When to Speak -- When to Be Silent

by Lucy S.

For the purposes of this blog post, I mean "write" more than I do "speak." And now is probably not the time to "speak" - that is, write - either, because I'm behind in getting students' essays graded with appropriate feedback, and drafts for the next ones are coming in soon. I feel buried. I don't know if I can continue in this line of work, especially when I think of the paper load doubling next semester. If it takes me an hour to get through an essay, what happens when I have 40 students instead of 20? And what is wrong with me to even struggle with this number when other people have so many more students?  But the question I'm grappling with now is when to SAY just these kinds of things to other people.

There's no perfect answer. If I were to remain silent until deciding I can't do this job anymore - looking to everyone else like I'm going along pleasantly until I stun and disappoint people with the news that I'm leaving teaching - that would be unfair to others who have supported my endeavors and maybe such a waste. Maybe I could have solved my problems somehow, or made something a little more bearable, or just heard that others struggle also and that things will get a little better while I'll also adapt over time. But how much of this do I express?

Does expressing it relieve the stress or magnify it? Should I try to go "acting as if" by 'performing' the role of the always competent, always calm teacher? Can I perform it?

And beyond however I'm affected by what I say, how does what I say affect other people? When do they empathize and maybe find relief in knowing that someone else struggles, too - and when does what I say only add to their stress or irritate them?  How does what I say affect our relationship, too? What bonds are forged or eroded in these expressions?

I'm tired of trying to make other people do things. Tired of getting students to try harder at their writing, to do the readings, to talk about them, to come to class, just so tired of it. Tired of it in other sectors of my life, too.

A few weeks ago, Matt and I argued - talking at the same time, yelling, bitter statements - over taxes. It came time for me to do them, as I have to every year, and he told me with a smile that I didn't have to because he'd had someone else do them. I disparagingly and probably childishly called her "his newest infatuation person" - she does accounting, he said. He gave her my social security number, along with his own; she "found' inflated write-offs that I knew weren't legitimate. I was angry that he'd done this without talking to me about it. He was angry that I 'thought I knew more than her' about it and was standing in the way of what he wanted to do. This made me even madder because I felt that he'd been wrong in the first place, plus I spent hours researching IRS regulations to show him why she was wrong. He still didn't accept that and insisted on calling, then going to the local IRS office, where he finally accepted that I was right. But that pissed him off, too, because whether I dug it in or not, it was an "I told you so" scenario. I didn't say it, but not because I wanted to smooth anything over. I didn't say it because I was disgusted and angry at him at that chronic level, that lousy bitter level that I hate to even feel about someone I'm around all the time. But I guess it's what happens when you live in the same house with someone you've been separated from for years. Who separates for light, breezy reasons?  Especially when you've been married for so long (though with many other of these 'separations') and have kids. But we can't afford to live separately still - now I suppose because of my choice to study English and teach college rather than just getting something that might bring me moderately decent income.

That brings me to another thing I'm trying to make people do: sign union cards and get more involved in our organizing for a union on my campus. I've led that effort this semester - emailed other adjuncts on my campus, met with people, formed a small group, worked with the full-time union organizers, met with full-time faculty to ask for their support, tried to get adjuncts to come to meetings that they don't want to come to... And I'm worn down. I'm tired of having to be the union zealot. Others can remain calm and critically observant because they aren't pushing this effort, even if they support it. There are a few people who at this point are about as devoted as I am (if such things can be measured), and that helps. But some of the full-time organizers are pushing hard - they too are in the role of having to make people do things, which I empathize with - and I feel squeezed.  Squeezed and sometimes stupidly resentful when I think to myself: man, I'm not even being paid for all this organizing work. Why can't these adjuncts just take a half hour to read up on the basics and sign the cards?

When you want people to do things, you can fluctuate between cheery peppiness, pushing information at them, irritation at their blase attitude even as they whine about pay and job security (notice the word "whine" - a non-neutral verb revealing the very annoyance I feel at times), despair that anything requiring so many people to agree and act quickly can work, and an urge to just flee all of it. I don't want to try to make these adjuncts do anything. Why me, anyway? I'm a first year teacher. But I made myself do this.

And maybe that's it. I'm tired of making myself do so much when I want to plant more for my garden, and talk to people I love while they're still alive, and clean my room even (put away all the stacks of books and papers, for example). I want to walk outside.

But yesterday was phenomenal. My friend Amir visited our class and taught us all so much about poetry, using three of his own poems. Afterward, we went to lunch and talked about how he could develop what he said and so much more, along with his poetry, into a book. I felt so fortunate and grateful yesterday.

So if I'd written to anyone then in that frame of mind, I'd have sounded pretty euphoric about teaching and my life. Those are the high-flying ups.

Today I'm back with these essays.  Reading a student's poorly written essay which is also a page short of the minimum (after all the feedback I gave him on drafts and weeks to finish this five page essay), and then reading his proud, happy cover letter reflecting on his writing process and how much I helped him and how he plans to take what we do and use it in other classes "always".... reading these two little texts by that one student just cracks me down the center. I don't know what I feel, except that I simply do not want to have to respond to or grade his essay. It's yet another way the need to express the 'negative' and the 'positive' pull me apart until I feel paralyzed into silence. But silence is not an option. The essays will not go away.

So I am forced to speak when I don't want to, and forced to say what I don't want to say. And I will. I have done it and I will do it. I don't have it in me to tell a student that something is "great" when it's not even "good." But how do I keep some things silent, things that will hurt the student too much?

And how do I find a balance of speaking and silence that makes me who I want to be, and builds rather than damages relationships?

And when does the decision stop being a decision, or is it always? Are speaking and silence purely voluntary actions? It seems to me that rather than relying on gritty 'willpower,' we must change the conditions. But that too requires speaking and trying to make ourselves and others do what we don't always want to do.


Sometimes I think paradise would be a place where I wouldn't have to make myself or anyone else do anything we didn't want to. And no one else would make me or others do what we didn't want to, either. Maybe we'd want to do plenty of important, progressive things with no one on our back. Maybe I could be silent as long as I felt like it or needed to, and 'if I couldn't say something nice, not say anything at all,' following that "Bambi" dictum - but did that ever work?  Many of us dream of an existence like that, and I wonder what makes us yearn for it. Maybe it's just a desire to be back where there isn't so much struggle. But from the time we're born, we have to cry and call out when we want help. We babble at others to share information, feelings, ideas; and we fall into silence to think, observe, mourn, maybe replenish ourselves.

Structures make me write when I don't want to, and I, inside those structures, make other people write when they don't want to. We make each other communicate when we don't want to, and once that gets going, we can't always make ourselves be silent, even when we should. Just when we're finally overflowing with so much to say, it's time to stop.

But I'm stumbling onward for now, shouting - no, just writing - to keep myself and maybe others moving zigzaggedly forward.  I hope.