The Colour-Coding of Higher Ed

            The first few weeks of teaching at the college were rough, I will not lie.  Along with the Children and Youth worker program students, I had three classes in the Social Service Worker Program.  All of the classes were on academic writing. As part of the application process, all students have to take an English proficiency test.  There are 4 options that students can be streamed into as an outcome: exemption from writing classes, mandatory class in advanced writing, mandatory basic class with requirements to take the advanced class after completion, and mandatory basic ESL with requirements to complete advanced class.  If you are funnelled into the writing classes, you must pay extra – above the program tuition.  Makes you wish you had paid more attention in high school English class, eh?

                The actual skills level of the classes ranged widely.  Some of them were able to write at an undergrad university level, so why the hell were they assigned into these classes?  No clue.  Then there were some students who didn’t know how to write a complete sentence.  The ESL students had a better grasp of grammar than the “native” English speakers.  And the native speakers could have benefitted from ESL.  Hm.  It was a bit mind-boggling.  Besides from teaching multi-level classes, I got my first real taste of the “reluctant learner”.  In one class, before I would even begin my lesson, inevitably, someone would ask me, “Are we getting let out early today?”  If you need anything to deflate your already frail ego, this was the place and position to be.  I don’t mind telling you that these students terrified me.  Completely freaked me out, and I am talking stomach cramp starting two hours before class kind of freaked out.  

                I started out too nice.  Should have been bad-ass.  I endured a fair amount of teeth-sucking, and texting, and phone-answering in the middle of my classes.  Oh, I let them out early – sometimes 2 hours early (in 3 hour classes) because I could only tread water in the rapids for so long before drowning.  Every week, I tackled it from another angle, trying to make it fun, more engaging.  My Wednesday class was the worse of the bunch while my ESL class was a joy.  I only had 4 ESL students who were paying double the tuition fee as international students and were not going to fuck up.

 

                But.  And this is the really important part.

                Let me give you a better visual to these classes.  In my Social Service Worker program classes, 99.9% of my students were young women of colour.  Aside from the ESL class, all of them came from the burbs.  As I got to know them better – and I did because I dropped the Dr. Leung fancy pants academic facade and became the Scarborough girl that I also am – I realized that for many, many of them, they were in this program because they knew the “system”.  They and their families were products of social services of all kinds – foster care, social financial assistance, subsidized housing, the police, etc.  Their case workers were as frequent visitors to their homes as family and friends.  Now before you start hearing the opening chords to “Gangsters in Paradise”, the theme music to Michelle Pfeiffer’s  film “Dangerous Minds”, please stop.  It wasn’t like that.

                I stopped trying to teach writing as an essential skill to upgrading one’s potential to garner a livelihood.  It is that, but this was not the right approach.  The way that made it work was this: I started teaching them how to beat yet another system that stood between them and something marginally better than what they had.  These women did not “choose” to be social service workers because they had an aching need to “help people”.  They were smarter than that.  They were there because that’s mostly what they knew, what was accessible to them, what was perhaps reachable.  

                One of my students, C, a particularly “reluctant learner” came up to me after class, throwing a graded assignment on the table and cussing.  She had received a failing grade on a “reflection paper”.  Perplexed, I wondered how anyone could fail at sharing their opinion.  In these programs, there were a lot of touchy feely exercises.  Lots of bad 80s flashback circle discussions where people are encouraged to divulge their inner most secrets and cry about them, or in this case, write about them.  I hated them, but never revealed this to my students.  Instead, I just helped put in correct punctuations, re-work run-on sentences, start new paragraphs, etc.

I skimmed C’s paper and found the grammar, sentence and paragraph structures perfect.  I looked at the notes in the margin, the red-penned authority of her teacher and felt like kicking something.  “You don’t express what you FEEL.  These are thoughts, not feelings.”  The same gist of comments coloured the whole paper.  I looked at C, who was already talking about “cutting” this instructor, and I really couldn’t blame her.  

“What does she want??” C screamed. 

I had a really soft spot for C.  She was 19, Black, a single mother to a 1 year old daughter.  She had been in foster care since she was 11 because a family member had sexually abused her.  Her daughter was cared for by an elderly woman in her building while she attended college full time.  Her biggest fear, she disclosed to me was that CAS would try to take her baby away again because someone in the building had called on her before.  These were just some of the facts of C’s life.  What you also need to know is that C was smarter than most people I have ever met – this includes the PhDs, the MDs and all the rest of the alphabet.  She was also one of my loudest teeth suckers, but man, I didn’t blame her after I got to know her.  She didn’t need grammar since her writing was just fine.  She had been racially profiled into this class.  I knew it, and she knew it. 

What did her affective state have to do with her success as a student in this program?  And more importantly, why was she being punished for not “feeling” enough? Why should C indulge this instructor or this program’s fetish for the sad victim story?  These young women did not sign up for therapy.  They signed up to get a piece of paper that would give them some legitimacy in this world.  They were paying through the eyeteeth for a two-year program that many of them could have taught because they actually LIVED through the systems they were studying.  They could tell you how it’s supposed to work, and the hundred ways that it doesn’t.  They could rhyme off any given form you are supposed to fill out to feed the bureaucracy of the ever-eroding safety net.  Why should they have to share their pain too?  Especially to strangers and this institution that were only proving to be yet another wall to scale and escape.

I had no good answers for C.  I had already been rebuffed time and time again by the other instructors to just stick to what I was supposed to do – teach them how to write.  Not what to write.  One instructor even told her students that I wasn’t teaching them the proper way to write a Sociology essay because all their theses were “too political”.  Scuse me?  (I googled this instructor, by the way, and found out that she only had a Masters, but somehow knew way more about Sociology than me)  Why not just teach them something else, you might ask? One of the core subjects that actually had content.  I couldn’t get anything else at this college except teaching writing.  The few jobs I applied for, I wasn’t even interviewed.  Not high enough on the union totem.  I know instructors who spent years living term to term not knowing if they were going to get re-hired, and I was just Johnny-Come-Lately.  Isn’t that a hoot?

I told C to lie if she had to.  Lie about her feelings.  Give them whatever they wanted and pass.  Then get out with her soul intact.  I even hugged her, and I don’t ever hug students.  She seemed like she could use one, and so did I.  Something to remind each other that we were human first and foremost and not just the cast to fill in the spaces between the cinder blocks in this here institution – the role of the cash cow student and the precarious worker. 

I threw out my lesson plans on writing formal essays, and I just asked them to write.  Anything.  I received bouquets of personal essays.  Their pieces were funny, tragic, resilient, stirring, hopeful and hopeless.  Approximately 80% of them disclosed stories of sexual violence.  Many wrote about poverty, marginalization, racism, misogyny.  A lot of them were holding on by a thread, but it was a strong thread.  I didn’t ask them to tell me how they “felt”, but they did, and I am beyond honoured that they trusted me. I only wished I had been able to give them more.

I didn’t pull a Sidney Poitier and uplift them so that they could take their lower rung positions in the neo-liberal rat race or lie to them that it would get better.  I didn’t pretend that the diploma they would receive at the end of this would even guarantee them work.  But I also didn’t disrespect their life choices of entering this school and wanting to join this field of work.   I didn’t disbelieve their dreams of being professionals and having stable incomes, housing, families of their own.  I wasn’t a saviour. For a short while, I was hopefully, a friend.