Or: Should I Walk?

by Lucy S.

Some confessions. Almost every day, I think about walking away from academia. I don't know if I could support myself if I left, but then, I don't know if I can support myself if I stay, either.  

I try to understand what I find so painful about being in it.

Part of my pain is rooted in my pay.  I make $4,000 a semester to teach a class. That's higher than what most other colleges pay around here. Last semester, that meant about $8.70 per hour before taxes (and gas and books...), based on my estimations ($4000 divided by 460 hours). Classes were 15 weeks, and I averaged at least 25 hours a week of work - 375 hours, not counting driving time of an hour a day there and back. (The truth is, I worked far more than 25 hours a week many weeks because I kept reading about how to teach writing and how to teach literature, and I often over-prepared for the content I thought I’d share with students during class meetings.) The week after classes ended, I needed another 25 (or more) hours to meet with students and email more feedback. Papers were due December 20, so I spent another 30 hours (or more) reading, answering more student questions, grading, adding up total course grade points, and submitting grades. Before the semester began, I spent at least 30 hours preparing (more, really, but some was connected to getting the job in the first place).  I will get faster, of course. But how much faster? Can I live on this pay when my separated spouse finally moves out soon?

At the same time, I don't like to think about my hourly wage. When I talk with students, I don't know which part of that is "work" and which is "fun.” That's part of what is confusing about this work. But there are only so many hours in a day and week and year. As much as I love the work, I need time for other things. Even if I get a lot faster, I can't imagine teaching more than three classes a semester – two might even be the limit – if they’re at different colleges and if I’m going to try my best to provide students with the kind of relationship-based education that I believe in. We're limited in how many classes adjuncts can teach at my university (two in fall; one in spring for a total of $12,000 maximum). If I manage to later line up and handle teaching one class at a community college in fall and two in spring for $3000 a class, I’ll make a total of $21,000 a year with no benefits, working a ton of hours and driving between my home and two colleges.

Why did this develop? We, the non-tenured, now teach the majority of classes in the U.S. Apparently, this, too, is not a job for real grownups, at least grownups whose earned income must support them. Why does anyone think that this is acceptable? 

Yet if I decide pay must be my first concern, I unravel the purpose in what I've done anyway, because if I were going to make a high income my main goal, I’d never have gotten a B.A. in English or gone to graduate school in English literature. I wanted to do work I believe in and love. The work means too much to me to dull my feeling for it all by going into factory or business mode.

So I continue to see what I do as a resistance to the status quo. (My honors thesis was called "Relational Education as a Resistance to an Immoral Status-Quo" - not a poetic title, but it says something about my stance.)  But I wonder at times if I'm deluding myself by seeing it that way. If I ever come to fully believe that, I will leave the work if at all possible. Will "ever" come too soon? Here I am only one semester into teaching, soon to start the second, and I hover between intense idealism and crushing disillusionment.

It was like that for me in grad school, too, and during part of my time finishing my B.A. Then, though, I was on the way to something. Graduation, I guess, but the degree itself wasn't the aim. I believed I was on the way to heightened consciousness, deepened sensitivity, and an unfolding panorama of language finally available to me to express what had felt dammed up inside me for so long. I would finally understand what had bewildered me throughout much of my life. And I hoped I was on the way to some kind of community, a place I’d finally be accepted into, where we would talk about all these things that matter so much, and our talk would infuse our actions, and we would help change the world for the better. I still hold onto all of that – still believe it – or at least believe IN that ideal – and hope that the rest is true. But what if none of it is or will ever be? What if I'm just another exploited adjunct helping to prop up the status quo?

I try not to think about the last questions too much, because doing so can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I fear what it would do to me to believe that. So I try to encourage myself. I try to care for the connections I have with a small number of friends who seem to have similar feelings for this work.  

I don't like cynicism about what we put so much of our life into, and I don't like selfishness, but I don't like the naive, uncritical "positive thinking" rampant in U.S. society, either (connected to its own kind of selfishness). Nor do I believe in saintly martyrdom that so often lets others become increasingly selfish.  I get mad and hurt at times when someone who does make a living wage says that I can do all this as a “labor of love” without material concern. I want to ask if they on the other hand do not center their lives, including their work, around love, but instead live and work just for money.  I've done so much unpaid labor for love in my life that at this point, I'm sickened and angered by the expectation that for some, love for the work and the people we care for is enough, and any compensation is icing on the cake (a cake we can’t eat).  I start to wonder, do any of these people "love" me? Where is the mutuality? Do they care if we don't make a living wage? Or do they just assume that we have "other" income? Trust funds? Our own businesses on the side? Are we "dependents" to be supported by the "primary income" of partners with "real" jobs?  Are our jobs hobbies? Or are we all to be their idea of other Mother Teresa's living out a vow of poverty for our vocation? 

And here I don’t just mean others in academia, but many in our society who blithely pursue their own concerns, embracing their privilege, guarding it, not willing to do anything to enact solidarity.

 And so my pain is rooted in my pay, but it is also rooted in the deep ways in which I am forever fused to my class and not to the class of people I teach or work with at this university. I teach undergraduates at a university where my kids would not be able to go to school for their undergraduate degrees. I teach students fresh out of high school who will probably earn far more than I do four or five years from now. The alternative – in which they graduate and don’t find work after paying $180,000 for their four years in school and in the dorms – does not bring me any comfort. But if all goes as planned, I’m helping to produce the professional-managerial class who often get to manage the working-class workers – the people like my own kids, my extended family, and many of my life-long friends. I produced the workers first – gave birth to them, taught them myself for years, thought that I would somehow give them a way out of the system’s demands.  And now, I produce the class who manage the workers, if my students are lucky enough to get the lives for which they study and pay. I, on the other hand, will not ascend into their class, nor do I want to.

It is hard now to know what to hope for and try for. My son – one of the twins – the one I, his brothers, and other people thought of as especially intellectual, who was reading adult history books at age 9 and studying labor history at 14 and the French Revolution at 17 – he had to get to his job stocking in the back at Target at 6 am this particular Saturday. He only got 18 hours this week, but will get 28 next week. He didn’t finish college – became disillusioned with many aspects of academia after a couple years – so many will blame him for the job he has. His twin brother has to be at Starbucks by 2 pm today; he has a B.A. with a dual major in English and Theater Arts. He too can be blamed for picking the wrong majors. My oldest son also has a B.A. in English and has applied for many jobs, but gotten none so far. He does freelance editing for $300-$400 a month. He worked at college writing centers for five years as a tutor; the other two also worked as writing center tutors at the nearby community college. Maybe I knew, even as a homeschooling mother, how to teach kids to write well: read with them and have them read a lot; discuss the readings and other important issues with them; let them write. I don’t know if the other two will ever go to college, though. One has learning difficulties; we will probably have to help him apply for disability income through Social Security.  The youngest might go, but I don’t want him to major in English – my discipline – if he does. I won’t tell him that, but I hope he doesn’t. He’d have a better chance of making a living if he learned tile-setting from his dad than he would from anything I could teach him. I still believe that learning, even in college, is for so much more than making money. But those who run and fund our institutions do not seem to see it that way. And also, I know what low-paying, boring, meaningless, tiring, unreliable jobs do to people over time. Even the better-paying, more reliable, but still boring and tiring jobs take such a toll. I want meaningful work and lives for my kids, for other people’s kids, and for myself. I am so sick of this society. I want better for us all. So I guess I do know what to hope for, but I am trying to know what I can do to create that.

I feel sandwiched between generations who are trapped. I grew up hearing my dad joke about suicide because he hated his job -- and I finally realized as I moved into adulthood that he hadn’t been just joking. When my uncle, an insurance agent, wanted to change his life-insurance policy every few years, my dad would say that the policy had just passed the two-year incontestable mark (after which it will pay, even if the policyholder commits suicide). He’d say that he couldn’t guarantee that he could last another two years for a new policy. He’d make us laugh in the way he said it, just as he made us laugh talking about dogs chasing him, supervisors interrogating why he couldn’t sort three-foot stacks of thin cards as fast as he’d sorted three-foot stacks of National Geographic magazines the other day, and so many anxieties and absurdities bound up with that job. But he hated spending the best part of his days and years in that work. He knew it could be far worse, but that only made him feel more trapped. And at times, the joking thinned and disappeared, revealing raw anguish underneath it. The viciousness and meaninglessness of so much, not only in his life, but in the larger society ate at him. But he kept living, enduring the bad parts of his days and his depression about this society while mostly savoring the better hours and days. And he’s always made us laugh at how stupid and lousy some aspects of the system are. I see my kids do so many of these same things now, but with even worse job prospects.

And so I think about walking away from my work, even though I love it. If that work doesn’t help make a better world – if it only churns out more professionals and managers for my kids and other people I love to labor under and serve rather than make community with as equals – then why should I put so much of my time and care into that work? 

On the other hand, where do I go and what do I do to work to make the world we need?

I know that I, my kids, my parents, and others I love are not simply among the exploited; we live as exploiters, too, of course. What is to be done with that knowledge? More affluent academic acquaintances have used that at times to repeat for the umpeenth time that "we're all implicated."  Okay… We're all implicated - the end?  Is that meant to pretend that we’re all in the same position? Is it supposed to be their absolution, even as they say it is not – a way to not worry about the horrific contradictions we live with and the lives and planet this system decimates? In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau says we're not obligated to right every wrong on earth, that we may choose to pursue our own life, but we need to get off another person's back first so that person can also freely create a life. How? How can we stop standing on other people's backs and get them off of ours?  That makes me think of Joan Baez, in the intro to one of her songs, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King's call to stand tall - if you stand tall, a man can't ride your back. But if we can't throw others off our backs and stand up very straight, and can't find anywhere to stand that isn't on other people's backs, can we start by at least not pretending that we're all standing up straight and walking our paths freely?  And if we do that, might we finally find a way to stand up side by side and MOVE toward better?  

For now, I stay in academia because it's where I learned to more thoroughly identify painful sources of what can deceptively come across as “just life.” I stay because it's where I met some of the people I know who also want better and who try to create it there, amidst all that perpetuation of the status quo. I stay because I love enough of what I learn and teach there. I stay because I hope that through my work and relationships there, maybe I can help us see where we all stand and where we might stand if we all change the world. But what we are doing now is not enough. I am standing in an academy that excludes many more people than it includes, and I don’t know how long I can keep standing in this particular spot.

***

Postscript: Already I feel the backlash within myself after posting the above.  This is a lack of gratitude, I think, and it is self-pity, I think, and I am one of the luckier people on this planet. Then I feel the defensiveness that arises in response to my backlash. Competing for levels of oppression is no way to stand up for ourselves, I think, and “being thankful for what we have” when it means perpetuating this devastating status quo does nothing for those most harmed. And then the idealistic impulse returns, that thought that maybe I am doing some good, that maybe we just have to try harder to take over these excluding, oppressive systems, and make them serve ALL OF US. After all, there is nowhere to go to escape capitalism and the many ways it hurts so many lives. 


I finish this just as I am finding out that a chemical spill into the Elk River in Kanawha County, West Virginia, is affecting over 300,000 people.  I remember this county, because it is the place in the U.S. where another chemical, the deadly methyl isocyanate, is produced – the gas that poured out into the city of Bhopal, India, for the worst industrial disaster ever known. I had my students read a book connected to Bhopal this last semester. The chemical released this time is called 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, and it is used to wash coal. Now we all wait to learn more about this chemical and what it will do to the ecosystems and inhabitants of the places it has poisoned. How long will we all stand this? 

***

A second postscipt.  When I wrote this post, it felt true. Then afterward, something felt wrong, so I added the postscript.  Now I'm home from going to see two friends play their music at a coffee shop -- two friends who are tenured professors where I teach, one of whom hired me and gave me the chance to teach, a good friend who is unceasingly kind to me -- and I feel something somehow untrue in the post I wrote. I don't know how to ever get to the truth, it seems. I cannot reconcile these pieces of reality that seem to sit completely apart from each other. 

What the university pays me or what the American academy as a whole has normalized in their pay and treatment of adjuncts seems completely disconnected from that friend. There is nothing he can do to pay me more. The university sets our pay. I know he is on my side. I know he would feel terribly hurt if he felt that I somehow imply a lack of concern for me and others on his part. He has done all he can to support my learning and teaching. And he calls me his friend. Tonight I got there after they'd started, and on the break between sets, he came over to talk and said he'd planned to start with one of his solo songs, but had held off to wait till I got there so I could hear it. 

Another truth is that despite my pain, I would never choose to have not done what I've done in these recent years since I returned to school.  My life is far better for having met the people I've come to know, and from what I've learned, written, and now taught. 

These truths that I can't fully fuse - the truths I tried to write in the original post and these later truths - these are what together hurt. At the same time, that too feels untrue. I don't move through my days in a state of anguish or morose despair. I laugh. I enjoy people. So far I love teaching. And most days, I'm glad to wake up. But these conflicting feelings aren't just "ups and downs" -- "moods"; they're the inevitably fractured responses to a broken contradictory system. 

That's all for tonight. It's not enough, but these are my truths on this late night in January. 

American Dream by Delaine W

I once believed that our education system was the great equalizer. If you worked hard enough in school you could overcome your circumstances and lead the life you’ve always wanted. American Dream bullshit. Life has taught me a lot of disappointing things. I was hoping this wasn’t going to be one of them.

When I was a kid I loved learning and helping other people learn. I would get so excited when my friends’ siblings needed help with homework. I have always wanted to be a teacher and now I am. My students ask me what I wanted to be when I was younger. “Surely you didn’t want to be a teacher” they say, “We don’t know why you would want to be a teacher.” They know. They know what I didn’t when I was their age. They have seen the American Dream fail over and over and they aren’t going to trust the lies they’re served. They have a socially acceptable answer to the question: “Why is education important?” but their bones know better and it seeps out in places of anger, fear, defeat, and frustration.

I live a conflicted life. One that makes me question my character, purpose, and worth. I try so hard to educate my students, to care about them, to change their lives. But, I am so tired. The kind of tired that overshadows your dreams and makes you think you want to work a 9 to 5 in a cubicle. A 9 to 5 where you don’t take children’s worries and lives home.

I often think that I am a terrible person. For not wanting to work any harder. For wanting to have a social and personal life. For wanting a job I am less emotionally invested in. For feeling like I am a martyr, laying my life down for the betterment of the next generation. But, do we need martyrs? Do we need harder workers? Or do we need a different system?

I met Lucy my senior year in college. We dreamt of a different system. A system where generations learned together, subjects weren’t separated and compartmentalized, employees were valued equally, and school was less about capitalistic gain and more about the personal and social freedom it can bring. Education is the plague as well as the solution. I no longer want to be part of a system that oppresses.  I want to be a part of a system that frees. I hope I can stay around long enough to see that happen. 

January 2014 with My Learning Comrades ~ Sean and Ryan

by Lucy S.

Sunday afternoon, and we've just finished Brother, I'm Dying by the great Haitian-American author, Edwidge Danticat. We've been reading a chapter a day for some time now, but today, I read the fourth to the last chapter, and we all wanted to go on.  I kept reading, and we knew the only thing to do was to see it through.  I started to cry on some parts, just intermittently.  After the last words, when I closed the book, Sean said with strong feeling, "God! That's so sad!" Ryan said it was up there with the great ones, with Animal's People and other great ones, and Sean said, "Yeah!" and I nodded.  I said, "Do you realize how few people your age have read that and all of the books and poems and other readings on our list?" "Yeah..." they both said, nodding, not placating me, but meaning it. I said, "So maybe you really have had a great education."  Sean said, "Yeah, think of all of them - this one, Animal's People, The Shock Doctrine, The Moral Underground..."  I said, "Go on this blog sometimes and look at the list, and let yourself think about each of the readings as your eyes take them in, and think about how much time each one represents, and how much you actually know from all those readings."

They have read other things, of course, but these are the ones we've read together that we could remember when I began listing these readings. And the ones that matter. There are far more movies, too, but I haven't tried to think much about making that longer. What I most care about are the books we read together. We don't even talk about them that much after each day's reading. But they bind us together, our travels through these books together.

I've been all over the place in my thoughts about homeschooling and public schools. In recent years, I've doubted my choices at times, thinking of them as maybe a retreat from the institutions that we should instead be struggling in - though there is ample evidence that working-class and poverty-class kids don't tend to fare too well in them, by and large. They tend to perpetuate the same class inequalities. But I am tired of thinking about it in those terms, tired of trying to arrive at a perfect answer. I only know that I've given my kids a moral education, reading these books to them, talking about the book a little during the readings, referring back to them, building in my kids a deep well of understanding, a way of seeing a larger picture of this world. They don't get falsely cheery interpretations that are meant to make them see their society and government as advancing further and further into some brightening light of benevolent progress.  And yet they never become jaded in their responses to our readings. They're always moved.

Sean and Ryan told me I should read Brother, I'm Dying with my class, and I said, "I am! This coming semester!" They said they think the students will love it. I hope so. I hope they'll all actually even do all the readings. Sometimes I wonder if they'd get more out of their education if we all just sat and read together and talked about the readings afterward, and we cared more about their moral or ethical development than about producing another worker to take another spot in - the students hope - the professional-managerial class. But that's a topic for another post. Right now, I'm feeling thankful to my kids (all of them) for teaching me how to teach before I ever went back to school.


Books

Adams, Richard Watership Down (me and Ryan)
Blanding, Michael The Coke Machine
Bradbury, Ray Farenheit 451
Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game (one only in the series)
Carson, Rachel Silent Spring
Cather, Willa. My Antonia.
Danticat, Edwidge. Brother, I'm Dying. 
Davis, Rebecca Harding Life in the Iron-Mills
Dawson, George Life Is So Good
Dickens, Charles Hard Times
DiCamillo, Kate The Tale of Despereaux
Dodson, Lisa The Moral Underground
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Chapter One.
Fleischman, Paul Seedfolks
Funke, Cornelia Inkheart books (three)
Habila, Helon Oil on Water
Hochschild, Adam Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
Jimenez, Francisco: (trilogy) The Circuit; Breaking Through; Reaching Out
Jacques. Brian Redwall (books)
Jaffee, Daniel Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
Kingsolver, Barbara The Poisonwood Bible
Klein, Naomi The Shock Doctrine
Lapierre, Dominique and Javier Moro Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
L’Engle, Madeleine Wrinkle in Time series
Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia series (all, me and Ryan; Sean up to book 2)
Lowry, Lois The Giver
Lowry, Lois Gathering Blue
Lowry, Lois Messenger
Lowry, Lois Number the Stars
More, Thomas. Utopia
Nix, Garth. Keys to the Kingdom (me and Ryan)
Peck, Dale Dritfhouse books (two)
Peck, Robert Newton A Day No Pigs Would Die (me and Ryan)
Philbrick, Rodman Freak the Mighty and Max the Mighty
Roy, Aruhndhati. Walking with the Comrades
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter series
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle
Sinha, Indra. Animal's People
Skye, Obert. Levin Thumps (five)
Stowe, Harriet. Uncle Tom's Cabin
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn


Short Stories and Essays

Bulosan, Carlos. "Be American"
Chesnutt, Charles “Po’ Sandy”
Chopin, Kate “The Story of an Hour”
Cleary, Kate M. "Feet of Clay."
Edmundson, Mark. "The Ideal English Major."
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Birth-Mark”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The May Pole of Merry Mount”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"
Irving, Washington “The Adventure of the German Student”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Irving, Washington “Rip Van Winkle”
Kafka, Franz. "A Hunger Artist."
Poe, Edgar Allen “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Travens, B. "Assembly Line."
Wright, Richard. "The Library Card."
Zitkala-Sa "Impressions of an Indian Childhood"
Zitkala-Sa "School Days of an Indian Girl"
Zitkala-Sa "An Indian Teacher Among Indians"


Poetry

Ashbery, John. "The Painter."
Auden, W.H. "Musee des Beaux Arts."
Barghouti, Mourid. "Even Gods."
Barghouti, Mourid. “The three cypress trees.”
Berry, Wendell, "The Peace of Wild Things"
Cullen, Countee. "Incident"
Dickinson, Emily."Because I could not stop for Death" (479)
Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the thing with feather" (314)
Dickinson, Emily. "I felt a funeral in my Brain" (340)
Dickinson, Emily. "I like a look of Agony" (339)
Dickinson, Emily. "I'm nobody! Who are you?" (260)
Dickinson, Emily. "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (620)
Dickinson, Emily. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1263)
Dickinson, Emily. "The bustle in a House" (1108)
Dickinson, Emily. "There's a Certain Slant of Light" (320)
Frost, Robert: “Home Burial”
Frost, Robert: “Mending Wall”
Frost, Robert: “The Road Not Taken”
Frost, Robert “The Wood Pile”
H. D. excerpt from “The Walls Do Not Fall”
Hayden, Robert. "Those Winter Sundays"
Heaney, Seamus. “Digging”
Hughes, Langston. “I, Too”
Hughes, Langston. "Mother to Son."
Hughes, Langston "Theme for English B"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Banking Potatoes"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Facing It"
Komunyakaa, Yusef: “Sunday Afternoons”
Lorde, Audre. "Coal"
Lorde, Audre. "From the House of Yemanjá"
Merwin, W.S. "Losing a Language"
Morales, Aurora Levins. "Child of the America."
Neruda, Pablo. "It Rains."
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. "Are All the Break-ups in Your Poems Real?"
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee."Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia."
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. "Kottayam Morning."
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "England in 1819"
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias"
Thomas, Dylan “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."
Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing"
Williams, William Carlos “This Is Just to Say That”
Williams, William Carlos “The Red Wheelbarrow”


Movies

"A Better Life"
"Children of Heaven"
"The Cove"
"Darwin's Nightmare"
"Flow"
"The Garden"
"The Grapes of Wrath"
"In a Better World"
"Joyeux Noel"
"La Cosecha" (The Harvest)
"Life in Debt"
"Man of La Mancha"
"Planet Earth" series
"Under the Same Moon"
"Winter's Bone"