Jeanine: the bereft

When I started teaching college twelve years ago, I had very few avenues through which to communicate with my students outside of class. As an adjunct instructor, I had no office or campus phone number. I didn’t have a cell phone. I didn’t even have my own email address, and since most of my students did not have an internet connection at home, it wouldn’t have done me much good if I had. So, I had to do the unthinkable: I gave out my home phone number.

My class met in the evenings, so when my phone rang as I was getting an early dinner on the table and shoveling squash into the baby’s mouth and trying to keep my clothes clean until class time, I could count on it being a student with a last minute question or excuse. (Once, my phone rang at 11:45pm. It was a woman who’d been absent for three weeks wondering when might be a good time for her to turn in the paper that had been due earlier that evening. I told her “never” and went back to sleep, but that’s another story.)

One day I got a call at about 8:30 in the morning from Jeanine, a perfectionist who attended every class, met every deadline, and seldom got less than 95% on any assignment.

“I’m not going to be able to turn my paper in tonight, but I’ll have a friend bring it.” She sounded flustered but businesslike.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“My husband died,” she said, as matter-of-factly as if she’d been telling me that her car had broken down.

“Oh, Jeanine. I’m so sorry. When?”

“Just now. I’m waiting for the coroner.”

“What?”

“I’m waiting for the coroner. I just found him about five minutes ago. I don’t think I’m going to make it to class.”

I stammered my condolences, told her not to worry about a thing, that I didn’t need her paper that very day under the circumstances and she could just call me when she was ready to come back to class, but I could tell she wasn’t listening.

“Ok. I’ve got to go. I have to tell my family.”

I hung up the phone, trying to imagine the state of shock someone would have to be in to make such a call. It was as though she had immediately started running a checklist in her head, one that she was making up as she went: Take care of business. Make the easy calls first: 1) call coroner; 2) call English teacher.

Jeanine had told me about her husband one evening while we were on a break during the three-hour class meeting. She had been married for twenty years, since she was nineteen. She was studying to be a nurse; after all, she had been a caregiver for half her life.

The accident happened two weeks after her wedding. Her husband had been gravely injured. Shortly after she moved into the house they had bought together, she had moved a hospital bed into what would have been the dining room. In twenty years, she had never slept for more than four hours at a stretch, because she had to get up to check on him. I don’t remember the details of his condition. He was not on life support, but apparently there were things that could go wrong, things that Jeanine had to monitor, medications she had to administer. He was responsive, though. He could smile at her, respond to her touch. She read to him and sang to him. He was, she told me, her Honey Bunny.

I don’t remember exactly how he died. When I spoke to her a few weeks afterwards, Jeanine told me she had been up until the wee hours working on her research paper and had checked on him before turning in, but when she got up the next morning, he was dead. She wondered aloud if she had been so distracted and overtired from working on her term paper that she had done something wrong, forgotten something. And I (irrationally, I know) wondered if that meant I was somehow to blame, or (more rationally) if she blamed me. Everything is such a delicate chain of cause and effect: if the deadline had been different, if I’d given her more time in class, if I had not made the paper seem like too big a deal, maybe he wouldn’t have died. But of course, that train of what-ifs is infinite. I don’t know what the autopsy showed. It could have been an infection. He could have aspirated. It didn’t matter. He was dead just the same.

Jeanine came back to class about two weeks later. The quarter was almost over, and there was a lot of work to make up. I offered to give her an incomplete.

“Why not take your time? I’ll work with you on what you missed. We’ll get you caught up. There’s no need for you to do this right now.”

“What else would I do?” she asked. Her eyes welled up. It was the only time I ever saw her cry. “I have no idea what to do with myself. I have so much time, so much freedom.”

I waited while she dabbed at her eyes.

“You know,” she said quietly, “I mourned my husband twenty years ago. The man I married died in a car accident when he was twenty years old. But I loved this man, too. People always told me how brave I was for staying with him. Now they talk about how I can finally move on. But I need to grieve him again. He was my baby. I took care of him. I don’t know who I am without him.”

When gravely disabled or ill people die, it’s easy to say that it was a “blessing.” We hear platitudes about their suffering being eased or about their caregivers being released from obligation or about their being at peace. It’s all true on the surface, I suppose, but there’s something about those phrases that disregards the relationships that are born from loss or tragedy or illness or injury. It’s an especially complicated sort of grief.

When Jeanine started school, it had been something to do for herself. She knew that she would never be able to take a job as long as her husband needed her care, but since she was already an experienced caregiver, she thought that perhaps she could learn how to do her job better, and to prepare herself–as family and friends had urged her–for a time when he no longer needed her. She never imagined that time would come so soon.

Jeanine finished the quarter on time. She got an A. I never saw her again. I imagine she finished her nursing degree, probably with honors. She grieved her husband’s death for a second time. By now, she has probably made a whole new life for herself. I think of her now and then. I hope she is happy.

*An edited version of this post was featured on The Story with Dick Gordon, an American Public Media production that airs on NPR stations nationwide. Please listen here. The episode starts off with an interview with one of my students.

Irene: the grandma

Every so often, a teacher just gets one of those classes: a weird mix of people, an imbalance of genders, an odd time of day or a not-quite-right classroom. One spring quarter 6 or 7 years ago, I had a class that met all of those criteria. It was small for my school, which is to say there were fewer than twenty students who showed up regularly. (These days, with enrollment skyrocketing, it’s more typical to have 28-29 students enrolled in a section. But that’s a rant for another time.) Anyway, it was not looking good.

Of those twenty or so students, nearly all of them were young males–teenaged and young twentysomething guys who looked as though their parents had sentenced them to community college. They schlepped into class five, ten minutes late, looking like they had just rolled out of bed, even at two o’clock in the afternoon.

Thank God for Irene. She was not messing around, and was not going to have her time wasted by those little punks. She’d glare at them when they came in late like the disapproving grandmother she was old enough to be. She had retired from a long career as an autoworker, and thought it was about time to get her college degree. For her second act, she wanted to be a cop. You might think that goal was pretty unrealistic, but then you’ve never met her. She was no little old lady.

Irene was tall and broad shouldered, and had a deep, sandpapery voice earned by at least a pack a day (until, as she proudly told me, she had quit smoking after retirement). Her skin was tanned and as wrinkled as crumpled paper, but she moved like a much younger woman. She spoke up in class often, asked smart questions, and took notes furiously.

The day of the first draft workshop, she was in a group with three of the aforementioned young men. As I circulated around the room eavesdropping on their progress and checking drafts, I heard her say to one of them, “Why’d you only write two pages? It’s supposed to be at least three.”

The kid she’d addressed gaped at her like a fish and mumbled something about it just being a rough draft and not counting for a grade.

“But the professor said three pages.” She stared at him over the top of her reading glasses and waited for an answer.

From then on, a mutual grudging respect formed between her and the kids in the class. She became the ad hoc grandma of the teenaged boy crowd. Irene was not a great writer. She had plenty to say, but sentence boundaries eluded her. Fortunately, Caleb was in her group: a lanky, heavily tattooed, copiously pierced, Doc Marten wearing artist and a fabulous writer. She kicked his ass when he was late or absent, and he proofread for her. It was a perfect symbiosis.

When Irene turned in her first paper, she remarked that it had taken her longer to type it than it had to write it in the first place. And when she said “type,” she meant “type.”

“I’m thinking about getting a computer, but I don’t really know how to use one.”

I told her I thought it would be a good investment, but that she could get by without. Two weeks later, when her next paper was due, she handed in a perfectly-formatted computer-generated document.

“I bought that computer on Friday,” she told me. “Took me all weekend to figure out how to use it, but I think I’ve got it down.”

Her essays improved steadily as the quarter went on. One was about the night she went on a ride-along for her criminal justice class. I kept wondering why a woman her age would want to subject herself to such brutal hours and dangerous conditions, but she loved every minute of it. “I worked in a factory for thirty years. I’ve raised my kids. I could use a little excitement,” she told me. I could hardly argue with that.

By the end of twelve weeks, my ragtag bunch had become my favorite class. I was sorry to see them go. Irene said her goodbyes to her boys and to me, promising to keep in touch. I didn’t see much of her after that, but a couple years later, at commencement, I saw her name in the program. She was profiled, along with three or four other “nontraditional” students, in an article about student success. I watched for her as the 1200 or so students filed past the college president to receive their diplomas, and sure enough, when she was handed hers, a cheer went up from the other graduates in her major. She pumped her fist in the air as she went back to her seat, a grandmother, a retiree, and a graduate. Commencement, indeed.

*An edited version of this post was featured on The Story with Dick Gordon, an American Public Media production that airs on NPR stations nationwide. Please listen here.

Hassan: the other

Hassan sat in the back of the classroom each day, always in a freshly pressed dress shirt and sharply creased trousers. His short beard was neatly trimmed and shot through with silver, like his hair. He struck me immediately as the consummate gentleman.

Over the course of eleven weeks, he proved to be exactly that. His accent was lilting, the r’s rolling and consonants originating in his throat or tripping down his palate. His voice was gentle, as was his demeanor. Often, he would stay after class to ask for clarification about an assignment. Although his English was quite good, I am *ahem* a bit of a fast talker, and verbal instructions sometimes got past him.

Hassan was, in every way, the model student. He worked hard, asked questions, and met deadlines. And although he struggled a bit with English grammar and idiom, so different from his native Arabic, his writing had a poetic quality that I admired. His use of metaphor, even when writing expository essays, was lovely. I would guess that the rhythms of his native language found their way into his work.

As the quarter went on, I also learned that he was warm and thoughtful. Once he learned that I had children, he inquired after them almost every time I saw him.

“How are your little girls, Miss?” he’d ask, the initial “h” throaty and the richly rolled “r” in “girls” giving the word an extra syllable: “geh-rrruhls.” One day I asked him if he had any children, and his face darkened and lit up in the same instant.

“Yes, I have one daughter. Her name is Habibah. She lives with her mother.”

I didn’t ask for details; it was clear that the subject was difficult for him. But over the course of the quarter, things leaked out in his writing. One of his papers made an argument that Islam was not the violent religion that most Westerners believe it to be. In it, he cited passages from the Koran to show how extremists had perverted an otherwise peaceful religion. Another paper was an argument against the state, alleging that he had been treated unfairly by the court system in the custody battle for his daughter.

The latter paper was painful to read; the longing for Habiba was palpable in his words. But perhaps worse than the ache of missing his daughter was that his ex wife was using his nationality and his religion as ammunition against him in a custody battle, even though she shared both. She had shed her hijab for the hearing. She had denounced her religion openly, even though Hassan knew that she was still observant. When asked in court if she had any reason to suspect that her ex husband was involved in any anti-American activity, she said she didn’t know, but that it was certainly possible. This in spite of the fact that they had together faced discrimination following 9/11. Most of the attackers were, after all, Egyptian, like them. That Hassan’s attorney allowed such questions to be asked, let alone answered, left him feeling utterly powerless, and utterly alone.

Despite this, he never seemed angry. Grief-stricken, perhaps. Demoralized. But not angry. Not violent. In fact, he seemed grateful. Humble. Appreciative of the opportunities that were in front of him–opportunities that he’d left Egypt to pursue.

I have been thinking of Hassan a lot this week, as the news of rioting, internet blocking, and revolution have dominated everything from network TV to Twitter. Hassan’s country is trying to shake off the mantle of 30 years of authoritarian rule. His homeland is in turmoil, its future uncertain.

Certainly, one might think he could have a better life here. His daughter could be free of fear and oppression. His wife could be free of systemic misogyny. He could be free of the radical elements of his faith that had hijacked both the airliners and his religion.

And yet here, where we believe in fair trials and justice and freedom, we have branded him a threat. His own wife has already learned to exploit the ingrained prejudices of people who should know better: attorneys, magistrates and judges, to keep him from his own child. Here too, his home is in turmoil, his future uncertain.

It’s quite a trade.

Gina: the mother

“I’m freaking out,” Gina said as she flung herself into the chair in my office. “I’m sorry. I’m just freaking out…”

“Relax, girl. It’s just a paper.”

The quarter was almost over. Portfolios were due in a week. My office hour was crammed with back-to-back conferences with panicked students. It is hard right before finals week not to take on some of their stress. “It’s just a class. Just do the work,” I want to tell them. Sometimes that helps.

But not Gina.

“No, no. No, it’s not that,” she was starting to cry.

I handed her a tissue.

“I’m pregnant again,” she blubbered. “I’m sorry I’m sorry. You don’t need to know this…”

But she went on, the words spraying out like water from a ruptured pipe. She was a fast talker to begin with; it was all I could do to keep up.

Gina had frustrated me all quarter. She was loud. Constantly late. In the habit of interrupting class to ask a question that I had answered just minutes before. But I liked her. She laughed easily, and there was a ferocity to her that lurked just beneath the surface.

In her first paper, I learned that she had been incarcerated for two years prior to coming to school. She wrote about her meth addiction. It had begun as a way to cope with sleep deprivation and weight gain following the birth of her child, and had landed her in jail after she moved in with a loser who was cooking it in his basement. The baby went to foster care. The boyfriend was in for five years.

But now she was out, she was clean, she had her now-three-year-old back, and she was determined to do right by him. College was the first step, and she was not, in her words “going to fuck it up this time.”

So this discovery, coming at the end of her first quarter of college when things were looking so good for her, was an earthquake.

“I can’t have a baby,” she sobbed. “I can barely take care of the one I have. I can barely take care of myself.”

Her honesty was raw and brutal; her fierceness had deserted her. I didn’t quite know what to say. I could not presume to suggest options, but I didn’t have to.

“I can’t have an abortion,” she said preemptively. “I’m adopted. Somebody gave me a chance. I can’t…”

She had written about her middle-class upbringing. Her struggles with ADD. The parents who did everything right, but still raised a troublemaker and an addict. She seemed vaguely apologetic for not having been the daughter they deserved, but also grateful to them for not giving up on her. She never once blamed them; it was as though her troubles had been predetermined in her genes.

“Well, what about that, Gina?” I offered. “Couldn’t you do the same? Give this baby a chance by putting it up for adoption?”

“He won’t let me. He has already said he won’t sign the papers.” She went on to tell me, as my blood pressure rose, about her poorly chosen mate, his financial issues, his debt to two other women and their children. It would not have done any good to shout what I wanted to ask: What the hell were you thinking, sleeping with this loser after all you’ve been through? Have you ever heard of birth control?!? But I didn’t have to. She said it for me.

When the storm had subsided, she sat for a few minutes while I handed her Kleenex. I encouraged her to talk to the baby’s father again. Talk to her counselor and her sponsor. She had some time to make a decision. It was too soon to give up.

“I have to go to my Psych exam,” she finally said. “I’m sorry I dumped on you. I’ll figure it out.”

When I saw her next, she was preternaturally cheerful.

“Hey, you look better,” I said.

“I am. I’m good, I’m good,” she told me. “He’s agreed to adoption. It’ll be fine.” She delivered this in her typical rapid-fire style, her jittery energy back in evidence. “I’m going to do this, you know.”

“I know,” I told her.

But I didn’t know. I still don’t.

I saw her again only once, about six months later. We were in a crosswalk on campus, rushing in opposite directions. By the time I recognized her and started to speak, she was gone. I couldn’t tell whether she was pregnant; by my calculation, she should have been close to delivery by then. But even shrouded in a heavy coat, she didn’t appear to be carrying a child.

Maybe it had been a false alarm, or she had miscarried, or had an abortion after all. Maybe I had calculated wrong, and she had already delivered the baby. I didn’t have a chance to ask.

Today, as I was writing this post, I got my daily email from The Rumpus. The editor, Stephen Elliot (author of The Adderall Diaries) said this: “You pull yourself up by the bootstraps. You get, in life, what you deserve. It’s patently false. You don’t get what you deserve, for better and worse. Bootstraps only work with safety nets, something to catch you when they snap.”

Here’s hoping hers didn’t snap, or if they did, that the safety net held.

Franny: the little person

On the first day of class each quarter, I have my students write an informal introductory letter. In it, they can tell me about their fears and hopes for the class, their kids, their pet pythons, or anything else they think they’d like to share. Some of the letters are stilted and dull (the ones who try to impress me the first day often bore me to tears), some over share, and some are just fun to read. But I can’t say I’ve ever before or since read a sentence like this one:

“I’m Franny, and I’m 27 inches tall…”

It’s not as though I hadn’t noticed this tiny woman in class, but when I was reading the letters the next afternoon, seeing the number was sort of jarring. “…in case you’re wondering,” she went on as if she were reading my mind. I would guess she’d been asked “exactly how tall are you?” by enough boors to just preemptively get it out there.

“I’m also 27 years old, an inch for each year. I live with my boyfriend. He is six feet tall. And yes, people stare.”

Once in a while, Franny would arrive at the classroom in an umbrella stroller pushed by a classmate. Sometimes she put her backpack in it and pushed it herself; her book bag was, after all, almost as big as she was.

“I can’t walk very far,” she told me once when I announced that we’d be meeting in the library (a pretty good hike across campus) next session. “…it’s my arthritis. But if I know ahead of time, I can get someone to help me.”

I was sort of awed by Franny’s frankness. She wasn’t the slightest bit shy about asking someone to give her a push to her next class or boost her up to her chair or get a book from a shelf. And why should she have been? Her stature was not an infirmity, it was a physical fact that she dealt with matter-of-factly.

Until the research project, that is.

For their term papers, I encourage students to research something that has some sort of personal relevance. If you have a kid with autism, learn more about it. If you lie awake at night worrying about global warming, read up on it. If you want to legalize marijuana, shut up already, I’ve heard it all. Franny, not surprisingly, decided to write about dwarfism. It was a little shocking to me that she had never done any research about it, but in retrospect, I suppose it makes sense. She did not think of her stature as a medical condition any more than I think of my eye color as being one.

About two weeks into the research project, she approached me after class.

“I’m not sure I can do this topic,” she said quietly.

“What do you mean, Franny? There has to be plenty of information out there. Maybe you’re not looking in the right places.”

“Oh, it’s not that. I’m finding plenty of articles. I’m just having a hard time reading them.”

“Oh, right. Those scholarly journal articles can be pretty dense. Have you tried some other sources?”

She was quiet for a second. Then she explained to me than that it wasn’t the jargon she was struggling with; it was that most of what she was finding in the medical literature regarding dwarfism was about how to fix it. How to correct deformities. How to conduct gene therapies that would eliminate the “risk” of this “defect.” How to ensure that people like her would never be born.

I didn’t quite know what to say to that.

Franny wound up writing a very different paper than she had planned. She used what she had found to show the biases of the medical community. She researched technologies that little people could use to adapt to their challenges. She wrote about intolerance and acceptance.

In the end, her paper was about the beautiful variety and infinite adaptability of human beings. I’m not sure she would have summed it up that way, but it seemed crystal clear to me.

 

Ella: the indomitable

Most college kids send an email attachment or download a file with the ease of sharpening a pencil, but sometimes the biggest challenge for “non-traditional” (read: middle-aged or older) students is not the course work itself, but the platform they are required to use: the online portal where their syllabi are posted and assignment drop boxes reside. At sixtyish, Ella fell into the latter category.

For the first few weeks of the quarter in my 111 class, she scowled and frowned at her computer monitor, lifting her chin to get a better view of the screen through her reading glasses. The young man who sat next to her often had to show her where to click and on what. After a couple of days, she confided to me that she wasn’t sure she’d be able to handle school. It was her first quarter, and she felt overwhelmed.

I encouraged her to be patient, told her where she could find some help outside of class, and offered to let her hand in her assignments the old fashioned way when possible. She thanked me and nodded, but did not seem all that reassured.

Ella had an almost regal bearing. She was not more than five feet tall, and had a prodigious, shelf-like bosom that made her seem much bigger than she was. Her skin was the color of milk chocolate, and she always smelled powdered and perfumed, though not overly so. Every day, her hair was neatly coiffed; it was clear that she was particular about her appearance, and about her classwork too. I can still remember her handwriting: the elegant slant, the slight flourish. Penmanship is a lost art; legibility is part of the reason I require that most students submit their work electronically. But this was never an issue for Ella. I loved seeing her words in her hand.

When the time came to write a memoir essay, Ella approached me and expressed some concern.

“I’m sorry, Miss Professor,” she said (although I had asked her to call me by my first name, she could not break herself of the habit of adding the “Miss” to it), “I just can’t think of anything to write about.”

“Sure you can, Ella. You have kids, right? A family and a past. There has to be something. Think small. It doesn’t have to be an ‘event,’ just something memorable.”

“Ok, Miss Professor,” she said. “I guess I’ll think of something.”

She wound up writing about putting on her Air Force uniform: the rituals of pinning and tucking and polishing and smoothing until everything was just so. Underlying the piece was her pride in having served many years before. She wrote about a son, but I never asked why a partner or other children might have been so conspicuously absent. While she had a raucous laugh and took a grandmotherly interest in her classmates, she was quite private about herself.

It wasn’t until weeks later while grading her portfolio that I learned, in a letter she submitted with her finished papers, why topic choice had been so difficult for her. “Every time I recalled a ‘significant’ event, something I had learned from, it was something sad,” she wrote. “I just could not bear to sit with those memories for any length of time, let alone write about them. But I’m still proud of putting on that uniform.”

As I read this I thought about a few things Ella had let slip during the quarter. The one time she had missed class was because she could not afford to have her car repaired. Her argument paper was about health insurance reform, and mentioned that she, a veteran, had no coverage. In bits and pieces, I glimpsed a very rough outline of a life of hardship and disappointment; of hard work and little reward. And yet the face that I knew was kind and serene, wise and humble. Neither in her eyes nor in her words had I ever detected the slightest hint of bitterness.

When she came by my office to pick up her portfolio on the last day of the quarter, Ella was visibly nervous. I handed it to her with a smile, knowing she’d be pleased with her grade, a well-deserved A. She thanked me and left without opening the folder or looking at the grade. Seconds later, though, I heard a whoop from the hallway outside my door, followed by a robust “Thank you, Jesus!” She burst back in, clutching the yellow folder to her generous bosom with one hand and fanning her face with the other. She was bouncing up and down like a game show contestant, tears streaming down her face. I wasn’t sure if she was laughing or crying, but maybe it was both.

“Thank you, Miss Professor. Thank you so much,” she said breathlessly. “Do you mind if I give you a hug?”

“Of course not, Ella,” I laughed, letting her wrap me up in her squishy embrace. “But I can’t believe you’re surprised.”

“I had no idea. I worked so hard, and I hoped for the best, but you just never know.”

I’m not sure what events in Ella’s life taught her that effort did not always pay, to expect disappointment, that fairness is never guaranteed, but I was glad that being back in school was teaching her otherwise.

Doug: the success story

One week last spring, three of my former students made headlines. It was exciting, really. Most of my students disappear into their futures, and I never find out what has become of them or what they have made of themselves. Imagine my pride when I read in the local paper about Donny, who had become a Tea Party organizer! Clearly, he had crafted his rhetorical skills in English 112 sufficiently to persuade like-minded folk to protest the current administration and promote legislation that…that…well, does something. Something different from what those bastards in office are doing, right Donny? So, good for him. Except that he was in the paper not so much because he had organized a rally, but because he was promoting said rally with racist hate speech, and all of the pols who had signed up to speak had pulled out. (Oh, and because he had a restraining order against him for harassment. But so do I, so who am I to call the kettle black?)

A few days later, I recognized on the front page a picture of Dick, a young man who was subsequently featured on several national news shows for having run off with his girlfriend to Florida. This would not have been newsworthy except for the fact that said girlfriend left her husband and baby one morning to “run some errands,” ditched her car in a parking lot, and set off a national manhunt, all in the name of love. How romantic! Perhaps you even saw them on The Today Show trying to explain why they had made it look as though she had been abducted. Dick had been a student of mine a year or so earlier. He had come to a few classes, turned in the first assignment or two, and then disappeared without a trace. So I guess I had prepared him for his future too.

Thank God for Doug. He made the headlines the same week, not of the local paper, but of USA Today, and not for nutty exploits, but for being one of the top twenty community college students in the entire nation.

I met Doug during his first quarter back at school in more than 20 years. He had been laid off (unjustly as it turns out, but that’s another story) from his manufacturing job due to an injury, and was starting over. This is a familiar narrative where I teach, but from the get go, there was something different about him. He was not intimidated; he was determined.

His first paper, though, was a bit of a mess. He had a lot to say, and he said it with conviction, but he also said it almost entirely in fragments and run ons. I expended an awful lot of ink before I finally just wrote “please visit the writing center,” which (I reluctantly confess) is shorthand for “there are too many errors for me to point out–get some one-on-one help.” Later I learned that he was shocked by this criticism. He had thought English would be a breeze. But instead of either rolling his eyes and resigning himself to C’s or blaming the messenger, he doggedly took every bit of advice I gave him all quarter. I never had to explain anything twice. He soaked all of it up like a sponge; not only writing instruction, but everything.

One day, we were chatting after class when he told me that he had once been a member of a notorious hate group. I hardly knew what to say to such a revelation.

“It was a bad time,” he told me. “I was running with a bad crowd. A lot of drugs, a lot of drinking, a lot of youthful rebellion.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know this about him. If you saw Doug, he might just fit the picture you’ve already imagined. He’s a big guy–not tall, but barrel chested, with a salt-and-pepper ponytail down to the middle of his back. I didn’t need to be told that he rides a Harley. His voice is deep and resonant; he has a booming laugh and kind eyes. This last part did not jibe with the past he told me about.

“Well, that was then,” was all I could think of to say. I’m glad to report that I have never seen a single vestige of that reckless young man. Sometimes I wonder if I imagined that conversation. Turns out he’s done a little good since then.

Doug and I didn’t agree about everything, but I know this: the man is a learning being. By the time he finished his degree last spring, he had not only rocked every class he took and racked up a shelf full of awards, but he was also running the honor society–not just for our school, but for the entire multi-state region. One day, while visiting the VA hospital, he got talking to a patient, a stranger who noticed the videos he had brought for a friend. Within a couple of months, Doug had organized a video drive and set up a movie library for the vets. As part of another service project, he spearheaded an effort to clean up the riverfront in our little industrial city. I can’t begin to list the good he has done in the community, but I can tell you that it’s humbling.

The only person truly surprised when he received national recognition was Doug. Sure, his Phi Theta Kappa advisors nominated him for the honor. I helped him to edit it his application. But he is the one who did every bit of good work, both in the classroom and outside of it. I heard him speak a number of times to large audiences about this honor, and he always began by saying that he didn’t do it alone. Despite his generally outgoing personality and big voice, on these occasions I was struck by his humility and gratitude. Even as he wore the half dozen pins and badges and medals he had earned, or showed off the trophies that were starting to accumulate, he seemed amazed that all of this had happened to him. But he was proud, too: so much so that he had to stop every now and then when he was speaking to keep his emotions in check.

The day after commencement last spring (at which he was a featured speaker, of course) he proposed to a woman that he met while going through the surgical technology program. He had landed a job within weeks of graduation, and has already earned at least one promotion that I know of. I’m sure I’ll see him in the newspaper again some day, but he might be hard to recognize without his ponytail, which he donated to oil cleanup efforts right before graduation. He has thanked me dozens of times for whatever role I may have had in his success, and I always answer by thanking him back. I hope he knows how very sincerely I mean that. I was truly honored to have him in class, and am proud to call him my friend.

I’ll be back with my bad snarky self next week time, but in the spirit of the approaching holiday and even as I avoid the endless amount of grading that has to be done as the quarter ends, I am thankful for my job. In a world populated by the likes of Donny and Dick, Doug reminded me of why I am a teacher.

Bonnie: the stalker (part 2)

(continued from here)

The cake was was enormous–easily enough to feed 10 people. Like the mysterious beverage she had brought me that first day of class, it too was a color seldom found in nature. I vaguely wondered if massive amounts of sugar and red dye were at least partly to blame for Bonnie’s troubles. I don’t remember whether the cake was to celebrate the pregnancy or the end of it; I just remember wondering how to politely turn down such a generous offering.

You see, that was the thing about Bonnie. I have never had any trouble drawing boundaries with my students. I pride myself on being friendly and approachable, while maintaining a reasonable professional distance. But Bonnie crashed through any such boundaries with such spectacular disregard, I was often caught wrong-footed. I wanted to help her, but she was a bottomless pit of need.

As the weeks wore on, I began to feel as though my own privacy were being violated. I couldn’t go near my office without finding her waiting for me, and keeping an open door during office hours was impossible. Finally, I just had to buck up and tell her that my office time was for conferencing about course-related issues only, and that she’d have to go to her counselor for support in all of these other matters. She easily circumvented this limitation by showing up with “drafts” of “essays” that she needed help with, and the topics would handily circle around to abuse or pregnancy or any of the half-dozen other “challenges” she was dealing with. “You said in class that we should write about what we know,” she’d say. Or, “I thought you said to choose something we felt strongly about.”

She was right, of course. I do say those things, and I mean them. I believe that writing can heal and empower the writer. I want my students to feel safe sharing personal details. But Bonnie had a way of using all of my best ammunition against me. She made me question my instincts about everything: about open doors and approachability, about boundaries and professionalism and even about writing itself. I started waking up every day at 4 or 5 a.m., actively dreading going to a job that I had always loved.

One Friday, I bluntly told her she would have to leave so I could get some work done. I got a voicemail later that afternoon that went something like this: “I was hoping we could talk today, but since we can’t, I just wanted to say goodbye. If I’m not in class on Monday, don’t worry about me. It’s not your fault.” I knew that she was more manipulative than suicidal, but that didn’t stop me from spending the next couple of days (once I had forwarded the message to her counselor and debriefed with him) wrestling with my own guilt and anger.

Fortunately, I work at a big institution with a large network of student support services. In addition to sucking the life out of me, Bonnie had been setting off alarms all over campus with at least one other professor and any number of student services personnel. Eventually, a meeting was called, complete with a boardroom, people in suits, and people in uniform–about eight of us all told. A very smiley and avuncular dean told me how important it was to just say no, and that it wasn’t my job to be all things to all students. I somehow resisted reminding him of my fifteen years of teaching experience. No one who had not personally met this girl had the vaguest idea what we were up against. When I started to explain this, the dean said, “Well, when I met her, she seemed pretty harmless. But Tom,” he smiled, addressing Bonnie’s counselor, “please don’t send students straight to me without going through the proper channels.”

Tom and I exchanged a knowing look. He paused for a minute, looked at the dean with one eyebrow slightly raised, and said quietly, “I didn’t send her to you.”

“You didn’t?” the dean said. “But she said—“ he paused. “Ah. Wow. She’s good, isn’t she?”

The mood in the room changed over that next hour or so as those of us involved with Bonnie’s case exchanged anecdotes and unraveled details. When I told the campus police officer that I didn’t think she was dangerous, he looked at me like I was an idiot. “What do you think is in that black duffel?”

“Oh, I don’t know. More cake?” I laughed, trying to lighten the mood. “You don’t honestly think she’s packing weapons, do you?”

He was not amused. “You have no idea what she has in that bag.”

He was right. And since I suddenly felt like I didn’t know much of anything anymore, I stopped cracking wise and listened as he set down a list of procedures: “Do not allow her to bring her bag into your class. Do not speak to her privately. Do not respond to any email that is sent outside the course mail or that has any content other than course work. Forward all messages to the police and counselor. If she approaches you, tell her she is making you uncomfortable, and tell her you will call campus police if she does not back off. Document every interaction with her. Draw a line. And above all, do not explain. Do not give her an opportunity to respond. Just cut her off.”

That evening, I went home and sent her an email explaining that, while she was welcome to continue in class, she was not to have any one-on-one interaction with me, etc. etc. To do this without a word of explanation was inexplicably difficult, and I’ll confess, a little painful. She was obviously suffering, and as much as I had begun to resent her and the energy and time she was taking from me and from my other students, I also cared about her welfare. It took some convincing from Tom (did I mention that he had become my personal hero?) before I was persuaded that cutting her off was not a matter of self-preservation, but was in her best interest as well.

For whatever reason, Bonnie did not cross this line. I don’t know if it was because she realized that she could no longer play people off one another, or because she overestimated the amount of trouble she’d be in with the police, but she never contacted me again. She submitted the last couple of papers via email with no shenanigans, and got credit for the course. For weeks, I looked around corners on campus before turning them, asked who it was before answering a knock at my office door, screened phone calls whose numbers I did not recognize. She was gone, and I was off the hook.

One spring afternoon, weeks after I had last seen her and just as I was starting to relax, I got a call from campus police. A restraining order had been taken out against me. Could I please come down to the station for a briefing? Apparently, Bonnie had decided that I was a threat. That I had violated her personal freedoms. That by threatening to involve the police, I had wronged her. As I signed the forms the officer provided, I was not sure she wasn’t right. I wasn’t sure of anything.

But since I was already there, I filed one against her, too. You can never be too safe.

Adam: the noob

What is a beleaguered professor to do when a student writes rhapsodically, even well, about the Cracker Barrel? For a few beautiful moments as I was reading, I thought to myself, “You comic genius, you. Look how you have touted convenient parking and an old timey candy shop as assets to your dining experience. Look at the clever babe-in-the-woods persona you have adopted to make your hipster point about chain dining and the utter lack of culture in this culinary wasteland. See the clever political commentary about Interstate consumerism and suburban blight! A + + + +!!” I imagined myself writing with a flourish. And then I saw the name at the top of the paper, Adam, and realized that it was written without the tiniest whiff of irony. In fact, I’m not sure Adam yet grasped the concept that what the words on a page say is not necessarily what they mean. (He was certainly not alone in this. To befuddle a group of undergraduates, just have them read “A Modest Proposal,” then sit back and watch the fun.)

On the first day of class, Adam was twenty minutes late. That’s not unusual at the community college where I teach. The parking garage is jammed for the first few weeks of each quarter at the commuter school–at least until enrollment settles down, which is usually around week three. Three weeks is about how long it takes for students to be purged from the system for nonpayment of tuition or fees. Or how long it takes for them to get their first tests or papers back. Or to give in to the fear that they have made a terrible, terrible mistake by thinking they could make it in college.

So on that first day, I was tolerant of the latecomers, even welcoming. I ended class early to catch them up on what they had missed. Of the half dozen or so people who lingered, Adam was particularly apologetic.

“I’m so sorry, Ma’am. I’m new to town, and all of the streets down here are one-way. I got so lost.”

I resisted the urge to tell him not to call me Ma’am. Instead, I just remarked that at least it wasn’t a very big downtown. He looked nonplussed.

“Well, to me it is. I just moved here from upstate New York.”

I don’t remember the name of the town he mentioned or what brought him here, only that he spent the next few minutes talking about how confusing it was to have landed in such a big city, what with all of the traffic and things being so spread out.

I am fairly certain that by no metric would this place qualify as a big city. I love it that I can get from one side of town to the other in under half an hour. Any place that is more than twenty minutes’ drive from my home in an inner ring suburb is too far away to merit my serious consideration; but then, in order to be more than twenty minutes away, it would have to be in a strip mall or in the middle of a cornfield. Sort of like Cracker Barrel.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it soon. Just let me know if I can help.”

Nervous as he was, Adam did just fine those first few weeks. His first essay was a personal narrative. I don’t remember what he wrote about–probably something about losing a grandparent, or getting his first car, or putting his dog to sleep. I probably made some suggestions about how to move it along a bit more briskly. I probably marked up some comma splices. He took all of my feedback with an earnest gratitude that I seldom see. His face was round and open, his hair thick and boyishly cut. I was surprised to learn that he was married and a father of children almost the ages of my own. He looked to be just out of high school.

When the time came for more critical topics, Adam, like many of my other one-hundred level comp students, was flummoxed. The next assignment was to write a review of a subject of the student’s choice, based on criteria that were clearly established in the introduction. This somewhat pedestrian assignment is pragmatic at best, and dreadful at worst. Yes, it is dry and formulaic. A bigger problem, though, is that most of my students stubbornly refuse to distinguish between opinion and judgment. I return dozens of papers for revision because the authors want to write about “three reasons I love Ben Folds” (he’s awesome, he’s amazing, and his songs are awesome!) rather than objectively critique his latest release. When they ask me for advice, I am ashamed to admit that out of sheer ennui and exhaustion, I often say, “Why don’t you just try writing a restaurant review?”

For whatever reason, they get this. They know what they are looking for in a dining experience: good food, good service, good atmosphere and perhaps, depending on the restaurant, a good value. Check. There’s your outline. Now just write the damned thing.

Adam seemed excited when I made this suggestion to him after he had failed to define exactly why Rascal Flatts’ latest c.d. was currently in heavy rotation.

“I hope you like this one better,” he said proudly as he handed it in. “I took your advice and went somewhere I had never been before. It was really fun to write.”

“I’m sure I will, Adam. See you Thursday.”

And now here was this paper, this glowing review of a restaurant that, to most denizens of the coasts, represents everything that is wrong with my beloved flyover state. I had to put a grade on it. Like the assignment itself, I had to make a judgment about it based on objective criteria. It was not mine to offer an opinion, but to determine to what extent the student had met the outcomes of the assignment. It was correctly written, if not exactly sparkling. It was unified and well organized, if not subtle. It offered vivid details to support its clearly established criteria. (Why yes, the macaroni n’ [sic] cheese is delightfully orange and creamy, the portion nearly the size of the writer’s fist!) Adam had listened to my directions and had done exactly what I asked of him, and yet, the impulse to shake my fist at the heavens proved irresistible. I think I actually made a noise, something like “Gaaaah!” that echoed in the cinderblock box that is my office.

During moments like these, I am often thrown into existential confusion about my role as a community college English professor. Is it in my job description to get students to think more critically about their chain dining experiences? Maybe. But this kid (I can’t help thinking of him this way, his 30 or so years notwithstanding) just wanted to be a radiology tech. He just wanted to do better for his family. He just wanted to learn how to write more clearly. That was all exactly as it should have been, and I had the means to help him do it. I felt mean for having held him up to my private ridicule. After all, I had never even been to a Cracker Barrel. What did I know?

I read the paper again, fending off the familiar feeling of ambivalence about my job, my students, my town.

I settled on a B. He was delighted.