Homeschooling and Academia: Am I a Teacher?

 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.