Hildegarde

So, here we are, at the start of another term. 

And I’m happy about that, mostly.  I get bored at home.  I get bored without sufficient to do.  I can only write so much before I start doing it badly.

But there is something else on the table, and four months of trying to think about it has not helped.

Some people teach what I teach because they need the money, or because they can’t get hired to teach anywhere else. 

I got into this in an attempt to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak.  I’d spent a long time telling myself and anybody else who would listen that we all had a real obligation to do something to alleviate the situation of people who are blocked from any ability to participate in the wider culture through circumstances that they did not create.

That was put badly. 

I deal, by and large, with people who have grown up in rural poverty or the poverty of our small cities in Northern Connecticut.  In a way, they’re even worse off than the residents of big city inner cities.  If you grow up on Harlem or the Bronx, you can always take the subway down to the Metropolitan Museum, and even your neighborhood will probably have a very decent branch library.

My kids come from places where the nearest library can be twenty miles away, and then often have nothing in it but the latest best sellers and a few stray ancient “facts” books that were added for local school projects decades ago.  Of course, Connecticut has universal interlibrary loan.  Books can be ordered from any library in the system to be taken out from your home library.  I love interlibrary loan.  But before you can use it, you’ve got to know what books you want, and before that you have to know that you want books.

 Most of my kids came from homes that didn’t contain a single book–not even Mike Fisher’s encyclopedias–or, if they did, it was the Bible.  Neither their parents nor their neighbors read the newspapers.  Their houses and apartments do not have computers. 

If they come from out in the country, they usually have something to drive, although it will be old and very unreliable.    If they come from town, they will not have anything to drive, and getting to class will be a matter of getting public transport (where available), or walking (often a long way), or finding a ride. 

Our campus, of course, is out in the country, close to absolutely nothing.  The one local college or university that is downtown–and therefore easily accessible to kids living on East Main or any of the neighborhoods branching off it–is the local UConn branch, the most difficult of the bunch to get into.  My kids would love to go there if they could, but most of them couldn’t qualify if their lives depended on it.

A significant number of my kids are not in fact able to read.  They can sound out words if they work at it.  They have brothers and sisters at home who cannot do even that.  That is, in fact, a good deal of the reason why they’re my kids.  Most of them can’t meet the basic requirements for any school.  Even the local community college will only allow them to take non-credit remedial classes.

We require a high school diploma.  That’s it.  All my kids have high school diplomas, and most of them have actually made their way through highs schools.  For one thing, the requirements to pass the Connecticut GED are much higher than the requirements to get through our inner city and poor rural schools. 

If you go to the right Connecticut schools–in Wilton, maybe, or Westport–you can get an education in a public school that will outdo what most high-end prep schools offer. 

If you go to the wrong Connecticut schools–in Waterbury, say, or Bridgeport–you can graduate from high school without being able to read and understand a paragraph in an article from People Magazine, without being able to add and subtract well enough to figure out the change you’ll get back from your dollar if you take the bus, and without knowing anything at all.

And I do mean anything.

My black kids know who Martin Luther King is, but not what the Jim Crow laws were.  They know there was slavery in the South, but not that there was ever slavery anywhere else.   They are fascinated by Obama, but have no idea what the requirements are to run for President, or even if there are any.

Black or white, they don’t know the name of the mayor or the governor, they don’t know how many senators and representatives the state has, they don’t know that there is a difference between state and federal law.  Most of them get all their news from MTV, VH-1, and Fuse.    They know a lot of things I don’t know.  Most of them aren’t useful.

The big thing, though, and I’ve said this before, is the passivity.  Most of them aren’t openly defiant.   This is good, because some of them are very large male people.  Although not many.   Women outnumber men by a good three to one.

And a good segment of the men are on probation or parole, but that’s something else. 

The passivity is very pleasant, but it is what it is.  “You need to get this paper in,” I say.  “Oh, I will,” the student says.  And that’s it.  The paper never arrives.  You can have one on one conferences that go on for hours, and nothing ever arrives. You have them write things in class and hand them in at the end–and they don’t hand them in.  They don’t do them.

Mike Fisher pointed out that the pasivity might be due to depression, and it might be, but it doesn’t matter.  I’m not equipped to fix it, and I don’t know if anybody is.

I do know that the usual approach to trying to fix it–dumbing down the high schools to the point where anybody can pass, then to where anybody can get an A, on the assumption that to do otherwise will only discourage students more–not only doesn’t work, but may very well be counterproductive. 

A lot of my kids think school is a waste of time, a set of arbitrary hoops they have to jump through in order to get stuff–and they’re not wrong, except that the hoops they’ve been made to jump through are so low the jumping won’t even get them stuff.

Like everybody else, I go on doing this because every couple of years I have somebody who uses the system and makes it work for them, and the people who do that can get very far indeed.

But the question, the one I keep running through my head, is:  does it make any sense for me to do this?  Am I helping anybody at all besides those one or two every second year?  Does helping those one or two make up for months upon months of slog trying to work with people who don’t want to be there, don’t want to hear from me, and resent the whole thing?

And what can be done, after all, about the things that create this situation in the first place? 

It’s not the poverty that’s the real issue.  Poverty sucks, but lots of people have overcome childhood poverty.  Right now, as we speak, there are dozens of Korean and Chinese families within screaming distance of this office who are just as poor (and sometimes poorer) than my kids’ families, but none of their kids ever ends up in my program.

What do we do about kids whose mothers drink all the time or stay high on heroin (in the city) or crystal meth (in the country) and who drop them off on streets or porches to fend for themselves at four or seven or twelve?   Theoretically, this is what Child Protective Services are for, but there’s an awful lot of it going around that isn’t being taken care of.  Or even noticed.

And even if DCF does come in and try to do something–what exactly gets done?  The majority of foster families in my state are in it for the money.  When the local newspapers or television stations decide to notice, they find that child rape and battering in endemic in foster homes, that children are left without adequate clothing or food, that the places are often filthy.

 I suppose it’s better than living on the street, or being left alone in a trailer for a week with nothing to eat but crackers, but it’s hardly a solution to the problem.

And it doesn’t solve the contextual deficit, either–the difference in what kids bring to school when their families talk about politics and books at the dinner table and go to see plays as well as movies and listen to classical as well as the local rock station, next to what kids bring to school when the television would be on 24/7  if the cable company hadn’t cut off the feed for lack of payment.

The worst about all of this, though, is my increasingly strong feeling that if the kids don’t want to help themselves, then nothing I can do will matter.

And it doesn’t matter if the kids don’t want to help themselves because they’ve been through hell and back, or because they’re just lazy, or whatever–the reason doesn’t matter.  The fact reigns supreme.  

Life isn’t fair, President Kennedy said–and that’s true.

But there’s a part of me that says it ought to be fixable.