Coming to Terms with My Experience

by Lucy S.

Tomorrow the new semester begins.  It’s the first class of my second semester as a college teacher. I teach at a private liberal arts school. A plaque outside the office I share with one professor this coming semester says: “Professor Lucy S……”  I’m an adjunct, an “instructor” – but also called “Professor” by students.

I’m trying to become that new identity. It feels like certain vital elements of who I am have changed so quickly. A recap: Four years ago, I’d begun the second of three semesters back at our huge public university to finish my B.A. I’d done one other ‘round’ there – (fall 2005; spring 2006; spring 2007). I transferred in 66 credits, most from the California community college I began when my oldest son was two, some from another California community college where I took four classes with him when he was fifteen and then seventeen. After years of stretched out education, I graduated in December 2010.  I didn’t know what I should do next with a B.A. in English at that point.  In community college when my son was little, I’d planned to get a master’s and teach college English. But during the in-between years, work in the academic humanities became more precarious. I became more aware of the precariousness. I also lost confidence on a personal level in some ways. I was in such a different stage of life, too – permanently separated from my spouse, kids to still care for, not up for the one-room- or couch-spot-renting I did in my teens and fledgling adulthood, or the umpteen moves of my 20s and 30s (with kids in tow), or all the “dues-paying” some people insist “young” people must do now (with the meaning of “young” stretching further and further into adulthood). But I took the leap and applied to a master’s program along with the full-time fellowship at a local private liberal arts university. Then I kept planning what I’d “really” do. Getting the fellowship stunned me. I began in September 2011, graduated in May 2013, and began teaching at that institution in September 2013. So here I am.

I’ve been trying for four-and-a-half years to understand my experience. The first round at the U, I didn’t try to understand in these ways. I just knew I felt depressed at times, and almost always felt awkward and alienated. I heard what the situation was for would-be college English teachers, so I shifted to the plan of teaching adult ESL, but soon I found out that job outlook was terrible, too. And the seemingly uncrossable chasm between my life, my relationships, my other forms of knowledge and wisdom before and beyond academia and, on the other side, what I was doing in college – this chasm did things to me psychologically that I couldn’t understand well enough. I just knew that I felt so much better about myself when I wasn’t there. At the same time, there were classes that taught me a lot, and moments I liked or even loved. Then I took another leap in 2009 – went back – and it was all different.  I connected to a small number of people who made a profound difference in my experience, plus two of my kids were there at the same time. I loved it enough to see it through. Yet the experience has disrupted my sense of who I am – which is why I’m still grappling with the question of how to understand my experience and what to DO with that understanding.

Sometimes I think about how someone would “normally” be about 21 or 22 when graduating with the B.A., and if they’d then continued along this same trajectory as me, they’d be about 24 or 25 now. Then I sometimes rail against the pretense of when these college educations supposedly “normally” occur. Even with the insistence from so many sectors that people must get a college degree now to ‘make it,’ almost 60 percent of 18-24 year-old Americans were not in college in 2010. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98  Or, from a 2011 article in The Atlantic: “Thirty-eight percent of those enrolled in higher education are over the age of 25 and one-fourth are over the age of 30. The share of all students who are over age 25 is projected to increase another twenty-three percent by 2019. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/old-school-colleges-most-important-trend-is-the-rise-of-the-adult-student/245823/  And still, in so many circles, people perpetuate the fiction of college education as something that, for the “normal” person, occurs right after high school. It is imagined as the final stage of coming into adulthood. When it is merged with arrival at adulthood, what does that say about the rest of us, who either don’t get college degrees or get them much later? In the minds of all who believe a college degree makes someone an adult in a way they can’t be without the experience, are we never quite adults, or developmentally delayed adults, or are we some variation of the mature American human? And what does it do to people who don’t go to college (at all or at least not until later) to even partly believe this, or have others believe it?

People can pay lip service to valuing ‘many kinds of knowledge,’ including the kinds gained by caring for babies and kids, raising them, homeschooling them, managing to keep oneself and a family going through so many mishmashes of jobs and living situations (without scams – without hurting other people), growing gardens, moves, whatever else – but it is the college degree that so many employers make into a gatekeeper, to get certain jobs or to take on additional responsibilities. I know what it feels like to live through a large portion of my adulthood without one. I can’t say what it feels like for every person, but for me and quite a few other people I’ve known, not having one takes on huge sociological, economic, and psychological dimensions that we can’t fully sort out. In contrast, the multitude of adults in their 30s, 40s, or beyond in this country would never find themselves kept out of so many jobs and blamed for their economic distress because ‘after all, they CHOSE to not have kids.’  And even so, I’ve read umpteen articles by some professional whining about being asked when that person is going to have children when that person does not ever plan to do so and resents the idea that this must be an event of adulthood. Okay, maybe “whining” is a mean way to put it, and maybe people have a right to feel whatever it is they feel, and maybe I’m just angry about my main point. Namely, I am sickened and hurt and angry that people who do have kids and do not go to college or go much later – the MAJORITY of us, by the way – are often blamed when they and their kids are harmed by the system on multiple levels.

But I didn’t go to college to make a lot more money.  I knew my particular education wouldn’t do that for me. I went primarily because I hungered so badly for what and how I might learn there, and to be part of a community of intellectually, artistically, creatively, and politically engaged people. But still, that means that on various levels, I too believed I would grow ‘upward’ in some way through the experience, and that the people I’d come to know there would be ‘more’ intellectual, artistic, creative, and politically engaged than would generally be the case for those not there. And that is one of the huge tensions inside my experience. I don’t know how to reconcile my anger and pain that those of us who didn’t go or didn’t finish are so often seen as ‘less than’ and not good enough at critical thinking – how to reconcile that with my love for what I learned through the experience. Sure, I or others can say it is just ONE way to those kinds of growth, and that there are others. But I chose to go the college route ultimately. and I now have chosen to teach college classes. I am confused about what I think of all this. Does what I teach now matter tremendously?  Is it life-changing, as I hope it is? What does that mean for those who never get to experience anything like it?

And at times, I wonder how much good college education does people or our society as a whole.

Why have people with college degrees voted more conservatively than those without them?  (This flies in the face of some college-educated liberals who insist that it’s the ‘dumb’ working-classes who make the country so reactionary.) In the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the less education someone had, the more likely they were to vote for Obama over Romney (except at the grad school level, when it tipped back to Obama). Here are the numbers:

                                      % of pop.           Obama                Romney

Some HS	3	64	35
HS graduate		21	51	48
Some college		29	49	48
College graduate		29	47	51
Postgraduate study		18	55	42

Source: http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/elections/how_groups_voted/voted_12.html

The college educated voted more conservatively because they voted what they perceived to be their economic interests. People who made under $50,000 a year voted 60 percent Obama, 37 percent Romney. People who made $50,000-$90,000 a year voted 46 percent Obama, 52 percent Romney. And those making over $100,000 a year voted 44 percent Obama, 54 percent Romney. Isn’t it repeatedly emphasized that those with college degrees generally make a lot more money in their lifetime than those without them? 

During the Vietnam War, the people most against the war were people without a high school diploma, followed by those with just high school diplomas… despite our cultural story about all the anti-war college students. Those who didn't go on to college knew they were the ones most at risk for being drafted to go fight that war.

Who opposed the war? Contrary to the impression promulgated by the media then, and overwhelmingly prevalent today, opposition to the war was not concentrated among affluent college students. In fact, opposition to the war was inversely proportional to both wealth and education. Blue-collar workers generally considered themselves “doves” and tended to favor withdrawal from Vietnam, while those who considered themselves “hawks” and supported participation in the war were concentrated among the college-educated, high-income strata. For example, a Gallup poll in January 1971 showed that 60 percent of those with a college education favored withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, 75 percent of those with a high-school education favored withdrawal, and 80 percent of those with only a grade-school education favored withdrawal. InLies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen reports a revealing experiment he conducted repeatedly in the 1990s. When he asked audiences to estimate the educational level of those who favored U.S. withdrawal back in 1971, by an almost 10-to-1 margin they believed that college-educated people were the most antiwar. In fact, they estimated that 90 percent of those with a college education favored withdrawal, scaling down to 60 percent of those with a grade-school education. http://www.isreview.org/issues/22/feat-franklin.shtml

I hope what we teach now has a different effect than what was taught before, but I don’t know. And I’d like to know if the wisdom that is connected to a college experience lasts, long after graduation. What happens after these graduates take their places in the professional-managerial class (if their degree gets them there, which it may not, especially if they start off working-class or low-middle-class)? In my paper for my directed-study class at the end of my 2009 semester at the U, I asked why most people who run things in this world have college degrees, yet do such a harmful, short-sighted job of it? (At times they do a vicious, even genocidal job of it.)  I still wonder.  Marxist theory tells me that their roles shape who they are. But then, where does that leave me, as a college teacher?

On a personal as well as scholarly level, at times, I think I’ll never really belong in academia. Maybe I’ll never be deeply accepted by other professors there who can’t understand my experience and frame it inside their own. At times, I want to emphasize to them: I AM NOT YOU.  You haven’t lived my life. You haven’t raised five kids, homeschooled them, lived in the situations we lived in. And I haven’t lived your life.  But then I find myself wanting to insist: I AM YOU. I too love these studies, and I too feel the insecurities of what’s being done to higher education, and I too am a human being who wants friends, who wants some sense of abiding, genuine community in these endeavors. Regardless of to whatever extents ‘I am not them’ and ‘I am them,’ I can’t say I have it worse. I know that too many find themselves struggling on low incomes and/or in tenuous jobs, afraid that they can’t ever forge long-term partner relationships, buy homes, settle somewhere, or have kids if they want them. And even if I have it worse than some, what is there to be done with that? It’s not a basis for relationship. I don’t want pity; I want friendship. And with friendship comes compassion, trust, and some sense of equality. I go around in my head about these thoughts at times.

When I’m honest enough to begin to express some of this, people sometimes think it’s an invitation to ‘explain to me how it is’ in some way. I don’t want those kinds of conversations. I understand how they happen. I know the urge inside myself at times to just tell someone what I think the problem and solution are, because those may seem easy to identify looking in on a part of someone else’s life.  But that’s a false ease and a kind of arrogance. People need to be listened to carefully if we’re going to weigh in. I DO want dialogue, and I want mutual understanding. And mutual respect.

And sometimes I’m so tired of thinking about these issues. Sometimes I just want to think about and write about other people’s situations or broader problems, with more research, more critical analysis. Maybe the answer is to just forget about my own educational experiences and feelings.  But then I wonder if there’s any point to someone doing these things later, like I did, if we can only be ‘behind’ in our education and work connected to that. Or if my own experiences contribute significantly to my work now, how do I draw on them, write about them, grow wiser about them? 

Tomorrow I go teach, and as I have mentioned in here a couple of times now, I teach at an expensive private college that is ultra-traditional in its student ages, a college neither my kids nor I can / would have been able to attend as undergraduates. What I feel isn’t petty resentment about that. It’s confusion over what to make of it or DO about it, if anything.

For now, I’m thinking a lot about utopian impulses (drawing on Fredric Jameson and Ernst Bloch), and how what goes on in that school and in my course constitute one kind of utopian effort and practice. My own education has been an enacted utopian impulse. If so many of us yearn to create spaces and experiences that stretch toward something more perfect, maybe the thing to do is to direct the urges more expansively and democratically, so that they reach outward to embrace and welcome more people. I still imagine college classes where women can nurse their babies – not segregated spaces, either – but right in there with 19 year olds who have no kids – and people struggling to recover from prison’s ravages can be there, too, and someone like my grandmother (who took one college class in her life, with me), and a mix of people that look far more like what our whole society looks like. I still believe that the meaning of my experience is that so much of what gets studied there must be shared with all people in society if it is truly valuable. 

***

Postscript: I started to write this the other day, and am now thinking it fits here.

I've started reading a well-known book called Women's Ways of Knowing, written by two psychology professors, a research professor of human development, and a professor of the college of education and social services of U. of Vermont. These four women interviewed 135 women about their experiences in families, schools, and other institutions, and they let these in-depth interviews shape their own theories, in the same sense as we who write about literature have to let the text guide us, rather than trying to impose our own pre-constructed meaning onto a text. The book was first published in 1986 and then there was a 10th anniversary edition in 1997. In this 1997 edition, they begin with a preface that explains how they wrote this book - the many collaborative meetings for three to four days at a time together every two months, often at one of their homes with kids and/or dogs walking around them as they sat at tables or on couches, sometimes with one of their family members making food for the four of them.

I love the description of their process. This is for me how education should happen. It shows that of course people can talk about scholarly topics and work in the midst of kids and other 'messy' parts of life - something I've known from personal experience for years. The continued insistence that education happen instead in ways that function more like business boardrooms, places where 'of course' it would be 'highly inappropriate' for kids to be, always excludes caregivers. Not just caregivers of kids, but caregivers of the elderly or of those with severe physical or mental problems. But I love the description also because they talk about how the early drafts of sections by one or another were sometimes almost as bad as their freshman composition papers. They worked and worked, talking so much, going for walks together while talking more, talking in expansive terms about the project and more narrowed down nuanced terms, writing, re-writing each other's work, poring over the interviews, and they decided to make the book by all four of them without saying who wrote which sections.

I found out about this book because I'm also reading an excellent 2000 book called Women as Learners: the Significance of Gender in Adult Learning, which was in part inspired by the well-known earlier book.

I think the mix of fluctuating anguish, desperation, anxiety, resignation, awkwardness, self-pity, anger, confusion, humor, pain over real and perceived exclusions, resilience, somewhat euphoric ups (with all my new plans at various times) - I think all this comes from craving intellectual engagement, camaraderie, and challenge, and at the same time, from the deep connections I feel to the people I've been bound to during my life - and separations from both (the intellectual growth and participation as well as some of my relationships). Some of this makes me think of Virginia Woolf writing that if Shakespeare had had a sister with similar talents and aspirations, she'd have ended up killing herself. Woolf of course genderizes it - and it is grounded in gender, because of the ways even this society functions for women - but at the same time, it's not. I believe it has to do with people who yearn so badly to do something, to create, to engage with others who UNDERSTAND and feel similarly, but not in a way that leaves loved ones behind and leaves them with their own pain because of their stamped out yearnings and their own awareness of their intelligence.