'A Moral Economy' -- On Paper

by Lucy S.

7 am.  What right do I have to take the time to write like this when there are four papers to finish grading - ridiculous that I've taken so long - but the exploratory writing and now drafts have poured in for the last paper because these essays are too bunched together at the end now, and I'm meeting with students again today - so what right do I have to write this way?  Or what right do I have when I could be emailing more adjuncts about meeting me and signing a union card?  I feel those claims on me, but I am doing this anyway. And so I can't truthfully claim that I use all my time working on my class in some way or union-organizing. I don't, and I can't. So I don't know... What is it to "try my best," anyway, in something this extended?

7:08 am. I was laughing with the last student group I met with yesterday afternoon from 4 to about 5:10 - Austin's writing his last paper on what Thoreau can tell us now about a "moral kind of economy" - and Austin drew our attention to the part in "Life Without Principle" when Thoreau asks what he would have to live for if he had to sell not only his forenoons but his afternoons, too, for income!  So his position was that four hours a day is enough already to sell for income! If you sell the whole day, the time when the sun is brightest, that sweetest part of the day - what is your life, anyway, then?  Austin's majoring in mechanical engineering; students from this university with that major have jobs lined up before they even graduate, he said. But be prepared to work 70 or 80 hours a week for a while, people tell him. The joke that isn't only a joke is that some people even sleep there during especially demanding work hours. Austin likes to write poetry, do woodwork - he comes across like my stereotype of (and people I knew back in the day in high school) a surfer dude. He already hates the idea of the long hours ahead, but this is his course: a job that pays well.  Still, he dreads the loss of his freedom.

7:19 am. Another thunderstorm now; the first one blew in last night around midnight. Why, oh why, did I plan to go in to meet student groups today when I don't have to?  But they zero in so much better when we do this. I suppose that makes their thesis a bit of talked through collective effort at times, but in my view, they're learning how to think in ways they never thought in before. I want them to experience how that comes about if they don't quite understand yet. I don't see how getting B's or C's on papers with vague, blah theses and then ending the semester will teach them that. So sometimes they come in with a thesis or even just a topic and we keep talking, throwing ideas around; I ask the other two students at various points what they think. It's a bit of a free-for-all. But it always stems from something they've already written in that first draft. I also tell them about passages they would have no way of knowing about otherwise. I told Austin for his last paper on Benjamin Franklin (a funny paper called "Benjamin Franklin - Virtuous?") about a passage by the great literary critic Kenneth Burke, where Burke says that people who read positive-thinking books are living in the aura of success while they're reading them - that is when the book does the most for them - they can imagine themselves as successful in those reading moments. I said it because that's what he was reaching for, and how could he know about Burke's quote? I just sent it and said to use it if he wants and feel free not to, but that his essay made me think about it. He made it his grand finale.     And it's pouring rain now.

7:29 am. I am no martyr just because I'm driving in today. I love meeting with the students about their essays. And also, I love good and great papers. Reading boring or weirdly lost ones pains me, especially when I have to grade them and/or provide feedback. Ugh.  At times I feel that I do all this in service to producing essays as excellent as possible. We're all devoted to the quest for sublime essays, I tell myself. And I want students to feel this, too. I want them to know that what they're writing matters, or at least it can.

7:33 am. I actually love what I do, at least most of the time. I hate grading, especially paper after paper, but so much of the other time, I love the rest.  Austin said he will make one Thoreau point a focal point. a passage from "Life Without Principle":

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. 

And this is why union-organizing in the quest to be paid more in the context of this economic system does much more than succumb to the logic of Capital (something I was working through in my last post, and didn't grapple with well enough). If they pay us well enough to live in this society that demands money, I can keep meeting with students, emailing them passages, remembering what they're writing about. If I have to teach four or five classes a semester, that cannot happen.

7:46 am. I've taken too long writing, but writing often centers me.  I must grade these last papers before I head out into the storms!

If This Were a Humble Journal, or 'Faithfulness' to 'the Event'

by Lucy S.

A few minutes after meeting with a student today in the university's library coffee shop area, I thought with a pang that for the past two semesters, I should have chronicled my experiences, week by week, on this blog. This, too, would be a kind of 'labor' and 'birth,' right?  I'd just finished meeting with Chase, one of my favorite students, who was in my class last semester as well, and we'd somehow talked our way to him deciding to write about American Idealism as it manifests in sports - specifically in Muhammad Ali's story. He'd been perfectly willing to write a reflective essay on American Idealism connecting to our class's readings this semester, but I could tell his heart wasn't in it.

The longer we talked, the more I wondered why I hadn't chosen a sports movie or text as yet another strain of American Idealism - such an important manifestation of the ascension narrative. We talked about how in Ali's case, there are strains at odds with one another; there is the celebrity story - a popular rags (or, for Ali, middle-class) to riches narrative - and there is Ali refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam War, or Cassius Clay who changed his name and converted to Islam.  We talked about the ways in which popular culture may shift people away from their prejudices by seeping into their affection - and the limitations of this approach. Chase wondered how to avoid having the paper turn into a report on Muhammad Ali, and I told him that the way he was talking about it was already more than a report - that framing it in these ways, delving into these questions, would yield more than a report. He left more excited about his paper than he'd been when we started.

Chase and I share a yearning for California. He's from one of the suburbs near here, but he's sick of winter and is looking into transferring to a California college. And I'm from California, of course - and I get so homesick sometimes. I joke with him that if he gets to transfer, he'd better email me now and then in the depth of winter to torture me with reports of sitting outside in the sunshine and mild air. In his letter at the beginning of this semester, he told me about some music releases he was waiting for; Schoolboy Q was one. I told my oldest son, Justin, and he told me the day the album leaked, so I let Chase know that day. He laughed and couldn't believe I would know this, and I later confessed that I'd been tipped off.

Today I told him that I wouldn't normally be so busy this semester with only one class, but that adjuncts here are trying to unionize and that I've been throwing myself into that effort from early on. He seemed supportive. I told him I currently make $4000 a semester - that I get a check every two weeks for about $420 - and he said that was too low. I didn't hover on my personal pay for long, but just talked about how union organizing has its lows and highs.

At some point - we were waiting for his writing partner, who forgot to show up - we talked about adults complaining about 'the kids nowadays.' He said he'd read something expressing this lament in one of his classes - and then saw that it had been written two hundred years ago. I said I'd read something in Will Durant's volumes of history complaining of the same terrible young boding ill for the future - written in the year 1000. We wondered if it's a displacement of the dissatisfaction older adults feel with their societies and themselves, and a resentment of the young for being young. Or do they just forget? What makes too many adult humans resent their own young so much? Is it positioning themselves as always at odds with the young?

I try to approach my students as if we're all in this semester-long journey together. I'm doing my best to steer us, and they need to row along and help direct us to our destination. It's a flawed metaphor because they'd be in a lot of boats at once, some of them moving them in other directions. But the point is, we're on the same side. I hope. I want them to do as well as possible. And I want us to at least try to create a more democratic relationship in our class. I tell them it's clearly not fully democratic, but that we're maneuvering as best we can within the parameters of formal higher education in our institution.

I'm trying to treat them like adults - free, intelligent adults. Adults, if they're not oppressed and exploited, have some ability to juggle different demands. They might choose to not have everything due on one day. They have some choices about what they labor over. They take their work seriously and don't waste their time laboring to create things that others don't take seriously. At the same time, they're not patronized. So I don't tell students that dull papers are great, and I don't ask them to read them to the class.  When students write great papers, I do ask them to read their papers, and I put the paper up on the projection screen at the same time, We talk about their process and their ideas for a bit. We applaud.

I don't know how to speak for what I do or stand for my beliefs about how we should treat students without implying a lack of humility and even an insult toward those who run more authoritarian or even just very different classes. But my focus is my students. I don't know how to compare what we do with what happens in other classes. I also can't help bringing in some of what I've learned from years of raising and teaching kids. So I'm not quite the same as a new teacher who's never taught in any way before. And yet, I don't know how many of my ideas are great, or good, or mediocre, or lousy.


If this had been a humble journal I'd kept for the past year, maybe I'd have avoided too much angst-ridden introspection in some of these posts, or too much preachiness, or other written communications that narrated too much of my internal emotional states rather than the story I've actually been living through.  I think it would have been a lot truer to my experiences.


After Chase and I met, I made my way to class a half hour later. It was a draft workshop day. Students in their writing groups of three read their drafts out loud to each other and talked about them a bit. I have some doubts about this aspect of my approach.  I need to do better with this.

Before that, Mike presented the last poem of the semester - or rather song. He'd asked me if he could present "The Times They Are A-Changing" by Bob Dylan. He played some of it first with the lyrics up on the projection screen. He was more nervous than I'd imagined he'd be, but I think we enjoyed it. I did, at least.

I sat in on John and Burke's group because Katie couldn't be there, so I decided to lend an extra set of ears and some feedback to their group. They're both writing about the corruption and cruelty in the U.S.'s immigration practices. Both are drawing on Edwidge Danticat's nonfiction memoir about her father and uncle, Brother, I'm Dying. Today I feel overjoyed with how much they've grown in their analysis of this issue.

Katie emailed that she was so sorry that she couldn't be in class, that her chronic diabetes is mixing with her temporary mono to cause complications; the doctors are worried by what looks like enlargement in her spleen. She's worried about how many classes she's missed, she said. I told her I'm not holding those against her - that these health issues aren't her fault, but that if it would work, I'd love to meet with her individually to talk through some crucial questions we discussed one day when she was gone. She responded that she'd love to meet individually and thanked me.

Teaching this way takes time. Some weeks, I feel like all I do is work on my class and work on union-organizing. And the two seem at odds at times - and not just in two commitments pulling at me. Working more hours than I'm paid for is "a labor issue," as one of my tenured friends reminded me my first semester. But I can't help giving all I can to my teaching, at least as long as I can.

In that same tenured friend's class in 2012, we read philosopher Alain Badiou's 2001 book, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.  [Some points from my presentation summing up that book...]:

He argues against the idea of a general or abstract ‘ethics,’ calling it a “genuine nihilism, a threatening denial of thought as such” (3). He instead insists that ethics must be “referred back to particular situations" (3). [I've pulled up my presentation of it now to look back at this.] Badiou says that abstract ethics are grounded in the law against Evil, which means that good only emerges as that which is not Evil. (8). 

This prevents the imagining of the Good; it prevents an “affirmative humanity” (15). It stops us from being “faithful to [the] situation”; being faithful would mean “to treat it right to the limit of the possible” (15).

This is how I try to teach, or maybe how I HOPE I try to teach.

Badiou says the “reign of ethics” is a “symptom of a universe ruled by … resignation in the face of necessity together with a purely negative, if not destructive, will.” This is nihilism (30). This “necessity” is economics – the logic of Capital (30).

How do we organize a union focusing on pay for our labor without utterly succumbing to that logic?

There is only a particular ethics connected to a particular person who becomes a subject due to the circumstances of a truth. Ordinarily, “every animal gets by as best as it can,” but when something extra comes along – the event – this “compels us to decide a new way of being” (41). 

Education. And it feels more like a series of events that are all tied together. There were my kids; there was friendship; relationship in its many forms - and education woven into all this. Relationships as education, and education as relationships.

The process of truth comes from the decision to be “faithful to an event … by thinking … the situation ‘according to’ the event” (41). This is fidelity for Badiou. This kind of truth is an “immanent break … because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else” (42-43). It is a break because the event “meant nothing according to the prevailing language and established knowledge of the situation” (43). Through that person’s experience with this ‘event,’ he becomes “in excess of himself,” inscribed from “within time, in an instant of eternity” (45).

The best teachers I've known taught and engaged this way, transcending logic in what they could accomplish, living somehow 'in excess of themselves.' I''m trying to be like them. And somehow, contrary to the glorious highs we imagine when focusing on such transformation, I think they do it in the way I should have kept a humble journal, day by day.

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. 2001, Reprint. London: Verso, 2002. Print.

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.

"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.

Everyday Mutual Aid

by Lucy S.

I've felt fine today and yesterday, so I feel kind of stupid now for writing about my health problems in the last post.  I started taking hawthorn berries and motherwort, two herbs that some people swear by for instantly calming the racing heartbeat and some of the other symptoms of panic attacks.

One of the places I read about this was on Earth Clinic, a site I found some years ago and like because they aren't selling any products. I'm always heartened by some people's willingness to take the time to share things that might help other people, just because they want to contribute that bit of knowledge and experience to the rest of us. One time, my friend Amir said the toilet in his apartment stopped working and he couldn't get hold of the manager, so he went to buy a plunger but didn't know how to use it. He said he found a video on youtube with someone carefully demonstrating how to use a plunger. We talked about how we found it kind of touching that someone cared enough to put that out there.

That makes me think about when I was in a political science class on the struggle for democracy and citizenship. Our professor made the point that although capitalism elicits people's selfishness, we still see that propensity for mutual aid in people even in this kind of economic system, as evidenced by (at the time) people across the U.S. offering to take some of those displaced by Hurricane Katrina into their homes.


I have a student struggling to write an essay about the problem with a society that makes it seem as if we're born to want more and more money, born to pursue profit. She's grappling with something that is beyond her knowledge and ability in some ways, but she's trying. I talked with her for an hour and a half on Friday after class. We sat in the library (me trying to feel better from my attack that hit during class), and we talked about her paper topic and a lot of stuff.

She's losing her eyesight, so I've been trying to learn more about her writing process and how to help her make the transition to writing without being able to see the paragraphs on the page. If she makes the words huge, she can see them, but only a few at a time. I told her that I've been thinking about this and had talked with the writing center director to get more ideas. I said that I'm such a visual learner in the sense of seeing the words on the page and writing based on that. She said she is, too, and that this is a real challenge.

I can't say it was work talking with her. I so enjoyed our conversation. She's one of my favorite students. She speaks up in class without seeming to worry about what other students think. Fearless, she seems.

She was telling me that she struggles thinking about how to think about suffering when there is even worse suffering. I talked about my thoughts on that, the problems with making suffering too comparative, although we can't help sometimes making certain comparisons. But if we make it too comparative, I said, the logic can keep us from trying to alleviate injustice and suffering before it slides down further to get even worse. And also, human feelings can't all be quantified and weighted against each other. She said this made sense to her. I like her impulse, though, in the way she applies it -- this serious concern with profound suffering and a desire to make people who have so much pay attention to something more than their own situation.

She says she can't stand to have people expressing pity for her, saying, "Awww.... you poor thing...." Things like that. Last semester she told me that in high school, she and her best friend used to tether themselves together so they could run track, and people would come up to the friend (right in front of Rachael, my student) and say, "Oh... That's so awesome of you to help your little blind friend!"  And Rachael would tell her best friend, "No  it's not!  Don't get a big head over that as if you're so noble!" And similar stuff. I laughed when she told me that.  We laugh about a lot of things.

This too is teaching, I guess, or maybe it's just being a human being and talking to the people around us wherever we happen to be. I sure appreciated just sitting there talking and laughing on Friday after feeling so awful in class.

Almost Midterm

by Lucy S.

I don't know what all I'm struggling with right now. Physical symptoms scare me at times. Inundated as I am, as most of us are, with so much information on potential health disasters, I think at times: "What if it's a stroke coming on? What if it's a brain tumor? A heart attack?" What the hell is this problem that's been gradually worsening over the past four years?  Are they just anxiety attacks?  I keep hoping that's all they are. It hit me today on my way to class, lifted a bit on the walk from the parking ramp to the building, and then intensified while I was in class. I wasn't particularly nervous. If anything, it's more a feeling of sinking down, a weird sense of doom. I was terrified I'd stop making sense or not be able to carry on a conversation to keep the class moving. Or even worse: end up lying on the floor.

At times I feel sorry for myself and whine and plead and wail inside my mind at the universe. Why, after getting through undergrad and grad school, and now being able to teach - why is my body failing me? I always thought I could just count on this body, at least for a lot longer. How can I do the things I want to do if this happens?

At its worst, this thing has made me fall - hit the wall on the way down and then the floor, out cold. Other times, I've lain down on the ground or floor quickly enough to stave off any fall, but ended up stuck down there for hours. Cold attacks come with it sometimes. I shake violently then.

Oh, but I hate it all. I just want it gone. I have so much that I want to DO. So much that I care about.

And who is to say that my body IS failing me? Maybe this is minor. A woman I respect so much, another adjunct, who has been teaching for thirty years where I teach - who is teaching two classes on prison literature this semester, trying to care for her husband who just had surgery... she is in her late 60s or so, and SHE is doing all this.


I'm teaching, of course. I think - hope - that the class is going well, although I get scared at times that I'm not doing well enough.  I'm also working on getting a union for adjuncts at my institution. I've been emailing people, meeting with people individually, meeting with the national organizer... I struggle at times trying to know how to do all this in a way that's true to what I believe in.

I'm so worn down this week, and sometimes on other weeks. When I have to respond to student drafts, that takes me so much longer than it should. I think about the draft, think about readings I might refer them to. I take an hour or more responding to each draft, which is fine, but it sometimes adds up to too many hours in a short time because i have to get them back to the students so quickly.

I feel like I can't write. I feel dull, sort of scrubbed down, no sheen. I am only writing now to at least try to force myself to write SOMEthing on my blog.

I can't wait for spring break - week after next.

Thinking again about a passage by Audre Lorde from Burst of Light:

I had to examine in my dreams as well as in my immune function tests the devastating effects of overextension.  Overextending myself is not stretching myself.  I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference.  Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Trying to understand how to know when I'm caring for myself and when I'm indulging myself. Crawling toward midterm, feeling like I have no good reason to be feeling this way.