"Real Life": Beyond Herding

by Lucy S.

They've given me two classes for fall, both the same, so my class preparation won't be double the work. And the classes are back to back.  The folks in our English department who decide these things and work out the details have done everything they could for me. The classes themselves - what everyone thinks of when they think of the work that college teachers do - take little time. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 65 minutes a class. Six and a half hours a week of actual class time next semester. Our time in there together is never enough. I meet with students as writing partners for each of the three essays. I meet with them individually, too, to talk about their essays, our readings, big ideas, little questions, my or their concerns when they fall behind, writing process... But what takes the most time is reading, thinking about, and responding to their essays - and for the final versions, grading them.  It's easy for me to spend an hour per essay at two or three of these steps. That's twenty-one hours each time this semester, at times crammed into a few days if I need to return papers quickly so they can proceed. It'll be forty or so hours next semester. How will I turn those papers around in even a week if I take that long?

The answer I hear from everyone who teaches classes like these is that I must get faster. Time myself. Aim for 20 minutes a paper. How? I can't imagine ever being that fast. The chair of our department, who's also a friend of mine and who's talked with me about handcrafted education versus mass-produced off the rack education, tells me that after decades, the fastest he can do it is 25 minutes an essay. It took him years to get to that point, he says. Others tell me not to try to teach them anything in the feedback.  But I DO. I do try so hard to teach them. And some of them improve enormously from that first essay and its multiple drafts to that second essay, and one more time, to the third and final essay (all with their multiple drafts). All my feedback is by computer. I work on their "papers" as computer documents and email them back. I write comments on the side and paragraphs at the end. I sometimes use 'track changes' to line things out and show them how their words and ideas could be reshaped to make them more stronger. People tell me the students won't absorb that anyway.

I never hear what research has been done to prove that the students can't improve that much as writers in 15 weeks, or that we can't teach them via extensive written feedback to their own essays. It is true that with some students, it's a waste because they won't read or apply the feedback. But most try. They quote me back to myself or to other students in peer reviews. In my admittedly limited time as a college teacher, I see huge leaps in their thinking and writing during the semester. So where is the research that proves otherwise?

Maybe we must construct theories to explain why the ways in which we're forced to do things are the best ways to do them. A childcare provider forced to care for ten infants on her own might try to convince herself and others that babies do best when left lying or sitting on their own most of the time, bottles propped up by cloths to feed them. A whole theory about 'spoiling' babies and the importance of them crying it out alone for hours because they need to learn 'autonomy' could emerge. But we know some of those theories already. It is important to learn early on - in these theories and the setups that make them necessary - that no matter how hard you cry or how much you need another human, other people are too busy with other things. So you had better learn to comfort yourself and accept the scarcities and limitations.

It turns out that in a world with seven billion people in it, there just aren't enough of us to go around.

I would like to know why.

Why -- when, in contrast, Zitkala-Sa's mother -- a Dakota widow caring for her little girl on a South Dakota Sioux reservation in the late 1800s without running water, let alone washers, kitchens, and all the conveniences of modern life -- could attend to their material needs while talking with her daughter, carefully reasoning with her, teaching her, savoring their time together. They cared for others there, too. They invited the old people to come to their teepee at night to tell stories that transported them all to other times and places. But when Zitkala-Sa was eight, some white men came and talked her and other children into leaving all that behind to go east to one of the Indian boarding schools. Zitkala-Sa and the other kids became "the children of absent mothers" (87). And then there were not enough mothers to go around. There were none. Haunted vacancies spread - in the lives of the children and the parents of those absent children.  Soon after arriving at the school, the school authorities tied Zitkala-Sa to a chair to teach her that her relationships with her culture, her people, even herself would be severed. She must learn to let go, and to submit to those who could outnumber and overpower -- vast numbers who could touch her and her people to control, but not to comfort. That night, when Zitkala-Sa  moaned for her mother, "no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder" (91). This then is the answer to why: we are arranged by others inside systems of herd control and mass production. The answer is inside the story. But at the same time, the answer itself is always partly absent, always empty inside, a circular logic. This is capitalism; this is imperialism... Yes, but why? Why do any of this?

At the end of her third essay, each of them published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 when she was 24, she writes: "But few there are who have paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization" (113). What is "real life"? Is it to be found in herding people up, rushing them through school work that they learn to not take too seriously and that we who teach them learn to not take too seriously as well? How can they feel that the work itself matters when everything in the system treats it as a means to an end - an end that is never quite reached for most of us. Is that part of the "long-lasting death" - that gaping emptiness at the center as we rush through our activities, consuming lives of all sorts?


I resist being a herder. If I am to be one, I'd might as well leave this line of work. I make too little to live on anyway. But the way to make more is to succumb to the logic of the system.  My two classes will pay me $8,000 total next semester. For September through December, I will make $2000 a month -- a record for me.  I don't think I can ever do more than the two unless I become a herder.

Students pay over $4000 to be in my class. For my class of twenty-one this spring, that's over $84,000. I get $4,000 of that.

One student wrote in her last essay on student loan debt that when she graduates, she will have $128,000 in student loan debt for her bachelor's degree. What "long-lasting death" might this create for the rest of her adult life?  Does an 18 year old have the capacity to decide to take on that kind of debt?  She can't buy a beer, but she can sell her future. The system is preying on her, herding her through now in order to consume her later, in the years ahead as she tries to pay that debt. What ethical gaps -- what "long-lasting death" -- does it reveal at the foundation of this system and in the adults running it? Are these people grownups, wise elders to entrust with the care of children and those just emerging into adulthood? Or can they only teach absence, scarcity, "long-lasting death"?


And still, I teach. I teach so I can have my students read Zitkala-Sa and others whose stories must not be lost. I teach to help my students recognize glimpses of real life and fight for that life. But I remain unsure about gaps at the core of it all.

If my students paid me a tenth of what they do for my class -- if they paid me $400 for the semester --I'd make $8000 a class -- double what I do now. But even that is not the way out of this mess. Imagining that we can all become independent contractor teachers selling our care-labor to students who buy it as a product seduces us down another section of the same old road to death.  Zitkala-Sa did not pay her mother to take care of her. And her mother did not pay someone else for the right to live in her teepee, draw water from the river, or gather food.

Maybe that is the "real life" -- the kind of non-commodified life all other beings live on this earth. The logic of that "real life" surges, pushing against constraints of the herding edufactory, revealing the lies of limits and scarcities imposed by those who extract profit from our relationships. Abundance and generosity contradict the manufactured absences. What we learn and create together threatens to fill up and overflow the absences with "real life."


Zitkala-Sa. American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Yoshi

by Lucy S.

Our dog Yoshi died yesterday. He would have been 15 years old had he just made it a little longer.  I think a lof of "at leasts."  At least he lived a good, long life for a dog with almost no health problems. At least he didn't suffer for too long. At least he died with all of us round him except Kevin, who came later in the day after we told him. Matt was headed out the door with Sean and Ryan to take them to the nature center where they volunteer on Mondays. Justin was holding Yoshi then, and when he stopped breathing, he ran out to get them before they left. Then I ran into him in the hallway as I was heading out to the kitchen to sit out there with Yoshi and anyone else before I had to leave to teach. He got Jonathan, too. But Yoshi started breathing again. At least he made some come backs, though maybe it prolonged his suffering. At least Jonathan held him and I used a dropper to put drops of water on his tongue because I was afraid he was dehydrated.

At least it warmed up the day before he died and he got to be outside for a while. Jonathan, Kevin's twin brother, held him all night so that he was more upright and didn't have to wheeze and cough all night. He even took Yoshi outside for part of the night. It's been such a miserably long cold winter. I kept hoping Yoshi could make it to the warm days again. We all hoped for that. At least it was in the 50s for his last days alive. At least the ground wasn't frozen when it came time to bury him, so we could bury him in his own back yard. The kids dug over three feet down, so that no animal would try to dig him up. He was in a box with his sheet, and Jonathan taped up the box. We went out there and each threw in a handful of our sandy dirt over the box. After the hole was filled, the kids rolled a big gnarled piece from a fallen tree over on top of the spot.

It was hard to see him give up his old pleasures in recent years. He used to love to climb up from the couch to the bumped out wood covered area of the bay window behind it and just sit there looking out, especially when the windows were open in warmer weather and the breezes blew his fur back. But there came a time when he didn't go back there anymore. And there came a later time when we even had to lift him up onto the couches, and lift him down.

He slept in my room sometimes. Or in Jonathan's, or on the couch in the kitchen area where Kevin sleeps now when he visits. Sometimes other places.

I can't help associating him with so much. He is the dog of my kids' childhood. The day that I went to go pick him up in June, 1999, Justin had just turned 15; Jonathan and Kevin were almost 11; Sean was 7; and Ryan was 2.  My niece Rose and nephew Ricky were staying with us, too. I let them all hash out what to name him. Since he was a Shih Tzu - and we thought they came from Japan originally (I have just now read that it's China - a surprise - and where did we get Japan?) - the kids named him after (yes) a Nintendo character with a Japanese name.

Yoshi's name means "good luck" or "righteous" or "good."

It's hard to see the life go out of a living being, especially one you've lived with and cared for and loved for fifteen years. There is something shocking about it. What is this force called life, and how can it be there inside of someone and then be gone?

That's all I have for now.