Writing and Fighting -- For What? (Part 1)

by Lucy S.

From the time I started this blog last January, I’ve been trying to understand what I’m doing with it. I wonder if it’s too fragmented and unfocused, even as, for me, all these things connect, often more intuitively than overtly.  But I probably need to work on overtly identifying and explaining the connections better. 

A few posts back, I wrote about huge questions regarding my practices and goals as a new college teacher (What ARE my goals? How do they differ from simply perpetuating an unjust status quo?). Then I wrote a very personal post called “So.” Jiji wrote her excellent piece, “Run, Run, Run, Run,” which I think makes the connection between these education endeavors and the personal pretty clear. Thursday night, I put up a simple post called “Old Photos of Me and Gloria” with a couple old photos and a few thoughts about their significance along with a few memories. What do my more personal posts have to do with my efforts to highlight care-labor – unpaid or often poorly paid – as a parent, family member, friend, childcare provider – and now as a contingent college teacher? And what do they have to do with larger political, social, and economic struggles and endeavors?

This post is one effort to begin to dig into that more fully. To ask what I’m writing for is in some ways to ask what I’m fighting for.

I’ll start with this. I think of many of the people I write about as “my people.” That’s how I feel about them and myself, and the experiences and mutual concerns and affection that connect us in various ways. They constitute my past and present – the more distant past, the past of recent years, and the present. My decision to return to school in 2009 to finish my B.A., my continued efforts in graduate school for a master’s, and my new work teaching literature and composition have all grown out of my love for people – not simply people as an abstract concept, but THESE people. These relationships always help me make the leap to care for others. I think we can learn to love our fellow human beings by loving particular people.

If what I do in these educational endeavors can do nothing for someone like who I was at various points in the past, or who Gloria was or is, or my grandmother, parents, kids, nieces, nephews, other friends and family… I begin to wonder what I’m doing.  Years ago, when I took those photos with Gloria during our high school years (shown in my last post), I knew I loved to read and write, but I couldn’t grasp how to connect this love to meaningful activities within the system or society as I understood it. (I knew I wasn’t on a college track, “knew” I wasn’t ‘college material,’ knew I wanted to be part of some meaningful cause bigger than myself, but couldn’t understand what that meant or how to find it, and “knew” at some deeply embedded level that something was deficient about me – not pretty enough (this mattered so much then, like it or not, as far as I understood in my small circles); not intelligent enough; not quick-witted enough; not confident enough (a vicious cycle, of course….). In Gloria’s case, she’s said many times that when she got C’s, she felt that she WAS a C. At times, we talked about what we “could have” been or “would like” to be in some other reality. An attorney, she sometimes said (and says), and she was logical enough and relentless enough in working toward a truth that I always believed she would have been a great one. Me? I always said a teacher or a writer. But all of that seemed like a pipe dream, about as attainable as becoming famous actors, with no path visible to US for getting from one point to another. School guidance counselors saw us as at best average students, nothing special. And of course, the whole system is set up so that we still often think that more meaningful jobs are for those who are ‘special,’ not ‘average.’

So we would find our meaning somewhere else – not in formal education and not in paid work back then. Well, Gloria did make a point of graduating from high school, and this meant a great deal to her.  I probably would have graduated, but my parents moved halfway through my high school years, so I took the California proficiency exam after tenth grade to get the ‘legal equivalent of a high school diploma’ and started my first job at McDonald’s. I moved out young. We had kids – Gloria first. Married in her teens, she put her all into being a ‘good’ wife and mother. The places they lived were immaculate; she bathed her baby (soon babies) every day; she cooked; she managed what money they had wisely. As for me, I was a single parent with my first child, determined to prove people wrong who thought I had no business having a baby. Having absorbed some negative feelings attached to welfare, I held off on even applying for Medi-Cal till my last trimester. At seven months pregnant, I first saw a doctor. I worked till my due date, went three weeks overdue, and went back to work fulltime when Justin was two weeks old because my “disability” income from the state was ending (and California is one of the better U.S. states in even providing maternity leave pay).  I worked long days, lengthened by the 90 minute commute each way. I woke up at 5 am, left the house by 6 am, and wearily returned to my apartment at about 7 pm after picking up Justin from the family daycare home. Justin was my purpose, but my sense of meaning kept unraveling.  I felt exhausted and guilty no matter what I did within the narrow parameters I recognized as available to me. I cried almost every day during part of the long drive to work or longer drive home through Southern California traffic (and blasted music for part of it, trying to drive out the dreary melancholy or the more acute desperation). My boss lectured me about work ethic, though I was the top telemarketer in that soul-draining job. Gloria, meanwhile, was married with two small kids; her spouse (with his own serious abandonment issues) regularly accused her of wanting to “f-” someone else and demanded she not go anywhere wearing shorts of any kind (among other things). If I wanted to see her, I had to go there, because she couldn’t have taken her kids to come and visit me – not in a million years back then. We were fighters, to be sure – never just passively accepting what happened to come our way – but we didn’t fully understand HOW to fight or WHAT to fight against or for.

Well, we knew we were fighting for our kids. We each tried in our own ways to take good care of them, and help them become ‘good people' who would be 'happy.' That connected in various ways to education. Thus, it was devastating in certain ways when we saw the schools failing them and them struggling in those schools. Gloria fought from within the system. As her kids got older, she worked at a flower shop in town to earn income, have her own job, and have backup when her spouse periodically got laid off. I sometimes fought from within, but increasingly grew into believing that opting out was the only way for my kids. Homeschooling.  Bad experiences piled up rapidly for my older kids. And we moved so much, chasing jobs and dreams of a way out, as if such a thing were possible. My efforts and Gloria’s seemed so different from one another’s, and yet at some core level, we were trying for the same things, both trying the best we knew how to raise our kids well and give them meaningful lives.

So I think all the time now – what am I doing for people like the us of the past or the us of more recent times, or our kids or people like our kids? 

And there are others. I’ve written a number of times about my niece, Rose, in here, who died in 2007. What am I doing for people like her? What am I doing for those who might become the parents and teachers and principals and probation officers in the near future of people like her? I can think of so many steps along the way where she might have been cared for instead of treated harshly. Or there is my nephew, Ricky, her brother, who struggles with depression, deep insecurities about his severe stuttering, loneliness, and a sense of going nowhere in life. He wants to work on important things. He yearns for family relationships, but we’re so far away. How do I work to create a system that doesn’t rip family and friends apart from each other? How do I help create a system that treasures and supports each person’s learning, creating, growing, and participation in society for their whole life?

I’ve written of William, Rose’s partner, who came to the U.S. at age eleven from El Salvador and was deported in his early 20s, knowing no one there anymore, shot in the head, murdered there. How does what I do impact everything connected to that? (The U.S.’s support of dictatorial, vicious regimes when it suits the government’s political interests; the valuing of human life based on categorizations of citizenship or “legal” residency, the inability to even reason with anyone on his or so many other cases…) 

And there is my close friend Jiji who lived with us for a time in the summer of 2012, who I laughed with so many times about a thousand absurdities as we walked around our grad school campus or sat in the nearby coffee shop. We debated, we shared stories, we cried together at times. Because she is from a “third world” country, she is so much more restricted by these “first world” governments in her choices, even as they congratulate themselves about “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” She is so pressured from a multitude of directions, deep anxiety always riding her back. How does what I do help in even the slightest degree to address the disgusting continued legacy of colonialism, racism, imperialism, and the other brutal ‘isms” that she is forced to navigate through?

There is my friend and honors thesis partner, Delaine. We were co-enthusiasts, burning with hope to change the world through education.  Every week in the fall of 2010, we met for lunch, and man, did those conversations sustain me. We daydreamed about creating a special school, maybe for kids and their parents, something democratic…  We shared our readings, our pain, our hope, our personal stories. Now she teaches math at an inner city high school in the South, giving it all she can, growing increasingly upset about the chasm between her ideals and the crushing realities inflicted on the students she tries to help. How do I study, write, and teach in a way that helps create a system worthy of the passion and work of someone like Delaine?

There’s Amir, a good friend who I feel that I’ve known for far longer than almost four years. Monday, he’ll visit my class to read and talk about three stunning poems of his, and to talk about reading and writing poetry. If he’s “lucky,” that won’t be possible next fall. He’s recently finished the expensive process of applying to PhD programs, a process that filters out those without the time or money to apply to several programs (and the $160 for each GRE exam – general and subject). And the ability to pick up and move, more than once. How does what I do challenge this model that excludes people or forces the “lucky” into an individualist existence, broken from their networks of support over and over, all to emerge with a PhD that most likely (statistically speaking) will never get them a tenured job?  

There’s Dan. I wrote about him in one of my honors thesis essays, “Defining Morality.”  http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/02/defining-morality.html He was my professor; he became my friend. That first semester I went back to finish my B.A., he did a directed study with me that changed my life. He told me many times that I could go to graduate school when I’d thought I couldn’t.  I’ve told him before that he makes people realize things are possible that they did not know were possible. More than what he did for me specifically, even, his whole example restored my faith in what education could be.  When it turned out he was leaving after my second semester back, because he was full-time but contingent faculty – kept anxiously awaiting a contract for as long as possible by our big public university, worried about having a job the next school year – paid too little for the massive amount of responsibility he carried, and the time all the work took – when it turned out he’d taken a job 1000 miles away that would treat him better and pay him better, I was so angry at our university for what we as students were losing and the toll their inhumane policies and exploitation took on his life. That, too, became part of my reason to go on with my education. I wanted to be in it for the FIGHT. I wanted to fight for and alongside a person like Dan.

That brings me to the question of the state – are we fighting for education as a public good?  And if so, what kind of public good?  Are we fighting for an education-centered society, in which people learn, create, and grow over the course of their lives, all participating in continually creating the communities and various spaces they inhabit? 

I will add one more person for now: my cousin, Johnny.  His experience with the state is complicated. After 17 years, the state of California finally let him out of prison. He’d been incarcerated on a 27-years-to-life sentence at age 32 for nonviolent felonies related to his heroin addiction. In November 2012, California voters overwhelmingly voted to change the law so that the third strike had to be for more ‘serious’ felonies. (I have to wonder why anything that isn’t ‘serious’ is even considered a felony…)  The prisons began to release people. He walked out of there in February of this year. We rejoiced – but he came home with Valley Fever, a chronic disease that for some reason is more rampant in some California state prisons, including one that held him for a long time. It’s a fungal disease that can destroy a person’s bodily organs. Its spores reside in some dirt, and people breathe it in. Sometimes when I talk with him on the phone, he struggles to breathe and has to lie down for a while. He can’t work. He’s applied for disability income through Social Security and they’ve turned him down. (They turn most people down the first time, knowing that some will go away rather than reapplying – a strange practice from a government organization that’s supposed to serve the public.)  He’s reapplying. I often wonder how what I do can help Johnny or people in similar positions now, or the Johnny who didn’t learn to read until he went to prison, or the Johnny who struggled with heroin addiction before he went to prison for so long, or the Johnny who had so much of his life stolen by the prison system. Which facets of the state do I want to engage with and change, if any?

This is what I’m grappling with now. Do we change the system or abandon it? And CAN the system be abandoned, or is that just a fantasy of those who think they can ‘opt out’ even as they always remain inside the system?  What do we even mean by the system? The capitalist system? The state? All nation-state forms or just some?

How do I teach and write and live in ways that make a difference for “my people” or so many people likewise harmed in so many ways by things as they are?

I haven’t even written more extensively about my kids as “my people" now.  I’ll do that in the next part of this. 

***

Postscript:

The point in talking about my and Gloria's stories and past experiences is for more than to explain us or talk about what inherently has meaning for us because, after all, these are our lives. The point is that I see these things continuing to play out in so many ways with others of many ages.  The idea that these issues are over is a fantasy that runs in certain circles, even as those who make that claim often replicate patriarchy, sexism, racism, classism, nationalism, imperialism, and other deeply entrenched inequalities and forms of violence in their own ways. 

The way I've told these stories may seem to conform to standard narratives about people missing their individual chance to "rise" and finding this tragic because they, not surprisingly, care especially for how their individual life gets lived. But I mean these things to highlight, in fact, that those standard stories don't serve any of us well. The tragedy is that so many of our lives can't be lived in deeply fulfilling ways that simultaneously make the world better.

I should also say that I don't mean to villainize Gloria's ex. It's hard figuring out how to tell stories truthfully, explaining which experiences affected us in certain ways, without including other people in these accounts.  But I believe that focusing most of the blame on these individual people with their own past traumas and confusion about their own motivations and situations can make us misrecognize the real sources of our oppression. Yes, we have to protect ourselves. We have to call out these ideas and behaviors that can hurt us so badly. We have to sometimes distance ourselves from some people. But we can also try to understand where these ideas and behaviors come from, and ultimately, when possible, transform our relationships with people. In doing so, we help change them and ourselves without succumbing to self-destructive 'pity' for them that keeps us stuck.  Lastly, I want to say, I'm so glad that Gloria has a healthier partner relationship now with a great person. 

Old Photos - Me and Gloria

Partway into our teens, thinking we were older than we were. 

In that top photo, I wore my big hoop earring and medium blue sweater jacket that I started high school with, the jacket I so often wore into our driver's ed. class with shirts that ended just short of where they were supposed to, some small bit of skin showing, prompting our driver's ed. teacher to declare in his highly enunciated way, "Zip it up!"  Which of course I always did for the duration of his class. 

Gloria, do you remember how he always put his emphasis on the strangest words? "Before you turn THE corner, you will want TO use your brakes..." Do you remember how Gilbert would proclaim, "Glllloria TOVeeoff" from his place in the room, distorting your name in his idea of a Bulgarian accent, unfailingly confusing the teacher as he glanced around for the source of this interruption, and we'd always laugh at that same joke?   

And an Antelope Valley Fair photo from the summer. From those booths that we always spent too much of our small amounts of money on. 

Still to come in life were Gloria's kids, my kids, Gloria's grandkids, our partners, split ups, moves, homes, jobs, bewilderment, realizations, confidence (and over-confidence), humility, hurt in its many forms, grieving, exhilarations, quieter joys, disappointments, losses, new beginnings, resilience. The rest of our teens and our whole adult lives. 

Like so many others in the many variations possible. 

And through it all, our friendship. I'm a big believer in holding onto people. Back then, we declared we would be friends for life. We could not know then that we would actually keep that promise. Keeping that promise has made us who we are.

Now I imagine the us of twenty or thirty years from this present, if we're fortunate enough to both still be living, looking back at photos of the us of this 2013 time. What possibilities might we see open to the women in those photos that we did not fully realize were there?  Or what will we see in the women of now that already held the promise of what would follow? 

***

Postscript:

And still, I find myself drawn to these photos. I felt something shift in me when I first saw them after so long. The theorists who claim that all reality is only reality through language - how do they account for these feelings which I search through my mind to find words for? I'll know them when I see them - the right words for the feelings that already wait for the words. The life of then, that photo time, and so much in between that finally led to now feels closer. Well, what am I going to do about that, anyway?  Does it mean something? Is it just a feeling that seems urgent, but has no way to be acted upon?  And if it calls for action, what is that action?

Sometimes these little encounters change our whole lives. In May 2009, I went to a reunion gathering that changed my whole life. A woman I didn't know, just finishing her PhD in political science at my undergrad university, responded to what I'd said about having stopped pursuing the B.A. in 2007 because I just couldn't see where it was even going anymore. She said sometimes you have to do something as well as you possibly can and live your way through it to see who you become. I kept thinking about that.  Sometimes you do things, and you aren't fully sure why, but something in your core says yes, this is right. What is that inner guide? 

Run, Run, Run, Run

I just discovered this comment posted here yesterday. http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/10/teaching-34-days-in.html  My great and wonderful friend Jiji wrote it.  She said that she meant to make it a post, but didn't know how, so she was leaving it as a comment. But I will make it a post now, so that many more people can read what she has written.

***

This is my problem: I have become a machine. I do not have time for anything. I cannot talk with my mother as long as I want. I do not have time to discuss the things I used to discuss with my brothers at length. I cannot do the cultural and sport activities I want to do. I have gained weight because I do not have time for exercise. I could not even find time to support one of my best friends when she launched a very interesting blog. I feel guilty because I have not contributed to it yet. It has been almost a year since she started it and till now I am running: it’s either homework, or readings, or weekly assignments, or long papers, or long books, or visa applications, or moving from one place to another, or from one country to another or from one house to another, or trying to find a job to make some money, or, or, or, or. Sometimes, I wonder where this life is taking us. Run, run, run, run. This is the new life slogan under this capitalist system that make us run till we retire. We lose out health, youth and happiness running so that we get diplomas, so that we find jobs, do that we get promotions, so that and so that and so that. I am in my late twenties and I can already foresee my fifties: a continuous race, running, running, running. I can predict that I will lose the coming years running to finish the Ph.D, running to get published, running to get hired, running to keep my job and never finding time for myself, my family, my friends and the people I love expect from the few moments I will steal from the life race time. I miss my mum, my two brothers, Asma, Naziha and Lucy. 
Written by a machine-like runner

So

by Lucy S.

Chatting with my nephew Ricky yesterday online, I sent him a link to the song, “Don’t Let No One Get You Down” by War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqhJqudKOY I asked him if he likes it; he said, “Yeah, I like all those oldies.” So that made him ask me about another song by War because his sister Rose used to play it all the time after her partner William got deported to El Salvador and ended up killed there. So I found it for him and sent him the link. 

“So” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ixhqGsuqI

We were just joking around before that. He found some old photo of me in his grandma’s photo box from my early teens, and he wrote me saying, “You were all gangstered out.”

***

And that sent me tumbling in my mind into my own connections. "You were all gangstered out," which is an exaggeration – a joke --really, we were all sort of pretending back then out in our desert town, many Joshua treed miles away from L.A., before it turned into the real and more dangerous thing even out there. We knew we weren’t fighters – we knew were mostly playing – and we laughed at ourselves, sometimes joking that we had a gang called “Lancas.” We were a fused blend of sarcastic and sentimental with carefully guarded sincerity – guarded because someone could mock the hell out of us for it, and who knew when to trust it in some people, having seen sincerity, too, used as a means to an end… 

As in my first boyfriend who'd cry and tell me again how hurt he was that his mom and dad weren’t together if I said I was going to end our relationship or even asked him directly why he said or did some of the things he did to me. He did and didn't mean the tears and the sadness about his parents' situation. It was and wasn't a lie. 

His mom and dad weren’t together because his dad used to brutally beat his mom. Getting free of him was essential to her well-being and survival. Agnes went on one date with him one night in her teens and he raped her – “So that was my ‘first,’” she told me one time. And she got pregnant. She told her mother, and her mother blamed her daughter for going out with him and said who knew if she was telling the truth about rape anyway, and she'd better go to him now if he’d have her. Yes, he’d ‘have her.' He was determined to ‘have her’ if he could. So she married him with no happy wedding and moved in with him and his mom. 

My teenage self told Paul one time that his mom was ten thousand times the person that his dad was – not that an equation like that makes any sense – that she was a GREAT woman and he was such a piece of shit. Now I feel guilty and kind of ugly for using the curse words then or here because I’m talking about Agnes in this paragraph (and it was his dad -- but I used to get so mad that Paul idolized him when he knew what his dad had done to his mom) and Agnes never could stand those words – the most she’d say was an annoyed “Bless you” to replace “Damn you” – she hated words and phrases like fucking bitch or piece of shit or even ass as in Shut your mouth you fucking bitch or I’ll beat your ass you piece of shit which might be said if she confronted him when he blew through ‘their’ money or he started seeing someone while she worked all day holding the 40 pound riveter at Lockheed and then came home to her job as the sole functioning parent to their five kids. Joe used to shoot those words at her as he shoved and kicked and slapped and punched her, until finally Paul’s older brother Jesse pulled a butcher knife on his dad during a beating in the kitchen, and Jesse said Hit her again and I’ll kill you. And later at long last, Agnes threw Joe out when she was in her mid-30's… and Paul was 10.  So I thought Paul’s real yet strategically used sadnesses missed the point in terms of what was tragic in the situation. 

His own pain was both genuine and feigned. Responding directly to my questions about his own burgeoning abusiveness or accepting any 'ending' to the relationship that I tried to enact by speaking it -- these were always deferred by his own tears about these histories so far beyond us yet connected, always connected. Neither he nor I could pry the true and false elements apart.

Which makes me think now about how I’ve always had such a hard time knowing how to respond to people who have been so hurt and need something so huge that I don’t know how to give it or where my own traumas and needs and hopes and efforts and rights to some happiness – or are there any ‘rights’ to happiness? – where all of this might stand in relationship to all of that. 

***  

I laughed reading what Ricky said about me being all gangstered out in the old picture, and wrote back, “Yeah vato.” He wrote, “Orale ese.” I wrote, “Hey vato come and visit us here [in the Midwest] and I’ll take you for a cruise in my firme minivan so you can find a ruca to take back to Nevada.” And so on. (Chola/o talk…) Silly stuff, with happy faces, and his LOLs and my hahahahahaha’s.  Then that first War song popped into my head out of nowhere, a song I hadn’t heard or thought about in so many years. I just sent it on a whim, associating it only with good old times with Gloria and Ana in the Lancaster of long ago. I even kind of meant the song toward him. “Don’t let no one get you down, Ricky…”  Be happy, my nephew…

It is so easy to step from the level ground of lightheartedness and good old times into the forever fall of trauma without meaning to.

One War song connected to the other War song for Ricky, to the one Rose used to play over and over at her dad’s when she and Ricky were living there after William was gone.

And now – well now I’m thinking about when Rose lived with us different times, how she’d play her cassettes (she never figured out how to burn CDs so her favorite mixes were on cassettes), same couple of songs over and over – rewind – play – something I do, also, but on CD now or computer, as if a certain song were just the happy tonic – or, more often, painful medicine my mind needs to understand beyond words, to grieve some more, to submerge myself in it in order to finally be filled with it for a while and then be able to let it rest again.  

This is something that people who disdain sentimental songs may not understand. They may not realize that you may know whatever it is they might say about the song, and you don’t care. They, like you, have no actual answers for why some people do some of the awful things they do to each other while others who have been brutalized (like Agnes) become fiercely strong caregivers; or how to heal what gets wounded or if healing is even a goal or should be used as a word for living with love and anger and anguish and bewilderment and anxieties; or what to say; or where to go to be better; or when we might get way beyond these cruelties, as individuals or as a world. Sometimes a song bleeds the pain out after enough repetitions to let us finally stop playing it until we can return to it later as a receptacle for what must be expressed somehow but might be partly contained and then let out in that song so that we can bleed without too many hard scabs, and remain soft somewhere in our encounters with the world.

One thought – one word – one scent, sight, song -- elicits one memory that has its own “So” path to another in every person, all of these connections grown in different orders in each particular living mind and body, so that you never know what may lead to what. So you are never quite safe from having hurt brought up to your surface again or from plunging down to bring the pain of another back up from chronic to acute, again and again.

So this time, I wrote to Ricky, “Hey, we were joking around and now look at us. We’re all sad.” He wrote after a while, “I think we’re just getting ourselves all sad.” I said, “Well sometimes I like to think of her and be both happy and sad. I smile thinking of when she used to say, ‘Oooohh, my JAM!’ when she lived with us.” He wrote, “Lol and once I went to the back door with her and she was dancing with this girl and boom she fell right on top of her and got up like nothing happened lol.” We keep it light a little longer, if this can be called light, and then he says, “I’m trying it’s hard cause I had to see her covered up.  I got traumatized.”  Ricky went to see her body.  I sit here 1500 miles away unable to hold his hand or look him in the eyes to convey that I’m with him on this, at least as much as I can be. I type, “yeah” and then he types, “But I’m trying” and then I type, “yeah that’s all you can do” and then he types, “Yeah”… 

All of this makes me think about something Julie, Rose's and Ricky's younger sister, said to me not too long ago when we were talking on Rose's birthday. "You tried to help them, Lucy. When you love people, you try to help them." And I thought right then with inexpressable gratitude, "Julie, you have all the wisdom in the world right in this moment." I said, "So did you, Julie. You did so much."  So maybe that's it, the big answer.  If we love each other, we try to help each other. 


"Don't Let No One Get You Down" War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqhJqudKOY

"So" War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ixhqGsuqI

Educated Decisions in Time

by Lucy S.

Sometimes I think writing quickly would be better, writing without much crafting, the idea being that this would be more 'honest' writing. Or the idea being that I could at least write then, instead of carrying words and sentences that spring up in my head, waiting for the right time that never seems to come. How can there be no time to write? I teach only three times a week for 65 minutes a class. What can possibly take up so much of each day? 

The day before yesterday, a student cheated. He copied an excerpt of a New York Times book review onto a minor informal writing assignment - their weekly responses to the readings on the class website - as if it were his own work. So there was that. My first plagiarism case. I emailed back and forth with a professor I know, like, and respect, there where I teach. He told me which steps I needed to follow; informing the student by email was important for documentation, in case a bigger problem arose. I finally emailed the student; he apologized and agreed to meet me the next morning before class. Yesterday I left early to meet with him, and then I taught.

A bit later, I ran into a professor who asked me how teaching is going. "Great! I love it!" I said.  I said that I'm trying to learn more as quickly as I can about writing process and how to teach writing. He suggested I apply to be part of a week long seminar there in January, during semester break, which even pays a stipend. This morning I worked on that and emailed the application in. 

My students' drafts for their second essay came in yesterday, so I will be spending days writing extensive feedback and meeting with those who want individual help on the next steps in their essays. I take far too long with each draft, often an hour or more, reading, thinking, rereading, writing feedback. The next seven days will be so full.

I need to submit my book list for the class I will be teaching next semester by November 15. I've only read parts of two books I'm considering, so I'm trying to read them now.  I'm also trying to force my mind to be making the final decision about the course books in the 'background' of my surface thinking. I don't know if this strategy amounts to anything. 

I read to Sean and Ryan most days, though not all. I never feel that I read to them or work with them enough. 

This year is my last chance to apply to PhD programs. It's probably already past my last chance, really. But I think of this as the final chance to apply. I've looked up so many programs, taken notes about people I might work with, noted deadlines and what each program wants. That in itself took enormous amounts of time last year, when I thought I would apply to many more places than just the local research 1 university where I went for my undergraduate degree not long ago. But I only applied to that one. I made it onto their waitlist, but no further. This year, I figured, I would have more time to apply to more places. But it never works out that way. 

I'm trying to learn to do things quickly - thus, this more hastily written blog post. 

Even so, I have decided - or I think I have decided - that I won't apply. I don't know if this decision is wise or weak.  I don't know how to know what I need to in order to make the decision in any meaningful way.  I always seem to be rushing from one thing to another, always thinking that soon I will arrive at the time when I will be unhurried and wise (the pairing which Thoreau believed in). I wanted someone to calmly talk it through with, someone who really understood me as well as the realities connected to the choices, but in our busy society, we instead are supposed to pay 'counselors' to talk us through these often irreversible upheavals in our own and our loves ones' lives. I know that the paid counselor approach would not work well for me, would only use up more of my time (and money), so I am 'deciding' as the days go by. 

I dream more and more about moving out of the country, maybe to teach ESL in Chile or Ecuador or Nicaragua. I dream about building a strawbale home or a small cob home, something muddy to put my hands into. I dream about studying 'non-traditional' adult education, and going to Cuba to do yet more research on the 1961 Cuban literacy campaign, and more followup on what became of the participants. I dream about all of those things I wanted to do but have not done, just like so many other people do when they start thinking in terms of last chances. I try to recognize the difference between ghosts of dreams that no longer mean enough to me and the sparks of excitement which should be acted upon. 

I wonder at times why I write at all for this blog. This isn't scholarly writing. It's entirely too subjective, too personal, too much like a private journal. But I wrote long and hard for each semester in graduate school, and those papers sit mostly unread, too. When you work at something with everything you have, and then the object you produce somehow becomes unimportant for its own sake to a large extent - becomes a means to get to go on to another level - after a while, you can feel yourself crumbling within. It functions too much then as currency rather than as a real object with use-value. The blog, at least, is an attempt, however feeble, at communicating with other people.  

During my conversation with the student who plagiarized, he told me at one point that his English teacher last year (his senior year in high school) hadn't had them write any papers all year, and had given them all A's. He said that at the time, he'd thought this was great, but has since realized how unprepared for college this left him.  I told him that this feeling of gladness to not have to write papers arises from a society in which education is always a means to some other end without much intrinsic value. I said that we would never pay a piano teacher to give us lessons and then be happy that this person never made us play piano. But our system routinely produces these absurdities. 

And so... Do I try to change it from within? If so, how?  With whom? From within where I am now, or from within a PhD program?  Or do I abandon it, try to make a living some other way, and teach and learn autonomously? How does a person know what to do? Or is most choice an illusion as we rush through our days?  Yet still... there is SOMETHING resembling choice here.  I will try to 'decide' what to do with some of my present and future life while I read and write feedback on students' essays, and plan some more for class tomorrow. 

Yesterday, I told that student that I've given him so many chances and worked with him to get him caught up. I'd even volunteered to meet with him to make up his last missed class (the day after Halloween) because he'd been trying hard to do better, and then blew it again by not getting up early enough. I said that I only do this because I believe what we do has meaning. I said I'm not required to do this, and that most of my colleagues would not be willing. I said I'm a part-time professor, and if he ever looks into it, he'll find that part-time college professors mostly make very little for that work. I asked him why I should bother meeting with him on my own time if he doesn't value what we're doing and only sees it as a way to get points. I've talked with my class so many times already about the problems inherent in education as a way to get points, grades, credits, degrees, jobs, and finally, money. These are our lives, right now, I tell them. If they don't matter now, how will they ever matter?  He seemed deeply sorry, and seemed to understand at least some of my larger points. 

In the aftermath, I'm glad I talked with him, but I wonder if I'm putting too much blame on someone who is himself being shaped by the logic of this system. Was I too self-righteous and moralistic?  In the end, I decided to still meet with him next week to let him make up one of the six classes he's missed. This hardly feels like a decision for me. I have to err on the side of doing too much for someone rather than doing too little - 'deciding' as we're all swept and rushed along. 

***

I wrote of dreams, but I am living this dream - this one - the one I carried with me for so long. It isn't that it's not that good after all - far from it. I love teaching.  But I wonder at times what we are to do for students when we make the cruel absurdity of our society's dominant logic and practices more starkly visible. What then?  Is the message supposed to be that we've now shown them that the structure itself is inherently at odds with our collective well-being - and so it is up to them to go forth and change it?  

A student wrote in his rough draft this time about being forced by his father to get all A's in the toughest classes in high school, because he's living in a time when he must compete against so many others for the dwindling supply of livable wage jobs. He wrote of his sister who graduated from this university with honors, and is now unemployed.  He wrote of his cousins who did poorly in college, but now make quite high salaries. He wrote angrily and painfully. 

The problem I think is that even so-called 'right livelihood' in a profoundly destructive, unjust society cannot quite BE 'right livelihood.' Even if we love our work and beam with enthusiasm, what do most of our students get?  And how long can we count on our work? What can we all 'decide' to do with and for each other in this rushing but paradoxically stagnant 'society' or 'system'? How do we somehow create the ability to decide?