In the winter of 1988, I was hired to teach English literature and writing at the Broadway campus of Vancouver Community College, located on the eastside of the city, about a block west of Clark Drive.
The head of the College Foundations Programme in which I would be employed was a gregarious, erudite fellow in his mid-50s. I went in for the interview in early February of that year, and what started out as your run-of-the-mill confab, turned into a 3-hour gabest, where the two of us spoke about our lives and the various experiences of our lives over the years.
While I was a flaming, long-haired radical, the button-downed department head was a staunch Conservative party member. Now, in those days that meant Progressive Conservative party, with the emphasis on progressive. Turns out we had much in common, agreed on many issues (particularly human rights), felt the same way about the English language (always, always use the English spelling, never the bawdlerized American spelling).
During the course of our three hour discussion, he informed me of a number of issues for my consideration respecting my pending job …
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Vancouver Community College’s College Foundations Programme was a provincially funded high school completion programme for adults who wished to go on to a post-secondary education;
- The student drop-out rate for College Foundations classes was 75% by the end of the term, as had long been the case, with a full 50% of the students generally withdrawing from classes in the first 3 or 4 weeks;
- Arising from the high drop-out rate, class sizes were set at 30. Of the 30 students enrolled in each class, all were working class with troubled backgrounds, a full third (sometimes more) of the class were sex trade workers still active in the profession, while the remaining two-thirds worked at minimum wage jobs, if they could find employment at all;
- The mid-19th century novel I was to teach for the summer semester (to begin in May), was Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I told the department head that under no circumstance could I teach the anti-feminist Tess, all the moreso because of the makeup of the class I was to teach. The creation of Tess was entirely a male construct, I argued, the lead character passive and accepting of a guilt that was not her own, hardly an inspiring figure for the women students enrolled in my class.
Instead, I told him I would wish to teach my favourite novel, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, the protagonist, Maggie Tulliver, the strongest feminist heroine in 19th century literature, as passionate and bright, as obstinate and loving, as imaginative and sympathetic, and intoxicatingly beautiful a woman — for her mind, and the world of ideas in which she lived, with a sensuousness that charmed all in her world — as one could hope to find in the novel. Not to mention which, George Eliot was just a pen name, the working class author’s true name, Mary Ann Evans, presenting her characters as social outsiders subject to small-minded persecution, with Maggie triumphing throughout the book.
My argument carried, with permission granted to teach Eliot’s fine novel.
When classes started in early May, my first impressions of the members of the class was that, as a whole, here were a group of mostly young people in their early to mid-twenties who had been beaten down by life, who had been subject to much abuse, and an utter lack of love and support.
As we got to know one another, I learned of the dreams that my students held for themselves: one wanted to be a police officer, another an airplane mechanic, yet another a day care supervisor, another a social worker, and yet another a university professor. I also learned that the friends and families of the students did not offer their support to my students in their “trying to better themselves,” rather their friends and families experienced the ambitions of my students as their being “too big for their britches”, as a disloyalty to their working class roots, as a pulling away, a desertion.
I also learned that a feature of my students’ lives was a propensity to have their friends argue with them, which inevitably — in many cases — often meant coming to blows, a decidedly unsatisfactory end to a dispute.
I decided to begin each of the two three-hour evening classes each week by teaching the students a new word. The first word I taught was specious …
After discussing the word specious with my students, its connotative and denotative meaning, I suggested to my students that the next time they found themselves in an argument with a friend, rather than appear to disagree with their antagonist, instead say something — with a big, almost revelatory smile on their faces — along the lines of, “Thank you. What a wonderfully specious thing to say,” that all the time their friend was thinking you were saying something kind, thoughtful and seemingly agreeable, in actuality you were calling him or her a fool — but only my students would know that, as it was unlikely that their friends knew the meaning of specious, and the implications of employing that word.
Unsurprisingly, several of my students did exactly as I prescribed above, returning to class a few days later with shit eating grins on their faces, saying, “I tried it out. It worked perfectly! I didn’t have to get into an argument with my friend, and what was even better, I felt that I’d won the argument, defended myself, allowing us to enjoy our evening and to have a good time out drinking at a bar, with the both of us feeling just great!”
Ah, the power of language — it’s just a wonderful thing, don’t you think?
Now on to teaching The Mill on the Floss. Early on my students could not make hide nor hare of Eliot’s novel, they protested that they didn’t understand the flowery British language of 1860, and that as far as they were concerned, the novel I’d chosen was a no go — they couldn’t and they wouldn’t read it, and that was all there was to it. The students were adamant (another word I taught them the meaning of, and gratefully so).
Little wonder, I thought to myself, that students long out of school would experience some difficulty with deriving meaning from mid-19th century British literature. I asked my students how many of them had been read to when they were young children. Not one had had a parent, an aunt or a teacher read to them at any point in their lives. I decided to change that.
“Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by,” is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth long since past; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of her childhood, not merely with a memory of what she did and what happened to her, of what she liked and disliked when she was in a pinafore but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what she felt then, when it was so long from one Midsummer to another; what she felt when her school chums had shut her out of their game because she would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when she didn’t know how to amuse herself, and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when her mother absolutely refused to let her have a tailed cape that “half,” although every other girl of her age had the cape she so desired? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.”
When we were to begin the teaching of The Mill on the Floss, I asked the students to read Book One, Chapter One, for the next class.
At the beginning of that class, I turned down the lights, and from the lectern at the front of the class, I proceeded to read cogent passages from Chapter One, injecting meaning and emotion into the words. When I was done, the lights were turned up, and I could see that there was hardly a dry eye among the students in the class, who’d found the passages I’d read moving beyond anything they’d experienced in their school years to date, as many of the students exclaimed to me. We went on to discuss what occurred in Chapter One, the meaning that could be derived from the chapter, and why I had chosen the passages that I did to read to the class.
As the Wednesday evening class was drawing to a close, I assigned one of the students (who I had consulted with in advance, in my office, and during the mid-class break) to read passages from, and present Chapter Two to her fellow students at the next class, and to do as I had done, reflect on the meaning of Eliot’s words, why they were moving, what we learned about Maggie, her brother Tom, her parents and aunts and uncles and cousins, about where she lived, and what she and they thought of her parents and who, perhaps, was the more loving and supportive parent.
After the mid-class break at the next class, the student I had assigned to read passages from Chapter 2 did just that, coming up to the lectern, the lights now dimmed. Again, reading for meaning, when the lights were undimmed, there was not a dry eye among the students. All of the students came to love George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver (as for me, both Cathy and I called Megan “Maggie” all the time she was growing up, and still do).
We read through the thirteen chapters of Book One of The Mill on the Floss, just as we had for chapters one and two.
In the third week of May 1988, the head of the College Foundations Programme — the man who had hired me — took a leave. Three weeks later he was dead, the first person I’d been close to who had died of AIDS.
A new department head was put into place, a feminist woman and left wing activist of some note, who proved to be very much the authoritarian (rather than a humanist, as her antecedent had been) and proved, as well, to be much less open than had been her predecessor to my approach to teaching. She scolded me for teaching The Mill on the Floss rather than the assigned 19th century novel I was teach for the summer semester, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, also frowning on the dimmed lights for the reading of passages of the first Book of Eliot’s 1860 novel; neither was she particularly enamoured of the easygoing camaraderie that had developed between the exhilarated members of the class and myself.
“Unprofessional,” she harrumphed, telling all of her administrative colleagues at VCC of what a terrible teacher I was, how I had demeaned my students both by reading to them, and allowing them to read to one another, which imprecations by her, and more, carried over into my involvement with members of the civic party of which I was a member, the Coalition of Progressive Electors, prominent members of whom taught at Vancouver Community College, and who made no bones about the fact that they knew me to be a terrible teacher, a teacher who demeaned his students, treated them improperly and with unconscionable disrespect.
Sometimes, youse just gotta love the authoritarian, holier-than-thou left.
Thing is, though, while students dropped out in droves from the classes taught by my colleagues in the department — as the now deceased head of the department had said had been a common circumstance for years — not one of my students withdrew from my class before semester’s end.
Over the years, I have run across more than a dozen students from the class the students and I shared at VCC in the summer of 1988.
During that summer semester of 1988, and beyond, I provided out of class assistance to the student who wished to be a police officer, which he is today, having gone on to a baccalaureate degree in criminology, and then a Masters degree, both from Simon Fraser University. The student who wished to become an airplane mechanic? Ran into him at a Dollar Store on Commercial Drive — he told me he had taken specialized training, and now travels the globe providing service that only he and very few others are able to provide. The woman who wished to attain a degree in Early Childhood Education did just that, only recently retiring from her work at the child care centre where she was a supervisor for a near quarter century.
The young woman who wished to be a university professor?
Well, she has long worked as a consultant in the federal corrections system, directly with offenders, and on the way to attaining her PhD in Psychology was hired first as an instructor at a British Columbia university and then as a professor, all the while raising her family and running a successful private therapeutic practice, for which work she has received much recognition.
Teaching? I loved teaching.
But as anyone who knows me soon realizes, I can be obstinate, and when I believe myself to be in the right, no one and nothing will direct me away from the path that I have chosen, a path always in the service of others.
